Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Coronavirus Chronicles — Holiday Excess vs. COVID-19

Pat Hartman October 15, 2020 2 Comments

The pandemic might have one good effect, namely, reducing the amount of candy eaten around Halloween. This could reduce the amount of ultimate damage to America’s young. And old. If you think Grandma never sneaked a chocolate bar out of somebody’s trick-or-treat stash, think again. Anyway, the elimination of at least some of the usual mountain of sweets consumed might make it just a little bit easier to prevent childhood obesity.

Several factors are in play. It is more difficult to get to stores, and more annoying to observe the new rules of shopping. A lot of people have much less discretionary income than they used to. Treats are not in the budget unless they happen to be found at the Food Bank.

On the other hand, stressed-out parents are strongly motivated to give the kids whatever abomination they want to eat, if it will increase the household’s peace by a small increment. The Catch-22 in that arrangement of course is that sugar can turn children into hyperactive maniacs, a condition that does not usually increase tranquillity in the home environment.

On the third hand, many people, including children and teens, are already heavier than they would have been, if not for the coronavirus and the consequent lockdowns, quarantines, shelterings-in-place, playground closures, and other immobilizing conditions necessitated by the virus.

And people want their fun

Just because there will not be as much trick-or-treat action as was seen in previous years, that does not mean Halloween will go uncelebrated. Come to think of it, “celebrate” is an odd word to use for the ritual ingestion of tons of yucky stuff like…

[…] bleached and heavily processed flour, artificial colors derived from petroleum, nasty preservatives, GMO refined white sugars, GMO oils, and the absolute worst ingredients you can put in food.

That is Vani Hari’s description of the contents of the typical retail establishment’s “Holiday Death Aisle.” The best thing to do with that piece of real estate is to avoid it entirely. Manufacturers are not really selling food, she explains, but pseudo-food made from the cheapest and most process-damaged and nutritionally depleted ingredients.

This is accepted by a compliant public because what the industry actually markets is not food but comfort. They are selling nostalgia and all the complicated emotions that go with it, including the delusion that any particular fattening holiday only comes once a year. Hari says,

[…] but really it’s ALL YEAR. Almost immediately after they clear the Halloween candy from their shelves, grocery stores stock up on Christmas candy and all the fast food places come out with “holiday drinks” […] and then comes Valentine’s Day […] and then Easter […] and it really just keeps going in an endless cycle of toxic seasonal treats.

Hari, also known as the Food Babe, investigates and reports on (surprise!) food. She confesses,

My typical American diet landed me where that diet typically does, in a hospital. It was then, in the hospital bed more than ten years ago, that I decided to make health my number one priority.

And then she holds out hope:

When we all vote with our dollars by choosing to buy products that are sustainably produced, we actively shape the market place. Companies have no choice but to respond to us and improve the quality of their products.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How To Avoid The Holiday Death Aisle This Year And Beyond!,” FoodBabe.com, undated
Source: “About Me,” FoodBabe.com, undated
Image by Scott Mcleod/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles: The End of Halloween?

Pat Hartman October 14, 2020 2 Comments

There is an old saying: “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” The annotation to that is, you might get it in a way you didn’t expect, that turns out to be not so great. After all these years of encouraging that the annual October candy orgy should be curbed, Childhood Obesity News is seeing that wish, for the most part, come true. This year, because of COVID-19, far fewer people will be distributing Halloween treats, and far fewer children will be out there hoping to fill their plastic pumpkins.

In some neighborhoods, traditional trick-or-treating is out of the question. In others, people have come up with some amazing workarounds to preserve social distancing. They have devised clever pulley systems, or fastened decorated segments of PVC pipe to their stair rails to send candy sliding down into children’s bags.

The other half of the equation

But what about the recipients of the treats? And their adult caregivers? The question is never easy, but this time it must be incredibly difficult for parents to make the decision about trick-or-treating. Of course, some danger has always been perceived, especially when the candy-collecting journey happens after dark. A child could trip and fall, or be hit by a car. Extremely unlikely as the possibility might be, parents are always afraid that a child could be kidnapped. Although candy-tampering stories may have turned out to be urban myths, it might have happened somewhere, some time.

