What Are Eating Disorders?

The Minnesota Experiment by Ancel Keyes

The one thing we can count on our dieting to give us, is a complicated relationship with food. This, too, is proven by science. Most notably in a study done in the 1940’s on a bunch of healthy men. They were put on a calorie restricted diet, and the scientists soon started observing weird behavior in the men. They got depressed and irritable, started hiding food and binge eating. They lost their sex drive and their sense of humor. Some of them even went psychotic. All from living on around 1500 calories a day.

Scary isn’t it, when we think about how many of us, particularly women, live like this every day and have been since an early age?

Why is it, when we have such overwhelming evidence that diets are futile and destructive, that we still continue to blame ourselves? That we are still hell-bent on trying again and again, hoping for a different result this time.

A movement toward acceptance of body size and a more realistic view of individual differences in body shapes is emerging in the U.S. Acceptance may be the most effective measures that can be taken to prevent many eating disorders.

Besides the more well-known disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder, there are many other eating disorders.

Some examples:

Anorexia athletica /female athlete triad: engaging in compulsive exercise to lose weight or maintain a very low body weight. Common in athletes.

Body dysmorphic disorder/bigorexia (muscle dysmorphia): An obsession with a perceived defect in the sufferer’s body or appearance. Affects males and females equally but can be prevalent in bodybuilders and gym-goers.

Pica: Craving and eating nonfood items such as dirt, clay, paint chips, chalk, laundry starch, coffee grounds, and ashes. More common in pregnant women and children of a certain ethnicity.

Please link to Louise Stigell (below) to read a provocative account of her dieting experiences.

Louise Stigell

Dec 6 · 11 min read

How To Cook?

We are becoming a nation of microwave cooks. Just pop a fully cooked meal into the microwave and we can have dinner in just 5 minutes. But wait – the finished product often does not resemble the picture on the box and/or the taste resembles the dinner you had last night – only the pasta shape has changed. Sometimes I think they use the same sauce of some kind and just alter the name of the dish slightly.

Now days it is a well known fact that the family is busier with jobs and activities outside the house and the term “housewife” has actually disappeared into oblivion. Home economics is not taught in schools as it was a few decades ago, and convenience reigns as the most important marketing ploy when it comes to food preparation. Our kids have no idea where the food comes from unless it comes in a box or wrapped in plastic. We know the Nutrition Facts (calories, etc) but the list of ingredients takes up more room than it should and reads like a foreign language.

The following article presents some easy creative ideas that may help make a cooking experience easier and more appealing and even flavorful. Try them – you may become your own gourmet chef without much effort. Just in time for Christmas Dinner?

CLICK HERE.

Nutrition Myths

It is time to put to rest some nutrition misinformation that has dominated the media for a number of years now. Here is the nonsense and the sense of some of the most prevalent myths – it’s time to move away from them.

Gluten -Free Foods are Healthier. Unless you are truly sensitive to gluten or have been diagnosed with celiac disease, you may miss out on some healthy whole grains if you choose gluten-free foods.

You only need to limit salt intake if you have high blood pressure. 90% of us will develop high blood pressure and some of us are sodium sensitive. We get plenty of sodium in processed foods and should try to limit our total intake to no more than 2,300 milligrams a day.

Sugar is toxic. There is no evidence that shows that sugar causes disease on its own. However, a high sugar intake can replace the healthier habits of learning that carbohydrate intake can be healthier if we consume more complex carbs (fruits, whole grains, vegetables) and less highly refined carbs (sugary drinks and foods with added sugars).

Fresh Produce is healthier than canned or frozen. Foods which are picked fresh and immediately canned or frozen may even have more nutrients than fresh produce. In fact, your body more easily absorbs nutrients like lycopene when they’ve gone through the canning process.

The term “natural” means healthier. The term natural on a food label has no FDA defintion, so it has no meaning in terms of health or that it is “organic.”

