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Eat like a baby. Cook like a caveman. Snack on one color of the rainbow each day of the week.

These habits belong to some of the viral diets that celebrities from Beyonc to Taylor Swift have sworn by.

Oddly enough, some of these eating plans contain nuggets of wisdom that could help you lose weight. Still, the bigger danger with any diet is that it sets us up for unhealthy habits we can't maintain, says Andy Bellatti, a registered dietitian and the cofounder of Dietitians for Professional Integrity.

"I know many people whove gone on some kind of crash diet for a week and lose a bunch of weight and a few months later theyre back to square one."

With that in mind, here's the dirt on the strangest viral diets along with some science-backed wisdom about what actually works if you want to lose weight and keep it off.

The hype:Actresses including Jennifer Aniston, Kirsten Dunst, and Gwyneth Paltrow, haveall reportedly done the pH or "Alkaline" diet, which advocates swappingso-called acid-forming foods like meat, fish,dairy,and grains with alkalineones like fruits, nuts, beans, and vegetables.

The truth:The diet is based on the misleading idea thatyoucan change your bloodpHwith food. While the pH of thestomach is acidic, theblood is slightly alkaline, something the food you eatcan't change. Still, onepositive partof the dietis that itadvocates eating morefruits and veggies, something most dietitians agree we should all be doing.

The hype:Beyonc reportedly used the Master Cleanseto slim downbefore the movie "Dreamgirls." The cleanse involves drinking a lemon juice-based mixtureto allegedly clean out thesystem and speedweight loss.

The truth:Any diet that's based around the idea of detoxing is probably bogus, since our bodies naturally detoxify themselves.

The hype:Singer Tim McGraw sticks to a paleo diet, a meal plan free ofdairy, legumes, refined sugar, alcohol, andgrains.

The truth:The US News and World Report ranks the paleo diet 36 out of 38 diets, saying that it can be tough to follow andis somewhat "nutritionally incomplete."

See Also:

SEE ALSO:11 fitness myths that are doing more harm than good

DON'T MISS:A new show features Biggest Loser winners who regained weight and reveals a deeper truth about weight loss

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11 viral diets and the ones that actually work - mySanAntonio.com

Calories in, calories out. The saying is painted on the Pinterest boards of health enthusiasts, raved over by fitness models, and even preached by some nutritionists. But recent studies suggest that this method of dieting could be making people less healthy in the long run.

The premise of calorie counting is that based on your weight, height, and activity level, there is a magic number of calories that is optimal for your daily consumption. Those who wished to regulate their calories would theoretically limit their intake to that calculated number (numbers that may be more difficult to find once Obamacare ends).

There have been multiple apps, websites, and programs based solely on the practice of calorie counting for weight loss. MyFitnessPal, VeryWell Calorie Counter, and Lose It! are a few well-known examples. Despite the many articles presenting evidence that all calories are not created equal, the proliferation of calorie counting has gotten out of hand.

Even if calorie counts were accurate, evidence suggests it still isnt a good idea. In essence, calorie counting is a strict version of dieting: the bodys natural signals of hunger and fullness are thrown to the wayside in favor of a predetermined number.

Many who count calories have reported going to bed hungry, obsessing over their calorie counting app, and becoming frustrated when their weight stalled at a higher number than expected. When it comes down to it, calorie counting is often an attempt to control the body and adhere to a weight loss diet.

The science tells us that weight loss diets dont work. One study showed that 90 to 95 percent of weight loss diets result in any weight lost while dieting simply being regained in the following years. You dont have to be a health enthusiast to see this effect in real time; theres a reason your friends conversations so often revolve around attempted but failed weight loss attempts. If dieting worked, it would be easy. If dieting worked, people wouldnt need consumptive programs like Weight Watchers or going low-carb.

In an attempt to understand the widespread failure of diets, another group of experts convened to evaluate the effects of calorie restriction on the body. Their investigation revealed that one-third to two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets. So, in essence, weight loss attempts were actually counterproductive.

Like nutrition expert Jonathan Bailor, author of The Calorie Myth, told Prevention, counting calories leads to failure 95.4 percent of the time and often leaves people fatter.

The specific reasons for this failure of dieting are a little less clear, but research suggests that it has to do with the bodys fear response to starvation. According to Traci Mann, a professor of psychology who has studied nutrition for over 25 years, After you diet, so many biological changes happen in your body that it becomes practically impossible to keep the weight off.

To summarize her explanation, the three changes that occur are reactions from the body to try and escape the state of deprivation:

There has been no reliable evidence published to support that dieting improves any aspect of health or wellness. To the contrary, however, studies have revealed some adverse health effects of dieting, including irreversible effects on metabolism and mental health.

By restricting your body to a calorie number, you could be condemning yourself to future weight gain alongside negative effects on your health.

Its time to put down the calculator and leave diets in the dust theyre not doing our health or our waistlines any favors.

Go here to read the rest:
How Calorie Counting Is Sabotaging Your Weight Loss - The Daily Meal

New study shows how different people react to various breads.

