MALE PATTERN FITNESS: diet/nutrition Archives

March 30, 2007

Friday Blog Meat: All Your Symptom Are Belong to Us

In the 15 years I've been writing about health and fitness, I've seen my share of nutritional panaceas rise and fall. Right now, vitamins are down, especially antioxidant vitamins. But back in the mid-'90s, when I started, they looked like the solution to everything.

Today, the anti-antioxidant backlash is in full swing; rarely is heard an encouraging word. My doctor asked me what vitamins I supplements I use during my last checkup, and scolded me for including vitamin E on the list. (I confess I stopped taking it after that.)

So it's remarkable, in the midst of this backlash, to read that antioxidant supplements might be good for something after all:

In a study published recently in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, University of Michigan scientists appear to have found a dietary approach to reducing noise-related hearing loss.

They fed five groups of guinea pigs vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium or a cocktail of all four nutrients, then exposed the unfortunate rodents to five straight hours of jet-level noise. Those in the cocktail group had better hearing afterwards.

The researchers think the compounds worked synergistically to absorb free radicals before they'd done damage, and expect to start testing an ear-saving dietary supplement within two years.

Okay, it's an animal study, has limited application, and appears to be linked to a profit motive on the part of whoever patents and produces this new supplement. But it is one small step back to respectability for a downtrodden nutritional wonderkind.

Green ... with envy

Green tea is the cutest girl at the panacea ball these days, with a new study showing it might actually help fight HIV. But is it all too good to be true? That's the question Jonathan Brown asks in The Independent:

In Britain, sales of green tea have been growing at the rate of 25 per cent a year, fuelled in no small part by the celebrity endorsements of stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez. ...

[N]ot everyone is convinced by the many health claims. Professor Mike Williamson of Sheffield University, whose laboratory tests this week suggested that epigallocatechin, a component of green tea, could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by coating immune cells, is unconvinced.

"There is a lot of rubbish talked about what green tea does and most of it I don't believe," he said. "I think a lot of claims have been exaggerated and the main way they have been exaggerated is that they have used far too much green tea. This can amount to several hundred cups a day -- something that presents its own toxicity risk. If you throw enough green tea at something you can show any effect you like," he said.

According to Professor Williamson, whose own study suggested benefits could be gained from drinking two to three cups a day, there is at least one other exciting area of research. Green tea has been found to have the ability to "switch off" stomach cancer cells, something which could one day inform a treatment, he said.

Dr Philip Coan, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, is if anything even more skeptical. He argues that there has yet to be a sufficiently large study conducted outside the laboratory with the correct controls to establish green tea as a bona fide medicine. "People tend to believe that there are cures for things in simple old remedies but there really is no scientific basis for this," he said.

Smells like yet another backlash brewing.

The omega code

Which brings me to fish oil, the alpha-dog panacea. Will it, too, travel the familiar path to Backlash City? If it does, it probably won't be anytime soon. Fish oil, for the moment, still has legs, according to a recent Japanese study.

The study looked at whether fish oil, in addition to statins, would help prevent people from having heart attacks. The sample size was huge -- 18,600 adults with high cholesterol, 3,660 of whom had established heart disease -- although the duration, four and a half years, seems kind of short.

Two keys:

1. Everyone in the study was taking statins.

2. Half the people took a purified form of EPA, one of the omega-3 fats in fish oil. So it wasn't the stuff you get by the jug at Sam's Club.

As for the results, they sound good until you look at the details:

During the study, the vast majority of patients had no major heart problems. However, 2.8 percent of those taking EPA along with statins experienced a major coronary event, compared with 3.5 percent of those only taking statins.

That's a 19 percent difference, note the researchers, who included Mitsuhiro Yokoyama, MD, of Kobe University in Kobe, Japan.

EPA pills weren't linked to any difference in fatal heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.

When Yokoyama's team took a closer look at the data, they found the EPA advantage only applied to patients with a known history of coronary artery disease.

Patients with high cholesterol but no history of coronary artery disease may also get some heart protection from EPA, but that's not certain, since so few of them had major heart problems during the study.

So if you have diagnosed heart disease, a purified form of one of the fats found in fish oil might help, when used in conjunction with statins. That's a pretty tepid finding, but I guess it's better than a backlash.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the study showing that Diet Coke prevents ... well, I'd settle for anything. Paper cuts? Good enough.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

New Blood

If vampires really existed, they'd replace the entire human race in 30 months, according to a paper written by physicists at the University of Central Florida and analyzed at the Collision Detection blog here. (Here's the PDF of the study; hat tip to Rachel Sklar.)

Here's the argument:

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter’s Vampires or the movie Blade or any of the host of other vampire films is already quite familiar with how the legend goes. The vampires need to feed on human blood. After one has stuck his fangs into your neck and sucked you dry, you turn into a vampire yourself and carry on the blood-sucking legacy. The fact of the matter is, if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared.

It's a fun theory, but we all know that's not how vampirism really works. Vampires don't always turn out their victims; most often, they just suck their blood and kill them on the spot. Unless our distinguished horror and science-fiction literature has been lying to us all these years, it's obvious that vampires are very choosy about the company they keep, since they're stuck with any vampires they create for eternity.

But I wouldn't expect a physics professor to have these insights into the undead world. For that, you need a guy who writes about weight lifting.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2007

Monday Blog Meat: The Pressure's Off

As a strength and conditioning specialist, I have to renew my CPR certification every two years. It's a pain in the ass, and I always feel as if I've forgotten the most important stuff the minute I pass the test for renewal. I still remember the protocols I learned when I took my first CPR course back in the mid-'70s, when I was a lifeguard, but I can't remember the ones from 18 months ago.

Now I learn that the most important component of all the classes I've taken in the 30 years I've been taking them might be useless:

Chest compression -- not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation -- seems to be the key in helping someone recover from cardiac arrest, according to new research that further bolsters advice from heart experts.

A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published in Friday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

More than a year ago, the American Heart Association revised CPR guidelines to put more emphasis on chest presses, urging 30 instead of 15 for every two breaths given. Stopping chest compressions to blow air into the lungs of someone who is unresponsive detracts from the more important task of keeping blood moving to provide oxygen and nourishment to the brain and heart.

Another big advantage to dropping the rescue breaths: It could make bystanders more willing to provide CPR in the first place.

I agree with that last part; nobody wants to do mouth-to-mouth on a stranger. (The odds of a beautiful woman suffering cardiac arrest in your presence are ridiculously small.) But the older I get, and the more I learn, the harder it is to keep straight what I'm supposed to retain and what I'm supposed to forget. At least in this case I'll get to forget something I struggled to remember in the first place.

When telling Americans to "eat more" doesn't work

Here's a shocker -- Americans don't eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables:

People should eat at least five daily servings -- two or more servings of fruit, and three or more servings of vegetables -- as part of a balanced diet, says the CDC.

But today the agency reported that in 2005, fewer than 33 percent of U.S. adults reported eating at least two daily servings of fruit and barely 27 percent claimed to eat three or more daily servings of vegetables.

The government wants at least 75 percent of people age 2 and older to meet the fruit consumption goal, and at least 50 percent to meet the vegetable consumption goal, by 2010.

Say it along with me: Nagging doesn't work. Nag people about exercise, and they don't want to do it. Nag people about nutrition, and they don't want to do it.

But there's also a bigger question here: Who in America in 2007 believes the government's advice is infallible? Instead of making the argument for better nutrition, it seems that the CDC and other government agencies assume their scientific authority is beyond reproach, and that we should all start line-dancing on their command.

That said, their advice is perfectly reasonable, to the best of my knowledge. But even I don't get five servings of fruits and vegetables every single day. On days I don't exercise, I don't want the extra carbs from the fruit. And my menu just doesn't allow for the extra vegetables on days I skip fruit.

BTW, here's a new reason to add some fruit juice to your post-workout shake:

Drinking purple grape or cloudy apple juice reduces the risk of heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's by more than orange, grapefruit or pineapple juice, scientists say.

The top five juices for polyphenol content were Welch's Purple Grape. Copella Cloudy Apple, Tropicana Tropical Fruit, Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Drink and Pomegreat Pomegranate Juice Drink.

The drink with the lowest polyphenol content was Tesco's Own Brand White Grape, followed by Own Brand Clear Apple, Del Monte Tomato, Own Brand Pineapple and Own Brand Red Grape.

I'm not sure this tells us anything we didn't already know about dark-purple fruit drinks, but it's still good to have the reminder. And the news about cloudy apple juice is actually new, to me at least.

But I can't let this go without mentioning the story's opening paragraph. Nobody knows if any type of fruit juice reduces the risk of anything, much less that purple juice reduces Alzheimer's incidence more than orange juice. All we know is that certain juices have more polyphenols than others. Like I said, that part is good to know. But the disease-fighting claims? File that under "horseshit."

Death by sanitation

I've been working my way through the Season Two DVDs of Deadwood, my new favorite show. Aside from remaining confused about the meaning of "hooplehead," I enjoy both the familiarity and strangeness of the series.

I've actually been to Deadwood, which lives on as a tourist trap. And I've read two novels set there: Pete Dexter's Deadwood and Larry McMurtry's Buffalo Girls.

The strangeness comes when I try to figure out how any of those characters stay alive, given the complete lack of sanitation and general lack of anything we'd consider good nutrition. It might be fun to try to live for a week on whisky and buffalo steaks, but the people in Deadwood have few options beyond that.

