Symptoms: Metabolic Syndrome Is Tied to Diet Soda

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

Read more . . .

Top 6 Myths: About Bottled Water

Bottled water — already a more than $10 billion industry — is the fastest-growing beverage category in the U.S. But is it good for you? Here's the pure truth.

Myth #1: BOTTLED WATER IS BETTER THAN TAP.

Not necessarily. While labels gush about bottled water that "begins as snowflakes" or flows from "deep inside lush green volcanoes," between 25 and 40 percent of bottled water comes from a less exotic source: U.S. municipal water supplies. (Bottling companies buy the water and filter it, and some add minerals.) That's not really a bad thing: The Environmental Protection Agency oversees municipal water quality, while the Food and Drug Administration monitors bottled water; in some cases, EPA codes are more stringent.

Read more at WebMD.

5 Reasons You're Not Losing Weight

1. You're Following Bad Advice
2. You Eat Fat-Free Foods
3. You (Still) Don't Eat Breakfast
4. You're Eating Too Much Sugar
5. You Don't Lift Weights

Read the entire article . . .

They didn't add, and I would, you eat too much processed, and by processed I mean anything you didn't pick yourself, food. LOL My goal for next summer is to expand my garden to provide at least 75% of our fresh vegetables . . and to increase our fresh vegetable intake.

Emotional' Eaters Most Likely To Regain Lost Weight

new study led by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center finds that dieters who have the tendency to eat in response to external factors, such as at festive celebrations, have fewer problems with their weight loss than those who eat in response to internal factors such as emotions. The study also found that emotional eating was associated with weight regain in successful losers.

The study is published in the October 2007 issue of Obesity.

“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, such as, ‘when I feel lonely, I console myself by eating,’ the less weight they lost in a behavioral weight loss program. In addition, amongst successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain,” says lead author Heather Niemeier, Ph.D.

Read more . . .

I always find this sort of thing interesting and don't know where I fit. I'm likely to not eat if I am upset, to withdraw and allow myself to sick. I usually overeat because I'm "hungry' . . . feel empty or unsatisfied on some level. I usually lose weight when I'm in a new relationship and then regain it when the relationship gets distant.

Monster mash: Squelch all those snack attacks

from the Contra Costa Times

Lots of good suggestions for resisting the snack monster arrived in my in-box after my recent column. Here are the highlights:

"I find that if I floss and brush my teeth, it will keep me from raiding the cupboards." -- Vicki

"One easy solution I use is to drink something low cal when I first get the munchies. I love sparking water (plain or flavored), and caffeine-free diet sodas, especially for the carbonation. A 12- or 16-ounce glass helps to make me feel 'full.' Then, I wait a half-hour before deciding if I am really hungry, because often thirst is masked by hunger.

"Beware of juices and other beverages that pack in the calories, and make sure you leave plenty of time for the liquid to go through you if it's close to bedtime." -- Carol, Clayton

"I have found the best way to resist snack attacks is to schedule the snacks. Mid-morning snack is at 10:30 a.m., about half-way between breakfast and lunch. Mid-afternoon snack is around 3:30 p.m., half way between lunch and dinner.

"I plan to eat something healthy when I schedule the snacks, like fruit or pretzels or a few nuts. If I schedule the snacks, it gives me something to look forward to and helps me resist cravings in between.

"The hardest time for me is after dinner when I am watching TV. I try not to eat after 7:30 p.m. If I get an attack, I drink a glass of skim milk or make a cup of Good Earth Original Sweet & Spicy Tea and Herb blend. Sometimes, I just drink coffee. But that often
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results in too many late night trips to the bathroom." -- Carole, Antioch

"Give in -- but eat foods that are good for you and that will satisfy your appetite. Try low-calorie but filling foods such as plums at 10 calories, peaches at 70 and bananas at 100. Also, I keep a large jar of dill pickles in my fridge because they are only 10 calories per medium size. The cold crunch is really satisfying.

