Nutrition News Bites 5/1/17

As you rummage through your Easter basket for those last few jelly beans that got lost in the fake grass, here are a few more of the latest nutrition food news bites…

Food is made of…chemicals?!? One of the things food purists find most shocking and upsetting is that, like our entire bodies and everything else in the world, food—all food—is just a bunch of chemicals. I’ve long wondered about the similarity between the chemicals in strawberries that make them smell and taste like, well, strawberry, and the chemicals used as artificial strawberry flavor. Well, according to this article in the “Healthyish” section of Bon Appetit magazine, Very Similar!

Stop weight regain! As many of us have experienced, firsthand, most weight lost on a diet is regained…and then some. The main reason is that we ease up on the new habits we’ve formed while losing the weight and have slipped back into the habits that packed the pounds on to begin with. An article in the February issue of Consumer Reports on Health discusses the results of a new study on structured maintenance activities for weight loss patients and gives tips on identifying and tackling your own weight-encouraging habits.

But I really really can’t tolerate gluten…Many people who have tested negative for celiac disease have been told they may instead have some type of gluten sensitivity. Unfortunately, the results of a new study published in the journal, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (diseases of the digestive tract and liver), does not lend strong support to such a condition. Essentially, in blinded taste tests conducted in hospital labs in Spain and Italy, most people with apparent gluten sensitivity who were given foods that contained gluten in amounts ranging from none to a lot reacted in ways that had no relationship with the gluten contents of the foods, or paradoxically had more severe reactions to the foods containing no gluten at all. Stay tuned to a future blog for a plausible new theory on what might be causing all this distress.

Gluten-free, arsenic-rich?!? Following a gluten-free diet may reduce your intake of B vitamins (since commercial wheat-containing baked goods and cereals are fortified with B vitamins) and increase your consumption of processed foods (as folks trying to go gluten-free seem to go overboard with gluten-free substitutes) but could you also be increasing your chances of developing arsenic poisoning? In a letter published in the journal, Epidemiology, researchers described higher-than-average amounts of arsenic in blood samples from gluten-free individuals enrolled in a long-running survey of US nutrition and health called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES for short), compared with non-gluten-free folks. Keep in mind that letters to scientific journals escape the rigorous peer review process that published articles must undergo. Still, if these findings are confirmed, they serve to remind us that everything, including radical dietary changes, has consequences. One hypothesis for the higher arsenic levels is that those going gluten free tend to consume more rice, which is known to absorb arsenic (as well as methyl mercury) from contaminated soil. So if you haven’t undergone and gotten a positive result from a biopsy for celiac disease, I’d reconsider going gluten free!

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