7 reasons to boycott the Super Bowl from a medical standpoint

As an aside, I stopped participating in alumni band during football homecoming.
Just don’t want to be part of this sport which in increasingly unhealthy in the short and long run.

From the 30 January 2013 KevinMD post

You’ve probably watched the Super Bowl as I have many times, faithfully, elevating the occasion to some kind of macabre family tradition. It is a spectacle of athletic agility, drama, and struggle; the pinnacle of American sporting contests. Despite the heavy onslaught of commercialism, faux halftime culture, and evident violence on the field, we suspend our awareness that this event may not be a magical moment worth our time and validation, even as its winners call out to some magical Disney kingdom.

Here are 7 points to consider:

7. Obesity and cardiovascular disease. Up to 45% of youth participating in football are overweight or obese. The nature of the sport favors, and increasingly demands, a large body size. The physique acquired in adolescence often persists into adulthood.
According to a 2007 study of 653 boys ages 8-14 playing football in Michigan, 20% were overweight and another 25% were obese, as defined by body mass index.Studies have shown that linemen have high early mortality rates, and for all professional players who have played 5 years or more, life expectancy is less than 60.

6) MRSA infections and abscesses. Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have suffered from it.

Read the entire post here

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Public health extremism

Reblogged from JHU Press Blog:

Guest post by Maxwell J. Mehlman

In a November article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard law professors Michelle Mello and Glenn Cohen argue that in upholding the Affordable Care Act's individual insurance mandate as a tax the Supreme Court "has highlighted an opportunity for passing creative new public health laws.” As a bioethicist who writes extensively on the question of coercive public health this troubled me on several fronts. 

Read more… 491 more words

Chemical Exposure in the Womb from Household Items May Contribute to Obesity

 

From the 30 August 2012 article at Science News Daily

Pregnant women who are highly exposed to common environmental chemicals — polyfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs) — have babies that are smaller at birth and larger at 20 months of age, according to a study from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health published online in the August 30 edition ofEnvironmental Health Perspectives.

PFCs are used in the production of fluoropolymers and are found widely in protective coatings of packaging products, clothes, furniture and non-stick cookware. They are persistent compounds found abundantly in the environment and human exposure is common. PFCs have been detected in human sera, breast milk and cord blood…

..

The researchers found that even though girls with higher exposure were smaller than average (43rd percentile) at birth, they were heavier than average (58th percentile) by 20 months of age. The authors say this path may lead to obesity at older ages.

“Previous animal and human research suggests prenatal exposures to PFCs may have harmful effects on fetal and postnatal growth,” says lead researcher Michele Marcus, MPH, PhD, a professor of epidemiology in Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health and the assistant program director at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research.

“Our findings are consistent with these studies and emerging evidence that chemicals in our environment are contributing to obesity and diabetes and demonstrate that this trajectory is set very early in life for those exposed.”

According to Marcus, a recent study in Denmark found that women exposed to PFCs in the womb were more likely to be overweight at age 20. And experimental studies with mice have shown that exposure in the womb led to higher levels of insulin and heavier body weight in adulthood….

 

Related articles

• Chemical exposure in the womb from household items may contribute to obesity (engineeringevil.com)
• Chemical exposure in the womb from household items may contribute to obesity (scienceblog.com)
• Chemical exposure in the womb from household items may contribute to obesity (eurekalert.org)
• Chemical exposure in the womb from household items may contribute to obesity (medicalxpress.com)
• Child obesity link to magnetic field exposure in the womb (nyrnaturalnews.com)
• Exposure To Magnetic Fields In The Womb Associated With Increased Risk Of Obesity In Childhood (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Exposure To Chemical In Drinking Water In The Womb And Early Childhood May Affect Vision (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Diesel Exhaust Exposure In The Womb A Possible Risk Factor For Obesity (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Exposure to environmental chemicals in the womb reprograms the rodent brain to disrupt reproduction (medicalxpress.com)
• Widely Used Pesticide Harms Boys’ Brains (eastbayexpress.com)

 

‘Burdens Of Place’ Plague Urban Poor; Often Lead To Weight Gain, Obesity

 

From the 12 August Medical News Today article

Most of America’s urban cores were designed for walking but offer little in the way of supermarkets, healthy restaurants and other amenities for residents to walk to, according to a study led by a Michigan State University scholar.

The study is one of the first to show that poor residents living in declining urban neighborhoods want healthy food choices – evidenced by their willingness to travel long distances to find them. Past research has generally assumed that poor people will shop at whatever store is closest.

