Goals:

• The big fat con story

  (Don't automatically assume that thinner is better...)

  "The most extensive work of this sort has been carried out by Steven Blair and his colleagues at Dallas's Cooper Institute, involving more than 70,000 people. What they have discovered is that, quite simply, when researchers take into account the activity levels and resulting fitness of the people being studied, body mass appears to have no relevance to health whatsoever. In Blair's studies, obese people who engage in at least moderate levels of physical activity have around one half the mortality rate of sedentary people who maintain supposedly ideal weight levels."

Eating Right:

• What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

  "If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true." ...

  "It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat." ...

  "In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link." ...

• High-Fat Diet Shows Promise in Study

  "After years of dismissing the high-fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, the medical establishment is at last putting it to a careful test and finding it might not be the nutritional folly they long assumed."

• Atkin's diet may cut risk of heart disease

  "Overweight subjects on the high-fat, high-protein diet - which allows butter, mayonnaise and steak - increased the proportion of "good" cholesterol and cut the level of fatty triglycerides in their blood compared with those on conventional low fat, high carbohydrate diets." ...

  "The results were "unexpected", Foster told New Scientist. This is the first controlled trial of the Atkin's diet, and the "common sense notion that it would be associated with increases in bad cholesterol" was expected to prevail." ...

• The Paleolithic Diet

  "For most of the million or so years our species has existed on Earth, we have been hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors hunted game and ate lots of meat. They also gathered whatever fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries were in season. Being nomadic, they followed the sources of food and did not grow crops. Over many hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors became superbly adapted to this diet and lifestyle." ...

  "The archeological record shows that there was a sharp decline in stature and health that went along with the change to the agricultrual diet and lifestyle. Early hunter-gatherers were 4 to 6 inches taller than early farmers. The hunters had stronger bones, fewer cavities, and, barring accident, they lived longer. Hunter-gatherers were rarely obese and had low rates of autoimmune diseases like arthritis and diabetes." ...

  "The rules of the Paleolithic Diet are simple: Only eat what was available to the early hunter-gatherers. Foods which are edible raw. All other foods should be avoided. In effect this is the factory specified diet." ...

• Native American Diet

• Understanding Blood Sugar

  "It turns out that different foods take different times to become glucose in the blood. Just among carbohydrates there is a metric called the Glycemic Index (GI) which measures how fast the food becomes glucose in the blood." ...

  "Excess glucose in the blood gets converted to fat by the liver. Moreover, this conversion is a one-way process. Once glucose gets converted into a fatty acid, it eventually becomes a ketone body, never a glucose. If you recall, body fat is a tri-glyceride, which is a glycerol and three glycerides. The glycerol part of body fat can be recouped as glucose, but the glyceride parts cannot. Thus, whenever we have an excess of carbohydrates around three-quarters of it gets irrevocably converted to fat. Since the insulin message is stronger the higher the blood glucose is, carbohydrates with a higher GI are more likely to get converted into fat, whereas carbohydrates with a lower GI are less likely. Sugar is the carbohydrate most likely to be converted to body fat." ...

• Biochemistry of Nutrition

  A quick overview of nutritional biochemistry that dispells many common assumptions...

• Consumer Reports, June 2002

  "In one study, Ludwig put a group of overweight children on a standard low-fat diet and a comparison group on a low-glycemic diet. The low-glycemic dieters were instructed to combine protein, healthful fat, and low-glycemic carbohydrates like fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains at each meal. After four months, children on the low-glycemic diet had lost an average of 4.5 pounds, while the kids on the low-fat diet had gained 2.9 pounds." ...

  "In a clinical trial reported last October, McManus and her colleagues divided 101 overweight men and women into two groups. One followed a standard low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet restricting fat to 20 percent of calories. The other group followed a diet equally low in total calories with as much as 35 percent of those calories coming from sources of healthful fats such as nuts, fish, and olive oil.

  "The study lasted for the unusually long period of 18 months. At first, the two groups were losing weight at about the same rate; but as the study wore on, members of the moderate-fat group began to pull ahead. About 60 percent of each group came back for a final weigh-in. The results were telling: People in the low-fat group had gained an average of 6.4 pounds, while the moderate-fat group had lost an average of 9 pounds."

• Plague of pimples blamed on bread

  "Eating too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, may be the culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster. That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins." ...

• Short-sightedness may be tied to refined diet

  "Diets high in refined starches such as breads and cereals increase insulin levels. This affects the development of the eyeball, making it abnormally long and causing short-sightedness, suggests a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and Jennie Brand Miller, a nutrition scientist at the University of Sydney." ...

• Bottle-fed babies could pass on obesity risk

  Babies that are formula fed a high-carbohydrate diet are more likely to grow up to be obese - and they pass that increased risk onto their own offspring, a rat study suggests.

• Potential carcinogen revealed in french fries

  A chemical known to cause cancer in laboratory animals been detected in some fried and baked foods at surprisingly high levels. The chemical, called acrylamide, was found by Swedish researchers in carbohydrate-rich foods that had been fried, grilled or baked at high temperatures.

• Food 'cancer chemical' reaction identified

  Asparagine is present in high quantities in many plant-based foods, including cereals and potato. [...] Sure enough, when Mottram's team heated asparagine with any of a number of sugars to above about 100°C, large amounts of acrylamide were formed. Further research with other amino acids did not result in significant acrylamide creation.

