By Staff
The South Beach Diet, ridding carbs, detox diets and many more have been all the craze for the past few years. People are always desperately trying to find ways to lose weight and keep it off. While these diets may work, it's important to understand they may not be as healthy as you think.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, an American cardiothoracic surgeon and author, is a regular on the Oprah show and has been educating millions of viewers on their bodies and health right in the comfort of their own home. Some of the shows have featured how our heart, brain and digestive tracks work. Recently he talked about diets and why they may not be as good for us as we think.
Oz did several tests on everyday people. He took two people, gave them different diets, and after a few weeks checked the results of each. In one study, for example, nine people reported to the Paignton Zoo in Devon, England, ready to go ape, literally. All nine people had high blood pressure, which Dr. Oz says can strip a decade off your life span after years of eating unhealthy foods.
For the next 12 days, they lived in the zoo and kept to an "evolutionary" new diet. The zookeeper fed them a diet reminiscent of an apes. To get the calories they needed, each volunteer had to eat 11 pounds of raw fruits, vegetables and nuts every single day.
Can a human possibly lose weight eating 11 pounds of food a day?
These volunteers ate a lot of food, as much as a large basket filled with fruits and veggies. Yet after 12 days, their cholesterol dropped by an average of 25 percent, their blood pressure dropped by 10 percent and they lost about 10 pounds each, including two-and-a-quarter inches off their waists.
"When you eat this kind of food, you're sending a very clear message to your brain," Dr. Oz said. "You're taking calories and nutrients. What we normally do in America is we give calories to people without nutrition. The natural colors are gone, and so your brain sits back there and says, 'Am I still hungry or not?'"
Diets that require people rid certain things from their bodies are usually not a good idea.
According to the book 'Nutrition 101,' which takes an in-depth look at why our bodies need certain foods, carbs, protein, fat, sugars and so on may seem to be our enemy, but, the truth is, they aren't.
Carbohydrates, for example, have been given a bad reputation lately. The are found in foods like bread, pasta, rice, grains, cakes, cookies, crackers, cereal, vegetables, fruit, legumes, milk, juice, pop, candies and sugar.
Many may look at some of these foods and frown, but the truth is that we need carbs to fuel our brains and our bodies. It's important to choose your carbs wisely though. Pop and candies contain sugar and not much else in terms of nutrition. While carbs like whole grains, vegetables and fruit give us essential vitamins, minerals and fiber.
Fat is probably the scariest word in nutrition, but it shouldn't be. Although we should choose the foods high in fat wisely and not go overboard, Fat is needed to keep us warm and help us better absorb the fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K.
The list of pros and cons about foods is something that will never go away. New diets will continue to surface and people will be left wondering what is good and what is bad. To make it simple, Oz suggests to just eat right, in moderation, exercise and get plenty of rest. Diets are not a terribly bad thing, but they do require we eliminate certain foods from our bodies which we actually need. If you do diet, just do lengthy research on exactly what it is you're going to be missing out on. Nine times out of 10, a good old fruit and veggie diet will do the trick over any diet.