Channel surfing on a lazy Sunday afternoon brought me to CNN and a news item about something called The 50 Million Pound Challenge – a creation of Dr. Ian Smith, a quite popular medical contributor to such shows as The View and Celebrity Fit Club on VH1. Community-based weight-loss efforts like The Biggest Loser on NBC always pique my interest because they introduce a social concept not found when individuals diet alone at home or workout in the gym. On further inspection I came away with mixed feelings about this site, but I’ll leave you to decide for yourself:

The Goal

The primary goal of the 50 Million Pound Challenge is, as the name suggests, to get all its users to collectively lose 50 million pounds. While this number might, at first glance, seem astronomical, imagine 5 million users losing just 10 pounds each and suddenly, not only is this achievable, but the total probably needs to be increased pretty soon, if this challenge is indeed a success.

Tools

Registering on The 50 Million Pound Challenge website gives you free customizable tools to track your progress in your weight loss effort. You can also get a free Challenge Kit from any local State Farm agent’s office. According to the site, each Challenge Kit contains a pedometer, a health-related booklet from Dr. Ian and also a DVD featuring him.

Once registered, a user is also offered five different tools on the website itself:

1. A Weight Tracker: Simply update your weight every day and you get access to graphs charting your weigh loss progress, calculators for BMI (not a great ratio, in my opinion) etc.
2. Dr. Ian’s 30-day Meal Plan: A full-fledged food-program for the beginning dieter including shopping lists, meal-ideas and even emails with things to buy for the day or week. You get detailed food lists and things to eat on a daily basis on a calendar and it seems fairly simple and intuitive to use. Some of these features are only available in premium websites but is yours for the taking – totally free on this site.
3. My Journal: Your personal diary where you can enter personal thoughts, motivational quotes, your mood during the day, number of glasses of water you rink – literally anything that catches your fancy which you feel might be useful later while analyzing your weight-loss progress.
4. My Activity Tracker: How many miles did you run? Did you do 20 or 30 laps? 5000 steps on your pedometer? This is where you track all of those daily activities. Your exercise routine for the day goes in here as well and all of this is viewable form your Daily Journal as well.
5. My Teams: This is where the social aspect of the site shows itself. Challenge teams can be based on a variety of factors like friends, family or even place of worship or work. You can track the progress of the entire team as a whole and even challenge other teams to certain pre-set goals.

Thoughts

My initial thoughts about the 50 Million Pound Challenge site were along the lines of “Here we go, another weight-loss social network fad”. But as I read about the tools being offered on the site for free and realized that many of these were considered “premium” by other health-sites, I gave it more serious consideration.

While it’s true that Dr. Ian does make numerous references to certain books he has written like The Fat Smash Diet and The 4 Day Diet, I am not going to hold this against the author when he has provided this many free features for free on the site. In fact, he does go out of his way to mention in the FAQs that you need not make any purchase to use the program and goes on to even say that if you already have a diet-exercise regimen that seems to work for you, then you should stick to it and just use the site to keep all your goals, activities and challenges in one place. Some of the challenges on the site however do seem to require that you have read his books though, like the $10000 challenge that asks to you to describe how the The 4 Day Diet has helped you lose weight.

As with all socially-dependent sites, like Wellsphere for example, the success of this one will also depend on how many users remain active on the site and make use of all the features on a regular basis. Scheduling time everyday to enter all the information on the site that would actually make this useful is not something everyone can realistically do. To its advantage, however, the site recently enrolled its millionth member and seems well on its way to actually achieving its primary objective of 50 million pounds lost. What remains to be seen if these million members are motivated and committed enough to stay on track and keep their diaries updated regularly.

So, what say you? Do you believe such sites help or add another step in a person’s quest for fitness? My feeling remains that much depends on the individual.

Tweeting For Fitness!

FitnessMantra is the latest to join the micro-blogging craze that is Twitter and you can catch all the updates at http://twitter.com/FitnessMantra.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is quite similar to a blog except you can expect more frequent, shorter, updates. With a limit of 140 characters per message (or “tweet” as it is called), brevity is the name of the game and this can lead to very focused and to-the-point messages streaming through the system.

You can catch all the FitnessMantra Twitter messages using various Twitter clients or also subscribe via RSS.

