A Drink A Day May Keep the Pounds Away
March 10, 2010
ABC News
By Kristina Fiore
Cheers, ladies! Researchers now say light to moderate drinking may keep women from gaining too much weight.
Normal-weight women who drank 5 to 30 grams of alcohol daily gained less weight and had a lower risk of becoming overweight or obese than either teetotalers or those who drank too much, according to a report in the March 8 Archives of Internal Medicine.
How much is that? A 12-ounce light beer contains about 11 grams of alcohol, while 5 ounces of red wine contains 15 to 16 grams and a 1.5 ounce shot of 80-proof whiskey contains about 14 grams of alcohol.
Despite their findings, Dr. Lu Wang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and colleagues cautioned against recommendations for drinking alcohol as a weight control measure.
“Taking into account the potential medical and psychosocial problems related to drinking alcohol,” they wrote, “any recommendation on alcohol use should be made for the individual after carefully evaluating both adverse and beneficial effects of the drinking behavior in broad context.”
Alcohol has a relatively high caloric value and may, in the long run, result in weight gain, some researchers have said. But epidemiological studies haven’t provided consistent evidence of that relationship.
So the researchers conducted an analysis of data from the prospective cohort Women’s Health Study of 19,220 women over age 38 who were disease-free and had a normal body mass index (BMI) at the outset.
They reported their weight and alcohol consumption on a questionnaire at that time, and reported their weight again on eight annual follow-up questionnaires.
The women were followed for an average of 12.9 years. During that time, 41.3 percent of the women became overweight or obese, while 3.8 percent became obese.
Average weight gain was 3.63 kg — about 8 pounds — for those who didn’t drink, compared with 1.55 kg — about 3.5 pounds — for moderate drinkers.
The researchers found an inverse relationship between alcohol consumption and subsequent weight gain. “Weight gain was largest for women who did not consume alcohol and then monotonously decreased with increasing total alcohol intake,” they wrote.
After taking into account many other variables, including nonalcohol caloric intake, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors, the relationship strengthened, with the risk of becoming overweight or obese diminishing as women drank more moderately.
But the risk of weight gain did not decline further once women drank 40 grams of alcohol per day or more.
This is not great news for men, however, the researchers say. That’s because mean and women drink differently: men add alcohol to their daily dietary intake, while female drinkers substitute alcohol for other foods without increasing total calories.
In this study, for instance, women who drank alcohol had lower caloric intake from nonalcohol sources, particularly carbohydrates.
The investigators said there may be gender differences regarding the metabolism of alcohol.
But they cautioned that “complex interrelationships” exist between drinking habits and various lifestyle, clinical, and physiological factors, which may help explain inconsistent findings in studies past.
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Obese Kids May Have Early Signs of Future Heart Disease
March 1, 2010
Wall Street Journal
By Shirley S. Wang
Obese children as young as age 3 show signs of an inflammatory response that has been linked to heart disease later in life, researchers said, in a finding that is likely to further stoke concerns about childhood obesity.
The results suggest that obesity-related disease processes may start earlier than previously believed. Nearly 30% of obese 3-to-5-year-olds had elevated blood levels of C-reactive protein—a widely studied marker for inflammation—compared with 17% of healthy-weight kids of the same age. The disparities widened as children aged, according to the study, which is being published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
“It’s really important to be concerned about childhood obesity and to even be concerned when they are quite young,” said Asheley Skinner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who was the first author of the study. “We can’t wait until they’re adolescents or adults.”
In the U.S., 14% of 2-to-5-year-olds are considered overweight, or at the 85th percentile or greater of weight for height in their age group.
C-reactive protein, or CRP, has been shown to help predict risk of heart disease, stroke and death under certain conditions, according to the American Heart Association. Previous studies have found that overweight and obese adults show elevated levels of CRP, but less has been known about CRP in children.
The study examined three markers that measure different aspects of inflammation, including CRP, in more than 16,000 children nationwide between the ages of 1 and 17. By ages 15 to 17, CRP was elevated in about 60% of obese teens, compared with 18% of teens of healthy weight. The increase was even more pronounced for very obese kids, with nearly 43% of young children and 83% of teens showing CRP elevation.
A similar pattern of elevation was observed for the other two inflammatory markers, though one of the markers wasn’t elevated in obese children until the age of 6.
It isn’t known whether elevated CRP in young children will predict heart disease in adulthood. Such a study, which would involve following overweight and obese children until adulthood, hasn’t been done, Dr. Skinner said. But, she said there wasn’t any evidence to suggest that CRP response would be different in children than in adults; its response in the body is the same regardless of age. Inflammation is the body’s immune response to infection or injury.
