Piling on kilos? Potato chips the top culprit

Piling on kilos? Potato chips the top culprit

Blame the potato chip. It’s the biggest demon behind that pound-a-year weight creep that plagues many of us, a major diet study found. Bigger than soda, candy and ice-cream.
    And the reason is partly that old advertising cliche: You can’t eat just one. “They’re very tasty and they have a very good texture. People generally don’t take one or two chips. They have a whole bag,” said obesity expert F Xavier Pi-Sunyer of the St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York.
    What we eat and how much of it we consume has far more impact than exercise and most other habits do on long-term weight gain, according to the study by Harvard University scientists. It’s the most comprehensive look yet at the effect of individual foods and lifestyle choices like sleep time and quitting smoking. The results are in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
    Weight problems are epidemic. Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. Childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Pounds often are packed on gradually over decades, and many people struggle to limit weight gain without realizing what’s causing it.
    The new study finds food choices are key. The message: Eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nuts. Cut back on potatoes, red meat, sweets and soda. “There is no magic bullet for weight control,” said one study leader, Frank Hu. “Diet and exercise are important for preventing weight gain, but diet clearly plays a bigger role.”
    Doctors analyzed changes in diet and lifestyle habits of 120,877 people from three long-running medical studies. All were health professionals and not obese at the start. Their weight was measured every four years for up to two decades, and they detailed their diet on questionnaires.
    On average, participants gained nearly 17 pounds over the 20-year period. For each four-year period, food choices contributed nearly 4 pounds. Exercise, for those who did it, cut less than 2 pounds. Potato chips were the biggest dietary offender. AP
Quality counts:
    Nuts, yogurt
    helps cut flab London: Struggling to shed those extra kilos? Then eat extra helpings of yogurt and nuts rather than concentrating on calorie cutting, scientists say. Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health found that the more good food in one’s diet, the more weight one loses over the long term.
    To maintain a slim figure, the researchers said, it is much more important to concentrate on eating healthy foods rather than fixating on how much one consumes, the Daily Telegraph reported. Their study of almost 120,000 people, five-sixths of whom were women, discovered that extra helpings of yogurt, nuts, fruit, whole grains and vegetables were all linked to weight loss.
    The team quantified the effect that eating particular types of food daily had on weight gain or loss. Eating more yogurt and nuts every day had a bigger effect on losing weight than fruits and vegetables. They found that people who ate an extra portion of yogurt daily lost on average 0.37kg every four years, over a 20 year period.