Mega Red Packet

By Jane Kirby, RD and The American Dietetic Association   The premise of food-specific diets is that some foods have special properties that can cause weight loss, other foods cause weight gain, and combinations of specific foods cause you to lose or gain.  Nutritionists call the human appetite for a variety of foods food-specific satiety . It’s nature’s way of assuring that you eat a diverse diet and, therefore, get the full spectrum of nutrients. You don’t have to eat only hot fudge sundaes to see the dynamic at work.  Think of last Thanksgiving’s dinner, for example. After eating a full savory, salty meal of turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, rolls, and so on, we bet that you were still tempted to have a slice of sweet pecan or pumpkin pie. That desire for dessert was because your palate was looking for the full complement of flavors. Unless you ate plenty of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, your desire for something sweet wasn’t s...

by Dr C.S. Foo Men turn into apples and women become pears. The twin factors of sedentary lifestyle and one meal too many lead to an expanding waistline, facilitated by male hormones. Females put on weight around the hips, buttocks and thighs. Interestingly, when the ovarian door closes in menopause, the distribution of fat becomes concentrated in the abdomen, once again auguring well for sexual equality. The body mass index (BMI) is popularly used to gauge obesity, but one can have normal BMI and yet carry unseen excess fat. Why all this fuss about fats? Obesity is obviously linked to a host of maladies but it is the dangers of hidden fat that needs to be urgently unmasked. Fat Cells There are an estimated 40 billion fat cells (adipocytes) in the adult body, soaring to thrice that level in some cases. Each fat cell contains essentially a large droplet of fat, much like a balloon filled with liquid. It was thought that fat (adipose tissue) is merely a passive sto...