Does TV make you fat? There’s a growing body of evidence connecting more TV watching with poorer diets.
The latest study in the field has found that kids who watch more TV than their peers while in middle and high school have less healthy diets five years later. As young adults, they eat more fried foods, fast food and sugary drinks and consume fewer vegetables, fruits and whole grains.
“We can’t say we know the specific mechanism linking TV and diets, but we see this relationship,” says Daheia Barr-Anderson, lead researcher of the study and a scientist at University of Minnesota’s School of Kinesiology. (Kinesiology is the study of human movement.)
Barr-Anderson offers some common-sense explanations for the TV-diet connection. She says that many snack and soda ad
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Here are some of the stories, studies, fads and other foibles of the dietary world that made headlines in 2008.
Diet Books: There is never a shortage of diet books hitting the shelves. A few noteworthy ones were; Toxic fat by Barry Sears, The GenoType Diet, by Peter D'Adamo, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. The latter gets my vote for food-related book of the year. For exercise-related books, Lou Schulers' New Rules of Lifting for Women and Eric Cressey's Maximum Strength are two stand-out strength training books.
The Economy and how it affects our dietary habits: It may be too early to tell how the economic meltdown will influence our eating habits and health, but needless to say, people are certainly going to be thinking about scaling back their spending. Ali wrote a wonderful 4-part series called "Dieting on a Budget".
Cancer and exercise: Weight training, high intensity cardio and other exercise can have ma
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Many of Diet Blog's readers - myself included - will have made various resolutions on January 1st. From past experience, I'm sure most of us know that those great intentions don't always last very long.
Resolving to exercise more, lose weight, eat healthily and so on can lead to a constant uphill battle. If your lifestyle is naturally sedentary and your eating patterns have been constant for years, the "new you" will struggle to constantly find motivation to do things differently - old habits are hard to change.
Instead of trying to make resolutions, then, focus on making good habits - and breaking bad ones. Here's how:
Breaking Bad Habits
1. Look for "the moment it all goes wrong"
With many bad habits, there's a specific point where your good intentions become derailed by events. Sometimes, you need to work back from this point to figure out where it went wrong - because this is what you need to tackle first.
Researchers have found that being slightly overweight and inactive - not just obese - increases the risk of heart disease.
A study of 21,094 US male doctors for two decades found that being even slightly overweight increased the risk of developing heart disease. The study, reported on by Reuters and published in the journal Circulation, focused on individuals with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 (defined as "overweight")
For every seven pounds of extra weight on a man of average height (5 ft 10), the risk of heart failure rose by 11 percent over the course of the study.
Although it's long been known that obesity (a BMI over 30) is a risk factor for heart disease, this research indicates that being even 10 or 20 lbs overweight increases the likelihood of heart problems.
The good news, though, is that a small amount of exercise can vastly cut the ri
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