From the monthly archives:

November 2009

Tips For Prop Tasters

November 30, 2009

in Uncategorized

No Matter What Diet You Are On

1. Eat the youngest leaves of leafy greens. Often young leaves have much less of the bitter flavor than more mature leaves.

2. Cook bitter vegetables in ways that reduce their bitter flavors. The most common way is to cook the vegetable at a high heat in a little olive oil with garlic. To enforce the fat-counting theme, use 1 to 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 60 to 120m! (2 to 41 oz) fat-free chicken stock or white wine. Simmer until tender.

3. Salt decreases bitterness. Season bitter vegetables generously with salt and see if you like them more.

4. Combine vegetables with starches. It's one way to use the tang of the vegetables to liven up the smooth blandness of the starch.

5. Use small amounts of vegetables as ingredients in other dishes. This way you will increase your vegetable intake in an enjoyable way. Broccoli quiche is a classic example. There are others out there. Just look around.

6. Very few fruits have bitter flavors. Grapefruit is probably the worst. There are also rhubarb and persimmons. So if you can't get yourself past your loathing of vegetables, try to increase your intake of fruits from the wide variety nature offers.

For carbohydrate counters: One of the easiest ways to reduce the bitterness of many vegetables is to add salt and butter. While butter is nothing but saturated fat, and filled with calories, the benefit it offers in making these important foods palatable outweighs the downside, especially on this diet. So, as you are cooking, feel free to use a modest amount of butter to enhance the taste of vegetables, if that makes them more appealing. You'll also find that many of these vegetables taste wonderful in a casserole made with eggs and cheese. Recipes for this type of casserole abound in cook articles and on the Web.

For calorie counters: Most of these foods are wonderfully low in calories, so you can combine them with other foods to make them more palatable. Mixing greens or other bitter vegetables with a starch is a classic way of improving on both the tang of the vegetable and the blandness of the starch. Normally, bitter greens such as spinach and kale can be sautéed in oil and stock or wine and then added to a pasta for a different taste. Including these foods in your diet will increase your variety without increasing your calorie count, so try it; you'll like it.

For fat counters: Since fruits and vegetables will make up the bulk (literally) of what you eat, it's very important to expand your horizons if you are a PROP taster. In addition to trying new foods, try new ways of preparing the same old stuff. Asian cuisines Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese offer a variety of ways to cook these foods to minimize the bitterness that may be there. If you like them, you should invest in one or two good cook articles to give you more ways to prepare these essential foods. A touch of exotic oil like walnut oil or sesame oil can bring new life and flavors to the same old dishes, and I encourage you to try some.

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PROP TASTER

November 30, 2009

in Uncategorized

‘An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh: Will ROGERS (A SUSPECTED PROP TASTER) If you scored 40 or higher on the PROP Test, chances are that you are what is known as a taster, and if you scored higher than 80, you may even be a supertaster. PROP is a naturally occurring chemical in food that’s only real importance is the bitterness of its taste. If you can taste it, you are genetically programmed to dislike important and health-promoting foods such as broccoli, spinach, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and grapefruit. As it turns out, liking these vegetables and fruits may be the odd quality, since up to 75 per cent of the world’s population are tasters and a mere 25 per cent non-tasters, that is, people who are insensitive to the bitterness of many of the foods that are so good for you.

When researchers have studied tasters and supertasters, they have found that, in general, both groups dislike Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, radishes and grapefruit more than non-tasters. Other foods disliked by tasters include coffee, green tea and bitter beers. In addition, the group described as supertasters tend to dislike foods that are very sweet or that have a high fat content. This makes supertasters perhaps the pickiest eaters in the world.

Is there an association between your PROP-taster status and weight? It makes sense, but so far the studies are not conclusive. In some surveys, supertasters were thinner than non-tasters. Why would they be thinner? Since supertasters have many more food aversions than non-tasters, it is possible that they eat a very bland, unvaried diet, and diets with less variety have been associated with a lower BM!.

If how things taste is determined by your genes, you can’t be blamed for not eating your broccoli. Doctors and nutritionists have insisted that we all should eat a diet low in fat and high in fruits and vegetables. The fact that these foods don’t taste good to a significant portion of the population hasn’t really even been discussed. The genetic basis of taste is not a new discovery. In the 1930s, a chemist named A. L. Fox was working with a chemical very similar to PROP, and some of it accidentally became airborne. Fox’s colleague immediately noted and commented on the bitter taste of the airborne stuff, but Fox himself tasted nothing. That simple observation led to hundreds of family studies investigating the genetic varieties in the ability to taste PROP.

