The term “toxic environment” was popularized years ago to refer to conditions that promote the consumption of high-calorie, unhealthy food and encourage being physically inactive. This combination is thought to be a major factor that contributes to obesity and other chronic diseases, so understanding both aspects is important. For now, lets focus on our toxic food environment, which I do in my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged diet, food, health, healthy eating, nutrition, weight loss
I have been writing about four important ways to improve your health: move more, eat smart, chill out, and make it work for you. I previously explained with importance of physical activity for health and why move more is first on my list.
Now let’s turn our attention to the role of food and eating in promoting good health. No question, for many people, changing the way they eat can make a huge difference in the way they feel and their current and future health.
Many people start off the New Year with a general desire to improve their health. But being “more healthy” can include an almost endless list of changes, leaving people unsure of where to begin. Furthermore, there is a perception that you have to implement all of the changes simultaneously or follow a complicated program in order to see results.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. Fortunately, there are a few simple guidelines that have the potential to lead to significant improvements in health, fitness, and wellbeing.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged behavior change, diet, exercise, fitness, health, healthy eating, nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress, wellness
Nutrition information is often confusing and conflicting, making healthy food choices a challenge. Fortunately, there are some recommendations that are consistent. Among these is eating more fruit and vegetables. Depending on how you consume these foods, you may be missing some of the nutrients that make them so healthy. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged diet, fruit, health, healthy eating, nutrition, vegetables
If you have been gaining weight or find it more and more difficult to maintain your weight, you are not alone. According to current statistics, one-third of U.S. adults are obese and two-thirds are considered overweight. Being overweight is now the norm in America, since only about 3 in 10 people are at a healthy body weight.
This is consistent with other reports that show that the waistlines of Americans are expanding. One study looked at the percentage of adults who had a high waist circumference (over 35 inches for women and over 40 inches for men). Overall, the average American added over one inch to their waist circumference over the past decade. As of 2012, over half of U.S. adults meet the criteria for abdominal obesity. This is bad news, since excess fat, especially around the waist, increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
It wasn’t always this way. As recently as the 1980s the prevalence of obesity was much lower, around 15%. There has been much interest in figuring out why this widespread weight gain has occurred. While there is no single cause, there are a host of factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Among the forces that seem to be working against you are your genetics and our environment, specifically as it relates to eating and activity behaviors. Over the past several decades our “food environment” has changed so that now low-quality, high-calorie food is readily accessible and more nutritious food is harder to find and more expensive. Our “activity environment” has changed, too. For most of us, the physical activity that was common at work and home years ago has been replaced by lots of sitting. While there are genes that influence our eating and activity behaviors, these genes have not changed enough over time to explain the obesity epidemic.
A practical explanation for weight gain, both for individuals and the population as a whole, is that we are eating more and expending less energy through activity. Indeed, even small changes in energy balance can add up to increased weight over time . One study, however, suggests that there may be other factors that may have contributed to the rise in obesity beyond eating and activity.
Among these factors are exposure to certain chemicals in the environment, the use of prescription drugs that cause weight gain, and how our current diet has changed the bacteria in our intestines, that we now know regulate our physiology in surprising ways. For example, bisphenol A (BPA), still found in some plastics, food containers, and receipts, alters normal hormone activity in a way that may increase fat storage.
There is some good news, though. Eating a healthy diet and being active everyday can help you lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. This is true whether your concern is changes in your own eating and activity habits or these other potential causes of weight gain. Indeed, regular exercise may help treat many conditions, like depression, for which prescription medications that may cause weight gain are often used. And a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and low in added sugar may help restore more normal gut bacteria which might help with weight control.
Until we know otherwise, eating smart and moving more is still your best approach to weight control and good health.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged activity, BPA, diet, exercise, healthy eating, obesity, weight gain
Breakfast is often thought of as the most important meal of the day, for good reason. Eating a healthy breakfast provides energy to start the day and can be helpful for weight control. In children, a healthy breakfast is essential for proper growth and development and is linked to improved attention and learning in school. Unfortunately, many common breakfast foods are more like candy and soda than a healthy meal to start the day.
This is also true for breakfast drinks, including coffee drinks. Many popular coffee drinks are more similar to a milkshake than to actual coffee! This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Take, for example, the grande (16 oz) Mocha Frappuccino blended coffee drink from Starbucks. This drink has 410 calories, 15 grams of fat, 61 grams of sugar, and 5 grams of protein. To put this in perspective, 61 grams of sugar is more than most people should have in an entire day!
You could order this drink with nonfat milk and no whipped cream. That’s a good idea, but it will still have 270 calories, 1 gram of fat, and 59 g sugar. That’s still a lot of sugar!
Let’s compare that to a small (16 oz.) McCafe Mocha Frappé from McDonald’s, which is essentially a coffee milkshake. It has 500 calories, 20 grams of fat, 66 grams of sugar, and 8 grams of protein.
