Our ‘food environments’ affect what we eat. Here’s how you can change yours to support healthier eating

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In January, many people are setting new year’s resolutions around healthy eating. Achieving these is often challenging – it can be difficult to change our eating habits. But healthy diets can enhance physical and mental health, so improving what we eat is a worthwhile goal.

One reason it’s difficult to change our eating habits relates to our “food environments”. This term describes:

The collective physical, economic, policy and sociocultural surroundings, opportunities and conditions that influence people’s food and beverage choices and nutritional status.

Our current food environments are designed in ways that often make it easier to choose unhealthy foods than healthy ones. But it’s possible to change certain aspects of our personal food environments, making eating healthier a little easier.

Unhealthy food environments

It’s not difficult to find fast-food restaurants in Australian cities. Meanwhile, there are junk foods at supermarket checkouts, service stations and sporting venues. Takeaway and packaged foods and drinks routinely come in large portion sizes and are often considered tastier than healthy options.

Our food environments also provide us with various prompts to eat unhealthy foods via the media and advertising, alongside health and nutrition claims and appealing marketing images on food packaging.

At the supermarket, unhealthy foods are often promoted through prominent displays and price discounts.

We’re also exposed to various situations in our everyday lives that can make healthy eating challenging. For example, social occasions or work functions might see large amounts of unhealthy food on offer.

Not everyone is affected in the same way

People differ in the degree to which their food consumption is influenced by their food environments.

This can be due to biological factors (for example, genetics and hormones), psychological characteristics (such as decision making processes or personality traits) and prior experiences with food (for example, learned associations between foods and particular situations or emotions).

People who are more susceptible will likely eat more and eat more unhealthy foods than those who are more immune to the effects of food environments and situations.

Those who are more susceptible may pay greater attention to food cues such as advertisements and cooking smells, and feel a stronger desire to eat when exposed to these cues. Meanwhile, they may pay less attention to internal cues signalling hunger and fullness. These differences are due to a combination of biological and psychological characteristics.

These people might also be more likely to experience physiological reactions to food cues including changes in heart rate and increased salivation.

Two young women sitting on a couch eating chips.
It’s common to eat junk food in front of the TV.
PR Image Factory/Shutterstock

Other situational cues can also prompt eating for some people, depending on what they’ve learned about eating. Some of us tend to eat when we’re tired or in a bad mood, having learned over time eating provides comfort in these situations.

Other people will tend to eat in situations such as in the car during the commute home from work (possibly passing multiple fast-food outlets along the way), or at certain times of day such as after dinner, or when others around them are eating, having learned associations between these situations and eating.

Being in front of a TV or other screen can also prompt people to eat, eat unhealthy foods, or eat more than intended.

Making changes

While it’s not possible to change wider food environments or individual characteristics that affect susceptibility to food cues, you can try to tune into how and when you’re affected by food cues. Then you can restructure some aspects of your personal food environments, which can help if you’re working towards healthier eating goals.

Although both meals and snacks are important for overall diet quality, snacks are often unplanned, which means food environments and situations may have a greater impact on what we snack on.

Foods consumed as snacks are often sugary drinks, confectionery, chips and cakes. However, snacks can also be healthy (for example, fruits, nuts and seeds).

Try removing unhealthy foods, particularly packaged snacks, from the house, or not buying them in the first place. This means temptations are removed, which can be especially helpful for those who may be more susceptible to their food environment.

Planning social events around non-food activities can help reduce social influences on eating. For example, why not catch up with friends for a walk instead of lunch at a fast-food restaurant.

Creating certain rules and habits can reduce cues for eating. For example, not eating at your desk, in the car, or in front of the TV will, over time, lessen the effects of these situations as cues for eating.

You could also try keeping a food diary to identify what moods and emotions trigger eating. Once you’ve identified these triggers, develop a plan to help break these habits. Strategies may include doing another activity you enjoy such as going for a short walk or listening to music – anything that can help manage the mood or emotion where you would have typically reached for the fridge.

