Editorial: In defense of cheese (and the scientific method) Tyler Morning Telegraph G.K. Chesterton once observed, Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. If only we could say the same of Washington scientists. We are now being told that cheese is bad for us - indeed, it's as addictive as crack. Can you ... and more »

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Editorial: In defense of cheese (and the scientific method) - Tyler Morning Telegraph

Researchers say it is because people face more temptation to over-indulge when dining out than at home, work, or in their car

FATTIES are less likely to stick to a diet when eating in a restaurant, a study found.

Those on a calorie-restricted diet ate too much six times out of ten.

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Researchers say it is because people face more temptation to over-indulge when dining out than at home, work, or in their car.

A group of 150 obese volunteers spent a year reporting what and where they were eating and whether they were tempted to break or broke their eating plan.

Temptations included guzzling sugary drinks or gorging on cake, a large portion of chips, or too much chocolate.

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Participants had fewer temptations in their own or someone elses home than in a restaurant but were just as likely to lapse.

The risk of caving in to temptation fell to 40 per cent at work and 30 per cent in a car.

They were also more likely to cheat when surrounded by others who were eating.

Study leader Professor Lora Burke, from the University of Pittsburgh, said: Research into understanding and preventing weight regain is vital for improving the public health.

University of Pittsburgh

Helping an individual anticipate challenges and problem-solve high-risk situations can empower them to stay on track with their weight loss plan.

She said the findings could be used to develop weight-loss programmes, in which people are sent motivational messages when dining out.

The findings were presented at a conference hosted by the American Heart Association.

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Fat people more likely to cheat on calorie-controlled diets when eating out, study reveals - The Sun

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Diet - Nutrition Express

How would you like to create the best diet plan for free? You know, the diet plan that will best allow you to lose fat, build muscle or just be healthy.

The diet plan that will not only let you reach those goals quickly and effectively, but also in the most convenient, enjoyable and sustainable way possible.

Im talking about the diet plan that is tailored specifically to YOUR preferences, YOUR needs, YOUR body, YOUR schedule and YOUR lifestyle.

The kind of diet plan that avoids every unproven gimmick, unnecessary restriction, and pointless diet method in favor of scientifically proven facts, real world results and always doing whats best for YOU!

Interested? Good, because Im going to show you how to create that diet plan right now.

Below is a step-by-step guide to designing the best diet plan possible for your exact dietary needs and preferences, and your exact dietary goal (to lose fat, build muscle, be healthy, etc.). So, if youre ready to begin, the guide starts now

Its for anyone who wants to create the diet plan that will work best for their exact goal and fit perfectly with their exact preferences (and do it all for free).

Men, women, young, old, fat, skinny, beginners, advanced whatever.

Looking to lose fat, build muscle, be healthy, make your diet easier and more enjoyable, improve the way your body looks, feels or performs in any capacity, or any combination thereof.

Whoever you are and whatever your goal is this guide is for you.

If you have any questions or comments about anything in this guide or you just want to let me know what you thought of it, you can leave a comment right here.

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The Best Diet Plan To Lose Fat, Build Muscle & Be Healthy

Enlarge / The jaw of the El Sidron individual found to be consuming poplar and Penicillium-containing vegetation.

Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC

Around 50,000 years ago in Spain, a Neanderthal had a toothache and popped the botanical version of an aspirin. Maybe. Although it's far from clear-cut, theres evidence from old teeth that hints at the possibility.

It's part of a study of Neanderthal diet, courtesy of their poor dental hygiene. Published in Nature, an analysis of preserved dental plaque from three different Neanderthals provides an intriguing glimpse into what theyput in their mouths. According to the authors, the analysis points to regionally varied diets and suggests possible medicinal plant use.

But some of the DNA evidence is a little strange, suggesting evidence of species where they really shouldnt have been 50,000 years ago. There are some good explanations for why this could happen, but, like most exciting results, drawing conclusions from the evidence demands a little caution.

The stereotypical picture of Neanderthals paints them as hunting the woolly mammoth. Theres evidence to back up a Neanderthal diet as carnivorous as polar bears or wolves, write the researchers: archaeological and chemical data suggest mealsheavy in large herbivores like reindeer, woolly mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros.

But Neanderthal teeth tell a more nuanced story. Previous research has found that the wear patterns on their teeth suggest a varied diet with regional differences. And dental plaque has been used before to analyze the starches and proteins that were preserved in the plaque. These analyses suggest that Neanderthals were eating many plants, possibly including medicinal ones.

Butdental plaque canpreserve more than simple chemicals; genetic material from the food can be encased init. This allowed a team of researchers, led by Laura Weyrich at the University of Adelaide, to get an incredibly detailed look at what plant and animal species three individual Neanderthals had been eating. Two were from El Sidrn Cave in Spain, including thepotential aspirin-popper, while one was from Spy Cave in Belgium.

The results add to previous evidence suggesting that the Neanderthal diet was actually many different things, depending on where the Neanderthals in question lived. The Belgian followed the meat-heavy pattern, with genetic material from woolly rhinoceros, mushrooms, and wild sheep showing up in the dental plaque. Mammoth, reindeer, rhinoceros and horse bones in the cave tell the same story as the dental plaque: these were hunters.

The Spanish Neanderthals, on the other hand, seemed to eat largely mushrooms, pine nuts, and mossthe kinds of food youd get from foraging in a forest. One of them had a dental abscess, and this individuals teeth came up with the genome of a poplar tree that has high levels of salicylic acid, aspirins active ingredient.

Heres where it gets a little slippery. The species identified, Populus trichocarpa, is actually native to North America. It wouldnt have been present in Europe 50,000 years ago, says Quentin Cronk, a botanist with an interest in the poplar genome, who wasnt an author on this paper. But it does have a pretty close relative in Europe, Populus nigra.

Whats going on here, says ancient DNA researcherHannes Schroeder, could be one of two things. The first possibility is contamination. The authors were watching out for this, though, and eliminated the data from two other Neanderthals because there was evidence of contamination. The DNA they ended up analyzing showed all the signs of being properly ancient. The other possibility is that, because ancient DNA is degraded and its possible to analyze only short strands of it, the strands left in the dental plaque matched more than one poplar species.

As it happens, Populus trichocarpa has the best genome data available amongthe poplars. All the other species of tree and mushroom identifiedincluding another oddity, the Korean pinehave good genome-sequencing data available, too. This suggests that the little bits of DNA matched up with the genomes available in genetic databases and just locked onto the species that happened to be in the databases because they didnt have enough data in them to differentiate between different species.

The most likely explanation of this issue is that the reads come from a European species of Populus that is not adequately represented in current sequence databases, says Daniel Huson, one of the authors of the paper. Cronk agrees that this is likely, as does Schroeder.

Its a bit strange for the authors to have pinpointed a single, impossible species, rather than identifyingthe genetic remains as belonging to the Populusgenus. It doesnt cause too much of a problem for the evidence of what Neanderthals were eating, thoughmushrooms are mushrooms. A difference in species doesnt really change the evidence that these people were eating like vegans rather than Texans.

As for the medicinal claim, theres also some evidence of Populus nigra having medicinal properties. Whether or not the Neanderthal knew what these properties were while chowing down on poplar is a different, and possibly unanswerable, question. Some other primate species seem to do this, so it might not be as far-fetched as it seems.

For Schroeder, the evidencedoesn't seem likeespecially solid ground for a big claim like medicinal use. But Keith Dobney, one of the authors on the paper, thinks it all lines up so well that it invites the interpretation of medicinal use. The abscessed individual also had bacteria associated with diarrhea, as well as evidence of the antibiotic Penicillium mould, and it just seems a bit of a strange coincidence that we have one individual with all these things, he says.

With different diets come different oral bacterial cultures. You eat a lot of meat, you get a lot of meat-digesting bacteria in your mouth. Weyrich and her team compared the Neanderthal oral bacteria to a modern human and a group of ancient humans from different cultures.

They found that there were different groupings of oral microbiomes: the SpanishNeanderthals grouped with chimpanzees and ancient African gatherers, in what the researchers called a forager-gatherer group with a largely vegetarian diet. The Belgian Neanderthal grouped more closely with the typical meat-heavy hunter-gatherer diet. Amodern human and early agriculturalist human also had different profiles.

The result helps us understand modern human oral microbiomes in context, says Dobney. Our current food-related health problems, like obesity, didnt happen in a vacuum: it hasnt happened overnight; its part of the journey that weve been on for thousands of years. Major cultural changes like the beginnings of agriculture are still impacting our health today.

As for Neanderthals, he hopes evidence of theirimportant place in our own historyin terms of behavior, genome, and microbiomecan help end the common perception of them asthese knuckle-dragging cavemen able to do not much more than bring down the odd bison here and there. The evidence is pointing toward varied behavior across the Neanderthals, and were starting to be able to get closer to inferences about the sophistication of their behavior and culture.

