Category Archives: Diet And Food

(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY It's big news and it's all over the internet: A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that a diet based on healthy carbohydrates -- similar to a Mediterranean diet of fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans, whole grains and healthy fats like olive oil -- is better for you than a low-fat or low-carb diet.

And this is news? We've known this for decades. It's how I've eaten for as far back as I can remember. It's how nearly all the healthy people I know eat.

Yes, I know, I'm forgetting about the Atkins Diet, South Beach Diet, Low-Fat Diet, Low-Carb Diet, Beverly Hills Diet, Hollywood Diet, Acai Berry Diet, and all those other diet fads that come and go because everyone wants a quick fix these days.

The only problem is quick fixes and fad diets don't work. Common sense works. It's the same thing with leadership, management, your career. It's exactly the same. The way to achieve a lasting competitive advantage, a high-performance organization, a successful business, or a fulfilling career, is through common sense and hard work - not fads and silver bullets.

Meanwhile, we're bombarded with book after book, blog after blog, website after website, and article after article about the one, seven or 10 things that will magically change your career or your company, make all the bad stuff go away and make everything wonderful.

Doesn't that sound remarkably like diets that promise to make your pounds just effortlessly melt away and leave you looking like someone from People magazine's Most Beautiful list?

7 things great employees do You won't achieve the American Dream by dreaming Trendy fads won't help your career

Here's an idea: Instead of the latest management fad; instead of all the Utopian platitudes and parables about leadership; instead of the endless obsessing over productivity, time management, employee engagement, emotional intelligence, other people's habits, personal branding, positive thinking, burnout, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z or how to be like Steve Jobs; why not try a little common sense for a change.

Here's the leadership, management and career equivalent of that old Mediterranean diet we've all known about forever. Let's just call it the Fad-Free Management Diet: 10 ingredients to business health and career success. Best of all, it's fad-free.

- Make smart decisions based on real-world experience, logical reasoning and solid ideas that pass the laugh test.

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The fad-free management diet

By Meredith Cohn

June 28, 2012 12:00 AM

Before Aiesha Eddins got pregnant, she didn't give much thought to her diet.

"I ate whatever," said the 27-year-old Owings Mills, Md., woman. "We ordered take-out."

But when she weighed in at 220 pounds during her initial prenatal visit, she quickly earned a spot at the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Nutrition in Pregnancy Clinic, launched in December to counsel and treat obese women. The clinic has around a dozen patients but already is expanding.

An estimated one in five pregnant women are obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an epidemic according to some doctors who have begun to buck conventional ideas about "eating for two." They now recommend healthy diets, little or no weight gain and even bariatric surgery for obese women before they get pregnant.

Obese pregnant women are at increased risk of miscarriage, high blood pressure, diabetes, pre-term delivery, stillbirth, cesarean section and other problems. Their babies, which are harder to see on ultrasounds, are more likely to be obese and diabetic and have other maladies.

Conventional advice for these women since 2009 has been to gain 11 to 20 pounds, reflecting guidance from the Institute of Medicine, the influential federal advisory panel. Normal weight women are told to gain 25 to 35 pounds.

Most doctors generally stick to the guidance and treat obesity complications, said Dr. Janice Henderson, an obstetrician for high-risk pregnancies at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and Eddins' doctor. But she said some doctors have begun to see that as a "missed opportunity" to teach patients about nutritional and lifestyle changes that can improve their and their babies' health.

Eddins was counseled to eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Now seven months pregnant, she's lost 20 pounds.

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Diets suggested for overweight pregnant women

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2012) Women who regularly eat a low carbohydrate, high protein diet are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease and stroke) than those who do not, a study just published on the British Medical Journal website suggests.

Although the actual numbers are small (an extra 4-5 cases of cardiovascular disease per 10,000 women per year) the authors say that this is a 28% increase in the number of cases and that these results are worrying in a population of young women who may be exposed to these dietary patterns and face the excess risk for many years.

Low carbohydrate-high protein diets are frequently used for body weight control. Although they may be nutritionally acceptable if the protein is mainly of plant origin (e.g. nuts) and the reduction of carbohydrates applies mainly to simple and refined ones (i.e. unhealthy sweeteners, drinks and snacks), the general public do not always recognise and act on this guidance.

