Calorie Counting at Chain Restaurants

Future visits to The Cheesecake Factory (and other major restaurants) may be quite a difference experience soon. Inside the new health reform legislation is language that will require calorie labeling on (chain) restaurant menus, menu boards, vending machines, and drive-through displays. The legislation applies to those chains with twenty or more outlets, and requires them to provide additional nutrition information upon request.

Some states have already passed similar legislation, but this new federal standard will supersede the varied local and state requirements. Interestingly enough, the National Restaurant Association dropped its longstanding objection to menu labeling last year and supported the recently passed legislation by Congress.

Margo G. Wootan, the director of nutritional policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, believes that this new piece of legislation is a huge victory for consumers and “one of dozens of things we will need to do to reduce rate of obesity and diet-related disease in this country. With the health reform legislation passed, Congress is giving Americans easy access to the most critical piece of nutritional information they need when eating out.”

I envision myself pouring over the published calories and having my menu decision influenced by this information. Do you think it will make a difference to you? Is ignorance really bliss? Or will this new law make for some new discoveries?

Either way, it will be quite interesting to see if this action helps transform portion size, offerings, and the American diet.

Hope Really Does Float!

My husband’s Mom is truly the most optimistic person I’ve ever known. At 93, she has been unable to get out of bed due to her very frail body, but that doesn’t seem to stop her. I phone her often and always ask her how she is. She responds with the same answer in an unusually upbeat tone, “I’m still here!” she rings out. At her recent birthday party, many of us agreed that it’s been her keen sense of optimism that has kept her alive. One friend remembered the phone call she shared with my mother in law a few years ago, immediately after she had lost her home in a fire. “Well,” said my mother in law “don’t you worry. Now you can go ahead and build the home you’ve always wanted!”

I, on the other hand, question whether or not I’m that optimistic. It’s not as though I’m pessimistic, but I’ve grown to be a bit cynical. On the other hand, I really seem to be hopeful. Is that the same thing as being optimistic? Not at all, according to Vaclav Havel. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Much to my surprise, it turns out that the sheer quality of having hope is a very potent weapon. According to Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, “hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it.” Hope is different from optimism, which is the expectancy that good things will happen. Instead, hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.

Cheavens and her colleagues tested a hope therapy treatment by sampling a number of people recruited through flyers and newspaper ads. The ads asked the participants to attend weekly group meetings designed to increase the participants’ abilities to reach goals. Specifically, the researchers looked for people who were not diagnosed with mental illness or depression, but had a level of dissatisfaction with their lives. In the study, half the participants took part in group sessions led by trained leaders. Here they were taught hope-related skills, like identifying goals and ways to achieve them, along with how to motivate themselves to do so. The results, published in the journal Social Indicators Research, illustrated that the participants in the hope therapy had fewer depressive symptoms compared to the control group that didn’t participate.

“We’re finding that people can learn to be more hopeful. We have been figuring out what hopeful people are doing right, and taking those lessons and developing therapies and interventions for people who are not doing as well. And the great news is that it seems to work. We can teach people how to be more hopeful.”

The methodology used focused on developing a blueprint for goals, and using positive motivators to keep the goals in check. (Positive motivators can be anything from self-help talk with yourself, a friend or a source.) Not a bad piece of information to share, especially to folks like me who don’t always have the gut feeling that the glass is half full. With hope and a road map to get there, I plan on crafting a way to maintain a hopeful attitude which keeps my level of motivation in full gear.

Cancer, cancer everywhere?

A friend of mine just died of cancer last week. He was fifty.

I suppose you get to a certain age, and the disease seems to crawl out from around the corners all around you. You hear the statistics – one out of two men and one out of three women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetimes.  Yet, then I read that “cancer death rates have steadily declined in the U.S. over the past fifteen years, and they are expected to do so again” according to the American Cancer Society. Hard to believe that from the period of 1990 – 2005, cancer death rates decreased by 19.2 percent in men. Women’s rates from roughly the same time period (1991 – 2005) death rates decreased by 11.4%. Much of the decline is due to increased screening (leading to an earlier diagnosis) and then there are improved treatments.

