Low Carb Science (12.09.04) - It’s the season of eating, and when the calendar turns, many people will start thinking about dieting. But one biochemist points out that not all calories are created equal. Hunger Suppression (12.24.04) - If your New Year’s resolution is to exercise more and eat less, it might not be enough to melt off the pounds. A new study shows how one hormone could drive overeating. Berkeley Nutrition Service's Worksite Internet Nutrition (WIN) Program American Dietetic Association If your New Year's resolution has you determined to cut the calories, the goal may be cutting the right ones. This ScienCentral News video has more. Running on Empty The key to a successful and healthy diet may not be about eating less, but eating differently. Gladys Block , a professor of epidemiology and public health nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley , analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys , in which over 4700 American adults reported everything they ate. "These large national surveys collect data on what Americans have eaten, and they collect it in great detail, so there are literally hundreds of thousands of reports about individual food items," explains Block. "So I collapsed those reports into about 150 food groups that represent everything that Americans have eaten in the past 24 hours. Then I was able to rank those foods according to how much of the total calories they contributed." And what she found surprised even her. "Soft drinks were the number one contributor of calories in the United States," she says. "And that group alone contributed over 7 percent of all the calories consumed." Bonnie Taub-Dix, spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and a registered dietician for 28 years, likes to describe soft drinks this way: "The most classic visual picture is that a can of cola is like having a can of water with ten packets of sugar in it. Like if you open up ten packets of sugar and put it in a cup of water and swirl it around and taste it, it tastes disgusting—that's a cola." Block says consuming all of these empty calories is making us a nation of people who are overfed, but undernourished. "We are eating so much stuff that doesn't contribute anything that's good for us, doesn't contribute vitamins, doesn't contribute minerals, and I believe that's actually leading to under-nutrition," she says. "We're not eating the kind of diet that I think will keep us healthy. I mean, vitamins and minerals aren't just some nutritionist's recommendation, they are key to keeping us healthy, and we ought to be eating more of them." While Taub-Dix says it's probably unrealistic in the long run to cut "junk" foods out entirely, she recommends taking care of your nutritional needs first. "All foods can fit into your diet, but I think you really need to make a priority meeting your needs, and again, it always comes down to portions." She also recommends eating something nutrient-filled along with the empty—in other words, have a glass of milk or fruit juice with that donut. "At least if you could take something kind of junky and enhance it, then…at least you're making something that is totally not valuable have a little bit of value," she says. Block agrees that making good choices is the key. "We need to be more careful in our food choices," she says. "We need to not keep having…calorie-full soft drinks and candy bars and things like that so much. That doesn't mean we need to cut them out, but we need to eat them less and eat more fruits and vegetables that are providing the good things to us." This research appeared in the June-August, 2004 issue of the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis and the January, 2005 issue of Discover Magazine . Block received no outside funding for this research.

karen lurie, gladys block, uc berkeley.,