Food myths
health advice,healthy eating,healthy living
Woman eating a strawberry tart
Sugar makes your kids hyperactive and eating at night makes you fat: - well-founded truths or just old wives\' tales?
When it comes to food and drink, just what kind of facts have we digested? Have we been fed a diet of common sense or one of pure fiction?
Drs Aaron Carroll and Rachel Vreeman, of the Indiana University School of Medicine in the US, have helped us debunk some of the most commonly held misconceptions about food, drink and health.
Here are their top foodie findings...
By Jo Carlowe
Sugar makes children hyperactive
health advice,healthy eating,fun for children
Little girl eating biscuits
There have been at least 12 studies that investigate different levels of sugar in children\'s diets and the way in which they behave. Of all these studies not one found that children with a diet full of sugar behaved differently from those who had a sugar-free diet.
That said, there is plenty of proof to show that sugar is linked to tooth decay and increased weight gain - so a good reason to keep your kids\' diet low in sugar all the same.
Don\'t swallow your gum!
health advice,healthy eating,snack ideas
Woman playing with gum
So your mum told you not to and your friends said it would stay in your tummy for seven years but what really happened to that chewing gum that you accidentally gulped down?
"Gum," say Drs Carroll and Vreeman, is ‘pretty indigestible stuff\'. It is made of gum base - which is a mixture of resins, emulsifiers, elastomers, fats and waxes, and of sweeteners, colouring and flavouring - yuk! The sugars and sweeteners might get absorbed but your stomach juices cannot break up the other stuff. Fortunately, though your body has another way of dealing with waste - it simply moves it through the intestines and out the other end. You\'ve guessed it - your gum will reappear one or two days later in the most indigestible form imaginable.
Milk produces phlegm
health advice,healthy eating,milk
Woman drinking milk
In the 12th century the physician Moses Maimonides recommended removing dairy products from the diet to help breathing or congestion problems. Chinese medicine similarly attributes increased mucus production to eating too many dairy products.
One scientific study has shown that drinking milk increases the amount of saliva we produce but then again so does water. Other studies have found no difference in the weight of the nasal secretions of people with colds who drank milk as against those who drunk no milk - so there appears to be nothing special about milk when it comes to saliva production
In conclusion our expert doctors say the chemicals that make your saliva thicker are not increased by milk consumption.
Eating at night makes you fat
weight loss tips,health advice,healthy eating
Woman eating at the fridge
A Swedish study comparing obese and non-obese women found that the obese women ate more meals and more of their meals were eaten in the afternoon, evening or night. Proof perhaps that you get fatter because you have less time to burn off those calories before you go to sleep, or because your metabolism slows down in the evening? Well, actually no.
"The key problem...was that these obese women were eating more meals (and more calories) - the issue wasn\'t the time of day that they ate," says Drs Carroll and Vreeman.
By contrast the idea that skipping breakfast is linked to weight gain appears to be valid. It seems those who eat breakfast do a better job of evenly distributing how much they eat during the rest of the day.
"When you eat three regular meals, you are less likely to overeat at any one particular meal. The key to weight loss is very simple: eat fewer calories than your body burns. As long as you do that, it doesn\'t matter what time of day you eat - you\'ll lose weight."
The five-second rule
health advice,healthy eating,healthy living
Toast dropped on the floor
The five-second rule - dropped food is safe to eat if you pick it up within five seconds - is terribly convenient and reassuring - but unfortunately a group of scientists who specialise in food science and microbiology have put it to the test - and the results are depressing.
They found that bacterium such as Salmonella typhimurium (which causes diarrhoea and vomiting) can survive for weeks on carpet, wood and tiles and can contaminate food within a few seconds of contact.
For the truth about more food myths buy: ‘Don\'t Swallow Your Gum - and other medical myths debunked\' by Dr Aaron Carroll and Dr Rachel Vreeman (Penguin, £7.99)
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