But compared with suburban residents, the urban poor are more overweight and must travel farther to find healthy food and access personal services, said Igor Vojnovic, associate professor of geography and lead author on the study…

..Other findings included:

• Fast food restaurants were more plentiful in poor neighborhoods. In addition, residents there reported that 55 percent of all dining-out experiences were at fast food eateries, compared with only 13 percent for those in the suburbs.
• Poor urban residents had to go nearly twice as far as suburbanites to shop at supermarkets.
• The urban poor made about five trips per month to convenience stores (which aren’t known for stocking healthy foods) compared with only one trip per month for suburbanites…

..

During the past 30 years, urban planners and business investors have largely ignored poor communities, instead focusing policy, research and investment efforts on wealthier neighborhoods, Vojnovic said. As a result, little is known about resident behaviors in declining communities, even as the number of poor people increases in the United States, he said.

The current study shows that the fundamental principles in city planning and design that have been developed around wealthy communities do not necessarily hold in poor neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, some have advocated an “obesity tax” on unhealthy foods to help pay for the health-care system overhaul or as a policy to curtail obesity. But Vojnovic said such a tax would disproportionately burden the urban poor and noted that this population has little power to influence the location decisions of healthy food suppliers.

Vojnovic said a better option might be for states to give subsidies to major supermarket chains, restaurants serving healthy food and other needed establishments that locate in poor neighborhoods. 

Related articles

• Urban poor plagued by ‘burdens of place’ (scienceblog.com)
• Urban poor need to hunt for healthy food (futurity.org)
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• Kinder Work Schedules May Reduce Obesity (theepochtimes.com)
• Obesity and Your Dental Health (topdentists.com)
• Overtime Shifts May Increase Obesity Rates Among Nurses (medicalnewstoday.com)
• AMA and Mercy Aligned in Educating Kids about the Dangers of Obesity (prweb.com)
• Fat of the land: how urban design can help curb obesity (healthycities.wordpress.com)
• Study: Junk food laws may help curb kids’ obesity (rep-am.com)

 

The New Science Behind America’s Deadliest Diseases – WSJ.com

The New Science Behind America’s Deadliest Diseases – WSJ.com (16th July 2012)

What do heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke and cancer have in common? Scientists have linked each of these to a condition known as chronic inflammation, and they are studying how high-fat foods and excess body weight may increase the risk for fatal disorders.

While much focus has been on fighting inflammation with drugs, researchers are getting a better understanding of the links connecting diet, inflammation and illness and discovering ways that foods can help keep inflammation in check. Laura Landro has details on Lunch Break.

Inflammation is the body’s natural response to injury and outside irritants. But when the irritants don’t let up, because of a diet of high-fat foods, too much body fat and smoking, for example, the immune system can spiral out of control and increase the risk for disease. Experts say when inflammation becomes chronic it can damage heart valves and brain cells, trigger strokes, and promote resistance to insulin, which leads to diabetes. It also is associated with the development of cancer.

Much of the research on chronic inflammation has focused on fighting it with drugs, such as cholesterol-lowering statins for heart disease. A growing body of research is revealing how abdominal fat and an unhealthy diet can lead to inflammation. Some scientists are investigating how certain components in foods might help. Dietary fiber from whole grains, for instance, may play a protective role against inflammation, a recent study found. And dairy foods may help ease inflammation in patients with a combination of risk factors…

…A substance known as C-reactive protein, measured with a simple blood test, is an indicator of inflammation in the body. A report published in Archives of Internal Medicine in 2007, which analyzed results of 33 separate studies, found that losing weight can lower C-reactive protein levels. For each one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of weight loss, whether by dieting, exercise or surgery, the mean reduction in C-reactive protein among participants was 0.13 milligram per liter…

..At a meeting in Quebec City last week on abdominal obesity and its health risks, experts in cardiology, endocrinology, nutrition and related specialties presented a wide range of new research linking obesity to inflammation-related diseases…

Related articles

• What do heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke and cancer have in common? (warmsouthernbreeze.wordpress.com)
• A.M. Vitals: Inflammation and Disease (blogs.wsj.com)
• Diet, Deadly Ailments Linked to Inflammation (pochp.wordpress.com)
• The silent killer: Modern lifestyle promotes Leaky Gut and low-level chronic inflammation (theaveragejoenewsblogg.com)
• Inflammation and food (therealfoodchannel.com)
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Geographic information systems demonstrate links between health and location

From the 10 April 2012 Eureka news alert

San Diego, CA, April 10, 2012 – The neighborhoods in which children and adolescents live and spend their time play a role in whether or not they eat a healthy diet, get enough exercise or become obese, concludes a collection of studies in a special theme issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Each of the six studies uses the latest concepts and methods in geographic information systems (GIS)-based research to determine how the geographic location affects physical health. A study titled “Spatial Classification of Youth Physical Activity Patterns” shows, for example, that while rural youth get the largest proportion of their physical activity while at school, urban and suburban youth are most active when commuting. Not only does this finding suggest that the walk to school might be just as important to some children’s health as is the physical education they receive as part of the school curriculum, it is also important given that adolescent health behaviors are predictive of behaviors in adults.

