Eat, drink and be healthy in 2010

A quick round-up of ideas for healthy eating and drinking, including fighting diabetes with small changes, more reasons to drink coffee, reasons to drink and not drink wine and an excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon.

‘Food Rules’ from someone who should know

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Michael Pollan
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Michael Pollan has written definitive tomes on food and health—the health of those who eat it, those who produce it and the planet we live on. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is the best known, weighing in at nearly 500 pages.

His latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, is a lot slimmer, a pocket-sized 112 pages. But in its own way, it’s just as full of useful information. In it, Pollan lays out 64 rules to help us eat smarter, eat healthier. In a piece he wrote for Huffington Post, he tells how the list came about and gives us a small taste of the list. Here are a couple of samples:

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Pollan recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He entertainingly but forcefully makes the point that the way we eat is responsible for much of the country’s health care problems—and that health care reform and the changes it brings to health insurance will “change the food and health dynamic.”

Small changes, big gains in preventing diabetes

There are 1.6 million new cases of diabetes a year in this country, according to a recent piece on NPR. The story, Preventing Diabetes: Small Changes Have Big Payoff, reports on twin brothers who faced Type 2 diabetes. Paul was diagnosed with it in 1996. Tim saw the genetic handwriting on the wall and was indeed diagnosed as pre-diabetic.

But this is a happy ending story, albeit a realistic one. As part of a big national study with more than 3,000 participants, Tim found that making small changes in his life—slight adjustments in how he ate and the amount of exercise he got—made big differences. Fourteen years later, Tim still has not developed diabetes. And when you read about the changes he made, they were fairly minor. In other words, changing your life doesn’t always require making life-changing adjustments.

Take two cups of coffee and call me in the morning

I‘ve tried to develop a taste for coffee over the years. Really I have. Now an article in the Wall Street Journal makes me want to try harder. In “Good News in the Daily Grind,” Melinda Beck reports on the growing list of health benefits being attributed to coffee. For instance, the twins in the story above would be interested to hear that “people who drink three to four cups of java a day are 25% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those who drink fewer than two cups.”

Studies show that coffee consumption can also reduce risks for Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, prostate cancer, gallstones and more. The article also points out some problems coffee can increase the risks of some health problems—hypertension, osteoporosis and high cholesterol [interestingly, decaf seems to be the culprit here]. So the usual pesky moderation is probably called for.

Good and bad news for wine drinkers

For years now, we’ve been hearing the benefits of moderate wine consumption. Reducing the risk of heart attacks, lowering bad cholesterol, raising good… But all is not rosy with rosé. Wine Spectator recently reported on a study funded by The National Cancer Institute. “Study Finds Alcohol Is a Risk for Breast Cancer Recurrence” states that “scientists found that consuming more than two drinks per day was equal to a nearly 39 percent greater risk” in breast cancer recurrence. “However, the lead author adds that the results do not necessarily mean women should give up alcohol altogether.”

But there’s plenty of good news for wine drinkers too. Among the potential health benefits Wine Spectator has covered, especially for red wine are its ability to kick-start good digestion, prevent thyroid cancer, fight off viruses and even improve women’s sex lives. And finally, speaking of segues…

An excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon and eggs

Don’t you love it when stuff that’s supposedly bad for you is suddenly deemed good for you?  I’ve already written in another blog about how the lecithin in eggs makes their cholesterol less of an issue than originally thought. Well, now an article in ScienceDaily reports that a study by “a team of University of North Carolina researchers shows that choline plays a critical role in helping fetal brains develop regions associated with memory.”

Two good sources for choline? Chicken eggs and pork. And the best way to combine those two? Bacon and eggs, of course. Not only does this classic combo provide fetal brains with choline, it’s a great antidote to the long list of foods pregnant women are told to avoid. So eat up, moms-to-be. You’ll be improving your child’s memory and, I’m guessing, your spirits.