THURSDAY, Nov. 22 (HealthDay News) -- In this land and season of plenty, low-income and rural Americans continue to have difficulty finding healthy foods that are affordable, a new study finds.

One study shows that low-income Americans now would have to spend up to 70 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables to meet new national dietary guidelines for healthy eating.

And a second study found that in rural areas, convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and grocery stores -- even though the latter carry a much wider choice of affordable, healthy foods.

"I think it's a matter of raising awareness among health professionals -- and that could be dieticians or diabetes educators or even doctors -- that when we typically give people a recommendation to eat more fruits and vegetables, that is actually so much more complicated in a rural environment," said Angela Liese, study author of the second report and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

"There needs to be some thought given to how do you make these recommendations," Liese said.

Both studies appear in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, a themed issue on poverty and human development.

New dietary guidelines recommend that Americans eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, up from five servings in the previous guidelines.

Despite clear evidence that eating your vegetables can ward off heart disease, diabetes and cancer, only 40 percent of Americans meet the old guidelines and less than 10 percent meet the new guidelines, according to one 2006 study.

People with more money eat more fruits and vegetables than those with less money, research shows. In turn, poorer people also assume a greater disease burden relative to their wealthier counterparts.

"Eating more fruits and vegetables would reduce the disease burden. That's why we have new guidelines. The science is very solid on that," said Diana Cassady, lead author of the first study, on food pricing.

"What the profession needs to do is figure out not just the science and appropriate guidelines but how to help people meet those guidelines," said Cassady, an assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of California, Davis.

Cassady's study first calculated the average cost of a "market basket" of fruits and vegetables based on the 1995 Dietary Guidelines' Thrifty Food Plan. They then compared that cost to the cost of a basket based on the 2005 guidelines. The survey was carried out at 25 supermarkets in Sacramento and Los Angeles across three time periods, which allowed for seasonal variations in fresh produce prices.

There was some good news: the 2005 basket actually cost 4 percent less than the 1995 basket, the researchers found. Fruits and vegetables were less expensive in low-income areas and in bulk supermarkets, the researchers noted.

However, a low-income family of four would still have to spend a very large percentage of its food budget on fruits and vegetables in 2005 to meet national healthy-diet guidelines.

"Americans typically spend 15 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables but based on our price survey, low-income families would have to spend 40 to 70 percent of their budget on fruits and vegetables," Cassady said. "We really need to rethink what kind of educational campaigns, what kind of advice we need to give low-income families. The food stamp allocation could and probably should be increased and the government can do even better bringing in more farmers' markets and very low-cost sources of fruit and vegetables."

The other study was conducted in Orangeburg County, S.C., a rural county with a population of more than 91,000, 63 percent of whom are minority.

Some 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas but the "nutritional environment" of these areas remains under-explored, Liese's team said.

The researchers identified 77 stores in the county in 2004, of which only 16 percent were supermarkets and 10 percent were grocery stores. The remaining 74 percent were convenience stores.

There were seven stores per 100 square miles and eight stores per 10,000 county residents.

Healthy foods were more available at supermarkets and grocery stores. Low-fat/nonfat milk, apples, high-fiber bread, eggs and smoked turkey were available in 75 percent to 100 percent of supermarkets and grocery stores versus 4 percent to 29 percent of convenience stores. Just 28 percent of all stores sold any of the fruits or vegetables included in the survey -- apples, cucumbers, oranges and tomatoes. Convenience stores tended to charge more for items than did supermarkets.

"The relative availability of healthy versus unhealthy items is way out of whack, so people have much more availability of unhealthy foods," said Tom Farley, co-author of Prescription for a Healthy Nation and a professor of community health sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. "This suggests that the primary environmental reason why people have unhealthy diets is simple availability."

"There are certain things in public policy that we have the ability to influence and those we don't," Farley continued. "What goes on inside people's heads is tough to influence but we can influence what happens in stores with subsidies, financial incentives, guidelines and public pressure."

More information

Check out the latest federal dietary guidelines at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Many older adults may mistakenly believe that becoming less active is just a normal part of aging, but a new pilot program suggests it's easy to dispel such notions.

