“I really avoid grains and starches, so meats and vegetables and fruits are my diet,” he tweeted. “I make them all different ways to keep it interesting. What’s worked for me is no sugar, no grains, no dairy except goat cheese, no white starches, portion control, and high intensity workouts.”
My Advanced Mediterranean Diet offers a low-carb option in addition to the traditional Mediterranean diet.
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Posted in Low-Carb Eating, Overweight & Obesity, Weight Loss
Keep your fat germs away from me!
From a Gina Kolata article at The New York Times:
The evidence is from a novel experiment involving mice and humans that is part of a growing fascination with gut bacteria and their role in health and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease. In this case, the focus was on obesity. Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.
Here’s the experiment write-up.
These findings may lead the way to new obesity treatments.
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Posted in Overweight & Obesity
Tagged gut bacteria, microbiome, microbiota, obesity
When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
—Thomas Jefferson, author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
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Posted in Quote of the Day, Uncategorized
Tagged gun rights, liberty, RKBA, tyranny
“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
– John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the U.S.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Dr. Emily Deans says if you need an alarm clock to wake up, you’re probably not getting enough sleep
It’s currently popular to blame inadequate sleep time for overweight and obesity. I found a study supporting that idea in children, but not adults. Here’s the authors’ conclusion:
While shorter sleep duration consistently predicts subsequent weight gain in children, the relationship is not clear in adults. We discuss possible limitations of the current studies: 1.) the diminishing association between short sleep duration on weight gain over time after transition to short sleep, 2.) lack of inclusion of appropriate confounding, mediating, and moderating variables (i.e. sleep complaints and sedentary behavior), and 3.) measurement issues.
I found another analysis from a different team that is skeptical about the association of sleep deprivation and obesity in adults.
Everybody knows adults are getting less sleep now than we did decades ago, right? Well, not really. From Sleep Duration Across the Lifespan: Implications for Health:
Twelve studies, representing data from 15 countries and a time period of approximately 40 years, attempted to document changes in sleep duration over that time period. They found that, overall, there is no consistent evidence that sleep durations worldwide are declining among adults. Sleep duration decreased in six countries, sleep duration increased in seven countries, and mixed results were detected in two (one of which was the USA). In particular, the data from the USA suggest that although mean sleep duration may have actually increased slightly over the past 40 years, the proportion of short sleepers (six hours per night or less) also seems to have increased over the past several decades.
See, it’s complicated. Don’t believe everything you read. Not even this.
PS: It’s fun being an iconoclast now and then!
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Posted in Overweight & Obesity
Tagged obesity, overweight, sleep deprivation, sleep duration
…according to an article in The Guardian. This finding is from the PREDIMED study of Spaniards aged 50 to 88. Those who drank between two and seven glasses of wine were less prone to develop depression.
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Posted in Uncategorized
So easy to over-eat!
Isn’t it just ’cause we eat too much and exercise too little due to lack of discipline and willpower?
Science writer David Berreby has an article at Aeon suggesting it’s way more complicated than that. Even if we do eat too much, why do we? Some quotes:
And so we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice. It is undoubtedly true that societies are spending vast amounts of time and money on this idea. It is also true that the masters of the universe in business and government seem attracted to it, perhaps because stern self-discipline is how many of them attained their status. What we don’t know is whether the theory is actually correct.
***
As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’
Like liver, skeletal muscle, and brain, our body fat is a tissue that is carefully regulated by genes, hormones, enzymes, etc., which I’ll lump together as “metabolism.” Regulatory metabolic processes for liver, muscle, and brain will be different from each other and from fat tissue. Some processes aid fat storage, others lead to fat breakdown and weight loss.
Mr. Berreby discusses various trendy factors that may directly alter fat tissue metabolic processes, leading to overweight and obesity. Here’s his list:
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Posted in Overweight & Obesity
Tagged cause of obesity, overweight
…according to an article at MedPageToday. The Mediterranean diet provides copious fruit, perhaps partially explaining why it too is linked to lower diabetes risk.
You’ll get all the fruit you need in my Advanced Mediterranean Diet. And lose excess weight, to boot!
Posted in Uncategorized
Low-carb doesn’t mean “meat-only”: You can eat these low-carb fruits
A low-carb diet was superior to a traditional low-fat weight loss diet, and without adverse effects on markers of systemic inflammation, according to a report at ScienceDaily. Some medical professionals are still hesitant to accept the validity of low-carb dieting, fearing that relatively high fat and protein content may promote inflammation, leading to atherosclerosis. The study at hand should be reassuring in that regard.
Some quotes from ScienceDaily:
The researchers measured the participants’ blood levels for three common markers of inflammation — C-reactive protein, interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha — at the beginning and end of the study. They also measured body weight, body mass index (BMI) and total body and belly fat. At the start, both groups were similar in the various measures, including elevated levels of inflammation markers.
The participants on the low-carb diet lost more weight, on average, than those on the low-fat diet — 28 pounds versus 18 pounds [over the six month trial.
…
“In both groups, there was a significant drop in the levels of all three measures of inflammation,” says [Kerry] Stewart, indicating that a diet higher in fat and protein doesn’t interfere with the ability to lower inflammation, as long as you are losing weight.
Despite reading several online articles on this study, I can’t determine which low-carb diet was used, nor the level of carbohydrate restriction. Both diet groups exercised three times a week. I expect full details to be published in a scientific journal within a couple years. The research was done at Johns Hopkins University and was not funded by Atkins Nutritionals. U.S. taxpayers funded it.
If you’re looking for a low-carb diet, consider the Low-Carb Mediterranean Diet. Carb restriction starts at under 30 grams a day, but allows for increases over time as long as you’re making weight-loss progress. The typical American eats 250 to 300 grams of carbohydrate daily.
Read the rest at ScienceDaily.
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Posted in Low-Carb Eating, Overweight & Obesity, Uncategorized, Weight Loss
Tagged inflammation, inflammatory markers
The Well blog at the New York Times has details. The study at hand involved only 11 women with insomnia, mostly in their 60s. A key take-away is that it took as long as four months for some to see an improvement. So don’t get discouraged and stop exercising too soon.
It doesn’t take much exercise.
Read the whole thing (it’s brief).
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Posted in Uncategorized
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Advanced Mediterranean Diet 