How USDA can be simultaneously Pro-and Anti-Fat Cheese?

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How USDA can be simultaneously Pro-and Anti-Fat Cheese? -
Tom Grill / Getty Image

Thanks to the long-standing campaign against the US government saturated fat, many Americans have embraced low-fat and skim milk and yogurt. But with 60 million liters of raw milk produced every day, what happens to all that remains whole milk and extracted milk fat? Apparently it goes right into our throats anyway through the cheese (think Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites or Cheesy Bacon Angus Burger King), a New York Times investigation reveals.

A nonprofit organization called Dairy Management Inc. was created by the government in 1995 before increasing cheese sales to restaurants and the public. He teamed up with Domino Pizza to create a new pizza with 40% more cheese, Times reports Michael Moss and even created and funded an advertising campaign of $ 12 million. Yet at the same time, the government is responsible for establishing dietary guidelines for the American public, guidelines that call for reducing saturated fat - now the Americans get most of their saturated fat cheese. ( More about Time.com: 5 ways to get the oatmeal in your diet, Deliciously).

Americans now consume an average of 33 lbs. cheese per year - three times the amount they did in 1970 - according to Moss, and while the government was begging people to reduce fat in their diet, he found that through confidential agreements with the government , dairy management has colluded with restaurants to add cheese-heavy products to their menus. Moss explains how the dairy management:

Management of dairy products, whose annual budget approaches $ 140 million, is largely financed by a tax imposed by the government on the dairy industry . But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of the members of the Board, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on his work.

The activities of the organization, revealed through interviews and records, provide a striking example of the conflicts inherent to the historical roles of the Ministry of Agriculture as both the marketing of agricultural products and police nutrition in America.

In one instance, Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign to promote the idea that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products , records and interviews show. The campaign lasted four years, ending in 2007, although other researchers - one paid by Dairy Management is -. Found no benefits like weight loss

Dairy management is also largely credited with getting milk again in the diet of school-age children through its "Got Milk?" grassroots campaign. ( More about Time.com: Understanding food labels).

With a budget that is nearly 20 times that of the Centre for Political nutrition and promotion, another USDA partner who is actually responsible for promoting low fat, high fiber it is clear wins. Dairy Management is the largest of the 18 USDA programs and most effective in terms of sales.

For more, see the full New York Times investigation here.

More about Time.com:

Photos: From farm to fork

The 'Other' Salt: 5 Foods rich in potassium

Top 10 most dangerous foods

How USDA can be simultaneously Pro-and Anti-Fat Cheese?

15.58 Add Comment
How USDA can be simultaneously Pro-and Anti-Fat Cheese? -
Tom Grill / Getty Image

Thanks to the long-standing campaign against the US government saturated fat, many Americans have embraced low-fat and skim milk and yogurt. But with 60 million liters of raw milk produced every day, what happens to all that remains whole milk and extracted milk fat? Apparently it goes right into our throats anyway through the cheese (think Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites or Cheesy Bacon Angus Burger King), a New York Times investigation reveals.

A nonprofit organization called Dairy Management Inc. was created by the government in 1995 before increasing cheese sales to restaurants and the public. He teamed up with Domino Pizza to create a new pizza with 40% more cheese, Times reports Michael Moss and even created and funded an advertising campaign of $ 12 million. Yet at the same time, the government is responsible for establishing dietary guidelines for the American public, guidelines that call for reducing saturated fat - now the Americans get most of their saturated fat cheese. ( More about Time.com: 5 ways to get the oatmeal in your diet, Deliciously).

Americans now consume an average of 33 lbs. cheese per year - three times the amount they did in 1970 - according to Moss, and while the government was begging people to reduce fat in their diet, he found that through confidential agreements with the government , dairy management has colluded with restaurants to add cheese-heavy products to their menus. Moss explains how the dairy management:

Management of dairy products, whose annual budget approaches $ 140 million, is largely financed by a tax imposed by the government on the dairy industry . But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of the members of the Board, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on his work.

The activities of the organization, revealed through interviews and records, provide a striking example of the conflicts inherent to the historical roles of the Ministry of Agriculture as both the marketing of agricultural products and police nutrition in America.

In one instance, Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign to promote the idea that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products , records and interviews show. The campaign lasted four years, ending in 2007, although other researchers - one paid by Dairy Management is -. Found no benefits like weight loss

Dairy management is also largely credited with getting milk again in the diet of school-age children through its "Got Milk?" grassroots campaign. ( More about Time.com: Understanding food labels).

With a budget that is nearly 20 times that of the Centre for Political nutrition and promotion, another USDA partner who is actually responsible for promoting low fat, high fiber it is clear wins. Dairy Management is the largest of the 18 USDA programs and most effective in terms of sales.

For more, see the full New York Times investigation here.

More about Time.com:

Photos: From farm to fork

The 'Other' Salt: 5 Foods rich in potassium

Top 10 most dangerous foods

Q & A: Talking Body Secrets of the picture with the author Diana Spechler

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Q & A: Talking Body Secrets of the picture with the author Diana Spechler -

"My least favorite feeling in the world feels too big to be seen. I want to lock me up till I'm thin again. "This is a typical comment on the website Body Confessions, recently launched by novelist Diana Spechler.

Spechler, whose new book Skinny sort April 26, created the site to give people a place to express the true depths of their feelings about their bodies, anonymously to strangers. So far, thousands of people responded - from the United States to Saudi Arabia - and the results, which are sometimes disturbing and sometimes inspiring, offer a fascinating glimpse of women (yes, it is most women) attitudes about their bodies. (Or on the other women's bodies, "Sometimes when I see a woman bigger than me, I'm glad it made me look better.")

Healthland spoke Spechler on its own body image struggles and experience with search Skinny which is fixed in a weight loss camp.

Q :. Tell me about the genesis of the Confessions Corps

A: There are five or six years, I decided to write a book which took place in a weight loss camp. This always happens to me when I'm something new to write is that there are conscious and unconscious reasons reasons for my doing.

The reason was conscious [my thinking about how] everyone around me has body problems - I can not think of a single person I know who is healthy eating. And weight loss camps are microcosms of the way we speak to eat and our bodies, so it was a great place to study all my questions: what is wrong with us? Why are we obsessed with our bodies? Why can not we stop eating? Why can we not lose weight as a country?

So I decided to write the book and realized that I have to work in a weight loss camp to do. So I did - I asked all these camps to teach creative writing. This guy hired me, and I spent the summer there, and it was amazing.

Q: Did you tell them you've had an ulterior motive

I do not say my employer. I was covered. I asked all my friends if it were nonfiction Ö.K., if it was not unethical, and they said it was Ö.K. I do not want to tell people, so that they act differently. water, not creative writing. ". I kept telling my agent, "This thing is itself in writing." But then I came home and I could not write. I am blocked. I always have.

I was going to really open a vein and tap into my true motivation for writing this. And I do not want to look - I do not want to assign my own behavior to my characters. But what I wrote was really flat. Ultimately, writing trumped the need to hide. Everything came out. I thought, "I must not publish it," and that allowed me to write freely, I found myself writing a fairly graphic book on disorders of the body it was so liberating And I felt... better and will not be obstructed because I got my secrets.

I do not mean that I was cured, but I'm much better. I have more control over my hunger and satiety than I ever had before in my life. I feel so relieved, great. And I wanted to give back to this world. I want others to be able to confess anonymously (as assigning my own questions the characters, I did it anonymously).

the way I set up the site, nobody can comment [on other people’s contributions]. so everyone can have the advantage of writing without someone say, "It's gross." You know how the Internet is becoming a nation hole when there is a comments section. So the only option I had decided to add a button that you can click that says "Been There" -. Just something to support

Q: What was the response like

A: It was 99% positive. Denominations only come in a steady stream and now there are thousands, which shows that there is a need for it.

But there has been some controversy on blogs because of two things [eating disorder] recovery: Some people think [Body Confessions] triggers, which means it makes people fall back into their cloud food. The other [criticism] is that it is not good to focus on negative thoughts, and that negative body image focusing on perpetuating.

So regarding the first complaint, I feel that if there is something that is making you feel bad, you should not do it. Just do not do it. There are thousands of other sites out there.

The other concern that I totally disagree with because it's so misleading messages out there that come from the food industry and government: how we should look at food and our bodies. If we sit around and say we love all our bodies and how we eat, we lie to ourselves. If we say, "Oh, we love our body because they work and they allow me to walk," of course, there is a part of our brain that feels this way, but there is also much which can have negative thoughts. So it's almost like the morality police come and tell you that you can not have those thoughts. Frankly, that is much outbreak in my opinion -. Hide things, keep things in

I'll give you an example. We've all heard women say things like, "Oh, my God, I ate half a jar of peanut butter because of my PMS," and it's socially acceptable, even a kind of cute. but you'd never meet someone at a party or walking into work and say, "I just Binged a buffet all you can eat and I feel horrible about myself." It's too dark. And compounds hiding our shame.

The food lobby says, eat what you want, then go to the gym. If you can not do that, go for a walk every day. It's ridiculous. Then we gain weight because we eat when we are not hungry, just because it's all around us. Then there is the food industry to be, like, "Take this pill, take this potion, a walk to get some exercise." That will not work.

