Posts Tagged ‘Healthy Eating’

Do I need to eat my words?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Different choices for different ages

An old friend forwarded an article on vitamins yesterday, one that I read with special interest. It came from MedPage Today, an online medical news service for healthcare professionals that partners with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to offer physicians continuing medical education credit (CME) for reading articles and then answering a few questions.

The article was titled "Vitamin Studies Spell Confusion for Patients" and extensively quoted Dr. David Katz fromYale's prevention research center. He is an adjunct Associate Professor at Yale's School of Medicine and an internationally renowned authority on nutrition. He comments that, based on the recent study I mentioned several posts ago, many clinicians say they've written off supplements for good.

Yet 50% of Americans take supplements; many take more than just a multivitamin.

Then Dr. Katz offers some caveats as I did, stating the Iowa study is "merely observational and can't prove cause and effect." He still recommends omega-3 fatty acids (AKA "fish oil") and vitamin D for most of his patients and adds calcium for women and prenatal vitamins and folic acid for pregnant women. otherwise he only uses vitamins when there are deficiencies.

A recent pole of clinicians found that 70% favor annual screening of specific vitamin levels to treat deficiencies. Which vitamins (and minerals) might be measured as part of an annual focused screening examination and whether medical insurance plans would cover such laboratory tests has not been delineated, as best I can find.

But I'm seventy, and articles from 2005 to 2010 in authoritative sources, talk about seniors needing much more B12, having multiple minor, but significant, vitamin deficiencies, and not eating well-balanced, healthy diets, even here in the United States, much less in other spots around the world. I'm lactase deficient and small-boned; do I need a calcium supplement?

clearly the best way to get your vitamins

I agree with Dr. Katz that eating a balanced diet would be a better answer, at least for those who are younger. The concept of "eating your colors," i.e., having multiple suit and vegetable dishes over the day which contain different phytochemicals as represented by the color of the food itself, makes great sense.

How many Americans do that at present or are likely to do that even if medical figures recommend such?

I regard this as an ongoing discussion. Dr. Katz is certainly correct in saying that vitamins have been shown to treat disease states, but not to prevent chronic disease. The surmise in the article in MedPage seems sound to me: vitamin isolates are less effective on their own and a full blend of antioxidants and phytochemicals (again, best found in those whole fresh fruits and vegetables, may be the key to obtaining maximum benefits.

This discussion is likely to go on and on, so I'll supply two URLs that may help you, in consultation with your own physician, make choices that are relevant to your nutritional status, age and degree of health.

http://www.uspharmacist.com/content/d/senior%20care/c/21981/

http://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/ConsumerInformation/ucm110493.htm

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Posted in Healthy eating, Healthy food shopping, medically-oriented background info, scientific controversies, supplements | No Comments »

Eating our way across Portugal

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

 

 

We started just west of Lisbon

 

 

We're on a three and a half week trip, almost all in Portugal. I wasn't planning to add any posts, but brought my iPad2 and realized I could find Wi-Fi connections in many places. So now we're on a two-day farm stay in the Duoro Valley, heart of the Port wine grape industry and we're eating well, perhaps too well.

I'm not normally a chocolate eater but the Mousse de Chocolata" here has been wonderful. I realized today that I've eaten more desserts and more bread (freshly made) than usual, but my slacks still fit and I' using the same belt notch.

So what's keeping me from gaining a significant amount of weight?

To begin with we're often eating one main meal, one smaller one and a fruit or yogurt snack. Breakfasts here have freshly squeezed orange juice, rolls that don't need butter and some cheese. Our lunches have often been eaten in transit and, more often than not, have been light.

Then too we're walking 45 minutes to two hours a day, often up and down hills.

Today for lunch we returned to the same wonderful gourmet restaurant we'd been to last night. As in the previous meal portions were smaller than we get at home. We ate slowly savoring each bite and drank a third of a glass of a late harvest wine the chef had sent us. My wife had a fruit and vegetable salad, while I ate a fish fillet. We really dawdled for an hour and forty minutes, talking, putting our forks down between smaller-than-usual bites and talking...a lot.

I realized we'd spent two and a half hours over dinner the previous evening. This was a European way of dining I noticed as I looked around. Nobody was in a hurry and, tellingly, nobody seemed significantly overweight.

So I've learned a lesson or two on this trip and, in doing so, have enjoyed my food more.

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Posted in balanced diets, International travel | No Comments »

But now they're adding sugar?

Friday, July 8th, 2011

We've removed the HFCS

A few days ago I re-read Taubes's July 2002 article in The New York Times and the November 2002 "Nutrition Action Health Letter" article from CSPI that looked at his claims that refined carbohydrates are the problem and contradicted many of them. I have 40+ years of personal experience of reading articles critically. I fully understand that all one sees in print may not tell the entire story or may be slanted toward a particular view of the truth.

But I was still surprised to see a Wall Street Journal article ("Personal Journal, Wednesday July 7, 2011 pp. D1-2) titled "Sweet Revenge, Chefs Pour on the Sugar."

The story of high-fructose corn syrup dates back to the aftermath of WWII. Two major war-time industries needed to continue employing large numbers of workers, especially with all the GIs returning. So toxic chemicals became pesticides and gunpowder morphed into fertilizer. Corn was felt to be the most efficient crop in converting sunlight to food energy, so it became the most favored crop. Soon there was the question of new uses for all that corn.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was first introduced by Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi in 1957.  The industrial production process was developed by Dr. Y. Takasaki in Japan from 1965 to 1970 and Takasaki is known to many as the creator of HFCS. HFCS was rapidly introduced to many processed foods and soft drinks in the U.S. from about 1975 to 1985.

High-fructose corn syrup is produced by milling corn to produce corn starch, then processing that starch to yield corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose, and then adding enzymes that change some of the glucose into fructose.

The problem of course, is the rapid absorption of both HFCS and table sugar leading to a surge of insulin levels, resultant lowering of elevated blood sugar levels and, perhaps to hunger and subsequent over-eating. Taubes may have that part correct.

Now however, many high-level chefs are turning away from HFCS and substituting sugar. That's also been true for food-producing companies; you can now purchase Wheat Thins or Pepsi sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS.

But these are better for you

But my copy of Harvard's School of Public Health "Nutrition Source Update," led me to their new Healthy Eating Pyramid (link below) which puts sugary drinks and sweets at the small end with a comment to use them sparingly.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid/index.html

The chef's in the "Sweet Revenge" article have it wrong; they think HFCS is worse for you than sugar (many scientists think both have negative effects on health) and are surprised to find it in so many commercial foods, e.g., oyster crackers.

The American Medical Association and the American Dietetic Association both urge all of us to restrict our intake of all caloric sweeteners. The research director of the University of Cincinnati's Diabetes and Obesity Center says HFCS and table sugar are biochemically identical.

So I believe it's time to cut down on HFCS, table sugar, honey, brown sugar, golden syrup (made from cane sugar) and even agave nectar.

Your dentist will be happy and in the long run I think you'll have better overall health.

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Posted in Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Choices, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Governmental Efforts | No Comments »

Reading Taubes: part one

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Avoid white bread

A while back one of my blog readers asked if I had ever read Taubes. I wasn't sure if that was a book title, a diet plan or an author, so I Googled the word and eventually purchased two books written by a veteran science writer, Gary Taubes.

Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard and areospace engineering at Stanford, then wrote articles for Discover and Science plus four books. He looks for scientific controversises and wades into them. In July 2002 he published an article in the New York Times Magazine titled "What if it's All Been a Big Fat Lie,"

The article takes us back to the Adkins diet craze. Dr. Atkins, trained in cardiology, was significantly overweight and used a JAMA study as a basis for his own personal diet plan. He then published two books urging dieters to severely limit carbohydrate consumption. At one point it was estimated that one out of eleven North American adults were on his diet. His company made over $100 million, but filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005, two years after he died.

Taubes explores some of the same turf, saying it's refined carbohydrates that make us fat. His initial plunge into the field was the NYT piece, followed by a 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories and now a 2011 book, Why We get Fat: and What to do About It.

