Vitamin Water has been in the news lately with some contretempts over the caloric content of their brightly colored, somewhat nutritious beverages. So it's fortuitous timing that they're coming out with 10-calorie versions of several flavors. Up for the dietetic treatment are Energy (tropical citrus/yellow), XXX (acai-blueberry-pomegranate/magenta), Multi-V (lemonade/white) and Essential (orange/orange).
Can you tell the difference between the 25-calorie bottle and the 125-calorie bottle? Well, the Essential lo-cal version is, weirdly, sweeter than the original, while the Multi-V is about the same. Along with the lighter revisions. Vitamin Water has also come out with two new standard-calorie flavors: Tranquilo (tamarind-pineapple/chartreuse) and Sync (berry-cherry/lavender).
It seems obvious: eat healthy foods in moderation, drink in moderation, and maintain your weight. But it's not obvious, at least not to the vast majority of Americans who are overweight, and Dr. Tedd Goldfinger, a Cardiologist in Arizona, has the answer in a book called The Wine Lover's Healthy Weight Loss Plan (McGraw-Hill, $16.95).
I think a lot of other food lovers would agree with me when I say that dieting is boring and restrictive. It's like being told you can only play certain chords on the piano if you're a pianist, or that you have to run the same route every day if you're a jogger.
That's where Goldfinger's plan is genius: he offers a dieting solution in the Mediterranean diet, based on Italian, Greek, Provencal, and Spanish cuisines that's designed to pair with wine. The foods aren't just good for you, they're good too. Goldfinger channels the author of The French Paradox, Dr. Serge Renaud, who discovered how healthy the French are in spite of eating buttered croissants and foie gras. Why? Wine, of course.
After successfully forcing NYC restaurants to post calorie counts on menus and to stop cooking with trans fat, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is waging a war on salt. A recent New York Times article explains that he's going after packaged food companies and mass-produced restaurant meals. Apparently, they contribute 80 percent of the sodium in the average American diet. Over the next five years, Dr. Frieden aims to cut the level of salt intake by 25 percent.
Is salt so bad for us? Salt, in some people (not everyone) can lead to high blood pressure which is a leading factor in the incidence of heart attack and stroke. At the same time, many scientists do not believe sodium intake is directly related to high blood pressure. In the past, studies comparing hypertensive populations found that those on low-salt diets had more than four times as many heart attacks as those on normal-sodium diets.
Although the health link may not be clear, what's obvious is that excess of most ingredients cannot be healthy. And, foods at fast-food chains, like McDonald's, are outrageously high in sodium. It seems that if dealt with in a reasonable way, Dr. Frieden's goal can be quite progressive. What do you think?
Spring, Summer, Late Summer, Fall, and Winter make up the five seasons of the Chinese calendar; corresponding with the five Chinese elements and a number of their healing philosophies.
According to my knowledgeable friend Lora: "Each season is connected to a set of organs in the body. Corresponding foods that are fresh in each season are meant to cleanse, detoxify, and heal those organs. When we eat the same diet year-round without paying attention to seasonal foods, we ignore our bodies' needs to support and properly heal organs, which leads to lots of health issues (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc.)."
You probably remember hearing about The Miracle Fruit (containing the mysterious protein miraculin) earlier this year. It makes bitter and sour taste sweet, and, by altering those two flavors, makes everything taste like something else.
Surprise surprise, they turned it into a pill!
Available from ThinkGeek, the Miracle Fruit Tablets come in dodgy-looking packets of ten and will apparently blow your mind so much, they recommend only taking half a tablet to start.
Originally documented in France in 1725, the Miracle Fruit has been experiencing a renaissance of interest since 2007. We attribute the public fascination to the hope that one day cauliflower will taste like ice cream and vinegar will taste like ranch dressing. As people continue to invent crazy diets to lose weight, everyone is on the lookout for a way to make diet food taste more like Snickers bars. We wonder what it does to cabbage soup!
For now, people are mostly using the tablets recreationally. Two pills per person makes one heck of a crazy dinner party!
Tofu noodles, a slimy, putty-pale item that might ordinarily be relegated to the back of the ethnic food shelf in American grocery stores, are experiencing a surge in popularity. Why? The 40-calories-a-bag noodles have been endorsed by Hungry Girl, a website dedicated to the kind of food substitutions that recall the bad old days of Slim-Fast, Snackwells, and other highly altered dietetic food stuffs. Her endorsement has made the once-obscure noodles a hot ticket item in stores like Whole Foods and Gristede's.
