Mika Brzezinski: Why we should start using the word ‘fat’
Fat. Obese. These are words that can sting. But, they are words that we need to use to have an honest conversation about the biggest health crisis facing our country: the epidemic of obesity among American adults and children.
I still remember the look on my friend Diane’s face when we had the conversation that started me down the path of writing “Obsessed.” We were on her boat on a beautiful Labor Day weekend with our families. Diane was worried about what to make for dinner because she had come to think of me as “the Food Police”—always so correct in my eating and not afraid to tell other people on “Morning Joe” what foods they should avoid. That day, I revealed my own obsession with unhealthy food and my struggles to stay thin, and I knew it was time to take on the one issue that we had never talked about in our long friendship.
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“Diane,” I said, “you can’t climb onto this boat without help. Is that how you want to live? Your whole body hurts and your joints are killing you. Why do you think that is? I am just going to say it. It’s because you are fat.”
At that moment Diane looked like I had punched her in the face. But, over the last year, she has lost 75 pounds. She tells me those are the kindest words I could have said to her, because they shocked her into changing her life and regaining her health.
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And that’s the conversation we all need to have—in our families, in our schools, in our doctor’s offices and in our communities. I don’t know how we can have this conversation without using those words.
I think about a doctor with a patient who weighs 250 lbs., and the doctor doesn’t talk about fat. To me, that’s insane. And, it’s one of the reasons why we are in the place we are in.
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We can use the word “obese,” or “overweight,” or “fat,” but we need to use the words. As of right now, we are not, and it’s amazing what avoiding those words can lead to: a country in which two thirds of adults are overweight or obese. I know those words can hurt, but we need to use them—not because we want to upset people, but because we want to explore the truth and get to a better place.
Some of the writers who have interviewed Diane and me about the book are upset with me because I called her “fat” and am not fat myself. There is a lot that goes along with that word that we need to shed. As I write in my book, “We should talk about being fat, not to be pejorative, but because we have to tell the truth. By trying to be politically correct and socially sensitive, we end up skirting the whole issue instead.”
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Saying someone is fat is not a judgment—it’s a description. We need to stop blaming and shaming people who struggle with their weight, and start figuring out how to help them, and help all of us, find a healthy way to eat.
Mika Brzezinski is a co-host of “Morning Joe” and the author of the New York Times bestsllers “All Things At Once” and “Knowing Your Value.” This essay originally appeared on Bookish.com. Buy the book here.
Article source: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/mika-brzezinski-start-word-fat-article-1.1339599
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Labor Day, Mika Brzezinski, Morning Joe, New York Times
Doctors Aren’t Mean to Fat Patients, They’re Just Nicer to Thin Ones – Jezebel
As a fat person, I’ve never been treated like complete shit at the doctor, although I’ve certainly gone in for a sore throat and been told to go on a diet (ugh, why wouldn’t I stop eating so many strep-laced Ding Dongs!?). But I have had some uncomfortable experiences, and I know plenty of fat people who have had downright abusive and dangerous ones.
Though I’ve never been overtly traumatized by a healthcare professional, I sometimes wonder if I would have been treated better if I was thin. I’ve never been thin at the doctor. Maybe it’s awesome! Maybe going to the doctor while thin is like that episode of Growing Pains when Chrissy goes to bed and then Jason and Maggie do pony-rides around the living room all night. I don’t know! Fortunately, academia is making some significant strides into solving this mystery—measuring and documenting anti-fat bias in clinical situations. (No word yet re: secret ponies. But I’ve got my eye on you, thin people.)
It shouldn’t be surprising or controversial at this point to hear that fat people, in general, get shitty medical care. Or, rather, that fat people have a harder time getting good medical care than thin people do. This is not new. Americans dislike and distrust fat people. Fatness is conflated with myriad moral failings: laziness, selfishness, ignorance, incompetence, whininess, lack of self-control, refusal to take responsibility for one’s choices. When most Americans look, superficially, at a fat person, they assume (not necessarily deliberately!) that they know a lot of things about that person: what they eat, how much they move, how they feel about themselves, how “healthy” they are. Their size tells the whole story; no need to investigate further. And doctors—the people supposedly employed to investigate and solve fat people’s health issues—are not exempt from those assumptions. Doctors don’t exist outside of that system. Doctors are human beings, and absorb the same cultural norms and subtle biases as the rest of us. Doctors can be dicks, and that puts fat people’s lives at risk.
A study last fall supported just that—about 2,300 doctors participated in a “Weight Implicit Association Test,” which revealed that physicians hold the same strong anti-fat biases as the general public. But, as one of the study’s authors noted, “We don’t know if this affects how doctors behave clinically.”
Jackpot! Now we do! A new study out of Johns Hopkins specifically examined doctors’ clinical practices and found that most doctors aren’t necessarily cruel to fat patients; but they measurably withhold the empathy and personal connection that they extend to thin ones. (Anecdotally, fat people are already very aware of how bias affects their doctors’ clinical behavior. Read through the heartbreaking stories of anti-fat medical bias collected here if you’re not convinced.)
Via the New York Times:
In conversations with patients of normal weight, the doctors offered simple comments to show concern — for example, “I’m glad you’re feeling better” to a woman who had experienced hot flashes. When a normal-weight patient had trouble getting an appointment with a specialist, her doctor shared her concerns. “I agree with you,” the doctor said. “That gets extremely frustrating when that happens.”
…And statements like these are no small thing. Studies show that patients are far more likely to follow a doctor’s advice and to have a better health outcome when they believe their doctor empathizes with their plight.
“When there is increased empathy by the doctor, patients are more likely to report they are satisfied with their care, and they are more likely to adhere to recommendations of physicians,” Dr. Gudzune said. “There is evidence to show that after visits with more empathy, patients have improved clinical outcomes, so patients with diabetes have better blood sugar control or cholesterol is better controlled.”
There’s a massive, distracting misconception about bias (and this applies to discrimination against all marginalized groups, by the way)—that it’s loud and ugly and direct. Sure, sometimes it is. Sometimes anti-fat bias is pointing and laughing at a fat person on the street, or telling a fat writer that she’s too fat to get raped. But much more often, it’s subtler. It’s not the presence of hostility, it’s the absence of care: a lack of compassion, of warmth, of representation, of generosity, of willingness to connect. A lack of things that are granted, without question, to other groups, and taken for granted by those groups. That deficit might not be violent or overt, it might be invisible, but it erodes people.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a thin person at the doctor. I don’t know. And that’s the point, really. I know that doctors are people, and plenty of them are wonderful (I personally love my doctor), and some doctors are fat, and some fat people get skillful, life-saving care. But many, many, many fat people don’t—whether overtly or subtly. And just because you might not know what that feels like, or be able to perceive it, doesn’t mean it’s not real. Sometimes you just can’t know someone else’s experience; and it’s especially difficult to perceive, in someone else’s life, the absence of a boon you’d never even noticed in yours. This kind of invisible bias is more entrenched, harder to fight, less fashionable to complain about, and much more painful to recognize and address in oneself. But we have to.
Anti-fat bias in medicine is a devastating problem. Fat people are already reluctant to seek medical care, thanks to entrenched feelings of worthlessness (why take care of this thing I’ve been taught to hate?), lifetimes of conditioning never to show their bodies (wouldn’t want to put the doctor through that), and the paralyzing cultural insistence that they’re on the verge of death anyway (avoidance feels safer than potential confirmation). And then, when they do go, when they do put their trust in the hands of a supposedly caring, objective medical professional, they’re met with the exact same disinterest and dehumanization and cheap myopia that they already get from every other angle. It blows a giant hole in the fallacy that anti-fat bias is really just “care” for fat people’s “health.” If you care about fat people’s health, then you care about their mental health, their emotional health, and their access to the exact same level of health care that thin people enjoy. If you don’t, then you don’t care about fat people.
Article source: http://jezebel.com/doctors-arent-mean-to-fat-patients-theyre-just-nicer-486284863
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Johns Hopkins, New York Times
Your Genes Are Why You’re Fat
For most people, losing weight is extraordinarily hard. You need only take a quick look at this New York Times article to see just how frustrating the process can be–90% of people who lose a significant amount of weight gain it right back. Where did it come from in the first place? The amount of food you eat certainly plays a part, but so does your neighborhood, your mom, and the time of day you choose to eat, among other factors.
A new study from University College London suggests that genetics is also a major factor in childhood obesity. Researchers examined a group of 2,269 children between 8 and 11 years old using a method called Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis (GCTA) to see if the kids deemed to be more genetically similar also had similar body weight. The result: Genes were responsible for 30% of individual weight differences.
This should come as something of a surprise–scientists have long known that genetics contribute to obesity, but there are only a few genetic variants known to explain differences in body weight. The study indicates that there are many others yet to be discovered.
The researchers explain in their study:
Although the method used in the GCTA analysis cannot be used to predict obesity risk for any one individual because the genetic variants involved are not identified, the results underline the importance of additive genetic effects in the development of adiposity in childhood. This supports the current convention of using parental weight status as a proxy for childhood obesity risk. Targeting children of obese parents for early-life obesity-prevention interventions, given that these children are most at risk, might be a useful direction to take.
By the time teachers, relatives, and other adult figures try to help older obese kids lose weight, it may be too late, in other words. And that’s not just because of genetics–living with obese parents who have less than ideal eating patterns can breed poor lifelong habits for kids. One solution: getting child care providers involved in healthy eating efforts, a la Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Childcare campaign. Whether more sweeping tactics like Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on large sodas in New York City can make a real difference remains to be seen.
Article source: http://www.fastcoexist.com/mba/1681692/your-genes-are-why-youre-fat
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: GCTA, Move Childcare, New York Times, University College London
The book Salt Sugar Fat makes you want none of that
A can of Coca-Cola contains roughly nine teaspoons of sugar. Lunchables were created as a way to revive a flagging interest in bologna. People like chips that snap with about 2,812 kilograms of pressure per square metre.
Those are just some of the nuggets of information that Michael Moss feeds readers in his new book about the food industry, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. But while the book is sprinkled with food facts, Moss doesn’t just want to entertain. Instead, he systematically shows readers how processed food makers manipulate their goods to get consumers to buy – often at the expense of their health.
Moss takes readers on a grocery store tour through the lens of three key ingredients: salt, sugar and fat. By the time he’s done, a host of iconic products, from Oreos to Hot Pockets and spaghetti sauce to soda, don’t look so appetising.
Moss goes the distance, literally, in researching the tactics companies use to create craving for their products. In Illinois, he inspects the cheese in the refrigerator of a former cheese expert with Kraft. In Minnesota, he visits the headquarters of one food industry supplier that sells 40 different types of processed salt, one that’s perfect for popcorn to others used in soups and cheese. And at a noted food lab in Philadelphia, he watches a 6-year-old down a series of different vanilla puddings to determine her perfect sweetness level, something called her “bliss point”.
Along the way, Moss meets tastemakers from former leaders at Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay to the creators of Cheez Whiz and instant pudding.
What he learns is enough to give readers serious indigestion. Companies often add salt to products rather than fresh herbs, which have the same effect, because it’s cheaper. Coca-Cola says it won’t market to kids under 12, but the company targets them anyway by advertising at amusement parks and sports venues. One ice cream maker cites scientific research that “ice cream makes you happy”, but even the scientist who did the study sheepishly downplays the results.
Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, is at his best when he’s acting like a journalist: talking to people, sifting through and explaining documents and writing with finger-licking flair. There are places, however, when he can feel like a lecturer repeating his salt, sugar, fat mantra until you want to scream: “I get it!”
Moss doesn’t really offer solutions for getting companies to produce healthier products. The companies argue that they’re producing what Americans want and Americans seem to agree by continuing to buy them. In the end, his message is about personal responsibility. We’re the ones who decide what we put in our shopping trolleys – and in our mouths.
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House) is out now
artslife@thenational.ae
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Article source: http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/well-being/the-book-salt-sugar-fat-makes-you-want-none-of-that
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Cheez Whiz, Coca Cola, New York Times, Salt Sugar Fat
‘Salt Sugar Fat’ highlights the questionable ingredients in popular food
‘Salt Sugar Fat,’ by journalist Michael Moss, explores how the three title ingredients make their way into American food and the dangers that they may pose.
Molly Driscoll, Staff Writer /
March 20, 2013
‘Salt Sugar Fat’ is written by Michael Moss.
There are three enemies of Americans in the food that the country eats daily, says writer Michael Moss, and their names are also the title of his new book: “Salt Sugar Fat.”
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Moss, a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 story about what was really going into the meat eaten by US residents, and his research for the piece inspired him to go farther into investigating what goes into our food. His new book argues that three ingredients are causing health problems in Americans, and considers the degree to which many consumers are ingesting far more of these products than they may realize.
Moss was able to convince many in the food industry to speak honestly about their policies in his interviews for the book.
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“Many opened up, not always eagerly, but willingly, to help me tell the full story,” Moss told the Chicago Tribune. “These interviews also … showed me that many of these companies are peopled with pure scientists who have a conscience and are well meaning. But this is America, and so these companies’ primary mission is to sell items, in this case food. And they are deeply beholden to Wall Street.”
Moss’s book examines foods like cereals, sodas, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Oreo cookies, and more, diving into what’s actually in the products and how each company is selling its wares to consumers, especially kids and teenagers.
In an interview with NPR, the writer cited one example of marketing strategy with the cereal Frosted Mini-Wheats, which created a series of commercials claiming that kids who ate a bowl in the morning would be better prepared for school.
“What the [company] came up with was some science that they had generated that they said showed that kids who ate Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast would be as much as or almost 20 percent more alert in the classroom, which the company translated into better grades for kids,” Moss said. “That campaign went on for a while until the FTC jumped in and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’re looking at your study and it doesn’t really show anything near that kind of gain,’ and not only that, but they weren’t even looking at other breakfasts to compare to the Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
Moss’s book came out on Feb. 26 and currently holds second place on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for the week of March 24.
Reviews have been largely positive, with Boston Globe reviewer Laura Collins-Hughes calling the book “an exactingly researched, deeply reported work of advocacy journalism.”
Associated Press reviewer Jessica Gresko agreed, noting that Moss could be repetitive but that he’s “at his best when he’s acting like a journalist: talking to people, sifting through and explaining documents, and writing with finger-licking flair.”
One guarantee: Once you set down the book, you probably won’t be reaching for a bag of potato chips.
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Article source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/0320/Salt-Sugar-Fat-highlights-the-questionable-ingredients-in-popular-food
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Frosted Mini Wheats, Kellogg Company, Michael Moss, New York Times
Salt Sugar Fat: Exposing the Junk Food War
From Bagdad to bacteria? Launchables to Lunchables? That’s one way to sum up the somewhat peculiar career path of Michael Moss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the meticulously researched, scathing new exposé, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. A few years back, Moss was risking life and limb to report for the New York Times from the Middle East, interviewing Islamic militants and exposing the appalling number of U.S. marines who died needlessly because the Pentagon failed to provide them with sufficient body armor.
When his Times colleague David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, Moss’s editors decided to bring Moss home and give him a safer beat: the processed food industry.
But in the terrorist-free terrain of Big Food’s boardrooms and Big Ag’s labs, Moss found himself once again reporting on body counts caused by a government agency’s failure to protect us. Only this time, the agents of death were salmonella and E. coli, not al Qaeda. And the agencies in question were the FDA and USDA, not the Pentagon.
Of course, these deaths were the tragic result of negligence, incompetence, and greed, rather than an ideologically driven desire to murder innocent Americans. No food company would set out to fatally sicken anyone by intentionally contaminating its products with known toxins.
But Moss’s book raises the specter that some of them seem to be OK with engineering what is, essentially, a kind of chemical warfare. They’re well-acquainted with the studies Moss cites which suggest that salty, fatty, sugary foods reward the same pleasure sensors in our brains that drugs do. In fact, they don’t even bother to assemble focus groups to sample the latest snack foods and beverages anymore, because now they can bypass our subjective perceptions and just scan our brains directly to monitor how our taste buds are responding.
Moss reveals that food company executives — like the tobacco industry before them — have long been acutely aware of and worried about the health hazards presented by their products. And yet, despite those concerns about their culpability, processed food giants like Kraft, General Foods and Nestlé continue to launch an all-out assault on the American palate to convert us to “heavy users” — their term — of the salty, sugary, fatty processed foods that have proven so profitable for them and so harmful to us. They target especially vulnerable demographics: impressionable children and low-income, low-information shoppers who lack the means and knowledge to make healthier food choices.
Their scientists and marketing mavens tinker endlessly with chemical formulas, and create branding and packaging that entice us to consume excessive quantities of the highly processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods and beverages that are slowly poisoning Americans on a scale that terrorists could only dream of. And they’ve been aided and abetted in this campaign by the tobacco industry, which responded to growing scrutiny about the hazards of its sole product by snapping up processed food companies in a bid to expand its portfolio and its profits. The same sleazy, disingenuous strategies that tobacco executives once used to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking are trotted out once again by the usual suspects, aka the Merchants of Doubt, to deceive the public about the perils of processed foods.
But don’t look to the USDA to counter those tactics in any meaningful way. As Moss notes, the USDA has the impossible job of simultaneously encouraging more wholesome eating habits while promoting the interests of industrial agriculture.
Any doubts about which of those mandates comes first? The USDA oversees the promotion of its agricultural agenda from its massive headquarters in the heart of Washington, D.C. But the branch of the USDA tasked with ensuring the public’s health, The Center For Nutritional Policy and Promotion, is located across the river on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. To get there, Moss had to take the DC Metro, transfer to a bus, and then walk a third of a mile. And out of a total budget of some $146 billion, the center receives a pitiful $6.5 million dollars. Hardly enough to offset the astronomical sums of money the food industry spends to develop and market its junky convenience foods.
Moss spent several years combing through mountains of documents, including confidential memos, and conducted hundreds of interviews with industry insiders. He found a few disillusioned whistleblowers and a handful of individuals who genuinely wanted to provide consumers with more wholesome options. But their efforts to chip away at the horrendous quantities of salt, fats and sugars the industry relies on to mask the shortcomings of its cheap commodity crop ingredients invariably hit a deadend labeled “Wall Street.”
Campbell’s Soup, for instance, found that it could reduce the sodium content of some of its soups without sacrificing too much flavor if they added dried herbs to their recipes. But the herbs were deemed “too expensive.” And despite claims from all of these companies that they are committed to offering healthier products, the reality is that none of them wants to risk sacrificing market share — or, as they call it, “stomach share” — to their competitors. To cut back on salt, fat and sugar is, essentially, a form of disarmament. So, barring some sort of self-imposed or government-mandated unilateral disarmament, there’s not likely to be much improvement in the quality of processed foods anytime soon.
In his interviews with scientists, food company executives, and other food industry insiders, Moss found their reactions to the public health hazard they’ve helped to create ran the gamut from defiantly unrepentant to sincerely remorseful. He notes, too, that whether food company executives openly acknowledge the shortcomings of their nutritionally dubious foodstuffs or not, none of them actually eats or drinks their own company’s products.
Under the circumstances, Moss writes, we’d be well advised to “think of the grocery store as a battlefield, dotted with landmines itching to go off.” The Wall Street Journal‘s review of Moss’s book dismissed this statement as “unnecessary hyperbole,” a word they also used to dismiss the scientists’ claims that junk foods can be as addictive in their own way as cocaine.
But as Salt Sugar Fat shows, it’s not hyperbole; it’s just another inconvenient truth. In the new documentary A Place at the Table, another exposé of our screwed-up food chain from Participant Media, who brought us Food, Inc., the actor and longtime anti-hunger activist Jeff Bridges bemoans the collective failure of private enterprise and public policy to provide affordable wholesome foods to all Americans. Instead, we’ve got government-subsidized empty calories from commodity crops and a rapacious food industry that seems to regard children as fair game in their eternal quest for greater market share.
“If another country was doing this to our kids,” Bridges says, “we would be at war.” When you read Salt Sugar Fat, it’s hard not to conclude that we already are at war. After all, there’s a real body count.
When Moss was a war correspondent in the Middle East, he wrote an article outlining the rules of jihadi etiquette, which included the edicts that “you can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt,” and “you can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.” The food industry folks that Moss interviewed for Salt Sugar Fat didn’t offer any such clear-cut commandments about acceptable levels of collateral damage. And anyway, it’s not their fault if we fail to exercise the proverbial ‘personal responsibility’ it requires to resist their strenuous efforts to tempt us to eat and drink ourselves sick. Besides, they’re just giving the public what it craves. And that, unlike salmonella and E. coli, is not by accident.
cross-posted from Civil Eats
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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/salt-sugar-fat-exposing-t_b_2829974.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: New York Times, Salt Sugar Fat, USDA, Wall Street Journal
Is Sugar Making the World Fat, Diabetic, and Hypertensive?
We’re moving toward a world with a shared diet. Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Pepsi can be found worldwide, and consumers around the world and in developing countries have developed a taste for our highly-processed food.
The shift from traditional diets in developing countries toward a Western diet — a diet high in refined sugars, animal based foods and vegetable oils — is known as nutrition transition. While this shift affords more food security and cheaper food, the move toward a Western diet has major health consequences, chief among them being obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
What is it about the Western dietary pattern that puts populations at risk?
Sugar, obesity and disease
A new study in Public Health Nutrition looked at the rates of overweight, obesity and high blood pressure (which are major risk factors for heart disease) in countries around the world and these countries’ availability of foods, including cereals, sugars, vegetable oils, fruits, starchy roots, pulses, total vegetables, alcoholic beverages, total meat, animal fat, eggs, milk, and fish and seafood.
The study, led by Mario Siervo, found that sugar consumption was directly associated with overweight, obesity and high blood pressure. Low intake of cereals and physical inactivity were also contributors, but nothing predicted how fat a country would be as much as how much sugar it consumes.
Coincidentally, another article looking at what people eat around was just published in PLoS One. This widely-publicized article by Sanjay Basu, Paula Yoffe, Nancy Hills, and Robert Lustig looked at the relationship between sugar availability and diabetes prevalence in 175 countries. After accounting for many factors, such as obesity, exercise, poverty, age, etc., the study found that the higher the sugar in the countries’ food supply, the higher the diabetes rates. Their conclusion was: “Every 150 kcal/person/day increase in sugar availability (about one can of soda/day) was associated with increased diabetes prevalence by 1.1 percent.”
What is it about sugar?
In a fascinating article about the science of creating addictive food in the New York Times, Michael Moss describes the well-known recipe to increase sales: “… one of the cardinal rules in processed food: When in doubt, add sugar.”
Sugar makes food craveable. That’s why sugar’s in everything.
So does sugar just make us consume too many calories because it makes food tastier and more desirable, or is there something inherently fattening and unhealthy about sugar? Dr. Robert Lustig is one of the leading voices warning that sugar is a major culprit in obesity and disease, and that sugar punishes us beyond the 4 calories per gram it sneaks in. Sugar, and especially its fructose component, Lustig claims, when consumed in excess, hits the liver rapidly, drives a whole cascade of metabolic outcomes, and causes fat production and insulin resistance. Lustig’s new PLoS One article supports this theory.
Lustig has his critics, of course, and other obesity and nutrition experts believe sugar drives obesity and disease just because of the quantities and rates we consume of the sweet stuff. Regardless of how we explain the sugar disease connection, there’s no doubt that to improve health we need to reduce sugar intake.
The World Health Organization recommended in 2003 that “added sugar” be limited to 10 percent of a person’s caloric intake. The American Heart Association (AHA) went further and recommended that women should consume no more than 100 calories of added sugars per day (6 teaspoons) and most men no more than 150 calories (9 teaspoons). One 12-ounce can of Coke contains 130 calories in added sugars, which puts women over the AHA upper limit — no room for bread, sweetened yogurt, and just forget about dessert.
Unfortunately, we don’t even know how much added sugar is in our processed food, as our food label only lists total sugars — both innate carbs and added sugar — in the sugar component of the label.
Efforts to curb sugar consumption in the U.S. face strong opposition from the industry. The Yale Rudd Center summarizes progress and efforts to reduce sugary drink consumption in different states in this nifty interactive map. Although sugar consumption is very high in the U.S. and in other developed countries, it has plateaued and even declined in the last decade. The new study in Public Health Nutrition reminds us that in developing countries, sugar intake continues to rise — and will probably result in an increase in chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Therefore, the developing world needs policies that limit added sugars, hopefully before the train leaves the station.
Dr. Ayala
Disclosure: I’m vice president of product development for Herbal Water, where we make organic herb-infused waters that have zero calories and no sugar or artificial ingredients. I’m also a pediatrician and have been promoting good nutrition and healthy lifestyle for many years.
For more by Ayala Laufer-Cahana, M.D., click here.
For more on diet and nutrition, click here.
Follow Ayala Laufer-Cahana, M.D. on Twitter:
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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ayala-laufercahana-md/sugar-obesity_b_2789707.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Herbal Water, New York Times, Public Health Nutrition, Robert Lustig
Lose weight — run a vacuum? Fat rates rise as housework falls off
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American women are fat because they don’t vacuum enough. That’s — kind of — the finding from a new study published this month on American waistlines.
The study, reported by the New York Times, is a follow-up to a 2011 full research report showing a five-decade trend of American workers to hold sit-down jobs versus physical labor positions. That trend, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, means workers are burning 150 fewer calories per day than they used to, the report said.
Coincidentally, over the same 50-year period, America’s obesity rate has been on a steady climb. But the study based on BLS numbers overlooked a key population segment — women who worked at home.
So researchers launched a new study, focusing on the stay-at-home woman. And, in a roundabout way, the study concludes that obesity rates are hitting these women hard, too, due to their rising avoidance of physical household chores.
Women in the 1960s spent nearly 26 hours per week on average cleaning, cooking and doing laundry, the New York Times said. Fast-forward to 2010, and women only spent a little more than 13 hours per week on average on housework. And they were spending almost 17 hours a week on average in front of the television.
“Those are large reductions in energy expenditure” that could lead to significant weight gain, said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study. “We need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into” our lives.
Mr. Archer had several suggestions.
“Walk to the mailbox,” he said. “Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog.”
He also clarified that he wasn’t trying to suggest men or women engaged in more housework.
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Article source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/1/fat-rates-rise-housework-falls-off/
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Edward Archer, Labor Statistics, Lavender Inc, New York Times
How Food Giants Keep Us Sick, Fat and Coming Back for More
The international obesity epidemic didn’t just happen by accident. Sure, people’s lifestyle habits shifted from active to sedentary. And, yes, we moved to the suburbs and stopped cooking at home so much.
But a new book suggests a more calculated and insidious reason why two-thirds of American adults and one-third of children are overweight or obese: The food industry started crafting foods that were of little nutritional value but kept consumers reaching for more.
Is Big Food Getting Even Bigger?
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss, is a detailed look at how the food industry has contributed to America’s nutritional mess by infusing processed foods with what he calls the “pillars” of the industry: sugar, salt and fat. Moss’ reporting turned up evidence that the industry capitalized on the ability of these three ingredients to mask bitter flavors that develop during manufacturing and to hook consumers on taste.
“Companies convincingly argue that they haven’t intended to make Americans obese or ill,” Moss told TakePart. “But they have been driving hard for decades to make their products as utterly crave-able as possible. They know from their research that when they engineer the perfect amounts of salt, sugar, and fat they will send us over the moon.”
Moss describes food industry marketing campaigns that were adapted from tobacco company blueprints aimed at downplaying health risks by promoting a fix or two designed to make a product a bit healthier. “You see a proliferation of products billed as low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt,” he says. “These are extensions to their mainline products which remain their biggest sellers.” However, these niche products are rarely truly healthy. Many products labeled low-fat, for example, are high in sugar. Or products labeled low-salt are high in both fat and sugar, Moss says.
Some food industry campaigns were adapted from tobacco company blueprints to downplay health risks.
The marketing of these foods has long been a contention of public health experts who criticize commercials of sugary cereals and candy airing around children’s television shows. Moss’ book describes in detail how the introduction of Kraft’s premade meal for kids, Lunchables, created a huge trend of ready-to-eat snacks and meals for kids that were heavy on sugar, salt, and fat but were marketed in an upscale fashion.
Lunchables—lunch-box-sized packages of finger foods, like crackers, cheese, and salami slices—appealed to working mothers who didn’t have time to make peanut-butter sandwiches or peel an orange for their kids in the morning. “Some people have viewed it as the poster child of our over-dependence on processed foods,” Moss says. “One of the more amazing marketing campaigns for Lunchables was this idea that Lunchables were more than about food.” The advertising campaign, directed at kids, delivered a message that they could choose to eat whatever they wanted at lunchtime—not what Mom served at home. “It became empowering to kids. And it helped bring the fast-food industry into the grocery store,” he says.
Food companies also engineer some products to appeal to certain ethnic groups. For example, Frito-Lay, he says, has introduced Sabrita’s brand of salty snacks, including potato chips that have twice as much salt as regular chips and additional sugar. The product is aimed at Hispanics, who have even higher rates of obesity than white Americans.