• How to Live for a Century

  My quick notes on calorie-restricted diets.

• The Fat Pyramid

  My thoughts on the Food Pyramid.

• Is ketosis from a low-carb diet bad? (5/23/02)

  ... "Thus it seems as though Atkins is somewhat distorting the truth. Because ketosis usually occurs in the context of DKA, he can blame all the ill effects on the hyperglycemia & extremeness of the ketosis, which are likely responsible for the acute effects, but does nothing to disprove the existence of long-term effects. It is unclear exactly what the costs of mild chronic ketosis are, but there are some (as can be seen from the studies cited below)." ...

• Fructose Maybe Not So Natural...and Not So Safe

  I've generally promoted fructose in the past as a superior alternative to sucrose, based on its low glycemic index and that it's the primary sugar found naturally in fruit. However...

• Is dietary fat a major determinant of body fat? (Am J Clin Nutr 1998 Mar;67(3 Suppl):556S-562S)

  "Diets high in fat do not appear to be the primary cause of the high prevalence of excess body fat in our society, and reductions in fat will not be a solution."

• High glycemic index foods, overeating, and obesity. (Pediatrics 1999 Mar;103(3):E26)
  

  "The rapid absorption of glucose after consumption of high-GI meals induces a sequence of hormonal and metabolic changes that promote excessive food intake in obese subjects."

  Note that the big fat bottom of The Food Pyramid contains most of the High Glycemic Index foods.

• Randomized trial on protein vs carbohydrate in ad libitum fat reduced diet for the treatment of obesity. (Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord 1999 May;23(5):528-36)

  "Replacement of some dietary carbohydrate by protein in an ad libitum fat-reduced diet, improves weight loss and increases the proportion of subjects achieving a clinically relevant weight loss."

Maternity Issues:

• Breastfeeding's IQ boost

  "However, for the 90% of people carrying a more common form of the gene, those who were breastfed scored on average 6.8 points higher in IQ tests than those who were bottle-fed. The result was unaffected by the mother's genotype, IQ or social class."

• Flu During Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia

  "Prenatal influenza exposure may account for about 14 percent of schizophrenia cases, according to the findings presented here this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association." ... "First trimester exposure to influenza raised the risk of schizophrenia by sevenfold, the authors report. Exposure at any time during the first half of pregnancy increased the risk threefold."

• Schizophrenia linked to mother's lack of sunlight

  "Evidence is accumulating to support the theory that vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, caused by a lack of sunlight, can alter the development of a child's brain in the womb. The data for a link with schizophrenia is still controversial, but potentially worrying because vitamin D deficiency is so common."

• Low fish intake linked to premature birth

  "Women who eat very little or no fish during early pregnancy are more likely to give birth prematurely, according to a study in Denmark. ... Just over seven per cent of women who never ate fish had a premature delivery, compared with 1.9 per cent of women who ate fish at least once a week."

  (However, much fish now days is highly contaminated with mercury, which is associated with many nasty neurological consequences for unborn babies, so perhaps supplementing with high quality (mercury-free) Omega-3 fatty acids is the way out of this catch-22?)

• Electrical appliances linked to miscarriage

  "The strong magnetic fields produced by some electric appliances and vehicles increase the risk of miscarriage, claim researchers in California. ...

  One study was led by De-Kun Li, a reproductive epidemiologist at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute in Oakland, California. His team asked 1063 women around San Francisco who were in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy to spend a day wearing a meter around their waists that measured magnetic field levels every 10 seconds.

  Overall, they found that women exposed to peak levels of 1.6 microteslas or greater were nearly twice as likely to miscarry as women not exposed to such strong fields.

  More significantly, says Li, among the 622 women who said the measuring period had been a typical day, those who experienced high peak fields were three times as likely to have a miscarriage. "That's another confirmation that the effect is due to EMF," says Li.

• Choline may be important for fetal brain development

  "Taking a nutrient called choline during pregnancy could "super-charge" children's brains for life, suggests a study in rats.

  Offspring born to pregnant rats given the supplement were known to be faster learners with better memories. But the new work, by Scott Swartzwelder and colleagues at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, US, shows this is due to having bigger brain cells in vital areas.

  Choline, a member of the vitamin B family, is found in egg yolks, liver and other meats - "exactly the kind of things people were told not to eat" due to their high cholesterol content, says Swartzwelder."

• Folic acid: An important way to prevent birth defects

  "The Centers for Disease Control report that women who take the recommended daily dose of folic acid starting one month before they conceive and throughout the first trimester reduce their baby's risk of birth defects, such as spina bifida, by up to 70 percent."

• Chloroform high in swimming pools

  "Public swimming pools contain high levels of chloroform, a chemical linked to miscarriage, say researchers in the UK."

• Babies learn in their sleep

  (Babies exposed to French vowel sounds in their sleep became more able to discriminate these vowels.)

• Baby food could trigger meningitis

  An extensive survey of [powdered] baby foods has found they contain worrying levels of disease-causing microbes. Of most concern was the presence of a bacterium called Enterobacter sakazakii, which has been linked to a handful of fatal outbreaks of meningitis at children's hospitals in the US and Europe.

• Low vitamin D linked to diabetes

  "Children with a diet lacking in vitamin D are more likely to develop type 1 diabetes, say Finnish researchers."