Wellness Posts by Brian Bender

Your Diet’s Missing Ingredient for Health and Happiness

2022-11-13T05:00:00Z

Wellness.com - Your Diet’s Missing Ingredient for Health and Happiness by Brian Bender

Proper nutrition is fundamental to our health and longevity. Without the right nourishment for the majority of your life, it becomes harder and harder to avoid most of the chronic diseases that plague the world today. But a long, healthy and rewarding life goes beyond simply choosing nutritious foods to eat. Like the World Health Organization’s holistic definition of health, it is better described as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." - Therefore, our - relationship - to food matters in a big way. Some of the latest work in this area has been popularized by the - Blue Zones - project. This massive and ongoing project has studied 5 regions of the world with disproportionately high rates of active centenarians who have low rates of many of the chronic diseases that afflict the rest of the world. A healthy diet, unsurprisingly, was a key component to their longevity. But other factors play equally important roles, as well. For example, the inhabitants of each region possess good habits for dealing with stress. Take the Sardinians of Italy, for example. Sipping on a glass of wine in the afternoon with friends and family everyday helps them wind down from the day’s stress (and potentially helping to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease at the same time). And meals are almost always enjoyed in the company of others in all of these regions. As I started to seek out traditional recipes from these places, another fact began to emerge. Many of their traditional dishes and cooking techniques take quite a bit of time. In a world of “10-minute-or-less” recipes designed to fit into our face-paced lifestyles, I too initially looked at the recipes dauntingly. But in doing so, I’ve been missing one of the best ways to improve wellness and overall life satisfaction. Instead of inducing more stress, extended cooking times have done just the opposite. The complication of a new recipe has ironically forced a simplification into the evenings I spend with my wife. Slowing down the pace of life, even for a moment, has reaped major benefits on my well-being. Being a researcher, my first instinct was to scour the peer-reviewed literature to see what kind of research had been done on the topic of cooking and its impact, either positive or negative, on health and life satisfaction. Here’s what I found. 1) Cooking at home leads to better nutritional health - Preparing and cooking meals from home is associated with better nutritional health, primarily because the use of whole food ingredients over processed foods leads to reduced consumption of salt and sugar and increased consumption of several vitamins and minerals often lost in many processing methods. It is also associated - with better weight management and higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole-grains. And if you’re having trouble getting your kids to eat their veggies, studies - show - that involving them in the cooking process improves their willingness to eat them! - A - study - in the - Journal of the American Dietetic Association - showed that young adults who prepared and cooked food themselves were less likely to eat fast food, and more likely to meet dietary recommendations for daily intake of fat, calcium, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Another study - interestingly looked specifically at the - time - spent preparing and cooking meals at home. They too, found that cooking home meals was associated with better quality diets. But in addition, these researchers found that those who spent - more - time routinely preparing and cooking meals showed a progressively greater correlation to a high quality diet. 2) Increasing quality cooking time is associated with more happiness and longevity - A 2007 study - showed a statistically significant correlation between satisfaction with their food-related life and their mental health. Other studies from around the world back up these findings. A study - on Norwegian seniors showed that those who are satisfied with their food-related lives and eat healthy diets were more satisfied with life, in general. This is particularly important for seniors, as their dietary habits tend to shift with decreased mobility and fractured social lives. Maintaining these ties to healthy diets, cooking practices, and dining with friends and family better maintains happiness and improves longevity. Indeed, another - study - that specifically looked at happiness and longevity demonstrated that happiness appears to have a causal effect on preventing illness and extending life. This association is stable across the world, both in developed and in developing nations. Studies in - Chile - and - Ecuador - produced similar results to that of European countries, showing that good dietary practices and better quality time spent around eating and preparing meals with family and friends leads to greater happiness and life satisfaction, improving physical and mental health along the way. 3) Increased time with friends and family spent while cooking and eating leads to greater happiness and life satisfaction - A recent - report - corroborated the notion that time equals happiness. This study, in particular, examined the best use of finances. Spending money on activities and services that increased time routinely improves happiness to a greater degree than buying material goods. The time spent cooking and eating meals is best spent in the company of those you care about. This is intuitive when we think about it; it is simply more fun spending time with people you like. But it boosts your mental and physical health, too. A study - of university students has shown that quality time around meals with family improves happiness and life satisfaction while lowering mental health issues. A large - study - of Thai eating behaviors also showed that those who did not eat alone over long periods of time are happier. Bon Appetit - If cooking from scratch seems intimidating, have no fear. A study - that investigated the new entrants to the field of culinary arts reiterated the old adage that practice makes perfect. Those who continued to cook from scratch improved not only their confidence, but their enjoyment of the process as well. Maybe society will never go back to its traditional cooking habits. Time is routinely - cited - as one of the major impediments to cooking from home. But increasing quality time, by any amount, can make positive gains for you and those around you. According to the 20-year - Framingham Heart Study - , happiness tends to cluster at the community level, suggesting that happiness can indeed be spread among communities. Increasing quality time spent cooking and dining with loved ones will not only help your own physical and mental health, it just might naturally spread to make the world a better place, literally!

