Pester power of kids driving junk food??

Could the "pester power" of kids be a significant factor behind junk food consumption? Are time poor parents simply caving in to the demands of kids too often?

Kids drive 97% of cereal purchase.

And where are these kids learning to "want" junk food? 

Marketing to kids is huge business - "pester power" is well documented as a sales tactic, and websites like this one show the statistics from studies into how powerful kids can be when it comes to influencing a purchase.

For example it's no surprise that 98% of the time kids have an influence on which restaurant is chosen when the family eats out. Advertisers that succeed in winning over kids can generate a massive amount of money.

And it's not just TV advertising - marketing of junk to kids on the web has now become even more invasive.

This study monitored the food advertising on four popular children's websites for a period of one year. Here is a summary of what they found:

• A total of 3.4 billion food advertisements appeared on the four websites over the one year period.
• Breakfast cereals and fast food were advertised most often (64% of ads).
• 84% advertised products that were high in fat, sugar and/or sodium (salt).
• Most ads (74%) promoted brands approved by companies for child-directed advertising.
• Even the "healthy" food choices featured in ads were unlikely to meet independent nutrition standards.

So what can we learn from this? I guess two things come to mind:

1. Adults need to talk with kids about healthy food choices, and educate them. We don't want our kids to be "food obsessed" but we also don't want our kids learning about healthy eating from advertisements.
2. Next time the government or regulators talk about putting rules in place to reduce junk food advertising directed at kids, you might consider supporting it.

Reference:

Ustjanauskas, A. E., Harris, J. L. and Schwartz, M. B. (2014), Food and beverage advertising on children's web sites. Pediatric Obesity, 9: 362–372. doi: 10.1111/j.2047-6310.2013.00185.x

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/design-dog/9730712923
Photo stream: https://www.flickr.com/photos/design-dog/

Top 6 reasons for unhealthy snacking

Keeping clients on track with healthy eating can be incredibly challenging, but it helps if you can "get inside the head" of the client and understand the triggers behind unhealthy snacking.

If you can understand the trigger, it's possible to offer the client a strategy or a mindset that might help them overcome unhealthy habits and adhere to healthier eating. Remember that small changes add up over time and snacking in between meals is often a stack of calories added to the daily intake.

A recent study identified the top six reasons for unhealthy snacking:

1. To enjoy a special occasion - Let's celebrate by eating a massive meal and a bottle of wine!

2. Opportunity induced eating - Someone puts a plate full of donuts in front of you at morning tea.

3. To gain energy - I feel flat, somebody give me a candy bar!

4. To reward oneself - I've eaten healthy all week, let's celebrate at KFC!

5. Because of social pressure - It's a BBQ, everyone else is drinking beer so perhaps I should have a few.

6. To cope with negative emotions - I'm feeling a bit down, a family size bar of chocolate will make me feel better. 

As a personal trainer, being able to offer clients different ways to deal with each of the above situations will help them avoid the trap of unhealthy snacking.

Graphic sourced from www.suppversity.com.

Reference:

Verhoeven, Aukje AC, et al. "It's my party and I eat if I want to. Reasons for unhealthy snacking." Appetite (2014).

Brazil creates epic guidelines for healthy eating

In Australia, despite the obesity epidemic our Government can't even agree on simple rules for food labels because powerful food industry groups seem to control the rules. 

The food industry does things like donating large sums of money to political parties to ensure they get a seat at the table when our healthy eating guidelines are drawn up. Did you know the food & beverage industry donates about the same amount of money as the mining industry?

The Fast Food industry was locked out.

Recently I became very interested in eating guidelines out of Brazil - you can view a full summary of the ten guidelines here, but what really spiked my interest was that these guidelines were designed by food, nutrition & health experts whilst the food industry (and commercial interests) were deliberately locked out of the room.

This is big news, and I've never heard of it happening anywhere else in the world. The guidelines contained the usual great advice to eat fresh foods, reduce fats, salt and sugars... 

But what I was really impressed with was a number of eating guidelines we have never seen before from a government body, several of them aimed at the social and emotional aspect of eating. Two great examples included:

#5 - Eat in company whenever possible.
#6 - Develop, practice, share & enjoy your skills in food preparation and cooking.

Do you enjoy preparing food?

It's really interesting to see people being encouraged to enjoy the process of cooking and sharing real food, instead of being told simply what to eat (or what not to eat). 

I think these guidelines might help people eat less fast food on the fly, less rushed eating, less gulping of soda, and more planning of healthy foods. All of these things are likely to reduce consumption of empty calories and promote healthier, happier eating.

Of course, commercial interests (like the fast food lobby) do not want you to stay at home and enjoy preparing fresh whole foods with your loved ones... They want you in the drive-through ordering a burger with large fries & a massive Coca Cola to wash it all down.

Another two eating guidelines from Brazil that I have never seen before:
#9 - Avoid fast food chains.
#10 - Be critical of the commercial advertisement of food products.

Probably two of the best eating guidelines I've ever seen, but sadly we will never see guidelines like this in Australia as long as the food industry gets a seat at the table when guidelines like these are designed. 

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Image acknowledgements from Flickr Creative Commons: 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/snekse/2501155494 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/esotericsean/2186109381

Should my Clients be Eating Carbs?

It's no surprise that people constantly ask questions about carbohydrate based foods, even qualified professionals who have studied nutrition are sometimes unsure about carbs.

This week's blog is going to focus on simple advice on carbs for clients wanting fat loss. Of course, any client of mine will be exercising so we need to make sure we give sensible advice to fuel exercise & not just try and starve our clients by cutting out every food that contains calories.

OK so first a disclaimer: I'm not a nutritionist and Personal Trainers should not be giving detailed dietary plans to clients. Send them to a dietician or nutritionist for that sort of support - I just want to help you give some common sense advice to clients, nothing more & nothing less.

Energy for Exercise: Before we jump into talking about foods, a quick lesson about how muscles primarily burn carbs for energy during exercise... When you eat carbs, it gets taken into the blood as glucose and then stored in the muscles as "muscle glycogen". Muscle glycogen is an essential fuel for exercise, whether the exercise is aerobic or anaerobic.
Your body can convert proteins to glycogen, but because your body relies on protein to rebuild muscle tissue after a workout you might then run short of what you need to rebuild the body. Converting protein to glycogen also stresses the kidneys because they have to work harder to eliminate some nasty by-products from the process.
So... It makes sense to eat at least some carbs (we can argue about how much another day) to keep glycogen stored in the muscles and fuel our workouts.

Good carbs, bad carbs... Evil carbs... I'm going to provide a list of carbs that I would personally recommend all clients avoid, as well as a list of carbs that I would strongly recommend to clients.
Essentially, anything that has been highly processed is on the banned list. I'll explain what this means and give you plenty of examples because I think this causes confusion sometimes - which foods are the processed ones?

Processed carbs will make you fat: Here is a pic of your typical grain. Once it gets mulched up by a big machine it loses most of it's bran & is turned into a fluffy breakfast cereal like 'Puffed Wheat' it has about 2g of fibre in one bowl. In an unprocessed breakfast cereal like 'Wheat Bran' we get over 26g of fibre -12 times more!
So why is Puffed Wheat evil? Well there are many reasons - firstly, fibre in has been proven to reduce the risk of digestive diseases and improve digestive health. Secondly, the unprocessed Wheat Bran actually requires you to chew. Chewing makes the meal take longer, slows down your eating and allows your body to recognise when it feels full sooner rather than just gulp down too much gluggy crap. So, you end up eating less. Thirdly (and probably most importantly) the highly processed Puffed Wheat gets digested & absorbed way faster than the unprocessed bran. It floods your blood with a massive glucose spike, which leads to a big glucose crash and you will be starving hungry within an hour or so. The glucose spike also causes a massive insulin spike & this increases your risk of type 2 diabetes but that's a topic for another blog.

Unprocessed carbs are pure joy for fat loss: In my previous blog I provided a link to a research paper citing 101 scientific studies indicating that eating whole grains helps prevent a whole range of potential diseases & ill health. It's pretty clear that Puffed Wheat doesn't contain a whole grain and this is where it gets difficult for clients to identify healthy carbs - it says "wheat" on the packet right? And the TV advertisement tells me I will be transformed into an Iron Man so I reckon it's gotta be good... Right?

