Insufficient consumption of fish, fruit and vegetables is as bad for human health as smoking, a Dutch report said on Monday.


The study, which the European Food Safety Authority says it will use when analyzing food and diet risks, concludes that most cases of serious illness and death in the Netherlands is caused by poor diet.

"Taking into account not just deaths but also years spent living with serious disability, unhealthy dietary habits cause as much health loss as does smoking," said the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).

"Unhealthy diet composition currently reduces the average life expectancy of 40-year-old Dutch by 1.2 years, while obesity claims 0.8 years."

Some 75 percent of the Netherlands' 16 million people eat fruit and vegetables below the recommended level, said the report, which is a result of an extensive research into the effects of current food trends in the country.


Each year in the Netherlands, poor diet causes about 13,000 deaths due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, while obesity claims 7,000 lives by causing heart disease and cancer, it said.


By comparison, foodborne infections cause between 20 and 200 deaths each year.

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Researchers at Oxford University have found that people who switched from a meat-eating diet to a vegetarian one did not gain as much weight over a five-year period.


The team studied the eating habits of 22,000 people recruited to the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) between 1994 and 1999.
The participants were weighed and measured and asked to provide details of lifestyle and diet.


The researchers followed up the volunteers five years later on average, asking them the same questions.

Everyone taking part had gained an average of 2kg, but those who had changed to a vegetarian diet from a meat-eating one gained around 0.5kg less.
Those switching to a vegan diet also had slightly smaller weight gains.


Lead researcher Professor Tim Key said it was known that vegetarians and vegans tended to be slimmer than meat eaters, but they had never been followed over a number of years.

However, the highest weight gain occurred in those who did no exercise, he said.


Source: Men's Health

LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIET HAS POSITIVE EFFECT ON BLOOD LIPIDS


The Study:
To investigate the effects of very low carbohydrate diets on the blood lipids and other markers of cardiovascular disease in women, investigators attempted to repeat work previously completed on male subjects, using female subjects.

This balanced, randomized two-period crossover study looked at numerous serum markers in 10 healthy women who consumed both a low fat (less than 30%) and a very low carbohydrate (less than 10%) diet for four weeks each.


The Results:
Although modest increases were noted in LDL, favorable effects on cardiovascular disease risk status occurred by virtue of a relatively larger increase in HDL and a decrease in fasting and postprandial triglyceride levels.




CORONARY ARTERY CALCIUM, DIABETES AND METABOLIC SYNDROME


The amount of calcium deposited in the coronary arteries is a strong predictor of future fatal cardiac events in apparently healthy individuals. It is also known that people with diabetes or the metabolic syndrome, also known as Syndrome X, have an increased risk of cardiac disease. But until now the relationship between diabetes, the metabolic syndrome and coronary artery calcium has not been studied.


The metabolic syndrome is closely related to insulin resistance, which makes it related to, and possibly a precursor of, diabetes. People suffering from the metabolic syndrome have at least three of the following health issues: obesity, low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, glucose intolerance and high blood pressure. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, examined 1,823 patients, measuring their coronary artery calcium in addition to the various symptoms of metabolic syndrome and diabetes. They found that the more factors of the metabolic syndrome a patient had, the higher the coronary artery calcium. Similarly, diabetics also had an increase in coronary artery calcium, raising the need for further investigation as to the relationship between these findings and the risk of future cardiovascular events in the subset of individuals with metabolic syndrome or diabetes and coronary artery calcification.



LOW CARB DIET EFFECTIVE IN SHORT-TERM TREATMENT OF OBESITY IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN


The Study:

With childhood obesity reaching epidemic proportions, physicians everywhere are looking for treatments that are effective. Doctors at the Marshall University School of Medicine in Huntington, West Virginia. report that 23 percent of their pediatric patients are obese. In an effort to find an effective treatment for these patients, they performed a small study comparing a low-fat, calorie-counting diet to a low carbohydrate, calorie-unrestricted diet.


