No, Avocados Don't "Scorch" Belly Fat

 

Avocados are good food. One-half of an avocado provides 160 calories, 2g of protein, 8.5g of carbohydrates, and 15g of fat. Avocados are an excellent source of magnesium, potassium, vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin K. While most of the calories in an avocado come from fat, they are mostly in the form of healthier monounsaturated fat. Monounsaturated fatty acids or come from plant sources and may be helpful in lowering your LDL or "bad" cholesterol. For this reason, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends that you choose foods with monounsaturated fats instead of saturated fat.

But will avocados "scorch belly fat", as a 12-week study funded by the Haas Avocado Board and reported on the "Eat This, Not That" website claimed?

The two main types of fat stores in our bodies are subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat is the body fat which is found directly under your skin and is normally pinchable and can be measured with fat/skin fold callipers. Visceral fat (also known as abdominal or belly fat) is found within the abdominal cavity, between the stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys etc., making it much trickier to measure.

The 12-week study on which the "scorching" claim based included 105 adults who were either overweight or obese. One group was provided a daily meal that included an avocado and the other group an equivalent meal that did not. The results? There was no difference in visceral fat between the study and control groups. Ooops! Not what the Avocado Board wanted to hear!

No worries though. Just dice and slice the data in different ways until you find something that you are looking for. In this case, that the women participants who were consuming a daily avocado showed a slight reduction in visceral fat. It was not statistically significant but that did not prevent a press release from claiming that "Women who consumed avocado as part of their daily meal had a reduction in deeper visceral abdominal fat." Nor did it stop the media from publishing breathless headlines about "scorching belly fat".

This is a classic example of a study that starts out with the results it wants, mines the data till it finds it - however meaningless the result may be - and than feeds it to an uncritical and headline hungry media. Always at least glance at the underlying study behind some new amazing claim. Who funded it? How was it conducted? For some unbiased advice on how to interpret nutrition studies, here is a quick read.

Go ahead and eat avocados, they really are good for you. Just don't expect them to "scorch" any belly fat. No matter what the Avocado Board tells you.

Long-term Tea Drinkers May Have an Edge on Avoiding Dementia

 

A 2019 study led by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) concluded that long-term regular tea drinkers have better organized brain regions -- and that this is associated with healthier cognitive function -- compared to non-tea drinkers. The research was carried out together with collaborators from the University of Essex and University of Cambridge, and the findings were published in scientific journal Aging.

"Our results offer the first evidence of positive contribution of tea drinking to brain structure, and suggest that drinking tea regularly has a protective effect against age-related decline in brain organization," explained team leader Assistant Professor Feng Lei, who is from the Department of Psychological Medicine at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

The research team recruited 36 adults aged 60 and above, and gathered data about their health, lifestyle, and psychological well-being. The elderly participants also had to undergo neuropsychological tests and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of their brains. The research team found that individuals who consumed tea at least four times a week for about 25 years had brain regions that were interconnected in a more efficient way. The type of tea did not seem to matter and green tea, oolong tea, and black tea were equally effective.

"We have shown in our previous studies that tea drinkers had better cognitive function as compared to non-tea drinkers," added Lei. "Our current results relating to brain network indirectly support our previous findings by showing that the positive effects of regular tea drinking are the result of improved brain organization brought about by preventing disruption to interregional connections."

While this is great news for those of us who have been regular tea drinkers for 25 years, it is not clear what it means for the rest of us. Further research is needed to determine how short a time might produce similar results. In the meantime, what could it hurt to start?

 

Can Bacon Be Part of a Healthy Diet?

 

There is really no question about whether or not processed meats are healthy food. They aren't. The World Health Organization warns that a person who eats just 2 slices of bacon each day increases their risk of colorectal cancer by almost 20%. But what about eating bacon, sausages, hot dogs or lunch-meat just occasionally. Is that safe? And how often is "occasionally" anyway?

All of these meats are high in saturated fats, sodium and nitrate preservatives (not to mention calories), so they should absolutely not be a staple part of anyone's diet. Besides raising your cancer risk they also put you at higher risk for heart disease. Still, having a weekly serving (2 slices of bacon, one sausage or hot dog, or 3 ounces of ham is most likely not a problem for most people, according to Lauri Wright, chair of the department of nutrition and dietetics at the University of North Florida. 

So go ahead and have some bacon with your Sunday morning meal. Just don't forget that it is loaded with things that are doing you no good. Enjoy it. But avoid it the for rest of the week.

The Year is Dead. Long Live the Year.

 

 

No sharing, educating or preaching today my friends. I just want to take the time to wish you a safe and happy New Year's Eve and a successful and fulfilling 2022. 

This has been a strange year for me, a hard to understand mixture of successes and failures, happiness and loss, excitement and fear. With all the challenges we have faced this past year, it has been in some ways a wonderful year for me.

My next year will be one of transition, leading to major life changes that I have planned for 2023. That is both encouraging and intimidating.

I hope that you have had your fair share of successes in 2021 along with its challenges, and wish you much joy, wellness and empowerment for 2022.

Want to Stay Mentally Sharp? Forget Reitiring!

A 2021 study published in SSM Population Health concluded that working past the usual retirement age is protective against age-related cognition issues compared with people who do retire.

The study authors concluded that continuing to work in the labor market up until the age of 67 helps slow cognitive decline and protects against the type of cognitive impairment often associated with Alzheimer's disease. Notably, these findings held up across genders, education levels, and job fields. In short, the study suggests that continuing to work past retirement age helps keep the brain sharp.

Don't much care for your job? The study showed that it doesn't matter what job you have and that part-time and volunteer work have similar benefits. So if you like what you do, keep doing it as long as you are able. If not, or if you just feel the need for a change, then find something else and do that. Turns out that Nike was right: Just Do It!

How Much Does Exercise Lower Stroke Risk?

 

I doubt it will come as much of a surprise to anyone reading this that regular exercise helps lower blood pressure and avoid or control hypertension. Old news, right? But you may not be aware of just how great the benefit to your health might really be.

Regular physical activity makes your heart stronger. A stronger heart can pump more blood with less effort. As a result, the force on your arteries decreases, lowering your blood pressure. Becoming more active can lower both your top and bottom blood pressure numbers. How much lower isn't entirely clear, but studies show reductions from 4 to 12 mm Hg diastolic (bottom #) and 3 to 6 mm Hg systolic (top #). That is as much as some commonly used hypertension medications.

High blood pressure can lead to a vast number of serious health consequences over time including: heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, vision loss and dementia.

A 2021 study by researchers in Portugal and published in JAMA Cardiology sheds some light on just how significant the benefit of exercise can be. Sixty participants aged 40 to 75 years with a diagnosis of drug resistant hypertension were enrolled and observed at hospitals' hypertension outpatient clinics. Half of the participants exercised on a stationary bicycle and/or walked daily for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks blood pressure had fallen enough to lower the risk of heart attack or stroke an average of 25% for those who exercised compared with those who did not.

If you are getting some exercise every day, keep it up. If you aren't, what are you waiting for? A stroke?

Poultry Safety

 

 

Who really knows why chickens cross the road? Who really cares? In any case this post is not about poultry making it safely to the other side of the street.

The CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States. Of course that is from all sources, but nearly 2 million people are sickened annually just from poultry contaminated by bacteria (principally salmonella and campylobacter). 28,000 of them end up in the hospital and nearly 500 die, but it is an experience that nobody wants to have. Reducing the incidence of these bacterial illnesses has been a stated national public health goal in the US for over a decade, yet the same number of people get ill from eating contaminated poultry today as in 2010.

Maybe this is at least partly because the US Department of Agriculture, who is responsible for regulating food safety, allows contaminated chicken to go from slaughterhouse to market legally. The USDA, in fact, allows 9.8 percent of the whole chickens it tests to be contaminated with salmonella. The percentages are even higher for chicken parts (15.4 percent) and ground chicken (25 percent). Campylobacter, too, is allowed in poultry—15.7 percent of samples for whole chickens, 7.7 percent for parts, and 1.9 percent for ground.

As if that is not bad enough, the USDA applies the limit to all bacterial strains in total. "What this means," says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports,"is that a manufacturer can meet the USDA's target by reducing strains that rarely make people sick without targeting the strains that tend to cause more severe illnesses."

But wait! No one eats raw poultry, right? Doesn't cooking kill salmonella and other bacteria?

“The short answer is yes, cooking will kill salmonella, but it has to be the right type of cooking,” says Trevor Craig, corporate director of technical consulting for Microbac Laboratories. As a general rule of thumb, cook all poultry to an internal temperature 165℉. The only way to ensure that you have hit the right temperature is using a meat thermometer to check. If you don’t cook your food to a certain temperature you’re not actually going to kill off that bacteria.

It is also very easy to spread the contamination from poultry to other foods by using, say, the same utensils or cutting board to prepare them. Always clean your tools and prep area after working with poultry. Better yet, use different ones.

You can read more about the issue of bacteria contamination here and here.

Enjoy those holiday turkeys!