diet

Advocate: Take ‘Times’ Coverage Of Sodium Report With Grain Of Salt

The New York Times‘ coverage of the ‘How much salt is too much salt?’ debate got a thrashing in a Huffington Post column yesterday by the head of a nonprofit health and nutrition advocacy group.

In the column, Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, writes that the Times “bungles” the sodium report in an article and editorial and “misrepresented the findings of a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

salt (/Flickr)

Jacobson writes that the Times “never told readers that the IOM found insufficient evidence that very-low-sodium diets are risky” and it “failed to inform readers that few Americans consume very-low-sodium diets.” Moreover, he writes:

“The Times imperiled its readers’ health by implying that all advice to cut salt is wrong.

“The panel did not conclude that the average intake of 3,400 milligrams a day is necessarily risky,” said the Times editorial. Of course, it didn’t. The IOM wasn’t asked to examine the risks and benefits of our current sodium intakes. Previous IOM committees concluded that they are harmful. The IOM was asked to look at the effects of intakes in the 1,500 mg to 2,300 mg range. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, diet, media, sodium

February 13, 2013 | 3:55 PM | Carey Goldberg

Film: Posted Calorie Counts Understate Truth

(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

“Aha! I suspected as much!”

That was my reaction upon viewing this charming and eye-opening new short film about testing the posted calories counts in New York City.

More and more chain restaurants are posting the calorie counts of the foods they serve, whether because of local rules, as in New York or, soon, nationwide under Obamacare. But, film-maker Casey Neistat points out in “Calorie Detective,” no one actually checks the accuracy of the posted calories, at least in New York. And, I would add, those of us with suspicious minds often find the purported calorie counts to be oddly…..low.

Casey decides to seek the help of some obesity researchers with a “calorimeter” among other impressive equipment, and do some checking himself. Watch the film for the full effect, but suffice it to say that he calculated that in a typical day, he’s getting more than 500 extra calories beyond the posted counts — about as many as inadvertently eating a quarter-pounder with cheese or two Snickers bars. (And what fun is accidental eating?)

The worst offender — wouldn’t you know it? — is the super-healthy-looking spicy tofu sandwich, which claimed to be 228 calories and actually measured out to 548. And the most virtuous food-maker: Subway, whose 6-inch turkey sub was actually a few calories less than the advertised 360. (So does this make up for that recent 11-inch foot-long scandal?)

Readers, do you have any particular suspicions about any Boston-based calorie counts? If we have some likely culprits, perhaps we could enlist some public-minded scientists here to do the lab work…

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, diet, nutrition, obamacare, obesity

February 9, 2013 | 7:12 AM | Carey Goldberg

One Harvard Researcher’s Surreal ‘Dr. Oz Show’ Experience

Last week, we linked to a skeptical New Yorker article about what could be called “The Dr. Oz Problem.” As The New Yorker puts it, much of what Dr. Mehmet Oz, otherwise known as “America’s Doctor,” propagates is sound medical science. But…

“…That is why the rest of what he does is so hard to understand. Oz is an experienced surgeon, yet almost daily he employs words that serious scientists shun, like ‘startling, ‘breakthrough,’ ‘radical,’ ‘revolutionary,’ and ‘miracle.’ There are miracle drinks and miracle meal plans and miracles to stop aging and miracles to fight fat…

In each of those instances, and in many others, Oz has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches the show.”

Dr. Pieter Cohen (Courtesy)

We sent a shout-out to our readers, asking if anyone had encountered health-care problems that stemmed from Dr. Oz’s more dubious reports, and one response — or rather, one surreal story — came in from Dr. Pieter Cohen, a general internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He appeared on a 2011 “Dr. Oz” show that you can watch here, if you don’t mind the ads.

You can listen to him tell the cautionary tale in the 10-minute audio file above by clicking on the play button, but here are some highlights. First, an advisory: Dr. Cohen emphasizes that he has the utmost respect for Dr. Oz as a brilliant surgeon. “This is in no way an indictment of his clinical abilities, which are amazing,” he says, “so it remains a mystery why the show is veering off in the direction it is.”

Dr. Cohen begins with some fascinating history of the “rainbow” diet pill fad of decades past, and the many doctors who were willing to prescribe them despite the risk and lack of solid evidence of benefit.

Now to more recent history: Dr Cohen was invited onto the Dr. Oz show to discuss the “hCG diet,” a crash diet aided by shots of the pregnancy hormone hCG. He assumed that he would be partnering with Dr. Oz “to help Americans realizes that this is another fad and potentially dangerous,” he says. Because in fact, there have been “a dozen randomized controlled trials to show that it doesn’t work, it’s no different than injecting salt water. The risk issues come down to the very restrictive diet” of only 500 calories a day, which can cause gallstones and other problems.

But no…. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, Cambridge Health Alliance, diet, dr. oz show, harvard medical school, nutrition

January 29, 2013 | 4:17 PM | Rachel Zimmerman

Timing of Large Meal Matters For Weight Loss, Study Finds

Dieters take note: Eating earlier in the day may help you shed pounds.

