Resolve to eat healthier in 2016

January 27, 2016

The article below, written by Susan Hudson, originally appeared in UNC’s University Gazette on Jan. 26.

So what if you gain a little weight as you get older? A pound a year doesn’t make that much difference, does it?

“A pound a year is not good. It cuts the number of healthy years of life,” said Barry Popkin, PhD, W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Popkin is also director of the Nutrition Transition Research Program in the Carolina Population Center and a world-renowned expert in nutrition and public policy.

Dr. Barry Popkin poses with his bicycle on the UNC campus.

“Obesity doesn’t kill you quickly. It debilitates you,” Popkin said. “It disables you, lowers your productivity at work, increases your illness rate and puts you in a nursing home earlier. And then you’re disabled five to eight years earlier.”

That’s the bad news. The good news is that eating the right foods and maintaining a healthy weight, in theory, isn’t that difficult. Popkin boils it down to these three guidelines:

• Drink only beverages with no calories;
• Eat more vegetables, fruits and whole grains; and
• Control eating frequency and portion size.

Of course, food isn’t the only factor in weight gain. Exercise also plays a major role. But Popkin promises it’s easier for most of us to cut the calories we consume than to burn them off later. “We’re not going to exercise off a Coke,” he said. “It takes half a mile of running or more for one Coke.”

You are what you drink

The nutritionist walks the walk, too. To get to his office in the CVS Plaza, you pass the bike he rode in on. A fit man in workout clothes and with a shock of white hair, he greets you with a firm handshake. He offers the only beverage choices he keeps in stock: a bottle of water or a Coke Zero. He sips a Coke Zero.

Sweet beverages are Popkin’s biggest bugaboos. His research has shown how consumption of soft drinks (or “liquid candy”) has led to increases in obesity and diabetes worldwide. Soft drinks top a list of sweetened beverages like sweet tea, fancy coffee drinks, fruit juices and alcohol that should be avoided.

Fruit juices aren’t really better for you than soft drinks, even though they sound healthier. Any kind of sweetened beverage fills you with excess calories without satisfying your hunger.

“We drink our fruit instead of eating it, which is very bad for our health,” he said. “You get filled by eating one orange, but you can drink six oranges in one glass.”

Don’t forget that alcoholic beverages have calories, too. The beer gut is real.

“We are now taking in too many calories from alcohol, particularly on weekends,” he said. Americans are consuming 100 to 200 calories more from alcohol on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

“The simplest thing to say would be to drink beverages with no calories, with the focus on water, coffee and tea,” he said.

Food that fills you up

The key to consuming fewer calories without feeling hungry is to eat foods that make you feel full: whole grains and plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables and nuts.

Popkin, for example, typically starts his day with a bowl of sugar-free cereal or steel-cut oats flavored with berries. For lunch, he has a big salad that’s heavy on vegetables and light on dressing, with some lean protein like fish, poultry or beans. Dinner is a small portion of protein with at least two colors of steamed or baked vegetables or fruit on his plate. “A potato is not a vegetable,” he said.

Popkin also advises avoiding red meat and processed meat products, for personal health and the health of the planet. Cows and other animals raised for meat are prodigious producers of greenhouse gases, he said, and we don’t need them to fulfill our protein needs.

“We can get plenty of protein from plant sources, like beans,” he said. “For most of our civilization, people only ate plant-based food, and they survived just fine.”

We are also better off preparing our food ourselves instead of relying on fast food, delivery and packaged, processed convenience foods. “Two-thirds of our diet is ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat stuff we buy,” he said. That adds up to far too many processed carbohydrates and four times the amount of sugar we should have.

Processed foods deceive people, he said. “We think we’re full, but we’re not. It runs right through us. We get hungry again, quickly, and we want to eat more.”

Less processing is also a good idea for home-cooked meals. Don’t negate the benefits of healthy foods by frying them or dousing them with fat, salt or sugar. “You can mess up anything by the way you prepare it,” Popkin said.

Not so much

The last tip from Popkin was to be aware of what you’re consuming and try to control the frequency and portion size.

“Actually a big hunk of why the calories increased in the past four decades in this country is going from half a snack a day to three snacks a day and going from a snack that was 50 calories to one that’s 300,” he said.

Instead of grazing all day on soft drinks, chips and sweets, limit snacks to small portions of healthy foods – raw carrots, celery sticks or other vegetables or fruits and nuts that haven’t been salted or fried. These snacks have valuable nutrients and make you feel full.

Most people don’t need to “graze” all day to maintain healthy blood-sugar levels. Three portion-controlled meals and a small snack each day should be enough for anyone. Also, “it doesn’t really matter what time of day you eat,” Popkin said. “It’s the total amount of calories that really matter.”

But what if you’ve already broken your resolution to eat healthier by polishing off the Christmas cookies or that half-pint of eggnog ice cream in the fridge?

Don’t despair. Just start over. “There’s nothing that says because you’ve gained a few extra pounds that you can’t then stop and try to eat healthy,” he said.