Category Archives: Diet And Food

Susanna Liu

Tomorrow, the Yale College Council and Yale Student Environmental Coalition are hosting the inaugural Yale Climate Crisis Summit. Prompted in no small part by the powerful displays of climate activism on campus and in New Haven in recent months, the summit will highlight the work of Yale students and New Haven residents in combating the climate crisis.

Over the past two decades, climate activism has moved from a focus on individual behavioral change to breaking down institutions that lie at the root of todays situation. But in both earlier and present iterations of the climate movement, the relationship between climate and our food systems has largely been ignored. For us to solve the climate crisis locally and across the world, we need to start talking about the food we eat.

The reality is that we cannot transition to a sustainable world with the current prevalence of animal products in our diets. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, rearing livestock and poultry for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5 percent of global carbon emissions. This contribution exceeds the total amount of transport-related emissions worldwide.

Animal agriculture is also the single largest source of methane emissions. Over a 100-year period, methane is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane gases are especially important to a crisis mitigation strategy, as methane dissipates from the atmosphere 10 times faster than carbon dioxide. This means that if we reduce methane emissions, the climate benefits would be felt much more quickly.

The increasing regularity of climate disasters highlights the importance of strategies that have an immediate impact on global warming. For this reason, we must adjust our actions including what we eat to respond to one of the largest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases: animal agriculture. To ignore animal agriculture is to ignore the problem.

Animal agriculture is contributing not only to a crisis of environmental sustainability, but also to a crisis of justice. Climate change will hurt us all, but it is marginalized and powerless people who will be harmed the most. Not to mention billions of animals those that suffer directly in the food industry and those pushed to extinction in the face of ecological destruction. These are the troubling politics that unfold on our plates daily.

What are the actions we can take to reduce food-related emissions? In our student organizations, we can drastically reduce the amount of animal-based foods we provide at our events. Participating in local politics is also an effective tactic. We can lobby our Senators, Congressmembers, mayors and city council members to move public procurement of food away from animal products.

Across the country, activists have already succeeded in making change through local politics. In New York, for instance, a group of activists successfully lobbied for Meatless Mondays in all of the citys public schools. This comes to 1.1 million meatless meals per Monday.

In the battle against animal agriculture, we also wield substantial power by virtue of what we put on our plates. Our mundane consumption choices play a part in producing crises of justice, like the climate crisis we face today. These everyday choices can deliver great blows to animal agriculture.

When just one additional Yale student commits to a plant-based diet, over 1,000 meals per year would no longer involve the harms of animal agriculture. If every person who attended the climate strike last semester opted for a plant-based diet for a year as many already have 1.3 million meals would be free from the negative consequences of animal agriculture. Adopting a plant-based diet is not an option for everyone, but for those who it is, privilege translates into responsibility.

To care about the environment is to care about ending animal agriculture. The severity of the problem requires an all-out effort on the part of individuals and institutions alike.

SEBASTIAN QUAADE is a junior in Pierson College. RAM VISHWANATHAN is a junior in Silliman College. They are members of the Yale Animal Welfare Alliance. Contact them at sebastian.quaade@yale.edu and ram.vishwanathan@yale.edu.

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QUAADE AND VISHWANATHAN: The politics of our plates - Yale Daily News

True weight loss for obese individuals is not flashy, glamorous or fit for reality television

The Biggest Loser is a weight-loss competition that originally aired on NBC in 2004. The series followed overweight to obese individuals as they competed to lose the highest amount of body weight relative to their initial size.

Although the series ran for 17 seasons, it was highly criticized for the way trainers treated the contestants and for the unrealistic weight loss methods it promoted. Contestants would exercise for numerous hours each day and would eat meticulously planned meals that were not always sufficient to restore their energy balances.

A longitudinal study in an obesity research journal followed 14 former contestants over six years. It showed that the contestants significantly damaged their metabolism after losing weight so rapidly, and they had all regained the weight.

Since the series ended in 2016, there have been radical shifts in the way society views body image and weight loss. From the rise of the Health at Every Size movement to a more general acceptance of different body types in the media, it would seem that a show like The Biggest Loser would never be popular in todays political and social climate.

The USA Network, however, decided to reboot the series, and the first episode aired on Jan. 28. The series made an effort to combat criticisms of the original, such as re-casting hosts and offering an extensive aftercare package to contestants who were eliminated, including a gym membership, a nutritionist and guidance towards a support group.

The goal of the series was rebranded as competing not only to lose weight, but [to] also improve their overall well-being, according to the USA Network.

Many, however, are not satisfied with this new take. The series has been criticized by Dr. Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and author of Why Diets Make Us Fat.

The Biggest Loser basically glamorizes dieting, which I consider to be quite dangerous, Aamodt said. And rebranding weight loss as wellness is a big trend.

Dr. Jennifer Kern was a contestant in the third season of the original series. She then returned to work as a medical consultant for the following two seasons.

I think it at least showed other people who are struggling with obesity that all is not lost, that they can successfully lose weight even if they have 150 pounds to lose, Kern told Insider.

She believes, however, that the format of the series as a whole is problematic. She openly criticizes fallacies the show perpetuates about massive weight-loss. In fact, she co-wrote the longitudinal study showing that re-gaining the weight for former contestants was almost inevitable.

To make a good TV show, theyre going to want to show rapid change, Kern said.

And there lies the fundamental issue with the series: True weight loss for obese and morbidly obese individuals is not flashy, glamorous or fit for reality television. While showing intense workouts and fitness challenges may make for good entertainment, it is, at best, inefficient and, at worst, dangerous for contestants trying to make better lives for themselves.

Sustained weight loss, especially for obese individuals, should include a strong focus on nutrition and include low impact excercises like walking or swimming. Yet The Biggest Loser forces contestants to perform box jumps and run miles in the first few weeks of the competition.

Based on the lack of significant changes this reboot made, it is hard to believe the series will regain the popularity it had in the early 2000s. Even worse, the contestants will probably suffer the fate of regaining the weight they lost during the competition. While the effort of rebranding the series could have been worthwhile, the execution will probably do more damage than good to those it is setting out to help.

Written by: Alyssa Ilsley arts@theaggie.org

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The Biggest Loser didn't work then and it won't work now - The Aggie

Nearly three decades ago, when I was an overweight teenager, I sometimes ate six pieces of sliced white toast in a row, each one slathered in butter or jam. I remember the spongy texture of the bread as I took it from its plastic bag. No matter how much of this supermarket toast I ate, I hardly felt sated. It was like eating without really eating. Other days, I would buy a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or a tube of Pringles: sour cream and onion flavour stackable snack chips, which were an exciting novelty at the time, having only arrived in the UK in 1991. Although the carton was big enough to feed a crowd, I could demolish most of it by myself in a sitting. Each chip, with its salty and powdery sour cream coating, sent me back for another one. I loved the way the chips curved like roof tiles would dissolve slightly on my tongue.

After one of these binges because that is what they were I would speak to myself with self-loathing. What is wrong with you? I would say to the tear-stained face in the mirror. I blamed myself for my lack of self-control. But now, all these years later, having mostly lost my taste for sliced bread, sugary cereals and snack chips, I feel I was asking myself the wrong question. It shouldnt have been What is wrong with you? but What is wrong with this food?

Back in the 90s, there was no word to cover all the items I used to binge on. Some of the things I over-ate crisps or chocolate or fast-food burgers could be classified as junk food, but others, such as bread and cereal, were more like household staples. These various foods seemed to have nothing in common except for the fact that I found them very easy to eat a lot of, especially when sad. As I ate my Pringles and my white bread, I felt like a failure for not being able to stop. I had no idea that there would one day be a technical explanation for why I found them so hard to resist. The word is ultra-processed and it refers to foods that tend to be low in essential nutrients, high in sugar, oil and salt and liable to be overconsumed.