Indeed researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the University of Murcia in Spain found that it’s not only what you eat but when you eat that matters when it comes to losing weight.

(Photo courtesy Brigham & Women’s Hospital)

The observational study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, found that among a group of overweight or obese Spanish diners, those who ate a late lunch (after 3 p.m) showed slower weight-loss rates and lost significantly less weight than folks who ate lunch earlier (before 3 pm). Notably, there was no significant difference in overall calories consumed by either group or their estimated energy expenditures, said senior author Frank Scheer, PhD, MSc, director of the Medical Chronobiology Program and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Rather, “the timing of meals predicted weight loss effectiveness,” he said.

(As is often the case in Mediterranean countries, lunch is the main meal of the day; for these study participants, it made up about 40 percent of total caloric intake for a 24-hour period.)

Scheer said the study corroborates earlier animal studies in which meal timing determined weight gain in mice.

So, what’s going on here?

Scheer said one hypothesis is that when you eat meals at “abnormal” times there may be a disruption of the normal synchrony of metabolic clocks in various organs. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, diet, google-editors-pick, metabolism, obesity

January 21, 2013 | 10:41 AM | Carey Goldberg

Study: Tweet Your Way To Weight Loss

feetonscale

I hereby dub this “The Brian Stelter Effect.” Stelter is the New York Times reporter who famously used the social-media site Twitter as a tool to lose nearly 75 pounds in 2010. He wrote:

I knew that I could not diet alone; I needed the help of a cheering section. But rather than write a blog, keep a diary or join Weight Watchers, I decided to use Twitter. I thought it would make me more accountable, because I could record everything I ate instantly. And because Twitter posts are automatically pushed to each person who subscribes to them, an audience — of friends or strangers — can follow along.

Stelter credited Twitter with helping not only him lose weight but some of his Twitter “followers” as well. Now, Wired reports that a new study finds more evidence for the Stelter Effect.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina found the support and accountability provided by posting to the social networking site made a difference in how much weight people lost. Although the two groups in the study — one that tweeted and one that didn’t — lost the same amount of weight during the trial, the individuals within the Twitter group who posted the most also lost the most weight.

Both groups received podcasts containing information on nutrition and exercise, but one group tracked their progress in a book, while another used a smartphone app and Twitter. When Brie Turner-McGrievy and her colleagues at USC’s Arnold School of Public Health took a closer look at the results, they found those actively tweeting and retweeting lost more weight. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, diet, obesity, weight loss

December 14, 2012 | 12:09 PM | Carey Goldberg

Anti-Carb Warrior Starts Non-Profit To Challenge Obesity Theory

(Tibor Vegh/Wikimedia Commons)

Science writer Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat and possibly the country’s most prominent critic of the reigning theories on the obesity epidemic, has founded a non-profit research outfit of his own, he writes in the journal Nature.

Under the headline “Treat obesity as physiology, not physics,” he argues that the idea that obesity is simply a product of overeating and “calories in, calories out” has gotten us where we are today: Overweight or fat, many of us. He backs an alternate theory:

The alternative hypothesis — that obesity is a hormonal, regulatory defect — leads to a different prescription. In this paradigm, it is not excess calories that cause obesity, but the quantity and quality of carbohydrates consumed. The carbohydrate content of the diet must be rectified to restore health. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, diet, nutrition, obesity

November 21, 2012 | 9:25 AM | Carey Goldberg

Watching What You Eat In The Air: New Ratings Of Airline Food

Northwest Airline snacks (Nemo’s Great Uncle/Flickre Creative Commons)

You know how captive you can feel when the peanuts and cookies come down the center aisle. You’re hungry. You’re stuck. You forgot to pack your own and didn’t want to buy rip-off airport food. So you take what’s offered. Sigh.

Well, it’s kind of late now. If you’re flying for Thanksgiving, you’re probably already in the air. But this might be helpful for the flight home, when you still can’t believe you ate the whole thing, and for future flights: Advance information on airlines’ in-air offerings, and their health values.

Regular CommonHealth contributor Karen Weintraub sent over word on some recent mile-high sleuthing by DietDetective.com, which features health advocate Dr. Charles Platkin of the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College. To wit, an impressively comprehensive review of the food offered on a wide array of airlines. The full report is here, in extensive detail, and this is from the press release:

The survey provides the calorie information of snacks and on-board menu choices, “best bets” and gives each airline a “Health Rating.” This year Virgin America wins the top spot with the “healthiest” choices in the sky, with Air Canada a close second and Alaska Air not too far behind. American and JetBlue are improving, United and Delta still not up to par. Frontier and Allegiant received the lowest scores, were the least cooperative and received the lowest health rating. From the press release:

DietDetective.com issued the 2012 Airline Food Survey rating foods for twelve (12) airlines. The survey assigned a “Health Score” (5 stars = highest rate, 0 star = lowest) based on seven criteria: health of meals, health of snacks, food variety, calories, improvement from last year’s survey, menu innovation and cooperation in providing nutritional information. The survey includes health ratings, cost, comments, food offerings, calories, and exercise equivalents.

