Best Diets for fat loss and health....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-7-2011

On AOL this morning I found an article titled:

“10 Best Diets for Weight Loss, Heart Health, and Diabetes”

The article was based the ratings by U.S. News & World Report.

They rated each diet on:

Reported weight loss the first year.

Reported weight loss after two years or more.

Estimated ease to stay on -- based on being filling enough and tasting good enough and not having too many special requirements.

Being at least minimally health OK by being nutritious enough to meet minimum standards and avoiding foods that tended to cause diabetes or heart disease and avoiding health problems caused by the diet.

The article did not state which version of each diet they reported on. That can change their results. (Dean Ornish’s latest information sounds a good bit closer to the post we did recently on how to make your diet most health supporting than his original no fat diet for example.)

It sounds like they didn’t get feedback from people actually on the diets.

Nor does it say what standards they used for foods that might cause diabetes or heart disease. So it’s a bit hard to say they have accurate information.

They also left out a diet that I think would have scored well on most of these criteria, the South Beach Diet.

That said, they had some decent results based on what I know of the diets listed.

Best Weight-Loss Diet Winner: Weight Watchers

Best Heart-Healthy Diet Winner: Ornish Diet
Third place: DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet


Best Diabetes Diet: Winner: DASH Diet

Best Commercial Diet Plan: Winner: Weight Watchers

Best Diet Overall Winner: DASH Diet
Runners-up: Mediterranean Diet, and Weight Watchers

They also listed a TLC Diet & the Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes Diet and Jenny Craig in some of the runners up categories but since I don’t know these well, this post is more about the winners and the diets I do know.

1. Weight Watchers has recently upgraded their points system and now is more health oriented and a bit more exercise oriented than they were.

They could move to restricting soft drinks, sweet or salty snacks, commercial desserts, and refined grains more than they do. And, they need even more emphasis on health and on exercise. But they do a lot of things right already.

But their three key strengths have always been that their points system shows that eating a lot more nonstarchy vegetables is a key to fat loss without going hungry, the coaching and moral support in meetings, and teaching their customers to monitor their points each week.

They have room to improve yet by my standards. But their strengths work. And, Weight Watchers is improving.

2. The DASH diet is set to feature more vegetables of all kinds and some fresh fruit and has no soft drinks, sweet or salty snacks, or commercial desserts. It aims to increase nutrition and fiber and potassium from foods and to move salt from way too much to moderately low. It does cause weight loss and tends to do so without hunger. And, for people who need the help and really follow the DASH diet well, it does lower elevated blood pressure.

By adding some health OK proteins and lowering carbs and adding even more vegetables it can even be better for fat loss. And, adding extra virgin olive oil would improve its health track record.

3. The current Ornish diet is pretty good. Dean Ornish has a new book out called, The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health.

If you turn up your eating to a high level on his “spectrum” using his information, I think you will get both good health results and tend to lose fat.

4. The Mediterranean Diet includes more vegetables than the average American eats and no soft drinks, sweet or salty snacks, or commercial desserts. It also features extra virgin olive oil instead of oils high in omega 6 or saturated fats. It includes cooked tomatoes, garlic, and enough spices to make the foods in it taste good. And, it features moderate consumption of red wine with dinner.

It’s easy to stay on and has multiple health benefits. It does well with heart health and preventing Alzheimer’s disease for example.

By cutting back on bread and pasta a good bit, keeping the olive oil and red wine at moderate levels and adding even more nonstarchy vegetables it can even work as a fat loss diet.

My own view is that combining these diets in a way that fits you and gives you foods you like to eat is the best diet.

It also helps to move your diet towards the components that help you lose excess body fat or keep it off and those that best support good health.

As you can see, there is a good bit of overlap in these best diets – particularly in the parts that help you lose excess body fat or keep it off and those that best support good health.

Why eat more kinds of fruits & vegetables....

Today's post: Monday, 4-6-2009

There are a number of key things you can do to keep or restore your health & live longer.

Some of those key things also help you get or stay thin.

Massive amounts of research show that people who eat a lot of vegetables and a moderate amount of whole fresh fruit most days and do it every week and eat very little “fast carbs” such as refined grain foods, foods containing sugar or high fructose corn syrup, etc are dramatically healthier than people who do the reverse. Five to seven servings of nonstarchy vegetables and one or two servings of whole fresh fruit each day is the ideal.

The research on the DASH diet proves eating that way lowers or prevents high blood pressure. You get more potassium, natural vitamin C, fiber, and the natural form of folic acid by eating this way, for example.

Weight Watchers has found that doing this is a key to losing fat and keeping it off. (They rate nonstarchy vegetables as having zero points. That means eating too much of anything else will make you fat; but eating lots of vegetables will not. And that means that eating lots of vegetables means you can still eat a lot of food and not be fat. This makes it dramatically easier to lose fat and keep it off.)

