Michael Phelps Diet Dont Try It at Home

Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besides grabbing five gold medals at the Beijing Olympics so far, making him the winningest Olympic athlete ever, he’s got to be setting new marks on the chow line.

A New York Post account of Phelps’s… wait for it… 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, gave us a stomachache. Could one human being really consume that much and still be in Phelps’s shape? And could this possibly be healthy for Phelps, even considering his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week exercise regimen?

Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

Does a diet like this make sense even for a calorie-incinerating human swimming machine? We checked in with Mark Klion, a sports medicine doc and orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He reminded us that the eating game all comes down to basic math.

If you eat fewer calories than you burn exercising, you lose weight. But an athlete like Phelps, who exercises up a storm, has to worry about eating enough to replenish the scads of calories he’s burned. If he doesn’t, Klion explains, his “body won’t recover, the muscles will not recover, there will not be adequate energy stored for him to compete in his next event.”

But what about the choice of foods? All those eggs and ham and cheese can’t possibly be good for him, can they? Says Klion, “I think for him, because of his caloric demands, he can probably eat whatever he wants to.” And besides, Klion says, if you’ve got to eat that much, it better be enjoyable, or you won’t be able to keep up. Phelps might not be so eager to shovel down a pound of tofu in a sitting, Klion points out.

Still, Klion cautions that he knows plenty of athletes who’ve been training for marathons and have gained weight because they thought they could eat whatever they wanted. So it really does take some planning. Some resources on the Web might help, such as this calorie-use chart from the American Heart Association and a calorie calculator from Runner’s World magazine. This calculator from the Calorie Control Council includes a bunch of different activities, from dusting to playing ice hockey.

But these kinds of calculators don’t really apply to a someone like Phelps, who exercises way more vigorously than the typical person, says Kathleen Laquale, an athletic trainer and nutritionist who teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Even by athletic standards, Phelps is in his own league. Laquale says cyclists in the Tour de France commonly consume a paltry 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day.

How to Boost Your Brain Power

Did you know that you can actually increase your IQ and reverse the aging process that slows down your brain? Health magazine contributor Dr. Roshini Raj shares tips on how to keep your brain sharp with the Today show’s Meredith Vieira on July 25.

Roshini Raj, MD, a Health magazine contributor and part of the magazine’s Health Expert Network, is board-certified in gastroenterology and internal medicine with degrees from the New York University School of Medicine and Harvard University. Currently Dr. Raj is an attending physician at NYU Medical Center’s Tisch Hospital in New York City. She also serves as an assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine, and she has a special interest in women’s health and cancer screening. She has published several research articles on colon cancer screening.

Dr. Raj has discussed health topics on numerous television outlets, including NBC’s Today show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, Fox News, and Discovery Health. She has been quoted in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Fitness on the state of health care and other health news of the day. Dr. Raj is often called upon to explain and demystify complicated health topics.

Drugmakers and Guess How Much Those Lawsuits Cost

Propose an accounting rule that has to do with litigation costs, and you’re sure to get drug companies’ attention. Six major drugmakers protested a Financial Accounting Standards Board proposal to require companies to estimate their exposure to potential losses from ongoing litigation.

Among other things, the proposal says that when a complaint doesn’t seek a specific amount of damages, the companies should provide a “best estimate of the maximum possible exposure to loss.” Currently, companies only have to disclose estimated costs when they believe they’ll probably lose a case, Dow Jones Newswires explains.

The companies, which say they’ve collectively “defended hundreds of thousands of product liability claims” in the past 10 years,
argue that making broader estimates would be really, really hard. Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Wyeth all signed the letter, which you can read here.

“Mass torts are characterized by explosive growth, rapid change, a dearth of information about individual plaintiffs, unpredictable procedural and substantive rulings, and wildly divergent verdicts on quite similar facts,” they write. “The defendant’s ‘best estimate’ of the ‘exposure to loss’ is likely to be unreliable, subject to constant change, and of little or no value to financial statement users.”

The letter reads like a collective venting session about the industry’s legal headaches. To demonstrate the fluid and unpredictable nature of litigation costs, they mention some of the plaintiffs bar’s greatest hits, from Merck’s Vioxx to Wyeth’s legal nightmare over the diet-drug cocktail fen-phen.

For Merck, there was a particularly crazy Vioxx case in Texas. “That one case ranged in ‘value’ from over $250 million at the time of the verdict to its current value of $0 [after being overturned] and is but one of many tens of thousands of similar cases,” the drugmakers write.

Omega 6

Most of us already know that the intake of omega-6 fatty acids in the American diet has gone overboard, much at the expense of the omega-3 fraction. This occurred as a result of the misguided advice of the 1970s and 1980s to eat polyunsaturated oils like corn, sunflower, and safflower, because of their presumed cholesterol-reducing properties compared to saturated fats. However, more recent examinations of this advice have suggested that the omega-6 fraction of oils present in polyunsaturated oils may amplify arachidonic acid and other inflammatory patterns despite the reduction in cholesterol (total and LDL).

Dr. Artemis Simopoulos of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health in Washington, D.C. has written extensively on the role of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in diet.

In a review entitled The Importance of the Omega-6/Omega-3 Fatty Acid Ratio in Cadiovacular Disease and Other Chronic Disease , Dr. Simopoulos collects the following comparison of omega-6 to omega-3 ratios from various populations:


Paleolithic humans 0.79
Greece (prior to 1960) 1.00-2.00
Current Japan 4.00
Current India, rural 5-6.1
Current United Kindom and northern Europe 15.00
Current United States 16.74
Current India, urban 38-50

(The numbers refer to the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 intake.)


If we believe the observations of Dr. Loren Cordain and others, while paleolithic man died of trauma and infectious diseases, they did not die of heart disease. Paleolithic human intake of omega-3 exceeded that of omega-6.

Likewise, the traditionally low cardiac event regions of the world like Japan and Greece have less omega-3 intake than Paleolithic man, but still many times more than the U.S. and U.K.

Worst of all with an enormous preponderance of omega-6 over omega-3 are urban Indians, who experience among the highest rates of heart disease in the world.

Just for perspective, let's assume you eat an 1800 calorie per day diet, of which 30% of calories come from fat. This would amount to 540 calories per day from fat. With 9 calories per gram of fat, this means that there are 60 grams, or 60,000 mg, of fat in your diet per day.

Paleolithic man has been found to have existed on a diet consisting of 21% of calories from fats. Again assuming an 1800 calorie per day diet, that comes to 42 grams of fat per day (42,000 mg).

If we were to try to recreate the Paleolithic fat composition of diet, we would ingest 21,000 mg of omega-3 fatty acids (EPA, DHA, linolenic acid) per day. Even recreating a Japanese experience with a 4:1 ratio, it would mean 8400 mg of omega-3 per day. (Curiously, this does not agree with all estimates of Japanese intake of omega-3s.)

No matter how you look at it, cultures with lower rates of cardiovascular disease take in greater--much greater--quantities of omega-3 fatty acids.

So don't complain about your six fish oil capsules (usually containing 6000 mg of total oil, 1800 mg omega-3s)!

Effective Natural Remedies to Treat Earache

Earache is a common medical problem in children as well as in adults. Often, earache becomes the cause of pain and inflammation of the outer part of the ear called pinna or earhole. Build-up of fluid and pressure behind eardrum in the middle ear often cause ear pain in children. Many people consider that the ear pain in children or infants is because of some infection but you must keep in mind that ear pain is not always from some infection.

There may be some other causes including retention of water, soap or shampoo from bathing, ear canal irritation from some object like cotton swabs etc. There are some traditional earache treatments like warm, damp compresses. Similarly, herbal extract ear drops are often recommended for the earache treatment.

There are also many homemade remedies that can be very handy to get instant relief from earache. Some of them are as follow.

1. Wrap a hot water bottle in a towel and make a comforting pillow of it for your aching ear and you will soon realize a soothing effect.
2. Wrap a clove of garlic in some cotton, make cotton ball of it and then dip this ball in alcohol .After squeezing the excess alcohol put the ball in your aching ear for some time and the pain will begin to vanish from your ear.
3. Take few drops of olive oil in a spoon and warm it for some time.Then, cool down the oil and put two to three drops in both ears by using a dropper. Soon you will realize that there was no pain in your ear.
4. You can also apply or massage the aching ear with mild warm olive oil.
5. Immerse some chamomile flowers in hot boiling water for ten to fifteen minutes.  Squeeze the flowers to take out the water and apply these hot flowers on your aching year.
6. A tested home remedy for earache is to put some drops of hydrogen peroxide in the aching ear.
7. You can also get rid of your pain by putting two drops of holy basil leaves’ juice in the aching ear.
8. Crush a garlic clove, wrap it in kitchen towel and squeeze the juice into aching ear. Soon you will be free of pain.
9. You can also use warm onion juice to vanish away pain in just few moments. This one is considered a tested homemade remedy for earache.
10. Ajwain oil serves as a natural eardrop and provides instant relief fro ear pain. This is a simple homemade remedy that requires only one ingredient.

Different homemade remedies are becoming more and more popular with every passing day. The good thing about these remedies is that you can start them from your kitchen or from your garden. By using these remedies, you can treat yourself with 100% natural substances that don’t cause any side effect. However, you must keep one thing in mind that before trying any of these remedies, you must consult your doctor first.