Scientists Cook Up World’s Healthiest Meal

File photo. iStockphoto/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- Scientists have cooked up what they are calling the world’s healthiest meal.

Leatherhead Food Research, an independent research company in the U.K., incorporated 222 food health claims approved by the European Commission to create the healthiest airline meal.

“I thought of the airline meal concept when flying back from Vitafoods in Geneva. I had spent three days talking about health claims and at a round table event I suggested that Leatherhead could make a product with all 222 claims, no problem! It wasn’t that simple, but we did it within one week!” said Leatherhead CEO Dr. Paul Berryman in a statement.

The result?  A fresh and smoked salmon terrine, a mixed salad with extra virgin olive oil dressing, a high-fiber multigrain roll and a chicken lentil casserole. For dessert, a yogurt custard, paired with spring water and a cranberry, raspberry and elderflower sports drink to wash it down.

The meal also offers a berry meal replacement shake and hot chocolate for melatonin deficiencies while traveling.  It’s packed with superfoods that contain energy, vitamins and electrolytes as well as nutrients that help with iron absorption and reduce cholesterol.

“Our airline formula is just an illustration of what we can do. Leatherhead Food Research is ideally placed to help companies make new claims through regulatory advice, product formulation and our state-of-the art human intervention studies,” said Berryman.

All food-related claims in the European Union must meet the new standards, which are explained here.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Hollywood's Hot Beach Bodies: Secrets to Celebs' Success

Steve Granitz/WireImage(NEW YORK) -- It’s summer, a time when some of Hollywood’s top names head to the beach to reveal their toned, fit physiques.

In its June 25 issue, People magazine is naming this summer’s hottest celebrity bodies.

“There’s no shortage of fabulous, A-list women flaunting it in a bikini -- and men, too, for that matter,” Suzanne Zuckerman, senior writer for the magazine, said Friday on ABC's Good Morning America.

As People celebrates these hot bodies of all ages, they also dug into the diet secrets to their success.

The magazine says pop star Rihanna, 24, traded in white rice for brown rice, and actress Paula Patton cut out bread.

“I mean, Hollywood stars have a great foundation when it comes to rocking a bikini, but a lot of them will honestly tell you they work really hard at it,” Zuckerman said.

Some celebrities do it the old-fashioned way: slashing the calories.  According to People, 34-year-old Maria Menounos’ typical daily menu contains just 1,000 calories, while George Clooney’s girlfriend, wrestler Stacy Keibler, 32, has about 1,200 calories a day.

And some of the hottest bodies on the beach belong to new mothers.  After giving birth to her fourth child, supermodel Nikki Taylor, 37, lost 55 pounds by eating mostly vegetables, chicken and fish.

“Losing the weight is always a challenge for any modern mom,” she said.

But it’s not all about the ladies.  Some of People’s sizzling beach-ready bodies belong to men.

According to the magazine, newlywed actor Matthew McConaughey, 42, who stars as a stripper in the film Magic Mike, prepared for his body-baring role by working out twice a day and eating only five protein-only meals a day.  His co-star, Channing Tatum, 32, achieved less than 5 percent body fat by doing three hours of cardio a day and going dairy- and gluten-free.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Choking Death Linked to Gastric Bypass Surgery

Keith Brofsky/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- A U.K. woman died choking on food that wouldn't fit in her stomach after weight-loss surgery, according to an inquest into her death. But experts say gastric bypass patients are no more likely to choke than someone who didn't undergo the surgery.

The inquest into the December 2011 death of Dianne Bernadette Cooper-Clarke concluded the 64-year-old mother suffocated because of a backlog of food outside her stomach, which had been surgically shrunken to the size of a thumb, according to the Daily Mail.

"The tube that goes from the mouth to the stomach was swollen and food had built up all the way to the throat," Dr. Hugh Jones, the Royal Cornwall Hospital pathologist who performed the autopsy, told the inquest, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. "Your esophagus is the size of a little finger, but hers was as big as her stomach. ... I considered the food had blocked off her breathing, and that was the cause of death."

Calls by ABC News to Jones were not immediately returned.

Cooper-Clarke had gastric bypass surgery in March 2010, the Daily Mail reported. The procedure uses staples to shrink the stomach so patients eat less food and absorb fewer calories. Patients are warned that overeating can lead to complications.

"After surgery, correct behavior should be measuring food, eating small amounts several times a day and not eating to the point where you're too full or throwing up," said Dr. Mitchell Roslin, a bariatric surgeon at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York. "It takes a long time for the esophagus to dilate out like that, and you'd be symptomatic long before that happened."

Symptoms like bad breath, vomiting and regurgitating food can signal a digestive obstruction, a risk associated with bariatric surgery, according to Roslin, who has no firsthand knowledge of Cooper-Clarke's medical history. But choking would mean aspirating food into the windpipe and being unable to cough it out -- a rare event that could also happen to someone who didn't have bariatric surgery.