But this pandemic presents a whole different level of risk. A child exposed to the virus could die, or suffer a lifetime of diminished capacity in the form of organ damage. It may be as rare as the poisoning scenario, but it could happen. For families that decide to let their children go house-to-house, a cheery mom has recorded a pep talk about best practices. If you must do the trick-or-treat thing, it would not hurt to give her a listen.

Just say no to hayrides

Of course, some familiar activities should not even be considered, like indoor parties. That is a big, fat no. Apparently, hayrides have been a big Halloween tradition in various parts of America. This writer’s personal recollection of church-sponsored hayrides in the middle school years includes a closed truck filled with hay bales and hormonally-charged teenagers. Not a great idea on any level.

But what about an open wagon? Apparently, in several states, the “haunted hayride” is a thing, along with variations like spook walks, zombie farms, and haunted trails. Even though the vehicles are not enclosed and feature open air, there is still some risk. Sure, it’s fun to ride past a pretend graveyard where someone hides behind a tree and utters blood-chilling cries. But what if someone ends up in a real graveyard? In this photo from a previous year, the riders are pretty well packed in there, and the proprietor probably must carry a certain number of customers just to make the enterprise financially viable.

In Los Angeles, creative entrepreneurs have come up with an alternative — they rent a drive-in theater, where the attendees stay in their cars while scenes from horror movies are shown, and “scareactors” roam around frightening them. The admission price is steep, starting at $50 per car, which could be prohibitive for families with children. And sadly, most cities are not even equipped for such shenanigans. This Halloween, staying home is safer than most alternatives.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Halloween at a distance,” Fox23.com, 09/16/20
Source: “Trick or Treating Safety in 2020,” YouTube.com, 09/22/20
Images by USFWS Mountain-Prairie and Ben+Sam/CC BY-SA 2.0

Diets, Dieting, and a Best Diet?

Pat Hartman October 13, 2020 No Comments

As we have seen, the word “diet” is in itself a neutral term that simply means what a person or animal eats. From the Mid America Heart Institute, cardiologist James O’Keefe states,

We’ve realized that diet is arguably the most important predictor of long-term health and well-being.

The corollary to that is, most major health problems are connected to the ways we eat. For instance, any restrictive diet that eliminates “whole macronutrient categories or food groups” carries more risk than reward. The exception of course is an underlying medical condition — like diabetes, celiac disease, or peanut allergy — that absolutely demands avoidance of certain foods.

One problem with embarking on any kind of restrictive diet is that it might turn out to be unsustainable. A person who lives in a remote area or is economically challenged may be unable to obtain the particular class of food desired, or avoid the other kinds. Also, there is the boredom factor. Someone who is very disciplined most of the time is also likely to rebel against the monotony and just go nuts once in a while and scarf down a dozen doughnuts. Even when a highly restrictive regimen that aims for weight loss is carried out successfully, “it could also contribute to the development of a disease or disorder 20 or 30 years later.”

So, what should we eat?

The Institute recommends a diet that is not “overly prescriptive” in terms of portion sizes or calorie counts. There are, of course, things that everyone would be wise to shun, like sugar, refined grains, and processed meats. The typical American diet, O’Keefe says, is rife with stuff based on white flour and/or sugar, and then highly processed and worse yet, fried, so it comes out “toxic and just highly addictive.”

Is there an ideal diet for cardiovascular health? O’Keefe and other colleagues examined this question and very recently published a report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. It appears that there is something close to ideal, and that is the pesco-Mediterranean diet. This consists, as the name suggests, of fish, along with plant-based foods and extra-virgin olive oil.

What is extra-virgin olive oil?

To be truthfully labeled extra-virgin, olive oil must be extracted by crushing, with no temperature elevation or solvents, and should come out with a pungent aroma and tasting fruity, but with a bitter edge. Its features include monounsaturated fats, antioxidants, vitamins E and K, and anti-inflammatory action. It appears to promote the health of the endothelium, or lining of the body’s blood vessels, and might help prevent unwanted clotting.

