Welcome to “FitnessMantra Weekend”, your once-a-week health news update. As always you can also stay updated with the latest in fitness news by subscribing separately to the Fitness Mantra del.icio.us feed.

SuperBowl Sunday again! How quickly a year passes! Last year, you read some eating tips for the big game, but some things don’t change during this time of the year. Manning is still the last name of one of the Quarterbacks (last year, Peyton led the Colts to victory - can baby brother Eli do the same thing for the Giants as they take on the Patriots this year?) and SuperBowl Sunday is still the second biggest day of wanton consumption (right behind Thanksgiving Day).

Of course, the eating tips we read last year are absolutely valid even today, but there are a couple of articles with interesting takes on fitness and nutrition before and during the game that warrant our brief attention before we charge off to view the game.

Firstly, Super Bowl shape-up: Get your game on! advises us to start off the day with a little activity ourselves so we get our exercise for the day while having fun doing it. A backyard game of flag football, apparently, does the trick quite well:

Get your buddies together, put on your favorite team jerseys and play some good old-fashioned flag football in the yard. A 150-pound person can burn an average of 576 calories per hour this way! [MSNBC Fit List]

Eat this, not that! 7 Super Bowl swaps meanwhile gives us the ever-useful Eat-This-Not-That take on Super Bowl eating. It starts off with a scary tidbit of information that can be quite unsettling: Americans, it seems, consume about 156 billion calories today! Just follow the pages of simple substitutions of low-calorie swaps for their higher-calorie cousins and you should be just fine by the time it’s the fourth quarter. For example at half-time, having 3 chicken fingers instead of cheese-fries with ranch will give you just half the calories and just a third of fat!

Go Patriots!

Here are the week’s top health and fitness stories:

1. Super Bowl excitement may hike heart attacks: For die-hard fans of the New York Giants and New England Patriots, this Sunday’s Super Bowl won’t be just a game. It may be a health hazard.
2. Good food ‘boosts earning power’: Giving babies nutritious food could significantly increase their earning power as adults, new research suggests.
3. You call that health food?: Take a moment and consider this logic: 1. Fat-free foods are healthy. 2. Skittles are fat-free. 3. Therefore, Skittles are healthy.
4. Eating red may prevent dropping dead: Eating red fruits and vegetables may help reduce inflammation which in turn cuts the risk of heart attack, a U.S. doctor says.
5. Eat this, not that! 7 Super Bowl swaps: By the time the final whistle blows at Super Bowl XLII, Americans will have downed 156 billion calories, mostly from pizza, wings, and beer, the unholy trinity of pigskin comestibles.
6. It’s February. How’s that diet coming?: It’s now one month into 2008, and your eating habits may have veered a bit off course. But it’s not too late - just a few small changes can make all the difference.
7. Va. Senate Backs Phaseout of Trans Fats in School Food: The Virginia Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to phase out the use of artery-clogging trans fats in food sold at public schools, from the cheese pizza in the cafeteria to the chips in the vending machine.
8. Super Bowl shape-up: Get your game on!: … choose the right snacks so you can stay “in the game.” Replace regular chips with baked versions, regular beer with lite beer, thick pizza crust with thin.
9. Obesity drug use rises eight-fold: More than 1m prescriptions are made for obesity drugs a year - eight times the number dispensed seven years ago.
10. Inmate discipline faces diet test: A £1.4m study of 1,000 inmates at three young offenders institutions will look at the effect on behaviour of vitamins and other nutritional supplements.
11. Cooking schools targeting trans fats from foods: The movement to ban artery-clogging trans fats from food has a new venue: cooking schools.
12. Sedentary life ’speeds up ageing’: Leading a sedentary lifestyle may make us genetically old before our time, a study suggests.
13. EU health chief wants food labels to fight fat: The European Union’s health chief wants to introduce tougher food labeling rules to combat the growing problem of obesity across Europe, but is facing stiff political and industrial opposition.
14. Warm-Up Advice From an Ancient Master: We’ve all heard Confucius’s aphorism about the journey of a thousand miles. What I want to know is: Did he actually ever try taking that first step?
15. Diabetes Rates Continue to Soar: The number of Americans being diagnosed with and also living with type 2 diabetes is soaring, presenting a major health and economic crisis for the United States, a new study reports.
16. One Size Does Not Fit All: So how does a young guy seemingly in good health suddenly become such a medical train wreck?
17. Carrots Are Good for Losing Weight: Study after study shows that doctors are often uncomfortable in telling their patients that they need to lose weight.
18. Coffee may make diabetes worse: Daily consumption of caffeine in coffee, tea or soft drinks increases blood sugar levels for people with type 2 diabetes, research suggests.

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Have a great weekend!

[tags]health, fitness, health news, fitness news, health links, fitness links, del.icio.us[/tags]

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There was a time (not too long ago) when the only choice you had to make at the Yogurt aisle was “Plain or Flavored?”. Today you are accosted by easily more than 20 varieties including frozen yogurt, live-and-active-cultures-yogurt and even yogurt with fruit on the bottom.

In early 2006 Dannon came up with a brand new type: Probiotics-enhanced Activia yogurt that is supposed to regulate your digestive system and followed it up a year later with their DanActive “dairy-drink” that would strengthen your body’s defense.

Then Dannon was sued:

A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles claims the Dannon Co. Inc., owner of the world’s best-selling yogurt brand, bamboozled tens of thousands of customers into paying extra for Activia and other yogurts falsely touted as offering special nutritional benefits. [ABC News]

What are Probiotics anyway? According to Dannon’s own website, “Probiotics are living microorganisms, usually lactic acid bacteria, that when consumed in sufficient numbers can provide health benefits that go beyond basic nutrition”. In other words, it’s a form of live-and-active-culture called “Bifidus Regularis” that is added to the yogurt with certain characteristics that are supposed to make it extra-beneficial: safe to eat, high shelf-life and presence n enough quantity to be of help.

But what quantities of these cultures are “enough” and what real benefits do they confer?

…medical experts disagree over what the right amounts are and what kind of benefits they could have, according to Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, an assistant professor of medicine at New York University.
“Probiotic bacteria have only been proven to help with very specific disorders,” she says. “Probiotics is an exciting field, but it is too early to make … general claims like ‘regulates your digestive system.’ That doesn’t mean anything in medical terms.”

So, while it’s probably true that more of the bacteria in this product survive the stomach acids and reach your colon than from regular yogurt (Consumer Reports article), the question is what real effect these bacteria have and is the extra cost worth it? Also note this from Triathlete:
“If you stop eating it, the bacteria levels rapidly return to their normal levels”. (All those opposed to this lifetime commitment speak now or forever just try to be fit!)

And what about DanActive’s claim that it strengthens your body’s defenses? Again, there is no conclusive proof that this is true and in fact according to the ABC News article, a Dannon-funded study itself concurred with this lack of evidence:

…a report issued last year by the American Academy of Microbiology, a report that Dannon helped fund, says, “To date, there is no conclusive evidence that altering the microbiota of a healthy human adult is beneficial.” The report goes on to say that “the efficacy … of probiotic treatments has yet to be determined.”

Now Dannon has a website for everything so there’s one for Activia, one for DanActive, then there’s the Probiotics Center and - surprise! - even one for their “Two Week Challenge” (everyone does these by the way, because apparently consumers just love a good challenge!) But even a cursory glance of these websites (which, by the way are loaded with way more technical information than the average consumer can - or would even care to - understand), brings up so many of the “usual suspects” keywords that their claims begin to sound more and more shaky:

• Activia with Bifidus Regularis is scientifically proven to help with slow intestinal transit when eaten daily for two weeks, as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle. [Activia Site]
• Taken every day, DanActive can help strengthen your body’s defenses. [DanActive Site]
• DanActive is believed to have a positive effect on the balance of your intestinal bacteria. [DanActive Site]

As a consumer, it’s in your best interest to look out for catch-phrases like those highlighted above - for these are the exact phrases companies can later use to wriggle out of taking any responsibility for tall claims. Now, don’t get me wrong - the benefits of active cultures may well be true and present, but claiming conclusive results on as yet unsubstantiated research is certainly not in the best interest of millions of consumers.

Just for kicks (well, not really - I do this for all products), I checked the nutrition and ingredient information for Activia Strawberry Yogurt. Well what do you know? Fructose Syrup, Sugar and modified corn starch must make for some yummy yogurt … with 17g of sugar!

If you haven’t already, read my earlier post from last summer about the Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie yogurt. In that ad, Yoplait claimed that eating yogurt would help you lose weight as long as it was part of a sensible diet and active life. Do you see the pattern? Eat Cheerios, lower cholesterol when eaten as part of a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Eat Special K and lose weight when eaten as part of a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Wait a minute, should we all just skip the extraneous stuff and just eat sensibly and be more active?

Well, I certainly think so!

Yes, we live in a world of high-stress with kids, commutes, pollution and more demands on our time than we can think we can handle. Maybe, just maybe, we can solve this by preventing the causes of this stress rather than rushing out to get the next big (unproven) cure.

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