Nutrition Frenzy

Hello readers, taking a break for a few days. Any questions, comments or concerns, write below or email.

Lab study offers new clues about how the body metabolizes carbohydrates

From MSNBC Health: Very interesting study. We may not be all that responsible for weight gain, and therefore, must work all that much harder to get rid of that fat.

Researchers have found a gene responsible for turning a plate of pasta into fat, offering new clues about how the body metabolizes carbohydrates and how they contribute to obesity.

The gene, called DNA-PK, appears to regulate the process in the liver that turns carbohydrates into fat, the University of California, Berkeley team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell.

“We hope that this research will one day help people eat bread, pasta and rice and not worry about getting fat,” Roger Wong, a graduate student who worked on the study, said in a statement.

When they bred mice with a disabled version of this gene, the mice stayed slim even when fed the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet.

“The DNA-PK disabled mice were leaner and had 40 percent less body fat compared with a control group of normal mice because of their deficiency in turning carbs into fat,” Wong said.

He said the mice who lacked this gene did not get fat when they ate high-carb food and they had lower levels of blood cholesterol, which can reduce the risk of heart disease.

Since humans have the same gene, the team thinks it may serve as a potential target for drugs to prevent obesity.

Just think of the possibilities.

Want to be happier, get in shape and have better sex? Try these strategies

MSNBC posted a great slide viewer on where the healthiest men in the world live and how they live their lives.

Here’s the Nutrition information:

Nutrition
Where men are well fed
1. Portugal
2. Spain
3. Canada
4. Italy
5. Greece
Worst diets
20. Ukraine

What went into the scores: We looked at each country’s per capita consumption of fish, vegetables, fruit, breakfast, tea, sweets, and take-out and fast food.

GREECE: Make vegetables a main event
Greek Orthodox men eat their greens religiously: Some go meatless half the year. “So they create tasty vegetarian dishes,” says Elena Paravantes, R.D., of the Hellenic Dietetic Association. Since these dishes are popular, so is produce.

What you can learn from Greece: “Stop trying to eat all your vegetables as sides,” says Paravantes. To that end, try this Greek stew, called ladera. Boil a pound of frozen green beans for 3 minutes, and then drain. Sauté a chopped onion in olive oil, and add a can of crushed tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, and some parsley. Cook for 10 minutes, add the beans and simmer for 20 minutes. Top with feta and serve with whole-grain bread. For more recipes, go to MensHealth.com, keyword world.

PORTUGAL: Keep a stash of seafood
Thanks to their country’s endless coastline, Portuguese men eat a serving of fish a day. That’s enough omega-3 fatty acid to reduce their risk of heart disease and possibly prostate cancer.

What you can learn from Portugal: The hardest part of eating more seafood is the forethought needed to buy and prepare it. Supplement the times when you cook or order fish with a cache of ready-to-eat tuna in your desk drawer. We like Bumble Bee’s Easy Peel Sensations in Lemon and Pepper and Spicy Thai Chili.

From My Pyramid and the Ad Council have teamed to bring you a new serie sof Public Series Announcements regarding the New My Pyramid.

Here’s one:

Less than 25% of adolescents eat the daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables. Few get regular physical activity. While mothers and caregivers are aware of the importance of healthy eating and physical activity habits, they struggle with the best way to implement them for their families. With obesity rates rising among children and adults, it’s important to provide information and realistic tips for making and sustaining healthy choices for kids.

This campaign motivates moms to encourage proper nutrition and physical activity for their families, emphasizing that a bright future starts with a healthy lifestyle. The notion that “Good Nutrition Can Lead to Great Things” reinforces that healthy eating and physical activity are fuel for a kid’s mind and body. The campaign encourages viewers to visit www.MyPyramid.gov and use the USDA’s Food Pyramid as an effective tool to help their children make healthy choices.