But wait, there’s more

Getting back to the paper that Dr. O’Keefe co-authored, the contents of the actual diet are only part of the story. It also involves time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting. The practice is to consume all the day’s calories within a window of 8 to 12 hours, which gives the body 12 or more hours, out of every 24, to attend to other matters besides digesting food. As Dr. O’Keefe puts it,

Time-restricted eating is a great way to reduce total calories and also get inflammation and hormones back into healthy ranges.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Science Might Have Identified the Optimal Human Diet,” Medium.com, 10/01/20
Source: “Extra Virgin Olive Oil,” OliveOilTimes.com, undated
Image by Maria Keays/CC BY 2.0

Food and Diets

Pat Hartman October 12, 2020 No Comments

Instead of “dieting” based on reducing calorie intake, nutritionist and nutrition science writer Maria Cross MSc, makes this recommendation:

The long-term solution is easier, more effective and evidence based. It involves these three principles:

1. When you cut out unnecessary carbohydrates, you burn body fat
2. When you eat fat, you burn fat.
3. When you eat protein, you stay full for much longer.

At the end of the day, this is still, technically, dieting. Because your diet is whatever you happen to eat.

Or… Maybe your diet is the prescribed plan that you have good intentions of following, whether to alleviate an illness or to reshape your body. The kinds advertised on magazine covers are more accurately described as reducing diets. Then, there are more variations. The diet could be a deliberate plan based on a positive principle, like “An apple a day.” Or it could be based on a strong negative admonition, like “No carbs ever.” Because the D-word has stretched out to cover so many meanings, misunderstandings have arisen.

Fitness expert Sean Croxton suggests that weight loss theory is too complicated and confusing for people to get a handle on, in addition to all the other things they have to deal with. He says of dieting, “It stresses people out. You know what? Stress makes you fat.” Here is his advice:

Eat right 80% of the time, other 20% of the time, get your groove on, have fun, enjoy your family, enjoy your friends. Don’t be the weird one out there being all evangelical about your food. Nobody likes that…

We always tell people the best diet to stick to. It is a diet that you can stick to.

More and more experts employ the term “multifactorial.” Purdue University’s Regan Bailey, Ph.D., MPH, is quoted as saying that many individual factors can cause people to respond differently to the same diet. Journalist Markham Heid adds,

These include person-to-person genetic variation, age, baseline nutritional status, inflammation levels, and microbiome makeup — to name just a few.

Joanna Blythman told audiences in her Guardian article that by advertising any food as low-fat, “you can sell people any old rubbish.” Also,

Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed.

This was in reaction to decades of what some critics view as the demonization of fat, which was carried out in order to divert suspicion from sugar. When a person embarks on a mission to get the body in order, the publication of new studies can sometimes upend their cherished beliefs. For instance,

[…] trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Dark Side of Fat Loss with Sean Croxton,” DaveAsprey.com, undated
Source: “Science Might Have Identified the Optimal Human Diet,” Medium.com, 10/01/20
Source: “Why Almost Everything You’ve Been Told About Unhealthy Foods is Wrong,” Guardian.co.uk, 02/03/15
Image by Alan Cleaver/CC BY 2.0

Calories and Junk Food

Pat Hartman October 9, 2020 No Comments

The subjects of the last few posts overlap in complicated and interesting ways. The energy balance idea, for instance, seems like it should be so straightforward. It’s science, right? By feeding in the exact right number of calories, and expending the exact right amount of energy, the body can be reduced; enlarged; or maintained at the same weight. Only, it turns out not to be that simple.

There is strong evidence that all calories are not created equal. However unfair it might seem, different foodstuffs might be judged good or bad, positive or negative, healthful or harmful. The concept of food addiction just does not go away, and neither does the idea that some foods could easily be mistaken for hard drugs. Some foods are addictive to some people, which makes them dangerous.

Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck

One contributing factor to the obesity epidemic is society’s willful blindness and refusal to acknowledge that fat, sugar, and salt are, in every meaningful sense, drugs. Jed Diamond, Ph.D., says,

A common definition of the word drug is any substance that in small amounts produces significant changes in body, mind, or both.

