Not only can pizza, chips, and chili wreck your waistline—a game-day binge of high-fat, high-sugar foods can have some startling and immediate effects on your health
Super Bowl Sunday isn’t an official holiday, but our eating habits
would lead you to believe otherwise. On America’s second biggest food
consumption day of the year, armchair quarterbacks chow down on 30
million pounds of snack food, according to research from the Calorie
Control Council and the Snack Food Association. The average spectator will take in 1,200 calories and 50 grams of fat
from foods like potato chips, nachos, pretzels, and popcorn alone. Then
comes the pizza, chicken wings, chili, and booze that are part of any
party spread.
While it’s a no revelation that a Super Bowl food binge delivers extra calories to last you a couple of days, what’s less obvious are the frightening effects your favorite party foods can have on your health. Here’s how high-fat or high-carb foods can stick you with a head cold, a nasty case of heartburn, or even a heart attack.
1. A Cardiac Event
According to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology,
three to five hours after eating a 900-calorie fast food meal
containing 50 g of fat, 38 healthy adults experienced a temporary
decrease in artery dilation, the widening that occurs when the volume of
blood increases inside the vessel (downing a big meal requires the
heart to pump more blood to the stomach and intestines to aid
digestion).
While the likelihood that a plate of wings or a couple slices of pizza will cause a heart attack or stroke is extremely small, individuals with existing cardiac conditions should exercise caution, says Matthew Sorrentino, MD, a preventive cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medical School. When you eat a meal that’s high in fat, that fat hits the bloodstream and can slow down blood flow or force the arteries to narrow or constrict, which in theory can lead to restricted blood flow to the heart and other organs, he explains.
While it’s a no revelation that a Super Bowl food binge delivers extra calories to last you a couple of days, what’s less obvious are the frightening effects your favorite party foods can have on your health. Here’s how high-fat or high-carb foods can stick you with a head cold, a nasty case of heartburn, or even a heart attack.
1. A Cardiac Event
It takes years of eating a diet high in saturated fat—think fast food, full-fat dairy, and plenty of
red meat—to generate the type of plaque buildup that would trigger a
heart attack, stroke, or aneurysm. But a single day of feasting on fatty
foods is still enough to alter the way your arteries function.
While the likelihood that a plate of wings or a couple slices of pizza will cause a heart attack or stroke is extremely small, individuals with existing cardiac conditions should exercise caution, says Matthew Sorrentino, MD, a preventive cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medical School. When you eat a meal that’s high in fat, that fat hits the bloodstream and can slow down blood flow or force the arteries to narrow or constrict, which in theory can lead to restricted blood flow to the heart and other organs, he explains.
2. A Common Cold
After a couple of
beers, you may not think twice about what’s lurking in the salsa bowl
sitting on the buffet table, but “double dipping” is a surefire way to
share germs with your guests.
Inspired by an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza
is confronted at a funeral reception for dipping the same chip twice,
Clemson University researchers took a look at how much bacteria ended up
in bowls of salsa, cheese dip, and chocolate yrup when study participants were instructed to double dip their crackers. Their study, published in the Journal of Food Safety, shows that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from a snacker’s mouth to the remaining dip.
When the researchers did the math, they concluded that since each cracker used in the study picked up one to two grams of dip, double dipping transfers 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with each bite, a saliva swap they compared to kissing or sharing a toothbrush.
3. Heartburn
Go overboard with eating on Sunday and you (and your employer) could be paying for it on Super Bowl Monday. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 1.5 million Americans are likely to call in sick the day after the big game—and many of them legitimately feel ill.
Aside from hangovers, heartburn and indigestion are major culprits behind work absences and likely explain why antacid sales at 7-11 stores jump 20% the day after the Super Bowl. Although heartburn is more of a nuisance than health hazard, fatty foods, spicy foods, alcohol, carbonated drinks, and lying down after eating can all trigger the unpleasant condition.
"One of the biggest causes of heartburn is eating too much at one time,” says Alyse Levine, RD, of the Los Angeles-based nutrition practice Nutritionbite “If you overfill your stomach, food comes up and pushes through the flap between the stomach and esophagus, allowing stomach acid to come up into the esophagus. Some foods, like wings, burgers, creamy dressings, and high-fat potato chips, also loosen that flap and contribute to acid reflux. Combining these foods with liquor also contributes to that physical occurrence.”
