DrClydeWilson's NUTRITION BLOG

“Blessed are the Sleek?" No

Summary: The Daniel Plan incorrectly calls nuts and grains protein sources, and ignores that fruits are not as healthy as vegetables, making it another “diet” rather than “common sense eating” as it claims. I do applaud, however, the integration of health initiatives within established communities to take advantage of their infrastructure to enable folks to pursue health together, dramatically increasing their shared experiences and success.

In the 11 June 2012 issue of Time magazine, J. Kluger and E. Dias write on Pastor Rick Warren’s movement for greater health, starting with his congregation and with plans for expanding world-wide. This movement is called the Daniel Plan because, although it includes strengthening the physical body through exercise and active lifestyle, it’s nutrition component is based on what is inferred to be the only verse in the Bible offering any specifics on eating: Daniel, one of four Jewish boys taken to the court of King Nebuchadnazzar to be groomed to serve the King, leads the other boys in a refusal to defile themselves with meat and wine, choosing vegetables and water instead. Professor C.L. Seow at Princeton Theological Seminary says: “Nowhere in the Bible does it say ‘This is what they should eat,’” and points out that Daniel’s diet is not about achieving health, but rather the rejection of privilege. Note to self: I am aware of another Scripture related to food because it is plastered on the front of Ezekiel products in the grocery store: “Take also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it” [Ez 4:9]. These Ezekiel carbohydrate foods are in the minority of what is allowed by the Daniel Plan, where they are incorrectly labeled as protein sources (more on this later).

I think it is fantastic when a community enables its members to help each other without forcing anyone; their restaurant still serves less healthy food, but with red stickers instead of yellow or green by those items on the menu. Pastor Warren, Mehmet Oz, Michelle Obama and others who are in a position to reach many people should use that position to enable health in those who want to improve their health. However, if some of the information they are using is inconsistent with the scientific data, their efforts to help would contribute to the confusion about how to eat that already exists, since information opposing what science says about nutrition is more likely to reduce health. If the misinformation is less important than the part that is correct, then there would still be an over-all benefit, but the science is readily and freely available to the public on line so I see no need to have any misinformation mixed in with the good information, such as what I see happening with every diet. In fact, I would argue that having one or more pieces of misinformation is precisely what makes a nutrition program a “diet.” The Daniel Plan, Paleo, Atkins, Ornish, raw food, cooked food, juicing, low-fat, low-carb, low-calories, and the rest are all narrow viewpoints within the broader and more neutral view of scientific data. Data tends to support all views simultaneously, some specifics more than others, so that practically any nutritional guidance can claim a stake on “truth.” Scientific and medical experts Mark Hyman and Mehmet Oz are helping with the Daniel Plan, but I doubt they have taken or have the time to review all the nutrition details described by Pastor Warren’s Daniel team, who incorrectly claim on their web site that nuts and grains are protein sources (see next paragraph). They also do not make it clear that having as much or more fruit than vegetables can reduce health, as shown in many studies, including one in which women at high risk of breast cancer were asked to eat more “fruits and vegetables” but ended up eating more fruits than vegetables and gained 6 pounds during the study, increasing their risk of breast cancer [Djuric Z et al, Nutr Cancer 43 2002 141].

The Daniel Plan specifies to follow the 70/30 rule: 70% of daily foods should be whole foods (raw or lightly cooked vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds), and the remaining 30% should be the healthiest versions of everything else (lean protein, whole grains, and starchy vegetables). In the Q&A section of DanielPlan.com, when asked “Am I supposed to eat fruits and veggies or can I have meat?” the Daniel Plan staff respond: “You can include protein in your diet with meat and other alternatives. If you choose meat, the doctors prefer free range, organic, antibiotic free, and hormone free or wild. Other sources of protein include legumes, nuts and grains.” To assess protein impact on lean tissue health in humans, the Institute of Medicine, the FDA, the World Health Organization and the United Nations uses the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), which specifies that relative to the highest quality protein (egg, soy, dairy, contractile tissue such as meat, poultry and fish), the usefulness to the human body of the protein in legumes is 70% as effective, peanuts only 52%, and wheat only 42% as effective. Combined with the fact that legumes are only 1/4 protein, and that both nuts (of all types) and grains (of all types) are only 1/10 protein on their nutrition labels (easily observable by anyone that simply looks), you end up with only 1/8 (in legumes) and 1/20 (in nuts and grains) of the calories in these foods being effective protein. This means you would need 300 Cal of legumes (an entire cup) or 800 Cal of any nut (an entire cup) or 800 Cal of any grain (8 slices of bread or 3 cups of pasta) to meet your minimum needs of just 40 Cal (10 grams) of protein in a SINGLE meal. Vegetables and greens like spinach have MORE (as much as HALF) of their calories as protein, making them more of a protein food than nuts and grains, and yet vegetables are in the non-protein 70% of the Daniel Plan.