In a new study, researchers discovered that different peoples bodies react differently to the same foods, which could be a breakthrough in understanding why dieting, for millions, hasnt worked.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, based their study on the nutritional and glycemic effects of eating two different types of bread. Their findings were published on June 6 in the journal Cell Metabolism.

After decades of studies on which breads are healthiest, it remained unclear what effect bread and different bread types have on different systems in the body, especially the microbiome, which encompasses the millions of microorganisms that naturally live on and in the human body.

One of the researchers new findings is that there is no clinical difference in the effects of ingesting white or wheat bread.

The researchers came to this conclusion after performing a crossover study of 20 adults. Processed white bread was introduced into the diets of half of the subjects, while the other half ate handmade, whole-wheat sourdough bread.

Read more: Simple carbohydrates vs. complex carbohydrates

In addition, researchers found that the composition of the subjects microbiomes was generally resilient to the dietary intervention of bread, and that the glycemic response (the effect on glucose, or blood sugar, levels) to the two bread types varies greatly among the population.

Dr. Eran Elinav, a researcher in the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute, and one of the study's senior authors, said these findings were fascinating and potentially very important.

To date, the nutritional values assigned to food have been based on minimal science, and one-size-fits-all diets have failed miserably, he said.

Eran Segal, PhD, a computational biologist at Weizmann, and another senior author, told Healthline they also performed a crossover clinical trial where subjects were compared with themselves. The results were very powerful as it compared short-term effects of interventions.

Subjects were compared to themselves, he explained. We compared increased short-term (one week) consumption of industrial white bread vs. matched consumption of artisanal sourdough-leavened whole-wheat bread, which we originally viewed as radical opposites in terms of their health benefits.

The researchers also measured various clinical end points, including weight, blood pressure, various blood tests, and the gut microbiome.

Read more: Best breads for people with diabetes

To their surprise, Segal said they found no difference between the effects those two breads had on the various end points they measured. They combined and analyzed data on the two bread types, testing whether bread of any type had an effect.

The scientists found that just one week of bread consumption after eating no bread resulted in statistically significant changes to multiple clinical parameters, he said.

We saw a reduction in essential minerals in the blood (calcium, magnesium, iron) and an increase in LDH (lactate dehydrogenase, a marker of tissue damage), Segal said. But we also saw an improvement in markers of liver and kidney function, inflammation markers, and cholesterol levels.

In the microbiome, he said they found only a minimal difference between the effects of the different breads two microbial taxa (groups of organisms), that were increased with white bread. But, generally they saw that the microbiome was very resilient to this intervention.

This is surprising, as the current paradigm in the field is that a change in nutrition rapidly changes the makeup of the microbiome, Segal said. This is probably dependent on the kind of change. We had a nutritional change that was significant enough to change clinical parameters, which we tend to think of as very stable. And yet it had a minimal effect on the microbiome.

The researchers were also co-authors of a paper published in 2015 in the journal Cell. In that study they observed the nutritional habits of 900 people. The researchers found that bread was the single most consumed food item in their diets, making up roughly 10 percent of their caloric intake.

In their latest study, participants also normally received about 10 percent of their calories from bread, Segal said. Half were assigned to consume an increased amount of processed, packaged white bread for a week (about 25 percent of their calories), and half were assigned to eat an increased amount of whole-wheat sourdough. The fresh wheat bread was baked specifically for the participants and delivered to them. Then, after two weeks without bread, the diets for each group were reversed.

Segal said they monitored numerous health effects before and during the study. These included the subjects glucose levels upon waking up; their levels of the essential minerals calcium, iron, and magnesium; fat and cholesterol levels; kidney and liver enzymes; and markers for inflammation and tissue damage.

The team also measured the composition of the subjects microbiomes before, during, and after the study.

In fact, half the people had higher glycemic responses to white bread, and the other half had higher responses to sourdough bread, Segal said. We also proved rigorously that this was statistically significant and not a result of random fluctuations.

So, having very personal, often opposite responses, to the same kind of bread poses a problem. How would we know, in advance, which type of food is better for each person?

Mood food: Can what you eat affect your happiness?

The scientists created a prediction algorithm: We showed that we could have predicted, with fairly good accuracy, which bread induces lower glycemic responses for each subject personally, and did that based on their initial microbiome configurations, Segal said.

This is one very important way in which the food we eat affects our metabolism, he said. High glucose responses are a risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and liver cirrhosis. It is also associated with obesity, and enhanced all-cause mortality in both type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Using personalized medicine has become increasingly popular in medicine, but using this technique for diets could potentially mark a shift in how nutritionists work with patients.

Kristin Kirkpatrick, MS, RD, LD, told Healthline that rather than giving universal dietary recommendations, nutrition advice is most effective when tailored specifically to the person, considering metabolic characteristics, microbiota, food allergies or sensitivities, insulin and glucose sensitivities, and genes, if applicable.

