Will booze make you skinny? 11.3.2010 10:30:0 +0000 Roll out the barrel because if you believe the news reports alcohol contains magical negative calories!
Yup a recent study is making waves in the media and blogosphere and the gist of the reporting is that a few alcoholic drinks a day may help control your weight - though of course that's not the whole story.
The study's a big one. It looked at 19,220 American women aged 38.9 years or older who had a baseline normal BMI and followed them for 12.9 years and tracked alcohol consumption and self reported exit weight.
As with any long term prospective study, the authors tried valiantly to control for potentially confounding variables and they adjusted for age, race, baseline BMI, smoking status, non-alcohol energy intake, physical activity, menopausal status, postmenopausal hormone use, multivitamin use, comorbid medical conditions, and macronutrient distribution. They then stratified results into alcohol intake by grams with a 5 level subdivision.
The results?
Firstly it's important to note that statistically all groups of women gained weight. Average weight gain for the women who didn't drink at all was 3.63kg over 12.9 years and for those drinking an average of 30g or more of alcohol daily the average weight gain was 1.55kg. That's a difference of 4.6lbs over nearly 13 years.
So best case scenario is the study has indeed accounted for all variables and the association is causal and if you're a woman, drinking 2 glasses of wine daily will help you not gain roughly a third of a pound extra per year.
Worse case scenario? The study proves just how difficult it is to study nutritional variables and that it's one of those association doesn't prove causality pieces.
The lead author, Dr. Lu Wang, very kindly responded to a few email questions regarding potential confounding variables and both in the paper and in her emails made it very clear the authors did a truly bang up job trying to control for everything they could think of. At the same time Dr. Wang readily admitted that there are,
"an endless list of potential confounders."
Given we're talking about a difference of only 4.6lbs over more than a decade of time, it would therefore certainly be possible there's some subtle difference or differences other than alcohol intake to account for the results.
But does that matter?
Ultimately research on heart disease and moderate drinking in women has already suggested benefit to tempered imbibing and with this study, perhaps there's more. More to the point of this post though, the press' reporting on this story has been abysmal with some articles suggesting that alcohol will cause weight loss, others not noting the small actual absolute differences seen in the study and sadly most of the articles doing a better job of reflecting the media's need to sensationalize study results than to practice good science journalism.
So will booze make you skinny? Nope. But maybe, just maybe it'll make you ever so slightly less fat.
Wang, L., Lee, I., Manson, J., Buring, J., & Sesso, H. (2010). Alcohol Consumption, Weight Gain, and Risk of Becoming Overweight in Middle-aged and Older Women Archives of Internal Medicine, 170 (5), 453-461 DOI: 10.1001/archinternmed.2009.527
The study, a small one published in the journal Diabetes Care in December of last year, investigated blood levels of GLP-1 (a satiety peptide which when produced increases satiety), glucose and insulin in 22 healthy weight individuals following the ingestion of diet soda or carbonated water prior to the consumption of 75grams of glucose.
The findings?
Following ingestion of artificially sweetened beverages the subsequent ingestion of a sugar load led to enhanced release of GLP-1.
So can anybody draw real life conclusions from this study?
Nope. The study's small, it didn't look at actual satiety and there are many more components to diet soda than just artificial sweeteners.
So why did I bother to post?
When it comes to artificial sweeteners it seems to me that the media and blogosphere tends to report based on the visceral belief that artificial sweeteners must be bad for us and that belief supersedes good evidence based reporting and leads folks to report on bad, preliminary or weak studies as evidence that sweeteners are unhealthy. The corollary to this is that bloggers and the media, while regularly trumpeting results from small studies as vilifying for sweeteners virtually ignore studies that suggest perhaps sweeteners aren't so bad or in some cases perhaps even good.
Me?
While I don't have any disclosures to make regarding ownership of shares or income streams from the sweetener industry my take on the weight of the evidence places the consumption of excess amounts of sugar as a riskier behaviour than the consumption of artificial sweeteners.
The point of this post? To remind my fellow nutrition bloggers, writers and readers that evidence trumps belief.
Before/when writing/reading a blog post or article consider the underlying study and ask yourself whether or not it's important enough to care about. Rat and mice studies, studies with very small numbers of folks, poorly controlled studies - certainly they can be interesting and can also point the way to future research, but please don't hang your hats on them.
Brown RJ, Walter M, & Rother KI (2009). Ingestion of diet soda before a glucose load augments glucagon-like peptide-1 secretion. Diabetes care, 32 (12), 2184-6 PMID: 19808921
"But Yoni, the advertisement for the Del Monte Fruit Twists says says there's "no sugar added"."
I beg to differ.