Lastly, we now know that fruits and vegetables are like natural, high quality supplements and, particularly if they are organically grown, contain literally hundreds of vitamins, minerals, and micro- or phyto- nutrients. And those nutrients do every thing from prevent heart disease to preventing cancer. For example, it was in today’s online health news that eating broccoli sprouts not only prevents cancer, if you eat broccoli sprouts often, it can wipe out the h pylori bacteria that causes stomach ulcers.

Even better, eating a lot of vegetables makes it far easier to NOT eat junky carbs that tend to make you fat AND cause type 2 diabetes.

So, anything that’s been discovered to increase the amount of vegetables you eat is quite literally worth its weight in gold or more.

So today’s Early to Rise health article was both interesting and important. Here it is.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com .”

“A Great Diet for Your Heart

By Craig Ballantyne

One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your health is to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Researchers from Iran's Obesity Research Center examined fruit and vegetable intake in 840 men and women from Tehran - and the results were dramatic. The subjects who ate a lot of different fruits and vegetables were significantly and inversely associated with cardiovascular disease risk factors.

Specifically, it appears that eating a variety of fruits and vegetables leads to lower LDL cholesterol in a dose-responsive manner. That means you'll get more benefits from eating an apple, an orange, a banana, and some broccoli than you will from just eating an apple and an orange.

So every time you are at the grocery store, add at least one new fruit and one new vegetable to your cart. You can choose from kiwi fruit, avocados, asparagus, pears, spinach, and so many other amazing foods.

Try to be a little better every week with your fruit and vegetable intake and you'll reduce your risk of heart disease in one of the simplest possible ways.

[Ed. Note: Extending your life and living out your years in tip-top health is really a matter of making simple lifestyle choices - like eating a wider variety of fruits and veggies. ….]”

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The reasons for this effect are pretty simple. If you know and have eaten a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that you like or at least find edible, you’ll be more likely to eat some each week. To find out what they taste like in the first place you, or the person who buys your food, have to make a regular habit of going by the produce section in your store and buying food from it. And, if you have eaten enough of a vegetable or eaten it often enough, you’d like a change of pace, you’ll already know a decent size list of things to get instead.

For example, the cruciferous vegetables, particularly if eaten raw, prevent cancer. But if you get tired of broccoli or simply don’t care for it, you can eat broccoli sprouts or raw cauliflower or coleslaw made with both red and green cabbage and some diced onion, you get as much, or more in the case of the broccoli sprouts, of the cancer fighting ingredients.

And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, you can also try radishes, water cress, Brussels sprouts, or kale.

Or, if you want to have take in a lot of natural carotenes, you can eat broccoli; but you can also eat pasta sauce with garlic, other spices, and extra virgin olive oil and get even more carotenes. Or you can eat carrots or sweet potato.

Even better, you can try several kinds of berries, blueberries, strawberries, black berries, raspberries, and more.

(The book, SuperFoods, is incorrect on its information about soy foods. But it’s superb on everything else; & it contains extensive lists of similar foods for each fruit and vegetable it lists as a superfood if you need a good starter list for reference.

Another good place to look is a large book of salad recipes.)

Eating these real foods that are very low calorie and high nutrition is like any other skill. The more you practice it and the more variations you try, the more skilled you become at using it.

And the benefits to your health and pocket book are extremely large.

Doing this improves and protects your health better than any prescription drug can other than antibiotics when you have dangerous bacterial infection. Eating a wide variety of fruits an vegetables costs far less than the doctor and hospital visits and statin drugs and type 2 diabetes drugs and high blood pressure drugs that it can make unnecessary! And other than making you less hungry it has no bad side effects.

Lower blood pressure without drugs....

Today's post: Friday, 8-1-2008

High blood pressure is both a warning sign that you have significant health problems that will get worse unless you take action AND high blood pressure can harm you directly if it stays too high or goes high enough.

Most doctors prescribe drugs for people they see who have high blood pressure.

The bad news is that most of the time, the quality of life issues from those drugs are so bad, many people refuse to keep taking them while those that do take them wish they didn’t have to. It feels like making yourself sick on purpose. And, it doesn’t help that many of these drugs tend to ruin your sex life.

Worse, some of these drugs cause real harm from fainting to type II diabetes to heart failure.

Even worse than that, sometimes even taking 3 of these mixed review drugs at the same time doesn’t reduce high blood pressure to desirable levels.

And, worst of all, taking the drugs without addressing the other health issues that may be causing the high blood pressure or that it will make worse, provides little actual protection for your health.

