Many Overweight Americans Uninterested in Healthy Lifestyle
January 21,2010
Mail Online
By Daily Mail Reporter
Television chef Jamie Oliver was reduced to tears during his latest efforts to convert an Amercian community to healthy eating.
The usually upbeat good food crusader broke down after he met serious resistance while shooting scenes for his new series, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.
More than half the residents of the country’s fattest city, Huntington, West Virginia, are obese but most were blatantly uninterested in the chef’s advice.
He sobbed as he said: ‘They don’t understand me. They don’t know why I’m here.
He felt so alone and thought at times of packing the whole thing in.’
Some members of the local press warned him to steer clear of their community.
One radio presenter blasted: ‘We don’t want to sit around and eat lettuce all day.
A production source told the Sun: ‘His tears was the lowest we’ve ever seen Jamie.
‘He is normally so upbeat but the scale of this challenge got to him. Everywhere he turned, he was face with obstacles.
‘People were outwardly hostile to some of the ideas he put forward.
Click here to read full report
New Book Features 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health
January 12, 2009
NaturalNews
by Mike Adams
On the heels of her popular book, 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health, Dr. Hyla Cass, M.D. has just launched her new 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health Audio Course, featuring 9 audio CDs, her “8 Weeks” book and an accompanying workbook.
It’s all about teaching women how to restore their energy, enhance their well-being and reclaim their health using all-natural, doctor-approved health strategies.
In this new audio course, Dr. Hyla Cass guides you step-by-step through things you need to know to transform your health starting right now. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll learn in this remarkable new audio course:
• The 10 most important areas of women’s health – how to score yourself across these 10 areas to discover where you can make the most improvements in the shortest time.
• Step-by-step instructions for monitoring your current health status (and adjusting your results as needed).
• How to teach yourself, perhaps for the first, correct breathing and circulation (with potentially huge health benefits).
• How to pinpoint thyroid and adrenal problems using the detailed questionnaire in the book (and then learn how to heal these problems from the inside out).
• What to do about digestive imbalances, yeast infections, Candida and other digestive tract challenges.
• What unexplained migraine headaches might really mean (and how to resolve the core problems naturally and safely).
• How to take advantage of detailed diagnostic lab tests offered by conventional medicine to pinpoint health challenges (and then begin healing them naturally).
• Learn how to interpret kidney test results, liver tests results, blood sugar tests and many others, all in a “holistic” way that goes way beyond mere symptomatic treatment. (You’ll combine the best of western medicine and natural medicine!)
• What you need to know about breast health and breast exams (that most women never learn).
• How to take all the information you’ve gathered and discover the pattern of root causes that reveal your best course of action for healing (an amazing feature of this book).
• Everything you need to know about food – tailored to women’s health! Includes guidance on protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats, dietary habits, phytonutrients, dealing with cravings and much more.
• How to intelligently choose — and use — nutritional supplements specifically to address and enhance women’s health.
• How to overcome and heal food addictions in a safe, intelligent way that leads to healthy lifelong habits.
• The importance of detoxification: Where to begin, how to proceed with a detox, and things to watch out for during the experience (this information can save you from unnecessary suffering).
• How to conquer an aspartame addiction. How to quit smoking for good. How to end addictions to caffeine and sugar. Amazing information on this topic, including specific recommendations for targeted supplements that enhance the effectiveness of your efforts.
• How to exercise the right way, specifically for women. Ways to use stress reduction, Pilates, yoga and other gentle movement modalities to vastly increase your total body health.
Exercise Guards White Blood Cells Against Aging
December 1, 2009
ABC News
by Lauren Cox
People who run everyday do it to keep their hearts strong, spirits up and waistlines trim, but how many could guess that sweating it out on the treadmill may actually fight aging?
A new study in the journal Circulation, shows that vigorous exercise may be inducing a natural anti-aging effect that goes right down to our DNA.
“People who exercise have better health and live longer, however the mechanisms are not completely understood,” said Dr. Ulrich Laufs, lead author of the new study and researcher at the University of Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany “You’d be amazed at how little we know about the mechanism of exercise on the cellular level.”
In his small study of 104 people, Laufs and colleagues found that 50-year-old adults who had exercised vigorously over a lifetime — such as marathon runners or endurance athletes — appeared biologically younger –sometimes decades younger– than healthy people the same age who were not active.
The American College of Sports Medicine and other medical institutions agree that exercising can prolong life by protecting against diseases.
But research has not been able to point to an actual anti-aging effect in exercise, or detail exactly how exercise protects against some diseases even among people who are otherwise thin and healthy.
Exercise a Fountain of Youth, or Just Fountain of Health?
“As most people grow older they develop increase likelihood of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. People who exercise regularly have been shown to have a lower rate of developing those chronic diseases,” explained Wojtek J. Chodzko-Zajko, a member of the American College of Sports Medicine and head of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“But individuals differ widely in how they age. I think we’re a long way from understanding all of it,” he said.
