Tag Archives: mhealth

Coconut Oil: Heart-Healthy Hero or Evil Engine of Extinction?

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A few years ago, research on coconut oil condemned the oil as a cause of high cholesterol and clogged arteries. A number of processed food manufacturers promptly removed coconut oil from their formulas. The Center for Science in the Public Interest slammed movie popcorn popped in coconut oil, saying it added a huge number of calories from unsaturated fat. (For some reason they didn’t mention the gobs of fake butter drizzled over the popped corn, which is composed of soybean oil, artificial flavoring, beta carotene for color, and preservatives. Yum.)

But lately, we’ve seen coconut oil touted as health food. After years of thinking of coconut oil as essentially fatty poison, this came as a surprise.

It turns out that the coconut oil used in the earlier research was partially hydrogenated oil. The process of hydrogenation creates trans-fats, which are responsible for raising cholesterol and clogging arteries. But virgin coconut oil is primarily composed of saturated fatty acids, with some mono-unsaturated fatty acids and a small amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids. This is where things get murky.

It has been an almost religious tenet of faith that saturated fats (such as animal fats and coconut oil) cause heart disease by encouraging atherosclerosis. This was established through many studies over the years—but does not explain why many people whose traditional diets are high in saturated fats such as the Inuit (in the days before they started eating TV dinners) or the Masai did not disproportionately suffer from heart disease despite the fact that their diets were much higher in saturated fats than most “developed” cultures. Some analysts, looking back at the data, say that the connection between heart disease and saturated fat is weak, at best.

Our body fat is saturated fat. When we burn fat for energy, we are consuming saturated fat, raising the question: why is bodily saturated fat consumption good for us, but eating saturated fat bad for us? Just asking.

Anyway, getting back to coconut oil, there are a lot of claims for its healthful benefits, such as increased energy and heart health. One organic food site says, “The health benefits of coconut oil include hair care, skin care, stress relief, maintaining cholesterol levels, weight loss, increased immunity, proper digestion and metabolism, relief from kidney problems, heart diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, HIV and cancer, dental care, and bone strength.”

HIV and cancer? Weight loss? And all that other stuff? Really?

A minimum of research turned up the information that coconut oil’s saturated fats are primarily medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which the body metabolizes more readily than the long-chain triglycerides found in most fats and oils. Animal studies have shown that these MCTs turn up the metabolic furnace, resulting in weight loss. However, this has not been shown in human studies.

Studies of people living on Pacific islands and in southeast Asia, who rely heavily on coconut oil in their diets, have very low rates of heart disease compared to Americans—but they also eat a higher percentage of plant-based foods than we do, so perhaps we are trying to compare apples and oranges.

As for the claim about AIDS, coconut oil contains a high percentage of lauric acid, which has been shown to inhibit virus production. Opportunistic virus infection is a constant issue with AIDS sufferers, and it is believed (hoped?) that the lauric acid in coconut oil reduces these infections. As far as we could determine, there is no evidence that lauric acid can inhibit the reproduction of the AIDS virus itself.

Beyond anecdotes and claims, there’s no data that coconut oil has any effect on cancer or diabetes. So there’s a lot of hype out there about this ancient food. What do we know to be true?

Virgin coconut oil is another cooking fat you can use in moderation as part of healthy diet. It has a mild coconut flavor that enhances many dishes, and its smoke point is 350ºF, so it can be used for sautéing. It can be substituted for butter or margarine in many dishes, often with an improvement in texture and flavor. It is no more likely to cause heart disease than any other saturated fat—and might actually have some heart-healthy characteristics.

But is coconut oil a cure-all for diseases from cancer to chronic stress? No. Is it a death-dealing Terminator among foods? No. As these things usually go, the truth is somewhere in between.

Wheat Can Make You Crazy? That’s Crazy. Isn’t It?

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Our last post, “Wheat: The New Strychnine?” enjoyed enormous popularity, pointing up how concerned people have become with the potential health risks of wheat.

