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Ilona Meagher

Reuters | Vitamin D may help keep blood sugar under control - 0 views

  • Drinking yogurt with extra vitamin D may help people with diabetes regulate their blood sugar, a study from Iran finds. In the trial, 90 adults with diabetes were divided into three groups, all given daily yogurt drinks: one group received plain yogurt, one got yogurt with extra vitamin D, and one was given yogurt with extra vitamin D and calcium.At the end of 12 weeks, "we found a relatively remarkable improvement" in blood sugar levels in the groups that got extra vitamin D, compared to the plain yogurt group, co-author Tirang Neyestani, associate professor at National Nutrition and Food Technology Research Institute in Iran, told Reuters Health in an e-mail.
  • Going back to the 1980s, numerous studies have linked vitamin D to a lowered risk of diabetes, however others have found no benefit. A recent report showed no link between women's blood levels of vitamin D and their risk of developing type 2 diabetes, for example. (See Reuters Health story of February 22, 2011.)Few studies have directly tested the theory by giving people vitamin D and then seeing how they compare over time in diabetes-related measurements with similar subjects who did not consume the vitamin.
Ilona Meagher

NPR | Drinking Soda May Increase Your Blood Pressure - 0 views

  • A new study adds yet another reason to consider scaling back your soda intake, and it's already putting beverage makers on the defensive. Researchers from the School of Public Health at Imperial College in London analyzed the diets of nearly 2,700 middle-aged people in the U.S. and the U.K. They found that people drinking more than one soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage a day had higher blood pressure, and that it kept going up the more they drank. After accounting for weight and other risk factors, that habit seemed to still put them at greater risk for cardiovascular problems.
  • The researchers also found that people who drank more than one sugary drink a day consumed nearly 400 more calories than those who didn't. And their diets were more likely to lack key nutrients like potassium, magnesium and calcium. "This is because they're getting the calories from these nutrient-poor sources. All they provide is the calories — none of the benefits of real foods," Brown says.
  • The new study seems to bolster previous research showing that cutting back even just a serving of soda a day can help lower blood pressure for those most at risk.
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  • But don't sit there sanctimoniously thinking that your diet soda is going to save you. While the U.K. study showed that diet soda drinkers didn't seem to have the same high-blood pressure problems experienced by their sugared-up counterparts, they did have higher BMI. They also had lower levels of physical activity. And other studies have suggested diet soda is bad for your kidneys. The new study appears in the journal Hypertension.
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.
Ilona Meagher

NYT | Army Revises Training to Deal With Unfit Recruits - 0 views

  • Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded. This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.
  • “What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”
  • “Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,”
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  • General Hertling said that the percentage of male recruits who failed the most basic fitness test at one training center rose to more than one in five in 2006, up from just 4 percent in 2000. The percentages were higher for women.
  • Another study found that at one training center in 2002, 3 recruits suffered stress fractures of the pubic bone, but last year the number rose to 39. The reason, General Hertling said: not enough weight-bearing exercise and a diet heavy on sugared sodas and energy drinks but light in calcium and iron.
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

Health | Diabetes-prone people at risk for Alzheimer's plaques - 0 views

  • People at risk for type 2 diabetes are also more likely to have brain abnormalities associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study from Japan. The study is the latest evidence of a diabetes-dementia link.
  • The researchers found that men and women in their 60s with higher-than-average levels of blood sugar (glucose) or insulin -- two signs of type 2 diabetes -- are between three and six times more likely to have certain protein deposits in their brains a decade or more later, according to the study, which appears in the journal Neurology.
  • Alzheimer's disease affects as many as 5 million people in the U.S., and the cause is largely unknown (although genes play a role). About 24 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, and about 90 percent of those have type 2.
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  • Obesity and a lack of exercise raise the risk of type 2 diabetes, and several studies have shown that people with type 2 are at increased risk of dementia and faster cognitive decline as they age.
  • a link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer's is plausible. Insulin resistance causes insulin levels to rise, which may interfere with enzymes that slow down the production of the protein found in brain plaques
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

Science Daily | Obesity and diabetes are a downside of human evolution, research suggests - 0 views

  • As if the recent prediction that half of all Americans will have diabetes or pre-diabetes by the year 2020 isn't alarming enough, a new genetic discovery published online in the FASEB Journal provides a disturbing explanation as to why: we took an evolutionary "wrong turn." In the research report, scientists show that human evolution leading to the loss of function in a gene called "CMAH" may make humans more prone to obesity and diabetes than other mammals.
  • "Our study for the first time links human-specific sialic acid changes to insulin and glucose metabolism and therefore opens up a new perspective in understanding the causes of diabetes." In this study, which is the first to examine the effect of a human-specific CMAH genetic mutation in obesity-related metabolism and diabetes, Kim and colleagues show that the loss of CMAH's function contributes to the failure of the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in overweight humans, which is known to be a key factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. This gene encodes for an enzyme present in all mammalian species except for humans and adds a single oxygen atom to sialic acids, which are sugars that coat the cell surface
Ilona Meagher

That's Fit | New Study Shows Exercise Improves Math Scores in Overweight Kids - 0 views

  • According to a recent study, regular exercise improves the ability of inactive, overweight children to do better in math. Researchers at Georgia Health Sciences University studied 171 sedentary and overweight 7- to 11-year-olds in an effort to identify what happens to children's brains with regular, vigorous exercise.
  • After allowing the kids to engage in fun, playful exercises, such as running games, hula hooping and jump roping, which raised their heart rates to 79 percent of their maximum, scientists used the Cognitive Assessment System and Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement III, tests that measure abilities such as planning and academic skills, to identify brain activity before and after the bouts of physical activity. Students showed an increase in complex thinking and decision making -- the areas of the brain that are used in math. In fact, the more the children exercised, the more their brains responded. Intelligence scores increased an average 3.8 points in those exercising 40 minutes per day for three months. Those who exercised just 20 minutes a day also benefited, just in a smaller dose. Researchers noted that the improved math skills were "remarkable," since no math lessons were given as part of the study. This suggests longer, more sustained periods of vigorous physical activity throughout the entire school year could produce even higher results. And researchers believe all children -- not just those who are overweight -- could benefit with improved reasoning and complex thinking skills.
  • In a country where one-third of our children are overweight, it is increasingly important to motivate schools and parents to encourage daily physical activity. The Center for Disease Control recommends at least 60 minutes of exercise a day for children, yet there is no federal mandate for minimum standards in schools. Each state is responsible for setting their own requirements, and unfortunately, with increasing budget cuts, not all schools comply or engage the children in quality-rich physical education.
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