The strongest dieting motives are personal Low Carb Nugget 58 Typically, people diet to improve their health, their appearance, their mood and confidence, and their chances at living longer. All of those are good motivations, and the nice thing is, they're connected; you can have them all. But the strongest motivations are always the most personal. … [Read more...]
Walnuts in a healthy low-carb diet
Walnuts are a good low-carb food. Like peanuts and almonds, walnuts provide protein, fat and fiber with relatively few net-carbs per serving. For instance, a quarter cup of walnuts has two grams of net-carbs (four grams of total carbohydrates minus two grams of fiber). Taste and Cost Some people find walnuts bitter. I admit I prefer the taste of roasted almonds and peanuts, and seldom eat walnuts as a stand-alone snack. The big drawback to walnuts is cost. Many consumers only encounter walnuts … [Read more...]
Study: lifetime “dose” of obesity linked to diabetes risk
My old alma mater is famous for a football stadium that seats (or at least wedges in) about 113,000 people, give or take a couple thousand. If the current obesity trend continues, it will get progressively harder to squeeze all those spectator butts into Michigan Stadium without the liberal use of butter. This lends special urgency to the research into the causes, consequences and cures for obesity, some of it being conducted across town in Ann Arbor at the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. A … [Read more...]
Is red meat guilty by association? Some at Harvard think so
The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) giveth to the low-carb community, and it taketh away. In late June 2011, the HSPH published a study singling out potatoes as a particularly fattening food, especially in the form of french fries. Having sworn off fries forever as part of my low-carb way of eating, I applauded the brilliance of the findings. I also liked the general conclusion that all calories are not equal when it comes to packing on pounds. Now I'm wondering what could have caused … [Read more...]
News report: cut carbs to hold off diabetes
Besides tracking my own weight-loss and healthy living progress, recording low-carb recipes, and showing off my considerable vocabulary (or lexicon) on this blog, I also keep an eye on media reports about diet, nutrition and fitness. Frequently, I am angered by the stubborn low-fat, high-carb bias of these reports, as well as their general lack of informed thoughtfulness, as was the case in yesterday's post on the claim that saturated fat may be the cause of inflammation. Every now and … [Read more...]
Two upward trends: drinking calories and getting diabetes
I was born in a simpler time. Back then, soda pop was an occasional treat, not an everyday (or twice a day) habit. In 1952, Americans on average drank 11.5 gallons of carbonated, caloric soft drinks per year. I doubt that I personally accounted for any of 1,786,100,000 gallons of cola, root beer, red pop, etc., produced and consumed in the U.S. that year, but a decade later, when per capita availability had increased to 14.5 gallons per year, I was doing my part. I continued drinking my … [Read more...]
Help fight the good fight against dietary dogma and bad science
In a recent article published in Diabetes Health, Hope Warshaw, a nutrition/diabetes consultant and author, calls the idea of controlling type-2 diabetes with a low-carbohydrate diet an "old dogma" that needs to give way to a "new reality." Warshaw's statement ignited a fire-storm of opinion among diabetics and low-carb dieters, including vehement responses from bloggers Dana Carpender, Jimmy Moore, and Tom Naughton. (No one does vehement like Naughton, who wrote two brilliant posts about the … [Read more...]
Remembering my dad
My father was a Flint guy, Great Depression edition – blue-collar even when he was in management, hands-on, patriotic, optimistic, and altogether typical of his generation. As a young man, he played baseball, drank beer, smoked whatever cigarettes he could afford, and helped save the world for democracy. Like his father and his only brother, Dad was an autoworker. All three men worked for Buick, a General Motors division that at its peak employed nearly 30,000 people in Flint, Michigan. Buicks … [Read more...]