Disney Partnership

In an effort to extend this important campaign message, the Ad Council and USDA collaborated with Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on a series of PSAs featuring the lovable characters and memorable songs from Disney’s original classic The Jungle Book. These PSAs highlight the importance of balancing good nutrition and physical activity by emphasizing the “Bare Necessities” of healthy living, and send a message to families that leading a healthy lifestyle can help you be the best at everything you love to do.

The McKee Group, Kellogs and the Peanut Corp have issued recalls of products made with Peanut Butter due to salmonella .

Man, I love peanut butter. Right now, in my cupboard, there are five jars of the brown goo. Peanut butter nourished me throughout childhood, college and spare times. Luckily, I don’t buy many process foods made with peanut butter.

McKee Foods Corp. of Collegedale, Tenn. made a voluntary recall covers all sizes of two kinds of sandwich crackers — Little Debbie peanut butter toasty crackers and Little Debbie peanut butter cheese crackers.

Officials are focusing on peanut paste, as well as peanut butter, produced at a Blakely, Ga., facility owned by Peanut Corp. of America. Its peanut butter is not sold directly to consumers but distributed to institutions and food companies. But the peanut paste, made from roasted peanuts, is an ingredient in cookies, cakes and other products that people buy in the supermarket.

The Kellogg Co., which listed Peanut Corp. as one of its suppliers, has recalled 16 products. They include Austin and Keebler branded Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers, and some snack-size packs of Famous Amos Peanut Butter Cookies and Keebler Soft Batch Homestyle Peanut Butter Cookies.

There have been deaths related to this current bad batch of peanut butter paste in all parts of the country. So, look through your cupboards and pantrys and throw these products away. The CDC said the bacteria behind the outbreak — typhimurium — is common and not an unusually dangerous strain but that the elderly or those with weakened immune systems are more at risk.

Next time you’re making Spaghetti or Lasagna, try substituting Mushrooms for Meat.

Mushrooms are an easy meat substitute, with their earthy taste and chock full of vitamins and nutrients. They are a good source of B vitamins, especially niacin and riboflavin, and rank the highest among vegetables for protein content. But because they are low in fat and calories, Western nutritionists mistakenly considered them of no food value (a fresh pound has only about 125 calories). Yet in dried form, mushrooms have almost as much protein as veal and a significant amount of complex carbohydrates called polysaccharides. Shiitake mushrooms are among the most delicious & very nutritious.

Mushrooms have to be one of my favorite vegetables. Being so versatile, it’s no wonder that many people love the little fungi. They can be put in most anything, from pastries, pastas to potatos.

Mushrooms are also a dieters best friend. People in the study also said the mushroom makeovers tasted just as good and kept them feeling full just as long as the beef versions did. And not only did the mushroom-based dishes mean a lower-calorie meal, but the mushroom eaters also ate fewer calories and less fat throughout the day than the beef eaters did.

Try this savory Mushroom Stroganoff:

8 ounces portobello mushrooms, sliced
8 ounces whole-wheat noodles, cooked
1 1/2 cups reduced-sodium broth, chicken or vegetable
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3 tablespoons flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups fat-free sour cream
1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley, chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper

To make this dish:

Mix the sour cream and flour together in a small bowl until smooth. Set aside. In a large skillet, sauté the onion in the olive oil over low heat until soft. Turn the heat up to medium-high and add the mushrooms. Sauté until the mushrooms brown. Transfer the mushroom mixture to a large bowl. Turn the heat up to high and add the broth to the skillet. Bring to a boil and reduce the liquid by 30%. Set the heat to low and add the mushrooms and onions. Add sour cream and flour mixture to skillet, stirring well. Add parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over noodles.

President-elect releases recorded message on Christmas

President-elect Barack Obama offered appreciation to the U.S. military on Christmas Eve in a recorded message and then asked children of uniformed troops if they had their wish lists ready.

Obama and wife, Michelle, made their early morning trek to Marine Corps Base Hawaii just northeast of Honolulu as they had done during the last three days. After about an hour at the base on Wednesday where he went inside a gym for a workout, he walked over to greet more than 60 people who waited for him. The president-elect shook hands while onlookers took pictures with their cell phones and digital cameras.

“You guys got your Christmas list?” Obama asked one person standing in the makeshift ropeline. He asked another: “Hey man, what’s going on?”

Earlier in the day, his aides released a recorded message of appreciation to the military “serving their second, third or even fourth tour of duty.”

“This holiday season, their families celebrate with a joy that is muted knowing that a loved one is absent, and sometimes in danger,” Obama said in the message, set to air Saturday morning. “In towns and cities across America, there is an empty seat at the dinner table; in distant bases and on ships at sea, our servicemen and women can only wonder at the look on their child’s face as they open a gift back home.”

The Obamas during past years spent the December holidays visiting Obama’s maternal grandmother, who died Nov. 2, before Obama’s historic Nov. 4 victory. The Obamas on Tuesday had a private memorial service for Madelyn Payne Dunham, known to friends as “Toot,” who helped raise him.

Aides said the Obamas would open presents on Christmas morning and have a traditional dinner of ham and turkey in the evening.

But rich diet is only one factor in rising rates of ‘the disease of kings’

Courtesy of JoNel Aleccia: Dr. Stephen Vogel should know better than to put chopped chicken livers on his Thanksgiving menu.

As a veteran victim of five years of gout attacks, the retired Gainesville, Fla., surgeon can more or less count on an excruciating flare-up of the acute arthritis that afflicts him and at least 3 million other people in the United States.

But does that mean he’ll steer clear of the savory spread at his brother’s house on Thanksgiving? Not a chance, said Vogel, 69, who is a walking, talking, noshing example of why rates of gout have doubled in the U.S. in recent years.

Indeed, gout has become the most common form of inflammatory arthritis in men older than 40, and increasingly common in women after menopause, said Dr. John Sundy, director of rheumatology and allergy research at Duke University.

Most long-term treatment of the disorder has relied on a drug developed in the 1960s, but on Monday, an advisory committee of the federal Food and Drug Administration recommended U.S. approval of the first new treatment to manage gout in four decades.

It’s not clear exactly how common gout is. A 10-year study of more than 4 million managed care patients in 1999 detected gout in 41 of every 1,000 people older than 75, up from 21 in 1,000 in 1990, according to the Journal of Rheumatology. Rates were more than 31 in 1,000 for people 65 to 74. Current rates have not been pegged, especially in younger people, because recent large studies have not been conducted.

At least one emergency department in Connecticut is keeping track on a small scale, however. At Windham Hospital in Willimantic, Conn., gout diagnoses appear to be up 23 percent over last year, according to Dr. Gregory Shangold, the ED director.

Gout is triggered by high levels of uric acid in the blood, a condition that occurs either when too much of the waste product is produced by eating certain foods, or too little is excreted by the kidneys. In either case, it accumulates, creating concentrations of needlelike uric acid crystals that pile up in the spaces between the joints.

Uric acid typically builds up over time, usually decades. While a single lavish meal isn’t enough to create conditions for gout, a flare can be sparked by a bout of binge drinking, by sudden dehydration or other changes in kidney function, or by trauma such as surgery or a heart attack. In some cases, a stubbed toe on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night has been enough to send a susceptible patient into an attack.

Have an attack of gout ? Check out this new medication.

Experts: Nixing commercials may lower number of heavy kids by 18 percent

Banning fast-food advertising on television in the United States could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 percent, researchers said on Wednesday.

But the team at the National Bureau of Economic Research questioned whether it would be practical to impose that kind of government regulation — something only Sweden, Norway and Finland have done.

“We have known for some time that childhood obesity has gripped our culture, but little empirical research has been done that identifies television advertising as a possible cause,” said economist Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

“Hopefully, this line of research can lead to a serious discussion about the type of policies that can curb America’s obesity epidemic.”

For their study, funded in part by the federal government, Chou and colleagues used data on nearly 13,000 children from the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, both issued by the U.S. Department of Labor.

“The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week,” they wrote in the Journal of Law and Economics.

“Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent.”

Slide show

Perspectives on obesity
A Daryl Cagle editorial cartoon roundup on the growing problem of obesity in the U.S.
msnbc.com

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 13.9 percent of children aged 2 to 5 are overweight, 18.8 percent of those aged 6 to 11 are and more than 17 percent of those 12 to 19.

The percentages have been steadily rising.

Television watching is also known to raise obesity rates, both because children exercise less and because it can interfere with sleep.

Tip Control for Candy Cravings

The trick to avoiding a candy binge? Surprising as this sounds: Put the minipacks away, and take a small handful from a big bag instead.

Treats in small Halloween-size packages can trick even careful eaters into overindulging. In a recent study, people concerned about their waistlines ate more high-calorie snacks when given small bags instead of big ones.

Persuasive Packets
Why? In a related study, minipacks of foods like M&M’s and little cookies led people to go overboard because they viewed the smaller portions as “healthier” versions of high-calorie treats. And careful eaters were less likely to even open big bags of candy, unlike snack packs. Which means small bags may do a better job of luring you into high-calorie munching in the first place.

Caveat for the Unconcerned
One alert: According to the study, minis don’t seem to make everyone overeat — only those who are concerned about managing their weight. People who weren’t concerned about gaining weight munched more snacks from large bags than small ones. Either way, what it all boils down to is portion control.

Eat Less by Keeping This in Mind

So you grabbed a bag of chips, and a short while later, you were down to the crumbs. How’d that happen?

While you’re figuring that out, here’s how you can stop it from happening again: Practice mindful eating. There’s a growing army of slim people singing this savor-the-moment practice.

Your Mantra:
Relax, Focus
To teach yourself how to eat mindfully, start with a raisin. Take a deep, relaxing breath as you pick it up. Look at it for a few seconds. Smell it. Place it in your mouth and roll it around on your tongue. Feel the wrinkles. Now bite. Note the chewy, gritty texture — the sweet, fruity, astringent taste. Extract all the flavor before you swallow. That’s kind of the idea with mindful eating — to savor the look, smell, texture, and taste of every bite. And it works! It had a huge impact on curbing chronic binge eating in a recent study.

A health minister in England wants eateries there to follow the lead of U.S. restaurants by posting calorie counts on menus.

Will England Start Calorie Counting?
British Health Minister Dawn Primarolo has issued a call for England’s restaurants to start posting calorie counts on their menus, according to U.K. paper The Daily Telegraph. Primarolo noted that a similar initiative has been declared a success in the United States, and said, “If it works for them why can’t it happen here.”

Obesity has been at the forefront of health officials’ concerns in England for some time. Currently, one in four British adults is overweight or obese, and the situation is expected to worsen. “I know good diet isn’t just about calorie content, and I know there will be difficulties for independent restaurants, but we have to start somewhere,” Primarolo told The Daily Telegraph. “Why can’t we have calorie content on menus in all chain restaurants?”

England is also trying to address the weight problems of its younger population. In August, the country rolled out a new plan to help reduce cases of childhood obesity.

Background: Trans fat bans, and calorie accountability
To protect the health of California residents who frequently consume fast food, on July 25 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law ordering all restaurants to eliminate the use of trans fats by Jan. 1, 2010. “Consuming trans fat is linked to coronary heart disease, and today we are taking a strong step toward creating a healthier future for California,” the governor said. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said that trans fats are “causing several thousand deaths each year.”

Although the ban was opposed by the California Restaurant Association, many restaurants have taken the initiative to ban trans fat on their own. McDonald’s has switched to cooking french fries in oils free of trans fats in all restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. Jim Skinner, chief executive of the restaurant chain, said that by the end of the year, McDonald’s pies and other baked goods will be trans fat-free as well.

Wendy’s fast food restaurants switched to trans fat-free cooking in 2006, KFC and Taco Bell chains switched over last year, and Burger King has promised to switch to trans fat-free cooking by the end of 2008.

