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Pledging to a weight-loss plan isnt the easiest thing to do but its made even harder when the plan doesnt work.

Trendy diets promoted by celebrities may seem like a good solution, but experts warn that those diets are difficult to sustain (not to mention were not privy to all the extra training and meal planning that their charmed lives afford).

You have to start with a mind shift that eating healthy and daily motion is non-negotiable, says Kathleen Trotter, Toronto-based fitness expert and author of Finding Your Fit.

Part of that shift also involves having the correct information about weight loss and fitness.

READ MORE: Weight loss and fitness trends to expect in 2017

For starters, weight loss is 90 per cent diet and 10 per cent activity, says Calgary-based registered dietitian Jessica Tong. You cant outrun your plate. What you put into your body is what counts.

The experts share some of their top tips for weight loss that will produce actual results and are actually sustainable.

Mindful eating is half the battle, Trotter says. And not just because you could be unaware of how much junk food youre eating in a dayit applies to healthy foods too.

Almonds are healthy, but if youre eating 10 handfuls every day, thats going to lead to weight gain, she says. Thats why she advises against noshing while youre cooking or keeping a jar of snacks on your desk.

But the real first line of defence is keeping a food journal.

Until you know what youre doing wrong and what youre eating, you cant fix it. But when you do know, you can make tweaks that will give you results.

Its a clich as old as time: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But its true.

Breakfast sets the foundation for the rest of the day. It helps to control your hunger hormones and curbs cravings, Tong says.

People who skip breakfast will set themselves up for hunger that will build throughout the day and culminate in making poor food decisions later on. Then you fall into a cycle of saying, Well, theres no point in eating healthy today, Ill just start tomorrow.'

Adequate amounts of protein are important, but so are the right types.

Cheese and almonds contain protein, but the percentage isnt that high and youre getting other things like fats and lots of calories, Tong says.

WATCH BELOW: Healthy eating tips

Egg whites, lean meats and fish are protein-dense foods that arent high in fat.

While Tong recognizes the importance of natural sources of fat in your diet, she says that consuming a lot of it (like on plans like the Paleo diet) can lead to negative repercussions like high cholesterol levels.

Ever since the Atkins diet swept North America, weve been vilifying carbohydrates, and now it has extended to all foods containing gluten.

Its not carbs or gluten that are the problem, its the excess consumption of them, Tong says.

She says that disrupts the macronutrient balance we should be striving for the even consumption of carbs, protein and fats and leads to weight gain. Its not the carbs themselves.

Look for healthy sources like fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and beans and legumes.

Eat more of them, Trotter says. And drink more water.

These are obvious things that when you say them to people, they always respond, Oh, I know, but they dont do it. Drink more water and eat more vegetables at every single meal.

READ MORE: Healthy vegetable chips arent always healthy. Heres why

It doesnt have to be a kale salad, either. Tong says if youre drawn to the starchier vegetables, like butternut squash, carrots or peas, incorporate them in your diet.

This will create a habit around eating vegetables on a regular basis. Even if you never graduate to eating kale, youll be inclined to branch out and incorporate a wider variety of vegetables.

Its no secret that booze is loaded with sugar and calories, which is probably why it tastes so good, but thats also why it leads to weight gain.

Since it gets digested and absorbed very quickly while not providing any satiety, its easy to overdo it.

Even if you go from two glasses of wine per day to just one and you dont change anything else in your diet or fitness routine, it will equate to a 10-pound weight loss in one year, Tong says.

The good thing is, youll still get a drink every day.

Although nutrition experts have been telling us for years that calorie-counting isnt the golden rule of weight management, that doesnt mean you should ignore them altogether.

Exceeding your caloric intake by 150 calories one or two days isnt going to derail your weight-loss efforts, but consistently consuming an excess of 150 calories per day will amount to a 15-pound weight gain in one year, Tong says.

Those extra calories can look like a three-quarter cup of rice, one-and-a-half glasses of wine or a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter.

The next time you find yourself craving a piece of cake or some potato chips, pause, Trotter says.

Make yourself do something else for 15 minutes, because if youre occupied, you wont mindlessly eat, she says. If youre at a party, go talk to someone or drink a glass of water. You want to disconnect from your food trigger.

READ MORE: Can two weeks of clean eating make you healthier?

Then if youve waited the 15 minutes and still want that cake, go ahead and have a small portion. At that point, youve considered the pros and cons of eating it, and youll likely make a wise decision about how much you need to satisfy your craving.

Motivation is created, its not found. Once youve shifted your perspective and you know you want to get fit, commit to moving every day, Trotter says.

