OBC Food Rules-Day 38: Favor the Kinds of Oils and Grains that have Traditionally been Stone-Ground

When grindstones were the only way to refine flour and oil, four and oil were generally more nutritious.  In the case of grain, more fo the germ and fiber remains when its ground on a stone; you can't get white flour from a stone.  The nutritional benefits of whole grains are impressive:  fiber, the full range of B vitamins; and healthy oils, all of which are sacrificed when the grain is refined on modern roller mills (as mentioned, highly refined flours are little different from sugar).  And the newer oils that are extracted by modern chemical means tend to have less favorable fatty acid profiles and more additives than olive, sesame, palm fruit, and peanut oils that have been obtained the old-fashioned way.

OBC Food Rules-Day 37: "The Whiter the Bread, the Sooner You'll be Dead"

This rather blunt bit of cross-cultural grandmotherly advice (passed down from both Jewish and Italian grandmothers) suggests that the health risks of white flour have been popularly recognized for many years.  As far as the body is concerned, white flour is not that much different from sugar.  Unless supplemented, it offers none of the good things (fiber, B vitamins, healthy fats) in whole grains-it's a little more than a shot of glucose.  Large spikes of glucose are iflammatory and wreak havoc on our insulin metabolism.   Eat whole grains and minimize your consumption of white flour.  Recent research indicates that the grandmothers who lived by this rule were right:  People who eat lots of whole grains tend to be healthier and to live longer.

OBC Food Rules-Day 36: Don't Eat Breakfast Cereals that Change the Color of Milk

This should go without saying.  Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives.

OBC Food Rules-Day 35: Eat Sweet Foods as you Would Find them in Nature

In nature, sugars are almost always packaged with fiber, which slows their absorption and gives you a sense of satiety before you've ingested to many calories.  That's why you're always better off eating the fruit rather than drinking it's juice.  (In general, calories taken in liquid form are more fattening because they do not make us feel full.  Humans are one of the very few mammals that obtain calories from liquids after weaning.)  So don't drink your sweets, and remember:  There is no such thing as a healthy soda.

OBC Food Rules-Day 34: Sweeten and Salt your Food Yourself

Whether soups or cereals or soft drinks, food and beverages that have been prepared by corporations contain higher fat levels of salt and sugar than any ordinary human being would ever add-even a child.  By sweetening and salting these foods yourself, you'll make them to your taste, and you will find you're consuming a fraction as much sugar and salt as you otherwise would.

OBC Food Rules-Day 30: Eat Well-Grown Food from Healthy Soil

It would have been easier to say "eat organic" and it is true that food certified organic is usually all grown in relatively healthy soil-soil nourished by organic matter rather than chemical fertilizers.  (It also will contain  little or no residue from synthetic pesticides or pharmaceuticals.)  Yet there are always exceptional farmers and ranchers in America who for one reason or another are not certified organic, and the excellent food they grow should not be overlooked.  (And just because a food is labeled organic, does not mean it's good for you:  Organi soda is still soda-a large quantity of utterly empty calories.)

We now have a body of research supporting the hypothesis, first advanced by organic pioneers Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale, that soils rich in organic matter produce more nutritious food:  that is food with higher leveles of antioxidants, flavanoids, vitamins, and minerals.  Of course, after a few days of rising cross-country in a truck, the nutritional quality of any kind of produce will deteriorate, so ideally you want to eat food that is both organic and local.

OBC Food Rules-Day 29: Eat like an Omnivore

Whether or not you eat any animal foods, it's a good idea to try to add some new species, and not just new foods, to your diet-that is, new kinds of plants, animals, and fungi.  The dazzling diversity of food products on offer in the supermarket is deceptive, because so many of them are made from the same small handful of plant species, and most of those-the corn and soy and wheat-are seeds rather than leaves.  The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all of your nutritional bases.

OBC Food Rules-Day 26: Drink the Spinach Water

Another bit of  traditinal wisdom with good science behind it:  the water in which vegetables are cooked is rich in vitamins and other healthful plant chemicals.  Save it for soup or add it to sauces.

OBC Food Rules-Day 25: Eat Your Colors

The idea that a healthy plate of food will feature several different colors is a good example of of an old wives' tale about food that turns out to be good science too.  The colors of many vegetables reflect the different antioxidant phytochemicals they contain-anthocyanins, polyphenols, flavonoids, carotenoids.  Many of these chemicals help protect against chronic diseases, but each in a slightly different way, so the best protection come right from a diet containing as many different photochemicals as possible.

OBC Food Rules-Day 24: Eating What Stands on One Leg (mushrooms and plant foods) is Better than Eating what Stands on Two Legs (fowl), Which is Better than Eating What Stands on Four Legs (cows, pigs and other mammals)

The Chinese proverb offers a good summary of traditional wisdom regarding the relative healthfulness of different kinds of food, though it inexplicably leaves out the very healthful and entirely legless fish.

OBC Food RULES - Day 23: Treat Meat as a Flavoring or Special Occasion Food

While it's true that vegitarians are generally healthier than carnivores, that doesn't mean you need to eliminate meat from your diet if you like it.  Meat, which humans have been eating and relishing for a very long time, is nourishing food, which is why we suggest "mostly" plants, not "only".  It turns out that near vegetarians, or "flexitarians"-people who eat meat a couple of times a week-are just as healthy as vegetarians.  But the average American eats meat as part of two or even three meals per day-more than half a pound per person per day-and there is evidence that the more meat there is in your diet-red meat in particular-the greater risk of heart disease and cancer.  Why?  It could be its saturated fat, or its specific type of protein, or the simple fact that all that meat is pushing plants off the plate.  Consider swapping the traditional portion sizes:  Instead of an eight-ounce steak and a four-ounce portion of vegetables, serve four ounces of beef and eight ounces of veggies.  Thomas Jefferson was probably onto something when he reccommended a mostly-plant based diet that uses meat cheifly as a "flavor-principle".

Food Rules-Day 11: Avoid Foods You See Advertised on Television

Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products - and rules like these - into new ways to sell slightly different versions of the same processed foods.  They simply reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or transfats, or to contain fewer ingredients) and then boast about their implied healthfulness, whether the boast is meaningful or not.   The best way to escape these marketring ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by refusing to buy heavily promoted foods.  Only the biggest food manufacturers can afford to advertise  their products on television.   More than 2/3 of food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible foodlike substances.  As for the 5% of food ads that promote whole foods, common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush - these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Bogus health claims and faulty food science have made supermarket particularly treacherous  places to shop for real food, which suggests the next 2 rules.

Food Rules-Day 5: Avoid Foods that have Some Form of Sugar (or sweetener) Listed Among the Top 3 Ingredients

Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.  (For the exception to this rule, see rule 60, regarding special occasion foods.) Complicating matters is the fact that , thanks to food science, there are now some 40 types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetner, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligossaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, turbinado sugar, and so on.  To repeat:  Sugar Is Sugar.  And organic sugar is sugar too.  As for noncaloric sweeteners such as aspartame or Splenda, research (in both humans and animals) suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners does not lead to weight loss, for reasons not well yet understood.  But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.

Food Rules-Day 4: Avoid Food Products that Contain High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Not because high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any worse for you than sugar, but because it is, like many of the other unfamiliar ingredients in packaged foods, a reliable marker for a food product that has been highly processed.  Also, high-fructose corn syrup is being added to hundreds of foods that have not been traditionally sweetened-breads, condiments, and many snack foods-so if you avoid products that contain it, you will cut down on your sugar intake.  But don't fall for the food industry's latest scam:  products reformulated to contain "no HFCS" or "real cane sugar."  These claims imply these foods are somehow healthier, they they are not.  Sugar is sugar.

Food Rules-Day 2: Don't Eat Anything Your Great-Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize as Food

Imagine your great-grandmother (or grandmother depending on your age) at your side as your roll down the aisles of the supermarket.  You're standing together in front of the dairy case.  She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt Tubes - and hasn't a clue what the plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be.  Is it a food or is it toothpaste?  There are now thousands of foodish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn't recognize as food. 

The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products are many, and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged, some of which are probably toxic.  Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons-our inborn preferences for sweetness & salt.  These tastes are difficult to find in nature but cheap & easy for the food scientists to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume more of these rarities than is good for us.  The great-grandma rule will help keep most of these items out of your cart.

Note:  If your great-grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, you can substitute someone else's grandmother-a Sicilian or French one works particularly well.

The next several rules refine this strategy by helping you navigate the treacherous landscape of the ingredients label.

New Camps / Schedules / Packages Available Now!

Fitness is important to everyone, regardless of how hectic and chaotic our schedules may be. OBC LA now offers special 4, 6, 8, and 12 workout packages for those who want the benefits of a challenging workout, but don't have the time for the entire 4 or 6 week program.

Check out which one best fits your schedule and register today for our next AM & PM camps starting this Monday, April 9th & next Monday, April 16th.

Complete Newsletter

Bring A Friend Day this coming Thursday, March 29th!

Sleeping Late, Eating Late Leads to Gaining Weight

A message to night owls: There's news that your bedtime -- and those late-night snacks -- may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds. A recentstudy took on an important, and under-examined, aspect of the sleep-weight loss connection: how the timing of sleeping -- and of eating -- can affect weight. Researchers at Northwestern University examined the effects of sleep timing on diet and body-mass index (BMI), and found that late bedtimes and late mealtimes can lead to less healthful diets and to weight gain.

A group of 52 adults -- 25 women and 27 men -- spent seven days keeping food logs and having their sleep and waking activity measured by a wrist sensor. The researchers divided participants into two categories of sleepers:

• "Normal sleepers" reached the midpoint of their night's sleep before 5:30 a.m. These sleepers were asleep by shortly after midnight, and woke around 8 a.m. Among the study group, 56 percent were normal sleepers.
  
• "Late sleepers" reached the midpoint of their nightly sleep after 5:30 a.m. They went to sleep in the middle of the night, well after midnight, and woke in the mid-to-late morning. Among the study group, 44 percent were late sleepers.

Continue....

Free Workouts, New Camps, & Good Stuff!

Here we are right after 4th of July and starting to gear up to Labor Day in 8 short weeks.  Summer is in full swing & looking.  Beach & bikini season is up & running full steam right now.  So it's time to put the finishing touches on your beach body for the season.  If you haven't started yet, now is the time to do it while there is still time to get some summer in before fall is here.

We have exactly what you need to conquer your fitness obstacles and make it happen!  We have (3) free workouts coming up this week in the morning.  These workouts will run from 6-7am on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday at Pan Pacific Park.  

Our next camps start Monday, July 18th in TWO locations:

Pan Pacific Park
Mon, Tues, Thur, Fri for 4 weeks
6-7 am

Culver City
Mon, Tues, Thur for 6 weeks
6-7pm

First time campers are $249 / Veteran campers are $199.  Along with the fun & intense workouts, we also include nutrition to really fine tune your health & fitness levels for maximum results.

Registration is now open for both camps at www,operationbootcamp.com

Get in touch with us with any questions and make plans to join us  in either of these camps this month!

Get Fit, Get Healthy, Stay Fit, Stay Healthy