Studies on the long term consequences of these diets on cardiovascular health have generated inconsistent results. So a team of international authors carried out a study on just under 44,000 Swedish women aged between 30 and 49 years from 1991-92 (with an average follow-up of 15 years).

Women completed an extensive dietary and lifestyle questionnaire and diet was measured on the low carbohydrate-high protein (LCHP) score where a score of two would equal very high carbohydrate and low protein consumption through to 20 which would equal very low carbohydrate and high protein consumption.

Factors likely to influence the results were taken into account including smoking, alcohol use, diagnosis of hypertension, overall level of activity and saturated / unsaturated fat intake.

After these variables were included, results showed that 1270 cardiovascular events took place in the 43,396 women (55% ischaemic heart disease, 23% ischaemic stroke, 6% haemorrhagic stroke, 10% subarachnoid haemorrhage and 6% peripheral arterial disease) over 15 years.

The incidence of cardiovascular outcomes increased with an increasing LCHP score.

Unadjusted figures show that, compared with an LCHP score of six or less, cardiovascular diseases increased by 13% for women with a score from 7 to 9, to 23% for those with a score from 10 to 12, to 54% for those with a score from 13 to 15, and to 60% for those with a score of 16 or higher.

After adjusting for other cardiovascular risk factors, there was still a significant 5% increase in the likelihood of a cardiovascular event or death with every two point increase in the LCHP score. The 5% increase resulted from a daily decrease of 20g of carbohydrates (equivalent to a small bread roll) and a daily increase of 5g of protein (equivalent to one boiled egg).

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Significant cardiovascular risk with low carbohydrate-high protein diets, experts warn

Public release date: 27-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Stephanie Burns sburns@bmjgroup.com 44-207-383-6920 BMJ-British Medical Journal

A diet rich in vegetables could help stave off the development of the serious condition acute pancreatitis, suggests a large study published online in the journal Gut.

Pancreatitis refers to inflammation of the pancreas - the gland behind the stomach, which, among other things, releases digestive enzymes to break down food. Occasionally these enzymes become active inside the pancreas, and start to digest the gland itself. In up to one in five of those with acute pancreatitis symptoms are severe and potentially life threatening.

Previous research suggests that excessive production of free radicals, which are by-products of cellular activity, is associated with acute pancreatitis. Furthermore, levels of antioxidant enzymes, which mop up free radicals, are increased during an attack. The authors therefore wanted to know if an imbalance in antioxidant levels, associated with dietary factors, might make the pancreas more sensitive to the effects of free radicals and so increase the risk of acute pancreatitis.

They tracked the health of a population-based sample of 80,000 adults living in central Sweden for an average of 11 years, following the completion of a comprehensive dietary questionnaire in 1997 on how often they had eaten from a range of 96 food items over the preceding year.

Average vegetable and fruit consumption was around 2.5 and just under 2 servings, respectively, every day. In general, those who ate the fewest daily servings of vegetables were men, smokers, and those who had not gone on to higher education.

A similar profile was seen for fruit consumption, although people in this group were more likely to drink alcohol and to have diabetes.

During the monitoring period, 320 people developed acute pancreatitis that was not associated with the complications of gallstones - a relatively common cause of the condition.

The amount of fruit consumed did not seem to influence the risk of developing acute pancreatitis, but this was not the case for vegetables.

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Diet rich in vegetables may help stave off acute pancreatitis

June 26, 2012

Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com

Chocolate cake. Crme filled donuts. These are some of the options people can look forward to having for breakfast after a new study highlighted the role dessert has in breakfast for dieters. Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently found that a diet focused on dessert with breakfast can actually help people avoid weight gain by decreasing the cravings they have.

The findings were presented at the Endocrine Societys 94 Annual Meeting recently in Houston and published in the March issue of the journal Steroids. The researchers believe that a carbohydrate-rich, protein-packed breakfast with dessert will help dieters be less hungry and not have as many cravings throughout the day. This, in turn, will help dieters keep off lost weight.

