Podium Talk

There are people who believe that exercise alone can help you lose weight as long as you don’t ‘overeat’. This view is evident by the sheer number of people who purchase gym memberships specifically for weight loss. Whilst physical activity is beneficial, there are a myriad of risks involved when people follow the advice of gurus who aren’t educated about the anatomy and physiology of the human body. At the other end of the spectrum, there are believers in nutrition who could swear by its effectiveness in weight loss. It’s easy to blame a particular macro, be it fats or carbohydrates. It’s much harder to back that claim with evidence. Does that mean we leave everything to chance and do whatever we feel is right? Absolutely not. Looking at the basics of nutrition content, a low carbohydrate diet has been shown to help with maintaining a low energy uptake, which in turn will reduce your weight (As carbohydrates and sugars are well known to be empty calories). Although fat was given a bad...

Caffeine is originally obtained from coffee, which seemed to be discovered and put to use in Ethiopia in the 15th century. Coffee beans made their way around the globe through mysterious trade routes and a treasury of interesting stories. At this point, this super drug is commonly found in kitchens all around the world and enjoyed as a beverage by a large number of people. Caffeine was first extracted from coffee in 1819 and has opened up many possibilities by which it can be consumed. The cultural history is just amazing, but I wouldn’t attempt to explain the history for the sake of relevance. What we are concerned about is how the contents of this bean is critical to the performance of professional and recreational endurance athletes. At first glance, knowing caffeine’s effect on the heart rate, one would assume that it would not be beneficial to begin a long run with your heart racing before your feet get a chance to catch wind. However, this cannot be further from the truth. Caffei...

Long before Christiano Ronaldo refused to promote Coke and claimed the superiority of water to the world in front of the press at the Euro 2020, we knew about the calorie-dense nature of sweetened beverages. Despite providing no nutritional value to our diets whatsoever, sodas and soft drinks continue to be in high demand almost everywhere. Most of its credit goes to shrewd marketing and obviously to global sugar addiction. A can of coke contains roughly 130 calories, whereas water has none. To expend just one can’s worth of energy, one would have to run for 15 minutes. That will help only if you don’t make poor diet choices again on the same day. It should be obvious that avoiding the consumption of sweetened beverages would help you lose some weight, and you might have already been advised to do so on numerous occasions. It’s a no-brainer that replacing these beverages with just water would reduce the total energy consumption in a day and thus help you to put yourself in a calorie de...

The kind of skepticism that can help us from being misled by research with radical and bold claims on topics of nutrition and its health outcomes. What is the perfect diet? How about keto or paleo? Vegan or carnivorous? It’s not that easy to answer. I doubt it is something we even have the answer for. The thing about nutrition is that it is extremely difficult to control diets for a significant period to note their effects. It’s even harder to monitor the consistency of nutrient composition of the same food at different times and places, not to forget about the tedious task of measuring the net weight (which can be either wet or dry weight). Even if all of this is taken care of, we need to understand that different people process the same food differently. There are just too many variables. Many studies are done on a particular population, concentrated on a certain geographic location and supposedly consuming a particular type of diet. You can see how this hardly counts as scientific. ...