Sunday, February 26th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 3:51 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
Candy Makers Cater to the Health-Conscious
By ELLIOTT MINOR, Associated Press Writer Sun Feb 19, 9:10 PM ET
ALBANY, Ga. - It’s every chocolate lover’s wish that their favorite indulgence could somehow be healthy for them. Now, chocolate makers claim they have granted that wish.
Mars Inc., maker of Milky Way, Snickers and M&M’s candies, next month plans to launch nationwide a new line of products made with a dark chocolate the company claims has health benefits.
Called CocoaVia, the products are made with a kind of dark chocolate high in flavanols, an antioxidant found in cocoa beans that is thought to have a blood-thinning effect similar to aspirin and may even lower blood pressure. The snacks also are enriched with vitamins and injected with cholesterol-lowering plant sterols from soy.
But researchers are skeptical about using chocolate for its medicinal purposes and experts warn it’s no substitute for a healthy diet.
“To suggest that chocolate is a health food is risky,” said Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Recent research has not established a link between flavanols and a reduced risk of cancer or heart disease, she said. And with obesity already a serious health problem, “the last thing we need is for Americans to think they can eat more chocolate.”
A paper published by the
American Heart Association concluded that chocolate contains chemicals, including flavanols, that have the potential to reduce heart disease. But it added researchers still don’t know enough about flavanols to make dietary recommendations.
Other major chocolate companies also have started promoting the flavanol content of their dark chocolates, such as Hershey’s Extra Dark, introduced last fall with highlights on its label touting its 60 percent cocoa content and high level of flavanol.
Dark chocolate, which contains more flavanols than regular chocolate, is the fastest growing segment of the $10 billion-a-year chocolate market. Hershey reports that its dark-chocolate sales have grown 11.2 percent over the past four years.
Last year, Hershey Co. acquired San Francisco-based Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker Inc., known for its dark chocolate with high cocoa content and baking products, and plans to add new dark-chocolate products.
Mars created a new division, Mars Nutrition for Health & Well-Being, to distribute CocoaVia. The company has sold the CocoaVia products online for a couple years. They are already available at retail stores in 34 states, selling for nearly $1 a bar.
“Chocolate … is the number one flavor ingredient in the world,” said Jimmy Cass, Mars’ vice president of marketing. “Heart health is the No. 1 concern of adults over the age of 40 in every civilized nation. Putting those two together is automatically a big idea.”
The industry, trying to appeal to baby boomers, has been focusing on products that may provide health benefits, including gourmet chocolates, organic chocolates and “functional” chocolates such as CocoaVia.
Rachael Brandeis, a national spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association in Atlanta, said dark chocolate is a good source of flavanols, but so are other foods such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
“Dark chocolate can fit into a healthy diet,” she said. The fat in chocolate is a type that does not raise cholesterol levels, but it can add unwanted pounds if a person overindulges, she said.
“I would say if you enjoy the taste of dark chocolate, enjoy it,” she said. “But you always have to be conscious of how much you’re eating.”
Mars adamantly defends its health claims for CocoaVia.
The company has done research studies that have shown it can improve blood flow, said Mars’ chief scientist Harold Schmitz.
“We believe … there can be a significant benefit around blood pressure, but we have not conclusively proven that,” he said.
The soy extract was included in the products because it has been shown to reduce cholesterol, Cass said.
Norman Hollenberg, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, told a recent cocoa symposium that the Cuna Indians of Panama, who drink flavanoid-rich cocoa beverages, have a 10 percent lower risk of dying of heart attacks and a 20 percent lower risk of dying of cancer than average Panamanians.
More studies are needed to determine whether it is the cocoa consumption or other factors that make them healthier, Hollenberg said.
“The data assigning it to one mechanism just isn’t there yet,” he said.
Regardless of the research, Mars’ Albany plant is filled with the fragrance of dark, warm chocolate. A seemingly endless procession of CocoaVia bars move along a conveyor belt under the scrutiny of human and electronic eyes.
It is a sterile environment of gleaming stainless machinery and highly polished floors where workers wear white suits or smocks, hair nets, safety glasses and white helmets.
The health bars pass through a machine that cools them, several that cut them to size and another that dribbles decorative swirls across the top and gives the underside a final coating of dark chocolate.
The Wellness Letter, a health and fitness newsletter published by the University of California-Berkeley, evaluated CocoaVia and advised readers to enjoy the snacks on occasion for pleasure, but not as a health food.