Mercifully, there ARE better ways to lower high blood pressure that do NOT have these problems.

We will soon release an eBook on all of these methods.

(Keep reading our posts as many of them fit those themes. And, we will announce it here when this eBook is available to you.)

Here’s one of those methods in brief.

The eBook will go into much greater detail on it.

It was in the online health news last Wednesday, 7-30-2008

“NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Research shows that boosting levels of potassium in the diet may lower a person's risk of developing high blood pressure and may decrease blood pressure in people who already have "hypertension." “

Doctors and researchers have known for quite a long time that the DASH II diet that combines a LOT of nonstarchy vegetables and a moderately high intake of whole fruit with moderate and consistent salt restriction reliably lowers high blood pressure. (It also limits saturated fat.)

This diet even optimizes “normal” blood pressure and lowers it to desirable levels in people who do not have high blood pressure.

And, one of these researchers and a foremost expert on treating high blood pressure, Mark Houston, MD & his colleague, Dr. Karen J. Harper , co- wrote a recent July 2008 special supplement to The Journal of Clinical Hypertension explaining one of the major reasons why this is so.

The DASH II diet replaces foods like potato chips and commercial baked goods and other snacks plus excess salting of food that each produce a high intake of sodium salt with the plentiful vegetables and whole fruit that is high in potassium and recommends very light use of added salt. (The 1500 mg a day limit it suggests is NOT no salt at all. It does allow moderate salt intake occasionally.)

It seems that one of the drivers of high blood pressure is that the much higher levels of potassium our bodies evolved to ingest combined with modest amounts of sodium salt produces good health and optimal blood pressure while the reverse that many people have been eating instead produces high blood pressure and health problems.

These two doctors pointed out that point out that a healthy intake of potassium is thought to be one reason why vegetarians and peoples still eating traditional foods instead of junk food have a very low incidence of heart disease.

They also state that in such peoples still eating traditional foods instead of junk food only 1 percent of those people get high blood pressure. In contrast, in industrialized societies today where most people still eat diets high in processed foods and large amounts of dietary sodium 1 in 3 people have high blood pressure.

(That’s about 33 times as many people per every 100 people.)

They point out that the typical American diet most people still eat contains at least double the sodium and half the potassium it should to produce good health and avoid high blood pressure.

(Most unfortunately, this is still becoming the case in countries all over the world with very bad medical problems and increase medical costs resulting.)

The way that many people in the United States have been eating gives them twice as much sodium as potassium while the diet, that humans evolved to eat that tends to produce optimum blood pressure and good health contains five times as much potassium as sodium.

Unfortunately, the list of foods too many people still eat every day includes bread, desserts, and snacks that all contain a lot of sodium salt and hardly any potassium.

And, these same people all too often eat virtually no green or nonstarchy vegetables or whole fruit on most days each week.

The research of Doctor Houston and others show that reversing this eating pattern protects your health and either keeps your blood pressure at optimal levels or moves it that direction.

The even better news is that making this change tends to help people lose fat without becoming hungry.

And, losing this excess fat (or not gaining it in the first place) also protects your health and either keeps your blood pressure at optimal levels or moves it that direction.

Almost every nonstarchy and unsalted vegetable or whole fruit is high in potassium while virtually all refined grain foods, packaged foods, snacks etc now sold in stores are surprisingly high in added salt.

Clearly eliminating such foods at least 95 % if the time and replacing them with nonstarchy vegetables and whole fruit will help to lower high blood pressure.

One of the nice things is that many of the kinds of whole fruit that are high in potassium taste good. Bananas and cantaloupe are two examples.

Avocados are high in potassium. And, they have mostly heart health OK monosaturated oils.

And, though vegetables such as raw carrots or broccoli are less enticing, they have incredible other health benefits and are the most effective at helping you lose or prevent gaining excess bodyfat.

Blood Pressure Drug Weakens Bones....

Today's post: Tuesday, 4-15-2008

I found the article below in the Yahoo Health News earlier today. (It was posted late Monday.) It has some significant implications I then add below it.

“Blood pressure drug reduces bone density in study Mon Apr 14

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Powerful diuretics used to control blood pressure can also steal calcium from the bones and cause significant bone loss in men who take them, researchers reported on Monday.

Older men who used the drugs the most had triple the bone loss of men who never used them, the researchers reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

They found a direct correlation between use of the drugs and bone loss in men -- putting them at risk of osteoporosis, which can cause broken hips and other broken bones.

Though osteoporosis is more common in women than men, one in five Americans with the bone-weakening condition is a man -- and as many as 2 million American men suffer from it.

Doctors should keep an eye out for this problem in men taking the drugs, said Dr. Lionel Lim of Griffin Hospital, in Derby, Connecticut, who led the study.

