Zola

Is Eating Gluten-Free More Healthy?

Going gluten-free is all the rage right now with urban and rural hipsters. Many people are jumping on the bandwagon; especially young adults in their 20s and 30s. They do it for good reasons, but they don’t realize how they are being manipulated.

Step back to the 80’s and I was in the same boat. I fell into a similar food marketing trap. I fell into the fat-free craze. Those supposedly in the know told me that fat would clog my arteries. They told me I better eat fat-free foods if I expected to live past 50. We all know now that was a bunch of bunk.

It is expected that the gluten-free industry will balloon to over $8 billion (yes, with a ‘b’) by 2020. But is “gluten-free” really necessary? And is it really healthier than wheat-based products?

For those with a gluten intolerance, going gluten-free is a good idea. If you have celiac disease you really have no choice (unless you want to go through your day with stomach cramps, bloating, diarrhea, gas and a whole lot of other uncomfortable issues). In order to stay out of the potty, you have to make a change.

So why do we have such an increase in celiac disease and intolerance to gluten?

Blame the wheat. I won’t go all science-y on you, but the wheat we grow today is not the same wheat we grew 50 years ago. Wheat is now genetically modified to grow faster to yield a bigger harvest. A bigger, faster harvest translates to more sales and more profit. But we are the ones who suffer as a result.

Since I’ve gone low carb I can tell when I eat too much wheat. I get bloated and uncomfortable. I’m not gluten intolerant, though. I’m just gluten sensitive. That gives me an incentive not to eat wheat (which I know is bad for me anyway). I stay away from wheat because it's full of carbs. And carbs make you fat.

So why not eliminate wheat from your diet and switch to eating the gluten-free products that now make up such a big industry?

Because gluten-free products are made with rice flour. At least, most of them are.

So all we’ve done is swap out wheat-based products with rice-based products.
Both are high in carbs. AND…rice flour is worse on your blood sugar than wheat flour.

We all know carbs increase our blood sugar. High blood sugar leads to Type 2 diabetes. No one wants that. So before we start eating gluten-free products (even those of us who are not gluten intolerant), we need to stop and think about what that would do to our bodies. Not only will we get fat eating gluten-free boxed food (another side effect), it will also raise our blood sugar levels.

We’ve talked before about how a glycemic index of 100 is the equivalent of straight glucose (sugar).

The glycemic index of wheat flour is 71.
The glycemic index of white rice flour is 89.

They are both bad, but rice flour is worse! You don’t want to continually jack up your blood sugar eating either of these or you’re on that express train to Type 2 Diabetes with very few stops along the way.

So how do we fix it?

Avoid most kinds of flour. Yes, some types of flour are better than others (coconut and almond flour are ok). But let me tell you, all those products in the ever-growing gluten-free aisle aren’t your friends…and they never will be. They are primarily made of rice flour for two reasons:

1. There’s no wheat in it so it’s safe for people who are gluten intolerant.
2. It’s cheap. Food manufacturers like cheap.

Remember my mantra.
Flour = sugar= dessert.

If you are do not have celiac disease and are not gluten intolerant you can get away with eating some this stuff before the pounds catch up to you. But if you think avoiding wheat-based pasta and switching to rice-based pasta is going to help you lose your belly fat, you are very, very misinformed.

Cheers,

Zucchini "Noodles"

You’ll never miss the pasta if you start serving these with your Italian dishes. They are pretty, too!

by Zola

Margarine Is Bad for You. Here's Why.

Pop Quiz: If you put a lump of margarine by an ant hole, the ants will:

A) Ignore it.
B) Bury it.
C) Close up shop and move away.

Answer: B or C.

Ants know the difference between butter and margarine. Do you? Our friends at the Pure Body Institute are here to tell you all about it.

BUTTER

• Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams. That’s not a bad thing. It’s good fat.
• Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
• Butter tastes better than margarine and it enhances the flavors of other foods.
• Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.
• I heard a story about the original manufacturers of margarine. Their plan was to use it to fatten turkeys. Guess what? The turkeys died.
• Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added!

