Tuned in to nutrition with Radio Nutrition

After writing about a recent study on intermittent fasting, I wanted to follow up on some thoughts about diets in general.  Plenty of people are trying to lose weight, and are eager to believe the latest fad weight loss scheme is going to be the one that finally works.  Considering that we have a worsening obesity epidemic, it’s obvious that none of them are working very well.  But hope springs eternal.  So people go on the diets and perhaps lose some weight and become diet evangelists: “I lost weight.  The diet must be wonderful and unique.”  Other people try the diet and fail miserably.  Low Fat comes to mind.  Dr. Dean Ornish is a major proponent of low fat, as in extremely low fat.  It works for him and a few followers, but most people find it impossible to stick to that type of diet for long.  Unfortunately when a diet like that fails, many people blame themselves.  Many health professionals blame them, too.  Failure must be the dieter’s fault. In fact it means the diet the diet failed you.  Sure, if you stick to one of those diets for a few weeks, you likely will lose some weight.  Whatever the gimmick, at the end of the day they all work by cutting calories.  And if you eat fewer calories than you need, eventually you lose weight.  But if the diet plan doesn’t work with your lifestyle, or is overly restrictive, you’ll eventually drift away from it. Studies comparing diets and weight loss that go on for more than a few weeks typically find that, after 6 or more months, weight loss is about the same, depending on the degree of calorie restriction.  But some people believe strongly in a particular diet system, and it may be helpful for those people to have that belief if it helps them stay on track.  Perhaps a particular diet fits well with your lifestyle or your food preferences.  As long as the food choices aren’t weirdly restricted to the point that your diet is unsustainable and out of balance (ketogenic comes to mind), sticking to some variation for the long term isn’t a terrible thing if you’re losing weight. Don’t pick a diet because the advocates claim it improves health risk factors.  Weight loss itself, whatever the method, leads to improvements in most health risk parameters, from cholesterol to glucose to blood pressure and beyond.  Even the professor who went on the infamous Twinkie Diet saw numerous metabolic improvements.  Whether Atkins or Paleo or Mediterranean or DASH: if you lose weight, you’ll see improvements.  I recently ran into an acquaintance who’s been losing considerable weight over the past year.  When I complimented him, he said “it’s for my knees”.  His knees feel better.  It’s a positive outcome he can appreciate, and will likely keep him on track. Don’t be lured in by outrageous promises like “Lose 10 lbs in one week”.  You might hear someone claim they did that.  Maybe they did, but they certainly won’t keep up that rate of weight loss beyond the first week.  Someone weighing 275-300 lbs say, who goes on a very restrictive diet, may very well see the scale go down 10 lbs in the first week.  It’s almost 100% water.  Smaller people will similarly lose water at first, but that initial weight loss may be 3 or 5 lbs.  As your body adjusts to lower calorie intake, stored glycogen is mobilized for fuel.  Water and glycogen are stored together, so as the glycogen is metabolized, the water is eliminated.  Water is heavy; weight goes down.  A dramatic initial weight loss might be motivating, but it will absolutely slow down.  Fat is not mobilized that quickly.  Think about it this way. If a person lost 10 lbs of fat in one week, that means burning off 35,000 calories over 7 days, or 5000 calories every single day.

Many of us have had this annoying experience. You meet a friend for lunch, or dine with family, and you’re barraged with a non-stop lecture about the person’s latest diet.  You get all the unwelcome details about food restrictions, along with perhaps a critique of what you might be eating at that very moment.  You’re guilty of transgressions against Diet Purity.  You’re condemned to a life of illness/excess weight/bad skin/bad hair/fatigue/dire diseases/etc.  Sounds like a religion?  Yes. Anyone who has endured diatribes on dietary perfectionism can’t help but notice the similarities to dogmatic religious ideas.  Not that religion doesn’t have its place in human society.  But some people have replaced traditional religion with a quest for dietary nirvana.  Whether Paleo, organic, gluten-free, low carb or vegan, there are people who take it to the extreme, at which point the diet can take over their life. Of course, if you’re not hurting anyone by your choices, so what.  You might be limiting yourself, whether by limiting food choices or enjoyment of eating or social ties.  That’s your business.  But if you’re concerned or curious, or if you know someone like this, here are some signs that food choices and eating have turned into a religion-like belief system: * You are convinced your diet will result in a state of physical perfection/enlightenment/disease-free eternal life. * If you stray from your diet restrictions, you’ll quickly experience bad repercussions. * You preach about your diet incessantly to everyone else, trying to convert them. * You demand that other people accommodate your multiple diet restrictions. * You prefer to associate with groups of like-dieting people, whether in person or online.  To the point where you start to feel like the world is divided into your chosen/enlightened group, and everyone else.  And everyone else is: * wrong * misguided * doomed (to poor health, short life, excess weight, etc) If you’ve ever been subjected to dietary haranguing from someone determined to convert you to their Perfect Diet, you probably recognize all these signs.  What can you do?  Hope it will pass eventually?  Drift away from a friend or family member?  Not invite them to social events that involve food?  Sometimes it’s hard for people in small judgmental peer groups to avoid getting sucked in to food restrictions. The Paleo Diet is a perfect example of the religio-diet phenomenon.  I came across this essay about the myth of the so-called “Paleo Diet”, written by Peter Ungar, paleoanthropologist and a professor at the University of Arkansas.  You know, a person who actually is an expert on what early humans ate, unlike the Paleo preachers, whose “expertise” comes from fad diet websites.  Among his observations: * Paleolithic people depended a widely varied diet based on where they lived, seasons, climate patterns and what was available.  They did not just gorge on slabs of meat, with a side of leafy greens. * Paleo advocates preach that (impure, poisonous, sinful) grains were never consumed by early humans, yet traces of cooked grains have been found trapped in the tartar deposits of 40,000 year old Neandertal teeth. * There is no such thing as an ancestral human diet.  Consider these disparate examples: natives of what is now Arctic Alaska ate nothing but high protein/high fat marine mammals and fish; the diet of a tribe in the Central African savannah was 70% sweet melons and starchy roots.  Yet both groups managed to survive. * Diet flexibility is a key to survival and evolution of humans over eons.  Rigid inflexibility was likely to result in quick extinct...

