The Drift Light wants to ease you to sleep.
Amanda Kooser/CNET
There
are all sorts of apps out there you can use to track your sleep.
Sometimes they involve keeping your phone or a fitness wristband in bed
with you to pick up on all your tossing and turning. If apps and
hardware accoutrements just aren't your thing, then you might like Saffron's Drift Light, a smart light bulb that is also incredibly simple.
The
40W-equivalent LED Drift Light has a built-in microprocessor. No app,
no extra hardware, and no fuss. You just screw the bulb into a light
fixture. In my case, I used the bedside lamp I always have on before
bed. Turn it on once and the Drift acts like a regular light.
Turn
it on, off, and back on, and it blinks to let you know it's entered
midnight mode, in which it fades to dark over the course of 37 minutes,
mimicking the light change involved in a real sunset. The third option
is called moonlight mode and it fades the bulb down to a gentle glow to
act as a nightlight.
The idea behind the artificial sunset is to encourage your body to react like humans did before we had electricity, laptops, tablets,
and phones to keep us occupied way into the wee hours. Saffron says the
bulb is meant to promote relaxation and increase melatonin to encourage
good sleep.
I've been testing out
the $29 Drift Light for the last week. I'm notoriously bad about falling
asleep. I shuffle around looking for a comfortable position and listen
to podcasts when I really can't get into dreamland. The first night I
used the Drift Light in midnight mode, I really noticed it moving
silently down through the dimness settings and ultimately turning off.
Over the next few nights, it got to the point where I never caught it
turning off because I was already asleep.
It helps when you can
really dial in the timing for the bulb. Knowing it takes 37 minutes to
count down to blackness, you can time it to turn off right about when
you would normally be going to sleep.
There is something soothing
about the world dimming around you. It's like being a kid with an early
bedtime, sensing the sun set outside your window.
My one-week
trial run is hardly a huge sample size. I still woke up a few times
during the night, but most of that was due to a 12-pound cat weighing
down my knees. Your experience with a product like this may vary, but
it's a temptingly simple alternative to a lot of the other, more complex
sleep-aid technologies out there.
The Drift Light in residence in a lamp.Amanda Kooser/CNET
Polio’s Return After Near Eradication Prompts a Global Health Warning
Health workers vaccinate a child in Afghanistan.Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Alarmed by the spread of polio to several fragile countries, the World Health Organization
declared a global health emergency on Monday for only the second time
since regulations permitting it to do so were adopted in 2007.
Just
two years ago — after a 25-year campaign that vaccinated billions of
children — the paralyzing virus was near eradication; now health
officials say that goal could evaporate if swift action is not taken.
Pakistan,
Syria and Cameroon have recently allowed the virus to spread — to
Afghanistan, Iraq and Equatorial Guinea, respectively — and should take
extraordinary measures to stop it, the health organization said.
“Things
are going in the wrong direction and have to get back on track before
something terrible happens,” said Gregory Hartl, a W.H.O. spokesman. “So
we’re saying to the Pakistanis, the Syrians and the Cameroonians,
‘You’ve really got to get your acts together.’ ”
The
declaration, which effectively imposes travel restrictions on the three
countries, represented a newly aggressive stance by the health
organization. In the past, it has often bent to pressure from member
states demanding no consequences even as epidemics raged inside their
borders and sometimes slipped over them.
Sakhina, a 3-year-old girl
from Kabul, has contracted polio, the first confirmed case in the
capital in 12 years. Her family previously lived in Pakistan and her
father is a taxi driver who travels frequently to the tribal areas.Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“This
is a fundamental shift in the program,” said Dr. Bruce Aylward, the
organization’s chief of polio eradication. “This is the countries of the
world signaling that they will no longer tolerate the spread of the
virus from the countries that aren’t finished.”
The
emergency was declared though the total number of known cases this year
is still relatively small: 68 as of April 30, compared with 24 by that
date last year.
What
most alarmed experts, Mr. Hartl said, was that the virus was on the
move during what is normally the low transmission season from January to
April.
“What
we don’t want is cases moving into places like the Central African
Republic, South Sudan or the Ukraine,” said Rebecca M. Martin, director
of global immunization for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has provided money and expertise to the eradication campaign since it began in 1988.
Fighting
the virus normally includes several rounds of vaccination of all young
children in a target country. But, in an unusual step, the agency also
said that all residents of Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon, of all ages,
should be vaccinated before traveling abroad, and that this restriction
should be retained until one year after the last “exported case.”
