Soft drinks AND diet soft drinks and sports drinks all fatten you....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-30-2010

1. Many people know that regular soft drinks make you fat. Because of that, health knowledgeable people drink water, green tea, tea coffee, or carbonated water only over ice. (A drink with one fourth apple or grape or orange juice, one fourth cranberry juice and half carbonated water only over ice isn’t too bad and fattens far less than a fruit flavored soft drink. And, tea and coffee provide caffeine without fattening the way cola drinks do.)

First regular soft drinks add calories but do NOT make you less hungry. That fattens and spikes your blood sugar. The blood sugar spike then triggers an insulin surge which also helps fatten you. Then when your blood sugar crashes you get MORE hungry and for sugary foods too! So, regular soft drinks make you fat three ways. Yikes!

2. But of the many people who DO know that regular soft drinks fatten, since
60 % of Americans drink them, most of them think drinking diet soft drinks will solve the problem. Unfortunately this is NOT the case.

Diet soft drinks ALSO make you fat.

The research shows that they fatten about as much as regular soft drinks; and their artificial sweeteners may cause other health problems for some people according to what I’ve read.

What happens at a basic level, that research has found that even happens to mice they tested, is that when you drink a diet soft drink and taste the sweet taste, your body sets itself to deal with the sugar. When you don’t get the sugar, it makes you crave sugary foods – worse, it makes you eat even more because real sugary foods are not as sweet tasting as the artificial sweeteners.

This means that diet soft drinks are drink like appetite stimulators for sugary and fattening foods that themselves have virtually no calories. So, they are VERY effective fatteners for most of the people who drink them.

3. So, to make money from more health oriented people and young people, enterprising beverage companies decided to promote “sports drinks.”

Some sports drinks have vitamins and herbs that actually might have a health value. But you can get those cheaper and at a more controlled dose by taking them as supplements.

Some sports drinks have caffeine. But as we’ve seen, there are health OK drinks that have caffeine. Plus if you get caffeine several ways each day, you can overdose and get anxious or jittery and sleep badly enough you need extra caffeine you wouldn’t have needed at a more reasonable intake initially the next day due to the sleep disruption of the excess caffeine. (I should know. I used to drink that much coffee.)

But the real problem is that most sport drinks have added sugar. This does exactly the same thing in sports drinks that happens from the sugar in soft drinks and fattens people in exactly the same way.

So, drinking sports drinks that have sugar as almost all of them do, fattens people just like soft drinks!!

This week a story came out that teens in Texas thought that sports drinks were OK for your health.

I saw it on HealthDay online health news. Their title was:

“Study Finds Teens Think Sports Drinks Are Healthy.”

And, in fact the teens that drank sports drinks instead of soft drinks did exercise more and eat better than those who drank soft drinks only.

They would have been better off healthwise and be less fat if they drank some water, some tea or coffee, and ate real fruit or drank a fruit smoothie or even a real glass of fruit juice instead.

The researchers further pointed out that while some heavily exercising teen athletes might burn off the extra calories, teens who spent that time playing computer games were particularly likely to add fat if they drank such sports drinks.

The researchers also noted that people who in their work, yard work, or exercise sweat very heavily might need the electrolyte replacement in a drink like Gatorade.

Gatorade may have a balanced electrolyte profile. But it also tastes dreadful and makes heavy use of artificial colors. It also has extra sugar – about 60% as much as a regular soft drink. So, it likely fattens many of the people who drink it also.

If someone who exercises enough or does so on a hot day to need electrolyte replacement takes 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium, they don’t need more in a sports drink. I personally think they would do better to drink two glasses of water, a glass of tomato juice (which has salt for sodium), and a glass of orange juice which has extra potassium.

(Lastly, when they are done exercising and feel blasted, a drink that is half tomato juice and half dark beer is not that much more fattening than a couple glasses of Gatorade. They’ll recover just fine with the tomato juice and beer combination and will feel recovered faster! And, if both the tomato juice and the beer are chilled, the taste is surprisingly good if you’ve never tried it.)

Set up your home for effective fat loss because it works...

Today's Post: Monday, 11-2-2009

I read a recent news story reporting that people who had exercise equipment in their homes and virtually no fattening, packaged foods or soft drinks often were quite successful at fat loss.

