Recent Research and News Items

Don’t Forget to Walk

A walk a day keeps Alzheimer’s at bay. Active Living reported on a recent study from the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Routine exercise such as a 15-minute walk three times a week will help to ward off dementia and related conditions among people age 65 and older.

Results of a six-year study by the Group Health Cooperative Center for Health Studies in Seattle were quite dramatic. The subjects comprised 1,740 older adults with no signs of cognitive problems. Those who exercised three or more times weekly had up to a 30% lower risk of developing these conditions than less active participants.

“Earlier research has shown that low blood flow can damage the parts of the brain used for memory, “ said lead author Eric Larson. “So one theory is that exercise may prevent damage and might even help repair these areas by increasing blood flow.”

The study did not provide direct proof that exercise will ward off dementia or make it go away, Larsen added. For that, a clinical trial covering several years would have to be undertaken.

Another Phoney Diet

Is one cell phone picture really worth 1,000 words or calories?

Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-largest US wireless services company, is offering a service that lets camera-phone users send pictures of their food to nutrition experts and receive advice on their eating habits.

For $9.99US a month, the service will let users send pictures of each of their meals to a nutrition advisor at Quebec City-based MyFoodPhone and get personalized video feedback on their eating habits every two weeks, Sprint said in a statement yesterday.

Users will be able to see their food photos on an Internet food journal on which they also can log data such as weight, exercise and calories burned, the company said.
“Of course, there are ways people can cheat on the diets, but they’re not going to be fooling anyone but themselves,” said Marc Onigman, a spokesman for MyFoodPhone.

MyFoodPhone has offered the service for about two years, and it has been running on a trial basis with Sprint for a month-and-a-half, Mr. Onigman said. The company has “couple of dozen” advisers working for it now and many more who are trained and ready to work, he said, without being more specific.

“With Sprint as a partner, there’s no limit to how many people we can take,” Mr. Onigman said this week in an interview.

A Useful Index for Problem Pounds

Many men seem impervious to information about overweight. In the US, 25% of overweight and obese men thought their weight was just fine in an April 2006 report. Women are more sensitive, but still struggle to lose weight, much to the delight of the diet industry.

One of the problems may be references to Body Mass Index (BMI), which is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by weight in meters squared (Kg/m2). Not a formula likely to resonate with anyone other than researchers, particularly in the USA where metric measures sound decidedly ‘foreign’.

The good news is that scientists at Glasgow Royal Infirmary have come up with an easy way to know if you are overweight and if that weight is unhealthy. They tracked the medical history, weight, body measurements and clothing size of 360 men and women.

An analysis of the results found that people who wore larger dress sizes and pants had the greatest chance of developing cardiovascular disease – surprise!

What is interesting is that health risks started to become significant at a pants size of 36 for men and a dress size of 16 for women. At size 38 for men and 18 for women, the respective risks were between 4 and 7 times higher than for people in smaller sizes.

I can just see the health zealots wanting to put up medical alert signs on large clothing sizes, “You are now entering the dangerous clothing zone.”

The only problem of using this simple technique as a way of assessing excess and unhealthy weight, is that the clothing manufacturers are unscrupulous and will continue the trend, which is already evident in women’s clothing, of “vanity sizing”. Their rationale is that, if it makes people feel good, will call a 36inch waist pant a 34, fine. Anything to sell more product.

If you can’t trust clothing sizes, one foolproof way to see if you are carrying too much weight is to stand naked in front of a mirror. Then jump up and down and stop suddenly. If your flesh continues to move after you’ve stopped it might be time for some more physical activity and a lot fewer calories.

Eat Less, Live More

The Baltimore Aging Study showed there were a number of well-defined markers identifying people who lived longer and healthier lives. These markers include:

• Lower core temperature
• Lower metabolic rate for a given lean body mass.
• Higher DHEA levels
• Lower insulin levels
• Less damage to DNA

In order to test these concepts in people, Dr. L K Heilbronn and colleagues at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Louisiana conducted a six-month trial in which subjects were randomized to one of four groups: a control group eating their usual diet, a diet-restricted group fed 25% less energy than their usual intake, a diet plus exercise group in which the diet was restricted by 12.5% and exercise increased to consume 12.5% of their usual energy intake, or a very low-calorie group fed only 890 calories a day until they lost 15% of their body weight and then stabilized by increasing intake.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 5, 2006.

