Are safe kids becoming fat kids?

Are we becoming so protective that we're no longer encouraging genuine learning (and exercise) among children? Here's from an editorial in the Wall St Journal today...(paid link, so I've reproduced the relevant parts.)

"One in six children in America is obese, and many of them will face a lifetime of chronic illness. According to the Center for Disease Control, this problem would basically cure itself if children engaged in the informal outdoor activities that used to be normal. But how do we lure children off the sofa? One key attraction is risk.

Risk is fun, at least the moderate risks that were common in prior generations. An informal survey of children by the University of Toronto's Institute of Child Studies found that "merry-go-rounds . . . anecdotally the most hated piece of playground equipment in hospital emergency rooms -- topped the list of most desired bits of playground equipment." Those of us of a certain age can remember sprinting to get the contraption really moving. That was fun. And a lot of exercise."

But most playgrounds today have removed most of the fun stuff...and now their safety items cause problems.

"Just when we thought playgrounds were accident-proof -- no more merry-go-rounds, high slides, jungle gyms, seesaws or pretty much anything that's fun -- it turns out that safety itself can be dangerous. A recent heat wave in New York exposed a new playground risk: The ubiquitous rubber safety matting gets hot, not as hot as McDonald's coffee, but hot enough to scald tender feet.

"The outrage was immediate. "Playgrounds should be designed with canopies," one park- safety advocate declared. "How many burn cases will it take," Betsy Gotbaum, the city's public advocate asked, "before the city wakes up and acts?"

But is the goal of total protection from risk a good thing?

"Risk is important in child development. Allowing children to test their limits in unstructured play, according to the American Association of Pediatrics, "develop[s] their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength." Scrapes and bruises are how children learn their limits, and the need to take personal responsibility."

What's your take? Are we becoming so soft that nothing on our playgrounds is more fun for kids than sitting on the couch watching TV or playing video games? Munching on chips?

8 glasses of water per day?

Here's a metric more personalized to you.

Take your body weight. Divide by two. That is how many ounces of water your body needs per day.

Water: Must be filtered. Herbal Tea and lemon water ok. Coffee, sodas, and other either caffeine or sugar laden fare does not count. -Dr. Heidi

ER Goody Bag Part II

WARNING: There's a catch in the ER Fat Burn program.

Readers here have heard about Dr. Heidi's ER Fat Burn program. But how do you know that it's not just people taking your money and, at the end of the program, you're still overweight and miserable?

You're right to wonder. Especially if your dieting experience has been like that of these women...

"20,000 women lost 2 lbs after 8 years of dieting"

All the women reduced their daily calories by an
average of 360 calories per day. They lost only
2 lbs after 8 years of dieting!
– National Institutes of Health, 1991.Women’s Health Initiative,
a $700 million study.

Of course these gals thought that if they restricted their calories, they'd lose weight.

ER asks that you suspend your belief in restricting calories to lose weight - because it might be wrong. 50 years of clinical research shows that:

Calorie counting has turned out to be useless, and may even be dangerous.

ER asks you try a new belief - that it's what you eat that determines what you weigh and how you feel.

Dr. Heidi is wrapping up the July 4-week ER Fat Burn program, based on that belief. Here's the story:

10 folks came to lose weight. After 4 weeks:
Average weight loss: 7 lbs
High: 19 lbs
Low 3 lbs
No one is hungry. No one is cranky.

No one counted calories. No one felt deprived. No one ate rabbit food. The ER weight loss mantra:

It's not how much we eat, it's WHAT we eat.

Next ER Fat Burn starts September 6. If you've been calorie counting without success, want to test a new belief? MAXIMUM: 15 Actives.

They all believed the earth was flat once too, didn't they?

P.S. Tidbits. Carol, this month's star loser who lost 14 lbs in her first 14 days on ER Fat Burn, has now lost 19 lbs, and is dropping about 2 lbs per week now. Vanessa, an auditor, lost 10 lbs; Mary, an auditor, lost 11 lbs. Wanda, an Active, lost 9 lbs. And, one gal lost 0. She came to ER with a dead metabolism, looking for way to heal it so she could start losing. After 4 weeks in ER, she got rid of her gas and bloating, and her joint pain disappeared. She too, is a happy camper.

Mr. Banting Lost 50 lbs on low-carb. Is it dangerous?

Part III: Is a low carb regime dangerous? Picks up from the Mr. Banting post here.

Six years after he lost 50 lbs with his low carb regime, Mr. Banting published the fourth edition of his "Letter on corpulence." By then his name had become a verb - 'to bant' meant to diet - by following his published low carb regime. Mr. Banting had kept those 50 lbs off all those years and added that "My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history."

Still, in 1865 and today, 143 years later, some people ask, "Is low carb dangerous?"

Remember Banting's regime: Mostly meat, fish and fowl and a bit of fruit and veggies see here; and No sugars, no starches, bread, milk, sweets and potatoes

Few experts disagree with what he stopped eating. It's what he DID eat - the meat - that has caused mild panic in some corners in the past 15 years.

