I generally don’t get political in this blog–after all, my focus is on the science of fitness, not the world of politics. However, a recent issue here in New York has motivated me to take up a cause. Namely, New York governor David Patterson has proposed a tax on soda and other sugary beverages. The tax would encompass soft drinks, energy drinks, sports beverages, and various juices and iced teas; sugar-free diet soft drinks would not be affected. It is estimated that such a tax would bring in about $1 billion over the course of a fiscal year, enough to make a significant dent in New York State’s $8.2 billion budget deficit. My only question: what took so long?
Predictably, beverage makers are up in arms over the bill. The American Beverage Association is lobbying hard to rally opposition against it. They have created an organization called American’s Against Food Taxes and set up the No Beverage Tax website where readers are encouraged to sign a petition against the governor’s proposal. They profess that tax against soda is discriminatory. They imply it is Un-American, harmful to the poor consumer who is overburdened by the recession. Before any tears well up, let’s get real here. We’re talking about making people pay a few cents more for something they shouldn’t be drinking in the first place. Here’s a simple solution for those who feel this causes financial hardship: switch to tap water–it’s free and has no calories!
Make no mistake, sweetened beverages, particularly sodas, are a major threat to public health. These beverages have no nutrient density whatsoever. Zilch! They epitomize the term “empty calories.” Worse, they are digested very quickly into your blood stream, and therefore don’t satisfy hunger—a fact that can lead to overeating. What’s more, they elicit a rapid spike in blood sugar levels, which in itself can lead to excess fat storage as well as increasing sugar cravings. And on top of everything, they’re bad for your teeth, too!
In a recent review of research appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Brownell and Frieden (1) reported that consumption of sugary beverages is associated with increases in body weight, poor dietary habits, and an elevated risk of obesity and diabetes. Conversely, a reduced consumption of these beverages has a positive effect on health and wellness. But that’s not the worst of it…
Soft drinks companies focus a great deal of their marketing efforts on children and adolescents, so much so that sugared beverages now comprise 10 to 15% of the calories they consume. It is estimated that each additional glass a child drinks increases his/her likelihood of becoming obese by approximately 60%. Given the epidemic of childhood obesity and its ramifications (approximately one-third of all children in New York State are classified as overweight or obese), this is something that needs to be addressed. Soon!
The real question, then, is whether a soda tax would have any impact on consumption? Evidence suggests it would. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health shows that taxes on cigarettes have substantially curbed the rate of smoking in America (2). What’s more, larger tax increases were associated with larger smoking declines, with the greatest effect seen in youth, minorities, and low-income smokers. This bodes well for the effectiveness of a tax on sugary beverages.
In their article, Brownell and Frieden estimate that for every 10% increase in price, soda consumption decreases by 7.8%. They quote an industry trade publication report that shows even greater price sensitivity: a 12% increase in the price of Coca-Cola resulted in a 14.6% drop in sales. These statistics provide powerful support to the belief that a soda tax would decrease consumption of sugary beverages. If so, this would reduce caloric intake, leading to better weight management for millions of Americans.
An essential aspect of any soda tax is that revenues must go toward offsetting health care costs (the money collected from the proposed tax in New York would be targeted for an existing pool that funds the state’s health expenses). The medical expenses associated with overweight and obesity are staggering. Taxpayers assume the majority of these costs through Medicare and Medicaid. This clearly is unjust. Why should those who watch their diet and maintain their health pay for those who don’t? If a person wishes to consume sugary beverages, that is certainly his right. But he then should be responsible for bearing the costs associated with his decision, not the taxpayers.
Bottom line is that a tax on sodas and other sugary beverages is an idea whose time has come. It will help to make us healthier as a nation, and transfer some of the economic burden of skyrocketing medical costs to those who don’t assume responsibility for their own health. Perhaps the success of such a tax in New York will motivate congress to pass a national tax on sodas and sweetened beverages. And perhaps then, despite the protests from special interest groups, we’ll have a healthier nation because of it.
Stay Fit!
Brad
1) Brownell KD, Frieden TR. Ounces of prevention–the public policy case for taxes on sugared beverages. N Engl J Med. 2009 Apr 30;360(18):1805-8.
