You Can't Believe Everything You Read on the Interweb....

 I just love our sixteenth President. Honest Abe was a man with wisdom beyond his time. I mean, how did he even *know* about the Internet, considering he died 100 years before Al Gore even had a chance to dream it up? Remarkable, really.

The internet holds a wealth of information, but it can also spread a lot of crap unbelievably fast. Look at Facebook: you have people trying to get a million likes so Josh Groban will take a girl to her senior prom (or was that just me?), and telling people to "remember to SHARE if you want to keep this recipe in your photo album." I guess people don't know about right-clicking and Save As to keep a file on their own hard drives. Or the beauty of copying photos to your iPad. Nice underhanded tactic for getting people to give your business free advertising, guys.

You know, one area I find this disturbing trend of false information to be mushrooming is in the wellness industry. An abundance of exaggerated claims abound, both from alternative practitioners who want you to believe that their magical mix of herbs can cure every ailment, to more traditional doctors who think that all nutritional products are snake oil. Neither one is completely true, and I'd like to set the record straight on a few them now so you know what to watch out for the next time you see a news headline or cute little picture like this pop up on your Facebook newsfeed:

I found this little gem recently, and it just reminds me of how many exaggerated claims are out there about the benefits of healthy foods. That may sound a little ironic, coming from a girl who has a blog about healthy eating; but, in the interest of full disclosure, I believe that even the healthiest eater isn't going to get all of these benefits from a good diet. I watch what I eat for my blood sugar (and my vanity), but I am a big believer in getting a lot more additional nutrition from my daily vitamin tablets.

Let's face it: that picture of asparagus is pretty sketchy. Relieves pain? Prevents birth defects? Fights cancer? Those are some pretty tall orders, my friends. And while I wholeheartedly agree that asparagus contains the nutrients attributed to these health benefits, you have got to get those key nutrients at the right levels before you can experience the benefits. It's not that I don't think asparagus can be a great staple food for people wanting to enjoy good health and have healthy babies; but I certainly don't want an expectant Mom thinking that if she just munches on a cup of asparagus every once in a while her baby will be some perfect little munchkin and her labor will be painless, either. Bottom line: 1 cup of asparagus has 267.8 mcg of folate in it, a nutrient known to be vital to a developing baby in the womb.  But, unless you want to eat 4 servings of asparagus everyday, you still can't match up to the multivitamin I take with 1,000 mcg of the good stuff in it. This is good in two ways:

1)I don't have to worry if I'm getting enough folate. Ever.
2)I don't have to worry if asparagus will taste good dipped in my lunch's strawberry Greek yogurt. Ever.

Here's another gem that is true, but pretty misleading. There are a ton of health benefits from curcumin, an antioxidant most commonly found in tumeric, used in a lot of Indian and Asian dishes. Again, this picture kinds of leaves you thinking, "Oh, we'll just order Indian every weekend, and we'll be fine." Um, nope. Turns out that there are only about 30mcg of this powerful antioxidant in every milliliter of turmeric spice, so that's going to be some pretty spicy chicken if you want to compete with the 15 mg of turmeric I get from my multivitamin, or the 247 mg of curcumin available in my favorite joint supplement. For the mathematically challenged, 15 mg is 15,000 mcg of turmeric. And it's a whopping 247,000 mcg of curcumin. Your curry chicken wants to be my vitamins when it grows up.

Believe me when I say that it's not just the alternative medicine fan girls in the wellness field making unwarranted claims. The medical headlines you see everyday from "major studies" are pretty misleading, too. Have you heard the latest?

Note: This is probably not a real image of a recent headline. I don't think the New York Times uses emoticons.

I think this one scared a lot of women who have been taking calcium to try to prevent osteoporosis. Calcium is a critical part of retaining bone mass, and I would hate to think that women dedicated to enhancing their bone health stopped before they looked into the matter more closely.


Know the major problem with this study? The researchers only studied the effects of calcium taken alone, not with the critical addition of magnesium that is supposed to accompany every dose of calcium in a ratio of 2:1. Any decent calcium supplement manufacturer should know that. And in case you don't know, calcium is responsible for contracting muscles, and magnesium is known to relax them. So, yeah. Only taking a pill that has muscle-contracting properties without muscle-relaxing abilities could kind of become a problem on an important muscle like the heart. Just saying.

And this next little report is a real doozy. You probably saw this headline recently:

If you're just a headline skimmer, that's probably as far as you got. Or you might have read these ominous findings, which sound far more serious just because they use all those sciency words. Read it to yourself in your best Tom Brokaw voice:

...randomized clinical trials cast doubt on the efficacy of vitamin E supplements to prevent CHD [18]. For example, the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE) study, which followed almost 10,000 patients at high risk of heart attack or stroke for 4.5 years [19], found that participants taking 400 IU/day of natural vitamin E experienced no fewer cardiovascular events or hospitalizations for heart failure or chest pain than participants taking a placebo.[emphasis mine]

Further down the study, however, almost as a side note, was this statement:

However, the study did find two positive and significant results for women taking vitamin E: they had a 24% reduction in cardiovascular death rates, and those ≥65 years of age had a 26% decrease in nonfatal heart attack and a 49% decrease in cardiovascular death rates.