Kirkpatrick, also the manager of Wellness Nutrition Services at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute in Ohio, has co-authored Skinny Liver: A Proven Program to Prevent and Reverse the New Silent Epidemic Fatty Liver Disease. She said despite the findings in this small study, a longer-term study is needed.

The findings in this study are based on two 1-week-long interventions. A small snapshot in time, she said. It may not be indicative of the potential nutrition effects that can take weeks, months, or even years to be seen and quantified.

The study also brings up a question. Which is better bread: processed white or fresh, whole-wheat sourdough?

There are certain facts about whole-grain bread vs. white bread that support healthier overall nutrition, regardless of glycemic response, Kirkpatrick said.

We know that the processing [milling] of intact grains to white flour removes layers of essential nutrition: B vitamins, minerals, proteins, healthy fats, and fiber in the bran and germ layers removed, she said. This leaves the white flour with only the endosperm, containing all the starch without a lot of nutrient density.

So, even if glycemic responses after ingestion were the same, she added, study participants most likely would still miss out on those these vital nutrients if they chose white bread over whole wheat.

How did the Weizmann team measure the makeup of microbiomes? Some trips to the bathroom and a little help from their smartphones.

Stool samples were collected from participants at several points during the study. Segal said they extracted DNA from the samples, and analyzed the DNA sequence of the microbes in the stool.

To identify the source of each of these DNA sequences, we matched it with databases of known DNA sequences of different bacteria known to reside in the gut, he said.

Participants also used a smartphone app, developed by the scientists, to log their bread intake in real-time.

Called the Personalized Nutrition Project, the app analyzes the microbiome to predict sugar responses to thousands of different foods. Originally developed for the teams previous 2012 study, the app was licensed and is now marketed by DayTwo.

The study raised questions that Segal, Elinav, and their colleagues are exploring now. Which genetic mechanisms drive differences between people? What biological mechanisms in the microbiome drive differences between people?

If one-size-fits-all diets do not work, Segal said, how can we better personalize diets? We are currently conducting research to answer some of these questions.

We need more research to establish precisely how the microbiome affects how people respond to food. But, we envision a future where each of us would have their microbiome profiled, and then receive personal nutrition advice based on it.

See original here:
White or Whole Wheat Bread Study May Shed Light on Diet Failure - Healthline

L

OS ANGELES He knows he sounds like a snake-oil salesman.

Its not every day, after all, that a tenured professor at a prestigious university starts peddling a mail-order diet to melt away belly fat, rejuvenate worn-out cells, prevent diseases ranging from diabetes to cancer and, for good measure, turn back the clock on aging.

But biochemist Valter Longo is convinced that science is on his side.

Longo has spent decades studying aging in yeast cells and lab mice. He now believes hes developed a diet that may boost longevity by mimicking the effect of periodic fasting. So hes packed precise quantities of kale chips, quinoa soup, hibiscus tea, and other custom concoctions into boxes that go for $300 a pop.

Longos ProLon diet (it stands for pro-longevity, he says, and not Professor Longo) reflects a growing interest in episodic fasting, which has been touted by celebrities such as Jimmy Kimmel and Benedict Cumberbatch and in best-selling books like The Alternate-Day Diet. His approach stands out because he insists he can use certain combinations of nutrients to trick the body into thinking its fasting without actually being on apunishing, water-only diet.

Kale crackers and hibiscus tea: My five days on a fasting diet

Intrigued, STAT reviewed dozens of scientific studies and talked to a half-dozen aging and nutrition experts about fasting in general and ProLon in particular. We visited Longos lab at the University of Southern Californias Longevity Institute, where slender black and whiterodents pass their days in clear plastic boxes labeled DO NOT FEED. We even tried Longos diet for one long and rather hungry week.

Our conclusion? Fasting does appear to boost health certainly in mice, and preliminary evidence suggests itmight do so in humans as well, at least in the short term. Its not yet clear whether thats because abstaining from food prompts cellular changes that promote longevity, as some scientists believe or because it simply puts a brake on the abundant and ceaseless stream of calories we consume to the detriment of our health. Either way, it can be a powerful force.

Were not meant to eat three meals a day and snacks, said Mark Mattson, a pioneer in studying the effects of intermittent fasting on the brain who runs the neuroscience lab at the National Institute on Aging.

Does good food count as health care? New research aims to find out

Mice and rats on fasting regimes are slimmer, live longer, and stay smarter and physically stronger as they age. They resist tumors, inflammatory diseases, and the neurodegeneration that characterizes diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimers. They handily fight off infection and can even sprout new neurons. They dont end up with diabetes, autoimmune disease, high cholesterol or fatty livers.

Longo, who runs labs at both USC and at at the IFOM cancer institute in Milan, believes he knows why. Fasting, he and others argue, gives cells a break to rest, renew, rebuild themselves and, essentially, take out the trash as the body shifts from storing fat to burning it. They cant do that when the body is constantly ingesting food, stockpiling excess calories and pushing cells and organs to exhaustion.

The animal data is very striking, Mattson said. These arent trivial effects on health.

