The Natural Health Blog

As we detailed in our previous installment, More details on moving to a Google account, if you used the MyBrand service at feedburner.com — our service that allows you to use a custom domain with your feed — you must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 "page not found" error.

It's important to note that it is not enough to just sign in with a Google account and request to move your account if you use MyBrand. Even if your MyBrand-ed URLs have continued to work after you have completed your move, they will cease to work on March 16, 2009 if you have not changed your DNS CNAME.

If you plan to continue to use MyBrand, you can find detailed instructions for changing your CNAME when you are signed into FeedBurner in the My Account > MyBrand section. If you haven't already moved from feedburner.com to a Google Account, please sign in to your account and follow the guided steps to complete this move. Here's a quick preview of those steps (click to zoom in):

(In the image above, you'll see the phrase {YOUR_CODE} in the instructions. This is replaced by an address that is specific to your Google Account available on the aforementioned MyBrand page; you need to use that address to update MyBrand correctly.)

If you have any questions about this transfer process, please refer to the FeedBurner Help Center entry “Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ” for additional details.

Many of you have asked for a way to preview ads before they appear in your feed posts. That feature is now available.

The Ad Review Center (ARC) will give you more transparency and control by enabling you to approve or disapprove placement targeted ad creatives before they appear in your posts.

To get started with this tool, please login to your AdSense account. You will find ARC in the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ section located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. If you are using your AdSense account for other products- content, mobile, or video- please make sure to select the Client-ID starting with ca-feed-pub.

In order to maximize your revenue, we suggest that you keep the default setting to, ‘Run ads immediately.’ This will allow ads to run without delay while still allowing you to login and review the ads at a later time. By selecting the ‘Hold ads’ option, you could potentially decrease your revenue. This option will hold ads from displaying for 24 hours, thus limiting the number of advertisers' driving up your auction price.

You will then have the ability to approve or block a specific ad or advertiser in general. These settings can be changed at any time. Please keep in mind that blocking ads will remove them from the auction and could impact your revenue.

For more information about using the Ad Review Center, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Barbara Bochner, Google Publisher Solutions Team

One particularly enticing aspect of low-carbohydrate dieting is that you can lose weight. The down side of it is, unless you are careful, you can end up gaining it all back - plus more. While low-carbohydrate diets do help you to lose weight, it's worth mentioning that it also takes some discipline to follow the daily program and keep the weight off. Unfortunately, many low-carb diet programs fail to include instructions for the necessary lifestyle changes that must be put into place for long-term success. Additionally, low-carb diets can literally rob the body of certain nutrients which are beneficial in the overall reduction of other potential health problems. Know What You Are Giving Up.

Carbohydrates are typically found in fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains (whole wheat breads, pasta and brown rice). These carbohydrates help to reduce the risk of heart disease, hypertension, cancer, diabetes and gastrointestinal disorders. To date, there is no evidence that high saturated fat, high protein, low-carb diets are healthy if consumed over a lifetime.

Why Low-Carb Diets Work So Well.

Low-carb diets, as with all diets, work because people eat fewer calories while following them. On the low-carb diet, calories are lower because you are reducing or eliminating sugars, sweets, starches, fruits and vegetables. If at the same time, you substitute high protein and fat foods, which are filling, you will feel fuller and eat less.

On any low-carb diet a considerable amount of the weight lost is water weight. Here's how it happens. Your body stores carbohydrates in muscles and the liver. Carbs are stored with 3 parts water to 1 part carbohydrate. If you stop eating carbohydrates the body uses up its existing carbohydrate reserve to maintain your blood sugar. This releases lots of water. That is the initial "weight loss" that you experience on a low-carb diet.

What Are Some Benefits of Low Carb Dieting?

Weight loss for the overweight helps to improve overall health in many ways. It can reduce blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels. It can have positive effects on self-esteem and body image. It can be a great motivator for anyone who has had difficulty losing weight following other diets.

The Low-Carb Food Craze: Pay More - Lose More?

Don't be fooled. These foods can have plenty of calories and are expensive too. In the last few years, more than 1,000 products labeled "low-carb" have made their way to grocery shelves. To reduce the carbs, most products substitute soy flour or cellulose (not unlike wood pulp) for refined flour. They add artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols, which have half to one-third the calories of sugar, instead of sugar... And taste is definitely not their biggest selling point.

Low-Carb Dieting Drawbacks.

Most people can only follow a low-carb diet for so long before they start craving some sweets or starches. The problem is that when you start eating these foods again you will begin to retain water and this will appears on the scale as "weight gain." If you have been on a low-carb diet and want to work back to a diet that includes complex carbohydrate begin by slowly adding small portions of grains into your diet. (A slice of bread or 1/2 cup rice or potatoes.) Expect to see a few pounds of water weight gain but remember - it's not fat weight!

Cut The "Junk Foods" And Drop The Weight!

You don't have to follow a special low-carb diet to lose weight. Eating fewer high calorie and high fat foods and increasing your exercise can also result in successful weight loss. I know, you've heard that before, but it really is true.

The average man eats about 2600 calories a day, the average women about 1900. A pound of fat a week can be lost by reducing your intake by 500 calories a day. One 20 ounce can of regular Coke contains 250 calories and a Snickers candy bar contains 280 calories. Cutting down on sweets can produce weight loss without sacrificing overall nutrition. Add a mile or two walk, or jog, several days a week (100-200 calories burned) and you are well on your way to weight loss. Cutting the "junk foods" can be a strategy in itself. At the same time, eat more fruits, vegetables and salads. Try filling up without "junking up" and your chances of successful weight loss will increase dramatically.

Many of you have already moved from a feedburner.com account to a Google Account. For those who have not yet made the move, there seems to be some confusion on the process and exactly what will happen, or not happen, by certain dates. We want this post to help clear up any confusion.

• The FeedBurner functionality of analyzing, optimizing, publicizing, and monetizing your feeds is not being shut down or reduced in any way. We have made some strategic decisions to remove some of our functionality that is not directly relevant to managing feeds for reasons we hope will become apparent over time. Names may change, things may move around, but in general our plan is to provide a lot more functionality that makes sense in 2009, and beyond, for all publishers. Learn more here.



• On February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account, unless you use MyBrand. Technically, this means that all traffic will now be served out of our Google data centers, and there will still be a way to move your account that will be in place indefinitely.



• If you used MyBrand at www.feedburner.com, you absolutely must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 error. If you use MyBrand and have not moved, you should have already received an email from us with detailed instructions. If, for some reason, you have changed the email address associated with your FeedBurner account, you will receive another message once you have finished the move process to the email address associated with your Google Account.

From a features perspective, this means the work to transition publishers to Google will be complete, and we plan to focus all of our resources on building new and exciting publisher tools that are integrated with other Google products, and to continue improving the monetization potential of AdSense for feeds. We can't wait for you to see some of the things we have in store, but if for some reason you do not want to migrate to a Google account, you can still take your feeds with you.

Posted by Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe, on behalf of the AdSense for Feeds/FeedBurner Team

People who drink diet soft drinks don't lose weight. In fact, they gain weight, per recent studies. The findings come from eight years of data collected by Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio.

It is not surprising that total soft drink use was linked to overweight and obesity. However, the surprise was that the risk of obesity was even higher among people who drank only diet soft drinks. In fact, when the researchers took a closer look at their data, they found that nearly all the obesity risk from soft drinks came from diet sodas.

"There was a 41 percent increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day," Fowler says.

More Diet Drinks, More Weight Gain

Fowler's team looked at seven to eight years of data on 1,550 Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white Americans aged 25 to 64. Of the 622 study participants who were of normal weight at the beginning of the study, about a third became overweight or obese.

For regular soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:
· 26 percent for up to 1/2 can each day
· 30.4 percent for 1/2 to one can each day
· 32.8 percent for 1 to 2 cans each day
· 47.2 percent for more than 2 cans each day.

For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:
· 36.5 percent for up to 1/2 can each day
· 37.5 percent for 1/2 to one can each day
· 54.5 percent for 1 to 2 cans each day
· 57.1 percent for more than 2 cans each day.

For each can of diet soft drink consumed each day, a person's risk of obesity went up 41 percent.

A study of this kind does not prove that diet soda causes obesity. More likely, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity. One possible part of the explanation is that people who see they are beginning to gain weight may be more likely to switch from regular to diet soda. But despite their switching, their weight may continue to grow for other reasons. So diet soft drink use is a marker for overweight and obesity.

Why?

Take a look at what your eating, not just what you are drinking. Have you ever noticed people who order the biggest burger and fries and then choose a diet soda?
Soft drinks by themselves are not the root of America's obesity problem. If you don't do anything else but switch to a diet soft drink, you are not going to lose weight.

Perhaps our bodies are smarter than we think. People think they can fool the body, but the body isn’t fooled. If you are not giving your body the calories you promised it, your body will retaliate by wanting more calories. Some studies suggest that diet soft drinks stimulate appetite.

The Theories:

The Confusion Factor: When you use artificial sweeteners, you and your brain become confused about the calorie content of the food you eat. You may actually find yourself eating more in an effort to satisfy an internal urge, and this urge may be related to the assumed “fact” that the sweet dose you just drank didn’t have that many calories, so neither does this cinnamon roll. Actually, before artificial sweeteners, our bodies were pretty good at relating calorie content to food based on the sweetness. This development of internal calorie estimating occurs in childhood. Early use of artificial sweeteners could cause over ingesting of sweet foods later in life, and therefore struggles with weight.

The Sugar Trap: The body is very complicated and has a huge number of inter-related, synergistic processes that respond to stimuli. It has learned to begin various body processes when something sweet is detected. The digestive system is prepared to receive a certain type of fuel, but when you ingest artificial sweeteners, our system gets confused and our internal messengers start “asking” for food. This is the trap. You end up ingesting the calories anyway.

Caffeine and Dehydration: Many of the artificially sweetened drinks we consume contain caffeine. Caffeine is a diuretic, which means it dehydrates you by causing your body to lose water. When you are dehydrated, your body’s metabolism slows down. This means that your body functions on fewer calories, and the rest is stored as fat. As you could imagine, this will lead to weight gain, not loss.

The Bottom Line:

Avoid artificial sweeteners and diet sodas. Replace artificially sweetened beverages with water to best fuel your body and assist in weight loss. If you crave something sweet to drink, opt for 100% fruit juice.