Farm-raised fish isn’t healthy. Today’s farm-raised fish has just as much and maybe more healthier omega-3 fats than wild-caught. Also farm-raised fish may have less mercury. They are now more sustainable and when from reputable farms can be raised with fewer antibiotics and no added coloration.

Margarine is loaded with unhealthy trans fats. This depends on whether the margarine is in stick form or tub form. A better choice is the softer tub margarine that is less hydrogenated and thus has less trans fat than the more saturated and trans fat content found in the stick form.

Source: Environmental Nutrition.

For more myths:

CLICK HERE.

Eat Like the French?

Eat Like the French?

To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

French writer and moralist

To say the French know their food is an understatement. Even their children are aware of the gourmand cuisine – they have two-hour multi course lunches in schools and the presentation and preparation of the food becomes a normal part of their education.

A lot of attention was paid to the French way of eating due to what became known as the “French Paradox”. Consider these facts:

The French diet is high in saturated fat compared to the American diet. The good cholesterol (HDL) and high blood pressure rates are about the same as they are in North America; however, the total serum cholesterol levels are higher in the French population. Their smoking rates are relatively high which is a risk factor for heart disease.

So, all things considered, the French should have a lot more heart attacks than the U.S. population with our obsession with cholesterol and smoking cessation efforts. But quite the opposite is true. Compared with North Americans, the French are far less likely to die of heart disease with reports of death rates that are among the lowest in the world – second only to Japan. Also their rates of colon and prostate cancers are roughly 30 and 60 percent lower, respectively, than those in the U.S. That’s the paradox!!

Another part of the puzzle is that the French are leaner. In 2010, their obesity rate was 17% whereas in America in 2015 it is close to 39.8% and counting. The French are reported to live longer on average – French men by about a year and French women by two and one-half years. Is it genetics? Probably not much – when the French move to Montreal and begin to consume a more Western diet, they get “fatter” and their heart disease rates begin to resemble that of North America.

The Traditional French Diet At A Glance: Surprisingly Simple in Form with no tricks or gimmicks

Moderate drinking – one to two drink a day defined.
Lots of fruits and vegetables (35 to 38 percent of total calories) or on average four or more servings of vegetables a day.
No snacking or dieting – this is astounding! Compare to the typical American with our vast snack aisles in the supermarket and our obsession with diets (fad and otherwise).

Source: 30 Secrets of the World’s Healthiest Cuisines, Steven Jonas, MD and Sandra Gordon

How do they stay so slender?

Their food is nutrient dense. They emphasize quality over quantity.

Eating is mindful at each meal. They pay close attention to the type of foods they eat.

They don’t eat in a hurry or when stressed or in front of the TV.

They see food as a ritual with accompanying wine, family or friends, laughter and reverence of the food quality.

They enjoy market trips and understand where their food comes from. They favor seasonal, local foods.

“Sinfully delicious” is a ridiculous oxymoron in French culture. They eat without guilt.

They adhere to traditional dietary guidelines and eat a wide variety of foods. The children eat what is given them. Most French parents would never give their children the option of a hot dog instead of eating “grownup foods.”

The French don’t count pounds or calories or step on the scale each morning. Instead they are mindful of how their clothes fit – using the “zipper syndrome” or a tape measure. When clothes feel tight – they will simply cut back on high caloric dense foods or have a lighter dinner.

They are aware that yo-yo and crash dieting ruins their metabolism since the body senses a period of starvation and then burns calories more slowly to conserve energy.

They don’t eat “fake” foods – they stick to butter instead of using canola oil sprays, e.g.

They appreciate the art of cooking (remember Julia Child?)

We think we know a lot about nutrition science, but we may sadly be kidding ourselves. We can learn a lot from other cultures and their traditional ways as exemplified by the French experience and the following known the Roseto Effect.

“A remarkable discovery by physician Stewart Wolf found a strikingly low incidence of heart disease and deaths from heart attacks, spanning three generations, in a small Italian immigrant community in Roseto, Pennsylvania and was reported in the early 1990s.