And, the people who had no exercise equipment in their homes and lots of fattening, packaged foods and soft drinks were usually not successful if they tried to lose excess fat.

That seemed so basic and obviously true, I didn’t bother at that time to note which news service or who did the research.

But, I wish I had now -- because I suddenly realized how important this finding is.

It gives people who really want to lose excess fat a really powerful way to load the dice in their favor and sharply increase their chances of success!

And, since people have to drink and eat something, the third piece of information or strategy that follows from this is that if you don’t have lots of fattening, packaged foods and soft drinks, you are much more likely to have whole fruit and vegetables and other low glycemic good for you foods such taste enhancers like spices and garlic and onions.

1. So if you have lots of fattening, packaged foods and soft drinks in your home and want to win at fat loss, a great first step is to get a large garbage can (or a set of grocery bags to use to give away the stuff if you are too thrifty to be comfortable just tossing it) and get it out of your house.

Boxes of commercially baked cookies, boxes or bags of snack foods, all soft drinks, all white bread and bread not totally whole grain, cake mixes, any sugared breakfast cereal, and most candies should all go out.

Then get apples or cherries or berries and shelled, raw or dry roasted nuts, and snack vegetables like baby carrots or radishes or broccoli florets or cauliflower florets and low salt vegetable juices and green tea or black tea and unsweetened cocoa and coffee or soda water to have to drink & for snacks.

And, buy more vegetables for cooked vegetable dishes and salads and some extra virgin olive oil and real garlic or garlic powder from the spice section and onions and some kind of vinegar you like for these dishes.

2. If you have rugs, get a large towel you can use to lie on for crunches and pushups and other exercises you do at home and on the floor or buy mats like they use in gyms. If you are willing to do skipping rope as an exercise (it’s very effective in causing fat loss), get a good jump rope for about $25. If you are willing to try a mini-trampoline (also very effective at causing fat loss) check out www.urbanrebounder.com . Their mini-trampoline costs about $150. If you are willing to do dumbbell work as strength training, get a set of fixed weight or a few adjustable dumbbells and plates. (I’ve found that a great way to do this cheap is to just get one dumbbell at each weight—instead of two. Then I do an exercise for each arm one at a time which allows me to do exercises virtually nonstop since each arm rests while the other is being exercised.) If you can afford to get more equipment like a gym-quality treadmill or elliptical trainer or recumbent exercise bike you can use while watching the TV news or sports or a Nordic Track or a Bowflex or Total Gym strength training station that can also work. Then use the equipment several times each week.

Then find your favorites or those your are at least OK with in the health OK foods and drinks and ingest those instead of bringing home the stuff that made you fat in the first place.

And, keep using your exercise equipment several days each week.

I believe about half of all Americans now obese (really fat) or very over-weight just did these two things without any other effort to restrict the amount of food, most of them would lose most of their fat. A woman who is 120 pounds overweight might easily lose 80 pounds of that in about a year and a half for example.

And, the converse is also true. I’m about 15 pounds overweight and 30 pounds overfat. If I stopped eating vegetables and doing regular exercise and had sugary cereal for breakfast instead of oatmeal and fatty meats and white bread and cookies and my favorite commercial desserts each day and drank several soft drinks each day, in a few months I could easily be 60 pounds heavier and fatter. Yikes!

But that stuff never comes in our front door.

And, I do have a towel and dumbbells and a NordicTrack that I use every week and exercise virtually every day even if it’s just 5 minutes of crunches. (Most weekdays my total exercise session is just 15 minutes or so first thing in the morning just before breakfast.)

So I don’t carry that extra 60 pounds of fat around that I’d otherwise have.

I also haven’t had a heart attack triggered and partially caused by that lifestyle. (To be fair, I do take some supplements that, according to my blood tests, are effective at giving me extra heart protection.)

If you have kids, this may be more challenging as they may be used to the bad stuff and all their friends may still eat it. But consider this. One mother who insisted on doing this found her family grocery store bills dropped a few hundred dollars a month!

Way to lose fat & prevent cancer too….

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-18-2009

To lose fat & keep it off, one of the most powerful methods is to eat frequent servings of nonstarchy vegetables every day. And, eating some of the crunchy ones raw each day may even work better.

