Tag Archives: Diet & Nutrition

Healthy Diets: Probiotic- and Prebiotic-Rich Foods

With a focus on maintaining a healthy gut by incorporating probiotic- and prebiotic-rich foods into your diet, Chef Jeffrey Held at NYU Langone makes plant-based miso soup with wild mushrooms, bok choy, and soba noodles, topped with boiled eggs.

Healthy Diets: Balanced Carbohydrate Ratio – Low Free Sugars + High Fiber

Are all carbohydrates equally important to you? Considering carbohydrate quantity but also quality has a crucial importance for a healthy and balanced nutrition. Balanced Carbohydrate Ratio has been developed and scientifically proven in order to identify products and diets with the most optimal carbohydrate content.

Anaylysis: Is Obesity Driven By Food Industry Profits & Low Prices? (Video)

Marion Nestle, Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition at New York University, discusses the U.S. food industry being in a highly competitive environment where profits are paramount and public health is not a priority.

Nutrition: ‘Healthy Eating With Diabetes’ (Video)

Making changes in the way you eat can be difficult. Learn about small steps for healthy eating to help you manage your weight. For more information, visit https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-info…

Health: ‘Top Five Diets’ Ranked – “Keep It Simple”

January 6, 2021

Every year, as millions of people around the world forge new resolutions to eat healthier and lose weight, US News & World Report releases a conveniently timed ranking of the best diets. A panel of experts in obesity, nutrition, diabetes, heart disease, and food psychology rigorously rate each of 39 diets on seven criteria:

  • Likelihood of losing significant weight in the first 12 months
  • Likelihood of losing significant weight over two years or more
  • Effectiveness for preventing diabetes (or as a maintenance diet)
  • Effectiveness for preventing heart disease (or for reducing risk for heart patients)
  • How easy it is to follow
  • Nutritional completeness
  • Health risks (like malnourishment, too-rapid weight loss, or specific nutrient deficiencies)

1. Mediterranean diet

Emphasis on fruits, veggies, whole grains, olive oil, beans, nuts, legumes, fish and other seafood. Eggs, cheese, and yogurt can be eaten in moderation. Keep red meats and sugar as treats.

2. DASH (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) diet — TIE

Eat lots of fruits, veggies, lean protein, whole grains, and low-fat dairy. Avoid saturated fats and sugar.

2. Flexitarian diet — TIE

Be a vegetarian most of the time. Swap in beans, peas, or eggs for meats, and consume plenty of fruits, veggies, and whole grains. You can look up more details because there’s actually a full meal plan involving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two snacks to add up to a total 1500 calories per day. But feel free to also just swap in flexitarian meals ad hoc.

4. Weight Watchers

The first actual paid program on the list, WW uses a points system to guide dieters towards foods lower in sugar, saturated fat, and overall calories while consuming slightly more protein. There are a variety of paid WW plans, with the lowest being about $20 per month.

5. Mayo Clinic diet — TIE

A two-part system, with part one (‘Lose it!’) involving adding a healthy breakfast (i.e. fruits, veggies, whole grains, healthy fats) plus 30 minutes of exercise per day. You’re not allowed to eat while watching TV or consume sugar except what’s naturally found in fruit. Meat is only allowed in limited quantities, as is full-fat dairy. The second phase (‘Live it!’) is basically the first phase but with more flexibility. You aren’t realistically going to cut out sugar forever, and the Mayo Clinic diet acknowledges that. So the long term plan involves lots of whole grains, fruits, veggies, and healthy fats. Less saturated fats and sugar.

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Diet Study: The Top 250 U.S. Movies Depict Unhealthy Foods & Drinks (Stanford)

Stanford researchers examined the 250 top-grossing American movies of recent decades and found the on-screen foods and beverages largely failed U.S. government nutrition recommendations and U.K. youth advertising standards.

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Health Videos: “You Have The Gut Microbiome You Deserve” (Cambridge)

Do you have good or bad microbiome? Or do you have the microbiome you deserve?

Gut Microbiome, the new Open Access journal from Cambridge University Press and The Nutrition Society has published its first papers, including the animated abstract above from the paper: Hill, C. (2020) “You have the microbiome you deserve,” Gut Microbiome, Cambridge University Press, 1, p. e3.

Access the paper here: https://bit.ly/3bFOjc7

Healthy Diet Podcasts: “Spoon-Fed” Author & Professor Tim Spector

According to a recent study, obesity increases the risk of dying of Covid-19 by nearly 50%. Governments around the world are now hoping to encourage their citizens to lose weight. But with so much complex and often contradictory diet advice, as well as endless food fads, it can be hard to know what healthy eating actually looks like. 

How many pieces of fruit and vegetables should you eat a day? Will cutting out carbs help you lose weight? Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? Speaking to Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London about his new book Spoon-Fed, Madeleine Finlay asks why we’re still getting food science wrong, and explores the current scientific evidence on snacking, supplements and calorie labels. 

Tim Spector is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Director of the TwinsUK Registry at Kings College, London and has recently been elected to the prestigious Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He trained originally in rheumatology and epidemiology. In 1992 he moved into genetic epidemiology and founded the UK Twins Registry, of 13,000 twins, which is the richest collection of genotypic and phenotypic information worldwide. He is past President of the International Society of Twin Studies, directs the European Twin Registry Consortium (Discotwin) and collaborates with over 120 centres worldwide. He has demonstrated the genetic basis of a wide range of common complex traits, many previously thought to be mainly due to ageing and environment. Through genetic association studies (GWAS), his group have found over 500 novel gene loci in over 50 disease areas. He has published over 800 research articles and is ranked as being in the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists by Thomson-Reuters. He held a prestigious European Research Council senior investigator award in epigenetics and is a NIHR Senior Investigator. His current work focuses on omics and the microbiome and directs the crowdfunded British Gut microbiome project. Together with an international team of leading scientists including researchers from King’s College London, Massachusetts General Hospital, Tufts University, Stanford University and nutritional science company ZOE he  is conducting the largest scientific nutrition research project, showing that individual responses to the same foods are unique, even between identical twins. You can find more on https://joinzoe.com/ He is a prolific writer with several popular science books and a regular blog, focusing on genetics, epigenetics and most recently microbiome and diet (The Diet Myth). He is in demand as a public speaker and features regularly in the media.

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