Since then, populations across the globe have been tested for this trait. In Western Africa, 97 per cent of the population are tasters. In India, only 60 per cent are. In the adult populations of the US and UK, 75 per cent are tasters. In general, the ability to taste PROP is strongest when you are younger and declines slowly with age. It’s more common in women than men. In women, the ability to taste PROP is influenced by sex hormones, so it fluctuates over the course of the menstrual cycle and in pregnancy.

Although exactly how this trait works is not well understood, there are measurable differences between tasters, non-tasters and supertasters. For one thing, tasters have more tastebuds than non-tasters, and supertasters have even more than tasters. And some researchers have found that there are different sensitivities to dif fervent types of bitterness even among tasters – that some of us may be more sensitive to the taste of quinine; others, to the taste of PROP. Current thinking is that there may be up to 60 different receptors just for the perception of bitterness.

This is an active area of research, simply because what we eat is important and many of the foods currently thought of as good for us (such as fruits and vegetables) are not widely consumed despite active encouragement. The reason doctors and nutritionists want you to eat these fruits and vegetables is that they contain disease-reducing chemicals that can help you stay healthy longer. In a number of population- based studies like the Harvard Nurses’ Study, higher consumption of fruits and vegetables was associated with lower rates of many cancers as well as lower rates of obesity and heart disease.

The goal of this research is to see if there is a biological and genetic reason for our eating habits and then try to fix it. So, if you hate broccoli, as does the former US president, George Bush pere, consider that this may be inherited. You can’t help it if you don’t like it; you got it from your mum or dad. On the other hand, research also indicates that sensitivity to bitterness is highest in young children, and this is the age when food preferences are determined. It is possible that the vegetable you hated as a child tastes pretty good now – but first you have to taste it.

The other thing to do, since fruits and vegetables are an important part of a diet and grossly underconsumed, is to actively look for ones you like. Too often, we are introduced to only a few vegetables before our mothers throw up their hands in despair and give up. We generalize from our experience with broccoli and spinach that we do not like vegetables. Let me encourage you to try other (non-bitter) vegetables and fruits. (A list of non-bitter fruits and vegetables is provided on article 280.) We live in a world where we can eat just about everything. Use this ability to expand your horizons vegetable-wise.

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Tips for Waterless Wonders.

November 30, 2009 Uncategorized

No Matter What Diet You Are On For carbohydrate counters: Drinking your basic eight glasses of water a day is particularly important for you for two reasons. First, a diet low in carbs is high in proteins. No matter what you eat, you have to drink enough water to flush the waste out, and with proteins there is more waste. In order to deal with this, you will need to drink extra water.

The second reason is that constipation is a big complaint of man y on this diet at least in the early part. Water can help prevent constipation. Eight glasses will be enough; make sure you get that much water every day. For calorie counters: You will be taking in more protein as you cut calories, so make sure you get enough water to flush out the waste products left over after you use the proteins. Watch your urine, and if it looks darker than water, you need to drink more liquids.

For fat counters: You will be eating foods that have a very high water content, so your need for extra liquid is lower than those on the other types of diets. Still, you need to monitor your urine. If it looks darker than water, increase the amount of water you drink.

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What about Alcohol?

November 27, 2009 Uncategorized

‘Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them; and Champagne makes you do them: JEAN ANTHELME BRlLLAT-SAVARIN

Alcohols contain 7 calories per gram, almost twice what soft drinks have. So when you drink, you are loading up on calories. On the other hand, we rarely drink alcohol, with the possible exception of beer, in the sort of quantities that characterize how many of us drink soft drinks.

The other problem with alcohol is well, your mother was right it lowers your inhibitions. It lowers your inhibitions about drinking
more; it also lowers your inhibitions about eating more. Research has shown that drinking wine with meals causes people to stay longer at the table and to consume more food calories. A glass of wine with dinner is a pleasure, but just assume that when you drink with a meal, you will also eat more.

In addition, alcohol has some diuretic effects. One of the reasons (although not the only one) you feel so bad the day after you drink too much is that you are dehydrated. Drinking alcohol causes a net fluid loss, so it doesn’t count towards your eight glasses a day. On the other hand, alcohol has been shown to decrease the risk of heart disease. In a study of 38,000 American male doctors and dentists, men who drank moderately (between one and three glasses, five to seven nights a week) had a lower risk of heart disease than those who didn’t drink at all. And this is surprising it didn’t seem to matter whether they drank beer or wine. Bottom line: avoid alcohol when you are actively trying to lose weight; when your weight is stable, alcohol in moderation can improve your health. And because it’s a diuretic, it doesn’t count towards your eight-glass goal

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What about Juice?