Seriously, is someone trying to make nutrition look bad? This is the kind of pointless research that drives me nuts.  The headline reads “Multivitamins Don’t Help the Heart“.  Who thought they would?  As part of the ongoing Physicians Health Study, 13,000+ male physicians aged 50+ were followed for more than 11 years each on average. Half of them got a multivitamin; half got a placebo.  The multivitamin users did not have significantly different rates of cardiovascular problems than the placebo users.  The conclusion is that multivitamins don’t prevent heart disease.  Well alrighty then.  Must mean multivitamins have no purpose.  After all, if something doesn’t prevent heart disease, what’s the point? This is a lot like saying spark plugs, oil, new tires and engine tune ups don’t prevent car accidents.  Well perhaps in the sense that, when the car runs properly, you won’t have an accident caused by some random breakdown or flat tire.  The vitamins and minerals found in multis are nutrients.  They are all essential for health, the same way spark plugs and tires and oil are essential for a car to run.  If you get too little of a nutrient for too long, many metabolic functions go haywire.  If you get too much, excesses (water soluble vitamins) can be flushed out or simply not absorbed (many minerals).  Some excesses (fat soluble vitamins) can cause problems.  Heart disease is a complicated process that takes years to develop, and is highly dependent on genetics, lifestyle and diet.  Other than insuring you have an adequate intake of many vitamins/minerals, how exactly would a multiple prevent a complicated disease? So what was the purpose of this study?  The researchers were perhaps trying to dissuade people from believing that multivitamins will prevent heart (or other) disease, assuming beforehand that there would be no benefit.  Certainly there are people who think a daily multiple makes up for a junk diet.  Or perhaps the researchers did believe there would be some benefit, at least from this particular multi vitamin preparation. The problem with using the term “multiple vitamin” is that there is no standard formula.  The different brands make up their own formulas; sometimes I think they pulled numbers out of a hat.  Let’s have 500% of this vitamin and 10% of that mineral.  Let’s see, how big can the pill be?  Well we can’t fit too much of this mineral, it makes the pill too large.  And we can’t afford too much of this expensive nutrient, but let’s put just a smidgen so we can list it on the label.  A long list of stuff sure looks good! By coincidence, I tried shopping for a multiple the other day.  I was sort of horrified.  Too much of many B vitamins.  I don’t need to be constantly overdosed on folate.  I don’t need 500% of the RDA for thiamine.  Way too much vitamin D for me, too much unwelcome calcium carbonate.  Some excessively high doses of zinc and vitamin E to take daily.  Vitamin A was all over the map, and in fact this fat soluble vitamin can be a problem in excess.  Some had silly tiny amounts of probiotics, for marketing purposes.  Omega-3 is another popular marketing come-on (NOTE: it’s pretty difficult to get any meaningful amount of omega-3 fats into a multiple vitamin pill).  At one point I started examining the children’s vitamins, since those would likely have lower doses to match a child’s recommended intake.  No such luck.  And in some cases, the children’s preparation was lacking several key nutrients.  I was so annoyed I bought nothing. In fact it seemed like Silly Research Week.  Another study headline br...

Have you ever made a purchasing decision based on one of these food label claims? Contains Fiber! More fiber than [fill in the blank] ! Added Fiber! With [fill in the blank] grams of fiber! High Fiber! You may have been played by a clever food marketer. What exactly is fiber?  Fiber used to be defined as “roughage”, stuff that didn’t get digested, like those stringy bits in celery or the bran in whole wheat or corn kernels.  But the official official FDA definition of fiber includes all kinds of things that have no relationship to roughage: “non-digestible soluble and insoluble carbohydrates (with 3 or more monomeric units), and lignin that are intrinsic and intact in plants; isolated or synthetic non-digestible carbohydrates (with 3 or more monomeric units) determined by FDA to have physiological effects that are beneficial to human health.” No strings or roughage anywhere to be found.   Instead we get monomeric units, gums, gels and short-chain carbohydrates that are fermented by bacteria.  In short, anything that isn’t digested or absorbed by a human.   This definition gives the food industry incentive to identify non-digested/non-absorbed stuff that can be added to manufactured foods to boost the fiber content, including foods that never, ever had fiber in their natural state, such as yogurt.  Yogurt with added celery strings might be higher in fiber, but who would buy that?  But you can officially make your yogurt “high fiber” by adding inulin — a non-digestible carbohydrate that dissolves in liquid.  You can slap a High Fiber Health Halo on the yogurt and gain market advantage.  You can also add inulin or wheat dextrin to the mix for leaden energy bars or extruded cereals and make a high fiber claim on the label. Why do we want more fiber? Fiber has a great reputation.  It’s supposed to keep you regular, lower cholesterol, control blood sugar and make you feel full so you eat less, perhaps aiding weight loss efforts.  These’s some truth to those claims for some types of fiber, but not to all types of fiber.  Food marketers would prefer that consumers remain in the dark about those differences, and just believe that all fibers provide all benefits.  Precisely the kind of nutrition fakery I detest.  And I’m not alone.  I ran across an article recently that backed up my annoyance with specifics about what different fibers do and do not do.  It turns out, the best fibers for health benefits are the ones from whole foods.  No surprise there. The article is chock full of details about how different fiber types are handled in the digestive tract.  Check out the article if you want the extreme details, such as the importance of viscosity, the gel-forming properties of carbohydrate chains and the fermentation of extracted fiber additives.  If you don’t have the time to wade through that, here are some of the key points: * There are two basic classes of “fiber”: soluble and insoluble, which  refers to chemical properties of the fiber. * Soluble fibers from intact foods (such as from oats or psyllium) hold water and are effective for lowering cholesterol or controlling blood sugar, thanks to their molecular structure.  Because these fibers are effective at holding on to water, they are effective stool softeners. * Insoluble fibers, such as from wheat bran, do not impact cholesterol or blood sugar.  They can have a laxative effect due to direct irritation of the gut mucosa, which leads to secretion of mucous and water, promoting laxation. * Research does not show any of these benefits from the extracted non-digestible fibers,

It’s National Nutrition Month, a good time to contemplate the future of nutrition.  Our food supply is on the brink of some big changes, some of them encouraging, some of them essential, some of them purely for marketing. What does the crystal ball show for the future of food? * One of the biggest challenges to our future food supply is adequate food for 9 billion or so humans.  That means adequate calories, protein and nutrients for 9+ billion people using only the limited amount of land available. * A second challenge is that, as people around the world move into the middle class, the demand for meat rises.  And there simply isn’t enough land on the planet to raise enough livestock to meet that demand.  What can we do about that? * Another challenge: making food supplies more local, to reduce transportation logistics and costs.  An abundance of food is great, but if the food is 3000 miles away, or across an ocean, it isn’t going to do you any good if shipping is disrupted for any reason. * There is no healthy diet without healthy food.  Nutrition does not come from pills or supplements, so it’s essential that our future food is healthy, or at least mostly healthy. Many of the solutions to our future food supply will rely on technology.  Genetic engineering is going to play a significant role, despite the Luddite protestations.  Around the globe, people struggling in Third World countries want to eat food, not high minded ideals.  Farmers will make their decisions based on results. If a GMO crop can be grown without expensive or toxic pesticides, resistant to a devastating insect or fungus infestation, that’s what will be grown.  Results talk.  Other agricultural practices will be equally important: companion planting, encouraging more small local farms and better management of soil and water,  Drones, robots and satellite technology will certainly be important, too. I’m excited about hydroponics for growing food locally, in some cases very locally.  I recently stayed at a hotel that had its own hydroponic grow facility for greens.  I also read about a company developing industrial-scale indoor grow facilities for urban locations.  This particular company is working on a technology that uses a grow medium and a constant mist, rather than straight hydroponics.  Imagine buying local arugula or leaf lettuce in the middle of New York City or Minneapolis?  Even in winter.  It’s not just possible, but likely. Right now, greens are fairly easy and quick to grow with these experimental indoor farms, but what’s to stop someone from developing the technology to grow vegetables, legumes, soybeans, peanuts or even grains?  Imagine an indoor rice paddy in a high rise building.  Facilities like these have other benefits: control of the “weather”, control of the nutrient mix, avoidance of insect pests and control of microbial diseases. Indoor greens sound almost commonplace compared to the idea of lab-grown meat.  But I think this is where we’re heading in the not-that-distant future.  We simply do not have the land available to feed everyone the amount of meat they want.  Plus there are plenty of other problems with the current state of livestock agriculture: use of antibiotics, animal waste disposal, energy and water input to produce just one pound of edible meat, bacterial contamination of meat and concerns about treatment of animals. People are already working on growing pieces of meat from scratch in labs.  So far reviews have been mixed, to say the least, but I have no doubt eventually they will succeed.  We’ll have standardized boneless rib eye steaks, boneless chicken breast, bone-free salmon filets and maybe even boned Thanksgiving turkeys, grown in labs, all of the same quality and flavor.

