Living Well

Shoes are bad for you

A really interesting article in the New York Magazine explains how shoes are bad for you: You Walk Wrong. The author explains that by adding padding to the heal, shoes actually make you step harder (you are looking for that feedback from the ground), by turning the toes up your foot doesn't have the same strike off motion, and much more. The article is a very interesting read.

The author recommends going barefoot a lot and switching your shoes up so your feet don't become dependent on any one shoe type.

Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you have ever tried to lose weight or just eat healthy, you must read this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  This book changed my thinking about food, health, nutrition and exercise.  I didn't realize how much of what doctors said that I just believed.  I didn't realize that what they recommend is based on little proven evidence.  Or how much contradictory evidence is just ignored. 

This isn't a diet book.  It's a book about the history of nutritional advice.  Our understanding of food and obesity, how it's come about and how it's changed over the past century.  I'll be writing more in future posts but here's what I've definitely taken away:

1. A calorie is not a calorie.  A lot of other factors matter like what kind of calorie, what kind of person, metabolism, exercise, external environmental factors, ...
2. Calories in does not always equal calories out.  Or we are not measuring all the calories in and out correctly.
3. Dietary fat does not make you fat.  Fat is not necessarily better or worse than protein or carbs.  It's not necessarily equal either!
4. Many of our current doctors are 100% convinced of what they know and not really willing to consider radical shifts in thinking.   Like they continue to recommend  eating less calories and exercising to lose weight when it's obviously not working for many people.  (Do you really lack the will power?)

More to come, but I definitely recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You can read a good excerpt written by the author, Gary Taubes, on ABC News.

Does Coke hurt your bones?

Here's a great humorous post on what a coke does to you.  It talks about the effects of the sugar, the caffeine and the phophoric acid.  What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now?  But it's not accurate.

Too much phosphorus can cause you to excrete calcium.  However, a can of coke only has 41 milligrams of phosphorus - the daily recommended intake of phosphorus is 700 mg for a woman.  To put it in perspective, a glass of skim milk has 235 milligrams!  For more information, see this Tufts article.  So it's highly unlikely that coke is causing you to lose bone mass unless you are drinking a case a day.