I came across this shockingly silly report on AOL, who obtained their info courtesy Health Magazine:
The Best New Healthy Foods for Busy People from Health
The foods on their list:
Kettle Brand Bakes Hickory Honey BBQ--the healthy claim is based on the lack of trans-fatty acids and low-fat.
Post Healthy Classics Raisin Bran Cereal Bars, Cranberry--Likewise, low-fat, sweet, and addictive means healthy to these people.
Amy’s Mediterranean Pizza With Cornmeal Crust --Please!!
Horizon Organic Colby Cheese Sticks --Because it's made by cattle without use of growth hormone or antibiotics, they declare this healthy. I guess we can ignore the saturated fat content and high total fat content.
100% Whole Grain Chips Ahoy! Cookies --You mean we can add the bran back to wheat products and make it healthy?!
This kind of mass-market marketing trickery leaves me incredulous. Don't believe it for a moment. This is typical of the food industry: Take one aspect of nutrition that is truly healthy, such as high-fiber, or low-fat, or organic. Then add undesirable, unhealthy ingredients. The current fad is to add lots of sugar and or sugar-equivalents (usually flour and other wheat products). Because there's one healthy ingredient, they'll call the end-product healthy, too.
If you want to see what health looks like if you indulge in "healthy" products like this, just look up and down the grocery aisles at your neighborhood grocery store. You're likely to see the results: Gross obesity, diabetes, and arthritis.
You won't, of course, see the huge acceleration of growth in coronary plaque, but it's there, ticking away.
Jack was skeptical. At 273 lbs, 5 ft 11 inches, he felt that he was "just right".
"I feel fine. I don't see why you think I should lose weight," he declared. "In fact, when I lost 25 lbs a couple of years ago, everyone said I was too skinny!"
I showed Jack why: He had an HDL of 35 mg/dl, small LDL (over 90% of all LDL particles), an elevated blood sugar of 123 mg/dl (diabetes is officially 126 mg/dl or greater), high blood pressure, and increased inflammation (C-reactive protein). These were all manifestations that his body weight was too much for it to handle.
So I told Jack that we've all forgotten what ideal weight should look like. Our perception of "normal" has been so utterly and dramatically distorted by the appearance of our friends, family, co-workers, and other people around us that we've all lost a sense of what a desirable weight for health should be.
So I suggested to Jack that, if he wanted to rememember what ideal weight is and what people are supposed to look like, just watch old movies.
Old movies, like the 1942 production of Casablanca, or the 1952 production of Singin' in the Rain, show the body build that was prevalent in those days. Look at Humphrey Bogart or Gene Kelly--men with average builds, weighing 140-160 lbs--that's how humans were meant to look.
A report this morning on the Today Show showed the "after" photos of several people following bariatric (weight reduction) surgery. The "after" pictures, from the perspective of ideal weight and ideal health, remain hugely overweight.
We need to readjust our perceptions of weight. The average woman in the U.S. now weighs 172 lbs(!!!). Don't confuse average with desirable.
Tim had heart disease identified as a young man. He had his first heart attack followed by a quadruple bypass surgery at age 38. Recurrent anginal chest pain and another small heart attack led to several stents over three procedures in the first four years after bypass.
Tim finally came to us, interested in improving his prevention program. You name it, he had it: small LDL, low HDL (28 mg/dl), lipoprotein(a), etc. The problem was that Tim was also clearly pre-diabetic. At 5 ft 10 inches, he weighed 272 lbs--easily 80 or more pounds overweight.
Tim was willing to make the medication and nutritional supplement changes to gain control over his seeminglly relentless disease. He even turned up his exercise program and lost 28 lbs in the beginning. But as time passed and no symptoms recurred, he became lax.
Tim regained all the weight he'd lost and some more. Now Tim was diabetic.
"I don't get it. I eat good foods that shouldn't raise my insulin. I almost never eat sweets."
I stressed to Tim that diabetes and pre-diabetes, while provoked acutely by sugar-equivalent foods (wheat products, breads, breakfast cereals, crackers, etc.), is caused chronically by excess weight. If Tim wants to regain control over his heart disease, he needed to lost the weight.
Unlike, say, leukemia, an unfortunate disease that has little to do with lifestyle choices, diabetes is a choice you make over 90% of the time. In other words, if you become diabetic (adult variety, not children's variety) as an adult, that's because you've chosen to follow that path. You've neglected physical activity, or indulged in too many calories or poor food choices, or simply allowed weight to balloon out of control.
But diabetes is also a path most people can choose not to take. And it is a painfully common choice: Nearly two-thirds of the adults in my office have patterns of pre-diabetes or diabetes when I first meet them.
Let me stress this: For the vast majority of adults, diabetes is a choice, not an inevitability.
Max just had his heart scan. He sat down with the x-ray technologist at the work console while she pointed out the white areas in his coronary arteries that represented plaque.
"It looks like you're going to have a fairly high score," the technologist commented. "The final report will be available after one of our cardiologists reviews your images."
Max shrugged. "Well, I don't feel anything. I'm always running around with work, with my kids, stuff like that. That's better than any stress test. I guess I'll worry about it if it starts to bother me."
You'd be surprised how common this view remains: If it's not bothering you, then just forget about it. It's easy to do, since you have no symptoms, nothing to impair your physical activities. But what are the potential consequences of ignoring your heart scan? Here's a few:
--Prevention and plaque reversal efforts are most effective the earlier you start. From a heart scan score viewpoint, the lower your starting score, the easier it is to gain control over it. More people will succeed in reducing their score when the starting score is lower.
--The role of prevention of heart disease instantly crystallizes when you know your score. Your LDL cholesterol of 142 mg/dl or HDL of 41 mg/dl no longer seem like just numbers of borderline signficance. Instead, they become useful tools to gain control over plaque. They cast your numbers in a new and clear light.
--Knowing your heart scan score today gives you a basis for comparison in future. Your score of, say 250, today, can be 220 in one year. Without your preventive efforts, it will be 30% higher: 325. That's a big difference!
--Sudden death or heart attack--can occur in up to 35-40% of people with hidden heart disease--without warning.
Don't even bother getting a heart scan if you're going to ignore it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: A heart scan is the most important health test you can get--but only if you do something about it.
