Dr. Dean Ornish is a preventive cardiologist at UCSF who's shown for over 2 decades that some people can reverse the symptoms and signs of their coronary heart disease by just diet and meditation alone (see his 1989 JAMA paper titled "Intensive Lifestyle Changes for Reversal of Coronary Heart Disease"). He's been running the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, where he and his team continue research into how changing what you eat and how you handle your stress can influence your health and your body battles disease. 

So it caught my attention when I learned that Dr. Ornish wrote an essay carried by the New York Times ("Eating for Health, Not Weight," 9/22/2012). In it he writes that the purpose of diets should not be to lose weight. Rather, the purpose should be to improve your health. By virtue of eating for health, you'll control your weight. More importantly, you'll feel better and keep disease away. An interesting point he makes is that being obese doesn't always lead to disease. Studies like this one run in JAMA this year (and covered in another NYT piece) have implied that obese people live longer than thinner people. 

Read on...

One of the big fallacies in dieting is the belief that it's all about calories, that if one limits how many calories one eats, that he or she is dieting right. But as Mark Bittman writes recently in the NY Times ("Which Diet Works?", June 26, 2012), what matters more than the number of calories is where those calories come from. 

If you believe like many do that it's only calories that matter, then you'll believe this:

"Accept that, and you buy into the contention that consuming 100 calories’ worth of sugar water (like Coke or Gatorade), white bread or French fries is the same as eating 100 calories of broccoli or beans."

They are not the same thing. Yes 100 calories from soda is equal to 100 calories of broccoli. But eating them isn't the same thing. One, you'll get nutrition & fiber in 100 calories of broccoli, and almost nothing else than calories in 100 calories of soda. Two, the sugar in soda will quickly enter your bloodstream, causing a spike in insulin which has many effects, one of which is an increased storage of body fat in your cells. Meanwhile, the much of the sugar in broccoli won't make it to your bloodstream because the fiber from broccoli (which is missing in soda) holds onto it. In other words, the 100 calories from soda will give you more body fat due to metabolic processes under the hood than will 100 calories from broccoli.

Click "read on" to see more of Mr. Bittman's article to read his explanation of a clinical trial that studied the metabolic effects of different diets in a group of initially obese kids who all went on a crash diet and lost weight before the trial. The 3 diets were a low fat diet, a low glycemic index diet, and a very low carb diet. While the subjects on the very low carb diet had the greatest weight loss at the end of the trial, they also had the highest levels of inflammation and stress. (And if you read our book "The Healthy Indian Diet" or other health books like "AntiCancer," you'll know that chronic inflammation and stress are associated with heart disease, diabetes and cancers.)

I like how Mr. Bittman comes to the conclusion that the best kind of diet for people like you and me who are not on diets is a "low glycemic index" diet. What did people eat all over India and elsewhere over the world before modern times? Low glycemic index diets, which were based on meals made of whole grains, some meats and fresh vegetables, and where people ate fruits, nuts, and fermented dairies, and there were almost no refined or processed foods. From everything I've read, the low glycemic index diet is the best diet for a good quality of life and for a long life. 

The Vegan and the Paleo Diets, two forms of dieting which people label extreme, seem to be very popular nowadays. Naturally, many wonder: Which one is healthier?

The answer depends of course on what healthy means to you (for example, does it mean not being sick, or does it mean feeling at your optimal level?). An article in Experience Life magazine explores what the Vegan and Paleo Diets are, attempts to dispel myths, and features experts who weigh in on which diet is better for you.

After reading this artcle, my personal verdict is that both diets are healthy because both are based on eating plants (which may comes as a surprise to people who believe Paleo is all about eating meat) and eating whole foods (which many though not all vegans do) and eating little to no processed carbs. 

Part of what makes choosing the healthiest rice difficult is the many, many varieties. Last week, Padmaja asked whether a particular brand of rice that claims to be good for diabetics because it has a low Glycemic Index (GI) number is truly good. (The GI describes how quickly a food is converted into glucose or blood sugar, and how much of it. The lower the GI number, the better.) 

Here is the Basmati rice brand she asked about: http://www.amazon.com/Laxmi-Basmati-Lower-Glycemic-Diabetics/dp/B0077S75NI. 

It's too bad I don't have a good answer about this specific brand. This is because I can't find a GI number done by an independent (and thus unbiased) academic lab for this particular rice, as I can for others. 

But by looking at the various rice varieties studied by academic centers for their GI values, I am able to explain general principles that I feel will help Padmaja and also yourself make an educated decision on what rice to eat for good health. Here they are:

(Click "Read More" below.)