2) Peterson DE, Zeger SL, Remington PL, Anderson HA. The effect of state cigarette tax increases on cigarette sales, 1955 to 1988. Am J Public Health. 1992 Jan;82(1):94-6.
Wanted to let everyone know I’ll be conducting a seminar at the upcoming NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference. The conference is taking place at Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas on March 7th and 8th, 2010. The topic of my seminar is “Maternal Fitness: Safe and Effective Strategies for Training the Pregnant and Postpartum Client.” Hope to see you there!
The current issue of More Magazine includes an excerpt from my book, Women’s Home Workout Bible. The excerpt details my “Ten Commandments of Fitness” and can be found at the following link: How to Work Out Smarter. These are tried and true principles that are essential for optimizing exercise results. While some of the commandments may seem obvious, many people unfortunately neglect to follow through and regiment them into their workouts. Hope you enjoy the excerpt!
I recently teamed with Heartbeat Radio 1410, a popular radio station out of central Florida, to help with a weight loss challenge they are sponsoring. Specifically, the station chose 6 contestants to go through a real-life “Biggest Loser” challenge. The goal is to see who can lose the most weight without being confined in an artificial environment. For the exercise component, contestants will be following the programs outlined in my book, Women’s Home Workout Bible. The contest started at the beginning of the year and is now well into its second month. I look forward to posting the final results of the contestants and reporting on their success. Good luck to all!
Hands down, no other body part gets more attention than the abs. It’s not even close. Unfortunately, there are more myths associated with the best way to trim and tone midsection than any other body part. Falling prey to these myths not only diminishes results, but you also may increase the potential for an injury.
So how do you go about deciphering ab training fact from fiction? Read on…
MYTH #1: Training the abs will give you a flat stomach.
Contrary to popular belief, you cant spot reduce fat. It’s a physiologic impossibility. When you exercise, fat is utilized (i.e. burned) from all areas of the body; you can perform crunches until the cows come home but it will have virtually no effect on losing those love handles or blasting that beer belly. What’s more, the calories expended during ab exercises are very low. There are far better exercises to expedite fat loss than crunches and side bends, particularly those that work multiple muscle groups such as squats, presses, and rows. Now training your abs will develop the underlying muscle, which is essential if you want that coveted “six pack.” But if there is a layer of fat obscuring your muscles, no one will ever see what you’ve worked so hard to develop.
MYTH #2: The lower and upper abs are separate from one another.
The abs are one long sheath of muscle–not two separate entities. Any ab exercise you do is going to involve both the lower and upper abdominal areas. However, studies show you can shift the emphasis more toward the lower or upper regions by performing specific exercises. Specifically, exercises that bring the chest toward the pelvis (crunch-type exercises) target the upper region of the abs, while exercises that bring the pelvis toward the chest (reverse curls) target the lower abdominal region.
MYTH #3: You should perform ab exercises every day for best results.
It has been taken as gospel that the abs are somehow different from other muscles and respond best to daily training. Nonsense, at least if getting a six-pack is your goal. You wouldn’t think of training the biceps or the quadriceps every day, would you? Well, the abs have the almost the same percentage of “fast twitch” to “slow twitch” muscles as the biceps and the quads. This means they are designed just as much for strength as for endurance. Realize that your muscles develop during rest. When you train, you’re actually breaking down muscle tissue. Short change results and you shortchange the recuperative process, thereby impairing results. Approximately 48 hours rest is needed between training sessions for a given muscle group–and that includes the abs.
MYTH #4: During the crunch, you should place your hands behind your head for support.
More times then not, people are taught to support their head with their hands when doing crunches. Bad idea. You see, when you clasp your hands behind your head there is a reflexive tendency to pull on the neck muscles. This greatly increases the risk for straining your neck muscles, especially towards the end of a set when you begin to fatigue and are struggling to perform those last few reps. I cringe watching some people yank their heads up as they crunch; they’re an injury waiting to happen. Ouch! The best advice is to place your hands behind your chest or put your fists at your ears. Your neck will thank you. For more detailed info on this myth, see my post Do Crunches Lead to Neck Pain?.
So there you go. Heed these truisms about ab training and you’re well on your way to a better workout…and a firmer midsection!