It
also said another seven countries should “encourage” all their would-be
travelers to get vaccinated. Those are Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea,
Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria and Somalia.
Health workers vaccinated children in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Israel
has had no confirmed human cases of the disease, but a Pakistan strain
of the virus has been detected in sewage in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
While
the W.H.O. has no enforcement power, the regulations are part of a 2007
global health treaty saying all parties “should ensure” that steps it
recommends are taken. That applies to Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon. The
other seven only need to “encourage” those steps.
But
countries could use the document to refuse to admit migrants, visitors
or even business travelers who lack vaccination cards.
Polio,
short for poliomyletis, is a highly contagious virus spread in feces;
although only one case in 200 causes symptoms, the hardest-hit victims
can be paralyzed or killed. With so many silent carriers, even one
confirmed case is considered a serious outbreak. There is no cure.
Unlike
influenza or other winter viruses, polio thrives in hot weather. Cases
start rising in the summer and often explode when the monsoon rains
break the summer heat, flooding sewage-choked gutters and bathing the
feet of romping children with virus, which they pick up by touching
their feet or a ball and then putting a finger in a mouth.
Though
the disease primarily strikes children, evidence has mounted that it
also crosses borders in adult carriers, such as traders, smugglers and
migrant workers.
Health officials recommend immunization for people traveling to or from 10 countries affected by polio.
With
54 of this year’s 68 new infections, Pakistan is by far the riskiest
country, Dr. Aylward said. Polio has never been eliminated there,
Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in North Waziristan for
years, and those elsewhere have murdered vaccine teams.
Syria has had only one confirmed case of polio this year, but it had 13 cases last October, the first in the country since 1999.
Before
the uprising began in 2011, Syria had a 90 percent vaccination rate,
but it fell rapidly in war-torn areas. About 300,000 children are in
areas blocked off by the government or too dangerous to reach, according
to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
The
Syrian cases from last year were of the Pakistan strain, which was
found in Egypt last year, then moved into Israel, first in a largely
Bedouin desert town, then elsewhere. How it reached Syria is unclear,
but in April it was found in a Syrian refugee camp in Iraq, despite
extensive vaccination campaigns in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and
elsewhere.
“Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do in refugee camps,” Mr. Hartl said.
With Syrians fleeing massacres and bombings, it seems absurd to make them stop and produce vaccination cards, critics said.
Annis Gul contracted polio in March.Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Cameroon’s
outbreak is of a strain from Nigeria, which previously had more cases
than any country in the world but which has had only two so far this
year. As in Pakistan, Islamic terrorist groups in Nigeria have killed
vaccinators. Nonetheless, multiple vaccination rounds have reduced the
problem.
Cameroon,
Equatorial Guinea and other African countries are all vulnerable
because their routine immunization rates are so low; in Equatorial
Guinea, only 26 percent of all children are protected, Dr. Martin said
It
is unclear whether the new travel restrictions will hurt the economies
of the affected countries. Pakistan already has vaccination booths where
its highways enter Afghanistan, China and Iran.
Pakistan’s
health minister, Saira Afzal Tarar, said her office had recommended
vaccinating travelers at the country’s five international airports
before they board. (The W.H.O. calls for vaccination at least four weeks
before traveling, except in emergencies.)
She
expressed her disappointment at the restrictions, saying, “We have been
doing whatever we can, but due to the law and order situation in our
country, especially in the two tribal regions, we are facing
extraordinary challenges.”
Until
2012, the world was making enormous progress toward eliminating polio.
India, which once had millions of cases, had its last three years ago.
Monday’s emergency was declared both to alert donors and to pressure the
affected countries to organize vaccination drives, Mr. Hartl said.
That
means recruiting and training hundreds of thousands of vaccinators, and
sending them into the field with millions of doses of vaccine, which
must be kept cold, usually by packing them on ice in a foam plastic box
each vaccinator carries on a shoulder strap.
It
is a huge logistical undertaking. Vaccinators go door to door in
village and cities, approach passengers at railway stations and on
buses, and walk up to cars at toll plazas and in traffic circles. The
ideal is to vaccinate every child in the country several times, with a
month or so between each round.
