The very capable guys and gals at the Mayo Clinic have an article today about Bisphenol A health risks. This is something very new to most of us but it involves plastic containers that we store food in.

An important article in the Sept. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association discusses the health effects of the chemical Bisphenol A. What is this compound and what are its effects? What might happen as a result of this study?

Bisphenol A is a chemical in plastics. It is widely found in the lining of food containers, plastic bottles, compact discs, carbonless paper, and many medical devices. It also is used to coat metal products (food cans and bottle tops), and even water supply lines. Some dental sealants also contain this ingredient.

Now for the Bisphenol A health risks. Animal studies done in the 1980s and ’90s identified that low doses of Bisphenol A have adverse effects on the brain, reproductive system, and metabolic processes related to insulin balance and liver function. It may also be related to cancer or even obesity and heart disease. Although it is not immediately lethal, studies show that greatest sensitivity to Bisphenol A occurs during periods of early development and that the substance accumulates over time in the body and environment. Read the rest of this entry »

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Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

Tags: American Medical Association, cancer, dishwasher, Environmental Protection Agency, food cans, food containers, food in., heart disease, Mayo Clinic, medical devices, metal products, National Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, obesity, plastic food containers, plastic sports bottles, plastics, the Journal of the American Medical Association, U.S. Food and Drug Administration

I have been compiling info on artificial sweetners for years and there are some that are OK and some that are really bad for you but here is a bit of an overview of he dangers of using different artificial sweeteners to try to drop your calorie intake.

Aspartame

Aspartame, a dipeptide of aspartic acid and a methyl ester of phenylalanine, is approved for use in pharmaceutical products and is being used increasingly in chewable tablet and sugar-free formulations. Labels for both prescription and nonprescription products must include the phenylalanine content. The major consideration in the use of aspartame in children is in patients with autosomal recessive phenylketonuria. Although heterozygotes do not appear to have clinically significant increases in phenylalanine after ingestion of even large amounts (equivalent to 24 12-oz cans of diet beverages), homozygotes with strict dietary restrictions should avoid aspartame. Children without dietary restrictions could safely ingest 10 mg/kg/day. Dietary consumption of aspartame is typically less than 5 mg/kg/day; young children, however, could ingest considerably more. For example, a 2-year-old child weighing 12 kg consumes 17 mg/kg from drinking one 12-oz can of diet soda and one serving of a sweetened product (eg, cereal, pudding, gelatin, or frozen dessert). Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: absence seizures, affective disorders, albuminuria, allergy, American Herbal Products Association, American Medical Association, artificial chemical, artificial sweetners, aspartame, aspartic acid, bladder cancer, blisters, Brazil, cancer, chemical, dairy by-product, dairy products, depression, diarrhea, diet beverages, Dietary Supplement, dietary supplements, dizziness, eczema, epilepsy, evidence, fda, FDA/National Cancer Institute, food, food additive, Food additives, food processors, food products, headache, headaches, Hypersensitivity, insomnia, Japan, Japanese government, migraine headaches, mitral valve prolapse, nausea, neuropsychiatric disorders, nonprescription products, oliguria, panic attacks, Paraguay, pharmaceutical agents, pharmaceutical products, phenylketonuria, placebos, product, prurigo, pruritus, Saccharin, salty applications, SeaLife SL 200C 35mm Film Camera, seizure disorders, seizures, sodium chloride, Stevia, strabismus, Sucralose, tachycardia, Tagatose, United States, urticaria, vascular headaches, visual hallucinations, wheezing

Dietary intake of omega-3 fatty acids was associated with a lower incidence of autoantibodies in the blood that signal the immune system to attack insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Omega-3 fatty acids are known to have anti-inflammatory properties, and inflammation is believed to play a major role in the development of type 1 diabetes through destruction of these insulin-producing cells.

“The thinking is that omega-3 may increase the body’s ability to fight the inflammation that leads to type 1 diabetes,” researcher Jill M. Norris, MPH, PHD announced yesterday.

“This is a preliminary study,” she says. “We really can’t make dietary recommendations based on these findings.”

The study appears in the Sept. 27 issue of TheJournal of the American Medical Association.

Omega-3, Diabetes Research
In adults, omega-3 rich diets are believed to lower cardiovascular risk, and in babies the fatty acid is believed to boost brain development.

A 2003 study from Norway was one of the first human trials to suggest a protective role for omega-3 fatty acids in type 1 diabetes. Researchers reported a lower incidence of omega-3-rich cod liver oil supplementation during infancy in children with diabetes, compared to children without the disease.

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Tags: American Medical Association, annual food-frequency questionnaires, canola oil, cod liver oil supplementation, diabetes, diabetes_research, dietary_recommendations, flaxseed_oil, food sources, Health Issues, inflammation, Jill M. Norris, Michael Clare-Salzler, Norway, oil, omega_3s, researcher, sunflower oil, Uncategorized

We all know that many people fail on their diets and often wonder why. Well there is a number of factors that affect whether a diet will work or will not. I thought I would pull some info from a KLTV article from today and will paraphrase the details.

About one in three American adults is trying to lose weight at any given time, and while their track record for trying is good, their track record for succeeding is not.

Within five years, most dieters will regain the weight they lost. And, after five years, they may even weigh more than when they started the original weight-loss effort, some studies have found.

But weight-loss researchers have begun to uncover insights into what makes some dieters succeed while others fail. While there are no hard-and-fast rules that work for everyone, there are ways to maximize your success the next time you decide to drop those excess pounds — maybe for good.

A strategy for success begins with getting realistic, experts say.

Unrealistic Goals
“Cause number-one [for failure] is setting too unrealistic of goals, losing too much too fast,” said Barbel Knauper, an associate professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal. Instead of trying to lose, say, 15 pounds in a month — very unrealistic — most experts suggest a slow, steady loss, about one or two pounds a week.

Bad eating planning
Another pitfall, Knauper said, is a lack of advance planning before social situations. “If people were making ‘when, where, how’ plans, they would be more likely to adhere to their goal,” he said. For instance, you might say to yourself, ‘When I go out for dinner tonight with friends, I won’t order a large entree, but a smaller one. And I’ll stick with my choice even if they pressure me to eat more.’”

Socializing is one of the top three reasons people eventually fail with a diet, said Dr. Michael Dansinger, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center, in Boston.

Feeling deprived of certain foods
The other two? “Feelings of deprivation or boredom with the current eating plan,” Dansinger said, “and the healthy foods often seem to be less available, require more preparation or cost more than the unhealthy foods.”

Portion size and the effect of exercise
Still another pitfall, Knauper said, is that people often underestimate the number of calories in foods and overestimate the number of calories burned through exercise.

In one study, Knauper asked 132 women trying to lose weight on their own to tell him their strategies — their dieting “rules,” so to speak. In all, the 132 dieters offered 895 rules, with each woman listing an average of nearly seven.

Then his research team followed the women to see which rules worked. Overall, adherence to the self-set rules was low. But the ones deemed most effective were the simplest — reducing calories and increasing exercise. Other rules that worked included: decreasing sugar intake; increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables, vitamins and water; watching less TV; and eating at home more often.

If you’ve tried unsuccessfully to diet many times, Dansinger suggests getting a “coach.” A coach can be your doctor, another health professional, or a friend who’ll hold you accountable to your goals, he said. He also suggests recording your intake of calories every day, limiting calories, and exercising seven hours a week, including cardiovascular and weight workouts.

In a 2005 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dansinger also found that adherence to a weight-loss plan — any plan — is more important than the diet regimen itself. He compared people on Weight Watchers, Atkins, Zone and Ornish diets and found no substantial weight-loss differences at one year, regardless of the diet. The amount of weight lost ranged from 4.6 to 7.3 pounds.

So what can we learn from this study? Well I believe that it is most important to look sometimes at your weight loss plan as a bit of a high wire act where you always need to be loose and able to move one way or another but at the same time focused on whee you are and where you are going. Although most diets fail there is no way to fail if you change your lifestyle and attitude about food and exercise.

Tags: American Medical Association, associate professor, associate professor of psychology, Barbel Knauper, Boston, coach, Dansinger, food, KLTV, McGill University in Montreal, Michael Dansinger, Montreal, professor of medicine, professor of psychology, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Tufts-New England Medical Center

A huge review of studies on pain relievers has found that a widely-used medicine may confer cardiovascular risks as serious as those found with Vioxx, an arthritis medicine that was withdrawn from the market two years ago.

Diclofenac, marketedas Voltaren, Cataflam, Solaraze and Arthrotec, an older non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), has been on the market for decades and is one of the most-widely prescribed anti-inflammatories in the world especially in Europe. At commonly prescribed doses, it was found to increase the risk of cardiovascular events primarily heart attack and sudden death by 40%.

The good news from the study is that there are alternatives. “European consumers would be better off switching [from diclofenac] to naproxen,” says David Graham, a safety official at the US Food and Drug Administration, who authored an editorial1 accompanying the published review. Naproxen was found to neither increase nor decrease cardiac risk.
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Tags: American Medical Association, arthritis, atherosclerosis, Australia, David Graham, David Henry, Europe, heart attack, heart disease, New South Wales, Newcastle Mater Hospital, pain, Patricia McGettigan, safety official, the Journal of the American Medical Association, University of Newcastle in New South Wales, US Food and Drug Administration, vioxx, Waratah

I found this list of some common supplements used in weight loss from the Blue Cross of of Massachusetts. This list even includes some warnings where needed:

Chromium Supplement

This mineral, found in tiny amounts in almost all foods, helps the body burn fat, build muscle, and control blood sugar. A little chromium is essential to good health, but does that mean extra chromium must be extra healthy?

Supplement marketers and manufacturers claim that chromium pills are a shortcut to the perfect body, but the benefits are far from certain. For one thing, chromium is a nutrient and not a drug, which means it can only help people who don’t get enough chromium in their diet. And while a few studies have found that chromium supplements apparently lead to small gains in muscle and modest weight loss (as in roughly 2 pounds of fat lost per month), several recent studies have found no such effects.

Richard A. Anderson, lead scientist at the United States Department Of Agriculture’s Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, has studied chromium supplements in many contexts over the last 20 years, and he’s never seen the supplements change a person’s body weight. Dr. Anderson summed up his opinion of the supplements in the September, 1998, issue of the journal Nutrition Reviews: “Chromium is only a small part of the puzzle in weight loss and body composition, and its effects, if present, will be small compared with those of exercise and a well-balanced diet.”
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Tags: American Medical Association, bloating, chemical, Columbia, Columbia University, diabetes, diarrhea, Editor, energy, ephedra product, FDA's Office of Over, food and drug administration, HCA, headaches, Health and Human Services Secretary, heart attack, heart attacks, high blood pressure, hypertension, India, insomnia, kidney disease, neurologic disorders, numerous injuries, obesity, over-the-counter products, Pittsburgh Medical Center, Robert Sherman, seizures, stroke, strokes, the International Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Tommy G. Thompson, tremors, United States, University of Pittsburgh

A couple years ago my wife was considering weight loss surgery as her years off dieting and exercise and the yoyo weight loss/gain nightmare had mad her tired of the whole weight loss industry. Using Weight Watchers and getting the exercise to a more moderate lvel have helped Michelle lose three pounds or so per week and she is quickly dropping the weight that was so stubborn just a couple of years back. Yesterday Michelle got a call for the gastric bypass surgery consultation which here in Alberta Canada takes 19 months, I am happy to say that she turned it down because a healthy lifestyle has maed the difference for her. As you probably know there are a lot of instances where this surgery is really helpful for people but only in cases where there is a risk of imminent death by now doing something as drastic as this surgery is.

I have found an article from Bloomberg that I think really shows the importance of this surgery and the possible implications. Below are some exerpts from that article.
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Tags: American Medical Association, arthritis, associate professor, back surgery, bariatric surgeries, bariatric surgery, Bloomberg, Bruce M. Wolfe, California, David R. Flum, David S. Zingmond, diabetes, food, Gastric bypass, gastric bypass surgery, GBP, health care services, heart surgery, high blood pressure, hip replacement, insurance, John M. Morton, Journal of the American Medical Association, knee surgery, lead researcher, Los Angeles, Medicare, Michelle Fay Cortez, Minneapolis, obesity, obesity surgery, Oregon Health Science University in Portland, plastic surgery, Portland, professor of medicine, professor of surgery, reporter, Seattle, Stanford University in California, surgeries, surgery, UCLA's School of Medicine, United States, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Washington in Seattle, weight loss surgery