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Is there a picky eater in your family? This story may be useful to back up your warnings to the child who won’t eat anything but chicken nuggets or peanut butter sandwiches or bread. British 17-year-old Stacey Irvine was admitted to a hospital after she collapsed and had trouble breathing. It came to light that she had eaten hardly anything at all besides chicken nuggets since she was two years old.
Miss Irvine, who has never eaten fruit or vegetables, had swollen veins in her tongue and was found to have anaemia.
Medics gave her a series of injections and started her on an urgent course of vitamins.
But, despite being warned that she could die if she sticks to her nugget addiction, she still can’t resist the fast food.
Miss Irvine, who prefers McDonald’s treats but also enjoys KFC’s, told The Sun: ‘I am starting to realise this is really bad for me.’
That understatement is not news to Irvine’s mother, who has been warning her for years that her diet would send her to a hospital. But Irvine had eaten other things -fries, chips, and an occasional piece of toast to go with her nuggets. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: NTI)
Carolyn Eakins has a goal to lose 100 pounds. To accomplish this, she is copying the diet of wartime rations from the 1940s. For a year.
The 1940s Experiment is a personal journey and social experiment living for one year on a wartime ration book diet to conquer obesity. 100 wartime recipes will be recreated with photos as well as experiences of living on a 1940s WW2 ration diet… 1 authentic wartime recipe will be re-created for every 1 lb lost.
My highest ever weight was 345 lbs… I started the 1940s Experiment at 315 lbs and today I am 277 lbs. I’ve had a few stops and started along the way but now I’m committed to seeing this through…
My goal is to shift 100 lb in one year using a 1940s ration diet as my foundation….. at the moment I am also vegan.
Eakin is now two months into the experiment. You can follow her progress and learn more about the wartime diet at her blog. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Making
the rounds on the Net today is the adventure of a man who's trying to
survive on a diet consisting
solely of his wife's breast milk.
Here's what happened:
The story so far: Curtis and his wife Katie, a childbirth and lactation educator, have three children. After their first baby spent time in the NICU Katie got into the habit of pumping milk "religiously every two hours round the clock for fear that my milk would dry up." That left her with a huge surplus of milk which she used to feed her first child while pregnant with her second. Her second child also spent time NICU, and she quickly filled up a 7" cubic freezer with more milk, which she eventually donated. Over six months she gave more than 10,000 ounces of breastmilk to an adopted premature drug baby who was not responding well to formula!
And then Katie got pregnant again, and again the baby went to the NICU. This time they ended up with an even bigger freezer full of the white stuff (right), which sadly no milk banks would take (for various reasons including the medicines she had taken while pumping). So this time they were just going to save the milk for themselves...until they realized they had to move and that the cost of transporting so much lactation would be quite expensive. So Curtis decided to take one for the team and drink the milk, and just the milk, for as long as his body will let him. They just finished day two.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Tastes in comedy vary and differ, just like tastes in colors, women, or cars. To me, Groucho Marx has always been the funniest guy ever. As talk show host Dick Cavett astutely observed, Groucho was the “consummate comedian.” He looked funny, he talked funny, he walked funny, the content of what he said was funny, he danced funny, even his name was funny.
Like all of us, Groucho loved food and he loved to eat. Groucho always had a great fondness for chocolate. His first experience with chocolate happened when he was five years old. He and his older brother Leonard (“Chico”) were traveling with their mother, Minnie, on a boat to visit Germany. Minnie was without her husband, Sam (“Frenchie”) on the voyage, and like most single women, she attracted a man.
The man kept pursuing her, but Minnie told him to take a hike. Hoping to get his revenge, the man gave the young boys each a chocolate bar. He told them to go to a party their mother was attending that night. He said their mother wanted them to go to the party naked. Young Groucho and Chico did as the man said, but when they walked into the party naked, Minnie just laughed.
Even in his last days, Groucho craved chocolate, but limited himself to two pieces a day. (“Well, I’ve had my chocolates,” he would say, “Now there’s nothing to do but wait for tomorrow.”)
Groucho loved sweets and as a young boy, he once ate six cream puff pastries called Charlotte Russes. After he scarfed them down, he threw up. (“I used to do a lot of vomiting in those days.”)