Of course, many exciting findings that hold true for lab mice dont translate to more complex human biology. Small, short-term studies in humans do show that periodic fasting reduces weight, abdominal fat, cholesterol, and blood glucose, as well as proteins like C-reactive protein and IGF-1 that are linked to inflammatory diseases and cancer.

But its not clear how long these effects last or whether they translate into any lasting clinical advantage such as fewer heart attacks or longer lifespan.

So some experts say there just isnt enough clinical data to prove the diet does everything Longo claims. These are only animal studies. There isnt a big body of evidence in humans, said Kristen Gradney, a dietician in Louisiana and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. It could work, but I cant confidently say that it will.

Were not meant to eat three meals a day and snacks.

Mark Mattson, National Institute on Aging

Yet even some scientists who fully understand the limitations of the data are sold.

Satchidananda Panda, a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., compared mice that were allowed to eat whenever they wanted to mice that only had access to food during a 10- to 12-hour period each day. The differences were profound. The mice that fasted intermittently had no gray fur and werent lethargic, even as they neared 2years of age, the average mouse life span.

The results were so striking, Panda and his family haveadopted the practice. He also undertakes a water-only fast for a week each year.

Once you see these animals, Panda said, its hard not to follow.

Mattson, too, eats all of his roughly 1,800 calories per day in a six-hour window in the late afternoon and early evening. He hasnt eaten breakfast in 40 years.

As for Longo, he uses his own diet every few months especially to lose weight after returning from stays in Italy. Otherwise, he often eats just two meals a day and is passionate about natural, healthy, and plant-based food.

As one of his senior researchers, Sebastian Brandhorst, put it: Valter always gives us crap when theres junk food in the lab.

Valter Longo was born to study aging.

Italian by birth, he spent summers in his familys ancestral home, a town called Molochio in southern Italy thats home to an unusually high percentage of centenarians. His father is 91. Exactly why the villagers live so long is a question thats always simmered in the back of Longos head.

Now 49, Longo originally came to the U.S. to be a rock star. He enrolled at the University of North Texas, which has an acclaimed jazz guitar program. But he soured on the program when he was forced to run a marching band and turned instead to biochemistry as a way to study aging.

Food fight erupts as top nutritionists gather to define healthy eating

He moved on to UCLA to pursue a Ph.D. with Dr. Roy Walford, who had become something of a celebrity scientist while pushing the idea that severely restricting caloric intake would extend life.

While he calls Walford a pioneer, Longo soon grew disenchanted with the extreme regimen he espoused. First, it was brutal to maintain. Then, there was what it did physically to Walford, who had been among a Biosphere 2 crew that restricted food intake dramatically during their stay in the experimental habitat. When they exited Biosphere, they looked liked hell, Longo said. Walford looked like a skeleton.

Walford, a colorful character known for walking across Africa and paying for med school by gaming roulette tables in Reno, Nev., had hoped to live to 120. But he died in 2004 at age 79 of ALS, a disease a number of researchers assert was exacerbated by, or even caused by, his severe diet.

At UCLA, Longo was growing frustrated with Walfords attempts to study longevity in humans, and even mice, without having adequate tools to drill down into the genetic mechanisms underlying aging.So Longo turned back to biochemistry.

He transferred to a genetics lab focused on yeast, figuring that would let him study the mechanisms of aging in the simplest of organisms.

If someone said, What are you working on? we would say oxidative chemistry. You couldnt say aging. That was viewed as a joke.

Valter Longo, University of Southern California

Few people took his early results seriously. Studying aging was still considered flaky. And many scientists at the time were deeply skeptical that you could learn much about human biology by studying simple yeast.

If someone said, What are you working on? we would say oxidative chemistry, Longo said. You couldnt say aging. That was viewed as a joke.

Convinced his work was important, Longo kept his head down and kept going. I didnt pay attention to what people were saying, he said. In just a year, Longo was able to work out a genetic pathway to describe aging in yeast and show that food proteins and sugars could speed aging. It was 1994.

I was so excited, I thought people were going to say, This is the discovery of the century, he recalled. Of course, it was sent back rejected.

He rewrote the paper and resubmitted. No luck. He couldnt get any of the work published without taking out every last reference to aging. The discovery he thought most important the aging pathway he published only in his UCLA thesis. We would get insults from reviewers. The yeast world was the worst. They thought it was crazy science, he said.

As years passed, other groups started publishing work detailing, as Longo had, specific aging pathways, first in worms and eventually in flies. The frustrating thing is, Longo said, we had all of these things figured out and no one was listening.

Frank Madeo, a yeast researcher at the University of Graz in Austria, had seen Longo being dismissed at conference after academic conference. Now, he said, the work is finally being embraced. Valter for sure is a fighter. He doesnt care what others think, Madeo said. He did something that at first was considered weird and he was attacked. Now, its the basis of work in so many labs.

The turning point, Longo said, came when an editor at Science recognized that his rejected paper was part of the new paradigm to understand the genetics of aging. The paper was published in 2001, seven years after hed first submitted it. It has since been cited hundreds of times.