Write (and stick to) a grocery list and avoid shopping for food when hungry. Plan and prepare meals and snacks ahead of time so eating decisions are made in advance of situations where you might feel especially hungry or tired or be influenced by your food environment.The Conversation

Georgie Russell, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), Deakin University and Rebecca Leech, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • 10 Mistakes To Sabotage Your Ozempic Progress

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Ozempic has a good reputation for getting reliable results, but there are ways to mess it up:

    It’s not just inject-and-go

    We’ll not keep the 10 ways a secret; they are:

    1. Increasing the dose too quickly: avoid cranking doses up too high too quickly, to prevent severe nausea, appetite suppression, and muscle loss. It’s worth being aware that high doses without proper management can lead to metabolic health disasters.
    2. Pushing through side effects: severe nausea or vomiting means you probably have an unhelpfully high dose; consult your prescribing doctor—it’s easy to feel “more is better; I don’t want to have less!”, but there really is a sweet spot, and if you’re not in it, then adjustments are needed in order to find it.
    3. Eating nutritionally scant food: reducing the quantity of unhealthy food isn’t enough—please prioritize nutrient-rich foods instead. Remember, “it’s not the calories in your food; it’s the food in your calories”.
    4. Consuming fried food and refined carbs: their general metabolic woes aside, fried foods and ultra-refined carbs can exacerbate nausea and other side effects, so it really is best to skip them. The good news is that Ozempic will help overcome those cravings more easily.
    5. Neglecting muscle protection: especially women, especially middle-aged or older, are at higher risk of osteoporosis and should maintain muscle mass (strong muscles and strong bones go together, by necessity). So, eat protein and do resistance training!
    6. Assuming it’s a monotherapy: GLP-1 drugs work best as part of a holistic protocol, including proper nutrition, strength training, and hormone therapy if appropriate.
    7. Not addressing metabolic health first: GLP-1 drugs are less effective in people with poor baseline metabolic health, so there’s a bit of a catch-22 here, but it’s important to be aware of. Fortunately, Ozempic and adopting a healthy lifestyle will each make the other work better.
    8. Neglecting comprehensive treatment plans: in other words, going through the motions of a holistic protocol and then expecting Ozempic to do all the work.
    9. Upping doses to overcome plateaus: plateaus often signal other issues (e.g. lack of protein, no strength training), so do address these before increasing dosage.
    10. Lack of collaboration with doctors: the human body is complex, and what’s going on metabolically is complex too, so there’s a lot a layperson can easily miss. For that matter, there’s a lot that doctors can easily miss too, but more heads are better than one.

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  • New News From The Centenarian Blue Zones

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    From Blue To Green…

    We sometimes write about supercentenarians, which word is usually used in academia to refer to people who are not merely over 100 years of age, but over 110 years. These people can be found in many countries, but places where they have been found to be most populous (as a percentage of the local population) have earned the moniker “Blue Zones”—of which Okinawa and Sardinia are probably the most famous, but there are others too.

    This is in contrast to, for example “Red Zones”, a term often used for areas where a particular disease is endemic, or areas where a disease is “merely” epidemic, but particularly rife at present.

    In any case, back to the Blue Zones, where people live the longest and healthiest—because the latter part is important too! See also:

    • Lifespan: how long we live
    • Healthspan: how long we stay healthy (portmanteau of “healthy lifespan”)

    Most of our readers don’t live in a Blue Zone (in fact, many live in the US, which is a COVID Red Zone, a diabetes Red Zone, and a heart disease Red Zone), but that doesn’t mean we can’t all take tips from the Blue Zones and apply them, for example:

    You may be wondering… How much good will this do me? And, we do have an answer for that:

    When All’s Said And Done, How Likely Are You To Live To 100?

    Now that we’re all caught-up…

    The news from the Blues

    A team of researchers did a big review of observational studies of centenarians and near-centenarians (aged 95+). Why include the near-centenarians, you ask? Well, most of the studies are also longitudinal, and if we’re doing an observational study of the impact of lifestyle factors on a 100-year-old, it’s helpful to know what they’ve been doing recently. Hence nudging the younger-end cutoff a little lower, so as to not begin each study with fresh-faced 100-year-olds whom we know nothing about.