BY MELISSA NEWMAN

EVERY YEAR, AMID the excitement of Halloween-related fun, conversations commonly turn toward scary and unnerving talk of the mysterious world of paranormal and supernatural phenomena.Unlike the entertaining “safe scares” that Halloween brings, for those who encounter “real paranormal phenomena,” the encounters can be truly terrifying and even life-changing. And while these otherworldly phenomena have been a part of the human experience since the dawn of humankind – and, incidentally, is where Halloween originates – not even western society’s modern-day cynical culture of scientific analysis could dismiss and suppress the existence of these elusive phenomena. On the contrary, whether you are a believer or a hardened skeptic, an avalanche of experiences involving paranormal and supernatural phenomena continues to be reported worldwide.

According to several polls and surveys conducted around the world, belief in the paranormal and supernatural is at an all time high and shows no evidence of decline. In the U.S. alone, a recent Gallop poll showed that 75% of Americans have some sort of paranormal belief; a Harris poll showed that half of Americans believe in ghosts; a CBS poll showed that one in five Americans have seen or physically encountered a ghost; and still another survey taken from more than 400 college students with the highest GPAs found seniors and grad students more likely to believe in the paranormal then their “uneducated” freshman counterparts. Paranormal beliefs include such phenomena as extraterrestrial and UFO close encounters, all types of psychic phenomena, miracles and demonic possession, ghosts and poltergeists, witchcraft and metaphysics, and encounters with extraordinary life forms, including Bigfoot and the notorious chupacabra.

HALLOWEEN ORIGINS

Whether one is a believer or a skeptic, Halloween in the U.S. might be the one time of the year that both stand united in simply having a good time in the shadow of such reported phenomena. The origins of Halloween itself lay in supernatural beliefs and an ancient Celtic festival that dates back some 2,000 years. Originally called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the festival originated amidst the region now known as the United Kingdom and celebrated the one night each year that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became indistinguishable. On this night, the Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth for good or for bad and allowed Druid priests to additionally interact with them for the wellbeing of them all.

Over the course of hundreds of years, early Christianity would attempt to suppress and replace the Celtic festival with All Saints’ Day, which was celebrated on November 1, a holy day of obligation to honor saints and martyrs in the Christian faith. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. But even the powerful influence of the church was unable to squelch the supernatural festival, and Halloween endured and flourished over the centuries to become the sensationalistic celebration it is today in the U.S.

While Halloween is still mostly an American commercial phenomenon, little by little every year, evidence that the spooky holiday is being embraced globally is being seen more and more. UNICEF itself has a special “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF” program aimed to empower kids, not just in the U.S., but in other countries as well, by trick-or-treating for donations to help their counter-parts in need all over the world. The reluctance to embrace Halloween in other countries has been primarily due to the seriousness that the supernatural and paranormal is taken in other cultures. While the western world can make light of beliefs, both religious and metaphysical, other old-world cultures are very sensitive to and deeply immersed in their beliefs and find such playfulness like the Amercanized version of Halloween to be considered as taboo and, in some cultures, even sacrilegious.

Enjoy your Halloween!

Anorexia

Do you always worry about gaining weight?

Do you attempt to lose weight by starving yourself?

Do you eat an extremely low fat diet? Do you feel fat no matter how much weight you lose? If this is you or your child, you may suffer with anorexia. Anorexics may suffer from brittle bones, brittle hair and nails, thin skin, anemia, constipation, or lethargy. You may appear skeletal. You may be more susceptible to other illnesses, which could become fatal.

You could have started out on a diet to lose a few pounds and continued to drop weight because you felt successful. You may have also developed a sense of control when your life seemed chaotic. You do not want to gain weight under any circumstances.

Bulimia

Do you struggle with feelings of shame over the secret of binging and purging?

Bulimia is characterized by bouts of binge eating, followed by secret efforts to rid one’s self of food. Some of the desperate methods people use to purge food include vomiting, fasting, excessive exercise, diuretics, and laxatives.

