I MARRIED A NUTRITIONIST Inside Information for Men on Health and Nutrition

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The other day, while reaching for seconds, I got into a conversation with my nutritionist about Calories… that mysterious measurement that we immediately link to weight gain.  Or, at least I did.  I had recently read that the term “calorie” is defined as a unit of heat which raises one kilogram of water one degree.  It’s a measurement that goes back a hundred years, but today the calorie is tied to your body’s chemical energy which is created by oxidation of fat, carbs and protein.

And the way you burn all those calories off is with exercise, right?   Well, let’s just say “some” of the calories.  My nutritionist is a big supporter of exercise, but she cautioned that no matter how much you work out, you’ll burn no more than 25-30% of your daily calories through all that huffing, puffing, grunting and groaning.

The majority of your daily calories burn, my nutritionist said, is from doing your everyday activities, such as standing, sitting, breathing, eating, farting, climbing stairs, even watching TV.  Score!  You can figure you’ll burn roughly 11 calories for every pound you weigh, so if you’re clocking 180, your everyday activities will burn roughly 1,880 calories.  Not bad, if you can keep your calorie intake at the recommended level.   The Mayo Clinic says the average male needs a maintenance level of 2,800 calories per day, depending on physical activity, age, weight, metabolism, and muscle mass.  Pile on more and you may win a trip to Chubbyville.

Even with all that burning going on, what you eat is an important piece of the puzzle.  Why?  Well, for one thing, you’ll burn more calories in the digestion process depending on what you eat.  Digesting carbs, for example, will earn you somewhere around 5-10% calorie burn simply because carbs break down easily, as does fat.  And as for protein?  Bingo.  You’ll burn between 20-30% of the calories simply because it takes more processing.

Finally, let’s talk fiber.  The reason why it’s so good is it hangs out in the digestive track longer, like your mother in law who extends her visit without asking.  And some complex carbs, like veggies and whole grains, can even block the absorption of other calories.

So, as you can see, calorie counting isn’t the end all.  What’s more important is the type of calories you put in your cake hole.  It’s good to have protein at every meal, a good source of fiber from your veggies first and whole-grains second.  And if you’re not good with fiber, here’s what I take and what my nutritionist highly recommends CLICK HERE.

And that’s the scoop from Healthy Spouse.  Calorie… Calorah!

Be careful what you eat, cause it may not be meat.  That’s probably what a lot of Japanese are saying these days after reading that Okayama Laboratory has discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.  Holly shit, tell me it’s not so!  Well, it is so.  How so?  Well, Japanese researchers developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement.  Why?  Simple. With the population boom, shortages of food and an overabundance of sewage mud, the climate was right for some whacky scientists to take the term “eat shit” literally.

Here’s the dump.  Sewage mud contains a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.  Researches extract those proteins, combine them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which creates artificial steak.  The next step is to color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein… which, if you’ve been reading my posts, contributes to an overabundance of estrogen in males, essentially feminizing them.  But if you’re eating crap, what does it matter if you’re consuming a lot of soy, growing man boobs and reducing your sperm count.  Women probably won’t want to kiss you either way, dung tongue.

Not to give fake beef all the attention, scientists here in the U.S. have created the first soy product that not only tastes like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does.  When you pull apart this Franken-chicken, it even tears the way chicken does with a few random strands of “meat” hanging loosely.

Developing fake chicken hasn’t been easy.  The challenge was to find the right combination of soy, wheat gluten, oil and water, the building blocks of most fake meat.  Then came the texture problem which was solved over time by a whacky mix of soy-protein (here we go again) and wheat flour added with water and dumped into an industrial mixer to make a cake batter like substance.  You see?  A little ingenuity can solve any problem.