Do you use Twitter? Do send your feedback of the service as well as your thoughts about FitnessMantra on Twitter,

On March 20th, Eli Manning, the winning New York Giants quarterback of this year’s SuperBowl, kicked off the annual President’s Challenge For Fitness. This annual event is a challenge to get Americans to be more active by exercising for at least 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 6 weeks and runs all the way to May 16th of this year.

With sedentary lifestyles the norm for most Americans these days, the President’s Challenge is a real wake-up call to both adults and children (if you’re older than 6, you’re part of the targeted group!) to get moving toward fitness. There are awards to honor states with the highest percentages of participation at the end of the challenge, as well.

To get started, create a profile at the President’s Challenge website. Are you up to it?

Today, November 14th, is World Diabetes Day and the theme for this year is “Diabetes in Children and Adolescents”. In fact, today also marks the first day that the United Nations will observe World Diabetes Day through a series of activities all around the world.

I am sure that there isn’t a single one among us who doesn’t know someone who is afflicted with this terrible disease or beset with its predecessor “pre-diabetes”. Maybe you are affected yourself. In an age of opulence and high-availability of processed and refined foods, diabetes has unfortunately become the very bane of our existence.

The United Nations and Diabetes

Diabetes, on a world-wide scale, has become such a serious issue that the United Nations stepped in late last year to turn the spotlight on the disease and focus the world’s attention toward finding cures and, better yet, preventions for the disease:

On December 20 2006, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a landmark Resolution recognizing diabetes as a chronic, debilitating and costly disease. The Resolution designates World Diabetes Day as a United Nations Day to be observed every year starting in 2007.

The UN Resolution makes World Diabetes Day stronger than ever and provides the opportunity for a significant increase in the visibility of the campaign and an increase in government and media participation on or around November 14. The Resolution will ensure even greater reach for awareness-raising activities throughout the diabetes world.

This Year’s Theme: Diabetes In Children And Adolescents

While we often associate Diabetes with the Type-2 or “Adult Onset” type of the disease, the sad fact is that diabetes (both Type 1 and 2) can (and does) strike people at an early age as well. The focus of this year’s efforts is directed toward the accurate and early diagnosis of diabetes in children with the worthy goal: “No child should die of diabetes”.

Unfortunately, the going is pretty tough and challenging given that:

• Type 1 diabetes is growing by 3% per year in children and adolescents and 5% per year among pre-school children
• An estimated 70,000 children under 15 develop type 1 diabetes each year (almost 200 children a day)
• In the US, it is estimated that type 2 diabetes represents between 8 and 45% of new-onset diabetes cases in children depending on geographic location.
• Over a 20-year period, type 2 diabetes has doubled in children in Japan, so that it is now more common than type 1.
• In native and aboriginal children in North America and Australia, the prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes ranges from 1.3 to 5.3%

Treating children for any illness is challenging enough without having to go through the rigor and pain that keeping tabs on diabetes involves. One can only imagine how disruptive it must be for young children to constantly have to monitor their blood sugar levels while all the time keeping a close watch on their diets.

The campaign assumes the worthy cause to raise awareness of both types of diabetes among the young:

Early diagnosis and early education are crucial to reducing complications and saving lives. The health care community, educators, parents and guardians must join forces to help children living with diabetes, prevent the condition in those at risk, and avoid unnecessary death and disability. [World Diabetes Day]

Truly a cause so worthy it behooves us all to support it. You can learn more about the movement on the official site of World Diabetes Day. (Read last year’s coverage here).

Political cartoonists are experts at poking fun at the government, public policies and politicians. But when those same folks turn their pencils and drawing board toward topics like obesity, nothing but fun ensues as evidenced by the series of comics on MSNBC Health titled “Perspectives On Obesity“.

This Halloween sit back and enjoy the lighter side of obesity …

Happy Halloween!

[tags]health nutrition, fitness, obesity, overweight, comics, cartoons, satire, perspectives on obesity[/tags]

Read any report about the world’s weight problems and you’d think someone super-glued the words “obesity” and “epidemic” together – they always appear side-by-side! In fact, Google currently indexes more than a million pages that contain the phrase “obesity epidemic“.

