BEST DIET : LOSE WEIGHT WITH BEST TRICK

There’s no denying that losing weight is tough, and keeping it off is even harder. We tend to be less physically active as we get older, which is why women tend to gain weight after menopause. But a  four-year study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says there are ways that women can keep the pounds off as they age.

“As women move through menopause, it’s thought that without decreasing calories or increasing exercise, [they] may be prone to gaining weight,” said lead study author Bethany Barone Gibbs of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Health and Physical Activity, discussing the study in a podcast. Americans live in an environment that makes weight gain easy thanks to the availability of cheap and calorie-dense foods, and aging women also have a host of physiological changes working against them.

(MORE: The Secrets to Weight Loss: Keep a Food Journal, Don’t Skip Meals, Eat In)

For instance, after menopause women experience a natural decline in energy expenditure coupled with a lower resting metabolic rate and an increase in appetite-related hormones. It’s not exactly a recipe for a slim figure. Add in the fact that when people lose weight, their brain’s reward system is revved up and increases their desire to eat and it’s a wonder anyone can lose weight and keep pounds at bay.

In the study, the researchers followed 508 post-menopausal and overweight women for four years between 2002 and 2008. They examined their early and long-term weight loss in order to identify any eating behaviors that distinguished women who were successful in keeping their weight down and women who weren’t. The women were assessed at six months and again at the four year mark and filled out questionnaires detailing their food consumption at both check-ins.

(MORE: Calorie vs. Calorie: Study Evaluates Three Diets for Staying Slim)

The volunteers were split into two groups. Half participated in a Lifestyle Change group and met with nutritionists, exercise physiologists and psychologists while the remainder were in the Health Education group, which simply listened to general seminars about a variety of issues involving women’s health . The Lifestyle Change group also attempted to reduce their fat and overall calorie intake, increase their consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains and exercised regularly.

In the short term, the researchers found that at six months the eating behaviors associated with weight loss included eating fewer desserts and fried foods, drinking less sugary beverages, eating more fish and eating less at restaurants, a trend that continued at the four year mark.

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“That means that eating less as restaurants and eating less fried foods were either not effective in the long term, or were unsustainable,” said Gibbs in the podcast. “Eating more fruits and vegetables did not predict weight change at six months, but was one of the most important predictors for long-term weight change. That means if you increase your fruit and vegetable intake you may not see a big result at six months, but it may be a very sustainable behavior change that can help you with long-term weight control.”

The authors speculate that the sustainability of various weight loss strategies are what make some better than others in the long run. “People are so motivated when they start a weight loss program. You can say, ‘I’m never going to eat another piece of pie,’ and you see the pounds coming off,” said Gibbs in the podcast. “Eating fruits and vegetables may not make a big difference in your caloric intake. But that small change can build up and give you a better long-term result, because it’s not as hard to do as giving up French fries forever.”

(MORE: Study: The Best and Worst Food for Healthy Weight)

The authors say that slashing dessert and sugary drink consumption is consistently effective for short and long-term weight loss and more fruits and veggies and less meat and cheese are best for long-term pound-shedding. “If the goal is to reduce the burden of obesity, the focus must be on long-term strategies because changes in eating behaviors only associated with short-term weight loss are likely ineffective and not sustainable, they write. That seems to make sense for anyone hoping to keep their weight in check, not just for women after menopause.

Salt is a ubiquitous part of the American diet, but even healthy people should be cutting back to avoid high blood pressure and life-threatening heart disease and stroke.

That’s the message from the American Heart Association (AHA) in its latest advisory. The AHA takes issue with recent studies disproving a link between salt and heart-disease risk that it says have been “widely misinterpreted.” It also re-affirms its 2011 recommendation that all Americans should limit their sodium intake to just 1,500 mg per day — less than the amount found in a single teaspoon of table salt (sodium chloride). The typical American now eats more than twice that amount.

(MORE: To Salt Or Not to Salt? Study Questions Benefits of Reducing Dietary Sodium)

“Americans of all ages, regardless of individual risk factors, can improve their heart health and reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease by restricting their daily consumption of sodium to less than 1,500 mg,” AHA chief executive officer Nancy Brown said in a statement.

The data on salt and its impact on health, however, has been confusing and often conflicting. That’s because it’s challenging to design the fool-proof study that isolates just the effect of salt, and not other diet or lifestyle factors, from health outcomes like heart disease and hypertension. In addition, most studies rely on participants’ recollection of what they ate, a notoriously unreliable measure of dietary intake. Measuring sodium levels in urine is more accurate, but also more costly and too intrusive to test a large number of people several times.

(MORE: Cutting Back on Salt: How Low Is Too Low?)

Then there is the “reverse causality” effect, in which high blood pressure may actually be linked to lower blood pressure since people with hypertension may have decided to limit their salt intake at the advice of their doctor. According to the AHA, said this may explain several studies published in the past year that found unusual associations between poor heart health and low sodium intake.