When someone says “protein” does the word “meat” pop into your mind?  This might happen even if you’re a committed vegetarian.  We’re practically hard-wired to think this way.  People who want to build muscle think meat or special protein supplements are essential.  Paleo dieters gorge on big portions of meat, thinking that’s how our primitive ancestors ate.  Plant proteins are dismissed as poor quality.  There’s a belief that protein from plant sources — legumes, nuts, whole grains, soy — is nutritionally irrelevant.   It’s not. A new study suggests that, when it comes to protein food source it doesn’t matter if you eat meat, milk, fish or legumes.  For muscle mass, what does matter is amount of protein consumed. Protein 101 Protein is essential for human health.  The official recommended intake for an adult is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight per day.  Our bodies manufacture all the proteins we need, using the basic building blocks: amino acids.  We get those amino acid building blocks by consuming protein from food.  During digestion, proteins are broken down and the amino acids are absorbed and taken up by tissues to make necessary protein molecules.  There are 22 amino acids.  9 of these are essential meaning our metabolism cannot make them; they must be obtained from food.  Your metabolism can tweak some of those to produce the other 13 as necessary. Not only do we need to consume amino acids, we need specific ratios of the 9 essentials for our unique human needs.  This is where the concept of protein quality comes in.  Some natural protein sources better match our ideal amino acid ratio than others.  Egg is one of the best matches.  Cow’s milk and soy are also good matches.  Plant proteins are not good matches.  The amino acid lysine is lacking in most grains; legumes lack methionine.  Put the two together in a meal and you have a higher quality protein.  Since most people eat mixed meals, protein quality of plant foods is naturally enhanced by default. Meat Mania Unfortunately, the meat-aholics have taken over the conversation about protein.  Weight loss and strength diets are all about meat, and lots of it, from low carb to Paleo.  We now have a protein supplement industry promoting the idea that protein from specific sources (whey, for example) is ideal for boosting muscle mass.  Occasionally you might see a story about a successful athlete who is vegan, but these people are treated more as exotic outliers.  The PR is all about meat for muscles. This new study looked at food intake data for almost 3000 adults.  The people with the highest protein intakes had the most muscle mass.  It didn’t matter what the protein source was, animal foods or plant foods.  Protein from legumes or nuts was just as effective as protein from meat or eggs.  Interestingly, the higher end protein intake was about 1.8 grams per kilogram body weight, more than twice the recommended intake.  That finding itself is pretty interesting, because there’s some controversy about what protein recommendations should be.  The 0.8 g/kg/day recommendation is intended to cover basic metabolic needs, but there’s no consensus about optimal intake, whatever that might mean.   What’s optimal for a 22 year old male might not be optimal for a 55 year old female, yet the official recommendation is supposed to work for both people.  For older adults, sarcopenia, or loss of muscle mass, is a major concern.  Some researchers suspect that higher-than-recommended protein intakes might ...

I like salt.  In moderation.  On tossed salad.  On eggs.  On hamburgers.  On potatoes.  On tomatoes.  I’m probably something of an outlier in my profession, since everyone else is officially anti-salt.  We’re supposed to repeat the mantra of Low Sodium and we’re supposed to support official doctrines about limiting salt intake to prehistoric levels, not seen since early humans got most of their salt from the blood of animals they killed.  I don’t support those doctrines and I don’t chant the official mantra.  Therefore I was encouraged to read that there are other health experts out there that agree with me and then some. The 15 experts in question are described as the “joint working group of the World Heart Federation, the European Society of Hypertension and the European Public Health Association.”  Their basic argument is that sodium intake of 3-5 grams/day is reasonable and compatible with low risk for high blood pressure.  They believe the 1.5 gram/day recommendation currently being touted by the American Heart Association is unreasonable, because population-wide hypertension rates will not be significantly improved by such a drastic restriction.  They also note that there is no good research evidence one way or the other about what exactly is an “optimal” sodium intake.  The most we know is that population-wide intakes above 5 grams/day are linked to increased rates of hypertension.  By the way, 5 grams of sodium a day is the amount in just over 2 teaspoons of table salt. Well, what does all this mean in terms of your actual food?  First, all these gram numbers refer to sodium not to salt.  Table salt is sodium chloride.  One gram (or 1000 mg) of salt has 388 mg of sodium.  The rest is the chloride.  So salt is about 38.8% sodium by weight.  1.5 grams of sodium represents 3.9 grams of salt, or about 2/3rd of a teaspoon.  That’s not much.  You might say “oh I don’t use much salt on food.”  And in fact you might not shake that much on your food throughout the day.  But salt is added to many foods, especially processed foods, and you have no control over that.  Bakery products, bread, sauces, soups, frozen entrees, deli meats, snack foods, cured meats, cheese, cereals and on and on.  In fact the only foods that don’t have added salt are raw meat, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, grains like rice or oatmeal and dairy products like milk.  And even then, whole unprocessed foods have some natural sodium content.  So in order to achieve the 1.5 gram/day sodium limit, you’d be eating a really strange diet: no use of table salt whatsoever.  No processed foods whatsoever.  Probably no bakery products, no cheese.  Definitely no chips or fries.  No restaurant food, no take-out.  It would be a very bland diet indeed.  Is anyone actually doing this? Salt has several positive aspects in the human diet * Sodium is a nutrient.  Without sufficient intake you are in big trouble, especially if you sweat a lot. * Sodium adds flavor to food.  These anti-sodium fanatics always remind me of a paragraph in a novel I read awhile ago: a new kitchen maid prepared the roast one day, and the family raved about the flavor.  The cook was peeved, what was wrong with her cooking?  The new maid had added salt to the meat, making it tastier.  The cook’s job was now hers. * Salt has a long history of use in food preservation, allowing people to survive winter or famines or long trips, before there was refrigeration and modern food storage. * Salt production drove human history for centuries,

