Consider two simple scenarios you could be facing at lunchtime: when you have a solid food and water, you could eat those separately or you could premix them into a soup and drink the whole thing together. Which of the two techniques do you think will keep you full longer hence preventing you from snacking often and gaining weight? If you said “The soup!” then it just shows you have read the title of this blog post!

But seriously, BBC News Magazine reports that eating the same food and water combined together as a soup will help keep you full much longer than if you ate them separately. The secret lies in the way food passes from the stomach to the intestines:

After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work. Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to “filling you up”.

When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists’ scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs. [BBC]

Ghrelin and the suppression of hunger:

Ghelin is a hormone released by the stomach walls when the stomach is empty. This hormone triggers a response in the brains hypothalamus region that causes us to “feel hungry” and we start to look for food. But when the stomach walls are stretched as a result of eating food, ghrelin production is stopped and we “feel full”. So one easy way to keep the feeling of fullness for longer periods of time is to eat foods that stay in eh stomach longer.

But as you saw eating food and drinking water separately causes the water to leave the stomach first and the food left behind is not there long enough to keep you satisfied. Soups on the other hand stay in the stomach in their entirety and are only slowly removed causing you to avoid the dreaded 3:00 p.m. snack craving.

What has been your own experience with soups? Have you ever felt full for a longer period of time when you drank soup for lunch? Do comment your thoughts  on this study and head on to BBC to read the entore article also.

[Via Lew Rockwell]

Salt, how do we hate thee, let me count the ways! Sometimes the public is so quick to get on the nutrition bandwagon and demonize a perceived common enemy, that common sense and due diligence are often shown the door (case in point: our fear of saturated fat, cholesterol, … I could go on, but those are rants for some other day). Today we shall talk about salt. Yes, that very same white powder which was once apparently given to the Gods as an offering, without which food is often tasteless, heck, without which we could not even survive.

Today it is not far from the truth if I say salt is close to being public enemy #1. With the sodium content prominently displayed on all food-nutrition labels, salt is the bane of many a food-processor who just wants to preserve the food until it gets to you and wants to add some flavor while at it. Before you think I am all for excessive salt consumption, let me make it clear that anything in excess is bound to create an imbalance in our bodies that will then have to be taken care of, a process that uses up valuable resources and could lead to other complications. But to vilify one particular ingredient to the extent it is being done these days is overkill and probably incorrect as well.

“The neverending war on the white stuff” posted on Spiked-Online discusses the campaign against salt waged by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA). By 2012, the FSA would like to bring the salt consumption of UK residents down to just 6g a day. Almost 80 categories of foods like bread and cereals have been affected by this new mandate.

As can be expected, the food manufacturers are up in arms over these new rules. Yes, the primary concern is that the foods being packaged with less salt will have a lot less appeal to consumers. But there is something else: the relationship between salt consumption and our health is not even conclusive! From Spiked:

When it comes to actual research on the effects of salt reduction, the results are inconsistent and any benefits are generally very small. A review in the British Medical Journal in 2002 concluded: ‘Intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programmes, provide only small reductions in blood pressure and sodium excretion, and effects on deaths and cardiovascular events are unclear. Advice to reduce sodium intake may help people on antihypertensive drugs to stop their medication while maintaining good blood pressure control.’ In other words, if you’ve already got high blood pressure, salt reduction might help, but for everyone else it is probably pointless. [Spiked]

And irrespective of what excessive salt could or could not do to our bodies, regular consumption of salt is not only OK, it is actually vital to our very survival. Our bodies are certainly capable or handling any little extra quantities of salt we might unknowingly consume (no one I know would consume spoonfuls of salt – our mouths pretty much makes sure we eat things in the right quantities and proportions). There is even a theory that our mouths react to salt in a favorable way because from an evolutionary point of view it was known to be good for health.

As the article concludes, while politicians try to “save us from ourselves” by giving us one mandate after another and invading our privacy with faulty research, it’s up to us to read more, get educated and not give into the hype.

[Via Lew Rockwell]

Michael Pollan, every Big-Food manufacturer’s greatest nightmare, has some new advice. The author of books like “In Defense Of Food” and the “Omnivore’s Dilemma” simply says this about how to decide whether to buy a food or not:

“Never Buy Any Food That Is Advertised”

True, that is a bold statement and to some it might even be virtually impossib;e to follow (after allwhich food isn’t advertised these days?). But look closely and realise he is not talking about packaged foods at all! When was the last time you saw an ad for carrots and broccoli? That’s right: never. In fact Pollan claims that 94% of all food-advertisements are for processed foods.

FoodRenegade has an article on Pollan’s interviews with DemocracyNow and even has a couple of videos well worth watching:

Check them out and begin the move toward “real food”, folks!

[Via Mark's Daily Apple]

Many of us have heard about, or even know someone who suffers from, severe allergic reactions. Typically,the sufferer has a bad reaction to nuts or shellfish and unless he rapidly injects himself with Epinephrine (Adrenaline), this reaction could even prove fatal. It’s interesting to understand, however, why this reaction happens in the first place and what, if anything, can be done to prevent or lessen the severity of these attacks.

A recent Daily mail article details the case of a lady who suffered just such a reaction to hazelnuts and gives us interesting details of the allergy and its causes:

An allergy occurs when the body over-reacts to the presence of something harmless and produces antibodies and chemicals such as histamine in response. It is the body’s way of trying to get rid of the perceived invader as rapidly as possible.
An anaphylactic reaction [...]  occurs when the body produces a huge amount of histamine from all of the body’s cells, not just localised ones, as happens in a milder reaction. The large amount of histamine causes blood vessels and tubes in the lungs to swell, leading to severely reduced blood pressure and breathing problems. [Daily Mail]

While it’s true and stress and hormonal imbalances are all leading causes of allergic reactions, what is surprising researchers is the fact that people are developing allergies to even plant-based foods something man has eaten for centuries. This is where it gets interesting because it is truly possible that our immune systems are not being challenged enough by the sanitation and cleanliness of modern food preparation and consumption:

‘For example, in years gone by we would have had regular exposure to bacteria found in muddy water, and these bacteria would also have been found on unwashed fruit and vegetables.
‘Throughout evolution, all animals and humans will have consumed large numbers of these bacteria daily. Now we drink sanitised water and scrubbed fruit and veg, so we have no contact with them.’
Indeed, animal studies have shown that regular exposure to such bacteria can reverse eczema, for instance. [Daily Mail]

Various parasitic worms are also being studied to see what their role could be in preventing allergies. These parasites and bacteria routinely found in our gut are now being slowly eradicated by the high use of antibiotics and this could be a leading cause of the increase in allergic reactions as well.

Do read the full article contains more details on the new ways allergies are being studied and ossible cures are being investigated. If you or someone you know suffers from allergies, it’s probably not a very bad idea to pluck fruits right off the trees and have a go at them.

Your ancestors did that and you are living proof they survived!

Sugar, in all its devious forms like High Fructose Corn Syrup, High Maltose Corn Syrup and their various cousins, is added in almost every food you can possibly imagine including ketchup, barbecue sauce, pasta sauce and even bread! Yes, the nutrition labels are honest enough to tell you how many grams of sugar are contained in the product, but like they say: a picture is worth a thousand words …

Enter SugarStacks, a website that shows you how many standard 4g cubes of sugar are contained in each serving size of various types of foods like sauces, drinks and snacks. One look at the number of sugar cubes in a 20 oz bottle of soda and I am sure you’ll rethink your decision to fill your body with empty sugar calories.

Check out the site and see the number of ways you get sugar each day, in many cases without even realizing it.

It’s almost fashionable to “eat healthy” these days. Pretty much any food in the supermarket now seems to have a claim to health and really how could you go wrong if you eat so-called “natural”, “whole grains” and “fat free” stuff all day? Well …….

The Wall Street  Journal does some digging of its own and finds that most of the stuff that is claimed to be natural or “free” of bad stuff is anything but. “The Fine Print: What’s Really in a Lot of ‘Healthy’ Foods” investigates the tall claims on packaged foods and the results are pretty eye-opening.

Here are some of the most glaring violations of consumers’ trust:

• Chicken that is plumped by stuffing it with salt and water and then some “carageenan” that holds all that salt and water in! While salt and water are not naturally found in a chicken, they are still “natural” products themselves so they are allowed to call the chicken package “All Natural”. Brilliant!
• Using sorbitol instead of natural sweeteners actually makes things much worse for those sensitive to it leading to things like diarrhea and stomach pains.
• Trans fat – that age old enemy can still be added in quantities up to .49g and the package can still claim “No Trans Fat”! Must be nice to round down like that!

Read the entire article to learn how to protect yourself from wily food-marketers and stay one-step ahead of them.

[Via The Consumerist]

Cheerios, the quintessential American breakfast cereal, has been making some pretty tall claims on it’s boxes for the last two years and it looks like the long (and apparently slow) arms of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have finally caught up with it.”You can lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks” claims the big letters on the front of a Cheerios box. Elsewhere, on a website called WholeGrainNation (which is mentioned on a box of Cheerios) is the promise: “Heart-healthy diets rich in whole grain foods can reduce the risk of heart disease.” The FDA’s response: “Not so fast!”

You see, the problem is more with how this claim is presented on the box than of it’s even true or not (and I have my doubts!). In a formal “Warning Letter” published on its site, the FDA explains:

Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease. Specifically, your Cheerios® product bears the following claims on its label: “you can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks” [FDA]

So essentially, because it claims to cure a disease, Cheerios is now behaving like a drug and as such cannot continue to market itself without a new drug application from the FDA! The entire fiasco is succinctly summed up by this comic :

Image From: VarvBlog by Gary Varvel

General Mills, the makers of Cheerios, for their part are coming out with their defense saying that their “soluble fiber health claim” has been FDA approved for almost 12 years and this current situation probably as more to do with how this claim is presented than the claim itself. Their main homepage now has the following message:

Image from Cheerios.com

While this issue will probably be resolved once General Mills changes something minor like the font on these messages,a larger problem continues to exist and that is the prevalence of claims that breakfast cereals can have magical disease-squelching properties. True, of all the cereals out in the market, Cheerios are probably the least of the evils with barely a gram of sugar and just 100 calories per 1 cup serving. A one cup serving (as mentioned in the Cheerios Nutrition Label) contains just 1g of soluble fiber. Note that this also contains 20g of carbohydrates (effectively 17g if you deduct the fiber as some folks like to).

Now notice their health claim (this is right on their box, Here’s an example): “Three grams of soluble fiber daily from whole-grain oat foods, like Cheerios, in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease.” OK, so now one needs 3g of soluble fiber and they say you can get it from two 1.5 cup-servings of Cheerios. Subtle, but notice how they say 1.5-cup servings but their nutrition label really says a serving size is one cup! So essentially you are really having three servings of their nutrition label to get 3g of soluble fiber. By this time you have also consumed 51g of carbohydrates and even if it is whole grain, I am not sure if that is really going to do you that much good. In comparison, just a half-cup of kidney beans, pinto beans or brussel-sprouts will give you 2g of soluble fiber and its all natural!

The bottom line is really simply this: always read between the lines of any product manufacturer’s claims and see if there could be other factors contributing to their supposed benefits. For example, look at the Cheerios claim again. Note the phrase “in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease”. So first of all there is no telling if a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol might alone have reduced your cholesterol anyway even without adding any Cheerios! Secondly it only “may” reduce the “risk” of heart disease. There are just so many loopholes in this claim, that I could package tap-water and sell it with these exact claims and I would still be right!

“Drink plain water as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, coupled with plenty of exercise and you may reduce the risk of heart disease”.

I feel like a big-industry-marketer already!

During the past few decades, Americans have tried one weird diet after another and even though we have precious little good results to show for all the effort, these diets continue to haunt us by making periodic appearances now and then. Glamor Magazine on MSNBC gives us a brief overview of the various dieting fads that have hit this country along with how they have resurfaced in modern times.

From Master Cleanse, which was popularized by Beyonce when she said she used the diet to get ready for her role in Dreamgirls to the Cabbage Soup Diet, you can follow each one and see when it first originated and how to follow it.

The article ends with a description of the Atkins Diet followed by the top 5 dieting trends for today’s times including such gems as “portion control” and “diet delivery” (home delivered nutritios meals, anyone?)

Do you know of any crazy diet from the past that is not mentioned in the article? Comment away to share what you know!

It’s the season for the sneezin’ and if you notice youngsters and adolescents sniffling around the house permanently hanging on to the tissue boxes, then you know the allergies are acting up. But before you react instinctively and get out the antihistamines, consider this news item from Yahoo News: Teenagers and adolescents who are obese have an increased risk of getting allergies.

This was found to be especially the case for food-based allergies:

The study authors analyzed data from 4,111 participants, aged 2 to 19, who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and found that obese children and teens were 26 percent more likely to have any kind of allergy, and 59 percent more likely to have a food allergy, than their normal-weight peers. [Yahoo News]

While the authors of the study note the association between obesity and risk of allergies, they do concede that there is probably no causal relationship between the two. In other words, it cannotbe shown that obesity caused the incidence of allergies in the first place.

Keeping fit in this early summer season is one sure-fire way to escape the nasty clutches of a bad seasonal allergy atack!

Michael Pollan’s recent book “In Defense Of Food“  has a seven-word by-line, but those words are a lesson for a lifetime:

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

That’s as simple as it’s ever going to be put, folks.
Eat Food: as in “real” food (basically, if it’s boxed, available as a tube or slice, or has 30 ingredients, it’s probably not “food”)
Not Too Much: No explanation required except to point out that if you really want to know when you have had enough so you can stop eating, then your meal-time has to be longer than about 20 minutes. You need to eat slowly enough that your stomach gets an opportunity to communicate to your brain that you have had enough.
Mostly Plants: No, all meat is not bad. But most of the meat you find in the grocery’s meat aisle is. Cows were not meant to be eaten after spending a lifetime of eating grain, slaughtered in factories and then ground and packaged in plastic. (And yogurt was never meant to be eaten in a pink tube either). Eat meat in moderation, but mix in plenty of the plant-varieties as well is the gist.