If you want to eat a certain way for spiritual or any other reasons I think that is 100% completely fine and good. If you want to promote ideas as being scientific or medically relevant, then you must know what the data says. You have no choice: you must look to the nutrition and medical scientific literature. Anything else is ignorant by definition, lazy since you could easily find out the truth by looking it up, and immoral because that laziness leads to false nutritional beliefs in followers, resulting in unnecessary dietary restrictions in place of what could have been more substantive advice.

Pastor Warren’s inspiration for initiating this movement is intersting. He was doing immersion baptisms of hundreds of congregants, winding up “having to dip and lift a whole lot of cumulative weight”, leading him to think “Man, we’re all fat.” Looking in the mirror, faced in the face with his 295 lb bulk, or looking at his congregation and seeing the men and women with average weights of 210 and 170 lb, respectively, was apparently not enough. In fact, his church was helping to push congregants to higher and higher body fat (see next paragraph). One of his congregants in response to seeing doughnuts for sale at the church, hot dogs and sausages on the grill out front, and hearing the Pastor talk of their ice cream festival, thought “They have no idea they are sending people to heaven early. This has to change.” Two weeks later, after Pastor Warren's inspirational baptism fatigue, this person was recruited by Warren to help initiate the Daniel Plan.

Pastor Warren is the author of the best-selling hard-cover book of all time, besides the Bible, called The Purpose Driven Life. Besides personal fatigue during baptisms, the purpose driving the Daniel Plan is apparently the belief that our bodies do not belong to us and we must be good stewards of this body in the same way that we must be good stewards of our children, our community, this planet and all else that has been put into our trust. That is a beautiful thought and, without proof or scientific references, I agree. I applaud Warren and his congregation for making the effort, reducing their body fat by 160,000 lb, increasing the feeling of community in their community, wanting to help more and more people, and using a spiritual drive as the underlying fuel, since that is the most powerful fuel of our human experience and therefore not only the most likely to succeed in the short term, but in the long term as well. The photo of the apple inserted into Warren’s mouth is from jezebel.com, reminding me to go eat my fruit, MORE VEGETABLES than fruit, some starch to fuel my brain and my activity, and QUALITY protein to maintain my lean tissue.

Death is "Free" as Low-Fat/Cal Dressing

I took Subway sandwiches to feed the medical students in my Food Pharmacology class yesterday.  Because no sandwich place on the planet gives you enough vegetables to slow down the bread digestion rate enough to optimize health, I asked them for several trays of vegetables so the students could max out on their own.  In the condiments bag was salad dressing in case anyone wanted to avoid the carbs altogether.  Little does the consumer (even if you are a medical student, and even if you are teaching them a nutrition class) realize, but the "Free" dressing, meaning fat-free, is loaded with the worst of all sugars.  Here are the ingredients: water, vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, more corn syrup, salt, and less then 2% of other things.  Instead of healthy fats from vegetable oils that improve metabolism and immune function, reduce cancer risk, the list of benefits goes on and on, this dressing is all marketing hype that taps into the publics perception of fat as bad, replacing it instead with sugar that forces our liver to turn against our own body, producing triglyceride and ultimately cholesterol as fast as when you drink alcohol.  The research is so clear on this, that I have to ask myself if the people who are in charge of the companies making these products have anyone on staff or consult with anyone who understands human physiology as it relates to nutrition before they start selling us things to put into our bodies.  If they do not, then they are incompetent, and if they do, their consultants are incompetent.  That leaves the consumer needing to get a PhD in human physiology to figure it out on their own, and until then consume things that only appear healthy on the surface.  Unbelievable.  To me, this is profoundly sad: we need to HELP each other, not hurt each other (through ignorance or otherwise).  Yes I have anger over what is happening to the public without their even realizing it as they make valiant efforts to be healthy, but even more than anger I have sadness and would like to reach out to the companies (like Kraft and their suppliers like Subway) with information so they can better help us help ourselves.  For example, lets put flax oil with extra virgin olive oil in these products and REALLY get something done in our bodies.  Yes the products will have a shorter shelp life, but our bodies will have a longer life!  I would rather trade longevity of food products in for longevity of me.  And in particular, I would like to avoid compounds (fructose) that instead of killing me directly makes my own body (in this case the liver) turn against itself and kill me from the inside out.  Our effort to turn healthy salads and other foods into desserts so we are willing to eat them, while cutting out critically healthy ingredients we incorrectly perceive to be unhealthy, has the opposite effect of making them "free".  They come at the ultimate cost: our lives.