In addition to obesity (in particular the disproportionate distribution of fat to the belly, which is a marker for potential cardiac disease), joint pain, digestive issues, headaches, etc. mentioned by Dr. William Davis in his book, “Wheat Belly,” he claims that wheat can exacerbate serious mental illness such as schizophrenia in some people.

We didn’t mention this in our last blog because we wanted to look further into this alarming claim. It seemed just a tad too far-fetched that mental illness could be worsened just by eating toast and pasta and cured by giving up wheat. It sounded too much like the proverbial snake-oil salesman: “Cures gout, eczema, female troubles of all kind! Does away with thinning hair, cures arthritis and will make your children grow strong and tall!” So we did a bit of looking around the Internet to see if anyone’s come up with substantive proof that wheat can affect mental health.

Dr. Davis claims that, unique among foods (although there is evidence that milk has the same property), wheat can cross the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier refers to a mechanism of the central nervous system that prevents microscopic particles from passing into the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. This is a very good thing; otherwise, our brain would come under attack by bacteria, which would multiply like wildfire in the ideal growth medium supplied by this fluid. When the blood-brain barrier is breached, as in the case of spirochetes which physically bore through the blood vessel walls to reach the central nervous system, the result can be life-threatening, like syphilis or Lyme Disease.

Wheat is able to cross this tough barrier because when wheat gluten is exposed to pepsin, a stomach acid that helps break down food, the gluten is degraded into a variety of polypeptides, which are basically short-chain proteins. In a study at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), these polypeptides were found to cross the blood-brain barrier in rats. Because the polypeptides look to the brain’s receptors like endorphins (the naturally-produced proteins that produce “runner’s high” and act like opioids), the wheat polypeptides bond readily to the brain.

And what do they do when they reach the brain? Researchers in the mid-1960s at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia decided to remove all wheat products from the diets of schizophrenic patients. Four weeks later, there was a marked reduction in schizophrenic symptoms such as hallucinations. When wheat was returned to the diet, the symptoms likewise re-emerged. Other instances of improvement or even cures of schizophrenia exist in the scientific literature, such as a study published in 2003 that explored the possible connection between celiac disease and schizophrenia. (Huebner et al)

Obviously, not everyone who eats wheat succumbs to schizophrenia. However, it does mean that wheat can tweak your brain as well as your body. A Danish study of 55 autistic children showed marked improvement in autistic behaviors with the elimination of wheat gluten and casein from milk products. Wheat is not suspected as the cause, but it apparently worsens conditions in people with schizophrenia, autism and celiac disease.

So what does wheat do to the psyche of a normal, healthy individual? There don’t appear to be any studies of this (at least none that we could find, which is not the same thing). Dr. Davis says that the endorphin-like polypeptides set up a reward response; eat wheat, and your brain feels good. Your subconscious likes that, so it tells you to eat more wheat. In a study done at the Psychiatric Institute of North Carolina, wheat-eating subjects were given an opiate blocker, naloxone. These subjects consumed approximately 400 fewer calories over the course of lunch and dinner than the control group. Can you envision what 400 fewer calories a day might do for your waistline? Further, when wheat is withdrawn, many people feel strong cravings for bread, crackers, and other wheat-containing foods, so there is such a thing as “wheat withdrawal” for some.

So in effect, wheat acts like a little devil on one shoulder, urging you to eat more, while the little angel of your better self gets knocked off his perch.

This entire topic again illustrates how our physical and mental selves are inextricably interconnected; you can’t tinker with one without affecting the other just as strongly. As we have mentioned before in this blog (see “Five Things You Didn’t Know About Losing Weight”), purely mental stress can cause you to gain and retain weight through the action of cortisol and other stress hormones. Reducing stress should be an essential component of a weight-loss effort—and apparently, so is losing the wheat.

