DadTalk

I Wish I Wrote This Article on Nutrition

While there are bits and pieces of how I view nutrition all over this site, I always wanted to put it together in one long essay. It turns out that would be a waste of time because Michael Pollan has already done this in a New York Times article.

I don’t know who is channeling whom, but one thing is clear: Pollan explains my worldview far better than I ever can. Yes, I have writer’s envy. It also is clear I need to read his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

In the Times’ magazine article, Pollan explains why processed food is bad for you, what’s wrong with the studies out there, how fads and nutritionism win over common sense thinking, why we are getting sicker, and why we need to eat less meat.

If you do nothing else for the next week, read this article. You and your family may greatly benefit.

Choices Determine Lifespan, not Genetics, Studies Show

A lot of people have internal motivating factors that drive them along. One of mine is to not die young like my dad.

Before suffering an embolism that was caused by a broken leg, he had not taken good care of himself. I don’t think he would have slipped on the ice had he kept himself physically fit in the first place.

As years went by, virtually all my relatives died of heart attacks, so that became my primary bugaboo. I figured staying fit, something most of my relatives didn’t do, would add years to my life.

Fortunately, I never really bought into the idea that dying young from heart disease was inescapable. A few years back, I read a book called The Okinawa Diet Plan, which strongly reinforced my belief that healthy living can increase lifespan by decades. The problem with Western writings on this subject? A good diet didn’t really exist.

So I read with fascination an article in The New York Times, which reveals that many aspects of health, and particularly lifespan, ARE NOT GENETICALLY PREDETERMINED.

I particularly like the graphic that shows even height is only 85 percent based on genetics; weight 70 percent; memory 20 percent; and lifespan 3 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those numbers get revised downward in a few years.

The Okinawan diet is another paradigm altogether. Elder Okinawans eat a diet based on soups, sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables and a tiny bit of fish. Those who eat the diet – and stay physically fit – often live into their hundreds in near perfect health. Those who eat the Western diet die as young or younger than Americans.

Much of the research in the Times article inadvertently explains why the Okinawan phenomenon is likely: genetics simply do not determine lifespan beyond normal human limitation, which has yet to be determined. Random events (such as a car crash), lifestyle, general health and nutrition do.

What does this have to do with parenting? Everything. Many people in this country seem to believe that poor health and shorter lifespans are inevitable. But if they are not, then how you raise your kids can have an enormous impact on their later years.

If only 3 percent of lifespan is determined by genetics, than at least some of the 97 percent can be influenced by choices. You can teach kids to not be reckless to lower the risk of car crashes. You can teach your kids to eat right and exercise regularly to increase lifespan.

In a way, I find this Time story a sort of validation for those of us who regularly chat about parenting. In my mind I hear this phrase: “Yes, it does matter what you do as a parent.”

My Diet Plan Get the Sludge Out of Your Food

Author’s Note: This is one in an occasional series on how I lost weight – about 30 40 pounds so far. Most of the principles I followed are based on The Okinawa Diet Plan. While these methods worked well for me, please see a doctor before embarking on ANY weight-loss plan. I explain more about dieting here.

I always suspected that something was wrong with America’s food. While my mom was a good cook by 1970s standards, I thought food should be fresher and that each ingredient should taste great regardless of what sauce was dumped on it. I was deeply dubious of meals that came out of a can.

I had this weird idea that there should be real cheese in Macaroni & Cheese instead of a list of chemicals that could boost a rocket into orbit. I wondered why some hot dogs had a “funny” flavor to them. I thought bread should not be the consistency of toilet paper. I questioned why fruit was rock hard and vegetables tasted like cardboard.

So when I began college in 1982, I couldn’t wait to expand my food horizons. Oops, I went to Indiana University in Bloomington. Still, there were options there that I never had before: one or two health food stores, a handful of interesting restaurants and a humongous salad bar at my dorm.

When I graduated and moved to Arizona in 1986, a new grocery store called Ceres opened near my apartment. The place could have been the prototype for Whole Foods. There, I was introduced to all kinds of then-new foods such as quinoa and amaranth. But the store was too far ahead of its time and eventually closed.

Ever since then, though, I’ve sought out high-quality food, skipping normal grocery stores as much as possible. Another small Arizona chain, Reay’s Ranch Market, which eventually was gobbled up by Wild Oats, used to get high-end beef that would have made chefs at Morton’s jealous.

During this whole time of exploring food, I always strived to eat what I thought was a healthy diet; hey, I just happen to love steamed vegetables. More recently, I’ve greatly cut back on most animal products after my cholesterol jumped to 295 four years ago. As it turns out, cutting out meat and further increasing plant-based foods, cut my cholesterol to a comparatively respectable 192.

