We Are Right About Moderation, Again!

Recently, researchers from the Oregon Research Institute published their new finding on the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and they found that frequent intake of ice-cream may reduce the rewarding feeling from intake of similar food products.

There were 151 healthy-weight adolescents with various ethnic backgrounds participating in this survey study. An fMRI test was used during visual stimuli and upon receipt of an ice-cream based milkshake (270 kcal, 13.5 g fat, and 28 g sugar per 150 mL) and a calorie-free tasteless solution to compare striatal responsivity. Percentage body fat was assessed and used as a dependent variable and covariate in fMRI analyses. Resting metabolic rate was measured. A food frequency questionnaire was filled out by the participants, inquires about the frequency of consumption of 60 specific food types in the past two-week period, including ice-cream. Also, the craving and liking of a variety of foods, including ice cream was assessed

The study shows that frequent ice-cream consumption was associated with reduced striatal response to receipt of an ice-cream based milkshake, which indicates the possibility that regular intake of an energy-dense food like ice-cream may reduce reward-region responsivity to that food or other similar foods. Another interesting finding from the study is that reduced striatal activation was correlated with frequency of ice cream consumption, but not with frequency of chocolate candy, cakes/cookies, hamburger, or French fry consumption or general fat-and-sugar-dense diets. Given the fact that both a chocolate milkshake and chocolate candy are palatable, fat-and-sugar-dense foods with similar flavors, while the fat and sugar content, food form, texture, and temperature of ice cream are most similar to the milkshake delivered in the scanner, the researchers suggests that it is the texture, not flavor, affects the expected satiation of foods.

Although it is not a randomized control study, part of the data is collected on site to provide more accuracy. In contrast of to what past research suggested, result of this study is independent of total energy intake and excess adipose tissue, which might be due to the limitation of subjects’ BMI range. Thus, further study with overweight and obese population is needed to confirm or reject the current result. Moreover, other than frequency, quantity of past ice-cream intake should also be assessed and compared in terms of its effect on striatal responsivity. To further confirm the result, more than one food that shares the same characteristic with ice-cream (high-fat, high-sugar, cold) should be introduced to obtain the same effect in future studies.

Despite of the few limitations of this study, I am grateful that we are probably right again about the idea of consuming everything in moderation. Now, we would even be able to feel better when asking our clients or patients to cut back on their ice-cream consumption, since you would be able to say: “Instead of making you feel worse as you believed, it may actually help you feel better and more rewarding when you do eat them.”

The Truth about Salt that may Shock You: Go Asian for Your Heart

February is American’s National Heart Month, which attracts nation-wide attention to heart health once again. For the occasion, CDC just published its 61 volume of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on February 7^th, in which they investigated on American’s consumption of salt. As you may know, excessive consumption of salt raises blood pressure especially in sodium sensitive population: a threat for a healthy heart.

CDC’s report analyzed data from the 2007–2008 What We Eat in America, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), in which approximately 7100 people within various ethnic groups had participated. These data were collected from across the country by administering 24-hour recalls, and then are analyzed using USDA’s Food and Nutrition Database. Although the result of 24-hour diet recall is not as accurate, it gave us a decent grasp of our average salt intake level. Also, since salts added at table were excluded in the survey, the total intake is subjected to underestimation.

Following are the key findings and recommendations from the CDC report. Be prepared for one or more “wow moments”:

1. Many Americans eat too much salt, and you are very likely to be one of them. Recommended daily sodium consumption is <2,300 mg, and is 1,500 mg for groups that are more sodium sensitive. However, American’s average dietary sodium intake is 3,266 mg/day, and about 90% of us consume way more sodium than recommended.
2. 44% of the sodium consumed is coming from 10 main categories of foods, and surprisingly, bread is at the top of the list.                                                                                  The 10 main categories are: bread and rolls, cold cuts/cured meats, pizza, poultry, soups, sandwiches, cheese, pasta mixed dishes, meat mixed dishes, and savory snacks.
3. More than 85% of dietary sodium from foods and drinks comes from stores or restaurants rather than home cooked foods.
4. Reducing the sodium content of the 10 leading sources by one fourth would reduce total dietary sodium by more than 10%.

How come breads and rolls contribute the most toward our sodium intake? You may ask. In fact, there is quite high but not extremely high amount of sodium (about 150mg per serving) in most commercial breads, however, since we eat so much of them on a daily basis, small quantities added up.

To cut back on your sodium intake from breads, you can certainly make your own bread with less salt added, which is nevertheless quite time consuming. In comparison to bread, however, rice contains way less sodium (about 1mg per serving) and is way easier to prepare!