One of the most common brand names is Lasix, and these so-called loop diuretics are also sold under the generic name furosemide. Diuretics work to lower blood pressure by removing water from the blood via the kidneys.

With less blood circulating, the blood does not have to pump so hard. The kidneys also filter out more sodium, potassium and, evidently, calcium. The drugs are especially effective in patients with heart failure, relieving the characteristic swollen ankles and breathlessness.

Lim studied nearly 3,300 men aged 65 and older, about 8 percent of whom had taken the drugs either regularly or from time to time.

Lim's team measured the men's hip bone density at the start and again roughly 4-1/2 years later.

Bone loss averaged 0.78 percent annually among the 84 men who used loop diuretics regularly, compared to 0.33 percent among non-users and 0.58 percent among the 181 intermittent users.

Previous studies have associated diuretic use with a patient's risk of breaking a hip or fracturing another bone.

"However, there is uncertainty as to whether this increased fracture risk is attributable to negative effects on bone mineral density, fall-related mechanisms (such as dizziness and low blood pressure when standing up), or associated (illnesses)," Lim wrote in his report.

The men taking diuretics in the study tended to be heavier, more sedentary, and more likely to suffer from other maladies including heart disease than non-users.

(Reporting by Andrew Stern; Editing by Maggie Fox and Eric Beech)”

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Doctors should prescribe diuretics for people with fluid retention as the article mentioned for heart failure patients.

However, since the diuretics tend to be cheap drugs & reduce blood pressure reliably many doctors tend to prescribe them first before seeing if other drugs are needed.

This article suggests an important reason to do otherwise.

It looks to make much better sense to initially prescribe the ARB’s in low doses or ARB’s in combination with calcium channel blockers with both at low doses AND to prescribe lifestyle upgrades.

And lifestyle upgrades may make even better choices.:

The Dash diet with moderate salt restriction that cuts out junk food & excessive fatty meats in favor of lean meats & poultry in moderation, fish, beans, nuts, & low fat dairy AND includes plentiful vegetables & whole fresh fruit is clearly indicated.

When people who eat badly upgrade to it, they experience blood pressure reduction similar to taking a blood pressure drug AND with NO drug costs or side effects.

And, just recently it was reported that this diet protects against heart attacks & strokes in both people with high blood pressure AND people with normal blood pressure.

Since the whole point of lowering high blood pressure is to prevent heart attacks & strokes & other health problems -- & patients with high blood pressure tend to not eat this way added to the blood pressure lowering effects of eating this way, this is the first prescription I think doctors should give most people they see who have high blood pressure.

In addition, being overfat, “heavy,” has been found to create high blood pressure notably by creating endothelial dysfunction which stiffens blood vessels & impairs their ability to relax.

Eating a Dash diet with moderate salt restriction combined with totally stopping junk foods & soft drinks and getting enough of the right regular exercises has been proven to prevent people from getting fat or to help them lose excess fat.

In addition, exercise lowers blood pressure both overall and on the days people exercise & it tends to improve endothelial dysfunction.

The patients in this study clearly needed both the Dash diet and regular exercise prescribed FIRST since they had high blood pressure, were fat, & were sedentary -- & had higher than average heart attack risks.

This would be more protective than the diuretics alone. And, the calcium in the DASH diet plus weight bearing or strength exercise INCREASES bone density. So even if there was a need for diuretics, they would tend to produce less bone weakening if patients followed this lifestyle prescription.

In addition, when doctors prescribe blood pressure medication a huge number of people simply won’t take them or will stop taking them due to harsh side effects. (Stopping blood pressure drugs suddenly is unsafe but people often do exactly that if they take drugs with heavy side effects.) Things like fainting when you stand up from taking something that is supposed to make you healthier is something many people simply won’t tolerate. For most people, it looks to be unnecessary.

So unless the blood pressure is quite high, it makes the most sense to prescribe the drugs that will produce the most lowering with minimal side effects.

The ARB’s in low doses or ARB’s in combination with calcium channel blockers with both at low doses tend to have that combination.

Even better, there is a new drug out called ExForge that combines them so a patient only needs to take one pill.

But the things to prescribe first & keep up are the Dash diet with moderate salt restriction and regular exercise. Those are protective even more than the drugs. They make people healthier if done right. And, they make people feel healthier instead of sicker.

Diuretics have their place. Some patients need them for other reasons as we’ve discussed; & some people do need them to be used to lower blood pressure when nothing else is working well enough. But they should NOT be the first or main prescription for high blood pressure for most people in my view.

There are also supplements that lower blood pressure directly & supplements that reverse some of the causes of high blood pressure that can be used.

That’s a big subject we plan to do an eBook about soon as well.