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Ilona Meagher

MSNBC | Study: Healthy eating adds up on grocery bills - 0 views

  • If you are trying to eat as healthy as the government wants you to, it’s going to cost you: at least $7.28  a week extra, that is. A recent update of U.S. nutritional guidelines -- what used to be known as the food pyramid and is now called "My Plate" -- calls on Americans to eat more fresh foods containing potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D and calcium.
  • With potassium, for instance, the participants consumed an average of 2,800 milligrams a day — 700 milligrams below the recommended amount. To get up to par, they’d have to spend an extra $1.04 a day, or $380 a year. For a family of four, that's $1,520 annually. To boost levels of dietary fiber and vitamin D, they’d have to spend about 35 cents extra a day for each of the two nutrients. Most participants came so close to meeting calcium guidelines, they wouldn’t have to spend more on dairy products.
  • Boosting potassium doesn't have to come with such a high price tag, though. “If you were to guide people toward the most affordable sources of potassium, you could do it more cheaply,” Monsivais said. Potatoes and beans, for instance, are inexpensive sources of potassium and dietary fiber, For a mere 95 cents, you could buy five bananas at Trader Joe’s, and they’d provide 450 to 500 milligrams of potassium each. So why would the participants in Monsivais’ study have to spend so much? King County includes Seattle, one of the most affluent and highly educated cities in the country. When those folks consume potassium, Monsivais says, it tends to come in the form of more expensive fruits and vegetables such as nectarines and dark leafy greens. Sure, they could eat more economically, but they'd have to know how to do so, Monsivais said. The guidelines may be based on solid scientific evidence, he says, but they won’t do much good if Americans don’t know what foods provide the best nutritional bang for their buck.
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  • "Almost 15 percent of households in America say they don't have enough money to eat the way they want to eat," Seligman said. Recent estimates show 49 million Americans make food decisions based on cost, she added. "Right now, a huge chunk of America just isn't able to adhere to these guidelines," she said.
Ilona Meagher

Reuters | Healthy eating helps reverse metabolic syndrome - 0 views

  • People with metabolic syndrome -- a cluster of risk factors for heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes -- have a better chance of reversing it if they stick to a healthy diet, a new study shows.
  • A person is considered to have metabolic syndrome if they have three or more of the following risk factors: excess belly fat; high triglyceride levels (a harmful blood fat); low levels of "good" HDL cholesterol; high blood pressure; and either high blood sugar levels or type 2 diabetes.
  • According to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), having metabolic syndrome doubles a person's risk of heart disease and quintuples their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Nearly a quarter of US adults have the metabolic syndrome.
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  • The AHEI is a set of nutritional guidelines published by Harvard School of Public Health researchers in 2002. The guidelines emphasize eating whole grains rather than refined grains, white meat rather than red meat, and lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts and soy. Studies have shown that following the guidelines helps cut the risk of chronic disease in both men and women.
  • After five years, nearly half no longer had the metabolic syndrome. People who adhered the most closely to the AHEI, the researchers found, were nearly twice as likely to have reversed their metabolic syndrome.
  • For people with central obesity, defined as waist circumference above 102 centimeters (40 inches) for men and 88 centimeters (35 inches) for women, those with the healthiest diets were nearly three times as likely to have recovered from metabolic syndrome than those with the unhealthiest eating patterns; healthy eating also had a somewhat stronger effect for people who started out with high levels of harmful triglycerides.
  • "It's not about focusing on individual components of the diet," Lichtenstein said. "It's really the whole package, and that becomes important because it means that if one of the components of a healthy diet is to eat more fruits and vegetables, just buying a pill saying that there's a concentrated extract of fruits and vegetables is probably not what's going to help you."
Ilona Meagher

The Star | Children's physical fitness: Walk away from the TV - 0 views

  • Canada’s guidelines on sedentary activity (an oxymoron to be sure) released last week say children should spend no more than two hours a day in front of a TV, videogame or computer screen.
  • Only 7 per cent of children meet Canada’s physical activity guidelines. (Adults don’t fare much better at 15 per cent.)
Ilona Meagher

Nutritional Blogma | Choose foods, not nutrients - 0 views

  • We should move toward food-based instead of nutrient-based dietary guidelines.
  • we should be promoting whole foods, not specific nutrients which push consumers toward processed products
  • While nutritional science at the nutrient and molecular level is fascinating and making incredible progress, I think the most effective way to reverse health epidemics is to focus on education about foods and changing the nutritional environment.
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  • shifting to real foods over processed ones will bring dramatic improvements in health
  • Cultures that have not developed often enjoy low rates of chronic disease.  Consuming diets with whole foods generally leads to a pretty balanced macronutrient intake anyway, which lowers the need to worry about details.  I like the rule of going mostly for foods that don’t have nutrition facts panels at all- those that are generally toward the outside of grocery stores.
Ilona Meagher

USA Today | 'Real world' advice increases awareness of heart disease in women - 0 views

  • Every minute, there's a death due to cardiovascular disease in women, says Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who was not an author."This constitutes 422,000 deaths a year — more than cancer, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's and accidents combined," Fonarow says.The guidelines recommend that women:•Avoid smoking and exposure to environmental smoke.•Be physically active, getting 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise.•Establish a comprehensive risk-reduction regime if diagnosed with heart disease or have a heart event.•Achieve a healthy body weight.•Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables; choose whole-grain, high-fiber foods; eat oily fish at least twice a week; limit saturated fat, cholesterol and sugar; avoid trans-fatty acids.•Consume omega-3 fatty acids by eating fish, or in capsule form if they have high cholesterol.
Ilona Meagher

Clinical Pediatrics | Running-Related Injuries in School-Age Children and Adolescents T... - 0 views

  • Running for exercise is a popular way to motivate children to be physically active. Running-related injuries are well studied in adults but little information exists for children and adolescents. Through use of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, cases of running-related injuries were selected by using activity codes for exercise (which included running and jogging). Sample weights were used to calculate national estimates. An estimated 225 344 children and adolescents 6 to 18 years old were treated in US emergency departments for running-related injuries. The annual number of cases increased by 34.0% over the study period. One third of the injuries involved a running-related fall and more than one half of the injuries occurred at school. The majority of injuries occurred to the lower extremities and resulted in a sprain or strain. These findings emphasize the need for scientific evidence-based guidelines for pediatric running. The high proportion of running-related falls warrants further research.
Ilona Meagher

TIME | How to Make a Healthy Diet More Affordable - 0 views

  • A new study published on Thursday in the journal Health Affairs calculates that it would cost the average American an extra $380 in fruits and vegetables per year to meet the government's recommendation for potassium intake alone. Healthy foods are expensive. Conversely, the unhealthier your diet gets, the less it costs. The study found that for each 1% increase in calories from saturated fat, food costs decline by 28¢; for each 1% increase in calories from added sugar, the savings equal 7¢.
  • Not only are fresh, whole foods costly, but there isn't enough of them to go around. Regarding the U.S. food supply, the researchers wrote: The current system has proved to be remarkably effective in the provision of calories, but not as good at supplying nutrients. More fundamentally, the system currently falls short of producing enough vegetables and fruit to supply Americans with even the minimum recommended number of daily servings of these foods.
  • Potassium was, calorie for calorie, the most expensive nutrient. U.S. guidelines recommend that Americans get 4,700 mg of potassium each day, but study participants got just 2,800 mg per day on average. In order to make up the difference, a person would have to spend an additional $1.04 per day
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  • Not surprisingly, people who spent the most on food had the most nutrient-rich diets and those lowest in saturated fat and added sugar.
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