Calorie Detective: The Real Math Behind Food Labels

With the help of a science lab, the filmmaker Casey Neistat found that calorie listings on food labels can be highly inaccurate - mostly underestimating the amount of calories in food products such as muffins, sandwiches, burrito, etc.

He selected 5 items he might consume in an average day: a muffin, a tofu sandwich, a Subway sandwich, a Starbucks Frappuccino and a Chipotle burrito. Then, two food scientists tested the caloric content of each using a device called a calorimeter. It’s a precise but slow process — taking more than an hour per sample. The results were surprising.

Four out of the five items had more calories than their labels reported, adding up to 550 calories. If he unknowingly consumed those extra calories every day, in a week he would put on an extra pound of body weight.



References:

‘Calorie Detective’ - NYTimes.com http://nyti.ms/Yit3KO

As good as pills: Mediterranean diet prohibits nothing that was recognized as food by your great-grandmother

From NYTimes: The Times's Gina Kolata talks about a new study, published on The New England Journal of Medicine's Web site, focusing on the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet.



When Diet Meets Delicious - The Mediterranean Approach http://buff.ly/XCsvTJ -- Mediterranean diet prohibits nothing that was recognized as food by your great-grandmother.

Here is the original research from NEJM:

In a multicenter trial in Spain, 7447 participants who were at high cardiovascular risk, but with no cardiovascular disease at enrollment (age range, 55 to 80 years, 57% were women), were randomly assigned to one of three diets:

- a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil
- a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts
- a control diet (advice to reduce dietary fat)

Participants received quarterly educational sessions and, and depending on group assignment, free provision of extra-virgin olive oil, mixed nuts, or small nonfood gifts.

The primary end point was the rate of major cardiovascular events (myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes). On the basis of the results of an interim analysis, the trial was stopped after a median follow-up of 4.8 years.

The two Mediterranean-diet groups had good adherence to the intervention. A primary end-point event occurred in 288 participants.

The multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios were 0.70 and 0.72 for the group assigned to a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil (96 events) and the group assigned to a Mediterranean diet with nuts (83 events), respectively, versus the control group (109 events).

Among persons at high cardiovascular risk, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts reduced the incidence of major cardiovascular events (the study was funded by the Spanish government).

References:

Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet. February 25, 2013DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1200303
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303

Comments from Twitter and Facebook:

Dr Kelly Sennholz @MtnMD: Better! RT .@DrVes: As good as pills: Mediterranean diet prohibits nothing recognized as food by ur grt-grandmother bit.ly/WuFQKv


Matthew Bowdish: My grandmother used to serve bacon-wrapped asparagus. Is that in the Mediterranean diet?

NYT weekly column: Life, Interrupted: Facing Cancer in Your 20s

Suleika Jaouad, a writer and recent college graduate, is chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer in a weekly column for the NYTimes: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/author/suleika-jaouad

Children’s ability to "roam" has been destroyed, and they congregate on social media sites

From the the NYTimes:

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft and an assistant professor at New York University: “Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed. Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

Moreover, grown-ups’ panic about teenage online behavior distracts from the potential benefits.

Let kids be kids - unstructured play time may be more important than homework, suggests a childhood psychologist. "Children have lost 8 hours per week of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play over the last 2 decades due to homework. Decrease in unstructured play time is in part responsible for slowing kids’ cognitive and emotional development. Today’s 5-year-olds had the self-regulation capability of a 3-year-old in the 1940s; the critical factor seems to have been not discipline, but play."

Video: A life cycle in 90 seconds:



References:

Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes. NYTimes, 2012.

Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.

"Medical systems are made of holes and stacked like slices of Swiss cheese"

From the NYtimes:

"In 2000, the British psychologist James Reason wrote that medical systems are stacked like slices of Swiss cheese; there are holes in each system, but they don’t usually overlap. An exhausted intern writes the wrong dose of a drug, but an alert pharmacist or nurse catches the mistake. Every now and then, however, all the holes align, leading to a patient’s death or injury."

We have to fix the systems.

References:

The Phantom Menace of Sleep Deprived Doctors. NYTimes, 2011.
Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.