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The great potato war

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Time for a switch?

I was reading The Wall Street Journal this morning, starting as usual with the "Personal Journal section which headlined the story of a successful prolonged cardiac resuscitation: "96 minutes without a heartbeat."But then the front page caught my eye with an article titled "Spuds, on the Verge of Being Expelled, Start a Food Fight in the Cafeteria."

Searching back-files, I found recent discussions at the US Senate Agriculture's Appropriations Subcommittee hearings. The Department of Agriculture plans to not allow money in the WIC program budget to be spent on white potatoes and not surprisingly senators from Maine and Idaho protested.

Medical articles I found stated that potatoes dominate our vegetable consumption, especially among adolescents who favor them fried. Another study, this one among young preschoolers, showed 70% of 2 to 3 year old kids eating some form of vegetables daily, with french fries and other fried potatoes being the most commonly consumed vegetables. An article in Nutrition Research from April 2011 stated that white potatoes, including French fries, did contribute "shortfall nutrients' and, when consumed in moderate amounts, could form part of a healthful diet.

So what's the rub? Well to begin with if you're only eating French fries, or worse still baked potatoes with lots of cheese, butter and other toppings, you may not be eating any other vegetables and you're getting a lot of "unhealthy diet" items.

Then there's the question of which potato is better. The "Tufts University Health&Nutrition Letter" recommends trying sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes, saying they have huge amounts of beta-carotene  (if you eat them, as I do, with the skin) and larger quantities of vitamin C, folate, calcium and manganese than their pale cousins.

The article in the WSJ that I started with mentions "Maine Potato Candy," mashed white potatoes rolled in coconut and dipped in chocolate and even potato doughnuts, One school food-service director is quoted as regularly serving hash browns , mashed potatoes, "Maine fries," a baked potato bar and even potato puffs for various school meals.

The proposed USDA guidelines, on the other hand, would limit starchy vegetables (not just white potatoes, but also corn, peas and lima beans) to no more than one cup per week. As expected the potato industry and their elected representatives launched a campaign to defend their product, even calling the white potato a "gateway vegetable" that can introduce kids to other vegetables.

The fracas apparently started when the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Science, recommended that WIC money shouldn't be used to buy white potatoes. One food-service director, up in Caribou, Maine, said she tried serving sweet-potato fries, but her students "just don't like them." She'said to have noted they cost more and most of it goes in the trash.

I love sweet potatoes, but I started eating them early in life and I think that's the key. If those two and three year-old kids get introduced to sweet potatoes, in whatever form, and then after a few years get baked sweet potatoes (without all the toppings...we use salsa), by the time they are teenagers they'll eat them without any qualms.

Or so I think.

Posted in Food Choices, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, our kids and their weight issues | 2 Comments »

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 »

Leave it to we Beaver's

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

a tree, post-beaver

The May 4, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal had an article that quickly send me to my computer. The title was "Why Wood Pulp Makes Ice Cream Creamier." Well, until I read the article and then hunted down background information, I certainly didn't know I could be chewing on logs (or derivatives thereof) in my daily diet

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization I generally trust, has a website on food additives. There's a couple of pages on the good, the semi-bad and the ugly (as I would phrase it) and then 25+ pages on specific additives. I'll drop in a link to that fascinating section of the CSPI's web content if you want to learn more and perhaps return to the general topic in a later post. http://www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm

In the meantime back to the May 4th article and its cousins. I say that since Googling "wood pulp in food" yields links to a considerable number of articles, blogs and other Internet-accessible items on the subject. I just printed out a page from a blog from India, a 2006 Dow Chemical Company's attorney's letter (the first page of 68) requesting an exemption to for considering wood pulp as a food additive and an FDA paper on the subject.

cellulose

The bottom line is CPSI in their extensive listing of food additives rates carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) in their group "Cut Back: Not toxic, but large amounts may be unsafe or promote bad nutrition."

Yet processed food manufacturers are using more CMC and other cellulose (read this as wood pulp) deriviatives to increase fiber content of white bread (I don't eat white bread), allow hurried/lazy cooks to add pre-shredded cheese (we shred our own) and enhance something called "mouth feel" in ice cream.

To make the powdered form of cellulose, wood is cooked in chemicals to separate the constituent and then, in some cases, processed further with acid to break down the fiber.

If made properly, (ah, there's that word "if" again), cellulose is a). supposed to be harmless in small amounts and b). isn't absorbed by the body, thus adding bulk to foods without adding calories. It also adds fiber to foods that otherwise are low in this component.

The WSJ article quotes Michael Jacobson, the CSPI's executive director, as saying, "Cellulose is cellulose." He then apparently said that no research points to health problems secondary to eating cellulose.

The FDA limits the percentage of cellulose in some foods (e.g., cheese spread and jams) and sets an upper ceiling (usually 1 to 4 %) for how much cellulose can be added to meat products.

Well I know we need fiber in our diet and it appears that this additive isn't bad for you. But I prefer not to eat processed foods and to get my fiber in natural forms.

So I Googled "Food high in fiber" and found a Mayo Clinic website that listed, amoung other foods: raspberries, unpeeled pears and apples, whole-wheat spaghetti, bran flakes, cooked split peas and lentils and artichokes.

It's your choice; Processed foods with added wood pulp or plain old fruits and veggies.

Chew on!

 

Posted in Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Additives, Governmental Efforts, tricks and gimmicks, Weight Loss | 1 Comment »

New proposed food advertisement rules with hedging language

Friday, April 29th, 2011

And here we go again

In response to the hue and cry about childhood obesity, an Interagency Working Group was set up, under the direction of our Congress, between the FTC, the FDA, the CDC and the Department of Agriculture . Their tasking was to "develop a set of principles to guide (note that word) industry efforts to improve the nutritional profile of foods marketed directly to children ages 2-17" and also to support healthful food choices.

After I read a short Wall Street Journal article on this proposal this morning, I found the original government release from yesterday online and a commentary in The Atlantic online written today by Dr. Marion Nestle, a named chair professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at NYU and a visiting professor at Cornell. I have her 2006 book, What To Eat and consider her a trusted and knowledgeable figure in the field.

Let's start with the Interagency proposal, titled "Food for Thought." It mentions the major sources of calories for youngsters are cookies and cakes, pizza and various sugary drinks. When and if they eat veggies, half of those are chips and fries. Their parents are becoming concerned about childhood obesity as well they should be; one in three kids is overweight and headed toward an increased risk of all the diseases associated with obesity, hypertension, asthma and diabetes among them. They won't, on average, live as long as their folks do.

So, given that issue and the fact that the food industry spends huge amounts to markets these unhealthy food choices to kids, what does this august group come up with?

A voluntary program that should (note the word choice) be followed by the year 2016. Strange I think that's five years from now.

The recommendations, now subject to public comment (read that as efforts to soften them by the food industry) appear reasonable on first glance. They include foods that "provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet" and note those food components that should (same word again) be limited (added sugars, sodium, saturated fats and trans fats).

Marion Nestle's comment notes a prior attempt that never saw the final "rules" being implemented, and voices concern that the principles are still voluntary with no agency set up to track compliance and that five years seems far too long to institute these kind of changes. She thought the 2010 proposals weren't strict enough and noted the sodium level mentioned in the 2011 version was actually slightly increased, presumably to allow inclusion of more junk foods. She does congratulate the FTC for its courage.

Well I'll be a little blunter. I'm not holding my breath that these changes will happen short of massive public protest.

Even though 17 major companies are making some changes by reformulating foods and decreasing their markets efforts to kids, I think those will be glacially slower than they should be if we're going to help and even save the upcoming generations.

So it's time for all of us to weigh in on this issue. Start a campaign, talk to friends, write a blog...do something.

 

 

Posted in Food Choices, Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, Life Expectancy, our kids and their weight issues | No Comments »

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 »

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 »

Eggs, eggs and more eggs

Friday, March 4th, 2011

Eggs from Morning Fresh Dairy

I recently started eating egg whites on a regular basis.  We get our eggs from the Morning Fresh Dairy, the same organic dairy that delivers milk to our front door once a week. Lynnette gets a half gallon of fat-free, locally produced milk every week and I  buy a half gallon of their whole milk every other week. The herd resides about eight miles from us and we enjoy purchasing local products whenever we can. Since I'm moderately lactose intolerant, I also buy vanilla soy milk.

We get eggs from the same dairy, and usually go through a dozen a week. I worried about the cholesterol in the eggs yolks although I love to make omelets. So more recently I've started hard-boiling six eggs at a time, keeping the resultant cooked eggs in the refrigerator and eating just the whites. I felt good about getting egg protein, but hadn't done my due diligence so today I started looking at various comments on eggs.

The eggs come from Platteville, Colorado, a small community about 35 miles southeast of Fort Collins where we live. They're produced under the United Egg Producer Animal Husbandry (UEP) standards and, having Googled those, I'm reasonably content. For instance those chickens get no hormones in their food. The UEP standards started with an independent scientific advisory committee in 1999 and came out as a voluntary program in 2002. The USDA and an independent firm called Validus audit farms seeking UEP certification annually and look at cage space, clean water and nutritious food issues.

a better chicken coop

On the other hand, The Humane Society issued a statement against the UEP in 2009, saying their standards were misleading and the so-called battery cages were abusive. In response the UEP issued their own statement in January 2010 discussing revisions in the guidelines. I haven't been to the Plateville facility, so I can't comment on their "hen-friendly" environment.

The other issue is eating eggs. There has been a recent downplay of the role of dietary cholesterol as a risk factor as compared to saturated and especially trans fats. The Harvard nurses' longitudinal study found that consuming an egg a day wasn't associated with a higher risk of heart disease.

Chicken eggs have been termed the "perfect protein" and supply all essential amino acids needed for humans. The yolk is the question I haven't totally resolved: it contains all the egg's vitamin A, D, and E, but rougly four times the calories of the egg white and a large yolk has greater than two-thirds of the recommended daily intake of 300 mg. of cholesterol. There is debate as to whether the egg yolk presents a significant health risk with a variety of research studies showing differing results. On the other hand, one amino acid, choline, is found only in the yolk. Pregnant and nursing women need choline (from some source), as it's needed for fetal brain development.

So for now I'm going to continue eating my hard-boiled egg whites and I'll try to go to Plateville and do my own inspection of the chicken farm one of these days.

 

 

Posted in food and food-producing animals, Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info | No Comments »

Genetically-engineered Foods

Friday, February 18th, 2011

a large, but normal salmon

I can't say I've had much of an opinion on genetically modified organisms (GMO) or the more recent take on them, genetically engineered (G.E.) foods. After all, goes one argument I've read in a number of places, mankind has been selecting and thus modifying foods/food anmals for certain "desirable" traits for thousands of years, so what's the difference.

Then I read Mark Bittman's Opinionator post in the New York Times online (Feb 15, 2001) and found one crucial difference, honesty. The government has approved three new G.E. foods, one of which becomes hay, another to be used to make fuel (ethanol) and the third a variety of sugar beets. None of them have to be labeled as coming from GMOs.

When I looked at public opinion polls from 1997 to 2010 originating in a number of countries around the globe, people want to know if they're buying G.E. foods. The numbers in favor of labeling are 70-90+%. There's a question of safety in the public's mind, one ABC poll conducted nearly ten years ago had 35% of respondents thinking G.E. foods were safe, 52% voting they were unsafe and 13% without an opinion.

Yet 93%, in the same group polled, thought the federal government should require labeling.

The three G.E. products I'm writing about are alfalfa, corn and sugar beets. The alfalfa could become hay fed to animals, dairy cows for instance, who were supposedly being raised organically, and therefore, strictly speaking, the milk from those cows wouldn't be organic. But we wouldn't know that if the government rules don't require labeling of the alfalfa as G.E.

Now there's a new worry. I printed a copy of a Sep 20, 2010 msnbc.com article titled "Super salmon or 'Frankenfish'? FDA to decide." A Massachusetts company, AquBounty, is producing a G.E. salmon which grows twice as fast as ordinary salmon. The photo of a G.E. AquAdvantage salmon swimming alongside an ordinary salmon of the same age (presumably Photo-shopped together) is striking. I wouldn't have assumed they were the same species.

And the Food and Drug Administration is apparently about to approve the new super fish. Two Alaska Senators and a California Assemblyman have introduced bills to either ban the fish or require its labeling as G.E.

In Europe most foods containing more than 0.9% of GMOs must already be labeled.

The claims in favor of GMO crops are they need less water, less fertilizer and fewer pesticides and similar sprays. Bittman's column notes these claims aren't verified in many instances and most of the world's farmers can't afford to grow the new GMO species.

I'm personally not very afraid of the G.E. crops and even the salmon. Bittman notes that neither allergic reactions nor transfer to people of antibiotic resistance , major concerns of those against GMO crops/foods, have thus far been shown to be factual problems.

But, the labeling issue is quite another matter. If it's a GMO food product, it ought to say so.

Posted in Food labeling, Food producers and less-healthy foods, Governmental Efforts | No Comments »

Dietary fiber: The latest from the NIH-AARP study

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

brown rice and couscous

Okay, I confess; I didn't know there was such a thing as the NIH-AARP study either. Today I was reading the Wall Street Journal and saw an article titled "Fiber-Rich Diet Linked to Longevity." It mentioned the large ongoing study that I subsequently found online. Back in 1995-96 three and a half million questionnaires were mailed out to AARP members aged 50 to 71 who lived in one of six states (CA, FL, PA, NJ, NC, or LA) or two metropolitan areas (Detroit and Atlanta). Why these particular states and cities were chosen wasn't immediately clear to me.

Roughly one out of seven returned the questionaires, still that's over half a million people and an large number of medical articles have been generated from following this group over the past fifteen years. The stats on the subjects of the study interested me; 60% were male, 90%+ were white, non-Hispanic, only 11 of the men and 15% of the women were current smokers. Body mass index and education levels varied widely.

I read the newspaper article about dietary fiber, tried to get the online article from the Archives of Internal Medicine (they wanted $30 for 24 hour usage of the paper) and then found the (free) NIH release on their MedlinePlus web page.

The report says eating a fiber-rich diet could cut your risk of dying from heart disease, respiratory disease or "other causes" by 22%. The lead author works at the National Cancer Institute and mentions that the 2010 Dietary Guidelines push whole grains, vegetables and fruits. But the study, with over a third of a million participants, said that the fiber from fruits wasn't a factor in the reduced death rates. That doesn't mean we shouldn't eat fresh fruit though.

Fiber has already been linked to lower risks of diabetes, reduced rates of some cancers (liver, bladder, esophagus, kidney, head & neck) and less tendency toward obesity; here it's also associated with a lower mortality rate from heart disease or respiratory disease.

Now a real question, and one asked directly by a dietician/exercise physiologist who commented on the study, is whether those who choose high fiber diets also lead healthier lifestyles (e.g., more exercise, no smoking). That may well be the case, but why not add more whole grains to your own diet? That seemed to be a nugget of nutritional advice that could benefit everyone.

The recommended fiber intake for adults over 50 is 30 grams for men and 21 for women. That's a lot of whole grains and where can we get them? I found a Harvard Medical School list online and copied and pasted it into this post.

  • Amaranth
  • Barley
  • Brown rice
  • Bulgur (cracked wheat)
  • Whole-wheat pasta or couscous
  • Flaxseed
  • Millet
  • Oats
  • Quinoa
  • Rye
  • Spelt
  • Wheat berries
  • Wild rice

We cook with some of these (e.g., barley was in the bison, potato, carrot and turnip stew we had this week). We eat brown rice, millet seeds, wild rice, oats and flax seeds on a regular basis (we had a dish of steel-cut oats at breakfast today; most of the rest we've tried at one time or another.

More fiber, especially from whole grains, makes sense. Give it a try.

Posted in Governmental Efforts, Healthy eating, Life Expectancy | No Comments »

Dietary supplements and scams

Friday, February 11th, 2011

and it isn't cheap

When I was at Langley AFB in th early 1970s, we had an opportunity to take a field trip to the Cayce Institute. Edgar Cayce was a supposed psychic who lived from 1877 to 1945. I came away from that trip with a healthy dose of scepticism, not so much about Mr. Cayce himself, whose work I never saw, but of those who inherited his mantle,

That scepticism has served me well over the years and today led to a prolonged web search on the supposed benefits of acia berries as a dietary modality and supplement. It started with a news article I found that claimed a Channel 10 employee had lost 25 pounds in 4 weeks on the "Optimal Acai" program.

I began tracing the story and found a number of websites that were pertinent: WebMD said acai berries are claimed by marketeers to be an "elite superfood with anti-aging and weight loss properties." They did note that the berry, which comes from a palm tree found in Central and South America, has lots of antioxidant capacity, even more than other berries (cranberry, raspberry, blueberry). It contains chemicals that are in the flavinoid and anthocyanin family, the latter being found in red wine for example.

But as to the claimed health benefits of this particular berry, who knows. Thus far there are no studies that show it's better than other similar fruits.

MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine's consumer information source, notes the acai berry has antioxidants, but says there is insufficient evidence thus far to show its effectiveness.

So how did the acai berry craze start? In November of 2004 a dermatologist, Dr. Nichoas Perricone, appeared on the Oprah show. Subsequently a post on oprah.com touted his so-called superfoods, especially acai. The comment that struck me was "harvested in the rain forests of Brazil, acai tastes like a vibrant blend of berries and chocolate."

Well that sounds yummy, but who is Dr. Perricone and what's the data? And why do I connect this back to Edgar Cayce?

Dr. Perricone is a dermatologist who writes on weight loss and anti-aging. He's also an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Michigan State's medical school. One of his books, The Perricone Promise, tells of neuropeptides and their role in aging and focuses on a particular diet. A three-month supply of a neuropeptide-based serum that his own company sells costs $570.

Subsequently there have been scams with emails sent off linking to supposed news reports on the acai berry diet; one was to a website New7health.com which had an identical claim as the supposed website I saw today (reporter lost 25 pounds in 4 weeks). This was exposed as bogus in March 2010 and led me to reread the supposed Channel 10 health news article.

Part of the promise beside rapid weight loss is to eliminate bad toxins built up over many years and remove sludge from the walls of the colon. Now I was back at the Cayce Institute with a basic part of their program being so-called "High Colonics," enemas to lose weight.

I won't believe any of this kind of spiel until The NLM and other reputable medical organizations report controlled, double-blind, peer-reviewed, evidence-based studies.

Posted in Dieting, Governmental Efforts, medically-oriented background info, supplements, tricks and gimmicks | 4 Comments »

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