Which foods qualify as ultra-processed? Its almost easier to say which are not. I got a cup of coffee the other day at a train station cafe and the only snacks for sale that were not ultra-processed were a banana and a packet of nuts. The other options were: a panini made from ultra-processed bread, flavoured crisps, chocolate bars, long-life muffins and sweet wafer biscuits all ultra-processed.

What characterises ultra-processed foods is that they are so altered that it can be hard to recognise the underlying ingredients. These are concoctions of concoctions, engineered from ingredients that are already highly refined, such as cheap vegetable oils, flours, whey proteins and sugars, which are then whipped up into something more appetising with the help of industrial additives such as emulsifiers.

Ultra-processed foods (or UPF) now account for more than half of all the calories eaten in the UK and US, and other countries are fast catching up. UPFs are now simply part of the flavour of modern life. These foods are convenient, highly profitable, strongly flavoured, aggressively marketed and affordable and on sale in supermarkets everywhere. The foods themselves may be familiar, yet the term ultra-processed is less so. None of the friends I spoke with while writing this piece could recall ever having heard it in daily conversation. But everyone had a pretty good hunch what it meant. One recognised the concept as described by the US food writer Michael Pollan edible foodlike substances.

Some UPFs, such as sliced bread or mass-produced cakes, have been around for many decades, but the percentage of UPFs in the average persons diet has never been anything like as high as it is today. It would be unusual for most of us to get through the day without consuming at least a few ultra-processed items.

You might say that ultra-processed is just a pompous way to describe many of your normal, everyday pleasures. It could be your morning bowl of Cheerios or your evening pot of flavoured yoghurt. Its savoury snacks and sweet baked goods. Its chicken nuggets or vegan hotdogs, as the case may be. Its the doughnut you buy when you are being indulgent, and the premium protein bar you eat at the gym for a quick energy boost. Its the long-life almond milk in your coffee and the Diet Coke you drink in the afternoon. Consumed in isolation and moderation, each of these products may be perfectly wholesome. With their long shelf life, ultra-processed foods are designed to be microbiologically safe. The question is what happens to our bodies when UPFs become as prevalent as they have done.

Evidence now suggests that diets heavy in UPFs can cause overeating and obesity. Consumers may blame themselves for overindulging in these foods, but what if it is in the nature of these products to be overeaten?

In 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising its citizens to avoid UPFs outright. The country was acting out of a sense of urgency, because the number of young Brazilian adults with obesity had risen so far and so fast, more than doubling between 2002 and 2013 (from 7.5% of the population to 17.5%). These radical new guidelines urged Brazilians to avoid snacking, and to make time for wholesome food in their lives, to eat regular meals in company when possible, to learn how to cook and to teach children to be wary of all forms of food advertising.

The biggest departure in the Brazilian guidelines was to treat food processing as the single most important issue in public health. This new set of rules framed unhealthy food less in terms of the nutrients it contains (fats, carbohydrates etc) and more by the degree to which it is processed (preserved, emulsified, sweetened etc). No government diet guidelines had ever categorised foods this way before. One of the first rules in the Brazilian guidelines was to avoid consumption of ultra-processed products. They condemned at a stroke not just fast foods or sugary snacks, but also many foods which have been reformulated to seem health-giving, from lite margarines to vitamin-fortified breakfast cereals.

From a British perspective where the official NHS Eatwell guide still classifies low-fat margarines and packaged cereals as healthier options it looks extreme to warn consumers off all ultra-processed foods (what, even Heinz tomato soup?). But there is evidence to back up the Brazilian position. Over the past decade, large-scale studies from France, Brazil, the US and Spain have suggested that high consumption of UPFs is associated with higher rates of obesity. When eaten in large amounts (and its hard to eat them any other way) they have also been linked to a whole host of conditions, from depression to asthma to heart disease to gastrointestinal disorders. In 2018, a study from France following more than 100,000 adults found that a 10% increase in the proportion of UPFs in someones diet led to a higher overall cancer risk. Ultra-processed has emerged as the most persuasive new metric for measuring what has gone wrong with modern food.

Why should food processing matter for our health? Processed food is a blurry term and for years, the food industry has exploited these blurred lines as a way to defend its additive-laden products. Unless you grow, forage or catch all your own food, almost everything you consume has been processed to some extent. A pint of milk is pasteurised, a pea may be frozen. Cooking is a process. Fermentation is a process. Artisanal, organic kimchi is a processed food, and so is the finest French goats cheese. No big deal.

But UPFs are different. They are processed in ways that go far beyond cooking or fermentation, and they may also come plastered with health claims. Even a sugary multi-coloured breakfast cereal may state that it is a good source of fibre and made with whole grains. Bettina Elias Siegel, the author of the recent Kid Food: The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World, says that in the US, people tend to categorise food in a binary way. There is junk food and then there is everything else. For Siegel, ultra-processed is a helpful tool for showing new parents that theres a huge difference between a cooked carrot and a bag of industrially produced, carrot-flavoured veggie puffs aimed at toddlers, even if those veggie puffs are cynically marketed as natural.

The concept of UPFs was born in the early years of this millennium when a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro noticed a paradox. People appeared to be buying less sugar, yet obesity and type 2 diabetes were going up. A team of Brazilian nutrition researchers led by Monteiro, based at the university of Sao Paulo, had been tracking the nations diet since the 80s, asking households to record the foods they bought. One of the biggest trends to jump out of the data was that, while the amount of sugar and oil people were buying was going down, their sugar consumption was vastly increasing, because of all of the ready-to-eat sugary products that were now available, from packaged cakes to chocolate breakfast cereal, that were easy to eat in large quantities without thinking about it.

To Monteiro, the bag of sugar on the kitchen counter is a healthy sign, not because sugar itself has any goodness in it, but because it belongs to a person who cooks. Monteiros data suggested to him that the households who were still buying sugar were also the ones who were still making the old Brazilian dishes such as rice and beans.

Monteiro is a doctor by training, and when you talk to him, he still has the idealistic zeal of someone who wants to prevent human suffering. He had started off in the 70s treating poor people in rural villages, and was startled to see how quickly the problems of under-nutrition were replaced by those of tooth decay and obesity, particularly among children. When Monteiro looked at the foods that had increased the most in the Brazilian diet from cookies and sodas to crackers and savoury snacks what they had in common was that they were all highly processed. Yet he noticed that many of these commonly eaten foods did not even feature in the standard food pyramids of US nutrition guidelines, which show rows of different whole foods according to how much people consume, with rice and wheat at the bottom, then fruits and vegetables, then fish and dairy and so on. These pyramids are based on the assumption that people are still cooking from scratch, as they did in the 50s. It is time to demolish the pyramid, wrote Monteiro in 2011.

Once something has been classified, it can be studied. In the 10 years since Monteiro first announced the concept, numerous peer-reviewed studies on UPFs have been published confirming the links he suspected between these foods and higher rates of disease. By giving a collective name to ultra-processed foods for the first time, Monteiro has gone some way to transforming the entire field of public health nutrition.

As he sees it, there are four basic kinds of food, graded by the degree to which they are processed. Taken together, these four groups form what Monteiro calls the Nova system (meaning a new star). The first category group 1 are the least processed, and includes anything from a bunch of parsley to a carrot, from a steak to a raisin. A pedant will point out that none of these things are strictly unprocessed by the time they are sold: the carrot is washed, the steak is refrigerated, the raisin is dried. To answer these objections, Monteiro renamed this group unprocessed and minimally processed foods.

The second group is called processed culinary ingredients. These include butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour all used in small quantities with group 1 foods to make them more delicious: a pat of butter melting on broccoli, a sprinkling of salt on a piece of fish, a spoonful of sugar in a fruit salad.

Next in the Nova system comes group 3, or processed foods. This category consists of foods that have been preserved, pickled, fermented or salted. Examples would be canned tomatoes and pulses, pickles, traditionally made bread (such as sourdough), smoked fish and cured meats. Monteiro notes that when used sparingly, these processed foods can result in delicious dishes and nutritionally balanced meals.