It
also entails many conflicts. Even when there is no local opposition,
there are struggles over issues including who gets the vaccinator jobs,
which usually pay $2 to $5 a day, and who controls the gas money for
minibuses taking teams to villages.
Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Dan Bilefsky, Rick Gladstone and Salman Masood.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesAbout 55,000 dietary supplements, largely unregulated, are sold in the United States.
The first cases of liver problems linked to a popular weight loss
supplement called OxyElite Pro began in Hawaii last May. But it wasn’t
until four months later that the Food and Drug Administration,
the agency responsible for getting dangerous products off the market,
learned of the outbreak, and the product was finally recalled in
November.
Flaws in the way that dietary supplements are
monitored and reported are causing potentially life-threatening delays
in how long dangerous products linger on store shelves, said Dr. Pieter
Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied supplement safety problems. They are also, he said, setting the stage for similar episodes to occur again.
Writing in a recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine,
Dr. Cohen said that one of the more significant problems in such
instances is that many cases of harm are reported to doctors and poison
control centers but are either delayed in reaching the F.D.A. or do not
make it to the agency at all.
“We’ve all been working under the premise
that once a dangerous supplement is identified, the F.D.A. will swiftly
remove it from the market,” he said. “But what I’ve come to realize over
the last several years is that dangerous supplements remain on store
shelves sometimes indefinitely or much longer than they should be.”
Many doctors who suspect a supplement has injured a patient neglect to submit a timely report to MedWatch, the online portal
that the F.D.A. maintains to help identify clusters of injury linked to
harmful products, Dr. Cohen said. He noted that delays occurred in
2008, when local health departments determined that more than 200 people
had suffered selenium poisoning from a brand of multivitamin. And it
happened in 2011, when the Department of Defense removed a workout
supplement from military bases that contained a powerful stimulant known as DMAA.
“It took the F.D.A. an additional 16 months
after the military ban to gather sufficient safety data from MedWatch to
alert consumers about DMAA’s risks,” he wrote. In all of these cases,
he added, “MedWatch reports were irrelevant.”
The F.D.A. has been stepping up efforts to
make doctors more aware of the MedWatch system and to encourage them to
use it to report promptly any serious reactions to drugs, supplements
and other products, said Daniel Fabricant, the director of the division
of dietary supplement programs in the agency’s Center for Food Safety
and Applied Nutrition.
Even so, he said, doctors sometimes neglect
to include critical information in their reports. Often left out are
details about the product and its label, the results of any blood work
or diagnostic tests, and whether the patient was using any other drugs
or supplements, which can make follow-up difficult. Linking a single
supplement that might contain dozens of different ingredients to an
illness requires a forensic investigation that takes time, he said.
“I certainly understand and share Dr. Cohen’s
concern,” Dr. Fabricant said. “But I do think the system has been
useful and successful and instrumental in the agency taking action
against products that were unsafe.”
Before joining the F.D.A. in 2011, Dr.
Fabricant was a top executive at an industry trade group, the Natural
Products Association. The F.D.A. recently announced that Dr. Fabricant is leaving the agency this month to return to the trade group as its chief executive.
Dr. Cohen said that many doctors simply do
not find the F.D.A. or MedWatch very helpful in dealing with patients
who have ingested a tainted product. So instead they turn to poison
control centers, which offer medical advice in cases where a patient
ingested something toxic. Indeed, in a report last year,
the Government Accountability Office noted that from 2008 to 2010, more
than 1,000 adverse events related to dietary supplements were reported
to poison control centers – but not to the F.D.A.
“Because data are not routinely shared
between the centers and the agency,” Dr. Cohen wrote, “the F.D.A. did
not have access to these reports.”
Critics of the $32 billion a year supplement
industry argue that the F.D.A. is hampered by a federal law that, they
say, was written largely to protect the industry, the 1994 Dietary
Supplement Health and Education Act.
The law, which gives companies much leeway in
how they manufacture and advertise supplements, allows them to put
products on the market without F.D.A. approval. As a result, the agency
has little power to stop tainted products from landing on store shelves
in the first place, even though research suggests that adulteration and mislabeling are widespread.
But industry representatives like Steve
Mister, the president and chief executive of the Council for Responsible
Nutrition, a supplement trade group, said the problem is not the law
but an overstretched F.D.A., which has not aggressively pursued the
industry’s bad apples. “The F.D.A. is grossly underfunded, it needs more
resources, and Congress can do that,” he said.
