Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

The Seattle Times reports on a new weight-loss plan, entitled "The Flavor Point Diet." The idea behind it is to outwit the chemicals, especially in processed foods, that make us want to eat more:

Fast food and packaged snacks push all kinds of flavor buttons, some of them almost secretly. Katz observes that we might reach for our favorite breakfast cereal because it's sweet, not realizing it's also loaded with salt. Ditto for the salty corn crisps that are nearly as sweet as the cereal. We might not detect it, but our brains do. As a result, we tend to eat more of these foods…

…He defuses this dietary bomb by narrowing each day's flavor options and providing variety over time, not all in one mouthful.

The menu for each day of a six-week program centers on a specific taste theme. For example, there is "peach day," with a fresh peach on whole-grain cereal for breakfast, a peach jam (all-fruit) and peanut butter (natural) sandwich on whole-grain bread for lunch and peach-coriander turkey with oven-roasted potatoes and turnips for dinner. (The recipes are in the book.) There is also walnut day, tomato day, lemon day, bell-pepper day, thyme day and other flavor-theme days.

Dr. Fuhrman addresses appetite satiety in a different way. As he explains in Disease Proof Your Child:

All primates, including humans, are driven to consume food from a variety of categories. Contrary to popular belief, a monkey does not sit under a banana tree eating bananas all day. He eats bananas and then may travel half a mile away to find a different type of food. He has an innate drive to consume variety; just satisfying the caloric drive is not enough. Likewise, children [or humans] will not be satisfied with eating only one or two foods; they will want to eat a portion of one food and want another type of food. As a higher-order animal with a bigger brain, we search for a variety of nutrient sources, and this variety assures that we get the broad assortment of nutrients that increases our immune function and longevity potential. I call this desire for different foods our variety driver.

The sense of taste is very important factor triggering the release of digestive juices and initiating the process of proper digestion. Taste can also be a guide for the body to judge the correct amount of food to consume, providing one is eating natural food. To satisfy true hunger, natural food tastes great. As the appetite is satiated, the thrill of eating diminishes and we feel we have had enough. Yet when we are exposed to processed foods, the body's natural signals to stop eating are disturbed. We offer tasty treats and desserts to stimulate and already-full appetite further and entice all to eat more. Then the unhealthier the diet becomes, the more food addition plays a role in governing appetite. We feel the need to imbibe when we get accustomed to consuming unhealthful foods. Unhealthful foods are addicting; healthy foods are not, and do not induce overeating.

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Carolee from Fairfax Virginia recently sent us an email exclaiming her and her son's excitement over starting Eat to Live:

I just purchased and quickly finished reading Eat To Live. I am on day three of the six-week program and enjoying it so far. I JUST got an email informing me that my copy of Disease-Proof Your Child is in the mail RIGHT NOW - I can hardly wait. I look forward to learning more about how I can feed the whole family the RIGHT way. In the meantime, my three-year-old son is eagerly joining me in gorging on veggies. This picture shows him eating his lunch: a whole-wheat pita smeared with roasted-red-pepper-hummus and stuffed with baby greens, shredded carrots and sliced red-pepper. He drank a glass of water and had a clementine for "dessert." He's clearly happy with it - I don't anticipate that he will have a difficult time with this transition.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for the work you have done to get these books out.

Carolee
Fairfax, VA

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You can listen online as Dr. Fuhrman discusses recent news about the FDA investigating deaths that may have been related to ADHD drugs. He will be a guest a little after 8pm ET (5pm Pacific) on Thursday, February 9--in about two hours from this writing.

Click here for more of Dr. Fuhrman's thoughts and anecdotes about treating ADHD with diet.

UPDATE: Gardiner Harris of The New York Times explains the new concerns about the effect some prescription stimulants may have on heart disease.

The votes came after F.D.A. medical officers described reports of 25 sudden deaths among people taking stimulants — the deaths were mostly children — and a preliminary analysis of millions of health records that suggested stimulants might increase the risks of strokes and serious arrhythmias in children and adults. The reports of sudden deaths never exceeded one in a million for any stimulant drug, although the F.D.A. usually receives reports of only a fraction of drug problems.

The preliminary analysis suggested that the stimulants might increase heart risks more than twofold. Such an increase may not be significant in children, whose heart risks are low, but could cause concern in adults, panel members said.

One of the drugs, Ritalin, has been marketed since 1955, and dozens of studies have shown it to be safe and effective. But no studies have been of sufficient duration or included enough participants to evaluate stimulants' long-term effects on the heart.

But the drugs' soaring popularity and increasing use in adults, panel members said, mean that the F.D.A. should study them more closely and warn patients and doctors about the potential risks to the heart.

Arthur A. Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York City and a member of the panel, said that patients assumed that stimulants were safe, but that that confidence was misplaced.

"For us to sit around and talk about it, and for us to not make a very strong warning about the uncertainty of these drugs and their possible risks, would be unethical," Mr. Levin said.

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The New York Times reports that school districts in the Bronx and Manhattan won't be going the "whole" way with milk any more. New York education officials decided to eliminate whole milk as part of a larger movement to curb childhood obesity. Martin Oestreicher, executive director of school support services explains that this initiative is all about children's livelihoods:

"We got rid of white bread; you'll never see any white bread in our schools—it's all about whole-wheat bread, frankfurter buns, hamburger buns. We reformulated a lot of items. It all goes in the context of trying to cut down the obesity index in our kids."

The article mentions that New York City is not the first major district to stop serving whole milk. Los Angeles initiated the same ban in 2000. States such as Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut have enacted or are considering similar decisions to bar or limited the serving of whole milk in public schools.

Federal guidelines still suggest three full servings of milk per day, but school officials feel their decision will help control the fat and calorie intake of children. Dr. Fuhrman has his own concerns about childhood consumption of milk. In Disease Proof Your Child he explains that mother's milk is the best choice for natural childhood development for kids until the age of two. After that it's better to get healthy fat and calcium from other sources:

The antibodies derived from mother's milk are necessary for maximizing immune system function, maximizing intelligence, and protecting against immune systems disorders, allergies, and even cancer. The child's immune system is still underdeveloped until age two, the same age when the digestive tract seals the leaks (spaces between cells) designed to allow the mother's antibodies access to the blood stream. So picking the age of two as the length of recommended breast-feeding is not just a haphazard guess, it matches the age at which the child is no longer absorbing the mother's immunoglobulins to supplement their own system. Nature designed it that way.

Breast-feeding for two years might be considered a prolonged time by today's standards, but this practice offers significant protection against childhood diseases, including allergies and asthma. One recent study showed that breast-feeding for less than 9 months was found to be a risk factor for asthma and after that period of time, the longer a child was breast-fed, the lower the risk of asthma.1 Avoiding cow's milk proteins, even those found in infant formulas, has also been shown to reduce asthma occurrence.2

After weaning from the breast, the same qualities that make a healthy adult diet, a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds, makes the best diet for children. The bottom line is to have your children develop a taste for other wholesome drinks besides cow's milk. Try soy milk or almond milk, or a mix of soy and almond. Many options are available fortified with vitamin D, vitamin B12, and calcium. If using dairy products or milk, stick to the fat-free variety. The fat in our children's diet should mostly come from avocadoes, nuts, and seeds, not cows.

Incidentally The New York Times article mentions that switching to soy milk would have jeopardized federal school food reimbursements.

For more of Dr. Fuhrman's thoughts on children's consumption of milk read this post entitled Cow's Milk and Kids Aren't Made for Each Other.

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