Paleo incorrect: legumes are not antinutrients

The Paleo Diet claims that beans and lentils should be excluded from the diet because they contain antinutrients.  Phytic acid (reduces some micronutrient absorption) is just as high in nuts as they are in legumes, and yet nuts are not excluded from Paleo.  Tannins are just as high in wine, and oxalates are just as high in spinach, but these are not excluded from Paleo.  The "anti-nutrient" higher in legumes than other foods are lectins, natural phytonutrients that plants use as insecticides to protect themselves.  Lectins break down the membranes of hurtful invaders: cancer cells (reducing prostate, colon and other cancers), fungi, bacteria and viruses (even the HIV-1 retrovirus) is part of the reason that tomatoes, corn, whole grain rice, wheat, oats, nuts, sunflower seeds, peaches, mangos, grapes, cinnamon, citrus, berries, tea and most other plant foods are healthy.  All of these contain significant amounts of lectins.  When there are VERY large amounts of lectins in our food, we start to feel the effects of their hurting the membranes of the cells lining our intestine the same way they hurt cancer cells and bacteria.  As with everything in life, too much of a good thing is a bad thing.  We have known for over half a century that lentils and beans have the highest levels of lectins and therefore can make us sick if we eat them raw ["Toxicity of raw kidney beans", Jaffe WG, Experientia 5 (1949) 81]. We also know that cooking beans for 15 min at 100 C or 2 hrs at 80 C completely denatures lectins, and canning beans is just as effective, meaning cooked and canned legumes are not only completely safe but their residual lectin levels fight cancer and fungal / bacterial / viral infection [Thompson LU et al, J Food Science 48 (1983) 235; Dhurandhar NV & Chang KC, J Food Science 55 (1990) 470; Xia L & Ng TB, J Chromatography 844 (2006) 213]. Cooking at temperatures under 80 C does not denature lectins even after many hours.  People who have intestinal issues with cooked legumes are often dehydrated, usually because of high levels of exercise with insufficient salt consumption, or else low levels of exercise with high salt consumption.  Since 1/4 of the starches in legumes digest very slow, if a person's digestion is compromised for any reason, such as being dehydrated because of high salt consumption, a significant amount of legumes are not digested until intestinal bacteria digest them, producing gas.  Legumes are therefore the canary in the coal mine for poor digestion capacity.  Avoiding legumes because digestion is hindered from high salt and low water consumption (typical not just in the US) is the wrong solution.  This would be like pushing harder on the gas in your car because the transmission is going out.  You SHOULD eat legumes regularly, ideally EVERY DAY, for the highest levels of health, weight loss, and performance.  Many cultures in the world (Southeast Asian, the Americas) have had extremely high levels of health eating lentils and beans, but are now fairing worse as Western modern eating takes over.

Since legumes are almost always eaten cooked, saying they are unhealthy is almost always incorrect.  Paleo says to eat as much meat as you want, even though choking down a steak without chewing it could hurt you.  Paleo people would say "no one eats meat that way".  Well, no one eats legumes uncooked.  If they want to give us rules to follow, at least make it clear when the rules are almost irrelevant.  Drinking 3 galons of water all at once would kill you in minutes (dilutes electrolytes around neurons too much), but no one drinks water that way.  Eating a galon of spinach every day would give you kidney stones within 10 years (oxalic acid), but no one eats spinach that way.  So I don't tell people to avoid lentils, beans, water, and spinach, as well as every other food we could possibly eat, since the way we eat them (when we do eat them) makes us MUCH healthier.  On the flip side, I don't tell people to eat unlimited amounts of meat, which slowly kills you (over decades).  Any time you see a diet that completely eliminates a type of food and/or tells you that you can eat any amount of a type of food (the Paleo Diet does both), run.

It is true that phytonutrients, protein, water and oxygen are toxic, but does that mean we need to eliminate them?  Should we stop eating plants, animals, water, and stop breathing because these things hurt us?  It seems to me that we should all work together to discover what range of consumption of all things is ideal, rather than using selected scientific studies to argue back and forth as if one viewpoint is absolutely correct, when it is not.  In the case of legumes, eat them every day as part of a healthy diet, avoid them raw, and stay hydrated.

Medical Research Ignores & Duplicates Previous Research: Ignorance Can Kill

"Few principles are more fundamental to the scientific and ethical validity of clinical research than that studies should address questions needing to be answered, and that they are designed in a way that will produce a meaningful answer.  A prerequisite for either of those goals is that relevant prior research be properly identified."  This quote come from a paper published this month (click image) showing that about 1/4 of medical research cites NO relevant previous clinical trials done by other labs, another 1/4 cite only 1 previous trial, and on average researchers cite only 2 trials, when in reality there are anywhere from 4 to 60 previous clinical studies (average of 10) that they should cite. 

This paper goes on to say what we all know but do not follow: "Accurate representation of the prior cumulative evidence is necessary both to ethically justify a trial and to make proper inferences.  Studying prior research also can lead to designs more likely to fill evidence gaps.  Although the presence of a trial citation does not tell us how information from that trial was used, the absence of a citation almost guarantees that it was not."  It gets better:  "The findings here show not just that the prior evidence is understated but also that it is barely acknowledged."

And when you thought it couldn't get any worse: "Our finding of very limited citation is particularly concerning because it indicates that evidence is missing and because selection of the few trials that are cited is likely to have been biased." 

Ignorance leads to hubris as scientists believe their ideas and research are new and unique when they are not: "When we examined the introduction and discussion sections in the reports of 30 trials...we found that reports were not...integrating their findings with the trials they did cite, and several claimed to be the first trial even when many trials preceded them."  In other words, medical researchers completely ignore most published research similar to their work, select a few references that bolster their work, but even in that case do not integrate the results of the references they cite with their own, choosing instead to duplicate and interpret their work within the vacuum of their isolated mind.

Ignorant hubris leads to immorality: "An incomplete picture of preexisting evidence violates the implicit ethical contract with research participants [meaning patients participating as subjects] that the information they provide [as well as their time, effort, consumption of medications, and suffering they endure for the trial] is necessary and will be useful to others."

As you can read for yourself in the abstract (click image), the "potential implications include ethically unjustifiable trials, wasted resources, incorrect conclusions, and unnecessary risks for trial participants."  Put more harshly, if we worked together a little more by paying attention to each other's efforts (this is true for researchers and for all of us in most areas of our lives, including myself), we would not only get more done but maybe even live longer and be happier in the process.  With respect to medical research, wasted effort, resources and time obviously equates to lost years of life for patients.  Stupidity is not always harmless: It can be lethal.  As is discussed in a 2005 paper in the journal called 'Clinical Trials', this is "an ongoing scandal in which research funders, academia, researchers, research ethics committees and scientific journals are all complicit."

Crap Science: Dehydrate to Perform

This article (click image to enlarge; Br J Sports Med, 15 Dec 2010, epub ahead of print) shows that faster marathoners tend to drink less than slower marathoners when racing, but that fluid intake is all over the map, with high and low drinkers in both the fast and slow categories (no data is presented on fluid intake during regular training).  The principle investigator for the research, Tim Noakes, has long been a proponant of low fluid intake during exercise because excess fluids (gaining weight during a race!) can lead to hyponatremia.  But this study does not address what would happen to anyone's performance time if they drank more.  To do that, you would have to have the SAME ATHLETES run a marathon TWICE to compare their performance with two different levels of hydration. 