MARGARINE

• According to a recent Harvard Medical Study, eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter.
• Margarine is very high in trans-fatty acids.
• Margarine carries a triple risk of coronary heart disease.
• Margarine increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol).
• Increases the risk of cancers by up to fivefold.
• Lowers the quality of breast milk.
• Decreases immune response.
• Decreases insulin response.

And here is the most disturbing fact…

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.

This fact alone is enough for most people to swear off margarine for life. It is also a good idea to swear off of anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).

Try this experiment at home:

Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it uncovered in your garage or a shaded area for a few days. Soon you will note a couple of things:

• No flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something).
• Margarine will not rot or smell differently, because not only does it have no nutritional value, but like plastic, it is dead. As a non-organic compound, margarine cannot be grown, only manufactured.
• Like plastic, it takes 1000’s of years to decompose even under perfect conditions. Like plastic, nothing – absolutely nothing – will grow in it or on it.

What does margarine do in the body?

It adheres to our cells walls, effectively coating them. This prevents them from breaking down as nature or our body intended.

What does this actually mean?

Imagine that every cell in your body has a lifespan of 20 minutes. Based on that, new cells grow every 20 minutes to replace the newly dead cells. Imagine now, that something is introduced into the body that increases the lifespan of your cells to 40 minutes! But new cells are still being generated every 20 minutes.

Get the picture?

The result is, we are preserved. Our cell life is increased. If you continue to draw this out, it spells weight gain, bizarre growth and trouble. A snail’s pace metabolism leads to all kinds of trouble.

I ought to know. The University of Wisconsin’s Obesity Clinic declared my metabolism “Kaput.” They could not figure out why I could not lose weight.

In my “old days” I used to cook with things like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” I thought it was good for me. I used it to saute. I loved the way it melted so easily and didn’t burn. I spread it on my baked potato because I thought it was keeping my calories down. The whole time I kept getting fatter and could not figure out what I was doing wrong.

Now I know better.

Clearly, the way to eat butter is by eating real butter.

Cheers,

Buttered Mushrooms

by Zola

Is Natural Really Natural

https://youtu.be/AftZshnP8fs

Coming out of college my first job was working for one of the Big Food companies. I was assigned to the Marketing Department.

Can I just say it? I loved my job! LOVED it.

I loved it so much I enrolled at Northwestern University to take more courses on marketing. I worked all day at marketing and I absorbed more marketing knowledge at night.

I was a sponge for marketing knowledge; everything from packaging to TV ad copy. I was enthralled with the reports on the experiences the customer had with the product. Was the product appealing? Was the packaging colorful and did it attract your attention? What information was on the package that was helpful in making the decision to buy it? I wanted to know more about everything.

I studied. I absorbed. I memorized.
Then I grew up.

So what does that mean?

Well, I started to design Plan Z and got involved in deciphering what the advertising really meant. I learned to read labels. I studied the ingredients list and found out what was healthy and what was not. What the box said on the front was not always a totally truthful indicator of whether what was in the package was good for me. In fact, most stuff that comes in a box or a package is full of all kinds of things that we really should not eat if we want to be truly healthy.

And what they say on the front of the box to entice you to buy it is in fact, just that. An enticement. Sometimes it’s truthful and sometimes it’s just plain manipulative. There is some government scrutiny in relation to what a food manufacturer can say on the packaging, but much of it is pretty vague. The food companies can get away with a lot.

I am not here to blame the ad agency. Their job is to make the product as appealing as possible; within the rules. So they do just that.

The video above is a funny look at the whole packaging issue as it relates to whether what’s in the package is healthful or not. This is put together by the USDA Organic Division. They are trying to “sell you” on eating organic. I support that effort. Much of what I eat is organic but I’ll admit too, that I do buy things that are not organic. I prioritize.

Some folks say eating organic is too expensive.

A comprehensive study came out recently that nails the numbers. The study (published in the prestigious British Medical Journal) found that it costs $550 a year more to eat organic. That might sound like a lot. Break it down by day though, and it’s $1.50 more per day to eat organic. For $1.50 a day, (or the price of what would now be considered a cheap cup of coffee), I can make eating organic an even bigger priority. Can you?

Cheers,

by Zola

Why Do Men Lose Weight Faster Than Women?

It's a fact.
Men lose faster than women.