“CocoaVia’s benefits are still unproven,” the newsletter said. “Eat it only if you like it and are willing to pay the premium price.”
Fruits and vegetables are still the best source of the antioxidants found in dark chocolate and they also contain vitamins, minerals, fiber and plant chemicals not found in chocolate, the newsletter said.
CocoaVia was just an expensive candy bar, concluded John Swartzberg, chairman of the newsletter’s editorial board and clinical professor of health and medical science at Berkeley.
“But it did taste good,” he said.
Sunday, February 19th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 3:38 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
Feb 13, 2006 10:32 pm US/Eastern
Weight Loss All In Your Head?
For more information on Hypnotherapy, contact Dr. Stiles at 724/940-2211
(KDKA) PITTSBURGH Tried all the diet fads – but can’t seem to keep the pounds off? More and more people are turning to a controversial method that some say has unbelievable results.
In fact, a local doctor says he has successfully treated over 12,000 patients – with a 95-percent success rate.
The method uses hypnosis as the key to shedding those unwanted pounds and keeping them off.
Debbie Kasper and Tony Fontana say they were skeptical; but together, they’ve lost 165-pounds.
“I thought the bell was going to go off and I was going to bark like a chicken,” jokes Fontana – who didn’t think he would be a good candidate. “I’m a very hard-headed, stubborn individual,” he explains. “You can’t hypnotize me!”
But after a hypnotherapy session with psychologist Dr. Bill Stiles, Fontana and Kasper say the pounds started the melt away.
Fontana lost 80 pounds; Kasper lost 85 pounds.
“The hypnosis part allows them to get into what is called the ‘alpha state,’ that’s a state where you’re relaxed enough that you’re super-focused,” Stiles explains. “That’s the hypnosis part; and the words then go into the mind and they stick.”
Dr. Stiles likens it to reprogramming a computer. “The subconscious mind is like all that perfect memory where the habits are stored,” Stiles adds, “it’s like the hard drive of a computer.”
A typical session starts out with anywhere from one patient to up to 15 clients relaxing.
Once they’re in the “alpha” state, Stiles says he begins to plant the seeds that he claims can change your life.
After the hypnotherapy session, patients must listen to an audio tape for 40-minutes a day for 21 days. Stiles says it helps engrain the proper tools in the deepest recesses of their minds.
Seven months after their hypnotherapy session, both Debbie Kasper and Tony Fontana have kept off the weight and regained a healthier lifestyle.
For more information on hypnotherapy, you can contact Dr. Stiles at:
Hypnotherapy Clinic
119 VIP Drive
Wexford, PA
Phone: (724) 940-2211
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Sunday, February 12th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 3:42 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
McDonald’s Says Fries Have More Trans Fats
NewsAdvance.org reports that
McDonald’s french fries just got fatter — by nutritional measurement. The world’s largest restaurant chain said Wednesday its fries contain a third more trans fats than it previously knew, citing results of a new testing method it began using in December 2005. That means the level of potentially artery-clogging trans fat in a portion of large fries is eight grams, up from six, with total fat increasing to 30 grams from 25.
Often used by restaurants and in packaged foods, trans fats are thought to cause cholesterol problems and increase the risk of heart disease. The dietary guidelines for Americans that were issued by a government panel last year said people should consume as little trans fat as possible.
The disclosure comes as McDonald’s Corp. starts rolling out packaging for its menu items that contain facts about their nutritional content - a move made voluntarily but with the fast-food industry under pressure from consumer groups and the government to provide more information…
Seen on Blue’s News and Digg.
Sunday, February 5th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 2:11 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
Obesity Might Be Catching
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay ReporterMONDAY, Jan. 30 (HealthDay News) — As if the close proximity of delicious, fattening foods weren’t bad enough, obesity might actually be infectious.
That’s the incredulous finding from new research involving overweight chickens; the study suggests that a contagious virus can make fat cells fatter.
“Obesity is a complex, chronic disease,” noted lead researcher Leah D. Whigham, a research scientist in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Wisconsin. “There are lots of factors contributing to the broad epidemic, but because of the rate of increase, it is very possible that it is partially due to an infectious disease.”
The findings appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.
The research team found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 triggers obesity in chickens. Adenoviruses are a frequent cause of colds, and a number of other types of illnesses.
The finding is not entirely new: earlier evidence suggests that two other adenoviruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, also cause obesity in animals. In addition, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity.
“There is an additional human adenovirus that causes obesity in the animal model we used,” Whigham said. “In this study, we showed that Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens.”
