TOP 11 BIGGEST LIES OF MAINSTREAM NUTRITION

Top 11 Biggest Lies of Mainstream Nutrition
By Kris Gunnars. Authority Nutrition, 11 February 2013.

There is a lot of misinformation circling around in mainstream nutrition. I have listed the worst examples in this article, but unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are the top 11 biggest lies, myths and misconceptions of mainstream nutrition.

1. Eggs Are Unhealthy

There’s one thing that nutrition professionals have had remarkable success with…and that is demonizing incredibly healthy foods.

The worst example of that is eggs, which happen to contain a large amount of cholesterol and were therefore considered to increase the risk of heart disease.

But recently it has been proven that the cholesterol in the diet doesn’t really raise the cholesterol in blood. In fact, eggs primarily raise the “good” cholesterol and are NOT associated with increased risk of heart disease (1, 2).

What we’re left with is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. They’re high in all sorts of nutrients along with unique antioxidants that protect our eyes (3).

To top it all of, despite being a “high fat” food, eating eggs for breakfast is proven to cause significant weight loss compared to bagels for breakfast (4, 5).

Bottom Line: Eggs do not cause heart disease and are among the most nutritious foods on the planet. Eggs for breakfast can help you lose weight.

2. Saturated Fat is Bad For You

A few decades ago it was decided that the epidemic of heart disease was caused by eating too much fat, in particular saturated fat.

This was based on highly flawed studies and political decisions that have now been proven to be completely wrong.

A massive review article published in 2010 looked at 21 prospective epidemiological studies with a total of 347.747 subjects. Their results: absolutely no association between saturated fat and heart disease (6).

The idea that saturated fat raised the risk of heart disease was an unproven theory that somehow became conventional wisdom (7).

Eating saturated fat raises the amount of HDL (the “good”) cholesterol in the blood and changes the LDL from small, dense LDL (very bad) to Large LDL, which is benign (8, 9).

Meat, coconut oil, cheese, butter…there is absolutely no reason to fear these foods.

Bottom Line: Newer studies have proven that saturated fat does not cause heart disease. Natural foods that are high in saturated fat are good for you.

3. Everybody Should be Eating Grains

The idea that humans should be basing their diets on grains has never made sense to me.

The agricultural revolution happened fairly recently in human history and our genes haven’t changed that much.

Grains are fairly low in nutrients compared to other real foods like vegetables. They are also rich in a substance called phytic acid which binds essential minerals in the intestine and prevents them from being absorbed (10).

The most common grain in the western diet, by far, is wheat…and wheat can cause a host of health problems, both minor and serious.

Modern wheat contains a large amount of a protein called gluten, but there is evidence that a significant portion of the population may be sensitive to it (11, 12, 13).

Eating gluten can damage the intestinal lining, cause pain, bloating, stool inconsistency and tiredness (14, 15). Gluten consumption has also been associated with schizophrenia and cerebellar ataxia, both serious disorders of the brain (16, 17).

Bottom Line: Grains are relatively low in nutrients compared to other real foods like vegetables. The gluten grains in particular may lead to a variety of health problems.

4. Eating a Lot of Protein is Bad For Your Bones and Kidneys

A high protein diet has been claimed to cause both osteoporosis and kidney disease.

It is true that eating protein increases calcium excretion from the bones in the short term, but the long term studies actually show the opposite effect.

In the long term, protein has a strong association with improved bone health and a lower risk of fracture (18, 19).

Additionally, studies don’t show any association of high protein with kidney disease in otherwise healthy people (20, 21).

In fact, two of the main risk factors for kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure. Eating a high protein diet improves both (22, 23).

If anything, a high protein diet should be protective against osteoporosis and kidney failure!

Bottom Line: Eating a high protein diet is associated with improved bone health and a lower risk of fracture. High protein also lowers blood pressure and improves diabetes symptoms, which should lower the risk of kidney failure.