I hear about it every day. When a husband and wife go on Plan Z together, the wife will invariably complain at some point that her husband is ahead of her in the weight loss battle.

There’s no one to blame except Mother Nature.
Here’s some science to back it all up. I got this from a CNN report:

In one study out of England, men and women were each put on commercial weight-loss programs such as Atkins, Slim-Fast and Weight Watchers. Two months in, the men had lost twice as much weight as the women -- and three times as much body fat. But by six months, the rate of weight loss had evened out between the genders.

If you're a guy, you can thank the testosterone you have -- and the extra estrogen you don't -- for your weight-loss edge. On average, women have between 6 and 11% more body fat than men, an assumed evolutionary adaptation to help during pregnancy. From puberty to menopause, women maintain more average body fat than men -- even when they take in fewer calories.

But it's important to remember that "fat" doesn't mean "unhealthy." Yes, women have larger fat stores, but it's part of their physiology, meaning it's not extra weight. So if a woman has 11% more body fat than a man, it doesn't mean she's 11% "fatter." A perfectly fit woman will still hold 6 to 11% more body fat than a perfectly fit man.

So there you have it, but in my opinion, that doesn’t answer all of it. I’ve observed a few other things. What I’m going to say doesn’t have any sanctioned science behind it. It’s just anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered over my years of dieting and my experience running a diet company.

I postulate that women get stuck on a diet more often than men. Men have a tendency to lose weight at a fairly even pace. Women on the other hand, often get stuck at multiple points during the dieting process. My feeling is this is not only hormonal (yes, we have that monthly event during our childbearing years), but it happens because women diet more often than men. Women try all kinds of diets only to fail - and start again sometime later.

You keep up this kind of behavior and you unconsciously train your body to stop losing at about the same point over and over again. I've seen it firsthand. About 35% of women on Plan Z experience some kind of stall between days 9 and 13. This is about the time most women quit their diet. Their body wants the status quo. In other words, your body wants you to go back and gain that fat back that you lost in the last two weeks. It wants to go back where it was, and the more we repeat the process the more ingrained it gets. Guys don’t diet as often so they don’t repeat the same patterns.

Another reason women lose slower? Women handle stress differently. When you are stressed, your cortisol level goes up. Cortisol is a hormone has a very important role in helping your body respond to stress. This is your "fight or flight" response. The interesting thing is when your cortisol level goes up, your weight loss pace slows down. In most families, women are the ones carrying more of the worry burden. Don’t blame the guys. We do it naturally. We worry about everything from the carpool calendar to the price of gas. The mortgage, the budget and where we are going to go on vacation. We worry about everything more than most guys do.

I know for a fact this plays out. I have been on as many diets as anyone I know. Even when I’m not on a diet this worry factor plays in.

I’ve run companies for over 30 years. I know when a bad recession hits I can eat the same amount of food as I did when the economy was good and I’ll gain weight. I eat the same, but my body gets bigger because my cortisol is up and my body reacts. So women don’t just lose weight differently than men, we even gain weight differently.

Another reason women don’t lose as fast as men? Exercise effect. There was a study done out of Canada that said that if the average woman over 40 works out at a moderate pace 60 minutes a day, 5 days a week, she won’t lose weight; she’ll only gain it slower than she would have if she didn’t exercise at all. Thank your hormones, women. Guys don’t deal with menopause and aging the same way.

Can women do anything to pick up the pace and lose as fast as the guys?

Unfortunately, not that we know of. The study I quoted above claims if you stay on a diet where you lose 1 – 2 pounds a week and stick with it for six months or more, the sexes will meet in the middle. This may be true, but I’ve never met a guy who dieted consistently for six months. (Losing 1-2 pounds a week is not enough to keep me motivated, either. That's why Plan Z is designed to help you lose weight more efficiently.) And I knew women who dieted ridiculously for years and never made their goal...until they changed they way they thought about diets in general. There's a lot of misinformation out there.

The more important thing is to not compare the weight loss results of women to men. We lose weight differently -- and it has nothing to do with willpower or self-restraint. So guys, the next time you feel the urge to gloat to your female counterparts - ZIP IT.

Cheers,

by Zola