SHR

Nowadays, people love looking for their health solutions in the form of a pill and companies bank off isolating and selling functional components of foods as dietary supplements. But as Elizabeth Reverri and colleagues from the University of California Davis point out, “functional ingredients may not produce the same effects when delivered outside a whole food matrix.” These researchers were interested in understanding how the food matrix contributed to the health benefits of two compounds: antioxidants and fiber. And what better group of subjects to test potential health benefits than overweight-obese men and women with metabolic syndrome. This study was a randomized, controlled, crossover trial consisting of three study days, each separated by one week, in which the 12-hour overnight-fasted subjects consumed a black bean (BB), fiber-matched (FM), or antioxidant-matched (AM) breakfast meal made of commercially available Western-style foods and had blood draws before and for 5 hours postprandially. Meal composition...

In previous articles, I wrote about a handful of studies that collectively demonstrated that consuming monounsaturated fat in place of saturated fat, even in small amounts, has beneficial effects on CVD risk factors, and that obtaining the monounsaturated fat from unadulterated whole-foods like unrefined olive oil and nuts can elicit even greater benefit through their secondary metabolites. However, these effects were obtained with chronic intake of at least one month and a largely uncontrolled for diet. This doesn’t downplay the health benefits by any means, but it does raise questions of whether these outcomes are observable within a single meal. To answer this, researchers from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy randomized 25 healthy male and female participants to consume a traditional Mediterranean lunch with or without 10g of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) in a crossover design separated by 30 days. Compared to consuming the meal without EVOO, the small 10g...

Imagine you are eating a meal; what do you eat first? Whether you are at a buffet, a nice sit-down restaurant, or cooking at home, meals typically have a combination of foods that can be roughly divided into proteins, fats, starchy carbohydrates, and fibrous vegetables. There is little to no debate that early treatment or prevention of postprandial hyperglycemia is important for health, especially in those with type-2 diabetes (T2D). Recently, researchers publishing in Diabetes Care asked whether the order in which a meal was consumed would influence the metabolic response to it in 11 T2D men and women. After a 12-h overnight fast, subjects consumed an isocaloric meal (628 kcal: 55 g protein, 68 g carbohydrate, and 16 g fat) with the same composition on 2 separate days, 1 week apart. During the first visit, the food order was carbohydrate (ciabatta bread and orange juice), followed 15 min later by...

Ryan Walker from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Michael Goran from the University of Southern California sought to determine actual sugar content and composition in commonly used infant formulas, baby foods, and other grocery items frequently marketed towards children. After looking through the online shopping databases for three of the U.S.’s largest grocery retailers – Walmart, SuperValu, and Safeway – they selected every tenth product from infant formulas, baby food, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and packaged baked goods and purchased all products from the retailers in a defined zip-code region in Los Angeles to help control for location and inventory. Twenty products per category were chosen for analysis. The results were not pretty The average percent of total calories supplied by sugar in infant formulas was 27.4%, with five having greater than 40%. Since most formula attempts to mimic breast milk, it was no surprise that most were...

Every day for years I have made my best effort to consume vinegar with every meal. Whether this is apple cider vinegar mixed in carbonated water or a touch of white vinegar on steamed greens or rice, I always try and find a way to have my vinegar. If you asked me why, I would say that it helps reduce post-prandial glycemia (the blood glucose response following a meal). In fact, it was the first guest-post article I had written for Adel Moussa over at SuppVersity. Since then I have never really given vinegar a second thought, until a newly published study popped into my inbox that once again brought vinegar to my attention. Only this time, I want to do it more justice than I had in the short article I wrote for Adel. So, what is vinegar? Vinegar is a liquid consisting mainly of water and acetic acid, which...