Category Archives: Health & Fitness

I am continuing my celebration of  National Nutrition Month by writing about the major nutrients (called “macronutrients”) in my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard. This week I provided information about fats.

Although there are different sources and types of dietary fats, they are are usually grouped together. This leads to the misperception that “fat is bad” or “fat is good. It turns out that some fat intake is essential for good health and getting more of your dietary fats from some sources is better for your health than other sources. For example, saturated fat and trans fats are This is where things get confusing.

I try to alleviate some of this confusion in my column, but I wanted to provide some links to additional (and quality) information. You can learn more about dietary fats, including additional details about functions, health effects, and recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here and from the Mayo Clinic here.

Ultimately, making smart food choices is needed to shift the balance from unhealthy (saturated and trans) fats to healthier (monounsaturated and omega-3) fats. But determining the types of fats in the food we eat is difficult, to say the least. This excellent graphic shows the food sources of the various types of fatty acids and I find it helpful for making recommendations.

Even though the health effects of dietary fats is a confusing issue, the bottom line is that most people could benefit from the following two steps:

1. Reducing their intake of total fat
2. Shifting the balance  away from saturated (primarily animal sources) and trans (processed foods) fats toward monounsaturated and omega-3 fats from vegetable oils and fish.

March is National Nutrition Month, an annual campaign to educate people about making healthy eating choices. Reading food labels is an important step in making smart choices. But food labels tend to be confusing, and many people don’t understand the terminology or even what the major nutrients listed on a food label are. In order to make informed decisions, people really need to know some basic information about the food we eat, including the major nutrients.

I am celebrating National Nutrition Month by writing about the major nutrients—carbohydrates, fats, and protein—in my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard. This week I provide an introduction to carbohydrates.

You can learn more about carbohydrates, including specific guidelines and recommendations here.  I recently heard an interesting segment about whole grains on the NPR show Talk of the Nation. Apparently, all whole grains are not created equally. It’s worth a listen.

Last week I wrote about some characteristics of a good weight loss diet and what to avoid if your goal is to lose weight and keep it off. At about that time, the Best Diets rankings were published in U.S. News and World Report.

Despite this focus on diets and what to eat to lose weight, the key to long-term weight management isn’t food—it’s your ability to make good decisions and change your behaviors to support your weight loss goal. Sure, what you eat is important, and you should find a diet that is low in calories and teach you how to eat a healthy diet in the long run. But to make that diet work you need to alter your eating and activity habits. This is the difficult part, especially after the diet or weight loss program “ends”. (As people who have lost weight and kept it off will tell you, the effort never really ends)

To illustrate the importance of behavior change in achieving lasting weight loss, here are two examples of real people (with fake names) and how they overcame a major obstacle by changing their habits:

Andrea was a single mom who worked full-time and took classes toward her college degree. As you can imagine, her days were full and, even though she knew exactly what she should eat, she ate most of her meals on the go, often when driving. This meant that she ate a lot of take-out and fast food, typically as several snacks throughout the day as opposed to normal meals. Andrea struggled to lose weight and was getting frustrated that even though she knew what she should be eating, her lifestyle made this all but impossible. Then she decided to start packing food for herself. She actually carried two bags—one with her books and the other neatly packed with healthy snacks. This way she could have appropriate food with her everywhere she went. A yogurt in the morning at work rather than donuts from the kitchen or fruit and cheese instead of fast food while driving to pick up her kids at school. Preparing a day’s worth of food took time, but making this change made all the difference for Andrea.

Ed travelled a lot for work, which meant he spent long days on the road and ate out for most meals. Sitting all day in meetings and eating at restaurants with business associates made it almost impossible for him to stick with his diet or exercise program. He did his best to order salads, skip desert, and look for the healthiest options on the menu. No surprise, he ended up eating far more calories than he should and didn’t lose much weight. But skipping these meals wasn’t an option. Ed decided that since he couldn’t control his diet as much as he would like, he would focus his efforts on exercise. He started staying at hotels with fitness centers and woke up early to exercise before work. If he finished early in the afternoon he would use that time to go for a walk or go to the gym again before dinner. This wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. The exercise helped with weight loss directly by burning calories and indirectly by giving Ed a sense of control over his weight loss which motivated him to be even more careful ordering meals.

What Andrea and  Ed have in common is that, even though they were following the same diet (a low-calorie diet with daily exercise), their success came more from how they changed their behavior to fit their lifestyle than from the details of the diet. And that is something that most diet books or programs don’t tell you. It is also why it takes most people several tries before they successfully lose weight and keep it off. Anyone can follow a diet for a few months, making short-term changes to accommodate a new eating and activity pattern. But it takes someone with real dedication to make the type of long-term behavior modifications that are required to keep weight off in the long run.

My Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week is about an unexpected consequence of childhood obesity. Much of the discussion of childhood — and adult — obesity is centered on the health effects. Since obesity is a leading cause of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, there are serious consequences of being overfat.

The problem is even more severe in young people. Because of childhood obesity, pediatricians are now treating kids in their early teens for type 2 diabetes. Adults who have type 2 diabetes tend to have heart attacks at a relatively young age and are likely to die early. Does this mean that teenagers who have type 2 diabetes will suffer heart attacks in their 20s and 30s? Many physicians and researchers think so, but the truth is that we just don’t know…yet.

Kids who are obese also tend to be less physically active than their peers. This leads to a condition of low fitness, making participation in sports more difficult, which leads to more inactivity, which can lead to weight gain… I think you get the idea. And children who are at a “healthy” weight may be unfit due to not getting enough exercise. So there is now this situation in which young people are likely to be unfit, obese, or both.

Aside from the health issues, there is an unexpected consequence of childhood obesity: many potential military recruits do not meet weight and/or fitness entrance requirements. It is entirely possible that the obesity epidemic could have national security consequences!

You can read more about the problems associated with obesity and poor fitness among military recruits here.

Let’s say you smoke, don’t exercise, and need to lose weight. Or maybe you are overweight and mostly sedentary. Let’s also say that you are only willing to change one of these health behaviors. Where should you begin?

This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week. Check it out…the answer may surprise you.

Incidentally, many people are in the situation described above and many more need to change two of these behaviors, most commonly losing weight and becoming more active. And many people find making these changes to be overwhelming, so they try to start with one. But which one?