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Addendum: The Wall Street Journaljust published an article on the dangers of gluten in schools. Act fast, because this URL expires in a few days: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10000872396390444840104577549350524941964-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNjAwODY3Wj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email

Feeling stressed? Download SweetBeat™, the iPhone stress management app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sweetbeat/id492588712?mt=8

 

 

 

Wheat: The New Strychnine?

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Everyone seems to be giving up gluten these days (and bragging about it). But we’ve been eating it for thousands of years, right? Good, whole-grain wheat is supposed to be healthy, and the government wants us to eat more of it.

Wheat sensitivities run the gamut from low-level inflammation that we don’t even notice to celiac disease, which is fatal if the sufferer does not give up eating gluten. I have friends and acquaintances who have given up wheat and lost weight effortlessly without changing anything else they are doing. They also report the disappearance of joint pain, skin rashes, muscular pain, diarrhea, and more.

Dr. William Davis, MD, author of “Wheat Belly,” makes the case that the wheat we eat today bears little resemblance to the wheat our ancestors consumed. He says that modern wheat contains the complete genomes of three different but related plants, and contains complex proteins (gluten is a protein) that ancestral varieties did not. Our gut has not evolved as quickly as wheat has due to modern genetic engineering. Also, modern wheat—uniquely among foods—has the ability to pass the blood-brain barrier, and thus can tinker with bodily mechanism and brain function in a way no other food can.

Dr. Davis cites many different studies to provide evidence that his assertions are valid. He also notes that the rise of obesity in America tracks precisely the advent of genetic modification of the wheat genome. (He doesn’t mention this, but it also precisely tracks the widespread introduction of high-fructose corn syrup that has become so ubiquitous in processed food since the 1970s.) Modern wheat, developed by Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace prize for his work on wheat, was crafted with the best of intentions in mind: alleviation of world hunger. It is a high-yield, short-growing-season dwarf wheat, and it has in fact done much toward alleviating world hunger. Apparently, it’s also making us sick.

The good doctor performed an experiment on himself to test his assertion about the pernicious effect of modern wheat versus ancestral wheat. He is highly wheat-sensitive himself. Somewhere, he managed to obtain two pounds of einkorn, probably the first form of cultivated wheat. He also obtained two pounds of modern wheat. He ground these two grains himself and made bread, using only flour, water, salt and yeast. He tried the einkorn bread. It was denser than modern bread, and had a rich, nutty flavor. He had no reaction at all. He tried the modern wheat bread—and was ill for 36 hours, nauseated and unable to focus.

Being a scientist, he also did blood tests before and after eating the breads. His blood sugar before eating either bread was 84 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl). After eating the einkorn bread, his blood sugar was 110 mg/dl. After eating the modern wheat bread, it was 167 mg/dl. He points out that one slice of whole wheat bread will raise blood sugar significantly higher than a Snickers bar.

High blood sugar, as we all know, leads to insulin resistance, which leads to gaining weight and may eventually cause diabetes. According to Dr. Davis, we’ve been virtuously munching away on something that is making us very ill.

“Wheat Belly” is an interesting book, well written, credible, and even entertaining. It is probably an exaggeration to claim that wheat is solely responsible for everything from joint pain to schizophrenia, however. There are certainly other trends in modern life (can we blame computers?) that contribute to the surge in obesity. But if even part of what Dr. Davis claims is true (and he does have the facts and figures), giving up wheat may be part of a sensible weight-loss and weight-loss-maintenance plan—along with exercise, portion control and common sense. There are other grains that don’t present the same problems, including quinoa, sorghum, buckwheat, millet, and oats (especially oats harvested in the British Isles, where it is less likely to be contaminated by coming into contact with machinery that is also used to process wheat).

Don’t forget that other food sensitivities can play a role in weight by causing low-level inflammation that spurs fat storage and the growth of fat cells. Stress can have the same effect, so stress management is another critical aspect of successful weight loss.

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Download SweetBeat™, the iPhone stress management app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sweetbeat/id492588712?mt=8

 

 

Eustress, or YOU Stress?