November 27, 2009 Uncategorized


Let me reveal a prejudice here: I don’t get juice drinking. I like the occasional V-8 juice and some homemade juices, but from my perspective, juice has lots of calories, little or no fibre and a reduced amount of vitamins. If you ate the fruit itself rather than drinking the juice, you would get fewer calories, more fibre and more vitamins.

Plus you would feel fuller. Can you have a glass of juice every now and then because you like it? Sure, but don’t drink it because you think it’s really good for you. Yes there are some good packaged juices out there but watch out for those with added sugar. And always remember that they add a lot of calories without filling you up. Bottom line: drink juices sparingly; if you love the taste, use a touch of them to flavor your water.

How about Soft Drinks?
Obviously, soft drinks contain lots and lots of sugar. And lately they come in 500ml bottles and cups that you can practically bathe in, so it’s very easy to over consume them. Here’s something else about soft drinks: they can make you fat and not just because they’re loaded with calories. There is something else going on here. Over the past 20 years, soft drink manufacturers (and manufacturers of other sweet products as well) have stopped using cane sugar you know, the white stuff that comes in a bag at the supermarket. They have replaced cane sugar with a sweetener made from corn. Corn sweeteners contain a type of sugar called fructose.

In your body, fructose acts differently than glucose the sugar most commonly found in your system. For example, glucose requires insulin in order to be taken up into cells. Fructose doesn’t. Fructose also reduces circulating leptin levels. Both insulin and leptin play important roles in getting us to quit eating at the end of a meal or snack, so there is some concern that fructose is helping us get fat by allowing us to take in calories without feeling their filling effect. (It just goes to show you how complicated our bodies are too much insulin can make you fat; it turns out that too little may also.)

Fructose consumption in test animals induces insulin resistance, impaired glucose tolerance, high blood pressure and high triglyceride levels. The data in humans are less clear, although there is some evidence that it can affect us the same way it does mice. From my perspective, this is yet another reason to avoid soft drinks. Bottom line: if you like soft drinks, you can drink them on occasion. If you can tolerate the switch to diet, drink that. If not, then think of a soft drink as a treat, like dessert, to be indulged in rarely and savored fully.

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How about Tea?

November 27, 2009 Uncategorized

‘If you are cold, tea will warm you if you are too heated, it will cool you if you are depressed, it will cheer you if you are excited, it will calm you.’ WILLIAM GLADSTONE

Tea has always had a patina of virtue about it, kind of the flip side to the dark aura of coffee. As it turns out, tea is full of antioxidants known as polyphenols. and, at least in the laboratory, these ingredients have been shown to have effects that would reduce risk of heart disease and cancer in humans. Does it pan out in reality? It’s not clear. Some studies have shown benefits to tea drinking; others have not. Tea drinking, like coffee drinking, has associated lifestyle factors that make measuring its effects more difficult.

By the way, when the virtues of tea are discussed, they are associated only with black tea, green tea or oolong tea. All of these come from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis.
The other types of infusions, which are usually called herbal teas, don’t really count as teas. And while they count towards your daily intake of liquids they don’t contain polyphenols.

I’m from the American South, where you always have two tea choices, both iced: sweet tea or plain. And when they say sweet, they mean it. When you drink that sweet tea, Southern style, it might as well be a cola. That’s okay in small quantities, but adding sugar to tea just increases its calories. Bottom line: drink tea if you enjoy it; it may even be good for you. Just don’t load it up with sugar.

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What about Coffee?

November 26, 2009 Uncategorized

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR., AUTHOR

That exhilaration comes at least in part from the caffeine in the coffee, and caffeine is a mild diuretic. (A diuretic is a drug that promotes water loss.) So, you can’t count on coffee to replace the water you lose.

Perhaps because of the caffeine and the exhilaration it produces, there is a sense that coffee is somehow bad for you and that tea is somehow good for you. This is a very old belief; researchers have been trying to pin down the truth for hundreds of years. The earliest controlled trial I have come across was actually conducted in 18thcentury Sweden. A pair of identical twins had been sentenced to death for murder. King Gustavo III thought that rather than execute these twins, he would put them to work in service to science. He spared the gallows-bound twins in return for their participation in a controlled trial of coffee drinking versus tea drinking. One twin had to drink three large bowls of tea every day, and his brother had to drink the same amount of coffee. Both outlived the curious king. But the tea drinker died first, at the ripe old age of 83. His coffee-consuming brother joined him in the graveyard just a couple of months later. I’m not sure that counts as a coffee victory.