4. Lower Testosterone
There’s nothing more macho than watching the game with a beer in one hand and your favorite snack food in the other, but our society’s increasing consumption of processed foods—on game day as well as any day of the year—may be lowering levels of the male sex hormone.
According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone levels have taken a population-wide plunge in recent decades. Between 1987 and 2007, levels fell at a rate of about 1 percent a year. Researchers aren’t quite sure what explains the trend, as their study controlled for obesity, which has been shown to lower testosterone levels.
Some speculate that the food we eat may be messing with our hormone levels, as the amount of processed, sugary snack food that Americans consume has risen sharply in recent decades. The USDA reports that the consumption of added sugars, ranging from table sugar to high fructose corn syrup, increased 43 percent between the 1950s and 2000. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that our desire for desserts is in overdrive. Added sugars are hidden in many foods that are more savory than sweet, like pizza, hot dogs, tomato sauce, lunch meat, and salad dressings.
The immediate effect of a huge dose of sugar on testosterone levels is pretty intense, making some scientists curious about what years of processed food consumption does to masculinity. Research from Massachusetts General Hospital shows that a large dose of sugar in the bloodstream (high-carb snacks break down into sugars once they are consumed) immediately lowers levels of testosterone. When 74 men drank a solution that contained 75 g of pure glucose, their testosterone levels decreased by as much as 25 percent and remained lowered for two hours after consumption
When the researchers did the math, they concluded that since each cracker used in the study picked up one to two grams of dip, double dipping transfers 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with each bite, a saliva swap they compared to kissing or sharing a toothbrush.
3. Heartburn
Go overboard with eating on Sunday and you (and your employer) could be paying for it on Super Bowl Monday. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 1.5 million Americans are likely to call in sick the day after the big game—and many of them legitimately feel ill.
Aside from hangovers, heartburn and indigestion are major culprits behind work absences and likely explain why antacid sales at 7-11 stores jump 20% the day after the Super Bowl. Although heartburn is more of a nuisance than health hazard, fatty foods, spicy foods, alcohol, carbonated drinks, and lying down after eating can all trigger the unpleasant condition.
"One of the biggest causes of heartburn is eating too much at one time,” says Alyse Levine, RD, of the Los Angeles-based nutrition practice Nutritionbite “If you overfill your stomach, food comes up and pushes through the flap between the stomach and esophagus, allowing stomach acid to come up into the esophagus. Some foods, like wings, burgers, creamy dressings, and high-fat potato chips, also loosen that flap and contribute to acid reflux. Combining these foods with liquor also contributes to that physical occurrence.”
4. Lower Testosterone
There’s nothing more macho than watching the game with a beer in one hand and your favorite snack food in the other, but our society’s increasing consumption of processed foods—on game day as well as any day of the year—may be lowering levels of the male sex hormone.
According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone levels have taken a population-wide plunge in recent decades. Between 1987 and 2007, levels fell at a rate of about 1 percent a year. Researchers aren’t quite sure what explains the trend, as their study controlled for obesity, which has been shown to lower testosterone levels.
Some speculate that the food we eat may be messing with our hormone levels, as the amount of processed, sugary snack food that Americans consume has risen sharply in recent decades. The USDA reports that the consumption of added sugars, ranging from table sugar to high fructose corn syrup, increased 43 percent between the 1950s and 2000. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that our desire for desserts is in overdrive. Added sugars are hidden in many foods that are more savory than sweet, like pizza, hot dogs, tomato sauce, lunch meat, and salad dressings.
The immediate effect of a huge dose of sugar on testosterone levels is pretty intense, making some scientists curious about what years of processed food consumption does to masculinity. Research from Massachusetts General Hospital shows that a large dose of sugar in the bloodstream (high-carb snacks break down into sugars once they are consumed) immediately lowers levels of testosterone. When 74 men drank a solution that contained 75 g of pure glucose, their testosterone levels decreased by as much as 25 percent and remained lowered for two hours after consumption
http://fitbie.msn.com/eat-right/tips/4-scary-side-effects-super-bowl-snacks
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