Diet & Nutrition

Your Nutrition is a critical element in your recovery and long-term health. The guide is designed to be flexible with the understanding that schedules and personal preferences make it hard to stick to a rigid regime. Diet is the most direct and effective way to improve your overall health. The more you can incorporate these suggestions into your life, the faster your recovery and the better your long term health.

Dr. Howard Fisher is an acknowledged expert on nutrition and can be found in the "Meet the Doctors" section of this WEB site. Please access the following link for an easy way to obtain his articles and books:

http://www.rawfood.com/cgi-bin/order/index.cgi?id=197360521847&c=Books

Fascinating History of the McDonald's French Fry

This fascinating New Yorker piece describes the transformation of French fries from a relatively obscure food to a market giant.

It also details how they changed from being an already unhealthy food to being a truly terrible one, and a major factor in the obesity epidemic.

The modern French fry was primarily the vision of Ray Kroc. He visited the first McDonald's hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California in 1954 because they were using eight of his five-spindle Multimixer milkshake machines.

He flew there to learn more about the operation.

Beyond the shakes and hamburgers, what really captured Kroc's attention was the way French fries were made. Soon after buying the franchising rights from the McDonald brothers, Kroc brought the lessons of the manufacturing world to the restaurant business, with an evangelical emphasis on making French fries of consistent quality everywhere, all the time.

Over time, French fries gradually became more and more unhealthy, most recently because of the use of trans fats in the deep-frying process. Nonetheless, the average American now consumes 30 pounds of French fries each year.

Gladwell.com


If you've ever wondered how French fries became the health-harming staple of fast-food diets around the world, one of the worst foods anyone could eat, and a huge money-maker for McDonald's, the largest of all fast-food restaurant chains, this excellent New Yorker piece will give you the inside scoop.

Potatoes are already harmful enough in their natural state, as the simple sugars they contain are rapidly converted in your body to glucose that raises your insulin levels. Preparing them in cooking oils and at high temperatures make the biggest difference of all, however, spurring the formation of the cancer-causing chemical acrylamide.

With all the attention paid to the health risks associated with harmful cooking oils, however, McDonald's recently made the switch to a trans-fat-free frying oil, albeit long after competitors like Taco Bell and Wendy's did.

Even so, French fries are a food that does no benefit to anyone's health and well-being.

Even without trans fats, foods that are fried in vegetable oils like canola, soybean, safflower, corn, and other seed and nut oils are problematic. These polyunsaturated fats easily become rancid when exposed to oxygen, and produce large amounts of damaging free radicals in your body.

They are also very susceptible to heat-induced damage from cooking. What is not commonly known is that these oils can actually cause aging, clotting, inflammation, cancer and weight gain. You can read the article Secrets of the Edible Oil Industry for more information.
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Nutritionists: Soda making Americans drink themselves fat. This Story Highlights
Soft drinks contribute 10 percent of the calories in the American diet

Center for Science in the Public Interest: Soda is "quintessential junk food"

CSPI wants obesity warning labels on the sides of soda cans

Scientists: Body reacts differently to liquid calories than solid food

By Caleb Hellerman
CNN


(CNN) -- If you're searching for a villain in America's obesity epidemic, most nutritionists tell you to put one picture on the wanted poster: a cold, bubbly glass of soda pop. Full of sugar, soda adds calories without making a person feel full, nutritionists say.

"Liquid candy" to detractors, sweetened soft drinks are so ubiquitous that they contribute about 10 percent of the calories in the American diet, according to government data. In fact, said Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard endocrinologist whose 2001 paper in the Lancet is widely cited by obesity researchers, sweetened drinks are the only specific food that clinical research has directly linked to weight gain.

"Highly concentrated starches and sugars promote overeating, and the granddaddy of them all is sugar-sweetened beverages," said Ludwig, who runs the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children's Hospital in Boston.

The rise in soft drink consumption mirrors the national march towards obesity. At the midpoint of the 20th century, Americans drank four times as much milk as soda pop. Today, the ratio is almost completely reversed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, in the past 30 years the national obesity rate has more than doubled, and among teenagers, more than tripled, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Soda pop is a quintessential junk food," said Michael Jacobson, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which lobbies for government restrictions on foods it considers unhealthy. "It's just pure calories, and no nutrients. It's like a bomb in our diet." Jacobson said the CSPI is pushing to require obesity warning labels on the sides of soda cans, like the surgeon general's warning on cigarettes.  While nutritionists are united in their dislike for nondiet soda, the "why" is controversial.

