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The Stroke Risk of Vegetarians | NutritionFacts.org

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The first study in history on the incidence of stroke in vegetarians and vegans suggests they may be at higher risk.

“When ranked in order of importance, among the interventions available to prevent stroke, the three most important are probably diet, smoking cessation, and blood pressure control.” Most of us these days are doing pretty good about not smoking, but less than half of us exercise enough. And, according to the American Heart Association, only 1 in 1,000 Americans is eating a healthy diet and less than 1 in 10 is even eating a moderately healthy diet, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:41 in my video Do Vegetarians Really Have Higher Stroke Risk?. Why does it matter? It matters because “diet is an important part of stroke prevention. Reducing sodium intake, avoiding egg yolks, limiting the intake of animal flesh (particularly red meat), and increasing the intake of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and lentils….Like the sugar industry, the meat and egg industries spend hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, unfortunately with great success.”

The paper goes on to say, “Box 1 provides links to information about the issue.” I was excited to click on the hyperlink for “Box 1” and was so honored to see four links to my videos on egg industry propaganda, as you can see below and at 1:08 in my video.

The strongest evidence for stroke protection lies in increasing fruit and vegetable intake, with more uncertainty regarding “the role of whole grains, animal products, and dietary patterns,” such as vegetarian diets. One would expect meat-free diets would do great. Meta-analyses have found that vegetarian diets lower cholesterol and blood pressure, as well as enhance weight loss and blood sugar control, and vegan diets may work even better. All the key biomarkers are going in the right direction. Given this, you may be surprised to learn that there hadn’t been any studies on the incidence of stroke in vegetarians and vegans until now. And if you think that is surprising, wait until you hear the results.

“Risks of Ischaemic Heart Disease and Stroke in Meat Eaters, Fish Eaters, and Vegetarians Over 18 Years of Follow-Up: Results from the Prospective EPIC-Oxford Study”: There was less heart disease among vegetarians (by which the researchers meant vegetarians and vegans combined). No surprise. Been there, done that. But there was more stroke, as you can see below, and at 2:14 in my video.

An understandable knee-jerk reaction might be: Wait a second, who did this study? Was there a conflict of interest? This is EPIC-Oxford, world-class researchers whose conflicts of interest may be more likely to read: “I am a member of the Vegan Society.”

What about overadjustment? When the numbers over ten years were crunched, the researchers found 15 strokes for every 1,000 meat eaters, compared to only 9 strokes for every 1,000 vegetarians and vegans, as you can see below and at 2:41 in my video. In that case, how can they say there were more strokes in the vegetarians? This was after adjusting for a variety of factors. The vegetarians were less likely to smoke, for example, so you’d want to cancel that out by adjusting for smoking to effectively compare the stroke risk of nonsmoking vegetarians to nonsmoking meat eaters. If you want to know how a vegetarian diet itself affects stroke rates, you want to cancel out these non-diet-related factors. Sometimes, though, you can overadjust.

The sugar industry does this all the time. This is how it works: Imagine you just got a grant from the soda industry to study the effect of soda on the childhood obesity epidemic. What could you possibly do after putting all the studies together to conclude that there was a “near zero” effect of sugary beverage consumption on body weight? Well, since you know that drinking liquid candy can lead to excess calories that can lead to obesity, if you control for calories, if you control for a factor that’s in the causal chain, effectively only comparing soda drinkers who take in the same number of calories as non-soda-drinkers, then you could undermine the soda-to-obesity effect, and that’s exactly what they did. That introduces “over adjustment bias.” Instead of just controlling for some unrelated factor, you control for an intermediate variable on the cause-and-effect pathway between exposure and outcome.

Overadjustment is how meat and dairy industry-funded researchers have been accused of “obscuring true associations” between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease. We know that saturated fat increases cholesterol, which increases heart disease risk. Therefore, if you control for cholesterol, effectively only comparing saturated fat eaters with the same cholesterol levels as non-saturated-fat eaters, that could undermine the saturated fat-to-heart disease effect.

Let’s get back to the EPIC-Oxford study. Since vegetarian eating lowers blood pressure and a lowered blood pressure leads to less stroke, controlling for blood pressure would be an overadjustment, effectively only comparing vegetarians to meat eaters with the same low blood pressure. That’s not fair, since lower blood pressure is one of the benefits of vegetarian eating, not some unrelated factor like smoking. So, that would undermine the afforded protection. Did the researchers do that? No. They only adjusted for unrelated factors, like education, socioeconomic class, smoking, exercise, and alcohol. That’s what you want. You want to tease out the effects of a vegetarian diet on stroke risk. You want to try to equalize everything else to tease out the effects of just the dietary choice. And, since the meat eaters in the study were an average of ten years older than the vegetarians, you can see how vegetarians could come out worse after adjusting for that. Since stroke risk can increase exponentially with age, you can see how 9 strokes among 1,000 vegetarians in their 40s could be worse than 15 strokes among 1,000 meat-eaters in their 50s.

The fact that vegetarians had greater stroke risk despite their lower blood pressure suggests there’s something about meat-free diets that so increases stroke risk it’s enough to cancel out the blood pressure benefits. But, even if that’s true, you would still want to eat that way. As you can see in the graph below and at 6:16 in my video, stroke is our fifth leading cause of death, whereas heart disease is number one.

So, yes, in the study, there were more cases of stroke in vegetarians, but there were fewer cases of heart disease, as you can see below and at 6:29. If there is something increasing stroke risk in vegetarians, it would be nice to know what it is in hopes of figuring out how to get the best of both worlds. This is the question we will turn to next.

I called it 21 years ago. There’s an old video of me on YouTube where I air my concerns about stroke risk in vegetarians and vegans. (You can tell it’s from 2003 by my cutting-edge use of advanced whiteboard technology and the fact that I still had hair.) The good news is that I think there’s an easy fix.

This is the third in a 12-video series on stroke risk. Links to the others are in the related posts below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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August 13, 2024
Obesity and a Toxic Food Environment | NutritionFacts.org

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Implausible explanations for the obesity epidemic serve the needs of food manufacturers and marketers more than public health and an interest in truth.

When it comes to uncovering the root causes of the obesity epidemic, there appears to be manufactured confusion, “with major studies reasserting that the causes of obesity are ‘extremely complex’ and ‘fiendishly hard to untangle,’” but having just reviewed the literature, it doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me.

It’s the food.

Attempts at obfuscation—rolling out hosts of “implausible explanations,” like sedentary lifestyles or lack of self-discipline—cater to food manufacturers and marketers more than the public’s health and our interest in the truth. “When asked about the role of restaurants in contributing to the obesity problem, Steven Anderson, president of the National Restaurant Association stated, “Just because we have electricity doesn’t mean you have to electrocute yourself.” Yes, but Big Food is effectively attaching electrodes to shock and awe the reward centers in our brains to undermine our self-control.

It is hard to eat healthfully against the headwind of such strong evolutionary forces. No matter what our level of nutrition knowledge, in the face of pepperoni pizza, “our genes scream, ‘Eat it now!’” Anyone who doubts the power of basic biological drives should see how long they can go without blinking or breathing. Any conscious decision to hold your breath is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe. In medicine, shortness of breath is sometimes even referred to as “air hunger.” The battle of the bulge is a battle against biology, so obesity is not some moral failing. It’s not gluttony or sloth. It is a natural, “normal response, by normal people, to an abnormal situation”—the unnatural ubiquity of calorie-dense, sugary, and fatty foods.

The sea of excess calories we are now floating in (and some of us are drowning in) has been referred to as a “toxic food environment.” This helps direct focus away from the individual and towards the societal forces at work, such as the fact that the average child is blasted with 10,000 commercials for food a year. Or maybe I should say ads for pseudo food, as 95 percent are for “candy, fast food, soft drinks [aka liquid candy], and sugared cereals [aka breakfast candy].”

Wait a second, though. If weight gain is just a natural reaction to the easy availability of mountains of cheap, yummy calories, then why isn’t everyone fat? As you can see below and at 2:41 in my video The Role of the Toxic Food Environment in the Obesity Epidemic, in a certain sense, most everyone is. It’s been estimated that more than 90 percent of American adults are “overfat,” defined as having “excess body fat sufficient to impair health.” This can occur even “in those who are normal-weight and non-obese, often due to excess abdominal fat.

However, even if you look just at the numbers on the scale, being overweight is the norm. If you look at the bell curve and input the latest data, more than 70 percent of us are overweight. A little less than one-third of us is normal weight, on one side of the curve, and more than a third is on the other side, so overweight that we’re obese. You can see in the graph below and at 3:20 in my video.

If the food is to blame, though, why doesn’t everyone get fat? That’s like asking if cigarettes are really to blame, why don’t all smokers get lung cancer? This is where genetic predispositions and other exposures can weigh in to tip the scales. Different people are born with a different susceptibility to cancer, but that doesn’t mean smoking doesn’t play a critical role in exploding whatever inherent risk you have. It’s the same with obesity and our toxic food environment. It’s like the firearm analogy: Genes may load the gun, but diet pulls the trigger. We can try to switch the safety back on with smoking cessation and a healthier diet.

What happened when two dozen study participants were given the same number of excess calories? They all gained weight, but some gained more than others. Overfeeding the same 1,000 calories a day, 6 days a week for 100 days, caused weight gains ranging from about 9 pounds up to 29 pounds. The same 84,000 extra calories caused different amounts of weight gain. Some people are just more genetically susceptible. The reason we suspect genetics is that the 24 people in the study were 12 sets of identical twins, and the variation in weight gain between each of them was about a third less. As you can see in the graph below and at 4:41 in my video, a similar study with weight loss from exercise found a similar result. So, yes, genetics play a role, but that just means some people have to work harder than others. Ideally, inheriting a predisposition for extra weight gain shouldn’t give a reason for resignation, but rather motivation to put in the extra effort to unseal your fate.

Advances in processing and packaging, combined with government policies and food subsidy handouts that fostered cheap inputs for the “food industrial complex,” led to a glut of ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat, ready-to-drink hyperpalatable, hyperprofitable products. To help assuage impatient investors, marketing became even more pervasive and persuasive. All these factors conspired to create unfettered access to copious, convenient, low-cost, high-calorie foods often willfully engineered with chemical additives to make them hyperstimulatingly sweet or savory, yet only weakly satiating.

As we all sink deeper into a quicksand of calories, more and more mental energy is required to swim upstream against the constant “bombardment of advertising” and 24/7 panopticons of tempting treats. There’s so much food flooding the market now that much of it ends up in the trash. Food waste has progressively increased by about 50 percent since the 1970s. Perhaps better in the landfills, though, than filling up our stomachs. Too many of these cheap, fattening foods prioritize shelf life over human life.

But dead people don’t eat. Don’t food companies have a vested interest in keeping their consumers healthy? Such naiveté reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. A public company’s primary responsibility is to reap returns for its investors. “How else could we have tobacco companies, who are consummate marketers, continuing to produce products that kill one in two of their most loyal customers?” It’s not about customer satisfaction, but shareholder satisfaction. The customer always comes second.

Just as weight gain may be a perfectly natural reaction to an obesogenic food environment, governments and businesses are simply responding normally to the political and economic realities of our system. Can you think of a single major industry that would benefit from people eating more healthfully? “Certainly not the agriculture, food product, grocery, restaurant, diet, or drug industries,” wrote emeritus professor Marion Nestle in a Science editorial when she was chair of nutrition at New York University. “All flourish when people eat more, and all employ armies of lobbyists to discourage governments from doing anything to inhibit overeating.”

If part of the problem is cheap tasty convenience, is hard-to-find food that’s gross and expensive the solution? Or might there be a way to get the best of all worlds—easy, healthy, delicious, satisfying meals that help you lose weight? That’s the central question of my book How Not to Diet. Check it out for free at your local library.

This is it—the final video in this 11-part series. If you missed any of the others, see the related posts below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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July 30, 2024
Marketing Takes Off and Obesity Soars | NutritionFacts.org

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The unprecedented rise in the power, scope, and sophistication of food marketing starting around 1980 aligns well with the blastoff slope of the obesity epidemic.

In the 1970s, the U.S. government went from just subsidizing some of the worst foods to paying companies to make more of them: “Congress passed laws reversing long-standing farm policies aimed at protecting prices by limiting production” and started giving payouts in proportion to output. Extra calories started pouring into the food supply.

Then Jack Welch gave a speech. In 1981, the CEO of General Electric effectively launched the “shareholder value movement,” reorienting the primary goal of corporations towards maximizing short-term returns for investors. This placed extraordinary pressure from Wall Street on food companies to post increasing profit growth every quarter to boost their share price. There was already a glut of calories on the market and now they had to sell even more.

This placed food and beverage CEOs in an impossible bind. It’s not like they’re rubbing their sticky hands together at the thought of luring more Hansels and Gretels to their doom in their houses of candy. Food giants couldn’t do the right thing even if they wanted. They are beholden to investors. If they stopped marketing to kids or tried to sell healthier food or did anything else that could jeopardize their quarterly profit growth, Wall Street would demand a change in management. Healthy eating is bad for business. It’s not some grand conspiracy; it’s not even anyone’s fault. It’s just how the system works.

As I discuss in my video The Role of Marketing in the Obesity Epidemic, given the constant demands for corporate growth and rapid returns in an already oversaturated marketplace, the food industry needed to get people to eat more. Like the tobacco industry before them, it turned to the ad makers. The food industry spends about $10 billion a year on advertising and around another $20 billion on other forms of marketing, such as trade shows, consumer promotions, incentives, and supermarket “slotting fees.” Food and beverage companies purchase shelf space from supermarkets to prominently display their most profitable products. They pay supermarkets. The practice is also known as “cliffing,” because companies “force suppliers to bid against each other for shelf space with the loser pushed ‘over the cliff.’” With slotting fees costing up to $20,000 per item, per retailer, and per city, you can imagine what types of foods get the special treatment. Hint: It ain’t broccoli.

To get a sense of what kind of products merit prime shelf real estate, look no further than the checkout aisle. “Merchandising the power categories on every lane is critical,” reads a trade publication on the “best practices for superior checkout merchandising.” It was referring to candy bars and beverages. Just a 1 percent power category boost in sales could earn a store an extra $15,000 a year. It’s not that publicly traded companies don’t care about their customers’ health. They might, but like most of the leading grocery store chains, their “primary fiduciary responsibility is to increase profits” above other considerations.

For instance, tens of millions of dollars are spent annually advertising a single brand of candy bar. McDonald’s alone may spend billions a year. Now, “the food industry is the biggest spender on advertising of any major sector of the economy.”

“Reagan-era deregulatory policies removed limits on television marketing of food products to children.” Now, the average child may see more than 10,000 TV food ads a year, and that’s on top of “the marketing content online, in print, at school, at the movies, in video games, or at school,” or even on their phones. “Nearly all food marketing to children worldwide promotes products that can adversely affect their health.”

Besides the massive early exposure and ubiquity, food marketing has become “highly sophisticated. With the help of child psychologists, companies began to understand the factors that unconsciously influenced sales. They found out, for example, how to influence children and get them to manipulate their parents.” Packaging was designed to best attract a child’s attention, and then those products are placed at their eye level in the store. You know those mirrored bubbles in the ceilings of supermarkets? They aren’t just for shoplifters. Closed-circuit cameras and GPS-like devices on shopping carts are used to strategize how best to guide shoppers toward the market’s most profitable products. Behavioral psychology is widely applied to increase impulse buying, and eye movement tracking technologies are utilized.

The “unprecedented expansion in the scope, power, and ubiquity of food marketing…coincided with an unprecedented expansion in food consumption in predictable ways.” Some techniques have “skyrocket[ed] from essentially zero to multi-billion-dollar industries” since the 1980s, including “product placement, in-school advertising, event sponsorships.” This led one noted economist to conclude that “the most compelling single interpretation of the admittedly incomplete data we have is that the large increase in obesity is due to marketing.” Yes, innovations in manufacturing and political maneuvering led to a food supply bursting at the seams with close to 4,000 calories a day for us all, but it’s the advances in marketing manipulations that try to peddle that surplus into our mouths.

I think the natural reaction to the suggestion of the power of marketing is: I’m too smart to fall for that. Marketing works on other people, but I can see through it. But that’s what everyone thinks! For a splash of cold water to shake us all out of this delusion, I next bring you some data: The Role of Food Advertisements in the Obesity Epidemic.

Also, for both the role of marketing and food advertisements, check out Friday Favorites: The Role of Marketing and Food Advertisements in the Obesity Epidemic.

This is the seventh in an 11-video series. If you missed any of the first six, check out the related posts below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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July 16, 2024
Do Taxpayer Subsidies Play a Role in the Obesity Epidemic? | NutritionFacts.org

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Why are U.S. taxpayers giving billions of dollars to support the likes of the sugar and meat industries?

The rise in calorie surplus sufficient to explain the obesity epidemic was less a change in food quantity than in food quality. Access to cheap, high-calorie, low-quality convenience foods exploded, and the federal government very much played a role in making this happen. U.S. taxpayers give billions of dollars in subsidies to prop up the likes of the sugar industry, the corn industry and its high-fructose syrup, and the production of soybeans, about half of which is processed into vegetable oil and the other half is used as cheap feed to help make dollar-menu meat. You can see a table of subsidy recipients below and at 0:49 in my video The Role of Taxpayer Subsidies in the Obesity Epidemic. Why do taxpayers give nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year to the sorghum industry? When was the last time you sat down to some sorghum? It’s almost all fed to cattle and other livestock. “We have created a food price structure that favors relatively animal source foods, sweets, and fats”—animal products, sugars, and oils.

The Farm Bill started out as an emergency measure during the Great Depression of the 1930s to protect small farmers but was weaponized by Big Ag into a cash cow with pork barrel politics—including said producers of beef and pork. From 1970 to 1994, global beef prices dropped by more than 60 percent. And, if it weren’t for taxpayers “sweetening the pot” with billions of dollars a year, high-fructose corn syrup would cost the soda industry about 12 percent more. Then we hand Big Soda billions more through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamps Program, to give sugary drinks to low-income individuals. Why is chicken so cheap? After one Farm Bill, corn and soy were subsidized below the cost of production for cheap animal fodder. We effectively handed the poultry and pork industries about $10 billion each. That’s not chicken feed—or rather, it is!

This is changing what we eat.

As you can see below and at 2:03 in my video, thanks in part to subsidies, dairy, meats, sweets, eggs, oils, and soda were all getting relatively cheaper compared to the overall consumer food price index as the obesity epidemic took off, whereas the relative cost of fresh fruits and vegetables doubled. This may help explain why, during about the same period, the percentage of Americans getting five servings of fruits and vegetables a day dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent. Why not just subsidize produce instead? Because that’s not where the money is.

“To understand what is shaping our foodscape today, it is important to understand the significance of differential profit.” Whole foods or minimally processed foods, such as canned beans or tomato paste, are what the food business refers to as “commodities.” They have such slim profit margins that “some are typically sold at or below cost, as ‘loss leaders,’ to attract customers to the store” in the hopes that they’ll also buy the “value-added” products. Some of the most profitable products for producers and vendors alike are the ultra-processed, fatty, sugary, and salty concoctions of artificially flavored, artificially colored, and artificially cheap ingredients—thanks to taxpayer subsidies.

Different foods reap different returns. Measured in “profit per square foot of selling space” in the supermarket, confectionaries like candy bars consistently rank among the most lucrative. The markups are the only healthy thing about them. Fried snacks like potato chips and corn chips are also highly profitable. PepsiCo’s subsidiary Frito-Lay brags that while its products represented only about 1 percent of total supermarket sales, they may account for more than 10 percent of operating proﬁts for supermarkets and 40 percent of proﬁt growth.

It’s no surprise, then, that the entire system is geared towards garbage. The rise in the calorie supply wasn’t just more food but a different kind of food. There’s a dumb dichotomy about the drivers of the obesity epidemic: Is it the sugar or the fat? They’re both highly subsidized, and they both took off. As you can see below and at 4:29 and 4:35 in my video, along with a significant rise in refined grain products that is difficult to quantify, the rise in obesity was accompanied by about a 20 percent increase in per capita pounds of added sugars and a 38 percent increase in added fats.

