The shape of things

Hope everyone had a great and relaxing weekend. Here are some interesting articles I've found in the health-news world that I thought you may be interested in:

Don't use the D word to overweight teens - a new study found that teens who are overweight and are told to "diet" or who are teased by family and friends resort to eating disorder tactics like bingeing and purging. The researchers suggested that parents of overweight children should not tell their kids to diet since it's a stigmatizing word - instead they should promote a balanced lifestyle and start cooking some healthy family meals.

Confused about what to eat to lower cancer risk? Read this! - Self put together a list of tried and true foods that will lower your cancer risk (and won't change every other month with new research). Want to lower your risk? Eat HIGH fiber anything, a lot of Vitamin D and calcium and cruciferous veggies (like broccoli, brussel sprouts and kale).

Which jobs rank highest in rates of depression? Child care workers and elderly-care workers. Coming in at a close second is food-service workers. Another interesting finding was that those people who worked full time (in any industry) were less likely to be depressed. Read the article for some more interesting information.

We all know (and have since 1960) that smoking is terrible for you. Not only will you damage your lungs and throat you also have a very very good chance of developing (and dying) of lung cancer. Yet, people still smoke. I find that fascinating.

When I read this article this morning about how 1 in 10 PREGNANT women smoke I was shocked and disgusted. These women know that it's wrong, they know they should quit and they know it's harming their unborn child yet they STILL smoke!

The thing that makes me livid about this is that when you smoke and you're not pregnant your doing the most damage to yourself (unless you're rude and smoking in front of others and therefore are killing them by your secondhand smoke). But when you're pregnant you're harming your child when you smoke.

The study found that the women who smoke while pregnant tend to also be depressed. So the researchers are trying to come up with non-medication depression treatment for pregnant women. That's awesome and I hope they succeed.

Then I read this article about hookahs. Not sure if you've ever tried it or even been exposed to it, but a hookah has flavored tabacco in a water pipe and you inhale and feel relaxed. We had a hookah bar here for a while, it has since closed down.

I've never smoked a cigarette, ever! But I did try hookah, assuming for some reason that it was different from cigarette smokes and not as harmful - boy was I wrong.  Researchers at the world health organization found that the typical hookah smoker inhales hookah 50-200 times in one sitting - which can make one session of hookah smoking much like smoking 100 cigarettes! EEEEK!

Stop smoking hookah and stop smoking while pregnant and just stop smoking!  

I found a bunch of interesting articles about food today and wanted to share them with all of you (in brief format of course). So here it goes:

1. Vitamin C Can't Cure Cancer Common Cold - (Talk about an alliteration) Anyway - you know how everytime you start to get the sniffles we automatically hand you a glass of OJ. Well apparently that just doesn't work. Vitamin C taken after a cold starts does not make the cold shorter or cure the cold. If you take Vitamin C as a preventive measure it only slightly shortens the duration of a cold (about 8% in adults). So what is a better way to prevent colds?? Wash your HANDS regularly and carefully. It's so simple.

2. Fruits and Veggies Don't stop cancers return - This study tried to see if eating a "mega-diet" of fruits and veggies (well over the FDA's recommendation) would help breast cancer survivors ward off a cancer relapse. Unfortunately it did not. The next step? Try to see if exercise wards off a relapse. So if you or a loved one is a breast cancer survivor, there's no need to go "overboard on fruits and veggies"

3. Curry Ingredient may fight Alzheimer's Disease - the spice turmeric found in Curry powder appears to stimulate a specific response against Alzheimer's symptoms. Of course, the large dosages of turmeric may be more than a normal person can consume - but there is evidence that people who eat a lot of foods with curry may be less prone to cancer and Alzheimer's. Ever cooked with curry? Try these recipes:

(Pardon moi for the bad links earlier)
Wolfgang Puck's Curried Chicken Satay - yum-o
Spiced Shrimp - uses Turmeric
Middle Eastern Lamb Burgers - I haven't made this one, but I have the ingredients to make it tonight!

4. Why fruits and veggies go bad quickly - could the explanation be as simple as just placing them next to one another? Fit sugar wrote a great piece today on how some fruits and vegetables emit an odorless and colorless gas that can prematurely decay other fruits and veggies. Read about it here to find out how to make your refrigerator gas-free. :) It just may help you get your recommended daily value of fruits and veggies because it will let your produce last longer.

5. Weight training for heart disease - People with heart disease not only benefit from cardio, they also benefit from moderate weight training. Read the article for some great tips on how to get started in weight training.

If you drink about 15 diet sodas a day, you may need to cut back on your intake. Although the FDA won't review aspartame's (sweetners in diet sodas) cancer risks, a new study found that rats who consumed the equivalent of 15 diet sodas a day developed luekemia, lymphoma and breast cancer.

The FDA says that the new study is not consistent with the plethora of other studies that show no cancer risks from aspartame. Therefore, they will not review it again.

But just to be safe (and to curb your extreme caffeine addiction) let's limit our diet soda intake - especially if you're up to 15 cans a day. (Sorry, but that just makes me sick thinking about 15 a day).

I found some interesting health-related articles today. I'll post briefly about a few of them:

1. Doctors now say that there are symptoms that point to ovarian cancer (in the past they thought you couldn't detect the cancer until later stages). If you or any of our loved ones experience these symptoms daily for a few weeks, please go to the doctor. Read an article about it.

Experts say these health problems may be symptoms of ovarian cancer:

• Bloating
• Pelvic or abdominal pain
• Difficulty eating or feeling full quickly
• Feeling a frequent or urgent need to urinate

2. This past weekend a teenager died of an overdose of muscle cream - the scariest part is that she didn't ingest it orally, she just used too much on her leg muscles following a grueling cross country training regime. Some doctors and experts are urging the FDA to require "BenGay" and "IcyHot" to have stronger labels that warn of this overdose (this is the first death they've ever documented from muscle cream). Currently the labels only say to stop using them if "condition worsens or symptoms persist for more than seven days." Read about it here.

 

3. An expert panel calls for pediatricians to stop using "fuzzy language" with obese children. The panel made recommendations that children and their family should be told that they have a medical condition and it is called obesity and the doctors should work with the families to help the children get to a healthy weight.

I agree. We need to stop sugar-coating this epidemic. If kids and their parents aren't told of the risks involved of being obese, they will continue to be obese into adulthood - most likely. This paragraph from the article was pretty shocking:

• "About 17 percent of U.S. children are obese and one-third are overweight, using the committee's recommended definitions. Those numbers are rising, putting children at risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and other ailments more commonly found in adults" Read the article here.

• 
  
• 
  

Ok, so the title to this post may be a little misleading. Like most women, breast cancer has affected my family very personally. Therefore, all the women in my family over 40 get regular mammograms and the young ones try to live healthy lifestyles to ward off the chance of getting this nasty disease.

When I saw this article about a new study about lifestyle and breast cancer survival, I knew I was going to post about it here.

Previous research by Harvard found that women who exercised 3-5 hours a week (that's equivalent to 3 - 1 hours sessions at the gym, not difficult) reduces the risk of dying with breast cancer by 50%!!

This new study looked at both exercise and diet. They studied about 1,500 women with early stages of breast cancer none of which were told how to eat or how to exercise. They found that regardless of weight, the women who ate five or more servings of vegtables and fruit a day and exercised regularly reduced the risk of dying by half.

Moral of the story: eat right and exercise.