Eat More Chocolate!

Daily chocolate intake linked to lower risk of diabetes, heart disease

. . . Compared with participants who did not eat chocolate every day, those who did were found to have reduced insulin resistance and improved liver enzyme levels. The effect was stronger the higher the chocolate consumption, the team reports.

The findings remained after accounting for participants' age, sex, education, lifestyle, and dietary factors that could affect the results.

Dietary factors included intake of tea and coffee rich in the antioxidants polyphenols, which the researchers say have the potential to spur chocolate's benefits for cardiometabolic risk.

And coffee too? Does this officially mean that doctors and nutritionists were wrong about everything?

Cardiometabolic risk refers to a person's likelihood of developing diabetes, heart disease, or stroke.

Participants who ate chocolate were more physically active, younger, and more highly educated than those who did not eat chocolate, according to the authors.

 Huh? I thought they controlled for "age, sex, education, lifestyle" etc?

Prof. Stranges and colleagues say their findings suggest that chocolate consumption may reduce the risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders by improving liver enzyme levels and protecting against insulin resistance.

 Does skin absorption work, too?

"Given the growing body of evidence, including our own study, cocoa-based products may represent an additional dietary recommendation to improve cardiometabolic health; however, observational results need to be supported by robust trial evidence.

Potential applications of this knowledge include recommendations by healthcare professionals to encourage individuals to consume a wide range of phytochemical-rich foods, which can include dark chocolate in moderate amounts."

However, Prof. Stranges notes that it is important to distinguish the difference between chocolate that contains natural cocoa and processed chocolate; the latter is much higher in calories.

Please remember that science seems to be right about half the time, and even less when it's something you really, really want to be true. But until they disprove it, I'm going to eat more chocolate!

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links. The mother of all babe lists, Wombat-socho's "Rule 5 Sunday: May Flowers"  is up at The Other McCain.

The Problems with Nutrition Guidelines

I've been sitting on this one for several days, and I just finally decided to get it out there:

I'm Completely Fed Up with Nutrition Science. You Should Be, Too.

Nutrition science is bad for your health! Not really, of course, but if you worried about every single study that linked a certain food to a negative health outcome, you'd probably go insane.

Red meat? Cancer. Grapefruit? Cancer. Cheese? Cancer. Artificial sweeteners? Obesity. Sugar?Obesity. Milk? Bone fracture. The list could go on and on, but let's get to the meat of the article.

I'm fed up with nutrition science, and you should be, too.

It was not a single study that evoked my distaste, but a nauseating status quo that's become too much to bear.

The problems with nutrition science begin with how most of its research is conducted. The vast majority of nutrition studies are observational in nature -- scientists look at people who eat certain foods and examine how their health compares with the health of people who don't eat those foods or eat them at different frequencies. But as I reported earlier this year, these sorts of studies have a high chance of being wrong. Very wrong. . .

Many familiar examples follow. But the problems go further.

Muddying the waters further is the stream of cash pouring into nutrition science from corporate interests. Nestlé funds research, as does Dannon. Coca-Cola has recently been accused of funding scientists who focus on physical activity as the primary cause for obesity rather than the copious amounts of sugar found in their undeniably unhealthy soft drinks. Many of the members of the advisory committee for the federal government's dietary guidelines also have ties to industry.

The ultimate point of nutrition research is to apprise the public of what they should and should not eat. What really is healthy? What isn't? But this endeavor may have been doomed from the start. As was recently showcased in research published to the journal Cell, what's healthy for one person may not be healthy for someone else.. . .

But beyond what companies try to push, the government, which has a whole additional method of persuasion, legal sanctions backed by the power of imprisonment, and ultimately, the gun, has been notoriously wrong on numerous recommendations on diet, salt, carbohydrates, meat, you name it, they've promoted bad ideas with the force of law. I can ignore a company, but I cannot safely ignore the state.

An interesting article in the Washington Post this morning on the diet guidance that ancient mummies are providing us. In a nutshell, not much:

But examinations of the bodies of the Unangans from Kagamil Island and other pre-modern people indicate that, in fact, the modern scourge of heart disease is not at all new, and that people who exercised more than we do as a matter of necessity, and whose diet was free from modern temptations, also suffered striking levels of heart disease, according to the researchers.

In recent years, X-ray based scans of mummies from around the world - including the hunter gatherers of Kagamil as well as those from ancient Egypt, Peru and the American Southwest — found signs of heart disease or atherosclerosis, the plaque lining the arteries near the heart.
. . .
Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City and a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, said the research has changed the way he views what we can do to prevent heart disease.

”I’m a clinical cardiologist and I want people to eat a healthy diet, but this puts all that in perspective. ... At least part of this disease is not explained by traditional risk factors. These ancient people didn’t have preservatives, everything was organic, they didn’t smoke and they got plenty of exercise. But ... the amount of atherosclerosis in ancient times isn’t much different from what you see in modern times. If you account for age, it looks like we’re in the same ballpark.”

My motto: Eat what you want (in moderation), die anyway.

Some Red Meat For the Crowd

Red Meat Is Not the Enemy

Chrissy Tiegen cooking a steak

There are people in this country eating too much red meat. They should cut back. There are people eating too many carbs. They should cut back on those. There are also people eating too much fat, and the same advice applies to them, too.

What’s getting harder to justify, though, is a focus on any one nutrient as a culprit for everyone.

I’ve written Upshot articles on how the strong warnings against salt and cholesterol are not well supported by evidence. But it’s possible that no food has been attacked as widely or as loudly in the past few decades as red meat.

In the past year we've seen a real turn around in the recommendations regarding salt and cholesterol. Neither appear to be particularly harmful to the majority of people at their customary consumption rates.

As with other bad guys in the food wars, the warnings against red meat are louder and more forceful than they need to be.

Americans are more overweight and obese than they pretty much have ever been. There’s also no question that we are eating more meat than in previous eras. But we’ve actually been reducing our red meat consumption for the last decade or so. This hasn’t led to a huge decrease in obesity rates or to arguments from experts that it is the reason for fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease.

In fact, obesity has blossomed as the government has issued faddish nutritional advice to avoid meat, cholesterol, salt, and pack the diet with carbohydrates.

The same reports also show that we eat significantly more fruits and vegetables today than we did decades ago. We also eat more grains and sweeteners.

This is the real problem: We eat more calories than we need. But in much of our discussion about diet, we seek a singular nutritional guilty party. We also tend to cast everyone in the same light as “eating too much.”

In short, we need to get government out of the nutritional advice business. But the next phase of the business will be to recommend cutting down on meat for environmental reasons.

Wombat-socho is celebrating Rule 5 Sunday with "Rule 5 Monday: Lt. Commander Rand, RIP" at the other McCain.

Gingers - Designed for the Dark

Scientists confirm redhead gene evolved due to lack of sunlight

Scientists believe that the “ginger gene,” or “V6OL allele,” showed up 50,000 years ago after humans left Africa for colder climates. This gene made human’s skin lighter, as they were exposed to less vitamin D from the sun.

That's just a ass backwards explanation. Say rather that humans got red hair (and very fair skin pigmentation) as a way of producing more vitamin D with less available sunlight.  A typical case of journalists not understanding the science

The scientists made this discovery having studied the gene evolution of 1,000 people from Spain.

Why Spain, the homeland of ebony haired beauties? Wouldn't Ireland, Scotland, or one of the Scandahoovian countries where gingers abound be better locales?

Ten percent of Irish people have red hair. In total there are 20 million people in the United Kingdom and Ireland with the gene that can cause red hair and this new study shows that this remains a dominant gene in southern Europeans today.

However, this paler skin also brought health risks, such as melanoma, the deadliest form of cancer, but the study’s author Doctor Saioa Lopez says this is not necessarily due to the redhead gene itself.

Melanoma, of course, is commonly blamed on sunlight, but there appears to be a sunlight independent added risk of melanoma associated with being red headed.  But then, if you lived in a region where the sunlight was low, and you had to cover up to stay warm, that would offset some of the added risk.

He told the Daily Mail, “As a consequence of depigmentation there has been a collateral damage consequence to health.