A proponent of this viewpoint is investigative reporter Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, which contains some truly disturbing numbers regarding the consumption of those commodities. He makes individual cases for the drug-like qualities and actions of salt, sugar, and fat. We are hooked on this stuff, supplied to us by the slickest dealer in town, UPF, the ultra-processed foods industry.

In describing Moss’s work, Diamond says of the harmful substances we eat,

They come from processed food and the giant food companies are making a killing with huge sales, while we and our children get fatter and sicker. These foods can contribute to everything from addictions to Alzheimer’s.

Fat, sugar, and salt are loaded into more and more foods because it is good for business, even if it’s bad for people. This will only change when people band together and break free of our collective addictions…

None of this is new. For a random example, a decade-old report from the United Kingdom notes that fast food is notorious for fat, sugar, and salt. The take-away establishments have been the scenes of many attempts to use calories strategically in advertising and in-store policy. The British Food Standards Agency convinced the outlets to prominently display calorie counts. Getting them to agree to it was easier than getting them to do it.

The few who complied soon lost enthusiasm. The outlook was grim. Commenting at the time, Martin Hickman wrote,

Despite growing waistlines and the annual cost of billions of pounds to the NHS in treating obesity and other diet-related illness, diners usually have to search out calorie information. Most chains only list nutritional information such as calories and fat and sugar content on their websites rather than prominently in their stores. Some, such as Starbucks and Costa Coffee, do offer an in-store leaflet — if customers request the information.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Are Fat, Sugar, and Salt the New Heroin, Meth, and Cocaine?,” Medium.com, 09/22/20
Source: “Fast Food Chains Drop Watchdog’s Calorie-Count Display Scheme,” Independent.co.uk, 07/26/10
Image by franchise opportunities/CC BY-SA 2.0

What Is a Diet?

Pat Hartman October 8, 2020 2 Comments

In the broadest sense, a diet is simply whatever an animal eats. The diet of penguins is krill, fish, and squid. The diet of humans includes thousands of items, many of them replete with harmful chemicals and/or empty calories. An impoverished person might live for weeks on a diet of pasta and popcorn. The four-letter word itself implies neither health benefits nor choice.

In the healing realm, medical science has devised an array of special diets to treat, or at least to avoid worsening, various conditions. The cardiac diet, the GI soft diet, the renal diet, and the diabetic diet are designed for the benefit of specific body parts or systems. The clear liquid diet, the low fiber diet, the cleansing diet, and the vegetarian diet all have their functions.

The doctor might order a specific diet to restrict the intake of salt, carbohydrates, or fat. In a hospital setting, the patient has little choice. When it comes to compliance at home, some patients observe the rules more diligently than others.

Reducing diets and other body mods

Then there are diets whose point is to restructure the body, for purposes of weight loss, increased strength, and general fitness. When experts condemn diets and dieting, this is what they are talking about. Thousands of influencers, all over the world, believe they have the true answers, and most are not shy about denouncing others in their field who have different answers. As fitness expert Sean Croxton has said,

Everybody talking trash about everybody else’s diet and we just need to reel ourselves back in… I think we need to just go back and focus on what real food really is and that’s when we came up with the slogan of “Just Eat Real Food.”

One of the registered dietitians of NourishColorado.com wrote:

Dieting is the act of restricting the amount and/or type of food you eat in order to lose weight. Going on a diet entails demonizing a food, food group, or macronutrient. Diets ignore hunger/fullness cues, and take the pleasure out of food…

But making a choice from a place of “I should eat this to be healthy” is the diet mentality… All foods fit into a healthful relationship with food when we don’t rely on diets to tell us what to eat…

This writer branches off into yet another tangential issue: Where is the borderline between a diet and a full-blown lifestyle?

You can’t make this stuff up

During a recent year, 42% of American adults went on some kind of diet for some period of time. And yet, the weight of an average American grownup increased by 4.6%. Rami Bailony, M.D., has seen enough to know that people can “do everything right” and still keep gaining weight. He adds his voice to the ever-growing chorus who use the term “multifaceted,” because…

The cause of the obesity epidemic is far more complex than a calories equation. It is the result of interactions between environmental, behavioral, psychological, medical, genetic, and microbiomic factors.