As he and his brothers toured the vaudeville circuit with their comedy act, they often stayed at cheap boarding houses. They were forced to eat the sloppy, unpalatable meals these homes often served. At one boarding house, the boys had to endure eating chili, three times a day, for two weeks. At another, on Thanksgiving, they were served fish. Angrily (and hungrily), they made a late-night ice box raid that night, consuming all the remains of the turkey. They left an ominous note in the ice box: “The Black Hand.” Groucho developed a lifetime aversion to seafood and later always ate huge turkey meals on Thanksgiving, giant spreads with all the trimmings.
Because of the greasy food served all slopped together in the boarding houses, in his later years Groucho always insisted he be served his food in separate dishes. Each main course, vegetable, salad, potato, whatever, was always served alone, in its own dish. “I’m rich enough to eat my food in separate dishes,” he would explain. Groucho hated mixed vegetables, calling them “trick vegetables.”
Groucho had a lifelong love of clam chowder. In his youth, his Aunt Hannah would cook up batches of the delectable soup for the Marx family. She would cook it out of the same pot the family used to do their laundry. Groucho claimed the dual-purpose pot enhanced both the wash and the flavor of the chowder. “I wish I could remember what it tasted like,” Groucho later recalled wistfully as an octogenarian. In his later years, the Beverly Hills Hotel would break their ironclad “only on Fridays” rule and serve Groucho his beloved clam chowder any day he dropped in there.
Groucho loved bread, especially pumpernickel. He was absolutely crazy about pumpernickel. Chasen’s, one of his favorite restaurants, served him his beloved pumpernickel and always kept a private stock of his favorite sweet butter.
He was never a big drinker. (“I only got drunk once in my life and that was in Jamaica drinking those sweet rum drinks.”) Groucho was an extremely slow eater, chewing and relishing every bite. He liked to dine with friends, who were often surprised to find that as they had finished their meal, Groucho was still working on a half-a-plate full of food.
He took a walk each day in Beverly Hills, and he liked to stop and treat himself to an ice cream cone. Groucho was always very partial to a strange food combination: he loved to eat ice cream along with saltine crackers. He was crazy about the banana shortcake at Chasen’s, but in spite of his sweet tooth, Groucho never let himself grow overweight. If he gained two or three pounds, he would discipline himself and cut back.
He enjoyed dining with his brothers, often being driven from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs to see them (a five-hour drive).
He always kept his icebox stocked full of his favorite goodies from Jurgenson’s, his favorite market. Interestingly, Groucho hardly ever entered his kitchen. He liked to leave his cooks alone to prepare his meals.
In his last days, Groucho’s health deteriorated severely and he was put on a salt-free, milder food regimen. His diet was bland, and salt-free tomato juice was a staple. For breakfast, he’d have orange juice, soft-boiled eggs, and decaf. “When I was a young man and I went to a restaurant, I used to look first at the prices. Now I’m an old man and I look at how fattening it is,” he said.
Towards the end, a dining partner remembered Groucho sadly informing him that “I don’t eat pumpernickel anymore.” The great Groucho Marx, the funniest man in the world, passed away on August 19, 1977. If the universe is a just one, wherever Groucho is now, there is plenty of chocolate, clam chowder, and pumpernickel, and all the food is served in separate dishes.
(Image manipulation via Speechable)
Mere dieting is for the poor. The rich, my friends, don’t just diet – they book a $5,600 week stay at a luxurious weight loss retreat.
Christina Binkley of the Wall Street Journal recounts the horror – oh the horror – of a rich man’s fat camp, The Ranch at Live Oak, Malibu:
The six-month-old Ranch isn’t one of the drug-rehab centers that dot the Malibu hills. But it is rehab of sorts—a luxury boot camp that aims to detoxify up to 14 (mostly middle-age) guests a week from the daily routine of cellphones, email, Diet Cokes and steak dinners washed down with Cabernet. Located on a 120-acre ranch tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains, it caters to wealthy A-listers with Spartan but perfectly appointed private cottages, and niceties such as laundry service and a daily aphorism placed on pillows ("Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle"). Yet the Ranch doesn’t kowtow to its heavy-hitting clientele: The exercise is mandatory—with a vengeance.
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Research by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian natural history museum shows us that Neanderthals were not all that different from modern humans in their eating habits. They ate grains and vegetables as well as meat, and they cooked their dinners, too!
Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass, as well as traces of roots and tubers, trapped in plaque buildup on fossilized Neanderthal teeth unearthed in northern Europe and Iraq.
