Check out this video from Fox:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/health-15749655/grapefruits-for-your-health-22790804
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November 15, 2010
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October 25, 2010
October 06, 2010
Obese But Healthy? Gray Area Confounds Science
Is it possible to be fat and fit? Perhaps, researchers say, but losing weight may make you even better off.
A new study, published in the September issue of the journal Diabetes Care, finds that people who are obese but metabolically healthy (meaning they have healthy cholesterol and blood sugar levels as well as normal blood pressure), can still improve their health profile by dropping a few pounds.
The study contradicts an earlier finding that people who are obese and yet healthy may actually be worse off if they lose weight. What the new study can't do is explain why some people manage to be both obese and healthy - or whether there's really such a thing.
"Right now, we are in a gray zone. Is it really protective to be metabolically healthy?" said Martin Brochu, an obesity researcher at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec. "There's a huge debate in the scientific literature right now."
Obese, but healthy
Researchers have long known that excess weight doesn't affect everyone the same way. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or over, a measure that includes height and weight but not other related measures like the ratio of muscle mass to fat. At the population-wide level, BMIs over 30 are associated with numerous health problems, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. But the measurement is less sensitive when it comes to predicting individual health.
Starting in the 1960s, researchers noted that some obese individuals didn't have the hallmarks of weight-related illnesses. Some had normal blood cholesterol and normal insulin sensitivity, meaning they lacked risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.
In the last decade, research on these metabolically healthy obese individuals has ramped up. In 2001, Brochu and colleagues tested 43 obese, sedentary and post-menopausal women and found that 17 of them qualified as metabolically healthy. The key difference between the healthy and unhealthy groups? Where they stored their fat. Those who were healthy had half the visceral fat, or deep belly fat, of those who weren't. Other studies have shown that visceral fat, which packs around the organs in the abdomen, is more detrimental to the body than the subcutaneous fat found just beneath the skin.
"The fat cells in the visceral depot tend to be a lot more likely to sort of spew out excess fat into the bloodstream," said Peter Janiszewski, an obesity researcher and recent Ph.D. graduate from Queen's University in Toronto. Janiszewski, who blogs about obesity research on the Public Library of Science website, added that metabolically healthy obese individuals are usually more active than those who are obese with poor metabolic profiles.
Dueling studies
There's no universal definition of metabolic health in obese people, but researchers estimate that between 25 percent and 30 percent of the obese have normal metabolic profiles. Now they're struggling to understand what that means. Why do some people resist packing on bad belly fat? And if they're already healthy, should they bother to lose weight?
A 2008 study published in the journal Diabetologica suggested the answer to that second question is "no." In that study, 20 metabolically healthy obese women and 24 metabolically at-risk women went on a six-month diet to lose weight. Results showed the women who were metabolically healthy actually experienced a 13 percent decrease in insulin sensitivity after losing about 6 percent of their body weight. Since decreased insulin sensitivity is a risk factor for heart disease and type 2 diabetes, the findings suggested that losing weight made the metabolically healthy obese women less healthy.
One study isn't cause to skip your gym appointments, however. Last month, Janiszewski and his Ph.D. adviser published a study attempting to replicate the 2008 study's results. They included other weight-loss methods, like exercise, and studied both men and women.
After six months, the researchers measured the participants' insulin sensitivity. The results failed to match the findings of the previous study: Regardless of how the metabolically healthy obese people lost weight, their insulin sensitivity improved by 18.5 percent. Metabolically unhealthy people improved more, perhaps because they had more to gain.
"There should be no fear, regardless of what your metabolic status is, of being active," Janiszewski told LiveScience. "You certainly won't get any worse with exercise and diet, and you have a likelihood of improving some metabolic risk factors."
Antony Karelis of the University of Quebec at Montreal, the author of the 2008 study, said that the two studies were hard to compare, because the two groups of researchers used different measurements and methods. But, he said, more studies are needed that take metabolic health into account.
"I think we should actually promote weight loss in these individuals, but we need to find out, what is the best way to do it?" Karelis said.
What is health?
Obesity researchers are quick to note that this academic gray area is no excuse to pack on the pounds. Obesity is a major public health issue, responsible for 9 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 1998, including out-of-pocket, insurance and Medicare/Medicaid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And good metabolic indicators may not capture the full picture of what it means to be healthy. Even the metabolically healthy obese are at higher risk for health problems like joint pain, and obesity has been linked with depression.
