HOW TO PREVENT CANCERS

• Exercise, exercise, exercise.  Being active is one of the best ways of controlling weight.
• Go Mediterranean.  A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy oils (like olive oil) can make you feel full, help regulate your appetite, and actually taste really good
• Choose smaller portions and eat more slowly.  Slow down and give your body a chance to feel full before you move on to seconds.
• Be a mindful eater.  Food is big business, and their main goal is to get you to eat.  Try to listen to what your body is telling you, not what the food business wants you to hear. 

As anyone who's ever been on a diet knows: taking the pounds off can be hard, but keeping the pounds off can be even harder.  The main reason for this simply seems to be that it's just easier to keep up with a new exercise and diet program over the short term than it is over the long-term.  While we may be willing to sustain ourselves on some wild, restrictive diet for a few months, especially if the pounds start to melt away, over time it gets harder and harder to keep it up, and eventually our old habits, our old ways of doing things, slowly bubble back to the surface, and we find ourselves putting the weight back on.

This is why most experts suggest making a small number of small changes when it comes to weight loss.  Taking baby steps gives us time to get our footing with a new behavior, with a new approach to eating, and helps it to actually become part of our lifestyle rather than a strange restriction that needs to be endured and then eventually discarded after three months because its so unpleasant.

In this vein of small changes breeding long term success is a Danish study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that shows that small differences in the make-up of what eat can help maintain real weight loss over time.

In this study, about 800 overweight participants who had recently lost weight were randomly assigned to one of five diet groups - each group had a varied combination of protein level and glycemic load, a measure of how quickly the carbohydrates in the diet are converted to glucose in the blood (study).  Diets with high glycemic loads (such as those with a lot of white bread, potatoes, and white rice) have been shown in some studies to increase the risk of weight gain as well as heart disease and diabetes.  Diets with a low glycemic load (such as those with a lot of whole grains or low amount of carbohydrates) may help keep calorie intake in check and promote feelings of fullness.

The researchers found that the group who ate a high protein, low glycemic load diet had the most success keeping weight off over time.  Those who ate a low protein, high glycemic load diet did the worst.  Worth noting: those who ate the high protein, low glycemic load diet not only had the most weight loss success but also had the highest rate of adherence of any group, meaning more people in this group were more likely to keep up with that way of eating than in any other group.

While the weight benefits were pretty modest, with participants in the high protein, low glycemic group weighing an average of about 4.5 pounds less over six months than those in the low protein, high glycemic group, it is a real difference that if sustained over time could have a big impact on health, both for the person, and on a broader scale, the nation.

Although this is just a single study, what's most heartening from these results is that maintaining the new weight after weight loss, and even continuing to lose weight, seems possible over the long term with a diet that isn't that radical and that's enjoyable enough to continue over the long term.

A healthy high protein diet with a low glycemic load would include foods like skinless chicken, fish, beans, low fat dairy as well as whole grains and brown/wild rice.  Healthy fats, like canola oil and olive oil, also help keep glycemic load down because they slow down digestion.  Red meat, high-fat dairy, and refined grains should always be kept to a minimum.

Related CNiC Posts:
Weight
Diet
Exercise

That obesity had deleterious health consequences isn’t news, especially around here. Yet, we still find the results of a study out of Australia, published in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention this week on weight gain and colon cancer risk compelling. Most adults experience weight gain over the course of their lives and this weight gain, even if your BMI remains within the “normal” range, can increase your risk of colon cancer. Bassett and colleagues found that each 5 kg (11 lbs) of weight gain in men significantly increased risk of colon cancer. Reports on the effects of weight gain for women are less consistent, and this report found no association.

Why might gender matter? Men and women tend to gain weight differently in adulthood. Men, in particular, tend to see a shift in body fat from the periphery to the trunk - that is, they put more weight around the middle - something called abdominal adiposity, or abdominal obesity if it gets bad enough. This central weight gain may be a stronger predictor than overall weight of cancer risk (along with other health outcomes). Abdominal obesity is associated with hyperinsulinemia, which likely plays a role in colon cancer risk. Men tend to accumulate more visceral fat.

Does this mean women are off the hook? Sadly, no – as regular CNiC readers have surely realized by now – “cancer” isn’t one disease with uniform risks. And weight gain increases risk of breast cancer in women as we’ve discussed before. So the findings on colon cancer are evidence that EVERYONE benefits from avoiding weight gain.

And since avoiding weight gain is easier than losing weight once you’ve gained it, watching weight gain is a good strategy for all of us.