The study consisted of 70 obese children divided into two groups. One was given a low-fat, hypocaloric diet whose calories consisted of 55 percent carbohydrates, 15-20 percent protein and less than 30 percent fat. The other group was put on a diet without calorie restriction that kept the carbohydrates to about 7 percent of the daily caloric intake, protein at 49 percent and fat at 44 percent.


The Results:
The result was that of the 47 children who completed the study with a minimum of two months of follow up, those on the low carbohydrate diet lost an average of 6 kilograms, with a decrease in body mass index of 2.6 kg/m2 compared to those on the low-fat diet, who gained an average of 4.6 kilograms and whose BMI increase by .8 kg/m2. While this study was small and the error bars large, the result does suggest that the low carbohydrate diet is indeed an effective treatment for juvenile obesity.


COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES, THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS


The Study:

Carbohydrates come in two basic varieties: sugars and starches. Sugars, also known as simple carbohydrates, are quickly absorbed by the body. Starches-complex carbohydrates-must first be broken down into simple carbohydrates before they are absorbed by the body. This difference can have an important effect on energy and appetite, as a recent study shows.


Researchers in the Netherlands fed 26 male subjects breakfasts high in simple carbohydrates one day and high in complex carbohydrates on the next. For the four hours following their meals, the researchers measured the subjects' blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides, free fatty acids and cholecystokinin levels. Following the simple carbohydrate breakfast, glucose and insulin levels were both higher at 30 minutes after feeding, triglyceride levels were higher at 180 minutes and free fatty acids were higher at 180 and 240 minutes. In addition, the subjects were asked to assess their satiety and levels of fatigue.


The Results:

The researchers found that those consuming a complex carbohydrate breakfast (whole grain breads and cereals) felt more energetic and less hungry than those who ate simple carbohydrates.

More than two-thirds of American adults are trying to lose weight or maintain their current weight, but their strategy for weight control is probably ineffective, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


The study found that few Americans were combining recommended caloric reduction with a minimum of 150 minutes of physical activity per week to lose weight.


The study's results were based on a telephone survey of 107,804 adults. Conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it shows that 64% of men and 78% of women were either trying to lose weight or to maintain their current weight through diet and exercise.


But the survey found that only about 20% of men and women were combining reduction of dietary calories and fat with moderate exercise, in their weight loss plans. Researchers specifically found that fewer people were approaching weight control by combining caloric reduction and exercise. Less than half of all men and women were exercising at recommended levels.



Source: Anne Collins

Inspired by the documentary "Super Size Me," Merab Morgan decided to give a fast-food-only diet a try. The construction worker and mother of two ate only at McDonald's for 90 days — and dropped 37 pounds in the process.


It was a vastly different outcome than what happened in the documentary to filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who put on 30 pounds and saw his health deteriorate after 5,000 calories a day of nothing but McDonald's food.


Morgan, from Raleigh, thought the documentary had unfairly targeted the world's largest restaurant company, implying that the obese were victims of a careless corporate giant. People are responsible for what they eat, she said, not restaurants. The problem with a McDonald's-only diet isn't what's on the menu, but the choices made from it, she said.

"I thought it's two birds with one stone — to lose weight and to prove a point for the little fat people," Morgan said. "Just because they accidentally put an apple pie in my bag instead of my apple dippers doesn't mean I'm going to say, 'Oh, I can eat the apple pie.'"

Spurlock, who turned his surprise-hit movie into a TV show on the FX network, isn't talking about Morgan or the many other McDieters who have criticized his film and found success losing weight by eating healthy foods off the McDonald's menu, said his publicist, David Magdael.


One person went so far as to make her own independent film about dieting at McDonald's. "Me and Mickey D" follows Soso Whaley, of Kensington, N.H., as she spends three 30-day periods on the diet. She dropped from 175 to 139 pounds, eating 2,000 calories-a-day at McDonald's.

"I had to think about what I was eating," Whaley said. "I couldn't just walk in there and say 'I'll take a cinnamon bun and a Diet Coke.' ... I know a lot of people are really turned off by the whole thought of monitoring what they are eating, but that's part of the problem."

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