Healthy Bytes

Get out the vote

118 words, under a minute

I can’t believe we have 20 months until the presidential elections. With all the campaigning already you’d think it was at least next year.

We only vote for presidents every four years. But you vote everyday – multiple times – with your fork.
Would people change their vote if they watched a debate between packaged food products and real food. Maybe we could have a square off between Chocolate Chip Cookie Crisp Cereal and Irish Steel Cut Oatmeal with cinnamon and fresh blueberries. Or perhaps a quarter pounder with super sized fries and soda versus grilled chicken, cous cous, salad and water with a slice of lemon.

We know how people are voting now. Would an open debate change that?

Weight loss surgery and brain decline

Weight loss surgery, such as gastric bypass surgery, can lead to a vitamin deficiency that can cause memory loss and confusion, inability to coordinate movement, and other problems, according to a study published in the March 13, 2007, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The syndrome, called Wernicke encephalopathy, affects the brain and nervous system when the body doesn’t get enough vitamin B-1, or thiamine. It can also cause vision problems, such as rapid eye movements.

Weight loss surgery and brain decline

Bariatric and lap band surgeries are getting rather popular.
Post surgery, folks consume a very limited amount of calories. Essentially, you’re shrinking your stomach size to that of a two year old. Of course you haven’t shrunk your nutritional needs to that of a two year old.

A study published this week in the Journal of the American Academy of Neurology points out numerous folks are experiencing memory loss and confusion as well as muscle coordination problems and vision problems.

They are tying the symptoms to lack of nutrition for the brain and nervous system – mostly B vitamins.

There have been other reports as well regarding brain functionality after weight loss surgery.

It’s basically mal-nourishment, whether you’re talking about a skin draped over bones person in a third world country, or a post-surgery “fluffy” person. The body still requires nourishment to function and rebuild itself.

Belly fat -> inflammation -> disease: cardiovascular, diabetes

read time: 417 words, about two minutes

In an apple versus pear comparison, the pear is by far the healthier option.
I’m not referring to fruit here, but rather to physical shape. Apple shape being wide through the belly. Pear shaped being wider through the hips.

What researchers have found is that not all fat is created equal. They’ve shown that ab fat has a high association with poor insulin response and inflammation.

In a study done back in 2004 at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, liposuction was used to remove about 20% of people’s total body fat mass. While that gave them different wardrobe options, there weren’t the expected metabolic benefits found with weight loss by diet and exercise.

Liposuction removes subcutaneous fat… fat right under the skin.
It does not remove visceral fat… fat that surrounds the organs. Those fat cells are more difficult (and dangerous) to get to.
Diet and exercise doesn’t remove fat cells – it shrinks them, with no apparent preference for subcutaneous versus visceral.

Back to the results… in a second phase, researchers studied the blood to determine if visceral fat was the problem, or a symptom. In this study, they took blood from obese patients going through gastric bypass surgery.

They showed visceral fat was secreting interleukin-6 (IL-6) - an inflammatory molecule – into portal vein blood. Portal vein blood had levels of IL-6 50% greater than blood at the periphery.

Increased levels of IL-6 correlated with C-reactive protein (CRP) which is an inflammatory substance.

Chronic inflammation is associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis and other diseases.

So let’s look at a few things…
Sucking out the fat doesn’t remove the health consequences.
Manufacturers of statin drugs keep telling you to lower your cholesterol – by taking their drugs for the rest of your life. And yet, folks with low and “normal” cholesterol have heart attacks and congestive heart failure. Why – inflammation.

Assistant professor of medicine Luigi Fontana, M.D., Ph.D.:

“Many years ago, atherosclerosis was thought to be related to lipids and to the excessive deposit of cholesterol in the arteries. Nowadays, it’s clear that atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease. There also is evidence that inflammation plays a role in cancer, and there is even evidence that it plays a role in aging. Someday we may learn that visceral fat is involved in those things, too.”

A lifetime of poor nutrition and lack of exercise isn’t going to be sucked away in a simple outpatient procedure or blasted away with a daily pharmaceutical regimen.

In the year Twenty-Thirty

read time: 364 words, under 2 minutes

The CDC just issued a report - The State of Aging and Health in America 2007 – that looks at a number of data points on a State by State basis.

Let’s look at a couple of current data points (this applies to the U.S. population):

• 80% of folks over 65 have one or more chronic diseases that can lead to disability and/or premature death.
• Health care costs are 3 to 5 times greater for the 65+ group as compared to younger adults.

In 2030:

• The 65+ population by the year 2030 - that’s just 23 years from now - will nearly double to 71 million / 20% of the total population.
• Health care costs will increase by another 25%.

The report notes that 35% of deaths in 2000 are attributed to 3 behaviors:
-> smoking
-> poor diet
-> lack of physical activity

Why? These behaviors lead to the top chronic diseases – heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes.

What’s missing in this picture is the impact of excessive weight and obesity. Not because there isn’t one, but because it isn’t showing up in older data. The dramatic increase in obesity has been in the last 10 years. That trend is still in tact.

Chronic conditions take time.
However in the present, snippets like number of weight surgeries (lap band, bariatric) have tripled in teens portend future impact.

Here’s the thing. These are chronic conditions – meaning with you everyday – that develop over time. Diet and lifestyle choices you’re making right now are forming your reality in 2030.

As a culture we have a difficult time “saving for tomorrow”. That’s true in a financial sense as well as a health sense. Unfortunately chronic conditions generally can’t be “fixed” quickly or easily.

What choices are you making today – for yourself and for your children? If we raise our children with good diet and lifestyle habits, they’ll never need to be “re-trained”. And if we start taking care of ourselves immediately, we’ll enjoy better health now and in the year 2030 and beyond.

The CDC report concludes:

If people adopt healthier lifestyles, they will not develop the expensive, chronic diseases that raise health costs sharply, such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

It’s not butter, it’s ?!?

read time: 204 words, about a minute

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.

Where’s the fruit

read time: 119 words, just a minute

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.

The hot sauce diet

read time: 176 words, about a minute

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.

Soda - the national drink

read time:130 words, a minute

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.

Whose healthier… red state kids or blue state kids?

read time: 790 words, about three minutes

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.

The economic demise of high fructose corn syrup?

read time: 60 words, under a minute

If you follow the commodities market, all the yap yap this week has been about corn - namely the escalating price of corn.

Demand for ethanol is projected to equal the entire corn crop. The price in the futures market has been taking the grain elevator up.

Perhaps corn will get too expensive to make high fructose corn syrup financially desirable.