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Exercise Can Help Prevent Weight Gain, but It Won't Be Easy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 23, 2010 Comment (5)There's a lot of attention paid to what works when it comes to losing weight. But that's not really the hard part; anyone can diet or exercise in the short term. Maintaining a loss, avoiding age-related weight creep, and keeping up healthful habits over time are much more difficult. That's why the researchers behind a new study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, wanted to examine the habits of people who were eating what they considered a normal diet and were "living life as usual," says one of the authors, I-Min Lee, an associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. And they made some interesting discoveries about the power of exercise.
When researchers followed more than 34,000 nondieting women (average age 54.2) over many years, they found that regular physical activity was associated with gaining less weight over time—but only in women who weren't overweight or obese. (That means a BMI of lower than 25, or less than 150 pounds for a 5-foot, 5-inch woman.) And those women had to exercise quite a bit: an average of an hour a day of moderately intense activity—such as a brisk walk—or the equivalent (if you exercise more strenuously, less time is required) during a week was the amount of activity recorded for the normal-weight women who gained less than 5 pounds during the 13-year study. (Just 13.3 percent of women studied filled that bill.)
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At the Last Supper, No Supersizing
Tweet Share on Facebook March 23, 2010 Comment (3)What would Jesus eat? Probably a lot less than we do now, according to an examination of how portion sizes have changed over time. Two brothers with divergent interests—Brian Wansink, a marketing professor and director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University's department of applied economics and management, and Craig Wansink, professor and chair of the department of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk—collaborated to examine artistic depictions of the Last Supper over the years to see how portion sizes have changed.
Not surprisingly, they found that relative sizes of the entree, bread, and plates have increased during the past 1,000 years. In order to control for the dimensions of different works of art, the Wansinks indexed average size of food items to the average size of the heads of human subjects. (Head size hasn't changed over that time, while average height and weight have.) They found that the relative size of the main course increased by 69.2 percent, the relative size of the bread by 23.1 percent, and the plate by 65.6 percent.
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Calorie Counts on Restaurant Menus as Part of Health Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook March 22, 2010 Comment (6)Coming to chain restaurants nationwide, courtesy of Congress (or at least 219 House Democrats): calorie counts on menus and menu boards. Health reform legislation passed yesterday includes provisions to require restaurants with more than 20 outlets to post calorie information for all of their regular menu items.
[Here are 10 healthful snacks that won't break the calorie bank.]
Whether the move, which some cities have already instituted, will actually work to change purchases or reduce waistlines is still a matter of debate. A working paper released in January by the Stanford Graduate School of Business looked at Starbucks. It found that the calorie posting mandated in New York City was linked with a 6 percent reduction in calories per transaction—though beverage purchases weren't affected. A study conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also found an impact; it said that people who saw the posted calories and used the information in their purchasing decisions "consumed 152 fewer calories at hamburger chains and 73 fewer calories at sandwich shops compared with everyone else," wrote USA Today. (It's worth noting that it was the city government that mandated the calorie postings in New York.)
