Happiness Helps Stop Heart Disease

February 22, 2010

BBC News

US researchers monitored the health of 1,700 people over 10 years, finding the most anxious and depressed were at the highest risk of the disease.

They could not categorically prove happiness was protective, but said people should try to enjoy themselves.

But experts suggested the findings may be of limited use as an individual’s approach to life was often ingrained.

At the start of the study, which was published in the European Heart Journal, participants were assessed for emotions ranging from hostility and anxiousness to joy, enthusiasm and contentment.

They were given a rating on a five-point scale to score their level of positive emotions.

By the end of the analysis, some 145 had developed heart disease – fewer than one in 10.

But for each rise in the happiness scale there was a 22% lower risk of developing heart disease.
The team believes happier people may have better sleeping patterns, be less liable to suffer stress and be more able to move on from upsetting experiences – all of which can put physical strain on the body.

Lead researcher Dr Karina Davidson admitted more research was needed into the link, but said she would still recommend that people try to develop a more positive outlook.

She said all too often people just waited for their “two weeks of vacation to have fun” when instead they should seek enjoyment each day.

“If you enjoy reading novels, but never get around to it, commit to getting 15 minutes or so of reading in.

“If walking or listening to music improves your mood, get those activities in your schedule.

“Essentially spending a few minutes each day truly relaxed and enjoying yourself is certainly good for your mental health and may improve your physical health as well.”

It is not the first study to suggest there is a link between happiness and health.

But Ellen Mason, of the British Heart Foundation, suggested such an association may be of limited value anyway.

“We know that improving your mood isn’t always easy – so we don’t know if it’s possible to change our natural levels of positivity.”

Cardiologist Iain Simpson, of the British Cardiovascular Society, added: “Things like reducing cholesterol and diabetes are more important when it comes to reducing heart disease.

“But at the end of the day it heart disease is still the biggest killer in the UK so anything you can do to help should not be ignored.”

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Reclassifying Mental Disorders

February 15, 2010

The New York Times

By Benedict Carey

Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. And the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated would be sharply revised. These are a few of the changes proposed on Tuesday by doctors charged with revising psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.

The eagerly awaited revisions — to be published, if adopted, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due in 2013 — would be the first in a decade.

For months they have been the subject of intense speculation and lobbying by advocacy groups, and some proposed changes have already been widely discussed — including folding the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into a broader category, autism spectrum disorder.

But others, including a proposed alternative for bipolar disorder in many children, were unveiled on Tuesday. Experts said the recommendations, posted online at DSM5.org for public comment, could bring rapid change in several areas.

“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.

“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”

One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.

The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.

“The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. “Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment.”

Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.

In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said he and his colleagues on the panel working on the manual “wanted to come up with a diagnosis that captures the behavioral disturbance and mood upset, and hope the people contemplating a diagnosis of bipolar for these patients would think again.”

Experts gave the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the manual, predictably mixed reviews. Some were relieved that the task force working on the manual — which includes neurologists and psychologists as well as psychiatrists — had revised the previous version rather than trying to rewrite it.

Others criticized the authors, saying many diagnoses in the manual would still lack a rigorous scientific basis.

The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”

To more completely characterize all patients, the authors propose using measures of severity, from mild to severe, and ratings of symptoms, like anxiety, that are found as often with personality disorders as with depression.

“In the current version of the manual, people either meet the threshold by having a certain number of symptoms, or they don’t,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, the psychiatric association’s research director and, with Dr. David J. Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the co-chairman of the task force. “But often that doesn’t fit reality. Someone with schizophrenia might have symptoms of insomnia, of anxiety; these aren’t the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but they affect the patient’s life, and we’d like to have a standard way of measuring them.”

In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. Regier, Dr. Kupfer and several other members of the task force outlined their favored revisions. The task force favored making semantic changes that some psychiatrists have long argued for, trading the term “mental retardation” for “intellectual disability,” for instance, and “substance abuse” for “addiction.”

One of the most controversial proposals was to identify “risk syndromes,” that is, a risk of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or dementia. Studies of teenagers identified as at high risk of developing psychosis, for instance, find that 70 percent or more in fact do not come down with the disorder.

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The Future of Food – Is there a Future?

January 11, 2010

Telegraph

By Bee Wilson

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, (the film of which is out this weekend), the only food left is in cans. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a father and son scavenge for tinned goods. “Chili, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. The richness of a vanished world.”

Is this a vision of our not-too-distant future? Will we soon be stockpiling canned mandarin segments and clawing one another’s eyes out for the last tin of powdered milk in Tesco? It’s not a nice thought, but it’s one that food campaigners have been begging us to face up to for some time now. In this uncertain world, we can no longer take our food supply for granted. For years, academics such as Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, gave warning that we were “sleepwalking” into a future where our food security was likely to be seriously undermined, whether by natural disasters, rising fuel costs, climate change or the massive pressures placed on the global food system by a rising population. We shrugged it off, setting off in our cars for another wasteful trolley of ready-meals.
In 2008, American pundit Paul Roberts published The End of Food. Roberts argued that the “bullet” attacking the world’s food system could come from any number of sources: avian flu, “a sharp spike in the price of oil, a series of extreme weather conditions, an outbreak of some new plant disease”. Any one of these, and we’ll be scrabbling in the canned goods aisles. More than one at once, and there might be no canned good aisles left to scrabble in. In April 2008, when spiralling food prices led to riots around the globe, people in Haiti were reduced to eating mud cakes.

At least that level of food anxiety could never happen in Britain. Or could it? For years, the Government told us everything was fine. This was a land of plenty. Only four years ago, Gordon Brown’s Treasury assured us that food security in Britain was not an issue because we were a rich country, and could buy food from wherever we chose, as if the world were our personal larder. Now, finally, as The Sunday Telegraph reported last week, the Government has woken up to the problem. A new report launched on Tuesday entitled Food 2030 gives a warning that Britain can no longer afford to be complacent. “We need to think differently about food,” said Gordon Brown in his foreword to the report, produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Setting out a new food strategy for the next two decades, the report says that the industry needs to prepare for “sudden shocks” such as natural disasters or price spikes. Britain will need to produce more food, we are told, but will have to do so sustainably, “without damaging the air, soil, water and marine resources, biodiversity and climate that we all depend on”.

Here was a long overdue acknowledgment that farming is actually pretty essential. Unlike Gordon Brown, food is something we can’t do without. Labour has hardly been the countryside’s best friend. But at last, the “2030″ report tells us the obvious truth that “the natural environment and the economy are intrinsically linked”. The food and farming sector employs 3.6 million people. It is in everyone’s interests to see this sector thrive. Britain will never be 100 per cent self-sufficient: life would be miserable without the imported pleasures of coffee, tea or spice. But the more food we can produce locally, the more secure our food supply will be in the event of sudden blips in the supply chain. UK farming, states the Defra report, “should produce as much food as possible, as long as it is responsive to demand”.

Well said! Except that very little in the report suggests that this dying Labour government is going to take any serious steps to make the necessary renaissance in British farming come about. The Government wants us all to eat a “healthy and sustainable diet”. Yet instead of any real reform, we are directed to “an enhanced eat-well website”. There is a pointed lack of any mention of organic food. The report blethers about such things as the “milk roadmap” and the “fruit and vegetable task force”. But there is no serious new injection of either money or laws to aid farmers. Sustain, a lobbying alliance for better food and farming, has already attacked the report as “soft”, complaining that it constitutes a “series of minor tweaks to our fundamentally unsustainable food system”.

By raising the idea of improving self-sufficiency, the “2030″ report only brings home the extent to which we have moved in the opposite direction in recent years. The problem of food security goes far beyond this country, but even by the standards of our European neighbours, Britain performs badly.

Look at fruit. In 1963, we grew around 30 per cent of our own fruit; now it is closer to 5 per cent. Compare this with France, which in 1963 grew enough fruit to feed 90 per cent of the population and still produces enough to feed 80 per cent; or Italy which produced around 110 per cent of its fruit needs in 1963 and still does today. We may not have Italy’s sun-kissed orange groves, but we could still do better with the land we have. Over the past 13 years, our self-sufficiency in food overall has plummeted from 75 per cent to 60 per cent.

Take dairy. Our milk and cream are among the best in the world. Give a spoonful of British double cream to a Frenchman and he will swoon. Yet our dairy farmers are in a quandary, unable to sell their delicious product for more than it costs them to produce it. A litre of milk costs the consumer 70-80p, of which the farmer gets only 21-28p, the same as it costs to produce. No wonder countless dairy farmers leave the industry.

There is a similar predicament in the honey industry. There is huge demand for British honey, boosted partly by awareness of the worrying collapse in honeybee colonies. Yet in many shops, all native honey is gone by halfway through the year. Of the 400g of honey per person we consume every year, only 80g is British. The reason? We currently have a mere 300 professional beekeepers in this country, many of them nearing retirement age. It will only get worse unless something is done. When I attended a forum on the future of honeybees at No 10 Downing Street last September, many well-intentioned words were spoken about saving British bees and honey. Yet when I suggested to a Government advisor that they might think of subsidising honey farmers, he laughed nervously.