Yeah, right. There are only two ways you can identify a good carb - well actually three because I'll link you to my own list of good carbs and evil carbs that you can use but it's not going to cover every food at the local supermarket so you will have to either:

1. Learn to read food labels and look for (primarily) fibre content. Compare labels and brands to learn which breads or cereals are lower, and which are higher. If it's higher in fibre it usually contains more whole grains - unless of course it's that fibre enriched white bread (avoid!).
2. Simply eyeball the foods. In breakfast cereals or breads, if it is whole grain you will see the grains. One example is Muesli - check out the whole grains in the bag! Of course you still need to read the label because some Muesli's are high in fat, so for calorie control you will want to choose a brand with less fat.

But what if I eat too many unprocessed carbs??? Let me be clear - overeating is bad for fat loss no matter what the food. However, if you eliminate processed carbs & adopt an "unprocessed only" approach, it is difficult to overeat.
This is because of the chewing factor (already mentioned), and also the fact that unprocessed carbs are usually very low on the GI (Wheat Bran is 30) compared to processed versions (Puffed Wheat is 80). Unprocessed foods take much longer (I'm talking hours) to digest so you aren't going to be hungry for quite some time after eating.
Healthy eating guidelines suggest at least three serves per day, so that's what I'm going to recommend. Just remember to choose good carbs, not no carbs.

So, check out my list of evil carbs which should be on the "avoid" list for anyone wanting fat loss, plus a bunch of replacement foods that you could recommend to clients. There are lots of carbs (good and evil) that are not on my list, you will need to make your own mind up about them.

Download the full list here

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Debunking the Paleo Diet - fact versus fiction

The Paleo Diet is one of the more recent diet approaches to take hold in the fitness industry... This diet is based on the notion that we should essentially be eating like cave-men and that this will somehow transform us into lean & mean hunter-gatherers that are immune from lifestyle diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. There doesn't appear to be any scientific proof or any long term studies to prove it, but it certainly sounds like a good story... Right?

For me personally, this is just another hard-sell from some diet gurus wanting me (and you) to buy their book. Why not the cabbage soup, liver-cleansing, vegetarian, vegan, south beach, Mediterranean, Dukan, detox, or Jenny Craig diet? Or if you prefer take your pick from this list - the diet game is a multi-billion dollar business with plenty of overweight people looking for a magic solution. You only have to find a million suckers worldwide to buy your book on the internet, and even if you are only making $5 per book... I'll let you do the maths.

The Paleo diet is being marketed hard to young fitness professionals and it's time to take a closer look at the science behind it. The fitness industry has a rich history of diets, supplements and fad equipment claiming to be the "best ever" or "cutting edge". It's important to be very critical of these things - you wouldn't rush out and buy the latest ab-swing promising a rock hard six-pack in three minutes would you? So why swallow the latest diet hype without first questioning it and considering alternatives?

I will link you to some scientific research as well as eating guidelines from a range of reliable sources which will debunk certain aspects of the Paleo diet, especially the "grains are unhealthy" message promoted by Paleo authors. I would also like to take a closer look at a couple of the leading Paleo authors - Mark Sisson and Dr Lauren Cordain. Who are these people and should we be taking their dietary advice?

A history lesson: The Paleolithic era (the stone age) spanned 2.6 million years and ended about 12,000 years ago. There was plenty of human evolution over that period and although some archaeological digs have revealed hard evidence of what Paleo man was eating up to 40,000 years ago, very little is known about the 2.6 million years that came before. Expert anthropologists can not agree on the true contents of the Paleolithic diet... We simply don't know exactly what they ate, or how much they ate. This is the first thing that bothers me about the Paleo Diet - it's cleverly branded and it's a nice story but if anthropologists don't know what Paleo man actually ate how can Mark Sisson & Lauren Cordain write books about it? Neither of these guys are qualified anthropologists by the way and neither of them hold qualifications in nutrition either but that's another story.

What the Paleo diet books don't tell you: Because the leading Paleo authors are not anthropologists and they don't like the facts to get in the way of a good story... They kinda forgot to tell us that Paleolithic man actually ate grains! In fact Paleo man had also developed the tools to grind grain, possibly to produce flour and than bake dough in a hearth (old school oven) - this was the beginning of bread-making and has been dated back about 30,000 years. Paleo man also ate legumes which again are banned in the Paleo diet. Each of these links proves that the modern "Paleo Diet" actually bans foods that were commonly eaten in Paleolithic times... Is anyone else out there feeling confused?

OK so now let's discuss grains... As my previous link shows, Paleo authors are telling us to avoid grains, despite current scientific evidence showing that whole grains play an important role in reducing the risk of diseases such as coronary heart disease (CHD), diabetes, cancer and assist in weight management and gastrointestinal health. I could link you to literally thousands of research based articles on this topic but let's start with this one - published in 2011 it is a review of numerous studies and cites 101 studies that prove the importance of grains in preventing disease. You could also visit a short version of this one showing that grains reduce CHD or this one showing that grains reduce type 2 diabetes. If your clients could eat a food that is proven to prevent numerous diseases, why would you ever tell them to avoid that food? I call it crazy, Mark Sisson calls it the 'Paleo Blueprint'.

Not only has science proven the health benefits of grains, but pretty much every elite athletic organisation also promotes eating grains for improved performance. Organisations like the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) and the NCAA are telling athletes to eat more whole grains. Organisations like the diabetes council and the Digestive Health Association are saying the same thing... All these highly reputable organisations are telling us to eat more whole grains - why would we take advice from Lauren Cordain and Mark Sisson when it goes against the best advice from such highly regarded sources? 

In Summary: I'm not a fan of diets overall. I'm a fan of trainers and clients using realistic healthy eating guidelines and making sensible choices about their food every day. You don't need to pay someone else for a nutritional silver bullet - you just need to educate yourself and use a large dose of common sense when it comes to nutrition.
All the information you need to educate yourself and your clients is available free on the web, but you sometimes have to be prepared to go beyond a simple Google search to find it. 
Nutrition is a minefield and I'm sure there are many people out there who disagree with my views, but remember these aren't simply my views - visit the links and do some reading for yourself before you make up your mind.

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Get toned & ripped - Breakfast nutrition

How do you turn the body into a fat-burning machine? Start with exercise, sure - but if you are feeding the machine a bunch of crappy foods high in fats or just too many calories, you will never get ripped because the energy balance is all wrong.

As a PT, you should be spending lots of time talking to clients about eating habits, ask them to keep food diaries for a few days at a time to get an accurate idea of what they are consuming. Lots of people skip breakfast - leaving their metabolism stuck in the mud all morning. Others eat cereals filled with sugar or toast with big chunks of butter on top... Ouch.

Changing client eating habits is incredibly challenging - it takes more than talk. You need to support clients with any strategy that might help kick them along. Try taking pics of foods with a mobile phone & SMS them to clients - gently suggest they pick it up next time they are shopping.

So... what does a fat-burning machine eat for breakfast? We want something with carbs for energy, we want fibre for intestinal health, and we want something slow to digest - it needs to be low GI so it gives slow release energy and the client is not going to feel full for a few hours.

I highly recommend you simply eyeball some breakfast cereals and pick one with unprocessed whole grains. Many "whole grain" cereals are processed into flakes or shapes - pick a cereal which actually has the original grain in it's unprocessed form. Lots of muesli brands have whole grains but beware you need to read the label of your muesli and avoid the brands that are high in fat.

OK... Once you've picked your whole grain cereal, walk to the health food aisle and buy a packet of psyllium husk. This is an ultra-high fibre supplement with wide ranging health (and fat-loss) benefits, if you've never heard of it check out this link and start reading. Adding fibre to your breakfast "bulks up" the meal (you tend to eat less calories) and it also slows down digestion, which leaves you feeling fuller for longer after you eat.

It will take some hunting around to find a whole grain breakfast cereal that has everything you want, tastes OK and is also affordable. My experience tells me that many of them taste like cardboard and some can be very expensive so you will need to experiment yourself with different products and you can then give advice to clients based on your own experience & with confidence.

Once you've chosen your cereal, you can add a table spoon of psyllium husk to the mix. Beware psyllium can have a laxative effect so perhaps start with a small amount & gradually increase as your body gets used to this massive fibre dose at breakfast. Psyllium as linked to all sorts of health benefits so it's well worth a try, stick with it for a few weeks and see how it makes you feel.