It was a astonishing discovery that it wasn’t their diet that was protecting their heart health. To the contrary, Rosetons embraced westernized foods and cooking, at the expense of their Italian-Mediterranean culinary roots. For example, they:

Shunned olive oil, and used lard instead, as the main fat for cooking.
Dipped their bread in a lard-based gravy, rather than olive oil.
Ate an Italian ham, including its one-inch rim of fat.
The average Roseton diet was high in fat, containing 41% of calories from fat.

The distinguishing protector of their heart health and longevity was found to be social cohesion and social support.

—once again as with the French, effect of positive emotional experiences can have a greater impact on health than which foods people actually eat.”

Source: Evelyn Tribole, M.S., R.D. and Elyse Resch, M.S., R.D., F.A.D.A., C.E.D.R.D. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works. Page 201.

My opinion: We find this same phenomenon in the study of the Blue Zones cultures where lifestyle patterns appear to affect the longevity and health of these populations. We need to rethink how we diet and learn to maintain our weight losses. From my experiences, it may be prudent to begin to seriously investigate the role that mindfulness and intuitive eating has on our food intake and body weight maintenance.

How Did We Get From There to Here?

A DIET HISTORY TIMELINE

1825 A French lawyer named Brillant-Savarin said in a publication entitled The Physiology of Taste: “More or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury” is a cure for obesity.

1830 Sugar consumption, mainly as molasses) had increased in the U.S. to 15 pounds per capita.

1863 William Banting lost 65 pounds on a high fat, carbohydrate restricted diet and subsequently published, Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. He based his success on the advice of his physician, Dr. William Harvey.

1900 Lillian Russell, a stage actress and singer born in 1861. was repeatedly mentioned known as one of the most beautiful women on the American stage.” At the peak of her fame, Russel weighed approximately 200 pounds and was celebrated for her curvaceous figure. She was described ” a particularly robust and healthy creature, who takes good care to remain so.” By today’s standards, her weight would be classified as “obese”.

1911 Proctor and Gamble introduced Crisco – a highly hydrogenated vegetable fat and cheap alternative to lard – the primary cooking fat at the time. The advantage to the manufacturer and the cook was a longer shelf life but provided a multitude of hundreds of pounds of unhealthy trans fatty acids. Now trans fats are banned.

1913 The twenty-seventh President of the United States, William Howard Taft reportedly was stuck in the White House bathtub due to his massive girth.

1918 Lulu Hunt Peters, an American doctor wrote the first known diet book, Diet and Health with a Key to the Calories. It was a best seller with over 2 million copies sold. She was the first to mention that cutting calories was an effective weight-watching tool. Her success was more than likely prompted by the new body image of women as being slender, or “thin was in”.

1920 Sugar consumption reaches 100 pounds per capita in the U.S.1930 Margarine consumption reaches 2.6 pounds per capita.

1934 A blood test for cholesterol was developed.

1937 – The Debate Begins (aka What’s going on here?) Columbia University biochemists David Rittenberg & Rudolph Schoenheimer demonstrated that dietary cholesterol had little or no influence on blood cholesterol. This scientific fact has never been refuted.

“Cholesterol in food has no affect on cholesterol in blood and we’ve known that all along.” These are the words of Professor Ancel Keys, American Heart Association board member and author of The Seven Countries Study who, in retirement, recanted the idea that dietary cholesterol raises blood levels. His recant has been greeted with silence. Keys studied 22 countries, but chose data from only seven. He also excluded France with high fat and low rates of heart disease. Due to this, his observational study was considered to be flawed.

1950 – 1955 Dietary emphasis on fats and cholesterol in the diet became a hot topic based on Ancel Key’s flawed study.

1955 – President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack. His twice-daily press conferences focused on his cholesterol levels and he was put on a low fat diet by his physician, Dr. Paul Dudley White. Dietary fat also became the villain for weight gain.

1957 Margarine outsold butter for the first time – more trans fat and an increase in omega-6 fats shown to be inflammatory to the body tissues.