More than half of all calories consumed by most adults in the United States were found to originate from these subsidized foods, and they appear to be worse off for it. Those eating the most had significantly higher levels of chronic disease risk factors, including elevated cholesterol, inflammation, and body weight.

If it really were a government of, by, and for the people, we’d be subsidizing healthy foods, if anything, to make fruits and vegetables cheap or even free. Instead, our tax dollars are shoveled to the likes of the sugar industry or to livestock feed to make cheap, fast-food meat.

Speaking of sorghum, I had never had it before and it’s delicious! In fact, I wish I had discovered it before How Not to Diet was published. I now add sorghum and finger millet to my BROL bowl which used to just include purple barley groats, rye groats, oat groats, and black lentils, so the acronym has become an unpronounceable BROLMS. Anyway, sorghum is a great rice substitute for those who saw my rice and arsenic video series and were as convinced as I am that we need to diversify our grains.

We now turn to marketing. After all of the taxpayer-subsidized glut of calories in the market, the food industry had to find a way to get it into people’s mouths. So, next: The Role of Marketing in the Obesity Epidemic.

We’re about halfway through this series on the obesity epidemic. If you missed any so far, check out the related videos below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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July 11, 2024
Children’s Cereals: Candy for Breakfast? | NutritionFacts.org

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Plastering front-of-package nutrient claims on cereal boxes is an attempt to distract us from the incongruity of feeding our children multicolored marshmallows for breakfast.

The American Medical Association started warning people about excess sugar consumption more than 75 years ago, based in part on our understanding that “sugar supplies nothing in nutrition but calories, and the vitamins provided by other foods are sapped by sugar to liberate these calories.” So, added sugars aren’t just empty calories, but negative nutrition. “Thus, the more added sugars one consumes, the more nutritionally depleted one may become.”

Given the “totality of publicly available scientific evidence,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to make processed food manufacturers declare “added sugars” on their nutrition labels. The National Yogurt Association was livid and said it “continues to oppose the ‘added sugars’ declaration,” since it needed “‘added sugars’ to increase palatability” of its products. The junk food association questioned the science, whereas the ice cream folks seemed to imply that consumers are too stupid to “understand or know how to use the added sugar declaration,” so it’s better just to leave it off. The world’s biggest cereal company, Kellogg’s, took a similar tact, opposing it so as not “to confuse consumers.” Should the FDA proceed with such labeling against Kellogg’s objections, the cereal giant pressed that “an added sugars declaration…should be communicated as a footnote.” It claimed that its “goal is to provide consumers with useful information so they can make informed choices.” This is from a company that describes its Froot Loops as “packed with delicious fruity taste, fruity aroma, and bright colors.” Keep in mind that Froot Loops has more sugar than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:46 in my video Friday Favorites: Kids’ Breakfast Cereals as Nutritional Façade.

Froot Loops is more than 40 percent sugar by weight! You can see the cereal box’s Nutrition Facts label below and at 1:50 in my video.

The tobacco industry used similar terms, such as “light,” “low,” and “mild” to make its products appear healthier—before it was barred from doing so. “Now sugar interests are fighting similar battles over whether their terminology, including ‘healthy,’ ‘natural,’ ‘naturally sweetened,’ and even ‘lightly sweetened,’ is deceptive to consumers.”

But if you look at the side of a cereal box, as shown below and at 2:13 in my video, you can see all those vitamins and minerals that have been added. That was one of the ways the cereal companies responded to calls for banning sugary cereals. General Mills defended the likes of Franken Berry, Trix, and Lucky Charms for being fortified with essential vitamins.

Sir Grapefellow, I learned, was a “grape-flavored oat cereal” complete with “sweet grape star bits”—that is, marshmallows. Don’t worry. It was “vitamin charged!” You can see that cereal box below and at 2:31 in my video.

Sugary breakfast cereals, said Dr. Jean Mayer from Harvard, “are not a complete food even if fortified with eight or 10 vitamins.” Senator McGovern replied, “I think your point is well taken that these products may be mislabeled or more correctly called candy vitamins than cereals.”

Plastering nutrient claims on cereal boxes can create “a ‘nutritional façade’ around a product, acting to distract attention away” from unsavory qualities, such as excess sugar content. Researchers found that the “majority of parents misinterpreted the meaning of claims commonly used on children’s cereals,” raising significant public health concerns. Ironically, cereal boxes bearing low-calorie claims were found to have more calories on average than those without such a claim. The cereal doth protest too much.

Even candy bar companies are getting in on the action, bragging about protein content because of some peanuts. Like the Baby Ruth, a candy bar that has 50 grams of sugar. Froot Loops could be considered breakfast candy, as the same serving would have 40 sugar grams, as you can see below and at 3:45 in my video.

Given that “research suggests that consumers believe front-of-package claims, perceive them to be government-endorsed, and use them to ignore the Nutrition Facts Panel,” there’s been a call from nutrition professionals to consider “an outright ban on all front-of-package claims.” The industry’s short-lived “Smart Choices” label, as you can see below and at 4:13 in my video, was met with disbelief when it was found adorning qualifying cereals like Froot Loops and Cookie Crisp. The processed food industry spent more than a billion dollars lobbying against the adoption of more informative labeling (a traffic-light approach), “opposing most aggressively the use of a red light suggesting that any food was too high in anything.”

I was invited to testify as an expert witness in a case against sugary cereal companies. (I donated my fee, of course.) Check out the related posts below for a video series and blogs that are a result of some of the research I did.

You may also be interested in videos and blogs on the food industry; see related posts below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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June 11, 2024
Skip Breakfast to Lose Weight? | NutritionFacts.org

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Breakthroughs in the field of chronobiology—the study of our circadian rhythms—help solve the mystery of the missing morning calories in breakfast studies.

Where did this whole “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” concept come from? “The Father of Public Relations,” Edward Bernays, infamous for his “Torches of Freedom” campaign to get women to start smoking back in the 1920s, was paid by a bacon company to popularize the emblematic bacon-and-eggs breakfast. The role of public relations, he wrote in his book Propaganda, is the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses….” Public relations specialists thereby “constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country….”

Breakfast is big business. Powerful corporate interests, such as the cereal lobby, are blamed for “perpetuating myths such as the value of consuming breakfast.” An editorial in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition urged nutrition scientists to speak truth to power and challenge conventional wisdom when necessary “even when it looks like we are taking away motherhood and apple pie.” “Actually,” the editorial concludes, “reducing the portion size of apple pie might not be a bad idea, either.”

So, should we “break the feast” and skip breakfast to lose weight? As I discuss in my video Is Skipping Breakfast Better for Weight Loss?, though “the advice to eliminate breakfast will surely pit…nutritional scientists…against the very strong and powerful food industry,” skipping breakfast has been described as “a straightforward and feasible strategy to reduce total daily energy [caloric] intake.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work.

Most randomized controlled studies of breakfast skipping found no weight-loss benefit to omitting breakfast. How is that possible if skipping breakfast means skipping calories? The Bath Breakfast Project, a famous series of experiments run not out of a tub, but the University of Bath in the UK, discovered a key to the mystery. Men and women were randomized to either eat breakfast (defined as taking in at least 700 calories before 11:00 am) or fast until noon every day. As you can see in the graph below and at 2:15 in my video, as in other similar trials, the breakfast-eating group ate a little less throughout the rest of the day but still ended up with hundreds of excess daily calories over the breakfast skippers.

Those who ate breakfast consumed more than 500 more calories a day. Over six weeks, that would add up to more than 20,000 extra calories. Yet, after six weeks, both groups ended up with the same change in body fat, as you can see below and at 2:36 in my video. How could tens of thousands of calories just effectively disappear?

If more calories were going in with no change in weight, then there must have been more calories going out. And, indeed, as you can see in the graph below at 2:52 and in my video, the breakfast group was found to spontaneously engage in more light-intensity physical activity in the mornings than the breakfast-skipping group. Light-intensity activities include things like casual walking or light housecleaning, not structured exercise per se, but apparently, enough extra activity to use up the bulk of those excess breakfast calories. There’s a popular misconception that our body goes into energy conservation mode when we skip breakfast by slowing our metabolic rate. However, that does not appear to be true. But, maybe our body does intuitively slow us down in other ways. When we skip breakfast, our bodies just don’t seem to want to move around as much.

The extra activity didn’t completely make up for the added calories consumed by the breakfast group, though. We seem to still be missing about a hundred daily calories, suggesting there may be another factor to account for the mystery of the MIA morning calories. Recent breakthroughs in the field of chronobiology—the study of our body’s natural rhythms—have unsettled an even more sacred cow of nutrition dogma: the concept that a calorie is a calorie. It’s not just what we eat, but when we eat. Same number of calories, different weight loss, depending on meal timing.

Just to give you a taste: As you can see in the graph below and at 4:11 in my video, the exact same number of calories at breakfast are significantly less fattening than the same number of calories eaten at supper. Mind-blowing!

A diet with a bigger breakfast causes more weight loss than the same diet with a bigger dinner, as shown below and at 4:23 in my video. Because of our circadian rhythms, morning calories don’t appear to count as much as evening calories. So, maybe breakfast should be the most important meal of the day after all.

If you missed my last video, catch up with Flashback Friday: Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal for Weight Loss or Should It Be Skipped?.

Did I pique your interest in chronobiology? If so, you’re in luck. See more in the related posts below.

For some breakfast inspiration, check out A Better Breakfast and my recipe videos for a vegetable smoothie and a grain bowl from The How Not to Die Cookbook.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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April 2, 2024
Are Fortified Children’s Breakfast Cereals Just Candy? | NutritionFacts.org

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The industry responds to the charge that breakfast cereals are too sugary.

In 1941, the American Medical Association’s Council on Foods and Nutrition was presented with a new product, Vi-Chocolin, a vitamin-fortified chocolate bar, “offered ostensibly as a specialty product of high nutritive value and of some use in medicine, but in reality intended for promotion to the public as a general purpose confection, a vitaminized candy.” Surely, something like that couldn’t happen today, right? Unfortunately, that’s the sugary cereal industry’s business model.