But science has continued to consider this question. Here’s what we know: coffee increases blood pressure in those who drink it occasionally, although this doesn’t appear to happen in habitual coffee drinkers. Coffee has been linked to elevated LDL cholesterol and other components that increase heart disease, but there is no evidence that coffee itself increases heart disease, despite many studies. Researchers have tried, without much success, I must add, to link coffee to all kinds of awful health outcomes in addition to heart disease: miscarriages and cancer, mostly. So far none of these connections have been confirmed.

It’s thought that much of the apparent guilt of coffee is by association due to lifestyle factors that often accompany coffee drinking, such as smoking. So, for now, coffee has a pretty clean bill of health. Bottom line: drink coffee if you enjoy it, but don’t count it as a beverage when you are trying to determine whether or not you are getting enough to drink.

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WATERLESS WONDER

November 26, 2009 Uncategorized

‘Some say the glass is half empty, some say the glass is half full; I say, are you going to drink that?’ LISA CLAYMEN

If you had a score of 30 or less, there is a good chance you’re not drinking enough. When I first started keeping my own diet diary, I was shocked to see that on most days I drank only coffee with perhaps a glass of wine at the end of the day. Others have reported the same pattern.

The usual recommendation is that everyone should drink eight 220m! (8fl oz) glasses of water each day. Most articles on nutrition will recommend this. What’s the science here? Well, there isn’t a lot. So what should a rational person do? Let’s start with the basics: water is an essential nutrient. And we have only limited capabilities to store water. While our bodies are 70 per cent water, that water is being used and is necessary. Moreover, we lose water every day. If we count only the water we lose by breathing and sweating without even exercising we lose 2 to 4 liters of water per day.

That’s not including urine or stools. Without water, the average person will die in 2 to 5 days, well before she would die from lack of food. So, water is important in the diet, in some ways even more important than food.

What is the optimal amount of water to drink when you are losing weight? Many diet articles will tell you that drinking water helps flush fat and promotes weight loss. Maybe. There isn’t any scientific literature on this, and you should know that anecdotal evidence such as, ‘It worked for my Aunt Minnie’ is wrong at least as often as it is right.

When there is no data, opinion can flourish, so I’ll give you my opinion. I think drinking a lot of water is good for you. I think it makes you feel better. I think it makes you look better and that your skin actually looks younger when you are well-hydrated. And I think water consumption can contribute to weight loss. I’m not convinced that it helps ‘flush out’ fat, except in the same sense that water flushes out much of our waste products.

I suspect that water consumption promotes weight loss, first, by contributing to our satiety (volume in the stomach helps to make you feel full) and, second, by helping us feel healthier. When we are clinically dehydrated, our bodies don’t work well; physical performance can suffer when we lose as little as 455 to 900g (1 to 21b) of water, and mental performance is measurably decreased when we lose 3.6 to 4.5kg (8 to 101b) of water. And mild to moderate dehydration has been linked to increased risk of bladder cancer (very rare in this country) and colon cancer (not so rare here).

So I say, drink up Here’s how you can tell if you are drinking enough water: your urine should be very pale in color. If it’s yellow or tan-colored, you aren’t getting enough water. If your heart is sinking at the prospect of drinking that much water, cheer up. Other fluids can provide the water you need plus some flavoring. Milk counts as a fluid; so do soft drinks. Juice counts as well. Even if you count those other drinks, chances are that you still fall short of your goal of eight glasses a day. How can you get all that water in?

I try to drink two glasses of water every morning even before my coffee. Now I have a good start on my goal. And I try to drink one glass of water with every meal and snack. I frequently substitute either a soft drink or tea for water, especially with my snacks, but I have to admit that I have developed a real love for plain cold water, especially first thing in the morning. I also drink at least one glass of low-fat milk in my coffee over the course of a day, and on a good day that gets me to my target of eight glasses a day.

If you are exercising, you’re going to need even more fluid. Every year we get a news story about a young, extremely fit marine or football player who doesn’t drink enough water. He or she gets overheated from too much exertion and gets carried off the field on a stretcher. If he’s lucky, he survives. When you exercise, especially when it’s hot but other times as well, drink before you play, drink as you play, and drink after you play. Your performance will be improved, and you will feel better.