    Looking at thousands of centenarians (and near-centenarians, but also including some supercentenarians, up the age of 118), the researchers got a lot of very valuable data, far more than we have room to go into here (do check out the paper at the bottom of this article, if you have time; it’s a treasure trove of data), but one of the key summary findings was a short list of four factors they found contributed the most to extreme longevity:

    1. A diverse diet with low salt intake: in particular, a wide variety of plant diversity, including protein-rich legumes, though fish featured prominently also. On average they got 57% and 65% of their energy intake from carbohydrates, 12% to 32% from protein, and 27% to 31% from fat. As for salt, they averaged 1.6g of sodium per day, which is well within the WHO’s recommendation of averaging under 2g of sodium per day. As a matter of interest, centenarians in Okinawa itself averaged 1.1g of sodium per day.
    2. Low medication use: obviously there may be a degree of non-causal association here, i.e. the same people who just happened to be healthier and therefore lived longer, correspondingly took fewer medications—they took fewer medications because they were healthier; they weren’t necessarily healthier because they took fewer medications. That said, overmedication can be a big problem, especially in places with a profit motive like the US, and can increase the risk of harmful drug interactions, and side effects that then need more medications to treat the side effects, as well as direct iatrogenic damage (i.e. this drug treats your condition, but as the cost of harming you in some other way). Naturally, sometimes we really do need meds, but it’s a good reminder to do a meds review with one’s doctor once in a while, and see if everything’s still of benefit.
    3. Getting good sleep: not shocking, and this one’s not exactly news. But what may be shocking is that 68% of centenarians reported consistently getting enough good-quality sleep. To put that into perspective, only 35% of 10almonds readers reported regularly getting sleep in the 7–9 hours range.
    4. Rural living environment: more than 75% of the centenarians and near-centenarians lived in rural areas. This is not usually something touted as a Blue Zones thing on lists of Blue zones things, but this review strongly highlighted it as very relevant. In the category of things that are more obvious once it’s pointed out, though, this isn’t necessarily such a difference between “country folk” and “city folk”, so much as the ability to regularly be in green spaces has well-established health benefits physically, mentally, and both combined (such as: neurologically).

    See: The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes

    And showing that yes, even parks in cities make a significant difference:

    The association of green space, tree canopy and parks with life expectancy in neighborhoods of Los Angeles

    Want to know more?

    You can read the study in full here:

    A systematic review of diet and medication use among centenarians and near-centenarians worldwide

    Take care!

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  • Dentists Debunk 15 Teeth Myths

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Dentists Dr. John Yoo and Dr. Jason Lin leave no gaps in the truth:

    The tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth

    Not only is there no tooth fairy (we are shocked), but also…

    1. “Baby teeth aren’t important.”
      False! Baby teeth act as space holders for permanent teeth, affect speech development, and influence a child’s psychological well-being.
    2. “Acidic fruits will whiten your smile.”
      False! In any practical sense, anyway: acidic fruits may temporarily make teeth appear whiter by dispersing stains but cause enamel erosion and weaken teeth over time.
    3. “Fillings last forever.”
      False! Fillings can wear down, fail, or develop cavities underneath if oral hygiene isn’t maintained, requiring replacement over time.
    4. “Cavities are irreversible.”
      False! Cavities in the enamel can be reversed with fluoride and good oral hygiene, but cavities that reach the dentin are typically irreversible.
    5. “Braces are just for crooked teeth.”
      False! Braces also correct functional issues like overbites, underbites, crossbites, and prevent future complications like tooth impaction.
    6. “A knocked-out tooth is gone for good.”
      False! A knocked-out tooth can be reimplanted if done quickly (ideally within an hour); storing it in whole milk or saliva helps preserve it.
    7. “Diet sodas won’t give you cavities.”
      False! Diet sodas can still cause cavities due to their acidic pH, which erodes enamel, even without sugar.
    8. “Dental cleanings aren’t necessary.”
      False! Dental cleanings help remove plaque and tartar that regular brushing can’t, and allow for regular oral health checkups.
    9. “Retainers aren’t for life.”
      False! To maintain teeth alignment after braces, retainers should be worn long-term as teeth can shift even years later.
    10. “You should floss before brushing.”
      False! The order doesn’t matter, but do floss regularly.
    11. “Everyone has wisdom teeth.”
      False! Not everyone is born with wisdom teeth; they are the most commonly missing teeth, and not everyone needs them removed.
    12. “Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda are good toothpaste replacements.”
      False! While they are common components in toothpaste, they lack fluoride, which is essential for remineralizing and protecting enamel.
    13. “You’re too old to get braces.”
      False! There’s no age limit for braces or aligners; adults often seek them for both aesthetic and functional reasons.
    14. “Teeth that have had root canals can’t feel.”
      False! Teeth with root canals can’t feel pain from nerves, but you can still sense pressure due to surrounding ligaments.
    15. “You’ll inevitably lose all your teeth when you’re old.”
      False! Good oral hygiene and regular dental care can preserve natural teeth into old age, though genetics also play a role.

