MORE HEALTHFUL DIETS from LIFE AHEAD
Getting Acquainted with Life Ahead Diet: Millions today are obsessed with diets and the diet books number in the hundreds. Life Ahead should be able to help people lose weight with any diet, develop a more healthful diet than that possible from any present diet book program, and help them keep excess weight off permanently.
Life Ahead values diets by all specific foods included, and not by labels such as low Fat or low Carbohydrate. Ten different specific "Pritikin Diet proposals or ten different "Atkins" diets will have different included foods and can have much differing health values. A recently promoted diet promoted by the National Institutes of Health is the DASH Diet is proposed to keep blood pressures down. A Life Ahead test of seven different proposed daily DASH recipes showed that although most were good, some eaten for life would produce up to several years difference in years of computed healthful Well-Days. And some of these diets were seriously deficient in some needed nutrients.
Life Ahead thus analyzes results from specific actual diets of foods, and not from questionnaires asking questions such as 'How many portions of meat or fruits or vegetables do you eat each week'. The differences in health from different fruits or vegetables are so large that answers to this type of a questionnaire have little usefulness. Much argument recently has focused on the health of low fat, low carbohydrate, and high protein diets. Life Ahead shows that these arguments have little scientific relevance. It is possible to construct diets very good, just average, or very poor in health from any of these so-called diet types. Some fats can be 'bad' and others very 'good'. High glycemic carbohydrate is 'bad' and low glycemic carbohydrate can be 'good'.
Diet Health Depends on its Multiple Combination of Nutrients. Most health recommendations on diet have been based on a single nutrient health factor for one or two diseases. For example, most research has been for fat and cholesterol for heart disease. But in more recent years a multiplicity of other nutrients have been found to affect risks of this and other major life-limiting diseases. These include saturated fat, antioxidants, omega-3 fats; folic acid, glycemic high carbohydrates, various vitamins as A, B6, C, E and selenium minerals as calcium, magnesium, sodium and others. It is the summed risks from combinations of all these nutrients that we regularly eat that determine how long and how healthy we probably will live. A diet low in saturated fat can be poor because it lacks omega-3 fat, antioxidants, and/or some other nutrient.
Diets include at least 50 different now recognized nutrients. Every addition or subtraction of a single food changes the dietary proportions of each of these nutrients. Life Ahead now uses the 23 nutrients found to have verified effects on risk of the major diseases.. Some of these nutrients can affect the risk of a half dozen or more different life limiting diseases. These 23 verified nutrients probable include our major health risks from diet, but as more research verifies the value of other nutrients these can be added to the program.
Global Health Valuation of Foods Cannot be Done Adequately Using Conventional Health Research. Health research has obtained rough values for risk of heart disease from baskets of fruits and vegetable. But defining risks of a single fruit or vegetable even for one disease appears out of the reach from this type of research. Partly because of their unique content of lycopene useful risks for tomato and cancer have been obtained from multiple studies. But attempts value such important items meats and eggs even for heart disease have been largely unsuccessful. The margin of error of these studies is large, and foods are so interrelated in practical diets that accurate separation and definition of them by statistical studies is not possible.
The solution to this problem called 'Global Scientific Nutrition (GSN)' identifies the health value of a diet from its included amounts of value-verified nutrients. Each value-verified nutrient is one that has an established quantified risk vs. amount of one or more major life-limiting diseases from multiple population research. The sum total of each of these nutrient risks on each of all included diseases produces a net risk of both morbidity and death from all included causes at age for any profile of population risks by disease. A result of GSN can be taken as a risk of death at age, as a life accumulation of death rates leading to life expectancy, or better yet, as Well-Days. More on GSN is included in another paper.
Life Ahead GSN from objective analyses of many hundreds of key studies published to about 2006 shows that saturated fat and serum cholesterol no longer are our major population diet health problems. Very high cholesterol from genetics can be quite harmful. Yet this usually can be corrected by drugs. And today's mean or average serum cholesterol for middle aged persons is only about 213. Life Ahead's analysis of a typical US un-supplemented diet of foods for an average 50 year old man identifies a potential of 1,830 Well-Days or 5.0 more years of healthful life for improving diet health via use of more healthful nutrients. Of this, a deficiency of 567 Well-Days appeared caused by insufficient Antioxidants; 256 Well-Days by lack of Folic Acid; 207 Well-Days by lack of Omega-3 fats; and 203 more for a too-high Glycemic Load. In contrast, diet Saturated fat cost 60 Well-Days, and Cholesterol cost only 53 Well-Days.