Not everything that is served in a glass will count towards the magic goal of eight glasses per day. Following are brief descriptions of what we know about some of the different types of drinks in a normal British diet. ‘Beverage Pros and Cons’ on article 276 summarizes these findings.     

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Sweets: The Plan

November 25, 2009 Uncategorized

How you want to deal with your sweet cravings depends on how you crave them. Some people must have them every day; others want them only at times of stress; up to half of women who crave sweets do so on the days before their periods. I notice that I crave sweets only after I have had them. That is, if I eat a piece of confectionery, I want one the next day. If I don’t eat any for a couple of days, I won’t crave it. Probably many other patterns exist too.

There is evidence that sweets can be incorporated into a healthy diet without wreaking havoc on weight control. In Montreal, researchers took a group of people with diabetes the very people who are usually taught to avoid sugary sweets at all costs and randomly divided them into two groups. One group got the usual nutritional advice; the people in the other group were taught to allow 10 per cent of their daily calories to come from sugary treats. After 6 months, the sweets eaters ate fewer calories and gained less weight than the group who got the usual teaching. So it can be done. But you have learn to plan around your sweets eating the same way you plan around all your other dietary goals. If you don’t, and just hope for the best, then when you do succumb to your cravings (which is almost inevitable), you will be adding sweet treats on top of your full diet, and that inevitably causes weight gain.

I find that most of my patients do best when they include sweet foods in most of their meals. At breakfast, you might try peanut butter on your toast. Eat fruits at snack times and plan on having a dessert after lunch or dinner. In all my meal plans, I have included some sweets every day. The exception is the 30-gram Counting Carbohydrates Diet, where the carbohydrate limit is too low to include more than a single sweet on most days.

Try to have the sweet when you are at home, where you have arranged choices that you can feel good about. Try not to eat desserts when you eat out. Restaurant servings of sweets, like all their servings of foods, are much too large. For most people, providing sweets as part of a scheduled meal or snack reduces cravings at other times. However, those extracurricular cravings will still come to most Sweets Eaters. When do you have most of your cravings? Most Sweets Eaters have cravings in the afternoon or evening. Researchers at MIT have also shown that many Sweets Eaters and other carb cravers tend to get their cravings at the same, predictable times each day. This is where your food diary will come in very handy. Find out when you are most likely to crave sweets and then figure out how to satisfy your urge in a way that allows you to feel good about yourself and your weight.

When you get a craving for sweets, take a minute to think about where it’s coming from. Are you stressed? Depressed? Lonely? Angry? These are common reasons I hear from my patients. Consider trying some other way to deal with your craving. Exercise is an excellent way to cope with many of these feelings. See if you can take a walk, a bike ride, an exercise class. If you still have the craving after the exercise, by all means eat a treat at least you will have burned some extra calories.

One of the patients I’ve told you about, Diane, came to my office not long ago, glowing with triumph. She had been tormented by cravings for sweets late at night, right before bed. She tried fruit, gum, even sugar-free sweets. Nothing worked except chocolate. Still, she didn’t like eating the chocolate right before bed. I had encouraged her to try exercise, and that hadn’t worked either. She recognized that the craving came from a bad feeling she was having, but she couldn’t figure out what she really wanted. Finally, it occurred to her that maybe she was lonely. The kids were in bed, the news on TV was all bad, she was tired, but this feeling, this longing for company kept her from going to bed. So instead of eating chocolate, she started calling her sister, also her best friend, when she felt this hunger at night. It worked, and she hadn’t eaten a snack at night in more than 3 weeks. She felt empowered. She felt good.

When you get the craving for sweets, choose a sweet you can eat and still face yourself in the mirror later. Of course, that means not overeating. So, no matter which diet you are on, choose a sweet that’s low in calories. If you are on a fat-counting diet, choose one that is low in fats. If you are on a carbohydrate-counting diet, you’re going to have a hard time getting any variety into your sweet treats, because most sweets are carbohydrates. Still, it can be done, and I have some tips below just for you.

You might think that a taste of what you crave is not going to be enough. You will be surprised. Sweets cravings, like many food cravings, are mediated through your mouth and its taste equipment. Your mouth has no ability to quantify how much you are eating. It only knows whether you are eating or not, so when you choose to give yourself the treat of your dreams, you can probably get away with really satisfying that craving with a much smaller serving than you are used to.

My sister Shelley loves McDonald’s McFlurries. There have been times in her life when she had to have one every day. But she discovered that she could order a small one and it was just as satisfying as a large. And more recently, there are even days when she can take a few spoonfuls and then throw the rest out, because she’s satisfied. Sweets may be the hardest food to incorporate into a rational diet, but if you are a Sweets Eater, it’s important to take on that challenge.

