Giving up all your favorite foods and switching to a very healthy but very boring diet won’t work. Kelly Brownell, PH.D., professor of psychology at Yale University and a top
obesity researcher, says he and others have studied dieters and found that the most punishing methods inevitably fail.
Nobody is going to eat food they don’t enjoy for very long. If you want to eat healthy, you have to either find low-fat prepared foods that taste great or learn to cook your own.
Strictly speaking, exercise isn’t a nutritional habit, but we included it in our survey because physical activity has a direct bearing on how much we eat and what happens to food once we’ve taken it in. The experts affirmed this view, and then some. Eighty-four percent gave high priority to exercising more. “It’s hard to reduce your weight by controlling calories alone,” says Dr.Stampfer. “If you exercise as well, you’re more likely to be able to maintain the weight loss in the long run.”
Exercise boosts your metabolism, allowing you to eat more without putting on more pounds, It also helps relieve stress and keep your heart, bones and circulatory system in top form.
Most people can fill their exercise quota with 20 minutes of brisk walking three times a week. Adding a regimen of resistance weight training fires up your metabolism to its calorie-burning peak.
The experts were almost unanimous in putting weight control at the top of the list—97 percent of them gave it high priority.
“If everybody in he United States maintained their ideal weight, the incidence of Type-II diabetes would be greatly reduced, hypertension would be much less common and so would coronary disease,” says Meir Stampfer, M.D., associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health.
Nearly 24 percent of American men are overweight for their age and build, which makes obesity one of the country’s biggest healthy problems.
How do the experts recommend we lose weight? Seventy-five percent said that cutting calories is Extremely Important of Very Important; 70 percent said the same about controlling fat intake. The two go hand in hand: If you cut calories, you’ll cut fat. The number of calories you eat ultimately determines how muck you’ll weigh, but reducing fat is important for other reasons: It slashes the risk of heart disease by keeping arteries from choking with plaque, and it may reduce the risk of some forms of cancer.
We asked the medical experts to design an eating plan for total health. They came up with a dozen steps to peak nutrition.
THERE IS CERTAINLY no shortage of self-proclaimed nutrition “experts” out there, from fitness gurus who make millions selling worthless supplement powders and pills to next-door neighbors who claim that eating white bread will send you to an early grave.
Who has the time to weigh all the contradictory advice, much less judge the validity of its source? Not you. And anyway, that’s why you read books like this one.
To get straight answers for our readers, Men’s Health surveyed 300 of the nation’s top nutrition experts—not the self-appointed kind, but the ones doing important research at major hospitals and universities. Medical Consensus Surveys, a research arm of Rodale Press, asked the experts to rate 44 nutritional actions (all purported to benefit health) as follows: Extremely Important, Very Important, Important, Not Important or Probably Worthless.
What we were after was a list of priorities, a simple guide to making smart nutritional choices. For example, should you put a lot of energy into reducing the amount of cholesterol in your diet? The amount of salt? Or is it more important to avoid pesticides, irradiated food or alcohol?
The nutritionists’ responses were then complied and statistically weighted to create a list of dietary priorities that’s both clear and practical. “We could easily have an enormous advance in the health of America if we could simply follow these guidelines,” says GeorgeL. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Nutrition/Metabolism Laboratory at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston.
Here, in order of importance, are the nutritional steps most vital to your healthy diet and the stuff that’s not worth worrying about.