Laufs and his colleagues decided to tackle the problem by studying exercise’s chemical influence on telomeres — caps, that act as a sort of buffer at the end of chromosomes that protect DNA from damage. A young cell typically has long telomeres, but telomeres begin to degrade and fray as it ages. Older people typically have shorter telomeres in their cells. If telomeres in a cell are too short, the cell dies.
Detecting How Exercise Affects Your DNA
Laufs first did a series experiments with mice and showed the more the mice exercised, the more their body’s biochemistry protected their telomeres from deterioration. The mice also helped researchers pinpoint exactly how exercise rejuvenates cells in the cardiovascular system.
The researchers then analyzed the blood chemistry of endurances athletes and non-active, but otherwise healthy people who were either in their 20s or 50s.
Human and mice endurance athletes of any age showed the same chemical signs that exercise was protecting their telomeres. But 50-year-old athletes had significantly longer telomeres than relatively healthy people their same age.
Despite the findings, Laufs and other scientists are hesitant to call exercise the fountain of youth.
Laufs said he can’t prove that the association has anything to do with cause and effect: Did a lifetime devoted to exercise make the 50-year-old marathon runners biologically younger, or did these individuals inherit physical advantage to begin with that would have made them appear biologically younger and led them to exercise more?
“This type of conclusion cannot be made,” said Laufs, especially because “the people we looked at in this study are kind of extreme examples. We chose these extreme examples because we wanted to look at the mechanism.”
For the rest of us who don’t run marathons until we’re 50, exercise experts ask that we please keep trying.
Reform Needs Healthy Life Incentives
June 30, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 29, 2009
Wall Street Journal
by Scott E. Harrington
Much of the debate over health-care reform has focused on whether there should be a government insurance plan to compete with private plans. This focus is understandable given the stakes. Because equal competition between a public insurer and private plans is impossible, public coverage would crowd out private coverage and make a public, single-payer system inevitable.
Another important issue is the scope of regulation that will likely apply to private health plans regardless of whether a public plan is created.
Given budgetary and affordability concerns, the insurance market proposals by House Democrats and Sens. Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd would permit some variation among plan benefits and cost-sharing provisions, such as deductibles and coinsurance percentages. The proposals otherwise would impose a regulatory straightjacket that would put upward pressure on health costs, thus undermining a major reform objective and creating additional pressure for government-mandated cost controls. Whether legislation being developed by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus will go as far isn’t clear.
The House Democrat and Kennedy-Dodd proposals do all they can to prevent health-insurance premium rates and coverage terms from reflecting the health status — and thus health-related behavior — of any insured person. Health status would not be permitted to affect coverage decisions, terms or pricing. Age-related variation in premium rates would also be significantly constrained in relation to risk.
Benefit design and marketing of coverage would be regulated in an attempt to keep insurers from rewarding healthier people. Retrospective “risk adjustment” would be employed to reallocate funds from insurers that experience lower medical costs to those with higher costs. If an insurer were to attract relatively more healthy people — or keep more people healthy — it would run the risk of paying some or all of the gains to competitors.
The proposals’ strong aversion to having insurance rates or coverage terms related to health status reflects the view that either the need for health care is immune from individual control, or that a person should not be financially responsible for behavior that contributes to poor health, or both. These views are difficult to reconcile with the consensus that unhealthy behavior contributes significantly to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and thus accounts for a substantial proportion of health-care costs.
Regulation that seeks to divorce insurance rates and coverage terms from health status would deter potential innovation that might provide meaningful financial incentives for healthy behavior and lower costs.
Incentives for healthy behavior have traditionally been weak under employer-sponsored health insurance, in part due to federal and state regulation that constrains the ability to reward healthy behavior. Turnover among employees and policy holders also reduces incentives to make long-term investments to promote healthy behavior.
Health-care reform should seek to encourage rather than discourage private innovation to provide incentives for healthy behavior. Safeway’s program offering employee premium discounts related to tobacco use, weight control, blood pressure and cholesterol levels is a good example.
The Democratic proposals would retard or even strangle such innovation. Rather than strengthening incentives to invest in the long-term health of policy holders, they would make it more difficult to earn a reasonable return on such investment. They also send a message that a healthy lifestyle earns no financial reward for reducing medical expenses.
Financial incentives for healthy behavior have the potential to significantly reduce costs without reducing quality. A failure of health-care reform to permit or incorporate such incentives would make coercive government measures to control costs more likely. These controls might include limits on provider reimbursement, comparative-effectiveness or cost-benefit criteria that must be met for care to be reimbursed, or budget caps. The results would be less health — more obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer — and eventually less health care.
An aversion to having health-insurance rates and coverage linked to individual behavior may be on the verge of becoming national policy. If that happens, the unintended consequences could be very costly.
Click here to read the full Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