Still, there may be a downside to our fully sanitized modern existence -- more children have type one diabetes, the type that's not caused by obesity and lack of exercise:

Research found that the number of under-fives with type one diabetes increased five-fold between 1985 and 2004. The numbers of under-15s with the condition doubled.

One theory about the cause of the huge rise is that young children are no longer exposed to as many infections as they were in previous decades because of higher hygiene standards.

Type one diabetes occurs when the immune system destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone that regulates levels of sugar in the blood.

Bristol University researcher Professor Polly Bingley said it could be a result of people being exposed to fewer infections because of changes in hygiene. "The immune system is supposed to fight infection but in type one diabetes it gets misdirected," she said.

The rise also could be linked to changes in children's diet, the decline of breast feeding or increased pollution.

Of course, it's just a theory. But at least it's an interesting one.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2007

Rats!

When I worked as a waiter at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, we'd sometimes get people who'd never been in a five-star establishment. They'd look at the menu, searching for something that they'd recognize as food, and immediately wonder what we could possibly do to a hamburger to make it worth $15. (That was in the mid-'80s, so you can imagine what it costs now.)

I never knew what to tell them.

I'm sure the meat was high-quality, and I guess it counts for something that the chefs were all trained at the finest culinary schools in the world. But I knew that what they were really paying for was the pleasure of eating a burger in a five-star hotel, served by people like me, who expected to be tipped accordingly.

I just couldn't tell them that.

The actual rich people, the people who fit in most easily, often had the simplest tastes. They'd order the most basic steaks and sandwiches on the menu, and never ask for anything special, unless they wanted us to make the dish even simpler by serving it without a sauce or garnish.

I bring up all that up because of this story, sent my way by Rannoch Donald, about the most expensive pizza in human history:

We've been dealing with the pocket-emptying effects of rising gas prices, new electric rates, and an increase in cab fare, but how would you feel about breaking the bank all for ... a pizza? Now you can find out thanks to Manhattan restauranteur Nino Selimaj, who has apparently brought from the heavens a real "pie in the sky" with his new $1,000 pizza.

Yep, that'll be $1,000 please.

The pizza will be added to the menu at Nino's Bellisima, one of Selimaj's six restaurants in the city. Forget traditional cheese and pizza sauce, the record-priced pie will be topped with creme fraiche, chives, eight ounces of four different kinds of Petrossian caviar, four ounces of thinly sliced Maine lobster tail, salmon roe, and a little bit of spice with wasabi.

And unlike your typical pizza, this one won't be cooked, after all, that would spoil the fish. The 12-inch pie is sliced into four pieces, which comes to $250 per slice.

"Let them say I'm crazy," Selimaj says. "But I believe in this product, and it's gonna sell!"

What's that Robin Williams line? "Cocaine is God's way of letting you know you have too much money"? I think $1,000 pizzas belong in the same category.

So, with thoughts of drugs and pimped-out pizzas on my mind, I read this New York Times op-ed column on something else you find in restaurants:

Rats in restaurants, while distasteful, are more a distraction than a disaster for public health. As reported in this newspaper, flies -- each one a potential airborne disease carrier -- are a more dire threat. So are cows, sheep and pigs, whose excrement can contaminate food at its source with E. coli, as was recently believed to be the case with California spinach and with vegetables served at Taco Bell. And to echo the punch line of many a nature documentary, the greatest threat to restaurant sanitation is man: salmonella, for example, is typically initiated or spread through improper hand-washing, food handling or cooking.

The author, Steven A. Shaw, concludes with this:

Perspective and proportion are the first casualties of hysteria, and food scares touch upon deep-seated fears about disease and control of what goes into our bodies. The American food supply, however, is by objective measures the safest it has ever been.

Good to know. And if I could go back in time 20 years, I'd have a much better answer for the people who didn't understand why a hamburger should cost $15:

"There's hardly any chance that it's been contaminated by animal feces."

Yeah, that would've scored me some nice tips.

UPDATE: For a few dollars less

I meant to include this, from Dr. Mike Eads' blog (also sent my way by Rannoch), about the latest dietary delight created by our ever-creative fast-food industry:

It’s really no wonder so many people are fat. The fast-food purveyor Chick-fil-a announced the promotion of a new high-everything milkshake available starting on St. Patrick’s day.

The carb and caloric content of this baby is astounding.

Chick-fil-a’s Cookies and Cream Milkshake has 790 calories, 300 calories from fat, 33g total fat, 18g saturated fat, .5g trans fat 95mg cholesterol, 660mg sodium, 111g carbohydrates, 1g fiber, and 100g sugars.

And it costs a whopping $2.79!

The last time I went to my natural foods grocery store grass-fed beef steak was selling for $16 per pound. According to the USDA food database, a 16-ounce T-bone steak with one-fourth inch of fat contains 599 calories. If you do the math you discover that with the steak you get about 37 calories per dollar spent, whereas with the Mint Cookies and Cream milkshake you get 283 calories for your dollar.

If you’re looking for cheap calories, the milkshake is the way to go. If you’re looking for nutritional bang for your buck and better health ... well, you make the call.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2007

Searching for a Loophole

Yesterday I wrote about a new study showing that the Atkins diet worked better than several others in a 12-month trial. It wasn't a big deal -- women randomly assigned to the Atkins diet lost an average of 10 pounds in 12 months, and their blood work showed more improvements than that of women who lost less weight on different diets.

You could just say, "The more weight you lose, the better your cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood-sugar levels will be." And chances are, you'd be right. The specifics will vary from diet to diet -- you'll probably have lower triglycerides and higher cholesterol on Atkins, for example, and the opposite on a super-low-fat diet like Ornish -- but the overall impact on your health is likely to be similar.

To me, that's just reality, circa 2007. I'd be surprised if it's any more complicated than that. If you're running an energy deficit over time -- eating fewer calories than you burn off -- and you're doing this in a healthy, sustainable way, you're probably better off than you were before. You could drink heavy cream and get away with it, as long as you're using more calories than you take in.

But that's not good enough for some. If you're a doctor or nutritionist who's invested in the idea that high-fat, low-carb diets must be dangerous, then you just have to find a loophole in the growing body of research showing that the Atkins diet isn't the ticket to an early grave you thought it was.

Here's Howard Eisenson, M.D., on the ABC News website:

Several recent studies suggest that overweight people might have more success with weight loss when they follow a diet lower in carbohydrates (and higher in fat and protein) than by following the standard guidelines for a lower fat, higher carbohydrate diet.

These findings have surprised and concerned many nutritional experts. Critics have correctly pointed out that these studies didn't involve enough people and were too short in duration to draw strong conclusions or to change standard recommendations.

That's always the first defense: The sample size was too small, and the study wasn't long enough. Never mind that these same people didn't require that kind of gold-standard scientific proof when they recommended low-fat diets.

The research involved only women between the ages of 25 and 50. It did not include men, children or seniors. That may make a difference.

Yes, it only included the single largest demographic group in the country, if not the world. And the only way to mention "men" in that sentence with a straight face is to pretend that you've never seen the research conducted with men. But I'll give him a pass on children and seniors (although there is research showing that children with seizure disorders do well on a low-carb diet).

The concern about the longer term still remains: What happens as people drift off their specific diet? While those following Atkins had indeed lost more weight, at the end of one year, the gap between the diets was narrowing.

What happens when people stop using any diet? What happens when they stop exercising? What happens when they drop out of rehab and start using heroin again?

Finally, this study was not designed to address all the potential health implications of the diets studied.

How might they affect people who are not trying to lose weight? How about those who have already lost and are trying to keep their weight stable?

And what about people who ride horses? And those who have an insatiable appetite for sawdust? And they didn't even attempt to assess the impact on fans of the Grateful Dead!

Dr. Eisenson goes on to list a bunch of common-sense nutrition recommendations that could apply to any kind of diet (don't drink soda, choose lean sources of protein), which nobody on earth, to my knowledge, disagrees with. And of course he throws in the usual shout-out to exercise:

And both for weight loss AND overall health, add regular physical activity to your day -- aim for 40 minutes to an hour daily.

So all you sedentary people out there, get up off the couch and jog for 40 minutes to an hour. Starting ... now!

Thanks, Doc, for making it all seem so gosh-darned simple.

Cheaters never win ... well, okay, sometimes

William Saletan of Slate points out that the participants weren't following the diets in the study to the letter:

The participants clearly cheated. In theory, Atkins restricts you to 50 grams of carbs a day. By the study's end, the average Atkins dieter was nearly tripling that.

The Zone tells you to get 30 percent of your calories from protein and only 40 percent from carbs, but the average Zone dieter never met the protein quota or obeyed the carb limit.

Ornish forbids you to get more than 10 percent of your calories from fat, but the Ornish dieters tripled that. LEARN dieters ate 20 percent of their calories in the form of saturated fat, twice what they were supposed to.

This, mind you, is what the participants admitted in phone interviews. Imagine how much more they concealed.

This helps explain why Atkins dieters lost more weight early in the study, and why the others caught up to them later. It's also given people like Dean Ornish a chance to invoke yet another loophole:

"People didn't really follow the diet I recommend," complains Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Ornish diet. Of Atkins, he sniffs, "It's a lot easier to follow a diet that tells you to eat bacon and brie than to eat predominantly fruits and vegetables."

I like this part of Saletan's conclusion:

In the real world, wise policies admit and work with human weakness. Capitalism uses greed to spread wealth. Political checks and balances use ambition to check ambition. Atkins uses meat and fat cravings to kill appetite. As Gardner explains, "Protein is more satiating than carbohydrates or fats, which may have helped those in the Atkins group to eat less without feeling hungry." Complaining that people follow Atkins only because it's tasty is like complaining that businessmen create jobs only to get rich. A job is a job.

And a diet is only as good as the ability of people to stick with it. Why is that so difficult for so many people to accept?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:47 AM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2007

Atkins Is Dead. Long Live Atkins.

Robert Atkins died four years ago. But his diet may have just gotten a second wind:

The largest and longest-running comparison of diet plans found the low-carbohydrate Atkins regimen produced greater weight loss than three other popular programs -- the Zone, the Ornish and the U.S. nutritional guidelines.

The average weight reduction was small, and participants started regaining pounds by the end of the one-year study, according to the report in today's Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Still, Atkins dieters -- who consume prodigious amounts of long-demonized saturated fats but shun carbs, such as pasta and breads -- experienced significant drops in blood pressure and cholesterol.

Atkins dieters lost an average of 10.4 pounds after one year, according to the report, compared with 5.7 pounds for those on a traditional balanced diet based on federal nutritional guidelines, 4.8 pounds for the high-carbohydrate Ornish diet and 3.5 pounds for the Zone diet, which calls for a set ratio of carbohydrate, protein and fat.

The study's results cast further doubt on the benefits of low-fat, high-carb diets, which have been touted for decades as the model of healthy eating.

I guess my work is finished, and I can retire now. Or I could, if the people advocating low-fat diets would just go away. But they won't:

Dr. Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., said the differences among the weight loss plans detected in the study were insignificant.

He added that Atkins dieters saw an increase in levels of LDL, or "bad," cholesterol.

"The conclusions of this study are highly misleading," he said.

Like most fanatics, Dr. Ornish has a bit of a problem with reality. The world just stubbornly refuses to conform to his black-and-white, carbs-are-good/meat-is-bad belief system.

Probably the most interesting comments come at the end of the L.A. Times story:

Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who also was not involved in the study, said the findings should be interpreted cautiously.

Women on the Atkins diet experienced most of their weight loss during the first six months, raising the possibility that weight loss on all four diet plans would look the same in a longer study, she said.

"My guess is that if they carried this study out for another six months, they would converge," Nestle said.

But a similar study actually reached that conclusion. This one, published in 2005, compared Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and Weight Watchers for 12 months, and found the weight loss was about the same across the board. Adherence was higher with Zone and Weight Watchers, and lower with Atkins and Ornish. The conclusion is exactly what Nestle says it would be:

Each popular diet modestly reduced body weight and several cardiac risk factors at 1 year. Overall dietary adherence rates were low, although increased adherence was associated with greater weight loss and cardiac risk factor reductions for each diet group.

That's the point fanatics on both sides fail to comprehend: Success isn't determined by the diet that's thrust upon you. What makes or breaks a weight-loss program is what you can stick with.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2007

The Wicked, Wicked World of Fitness Magazines

I want you to hold two thoughts in your head before I get into the main idea here:

First, a new study in Pediatrics shows that steroid use among adolescents did not increase between 1999 and 2004, despite growing media coverage of steroids in general, and in particular steroids in sports.

There's also this line from the study's conclusion:

Steroid use decreased as adolescents grew older.

The same group of researchers, two months earlier, published a study in the same journal showing that exposure to information about dieting in magazines increases a variety of behaviors, good and bad, among teenage girls:

For female adolescents, the frequency of healthy, unhealthy, and extreme weight-control behaviors increased with increasing magazine reading ... . The odds of engaging in unhealthy weight-control behaviors (such as fasting, skipping meals, and smoking more cigarettes) were twice as high for the most frequent readers compared with those who did not read magazine articles about dieting and weight loss. The odds of using extreme weight-control behaviors (such as vomiting or using laxatives) were 3 times higher in the highest frequency readers compared with those who did not read such magazines.

But there's also this:

There were no significant associations for either weight-control behaviors or psychological outcomes for male adolescents.

Like I said, I need you to hold these two thoughts when I get into my main news item this morning:

1. Information about dieting and weight loss in magazines does not affect boys in any negative ways, just as boys didn't increase anabolic-drug use despite much more exposure to news coverage of steroids.

2. However, exposure to information about dieting and weight loss in magazines does seem to have profound effects on young women, many of them negative.

Indecent exposure

An organization called the American Council on Science and Health has been reviewing magazine coverage of nutrition and dieting for two decades and counting. Its new study, "Nutrition Accuracy in Popular Magazines: January 2004 -- December 2005," came out this week. (Full PDF here.)

The results aren't encouraging for the ink-stained wretches who write about nutrition in popular magazines:

The quality of reporting on nutrition in popular magazines did not improve between 2000–2002 and 2004–2005 and may even have deteriorated over that time period.

Ouch!

My first instinct was to see if they said anything nasty about me personally, since I was still writing for magazines during that two-year period. Men's Health's score went up, from 71 to 76, probably because I left the magazine during the time of this survey. Men's Journal wasn't included in the study, so the articles I wrote for them are either above reproach or beneath contempt. (I'll sleep all right either way.)

Men's Health was ranked 18th of 21 magazines for accuracy, 20th for presentation, 17th for recommendations, and 18th overall. Men's Fitness ranked a dead-last 21st in every category. I'd feel bad, but I don't think I wrote any nutrition articles for MF in that period.

The study said this about MH:

A clever, attention-grabbing writing style seemed to triumph over accuracy and documentation of sources in this magazine.

And about MF:

Many articles had inaccurate, exaggerated, and/or undocumented statements about various aspects of nutrition.

Undocumented! Sounds almost political. Let's get into a few specifics of the problems the study had with these mags:

Some Men’s Health articles also contained factual
errors. The July/August 2004 article “The Abs Diet” stated, incorrectly, that whole-grain breads prevent the body from storing fat and that Egg Beaters are nutritionally equivalent to whole
eggs. The November 2004 article “Right On, Red” said that creatine is an enzyme. It isn’t. And the previously mentioned article “Build the
Perfect Feast” indicated that fructose and high-fructose corn syrup are the same thing. They are not. All of these errors would almost certainly have been caught before publication if the articles
had been reviewed by a registered dietitian.

As an aside, I should note here that some of the stupidest things I've ever heard about nutrition came out of the mouths of registered dietitians. How long did it take them to figure out that starches, which fall into their beloved category of "complex carbohydrates," were actually making people fat?

Here are some of the specific problems the study has with MF:

Other articles in Men’s Fitness ... led us to
wonder whether this magazine is in the business of publishing fiction. The most notable example was the March 2005 article “The Best and Worst Foods a Man Can Eat,” which managed to make inaccurate, exaggerated, or undocumented statements about most of the 54 foods it evaluated. The lack of documentation was a real disappointment; we would have loved to read the studies that allegedly show that “guys who eat bran cereal frequently are happier, more alert, and have greater energy levels than guys who don’t” or those that demonstrate that “alcohol plus a steak dinner works like lighter fluid on your metabolism.”

Conversely, the highest-rated magazines overall included Shape (#2 overall), Glamour (#4), Fitness (#7), and Self (#11). The only women's magazine down in the gutter with the men's mags is Cosmo (#19, just one notch above Muscle & Fitness).

So now comes the big question:

If the men's magazines are so deficient, how come their readers exhibit no unhealthy behaviors based on the advice they get from those magazines? No eating disorders, no increase in steroid use.

But the teenage girls getting all that accurate advice from Shape and Glamour have problems that range from fasting and skipping meals to vomiting and using laxatives for weight loss. The more they read those magazines, the more problems they have.

So perhaps it's time to address that 800-pound magazine publisher in the room: What the magazines say doesn't really matter. What matters is what the magazines show. Young readers of men's magazines are, we can assume, inspired to get lean and muscular without developing extreme behaviors to reach those goals. But young readers of women's magazines, despite getting information that passes muster with these self-appointed watchdogs in the dietetics community, develop extreme, health-threatening behaviors in apparently linear proportion to how often they read those magazines.

So is the problem with the information? Or do the images they show cancel everything else out?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:03 AM | Comments (1)

March 01, 2007

Pills Kill, Wine Is Fine, and Chunky Monkey Produces Unexpected Dividends

Around and around and around we go. Today, antioxidant vitamins are the kiss of death:

The Copenhagen team reviewed more than 815 clinical trials into the benefits of vitamins A, E, and C, alongside beta-carotene and selenium -- all commonly used supplements. They selected 68 whose methods were more likely to produce an accurate picture of vitamin benefits, then added their results together to form one, large-scale study.

This overview suggested that taking antioxidant supplements neither increased, nor reduced, the risk of early death.

However, when the researchers eliminated a further 21 trials which had a slightly higher possibility of producing a skewed result, the picture changed considerably.

While the risk of death was unchanged among selenium and vitamin C users, a statistically significant increase in risk emerged for the other three supplements. Beta-carotene produced an approximate 7 percent increased risk, vitamin E a 4 percent increase and vitamin A, a 16 percent increase.

There is an interesting reason why antioxidant vitamins might have a negative health consequence:

They said there were several different explanations for this increase in risk -- and suggested that knocking out "free radicals" might actually interfere with a natural defense mechanism within the body.

Of course, you could also use that argument against any medication or medical treatment -- you're interfering with something the body does naturally.

Anyway, a supplement-industry spokesperson disputes the entire premise of the study:

Dr. Ann Walker, of the Health Supplements Information Service, said the findings of the study were "worthless". She said some of the studies which had been examined by the Copenhagen team involved patients who were already seriously ill.

"How sensible scientists can suggest that a modest intervention of a single antioxidant supplement can have a major effect in reversing life-threatening pathology, where patients already have advanced cardiovascular disease, is ridiculous."

Fruit of the vine

So if antioxidant vitamins aren't the life-extending panacea we thought they were, what does work? Hint -- it comes with a cork:

Drinking a small amount of wine appears to extend men's life expectancy by a few years, Dutch researchers said on Wednesday in the latest study to find benefits in moderate drinking.

Dutch researchers sought to gauge the impact on health and life expectancy of long-term alcohol consumption, tracking 1,373 men born between 1900 and 1920 who lived in Zutphen, an industrial town in the Netherlands.

The researchers followed alcohol intake in seven surveys carried out over four decades starting in 1960, tracking some men until they died and the rest until 2000. The men were asked about drinking, eating and smoking habits, weight, and prevalence of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

Drinking a small amount of alcohol -- less than a glass per day -- was associated with lower rates of death from cardiovascular causes and overall causes, the study found.

Drinking wine appeared to be more protective than spirits and beer. Drinking an average of about half a glass of wine per day was associated with lowest mortality levels, it found.

I'm convinced! Okay, I like wine anyway, so this wasn't exactly a hard sell. Again, the really interesting part is in the potential mechanisms for this health benefit:

The study did not look at how alcohol may provide health benefits, but Streppel said it could be due to an increase in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, or to a reduction in blood clotting. Also, red wine has compounds that may ward off the build-up of fatty tissue in the arteries that can cause a stroke or heart attack.

The study didn't distinguish between red and white wine, alas. Maybe when all the data are published (this was a paper presented at a medical conference), we'll see if it's really better to drink one over the other. If I were a gambling man I'd put my money on red, although I have a personal preference for white. (Yes, I'm a chardonnay-sipping liberal. At midlife, I've come to embrace the fact that in some ways I'm just a character in someone else's cartoon.)

Ben and Jerry are fertility gods

I've finally figured out why my wife and I were so reproductively prolific in our baby-making days. (Our third was conceived while we were practicing birth control.) It's because we enjoyed the occasional bowl of ice cream -- and not the low-fat kind:

Women who eat low-fat dairy foods may have a higher risk of infertility than those who treat themselves to full-fat ice cream or cheese, surprised U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat dairy foods a day had an 85 percent higher risk of a certain type of infertility than women who ate less than one serving of low-fat dairy food a week.

Women who ate one serving of high-fat dairy food a day were 27 percent less likely to be infertile than women who avoided full-fat dairy foods.

That's a roundabout way of saying that full-fat dairy foods improve fertility. And since ice cream is the only full-fat dairy food Americans eat with any kind of regularity these days, it appears that Rocky Road could put you on the path to a baby bump.

In this case, it seems to me that there's an easy and clear interpretation: We know that dietary fat is linked to production of steroid hormones in men. More fat, more testosterone. Estrogen is also a steroid hormone, and we know that it's highly sensitive to nutrition. When women are undernourished, fertility declines. So why wouldn't a high-fat indulgence like ice cream be linked to fertility? My guess is that you could probably do the same study looking at consumption of fatty meat or cold-water fish, and reach the same finding.

However, the same researchers looked at the question of total fat in the diet and found no connection to fertility, although trans fats were linked to infertility.

That's why the researcher, Harvard's Jorge Chavarro, seems stumped by his own study:

"It was a bit of a surprise to us that high-fat dairy foods were positively related to fertility," he said. "There is really not a very clear explanation. It is possible that dairy fat or something along with dairy fat such as the hormones in pregnant cows may be affecting ovulation in women."

He said more study was needed before conclusions could be drawn.

Chavarro's team had earlier found that women who ate more iron from supplements and from plant foods were less likely to be infertile, and found no link between fertility and various types of fats.

For now, we'll just have to live with the joyous news that ice cream has one previously unforeseen benefit.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2007

It All Binges on This

The only good thing you can say about anorexia and bulimia, the best-known eating disorders, is that they're fairly rare. According to a survey published last week, 0.9 percent of American women suffer from anorexia and 1.5 percent from bulimia. Considering how devastating these two diseases are, there's small comfort in knowing they aren't more widespread.

But now there's another one to worry about:

3.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men reported having a binge-eating disorder (usually defined as engaging in uncontrolled eating episodes at least twice a week for at least three months) at some point in their lives.

Here's how a binge is defined:

A binge has two features. One is eating an abnormally large amount of food in a short period of time -- the typical binge would be 1,500 calories or so. There is also a sense of loss of control of the eating. It's not sufficient just to eat a large amount; one has to feel that they're out of control.

I find this personally interesting because I've talked to a few guys who clearly had it. I even came up with my own name for it: "blackout eating."

You take a guy who may be in pretty good shape, or at least not obviously out of shape. Something happens, like a devastating divorce, job loss, or a death of a close friend or family member. He spirals downward into depression, which includes periods of uncontrolled eating -- stuffing food down his throat, even though he's already eaten a recent meal and isn't actually hungry. Food becomes Prozac or Valium or Jim Beam, a form of medication that doesn't require a prescription or trip to the liquor store.

When he finally emerges from his depression, he's 100 to 200 pounds heavier, and thanks to one or two crash diets, his metabolism has done a FEMA.

What I just described is one extreme, but by no means the only type of binge eating that qualifies as disordered:

What's remarkable is how many people with the problem have said that almost as early as they remember -- age 6 or 8 -- they have had problems with out-of-control eating. That's far earlier than anyone develops bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa. Then there's another group of people who have had not that much of a struggle with binge eating or their weight, but then in their 30s or 40s it becomes very difficult for them to control their eating.

Back in college I had a girlfriend whose youngest sibling was already a power eater, and I think the poor kid was just in kindergarten or first grade. The family used to remark on her eating, but they regarded it more as an interesting personality quirk than a problem. Thinking back, I can't imagine why anyone thought it was normal for a kid to eat that much.

Last note about this issue: The article goes on to say that the average binge eater deals with the problem for about eight years, which puts it on a level with bulimia. Anorexia, by contrast, lasts an average of 1.7 years.

Driving kids to desiccation

Another aspect of all this is the 24-hour, full-spectrum media culture, focusing on every aspect of every famous person's appearance. An actress's body is examined from every possible angle. If she has curves, she's called fat. If she doesn't, she's rumored to have an eating disorder. Impressionable kids are left with the idea that it's horrible to be fat, and shameful to have eating disorders. So the kids with legitimate eating disorders have no place to turn for help:

Only 1 percent can talk to their parents and 9 percent can talk to someone at school about their concerns, a poll of 600 suggests. ... Of the young people surveyed, 92 percent said there was no one they could turn to about their eating disorder. And 83 percent said they would not be able to approach their GP or nurse about their eating disorder.

I have to think this will all sort itself out, kind of the way that people with depression, ADD, and Asperger's disorder have gotten used to the idea that they have a problem that can be helped with professional guidance and/or medication.

But until then, life's going to be unnecessarily difficult for a lot of people with issues that could be treated.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

Monday Link Dump

Kevin Drum asks if Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player in the universe.

I have a humbler suggestion: Tiger Woods is the best athlete in America right now.

It seems odd to talk about tennis and golf during Super Bowl Week, but really, does anyone dominate any sport the way these two dominate theirs?

The tooth is out there

Straight teeth don't make you any happier, according to this:

A 20-year study found that orthodontic treatment had little positive impact on future psychological health.

But what about future earnings? You can't tell me that having messed-up teeth won't affect your career path. Just try getting on TV without perfectly straight and glow-in-the-dark-white teeth.

Acceptance

I've never once seen an episode of House, but now, thanks to the vagaries of channel-surfing, I've seen Hugh Laurie accept two major awards -- the Golden Globe and one from the Screen Actors Guild.

Speaking of acting awards:

Forest Whitaker is considered the frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. As it happens, over the weekend, I saw much of Platoon on cable. He only had a minor role, but you always notice him when he's on screen.

By contrast, he shared several scenes in Platoon with Johnny Depp. But if you didn't know it was Depp, you'd never pay any attention to that character. He's just a guy in the background. Whitaker had a different kind of presence, even then. Even when he's in the background, you notice him.

I can't quantify this is any way -- writing about movies is pretty far from my paying gig -- but I think I can remember more minor roles by Whitaker than by just about any other actor.

The bit he did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as the force-of-nature football player, was just a cartoon, like a purely physical version of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli (interesting that neither actor ever played similar characters again), but in The Color of Money and The Crying Game, I remembered his scenes more clearly than I did just about anything else in the movie.

And who says there aren't any good roles for overweight black men with weird eyes?

The big picture

In this massive essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, argues that nutrition science misses the forest for the trees.