They have so much fiber and so little sugar, they have very few calories and the fiber takes enough calories to digest, nonstarchy vegetables wind up with close to zero effective calories. Weight Watchers literally lists them as having zero points.

Yet, nonstarchy vegetables both turn off hunger by filling you up AND give you astoundingly good and health supporting nutrition. (This enables you to eat less of foods with more calories with virtually no effort as well. That’s a great benefit!)

Not only that, many nonstarchy vegetables have powerful cancer preventing components. This works much better with organically grown vegetables repeated research has found.

Raw broccoli, raw cauliflower, broccoli sprouts, and most of the other cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, water cress, and radishes help prevent cancer.

Raw broccoli florets, raw cauliflower chopped up or eaten as florets, and radishes are all crunchy. That makes them even more hunger cancelling!

Cooked tomatoes and other carotene containing vegetables such as carrots work best if you eat them with extra virgin olive oil by contrast. That makes their carotenoids more bioavailable and you wind up with more in your bloodstream to protect you.

Other than French fries, which are NOT starch free and are so processed, it’s a stretch to call them vegetables, many people eat no vegetables at all.

So they are a good bit fatter and more likely to get many kinds of cancer.

(Warning, if you go in one day from eating hardly any nonstarchy vegetables to 5 or 6 servings a day, your body will rebel. But if you start with one a day for a week and add one more a day at the end of each week, after you wind up eating 5 or 6 servings a day after several weeks, your body will handle it just fine.)

Now, just today, I saw two health items with great, related news.

1. “Whole-cooked carrots "better for fighting cancer" Reuters Weds, 6-17-2009” was an online story that reported research finding that the anti-cancer properties of carrots were 25% greater if they were cooked whole instead of cooked after being diced up. And 80 % of the people tested found the carrots cooked whole tasted better. This was true even if the whole carrots were diced up after cooking.

Apparently less of the cancer preventing nutrient and flavor was washed away or heated away since the whole carrot was less exposed to water and likely cooked at a slightly lower internal temperature.

But wait a minute! How long have they known that something in CARROTS prevented cancer?

The news article had that info too. Dr Kirsten Brandt & professional colleagues at the University of Denmark, discovered the anti-cancer substance falcarinol in carrots 4 years ago.

I checked on Wikipedia and falcarinol is in carrots and real panax ginseng and is a plant based antifungal compound. (Organic produce is likely to have far higher levels of it.)

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “Falcarinol is thought to reduce the risk of developing cancer, as a research team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Danish Universities found in February 2005.”

So, you could have a snack with carrot sticks, broccoli florets, and radishes and get plenty of crunch plus a decent amount of cancer prevention at the same time.

2. Today Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa’s health email had a reminder that recent research found that drinking only one glass of low-sodium vegetable juice a day helps you lose weight.

In one study, adults who drank at least 8 ounces of low sodium vegetable juice a day lost 4 pounds more than people who ate the same way but didn't drink the juice.

He also had a reminder that Research has found that people whose diets are highest in phytonutrients from plants have the lowest incidence of cancer.

His specialty is treating and preventing Alzheimer's disease; and he also noted that people who drink juice more than 3 times a week are 76% less likely to develop Alzheimer's.

He suggests you go with organic vegetables you juice yourself.

Organic vegetables will prevent cancer better. And by doing it yourself you can juice broccoli, broccoli sprouts, carrots, or kale to get a really healthful drink with no salt added.

(Vitamix makes the best juicer; but any good juicer works.)

But if you eat a very low salt diet otherwise, V8 or regular tomato juice works too for fat loss. They aren’t organic and do have added salt. But you may not have time every day to use and clean a juicer. Those juices will give you the fat loss benefit. And, they can be really easy to add to your diet. (I like the SNAPeTom juice that has the added hot spices.)

You can even get a Bloody Mary or Virgin Mary drink at a bar that has tomato juice. (That would work best for fat loss if you stuck with only one Bloody Mary or ordered a Virgin Mary.)

And, the same day, you can eat raw organic broccoli florets and organic carrots both cooked and raw to add to the fat loss benefit and add the cancer prevention.

You can also get freshly made vegetable juice drinks at many Whole Foods Markets.