"Snack on peanut butter and crackers. It may sound contradictory because peanut butter has so many calories, but it also has the trait of satisfying your appetite for a long while, thereby keeping you from going back to the snack sooner." -- Dick F.

"Wanting to eat from boredom and habit triggers is a major problem, especially since 'ya can't eat just one' if you start. Two things often work for me.

"Brushing and flossing teeth, the whole bit. Then chewing some xylitol gum (XyliChew is great). I think it's both the reluctance to spoil the clean mouth and the 'good health' mode that makes it work.

"Doing little exercises, like tightening different muscles, stretching gracefully (or imagining it's graceful; nobody's watching), breathing deeply and slowly -- all these things take me to an 'ain't I the healthy, strong, slim one' mood." -- Janet F., Berkeley

"I'm surprised you didn't come up with this suggestion: Needlework.

"When you are doing needlework both hands are busy. You don't want to set it down until you've finished knitting or smocking this row or pattern, or cross stitching that color area, or quilting just one more section. Besides, you don't want to get your hands dirty from food or you will soil whatever you are working on." -- Carol C.

"So, what were you doing with cheesecake in your refrigerator? The first step for conquering that awful snack monster is restraint from buying those goodies at the grocery store." -- Bev

Lobes of Steel

Scientists have suspected for decades that exercise, particularly regular aerobic exercise, can affect the brain. But they could only speculate as to how. Now an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain

The Morris water maze is the rodent equivalent of an I.Q. test: mice are placed in a tank filled with water dyed an opaque color. Beneath a small area of the surface is a platform, which the mice can’t see. Despite what you’ve heard about rodents and sinking ships, mice hate water; those that blunder upon the platform climb onto it immediately. Scientists have long agreed that a mouse’s spatial memory can be inferred by how quickly the animal finds its way in subsequent dunkings. A “smart” mouse remembers the platform and swims right to it.

In the late 1990s, one group of mice at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, near San Diego, blew away the others in the Morris maze. The difference between the smart mice and those that floundered? Exercise. The brainy mice had running wheels in their cages, and the others didn’t.

Scientists have suspected for decades that exercise, particularly regular aerobic exercise, can affect the brain. But they could only speculate as to how. Now an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain.

This theory emerged from those mouse studies at the Salk Institute. After conducting maze tests, the neuroscientist Fred H. Gage and his colleagues examined brain samples from the mice. Conventional wisdom had long held that animal (and human) brains weren’t malleable: after a brief window early in life, the brain could no longer grow or renew itself. The supply of neurons — the brain cells that enable us to think — was believed to be fixed almost from birth. As the cells died through aging, mental function declined. The damage couldn’t be staved off or repaired.

Read more . . .

Low-Cal Sweets Might Still Make Kids Obese

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Diet foods and drinks meant to help children control their weight may actually spur overeating and obesity, Canadian researchers say.

The study found that animals learn to associate the taste of food with the amount of caloric energy it provides. The researchers speculate that children who eat low-calorie versions of foods that normally have a high calorie content may develop distorted connections between taste and calorie content, resulting in overeating as the children grow up.

"The use of diet food and drinks from an early age into adulthood may induce overeating and gradual weight gain through the taste conditioning process that we have described," lead author and sociologist Dr. David Pierce, of the University of Alberta, said in a prepared statement.

In a series of experiments published Aug. 8 in the journal Obesity, the researchers found that young rats started to overeat when they received low-calorie food and drink. Adolescent rats did not overeat when given low-calorie items.

This may be because, unlike the younger rats, the adolescent rats didn't rely on taste-related cues to assess the caloric energy content of their food, the researchers said.

"Based on what we've learned, it is better for children to eat healthy, well-balanced diets with sufficient calories for their daily activities rather than low-calorie snacks or meals," Pierce said.

[source]

Weight bias may harm obese children

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The stigma that society attaches to obesity can cause children immediate, and possibly lasting, harm, according to a research review.

