Acupuncture for good health

This AP article via the Washington Post is typical of many articles that have been reporting on a recent study of 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women which was published Monday online in the journal Circulation.

The study has reported that “People who drank one or more diet sodas each day developed the same risks for heart disease as those who downed sugary regular soda.”

Needless to say this is somewhat of a surprising result since it’s definitely counter intuitive that the diet colas would have the same impact as fully sweetened sodas given the massive calories contained in the latter. Not surprisingly, a representative from the American Beverage Association opined:  "How can something with zero calories that's 99 percent water with a little flavoring in it ... cause weight gain?"

Still, the study found those who “drank one or more sodas a day diet or regular had an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, compared to those who drank sodas infrequently. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that increase the risk for heart disease including large waistlines and higher levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides.”

Some of the theories being put forth are as follows:

1.      Adverse selection problems.  One contingent of diet soda drinkers are already overweight and drink diet sodas in an attempt to keep from gaining more.  Their link to heart disease is due to their overweight status, not the fact that they drink diet sodas.

2.      Diet sodas condition the palette to sweetness and users over consume non diet sweetened products elsewhere in their dietary intake, increasing weight gain and heart disease.

3.      There is something about diet drinks that we don’t understand.

Still, according to the article, the American Heart Association still condones the use of diet sodas as part of a program to control weight.

In our opinion, the most useful function of diet drinks is to help wean yourself off of regular fully sweetened soft drinks.  If you are still drinking fully sweetened soft drinks you are definitely not serious about losing weight.  However, once you have successfully accomplished this goal, the next step should be to replace diet drinks with, yes you guessed it, water.  Over time, you can adjust your palette so that ice water or carbonated ice water is just as refreshing as diet sodas.  And when you drink water you don’t have to be concerned with the caffeine content, availability, or the risk that this recent study  may in fact be correct.  Dribbling a little orange juice into soda water over ice can also be a refreshing low calorie and healthful drink.

This Times of India article reports on a study that links stress to obesity.  Money quote:  “the unexpected finding was that when stressed and non-stressed animals ate the same high calorie foods, the stressed animals utilized and stored fat differently….stressed mice on high calorie diets gained twice as much fat as unstressed mice on the same diet.”

The scientists from the study demonstrated that “neuropeptide Y (NPY), a molecule the body releases when stressed, can unlock Y2 receptors in the body’s fat cells, stimulating the cells to grow in size and number.”

Stress has long been known to have other deleterious effects on health as it raises blood pressure and heart rate and undermines sleep patterns.

We have the following comments:  Exercise is a well known stress reducer.  If you are stressed and gaining weight, the first thing you should consider is planning an exercise program.  See your doctor first.  The benefits of exercise should attack weight gain in two ways:  indirectly by reducing stress and directly by burning additional calories.    It also seems that stress linked weight gain is a self fulfilling prophecy as the more weight you gain, the more likely you are to be stressed, leading to a vicious circle.

This article from News-medical.net gives a solid dose of reality concerning the efficacy of various diets.  Bottom line, they are not large differences in the results from various diets and the benefits of all diets tend to dissipate over time.

“Those who are searching for the perfect diet can expect to be disappointed as the researchers say all diets have just about the same result, and none of them are brilliant.”

“Dr. Michael Dansinger of the Tufts-NewEnglandMedicalCenter in Boston and colleagues analyzed 46 trials that included 6,386 people who were participating in dietary counseling-based weight loss programs and 5,467 people not involved in formal weight loss programs.

They found that programs with more frequent meetings and greater calorie restrictions tended to produce greater weight losses over time but while around half the weight loss remained at three years, almost none of the weight loss remained at five years.”

The article also aptly summarizes the reason for dieting:  “Overweight and obesity are known risk factors for diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, hypertension, degenerative joint disease of the knees and hips, and some forms of cancer, among other conditions.”

The sad reality is that while diets do work, very few people are prepared to stay on them indefinitely and therefore, over time, the weight loss from diets are reversed.  Diets can help one lose, but one must essentially understand that they must permanently alter their eating and exercise patterns to lose weight and keep it off.  A sound knowledge of the calorie content of the foods you imbibe daily is a good place to start on your quest for a permanent change in lifestyle that can lead to the significant health benefits of a normal BMI.