Imagine if you had a friend that told you his Ferrari was low in coolant but that it drove faster than his truck, so low coolant must make cars go faster, and he was going to drain out some of the coolant in his truck so it could go as fast as the Ferrari.  You would probaby suggest to compare the Ferrari's performance with low coolant to that same Ferrari with full collant.  Noaks has no such controls in his paper, instead showing simply (and ONLY) that faster runners tend to drink less, like showing that Ferrari drivers don't take the time top off their coolant as much as truck drivers during a race.  From his observation that faster runners drink less, Noaks concludes that losing coolant (dehydration) "during a marathon race may be ergogenic in those who drink according to the dictates of their thirst".  This is saying that dehydration magically gives you energy (it is the low coolant that makes the Ferrari go faster) without providing any controled evidence or even any theory as to why that might be true.  Low coolant (low hydration) lowers performance in controled studies of endurance athletes, backed up by the theory that fluids supply our bloodstream, which is (literally) our body's coolant and delivers oxygen to our muscles.  His statement also assumes that athletes drink according to their thirst, but nowhere in the paper does it say that athletes were even ASKED whether or not they drank according to their thirst.  Maybe faster runners simply ignore their thirst, pain, dizziness, cramping etc more than slower runners.  It is well known that the harder we focus on something the less we notice everything else: the limbic system i.e. emotion center in brain regulates what sensory inputs make it through the thalamus to the sensory cortex.

These researchers are ready to drain the coolant from all our cars and the reviewers for the British Journal of Sports Medicine are happy to let them announce that fact as if it is a scientific conclusion.  Noaks says that his results conflict with laboratory results, when they actually don't conflict with anything.  This is a study of marathon hydration patterns, not of optimal hydration for performance.  Nutrition is confusing enough when we use the scientific method.  It gets confusing beyond usability when you don't.  No wonder people feel like scientists go back and forth on the facts.  Thank you to my friend Mike, a triathlete, who forwarded the the Wall Street Journal article on this paper (click then scroll down), which simply regurgitated the unsubstantiated interpretations of the researchers.  So much for these scientists making their data usable to anyone, or the news media helping us filter through information so we can make better decisions in our lives.

New Year's Resolution: Daily Small Dose of Comfort Food After Healthy Meal

Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has said that being a better citizen of the world in the 21st century "requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions, rather than be captive of them".  I would argue that the same is true for us to improve how we take care of ourselves.  Ignoring our survival instinct for sugar, fats, and satiety leads to thinking that at the New Year or some other tortured moment in our lives we can simply start eating healthier.  The result is that every New Year we will repeat our annual pattern of failure in recognizing how powerful our survival instincts are.  Instead of working with our survival instinct by feeding it small doses of comfort foods after eating a healthy meal containing vegetables, our tendancy is to go cold turkey and then fall off the wagon.  Back and forth indefinitely.

Natural Trans Fats Are Good For Us

Most of the trans fats in the American diet come from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.  They are created by man to increase shelf life, and they are much worse for us than saturated fats.  On the other hand, trans fats produced naturally by bacteria in the rumen of ruminants (like cows) have never been linked to increased disease, and one has now actually been correlated to reduced disease risk (click on image to see reference): trans-palmitoleate in meat and dairy, primarily milk.  Since polyunsaturated natural trans fats are conjugated (double bond every other carbon pair) but synthetic trans fats are not, there is a clear structural distinction between natural and synthetic trans fats that can account for their very different effects on our health.  However, this particular trans fat is monounsaturated, so the issue of conjugation is mute.  People with less of this natural trans fat in their body have THREE times the chances of diabetes.  Grass-fed free-range cows will produce this natural trans fat AND in addition have a healthier fat profile than grain or carb-fed cows.  In summary: natural good, man-made bad.

This research is being reported in the popular press as showing that dairy fat is healthy.  The Harvard (where the researchers are from) Gazette's article is entitled "Dairy fat may help not harm" and the CBC news article is titled "Dairy fat may cut type 2 diabetes risk."  Both articles are headed by photos of cheese.  The research is well done, has limitations that the researchers are aware of, and it will stimulate cellular and clinical research targeting the details of how slightly different types of fats affect disease.  Unfortunately, the oversimplified sound bites the public gets with images of cheese plates is sendin are sending the wrong message, just like the benefits of margarines were proclaimed decades ago and ended up killing many of us too soon.  Lumping all fats in dairy together will make it look like cream and butter are a health food, which they are not.  All that we have seen so far is that a particular fat produced by bacteria in cows is correlated to improving our health.