Plant based eating is a very popular diet trend, and for good reason.  Research shows that diets that focus more on plant foods are healthier.  But what exactly is a plant-based diet?  What foods are used? What do meals look like?  Registered dietitian Sharon Palmer knows plant based diets. She’s written two books on the subject, and writes a blog and newsletter with more tips on recipes and foods.  Since I’m also a fan of plant-based eating,  I thought it would be interesting to get Sharon’s perspective.  I spoke with her recently and you can listen in to our conversation on the podcast.  We touched on * barriers to adopting a more plant based diet * ways to make plant based meals easier and delicious * nutritional considerations * recipe tips One important point to remember is that there is no one set definition of “plant based diet”.  As Sharon points out, it includes a spectrum of food styles, from vegan to Mediterranean to flexitarian.  The key point is that more of the food on your plate comes from plants rather than from animals. Sharon’s books, “The Plant Powered Diet” and “Plant Powered for Life” are available on Amazon, or on her website, where you can sign up for her newsletter and find more ideas on plant-based eating on her blog.

A colleague recently inquired about ideas for a low fat Mediterranean diet for weight loss.  To which I responded (silently) No!No! No!  The whole point of a Mediterranean diet is that it is higher fat, 30% of calories as fat, up to 40% calories in some studies.  Which makes it satisfying, flavorful and healthier, assuming healthy fats are used.  All the research points to this.  And even though it’s a higher fat diet, people lose weight and maintain lower body weights on this type of diet.  A low fat Mediterranean diet is an oxymoron.  It’s also probably doomed to not work, since it’s notoriously hard, or impossible, for people to stick to low fat diets. All of which got me thinking about my Favorite Fats.  They would be fats that lend flavor and texture to food; if they provide a health benefit, so much the better.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about gorging on fatty foods, just about using fats to make food enjoyable.  Here are my 5 Favorites: * Olive oil: flavorful extra virgin olive oil, preferably from single-source vineyards, is the perfect dressing for salad, from tossed greens to a hearty entrée salad made with whole grains and/or legumes.  Olive oil can be used to sauté all manner of foods, from home fried potatoes to vegetables to lean meats.  Or use it to baste meats of vegetables for grilling or roasting.  I’ve even had it mixed into vanilla frozen yogurt recently, which was a revelation of flavor. * Cheese.  Cheese is typically high fat.  The fat makes it melt and gives it wonderful flavor and texture.  The idea of engineering something called “low fat” cheese just to cut a few calories annoys me no end.  Why not just eat real cheese, just smaller portions? * Nut butters.  Specifically peanut butter.  Natural peanut butter.  I could be addicted to it, for which reason I have to keep my distance so to speak, being careful about how much I use at any one time, because it’s easy to use a lot.  Sesame butter — tahini — is the same.  But they’re both wonderful foods: flavorful, nutritious and satisfying. * Toasted sesame oil: I use this very flavorful oil sparingly, in stir fry or to flavor grains or casseroles.  I never use it to sauté.  It’s a flavoring agent; a little dash will do you. * Butter: I love butter but I rarely use it as a spread or for frying.  It’s for baking.  I’m not especially fearful of saturated fat, but then I don’t eat a lot of those types of foods.  So occasional baked treats made with real butter can fit. Since I just mentioned two foods high in saturated fats, it’s probably a good time to revisit the saturated fat controversy.   Are they unhealthy nutritional time bombs or do they deserve a health halo?  A new study, done in Norway, that was published late last year seems to exonerate saturated fat as a risk for heart disease.  Here are the basics: * 46 obese middle aged men * half ate a very high fat diet (71% calories as fat, 34% as saturated fat, 11% carbohydrates) * half ate a very low fat/high carb diet (29% fat, 12% as saturated fat, 51% carbohydrates) * After 3 months, both groups had improved blood triglycerides, reduced waist circumference, reduced weight, reduced insulin and other markers for inflammation and insulin resistance.  The high fat group had increased HDL, which the high carb group had reduced LDL. Well, that’s all interesting, but what does it prove about saturated fat?  I’m not sure it proves much.  These were very unusual diets, especially the high fat diet.  75% of calories as fat!  Ugh.