These Life Ahead values of nutrient deficiency change widely with different diets. A heavy junk food diet could bring cholesterol up to the #1 or #2 problem position of nutrient deficiency. But for most diets the other above nutrients in varying order usually are computed as the key dietary health problems. There has been much discussion of the 'Mediterranean' diet that includes more fruits, vegetables, and than the usual US diet. This diet produced similar cholesterol levels but a third of usual risk of heart attacks. Life Ahead confirms the author's conclusion that this better result was mostly due to higher values of omega-3 fats.
Using the Life Ahead Diet Analysis: An important first option on the Life Ahead display of Results is 'Get More Well Days' This identifies the key habit changes needed to achieve the usually better outlook for "Good Habits". Diet often will head this list as the most important need to obtain more Well-Days of life. Exit this option and click the 'Diet Analysis' option at bottom. The values in the column at left will show uniquely how deficiencies in the included diet relate to deficiencies in diet nutrients. The diet nutrient values on the middle column show the nutrient amounts in this diet, and the right hand column numbers show the Good Health Values for each nutrient. Because diet deficiencies are sorted in order they denote the diet's health problems in order of importance. And it is interesting to view here how differences in the diet nutrients from their health objectives cause the diet deficiencies for health.
At bottom of this 'Diet Analysis' display are 14 options that show more about what needs to be done to improve amounts of each nutrient. These options compare user diet nutrients that are adjusted for user sex and weight with and without supplements to health goals. Each of these nutrient options includes a discussion and explanation for the need of proper amounts of the nutrient. The cholesterol and antioxidant options also include more detailed information.
For example, the cholesterol option identifies separately the amount of serum cholesterol or cholesterol in the blood that usually is due to diet factors of saturated, mono-unsaturated, polyunsaturated and trans fats; diet cholesterol, and fiber. A remainder at zero debit for these factors is an average value at age for a healthful diet. If an actual serum cholesterol value is entered, Life Ahead separates a probable diet contribution from that due to genetics. A genetic amount that is high suggests a visit to the doctor for a possible prescription for a statin drug. A higher than desired cholesterol thus can identify how much improvement usually can be obtained by modifying diet. For antioxidants, Life Ahead identifies amounts vs. targets of each of the four antioxidants of Vitamins A, C, E, selenium and beta-carotene and shows values for Antioxidant Index.
At lower left of each nutrient display are options to view in order the nutrient amounts by food either in the user's diet, or in the entire food library file. This can show users immediately the foods in their diets that cause a nutrient problem of 'too-much', or foods that best can eliminate a nutrient amount that is 'too-small'.
A user can access the nutrient options separately, and develop improvements for each nutrient of potential importance. An alternate option at lower right 'Summary of Diet Actions for More Well-Days' performs a diet deficiency analysis, and takes the user stepwise through the specific steps needed to develop a healthful diet. This option shows the specific foods causing too-high values of some nutrients in the user's diet.
Value Foods First: It is recommended that you first try to develop a healthful diet from foods. An option permits you to value diets without the supplements entered. Or when starting Life Ahead, simply start first without entering your supplements. Inclusion of supplements tends to mask the potential health value of foods, and it always is desirable to obtain nutrients from foods where possible
But Life Ahead from hundreds of research studies shows that it usually is not practical to design a diet for best health - and for optimum values of 23 different nutrients - without some use of dietary supplements. Supplements probably will be needed for the antioxidants vitamins C and E, and selenium. Although Life Ahead will compute maximum accepted benefits from half of the recommended values for each if all four of these antioxidants are used, or from 200 IU of vitamin E and any other antioxidant, it is best to use the suggested targets for all. Some are fat soluble and some are water soluble, and they can work differently. They are inexpensive and easy to take, and in the amounts suggested have no known harmful effects. Calcium, magnesium, zinc and folic acid targets also probably will be best achieved via use of some supplements. Write down the amounts needed for these as both total needs and the differences between targets and amount already included in diet plus supplements. Supplements are available for omega-3's and lycopene. But it is useful to try to develop dietary foods to provide these needs if possible Usual supplements for potassium include too small amounts of this to of much use vs. better results possible from use of potatoes or some other foods.