Once he had the aging pathway worked out, Longo went on to look more deeply at what restricting calories did to yeast cells. He found withholding food completely reprogrammed the yeast cells lived longer and were resistant to threat after threat. You could throw in any toxin you could think of and it wouldnt die, he said.

Fasting is at the foundation of the bodys ability to protect, repair, and rejuvenate itself, he said. We started to wonder: What can we use it for?

Records found in dusty basement undermine decades of dietary advice

So he started experimenting with limiting rodents intake of the proteins and sugars that hed seen activate the aging pathways. (His lab cooks up a diet by hand for the animals; its also the inspiration for the the five-day diet he sells for humans.) His team has found that the diet shows promise in restoring pancreatic cells that keep diabetes in check, boosting immune cells, and helping prevent the deterioration of myelin, which plays a role in multiple sclerosis.

San Diego computational biologist Karmel Allison, who blogs at the diabetes lifestyle site ASweetLife, took a deep dive into Longos paper on pancreatic cells and found the data unconvincing. She thinks the improvements in mice could have simply come from their weight loss, not from any cellular change brought on by fasting.

Other scientists agree thats a key question for further study, in both mice and people. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this May startled some diet researchers by showing alternative day fasting was no better at decreasing cardiovascular health risk factors than normal dieting and was harder to maintain. (Longo maintains that the popular alternate day and 5:2 diets, where people eat up to 800 calories on their so-called fasting days, are not true fasting, just calorie reduction, and therefore dont cause the metabolic shifts and cellular improvements of his diet. He thinks at least three days of fasting are needed, though other researchers disagree.)

In humans, is intermittent fasting only effective for weight loss because were restricting calories? In my mind, thats the big question, said Grant Tinsley, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Texas Tech University who studies sports nutrition. Is this just about eating fewer calories or are there unique cellular changes?

In humans, is intermittent fasting only effective for weight loss because were restricting calories? In my mind, thats the big question.

Grant Tinsley, Texas Tech University

Tinsley himself practices intermittent fasting: He restricts himself to eating during a six- to nine-hour period each day or does a 24-hour fast once a week. He likes the idea of Longos diet. Yet hed still like more data. There really are no side-by-side comparisons of different fasting programs in humans, he said.

He knows firsthand, though, how hard it would be to conduct such a study. For one thing, its hard to get corporate funding for a study involving abstaining from food. For another, human beings are prone to cheat on diets. Obviously its not ethical to keep people in cages for a year and feed them what you want, he said.

Longo can, however, do that with mice. And he and his lab are excited about new studies showing that fasting seems to strengthen normal cells in rodents while making cancer cells more vulnerable. Longo thinks this means fasting may increase the potency of chemotherapy while reducing its side effects.

And, indeed, small clinical trials in humans have shown patients report less fatigue and fewer gastrointestinal symptoms while fasting during chemotherapy treatments. Longo now has clinical trials underway at several cancer centers worldwide to see if his diet improves outcomes as well.

Longo came up with the idea for the fasting mimicking diet about 10years ago. He was trying to test the effect of a water-only diet for cancer patients. But most patients refused to fast and oncologists were worried about their already thin patients participating.

So Longo decided to devise a diet with minimal calories that would provide the nutrition the patients needed, but also confer the benefits of fasting. His lab worked out the precise amounts and types of calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats by testing various diets on mice.

The cancer fasting diet amounts to just 200 to 500 calories a day for four days. The ProLon diet allows 1,100 calories the first day and 800 for the next four. (Longo recommends doing the diet under a doctors supervision and notes that its not appropriate for people with certain health conditions, such as diabetes.)

His diet is low in protein and fat; he gets furious when he sees doctors advocating the opposite, a trendy practice he believes speeds aging.

He gets really fired up when nutritionists call fasting a fad. Fasting is as old as it gets, he said, noting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely went long stretches between meals. If 70 percent of America is obese or overweight, you would think theyd have figured out their [more traditional] interventions dont work.

He said, I need to have something thats going to have almost no calories but still have taste.

Ambra DiTonno, cafe owner

To devise fasting diets that people would actually want to eat, Longo turned to Ambra Ditonno, a longtime friend who runs a popular Italian cafe in Hollywood.

The two worked together after hours in Ditonnos panini shop concocting extremely low-calorie soups some just 30 to 45 calories per serving out of pumpkin, beets, tomatoes, and broth. He said, I need to have something thats going to have almost no calories but still have taste. It was really hard, Ditonno said.

Its not typical work for a scientist, but was typical for the hands-on Longo, whos not married, has no children, and is used to working long hours (though hes prone to pulling out his guitar when asked, and also does a lot of bike riding).

He doesnt have any other interests. Hes married to his job, Ditonno said. And, she added, he had a natural flair for the work: Hes Italian, so he has some idea of cooking.