As you can probably image, PETA and vegetarians across the land are dancing in the streets at the prospects of saleable meat substitutes.  What’s the verdict on taking in all that fake meat?  Only time will tell as the FDA watches this pseudo-chicken and fake meat experiment unfold.  One thing I have learned from my nutritionist and from scores of reputable articles, all that soy certainly ain’t good for us males.  Perhaps it’s part of the grand scheme to lower the human population over time.  Or, as most articles state, it’s to help reduce greenhouse gasses from farm animals.  Either way, I think I’ll stick with my cage-free, hormone-free chickens that eat bugs and play around all day like chickens should… and my hormone-free, grass-fed real steak from real cows that plump when I barbecue.  As for turd burgers?  I’ll stick with the nature-made brand.

There’s a long-lived mistaken belief that the size of a man’s nose, his feet, measurement of his wrist to index finger, and even his hand size reflects the size of his Johnson… and we’re not talking outboard motors.  As much as women would love to have a reliable predictor for the height of the pup-tent in their sheets the next morning, I’m sorry to say a reliable, scientific correlation just doesn’t exist.

So, now that that’s out of the way, we need to move on to the length of your ring and index fingers, and how that measurement could affect your long-term health. Years back  my nutritionist told me the following information and it wasn’t until recently that I found it dead-center in Men’s Health magazine.

The difference in length between your index and ring fingers depends on the amount of testosterone you were exposed to in the womb.  If your index finger is LONGER than your ring finger, you were exposed to less testosterone before birth and you may be one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer… you may be half as likely to develop osteoarthritis, and your sperm count may be on the low side.

On the flip side, if your index finger is SHORTER than your ring ginger, you were exposed to more testosterone before birth and you may be less likely to have a heart attack in your 30’s and 40’s… tend to be more physically aggressive than men with longer pointers… and you’re probably mentally tough and optimistic (which is good if you’re an air traffic controller and there’s a plane coming in for landing up-side-down).

So, that’s the long and short of it from Healthy Spouse.  Don’t forget to zip up!

My nutritionist and I recently moved to a new house and while packing the kitchen she turned to me and said, “We need to get rid of this microwave.”   Hmmm?   Looked perfectly good to me.  I mean, it’s not like we used it a lot, mainly quick heat ups and such.  Then it hit me.  She probably wants a new one to match our new refrigerator.  Women are like that sometimes.  Wrong.  Then she clarified  her statement saying we were getting rid of our microwave all together.   Gulp.

Like a skilled lawyer, my nutritionist began to present her case.  Conventional heating warms food from the outside in.  Think of your oven, or in caveman terms, think campfire.  Microwave ovens, on the other hand, heat food from inside out by creating a violent friction in the water molecules within food.  This friction deforms the structure of the water molecules and generates heat in the process.   As the molecules are literally blown apart, the molecular damage spreads beyond the water and into your food.

Microwave radiation destroys and deforms the food molecules and creates new compounds completely unknown to nature.  Recent research shows that microwaves significantly decrease the nutritional value of food.  All your good intentions in the supermarket to buy fresh and healthy can go out the window with microwaving.

Microwaves reduce levels of vitamin B 12… decrease flavonoids in food by 97% which eliminates anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and anti-microbial properties…. lower levels of sinapic acid derivatives which neutralize free radicals which cause cancer… and significantly alter levels of vitamins and nutrients in your food.  Whoa.

Oh, and if you have a baby at home and you’re heating breast milk in a microwave.  Slap yourself.  Microwaves break down bacteria-digesting enzymes in breast milk and decrease antibody levels.   Heat plastic baby bottles in the microwave and you may be leaching dangerous toxins into breast milk or formula.

Bottom line.  Microwaves impair the quality of the food.  Maybe the Russians knew something we didn’t when they banned the use of microwaves in 1976.   Or, maybe we knew but were more interested in how the new appliance would revolutionize the food industry.