I also suspect another very tasty food ingredient led to my cholesterol problem: partially hydrogenated oils. Keep in mind that hydrogenated oils are in just about every food product you can imagine: margarine, peanut butter, bread, cookies, donuts, salad dressings, fast food, cooking oils and candy are all good examples.

While my brother, who’s a nutritionist, warned me of that ingredient’s dangers back in my early Arizona years, it took time to greatly cut back on the creamy, artificially-made oil. Once I scored that 295, I finally dumped that poison for good. I suspect it will take years before all that hydrogenated crap is cleared out of my arteries – after all, this stuff remains solid at room temperature.

Experts have been ineffectually sounding the alarms about hydrogenated oils for several years, but I suspect most Americans don’t realize just how many products this gray sludge is in. Apparently, someone in New York City Health Department does know.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, is urging all city restaurants to stop serving food with hydrogenated oils, which also are known as trans fats. Reason? Heart disease is the biggest killer in New York.

Frieden’s request triggered several stories in The New York Times, including this one. While most high-end restaurants avoid trans fats, up to 60 percent of all restaurants in the city use them, reports the Times.

New York’s request follows a Food and Drug Administration decision that there are NO SAFE LEVELS of trans fats in a healthy diet. The FDA is even requiring the levels of trans fats be included on nutrition labels.

It’s interesting to note that Denmark already has enacted a ban on trans fats and Canada is considering it, reports the Times. Such bans must scare the bejeebers out of food manufacturers and for good reason:

1. Trans fats simply have the longest shelf live. The longer a box of cookies can gather dust at a store, the greater likelihood it will be sold.
2. Trans fats are creamy/smooth on the tongue. Nabisco, the makers of Oreos, reports difficulty making the middle creamy enough to satisfy lifelong consumers. Indeed, the middles of health-food versions of the cookie have a different consistency.
3. Trans fats are cheap, cheap, cheap.

But one of my discoveries about food after giving up trans fats: all other foods taste better. While I can’t prove it, there is something about trans fats that deaden the palate. I suspect the oil, nay sludge, remains on the tongue, covering up the taste buds. Most other oils seem to dissolve faster in the mouth.

Removing trans fats from your plate also may expand your lifespan while shrinking your waistline. I know it greatly helped in my own weight-loss efforts.

An easy way for me to keep the gray goo out of my diet goes back to my roots about eating – I favor quality above all else. I simply equate trans fats with the marginal food I ate while growing up, which makes it easier to pay a little bit extra for a product made without partially hydrogenated oil.

Even more importantly, we never feed our children trans fats. So when Seth was introduced to graham crackers at school, we trudged over to Whole Foods and bought him trans fat-free version of the cookies. He loves them.

I suspect, though, it will be a long time before America wakes up to this dietary threat. How can most people even keep up with the poisons in our food? Instead, food manufacturers and restaurants must be targeted. Whether through regulation, legislation or threat of lawsuits, hydrogenated oils need to be flushed down the drain.

Previous posts:

• My Personal Diet Plan
• Don’t Be Dense About Calories
• Don’t Be Dense About Calories II
• Dont' Be Thick, Just Add Water

My Diet Plan Don’t Be Thick, Just Add Water

Author’s Note: This is one in an occasional series on how I lost weight – about 30 40 pounds so far. Most of the principles I followed are based on The Okinawa Diet Plan. While these methods worked well for me, please see a doctor before embarking on ANY weight-loss plan. I explain more about dieting here.

One of the toughest things about modern society is that most humans are instinctually attracted to the most sugary, fat-laden foods within their field of vision. Candy bars. Fatty meats. Cake and cookies. It is a tough impulse to fight, and one of the only ways to avoid eating junk is to feel full. Very full.

How? Strangely enough, it turns out we can trick our bodies by pigging out on soups and stews. The simple act of adding water to a meal is one of the single best ways to lose weight, according the The Okinawa Diet Plan:

A fascinating study by researchers at Pennsylvania Sate University clearly illustrates this point and demonstrates that it’s the water in the food, not drinking water, that increases our feelings of satiety. In the study, researchers served lunch to 24 hungry young women and measured how much they ate. The first course was a 270-calorie appetizer of chicken-rice casserole with varying amounts of water. Women who started with the casserole alone or drank a 10-ounce glass of water along with it went on to eat another 300 calories of food at the main course, whether they drank the water or not. But when the 10-ounce glass of water was added to the casserole – in effect, making it soup – each woman ate only 200 calories of food at the main course – about 30 percent less! These women did not feel hungrier later in the day or feel any need to make up those calories later.

When I began my diet back in July of 2004, I started off by making at least one meal each day soup- or stew-based. Because I’ve never been a big broth fan, I make my soups by filling a bowl with vegetables and a few noodles before pouring in the broth.

