DailyDirt: Diet Myths

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The general public knowledge when it comes to diet and nutrition is an absolute mess, and it's no surprise given the number of mixed messages, bad scientific studies, deceptive marketing slogans and pseudoscientific quacks out there making noise. Even in the true scientific community (once you find it underneath the sensationalist journalism), there are a lot of unanswered questions about fueling a human body. One of the most notable things about the world of nutritional science is how fast myths are adopted and how frequently the common wisdom is genuinely overturned — here are just a few recent examples:

• More and more studies are suggesting that the number of calories you eat isn't as important as where they come from. People have been calorie-counting for years, and it rarely achieves long-term results. [url]
• Our fear of fats might be somewhat overblown, too. The original study that linked fat to heart disease (and many others that followed) had some serious flaws, and since a lot of fat gets replaced with carbs in the average diet, people may actually be worse off. [url]
• A researcher who found key evidence of non-celiac gluten sensitivity has done another more rigorous study that yielded opposite results. It's going to be hard to stop the multi-gazillion dollar industry that's formed around gluten sensitivity — expect further studies to provide more mixed results. [url]

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Filed Under: calories, diets, fat, gluten, nutrition

DailyDirt: Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There is an endless stream of dieting advice out there, telling people what to eat or what not to eat -- making it sound like there are simple magic bullet solutions to losing weight and getting healthier. (The really simple solution is to eat less and exercise more, but that's usually easier said than done for most people.) There have been diets telling people to avoid all carbs or all fats, and sometimes those diets work for people, but that's just anecdotal evidence. Maybe someday we'll have more medically sound data to support/refute these trendy diet fads.

• Some serious obesity researchers are planning to study the biological causes of obesity over the next 5-6 years. Volunteers will be monitored in a controlled test facility with meticulously measured meals and exercise schedules, and hopefully, they'll be able to make sense of all the data. [url]
• Alexander and Chris Van Tulleken are twins and also medical doctors, and these two brothers tried an experiment in which one brother would go on an extremely low-fat diet and the other would eat no sugar. Both lost weight, and one lost more than the other, but their conclusion is both diets are extremely difficult to maintain for a lifetime. [url]
• A regimen of "intermittent fasting" -- where you eat very little every other day -- could be a more successful tactic for some dieters. The key to losing weight is changing your diet permanently (otherwise you gain it back when you fall back to old bad habits), and fasting every other day might be more effective than other diets. A more rigorous study of this technique is underway.... [url]

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Filed Under: alexander van tulleken, chris van tulleken, diets, fat, food, intermittent fasting, obesity, sugar, weight loss

DailyDirt: You Are What You Eat

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The 2004 documentary Super Size Me set out with a goal of showing everyone how unhealthy it is to eat nothing but fast food every day for a month. The movie wasn't done in any particularly controlled way, but it still seemed to provide some convincing anecdotal evidence for the common sense knowledge that fast food is usually junk food. But the counterexample for fast food is Jared Fogle who lost an incredible amount of weight eating only at Subway (and has gone on to become Subway's most famous spokesperson). Does it really matter what you eat? Of course it does, but exercise and watching how much you eat is important, too. Here are just a few other weird diets that are trying to prove some point (with varying success).

• John Cisna, a high school science teacher, ate only McDonald's food for 90 days... and lost weight and improved his cholesterol levels. Cisna exercised more than he did prior to his all McD diet, and he strictly limited his daily intake to 2,000 calories. [url]
• Sylvester Graham was one of America's first radical diet promoters in the 1800s. The Graham Diet consisted of a lot of bland foods including graham crackers (which would not be easily confused with those made by Nabisco today). [url]
• Almost anyone could probably eat nothing but pizza for a week without even really trying. The teenage mutant ninja turtles are probably not great diet role models, but there are a lot of varieties of pizza to keep things interesting. [url]

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Filed Under: calories, diets, food, jared fogle, john cisna, junk food, pizza, sylvester graham
Companies: mcdonald's, nabisco, subway

DailyDirt: Diets That Work...?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people think losing weight is simple: just eat less. But that formula isn't as easy to put into practice as it sounds. There are also various arguments that overeating is triggered by the foods we eat or by hormonal changes that are not under conscious control. Researchers are studying a variety of variables that effect weight loss/gain and associated symptoms, and here are just a few interesting links on the research for fighting fat.

• The Nutritional Science Initiative (NuSI) is an organization dedicated to improving the quality of research for nutrition and obesity. NuSI is currently looking to clarify the root causes of obesity (and related conditions), determining what makes people obese: overeating itself or hormonal/biochemical triggers that cause overeating. [url]
• Consuming seaweed enriched toast seemed to get some people to subsequently eat 179 fewer calories for the rest of the day. The seaweed was ground up and added to the bread without affecting the taste, and it apparently acts as a bulking agent in the stomach to make people feel full. [url]
• Is snacking at night worse than eating the same thing in the morning? Possibly. It might not just be what you eat, but when you eat it. [url]
• Marijuana smokers tend to eat more than 600 extra calories in a day, but for some reason, they have slimmer waists, higher levels of HDL and lower insulin levels and insulin resistance. So if you needed another reason to smoke pot, it's possibly a treatment for obesity and diabetes.... [url]

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Filed Under: calories, diets, food, hdl, hunger, insulin, insulin resistance, marijuana, nusi, nutrition, obesity, seaweed, smokers, snacking

DailyDirt: Creative Ways To Eat Less

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A pretty concerning statistic for Americans is that 17% of kids in the US are obese. The solutions to reduce that figure range from getting kids to eat better school lunches to eliminating various kinds of advertising aimed at getting kids to equate food with fun. There are a few other crazy ideas to keep people from getting fat, without trying to eat less or exercise more. Here are just a sampling of such suggestions.

• There's a chance that the bacteria in our intestines have some influence on obesity. From a preliminary study, morbidly obese people were found to have different bacterial communities in their intestines, but it's not clear if the different flora are a cause (or a result) of obesity. If there is a causal relationship, maybe there will be an effective treatment that involves cultivating different intestinal microbes. [url]
• "The Parasite Diet" isn't a new idea. At the turn of the 20th century, some people used tapeworms to lose weight (before modern medicine convinced people this was a very bad idea). But genetically modified tapeworms that are benign to people could be a reality someday. [url]
• Freakonomics has yet another podcast on obesity called "100 Ways to Fight Obesity" that covers some interesting proposals to prevent overweight adults and children. Some suggestions, such as smelling a vial of vomit to curb an appetite, are not so pleasant -- and not really guaranteed to work that well, either. [url]

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Filed Under: bacteria, diets, eating, flora, food, obesity, tapeworm

A Case That Has It All: Kim Kardashian, Twitter, Libel, Cookie Diets... And The New FTC Sponsorship Rules

from the i-want-a-cookie dept

Oh boy. Here's a fun one. You had to expect that there would be more defamation lawsuits about Twitter following the first one involving Courtney Love, but this one is quite impressive, considering of all the twists and turns that must be followed. It involves some company promoting something called "The Cookie Diet" (which appears to be exactly what you would think) suing Kim Kardashian for libel. If you don't keep up with pop culture, Kim Kardashian is one of those people famous for being famous. The details of the lawsuit, though, are somewhat complex, and it's difficult to figure out who to side with in this trainwreck in progress (and, yes, it seems pretty likely that the whole thing is a publicity stunt for all involved, but that doesn't mean it's not worth covering).

So, basically, the story is that this "cookie diet" supposedly has some fans in Hollywood, and a variety of media have covered the story. Some of those media reports claimed that Kardashian (among many others) were fans of the diet. The Cookie Diet people -- like you would expect -- have a page on their website that links to news coverage, including a story (which they had nothing to do with) that said Kardashian used the diet. At some point, they also sent Kardashian's publicist a box of the cookies.

At some point towards the end of last year, Kardashian saw the link on the website and got upset, posting two Twitter messages saying the following:

• "Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet is falsely promoting that I'm on this diet. NOT TRUE! I would never do this unhealthy diet! I do QuickTrim!"
• If this Dr. Siegal is lying about me being on this diet, what else are they lying about? Not cool!"

After that, her lawyers sent the Cookie Diet people a letter demanding that it remove the link to the story. It's unclear on what legal grounds the demand was made, as the diet company insists it had nothing to do with the story, did not supply the information and, in fact, had no knowledge that Kardashian had tried the diet. However, they did remove the link. It was only then that they noticed the Twitter messages and... then we get the lawsuit.

OK. So far we've already got some confusion about whether a link to a news article is actionable, combined with a Twitter libel claim. But then the story gets even more bizarre. You see, there's been a lot of talk lately about Kardashian being the most high profile client of some company that gets people to post sponsored Twitter messages. In fact, reports claim that some companies are paying her $10,000 per sponsored message. This may or may not be true, but if it is true, then the companies paying that money are likely getting seriously ripped off because they don't understand how Twitter works and how follower counts are grossly inflated.

So, what does this have to do with the cookies? Well, the cookie people are noting in the legal filing that Kardashian is paid to promote QuickTrim, but that she failed to note this. How does that become important? Well... you may recall last year's kerfuffle over the new FTC "guidelines" about paid endorsements online. While the cookie people don't specifically bring this up, it's certainly implied that Kardashian's paid sponsorship had something to do with her messages against the cookie people.

It's hard to see either side as being worth defending here, but sit back, grab a cookie and enjoy watching the legal arguments fly.

Filed Under: cookies, diets, disclosure, kim kardashian, libel, sponsorships, twitter