Taubes has hefty credentials as a science writer; he is the only print journalist to have received the Science in Society Journalism Award three times. Currently he's a Robert Woods Johnson Foundation investigator in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. But his initial article ignited a firestorm. In the piece Taubes mentions that the common veiwpoint links the kickoff of the obesity epidemic  (in the early 1980s), to cheap fatty foods, large portion servings (at commercial establishments presumably), an increase in food advertisements and a sedentary lifestyle.

He would beg to differ, invoking what he terms "Endocrinology 101," an explanation that says human evolution was not designed for a high-sugar, high-starch diet. Until a comparatively recent era (roughly 10,000 years ago) we were not agriculturists, but hunter-gatherers. So Taubes thinks the problem is our increased consumption of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white bread, pasta &  white rice.

Others think he picks and chooses his facts. I don't think he's wrong in his basic premise, but he also disagrees with the ideas of "calories in; calories out," avoiding saturated fats and exercising being important in weight control (He seems to think people who exercise then hurry off to eat more).

more than one way to "thin a cat"

I'm down thirty pounds since early in 2009, have easily kept the weight off by exercising six days a week, avoiding sugar & HFCS foods and eating lots  more veggies and fruits while cutting back on portion size of meat dishes.

I'll read more on Taubes and his detractors and let you know what I agree with and what I don't.

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Posted in Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, Metabolic Syndrome, Publications, scientific controversies, Weight Loss | No Comments »

They're finally here!

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I woke up at 6:30 AM this morning and weighed myself: 149.6 pounds, right in the middle of my goal weight.  I've been working on my life style changes, more exercise and less food, since May 2009 and, although I bounce up and down 2-3 pounds, I'm basically lean.

Breakfast was a quart of "lime water" (I squeeze fresh limes three times a day), a cup of regular coffee for Lynnette and of Cafix for me (a blend of barley, rye, chicory and sugar beets; I avoid caffeine), a banana and a home-made oatmeal dish with millet, brown sugar, sunflower seeds, walnuts, and ground flaxseed to complement the commercial oatmeal. There's no salt in any of the above and we added fat-free milk (Lynnette) or soy milk (Peter) to our oatmeal. We'll eat our big meal of the day at noon and at home.

The Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section had an article titled "New Dietary Guidelines: Less Food, Less TV." The June 2010 DGAC version from the advisory committee of sceintists and nutrition experts had gone through the expected round of commentary, largely from food indusrty sources and the final products, as always is considerably watered down. You can find it online at www.dietaryguidelines.gov if you want to read the entire document, or skim through portions.

So here's a section of what it says:

• Reduce daily sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams (mg) and further reduce intake to 1,500 mg among persons who are 51 and older and those of any age who are African American or have hypertension, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease. The 1,500 mg recommendation applies to about half of the U.S. population, including children, and the majority of adults.

• Consume less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fatty acids by replacing them with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. • Limit the consumption of foods that contain refined grains, especiallyrefined grain foods that contain solid fats, added sugars, and sodium.

How do we translate that into simple English? More than 1/2 your plateful should be vegetables and fruits, buy lower salt products and don't add any when you cook or at the table; eat less red meat. Eat real food, not food products; read labels carefully when you shop. I'd add: eat out less and exercise more.

I read Dr, David Katz's column, "New Dietary Guidelines: A Physician's Perspective" on the Huffingtonpst.com website (Katz is the Director of Yale's Prevention Research Center). He agrees that the feedback gave a politicized spin to the final document, but liked the new emphasis on obesity and chronic disease prevention (roughly 1/6 of our kids and 1/3 of our adults are obese). He didn't care as much for the continued emphasis on dairy and meat consumption with less attention paid to plant-based diets.

So this version of the Dietary Guidelines isn't all that much different from prior versions, unless you read carefully and, in some cases, between the lines. I found a section (Chapter one, page 3) on "The Heavy Toll of Diet-related Chronic Diseases that I'll comment on at another time.

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Posted in Food-related disease, Governmental Efforts, Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, Obesity, our kids and their weight issues | No Comments »