Dr. Cohen said that at the very least,
Congress should require that supplements carry information about side
effects on their packaging.
“Right now, even when we know that a supplement has side effects, there’s no requirement that it appear on the label,” he said.
Dr. Cohen also called for a nationwide
surveillance system in which the F.D.A. would working with poison
control centers, local health departments and the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. The system would include a rapid response team
made up of toxicologists and other experts who could investigate reports
and contact doctors and patients. A pilot program based on this idea
was carried out in San Francisco in 2006 and shown to be successful, but it ended after one year because funding ran out.
Such a system, Dr. Cohen said, would help the
kind of patients he has treated as a general internist at the
Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts.
“I had patients who would end up hospitalized
– sometimes psychiatric hospitalization, sometimes kidney failure –
because they were taking these weight loss supplements that they hadn’t
been telling us about,” he said. “Since then, this has been a real focus
of mine. What are these lessons I’ve learned from my clinical practice
telling us about the sale of supplements throughout the United States?”
Just eat well — most exercise supplements are bunk
By Stuart Gray
(By Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)
I am always amazed by the wide range of sports nutrition products on
sale in gyms. No matter the time of day, it seems gym-goers are always
drinking nutrient shakes. The sports nutrition market has grown rapidly
in the United Kingdom in the last few years. In 2012 for example, it was worth around £260m (about $437 million).
There are health benefit claims all over these products, including
enhanced recovery, increased muscle mass, fat burning, better muscle
definition and improved “well-being.”
With so many of these messages out there, people are obviously
interested in separating the good products from the bad. As a sports
scientist, I am often asked which ones people should consume when
training. My general opinion is that supplements are unnecessary. You
should be able to satisfy all your nutritional requirements with an
appropriate diet.
But since this answer never seems to satisfy, here is a look at some
of the most common supplements and the data on their importance to
exercise. It is aimed at people who work out a few times a week.
Protein
The main reason for consuming protein is to increase muscle mass,
because it stimulates the body to produce muscle protein. This is well
established, but what is often debated is how much protein is
sufficient, what type to ingest and the best time to do so.
The best type appears to be whey protein. It is absorbed
into the gut more than 70 percent faster than other options, such as
casein and soy protein supplements. This means it gets to the muscles
more quickly, which increases the rate at which the body builds muscle
protein by more than 20 percent compared to the other options.
Many gym-goers swear by something called the “anabolic window,” a
claim that the protein needs to be consumed within minutes of stopping
exercise for any gains to be realized. Put simply, this is pretty much
hype. The window is likely 24 to 48 hours, rather than a few minutes.
As for how much protein to consume, a recent study
found that in young men between 176 and 187 pounds who weight-train
regularly, it took 20 grams of whey protein to achieve the best possible
result – what we in the trade call “maximal stimulation.”
Any more than 20 grams appears unnecessary, in this population,
anyway. It just leads to a lot of extra protein being excreted in the
urine.
Creatine
Creatine has been a popular supplement for many years, though it also
occurs naturally in red meat, eggs and fish. Quite a large body of scientific evidence supports its use to gain muscle mass and enhance recovery.
When creatine is taken up into the muscle, it helps to generate
energy. This allows the muscle to contract and exercise to continue.
This can help enhance gains in muscle mass and strength in response to
weight training.
But creatine’s effects on sport performance are less convincing. It increases body water storage,
which increases body mass. In sports where body weight is important,
this counteracts the muscle benefits and means there are unlikely to be
benefits overall.
Vitamins
It is often assumed that vitamins are good for health. That is true,
but when vitamins are taken in excess the opposite can be true for both
health and exercise.
In particular vitamin C and E, which act as antioxidants, have
actually been shown to hamper the body’s adaptation to exercise
training. Two recent studies found that
people who took large amounts of the two vitamins (1000mg/day of
vitamin C and 267mg/day of vitamin E) showed no improvement in aerobic
fitness or exercise performance.
This level of consumption is 250 times the recommended dietary
allowance for vitamin C and 80 times that for vitamin E, though well
within the range of commercially available supplements.
The study produced another important finding. Two benefits of regular
exercise are that human bodies become more sensitive to insulin,
meaning the person is less likely to get diabetes, and they can produce
more energy by creating more of the “work horse” units in cells known as
mitochondria.