After all, it’s unlikely that your preference will change, so you have to figure out a way to live with it if you want to manage your weight. The world we live in makes just saying no an unrealistic plan for those of us who have a love affair with sweets. I’ve included a list of a few of the millions of sweet treats you might consider. Here are the qualities I look for in a treat.

• The treat should be low in calories.

• It can be purchased in small snack-size amounts.

• It comes in a form that allows you to easily understand and consume only the amount you want for example, calorie counts that allow the snack to be divided into easily understood quantities, for example, the whole bar or this many pieces.

• It’s something that you like, but not something you need to binge on; if you know you can’t eat chocolate in moderation, don’t buy chocolate.

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SWEETS EATER

November 25, 2009 Uncategorized

‘Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits: BARON JUSTUS VON LIEBIG,

If you have a score higher than 40 on the Sweets portion of the questionnaire, then chances are you are a Sweets Eater. Actually, we all start off in life as Sweets Eaters; research has shown that infants instinctively prefer sweet tastes above all other tastes, and breast milk is perfectly designed to meet that demand. As a child grows, this preference decreases, but how much is variable. (Even in young children, you can see that some prefer sweets while others prefer more salty or savory treats. I call it the sweets-versus-crisps difference.) While many people who struggle with their weight regret their love of sweets, I think that like anything you really love, the job is to figure out how to integrate it into a way of eating that works for you and your own taste preference.

Sweets: The Good News: The love of sweets is certainly built-in at a very basic level. Anything that is this innate can’t be all bad. In fact, a study published a few years ago suggested that moderate confectionery consumption, like moderate wine consumption, can prolong your life. People who eat one to three pieces of confectionery a month I did say moderate consumption can add an average of 1 year to their lives.

Why do we love sweets? There is good evidence that consumption of these foods can stimulate the opiate receptors one of the primary pleasure sites we have in our brains. Researchers studying mice noted that eating sweets affected the same part of the rodents’ brains that was affected by narcotics. Similar studies in humans have produced similar results.

Thus, there may be a physiologic foundation to the sense some people have that they are ‘addicted’ to sweets. In another series of studies, mice and rats were exposed to high levels of sweet foods. When they were cut off from their supply, their little paws trembled, and they were nervous and jumpy. Basically, the researchers reported, they were going through the rodent version of withdrawal. This doesn’t mean that chocolate is the same as heroin. But I think it shows that our love for sweets is part of the way we are programmed at the genetic level and not some aberration. If a love of sweets is hardwired into the brain, willpower alone will not be enough to make you resist these cravings. You have to outsmart them.

Sweets: The Bad News: When we look at whole populations, it becomes clear that a higher consumption of sweets is associated with higher weight. So, while fats might not make you fat, too many sweets probably will. When you separate fat consumption from sugar consumption, it’s clear that a high-sweets diet is more likely to contribute to weight gain than a high-fat diet (though that’s not always easy to do, since so many high-carbohydrate foods are also high-fat foods) . Why is this, since sweets don’t have any more calories than other foods? (In fact, sweets have only 4 calories per gram compared to fat, which has 9 calories a gram, or alcohol, which has 7 calories per gram) There are probably two answers. First, I think it’s clear that our bodies process sugary treats differently than other foods. No other food triggers our opiate receptors. Perhaps because of this, people who love sweets tend to overeat them in a way in which they might not be tempted to overeat other foods.

In addition, there is some evidence that suggests that leptin, the hormone that is produced by fat cells to protect your fat stores, affects how things taste. High leptin levels, which are found during times of weight maintenance, are associated with a decreased preference for sweets – at least in mice. Mice with low leptin levels (the way we humans are when we’re losing weight) show a much stronger preference for sweet foods. If these findings are reproduced in humans, it will be just one more way that we are hardwired to love sweets and to use these foods to protect our precious fat stores.

From my perspective, a high-confectionery diet has another problem. A diet that’s high in sweets is often low in fruits and vegetables. Whatever your perfect diet may be, in the long run, a diet that’s high in fruits and vegetables is clearly the healthiest. Fruits and vegetables provide essential disease-fighting and cancer-preventing nutrients, they provide fibre, and they should be in everyone’s diet. Unfortunately, Sweets Eaters tend to avoid fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is a way to incorporate sweets into your diet that allows you to eat a good diet and control your weight.

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