Archive for the ‘Unhealthy eating’ Category

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Lies, damn lies and misleading labels

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware)

A while back I mentioned the Nutrition Action Healthletter that the Center for Science in the Public Interest puts out. The April edition has a fascinating article titled "10 Common Food Goofs" written by CSPI's PhD house nutritionist, Bonnie Liebman. I knew some of the concepts she mentioned, but certainly not all of them and her specific examples are superb.

The main thrust is we need to read labels and read them carefully. Yet even if we do so the food industry with the "help" of the FDA frequently misleads us. One examples had to do with portion size.  My wife, an extremely successful lifetime member of Weight Watchers (she's five foot nine and weighs 130 pounds), taught me this concept a while back. Her idea of an appropriate serving of meat is the size of a deck of cards.

I started from there and looked at what I ate. Twenty-six pounds ago my typical meat serving was 12-16 ounces, now it's six to eight ounces (I'm five foot eleven and now weigh 150 pounds). But Liebman takes the concept and moves it into areas I never thought my way through before.

One example is Fat Free Coffee-mate. Nestle's Original variety has a label that states it's free of cholesterol, lactose, gluten and trans fat and the Nutrition Facts label claims 10 calories, and zero cholesterol, sugar or salt.

There's a catch though and that's serving size. The FDA and the food manufacturers have decided to round down if you use just one absolutely level teaspoon as the serving size. That's not what most of us do when we use a coffee creamer.

If I do have a cup of coffee I almost always add a creamer and I don't measure out a level teaspoon. I usually don't pour the Coffee-mate, but I certainly use more than the "serving size." Liebman says if you drink a 12-ounce mug of coffee and pour in two tablespoons of Coffee-mate, you've actually added 50 calories and 1.6 grams of saturated fat, more calories and nearly as much saturated fat as if you'd added a similar amount of half and half.

There are nine other examples in her article, but the drift is the same. Serving sizes of a variety of foods, e.g., ice cream, aren't what the label may lead you to think. Contents may include only tiny amounts of what the label raves about (added fruits and veggies) or may have added vitamins that are best obtained from foods, e.g., not from expensive water that also contains added sugar and therefore calories.

On the other hand there are code words, "natural" and "made with real fruit" are two that Leibman mentions. We either don't know the code or need a magnifying glass to read the micro-print that explains it. The word "Natural," except for meats and poultry, is one of the vaguest terms in advertising. And Organic doesn't mean calorie-free.

Bottom line: read labels with extreme care. Better still, stick to unprocessed foods without labels.

 

 

Posted in Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Choices, Food producers and less-healthy foods, tricks and gimmicks, Unhealthy eating | 1 Comment »

What should I eat today? It depends who you trust.

Friday, May 13th, 2011

I ate out last evening and splurged a bit (I had one glass of Riesling, split an calamari appetizer, ate two-thirds of a Thai entree and split a favorite dessert, sticky rice with mango). So today my weight is up a little, but still within my allowable range.

Watch out for scam artists

But that sent me to my stack of recent articles on healthy and unhealthy eating and in particular to one from the April 2011 edition of the Nutrition Action Healthletter put out by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). I have four of their articles sitting on my work desk amidst others I found on the internet or in a medical journal.

The one that caught my eye was titled "10 Common Food Goofs: "Fool me once..." and written by Bonnie Liebman. She is the Director of Nutrition for CSPI, got an MS degree from Cornell and has worked since 1977 for the CSPI almost from its inception.

I was going to ping off her article, but then got caught up after Googling Liebman, in following the Web trail back to a harsh critique of CSPI coming from an organization called The Center for Consumer Freedom (TCFCF)

I personally respect CSPI, but my intellectual curiosity kicked in and I wanted to know if the criticisms, calling CSPI the "undisputed leader among America's 'food police,'" came from a valid source. It took a bit of hunting, but what I found was interesting.

The non-paper trail for TCFCF leads to an interesting character, Richard Berman, a high-paid lobbyist for the restaurant and beverage industry. I don't know his actual salary, but he traded in one very fancy house for another even fancier one in the past decade and a half. One ABC article said his business got $1.5 million back in 2004 from TCFCF.