Oh, so I guess improving your odds of living by up to 50% is no big thing, right? 


My best pieces of advice for anyone wanting to get to the bottom of all these claims and find out what is really best for your health:

1) Learn to read all the lines and in between the lines, and find a few experts whose knowledge you really respect. It's amazing what you can find out when you don't take headlines as Gospel. But, because even a health blogger like myself doesn't spend all her leisure time reviewing medical journals, I have a group of go-to experts whose information and opinions I really rely on to help me sort through the mumbo-jumbo. There are a few doctors whose works I will eat up faster than a Snickers bar. Which, as you know, is saying something. I trust their medical background (they are all MDs, DCs, or PhDs), and their common sense approach to nutrition.  Believe me, scoping out my own sources before sharing health advice works a lot better than using a photoshopped picture referencing a non-existent study from Copenhagen from one of my 456 Facebook friends who is always posting pictures of Crisco-baked peanut butter cake and now wants to talk about natural cures for arthritis.

2) Always read my blogs and hang on every word I say.
So maybe I'm not your first choice of expert. That's OK. But, as fun as this little blog is to write, I do some serious hunting before I put anything down here. If it's not something I've looked into myself, it's a study that one of my admired experts has referenced, with sources, and that makes me feel good about it. I don't like bad information any more than you do, and I'm not interested in spreading it. Because researchers in Copenhagen found that those who spread bad information while taking high doses of Vitamin E were 270% more likely to die than those who ate curry and took a calcium placebo.....



Full Disclosure: Yes, I am paid to recommend a particular brand of multivitamin. Which is pretty cool, because I've seen people have super rad health improvements by taking the right nutrients in the right doses instead of just eating curry-spiced asparagus once a week. So far, I've yet to discover a more rewarding way of making a living than helping people feel better.

Is Your Breakfast Ruining Your Diet? Become a Cereal Killer in Four Easy Steps.

Hey, there. How are the New Year's reso annual changes coming along? If you've stuck with any resolves at all, you've kept at it nearly two months longer than the rest of society. Kudos. But if you're like most of us and need little encouragement to keep going or simple steps to get your willpower back on track, you're in luck. And if you are barely literate serial killer thinking this is some sort of nifty forum for guys like you, you're out of luck. Cause it's not. And that's creepy. And you should probably leave now.

Anyway.

If you find yourself battling with your willpower and struggling with temptations throughout the day, the solution may be as simple as changing what you eat first thing in the morning. Turns out that, in a study done on school age boys, children who consumed a typical American high-glycemic breakfast ate up to 80% more food throughout the day than those who were fed a low-glycemic breakfast. Additionally, kids with low-glycemic breakfasts were shown to have better concentration and performance in schools, too. Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but doesn't it stand to reason that we adults might be susceptible to those same plagues of hunger, cravings, and distraction when we feed our bodies improperly? I think it's time we take a look at some craving-combatting options and figure out what health impostors are stopping us from having our healthiest year yet.

If you're ready to make a change to your morning, follow these guidelines on

How to Become a Cereal Killer in Four Easy Steps:

1) Get Down to Business. Fast.

What's the first thing to go on any new diet? Unnecessary calories. And what does this sometimes result in? Skipping breakfast to give ourselves the benefit of a deficit for later on in the day. Oh, man. If there's one thing that can set you up for failure throughout the rest of the day, it's skipping breakfast. I know we've all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and if you're a non-breakfast-eater, you're probably sick of it. 

I'm sorry to tell you that your body really doesn't care about your personal preferences. Not only does your metabolism remain in a sleep state until you feed it something, it also goes into a self-preservation mode, meaning that it clings tenaciously to every calorie you consume and actually perceives it as more calories than the label states. Don't believe me? One study revealed that those who ate only two meals a day gained more weight than those who ate three meals a day. I know what you're thinking: "Well, maybe they pigged out the rest of the day. Not me. I'm soooo much better than that." Prepare to be knocked off your high horse: The study I just referenced compared people who ate the same exact amount of calories. You just got myth-busted, my friend.

Just don't skip breakfast. And don't wait more than a half-hour to get around to it. It'll make you more vulnerable to temptations later in the day (like we need more of those!), and it is the metabolic equivalent of burning daylight. And besides, you don't want to get myth-busted again, do you?

2) Don't go for a soft target.

Maybe the only thing almost as detrimental to your dieting success than skipping a meal is loading yourself up on the wrong stuff at breakfast. Most Americans choose quick fixes like cereal, a coffee and pastry,  OJ and a bagel, or other foods that can be snapped, crackled, popped, or toasted. Turns out, most of our favorite breakfast foods are serious sugar spikers that cause the 10:00am candy drawer raid, the 11:00 am slump in productivity, and the 99-cents upgrade to your Extra Value Meal at lunch. All of these actions are the results of a vicious biological cycle that keeps our body in a perpetual craving state until our blood sugar reaches a balance point. But by making smarter breakfast choices, we may be able to eliminate this chain reaction altogether.

I realize not everyone is getting their breakfast from a box with a cartoon character on it, or dunkin' a donut in a sugary beverage masked as coffee; but before you go around tooting your own horn about how you don't feed your kids Fruit Loops and only consume flakes that contain the words "bunches of oats" on the box, let me give your mind a little food for thought:

• Fun Fact: Special K has the exact same glycemic index as Fruit Loops. I repeat: exactly the same glycemic index as a food-colored cereal touted by a toucan that leads little children into jungles. Toucan Sam probably is a serial killer, if you ask me.
• Fun Fact: Cheerios (with its low sugar content) and Shredded Wheat (with its notable fiber content) fall into the same glycemic category as Cocoa Puffs (with its super annoying bird mascot).
• Fun Fact: A piece of whole wheat toast with jelly has a higher glycemic load than two Oreos. And not nearly as much creamy goodness.
• Fun Fact: A bagel with cream cheese has a higher GL than a Snickers bar. And no caramel filling, either.

Turns out that America's obsession with "whole grains"--which, by the way, usually consists of nothing more than white-wheat bread and Big G cereals that mix in a little corn kernel with their food-colored loops--has left out one pretty important component: any source of sustained energy and satiety. Our bodies are begging for more substance from our breakfast.



3) Rough 'em up.

Before you go into a panicked tailspin about how I am advocating the abandonment of all cereals, relax. While I don't believe cereal is really the best choice you can make in the mornings, there are a few brands that pass muster and a few tricks to make subpar varieties just a wee bit better. First, here are my top picks for cereals that have a pretty decent GL, mostly because their manufacturers thought that leaving grains largely unprocessed and fortified with protein and fiber was a good idea:

• Uncle Sam's Cereal*-- Ok. Admittedly, the stuff has a mild cardboard texture and is best when left to soak in milk for a few minutes before eating. BUT, it is one of the only grains I have ever found that actually flattens my tummy, thanks to an impressive 7 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber per serving. And, it makes a great crunchy topping for Greek yogurt or apple crumble. Who doesn't love that?
• Steel Cut Oatmeal--This delightful,largely unprocessed version of oats the way God intended them to be is a real gem. Full of nutrients that the quick oats and those little instant packets leave out, its GL is exponentially better than either of its more instant counterparts. It takes a while to make, which puts it out of the running for my morning pick-me-up, but it's worth the effort if you have the time!

Finally, on those days when you simply have to indulge in that Special K or Cocoa Puffs--because it really makes no difference which you choose--there is something you can do to salvage your decision: add Fibergy to your milk. Yes, the same magic powder that works wonders to counteract the sugar-spiking effects of a slice of cake can easily be mixed into a cup of milk and then added to cereal for a sneaky, tasteless way of boosting satiety without boosting blood sugar. That stuff is pure magic.

4) Pack a Lean, Mean Punch

Finally, the last tip for making a better breakfast is to include plenty of lean protein in your first meal of the day. Not only will you feed your muscles instead of your fat cells, but you'll make it through that 10:30 meeting a whole lot better, too. Note I said plenty of lean protein. Most people err either on the side of too little protein--obviously, pouring milk into Fruit Loops does *not* adequately curb the sugar spike--or go for sources that don't exactly qualify as lean--a Sausage McMuffin does *not* qualify as lean. (Nor do the 13 grams of protein from my Cinnabon last April.)

You know what does qualify as a lean protein source? Veggie omelets. Scrambled eggs. Crustless quiche. Cottage cheese and fruit. Stuff with good old dairy products and not a lot of fluff. These things can take time to prepare, but at least it is time well spent.

However, I'll be the first person to admit that the reason I used to reach for the toast and a bowl of cereal was because it was a quick fix to start my day. I hate mornings enough to allot only about 3 minutes for breakfast each day. Now that I know how much damage I was doing to my productivity and my body,  I'll let you in on my biggest breakfast lifesaver: Chocolate Nutrimeal Shakes. Even with me stumbling around in the morning, trying to blink my contacts into place while questioning the Hubs' remarkable zest for life before daylight, they take all of 45 seconds to prepare. It's so fast to whip up that it makes eating cereal seem tedious. Plus they have all four stomach-slimming components of a balanced meal--carbs,fiber, protein, and good fat-- and are loaded with vitamins that actually wake me up and teach me to love again. And did you catch that first word? Yeah. Chocolate. Life *is* worth living after all. Even in the mornings.

So get out there and slaughter some cereal this weekend, my friends. Your waistline will thank you. And Toucan Sam will be defeated for good. Sounds like a weekend well-spent to me.

Seriously, did no one teach those cereal commercial kids about stranger danger?

 

* Editor's Note: Uncle Sam is in no way affiliated with Toucan Sam.