Q: the site has met your expectations

a: I did not know what to expect because I thought things that were really interesting to me would not necessarily be interesting to d other people. I was wondering if someone was going to post. one thing I thought was a more even distribution of men and women. There are many more women. I do not know why I thought men write when of course women are much more focused on issues of body image. [As for] content, I guess I do not know if I was surprised, but I am at the same time happy, because people write, and distraught to see how the pain is around these issues

. Q: Where do you see Body Confessions go from here

A: up this is the plan and I just hope to find more and more people to discover and use. I want to change the dialogue in this country: I do not want people to lie about it. There is an obesity epidemic, girls get younger and younger eating disorders, obesity starts young.

Something is very, very bad and I think [we need] voice that fight dishonest voices that say, "Take the stairs instead of the elevator" or "Use your will and will not eat this cookie ". These messages are not true. And they hurt us, and hurt women. My sort noble goal is to change that. People focus on these positive messages, but I have thousands of denominations that say otherwise.

Q: What advice would you see there instead

We need honesty against all the deceptiveness. For example, there is a great book called The End of Overeating - and similar books - that talk about how as a society, we had to work to burn cool, to repair the damage of smoking "cool" imagery (ie, the Marlboro Man), and how we need to somehow make the same with the industrialized food. If we can make people think "Yuck" instead of "Yum" when they see fast food, which is a step. But it is only a small step. I'm not a scientist, so I have great answers, but I think if we can move the national dialogue in some ways, like I said, and keep focusing on nutrition education for children and families, we 're on the right track. Or at least a better track.

Study: Want to live longer? Switch to whole grains

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Study: Want to live longer? Switch to whole grains -

Eating a diet rich in heavy-fiber reduced the risk of death in people with heart disease, infectious or respiratory disease, or any cause by 22%, according to a new study.

In addition, people who were in the highest group of fiber intake (29.4 g per day for men and 25.8 grams for women) were also less likely to develop these diseases than people with the lowest fiber consumption levels (12.6 g per day for men and 10.8 grams for women).

This is a good motivation for joining the US Department of Dietary Guidelines updates of Agriculture for Americans (DGA), who called on January 31 for increased fiber intake through grains whole, fortified foods, and fruits and vegetables. DGA recommends 14 grams of fiber per 1,000 calories a day -. Totaling about 25 grams of fiber per day

Dietary fiber is the edible part of a plant that is difficult to digest - found in wheat bran and green leafy vegetables - and is known to improve health in a number of ways. It is thought to reduce the risk of heart disease, some cancers, diabetes and obesity, and is known to reduce cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure. According to background information in the study, published in Archives of Internal Medicine, it also binds to potential carcinogens so that the body can not flush out.

For the study, researchers examined mortality data for 219.123 168.999 men and women who completed questionnaires on their eating habits between 1995 and 1996 as part of the National Institutes of Health-AARP longitudinal Diet and health study.

During nine years of follow-20.126 men and 11,330 women died. People who ate the highest amounts of fiber were 22% less likely to die of a cause that people who ate the least fiber. In addition, men in the highest quintile were 24% less likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, infectious or respiratory than men in the lowest quintile, and for women the risk reduction was 34%.

The researchers noted that fiber from grains, such as whole grain bread or brown rice, but no fiber from fruits, was associated with death risk reduction in men and women.

Are Cutting salt really improve cardiovascular health?

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Are Cutting salt really improve cardiovascular health? -
Kristin Duvall / Iconica / Getty Images

Asking people to reduce their dietary salt intake can help slightly lower blood pressure, but it does not have any effect on their risk of heart attack or cardiac death, according to a new review of existing research.

Professor Rod Taylor of the University of Exeter and his team examined data from seven randomized controlled trials published previously followed intake and rates of death or cardiovascular events serious (such as heart attack, heart surgery or stroke) salt from nearly 6,500 participants, with follow-up of at least six months.

While lowering dietary salt led to a slight drop in blood pressure, the researchers found no strong evidence that it has reduced the death rate among people with hypertension or pressure normal blood. One study suggested that restricting salt in patients with congestive heart failure could even potentially increase the risk of death.

Overall, the authors of the study concluded that there was not enough data in the studies together to make a conclusion about the impact of salt reduction on the risk of major cardiovascular events. More rigorous studies, a large and long-term are necessary.

