MIAMI, Feb. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Fresh Diet America's premier at-home meal delivery company announces today that in honor of March being National Nutrition Month® they are hosting The Fresh Diet 365 Contest wherein one (1) fortunate winner will win free meal delivery service from the company for one (1) year.  The prize awarded, which is 365 days of The Fresh Diet's Premium plan, will include daily or ground delivery of three (3) meals, plus two (2) snacks per day to the winner's home and is valued at $16,421.35 USD.

"March is National Nutrition Month® and the Fresh Diet 365 Contest is meant to promote our program's healthy, portion-controlled meals and increase awareness about proper nutrition and the many health benefits of eating fresh food," says Candy Tree, Marketing Director for The Fresh Diet.  "We want to encourage people to live fuller lives through proper nutrition and diet, and stress the important role that a balanced diet can have on one's overall quality of life."

With the recent exception of assisting a weight-loss subject on CBS' The Doctors show in January, this is a first for The Fresh Diet in terms of granting a prize that has such a significant duration and monetary value.  The Fresh Diet 365 Contest will cease on March 31, 2012 at 11:59pm EDT.  The sole winner will be selected and notified on April 6, 2012.  For more information on National Nutrition Month® please visit the Eat Right.org website.

To enter The Fresh Diet 365 Contest, please visit: http://www.thefreshdiet.com.  To view the official contest rules for the 365 Contest, kindly click here: http://www.thefreshdiet.com/index.php?fn=contest365.  To schedule an interview with Director of Marketing, Candy Tree, or CEO, Zalmi Duchman, please see media contact information.

About The Fresh Diet

The Fresh Diet is America's premier at-home meal delivery program that hand-delivers three, freshly prepared meals and two snacks every day to our clients' doorsteps.  Our healthy meals are never frozen, freeze-dried or vacuum-packed.  An innovator in the diet delivery service category, The Fresh Diet provides members with an online meal planner and hands-on control over their service plan.  The Fresh Diet can accommodate certain dietary restrictions and personal taste preferences.  Founded in 2005 by Zalmi Duchman and Yos Schwartz, a Le Cordon Bleu trained chef, The Fresh Diet is available locally with daily delivery in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, Delaware, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southern California, Southern & Western Florida, Washington D.C., and is now available nationwide via ground shipping.  For more information, please visit http://www.TheFreshDiet.com.

Media Contact for The Fresh Diet:
Kathleen Berzon
Kathleen@thefreshdiet.com
+1-561-955-0047

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The Fresh Diet is Giving Away ONE FREE YEAR of Food!

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Kids who got regular diet counseling starting very early on ended up eating slightly less saturated fat and had lower "bad" cholesterol levels as teens, in a new study from Finland.

High cholesterol in kids and teens has been linked to build-up in the arteries in adulthood, a known risk for heart disease. But whether intervening in childhood helps prevent heart attacks and other cardiovascular ailments down the line isn't clear.

"In general, we know that lower ("bad" cholesterol) is better," said Dr. Stephen Daniels, a pediatric cardiologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora.

"If you look at it that way, I think you would have to suggest that these are beneficial changes," Daniels, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. "But quantifying the effect that they might have on actual outcomes I think is hard to do."

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-backed panel, says there isn't enough evidence to recommend for or against regular diet counseling in kids and adults -- or routine cholesterol testing in youth.

Other groups, including the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, say that diet counseling can help kids and families stick to nutrition guidelines and reduce cardiovascular risks.

For the current study, researchers led by Dr. Harri Niinikoski from the University of Turku recruited more than 1,000 parents at well-baby clinics in their city. Starting when infants were seven months old, half of the kids and their parents had diet counseling with a nutritionist during routine visits every three to six months.

From age seven through 19, kids had more counseling sessions without their parents. Nutritionists used kids' food records, kept for a few days twice a year, to make recommendations with a goal of lowering saturated fat and cholesterol in their diets.

