Posts Tagged ‘sugar’

“What else can we add to a smoothie?” asks the wellness blog at the New York Times. They answer with an absolutely beautiful deep purple blueberry smoothie with black quinoa. It’s smooth, fashionable nutrition. What’s not to love? You get the rational nutrition benefits of two “superfoods” — quinoa and blueberries. It has very little sodium […]

We learned this week of yet another instance when pervasive bias distorted nutrition policy. In PLOS Medicine, Cristin Kearns and Stanton Glantz analyze documents from the 1960s that the sugar industry submitted to a committee formulating research priorities for the National Caries Program. They conclude that the industry successfully diverted the panel’s attention away from research into […]

At a time when consensus has formed that fixation on one nutrient (dietary fat) led us astray for the last 30 years, obsession with another nutrient (sugar) is proving to be just as distracting. But the truth is that whole diets matter more than single nutrients. The focus on healthy dietary patterns in the report of […]

One key article of faith for many people in nutrition, obesity, and health is that Americans are consuming too much added sugar for optimal health. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommends in their recent report that “added sugars should be reduced in the diet and not replaced with low-calorie sweeteners.” But today in the […]

Can we talk about issues in obesity and nutrition that people see very differently? It seems way too hard, way too often. Here are four examples of subjects where it seems that people are inclined to listen only to people who share their views. Dietary Guidelines. When the 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee issued their […]

The prevailing bias in nutrition, health, and obesity appears to work in cycles. Sometimes conviction about what must be true gets out ahead of the data we actually have to support our presumptions. The last cycle kept us focused on dietary fat and cholesterol for decades. In the current cycle, sugar is public enemy #1. […]

Some of the explanation for sharply higher obesity rates may lie at a bad intersection:  the corner of stress and rewards in the form of fatty, sugary foods. Neuroscience research is drawing an increasingly clear picture of the relationship between highly-rewarding food and the biological response to stress. A vicious cycle presented well by Margaret Morris and colleagues […]

Soda consumption is down 10% in Mexico, according to preliminary results of a survey of consumer purchase patterns published by Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health. This follows the institution of a seven-cents-per-liter tax on sugary drinks in January. At the same time, Mexico imposed an 8% tax on high-caloric, non-essential foods like chips and […]

Parents have long held onto a myth that sugar will make their kids hyper and then ultimately cranky when they crash from their sugar high. That myth has been dispelled by a considerable body of evidence. But now we’re noticing that sugar might make grown-ups cranky. Increasingly it seems that the subject of sugar can […]

The proposition that better nutritional advice might come from analyzing your genes has been floating around for a few years. And now a new study in PLOS ONE finds that “disclosing genetic information for personalized nutrition results in greater changes in intake for some dietary components compared to general population-based dietary advice.” Does this mean it’s […]