So, back to the new house and life without a microwave.  Surprisingly, it hasn’t been nearly as life-altering as I thought.   Liquids heat within 2-3 minutes in a sauce pan on the stove, and stay hot longer.  We now heat left overs in a convection oven which take a bit longer than a microwave, but works perfectly fine if you plan ahead instead of rushing last minute.  As for frozen foods, pop it in and set the timer.  The good part is, I now know the food I’m heating is the quality of food I want to be eating.  Food is expensive, and so are illnesses.  It’s something to consider.

And that’s the heat on microwaves from Healthy Spouse.  Get cookin’.

I recently discovered that every time I put my Blackberry in my pants pocket, I’m violating Blackberry’s safety warning.  Most people don’t know this but smartphone manufactures state a warning in their owner’s manuals that for your own safety you should keep your cell phone a certain distance from your body when sending or receiving data in order to “maintain compliance” with radio frequency-radiation standards set by the FCC.

For Blackberry owners, that safe distance is almost an inch (0.98”) while Apple’s iPhone 4 manual tells users to keep the phone “at least 5/8 inches away from your body.  Motorola?  They suggest that an active WI80 should be a full inch from the user’s skin, unless it’s paired with a company-approved “clip, holder, holster, case or body harness.”  Body harness?  What the hell is that, some kind of shoulder holster?

If you’re like most guys who don’t read directions (my Blackberry manual is somewhere in my desk)… you’re probably keeping your phone in your front pants pocket… not to replace your rolled-up sock, but for convenience.  Hey, not everyone can pull off the style of carrying a cell phone clipped to the belt.

As stated in a Time Magazine article, skeptics of cell phone safety have brushed off the warnings saying that guildelines set in 2001 say cell phone usage is safe.  Problem is, all the tests were done with belt clips or holsters.  The FCC told testers to assume a distance of 0.59 to 0.98 inches from the body.  Why should this concern you?  Because radio-frequency waves can heat cells in your body.  So, if you’re a guy who puts his cell phone in his right pocket and happen to “dress right,” well, you may be cooking sausage without all the trimmings.

The FCC says the link between cell phone exposure and cancer is inconclusive.  The FDA says it can not rule out the possibility of a health risk from cell phones but if it does exist, it’s probably small.  However, one recent multi-country study found that people who used their phones on average 30 or more minutes a day for 10 years had a substantially higher risk of developing brain cancer.  That’s enough for me.

Look, smartphones are not going away.  We rely on them every day for business and viewing YouTube on the run…oh yeah, and for things like email, too.  The way to minimize your risk is to limit the amount of time your phone is next to your body, such as in your pocket or next to your ear.  Using a wired ear piece or speaker phone is a good strategy.  As for those cyborg individuals who were Blue-Tooth ear pieces all day.  Well, there have been cases of brain tumors in the shape of the ear piece.  Once again, it’s radiation next to the body and your ear is next to your brain.

My nutritionist suggests you check out your cell phone model at the Environmental Working Group’s website to see just how much radiation your phone is putting out.   CLICK HERE.

That’s the scoop on cell phone radiation from Healthy Spouse.  It’s not my call, it’s yours.

Hopefully by now you’ve heard of Parabens.  They’re a group of chemicals used as preservatives in all those personal care products we squirt, lather, scrub and massage onto our bodies.

From conditioners on top to sex lube down below, most people are coated with parabens as they’re in literally thousands of products used by consumers every day.  Parabens go by many names such as methylparaben, butylparaben, ethylparaben, benzylparaben, isobutylparaben and propylparaben.  They make it simple for us to remember… just look for any product ingredient ending in paraben.

In the 1990’s the scientific community became increasingly aware that some synthetic chemicals are able to interfere with the function of both female and male hormones.   Within the category of hormone disruptors are xenoestrogens, synthetic chemicals that mimic estrogen.  A number of studies have shown that parabens fall into the xenoestrogens’ group; xenoestrogens may be linked to high rates of breast cancer, reproductive problems in women and descreased sperm counts, prostate and testicular cancer in men.