"People who can't protect their airways are usually in some sort of altered state," said Roslin, adding that aspiration is often a consequence of alcohol use. "Choking is not a realistic fear for bariatric surgery patients. This just demonstrates that crazy things can happen to anyone."

In the U.S., bariatric surgery is a last resort for people who have tried and failed to lose weight by other means. And while any surgical procedure carries risks, the benefits of bariatric surgery can be life changing, Roslin said.

"I've seen people on 20 medications come off them; people come out of wheelchairs able to live productive and active lives; people on transplant lists now working full time, just from the massive weight loss," he said. "It really can change lives. But the surgery is just a tool to help people be less hungry and make better choices. It's by no means a fool-proof solution."

The inquest concluded Cooper-Clarke's gastric bypass surgery was carried out properly, and that her behavior after the procedure is what led to her death.

"People do not stick to [eating less] and this is tragically what happens," said deputy coroner Andrew Cox, the Daily Mail reported. "This is not a natural cause of death. It is not an accident because she chose to eat. She died of a known complication of an elective surgical procedure of a gastric bypass."

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

New Weight-Loss Surgery to Lose 20-50 Pounds

Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- A new surgical weight-loss procedure is now available to women who are looking to slim down and lose 25 to 70 pounds.

Dr. Tom Lavin, founder of Surgical Specialists in Louisiana, is a pioneer behind the hottest new weight-loss procedure called POSE, which stands for primary obesity surgery endoluminol.

“POSE is for patients who want to lose 25-50, maybe 60 or 70 pounds,” says Lavin. “It’s a much different group of people than we normally approach for bariatric surgery.”

POSE is like the classic bypass operation, but there are no incisions, as everything is done through the mouth using an endoscope. The surgical tools make the stomach about 30 percent smaller, says Lavin, and the patient typically goes home the same day.

Critics argue that while the endoscope has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, its use in weight-loss surgery has not been approved, and no long-term studies have been done in the U.S. to test its safety or effectiveness.

“Until we have good data, it’s not something that we should be promoting to the public,” says Dr. Shawn Garber, director of the New York Bariatric Group. “You are putting needles through the patient’s stomach, you are putting a device down through the esophagus — there are risks.”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Texas Teen Loses Over 150 Pounds with Controversial Gastric Bypass

Courtesy of Nick Preto(NEW YORK) -- A year ago, Nick Preto, a 16-year-old from Baytown, Texas, weighed an astounding 403 pounds.  He was about to enter his senior year in high school and was plagued with potentially life-threatening health problems.

ABC's Nightline asked Preto and his mother, Toni Preto, if they could follow him as he underwent a highly controversial surgery for teenagers: gastric bypass.

Over the course of the past year, Preto has gone on a remarkable weight-loss journey, losing 150 pounds and changing the way he lives his life.  But it has not been easy.

Last June, before the surgery, Preto took Nightline on a tour of the fast food joints he regularly visited.  He was routinely consuming 7,000 calories a day -- three times the recommended total for an adult man -- and knew he had to make changes.

"It's senior year, you know, you want to date the homecoming queen.  You want to have the cutest girl," he said at the time.  "I guess just because I've been bigger, nothing has really happened with ... the ladies."

But Preto's doctors told him if he didn't lose the weight, the ladies were going to be the least of his problems.  The teenager was careening towards an early death.  He was already a pre-diabetic and suffering from sleep apnea, liver damage and joint pains.  So he decided to get some radical help through gastric bypass surgery.

Preto's surgeon, Dr. Mary Brandt, was hesitant about doing such a major and irreversible operation on a teenager.

"I really didn't think it was a good idea," she said.  "I mean, metabolically changing someone who's a growing adolescent to me, made no sense.  But this is the first generation that's not going to outlive their parents.  That's the scariest thing to me."

The procedure, which completely rewired Preto's digestive system and reduced his stomach from the size of a small toaster oven to the size of an egg, took about two hours.  The first weeks after surgery were tough for Preto as he adjusted to eating tiny portions.

Seven weeks later, his weight was down from 403 pounds to 315 pounds.  But Preto told Nightline anchor Cynthia McFadden that changing his diet was difficult.  Not only was he frequently vomiting, the whole process had been an emotional roller coaster.

But despite the tough road, Preto was determined to keep going, and said he intended to lose 100 pounds in the next six months.

Nightline reconnected with Preto a few weeks ago after the six months was up for the big weigh-in.  When he stepped on the scale, he had dropped another 70 pounds, which was not quite the 100-pound goal he had set for himself, but still an impressive achievement, weighing a total of 247 pounds.  A year ago, his waist was 60 inches.  Today, it's 34.

But more important than the number on the scale was the joy in Preto's eyes as he stepped out to attend his senior prom with his new girlfriend, Jordan.  Not only was he healthier, he was happier too.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Tony Mims Loses 198 Pounds on "Extreme Makeover"

ABC(NEW YORK) -- Tony Mims always smiled, but he’d had a tough life. The son of alcoholic parents, he left home when he was 14 and worked in the fast-food industry.

Over time, Mims’ weight ballooned.

“I’m tired of having limitations of what I have to do,” he said. “And I sweat like crazy. I’d give one of my kidneys to have a smaller body.”

Mims was tasting wedding cakes with his fiancée when Chris Powell, the trainer on Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition, showed up and pledged to help him change his body and his life.

At the weigh-in, Mims, then 49-years-old, got harsh news. After years of overeating, he weighed 398 pounds. He had to be weighed on a truck scale.

As part of Mims’ weight-loss program, he would learn how to cook healthy meals. Powell got him exercising.

It wasn’t easy. Added to the pressure, Mims’ son, Marcus, fell ill. His son suffered from cerebral palsy, and the hospitalization helped put things into perspective for Mims.

“I’m here fighting for my life and he’s in the hospital fighting for his,” Mims said tearfully.

Powell moved in with Mims and his fiancée, and helped them remake their home. For a while, things went well, at 90 days into his program, Mims weighed 294 pounds.

But Mims and his fiancée were having trouble. The relationship fell apart, and he moved out of the home he shared with her.

When it was time for Mims’ six-month weigh-in, Powell couldn’t find him. That’s because Mims was living in his car. He had become homeless.

Then, Mims got devastating news. His son had died. Rather than derailing Mims, the news strengthened his commitment to the weight-loss program.

When he showed up for his nine-month weigh in, the results were amazing. He weighed 226 pounds, for a total weight loss of 172 pounds so far.

He was now ready to have the excess flesh on his frame surgically removed.

Three months after the surgery, his friends and family gathered for his 50th birthday, and he had a final weigh-in. He weighed 200 pounds.

Mims found a new love, and is engaged to be married.

The episode of Extreme Makeover that chronicled Mims’ weight-loss journey aired Sunday on ABC.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Watch Life-Changing Surgery on TLC’s "Man With The 200 Lb. Tumor"

Keith Brofsky/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- For Hai, 31, one high-risk surgery is the deciding factor between life and death. Yet this Vietnamese native is willing to take that chance if it means he will have the opportunity to walk again.

Hai suffers from neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that facilitates tumor growth on nerves in the body. He has been weighed down by a tumor that has been growing his entire life, rendering him bedridden for the past six years.

Despite having his leg amputated in his teens, the surgery failed to stop the tumor’s growth. Now, the tumor, which originates at the base of his spine, weighs 200 pounds – twice as much as Hai’s body weight.

Doctors in Vietnam gave Hai less than a year to life, but his friends and family have reached out to renowned plastic surgeon Dr. McKay McKinnon of Chicago, who has successfully removed life-threatening tumors from patients around the world to see if he can help save Hai.

Given the severity of Hai’s condition, he is unable to travel outside of Vietnam. As a result, Dr. McKinnon will make the journey to Ho Chi Minh City to perform a complicated surgery with a team he has never met before.

The surgery is the subject of TLC’s medical special, The Man With The 200 Lb. Tumor, which premieres Wednesday at 10 PM ET/PT on TLC.

During the trying 12-hour surgery, McKinnon hopes that he can successfully sever the tumor as close as possible to its point of origin without cutting any of Hai’s vital organs.

Since blood is shared between the patient and the tumor, it puts Hai at risk for drastic shifts in body weight, as well as dangerous blood and fluid shifts during the procedure, which may require multiple blood transfusions.

“I’m happy, but worried,” said Hai in the special. “If the surgery’s successful, I can walk. If it isn’t…Well, we all yearn to live.”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Japanese Scientists Unveil 'Diet Glasses'

Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock(TOKYO) -- For those looking to shed some extra pounds, researchers at the University of Tokyo may have the ideal fashion accessory: a special pair of sunglasses.

Using a tiny video camera and augmented reality technology -- which can project an image in real time onto a screen -- the scientists have created "diet glasses."  According to a Japanese website, the specs can enlarge any object the wearer brings up to his or her mouth, tricking their minds into thinking they're eating more.

The link between vision and appetite has already been firmly established scientifically, and these researchers say their own experiments back that up.  Test subjects who wore the glasses ate 9.3 percent fewer cookies than those who weren't wearing them.

Conversely, when scientists flipped the script and shrank the cookies' size visually, subjects ate 11 percent more than those in the control group, the researchers claim.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Cool Temperatures Could Help Burn Calories, Lead to Weight Loss

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- Cool temperatures may activate “good” fat in the body that burns calories and ultimately leads to weight loss, according to a new study published in the journal PNAS USA Early Edition.

The “good fat” is called brown adipose tissue, or brown fat, and is naturally found in humans. It takes calories from normal white fat, which stores energy, and burns it. Past trials have shown that brown fat can be stimulated in mice, showing promising signs for future weight-loss therapies, but scientists have not shown how to successfully stimulate it in humans.

Researchers from the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston wanted to compare the effects of ephedrine, a stimulant that is used in weight-loss drugs, versus the cool temperatures, which scientists predicted would activate the brown fat.

The team tested 10 study participants in three different ways. They were given injections of ephedrine, or saline solution as a control, or made to wear a “cooling vest,” which had 57-degree water pumping through it.

After each phase, brown fat activity was measured using a PET/CT scan. Researchers found that ephedrine did not stimulate brown fat activity. But after study participants wore cooling vests for two hours, brown fat showed significant stimulation on the scans.

Both ephedrine and the cooling vests stimulated the body’s sympathetic nervous system, which controls our fight-or-flight response. Symptoms of this response include an increase in blood pressure and heart rate and the slowing of digestion. More symptoms of the response showed after the ephedrine shot than while participants wore the vest.

But Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Center, said neither ephedrine nor any type of cooling vest should be the go-to intervention for a weight loss regimen.

“One is unsafe, the other is uncomfortable,” said Katz. “If people are willing to put with discomfort, how about they try eating better and being more active?”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

Top 5 Weight-Loss Mistakes to Avoid

Fit2Fat2Fit.com(NEW YORK) -- A little more than a year ago, personal trainer Drew Manning stopped working out, and started eating fast food, white bread, sugary cereal and soda.

Manning, a self-proclaimed fitness addict, started the weight-gain journey to better understand what his overweight clients go through.  He let himself go completely, and chronicled the process in video blog on his website, Fit2Fat2Fit.com.

Manning gained 21 pounds in the first month. As the weeks progressed, his confidence – and his health – took a downturn. He started to get winded easily, and his glucose level and blood pressure were high. “It’s getting a little scary,” he said in one of his video blogs.

Manning’s wife, Lynn, was prepared to see the physical changes in her husband, but didn’t expect the emotional and personality changes that came with the weight gain.

“His self-confidence, that completely went away and depleted,” she said, explaining that he was “becoming lethargic, lazy, not helping around the house.”

“I was in denial at first until she kept pointing out the things I was doing,” Manning said Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America. “But I did become lazier.  … I had less energy so I did become exhausted and I kept seeing how it affected our relationship because of that. And so that’s where the biggest surprise was, the emotional [part].”

When Manning started his experiment on May 7, 2011, he had a 34.5-inch waist and 17-inch neck, and he weighed 193 pounds. Six months later, he had a 48-inch waist, 19-inch neck and he weighed 265 pounds. His clothes didn’t fit.

Last fall, he ended the experiment and started to whip his body back into shape.

“It was hard to get back into the exercise routine,” Manning said Monday on GMA, revealing his new physique.  “This is the first time going to the gym that I was nervous. Before I loved going to the gym, but for the first time in my life, I was humbled. … doing push-ups on my knees, doing assisted pull-ups, things like that for the first time, it was a very humbling experience.”

Manning tells his story in his new book, Fit2Fat2Fit: The Unexpected Lessons from Gaining and Losing 75 lbs on Purpose.

Weight-Loss Tips: Avoid These 5 Mistakes

What are the five biggest mistakes that people make when they are trying to lose weight?  Below Drew gives the answers and recommendations for overcoming those obstacles.

1. Lack of flexibility. There need to be scheduled breaks. When there is no flexibility or detours (where every “bad” decision feels like a loss), it’ll be impossible to stick with. We all make bad choices sometimes, so we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it.

2. Prepare, prepare, prepare your meals in advance. When you fail to prepare your meals in advance, it becomes so much easier to give into the temptations that are everywhere (fast food/most convenient food option). When meals are prepared in advance, you won’t feel that same temptation.

3. Thinking that just because it’s low-fat or fat-free it’s good for you. A lot of the foods I ate during my Fit2Fat stage were considered low fat (white bread, white pasta, sugary cereals, granola bars, sodas, juices, SpaghettiOs, Ramen noodles, etc.)

4. Not understanding the psychological battles that come with weight loss (plateaus, food addictions, fear of being judged at the gym, etc.). Understanding the physical side of weight loss (diet and exercise) is one thing, but I learned that the toughest part is overcoming the mental and emotional battles.

5. Focusing too much on weight. Weight is not the best measurement for overall health. You can lose weight in an unhealthy way, so just because you’re losing weight doesn’t mean you’re becoming healthier. People need to focus more on becoming medically healthy first rather than just becoming skinny or weighing less.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio