Fitness Buzz: Caffeine, Beef, and More

Too busy to catch all the week's fitness, diet, and workout news as it happened? Here's a quick wrap-up of what's been getting buzz.

Give Your Workout a Buzz
The New York Times reports on the (totally legal) performance-boosting ability of caffeine. If you’re like me and still feel mildly guilty about ingesting something with the intent of going faster, consider what one researcher told me when I wrote about caffeine use and athletics last summer. Because carbs also boost performance, “if you think they should ban caffeine, they should also ban the Gatorade,” he said. Works for me.

There’s the Beef
A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine associates eating red meat with a shorter life. For a great summary, see nutritionist Tara Gidus’s take on Healthline. Remember that diet studies are fraught with difficulties and that it’s really tough to actually prove a given food is good (or bad) for you. Following a traditional eating pattern that focuses on fruits and veggies, fish, “good” fats, and whole grains, however, has been associated with better health outcomes than the typical fat-, sugar-, and sodium-laden Western diet.

Defining 'Healthful'
Nutrition professor Marion Nestle digs into the debate over what makes a food “healthful,” highlighting one group’s alternative to some of the confusing product labels now popping up in grocery stores. The definition includes considerations of animal welfare, the environment, and cost—things that weren’t always part of the definition of “health.” As I wrote earlier this year, many people have started thinking more broadly about what constitutes a “good” diet.

Weight-Loss Tricks
Oprah’s eponymous magazine offers 3 quick tricks for losing weight, which basically boil down to keeping better tabs on what you eat and how much you exercise, even on the weekends. I gleaned 9 lessons from Oprah’s own weight-loss battle earlier this year.