There are more than 50 adenoviruses that need to be studied to see if others, beyond the three identified, also are linked to obesity, Whigham said. To this end, the researchers also developed a method of testing the effect of these adenoviruses in human fat cells.
Whigham said the common bugs “increase the fat in the fat cells. But we will still need to do animal studies to confirm those results.” Still, the evidence is very strong that adenoviruses also cause obesity in humans, she added.
“There is quite a bit of already published data with Ad-36 and its association with obesity,” she said. “If you look at obese people, more of them have antibodies to Ad-36 than lean people.”
In the future, Whigham thinks that it may be possible to develop a vaccine against obesity to target these viruses. “A great way to handle the [obesity] epidemic is to come up with a vaccine,” she said. “We are still a long way from that, because first we have to know how many of the human adenoviruses cause obesity.”
The findings don’t mean eating right and exercising are a waste of time, Whigham said.
“It is important for people to pay attention to those factors,” she said. “We don’t know how diet and exercise interact with the virus. Even if you are antibody positive, if you watch your diet and exercise, maybe it won’t have the same effect. There are people who have the antibodies but are not obese.”
One expert disagreed with the notion that viruses are key to the obesity epidemic.
“There are far more satisfying explanations for epidemic obesity, said Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center Yale University School of Medicine and author of The Flavor Point Diet.”We have more calories available per capita per day than ever before in history. And more and more of those calories are packaged in highly processed, flavor-enhanced, processed foods,” he said.
Katz said there’s a simpler explanation for why more Americans are getting fatter: because they can.
“We live in a profoundly ‘obesigenic’ world, one that makes weight gain the path of least resistance,” he said. “Any contribution that adenoviruses make to epidemic obesity is certain to be little more than specks of dust compared with these ‘obesigenic’ factors.”
Another expert agreed with Katz that viruses probably have only a small role to play in obesity.
“The obesity epidemic in the U.S. can be largely explained by our inactive, over-indulgent lifestyle behaviors,” said Lona Sandon, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas. “It is possible that viruses may play a role in setting us up for becoming overweight, similar to how our genes may be programmed to lead to obesity under the right circumstances.”
But for now, Sandon said, people need to stick with what works for preventing and treating obesity. “That’s eating less and moving more. We may not be able to change our genes and environment, but we can change the way we eat and exercise.”
Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.
Sunday, January 29th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 3:09 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
Limiting Flavors May Be Key to Weight Loss
By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Wed Jan 18, 2:54 PM ET
CHICAGO - Forget counting carbs and calories. Obesity researcher Dr. David Katz says the way to lose weight is to limit flavors.
Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, says people stop eating when the brain’s appetite center registers “full.” But eating lots of flavors promotes overeating because different sensors must register full for appetite to subside, Katz says.
The typical American diet “is a mad cacophony of flavors,” Katz said this week during a book-tour stop in Chicago.
Instead, Katz advocates flavor-themed meals — an apple day, for example, or a sesame day, even an occasional chocolate day.
The idea is perhaps less boring than it sounds. For example, pineapple day features pineapple juice and cereal for breakfast; pineapple-walnut chicken salad and crackers for lunch; pineapple shrimp, bulgur, sauteed peas and tossed salad for dinner; and caramelized pineapple rings for dessert.
The theory and practice are detailed in Katz’s new book, “The Flavor Point Diet,” based on a little-publicized phenomenon called sensory-specific satiety. That is the term used to describe the way food becomes less palatable when enough of it is eaten. Adding a new flavor renews the process, numerous studies have shown.
Katz, 42, the trim, youthful medical contributor to ABC News and a nutrition columnist for
Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, tested the diet on 20 people for 12 weeks and said they lost an average of more than 16 pounds.
Jonathan Link, a 34-year-old information services specialist from New Milford, Conn., was one of them. Link — who was 5 feet 9 inches and 183 pounds, with high cholesterol — was skeptical at first.
“I thought, `Oh, that’s disgusting, you have to eat peaches all day,’” Link said.
But Link said the diet was surprisingly varied. He lost about 20 pounds early last year and has kept it off by permanently changing his eating habits.
“By week two, I started getting stuffed. I couldn’t even finish dinner because I was feeling so full,” Link said.
Katz recommends 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days. His flavor theme builds on the diets many nutritionists advocate — lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains and nuts; fish and poultry for protein; limited fat; and healthy snacks.
Brown University researcher Hollie Raynor, who has studied sensory-specific satiety, said many diets are based on a more extreme interpretation of the concept, including ice cream diets, soup diets and diets that severely restrict carbohydrates.
Whether Katz’s diet works because it limits flavors, or because it promotes healthy eating and exercise, is unclear, Raynor said. “If you’re eating healthy and exercising, you’re going to lose weight,” she said.
Susan Burke, chief nutritionist for ediets.com, a weight-management Web site, said there is some validity to Katz’s flavor theory. “Jumbling flavors at any one meal can trigger you to eat more,” Burke said.
“Whether or not the science will bear out that this actually is the cause of the weight loss” is unclear, Burke said. But she added: “At the very least, this program you can be assured is going to be nutritious.
Sunday, January 22nd 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 2:21 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
The Fat Tax: A Controversial Tool in War Against Obesity
By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter
Wed Jan 11, 11:47 PM ET
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 11 (HealthDay News) — In America’s ongoing battle of the bulge, one strategy to combat the nation’s obesity epidemic has generated more than a decade’s worth of attention and controversy.
Popularly known as the “fat tax” or the “Twinkie tax,” the concept first gained widespread attention in 1994 when Yale University psychology professor Kelly D. Brownell outlined the idea in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
Addressing what he called a “dire set of circumstances,” Brownell proposed two food-tax options: A big tax, in the range of 7 percent to 10 percent, to discourage the purchase of unhealthy processed foods while subsidizing healthier choices; or a much smaller tax to fund long-term public health nutrition programs.
“The American food system is set up as if maximizing obesity were the aim,” Brownell told HealthDay. “So the idea was to tax either certain classes of foods — like soft drinks or fat foods — or to just tax specific foods high in calories or low in nutrition. Then you use the income from such a tax to subsidize the sale of healthy foods in order to reverse what is the unfortunate reality now: that it costs more to eat a healthier diet.”
The tax, said Brownell, would be a pro-active response to a food industry and consumer culture that increasingly promotes high-fat/low-nutrition products as the cheapest, tastiest, most convenient and most available dietary options.
Brownell emphasized that, if properly implemented, fat taxes could yield major benefits. For example, slapping a single penny tax onto the cost of soft drinks across the country would generate almost $1.5 billion annually — a figure that far exceeds the budgets of current government-sponsored nutrition programs, he said.
The non-profit Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports that, in recent years, levies of this kind have, in fact, been imposed — with states such as Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington creating “fat taxes” on soft drinks sold within their borders.
Other states such as California, Maine and Maryland have also experimented with hefty “fat-tax” legislation, Brownell said. However, all the levies were ultimately repealed, highlighting several practical problems with the fat-tax concept identified by both Brownell and the IOM.
One big problem is that money collected through fat taxes has typically not been earmarked for obesity-prevention programs or healthy food subsidies; instead they were often used to cover budget deficits.
Concerns have also been raised that such a tax is inherently regressive, meaning it punishes poorer people who must spend much of their limited income on food.
And although the fat tax appears to have gained popularity as a theoretical approach to weight management, deciding exactly which products are unhealthy, taxable foods is a tricky practical matter.
Nonetheless, while the IOM has remained neutral on the fat-tax issue, some legislators across the country are moving full-steam ahead to get food-related levies on the books.
New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, a Democrat from New York City, is one such proponent of the fat tax.
For three years Ortiz has championed a bill that would ding any foods high in calories, fat or carbs — including perennial favorites such as potato chips, candies and french fries. The bill would also add a one-cent surcharge on video games.
The taxes would generate an estimated $50 million a year, and all the money would be used to augment the state’s $1.5 million budget for the Childhood Obesity Prevention Program. The program, established in 2001, is designed to promote healthy eating habits among children and adults through family physician interventions and after-school dietary and physical activity workshops.
“We have a very chronic epidemic regarding obesity,” said Ortiz. “And we think the food tax is part of the solution. This will be a vehicle to fund the obesity prevention program that can provide the services needed to assure that our children and the working families of the state of New York will get the proper information on healthy lifestyles. It will save lives and the next generation.”
Sunday, January 15th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 2:14 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
Survey: Some Americans OK With Being Fat By CANDICE CHOI, Associated Press Writer
Thin is still in, but apparently fat is nowhere near as out as it used to be. A survey finds America’s attitudes toward overweight people are shifting from rejection toward acceptance. Over a 20-year period, the percentage of Americans who said they find overweight people less attractive steadily dropped from 55 percent to 24 percent, the market research firm NPD Group found.
With about two-thirds of U.S. adults overweight, Americans seem more accepting of heavier body types, researchers say. The NPD survey of 1,900 people representative of the U.S. population also found other more relaxed attitudes about weight and diet.
While body image remains a constant obsession, the national preoccupation with being thin has waned since the late 1980s and early 1990s, said the NPD’s Harry Balzer.
Those were the days when fast food chains rushed to install salad bars. In 1989, salads as a main course peaked at 10 percent of all restaurant meals. Today, those salad bars have all but vanished and salads account for just 5 1/2 percent of main dishes.
“It turns out health is a wonderful topic to talk about,” Balzer said. “But to live that way is a real effort.”
Fewer people said they’re trying to “avoid snacking entirely” — just 26 percent in 2005, down from 45 percent in 1985 — while 75 percent said they had low-fat, no-fat or reduced fat products in the last two weeks, down from 86 percent in 1999, according to the survey.
At 5-feet-6 and 230 pounds, Lara Frater likes her body just fine and turns up her nose at trendy diets.
“I don’t beat myself up if I have a piece of cake,” said Frater, a 34-year-old New Yorker and author of “Fat Chicks Rule.”
The survey’s findings aren’t that surprising, as attitudes about weight constantly shift, said John Cawley, associate professor at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology.
While heavy women were idealized at times — think “Rubenesque,” a term born of 17th century painter Peter Paul Rubens’ full-figured women — corseted women with tiny waists were preferred in other eras.
“I don’t think we’re going to go back to worshipping obese women, but it’s interesting to see how attitudes change as more people become overweight,” Cawley said.
Others argue that people are merely becoming more politically correct and that bias against fat people is actually growing sharper.
“These studies don’t pick up on implicit, unconscious bias,” said Kelly Brownell, head of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
“It’s like if you asked people around the country if they had racial bias. There’s a difference between what people say and what actually happens,” Brownell said.
Researchers at Cornell also found that negative attitudes about obesity persist.
The NPD study results may simply be a sign of “resignation from overweight people,” Brownell said, noting that it’s likely a majority of survey respondents are overweight.
The survey, to be published in February in the journal Rationality and Society, also found obese boys and girls were half as likely to date as normal weight kids.
At an obesity doctors meeting in 2003, a University of Liverpool study indicated that just standing next to a large woman can be bad for a guy’s image. The study had young women look at one of two pictures: One of a trim young man standing next to a svelte woman, and the other showing the same man next to a heavy woman.
When the man was shown standing by the large woman, he was rated 22 percent more negatively by the study volunteers than when he was next to the thin woman. When seen with the large woman, he was more likely to be described as miserable, depressed, weak and insecure.
Marilyn Wann, board member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, said fat people are the target of a witch hunt in a fitness-obsessed nation.
“Everyone thinks it’s OK to make fun of fatties,” said Wann, who won’t use the word “overweight” because she says it’s judgmental.
Even if people say they are more accepting of overweight people, many still yearn to be thin. The NPD survey shows the number of people who said “I would like to lose 20 pounds” jumped from 54 percent in 1985 to 61 percent last year.
Sunday, January 8th 2006
Sunday’s Funnies & Oddities
posted @ 2:27 am in [ Funnies & Oddities ]
*calories 840From: Third Age Gluttony Is Good for You
Eat up. The fatter you are, the less likely you are to get depressed and commit suicide.
Clichés only turn into clichés because they’re true. Otherwise, they just become a weird thing that someone in a bank once said to you.
Scientists in Bristol in southwest England have discovered that fat people are more cheerful than their thin peers. This was just a revivification of the ancient (well … maybe 25-year-old) wisdom that says you shouldn’t go on a totally fat-free diet because your brain needs its fat surround to keep from crashing against your skull. That makes you depressed, apparently. But you don’t have to be obese to maintain this fatty covering; you just have to not be anorexic.
Nor is this a reworking of the slightly less ancient study that found that people with notable self-control, people who weren’t “appetitive,” were more likely to be depressed.
The usefulness of this survey was opaque. It appeared to demonstrate that hedonists were happier than puritans. Nobody needs a scientist to tell them that. They just need to study the works of Chaucer. Or Dickens. Or most TV soaps. The people enjoying themselves are the fat, jolly ones. The people who worry about how they look, and what people think of them, and what God might think, and whether drinking too much mead will turn out to be a signal that they are bound for hell — those people don’t enjoy themselves so much.