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You may have heard that stress is good for you. Or you may have heard that stress is bad for you. Confusing? That’s because not all stress is equal. Hans Selye, who was one of the first researchers to focus on stress, coined the term “eustress” to refer to stress that gives you a feeling of fulfillment, success, or other positive feelings. An example of eustress is the stress you feel when competing in a contest for which you are well prepared, or when you are engaged in a challenging job that you enjoy.

Eustress enhances your functioning and is good for you because it makes you feel more alive, interested, and engaged with life.

Distress is the bad kind of stress. It can either be acute (you encounter a hostile dog that chases you) or chronic. Acute stress is the normal and helpful reaction of the body to a threat, when the body releases adrenalin and cortisol into the system, helping you to react more rapidly, run faster, and think faster. While it may leave you feeling shaken, you needed that extra oompf to escape the threat.

Chronic stress is the kind of stress imposed by modern life. The body actually doesn’t know the difference between a rabid dog and a difficult boss; any threat will cause the body to release stress hormones, and the body will react accordingly with elevated blood pressure, accelerated heart rate, and other symptoms of stress. The problem is that when a person is chronically stressed, it can cause a lot of health problems.

Selye mentions that chronic stress leads to anxiety, withdrawal and depression, but there is as much or more physical damage caused by chronic stress as psychological damage. Many respected medical institutions, including Stanford University Medical Schools, the National Institutes of Health and Mayo Clinic, estimate that as much as 90% of preventable disease is caused by stress.

This is because those stress hormones—so helpful when we are confronted by real danger—can cause damage to our tissues when they are always present in our systems. They can cause:

  • High blood pressure
  • Head and muscle aches
  • Immune system impairment
  • Asthma
  • Heart attacks
  • Breathing dysfunction
  • Constricted arteries, high cholesterol
  • Stroke
  • Weight gain
  • Digestive issues such as ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Accelerated aging

And these are just some of the physical issues created by chronic stress. Clearly, the less chronic stress we feel and the more time we spend in eustress, the better off we are.

If you are aware you are chronically stressed, then you can take steps to do something about it. But many people accept a state of chronic stress as normal. That’s the way they always feel, so they cannot recognize or accept they are in a state of continual stress. Most people are not going to proactively address a problem they think they don’t have.

So how do you determine whether or not you’re stressed? Consider whether you experience any of the physical issues mentioned above. Do you have a lot of indigestion? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you find it impossible to lose weight, even though you eat carefully and exercise? Do you have high cholesterol or high blood pressure? These conditions may indicate chronic stress, especially if you find you have a lot of these issues.

You can also detect stress through heart rate variability, or HRV. HRV is the variation in the time interval between one heartbeat and the next.

When we think of our heart rate, we generally think of a number between 60 and 90 beats per minute. This number represents the range for the average heart rate. In fact, your heart rate changes from beat to beat. When you inhale your heart rate speeds up and when you exhale it slows down. So rather than referring to a fixed pulse of, say, 60, the heart rate will actually vary between, say, 55 and 65. HRV is a measure of this naturally occurring irregularity in the heart rate. Nearly a quarter-century of clinical research has shown that when HRV levels are high, a person experiences low levels of stress and greater resiliency. When HRV levels are low, this is an indication of greater stress and lower resiliency.

General practitioners and internists are generally not set up to measure HRV, even though it’s been studied for about 30 years and is an accepted vital sign. You can measure your own HRV using a commercially-available heart monitor such as Wahoo or 60-Beat and an app like SweetBeat™ for the iPhone, which was designed specifically to monitor stress levels using HRV.

Regardless of how you choose to detect stress, it is critical to lower stress levels in pursuit of better health. The good news is that there are many simple and inexpensive ways to reduce stress, including deep breathing, meditation, nutrition, exercise, yoga, and much more. Do the things that help you to experience eustress, and avoid the things that cause you distress. A simple concept, but one that may bolster your health and prolong your life.

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Do you wonder whether you are experiencing chronic stress? Download SweetBeat™, the iPhone stress management app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sweetbeat/id492588712?mt=8

 

Maybe, Baby, It’s Those Baby Steps That Work!

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Some of us at SweetWater Health recently attended the 2012 Mobile Health Conference on the Stanford University campus. The theme was “Baby Steps.” The conference was oriented to mHealth entrepreneurs, but what the speakers had to say about baby steps really applies to any human being seeking to make changes in his or her life—especially those really difficult changes, like trying to lose weight or live a healthier lifestyle.

Part of the message was that behaviors are hard to change. They’re even harder when we take on a whole raft of changes at once, which is what we usually do when we’re trying to lose weight. Here’s a sample of what many of us try to do all at once:

  • Give up anything with sugar in it
  • Reduce fat in our diet
  • Eat more fruits and vegetables
  • Cut down on or give up red meat
  • Give up or cut down on bread, cereals, rice, pasta, etc.
  • Eat smaller portions
  • Exercise for an hour a day
  • Always take the stairs instead of the elevator
  • Attend some sort of weight-loss meeting every week
  • Journal what we eat/count points/count calories or carbs every day
  • Walk at least 10,000 steps a day (in addition to exercising)
  • Some diets demand things like eating only cabbage soup, drinking a supplement twice a day instead of eating, eating only prepackaged meals, or following a complicated diet regimen based on blood type—an endless array of exotic and difficult behavior changes.

That’s a HUGE number of changes for most people! Somehow, we think we can squeeze all this in to our routine day, which includes taking care of our families, working, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Talk about feeling stressed. And the results are predictable; we blow another weight-loss effort and feel guilty. (More stress. And if you’ve been following this blog, you know stress can make you gain and retain weight.)

The underlying message was that it’s easier to change behaviors if you just take baby steps, and when something doesn’t work, don’t keep trying to make it work; try a different baby step instead.

Not everyone can walk every day, for instance. So walk when you can, and on the days when you can’t, just try to get in 10,000 steps. If you always forget your pedometer, go up and down the stairs a few times; tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara famously remarked, is another day.

Another thing we tend to do is beat ourselves up if we eat something not on the “approved” list. Because we’re feeling bad anyway, we figure what the heck, in for a dime in, for a dollar, and throw the rest of the Oreos down the hatch after the first guilty cookie. Although the experts tell us truthfully that it’s better not to have temptations around the house in the first place, circumstances aren’t always ideal, and some of us have spouses and children who don’t share our issues. Look, it was just a cookie, it’s not like you stole a car. Enjoy that one cookie to the absolute maximum, and go do something else—like take a walk.

You wouldn’t begin training for a marathon by running 26 miles and 385 yards the first day. Add a step, do something else if it doesn’t work, and cut yourself some slack if you slip up. Eventually, all those baby steps add up to real progress in behavioral change.

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 As we’ve mentioned before, stress is a major cause of illness—responsible for up to 90% of preventable disease, according to medical institutions like Stanford University Medical Center and Mayo Clinic. And as mentioned previously, stress can actually cause weight gain and retention, even when eating habits don’t change. One baby step you can take to reduce stress is SweetBeat™, the stress management iPhone app from SweetWater Health. Learn more about SweetBeat on our website, http://www.beathealthy.com. You can read the app description and download SweetBeat here.

What Swedish Chickens Tell Us About DNA

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For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that our DNA is fixed; whatever genetic characteristics we were born with are the traits that will characterize us throughout our lives. While DNA changes do occur, we have thought that they occur only very slowly—over millions of years, like the evolutionary changes that enabled small-brained primitive primates to develop into homo sapiens. This means if we were born with the genes that predispose us to heart attack or obesity, we are doomed to be fat and short-lived.

Not true. Or rather, it is true that the DNA we were born with doesn’t change, but it turns out that DNA isn’t the whole story. A new field called epigenetics has shown that lifestyle and conditions you are exposed to in life can change how your DNA is expressed—and those changes can sometimes be inherited by your offspring.