Overweight children and teens are commonly teased or ostracized by their peers, and sometimes treated differently by teachers and even parents. This, the review shows, can lead to low self-esteem, poor school performance, avoidance of physical activity and, in the most serious cases, depression and suicide.

Research has long demonstrated the weight bias that heavy children face. In a classic 1961 study, 640 subjects between 10 and 11 years old were shown six pictures of other children their age: one child was overweight; one was normal-weight; and four had some form of physical disability.

When the study participants were asked to rank the children in the order of whom they would like to be friends with, they ranked the overweight child last.

Read more . . .

Study Suggests That Sugar Should Not Be Excluded From Slimming Diets

New study challenges conventional thinking that high carbohydrate, low fat slimming plan should contain little or no added sugar (sucrose).

A team of scientists at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh has found that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet (containing sucrose) combined with physical activity achieved the greatest health benefits in overweight subjects. The study, which will be published in the August issue of International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, provides evidence that the exclusion of sucrose, as is normally advocated in a weight loss diet, is not necessary to achieve weight reduction. In fact, the palatability of sucrose may even help dieters stick to their eating plans.

Read more . . .

Obesity link to high blood pressure has weakened

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - It seems that the association between body mass index (BMI) and high blood pressure or hypertension has decreased since 1989, researchers say. The finding suggests that obesity may not have as much of an impact on heart-related disease as previously thought.

"High blood pressure is a leading cause of the global burden of disease," Dr. Pascal Bovet, of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues write in the medical journal Epidemiology. "The prevalence of hypertension, and of several other conditions (including diabetes), is considered to be linked to the worldwide epidemic of obesity."

The researchers examined trends in blood pressure and BMI over a 15-year interval in the Seychelles. Their analysis was based on two independent surveys conducted in 1989 and 2004 using representative samples of the population between the ages of 25 and 64 years.

There was a slight decrease in average blood pressure between 1989 and 2004 in both men and women. The prevalence of high blood pressure changed little during this time -- from 45 to 44 percent in men and from 34 to 36 percent in women.

The percentage of people who were overweight, defined as a BMI of 25 or more, increased from 39 percent to 60 percent between 1989 and 2004.

Read more . . .

Early, Quality Child Care Linked to Less Depression

Children of low income families benefit from quality educational child care as the involvement appears to protect children against the negative effects of their home environments.

The early intervention, for young children from infancy to age 5, appears to make a difference in decreasing symptoms of depression in early adulthood.

The report, from the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, uses data from the Abecedarian Project, a longitudinal study begun in 1972 in which 111 high-risk children were randomly assigned to early educational child care from infancy to age 5 or to a control group that received various other forms of child care.

The study is published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

Read more . . . .

YAY for my online Food Log

I think this is going to help A LOT in keeping me on track or, rather, keeping me from letting getting off track last longer. I have been sick for the last week and a half. Between horrific menstrual pain and a bout of food poisoning, I just did not do well. And my food log shows it. I didn't keep it correctly, didn't even go back and try to at least guess at what I ate. It was grim.

Now, had this been a paper log, it would be under a couch or bed at this time and I wouldn't have the energy to find it. So I would just lapse back into not paying attention to my diet and how I feel. But because my food log is online, accessible from anywhere I can get on a computer, I have been able to drag myself back to keeping it . . .and to thinking about the consequences of eating bad stuff. (I'm pretty sure the food poisoning was not at all helped by eating junk food last weekend because I was still feeling crappy from my period.)

Anyway, I feel quite hopeful that this is the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship that helps me completely change my lifestyle!

Food and Emotion

A poem I wrote many years ago.

I am a baby in my crib
crying
I'm cold, I'm lonely
Hold me, love me. . .
and you give me a bottle.

I am a child, locked in my room,
crying
I'm hurt, I'm lonely,
Hold me, love. . .
and you give me cookies.

I am a adolescent, imprisoned in my fears
crying
I'm afraid, I'm lonely,
Hold me, love me. . .
and you give me pizza and the TV Guide.