It is all too easy to attack the “2030″ report for its typical Brownian mix of hypocrisy and impotence. I wonder, though, how many of us really have the stomach for root-and-branch reforms of our farming system. The Conservatives have said that they want action on sustainable food “with a supermarket ombudsman and legislation to enforce honest labelling if the retailers won’t act”. But David Cameron has stopped short of spelling out what the “sustainable farming” he favours might really entail.

Biologist Colin Tudge, organiser of the Campaign for Real Farming, says that our politicians are “dangerously deluded” about farming. “Feeding people is easy,” says Tudge, but only if our farmers switch to a “maximum variety” system of agriculture which puts plants first and meat second. This would involve a complete redesign of agriculture.

The odds are, we won’t get the crisis measures we need for our food system until the crisis has already hit. So let’s hope that The Road is just a scary story, not a prophecy.

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Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity Killed Brittany Murphy – Could It Be Killing Millions More?

December 28, 2009

Natural News

By Mike Adams

The entire pharmaceutical industry is based on the idea that for whatever’s wrong with you, there’s a patented chemical pill that can make it better. Feeling some anxiety? There’s a pill for that. Have high blood pressure? There’s a pill for that, too. Suffering from sleepless nights? There’s yet another pill for that, too.

Importantly, modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry both believe there is no limit to how many prescription medications you can simultaneously take. If you have ten health problems, they’ve got ten different pills for you. And when those pills cause twenty different dangerous side effects, they’re ready for twenty more prescriptions for you to dutifully swallow.

This idea that health is achieved by taking prescription chemicals is ludicrous from the start. And yet it’s the foundation of the pharmaceutical industry. Take as many pills as you “need”, they insist. Don’t worry: They’re all FDA approved!

This is akin to believing that if it’s safe to drive 65mph in your truck, and it’s also safe to drive 65mph on your motorcycle, then if you load your motorcycle onto your truck, it’s now safe to drive 130mph.

The fatal flaw in the theory behind pharmaceuticals
As you already guessed, there’s a fatal flaw in this pharmaceutical approach to sick care: Pharmaceuticals have never been tested in combination with other drugs. So all the so-called “gold standard science” is absolutely worthless at knowing what might happen when half a dozen pharmaceutical drugs are combined in a patient’s body. Brittany Murphy may have been on as many as TEN drugs!

Despite the fact that no combination testing has ever been done on pharmaceuticals, they are regularly prescribed in combination. Obviously, this creates a whole new realm of unknown risk based on the way multiple drugs might chemically interact in the human body.

The more pharmaceuticals you take, the more dangerous they become. While one pharmaceutical chemical may at first seem harmless (even though just one drug can actually kill you), when you start adding a second, third, fourth and fifth prescription on top of that, you’re dealing with Acute Pharmaceutical Toxicity (APT) that’s never even been tested in clinical trials.

Pharmacists are trained to help people avoid the most toxic two-drug combinations, but they rarely have any real knowledge about what happens when you combine three, four, five or more drugs. No one does. The science has simply never been done on that question. It’s no wonder: With all the possible combinations and permutations of pharmaceutical toxicity, it would take literally trillions of clinical trials to test them all.

So this whole idea that you can take a drug to treat one problem, then take a second drug to treat a second problem, and a third to treat a third problem… this entire approach to health care, upon which modern medicine is largely based, is flawed from the start. In clinical trials, patients are tested for one drug at a time. Never five or six (or ten).

So all the clinical trials that have ever been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry need to be thrown out the window for patients who take more than one drug. And that’s just about everybody! Ask any senior citizen which prescription drugs they take, and most of them (the ones who can still remember, anyway) will rattle off a shockingly long list of toxic chemicals that have never been tested in combination. Just because one drug in isolation seems “safe” in one trial in no way means it’s going to be safe when combined with half a dozen other toxic chemicals taken by the patient at the same time.

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I can’t remember the last time I felt so good…

Hi Kevin,

I just wanted to write to you to express my gratitude for all of the wonderful information that you are working so hard to share with the public. I recently picked up a copy of your Natural Cures book and after implementing just a few of your suggestions for the past few months, I must say I can’t remember the last time I felt so good!

As a 28 year old, my health has not been terrible, but I have had a number of problems which someone of my age and fitness should not experience. In particular I’ve suffered with so many colds and flu I’ve lost count, tiredness and lack of motivation, anxiety and panic attacks, and problems sleeping. Since I read your book, I’ve begun to modify my lifestyle as you suggested. I purchased a good quality filtration system and started drinking enough water daily. I’ve also begun only eating organic food and dishes that I’ve prepared myself. I’ve added a lot more organic fruit and vegetables to my diet and have begun taking a vitamin D3 supplement, stopped wearing deodorant, and I also now take some Aloe Vera juice daily.

The results are just phenomenal! Tiredness – GONE! Lack of motivation – GONE! Anxiety and panic attacks – GONE! Sleeping problems – GONE! Body odor from sweat – GONE!

I’ll be implementing more of your suggestions as I go along and I can’t wait to see the results! I just wanted to extend my thanks, as I never would have come across this information if not for your hard work. In a world where it’s so easy to be influenced by the negativity and  fear mongering on the airwaves, it’s great to finally have a voice such as yours out there committed to EMPOWERING people with information.

In this regard, your radio show stands head and shoulders above the rest of the alternative media. It actually makes me feel GOOD to listen to it! Congratulations on a fantastic job, thanks so much, and all the best!

Pete Morris
London, England

Happy Daze – Antidepressant Drugs Keeping you in”Drug-Induced State’

November 23, 2009

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Contrary to the impression promoted by the psychiatric and drug industries, psychiatric drugs do not work by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain, Joanna Moncrieff of University College London wrote recently in an opinion piece for the BBC. Instead, such drugs merely put people into “drug-induced states” that make it harder for them to experience the symptoms of their illness.

“Magazines, newspapers, patients’ organizations and Internet sites have all publicized the idea that conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be treated by drugs that help to rectify an underlying brain problem … just like a diabetic needs to take insulin,” Moncrieff writes. “The trouble is, there is little justification for this view.”

Moncrieff notes that prior to the 1950s, mental health workers largely saw antidepressants as psychoactive drugs, primarily sedatives, that eased the symptoms of depression without addressing the underlying cause – much as over-the-counter cold drugs may stop a runny nose without affecting the cold virus. This view was eventually replaced by the idea that depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and other mental health conditions result from chemical imbalances in the brain, imbalances that can be corrected by the right “magic bullet.”

“However, this transformation was not based on any compelling evidence,” she says.

Moncrieff holds to the older view, that “drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis. They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not.”

Antipsychotics, she notes, mute people’s emotions and thoughts, which can reduce the effects of psychosis as a side effect. Anti-anxiety drugs are central-nervous system depressants, like alcohol.

“If you told people that we have no idea what is going on in their brain, but that they could take a drug that would make them feel different and might help to suppress their thoughts and feelings, then many people might choose to avoid taking drugs if they could,” she writes. “People need to make up their own minds.”

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Recent Mammography Findings Under Fire

November 20, 2009

The Wall Street Journal

By Shirley S. Wang, Jonathan D. Rockoff and Barbara Martinez

The federally funded task force that loosened guidelines for breast-cancer screening this week clarified its position Thursday, in response to an intense backlash generated by its new recommendations.

Seeking to dispel confusion over some aspects of the new guidelines, task-force members said they never meant to convey that women in their 40s shouldn’t get mammograms, nor that they sought to discourage women from examining their breasts for signs of cancer.

Diana Petitti, a professor in biomedical informatics at Arizona State University who is vice-chairwoman of the panel — the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — said she felt its conclusions were misinterpreted.

The task force is not against women having mammograms in their 40s,” Dr. Petitti said in an interview. Instead, she said, it is in favor of women in that age range deciding on their own, after consulting with their doctors, whether to undergo regular screenings.

Similarly, the task force merely intended to signal that primary-care physicians no longer need to teach women how to conduct self-examinations because of a lack of evidence that such outreach is effective. But it didn’t mean to deter women from the practice, which can sometimes lead to the early detection of cancerous lumps.

Dr. Petitti and other panel members expressed surprise at the uproar caused by their paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, while conceding they could have handled the message better. “We probably, in retrospect, could have been more clear,” Dr. Petitti said.

The new guidelines reversed a longstanding recommendation that women in their 40s automatically undergo an annual mammogram, an X-ray used to detect breast cancers, and stated that women aged 50 to 74 could reduce the frequency of such screenings to once every two years, from once a year.

Critics of the new guidelines have complained that the task force consists entirely of primary-care experts rather than oncologists, and that the panel’s decision may lead to a decline in coverage of mammography among health insurers for women in their 40s. Some critics say the new guidelines may lead to breast-cancer deaths among women in their 40s who forgo screening.

In reaching its conclusions, task-force members said they relied on large quantities of research published since 2002. They weighed the benefits of frequent screening against the harms of false positives, such as anxiety and unnecessary additional tests and biopsies.

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Sleeping With the Lights off Fights Depression

November 09, 2009

Natural News

By S.L. Baker

Do you fall asleep while reading, with a lamp still turned on? Doze off with the glow of a television in your bedroom? Perhaps you turn off the lights when you go to bed. But think about it: is your room really totally dark? Maybe there’s a light from a clock radio or night light or perhaps street lights peek through the bedroom blinds. This not-completely-dark room might not keep you awake but it could lead to symptoms of depression. That’s the conclusion of a new study presented recently in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and slated for publication in the December 28, 2009, issue of the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

The Ohio State University research involved 24 male laboratory mice. Half were housed in light for 16 hours a day and darkness for 8 hours, while the others lived in a lighted area 24 hours a day. Half of each group of lab animals had opaque tubes in their cages where they could escape the light at any time. The other half had tubes that were clear and did not offer any respite from the light.

After three weeks, the researchers used a series of tests to measure depression and anxiety in the rodents (including several tests used by drug companies to test anti-depressive and anti-anxiety drugs on animals before they are tried on people). For example, mice usually like to drink sugar-laced water. But if they have symptoms of depression, they don’t drink as much. Researchers assume this is because they don’t get the pleasure they would normally get from the sweet water due to depressive symptoms. In all the tests, the mice who had to live and sleep in constant light with no chance of spending time in darkness showed more depressive-like symptoms than the animals with normal light-dark cycles.

“The ability to escape light seemed to quell the depressive effects,” Laura Fonken, lead author of the study and a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State University, said in a statement to the media. “But constant light with no chance of escape increased depressive symptoms.”

The scientists concluded that the use of artificial light at night may have harmful effects on human health. “This is important for people who work night shifts, and for children and others who watch TV late into the night, disrupting their usual light-dark cycle,” Fonken said.

The researchers also added that the implications could impact healthcare, too. Bright lights are kept on all night long in most intensive care units (ICUs) and that could increase health problems of these patients. NaturalNews previously reported on research showing that artificial light may disrupt premature infants’ biological clocks and result in depression in later life(http://www.naturalnews.com/020070_h…).

Editor’s note: NaturalNews is opposed to the use of animals in medical experiments that expose them to harm. We present these findings in protest of the way in which they were acquired.

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Pets Make You Healthy?

October 22, 2009

Natural News

By S. L. Baker

Would you like to lower your blood pressure to a healthier level? Know you should exercise but need some encouragement? Bothered by anxiety or depression? Lonely? Researchers say there’s a prescription for all these problems and it has nothing to do with a side effect-laden drug. Instead the “miracle treatment” is owning a pet.

The University of Missouri (MU) College of Veterinary Medicine Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction (ReCHAI) is hosting the International Society for Anthrozoology and Human-Animal Interaction Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, this month to discuss the mounting evidence that living with a furry, four-legged friend has numerous health and life-enhancing advantages.

“Pets are of great importance to people, especially during hard economic times. Pets provide unconditional love and acceptance and may be part of answers to societal problems, such as inactivity and obesity,” Rebecca Johnson, associate professor in the MU Sinclair School of Nursing, the College of Veterinary Medicine and director of ReCHAI, said in a statement to the media. “Research in this field is providing new evidence on the positive impact pets have in our lives.”

For example, in 2008, ReCHAI sponsored the “Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound and Stay Fit for Seniors” program. More than just a recreational activity with a cute name, this was a study which involved serious research into elders and the impact of exercising with dogs. One group of older adults was matched with shelter dogs while another group of older adults walked regularly with human companions. For about three months, the research participants were asked to walk on an outdoor trail for one hour, five times a week. At the end of 12 weeks, the scientists documented improvements in the older adults’ activity levels.

According to Dr. Johnson, those who walked with dogs improved their walking capabilities by 28 percent. “They had more confidence walking on the trail, and they increased their speed. The older people who walked with humans only had a four percent increase in their walking capabilities,” she said in the press statement. “The human walking buddies tended to discourage each other and used excuses such as the weather being too hot.”

Other research published last year in the Journal of Aging and Health by University of Portsmouth researchers in the United Kingdom concluded that interaction between humans and dogs enhanced the physical and psychological health of elders. And psychologists at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, reported in spring of 2009 that companion animals appear to help people diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Their study, published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, documented that people suffering from poor health due to CFS had an improved quality of life if they had cats or dogs as pets.

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Low Self-Esteem Leads to Obesity

September 11, 2009

BBC News

Children with self-esteem problems are more likely to be obese as adults, a research team has found.

A study of 6,500 participants in the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study found that 10-year-olds with lower self esteem tended to be fatter as adults.

The affect was particularly true for girls, researchers from King’s College London reported.

One obesity expert said the results highlighted that early intervention was key to tackling obesity.

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