What if You Ate Only What Was Advertised on TV?
by ilene - June 3rd, 2010 2:59 pm
Hint: perfect recipe for a coronary.
What if You Ate Only What Was Advertised on TV?
Courtesy of TIME, by Alice Park
Ragnar Schmuck / Getty Images
It should come as no surprise that the typical American diet isn’t exactly brimming with healthy goodness — rather, it’s laden with fat, sugar and salt. And now new research published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association points to a troubling reason: TV ads for food may be skewing our decisions on what we eat in powerful ways.
To figure out exactly how unhealthy a TV-guided diet would be, researchers studied food commercials that appeared during 84 hours of prime-time programming and 12 hours of Saturday-morning cartoons broadcast over the major U.S. networks during one month in 2004. When the research team calculated the nutritional content of a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet containing only foods that were advertised on television, they found that it exceeded the government’s recommended daily amount of fat by 20 times and had 25 times the recommended daily intake of sugar. "That’s almost a month’s worth of sugar in one day," notes study leader Michael Mink at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Ga.
In addition, the TV-marketed diet provided less than half the recommended daily servings of fruit, vegetables and dairy.
In fact, the sources of nutrition in the TV-ad diet were almost the exact opposite of what the government’s food pyramid recommends. Instead of making up the smallest proportion of a day’s calories, as nutritionists advise, fats and sugars accounted for the largest portion of calories in a diet based on television advertising. Couple this nutritional inversion with the fact that marketing campaigns are notoriously effective in influencing people’s behavior and the result is what many nutrition experts call a toxic environment — one that dissuades Americans from making healthy food choices and encourages inactivity.
In the year the study took place, the authors point out that foodmakers…
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IHOP’s Newest Dish is a War Crime
by ilene - April 28th, 2010 8:11 pm
The good news is that this sugar and fat-loaded delight should readily pass future salt prohibitions with flying colors (strawberry red, cream and cheesecake yellow). - Ilene
IHOP’s Newest Dish is a War Crime
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
What you’re seeing below is the latest innovation from the laboratory of Dine Equity ($DIN), the parent company of IHOP.
Yes, it’s a cheesecake-filled pancake.
My fellow Americans, you are all disgusting. General George Patton, Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen are rolling in their graves.
Read more (if you must):
IHOP Offers Cheesecake Filled Pancakes (MSNBC)
See also: FDA salt crackdown is in bad taste, Daily Bruin
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High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makes You Really Fat
by ilene - March 24th, 2010 6:26 pm
Do you eat a lot of high fructose corn syrup or other sources of fructose? Watch the excellent video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." It was made by University of California, Television. In this hour+ long video, Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues and presents evidence that too much fructose and too little fiber are cornerstones of the obesity epidemic, and that fructose is essentially "a poison."
Note: Ordinary table sugar is sucrose, which is one molecule of glucose linked to one molecule of fructose. Fructose is sweeter than glucose, but for reasons discussed in the video, the increased sweetness does not lead to eating less of it. - Ilene
Sugar: The Bitter Truth, Series: UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public [7/2009] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 16717]."
*****
Henry Blodget discusses a recent study of the effect of high fructose corn syrup on rats (below).
Oh, Crap: Scientists Discover That High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makes You Really Fat
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at Clusterstock
Princeton scientists have discovered something that will come as a blow to many food manufacturers: High-fructose corn syrup makes you a lot fatter than sugar.
How did the scientists discover this?
They fed rats high-fructose corn syrup. The rats blew up like balloons.
Sucks to be a high-in-high-fructose corn syrup food manufacturer right now…
A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,"
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Orthorexia: Can Healthy Eating Be a Disorder?
by ilene - February 12th, 2010 11:28 pm
Where is the line between healthy and excessive, or between passion and obsession, or between health and a new psychological disorder called "orthorexia"? And do orthorexics live longer? – Ilene
Orthorexia: Can Healthy Eating Be a Disorder?
Courtesy of TIME, by Bonnie Rochman
Kristie Rutzel was in high school when she began adhering precisely to the government food pyramids. As the Virginia native learned more about healthy eating, she stopped ingesting anything processed, then restricted herself to whole foods and eventually to 100% organic. By college, the 5-ft. 4-in. communications major was on a strict raw-foods diet, eating little else besides uncooked broccoli and cauliflower and tipping the scales at just 68 lb. Rutzel, now 27, has a name for her eating disorder: orthorexia, a controversial diagnosis characterized by an obsession with avoiding foods perceived to be unhealthy.
As the list of foods to steer clear of (bye-bye, trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup) continues to grow, eating-disorder experts are increasingly confronted with patients like Rutzel who speak of nervously shunning foods with artificial flavors, colors or preservatives and rigidly following a particular diet, such as vegan or raw foods. Women may be more prone to this kind of restrictive consumption than men, keeping running tabs of verboten foods and micromanaging food prep. Many opt to go hungry rather than eat anything less than wholesome.
Yet when Rutzel first sought help for anemia and osteopenia, a precursor of osteoporosis triggered by her avoidance of calcium, her doctor in upstate New York, where she attended college, had never heard of orthorexia. "You should be trying to eat healthy," she remembers him telling her. He couldn’t quite grasp that he was talking to a health nut who believed there were few truly healthy foods she felt were safe to eat. Her condition was eventually identified as anorexia, a diagnosis that organizations like the Washington-based Eating Disorders Coalition think is a mistake. The group, which represents more than 35 eating-disorder organizations in the U.S., wants orthorexia to have a separate entry in the bible of psychiatric illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
For the past decade, psychiatrists have been working on the fifth edition of the DSM — referred to as DSM-V — to refine the classifications used by mental-health professionals to diagnose and research disorders. Without a listing in the DSM, it’s tough to get treatment covered by insurance. And for researchers angling…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.