I am a woman, trapped in self
crying
I'm lost, I'm lonely
Hold me, love me. . .
and it's too late.

Feeding your love hunger

by Joan Dickinson

I'm binge shopping for groceries and cooking up a storm. My daughter is coming home for a visit, so I best be true to our family motto: Food is Love.

Now of course we laugh at that motto, know deep down inside it isn't true. But like many jokes, there is an element of truth. I like to think that my grandmother's and mother's recipes are fun ways of remembering their nourishment of our lives, but is it really necessary to fix the 1,000-calorie caramel cinnamon rolls?

All of this is food for thought.

We're told there is an epidemic of obesity in our nation. Do we eat to nourish our hearts and souls, to nurture and comfort ourselves, to soothe away anxiety? Is this emotional eating, meant to heal our hearts, the wrong cure for the wrong organ? Our stomachs really need small amounts of food. Our hearts and souls need love.

OK. If you buy this idea, how can we feed love to our hearts? Where does nourishing love come from? How can we fill up on high-test love? What's the recipe for just the right amount?

Hmm. There's a lot to ponder here.

Read more . . . .

Emotional Eating

A lot of women say they overeat when they are upset. I've tried to watch for patterns of that in myself, but I find that I don't consistantly overeat when I am angry or sad. I have a lot of reasons to be sad lately, what with getting a divorce from my third husband, who I love more than I've loved anyone before, and getting older and the dead of my second husband. So I've tried to track if any of this effects my eating.

What I've found is that I am likely to eat unwisely when I am lonely. When I miss my husband I really wish he was with me and loved and desired me. I eat when I want to be touched and held. Does anyone else experience weight gain when they don't get and want sex?

This week I posted another loss. I'm quite excited. That's at least a month of losses. So obviously I'm not succumbing to eating when I'm lonely. I've been trying to decide what my affirmation for this week should be and I'm drawing a blank. I suppose I could recycle an old one. Maybe I'll do I accept myself the way I am again

Would You Like To Make That a Combo?

I am at the drive thru of a fast food restaurant because my son needs some food at work (his boss is out and he can't close the shop to go and get food) and I need to get it quick and get back to my own workplace. I have decided on fish and chips for myself, in keeping with my plan to get sea food at least three times a week in order to increase my intake of omega-3 fatty acids. Well, sea food such as it is. I know, baby steps, baby steps . . I'll get there. Anyway, as I order, the cashier offers me the option to upgrade and get a soft drink.

I actually thought about it for just a brief moment, but I guess my mantra "no high fructose corn syrup" is starting to take root again, as I said, "No." No. It was that easy. What took me so long?

How The Brain Rewires Itself

article from TIME

It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test.

At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups--those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so--they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music--just as it had in those who actually played it.

"Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization" of the brain, Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don't), then mentally practicing a golf swing or a forward pass or a swimming turn could lead to mastery with less physical practice. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

OVERTHROWING THE DOGMA

FOR DECADES, THE PREVAILING DOGMA IN neuroscience was that the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have. Yes, it can create (and lose) synapses, the connections between neurons that encode memories and learning. And it can suffer injury and degeneration. But this view held that if genes and development dictate that one cluster of neurons will process signals from the eye and another cluster will move the fingers of the right hand, then they'll do that and nothing else until the day you die. There was good reason for lavishly illustrated brain books to show the function, size and location of the brain's structures in permanent ink.

The doctrine of the unchanging human brain has had profound ramifications. For one thing, it lowered expectations about the value of rehabilitation for adults who had suffered brain damage from a stroke or about the possibility of fixing the pathological wiring that underlies psychiatric diseases. And it implied that other brain-based fixities, such as the happiness set point that, according to a growing body of research, a person returns to after the deepest tragedy or the greatest joy, are nearly unalterable.

But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of "neuroplasticity"--the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. These aren't minor tweaks either. Something as basic as the function of the visual or auditory cortex can change as a result of a person's experience of becoming deaf or blind at a young age. Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortex that moves the right arm, a new technique called constraint-induced movement therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.

