Friday, February 03, 2012
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Showing Kids Pictures of Vegetables May Entice Them to Eat More
From the L.A. Times. Coming from an urban concrete jungle like L.A., this may be true. Jamie Oliver showed us that kindergarteners in L.A> Unified school district couldn't even identify fruits and vegetables when shown them.
"Kids don't always eat their vegetables, but does showing them photos of veggies make them consume more?
A research letter published online Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. employed about 800 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at one elementary school in Minnesota as study subjects. On two separate days in 2011 they received a school lunch; on the first day it was business as usual, as the kids helped themselves to the foods available.
A few months later they had the same meal, but this time their trays were fitted with photographs of the vegetables they served: green beans and carrots. Researchers, who were from the University of Minnesota, noted how many students took the vegetables each day, as well as how much of them were eaten.
The results showed some promise: significantly more students took vegetables on the photo day compared with the non-photo day. Eating them was a different story, however -- no differences were seen in consumption of green beans between the two days among those who took them, and the amount of carrots eaten was higher on the non-photo day.
But overall more vegetables were eaten on the photo day, since more children took them.
The study authors noted that adding photos to the trays required no special training and was fairly inexpensive--it cost about $3 and took 20 minutes per 100 trays. "The number of students taking vegetables and the amounts consumed, however," they wrote, "remained low and did not yet meet government recommendations."
They added since the study only lasted two days in one school, more research is needed to see if the intervention works in other settings and if the effects last over time.
School lunches have been in the spotlight lately, as childhood obesity rates continue to be a concern. Recently changes in school lunch programs were announced, with more fruits, vegetables and whole grains on the way."
Well, you know what they say about leading a horse to water...and what does this say about all those pictures (TV ads, building logos, billboards, product packaging, web ads, etc.) out in real life that have HAMBURGERS, FRIES, SHAKES, and OTHER JUNK FOOD the kids also see?
"Kids don't always eat their vegetables, but does showing them photos of veggies make them consume more?
A research letter published online Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. employed about 800 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at one elementary school in Minnesota as study subjects. On two separate days in 2011 they received a school lunch; on the first day it was business as usual, as the kids helped themselves to the foods available.
A few months later they had the same meal, but this time their trays were fitted with photographs of the vegetables they served: green beans and carrots. Researchers, who were from the University of Minnesota, noted how many students took the vegetables each day, as well as how much of them were eaten.
The results showed some promise: significantly more students took vegetables on the photo day compared with the non-photo day. Eating them was a different story, however -- no differences were seen in consumption of green beans between the two days among those who took them, and the amount of carrots eaten was higher on the non-photo day.
But overall more vegetables were eaten on the photo day, since more children took them.
The study authors noted that adding photos to the trays required no special training and was fairly inexpensive--it cost about $3 and took 20 minutes per 100 trays. "The number of students taking vegetables and the amounts consumed, however," they wrote, "remained low and did not yet meet government recommendations."
They added since the study only lasted two days in one school, more research is needed to see if the intervention works in other settings and if the effects last over time.
School lunches have been in the spotlight lately, as childhood obesity rates continue to be a concern. Recently changes in school lunch programs were announced, with more fruits, vegetables and whole grains on the way."
Well, you know what they say about leading a horse to water...and what does this say about all those pictures (TV ads, building logos, billboards, product packaging, web ads, etc.) out in real life that have HAMBURGERS, FRIES, SHAKES, and OTHER JUNK FOOD the kids also see?
House Votes to Repeal Part of Health Care Law
From Yahoo Health. Probably the part they couldn't make money from!
"The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to repeal a provision of President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul setting up a home-care program for the elderly and disabled that regulators said was unworkable.
The Republican-led House voted 267-159 for the bill that would terminate the Community Living Assistance Services(CLASS) Act that was supposed to create a voluntary insurance program to help the elderly and disabled pay for home care.
Republicans called it a step toward achieving their goal of dismantling the healthcare overhaul Obama signed into law nearly two years ago.
The legislation is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate even though Republicans are expected to push for a vote on it.
"There is no doubt that the president's healthcare plan is killing jobs," said Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling. "House Republicans have repealed it in its totality. It has been blocked by the president, by Democrats and so if we can't do it in its totality we'll do it piecemeal. We need to start out by repealing the CLASS Act."
Democrats opposed to scrapping the program acknowledged that it had a flawed design, but they argued it should be fixed rather than repealed so millions of elderly and disabled people could receive help at home rather than be placed in usually more expensive institutional care.
"You stand there with no alternative whatsoever," Democratic Representative Bill Pascrell shouted at Republicans on the House floor. "Millions of people out there are suffering. Where is your heart ... you have no heart."
The Health and Human Services Department last October pulled the plug on the program after officials determined they could not come up with a model that would keep it voluntary and solvent without adding to long-term U.S. budget burdens.
The law calls for workers to begin voluntarily enrolling in the program later this year. Participants would have paid monthly fees for at least five years before qualifying for benefits.
The Congressional Budget Office saw the program raising money in the short run, but adding to long-term budget imbalances in a few decades as the program began paying out more in benefits than it collected in premiums."
I was right on two counts: The government couldn't make it a profitable program, and the Congress-critters themselves couldn't make money from it by trading stocks/options/whatever.
"The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to repeal a provision of President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul setting up a home-care program for the elderly and disabled that regulators said was unworkable.
The Republican-led House voted 267-159 for the bill that would terminate the Community Living Assistance Services(CLASS) Act that was supposed to create a voluntary insurance program to help the elderly and disabled pay for home care.
Republicans called it a step toward achieving their goal of dismantling the healthcare overhaul Obama signed into law nearly two years ago.
The legislation is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate even though Republicans are expected to push for a vote on it.
"There is no doubt that the president's healthcare plan is killing jobs," said Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling. "House Republicans have repealed it in its totality. It has been blocked by the president, by Democrats and so if we can't do it in its totality we'll do it piecemeal. We need to start out by repealing the CLASS Act."
