Entries for June 2008

I left my running shoes at home when I packed for my recent vacation on an Italian island. (Can you blame me?) After a week of eating molto gelato and floating on my back in the Tyrrhenian Sea as my chief form of exercise, I expected my first run back in Brooklyn to be a death march. Instead, I felt the best and went the fastest that I have in weeks. One possible explanation came to mind: I erased my chronic sleep debt on vacation, thanks to sleeping in as long as I wanted in the mornings and napping most afternoons, which made me extremely well rested when I took that run.

Sleep, as sports performance coach Mark Verstegen told me last fall, is a "magic pill." That message is often ignored by athletes who think it's better to train for another hour or two rather than spend that time snoozing. In that way, they're just like everyone else. "Our society is not built around getting a lot of sleep," says Cheri Mah, a researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory. "A lot of people see it as a waste of time." Not surprisingly, there are a lot of people—athletes and nonathletes—walking (or running, as the case may be) around with a sleep debt. (My colleagues at U.S. News have written previously about how to get a good night's sleep and why kids need sleep even more than the rest of us.)

I saw a commercial the other day for Pizza Hut's P'Zone, the fast-food chain's version of a calzone, and I couldn't believe how big the thing looked on TV—it was wider than the actor's head. I went to Pizza Hut's website, where the P'Zone was also being heavily promoted, and learned that one P'Zone—basically pizza dough folded over and stuffed with pizza toppings like meat—weighs in at more than a pound. And the marketing message is very much that this is a one-person meal. The promotional tagline on the website: "Big enough to share! So good you won't want to!" And on one commercial I found on YouTube: "The Pizza Hut P'Zone is yours alone!"

I was curious about how a pound of cheese, meat, and dough stacks up nutritionally. In its nutrition guide, though, Pizza Hut points out that a serving is actually half a P'Zone. If you follow that unadvertised guideline and split it with a friend, each of you will get between 610 and 690 calories, depending on the filling, and between 23 and 29 grams of fat. But if you do as the ads promote and keep it "yours alone," you get from 1,220 to 1,380 calories and between 46 and 58 grams of fat. That's from 70 to 90 percent of your recommended daily calories from fat, if you eat 2,000 calories a day. Eating an entire P'Zone will also give you between 112 and 144 percent of your daily sodium recommendation.

It goes to show that you really do have to check serving sizes carefully; what you (or the company's own ads) consider a serving and what the actual nutritional information is based on may be two different things. As my colleague Adam Voiland wrote recently, there are more nutritionally balanced options at many fast-food restaurants. Pizza Hut has its own nutrition calculator, too, which can help you find better choices than the P'Zone.

During the week, I don't want to wake up and ponder what to eat for breakfast; I need a routine. In the winter, it's easy. I have oatmeal with some brown sugar and a few nuts. But with a New York City summer approaching, hot cereal is losing its appeal, and I'm looking for a cold replacement that's not a nutritional disaster. The problem is that the cereal aisle has gotten a lot more complicated than I ever remember it being. I needed some help.

So before I went shopping, I consulted nutritionists and dietitians for their ideas. Here's what I found out from them and what I discovered at the store:

• Don't judge a cereal by its cover. Going by the name is not necessarily the best way to make sure you end up with something healthful, says Heather Bauer, a New York City-based dietitian and author of The Wall Street Diet. At the store, I looked at a cereal called King Vitamin, which may well rule when it comes to vitamins but has just 1 gram of fiber per serving. And its first three ingredients are corn flour, sugar, and oat flour (i.e., not whole grains—see the next tip).

I've written before about how most (but not all) studies show that exercise suppresses appetite. But outside of a scientist's lab, some people say they're not any less hungry after working out; in fact, many have E-mailed me to report that they actually gain weight when they start an exercise routine because they are eating more than before. A small study presented today at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Francisco may point to why: The hunger-damping effects of exercise may not apply to obese women. The study looked at 20 women, half of them lean and half obese, and through a series of experiments found that obese women reported no appetite suppression during exercise, while lean women did.

The probable suspect is leptin, an appetite-regulating hormone described by my colleague Sarah Baldauf in a story about the biology of fat. The thought is that obesity throws off the ability of leptin to regulate appetite. Again, this was a small study, so this theory hasn't been nailed down yet. But it may mean, as the study's lead author, Katarina Borer of the University of Michigan, put it in a press release, "Obese women perhaps need to consciously watch their calories because some of the hormonal satiety [fullness] signals don't seem to work as well." That's a bummer, because it means the advice to just eat when you're hungry may not be productive for the already obese. I wrote earlier this year about how to more objectively figure out how many calories you should eat each day based on your weight and activity level.

If all goes well, on the evening of July 26, Stanley Paris will step onto a French beach, having swum the 20-plus miles across the English Channel. He's done it before, too. But this time, he'll be just shy of 71 years old, which would make him the oldest person to achieve the feat. Paris, a physical therapist and founder of the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in St. Augustine, Fla., is busy training and gearing up for his trip to Dover, England, where he'll start his crossing. (He's chronicling his progress on his blog.) I caught up with him to talk about his historic swim, previous attempts and a success at age 49, and how his training has changed in the years since.

I have to ask—why on earth would you do this again?
A lot of people my age are couch potatoes and don't believe they can get back to a youthful physical state. But the body doesn't really lose its ability in endurance sports as much as we allow it to lose its ability. I want to promote that people of my age can do better than what they're doing. When I started this, I wasn't in shape. I had to start all over again. But I'm not just some old crackpot who thinks he can swim the English Channel—I stand a very good chance of making it.

There's a reason why the last season of The Biggest Loser included couples; when two people meet and fall in love, they often change their eating and exercise habits, and not always for the better. My boyfriend jokes that his nickname has gone from "D-Love" to "D-Love Handles" in the 18 months that we've been dating, and I've had to be more vigilant about weight now that he's cooking dinner for me every night.

One study presented last fall at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society found that young women who were dating gained an average of 15 pounds over five years, those women who were cohabiting but not married gained 18 pounds, and the newly married gained 24 pounds. (The men saw a similar upward trend, albeit with no difference between the dating and cohabiting groups.) Meantime, according to the "obesity is contagious" study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, if one spouse becomes obese, the other is 37 percent more likely to do so, also.

There's a great article on the science of breakfast in New York Magazine this week that takes a thorough tour of the claims made about a regular morning meal (i.e., that it stokes your metabolism, cuts the risk of obesity and diabetes, and helps concentration). I wrote about this topic earlier this year, too.

The author didn't find convincing evidence that the very act of eating breakfast is necessary for every adult (for kids, it's another story—you won't find many people arguing they don't need to start the day with at least something in their stomachs). NYU nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle, who is not a breakfast eater, is quoted in the story. In an interview earlier this year, she explained more fully why she thinks people shouldn't feel compelled to eat in the morning if they aren't hungry. As to what we're supposed to choose if we do eat breakfast, the piece comes down on the side of unprocessed foods like oatmeal, whole grains, low-fat dairy, and the occasional egg.

Last month, I wrote about a review of research that questioned whether kids who drink more fruit juice are more prone to be overweight. Today, there's a new study out looking at the question and it, too, finds no link; the results show that kids ages 2 to 11 who drank 100 percent juice tended to have better intake of nutrients like vitamin C than kids who did not and that drinking juice wasn't related to weight status.

The study, which appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, also found that kids who drink juice had lower intakes of saturated fats and added sugars. The juice drinkers were more likely to eat more whole fruits, too, suggesting that kids who are drinking 100 percent juice also tend to have other good eating habits.

And because whole fruit still has the added benefit of fiber, which is not available from drinking juice, it is still the better option. The University of California, San Francisco's Children's Hospital has a neat list of suggestions for encouraging your children to eat their fruits and veggies.