Epigenetics refers to heritable changes in the “wrapper” of proteins that surround the DNA. It does take many generations for the genome to change, but the epigenome can be changed by the addition or subtraction of a methyl group. A good analogy is that DNA, or the genome, is the hardware (hard to change) and the epigenome is the software (easy to change).

A methyl group is one carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms. When a methyl group attaches to a specific spot on a gene, it can change how the gene is expressed; it can dampen the gene’s effect or turn it off–or it can turn a gene on or boost its effect. This process is called DNA methylation.

So where do the Swedish chickens come in? In 2007, researchers at the University of Linköping in Sweden created the henhouse from hell, designed to stress the chickens that lived in it. The experimenters manipulated the lighting, causing the chickens to lose track of when to sleep, when to eat, and so forth. The discombolulated birds demonstrated a significant decrease in their ability to negotiate their way through a maze to find food.

When the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, they conceived and hatched chicks that also demonstrated poor skills at finding food in a maze—even though they had never been stressed. The research went on to demonstrate that the mothers’ exposure to stress had resulted in a gene expression that the chicks inherited.

The chicken experiment is only one of many animal studies that have proved the validity of epigenetic theory. Another study, this time focusing on human beings (coincidentally, Swedish humans), also proves the point. In the 1980s, a preventive health specialist, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, studied the effects of feast and famine years during the 19th Century in a remote population of people living in northern Sweden. He wanted to see if there were long-term effects, not just on the people who had experienced the feast or famine years, but also on their children and grandchildren.

Bygren discovered that people who had gone from normal eating to over-eating during the times of overproduction produced children and grandchildren who lived significantly shorter lives than those whose progenitors had endured famines.

So what does this all mean to us on a day-to-day basis? Epigenetics is a new science, and while the human genome has been mapped, the human epigenome has not yet been fully deciphered. We don’t really know enough to be able to say, “Do this” and “Don’t do that.” But we do know—thanks to the Swedish chickens and people—that stress and nutrition play major roles in epigenetics.

The best we can do with this new knowledge is actually old wisdom:

  • Eat a wide variety of fresh foods and stay away from highly processed foods such as sugar to assure getting enough vitamins and minerals, and also to avoid additives (whether or not additives can influence epigenetics is not known)
  • Don’t eat too much
  • Get plenty of sleep
  • Reduce stress as much as possible

The last point—stress reduction—has a previously unrealized link to weight loss. As we mentioned last week, researchers have discovered that dieting—especially crash dieting—can inhibit weight loss or even cause weight gain. This is because the stress created by dieting triggers the body to produce cortisol. Cortisol is the “fight or flight” hormone, and it can inhibit weight loss in a variety of ways—especially in an individual who is chronically stressed (and may not even be aware of it because “stressed out” feels normal). Cortisol floods the body with glucose, delivering a quick jolt of energy to the large muscles needed for flight. At the same time, cortisol suppresses insulin to prevent glucose from being stored, as the body under stress needs to use that energy immediately. (Remember, all these mechanisms evolved when a threat meant more than being a few pounds overweight; it meant becoming someone’s dinner.)

Elevated cortisol levels can retrieve triglycerides from storage and relocate them to visceral fat cells (those that lie under the muscles deep in the abdomen), causing the fat cells to grow. Cortisol can also stimulate appetite and craving for high-calorie foods. This is because the body’s logic tells it that if you are under threat, you need to keep the calories coming.

So reducing stress can have a positive effect on weight loss, especially if you follow a reasonable regimen aimed at losing weight gradually over a long period of time. Weight lost quickly via crash diets merely triggers the body’s cortisol mechanisms, resulting in the yo-yo weight loss/weight gain cycle we all know so well.

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Tired of being stressed? Download SweetBeat™, the iPhone stress management app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sweetbeat/id492588712?mt=8

 

 

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Losing Weight

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We have been told for decades that losing weight was simple: eat fewer calories and exercise more so that you burn more calories than you consume.