Look for a multi-vitamin supplement package that will supply most of the dietary supplements you need. About 200 IU of vitamin E, 400-500 mg of vitamin C, 50-100 mcg of selenium and 400 mcg of folic acid often will be needed for optimum protection. You may have to take two or three supplements or one supplement two or three times daily to achieve this objective. A vast number of multi-vitamin supplements are now marketed. But avoid using much more of a supplement amount than that noted as a target value in Life Ahead. Excessive amounts of some as for example beta carotene or vitamin A can be harmful.
Health Values of Foods: Life Ahead now can value the Well-Days of health of eating any food in its library. Further, it can value the health of eating each food in any amount and frequency and and in any starting diet for men or women of any age and other habits.. The usual valuations of Well-Days assume that the food will be eaten in the amounts tested for the rest of a life. But the program can identify the effect on multiple major diseases and death from diseases for adding a food for any time period ahead.
To value a food do this: After you reach the Result Display and have viewed deficiencies in your diet, go back the the Result Display and click on the 'Health Value a Food' option. This will take you back to the food entry.. Select any desired food at left as for example a melon as a particularly healthful food, and double click to add it to the diet used. If a weekly diet, enter no of days used, as 7 for a daily portion eaten. Press OK, exit this display, and click on option to compute. A new computed result will display showing a change in Well-Days, and changes in risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancer for adding this amount of this food to the diet. .
Now click again on 'Diet Analysis' to view the new diet values for nutrient deficiencies. Two new options appear as 'Nutrient Analysis' and 'Disease Risk Changes'. Click on Nutrient Analysis first. This will show at top the original diet deficiency in Well-Days, and the change due to adding the new food. At left is the original nutrient deficiencies in order of Well-Days, and at center are the Gains and Losses of Well-Days for each nutrient due to adding the new food to the diet. A food usually changes the health value of its included nutrients as both gains and losses because an addition will change some nutrient values positively and some negatively. A food of very good health will show nearly all differences as Gains; One of poor health will show most nutrient values as Losses. And you can learn why these gains and losses occurred from the three columns at right as the nutrients in the starting diet, those in the modified diet, and healthful values for each.
Try clicking on the 'Disease---' tab. This shows the changes in risk of major diseases due to adding the new food. Adding a single food often changes risks of up to 10 or more different disease groups because the multi nutrients in each food in combination can affect the risk or quite a number of different diseases.
A computation in Life Ahead can be made as 'Prorated' or 'Not Prorated. Most diet files have less or more calories than those needed to just maintain body weight over the long term. Adding a new food changes calories so that they no longer will be balanced for long range weight management. The 'prorate' option changes amounts of each food so that the total just equals the calories needed to maintain weight. The 'un-prorated' option keeps calories at their originally computed total plus that of the new food... If you are dieting, the un-prorated option is required to lose weight. Use of these different options will develop somewhat different values for the health of foods. The prorate option is usually suggested for valuating foods. But this can give values in error when adding small amounts of food to a diet. Small food amounts may be valued more accurately using the 'un-prorate option.
Life Ahead Global Values for Foods: The Life Ahead web site includes Global food values for the 370 foods included in the programs original food library. Program users may find it useful to print these out as they can be very helpful in selecting the most healthful food to add to their diets. These specific values were computed using the Usual US Diet with the prorate option and without dietary supplements. . Actual global values will differ for program users of differing age and gender and having differing overall health habits. Values will differ for inclusion in different diets. But the general health order of foods probably will not change very much. Users thus should find these food health values of considerable interest.
Food health advice in the past nearly always considered only amounts of one or two included nutrients, with health inferred from risks only of one disease, usually heart disease. Heart disease usually develops only a quarter of our total life risk. Life Ahead Global values recognize the risk of 23 now verified nutrients as affecting risks of 15 different major life-limiting diseases. Thus these much more comprehensive values should identify long range health outlook with substantially greater accuracy than has been possible in the past. The new values show that different fruits and vegetables and fats can have far different health values. And that quite a few foods have global health values that differ from what has been been assumed for them based only on cholesterol and fat and heart disease.
Food health values may compute lower when measured with accompanying dietary supplements. Life Ahead assumes no health benefit will be obtained for nutrient amounts beyond target health values. Thus if a supplement nutrient together with an original food value reaches the target, an added food will accrue no further benefit for its amounts of this nutrient. This assumption of no benefit beyond a target value that is made for conservatism could be incorrect, and the added food could still provide its further benefit. Thus is is desirable to make all food valuations in a diet free of any supplements. Obtain a final overall value of a diet after supplements have been added.
