Watch College Carbs to Avoid the Freshman 15 -  Our daughter just finished the first week of her sophomore year in college. She tries to eat a relatively low-carb diet, but finds that it's pretty challenging, as everywhere she looks there are bagels, muffins, pizza, and sweets. To make matters worse, her college, in its efforts to provide "healthy" fare, have a lot of low-fat and fat-free offerings in the cafeteria, and as we all know, low-fat pretty much equals high-carb. There's sugar in the salad dressing instead of oil, more starch and less fat in the cafeteria line, and less satisfying meals so that students are reaching for that bag of chips a couple of hours later.
One way to avoid the "Freshman 15" (which is not limited to freshman!) is to learn some strategies for avoiding the College Carb Trap. Check out my Low Carb College Guide for lots of tips.
Photo of College Salad Bar: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Free Samples of Quest Low-Carb Bars -  If you've been eating a low-carb diet for very long, you've probably discovered that it's very difficult to find a decent low-carb nutrition bar. They almost all have objectionable ingredients such as maltitol, and very few of them even taste good. Well, the makers of Quest Nutrition Bars noticed, too! That's what motivated them to spend years developing their new low-carb bars. They were actually told by experts that what they wanted to do couldn't be done, but they persisted, even getting a patent along the way!
Read Full Post Free Samples of Quest Low-Carb Bars originally appeared on About.com Low Carb Diets on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 20:59:45. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Does Red Meat Cause Colon Cancer? -  It's pretty common to hear certain statements about health repeated so many times that it begins to gather a kind of "truthiness" - where the statement feels true, whether or not it is a fact. One of these is the "well-known fact" that red meat causes colon cancer. It's been studied quite a lot, and we hear it a lot, but what does the science tell us?
Unfortunately, the science isn't always clear. In this case, many studies have been done on this - but the results are very mixed. You can point to studies that show a small correlation between colon/rectal cancer and red meat - and others which don't. Some studies have one type of flaw, and others have different flaws (there are very few "perfect studies".) So what are we to do in a case like this?
Read Full Post Does Red Meat Cause Colon Cancer? originally appeared on About.com Low Carb Diets on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 at 21:59:38. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Notes on Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes -
 If you are interested in how we came to believe that dietary fat is bad, and carbs are good, you probably already know about Gary Taube's excellent book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. (For those of you who found it a bit heavy on the history and science, you'll be glad to know that a more user-friendly version is due out in a few months!) Now, for a limited time, someone (I know not who) has put their notes on the book on the Web. Check it out here.
Interested in the book Good Calories, Bad Calories? 
Image Courtsey of Pricegrabber
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New Study: Low-Carb vs Low-Fat Diets - 
I can often tell when a diet study has hit the news in a big way, because floods of people suddenly come to my site, A couple of weeks ago (during my vacation, so I was late getting to this), there was a diet study in the news - one of the "low-fat vs low-carb" studies. This one was somewhat unusual because it followed the participants for two years, but in other ways it was similar to many other studies, and most of the results were predictable (although the ways in which they varied from the norm were telling).
Capsule Summary: People were randomly assigned to a low-carb group, which was supposed to be similar to the Atkins Diet, and a low-calorie group which was low in fat. After two years, they had both maintained a similar weight loss (about 15 pounds). Other factors, including bone density, were not significantly different, except that the low-carb group had higher "good" cholesterol (HDL), which is one good indicator of heart health.
Problems with the Study and the Report:
Compliance: When looking at diet studies, it's always important to differentiate how much the study was looking at the effects of the different diets, vs the extent to which the people actually followed the diet. Read Full Post New Study: Low-Carb vs Low-Fat Diets originally appeared on About.com Low Carb Diets on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 11:59:37. Permalink | Comment | Email this
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