Now, most people would agree that being overweight or obese is definitely a growing problem and many reports show increasing percentages of obesity in a given population. For example, just early last month, I wrote about the state-wise percentages of obesity in the United States which showed Mississippi topping the list with 30.6% of the adult population classified as obese. But start talking about this being an epidemic (or even raise the issue of how many are, in fact, really obese) and you’ll begin to hear dissenting voices in the crowds.

For example just this week, my del.icio.us feed added two news stories one right after the other and they paint wholly different pictures of the world’s obesity problems. First, WebMD’s The Global Problem of Obesity gives us this sobering piece of information:

In one of the largest studies ever to examine obesity rates across the globe, researchers found that more than 60% of men and 50% of women were either overweight or obese. They concluded that obesity is a growing problem in all regions of the world, even among traditionally lean Asian populations. [WebMD]

With 69,409 men and 98,750 women from 63 countries, this was no small study and various factors like height, weight, disease risk and waist circumference were all used to determine the results. The biggest problem with the study? The fact that it was Body Mass Index (BMI) that was used to determine who was obese and who was not. True, waist circumference was used to determine risk factors of heart disease and diabetes, but we are talking about the very definition of obese here and that brings me to the very next bookmarked article ….

In The Independent’s Who are you calling fat? asks Professor Basham and he goes on to give numerous reasons why the whole “epidemic” of obesity is probably non-existent. Even if you ignore the first reason that the so-called obesity epidemic is simply an attention-grabbing ploy by deep-pocketed bureaucrats and big pharmaceuticals, the other reasons are quite sound and worthy of our consideration:

For a start, the claim that half of the British population will be clinically obese in 25 years assumes, without any empirical foundation, that every overweight child will become an overweight adult and that every overweight adult will progress to obesity.[The Independent]

This is precisely the kind of skewed extrapolation we have all been warned to avoid making during basic statistics classes! Now, BMI itself is a dubious way to decide if a person is obese because a ratio that simply involves height and weight can never account for the amount of muscle a person has as opposed to just fat (see Body Fat Percentage Is A Better Obesity Indicator Than Body Mass Index), but did you know that the BMI classification for “overweight” was changed from 27 to 25 instantly throwing millions of erstwhile normal people into the overweight category? According to Professor Basham no valid reason was ever given for this reclassification. For other reasons and observations that support his conclusion that obesity is probably more hype than reality, do read the entirety of Who are you calling fat?

There is even an entire website dedicated to the obesity myth called, interestingly enough, “Obesity Myths“! Now I must warn you that the publishers of this website (and the free PDF book about Obesity Myths) are from the Center For Consumer Freedom, a front group for restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries. So take the information on their site witha grain of salt, but keep an open mind. That will be the only way to truly make an informed decision based on facts alone with no influence by agenda-based hype.

My own personal view is that irrespective of what magic number decides who are obese and who are not, what percentages of obese people are living as opposed to just overweight people and so on, the fact remains that we live in a world of excessively processed and packaged foods and seem to have even less chance for physical activity than ever before. Whether the terminology used to denote people is obese or not is of less importance to me than the fact that more needs to be done so we are all happy with the way we personally feel about ourselves and how healthy we think we are.

So it would be best if people worry less about whether they are medically deemed overweight or obese. That’s just a naming convention. Instead there are far better things to worry about like: how do they see themselves in the mirror?, do their clothes fit well and are they confident of themselves while in public?, are they free of the ailments of excesses (heart disease, diabetes, stroke)?, how energetic are they while performing daily tasks like climbing stairs or house-cleaning? and so on.

I know for sure that those things matter more to me than some ratio of height and weight.

[tags]health, nutrition, fitness, exercise, obesity, overweight, body mass index, bmi[/tags]

]]> http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/27/the-obesity-epidemic-fact-or-hype/feed/ 1 http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/15/blog-action-day-health-nutrition-fitness-and-the-environment/ http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/15/blog-action-day-health-nutrition-fitness-and-the-environment/#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:51:46 +0000 FitnessMantra http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/15/blog-action-day-health-nutrition-fitness-and-the-environment/

Today is Blog Action Day, a day on which thousands of bloggers around the world will commit to write about a single topic to raise awareness about an issue we all face. This year, the topic of focus is “the environment”.