With the exception of natural flavour, colour and pectin the only ingredients are fruit concentrates. Wanna guess what the main ingredient of fruit concentrates are? Sugar. So much sugar that in each and every Health Check'ed serving of Fruit Twists there's 3 teaspoons of the stuff which account for nearly 70% of each serving's weight and 80% of each serving's calories. Buy hey, it's "natural" sugar, right?
According to the copy,
"Get your daily servings of fruit in a convenient and delicious way with new Fruit Twists"
Fruit?
Let's compare blueberries with Blueberry & Raspberry Del Monte Fruit Twists. Gram per gram the Health Check'ed Twists have 600% more calories and 666% more sugar (Hmmm). Put another way, if you wanted to consume the equivalent number of calories from berries as you'd get from a two Twist "serving" you'd need to eat 3/4 of a cup of blueberries (and that 3/4 of a cup still won't give you the sugar of the two tiny Twists).
But as with virtually everything Health Check'ed it gets worse.
Given that the Twists look exactly like Twizzlers, I decided to compare the two. Comparing Del Monte Fruit Twists - endorsed by the Heart and Stroke Foundation's stellar dietitians - with Twizzlers, gram per gram we see identical calories and get this, 40% more sugar in the Health Check'ed Twists.
So once again here we have the dietitians from the Heart and Stroke Foundation discouraging the consumption of actual fibrous, nutritious, satiating fruits and berries by promoting and endorsing a heavily processed product that's basically just a sugar-sweetened Twizzler.
They sure seem like a smart bunch.
As far as I'm concerned, the misinformation the Heart and Stroke Foundation is providing Canadians should be downright criminal but sadly there's no law that prevents them from abusing the public's trust.
Ad execs present online video predictions for 2010 In today's New Media Minute, Daisy Whitney hits the 4A's conference in San Francisco to uncover the top opportunities and threats for online video this year.
An inventor's shocking forecasts for marketing technology Renowned futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil shares his bold predictions on virtual environments for marketing, the effects of an accelerated technological pace, and how information will transform communications.
great! i have never heard of zigime, let me know im always open to anything especially if it is being brought to me by a friend. until then take care x
MS Excel (or any spreed sheet program)would be great for that and you could also copy and paste when you need to use the links. make a columns for 'program name', 'referral link', 'ID', etc. then you can sort the columns by alphabet or whatever.
or
just create a notepad document for each program and name it after the program. Then use it like a 'notepad' for each program... keep the programs' affiliate links, user names, maybe passwords, listed on the document. Then you can put the notepad files you have for each program in a folder in 'your docs' and use the file sort features in your operating system. sort by date modified, name(alpha-numeric), file size ...etc.
Are you talking about me specifically or any one generally? what links are you referring to? you want then easy for others to find or for you to keep track of them?
9/24/2010
Cynergy Diva
48 years old Female South Eastern Ontario, Canada Hometown: Montreal QC
My nest is empty now and I'm looking for new endeavours to keep me busy.While recovering from my broken ankle, I've been let go from my office job, so I've been exploring ways to do something for myself in order to be free from the demands of other people. To that end, I've been looking at learning how to market online. Experimenting with a lot of different things - some of them turned out to be scams - I have stumbled on something that looks really intriguing that I'm going to examine further. (See MoreNiche blog)
I really like this online socializing. The internet really makes the world a small place, and I hope I can really broaden my horizons and meet a lot of new people. Lifelong learning and personal empowerment are important to me. I'm always looking for new ways to improve myself, and if anything I learn can be passed on for the benefit of others, then that makes me happy.
I love the girly stuff: knitting, sewing,quilting, crafting and shopping.
I love to read too, but I'm really passionate about seeing my fellow humans better themselves and their circumstances. Cynergy (Synergy) is my keyword.
R&B - New Country - Pop - Jazz
I like most music and I'm not fanatical about any one artist. About the only music I can't take is Opera and Heavy Metal. My favorite radio stations are: BBC Radio 2; KJAZZ; and the local oldies station AM 1220 Cornwall
Fave song as of Aug 2007 The Way I Are
Movies:
My faves are The Grapes of Wrath, Corrina, Corrina & Edward Scissor Hands - The last movie I saw was Stomp The Yard - 2 thumbs up!
TV:
My two favorites are British soaps Coronation Street and Eastenders; I love the Brit coms and westerns too
Books:
I like to read for personal development, and I love historical and generational sagas, but I'm not ashamed to say that I do enjoy trashy romance novels too. Some of the books that I have enjoyed are: The The Power of Intention by Dr Wayne Dyer - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown - Just about all of Danielle Steele's novels. Now Reading: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
by Eckhart Tolle
by Dr Wayne Dyer - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown - Just about all of Danielle Steele's novels. Now Reading: 
by Eckhart Tolle 