His internet overview of CSPI slams its director, Michael Jacobson, an MIT-trained PhD microbiologist. But when I followed up on Jacobson's reputation, I found the Center for Disease Control (CDC) had given him its 2010 Foundation Hero's Award.

Berman, on the other hand, was noted in the 2006 ABC article I found online, as one of a growing group of lobbyists who've set up non-profit front groups to push their corporate messages. The Center for Media and Democracy was quoted as saying groups have filed complaints with the IRS against such smear tactics. A former IRS division director was quoted as saying, "If someone sets up a website claiming the moon is made of green cheese and they go through some elaborate proof of that, the IRS isn't going to say that's too absurd. It's a form of free speech."

So I'm going to stick with CSPI's publications and ignore Berman's industry-favoring slant. I found it interesting that one of the websites I found in tracing Berman's roots is titled activistcash.com.

I think my bottom message is don't believe all that you read. Check up even on sites and publications you normally have confidence in.

That was a divergence from my usual blog posts, but I thought it was worth my time and hopefully yours too.

 

Posted in Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Choices, Governmental Efforts, tricks and gimmicks, Unhealthy eating | No Comments »

Katz Redux

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

I went back to Dr. David Katz's classic article published in the Harvard  Health Policy Review in 2006. His example of the Pima Indian tribe had caught my eye the first time through the piece and serves as a cautionary note for the rest of us. I decided to explore the subject further.

mesquite tree

The Pimas, who live not far from us, in the four corners region where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet, used to be outdoors men and women, taking long-distance walks on a regular basis and eating a diet that fits all the modern parameters for healthy eating. it included two unusual items one of which was mesquite,  which I think of as a tree. I've now found that mesquite has bean pods that can be dried and ground into a sweet,nutty flour high in calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron and zinc, and rich in the amino acid lysine.

The other native foodstuff was a drought-resistant bean, tepary, which has recently been introduced into African agriculture . All in all they exercised much more than many of us and ate a high-fiber, low-fat low-sugar diet without an abundance of calories.

Then civilization happened to the Pimas. Now they own casinos and don't walk anywhere as far as their forebears (their per capita income is still on the low side). They also eat a less healthy "American diet" similar to the rest of us.

The consequences were those you'd expect. obesity and diabetes. Fifty percent of the adult Pimas are obese and of those 95% have diabetes. The tribe is now part of a major NIH research project (the website is at http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/pima and then add /pathfind/pthfind.htm or /obesity/obesity.htm), which over the past 30 years has shown that before gaining weight, overweight people have a slower metabolic rate.

This so-called "thrifty gene" theory originally suggested in 1962, looked at populations, like the Pimas, who over thousands of years would have alternating period of famine and feast. When there was little to eat, they stored fat. Now that they don't need to do this in the same fashion, the gene has led them toward the diseases associated with obesity, especially diabetes.

less healthy than mesquite flour

An update from the Harvard School of Public Health mentioned the mayor of Boston having banned sale and advertising of "sugar-loaded drinks" from city-owned buildings and city-sponsored events. The chair of HSPH's Department of Nutrition was quoted as saying, "There is abundant evidence that the huge increase in soda consumption in the past 40 years is the most important single factor behind America's obesity epidemic."

So not all of us have thrifty genes to blame for weight gain. But we can start by abandoning those sodas and other sugar-laden drinks.  And perhaps, to whatever extent we can, returning to a diet similar to our own ancestors, with more locally grown fruits and veggies leading the way to better health.

 

 

Posted in diabetes type 2, Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, Obesity, Unhealthy eating | 2 Comments »

Snacking: fried has to goeth before a small (size)

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Healthy snacks

To snack or not to snack, now that is the question. I read two articles on the subject, one in the Wall Street Journal and the other in the Mayo Clinic's online comments. Then I thought about Wednesday evenings, my own downfall.

The newspaper article was titled "The Battle of the Office Candy Jar" and detailed the travails of people whose bosses and office mates think that the workplace should always be stocked with a dish of candy bars. Then there are the tempters who are forever bringing cookies and birthday cakes in to work or selling candy bars for their kid's baseball teams or school fundraisers.

