The standard dietary wisdom: “Don’t eat crap” still stands out as a way to keep off the pounds. Paying attention to the number of calories consumed and increasing your amount of physical activity isn’t the only way to diet or remain weight-conscious; it’s also important to pay attention to what kind of calories you eat.
A recent study just published in The New England Journal of Medicine and primarily paid for by grant from the National Institutes of Health studied the effects of eating and lifestyle choices on weight gain. The study followed the eating and exercise habits and the resulting weight gain or loss of over 120,000 participants over four years in three separate groups. The average weight gain of the participants in the study was 3.35 pounds over the four years.
The results of the study indicated that a few food culprits are associated with the largest increases in weight gain: potato chips, potatoes in any form, sugar-sweetened beverages, and both processed and unprocessed red meats.
Several foods in the study had the opposite effect: an increase in the amount of vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, and yoghurt showed an inverse relationship with weight gain.
The study also demonstrated which activities and lifestyle choices both positively and negatively effected the weight gain of the participants. Exercise was the key lifestyle choice for weight loss, while alcohol use, quitting smoking, and television-watching ranked right up there with potato-chip eating in terms of increasing the amount of weight gain per year in the participants.
The researchers in the study are paid lecture fees by a wide variety of pharmaceutical companies and organizations related to nutrition and food. Most notably, Dr. Hu, who is one of the researchers, reported earnings from the California Walnut Commission. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the results regarding the healthfulness of nut consumption are flawed, it is interesting that nuts were included in the paper as a food source helpful to avoid weight gain.
That said, the large size of the study and the amount of controls for variables that the researchers employed seem to indicate that the results of the study should be fairly accurate. In addition, common sense and traditional wisdom tells us many of the same things that the study did. In this day and age, I don’t really think anyone thinks of potato chips or coca cola as diet foods or beverages, and exercise has long been known to help fight weight gain.