Entries for April 2009

If you haven't already done so, check out our 10-week workout routine. Those of you already following our calendar are beginning the strength-training element this week. If you've never done resistance training or a strength routine before, simply learning the exercises is plenty. But once you've mastered the basic moves, you'll need to shake things up in order to progress. Here are seven tips for doing that from Rachel Cosgrove, a personal fitness coach and owner (with her husband) of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, Calif. Her first book, The Fit Chick Body, will be published by Rodale in October.

Accept that you can't just go on autopilot. It would be nice to be able to memorize one strength routine and simply repeat it with the same set of dumbbells, three times a week, for the rest of your life. But the key to getting stronger, says Cosgrove, is to vary and change things on a regular basis.

Like many runners, journalist Christopher McDougall got hurt. A lot. And like many of those injured runners, he was told that his aches and pains were a natural consequence of his chosen form of exercise. "Running," one doctor told him, "is your problem." McDougall didn't accept that—especially after reading about the Tarahumara Indians, who live in Mexico's Copper Canyons and run like stink, on shoes McDougall compares to flip-flops. He set out to learn from the Tarahumara. After years of research, he concluded that "persistence hunting"—a combination of tracking and endurance running over many miles at a time—was the human race's original, and best, form of exercise. He chronicles his journey of discovery in Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95). Here's an edited version of our conversation.

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

All Sugars Aren't Created Equal
A small study published this week suggests that fructose and glucose, though calorically the same, differ in their effects on overweight and obese people: Fructose appears to have a harmful impact on fat distribution and insulin sensitivity, while glucose doesn't. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, found that over eight weeks, people who consumed 25 percent of their daily calories as a fructose-sweetened beverage showed increased abdominal and visceral fat, higher levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, and a decreased sensitivity to insulin—all of which suggest a risk of heart disease. Those whose drink contained glucose didn't show the same effects.

It's not known whether these effects would persist over the long term or whether they'd occur in normal-weight folks. The fructose-versus-glucose debate has been percolating for a while; I wrote last year about the role of fructose in fruit juice and, more recently, about sorting out sweeteners, including agave, high-fructose corn syrup, and table sugar.

A reader writes that he's going to participate in the 10-Week Workout Routine but has a question: When it comes to aerobic exercise, how hard should he be working out? I asked for advice from Vonda Wright, the orthopedic surgeon who designed the routine (and author of Fitness After 40: How to Stay Strong at Any Age).

If you're a newcomer to working out, she says, you probably can start with a very simple "talk test": While you're exercising, can you have a conversation made up of single sentences? Your effort level shouldn't allow you recite one of Hamlet's soliloquies, but you should be able to ask your walking buddy's opinion about Lindsay Lohan's latest antics. That level qualifies as brisk exercise, says Wright, and it's what the government means when it recommends 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week.

Sugary soft drinks and energy drinks are taking it on the chin these days. First, two public-health experts floated the idea of a specific tax on sodas and energy drinks, and now, two other researchers are saying the drinks contribute to obesity and need an extreme makeover.

Walter Willett, who chairs the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that there is a "direct causal link" between sugar-sweetened soft drinks and energy drinks and obesity, which is in turn linked to heart disease, some types of cancer, arthritis, and type 2 diabetes. So he and a colleague, Lilian Cheung, a lecturer in the nutrition department, are suggesting that we all start focusing on drinks with a far lower sugar and calorie content: things like water, tea, seltzer with a splash of juice, and coffee with one lump of sugar. They call on beverage makers to create reduced-calorie beverages with no more than 1 gram of sugar per ounce, without using noncaloric sweeteners like aspartame and stevia.

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

Healthful Diet, No Pills?

Nutritionists usually advise people to get their vitamins and minerals from a balanced diet, not supplements, whenever possible. The Eat, Drink and Be Healthy columnist at the Washington Post gave it a try, chronicling her attempt to "meet all the daily nutrition standards in the federal government's guidelines without taking a multivitamin or other dietary supplement." She and her dietitian found it was pretty hard. Among their suggestions: Resign yourself to eating some processed foods, and use mineral-rich herbs and spices. Earlier this year, I wrote about the latest research on vitamins and other supplements.

Last year, I wrote about the California Milk Processor Board's rather retro Spanish-language commercial, in which a witch represents a woman with PMS. She flies through the forest threatening children and men (turning two into pigs), until she discovers milk. That cures her symptoms, returns her to her usual state of sweetness and light, and also makes her hot-a happily-ever-after ending for everyone involved.

Now it's time for the 2009 ads, which are equally silly. The current PMS-themed spot, which you can see at www.tomaleche.com, features a "sad princess" whose monthly blues are cured only by a prince wearing—wait for it—white armor and bearing the curative milk. In another spot, this one claiming milk benefits hair, yet another princess is "unmarried because of her ugly hair, represented by Medusa's storied snakes." (I'm quoting from the news release here; the ad starts running next month.) Her father decides to marry her off to the first guy who can tame her 'do, and the winning suitor is a peasant who brings her a glass of milk. Her snakes turn into luscious locks, and, freed from ugliness, the princess marries the peasant.

I once assumed that yogurt, like milk, was fortified with vitamin D. (For those of you not caught up on vitamin D mania, it's an essential and possibly disease-preventing nutrient that most nutrition researchers agree we are not getting enough of.) But a commenter on my recent blog post about Greek yogurt versus. regular yogurt asked me to recommend a yogurt containing vitamin D, and I started poking around. It turns out that the vitamin is not found in all, or even most, yogurts. Even within a particular brand of yogurt, some products may have vitamin D while others lack it.

Below are the major national-brand yogurts I found that contain vitamin D. I'm sure there are more, so please add comments to share any you know about. I've included only brands that contain at least 10 percent of the recommended daily value of vitamin D per single-serving container. For the sake of brevity, I excluded smoothies and yogurt drinks and, for the sake of aesthetics, yogurt-in-a-toothpaste-tube.

Looking over our 10-Week Workout Routine, which officially kicked off this week, you will find lots of specific advice about exercise—notably, how to incorporate aerobic exercise, strength-training, flexibility, and equilibrium exercises into an easy-to-live-with regimen. There's no such detailed prescription for diet, however. Why?

Mostly because we wanted to focus on getting enough exercise, something that many folks—even skinny ones—don't do. While it's sometimes difficult for health experts to know whether a health benefit that studies link to exercise comes from the exercise itself or from the weight loss that exercise helps produce, working out certainly brings benefits independent of any resulting weight loss. One study published a few years ago found that lean study participants who exercised three times a week had healthier cholesterol levels than did their sedentary—yet still lean—counterparts. And strength training can help build up bone and muscle, which is needed regardless of weight. (In fact, thinner women have a higher risk of osteoporosis.)

Determined to get fit? Commit to our 10-Week Workout, an easy-to-follow plan developed by Vonda Wright, an orthopedic surgeon and author of Fitness After 40: How to Stay Strong at Any Age. It will help you develop a fitness routine you can keep up for a lifetime, incorporating aerobic exercise, strength training, and equilibrium and flexibility exercises.

But we don't want you to work out alone. For the next 10 weeks, this blog and its comments section will serve as the gathering place for people participating in the workout routine. Share your thoughts, offer tips, and ask questions. We'll do our best to answer them in regular blog posts, including in some guest appearances by Dr. Wright. So look over the plan, tell us what you think, and get ready to set some smart fitness habits!