For many people, National Food Day - Dr. Weed



Article for the October 15, 2015 edition of the Herald News Living Well section

Food Day in Fall River

For many people, National Food Day, coming up on October 24th, is just another day, but in Fall River it’s a day to focus on its four key provisions: 1) reducing diet related disease by promoting healthy foods, 2) supporting local farms, 3) expanding access to food and alleviating hunger, and 4) curbing junk food marketing to kids. While supporting local farms, expanding access, and alleviating hunger are clearly things Partners for a Healthier Community, the local health promotion organization, works on, it’s the first and last goals that have really captured our attention over the past year.

Partners began twelve years ago to look at how and what people in our city eat, and came up with the often-tried ideas of adding farmers’ markets, identifying healthier restaurants that served low-fat and low-calorie meals, and listing corner stores where one could purchase low-fat milk and whole grain breads and cereals. We also started an aggressive campaign to inform people about the dangers of sugar-sweetened beverages like soda and fruit drinks. But our approach didn’t seem to be making a dent in obesity rates among many of our residents who followed our advice.

It wasn’t until the documentary, “FED UP”, came out last summer that we realized that our approach needed some serious tweaking. The movie follows a group of families who were largely following our dietary advice but were not making any progress in seeing their children lose weight. What producers Katie Couric and Laurie David told us through those stories was that much of our message was wrong. Reducing calories and dietary fats were supposed to help anyone with a weight problem, and exercise was supposed to be half of the equation for curing the obesity epidemic in our nation. But, like the children in the movie, our families weren’t having much success.

While our messages about the dangers of soda and fruit drinks were spot on, our messages about low fat diets and “energy balance” from exercise might have been making the problem worse. We learned that low-fat foods were actually loaded with added sugar to make up for the taste that fat gives whole, unprocessed foods. And, sugar wasn’t just in soda, it was in a lot of foods. Gary Taubes’ book, Why We Get Fat, helped us understand how all carbohydrates stimulate insulin, which is mostly responsible for weight gain. Then, later in the year, we read Nina Teicholz’s book, The Big Fat Surprise, and learned how the early Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s recommendations to lower dietary fat were actually based on faulty science and were a major element in fueling the growing obesity crisis in America.

In fact, one of the nation’s most revered childhood obesity researchers, Dr. David Ludwig, at Boston Children’s Hospital advocated for reducing dietary carbohydrates and not fats to help children and adolescents return to a normal weight. Now he and the Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, advocate for lifting the Dietary Guideline restriction on fats and focus instead on carbohydrates, especially sugars and refined grains, a significant component of the low-fat foods we were advocating. When the new Guidelines are issued this fall, they hope to see those recommendations reflected in the updated advice.

So, we used this information to correct our message and stop recommending limitations on fat. Our current Guide to Healthy Meetings and Events now suggests that people consume full-fat products like cheese, milk, yogurt, meats, eggs and salad dressings. We suggest instead that people minimize products with any added sugar as well as those made with refined grains and flours that used to be the base of the Food Pyramid. You might say that we turned the Food Pyramid upside down as we see fats a key component of a healthy diet, not something to be avoided.

And, what about our recommendations that everyone should exercise more in order to lower overweight and obesity? It turns out that we were wrong about that, too! The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has reported that people were exercising more than ever over the past ten years even as obesity rates have continued to go up. We have learned that, while exercise is good for a dozen reasons, in the long run, it does very little for weight loss.

The notion that one can consume high amounts of carbohydrates and simply “work it off” is one that is heavily supported by Coca-Cola’s Global Energy Balance Network that would like everyone to believe that poor diets can be “balanced” with sufficient amounts of exercise. So, now during our annual Greater Fall River Fitness Challenge, we tell people that they won’t see any significant weight loss unless they also make substantial changes in what they eat. A low-carb information and support group follows each weekly work-out, and our cooking demonstrations show people how they can switch to a low-carb lifestyle and lose weight without going hungry as they used to with low-fat, calorie-restricted diets.

Diabetic and overweight patients at the Southcoast Diabetes Management Program are already getting terrific results following a low-carb, high-fat approach. While it’s too soon to see measurable changes in overall obesity rates in our city with our new approach, we think we are now on the right track in advising our residents to stay away from low-fat products and diets and to incorporate healthy fats while limiting sugars and refined grains.

The full-length feature movie “Fed Up” with ABC’s Katie Couric will be shown to the public in the Government Center Hearing Room at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, October 23rd. This free event will be followed by a thirty-minute discussion on how current dietary recommendations are changing.

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Saturated fats found in meat and dairy products are no longer linked to heart disease while foods made with refined grains and sugars are.

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Vegetables like those sold at the Saint Anne’s Farmers’ Market are an essential ingredient in a healthy diet.

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Residential Services Coordinator Pam Anderson-Livingston at Ships’ Cove Apartments teaches cooking that includes healthy fats in her recipes.

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