The WSJ calculated the effects of eating two pieces of candy a day, five days a week, assuming one didn't cut down other foood intake or decide they needed to increase their exercise regime. Wow, it's over seven pounds added a year. It's even worse when the candy is presented in a clear jar, rather than a covered and opaque dish.

I immediately thought, 'It's Wednesday!' That's when I go to a three-hour evening writers' critique group. My cohorts bring in stories to be read aloud and commented on (I have one for tonight on the Festival of Holi that our former graduate students from Mumbai brought us to recently). They also bring in cakes and cookies and I used to bring biscotti. Our leader always has a jar with Tootsie Pops and I invariably eat more than I intend.

The Mayo Clinic piece says snacks aren't always bad and their diet plan includes snacks that can help obviate hunger pangs and keep you from binge eating. But their choice of snacks is quite different: fruits and veggies make much more sense than doughnuts and candy.

Their website: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/healthy-diet/HQ01396 can lead you to a healthy snack site which suggests 100-calorie snacks, e.g, 2 cups of carrots or, one of my favorites, air-popped popcorn.

I'd prefer to avoid snacking whenever possible, but I'm aware I need help in avoiding the tempting items I encounter on wednesdays or at parties. I've switched from bringing biscotti to fetching a sack of almonds. Mayo's cautions that even though nuts contain protein and thus can help you feel full for a longer time, they also contain calories, largely in the form of monosaturated fat (which is certainly a better variety than the polyunsaturated kind).

So I've made a game of it: I eat four almonds. No particular reason that I chose that number, but it works.

I also have a four by six card that says

My home-made snack barrier

Posted in Dieting, Food labeling, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, tricks and gimmicks, Unhealthy eating | No Comments »

Eating Disorders, Part one

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Drugs as food

I was reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday and saw an article titled "Food may be addicting for some." Thus far I've been able to find the Archives of General Psychiatry online and ran across a synopsis of the article that was perhaps more erudite, but less helpful than the newspaper article. I then read a "psychcentral.com" review of the study.

Let's start with the newspaper. It describes a study on a small number of subjects, 39 women, who had MRI brain scans after completing a short food addiction test that was originally designed to detect people with eating disorders. Fifteen of the women had high scores indicative of potential addictive eating problems; those same women had markedly different brain scan results than the lean subjects.

Okay, let's go back a ways. Last year in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Scripps researchers found that obese rats had brain alterations as compared with lean rats. The changes in the rats' brains were similar to those reported in people who are drug addicts. In short we normally get neural (brain-mediated) rewards for "pleasurable" activities. Similar rewards occur in response to addicting drugs.

The current study started with 48 healthy young women, some of whom were thin and some fat (or as, in our world of political correctness, we now term "obese."). They were enrolled in a "healthy weight maintenance' study.  Thirty-nine MRI results are reported, after the women were show pictures of chocolate milkshakes or a less enticing solution and some actually got either the milk shake or a tasteless control surrogate.

Then they had brain scans and the pattern of neural activation was much like those seen in drug addicts. Either food intake (or even viewing a photo of food) or drug use can stimulate the brains release of chemicals we find pleasurable.

"It ain't easy" for some to lose the extra weight

So what does this mean for society? Number one: not everyone can lose weight by following a deciding to diet. Number two: the omnipresent visual food ads can be detrimental to a segment of our population. Number three: I think organizations similar to Alcoholics Anonymous may be one aid to that group of the obese.

The lead author, Ashley N. Gearhardt, a doctoral student at Yale, who help devise the 26-question Food Addiction Scale, was quoted as sayying, "Some of them actually stop socializing because it gets in the way of their eating."

We've got a major problem here folks. I gained a few pounds on a 11-day trip to see old friends all of whom wanted to feed me wonderful meals. When I got home I went back to my usual eating pattern and the extra weight dropped off rapidly.

That's not going to be as easy for some and darn near impossible for others.

 

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Posted in eating disorders, medically-oriented background info, Obesity, our kids and their weight issues, Unhealthy eating | No Comments »

Colorful foods, natural & un-

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Any food dyes here?