While I was trying to lose weight, I favored bean thread noodles because of their low calorie density. Once my weight was down to a comfortable 158 (from 198), I eased up a bit and started experimenting with noodles that were slightly higher in calorie density. But when my weight rises a few pounds, I go back to the bean threads.

Keep in mind, eating soup to lose weight won’t work if you add lots of fattening ingredients such as sausage, cheese, milk or oils. I know this will send some folk running out of the room, but putting tofu in for protein instead of Prosciutto or shrimp will help you lose weight much faster. Or substitute protein-heavy shitake mushrooms.

As for the broth portion of the meal, I usually use a low-salt miso or vegetable stock. I also use tomato or squash soup, but I recommend pairing it with buckwheat or wheat noodles rather than bean-threads, which will become mush in the heavier stock.

I decided against using animal-based broths because I also was trying to lower my cholesterol. The effort paid off because my cholesterol is now 197 instead of the 295 it had risen to by 2002. I do not take any drugs for the condition and control my cholesterol completely through diet.

Switching to the soups and stews turned out to have a variety of benefits for me:

• I felt full in such a way that I did not crave calorie-dense junk food.
• My energy level stayed on an even keel for a longer period of time than my old diet.
• I was clearly eating fewer calories at dinner than I used to, which contributed to weight loss.
• Foods with high water content will ease dehydration. Considering I was once hospitalized for a dehydration-related illness, that’s a big deal to me.

In case you were wondering why eating water-rich foods work, here are the Okinawa authors again:

One problem that makes weight control such a challenge is that our body’s natural sensors don’t tally our calories very well. We’re designed to check food amount, not caloric content. It’s this faulty feedback system that makes it so easy to overindulge in calorie-rich foods – like the carrot muffin that looks healthy but weighs in at 400 calories. But while this system is somewhat imperfect, it can also be your friend – when you take advantage of water-rich foods. Your body interprets the water in water-rich foods as actual calorie-bearing food, allowing you to fill up on fewer calories and not be hungry later.

Remember when ice cream came in half-gallon boxes? My dad would peel the four sides and top off before consuming the entire half-gallon in a single sitting. Since I was endowed with that same enormous appetite, this simple principle was the single largest key to losing weight. I must eat a lot to feel full. Fortunately, my body is fooled by a half-gallon of soup.

Previous posts:

• My Personal Diet Plan
• Don’t Be Dense About Calories
• Don’t Be Dense About Calories II

Editor’s note: Thanks go to 2Blowhards, whose recent link to this series spurred me to post another entry.

My Diet Plan Don’t Be Dense About Calories II

Author’s Note: This is one in an occasional series on how I lost weight – about 30 40 pounds so far. Most of the principles I followed are based on The Okinawa Diet Plan. While these methods worked well for me, please see a doctor before embarking on ANY weight-loss plan. I explain more about dieting here.

“Calories count, no matter what you read in the press. The laws of thermodynamics have not been reversed.”

Those words, which were spoken by Dr. Barbara J. Rolls at a recent meeting on the obesity epidemic, are crucial to understanding why it’s so difficult to lose weight. Here’s an explanation by Rolls, a professor of behavioral health at Penn State, as summed up by The New York Times:

With respect to weight gain and loss, the laws of thermodynamics can be translated as: Calories consumed must be used or they will be stored as body fat. The body does not waste energy, no matter what its source. When people are placed on carefully controlled calorie-restricted diets, the amount of fat in the diet – whether 25 percent or 45 percent of calories – has little effect on weight loss.

People who claim that they can eat as much as they want (of protein and fat, for example) and lose weight as long as they avoid certain kinds of foods (carbohydrates, for example) are really eating less (that is, fewer calories) than they did before.

If you have any doubts about what highly calorie-dense food can do to your waistline, as well as health, you haven’t yet watched Super Size Me. In that documentary, a fit Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s for a month. Each day he’s eating thousands of calories over his daily needs. By the end of the movie, his cholesterol has skyrocketed, he’s gained about 25 pounds and his doctors are in palpable fear he might die.

When it comes to McDonald’s, all their food is calorie dense. Even the salads are as fattening as a Big Mac because of high-calorie salad dressings. If you want to see what I mean, read this older post about a calorie counter I found at The Washington Post. The calculator shows that “a Big Mac, Hot Fudge Sunday, Medium French Fries and Medium Coke totaled 1590 calories. That means a person could only eat two pieces of bread for the rest of the day to stay under their caloric needs.

My Diet Plan Don’t Be Dense About Calories

Author’s Note: This is one in an occasional series on how I lost weight – almost 30 40 pounds so far. Most of the principles I followed are based on The Okinawa Diet Plan. While these methods worked well for me, please see a doctor before embarking on ANY weight-loss plan. I explain more about dieting here.