1961 Let the Diet Books Begin. Calories Don’t Count was published by Dr. Herman Taller. The low-calorie diet is a humbug, he declared. He was also a dieter whose weight ballooned up to 265 lb. on a 5-ft. 10-in. frame. Taller recommended a high-fat diet supplemented by polyunsaturated safflower oil capsules high in omega-6 linoleic acid. Back in the 1960’s vegetable fats were new and everyone wanted them to be a new health food. This has not been supported in the last 50 years of research. The American Heart Association adopted the well-known low-fat diet that began an era of fat maligning and the glorification of low fat foods. Dieters began to count fat grams daily. However, during our national experiment with a low-fat diet, people continued to pile on the pounds every decade.

1978 High fructose corn syrup enters the sweetener market. By 1985, 50 percent of the this sweetener was consumed in America.

1980 -1990 Obesity levels had remained between 12-14 percent from 1960 to 1980. After 1980 and then again in 1990, obesity grew dramatically until today when every state has obesity rates over 25 percent. Type 2 diabetes is now reported to have a 1 in 3 lifetime risk.

1992 The Food Guide Pyramid was introduced, recommending 6-11 servings of breads, cereals, rice, or pasta a day without mentioning whole grain options.

2000 Soybean oil has 70 percent of the edible fat market in the U.S. Lard consumption is less than 1 pound. Sugar cons0umption in the U.S. 150 pounds per capita. Butter consumption is less than 4 pounds per capita

2004 After 50 years of Egg-beaters, low fat cheese, margarine, skinless chicken breasts, and highly processed soy and canola oils, two Food Guide Pyramids and 11 releases of the USDA Dietary Guidelines, one third of Americans are obese; 25 percent are diabetic or pre-diabetic.

2008 Sugar consumption is now 160 pounds per capita. Compare that to the 15 pounds per capita in 1830.

2011 No More Pyramids A simplified MyPlate is introduced as the latest attempt at Food Guides. My Plate recommended 30% of the plate as grains, 30% vegetables, 20% fruit and 20% protein. A small circle represents dairy.

2015-16 The 2015 Dietary Guidelines were presented with little changes based on the latest research. Here is what they said and what they should have said.This is a big change For the first time, our national health authorities are urging Americans to limit sugar to no more than 10% of daily calories. In a 2,000-calorie diet, 10% is 200 calories—the equivalent of about 12½ teaspoons of sugar. Yet we average 20 teaspoons a day. Based on scientific evidence that’s been accumulating for decades, dietary cholesterol (as opposed to blood cholesterol) just isn’t any concern anymore. For the first time, there is no limit on total fat. However, the advice to limit saturated fat is still in there—even though the evidence that saturated fat leads to heart disease has turned out to be pretty weak. An original report associated with the new guidelines called for cutting back on red meat, especially processed meat, but the final official guidelines due to the lobbying of the meat industry wanted its message weakened.

2010-2020 The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a landmark report that has turned current fat recommendations upside down. The verdict from the study is that “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk for heart disease. ’Over the same period, the use of drugs to treat high blood pressure and high cholesterol increased quite a bit. Meat consumption has been declining for the past few decades..

In the last decade the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes has increased by almost a percentage point. Over the same period, obesity has increased by three percentage points. If that trend continues, heart disease rates may again rise. Unless we have been infected by a yet to be discovered obesity virus, we have a national eating disorder that needs to be fixed.

MY OPINION

Big food has made quite a mess of our food supply. Is saturated fat the culprit it was made out to be? Can excess refined vegetable oils, sugar or fructose be blamed?

Will our food culture ever be able to return to a diet of whole, real foods to replace the refined, processed, chemical-laden foods forced upon us by the food industry? The debate continues and we will see what trends are coming with the advent of the new Dietary Guidelines due in 2020. We should also hope that these guidelines are not encumbered by the influences of the food industry – but don’t count on it.

You Have Lost the Weight: Now What?