5. Low-Fat Foods Are Good For You

Do you know what regular food tastes like when all the fat has been taken out of it?

Well, it tastes like cardboard. No one would want to eat it.

The food manufacturers know this and therefore they add other things to compensate for the lack of fat.

Usually these are sweeteners…sugar, high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners like aspartame.

We’ll get to the sugar in a moment, but I’d like to point out that even though artificial sweeteners don’t have calories, the evidence does NOT suggest that they are better for you than sugar.

In fact, many observational studies show a consistent, highly significant association with various diseases like obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, premature delivery and depression (24, 25, 26).

In these low-fat products, healthy natural fats are being replaced with substances that are extremely harmful.

Bottom Line: Low-fat foods are usually highly processed products loaded with sugar, corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. They are extremely unhealthy.

6. You Should Eat Many Small Meals Throughout The Day

The idea that you should eat many small meals throughout the day in order to “keep metabolism high” is a persistent myth that doesn’t make any sense.

It is true that eating raises your metabolism slightly while you’re digesting the meal, but it’s the total amount of food that determines the energy used, NOT the number of meals.

This has actually been put to the test and refuted multiple times. Controlled studies where one group eats many small meals and the other the same amount of food in fewer meals show that there is literally no difference between the two (27, 28).

In fact, one study in obese men revealed that eating 6 meals per day led to less feelings of fullness compared to 3 meals (29).

Not only is eating so often practically useless for most of the people out there, it may even be harmful.

It is not natural for the human body to be constantly in the fed state. In nature, we used to fast from time to time and we didn’t eat nearly as often as we do today.

When we don’t eat for a while, a cellular process called autophagy cleans waste products out of our cells (30). Fasting or not eating from time to time is good for you.

Several observational studies show a drastically increased risk of colon cancer (4th most common cause of cancer death), numbers going as high as a 90% increase for those who eat 4 meals per day compared to 2 (31, 32, 33).

Bottom Line: There is no evidence that eating many small meals throughout the day is better than fewer, bigger meals. Not eating from time to time is good for you. Increased meal frequency is associated with colon cancer.

7. Carbs Should Be Your Biggest Source of Calories

The mainstream view is that everyone should eat a low-fat diet, with carbs being around 50-60% of total calories.

This sort of diet contains a lot of grains and sugars, with very small amounts of fatty foods like meat and eggs.

This type of diet may work well for some people, especially those who are naturally lean.

But for those who are obese, have the metabolic syndrome or diabetes, this amount of carbohydrates is downright dangerous.

This has actually been studied extensively. A low-fat, high-carb diet has been compared to a low-carb, high-fat diet in multiple randomized controlled trials.

The results are consistently in favour of low-carb, high-fat diets (34, 35, 36).

Bottom Line: The low-fat, high-carb diet is a miserable failure and has been proven repeatedly to be vastly inferior to lower-carb, higher-fat diets.

8. High Omega-6 Seed and Vegetable Oils Are Good For You

Polyunsaturated fats are considered healthy because some studies show that they lower your risk of heart disease.

But there are many types of polyunsaturated fats and they are not all the same.

Most importantly, we have both Omega-3 fatty acids and Omega-6 fatty acids.

Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory and lower your risk of many diseases related to inflammation (37). Humans actually need to get Omega-6s and Omega-3s in a certain ratio. If the ratio is too high in favour of Omega-6, it can cause problems (38).

By far the biggest sources of Omega-6 in the modern diet are processed seed and vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower oils.

Throughout their history, humans never had access to such an abundance of Omega-6 fats. It is unnatural for the human body.

Research that specifically looks at Omega-6 fatty acids instead of polyunsaturated fats in general shows that they actually increase the risk of heart disease (39, 40).

Eat your Omega-3s and consider supplementing with cod fish liver oil, but avoid the industrial seed and vegetable oils.

Bottom Line: Humans need to get Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats in a certain ratio. Eating excess Omega-6 from seed oils raises your risk of disease.