I recently was asked to write a paper for the NSCA Hot Topic series, and decided to address one of the most controversial subjects in the fitness field: namely, are full squats bad for your knees? As I detailed in the article, the answer is no, deep squats do not pose increased risk of injury to the knees *provided* you have no existing knee issues. Without question, deep squats may be contraindicated for those with knee pathology depending on the extent of the injury (it should be noted that any exercise may contraindicated because of injury). If you fall into this category, a qualified physician specializing in sports medicine should be able to assess what you can and can’t do. Otherwise, squat depth should not be an issue from an injury perspective. In fact, the deeper range of the squat is actually protective of many of the knee structures!
Assuming you have healthy knee function, what you should in fact consider with respect to squat depth are your goals. Deep squats have relevance to various sports, as well as many activities of daily living. These are powerful reasons why you would be well served by squatting as low as possible, at least on some of your sets. What’s more, glute involvement increases the lower you go in a squat. This means that if you want to maximize the development of your butt, then deep squats are highly beneficial. On the other hand, quadriceps development is greatest squatting to parallel. So if you are most concerned with developing your frontal thighs, deep squats might not be a necessity.
The bottom line is, don’t be afraid to squat low as long as you don’t have any existing knee problems. Make a decision based on your goals, not fear of injury. If you’re interested in reading about the science on the topic, you can check out my Hot Topic article at the link below.
In previous blog posts, I’ve addressed the importance of resistance training in reducing body fat and maintaining weight loss. You may remember that this was a hot topic over the summer in my rebuttal to the Time Magazine article on whether exercise is beneficial for losing weight. Now comes yet more evidence to back up these claims.
In a study published in the prestigious journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, a research group led by Jennifer Bea evaluated the effects of strength training on 122 postmenopausal women over the course of a 6-year period. All of the women had been previously sedentary. At the beginning of the study, 65 of the women were placed in an exercise program consisting of various strength training training exercises including squats and presses. A year into the study, 32 of the remaining non-exercisers were placed on the exercise program, leaving 25 of the women to serve as controls who did not exercise throughout the entire period studied. What was the outcome? As you may have guessed, strength training had a positive effect on weight management. Specifically, both exercise frequency and the amount of weight lifted were inversely associated with weight gain (i.e. those who exercised more and lifted more had lower body weights). On the whole, those who lifted were significantly leaner than those who didn’t.
For anyone who has read this blog, these results should not come as a surprise. The metabolic benefits attributed to lifting weights have been well documented. Not only is there a significant caloric cost associated with strength training (provided rest intervals are limited and sets are sufficiently challenging), but it also increases excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (i.e. the “afterburn”) so that calorie burning continues for up to 38 hours or more after a workout. Further, muscle itself is a metabolically active tissue that serves to keep your metabolism stoked round the clock. By increasing muscle development, strength training indirectly promotes better weight management.
Bottom line: An exercise program aimed at weight loss should always have a strength training component. While aerobic exercise certainly will help to expedite fat loss, nothing replaces lifting weights for enhancing fat burning and, more importantly, keeping the weight off over the long term. Lift to lose!
Stay Fit!
Brad
Reference:
Bea JW, Cussler EC, Going SB, Blew RM, Metcalfe LL, Lohman TG. Resistance Training Predicts Six-Year Body Composition Change in Postmenopausal Women. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2009 Dec 14.
Set foot in any gym and you’ll no doubt see cardio machines that have charts to help you train in your ‘fat burning zone’. The theory behind the concept is based on studies showing that the percentage of fat used as an energy source is optimized when you train at an intensity between 60 to 80 percent of your target heart rate. But while increasing the percentage of fat burned for fuel sounds like a great way to get lean, it unfortunately doesn’t translate into burning more fat on an absolute basis. The most important aspect of shedding body fat is the total amount of calories burned—not the percentage of calories from fat—and therefore a higher intensity cardio routine is the better choice.
You see, the human body is a dynamic organism and constantly adjusts its use of fat for fuel. This process is governed by a host of factors (including enzyme levels, substrate availability, internal feedback loops, etc.). If you expend more calories than you consume, your body will shift to a fat burning mode and mobilize excess adipose as a source of energy. Thus, from a fat loss perspective, high-intensity exercise burns more fat calories on an absolute basis than lower intensity activities.