“It’s hard to decide which one to pick, isn’t it?” I was standing in front of the olive oil display at my grocery store, reading labels as usual.  My fellow shopper was similarly engaged in choosing a bottle of olive oil.  I smiled and nodded, but thought better of explaining my criteria for picking olive oil: made with olives from a single source.  Most of the popular/less expensive oils are blends, made from olives from different countries.  The usual suspects are Tunisia, Italy, Greece and Spain.  Olives from Argentina are sometimes used.  Olive oils from California or Australia are typically made from olives grown only in those places.  I can usually find olive oil made just from Italian olives, possibly from a single grower.  Sometimes I find oils made from Greek olives.  But I always check, squinting at the tiny print on the label that lists the source of the olives.  I generally avoid oils made from Tunisian olives. ConsumerLabs recently (subscription required) conducted an evaluation of extra virgin olive oils, rating several popular brands on taste and aroma, and also on chemical analysis of acidity, purity, rancidity and UV absorbency.  Three brands failed the taste test, in that they were not considered to be extra virgin, even though they were labeled as such.  In one case, the oil was rated as a very low grade.  In all cases, the oils listed Tunisia as a possible source of olives.  The taste test description included words like “fusty”*, “rancid”, “bitter” and “burnt”.  ConsumerLabs did point out that chemical analysis of these oils were within normal limits.  They weren’t dangerous.  The problem was the flavor.  But flavor is important. On possible explanation for these particular results: a crop failure in Tunisia this past season.  Olive production was down by over half.  A drought was blamed, but there’s also evidence that mismanagement of the water supply contributed to the problem.  There are claims that water was diverted away from agricultural uses to affluent neighborhoods. Several years ago I read an account of olive oil fraud in Mediterranean countries.  In one instance, a boatload of inexpensive low grade olive oil left the port, sailed around for a bit and, when it docked at its destination, the oil had undergone a magical transformation and was now labeled as expensive extra virgin olive oil.  In some cases, green coloring was added to make the cheap oils look authentic.  And apparently olive oil fraud is still going on.  So one way to increase the odds of buying quality oil is to stick to single-origin oils. One other potential problem with inexpensive oil blends: dilution with pomace oil.  Pomace is oil that is extracted from the pulp that’s left over after olives are pressed.  The pulp is treated with chemical solvents and high heat to extract the oil, and the result is low grade olive oil.  While countries and olive oil trade groups attempt to regulate its use, pomace oil still creeps into the supply, and may not be labeled as such.  Some pomace oil is actually labeled  “Pomace Olive Oil”, but if you don’t understand what that means, you might think “Great!  Olive oil at 1/2 the price”. I haven’t seen that at my grocery store.  But it’s still annoying to have to review the tiny print on so many labels to find oils that are made from single-origin olives.  There are 2-3 brands I stick with,

Before I launch into a list of resolutions for 2017, I wanted to review what I resolved to do a year ago.  How did I do?  Here’s the list for 2016: * Cook more meals focused on plant proteins.  Hmmm, not sure I cooked more of those, although I thought about it more.  Don’t good intentions count? * Stay active even in cold weather: yes, definitely did that. * Cook more vegetables in interesting ways.  Again, hmmm.  I think I probably didn’t.  One problem with cooking — decisions can be very last-minute, and when you want something done quickly, you don’t tend to start searching for new recipes. * Prepare more dishes using whole grains.  No, I have to admit, I did not do that one justice at all. * Experiment with more Asian/Indian seasonings.  Again, I didn’t do more experimenting on that.  Doing so would be default have also covered #1 and #3 as well, since those cuisines use more plant proteins and vegetables. Oh darn, I seem to have failed! Well onwards to 2017.  I think I may need to pare my ideas down a bit if I’m going to be more successful this year.  Here’s one important thing: I’m calling them food resolutions.  Not diet resolutions.  Not nutrition resolutions.  It’s about food. * Eat more eggs.  This is pretty specific and there are nutritional reasons for more eggs: choline, high quality protein, versatility, convenience.  The only problem is that grocery store eggs are just not as good as the wonderful local organic eggs I find at the farmer’s market in summer. * Cook vegetables in more interesting ways.  This includes more Asian/Indian recipes.  I’m going to do it this year, definitely! * More cheese.  Specifically, more cheese as a snack or as part of a meal.  Grated on salads, served with soup and bread, melted on a casserole or pizza.  And more interesting cheese.  I love hard cheeses like Manchego.  They have wonderful flavor, so you don’t need to use a lot.  Nutritional benefits: calcium, protein and in some cases, a form of vitamin K that affects calcium metabolism in a good way. * Try some really unusual and unfamiliar recipes or foods at least once.  Such as socca, a traditional Italian flatbread made with chickpea flour.  I tried some new recipes over the holiday.  Well, they were cookie recipes, but they were interesting, and some are keepers. * More soup!  Recently a house guest expressed a desire for tomato soup, of which I had none.  So I looked up a recipe, got out the ingredients, or found substitutions, and whipped up tomato soup.  It was surprisingly easy to do, as long as you have a blender.  But it made me think of how nice soup can be for a meal, especially in winter.  But summer can also be a great time for refreshing cold soups like gazpacho or cold fruit or vegetable bisques.  Plus soup is a great way to use up produce sitting around in your frig, which helps reduce food waste. The general theme: cooking.  A theme that a lot of people are using in their own 2017 lists.  I asked my dietetic interns for their 2017 food and nutrition resolution ideas and here are a couple suggestions: Brooke Tresch This year, my New Year’s resolution is to learn to enjoy the art of cooking. After a long work day, the last thing I want to do is cook a meal. In order to make cooking more enjoyable, I plan to: * Plan meals ahead of time in order to avoid several trips to the grocery store during the week * Suggest to friends that our next social hour be a potluck at my house instead of a night at a restaurant or bar * Turn on music and light candles to create a more fun,

