Food Guide Follies: How Brazil is Leading the Way to a Healthier World

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, one of the biggest challenges facing the world today is getting people to take care of their bodies. In a world of fast food chains and a seemingly infinite supply of gummy bears, our cave-people brains face temptations almost beyond description. In their attempts to help us on the path to choosing healthy options, the governments of most western countries have put together food guides.

Generally speaking, these guides try to take a complicated issue and present it in a way that the average person can understand. Unfortunately, they almost always fail miserably. Whether you are basing your recommendations on the four food groups (meat and protein, fruits and vegetables, dairy, and grains) or some kind of crazy pyramid scheme it is pretty easy to go off the rails describing serving sizes, individual differences, vitamins, and granting people the occasional candy bar out of sheer guilt.

Because of the complexity and inherent confusion that goes along with making dietary recommendations, it is pretty uncommon for doctors, nutritionists, and researchers to all come out in favour of any country’s food guide. However, that is exactly what has happened recently with the guidelines published in Brazil, a country with rapidly growing access to fast food chains and even more rapidly expanding waistbands. So why has Brazil’s new food guide met such universal acclaim? The reason is that the recommendations focus more on how people eat than what they are actually eating.

The full guide is an 87-page behemoth of a document that the authors knew no one would read all of, so they distilled the overall message down to ten simple rules for a healthier diet:

1.       Prepare meals using fresh, staple foods.

2.       Use oils, fats, sugars, and salt in moderation.

3.       Limit consumption of ready-to-eat foods and drinks.

4.       Eat at regular times and pay attention to your food. Don’t multi-task and relax while you enjoy your     meals.

5.       Eat with other people whenever possible.

6.       Buy your food from markets and shops that sell mainly fresh (not ready-to-eat) foods.

7.       Develop, practice, share, and enjoy your cooking skills.

8.       Share cooking responsibilities and set aside enough time for healthy meals.

9.       When you eat out, go to restaurants that specialize in fresh food. Avoid fast food chains.

10.    Be critical of food-industry advertising.

As you can see, rather than a rulebook of numbers and steps, Brazil’s new food guide is about a lifestyle. Even better, it seems like a pretty fun lifestyle. Cook and eat with friends? Develop cooking as a skill? Go to farmer’s markets? What’s not to love?

As much as we might like it, the true test of any food guide is whether or not it will actually encourage people to eat right. Fortunately, recent research might suggest that this new approach to healthy eating is just what the doctor ordered. Specifically, studies have shown that people respond well and adapt their behaviour when food is framed as part of their lifestyle.

Researchers have looked at the effect of labeling menus on people’s dietary decision-making. In a study comparing menus with no additional labels, labels with the number of calories in each dish, and menus displaying how much exercise would be needed to burn off the calories in the food, researchers found that people made the healthiest choices when they were told what they would need to do to cancel out their meal. More to the point, the prospect of 35 minutes of jogging makes people less likely to eat a chocolate bar than telling them it contains 240 calories. Even more promising, other research has found that people are more likely to eat at restaurants that label their menus with nutritional information.

It all goes back to the way we detach ourselves from our food. We so rarely know where things come from, what is in them, and how they are made that when we are presented with relatable information about how food affects our lives, we make smarter choices. Not having to chase down a live chicken for dinner has made us poor decision-makers. Maybe the combination of skillful home-cooking with friends and the threat of hours on a stairmaster can bring us back to reality.

Sketchy Fact #39: Ancient Roots

The oldest living tree on earth is a Norway Spruce named Old Tjikko. Its root system is 9,550 years old, its main trunk is much younger, though.

Living the Sin: The Strange Lives of Three-Toed Sloths

Special thanks to our good friend Kyle Empringham over at TheStarfish for suggesting this week’s topic. Kyle asked “What’s the deal with sloths?” Fortunately for us, vague questions often lead to interesting answers.

Very few people would envy the lives of three-toed sloths. Native to the rainforests of Costa Rica, these animals are famous for moving incredibly slowly (they climb at a maximum speed of 8 feet per minute), and sleeping up to 20 hours per day. What most people don't realize is that sloths are unique among mammals in a lot of ways that might explain their apparently laziness.

As a general rule of biology, large mammals don’t live their whole lives in trees. Sure, trees offer great protection from predators and give you a pretty solid view of what is going on in your neck of the woods, but the food stinks. Living on a diet of leaves alone usually limits mammals to about the size of a squirrel. Most animals you can think of that make their homes in forest canopies rely on insects, fruits, or other means of added nutrition to keep them going. Not three-toed sloths, though. The reason these furry tree-dwellers move so slowly is because their metabolism is the slowest of any mammal. Leaves offer them so little in the way of nutrition that they can’t afford to waste a single calorie.