“This can be reconciled if we assume that melanoma is typically a post-reproductive disease, and consequently should have little effect on the individual’s genetic contribution to the next generation.”

And the added benefit of being a ginger? I mean, other than the obvious...

The recent study follows on the results of a ScotlandsDNA project in 2012 which found that the Celts flaming red hair can be put down to the weather. The experts believe that the gloomy climate in Scotland has seen a deliberate genetic adaptation. Essentially this means that red hair helps to take advantage of sunny days and allows the body to absorb more vitamin D.

Linked by The Classic Liberal in "Going the [Rule 5] Distance." Wombat-socho was on schedule with "Rule 5 Sunday - Stardancer." 

The Science is Settled...

...As long as you agree with me. Nature rebukes Harvard nutritionist for 'unscientific' behavior

In an extraordinary editorial and feature article, Natureone of the world’s pre-eminent scientific journals, has effectively admonished the chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, for promoting over-simplification of scientific results in the name of public health and engaging in unseemly behavior towards those who venture conclusions that differ to his.

Willett, who is one of the most frequently quoted academic sources on nutrition in the news media, appears to have crossed a Rubicon when he denounced Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the US National Center for Health Statistics, for publishing a study that showed people who were overweight (but not obese) lived longer than those deemed normal weight. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” he told National Public Radio.

Calling someone else's study "a pile of rubbish" is kind of harsh, but within the bounds of scientific discourse.  Try publishing a study that contradicts Anthropogenic Global Warming, for example.  However in making such an accusation, it helps to have the facts on your side.

Go Ahead, Double the Bacon

Saturated fat is making a comeback

The money quote (acronyms filled out):

"We conclude that avoidance of [saturated fatty acids] accumulation by reducing the intake of [carbohydrates] with high glycaemic index is more effective in the prevention of [cardiovascular disease] than reducing [saturated fatty acids] intake per se.

 Furthermore:

The total body of evidence suggests that attention should be shifted from the harmful effects of dietary [saturated fatty acids] per se, to the prevention of the accumulation of [saturdated fatty acids] in body lipids. This shift would emphasise the importance of reducing dietary [carbohydrates], especially [carbohydrates] with a high glycaemic index, rather than reducing dietary [saturated fatty acids]. 

In other words, calories count, but it's better to reduce calories by reducing the amount of carbohydrates in the diet than reducing saturated fat.  Robert Atkins is chuckling from the grave.

Found at Ace's ONT, who found it here.

"It's All About Moderation"

Michelle Obama orders 1700 calorie burger lunch

Update:We made a mistake in our original calculations. The calorie-count for the first lady’s order was actually 1,700, not the 1,556 we originally reported. Our apologies.

First lady Michelle Obama ordered a whopper of a meal at the newly opened Washington diner Shake Shack during lunch on Monday.

A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who’s made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.

According to nutritional information on Shake Shack’s Web site, the meal amounted to 1,700 calories.

Obama, who launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity last year, has previously admitted to having an “obsession with french fries,” which she says are fine to indulge in occasionally. “It’s all about moderation,” Obama told reporters.

Chocolate Shake and a Diet Coke?  Really?  Anyway, as I've said before, I don't really care what Michelle Obama eats or drinks, but I resent like hell being told what I'm supposed to eat and drink by anyone but my wife (and I resent her too, but not that  much...).

Wouldn't it be a marvelous thing if somebody conservative in the restaurant, tipsy from a sugar high, confronted her publicly, and tongue lashed her for her hypocrisy of using enough calories in one meal to provide a whole Sudanese village for a month, while downing their own 1500 calorie burger, shake and fries?

Oh right, they couldn't because the restaurant was closed to the public...

Michele Obama - "Do As I Say, Not As I Do"

Michelle Obama: 'I can't stop eating French fries. But eat your vegetables.'

During her visit to South Africa, First Lady Michelle Obama stopped by the University of Cape Town for an event with young people. ... But at the end of the session, one young person in the audience asked Mrs. Obama, who has devoted much of her time in the White House to promoting nutrition and healthy eating, what her favorite foods are.