Many of the particles “had undergone physical changes that matched experimentally-cooked starch grains, suggesting that Neanderthals controlled fire much like early modern humans,” PNAS said in a statement.
Stone artifacts have not provided evidence that Neanderthals used tools to grind plants, suggesting they did not practice agriculture, but the new research indicates they cooked and prepared plants for eating, it said.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
Robb Posch undertook an experiment in which he ate nothing but candy for a week. Oh, the things we do in the name of science! …or blogging, as the case may be.
Since I am apparently going to eat peanut butter candy every day, I went with Reese’s Peanut Butter Bells. Then after snacking on Nestle Crunch Bells, Gobstopper Snowballs, Christmas SweeTarts, and gummy reindeer, by night time it was becoming somewhat clear: candy isn’t very filling.
It’s filling enough to ruin your appetite for a meal, but it doesn’t work that well as a meal replacement. I’m thinking the key is just to eat more of it. So I ate a giant plastic candy cane filled with Reese’s Pieces. It was only about two hours later that I realized I had already eaten Reese’s Pieces for breakfast. Maybe the candy was starting to affect my brain.
And that was only day three! By day seven Posch was afraid his brain was starving. But he still likes candy -about half as much as he did before the experiment. You can read each day’s entry at Zug. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Kansas State University professor Mark Haub ate a Twinkies every three hours for ten weeks and lost 27 pounds! His cholesterol numbers improved as well. Haub put himself through this horrible regimen to prove a point: weight loss is all about caloric intake, not the type of food you eat. James Plafke at Geekosystem explains:
When I first started working out, I couldn’t gain weight no matter what I tried. I asked a large amount of people at the few gyms I attended at the time, and the advice received has always stuck out: Eat everything. The first (extremely in-shape) person I asked told me to buy a box of bakery cupcakes from the local grocery store and eat that after lunch a few times a week. The next (very ripped and cut) person I asked told me he ate a tub of chocolate pudding a few times a week after dinner. The message was clear: So long as you’re correctly working out, the type of food you eat doesn’t matter as much as you may think.
Of course, there’s a lot more to the story. Link
With today’s obesity epidemic, scientists are working non-stop to better understand weight gain and how to lose the excess pounds. While losing a lot of weight can be a challenge, recent studies have come up with a number of simple tips and tricks that can help you slim down without putting too much of a cramp in your daily routine.
Image via gfrphoto [Flickr]
You probably already know that you’re supposed to drink a lot of water if you’re trying to lose weight, but you might not know just how important water intake is to the cause. Simply drinking two glasses of water (around half a liter) prior to meals can make you think you are fuller and reduce your meal portions. Water can also help you digest. In fact, the average woman eats around 2,000 calories a day, but when she consumes water first, that number drops to around 1,200 calories. Similar decreased calorie consumption was seen in men as well.
Image via Arun Katiyar [Flickr]
Water’s not the only thing you should be drinking. A Tufts University study has shown that drinking three cups of green tea a day can help you lose twice as much weight as you would otherwise. White tea is also beneficial and a German study found that it can help decrease the number of new fat cells you develop while helping you burn off the existing fat cells in your body.
Image via Gezellig-girl.com [Flickr]
Speaking of beverages, if you just have to drink soda, put down your regular Pepsi products and grab some Throwback, which is made with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. While both add on calories, a Princeton University study has shown that corn syrup prompts far more weight gain than sugar does.
Of course, soda isn’t the only source of high fructose corn syrup. It seems to be in everything these days and it can even be hard to avoid. On a personal note, I can tell you that I cut almost all sources of corn syrup out of my diet and I’ve felt a lot healthier afterwards. Most noticeably, the shaking I get between meals if I wait to long to eat is mostly gone when I don’t have corn syrup for a whole week.
Most of us struggle to keep our weight down, but not Lizzie Velasquez. The 21-year-old woman from Austin, Texas actually has to eat every 15 minutes to say alive:
Miss Velasquez has a rare condition which prevents her from gaining weight even though she eats up to 60 small meals a day.
Despite consuming between 5,000 and 8,000 calories daily, the communications student, has never tipped over 4st 3lbs.
"I weigh myself regularly and if I gain even one pound I get really excited," said 5ft 2 ins Miss Velasquez, who wears size triple zero clothes. [...]
