Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/139639
4A Daily News – Tuesday, June 25, 2013 Vitality health & fitness How high-fructose corn syrup, sugar affect health: Q&A New fitness app selects music to match your running pace By Hope Warshaw Special to The Washington Post Q&A on the difference between sugar (white granulated sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup and how each impacts health. Q: What's the difference between sugar (white granulated sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup? Should I limit one more than the other for health reasons? A: High-fructose corn syrup is a corn-based sweetener. It's about an equal blend of glucose and fructose and can be bought only by food manufacturers. Its use increased greatly around 1975 because of its low cost, and in the ensuing years it has replaced sucrose as the primary sweetener in processed foods. Sucrose also contains equal parts glucose and fructose and is used by manufacturers in processed foods. People also use table sugar, a form of sucrose, to sweeten their foods and beverages and for baking. For the most part it comes from sugar beets and sugar cane. Fruit contains naturally occurring sucrose. Recently concerns have been raised about potential health consequences of high-fructose corn syrup. But there's insufficient science to vilify it. "Human studies, though short-term and small, consistently show no different impact on measures of health compared with other sugars. Though it'd be nice to have more research, we can confidently say people's health will benefit most from limiting all sources of calorie-containing sweeteners," says Cindy Fitch, a nutrition professor at West Virginia University and co-author of an Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics position paper on the topic. High-fructose corn syrup, sucrose and other sweetening ingredients such as brown sugar, molasses, fruit nectar, cane juice, honey and agave nectar are added to processed foods. As a group they're called "added sugars." Those concerns about highfructose corn syrup — unhealthy weight, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease — relate to any kind of added sugars. Now there's the rub. Nutrition labels give the "sugars" count per serving. The Food and Drug Administration's definition of "sugars" is all sugars naturally occurring in foods, such as those from fruit (sucrose) or milk (lactose), plus all "added sugars." Where you can detect the sources of sugars in foods is on the ingredient list. Ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity by weight. Read the list. Count up the sources of sugars and see where on the list they appear. Overall, Americans consume too much added sugars from all sources. Estimates reveal added sugars represent 16 percent of calories (that's an average of 300 to 400 calories) or 21 teaspoons of added sugars per day. These calories offer no nutritional value. According to the U.S. government's 2010 Dietary Guidelines, roughly 45 percent of added sugars come from regularly sweetened soda and energy, sports and fruit drinks, 15 percent from grain-based desserts (that's cookies, cake, doughnuts, pas- tries, etc.) and 15 percent from a mix of other foods. So rather than sleuthing out foods sweetened with sucrose instead of high-fructose corn syrup, take the healthier tack recommended in the Dietary Guidelines: Cut down on added sugars. Try these ideas: 1. Avoid sugary drinks. 2. Limit sugary desserts and snack foods. 3. Read ingredient lists to detect and limit hidden sources of added sugars. Warshaw, a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified diabetes educator, is the author of numerous books published by American Diabetes Association and the blog EatHealthyLiveWell found on her Web site, www.hopewarshaw.com. By Relaxnews A new app for runners selects music by tempo to match the beat of your foot hitting the pavement, which could make fumbling with your music player to find the perfect song obsolete. TempoRun lets you sort your music by tempo, rated on a scale of one to 10. Set the app to level one for a walking pace, while joggers can opt for level five. For sprinting, crank it up to 10. During your workout, you can adjust the setting to speed up or slow down the tempo with the click of an arrow on the app's interface, or lock the screen to hold your pace. If you're bored with your personal library, you can stream TempoRadio powered by SoundCloud, which provides thousands of tracks pre-categorized by tempo and genre. TempoRun also tracks your workouts in terms of distance, time, and calories burned. Plus it tallies your workout history on a single page, so you can view your workouts for the past few weeks or month and your personal best time. The app is available via iTunes for $2.99. Another similar app called Cruise Control can help runners hit their target pace, heart rate and cadence by synchronizing certain playlist songs to users' footfalls. After scanning the iPhone's music library, the app selects songs with the appropriate beat and tempo before speeding up or slowing down the rhythm in real time, without altering the sound and pitch (i.e. the 'Chipmunk' effect). Everything you thought you knew about age and fertility was wrong By Jessica Grose Slate NEW YORK — I often joke that working in women's media for six years has made me way too aware about how one's fertility declines with age. My husband and I decided to start trying to conceive when I was 29, in part, because I knew, from all of the articles I'd read on the job, that my eggs were rapidly shriveling up and dying with each passing day. I should amend that statement. I thought I knew my eggs were rapidly shriveling up and dying. A jaw-dropping new article by Jean Twenge in the Atlantic shows that a lot of what we've been told about the fertility plunge that happens to women in their 30s has been highly oversold. Here's just one example of how imprecise the popular literature surrounding fertility is. Facts that I remember parroting to my husband — that I had a 20 percent chance of conceiving each time I ovulated — turn out to be based on no specific published medical literature. The study that Twenge did discover, by biostatistician David Dunson, who is now at Duke University, found that: [I]ntercourse two days before ovulation resulted in pregnancy 29 percent of the time for 35-to-39-yearold women, compared with about 42 percent for 27-to-29-year-olds. So, by this measure, fertility falls by about a third from a woman's late 20s to her late 30s. However, a 35-to39-year-old's fertility two days before ovulation was the same as a 19-to-26year-old's fertility three days before ovulation: according to Dunson's data, older couples who time sex just one day better than younger ones will effectively eliminate the age difference. Even more shocking is that a lot of the statistics we hear about modern fertility are based on historical data from French birth records from 1670 to 1830. According to Dunson's research on contemporary women, there is only a 4 percent drop in pregnancy rates from age 28 to age 37. This comes as a huge shock because almost everything I've read takes it SCHOOL PHYSICALS Tehama Family Fitness Center Kid's Summer Fit Camps! ARE YOUR CHILD'S IMMUNIZATIONS UP-TO-DATE? 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And Twenge does bring up the fact that birth defects increase with a mother's age — though not as much as we might think. The data about all of this is still sparse and we need more research to know more. Some things Twenge's article doesn't mention: how pregnancy can affect an older woman's body differently than it affects a younger woman's body. And then there are the benefits that are not quite so tangible — enjoying your children for longer; having a greater probability of seeing grandchildren; having your own parents be involved in your child's life. That said, it's wonderful news that the statistics about fertility decline have potentially been exaggerated. Then perhaps we can push back against attitudes that women are "waiting too long" because they're deluded or selfish or career-obsessed. Most women time their children based on a host of factors — economic stability and romantic stability among them. We can't all snap our fingers and have a good marriage and a stable career in our 20s because that's the "optimal" age to have children. I'd also love to be able to dance and have really, really thick hair, but that ain't happening either. It's good to hear that our bodies will cooperate with the way society has changed. I don't know that I would have made my choices differently armed with this new knowledge. 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