So why not go Asian for your heart?

Here are the tricks:

• Pick up a rice cooker in Wal-Mart or Chinatown for as cheap as $12.
• Put rice in the cooking pot.
• Rinse rice with water to get rid of any bad pieces or empty bran that’s floating on the surface.
• Add water to the pot to cover the rice.
• Plug in your rice cooker and hit start!

Get To Know What You Eat

With the advance in technology, development of society, and improvement of living standards, people have never cared or been able to care about their health as they are now. In such an era of information explosion, people are not only willing but also able to know everything that is going on around them.

When you go to a restaurant, have you ever had doubts like this: Where do the ingredients for my dishes come from? Are they of high quality? Have they been produced under certain standards? Are they good for my health? Apparently, our concerns are largely due to the lack of information on the sources of our foods. No worries! United States RealTimeFarms.com is now trying to bring more transparency to our food sources. RealTimeFarms.com came into being in the spring of 2010, which is a crowd-sourced online food guide. Its vision seems to be nothing less than magnificent: "powered by the people”, “to collectively document the whole food system” It sounds like that they are building up a Wikipedia in the food world.

When you open their homepage, you can enter a zip code, and view a map showing farms, farmers markets and restaurants in the corresponding region. With the help of the “pins”, you can see the links between those facilities. For example, you can easily find the specific farm that supplies bread, produce, and meat for a restaurant. By clicking on the restaurant names, you will be able to find a special menu, on which, every single ingredients listed leads you to their supplier. Therefore, the origin of your foods will be crystal clear.

RealTimeFarms.com describes itself as a “for-profit social enterprise”, which does not charge a penny from farmers, food manufacturers, or diners, but the restaurants will have to pay a fee to be on their list.

As a fairly new born enterprise, RealTimeFarms.com’s database is far from complete. To get a grasp of its power, you may want to take a look at their database in its birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition, the database for Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Baltimore and New York City is also fairly well developed.

All in all, it is a good attempt to increase the transparency in our food system.

Below is a TED speech by Cara Rosaen, one of the co-founder of the website, “Why Food Transparency Matters and How RealTimeFarms.com Can Help”. Hope you will enjoy it and think deeper about food transparency.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XZUidbcwuc

Chocolates for Valentine: Feeling guilty? Make it Dark!

No matter as a typical male’s gift to female in the U.S., or a typical female’s gift to male in Japan, chocolate is, and always will be, the evergreen super-star on Valentine’s Day all over the world. However, chocolates and other chocolate products have usually been seen as a sweet but dangerous lure, as well as an enemy against our skinny or wish-to-be skinny waistline. So today, if you are looking for a box of chocolate to make your Valentine perfect but at the same time concerning about staying fit: Dark chocolate would be your perfect choice!

Among the various types of chocolate in the market, dark chocolate contains relatively less sugars and fats as well as a lot higher cocoa contents than other products. Under decades of investigation, we now know that thanks to the various bioactive ingredients that cocoa contains, dark chocolate can actually contribute to our health in many ways when consumed in moderation.

As we all know, oxidative stress contributes to degenerative human diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease through multiple metabolic mechanisms in our body. Recently, natural foods and food-derived antioxidants have received growing attention, because they are known to prevent us from those oxidative damages. Vitamin C is probably the most commonly known antioxidant for the general public, and has also been most popularly used as a dietary supplement to prevent oxidative stress-mediated diseases. What most people may not know is, however, dietary phenolic phytochemicals, in particular, the polyphenols prevalent in cocoa, the flavonoids, are among the most powerful antioxidants identified thus far and has a much stronger antioxidant activity than vitamin C.

Researchers from Cornell University found out in 2003 that cocoa actually contains much higher levels of both total phenolic and flavonoids than black tea, green tea, and red wine, which made it very likely to be the one that contains the highest total phenolic and flavonoids contents of all natural foods. In the same study, cocoa also exerted the highest antioxidant activity, which made it very beneficial to our health in terms of its high-quantity and also high-quality antioxidant content.