Surprisingly, their dietary deficiencies may also help explain one of the weirdest things sloths do. For years, biologists have puzzled over why sloths risk getting chomped on by predators once every week when they leave the trees to poo. They would be easy enough targets if they used different locations as their toilets, but for some reason sloths go back to the same spot time and time again. It is the only thing in their lives that they willingly leave the trees for.

Surprisingly, a recent study from biologist Jonathan Pauli at the University of Wisconsin suggests that the reason for this peculiar bathroom behaviour might lie in the sloths’ disgustingly unkempt fur. One of the odd side effects of their moving so slowly is that algae actually grows in the fur of three-toed sloths. The algae makes them appear green during the wet season and brown during the dry, so the arrangement actually provides them with some added camouflage. The interesting part about what Pauli had found is that the ecosystems in their fur also help supplement a slothful diet. Studying the stomach contents of sloths revealed that they eat the algae when grooming, which provides additional fats and calories that they need to make up for eating all those empty leaf calories. 

That is all well and good but how does it explain sloths’ preferred pooing spots? As it turns out, algae isn’t the only thing living in a sloths' fur. Their follicle forests are also home to moths. Up to 120 individual moths have been found living in the fur of one sloth. By observing the sloths for weeks on end, Pauli developed a theory that these moths were laying their eggs in the sloths’ dung. When the slow-moving hosts returned to their bathroom spots, the eggs hatched and the new moths hopped aboard to keep the cycle going.

Apparently, when the moths die and decompose in the sloths’ fur, they provide nutrients that allow the algae to grow. As we have seen, the sloths benefit from the algae by way of camouflage and a handy snack. In short sloths, moths, and algae have worked out one of the strangest symbiotic ménage a trois in nature. This also explains why three-toed sloths living in cleaner captive conditions often aren’t as healthy as their wild counterparts.

The morale of the story? They may be cute and easy to catch, but you really don’t want to hug a sloth.

Sketchy Fact #38: Emotional Orcas

Scientists believe that Orcas (Killer Whales) are the second most cultural animals on Earth after humans. Scans of their brains show huge areas devoted to emotion and analytical skills. Separate groups have completely different hunting techniques and are even thought to have their own languages.

The South-Paw Shuffle: Why Left-Handed People Are Freaks

The great thing about running a science website is that keeping up with your “competition” takes on the same feeling as visiting with friends. One of our personal best friends in this regard is the popular science juggernaut called RadioLab. The brilliant folks that create their articles and podcasts produce a constant stream of topics that get me thinking. Their podcast “What’s Left When You’re Right?” got me thinking enough to write this article. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Humans have all kinds of strange quirks. We love food that is terrible for us. We jeopardize secure lives and careers to chase crazy dreams. But few of our quirks are as tangible and as complex as our tendency to be right-handed. As most elementary school kids know, a whopping 90% of us Have brains that pull to the right in the vein of a poorly aligned sports car. The result for the remaining 10% (which includes our tireless illustrator over here at Sketchy Science) is that the world is not always an easy place. Among the things that left-handers face unfair challenges with are bank machines (all the slots are on the right), typing numbers (number keys are on the right of your keyboard), driving a manual transmission car, using scissors, and writing in binders/notebooks.

On top all the practical disadvantages, researchers at Yale University have found some evidence suggesting that south paws are at a higher risk of suffering from bi polar personality disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. But in a world with no numpad, who could blame them?

Given that the world seems out to get them, why do left handed people still exist? Darwin has made it perfectly clear that nature should phase out any trait that leaves an individual at a disadvantage. Well, as it turns out, there may be one thing working in their favour: lefties will kick your butt at most athletic/physical competitions. If you’ve ever watched a baseball game or a boxing match you may have heard the commentators mention that the pitcher, batter, or one of the fighters is left-handed. This is not an idle observation. Research has shown that a significantly greater number of pro athletes are left-handed than you would expect given that they make up only 10% of the general population (Grouios et al., 2000).

It makes sense when you think about it. Staying with the boxing example, most fighters you face when you start out (like most people overall) are right-handed. Your training will therefore bias you towards attacking and defending against people with a right-handed bias. When you one day face off against a left-hander, however, everything you knew about boxing is suddenly completely backwards. You may be faster, stronger, and even more intelligent, but if you're suddenly fighting a mirror image of what you expect, you will look as awkward as a newborn horse trying to stand for the first time.

Athletic superiority also leads to reproductive success. A study published in Evolution & Human Behaviour found that athletes reported having significantly more sexual partners than non-athletes (Faurie, Pontier, & Raymond, 2003). The authors point out that athletes are generally more physically fit and attractive than non-athletes and that this might have something to do with it. Fortunately, we can all agree that science writers are even more attractive than athletes, on average.

Many people don’t buy the whole left-handed athlete explanation for why south-paws persist despite the drawbacks. The scientists who disagree offer another possible explanation. They believe that as humans evolved the ability to speak, we became more right-handed. For whatever reason, when language evolved in people, it took over a good chunk of the left half of the brain. Since language and speech require such fine control over tiny muscles in your mouth and throat, as the left side of our brains got better at speaking it also got better at controlling motor skills. And since the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body, the side effect is that most of us are now right-handed.