Sure, the calories and sugar in the coffee drink aren’t quite as outrageous as the milkshake, but it’s close. This is especially clear when you compare the coffee drink to actual coffee. A grande (16 oz.) Pike Place Roast from Starbucks has 5 calories and no fat or sugar. If you like cream and sugar in your coffee, that adds 5 grams of sugar, 3 grams of fat, and about 50 calories, still way less than either “coffee” drink.
If you don’t want plain coffee a better choice might be a grande Starbucks Cappuccino, which has 140 calories, 7 g fat, and 10 g sugar. Get one with nonfat milk and you cut out 60 calories from fat. If you are worried about how much sugar you consume and how many calories you drink (you probably should be!), this is a much better coffee drink choice than a milkshake!
This isn’t specific to Starbucks. A medium (16 oz.) iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts has 130 calories and 28 grams of sugar. And that doesn’t include a donut.
Does this mean you can’t enjoy a delicious coffee drink? Of course not. But don’t try to fool yourself by calling it coffee. Depending on what you order, it may essentially be a milkshake! I think we can all agree that is not part of a healthy breakfast.
I call this idea that unhealthy food makes its way onto our breakfast table Candy & Soda for Breakfast. Foods like donuts and pastries are often topped with icing and it would be difficult to distinguish many muffins from cupcakes. Many “fruit” drinks contain little to no juice but plenty of added sugar, so they are essentially soda without bubbles.
And it’s not just breakfast, either. Lunch, dinner, and snacks frequently include foods that look like a healthy choice—yogurt, nuts, and granola bars are a few examples—but really are candy and soda in disguise.
Posted in Candy and soda for breakfast!, Health & Fitness
Tagged coffee, diet, health, healthy eating, milkshake, nutrition, unhealthy eating
February is Heart Month, an ideal time to assess your risk of heart disease and take steps to improve your health. This is important because heart disease, sometimes called coronary artery disease, is the leading cause of death among adults in the United States. It is responsible for nearly 600,000 deaths each year, mostly from heart attacks. Millions more are at increased risk because of certain biological and behavioral risk factors.
Some of these risk factors cannot be changed, such as age, sex, and family history, while others can be altered to reduce risk. These modifiable risk factors include smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, stress, and physical inactivity. While your doctor can play an important role in treating these conditions, there is much you can do on your own to improve your heart health. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
The first step is to get a good assessment of your heart health. If you haven’t done so recently, you should see your doctor to have your risk factors evaluated. This includes tests for blood glucose and blood lipids (including total, LDL, and HDL cholesterol and triglycerides), measurement of your blood pressure and body weight, and an assessment of other health factors such as your family history, whether you smoke, and your level of physical activity.
The next step is to treat the risk factors that you have. Depending on the severity and your own personal health history your doctor may prescribe medications to lower your blood pressure, blood glucose, or blood lipids. These medications are most effective when combined with lifestyle changes including good nutrition, exercise, and weight loss. In some cases, poor diet and lack of activity can counteract the beneficial effects of these drugs. Furthermore, these healthy habits may help you reduce the dosage, and limiting the side effects, or stop taking the medications altogether.
The other risk factors—obesity, inactivity, and smoking—really must be treated through lifestyle management. While there are medications that can help with smoking cessation and weight loss, being successful requires making lasting behavior changes. These habits can be difficult to change, and many people have tried before without success. Keep in mind, though, that everyone who is successful at quitting smoking, losing weight, or sticking to an exercise program has experienced their share of difficulty. The difference is that those people kept trying until they were successful. You can be successful, too.
Even small changes can have a big impact. Take exercise, for example. The benefits of as little as 30 minutes of physical activity per day are well established and impact heart disease risk in a multitude of ways. Physical activity helps with weight control, lowers blood pressure, improves blood lipids, and prevents and treats diabetes. Think of this as a great health “deal.” By modifying one risk factor—inactivity—you can also promote beneficial changes in four others—obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes. There is no other treatment, drugs included, which can have such a broad impact on reducing heart disease risk!
Knowing which risk factors are most concerning can help you and your doctor make effective treatment decisions. Quitting smoking, increasing your physical activity (and reducing sedentary time), and eating a healthier diet can lead to improvements in heart disease risk factors and reduced heart attack risk. The best news is that these same changes can also reduce your risk of other serious health problems including many types of cancer, stroke, and lung disease.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged blood glucose, blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, diet, exercise, fitness, HDL, health, heart disease, heart month, LDL, nutrition, physical activity
Eating well and being physically active are two of the most important things you can do to promote good health. But knowing you should do these things does not always mean it is easy to actually do them.
Despite the simplicity of the message “eat healthy and exercise,” many people struggle with knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. This is largely due to the complicated and ever-changing nature of nutrition and exercise science and the fact that most people receive little education in these areas.
You may even feel like the information you read and hear is designed to confuse you. That may be true, considering that much of the nutrition information we get comes from food companies that are trying to convince us to buy their products. Even scientific research can yield conflicting results, challenging even the most knowledgeable professionals, myself included, to make sense of it. And even if you do decide to make eating or activity changes, the “best” diet or exercise program claims may make you wonder if you made the right choice.