Democrats opposed to scrapping the program acknowledged that it had a flawed design, but they argued it should be fixed rather than repealed so millions of elderly and disabled people could receive help at home rather than be placed in usually more expensive institutional care.
"You stand there with no alternative whatsoever," Democratic Representative Bill Pascrell shouted at Republicans on the House floor. "Millions of people out there are suffering. Where is your heart ... you have no heart."
The Health and Human Services Department last October pulled the plug on the program after officials determined they could not come up with a model that would keep it voluntary and solvent without adding to long-term U.S. budget burdens.
The law calls for workers to begin voluntarily enrolling in the program later this year. Participants would have paid monthly fees for at least five years before qualifying for benefits.
The Congressional Budget Office saw the program raising money in the short run, but adding to long-term budget imbalances in a few decades as the program began paying out more in benefits than it collected in premiums."
I was right on two counts: The government couldn't make it a profitable program, and the Congress-critters themselves couldn't make money from it by trading stocks/options/whatever.
The Right Diet--By Prescription
From Stock & Land (Australia).
"Once a week Professor Michael Fenech sits down to a meal of liver pate. It might not be his first choice but a glass of wine makes it more palatable.
"I found I am particularly susceptible to folate deficiency," says the stream leader for nutrigenomics, lifestyle and neurodegenerative disease prevention within the CSIRO's food and nutritional sciences division. The vitamin B12 in the pate allows his body to take up the folate. "I try to get as much as possible from the diet but as insurance I take a supplement once a week," he says.
Fenech is at the forefront of world research into how individual foods and nutrients affect the integrity of human body cells, and has frequently been his own test subject, putting his blood through tests to establish how his genetic material responds to different nutritional exposures.
He can see the difference in his telomeres – the tip of the chromosome which governs how faithfully it is copied as his cells divide – according to how well he has been eating. "Sometimes," he laments, "the degree of improvement may not be as much as I would like."
Cells are required to divide and create new copies of themselves about 10,000 trillion times during an average human life, and their ability to do so healthily is fundamental to preventing disease.
Cell division underpins fertility, fetal development and cancer. Increasingly it is recognised as having a role in heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
"The question," Fenech says, "is whether damage to DNA is itself a disease and whether you can diagnose it. That's the approach I've been promoting.
"Even in young healthy adults, even though they're not deficient in B12 and folate, we still find when we supplement we reduce the level of [DNA] damage. Some people actually need more of these nutrients than others to minimise DNA damage."
He likens individual differences in the accumulation of DNA damage to interest rates. "Some of us are running at 4 per cent but you or I could be running at 6 per cent. It's not a big difference but over time it's ageing you faster. It's a game of low percentages over a long time."
In elderly people, Fenech says, the amount of B12 needed to protect the integrity of the cell division process is likely to be well in excess of health authorities' usual recommendations.
But the converse can be true, such as in the case of cancers that feed preferentially on some nutrients. "Some cancers amplify the receptor for [folate]," Fenech says. "If you knew you had a cancer like that, you might want to restrict folate a bit."
At the Reach100 clinic in Adelaide, Fenech and colleagues analyse blood samples to measure DNA damage and nutrient levels, to tell people whether their disease risk is low or high, plus how to address this through their diet.
Commercial tests for gene variants that make such damage more likely are further away, as too few have been fully investigated. Also due for further study is the complex interplay between matrices of individual nutrients, which may offset or amplify each other.
Eventually, Fenech says, it should be possible to tailor individual diets and supplement regimens to people's genetic strengths and weaknesses, "to prevent damage to specific regions of the chromosomes".
But Fenech and a growing chorus of colleagues worldwide believe the evidence is already firmly in favour of one immediate change: they say governments and health groups should consider the influence of a range of vitamins and minerals on cellular health when they determine the so-called daily reference values, or recommended amounts of nutrients – which are at present set based on established links between diet and diseases.
The National Health and Medical Research Council, which sets those values in Australia, is examining whether its current advice requires revision.
Fenech, who has just completed a study on nutrients and DNA damage in 450 children, says: "My argument, given damage to DNA is such a fundamental pathology, is that it should be examined [for every nutrient]."
Fenech's work is only one feature on a landscape of nutrition science that is growing exponentially in sophistication as individual food components are plotted against individual responses to them.
Associate Professor Josephine Forbes is shopping for her young family. "I buy yoghurt and fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and meat, the real basics," she says. She generally avoids all processed products. Unsalted corn chips are her worst nutritional vice.
The daughter of slender, healthy parents, Forbes, who is group leader of glycation and diabetes at Brisbane's Mater Medical Research Institute, says healthy eating "has always been my conviction . . . I think it's driven my work."
She is investigating how a particularly common by-product of food processing, preservation and refrigeration, called advanced glycation end products, may cause damaging inflammatory reactions in some people to foods that appear innocuous.
Humans, Forbes says, "haven't been eating these foods long enough to see the result," across the health of the population.
Autoimmune disorders, including Type 1 (or juvenile) diabetes, lupus and inflammatory bowel disease have all been on the rise in developed countries.
And among young diabetes patients, a growing proportion of the newly diagnosed do not show the traditional genetic markers associated with the disease, suggesting something different is triggering the new cases.
Advanced glycation, which may be seen in something as simple as the browning of a cut apple, "is a biochemical process that occurs in plants and animals", Forbes says. "We think it is to label proteins as old . . . If we give a diet high in those [advanced glycation] compounds we can induce a condition very like Type 1 diabetes," Forbes says, presumably as the immune response attempts to reject what it considers substandard food.
The better news is that the converse also works; a diet lower in advanced glycation end products increased insulin sensitivity in overweight people, she found in an experiment which compared two weeks on a processed diet heavy on the suspect compounds with two weeks on fresher foods.
The same people were evaluated on both diets with a two-week "wash-out" period in between. Forbes's team provided all the foods – and even a home yoghurt maker to keep glycation to an absolute minimum – to keep the diets as uniform as possible, and they were equal in their total energy, fat and protein content.
"We saw remarkable results" with the unprocessed food, Forbes says. Participants "improved their sensitivity to insulin and their blood sugar levels were lower".
But if study subjects are not only overweight but already suffering the early stages of diabetes, they respond less to the manipulation of advanced glycation end product levels in their diet.
Forbes thinks this is because the compounds are filtered by the kidneys, and once the kidneys are compromised by diabetes the substances continue to accumulate regardless of dietary levels.
Even among apparently fresh products, long-term storage can prompt the glycation process, a growing issue as the big food retailers centralise their supply chains and import more garlic from China and cherries from California.
"People want things out of season," Forbes says. "There have to be some compromises made."
Much more potentially can be done during food production to avoid advanced glycation, she says. One manufacturer found adding a natural grain to factory-produced bread halved the chemical reaction.
"Bread and cereals are quite big offenders," Forbes says. "They're considered healthy, and in their purest form they are." One clue, she says, is bread that browns ultra-quickly when toasted; browning is a direct sign of glycation.
Engaging the food industry, and educating consumers, will be the key to toning the excessive processing that goes into even the most basic products.
"Pasteurisation I can understand, but why do we have to have milk homogenised?" Forbes asks. "Do we really need to have it all mixed together?" Both of these diets were tested in the same group of overweight people. They ate the same calorie, fat and protein content. But over two weeks the more processed diet, on the left, impaired the participants' insulin sensitivity, putting them at higher risk of diabetes. Those on the fresher food, right, increased their insulin sensitivity."
I'm proof of that--I went on a no-label (nutritional label, that is) diet for a year, eating fresh (or deemed fresh) foods, and adhering to the Pyramid-established portion sizes, consuming CW-authorized "healthy foods." I lost 30 lbs., sure, but gained it back WHILE MAINTAINING THE SAME DIETARY HABITS. I only saw and kept weight loss (years later) after giving up grains, legumes, and dairy, as well as maintaining my "fresh foods" approach--the "no-label" designation of foods can no longer be used, because more and more foods now have labels on them--even bulk quantity containers (and meat coming later this year).
A decade ago, things like carrots, celery, eggs, and meat cuts had no nutritional facts label on them--now they do, so the "no-label" theory is out the window...at least in the grocery store. About the only thing you'll find to consume that doesn't have a label is tap water, and even THAT comes with a water quality brochure mailed out every year or so from your water company.
Unless you hunt, fish, garden, sprout, forage, and/or collect rainwater, you're going to run into a label of some sort...hey--maybe the no-label theory is AGAIN in play, but just on another field! :)
But then, if you hunt, fish, garden, and do all those other things, aren't you getting the freshest you can possibly can, limiting glycation and cell aging through food?
This is not new--in fact, some of our guys have been talking, writing, and publishing books on this very subject for years. Hell, even the dreaded Dr. Oz has discussed this on Oprah, devoting at least a whole episode on her "telomeres of a 29-year-old" when she was pushing 50.
My problem with this "diet prescription" thing is this: try and find a doctor who can and is willing to do the full testing that's required to determine your exact deficiencies and surpluses, then try to find a health insurer willing to pay for it. If you eat as fresh as you can as often as you can, while avoiding sugars, sodium, starches, and dairy, you really don't need a prescription of any sort!
"Once a week Professor Michael Fenech sits down to a meal of liver pate. It might not be his first choice but a glass of wine makes it more palatable.
"I found I am particularly susceptible to folate deficiency," says the stream leader for nutrigenomics, lifestyle and neurodegenerative disease prevention within the CSIRO's food and nutritional sciences division. The vitamin B12 in the pate allows his body to take up the folate. "I try to get as much as possible from the diet but as insurance I take a supplement once a week," he says.
Fenech is at the forefront of world research into how individual foods and nutrients affect the integrity of human body cells, and has frequently been his own test subject, putting his blood through tests to establish how his genetic material responds to different nutritional exposures.
He can see the difference in his telomeres – the tip of the chromosome which governs how faithfully it is copied as his cells divide – according to how well he has been eating. "Sometimes," he laments, "the degree of improvement may not be as much as I would like."
Cells are required to divide and create new copies of themselves about 10,000 trillion times during an average human life, and their ability to do so healthily is fundamental to preventing disease.
Cell division underpins fertility, fetal development and cancer. Increasingly it is recognised as having a role in heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
"The question," Fenech says, "is whether damage to DNA is itself a disease and whether you can diagnose it. That's the approach I've been promoting.
"Even in young healthy adults, even though they're not deficient in B12 and folate, we still find when we supplement we reduce the level of [DNA] damage. Some people actually need more of these nutrients than others to minimise DNA damage."
He likens individual differences in the accumulation of DNA damage to interest rates. "Some of us are running at 4 per cent but you or I could be running at 6 per cent. It's not a big difference but over time it's ageing you faster. It's a game of low percentages over a long time."
In elderly people, Fenech says, the amount of B12 needed to protect the integrity of the cell division process is likely to be well in excess of health authorities' usual recommendations.
But the converse can be true, such as in the case of cancers that feed preferentially on some nutrients. "Some cancers amplify the receptor for [folate]," Fenech says. "If you knew you had a cancer like that, you might want to restrict folate a bit."
At the Reach100 clinic in Adelaide, Fenech and colleagues analyse blood samples to measure DNA damage and nutrient levels, to tell people whether their disease risk is low or high, plus how to address this through their diet.
Commercial tests for gene variants that make such damage more likely are further away, as too few have been fully investigated. Also due for further study is the complex interplay between matrices of individual nutrients, which may offset or amplify each other.
Eventually, Fenech says, it should be possible to tailor individual diets and supplement regimens to people's genetic strengths and weaknesses, "to prevent damage to specific regions of the chromosomes".
But Fenech and a growing chorus of colleagues worldwide believe the evidence is already firmly in favour of one immediate change: they say governments and health groups should consider the influence of a range of vitamins and minerals on cellular health when they determine the so-called daily reference values, or recommended amounts of nutrients – which are at present set based on established links between diet and diseases.
The National Health and Medical Research Council, which sets those values in Australia, is examining whether its current advice requires revision.
Fenech, who has just completed a study on nutrients and DNA damage in 450 children, says: "My argument, given damage to DNA is such a fundamental pathology, is that it should be examined [for every nutrient]."
Fenech's work is only one feature on a landscape of nutrition science that is growing exponentially in sophistication as individual food components are plotted against individual responses to them.
Associate Professor Josephine Forbes is shopping for her young family. "I buy yoghurt and fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and meat, the real basics," she says. She generally avoids all processed products. Unsalted corn chips are her worst nutritional vice.
The daughter of slender, healthy parents, Forbes, who is group leader of glycation and diabetes at Brisbane's Mater Medical Research Institute, says healthy eating "has always been my conviction . . . I think it's driven my work."
She is investigating how a particularly common by-product of food processing, preservation and refrigeration, called advanced glycation end products, may cause damaging inflammatory reactions in some people to foods that appear innocuous.
Humans, Forbes says, "haven't been eating these foods long enough to see the result," across the health of the population.
Autoimmune disorders, including Type 1 (or juvenile) diabetes, lupus and inflammatory bowel disease have all been on the rise in developed countries.
And among young diabetes patients, a growing proportion of the newly diagnosed do not show the traditional genetic markers associated with the disease, suggesting something different is triggering the new cases.
Advanced glycation, which may be seen in something as simple as the browning of a cut apple, "is a biochemical process that occurs in plants and animals", Forbes says. "We think it is to label proteins as old . . . If we give a diet high in those [advanced glycation] compounds we can induce a condition very like Type 1 diabetes," Forbes says, presumably as the immune response attempts to reject what it considers substandard food.
The better news is that the converse also works; a diet lower in advanced glycation end products increased insulin sensitivity in overweight people, she found in an experiment which compared two weeks on a processed diet heavy on the suspect compounds with two weeks on fresher foods.
The same people were evaluated on both diets with a two-week "wash-out" period in between. Forbes's team provided all the foods – and even a home yoghurt maker to keep glycation to an absolute minimum – to keep the diets as uniform as possible, and they were equal in their total energy, fat and protein content.
"We saw remarkable results" with the unprocessed food, Forbes says. Participants "improved their sensitivity to insulin and their blood sugar levels were lower".
But if study subjects are not only overweight but already suffering the early stages of diabetes, they respond less to the manipulation of advanced glycation end product levels in their diet.
Forbes thinks this is because the compounds are filtered by the kidneys, and once the kidneys are compromised by diabetes the substances continue to accumulate regardless of dietary levels.
Even among apparently fresh products, long-term storage can prompt the glycation process, a growing issue as the big food retailers centralise their supply chains and import more garlic from China and cherries from California.
"People want things out of season," Forbes says. "There have to be some compromises made."
Much more potentially can be done during food production to avoid advanced glycation, she says. One manufacturer found adding a natural grain to factory-produced bread halved the chemical reaction.
"Bread and cereals are quite big offenders," Forbes says. "They're considered healthy, and in their purest form they are." One clue, she says, is bread that browns ultra-quickly when toasted; browning is a direct sign of glycation.
Engaging the food industry, and educating consumers, will be the key to toning the excessive processing that goes into even the most basic products.
"Pasteurisation I can understand, but why do we have to have milk homogenised?" Forbes asks. "Do we really need to have it all mixed together?" Both of these diets were tested in the same group of overweight people. They ate the same calorie, fat and protein content. But over two weeks the more processed diet, on the left, impaired the participants' insulin sensitivity, putting them at higher risk of diabetes. Those on the fresher food, right, increased their insulin sensitivity."
I'm proof of that--I went on a no-label (nutritional label, that is) diet for a year, eating fresh (or deemed fresh) foods, and adhering to the Pyramid-established portion sizes, consuming CW-authorized "healthy foods." I lost 30 lbs., sure, but gained it back WHILE MAINTAINING THE SAME DIETARY HABITS. I only saw and kept weight loss (years later) after giving up grains, legumes, and dairy, as well as maintaining my "fresh foods" approach--the "no-label" designation of foods can no longer be used, because more and more foods now have labels on them--even bulk quantity containers (and meat coming later this year).
A decade ago, things like carrots, celery, eggs, and meat cuts had no nutritional facts label on them--now they do, so the "no-label" theory is out the window...at least in the grocery store. About the only thing you'll find to consume that doesn't have a label is tap water, and even THAT comes with a water quality brochure mailed out every year or so from your water company.
Unless you hunt, fish, garden, sprout, forage, and/or collect rainwater, you're going to run into a label of some sort...hey--maybe the no-label theory is AGAIN in play, but just on another field! :)
But then, if you hunt, fish, garden, and do all those other things, aren't you getting the freshest you can possibly can, limiting glycation and cell aging through food?
This is not new--in fact, some of our guys have been talking, writing, and publishing books on this very subject for years. Hell, even the dreaded Dr. Oz has discussed this on Oprah, devoting at least a whole episode on her "telomeres of a 29-year-old" when she was pushing 50.
My problem with this "diet prescription" thing is this: try and find a doctor who can and is willing to do the full testing that's required to determine your exact deficiencies and surpluses, then try to find a health insurer willing to pay for it. If you eat as fresh as you can as often as you can, while avoiding sugars, sodium, starches, and dairy, you really don't need a prescription of any sort!
Big Nutrition Traps--Quality vs. Quantity
From the Huffington Post.v I skipped a few sentences about a Part 1 of this article, which I'm still trying to find to link to.