And when it comes to working out, the biggest obstacle is often just starting.

Trotter tells her clients to force themselves to do the activity, whether its running or riding a bike or doing yoga, and tell yourself youll just do 10 minutes.After 10 minutes, its highly unlikely that youll stop, because youre already doing it and you probably feel good about it.

She also advises getting a fitness buddy to work out with you at the gym or even just to walk with you after dinner.

Youre way more likely to do something if someone is waiting for you, and itll make it much more fun.

2017Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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9 weight-loss tips that actually work - Globalnews.ca

When Andrew Dillon, a cell biologist at the University of California Berkeley, set out to study the effect of the sense of smell on weight in mice, he assumed that hed find that mice without a sense of smell would enjoy food less, eat less, and therefore weigh less. Scientists have known that smell shapes the way we tastes thingsusually for the betterso without it, mice eating even a scrumptious, high-fat diet would enjoy it less.

He was rightkind of. The results of work he and his team published on July 5 in the journal Cell Metabolism show that adult mice without a sense of smell did weigh about 16% less than those with their sniffers intact. But the reason came out of left field: It was because somehow, without a sense of smell the rodents burned more energy from fat.

I was convinced they were just eating less, he told the LA Times. When it became clear they werent, I thought, Wow, this is incredibly interesting.

The team of researchers studied normal adult mice, and then a group of adult mice who had been genetically modified to lose their smelling abilities after a whiff of a chemical in a lab. They fed both groups of mice either regular diets or high fat diets for three months. On the regular diet, mice without a sense of smell weighed only slightly less, but on the high fat diet, the difference was much more pronounced. Furthermore, when overweight mice had their own sense of smell removed, they started losing weight, too.

When the researchers examined the amount of food each group was eating, they were surprised to find that it was more or less the same. So was their exercise. However, the mice without a sense of smell seemed to be burning a different kind of fat tissue that uses more calories.

Mammals like mice (and also us) have two kinds of fat tissue, both of which we need. Theres brown fat, which helps keep us warm by making heat, and then theres white fat, which is used as energy reserves (and is typically associated with weight gain in humans). Infants tend to have a lot more brown fat than adults, and mice tend to have more brown fat than humans.

When the researchers examined the fat content of mice after the experiment was over, they found that mice without a sense of smell seemed to be using more of their brown fat tissue than the others.

Theres a long road of research ahead before scientists can say whether losing a sense of smell can bolster weight loss efforts in humans. But Dillin thinks this work opens the door for more research into the relationship between smell and brown fat. Theres more to gaining weight than just eating foodits how you are perceiving the food, he told Science.

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Losing your sense of smell may help you lose weightand it has nothing to do with taste - Quartz

Pioppi is a very small village in southern Italy. It is one of those places where people are reputed to live much longer than average (the authors claim life expectancy is 89 years but do not provide a citation for this claim). The gimmick behind this book is that the authors have travelled to the village, bottled its secrets and are prepared to sell them to you for a small fee.

Since the authors are both advocates of the low carb, high fat (LCHF) regime, everything is seen through the prism of the Atkins diet. They are Aseem Malhotra (a cardiologist, as he never tires of reminding you) and Donal ONeill (director of internet-only, anti-carbohydrate movies such as Cereal Killers and Run on Fat).

In some respects, Pioppi is a surprising place to find this low carb duo as it was the home of the scientist Ancel Keys who died in 2004 at the age of 100. It was Keys who drew the worlds attention to the villagers longevity when he was conducting research into nutrition in the mid-twentieth century. That research helped to create the evidence that linked saturated fat to heart disease, and low carb activists have spent years portraying him as a crackpot and a bully who was probably in the pay of Big Sugar and who definitely blackmailed the scientific community into unfairly demonising saturated fat. As a result of his junk science, they say, governments around the world changed their dietary guidelines to encourage the consumption of carbohydrates at the expense of life-saving lard. The general public, slavishly following government advice as always, took this as a green light to stuff their faces with sugar and soon became obese.

Its a bizarre and ahistorical conspiracy theory which, as Anthony Warner says in The Angry Chef would require paying off the medical establishment, the World Health Organisation, numerous charities, public health bodies and nutrition researchers around the world, and keep producing systematic reviews that show links between consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of heart disease. The idea that millions of people have been killed by guidelines which (a) were never followed, and (b) clearly discouraged sugar consumption, is one of the strangest memes in the world of nutritional woo.

