Your Super Bowl Party

I shouldn't be surprised, but our government cares about our Super Bowl Parties! Here's some advice from the CDC if you are planning a get-together next Sunday.

• Eat healthy before you go to the party so you won’t be as likely to overindulge.
  
• Hosting the party? Although you may choose to have the typical pizza, wings, and chips, add some healthy snacks to the menu.
  
  
• Include fresh fruits and vegetables such as apple halves or carrot sticks.
  
• Provide fat-free, low-fat, or low-calorie foods and beverages.
  
• Offer foods and beverages low in added sugars; and serve foods that are low in salt and sodium.
  

It is also suggested that you protect your pets and children, and that guests park about a block away so they get some exercise.

Fat cats

Friends stopped by after we went out for dinner last night. Our cat has to wait on Friday evening to eat until we get back. "Is she full grown," our friend asked when she saw me feeding our 7 year old calico who is in excellent health. "Oh yes, she would eat all the time if we let her, but she gets fed just 1/3 can, twice a day."

Overweight pets usually have overweight owners.

The new government guidelines

The Fanatic Cook has a complaint about the new government guidelines. She also posts a mean Angel Food Cake recipe with stats.

Another study of weight loss programs

Must be the New Year's Resolutions. The Annals of Internal Medicine, January 4, 2005 issue, published a study of popular weight loss program research (i.e., the authors looked at the published research, but didn't do a clinical study themselves). At this site, you won't be able to have free access to the article for 6 months, but you can read the summary for patients, which is probably all you need. Programs studied were Weight Watchers, Health Management Resources (medical), Optifast, Jenny Craig, TOPS and OA.

Here's how "evidence based research" works. The study with the most studies wins! So in this article, Weight Watchers comes out on top because the other plans have had fewer really good studies published!

In the "Rapid Response," a reader from Health Management Resources responds:

"It is difficult to see how the authors reached the conclusion that Weight Watchers was the most successful program especially since they acknowledge that HMR’s weight losses are greater than 20% of initial weight (50-60 lbs). By their own analysis, participants in Weight Watchers were keeping off 3.2% of initial body weight at two years while HMR participants were keeping off 15.2% (6.4 vs. 30.4 lbs for a 200 lb person). For people needing to lose weight and decrease their medical risk factors (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) a loss of 6 lbs. is barely sufficient. Research clearly shows that greater weight loss leads to greater changes in medical risk factors."

It's not trendy, but I still say, eat all your colors, drink a lot of water, eat less and move more. But most importantly, give it a year or two until you change your eating habits.

Are we surprised?

Adherence to diet for one year, not the specific diet plan, determines your weight loss and reduction of cardiovascular risk, according to the results of a randomized trial published in the Jan. 5, 2005 issue of JAMA. When comparing Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets, the author recommends the "low fad" approach.

One hundred sixty obese adults were studied and randomly placed in the different diet plans. Guess what. Low adherence in each group! But those who stuck with it a year, regardless of the plan, benefited with better health.

"One way to improve dietary adherence rates in clinical practice may be to use a broad spectrum of diet options, to better match individual patient food preferences, lifestyles, and cardiovascular risk profiles," the authors conclude. "Our findings challenge the concept that one type of diet is best for everybody and that alternative diets can be disregarded. Likewise, our findings do not support the notion that very low carbohydrate diets are better than standard diets, despite recent evidence to the contrary."