The goal of a weight loss diet should be not only weight reduction but also reduction of hunger and cravings, thus helping prevent weight regain, remarked Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz, the studys principal investigator, in a prepared statement.

Jakubowicz, a senior physician at the Wolfson Medical Center of Tel Aviv University, and co-authors looked at 200 nondiabetic obese adults. These individuals participated in one of two low-calories diets. Both diets had the same number of daily calories, around 1,600 calories for men and 1,400 for women. However, the diets were composed of different items. While one group had a low-carbohydrate diet that had a 304-calorie breakfast with only 10 grams of carbohydrates, the other group had a 600-calorie breakfast with 60 grams of carbs of a small sweet like chocolate, cake, cookie or doughnut. Both diets had protein options like egg whites, cheese, low-fat milk, and tuna at breakfast. However, the dessert with breakfast diet featured 45 grams of protein, 15 more grams than the low-crab diet.

The study was done over an eight-month period and, midway through the experiment, participants reported an average of 33 pounds lost per person. Jakubowicz believes that these results show that both diets work the same. In the last months of the study though, the low-carbohydrate group regained around 22 pounds per person. On the other hand, study subjects of the dessert with breakfast diet group lost another 15 pounds each.

Furthermore, those participants who ate dessert with breakfast stated that they felt less hungry and had fewer cravings when compared to the other group. The food diaries from these subjects showed that they had less difficulty in sticking with their calorie requirements. Women who were part of the dessert with breakfast diet group were able to have 500 calories for lunch and 300 calories for dinner. Men in the same group could consume a 600-calorie lunch and as much as 464 calories for dinner. Further evidence shows that a hunger hormone called ghrelin had lower levels after breakfast in the dessert with breakfast diet group than the low-carbohydrate diet group (45.2 percent versus 29.5 percent).

Researchers propose that the better results from the dessert with breakfast diet group were based on meal timing and composition. In particular, Jakubowic credits the diets high protein content to reducing hunger. She also believes that the mix of protein and carbohydrates made people feel fuller and decreased their wants for sweet, starchy, and fatty foods. These cravings normally arise or come about when a diet limits the amount of sweets a person can have, which can cause people to eat more fattening foods.

Source: Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com

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Eating Dessert With Breakfast Helps Dieters

The Harvard lab of Bauer Fellow Peter Turnbaugh (above) is working to identify the mysterious microbes living in our intestines, and to better understand how the bacteria that live within us affect the drugs we take and the exotic foods we eat, collectively called xenobiotics. There are very few examples where we know the link between gut microbes and xenobiotics thats one thing Id like to change, Turnbaugh said. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Without the bacteria that live in our intestines, a drug used against rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease wouldnt work.

The microbes produce an enzyme that cleaves and activates a key molecule in the drug. Scientists know the microbes responsible are there and that this activity is important, but they dont know which microbes are responsible, or even how many kinds provide this service.

Another type of intestinal bacteria can keep drugs from reaching target tissue, altering a Parkinsons disease treatment in the same way the brain would, preventing absorption. Researchers believe that differences in patients microbial communities could account for the drugs variable effectiveness. The culprit microbe, again, is unknown.

The Harvard lab of Bauer Fellow Peter Turnbaugh is working to identify these mysterious microbes, and to better understand how the bacteria that live within us affect the drugs we take and the exotic foods we eat, collectively called xenobiotics.

There are very few examples where we know the link between gut microbes and xenobiotics thats one thing Id like to change, Turnbaugh said. I think were really at the very beginning.

This month, some 200 scientists from 80 institutions, including Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, filled in some of the blanks. They announced results from the massive Human Microbiome Project, a government-funded effort to uncover the scale and diversity of the microbes we carry and to analyze their genomes to provide tools for future researchers.

The scientists found that we carry some 100 trillion bacteria from some 1,000 different strains, many of which are new to science and some of which, though known to cause disease, were found living peaceably among 250 healthy volunteers.

Though there was understanding in the past that the microbes we carry affect our health, the advanced tools of genomics have fostered recent progress, Turnbaugh said. In a recent article in the journal Science, Turnbaugh and postdoctoral fellow Henry Haiser argued that a better understanding of our microbes metabolic activity and how they interact with our bodies in ways that both promote health and cause illness could revolutionize how we understand and treat disease.