It may be of some comfort to know that about a third of the expected cancer deaths will be linked to behavior-related factors, such as obesity, poor nutrition, and lack of physical activity. And then there is the issue of indoor tanning and overexposure to the sun. There also may be more to the element of nutrition, antioxidants, and prevention. (See www.anticancer.com for more information.)

On the other hand,  that is only one third of the story. What about the other two thirds?  My friend who just past away was one of those guys that drank red wine occasionally, ate well, had a balanced and very happy life, and was really in shape. Why him? There was no cancer in his family, and certainly he lead a very healthy lifestyle. Truth is, his oncologist said that some of us will get cancer just because of “dumb luck”.  And that is what makes this (and many other diseases) very scary.

To be optimistic, there is a world of positive forward movement with our battle against cancer. Three cancer vaccines (for prostate cancer, melanoma and lymphoma)have achieved positive results in Phase 3 clinical trials. These vaccines wouldn’t prevent the disease, but they may help people who are already fighting it. Additionally, we currently have two cancer vaccines that have FDA approval and both are strictly preventive as they target viruses that can lead to cancer. One is the vaccination that fights hepatitits B, the other, a vaccine for HPV, which is recommended for adolescent girls. The progress we’ve made is astounding, and the fight against cancer is finally taking center stage.

If you’re feeling helpless and wonder what you can personally do to help the cause, join the grassroots movement of CPS-3, the Cancer Prevention Study-3. The American Cancer is looking for men and women between the ages of 30 and 65  who have no personal history of cancer to join a historic research study. The ultimate goal is to enroll 500,000 adults from various racial/ethnic backgrounds from across the U.S. According to their website, “The purpose of CPS-3 is to better understand the lifestyle, behavioral, environmental and genetic factors that cause or prevent cancer and to ultimately eliminate cancer as a major health problem for this and future generations.” Contact your local Relay for Life to see if you can get on-board.

And in the meantime, follow the lifestyle advice given by physicans and be thankful that there is an active research community fighting on the behalf of all of us.

Pamela Rae, Trapeze Artist

Okay, I admit it. I don’t know a thing about trapeze. My closest reference is the familiar song…”He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease…The daring young man on the flying trapeze.” Certainly Pamela Rae doesn’t strike me as a typical trapeze artist. For one thing, she isn’t a man (yeah, that’s obvious) and she  clearly isn’t young. (Age is relative, though, isn’t it?) But Pamela Rae possesses a trait that so many people who take part in this graceful sport must have, and that is the trait of risk.

It’s funny how we seem to take more risks when we’re younger. We push ourselves, try new things, are more experiential, and then what happens? Do we fall into the rut of daily routine, or do we not create the time or energy to try new things? Do our brains develop and tell us that risk is a bad thing, or does the element of risk conjure up failures in life? Is risk suited to personality, or dopamine levels in the brain? Clearly, I don’t have the answers, but as the sport of trapeze is born from trust and risk, and I wonder  how its devotees trust enough to toss their entire body into the air and assume the right thing will happen on the other side.

Does anybody recall the Sex and the City episode titled “The Catch” (2003) featuring Sarah Jessica Parker thrusting herself into the air for the first time? From the few articles I’ve read, this episode helped catapulted the sport into the mainstream. There are now more than fifty trapeze schools and camps around the country. (www.HollywoodAerialArts.com, www.flyingtrapeze.com, www.trapezehigh.com just to name a few!)

The benefit of the sport includes the fact that the once on the trapeze, you work all of your muscles in one swing. You gain enough strength to be able to hold the entire weight of your body from your hands or knees. Coming from someone who has a very tough time executing even one  pull up, the idea of being fit enough to accomplish this is enticing and intimidating all at the same time. No doubt trapeze is a sport of training (training some more), preparing and doing.

Pamela Rae inspires me to put risk back into my life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that risk will translate in a physical environment, it may be on a personal level, be it personal relationships, a new business venture, or simply trying something new. All I know that my life has been  getting a wee bit too comfortable, and Pamela Rae makes me want to do more.