AMERICA'S MOST DANGEROUS EXPORT

What do you think is America’s most dangerous export? Is it nuclear technology? Is it weapons? Well, the answer is fast food! Yes fast food is America’s deadliest export in terms of the number of lives it threatens all across the globe. Obesity, especially among children is on the rise anywhere American fast food has penetrated. In Britain, for example, the number of fast food restaurants doubled between 1984 and 1993 and so did obesity among adults. The British eat the most fast food of any western European nation and have the highest obesity rate in the region. In Japan where obesity was unheard of before 1970 the obesity rates have climbed steadily since the introduction of fast food in 1971. In the 80’s the sale of fast food in Japan doubled and so did the obesity rates. India and China suffer the same fate now. Before the 90’s where people ate mostly whole wheat, rice, vegetables and unprocessed meat, they now eat, thanks to fast food, increasing amounts of processed flour, additive laden meats, sugary drinks and hardly any vegetables. This is true mostly of the younger generation in the metropolitan cities that love eating at a McDonalds or a Pizza hut. The result: a steady increase in the obesity rates, especially among children. According to a recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, China has about 92 million (5% of overall population) people with type II diabetes and India has about 51 million (7% of the overall population). Compare that to America which has about 27 million people with type II diabetes (12%). In fact it’s predicted that India and China will soon overtake the west in obesity and type II diabetes rates (in terms of overall percentages). So watch out for the big epidemic of heart disease in these regions by the time we reach our retirement age.

So why is fast food so bad? Simple! Like any other business, the fast food industry is motivated by profit. In order to make a healthy (pun intended) margin they need to use the cheapest ingredients that can last a long time without going bad. The end result is preservative laden fries (instead of freshly cut potatoes), refined flour (instead of whole flour), Margarine (instead of butter) and corn syrup (instead of plain sugar). The result is that the company’s bottom line gets fatter and so does your bottom (no pun intended).

CAN PROTEIN POWDER MAKE YOU FAT?

I have been asked this question several times. First protien and carb only have 4 cals/gram as opposed to 9 cals/gram in fat. So gram for gram protien and carbs have less calories than fat. But there is more to just the numbers. Carbs (esp. the high GI ones) are easy to convert to glucose and then later on (if unused) into stored fat where as protien is hard to convert to glucose and hence has difficulty converting into stored fat. Moreover protien (and good fat) hinder the assimilation of carbs and lower the combined GI of a meal, so it helps keep you full longer. So protein combined with a meal will actually slowdown the process of fat conversion after the meal. So the short answer is, no! Protein powder cannot make you fat, even if you don't exercise, unless it has added sugar. Health food stores sell weight gain protein powders that have protein mixed in with sugars, like maltodextrin and dextrose (pure glucose) and it is these types that will make you gain weight but then its due to the added sugar. Make sure you take a powder with sucralose or some other sweetner. And last but not the least there is always a possibility of overdoing a good thing. So use your own judgement.

Health tip:

I use protien powder mixed with milk, some strawberries, a teaspoon of almond butter and blend it to make a rich strawberry milk shake. It has high quality protien, low GI carbs from strawberries and heart healthy fat from almonds for a complete balanced meal replacement.

SHAPE-UPS: THE REVOLUTIONARY WALKING SHOES!

Just read on MSN about shape-up shoes, so I thought I’ll give my 2 cents on this. These funky looking shoes turn us into human rocking chairs and claim to give us sexy legs and butt and a strong core. Walking in them almost sounds like a new workout with its own warm-up and stretching routine (since when did we have to warm up and stretch before walking). Check them out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71cvCXp8_Tk&feature=player_embedded#!

First of all, realize that the models shown in the commercial or any other fitness commercial don’t get those bodies by solely using the product they are promoting. They get those bodies by following a diet plan and by sweating it out in the gym, period. So then the question is, will you get a body like this walking at the mall, wearing these shoes? I thought I already answered it!

These shoes claim to work your calves, legs, butt and core muscles to give you a better tone and additional calorie burn. First of all to effectively work any muscle you have to work it through the full range of motion (ROM) in order to stimulate the muscle fibers into getting stronger or burning any significant amount of calories. The amount of resistance against which the muscle is working also determines how many calories are spent. So walking at a speed of 3 miles/ hour with a body weight of 150lbs will burn about 270 calories/hour. Running at 6 miles/hour which works about the same ROM will burn about twice that much per hour because you push harder against the ground for the added speed. So looking at the women walking with these shoes it doesn’t seem like there is any increase in the ROM (or resistance) anywhere except perhaps the calves due to the rounded sole. As far as working the core trying to balance, all I can say is no one can ever lose any significant weight by doing crunches which directly hit the core. So while I wouldn’t deny that these shoes would burn some additional calories walking in them, the incremental gain (in calorie burn) wouldn’t be more than 5%.This translates to 15 additional calories for an hour of walking. Now is that enough to justify the $100+ tag on these shoes? I think you are better off walking 5 additional minutes or better even use that money to get a membership to a real gym, because when it comes to building sexy toned legs and butt, these shoes don’t hold a candle to good old fashioned squats and lunges.

P.S. if you have any low-back problems or knee pain I would suggest caution or even a physician’s advice before shelling out the green to get a pair of these.

FAILURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF TRAINING

If you never failed a rep in the gym and if you always ran the distance you said you will and if you always meet your goals in training, then how do you know you have pushed yourself to the limit? How do you know you are achieving the best that you are capable of? Do you get anxious before your workouts? Do you get nervous and sweaty palmed before your workout? If not, then I think you aren’t pushing yourself to the best of your ability. Try pushing yourself to the point of failure and that’s the only way you will know your potential. Don’t let your workouts become perfunctory just so you can get it over with. Keep challenging yourself and keep innovating in your daily workouts and that’s the only way you will endure and persevere in the long run. Don’t be afraid to fail because only then you will truly be your best or as someone put it:

“If you are afraid of being weak you will never truly be strong.”

