By James J. Gormley

This article by James Gormley originally appeared in Vitamin Retailer magazine in 2007.

In a recent issue of New York magazine, writer Gary Taubes in his article “The Scientist and the Stairmaster” posits the thesis: “Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner—-and why we’re wrong.”

Taubes first challenged the then “Holy Grail” of weight loss theory in a July 2002 article in The New York Times entitled: “What if it’s all been a big fat lie?”

In the Times article, Taubes had interviewed the country’s dean of health policy who confessed to Taubes that although “low-fat diets might lead to weight gain and low-carbohydrate diets might lead to weight loss,” he apparently asked Taubes to promise not to say he believed they did.

In reviewing Gina Kolata’s book, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health in the June 2003 New York Times, writer Eric Schlosser wrote:

“Over the last 20 years, while ordinary Americans became some of the most obese people on the planet—-sitting and eating their way to oblivion—the educated upper middle class spent more and more time seeking personal salvation on treadmills, ellipticals, LifeCycles, StairMasters and other sophisticated machines.”

And this search for personal salvation via more and yet more exercise has not gone un-remarked. In fact, as early as 1995 Fiona Stedman wrote, in an article entitled “Exercise Mania”: “Too much exercising, like too little food can slow down your body’s metabolism. When over-exercise is combined with dieting, your metabolism slows down even more,” a real obstacle for those who are trying to tone up or trim down.

In her prescient piece, Stedman outlined the dangers of compulsive over-exercising, exercise addiction and exercise dependence, concerns that are overlooked in the “Cult of the Body,” which is, it seems, one of the new religions of the 21st century.

In his concluding remarks in the New York article, Taubes wrote: “Because insulin determines fat accumulation, it’s quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much but because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer than might be ideal”

Dr. Vijaya Juturu and I noted in a 2005 scientific review that appeared in Current Nutrition & Food Science that “over 47 million Americans have metabolic syndrome.”

This syndrome, also called insulin resistance syndrome, often directly leads to hypertension, stroke and polycystic ovarian syndrome; it can also progress to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Tragically, some of the drugs used to treat these conditions lead to weight gain as well; therefore a vicious cycle may develop.

In addition to, and partly because of, America’s obsession with muscular archetypes on the one hand and impossibly thin and waiflike models on the other, it is perhaps no surprise that eating disorders are on the rise.

According to the NIH National Institute of Mental Health, up to 3.7 percent of females suffer from anorexia and 1.1 to 4.2 percent are afflicted with bulimia.

So with dysfunctional, and in many ways faulty, attitudes toward weight loss and exercise and a flawed and, ultimately, inchoate vision of what a healthy body should look like, what can help us find that path to nutritional enlightenment if not something resembling homespun common-sense?

With a few exceptions, there are no bad foods only behaviors that help us, or hinder us, from achieving our fitness and body composition goals.

Exercise is only a tool that we can use to become more fit versions of our current selves; it should not be an altar upon which we sacrifice time that could have been spent with our families and friends.

If life and living appear to be getting in the way of our Pilates classes and circuit training at the gym (and we never perceive the reverse), then maybe we should re-evaluate our priorities.

Because be careful: some day when we are admiring ourselves in the mirror and those abs we’ve trimmed, maybe we will have lost way much more than fat. Hint: I don’t mean muscle tissue.

By James J. Gormley

This article by James Gormley originally appeared in Vitamin Retailer magazine in 2007.

The May 14th issue of Newsweek magazine had an article entitled “Attack of the Diet Cokes.”

It discussed Americans’ consumption of Diet Coke, in addition to other sodas, in the context of a highly competitive $70 billion soft-drink market. Diet Coke Plus is the new rising star in Coca-Cola’s portfolio, a new version of Diet Coke featuring low, added levels of vitamins and minerals.

According to Newsweek, Diet Coke stands at the convergence of two powerful trends: the rise of diet drinks (30 percent of the soft-drink market today up from 25 percent in 2000) and the move toward functional beverages.

Considering that consumers in over 200 countries down Coca-Cola brand drinks at a rate “exceeding 1.4 billion servings each day,” the market potential for this latest “diet” soda is huge.

Unfortunately, huge is also a body type that fast-food-loving and soda-slurping Americans are increasingly adopting. Over 66 percent of American adults are overweight or obese; this amounts to 68.6 million adults. Worse yet, over the last 25 years the number of children in the US who are overweight has tripled. In fact, approximately 19 percent of children and 17 percent of adolescents are overweight.

Worse still, 60 percent of overweight children aged 5 to 10 have at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease and 25 percent have over two risk factors. Tied to obesity, soda over-consumption, sugar-packed diets and physical inactivity, type 2 diabetes in children is now the new children’s epidemic.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looked at national beverage consumption patterns for over 73,000 Americans between 1997 and 2001 and found the following: overall calories from sweetened drinks went up 135 percent. Kids drank about 40 percent fewer calories from milk while their soda imbibing doubled.

People may ask: Well, what’s wrong with diet sodas; aren’t they low in calories? While they are low in actual calories, data from the San Antonio Heart Study found that the more diet soda a person drinks the greater is the likelihood that he or she will become overweight or obese.

“On average, for each diet soft drink our participants drank per day, they were 65 percent more likely to become overweight during the next seven to eight years and 41 percent more likely to become obese,” said Sharon Fowler, MPH, faculty associate in the division of clinical epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. Other, more recent unpublished findings from Fowler, noted briefly in Newsweek, back this up.

Certainly, parents and schools need to do a better job of promoting regular exercise and better dietary choices, in general. And no one should be laying the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic solely at the feet of soda companies; but the viral distribution of these soft drinks doesn’t help things.

Part of the problem, says the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI), is that, “school food programs compete against the widely available and aggressively advertised fast food, soft drink and snack foods that fill vending machines, school stores and á la carte cafeteria lines.”

According to a study in the October 2006 issue of the Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing, the author, A. Opalinski, concluded: “Pouring rights contracts provide a profit to powerful mega-corporations at the expense of children’s health.” Opalinski added:

“There is a need to move beyond a solely individual approach to addressing childhood overweight and involve a social change […] including removal of soda machines from schools and changing marketing practices targeted at children.”

By James J. Gormley

Adapted from an original article by James Gormley in Vitamin Retailer magazine in 2007.

Cryogenically frozen in the 1970s, health food retailer Miles Monroe (played by Woody Allen) is revived 200 years later to find himself in a repressive, dystopian — and ultimately madcap — future.

It’s a future that has, presumably progressed far in the field of nutrigenomics, so far, in fact, that the foods believed to be the worst nutritional sins in the 1970s, when the film was made—steak, cream pies and fudge—were, in this Orwellian future, long established as healthy.

What also makes this ironic, and even more funny in 2007, is that, not unlike the scientists in Woody Allen’s comic farce, few broad-minded health-food retailers today would be likely to object to USDA Organic steak, cream pie and fudge made with organic, all-natural ingredients — in moderation, of course, and hopefully not all in one sitting!

In fact, the September 2006 issue of The Scientist has an article entitled “Eat Your Way to Better DNA” by writer Kate Travis, who points out that, at its core, nutrigenomics is the study of how genes and nutrients interact to promote health or predispose us to disease.

It’s a newly evolving science that is developing an understanding of how our diet may be changed — along with the addition of certain nutrients and the jettisoning of certain chemicals — in such a way that allows us to not become our parents.

“The important thing about nutritional genomics is that it tells us that we’re not slaves to our genes and that we’re not victims of genetic determination,” noted Raymond Rodriguez, director of the Center for Excellence in Nutritional Genomics at the University of California-Davis in The Scientist. “We ate ourselves into a disease state, and we can eat ourselves out of that disease state.”

According to the Center, its mission is to: “reduce and ultimately eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities resulting from environment-gene interactions, particularly those involving dietary, economic and cultural factors.” The goal of the Center is to prevent, delay and treat diseases such as asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer.

While the possibility for misuse of this nascent knowledge would be there if the lines between pharmacogenomics and nutrition were to be blurred beyond recognition, for example, much potential is there in truth for good and — one day, perhaps, in the not too-far-distant future — to have genetic-type-specific supplement sections in your retail store.

If Miles Monroe would awaken 30 years later, say in 2013 — rather than 200 — even he might not object.

By James J. Gormley

Adapted from an original article by James Gormley in Nutrition Industry Executive magazine in 2007.

If you ever were in a hospital awaiting surgery, have you had a nurse or doctor shake your hand while wearing rubber gloves?

I have. It’s one of the least comforting, while most impersonal and sterile, human exchanges that I have experienced.

Are germs today that much more rampant than when I worked on medical-surgical units in a New York City hospital between 1984 and 1988? In those days, latex gloves were only routinely worn when unconscious, geriatric or injured patients were being changed and when actual medical or surgical procedures were being performed.

America’s obsession with germs has certainly grown since then, however, as we have seen with how popular culture has been gripped by microbial madness.

In 1995, two major killer germ movies were released, Twelve Monkeys (a sci-fi thriller in which 99 percent of the Earth’s population has been wiped out by an unknown and deadly virus) and Outbreak, a modern-day fright flick about the Ebola virus.

Following the anthrax scare and the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001, at least two books came out the next year capitalizing on our fears: Killer Germs: Microbial Disease that Threaten Humanity and Secret Agent: The Menace of Emerging Infections.

If you add these dark visions to the real rise of antibiotic-resistant bugs, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, surely there are reasons for concern: real and imagined.

Now while I would not want to dispute the critical importance of the development of the Germ Theory of Disease that was discovered and developed by such scientists as Semmelweiss, Pasteur, Lister and Koch, I am greatly concerned that modern society has apparently transformed our view of germs—those we have always lived with and newer varieties to which we have inadvertently given rise—into an “us vs. them” paradigm, a War on Germs version of the War on Terror (not to even mention those cases in which these wars overlap).

With today’s ubiquitous latex gloves and viral spread of potent hand sanitizers, our evolutionary relationship with germs has been, it seems, left behind … or sanitized away. So has common sense, apparently, along with it the simple virtue of the type of vigorous hand-washing (with good old soap and water) that was always encouraged by our parents and grandparents.

Mark Morford, in the November 2 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, said that he feels that our nation’s desire to create a sterile world is fraught with larger health and social risks.

He quotes Slate’s Kent Sepkowitz as arguing that, “far from not cleaning, cooking and irradiating our food well enough and far from not ensuring we have the correct FDA precautions, we as an over-pampered culture are probably not getting enough nasty buggy, immune-system-boosting microbes in our diet, in our meats, in our mouths.”

Morford speaks of the true dangers behind an “alarmist, germophobic mindset that insists on sanitized, overcooked ultra-safe bleached-out everything then grows and mutates and extends well beyond the toilet and the kitchen and the backyard and the human gut, straight into human experience as a whole, resulting in one horribly bland, edge-free, prefab life.”

He has a point.

Perhaps a better approach would be to seek germ balance, or bacterial balance, acknowledging that all of life operates with, and within, a series of processes that are constantly in flux—whether we are talking about probiotics and pathogenic bacteria, proper immune response and excessive immune response (which we call allergy, asthma, etc.) or good germs on our skin and the germs that we would much prefer be transient visitors.

What is clear is that almost every global effort to sanitize ourselves and our world has created real and potential health consequences: whether antibiotic resistance and probiotics’ destruction through over-prescription of antibiotics, unwanted byproducts through food irradiation or toxins through the breakdown of certain hand-sanitizer ingredients.

As an arguably enlightened society, we have a unique opportunity to offer solutions which are informed by a more balanced view of health and ecological (including microbial) balance and not feed into the various hysterias that currently plague us.

By James J. Gormley

Adapted from an original article by James Gormley in Better Nutrition magazine in 2001.

The other day, my little girl, Natalia (who’s 5), matter-of-factly told me: “Pop, today you’re going to take off my training wheels—right?” How could I say “no,” all fatherly fears of boo-boos and specters of emergency rooms aside?

Natalia, after all, is the girl who can dribble a ball as good as (or better than) any 7-year-old boy on the block, can go from a headstand to a handstand (unassisted) in the middle of the living room and can keep three hoola-hoops going at the same time.

Nevertheless, when I took Natalia and her big brother, Julian, to the park, I was a little nervous. Not because I didn’t have faith in Natalia, but because I remember how my first venture (on my Schwinn Typhoon!) was associated with an involuntary closeup look at the pavement and I didn’t want Natalia to have the same experience.

Well, we got there. I lifted the bikes out from the back of the car and proceeded to take off the training wheels. I had just finished putting the wrench in my back pocket when Natalia took off like a bat out of hell down the block.

With my heart racing, I took off after her, with Julian leading the way. We got to the entrance of the park—right before a nice big sloping path—when Natalia stepped on the brakes, wobbling only a little as she put her left foot down to balance herself after she stopped.

I was shocked, although not truly surprised. The rest of the afternoon was taken up with a basketball game in which Julian was trying hard to convince one of his friends that carrying the basketball and running with it is not the best way to play and my running after Natalia, who only needed a little steadying once in a while.

When we arrived back at the house, Julian was actually bragging about how his little sister doesn’t need training wheels any more. He was duly impressed—as was Pop. In fact, a 7-year-old girl down the block looked at Natalia’s two-wheeled, controlled careening with admiring dismay, saying, “Wow! I still haven’t taken my training wheels off yet!”

When I asked Natalia to describe herself, recently, she said: “I’m just a girl.” In my male ignorance but father’s love I told her how incredibly cool and awesome it is to be a girl, and how proud she can be of that. She listened, with one eye on her Hello Kitty keychain.

Just a girl? What a girl at that. In that little 5-year-old girl’s identity, what incredible power and promise there is. What amazing opportunities and possibilities there are for girls today. What an awesome message of empowerment a little girl can offer to other girls and the world.

Just a girl? Watch out world! Girls can accomplish anything they dream of—training wheels not required.