For example, Dr. Steve Parker writes about a recent study showing that
eating more whole grains can lower your blood pressure on Nutrition Data's Heart Health Blog.
But that's not really the whole story. Every study I've ever seen (including this most recent one) shows that eating whole grains instead of refined grains is good for your heart. So are those heart-healthy benefits really the result of adding whole grains to the diet? Or are we seeing the benefits of subtracting refined grains?
As far as I can see, what the research on whole grains really shows is that if you're going to eat grains, whole grains are better for your heart than refined grains. But if you don't eat a lot of refined grains--or you don't eat a lot of grains, period, I haven't seen any evidence showing eating more whole grains makes your heart any healthier. Have you?
Here's the study design I'd like to see:
Group 1: eats refined grains
Group 2: replaces refined grains with whole grains
Group 3: replaces refined grains with vegetables
Or this one:
Group 1: eats 3 servings of refined grains per day
Group 2: eats 3 servings of whole grains per day
Group 3: eats no servings of grains per day
These days, it may not seem like a big deal to have a drink before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. Yet, according to the National Institutes of Health, consuming that amount of alcohol puts you in a high risk category.
Rethinking Drinking, a website run by the NIH, can help you assess the risks and/or benefits of your drinking habits.You might be surprised to see how just low the threshold
for "low-risk" drinking is, especially when you consider the size of a
"standard" drink is just 1.5 ounces of hard liquor. The newly (or once
again) popular martini drinks usually contain the equivalent of 2 to 4
servings of alcohol.
What do you think? Is this too heavy-handed an approach? Are we
American's showing our latent puritanism here? Are the risks of
moderate drinking being overstated?
Tip: See SELF Magazine's Guide to a Healthy Happy Hour
For those who are motivated to make a change in
their drinking habits, the site offers tools and strategies that are consistent with the proven approach developed
by James Prochaska and outlined in his excellent book Changing for Good.
See also: Fitting Alcohol into Your Weight Loss Program
I really hope they meant it as a joke. But even if they did, it's not funny.
In a paper published this week in The American Journal of Cardiology, the authors suggest that fast food joints should dispense free cholesterol-lowering medications along with the cheeseburgers and fries to offset the harmful effects of the food. Maybe this absurd proposal is simply a way to attract media attention. If so, it worked. But the authors stooped pretty low to make their point--which was fairly weak.
What was their point, anyway?
Statistically speaking, taking a cholesterol-lowering medication (a statin) every day reduces the risk of heart disease by a certain amount. Increased intake of fats and trans fats, on the other hand, increases your risk of heart disease. The author's point is that taking statins appears to reduce your risk slightly more than eating a cheeseburger's worth of fat increases it. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation.
Their conclusion is so ridiculous, I can't even paraphrase it. Here it is, in their own words:
"Routine accessibility of statins in establishments providing unhealthy
food might be a rational modern means to offset the cardiovascular
risk. Fast food outlets already offer free condiments to supplement
meals. A free statin-containing accompaniment would offer
cardiovascular benefits, opposite to the effects of equally available
salt, sugar, and high-fat condiments."
Statin drugs haven't been shown to be safe or effective when taken intermittently. So, are the authors urging you to eat fast food every day? And if you have 3 cheeseburgers, are you supposed to take 3 doses? Are we going to be handing out child-sized doses in Happy Meals?
I don't care if the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek. No matter how many yuks it got at happy hour, this hare-brained idea should never have made it past the first draft much less been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Shame on the American Journal of Cardiology for wasting our time with such stupid and potentially harmful drivel.
Here are some resources that are more worth your time:
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We keep hearing that eating more whole grains is good for your heart.
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