The program led to a 24 percent increase (about 2.5 miles more) in the amount of walking participants did each week, according to the leaders of a University of California, Los Angeles, study.

"We can teach older adults to get rid of those old beliefs that becoming sedentary is just a normal part of growing older. We can teach them that they can and should remain physically active at all ages," lead author Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, an assistant professor of geriatrics at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

The study included 46 sedentary adults, 65 and older, who attended four weekly, hour-long group sessions led by a health educator who used a technique called "attribution retraining" to teach the participants to reject the idea that getting older means becoming sedentary and to believe that they can continue being physically active well into old age.

Each attribution retraining session was followed by a one-hour exercise class that included strength, endurance and flexibility training.

During the study, the number of steps (as measured by electronic pedometers) taken by the participants per week increased from about 24,749 to 30,707 (a 24 percent increase) and their scores on an "age-expectation survey" rose by 30 percent. Their mental health-related quality of life improved, they reported fewer difficulties with daily activities, experienced less pain, had higher energy levels, and got improved sleep.

"The exciting part is that, to our knowledge, this attribution retraining component hasn't been tested in a physical activity intervention," Sarkisian said. "It's been very successful in educational interventions."

The study was published online by the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

More information

The American Geriatrics Society Foundation for Health in Aging has more about physical activity  .

TUESDAY, Nov. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Eating nitrite/nitrate-rich foods such as vegetables and cured meats may help improve the chances of surviving a heart attack and of recovering more quickly.

That's the finding of a preliminary study in the Nov. 12 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers found that mice fed extra nitrite and nitrate had 48 percent less cell death in the heart following a heart attack than mice fed a regular diet. Mice fed a low nitrite/nitrate diet had 59 percent greater cell death.

The study also found that 77 percent of mice fed extra nitrite survived a heart attack, compared with 58 percent of mice fed a low nitrite diet.

"This is a very significant finding, given the fact the simple components of our diet -- nitrite and nitrate -- that we have been taught to fear and restrict in food can now protect the heart from injury," lead author Nathan S. Bryan, a cardiovascular physiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, said in a prepared statement.

"Simple changes in our daily dietary habits such as eating nitrite and nitrate-rich foods such as fruits and vegetables and some meats in moderation can drastically improve outcome following a heart attack," said Bryan, who is also an assistant professor at the university's Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases.

He explained that nitrite forms nitric oxide gas during a heart attack, which reopens closed or clogged arteries and reduces the amount of permanent damage to the heart muscle.

"This paper provides the first demonstration of the consequences of changes in dietary nitrite and nitrate on nitric oxide biochemistry and the outcome of heart attack," Bryan said.

The next logical step in this line of research would be to determine if increasing nitrite/nitrate intake in patients with known cardiovascular risk factors would decrease the incidence and severity of heart attack and stroke, or enhance recovery, he said.

While some studies have linked nitrites/nitrates with cancer, Bryan said many of those study findings were based on weak epidemiological data.

More information

HeartHealthyWomen.org has explains the use of nitrate medicines  .

TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- There's more bad news about a high-fat diet -- it disrupts the body's 24-hour internal (circadian) clock, which regulates sleeping, waking, eating, as well as the daily rhythms of many metabolic functions, U.S. researchers say.

A team from Northwestern University and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) found that mice fed a high-fat diet gained weight and showed a sudden disruption in their circadian clock, eating extra calories when they should have been sleeping or resting.

The team also found that a high-fat diet caused changes in genes that encode the circadian clock in the brain and in peripheral tissues (such as fat), resulting in reduced expression of these genes.

The findings are published in the Nov. 7 issue of the journal Cell Metabolism.

"Our study was simple -- to determine if food itself can alter the clock," senior author Dr. Joe Bass, assistant professor of medicine and neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern and head of the division of endocrinology and metabolism at ENH, said in a prepared statement.

"The answer is, yes; alterations in feeding affect timing. We found that as an animal on a high-fat diet gains weight, it eats at the inappropriate time for its sleep/wake cycle -- all of the excess calories are consumed when the animal should be resting. For a human, that would be like raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night and binging on junk food," Bass said.

More information

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers advice on healthier eating.