She is one of 3 people in the world with a rare disease that prevents her from gaining weight:
Professor Garg and his team now believe Lizzie may have a form of Neonatal Progeroid Syndrome (NPS) which causes accelerated ageing, fat loss from the face and body, and tissue degeneration. People with PRS often have triangular and prematurely aged faces with a pointy nose.
More at Telegraph: Link | Lizzie’s Website – via Arbroath
Interview at Motah: Link
A recent issue of a US Department of Agriculture publication includes an examination of how America’s food choices have changed over the past one hundred years. As you can see from one of the charts provided in the article, we’re eating a lot more chicken. The authors explain why:
Chicken availability over the past 100 years illustrates the effects of new technologies and product development. Increased chicken availability from 10.4 pounds per person in 1909 to 58.8 pounds in 2008 reflects the industry’s development of lower cost, meaty broilers in the 1940s and later, ready-to cook products, such as boneless breasts and chicken nuggets, as well as ready-to-eat products, such as pre-cooked chicken strips to toss in salads or pasta dishes.
Broilers were first marketed in the 1920s as a specialty item for restaurants. By the mid-1950s, innovations in breeding, mass production, and processing had made chicken more plentiful, affordable, and convenient for the dining-out market and for cooking at home. Media coverage of health concerns associated with total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol in the last quarter of the 1900s may have contributed to a rise in chicken tacos and turkey burgers.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Psst – wanna lose weight while eating all you want and doing no exercise? No, it’s not a spammy Internet ad – it’s real science! All you have to do is live a while at high altitude:
Overweight, sedentary people who spent a week at an elevation of 8,700 feet lost weight while eating as much as they wanted and doing no exercise. A month after they came back down, they had kept two-thirds of those pounds off. The results appear in the Feb. 4 Obesity. [...]
The scientists ferried 20 overweight, middle-aged men by train and cable car to a research station perched 1,000 feet below the peak of Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze. During the week-long stay, the men could eat and drink as much as they liked and were forbidden from any exercise other than leisurely strolls. The team measured the men’s weight, metabolic rate, levels of hunger and satiety hormones before, during, and after their mountain retreat.
After a week up high, the subjects lost an average of 3 pounds. A month later, they were still 2 pounds lighter. The sceintists’ data showed this was likely because they ate about 730 calories less at high altitudes than they did at normal elevations. They may have felt less hungry, in part, because levels of leptin, the satiety hormone, surged during the stay, while grehlin, the hunger hormone, remained unchanged. Their metabolic rate also spiked, meaning they burned more calories than they usually did.
A high-altitude weight loss strategy could be viable, though studies have shown peoples’ appetites bounce back after about six months at high elevation, Leissner said. “If you could do intermittent periods for one week, then go down, and then go back up, this might actually be helpful.”
Link (Photo Stephan A [Flickr])
A skunk named Mr. Bumble was turned over to the RSPCA when his owners could no longer handle him. The skunk, who loves bacon sandwiches, weighed in at 14 pounds! Mr. Bumble is now at Tropiquaria Animal Park in Watchet, England and is on a weight-loss regimen.
Park owner Chris Noisier told the BBC: “We’re now working on dieting him down to what he should be and clearly bacon butties are not a normal part of a skunk’s diet in the wild.
“We’re putting him on the vegetarian option at the moment. It’s very much like a human weight watching issue.
“He is getting to meet lots of new people so there’s lots going on in his life and I suspect it’s making up for the lack of his old favourite food.”
How much weight you gain may depend on when you eat, according to a new study that looked at the timing of meals in mice. Scientists at Northwestern University fed two groups of mice the same amount of high fat food, but one group ate during regular waking time, while the other ate during what would normally be their sleeping period. The second group gained twice as much weight as the first group!
“For a long time we questioned whether or not eating patterns had anything to do with gaining weight,” says obesity expert Dr. Louis Aronne of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He points to previous observational research suggesting that people who skip breakfast in favor of massive meals in the evening hours tend to be overweight. “We had no proof that it’s a real problem,” says Aronne, who was not involved in the study. “If an experiment like this is replicated in humans, it might clarify for us just how much time of day matters when it comes to obesity.”
It is not yet clear whether the difference is due to hormone production or the disruption of sleep patterns. Link -via Digg
Results from a 20 year study on monkeys and their diets show that eating fewer calories can help you live longer. Animals with a restricted diet of 30% were shown to outlive those that were given the freedom to eat what when and how much they wanted. The monkeys also had improved chances of avoiding age related diseases, cancer, diabetes and brain atrophy.