9. Low Carb Diets Are Dangerous

I personally believe low-carb diets to be a potential cure for many of the most common health problems in western nations.

The low-fat diet peddled all around the world is fairly useless against many of these diseases. It simply does not work.

However, low-carb diets (demonized by nutritionists and the media) have repeatedly been shown to lead to much better outcomes.

Every randomized controlled trial on low-carb diets shows that they:

• Reduce body fat more than calorie-restricted low-fat diets, even though the low-carb dieters are allowed to eat as much as they want (41, 42).
• Lower blood pressure significantly (43, 44).
• Lower blood sugar and improve symptoms of diabetes much more than low-fat diets (45, 46, 47, 48).
• Increase HDL (the good) cholesterol much more (49, 50).
• Lower triglycerides much more than low-fat diets (51, 52, 53).
• Change the pattern of LDL (bad) cholesterol from small, dense (very bad) to Large LDL, which is benign (54, 55).
• Low carb diets are also easier to stick to, probably because they don’t require you to restrict calories and be hungry all the time. More people in the low-carb groups make it to the end of the studies (56, 57).

Many of the health professionals that are supposed to have our best interest in mind have the audacity to claim that these diets are dangerous, then continue to peddle their failed low-fat dogma that is hurting more people than it helps.

Bottom Line: Low-carb diets are the healthiest, easiest and most effective way to lose weight and reverse metabolic disease. It is a scientific fact.

10. Sugar is Unhealthy Because it Contains “Empty” Calories

It is commonly believed that sugar is bad for you because it contains empty calories.

It’s true, sugar has a lot of calories with no essential nutrients. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sugar, primarily because of its high fructose content, affects metabolism in a way that sets us up for rapid fat gain and metabolic disease.

Fructose gets metabolized by the liver and turned into fat which is secreted into the blood as VLDL particles. This leads to elevated triglycerides and cholesterol (58, 59).

It also causes resistance to the hormones insulin and leptin, which is a stepping stone towards obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes (60, 61).

This is just to name a few. Sugar causes a relentless biochemical drive for humans to eat more and get fat. It is probably the single worst ingredient in the standard western diet.

Bottom Line: The harmful effects of sugar go way beyond empty calories. Sugar wreaks havoc on our metabolism and sets us up for weight gain and many serious diseases.

11. High Fat Foods Will Make You Fat

It seems kind of intuitive that eating fat would make you get fat.

The stuff that is gathering under our skin and making us look soft and puffy is fat. So…eating fat should give our bodies even more of it.

But it isn’t that simple. Despite fat having more calories per gram than carbohydrate or protein, high-fat diets do not make people fat.

As with anything, this depends on the context. A diet that is high in fat AND high in carbs will make you fat, but it’s NOT because of the fat.

In fact, diets that are high in fat (and low in carbs) cause much greater fat loss than diets that are low in fat (62, 63, 64).

Top image via io9. Credit: Tyler Olson/Shutterstock.

[Source: Authority Nutrition. Edited. Some images added.]

Related Posts:

1. 5 biggest health myths

2. 10 Food Myths You Probably Believe

3. 10 Complete Falsehoods about Food

6 THINGS IN YOUR BURGER THAT ARE GROSSER THAN HORSE MEAT

6 Things Grosser Than Horse Meat In Your Burger
By Emily Elert, Popular Science, 27 February 2013.

An unintended hunk of horseflesh is one of the less alarming things that the meat processing industry can put in your ground beef.

1. Caution: Germs Inside

We're not trying to pretend that ground beef is the only food with germs living on it - there is, as we all know, an invisible film of bacteria living on virtually every surface on Earth. But the key word there is surface: the inside of muscle is largely sterile. When meat gets ground up at a processing plant, however, the outsides and insides of numerous animals get mixed together and mashed into homogenized meat spaghetti, and the bacteria is no longer restricted to the outside.

So while it's generally okay to eat your steak bloody - provided you've seared the outside to kill off the germs - burgers are a different story. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] recommends cooking ground beef until the internal temperature measures 160°F - brownness alone is not a safe indicator.

2. "Pink Slime"

Euphemistically referred to as the "trimmings," the leftover waste products from beef processing include fat, sinew, bloody effluvia, and bits of meat. Rather than throwing this material away or selling it to a pet food company, some enterprising meat plants transform their trimmings into a product they call "lean finely textured beef" (LFTB).

In case you're wondering how a grim mixture of slop gets turned into the elegant pink snake pictured at left a delicious hamburger, here's how: The trimmings are liquefied, then put into a spinning centrifuge to separate the remaining fat globs and solid bits. The resulting liquid is then treated with ammonia gas to destroy pathogens - of which there tend to be a lot - by raising the pH, and then frozen into small squares. The frozen squares are shipped off to supermarkets and producers, where they get added to actual ground beef as filler. The final meat product is sold raw as "lean ground beef" and sold as hamburger at restaurants and in school cafeterias.

[Note: BPI, the primary producer of LFTB in the U.S., claims that the photo we originally provided in the story is, in fact, an image of mechanically separated chicken, not beef a hoax. In an email to Popular Science, BPI's Jeremy Jacobsen also claimed that "the language used to describe how it’s made and what it’s made from are 100% completely false," but did not provide any further details. The company has also been disseminating its own photo of LFTB, and has created multiple websites aimed at improving the product's image. Oh, and they are suing everyone who calls it "pink slime" - including Gerald Zirnstein, a USDA microbiologist who coined the term in an email to colleagues after touring a processing plant. (Zirnstein was looking into allegations concerning bacterial contamination at the time; he also wrote in his email, "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labelling.”)]

3. Poop

Each year, the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] tests meat samples from hundreds of supermarkets around the U.S. Between 2002-2011, inspectors found that an average of 2/3 of ground beef samples contained E. Coli, the bacterium that lives in your lower intestines and helps turn your part-way digested food from a liquid green slurry into real, bona fide poop.

So how does so much E. Coli wind up in meat? PETA's website has this vivid explanation: "When animals' intestines are torn open during slaughter, faeces spill out onto their flesh." Then, as you know, the stuff is ground up and mixed together.

Some strains of E. Coli are harmless to humans, but others can cause serious food poisoning if ingested. One notable outbreak in 1993 sickened over 400 people in three states and took the lives of three children. The culprit was a batch of contaminated burgers from the fast-food chain Jack in the Box.

4. Superbugs

Believe it or not, there's a darker side to the aforementioned poop-in-your-burger problem: Livestock are treated with heavy courses of antibiotics and, as a result, their bodies become breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria. In 2011, FDA tests found that over 15% of the E. Coli in ground beef is resistant to at least one class of antibiotics. Ground beef also contains drug-resistant Salmonella, Enterococcus, and Staphylococcus aureus. But here's where it gets a little scary: some of the bacteria showing up in supermarket meat is resistant to multiple drugs. A 2011 study found that, of the 37% of total ground meat samples containing S. aureus, a third were found to have resistance to three or more separate antibiotic drugs. In other words, roughly 13% of meat contains harmful bacteria against which humans have no remaining defenses. (Full disclosure: We're talking ground beef here, but poultry is worse.)

5. Drugs, Chemicals, Pesticides

A 2010 USDA report found that residues of hazardous chemicals, including "veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals,” were widespread in the country's beef supply. Unlike bacteria, whose harmful effects can be avoided by cooking meat thoroughly, chemical residues stick around in meat until the meat gets broken down in someone's stomach. Some of those toxins, including certain pesticides and heavy metals, cannot be processed by the kidneys and liver, and will therefore stick around in the body's tissues for life.