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    ‍ How to not just #EmbraceEquity, but actually grow it, this International Women’s Day!

    It’s International Women’s Day, and there’s a lot going on beyond the hashtagging! So, what’s happening, and how could you get involved in more than a “token” way in your workplace, business, or general life?

    Well, that depends on your own environment and circumstances, but for example…

    A feminist policy for productivity in the food sector?

    We tend to think that in this modern world, we all have equal standing when it comes to productivity, food, and health. And yet…

    ❝If women do 70 per cent of the work in agriculture worldwide, but the land is mainly owned by men, then we don’t have equity yet. If in Germany, only one-tenth of female farmers manage the farm on which they work on, while they also manage the household, then there is no equity yet❞

    ~ Lea Leimann, Germany

    What to do about it, though? It turns out there’s a worldwide organization dedicated to fixing this! It’s called Slow Food.

    Their mission is to make food…

    • GOOD: quality, flavorsome and healthy food
    • CLEAN: production that does not harm the environment
    • FAIR: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers

    …and yes, that explicitly includes feminism-attentive food policy:

    Read all about it: Slow Food women forge change in the food system

    Do you work in the food system?

    If so, you can have an impact. Your knee-jerk reaction might be “I don’t”, but there are a LOT of steps from farm-to-table, so, are you sure?

    Story time: me, I’m a writer (you’d never have guessed, right?) and wouldn’t immediately think of myself as working “in the food system”.

    But! Not long back I (a woman) was contracted by a marketing agent (a woman) to write marketing materials for a small business (owned by a woman) selling pickles and chutneys across the Australian market, based on the recipes she learned from her mother, in India. The result?

    I made an impact in the food chain the other side of the planet from me, without leaving my desk.

    Furthermore, the way I went about my work empowered—at the very least—myself and the end client (the lady making and selling the pickles and chutneys).

    Sometimes we can’t change the world by ourselves… but we don’t have to.

    If we all just nudge things in the right direction, we’ll end up with a healthier, better-fed, more productive system for all!

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  • What to Eat When – by Drs. Michael Roizen and Michael Crupain

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Here at 10almonds, we cover a lot of the “what to eat”, but tend to only sometimes touch on the “when”—and indeed, this is a reflection of a popular focus. But what if we were to pay a little more attention to that “when”; what would it get us?

    According to Drs. Roizen and Crupain… Quite a bit!

    In this work, they take into account the various factors affecting the benefit (or harm!) of what we eat when:

    • in the context of our circadian rhythm
    • in the context of our insulin responses
    • in the context of intermittent fasting

    The style throughout is very focused on practical actionable advice. For example, amongst other lifestyle-adjustment suggestions, the authors make the case for front-loading various kinds of food earlier in the day, and eating more attentively and mindfully when we do eat.

    They also offer a lot of “quick tips” of the kind we love here at 10almonds! Ranging from “how about this breakfast idea” to “roasting chickpeas like this makes a great snack” to “this dessert is three healthy foods disguised as a sundae”

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    Click here to get “What To Eat When” from Amazon today!

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  • With all this bird flu around, how safe are eggs, chicken or milk?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Enzo Palombo, Swinburne University of Technology

    Recent outbreaks of bird flu – in US dairy herds, poultry farms in Australia and elsewhere, and isolated cases in humans – have raised the issue of food safety.

    So can the virus transfer from infected farm animals to contaminate milk, meat or eggs? How likely is this?

    And what do we need to think about to minimise our risk when shopping for or preparing food?

    AS Foodstudio/Shutterstock

    How safe is milk?