Bad Research Adds to Our Confusion By Saying Exercise Before Breakfast is Good

A recent study (click it to enlarge the image) showed that your metabolism is higher, so you burn more body fat, while on a Holiday diet (high-calorie and high-fat) if you exercise in the morning before eating anything.  Sounds great until you look at the details of how the study was done.  The researchers compared people exercising that either had not eaten or that had spiked their blood sugar with 675 Cal of carbohydrate at breakfast and then gorged on 200 Cal of sugar per hour during the exercise.  Excess carbohydrate consumption forces insulin to send blood sugar to fat cells.  Fat cells then rob all the sugar from, and stop sending fats into, the bloodstream because they interpret all the insulin as a signal that the blood is overloaded with fuel.  For example, Gail Butterfield showed in a paper over 10 years ago ["Pre-Exercise Carbohydrate Meals: Application of Glycemic Index", DeMarco HM et al., Med Sci Sports Ex 31 (1999) 164] that eating fast-digesting carbs (corn flakes) was much worse for metabolism and performace than eating slower digesting carbs (All Bran) before exercise: The faster-digesting corn flakes cut the amount of fat burned during the workout in HALF, raised the athlete's pain levels, and made them fatigue faster.  This was true even though the total amount of carbs between the two groups was the SAME.  Now imagine having fast-digesting carbs in a LARGER amount (675 Cal) and adding excess sugar during the workout as well: this will totally sabotage the workout and the body's metabolism, driving the body into insulin resistance, higher body fat, and greater disease risk.  My advice: Always consume both carbohydrate and protein before your workout but do NOT spike your blood sugar.  The "benefits" of exercising without eating are relative to an absolutely horrible breakfast (the equivalent to two bagels or a half dozen slices of bread).  Science like this adds to the misinformation and confusion of nutrition, making healthy eating harder for society, not easier.  It reminds me of all the scientific papers showing the benefits of high protein diets when none of them comment on the fact that such benefits are compared to high-carb diets that cause insulin resistance.  When compared to slow-digesting carboydrates (whole grains, whole fruit, vegetables), high-protein diets make you much LESS healthy.  Thank you to Ashish for making me aware of the starving exercise paper.

You Eat Less Comfort Food After Imagining Eating It

4 days ago an amazing piece of research came out in Science [v330, p1530].  After imagining eating 30 pieces of candy, unrestricted candy consumption was cut to nearly half.  After imagining eating cheese, unrestricted consumption of cheese was nearly cut in half, but there was no change in candy consumption.  This means that imagining eating a food partly satisfies the mind so it needs less later on.  Imagining moving but not eating 30 pieces of candy nearly doubled the amount of candy subsequently consumed, but imagining moving that many quarters had no effect on subsequent candy consumption.  That means imagining handling something you want (we want candy more than quarters) without eating it makes you want it more.  Although not part of this research, this lends support to the idea of "mindfull eating" i.e. that fully and slowly enjoying food will result in less of its consumption and more enjoyment than if you just gobble it up.  Now we know that fully and slowly enjoying food just in your imagination BEFORE you eat will reduce how much of it you natually eat even when you have no restrictions.  Mental imagery research has shown that imagining complex actions, like dance moves, significantly improves a person's ability to do those moves afterwards in real life.  It is as if imagining that you are dancing gives you acutal dancing experience.  Imagining eating a food does the same thing: it is like a real world experience as far as your mind is concerned.  If you were addicted to sugar, imagining eating candy might make you eat MORE since it could trigger the addiction.  The new research in Science did not investigate that aspect.  Thank you to Jon for making me aware of this paper.

MOVE more towards health: 350 cal/day!

It was shown in 2005 (Science, vol 307, p 584; click left image to enlarge) that leisurly standing or walking twice as much as sitting in your day burns 350 more calories.  For the people in the study, those that moved the most had 5 times less body fat than those who sat the most (10 instead of 50 kg).  It makes a strong arguement for not needing to exercise or even put much thought into nutrition as long as you just STAY ACTIVE.  Spending work, play and leisure time in front of a screen reduces muscle (use it or lose it) and increases fat (can't use it or lose it).  The lead author of this study founded a company that makes desk treadmills so you can slowly walk while working all day: Good idea!  www.treadmill-desk.com

Fat David and Fat Lincoln were created by the advertising agency Scholz and Friends in Hamburg, Germany for the German Olympic Sport Committee's new campaign trying to get people to move more.