What does a blog that primarily talks about health, nutrition and fitness have to do with the environment? A lot more than I first imagined! Think about it. Doing one’s part for the environment is not just the prerogative of big industries that might create the most pollution or effluents. You and I can each play our own little parts to help save the environment and also – in the long run – this planet we all call home.

As individuals, when we think about the environment and how we can help, recycling is one our first thoughts. But do you realize that just by making fitness a way of your life, you could already be making a huge impact on helping the environment?

Consider these healthful habits:

1. Walking or cycling to places within range like shops, your workplace or the gym. Getting the exercise you need while also saving on gas and reducing pollution has never been this beneficial!
2. Taking the stairs instead of escalators or elevators – work those quadriceps while saving electricity. And, did you know that for one or two floors, it’s actually faster to take the stairs than wait for the elevator? Heading for the stairs next time will help you burn some calories while saving some power for your building.
3. Brown-bagging your lunch (with recycled paper, of course!) will dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road during lunch hours crowding the restaurants. And don’t even get me started on the number of paper or plastic cups, plates, forks, spoons and knives that fast-food joints so liberally use – all of which just end up in landfills because, honestly, when was the last time you saw someone carefully recycle them? (Most just roll up everything in the brown bag they come in and trash them). Oh yes, bringing your own lunch saves money too!
4. Eating fresh (and I don’t mean Subway!): Last time I checked, individual fruits and vegetables sold fresh in the local farmers’ markets didn’t need to be shrink-wrapped, canned or otherwise wrapped with environmentally unfriendly plastic. Healthful habits automatically become environmentally friendly as well! The less processed food you buy, the better it is for the environment (and for you!).
5. Just being healthy helps! How? Every visit you ever made to the doctor, every surgical glove ever used, every prescription bottle ever dispensed, every tablet you ever had to have to take, everything ends up creating additional metal, plastic and paper that might end up in landfills further increasing the effect of the environmental nightmare the planet is facing today.

So do your part: live well, eat well, move more, be healthy and depend less on drugs and procedures. It might not be easy and it might take awhile, but this might well be your simple part in making this world a better place for all of us.

[tags]health, nutrition, fitness, exercise, blog action day, environment[/tags]

]]> http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/15/blog-action-day-health-nutrition-fitness-and-the-environment/feed/ 0 http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/08/the-hackers-diet-fitnessmantra-book-review/ http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/08/the-hackers-diet-fitnessmantra-book-review/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:49:54 +0000 FitnessMantra http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/08/the-hackers-diet-fitnessmantra-book-review/

The Hacker’s Diet is not your everyday diet book and neither is its author, John Walker, your everyday diet-book author. As the founder of AutoDesk (a company known primarily for its AutoCAD engineering design software package), Walker is neither a doctor nor a nutritionist (there’s your disclaimer right there). Another fairly unique feature about this book: it is freely available to read online or as a downloadable PDF file (1.4 MB zip file). But what makes this book a must read is not either of these things – it is that the principles outlined in the book are hype-free, cold, hard facts that are easy to understand and if implemented properly, almost guaranteed to help you lose weight.

First of all, you must know that being an engineer, Walker brings a host of engineering principles, math, statistics and analysis into the book although you certainly don’t need a mathematical bent of mind to appreciate the content or understand its principles.

At the core of The Hacker’s Diet is the same underlying principle that FitnessMantra has propounded throughout its existence:

Fad diets and gimmick nutritional plans obscure this simple yet essential fact of weight control: if you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight; if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight.

In fact the book goes so far as to reduce the human body to a simple rubber bag, the size of which depends on two simple criteria: what goes in and what goes out. It begins with the introduction of a mythical device called “The Eat Watch”, a device that magically tells you when to start eating and when to stop so that if you mindlessly paid heed to it you would achieve your targeted weight. You are then introduced to all the facts and tools you need to “create” such a tool for yourself.

Right upfront you are presented with this startling fact: close to 70% of “what goes in” and 80% of “what goes out” is water! If only all those “daily-weight-checker” types knew this simple underlying cause behind the sometimes wild fluctuations they see on the scale everyday! From there, Walker takes us on a whirlwind tour of body types, the “hand you were dealt” as far as metabolism goes, engineering terms like feedback, signal and noise, graphs, moving averages and what have you and finally brings them all together, closing the loop on how all this applies to your losing weight.

