By Julia Griggs Havey
EDITOR'S NOTE:
You've seen Julia on
the QVC home shopping network and the Wayne Brady Show,
in USA Today, The National Enquirer, Glamour, Bride's
and more! She's been called "America's weight-loss Cinderella. Here's
her article written for eDiets
With the new year, eDiets offers two new
programs. Mayo Clinic Plan
is the first weight-loss program designed and endorsed by the acclaimed
Mayo Clinic. If convenience is important to you, eDiets now offers FreshCuisine -- this new service
will deliver prepared foods on your meal plan directly to your door.
It's that month -- the month when virtually every
person starts a diet.
It can be very confusing trying to figure out what is good to eat, bad
to eat or how much of it to have. eDiets.com certainly makes it simple
for us, and it the best place to start when sorting through the sea of
confusing messages.
On other place that many people start a
weight-loss journey is at the
local bookstore. This time of year there are many on the market, and
the advice in them varies and can be confusing was well. I recently met
a man who makes it all quite easy to understand, Dr. Roy Vartabedian.
He was with the Cooper Clinic for many years and came up with a way of
counting our food intake in the most logical way that I have ever seen
-- it makes it easy to understand the nutritional values of the foods
we eat.
I interviewed Dr. Vartabedian for this eDiets exclusive. After
reading this, I think you will agree with me that it is the first
point-counting system that makes sense. It seems like today, when we
have more information than ever before, people are more confused about
nutrition than ever. Why? Each day you hear something new, and it seems
to contradict what you heard before. How can the average person sort it
all out?
In the past it was easy, we counted calories to
figure out if a food
was "good" or "bad." One number for each food, the lower the better.
But what's happened today? We're more sophisticated in our knowledge of
nutrition -- we know that calories aren't everything. We know it's what
goes with those
calories as well, like cholesterol, fats, sodium, fiber, sugar,
caffeine, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, proteins, carbohydrates
and now phytochemicals. Dr. Roy explained that his patients felt like
they needed to be "walking computers" to sort it all out!
He came to believe the average person doesn't want
to be a scientist
when it comes to figuring out what to eat each day-it just has to be
simpler than that. So about 25 years ago, he began working on a system
to help the average person figure out what were the best foods to eat.
His goal was to boil down all of the factors in foods-positive and
negative-into one number that tells you all you need to know about a
food. He wanted it to be a positive number, so you try to get more, not
less, and avoid the "deprivation mentality."
The system he developed is called "Nutripoints"
and it's based on a
computerized analysis of every food for 26 positive and negative
factors, to give you one number -- the Nutripoint score -- which tells
you the overall nutritional value of the food. The higher the number,
the better the food.
The Nutripoint system was developed through 10
years of research with
people who had serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes,
hypertension, hypercholesterolemia (high blood fats), and obesity. He
realizezed that they needed a simpler way of juggling all of the
variables of nutrition when they got back home after visiting the
lifestyle change program at the Cooper Clinic Residential Wellness
Program in Dallas, where he was director.
What they found is that it's pretty clear which
foods are really bad
for us and which are really good -- we seem to instinctively know those
items. What was it that George Bush Sr. didn't like? Broccoli -- we
know that's good for us. What was it he did like? Fried pork rinds --
we know that's bad for us!
But it's the gray area, the foods that have some
good characteristics
and some bad ones that make up most of our daily eating; these are the
ones that give us the most trouble.
Up until recently, there was been no way to simply
compare one food to
another in terms of it's overall nutritional value. Nutripoints is a
revolutionary nutritional system that solves this problem by
eliminating counting calories, worrying over fats, sugar and sodium,
calculating cholesterol, and figuring out the U.S. Recommended Daily
Allowances. It does all this and more with a point system, providing
one number for each food that can help you maintain a healthy diet.
Unlike calorie, cholesterol or fat-gram counting,
which are one
dimensional, the Nutripoint system is multidimensional and evaluates 26
nutritional components, scoring each food with a single number that
relates to how nutritionally complete the food is. The point score
takes into account 18 positive nutrients, or essentials, and weighs
them against 8 negative qualities, or excessives.
When he applied the Nutripoint analysis to foods,
there were some big
surprises! For instance, would you have guessed that one quarter of a
cantaloupe melon scores 29 Nutripoints while an apple gets only 4.5?
The simple explanation is that an apple is not packed with high
nutrition, it's a good food, but the melon has 50 times more vitamin A,
10 times more vitamin C, and more of virtually every other significant
nutrient than the apple. Maybe it should be a melon a day.
Let's look at some other Nutripoint comparisons.
Two cups of spinach
rate 75, but an equal amount of iceberg lettuce scores only 18 points!
Two slices of whole-wheat bread outscore white bread by a 6 to 2.5
margin, and cooked
broccoli chalks up 38.5 points to 8.5 in a baked potato.
Once you have been introduced to the Nutripoint
concept it becomes sort
of a numbers game, and the system even includes negative Nutripoint
scores for those items that contain more excessive qualities than
essentials, such as a
McDonalds' Big Mac burger at minus 2.
Most processing significantly alters the
Nutripoint values of many
foods, so one that most people think is a healthful item may not be so
healthy after it has been processed. As the food is processed and
adulterated, salt, fat and preservatives are added and the original
fiber, vitamin, and mineral content are reduced, thereby reducing the
Nutripoints.
In his Nutripoints Program For Optimal Nutrition,
I have rated more
than 3,600 foods; 1,500 basic foods like apples and oranges, 1,500
brand-name foods such as cereals, yogurts, convenience frozen items and
soups and 600 fast
foods like that at McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy's. Oversimplified,
the Nutripoint system works as follows: foods with the highest scores
are the most nutritious, and you should eat the highest-rated foods
from each of the
six food groups to score a total of at least 100 Nutripoints per day.
I think Nutripoints will forever change the way
you look at food and
nutrition and will help you make healthy substitutions in your daily
diet. It's practical, simple and workable. Most people routinely eat
only 20 to 30 different foods, and it won't take long to learn which
ones are best and change to others that have higher nutritional values.
Dr. Roy quotes Ern Baxter, and I love this quote
and may just have to
start using it, too: "If your lifestyle does not control your body,
eventually your body will control your lifestyle.the choice is yours!"
You can learn more about Dr. Vartabedian in his
book at Amazon.com! Understanding what foods are better and why just
got a whole lot easier!
Looking for more inspiration? Join eDiets
and visit Julia’s support group (Take It Off With Julia) for
interactive support! Support from other like-minded folks helps you
keep a positive attitude and helps keep you on the road to success!
You've seen Julia on the QVC home shopping
network and the Wayne Brady Show, in USA Today, The
National Enquirer, Glamour, Bride's
and more! She's been called "America's weight-loss Cinderella, someone
with the passion of Tony Robbins, enthusiasm of Richard Simmons and the
humor of Jerry Seinfeld." To get your copy of Julia's blockbuster
motivational book, Awaken the Diet Within, From Overweight to
Looking Great -- If I Can Do It, So Can You! click here. Email
Julia with your comments at julia@juliahavey.com. You can also visit
her website at www.JuliaHavey.com.