The concern of finding CRP elevation in such young children is that its effects could be cumulative. Future research is needed to investigate whether that is the case, and also whether losing weight could reduce CRP response in kids, according to Dr. Skinner. This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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High Blood Pressure is a Neglected Disease in the US
February 23th , 2010
Reuters
The report by the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences, urges the CDC to promote policies that make it easier for people to be more physically active, cut calories and reduce their salt intake.
High blood pressure or hypertension is easily preventable through diet, exercise and drugs, yet it is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, said committee chair David Fleming, who directs Public Health for Seattle and King County in Washington.
“Hypertension as a disease is relatively easy to diagnose and it’s inexpensive to treat,” Fleming said in a telephone interview.
“Yet despite that, one in six deaths in the United States is due to hypertension, and it costs our healthcare system $73 billion each year in expenses.
“In that context, hypertension is really a neglected disease in this country. There’s a huge gap between what we could do and what we are doing,” he said.
Fleming said the CDC spends less than $50 million a year for a wide array of heart disease prevention programs that includes hypertension.
Simple steps like consuming less salt and increasing the intake of vegetables, fruit and lean protein could cut rates of high blood pressure by as much as 22 percent, according to the report by the Institute, which advises policymakers.
They cited a recent study that found reducing salt intake to 2,300 milligrams per day — the current maximum recommended amount — from 3,400 milligrams a day could cut U.S. health costs by about $17.8 billion each year.
Helping overweight and obese Americans each lose 10 pounds could cut rates of high blood pressure in the overall population by 7 to 8 percent, the group said.
And a program that gets inactive people to exercise could decrease the rate of high blood pressure by 4 percent to 6 percent.
Doctors typically use generic drugs such as beta blockers and ACE inhibitors to control blood pressure. Lowering blood pressure can cut the risk of stroke, heart attack, heart failure and other conditions.
MANY INSURED PEOPLE NOT TREATED
According to the report, 86 percent of people with uncontrolled high blood pressure have insurance and see their doctors regularly. But Fleming said doctors often fail to follow guidelines, which is why many patients do not know they have the condition and are not taking steps to control it.
The group called for the CDC to research the reasons doctors fail to treat high blood pressure, and consider making blood pressure treatment a quality measure in any accreditation program.
The group also asked the CDC to urge the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs and private insurers to reduce out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments for blood pressure drugs, and to work with the drug industry to simplify the process for patients to get reduced-cost or free drugs.
About half a billion people worldwide have hypertension.
Risk factors include obesity, a sedentary lifestyle and smoking. Chronic illnesses such as diabetes, kidney disease and high cholesterol also can raise one’s risk.
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Anger to be Classified as Mental Illness
February 22, 2010
Mail Online
By Jerome Burne
Do you live surrounded by clutter – ancient copies of magazines, your children’s old toys, articles you’ve clipped out of newspapers over the years?
If you find it hard to throw out things of limited or no value, you could be suffering from hoarding disorder.
‘Hoarding’ is just one of the new mental conditions being added to the psychiatrists’ bible, or the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders (DSM), to give it its proper name.
Other new conditions identified as possibly needing professional help include binge eating – which is said to affect many people who are seriously obese – and ‘cognitive tempo disorder’, which seems very like laziness (symptoms include dreaminess and sluggishness).
There’s also ‘intermittent explosive disorder’, which involves occasionally becoming very angry suddenly.
Most bizarre of the proposed additions is one defined as ‘getting a thrill at being outraged by pornography’.
It was also described as Whitehouse syndrome after the campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who objected to sexual content on TV.
The DSM is a large book that lists all psychiatric disorders and describes their symptoms. If a condition is in there, it means it’s considered a mental illness.
But some of the new entries are controversial, not least because of fears they will result in many more people being put on drugs that could be ineffective or dangerous.
The DSM is produced by the American Psychiatric Association and is hugely influential worldwide.
‘Once a condition has got a label you’ve got a better chance of being treated and researchers are more likely to investigate it,’ explains Professor David Cottrell, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Leeds.
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8 in 10 Englishmen Will Be Too Fat By 2020
February 17, 2010
Breitbart
By AFP
Eight out of 10 men and nearly seven out of 10 women in England will be too fat by 2020, according to new data released Wednesday.
Researchers said that while recent research showed obesity among children levelling off, instances among adults show no sign of doing the same.
Some 41 percent of men aged 20 to 65 will be obese by 2020, with 40 percent overweight, according to the figures from the National Heart Forum, based on data from the Health Survey for England. That makes a total of 81 percent.
Among women, 36 percent will be obese and 32 percent overweight — a total of 68 percent.
By 2050, this will lead to sharp increases in the number of people suffering strokes, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, researchers said.
“These trends demonstrate that the cautiously optimistic picture we presented in November 2009 for a levelling off of future obesity rates among children is not mirrored in adults,” said Professor Klim McPherson of Oxford University, who also chairs the National Heart Forum.
“There are already more men who are obese than who are of a healthy weight and by the end of the decade, obese men and women could out-number those who are overweight.”
Britons were “being overwhelmed by the effects of today’s ‘obesogenic’ environment, with its abundance of energy-dense food and sedentary lifestyles,” he added.
The research used figures from 1993 to 2007 to predict future obesity levels in England.
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Surgeon in New Zealand Blasts Overweight Patient
February 12, 2010
The Sydney Morning Herald
By AAP
A foul-mouthed New Zealand surgeon has been reprimanded after swearing at a severely obese patient.
A 44-year-old mother filed a complaint about the doctor after a tense consultation with him last year, The New Zealand Herald reports.
The doctor said f— at least three times to the Maori woman after she told him she didn’t like the word “diet” and preferred the term “lifestyle”.
He told her she was, “going on a f—ing diet”.
In the letter of complaint, the woman wrote: “[The doctor] said if I couldn’t handle the word diet then he challenged my motivation and stated that I would never survive surgery because I was still bullshitting myself and therefore my thinking was still f—ed”.
In response to the woman’s concerns, the doctor said they no longer had a “therapeutic relationship” and scratched her from the gastric bypass waiting list.
New Zealand’s Health and Disability Commissioner, Ron Paterson, said the doctor, who admitted using bad language, had been unprofessional and insulting.
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Teenage Girls Live on Junk Food
February 11, 2010
Times Online
By Valerie Elliott
Teenage girls are eating a worse diet than they did ten years ago and putting their long-term health at risk, a national nutrition survey suggests.
Girls of secondary school age are not only living on junk food such as crisps, cakes, biscuits and fizzy drinks, but they are also smoking and drinking more than boys.
The pattern of consumption suggests that many girls are being influenced by fashion models. However, while girls aim to be slim, the study found that 37 per cent of teenage girls are overweight and 22 per cent are classified as obese. Among boys of the same age, 35 per cent are overweight but only 16 per cent are obese.
The preliminary findings of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, released yesterday, have made such depressing reading for health chiefs that civil servants have turned to social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo to see if 13 to 16-year-olds can be weaned on to healthy eating by their own friends.
The tactics are radical, but officials from the Food Standards Agency and Department of Health are dismayed that, despite all the healthy eating messages, only 7 per cent of girls are eating their “five a day” portions of fruit and vegetables and the average girl’s consumption is 2.8 portions.
Almost half of all girls are also failing to eat food rich in iron, such as cereals and red meat. A deficiency can lead to anaemia, which causes fatigue and lethargy and is a factor in some women failing to become pregnant.
Eleven per cent of girls aged 13 to 15 also admitted drinking alcohol every week, compared with 1 per cent of boys the same age, while 29 per cent of the young teenage girls said that they smoked cigarettes, compared with 16 per cent of boys.Dr Alison Tedstone, head of nutrition research at the agency, said: “Broadly, teenage girls don’t eat enough. Overall, they are a stand-alone group of the population whose diets are poor.”
An analysis of eating diaries found that the average teenage girl eats 54 grams of chips or fried potatoes every day while the average woman aged 19 to 65 eats just 40g. Each day the teenager also eats 14g of crisps or other salty snacks, 22g of sweets and choocolate, and 37g of cakes and biscuits.
The average older woman, however, will eat just 6g a day of crisps, 10g of sweets and chocolate, and 27g of cake and biscuits.
Researchers also found that teenage girls and boys were eating too much sugar and saturated fat. It is recommended that only 11 per cent of energy should come from food with sugars, yet secondary school age boys are consuming 16.3 per cent sugars a day and girls 15 per cent.
High levels of saturated fat which is linked to heart disease are also being eaten. The average recommended daily intake is 11 per cent, yet girls are eating 13.1 per cent a day and boys 12.7 per cent.
Dr Tedstone said she hoped that diets would improve as manufacturers reformulated products and lowered saturated fat and sugar content.
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Premature Death Could Await Obese Kids
February 10th, 2010
NY Times
Roni Caryn Rabin
A rare study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood found the heaviest youngsters were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die prematurely, before age 55, of illness or a self-inflicted injury.
Youngsters with a condition called pre-diabetes were at almost double the risk of dying before 55, and those with high blood pressure were at some increased risk. But obesity was the factor most closely associated with an early death, researchers said.
