leapin_larry North's List: Diet & Exercise

"Most people in the U.S. and Canada — from age 1 to age 70 —
need to consume no more than 600 international units of vitamin D a day to maintain health, the report found. People in their 70s and older need as much as 800 IUs. The report set those levels as the "recommended dietary allowance" for vitamin D.

That's only a bit higher than the target of 400 IUs set by today's government-mandated food labels, and higher than 1997 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine that ranged from 200 to 600 IUs, depending on age."

"A review of the nutritional contents of movie-theater popcorn reveals an alarming amount of fat, salt and calories in even the smallest sizes. The study, from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, looked at popcorn from three movie theater chains and detailed the contents of all portions offered."

"People with type 2 diabetes can significantly lower their blood sugar with an exercise program that combines aerobics and weight lifting, a study reports"

"exercising in a fasted state (usually possible only before breakfast), coaxes the body to burn a greater percentage of fat for fuel during vigorous exercise, instead of relying primarily on carbohydrates"

"those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a
screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week —exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time."

"animals that were assigned to the loaded wheels showed significantly increased levels of gene activity and B.D.N.F. levels within their brains. The higher the workload the animals managed to complete, the greater the genetic activity within their brains."

"high consumption of animal-based foods is associated with more chronic disease, while those who ate primarily a plant-based diet were the healthiest."

"there is a startling difference. This time, the government suggests that Americans also just eat less.

More specifically, the guidelines urge Americans to drink water instead of sugary drinks like soda, and it suggests that they avoid fatty foods like pizza, desserts and cheese (albeit deep in the report)."

"A smaller breakfast means fewer daily calories consumed, not more."

"we’ve come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system."

"50 minutes of hard running on a treadmill or riding a stationary bicycle significantly increased blood levels of endocannabinoid molecules in a group of college students"

"There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “bowl full of wholesome” — also known as
oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today.
From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a
nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco
demonstrates."

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades' worth of best-selling diet books, including ''The Zone,'' ''Sugar Busters'' and ''Protein Power'' to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it's not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.

"Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario."

"Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure
time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

Another study, published last year in the journal Circulation, looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11 percent."

"researchers are beginning to suspect that even if you engage in regular exercise daily, it may not be enough to counteract the effects of too much sitting during the rest of the day."

"folic acid is a powerful drug, even if its exact workings remain something of a mystery. For the population at large, it might increase or decrease the risk of certain cancers, depending—perhaps—on whether abnormal cells are already
present."

"The mayor wants to reduce obesity and diabetes by banning the use of food stamps to buy “sugar-sweetened beverages” in New York
City."