Still, experts agree on one thing: that whatever the healthy cut-off is for salt intake, most Americans are eating way more than we need. The debate is not so much about whether to cut back, but about how much to cut, and who needs to reduce sodium intake the most.

Our bodies need sodium to function, but our consumption in general far outstrips physiological needs, experts say. Guidelines like the AHA’s 1,500 mg per day would allow plenty for an adult or child to function well. About 99% of us consume more than the AHA limit, with the typical American eating on average 3,400 mg. daily.

(MORE: Top 10 Sources of Salt in Your Diet)

In the body, excess sodium is filtered out by the kidneys and excreted in the urine. When we take in so much that the kidneys can’t get rid of it fast enough, however, health problems can set in. The extra salt starts to build up in the blood and attract water, which causes blood volume to swell, putting pressure on the vessels and on the heart to work harder to move blood through the body. The result? Higher pressure in your arteries. Over time, elevated blood pressure can boost the risk of heart disease and stroke. It can also lead to heart failure and kidney disease, starting a vicious cycle since both of those conditions make it harder for the kidneys to balance the body’s salt levels.

According to the AHA, high sodium intake is also linked to kidney stones, asthma, osteoporosis, and gastric cancer.

(MORE: Are We Training Babies to Crave Salt?)

That’s reason enough, says the AHA, to watch your salt intake if you already have high blood pressure, and increasingly, even if you have no symptoms of risk factors for heart disease.

Yet the AHA is among the only major health groups recommending lower salt intake. Unlike the AHA, for example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Heath and Human Services say it’s fine for most people to consume as much as 2,300 mg of sodium per day. Those federal agencies recommend the stricter 1,500 mg limit only for people with higher heart risk, including everyone over age 51, all African Americans, and anyone with high blood pressure, diabetes, or kidney disease.

And the best way to keep sodium in check? According to the new AHA advisory, 70% to 80% of the sodium Americans eat comes from packaged or processed foods and sauces, soups, and cured meats. Hidden sources include breads, cereals,  salad dressings, and condiments. Substituting fresh foods for packaged foods is a quick way to cut out a lot of sodium; fresh meat contains far less salt than lunch meats, bacon, or sausage, and most fresh vegetables are naturally low in sodium (whereas as canned versions often have salt added).

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Other advice from heart-health groups: When you cook at home, you can often leave out some of the salt from recipes. And once your meal is prepared, stay away from the salt shaker. If you do buy packaged foods, it helps to read the labels. Just be aware that those listed daily recommended intakes are based on the USDA’s sodium recommendation of 2,300 mg per day for a healthy person who’s 51 or younger. To follow the AHA’s more stringent limit, you’ll need to eat less. But whether or not you have high blood pressure or not, the AHA says that’s ‘s an effort worth making.

Poor sleeping habits can lead to overeating, but can unhealthy diets keep you up at night?

Getting enough sleep and eating right are well-known behaviors for good health. Keeping a balanced diet is one of the best ways to maintain a healthy weight, and those who get 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night tend to have better health overall. Previous studies have linked a lack of sleep to overeating, but less is known about how diet influences sleep patterns.

A group of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania investigated how diets correlated with sleep patterns.

The researchers studied data from the 2007-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) involving 4,548 people. They looked at how much sleep the participants reported getting each night, as well as a very detailed report of their daily diet. For the study, very short sleep patterns were defined as less than five hours a night, short sleep was five to six hours a night, standard sleep was 7 to 8 hours, and long sleep was nine or more hours a night.

(MORE: Why Sleep Deprivation May Lead To Overeating)

It turns out that people in the  different sleep categories also had distinct diet patterns.  Short sleepers consumed the most calories, followed by normal sleepers, then very short sleepers. Long sleepers consumed the least calories. Normal sleepers, however, showed the highest food variety in their diets, and very short sleepers had the least variation in what they ate. A varied diet tends to be a marker for good health since it includes multiple sources of nutrients.

Very short sleepers drank less tap water and consumed fewer total carbohydrates and lycopene, found in red and orange-colored fruits and vegetables and high in cancer-fighting antioxidants, than people with other sleep patterns. Short sleepers tended to eat  less vitamin C, tap water and selenium (found in nuts, meat and shellfish) consumption, but more lutein or zeaxanthin, which are found in green, leafy veggies. Long sleep was associated with consuming less theobromine, which is found in chocolate and tea, the saturated fat dodecanoic acid, choline found in eggs and fatty meats and total carbohydrates. Long sleepers also drank more alcohol.