More useful information: The report calculates that the average calorie count for airline food items is 388. And it offers tips for “best bets” on the menus. Readers, any additional advice?

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, diet, nutrition, obesity

October 17, 2012 | 10:37 AM | Carey Goldberg

Study: Multivitamins Slightly Reduce Cancer Risk In Older Men

(US Navy via Wikimedia Commons)

Please don’t groan. Yes, this is one more of those confusing studies that seem to flip-flop the previous confusing studies. But let’s just file it away as a valuable data point in an evolving picture, and rejoice that at least, as these studies get bigger and better, the findings should become stronger.

Last we heard — last fall, actually — a study of more than 38,000 older women in Iowa brought disturbing news to the millions who take daily vitamins. It found, as NPR reported: “Use of many common supplements — iron, in particular — appeared to increase the risk of dying, and only calcium supplements appeared to reduce mortality risk. The increased risk amounted to a few percentage points in most instances.”

Now comes a somewhat countervailing study: The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that in 15,000 older men, multivitamins do confer apparent benefit, reducing the total risk of cancer by 8 percent. I spoke with the study’s co-author, Dr. Howard Sesso, an associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He acknowledged my flip-flip complaint, but noted that this latest study does take the research up a notch:

Previous multivitamin studies have been “observational studies,” he said. “These are free-living populations, and they take multivitamins or they don’t,” and the researchers would try to control for the pre-existing differences between vitamin takers and non-takers.

This new research, he said, is different in that among the 15,000 men in the Physicians’ Health Study, it randomly assigned men to take vitamins or a placebo, for an average of 11 years. So it’s longer-term than previous studies, and it is “the first long-term randomized trial that tested whether daily multivitamin use prevents cancer.”

In a few weeks, he noted, the researchers will also present data on vitamins’ effects on heart and blood-vessel health. And in a months, on eye disease and cognitive function. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, brigham and women;s hospital, diet, supplements

October 15, 2012 | 12:00 PM | Carey Goldberg

Sorry, That Paper Linking Chocolate To Nobels Really Is A Prize-Season Joke

This is so embarrassing, but I have to confess that I had a moment of doubt. Maybe this was a real paper in the august New England Journal of Medicine? Maybe a researcher was seriously arguing that eating more chocolate may lead to winning more Nobel prizes?

I blame my briefly idiotic credulity on the endless parade of really questionable papers that come out all the time (in lesser journals, of course!) linking various foods and behaviors to slightly greater or lesser risks and benefits. Blueberries for brains, raspberries for cancer prevention, gooseberries for weight loss — you know.

So I’m happy to report that I have on very good authority that no, really, the paper “Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates” is in fact utterly tongue-in-cheek, a bit of the New England Journal’s humor. This could prompt great relief in some Latin American circles, where, according to the ever-fascinating Knight Science Journalism Tracker, some reporters took the study seriously:

It’s a mystery why the New England Journal of Medicine published the silliest study correlating a country’s chocolate consumption with chances to win a Nobel prize. The study even suggests that Nobel Panel may have a “patriotic bias” because according to its consumption of chocolate, Sweden should have produced only 14 Nobel prize winners yet it had 32. We’ve seen three different reactions in the Spanish speaking press: 1) the majority of serious outlets have simply ignored the study, 2) Some have joked about it and compared to other associations like sun spots and male depression, and 3) many reporters took it seriously, they bought the flavonoid’s argument, and without any critical spirit they told their readers that “eating chocolate increase the possibilities of winning a Nobel prize”.

Sigh. A little humor can be a dangerous thing. And just for the record, yes, the argument is a joke, but the data — such as they are — and the statistical analysis in the chart below are accurate. Though naturally a bit incomplete; the NPR report on the study prompted this commenter’s query: “My only question: how many Nobel winners have there been from Hershey PA?”

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Politics, diet, new england journal of medicine

August 28, 2012 | 9:54 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Weight Loss After Menopause: A Few Tricks Left

(Newbirth35/flickr)

Over the weekend, I unpacked my wedding dress, which had been stored in the back of my mother’s closet and impenetrably sealed for 10 years. I’m happy (but not surprised) to report that my finely bejeweled ivory gown was way too big; I’ve lost 15 pounds since I got married in 2002. (OK, I was pregnant then — but only three months, and hadn’t gained much weight.)

I’m now 48 and my metabolism is clearly slowing down. Frankly, I’m entering that fraught period of life when the odds of losing weight or even maintaining a healthy weight are against me. But I’m fighting back, and so far, winning.

A new study,“Short-and Long-Term Eating Habit Modification Predicts Weight Change in Overweight, Postmenopausal Women: Results from the WOMAN Study,” supports my personal experience. (I love when that happens.) The report underscores the difficulties that post-menopausal woman face in achieving any kind of meaningful weight loss, particularly in the long term. However, the study, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, finds there are a few tricks lefts — but no magic. Alas, it’s what you already know with no shortcuts: fewer desserts and fatty foods, and substituting fruits and vegetables for meats and cheeses. Continue reading →