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Cases in the US have doubled in recent decades and it seems fructose, a type of sugar, may be to blame, the British Medical Journal study reports.

You've heard the reason not to: You'll only eat more later on. But people don't automatically replace all the missed calories at their next meal, says David Levitsky, a professor of nutrition and psychology at Cornell University. His research team assigned one group of people small lunches of about 200 calories, while a second group dined on about 600 calories. Both ate as they wished the rest of the day. After two weeks, the small-lunch bunch lost weight; they were eating about 400 calories fewer than the all-you-can-eaters.

A variation that might not even feel like self-denial is to restrict calories every other day. In a small study published in March, researchers followed a group of 10 overweight people who were fed just 20 percent of their normal calorie intake on alternate days. The other days, they could eat what they wanted. After eight weeks, they'd lost an average of 8 percent of their body weight, says study co-author James Johnson, a clinical instructor in the department of surgery at Louisiana State University School of Medicine and author of a forthcoming book on alternate-day calorie restriction.

"I like the psychology of it," says Kenneth Webb, 37, a hedge fund trader from Walnut Creek, Calif., who's followed Johnson's program. "On the down days, you've got hope for tomorrow — who can't diet for one day? And on an up day, you've got no guilt about it."

Webb calculated his calorie needs based on his level of activity and eats just 30 percent of that one day; the next, he eats 130 percent. He's lost 30 pounds since July.

Healthy benefits?

Besides shrinking the waistline, skipping meals regularly might protect against disease. A study presented in November at an American Heart Association conference compared the rates of heart disease among Mormons, who are supposed to fast on the first Sunday of every month, with the habits and disease rates among a smaller number of non-Mormons.

Controlling for other behaviors that make a difference in the risk of heart disease, the researchers found that fasting seemed to be significant: If you fasted, you had a smaller chance of having heart disease.

"The thought from a biological perspective is that fasting rests the metabolism for a day and resensitizes the body's cells to glucose and insulin," says study author Benjamin Horne, who researches heart disease at Intermountain Medical Center and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That's only a theory, he notes, since most studies on calorie restriction have been done in rodents, roundworms and slugs.

Less is more

Still, there's plenty of evidence from the animal studies to suggest that some sort of calorie-restricted eating plan might be good for humans, too, says Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging who was also an author of the alternate-day study. (That study focused on asthma sufferers, whose symptoms improved more when they reduced their intake than seemed attributable to just losing weight.)

Eating less cuts down on the production of free radicals, which damage cells and can lead to disease, Mattson says. And there's a cellular response similar to what happens when we exercise. Like working out, going without calories is mildly stressful to the cells at the time but beneficial over the long run.

"Dietary restriction is about the best dietary advice I can give you," Levitsky says. "We don't know about living a longer life, but all the markers are in a favorable direction."

You may have noticed, though, that the bottom line of any of these techniques is cutting the overall number of calories you eat. Webb, for example, has effectively reduced his average daily caloric intake to 80 percent of what it used to be. Like Webb, many people may find that skipping a meal or two a week, or taking a day every month entirely away from food or eating a lot less during a given meal or every other day, is far more appealing than making the sacrifice all the time.

If you listen to science writer Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, you will see that we actually live in a world in which all these beliefs are untrue.

He argues that most of the conventional diet wisdom that has been given to Americans in popular health writing has been wrong, and that in fact most of our health ills, including obesity, heart disease, cancer and maybe even Alzheimer’s can be blamed on people eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates.

The Truth About What We Eat

Taubes got his start writing about America’s diet and the problem with conventional dietary wisdom with a 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine called “What if it’s All Been a Big, Fat Lie?”

The article, like the book that followed last year, argues that ever since the government started telling us that the key to losing weight was eating less, people on the whole have actually gained more weight.
 
While medical experts were calling the Atkins Diet the worst thing you could do for your body — since conventional wisdom had it that fat was the problem — more and more people were having success with these diets, and more diet writers were coming up with successful variations on the theme.
 
He explains the value of low-carb diets as follows: The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in testing carbohydrate-restricted diets as obesity levels have risen and a new generation of clinicians have come to question the prevailing wisdom on weight loss. Six independent teams of investigators set out to test low-fat semi-starvation diets of the kind recommended by the American Heart Association in randomized control trials against ‘eat as much as you

like’ Pennington-type diets, now known commonly as the Atkins Diet, after Robert Atkins and Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet — unrestricted in calories — than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet.

That’s a long quote, but it’s also a long book, more than 600 pages with notes and index. It’s a dense read that will often go over the average reader’s head, but the conclusion of his words is clear: instead of cutting fat and calories to lose weight, people should instead be cutting carbs and sugar.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book is interesting (to food geeks, anyway) for its tracing of how the low-fat diet came to be the most  popular one advocated by health experts, and how he reached his conclusion that excess body fat, not dietary fat, is the problem, and that fat accumulation is caused by excess insulin, which is produced by eating excess carbohydrates.
 
If you can’t bring yourself to read the whole book, seek out a copy of January’s Ladies Home Journal, which includes a handy summary of Taubes’ findings written by the author himself. Even if it doesn’t change the way you eat, it will probably change the way you think about diet news.

A big challenge for the food sector would be to transform its products to reduce the promotion and abundant array of high energy foods, he said.

Alok Jha
The Guardian
Monday February 18 2008

Dieters who have managed to shed their excess weight need to do 90 minutes of exercise a day to keep the pounds off in the long term, according to a study.

The finding comes as a leading nutritional researcher called on world leaders to tackle obesity with the same urgency as global efforts to tackle climate change.

Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston yesterday that exercising 60 to 90 minutes a day was essential to long term weight loss. By studying data on more than 5,000 men and women who have, on average, lost 70 pounds and kept the weight off for six years, she found that successful dieters had high levels of physical activity and consciously controlled their eating habits. This meant frequent weighing, following a consistent diet across the week and taking quick remedial action at the first sign of weight gain.

"There's no way around it," Wing said. "If you want to lose weight and keep it off you need to really change your lifestyle, particularly if you're overweight or have a family history of obesity. The obesity epidemic won't go away simply because people switch from whole to skimmed milk. They need to substantially cut their calories and boost their physical activity to get to a healthy weight – and keep minding the scale once they do."

In Britain more than one-fifth of adults are obese and, of the remainder, half of men and a third of women are overweight. Obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. By 2015, 2.3 billion adults are forecast to be overweight, including 700 million obese.

Philip James, of the International Obesity Taskforce, told the seminar urgent steps were needed to transform the environment that makes people fat. James, who chaired the UN Commission on the Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century, said obesity was a problem for all of society, arguing that blaming individuals for their vulnerability to gain weight was no longer acceptable when the "environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic".

He added: "It is even more naive to tell people that they just need to make a little change in their eating habits or their daily activity and suddenly the obesity problem will be remarkably easily solved."

A big challenge for the food sector would be to transform its products to reduce the promotion and abundant array of high energy foods, he said.

Jacksonville Business Journal – by Stewart Verney
A local company has begun shipping a washable keyboard and mouse made of antimicrobial plastic.

Seal Shield LLC's Silver Seal keyboard is aimed primarily at the health care market, said CEO Brad Whitchurch, though he expects other markets to latch onto the product as well.

"The health care market is definitely the low-hanging fruit," he said. "Two million people a year get a hospital infection, and close to 100,000 die."

The company estimates U.S. hospitals have two keyboards for every three employees, meaning the domestic market alone could be worth $450 million. Seal Shield has deals with Tenet Healthcare Corp. and Banner Health.

Seal Shield introduced a washable, dishwasher-safe keyboard last year and has shipped about 10,000 of them. The new product is the same design, Whitchurch said, but silver ions are embedded in the plastic in the manufacturing process. Silver is a natural antibacterial agent.

"The antibacterial plastic we're using is kind of the latest and greatest based on silver ion technology," he said.

The new keyboards retail for about $70, though the price drops to about $45 if ordered through certain distributors, such as Dell.

Whitchurch said 48 states require hospitals to report infections acquired at the hospital. That requirement and the advent of resistant strains of MRSA and Norovirus make the keyboards even more attractive to health care companies.

And after hospitals, he said, there are other natural markets, such as libraries, schools and food processing companies.

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