Entries Tagged 'Nutrition & Supplements' ↓

Sugar, long reviled by dentists and dietitians, is now being dressed up as a natural, healthful ingredient. Some of the biggest players in the American food business have started replacing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with old-fashioned sugar, and using this as a selling point.

ConAgra uses only sugar or honey in its new Healthy Choice All Natural frozen entrees, and Kraft Foods recently removed HFCS from its salad dressings.

The change comes after three decades during which HFCS had been gaining on sugar in the American diet. Consumption of the two finally drew even in 2003, according to the Department of Agriculture. However, per capita, American adults ate about 44 pounds of sugar in 2007, compared with about 40 pounds of HFCS.

With sugar sales up, the Sugar Association last year ended its Sweet by Nature campaign, which pointed out that sugar is found in fruits and vegetables.

Though research is still under way, many nutrition and obesity experts say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess.
Sources:

  New York Times March 20, 2009

Your Personal Trainers,

Eric and Nargiz Bravo

Whittier, CA

 Nearly one-fifth of American 4-year-olds are obese, and children of color are at higher risk, according to new research. Obese children are at risk for early onset of diabetes, fatty liver and musculoskeletal problems. Researchers calculated the body mass index from a sample of 8,550 Hispanic, black, white, Asian and Native American 4-year-olds. The children were born in 2001, and in 2005, their height and weight were measured — 18.4 percent of them were obese.

“Significant differences in the prevalence of obesity between racial/ethnic groups were evident at 4 years of age,” the researchers wrote in the April issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Using body mass index, they found that 31.2 percent of American Indian/Native Alaskans, 22 percent of Hispanics, 20.8 percent of blacks, 15.9 percent of whites and 12.8 percent of Asians were obese.

“It’s surprising that there are large differences by racial/ethnic group by that age,” said Sarah Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at The Ohio State University and lead study author.

Anderson and co-author Robert Whitaker’s analysis showed that children were becoming obese even before encountering soda and candy vending machines in schools.

“These results really do point to the need for us to focus attention on early childhood and the need for research to understand how these differences can emerge so early,” Anderson said. “To do that, we may need to understand the different family and cultural factors that are at play in these children’s lives.”

The cause for the early health disparities is hard to pinpoint, childhood obesity experts said.

“It’s always possible there are biological factors within ethnic groups,” said Dr. Tom Robinson, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “We know most of the changes that have occurred in body fat tend to occur from being in an environment that promotes very easy access to high-caloric foods and limited opportunities for physical activities.”

Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, called the disparities between ethnic groups disturbing.

“The expectations, lifestyle, behaviors are different on a cultural and socioeconomic basis,” he said. “Kids who live in the inner city, whose neighborhoods are perceived as dangerous, stay at home more, sit more, eat more snacks, because that’s all they can get at the local bodega. There are no supermarkets to get produce. That’s what mom is eating, so that’s what kid is eating. What we’re dealing with here is whole life issues.”

Previous research has shown that older children are becoming less active and spending more time in front of a computer or TV.

“That is displacing physical activity,” said Dr. Sarah Barlow, director of the Obesity Center at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. “You can imagine strollers, less outdoor play — all those kinds of things that have shifted how much activity younger kids are getting. At the same time, portion sizes are increasing for everybody.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults fare no better. Approximately 45 percent of blacks, 36.8 percent of Mexican Americans and 30 percent of whites are obese.

“It’s a very bad sign if we see obesity at a young age,” Robinson said. “When we see children obese at age 4, we’re likely to see complications — high blood pressure, abnormal lipids — which can lead to heart disease and stroke, diabetes in children.”

Diseases commonly seen in 40- or 50-year-olds are presenting in 6- and 7-year-olds. Obese children are developing type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and musculoskeletal problems, which occur because their bodies can’t carry that much weight, doctors said. Calculate your child’s body mass index.

“The heavier you are as a child, the likelier that extra weight will follow you through life,” Robinson said. “That’s why we see adolescents who need weight-loss surgery, because they have life-threatening complications from obesity.”

If you have an obese child…

The first step is for the parents to acknowledge that the child is overweight, instead of making excuses or comparing him or her to heavier children. Many of the parents of obese children are overweight themselves, which makes that acknowledgment difficult, said Rich, who is also director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

“While it’s important to focus on it and take it seriously, it’s also important not to give up or feel hopeless,” he said. “Then you won’t try. You want to look at it for what it is and not be defeated by it.”

When you’re trying to help your child achieve a healthy weight, remove the stigma attached to obesity.

“It should always be about health, not about losing weight,” Rich said. “You’re trying to build the positive.”

At least five servings of fruits and vegetables, cut screen time down to two hours or less, exercise at least one hour, and have zero soda and sugary drinks.

Such changes, which are not seismic shifts to lifestyles, can help the child get into a health weight.

“It’s easier to start that way, rather than try to change habits when they’re 8 or 12 or 16,” said Barlow, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

While it’s possible for some kids to outgrow the excess weight, she warned parents not to count on that. “We’ve seen over time that the environment doesn’t promote that,” she said.

Brought to you from CNN Health &

Your Personal Trainers,

Eric and Nargiz Bravo

Whittier, CA

Residues of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide found in GM food and feed can cause cell damage and even death, even at very low levels. The authors of a study on the subject say their research “… points to undesirable effects which are currently masked or hidden from scientific scrutiny.”

Roundup herbicides are among the most commonly used in the world, especially on GM crops that are engineered to be Roundup resistant. Their residues are among the major pollutants, and they are authorized as residues contaminating GM foods and feed at the tested levels.

The researchers studied toxicity mechanisms of four different Roundup formulations in human cells. The formulations were diluted at minimal doses (up to 100,000 times or more), but they still caused cell death within a few hours. The researchers also noted membrane and DNA damages, and found the formulations inhibit cell respiration.
Sources:

  Chemical Research in Toxicology January 2009;22(1):97-105

  Organic Consumers Association January 5, 2009

Your Personal Trainers,

Eric & Nargiz Bravo

Whittier, CA

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Here is a great article from Parents magazine. This especially goes out to our expecting clients. 

 Women who want to maintain a high exercise level during pregnancy may be frustrated at the outdated (”keep your heart rate below 140″) and vague (”stop exercising if you feel tired”) information they find. “Physicians aren’t trained to counsel pregnant women about exercise,” says James Pivarnik, PhD, vice president of the American College of Sports Medicine. “It’s a rare bird who keeps up with the exercise and pregnancy literature.” Doctors may have you believe that we know little about how exercise affects pregnant women. But in reality, we know quite a bit — and it’s good news for runners, cyclists, and gym rats who are moms-to-be. “If a woman is having a normal pregnancy, she can continue to exercise, and the upper limit of the level can be reasonably close to what she was doing before pregnancy,” Pivarnik says.

Will Exercise Harm My Baby?

The first thing that most newly pregnant exercisers worry about is miscarriage — thanks to age-old myths that have women believe that a bout of strenuous exercise can harm the baby. “There is no real evidence that exercise is linked to miscarriage,” says Bruce K. Young, MD, coauthor of Miscarriage, Medicine & Miracles(Bantam) and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University School of Medicine. Heavy exercise isn’t going to hurt your baby, but it will tire you more quickly than it did prepregnancy. The amount of blood a woman has increases during pregnancy by about 50 percent, and her heart needs to work harder to push all that blood around — including circulating it through the placenta, an extra organ. “That means the stress on your heart will be 50 percent greater for the same exercise that you were doing before pregnancy,” Dr. Young says. So you can work just as hard doing less than you did before you were pregnant.

Pregnancy isn’t the time to push yourself to the max, but it’s also okay — and good for you — to get your heart rate up with cardiovascular exercise. Although a target heart rate of 140 is a number that’s often cited, there’s no precise number to shoot for. When prenatal trainer Erinn Mikeska, owner of Delivering Fitness, in Dallas, works with pregnant women, she has them monitor their rate of perceived exertion (RPE) — how hard they feel they’re working, on a scale from 1 to 10. “You probably want to stay around 5 or 6,” she says. In the first trimester, when you’re not any bigger and don’t yet have balance issues, you may be able to exert yourself more if you’re not too tired.

How Will I Feel While Exercising During Pregnancy?

Pregnant women often notice that they feel out of breath more quickly than they used to. You may assume this is a sign that you’re out of shape. In fact, during pregnancy you’re breathing 20 to 25 percent more air because you need to get rid of the carbon dioxide levels in your own blood — and in your baby’s. (Babies in utero aren’t breathing on their own, but they’re still producing carbon dioxide, which transfers to the mother’s blood. She needs to breathe more so she can get rid of it.) “So breathing more doesn’t mean you’re any less fit,” explains Dennis Jensen, PhD, lead researcher on a Queen’s University study of exercise and respiratory discomfort during pregnancy. It simply means that your body is adapting exactly as it should.

Jensen’s research found that when pregnant women exercised to fatigue on a stationary bike at 20, 28, and 36 weeks, their maximal aerobic capacity (how hard they could work) was well preserved, even though they were breathing more.

What Exercise Should I Avoid During Pregnancy?

For women who are already in top shape, exercising during pregnancy is about maintaining their fitness, not about making fitness gains, Pivarnik says. “Even if I had tried to take it to a new level, my body wouldn’t have let me,” Amy Hyland says. Before Hyland got pregnant with her first son four years ago, she was a triathlete who had completed an Ironman, and she exercised six or seven days a week. She was determined to stay active during pregnancy and continued to run, swim, and even ride her bike. “For me, it was about maintaining fitness, not training hard,” she says. Hyland even did a duathlon (a run/bike/run event) at five months. “My doctor just told me to stop if I had any pain.” She finished just fine — though certainly not in record time. For most pregnant women, the fear of working out too hard is likely a misplaced worry because the pregnant body has a way of both imposing its own limits and adapting.

While there are some things to avoid, such as scuba diving, horseback riding, or any contact sport that could cause blunt-force trauma to the abdomen, there’s relatively little that pregnant women can’t do. Even the longstanding prohibition against exercising on your back is somewhat of a myth, Dr. Young says. It’s true that lying flat on your back late in your pregnancy can cause your growing uterus to push down on the veins whose job it is to deliver blood, leading to decreased blood flow. “Blood can get shunted away from the uterus, and you might feel light-headed,” Dr. Young says. But performing exercises on your back for a short period (such as a series of Pilates moves) is not likely to do any harm, and you would feel uncomfortable long before your blood flow was compromised, he explains.

Can Exercise Help with Pregnancy Mood Swings?

Hyland didn’t just exercise to stay in shape; it also helped lift her mood. “I was so happy to be able to get outside and jog for 45 minutes,” she says. In fact, exercise keeps your endorphins (your body’s natural “happy” chemicals) flowing, Mikeska says. That’s a crucial benefit, especially since we now know that there are more mood disturbances during pregnancy than postpartum, due to the massive influx of extra estrogen and progesterone (hormones linked closely to mood), says Melanie Poudevigne, PhD, health and fitness management program coordinator at Clayton State University, in Morrow, Georgia.

Psychologically speaking, pregnancy can also be stressful because it’s full of so many unknowns. “That perceived lack of control makes pregnant women very vulnerable to mood disturbances,” Poudevigne says. She and her colleagues recently conducted a study where they led sedentary pregnant women with lower-back pain through a moderate-intensity weight-training program. It not only curbed the pain, it also lifted the women’s moods, Poudevigne says. They learned how to monitor their discomfort levels, and came to feel that they were more in control of their own bodies.

When Should I Stop Exercising?

Pivarnik suggests that pregnant women who exercise monitor signs of potential problems, keeping in mind that if there’s something wrong with the pregnancy, it’s not caused by exercise. Rather, exercise might provide that extra bit of stress that brings the problem to the forefront. “Don’t ignore these symptoms (see below), especially if they keep happening when you exercise,” Pivarnik says. Stop exercising and consult your doctor if you have:

• Vaginal bleeding
• Abdominal cramping
• Light-headedness
• Excessive nausea
• Extreme headaches

A Trimester-by-Trimester Guide to Exercise

First Trimester Tips

• You can pretty much continue doing exactly what you were doing before pregnancy (including lifting the same amount of weight).
• Now is a smart time to get involved in a prenatal yoga or Pilates class; it’s a great habit to carry throughout your pregnancy (plus, you’ll get to be around other pregnant women).
• If you feel sluggish, try decreasing either the intensity or the duration of your workout rather than skipping the workout altogether (example: drop your jogging pace by 30 seconds a mile, or cut your bike ride a few miles short).

Second Trimester Tips

• Your heart is starting to work harder to circulate all the blood you built up during the first three months. Cut back your cardio intensity by 20 to 30 percent, says Dr. Young. You’ll still feel as if you’re working just as hard.
• Avoid inversions (such as Downward Dog in yoga) if you feel at all light-headed.
• If you’re a cyclist, consider switching to the stationary bike or to a Spinning class; your growing belly can make balancing on a bicycle tricky.

Third Trimester Tips

• Your joints are more vulnerable, so beware of heavy (15 pounds or more) weights; opt instead for more repetitions, says Pivarnik.
• Do free-weight exercises seated, if possible, because you’ll want your back supported (plus it’s hard to balance while standing up).
• You can continue with your cardio right up until you deliver, but don’t be surprised if you can walk faster than you can jog. Many pregnant women find that supporting their belly (with something like the Belly Band) during cardio helps take the pressure off.
• Now is a great time to try swimming: You’ll feel wonderfully weightless in the water, and it won’t stress your joints.

Great article.

Your Personal Trainers,

Eric and Nargiz Bravo.

Whittier, Ca.