Below are several Beneficial Effects shown by studies of cocoa and dark chocolate consumption on human health:

• Improve circulation
• Improves cardiovascular health
• Decreases blood pressure ( promotes arterial dilatation effect)
• Lowers cardiac mortality following a first acute myocardial infarction (AMI)
• Lowers the risk of total stroke, cerebral infarction, and hemorrhagic stroke
• Improves brain function (better cognitive test performance)
• Prevention of certain kinds of cancer
• Improves insulin sensitivity
• Improves immune response
• Involves in anti-inflammatory actions
• Provides instant enjoyment and pleasure

Here’s some TIPs for you in choosing your Valentine’s chocolate treat:

• Go dark. Try the darkest chocolate possible to get more beneficial flavonoids.
• Choose low-sugar or fiber enriched dark chocolates. Sugar content may attenuate some of the beneficial effects of cocoa, and it is also bad for your waistline.
• Control portions. Although the health benefits that dark chocolates may provide us seems really obvious, the caloric load of chocolate should not be overlooked.

References:

http://pubs.acs.org.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/doi/full/10.1021/jf0344385

http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/doi/full/10.1080/10408390802066805#tabModule

http://betterlivingthroughchocolate.com/lifestyle/vegetarianism/raw_foodism/chocolate/chocolat-1.pdf

http://www.ajcn.org/content/88/1/58.full

http://av.medpagetoday.com/upload/2011/10/10/1828.pdf

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/139/1/120.long

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/39/

http://www.departmentofmedicine.com/documents/dom/imrp/articles/chocolate_mortality_program.pdf

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/138/9/1671.full

http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/13/1616.full

Cheer for The Reform Movement of School Meals

      Recently, "new school lunch" has become a hot topic not only in the U.S. academia of nutrition, but also for the lay audiences, for it is not only a reform that countless number of nutrition researchers and dietitians has been working toward, but also a historic improvement that concerns every American in some way.

      According to USDA, the new nutrition standards for both the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs was finalized and released on Thursday, January 26, 2012 by Food and Nutrition Service, Department of Agriculture. This rule is scheduled to be effective on March 26, 2012. Compliance with the provisions of this rule by schools must begin from July 1, 2012.
The new school lunches and breakfasts will reflect the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans and also based on the recommendations issued by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research, Institute of Medicine (IOM).

      The major changes in school meals are: 
School Lunch Program:
    • It provides both servings of fruit and vegetable daily rather than one serving of fruit or vegetable.
    • Stricter specification of vegetable subgroups
    • It specifies daily amounts as well as weekly ranges for meat and grain based on age groups.
    • It specifies the amount of whole grains provided daily rather than simply encouragement. 
    • It restricts milk provided to unflavored fat-free or 1% fat only.
School Breakfast Program:
    • It specifies daily amounts as well as weekly ranges for meat and grain based on age groups.
    • Specifies the amount of whole grains provided daily rather than simply encouragement.

      In addition to changes mentioned above, the new regulatory requirements also set the upper-limits for sodium, determined ranges of calorie content, and completely restricted the presence of trans-fat in school meals. 

      This new standard is not only going to help alleviate or even resolve the rising concern of chronic diseases in children, such as childhood obesity, but more importantly, it is going to help building a healthy future for the whole generations affected by the change.  Several studies had been done to examine the correlation between food preference and practice in childhood as well as which in adolescent or adulthood. The results are positive. Study suggests that there’s an enormous amount of learning about food and eating occurs during one’s childhood. This early learning process, although mostly determined by one’s genetic predisposition, however, is also largely influenced by their caregiver’s feeding pattern and modeling effect when they were young. As an old Chinese saying goes, “A child is the father of man.” The new reform of school meals, combined with various existing campaigns devoted to educate parents as well as children themselves, stands a good chance of bringing to us a healthier United States of America in the near future.

References:
1. Final Rule: Nutrition Standards in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. URL: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-01-26/pdf/2012-1010.pdf
2. Comparison of Current and New Regulatory Requirements under Final Rule.
URL: http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/governance/legislation/comparison.pdf
3. Development of Eating Behaviors Among Children and Adolescents.
URL: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/101/Supplement_2/539.full
4. University students  food preference and practice now and during childhood.
URL:http://pdn.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271256&_user=201547&_pii=S0950329305000662&_check=y&_origin=article&_zone=toolbar&_coverDate=31-Jul-2006&view=c&originContentFamily=serial&wchp=dGLzVBA-zSkWA&md5=59f66274c46e37d39d51528e49d41594/1-s2.0-S0950329305000662-main.pdf
5. Comparison of College Students' Current Eating Habits and Recollections of Their Childhood Food Practices. URL:http://pdn.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=277316&_user=201547&_pii=S0022318299704838&_check=y&_origin=article&_zone=toolbar&_coverDate=30-Nov-1999&view=c&originContentFamily=serial&wchp=dGLzVlB-zSkzV&md5=082c7ea7350663fe3455984d4f3fe23c/1-s2.0-S0022318299704838-main.pdf