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Bureaucrats from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will weigh and measure children in daycare as part of a study mandated by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. The agency published a notice in the Federal Register on Friday proposing data collection on what meals are served in professional and home daycare facilities and how much physical activity children perform. Aside from assessing how healthy the food in daycare is, the USDA will also check the weight and height of roughly 3,000 children.

With the aid of a $148,000 federal grant, engineers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed what they call a “diet choker.” The device is a necklace that detects what and when a person is eating. This information is then communicated by phone. Lead researcher Majid Sarrafzadeh called the device “a breakthrough for healthy eating. If it detects excessive quantities are consumed or poor food choices are made it can be programmed to call the person’s cell phone to remind them that their choice is an unhealthy one.” “If individuals prove insufficiently motivated to alter their behavior...

[SNIP....Poor Dad. He gave up all his favourite foods for nothing. It turns out that for most people, the cholesterol in the food you eat has little or no connection to the cholesterol in your blood, or to heart disease either. “There’s never been a single study that showed higher egg consumption is related to higher risk of heart disease,” Walter Willett, a nutrition scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, told New York Magazine recently. Last month, in an epic climbdown, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advice Committee, whose guidelines influence millions of people, finally dropped its recommendation to...

Meals are good, and snacking is bad. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and if you eat dinner with your family, you will keep your girlish figure and your kids will be healthier. Taking a lunch break will make you succeed at your job. Okay, now forget all that. Because as it turns out, the concept of three square meals a day has practically zero to do with your actual metabolic needs. And our dogmatic adherence to breakfast, lunch, and dinner might actually be making us sick. Historian Abigail Carroll, author of the book Three Squares: The...

Stop chugging sugary soda and munching sweet treats. Cut back on red meats, butter and other sources of saturated fat. Lay off the salt shaker. Eat plenty of fruits and veggies. And don't worry about having an egg and an extra cup of coffee with your breakfast. These are the conclusions of the advisory panel that helps shape America's official dietary guidelines, and they appear to be about the same as they were back in 2010, the last time the guidelines were updated, dietitians say. "What's good about the report is that much of it is reinforcing what we saw...

Increased sodium intake was not associated with higher risk of mortality over the course of 10 years in Medicare patients, Andreas P. Kalogeropoulos, MD, MPH, PhD, of Emory University, and colleagues reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. "There's been a lot of controversy recently about the appropriate dietary sodium intake," Scott Hummel, MD, of the University of Michigan, said in an interview. "Low sodium content in the diet might increase the levels of aldosterone and catecholamines and other so-called neurohormones that might contribute to cardiovascular damage."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing strict new dietary guidelines for day cares that would prohibit them from frying food that is served to children.Child care providers would also be formally required to provide children with water upon request, though they would face restrictions on how much apple juice and orange juice they serve.The proposed nutrition standards are intended to promote the "health and wellness of children" at day cares that participate in government-funded meal programs, the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service said Wednesday.One of the more notable provisions would restrict day cares from frying food on site...

Once reputed to be effective for killing werewolves, modern day silver bullets are seemingly magical solutions to complex problems. However, most of the time you see “silver bullet” in print it is in the negative as “XYZ is not a silver bullet against [fill in the blank].” And, in a double irony, according to tests run by ballistics experts, silver bullets aren’t even silver bullets. They tend to travel slower, with inferior target penetration, and are less accurate than conventional lead projectiles. That’s why I had to smile at the recent headline from MedPageToday—”OmniCarb Study: Cutting Carbs No Silver Bullet.”...

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, the government has been issuing guidelines about healthy eating choices. Now, a panel that advises the Agriculture Department is ready to recommend that you be told not only what foods are better for your own health, but for the environment as well. That means that when the latest version of the government's dietary guidelines comes out, it may push even harder than it has in recent years for people to choose more fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and other plant-based foods — at the expense of meat.

For years, the government has been issuing guidelines about healthy eating choices. Now, a panel that advises the Agriculture Department is ready to recommend that you be told not only what foods are better for your own health, but for the environment as well. That means that when the latest version of the government's dietary guidelines comes out, it may push even harder than it has in recent years for people to choose more fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and other plant-based foods — at the expense of meat....

The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat. "There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. "The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter. ------------------- The second most frequently asked question is whether weight loss can cause global warming.

Now that global warming has been tamed by record breaking cold spells across the nation, former Vice-President Al Gore is looking for new worlds to conquer. That new world appears to be the establishment of a “national policy on food.” “Under current rules, what a person eats is largely left up to each person to decide,” Gore pointed out. “Judging from the rates of obesity, it seems clear that the idea that letting individuals choose what to eat is not working. It is way past time that experts in the field of nutrition be given the authority to determine healthier...

Nutrition and health in agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers 22. April 2009, 2:21 UhrLow-carb diets, Paleolithic diet, Paleopathologymreades139 comments 87 When I wrote the Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies chapter in Protein Power, I wrote mainly about the evidence of disease found in the mummies of ancient Egyptians and correlated this disease with their high-carbohydrate diet.  Along with all the material on mummies, which is the part everyone seems to remember, I wrote about a study done in the United States in the 1970s that persuasively demonstrated the superiority of the hunter diet as compared to an agricultural diet, which no...

If you think losing weight is enough to prevent Type 2 diabetes, don't get your hopes up. A new research report in September 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal, suggests that you don't have to be overweight to develop Type 2 diabetes. This study compared genetically identical twins-one heavier and one leaner-and found that after eating a fast-food meal, the circulating metabolites, including those related to Type 2 diabetes, were found in both individuals at the same levels. These findings suggest that the onset of this type of diabetes is largely influenced by genetic factors and/or the composition of gut...

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows. The findings are unlikely to be the final salvo in what has been a long and often contentious debate about what foods are best to eat for weight loss and overall health. The notion that dietary fat is harmful, particularly saturated fat, arose decades ago from comparisons of disease rates among large national populations. But more recent clinical studies in which...

Those with a diet low in protein likely to gorge on carbohydrates and fat Proportion of protein in Western diets has dropped - which could account for obesity levels Poeple must eat enough protein to satisfy appetites, scientists say Protein is essential for the healthy growth and repair of body tissues Over the past 60 years the proportion of protein in Western diets has dropped, and researchers suggest this could account for soaring levels of obesity.

Eating too much protein could be as dangerous as smoking for middle-aged people, a study has found. Research which tracked thousands of adults for nearly 20 years found that those who eat a diet rich in animal protein are four times more likely to die of cancer than someone with a low-protein diet. The risk is nearly as high as the danger of developing cancer from smoking 20 cigarettes each day. Previous studies have shown a link between cancer and red meat, but it is the first time research has measured the risk of death associated with regularly eating too...

You’re not imagining it: There really are differences between the way men and women diet, lose weight and respond to exercise. Some of the differences stem from biology; other differences are behavioral. But though many of these seem to give men a head start, they shouldn’t be taken to imply that guys have it easy. No matter who you are or where you’re starting, the road to your ideal weight is difficult at best, and confusing for most. But the information that researchers are unearthing about the differences in the way that men and women lose weight inspires hope that...

It sounds like science fiction, but it seems that bacteria within us - which outnumber our own cells about 100-fold - may very well be affecting both our cravings and moods to get us to eat what they want, and often are driving us toward obesity.

The new study, which tracked more than 100,000 people from 17 countries over an average of more than three years, found that those who consumed fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day had a 27% higher risk of death or a serious event such as a heart attack or stroke in that period than those whose intake was estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams. Risk of death or other major events increased with intake above 6,000 milligrams. Last year, a report from the Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress on health issues, didn't find evidence that cutting sodium intake...