This would explain why evidence for right-handed dominance can be found all through human history, from the time of Greek philosophers through the middle ages. It can also help shed some light on when language first evolved. Evidence of right-handed preference has been found in stone tool use dating back nearly 2 million years! (Toth, 1985) This could mean that humans were first learning to speak (and becoming right-handed) before we were even technically humans (2 million years ago we were either Homo habilis or Homo erectus, depending who you ask). Homo sapiens (modern humans) first appeared about 200,000 years ago.

That's the amazing thing about science. What starts as a seemingly meaningless difference between people eventually gives us insight into neuroscience, evolution, and the incredibly distant past. Think about that next time you reach for a can opener.

References:

Toth, 1985. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248485800877

Faurie, Pontier, and Raymond, 2004. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(03)00064-3/abstract

Grouios et al., 2000. http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.2000.90.3c.1273?journalCode=pms

Sketchy Fact #37: The Stench of Flowers

The giant Sumatran flower Titan Arum smells like rotting flesh. Its common name is the “Corpse Flower” and it very rarely blooms, presumably to the relief of everyone in Sumatra.

The Trouble with Chairs: How Doing Nothing is Doing You Harm

Living a healthy lifestyle is as difficult as it is important. We saw in our discussion of Epigenetics that the bad decisions we make about our health today can have consequences for not only ourselves, but generations of our offspring. Eating right and exercising regularly are the two crucial things that everyone knows to do to protect their health; however, recent research is beginning to realize that there may be a third factor that is just as important: sitting.

A paper published by the American College of Sports Medicine suggests that if you spend too much time with your feet up, your lifespan may be headed down (Katzmarzyk et al., 2008). The study included over 17,000 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 90 and compared overall mortality with a number of lifestyle factors. The researchers determined that even after controlling for obvious factors like age, diet, and exercise, time spent sitting was correlated with a significantly increased risk of death from any cause.

That is a complicated thought so let’s take a second to think about it. When researchers “control” for something they are trying to rule it out as a cause of some effect. In this case when the researchers control for exercise, for example, they are basically comparing their findings across groups of people who exercise similar amounts. Ditto for diet and age. Even after doing this the effects they found were significant. That means that even if you go for an hour long run after sitting behind a desk at work for 8 hours, you are still at an elevated risk of death compared with a mail carrier, for example.

Other research has linked excess sitting to colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, and chronic chest pain. To understate things dramatically: this is bad news. We live in a world that is designed to promote sitting. Buses and trains are basically mobile rooms full of chairs. We sit to eat, we sit to work, we sit to read about how bad sitting is for us (caught you). So what can we do?

Doctors have begun taking this research to heart and have offered several recommendations. First, if you have a job that requires you to sit all day, use your time away from work to be more active. Stand while you watch TV, stand while you eat dinner, go for a walk before breakfast. Much of the problem comes from the fact that when we sit, our muscles don’t contract. The minor contractions that go along with shifting from one foot to the other or moving things around with our arms help our bodies to metabolize and remove fats and sugars. When we sit, those processes shut down and we store harmful waste products in our bodies. The science has even specifically shown that sitting all day increases fat storage around the middle of your body… and beach season isn’t far off.

If you’re the especially wacky type, Amazon offers a plethora of stand-up work station options. You can buy the exercise bike with the laptop tray. There are plenty of desks with the work platform at chest height. You can even buy a treadmill complete with a desk, file sorter, and pen organizer. In his book  Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, A.J. Jacobs brags that he walked over 1000 miles (1,600 km) while doing his writing.

Clearly not all of us are cut out for that sort of dramatic undertaking, but we can do some of the little things that the experts recommend. Take a 5 or 10 minute break once an hour to get up and walk around your office. Instead of sitting in a boardroom for a meeting, invite your coworkers to go for a walk while you talk about your next project. An evening stroll after dinner won’t only prolong your life, it might make you enjoy it a little more too.

Usually when bad news makes its way down the scientific grapevine we need to make big changes to our lives if we want to keep enjoying them. Working out is tough and there are days when the thought of going to the gym is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Walking by a pizzeria, smelling the delicious aromas and not going in for a slice is an act of willpower worthy of a medal. By comparison, a little extra standing isn’t such a big deal. Besides, if anyone tries to judge you for it, you are already in position to look down your nose at them. And, in case you were wondering, yes researching this article scared me into action myself. I now spend 6 of my 8 working hours a day standing at this wonderful monstrosity trying to avoid an early grave:

If a lazy blogger can do this, what's your excuse?

Other References:
http://revdesportiva.pt/files/form_cont/Sitting_Time_and_Mortality_from_All_Causes.pdf