Beware: Oprah’s Health Advice
What a relief to finally see a major magazine like Newsweek do a feature article on Oprah and her antics on weight loss, longevity and healthy living. For decades we watch her on roller coaster diets and we still listen to her advice as she brings in experts on exercise, food portion control and food content. The ‘Oprah Effect’ encompasses everything from fad diets, books, positive thinking, autism and even interior decorating, and her disciples always follow her every word and go out and spend their money on whatever she deems to be good.
Newsweek has finally investigated the matter to determine that some of Oprah’s ideas and her guests’ ideas are just down-right outlandish, impractical or unhealthy. Oprah’s campaign to ‘Live Your Best Life Ever’ is finally being questioned. There was only a small portion of the article that actually agreed with Oprah’s philosophy and that was on diet and exercise:
“Right about now is when you might be asking, is there anything Oprah gets right? In fact, there is. For one, she gives excellent diet and fitness tips. Two of her longest-serving resident experts, Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Bob Greene, routinely offer sound, high-quality advice to Oprah and her audience on how to lose weight and improve overall health. For the most part, it is free of the usual diet-industry hype, perhaps because so many of her viewers are on to those scams by now. Oz’s and Greene’s philosophy amounts to: eat nutritious foods, and exercise.”
However, it’s not new news that people should eat nutritious foods and exercise. What’s more interesting is that Oprah earns millions of dollars a year but can’t seem to get her own weight under control but yet we still listen to her as if she is the all-knowing Oprah.
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Not in defense of Oprah, but I’m afraid that experts are not always right either. A few good examples:
1) How many dietitians believe that one needs to exercise 3500 calories to lose a pound of fat?
One pound = 454 g
1 g of fat = 9 calories
454 x 9 = 4086 calories, not 3500 calories!
According to NYU Nutrition Professor Marion Nestle, the discrepancy is mainly due to “fudge” factors – incomplete digestion, metabolism, etc. The actual calories per g of fat is closer to 9.5 calories! More details can be found in “What Einstein Told His Cook” by Dr. Robert Wolfe.
2) How many athletes still believe that the maximum heart rate is 220 minus age?
Polar Heart Rate Monitors actually uses this formula, and at one point even doctors believed in this formula.
In fact, doctors believed in this formula FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS! It was not until the originators of the formula – Drs. Sam Fox (a heart specialist) Bill Haskell (an exercise specialist) confessed that the formula was not based on age but more on the strength of the individual. The harder one exercised, the faster the heart had to pump, thus increasing the rate of the heart. See NY Times article, “Maximum Heart Rate Theory is Challenged”.
3) How many dieticians/nutritionists still believe that cheese is a good source of calcium?
Yes, there is calcium in milk, but when the milk coagulates and curdles into cheese, the fat and the whey (the watery part) separates. Most of calcium is in the whey, not in the fat, so when the whey gets drained out, so does most of the calcium. Unless the calcium is fortified in the cheese, I can’t see cheese being a good source of calcium. This is just my personal observation after touring one of French Laundry’s cheese suppliers.
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Well, all this hub bub about Oprah and non-coventional medicine might be a very U.S. centric type of thing. I receive a newsletter from the Women to Women clinic in Maine and lead practitioner Marcelle Pick had this to say: “The thing that is most upsetting to me about the recent attempt to undermine Oprah’s approach,” says Pick, “is that it doesn’t present a balanced perspective on alternative therapies and the role they play in our wellness. There is a substantial body of scientific literature supporting alternative approaches, which is why more and more Americans are choosing to include an alternative perspective when considering their health. Much of what is considered as alternative in our country is part of the conventional standard of care in Europe and Asia, where alternative therapies have been helping people for centuries.”
I get this in my email and can’t find a direct link on the site, but check out womentowomen.com for lots of well-researcher, non-hype articles on alternative women’s health!
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