Tag Archives: heart disease

Two favourite foods that are killing us!!!

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Hi welcome back:

Today’s post is about a simple way to help you and your loved ones to improve your health, support weight loss and yes increase leanness.

It does require some exercise – the exercise of willpower…

Just about the worst 2 foods you can eat / ingest / scarf down are…fries and soft drinks (soda to our American friends!)

Yep – just removing these two ‘foods’ from your diet will lead to improved health, less fat storage, less whole body inflammation and more besides.

This is NOT to say that avoiding fries’ ‘ Soft drinks will cure all diseases known to man, nor will it overnight cure diabetes, obesity or heart disease BUT if enough folk did eliminate these 2 foods from their diet the cumulative effect would be an amazing decrease in overall illness from diseases like those mentioned above.

We’d simply be a healthier society with healthier individuals in it.

Why you ask? Well…

two foods that kill

Pretty much most ‘foods’ or food-like substances have something in that is semi / sort of ‘good’ for you…

In the case of soft drinks they have water. And water is essential for life and wellbeing. But we can water from a whole lot of other sources without having to take on board all of the other crap that soft drinks / soda contain…

Soda is either loaded with sugar (usually of the high fructose corn syrup variety see this post for the evils associated with that), added sugar (variation of dextrose, maltose, sucrose or HFCS again) certainly have loads of chemicals and colourings and even sodium.

In the US of A up to 25% of daily calories come from sugar with a whopping 7% from soft drinks / sodas. That is a lot of sugar, a lot of insulin spiking, a lot of fat storage and a lot of body inflammation right there…

Okay so you’ll drink the zero sugar ones…not so fast!! The diet ones use artificial sweeteners and whilst the jury is still out on their long term effects on human beings (and some of the more hysterical internet rants & warnings have been disproven) they still carry lots of other chemicals & colourings. And they still not be good for you. An increasing body of research shows that people who drink diet drinks actually stimulate their appetite and can sabotage their diets through this mechanism…

Which brings us to fries. They’re made out of potato and spuds are essentially benign aren’t they? Again – it depends. If you are making your own fries (their thicker cousins – chips) from whole potatoes store or market bought and  you are either oven baking or at least frying in lard (yep lard!) then you will end up with a food that has some redeeming features. I mean they would be filling, trans-fat and colouring free. Still not great but acceptable now and again.

The truth is that the store bought fries are loaded with sodium, have colourings added for colour in many cases and are flavoured with more salt and sugar to increase their tastiness. (remember we are genetically wired to love salty and sweet foods and fast food manufacturers in fact processed food manufacturers use this to sell more products.) The potatoes (maybe good quality maybe not) are fried in one of the those pro-inflammatory seed (called vegetable – see marketing) oils which are so high in omega-6 like canola or blended oils – which oil can be used and re-used numerous times before being replaced with ‘fresh’ oil. Two things here – reusing high omega-6 oils for cooking makes them even more prone to become trans-fat laden, more carcinogenic and when I say fresh – I mean not yet cooked in. Most ‘seed’ oils are already rancid when you buy them off the supermarket shelf, never mind about the ones that are supplied by food services.

So trans-fat filled, chemical / sugared / salted yumminess is what a fry basically is. Add to this by glugging down a few teaspoons of sugar, colourings and more chemicals and you have the complete meal if you want to induce inflammation, insulin spikes, fat storage, damage insulin sensitivity, and support the likelihood of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. And that’s before we even think about portion size…

Many folk say that the advice on nutrition is confusing because expert A disagrees with Expert B or opinions change (Remember the crap about no eggs because they’ll raise your cholesterol and give you heart disease which was scientifically proven only it was wrong…).

And you’re right it is confusing and made even more so by the various lobby groups and manufacturers who ‘support’ scientific and University studies into the effects of various ‘simple foods (like sugar) on people.

It’s a play straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook – confuse & muddy the issues and sell lots in the meantime and then say ‘The best available research of the time…’

However when it comes to fries and soft drinks / sodas the only folk you’ll find defending these quasi-foods are the paid spokespeople of the manufacturers or the companies that retail them. Even the oft trotted out ‘as a part of a balance diet’ argument is no longer supported.

Remove these 2 foods from your diet and from that of the people you care about – your body and theirs will thank you by giving you better health and less chance of unnecessary disease.

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See you next week.

Be well and think before you put stuff in your mouth…

 

Food impact on cholesterol is irrelevant

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Welcome Back

Here is another important post from Dr Briffa – enjoy!!

Claims regarding the impact of foods on cholesterol are simply irrelevant

I got a press release today from the consumer advocacy group Which? informing me that “Misleading health claims to be banned at last”.

Apparently, European Union Member States today voted to adopt a list of scientifically proven health claims that can be made about food and drink products. Claims for green tea and glucosamine (regarding benefits for blood pressure and joint health) are examples of a couple of things that did not make the cut. On the other hand, it seems the following claims will be allowed to be made:

  • reduced consumption of saturated fat contributes to the maintenance of normal blood cholesterol levels
  • plant sterols and plant stanols contribute to the maintenance of normal blood cholesterol

Cholesterol levels are widely recognised as a marker for heart disease, and so the logic goes that reducing cholesterol levels will help prevent this condition. In this case, cholesterol is being used as what is known as a ‘surrogate marker’. The assumption is that a positive change in surrogate marker levels will translate into benefits for health.

However, is this actually true?

Taking dietary steps to reduce cholesterol has not been convincingly shown to reduce the risk of heart disease or overall risk of death. If this practice does not have benefits for health or extend life, why bother? Eating less saturated fat and swallowing stanols and sterols can reduce cholesterol all they like, but none of it has proven benefits for health.

It is perhaps worthy of note that a PR representative of the Unilever-made Flora Proactiv products commented here [1] that:

“We absolutely agree that simply lowering cholesterol without making wider positive changes to one’s diet and lifestyle will not make a significant positive health impact.”

I take this as admission of the general uselessness of cholesterol reduction in terms of its impact on health.

It can be hard for some to make sense that taking dietary steps to reduce cholesterol is not broadly beneficial to health. However, we should perhaps not be too surprised, when we consider that we have plenty of similar experiences regarding pharmaceutical drugs.

For example:

  1. drugs called resins reduce cholesterol but do not reduce overall risk of death
  2. the drug ezetimibe reduces cholesterol but has never been shown to benefit health
  3. drugs called fibrates improve the ratio of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol but don’t reduce overall mortality
  4. hormone replacement therapy improves the ratio of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol but doesn’t reduce overall mortality and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease

The situation with statin drugs is somewhat nuanced. In primary prevention (in essentially healthy individuals) statins do not reduce risk of death. In secondary prevention (those who have already had, say, a heart attack or stroke), they do, but the fact remains that even in high risk individuals, the great majority of people who take statins do not stand to benefit from them at all. There is reason to believe, by the way, that the little benefit statins have is not as a result of their cholesterol-reducing action, but due to other effects including anti-inflammatory blood-thinning actions.

In short, the fact that foods low in saturated fat and/or rich in sterols/stanols may contribute to lowered cholesterol levels is irrelevant. The idea that this translates into benefits for health is simply unproven. My advice? Don’t swallow it.

Article printed from Dr Briffa’s Blog – A Good Look at Good Health: http://www.drbriffa.com

URL to article: http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/12/06/claims-regarding-the-impact-of-foods-on-cholesterol-are-simply-irrelevant/

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[1] here: http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/07/18/newspaper-takes-money-from-food-company-to-promote-cholesterol-reducing-food-via-journalist-who-doesnt-seem-to-exist/#comment-190332