Given this, it’s not your fault if you struggle to understand basic health information and recommendations. But it is your responsibility to learn as much as you can to make the best choices for you and your family.
This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week
This won’t be easy, of course. The popular media, as well as social media, promote confusion and false promises about nutrition by making claims that some foods are “toxic” while others are “super foods.” The old “good carb, bad carb” or “good fat, bad fat” arguments have been given a new life as “eat this, not that” lists. The problem is that many of these claims are not supported by science. The research that is done often yields complicated or conflicting results that aren’t explained in a way that actually helps people make good decisions.
The same is true for exercise. No one doubts that exercise and physical activity are essential for good health, but there are conflicting claims about specific benefits of exercise and what the best form of exercise really is. This can lead to the idea that if you aren’t doing the right exercise, it doesn’t count. Nothing could be further from the truth! While there are reasons why some athletes might want specific types of training, the majority of people can benefit from simply spending less time sitting and participating in some activity each day.
So, what can you do? Given the confusing and changing nutrition recommendations it’s best to focus on what hasn’t changed. That is, to eat real food rather than processed, prepackaged foods and making water your drink of choice. Planning meals and snacks to include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, meat, eggs, and dairy should give you plenty of healthy fats, carbohydrates, and proteins.
Instead of worrying about the “perfect” exercise, make it your goal to do something active for at least 30 minutes every day. Beyond that, dedicating time for aerobic, strength, and flexibility training will bring greater benefits. Remember, the best exercise for you is the one you will do! Seek advice from people you trust and credible professionals, but remember that if what they tell you sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Your responsibility isn’t to understand all the nutrition, exercise, and health information you encounter. It’s to try to make a few simple, healthy choices despite that confusing information: Sit less, move more, and eat real food.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged diet, exercise, fitness, food, healthy choices, healthy eating, nutrition, physical activity
The term “toxic environment” was popularized years ago to refer to conditions that promote the consumption of high-calorie, unhealthy food and encourage being physically inactive. This combination is thought to be a major factor that contributes to obesity and other chronic diseases, so understanding both aspects is important. For now, let’s focus on our toxic food environment, which I do in my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
It’s hard to believe, but summer is winding down and a new school year has begun. As teachers, students, and parents know, this is the real beginning of the new year. For those of us involved in education, the start of a new school year is a perfect time to make goals for the upcoming year, whether they are related to school or not.
This is a lot like making New Year’s resolutions on January first. Hopefully, you are still on track with the resolutions you made. Sadly, research suggests that only 8% of people actually achieve their goal (more data here).
There are a host of reasons for this. Some of the most common resolutions—quitting smoking, losing weight, and getting in shape—are also some of the most difficult behaviors to change because they require making significant lifestyle modifications. To make things worse, many people set unrealistic goals or try to take on too much at once.
Many people who fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions this year will recycle them next year and try again. In fact, most people who manage to successfully quit smoking or lose weight have tried many times in the past. Sometimes experience, even a bad experience, is the best way to learn what does and doesn’t work for you.
But there is no need to wait until 2023 to restart your stalled New Year’s resolutions or finally get around to doing what you planned months ago. Setting a date to begin a behavior change is an important step in the process so, why not make the end of summer and the start of a new school year the time to revisit your resolutions and try again?
Here is some advice to help make this second chance to start or restart your New Year’s resolutions successful.
Be realistic. Many people fail to keep their resolutions simply because they don’t set realistic goals or aren’t realistic about what it will take to meet those goals. For example, running a marathon is an ambitious goal for almost anyone, especially someone who doesn’t exercise at all. A resolution to work up to walking or jogging five days per week, with a goal of completing a 5k run/walk is more achievable.
Focus on learning. Making most health behavior changes involves learning as much as doing. Something as simple as eating healthier meals requires learning about the nutrients that make some foods healthier than others, learning to read food labels to select healthy foods, and learning how to cook and prepare healthy meals. If your resolution is to learn about healthy meals, you will be able to achieve that goal and be well on your way to eating a healthier diet.
Manage your time. Most health improvement projects require taking time to learn about, implement, and maintain those healthy behaviors. If you resolve to manage your time to include exercise or meal preparation in your daily schedule you will be much more likely to meet your goals. Trying to add these new activities as “extras” to your already busy day will inevitably lead to them getting squeezed out.
Plan ahead. Most people already know that changing health behaviors can be challenging, even under the best circumstances. It’s no wonder that holidays, travel, and other life events can complicate or even derail an otherwise successful diet or exercise program. Make it your resolution to think about what you can do before, during, and after these (and other) disruptions occur to keep yourself on track.
Hopefully these steps will help you keep your resolutions, achieve your goals, and make this a happy, healthy year. As a bonus, you can take January 1, 2023 off!
Dr Parr Says... 