Volume 61, Number 3 - Summer 2010

 

By Brien Seeley, MD

Nutrition Made Clear, by Roberta Anding 

36 half-hour lectures in various audio formats 

The Teaching Company, $200 and up.

Restricting calories may be the path to greatest longevity,1 but such an approach ignores food’s role as a glorious ingredient for quality of life. How can we reconcile these two conflicting propositions? 

We all eat. What and how much we eat profoundly affects our health, wellness and longevity to a greater extent than any of our other lifestyle choices, with the possible exception of exercise. We ought to know what we are doing, and now we can. 

Roberta Anding’s series of 36 half-hour lectures, Nutrition Made Clear, is nothing less than a User Manual for the human body. It should be core curriculum in every high school. The lectures, available from The Teaching Company at teach12.com, come in various audio formats with an accompanying guide book.

This comprehensive, well-organized treatise on how we fuel ourselves is told by an eminently qualified educator whose many anecdotes vividly testify to her authority. Anding has “been there, done that,” and her presentation style is so folksy and conversational that it engages a broad audience. Despite her style, she does not skimp on details or science; rather, she possesses that rare talent of being able to make them interesting. 

Anding’s anecdotes include that of the 1,065-pound man who could not get out of bed yet continued to consume 10,000 calories per day; the faddist on the cayenne, lemonade and maple syrup diet; and the consumer who used an “all-natural” supplement that contained strychnine. Anding presents these and many more real-life cautionary tales of nutrition from her 30-plus years of experience in a nonjudgmental and constructive tone.

Anding’s qualifications are impressive. She is an award-winning lecturer at both Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University. She holds degrees in dietetics and nutrition and is a registered dietitian, a certified diabetes educator, a certified specialist in sports dietetics, and the dietitian for the Houston Texans NFL franchise. Some of her most illustrative anecdotes come from her experiences with NFL players and their extreme caloric and fluid-replacement needs. For example, she describes one player who, after an intense practice, had an acute need for more than two gallons of fluid and electrolyte replacement. 

Anding simplifies and distills what we need to know. She points out, for example, that we burn only about 100 calories for each mile that we walk. This equation means we have to walk 35 miles to burn enough calories to lose one pound. The miraculous human body is a machine so efficient that it can walk 290 miles on the caloric energy in one gallon of gasoline. That is 290 mpg! No wonder losing weight is so difficult. 

One particularly valuable lecture explains the importance of weight training for building and maintaining muscles. Such training is a secret engine that boosts basal metabolic rate and increases one’s capacity to eat more without gaining weight. Anding emphasizes the importance of weight training as a defense against age-related muscle loss, which ultimately is a major cause of declining health in the elderly. On this point, she describes how she finally learned from NFL trainers the ideal technique for weight training and replenishing herself with the right foods to grow new lean muscle mass. She goes on to reassure women that such training will not cause them to develop a bulky, unfeminine figure!

The third lecture, on gastrointestinal function, is one of Anding’s best. In an understandable and insightful way, she portrays the gut as our body’s main interface to the outside world. Anding explains the 12-hour transit through the gut as a sequence of essential stations in an automatic refinery. Everything that happens along the way contributes to the purpose of extracting maximal nutrition from food. While in transit, Anding goes into interesting details about Peyer’s patches, intrinsic factor, amylopectin and bile. Her explanations help us appreciate the gut as the physiologic masterpiece that it is, and as the source of many familiar ailments when disordered. 

Another lecture explains how to read a nutrition label to make sure you’re getting the nutrients you need. Anding cautions that servings that appear to be low in calories may be based on an incredibly small serving size. Other valuable lessons concern the importance of hydration and the need for electrolyte replacement in athletes.

Anding reminds us that we all eat according to taste, hunger, convenience, emotion and rumor. She devotes significant attention to dealing with rumor, i.e., misinformation, as the most potentially damaging and most readily fixable aspect of nutritional choice. Misinformation of all kinds abounds on the Internet, especially in the area of nutrition. Unfortunately, such misinformation is often more trusted and accessible than the real truths about nutrition. To counter this flood of misinformation, Anding debunks many myths about fad diets, supplements and exercise-related weight control and then provides reputable Internet-based resources on these subjects. She discredits “colon cleansing,” supports the appropriate use of sports drinks and sweeteners, and teaches how to quickly recognize that a product or service is really a health fraud. 

Anding explains that many “illnesses” are not really illnesses at all. Rather, they are a locked-loop of bad choices with bad consequences—a loop in which bad choices are driven by the desire for comfort, pleasure, reassurance and certainty. “Enablers” of such self-destructive choices can include doting friends and loved ones who fail to help the sufferer confront the real problem. Other enablers include “health experts” whose opportunistic advice is that the problem lies in some as-yet-undiscovered hormonal imbalance, gene defect, subclinical metabolic disease, or missing secret ingredient in the diet. Anding’s lectures may help to overcome such ignorance and can be a valuable defense against the unfortunate tendency of people to change their bad habits only when faced with an urgent health threat. 

Nutrition, like exercise physiology, is an applied science, meaning that its power lies not in merely grasping its concepts, but also in applying them to daily living. Anding addresses the challenge of applying nutritional knowledge when hungry by offering many ideas on how to make healthy foods more appealing. She suggests, for example, that we grind up cauliflower and mix it in with mashed potatoes, where its bland taste is hardly noticed. In another instance, she explains how the soluble fiber in oatmeal can swell with water to produce satiety on fewer calories than low-fiber foods. Many other practical examples are given. 

Listening to Nutrition Made Clear is both a motivating learning experience and an important investment in one’s personal health. The experience can reward the listener for the rest of his or her life. Creating such a practical and personal guide to nutrition science and its intimate connection with exercise is an achievement of the highest order—one whose impact on our national health care costs could be enormous if implemented effectively. It is high time that we physicians, as well as educators, embrace and extend this solid and reputable body of medically backed, trustworthy information.