Theyd then freeze individual portions of the soups for delivery to cancer patients. (The soups are now manufactured in a facility and freeze-dried so they can be easily shipped and stored.) The diets include additional ingredients algal oil supplements, specific proteins, trendy additions like flax seed, inulin, glycerol, and cider vinegar that Longo believes act to improve health or trick the body into thinking it is fasting.

Deep dive into diets shows just how much processed food Americans eat

After cooking so many fasting soups, Ditonno tried the diet herself last year. She lost weight, got rid of the extra tummy fat shed carried since having a child and eased several digestive issues. The benefits have persisted long after that initial fasting period. Like many who work with Longo and have tried the diet, shes become a convert. I believe in it like 1,000 percent, Ditonno said.

The idea of a professor marketing his own longevity diet has raised eyebrows. Its a tricky spot to be in, said Allison Dostal, a registered dietitian and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She was part of a watchdog team that wrote a scathing review of a press release touting one of Longos studies that was put out by USC, which also stands to profit if the diet is a financial success. Its not something Ive generally seen.

The cost of ProLon has also raised questions, especially since theres no proof this particular combination of foods works better than any other ultra-low-calorie diet or episodic fast.

The diets OK, Mattson said. Im just thinking about the people who cant afford it. A lot of obese people are of low socioeconomic status. Thats the target population that could really benefit most.

Longo created a company, L-Nutra, to market the diet, and retains majority ownership. He intends to funnel any personal profits into a nonprofit to fund research. For now, not much money is rolling in, though he says about 5,000 people have used ProLon some paying customers, some research subjects. He hopes to one day receive FDA approval to market the diet as a tool to help prevent diabetes, but thats well in the future.

Panda, the Salk Institute researcher, calls Longos approach a smart business move.

The general public wants something encapsulated, they want a prescription, he said. Valters done a very smart thing. Hes encapsulated fasting.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the location of the University of Graz.

Usha Lee McFarling can be reached at ushalee.mcfarling@statnews.com Follow Usha Lee on Twitter @ushamcfarling

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He wants to sell you a $300 'fasting diet' to prolong your life. It might not be as crazy as it sounds - STAT

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Youth using Ramadan for crash diets, UAE doctors say The National "I have had cases where parents were complaining about their teenage children, around the age of 14, saying they do not eat any-thing, skip their breakfast and work out on an empty stomach hoping to shed weight," said Dr Juliot Vinolia, a clinical ... and more »

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Indiana egg farmer John Brunnquells 1.3 million hens dont live in cages. They also get to go outside, making his company, Egg Innovations, the nations largest free-rangeoperation in the industry.

It wasnt always so.Brunnquell, 54, grew up on a traditional chicken farm, and he says he could argue all the benefits of cages. That changed in the early 1990s, whenhis first glimpse of a cage-free barn convinced him that the freer systemwas better for the birds. He spent the next decade overhauling his own.

Along the way, he admits, things werent always better for his flocks. He had tofigure out how to prevent a barn full of newly mobile chickensfrom pecking, or cannibalizing, each other. He went through seven perching designs to find one that kept the birds from crowding on the floor. He also needed to find ways to lower the rate of a very common injury to laying hens: damage to thekeel bone, an extension of the sternum.

It was a steep learning curve on a pretty small scale. And it has made Brunnquell worry about the large-scale change now facing theU.S. egg industry, which is racing to meet the demand of hundreds ofcompanies that have pledged to switch to cage-free eggs by 2025.

The industry is going to adapt. It will go cage-free because the market says so, said Brunnquell, who sits on several industry boards. But we are going to be behind the curve for five to 10 years on how to manage those structures given the birds newfound freedom.

There are going to be some cases where management isnt up to par, he added, and we have fear of undercover videos showinghens that appear worse off despite their roomier quarters.

The cage-free revolution has been driven by consumers, many of whom thinkthe change is better for chickens (though many also may believe eggs from uncaged hens are better quality). Animal protectiongroups argue it definitely is: Birds that are not confined to small wire cages can at least spread their wings and engage in natural behaviors like dust-bathing and perching, even if they never see the light of day.

But egg producers and researchers cautionthat the switch is not as simple as just opening those cage doors and that mobility brings with it a new set of concerns for chickens welfare that most farmers have never confronted. A major 2015 studyof three different hen-housing systems found that mortality was highest among birds in cage-free aviaries and that they also had more keel bone problems.

Animal advocacy groups contend that the industry-backed study was flawed because the cage-free operations examined were run by farmers inexperienced with such systems.Michael Toscano, an American research scientist who leads the Center for the Proper Housing: Poultry and Rabbits at the University of Bern, said egg farms in Europe where cage-free operations are far more common show that the problems can be mitigated. But theres definitely going to be a very steep learning curve, he noted.

Professionally, I would say that in terms of welfare, cage-free systems are the best for the birds, Toscano said. But it needs to be done well.

One challenge is pecking, a behavior often described as a virus. Cages keep pecking contained,but it can rapidly spread throughout a flock of thousands of roaming hens, causing injuries and deaths to the birds, not to mention a loss of profits for producers. Reducing lighting can help stop it, as can distributing straw or offering pecking blocks. But farmers first need to know how to spot peckingand act quickly a skill those who have worked with caged hens dont necessarily have, Toscano said.