Pioppi is at the very centre of the nutritional orthodoxy. Not only did Ancel Keys live there for many years, but it is recognised by UNESCO as the home of the Mediterranean Diet. In a sense, The Pioppi Diet is an attempt to erase the legacy of Keys and reclaim the village for the one true faith of LCHF. Keys attributed the Pioppi residents low rates of heart disease to the relative scarcity of saturated fat in the Mediterranean diet, but as far as Malhotra and ONeill are concerned, saturated fat has been exonerated and their job is to discover what is really going on there.

Reading between the lines of The Pioppi Diet, its reasonably obvious whats going on. Its a rural farming and fishing community of 200 people who are engaged in manual labour from a young age and remain physically active throughout their lives. The air is clean and the local diet is dominated by fruit, vegetables, fish, pasta, olive oil and wine. The villagers have traditionally been too poor to eat a lot of red meat. Indeed, they have been too poor to eat a lot of anything, hence the low rate of obesity and its associated diseases.

The longevity of the Pioppi people is therefore entirely consistent with mainstream science and yet it forms the backdrop to a book which tells the reader to be prepared for everything you know and believe to be true to be turned on its head. But it is only a backdrop, a blank screen onto which they project whatever thoughts come to mind. They visit the village but do not conduct any research there. Instead, they stroll around drinking coffee, admiring the noble peasants and making sagelike comments such as Theres not much sign of stress around here, Aseem.

The first half of the book sees them take it in turns to crowbar in all the LCHF articles of faith: physical activity wont help you lose weight, saturated fat is good for you, cholesterol is nothing to worry about, sugar is a poison, a calorie is not a calorie, etc. I have neither the time nor inclination to fact-check all of their claims so I will allow for the possibility that they might be right from time to time. I am quite prepared to believe that the dangers of saturated fat have been overstated; better qualified people than Malhotra and ONeill have been critical of the evidence for years. But whenever they touch on a topic with which I am familiar, I noticed that their discussion of evidence was partial and one-sided, and sometimes totally incorrect. On the occasions when I felt moved to follow up their (rather patchy) references, I nearly always found that there was less to them than meets the eye.

For example, Malhotra cites the PREDIMED study, a well-regarded piece of research which appeared to show significant benefits from the consumption of nuts and olive oil. But it did not, as Malhotra claims, show the superiority of a high-fat diet over a low-fat diet; such a hypothesis was never raised nor tested. He also cites the Lyon Diet Heart Study as evidence that the standard American Heart Association recommended low-fat diet causes more heart attacks than the Mediterranean Diet. The study does indeed show benefits from the Mediterranean Diet, but it is only by reading the study that you would see that the Mediterranean Diet was lower in both total fats and saturated fats than the standard diet.

Some of the errors in the book are risible, such as when they claim that in industrialised countries between 5 and 10 per cent of GDP is spent treating dental disease (the entire NHS budget takes up 9 per cent of GDP). Others are just sloppy, such as when they use a graphic from a newspaper to prove that poor diets cause 35 per cent of deaths (they dont). Nearly all of them are consistent with a systematic bias towards a desired conclusion.

The reader should not have to look up the references in a book to find out what is being concealed. The nutritional epidemiology literature is enormous. Thousands of studies have been conducted and they do not all agree with one another. If one ignores the totality of the evidence and cherry-picks a handful of studies, it is possible to argue almost anything. If the reader cannot trust the author to play with a straight bat, he might as well save his money and go on a Google binge.

Take the chapter on sugar, for instance. The scientific consensus says that obesity is a risk factor for diabetes. Insofar as there is a link between sugar and diabetes, it is the same as the link between cheese and diabetes, ie. if you eat to much of it, you will become obese and therefore be at greater risk of diabetes. It is indirect.

A handful of dissenters claim that there is a direct link and that sugar can cause diabetes even in the absence of obesity. The most famous of them is Robert Lustig, a Californian endocrinologist who has views on sugar that are extreme by any standard. He has made various wild claims about sugar being toxic and addictive. He calls it the alcohol of the child. Amongst other strange assertions, he has said that breast milk is not sweet and that pasta was invented in America. His published research on sugar is, in my view, third rate and I dont think anybody should take him too seriously. But he is on the low carb bandwagon and is one of Malhotras chums. Consequently, while the chapter on sugar only references five studies, four of them are by Lustig and his colleagues, although this is not obvious from the text.

Even if the scientific consensus is wrong and Lustig turns out to be a sort of Galileo, shouldnt Malhotra at least acknowledge the totality of the evidence, even if only to argue against it? And if there is an independent association between sugar and diabetes, why do organisations that want people to eat less sugar such as SACN and Diabetes UK continue to deny it? Is everybody in the pay of Big Sugar?

Malhotras credentials as a cardiologist are not sufficient to persuade me to ignore so many scientists. He says himself that the majority of doctors are not equipped with even basic training to give specific, evidence-based lifestyle advice and admits that he doesnt recall receiving a single lecture at medical school on the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on preventing and treating disease. All of his conclusions, he says, are based on my own research. But there are experts in this field who have received ample training and have been given many lectures on nutrition. They are called dieticians, and I have yet to meet one who endorses Malhotras message.

It soon becomes clear that The Pioppi Diet is not a serious review of the evidence. It provides a distorted and superficial account of a tiny fraction of the evidence. It does not really attempt to overturn the scientific consensus, it simply ignores it. Meanwhile, it devotes page after page to a handful of low carb activists who are portrayed as world-leading authorities, such as Zoe Harcombe, Tim Noakes, Nina Teicholz, Jason Fung and Robert Lustig. While all these people have books to sell, Malhotra and ONeill accuse many scientists and doctors, as well as the media, of being under the financial influence of the food and pharmaceutical industry. This, we are told, is why they disseminate selected, biased and outdated information. When your best evidence is a single study from 1956 which has never been replicated, this is a bit rich.

So what is this Pioppi Diet that promises a life-changing journey taking just 21 days? The first thing to understand is that it is not a diet, it is a lifestyle. From wandering around Pioppi, Malhotra and ONeill come to the profound conclusion that it is important to socialise with friends, take plenty of exercise, be relaxed and get some sleep. They cant help you with socialising or stress relief, but they suggest you get at least seven hours sleep (which is also what the National Sleep Foundation recommends). With regards to exercise, ONeill spends several pages waxing lyrical about high intensity interval training, but is forced to admit that they dont do that kind of thing in Pioppi and so recommends getting up from your desk every 45 minutes to stretch your legs.

So much for the lifestyle. What about the food? Malhotra and ONeill recommend that you avoid desserts, all sugars (including fruit juice and honey) and many of the most common sources of calories, including bread, rice, pasta, cereals, potatoes, noodles, couscous and anything flour based. You should also fast for 24 hours once a week and think about skipping breakfast every day (because the authors were told that Pioppi people used to be so poor that they sometimes went to work hungry). If you do all this, plus lots of walking and go to the gym five times a week (as Malhotra does) or engage in regular high intensity training (as ONeill does), they reckon you will lose weight. And do you know what? I think they might be right. Behold the miracle of the Pioppi Diet!

The trouble with this whole concept is that Malhotra and ONeills interpretation of the Pioppi Diet does not reflect what the people of Pioppi eat. It is basically an ultra-low carb version of the Mediterranean Diet with a few trendy ingredients, such as coconut oil, thrown in. Coconuts have never been part of the Italian diet and nor have full-fat fermented dairy products but the authors include the latter anyway because as they say the Greek cohort in Ancel Keyss original studies enjoyed [them] so there is no reason we shouldnt be doing likewise!

Do you know what the people of Pioppi actually eat? Processed carbohydrates. Farm workers in rural Italy do not could not survive on a diet of fish and seasonal vegetables. Pasta is as central to the Italian diet as potatoes are to Britains. So too is bread. This is the elephant in the room for anyone trying to pretend that Italians eat a low carb diet. As a 94 year old Pioppi resident said last year: Pasta is my favourite food. I dont understand why so many people try to cut that and bread out of their diets it is like medicine for the heart and it is silly not to eat it.

Once you accept that pasta and bread are important elements of Mediterranean cuisine, the actual Pioppi diet involves lots of fruit, vegetables, fish, starchy carbohydrates, mushrooms, nuts and eggs, but little or no cake, biscuits, processed meat, crisps and red meat. In other words, it is the UK governments Eatwell Guide with extra virgin olive oil. Maybe those official dietary guidelines are not so deadly after all?

Visit link:
The Pioppi Diet is a superficial lifestyle guide based on distorted evidence - Spectator.co.uk

Heart palpitating, beads of invisible sweat dripping, Ill have the House Chop Salad please.A small pause. Nerves. The loud silence from the rest of the table. Youre positive theres no soy or peanuts in the dressing? Ill have it with no dressing if youre not sure. So sorry to trouble you.

Doesnt matter which allergen: peanuts, soy, shellfish, dairy, gluten, just name the culprit, its a roll of the dice every time. Triple roll with gluten and soy because theyre not as easy to avoid as shrimp is.

What Follows Contamination Almost Every Time: Supplements Aisle for Damage Control

Some just tough it out, while many will be in the supplements aisle trying to find what will take them out of pain faster.

Or make the red blotches go away faster.

Or control the vomiting, at least until their plane lands (that concludes the sexy portion of this article).

Are Retailers Up to Date with the Ever-Growing List of Food Issues?

The bigger question is should they be? Are they meant to be substitutes to doctors? But doctors dont usually handle these things anyways. Nutritionists? Contamination is a 911 Emergency; its not like the person can wait a week for an appointment.

Q: Is There a Quick Fix for Food Contamination?

A: Not really. But you can speed up the process by flushing toxins out faster.

5 Suggestions:

TIP: Know what to do ahead of time. While in pain is not a good time to be running around. 2 more things you can do:

Writing this article, my predominant thought is: I wish no one ever needed this info.Heres to Speedy Recoveries and one day never needing them.

p.s. This isnt a long-term full-on healing protocol; its just immediate damage control. Work with a qualified professional for proper gut repair.

Jaqui Karr, CGP, CSN, CVD, is a best-selling author, speaker, and corporate consultantwho specializes in educating about gluten, celiac disease, specialty diets, and health through nutrition. Her popular NakedFood brand has helped thousands include more power raw and healing greens in their diet. Ms. Karr is a certified gluten practitioner, certified sports nutritionist, and certified vegan/vegetarian educator to dietitians.http://jaquikarr.com

Note: The statements presented in this column should not be considered medical advice or a way to diagnose or treat any disease or illness. Always seek the advice of a medical professional before altering your daily dietary regimen. The opinions presented here are those of the writer, not necessarily those of the publisher.

Published in WholeFoods Magazine Online, 7/6/2017

Excerpt from:
Specialty Diets and Contamination - WholeFoods Magazine

Crohns disease is a constant source of misery for sufferers. This chronic condition, which triggers inflammation in the digestive tract, is commonly found in the small intestine and the symptoms can include persistent diarrhea, stomach cramps, joint pain, weight loss, and anemia. A new study suggests there may be a way to alter your diet to tame this difficult-to-treat disease.

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One common cause of the condition, which affects as many as 780,000 Americans according to the Crohns and Colitis Foundation, is an overactive immune system that perceives harmless gut bacteria as foreign invaders and responds by producing inflammation. Standard treatments include anti-inflammatories and immune suppressors. However, the new study out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (CWRU-M) suggests that a diet rich in healthy fats and oils such as coconut oil or cocoa butter may lead to specific changes in gut bacteria that could fight harmful inflammation.

Although the research was conducted on mice with a Crohns-like disease, the results are the first to show how high-fat diets can alter gut bacteria to combat inflammation, according to lead author Alexander Rodriguez-Palacios, DVM, DVSc, PhD and Assistant Professor of Medicine at CWRU-M at the annual Digestive Disease Week Conference in Chicago, Illinois. In the study, the mice who were fed even low concentrations of coconut oil or cocoa butter were found to have up to 30 percent fewer types of gut bacteria and less severe intestinal inflammation and less than those fed a typical diet.

Ivanna Grigorova/shutterstock,Africa Studio/shutterstock

These findings suggest that there may be a beneficial Crohns disease diet that involves ingesting good fats in normal amounts. Patients can substitute these good fats for other sources in their diets, Dr. Rodriguez-Palacios notes. The results could also help doctors to identify bacteria that should be used in probiotic supplements aimed at treating patients suffering from all inflammatory bowel syndromes.

Humans and mice share many common genetic features, and by examining the physiology, anatomy and metabolism of a mouse, scientists can gain a valuable insight into how humans function. Nevertheless, humans may respond to dietary changes differentlyand in their own individual ways. For example, not all so-called good fats will be work for all patients, Dr. Rodriguez-Palacios points out. That said, he is hopeful that the diet could be beneficial to at least some patients, and it wouldnt have the side effects and risks that come with medical treatments. The trick now, he says, will be to really discover what makes a fat good or bad' for Crohns patients.

Did you know that patients are developing Crohns getting younger and younger? More and more millennials are being diagnosed with autoimmune disorders.

Read this article:
The Science Is In: One Simple Diet Change Can Help Calm Crohn's Disease - Reader's Digest

Thanks to an overabundance in her herb garden, Alyssa Milanos family is getting a hint of mint in every dish this summer, whether they like it or not.

My mint is out of control right now, so I basically put it in everything, Milano, 44, tells PEOPLE. It doesnt matter what it is, its getting mint in it.

The Charmed and Whos The Bossstar incorporates the refreshing herb into her club soda and into summer dishes like her go-tofresh watermelon, feta cheese and cucumber salad.[Its] super easy to make and super delicious, she says.

Milano follows a low-carb diet a lifestyle she has maintained through Atkins after looking for a way to shed thebaby weight following her last pregnancy.The last 20 pounds were kind of stuck and I couldnt get them off, says Milano, a spokesperson for the diet company. I did some research and Atkins had such a great community and tools to help you through it, and for me, thats really what made the difference.

RELATED: Celebrities Who Eat the Same Thing (Pretty Much) EveryDay

The actress and her husband David Bugliari, 38, avoid items like rice and pasta, instead opting for high-protein meals and healthy fats.We feel satisfied, she says. Were not stripping our kitchen bare and saying, We cant eat this, we cant eat that.'

When it comes to family dinners with her two children,Milo, 5, and Elizabella, 2, Milano says the kids dont question why Mom and Dads plates dont match their own.Its just been part of their life that we eat slightly different, she says. I dont think kids diets should be structured like that.

From PEN:Oprah Shares Some Of Her Favorite Foods For Weight Loss

But there isnt a drastic disparity between what she serves her kids and what she makes for herself. Milano modifies her favorite recipes to suit everyone (picture taco night as hard corn tortillas for the little ones and lettuce cups for the grown ups).Its super easy to modify for us and still eat as a family, she says.

The actress, who will appear later this summer in Netflixs Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later,typically starts her day with a vegetable omelet, followed by a salad with grilled fish for lunch and a dinner made up of some kind of protein with vegetables.

Wantthe ultimate dish on the latest celebrity food news, plus exclusive recipes, videos and more? Click here to subscribe to the People Food newsletter.

To Milano, barbecuing is the best thing about summer, mostly because extensive modifying isnt necessary. I love to grill chicken or fish, she said. I love grilled vegetables because I think it gives it a little bit of a smoky flavor, and you do some olive oil with salt and pepper and its just delicious.

As for sweets or guilty pleasure foods, Milano simply doesnt have time for that. To even think about having junk food would completely throw a wrench in my entire day I would want to take a nap because my blood sugar would drop, she said. I have to maintain eating healthy and a certain amount of energy to work the way I work and also to be such a proud mommy.

Link:
Alyssa Milano Puts This Homegrown Ingredient In 'Everything' - PEOPLE.com

Verily

'Cheat Days' WorkBut You Might Be Doing Them Wrong Verily Most people end up throwing up their hands and giving up or stuck in an endless cycle of diet fads. In the wake of restrictive dieting, the idea of the "cheat day" has emerged. You eat really well all week, work out just as you shouldand then reward ...

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'Cheat Days' WorkBut You Might Be Doing Them Wrong - Verily

Looking for a late-night snack. Photo Credit: Christopher Boswell/Shutterstock

It's tempting to think that by rearranging your entire diet, you could quickly lose weight and keep it off. All you need to do is eat right for your blood type, or give up carbs, or eat like a Paleolithic human, or eat only raw foods, and so on, and you will be thin before you know it. At least, that's what fad diets promise.

Melinda Hemmelgarn, a registered dietitian and investigative nutritionist who hosts Food Sleuth Radio, distinguishes between "fad" diets and what she calls "popular" diets. A fad diet "generally promises quick and easy weight loss but comes up short on quality." They may lack certain nutrients, and could even be dangerous. She adds that they are "notoriously difficult to follow."

She specifies that the Mediterranean and DASH diets are not fads. While both are popular, they are also "effective for maintaining health for the general population" and "relatively easy to follow if you have access to healthy foods." The Mediterranean diet calls for eating like people who live in the Mediterranean: high in vegetables and olive oil and only moderate in animal protein. The DASH diet stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertensionandcalls for a low-sodium diet with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy, plus moderate amounts of whole grains, fish, poultry, and nuts.

When U.S. News and World Reports asked health experts to rank 38 different diets overall, DASH and Mediterranean came in first and second, respectively. The experts considered whether they were "easy to follow, nutritious, safe, effective for weight loss and protective against diabetes and heart disease."

A number of well-known fad diets fared poorly in the rankings: Slim Fast (#20), South Beach (#24), Glycemic Index diet (#25), the Zone (#25), Medifast (#29), Raw Food (#32), Atkins (#35), and Paleo (#36).

While a few of those that did poorly overall actually ranked well for promoting weight loss (raw food ranked fifth and Atkins came in 12th), the Paleo diet came in dead last for weight loss. If that isn't enough bad news about the Paleo diet, archaeological scientist Christina Warinnersays the foods called for by the diet are not even what ancient human ancestors actually ate.

