Monthly Archives: September 2012

Corn. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Posted on September 30, 2012 | 3 comments

Utterly.  Shocked.  is how I feel gazing upon the ingredients listed on one particular popular snack food.  And it isn’t one of those fancy gourmet all-natural whole food snacks, it is a classic that is probably in the kitchen of every child-wielding household.

Corn, corn oil, and salt.  And salt doesn’t even count, so it might just as well have said corn and corn oil, which could be summarized as “corn.”  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the reigning champion of snack food sorcery, the red-headed stepchild (no offense) of international superpower PepsiCo… Fritos.  Using only corn, the wizards of Frito-Lay are turning this:into this:

and that’s without the use of trans fat, gluten, artificial additives, dairy, msg, onions, or soy.  They’re Kosher too.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Fructose, gluten, Grains, Sugar, Trans fat

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BPA

Posted on September 28, 2012 | 1 comment

Though they won’t kill you [instantly], environmental and dietary xenoestrogens warrant a bit of attention, especially considering their theoretical mechanism of action is, among other things, augmenting insulin secretion.  This is of particular importance given the growing body of evidence of a causal role for insulin hypersecretion in the obesity epidemic (see Barbara Corkey’s 2011 Banting Lecture for an overview).

And this is the SECOND time this year BPA has made headlines.

BPA. Looks like some kind of medieval weapon or something.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, empty calories, Energy balance, insulin, Sugar, TPMC

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Soda vs. childhood obesity

Posted on September 24, 2012 | 11 comments

What happens if you give skinny kids a can of fully sugared regular soda to drink every day for a year?

What happens if you take the soda away from overweight kids for a year?

The answer to these two questions should be a definitive user’s guide to the question: how bad is soda for my children?   And we got those answers this week.

 

A set of powerful studies were recently published, the likes of which I thought we’d never see.  It’s unethical to assign anyone to start smoking so we can properly study the effects of cigarettes; and before today, I would’ve thought it unethical to assign young children to start drinking fully sugared regular soda.  And not just one or two cans…  over 350.  For the 4 year olds the first study, by the end of the trial they had been on soda for almost a third of their life… during a critical period of development.  Ethics schmethics.  Hopefully this study will never be repeated.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, empty calories, Energy balance, Sugar, TPMC

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Why diets fail, Op. 106

Posted on September 21, 2012 | 1 comment

Correction: diets don’t fail, dieters do.  And don’t take that the wrong way; adhering to a restrictive diet is one of the most difficult tasks for ANYone; thus, the obesity epidemic.  Some recent insights into diet-induced weight loss success, or lack thereof, have shed a new light on why some dieters adhere and others don’t.

In Insulin resistance, I discussed how insulin sensitivity may influence how well someone responds to a diet.  In brief, insulin resistant obese people do much better on low carb than low fat in a closely controlled clinical setting.  If you’re one of the lucky few insulin sensitive obese people, then simply reducing calories works.  Unfortunately, however, most obese are insulin resistant.

When it comes to devising a weight loss strategy, I’m willing to cut every corner and use every trick in the book to achieve success.  Data in this new analysis came from Chris Gardner’s notorious A to Z study, where patients were given diet books and told to have at it.  It was the weakest intervention in the history of diet studies, but it is exactly what everyone who wants to lose weight does.  And just like in Gardner’s study, most people fail.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, insulin, Protein, Sugar, TPMC

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Insulin resistance

Posted on September 17, 2012 | 23 comments

Why it is important and what you can do about it, Op. 105

 

This post was largely inspired by a recent manuscript by Chris Gardner.  He’s an outside-the-box thinker and if you haven’t heard of him, check out this YouTube video: The Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning (At Losing?)

Part I.  

Type II diabetes is the clinical manifestation of insulin resistance.  It is preceded by obesity (except in the cases of MONW & NOD), and caused by poor nutrition.  Markers of insulin resistance are: 1) impaired fasting glucose; 2) impaired glucose tolerance; and 3) elevated HbA1c.  THIS is why it is important: in 2009, Barr and colleagues showed a linear relationship between all three of these risk factors and all-cause mortality in the AusDiab study.  All.  Cause.  Mortality.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, empty calories, Energy balance, insulin, mortality, Protein, Sugar

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Protein bar round-up, take II.

Posted on September 14, 2012 | 3 comments

The meaning of ingredients, just the facts.

My official statement:  protein bars are not superior to high protein foods like steak or eggs; they’re just incredibly convenient.  For exercisers, it is much easier to snack on a protein bar than a Tupperware bowl full of chicken (on your way TO the gym, that is).  They shouldn’t be relied upon for providing substantial nutrition because, well, they don’t.

That said, while perusing the various categories of protein bars at Bodybuilding.com, I found some big differences between the “best sellers,” “newest,” and “highest rated.”  So which should you buy: what everyone else is buying (best sellers)? the new kids on the block (newest)? or the favorite (highest rated)?

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, empty calories, fiber, Protein, Sugar

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A historical argument against caloric equality

Posted on September 10, 2012 | 11 comments

80 years later, a calorie still isn’t a calorie.

Exhibit A.

The treatment of obesity   (Lyon and Dunlop, 1932)

As early as 1932, Lyon and Dunlop recognized that the calories from as little as one slice of bread every day could result in pounds of fat mass gained every year.  For whatever reason, this doesn’t happen to lean people; so they decided to study the effect of different diets on obese subjects in a metabolic ward at the Royal Infirmary.

Their idea of a “diet:” If they could only see how much times have changed!  (this is a hotly debated topic.)

Lyon and Dunlop first tested weight loss vs. total calorie intake.  The diet was roughly 40% carbs, 24% protein, and 36% fat.  Not surprisingly, people fed 800 kcal/d lost more weight than those given 1,000 or 1,200 kcal/d (200 vs. 172 vs. 157 grams of body weight lost per day over the period of 7 – 10 days), confirming that the less you eat, the more weight you lose (duh).  A calorie is a calorie after all, right? …

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, Energy balance, Protein

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The easy diet diet II

Posted on September 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Full disclosure.  IMHO, with regard to obesity and weight loss diets, low carb is a little bit better, most of the time.  It’s not such a huge difference that it’s ridiculously obvious, and in situations where low carb proper is too impractical, it might just be more important to focus on eliminating as many empty calories as possible.  Because as discussed in the Easy diet diet, Op. 72, you don’t have to go militant zero carb; simply “low“ carb seems to work pretty well.

In type 2 diabetes, randomization to advice to follow a low-carbohydrate diet transiently improves glycaemic control compared with advice to follow a low-fat diet producing a similar weight loss (Gulbrand et al., 2012)

[if you follow the advice, that is, at least to some degree] Continue reading →

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, insulin

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