The Healthiest (and Unhealthiest) Food on Domestic Airlines

Since 2012, Dr. Charles Platkin, editor of DietDetective.com and a professor of public health at Hunter College and CUNY, has been investigating in-flight snacks and meals found on major carriers across the U.S. and Canada.
This year’s survey revealed which airlines are improving, becoming less cooperative, and which ones continue to fly the healthiest food across the skies. The 2015 report also highlighted a concerning trend: after four years of investigating in-flight nutrition, average number of calories per item have risen from 360 to a whopping 400. Meanwhile, the number of choices continues to decrease.
In addition to calling out the best meals, snack boxes, and treats, Dr. Platkin gave airlines average calorie counts, and overview of food offering, exercise equivalents (one 350 calorie peanut butter-and-jelly half sandwich from Virgin America equals 76 minutes of walking). The final ranking, one star for the worst airline (lowest health rating and least cooperative in terms of providing information) and four and a half stars for the best.
Want to know the healthiest airline in the skies—and what you should order? Read on.
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No. 12: Frontier Air

Score: 1 Star
Frontier landed in the most shameful spot in the 2015 Airline Food Investigation, not only because of a complete lack of healthful foods (snacks ranged from gummy bears to Pringles and rice krispy treats) but also because of a complete lack of transparency: they airline refused to turn over nutritional info to Dr. Platkin of DietDetective.com.

No. 11: Spirit Airlines

Score: 1.25 Stars
It doesn’t realize this airline, which scored so poorly on our World’s Best survey for In-flight Service, received a “terrible” rating for its failure to cooperate and its unhealthy snacks. The chicken Cup Noodles received a surprising thumbs-up as your best bet—but not as a snack. Make this your meal and then go for an hour long walk around town after you disembark.

No. 10: Hawaiian Airlines

Score. 1.25 Stars
By handing over snack nutrition information, Hawaiian gained an extra quarter star over Frontier; unfortunately, their in-flight food (treats, snack boxes, and meals) didn’t perform well when analyzed by a nutritionist. Average meal calories were more than 950, while snack boxes had a whopping 417. The moral of the story? Pack your own meal, or pick the healthful options out of the Gluten-Free snack box (roasted chickpea snacks, 90 calories, and hummus, 67 calories).

No. 9: Allegiant Air

Score: 1.5 Stars
Unfortunately, Allegiant Air’s in-flight snack offerings have taken a turn for the high-calorie and high-sodium, whereas in 2014, they at least had a fruit and cheese plate diners could opt for. None of the options onboard this regional carrier impressed the dieticians, except for nuts (which, as we all know, need to be consumed in moderation). And DietDetective.com warned that travelers should not let their children near the Wingz Kids Snack Pack, which is loaded up with sugary jelly candies and peanut butter cracker sandwiches, among others.
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No. 8: Southwest Airlines

Score: 1.5 Stars
Southwest failed to provide nutritional information for the review—a major knock to the total score. Though the airline also provides little in terms of variety or nutritional value. If you need to snack in-flight (and you didn’t bring your own) opt for the dry-roasted peanuts: 70 calories. Fortunately, they’re free of charge.

No. 7: Alaska Airlines

Score: 2.5 Stars
Alaska Airlines, a favorite with domestic travelers, used to be eager to participate in the annual study. But this year, the airline opted out of providing info—and in-flight food calorie averages have soared from 444 to 537. The healthiest choice is the Mediterranean Tapas Picnic Pack, which is vegan and gluten-free: it contains olives, hummus almonds, and apricots, though it clocks in at 497 total calories. You’ll want to order that for breakfast, lunch, or dinner: not a snack to tide you over.

No. 6: American Airlines

Score: 2.75 Stars
America’s largest carrier has stepped-up its health food game this year, offering snacks with significantly lower calories than in years past.  Snacking is best limited to the hummus and chips (gluten-free, 147 calories) and for meals, the Chicken Cobb Salad is significantly healthier than its neighbors on the “Fresh and Light” menu. Even with the creamy ranch dressing and blue cheese crumbles, the salad has only 310 calories.

No. 5: United Airlines

Score: 3.25 Stars
DietDetective.com noticed that while the snacks and snack boxes are becoming increasingly less healthful, the meals are improving on this domestic carrier. Breakfast, in particular, is king. Order the Fresh Start Breakfast Selection, which offers fresh fruit, cheese, and zucchini bread for only 205 calories, or the organic steel-cut oatmeal, topped with cranberries, brown sugar, and butter. Skip the toppings if you can, but at only 340 calories, this will definitely help keep you full for the duration of the flight.

No. 4: Air Canada

Score: 3.25 Stars
Canada’s flag carrier (okay, not a domestic carrier but close, right?) was extremely cooperative with DietDetective.com. Calorie counts for meals are low, though nutrients are still lacking. Believe it or not, the nutritionists recommended the sushi, which is only available on flights 4 hours or longer departing from Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The combo of California, Spicy California, and Vegetable Salad Sushi Rolls are packed with good-for-you ingredients and have a satisfying 450 total calories. Other smart options include the Chicken Club Wrap (roasted chicken, turkey bacon, tomatoes) and the fat-free Greek yogurt with strawberry and granola.
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No. 3: JetBlue Airways

Score: 4 Stars
JetBlue has always performed well on this survey, though it got a hat tip for posting nutritional information for its meals online this year. Travelers flying on planes with Eat Up Café on offer should stick to yogurt with granola, the veggie platter, or the Kale and Quinoa Salad: 320 calories of protein-rich cannellini beans, filling quinoa, grape tomatoes, and kale and spring greens. While the snacks are not terrible (omega-3 mixed nuts, beef jerky) the free ones are—go figure—the least nutritious of the options. And just because they’re free doesn’t mean you should eat as many as you can stuff in your carry-on.

No. 2: Delta Air Lines

Score: 4 Stars
Thanks, in part, to a partnership with healthful Luvo, Delta consistently offers calorie information for the brand’s snacks. Peanuts (free and full of protein) are your best choice for in-flight snacking. Breakfast looks good on almost all flights: especially if you skip the muffin. Continental breakfast plates have Greek yogurt, granola, and seedless grapes, while the Luvo Fresh Breakfast Medley (transcontinental flights) comes with a hardboiled egg, chia ricotta, Fuji apple slices, and strawberries. There is also the organic chocolate and the multi-seed mini muffins, which you’re still better off without.

No. 1: Virgin America

Score: 4.5 Stars
Calories are dropping across the board, by more than 15 percent, helping the San Francisco-based airline snag the top spot this year.  In terms of snacks, the airline still got knocked for offering nothing particularly healthful (turkey jerky isn’t terrible, and the seasoned nuts are fine as long as you don’t binge on the whole 450-calorie package). A vegetable wrap with curried white bean hummus, arugula, carrots, tomatoes, and a side of fruit salad, as well as soba noodles with ginger chicken, bell peppers, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, and soy beans were high scorers, thanks to a cool calorie to protein ratio.

Source : health.com

How Expressing Gratitude Might Change Your Brain

A lot of so-called “positive psychology” can seem a bit flaky, especially if you’re the sort of person disinclined to respond well to an admonition to “look on the bright side.” But positive psychologists have published some interesting findings, and one of the more robust ones is that feeling grateful is very good for you. Time and again, studies have shown that performing simple gratitude exercises, like keeping a gratitude diary or writing letters of thanks, can bring a range of benefits, such as feelings of increased well-being and reduced depression, that often linger well after the exercises are finished.

Now a brain-scanning study in NeuroImage brings us a little closer to understanding why these exercises have these effects. The results suggest that even months after a simple, short gratitude writing task, people’s brains are still wired to feel extra thankful. The implication is that gratitude tasks work, at least in part, because they have a self-perpetuating nature: The more you practice gratitude, the more attuned you are to it and the more you can enjoy its psychological benefits.

The Indiana University researchers, led by Prathik Kini, recruited 43 people who were undertaking counseling sessions as a treatment for their anxiety or depression. Twenty-two of them were assigned to a gratitude intervention; for the first three sessions of their weekly counseling, this group spent 20 minutes writing a letter in which they expressed their gratitude to the recipient, an hour in total (whether they chose to send these letters was up to them). The other participants acted as a control group, so they simply attended their counseling as usual without performing the gratitude task.

Three months after their counseling was over, all of the participants completed a “Pay It Forward” gratitude task in a brain scanner. Each was “given” various amounts of money by imaginary benefactors whose names and photos appeared onscreen to add to the realism of the task. The researchers told the participants that each benefactor said that if the participant wanted to express their gratitude for the monetary gift, they’d appreciate it if the participant gave some or all of the donation to a named third party (again, identified by photo and name), or a named charity. The participants knew this was all an exercise, but were all told that one of the transactions, chosen later at random, would actually occur — that is, they’d actually receive the cash amount offered to them by one of the benefactors minus the amount they chose to pass on (and the money they opted to pass on really would go to charity).

The researchers found that, on average, the more money a participant gave away, and the stronger the feelings of gratitude they reported feeling, the more activity they exhibited in a range of brain areas in the frontal, parietal, and occipital regions. Interestingly, these neural-activity patterns appeared somewhat distinct from those that usually appear when brain-scan subjects complete tasks associated with emotions like empathy or thinking about other people’s points of view, which is consistent with the idea that gratitude is a unique emotion.

Most exciting, though, is the finding that the participants who’d completed the gratitude task months earlier not only reported feeling more gratefulness two weeks after the task than members of the control group, but also, months later, showed more gratitude-related brain activity in the scanner. The researchers described these “profound” and “long-lasting” neural effects as “particularly noteworthy,” and they highlighted that one of the main regions that showed this increased sensitivity — the “pregenual anterior cingulate,” which is known to be involved in predicting the effects of one’s own actions on other people — overlaps with a key brain region identified in the only previous study on the neurological footprint of gratitude.

This result suggests that the more practice you give your brain at feeling and expressing gratitude, the more it adapts to this mind-set — you could even think of your brain as having a sort of gratitude “muscle” that can be exercised and strengthened (not so different from various other qualities that can be cultivated through practice, of course). If this is right, the more of an effort you make to feel gratitude one day, the more the feeling will come to you spontaneously in the future. It also potentially helps explain another established finding, that gratitude can spiral: The more thankful we feel, the more likely we are to act pro-socially toward others, causingthem to feel grateful and setting up a beautiful virtuous cascade.

However, let’s not allow the warm glow of all this gratitude to melt our critical faculties. It’s important to realize this result is incredibly preliminary. For one thing, as the researchers openly acknowledge, they didn’t conduct a baseline brain scan of the participants before they started the Pay It Forward game, so it’s possible, though unlikely given that participants were randomly assigned to the gratitude and control groups, that the participants who performed the gratitude task simply had more neural sensitivity to gratitude already, not because they performed the gratitude task. Another thing: Members of the control group didn’t perform a comparison writing task, so we can’t know for sure that it was the act of writing a letter of thanks, as opposed to any kind of writing exercise, that led to increased neural sensitivity to gratitude.

Still, neurological investigations into gratitude are in their early days, and this research certainly gives us some intriguing clues as to how and why gratitude exercises are beneficial. For that we can be, well, grateful.

Source : health.com