6. The Thousand-Animal Burger

Maybe there's nothing inherently gross about the fact that, when you bite into a hamburger, you could be chewing the flesh of over 1,000 individual animals simultaneously. But if you're the chief of the food-borne and diarrheal diseases branch at the CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention], you look at that hamburger and also see the pooled bacteria from a thousand farm animals, and you know that, the next time an outbreak of drug-resistant Salmonella pops up somewhere, you've got your detective work cut out for you.

Grinding your own beef, or having it ground by a trustworthy butcher before your eyes, ensures that no more than a few cows (the juicy chuck of one, the sirloin of another, maybe) contribute to your burger.

[Source: Popular Science. Edited.]

10 MOST OFFENSIVE APPS

Users beware! Steer your children away from these apps. Some were banned but some are still available.

10 Most-Offensive Apps
By Ed Oswald, Tech News Daily, 28 February 2013.

Not all apps are in good taste, but some are especially egregious. A few have even been banned as a result.

There Shouldn't Be an App for That

While the majority of apps for our mobile devices are useful or just good fun, a few go too far. Some app developers seem intent on crossing the line of good taste to get our attention. And in some cases that’s gotten them tossed from the Apple App Store or Google Play.

1. Bang With Friends

Web-based, free, available.

This Facebook app allows you to choose which of your friends you’d like to get it on with and will disclose a connection only if your friend feels the same about you. There's nothing wrong with a little consensual fun, but shopping through photos of your friends in search of a shag is a bit creepy. For an extra touch of class, the "How It Works" page features the F-word in its URL and matches the steps in using the site with illustrations of the steps for applying a condom. [More here and here]

2. NRA: Practice Range

iOS, free, available.

If you believe the National Rifle Association, the increasing gun violence in this country is a result of violent video games. That said, less than a month after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, the NRA came out with a first person shooting game of its own. The object is to shoot the various – inanimate - targets that appear in the line of view. While the game is not necessarily violent, the timing could not have been worse. [More here and here]

3. Sexy Asians

BlackBerry, US$1.99, available

There is no shortage of Asian-pinup-girl apps, but this is an example of how they have spread beyond iOS and Android to the BlackBerry World app store, as well (where this app is the top-rated). “Sexy Asians” promises pictures of scantily clad Asian women that can be used as backgrounds for your home screen, incoming calls and the like. Sex sells, the saying goes, but these are unlikely to be the killer apps that will rescue a floundering mobile brand. [More]

4. Baby Got Back

iOS, 99 cents, available.

When Sir Mix-A-Lot released “Baby Got Back” in 1992, the humorous video and catchy beat made his ode to big butts an instant hit. But an app released in 2011 to celebrate the song is not so good-natured. This app includes the Ba Dunka Dunk game in which you must manoeuvre with dancing big-bootied (and busty) African American women wearing thongs into a pair of pants. With the “Mix Makeover,” you tap the screen to enlarge body parts in someone's photo into a physical stereotype, then share them to Facebook. [More]

5. Ugly Meter

iOS, 99 cents, available.

This iPhone app claims to analyze your face and tell you how unattractive you are. The scale is from 1 to 10, with 1 being supermodel status and 10, well - you guessed it. Be prepared for some nasty insults from this app if you score high, which caused the Family Safety Online Institute to say that Ugly Meter promotes cyber bullying. Not ugly enough? Use the app’s “Make Me Ugly” feature to up your score. [More here and here]

6. Girls Around Me

iOS, banned March 2012.

Checking into Foursquare in March 2012 had extra risks for women. The Girls Around Me app used the check-in data from the service to display to could-be stalkers the details on nearby women, such as photos and location. While the reaction from some circles was immediate and harsh, causing Foursquare to cut off the app's access and Apple to remove it from the App Store altogether, others were sceptical of its real risks. [More here and here]

7. Baby Shaker

Credit: geekmagazine.org

iOS, banned April 2009.