The final category, group 4, is unlike any of the others. Group 4 foods tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, but instead of being used sparingly to make fresh food more delicious, these ingredients are now transformed through colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to become more palatable. They contain ingredients unfamiliar to domestic kitchens such as soy protein isolate (in cereal bars or shakes with added protein) and mechanically separated meat (turkey hotdogs, sausage rolls).

Group 4 foods differ from other foods not just in substance, but in use. Because they are aggressively promoted and ready-to-eat, these highly profitable items have vast market advantages over the minimally processed foods in group 1. Monteiro and his colleagues have observed from evidence around the world that these group 4 items are liable to replace freshly made regular meals and dishes, with snacking any time, anywhere. For Monteiro, there is no doubt that these ultra-processed foods are implicated in obesity as well as a range of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Not everyone in the world of nutrition is convinced by the Nova system of food classification. Some critics of Monteiro have complained that ultra-processed is just another way to describe foods that are sugary or fatty or salty or low in fibre, or all of these at once. If you look at the UPFs that are consumed in the largest quantities, the majority of them take the form of sweet treats or sugary drinks. The question is whether these foods would still be harmful if the levels of sugar and oil could be reduced.

The first time the nutrition researcher Kevin Hall heard anyone talk about ultra-processed food, he thought it was a nonsense definition. It was 2016 and Hall who studies how people put on weight at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at Bethesda, Maryland was at a conference chatting with a representative from PepsiCo who scornfully mentioned the new Brazilian set of food guidelines and specifically the directive to avoid ultra-processed foods. Hall agreed that this was a silly rule because, as far as he was concerned, obesity had nothing to do with food processing.

Anyone can see that some foods are processed to a higher degree than others an Oreo is not the same as an orange but Hall knew of no scientific proof that said the degree of processed food in a persons diet could cause them to gain weight. Hall is a physicist by training and he is a self-confessed reductionist. He likes to take things apart and see how they work. He is therefore attracted to the idea that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrient parts: fats plus carbs plus protein and fibre, and so on. The whole notion of ultra-processed foods annoyed him because it seemed too fuzzy.

When Hall started to read through the scientific literature on ultra-processed foods, he noticed that all of the damning evidence against them took the form of correlation rather than absolute proof. Like most studies on the harmful effects of particular foods, these studies fell under the umbrella of epidemiology: the study of patterns of health across populations. Hall and he is not alone here finds such studies less than convincing. Correlation is not causation, as the saying goes.

Just because people who eat a lot of UPFs are more likely to be obese or suffer from cancer does not mean that obesity and cancer are caused by UPFs, per se. Typically, its people in lower economic brackets who eat a lot of these foods, Hall said. He thought UPFs were being wrongly blamed for the poor health outcomes of living in poverty.

At the end of 2018, Hall and his colleagues became the first scientists to test in randomised controlled conditions whether diets high in ultra-processed foods could actually cause overeating and weight gain.

For four weeks, 10 men and 10 women agreed to be confined to a clinic under Halls care and agreed to eat only what they were given, wearing loose clothes so that they would not notice so much if their weight changed. This might sound like a small study, but carefully controlled trials like this are considered the gold standard for science, and are especially rare in the field of nutrition because of the difficulty and expense of persuading humans to live and eat in laboratory conditions. Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, has praised Halls study published in Cell Metabolism for being as good a clinical trial as you can get.

For two weeks, Halls participants ate mostly ultra-processed meals such as turkey sandwiches with crisps, and for another two weeks they ate mostly unprocessed food such as spinach omelette with sweet potato hash. The researchers worked hard to design both sets of meals to be tasty and familiar to all participants. Day one on the ultra-processed diet included a breakfast of Cheerios with whole milk and a blueberry muffin, a lunch of canned beef ravioli followed by cookies and a pre-cooked TV dinner of steak and mashed potatoes with canned corn and low-fat chocolate milk. Day one on the unprocessed diet started with a breakfast of Greek yoghurt with walnuts, strawberries and bananas, a lunch of spinach, chicken and bulgur salad with grapes to follow, and dinner of roast beef, rice pilaf and vegetables, with peeled oranges to finish. The subjects were told to eat as much or as little as they liked.

Hall set up the study to match the two diets as closely as possible for calories, sugar, protein, fibre and fat. This wasnt easy, because most ultra-processed foods are low in fibre and protein and higher in sugar. To compensate for the lack of fibre, the participants were given diet lemonade laced with soluble fibre to go with their meals during the two weeks on the ultra-processed diet.

It turned out that, during the weeks of the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an extra 500 calories a day, equivalent to a whole quarter pounder with cheese. Blood tests showed that the hormones in the body responsible for hunger remained elevated on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet, which confirms the feeling I used to have that however much I ate, these foods didnt sate my hunger.

Halls study provided evidence that an ultra-processed diet with its soft textures and strong flavours really does cause over-eating and weight gain, regardless of the sugar content. Over just two weeks, the subjects gained an average of 1kg. This is a far more dramatic result than you would expect to see over such a short space of time (especially since the volunteers rated both types of food as equally pleasant).

After Halls study was published in July 2019, it was impossible to dismiss Monteiros proposition that the rise of UPFs increases the risk of obesity. Monteiro told me that as a result of Halls study, he and his colleagues in Brazil found they were suddenly being taken seriously.

Now that we have evidence of a link between diets high in UPFs and obesity, it seems clear that a healthy diet should be based on fresh, home-cooked food. To help champion home cooking among Brazilians, Monteiro recruited the cookery writer Rita Lobo, whose website Panelinha (network) is the most popular food site in Brazil, with 3m hits a month. Lobo said that when she tells people about UPFs, the first reaction is panic and anger. They say: Oh my God! Im not going to be able to eat my yoghurt or my cereal bar! What am I going to eat? After a while, however, she says that the concept of ultra-processed foods is almost a relief to people, because it liberates them from the polarities and restriction created by fad diets or clean eating. People are thrilled, Lobo says, when they realise they can have desserts again, as long as they are freshly made.

But modern patterns of work do not make it easy to find the time to cook every day. For households who have learned to rely on ultra-processed convenience foods, returning to home cooking can seem daunting and expensive. Halls researchers in Maryland spent 40% more money purchasing the food for the unprocessed diet. (However, I noticed that the menu included large prime cuts of meat or fish every day; it would be interesting to see how the cost would have compared with a larger number of vegetarian meals or cheaper cuts of meat.)

In Brazil, cooking from scratch still tends to be cheaper than eating ultra-processed food, Lobo says. UPFs are a relative novelty in Brazil and memories of a firm tradition of home cooking have not died yet here. In Brazil, it doesnt matter if you are rich or poor, you grew up eating rice and beans. The problem for you [in the UK], Lobo remarks, is that you dont know what your rice and beans is.

In Britain and the US, our relationship with ultra-processed food is so extensive and goes back so many decades that these products have become our soul food, a beloved repertoire of dishes. Its what our mothers fed us. If you want to bond with someone who was a child in the 70s in Britain, mention that you have childhood memories of being given Findus Crispy Pancakes and spaghetti hoops followed by Angel Delight for tea. I have noticed that American friends have similar conversations about the childhood joys of Tim-Tams chocolate biscuits. In the curious coding of the British class system, a taste for industrial branded foods is a way to reassure others that you are OK. What kind of snob would disparage a Creme Egg or fail to recognise the joy of licking cheesy Wotsit dust from your fingers?

I am as much of a sucker for this branded food nostalgia as anyone. There is a part of my brain the part that is still an eight-year-old at a birthday party that will always feel that Iced Gems (ultra-processed cookies topped with ultra-processed frosting) are pure magic. But Ive started to feel a creeping unease that our ardent affection for these foods has been mostly manufactured by the food corporations who profit from selling them. For the thousands of people trapped in binge-eating disorder as I once was UPFs are false friends.

The multinational food industry has a vested interest in rubbishing Monteiros ideas about how UPFs are detrimental to our health. And much of the most vociferous criticism of his Nova system has come from sources close to the industry. A 2018 paper co-authored by Melissa Mialon, a Brazilian nutritionist, identified 32 materials online criticising Nova, most of which were not peer-reviewed. The paper showed that, out of 38 writers critical of Nova, 33 had links to the ultra-processed food industry.