Life Ahead Values for Diets: An important recent controversy has been about the value of low fat and low carbohydrate diets. Low carbo diets proposed by Atkins included substantial saturated fats. Because these are well known to harmful to health many researchers were troubled that such diets could be unhealthful. Unfortunately there as been no known way to value a diet objectively for its full effect on health from all of its included nutrients. Life Ahead provide a solution to this problem.
The program automatically values an included diet for its estimated Well-Days, from the effect of 23 included nutrients on the effect of 15 major diseases, with each valuation based on results of all useful published research found. Life Ahead also identifies a quantified health value for a diet that produces target values of all of these nutrients. Thus perhaps for a first time we have a quantified measure of the health value of any diet. It can be argued that there are many more nutrients in foods not included in this analysis. But the fact that these 23 have been successfully measured and to date the others have had effects too small to be measured suggests that nutrients most important to health are those now known.
Entering Diets: You can enter multiple daily or weekly diets into Life Ahead. The program can sum and average values for consecutive diets entered. More about how to do this is described in the program help files Before entering your own diet, experiment with the Food Library Tabs to see where to find the various foods included in the library. And if some important food you eat is not listed, consider entering its nutrients into the Food Library from the package label as an added food. More about the Life Ahead diet library and how to add foods is included in More About Life Ahead Diet.
Life Ahead can analyze diets in two different ways. First, after completing a diet entry or loading a previous diet, you can proceed through the diet displays that will show successively how calories and fats, vitamins, and minerals in each meal, in total and in total foods plus supplements compare with good health targets. These displays also provide prose telling about the values of various supplements. You can sort your diet on any food factor to see which foods produced the most calories, fat, etc. You then see some overall analyses of diet and of diet deficiencies, and can compute a program result. Or second, after completing your diet entry you can view the Result Display immediately and also learn how each nutrient value in this diet compares with health targets, and how many added Well-Days are potential for improving values of each of these nutrients. Access the "Analyze---' tab and then ask for 'Diet Analysis.' to reach the diet analysis.
Life Ahead also can identify how the nutrients in any diet entered will produce different risks of 10 different disease and disease-death groups to any future age to life expectancy. It will detail effects of diet factors on risks of three specific cardiovascular disease groups and five types of cancer, and compare these with probable results for using better diet habits.
Valuing a Food with Life Ahead. Life Ahead provides what now is believed to be a unique capability - that of valuing the health benefit of any food from up to 23 of its included nutrients. This was illustrated for the Demo example above for adding All-Bran to a diet. Best, use your usual diet that is saved. As alternate, use weekly Demo #1. Before doing this first computation press the Reset option to initialize the Well-Days for a first entered or base diet. Now from this initial Result Display for this diet, click on 'Explore Food Changes' and the diet entry display will reappear. Add any amount of any of the 320 foods in Life Ahead, or subtract any food from the existing diet. Enter 7 in number of days per week if a weekly entry to obtain a result for a daily entry. Re-compute the result. The change in Well-Days from this change in diet will appear in the Result Display. You can analyze further in the 'Diet Analysis' the changes made by this food. This will show the benefit or debit to long range health for adding or subtracting this specific food from the diet.
This food valuation method values the change is Well-Days made by adding an amount of a specific food to just this specific base diet. Life Ahead re-computes the value of the modified diet and compares this with the value of the base diet. Thus adding a given food to a poor diet can produce a significant benefit; adding the same food it to a fairly good diet can result in no benefit, and adding the same food to a very healthy diet can produce a negative contribution. As shown above for fiber and All-Bran, adding a food to a inadequately supplemented diet can produce a much different result than adding it to a fully supplemented diet. It can be fascinating to learn how additions or subtractions of individual foods from a diet can modify long range health outlook from risk of major disease.
Life Ahead Food Values can be Reassuring. Health advice the harm of fat and cholesterol has motivated many people to consider some foods as near poisons. Eggs, salt, and even meat can be shunned as things rarely to eat and enjoy. The Life Ahead valuations show that such concerns can be absurd. Adding one egg each day to the average US weekly diet #1 subtracts about 70 computed Well-Days for a 50 year old man. This is for eating that egg every day for the entire rest of life. Eating it once a week for life makes this a meaningless loss of 10 days. The harm of a Big Mac every day for life works out to about 1.3 years loss of Well-Days. And adding fries and a shake to this every day can increase this loss to nearly 4 years. But a usual taking of nearly any food occasionally computes to trivial effects on long range health. The eating of foods can bring enormous enjoyment to us. It is unlikely that the eating of any usual food just occasionally will have an appreciable effect on our future Well-Days.
