Find out why some of your favorite foods can be very dangerous. You can’t go by taste alone.
Eat THIS in Your 50s…Die Early?
You might want to cut back on the cheeseburgers. Men and women who eat a lot of meat and cheese in middle age appear to risk a shortened life span. But the opposite is true for the elderly. HealthDay News reports that researchers from the University of Southern California have concluded that a low-protein diet in middle age helps prevent cancer and overall mortality (or death). However, in old age, a high-protein diet is better for maintaining a healthy weight and protecting the bones from frailty.
The study: Led by Valter Longo and Eileen Crimmins, the team analyzed data on more than 6,800 middle-aged and older adults in the United States.
The results:
• 50-year-olds who consumed more than 20 percent of their daily calories from animal protein, including meat and dairy products, had an increased risk of death from cancer and type 2 diabetes that was four times higher than those who had a low-protein diet.
• In addition, those on a high-protein diet at age 50 had a twofold increased risk of death from any cause over the next 18 years, compared with those who ate less meat.
• Middle-aged people who consumed moderate levels of protein had a risk of death from cancer that was three times higher than those who ate a low-protein diet.
• An increased risk of death was far lower or even non-existent for the 50-year-olds whose protein came primarily from plants.
But if you love meat, just wait a few years. The study also found that those who are 65 and older and consumed a diet high in animal protein had a 60 percent lower risk of dying from cancer and 28 percent lower risk of death from any cause, compared with those who had a low-protein diet at this age.
What should you do? Longo says that most of us are eating about twice as much protein as we should. He recommends cutting back on the amount of all proteins, especially animal proteins, in middle age.
The study findings were published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
article source: http://netscape.compuserve.com/whatsnew/default.jsp?story=20140601-0630
photo credit: Flickr/Krista https://www.flickr.com/photos/scaredykat/3864013408″ title=”shake shack double cheeseburger by Krista, on Flickr
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`The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth’ by Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S. is the latest and best of the healthy eating genre, the `best foods’ book. Earlier entries in this category are `Superfoods’ by Steven Pratt, M.D. and Kathy Matthews and the ’12 Best Foods Cookbook’ by Dana Jacobi. Bowden’s book is different in three directions from these other volumes. First, it contains no recipes. This is little loss, as the second difference, the much longer list of `good’ foods more than makes it up. One can quite easily find good recipes for these foods by yourself. For starters, just get Pratt and Jacobi’s books! The third difference is that the author has many comments on what is NOT good for you, what you should avoid, as well as the many things you should search out.
The very best news in this book is the revelation (or confirmation, if you are up on your nutritional news flashes) that coffee, wine, butter, eggs, chocolate, cinnamon and watermelon are GOOD FOR YOU! One of the biggest surprises is that most soy products and many milk products (although NOT cheese and yogurt) are NOT good for you. Weak soy products include soy milk and tofu. Fermented soy products such as miso, like so many other fermented food products (yogurt, Kimchee, cheeses and sauerkraut) are still valuable, enhanced by the friendly bacteria responsible for the fermentation.
In spite of all the great news about some guilty pleasures, Bowden gives no relief for the bread and pasta lovers among us. It seems that grains such as wheat and rice, no matter how `unfussed about with’, are high in `empty calories’. Processed white grain and their wheats come off as being close to being poisonous! I’m exaggerating, of course, but I sometimes have the feeling that our good Dr. Bowden sometimes overstates his case just a smidge. One example that caught my eye was his opinion on the relative value of the commercially packaged honey (regardless of flowery source) versus raw honey in the comb. While I am not intimate with all the details of honey processing, I have seen some of the steps, and I honestly can’t see how a bit of centrifugation and even pasteurization can succeed in turning something good into something bad or at least neutral. On the other hand, Bowden does agree with a general position on food processing that claims that all heat treatment such as pasteurization degrades foods. The entire `Raw’ food movement is based on this premise. So, while I am not ready to go out and buy my dehydrator and ship my range off to the metal recycler, I chalk some points up to the `Raw’ camp from this very knowledgeably written book. One question I would pose to the Raw camp is how can you deal with especially good foods such as bitter greens which are almost inedible, or at least unpalatable if left uncooked.
One thing I find missing in this and virtually all other books on nutrition is a good practical sense of what in economics is called the marginal value of one food over another. For example, what is the practical difference to us between raw honey and `processed’ honey. I will grant the difference, but is that difference worth the effort required to search out a source for raw honey when the `Sue Bee’ honey bear is on every supermarket shelf. A more serious thought on the marginal value of foods arises when the author, or any other nutritional author touts a particular nutritional benefit, such as the anti-prostate cancer properties of lycopene found in both tomatoes and watermelon. As I am genetically predisposed to prostate cancer, I am inclined to wolf down as many tomato preparations as I can get my hands on. My problem is that this `hope’ is probably pretty slim. Two portions of tomatoes a day for the rest of my life will probably change my chances by about 0.2%. I’m just guessing here, but I have a hunch that if someone ate a perfect diet according to these recommendation, the difference may still be too small to measure. This is why the author’s negative comments about grains, milk, and soy are probably more valuable, as they warn us against things which we have for generations believed to be especially good for us.
I found only one weakness in Dr. Bowden’s facts, or at least in his completeness. In the article about cinnamon, he does not distinguish between true cinnamon (cinnamonum zelanicum) from Sri Lanka and it’s close lookalike, cassia (Cinnamomum cassia) from China and southeast Asia. My hunch is that the good doctor was really talking about cassia. He would have removed a small blemish on his thoroughness if he would have distinguished the two. In general, he would have given a small bone to those of us who dote on such things if he were to have given the scientific names for all plant and animal food sources.
Overall, this is a really good book on nutrition. Not because it’s facts are better than those in many other books on nutrition, but rather because the cases for both good and bad foods are so eloquently and readably made. My two favorite facts are on the relative nutritional value of dandelion greens and lamb. Now dandelion should be no surprise, ALL green leaved vegetables are good for you. It’s just that dandelion, like so many greens, is cheap. The good news about lamb, my very favorite meat, is based on the fact that sheep are grass fed, unlike cattle and pigs. And, if there is any one lesson we get from this book, our food sources, like us, are what they eat, and green grass is much better for Bo Peep’s charges than corn or wheat.
This is an excellent book of useable information on nutrition! I hope the author gets together with a strong culinary collaborator and turns all this information into a cookbook.
