Words on Wellness

Guest Column
By: 
Rachel Wall
Nutrition & Health Specialist, ISU Extension & Outreach

Cardio or Resistance – Which is Best to Lose Weight?

     For decades, it was believed that aerobic (or cardio) exercise, such as walking or running, was the best exercise for weight loss. Then strength (or resistance) training gained more favor. Recently, Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) conducted the largest study of its kind to compare the two.

     Researchers tracked 119 overweight and previously sedentary volunteers for eight months while they performed resistance training, aerobic exercise, or a combination of the two. The clear winner was aerobic exercise.

     The cardio-only group shed more than 3.5 pounds of fat while the resistance-only group lost no weight even though they actually exercised 47 more minutes each week than the aerobics group. The cardio-plus-resistance group improved their body composition best but they also spent twice as much time in the gym.

     The conclusion? Cardio burns more calories, so it works best for reducing fat mass and body mass. As you age and lose muscle mass, strength training is important for maintaining lean body mass, strength, and function. Being fit is important for daily living no matter what your size.

Make Tasty, Affordable Holiday Meals

     Celebrate holidays with healthful and delicious menus this summer. You can find recipes to make low-cost and tasty holidays all year round. Download a Recipe Finder Cookbook for Father’s Day or Fourth of July at snaped.fns.usda.gov/recipes. Select the “healthy, thrifty holiday menus” and print your own holiday cookbook of recipes with nutrient information included.

     Perhaps you want ideas for more than just one meal? Go to ChooseMyPlate at choosemyplate.gov/budget-sample-two-week-menus and print sample menus for two weeks, along with recipes, a grocery-shopping list for each week, and a Pantry Staples List.

How Safe are the Recipes in Your Cookbooks?

     A recent study found that best-selling cookbooks offer readers little useful advice about reducing food-safety risks, and that much of the advice they do provide is inaccurate and not based on sound science.

     According to Ben Chapman, associate professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University, “cookbooks tell people how to cook, so we wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting foodborne illness.”

     Researchers evaluated nearly 1,500 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best-sellers list for food and diet books. All of the recipes included handling raw animal ingredients: meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs.

     They looked at three things: (1) Does the recipe say to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature? (2) If so, has it been shown to be safe (e.g., cooking chicken to 165°F)? (3) Does the recipe spread food-safety myths—such as cooking poultry until juices run clear—that are unreliable for determining if a dish is safe?

     Only 8 percent of those reviewed mentioned cooking the dish to a specific temperature, and some were not high enough to reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Also, 99.7 percent of recipes gave readers subjective indicators to determine when a dish was done. None of those indicators were reliable ways to tell if a dish was cooked to a safe temperature. That’s important because recommended temperatures are based on extensive research, targeting the most likely pathogens found in each food.

     Time to cook was the most common indicator in recipes. Time alone is unreliable, due to factors that can affect how long it takes to cook something such as the size of the dish and how cold it was before baking. Other common indicators used included references to color or texture of the meat and vague language such as “cook until done.”

     To determine safe minimum cooking temperatures, visit www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html.

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