As I discuss in my video Are Fortified Kids’ Breakfast Cereals Healthy or Just Candy?, nutrients are added to breakfast cereals “as a marketing gimmick to “create an aura of healthfulness…If those nutrients were added to soft drinks or candy, would we encourage kids to consume them more often?” Would we feed our kids Coke and Snickers for breakfast? We might as well spray cotton candy with vitamins, too. As one medical journal editorial read, “Adding vitamins and minerals to sugary cereals…is worse than useless. The subtle message accompanying such products is that it is safe to eat more.”

General Mills’ “Grow up strong with Big G kids’ cereals” ad campaign featured products like Lucky Charms, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs. That’s like the dairy industry promoting ice cream as a way to get your calcium. Kids who eat presweetened breakfast cereals may get more than 20 percent of their daily calories from added sugar, as you can see below and at 1:28 in my video.

Most sugar in the American diet comes from beverages like soda, but breakfast cereals represent the third largest food source of added sugars in the diets of children and adolescents, wedged between candy and ice cream. On a per-serving basis, there is more added sugar in a cereal like Frosted Flakes than there is in frosted chocolate cake, a brownie, or even a frosted donut, as you can see below and at 1:48 in my video.

Kellogg’s and General Mills argue that breakfast cereals only contribute a “relatively small amount” of sugar to the diets of children, less than soda, for example. “This is a perfect example of the social psychology phenomenon of ‘diffusion of responsibility.’ This behavior is analogous to each restaurant in the country arguing that it should not be required to ban smoking because it alone contributes only a tiny fraction to Americans’ exposure to secondhand smoke.” In fact, “each source of added sugar…should be reduced.”

The industry argues that most of their cereals have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving, but when Consumer Reports measured how much cereal youngsters actually poured for themselves, they were found to serve themselves about 50 percent more than the suggested serving size for most of the tested cereals. The average portion of Frosted Flakes they poured for themselves contained 18 grams of sugar, which is 4½ teaspoons or 6 sugar packets’ worth. It’s been estimated that a “child eating one serving per day of a children’s cereal containing the average amount of sugar would consume nearly 1,000 teaspoons of sugar in a year.”

General Mills offers the “Mary Poppins defense,” arguing that those spoonsful of sugar can “help the medicine go down” and explaining that “if sugar is removed from bran cereal, it would have the consistency of sawdust.” As you can see below and at 3:17 in my video, a General Mills representative wrote that the company is presented “with an untenable choice between making our healthful foods unpalatable or refraining from advertising them.” If it can’t add sugar to its cereals, they would be unpalatable? If one has to add sugar to a product to make it edible, that should tell us something. That’s a characteristic of so-called ultra-processed foods, where you have to pack them full of things like sugar, salt, and flavorings “to give flavor to foods that have had their [natural] intrinsic flavors processed out of them and to mask any unpleasant flavors in the final product.”

The president of the Cereal Institute argued that without sugary cereals, kids might not eat breakfast at all. (This is similar to dairy industry arguments that removing chocolate milk from school cafeterias may lead to students “no longer purchasing school lunch.”) He also stressed we must consider the alternatives. As Kellogg’s director of nutrition once put it: “I would suggest that Fruit [sic] Loops as a snack are much better than potato chips or a sweet roll.” You know there’s a problem when the only way to make your product look good is to compare it to Pringles and Cinnabon.

Want a healthier option? Check out my video Which Is a Better Breakfast: Cereal or Oatmeal?.

For more on the effects of sugar on the body and if you like these more politically charged videos see the related posts below.

Finally, for some additional videos on cereal, see Kids’ Breakfast Cereals as Nutritional Façade and Ochratoxin in Breakfast Cereals.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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March 7, 2024
Take 5 Stuffed Dates – Simply Scratch
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Take 5 Stuffed Dates are the perfect “better for you” sweet treat when your craving something sweet and salty. Pitted dates, stuffed with crunchy peanut butter is topped with a pretzel and coated in milk chocolate. Yields 10 servings.

If there’s one thing to know about me (besides loving citrus desserts) is that I am, and always will be, a chocolate covered pretzel fan. So naturally Flipz were a major part of my teen years and then the Take 5 when it came out in 2004. Last year, you might recall, when I shared these snickers stuffed dates? Well I’m happy to announce that this year I’m sharing my second favorite candy bar stuffed date.

Take 5. Obviously.

The dates add sweetness and caramel like flavor, I use crunchy peanut butter (dark roasted by Santa Cruz organics is legit so good!) and the pretzel adds incredible crunch and salty cracker flavor.

To Make These Take 5 Stuffed Dates You Will Need:
- medjool dates – Choose soft, fresh dates either with pits or without.
- crunchy peanut butter – Or use any other nut or seed butter.
- mini pretzels – Adds crunch and salty cracker flavor.
- chocolate chips – I like to use milk chocolate but dark chocolate would great too!
- coconut oil – Helps set the chocolate when chilled.
- toothpicks – Secures the dates and gives you something to hold when dipping and drizzling chocolate, keeping your fingers (mostly) clean.
- fleur de sel – For a salty contrast.
Using a paring knife, slice each date along one side and remove the pit.

Repeat with the remaining dates.

Fill each date with about 1/2 teaspoon peanut butter or with a nut or seed butter of your choice and top with a mini pretzel.

Then insert a toothpick. This gives you something to hold onto when dipping and drizzling, keeping your fingers (mostly) clean.

Next, in a bowl set over a pan of shallow simmering water, add 1 cup milk chocolate chips plus 1 generous teaspoon coconut oil.

Stir until mostly melted, then carefully remove the bowl off of the sauce pan and continue to stir until the chocolate is smooth.

Using the toothpick to hold on to, gently dip the underneath of a peanut butter stuffed date.

Then use a spoon or mini spatula to drizzle chocolate over top. Gently tap the toothpick on the side of the bowl to remove excess chocolate.

Transfer to a small, parchment-lined, rimmed metal pan. Use another toothpick to hold the date in place as you remove the original toothpick. Repeat with the remaining stuffed dates.

Sprinkle with a pinch of flour de sel before popping into the fridge for about 30 minutes to set.

These should come with a warning, because they are extremely addictive.

HOW TO STORE SALTED SNICKERS STUFFED DATES:

You can store these in a container and refrigerate for a few weeks or freeze up to 2 months. Not that they will last that long.😏

Click Here For More Stuffed Date Recipes!

Enjoy! And if you give this Take 5 Stuffed Dates recipe a try, let me know! Snap a photo and tag me on twitter or instagram!
Yield: 10 servings

Take 5 Stuffed Dates

Take 5 Stuffed Dates are the perfect “better for you” sweet treat when your craving something sweet and salty. Pitted dates, stuffed with crunchy peanut butter is topped with a pretzel and coated in milk chocolate.

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 20 minutes

10 medjool dates, pitted

2 tablespoons crunch peanut butter, depending on the size of your dates

10 mini pretzels

1 cup milk chocolate chips, or use semi sweet or dark chocolate

1 (heaping) teaspoon coconut oil

fleur de sel

Using a paring knife, slice each date along one side and remove the pit.

Fill each date with about 1/2 teaspoon peanut butter or with a nut or seed butter of your choice and top with a mini pretzel.

Then insert a toothpick. This gives you something to hold onto when dipping and drizzling, keeping your fingers (mostly) clean.

Next, in a bowl set over a pan of shallow simmering water, add the chocolate chips and coconut oil.

Stir until mostly melted, then carefully remove the bowl off of the sauce pan and continue to stir until the chocolate is smooth.

Using the toothpick to hold on to, gently dip the underneath of a peanut butter stuffed date. Then use a spoon or mini spatula to drizzle chocolate over top. Gently tap the toothpick on the side of the bowl to remove excess chocolate.

Transfer to a small, parchment-lined, rimmed metal pan. Use another toothpick to hold the date in place as you remove the original toothpick. Repeat with the remaining stuffed dates.

Sprinkle with a pinch of flour de sel before popping into the fridge for about 30 minutes to set.

Nutrition Disclaimer: All information presented on this site is intended for informational purposes only. I am not a certified nutritionist and any nutritional information shared on SimplyScratch.com should only be used as a general guideline.

Serving: 1serving, Calories: 180kcal, Carbohydrates: 31g, Protein: 1g, Fat: 7g, Saturated Fat: 4g, Polyunsaturated Fat: 0.5g, Monounsaturated Fat: 1g, Sodium: 18mg, Potassium: 247mg, Fiber: 2g, Sugar: 27g, Vitamin A: 36IU, Vitamin C: 0.01mg, Calcium: 30mg, Iron: 0.3mg

Author: Laurie McNamara

Course: Desserts & Sweet Treats

Cuisine: American
This post may contain affiliate links.

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Laurie McNamara

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February 23, 2024
Sugar and Gaining Weight | NutritionFacts.org

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The sugar industry responds to evidence implicating sweeteners in the obesity epidemic.

In terms of excess body fat, the “well-documented obesity epidemic may merely be the tip of the overfat iceberg.” It’s been estimated that 91 percent of adults—nine out of ten of us—and 69 percent of children in the United States are overfat, a condition defined as having “excess body fat sufficient to impair health.” This can occur even in individuals who are “normal-weight and non-obese, often due to excess abdominal fat.” The way to tell if you’re overfat is if your waist circumference is more than half your height. What’s causing this epidemic? As I discuss in my video Does Sugar Lead to Weight Gain?, one primary cause may be all the added sugars we’re eating.

A century ago, sugar was heralded as one of the cheapest forms of calories in the diet. Just ten cents’ worth of sugar could furnish thousands of calories. Dr. Fredrick Stare, “Harvard’s sugar-pushing nutritionist,” bristled at the term “empty calories,” writing that the calories in sugar were “not empty but full of energy”—in other words, full of calories, which we are now getting too much of. The excess bodyweight of the U.S. population corresponds to about a daily 350- to 500-calorie excess on average. So, “to revert the obesity epidemic,” that’s how many calories we have to reduce, but which calories should we cut? As you can see below and at 1:33 in my video, the majority of Americans who fail to meet the Dietary Guidelines’ sugar limit get about that many calories in added sugars every day: Twenty-five teaspoons’ worth of added sugars is about 400 calories.