Winter holidays may be over soon, but winter will be hanging around for a few more weeks or months, depending on where you live.  Cold weather and short dark days may put you in the mood for comfort food and sweet treats, not exactly a recipe for healthy moderation.  What to do?  You could try to swear off all temptations, but I don’t recommend that either.  Here’s a list of some simple positive steps you can take towards healthier food choices, until spring comes along and inspires you to eat nothing but fresh greens and grilled chicken (ha!): * Eat a piece of fresh citrus every day.  Nutritional benefits: vitamin C, folate, fiber, potassium.  Oranges, grapefruit, tangerines and clementines are in season, refreshing and taste good. * Don’t load your coffee and tea drinks up with empty calories.  Sugar, flavor syrups and whipped cream are nothing but calories.  Not to mention they dilute the actual flavor of the coffee or tea. * Add a fermented food to your diet (no, not beer).  Think kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha.  Yogurt is our most popular cultured food, but there are many others, and increasingly grocery stores are carrying them. * Soup for dinner.  Enjoy warm and filling soups for a meal.  There are many canned or dry mix soups available, but they all seem to lack vegetables, even the “vegetable” soups.  So add your own.  It’s too easy: buy a variety of frozen vegetables and add a handful of 3-4 to your pot of soup.  Corn, peas, green beans, broccoli, chopped spinach and so forth.  Or add a can of cooked beans, like kidney or black beans, which also boosts protein. * Have at least one salad meal per week.  It may be winter but don’t neglect the nutrition power of salads.  Can’t be bothered to make salads?  Buy them ready-made, at a salad bar or salad-focused restaurant.  Add high protein foods like grated cheese, nuts, chopped cooked egg, flaked tuna or salmon, or cooked chicken or turkey.  Voila, a meal. * Don’t rely on bars (no, not those bars!).  Whether they’re labeled “energy”, “breakfast”, “power” or whatever, bars are not meals. In some cases, I’m not even sure they’re food.  They seem like a good idea — They’ve got a few added vitamins!  They’re loaded with protein powder!  They’ve got added fiber!  They’re “organic” or gluten-free or some other faddish claim. — So what.  They’re glorified candy bars.  They’re not filling, although some may seem leaden in your stomach, which isn’t the same thing.  Don’t rely on bars to get you through the day. * Don’t diss fats.  Fat in food helps you feel satisfied and adds flavor to food. Low fat diets are falling out of favor, with average people and with nutrition researchers.  Some are again arguing the case for saturated fats.   The healthiest fats are plant-origin: olive oil, canola oil, nuts, avocado and the like.  Use oils to sauté food, or for salad dressing.  Use nuts for snacks.  Spread nut butter or avocado on toast. * Hot Foods!  As in spice.  A meal of spicy foods — Mexican, Caribbean, Thai, Indian curries — can warm you up and turn off cravings for post-meal sweets.  Added benefit: many of these cuisines are heavy on vegetables and low in sugar. * Don’t rely on vitamin supplements to get you through the cold and flu season.  There’s precious little evidence that high doses of any vitamin provide any protective or curative benefit.  The best general advice: stay hydrated and perhaps have some chicken soup. * Stay active.  Despite the short days and cold weather, there are plenty of ways to stay active in winter.  Winter sports like skating, skiing,

The RD team checks out a regional fast salad restaurant chain. Winter might not seem like salad season, but it could be the perfect time for salads.  Especially salads that someone else prepares for you.  The WalkTalkNutrition team recently visited regional chain Mad Greens to see how the post-salad-bar salad restaurant works. While Mad Greens also offers wraps and paninis, meal-sized salads are the signature feature.  You can choose from several combinations, and the salad is composed and tossed with dressing on the spot, much as sandwiches are prepared at a restaurant like Subway. What we liked * dark leafy greens. If there was any iceberg lettuce on the premises, we didn’t see it. * a wide variety of salad vegetables which were really fresh * quality protein ingredients, from beef to tofu * easy to put together a vegan or vegetarian salad meal * choice of how much dressing you get The dressing portion choice is key to controlling calories, since dressing typically accounts for most of the calories in a salad.  We both got the ‘Light’ portion of dressing, although we suspect it was more than the standard 2 TB serving size seen on food labels. Mad Greens posts calorie and nutrition information on the menu board.  There’s also a nutrition calculator, available online or as an app, which allows you to compose a whole meal and add up the calories.  Kathy found the app a bit unresponsive at times.  And we remained confused about how the salad dressing portions were calculated. What we didn’t like Not much.  As usual, Mad Greens offers sugary soft drinks and desserts that all seemed to be 300+ calories, which can be a temptation to someone who thinks their healthy salad justifies a sweet treat.  We also thought that getting the large-sized salad with ‘Heavy’ dressing would be a giant calorie load. Both of us agree that salad meals are a great idea that’s under-appreciated.  Salads with a variety of vegetables, high protein ingredients and a modest amount of dressing are loaded with nutrients and very filling.  The best part about restaurants like Mad Greens is that someone else does all the salad prep work for you, making the healthy salad meal very easy anytime of year.

I’ve never been a fan of artificial sweeteners.  My philosophy about that stuff “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”.  Taste buds were meant to sense sweetness from sugars.  Stimulating them with unrelated chemicals sounds like a bad idea to me.  But plenty of people are now dependent on that sweetness fix from manufactured non-caloric sweeteners like saccharine and aspartame.  For years, artificial sweeteners have been pushed marketed as the solution to obesity, although ironically obesity keeps increasing.  Coincidence? So this headline caught my eye “Can aspartame prevent weight loss?”  Wait, what?  Aspartame was supposed to cause weight loss.  No this is not a typo.  The study examines whether aspartame in fact prevents weight loss.  In other words, it’s not just a study about cutting calories by substituting a non-caloric sweetener for sugar.  The premise is that aspartame actually does something in the body that metabolically interferes with metabolism and weight loss. The researchers used mice, divided into 4 groups: * chow diet and water * chow diet and aspartame sweetened water * high fat diet and water * high fat diet and aspartame sweetened water After 18 weeks, the mice were evaluated for a variety of metabolic indicators including: * intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP) an enzyme found in the intestines that, in normal conditions helps to prevent type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other problems.  When aspartame is broken down, one by-product is phenylalanine, a known inhibitor of IAP. * blood sugar * TNF-alpha, a protein involved in inflammation Results: * The mice on the high fat/aspartame diet gained more weight than mice consuming high fat/water diet. * Both aspartame-drinking diet groups had higher blood glucose and higher TNF-alpha levels than the water-drinking mice The researchers attributed these findings to the sweetener’s interference with IAP activity.  They pointed out that elevated TNF-alpha is characteristic of people with metabolic syndrome. Problems? First it’s a mouse study, so critics can cry “Foul!  These findings don’t apply to humans.”  Maybe.  Maybe not.  It’s certainly interesting though. Second, the study didn’t look at any effects on calorie intake.  We’re talking about mice after all.  They aren’t likely to put themselves on low calorie diets and stick to reduced calorie intake.  So while aspartame might have some effect on IAP, if use of aspartame reduces calorie intake, a person still could lose weight, or maintain a lower weight after a diet. Finally, this study was about specific chemical effects of aspartame, not about any other artificial sweeteners in use today.  Aspartame is a unique molecule, so if it’s found to have unique metabolic effects, I’m not surprised. What should you do? Well, you could get off the sweet tooth bandwagon and drink plain water or plain tea or unsweetened coffee drinks.  Sweetened beverages don’t contribute anything useful that you can’t find in whole foods.  I remain suspicious about the effect of artificially sweetened beverages and foods on sugar cravings.  And then there’s the obesity evidence.  In all the decades we’ve been guzzling artificially sweetened soft drinks, rates of obesity,

With all the Main Stream Media hype about super foods, local eating and diet fads, it’s easy to imagine that everyone is following these allegedly healthy dictates.  So why aren’t you?  If you’re feeling slightly guilty about your dietary failures, take heart.  The NPD Group has released the 29th edition of “Eating Patterns in America” and the report tells an extremely different story about what people are actually eating.  It isn’t spelt or kale smoothies. The report lists the foods and drinks that have increased the most in our diets between 2004 and 2014.  We’re eating more at home, but that doesn’t mean we’re cooking.  Rather, people are relying on ready-to-eat foods.  According to NPD, the Top 10 Foods that have increased the most in our diets are: 10. Pancakes up 5.3%.  Nutritional consequences: pancakes are typically eaten with a generous coating of sugar syrup.  Even if it’s low sugar syrup (ugh!), the pancakes themselves are typically high carbohydrate with modest or low protein.  They may be cooked in added fat and topped with butter or margarine.  And unless they’re made with whole wheat flour, they’re low fiber. 9. Chips up 6.1%.  Seriously people?  You needed more chips? 8. Frozen sandwiches up 6.2%.  This might not sound terrible, but the accompanying photo is of ice cream sandwiches.  In which case people are eating more sugar and fat. 7. Bars up 6.7%.  No surprise here.  A trip to the average grocery store shows the bar aisle expanding to infinity.  It’s hard to even focus on them, there are so many choices.  With few exceptions, they’re glorified candy bars with a health halo because the label says “granola” or “nuts” or “energy”.  They’re just more processed convenience food, in individual packages. 6. Fresh fruit up 7%.  At last!  Something to feel positive about. 5. Mexican food up 8.3%.  Mexican-style food is delicious and certainly there are plenty of variations, some healthier than others.  If I thought people were eating soft tacos with seasoned meat, fresh veggies and salsa I’d be happy.  But more likely most of this increase is smothered burritos loaded with cheese and sour cream, or hard shell tacos filled with greasy meat, cheese and sour cream. 4. Poultry Sandwiches up 8.3%.  This is a lot like the Mexican food category.  You can find grilled chicken sandwiches at most fast food restaurants now.  You can also find breaded fried poultry sandwiches, which are higher fat and calorie.  Which is it?  And what are people eating with their poultry sandwiches?  French fries or a green salad? 3. Pizza up 9.6%.  Can pizza go anywhere but up?  No information about the pizza toppings, but other surveys show that pepperoni is very popular.  And most commercial pizzas are not the thin crust/wood fired oven type, rather the doughy varieties, loaded with cheese and meat. 2. Bottled water up 10.7%.  I’m not sure what to make of this, as I’d heard that bottled water was getting a bad rep due to all the plastic bottle waste.  Maybe that was just a rumor.  It’s a Good News/Bad News sort of statistic.  Better that people are drinking water; not so great that we have all this plastic bottle waste.  Not to mention the vast amount of energy consumed manufacturing those bottles and then driving truckloads of bottled water all over the country to warehouses and stores.  The environmental concerns are not just about the empty bottle. 1. Ta Da!  Yogurt up 12.5%.  Of course, the term ‘yogurt’ can mean a lot of things, from the sugar-sweetened stuff thickened up with additives and loaded with candy bits to pl...