nutrition

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

Obesity is our century's version of the Kennedy assassination: Everybody's got a theory. But even with blame perpetually shifting -- one day it's fast-food corporations, the next it's genetics -- and a $40-billion-a-year diet industry, our waistlines just won't stop expanding.

Let's take a look at the ingredients in a typical can of cat food: meat by-products, chicken by-product meal, turkey by-product meal, ash, taurine. Nothing too horrible, but in general, these things don't constitute a healthy human diet, says Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian with the American Dietetic Association. "That said, I'm fully confident that your body can handle kitty chow."

With all due respect to Snackwells, not all chocolate cookies taste the same. The human tongue, the stomach and the soul can tell the difference between a fat-free and a fat-filled snack. Sadly, so can the human waistline. But what if instead of eating less fatty food that taste so dang yummy, your body just absorbed less of the freaking fat? That’s the claim being made by Satisfit, a nutritional additive being developed not for a 3 am infomercial, but by the food and nutrition department of Dow. Hungry for more?

The world may finally be ready for the awesome taste of calcium.

Chemists from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have done research that suggests mice may have a specific taste for calcium. Because mice and humans share many of the same genes, the finding suggests that humans may have the ability to taste the elemental nutrient as well.

Finally, the scientific finding every man has been waiting to hear: carbo-loading on doughnuts optimizes your lifespan and makes you sexually potent. Too bad the research only applies to crickets (so far . . . ).

Given that Americans drink billions of gallons of diet soda every year, it comes as little surprise that one of the most popular articles abuzz on the New York Times Web site is about the potentially waist-thickening effects of diet soda. The article highlights a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota who scrutinized the dietary intake of 9,514 volunteers ages 45 to 64 over the course of nine years. The Times honed in on the effects of diet soda: specifically, drinking one can of the stuff each day can increase the risk of developing metabolic disorder, a scary collection of risk factors including increased waist circumference, high blood pressure and low levels of good cholesterol, by 34 percent.

But the same study also came to an even more depressing conclusion: that consuming a healthy diet dominated by fruits and vegetables does nothing to reduce the risk of contracting chronic disease.