The best editors understand that the only thing readers like more than lists of Bests is lists of Worsts. So it's nice to see that the reliably good editors of Men's Health have given us a list of the 20 Worst Foods in America, starting, at number 20, with McDonald's Premium Breast Strips of Chicken with creamy ranch sauce (835 calories, 55 grams of fat), and going downhill from there. Read about 19 more meals that your body does not want you to eat.
The good news, according to this L. A. Times taste test of four protein bars, is that these simulated food products no longer taste like dirt. Instead, they taste like s'mores, chocolate peanut butter, and cocoa-dipped peanut butter. Progress does not always mean improvement. The Times piece also gives us the calories, fat, and protein of each bar, and more importantly, these two pieces of advice: The best time to eat a protein or energy bar is generally not during a race or while exercising; and Consumers should look for zero transfat and minimal vitamins. Why? Because vitamins, which aren't really necessary, will negatively affect taste. Read more about protein bars in the L.A. Times.
The New York Times puts any discussion of avocado cholesterol aside for a moment, and looks at the bacterial risks associated with double dipping chips in an avocado dip. Reporter Harold McGee managed to locate a Clemson University study that explored the likelihood that bacteria would be transferred to by the dreaded double dipping of chips or crackers. McGee reports on the study, in which students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it. They didn’t determine whether any of the bacteria were harmful, and didn’t count anaerobic bacteria, which are harder to culture, or viruses. On average, McGee, reports, the students found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the remaining dip. Because each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip, sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite. The bottom line, says Clemson food microbiologist Prof. Paul L. Dawson, is this: "Before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here?" Read more in the New York Times.
Everyone knows that somewhere high in the mountains of Eurasia there is a people who eat nothing but yogurt and live to be several hundred years old. Or something like that. Now Dannon, "the top-selling brand of yogurt worldwide" is trying to take such legend to the bank, and it is running into a couple of obstacles, like a class action lawsuit arguing that health claims made in the company's advertisements for its Activia and DanActive products are bogus. Writing in her health blog, Well, in the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope talks about the squabble, and tries to find some evidence that "probiotic" food--food with live organisms- really does more good than food without live organisms.
"Although the scientific evidence shows that probiotics really can help," writes Parker-Pope,
"questions remain about how well that research translates into the real
world, where some marketers may add untested amounts of the bacteria to
various foods. While there are thousands of different probiotics, only
a handful have been tested in clinical trials and been shown to deliver
specific health benefits when eaten regularly."
Read more in Well.
For a little over a year now, Geezer's loving wife has declined to eat tuna sushi, generously offering all tuna slices to her grateful husband. Now he knows why. A New York Times study of tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants found so much mercury that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency. The New York Times reports that sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. Experts consulted by the paper warned that while these samples were gathered in New York City, similar results would likely be observed elsewhere.
Read more in the New York Times.
Why should you load up on protein after resistance training? Because Judy Foreman says so. And Foreman, a health writer for the Boston Globe, says so because William J. Evans, director of the Nutrition, Metabolism, and Exercise
Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, says so first.
"Strength training causes muscle cells to be extremely sensitive to
insulin," Evans told Foreman. "Insulin stimulates muscle
protein synthesis by increasing the transport of amino acids into the
cells."
Evans believes that the "window of opportunity" for this protein loading is
short-lived."The protein should be consumed before, during, or within
30 minutes of completion of the exercise," he says. Evans is partial to protein of "high quality," meaning it contains all of the
essential amino acids like whey, casein (a milk protein), or meat. What else does he say? Read more in the Boston Globe.
On the off-chance that it might encourage some healthful new year's resolutions (exercise more, drink less), psychiatrist Paul Steinberg writes on the New York Times Op-Ed page about the long-term damage that can be done by binge drinking. The good news, Steinberg reveals, is that exercise has been shown to stimulate the regrowth of normal neural tissue that has been damaged by alcohol. It's true, unfortunately, that this kind of regrowth has only been observed in mice. On the other hand, the neurogenesis was greater in the exercising former drinking mice than that induced by exercise in the control group that had never been exposed to alcohol. Read about more evidence that exercise improves memory.
How powerful, exactly, is the amazing fat producing influence of booze? Anahad O'Connor, the New York Times health answer man, says it depends. Mainly, it depends on how much and how regularly you drink the stuff. Beer, wine and spirits, O'Connor says, have a greater effect on belly fat in adults who
drink sporadically than in people who drink regularly but in small
amounts. The Times' expert reports on a study published in The Journal of Nutrition in 2003, in which a group of
scientists followed more than 2,300 drinkers and nondrinkers. The researchers found
— after controlling for a number of variables — that those who averaged
a single drink per day had the lowest levels of abdominal fat. Those
who drank occasionally but had four or more drinks in one sitting had
the greatest levels. Several studies, says O'Connor, have shown similar results.O'Connor's Bottom Line puts it this way: Moderate drinking does not seem to increase abdominal fat. Excessive drinking might.
Read more in the New York Times.
Can a glass or two of wine stave off a cold? How about red wine? How about eight to fourteen glasses of red wine a week? The answers, according to a recent column by NYT's health answer man Anahad O'Connor, are yes, yes, and yes. In the final, but most important paragraph of a column that disputes the notion that alcoholic drinks may diminish the likelihood of catching a cold, O'Connor tells us that in 2002, researchers in Spain followed 4,300 healthy adults, examining their habits and susceptibility to colds. The study, published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, found no relationship between the incidence of colds and consumption of beer, spirits, Vitamin C or zinc, but it did find that drinking 8 to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, was linked to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. The scientists suspected this had something to do with the antioxidant properties of wine. Read more from Anahad O'Connor.
Geezer is uncertain why anyone would prefer to take his protein in a liquid form when one can simply order up a cheeseburger, but it's possible that the marketing people at Kellogg's are way ahead of Geezer on this one. The company's new Kellogg's Special K20 is one of four protein waters subjected to a taste test by a team of tasteful taste testers at the L.A. Times. Wisely, the piece also offers information about calories, protein, fat, carbs, fiber, sugar and sodium, for Special K20, Accelerade (actually a carb drink with little protein), Isopure, and Stacker 2 Protein. Wanna know which tastes least bad? Read more in the L.A. Times.
Recent Comments