There's also no guarantee that being obese but metabolically healthy reduces the risk of dying sooner than metabolically at-risk individuals. A study published last year in the journal Diabetes Care found there was no difference in the age of death between metabolically healthy and metabolically unhealthy obese people over a follow-up of nine years.
Part of the reason, said Jennifer Kuk, a professor at York University in Toronto who led the study, seems to be that obese people are more likely to die of cancer and trauma-related causes regardless of their metabolic status. Cancer may claim lives, because obese people are more reluctant to see their doctors, Kuk said, and trauma injuries may be more difficult to treat in people with greater body mass.
The bottom line: diet and exercise
Kuk's findings suggest weight loss might be beneficial no matter what your cholesterol levels tell you. But given research showing that most people fail to maintain weight loss (and findings that yo-yo weight loss and gain may be psychologically and physically harmful), the best message for the metabolically healthy subset is unclear.
"Whether we should be actively promoting weight loss knowing that over 90 percent of these individuals are going to fail is a question that I don't think anyone can answer at this point," Kuk said.
At least some clinicians are considering increasingly sophisticated screening procedures to separate metabolically healthy from metabolically unhealthy patients in the doctor's office. In 2009, researchers proposed a new scale in the International Journal of Obesity that would take into account metabolic risk factors. Under that scale, metabolically healthy obese patients would be counseled to maintain their weight by eating well and exercising.
Amid the debate over the benefits of weight loss, one thing is certain, Janiszewski said: The "eat well and exercise" message is good for everyone.
"Weight isn't maybe the most important thing you should look at," he said. With a healthy diet and exercise, "even if the scale says zero change, you're still getting a lot healthier and reducing your risk of disease."
September 28, 2010
September 23, 2010
Report: Obesity hurts your wallet and your health
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer – Tue Sep 21, 3:49 am ET
WASHINGTON – Obesity puts a drag on the wallet as well as health, especially for women.
Doctors have long known that medical bills are higher for the obese, but that's only a portion of the real-life costs.
George Washington University researchers added in things like employee sick days, lost productivity, even the need for extra gasoline — and found the annual cost of being obese is $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man.
That's far more than the cost of being merely overweight — $524 for women and $432 for men, concluded the report being released Tuesday, which analyzed previously published studies to come up with a total.
Why the difference between the sexes? Studies suggest larger women earn less than skinnier women, while wages don't differ when men pack on the pounds. That was a big surprise, said study co-author and health policy professor Christine Ferguson.
Researchers had expected everybody's wages to suffer with obesity, but "this indicates you're not that disadvantaged as a guy, from a wage perspective," said Ferguson, who plans to study why.
Then consider that obesity is linked to earlier death. While that's not something people usually consider a pocketbook issue, the report did average in the economic value of lost life. That brought women's annual obesity costs up to $8,365, and men's to $6,518.
The report was financed by one of the manufacturers of gastric banding, a type of obesity surgery.
The numbers are in line with other research and aren't surprising, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health economist at Duke University who wasn't involved in the new report.
Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Nearly 18 percent of adolescents now are obese, facing a future of diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.
Looking at the price tag may help policymakers weigh the value of spending to prevent and fight obesity, said Schulman, pointing to factors like dietary changes over the past 30 years and physical environments that discourage physical activity.
"We're paying a very high price as a society for obesity, and why don't we think about it as a problem of enormous magnitude to our economy?" he asks. "We're creating obesity and we need to do a man-on-the-moon effort to solve this before those poor kids in elementary school become diabetic middle-aged people."
A major study published last year found medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for the obese than normal-weight people. Tuesday's report added mostly work-related costs — things like sick days and disability claims — related to those health problems.
It also included a quirky finding, a study that calculated nearly 1 billion additional gallons of gasoline are used every year because of increases in car passengers' weight since 1960.
September 07, 2010
How Nutrition Tripled My Sales
Robin De-Ivy is being Interviewed by Ursula Mentjes of Sales Coach Now www.SalesCoachNow.com
August 31, 2010
Registered Dietician Joins Necessary Nutrition’s Advisory Team
Gwendolyn Moore, MPH, RD
A long standing practitioner of holistic health and wellness; currently a Clinical Dietitian and Director of Food & Nutrition at a local hospital. A part time faculty member at Chaffey College and Clinical Instructor at Loma Linda University/Preceptor of Nutrition and Dietetic Student Interns.
Received certification in nutrition and dietetics through Loma Linda University, completed internship at Kaiser Permanente, Fontana, Preventive Medicine Outpatient Dept: consulted patients on Hyperlidemia, Diabetes, Hypertension, Overweight & Obesity Management, Bariatrics, GI and Eating Disorders.
August 12, 2010
The Dark Side of Vitaminwater
Now here's something you wouldn't expect. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company's vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself?
In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage."
Does this mean that you'd have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named "vitaminwater," a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits?
Or does it mean that it's okay for a corporation to lie about its products, as long as they can then turn around and claim that no one actually believes their lies?
In fact, the product is basically sugar-water, to which about a penny's worth of synthetic vitamins have been added. And the amount of sugar is not trivial. A bottle of vitaminwater contains 33 grams of sugar, making it more akin to a soft drink than to a healthy beverage.
Is any harm being done by this marketing ploy? After all, some might say consumers are at least getting some vitamins, and there isn't as much sugar in vitaminwater as there is in regular Coke.
True. But about 35 percent of Americans are now considered medically obese. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight. Health experts tend to disagree about almost everything, but they all concur that added sugars play a key role in the obesity epidemic, a problem that now leads to more medical costs than smoking.
How many people with weight problems have consumed products like vitaminwater in the mistaken belief that the product was nutritionally positive and carried no caloric consequences? How many have thought that consuming vitaminwater was a smart choice from a weight-loss perspective? The very name "vitaminwater" suggests that the product is simply water with added nutrients, disguising the fact that it's actually full of added sugar.
The truth is that when it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be even more important than what you eat. Americans now get nearly 25 percent of their calories from liquids. In 2009, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, finding that the quickest and most reliable way to lose weight is to cut down on liquid calorie consumption. And the best way to do that is to reduce or eliminate beverages that contain added sugar.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in its vitaminwater line, paying basketball stars, including Kobe Bryant and Lebron James, to appear in ads that emphatically state that these products are a healthy way for consumers to hydrate. When Lebron James held his much ballyhooed TV special to announce his decision to join the Miami Heat, many corporations paid millions in an attempt to capitalize on the event. But it was vitaminwater that had the most prominent role throughout the show.
The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, alleges that vitaminwater labels and advertising are filled with "deceptive and unsubstantiated claims." In his recent 55-page ruling, Federal Judge John Gleeson (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York), wrote, "At oral arguments, defendants (Coca-Cola) suggested that no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitamin water was a healthy beverage." Noting that the soft drink giant wasn't claiming the lawsuit was wrong on factual grounds, the judge wrote that, "Accordingly, I must accept the factual allegations in the complaint as true."
I still can't get over the bizarre audacity of Coke's legal case. Forced to defend themselves in court, they are acknowledging that vitaminwater isn't a healthy product. But they are arguing that advertising it as such isn't false advertising, because no could possibly believe such a ridiculous claim.
I guess that's why they spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising the product, saying it will keep you "healthy as a horse," and will bring about a "healthy state of physical and mental well-being."
Why do we allow companies like Coca-Cola to tell us that drinking a bottle of sugar water with a few added water-soluble vitamins is a legitimate way to meet our nutritional needs?
Here's what I suggest: If you're looking for a healthy and far less expensive way to hydrate, try drinking water. If you want to flavor the water you drink, try adding the juice of a lemon and a small amount of honey or maple syrup to a quart of water. Another alternative is to mix one part lemonade or fruit juice to three or four parts water. Or drink green tea, hot or chilled, adding lemon and a small amount of sweetener if you like. If you want to jazz it up, try one-half fruit juice, one-half carbonated water.
If your tap water tastes bad or you suspect it might contain lead or other contaminants, get a water filter that fits under the sink or attaches to the tap.
And it's probably not the best idea to rely on a soft drink company for your vitamins and other essential nutrients. A plant-strong diet with lots of vegetables and fruits will provide you with what you need far more reliably, far more consistently -- and far more honestly.
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