Yet there is a lot of data - and consensus among experts - that excess dietary salt affects blood pressure and cardiovascular health. Reported Wall Street Journal

Taylor tells the Health Blog that does not question the notion that salt intake is related to cardiovascular risk. But he says giving individuals dietary advice alone will not cut it as a way to permanently reduce their salt intake, and therefore is not likely to have a long term impact on health. "What does not work is the board," he said

Taylor notes that the table salt shaker is not the real problem. ". invisible salt "75% of our salt intake comes from restaurant meals and packaged foods as So, tell people to reduce salt without simultaneously obtain food manufacturers to use less salt is not likely result in significant reductions of consumption.

Americans eat an average of 3,400 mg of sodium per day, far more than the limits set by government dietary guidelines, which recommend that healthy adults stick to 2.300 mg daily and those over 51, African-Americans of any age, and people with hypertension, kidney disease or one of several other conditions consume less than 1,500 mg of sodium . per day

the best way to get enough sodium - which is essential for good health - without going overboard is to cut processed, packaged foods in favor of whole fruits, vegetables and meat

.

So what is the right amount of sodium for you? "There is a good amount of sodium that we all need in our diets," Dr. Stephanie Moore, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told ABC News. "Set [a] good amount of sodium - it is the study we need. "

the current revision was published in full by Cochrane Library and an abbreviated version appears in the American Journal of Hypertension .

Meredith Melnick is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeredithCM. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

Study: Chocolate lovers have less risk of stroke

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Study: Chocolate lovers have less risk of stroke -
Steve Gorton / Getty Images

The new guard is soft. eating chocolate has been linked to lower blood pressure, reduced risk of heart disease and now in a new study, a lower stroke risk in women

Better yet more chocolate women indulged in, the more their risk of stroke, Swedish researchers found. For every increase of 50 grams (1.8 ounces) From chocolate consumption per week, the risk of total stroke of participants fell by 14%. The protective effect seems kick 45 g (1.6 ounces) of chocolate per week, with women in the highest consumption group - who ate an average of 66.5 g (2.4 oz.) or between one and two chocolate bars a week -. enjoying a lower risk of 20% of stroke than those who ate the least

When broken down by type of stroke - ischemic, which occurs when a blood vessel supplying blood the brain is blocked by a clot, against bleeding, which occurs when a blood vessel in the brain bursts weakens and - the advantages of variable chocolate protection. Every increase of 50 grams per week-chocolate consumption was associated with a 27% risk of hemorrhagic stroke, compared to a lower risk of 12% of strokes caused by clots. Why the effect was greater with one type of stroke was unclear, the authors wrote.

PLUS Enjoy! Chocolate is good for your heart

Directed by Susanna Larsson, associate professor in the division of nutritional epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, researchers followed 33.372 women aged 49-83 from around 10 years, until 2008. at the beginning of the study, the women completed extensive questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle, including chocolate how often they ate and about 95 other foods in the year previous. The protective effect of chocolate consumption on stroke risk of women persists even after researchers adjusted for other major risk factors for stroke. The results fall in line with previous research on the subject.

The potential benefits to the health of chocolate, especially dark chocolate, have been widely attributed to its flavonoids, antioxidant compounds in cocoa that can stimulate the cardiovascular system. In other studies, researchers have shown that flavonoids can improve blood flow by dilating blood vessels and lowering blood pressure. They can also inhibit platelet aggregation and reduce inflammation, both of which contribute to cardiovascular health.

The question is whether women begin gorging on chocolate to protect against stroke? Not exactly.

MORE: slightly elevated blood pressure can still be at risk of stroke

chocolate is not the only food that contains antioxidants, of course "It's important. to keep results like these in context. These findings do not mean that people need to exchange chocolate for broccoli in their diet, "Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York , told HealthDay. "chocolate makes have antioxidants, and antioxidants are beneficial to your health. ... But if they had tried this study with apple skins or grapes? "

Although the study adds to the evidence that chocolate can be good for heart health, its observational nature can prove a direct effect. Its dependence on self-reports of women diet and lifestyle other limits of its conclusions.

the authors also note that 90% of the chocolate consumed in Sweden at the time the questionnaire was Swedish milk chocolate, which contains about 30% cocoa solid. - a much higher concentration than what Americans are used to eating so if you go for a chocolate bar, the author suggests choosing dark chocolate, at least 70% cocoa, which has more antioxidants and less sugar than milk chocolate.

"chocolate consumption in moderation, and preferably dark chocolate, with a high consumption of other antioxidant-rich foods like fruits and vegetables can help reduce the risk of stroke, "says Larsson.

PLUS Psych-Out Diet: Why health foods is less satisfactory even if Sinful

The study was published as a research letter in Journal of the American College of Cardiology .

Sora Song is the editor of TIME Healthland. Find her on Twitter at @sora_song. You can also continue the discussion on the Facebook page and on Twitter at Healthland @TIMEHealthland.