The first discoveries of neuroplasticity came from studies of how changes in the messages the brain receives through the senses can alter its structure and function. When no transmissions arrive from the eyes in someone who has been blind from a young age, for instance, the visual cortex can learn to hear or feel or even support verbal memory. When signals from the skin or muscles bombard the motor cortex or the somatosensory cortex (which processes touch), the brain expands the area that is wired to move, say, the fingers. In this sense, the very structure of our brain--the relative size of different regions, the strength of connections between them, even their functions--reflects the lives we have led. Like sand on a beach, the brain bears the footprints of the decisions we have made, the skills we have learned, the actions we have taken.

Read more . . .

Combatting Resistance

Anyone who is trying to overcome bad habits and make positive lifestyle changes faces it. Resistance to change. I'm struggling with that right now, so I'm trying to make tiny changes that I can slip under the radar of my subconscious. :D Additionally, I'm struggling to rebuild a body devastated by three years of chronic pain. This week (and you may notice my weeks run Thursday to Thursday because that is when my TOPS Chapter meets) I am working on two things: totally removing refined sugars from my diet and just getting back in the habit of exercising every morning.

So far the sugar is going pretty good, but that's because this is a goal I return to regularly and have made permanent progress on over years of behavior modification. My goal for this week is to have no more than one sweetened soft drink. I allow myself the one because I have a very public life and chances are I'll be somewhere in the next week where a soft drink is my only option and I'm thirsty.

At home I use raw sugar, when I use added sugar at all. The only things I add sugar to are coffee and oatmeal. Raw sugar, at least in my opinion, is better than refined. It could be all my head, but when I miss my morning coffee and have to have coffee at office where the choices are white sugar or artificial sweetners, I notice I am more . . hyper. I'm not sure of a good way to test the validity of this observation, but I figure, eh, if raw sugar works, even in my head, I'll just use it.

I've having a more difficult time with exercise goals. Anyone who knows me knows I have a ferret-like mind that is easily distracted and so, as I've been doing searches and reading books about physical training, it is easy for me to see a cool link and end up pondering a page on the effects of climate change on larval termites or something bizarre like that. I've been adding to the links at the side though and have added a page to my Food and Exercise Log (see links at right) where I am compiling exercises I can manage and the reps each day.

So, I guess my exercise goal for this week should be to come up with a program I can manage and stick to it.

The Science of Lasting Happiness

Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work

The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps getting calls from her Toyota Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is excited by the news: she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. The hybrid will be gentler on the environment, and a California state law letting some hybrids use the carpool lane promises a faster commute between her coastal Santa Monica home and her job at the University of California, Riverside, some 70 miles inland. Two weeks later, in late January, the 40-year-old Lyubomirsky, who smiles often and seems to approach life with zest and good humor, reports that she is "totally loving the Prius." But will the feeling wear off soon after the new-car smell, or will it last, making a naturally happy person even more so?


Read more . . .

Neanderthin: Review from Nerdheaven.com

Neanderthin (Paleo) life style

The Paleolithic Diet a.k.a. Neanderthin is the diet that we humans are genetically adapted to eat. The paleolithic age is the same as the Stone Age - so this is a stone age diet or life style. This has been humanity's preferred diet for something like 2.5 million years, and humans have only genetically changed 0.005% since the introduction of agriculture (the Neolithic). As a rule, agricultural (and technological) products are not healthy to eat, and we should predominantly try to eat only those whole foods that are healthy in their raw state (though almost all humans, including hunter-gatherers cook their food). (Check out the Paleolithic links)

This is not a quick-fix diet but a way of life. You're not supposed to starve when you eat only paleo foods. Eat when you're hungry!

Disclaimer: the below are the bare essentials with no particular attempt at being in-depth, and they're to an extent my personal notes (and may change as my opinion does). Read the books in the Paleolithic links section if you need specifics.

Read more . . .


Other Links
Review at Low Carb.ca
Review at Obesity Cures.com