Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock surprised audiences at the Sundance Film Festival with his film “Super Size Me,” about his 30 day diet of eating nothing but McDonald’s, in order to find out if American obesity is tied to fast foods. He gained 25 pounds on the diet and his liver began to fail.
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What you eat and drink can protect you from certain diseases and maybe even cure others. Eating a diet rich in antioxidants, which are present in foods like berries, tea and red wine, may help keep elderly brains healthy. Researcher P. Dwight Tapp says, “We found that old dogs that were on an antioxidant diet performed better on a variety of cognitive tests than dogs that were not on the diet. In fact, the dogs eating the antioxidant-fortified foods performed as well as young animals.”
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Every diet tells us to stay away from fast food, despite the fact that it contains some of the same ingredients that are supposed to be “good” for us. What is it about fast food that makes us fat? And why do some people become alcoholics, while others don?t?
The Medical Research Council says most fast food is high in fat and low in fiber, so it’s very dense in calories. In other words, you only need to eat a little in order to get a lot of calories, and since so much of it is “super sized,” we eat much more of it than we need.
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If, like Dagwood, you feel the urge to creep into the kitchen late at night for a snack, don’t worry, you’re not making yourself fat.
Dr. Judy Cameron carried out tests on 47 female monkeys and found no link between when they ate and whether or not they gained weight. She made the discovery by accident, while studying the relationship between female hormones and weight gain. Her team surgically removed ovaries from 19 of them, inducing instant menopause. She found that the monkeys who no longer had the female hormones estrogen and progesterone started to eat more and put on weight. She says, “The absence of these hormones resulted in a 67% jump in food intake and a 5% jump in weight in a matter of weeks.”
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