The study, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data gathered from Pima and Tohono O’odham Indians, whose rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes soared decades before weight problems became widespread among other Americans. It is one of the largest studies to have tracked children for several decades after detailed information on weight and risk factors like high cholesterol were gathered.
“This suggests,” said Helen C. Looker, senior author of the paper and assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, “that obesity in children, even prepubescent children, may have very serious long-term health effects through midlife — that there is something serious being set in motion by obesity at early ages.” Dr. Looker added, “We all expect to get beyond 55 these days.”
Nearly one in three American children is now considered to be either overweight or obese, and this week, the first lady, Michelle Obama, kicked off a campaign intended to end childhood obesity.
The new study analyzed data gathered about 4,857 nondiabetic American Indian children born between 1945 and 1984, when the children were 11 years old on average, and assessed the extent to which body mass index, glucose tolerance, blood pressure and total cholesterol levels predicted premature death.
By 2003, 559 participants had died, including 166 who died of causes other than accidents and homicides, like cardiovascular disease, infections, cancer, diabetes, alcohol poisoning or drug overdose and a large number who died of alcoholic liver disease, which the study’s authors suggested might be exacerbated by diabetes.
Adults who had the highest body mass index scores as children were 2.3 times as likely to have died early as those with the lowest scores, and those with the highest glucose levels were 73 percent as likely to have died prematurely.
“This really points a finger at impaired glucose tolerance, or pre-diabetes, in ways we have not seen before,” said Edward W. Gregg, who is with the diabetes branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and wrote an editorial accompanying the article. “We’ve been aware that pre-diabetes in adults is related to a lot of adverse outcomes, but the relationship in youth has not been as clear. There are not as many long-term studies to document a risk factor like pre-diabetes in youth all the way to adult outcomes.”
The study found that high blood pressure in childhood was only a weak predictor of early death and high cholesterol was not associated with premature death, but experts suggested those factors were easier to control with medication.
And though the American Indian community is not representative of the nation’s population as a whole, Dr. Gregg said its experience was instructive because “they’ve tended to be just a decade or two ahead of the rest of the U.S. population” in obesity.
“The message here is that if you take your kid to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘Well, their blood pressure is O.K., their cholesterol is O.K. and their sugar’s O.K..,’ the kid who’s obese still warrants our attention,” said Dr. Peter F. Belamarich, chief of specialty medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx.
Click here for the full report
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Sodas with High Fructose Corn Syrup Cause Cancer Not Sugar
The New Definition of Child Abuse
The Most Evil Corporation
McDonalds Closing Hundreds of Locations in Japan
17,000 Harmful Chemicals Kept Secret Under Obscure Law
Chemicals Passed Through Breast Milk May Cause Cancer
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Fast Food Linked to Diabetes
February 5, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
A report recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that black women who consume fried chicken or fast food burgers at least twice a week are between 40 and 70 percent more prone to develop type 2 diabetes over the course of a decade than those who do not. Not only black women but all people who consume high calorie, low nutrient fast foods on even a moderate basis are susceptible to developing the disease.
Dr. Julie Palmer and her colleagues from Boston University analyzed over 44,000 black women who were instructed to complete questionnaires that they were given beginning back in 1995. Once concluded, researchers compared the results with another group of women who claimed never to eat fast food. The result was that not only were the women who ate fast food more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than the non-fast food group, they also were generally heavier with many falling into the overweight range.
The standard measuring tool for determining healthy body weight is the Body Mass Index (BMI). A healthy BMI is somewhere between 18.5 and 24.9. Most of the participants in the fast food group were somewhere between 28 and 29 when they started the study, which according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is overweight. Those in this group also continued to gain more weight during the course of the study.
Interestingly, the two foods that played the largest role in blood sugar disorder were fast food hamburgers and fried chicken. These foods were implicated in causing the most weight gain which resulted in more cases of diabetes. Nearly 3,000 women in the fast food eating group developed type 2 diabetes by the time the study concluded.
A previous fast food study conducted in 2004 by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital found similar results. After tracking more than 3,000 young adults for over 15 years, researchers found that people who ate at fast food restaurants more than twice a week gained an average of almost 10 pounds more than those who went only once a week. The twice a week group also had a 200 percent increase in insulin resistance compared to the once a week group.
Experts also concluded that those who ate the most fast food lived the most unhealthy lifestyles in general and were the most prone to developing other serious diseases throughout the course of their lives.
While some experts suggest consuming smaller portion sizes and less overall calories, a better option would be to make better food choices. Eating less fast food is good, but changing one’s lifestyle to include whole, living foods is even better.
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