For most of my adult life, I have lived by the mantra, “If I gain weight, it’s because I’m not exercising enough.” That was fine and dandy when I was biking 100-200 miles a week in my 20s. Or even running 20 miles a week in my 30s.

But the folly of my mantra came clear after the birth of my son Seth two years ago. Actually, I kept running for several months, but fires in the Angeles National Forest, a huge project at work and repeated bouts of Seth-delivered flu interrupted my regular exercising routine. I slowly slid up about 10 pounds in addition to the 10 pounds I was already overweight.

At 5-foot, 10-inches, many Americans would argue that weighing 198 pounds isn’t the worst thing in the world. But to me, it was sheer hell. I frequently felt out of breath, and I literally felt uncomfortable most of the day. I could only run a fraction of the mileage I was accustomed to.

I knew I needed to lose weight, but most of the diet adjustments I made didn’t help. So it was sheer dumb luck that someone threw a copy of The Okinawa Diet Plan onto the pile of free giveaways where I work. I picked it up and put it in my pile of books that I never have any time to read. Only I did start reading it. A chapter here and a chapter there. Eventually, I absorbed most of the book’s concepts, even though to date I haven’t even looked at the recipes.

But the one I kept coming back to was this: “Making Caloric Density Work for You.” This chapter, more than any other, provided the key to losing weight. And it verified my belief that something was wrong with the food pyramid, and it made the Atkins Diet Plan look absolutely stupid.

Caloric Density is calculated by dividing the calorie count per serving by the serving weight in grams. Take one of my favorite foods, dark chocolate, as an example. A single serving has 230 calories and weighs 40 grams. So, 230/40 equals a Calorie Density of 5.75.

The Calorie Density of a cucumber, another favorite food, is a mere 0.1. Essentially, you can eat 57.5 cucumbers before reaching the total calorie count of 1.5 ounces of dark chocolate. That’s a lot of cucumbers; you can guess which leaves me feeling more full.

So here was my revelation: I could eat LOTS of food with a low Calorie Density but VERY LITTLE food that is high in Calorie Density. It seems so obvious now, but I was pretty surprised to see the densities of some foods. Down the road I’ll post a table of some common foods and their density levels to give you an idea of how I made my choices.

My Personal Diet Plan

While it’s fairly easy to single out government, big business, culture and fad diets in the war against obesity, it’s a lot tougher to suggest solutions that work. To complicate matters, most researchers don’t agree on numerous weight-related issues: Why are Americans getting fatter? Why are children also becoming too heavy? What’s the fastest way to lose weight? What’s the right balance of grains, meat, fat and produce? Will losing weight too fast damage my health?

Unlike other areas of research, science surrounding eating is about as muddled as you can imagine. Some research questions the healthfulness of soy even though billions of healthy, long-lived humans eat copious quantities of the legume. Those few negative research reports confuse Americans, even though most studies show the food product lowers cholesterol and reduces risk of heart disease.

Even more confusing is the research on fad diets. There is no question, for example, that the Atkins Diet will help you lose some weight. Because Atkins requires you to cut out carbohydrates, those on the diet reduce their total calorie count, which will cut pounds. Also, the high-protein diet kicks in something known as ketosis, which means body fat is burned to make up for the shortage of carbohydrates. Atkins as a diet plan is very difficult to attack because it does help you lose weight initially.

Unfortunately, there may be long-term side effects with Atkins, which requires dieters to greatly reduce consumption of grains, fruit and vegetables. Eating steak nonstop may not trouble some people, who seem better genetically adjusted to deal with large quantities of protein. The rest of us, though, risk gout, high cholesterol, intestinal cancer, liver and kidney damage and a return to obesity. You can read more about the problems of the Atkins Diet on my site, or go to this page posted by the Partnership for Essential Nutrition.

The reason I make such a big deal about obesity on DadTalk is because I suspect the American diet has a huge qualitative impact on parenting.

First, parents want to live long enough to see their children grow up. And that’s part of my motivation for losing weight. I know what it’s like to grow up without a dad since mine died when I was 9. Research consistently shows that low calorie consumption and a lean body can increase lifespan.

Second, being fit helps parents care for their children. We all know how much energy it takes to keep up with them. And being fit sends a message to youngsters that they should be slim, too.

Third, few parents want to see their children grow up with weight-related health problems. I’m still freaked out that blood pressure medicine was doctors’ and parents’ treatment of choice for 8-year-old Adiva Berkovitz rather than an aggressive weight-loss plan.

But then it seems our nation is headed in the direction of a medical cure to obesity rather than a dietary one. After all, the pharmaceutical company first to come up with a safe, effective weight-loss plan in a pill will make billions. Read this from The Washington Post: