by gekko at 5:30 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I've just dumped my old blog, the Blob. I decided, since I haven't posted there in six months, and since I seem to be barely able to keep up over here, that it'd make sense to close that one down.

Weight-obsessed peeps, fear not! I have imported all of the Blob's archived entries to this blog and you can find them under the new category "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition."

Or you can find them using the Tags in the tag cloud.

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by gekko at 10:16 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"Bowling is over for the summer, and I have that babysitting job," she sighed, pinching the roll of extra, flabby flesh that has begun to accumulate in her middle. "I weigh the same as always, but everything has sagged down to my stomach and hips and I have no time for exercise!"

That's a familiar lament. I've used it. Everyone I talk to who hates the way they look but hasn't yet made any change to their life to fix what they think is wrong usually uses a variation of "I just don't have time for exercise!"

Leave aside for the moment that if you don't get much exercise you need to reduce what you eat. We'll focus only on exercise and activity in this post.

It's as simple as setting priorities in our lives. She bowls. What is she doing with that time slot now that the bowling, er, "season" is over? She replied that she busies herself, so much to do.
She babysits a toddler two days a week. What does she do in that time slot on the other five days a week? Oh, she busies herself. So much to do. She has a dog, a five year old lab with a LOT of energy and she complains about how much attention the dog needs, but she can't take the dog for walks because the dog always pulls so hard on the leash. She's older, and can't take that kind of strain on her arms.

Hmmm.

Has she considered taking training classes with the dog? And then setting aside 45 minutes or an hour a day walking the dog, energetically? Drain the dog, work the dog, get exercise herself, and add the "upper body" strength training that comes with correctly working a dog on a lead?

Oh, so much to do, when would she have time for that?

I don't know, to be honest. I know what my days are like, and how I set my schedule, and because I consider exercise to be important to me -- as important as eating, in fact -- I put exercise into my schedule. I give up things that are a little less important. I watch very little television, for example. I "TiVO" my few programs that I like, then spend maybe an hour or an hour and a half watching some of the shows just before bed time. I probably spend a little less time fussing about the house, scrubbing it. I don't know what all I am skipping or missing, really. Clearly, it is less important to me.

I don't think, I know this is a key to weight management. She hasn't changed weight, but she's lost muscle mass and discovered fat accumulating in the places it likes to accumulate because she's not using her muscles much. She's set her priorities to exclude obvious places to get exercise. Whatever she is doing instead of bowling, or on days when she's not babysitting, it's more important to her than dropping the fat.

Oh, and she eats massive, fat- and calorie-laden meals, too. ;-)

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by gekko at 5:55 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I've said it. This article, quoted below, has said it. Walkies are good for you.

These days, it's easy for people to get confused about exercise -- how many minutes a day should they spend working out, for how long and at what exertion level. Conflicting facts and opinions abound, but one Mayo Clinic physician says the bottom line is this: walking is good, whether the outcome measurement is blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, joint problems or mental health.

"Getting out there and taking a walk is what it's all about," says James Levine, M.D., Ph.D., and a Mayo Clinic expert on obesity. "You don't have to join a gym, you don't have to check your pulse. You just have to switch off the TV, get off the sofa and go for a walk."
-- Walking Has Major Benefits, Whatever The Problem

Caveat: Walkies are not good for you if you're a bit scatter-brained and end up getting hit by a car. Also, probably not a good idea to walk far in the blinding heat and sun in a desert summer.

Try a treadmill, instead.

'k?

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by gekko at 2:36 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This one seems dodgy, but who could resist?

Eat six cookies a day (plus a meal) and lose weight.

Linda Hoover said she tried numerous diets without results before stumbling upon the Cookie Diet. She's been eating six cookies a day for about a month and said she's lost 17 pounds. -- Lose Weight By Eating Cookies - Featured Stories News Story - KPHO Phoenix

The diet is 800 calories a day.

I don't care what you eat, if all you eat is 800 calories and you're not, like, 80 pounds to start with, then you're going to lose weight.

But here's the clincher: you spend $250 to get into the program, then buy your daily protein cookies at $7 a pop. Might be worth it to some, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're limiting your daily caloric intake to 800 calories, you're endangering yourself and probably setting yourself up to yo-yo right back into the plus sizes.

I'd love to see someone do a story on one of these diets a year after they stopped.

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by gekko at 2:53 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I guess you can look skinny to everyone, have the right BMI and all that, but really be fat on the inside -- that is, by the internal fat surrounding vital organs, according to Britsh researchers.

"Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," an AP report Thursday quoted Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London, as saying.

Bell's team has scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines since 1994 to find out where fat is stored in their bodies.

Data show people who keep slim through diet rather than physical exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat.
-- Xinhua - English

The article doesn't tell us much. It does not tell us how we can tell if we're just thin on the outside and a diabetic in the making. It just kind of warns you to not rely on diet alone, but to add exercise to your daily practices.

I am an advocate of exercise, of course. It has so many benefits beyond just helping sculpt your body. The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be all muscle-head weight lifting or hot sweaty aerobics to qualify as "exercise." In fact, to optimally burn fat, you're best off if you exercise moderately -- brisk walking f'rex -- for longer periods of time. As you burn the fatty deposits in your muscles, you'll also build lean muscle and that will help you keep weight off. Adding weight training doesn't hurt, of course, and can only improve your lean-meanness, but, again, you don't have to be one of those sweaty grunting thick-necked power lifters like Wayne. Add a few 5 lb dumbbells to your walk and swing your arms. Do some curls with 'em. Get a wee weighted exercise ball and swing it around a bit.

Have fun with activity, and do it often.

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by gekko at 12:13 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Or maybe it should say, "More Taste! Less Filling!"

Or maybe "Is it soup, yet?"

Pick yer advertising meme to fit the revelation that starting off your mealtime repast with a bowl of low-calorie soup may result in you consuming up to 20 percent fewer overall calories in that meal than if you did not add the soup.

"Consuming a first-course of low-calorie soup, in a variety of forms, can help with managing weight, as is shown in this research and earlier studies. Using this strategy allows people to get an extra course at the meal, while eating fewer total calories," says Flood. "But make sure to choose wisely, by picking low-calorie, broth-based soups that are about 100 to 150 calories per serving. Be careful of higher-calorie, cream-based soups that could actually increase the total calories consumed."

-- Medical News Today: Cut Calories At Meals With A Soup Starter

The soup they used in the study had chicken broth, broccoli, potato, cauliflower, carrots and butter. They tried thin and thick, soupy and chunky varieties but concluded it didn't matter what form, just that it was soup and low cal.

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by gekko at 3:32 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Paula located a good site that breaks down fat, um, so to speak, in easy to understand terms.

Thanks, P.

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by gekko at 9:55 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

With work, family, and other whiny-assed excuses -- I mean, responsibilities, I'm hearing too many peeps saying they can't manage to do the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity needed to maintain fitness or assist in a weight loss program. Tons (sorry) of folk imagine you have to change into your workout clothes, drive to the gym, and sweat on the stair climber for 30 minutes every day and that's what it takes.

Dude! You don't have to wear workout clothes (although there are some darling ones out there that you'll prolly want to buy just cuz they're too cute to pass up), you don't have to go to a stinky old gym, and you don't even have to do a 30-minute workout -- I mean, the way you may think of it.

So plan ahead and take three 10-minute walks during the day.
1. Get up a few minutes early, toss on yesterday's clothes and do a ten-minute walk outside before your morning shower. Be sure to take along a paper bag to cover up your bedhead and do NOT breathe on anyone you happen to meet. But, still. If you're early enough, the only other people you'll meet will look just like you so, like, who cares?
2. Next, take a walk break instead of a coffee break mid-day (specially if you're craving a package of vending machine cookies or one of those bear claws in the cafeteria).
3. Then in the evening, walk the perimeter of your daughter's la crosse field as she plays (or wotever).

Extra bonus points if you can make 40 minutes for your walk. Keep your stride fairly long and rapid to get your heart rate up so you can still talk easily. Just a little extra hard breathing. You can receive substantial health and fitness benefits from accumulating 30 minutes or more of moderate intensity physical activity most days of the week. If you're looking to kill two birds with one stone, get into the routine of combining family and fitness time. Okay, you're not actually going to try to kill the birdies. Unless, of course, you get pleasure out of that, but I digress.