I've always been suspicious of food dyes. Reading labels and seeing Red 40 and Yellow 6 made me wonder if they added any benefit, other than allowing the food companies to sell more of their product. Then we were in Maryland, near the end of an eleven day trip to visit kids and grandkids and old friends and I spotted an article in the Washington Post titled "Eye-catching foods to get closer look from regulators." Today the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times had similar articles.

So I went back to an online 2007 British article published by professional staff from two medical schools which, in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial showed adverse effects (hyperactivity) from one mxture of artifical food color and additives. In 2008 the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, calling those dyes the "Secret Shame" of food industry and regulators, petitioned the FDA to ban them, noting several of them were already being phased out in the United Kingdom.

CSPI noted that a 2004 meta-analysis had shown that those dyes can affect children's behavior and quoted two more recent British government-funded studies of kids in a general population that had also concluded that the dyes and a preservative (sodium benzoate) had adverse effects on behavior.

So what happened? You got it. The FDA didn't ban the dyes.

In June of 2010 CSPI published another article that raised issues beyond hyperactivity, namely cancer and allergic reactions. They commented that our public is exposed by the food manufacturers to roughly fifteen million pounds per year of eight synthetic dyes. Three of those dyes are contaminated with known carcinogens, CSPI said, and a fourth, Red 3, was already acknowledged to be a carcinogen by the FDA itself.

Three of the four plus Blue 1 can cause allergic reactions in some people; this is not new knowledge according to CSPI.

Why do the food companies use the dyes? They're eye-catching and kids look for bright colors. CSPI urged the FDA to ban the dyes since there is evidence in human and animal studies of potential harm from them, but none of helpful effect, except to the wallets of the food producers.

That article came out in late June of 2010. Now in late March of 2011 the FDA is convening a panel of experts with the comment that artificial food dye is an issue "for certain susceptible children with ADHD and other problem behaviors."

I'm not betting on the outcome of the panel's recommendations, at least not from the FDA. On the other hand the food industry may be catching on. Some may try natural colors and I saw a mention of a new Koolaid product, Koolaid Invisible.

In the meantime, maybe it's time to wean your kids off of M&Ms.

Posted in additives, Corporations and healthy foods, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, Unhealthy eating | No Comments »

Good fish, bad fish: a cautionary tale

Monday, March 21st, 2011

This fish is in trouble

I've learned something about fish food poisoning these past few weeks. Perhaps I knew about it  in medical school, but that was a long time ago. We love fish, consider it a treat, eat it several times a week and, once in a while, partake of other marine creatures. I like mussels as long as they're cooked,  and will eat sushi, but never raw oysters.

So four people we know have had apparent fish-related food poisoning recently. They didn't eat at the same place or the same fish. That got me curious and I started to hunt down types of food poisoning related to eating fish and other marine critters. I found two that aren't the usual bacterial- or viral-caused forms (I'll write about those another time).

So what happened in the first instance was at a play when a close friend got suddenly and violently ill. He collapsed, was "out of it" for perhaps thirty seconds (I thought cardiac arrest or major stroke), then sat up and vomited copiously over himself and his spouse. Then he seemed weak, but otherwise normal. I went with hin to the ER where he was monitored for cardiac rhythm changes for four hours, got blood work and had a brain scan. All those were essentially normal, but he vomited four more times in the ER and once more as I was driving him home.

Over the next two weeks he had a cardiac workup with an echocardiogram, a stress test and a 24-hour Holter monitor for rhythm disturbances. All those were negative. He was previously reasonably healthy for his age of 72 and had no history of any seizure disorder.

A few other tests are pending, but then I spoke to a friend who had suffered a similar illness and heard of two others in the community. I went hunting for odd forms of food poisoning as none of these folk had diarrhea and none had sequelae of their short-term illness.

I finally heard the term scromboid fish food poisoning. All four had eaten fish and several had eaten shellfish.

Scromboid turns out to fit better than other diagnoses. It's typically associated with the consumption of fish, especially Scombridae fish like tuna or mackerel. It has a rapid onset, is marked by abdominal symptoms and or prostration, headache, palpitations, or flushing., sometimes tachycardia (rapid heart beat) and low or high BP and usually is self limited. It is caused by a toxin which is not inactivated by cooking and may be associated with spoiled meat.

The CDC says it's the most common chemically-related food poisoning in the United States., but at that only causes 5% of the food-related illness reported. It's much less nasty than ciguatera, the other fish related illlness I found. That one is also toxin-related, heat-resistent, can cause somewhat similar symptoms, but can lead to months ort even years of problems.

After reading of these I'll still go back to our favorite fish restaurant; they had no other patrons with similar symptoms. Scromboid seems to be relatively uncommon & mild in retrospect. On the other hand some speculate that ciguatera caused the migration of the Polynesians between 1,000 and 1,400 CE.

Posted in food and food-producing animals, Food Choices, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Food-related disease, medically-oriented background info, Unhealthy eating | 1 Comment »

Doonesbury adds up the calories

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

Don't eat here

I was reading the Sunday comics in our local paper and did a double take at the message in "Doonesbury," always one of my favorite cartoons. Zonker is working at "McFriendly's" and there's an emergency staff meeting. Their boss, termed Mr. Big, is there and talks about the chain falling behind their competition.

What's going on is their appetizer special isn't offering enough calories compared to Applebee's appetizer sampler (@2,590 calories) and Chili's Texas Cheese Fries (@2,100 calories) with the latter offering a full day's worth of calories "packed into an appetizer {bolding taken directly from the cartoon}).

We don't eat fast food (once in a while while on a trip we'll stop at Subway which has nutrition info listed), but I decided to check into these incredible numbers.

Guess what; they're real. A variety of fast food chains (Applebees, Chilis, On the Border) and restaurants (Outback Steakhouse) offer appetizers that boggle my mind. Remember, these are appetizers, and even if one presumes they're shared with one to three others, if you follow them with a meal, you'll be so far over the dietary guidelines you might as well be on a spaceship.

I found a website titled "The 20 Worst Foods in America" and looked at a few items. Applebee's apparently offers (or, to be charitable, offered at sometime in the recent past), an onion appetizer called the "Awesome Blossom." This one had 2,710 calories, 168 grams of fat and 6,360 mg. of sodium (my goal is 1,500 mg of sodium a day or less).

No wonder we're tipping the scales at higher and higher numbers; no wonder two thirds of our population is overweight and/or obese.

Don't eat these things. Best of all, don't eat in these places, at least until they clean up their act.

Yet we're at fault, at least partially. We've allowed ourselves to be gulled by the big corporations' propaganda and find it easier to eat out than to cook from scratch.

Our kids learn from our example, even when they appear to resist what we say, they often do what we do.

It's time and past time to walk (or drive) away.

Thanks, Garry Trudeau. You were right on target.

 

 

Posted in Obesity, tricks and gimmicks, Unhealthy eating | 1 Comment »

More on salt; is it addictive?

Friday, December 31st, 2010

Salt for your addiction

Finished with shoveling snow for the second time in twenty-four hours, I sat down to eat hot oatmeal with pumpkin, a treat Lynnette dreamed up recently. In her mail stack I noted a copy of Prevention, a magazine I seldom read, but this particular issue had a story with an intriguing title "The Food Addiction That's Making you Fat,"

After reading the article, which I regraded as strong on suggestions, but light on references, I went back to the medical literature trying to discover if the basic premise, that salt can cause a spike in the level of dopamine, a chemical that stimulates our brain's "pleasure center" made medical sense. It took a while, but I found a 2008 article on PubMed Central (part of the National Library of Medicine's website that offer access to abstracts and full-text articles), and discovered the background data for the statement.

In 2008, in the journal Physiology and Behavior, a University of Iowa group published an article titled "Salt Craving: The Psychobiology of pathogenic sodium intake." I won't bore you with the details, but the 46-page article was well=written and the data seemed sound.

The abstract mentioned that salt is essential to our physiological functions and generally is regarded as "highly palatable." Other sources say it brings out flavor in many foods and a humorous Time Magazine article on that subject that I found  (Josh Ozersky May 17, 2010) said a New York legislator had recently proposed banning all salt use in restaurant kitchens, making the author think of fleeing to Canada. He called salt "cocaine for the palate."

That made me delve into the body of the much longer article. The data and studies quoted did point to the dopaminergic mechanism being involved in salt depletion experiments. But that's salt depletion and our typical diet is a long ways from leading to that state.

I think the bottom line is salt enhances taste and we get conditioned to expect it as a learned behavior. Newborns either dislike salt or don't care; we're two or three before the baby-food industry or our parents get us hooked on salt.

But hooked most of us are; that's the bad news. The good news is that addiction can be broken, starting with removing salt shakers form your dining area and coking without salt. We now use many other spices, not spice mixes which may have salt as a major ingredient...and get by just fine.

The bottom line is that many things can be regarded as addictive: drugs of course, but also fats, chocolate, carbs, sex and voluntary exercise. And with that note, I think it's time to go to the gym. Now there's an addiction I enjoy.

Posted in Food Additives, Food-related disease, medically-oriented background info, Unhealthy eating | 2 Comments »

Fats and fatty acids and our health: chemistry and politics

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

Butter on a dish

I wrote about omega-3 fatty acids the last time, but, until I read Professor Robert L. Wolke's wonderful book, What Einstein Told His Cook, I didn't understand the name or remember much of the chemistry behind the fatty acids or fats themselves for that matter.

So let's start with a little chemistry, thanks to Wolke who is an emeritus  professor of that discipline and wrote a Food 101 column for the Washington Post for a number of years.

Fats, also called triglycerides, are chemical substances whose molecules are made up of three fatty acid, long chains of carbon atoms hooked onto a connector called glycerol. The carbon atoms themselves usually have two hydrogen atoms and if every carbon in the fatty acid chain has both its soul-mate hydrogens then we call it a saturated fatty acid.

When one carbon hydrogen is lacking its pair of hydrogens, the fatty acid is termed monounsaturated; if two (or three or more) carbons find themselves without their hydrogens, the fatty acid is polyunsaturated.

And then there's olive oil

The last carbon on a fatty acid's chain is termed the omega carbon from the final letter in the Greek alphabet. Omega-3 fatty acids, the good kind I've mentioned before, are missing hydrogens three carbons from the end of their chain.

So Omega-6 fatty acids, the much less healthful kind, lack hydrogens six places away from the omega end of the carbon line. And so on for Omega-9 fatty acids.

And while we're at it, if we're talking about a mostly saturated fat, it's likely to be a solid and from  an animal source (or a chemistry lab). Those that are mostly unsaturated are usually from vegetable sources and are much more commonly liquids.

Two more chemistry concepts for today, then I'll quit. If you look at the composition of a particular vegetable oil, part may be saturated, part monounsaturated and part polyunsaturated. The proportions count in deciding if the veggie oil is good for you or not, as saturated fats aren't healthy.

When food manufacturers want to stack the deck and sell you solids, not liquids (think margarine versus canola oil), they can add hydrogens in a technical process. On the other hand, partially unsaturated fats are easier to spread than totally solid ones.

That process, hydrogenation, can produce molecules rarely found in nature and one of the consequences of doing so led to trans fats, where the hydrogens added end up on opposite sides of a carbon. Those trans fats turned out to be nasty beasts (this was suggested in the medical literature as early as 1988), causing heart disease, with one estimate of 20,000 additional deaths per year in the United States. That number was published in  The American Journal of Public Health in 1995.

Thirteen years later, in January 2008, the state of California passed a law to minimize restaurants use of trans fats to less than half a gram per serving and in 2010 started to enforce that law. Apparently the state didn't think the restaurants would be able to comply with the new rules immediately and gave them two years to make changes. During all that time they could serve more than the limit of trans fats. Bakeries will have to comply with a similar law beginning on January 1, 2011.

I'll come back to the various kinds of fatty acids next time as there's more to add.

In the meantime, especially over the holidays, be aware of what you choose to eat.

Have a Merry (and healthy) Christmas.

Posted in Food producers and less-healthy foods, Governmental Efforts, medically-oriented background info, Unhealthy eating | No Comments »

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