Product manufacturers and the FDA give a thumbs up to parabens for consumer use.  After all, they give products a long shelf life and they’re cheap.  Many people believe more research needs to be done before rubber stamping them safe.  Despite FDA approval, a number of manufacturers are following consumer demand by removing parabens from some of their products.  Other companies, such as Bubble and Bee, one of my favorites, not only bans parabens from their entire product line, but no one within 500 feet of the company headquarters is allowed to say, spell, utter, sing, burp, slur, or hiccup the word paraben.  Actually, I just made that up.  No one can hiccup the word paraben.

If you have any questions about whether your personal care products contain parabens or any toxic chemicals, click on SKIN DEEP to visit the cosmetics database.  It’s a great website and resource.

With my nutritionist being an expert in hormone imbalance, she is very serious about our home being paraben free.  If you’re interested in going that route, there are some terrific products out there to replace what you’re currently using.  Just read the label, ask around, and let your fingers do the walking on the keyboard.

And that’s the rub on parabens from Healthy Spouse.  Get squirtin’.

“Sugar, you make my heart race.”  Okay, perhaps it’s not the smoothest line to use on a woman… although feel free to use it if your best line is “Lie down.  I think I love you.”

As corny as the heart race line is, there is a lot of truth to it.  A recent Swiss study found that when people consumed 60 grams of fructose (sugar), their heart rates rose by as much as eight beats per minute.  What this does over time is increase your risk of heart disease.

The average American eats 92 grams of sugar a day….that’s the equivalent to 1/2 cup of sugar….a day!  Your body only needs about 8 grams, which it could easily get from natural sugars in fresh fruits, veggies and grains.  In addition to making your heart race, sugar suppresses your white blood cells for up to six hours, impairing your immune system.  And in today’s germ-filled world, that’s not a good thing.

Reader, I would like you to meet Xylitol.  Xylitol… Reader.  Great, now that you’re introduced, I’m gonna tell you why this brief introduction is an important one for helping combat your excessive sugar intake.

Xylitol is a naturally occurring sugar in fruits and veggies.  It’s not a chemical and there’s nothing artificial about it.  Xylitol looks, tastes and even bakes just like sugar.  Where you would normally use one teaspoon of sugar, you use one teaspoon of Xylitol.  Okay, aside from being natural, why is Xylitol so good?  To begin with, it has 40% less calories, 75% less carbs and is actually healthy for you.  While satisfying your sweet tooth, Xylitol stabilizes your insulin levels and is even good for your teeth by strengthening the enamel.  Chop. Chop.

Now, it’s important to note that not all Xylitol is created equal.  Much of Xylitol comes from corn and most of our corn is genetically modified….that’s a whole other blog.  That’s why my nutritionist recommends getting the good stuff online at www.myhealthysugar.com You can buy it by the pound, five pounds or truckload if you’re looking to make the world a sweeter place.  You’ll even find other Xylitol products there such as gums, mints, sours, jams, jellies and condiments…. all made with Xylitol.  It’s a literal Xylitol circus.

At home, our kitchen is always stocked with Xylitol “sweetened” products like jams and ketchup, and my nutritionist keeps my car loaded up with Xylitol mints and sours for those slow L.A. commutes.

So, that’s inside scoop on Xylitol.  Sweet!  Healthy Spouse

Let’s talk Cooking Oils for a moment.  Guys, it’s important to know that not all cooking oils are the same, especially when it come “Smoke Points.”  The smoke point of cooking oils is how high a heat the oil can take before it, literally, begins to smoke or burn.  When oil smokes, it releases free-radicals within the oil and, believe me, that’s not good for your health, or that of your family, dog, or any other living thing that might consume your masterpiece.  In addition, burnt oil makes food taste rank.  Remember, you have a reputation to uphold.

Different cooking oils have different uses, and each performs within a certain range of temperatures.  Some are made for high heat cooking, such as frying or grilling, while others have intense flavors that are best enjoyed by drizzling directly on to the food, or on that special someone in your life (but that’s another post).