Hungry Girl suggests eating Tofu Shirataki noodles with low-fat cheese as a sort of (very) faux fettuccine Alfredo. I dunno - anything labeled "lite" or "low-fat" reminds me too much of my mid-90s girlhood of eating neon-colored sugar-free yogurt for breakfast and tofu bologna slices for lunch.
One of my favorite early Saturday Night Liveskits was featured John Belushi as an Olympic athlete. The scene opens with clips of Belushi doing a high jump and running around a track, then cuts to a shot of him at the breakfast table. Clutching a cigarette, Belushi looks into the camera with complete gravitas and tells about his secret to staying fit: "I downed a lot of donuts. Little chocolate donuts. They taste good and they've got the sugar I need to get me going in the morning."
The commercial played off the classic "Wheaties" ads, which featured Bruce Jenner. The prevailing wisdom in those days stated that top-class athletes had to eat extremely healthy foods, like whole grain cereal and skinless, boneless chicken. However, as I recently read about Michael Phelps' daily eating regimen, I was surprised to see that his diet is much closer to John Belushi's than to Richard Simmons. To begin with, the Olympian consumes approximately 12,000 calories a day, roughly six times the RDA for a man his age. Second, it is heavily skewed towards carbohydrates and fats, which most diets eschew. Given Phelps' amazing energy expenditure (in the average week, the guy swims five hours a day, six days a week!
At any rate, Phelps' average daily menu is after the jump...
As someone with an insatiable sweet tooth, I was fascinated when I found out that hormones in our body affect how we perceive and crave sweetness. They do this according to our body's nutritional needs. Since I have a pretty bad sweet tooth, does this mean my body needs more of it? Not exactly. A recent article in The Economist explains that scientists have done the first step; they've isolated hormones that affect our palate's sensitivity to sugar.
The reason why this study is so important is because it may lead doctors and nutritionists to find a solution for ways of reducing the desire for sugar-heavy foods, and thus reduce calorie-intake. Yuzo Ninomiya, a neuroscientist at Kyushu University in Japan, researched the effects of leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite and metabolism. His results show that when leptin levels are low, we are more sensitive to sugar, which means something tastes sweeter than when our leptin levels are low. The level of the hormone increases over the day. This might explain why we tend to eat lots of sugar in the morning ('cause it tastes so good!).
So, it seems, if scientists can figure out how to raise leptin levels (or at least keep them steady) throughout the day, then all of us sweet-tooth types might have a chance at eating less cake!
In a world full of sweets, it's not easy to avoid them. What are some ways you control your sugar intake?
If you're trying to lose weight this summer to fit into that very special bathing suit, you should consider keeping a food diary. A recent study from the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research shows that maintaining a daily food diary doubles a person's weight loss. This recent discovery comes from one of the largest and longest running weight loss maintenance trials ever conducted.
Since more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, the results from this study seem crucial in helping Americans lose weight more easily. It's also worth noting that since African Americans have a higher risk of conditions aggravated by being overweight, including diabetes and heart disease, the research recruited 44 percent of its study participants from the African American community.
While it seems obvious that writing a daily account of our food intake will help us lose weight, we seem to forget it. Now, it's proven to work. I have to admit that on the rare occasions when I've kept a food diary, I was often shocked to see the laundry list of junk food I eat. Have you ever kept a food diary? If so, what were some of the foods you were surprised to see reoccurring in your daily diet?
What's up with these 'cleansing' diets and why are they so popular? In the latest high-profile example, Oprah has just completed a three week vegan cleansing diet, and, according to Access Hollywood, she feels not only refreshed, but awakened. She states that she is now more aware of the global food crisis.
Oprah's diet was based on Kathy Freston's book "Quantum Wellness." To find out more about her cleansing experience, you can read her blog. Apparently, everything she ate, with the exception of olive oil, came from her garden. I can understand feeling healthy after a cleansing diet, but I'm not sure I'd say that it made me more sensitive to the world's food problems. Oprah, coming from you, that just seems a little ridiculous, not to mention a bit insensitive!
Have you tried a cleansing diet? If so, which ones and how did they work out?
...well, not forever. Technically, only for 21 days, along with all animal products, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, and gluten. Oh, right: and she's calling it a "cleanse," in hopes that it will prepare her for her "inner makeover."
Now, giving up alcohol, caffeine, and animal products is a difficult decision, and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
But, (big surprise), I have several issues with this. First of all, I dislike the word "cleanse." It's often associated with that ridiculous maple syrup/cayenne pepper diet, and don't even try to convince me that it works, because depriving yourself of food is simply unhealthy, I don't care if you feel "amazing" or not (most likely, that "amazing, high" feeling is the effects of oxygen depletion to your brain, sweetie).
Remember all the hype surrounding Beyonce and her occasional detox diet?
It's now officially being referred to as the Def Jam Diet. For some reason, everyone associated with the record label is drastically dropping pounds. However, now that Beyonce's (supposedly) pregnant, she can't do drop the pounds with the extreme dieting. (Well, duh, Beyonce, you're gaining weight because you're pregnant.)
As I flipped past Maxim, Shape, and Better Homes and Gardens, a new mag caught my eye the other day - Clean Eating. Come again? I flipped through it for a minute or so, but couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what "clean eating" was. The opposite of 'dirty eating?' (see picture at right for an example of what I imagined 'dirty eating' to be). Perhaps a way of eating without spilling anything on yourself. Sadly, this intrigued me.
So I went home and consulted my trusty ol' Interweb, and there it was: the unofficial definition of clean eating: "Consuming food in its most natural state...it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle approach to food and its preparation, leading to..." My eyes glazed over at this point (and by the way, why does every new diet define itself as a "lifestyle?" Can't anyone just eat anymore without defining themselves within a food "lifestyle?"
Anyway, I digress. From what I can tell, "clean eating" is just another way of saying "eat normal-sized portions of healthy, low-fat, fresh foods." Which everyone already knows. And like every di - er, lifestyle - there's a list of stuff to avoid (refined sugars, anything fatty, alcohol - y'know, all the tasty stuff) and a "seven-day meal plan" to get you started. Oh, and the best part: the token "Before and After" pics of a woman in a muumuu and then that same woman, 200 pounds lighter and "much, much happier." Because only thin people are happy, dontcha know.
Eh, I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded - and I'm sure Clean Eating could be a good source for new healthy recipes - but healthy eating and portion control are simply that. Stop trying to slap a label on it turn it into a book, movie, stuffed animal, or lifestyle. Just eat right, right? And have a beer or a cupcake once in awhile. Tell them Ellen said it's okay.
Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?
Put down that pink/yellow/blue packet and step away from your latte.
New research from scientists at Purdue University claim that artificial sweeteners, long thought to aid in dieting, actually makes it tougher to lose weight. Because sweet foods normally prompt the body to get ready to take in a lot of calories, the body gets confused when the taste of sweetness from an artificial sweetener is not followed by a calorie flux. You'll eventually end up eating more, or burning fewer calories.
Guess that means I'm going back to plain old sugar.
That's according to Mehmet Oz, the doctor who always appears on Oprah in his scrubs, talking about colons, and Joel Harper, in this quick Q and A at Esquire.com.
Oz and Harper (a personal trainer) answer several questions about food, health, and exercise. Besides declaring blueberries the healthiest fruit, they also say that the only good thing about pizza is the sauce, that colon cleansing isn't really worth it, and that a little alcohol isn't bad for us at all. They also answer the question on whether it's ok to eat something that has fallen on the floor as long as we pick it up within five seconds.
As for the pizza advice, I think there's another good thing that they're forgetting: pizza is totally awesome!
Vitamin Water has been in the news lately with some contretempts over the caloric content of their brightly colored, somewhat nutritious beverages. So it's fortuitous timing that they're coming out with 10-calorie versions of several flavors. Up for the dietetic treatment are Energy (tropical citrus/yellow), XXX (acai-blueberry-pomegranate/magenta), Multi-V (lemonade/white) and Essential (orange/orange). 
It seems obvious: eat healthy foods in moderation, drink in moderation, and maintain your weight. But it's not obvious, at least not to the vast majority of Americans who are overweight, and Dr. Tedd Goldfinger, a Cardiologist in Arizona, has the answer in a book called 
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One of my favorite early Saturday Night Live 
Remember all the hype surrounding Beyonce and her occasional detox diet? 
Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?
That's according to Mehmet Oz, the doctor who always appears on Oprah in his scrubs, talking about colons, and Joel Harper, in 
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