Which diets are most effective, according to science? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

The obvious question about what diets work best, is are theyeffective for what? Im going to assume we mean most effective at helping us achieve and/or maintain a healthy weight and maximize our health in doing so.

I think diets that make us leaner and healthier are the diets that remove those components of the diet that cause us to get fat and cause the chronic diseases that associate with obesity and diabetes. As I clearly believe the worst offenders there are added sugars (sucrose and HFCS) and then refined, easily digestible carbohydrates, then the most effective diets are the ones that remove the sugars and high-GI carbs. And diets that work, regardless of the fat content, do so because they remove these carbohydrates. Indeed, by merely trying to avoid added sugars as part of a healthy diet, that means well have to avoid virtually all of the processed foods in the grocery stores, which means well be avoiding a significant amount of the other processed carbs, virtually all of the vegetable oils, etc. Well be healthier and we wont even know why or whether I was right that the sugar was the problem.

The flip side of that is my believe that if a diet like Dean Ornishs very low-fat diet works, its primarily because it, too, removes the sugars and white flour (for the same reason I think any diet should). If vegan and vegetarian diets work, or when they work, its for this reason as well.

That said. my reading of the existing clinical trial on diets is that the ideal diets for most of us (who arent necessarily world class athletes trying to enhance their performance) are indeed low-carb, high-fat or at least some variation like the paleo diet. I recognize that these diets will raise LDL cholesterol or LDL particle number in some proportion of the people who eat them, but because they seem to do such an effective job at resolving insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, I would bet that theyre more than worth the trade-off. (Again, if Im wrong, I apologize.)

Ketogenic diets, in which carbs are restricted almost entirely and replaced by fat, clearly have remarkable clinical efficacy in resolving a host of disease states, from obesity and diabetes to epilepsy and perhaps other neurological problems as well. I expect theyd even go a long way to preventing cancer and dementia, but thats speculation and has yet to be rigorously tested in any meaningful way.

This question originally appeared on Quora. -the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

Read more here:
Which Diets Are Most Effective According to Science? - Huffington Post

The complexity of the nervous system

Neuroscientist, Sandra Aamodt, has studied the brain during dieting. In her research, she suggests that the brain is hard-wired for survival with a proposed set-range of between ten to fifteen pounds for a healthy weight. This leeway allows for our lifestyle choices to not permanently influence our body's weight.

The hypothalamus is a section in the middle of our brain responsible for production of many essential hormones and chemical substances that help control different organs and cells. It has more than a dozen signals to control weight gain and more than a dozen to lose it.

"The hypothalamus is like a thermostat," she explains in one of her Ted Talks. "It will work to keep weight stable as conditions change so the brain will respond to weight loss by pushing the body back to what it considers normal."

Sandra suggests that these set points can go up when individuals become overweight, but rarely does it go down which is why it is fairly easy to put weight back on following yo-yo dieting.

"It is a lot harder for our hypothalamus to control weight when outside of this range. Having mindful eating behaviours would be a better way for the brain's weight-regulation system to maintain a stable and healthy weight for most people- if allowed to do its job without interference from dieting and other short-sighted slimming strategies."

"Start concentrating on regular exercise, good food choices and stress reduction instead."

So if dieting isn't the best way to go, what should we do instead to lose weight?

Getty Bodo A. Schieren

Yo-yo dieting is probably not your answer- simple. Losing weight should be a lifestyle change, meaning gradual changes that you are able to sustain are a better option. Like the hare and the tortoise, slow and steady wins the race.

Eating carbs - such as breads, rice, pasta and refined sugars- would be better when you are more active. This is because these foods require more energy to breakdown into their simple sugars. When you exercise, your metabolism speeds up; breaking down these foods more efficiently without being stored as fat. Changing rate of metabolism may actually be all you need to lose weight.

As diets are often restrictive and repetitive, essential nutrients can be missed. Eating a variety of food is therefore important- it also helps with not getting bored and keeping that mind positively associated to food.

If you know you are going out for a tasty meal or a big celebration where you will be having a glass or two (or three), then make sure you factor this into your daily allowance of calories. This will avoid exceeding calorie intake and storing excess as fat. The odd day wouldn't hurt, but this is often a cause to putting on the pounds when done regularly.

People who exercise are found to lose more weight when dieting. Exercise is an essential part for burning fat, building muscle and manipulating metabolism. So don't forget to get the heart rate up too.

Last tip is to remember that having a healthy mental and physical well-being is essential in reducing weight. Reducing your stress levels and getting plenty of sleep may be your final steps to helping keep off the pounds.

Related Article

A guide to the eating disorders you may not have heard of

Continue reading here:
Why diets don't work - NetDoctor - Netdoctor

Theres a lot of buzz in Washington about reducing the size of the federal workforce. The release of the Trump administrations first budget gave us a better idea of the political agenda for those cuts, and many valid and popular government programs could be at risk.

Ive been reading a new book that tells a different story: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression focuses on the years following the crash of 1929, and how federal involvement in agriculture, welfare and nutrition shaped the nations health.

Authors Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe remind us that there was a time when the federal government had almost no role in the private lives of its citizens. Although there were cycles of boom and bust in the economy, individuals expected little or no help from Washington, and Washington had little or no interest in helping individuals.

The unexpected depression of food prices in the 1920s, which devastated the farm economy, seemed to have little impact on the folks who lived in cities, where urban prosperity cushioned professionals, office workers and most factory laborers from hardship. The Roaring Twenties left the farmer behind.

And the Depression only made it worse. President Hoovers platitudes about hard work were at odds with long breadlines, reports of malnutrition by social workers and school employees, and headlines about crops being left to rot in the fields because it was too expensive to harvest them.

The Red Cross became the chief distributor of welfare, mostly in the form of grains, milk and other staples, but their efforts were limited and inadequate. In New York, Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt paved the way for more centralized efforts to feed and clothe the people. Led by his welfare chief Harry Hopkins, a social worker, the push for a national effort came with the 1932 presidential election. FDR took over the White House from the hapless Hoover, and Hopkins went to Washington to implement the National Recovery Act.

Private welfare, always a somewhat stingy and unreliable form of aid, was replaced by national support for the needy, and every conceivable program promoted hard work as a condition for receiving support. With unemployment rising to 25 percent or more, the alternative to welfare would have no doubt triggered revolutions like those that had swept the Communists to power in Russia and the Nazis in Germany.

With the aid came the power to recommend what people ate. Home economists were held in high esteem, putting many people to work who had training in the scientific study of food. Many believe that improvements in diet prepared American youth to fight and win World War II.

Eleanor Roosevelt became the nations advocate and role model, adapting the White Houses menus to put on the presidents platethe same simple, cheap and often bland food that his people were eating. Privately, FDR didnt think much of it. He came to detest the housekeeper, one Mrs. Nesbitt, who watered down his favorite stew and put meatloaf on the table rather than fresh game.

The shift in diet changed America in more ways than that. Malnutrition decreased. Prior to the 1930s, farmers and factory workers focused on intake of calories. Around the turn of the 20th century, most American adult males ate at least 4,000 calories a day to retain energy for their labors. Today, most adults should eat fewerthan 3,000. The popularityof fast food and the additives that expand its production have resulted in a national crisis of obesity.

How the wave of Trump-era cuts could affect our daily lives is still unclear. But A Square Meal reminds us of the value of some federal leadership in the field of public health.

Keith Runyon is a longtime Louisville journalist and former editorial page editor for The Courier-Journal. His commentaries run every Friday on 89.3 WFPL and wfpl.org.

The rest is here:
Commentary: How Government Intervention Changed American Diets - 89.3 WFPL

March 17, 2017

Researchers have discovered that despite meat-heavy diets, low levels of good cholesterol and high levels of inflammation, an indigenous South American tribe has the healthiest hearts ever examined and it might have something to do with parasites in the gut.

Its kind of an exciting paper, said Ben Trumble, co-director of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and affiliated faculty in the Center for Evolution and Medicine, because for a long time we thought pre-industrial groups had lower levels of heart disease. The Tsimane have the lowest levels of plaque in their coronary arteries that weve ever seen.

An 80-year-old Tsimane has heart arteries equal to a 50-year-old American, scientists discovered.

One of the key things about this study is weve always thought populations living these traditional lifestyles had low risk factors, Trumble said, but we were never able to show before that they actually did have these very low levels of atherosclerosis. This is the first time its been shown.

About 90 percent of the Tsimane peoples food comes from hunting, fishing, foraging, and farming. Until two years ago, none of their communities had electricity. None have running water. They live in the Bolivian Amazon with relatively low contact with the rest of Bolivia. Most still speak their traditional language. It takes days to get from villages to towns.

They eat about the same amount of meat that Americans do, but its much leaner, coming from wild animals. The average hunt for a Tsimane man takes five to six hours and ranges up to 10 miles.

But another potential factor for a healthy heart is perhaps surprising: Tsimane have a high parasite -pathogen load.

More than two thirds of Tsimane adults have intestinal ailments, according to Trumble. About 30 percent also have giardia on top of that.

Smoking fish over a fire. Ninety percent of the Tsimane peoples food comes from hunting, fishing, foraging, and farming.Photo by Ben Trumble

That creates a really big burden because intestinal parasites eat the food we eat before we can absorb it, or theyre tapping into our blood streams, stealing the (fats) from our blood, stealing calories, he said.

Some combination of diet, physical activity and the immune system are working together to prevent heart disease, but researchers arent sure how they connect.

The Tsimane have high rates of inflammation, stemming from high exposure to the pathogens and parasites, but not obesity.

Thats what makes this population really interesting to study, Trumble said. You could say, Oh, they get four to seven hours of activity per day, and theyre not eating cheeseburgers, so of course theyre not going to get heart disease. But the thing that makes this population really interesting is that they have such levels of inflammation. Weve always thought of inflammation as this major cause of heart disease. Theyre just getting it from a different source, and its not having any effect at all.

If youre reading this with a kale smoothie before your morning run and wondering if it all makes a difference, co-author Michael Gurven of the University of California - Santa Barbara Anthropology Department said youre doing the right thing but the Tsimane still have medical issues.

While the active lifestyle, lean diet, minimal obesity and smoking are all consistent with having a healthy heart, (the) Tsimane also experience high levels of inflammation and low levels of 'good cholesterol, Gurven said in an email interview. Given this combination of factors consistent with both low and high risk, it is remarkable that the Tsimane have such low levels of coronary artery disease.

Gurven said researchers compared the arterial age between Tsimane and Americans using coronary artery calcium scores, revealing the gap between Tsimane and American hearts.

Curiously, prior work measuring biological age based on immune cell parameters showed that Tsimane were biologically "older" than their age that their immune systems are not up to par, Gurven said. This is fascinating because it shows that different biological systems may age at different rates and indeed, the majority of older adult deaths are due to infectious disease, and rarely (if at all) from coronary artery disease.

There are 16,000 Tsimane living in 95 communities, with between 30 to 500 in each village. The population is mainly children. Tsimane women average about nine children each.

One thing I think a lot of people get confused is that theres this idea that life was nasty, brutish and short, and with life expectancies in the 40s and 50s, people were going to die before they got heart disease anyway, Trumble said.

Theres a big problem with that, however: the way life expectancies are calculated. Life expectancy at birth in a hunter-gatherer population is in the 30- to 40-year range, because of high infant mortality.

For the average Tsimane who makes it to age 15, the modal age of death is 70, Trumble said. Theyre living just as long as we are, but their rates of heart disease are far, far lower.

The study was published Friday in The Lancet.

Top photo: Tsimane man crossing the Maniqui River. Photo by Ben Trumble.

Here is the original post:
Despite meat-heavy diet, indigenous tribe has world's healthiest hearts but why? - Arizona State University

A moderate reduction in food intake, known as dietary restriction, protects against multiple aging-related diseases and extends life span, but can also suppress growth and fertility. A research group from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne has now developed a diet based on the model organism's genome, which enhances growth and fecundity with no costs to lifespan.

What is the best path to a long and healthy life? Scientists had a relatively simple answer for many years: less food. But it turned out that this could have unpleasant consequences. Experiments showed that putting flies or mice on diet could impair their development and fecundity. How could we take advantage of the beneficial effects of dieting, and at the same time avoid the damaging effects?

Genome-based diet

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne and UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing in London have now designed a diet based on the model organism's genome. In the study they calculated the amount of amino acids a fruit fly would need, thereby defining the diet's amino acid composition.

"The fly genome is entirely known. For our studies we used only the sections in the genetic material that serve as templates for protein assembly - the exons, which collectively make up the 'exome.' Then we calculated the relative abundance of each amino acid in the exome, and designed a fly diet that reflects this amino acid composition," explains George Soultoukis, scientist in the department of Linda Partridge, director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne and at the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing in London.

Using a holidic fly diet previously developed by the team to enable manipulation of individual nutrients such as amino acids, the group found that flies eating this exome-matched diet develop a lot faster, grow bigger in size, and lay more eggs compared to flies fed a standard diet. Remarkably, the flies on the exome-matched diet lived as long as slower-growing, fewer-egg-laying flies fed with "standard" diets.

"The flies that had free access to the exome-matched diet even ate less than controls. Thus, high quality protein, as defined by the genome, appears to have a higher satiety value," said Matthew Piper, who conducted the work at UCL and is now working at Monash University.

The study also found that similar phenomena may occur in mice, and future mouse work could further improve our understanding of how and why diets affect mammalian lifespan.

"Our aim now is to characterize the effects of genome-based diets upon mammalian lifespan," says Soultoukis.

Human diet

In theory this approach is applicable to all organisms with a sequenced genome including humans.

"Dietary interventions based on amino acids can be a powerful strategy for protecting human health. Obviously factors such as age, gender, health, and personal lifestyle also have to be taken into account. Future studies may still employ novel -omics data to design diets whose amino acid supply matches the needs of an organism with even higher precision. Understanding why we need amino acids in the amounts we do will be key, and such studies provide novel and powerful insights into the vital interactions between nature and nurture," explains Soultoukis.

Continued here:
Genome-based Diets Maximize Growth, Fertility, Lifespan - Laboratory Equipment

Science Daily

New 'gene silencer' drug reduce cholesterol by over 50 percent Science Daily Researchers from Imperial College London and their colleagues, who conducted the trial, say the twice-a-year treatment could be safely given with or without statins, depending on individual patient needs. Eventually, inclisiran could help to reduce the ... and more »

Read this article:
New 'gene silencer' drug reduce cholesterol by over 50 percent - Science Daily

He has one job - to rid Downing Street of mice - but it appearsLarry the catis not up to the task, after he was caught on camera letting a rodent go.

Rather than hunting down the creatures Number 10 said in the past he prefersto take cat naps, but the latest incident confirms he may lack the killer instinct of many politicians who have lived there.

Photographer Steve Back, who captured the incident, said : Larry the chief mouser of Number 10came face to face with a tiny little mouse,which after some play time, got away safely.

The 10-year-old tabby has his own Twitter account with more than 107,000 followers, making him more popular than many MPs.

His Twitter account explained his latest failure to deliver by saying he was playing a tactical game, before claiming he was "on a diet".

It said: My friend @PoliticalPics thinks I look sleepy; Im actually just lulling the mice into a false sense of security...

Larry was recruited from Battersea dogs and cats home during the Cameron years to tackle the rampant mouse problem at the famous address

But after this latest incident,ssome have accused of failingto deliver the results expected of him.

He is one of several Whitehall pets, including Evia and Ossie of the Cabinet Office and dogs Rex and Oscar, who live upstairs at Number 10.

Larrys mousing skills are said to pale in comparison to those of his fellow moggies, Palmerston, who lives atthe Foreign Office, and Gladstone, who minds the Treasury.

David Cameron caused a minor outcry when he left office last year and failed to take Larry with him because he is an official civil servants cat rather than the Prime Ministers personal pet.

Read more here:
Larry the Cat: Downing Street mouse-catcher caught failing to kill rodent - The Independent