There are die-hard sugar defenders. James Rippe, for example, was reportedly paid $40,000 a month by the high fructose corn syrup industry—and that was on top of the $10 million it paid for his research. Even Dr. Rippe considers it “undisputable that sugars…contribute to obesity. It is also undisputable that sugar reduction…should be part of any weight loss program.” And, of all sources of calories to limit, since sugar is just empty calories and contains no essential nutrients, “reducing sugar consumption is obviously the place to start.” And, again, this is what the researchers funded by the likes of Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola are saying. The primary author of “Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?…,” Richard Kahn, is infamous for his defense of the American Beverage Association—the soda industry—and he was the chief science officer at the American Diabetes Association when it signed a million-dollar sponsorship deal with the world’s largest candy company. “Maybe the American Diabetes Association should rename itself the American Junk Food Association,” said the director of a consumer advocacy group. What do you expect from an organization that was started with drug industry funding?

The bottom line is that “randomised controlled trials show that increasing sugars intake increases energy [calorie] intake” and “increasing sugar intake leads to body weight gain in adults, and…sugar reduction leads to body weight loss in children.” For example, when researchers randomized individuals to either increase or decrease their intake of table sugar, the added sugar group gained about three and a half pounds over ten weeks, whereas the reduced sugar group lost about two and a half pounds. A systematic review and meta-analysis of all such ad libitum diet studies—real-life studies where sugar levels were changed but people could otherwise eat whatever they wanted—found that reduced intake of dietary sugars resulted in a decrease in body weight, whereas “increased sugars intake was associated with a comparable weight increase.” The researchers found that, “considering the rapid weight gain that occurs after an increased intake of sugars, it seems reasonable to conclude that advice relating to sugars intake is a relevant component of a strategy to reduce the high risk of overweight and obesity in most countries.” That is, it’s reasonable to advise people to cut down on their sugar consumption.

Findings from observational studies have been “more ambiguous,” though, with an association found between obesity and intake of sweetened beverages, but failing to show consistent correlations with consumption of sugary foods. Most such studies rely on self-reported data, however, and “it is likely that this has introduced bias, especially as underreporting of diet has been found to be more prevalent among obese people and it is sugar-rich foods that are most commonly underreported.” However, one can measure trace sucrose levels in the urine, which gives an objective measure of actual sugar intake and also excludes contributions from other sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup. When researchers did this, they discovered that, indeed, sugar intake is not only associated with greater odds of obesity and greater waist circumference on a snapshot-in-time cross-sectional basis, but that was also seen in a prospective cohort study over time. “Using urinary sucrose as the measure of sucrose intake,” researchers found that “participants in the highest v. the lowest quintile [fifth] for sucrose intake had 54% greater risk of being overweight or obese.”

“Denying evidence that sugars are harmful to health has always been at the heart of the sugar industry’s defense.” But when the evidence is undeniable, like the link between sugar and cavities, it switches from denial to deflection, like trying to pull attention away from restricting intake to coming up with some kind of “vaccine against tooth decay.” We seem to have reached a similar point with obesity, with the likes of the Sugar Bureau switching from denial to deflection by commissioning research suggesting that obese individuals would not benefit from losing weight, a stance contradicted by hundreds of studies across four continents involving more than ten million participants.

For more on Big Sugar’s influence, check out Sugar Industry Attempts to Manipulate the Science.

You may also be interested in some of my other popular videos on sugar. See related videos below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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January 4, 2024
This Week In Entertainment December 16, 2023

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December 16, 2023
Candy Cane Lane, Netflix’s May December, and every new movie to watch this weekend

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Happy December, Polygon readers. Christmas movie season is here, and there are tons of new Christmas movies slated to come out over the next month.

This week, there are four in that category: the critically acclaimed The Holdovers, Eddie Murphy’s Candy Cane Lane, Netflix’s Family Switch, and the horror movie It’s a Wonderful Knife. But that’s not all that’s new this week: Carol director Todd Haynes has a buzzy new movie out on Netflix, there’s a second movie with musical numbers named Leo dropping on Netflix in as many weeks, and big franchise reboots Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and The Exorcist: Believer make their streaming platform debuts.

That’s only touching the surface — December is usually a busy time for new movies to watch at home, and this year is no different. Let’s dig into it.

New on Netflix

May December

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Photo: Francois Duhamel/Netflix

Genre: Drama
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton

One of our great modern filmmakers is back with another thorny story — this about an actor (Natalie Portman) studying a woman (Julianne Moore) she is going to play in a film. The woman (based loosely on convicted sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau) is known for her scandalous relationship with her husband (Charles Melton), who she first met when he was a minor. Melton has already won multiple awards for his portrayal of the husband, and as it’s a Todd Haynes movie, you can expect a sumptuous, at times uncomfortable watch led by fantastic performances.

Leo

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Image: Seven Screen Studios

Genre: Thriller
Run time: 2h 39m
Director: Lokesh Kanagaraj
Cast: Vijay

No, you are not seeing double. Yes, last week, Netflix premiered its “Adam Sandler as a talking lizard” animated musical Leo. This week, the Tamil box-office hit Leo, a remake of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, lands on the platform.

Both Leos on Netflix prominently feature musical numbers, but they couldn’t be more different movies. In this one, a coffee shop owner and family man (Vijay) dispatches a group of killers at his business, making him an overnight sensation. This raises the interest of a gangster, who believes the man is his long-lost son.

Leo is the third movie in director Lokesh Kanagaraj’s LCU, after Kaithi and Vikram. There are a few repeat characters in this one, but neither of the previous movies are necessary to understand it (but they are both better, so I’d say they’re worth checking out).

Family Switch

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Photo: Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

Genre: Sci-fi family comedy
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: McG
Cast: Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers

It’s Freaky Friday, squared! From McG (Charlie’s Angels), this spin on the body-swap trope adds a dash of Christmas to the formula and has all four members of the principal family swap bodies.

American Symphony

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Image: Netflix

Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 44m
Director: Matthew Heineman
Cast: Jon Batiste, Suleika Jaouad

This documentary follows two artists in love facing a difficult situation: One, award-winning musician Jon Batiste, is writing a symphony, while his partner, bestselling author Suleika Jaouad, is being treated for cancer.

New on Disney Plus

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Where to watch: Available to stream on Disney Plus

Image: Lucasfilm

Genre: Action-adventure
Run time: 2h 34m
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen

Harrison Ford’s final outing as Indiana Jones sees the whip-wielding archaeologist adventurer embark on one last intrepid expedition with his estranged goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) as they race across the world in search of an ancient artifact before a Nazi rocket scientist (Mads Mikkelsen) gets his nefarious hands on it.

From our review:

Mangold is a very fine director capable of helming solid crowd-pleasers (Ford v Ferrari, Walk the Line) and even breathing new life into the dying X-Men franchise with Logan. But Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny looks anonymous. Its visual style is drab in a way that drains the film of any personality. When Indiana Jones makes his way through boobytrapped caves in torchlight in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the contrast between the outside world and this creepy tomb evokes a singular wonder. But virtually every scene in darkness here is scantily lit and hard to see. And like many a modern blockbuster, Dial of Destiny leans on rapid cuts that heighten the pace of Indiana’s brawls with the Nazis, but the choreography is barely discernible.

New on Hulu

A Compassionate Spy

Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu

Image: Magnolia Pictures

Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Steve James
Cast: Tom Goodwin, Mickey O’Sullivan

Legendary documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams) turns his camera toward the story of Theodore Hall, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and gave information to the Soviets about the development of The Bomb. The documentary uses interview footage with Hall and his wife, as well as reenactments and archival footage.

New on Prime Video

Candy Cane Lane

Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

Genre: Christmas
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Reginald Hudlin
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jillian Bell

It’s a very Eddie Murphy Christmas on Prime Video. He’s a man determined to win a Christmas home decoration contest, and he makes a deal with an elf (Jillian Bell) that has unforeseen consequences on his town.

New on Paramount Plus

The Lesson

Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus

Image: Bleecker Street

Genre: Thriller
Run time: 1h 43m
Director: Alice Troughton
Cast: Daryl McCormack, Richard E. Grant, Julie Delpy

A young writer (Daryl McCormack) agrees to tutor the son of his idol (Richard E. Grant). But all is not as it seems, as dark secrets threaten to tangle the writer in this family’s web.

Earth Mama

Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus

Image: A24

Genre: Drama
Run time: 1h 37m
Director: Savanah Leaf
Cast: Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Doechii

A pregnant single mother in the Bay Area hopes to reclaim her two children from foster care in this moving drama from first-time feature director Savanah Leaf. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

New on Peacock

The Exorcist: Believer

Where to watch: Available to stream on Peacock

Image: Universal Studios

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 51m
Director: David Gordon Green
Cast: Leslie Odom Jr., Ellen Burstyn, Ann Dowd

After a short theatrical run, David Gordon Green’s new entry in the Exorcist franchise arrives at home. It’s a bizarre twist on the franchise, per our review:

Up until this most recent movie, the title The Exorcist carried some weight. While its role as a representation of quality was up for debate, its mark as a sign of ambition was not. Since the original Exorcist, the series has provided some of American cinema’s best and most interesting artists with space to ruminate on faith and evil. Believer lacks the ambition that’s meant to define an Exorcist movie. This is the most profound statement the movie has to offer, seemingly by accident: If the result of moving past God is that everything in the world will feel as empty and pointless as The Exorcist: Believer, we should cling to faith forever.

New on Shudder

It’s a Wonderful Knife

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

Image: RLJE Films

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 27m
Director: Tyler MacIntyre
Cast: Jane Widdop, Justin Long, Joel McHale

It’s a Wonderful Life meets the slasher genre in this Christmas movie about a girl who wishes she’d never been born, only to discover how many lives that would truly cost.

New on Starz

Joy Ride

Where to watch: Available to stream on Starz

Image: Araquel/Lionsgate

Genre: Comedy
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Adele Lim
Cast: Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu

What if someone took the 2017 comedy Girls Trip and combined it with the soul-searching drama of Return to Seoul? You might get something like Joy Ride, the new comedy about a four Chinese American friends who bond through their shared adventure to track down their birth mothers.

New on MGM Plus

Bottoms

Where to watch: Available to stream on MGM Plus

Image: Orion Pictures

Genre: Comedy
Run time: 1h 31m
Director: Emma Seligman
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Marshawn Lynch

Teen girl comedies are back in a big way, and Bottoms is a standout of this year’s crop. A trio of comedic powerhouses star in this movie about high school girls who start a fight club to try and impress the popular girls at school they have crushes on. Chaos ensues.

From our review:

Bottoms is strongest when it fully indulges that satire. Part of the high school’s hype strategy for the big football game involves plastering the halls with heavily sexualized shirtless posters of the star quarterback. A classroom scene inexplicably involves one of the students standing in a cage. After a particularly climatic moment, a sad montage plays out, set to none other than Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” a needle drop so ridiculously 2000s that it transcends time and space.

Marlowe

Where to watch: Available to stream on MGM Plus

Image: Quim Vives/Briarcliff Entertainment

Genre: Neo-noir crime thriller
Run time: 1h 49m
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange

Liam Neeson (Taken) plays Raymond Chandler’s iconic down-on-his-luck detective in a feature length adaptation of the 2014 Philip Marlowe novel The Black-Eyed Blonde by John Banville. Hired by a glamorous heiress (Diane Kruger) to ascertain the whereabouts of her ex-lover and bring them back, Marlowe quickly finds himself entrenched in an investigation that goes far deeper (and potentially far deadlier) than a lover’s quarrel.

New to rent

The Holdovers

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: Focus Features

Genre: Comedy drama
Run time: 2h 13m
Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa

A strong late awards-season contender, The Holdovers has been beloved by every single person I’ve seen watch it. It’s about three people left at a New England boarding school for Christmas in 1970 — an uptight teacher (Paul Giamatti), the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and a sulking student (Dominic Sessa).

Freelance

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: Relativity Media

Genre: Action comedy
Run time: 1h 48m
Director: Pierre Morel
Cast: John Cena, Alison Brie, Juan Pablo Raba

Taken director Pierre Morel moves to a more comedic mode here, in this movie about a former Special Forces officer (John Cena) and a journalist (Alison Brie) who travel to a fictional country together to interview the nation’s dictator.

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Peacock

Photo: Patti Perret/Universal Pictures

Genre: Supernatural horror thriller
Run time: 1h 50m
Director: Emma Tammi
Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio

The massive hit video game series finally gets a horror movie adaptation, and Universal is going with the 2021 release model of simultaneous home and theatrical releases. Will it work for them? Only time will tell, but what it means for you is that you can watch a movie about the infamous, creepy pizza restaurant and its cursed animatronic animals either at home or in theaters.

From our review:

The movie’s funniest line is unintentional, when Mike earnestly explains, “I’m having a hard time just processing everything that’s happened,” as if he’s working through a tough breakup rather than a series of increasingly bizarre animatronic attacks. He’s right, though. For a movie with such a simple, appealing premise, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a lot to process.

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Pete Volk

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December 1, 2023
KENTUCKY BOURBON BALLS
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This recipe for bourbon balls is an old-fashioned classic! This Southern favorite is one anyone will love. Being from Kentucky, we know all about bourbon balls!

If you love this candy, you will also love these No Bake Orange Balls. They are an old-fashioned classic only a few ingredients and are absolutely wonderful for the holiday season!

❤️WHY WE LOVE THIS RECIPE

These bourbon balls are a classic candy that has been around for many many years. They make a wonderful gift during the holiday season. They are only a few ingredients, not hard to make and always a hit. Put them in a pretty tin and give them as a gift!

🍴KEY INGREDIENTS
- unsalted butter
- powdered sugar
- crisco
- pecans, finely ground
- 100 proof Kentucky bourbon (can use more or less and could use another kind of bourbon) *see swaps
- vanilla extract
- semi-sweet chocolate chips
- pecan halves for garnish
SWAPS

If you are not a bourbon fan or don’t have bourbon, you can use apple or orange juice in it’s place. We have made them with apple juice, and they were so good! Everyone loved them. You don’t have to use crisco but we find it adds a smoothness to the chocolate that is helpful and makes it cover the balls well.

🍽️HOW TO MAKE KENTUCKY BOURBON BALLS

These are easy to make but they do have a few steps of putting them in the refrigerator to chill. So that part adds time to the process.

DIRECTIONS

Step 1
Cream butter and sugar. Add pecans, bourbon and vanilla extract mixing well with mixer. Chill this mixture in the freezer for 30 minutes or refrigerator for an hour.

Step 2
Remove from freezer and make into balls using about a teaspoon of mixture for each one. Place on wax or foil paper on cookie sheet and put back in the freezer for 30 more minutes or refrigerator for an hour.

Step 3
When 30 minutes are up, melt the chocolate chips and crisco about 2 minutes in the microwave. (The smaller the container or bowl you use to melt the chips the easier it is to dip the bourbon balls in the chocolate). Some people use a toothpick to hold the bourbon balls. It is easier for me to just drop them in the chocolate and use a wooden spoon or fork to cover.

Step 4
Remove each bourbon ball and place on a clean piece of wax paper or foil on cookie sheet. Add a pecan half on top. Place in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes until chocolate hardens. Store in refrigerator. Makes about 15-20 bourbon balls, depending on the size you make them.

⭐TIP

These authentic Kentucky bourbon balls are always a hit and this recipe is one many people love. Just check the comments. If the chocolate begins to get too hard for dipping, just heat it up again and stir it well. If the balls start to warm before you dip them in the chocolate, you can always set them back in the fridge to harden up some. Take your time, and we put them in and out of the fridge a few times so we can get the coated the way we like.

When melting the chocolate in the microwave, only do about 20-30 seconds at a time and then stir.

RECIPE VARIATIONS

If you read the swaps above you can switch out the bourbon, and you could also switch out the vanilla with other flavors too. However, for authentic Kentucky Bourbon Balls this is the way to make them.

❓FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is the 1/2 cup of pecans in the recipe before chopping?

That is correct, measure out a 1/2 cup and then chop them up for the recipe.

Can you taste the bourbon in the recipe?

Yes, you can taste it since these are no bake, the bourbon isn’t “baked” out.

Do I need to keep them in the fridge?

No, you do not need to keep them in the fridge but we think they are great cold, so we do.

STORING

These will keep for a few weeks stored in an airtight container. You can easily make these in advance for the Christmas holidays and they are a wonderful gift.

💕MORE POPULAR RECIPES TO ENJOY

Five Minute Fudge

This fudge is an excellent recipe for the holidays! Makes a great gift too!

SERVING SIZE

This recipe makes 15-20 bourbon balls and can easily be doubled.
Kentucky Bourbon Balls

Leigh Walkup

These Kentucky Bourbon Balls are an old fashioned southern classic! The perfect Christmas treat or gift!

Prep Time 15 minutes

2 hours

Total Time 2 hours 15 minutes

Course candy

Cuisine American, southern

1/2 cup or 1 stick unsalted butter not margarine, softened(I use organic)

2 cups powdered sugar

1/2 cup pecans finely ground

4 tablespoons 100 proof Kentucky bourbon can use more or less and could use another kind of bourbon

1 teaspoon crisco

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips melted

pecan halves for garnish

Cream butter and sugar. Add pecans, bourbon and vanilla extract mixing well with mixer. Chill this mixture in the freezer for 30 minutes or the refrigerator for an hou. Remove from freezer and make into balls using about a teaspoon of mixture for each one. Place on wax paper on cookie sheet and put back in freezer for 30 more minutes or the fridge until hard.

When 30 minutes are up, melt the chocolate chips and crisco about 2 minutes in the microwave. When melting the chocolate in the microwave, only do about 20-30 seconds at a time and then stir. (The smaller the container or bowl you use to melt the chips the easier it is to dip the bourbon balls in the chocolate). Some people use a toothpick to hold the bourbon balls. It is easier for me to just drop them in the chocolate with a fork and use a wooden spoon or another fork to cover. Remove each bourbon ball and place on a clean piece of wax paper on cookie sheet. Add a pecan half on top. Place in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes until chocolate hardens. Store in refrigerator. Makes about 30 bourbon balls depending on the size you make them.

If the chocolate begins to get too hard for dipping, just heat it up again and stir it well. If the balls start to warm before you dip them in the chocolate, you can always set them back in the fridge to harden up some. Take your time, and we put them in and out of the fridge a few times so we can get the coated the way we like.

Keyword Kentucky Bourbon Balls

Let us know by commenting below!

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Leigh Walkup

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November 28, 2023
Best Ways To Detox After Halloween

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Halloween brings a lot of things to mind, most of them being candy and sweet. October 31 is one of those days where we sort of give ourselves a free pass for overindulging, even if we end up eating all the candy and chocolates within out vicinity. Think of it as a the start to get ready for Thanksgiving. Here are the best ways to detox after Halloween!

Let go of guilt

So you ate everything within reach and now you’re feeling extremely guilty and sorry for yourself. What happened, happened, and the faster you realize that, the faster you can get back on track. Remember that more holidays are coming, opening the door for plenty of temptations. The sooner you get over your Halloween induced stupor, the better off you’ll be.

RELATED: Food Coma: 3 Things That Happen To Your Body When You Eat Too Much

Photo by Flickr user slgckgc

Drink tons of water

Water is always important, but even more so when you’re system is packed with sodium, sugar and your body feels super bloated. Drinking water will help you clean your body and make you feel energized, something you’ll need if you had too much food or alcohol the day before.

Don’t skip meals

While some might think that skipping meals is a good idea after you’ve eaten so much the day before, most experts would disagree. In order to keep your metabolism moving, you need to eat. It’s also likely that if you ate a lot the night before, you might also feel some pretty intense cravings as soon as you wake up. Aim for meals that contain veggies and good portions of lean protein. Eat as clean as possible but don’t forget to do it.

RELATED: 5 Scary Things To Make With Leftover Halloween Candy

Photo by pixel1 via Pixabay

Work out

While working out is the best thing you can do to ease your conscience and put your body back on track, moving around also helps a lot. Try to walk and move more than usual, that way stimulating your digestive system and improving your mood.

Take a 5 day sugar break

If your Halloween indulgences weren’t limited to October 31st, celebrity trainer Jackie Warner believes that taking a 5 day sugar break can be the best way to get you back on track. While explaining the program, she says: “By the third day of no sugar, man are these people grumpy. I can totally tell by Wednesday that they have a habit and they’re craving that sugar. And then by Thursday, Friday, which is the fourth and fifth day, they completely stop that craving for sugar.”

RELATED: How Much Candy Does It Take To Kill You?

Photo by rawpixel.com

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Amy Hansen

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November 1, 2023
Butterfinger Cookies – Simply Scratch
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These Butterfinger Cookies have crisp buttery edges, a soft and chewy middle and are loaded with chopped butterfinger candy bar pieces. This recipe will yield 40 cookies.

Love butterfinger candybars? I’ve got you.

If you happen to find your self with a few extra butterfinger candy bars, I highly suggest your make these cookies. I was going to write that these cookies are a great way to use up leftover butterfingers… but I don’t even know what that means. lol.

So incredibly simple. Basically, it’s just a a soft, chewy cookie studded with big hunks of Butterfinger candy bars.

What’s not to love?

To Make These Butterfinger Cookies You Will Need:
- unbleached all-purpose flour – The base for the cookie dough.
- baking soda – Creates a gas while baking which helps the cookies rise.
- fine salt – Use either sea salt or pink himalayan.
- unsalted butter (softened/room temperature) – Lends richness, tenderness and structure to cookies.
- light brown sugar – Adds sweetness and gives the cookies a chewy texture.
- granulated sugar (white) – Also lends sweetness but will give the cookies a crispy edge.
- pure vanilla extract – Adds warmth and enhances all of the other flavors in this recipe.
- eggs – Add structure, leavening and flavor.
- butterfinger candy bars – You will need 12 ounces total. More on this below.
For this recipe, I use 12 ounces very coarsely chopped butterfinger candy bars, which is about 6 full-size bars or about 16 “fun size” (not-so-fun-size if you ask me) candy bars. I chop them into 3/4 to 1 inch pieces because we like big pieces in our cookies and they will break up more when you mix them into the cookie dough.

Preheat your oven to 350℉ (or 180℃).

Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment paper

Start by measuring 2-1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon fine salt into a medium mixing bowl.

Use a whisk to stir and combine. Set this off to the side.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment, add 1 cup (room temperature) unsalted butter, 1 cup light brown sugar and 1/2 cup granulated (white) sugar.

Mix on low to medium-low speed for 3 to 4 minutes until light and fluffy.

Next, measure and add in 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract.

With the vanilla, add in the first egg and mix until incorporated. Then add in the second egg and mix well to combine.

Use a rubber spatula to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl.

Gradually add in the dry ingredients. Again, stop to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl after each addition. Stop mixing once the flour is incorporated.

The dough should be creamy and light in color.

Next, add in 12-ounces roughly chopped butterfinger candy bars.

Give a quick mix just to get the pieces throughout the dough. I like big pieces of butterfinger in my cookies, so I literally only mix it a few times. Alternatively, you could do this step by hand.

Working in batches, use a 2-tablespoon scoop to measure out the dough. Place them a few inches apart onto your prepared pan.

I bake 10 cookies per pan at time to avoid them touching while they bake and spread in the oven.

Slide the baking sheet onto the middle rack of your preheated oven and bake for 10 minutes or until the edges are crisp and slightly golden.

Allow the cookies to cool for a few minutes on the pan before transferring the cookies to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Repeat with the remaining cookie dough.

How to get perfectly shaped cookies?

If perfect circular cookies is what you’re after, this is a trick, or should I say hack, that I only recently leaned. Once you’ve removed the pan of cookies from the oven, working quickly, use a wide mouth drinking glass and place it over a misshapen cookie and swirl the glass. The edge of the cookie will smooth out and in turn, you’ll have a perfectly circular cookie. Repeat with the rest of the cookies. If you need a visual, click here and scroll down a bit.

I love these butterfinger cookies warm out of the oven. However, the day after when the Butterfinger candy pieces have returned back to being their crispy-flaky-selves while suspended in all that delicious cookie goodness – isn’t to shabby either.

My favorite candy bar in cookie form, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.

HOW TO STORE BUTTERFINGER COOKIES:

Once the cookies have completely cooled, store them in an air-tight container for up to a week.

HOW TO FREEZE BUTTERFINGER COOKIES:

Portion out the dough and freeze the raw dough as is, placing them closed together on a lined baking sheet. Place into your freezer and freeze until frozen solid. Transfer to a freezer safe container or baggie and store up to 2 months. Bake desired amount of cookies following the recipe instructions. There’s no need to thaw before baking.

FOR MORE COOKIE RECIPES CLICK HERE.

Enjoy! And if you give this Butterfinger Cookies recipe a try, let me know! Snap a photo and tag me on twitter or instagram!
Yield: 40 cookies

Butterfinger Candy Bar Cookies

These Butterfinger Cookies have crisp buttery edges, a soft and chewy middle and are loaded with chopped butterfinger candy bar pieces. This recipe will yield 40 cookies.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 45 minutes

2¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon fine salt, sea salt or pink himalayan

1 cup unsalted butter, softened at room temperature

1 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 large eggs

10 full size Butterfinger candy bars, coarsely chopped

Preheat your oven to 350℉ (or 180℃).Line two rimmed, metal baking pans with silicone liners or parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, cream the butter with both sugars until light and fluffy. About 3 to 4 minutes.

Add in the vanilla and one egg at a time, mixing and scraping down the sides of the bowl after each one.

Gradually add in the dry ingredients, scraping down the sides and bottom of the bowl after each addition. Mix until the flour is incorporated. Add in the chopped candy bars and mix a few times until through the dough – for large chunks of candy bar in your cookies, be careful not to over mix.

Use a 2-tablespoon scoop and place rounded scoops of dough onto prepared pans. I do 10 cookies per pan.

Bake on the middle rack of your preheated oven for 10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are lightly golden brown.

Remove the cookies from the oven and let cool on the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. Repeat with remaining dough.

See post for storage instructions and the hack I use for perfectly round cookies.

Serving: 1cookie, Calories: 142kcal, Carbohydrates: 20g, Protein: 2g, Fat: 7g, Saturated Fat: 4g, Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g, Monounsaturated Fat: 2g, Trans Fat: 0.2g, Cholesterol: 22mg, Sodium: 112mg, Potassium: 40mg, Fiber: 0.4g, Sugar: 12g, Vitamin A: 155IU, Calcium: 12mg, Iron: 0.5mg

Author: Laurie McNamara

Course: Desserts & Sweet Treats

Cuisine: American
This post may contain affiliate links.

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Laurie McNamara

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October 31, 2023
Delicious Candy Pie And You Can Add A Weed Twist

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You buy bowls or buckets of candy and suddenly you have a ton leftover and you don’t want to gorge on it for the next week. Why not try something new? You can make a candy pie and if you want to add a little marijuana – you have a leftover “Hallo-weed” pie. This recipe is for a delicious candy pie and you can add a weed twist!

It’s a dangerously delicious concept: simply take a bunch of fun-size candy bars and make them a whole lot more fun by mounding them in a pie crust brushed with cannabutter. All you have to do is bake until melty and gooey to your liking, let cool briefly, and enjoy. Trick or treating may be for kids, but this pie will make you proud to be an adult.

RELATED: 5 Scary Things To Make With Leftover Halloween Candy

Makes 8 servings

● 1 unbaked pie crust (homemade or store bought)

● About 1 pound halloween candy

● 2 Tbsp plus 2 tsp cannabutter, melted (optional)

1. Preheat The Oven To 350

Have your unbaked pie crust at the ready.

2. Bush Your Crust

Using a pastry brush, gently brush the entire bottom and the inner sides of your pie crust with the melted cannabutter. Take care to apply it evenly along the surface or the party may not be equally as fun for everyone.

Photo by Jessie Moore

3. Unwrap A Big Ol’ Bunch Of Halloween Candy

I was working from an assorted bag of fun-size chocolate treats, and I used about half of the two pound bag (so, about 1 pound of candy). You can use whatever mix of candies you like. Mound the candy into the pie shell. Make sure to evenly distribute the candy. Fill it fairly close to the top of the shell, because the candy will lose a little volume as it melts.

Photo by Jessie Moore

4. Bake Until The Candy Is Melty And The Crust Is Toasty

About 35-40 minutes. If you feel as if the crust is browning more rapidly than the candy is melting, you can tent some foil over the edges of the crust.

RELATED: How To: Make Your Marijuana Edibles Taste Less Like Weed

Photo by Jessie Moore

5. Serve While Still Slightly Warm

Photo by Jessie Moore

Do not let your pug have any, no matter how nicely he asks.

A note on dosage:

This recipe is “dosed” with 1 teaspoon of cannabutter per serving (3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon). The strength of your finished product will depend on many factors, including the type of marijuana you used and how you made your cannabutter.

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Jessie Moore

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October 31, 2023
This Iconic Halloween Candy Is Falling Out of Favor | Entrepreneur

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This Halloween, people are going loco for cocoa. Milk chocolate is far and away the most popular item on the fright night menu, according to a study by Nielsen IQ. Americans buy more chocolate candies than all other competitors by a 2:1 margin. In fact, chocolate makes up 65% of the overall $3.7 billion candy business.

But there is one classic candy item that consistently appears to be losing favor. Candy corn. Those orange, yellow, and white kernels have dropped in sales every year since 2018, reaching an all-time low in 2022. Meanwhile, sales of upstart candies such as gummies and marshmallows have increased 30%.

Why Candy Corn is Collapsing

Candy corn is as synonymous with trick or treating as pumpkins and witches, so why are people souring on the confection?

“Either people love it or hate it,” Beth Kimmerle, founder of found industry data company Attribute Analytics told CNN. She says the marshmallowy vanilla taste has not aged well.

Earlier this year, her company performed a flavor profile in which a taste panel described Candy corn’s flavor as “sweet” and “chemical.” Meanwhile, Gummi Bears were described in much more favorable terms. “Gummies bounce around playfully in your mouth while you’re chewing, and they dissolve,” Kimmerle said. However, Candy corn is chewy and sticky and lasts a while.

Where Does Candy Corn Come From?

Candy corn has a storied history. It was invented in 1883 by George Renninger, a candymaker at the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia. It was called candy corn because the colors represent the various colors of a kernel of corn. Later, The Goelitz Confectionery Company brought candy corn to the people. The company is now called Jelly Belly Candy Co.

The current leader in the candy corn game is Brach’s, which churns out 30 million pounds of the stuff every year. While revenue from Brach’s candy corn has increased for the last few years, the total units sold have decreased, indicating that the revenue surge has more to do with the price increase than popularity.

Still, people managed to plop down $30 million last year on candy corn. Is it a hate buy?

“I would put it in the category of something that people feel compelled to buy because of the nostalgia factor,” Kimmerle explained.

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Jonathan Small

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October 30, 2023
Tips To Avoid Mixing Up Halloween Candy With Edibles

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Since spooky season is upon us, it won’t be long before everyone is indulging themselves in their favorite sweet treats. And for many of us, those treats could contain cannabis. It is the time of year when candy is all about, waiting for all sizes of hands to reach in and start snacking. But the last thing you want is for a mix up. Here are tips to avoid mixing up Halloween candy with edibles.

As many canna-consumers know, there is a wide variety of products on the market capable of satisfying a sweet tooth while delivering a buzz. Currently gummies are the most popular form of edible. Cannabis data firm BDSA shared 49% of consumers across adult-use and medical states claimed to have consumed a gummy edible in the past six months . The challenge is if treats can be easily accessed by the unsuspecting. Fortunately, there are numerous ways consumers can keep it from happening.

Photo by Moussa81/Getty Images

Open and Empty Them Into a Tightly Sealed Container

One of the aspects of edibles that attracts the attention of children is the fact that they often look like the treats that they’re used to. Additionally, as effective as child proof seals can be on packages, every now and again there are kids who are smart enough to get into them anyway. That’s why one of the most effective ways of keeping them out of their hands is by removing them from the packaging altogether and keeping them in a tightly sealed jar or container. Doing that allows consumers to keep their goodies fresh, without catching the attention of children.

Keep Them Out of Sight

Storing edibles in a separate container, out of the sight of children solves numerous problems for consumers. Among the biggest are dealing with kids who accidentally eat them thinking they’re regular treats they’re used to, along with conversations about why they aren’t allowed to have them.

RELATED: Perfect Weekend For Weed And A Scary Movie

By having a designated location for them, the only time they come out is when you’re ready to enjoy them. That eliminates a lot of the worry that comes with consuming edibles while children are present. The key to storing edibles out of plain sight is not forgetting where they are, so they don’t go bad.

Dispose of Them Correctly

As great as edibles are, they can pack quite the punch. With that in mind, it’s easy to feel the effects of an edible set in quicker than you might have anticipated. When that happens, and consumers prefer to dispose of edibles that they can’t eat, it’s important to get rid of them safely.

RELATED: Why You Need To Be Careful Using Edibles The First Time

In many cases, leftover edibles can be conserved with foil and safe storage as mentioned earlier. On the other hand, there are cases when consumers prefer not to save their leftovers, so if that’s the case it’s best for consumers to finely break up any remnants of an edible and blend it with the rest of the waste in the garbage can.

Photo by Sarah Pender/Getty Images

One of the great things about consuming marijuana nowadays is the fact that consumers aren’t restricted to smoking; people can enjoy their cannabis in numerous forms like brownies, cupcakes and gummies.

RELATED: Rainy Weather Cocktails

Everyone wants to enjoy their edibles safely, so when there are kids or pets in the household, it starts with keeping them out of their reach. Marijuana edibles can have detrimental health effects when taken unintentionally. The good news is, no one would mix up candy corn with an edible!

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Sarah Johns

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October 27, 2023
Chewing Gum for Weight Loss? | NutritionFacts.org

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If extra chewing is effective in suppressing your appetite when it comes to food, what about chewing gum as a weight-loss strategy?

As I discuss in my video Does Chewing Gum Help with Weight Loss?, chewing gum may only burn about three calories an hour, but the calorie expenditure isn’t only working your little jaw muscles. For some reason, chewing gum revs up your heart rate as much as 12 extra beats per minute after chewing two sticks of gum, even if you’re just sitting quietly, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:21 in my video. It also works while walking, increasing your heart rate by about three more beats per minute (and proving scientifically that people can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time).

Does this translate into weight loss? Researchers at the University of Buffalo asked study participants to either chew gum before every single eating occasion or not chew any gum at all for a number of weeks. On the gum-chewing weeks, the subjects didn’t just have to chew gum before each meal, but also before each snack or drink that contained any calories. That may have been too much, so the participants actually ended up eating on fewer occasions, switching from four meals a day on average down closer to three. They ended up eating more calories at each of those fewer meals, though, and had no overall significant change in caloric intake and, no surprise, had no change in weight. See the charts below and at 1:08 in my video.

University of Alabama researchers tried a different tack, randomizing people to chew gum after and between meals. After two months, compared to those randomized to avoid gum entirely, no improvements were noted in weight, body mass index (BMI), or waist circumference. However, some studies have suggested that chewing gum has an appetite-suppressing effect. For example, as you can see below and at 1:51 in my video, in one study, people ate 68 fewer calories of pasta at lunch after 20 minutes of chewing gum, but other studies have shown differently.

Whenever there are conflicting findings, instead of just throwing up our hands, it can be useful to try to tease out any study differences that could potentially account for the disparate results. The obvious consideration is the funding source. That failed University of Alabama weight-loss study was funded by a gum company, so the outcomes are not necessarily predetermined.

As well, different types of gum using different sweeteners may have contributed to the diversity of findings. As you can see in the graphs below and at 2:35 in my video, a study that found that chewing gum may actually increase appetite was done with aspartame-sweetened gum. People reported feeling hungrier after chewing the sweetened gum—and not only compared to no gum, but compared to chewing the same gum with no added aspartame. It’s true that not one randomized controlled trial has ever shown a benefit to “chewing gum as a strategy for weight loss,” but they all used gum containing artificial sweeteners.

There was a landmark study that showed that the size of a sip matters when it comes to reducing the intake of sweet beverages. When study participants took one sip every two seconds or a quadruple-sized gulp every eight seconds, but with the same ingestion rate of 150 grams per minute, the smaller sip group won out, satiating after about one-and-a-half cups compared to two cups when taking larger gulps, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:13 in my video. This is thought to be because of increased oro-sensory exposure, so our brain picks up the more frequent pulses of flavor and calories. But repeat the experiment with an artificially sweetened diet drink, and the effect appears to be blunted, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:38 in my video. So, might a different type of gum have a different effect? The positive pasta study I discussed earlier was performed using gum sweetened mainly with sorbitol, a sweet compound that’s found naturally in foods like prunes, and, like prunes, can have a laxative effect.

Case reports like “An Air Stewardess with Puzzling Diarrhea” unveil what can happen when you have 60 sticks of sorbitol-sweetened sugar-free gum a day. Another report was entitled “Severe Weight Loss Caused by Chewing Gum.” A 21-year-old woman ended up malnourished after suffering up to a dozen bouts of diarrhea a day for eight months due to the 30 grams of sorbitol she was getting chewing sugar-free gum and candies every day. Most people suffer gas and bloating at 10 daily grams of sorbitol, which is about eight sticks of sorbitol-sweetened gum, and, at 20 grams, most get cramps and diarrhea. So, you want to be careful how much you get.

The bottom line is that we have no good science showing that chewing gum results in weight loss. Could that be because the studies used artificial sweeteners that “may have counteracted” any benefits? Maybe, but the most obvious explanation for the results to date “is that chewing gum simply is not an efficacious weight-loss strategy”—and that’s coming from researchers funded by the gum company itself.

How Many Calories Do You Burn Chewing Gum? Watch the video to find out. For information on both artificial and natural low-calorie sweeteners, check out the related videos below.

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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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October 26, 2023
Is Chocolate Technically Candy? It’s Complicated

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Is Chocolate Candy?

Yes, generally speaking, processed chocolate, as in milk chocolate bars, chocolate chips, and chocolate fudge, are considered candy, as they are all combined with considerable amounts of sugars and other sweeteners. Cocoa products that do not have high amounts of added sugar and are not meant to be eaten by themselves, such as unsweetened cocoa powder and cocoa butter, are not forms of candy.

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Sarah Beling

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October 19, 2023
These are the 8 best CBD gummies you can buy, period – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

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CBD’s hot streak shows no signs of cooling down any time soon, as shown by the eagerness with which consumers snap up products containing this cannabis compound. The benefits of cannabidiol create a high demand for CBD products. This results in a somewhat flooded market, which can seem like a good problem to have, that is, until you’re planning to buy a container of high-quality CBD gummies you can munch on, and you don’t know where to start. Having been in this challenging position a few times myself, I thought it prudent to seek advice from the experts, and ten cannabis industry pros came through with recommendations for the best CBD gummies that are currently available on the market.

Looking for something else to consume? We’ve also rounded up the best CBD drinks and CBD snacks for you to consider.

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Mendi CBD gummies

Many CBD users look to this substance for its pain-relieving properties, and account associate Kaulana Dilliner of Rebellious PR & Consulting in Portland, Oregon (a company that represents numerous CBD brands) considers Mendi CBD Gummies his go-to remedy for muscle aches. “I work out regularly, and I tend to get body pain often, so I use Mendi’s CBD Gummies to help recover. They immediately take away my pain overnight, and I feel fresh & new by the next morning. They’re also great for sleep, so if you have trouble sleeping, pop one into your mouth, and you’ll fall asleep instantly,” Dilliner tells us.

Kurativ…

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MMP News Author

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July 15, 2023