I can't argue with his point that eating real food is better than eating anything "enriched" or "fortified." I made the case for "clean eating" in New Rules of Lifting, although I suspect I'm more enthusiastic about protein supplements than Pollan is.

Right on cue, I found a news report this morning that bolsters Pollan's argument that we spend far too much time looking at the bits and pieces of nutrition, instead of the big picture:

Children who eat too little fat can end up overweight, a new study has found. Researchers in Sweden discovered that eating the right sort of fat kept the weight of children down.

Those who were significantly overweight consumed low amounts of unsaturated fat, the type found in fish, olive oil and vegetables.

Another point that could be made is that these bitsy-piecey studies do all tend to point to the same place -- eat more fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods, and skip anything that comes in a box.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:22 AM | Comments (2)

January 26, 2007

And We Hear They Aren't Very Good at Math, Either

Rannoch Donald sent along this story, headlined, "Average woman spends 31 years on a diet, researchers say."

Rannoch added this caustic line: "Something says the diet isn't working, eh?"

But what caught me is that the premise of the story is negated by the story's information. Here's the premise:

According to a new report, British women spend an average of six months a year counting the calories and more than a fifth are on a permanent diet throughout their lifetime in a seemingly never-ending quest for the perfect figure.

But later in the story it says this:

But despite best intentions, three quarters of those who began their New Year with the firm resolution to lose weight will give up by the end of the week. The average diet lasts 5.5 weeks, with the post-Christmas fast being even shorter at just three weeks.

Half of slimmers throw in the towel due to lack of willpower, while a quarter of respondents said that they give up because their strict diet regime leaves them moody or depressed.

The most determined of dieters are aged between 45 and 64, with almost a quarter spending up to a year slimming. In comparison, those aged between 18 and 24 are more likely to be yo-yo dieters, with a fifth giving up within a month.

This part isn't surprising. When I began to look into the issue of exercise adherence -- everyone knows you're supposed to exercise, but relatively few of us do it consistently enough to get results -- I learned that about a quarter of exercisers will drop out of a new program at three months, half will have quit at six months, and only about 25 percent will still be exercising a year after starting a program. The most common excuse is "lack of time," but these trends help up even when researchers looked at prisoners, who in theory have all the time in the world.

So here's what I don't get: If the average woman gives up on a diet in a matter of weeks, how can her time spent on a diet possibly add up to 31 years? Wouldn't she have to live hundreds of years for the two factual assertions to correlate?

It seems to me that what the researchers are saying is that most women spend most of their adult lives watching their weight -- which is very different from being "on a diet." Hell, I watch my weight, in the sense that I don't want to gain any. Don't you? Doesn't just about everyone you know? But do you think of yourself as being "on a diet"?

If you live in an industrialized country, you have more food available than any human should ever consume. And if you're an intelligent and health-conscious person, you pick and choose among those available foods. You know you're at no risk of starvation, but at very real risk of overeating, and all the health problems that go along with it. So why wouldn't you watch what you eat? And why wouldn't you watch your weight, using it as a rough indicator of whether you're eating too much?

Really, shouldn't the headline be, "Average woman spends 31 years displaying common sense"? And since the same story says men spend just 28 years "on a diet," employing the same flawed criterion, shouldn't the second paragraph say that men lag behind woman in using their freakin' brains to control their weight and manage their health?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2007

All Wet

A theme emerged from some news reports I scanned this morning.

This first one isn't a huge surprise:

Nutrition studies are more likely to tout the health benefits or downplay concerns about soft drinks, juice and milk when they are financed by manufacturers and industry groups than when they are paid for by impartial sources, a new analysis shows. ...

Researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston reviewed 111 studies on soft drinks, juice and milk. Two scientists analyzed the studies' conclusions without knowing who sponsored them. Another researcher identified the financing source without knowing the conclusions and classified articles according to whether a favorable finding would be beneficial, negative or neutral to the spender's financial interests. ...

* 14 studies sponsored completely by the industry showed favorable results; five were neutral; and three were unfavorable.

* 24 studies paid for by independent sources had positive findings; eight were neutral; 20 studies had unfavorable results.

Okay, you get what you pay for. Understood.

What I find funny is the fact that the National Dairy Council was singled out. There's no mention of Gatorade, which may very well have pioneered the practice of hiring name-brand researchers to promote the idea that everyone is dehydrated, and that sports drinks are better than water for helping people fix that alleged problem. Maybe it's the methane. If Gatorade involved fluids that came from animals that farted, the media might treat its research with more skepticism.

Moving on:

Sally Squires, in her weekly Washington Post column, goes after some questionable claims being used to sell a fat-burning beverage:

A new green tea beverage is drawing sharp criticism from scientists and from a consumer group that says the drink's promotional material implies that it could help with weight loss.

Enviga -- a green tea beverage supplemented with calcium and caffeine -- has been test-marketed in Philadelphia and New York since October. A joint venture of Coca-Cola and Nestle S.A., Enviga is slated to be sold nationwide in early February. A 12-ounce can is expected to cost between $1.29 and $1.49, according to Coca-Cola.

Enviga has five calories per can, according to its makers. It provides 90 milligrams of green tea extract, known as epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), as well as caffeine and 20 percent of the daily value for calcium. That's a combination that is "proven to burn calories," its makers say on their Web site.

How many calories? That's under debate. There's limited research on the calorie-burning effects of EGCG and caffeine. There's also little, if anything, to show that consuming these substances translates into actual weight loss, since most studies have been small and short-term.

Take the company-funded research presented in October at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO). It found that drinking about three cans of Enviga daily boosted metabolism by about 100 calories. "When consumed regularly as part of a healthy diet and exercise regime, such a beverage may provide added benefits to help in weight control," the team concluded.

But the experiment lasted just three days and involved 32 people, a sampling that scientists would consider small. And all participants were either lean or of normal weight. Whether Enviga would have the same effect on overweight or obese people is not known.

This follows another report, which was brought to my attention by my friend Rob Duffield:

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday fined the marketers of four weight loss pills $25 million for making false advertising claims ranging from rapid weight loss to reducing the risk of cancer.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said the products ... would remain on store shelves, but that the companies would have to stop making the false claims.

"What we challenge is the marketing of the claims," she said. "The marketers are required to back up the claims with the science and if they can't do that they can't make the claim. But we don't ban the products from the shelves."

The FTC investigated a variety of claims made -- including rapid weight loss and reduction in the risk of osteoporosis, Alzheimer's and even cancer, Majoras noted.

Fines were levied against marketers of Xenadrine EFX, One A Day Weight Smart, CortiSlim and TrimSpa.

All of these news reports concern marketing -- how certain products are promoted. There's no implication that any of the specific products under discussion are dangerous. And yet, the cumulative effect of these reports, to anyone who's paying attention, is that all these products must somehow be dangerous, as opposed to "worthless," which is the more logical conclusion.

This is going to come off as a frivolous question, which I suppose is inevitable, given the fact I'm on deadline and don't have time to dig up research to back up my points, but I'll ask it anyway:

Isn't all advertising deceptive? Ads for other products may not make blatantly false claims, but they damned sure do everything in their power to create alterate realities.

In Car Ad World, drivers live in a land in which no other people exist, so they get to drive anywhere without the annoyance of traffic.

In Cialis Ad World, a trim, fit guy who just happens to suffer from erectile dysfunction needs a pill so he can have sex with his trim, fit wife.

In Political Ad World ... well, you get the point.

Every waking minute of every day, we're assaulted by advertising, marketing, public relations, spin. You can't escape it -- there's always someone trying to sell you something, or convince you of something. And it's all B.S., and every sentient human knows it. We choose to believe some piles of B.S. and reject others, but that's our right as citizens and consumers.

So why so much noise about the particular B.S. of a particular class of products? I can tune it out just fine. Can't you?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (2)

January 03, 2007

The Perfect Book for Retonement Season

Yesterday was January 2, which I have dubbed the National Day of Retonement. It's not listed on calendars yet, but that's more a function of my unfortunate obscurity than any inherent problem with the idea.

NDoR is the opposite of a holiday. It's the day you start paying the price for all the holidays you've just celebrated.

So how did you spend your NDoR? I spent most of it working on my next book, which should be out about this time next year, with a great midday workout designed by the incomparable Alwyn Cosgrove. It's one of the workouts in the new book, which is the first I've written for women. All I'll say is that the workout may be designed for women, but it's sure not for sissies.

Speaking of books:

When Time magazine, in its December 18 issue, previewed the top five diet books of Retonement Season (I figure if I keep using the word, someone else will pick up on it, obscurity be damned), it turned out that two were written by friends of mine.

The first is The Reverse Diet, by Tricia Cunningham and my friend Heidi Skolnik. Cunningham is a motivational speaker who lost 172 pounds. Heidi is a nutritionist who's worked with the New York Mets and Giants. I've known Heidi since I gave her a lift from the airport. We were both going to a conference where she was one of the featured speakers, and I think I figured out who she was when I saw her going over her notes on the flight to whatever city it was in. We kept in touch for the next few years, and I immediately thought of her when a PR person at Men's Health asked me if I knew of anyone who could do TV appearances in New York as a representative of the magazine. That led to her gig as the weight-loss coach in MH, as well as continued TV appearances. She met Cunningham on Good Morning America, which led to this book.

