Brent Kearney

The American Heart Association (AHA) recently issued some revised guidelines for healthy diet and lifestyle, I recently learned via Nubella’s newsfeed. I guess the guidelines are an improvement, but they don’t go far enough, which is troublesome: what were they like before the revision?

The new recommendations include:

• * Do 30 minutes of physical activity each day.
• * Transfats should make up no more than 1% of total caloric intake.
• * Avoid exposure to tobacco products.
• * Cut back on sugary foods and drinks.

… among others.

The problem with the “30 minutes of activity” recommendation is that they add that the activity need not be all together. For example, 5 minutes of walking to the bus counts as part of that. This seems rather pathetically inadequate to me. It amounts to a recommendation against not moving all day, every day. Well duh. I admit that I don’t know how they came up with 30 minutes, but I doubt that the research that was used showed that any motion whatsoever, so long as together the amount of time in motion added up to 30 minutes, resulted in cardiovascular fitness.

If your aim is a strong heart, much better advice would be to exercise at least three times per week. By “exercise”, I mean an aerobic workout, where you significantly increase your heart rate and breathing for more than 20 continuous minutes. The heart rate should be sustained at 60 to 90% of the maximum (maximum is usually around 220 minus your age). And by “at least”, I mean it would be preferable to exercise five days per week, but you can get away with three days per week and still have cardiovascular fitness gains. (Assuming that three days per week isn’t less than your current activity level!)

I wonder how many people actually get less than 30 minutes of “physical activity” per day? It would seem that you’d never get out of bed. I suppose that if it only takes 2 minutes to get into the car, 2 minutes to get to a chair in the office and back, and 10 minutes of going back and forth to and from the toilet, one could get away with only 18 minutes of motion in a day. *Shudder* That is some serious abuse of the self.

I have no idea where the AHA came up with 1% of caloric intake as a safe upper limit on trans fats in the human diet. There have been conclusive studies showing that there is no safe upper limit for consuming trans fats.
Studies have shown that diets with even a small amount of trans fatty acids increases the level of LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) in the blood, while at the same time inhibit the heart’s ability to create HDL cholesterol (the good kind). It also increases the tendency for blood platelets to clot, and last but not least causes internal inflamation, increasing risk of stroke and heart attacks. Trans fats result in a four-pronged attack on the heart. These trans fats are the man-made type: oils that have been hydrogenated. They are poisonous to your health, and should be avoided at all costs short of starvation. This means that if you were stranded on a desert island with a huge supply of McDonald’s food, you should only eat it when you are on the verge of death by starvation trying to catch fish, have run out of seaweed and can’t swallow any more dirt. Its that bad.

AHA recommends that you avoid exposure to tobacco products. This means that if you smoke, stop, and regardless of whether you smoke, avoid second-hand smoke. This is sound advice, but I doubt that many smokers will get it. Smokers probably don’t care too much about their health in the first place, and are unlikely to be readers of health bulletins from Heart Associations. There is no lack of information about how bad cigarettes are for you, but I’d like to share this little tidbit, published in 1999, by Mike Stroud:

It is clearly so unnatural and likely to cause harm that it is hard to understand how smoking was ever accepted as a reasonable thing to do. Yet, while nobody believes the contorted arguments of the tobacco industry that try to dismiss the link between smoking and damage to the lungs in the form of bronchitis and cancer, many people do not realise that the danger from cigarette smoking does not stop there. By mechanisms not entirely clear, smoking markedly contributes to atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries, as well as the furring up of blood vessels elsewhere. Many smokers will therefore have heart attacks and strokes, and may even lose their limbs, well before their time. As a practicing hospital doctor, I can state without prejudice that I almost never see a patient under the age of 40 who has had a heart attack but who is not an avid proponent of the weed. For that matter, most of those I see in their 50s and 60s are also keenly addicted.

And last, but certainly not least, the AHA’s recommendation to “cut back on sugar”. Again, this is a major understatement. The sugar in the average North American diet is probably the number one contributor to the expanding obesity epidemic (excuse the pun), and certainly the type-2 diabetes epidemic. Fatty foods are likely a close second.

For millions of years, we evolved to digest naturally occurring sugars in fruits — processed sugar is only a recent luxury. Now we dump it down our gullets by the mouthfull, and it is added to most processed foods, exploiting our weakness for it. The empty calories do add up though, and the results can be devastating. I again draw on Mike Stroud’s work. This excerpt is a striking example of how a few extra calories can add up:

In 1995, newspapers in the United States reported the death of the fattest man in the world. He had come to weigh 465 kilogrammes, or around 1,000 pounds. On a visit to hospital he had to be transported by forklift truck, and after his death the wall of his bedroom had to be demolished in order to remove the body. Obviously he was an extreme example of the obesity problem, yet it would have required a weight gain of only 37 grammes per day to take him from a normal 70 killogrammes (155 pounds) at the age of sixteen up to the grotesque proportions of his death at just 45 years of age. This is the equivalent of eating an extra 250 calories per day — less than one small bar of chocolate.

I’m not suggesting that processed sugar needs to be entirely eliminated from the diet, and I’m sure that is what the American Heart Association has in mind when they choose conservative words such as “cut back”. However, it is clear that obesity, heart disease, diabetes and all of these related health problems which are reaching epidemic levels indicate that way too many people are gorging on sugars and fats, and do not exercise.

Extra calories gained by the odd sugar indulgence would be quickly burned off by active individuals — that is, people for whom exercise is part of their daily lifestyle. Of course there are always limits; if you take in more calories than you burn, you will inevitably gain body weight. Sugar and fat just happen to supply large amounts of calories, so if you’re going to consume them, you should also be spending a good deal of time doing hard physical work.

Note that this does not apply to trans fats! Consuming this man-made Frankenstein “food” will magically expand your waistline, regardless of the usual calorie physics. This disturbing fact was revealed in a six-year study using monkeys. The monkeys were fed minimal diets, with one group having 8% trans fats. That group somehow managed to add 30% more fat to their bellies than the other group. Waistline fat dramatically increases the risk of diabetes, and I have heard it said that the waistline is one of the best indicators of overall health. Eating something that by its very nature adds fat to this area is an unwise thing to do. Everyone should eliminate it from their diets, and join the effort to lobby for a ban on trans fats.