June 19 2012

Just like the Spice Girls, carbohydrates were at the height of their popularity during the mid-1990s. When "fat-free" became the desired state, people turned to carbs instead. Consumers soon learned that a high carb diet wasn't so healthy either. Today, between marketers who promote packaged carbs as "heart healthy" and fitness "experts" who espouse that all carbs are bad, it's easy to be confused. Here are some carb myths debunked:

Myth 1: If you want to eat a low-carb diet, just cut out bread, pasta, cereal, rice and potatoes.

Although bread, pasta, cereal, rice and potatoes are among the best-known carbohydrates, the truth is that many other foods have carbohydrates, including fruits, vegetables, dairy products, nuts, seeds, beans/legumes and avocados. These foods are natural carbohydrates and have greater nutritional value than processed or low-fiber carbs. If you cut out starchy carbs, you are still consuming adequate amounts of carbohydrate depending on your lifestyle, activity level, age and medical issues.

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June 18 2012

Night owls often wake up for work or school with a scowl on their faces and wishing for an IV drip of coffee, while morning people come skipping in 15 minutes early. However, morning people aren't chipper just as the sun is coming up; they are happier and more satisfied with life overall, a new study suggests.

Teenagers' night owl tendencies fade as they age, and the study says this switch to a morning-focused schedule could be why older adults are happier than younger ones.

"Past research has suggested that morning-type people report feeling happier than evening-type people, and this research was only on young adults," study researcher Renee Biss, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, told LiveScience.

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June 18 2012

Frito-Lay has long dominated the snack-food business by relentlessly focusing on the middle swath of America that eats chips and pretzels and party mix without regard to the effect on the waistline.

Now, though, Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo, is building a “company within a company” to pursue what might be called a 1 percent-99 percent strategy: creating high-end snacks as well as those that appeal to what it diplomatically calls “value” customers.

The effort is all about what Tom Greco, president of Frito-Lay North America, has called the “bifurcation” of American snackaholics.

By that, he meant that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,” said Ann Mukherjee, chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay North America.

“Demographics, the aging population and changing ethnic mix, and bifurcating income are the trends reshaping the way people are eating,” Ms. Mukherjee said. “We’re snacking more often during the day, and we’re looking for snacks that are more satisfying physically and healthier.”

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June 18 2012

Not losing weight? Or worse, you worked like hell to lose it and now the pounds are back, and then some? If you're on a diet, or if you've spent much of your life dieting, you've undoubtedly worked very, very hard to achieve results. And quite probably you've experienced the devastating shame or disappointment of having the weight creep back on. Whether you've been working against 10 pounds or 200, losing weight and keeping it off can be one of the toughest challenges, and I bow to you for the efforts you've made. Losing weight may have been hard thus far, but it doesn't have to be. Let's look at three of the reasons your diet has probably not been working, and then I'll show you how to change things up.

The Three Reasons Your Diet Isn't Working:

1. You are miserable while dieting. Most diets would have you cutting things out from your diet; they are about denial and discipline. You love pizza? No more of that. Pasta? Forget it. Dessert? Erase the word from your vocabulary. So you white-knuckle your way through some crazy diet of deprivation, and you're miserable. If you are fed up with too many restrictions and you are missing the simple joys of your old life, you simply won't keep up the effort. And why should you? Life is meant to be lived and enjoyed -- and that includes enjoying your food.

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