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

Fads love them or hate them—they sell—Beanie Babies, Pokemon, The Atkins Diet, and Slap Bracelets all huge money makers, and in my humble opinion, giant wastes of time. You can certainly add The South Beach Diet to that list too, and, the new South Beach vending machines. Yup, it’s sad but true. Diet Blog is on it:

Kraft Foods is rolling out a vending machine stocked with South Beach Diet branded food.


Apparently the machines are already in service in Florida. The machines are only stocked with foods that are compliant with the Arthur Agatston's South Beach Diet.

This includes: Planters nuts, Breakstone's low-fat cottage cheese, Crystal Light drinks, Jell-O sugar-free gelatin snacks, Nabisco Wheat Thins and the new South Beach Diet lunch wraps.


I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Truth be told, I don’t know that much about The South Beach Diet—I’m not into bandwagons—but Dr. Fuhrman considers South Beach to be just another ineffective approach to a healthy diet. Why? He points out a major reason in this post debunking the dietary misinformation of Joseph Mercola, D.O. Check it out:

I am not arguing that a vegan diet is healthier or will lead to a longer life compared to someone who eats a small amount of animal products, such as a little fish or eggs in their diet. But I am arguing that as the amount of animal products increases in a diet-style forcing natural plant foods off the plate to become a smaller percentage of total caloric intake, the modern diseases that kill over 80 percent of Americans (heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes) will occur in greater and greater likelihood in every genetic type. My review of over 60,000 articles in the scientific literature supports the conclusion that animal products if consumed should be held to a maximum of ten percent of total caloric intake, reduced from 40 percent in America today and certainly significantly reduced from 60 percent on the Zone and South Beach diets and 80 percent of total caloric intake on the Atkins type diets, and somewhere in between these level on Dr. Mercola's high protein type diet. Dr. Mercola's recommendation are somewhat similar to the Weston Price Foundation, another group that advocates a diet rich in meats based on distorted science and old scientific views that have been disproven by the preponderance of the evidence.

I’ve said it before, I’m a layman not an expert, but from my experience managing this blog I have learned one important overriding fact: the more animal products you eat, the shorter your life and the higher your risk of disease. Again, this isn’t my opinion. I picked it up from Dr. Fuhrman and the graphs in these two posts clearly illustrate this relationship. Take a look:

• Animal Fat and Cancer
• Animal vs. Plant Foods and Heart Disease in Pictures

The trouble is fads sell…truth doesn’t.

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Dr. Fuhrman will never give weight-loss surgery his endorsement. Why? It’s risky and full of complications. He talks about it in Eat to Live. Here’s a snippet:

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wound problems and complications from blood clots are common aftereffects of gastric bypass and gastroplasty surgery. The NIH has also reported that those undergoing surgical treatment for obesity have had substantial nutritional and metabolic complications, gastritis, esophagitis, outlet stenosis, and abdominal hernias. More than 10 percent required another operation to fix problems resulting from the first surgery.1

And some new research confirms Dr. Fuhrman’s concerns. According to Reuters death-risks increase after weight-loss surgery. Michael Conlon reports:

Patients who undergo weight-loss stomach surgery have a higher death rate than is true for the general population, including more suicides, perhaps linked to depression, researchers said on Monday.


The higher risk of death generally is due not to the surgery itself but to the health problems that accompany obesity, and the damage that the condition does to the body before and after surgery, the researchers said.

Dr. Bennet Omalu and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh said a review of more than 16,000 bariatric operations done in Pennsylvania over a nine-year period found a "substantial excess of deaths owing to suicide and coronary artery disease" compared to normal death rates found in the population at large.

Why not just eat healthfully and exercise?

Continue Reading...

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Well, this is an odd report. Judy Foreman of The Boston Globe asks the question, “Is dieting or exercise better for weight loss?” Let’s find out:

In a small, randomized, controlled clinical trial, Ravussin divided three dozen overweight but healthy men and women into three groups. One group reduced their calorie intake by 25 percent. Another group cut calories by half as much (12.5 percent) while increasing energy output through exercise by 12.5 percent; and the third group made no diet or exercise changes.


The researchers looked at weight loss, body composition, and measures of superficial and deep fat. They found that it doesn't matter whether people lose weight by diet or by exercise or a combination, although exercise has the important benefit of improving cardiovascular health.

"So long as the energy deficit is the same, body weight, fat mass, and abdominal fat will all decrease the same way," said Ravussin, in an e-mail.

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The heck with the gym! Diet Blog passes along this diamond in the rough. Let’s all jiggle our way to superior health. Check it out:


Egad!

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John Tierney of The New York Times examines the debate surrounding dietary fat. Here’s a bit:

Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly…

…In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.

There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet…

…To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)

Yeah, this made me say, “What the—?” So, here’s what Dr. Fuhrman had to say about it:

Amazing how stupid people are. Gary Taubes is a known Atkins' devotee and nutritionally naïve and led by the Atkins' crowd. Now he has his own book. All I can say is that this makes me look like a genius comparatively when I am only stating the obvious. All I can say is:

Health = Nutrition / Calories

Not sure what this means? Well, Dr. Fuhrman explains it in his book Eat to Live. Take a look:

Your health is predicted by your nutrient intake divided by your intake of calories. Health = Nutrition / Calories, or simply H = N/C, is a concept I call the nutrient-density of your diet. Food supplies us with both nutrients and calories (energy). All calories come from only three elements: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Nutrients are derived from non-caloric food factors—including vitamins, minerals, fibers, and phytochemicals. These non-caloric nutrients are vitally important for health. Your key to permanent weight loss is to eat predominantly those foods that have a high proportion of nutrients (non-caloric food factors) to calories (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins). In physics a key formula is Einstein’s E = mc2. In nutrition the key formula is H = N/C.

Every food can be evaluated using this formula. Once you begin to learn which foods make the grade—by having a high proportion of nutrients to calories—you are on your way to lifelong weight control and improved health.

Oh! And for more on the Atkins foolishness, be sure to read these previous postings. Enjoy:

• The Physician and The Student
• How a High-Protein Diet Works
• Increased Risk of Cancer Associated with The Atkins Diet
• Short and Long-Term Dangers of High-Fat Diets
• What Happens When You Tell The Truth About Atkins

And don’t forget about our friends over at AtkinsExposed.org!

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A few years ago I asked a heavy-set friend of mine why he chewed so much gum. His response, “Dude, it totally helps you lose weight.” After I bashed him on the head, I walked away in disbelief. But apparently there’s actually research on gum-chewing and weight-loss. More from Diet Blog:

There are a few shortcomings of such research:

• The numbers were small - just 40 women and 20 men - of which only 9 were overweight or obese.
• The results were also skewed by those called "restrained eaters". Those who were good at denying themselves food tended to be the ones who ate less after chewing the gum.
• This is no double-blind research. Either you were chewing the gum or you weren't. Who is to say how the gum-chewers consciously or subconsciously changed their eating habits?
• The research was "supported" by an Educational Award from the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.

Chew tubby! Chew till the pounds melt away—sigh!

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