Health

Nutrition Summit for Women: Eat Your Way to Health

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 31, 2002 / 8:41 AM EST / CBS

Our friends at Self magazine convened a summit of experts in New York yesterday on the subject of nutrition for women. Cindi Leive, the editor in chief of Self, is here to talk to us about it.

Vegetable, Fruits, Whole Grains

The one big message for women to take home from this conference is to eat lots of fruits and vegetables and lots of whole grains. The biggest myth is, "Avoid fat": People who do invariably gain weight. Fat make you feel full, so if you have no fat in your diet you want to eat all the time. When people eat low-fat or no-fat foods, they usually turn to sugar, which is high in calories. The best idea is to concentrate on what you should be eating so that you'll get a well-balanced diet. If you avoid foods you may end up replacing them with empty calories like sugar.

Big Portions

For most of us, eating a healthy diet is difficult. We are surrounded by fast food, and even in school cafeterias a well-balanced diet is not necessarily easy to come by. Trying to eat healthily is like trying to run up the down escalator. But perhaps the biggest obstacle is portion size. In this country, compared to others, we eat much bigger portions of just about everything. Even if European countries eat fatty foods, they eat less of them, so people are less obese.

The panel felt that fad diets--the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Diet and the Zone--are hard to stick. People tend to feel bad and lose energy because these diets can deprive your body of nutrients. But they can teach good portion control, for instance. Americans tend to eat more carbohydrates in big portions than anything else, so if you can wean yourself off those kinds of habits, you'll be in better shape in the long run.

When it comes to breast cancer, a woman can reduce her chances by changing her eating habits. When it comes to nutritional supplements, most of the experts agreed that a woman should take a daily multivitamin supplement. The typical American would have to triple the amount of fruits and vegetables to get the recommended daily allowance, and that's pretty unlikely. Folic acid supplements for women are recommended to prevent birth defects. But don't overdo supplements. Extremely high doses of certain vitamins can put a woman's health at risk rather than help. And make sure you take vitamins from a reputable company so you know exactly how much you're getting of which vitamins.

The Nutrition Summit

The summit was held at the Conde Nast headquarters in Times Square. The keynote speaker for the event was Andrew Weil, MD, director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. The panelists included

Eileen Kennedy, SSc, former deputy under secretary, United States Department of Agriculture.
Michael Jacobson, PhD, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Cheryl Rock, PhD, RD, associate professo in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and the Cancer Prevention and Control Program, University of California, San Diego.
Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH, chairman of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health.

The panel discussed the biggest enemies in America's losing battle with obesity, the low carbohydrate diet fad, conflicting messages about what to eat to avoid ailments such as breast and colon cancer, and the widespread use of nutritional supplements.