(MORE: Losing Sleep Leads To Gains In Weight)

What do all the correlations mean? As one of the first studies to look into the role that diet plays on sleep quality, the findings are more hypothesis-generating than confirming. “It was like, ‘no one has ever entered this country before, let’s go in and take some pictures,'” says study author Michael Grandner, an instructor in psychiatry and member of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at Penn.

Many studies have looked at how sleep influences eating habits. Research suggests sleep deprivation interferes with hunger and satiety hormones crucial to regulating appetite. But the study authors suggest that the relationship works both ways, and that diet can alter sleep as well. Some of the interactions are well known already, such as how drinking too much water and interrupt sleep by waking you up to use the bathroom, or how consuming heavy and spicy foods can keep you up, but there may be less apparent effects as well.

“For example, iron deficiencies have been linked to restless leg syndrome in some cases. There may be certain substances that work on the molecular level to regulate some of the biological machinery of sleep, but there hasn’t been a lot done to tease that apart, and this study may be one of the first to help point us in the right direction of where to look,” says Grandner.

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Further work may may clarify whether the relationship is as complicated as short sleep disrupting the body’s ability to process calories, or as simple as people who report very short sleep also under reporting the amount they eat. Still, there is the potential that scientists could one day determine the right mix of calories and nutrients to promote better sleep, which could become a low-cost strategy to curb obesity and heart disease.

“It reminds people that we have come to the point in our society where we recognize that our diet is important to our health. We don’t always act on it, but we recognize it,” says Grandner. “We haven’t come there with sleep yet. People don’t brag about how much they eat anymore, we used to, but we don’t anymore, but we still show off about how little sleep we get.”

The study is published in the journal, Appetite.

More restaurants display calorie counts on their menus, but what if they also informed you what it would take to burn off those calories?

It’s one thing to know how many calories are packed into a meal you’re about to eat, and quite another to fully appreciate what your body does with them. That’s been clear since cities like New York mandated calorie counts on fast food and restaurant menus so consumers would have a better idea of what they were eating. Despite the added information, studies haven’t shown that the counts led people to eat less. In fact, some surveys found they prompted people to order more food. So caloric information, it seems, doesn’t  have much impact on eating behavior.

Better strategies are clearly needed, so researchers Dr. Meena Shah and Ashlei James from Texas Christian University tried another approach — replacing the calorie counts with the number of minutes of brisk walking a person would need to complete to burn off what they just ate.

(MORE: Do Calorie Counts on Menus Curb Eating? Not So Much)

The researchers chose brisk walking since it’s a physical activity most people can do, and can easily fit into their day, as opposed to running or jogging. “We did the study specifically in younger adults. The reason why we chose young adults is because they exercise more than older adults and we felt that they would relate to it more than older adults,” says Shah.

The scientists recruited 300 men and women ages 18 to 30 and randomly assigned them to order lunch from one of three menus: one that was calorie-free, one that included calorie counts and another labeled with the minutes of walking needed to burn the calories in the food. All the menus had the same food offerings, including burgers, chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, salad, fries, desserts, soda and water.

The participants who were provided the walking information ordered and consumed fewer calories compared to those who ordered off the menu without calorie labels. However, as with some previous studies, there was no difference in the calories consumed between those who ordered off the menu with calorie count labels and those who were not provided with calorie information.

(MORE: Are Calorie Counts on Menus Accurate? Not So Much)

The findings suggest that putting caloric information in context may help consumers to better appreciate how much they are eating. And while the study focused on participants under age 30, the researchers say the results could have implications for changing eating habits for all adults. “It could take anywhere from one to two hours of moderate exercise such as brisk walking to burn the calories in some of the energy-dense foods. This may then help them make more appropriate food choices,” says Shah. The more information people have, he says, the more informed their food choices might be; there’s nothing like the prospect of more exercise to help fight the urge to eat.

The research was presented at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting in Boston.

Think you know the rules about healthy foods and can pick the best-for-you fruit from the produce section? These facts might surprise you.

More than half of Americans say they give a lot of thought to the healthfulness of foods and beverages they consume. But much of what we read and hear about nutrition — from the virtues of fruit juice to the hazards of fat — can steer us to make choices that are less healthful than we think. How many of the following food facts come as a shocker?

1. Imported produce from the supermarket can have higher nutrient levels than local produce from a farmers’ market. The nutritional content of produce is determined by a number of factors, including temperature, light and soil. Though storage and transportation cause some types of produce to lose nutrients, studies show that antioxidants may actually increase in other cases. As counterintuitive as it seems, this means blueberries shipped long distances could be slightly more nutritious than those right off the bush.

2. Foods labeled “no trans fat” may legally contain some. The government allows manufacturers to round down anything less than 0.5 g of trans fat to zero. That means if you eat several servings of a so-called trans-fat-free food — or a few such foods a day — you can wind up consuming measurable amounts of trans fat. To avoid it, check ingredient labels and steer clear of anything containing partially hydrogenated oils. (That may become easier if the Food and Drug Administration’s declaration that trans fats are unsafe holds, and they are banned from foods like doughnuts, baked goods and frozen pizzas.)