Plan some activities that involve the entire family:

* Plan active vacations that involve hiking, skiing or water sports.
* Mopping floors! This is actually fun with littler kids. Dampen some rags, take off your shoes, and everyone take a pair of rags and step on them. Then slide around the floor, scooting from side to side, do the twist, etc. to some funky music. Change out the rags every now and then so you don't just swish the dirt around in mud swirls.
* Take regular walks. Walking is a great habit, and a good way to foster communication. Unless you can't stand each other -- I mean, then make sure you plan routes that do NOT take you through any secluded areas.
* Ice or roller-skating at a local rink. Yes, you, too can look like an idiot as you wobble around on blades or rollers!
* Play pickup games at a local field or playground. Call the neighbors to add to the fun.
* Plant a garden at home. Just don't use any hoes for implements, because if you call out to your son "Yo, get me the hoe" and Al Sharpton happens to be walking past, he'll have you fired.

The key is to try to make physical activity a fun diversion instead of another chore. Ya know?

Oh. And one more thing: I decided I want walking sticks. Those poles that you use like cross country skiiers use, only designed for walking. I hear they take the strain off of the back if you use them, and if you swing them correctly, then you get the added caloric burn benefit. Get me a pair for my birthday, please.

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by gekko at 12:52 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, I commented that the common use of the word "diet" is problematic. See, I never really believed in "diets" -- whether it's Atkins, South Beach, Grapefruit, Jenny Craig, or The Alternating Dog Food and Peanut Butter Weekly Drink Program. Too few of them are realistic. Too few of them, I felt, involved how humans were intended to eat, and so they were all doomed to fail at some point.

Sure enough, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), reviewed 31 long-term studies lasting between 2 to 5 years and pretty much concluded that not only does dieting in the conventional sense of the word not work, it actually leaves you worse off than had you never dieted.

Dr Mann and colleagues sought to determine the long term effects of dieting and address the question "Would they have been better off to not go on a diet at all?".

So they analyzed every study they could find that followed people on diets for 2 to 5 years. Studies that take less than 2 years are "too short to show whether dieters have regained the weight they lost," they said.

They discovered that it would have been better for most of them if they had not gone on a diet at all.

"Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back," explained Dr Mann.

Their findings show that:

-- People on diets typically lose 5 to 10 per cent of their weight in the first 6 months.
-- But 33 to 66 per cent regain more than what they lose within 4 to 5 years.
-- Scientists Say Dieting Does Not Work

I confess that I followed a program that is considered a "diet" program. I used Weight Watchers© to help guide me, and I used it to track my eating, exercise, and progress. I do not credit WW with my success, however. My success (so far) has come about because I chose a program that educated me and gave me tools to do it on my own, and because -- and this is important -- I stuck with it. I changed my eating habits. I changed my exercise habits. I changed my life.

I'm still within that four-to-five year window that the researchers have noted serves as an outer limit for the eventual weight gain, and I have noticed my weight creeping back up again as I stop following my life-changing habits and go back to the emotion-based stress eating that got me fat in the first place.

But I'm not going to diet. I'm simply going to go back to the sensible eating habits I had adopted when I lost the 60 pounds.

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by gekko at 11:36 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I am gleefully stealing this from another web site, one that they made me sign up for as part of a "wellness" program at work. I tried telling them I already do this stuff and I should just get the credit for it, but they never listen. Anyway, I've heard from a number of folk that they just can't get into exercising. See, a lotta peeps seem to equate "exercise" with visiting the gym or the track and exerting yourself heavily, sweating, having to wear gym clothes, pump iron, etc.

All of that is true -- I mean, going to a gym or running through your neighborhood or on a track, or some focused, purposeful strenuous activity is exercise and can be good for you to do and maybe is the bestest and quickest way to get fit and healthy and lose weight and all that stuff, but it isn't the only kind of exercise.

This article actually talks about what you're already doing that qualifies as exercise.

Does the thought of exercising make you wince and reach for the remote control? Then it may surprise you to learn that you're already working out aerobically every day. Whenever you walk or move about -- no matter how slowly -- your muscles immediately start working harder, boosting your heart rate and burning extra calories. "How can I be exercising, if I'm not out of breath?" you protest. Well, aerobic exercise includes any activity that works large muscle groups and increases your respiration and heart rate. While the benefits of rigorous exercise may be greater, you don't need to be panting for breath to improve your health.

Now that you know you've been exercising all along, it's time to start measuring exactly what your current activity level is:

Keeping Track
Start by keeping track of all the walking you do each day, including:

* Going to and from your car
* Strolling through stores and malls
* Walking around your office
* Heading from the office to lunch and back
* Walking the dog
* Rambling around your house

You can gauge this daily activity in minutes, using a wristwatch, or you can buy an electronic pedometer and record the number of steps you take. Also, you can note these activities in your Exercise Journal.

Around the House
Give yourself double credit for every flight of stairs you climb. This boosts your heart rate substantially more than walking on flat terrain. Include in your exercise total any chores that require you to be on your feet -- including housecleaning, yard work, and puttering around the garage or kitchen.

Fun Counts!
Finally, count all time spent moving about in recreational activities such as tennis, bike riding, swimming or golf (count only the time spent walking the course). When you add up all this activity, you might discover that you already have the foundation for an aerobic program in place!

Next Steps?
The ideal amount of exercise recommended for optimal health is 30 minutes or 10,000 steps per day. To do this, many people are able to reach these amounts by simply building on what they're already doing. Here are a few ways people can give their activity a boost:

* Walking around the block a few times going to and from lunch
* Parking the car a little further away from a destination
* Stretching out a bike ride or tennis game by a few minutes
* Getting off the elevator several flights early and walking the rest of the way
* Raking the yard or cleaning the house instead of hiring someone
* Walking over to a colleague's desk rather than calling or IMing

Exercise opportunities are everywhere — once you realize that every step counts.

So now you know.

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by gekko at 12:17 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Women friends of mine who've been impressed with my weight loss and maintenance of same (they haven't noticed the ten pound gain) also tell me that they feel bad about themselves.

"You look so good. Me? I'm just a lump and I can't get motivated. How did you do it?"

Well, I look at myself in the mirror and think I'm just a lump and I despair, too. I don't really look all that good. Not to me. As to how I did it, I wonder how to do it some more, so I can start really looking good.

It's a poison, this feeling. It truly is. And researchers are starting to demonstrate that my friends and I are so not alone.

The rail-thin blonde bombshell on the cover of a magazine makes all women feel badly about their own bodies despite the size, shape, height or age of the viewers. A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory."
-- Women Of All Sizes Feel Badly About Their Bodies After Seeing Models

Here's the deal: when I express my negative feelings about myself to men, they almost all of them say "Well, you look good to me!" As if that matters. Dude, while I am glad you like what you see (you think "sex", c'mon, admit you're not really looking), I don't care that you think your opinion trumps mine, gottit? I'm talking about how I feel, not you.
And I'm saying that those airbrushed impossibilities who starve and beat themselves to create that look are making it worse for me.

I have no advice. Simply ... sympathy.

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by gekko at 9:20 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's a case where color does matter. The human body actually has two different types of fat tissue -- the normal "white" fat that we all complain about (and see drooping about beneath the skin of far too many people), and a brown or adipose fat tissue that we do NOT see.

It's long been understood that the brown fat actually generates a lot of energy and burns the white fat to create that energy. In a way, the brown fat acts a bit like muscles. It nestles deep in the muscles, in fact, near the mitochondria in order to feed the muscles. Babies generally have a lot of brown fat, and we lose it as we grow older.

Or, at least, most of us do.

You've seen those impossibly slender people, right? The ones who never seem to get fat? They have smooth lines, no lumps, and you never really even see them at the gym. There are many reasons that they are that way, including the fact that they probably do not overeat, that they do move around a lot ... but now maybe, just maybe, it can be shown that they have more of the brown fat tissue in their bodies than do we chubby mortals. That means they can and do eat a lot more, seemingly, than seems right for their size and they burn it. Their basal metabolism is higher than ours.

So those of us who are predisposed toward girth, no matter what we do, can lay the blame only in part -- a big part -- on our habits. There is a bit of body engineering that is making it more difficult for us.

Don't take this as an excuse that there is nothing you can do, however. Don't start saying "Oh, I don't have enough adipose fatty tissue so I'll just eat more muffins 'cuz it ain't gonna matter." Just, maybe, stop eyeballing those skinny peeps who chow down everything and never gain wait and plotting their murders. It's not entirely their faults, see.

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by gekko at 1:07 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

So I've always been a chocoholic. And most everyone knows about the chemical dependence one can form with chocolate -- theo-whatsit and endorphins, same stuff as when we fall in love, yadda.

But anyone who's dieted and already formed a close, um, relationship with chocolate knows this:

New research led by Professor Ben Fletcher and Dr Karen Pine at the University's School of Psychology, has revealed that dieting leads women into a vicious cycle of negative emotions which in turn provokes cravings for the very foods they are trying to avoid, chocolate being one of the most powerful. -- Cravings For Chocolate Increased By Dieting

So when're they going to invent a non-fat fat that tastes right and doesn't give you the squirts? Then just mix that ol' cocoa bean with Splenda© and the non-fat fat and, baby, I'll be your chocolate slave fer life.

OTOH, I incorporate chocolate into any weight-loss diet effort I undertake. It's all about calorie budgets, and you can budget in your sin food -- in moderation -- as well as any other food. That helps reduce the cravings and the depression as well.

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by gekko at 8:45 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's just emotion. Just stress. Just boredom. Just habit.

I am not hungry, so I should not eat.

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by gekko at 1:38 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I really, really, really wish I'd gone into research, because, man, you get all kinds of money to study the most obvious of things.

People feeling sad tend to eat more of less-healthy comfort foods than when they feel happy, finds a new study co-authored by a Cornell food marketing expert. However, when nutritional information is available, those same sad people curb their hedonistic consumption. But happier people don't. -- Mood-Food Connection: We Eat More And Less-Healthy Comfort Foods When We Feel Down, Study Finds

All those who did not intuit this, raise your chubby right hands.

BTW, I have to report I've gained 10 lbs over the past couple of months. Because I've been undergoing some stress-filled, downer type months in which Awful Things have been happening. Layoffs, rumors of layoffs, job cuts, people leaving my team, and other, far more personal matters. So, yes, I've turned to piles of cookies and snacks, bowls full of ice cream and such like.

Now that the really bad stuff is past, I'm planning on turning it around and dropping the ten. Wish me luck!

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by gekko at 2:09 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Those are the words Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the New York Times, a Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the book "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," which was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006 has to say about diets and nutrition.

His words of wisdom are captured in a lengthy but worthwhile article at the New York Times site.

There are a few minor bones of contention within the article itself, but I'll pick on those at a later date. I find myself in agreement with most of it.

If you cannot see the article (you may need a subscription or it's been pulled from the site and archived for $$), then click the link following this paragraph. I feel this article is worth preserving for my own purposes, and am willing to share it with you, my faithful reader.

Unhappy Meals
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat "food." Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing -- this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that "it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health" (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third -- a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you’re probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and -- ahem -- journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help -- something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees -- is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, "Eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition -- much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles -- things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies -- claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated fat" rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things -- who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients -- those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health -- gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the "macronutrients": protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn’t seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the Chinese ate "polished," or white, rice, while the others ate rice that hadn’t been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the "essential nutrient" in rice husks that protected against beriberi and called it a "vitamine," the first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn’t until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet -- including heart disease, cancer and diabetes -- a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called "Dietary Goals for the United States." The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food -- the committee had advised Americans to actually "reduce consumption of meat" -- was replaced by artful compromise: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless -- and politically unconnected -- substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism -- I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis -- is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to "let food be thy medicine" is ritually invoked to support this notion. I’ll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health -- like pleasure, say, or socializing -- makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the "French paradox" -- the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists’ lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program. In the years following McGovern’s capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late ’80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran -- also known as 1988 -- served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 "Dietary Goals" -- McGovern’s masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel’s recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet -- indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages ("What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?" by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it’s a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn’t make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture. First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do -- that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern’s original food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell’s is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce -- compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. -- are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

What’s going on here? We don’t know. It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other component) in a carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here’s a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you’re ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It’s also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn’t matter. That’s the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a second, related error when they study the food out of the context of the diet. We don’t eat just one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, we’re not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to, helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you’re probably not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer than those that don’t. Yet nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-population studies, like the Women’s Health Initiative, fail to find that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as much in his recent book, "The China Study.") Or, as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn’t wait for scientists to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the 1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild greens -- weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but unavoidable factors are called, aptly, "confounders." One last example: People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take -- which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health -- confounding factors that probably account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous "prospective" studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably even more disabling flaws. In these studies -- of which the Women’s Health Initiative is the best known -- a large population is divided into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds sound. In the case of the Women’s Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the eating habits and health outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: "Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds." And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study’s methods makes you wonder why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was on "fat," rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products. Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of "good fats" was not yet on the scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day -- as the women on the "low-fat" regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies, but I just don’t buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women’s Health Initiative rely on "food-frequency questionnaires," and studies suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the total number of food calories produced every day for each American (3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women’s Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: "Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?" Having answered yes, I was then asked, "When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?" But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, "shortening" (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn’t remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven’t been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered "medium," was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the "medium serving sizes" to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn’t under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and su