Researchers found when compared with the control group, all forms of energy restriction resulted in lower metabolic rate of the lean body mass, lower insulin levels, increased DHEA and reduced DNA breaks. All the above changes are markers of longevity in humans.

For the first time it was shown in humans that simply reducing energy intake may have the potential to promote a longer life. Of greater interest is that reducing intake by 25% had the same effect as reducing intake by 12.5% and increasing exercise to consume 12.5% more energy, showing it is not simply dietary penance but net energy balance that determines health. In short, exercise more to enjoy more food.

In this context, if we examine Canada’s Food Guide “rainbow” and healthy choices, it becomes clear “healthy foods” such as whole grains and vegetables, have a low-calorie density, and enhancing the quantity of these foods automatically reduces energy intake while satisfying hunger. Calorie dense foods do the opposite, as do foods rich in fat.

The dietary concept for longevity may simply be restriction of the net quantity of energy by eating less energy-dense foods and exercising more rather than complex formulae created by governments.

A So-What Pedometer Study

It’s interesting how some studies get picked up by the press ad featured as a news item. A recent Belgian study concerning the accuracy of inexpensive pedometers has been featured in a number of magazines and newspapers of late.

The study was first published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and at first glance seemed intriguing. However, when I downloaded it and read it more thoroughly it seemed more like the sort of study I’d have given a failing grade to as a graduate supervisor.

The essence of the study is this. The authors acquired 1000 pedometers, called the ‘Stepping Meter’, which retail for one Euro apiece (approx. $1.40CAD). They then had a team of 35 adults; wearing 6 pedometers at a time (5 Stepping Meters and one Digiwalker), test 30 Stepping Meters each. To the surprise of no one the 1 Euro Stepping Meters appeared less reliable than the relatively expensive Digiwalker.

Here are some questions I have:

1. Do you have to test 1000 pedometers of the same make and model to show that a very cheap one is less reliable than an expensive Japanese Yamax Digiwalker? It’s rather like testing 1000 $3.00 watches against a Rolex.
2. Did the researchers test the accuracy of the Digiwalker? (The paper does not state which model of Digiwalker was used). When I tested single models of 3 different Digiwalkers I found all were within 1% accuracy at 4mph but no one was within 1% accuracy at 2mph. In fact one, an SW500, had an unacceptable 7.25% error at 2mph. It interests me that researchers often hold up Digiwalkers as the criterion for pedometer testing when apparently better pedometers are available.
3. Because the subjects wore 6 pedometers at a time, the pedometers were spread in various positions on their belts or waistbands. “3 pedometers were randomly worn on the right and 3 on the left.” When I have tested pedometers in different positions I have found significant variations. The best place to wear a pedometer is over the point of the hipbone. As it is moved closer towards the navel, accuracy deteriorates.

Heavy Teddies an Answer to Childhood Obesity? – I don’t think so

Researchers at Indiana State University experimented with having children play with heavier toys to help them burn more calories and provide some heavy artillery in the battle against childhood obesity. Dr. John Ozmun claimed that playing with 1.4kg blocks and weighted teddy bears lead to higher heart and breathing rates than playing with unweighted toys. The mind boggles, but it’s interesting to speculate on other ways to develop the musculature of our children and infants.

I’m sure there are research papers to be written and funding to be found for testing such things as:

• Heavy cutlery
• Weighted cups and plates
• Chain mail children’s clothing
• A 2kg box of crayons
• Lead inserts for the TV remote

When Eating Becomes an Unnatural Act

Dr. Russell Keast, a senior lecturer in the school of exercise and nutrition sciences at Australia's Deakin University, has developed a new snack food with a parmesan cheese cracker, organic mashed potato and special healthy additives.

He said, "This new snack has natural additives such as an anti-inflammatory agent, omega 3 fatty acids and zinc to improve brain and heart function, boost male virility and improve immunity."

Dr. Keast said it was the first time the anti-inflammatory agent oleocanthal had been included in a manufactured food and research was continuing into its flavor and health promoting properties.

A natural appetite suppressant which makes the consumer feel fuller for longer, and a natural compound to increase liking for a product, have also been added to the snack food.

Samples of the snack are being presented to the food industry at a workshop at Deakin University to point the way to healthy snacks of the future.

"Overall, the snack is a vehicle for these health promoting compounds. However, it must be flavorsome and popular so people will want to eat it repeatedly," Dr. Keast said. "An agent in the snack will help prevent overeating it. While it is not a natural food, it is an innovative food.”

Late Breaking Research News – Physical Activity is Good for You

Three big, new studies have been released in the past few days and what they show is that physical activity is good for young and old, weak and strong, healthy and sick, active or sedentary, in fact, exercise is good for everybody.

A few years ago, at my suggestion, Steve Nash gave his parents the gift of a complete physical at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas. Steve’s dad, John, who is in great physical shape and still playing soccer in his 50s, sent me an update he received from the Institute.

Some of the key results show that unfit people are three times more likely to have a heart attack, almost twice as likely to have high blood pressure, three times as likely to have diabetes and the women are three times as likely to have a stroke. However, perhaps the most telling finding was the big difference in the ability of the fit and unfit respondents to perform the activities of daily living, ranging from kneeling to prolonged standing and from fishing to leisurely cycling.

Thank you for your support of the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study (ACLS).

Last year the Cooper Institute sent questionnaires to all patients examined at the Cooper Clinic since 1970. This effort was part of an important research project funded by the National Institutes of Health, and was designed to evaluate the relationship between physical activity and physical fitness and health and function. Information from the ACLS survey provides us with valuable data that will enable us to remain one of the world’s leading centers on physical activity and health research.Your responses to our questionnaire are greatly appreciated.

• General Info: Over 22,000 completed questionnaires were returned. Thirty percent of the respondents were women with an average age of 59 years and an average weight of 145 lbs. The men had an average age of 60 years and an average weight of 191 lbs. (Martin’s note: This is an above average group of men and especially women.)

The July edition of Heart reports on a study from Germany by Rothenbacher et al. The researchers interviewed 312 senior adults with heart disease and 479 without any diagnosed cardiovascular disease. Probably the strongest finding is that by 65, physically active people were about 60% less likely to develop heart disease than their sedentary peers. The other interesting finding is that you can start exercising in middle age or late middle age and almost catch up to the life time exercisers in the low risk group.

Lastly, Dr. Marlo Shapiro wrote an article titled, “Exercise, a disease dodging option” based on a review of exercise and disease in the Canadian Medical Journal. Highlights include:

1. Active people reduce their chances of premature death by 35%.
2. Walking as little as 2 hours a week can reduce the risk of premature death by about 50%. And, of course, walking more is better!!!
3. There are strong links between exercise and the likelihood of avoiding:
   1. Diabetes
   2. Heart disease
   3. Colon cancer
   4. Breast cancer
   5. Osteoporosis

ummertime is traditionally a time when people read books, or think they’re going to read books. It’s time for a bit of John Grisham on the beach or Patricia Cornwell by the lake. I read recently that when people buy books what they really think they’re buying is the time to read them. Over the past few months there have been some excellent, and entertaining, books in the area of the role of food and its connection to wellness. I’ve selected a few that are interesting, readable and which might just change your life. I will provide you with a segment or two of each book so that you can see how you like the style and subject matter of the authors.

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

If you’re going to read one non-fiction book this summer, this is the one. The title might be a little daunting and is perhaps better explained by the sub-title, “A Natural History of Four Meals”. Author Michael Pollan takes us from the dinner table to the origins of what we eat. He writes with a clarity and detail that must terrify the giants of industrial agriculture, because the last thing they want you to know is the journey your food takes to arrive on your plate or Styrofoam container.

Pollan is a great writer and investigative journalist and in order to draw you into the book I can do no better than include a few segments.

(I) Mr. Pollan’s section entitled “Corn’s Conquest” is brilliant.

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that’s dominated by a single species: Zea Mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it’s in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the non-food items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself – the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built – is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or a soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are the “antifoaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness”. According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, the TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

With so many exotic molecules organized into a food of such complexity, you would almost expect a chicken nugget to do something more spectacular than taste okay to a child and fill him up inexpensively. What it has done, of course, is to sell an awful lot of chicken for companies like Tyson, which invented the nugget – at McDonald’s behest – in 1983. The nugget is the reason chicken has supplanted beef as the most popular meat in America.

(III) At first sight, the traditional farm with a variety of animals and crops appears inefficient until one looks more closely at how they operate, and what efficiency really means.

For example, in nature there is no such thing as a waste problem, since one creature’s waste becomes another creature’s lunch. What could be more efficient than turning cow pies into eggs? Or running a half-dozen different production systems – cows, broilers, layers, pigs, turkeys – over the same piece of ground every year?

Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification; doing lots of the same thing over and over. In agriculture, this usually means a monoculture of a single animal or crop. In fact, the whole history of agriculture is a progressive history of simplification, as humans reduced the biodiversity of their landscapes to a small handful of chosen species. (Wes Jackson calls our species “homo the homogenizer.”) With the industrialization of agriculture, the simplification process reached its logical extreme – in monoculture. This radical specialization permitted standardization and mechanization, leading to the leaps in efficiency claimed by industrial agriculture. Of course, how you choose to measure efficiency makes all the difference, and industrial agriculture measures it, simply, by the yield of one chosen species per acre of land or farmer.

By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence – by definition the very opposite of simplification. To achieve the efficiency represented by turning cow manure into chicken eggs and producing beef without chemicals you need at least two species (cows and chickens), but actually several more as well, including the larvae in the manure and the grasses in the pasture and the bacteria in the cows’ rumens. To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers.

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact there’s research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.) As our diet – and the diet of the animals we eat- shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization – cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc. – that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat – long associated with cardiovascular disease – may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain-fed and the salmon crill-fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to –3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef). The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten. The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food’s food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon is salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta-carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel’s $2.20 a dozen pasteurized eggs actually represents a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.

The Hungry Years
Confessions of a Food Addict by William Leith

William Leith is a fat man, who doesn’t like being fat. He is filled but unfulfilled.

“I am fat. Therefore everything I do is fat. This morning I take a fat shower, squirming around in the suds like an oversized cherub. Fatly, I towel myself dry. Fat people absorb water like sponges. Fat people sweat more. Fat people don’t want to walk half-naked out of the bathroom to a place that is less hot and steamy. Fat people don’t like being exposed. Fat people take their clothes into the bathroom, so that they can emerge magically, fully dressed, if a little damp and uncomfortable. Fat people wear fat clothes.”

“Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I’m hungry most of the time. I also feel bloated most of the time. I am always too empty, and yet too full. I am always too full, and yet too empty. Last night I ate three platefuls of mash and gravy. I also had chicken and vegetables. I can barely remember the chicken or the vegetables. The mash was fluffy, starchy. I could not relax until it had all gone. Then I licked my plate clean. I picked the plate up and licked the starch residue and congealing gravy. It tasted delicious, vile, shameful. People sometimes ask me why I have crusty stains on the lapels of my jacket or the bib area of my shirt.

My girlfriend said, ''I hate it when you do that.''

''I thought you thought it was funny.''

''No, I hate it.''

''It’s a tribute to your cooking.''

''No, I hate it.''

Now it’s early, and I want toast. God, I hope there’s some bread in the kitchen. God, I hope there’s some sliced bread in the kitchen. I really don’t want to do any slicing. In the morning, with low blood sugar, it’s like slicing a stone with a long, bendy razor blade. I could easily have an accident. I swing myself out of bed, my belly tight and sore under my T-shirt. When I was slim, I slept naked, but now I dress for bed, or rather don’t fully undress; I wake up damper, hotter, hungrier. My hunger frightens me. The fatter I get, the more I want to eat. The fatter I get, the more comfort I need. Right now, I want thick slices of warm white bread, crispy on the outside, with butter soaking into the middle.

In the kitchen, there is most of a loaf of sliced bread, and — yes! — the butter has been left out all night, so it will be soft enough to spread. When I was a kid, when I had my worst hunger, I hated cold butter. Later, it didn’t bother me so much — I was patient enough to pare off thin slices, which I would arrange carefully on the toast. Then I would wait until the butter had melted, something I can’t imagine now.
Now I’m in a hurry. The bread is brown. Damn. Still, I put two slices in the toaster, and, while I’m waiting, I take another slice from the loaf, butter it, fold it over, and eat it in three bites. I pop the toast, to see if it’s nearly done, but it’s not — nowhere near — so I butter another slice, and try, and fail, to eat it slowly. Now, when I pop the toast, it is slightly crisp, and slightly warm, so I take a slice, butter it, eat the disappointing, mushy result, and put another slice in the toaster. And then I realize I should have put the second slice in the toaster before I ate the first. As usual, I am falling behind.

I am in a toast frenzy. I have an urge, like in the Burger King ad, in which ''urge'' is an integral part of the word ''Burger''. Although, of course, ''urge'' isn’t an integral part of the word ''toast''. But I am aching for toast. It’s like a Mac Attack. (I have actually suffered from Mac Attacks.) It’s like a nicotine fit.

I know about willpower. Looking at the toaster, glaring at it, listening to the buzz of its little engine or whatever, I stop for a moment to make a cup of instant coffee, and ask my girlfriend if she wants any toast.

''No thanks,'' she says. She never eats breakfast.”

Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Andrew Weil is one of the more renowned and respected writers in the general area of wellness. He’s been on the cover of Time magazine and is a frequent contributor to the Larry King Show. This book is a follow-up to “8 Weeks to Optimum Health” and in typical Andrew Weil style dispenses common sense, good references and the wisdom that comes from a lifetime in the field. Dr. Weil is now in his 60s and reminds his readers of the inevitability of aging and provides numerous intelligent insights into how to enjoy the aging process rather than attempting to stay forever young.

Some things improve with age:

I like to ask people to think of examples of things that improve with age. Some common answers are wine, whiskey, cheese, beef, trees, violins, and antiques. I would like to examine the qualities that aging brings out in these things in order to see whether comparable benefits come with aging in people.

Cheese, in the words of one writer, is “milk’s leap toward immortality.” It has also been called the “wine of foods” – that is, the food that is closest to wine in its essential nature. Originally invented as a way to preserve milk by concentrating its fat and protein and discarding most of its water, cheese has become a favorite food of many peoples in the Western world, and in some countries (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the British Isles especially), the art of cheese making has reached stupendous heights. The key step in the production of the most famous and treasured examples of the cheese maker’s art is aging, a process the French call ‘affinage’ and English speakers often call ‘ripening’.

If you thought whiskey making and wine making were complicated, I can only tell you that they pale into simplicity beside the making of fine cheese.

All you need to know about the effect of stress on health an be said in one sentence. Cortisol, the adrenal hormone that mediates stress responses, is directly toxic to neurons in the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotion. If you want to minimize age-related deficits in mental function, you must know and practice strategies for neutralizing the harmful effects of stress on the brain and other organs.

Recently, scientists demonstrated a direct correlation of objective and perceived stress on cellular aging. They measured length of telomeres, telomerase activity, and oxidative stress in white blood cells in healthy premenopausal women who were biological mothers of either a healthy child or a chronically ill child. The women who experienced more stress in their lives had shorter telomeres, lower telomerase activity, and greater oxidative stress than their less-stressed counterparts. All of these changes indicate accelerated aging and, probably, increased risk of age-related diseases. In this study the changes correlated with perceived stress and its chronicity (that is, duration over time); the greater the perception of stress and the longer it lasted, the more harmful it was.

Some years ago, researchers went to several remote regions to try to verify claims of extraordinary longevity. Three of these were Abkhazia in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union; Hunzakut, a valley in Pakistan; and Vilcabamba in Ecuador. The only one that I have personal experience of is the last, which did not seem different to me from any of the other Andean Indian villages I visited in Ecuador.

In every case, the claims turned out to be unsubstantiated, because there were no reliable birth records. In fact, strong evidence turned up that old people in these places exaggerated their ages for various reasons, even that some of them used the birth dates of deceased older siblings. In Abkhazia, investigators uncovered a clear pattern of state-supported falsification of birth records in order to develop unusual longevity as a national resource and tourist attraction.

Before the scientific community reached a consensus about the lack of evidence for these claims, many articles appeared in the popular press about the lifestyles of Abkhazians, Hunzakuts, and Vilcabambans that attempted to find commonalities. Most of the residents of the regions, as one might have expected, were physically active into old age; indeed, their traditional lifestyles demanded it, because they had to herd animals, gather wood, carry water, and till fields. They ate well, eating more fresh foods than typical Westerners and no fast or processed foods. The Abkhazians had frequent feasts, featuring local fruits, vegetables, and meat, as well as yogurt, which is often touted as a magical rejuvenator. They also consumed alcohol at these gatherings. In all of the regions, strong communal ties were evident, and early investigators made much of the contribution of these ties to supposed unusual longevity.

Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock is the man who brought us the movie documentary “Super Size Me”. His writing style is hard hitting and ‘in your face’, somewhat like the film. However, his book goes far beyond an indictment of McDonalds and is a sweeping look at how the American lifestyle has been hijacked by big business to the detriment of millions. Mr. Spurlock alerts us to the fact that many of the American organizations associated with specific diseases (e.g. cancer, diabetes) are funded by some of the very companies whose products are part of the problem.

The American Dietetic Association, for example, calls itself “the nation’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals,” and says it serves the public by “promoting optimal nutrition, health and well-being.”

But really, the ADA serves its corporate sponsors and, as the Center for Media & Democracy notes, hauls in large sums of money advocating for the food industry. Its stated mission is to “improve the health of the public,” but with 15 percent of its budget, more than $3 million, coming from food companies and trade groups, it has learned not to bite the hand that feeds it. “They never criticize the food industry, “ says Joan Gussow, a former head of the nutrition education program at Teachers College at Columbia University. The ADA’s website even contains a series of “fact sheets” about various food products, sponsored by the same corporations that make then (Monsanto for biotechnology; Procter & Gamble for olestra; Ajinomoto for MSG; the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers for fats and oils).

How messed up is that?

Big American Dietetic Association funders ($100,000 plus) have included Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Weight Watchers International, Campbell Soup, the National Dairy Council, Nestle USA, Ross Products Division of Abbott Labs, Sandoz, Coca-Cola, Florida Department of Citrus, General Mills, Nabisco, Uncle Ben’s and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs. The ADA’s 2004 donor report lists other interesting Big Food names like ConAgra, Goya, Sunkist, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and Sodexho (who run school-lunch programs as well as prisons – a nice combo for your kids, don’t you think?)

Similarly, there are good reasons the American Cancer Society seems to focus all its energies on promoting cancer drugs and treatments, then falls almost silent when it comes to identifying potential carcinogens in our food, air and water, and is downright quiet about strategies for cancer prevention. The ACS recruits board members and receives huge donations fro the very pharmaceutical, chemical, food and biotech companies that sell cancer drugs, manufacture pesticides, experiment with genetic modification, peddle foods that are bad for us and pollute our environment.

According to its own 2002 annual report, the American Cancer Society’s major donors that year included 3M Foundation, Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Avon Products, Inc., BFI Waste Systems, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Colgate-Palmolive, Dr Pepper, DuPont, the Eli Lilly & Company Foundation, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, IDEC Pharmaceuticals, International Flavors & Fragrances, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Company, Nissan, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Ortho Biotech, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, Unilever/Bestfoods, Warner Lambert, Wendy’s and Winn Dixie.

The whole scam of labeling kids’ foods as healthy and good for them came to its most despicable low in 1998, when, as Marion Nestle explains, “the American Heart Association *(AHA), long a distinguished champion of research and education promoting low-fat and other dietary approaches to prevention of coronary heart disease, decided to raise funds by labeling foods ‘heart-healthy.’ The AHA would identify foods that met certain standards for content of fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium with a logo consisting of a red heart with a white check mark and the words ‘American Heart Association Tested & Approved.’ The AHA planned to collect fees from food companies that made approved products and expected to benefit from company advertising and promotion of the partnership.”

Get it? For a fee, we’ll declare your product healthy! Pretty soon, you had manufacturers like Kellogg promoting all their “heart-smart,” AHA-approved brands…..like the notoriously sugar-laden Cocoa Frosted Flakes, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies and “Low-Fat (but by no means low-sugar) Pop-Tarts.” Remember? And now, General Mills is making the same American Heart Association claims for most of its cereals, including Cocoa Puffs and Frosted Cheerios. Sure, none of these cereals and others like them are fat laden, which most people associate with heart trouble, but the AHA seal of approval sends an overall message that the product is healthy.

• Former Secretary Ann M Veneman served on the board of the biotech company Calgene.
  
• Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, had been an executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the enormously powerful corporate meatpackers’ lobby.
  
• So had her director of communications, Alisa Harrison.
  
• Her deputy chief of staff (who left in 2004) was vice-president of the International Dairy Foods Association, the also extremely powerful milk-and-cheese industry’s lobby.
  
• Deputy Secretary of Agriculture James Moseley was a partner in Infinity Pork LLC, a corporate pig farm in Indiana.
  
• Under Secretary J. B. Penn was an agribusiness consultant.
  
• Under Secretary Joseph Jen came from Campbell Soup.

Lousy food and little play
Makes kids fatter every day.

Three new books

Three more new books, which deal with the ethical, human, financial and environmental cost of a food industry, which puts profit so far above other considerations that little else counts. Everything looks wonderful in our supermarkets with uniform, blemish-free fruits in cartoon-like brightness, exotic vegetables available 365 days a year and aisles of refrigerated meats that have no visible signs of the squalor and confinement from which they originate. I’ve yet to read these new releases but they look interesting.

1. The Way We Eat – Why our food choices matter. By Peter Singer and Jim Mason
2. The End of Food – How the food industry is destroying our food supply, and what to do about it. By Thomas Pawlick
3. What to Eat – An aisle-by-aisle guide to savvy food choices and good eating. By Marion Nestle

I have felt for a number of years that the use of pedometers was an important way to get people walking. In other issues of “Well” I’ve documented the wide range of physical and psychological benefits associated with a walking program. However, I quickly found out that just giving people a pedometer was not enough to turn them into regular walkers. They needed goals and a stimulating program. I searched the web for an interesting step-counting program but found most of them failed to make use of computer technology and were unimaginative and uninspiring.

The old saying is, “that if you want something done right, do it yourself”. So, using the skills of two brilliant friends in the computer field, Ron Nye and Luke Niedjalski, I created Circle Canada and the P•E•D (Pedometer Enhancement Device). This is a virtual walk around the country with great graphics, information on all the major cities on the 18,000k journey, surprise ‘rides’ and readily available information on number of steps, distance traveled and calories burned. Eighteen thousand kilometers is a long way for one person, but is great for groups who pool their steps to help speed their way around the country. Had this been a government project I suspect the price tag would have been very high, but with good will, hard work and some fiscal sacrifice we have created a very sophisticated and challenging virtual journey.

In another part of “Well” I used the line from ‘Field of Dreams’, “If you build it they will come.” What we are seeing now are a variety of government departments, hospital groups, universities, recreation centers, schools and now a major corporation using Circle Canada as a central part of their fitness and wellness initiatives.

The Wellness team at TELUS Mobility (a division of TELUS Communications) was quick to see the value of Circle Canada as a company wide program to help boost the activity level of their employees. TELUS has made pedometers available to their employees and, in conjunction with Speakwell, has created a designated portal where TELUS employees can access a customized Circle Canada and record their steps as they walk as individuals or work groups on the 18,000 km virtual walk around the country. What attracted TELUS to Circle Canada was that every employee, wherever they were based, had equal access to this part of the company Wellness program. Each month they are provided with information about the walking activity of employees in different regions of the country. Speakwell is now able to provide this service to other companies and offers a completely bilingual version.

Walking is good for your mind, your muscles, your cardio-vascular fitness, your stress levels and your life. Fit employees are absent less often, are more productive, have fewer industrial accidents, make fewer mistakes and cost any company health plan less money than their unfit colleagues. Given the above facts it is clearly in the interest of individual employees to build walking into their working day, and it is also in the interest of employers to support any walking initiatives.

All business organizations have to be aware of the ROI (Return On Investment) of any initiative. The commonly accepted figure for a successful company wellness program is that it will return 3 dollars for every one dollar invested. A well-structured walking program can exceed that ratio many fold because it requires no capital outlay, other than the purchase of pedometers (which are often supplied on a cost recovery basis). The physical, psychological and social benefits of regular walking inevitably have a positive impact on an organization’s bottom line. The positive impact of walking goes beyond an ROI and delivers an ROL (Return On Life).

We believe that Telus will be the first of a number of national companies with employees spread around the country who will take advantage of the flexibility and accessibility of PED Circle Canada. Insurance companies have long been in the vanguard of pedometer-based programs. Their actuarial figures tell them of the powerful link between regular exercise and health. Regular walking inspired by Circle Canada will benefit not just the employees of an insurance company, but their hundreds of thousands of clients whose medical costs and insurance claims will inevitably decrease.

One important reminder: If you are going to set up a pedometer based walking program, GET A GOOD PEDOMETER. I’ve seen participants in some programs quickly lose interest when they realize the numbers on their pedometers are basically meaningless. (see our recommended pedometers in WellMart).

Team Speakwell Circles the Country

The two-person team of Bev Mason and Martin Collis became the first duo, of which we’re aware, to complete Circle Canada. It took us 23 months, each of us averaging just over 12,000 steps per day. Our total step count was 16,310,561. This means that we burned about 815,528 calories, which is the equivalent of burning 233lbs (105kg) of weight. This is the beauty of walking on a daily basis, at first it might seem insignificant, until it’s recorded and totaled to show the life-enhancing value of getting about 10,000 steps a day.

Bev Mason, the executive assistant at Speakwell, certainly practices what we preach. Since joining Speakwell, she has learned to swim, run her first 10k, is a regular at Curves and lost over 40lbs (18kg) while completing Circle Canada.

RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa), which has been described as a ‘Mardi Gras on wheels’, will really come of age in 2006 when Lance Armstrong will spend 3 days riding with the weekend warriors, bike to work specialists and cycling enthusiasts from around the state of Iowa and far beyond. We’ve mentioned RAGBRAI before in earlier editions of ‘Well’ in the Fall 2003 article, ‘Obesity: the Tipping Point’ and in the ‘Fitnet’ compilation in Summer 2004.

RAGBRAI began almost as a joke by two reporters from the Des Moines Register, but with the enthusiasm of people like Tim Lane and many others it has grown into an extraordinary week long cycling celebration with 10,000 riders drawn by lottery. As Iowa has shown us before in ‘Field of Dreams’, “If you build it he will come.”

Tim Lane writes:

Now that he doesn't have to ride in France every summer, Lance Armstrong will be opting for a leisurely ride in Iowa. So rather than Fromentine, Chambord, Grenoble, Pau, and Paris, Lance will be touring Newton, Sully, Ladora, Montezuma and Marengo. Last year he conquered the Alps, this year it will be the humidity and let’s hope not Montezuma’s revenge.

Instead of focusing on teams like T-Mobile, Phonak and CSC, this year Lance will need to deal with Team Skunk, Team Pharfrumpuken, and Team Bare Naked. In 2005 he shared the road with over a hundred riders and thousands of spectators. This year there will be thousands of riders and hundreds of folks along the road. Last year he was on an engineered diet, this year it will be pork chops, ice cream, pie and possibly the occasional beverage. We are willing to bet that on the day he rides there will also be about 9,000 yellow jerseys on the course. It should be fun.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation in Austin, Tex., has announced that Lance Armstrong will be spending several days in Iowa during RAGBRAI. The seven-time Tour winner and "world's greatest athlete" will be joining the world's largest and reportedly most fun-filled tour. In addition to riding, Lance will be visiting cancer survivors and lobbying politicians to make the fight against cancer a national priority and increase federal funding for cancer research.

For those of you unfamiliar with RAGBRAI think of the last day into Paris, with the race decided and the riders clowning around and drinking champagne. RAGBRAI consists of seven days of that.

Lipstick Man helps riders stay beautiful

For Lance, Iowa is the perfect storm that combines lots of candidates for political office, tons of cyclists, and the accompanying media attention. You can't swing a dead cat (or for that matter a live one) in Iowa without hitting someone running for president. It will be both fun and an opportunity for Lance to win a stage in his new race to beat cancer. On July 28th, the 34-year-old Armstrong will address a congressional hearing conducted by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in Iowa City.

Note to animal lovers: NO CATS WERE SWUNG IN THE RESEARCH FOR THIS REPORT.

The only challenge will be keeping the crowds of spectators and wannabe riders down to manageable numbers, but those are the best sort of problems to deal with for a ride that is all about fun, fitness and taking part.

Note:

There is also a Bike Ride Across Nebraska (BRAN), which has a good acronym but attracts far fewer riders. Speaking of bran, I recently saw a cartoon of a man who had been given a speeding ticket, claiming that he was driving under the influence of bran.

For a very funny, tongue in cheek, irreverent description of RAGBRAI go to this link.

Some interesting examples of how effective an artist can be to create an illusion, featuring the work of Eric Grohe.

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Eric in his element, 30' off the ground. He does most of the artwork by himself & researches, paints and designs each project from scratch.

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A company can do a lot to brighten up a working place, such as Miller Brewing was able to do...

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Amazing!!!