Nature, 2016. DOI: doi:10.1038/nature21674 (About DOIs).

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Neanderthal teeth tell tales of diet and medicine - Ars Technica

Want to live a long, healthy life? Move to South Korea.

In a study from Imperial College London,published in the journal the Lancet in late February, researchers projected the life expectancy for men and women born in 35 industrialized countries in the year 2030. The study authors used 21 different forecasting models to analyze death rates across various age groups over the past 50-plus years, resulting in predictions that they believe are the most accurate statistics available.

The good news: The study predicts life expectancy will increase in all 35 countries. South Korea is expected to take the top spot for both women and men, with projected life expectancies of 90.8 and 84, respectively.

The bad news: The USA came in dead last in its cohort, with the lowest predicted life expectancy out of all high-income industrialized countries an average of 83.3 years for women, and 79.5 years for men.

Although the study doesnt dig deep into why citizens of certain countries can expect longer life spans than others, co-author James Bennett tells The Post that high-ranking countries do have some commonalities, such as access to health care, low smoking rates and healthy diets.

Below, the life-extending staples that keep these top countries ticking.

Bennett cites Koreas traditional diet as one reason why its citizens are expected to live so long.

Thats thanks in part to kimchee, a popular Korean condiment thats served with most meals. The fermented vegetable mix is packed with gut-healthy probiotics which can help your body fight off disease as well as filling fiber and antioxidants.

Other South Korean staples include bibimbap, a popular dish of rice, vegetables, red pepper paste, egg and a small amount of meat.

It goes down so easily, and its full of healthy foods, says nutritionist Joshua Rosenthal, founder of NYCsInstitute for Integrative Nutrition.

Plus, says Bennett, South Koreas recent economic growth has made health care more accessible across the whole population, leading to huge gains in its life expectancy standing.

France isnt exactly known as a health-food mecca the country is synonymous with baguettes, croissants and healthy pats of butter. Still, its citizens tend to live long lives, with a projected life expectancy of 88.6 years for women and 81.7 for men for those born in 2030.

Whats fascinating is that many of the foods that Americans avoid, like foods that are high in carbs or saturated fat, are things you see in a French diet, says Danielle Rehfeld, a personal chef who specializes in global cuisine.

But the French generally consume foods differently than Americans, opting for smaller portion sizes eaten at mealtimes, rather than snacks or binges.

It also helps that they tend to see meals as social events.

Its not just what youre eating, its how youre eating, says nutritionist Rosenthal. If youre eating while youre watching TV, you dont realize how much food you ate youre unconscious.

And staying connected with friends and family has been shown to aid in healthy aging as does the easy access to health care and social services that the French enjoy.

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Diet secrets from the world's healthiest countries - Fox News

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times/Redux

The nation is in serious danger. The creeping spread of Islam is pushing out Christianity. The countrys borders are swarming with drug-slinging criminals, and its veterans are dying in droves. Heartless, power-hungry liberals snatch guns away from poor, defenseless citizens while openly mocking Gold Star widows. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives are planning a coup from a bunker not far from the White House and wiretapping Trump administration officials, not to mention Trump Tower itselfa looming scandal of Watergate proportions.

The worst part? The propagandistic left-wing media (that subhuman species) wont report a word of it.

At least, thats what I learned spending a few weeks on a self-imposed binge of President Trumps media dieta virtual smorgasbord of Breitbart, Fox News, front-page newspaper headlines, presidential Twitter, and a smattering of Infowars for flavor. I already know what the president thinks of the press, but I wanted to know more about how the world looks to the president through his particular media lens. Yes, even presidents live inside their own filter bubbles. And this past weekend demonstrated just how damaging such media myopia can be when that blinkered vision belongs to the worlds most powerful person.

In less than a day, a Breitbart story accusing the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower became, via tweet, a presidentially asserted fact. As with most Americans, the television Trump watches, the news he consumes, and the people he follows on social media warp and distort his view of the world.

Millions of people share Trumps media habits. His favored outlets have huge, devoted followings. But unlike everyone else, Trump has the authority to turn these often lopsided and misleading narratives into policyor at least 140-character proclamations that, by virtue of his office, the rest of the world must take seriously. Now the Trump administration is calling for a congressional investigation into the wiretapping claims, even though Trump aides have repeatedly failed to point to any hard evidence to back up the presidents allegations.

And I should have seen it all coming. During my weeks on the Trump media diet, I surfed an endless feedback loop circulating between Trump and his preferred media outlets, where speculation leads to justification, ad infinitum. Through this fish-eye, Trumps wiretapping tweets dont look surprising at all. They would instead represent the logical conclusion of what happens when the President of the United States seems to believe everything he hearsand when he limits what he hears to what he wants to hear.

Trumps media diet is tough to stick to. Its like the Paleo of media consumption. It requires extra preparation to fit everything in and a spartan commitment to elimination. (Trump reportedly swore off Morning Joe after years as a devoted viewer).

Trump follows this regimen rigorously. Aloneperhaps in his bathrobein the pre-dawn hours, he flicks on the television to tune into Fox & Friends, which he recently called the most honest morning show. He scours the New York Times and the New York Postin print, not digitaland scans the Wall Street Journal. At night hes been known to tweet reactions to The OReilly Factor and Hannity, and hate-tweet his response to Saturday Night Live. And dont forget the Sunday shows.

Its a lot to take in. So, as with any diet Ive ever tried, I cheated a little here and there. Instead of waking up at 6am to catch the morning shows and staying up late to watch Hannity, I caught the highlights online. And I added outlets that have a known influence on Trump. Every day I checked in on Breitbart, whose former chairman Steve Bannon is now Trumps chief strategist, and watched as Alex Jones face grew ever-redder throughout his four-hour Infowars broadcast. (Please know, dear reader, I did this for you.) Trump may not listen to Infowars, but several of his most controversial claimsincluding the idea that millions of people voted illegallyfirst gained traction on Jones show.

I also created a Twitter account to follow everyone Trump follows on Twitter, a list that notably does not include any government agencies, press secretary Sean Spicer, @WhiteHouse, or even @POTUS, but which does include Apprentice producer Mark Burnett and his wife, Touched By an Angel star Roma Downey. In the dark dystopia that is Trumps media bubble, Downeys random musings exuded a welcome ray of light.

Otherwise, the world inside the bubble looked bleak. On Infowars, Jones touted what he called a bombshell story about Hillary Clinton planting moles throughout the White House. On Fox, Sean Hannity asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whether Iran was readying a modern day holocaust. Its up to us to prevent it, Netanyahu replied in a sober baritone. Fox & Friends hosts told the story of an undocumented immigrant accused of murder in Colorado and claimed a DREAMer detained under Trumps executive order was a gang member. Breitbart published videos of Palestinian children dancing joyfully to a song called Pull the Trigger, while Ann Coulter filled my Twitter feed with headlines about crimes committed by Latinos.

For the most part, these stories werent fabricated. But they were cherry-picked, selected to convey an overarching message about what Trump might call American carnage. In this world, immigration and Islam serve as the default enemies, along with the mainstream media and the left. Whenever the president comes under attack by either one, his preferred outlets offer him the ammunition he needs to fight back. When the press seized on reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions didnt say during his confirmation hearing that he had met with a Russian ambassador, Trumps media mirrors scrambled to dismiss the story as hysterical.

This whole smear campaign is really just part of the Democrats larger fake news conspiracy theory that Russian hacking, hacking, is the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election, Hannity quipped during his opening monologue.

The wiretapping story wasnt the only one Trump ran with and repeated to millions of people across the country. After a Tucker Carlson segment on Fox about Swedens issues with refugees, the president held a rally in Florida, where he compared Sweden to Brussels, Paris, and Niceall places that have experienced deadly terror attacks. More recently, the president tweeted that 122 prisoners released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield, a phony line he repeated verbatim from Fox & Friends.

I surfed an endless feedback loop where speculation leads to justification, ad infinitum.

This alternate universe to which I traveled taught me as much about my bubble as it did the presidents. Im a 30-year-old, college-educated writer living in Brooklyn, and my media diet is pretty much what youd expect given those credentials: the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, CNN, WIRED (duh), and a whole lot of Refinery29 in my Facebook feed. In Trumps filter bubble, senator John McCain is a politically motivated warmonger. In mine, he and Lindsey Graham represent the lone Republican voices standing up to a rogue president. In my bubble, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wins over hearts and minds with his good butt and welcoming approach to refugees. In Trumps, the Trudeau effect is steadily decimating trust in government among the Canadian people.

My Trump media diet reminded to me that I could also benefit from breaking out of the bubbleexcept, Im not the president. Theres no subset of the media who makes it their job to convince me Im right. For Trump, there is.

Time and again, Trumps pet outlets find a way to rationalize the presidents claims, even claims as apparently baseless as the wiretapping conspiracy. By Monday morning, while other outlets pressed the administration on the origins of the presidents theories, Utah representative Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sat stiffly beside the hosts on the Fox & Friends couch, vowing to get to the bottom of this.

The real danger in all of this is not that Trump lacks media literacy. Indeed, he may understand the machinations of the media better than anyone. The danger is that an increasingly large number of media outlets today have built their business models around telling the presidents supportersand the president himselfonly what they want to hear. As long as that cycle exists, the wiretapping claim wont be the last online conspiracy theory to become state-sanctioned.

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I Tried Trump's Media Diet. Now Nothing Surprises Me Anymore ... - WIRED

Nearly half of all deaths from heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes may be due to diet, a new study finds.

In 2012, 45 percent of deaths from cardiometabolic disease which includes heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes were attributable to the foods people ate, according to the study.

This conclusion came from a model that the researchers developed that incorporated data from several sources: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, which are annual government surveys that provide information on peoples dietary intakes; the National Center for Health Statistics, for data on how many people died of certain diseases in a year; and findings from studies and clinical trials linking diet and disease. [7 Foods Your Heart Will Hate]

The researchers found that, in 2012, just over 700,000 people died from a cardiometabolic disease. Of these deaths, nearly 320,000 or about 45 percent could be linked to peoples diets, according to the study, published today (March 7) in the journal JAMA.

The estimated number of deaths that were linked to not getting enough of certain healthier foods and nutrients was as least as substantial as the number of deaths that were linked to eating too much of certain unhealthy foods, according to the researchers, who were led by Renata Micha, a research assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Tufts University in Boston.

In other words, Americans need to do both: Eat more healthy foods, and less unhealthy food.

The researchers focused their analysis on 10 food groups and nutrients: fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, whole grains, unprocessed red meat, processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, polyunsaturated fats, omega-3 fats from seafood, and salt, according to the study.

For each food or nutrient, the researchers identified an optimal intake amount. When people ate more or less than this optimal amount, the intake was considered suboptimal.

Overall, the greatest number of deaths were linked to suboptimal sodium intake; in other words, eating too much salt. The researchers model found that about 66,500 cardiometabolic deaths in 2012 were linked to high sodium intake.

Not eating enough nuts and seeds was the dietary factor linked to the second highest number of deaths (59,000), followed by too much processed meat (58,000 deaths), too little omega-3 fats from seafood (55,000 deaths), too few vegetables (53,000 deaths), too few fruits (52,500 deaths) and too many sugar-sweetened beverages (52,000 deaths), according to the study.

When the researchers looked at specific demographic groups within the study, they found that more deaths in men were linked to dietary factors than in women. In addition, a greater number of deaths in younger people were linked to dietary factors, compared with older people. There was also a greater number of deaths linked to diet among African-Americans and Hispanics when compared with non-Hispanic whites.

The researchers also calculated the percentage of deaths in 2002 that were linked with dietary factors, and found that deaths linked to certain dietary factors such as too many sugar-sweetened beverages, not enough nuts and seeds and not enough polyunsaturated fats decreased between 2002 and 2012. The number of deaths attributed to factors such as sodium and unprocessed red meats, however, increased over the same time.

The findings have the potential to help guide public policy planning to prevent early deaths and reduce health disparities, according to an editorial that was published alongside the study in the same journal. The editorial was written by Noel Mueller, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Dr. Lawrence Appel, a professor of medicine at the same institution. [5 Diets That Fight Disease]

However, there are several limitations to consider, Mueller and Appel wrote. For example, the calculations that the researchers made in the new study assume that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between dietary factors and death, they wrote. However, the studies used in the model were observational studies, which dont prove cause-and-effect, they wrote.

In addition, Mueller and Appel noted that there may be other dietary factors beyond the 10 included that could play a role, such as saturated fat and added sugar. Its also possible that certain dietary factors are linked, such as sodium and processed meats, they wrote.

Despite the limitations, the study is quite relevant to public health nutrition policy, Mueller and Appel wrote. As the study authors suggested, policies that affect diet quality, not just quantity, are needed, they wrote.

Originally published on Live Science.

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A Shocking Number Of Deaths May Be Due To Poor Diet - Huffington Post