And remember this applies to all walks of life!

THE OBSESSION WITH LOW FAT DIETS

Every now and then I hear people promoting low-fat diets, assuming that a low fat diet is naturally healthy. If fat in the body makes a person fat then it must be coming from the diet, right? It’s this simple logic that has spiraled much of the developed world into an epidemic of obesity in spite of the steady decline in overall fat consumption in our diets, thanks to the popular media and the high-carb advocates. But this couldn’t be farther from truth. The reason being that it is not the excess fat but the excess carbohydrates in our diets that gets converted to fat and stored in the adipose tissue. I have talked about the fat storage mechanism in my previous articles so I am not going to get into the details of it but I would like to reiterate that a healthy balanced diet must have ample quantities of mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) and omega-3 fatty acids.

Let’s look at why this low fat thinking won’t make people any slimmer. Take for example the raging success of low-fat yogurt parlors these days. I see these low-fat yogurt stores popping up all over the bay area faster than the weed in my lawn and people who have seen my lawn know what I am talking about. Their selling point is flavored low-fat yogurt and everyone seems to be raving about the low-fat aspect of it. So I went online to check the nutritional content of one such store and their offerings. Here is what it reads:

Figure 1.

So a small cup has two servings of these. There is no fat of course but looking at the sugar content it seems like a small cup would have about 4 teaspoons of sugar. And if you were someone like me and went for the large cup of the healthy stuff then you would end up getting about 52 grams or about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Now if you have been paying any attention to my previous articles you would know what eating sugar is going to do to your blood glucose levels and that getting fat has little to do with how much fat you eat but a lot more to do with your insulin response to sugars and high GI carbs. In fact the addition of a little healthy fat to this yogurt would be more wholesome and less fattening because fat slows the glucose response of carbs as illustrated in a study conducted in reference [1]. In this study ten healthy men received a 50-g portion of glucose alone and the same quantity mixed with butter, sunola oil (MUFA) or sunflower oil (PUFA) on separate days. Blood was collected at regular intervals for 2 h. The glycemic index (GI), insulin index (II) were calculated from the blood-work. It was found that addition of fat to a carb meal blunts the rise in blood glucose levels (shown in figure 2) following the meal which means smaller insulin response and less fat storage (remember, insulin is basically a storage hormone).

Figure 2.

So, from the way I see it, adding some healthy fat especially to a high GI carb meal would have the following benefits:

1) As illustrated above, fat slows the glucose spike in your blood from high GI carbs like sugar and starches.

2) Fat triggers the satiety centers in your brain and fills you up so you end up feeling fuller quicker (and you thought it was the guilt of eating fat that made you stop eating sooner).

3) Fat also slows your digestion and keeps your fuller longer so you don’t go for the next carb meal as quickly.

So the next time you go for a low-fat meal read the label closely for the amount of sugar or carb in a serving and even if it’s the most healthiest thing in the world adding some healthy fat from almond butter or such will only make it healthier.

REFERENCE:
Joannic, J.-L., Auboiron, S., Raison, J., Basdevant, A., Bornet, F. & Guy-Grand, B. (1997) How the degree of unsaturation of dietary fatty acids influences the glucose and insulin responses to different carbohydrates in mixed meals. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 65:1427-1433.

BUILD MUSCLE TO BURN FAT

An article that appeared in the women’s health magazine talks about the benefits of weight training in burning body fat:

Why weight training is a great way to burn fat

Although the article focuses on fat burning for women the same general principle applies to even men, and that is gaining muscle is the only permanent way to increase your metabolism. While cardio burns more fat during the workout, weight training wins in overall fat burning ability in the long run as muscle tissue is active tissue and burns calories even in the state of inactivity. So hit the gym and pump some iron and don’t worry about bulking up.

THE HEALING POWER OF THE MIND: THE PLACEBO EFFFECT

Most everyone must have heard of the placebo effect. It’s the healing effect that arises from the belief that something is beneficial. There are stories of world war II nurses giving saline water shots to injured soldiers and telling them they were given a powerful shot of morphine (because they ran out of morphine, of course). Surprisingly many of the soldiers did feel a reduction in pain. In almost all the drug clinical trials there is some placebo effect observed in the control group that receives the ‘sugar pill’. A recent article in the Scientific American talked about a patient with cancer tumors all over his body. He was fighting for every breath but believed that a new drug, Krebiozen, which was going to be given to him, would cure him of his cancer. Three days after he received his first injection he was able to walk and his tumors had shrunk by half. 10 days of treatment later he was discharged. Other patients in the hospital that received the same drug didn’t show any improvement. So why this miraculous recovery in this case? Apparently when the brain believes in something it triggers the appropriate response in the body to make it a reality. There have been known cases of multiple personality disorders in which a person suffers from a split personality and one of the personalities has diabetes while the other personality is perfectly healthy. So when the person is in the diabetic personality state he in fact has an insulin disorder and while he is in the healthy personality state his insulin response is perfectly normal, all in the same body! Scientists are now trying to unlock the missing link between what the mind believes and how the body heals due to that belief. So perhaps Aamir’s mantra ‘all is well’ works within one’s body! Or in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger (from his bodybuilding days): Where the mind goes, the body follows! These days I keep patting my injured shoulder and telling myself ‘all is well’ 