3 Hacks for Healthy Habits

2017-12-09T22:00:00Z

Wellness.com - 3 Hacks for Healthy Habits by Brian Bender

If it’s one thing the world of nutrition has unfailingly demonstrated over the past few decades, it’s that the typical Western diet is not working. A - publication - from the - New England Journal of Medicine - reported that 10% of the planet is now considered obese, and according to the CDC, 40% of U.S. adults and nearly 20% of U.S. children are now obese. And because of well established links between obesity and poor health, including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders, and some cancers, the World Health Organization has labeled the problem as nothing short of an epidemic. There are many causes. Some related to food policy. Others related to costs. Others still related to overconsumption of processed meats, sugar-laden beverages, and a lack of veggies. But for many, one of the major causes is also a behavioral one. Many areas of research, as we’ll get into, demonstrate that many of us get stuck in bad habits, we routinely underestimate our caloric intake, and we often eat mindlessly. Research from areas of behavioral economics and psychology has revealed several different tactics that may help ditch the idea of a quick fix and permanently switch towards a healthier lifestyle.- Whether it’s easier to - train - , - track - , or - cheat - , these methods have all been proven to work. Train Your Habits - Training yourself to adopt new habits can be tough. But BJ Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, has been demonstrating for many years the power of - Tiny Habits. The premise: Inserting new habits into your life is difficult, whatever the goal may be. Therefore, starting extremely small is a good place to start. Habits develop, according to Fogg, when a motivation, an ability, and a trigger happen simultaneously. Motivation is straightforward. Most people looking to switch to a healthier diet - want - to switch to a healthier diet. He argues that focusing your efforts on modulating motivation are typically much less effective. So what works better? Reducing the ability is one tactic. This is where Tiny Habits lives. Making the new habit so incredibly small as to feel almost useless is precisely the point. For example, when deciding to begin exercising, don’t set the new habit as a 2-mile jog 3 times a week. Instead, just say you will lace up your running shoes. It might seem pointless, but he has shown over time that that leads to easier habit formation. After the easy habit sticks you will naturally increase the demand. My shoes are on now, maybe I’ll walk around the block. And so on. There are two more caveats to his method to improve its effectiveness and staying power. First, reward yourself. After you perform your new habit, do whatever it takes to give yourself a momentary reward. Say to yourself, - I’m awesome! - Or maybe, do a little dance. Second, try tying the new behavior to a previous one already established in your routine. For example, he cites brushing teeth as a natural trigger to help cue your new habit of flossing. Perhaps putting your dinner plate in the dishwasher might cue your new habit of putting on your running shoes. Track Your Intake - For over three decades, studies have - consistently - found that tracking what you eat helps you lose weight and meet nutrition goals. Why does this work so well? - One suggested reason is that we simply do a poor job of estimating our dietary intake patterns. We routinely underestimate caloric consumption, we often don’t know what our meals are composed of nutritionally, and we (as we will touch on in a moment) often eat without realizing that we’re eating. The degree of diet-tracking success is related to the frequency and longevity of tracking. In other words, those who tracked their dietary intake more often, and over a longer period of time, showed progressively better health outcomes. A few jaded nutritionists have come to the conclusion that more knowledge doesn’t seem to work. The fact that most of us - know - that an apple is better than a candy bar, while progressively eating worse has led many to despair. However, knowledge may indeed still be power. However, certain knowledge may be more impactful than others. The problem - as anyone who has tried tracking their diet before will tell you - is that tracking your dietary intake is painfully tedious and difficult to maintain over time. While this technique works, and some people can successfully stick to the habit, most must wait for easier diet-tracking solutions. But the simple act of discovering your actual dietary intake may be the trick to more mindful eating. Cheat! - When all else fails, is it okay to trick your mind? Although I don’t want to place negatively connotated words into Dr. Brian Wansink’s mouth, I’d argue that he might agree with the language. Why? - Dr. Wansink’s research at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University has shown some very interesting eating behaviors we mindlessly exhibit that he has termed, well, - Mindless Eating. With it’s self-explanatory title, the concept is quite literally that we eat with thinking about it. For example, the volume of food before us can sometimes affect how much we eat. A study using 14-day old, stale popcorn showed that moviegoers, - despite agreeing that they did not enjoy the popcorn - , still ate 38% more than those with fresh popcorn in smaller containers! - Another interesting study involved a bottomless soup bowl. The bowl of soup was cleverly designed to slowly refill as the participants ate the soup, indefinitely. Quite literally, all-you-can-eat. Once again, those with bottomless bowls ate 73% more! - One of Dr. Wansink’s solutions? Use a smaller plate! By using smaller plates, we tend to serve less and eat less without even thinking about it. This type of - cheating - has also found its way into broader public health experiments, such as the buffet line in school cafeterias. Simply moving healthier options to eye-level can significantly increase its consumption over its less nutritious counterpart. While this technique is difficult to apply everywhere, and top-down implementation must combat deeper ethical debates, - cheating - can be highly effective and worth using to meet your own dietary goals! - Conclusion - The pandemic of malnutrition will require a multifaceted approach to solve. But these are just a few of the behavior-minded approaches that will likely be part of the solution. Not every tactic will work for everyone. But if weight control is a personal issue, try one out! You never know which one may stick!