Sikalosoft’s app, released in April, 2009, was deadly simple. The baby starts crying. Your goal is to quiet the baby by shaking it. When X’s appear over the baby’s eyes, you’ve won - because the baby is dead. The humour was lost on just about everybody, considering Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) injures or kills up to 1,600 infants every year. Apple pulled the app, and both companies apologized for its content. [More here and here]

8. Make Me Asian/Make Me Indian

Android, banned January 2013.

These two apps on Google Play by Kimberly Deiss allowed you to see what you'd look like if you were another race - a racial stereotype, that is. Make Me Asian adds slanted eyes, a Fu Manchu moustache and yellow skin to a photograph you shot with your phone. Make Me Indian allows the addition of face paint, darkened skin and a feathered headband. Deiss then outdid herself with Make Me Black and Make Me Auschwitz, but it looks like Google has had enough. As all these apps have been removed from Google Play. [More here and here]

9. KG Dogfighting

Android, $4.99, available.

You know you've struck a bad chord when the poster child for what your app promotes denounces it. This app from 2011 allows you to pit two canines together in a fight to the death. You could even feed your dog steroids or outfit it in protective gear to last longer in the ring. When KG dogfighting was released, NFL star and former dog fighter Michael Vick said “I think it's important to send the smart message to kids, and not glorify animal cruelty - even in an Android app.” [More here and here]

10. Smuggle Truck

iOS, banned 2011. Now available for PC/Mac.

Here’s the plot of this 2011 game: Your truck is filled to the brim with Mexican-looking passengers, and your goal is to get as many as you can safely across the border - that is, without killing them by ejecting them from the truck. The game developer, Owlchemy Labs, described Smuggle Truck as “hilarious physics-based driving gameplay while trying to transport your cargo over the border.” Note it said "cargo," not even "people." [More here and here]

[Source: Tech News Daily. Edited. Links added.]

Related Post: 8 Apps Your Kids Should Not Download

4D PRINTING: THE TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKES OBJECTS ASSEMBLE THEMSELVES

Now we have 4D printing! The wonder of technology…

MIT's 4D printing tech makes objects assemble themselves
By Evan Ackerman, Dvice, 28 February 2013.

2D printing makes things that are flat. 3D printing makes things that have volume. Add in the fourth D, time, and you make things that move. We're not talking about things that can be be moved, but rather, objects that come printed with the capacity to move all by themselves.

MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab has been working on ways to print things in 3D that can change their shape after they've been printed. Routinely printing something as complex as a motor or an actuator is still a ways off, but by mixing different kinds of smart materials, it's possible to get stuff to move on its own, albeit very slowly and (so far) in just one direction.

The process is actually not that complicated, and the smart materials aren't even all that smart: all it takes is a material that acts like a sponge that can be layered inside of a joint during the 3D printing process. When the joint is submerged in water, the sponge material expands and the joint bends. Put a bunch of joints together, and you can get a fairly complex self-assembling object, like this cube:

Video 1: 4D Printing: Cube Self-Folding Strand

In this case, water is acting as the energy source that activates the printed smart material, but different materials can use light, heat, vibrations or even sounds. Imagine one day going to IKEA and buying a table made out of this stuff that you can hose down in your front yard to get it to self-assemble. Or, with some sound activated smart material, all you'll have to do is scream at it loud enough and it'll put itself together. Since most of us do this with our IKEA furniture anyway, it seems as though adding in the smart self-assembly bit is the logical and obvious next step.

4D Printing: Multi-Material Shape Change: MIT 2013. Images: SJET.

Self-Assembly Line: TED Conference, CA 2012. Image/more info: SJET.

Self-Folding Proteins: MIT 2012. Image/more info: SJET.

Video 2: 4D Printing: MIT Self-Folding Strand. Source: SJET.

MIT Self-Assembly Lab and SJET, via BBC

Top image credit: MIT/SJET

[Source: Dvice. Edited. Video 2 and some images added.]