Hemmelgarn adds that some diets can be clinically indicated for certain patients but may be fad diets if others adopt them. She includes gluten-free in this category. For many, eschewing gluten is no fad. If you have celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which you become ill from eating even the smallest amount of gluten, a protein found in wheat and some other grains, going gluten-free is an important matter of staying healthy. But if your body tolerates gluten just fine and you decide to give it up, that can be a fad.

The same can be said for the ketogenic diet, a low-carb diet that calls for eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods. The word ketogenic refers to ketosis. Normally, your body gets its fuel by turning the carbohydrates you eat into glycogen and using glycogen as its energy source. If you do not eat carbs, your body must turn elsewhere for fuel. It turns fat into molecules called ketones and the ketones serve as the body's fuel. When your body does this, it is in ketosis.

By avoiding carbohydrates in the diet, people on the ketogenic diet cause their bodies to go into ketosis. While this sounds like a weight loss scheme, the ketogenic diet is actually often recommended to epilepsy patients to help manage their epilepsy. According to Hemmelgarn, ketogenic diets "should be followed under the guidance of a registered dietitian who is proficient in working with them. They are hard to follow. They are generally effective in weight loss, but most people who follow these kinds of diets generally gain the weight back once they start eating higher carbohydrate levels."

Amanda Bullat, a registered dietitian nutritionist, adds that while she'd support any patient following a ketogenic diet for clinically indicated reasons, research is not conclusive about whether it is a good diet if your only goal is weight loss. In particular, she worries that a high-protein, high-fat diet could be taxing to the kidneys and liver.

Both the ketogenic and the Paleo diets call for eliminating all grains and legumes. Bullat says, "for myself and my clients, when we cut a carbohydrate coming from whole grains and legumes pretty significantly, we start having some mood issues and start being kind of lethargic. It's not to say that I think people should necessarily eat as much bread and pasta as they want," she qualifies. "Having small amounts of whole grains, having small amounts of legumes, you're getting your nutrients from those whole foods and then you're not having to be on a B complex vitamin."

While some followers of diets that eliminate whole grains and legumes point out that these foods contain "anti-nutrients" (chemicals that interfere with the absorption of nutrients), Bullat recommends soaking, sprouting, or fermenting as methods of eliminating the anti-nutrients from grains and legumes.

But Bullat takes an even larger perspective of fad diets. Rather than nitpicking the particular details of each individual diet, she questions the idea of going on a diet in the first place. Bullat approaches nutrition from a "Health At Every Size" perspective. That means turning the idea of diets on its head. If you've tried 10 diets to lose weight and you have not lost weight, you might say, "I failed." The Health At Every Size approach says that the dieter did not fail; the diets failed.

Bullat explains, saying, "The science shows that across the board, no matter what diet people are put on in the study, in the long term, that way of eating will not help them promote weight loss." If you try a diet and fail to lose weight, or lose weight and then gain it back, "the studies show that you're not the only one. Therefore that shows that the physiology aspect of the diet shows that it's not possible to lose the weight off of that diet."

Using this approach, analyzing individual fad diets becomes more or less meaningless. Bullat coaches patients to be intuitive eaters who can listen to their bodies' cues so that they eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full, and by eating foods that make their bodies feel healthy. This is basically the exact opposite of following a complicated diet plan that promises weight loss while attempting to ignore your body's own signals.

In other words, no matter how much we might wish it, there's no magic bullet to quickly and easily lose weight and keep it off, but there are ways to adopt new long-term dietary habits to promote health and weight loss, whether it is through intuitive eating or a more prescriptive diet plan such as the Mediterranean diet.

Jill Richardson writes about food, agriculture, the environment, health, and well-being. Currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, shes the author ofRecipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

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Have You Ever Tried a Fad Diet to Lose Weight? Here's Why It Didn't Work - AlterNet

Some meat labels for antibiotics only apply to specific antibiotic categories. CR photo

More people are buying chicken and beef with labels that promise no antibiotics according to a nationally representative Consumer Reports survey. The trend comes out of concerns about antibiotic resistance. But what do the no antibiotics labels really mean? Consumer Reports says youd be surprised.

Research shows there is a connection between the overuse of antibiotics in food animals and drug-resistant infections in people. In other words, our arsenal of antibiotics may no longer work to kill bacteria that cause certain illnesses. We calculate that about one in five people who got an antibiotic-resistant infection because of something they ate.

To avoid antibiotic-treated animals, check the labels carefully. A label might say no growth-promoting antibiotics." That means those used to enable quicker weight gain. But look at the much smaller print, and youll see that antibiotics might still have been used in to treat or prevent illness.

Another twist: Some fast-food restaurants, KFC, Taco Bell and Wendys, for instance, promise that now or soon they will serve only poultry that is raised without antibiotics important to human medicine," meaning none that are given to people. Eliminating medically important antibiotics does help thwart antibiotic resistance, but its not as good as eliminating all antibiotic use in healthy animals. Your best bet is to look for labels that say never given antibiotics No antibiotics ever or raised without antibiotics.

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Meat labeled 'No Antibiotics' may still have antibiotics - KOMO News

Chemical signatures from gut bacteria which show up in urine can be used to predict how the body will respond to a 'junk' diet.

Scientists have found that certain compounds, produced by microbes in the guts of mice, could be used to show which animals are at greater risk of becoming obese or developing health conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

The group, led by scientists at Imperial College London and INSERM UMRS 1138 in Paris, tested the urine of mice for a number of these microbial compounds, finding that certain key chemical signatures could accurately predict how the animals would respond to a high-fat diet before they received it.

According to the researchers, the findings are another crucial piece of the puzzle in how the microbiome the ecosystem of bacteria living in our digestive tracts helps to shape our health, and could lead to personalised diets for patients based on the makeup of their gut flora.

High-fat diets are a major driver of obesity and related health conditions, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, evidence from previous studies suggests different people eating the same high-fat diet may have different outcomes, making it hard to define a one-size-fits-all 'healthy diet'.

Previous research has shown that the hundreds of species of bacteria and other microbes which inhabit our gut work with our own cells to carry out a number of roles, and that this microbial garden can be shaped by what we eat or what medicines we take, such as antibiotics.

In the latest study, published in Cell Reports, researchers used genetically similar mice to highlight the role that gut bacteria played in how the body responds to changes in diet and the impacts on health.

We know that our environment and genetics can influence our risk of obesity and disease, but the effects of these communities of bacteria living inside us are less well understood, said Dr Marc-Emmanuel Dumas, from the Department of Surgery & Cancer at Imperial, who led the research. By using a group of mice with the same genetic makeup, we were able to zoom in on the variability in animals switched to a high-fat diet.

Before animals switched diets, their urine was screened for compounds produced by their gut bacteria using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, giving the mice a profile of chemical signatures generated by metabolites from their microbiomes.

The team found that once the mice were switched to the same high-fat diet they had a range of outcomes, with some animals gaining more weight than others or becoming less tolerant to glucose one of the early warning signs of diabetes.

Analysis revealed that key chemical signatures in their urine were predictive of some outcomes, such as changes in behaviour, weight gain and tolerance to glucose. One compound in particular, trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), was shown to be predictive of glucose tolerance.

Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Head of the Department of Surgery & Cancer at Imperial explained: "When the microbiome develops in early life, we start off with very few bugs, acquiring more bacteria from our environment as we develop. This means that small differences in the local environment can result in a great diversity in terms of the microbiome."

This study is another fascinating example of the power of the microbiome to influence the host with respect to major health risks, said Professor Nicholson. It shows that value of a diet is determined not only by your genes, but also the genes of your gut microbes. This work has implications in lots of different areas, which is why it's so exciting.

Senior investigator on the study, Dr Dominique Gauguier, from INSERM-Paris and a visiting professor at Imperial, added: We tend to believe that obesity is caused by bad genes or by bad genes interacting with bad environment. Our findings indicate that an organisms gut microbiome can drive the adaptation to dietary challenges in the absence of genetic variation. They underline the need for deeper physiological and molecular phenotyping of individuals in large scale genetic studies.

The findings will be explored further as part of an ongoing large clinical trial of 2,000 patients, where details of their lifestyle, diet, medication and other factors, as well as their microbiomes, are being characterised. Pulling together all of these data, and building on previous findings, they will be able to reveal how people react to different diets, and how their microbiomes influence the outcome.

According to the researchers, the hope is that in future, a patients profile could be generated from urine and blood samples and used to predict which diet they will respond to best.

Our findings reveal that measuring metabolites in urine before the diet switch, we can predict which animals will get fat and become intolerant to glucose and which ones wont, added Dr Dumas. These findings open up really strong perspectives into designing personalised diets and harnessing our gut bacteria to promote health.

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Your Gut Bacteria Could Help Predict Your Bodies Response to Junk Food - Technology Networks

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