Exercise Won’t Make You Fat – And Pigs Still Can’t Fly

August 20, 2009

The poor guy. His name is John Cloud and he recently wrote an article called Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin for TIME magazine. He, and the article, have taken a real battering from fitness industry stalwarts, including me over at my About.com gig: Exercise Won’t Help You Lose Weight – Wrong! But you would [...]

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All About Fructose and Why You Shouldn’t Panic

July 26, 2009

Fructose is essentially fruit sugar. It’s a monosaccharide like glucose that occurs naturally in plants, mostly fruits, but in other plants as well like beets, carrots, sugar cane and so on. The trouble is, poorly informed opinion is treating fructose like some sort of poison. Metabolism of fructose The body metabolises fructose a little differently [...]

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Survival of the Fittest

July 1, 2009

We all know that exercise and physical activity is good for us: authorities have been belting out the message for decades. Even so, it all gets a little confusing trying to decide how much, what type of exercise, and how to know if you’re doing enough by any measurable parameter. Now it seems we have [...]

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Acid and Alkaline Foods – What Are They?

June 23, 2009

We all know that citrus fruits and pineapple are acid foods: right? Coffee and tea are acid forming: right? Wrong. Much of what you may have read from the alternative health movement over many years is just that. Wrong! Here’s how it works. The body very carefully maintains a crucial balance of acidity and alkalinity in the [...]

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Are Antioxidants Finished as Dietary Supplements?

June 2, 2009

Twenty years ago, antioxidant supplements ruled. The famous, now infamous, supplement combination of vitamins A, C and E, was supposed to be a miracle supplement combo that would fight everything from heart disease to cancer. Famous cardiologists started to take vitamin E — and say so — and the whole ACE thing boosted the reputation [...]

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Prevention and Management of Diabetes with Lifestyle Change

May 8, 2009

Diabetes comes in a few different medical configurations. Type 1 Diabetes (insulin-dependent diabetes) was once called juvenile diabetes because it appears mostly in childhood or early teens. Insulin, the hormone responsible for storing  glucose (blood sugar) and fats, fails completely and has to be replaced by injected insulin. Without insulin, glucose and fat and derivative products [...]

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Red Meat and Chronic Disease

April 8, 2009

Red meat is a dietary staple in developed nations of the west — North America, Europe, Australia and much of South America in the more affluent countries and regions. In fact, eating read meat is almost a badge of affluence. In Asia, red meat is not usually the protein of choice, or availability,  although consumption [...]

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Best Exercises to Prevent Osteoporosis

March 23, 2009

Building bone strength and density at a young age and holding on to it as we get older is something everyone should be concerned about. Hip replacements and wrist fractures are painful and debilitating at any age. While adequate nutrition, especially the nutrients calcium and vitamin D are essential in early development and throughout life, physical activity plays a complementary role [...]

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Increasing HDL Cholesterol is the New Focus

March 2, 2009

Cholesterol from your diet or that produced internally by the body is carried in the bloodstream bundled into complexes called ‘lipoproteins’, which means fat-proteins, ‘lipo’ meaning fat. There are diffent types of lipoproteins classified by how dense they are, that is, how much protein they include. These include high density (HDL), low density (LDL), intermediate [...]

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Losing Weight and Keeping It Off

February 14, 2009

Weight Loss and Exercise Guidelines from ACSM The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has released a new Position Stand, Appropriate Intervention Strategies for Weight Loss and Prevention of Weight Regain for Adults, which addresses obesity and overweight in adults. Specific dietary and exercise recommendations are included. The paper also explores resistance exercise and pharmacotherapy [...]

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The Top 6 Lifestyle Tips to Prevent Heart Disease

February 4, 2009

If you read about healthy lifestyles, fitness and health regularly, some of these tips may seem like old territory — but wait — you may not know some of the finer details that I’ll share here. 1. Eat Less Animal Fats and Cholesterol and More Unsaturated Fats and Plant Foods There’s no doubt that diets high in [...]

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A Low-Fat Mediterranean Diet – Is It Possible?

January 23, 2009

This may seem like a contradiction in terms for anyone who has been used to the propaganda that the traditional dietitians’ low-fat diet and the traditional Mediterranean diet are poles apart. Frankly, it’s bunkum. In fact, the differences between the early Mediterranean diets of Crete and similar regions, and a well-constructed low-fat diet are not much at all. Here’s what it [...]

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Steady State v Intervals v Weight Training

January 13, 2009

If you’ve been reading about fitness and training for a while, you will know that various trainers and fitness experts have a view about which type of exercise is best for health, fitness and body composition — fat loss, muscle building, strength and aerobic and anaerobic  capacity. The truth is, if you want all round fitness with a [...]

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My Top 3 Internet Fat Loss and Fitness Gurus

January 5, 2009

I get to read a lot of articles from many different internet trainers, nutritionists and health and fitness experts. Sometimes it’s just curiosity and sometimes I really learn from what they have to say. Although I mostly rely on my own research of the scientific literature for assessing the worth and veracity of any particular aspect [...]

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The 7 Mega Principles of Diet and Exercise for Fat Loss

December 23, 2008

Yes, I am somewhat proud of the fact that if you do a Google search (at the main google.com site), an article of mine still comes up number 1 for the term fat burning. It’s an article I wrote for About.com Weight Training over 12 months ago. I am surprised at this because Google records about 3.1 [...]

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What You Don’t Know About Saturated Fat That Could Harm You

December 3, 2008

What you probably do know is that most dietary recommendations say that you should keep your consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol in food low in order to lower your blood cholesterol and consequently your risk of heart disease. The usual recommendations are that saturated fat should be no more than 10% of total calories [...]

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The Fitness Wars Are Futile

December 2, 2008

I’ve put up a permanent page called Fitness Wars because I thought it should be a little “sticky.” It discusses the very strange culture of strength trainers who seem to react to cardio and aerobics with a crucifix held at arms length. It’s a very odd response to a very important component of health and fitness [...]

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Dioxins in Food and Water Could Cause Diabetes

November 25, 2008

I’ve been aware of an increasing number of recent studies that seem to show that the chemical pollutants called POPs – dioxins and similar compounds – could be at least partly responsible for the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes. Now it’s not conclusive, but some aspects of these investigations are certainly interesting. Like the fact that when [...]

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Recommended Dietary Intakes – Do You Need Supplements?

November 13, 2008

Here’s a quick definition of RDIs — or RDAs as they are called in some countries. Recommended Dietary Intakes (RDIs) (or allowances, RDA) are the levels of intake of essential nutrients considered, in the judgment of national health and nutrition authorities on the basis of available scientific knowledge, to be adequate to meet the known nutritional needs [...]

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Burn That Belly Fat With High-Intensity Training?

November 8, 2008

A recent study by researchers at the University of Virginia found that high-intensity exercise training disposed of more belly fat in obese middle-aged women than lower-intensity training of the same energy expenditure. The idea that doing high-intensity interval training burns off stubborn fat and visceral belly fat has been around for quite a few years. The premise [...]

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