Diet advice do jour. Usual grains of salt apply.

[elfs]

In an article entitled Unhappy Meals, author Michael Pollan documents the rise of food science and "nutritionalism," the belief that one can control one's nutrition completely by understanding nutrients. Pollan's advice is simple and direct: all of the diet advice in the world comes down to seven words:

"Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

Pollan's main point is that it is the second word in all that advice that is difficult for people to grasp. Power bars and soda pop are not "food"; anything that tries to sell itself to you as "nutritionalized" is probably not "food". His advice: if someone from 1900 wouldn't recognize it as food, it's not. Avoid ingredients that are unfamiliar and unpronouncable. I especially like his "You're an omnivore: eat like one!" line.

And the bad news came in yesterday: A calorie is a calorie. I can't make my gut go away by doing abdominal crunches. The distribution of fat is wholly genetic: the only way to make it go away is to eat less. That may not be entirely true: some of the middle-age abdominal distension is due to a loss of muscle tone in those areas, so exercise will help that. But not the love handles.

Comments

[mundens.livejournal.com]

You can loose fat by exercise, but "crunches" or any actual particular exercise are irrelevant. (though as other have said they're good for other reasons)

What's required to begin using up the fat is for you to use up your readily available energy store, and force your body to start using it's reserves. This means that you generally need at least thirty minutes of sustained exercise of some sort, and only after that, will any exercise begin to burn off fat.

The good news is that brisk walking for that amount of time is as good as any other exercise!

Over here in New Zealand our government health agencies run television commercials and the like to educate people about this sort of thing. As we have a public health system, they have realized that the cost of commercials to try and get action now is minimal compared to the cost to the country if action isn't taken to improve health!