Sometimes, the headline tells the whole discouraging story. For example: “Study Shows 1 In 4 Kids Have Dieted By Age 7.” In Dr. Pretlow’s experience, dieting generally leads to a vicious cycle, as he discusses in his book, Overweight: What Kids Say. For more details, visit the Weigh2Rock website, and to learn how the concept of diet meshes with the W8Loss2Go program, check out the “Approach” page.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Dark Side of Fat Loss with Sean Croxton,” DaveAsprey.com, undated
Source: “What is a diet, and can a lifestyle be a diet?,” NourishedColorado.com, 01/20/18
Source: “Obesity Is About So Much More Than Diet and Exercise,” Medium.com, 01/08/20
Source: “Study Shows 1 In 4 Kids Have Dieted By Age 7,” HuffPost.com, 03/17
Image by Marco Verch/CC BY 2.0

Move More, Eat Less

Pat Hartman October 7, 2020 No Comments

There is more to consider about calories and their role in health, especially in weight control. We saw how animals are becoming fatter — not just pets and feral animals, but even the ones whose diets and activities are rigidly controlled by human intervention.

A general trend toward bigness is overtaking the human population, too. Here is a quotation about Edward Archer, Ph.D., of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center and Office of Energetics:

Archer says that previously there were no valid theories as to why children are becoming so obese so rapidly, and that the common notion of “moving too little and eating too much” is simplistic and leads to the stigmatization of a large portion of our population.

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned science writer David Berreby, who also uses the word “simplistic” to describe the credo of “eat less, move more.” For backup, he quotes a professor of child nutrition, Jonathan C. K. Wells, who has looked into the particulars of how easy it would be to lose weight, if only the four-word saying could encompass the totality of what is going on, which apparently it cannot. Wells talks about a study which indicated that when someone takes in only 30 calories per day more than they burn, serious weight gain can result.

But then, wouldn’t that seem to imply the converse? That creating a deficit of that same daily 30 calories should lead to serious weight loss? Except, it doesn’t, as hundreds of thousands of “starvation diet” veterans will attest. Berreby writes,

Given what each person consumes in a day […] 30 calories is a trivial amount: by my calculations, that’s just two or three peanut M&Ms. If eliminating that little from the daily diet were enough to prevent weight gain, then people should have no trouble losing a few pounds. Instead, as we know, they find it extremely hard.

As always, this debate over “eat less, move more” has larger implications. First of all, there is nothing wrong with the idea, up to a point. Many, many people would be much better off, in general, if they ate less and moved more. It’s not like anyone is encouraging gluttony and laziness.

But wait. Actually, the manufacturers and advertisers of highly processed foods are proponents of gluttony and laziness. They are also big fans of the concept of personal responsibility, which translates as, “Look, nobody forced you to buy our so-called food products, so we take no blame for anything the stuff does to you. People are fat because they want to be, and if they die from it, they made their own choice.” That is the party line.

Even though eating less might be a good idea in most cases, and even though moving more might be good idea in most cases, neither of those practices can fix everything and everybody. “Eat less, move more” has a nice ring to it. But as Berreby points out, “What we don’t know is whether the theory is actually correct.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Novel Theory Connects Mothers to Childhood Obesity: Evolution Is the Cause, and Moms Are the Cure,” Newswise.com, 11/17/14
Source: “The Obesity Era,” GetPocket.com, 06/19/13
Image by deb@deb-gray.com/CC BY-SA 2.0

Eat Less, Move More

Pat Hartman October 6, 2020 2 Comments

Calories are involved in two major differences of opinion. There is the disagreement about whether some calories are good while others are bad. Then, there is the energy balance controversy. Is the body an organic calculator that rigidly tracks every calorie that comes in? Does the body also accurately record how many of those atoms have been converted into energy, and conduct itself accordingly, no matter what else is going on in any of the numerous systems? Could the relationship between calories and weight, like so many other things, be multifactorial?

Jerome Groopman, writer on biology and medicine for The New Yorker, affirmed that one of the few unchallengeable facts of dietary science is, “[I]f energy gained exceeds output, the excess becomes fat.” He went on to say,

Still, further research has shown that calories eaten are only part of what determines weight. Our metabolism reflects an interplay of things like genes, hormones, and the bacteria that populate the gut, so how much energy we absorb from what we eat varies from person to person.

Big and overarching concerns

Science writer David Berreby made a strong effort to get to the crux of the matter, and came at it from the angle of obese animals. People will literally feed their pets to death. Dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals that are overindulged are called spoiled, and sometimes they literally are. Their health may be ruined by diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or arthritis — all due to consuming calories, either too many or the wrong kind. But at the end of the day, the tragedy is traceable to human error.

Feral rats have been getting fatter, too, which is also explainable. They have been making out like bandits, thanks to human heedlessness and ignorance. Both house pets and wild scavengers have good reason to get fat. People are quite wasteful and careless about how they dispose of their excess of anything, so, again, this phenomenon is ultimately caused by humans.

On the other hand, some humans are neither ignorant nor careless. Researchers, for instance, are very exacting, and they discovered something that kind of freaks them out. Berreby says the overall weight gain is happening among species that are not subject to pampering, namely, lab animals:

[R]ecords show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. Obviously, if animals are getting heavier along with us, it can’t just be that they’re eating more Snickers bars and driving to work most days. On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.

When journalist Joanna Blythman researched supposedly unhealthful foods, she admitted to regarding the “well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye,” and wrote some uncomplimentary words about calories:

After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time.

Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is Fat Killing You, or is Sugar?,” NewYorker.com, 04/03/17
Source: “The Obesity Era,” GetPocket.com, 06/19/13
Source: “Why almost everything you’ve been told about unhealthy foods is wrong,” TheGuardian.com, 03/22/14
Image by Elliott Brown/CC BY-SA 2.0

When Is a Calorie Not a Calorie?

Pat Hartman October 5, 2020 2 Comments

The energy balance paradigm assumes that caloric intake and output can be accurately, consistently measured, and that “eat less move more” is the answer to everything. If actual experience stubbornly belies the ability of this formula to cover every case, it might be assumed that something is wrong with how intake and/or output are being measured. Maybe the grad student who crunched the numbers was having a bad day. Perhaps the patient or the research subject supplied incorrect data, or simply lied.

The energy balance concept is closely linked with the idea that all calories are created equal. Food obsession is very similar to other mental/emotional disorders in which a person is held in thrall by a substance (cocaine) or experience (gambling) to the point where we call it an addiction.

But with food, there seem to be sub-categories. Are people loving the food itself, or the familiar, habitual, comforting actions and sensations involved in eating? How much of the preoccupation with food has to do with quality, and how much is dependent on a simple desire for quantity? Things get complicated, and outlier behaviors confuse the issues. Dr. Pretlow once mused,

From the difficulty we’ve encountered recruiting young people for our study, who are willing to reduce their food intake, it portends of an obesity Armageddon.

Most youth in our studies seem to want to engage in calorie counting to lose weight, even though we’ve stated firmly up front that our app does not involve calorie counting. I suspect the reason is that they can eat large amounts of “low calorie” food.

Calorie counting would seem to still leave the individual hooked on food, even though low calorie.

As it turns out, no matter what anyone thinks they know about calories, somebody else thinks they are wrong. Childhood Obesity News has mentioned a report that was said to “move the debate beyond calories.” The 22 scientists who contributed to the paper determined that there are specific pathways and mechanisms that account for the mysterious ability of some calories to be more harmful than others. About this significant research, Dr. Pretlow said at the time,

The paper finds that soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages increase health risks when compared with the same number of calories from other carbohydrates such as starch. That’s a big deal because it contradicts the beverage industry claim that “all calories are created equal.”

Nutrition researcher Kris Gunnars has a bachelor’s degree in medicine and founded the website Authority Nutrition, which later joined up with Healthline. In an article titled “8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths Debunked,” he took apart one belief related to child obesity. By giving three examples of how foods can affect our hormones and our hunger levels in different ways, Gunnars showed how “a calorie is NOT a calorie”:

— Fructose vs. Glucose: Fructose is more likely to stimulate hunger, increase abdominal obesity and insulin resistance, compared to the same amount of calories from glucose.
— Protein: Eating protein can raise the metabolic rate and reduce hunger compared to fat and carbs.
— Medium vs. long-chain fatty acids: Fatty acids that are of medium length (such as from coconut oil) raise metabolism and reduce hunger compared to longer chain fatty acids.

What about the science? It is there, in great detail, a trove of easily-assimilated information for anyone inclined in this direction.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths Debunked,” AuthorityNutrition.com, 05/22/13
Image by j_lai/CC BY 2.0

Ultra-Processed Foods Are Frowned Upon

Pat Hartman October 2, 2020 No Comments

“You are what you eat” is an old saying, and if it’s true, at this point in time a lot of people are bowls of pasta coated with day-glo orange goop. Since humans were designed for survival, it is not surprising that we are able to eat all kinds of things, just for the caloric value, so our bodies have energy to keep moving in search of better-quality food. But just because the body can survive on empty and harmful calories does not mean we should do it that way if we have a choice.

Childhood Obesity News has been discussing Ultra-Processed Foods, or UPFs, which tend to contain both empty and harmful calories. Compare the government’s 2010 list of America’s top 10 calorie sources with its corresponding 2020 list, and compare those with the list of UPFs appearing in a recent study from authors representing eight different institutions:

Soda, flavoured dairy drinks, packaged snacks, many breakfast cereals, flavoured ice creams, instant noodles and soups, nuggets and similar reconstituted meat products…

Ultra-Processed Foods are defined as:

[…] ready-to-eat formulations of processed substances that have been extracted or refined from whole foods and that typically contain added flavors, colours, and other cosmetic additives, with little, if any, whole food remaining…

These products are generally high in free sugars, saturated fat, and sodium, and low in protein, dietary fibre, micronutrients and phytochemicals… They are also highly palatable, energy dense, with a high glycaemic load…

UPFs, in other words, have little to recommend them. In the pediatric obesity field,
many practitioners and researchers are quite comfortable with blaming UPFs as obesity villains. These authors say…

[…] it is becoming increasingly difficult to rationalize not taking a clear, universal, UPF-avoidance stance in our obesity prevention and treatment efforts…

We have spoken before of the advisability of continuing to breastfeed a child until age 2. If that cannot be arranged, parents are urged to at least be sure that the child’s food is as pure and natural as possible. Children younger than 2 should definitely not be fed UPFs, which “can lead to one or more forms of malnutrition.” Deficiencies in micronutrients can cause serious development issues, and the consumption of UPFs can lead to food addiction.

Science writer David Berreby referenced the work of Jonathan C. K. Wells, professor of child nutrition at University College, London:

Wells notes, for example, that sugar, trans-fats and alcohol have all been linked to changes in “insulin signalling”, which affects how the body processes carbohydrates. This might sound like a merely technical distinction. In fact, it’s a paradigm shift: if the problem isn’t the number of calories but rather biochemical influences on the body’s fat-making and fat-storage processes, then sheer quantity of food or drink are not the all-controlling determinants of weight gain.

A calorie is not just an energy unit, and all calories are not created equal. The evidence continues to pile up.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Ultra-Processed Food Consumption among the Paediatric Population…,” Karger.com, 04/28/20
Source: “The Obesity Era,” GetPocket.com, 06/19/13
Images by Greg Westfall and Ben Francis/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Holiday Excess vs. COVID-19

And people want their fun

Coronavirus Chronicles: The End of Halloween?

The other half of the equation

Just say no to hayrides

Diets, Dieting, and a Best Diet?

So, what should we eat?

What is extra-virgin olive oil?

But wait, there’s more

Food and Diets

Calories and Junk Food

Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck

What Is a Diet?

Reducing diets and other body mods

You can’t make this stuff up

Move More, Eat Less

Eat Less, Move More

Big and overarching concerns

When Is a Calorie Not a Calorie?

Ultra-Processed Foods Are Frowned Upon

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources