Mediterranean Diet Research Deeply Flawed

A new study published in the British Medical Journal reports that the Mediterranean diet "helps reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 83 percent." The research uses a flawed "Mediterranean Diet Scale" developed a few years ago to determine just how "Mediterranean" a person's diet is. It's a nine-point scale, and test subjects get a point for each aspect of their diet that falls within range. For example, a male who eats a certain quantity of fruit per week gets a fruit point. If he eats an amount of whole grains above a certain amount he gets a whole grain point. Falling outside the scale results in a zero. Getting a nine means someone has a perfectly "Mediterranean" diet. The scale is horribly flawed for four reasons:

First of all, it concerns itself only with quantities of specific things, not quality. So nutrient-poor industrialized, toxin-compromised foods are given the same score as organic and nutrient-rich foods free from toxins.
Second, Mediterranean Diet research assumes that only diet, or only diet and exercise are factors in the superior health and longer lifespans of Mediterranean people, but as other research is showing, sunshine is another factor. This is a problem because Mediterranean diet research does not include advice to get more sun.
Third, with the exception of alcohol and saturated fats, the Mediterranean Diet Scale doesn't concern itself with consumption or over consumption of unhealthy foods. So it's possible to get a perfect 9 on the Mediterranean diet scale, and still consume huge amounts of cotton candy and Red Bull and every day.
Fourth, subjects get an alcohol point for consuming from one to three glasses of alcohol for men and slightly less for women. That means drinking zero alcohol -- the healthiest option, assuming the rest of your diet is healthy -- is treated the same as drinking a bottle of scotch every day. The upper end of this scale -- three glasses per day -- is enough to develop chronic alcoholism.
Also: The research presents Mediterranean food as a drug that "reduces the risk" of diabetes. In fact, the Mediterranean diet is simply closer to what people have eaten for millennia, and that our science-fiction industrialized modern diet *causes* diabetes and other diseases.
When scientists discovered that children were suffering from growth retardation and nervous system damage from eating lead paint, they didn't say that "switching to paint that contains lower amounts of lead can help reduce nervous system damage by 83 percent." No, they reported that lead causes the damage.
The same is true for industrialized diets: They *cause* diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer and other maladies.

The Joy Fit Club Helps To Lose 100 pounds or more

New York nutritionist Joy Bauer is making good headlines with her weight loss and nutrition program called The Joy Fit Club.
The Joy Fit Club is based in New York City and has earned the attention of numerous top TV shows and health magazines. In fact, The Today Show will present members of the Joy Fit Club who have lost and kept off a significant amount of weight.
"Twice a month, TODAY will induct new members into nutritionist Joy’s Bauer’s Fit Club. These are determined people who have lost and kept off a significant amount of weight — 100 pounds or more. Read their inspiring and motivating stories of how they lost the weight the good old-fashioned way, through diet, exercise and no surgery," reads the announcement in TODAY show’s website.
The club has been inspiration for many people wishing to lose extra weight. Patti Ferrara from Youngstown, OH comments to a personal weight loss experience of Mandy Muniz (who went from 300 pounds to 126 with Joy Fit Club) and writes "I haven’t hit the Joy Fit Club 100 yet, but I’m close. Your story has given me the incentive to get rid of the last twenty lbs once and for all."
In her website’s About Us section we learn about The Joy Fit Club that "Joy Bauer has built one of the largest nutrition centers in the country. Located in Manhattan and Westchester, Joy Bauer Nutrition, provides counseling to both adults and children dealing with a variety of nutritional concerns, including weight management, diabetes, eating disorders, cardiac rehabilitation, sports nutrition, food allergies, gastrointestinal disorders, pregnancy, lactation, and menopause."

Biggest Loser Erik Chopin Finds it Difficult to Keep Weight Off

Eric Chopin was the winner of Biggest Loser, season 3, but has found it difficult to keep the weight off and gains weight. The reality show, Biggest Loser, takes overweight individuals and has them work with trainers to shed pounds. Eric Chopin weighed 407 pounds his first day on the show. During his participation in the show, he lost 214 lb to become the season’s winner.
Prior to the show at 407 lb, he had been diagnosed with a variety of weight related medical conditions including high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
Since leaving the show in December of 2006 he has slowly gained the 122 lb of the weight back. He was inspired by Oprah and her struggles with weight gain to come forth and talk about his own. This week when Oprah invited guests who had also publicly lost a lot of weight only to regain it, to appear on her show, Erik Chopin was one of those who accepted.
He told Oprah Winfrey that he has been hiding from the world because he was an inspiration to so many people that watched him on The Biggest Loser and felt like a fraud. He also talked about having a body lift surgery in 2007. He lost an additional 10 pounds of sagging skin with the surgery.
Erik Chopin believes he is addicted to food, eats to relieve psychic pain and that that is what caused his 122 pound weight gain. He has decided to return to a healthier lifestyle, eating healthier and working out. His goal this time is to get healthy and fit, not just to lose weight.

Diet for small planet may be most efficient if it includes dairy and a little meat

A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat to your diet may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest.
This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today’s high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers.
The study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, is the first to examine the land requirements of complete diets. The researchers compared 42 diets with the same number of calories and a core of grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy products (using only foods that can be produced in New York state), but with varying amounts of meat (from none to 13.4 ounces daily) and fat (from 20 to 45 percent of calories) to determine each diet’s "agricultural land footprint."
They found a fivefold difference between the two extremes.
"A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, M.S. ’02, Ph.D. ’07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. "A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres."
"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.
The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.
Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York state may require less land per person, they use more high-valued land. "It appears that while meat increases land-use requirements, diets including modest amounts of meat can feed more people than some higher fat vegetarian diets," said Peters.
"The key to conserving land and other resources with our diets is to limit the amount of meat we eat and for farmers to rely more on grazing and forages to feed their livestock," said Jennifer Wilkins, senior extension associate in nutritional sciences who specializes in the connection between local food systems and health and co-authored the study with Gary Fick, Cornell professor of crop and soil sciences. "Consumers need to be aware that foods differ not only in their nutrient content but in the amount of resources required to produce, process, package and transport them."
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005.
"In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day," Peters said.

An Easy Fix To Weight Loss

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easy fix to our weight loss problems in the United States? Recently the CDC released a report on the dramatic increase in obesity in the U.S. over the last 20 years. The states with the greatest prevalence of obesity (great than 30% of their population) are Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Only one state, Colorado, has less than 20% of their population who are considered obese.
For the millions of Americans who want to lose weight, but had to exercise and diet, the recently published study in the online journal Nature Chemical Biology might offer that “easy fix” to weight loss and healthy lifestyle.
Researchers at Indiana University published a study using rodents which shows great promise with the use of a single drug that suppressed appetite and increased metabolism. If future research in humans shows the same results, then indeed it could be the “easy fix for weight problems.”
The drug was given in a once a week injection. Within a week after receiving a single injection, the rodents’ body weight decreased by 25% which translates into a 42% reduction of fat mass.
Over time, the obese mice were noted to have obtained normalized weight and glucose tolerance. Reduction of body weight was achieved by a loss of body fat resulting from decreased food intake and increased energy expenditure.
Dr Richare DiMarchi states, “I'm excited. It is rodent work that's representative of human obesity. What we're doing is using the proven ability of two hormones to stop appetite and use more calories."
The drug is a combination of two natural hormones (PEGylated peptides) which researchers say might one day be taken as a weekly injection. The peptides are the active ingredients in two medications already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- the diabetes drug Byetta, and Glucagon, which is used to control blood sugar.
Currently, there is no easy fix for weight loss in humans. It will be years before the drug is ready for human trials. For now, it is important to continue to use diet and exercise for a healthy weight.