The people in the study who took the vitamins found that these
benefits were attenuated to some extent. This suggests that these
supplements may do more harm than good, certainly if you take them in
large quantities.
Caffeine
People don’t consume caffeine to help adapt their bodies to training
but rather for improved performance during a single bout of exercise,
such as a competition.
Taking caffeine supplements will indeed prolong your endurance during exercise. Coffee lovers will be glad to know that you can get the same benefits from coffee consumption.
Energy drinks
Carbohydrate-based drinks have been around for a long time, and have
long been seen as worthwhile because of the way they increase the
delivery of energy to the body and provide hydration. But in recent
years the evidence supporting their ability to improve acute exercise
performance has been called into question.
While I am confident these drinks are useful during prolonged,
intense exercise of about two hours, they are often consumed during
shorter duration exercise when they are likely to have little benefit.
There has also been
a lot of concern in recent years about young children consuming these
drinks without exercising much and unwittingly increasing their sugar
and calorie consumption. These drinks also often contain caffeine, which
is not recommended for children.
Other supplements
There are several other supplements available that claim to benefit
to exercisers. These include beta-alanine, fish oil, conjugated linoleic
acid, L-carnitine, L-arginine, nitrate and vitamin D. Current evidence
suggests there is no apparent benefit from them.
Supplement contamination
In a recent study,
10 percent of supplements tested contained banned products, such as
steroids. Clearly this creates the possibility of failing a drug test if
exercising competitively. More important, it is extremely worrisome to
me that these substances could be in health products that can be picked
up in a local supermarket.
In short, nutrition products can benefit people who work out, but
there’s so much misinformation that you may well be wasting money or
even undermining your body’s performance.
If the question is, “What supplements should I take to enhance my exercise training?” the simple answer is: Nothing. Exercise, have a balanced diet and enjoy it!
Stuart Gray is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Medical
Sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. A version of this
post first appeared on the Web site The Conversation.
Nicky Loh/ReutersAs a plant, rice is particularly prone to absorbing certain toxic metals from the soil.
For the past few years, Mary Lou Guerinot has
been keeping watch over experimental fields in southeast Texas,
monitoring rice plants as they suck metals and other troublesome
elements from the soil.
If the fields are flooded in the traditional
paddy method, she has found, the rice handily takes up arsenic. But if
the water is reduced in an effort to limit arsenic, the plant instead
absorbs cadmium — also a dangerous element.
“It’s almost either-or, day-and-night as to
whether we see arsenic or cadmium in the rice,” said Dr. Guerinot, a
molecular geneticist and professor of biology at Dartmouth College.
The levels of arsenic and cadmium at the
study site are not high enough to provoke alarm, she emphasized. Still,
it is dawning on scientists like her that rice, one of the most widely
consumed foods in the world, is also one of nature’s great scavengers of
metallic compounds.
Consumers have already become alarmed over
reports of rice-borne arsenic in everything from cereal bars to baby
food. Some food manufacturers have stepped up screening for arsenic in their products, and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration now recommend that people eat a variety of grains to “minimize potential adverse health consequences from eating an excess of any one food.”
But it’s not just arsenic and cadmium, which
are present in soil both as naturally occurring elements and as
industrial byproducts. Recent studies have shown that rice is
custom-built to pull a number of metals from the soil, among them mercury
and even tungsten. The findings have led to a new push by scientists
and growers to make the grain less susceptible to metal contamination.
The highest levels often occur in brown rice,
because elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are
polished off in the processing of white rice. The Department of
Agriculture estimates that on average arsenic levels are 10 times as
high in rice bran as in polished rice.
“Rice is a problem because it’s such a widely
consumed grain,” said Rufus Chaney, a senior research agronomist with
the U.S.D.A.’s Agricultural Research Service, who is leading a
investigation of metal uptake by food crops. “But it’s also a
fascinating plant.”
Like people, plants have systems for taking
up and absorbing necessary nutrients. In plants, these “transporter”
systems work to pull minerals such as iron, calcium, zinc and manganese
from the soil.
The rice plant has a well-designed system for
taking up silicon compounds, or silicate, which help strengthen the
plant and give stiffness and shape to its stems. Tissues generally
referred to as phloem move such water-soluble nutrients throughout the plant.
But that delivery system also inclines the
plant to vacuum up arsenic compounds, which are unfortunately similar in
structure to silicate. And the traditional methods of growing rice,
which often involve flooding a field, encourage formation of a soluble
arsenic compound, arsenite, that is readily transported by the rice plant.