"My favorite?" Obama said. "Oh, this is a tough one. "It is tough, you know, because if I say something not healthy, people will be, like, you aren't really committed to health. If I say something healthy, you know -- I do -- honestly, I like all kinds of foods."

Obama mentioned Indian food, and then Mexican food, and then said: "No, if I picked one favorite, favorite food, it's French fries." The audience began to laugh. "Okay? It's French fries," Obama continued. "I can't stop eating them." As the students laughed more, the First Lady quickly returned to her role as advocate of health eating. "But eat your vegetables," she said, to still more laughs. "And exercise."

It's not wrong to like French Fries.  I like 'em.  But it is wrong to eat them and tell other people not to.  Not exactly Caesar's wife, is she?

The New Diet Guidelines - Double Chili Dog, Fries and a Soda

Just days after the Michelle Obama and the Federal Government issued new guidelines on good eating, President Obama was spotted downing not one, but two chili dogs, fries and bowl of chili on the side, and, the picture suggests, a soda.  Obama remarked:

'Marcy just wants ketchup. By the way, as an aficionado of hot dogs, you shouldn't put ketchup on hot dogs... I'm trying to teach my girls.'

When the new "food plate" was introduced a Departement of Agriculture spokesman called it:

“an easy-to-understand visual cue to help consumers adopt healthy eating habits.”

Yeah, that's clearly working...

 

Still More Vindication for the Low Carb/High Protein Diet

No, it won't "kill your kidneys"

Anyone who has tried a high-protein diet has probably heard this warning: You may lose weight, but you risk kidney damage. The idea is that processing large amounts of protein strains your kidneys, which filter blood and remove waste. But there is little research backing that assertion.

In one study, in The International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, researchers recruited bodybuilders and other athletes, then examined their kidney function over seven days as they followed high- and medium-protein diets. The researchers found that every marker of kidney function was within the normal range in all of the athletes who consumed large amounts of protein.

In a much larger study, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers looked at protein intake in 1,624 women over an 11-year period. They found that high-protein diets did not cause any problems in women with normal kidney function. But in women who had “mild renal insufficiency,” they wrote, consuming large amounts of protein accelerated renal decline. University of Connecticut researchers reached a similar conclusion when they reviewed years of research on the subject in a 2005 report in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism.

I've never given any credence to that particular claim (although I've heard it numerous times).  For one thing, in most cases a "high protein diet" is high in protein compared to a "normal" diet because carbohydrates (sugars and starches) have been drastically reduced, and not because because the calories taken in as protein are dramatically increased.  This is what leads to the weight loss.  I also firmly believe, and have experienced the fact that a diet low in carbohydrates leads to a greater feelings of satiety and less hunger between meals, and makes it easier to eat a diet with fewer total calories.

For such a diet to cause kidney damage would require you to presuppose that the presence of carbohydrates has some "buffering" reaction that prevents kidney damage at similar protein concentrations.

We've been on the a carbohydrate diet since Jan. 1, and as of today, I am down 33 lbs and Georgia is down 20, with no evidence of kidney problems.

Bioengineered Crops: Good for You, Good for the Earth

Biotechnology expert: "I have screened thousands of studies and scientific peer reviewed papers and not in a single one I have seen documentation of permanent negative impact on biodiversity done by genetically engineered crops."

And Hold the Fruitcake!

Atkins is Back!

Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.

But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

It's a confusing message. For years we've been fed the line that eating fat would make us fat and lead to chronic illnesses. "Dietary fat used to be public enemy No. 1," says Dr. Edward Saltzman, associate professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University. "Now a growing and convincing body of science is pointing the finger at carbs, especially those containing refined flour and sugar."...

I used the Atkins Diet to lose over 50 lbs a few years ago, and kept most of it off for at least three years.  We kind lost it after I switched jobs and donuts became more readily available.  Our health stayed good through out the time, contrary to everyone's fear of cholesterol and all.

With the planned events around the nuptials of #2 son next Sept, Georgia and I are planning to give it a shot again, to get a little trimmer.  Somehow, walking on the beach twice a week just isn't enough.