Weight loss may be achieved by using any method that people can live with preferably with the least calorie restriction possible. People who follow a weight loss regimen that restricts either fats or carbohydrates may lose the weight, but they tend to gain it back after they abandon the diet itself. In other words, people refer to “going on a diet” will often declare “going off a diet”. The hard part is keep the weight off or avoid binge-eating and possible weight gain that often results in what is commonly called “yo-yo dieting.” Why do so many people end up dieting and dieting and losing the same pounds over and over? The hard part of weight maintenance needs to be part of the treatment.

One way that has some science backing is the practice of mindful eating. The following describes this approach and may be the go- to method for weight maintenance.

CLICK HERE.

Living in Our Diet Culture

Lately I have begun to read the experiences of primarily women who have lived the diet culture. Most of their accounts are heart-breaking and present to other young women a glimpse into the world of weight loss. Many never recover and their dieting habits continue throughout life.

This particular account caught my attention since she is only 22 years old and already understands and seems to have realized the dieting activities all too well. I thank her for her input.

Just in case you’re a little rusty in metrics, In the article, she states at age 13 her weight and height as 70 kg (154 lbs) and her height in cm. as 1.67 cm (around 5’5″). This weight/height results in a Body Mass Index of 25.6 (just at the cutoff for the normal weight category but hardly overweight (in the article she states a few pounds overweight)

The article makes some excellent points:

Women have a tough time meeting the standards of body image in our society and often find it nearly impossible- we are always about 5 pounds overweight or 5 pounds underweight, never perfect and either judged by others or ourselves.

Many dieters self-report binge-eating which is common among people who attempt to follow a restrictive diet and also may suggest incidences of a sort of food addiction syndrome. There is an established binge-eating disorder characterized by the following:

Rapid consumption of extremely large amounts of food (several thousand calories) in a short period of time.
Two or more such episodes of binge-eating per week over a period of six months.
Eating in secret.
Lack of control over eating or an inability to stop eating during a binge.
Post-binge-eating feelings of self-hatred, guilt, depression or disgust.
Eating until uncomfortably full.

It is estimated that 10-15% of people enrolled in commercial weight-loss programs suffer from this disorder.

CLICK HERE.

The Mediterranean Diet? Olive Oil and Longevity

The Mediterranean Diet has gained fame and much has been written about it since its debut circa 1960. Actually, there is no one Mediterranean diet, the diets of southern France, Italy, Spain, and Greece share several characteristics that make this healthy diet what it is today.

What makes this diet so important for our health? Disease statistics and incidence rates show that countries eating the Mediterranean way for centuries have traditionally been on the good side. These countries have reported statistics that have significantly lower death rates from cardiovascular disease than does the United States. Each of these countries also shows only a fraction of the U.S. rates for breast, prostate, lung and colon cancers. Furthermore, on average, the people of the Mediterranean live about a year longer than U.S. citizens.

What is this diet all about?

CLICK HERE.

Blue Zones in America?

Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones and The Blue Zones Solution has revealed that the world’s longest living people have lived lifestyles over the past 100 years that help them and others lead healthier and more fulfilling lives.

One of these lifestyles includes their diets. Buettner’s teams have helped thousands of people lose weight and reverse disease by changing the way they live, eat, and connect with each other. Ultimately, these changes can transform your health and help you live longer.

The basis of this diet at a glance:

Rich in “healthy” fats including olive oil and omega-3 fatty acids.
Vegetables abound; meat is minor.
Loads of beneficial herbs.
Moderate drinking.
Practice of a slower pace of life with a strong social connection.

FYI: There is a new book by Dan Buettner called The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 recipes to live to 100. The information is priceless and the photographs are stunning (provided by David McLain and National Geographic).

CLICK HERE.

Vegans: Nutrients Needed Beyond B12 and Vitamin D

The debate will continue as to whether vegan diets can furnish all the nutrients we need. The following article discusses seven of them not abundantly found in plants and in some cases not found at all or not well-absorbed. Vegan diets and/or vegetarian diets can be healthy, but if you are considering veganism in any form, please become fully informed on some of the lesser known issues that need to be addressed.

CLICK HERE.