In terms of overall animal health, Weindruch notes, the restricted diet leads to longer lifespan and improved quality of life in old age. “There is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to the diseases of aging,” he says.
The incidence of cancerous tumors and cardiovascular disease in animals on a restricted diet was less than half that seen in animals permitted to eat freely. Remarkably, while diabetes or impaired glucose regulation is common in monkeys that can eat all they want, it has yet to be observed in any animal on a restricted diet. “So far, we’ve seen the complete prevention of diabetes,” says Weindruch.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
“I decided that the best way to get over my fear was to destroy it … and the best way to be seen is on television,” he wrote. So he contacted KTVK, a local television station that had a feature hosted by fitness and nutrition guru Chris Powell. After some initial hesitation, Powell took Smith on.
Now 240 pounds, Smith is a certified trainer. The documentary is called “The 650-pound Virgin” and will air Sunday night on TLC. Link (with video) -via Digg
A gastric band (the LAP-Band) is a restrictive band placed around the patient’s stomach that gives the sensation of a full stomach after eating smaller portions of food, thus letting the patient eat less and lose weight without going hungry.
But fitting the band requires surgery, with potential side effects – so here’s a novel idea: making obese patients believe that they have an "imaginary" gastric band through hypnosis!
A therapist convinced Marion Corns, 35, she had had surgery to fit the band by talking her through the procedure while in a trance.
Hospital smells were even pumped into the room to boost the effect.
Housewife Marion, who has slimmed from 15st 6lb to 11st 7lb, said: “Bizarrely I can even ‘remember’ being wheeled into theatre, the clink of the surgeon’s knife and smell of the anaesthetic.”
She spent £780 on five sessions with a therapist at the Elite Clinic in Marbella after her weight ballooned despite trying numerous diet aids.
Afterwards Marion felt her stomach had tightened and she was full up on just a small portion of food.
We know that men have an easier time losing weight than women do. Why this is so is the subject of a recent study. Nuclear-medicine specialist Dr. Gene-Jack Wang of the Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a rather sadistic experiment using 23 male and female volunteers. First, they fasted for 17 hours. Then they were presented with a large amount of their favorite food and told to think about something else to reduce their cravings. Meanwhile, they had been injected with a dye and scanned to see what areas of the brain were most active.
When the scans were studied and the results were tallied, it appeared that both sexes were actually able to lower the overall sensation of hunger. In most people, the brain may grow partially habituated to an empty belly over time, and all of Wang’s volunteers did a good job of hastening that desensitization. What the men could do that the women couldn’t was quit ruminating on food, successfully suppressing — if only temporarily — the conscious desire to eat. The women continued experiencing emotional cravings even if their hunger had subsided.
Wang suspects hormone may play a part in the difference. Link -Thanks, Freshome!
(image credit: Ansgar/zefa/Corbis)
To paraphrase Animal Farm, “some fats are more equal than others”.
While putting on weight in general can have negative effects on your health, abdominal weight gain (visceral fat) is particularly unhealthy. Since visceral fat is buried deep in your abdomen, it may seem like a difficult target for spot reduction. But this fat is actually quite sensitive to exercise and calorie reduction.
In addition to diet and exercise for reducing overall fat, eMedExpert Blog has five tips for reducing belly fat in particular. Link -Thanks, Karen!
Uh oh, here comes another study that will surely add confusion to how exactly one should go about losing weight: exercise won’t make you slim.
Researchers from Loyola University Health System and other centers compared African American women in metropolitan Chicago with women in rural Nigeria. On average, the Chicago women weighed 184 pounds and the Nigerian women weighed 127 pounds.
Researchers had expected to find that the slimmer Nigerian women would be more physically active. To their surprise, they found no significant difference between the two groups in the amount of calories burned during physical activity.
"Decreased physical activity may not be the primary driver of the obesity epidemic," said Loyola nutritionist Amy Luke, a member of the study team. [...]
Diet is a more likely explanation than physical activity expenditure for why Chicago women weigh more than Nigerian women, Luke said. She noted the Nigerian diet is high in fiber and carbohydrates and low in fat and animal protein. By contrast, the Chicago diet is 40 percent to 45 percent fat and high in processed foods.
