On Fitness

Your views on solutions to the obesity problem will depend on how you see its causes. If you assume extra pounds are purely a matter of self-control and personal responsibility, you are likely to believe the answer is for people to simply muster up willpower and burn off more calories than they take in. (I heard from a lot of personal-responsibility advocates when I wrote about the health claims for VitaminWater.) If you believe that individuals fight an uphill battle given the "obesogenic" environment, you're more likely to be sympathetic to things like regulating how food companies market and label their products or using the tax code to change habits.

That latter proposal is the subject of a piece in the current New England Journal of Medicine by Kelly Brownell, professor and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, and Thomas Frieden, the health commissioner for the city of New York. The authors support the concept of a penny-per-ounce excise tax on sugar-sweetened soft drinks (including nondiet sodas and energy drinks but excluding fruit juice), saying it could cut their consumption by 10 percent. The proceeds, the article says, could be used to promote or even subsidize more healthful foods, like fruits and veggies, whose boosters lack the marketing resources of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Producing behavior change by education alone would be tough, they write, but "a sales tax on sugared drinks would generate considerable revenue, and as with the tax on tobacco, it could become a key tool in efforts to improve health."

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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.

"Antioxidant" as Marketing Tool
Slap the word "antioxidant" on a food label and people are more likely to buy it, Marion Nestle, a New York University professor, writes on her Food Politics blog. Food manufacturers introduced 300 new antioxidant-labeled products to the U.S. market last year, despite studies showing that supplemental antioxidants (as opposed to the ones that occur naturally in fruits and vegetables) don't do much to improve health outcomes and in fact may do some harm. I wrote about VitaminWater's labels, including the brand's antioxidant claims, earlier this year.

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There's a lot of misinformation out there about exercise and nutrition. In this recurring feature, I ask experts in those fields about their fitness pet peeves—common myths that are just plain wrong. This week, I talked to Conrad Earnest, an exercise biologist at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Institute.

Myth: You burn the same number of calories whether you walk or run a mile.

Explanation: Not true. The general reason is that your body becomes less efficient as you switch from walking to jogging to running, requiring more and more energy to cover the same distance. In other words, a mile is not a mile is not a mile. If your goal is to lose weight, running would be a better option.

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