Some point a finger at high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, the sweetener used in most nondiet drinks. Last month, researchers at Rutgers University said they'd identified compounds in HFCS which may start a chemical chain reaction, leading to diabetes.  Most scientists, though, say there's little difference between HFCS and simple sugar, either in chemistry or the way they're handled by the body.  A bigger problem, doctors say, is simply the sheer number of calories. You'll find about 400 calories in a 32-ounce "extra-large" Coke, a fast-food staple. That's nearly a quarter of what the average adult woman needs in a whole day.

Immigrant children struggle with junk food. Scientists also say the body doesn't respond to liquid calories in the same way it would if those calories came in the form of French fries or chocolate cake. Appetite is controlled by a complex mix of hormones. Some signal the brain that your stomach is getting full. Others, including a hormone known as ghrelin, signal it's time to eat again.

If you eat a big burger, the level of ghrelin drops for a few hours. That drop doesn't happen if you drink a Big Gulp soda, even if it has more calories than the burger, according to Wayne Campbell, a professor in the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Purdue University.  "We're finding your hunger does not go down as far when you consume a beverage, as when you consume a solid," Campbell said. The result: Even with 500 liquid calories in stomach, you polish off the burger too.  Campbell cautioned that the ghrelin theory isn't proven and that other factors -- such as a food's smell, or the sensation of chewing -- may affect appetite just as much, or even more. Our expectations also play a role. "Soup is the anomaly to the liquid calorie research," he said. "People perceive soup as a meal, unlike drinking a Coke. So when we've done these types of studies, but used soup as the liquid, we don't see the same differences in [appetite] response."

The sugar in soda pop not only provides a massive dose of calories, but triggers a vicious appetite cycle, said Ludwig, who wrote "Ending the Food Fight," about healthy eating for children. "It's rapidly absorbed, which raises blood sugar and in effect causes the body to panic." The body releases insulin to break down the sugar, "but the body overcompensates, and blood sugar drops below the fasting level," lower than it was in the first place. Recognizing low blood sugar, the body releases ghrelin and other hormones, inducing hunger, inducing us to eat even more, Ludwig said.

The public is catching on, he said.

"In our obesity clinic, we used to routinely see patients coming in who were drinking four or five soft drinks a day. Now it's rare. That seems to be the first factor that comes to mind, when people are trying to lose weight."  Soft drink companies, under fire, are taking steps including a pledge last year to phase out nondiet soft drinks from America's schools. A progress report issued Monday by the American Beverage Association said that shipments to schools of sweetened soda are down 45 percent since 2004, while shipments of bottled water are up 23 percent.  "There's no question the changes that are happening in schools are a mirror of what's happening in the larger marketplace," said Susan Neely, the ABA's president & CEO. "Adults, like kids, are reaching for lower-calorie beverages. ... As a consumer product company, we want to give consumers what they want."

While fighting obesity is complicated, Ludwig said, the first step is clear. "Giving up sugary soda for diet drinks, or water, will cause you to lose weight." E-mail to a friend
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"Nutrition Facts" Are Inaccurate 

Reading the “Nutrition Facts” panels on foods may not be as reliable an indicator of a food’s nutrients as you may think.

"Good Morning America" hired a lab to test a dozen packaged food products to see if the nutrients matched the labels.

The government allows foods to contain 20 percent more diet-damaging ingredients than the label lists before taking enforcement action, and all 12 products were indeed over in one way or another. Three were actually over by more than 20 percent, including:

David's Sunflower Seeds with 23 percent more saturated fat
Ritz Crackers with 36 percent more sodium
Wonderbread with 70 percent more total fat

Meanwhile, manufacturers are allowed to list "0" on the label even if their product contains up to half a gram of the item in question. Despite a "0" on the labels, there were small amounts of saturated fat in Baked Lay's Potato Chips, Rold Gold pretzels, Special K Cereal and Grape Nuts Trail Mix Crunch, and trans fats in Nabisco Cheese Nips.

Good Morning America did point out that their study was small, and included only one sample of each product. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests nutrition labels, it buys multiple samples from different lots.
Sources:
ABC News April 7, 2008