For many in the developing world, the prevalence of ultra-processed foods is making it hard for those on a limited budget to feed their children a wholesome diet. Victor Aguayo, chief of nutrition at Unicef, tells me over the phone that across the developing world, as ultra-processed foods become cheaper and other foods, such as vegetables and fish, become more expensive, the UPFs are taking up a bigger volume of childrens diets. Whats more, the pleasurable textures and aggressive marketing of these foods makes them appealing and aspirational both to children and parents, says Aguayo.

Soon after the arrival in Nepal of brightly coloured packages that, as Aguayo describes them, look like food for children: the cookies, the savoury snacks, the cereals, aid workers started to see an epidemic of both overweight and micronutrient deficiency including anaemia among Nepalese children under the age of five.

Aguayo says there is an urgent need to change the food environment to make the healthy options the easy, affordable and available ones. Ecuador, Uruguay and Peru have followed Brazils example in urging their citizens to steer clear of ultra-processed foods. Uruguays dietary guidelines issued in 2016 tells Uruguayans to base your diet on natural foods, and avoid the regular consumption of ultra-processed products. How easy this will be to do is another matter.

In Australia, Canada or the UK, to be told to avoid ultra-processed food as the Brazilian guidelines do would mean rejecting half or more of what is for sale as food, including many basic staples that people depend on, such as bread. The vast majority of supermarket loaves count as ultra-processed, regardless of how much they boast of being multiseed, malted or glowing with ancient grains.

Earlier this year, Monteiro and his colleagues published a paper titled Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them, offering some rules of thumb. The paper explains that the practical way to identify if a product is ultra-processed is to check to see if its list of ingredients contains at least one food substance never or rarely used in kitchens, or classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing (cosmetic additives). Tell-tale ingredients include invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose, soluble or insoluble fibre, hydrogenated or interesterified oil. Or it may contain additives such as flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents.

But not everyone has time to search every label for the presence of glazing agents. A website called Open Food Facts, run by mostly French volunteers, has started the herculean labour of creating an open database of packaged foods around the world and listing where they fit into on the Nova system. Froot Loops: Nova 4. Unsalted butter: Nova 2. Sardines in olive oil: Nova 3. Vanilla Alpro yoghurt: Nova 4. Stphane Gigandet, who runs the site, says that he started analysing food by Nova a year ago and it is not an easy task.

For most modern eaters, avoiding all ultra-processed foods is unsettling and unrealistic, particularly if you are on a low income or vegan or frail or disabled, or someone who really loves the occasional cheese-and-ham toastie made from sliced white bread. In his early papers, Monteiro wrote of reducing ultra-processed items as a proportion of the total diet rather than cutting them out altogether. Likewise, the French Ministry of Health has announced that it wants to reduce consumption of Nova 4 products by 20% over the next three years.

We still dont really know what it is about ultra-processed food that generates weight gain. The rate of chewing may be a factor. In Halls study, during the weeks on the ultra-processed diet people ate their meals faster, maybe because the foods tended to be softer and easier to chew. On the unprocessed diet, a hormone called PYY, which reduces appetite, was elevated, suggesting that homemade food keeps us fuller for longer. The effect of additives such as artificial sweeteners on the gut microbiome is another theory. Later this year, new research from physicist Albert-Lszl Barabsi will reveal more about the way that ultra-processing actually alters food at a molecular level.

In a two-part blog on ultra-processed foods in 2018 (Rise of the Ultra Foods) Anthony Warner (who tweets and campaigns as Angry Chef), a former food industry development chef, argued that Nova was stoking fear and guilt about food and adding to the stress of already difficult lives by making people feel judged for their food choices. But having read Kevin Halls study, he wrote an article in May 2019 admitting: I was wrong about ultra-processed food it really is making you fat. Warner said the study convinced him that eating rate, texture and palatability of UPFs lead to overeating, and ended with a call for more research.

Hall tells me that he is in the process of constructing another study on ultra-processed food and obesity. This time, the people on the ultra-processed diet would also be eating larger amounts of unprocessed foods, such as crunchy vegetables with low energy density, while still getting more than 80% of their calories from ultra-processed food equivalent to adding a side salad or a portion of broccoli to your dinner of frozen pizza. This is much closer to how most families actually eat.

Even if scientists do succeed in pinning down the mechanism or mechanisms by which ultra-processed foods make us gain weight, its not clear what policy-makers should do about UPFs, except for giving people the support and resources they need to cook more fresh meals at home. To follow the Brazilian advice entails a total rethink of the food system.

For as long as we believed that single nutrients were the main cause of poor diets, industrial foods could be endlessly tweaked to fit with the theory of the day. When fat was seen as the devil, the food industry gave us a panoply of low-fat products. The result of the sugar taxes around the world has been a raft of new artificially sweetened drinks. But if you accept the argument that processing is itself part of the problem, all of this tweaking and reformulation becomes so much meaningless window-dressing.

An ultra-processed food can be reformulated in countless ways, but the one thing it cant be transformed into is an unprocessed food. Hall remains hopeful that there may turn out to be some way to adjust the manufacture of ultra-processed foods to make them less harmful to health. A huge number of people on low incomes, he notes, are relying on these relatively inexpensive tasty things for daily sustenance. But he is keenly aware that the problems of nutrition cannot be cured by ever more sophisticated processing. How do you take an Oreo and make it non-ultra-processed? he asks. You cant!

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How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket - The Guardian

In the remote northern steppes of Mongolia, in 2017, anthropologist Christina Warinner and her colleagues were interviewing local herders about dairying practices. One day, a yak and cattle herder, Dalaimyagmar, demonstrated how she makes traditional yogurt and cheeses.

In spring, as livestock calve and produce the most milk, Mongolians switch from a meat-centered diet to one based on dairy products. Each year, Dalaimyagmar thaws the saved sample of the previous seasons yogurt, which she callskhrngo. She adds some of this yogurt to fresh milk, over several days, until it is revived. With this starter culture, she is then able to make dairy products all summer.

Afterward, as the anthropologists drove their struggling vehicle up steep hills back to their camp, graduate student and translator Bjrn Reichardt had a realization. Khrngo is also the Mongolian word for wealth or inheritance.

In Mongolia, dairy products are vital dietary staplesmore than70 are made and consumed. From a certain perspective, then, the double meaning of khrngo was unsurprising.

But there was some irony at work. In Mongolia, most herders have no idea that the khrngo is, in fact, made up of a wealth of microbes. And that lack of knowledge could be a problem. Not only do these microbes bring benefits to the health, diet, and food practices of Mongoliansas well as a distinctive taste endemic to their cuisinebut they could be lost as Western industrial practices come to the country.

The Heirloom Microbes project has sampled a range of Mongolian dairy products, several of which are shown here.(Heirloom Microbes Project.)

Its become a dual mission of Warinners to not only help Mongolians value their microbial riches, but also explore the impact these regional microbes have had on human history. Bacteria are amazing, overlooked, and misunderstood, says Warinner, who splits her time between the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Warinner and her collaborator, Jessica Hendy, an archaeological scientist at the University of York, started theHeirloom Microbes projectin 2017 to identify and preserve rare microbes, specifically the bacteria that turn lactose into lactic acid, the first step in transforming milk into yogurts and cheeses. In the process, they hope to understand which microbes were unique to specific early dairy communitiesand how they spread from one region to the next.

Combining interests in ancient diets, traditional cultural practices, and gut microbiomes, the Heirloom Microbes project collaborators are blazing a trail that traces the origins of dairyingand promises to reveal previously unknown microbial influences on human culture. The project has sampled dairy products from several parts of the world, including the European Alps and Jordan.

But the project team has focused on Mongolia, a country where traditional dairying practices from nomadic herding communities remained largely intact. Along the way, they have realized they may be sampling what are effectively endangered microbes if the worlds remaining traditional dairying societies industrialize.

Warinner, who calls herself a molecular archaeologist, set out to investigate past human diets more than 10 years ago. She found a goldmine of information trapped in the tartar on skeletal teeth, including the individuals DNA, the oral bacteria they carried, and clues to that persons eating habits.

Thats why Warinner teaches her archaeology students to wield an unusual tool: a dental scalar. Researchers use this hooked metal instrument, commonly found at dentists offices, to scrape ancient tartar from exhumed remains. The calcified microbial biofilm on teeth effectively offers researchers dietary sedimentary layers for each individual that can be preserved for centuries.

When the decayed plaque is particularly tough to dislodge, Warinner pops the ligament-free tooth out, cleans it, and puts it backwithout damaging the skeleton itself. (Following training, her students receive a Dental Hygienist to the Dead certificate.)

Warinner first started scraping the hardened calculus from medieval skeletons in England, Germany, and Greenland to study ancient periodontal disease. Results from Greenland, however, yielded truly unbelievable results:milk proteinson teeth from Vikings who lived roughly 1,000 years ago. Convinced it must be a mistake, Warinner ignored the Greenland data for a year.

When she eventually re-ran the samples and got the same exact results, Warinner was flummoxed. When I realized it might be real, I almost scared myself, she says. What if we could reconstruct dairying in the past? Dairy, she realized, could serve as a window into human dietsand the practices supporting those dietsthrough time.

Milk proteins trapped in layers of tartar would allow Warinner to not only determine which animal produced the milk, but also date milk consumption across space and time, something that had previously only been attemptedby tracing milk fatsin ancient pottery. This new approach provided scientists with a way to extract evidence of milk directly from the mouths of past people, Hendy notes.

Milk and the microbes behind dairy products are intriguing objects of study on many levels, say Hendy and Warinner. For one, Hendy says, Humans are the only species to drink another mammals milk.

Even more intriguing is why early societies would practice dairying for thousands of years when they could not easily digest lactose, the sugar in milk. For decades, scholars thought that dairying increasedafterhumans evolved a gene to digest milk.

The majority of the world is lactose intolerant (map percentages indicate the overall rate of lactose intolerance in each region).(NmiPortal/Wikimedia Commons)

But that presumption was overturned once the extent of lactose intolerance was documented. In fact, research suggests that dairying was practiced for 4,000 years before the emergence of a mutation that allowed lactose digestion.

Even today, the majority of people around the planet65 percentare lactose intolerant, meaning their bodies struggle to break down the sugar lactose found in fresh milk. (Mongolia offers a stark example: Consumption of dairy products in Mongolia remains extraordinarily high, despite the fact that 95 percent of Mongolians are lactose intolerant.)

Milk continues to be an incredibly fraught food,a lightning rodfor discussions around nutrition and health. Its either a superfood or the worst thing in the world, Warinner says.

Dairying is this amazing invention that people came up with in prehistory, she adds, but its a complete puzzle why and how it worked. In addition, dairy products were among the earliest manufactured foods.

And that is the work of microbes. Cheese doesnt exist in the wild, Warinner says. Milk itself is highly perishable and goes bad in hours.

Through trial and error, humans figured out how to harness bacteria to consume the lactoseand thereby acidify and ferment milk into cheeses and yogurt, respectively.

People from deep prehistory, millennia ago, were domesticating microbes they didnt even know existed, Warinner says. It must have seemed magical to them.

In fact, Warinner notes, this microbe-driven approach was likely among the earliestand most importantfood storage mechanisms in ancient times. Warinner and Hendy soon turned their interest to identifying early dairy microbes. If they could find milk proteins in skeletal tartar, they hoped to find DNA from the lactic acid bacteria.

In arid or grassland steppe regions like Mongolia, there would have been few shelf-stable foods several millennia ago. Dairying proved transformative. Given the harsh and arid environment, barren landscape, and limited foodstuffs, it is hard to imagine how Genghis Khan could have conquered Asia and Eastern Europe without portable, probiotic-rich, high-calorie cheese, explains Warinner.

Mongolians milk all seven livestock species in the country: cows, sheep, goats, horses, yaks, reindeer, andas shown herecamel.(Heirloom Microbes Project.)

And the menu of dairy options is vast. Mongolians milk every one of the seven livestock species in the country: cows, sheep, goats, horses, yaks, reindeer, and camel.

From that native diversity, Mongolian milk products have a distinctiveterroir, or characteristic flavor infused by the environment producing the food. Aaruul, which are dried, hardened curds eaten as a snack, have a pungent, tangy flavor. Shimiin arkhi is yogurt made from yaks or cows milk that is distilled to make a vodka. Airag is a fermented mares milk liquor that is light and bubbly. People listen to mares milk ferment and say, Its alive when they hear it fizzing, Hendy says.

Mongolians hand down starter bacterial cultures, the khrngo, from generation to generationand typically the work is carried out by women. They often receive starter cultures from their mothers, who received it from their grandmothers, Reichardt says. There is a chance that these microbes are hundreds of years old and still alive today.

But when Warinner and Hendy first asked to collect dairy microbes in Mongolia, the nomadic herders denied their products had any bacteria in them. In Mongolia, microbiology is taught from a clinical perspectivenamely, that bacteria only cause disease, Warinner says.

She found that herders were unaware of beneficial or food microbes. They also did not know that the hides and wooden vessels used to store starter cultures were crucial to maintaining these bacterial populations over time. Unbeknownst to contemporary and early herders, the porous, organic materials used as containers were inadvertently inoculated with the lactic acid bacteria over and over again. As a result, the containers themselves helped desirable microbial populations persist over timein part because nothing else, including pathogens, could grow in the containers.

In Khvsgl, Mongolia, herder Gerel scrapes curds from the inside of her century-old still after makingshimiin arkhi, a vodka from distilled cow or yak yogurt.(Heirloom Microbes Project.)

Pathogens are like weeds, they are the first to grow, whereas lactic acid bacteria are like old-growth trees, Warinner explains. If you get the lactic acid bacteria established, theyll prevent weeds from growing. In short, the traditional nomadic dairy model promotes the growth of good bacteria that naturally outcompete pathogens.

Still, that hasnt stopped the spread of western practices, including industrialized dairy cultures. The Heirloom Microbes project has not found traditional practices to be as prevalent in the other regions the team has studied, such as Jordan and the European Alps, as compared to Mongolia. The concern, as stated in their project grant, is that with contemporary food globalization and industrialization, traditional methods of dairying and their unique microbial cultures are being lost at an alarming pace.

While traditional practices continue in isolated pockets in Jordan and the Alps, those practices can be, in part, a tourist attraction. European countries largely industrialized their dairying procedures in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast with traditional methods using heirloom bacterial cultures, industrial practices begin with sterilization and then introduce lab-grown, high-performing bacterial cultures. In these industrialized systems, everything has to be constantly killed in large partbecausethe first things to come back are pathogens.

For Warinner and her colleagues, helping Mongolian herders and policymakers understand the benefits of the traditional methods has become even more urgent as the first steps toward dairy industrialization begin in Mongolia. Most notably, European lab-grown starter cultures are being introduced into the region.

Bacteria are amazing, overlooked, and misunderstood, says anthropologist Christina Warinner.

Warinner does not think the lab-grown strains, produced under highly controlled conditions, will fare well in Mongolia simply because they lack the regions traditional diversity. These are cultures developed in a completely different environment, she says. Industrial methods of sanitation are not easily implemented on the steppe and doing so would disrupt the microbial ecologies that support traditional Mongolian dairying, she notes. I fear that well-intentioned attempts to introduce such techniqueswithout consideration of their cultural contextwould actually reduce the safety of the dairy products and radically transform and undermine the lives of nomadic herders.

Hendy adds that microbes may not only support the process of dairying but also play a role in peoples health and digestion. Microbes in traditionally made dairy foods help maintain a healthy gut microbiome, which could be alteredto unknown effectby a switch to industrialized microbial cultures.

Over the past three years, the Heirloom Microbes project team has scraped tartar from roughly 200 skeletal remains around the world. As they piece together ancient microbial sequences in the tartar, they will start this summer to sample the microbiomes of both Mongolian nomadic herders and urban dwellers to determine whether herders gut microbes have played an unrecognized role in their dairy digestion.

As a growing body of research makes clear, the gut microbiome exerts a shocking degree of control over many aspects of our healthfrommood to immune function to pain. It may even shape seemingly unrelated aspects of our behavior, includingsocial interactions.

Mongolian researcher Soninkhishig Tsolmon has documented nutrition in her homeland for the last 20 years. It has not been easy. With few resources or existing studies available, Tsolmon has focused on the dietary differences between nomadic and urban people.

Tsolmon suspects that many traditional foods could reveal intriguing health and microbial connectionsbut time is running out. In addition to looming industrialization, climate change is transforming the landscape under herders feet.

Were starting to lose traditions, Tsolmon says. Mongolians have traditional ways of using meat and milk. The traditional meat-based diet in the winter is replaced with fermented dairy products in the summer that, elders say, eliminate the toxins from a winters worth of meat eating. She adds, Im afraid that some bacteria are disappearing.

To help stem the loss, Tsolmon, Warinner, and their colleagues created opportunities to share knowledge between the scientists and the herders. In July, for example, the researchers held a Seeing Microbes workshop in villages near Mongolias Lake Khuvsgul.

There the group showed local herders microscopic images of the bacteria in their dairy products. We explained how their practices maintain plenty of good microbes in their productsand that microbes dont just cause disease, explains translator and graduate student Zoljargal Enkh-Amgalan. They were proud of their way of life and how pastoralism and dairying still exist, she adds.

At another meeting earlier last summer, traditional steppe herders, cheesemakers from the Swiss Alps, the Heirloom Microbes team, businesspeople, and government officials came together for a traveling conference held in both Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Research Council funded the meetings.

These disparate groups shared their insights on traditional practices and the science underpinning their success. While traditional dairying practices, which go back at least 5,000 years, have not been studied intensively, they are clearly adapted to the Mongolian landscape and sustainable, explains Warinner.

Warinner believes the deep time emphasis that her discipline brings to such discussions is especially valuable. Anthropology matters. Archaeology matters, she says. We work to understand humans in the past and how we are todayin order to inform public opinion and government policies. That perspective can help counterbalance the ways in which globalization and well-intentioned interventions may, intentionally or not, threaten traditions, with complex consequences.

In addition to educating Mongolians about the science underpinning their ancestral practices, Warinner and colleagues hope they will take stock of the microbes that have played a starring, yet unsung, role in their nutrition and health. It is ironic that Mongolia has this very deep tradition of dairying that is so central to identity, culture, and historyand yet possesses no archive or any centralized collection of the many bacterial cultures. The Heirloom Microbes project collaborators hope to develop and maintain a storehouse of these resources for Mongolia.

We live in a microbial world, Warinner says. We are only now realizing how integral microbes are to being human. Put another way, science is just starting to uncover the degree to which microbial cultures have shaped human cultures.

This work first appeared on SAPIENS. Read the original here.

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What Mongolia's Dairy Farmers Have to Teach Us About the Hidden History of Microbes - Discover Magazine

What is the Mediterranean diet?

The Mediterranean diet is a way of eating that is similar to the cuisine of countries along the Mediterranean Sea. There is no single definition of the diet, but you will eat mostly plant based foods. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has shown the Mediterranean diet to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death related to heart problems by 30%. The diet can be used as a long term diet pattern to promote health, control blood sugar and prevent chronic disease.

You will eat mostly plant-based foods like fruits and vegetables, potatoes, whole-grains, beans, nuts, seeds and extra virgin olive oil. Meals are planned around these foods. The diet also includes moderate amounts of lean poultry, fish, seafood, dairy and eggs. You should avoid fried foods, sweets, red meats and white flour products.

The following information will clarify details about the Mediterranean diet, such as which foods to pick and how much of each food to eat. You will also find how to include these foods into your diet.

Limit to lean cuts, such as

tenderloin, sirloin and flank steak

1 to 2 glasses per day(1 glass = 3.5 ounces.)

Limit to one serving per day for women and two servings per day for men.

Last reviewed by a Cleveland Clinic medical professional on 09/19/2019.

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Mediterranean Diet | Cleveland Clinic

Is it better to eat before or after exercising? Should certain people stay away from weightlifting? Does 2% milk really only contain 2% fat? Which is better, strength or endurance? These questions and more surround daily diet and exercise. Some are easy to answer, but others are trickier.

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While some people think there is a magic number associated with fat burning, the truth is that youre always burning fat no matter the intensity or duration. As you increase these two variables, the fat burning will rise; however, our bodies will always be burning fat regardless.

You can still optimize fuel utilization though. In fact, with the proper exercise regimen, you can train your body to focus on fat burning!

The more you exercise a muscle, the stronger it will become, and the heart is no different. When you perform an exercise involving thousands of repetitions, the hearts is put under enormous stress (also referred to as overload). This results in a strong, well-fit heart. This actually makes your heart larger and increases overall ventricle size. This also results in a lower resting heart rate because your heart pumps so efficiently with a high stroke volume. For good cardiovascular health, aerobic exercise truly is a fantastic endeavor.

No cholesterol doesnt always mean no cholesterol, 2% milk is not made up of only 2% fat, and simply because it says it contains 0 grams trans fat, doesnt mean it really does. Through clever math with the serving size, companies are allowed to omit ingredients on the nutritional table. Likewise, the framing of products are presented in such a way that they incite consumers to make wrongful inferences.

2% milk, for example, refers to 2% fat percentage based on food weight. Heres the math: 120 kcal/cup, 5 g fat (which has 9 kcal/g/fat) = 45 kcal/fat. 120 kcal divided by 45 kcal/fat = 37 percent!

Based on the chemical reactions of ingesting food, when you eat prior to exercise, you adversely affect your bodys fat burning during exercise. While you continue to burn energy, it will primarily be carbohydrates. Essentially, when ingesting carbs, your body releases insulin, which inhibits hormone sensitive lipase, and in turning promoting fat storage rather than fat use. Unfortunately, this is true even 1-2 hours prior to exercise.

Caution: If you are not used to exercising on an empty stomach, you may experience medical problems and even feint. That said, make a gradual transition and be safe!

By far, we are consuming too much meat and animal products in our diet. Today, average Americans get 30-35 percent of their daily calories from fat. While fat is a powerful energy source, abundance of it is correlated with cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, and hypertension. According to the USDA, in 2000, Americans consumed an average 57 pounds more meat than they did annually in the 1950s, and a third fewer eggs. While this abundance of food is great, we need to be sure our diets are well-rounded.

Try skipping meat 1-2 nights of the week. This will help keep your fat intake down as well as keep demand down for an unsustainable practice.

Under the right supervision, weight lifting can be beneficial for everyone. Of course, peoples goals may be different, but physiologically speaking, the muscles are the same. Like aerobic exercise, the fibers in the body will strengthen. This will help keep you healthy and feeling great. Getting a weight set can be beneficial for the whole family!

Stretching can reduce tension, increase flexibility, better your circulation, and help aid your muscle coordination. However, stretching also has a poor statistical background in risk-prevention. According to military research, those who stretched before training were 2.2- and 2.5-times more likely to incur an injury than trainees with average flexibility.

If you dont find yourself doing intense physical exercise, however, it is still useful for the occasional shock to muscles and tendons. Some say it may make more sense to limber up with rapid, full body movements rather than stretch in position for an extended period. Just remember not to go overboard. You dont want to end up stiffer than before because of a pull!

One important thing to keep in mind when exercising is that everyone has different goals, and, more importantly, have different bodies. Genetically, our muscle types and fiber proportions are already determined. Furthermore, depending on if you exercise for minimal fitness or because its your 9-5, youll want to further individualize your routine.

