"weight" news and stories

No breakfast, no weight gain? Not buying it.

That sound you hear is eyebrows rising on more than a few nutrition and obesity experts. A new German study is challenging one of the most basic and longstanding tenets about weight and eating: that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Researchers at Technical University of Munich found that people who ate more food for breakfast didn't cut their calorie intake at other meals to compensate – they simply ate more.

The researchers looked at 380 subjects -- 280 obese and 100 normal weight -- who kept track of what they ate for about two weeks. Breakfast foods varied, but when subjects, normal or obese, ate at least 400 additional calories for breakfast, they wound up eating 400 more calories for the day.

"Reduced breakfast energy intake is associated with lower total daily intake," the study's conclusion said as reported in Nutrition Journal. "The influence of the ratio of breakfast to overall energy intake largely depends on the post-breakfast rather than breakfast intake pattern. Therefore, overweight and obese subjects should consider the reduction of breakfast calories as a simple option to improve their daily energy balance."

Restaurant menus abound with unhealthy choices. Photo: smoorenburg, flickr

Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the ninth in a series of posts.

Server discretion, like sobriety checks and seat belts, helps prevent deadly car crashes.

Backed by laws that decree certain ruin for restaurants that serve drinks to overly intoxicated patrons, most servers don't hesitate to cut off customers who've had enough. But they're understandably reluctant to police other equally dangerous behaviors observed at the table, raising the question of whether servers ever have an ethical obligation to intercede.

Restaurants are in the business of providing their guests with food and drink, which makes the prospect of withholding either seem counterintuitive at best. But when the requested item would harm the diner, does the "just doing my job" argument falter?

I always hate the word "diet," because even though it's also a medical term, it's usually used by people looking for a quick fix. We all know that losing weight and getting in shape is a life long change in lifestyle. I'm especially reminded of that since I just got back from my yearly physical and...well...I don't want to tell you what my weight is.

Having said that, I think all diets have at least something that we can take away from them and use, and Yahoo's Buzz log has the top 20 diets being searched on Yahoo right now. They include old standbys like Atkins, The Zone, and Weight Watchers, and a few newcomers, such as the Master Cleanse Diet and The Hallelujah Diet, which is "biblically based." I have no idea what that means, but it probably means walking in a desert for a really long time.

Every year I make food resolutions. Oh, sure, there's the inevitable "eat better, exercise more, lose weight" resolution that 98% of us make, but I'm talking about resolutions that have to do with specific foods and specific eating habits. Here are some of mine for 2008.

1. Drink more alcohol. Yes, that's right, more alcohol. For some reason I haven't had much in the past year or two, but alcohol (especially red wine) has a lot of health benefits (as long as you don't overdo it, because too much will negate the benefits you get). So, 2008 will become the Year of More Alcohol for me. I think this is one resolution that will be easy to keep.

The Diet Blog has a list of the seven drinks that have the most sugar in them. I don't drink any of these (though I did go through a weird phase several years ago when I was drinking Sunkist Orange Drink all the time) because I drink diet soda and tea, and if I do have juice it's low-sugar orange juice or Ruby Red Light.

Sunkist Orange does make it on the list, at No. 4, with 87.5 grams of sugar in a 20 oz bottle (35 grams in the 8 oz). Other drinks on the list include Minute Maid Cranberry Grape and Sobe Adrenaline Rush. I'll let you click on the link above to find out what number one is.

Read what readers say at the link too, some interesting comments there.