Still Counting Calories?
Part I
This is a copy of New York Times Article
Dated July 18, 2011
By Jane E. Brody
It's no secret that Americans are fatter today than ever before, and not just those unlucky people who are genetically inclined to gain weight or have been overweight all their lives. Many who are lean as young adults have put on lots
of unhealthy pounds as they pass through middle age and beyond.
It's no secret that the long-reommended advice to eat less and exercise more has done little to curb the inexorable
rise in weight. No one likes to feel deprived or leave the table hungry, and the notion that one generally must eat less to control body weight really doesn't cut it for the typical American.
So the newest findings on what specific foods people should eat less often---and more importantly, more often--to
keep from gaining pounds as they age should be of great interest to tens of millions of Americans.
The new research, by five nutrition and public health experts at Harvard University, is by far the most detailed long-term
analysis of the factors that influence weight gain, involving 120,877 well-educated men and women who were healthy
and not obese at the start of the study. In addition to diet, it has important things to say about exercise, sleep, watching television, smoking and alcohol intake.
The study participants--nurses, doctors, dentists and veterinarians in the Nurses' Health Study, Nurses Health Study II
and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study--were followed for 12 to 20 years. Every two years, they completed very detailed questionnaires about there eating habits and current weight. The fascinating results were published in June in
The New England Journal of Medicine.
The analysis examined how an array of factors influenced weight gain or loss during each four-year period of the study.
The average participant gained 3.35 pounds every four years, for a total weight gain of 16.8 pounds in 20 years.
"This study shows that conventional wisdom--eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods--
isn't the best approach," Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. "What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won't matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you're eating.
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and co author of the new analysis, said: "In
the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking a magic bullet hasn't solved the problem of obesity."
Also untrue, Dr. Mozzaffarian said, is the food industry's claim that there's no such thing as a bad food.
"There are good foods and bad foods, and advice should be to eat the foods more and bad foods less," he said.
"The notion that it's O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want."
The study showed physical activity had the benefits for weight control. Those who exercised less over the course of the study tended to gain weight, while those who increased their activity didn't. Those with the greatest increase in physical
activity gained 1.76 fewer pounds than the rest of the participants within each four year period.
But the researchers found that the kinds of food people ate had a larger effect over all than changes in physical activity.
"Both physical activity and diet are important to weight control, but are fairly active and ignore diet, you can still gain weight," said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the study.
As Dr. Mozzaffarian observed, "Physical Activity in the United States is poor, but diet is even worse."