Ideally, the activity that maximizes calorie burning is interval training, where short bouts of low intensity exercise are interspersed with high intensity bouts. Interval training not only heightens fat burning during the activity itself, but also increases the amount of calories you burn after the workout is over! This is due to a phenomenon called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). Simply stated, EPOC keeps your metabolism elevated for several hours following training. Moreover, there is an associated increase in the secretion of both growth hormone and noradrenaline—hormones that are integrally involved in the fat burning process—resulting in an increased utilization of fat of fuel. All told, there is both a greater total amount of calories expended as well as a greater amount of fat oxidation following training.
Here’s the catch, though: EPOC is intensity dependent—the harder you train, the more calories you expend following training. That’s why you need to push yourself as hard as you can during your high-intensity intervals, going as close to all-out as possible. For those who have never performed this type of cardio, I generally recommend starting out with an interval ratio of 4:1 (i.e. four minutes at low intensity followed by 1 minute at high intensity) and, as you become more fit, gradually lower the ratio until you are at 1:1.
Although people tend to associate interval training with treadmill exercise, virtually any cardiovascular activity can be employed, including machines such as the stair climber, elliptical machine, and stationary bike. You can also jump rope or perform any number of outdoor activities, too. Just make sure that you are readily able to switch between high and low intensities. In final analysis, you’ll exert a good deal more effort in your training, but the results will be well worth it!
Schoenfeld, B., Dawes, J. (2009). High-Intensity Interval Training: Applications for General Fitness Training. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 31(6), 44-46
I generally don’t get political in this blog–after all, my focus is on the science of fitness, not the world of politics. However, a recent issue here in New York has motivated me to take up a cause. Namely, New York governor David Patterson has proposed a tax on soda and other sugary beverages. The [...] […]
Wanted to let everyone know I’ll be conducting a seminar at the upcoming NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference. The conference is taking place at Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas on March 7th and 8th, 2010. The topic of my seminar is “Maternal Fitness: Safe and Effective Strategies for Training the Pregnant and Postpartum Client.” Hope to [...] […]
The current issue of More Magazine includes an excerpt from my book, Women’s Home Workout Bible. The excerpt details my “Ten Commandments of Fitness” and can be found at the following link: How to Work Out Smarter. These are tried and true principles that are essential for optimizing exercise results. While some of the commandments [...] […]
I recently teamed with Heartbeat Radio 1410, a popular radio station out of central Florida, to help with a weight loss challenge they are sponsoring. Specifically, the station chose 6 contestants to go through a real-life “Biggest Loser” challenge. The goal is to see who can lose the most weight without being confined in an [...] […]
Hands down, no other body part gets more attention than the abs. It’s not even close. Unfortunately, there are more myths associated with the best way to trim and tone midsection than any other body part. Falling prey to these myths not only diminishes results, but you also may increase the potential for an injury. [...] […]
I recently was asked to write a paper for the NSCA Hot Topic series, and decided to address one of the most controversial subjects in the fitness field: namely, are full squats bad for your knees? As I detailed in the article, the answer is no, deep squats do not pose increased risk of injury [...] […]
In previous blog posts, I’ve addressed the importance of resistance training in reducing body fat and maintaining weight loss. You may remember that this was a hot topic over the summer in my rebuttal to the Time Magazine article on whether exercise is beneficial for losing weight. Now comes yet more evidence to back up [...] […]
Set foot in any gym and you’ll no doubt see cardio machines that have charts to help you train in your ‘fat burning zone’. The theory behind the concept is based on studies showing that the percentage of fat used as an energy source is optimized when you train at an intensity between 60 to [...] […]
In case you missed it, here is the link to the article that the Gannett Newspaper chain did on my new book, Women’s Home Workout Bible. Get an Excellent Workout at Home Without Spending a Lot of Money. The article features tips for setting up a home gym, achieving results, and maintaining motivation over the long term. [...] […]
For those who missed it, here is the video from my appearance on NBC Today in New York. Enjoy! [There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.] Bookmark this on Delicious […]
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