..."Even when a food is good for you, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can eat it in unlimited quantities. Whole grains and fresh fruits are two examples of healthy foods that can easily be over-consumed.
Hold the Line on Whole Grains
You hear an awful lot these days about the benefits of whole grains. People who replace refined grain products like white bread with whole grain products like whole wheat bread have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and many other diseases. But a lot of people have misunderstood this to mean that whole grains are like vegetables -- the more, the better! I have friends, for example, who wouldn't be caught dead eating a forkful of white rice. Yet they see nothing wrong with eating two or three cups of brown rice with dinner.
Whole grains are definitely better for you than refined grains. But that doesn't mean that portion sizes don't matter. Despite being higher in fiber and certain nutrients, whole-grain foods are primarily starch. They provide a lot of calories and relatively little nutritional value. And although whole-grain foods are a little easier on your blood sugar than refined grain foods, they still have a moderate to high glycemic impact.
When it comes to grains, you need to pay attention to quality and quantity. In fact, when it comes right down to it, quantity may even be more important. I'd actually rather see you have an appropriately-sized serving of white pasta than an over-sized serving of whole grain pasta. Best of all, of course, would be an appropriately-sized serving of whole grain pasta.
Fruit: How Sweet It Is!
Fruit also has a place in a healthy diet -- but, again, more is not necessarily better. Fruits and vegetables both provide important antioxidants, phytonutrients, fiber, fluids -- nutrients that protect and enhance your health. However, compared with vegetables, fruits tend to be significantly higher in sugar and calories. I think people often rationalize that the sugar or calories in fruit doesn't really "count" because it's coming from a healthy source.
Fruit is both yummy and good for you. And you're much better off satisfying your sweet tooth with a piece of fruit than a candy bar. But to keep your diet balanced and your sugar intake within bounds, I suggest limiting fruit to two to four servings a day -- and no more than one of those should be in the form of juice."
Here's Part 1: Healthy vs. Natural (if you're interested). Part 3 (forthcoming) will be Means vs. Extremes.
..."Even when a food is good for you, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can eat it in unlimited quantities. Whole grains and fresh fruits are two examples of healthy foods that can easily be over-consumed.
Hold the Line on Whole Grains
You hear an awful lot these days about the benefits of whole grains. People who replace refined grain products like white bread with whole grain products like whole wheat bread have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and many other diseases. But a lot of people have misunderstood this to mean that whole grains are like vegetables -- the more, the better! I have friends, for example, who wouldn't be caught dead eating a forkful of white rice. Yet they see nothing wrong with eating two or three cups of brown rice with dinner.
Whole grains are definitely better for you than refined grains. But that doesn't mean that portion sizes don't matter. Despite being higher in fiber and certain nutrients, whole-grain foods are primarily starch. They provide a lot of calories and relatively little nutritional value. And although whole-grain foods are a little easier on your blood sugar than refined grain foods, they still have a moderate to high glycemic impact.
When it comes to grains, you need to pay attention to quality and quantity. In fact, when it comes right down to it, quantity may even be more important. I'd actually rather see you have an appropriately-sized serving of white pasta than an over-sized serving of whole grain pasta. Best of all, of course, would be an appropriately-sized serving of whole grain pasta.
Fruit: How Sweet It Is!
Fruit also has a place in a healthy diet -- but, again, more is not necessarily better. Fruits and vegetables both provide important antioxidants, phytonutrients, fiber, fluids -- nutrients that protect and enhance your health. However, compared with vegetables, fruits tend to be significantly higher in sugar and calories. I think people often rationalize that the sugar or calories in fruit doesn't really "count" because it's coming from a healthy source.
Fruit is both yummy and good for you. And you're much better off satisfying your sweet tooth with a piece of fruit than a candy bar. But to keep your diet balanced and your sugar intake within bounds, I suggest limiting fruit to two to four servings a day -- and no more than one of those should be in the form of juice."
Here's Part 1: Healthy vs. Natural (if you're interested). Part 3 (forthcoming) will be Means vs. Extremes.
Exercise as Housecleaning For the Body
From the NY Times. So what exercises must I do if I want my oven cleaned, or my tub scrubbed--some treadmill? Stair-steppers? Weight lifting? Spinning or rowing? Zumba?
"When ticking off the benefits of physical activity, few of us would include intracellular housecleaning. But a new study suggests that the ability of exercise to speed the removal of garbage from inside our body’s cells may be one of its most valuable, if least visible, effects.
In the new research, which was published last month in Nature, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas gathered two groups of mice. One set was normal, with a finely tuned cellular scrubbing system. The other had been bred to have a blunted cleaning system.
It’s long been known that cells accumulate flotsam from the wear and tear of everyday living. Broken or misshapen proteins, shreds of cellular membranes, invasive viruses or bacteria, and worn-out, broken-down cellular components, like aged mitochondria, the tiny organelles within cells that produce energy, form a kind of trash heap inside the cell.
In most instances, cells diligently sweep away this debris. They even recycle it for fuel. Through a process with the expressive name of autophagy, or “self-eating,” cells create specialized membranes that engulf junk in the cell’s cytoplasm and carry it to a part of the cell known as the lysosome, where the trash is broken apart and then burned by the cell for energy.
Without this efficient system, cells could become choked with trash and malfunction or die. In recent years, some scientists have begun to suspect that faulty autophagy mechanisms contribute to the development of a range of diseases, including diabetes, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The slowing of autophagy as we reach middle age is also believed to play a role in aging.
Most metabolism researchers think that the process evolved in response to the stress of starvation; cells would round up and consume superfluous bits of themselves to keep the rest of the cell alive. In petri dishes, the rate of autophagy increases when cells are starved or otherwise placed under physiological stress.
Exercise, of course, is physiological stress. But until recently, few researchers had thought to ask whether exercise might somehow affect the amount of autophagy within cells and, if so, whether that mattered to the body as a whole.
“Autophagy affects metabolism and has wide-ranging health-related benefits in the body, and so does exercise,” says Dr. Beth Levine, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at U.T. Southwestern. “There seemed to be considerable overlap, in fact, between the health-related benefits of exercise and those of autophagy,” but it wasn’t clear how the two interacted, she says.
So she and her colleagues had lab mice run. The animals first had been medically treated so that the membranes that engulf debris inside their cells would glow, revealing themselves to the researchers. After just 30 minutes of running, the mice had significantly more membranes in cells throughout their bodies, the researchers found, meaning they were undergoing accelerated autophagy.
That finding, however, didn’t explain what the augmented cellular cleaning meant for the well-being of the mice, so the researchers developed a new strain of mouse that showed normal autophagy levels in most instances, but could not increase its cellular self-eating in response to stress. Autophagy levels would stubbornly remain the same, even if the animals were starved or vigorously exercised.
Then the researchers had these mice run, alongside a control group of normal animals. The autophagy-resistant mice quickly grew fatigued. Their muscles seemed incapable of drawing sugar from the blood as the muscles of the normal mice did.
More striking, when Dr. Levine stuffed both groups of animals with high-fat kibble for several weeks until they developed a rodent version of diabetes, the normal mice subsequently reversed the condition by running, even as they continued on the fatty diet. The autophagy-resistant animals did not. After weeks of running, they remained diabetic. Their cells could not absorb blood sugar normally. They also had higher levels of cholesterol in their blood than the other mice. Exercise had not made them healthier.
In other words, Dr. Levine and her colleagues concluded, an increase in autophagy, prompted by exercise, seems to be a critical step in achieving the health benefits of exercise.
The finding is “extremely exciting,” says Zhen Yan, the director of the Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at the University of Virginia, who is also studying autophagy and exercise. The study, Dr. Yan says, “improves our understanding of how exercise has salutary impacts on health.”
The implications of Dr. Levine’s results are, in fact, broad. It’s possible that people who don’t respond as robustly to aerobic exercise as their training partners may have sputtering or inadequate autophagy systems, although that idea is speculative. “It’s very difficult to study autophagy in humans,” Dr. Levine says. Still, it’s possible that at some point, autophagy-prompting drugs or specialized exercise programs might help everyone to fully benefit from exercise.
In the meantime, the study underscores, again, the importance of staying active. Both the control mice and the genetically modified group had “normal background levels of autophagy” during everyday circumstances, Dr. Levine points out. But this baseline level of cellular housecleaning wasn’t enough to protect them from developing diabetes in the face of a poor diet. Only when the control animals ran and pumped up their intracellular trash collection did they regain their health.
“I never worked out consistently before,” Dr. Levine says. But now, having witnessed how exercise helped scour the cells of the running mice, she owns a treadmill."
"When ticking off the benefits of physical activity, few of us would include intracellular housecleaning. But a new study suggests that the ability of exercise to speed the removal of garbage from inside our body’s cells may be one of its most valuable, if least visible, effects.
In the new research, which was published last month in Nature, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas gathered two groups of mice. One set was normal, with a finely tuned cellular scrubbing system. The other had been bred to have a blunted cleaning system.
It’s long been known that cells accumulate flotsam from the wear and tear of everyday living. Broken or misshapen proteins, shreds of cellular membranes, invasive viruses or bacteria, and worn-out, broken-down cellular components, like aged mitochondria, the tiny organelles within cells that produce energy, form a kind of trash heap inside the cell.
In most instances, cells diligently sweep away this debris. They even recycle it for fuel. Through a process with the expressive name of autophagy, or “self-eating,” cells create specialized membranes that engulf junk in the cell’s cytoplasm and carry it to a part of the cell known as the lysosome, where the trash is broken apart and then burned by the cell for energy.
Without this efficient system, cells could become choked with trash and malfunction or die. In recent years, some scientists have begun to suspect that faulty autophagy mechanisms contribute to the development of a range of diseases, including diabetes, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The slowing of autophagy as we reach middle age is also believed to play a role in aging.
Most metabolism researchers think that the process evolved in response to the stress of starvation; cells would round up and consume superfluous bits of themselves to keep the rest of the cell alive. In petri dishes, the rate of autophagy increases when cells are starved or otherwise placed under physiological stress.
Exercise, of course, is physiological stress. But until recently, few researchers had thought to ask whether exercise might somehow affect the amount of autophagy within cells and, if so, whether that mattered to the body as a whole.
“Autophagy affects metabolism and has wide-ranging health-related benefits in the body, and so does exercise,” says Dr. Beth Levine, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at U.T. Southwestern. “There seemed to be considerable overlap, in fact, between the health-related benefits of exercise and those of autophagy,” but it wasn’t clear how the two interacted, she says.
So she and her colleagues had lab mice run. The animals first had been medically treated so that the membranes that engulf debris inside their cells would glow, revealing themselves to the researchers. After just 30 minutes of running, the mice had significantly more membranes in cells throughout their bodies, the researchers found, meaning they were undergoing accelerated autophagy.
That finding, however, didn’t explain what the augmented cellular cleaning meant for the well-being of the mice, so the researchers developed a new strain of mouse that showed normal autophagy levels in most instances, but could not increase its cellular self-eating in response to stress. Autophagy levels would stubbornly remain the same, even if the animals were starved or vigorously exercised.
Then the researchers had these mice run, alongside a control group of normal animals. The autophagy-resistant mice quickly grew fatigued. Their muscles seemed incapable of drawing sugar from the blood as the muscles of the normal mice did.
More striking, when Dr. Levine stuffed both groups of animals with high-fat kibble for several weeks until they developed a rodent version of diabetes, the normal mice subsequently reversed the condition by running, even as they continued on the fatty diet. The autophagy-resistant animals did not. After weeks of running, they remained diabetic. Their cells could not absorb blood sugar normally. They also had higher levels of cholesterol in their blood than the other mice. Exercise had not made them healthier.
In other words, Dr. Levine and her colleagues concluded, an increase in autophagy, prompted by exercise, seems to be a critical step in achieving the health benefits of exercise.
The finding is “extremely exciting,” says Zhen Yan, the director of the Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at the University of Virginia, who is also studying autophagy and exercise. The study, Dr. Yan says, “improves our understanding of how exercise has salutary impacts on health.”
The implications of Dr. Levine’s results are, in fact, broad. It’s possible that people who don’t respond as robustly to aerobic exercise as their training partners may have sputtering or inadequate autophagy systems, although that idea is speculative. “It’s very difficult to study autophagy in humans,” Dr. Levine says. Still, it’s possible that at some point, autophagy-prompting drugs or specialized exercise programs might help everyone to fully benefit from exercise.
In the meantime, the study underscores, again, the importance of staying active. Both the control mice and the genetically modified group had “normal background levels of autophagy” during everyday circumstances, Dr. Levine points out. But this baseline level of cellular housecleaning wasn’t enough to protect them from developing diabetes in the face of a poor diet. Only when the control animals ran and pumped up their intracellular trash collection did they regain their health.
“I never worked out consistently before,” Dr. Levine says. But now, having witnessed how exercise helped scour the cells of the running mice, she owns a treadmill."
Massage Speeds Muscle Healing, Reduces Pain--Study
From the Atlantic.
"PROBLEM: Even though getting a massage is an increasingly popular way to alleviate pain and stress, very little work has been done to understand the molecular underpinnings of this healing process.
METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by McMaster University scientists Justin Crane and Mark Tarnopolsky documented the biological changes that massage evokes in 11 young men who pushed themselves to exhaustion on a stationary bike by analyzing their leg-muscle biopsies prior to the exercise, immediately after 10 minutes of massage, and after a 2.5 hour recovery period.
RESULTS: The participants' thigh muscles showed microscopic tears and inflammation, but just 10 minutes of pushing and kneading reduced signs of inflammation. Massaged muscle cells were also better able to make new mitochondria, which promote faster recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage. Interestingly, the popular belief that massage helps clear lactic acid from tired muscles proved false.
CONCLUSION: Massage speeds up muscle healing by activating molecules that reduce inflammation and promote mitochondrial growth.
IMPLICATION: Most pain medications may be replaced by massage therapy since it blunts muscle pain by the same biological mechanisms.
SOURCE: The full study, "Massage Therapy Attenuates Inflammatory Signaling After Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage," is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine."
"PROBLEM: Even though getting a massage is an increasingly popular way to alleviate pain and stress, very little work has been done to understand the molecular underpinnings of this healing process.
METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by McMaster University scientists Justin Crane and Mark Tarnopolsky documented the biological changes that massage evokes in 11 young men who pushed themselves to exhaustion on a stationary bike by analyzing their leg-muscle biopsies prior to the exercise, immediately after 10 minutes of massage, and after a 2.5 hour recovery period.
RESULTS: The participants' thigh muscles showed microscopic tears and inflammation, but just 10 minutes of pushing and kneading reduced signs of inflammation. Massaged muscle cells were also better able to make new mitochondria, which promote faster recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage. Interestingly, the popular belief that massage helps clear lactic acid from tired muscles proved false.
CONCLUSION: Massage speeds up muscle healing by activating molecules that reduce inflammation and promote mitochondrial growth.
IMPLICATION: Most pain medications may be replaced by massage therapy since it blunts muscle pain by the same biological mechanisms.
SOURCE: The full study, "Massage Therapy Attenuates Inflammatory Signaling After Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage," is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine."
This Just In: A Little Sugar is Okay, But a Lot Kills--Slowly
From the Montreal Gazette (Canada). So who's going to tell the public what's a little and what's a lot? Evidently, they are unaware. Then, there's the sugar lobby...
"Sugar is so toxic it should be controlled like alcohol, according to a new report that goes so far as to suggest setting an age limit of 17 years to buy soft drinks.
It points to sugar as a culprit behind many of the world's major killers - heart disease, cancer and diabetes - that are now a greater health burden than infectious disease.
A little sugar "is not a problem, but a lot kills - slowly," says the report to be published Thursday in Nature, a top research journal.
Over the eons sugar was available to our ancestors as fruit for only a few months a year at harvest time, or as honey "which was guarded by bees," says the report by Dr. Robert Lustig, a noted childhood obesity expert at the University of California, and two U.S. colleagues specializing in health policy.
Now it is added to "nearly all processed foods." In developing countries, sugary soft drinks are often cheaper than potable water or milk, they say, noting that over the past 50 years, consumption of sugar has tripled worldwide.
The sweetener is made from sucrose, found in sugarcane and sugar beets or from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and contains a roughly equal mixture of glucose and fructose.
A growing body of scientific evidence shows the fructose "can trigger processes that lead to liver toxicity and a host of other chronic diseases," Lustig and his colleagues say.
"If international bodies are truly concerned about public health, they must consider limiting fructose - and its main delivery vehicles, the added sugars HFCS and sucrose - which pose dangers to individuals and to society as a whole," they say.
"We recognize that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby," the researchers say, "and will require active engagement from all stakeholders."
But such "tectonic shifts" in policy are possible, they say, pointing to bans on public smoking, limits on alcohol sales and condom dispensers in public washrooms. "It's time to turn our attention to sugar."
Many schools have removed pop and candy from vending machines, but "often replaced them with juice and sports drinks, which also contain added sugar," the report says.
Canada and some other countries have also imposed small taxes on some sweetened food, but the researchers say it would take a big price hike to affect consumption.
"Statistical modelling suggests that the price would have to double to significantly reduce soda consumption - so a $1 can (of soft drink) should cost $2," they say.
The report suggests governments introduce zoning rules to control the number of fast-food outlets and convenience stores in low-income communities and around schools.
"Another option would be to limit sales during school operation, or to designate an age limit (such as 17) for the purchase of drinks with added sugar," particularly soft drinks.
Parents in South Philadelphia, Pa., recently lined up outside convenience stores and blocked children from entering them after school. "Why couldn't a public health directive do the same?" says the report.
The notion of putting a 17-year-old age limit on soft drinks is a nonstarter with the Canadian Beverage Association, representing makers of pop and most non-alcoholic drinks sold across Canada. The industry sells about $5 billion worth of product in Canada each year.
"No," the association would not support putting a 17-year-old age limit on soft drinks, said Stephanie Baxter, the association's communications director, who chuckled when told of the Lustig's age-limit suggestion.
Baxter was quick to dismiss the report in Nature as an "over-simplification" of a complex issue.
"No one single food or beverage can be linked to obesity," she said. "And there is no scientific evidence to support the allegations that sugar, in any of its various forms, is a unique cause of health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome."
She also said there is "no evidence that taxing or restricting access to sugar-sweetened beverages would have any meaningful impact."
Lustig and his colleagues say the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could "set the table" for change by limiting the amount of sugar that can be added to food.
Ultimately, Lustig's report says, food producers and distributors must reduce the amount of sugar added to foods. "But sugar is cheap, sugar tastes good and sugar sells, so companies have little incentive to change."
Larger image here.
We currently tax beer and cigarettes, yet people still consume them. We also put an age limit on them, too, but nevertheless...ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem. A very expensive and lingering problem, but it does self-correct in time. You'd think Alzheimer's would be the big wake-up call on this, but no.
Knowing that booze and most illegal drugs are just forms of manipulated sugar that have extremely addictive qualities, you'd think there'd be a huge clamp-down, but no...we have IMPORT TARIFFS instead. Unless somebody wants to pay the tariff, we're currently limited to what we ourselves can produce, which is a lot.
"Sugar is so toxic it should be controlled like alcohol, according to a new report that goes so far as to suggest setting an age limit of 17 years to buy soft drinks.
It points to sugar as a culprit behind many of the world's major killers - heart disease, cancer and diabetes - that are now a greater health burden than infectious disease.
A little sugar "is not a problem, but a lot kills - slowly," says the report to be published Thursday in Nature, a top research journal.
Over the eons sugar was available to our ancestors as fruit for only a few months a year at harvest time, or as honey "which was guarded by bees," says the report by Dr. Robert Lustig, a noted childhood obesity expert at the University of California, and two U.S. colleagues specializing in health policy.
Now it is added to "nearly all processed foods." In developing countries, sugary soft drinks are often cheaper than potable water or milk, they say, noting that over the past 50 years, consumption of sugar has tripled worldwide.
The sweetener is made from sucrose, found in sugarcane and sugar beets or from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and contains a roughly equal mixture of glucose and fructose.
A growing body of scientific evidence shows the fructose "can trigger processes that lead to liver toxicity and a host of other chronic diseases," Lustig and his colleagues say.
"If international bodies are truly concerned about public health, they must consider limiting fructose - and its main delivery vehicles, the added sugars HFCS and sucrose - which pose dangers to individuals and to society as a whole," they say.
"We recognize that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby," the researchers say, "and will require active engagement from all stakeholders."
But such "tectonic shifts" in policy are possible, they say, pointing to bans on public smoking, limits on alcohol sales and condom dispensers in public washrooms. "It's time to turn our attention to sugar."
Many schools have removed pop and candy from vending machines, but "often replaced them with juice and sports drinks, which also contain added sugar," the report says.
Canada and some other countries have also imposed small taxes on some sweetened food, but the researchers say it would take a big price hike to affect consumption.
"Statistical modelling suggests that the price would have to double to significantly reduce soda consumption - so a $1 can (of soft drink) should cost $2," they say.
The report suggests governments introduce zoning rules to control the number of fast-food outlets and convenience stores in low-income communities and around schools.
"Another option would be to limit sales during school operation, or to designate an age limit (such as 17) for the purchase of drinks with added sugar," particularly soft drinks.
Parents in South Philadelphia, Pa., recently lined up outside convenience stores and blocked children from entering them after school. "Why couldn't a public health directive do the same?" says the report.
The notion of putting a 17-year-old age limit on soft drinks is a nonstarter with the Canadian Beverage Association, representing makers of pop and most non-alcoholic drinks sold across Canada. The industry sells about $5 billion worth of product in Canada each year.
"No," the association would not support putting a 17-year-old age limit on soft drinks, said Stephanie Baxter, the association's communications director, who chuckled when told of the Lustig's age-limit suggestion.
Baxter was quick to dismiss the report in Nature as an "over-simplification" of a complex issue.
"No one single food or beverage can be linked to obesity," she said. "And there is no scientific evidence to support the allegations that sugar, in any of its various forms, is a unique cause of health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome."
She also said there is "no evidence that taxing or restricting access to sugar-sweetened beverages would have any meaningful impact."
Lustig and his colleagues say the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could "set the table" for change by limiting the amount of sugar that can be added to food.
Ultimately, Lustig's report says, food producers and distributors must reduce the amount of sugar added to foods. "But sugar is cheap, sugar tastes good and sugar sells, so companies have little incentive to change."
We currently tax beer and cigarettes, yet people still consume them. We also put an age limit on them, too, but nevertheless...ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem. A very expensive and lingering problem, but it does self-correct in time. You'd think Alzheimer's would be the big wake-up call on this, but no.
Knowing that booze and most illegal drugs are just forms of manipulated sugar that have extremely addictive qualities, you'd think there'd be a huge clamp-down, but no...we have IMPORT TARIFFS instead. Unless somebody wants to pay the tariff, we're currently limited to what we ourselves can produce, which is a lot.
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