Interspersed with all the technicality (it is a “hacker’s” diet after all!), Walker also shows a penchant for humor keeping the reader engaged in a lively fashion. A particularly hilarious section of the book outlines what would happen if a researcher finds a link between a dietary component like fiber and an aspect of your health like cholesterol levels: as the news spreads, marketers all over the place try to capitalize on this finding leading to ridiculous consequences:

Oat-this and oat-that breakfast cereals begin to vanish from the supermarket, displaced by the arrival of Peachies, Fuzz-chex, and Teenage Mutant Fuzzy Ninja Turtles. Soon, the whole supermarket looks like it’s been sprayed with minoxodil. Whole grain cookies enriched with peach fuzz. Fuzz-tab supplements. Fuzzy toothpaste. “Fizzy fuzz” peach champagne.

The website also provides a set of supporting tools (mostly Excel spreadsheets) that can help you along the way. There is also a “Hacker’s Diet Online” site that you can create a free account on to track your progress online from anywhere.

Although the book places slightly less emphasis on exercise than I would like, the fact is that food does have a greater impact on your weight than exercise alone. There is a still a chapter on exercises that you can perform everyday whatever stage of weight-loss you are in.

The book and website are not only just recommended, but I would say they are required material for anyone seriously interested in losing weight.

[tags]the hacker’s diet, diet, weight loss[/tags]

]]> http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/10/08/the-hackers-diet-fitnessmantra-book-review/feed/ 0 http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/06/13/microwave-oven-the-latest-victim-in-the-obesity-blame-game/ http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/06/13/microwave-oven-the-latest-victim-in-the-obesity-blame-game/#comments Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:37:05 +0000 FitnessMantra http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/06/13/microwave-oven-the-latest-victim-in-the-obesity-blame-game/

It sits silently in a corner of your kitchen ready to do your bidding whenever asked. You can pop open its door put in foodstuffs, punch a few buttons and hey presto! – a minute later you have those same foodstuffs nice and warmed up for you. A pretty innocuous (and very handy) little kitchen gadget you would think, right?

Well think again, because at the prestigious British Cheltenham Science Festival, the invention (and eventual popularity) of the microwave is one of three factors being considered as the reason for the meteoric rise in obesity levels in the country. Oh, just so you know, the other two factors are the creation of the supermarket and the end of the Second World War!

Did microwaves ‘spark’ obesity? asks a BBC news article which describes a debate in which three experts were asked when the nation’s obesity crisis really began and what could be the probable causes.

Professor Wardle who is professor of clinical psychology at University College London said: “I looked at the figures showing rates of obesity in the population over many years and it seem very clear it began between 1984 and 1987.

“So then we looked at what changes were going on in the food and activity world at that time and one of the striking changes was there were differences in the speed with which we could prepare a meal as a consequence of the introduction of microwaves.”

So it turns out that the availability of easy-to-prepare meals and the hapless machine that facilitates their easy consumption are to be blamed for the millions of obese folks who put more of these foods into their mouths than they needed in the first place.

A couple of other debaters Professor Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London and Professor Ken Fox, professor of exercise and health science at the University of Bristol respectively feel that supermarkets and world war 2 are to blame:

“Co-op introduced the supermarket retail format to Britain, heralding the late 20th century food revolution in which prices have tumbled, car use rocketed, physical activity plummeted and the NHS was born which picks up the pieces.”

… and …

“The end of the war saw technology starting to replace physical effort in both work and leisure.”

In related news, FitnessMantra would like to take the opportunity to turn your attention to a couple of other probable causes of obesity:

1984: The Apple Macintosh

Critics blame the revolutionary and cute-looking Macintosh for propagating a tidal wave of obesity in the 80s because it created a generation of lazy people who sat indefinitely in front of these machines, eating nonstop and creating colorful documents and artwork while their garbage overflowed from their bins and their lawn overgrew to reach Amazon rain forest levels. Some psychiatrists also claim that the word “Apple” was a subliminal message to get people to eat while working, while the word “Macintosh” (which means raincoat) suggested to users that the weather was not good outside and they should stay inside longer.

1985: The Nintendo Entertainment System

Who can forget Donkey Kong, the ape-villain who takes Pauline captive and throws barrels at our diminutive hero, Mario, as he tries to recuse the fair maiden? Certainly not the scores of kids who became captive to their couches when Nintendo came out with their ground-breaking game system in 1985.

Today a sizeable chunk (these puns happen, you know) of those children are obese and have decided to blame Nintendo for robbing them of their ability to go outside and enjoy some physical activity. “The only exercise I got was for my thumbs as I furiously pressed ‘Left’ and ‘Jump’ about a 100 times a minute” said Jevaughn, a portly teenager with amazingly well-developed thumbs.

But it turns out there was an upside: “I am really good at hitching a ride, though”, he added as he stuck out his thumb in peak traffic and a taxi collided with it, suffering massive frontal damage in the process.

See? It’s easy when you know how!

Meanwhile …

Dr David Haslam, clinical director of the National Obesity Forum said all the theories could have contributed to rising levels of obesity and there was no one cause. “Microwaves are a double-edged sword because they are also a very healthy way of cooking food and supermarkets sell healthy food if people choose to buy it.”

You think?

[tags]health, fitness, nutrition, exercise, obesity, microwave oven[/tags]

]]> http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/06/13/microwave-oven-the-latest-victim-in-the-obesity-blame-game/feed/ 2 http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/05/05/face-the-fats-advises-the-american-heart-association/ http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/05/05/face-the-fats-advises-the-american-heart-association/#comments Sat, 05 May 2007 19:50:21 +0000 FitnessMantra http://www.fitnessmantra.info/2007/05/05/face-the-fats-advises-the-american-heart-association/

Probably no macro-nutrient is as misunderstood or mischaracterized as fat is. While it is generally known that excessive fat in our diets tends to lead to clogged arteries and a variety of heart-related issues, it is also clear that the body cannot survive without fat. As I pointed out in Fat Fiction, our brains are almost 60% fat and fat is vital for the functioning of many of our internal organs including the heart and lungs.

But with so many varieties of fats like saturated, unsaturated, trans fats etc. it’s no wonder that misconceptions are rife and finding the right information even more difficult. Well, the American Heart Association has come to the rescue with a feature titled “Face The Fats“.

According to introduction on the site it will give you enough information to help you know things like which fats are good and which to avoid, which foods contain which types of fats and even how much fat you should consume each day.

It all begins with the Fats 101 primer that answers basic questions like “Does My Body Need Fat?” (you already know it does!) and whether fats can be part of a healthy diet. In the same section you can find detailed information about the various types of fats like Saturated and Trans Fats. These are very informative and will satisfy the quest of most readers to know what these fats really are and how each type affects their health.

You can wrap up your “Fat Finding” tour with a nifty tool called “My Fats Translator” (has it’s own website!). Just plug in your age, gender, height, weight and physical activity and the tool churns out not only the total number of calories you need to maintain your weight but it goes one step further: it actually ells you how many of those calories should come from fats and within that it gives you limits for saturated and trans fats. I have touched upon this topic in one of my earlier quick tips: “Know where you are getting your daily requirement of fat from“.

Now, I agree this kind of detailed counting is going to be almost impossible to keep track of on a daily basis but given that most of us eat in a consistent pattern everyday, just maintaining a food diary for a week will give us a quick estimate of whether we are atleat close to our daily limits or not. Pretty soon one should be able to eyeball foods and know how it will affect our diet plan for the day.

Finally what health website worth its salt is complete without a few mascots or comic characters? The AMA surely doesn’t want to disappoint you here: Behold the “Bad Fat Brothers“, a flash-based website about two very creatively named characters called Sat and Trans (ouch).

Supposed to represent the two types of fats that are bad for you, these two characters come replete with bad James-Bondish jokes like “We’re real heart-breakers”. Once on the site, entering the diner will start a little webisode where the two brothers will entice you with all sorts of foods laden with bad fats.

Go ahead and explore the site. If you can numb yourself to the poor jokes you will actually learn something useful and have fun while at it – perfect for a younger audience to whom parents wish to impart the knowledge of healthy eating.

Here’s to healthier eating with a better understanding of fats and the knowledge of how the right quantity of the right variety of fat can be a huge asset to our diets.

[tags]health, nutrition, fats, saturated fats, trans fats, american heart association[/tags]

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