I haven't read it -- one of the minor tragedies of my obscurity is that publishers don't always send me advance copies of diet and fitness books, the way they did when I was on staff at magazines -- but the premise seems simple enough: Eat a big breakfast, a medium-sized lunch, and a small dinner. It's not a new concept (I can't count the number of times I've seen it in magazine articles, including one or two of my own), but I don't think the authors are pretending that they're introducing an original or earth-shaking premise.

It seems to be selling well out of the gate, which is great for Heidi, who's one of my favorite people in the business.

Mood up

The other new book is The Good Mood Diet, by my friend Susan Kleiner and Bob Condor, a health and fitness columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

That premise is more interesting, and as luck would have it, I got a copy of the book.

Sue, like Heidi, is a sports nutritionist who's worked with college and pro teams and individual athletes. She's also trained as a scientist, and did her doctoral dissertation on the diets and health risks of competitive, steroid-using bodybuilders.

The Good Mood Diet started as the Daylight Diet, which she used to help clients and friends (including her own mother) alleviate depression. She discovered that everyone who tried the diet reported about the same result within the first two weeks -- they all said they had more energy.

The original diet was low in fat (about 15 percent of total calories), high in protein (35 percent), and moderate in carbs (50 percent). She since modified that formula to 40 percent carbs, 30 percent protein, and 30 percent fat, which made it more effective for weight loss while maintaining its potent mood-elevating properties.

Having worked with Sue for many years -- starting when I was at Men's Fitness -- I was surprised to see her recommending a specific macronutrient ratio, especially one as ubiquitous as 40/30/30. Since that's also my favorite ratio, for a variety of reasons (the main ones being that it works and it's easy to use), I asked how she arrived at it:

"A diet with less than 40 percent carbs is depressing, literally," she told me. "Forty percent is also better for weight loss. A diet less than 25 to 30 percent fat lowers stress-coping skills and raises anxiety/anger/hostility. The higher healthy-fat intake may also enhance body-fat loss.

"For weight loss, I was looking for about 2 grams of protein per kilogram per day, which in a 1,600-calorie diet for the average overweight person comes out to about 30 percent."

My favorite section of the book is her list of "feel-great foods." You'll find the usual things that appear in just about every book on healthy eating (green tea, nuts, spinach, strawberries), but she also comes up with some surprising choices:

* egg yolks

* lean pork

* garlic and ginger

* low-fat or nonfat dairy

* chocolate

* caffeine

Any book that says good things about pig meat and coffee is all right by me. The fact it's also a well-researched book integrating the latest science on how diet affects mood with the somewhat better-understood principles of eating for weight loss makes it a winner three times over.

If you ask me -- and I'll confess almost no one does -- it's the perfect nutrition book for this Retonement Season.

Check it out at goodmooddiet.com.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2007

New Year, Old You

I got into a discussion about a relative over the holidays. This person aspires to a particular life goal, and some members of his family believe he's sincere in that aspiration. Another relative believes that it's time for an intervention, a council of elders to explain that he needs to make drastic changes in his life if he's going to achieve this goal.

I disagreed.

In my corner of the fitness biz, the part that's mainly concerned with physical transformation, with making bodies bigger or smaller or stronger or leaner, a new conventional wisdom has emerged. I first heard it from Charles Staley, but I've since heard Alwyn Cosgrove and others say it:

If you have a stated goal, but your actions are incompatible with reaching that goal, then it isn't really a goal.

A gentler way to say it: If you aren't achieving your goals, then you have to look at your actions. If your actions aren't leading you closer to your goals, then you have to change your actions or reassess your goals.

I don't mean to imply that this person isn't sincere when he says he aspires to the thing we were discussing. And I certainly am not in any position to judge anybody; I don't believe I have any extrasensory abilities to look into people's psyches and examine their beliefs and motivations.

But, after more than a decade of writing about exercise and nutrition, I've learned that a lot of people simply value their current actions more than their stated goals.

For example -- and, by the way, this has nothing to do with the family member we were discussing -- if someone tells you he wants to lose weight, but won't even consider joining a gym, drinking less beer, getting more sleep, starting the day with a good breakfast, and/or establishing a disciplined eating pattern, then you know that person is kidding himself and wasting your time.

If his goal were to maintain or increase the size of his waist, then his actions would match his goal, since he's established a perfectly lipogenic lifestyle.

Now, if I were a behavioral psychologist, instead of a fitness geek who puts my spin on other people's ideas, I'd ask why someone would attach so much value to actions that are so incompatible with one's goals. In other words, if you don't aspire to be fatter than you are, why did you set up your entire life to achieve a goal you don't have?

But I'm not a psychologist, so I focus my energies on helping people whose actions are compatible with their goals. I never know what to say to people on the opposite track. I've spent hours in email correspondence with readers who have unique roadblocks to what they're trying to achieve. But I wouldn't spend minutes with those people if I thought they were unwilling to make the changes necessary to reach those goals.

Getting back to the family member: My advice was to get off the guy's back. He'll change his actions if and when he values them less than the goal he says he wants to achieve. Nobody can talk him out of those actions, because they work for him. He likes his life the way it is, and no matter how often or how emphatically he attests to one particular aspiration, the evidence suggests he has no real intention of achieving it.

He's chosen not to move toward his goal, and I'm perfectly willing to respect that choice. But even if I weren't, what difference would it make?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2006

Why I'm Not a Vegetarian

I'm just not smart enough:

Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says. A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.

Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.

The study of 8,179 was reported in the British Medical Journal.

Even with my tragically low IQ, I didn't have much trouble picking apart these conclusions. Vegetarianism, of course, is a luxury. You wouldn't think to eliminate so many of the most accessible foods from your diet unless you enjoyed a wealth of options. The people with the highest IQs tend to come from the type of families and circumstances that allow them to indulge in luxuries.

By way of comparison, the people who came up with the idea of the invasion and occupation of Iraq are also smarter than me, and considerably more privileged and connected. You have to be both smart and isolated from the real world to come up with such a tragically bad idea, and get other members of your elite to go along with it.

To its credit, the article does note this ... kind of:

Researchers said the findings were partly related to better education and higher occupational social class, but it remained statistically significant after adjusting for these factors.

Vegetarians were more likely to be female, to be of higher occupational social class and to have higher academic or vocational qualifications than non-vegetarians.

However, these differences were not reflected in their annual income, which was similar to that of non-vegetarians.

I think you could flip this and show that fast-food consumption is inversely correlated to IQ -- the lower the intelligence, the higher the tendency to Supersize. And you could probably find a strong relation to low education levels and occupation status, although that wouldn't hold across the board -- some people born with wealth and status but not much intelligence will develop a weakness for food served in establishments with yellow-and-red signs.

All of which you could've figured out on your own.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie ... cola

If you've ever wondered why Coke, the soft drink, gives you a buzz even without the cocaine that was part of the original formula, this blog explains it.

(Thanks, as always, to Rannoch Donald for these links.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2006

A Dispatch from the Trans-Cupcake Wars

Some days I question my competence as a blogger. I call MPF "the official weblog of the American obesity epidemic," but when a story comes along that's right in my wheelhouse -- like the trans-fat ban in New York City -- I can't work up the energy to care about it.

I'm not in favor of trans fats, but I do cringe when governments get involved in nutrition debates. Historically, they tend to jump in on the wrong side. Look at the original Food Guide Pyramid, for example. It was a virtual prescription for diabetes, and yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture continued to promote it long after we knew about the dangers of large quantities of refined carbohydrates.

The only good thing you can say about the pyramid is that the government never forced anyone to follow it.

Don't get me wrong; I don't think any harm will come from banning trans fats. But it's worth noting how we ended up with so many trans fats in our foods in the first place.

Here's one example: Companies like McDonald's used to cook French fries in beef tallow. But, because of the fear of animal fats in general and saturated fats in particular, they were pressured to switch to vegetable oil. The type they chose was partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which includes a trans fat called elaidic acid, and what looked like a win for nutritional virtue turned into a major loss. (And that was before McDonald's started supersizing.)

As Mike Roussell points out in this T-nation column, some trans fats occur naturally in beef, and are actually good for us. Our bodies convert these fats to CLA, which is currently thought to reduce body fat. So the debate isn't as simple as it looks.

My other concern about banning trans fats in our nation's media capital is that it gives ammunition to all the people who don't want anything to be regulated. (Trust me, they'll use this mostly symbolic trans-fat ban to drum up fear of universal health care, which will be a major issue in the 2008 elections and beyond.)

I don't mind setting those people off if we're talking about a legitimate public-health issue, like smoking in public buildings. But it's hard for me to imagine how my health is improved by the fact the guy next to me in a New York City restaurant can no longer order foods fried in partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

But there is a current nutrition debate that hits closer to home:

Once a cupcake wasn't something to think about. It was just what your mom brought to school for your birthday. But this year, as schools across the country begin enforcing new federally mandated "wellness policies," many are banning the little treats. And parents are fighting back.

When the principal at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria explained to the PTA earlier this year that cupcakes were out, a furor erupted.

"A lot of people are really angry," said Karen Epperson, a George Mason parent. "They think this is really stupid."

What the Washington Post story doesn't say is that cupcakes are only a small part of the problem in today's schools. If your kid is in a classroom with 25 other kids, she's not only getting birthday cupcakes a couple dozen times each school year, she's also getting treats to celebrate every freakin' holiday imaginable. Even on Halloween, when the kids are just hours away from storming the streets and coming back with pumpkin-loads of candy, they get bags of it at school. Valentine's Day is an orgy of hardened, blood-red globs of pure sugar. I'm waiting for them to come home with candy pitchforks because someone wanted to celebrate Bastille Day.

(Okay, that wouldn't happen, since Bastille Day is July 14, when kids are home for the summer, whining about having nothing to do, which is how they prepare for the 9-month school year, when they whine about having too much to do. And, okay, there isn't much call for acknowledging French holidays in the U.S. these days. But if it were in March instead of July, I'll bet some kid would bring in something baked or sugar-coated to celebrate it.)

The upshot of all this is described by a commenter on Kevin Drum's blog:

You try to raise a non-obese, relatively healthy kid and you do okay until they hit kindergarten. Between the cupcake days, the party days, and the "specials" (teacher's day, Arbor Day, whatever), there's hardly a day that isn't loaded with extra artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup and fat. And then we wonder why the kids all misbehave. Blue, tattooed "froot" leather does not occur anywhere in nature! But try to tell that to most parents.

Seriously, parents will get near violent with you when you suggest at an average suburban school that maybe we should just have one cupcake/candy/sweet-treats day a month, or otherwise limit sweets. So, you can tell your kid that she can sit in the corner and eat her grapes and carrots while her friend passes out the Sponge Bob froot snacks. You can harp on the teacher. Or you can take it to the [PTA] where they will roll their eyes at you.

That's pretty accurate. But there's yet another level of absurdity here: At the same time the parents are fighting to keep cupcakes in the schools, the schools are wringing their hands over childhood obesity.

It's like complaining that children are illiterate, but then refusing to put books into classrooms.

Seriously, it's that absurd.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:56 AM | Comments (4)

December 10, 2006

Brain Drain

The human brain is what drove a relatively hairless and defenseless mammal with a singular advantage -- opposable thumbs -- to the top of the food chain. Our brains transformed us from four-cylinder foragers to ... well, let's hear it from the master:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!"*

The organ that turned half-assed apes into full-assed homo sapiens uses 20 percent of an adult's daily energy, and 50 percent of a child's. That's right: Half of their daily calories are consumed by their rapidly developing brains. By comparison, a monkey brain might use just 8 percent of its total energy, proof that it doesn't take a lot of cognitive power to throw your own feces at whatever you find annoying.

You'd think that such a magnificent energy-sucking machine as a human brain would function best with plenty of energy to suck. But according to this, in the New York Times Magazine, the opposite is true:

The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better -- basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

A team led by Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, had been analyzing the pathways followed in mouse brains by ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining, when the stomach is empty. To the scientists’ surprise, they found that ghrelin was binding to cells not just in the primitive part of the brain that registers hunger (the hypothalamus) but also in the region that plays a role in learning, memory and spatial analysis (the hippocampus). ...

The finding was startling, but “it makes sense,” Horvath says. “When you are hungry, you need to focus your entire system on finding food in the environment.” In fact, some biologists believe that human intelligence itself evolved because it made early hominids more effective hunters, gatherers and foragers.

The final line of the short piece, though, puzzles me:

Since overweight kids have suppressed ghrelin levels, Horvath theorizes that perhaps the obesity epidemic has contributed to declining test scores and other American educational woes.

If that's true, then wouldn't we create smarter kids by denying them breakfast? Obviously, we wouldn't; and we shouldn't. This study, for example, shows that Spanish schoolchildren who ate the most food for breakfast (at least 20 percent of their total daily calories) had the best performance on the "reasoning" portion of their standardized tests.

I'm just guessing here, but I assume that a standardized test would be taken in the morning. Logically, would the researchers look at the relationship between breakfast and cognitive performance if the test were taken after lunch?

So here we have at least one link between food eaten (we have to assume) shortly before a test and performance on that test.

I understand that Dr. Horvath is talking about learning, and a standardized test would measure what one has learned. So it could be that the two things aren't related -- maybe the brain learns better when the gas tank is empty, but regurgitates information better when it's full.

Then again, the breakfast clubbers in the Spanish study did better on the "reasoning" portion of the test, which would seem to indicate that a full stomach didn't help them dredge up facts or calculate figures. But it also doesn't seem to have hurt them do those things; the researchers didn't mention any differences in those areas of performance between subjects who ate big breakfasts and those who ate little or nothing in the morning.

And yet ... well, maybe there is something to the idea that a starving brain is a better brain. I was clicking around PubMed, looking for studies linking nutrition to cognitive performance, when I found this one.

The study looks at thyroid function, rather than nutrition. But thyroid hormones are linked to food. If you starve yourself, the hormones drop, slowing down your metabolism to keep your body from burning through too much of its energy reserves before you can find something to eat. Hypothyroidism is a condition in which your thyroid hormones are chronically depressed, which has the big negative effect of making people gain weight no matter how little they eat.

But in the study I mentioned, published earlier this year, young teenagers with low thyroid functioning scored better on standardized tests of reading and "block design" (I assume that's a measure of three-dimensional spatial relationships) than those with normal or elevated thyroid function.

So, what the hell, maybe starving your kids might make them smarter. I don't recommend it, and I'm not going to test the theory on my own kids. But you never know.

* Huge digression, having nothing to do with hunger and brain function:

Shakespeare has Hamlet say the lines I quoted while describing his deep and seemingly inexplicable depression to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The line preceding this is more harsh than anything Al Gore says in An Inconvenient Truth: "This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire -- why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."

Whenever I feel good for having written what strikes me as a clever line, I remind myself that I've never put together any string of words as memorable and vivid as "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors."

But it's not just the words, it's the context. It would be one thing if Shakespeare were making fun of a political speech by the Elizabethen equivalent of some asspipe like Rick Santorum or Bill Frist.

Instead, he was describing the joyless void within the mind of someone who's clinically depressed. I've had my blue moments, but I've never been that deep into the funk, and this snippet of Hamlet, written more than 400 years ago, still gives us insight into what it must feel like when your mind goes from blue to pitch-black.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:23 AM | Comments (1)

November 30, 2006

The Empire Strikes Back

I wrote about Adam Campbell's excellent takedown of the American Diabetes Association here. Now the ADA has written to protest ... and Adam lets them have it again.

(Thanks to Steve Adam for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:38 AM | Comments (1)

"Your Mother Was a Hamster, And Your Father Smelt of Resveratrol!"

More news about red wine. (For old news, start here.) First, another health benefit:

In the latest research, Roger Corder of Queen Mary's School of Medicine in London and colleagues analyzed various components of red wine. They found that substances called procyanidins appeared to have the most potent beneficial effect on the cells that enable arteries to power the heart.

Moreover, the researchers discovered that levels of procyanidins were highest in red wines produced in southwestern France, where French men tend to live the longest, according to a report in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The winemakers of that region tend to use more traditional techniques in which Tannat grapes are soaked with their seeds longer, boosting the procyanidins.

The research suggests that one or two glasses a day of cabernet sauvignon or other Madiran wines made with similar grapes and methods would be enough to get the health benefits, Corder said.

If these were French researchers concluding that French wines are the healthiest, I'd be skeptical. And I'd really want to know who funded the research. But I have to think that the Brits didn't have a financial stake in the outcome of their study. Plus, you know, Nature isn't exactly a haven for pay-to-play science.

So the best reaction is to giggle at the fact that anything French comes out on top in any category. That's sure to get a rise out of certain individuals.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

So Should We Start Testing Athletes for Red Wine?

Is there anything resveratrol can't do? Two weeks ago we learned it can prevent diabetes and heart disease in overweight mice, as well as giving them unusual balancing skills.

Now we learn resveratrol can also boost endurance:

Mice given high doses of the compound were able to run twice as far on treadmills than they normally could, French researchers reported.

Resveratrol might even help the rodents live longer, they say.

"The compound resveratrol, found in the skin of red grapes and cranberries, was known to activate SIRT1, an enzyme known to be involved in lifespan extension," explained lead researcher Dr. Johan Auwerx, from the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

These results, published in the Nov. 16 issue of Cell, add to findings from a recent study that showed that resveratrol improved health and lengthened survival of mice placed on a high-calorie diet.

The researchers think that what they found applies to humans as well as mice. SIRT1, they say, works the same way in humans, signaling cells to burn more energy. That not only would help obese people lose weight, it might help patients with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's.

This is all coming from Sirtris, the company that's developing the resveratrol-based drug and sponsored the research, so take that for what it's worth.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2006

When Is a Low-Carb Diet Not Actually Low in Carbs?

I ripped through yesterday's post about low-carb diets before I'd actually printed out the study. I don't normally print out every study I write about, but I should have this time, since the charts detailing the data were configured so that you had to print them out to drill down into the parts of the study that didn't make it into the headlines.

Fortunately, Regina Wilshire did print it out, and she discovered that the data don't actually say what the news reports assumed they said.

Just to review, the data were the latest from Harvard's Nurses' Health Study, a long-running survey of more than 80,000 women. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. So there's no questioning the validity or importance of the data.

The big finding in the study is that women eating low-carb diets did not have more heart disease than women eating high-carb diets. When I actually looked at the data, after printing out the study, what jumped out at me is how there's really no trend at all. The women were divided into 10 groups, from most to least carbs in their diets, and you don't see any linear connection to heart disease. The data jump around from one decile to the next, with no clear line implicating carbs, fat, or protein in heart disease.

But there is one place in the data where you see something important: The women eating the most vegetable fat had the lowest incidence of heart disease. It's clear, and statistically significant.

The news reports said that this is proof that low-carb diets only work to reduce heart disease when the diet is also heavy in vegetable fat.

Unfortunately, that's not what the data show at all, as Regina discovered.

The researchers sorted the women in the study three different ways. First, they divided them according to the overall percentages of carbs, protein, and fat and in their diets.

The women eating the fewest carbs were very different from the ones eating the most, and comprised the smallest of the 10 deciles. They ate fewer calories, exercised less, and were more likely to be smokers. Once the researchers adjusted for things like smoking and total calories in the diet, they found no trend for heart disease.

Then the researchers aligned them according to percentages of carbs, animal protein, and animal fat in their diets. Again, there were very clear differences from the first decile to the 10th. And again, once they adjusted for all the confounding variables, the researchers found no connection between animal protein and fat and heart disease.

The third group sorted the women according to percentages of carbs, vegetable protein, and vegetable fat. But in these groups, as Regina noted, there was very little difference across the board. Total calories in their diets, the amount of exercise they got, the amount of protein, BMI -- the women in this category were much more alike than different.

And, most important, there wasn't much difference in the percentage of carbohydrates in their diets. In the first decile, the women got 56 percent of their calories from carbs. In the 10th decile, it was 45 percent. I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't describe a 45-percent-carbohydrate diet as "low carb." That's more than you get in the Zone diet.

Regina noted that the real difference from the first group to the 10th was the amount of nuts in their diets. The women in the 10th decile, the ones with 30 percent less heart disease, averaged 0.4 servings of nuts a day, or about three servings a week. A serving of nuts is one-quarter cup, so, with less than one cup of nuts a week, they cut their heart-disease risk by 30 percent.

Shouldn't that have been the headline?

One other thing jumped out at me: The women in the 10th decile drank a lot more alcohol than the women in the first decile -- 6.3 grams a day, vs. 3.9. But it turns out to be unimportant. A five-ounce glass of wine is about 14 grams of alcohol, so 6.3 grams a day is about two glasses of wine a week. It could turn out that two glasses of wine a week is more cardioprotective than one or none, but that's an entirely different discussion.

For now, I'm going with Regina's analysis: It's the nuts.

(Thanks to Steve Adam for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:19 AM | Comments (1)

November 10, 2006

Does This Diet Make Me Look Fat?

Rannoch Donald, our linkmaster in Scotland, sent along this article from an Australian newspaper, which profiles a pair of weight-loss researchers in Canada. I'm not great at geography, but I think that's three continents in two different hemispheres to reveal one simple truth:

Long-term weight loss is more about lifestyle changes, a conference on the Sunshine Coast will be told this weekend. Keynote speakers at The Clinicians Challenge in Treating Obesity will be husband and wife team professors Peter Herman and Janet Polivy.

The couple are psychologists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and world authorities in restraint theory, which holds that if you deny yourself food, you ultimately overeat.

Prof Polivy said most people trying to lose weight had unrealistic expectations and self-defeating behaviour from the start of their diet. When it failed, they were actually likely to gain weight before the next attempt, and so the cycle continued.

"I'll be talking about how restraint eating leads to the false-hope syndrome and how this results in failed attempts at dieting but renewed attempts that are no more likely to succeed," Prof Polivy said.

"Losing weight involves actually changing permanently how people live their lives."

Most of us reading this already know that. If you're hungry, you've already doomed your weight-loss effort. But even more important than that, dietary restraint slows down your metabolism. That's why, since my colleagues and I wrote this book way back when, I've been advocating a different way to look at food for weight control: Focus on what you should eat, rather than on what you shouldn't.

I don't know how many guys told us that the T diet seemed like too much food to them, that they felt unusually stuffed the first couple of weeks. A diet with more protein and healthy fat will have that effect, if you aren't used to it. A lot of these guys were actually eating less, in terms of calories, but felt as if they were eating more.

The biggest question we heard then, and sometimes hear even now, is whether the diet we advocated is healthy. Most of us grew up with the idea that fat is bad, and figured that if bodybuilders eat extra protein then there must be something wrong with it as well. By default, that means carbohydrates must be good. If they weren't, what the hell would we eat?

For all our assurances that a higher-fat, higher-protein, lower-carb diet is ideal for any number of reasons, including overall health as well as weight control, we still found some skepticism.

This new data, from Harvard's Nurses' Health Study, should help alleviate those lingering doubts:

Our findings suggest that diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease in women.

The researchers crunched the data two ways. When they compared those eating the most animal fat and protein, and the fewest carbs, with those eating the least animal fat and protein and the most carbs, the meat-eaters had 6 percent lower rates of heart disease.

But when they looked at the data in terms of who ate the most and least vegetable fat and protein, the results were much more dramatic. Not surprisingly, the Washington Post's Sally Squires focused on those numbers:

Women who eat a diet moderately low in carbohydrates, but rich in vegetable fat and vegetable protein, can cut their risk of heart disease by as much as 30 percent compared with just following a low-fat approach, according to a new Harvard study.

The findings, drawn from a study of more than 80,000 nurses, reinforce a growing shift in nutritional advice toward moderate amounts of healthful fat found in such foods as nuts, avocados, liquid vegetable oils and seafood along with less-processed carbohydrates, including whole-grain bread and cereal and fruits and vegetables.

I think most people in the nutrition biz would agree that vegetable fats, such as olive oil, are healthier than animal fats, although Squires isn't being particularly helpful to her readers when she says the diet is "moderately" low in carbohydrates. The women eating the fewest carbs got fewer than 30 percent of their total calories from that category of nutrients. To most people, that's less than "moderately" low.

But that's just one of the odd turns Squires' story takes:

"We didn't really design the study to look at weight loss," said lead author Frank Hu, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. But after analyzing 20 years of food information collected from participants who reported eating a moderately reduced carbohydrate diet, Hu and his colleagues concluded that there is "no significant long-term effect on body weight."

The findings suggest that "there's no magic formula for weight loss," said Lichtenstein of Tufts. "You still have to focus on calories."

Really?

If you're just cutting calories without focusing on which calories you cut, then all you're doing is feeding yourself at a level below your comfort zone. That would fall into the category of dietary restraint -- making yourself hungry -- and we already know that doesn't work. So if someone sets out to change the hunger equation by eating more protein and fat, which leaves him feeling fuller longer, and fewer carbohydrates, then isn't that the best way to eat fewer calories without triggering the body's natural resistance to dietary restraint?

Loaded question, I know.

Last point -- look who gets the almost-final word in Squires' story:

The new study may also help to put to rest some concerns about heart disease that once dogged the reduced carbohydrate diets. But some experts including physician Dean Ornish, a proponent of a very low-fat, vegetarian approach that has been proved to reverse blocked arteries, cautioned that the report should not be used to resurrect the Atkins diet.

"I worry this will confuse people and potentially mislead them to think that low-fat diets don't decrease your risk of heart disease, because they do," Ornish said.

This is almost a political question: Why do reporters quote experts saying things that are clearly contradicted by the evidence presented in the story ... and then not point out that the evidence contradicts the expert?

I asked a friend to send along the full study from the New England Journal of Medicine (thanks Cass!), and the data couldn't be more clear:

Those eating the most carbohydrates -- and thus the least fat and protein -- had more heart disease than those eating the fewest carbohydrates.

The researchers divided the nurses into 10 groups. The first group ate at least 56 percent of their total calories in the form of carbohydrates. The 10th group got less than 30 percent of their calories from carbs. And the 10th group had slightly less heart disease than the first group.

The way the study's abstract is written, and the way it's described by Squires in the WaPo, you get the impression that the women who had the least heart disease were getting their fat and protein primarily from vegetable sources -- protein from tofu and beans, fat from olive oil, that sort of thing.

But the women in that category weren't eating exclusively from those sources. To get into the highest decile, they had to get at least 26 percent of their total fat and protein from vegetable sources. But they still were eating fewer than 30 percent of their total calories from carbs. So there's still a lot of animal fat and protein in their diets.

In other words, Dean Ornish is totally wrong. Shouldn't somebody point that out?

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:54 AM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2006

The Whole Package

A chain of grocery stores in New England has decided to start calling out allegedly "healthy" foods on their true health-promoting qualities. I don't think the results are much of a surprise:

The chain, Hannaford Brothers, developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you.

These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat -- no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal.

My eyes kind of glazed over as I was reading the story in the New York Times this morning. Sure, warning consumers about added salt and sugar is perfectly fine, but something tells me that parents who feed their kids yogurt or Healthy Choice soups aren't the ones responsible for this:

American children and teens are growing ever-fatter tummies, a bad sign that means they are at even more risk of heart disease and diabetes, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

They found that the belly fat of children and teenagers had increased by more than 65 percent since the 1990s -- directly in line with rising obesity rates.

The study measured waist circumference, and the researchers determined that the growth in American waistlines is a sign of increased visceral fat, the type that accumulates around internal organs, beneath the abdominal muscles, as opposed to the squishy subcutaneous fat that grows between the muscles and skin.

This is a small quibble -- and it's really more of a qu