The big issue, however, is keel bone damage. Fractures and cracks are not fatal, and it is difficult to tell a chicken with damage from one without. But some research suggeststhat the injury reduces a hens egg production. And its almost certainly painful.

If I were to impose a similar level of damage on your arm, you wouldnt be working, said Toscano, who called keel bone damage the biggest problem for commercial laying hens in terms of animal welfare.

And its a larger problem in cage-free operations. Studies on caged birds suggest that about one-quarter to one-third will have keel bone damage, but the injury rate is upward of half of cage-free chickens, Toscano said. That isprobably because cage-free aviaries which provide nesting boxes, litter and food and water on different tiers contain lots of things for moving birds to smash into. Brunnquell, whose farms use a single-tier system, said most U.S. producers are likely to use aviaries because they can house more chickens.

Chickens arent good fliers, Toscano said. Theyre going to have collisions with other birds, support beams, drinking lines.

Theres no clear fixfor this yet. Farmers can help hens by providing ramps for them to get up and down tiers, but for that strategy to work they also need to raise chicks with ramps so they know how to use them,Toscano said. Solutions also might involve diets that include more calcium to strengthen chickens bones or genetic approaches to breed birds better suited to the environment, he said.

Keel bone damageis a major concern of U.S. egg producers who are staring into a cage-free future,said Sally Rockey, executive director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit organization created and funded by the government. It recently teamed up with the Open Philanthropy Project, which gives money to causes deemed underfunded, to offer $1 millionin grants for research on reducing keel bone fractures in cage-free laying hens.

The foundations main interest in the topic is chicken productivity, Rockey said.Having an effective production system for animals includes making sure theyre healthy and treated in such a way that you get a good product,she said.

For the Open Philanthropy Project, the motivation ischicken well-being.We wantto make sure that the systems that replace those cages are as good as possible and are as pro-welfare as possible,said Lewis Bollard, the organizations farm animal welfare program director. This is a new challenge created by the increased behavioral opportunities.

Toscano stressed that research is only one part, though. Training for farmers is crucial, he said, and he hopes the food service and retail companies that have made cage-free pledges offer it.

Its not just ripping out the cages and dropping in an aviary and everything goes according to plan, hesaid. Myconcern is that youre going to get this massive change, which in 20 years is probably going to be where we want it to be. But in the interim period, youre going to have a lot of difficulties.

Read more:

How eggs became a victory for the animal welfare movement

New techniques may prevent the gruesome deaths of billions of male chicks

Fresh eggs and Neosporin? The joys and challenges of raising backyard chickens

Bear breaks into house, plays the piano but not very well

Two lions survived a circus, only to be killed and mutilated in a sanctuary

Original post:
Many people think a cage-free life is better for hens. It's not that simple. - Washington Post

WASHINGTON D.C: In a process to lose weight early, one size approach may not fit everybody, as a study has found that selecting a right diet based on person's blood sugar and fasting insulin levels is important to achieve six to seven-fold greater weight loss.

Fasting blood sugar is a test performed after a person has fasted for at least eight hours.

The research shows that weight loss strategies should be customised based on an individual's biomarkers -- a naturally occurring molecule, gene -- which is a big step forward in using personalised nutrition to help people achieve greater weight loss success. These biomarkers were repeatedly proven as predictors of weight loss and maintenance success.

The specific diets that will work differ based on whether a patient has normal blood sugar, has prediabetes or is living with diabetes. Arne Astrup from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark said that for many patients, use of these biomarkers can lead to a six to seven-fold greater weight loss.

Astrup added that researchers can educate patients when a diet they planned to follow would actually make them gain weight, and redirect them to a strategy that works for them.

The studies demonstrate that, for successful weight loss, fasting blood sugar and fasting insulin should be used to select an approach that is proven to work based on those biomarkers.

For most people with prediabetes, a fiber-rich diet without calorie restriction will be very effective and has been shown to improve diabetes markers.

In this population, carbohydrates or fats should be adjusted based on fasting insulin levels.

For people with type 2 diabetes, a diet rich in healthy, plant-based fats (such as from olive oil, nuts and avocados) will be effective to achieve weight loss.

The researchers acknowledge that no one solution works for every patient.

The University of Copenhagen will continue to participate in and support research to explore additional biomarkers such as gut microbiota and genomics approaches, which may offer more insights and help to better predict success with specific diets.

The data were presented at the American Diabetes Association 77th Scientific Sessions.

Visit link:
Diet-plan based on your blood sugar will help you lose six to seven-folds of weight - Economic Times

Only in an era of abundance could an industrya particular mindset, reallychurn out innumerable fad diets promising to be the silver bullet that will finally (finally!) offer perfect health, weight loss, and inner radiance.

At the moment the top sellers in diet and nutrition on Amazon promise you total health and food freedom, warn against hidden dangers in healthy foods, guarantee fast metabolism, and declare a revolutionary diet that, among other things, helps you combat cancer. Thats a tall order for something that, for most of human history, was so scarce and difficult to procure that securing enough to eat was itself considered a blessing.

This is not your ancestors diet. Yet it appears that we can turn to our forebears for an important piece of nutritive advice: fasting. In one of the most in-depth pieces Ive come across on this topic, it seems intermittent fasting is helping many deal with metabolic and immune functions.

Lest you think this a sales pitchIve found the silver bullet!lets start at the conclusion. University of Illinois nutrition professor Krista Varady studies alternate-day fasting for a living. She readily offers up the fact that intermittent fastingtaking varied breaks from eating, either on a daily schedule or on alternate daysis probably another nutritional fad.

She has observed that every decade or so fads switch and rearrange. To declare fasting to be an end-all is ambitious; human psychology is generally not designed for the long-term. Novelty usurps integrity and discipline. That said, Varady concludes of fasting,

I still think that it can really help people out, and I think people who are able to stick to it really reap a lot of metabolic benefits.

The article opens with a 1973 case of a man who survived for 382 days ingesting only vitamin supplements, yeast, and noncaloric fluids, in what has to be a hero to the Soylent movement. A.B., as he's known, dropped 276 pounds. More importantly he gained back only fifteen over the next five yearsone criticism of most diets is that the weight returns.

This is an extreme example, enough to garner a place in the Guinness Book of Records. What A.B. was doing, however, is an old trick once performed, albeit not so extremely, out of necessity. It wasnt until widespread advancements in agriculture at about 10,000 BChumans had been growing and harvesting for tens of thousands of years priorallowed our ancestors to settle down and treat themselves to relatively consistent nutrition. Our dietary habits changed dramatically.

The synopsis: our ancestors were accustomed to intermittent fasting. They might not have liked it, but their organs adapted, just as ours adapt to an overabundance of sugar- and carb-heavy foods by failing to work properly. Neuroscientist Mark Mattson relates our odd food rhythms to another cycle weve completely restructured. Thanks to electric lights our circadian rhythm is thrown off, which affects when and how we eat. He states,

When there was darkness in the evening, of course people didnt have much to do. . . . The light enables us to stay awake later in the night. And now we have plenty of food, so we tend to eat.

I practice intermittent fasting at various cycles. I found the 16:8 cyclefast for sixteen hours, eat all of my days food during eight hourschallenging, as I teach (fitness and yoga classes) in the mornings and evenings and often work out before my first class. Interestingly, research, on mice at least, is showing that changing the feeding windows from 16:8, 15:9, or 12:12 didnt make that much of a difference. That said, a fifteen-hour feeding window didnt seem to have much benefit at all.

What are the benefits? Besides a metabolic boost and weight loss, here is what the science says:

For a deep dive into the studies read the full article on The Scientist. Of all the fads to take root in recent memory, this technique appears consistently reliable. Forget about your blood type. In fact, forget about all food for prolonged periods during the day. Then enjoy the window youve chosen to eat within.

--

Derek's next book,Whole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health, will be published on 7/17 by Carrel/Skyhorse Publishing. He is based in Los Angeles. Stay in touch onFacebookandTwitter.

Link:
Is Fasting the Key to a Healthy Diet? - Big Think

Washington D.C. [USA], June 12 : In a process to lose weight early, one size approach may not fit everybody, as a study has found that selecting a right diet based on person's blood sugar and fasting insulin levels is important to achieve six to seven-fold greater weight loss.

Fasting blood sugar is a test performed after a person has fasted for at least eight hours.

The research shows that weight loss strategies should be customised based on an individual's biomarkers - a naturally occurring molecule, gene - which is a big step forward in using personalised nutrition to help people achieve greater weight loss success.

These biomarkers were repeatedly proven as predictors of weight loss and maintenance success.

The specific diets that will work differ based on whether a patient has normal blood sugar, has prediabetes or is living with diabetes.

Arne Astrup from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark said that for many patients, use of these biomarkers can lead to a six to seven-fold greater weight loss.

Astrup added that researchers can educate patients when a diet they planned to follow would actually make them gain weight, and redirect them to a strategy that works for them.

The studies demonstrate that, for successful weight loss, fasting blood sugar and fasting insulin should be used to select an approach that is proven to work based on those biomarkers.

For most people with prediabetes, a fiber-rich diet without calorie restriction will be very effective and has been shown to improve diabetes markers.

In this population, carbohydrates or fats should be adjusted based on fasting insulin levels.

For people with type 2 diabetes, a diet rich in healthy, plant-based fats (such as from olive oil, nuts and avocados) will be effective to achieve weight loss.

The researchers acknowledge that no one solution works for every patient.

The University of Copenhagen will continue to participate in and support research to explore additional biomarkers such as gut microbiota and genomics approaches, which may offer more insights and help to better predict success with specific diets.

The data were presented at the American Diabetes Association 77th Scientific Sessions.

Follow this link:
Here's how you can lose six to seven-folds of weight - Outlook India

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