Postdoctoral fellows, interns, and other researchers in Turnbaughs lab, which is not part of the Human Microbiome Project, are at work on 10 to 15 projects. Though the human body has microbes in many places including the mouth, intestines, and skin Turnbaugh has been focusing on those in the intestines. He collects samples from the feces of volunteers and from gnotobiotic laboratory mice, born and maintained in a microbe-free environment before they are colonized experimentally. Using an oxygen-free incubation chamber to grow microbe colonies that favor the anaerobic intestinal conditions, as well as cell-sorters and gear that aids advanced genomic analysis, researchers are investigating a variety of questions.

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Life partner: Microbes, at work inside of us, are of rising interest to researchers for role in health, diet

by Associated Press

KING5.com

Posted on June 27, 2012 at 12:16 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration has approved Arena Pharmaceutical's anti-obesity pill Belviq, the first new prescription drug for long-term weight loss to enter the U.S. market in over a decade.

Despite only achieving modest weight loss in clinical studies, the drug appeared safe enough to win the FDA's endorsement, amid calls from doctors for new weight-loss treatments.

The agency cleared the pill Wednesday for adults who are obese or are overweight with at least one medical complication, such as diabetes or high cholesterol.

The FDA denied approval for Arena's drug in 2010 after scientists raised concerns about tumors that developed in animals studied with the drug. The company resubmitted the drug with additional data earlier this year, and the FDA said there was little risk of tumors in humans.

With U.S. obesity rates nearing 35 percent of the adult population, many doctors have called on the FDA to approve new weight loss treatments.

But a long line of prescription weight loss offerings have been associated with safety problems, most notably the fen-phen combination, which was linked to heart valve damage in 1997. The cocktail of phentermine and fenfluramine was a popular weight loss combination prescribed by doctors, though it was never approved by FDA.

In a rare move, the FDA explicitly stated in a press release that Belviq "does not appear to activate" a chemical pathway that was linked to the heart problems seen with fen-phen.

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FDA approves first diet prescription pill in 13 years

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com

Diets based on healthy carbohydrates and not on low-fat may offer dieters a better chance of burning calories and keeping weight off and without unwanted side effects, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research suggests that dieters trying to maintain weight loss burned significantly more calories eating a carb-healthy diet rather than a low-fat diet, but some experts say the results are still preliminary.

The National Institutes of Health-funded study, led by Cara Ebbeling, PhD, associate director and David Ludwig, MD, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center Boston Childrens Hospital, found that diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal (low-glycemic index or very-low carb) may be more beneficial to those trying to achieve lasting weight loss.

Participants in the study who followed a low-glycemic-index diet, which includes fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts and whole grains, also saw improved cholesterol levels and other important markers that lower the risks of developing heart disease and diabetes. The researchers said that foods such as minimally processed oatmeal, almonds, brown rice, beans and healthy fats like olive oil, and other similar foods also offer beneficial results.

Furthermore, the study found that the low-glycemic diet had similar metabolic benefits to the very-low-carb diet without negative effects of stress and inflammation as seen by participants consuming the foods in the very-low-carb diet.

Ludwig explained that most people struggle to keep weight off. Previous studies have shown that weight loss reduces the bodys daily energy expenditure (how many calories the body burns through activity and just by resting) making it easy to regain weight.

The studys 21 participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 40 years old, lost 10 to 15 percent of their body weight during the three-month diet that contained about 45 percent of total calories from carbohydrates, 30 percent from fat, and 25 percent from protein.

One month after the weight-loss phase of the study, the participants were each placed on one of the three diets: low-fat, very-low-carb, and low-glycemic-index. The participants were then switched to the other two diets during two additional four-week periods.

The low-fat diet consisted of about 20 percent calories from fat, 60 percent from carbs, and 20 percent from protein; the low-carb diet consisted of 10 percent of calories from carbs, 30 percent from proteins, and 60 percent from fat; and the low-glycemic diet was made up of 40 percent calories from carbs, 40 percent from fat, and 20 percent from protein.

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Low-Glycemic Diet Best For Maintaining Weight Loss

(CBS News) Does it feel like your diet isn't helping you keep off pounds in the long run? A new study suggests that simply cutting calories might not do the trick: It may depend on what kind of calories you're snipping from your daily intake.

The study, published on June 27 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, says that low-glycemic diets that compliment a person's changing metabolism are the best at helping keep the pounds off.

Study: Not all calories are created equal U. S. Task Force recommends obesity screening, counseling for obese patients Nuts about nuts? Best and worst kinds for health

"Our findings suggest that actually trying to restrict either carbs or fat is not the best way (to achieve long-term weight loss) and instead to focus on the quality of the fats and the quality of the carbs," Dr. David Ludwig from Boston's Children's Hospital told CBS This Morning (CTM).

Ludwig explained on the Boston Children's Hospital blog that after individuals lose weight, the rate at which they burn calories slows down. This makes it difficult to maintain the continued weight loss. With the study, researchers were attempting to find a diet that would continue the accelerated calorie-burning rate while taking into account the body's new metabolism.

"Keeping weight off - even under the best circumstances - is difficult," Ludwig told the Boston Children's Hospital blog. "But lining up biology and behavior can help."

For the study, researchers recruited 21 young adults who were overweight and obese. After losing 10 to 15 percent of their body weight (on average 30 pounds), they were placed on one of three diets that contained the same amount of calories, albeit from different sources, in random order for four weeks each: a low-fat diet (60 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 20 percent from fats, 20 percent from proteins; high glycemic load), a low-glycemic index diet (40 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 40 percent from fats, and 20 percent from protein;s moderate glycemic load) and a very low-carbohydrate diet (10 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 60 percent from fats, and 30 percent from proteins; low glycemic load).

Doctors measured both the pre-weight loss numbers for resting energy expenditure (REE) - the amount of calories required for a 24-hour period during a non-active phase - total energy expenditure (TEE) - all energy expended in a 24-hour period including the REE - hormone levels and metabolic syndrome components, as well as the stats during each period the subject was on the various diet.

The researchers found that compared with the pre-weight loss numbers, the decrease in REE and TEE was greatest in the low-fat diet, followed by the low-glycemic index diet and finally the very low-carbohydrate diet. This means the low-fat diet slowed down metabolism the most. Hormone levels were negatively affected by the low-carbohydrate diet, meaning that inflammation increased and the risk of disease also increased as well.

The overall winner was the low-glycemic diet, which offered both a healthy and an easy way to keep metabolic rates up. To keep a low-glycemic diet, people must eat fiber-rich, natural carbohydrates, proteins and healthy fats, including nuts, avocados or olive oil. Grain products that have a low level of processing are also encouraged, while fruit juice and soda are to be avoided. Sugar can be consumed, but only with a balanced meal and in moderation. Drinking water is encouraged.

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Low-glycemic index diet may be best at keeping off pounds

Millions have been converted to the approach, which work because protein keeps hunger at bay for longer.

But lead author Professor Pagona Lagiou, from University of Athens Medical School, yesterday (Tuesday) warned against sticking to such diets long-term.

She said: We found that the lower the intake of carbohydrates and the higher the intake of protein, the greater the risk of cardiovascular disease.

That applies to small differences as well, if they are habitual.

If my long-term diet changes by having one fewer bread rolls a day and one more egg, I will be at a five per cent increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death.

She went on: This study is bad news for people who follow these types of diet for long periods of time. They should be very careful about dietary regimes, the long term safety of which have not been studied adequately.

However, Prof Lagiou said she did not want to be prescriptive about eggs.

I would just say, avoid going to extremes.

She explained it was not the protein per se that was the worry, but the fact that high-protein foods tended to come from animal products high in saturated fat.

A medium-sized egg (boiled or poached) contains 78 calories, 6.5g of protein, a trace of carbohydrate and 5.8g of fat, of which 1.7g is saturated. These are not high amounts of fat but they are relatively high proportions. The yolk is much higher in fat and cholesterol than the white.

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Breakfast egg 'can raise heart disease risk'