Many Americans Cannot Afford to Eat Right

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:48:03 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern

Many Americans Can't Afford to Eat Right

THURSDAY, Nov. 22 (HealthDay News) -- In this land and season of plenty, low-income and rural Americans continue to have difficulty finding healthy foods that are affordable, a new study finds.

One study shows that low-income Americans now would have to spend up to 70 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables to meet new national dietary guidelines for healthy eating.

And a second study found that in rural areas, convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and grocery stores -- even though the latter carry a much wider choice of affordable, healthy foods.

People with more money eat more fruits and vegetables than those with less money, research shows. In turn, poorer people also assume a greater disease burden relative to their wealthier counterparts.

However, a low-income family of four would still have to spend a very large percentage of its food budget on fruits and vegetables in 2005 to meet national healthy-diet guidelines.

Tags: diet, income, nutrition, poverty

Sleep, Food, Exercise, and Weight

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:23:06 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: There are more and more articles linking poor quality sleep with weight gain and vice versa.

Clip Source: www.healthday.com

High-Fat Diet Can Disrupt Body's Clock

Like a midnight raid on the fridge for junk food -- sleep often suffers, study says

TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- There's more bad news about a high-fat diet -- it disrupts the body's 24-hour internal (circadian) clock, which regulates sleeping, waking, eating, as well as the daily rhythms of many metabolic functions, U.S. researchers say.

The team also found that a high-fat diet caused changes in genes that encode the circadian clock in the brain and in peripheral tissues (such as fat), resulting in reduced expression of these genes.

"The answer is, yes; alterations in feeding affect timing. We found that as an animal on a high-fat diet gains weight, it eats at the inappropriate time for its sleep/wake cycle -- all of the excess calories are consumed when the animal should be resting. For a human, that would be like raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night and binging on junk food," Bass said.

Tags: sleep, weight, food, diet, exercise, health

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Many Americans Cannot Afford to Eat Right

Sleep, Food, Exercise, and Weight