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a HEARTy eating plan

How hard is it to get the heart health benefits of a reduced carbohydrate diet? It isn’t that hard. Research from Univ. Cal Davis showed that dropping your carbs to 30-40% of calories will allow you to start yielding the benefits (e.g. lower triglyceride levels).  In the April 2008 issue of Men’s Health (page 50) I wrote a research blurb about one of these studies (see picture).

Fat in 2008? It isn’t your fault Part 2

Yesterday we ended with the following…

Let’s recap so far.

1. People eat away from their homes more than ever.

2. People are terrible at estimating the caloric value of foods.

How does that make you being overweight not your fault?

….you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out

Many of you may be wondering where I’m going with this. Here we go.

Restaurants and other foods serving places (those are places that call themselves restaurants but their food is so bad they shouldn’t fall into the “restaurant” category) have begun to do something very sneaky. In an effort to boost taste, flavor, and perceived value they have figured out ways to cram inordinate amounts of calories into “normal” looking foods.

This results in our inability of judge caloric value of foods even MORE detrimental to our health especially when you couple this with the fact that people eat out more than ever. Here are some really good examples (courtesy of Men’s Health):

Ruby Tuesday’s Turkey Bella Burger - Turkey burger. Must be healthy right? It even has portabella mushrooms. It also has almost 1200 calories! 1200 calories!!!! Are they serious? when should a burger ever have 1200 calories? Seriously, give me an example, Ruby?

Massive Burritos - There is a whole crop (crop or crap?) of Franchises popping up that serve massive burritos. I recently spoke with a friend of mine who opted for the lower calorie version (no rice or beans). It still ended up being ~800 calories!!!

Here’s another one

Boston Market Rotisserie Chicken (Dark Meat), Sweet Potato Casserole, and Market Chopped Side Salad - Good? Only to the tune of 1400 calories.

While I know that one would not call these items low calorie but I doubt anyone would guess that they are such high calorie. Also, I am not about giving people excuses for carrying around overweight. Poor eating and lack of exercises are the two main reasons and you have control over those things. But you may not have known about the insane caloric inflation that is going on at restaurants across the country.

But now you know.

You have not excuse for the extra fat around your midsection anymore (well you never did but it made a good title).

Have a great weekend (and be skeptical about caloric values when you eat out)

-Mike

Fat In 2008? It isn’t Your Fault

How about that?

Let’s say you’re a little overweight. Maybe you’re more than a little overweight.

Good news…it isn’t you fault.

Seriously. I’ve been thinking about this a bunch over the past week or so. What do people do more today than ever? Other than sit on their rear end.

Eat out.

People are always eating on the go.

We also know from studies done decades ago (some before I was even born!), that people don’t do a very good job of estimating the caloric value of foods. Let’s be honest. People are TERRIBLE at looking at a food, saying “Yeah that’s about 257 calories.”, and being accurate. So next time you look at that heaping spoon full of peanut butter and say “That’s about 2 tablespoon.”

STOP before suck down what is really ¼ cup.

Let’s recap so far.

1. People eat away from their homes more than ever.

2. People are terrible at estimating the caloric value of foods.

How does that make you being overweight not your fault?

….you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out

Biggest Loser - Why Did They Stop Losing??

I’m not a huge fan of the Biggest Loser show but for whatever reason my wife and I have been recording the shows this season. If you watch the show you’ll know that during the first week the contestants lost an incredible amount of weight (30lbs in a week!); but this week the weight loss was SLOW and one woman gained a pound. My wife and I talked a bunch about what happened to cause such a great halt in weight loss.

I was going to write about it but here on the NN Blog but I just read a post by Adam Campbell over at Men’s Health and he laid things out very clearly so I won’t rehash it. Click the link and read what Adam had to say:

Adam’s Take on The Biggest Loser

I should note that one thing that I think happened that Adam didn’t address was metabolism and I think this plays a big role. These people were used to consuming a large amount of calories. To some extent the more you eat the more your metabolism increases (to some extent). Then these people started exercising a TON. But they also started to severely restrict their calories (SEVERELY). I hypothesize that during the first week there was a period in which the contests’ metabolisms were way up and their intake was way down. This huge gap in intake vs expenditure caused huge weight loss for some people.

But this week their bodies responded (via a survival mechanism) in an almost supercompensation mechanism and their metabolisms were greatly down regulated. Thus the gap between intake and expenditure was much smaller.

I have a feeling that this coming week their weight loss number will increase again as their bodies adapt a little and go out of metabolic/caloric deprivation shock. We’ll see.

Now go read Adam’s Take on The Biggest Loser

Hey Men…listen up!

Typical day here in the office at Penn State. I’m sitting at my desk hunting through Pubmed abstracts for information on obesity, heart disease, and dyslipidemia for a scientific paper I’m writing and I got distracted (surprising huh). I started searching for some information on green tea consumption in China. I wanted to see what their maximum daily consumption is, see if I could match it, and observe any weight loss effects.

So I came across a paper that found that men in China who go less than 5 hours of sleep a night or men that are overweight has lower testosterone levels. Now there is a good chance that you (as a man in American) are overweight (66% chance) and not getting more than 5 hours sleep. That’s a double downer for your T-levels.

So….get some sleep and lose that gut !
Back to work…

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