“The issue with the rice plant is that it
tends to store the arsenic in the grain, rather than in the leaves or
elsewhere,” said Jody Banks, a plant biologist at Purdue University, who
studies arsenic uptake in plants. “It moves there quite easily.”
But arsenic at lower levels is found in all
soils, including American fields. The fertile soils fanning out across
the Mississippi River floodplain are up to five times as high in arsenic as other parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, according to studies done by the United States Geological Survey.
It’s for that reason, as well as for water
conservation, that scientists have experimented with reducing the amount
of water used for rice fields. But as Dr. Guerinot has found, that
makes cadmium more available to the plant instead.
Other plants also take up cadmium, Dr. Chaney
noted, usually by the channels normally used to acquire zinc from the
soil. But the rice plant, curiously, absorbs nearly all of its cadmium
through a manganese transport system. And this route — discovered by a
determined group of Japanese researchers — brings a new set of
complications.
While zinc is relatively common in soil,
soluble manganese is less readily found. So cadmium has little
competition in the rice plant’s transport system — meaning that it is
accumulated with apparent enthusiasm.
Researchers eventually discovered that
cadmium pollution from mines and other industry had spread into rice
farming areas in Japan, causing the grain to be loaded with the toxic
metal. A host of similar problems have occurred in China, setting off an uproar over tainted rice last year.
Scientists say that the cadmium occurring
naturally in American soil is not high enough to cause acute disease.
Still, because rice is such an important food crop, scientists are
searching for ways to block its metal-acquiring tendencies.
There are efforts to breed rice plants that transfer more zinc and iron into the grain,
which would both increase nutritional quality and reduce toxicity.
There are also programs, including the experiment in Texas, that try to
breed improved rice cultivars less prone to absorb toxic minerals.
And researchers have explored the idea of
genetic engineering to make the plant’s transport systems more precise
so that cadmium or arsenic is filtered out.
Finally, they are looking into using other plants to reduce the toxic elements in the soils themselves, a process called phytoextraction. Dr. Banks, for instance, is studying a fern that deftly pulls arsenic from the soil and stores it in the fronds.
The plant, known as a Chinese brake or ladder fern, is so talented in this regard
that the Chinese have approached American scientists about the
feasibility of using it to clean up contaminated soils. Of course the
ferns eventually have to be incinerated or taken to a toxic disposal
site.
“You definitely wouldn’t want to eat them,” said Dr. Banks.
Question: Is it possible to follow a paleo vegetarian eating plan?
Answer: The short answer is that it’s possible. But in
entertaining this eating plan, you’ve got to examine your health goals,
the plan’s nutritional soundness and whether you can follow it
long-term.
Let’s unpack each part of the plan and look at the research and the nutritional pluses and minuses.
Paleo diet defined
This diet, also called the caveman or Stone Age diet, has
recently become popular, mainly through books, the Internet and social
media buzz. The premise: It’s our highly processed, grain-focused food
choices that are causing our rampant rate of chronic diseases. Eating
like our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Paleolithic time will help us
lose weight, minimize heart disease and Type 2 diabetes and live longer.
In: Meat, fish, poultry, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits.
Out: Grains, dairy foods, legumes (beans and peas), processed foods and foods containing refined sugars.
Research rundown: “If you search for controlled studies
on the paleo diet, meaning it was tested against another diet, you’ll
find a couple of short-term studies each done with a relatively small
number of people,” says Brie Turner-McGrievy,
an assistant professor and registered dietitian in health promotion,
education and behavior at the University of South Carolina. Like many
diet studies, these show slightly more weight loss and some improvement
in chronic disease indicators for the paleo plan. But a few short-term
studies don’t constitute an evidence base.
In U.S. News and World Report’s 2014 ranking of Best Diets Overall (compiled with the help of top health and nutrition experts), paleo tied for last
in a group of 32 diets, with this comment: “Experts took issue with the
diet on every measure. Regardless of the goal — weight loss, heart
health, or finding a diet that’s easy to follow — most experts concluded
that it would be better for dieters to look elsewhere.” No. 1? The
government-developed DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet.
