Healthy Bytes

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Here’s something fun – well scary really – I picked up from Health Science Institute.

Butter versus margarine

Butter:
* Both have the same amount of calories.
* Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.
* Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.
* Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
* Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added!
* For most people, butter tastes better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods. (The best flavor claim margarine can make in ads is that it tastes the same as butter.)
* Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.

Margarine:
* Very high in trans fatty acids.
* Triple risk of coronary heart disease.
* Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol)
* Lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol).
* Increases the risk of cancers by up to five fold.
* Lowers quality of breast milk.
* Decreases immune response.
* Decreases insulin response.

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Leslie Mikkelsen, Prevention Institute dietitian presented a report sponsored by sponsored by the Strategic Alliance for Health Food and Activity Environments at the 2007 California Childhood Obesity Conference.

The report – “Where’s the Juice? Fruit Content of the Most Highly Advertised Children’s Food and Beverages” – revealed the findings of their study:

Product selection criteria –

• Identified by Kaiser Family Foundation as a top spending advertised food on kid’s TV shows
• Picture of fruit or the word fruit on the packaging
• Commonly available at the grocery store

37 products examined…

-> 19 contained NO fruit ingredients (51%)

-> 6 had 10% or less fruit juice (21%)

-> 2 had 100% fruit juice (6%)

-> 10 had real fruit (27%)

Yep, ya gotta read the label.

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CNN House Call ran a story over the weekend about the “Hot Sauce Diet”.
Dr. Spiro Antoniades weighed 265 lbs. He wanted to punish himself for eating poorly. He decided he’d do a shot of hot sauce before meals.

He lost 70 lbs.

His theory is he attached pain to bad food, which made him avoid bad food.

Clifford Woolf of Harvard Medical School said:
“One of the major features of pain is to learn to avoid danger. And by taking a swig of Tabasco, you’re switching on that avoidance mechanism.”

I don’t agree with the theory.
If hot sauce = pain, then why do people like spicy food? Or are they all masochists?

The burning sensation is from capsaicin – a chemical in the hot sauce. It’s believed capsaicin increases calorie and fat burning.

Capsaicin is in numerous pain relief products.
Research also has shown it:

• Lowers blood pressure
• Lowers cholesterol
• Kills cancer cells without harming healthy cells
• Lowers insulin after a meal
• Has reversed diabetes in mice

Spice it up.

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The Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP) studied what folks are gulping down… and it’s not as much milk as they would like it to be.

Nearly half – 50% – of Americans, AGE 4 and older drink a soda on a given day. That pencils out to roughly 25% of their daily calories.

The American Beverage Association claims the average American guzzles 54 gallons of soda a year.

12 ounces of Coke has about 10 teaspoons of sugar.
Sugar in soda accounts for 36% of added sugar in the U.S.

Then there’s the diet species with artificial sweeteners which, all in all, are worse than sugar. New Mexico is proposing banning aspartame – the manufacturing of and contents of – in the state.

Soda… obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis

Put the can down, walk away.

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Michael Petit, author of a new book “Homeland Insecurity … American Children at Risk,” lays out an interesting set of data comparing kid’s health in each state to how the state voted in the 2004 election.

To determine the kid part, he used 11 statistics measuring health, including insurance coverage and prenatal care.

The top ten: Wisconsin, New Jersey, Washington, Minnesota, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa, and New Hampshire. Only Iowa voted Republican.

The bottom ten: Wyoming, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi. All Republican.
In fact 24 of the bottom 25 are red states.

That’s ummm, significant.

Timothy Jost, professor of health care law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law says:
“States that tend to be politically and economically conservative have less inclusive medical assistance programs. So, it would make a great deal of sense that states that are Republican have conservative social and economic policies that lead to a decreased health status for poor children.”

How does this jive with that No Child Left Behind platform? But I digress.

Of those blue states Jost says:
“More liberal states probably have better food stamp, public assistance, housing and education programs.”

Back in early December, 2006 I wrote about an annual report on America’s Health Rankings.

The top 5 states for health were: Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Hawaii and Connecticut… all blue states, four of them in the top 10 for kid’s health.

Jost believes the solution is to get people insured:
“That is not going to happen through the private sector; the government is going to have to step in. It is a political problem, and it needs to be solved politically.”

Perhaps that is A solution. Is it the BEST solution?

I dunno.
Health care costs big bucks. I just made my quarterly payment and by golly, it’s gone up again. And I don’t have fancy insurance.
And my experience has been it’s not necessarily easy to get decent health care, EVEN IF you have insurance.

The Universal Health Care platform is popping up quite a bit these days.
In California… where I live and pay taxes… they’re talking about it. 6.2 million folks are uninsured in California. We’re talking about a lot of oranges and artichokes there.

But beyond that, is “having health insurance” the magic pill (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). Yes, I realize there’s utility in insurance. But for the most part, health insurance is sick insurance and health care is sick care.

Do you go to a doctor when you’re well?

In the U.S. we spend significantly more on health care and yet, we’re not the healthiest… by far.

Let’s throw another piece of data into the conversation…
For every $1 spent on “wellness”, $3 is saved on “health” care.

World changer people were hanging out in Davos Switzerland this week at the World Economic Forum.

Back in 2000 Bill & Melinda Gates and a few others formed GAVI – the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. GAVI has immunized 138 million kids for preventable diseases. Darn big numbers.

The estimate is the program has prevented 2.3 million deaths and heck of a lot of illness. They’ve spent $1.5 billion. That’s under $11 a kid and about $650 a life saved.

One of the changes they’re going to make is in the personnel sticking all those needles in all those kids. They’ve invested in training and funding doctors to do the work. Seems those doctors move onto other opportunities. They will now instead train paramedics. Lowers the costs of training and the thought is turnover will also be lowered.

It’s true, a paramedic is not able to do as much medically as a doctor, but they can dispense vaccinations. GAVI doesn’t have a timid goal. They’d like to vaccinate everyone who needs to be. If they cut their costs, they can vaccinate more people.

How much does it costs to have PE in schools? Are we saving a dollar only to incur a $3 expense elsewhere?
I bet a year of PE costs less than a round of chemotherapy.

Instead of focusing on “Universal Health Care” in the form of health insurance, why don’t we spend our resources on Universal Well Care with education on nutrition, exercise, lifestyle and stress relief and management and other programs.

Sooooo many “health” care dollars are now being spent on preventable lifestyle diseases. Just because you have insurance should you do your best to use it?
Would you burn down your house because you have homeowners insurance?

It costs less to prevent than to treat. You get what you focus on.