    Bird flu (or avian influenza) is a bird disease caused by specific types of influenza virus. But the virus can also infect cows. In the US, for instance, to date more than 80 dairy herds in at least nine states have been infected with the H5N1 version of the virus.

    Investigations are under way to confirm how this happened. But we do know infected birds can shed the virus in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces. So bird flu can potentially contaminate animal-derived food products during processing and manufacturing.

    Indeed, fragments of bird flu genetic material (RNA) were found in cow’s milk from the dairy herds associated with infected US farmers.

    However, the spread of bird flu among cattle, and possibly to humans, is likely to have been caused through contact with contaminated milking equipment, not the milk itself.

    The test used to detect the virus in milk – which uses similar PCR technology to lab-based COVID tests – is also highly sensitive. This means it can detect very low levels of the bird flu RNA. But the test does not distinguish between live or inactivated virus, just that the RNA is present. So from this test alone, we cannot tell if the virus found in milk is infectious (and capable of infecting humans).

    Rows of milk bottles in supermarket fridge
    It’s best to stick with pasteurised milk. Amnixia/Shutterstock

    Does that mean milk is safe to drink and won’t transmit bird flu? Yes and no.

    In Australia, where bird flu has not been reported in dairy cattle, the answer is yes. It is safe to drink milk and milk products made from Australian milk.

    In the US, the answer depends on whether the milk is pasteurised. We know pasteurisation is a common and reliable method of destroying concerning microbes, including influenza virus. Like most viruses, influenza virus (including bird flu virus) is inactivated by heat.

    Although there is little direct research on whether pasteurisation inactivates H5N1 in milk, we can extrapolate from what we know about heat inactivation of H5N1 in chicken and eggs.

    So we can be confident there is no risk of bird flu transmission via pasteurised milk or milk products.

    However, it’s another matter for unpasteurised or “raw” US milk or milk products. A recent study showed mice fed raw milk contaminated with bird flu developed signs of illness. So to be on the safe side, it would be advisable to avoid raw milk products.

    How about chicken?

    Bird flu has caused sporadic outbreaks in wild birds and domestic poultry worldwide, including in Australia. In recent weeks, there have been three reported outbreaks in Victorian poultry farms (two with H7N3 bird flu, one with H7N9). There has been one reported outbreak in Western Australia (H9N2).

    The strains of bird flu identified in the Victorian and Western Australia outbreaks can cause human infection, although these are rare and typically result from close contact with infected live birds or contaminated environments.

    Therefore, the chance of bird flu transmission in chicken meat is remote.

    Nonetheless, it is timely to remind people to handle chicken meat with caution as many dangerous pathogens, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, can be found on chicken carcasses.

    Always handle chicken meat carefully when shopping, transporting it home and storing it in the kitchen. For instance, make sure no meat juices cross-contaminate other items, consider using a cool bag when transporting meat, and refrigerate or freeze the meat within two hours.

    Avoid washing your chicken before cooking to prevent the spread of disease-causing microbes around the kitchen.

    Finally, cook chicken thoroughly as viruses (including bird flu) cannot survive cooking temperatures.

    Are eggs safe?

    The recent Australian outbreaks have occurred in egg-laying or mixed poultry flocks, so concerns have been raised about bird flu transmission via contaminated chicken eggs.

    Can flu viruses contaminate chicken eggs and potentially spread bird flu? It appears so. A report from 2007 said it was feasible for influenza viruses to enter through the eggshell. This is because influenza virus particles are smaller (100 nanometres) than the pores in eggshells (at least 200 nm).

    So viruses could enter eggs and be protected from cleaning procedures designed to remove microbes from the egg surface.

    Therefore, like the advice about milk and meat, cooking eggs is best.

    The US Food and Drug Administration recommends cooking poultry, eggs and other animal products to the proper temperature and preventing cross-contamination between raw and cooked food.

    In a nutshell

    If you consume pasteurised milk products and thoroughly cook your chicken and eggs, there is nothing to worry about as bird flu is inactivated by heat.

    The real fear is that the virus will evolve into highly pathogenic versions that can be transmitted from human to human.

    That scenario is much more frightening than any potential spread though food.

    Enzo Palombo, Professor of Microbiology, Swinburne University of Technology

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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