MY COMMENT:    Have the Atkins people looked at this?   I find it interesting that weight loss was identical in the study groups- one high protein and one meat free.   Which diet do you suppose has the potential for additional health problems?

Forget fat loss for just a minute- how many adults actually spend time working their muscles?  “…starting at age 40, the body can lose eight percent of muscle per decade”. 

This is easily preventable by spending just a few minutes per day with bands, dumbbells, and body weight exercises like push-ups.   How many can you do?

MY COMMENT:  I don’t watch the show but let me guess that the exercise gets a wee bit over dramatized?   I’ll assume these people are  medically cleared?

   We’ve spent billions of our tax dollars trying to prove the diet-heart hypothesis. Yet study after study has failed to provide definitive evidence that saturated-fat intake leads to heart disease - from the article  What if Bad Fat Isn’t So Bad?

Cut your saturated fat and reduce your heart attack risk.  This is the advice we’ve been following for a couple of decades.  Now some researchers are giving the saturated fat-heart disease link another look.

This article by Nina Teicholz on msnbc.com is a well-written summary of the questions surrounding evidence that a diet high in saturated fat alone contributes to heart disease.   

If it’s not saturated fat causing all of this heart disease, then what is it?  You have to read the very last paragraph of Nina’s article to find a proposed answer to that question. 

If you consistently consume more calories than you burn, and you gain weight, your risk of heart disease will increase — whether you favor eating saturated fats, carbs, or both.

Finally, check out this latest study published in the respected American J of Clinical Nutrition in Jan of this year.   Researchers pooled the results from 21 studies involving more than 347,000 subjects and found  “that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat.

^{Holy cow!}

The Berkley Wellness Newsletter summarizes the benefits of eggs as part of a healthy diet: 

One large egg contains 6 grams of high-quality protein (in both the yolk and the white). The yolk is also a source of zinc, B vitamins (including riboflavin and folate), vitamin A, iron, and other nutrients.

In addition to lutein and zeaxanthin, egg yolks provide choline, an essential nutrient, which is especially important for fetal brain development. Researchers have also identified other compounds in eggs that may have anti-cancer, anti-hypertensive, immune-boosting, and antioxidant properties.

While one egg does contain more than 200 mg of cholesterol, according to the Harvard Health Letter, “For most people, only a small amount of the cholesterol in food passes into the blood.”

It’s highly unlikely that one egg per day is not going to increase your cholesterol or risk for CV disease.   The sausage is another story!

DiseaseProof is Dr. Joel Furman’s very enlightening  blog- Furman is author of Eat to Live.   

Dr. Fuhrman maintains that heart attacks, strokes and dementia are not the natural effects of aging but are the consequences of “an insane toxic food supply.

More than 11% of the beverages analyzed contained Escherichia coli and over 17% contained Chryseobacterium meningosepticum. Other opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms isolated from the beverages included species of Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and Serratia. Most of the identified bacteria showed resistance to one or more of the 11 antibiotics tested. These findings suggest that soda fountain machines may harbor persistent communities of potentially pathogenic microorganisms which may contribute to episodic gastric distress in the general population and could pose a more significant health risk to immunocompromised individuals  -sciencedirect.com

MY COMMENT: I’d stay away from drinking soda out of dispensers typically found in fast food joints!  Get a bottled water instead.

According to the article, risk of weight regain and risk factors including diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and high cholesterol are NOT linked to history of weight cycling (losing and regaining).   Correlations do exist between these risk factors and high body mass index.