Entries for February 2009

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

Is Nutrition Information Overload Scaring Kids?
All parents want their children to develop healthful eating habits that may help reduce the odds of chronic diseases later in life. But are some parents going overboard? That's the question posed by the New York Times, which quotes dietitians and eating disorder experts expressing concern that Mom's and Dad's insistence upon all-organic meals and no white carbs may be producing a crop of paranoid kids. We've written before about the 5 comments you should never make to your kid about his or her weight; maybe it's time for a similar guide to discussing nutrition. Or maybe it's as simple as one of the experts quoted in the piece says: "All an 8-year-old kid should know is that he or she should eat a variety of colors, and don't supersize anything but your water jug."

Maybe it's the uppity female athlete in me, but what first made me notice One-a-Day Teen Advantage was the TV ad, which seemed like a flashback to a pre-Title IX world. Boys get their own version of the multivitamin, which among other things addresses their concern about "healthy muscle function." The girls, meantime, want "healthy skin," hence their particular formulation. I found it odd, since a lot of girls idolize Mia Hamm and are just as concerned about their muscles as their skin. (I wasn't the first to catch this—the blog Appetite for Equal Rights commented on the issue last fall, when the product launched.) Tricia McKernan, a spokesperson for Bayer, which makes One-a-Day, said in an E-mail that the formulations were based on "extensive market research" about the health concerns of teens.

Regardless of the ads, I wondered if teenagers need a vitamin of their own and, if so, whether boys' and girls' needs differ. To begin with, there's broad debate over whether healthy, nonpregnant adults without any specific deficiencies benefit from any kind of multivitamin or other supplementation. Chronic-disease-fighting benefits from many single-nutrient supplements appear to be nonexistent, according to recent studies. Another recent study of kids and teens, meantime, found that those who were taking the most supplements were already engaging in healthful behaviors—including getting physical activity and eating a nutritious diet that includes milk—that were likely to protect them from health problems. (The kids and teens at highest risk of nutritional deficiencies are not taking supplements.)

It's a truth universally acknowledged that eating fewer calories than you burn off, regardless of the specifics of your diet, will result in at least temporary weight loss. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine emphasizes that principle; the mix of carbohydrates, fat, and protein in the four diets to which people were assigned didn't make a difference in whether they lost weight. One hopes this means an end to the interminable battles over whether the Atkins diet trumps a low-fat diet, for example, or whether either of those trumps the Zone diet. As the authors said about this and previous research:

These findings together point to behavioral factors rather than macronutrient metabolism as the main influences on weight loss...any type of diet, when taught for the purpose of weight loss with enthusiasm and persistence, can be effective.

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

Cookbook Recipe Calories Can Add Up
It's a rule of thumb that you'll save calories (and dollars) by cooking at home rather than going out. But as the Associated Press reported this week, portions and calories at home are on the rise, too. Research conducted by Cornell's Brian Wansink (who studies the environmental cues that encourage us to eat more) and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that recipes in the Joy of Cooking have seen their calorie counts per serving rise over the years. The seminal cookbook, first published in the 1930s, is updated regularly. All but one of the 18 recipes that have survived through all the iterations of the book have more calories per serving now than then, either because of increases in the serving size, revisions in the total recipe calorie count, or both.

Last weekend, I spoke with WTOP radio in Washington about why and how you should work out with your significant other, including tips about the best way to work out with someone of different athletic ability. I suggested exercising with the whole family, too, but the host pointed out that it might be hard for parents to get a good workout if they're playing ball or hiking with young kids. While I had some ideas on how to get around this, it's a great point. If you're a parent, how do you incorporate your kids into your workout? Do you treat those sessions as real exercise, or just fun ways to be active with your kids?

We may agree on whether the toilet paper should hang over or under the roll (correct answer: Who cares?), but when it comes to exercise, my boyfriend and I are seriously incompatible. I never once got my foot on the ball during a childhood season of soccer, used my time in the softball outfield to kill bees, and finally grew to love endurance sports for their meditative quality and lack of a hand-eye-coordination requirement. Dan, on the other hand, was the captain of his football team as a teenager and a ringer on his company softball team but runs only to get to the discount cheese store before it closes.

Because we both lift weights, albeit separately, we decided that would be a good neutral ground on which to begin our weekend of Valentine's Day-inspired workouts. We each agreed to show the other some exercises from his or her own routine. I'd seen Dan use the weight bench before, but I'd mentally dismissed it as unnecessary, thinking I was working all the same muscles with other moves. I continued to smugly think that, right up to the point when I sat down and could barely eke out 10 reps of incline bench presses and reverse presses with dumbbells. We did three sets of each, then the same of regular bench presses and reverse flies. I have no idea what specific muscles I'd been neglecting, but whatever they were, those exercises found them; two days later, I could barely lift a jar of peanut butter off the top shelf.

Working out with your significant other (or even a platonic buddy) can reap benefits: It's often more fun to exercise with company, you motivate each other to actually get out the door, and your workout gets a shakeup. Here are some tips on how to make a double workout work:

1. Be open to trying so mething different. For many people, exercise is a strict and unvarying routine limited to one or two activities. But you'd be surprised what you may enjoy if you give something else a try. When your partner offers to teach you to shoot a basketball, even though you haven't played since elementary school, suspend your disbelief or your fear of humiliation rather than reflexively saying, "I'd rather be swimming."

Golf. Running. Swimming. Basketball. Football. Cycling. It's hard to find a sport for which yoga hasn't been suggested as a performance or injury-prevention aid. While there's not yet a whole lot of scientific research to quantify or qualify the benefits of yoga for athletes, it's easy to find sport-specific yoga DVDs, books, and testimonials from star athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Sasha Cohen. (More common is research examining how yoga can help the elderly or people with diseases or disabilities.) So absent a pile of studies to thumb through, I thought it might be instructive to talk to a handful of experts about how yoga might spill over into the rest of your workout life. They said yoga:

1. Will most likely make you more flexible. That's probably a good thing; there's debate on whether and how competitive athletes should stretch, but most agree that if you don't push it, the stretching in yoga isn't likely to harmthe average exerciser. "In my heart, I believe in stretching," says Nicholas DiNubile, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and the author of FrameWork: Your 7-Step Program for Healthy Muscles, Bones and Joints.

What if doctors could prescribe something that could relieve lower back and neck pain, very likely improve the outlook for many heart disease patients, and significantly cut the odds of developing or worsening diabetes? You'd assume that they'd write the prescriptions and patients would eagerly fill them, right?

That process might work if it were as easy as taking a pill, but it falls apart when the remedy is exercise. Just this week, researchers reported that exercise was prescribed by fewer than half of the doctors, chiropractors, and physical therapists seen by a group of patients with lower back or neck pain. That, despite the evidence that for many, stretching and strengthening exercises ease the pain.