Right.

If losing weight (and keeping it off) was simple, don’t you think that we would all be slender? But those of us who have struggled with weight loss, those of us who have lost weight only to put it all back on again—sometimes with interest—have long suspected that weight loss and sustaining healthy weight is not so simple as we have been led to believe.

Recent research has shown that there is indeed more than meets the eye when it comes to losing weight. Here are a few of those recent findings:

1. The Role of Stress. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that stressed-out mice that had a history of quick weight loss due to dieting (imposed by the researchers, not by the mice) ate more high-fat foods than stressed mice that had not been made to diet. The study found that the stressed dieters had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone, and were more likely to exhibit “depressive” behavior than their non-dieting brethren. Even after the dieting mice were allowed to eat as much as they desired and had returned to normal weights, the changes in their brains respond to stress persisted.

Lesson Learned: while this study has not yet been tried on human subjects, it indicates there may be a link between quick weight-loss diets and a permanent change in the way the brain responds to stress. This may explain why so many people become “yo-yo” dieters, losing and gaining weight over and over again.

2.  Weight Loss Reduces Risk of Cancer. Moderate weight loss can reduce levels of inflammation that have been linked to the development of certain cancers, according to a study published in the May 1, 2012 issue of Cancer Research. The study was done on a group of post-menopausal women whose goal was to lose 10% of their body weight. During the one-year study, cancer-reactive protein levels dropped by about 36% in the women who only dieted, and about 42% in women who dieted and exercised. The researchers said that obesity drives inflammation, and inflammation drives the development of cancers, particularly cancers of the breast, lung, colon, and endometrial cancer.

Lesson Learned: Even modest weight loss will reduce the risk of some common cancers. Diet and exercise combined are the most effective ways to lose weight.

3.     Not All Calories Are Equal. A 2011 study at Harvard University showed that calories from potatoes (especially French fries, of course), red meat, and soda will cause more weight gain than the same number of calories consumed by eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, poultry or fish. The study followed 120,000 non-obese, healthy Americans for up to 20 years.

Lesson Learned: It’s not just how much you eat—it’s also what you eat. Potatoes, sugary drinks, red meats, and refined carbohydrates (such as sugar, corn syrup, and white flour) will put on more poundage than fish, fowl, fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

4.     Sleeping Helps Lose—or Gain—Weight. The same study from Harvard found that study participants who slept less than six hours or more than eight hours a night gained more weight during each study period than those sleeping around seven hours a night. According to Michael Breus, PhD, author of “Beauty Sleep,” sleep deprivation increases levels of the hormone ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, and reduces levels of leptin, which tells us when to stop eating.

Lesson Learned: Aim at getting about 7.5 hours of sleep a night to avoid creeping weight gain.

5.     You Can Predict When Willpower Is Low. Every dieter has experienced this scenario: You are invited to a party where you know there will be lots of yummy and fattening food. You talk to yourself firmly about sticking to the vegetable crudités. But when you get there, the food is so beautiful and delicious-looking, and all home-made, too—and you wind up eating your day’s allowance of points or calories long before it’s time to go home.

How do you know when your willpower is going to let you down? If you monitor your heart rate variability (HRV), you can predict when your willpower is strong—or weak. When HRV levels are high, so is your will to resist. When HRV is low, your willpower will be low, as well. So if you monitor your willpower before that party and see it’s down in the dumps, you can give it a helping hand. You could eat before you go to the party, for instance. Or you could decide to stay home and avoid temptation altogether. HRV can be measured easily at home or on the go with SweetBeat™, an iPhone app, plus a compatible heart monitor (widely available in sporting goods stores or at http://sweetwaterhrv.com/store.html).

Lesson Learned: Willpower and HRV are tightly coupled. When HRV is low, don’t put yourself in a position where you know you will be tempted to go off the diet. The more we learn about weight loss, the more likely it is that we will be successful at it. Losing weight is hard; make it a little easier by using real data to give yourself a break.