Paleo
advocates recommend eating meat and avoiding all grains, saying the
grains we eat today have been dramatically changed with modern
agricultural techniques. One problem they cite is greater gluten
content. “The notion that our ancestors ate more meat than grains is not
based in fact. Our ancestors were constantly gathering grain-based
foods,” says Julie Miller Jones, a professor emeritus in nutrition at St. Catherine University in
St. Paul, Minn., who has studied grains extensively. Jones adds,
“Though the hunt for meat was pretty constant, the kill was rare. They
didn’t sit down to Tyrannosaurus steaks every day.”
As for the gluten claim, Jones points to research
sampling century-old wheat showing that the amount of gluten hasn’t
changed. But she acknowledges a small increase in the population of
people with gluten sensitivity and celiac disease, as well as other
autoimmune diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes.
“A lot has changed in our
environment. Perhaps it’s changes in our grains, the gut, use of
antibiotics or countless other factors,” Jones says.
Is it wise
to omit grains? “Absolutely not. We need a variety of whole grains, as
well as legumes, fruits and vegetables, to get the gamut of dietary
fibers for their unique effects on the heart, digestive system and
insulin and glucose control.” Plus, Jones adds, grains’ and legumes’
different types of fibers and amino acids make them a perfect
nutritional match.
Nutrition pitfalls: Eliminating whole grains and
legumes might leave people deficient in iron and zinc and some B
vitamins. Deleting dairy could make getting enough potassium a
challenge. And going heavy on animal-based proteins, which take center
stage in the paleo diet, could raise saturated fat and cholesterol
intake.
Vegetarian diet defined
The spectrum of vegetarian eating runs from the most restrictive,
vegan, to lacto-ovo (eating eggs and dairy-based foods but no animals).
All plant-based eaters generally consume fruits, vegetables, nuts,
seeds, legumes and grains.
Research rundown: Comparatively, the evidence on
vegetarian eating runs long and deep, with a host of health benefits
including weight control and disease prevention.
Among the
largest and longest research projects are the Adventist Health Studies,
conducted over the past 40 years. The largest study in the series was
conducted among nearly 100,000 Seventh-day Adventists.
The researchers, based at Loma Linda University in California, use
periodic questionnaires to gather data about participants’ health
status, disease risk factors, eating and lifestyle habits and more.
Results show that Adventist vegetarians have a lower risk of overweight,
insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, prediabetes and Type 2 diabetes
than non-vegetarians in this population. And the closer people abide by
a vegan diet, vs. the least-restrictive lacto-ovo vegetarian plan, the
healthier they are.
The Adventist Health Study and several other
large observational studies have drawn a link between reduced red-meat
and processed-meat consumption and lower chronic disease risk.
Turner-McGrievy points out that the more people choose plant-based foods
over animal-based foods, the more they can cut down on saturated fat
and cholesterol. That’s a healthy move.
But it’s not just plants
that keep vegetarians healthier. Studies show they also tend to practice
other healthful behaviors such as not smoking, being physically active,
watching less television and getting sufficient sleep. That might turn
out to be true for long-term paleo followers, but we don’t have the
research yet.
Nutrition pitfalls: The more food groups a vegetarian
eats, the easier it will be to meet his or her nutrition needs.
Nutrients to keep an eye on: vitamins B12 and D, omega-3 fats, iron and
zinc.
Paleo vegetarian?
The only foods that overlap in the paleo and vegetarian plans are
fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Translated, this would be a vegan
eating plan, plus eggs, minus grains and legumes. “Following this eating
plan could make it difficult to get enough protein, dietary fibers,
iron, zinc and B vitamins,” Turner-McGrievy says.
Research shows
most people can follow a regimented eating plan for a short time. That’s
not the challenge. The challenge is finding a healthful eating plan you
can follow day after day and achieve your long-term health goals. At
this point, it doesn’t appear that the paleo eating plan meets these
objectives for most people.
Warshaw, a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified diabetes
educator, is the author of numerous books published by the American
Diabetes Association and the blog EatHealthyLiveWell found on her Web
site, www.hopewarshaw.com.
New research has found that lower vitamin D levels were associated with illness, but didn’t show whether they were a cause.
People with low vitamin D levels are more likely to die from cancer and heart disease and to suffer from other illnesses, scientists reported in two large studies published on Tuesday.
The new research suggests strongly that blood
levels of vitamin D are a good barometer of overall health. But it does
not resolve the question of whether low levels are a cause of disease
or simply an indicator of behaviors that contribute to poor health, like
a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and a diet heavy in processed and
unhealthful foods.
Nicknamed the sunshine nutrient, vitamin D is
produced in the body when the skin is exposed to sunlight. It can be
obtained from a small assortment of foods, including fish, eggs,
fortified dairy products and organ meats. And blood levels of it can be
lowered by smoking, obesity and inflammation.
Vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium
and is an important part of the immune system. Receptors for the
vitamin and related enzymes are found throughout cells and tissues of
the body, suggesting it may be vital to many physiological functions,
said Dr. Oscar H. Franco, a professor of preventive medicine at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and an author of one of the new studies, which appeared in the journal BMJ.
“It has effects at the genetic level, and it
affects cardiovascular health and bone health,” he said. “There are
different hypotheses for the factors that vitamin D regulates, from
genes to inflammation. That’s the reason vitamin D seems so promising.”
The two studies were meta-analyses that
included data on more than a million people. They included observational
findings on the relationship between disease and blood levels of
vitamin D. The researchers also reviewed evidence from randomized
controlled trials — the gold standard in scientific research — that
assessed whether taking vitamin D daily was beneficial.
Dr. Franco and his co-authors — a team of
scientists at Harvard, Oxford and other universities — found persuasive
evidence that vitamin D protects against major diseases. Adults with
lower levels of the vitamin in their systems had a 35 percent increased
risk of death from heart disease, 14 percent greater likelihood of death
from cancer, and a greater mortality risk overall.
When the researchers looked at supplement
use, they found no benefit to taking one form of the vitamin, D2. But
middle-aged and older adults who took another form, vitamin D3 — which
is the type found in fish and dairy products and produced in response to
sunlight — had an 11 percent reduction in mortality from all causes,
compared to adults who did not. In the United States and Europe, it is
estimated that more than two-thirds of the population is deficient in
vitamin D. In their paper, Dr. Franco and his colleagues calculated that
roughly 13 percent of all deaths in the United States, and 9 percent in
Europe, could be attributed to low vitamin D levels.
“We are talking about a large part of the
population being affected by this,” he said. “Vitamin D could be a good
route to prevent mortality from cardiovascular disease and other causes
of mortality.”
In the second study, also published in BMJ, a team of researchers at Stanford and several universities in Europe presented a more nuanced view of vitamin D.
They concluded there was “suggestive evidence” that high vitamin D levels protect against diabetes, stroke, hypertension
and a host of other illnesses. But they also said there was no “highly
convincing” evidence that vitamin D pills affected any of the outcomes
they examined.
“Based on what we found, we cannot recommend
widespread supplementation,” said Evropi Theodoratou, an author of the
study and research fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences
at the University of Edinburgh. The second study also looked at bone
health. While Vitamin D had long been believed to help prevent osteoporosis fractures from falls, clinical trials in recent years have challenged the idea. The study also found no evidence to support that assumption.
“Vitamin D might not be as essential as
previously thought in maintaining bone mineral density,” Dr. Theodoratou
and her colleagues wrote.
Dr. Theodoratou was not alone in suggesting
people hold off on taking vitamin D supplements for now. Even though Dr.
Franco found them to be beneficial, he said that more research was
needed to show what levels are best. Instead of taking pills, people
could improve their vitamin D levels with an adequate diet and 30
minutes of sunlight twice a week, he said.
“The most important factors in obtaining
vitamin D are going out and doing some exercise and following a healthy
diet,” he added.
And in an editorial that accompanied the studies
in BMJ, Paul Welsh and Dr. Naveed Sattar of the British Heart
Foundation’s Glasgow Cardiovascular Research Center pointed out that
previous research “extolled the virtues of antioxidant vitamins only for major trials of vitamins E and C and beta carotene to show null, or even some harmful, effects of supplementation.”
They said vitamin D pills should not be
recommended widely until clinical trials that are underway shed more
light on the benefits and potential side effects.
But Duffy MacKay, a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Nutrition,
a supplement industry trade group, said that vitamin D is not easily
obtained through food alone, and noted that exposure to sunlight has its
dangers.
He said he agreed with Dr. Franco that more research was needed to identify “an optimal dose and duration” of vitamin D.
“But there is enough positive research
currently to indicate that people should be supplementing with vitamin D
for a variety of positive health outcomes,” he added.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 5, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed kale as a source of vitamin D. It is not.