Frito-Lay has introduced a brand aimed at Hispanics with twice as much salt and more sugar. Hispanics have among the highest obesity rates.
And while many Americans are aware that they’re often manipulated into eating things they shouldn’t, it’s not as easy to select healthier foods as it perhaps should be. Companies add labels to their packages touting “all-natural” or “contains real fruit juice,” but that doesn’t mean these food items are healthy, Moss explains.
Nutrition labels are still of little help to consumers, he says, because companies divide ingredients into serving sizes (typically much smaller than what people really eat) to make the amounts of salt, sugar, and fat seem reasonable, instead of what they are, which is horrendously unhealthy.
Manufacturers will find it hard to change their ways, he predicts. “They’re between a rock and hard place,” Moss says. “They feel pressure from consumers. They have their own huge dependence on these three ingredients. They’re cheap. They’re effective in all kinds of ways. Then you have Wall Street,” he adds, which leans on the industry to maintain big profits.
Government regulation may be needed to produce real change, Moss says. For example, processed foods are cheap compared to fresh produce. Some type of government action may be able to level the playing field regarding food pricing. But, he says: “Unfortunately, a lot of burden is going to fall on consumers. If we’re going to get control of the situation then we have to pay more attention in shopping and meal preparation.”
Should food companies be forced to reduce sugar, salt, and fat content through government regulation?
Related Stories on TakePart:
• Walmart Wants You to Have Local Strawberries
• 5 Obesity Myths You Probably Believe
• A Surprising Dip in Childhood Obesity Rates
Shari Roan is an award-winning health writer based in Southern California. She is the author of three books on health and science subjects.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/food-giants-keep-us-sick-fat-coming-back-175639304.html
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: New York Times, Related Stories, Salt Sugar Fat, Southern California
Mediterranean diet over low fat? Well, at least it’s more fun
It sounds like a happy hour dream: Now, scientists say, you can have your wine and eat the nuts that go with it, and be healthier in the bargain. A rigorous new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine should finally put to rest any doubts about whether a Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil or nuts as well as fish, with a glass of wine per day also allowed — promotes better cardiovascular health than the way most of us eat. It does.
That might not be surprising, but up to now, advice on the Mediterranean diet has been based on correlation: People in Mediterranean areas that tend to follow that way of eating experienced lower incidence of stroke and other cardiovascular problems. Could the difference have been genetic? Could people who ate that way also be doing other things that made the crucial difference? The new study, conducted in Spain, randomly assigned a large number of subjects to different eating styles, made sure they were following it and measured results — not lab-test results but illness and death.
But what about the long-standing battle between those who believe that a very low-fat diet is the best way to fend off cardiac risk, and those who espouse a way of eating much higher in the so-called good fats? Should all of the people carefully counting their daily fat grams give up the effort and take a spoonful of medicine in the form of olive oil? (Or, as the study had it, four tablespoons a day — close to 500 calories of fat before you’ve eaten a solid thing.) Here the situation is much more complicated.
The study meant to compare the two. The control group was supposed to eat a low-fat diet. The problem, as reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, was that those people barely reduced their fat intake, even after receiving additional coaching. That’s why the article words things this way:
“We designed a randomized trial to test the efficacy of two Mediterranean diets (one supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil and another with nuts), as compared with a control diet (advice on a low-fat diet), on primary cardiovascular prevention.”
The researchers could have made that clearer at the get-go: Receiving advice on a diet isn’t the same as eating that way most days. So the actual comparison was between a Mediterranean diet and the standard way of eating among Spaniards (who apparently, in many ways, are not following a Mediterranean diet no matter what their geographical location happens to be).
What this study may have shown us about the difference between Mediterranean and low fat is that the former is easier to follow. There were no big problems getting subjects to ingest olive oil, wine and seafood. Low fat? Not so much.
The believers in low-fat diets could legitimately argue that the control group received too little coaching and support for their way of eating. But there’s also a reality that has to be taken into account. No matter what future research shows about the value of a low-fat or very low-fat diet, when it comes to improving public health, we might need not just a healthier diet but one that large numbers of people will find sustainable over a lifetime.
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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-mediterranean-diet-study-20130226,0,2012054.story
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Categories: Fat Loss Diary Tags: Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spain, Wall Street Journal