Ideally, a well-rounded diet with healthy levels of fruits, veggies, meats, and cheeses will cover all your bases when it comes to nutrition. Thats not to say vitamins arent useful though. Many people have deficiencies in things like Iron and Omega-3. If you arent able to cover the problem through natural nutrition, vitamins can be a great help.

Depending on your goals, you may want a specific result. Because of this, you should always identify the area of the body you want to work on. While strength training (low rep, heavy weight) is great for building power, aerobic exercise (high rep, low weight) tends to detract from the strength gain eventually. For someone just beginning, however, a combination may be attractive because your body will benefits in both areas greatly.

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10 Facts about Diet and Exercise

Growing up, Marc Ramirez thought that diabetes was inevitable. As a young adult, his mother and six of his siblings battled type 2 diabetes and suffered through side effects, including kidney and pancreas transplants, amputations, and dialysis. Eventually, Marc was diagnosed, too. He tried to improve his health by lowering his carb intake and exercising, but he soon found himself on daily insulin injections and four other medications. Frustrated and feeling hopeless, he asked his doctor if he would ever live a life without daily medications. When his doctor said, no, Marc decided to take his health into his own hands.

After hearing about the health benefits of a plant-based diet, he and his wife decided to give it a try. His new diet followed just a few simple rules: He would avoid animal products and keep it low in fat. Otherwise, he could eat as much as he wanted, without counting carbs or calories. Marcs daily menu included foods like oatmeal with fruit, pasta primavera piled high with vegetables, and spicy black bean burritos. Under his doctors supervision, in less than two months, Marc was not only able to drop his daily insulin injections, but every last one of his medications. His glucose levels are now completely normal.

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Diabetes

Provided by Daily Mail Diet plan? This Morning's health experts have suggested Adele's alleged '1000-calorie-a-day' diet isn't sustainable in the long term (pictured left last weekend)This Morning's health experts have suggested Adele's alleged '1000-calorie-a-day' diet isn't sustainable in the long term.

The 31-year-old singer is rumored to have shed a whopping 98 pounds in recent months due to a calorie-controlled diet, according to recent claims made by her one-time PT Camila Goodis.

Speaking on Wednesday's installment of This Morning, food writer Dale Pinnock - aka the Medicinal Chef - warned the diet could have adverse side effects such as brain fog and irritability.

The conversation came during a chat about Adele's transformation, with the singer looking stunning in her latest snap taken over the weekend.

Dale explained: 'If you've got a short-term goal that kind of approach could be very, very suitable - if you want to lose weight for a wedding or holiday.

'But it isn't sustainable. There will be a cut off because after a while your body will start to down regulate the things it will do.'

He reminded people at home that the recommended daily intake for a woman is between 1,800 and 2,000 calories.

'[The body's] top priority is survival, after a couple of weeks you won't be as active, you'll find that you get brain fog and become irritable, it kicks in quite quickly.

'Slow and steady wins the race, definitely - find something that you can stick to.'

Provided by Daily Mail 'Slow and steady wins the race': This Morning's resident doctor Zoe Williams and food writer Dale Pinnock - aka the Medicinal Chef -reminded people at home that the recommended daily intake for a woman is between 1,800 and 2,000 calories Provided by Daily Mail Weight loss: The 31-year-old singer (pictured) is rumoured to have shed a whopping seven stone in recent months due to a calorie-controlled diet, according to recent claims made by her one-time PT Camila Goodis

This Morning's resident doctor Zoe Williams was in agreement, advising viewers to make small changes they will be able to stick to.

She said: '1000 calories a day isn't sustainable and you set yourself up to fail. Make small changes you can stick to for the rest of your life.'

'Brazilian body wizard' Camila appeared on Lorraine earlier this year, where she gave a unique insight into the grueling regime that has helped Adele.

But in recent weeks, several fitness industry experts have spoken out about the rumored diet.

Instagram star Alice Liveing, 26, hit out at Camila on social media for promoting a green juice diet and 'riding on the coat tails of a celebrity client.'

In an impassioned post, personal trainer and nutritionist Alice, who goes by the name Clean Eating Alice, said: 'For the record, no credible trainer would agree to their client eating only 1,000k cals a day.

'No credible trainer would suggest green juices to be the elixir of good health. No credible trainer would/should share this confidential info for their own gain.

'I have trained celebrities in my time and when asked in interview about said clients, I have always remained silent because of client confidentiality, their privacy and the fact that that is their information to share, not mine.

'These 'so called' celebrity trainers need to realize that putting someone on a 1000 calorie a day diet and an intense workout regime doesn't make them a good trainer.

Brazilian body wizard: Camila Goodis (pictured) appeared on Lorraine earlier this year where she gave a unique insight into the gruelling regime that has helped the musician

'It makes them the instigator of seriously disordered eating habits and the health repercussions that accompany it.'

Alice continued she has trained celebrities herself but wouldn't boast about it on TV, so as to not betray her client's privacy.

'I'm not going to get on to Lorraine riding on the coat tails of a celebrity client,' she said.

'If I ever do get on TV it will be because I am a credible trainer in my own right and I don't need to compromise their privacy to further my career.'

Alice has become a health and fitness Instagram sensation.

Thanks to the no-nonsense healthy recipes and simple workout regimes, she has garnered more than 600,000 followers and recently launched her own gymwear range with Primark.

Her debut book The Body Bible was so successful it outsold well-known bakers like Mary Berry, Deliciously Ella and Jamie Oliver.

Alice was once a binge eater and yo-yo dieter but shed four dress sizes after finding a love for fitness.

The Instagram star has been vocal about her own journey, admitting she was once addicted to working out but now encourages her followers to have a healthy relationship towards exercise and eating.

Celeb clientele: Camila describes herself as 'a Brazilian body wizard', was introduced to Adele through Robbie Williams' wife Ayda

On Lorraine, Los Angeles-based personal trainer Camila revealed the changes to Adele's body are largely down to significant decrease in her calorie intake, cutting the recommended daily allowance for females of 2,000 calories by half.

'She's working out but I think 90 per cent of it is diet,' Goodis said.

'It's a good diet to shed the weight. The first week is intense, green juices and only 1,000 calories. She doesn't look too thin - she looks amazing.'

The instructor, who describes herself as 'a Brazilian body wizard', was introduced to Adele through Robbie Williams' wife Ayda and even gave them a joint workout in the former Take That star's Los Angeles mansion.

Her online biography says she uses 'a variety of Pilates and core strength training exercises'.

Provided by Daily Mail Revelation:'She's working out but I think 90 per cent of it is diet,' 'Brazilian body wizard' Goodis told show host Lorraine KellyShe recalled: 'When she came for a work out I didn't know it was her and when she left I thought 'Oh it looks a little bit like Adele'.

'She looks amazing - she's changed her lifestyle and diet.'

Speaking to The Sunin January, the fitness coach claimed the singer's weight loss is mostly down to dieting because she doesn't like exercise.

'I trained Ayda [Field] for a long time and it happens that they are good friends so I did Adele when she was there in Robbie's house,' she said.

'I don't believe she liked exercise much but she has changed her lifestyle and I believe that 90 per cent was dieting.

Provided by Daily Mail Stunned: Adele left fans shocked over the festive season when she unveiled her amazing weight loss at a Christmas Party (pictured)The singer has wowed fans with her weight loss, which she first unveiled over Christmas and also showed off during a holiday toAnguilla with Harry Stylesearlier this month.

It is believed the Rolling In The Deep hitmaker transformed her physique after a dietary overhaul but was inspired to do so for her son, Angelo, seven.

A source toldPeopleearlier this week: 'She got to the point where she didn't feel great. She knew she had to change something, because she wants to be the healthiest mum possible.

'Her whole focus during the weight loss journey has really been all about how she can be healthier and how can she treat her body better.It was never about losing weight.'

Provided by Daily Mail Feeling better: It is understood the Rolling In The Deep hitmaker transformed her physique after a dietary overhaul but was inspired to do so for her son, Angelo, seven (pictured in 2017)The comments come after college student Lexi Larson, 19, spoke to People and claimed that Adele told her she's lost 'something like 100 pounds'.

Lexi crossed paths with the singer at theBlanchards Restaurant and Beach Shack in Anguilla.

She said: 'She said she lost something like 100 pounds, and that it's such a crazy positive experience. She seemed so happy, and she looked amazing.'

The teenager said that the singer's weight loss was evident as she met her in the eatery.

Lexi added Adele did not want to take a picture with her as Angelo was present at the time, but did bring over Harry to chat to her group of pals in the restaurant.

She revealed that she and a group of pals spoke with the British stars for around 15 minutes and discussed college life and their future plans.

The Sirtfood Diet is based on sirtuins (SIRTs), a group of seven proteins

It focuses on plant foods which help to suppress appetite and activate the body's 'skinny gene'

Followers of the diet go through two diet cycles that last for three weeks

Recommended Sirtfoods include:Kale, red wine, strawberries, onions, soy and dark chocolate (85% cocoa)

The diet has been criticized for failing to provide any long-term benefits

Source: Healthline

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Back in October, Adele joked that she 'used to cry but now I sweat' in an Instagram post, as details of her overhauled fitness regime emerged.

It's understood that her huge transformation has been a result of reformer pilates, using weights in the gym, cutting down on sugar and also following The Sirtfood Diet.

The regimefocuses on plant foods, such as kale and buckwheat - which help to suppress appetite and activate the body's 'skinny gene'.

The diet's creators claim that following the Sirtfood Diet will lead to rapid weight loss, all while maintaining muscle mass and protecting you from chronic disease.

Provided by Daily Mail All over: Sources previously claimed her new workout regime has given the vocal talent a 'new lease of life' following her split from ex-husband Simon Konecki (pictured in 2013) Provided by Daily Mail Diet: Adele admitted that she'd cut out alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine, as well as 'spicy, citrusy, and tangy' foodsFollowers of the diet go through two diet cycles that last for three weeks - following specific recipes and plans - and they are then encouraged to continue adding as many sirtfoods as possible into their food.

However, Healthline report that although the low-calorie diet may kick-start weight loss, it is too short to have a long-term impact on health.

Speaking in June, sources claimed Adele's her new workout regime had given the vocal talent a 'new lease of life' following her split from ex-husband Simon Konecki - with whom she shares son Angelo.

Adele confirmed her split from Simon in April 2019 and filed for divorce in September

The vocal powerhouse and Simon first began dating in 2011 and welcomed their son the following year, before tying the knot four years later.

Gallery: U.S. News' 35 Best Diets Overall (U.S. News & World Report)

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Adele's '1000-calorie-a-day weight loss diet isn't sustainable' in the long term, This Morning health experts warn - msnNOW

Popular diets low in carbs and high in fat and protein might be good for the waistline, but a new UNLV study shows that just the opposite may help to alleviate the hospital-acquired infection Clostridioides difficile.

In a study published in mSystems, an open access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, UNLV scientists found that an interaction between antibiotic use and a high-fat/high-protein diet exacerbate C. diff infections in mice. Conversely, they found that a high-carbohydrate diet which was correspondingly low in fat and protein nearly eliminated symptoms.

C. diff, an intestinal infection designated as an urgent threat by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is often acquired when antibiotics have wiped out the good bacteria in the gut. Hundreds of thousands of people are diagnosed with C. diff infections each year and more than 10,000 die.

Every day, we are learning more about the human microbiome and its importance in human health, said Brian Hedlund, a UNLV microbiologist and study co-author. The gut microbiome is strongly affected by diet, but the C. diff research community hasnt come to a consensus yet on the effects of diet on its risk or severity. Our study helps address this by testing several diets with very different macronutrient content. That is, the balance of dietary carbohydrate, protein, and fat were very different.

Though studies suggest dietary protein exacerbates C. diff, theres little or no existing research exploring the interaction of a high-fat/high-protein diet with the infection. Hedlund and study co-author Ernesto Abel-Santos, a UNLV biochemist, caution that the study was conducted using an animal model, and more work is underway to begin to establish a link between these diets and infections in people.

Extreme diets are becoming very popular but we do not know the long-term effects on human health and specifically on the health of the human gut flora, Abel-Santos said. We have to look at humans to see if it correlates.

Recent studies suggest that because antibiotics kill bacterial species indiscriminately, the medications decimate populations of organisms that compete for amino acids, leaving C. diff free to propagate.

But Hedlund said the story is even more complex. "It's clear that it's not just a numbers game," he said. The new work suggests that diet may promote microbial groups that can be protective, even after antibiotics. For an infection to flourish, he said, "you might need this combination of wiping out C. diff competitors with antibiotics and then a diet that promotes overgrowth and disease."

The new study raised other questions as well. For example: The high-carb diet, which was protective against C. diff infection, gave rise to the least diverse community of microbes.

"Lots of papers say that a lower microbial diversity is always a bad thing, but in this case, it had the best disease outcome," said Abel-Santos. However, he cautions that a high-carb diet could lead to animals becoming asymptomatic carriers that can disseminate the infection to susceptible subjects.

The Abel-Santos lab has been working with C. diff for 12 years with the goal of developing compounds that could prevent infections from this bacterium. The Hedlund lab has been working with C. diff for five years, focusing on the role of diet in infection. This collaboration was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

A High-Fat/High-Protein, Atkins-Type Diet Exacerbates Clostridioides (Clostridium) Difficile Infection in Mice, Whereas a High-Carbohydrate Diet Protects appeared Feb. 11 in mSystems, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology

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Study: Diet Makes a Difference in Fight Against Hospital-Acquired Infection - UNLV NewsCenter

KEY POINTS

High blood pressure has been referred to as the silent killer because of its tendency to suddenly appear without warning. If left untreated, it increases your risk of developing more serious conditions.

While high blood pressure may be devoid of visible warning signs, constantly high pressure may cause you to suffer a stroke or heart attack. To keep these threats at bay, you must observe a healthy lifestyle.

Dietary Changes

Your diet plays a very important part when trying to control and manage blood pressure. Instead of focusing on particular foods that are said to be heart-friendly, it would be better to observe a total healthy dietary practice as this accords you the best protection.

Cutting back on certain food groups, like carb-heavy foods, for instance, has been proven to lower blood pressure. Observing a low-carb diet can have a positive impact on high blood pressure. how to lower blood pressure diet Photo: 1643606 - Pixabay

Proven by Studies

In one such study, the results of which were published in the journal JAMA; it compared the benefits of consuming a low-carb diet to a low-fat diet.Those who were on a low-fat diet also took a diet drug oftentimes used in weight loss programs.

While both of these diets resulted in weight loss, the low-carb diet was proven to be more efficient in reducing blood pressure. At the end of the study, participants enjoyed lower blood pressure by approximately 4.5mmHg diastolic and 5.9mmHg systolic.

In contrast, the low-fat diet, which included the diet drug, was able to lower blood pressure by only 0.4mmHg diastolic and 1.5mmHg systolic.Systolic blood pressure is the figure that measures the greatest pressure when the heart beats and pumps the blood throughout the body. It is commonly regarded as the most significant number since it provides the most accurate indicator of the likelihood of suffering from a heart attack.

These findings are made even more substantial by past researches showing a 2mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure also lowers your risk of dying from stroke by at least 6%. It also lowers your risk of dying from certain types of heart disease by 4% and reduces your risk of dying from any cause by 3%. In the recent study, note that the low-carb diet can reduce systolic blood pressure by 5.9mmHg.

Minimizing carbohydrates consumptions have also been proven to directly help with weight loss, which is another defense measure against high blood pressure. The NHS said that being overweight can force your heart to work double-time in pumping blood around the body, a situation that can raise blood pressure.The NHS also said that if you need to lose weight, it is important to remember that shedding even just a couple of pounds can make a big difference.

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Following This Diet Helps Lower Blood Pressure Readings - International Business Times