Archive for the ‘Healthy eating’ Category

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Obese kids, a growing problem

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

eating too much of the wrong things

There is a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about how Portland, Maine, concerning about the growing number of obese kids in the community, developed a city-wide plan to combat the issue. Their concept has now spread elsewhere in the state.

Well that caught my attention and I started looking for background medical and non-medical data. Many of the websites I visited initially were poorly written, causing me to move on, but I found one for the 6th Biennial Childhood Obesity Conference to be held in San Diego starting 0n June 27th (www.childhood-obesity.net). The underlying dire fact is the percentage of kids in the US who are overweight or frankly obese has nearly tripled in the last thirty years.

The conference offers youth scholarships for travel, hotel accommodations, meals (presumably healthy ones) and registration/materials fees. This way kids ages 14 to 18 can meet with medical experts, teachers, policy makers and other kids to hear the evidence-based best approaches to combating obesity.

some start off the wrong way

Former President Bill Clinton's foundation's web page said we've got ~25 million kids in the overweight and obese danger zones and the medical therapy for obese kids costs us three times that of normal weight kids. Twenty-five percent of our children don't engage in any kind of free-time physical activity.

So is it genetics or food or activity that's causing the problem. I think the answer is "yes," but I'd certainly put more emphasis on the latter two factors. Less than 25% of our high school kids take PE on a daily basis; instead they spend an average of four to five hours a day doing non-exertional "techy" activities including video games, computer use and even plain old television watching.

So back to Portland's plan. They developed a 5-2-1-0 concept: five servings of fruits and veggies, 2 hours or less of "screen time," at least one hour of exercise a day and zero sugar-filled drinks. They've already reversed the upward trend in obesity, but at considerable cost ($3.7 million) and with some difficulty in measuring the results. Now the CDC has recently given over a quarter of a billion dollars to 39 US communities in an effort to both start programs and follow their outcome.

I Googled the name of Dr. Victoria Rogers, a pediatrician mentioned in the article. She works as Director of the Kids Co-op at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center and is involved in the 5-2-1-0 Goes to School program, another  Portland-based program called "Let's Go!," and the state-wide Maine Youth Overweight Collaborative.

In Maine alone, Let's GO is now active in nearly 350 schools and the local business men and women who funded the original project are able to see some preliminary results already. One phone survey found increasing (but still relatively low) percentages of kids adopting healthier eating and exercise habits. Dr. Rogers and her cohorts want to follow 1,500 kids who are in the Let's Go! study long term to see if they change their eating and exercise habits for a lifetime.

So what's happening in your town or city and your state. It's our kids; we have to make a difference in their lives and this is a great way to do so.

 

 

Posted in Exercise possibilities, Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, Obesity, our kids and their weight issues, Publications, Weight Loss | No Comments »

exercise and eating as you get older

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

you may not want to try this much weight

I was reading a food and exercise article this morning in a Nutrition Action Healthletter, a publication from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group whose watchdog goals I often support. CSPI has been around for forty years and when I looked at its board member list I saw the familiar name of David A. Kessler, MD, JD, the former FDA head and ex-dean of two medical school.

The April 2011 article my wife showed me was titled "Staying Strong: How exercise and diet can help preserve your muscles." Well I'm two days shy of my 70th birthday and a gym rat, there six days a week. And I eat well or so I thought. What's there for me to learn from this article?

I agreed with the opening quote from Dr. Miriam Nelson, the director of Tuft's Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity Prevention, "Muscle is the absolute centerpiece for being healthy, vital and independent as we grow older." Of course, having a functioning brain helps. But I wasn't about to quibble with a distinguished figure like Dr. Nelson, who is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, an Assocatiate Professor at Tufts and founder of the Strong Women program.

The Healthletter said most of us lose muscle mass starting in our late 30s and early 40s. I had certainly noticed that a few years back, in spite of being physically active. To reverse the process, or at least keep a decent amount of muscle, resistance training is advocated, I've been doing lower body exercise mostly (an hour+ on a recumbent bike), but recently added back some weight training for both upper and lower body.  Ben Hurley, a PhD Exercise Physiologist at the University of Alabama, feels muscle power is the key to fall prevention, a critical factor in the elderly.

Even if you fall and break a bone, like the oldest member of my wife's Strong Women, Strong Bones class, did, your chances of having a rapid recovery are considerably increased. Her docs were amazed at how she bounced back. Strength training, in several studies, has been shown to increase bone density.

What else did I need to do? The new information in this Healthletter was of the amount of protein we need as we age. I read the article and added a hunk (~4 ounces) of leftover beef to my cereal, milk and fruit breakfast. That advice came from researchers at UT Galveston (and numerous other universities), especially a PhD Associate professor, Dr. Douglas Paddon-Jones, who's worked with NASA on usingartificial gravity and amino acids to preserve muscle mass in astronauts.

Is leucine the key?

The bottom line was to eat more protein and to add some to your breakfasts and lunches as you age. One particular amino acid, leucine, appears to be most crucial. it's found in whey (in milk and cheese) and in fish, poultry, eggs and meat. I'll write more about timing of amino acid intake another time.

 

Posted in Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, Publications, strategies for healthy aging | 2 Comments »

grass-fed (and grass-finished) vs. grain-finished beef

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

What's your beef?

We've been buying meat (a bison we split four ways, a young sheep we shared with another couple and, most recent a quarter beef) that's been grass-fed and grass-finished. I always thought it was a healthier way to eat red meat, even though overall we're eating smaller meat portions, more fish and chicken, lots more fruit and veggies all the time and an occasional meat-free main meal.

Now I found a very well done (no pun intended) examination of the issue at the CNN.com website. CNN discussed the Cooking Light Test Kitchen. We have a subscription to that magazine and enjoy its recipes, but I didn't know much about its test kitchen. They had a complete article on the grass-finished vs. grain finished beef controversy. I say grass-finished since essentially all cows eat grass to start with, but some eat only grass and perhaps some hay for six months to a year. Others, those who end up in those huge feedlots like the ones we see when we drive east in Colorado, eat corn mixed with soy and other edibles and are given hormones and lots of antibiotics, whether they are ill or not.

I won't even get into the subject of drug-resistent bacteria in this post, but instead I'll stick to the question of "Can a grass-finished ruminant taste good and can I afford to buy grass-finished beef?" I should mention bison as well, but that meat wasn't tested in CNN's study.

In short, the answer is going to be yes for almost all of us. I know the meat will be less fatty (there's always going to be some fat, of course), but cooked properly, anyone other than those who are specially "trained to evaluate sensory characteristics in beef" won't know the difference. I have a friend who raised beef cattle in Nebraska and disagrees with me on the subject, but the Nutrition Journal article I just quoted (I printed the entire journal article that was mentioned in passing in the CNN piece), basically said it's what you grew up eating. Consumer "sensory panels", that represent the vast majority of us, they felt, were more of an art than a science.

So what are the advanatges and disadvantages of grass-finished beef. It's got fewer calories, roughly four and a half pounds worth per year if you eat as much beef as the average American. Its fat is yellower than the grass-finished cow's, representing more beta-carotene, a significant antioxidant. And it contains more omega-3s as well as more Vitamin A & E.

Disadvantages? It may cost more, if you buy it at the supermarket, but try your area's CSA or look for a local farmer who raises beef and buy it in bulk. CNN got 243 pounds of meat for $5.32 per pound, just a tad higher than they would have paid in supermarkets. We paid <$3 per pound for the quarter cow we bought recently. I'll finish the Chico State article + one from Tufts in another post.

Posted in food and food-producing animals, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, Publications, Vitamins and Minerals | No Comments »

Saving $1T by losing pounds

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

whole-grain cereal and a banana

Mark Bittman's "Opinionator" column in the New York TImes April 12, 2011, was right on. He called the $36B that Congress has been haggling over (like two small boys) small potatoes compared to what could be saved if we ate less overall and ate more of the right things. He quoted a number of medical resources, so I went back to look at the originals.

In the January 24, 2011 online edition of the American Heart Association's journal Circulation, a panel headed by a Stanford Associate Professor, Paul Heidenreich, stated that cardiovascular disease (CVD) currently accounts for more than one sixth of all US health dollars spent. They went on to predict that by 2030 the direct costs of care for all forms of CVD would triple from a 2010 estimate of $273B to $818B .

CVD includes stroke, heart attacks, congestive heart failure and hypertension among other entities and they are often highly correlated. In fact the INTERHEART study which Bittman quotes (and I found in a seven-year-old copy of the journal Lancet), says lifestyle-related risk factors such as obesity, smoking and hypertension account for roughly 90+% of heart disease.

We haven't even started on Type 2 diabetes (DM) yet and Bittman noted that problem will cost roughly $500B per year  by 2020. And almost all of the cases of Type 2 DM are preventable.

If we want to reduce the deficit, one way would be to reduce our weights and trim our waistlines. Sure, we wouldn't get rid of all CVD and Type 2 DM, but a large share of the $1.3T per year we will be spending on them by 2020-2030 could be avoided.

We're spending over $2T a year now on healthcare and those costs are going up and up.

So how can we save a major chunk of that huge sum? How about Dr. David Ludwig's ideas? He's a Harvard doc who has worked with Marion Nestle, the PhD dietitian I've mentioned before. He published a very recent article in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) with both straightforward and complex/innovate modalities to improve our American diet.

I read something about Dr. Ludwig and his earlier concepts in his Harvard bio and a WebMD interview. He's a pediatric endocrinologist working at Children's Hospital in Boston, founding director of its Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) program and author of Ending the Food Fight:Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World.

In the JAMA article he talks about better funding for school lunch programs, making breads with whole grains (non-refined) and research needed to improve food preservatives that are healthier than the current ones. His own studies appear to show a correlation between lower calorie intake and eating whole grain products.

I see two difficult issues: getting people to make healthy foods choices and avoiding bureaucratic costs as the British experienced from their NHS shift toward paying physicians for preventive measures (NB. WSJ article from 4-16-2011 p. C3).

But what a great way to save us money that Congress might even agree on.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Complications of Obesity, Dieting, Healthy eating, Life extension, medically-oriented background info, Obesity, Weight Loss | No Comments »

Updated link

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

I had a link to a Mayo Clinic article in my last post that needs correcting.

It should be http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/healthy-diet/HQ01396

Posted in Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info | No 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 »

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 »

If you do eat fast food, you may want to buy this book

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

My writing mentor, Teresa Funke, sent me an email after reading one of my posts recently. She mentioned that her family has a book titled Eat This Not That! Her three kids love reading the book and pointing out choices, especially wrong ones, that she and her husband make. They've purchased several editions of the book over the past few years.

Well I had to buy the book and easily found it in our favorite locally owned bookstore, Old Firehouse Books (that's right; it's in an old fire station). This is the 2011 edition and costs $19.99.

The authors (major and minor) are David Zinczenko, the editor-in-chief of Men's Health and a co-writer, Matt Goulding, who's said to be a New York Times best-selling food author and has cooked and eaten his way around the world. I Googled the second author and found he also has a book called Cook This Not That! Since we already do lots of healthy heart cooking I won't buy that other book.

But let's go back to the book that I did purchase.

So what does this book do? Remember, I rarely eat fast food at all and if I do it's because we're on a trip and didn't bring sandwiches (we almost always do for shorter road trips, but the second or third day out, we may have to find a place to eat). My favorite choice then is Subway since I can pick a simple "sub" and not goop it up. Plus I know what the calories are in the sandwich since they're listed.

But the book is interesting. It lists the "20 Worst Foods in America,' for instance. It tells what's really in a "Chicken McNugget" (seven ingredients in the meat and twenty more in the breading). It has a Top Swaps section telling which burger, wings, pasta, ribs, fajitas, chicken, fries, salad, pizza and ice cream is better than its competitor. It focues on some specific food choices (bad ones, according to the book) and tells why (e.g., a Taco Bell Mexican Pizza has 64 different ingredients; Skittles have more sugar per package than two twin-wrapped packages of Peanut Butter Twix and a whole range of additives that help bring about all those colors; many of those were apparently linked in a Lancet article to hyperactivity and behavioral problems in children).

The bulk of the book fits the title, side by side comparisons of food choices from different fast food restaurants. They're interesting and may be quite useful to those of you who partake on a regular basis of such fare.

I have some real caveats however. Many of their "Eat This' selections still have way too much salt and sometimes more fat than I'd be interested in eating. The book touts losing weight without exercising or dieting. That's not my style at all. Nonetheless it's both a good read, and according to Teresa, a nice way to introduce kids to making food choices. The book rates and, in some areas, grades a wide variety of foods.

Overall I'd give it a C+, but you may rate it higher, even if you only eat fast food occasionally.

 

 

Posted in Corporations and healthy foods, Food Choices, Food labeling, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Healthy eating, Holiday/travel eating, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Fish, fish and more fish

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Sardines by the dozen

I've been looking at three articles  on which fish we should be eating. One came from a newspaper, one from a health.usnews.com website and the third from the Environmental Defense Fund website.

One of the dietary changes we've heard repeatedly over the last few years, besides eating more fruits and veggies and less red met, is to eat more fish. We're fortunate to have a wonderful restaurant here that's simply titled "Fish." We eat there fairly frequently, especially before attending plays (but that's another story). We also cook fish at home at least once and usually twice a week.

So which kind of fish should we be eating? That leads to the questions of sustainability, heart health and contaminants. To those, based on a recent experience, I'd add the risk of toxins (I'll write a blog post about that some other time).

The article from the Wall Street Journal (March 2, 2011) focused on salmon, talking about Wild Alaskan, Wild Pacific, Farmed Atlantic and Closed Tank-Framed varieties. The Farmed Atlantic salmon raised many enivronmental concerns and both Seafood Watch and Greenpeace decry salmon farming, stating it takes three pounds of  wild-caught fish to produce one pound of salmon.

The Wild Alaskan salmon got kudos from Seafood Watch, although another group noted that 40% of "wild" salmon caught in the state's waters were actually raised in hatcheries. Wild Pacific slamon raised sustainability concerns from some groups, but not all.

Confusing, huh? Well then I turned to the online health.usnews.com piece. This had three distinct sections: the AHA wants us to consume more omega-3s and recommends mackerel, lake trout, herring, sardines, albacore tuna and salmon as good sources. Yet in the contaminant section it's noted that albacore tuna, high on the food chain, carry the risk of mercury and PCBs.  There's debate as to the risk for most adults, but pregnant women (or those who are at risk of pregnancy) should clearly avoid this fish choice.

And farmed salmon, high up on the list of omega-3s, is tough to raise in a sustainable fashion.

The Environmental Defense Fund suggests we eat wild salmon from Alaska, pink shrimp from Oregon, talapia from the US, farmed rainbow trout, alabacore tuna from the US or Canada, yellowfin from the US. The EWG website led me to a Mark Bittman article (New York Times November 16, 2008) where Mark lauds wild-caught fish; he finds the flavor better and the environmental concerns lessened.

So what are we to do? I'd suggest eating more fish, trying to eat some fatty fish, eating less farmed fish and reading more about the issues involved. I may try more sardines.

The real question is whether there will be enough wild fish for all.

Posted in Food Choices, Food-related disease, Healthy eating, Healthy food shopping | No Comments »

More Beef or Zorba's diet?

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

eat half the steak and ask for more veggies

I read dueling articles in the Wall Street Journal, one appeared yesterday with the title "Beef Industry Carves a Course" and the other today titled "Why to Eat Like a Greek." So I wanted to go through the pros and cons of both.

Apparently the National Cattlemen's Beef Association came up with a new kind of MBA two years ago. This one isn't the traditional MBA, but instead stands for Masters of Beef Advocacy. Roughly 2,000 people have finished the program thus far, but that's only 10% of what the beef producer's group hopes to train.

This is not a 2+ year Master's degree, like some of our graduate students got; it's a six-session, one hour at a time online course on beef safety, beef nutrition, animal care, environmental stewardship, modern beef production and something called the beef checkoff. The last of those is a program started way back in 1985 where $1 a head is assessed on sales of live cattle and the states get half and the Cattleman's Beef Promotion and Research Board gets the other half.

Note the term "promotion." The WSJ article says the MBA program helps train beef-associated folk (chefs, butchers, feedlot operators and ranchers) in promoting and defending red meat.

The per capita consumption of beef and veal has fallen from a peak of  94 pounds in the 1976 to 62 pounds in 2009 and the new USDA guidelines suggest we replace some of the red meat in our diets with fish and other seafood. Many schools have instituted a "Meatless Monday" policy

One thing I hadn't heard about was that PETA (People for Ethical treatment of Animals) has a new program where models wearing only strategically placed lettuce leaves stand on street corners in towns across the country and hand out tofu hot dogs. Now that's a new approach.

I'm a long way from a vegan; we do eat beef and have a quarter cow in our freezer. The cow was raised with a small number of companions, grass-fed and grass-finished, so is lean meat.

In our case we also eat vegetarian meals on occasion and will spend four days with our other set of adult children, our former graduate students from India who are lacto-ovo vegetarians, next week.

Most of the time we eat what amounts to a Mediterranean diet with whole grain cereals, lots of fruits and vegetables, fish and relatively small amounts of animal fat. The other WSJ article mentioned a meta-analysis done by an Athens university on studies involving more than a half million people; they claim  nearly a one third reduction in the risk of developing the metabolic syndrome (high BP, large waist circumference, high blood sugar, low levels of good cholesterol (HDL) and high triglycerides).

Okay, what are the cons I said I'd mention? Well to begin with I'm not sure the beef industry has changed much other than trying to increase their PR efforts. And the Mediterranian diet isn't much different from the increase fruits and veggies, eat less red meat. Same old, same old. I agree with the overall premises, but I'm not convinced that olive oil is an essential component.

So neither article changed my diet at all.

Posted in Healthy eating, Healthy food shopping, tricks and gimmicks | No Comments »

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