If you are bulimic you may not be underweight, however, you may feel inadequate that your body is not perfect. You may experience a sense of low self-esteem or self- loathing because of a poor body image.

Binge Eating Disorder

Do you spend too much time thinking about food? Does food serve as a distraction from uncomfortable moments in your life?

Compulsive overeating may be your way of avoiding painful feelings.

Binge Eating Disorder is repeated binging to “numb out stress”. You may feel shame or disgust when you cannot control your eating. Even a small amount of food you deem “illegal” might be considered a binge.

You stuff yourself to the point where you feel painfully full. Often the binge eating is done in secrete. Even though you are upset, you may feel unable to STOP!

Binge eating disorder can cause weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes, gallbladder problems, heart issues, poor circulation, joint deterioration, as well as other difficulties

More than 75 percent of sodium comes from processed foods

Less than 2,300 milligrams recommended, but most consume 4,000 milligrams

Less salt you consume, the less your palate craves

Control sodium when cooking, rinse and drain canned foods to wash away salt

Sodium has benefits, like helping to maintain the body’s right balance of fluids,” says my cardiologist Richard Katz, MD, director of the cardiology division of George Washington University. “But ingesting too much salt is a prime cause of increased blood pressure. Higher blood pressure is a major cause of heart attacks and strokes, both of which can be reduced by minimizing salt intake.” Even among healthy adults there is usually room for improvement in the blood pressure department. “If blood pressure is 125/70, it’s better at 120/70,” Katz says. (The American Heart Association [AHA] notes that low blood pressure is relative for each person and is a concern when it drops suddenly. Your doctor can help you reach a blood pressure goal that best enhances your health.)

Various organizations, including the USDA, AHA, and Cooking Light magazine, recommend less than 2,300 milligrams sodium daily (the amount in one teaspoon of table salt) for healthy people. Most Americans consume closer to 4,000 milligrams a day.

The first step to keep sodium under control is to make smart choices at the grocery store. Choose sodium-free, low-sodium, or no-salt-added convenience foods. Sometimes organic versions of packaged foods are lower in sodium than regular and reduced-sodium versions, but not always. Check the label. Reading the Nutrition Facts Panel is an easy way to gauge the amount of sodium present in a food. If an item contains more than 20 percent Daily Value (DV) of a nutrient, a serving of that food is considered to contain a high amount of that nutrient, according to the FDA; five percent DV of a nutrient is deemed low. For sodium, 20 percent DV equals 460 milligrams; five percent DV sodium is just 115 milligrams.

Lower-fat or fat-free products can be higher in sodium than their full-fat counterparts: An ounce of full-fat sharp cheddar cheese has less sodium than one ounce of fat-free cheddar. When fat, a major vehicle for flavor, is removed, other ingredients like sodium may be added to compensate. Still, if you’re trying to limit saturated fat in your diet by enjoying low- and fat-free foods, the trade-off may be worth it if you limit sodium in other areas

The way you consume food, not just how much, affects weight, study finds

who eat quickly until full are three times more likely to be overweight, a problem exacerbated by the availability of fast food and the decline of orderly dining habits, Japanese researchers said on Wednesday.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, highlight how eating styles, and not just what or how much is eaten, can contribute to an obesity epidemic fueled by the spread of Western-style affluence in many parts of the world.

The World Health Organization classifies around 400 million people as obese, 20 million of them under the age of five. The condition raises the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart problems.

For their study, Hiroyasu Iso and colleagues at Osaka University asked more 3,000 Japanese volunteers aged 30 to 69 about their eating. About half of the men and a little more than half of the women said they ate until full. About 45 percent of the men and 36 percent of the women said they ate quickly.

Those who said they ate until full and ate quickly were three times more likely to be fat than people in the “not eating until full and not eating quickly” group, the researchers found.

They cited as causes both the availability of cheap food in big portions and habits like watching television while eating.

To counteract the “supra-additive effect” of speedy or glut eating among children prone to obesity, parents should encourage them to eat slowly and in calm surroundings, the study found.