Since this is a blog for guys, and guys like heat, especially when grilling, let’s talk about the best healthy oils for your culinary arsenal when the heat is on.

Recommended oils and their smoke points:

Avocado oil (510º F)…   Safflower oil  (460º F)…  Sesame oil  (445º F)…

Grapeseed oil (425º F)…  Coconut oil (425º F)

You’ll notice I left off Canola and Soy oil.  According to my nutritionist, there are much healthier options, such as those listed above.

Here’s a “did you know?”  Canola is not the name of a natural plant but a made-up word, from the words “Canada” and “oil”.  Canola is a genetically engineered plant developed in Canada from the Rapeseed Plant, which is part of the mustard family of plants.  Rapeseed oil, which is an industrial oil, is poisonous to living things and is an excellent insect repellent. Some people suspect Rapeseed oil causes emphysema, respiratory distress, anemia, constipation, irritability, and blindness in animals and humans.  Rape oil was widely used in animal feeds in England and Europe between 1986 and 1991, when it was thrown out.

As for Soy oil, well, if you haven’t read my post “Soy is no Joy,” you ought to.

So, there you go.  You’re all set for the grill, stove top or oven.  Whether you boast about this new-found knowledge to your wife, or share it with the guys at your next poker game, smile proudly because you are just one big know-it-all… and thank goodness for that.  Cook on!  Healthy Spouse.

Being married to a Holistic Nutritionist who specializes in hormone balancing, I’ve learned quite a bit about hormones and women.  One important thing is that women who are dealing with hormonal issues can, at times, be a guy’s worst nightmare.  And most women will at one point or another deal with this.  It’s not her fault.  Hormonal imbalance can put a woman on an emotional and physical roller coaster that makes her feel like crap.  And, like you do when you feel down, out, or hung over, it ain’t pretty, including for those who are within striking distance.

As a guy, its important for you to know your options.  After all, that’s how we guys work.  Problem?  Task it out.  So here’s the playing field.  A woman with hormonal issues has several options.  One… do nothing and stick it out.  This is old school, and often how her mother, aunt, and women in black and white movies did it.  Problem is she can be miserable for a really long time, and that means you’re miserable, too.

Two… take the pharmaceutical approach and start taking something called HRT (hormone replacement therapy).  Pop the drugs, feel better but greatly increase your risk cancer and other medical problems.  If your wife is on HRT and refuses to explore other options, do your part and make sure all your insurance is paid up, from medical to life.  Study after study shows it can do a lot of harm.  Nothing to mess around with.

Three… something called Bioidenticals.  Not as bad as HRT but the jury is still out on the affect of putting these type of hormones in the human body.  It’s still an artificial hormone and not being produced by the body.

And, Four… solve the problem safe and naturally, the way my nutritionist approaches things.  Get to the root of the problem, adjust diet, perhaps a few lifestyle changes, maybe a few natural supplements, and let the body slide back into balance naturally.  Sometimes it takes a few weeks, other times longer, but it’s rolling with nature not bucking it.

Okay, so why am I telling you this?  For one thing, most guys at some point are going to be on the receiving end of the effects of hormone imbalance, whether it comes from a wife, girlfriend, lover, mother, or woman undercover.  The last one was because it rhymed.  Bottom line, if that special woman in your life is having issues, it’s important for you, as her guy, to understand the problem, understand the solutions and give support that leads to wise choices and safe solutions.  You’ve invested a lot of time and effort in your relationship, protect your investment and enjoy the ride as much as humanly possible.

Regardless if you’re in the L.A. area or on the east coast, if your woman’s struggling with hormone imbalance and you’re feeling like the guy in the picture above, find a creative way to put my nutritionist’s website on your computer screen so your lady sees it.  It’s covert but hey, you’re a guy.  www.karenrothnutrition.com

And that’s the scoop from Healthy Spouse.  You can thank me later.