3. Decaffeinated coffee is not caffeine-free. Most decaf coffee has some caffeine. A decaf espresso, for example, can have as much as 16 mg. In a decaf latte, which contains two shots of espresso, that adds up to about the same amount of caffeine found in a can of Coke.

4. Canned white tuna has about three times more mercury than chunk light. The species used for white tuna, albacore, is larger and accumulates more mercury than skipjack, which is used for chunk light. The better option? Canned salmon has less mercury than both types of tuna.

5. Fruit juice can have more calories and sugar than soda. An 8-oz. glass of apple juice has roughly 115 calories, compared with about 95 in Coke. A cup of grape juice contains 36 g of sugar — about 9 g more than in the same amount of Pepsi. While the sugar in juice is natural (and not high-fructose corn syrup), it’s still sugar.

6. Not all fiber is created equal. To boost their fiber content, many packaged foods contain added fiber with names such as inulin, maltodextrin and polydextrose. While these count toward a food’s fiber total, they haven’t been proved to offer the same health benefits as the naturally occurring fiber found in fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

7. Cooked vegetables can be more nutritious than raw ones. Whether a vegetable is more nutritious cooked or raw depends on the vegetable, the nutrient and the cooking method. For example, we get more of the antioxidant lycopene from cooked tomatoes than from raw ones. Likewise, boiling carrots increases their levels of antioxidants called carotenoids. But cooking carrots also lowers amounts of other compounds.

8. “Multigrain” products aren’t necessarily whole grain. While multigrain may appear to be a synonym for whole grain or whole wheat — which is associated with a reduced risk of heart disease, diabetes and digestive problems — it’s not. It simply means the food is made from several grains, which may be whole or refined. To make sure the food is rich in whole grains, check the ingredients. The first one listed should contain the word whole.

9. Adding fat to your salad can make it more healthful. Eating vegetables along with fat can help the body better absorb their nutrients. So using a dressing with fat may make a salad with tomatoes and carrots, which are high in fat-soluble carotenoids, more nutritious than using a fat-free one or skipping the dressing altogether.

Many clinical trials (and blockbuster diet plans, from Scarsdale to South Beach to The China Study) have supported the idea that reducing the intake of simple carbohydrates — white breads, pasta, rice and sugar — leads to weight loss in obese people.

It is also well-established in the medical community that a diet high in refined carbs can contribute to the development of Type 2 diabetes. That’s because refined carbs, which are created when whole grains have been processed to remove fibrous materials like husks, have a high glycemic index — meaning that they cause a rapid rise and fall of blood sugar levels after eating. A 2004 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that as consumption of refined carbs increased in the United States, so did Type 2 diabetes in equal measure.

But if it’s good for the average overweight American to lower carbohydrate intake and up protein consumption, which low-carb diet is best? Further, is any one diet better than the next when it comes to long-term health? Yes, according to a new study funded by the National Institute of Health and published Sept. 7 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which emphatically advocates a vegetarian approach to the low-carb plan, finding that a diet high in animal protein is associated with an increased risk of death.

The large, long-term study tracked middle-aged dieters — 85,168 women aged 34 to 59, and 44,548 men aged 40 to 75 — from 1980 to 2006. All participants followed low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets, but one group got most of their protein from vegetable sources, like rice and beans, tofu and nuts and seeds. The other group ate primarily animal proteins like meat, eggs and yogurt.

“We found that all low-carb diets are not created equal,” says Dr. Frank Hu, a leader of the study and a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “If you replace refined carbohydrates with bacon and sausage, that’s not going to help you. If you want to cut out refined carbohydrates, you need to replace them with healthy sources of protein and fat — olive oil, nuts and peanut butter.”

Dieters who consumed mostly animal fats and proteins were 23% more likely to die over the course of the study than their counterparts in the general population, with a 14% increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 28% increased risk of dying from cancer.

Meanwhile, participants who followed the plant-based diet, which is naturally lower in fat and saturated fat, had a 20% decreased risk of dying than the general public, with a 23% decrease in risk of fatal heart disease.

So what does meat have that plants don’t? “Saturated fat and heme-iron are very high in red meat and processed meat,” said Hu, adding that colorectal cancer was the most common fatal cancer affecting the subjects of his study. Despite this observation, there is no known link between saturated fat, heme-iron and colorectal cancer and Hu added that it was very hard to single out one factor that could be responsible for the association.

An editorial accompanying the study called for larger-scale research that could control for factors like education-level and cigarette use, which are known to affect mortality risk and which were not accounted for in the current study — a common problem with observational studies. Still, the research as it stands offers a compelling reason to reach for an avocado, even if you really want a steak.