The Concept of Collapsing Benefits: Another factor that users should understand is that health benefits in the real world are not amounts that can be added or subtracted. A risk can never become equal to or lower than zero. A good diet can reduce heart disease by 50%; good cardiofitness can easily reduce risk by 50%. If both risks are so reduced, the result cannot be zero risk. Rather, this produces a risk reduction of 75%. Now each benefit contributes only 37.5%. If we reduce risk 50% by each of three factors, risk reduction becomes 87.5% and prorated risk benefit for each of three factors is reduced to about 29%.
The change computed for changing a single food is for just this single change.. If multiple food changes are made, benefits will become less than that computed by this method for the sum of individual values for each. Life Ahead diet related and other risks in Well-Days are prorated risks or the lower values obtained for each factor from a multiple reduction in factor risks. If you change just one of any of these factors, the benefits from this single factor change will be much larger that these prorated risks. The benefits in Well-Days computed in Life Ahead for various factor deficiencies or changes are only very approximate values that give only the roughest estimate of the relative value of factor changes. As example, if exercise is increased and risk from this improved, the Well-Days potential for improving each dietary nutrient will be reduced somewhat. This simply expresses the reality that their is a limit to overall benefits possible and that risks never can be reduced to or below zero.
Main Menu See also Losing Weight with Life Ahead
Notes on that never ending Controversy: Foods vs. Supplements--Some in the health research field have been conducting a hate campaign against diet supplements for decades. We have heard tiresomely "You can get all the vitamins and minerals you need from food." The so-called RDA values of various Vitamin and factors that are amounts needed to prevent certain diseases of deficiency are confused with the far larger amounts now verified to be useful in preventing cardiovascular diseases, cancer and other more significant health problems. We now have tens of thousands of research studies that verify health benefits for nearly two dozen supplements. Biochemistry has now shown the important role of antioxidants in slowing the progress of both of these major disease groups. The advice here is to program diets first to obtain maximum healthful nutrients from food. But Life ahead shows that practical diets of foods per se usually will not provide the amounts of antioxidants and other nutrients that research on supplements shows produce best health protection.
The Life Ahead analysis approached this problem objectively and with no preconceived bias. The result: The broad body of all research published provides a solid endorsement for use of optimum supplements. Used continuously for 20 years or more, a convenient addition of antioxidants alone in dietary supplements can increase Well-Days of life by more than 5 years for US men and women of age 50 that obtain no other accompanying diet or other health improvement. The research results from 160 key study comparisons verifying this estimate is included in the accompanying Health Research Library. And other supplements can contribute beyond those that operate as antioxidants. It is difficult to visualize any program of public health that could contribute more to the future health and life of our population per unit of cost than that of a proper promotion of the use of dietary supplements. The present confusing and long out of date RDA system may mislead people more than it helps them.
An important observation that applies to both foods and supplements is that some appear to modify the rate at which both atherosclerosis and cancer progress during life. Thus their benefit develops as a function of "Amount times years of use." A specific change in either a food or supplement in a diet usually will require 7-10 years of continued use for good benefits to develop and continue for up to 20 years or more. Life Ahead imposes conservative limits on both amounts and years of use that are accepted for present valuations. Because nutrients in certain foods may have been taken for a much longer time than the same nutrients added in supplements, the net benefit of a food nutrient up to a certain age or time could be larger than that of a similar amount of the same nutrient included later in a supplement. Clinical studies on vitamin E that usually measured antioxidant effects only for a net of 2-4 years - and this mostly for coronary patients taking other medications - confirmed that its short term use probably will not be beneficial. enough to be measured with the present statistical study method.
Another claim is “Vitamins and minerals in foods are better for health than those in supplements. From the viewpoint of chemistry it is not scientifically credible that the human body can tell where each molecule of a vitamin and mineral chemical it uses came from, and then utilize only those molecules that came from a preferred source. The main body of research on minerals and vitamins identifies and verifies the added health effects of amounts in supplements taken in a variety of actual diets of foods. These are the values used in Life Ahead.