The other participants, serving as a comparison, were given basic health education once or twice a year.

By the time they were teenagers, both boys and girls who had the nutrition sessions reported getting fewer of their calories from saturated fat than those in the comparison group.

The individual differences were small: at age 19, for example, saturated fat accounted for 11.8 percent of calories consumed by boys in the counseling group, compared to 12.7 percent in the non-counseling group. For girls, those numbers were 11.4 percent and 12.0 percent of calories from saturated fat, respectively, Niinikoski's team reported in Pediatrics on Monday.

Kids who were counseled also had lower levels of LDL, or "bad" cholesterol, on blood tests in their teens -- again a small but consistent difference. At age 19, average LDL cholesterol levels in both groups were in the range considered ideal or near-ideal for adults.

There was no difference in teens' body mass index, a measure of weight in relation to height, based on whether they had gotten diet counseling.

"One way of looking at this is, we need to do a better job across the whole population of improving diet," including lowering saturated fat intake, Daniels said.

While one option is focusing on those kids that already have a family risk of high cholesterol or have especially poor diet and lifestyle, Daniels said the real goal is to prevent problems before they start. He said that even if it might take up extra time, nutrition counseling should be part of every well-child visit -- and that any extra costs are likely to pay off with fewer health problems over the long run.

Those costs would depend on whether counseling would also help when done only once a year, and by a kid's pediatrician.

"Getting lifestyle right early and keeping it right over the lifespan I think is a really important idea," Daniels concluded.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/xuc9or Pediatrics, online February 13, 2012.

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Kids' diet counseling tied to better cholesterol

I'll say it upfront: I don't think most diets work. There are people -- with severe problems like advanced coronary disease, celiac, major intolerances, etc. -- who need to be on very restrictive diets. OK. But for the rest of us, from all my research and observations, diets just don't work.

Sure, at first you tend to lose a bunch of weight -- Yee-hah! But before you can say "Paula Deen," it's creeping back on again, and then some. Why is that?

I think the answer has to do with the fact that with most diets you're always hungry. And what's worse, when you do finally get to eat something, it's rarely something you enjoy eating. There's all that delicious food out there, and what do you end up with? A celery stalk and some brown rice. Washed down with some green tea. Blech!

Food is one of life's great pleasures. It can soothe the soul, enhance romance, stimulate the mind, lift your spirits, please the senses. It has inspired great art and literature and served as a platform for diplomacy. Surely we weren't meant to ignore the wonders of the culinary universe just to drop a few pounds and clean out our arteries?

OK, that being said, I find myself in the position -- like many of us -- of having for too long abused a basic tenet of that universe: Thou Shalt Not Partake of Too Much of a Good Thing. Which is why I find myself in the shape that I'm now in, and why I have to even consider the question of diets.

So what's a boy chef to do? Naturopath Dr. Martin Milner explained that it's not diabetes per se that kills you. It's the things diabetes can cause -- heart disease, circulation problems, blindness, to name a few. Then -- with a straight face, I swear -- he strongly advised me that I should go on a strict, plant-based (aka vegan) diet, with a mere 10 percent of my calories from fat. That diet being the only one that has been clinically proven to reverse heart disease, among other benefits.

After my initial chuckle, I realized he was serious. I think the premise is that, if I were to go on this diet, I could expect to live a healthy, normal life until the ripe old age of 112. I explained that: 1) I really only want to live to 95 or so, 2) I disdain diets for the above reasons, and 3) I truly believe that life isn't worth living if it is without at least some of the flavors and textures I've come to adore. And I hope -- with the Doc's guidance, some planning and willpower, and some inspiration -- I can come up with a way of eating that will be both healthy and satisfying. I can have my cake and eat it. Well, minus the cake.

So that has become my quest.

It has to be. I look at it this way: I either get my dietary and fitness act together in a way I can live with, still able to enjoy the food I cook and consume, or it's off to vegan hell for me, and a life filled with sausage substitutes and groats. So I am taking up the gauntlet.

So far, it hasn't been easy. But it hasn't been nearly as hard as I thought it would be. The first thing I did was to sign up for one of those free iPhone mobile apps. This one is called MyFitnessPal.com. I don't know if it's the best one, but it was the first one listed and the most downloaded and I wanted to get on this right away. The principle is that you create a profile with your vital statistics, goals for weight loss, daily calorie consumption, targets for ingestion of fat, protein, carbs, salt, etc. You enter your exercise regime, if any, for which the program figures the calories burned and adds that into the equation. Then you enter everything you eat each day. Everything. It has a huge data base that for the most part will have the breakdown for whatever you could possibly eat. They had my preferred brand of Thai fish sauce, every conceivable variation of Dave's Killer Bread, Mama L'il's Peppers. Even the brand of buckwheat soba noodles I was using. If they don't have it, you enter it, using the nutritional information on the package.

Once you've plugged in all the information from the day's consumption, it spits out the total number of calories consumed, broken down into all its nutritional components. Finally, it figures in your exercise "burn," then calculates your potential weight loss. The site has all sorts of other tools -- such as the ability to log your own recipes -- along with a social component should you want to share your experience with your "friends."

The benefit of such a program is that it forces you to consider everything you eat, and what each thing contains nutritionally. That was eye-opening, to say the least!

I'd never really thought much about what I consumed. Mostly, I ate what tasted good, without regard for calories, fat or salt content, or the cumulative effect of it all. Sure, I consumed my share of salads and veggies, figuring that, in total, I was getting the nutrients I needed. Which I was. Along with ungodly amounts of fat and salt and sugar from the countless burgers and sodas and bacon and fries and chips and ice cream and, and ... Jeez, this is making me hungry!

But the bottom line is that I am now paying the price for years of ignoring good nutrition. And something has to give.

Next week I'll discuss how my eating habits and attitudes toward food have changed. And how I'm really enjoying it.

Next: Part II – Eat your vegetables!

Any questions about Ken's regimen or, well, anything? Email him at kgnyport@aol.com

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Diary of a Diabetic Chef: Creating an eating plan that satisfies the senses and weight-loss goals

PLEASANTON, Calif., Feb. 15, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ZELTIQ(R) Aesthetics, Inc. (Nasdaq:ZLTQ - News), a medical technology company focused on developing and commercializing products utilizing its proprietary controlled-cooling technology platform, announced today plans to release its fourth quarter 2011 financial results on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 7:30 a.m. ET.

ZELTIQ will hold a conference call on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 8:00 a.m. ET to discuss the results. The dial-in numbers are (877) 280-7291 for domestic callers and (707) 287-9361 for international callers. A live webcast of the conference call will be available online from the investor relations page of the Company's corporate website at http://www.coolsculpting.com.

After the live webcast, the call will remain available on ZELTIQ's website, http://www.coolsculpting.com, through April 6, 2012. In addition, a telephonic replay of the call will be available until March 20, 2012. The replay dial-in numbers are (855) 859-2056 for domestic callers and (404) 537-3406 for international callers. Please use the replay pin number 52321656.

About ZELTIQ Aesthetics

ZELTIQ Aesthetics is a medical technology company focused on developing and commercializing products utilizing its proprietary controlled-cooling technology platform. The Company's first commercial product, the CoolSculpting System, is designed to selectively reduce stubborn fat bulges that may not respond to diet or exercise. CoolSculpting is based on the scientific principle that fat cells are more sensitive to cold than the overlying skin and surrounding tissues. CoolSculpting utilizes patented technology of precisely controlled cooling to reduce the temperature of fat cells in the treated area, which is intended to cause fat cell elimination through a natural biological process known as apoptosis, without causing scar tissue or damage to the skin, nerves, or surrounding tissues. ZELTIQ developed CoolSculpting to safely, noticeably, and measurably reduce the fat layer within a treated fat bulge without requiring the patient to diet or exercise.

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ZELTIQ to Report Fourth Quarter 2011 Financial Results on March 6, 2012

East-bench angst is ballooning over Sunnyside Avenue’s "road diet," and now a war of words between Mayor Ralph Becker and the Salt Lake City Council has scuttled the six-week test.

Initially planned to start this month, the experiment sought to replace one westbound lane of traffic between Guardsman Way and Foothill Drive — and perhaps an eastbound lane later — with a bicycle lane.

Residents who rely on the east-west corridor went berserk, complaining that slimming the thoroughfare would spray cars into their neighborhoods, jeopardizing child safety. It is "patently irresponsible," they argued, to squeeze the east bench’s primary artery to downtown.

"We in these neighborhoods are going to be left with the disaster," resident Loree Hagen told the council.

Similar protests and more than 100 angry emails prompted new Councilman Charlie Luke to pen Becker a letter, calling instead for keeping four traffic lanes but eliminating the center turn lane. Pointing to "a lot of unnecessary controversy," the missive was signed by three other council members, making a voting majority.

"This option would benefit Sunnyside residents by creating a ‘complete street,’ " the letter reads. It would provide space for expanded and safer bike lanes, give east-siders who rely on Sunnyside access to downtown, Research Park and the University of Utah, keep traffic from diverting into Yalecrest neighborhoods, and ensure commuters can use all four lanes.

Story continues below

Known for high speeds and difficult crossing by foot, Sunnyside has been debated and repeatedly studied for a decade. The road diet, funded by a previous council, is part of the capital’s Complete Streets initiative, a citywide effort to design and operate streets safely for motorists, bicyclists, transit riders and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

In a response letter, Becker notes a road-diet test is crucial to let engineers study auto, pedestrian and bicycle patterns.

"Not doing so is a significant departure from the city’s current approach to redesigning streets using the complete-streets philosophy," Becker writes. "Given this apparent change in policy direction, I ask that you revisit, with the rest of the council and in a public meeting, what the council intends with its complete-streets ordinance and policy and how it applies to the 800 South-Sunnyside roadway."

Until then, Becker has ordered that the six-week test be delayed.

In a recent meeting, the mayor’s chief of staff rejected rumblings that "the test is not a test — and we are trying to fool you" into making the lane reductions permanent. "That is not the case," David Everitt told a group of residents.

The frustration is raw, said resident Ryan Bell, since it follows the 1300 East pedestrian-crossing moves and Yalecrest’s historic district debate. "Here we go again," Bell said. "We are again having a solution imposed by our city government that frankly, a very, very small number of people were asking for."

Yalecrest resident Bonnie Barker said more input should be solicited, especially from parents ferrying kids to nearby schools. "Mothers who are carpooling in vans to these six schools," she said, "are not going to be riding bicycles."

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East-bench angst is ballooning over Sunnyside Avenue’s "road diet," and now a war of words between Mayor Ralph Becker and the Salt Lake City Council has scuttled the six-week test.

Initially planned to start this month, the experiment sought to replace one westbound lane of traffic between Guardsman Way and Foothill Drive — and perhaps an eastbound lane later — with a bicycle lane.

Residents who rely on the east-west corridor went berserk, complaining that slimming the thoroughfare would spray cars into their neighborhoods, jeopardizing child safety. It is "patently irresponsible," they argued, to squeeze the east bench’s primary artery to downtown.

"We in these neighborhoods are going to be left with the disaster," resident Loree Hagen told the council.

Similar protests and more than 100 angry emails prompted new Councilman Charlie Luke to pen Becker a letter, calling instead for keeping four traffic lanes but eliminating the center turn lane. Pointing to "a lot of unnecessary controversy," the missive was signed by three other council members, making a voting majority.

"This option would benefit Sunnyside residents by creating a ‘complete street,’ " the letter reads. It would provide space for expanded and safer bike lanes, give east-siders who rely on Sunnyside access to downtown, Research Park and the University of Utah, keep traffic from diverting into Yalecrest neighborhoods, and ensure commuters can use all four lanes.

Story continues below

Known for high speeds and difficult crossing by foot, Sunnyside has been debated and repeatedly studied for a decade. The road diet, funded by a previous council, is part of the capital’s Complete Streets initiative, a citywide effort to design and operate streets safely for motorists, bicyclists, transit riders and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

In a response letter, Becker notes a road-diet test is crucial to let engineers study auto, pedestrian and bicycle patterns.

"Not doing so is a significant departure from the city’s current approach to redesigning streets using the complete-streets philosophy," Becker writes. "Given this apparent change in policy direction, I ask that you revisit, with the rest of the council and in a public meeting, what the council intends with its complete-streets ordinance and policy and how it applies to the 800 South-Sunnyside roadway."

Until then, Becker has ordered that the six-week test be delayed.

In a recent meeting, the mayor’s chief of staff rejected rumblings that "the test is not a test — and we are trying to fool you" into making the lane reductions permanent. "That is not the case," David Everitt told a group of residents.

The frustration is raw, said resident Ryan Bell, since it follows the 1300 East pedestrian-crossing moves and Yalecrest’s historic district debate. "Here we go again," Bell said. "We are again having a solution imposed by our city government that frankly, a very, very small number of people were asking for."

Yalecrest resident Bonnie Barker said more input should be solicited, especially from parents ferrying kids to nearby schools. "Mothers who are carpooling in vans to these six schools," she said, "are not going to be riding bicycles."

Next Page »

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Becker delays Sunnyside ‘road diet’ after bumpy reception

WILTON, Conn., Feb. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Peter J. D'Adamo, author of the New York Times best-selling book, Eat Right for Your Type, as well as several other books on diet and nutrition, has collaborated with cooking show producer Kristin O'Connor to create a series of four new e-cookbooks aimed at people following the Blood Type Diet and anyone interested in healthy and delicious meals.  The books, Personalized Living Using the Blood Type Diet, are available today through Amazon.

The goal in creating the cookbooks was to simplify eating and living according to blood type.  Each book includes 150 recipes, menu planning strategies and pantry-stocking tips.

Says author Kristin O'Connor, "To combine my philosophies on health with my love of cooking by writing this series of cookbooks is sincerely a dream come true.  I came to see Dr. D'Adamo as a patient and I have never been healthier; but more than that, I have been able to see first-hand how dramatically he changes the lives of so many patients who walk through his door, read his books or follow his web forums.  My intent with this cookbook and series is to make life a little easier (and certainly tastier) once you have started eating right for your blood type." 

Each cookbook has been specifically designed to meet the unique nutritional needs of people following D'Adamo's guidelines for their blood type: A, B, AB and O. As a continuation of the lifestyle cookbooks, O'Connor has a Personalized Living Using the Blood Type Diet blog, http://www.dadamopersonalizedliving.com, where she contributes new recipes and tips on living according to the Blood Type Diet, from eating out at restaurants to shopping for ingredients.

Kristin O'Connor is chef, cooking show producer and food consultant.  After suffering from multiple health issues that were unsuccessfully treated with traditional medicine, O'Connor sought alternative means of healing and changed her diet.  In doing so, her perspective on food and cooking changed dramatically, and inspired her to pursue a career in the culinary arts.  As an associate producer, she assisted in developing cooking shows for Food Network and the Cooking Channel.  She also acts as a dietary consultant, helping families who have been placed on restrictive diets to adapt to their new dietary guidelines.  Personalized Living Using the Blood Type Diet is her first cookbook series.

The books have been published in e-book format by Drum Hill Publishing, Wilton, Connecticut.

CONTACT: Ann Quasarano
ann@dadamo.com
203-761-0042

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New Cookbook Series Expands Upon Blood Type Diet