Reason: Meat has "saturated fats" which are thought by some to be associated with heart trouble - you know, clogging of the arteries and such. And since the low-carb regimes recommend eating meats, bacon and similar fare, it was put on the high risk list by these concerned folks.

I am no health expert. I'm just a person extremely interested in health, want to play tennis when I'm 95. And I love to eat good foods. Here's my take:

Let's agree that meat has saturated fat in it. And let's agree also that meat has had saturated fats in it since the beginning of time.

I have three questions for someone who asks: Is a low-carb regime safe - since it's high in saturated fat?

1. Why has saturated fat become a problem now, when our ancestors since the stone age, 2.5 million years ago, survived by eating animals? There was no heart disease reported in the stone age. And we're here, aren't we?

2. Is it possible that the recent association of saturated fat and heart disease might have been off the mark? It wouldn't be the first time we've been wrong about the cause of a problem. The latest and meticulously researched 601-page tome, Good Calories, Bad Calories (journalist Gary Taubes, 2007) has 10 conclusions. Here are the first two:

• Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
• The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and the hormonal regulation of homeostasis - the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. (p. 454)
  

3. If it's not the fat, could it be the meat? There were no industrial feedlots in the stone age. No one was force-feeding the animals corn and soy, instead of their natural food source, grass. No one gave them growth hormones and shot them full of antibiotics (because they're mostly sick in the feedlots now, reports Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma), since they cannot digest the corn and soy).

Might part of the resistance to a low carb approach to weight loss be a result of NOT making the bad meat- good meat distinction?

These questions, and my personal wonderful experience being on a real food low carb regime make me say that for me, low-carb is a wonderful, healthful approach to living. The caveat: all food must be real. No highly processed foods, no toxins, no artificial ingredients or any other poisons or chemicals.

P.S. I learned all this (and have become extremely interested in eating and health) because of my old friend, Dr. Heidi. I filmed her university nutrition course in CA this spring.

I am now marketing her ER Fat Burning program because I am betting that it will change your idea of eating- now and for years to come.

Dr. Heidi's Goody Bag part I

Dr. Heidi went off for a weekend retreat last week. At 6AM Friday AM, the camera caught her packing her ER Goody bag. (9:11)



Here's Part II (4 mins)

How Mr. Banting Lost 35 lbs in 8 months even though he drank a lot of alcohol. Part II

"He cut back on calories, which failed to induce weight loss but did leave him exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding horseback, and manual labor. His weight increased. He consulted the best doctors... He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight increased..." (from Part I)

Part II.

"Luckily for Banting, he consulted a surgeon who had recently been to Paris. The doctor had just heard the great physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes.

The liver, reported Bernard, secretes glucose, the substance of both sugar and starch. It was this glucose that accumulates excessively in the bloodstream of diabetics. It struck him that "a diet of only meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic."

Banting's surgeon immediately formulated a dietary regimen for Banting. Namely, "complete abstinence from sugars and starches."

After all, wrote the doctor, we know that to fatten up animals, "a saccharine (sugar) and farinaceous (flour) diet is used." He thought "excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause...and if a purely animal diet were useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with a vegetable diet that contained neither sugar nor starch might...arrest the undue formation of fat."

So here's the regime Banting followed for the next year:

"He ate three meals a day of meat fish, or game, usually five or six ounces at a meal, with one or two stale toast or cooked fruit on the side. He had his evening tea with a few more ounces of fruit or stale toast. He scrupulously avoided any other food that might contain either sugar or starch, in particular bread, milk, beer, sweets and potatoes."

"Despite a considerable allowance of alcohol in Banting's regimen - four or five glasses of wine each day, a cordial every morning, and an evening tumbler of gin, whisky or brandy - Banting dropped thirty-five pounds by the following May (eight months later) and fifty pounds by early the next year.

"I have not felt better in health than now for the last twenty-six years,' he wrote. 'My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.'"
- Taubes, 2007

That was 1864. Banting's 16 page (free) Letter on corpulence, Addressed to the Public, launched the world's first popular diet craze. Within a year, Banting "had entered the English language as a verb meaning 'to diet.'"

If someone is "gouty obese, and nervous, we strongly recommend him to 'bant'" suggested the Pall Mall Gazette in June, 1865. - Taubes, 2007

Guess how the medical community of the day reacted? Some, writes Taubes,

"did what members of established societies often do when confronted with a radical new concept: they attacked both the message and the messenger. The Lancet, (like today's Newsweek), first whined that Banting's diet was old news. Second...that his diet could be dangerous."

150 years later, some in the medical community raise the same question:

Is a low carb approach safe?

Today we have many modern versions of Banting's low carb diet, most notably Atkins and South Beach. And just this year, Dr. Heidi's ER Fat Burn Program, the very latest in a low carb-based regime, has seen great success among the participants. (One gal dropped 18 pounds in her first four weeks and got her sex drive back(!))

For some people, however, the question remains:

Is a low carb regime dangerous?

That's next.