Another study by researchers in the United Kingdom concludes that adolescents in rural areas ate fast food more often when fast-food outlets were easily accessible, whereas the opposite was true for adolescents living in urban areas. The researchers, led by Lorna J. Fraser of the University of Leeds, conclude that although the need continues to exist for nutritional education regarding fast food, placing restrictions on the location of fast-food outlets may not decrease consumption of fast food in the same ways in all areas.

Brian E. Saelens and Lawrence D. Frank, along with their colleagues, authored two papers for the theme issue. “Obesogenic Neighborhood Environments, Child and Parent Obesity: The Neighborhood Impact on Kids Study” evaluated child and parent weight status across neighborhoods in Seattle and San Diego and ultimately found evidence that GIS-based definitions of obesogenic neighborhoods that consider both physical activity and the availability of healthy food options were strongly related to childhood obesity.

In a second study, the researchers used GIS-based measures to determine the ‘walkability’ and proximity to healthy food of certain neighborhoods in the San Diego and Seattle regions. The study recommends that such measures be used to study physical activity, nutrition and obesity outcomes.

In a paper titled “Obesogenic Environments in Youth: Concepts and Methods from a Longitudinal National Sample,” Janne Boone-Heinonen and colleagues describe the challenges inherent to longitudinal neighborhood environment research, as well as the insights they gained and the advances and remaining gaps in study design. The researchers note that understanding which neighborhood environment features influence weight gain in various age groups is essential to effectively prevent and reduce childhood obesity.

Two commentaries included in the theme issue examine the ways that computer-based GIS systems—which transform geospatial data into visual representations of the real world—can help prevent childhood obesity. “Thinking About Place, Spatial Behavior, and Spatial Process in Childhood Obesity” by Stephen A. Matthews, outlines the content of the theme, concluding that although GIS is not a panacea, it “offers an important means of better understanding and dealing with some of the most pressing problems of our time, and provides valuable tools for researchers and policymakers alike.”

The second commentary, providing a perspective from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, notes that while GIS is still in the relatively early stages of application in the field, it might one day enhance understanding of the complex and dynamic connections between people, their health and their physical and social environments.

Report Finds Reducing Average Body Mass Index Rates by Five Percent Could Lead to Billions in Health Care Savings

Relative risk of mortality by BMI in White US men who never smoked. Berrington de Gonzalez A,..

http://healthyamericans.org/newsroom/releases/?releaseid=255
The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) has released a new report, Bending the Obesity Cost Curve, which finds that reducing the average body mass index by just five percent in the United States could lead to more than $29 billion in health care savings in just five years, due to reduced obesity-related costs.

Related articles

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“Your “healthy” weight cannot simply be calculated from a general source – people’s healthy weight, orideal weight, depends on several factors, including their age, sex, body type, bone density, muscle-fat-ratio, overall general health, and height.

Over the last few decades, using BMI (body mass index) was seen as an excellent means for calculating a person’s healthy weight. However, BMI, as you will see later on in this article, is at best, a ballpark calculation with several limitations…

…Health care professionals and sports scientists say measuring a person’s body fat percentage is the ideal way of gauging their level of fitness and general health, because it is the only one that includes the person’s true body composition. [my emphasis]

(Unfortunately, at this time, the only ways to measure body fat percentage are rather hi-tech according to this article. Three ways noted are based on air displacement, infrared rays, and X-rays)

Societal Control of Sugar Essential to Ease Public Health Burden, Experts Urge

From the 1 February 2012 Science Daily news article

Sugar should be controlled like alcohol and tobacco to protect public health, according to a team of UCSF researchers, who maintain in a new report that sugar is fueling a global obesity pandemic, contributing to 35 million deaths annually worldwide from non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Non-communicable diseases now pose a greater health burden worldwide than infectious diseases, according to the United Nations. In the United States, 75 percent of health care dollars are spent treating these diseases and their associated disabilities….

….

Sugar, they argue, is far from just “empty calories” that make people fat. At the levels consumed by most Americans, sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones and causes significant damage to the liver — the least understood of sugar’s damages. These health hazards largely mirror the effects of drinking too much alcohol, which they point out in their commentary is the distillation of sugar.

Worldwide consumption of sugar has tripled during the past 50 years and is viewed as a key cause of the obesity epidemic. But obesity, Lustig, Schmidt and Brindis argue, may just be a marker for the damage caused by the toxic effects of too much sugar. This would help explain why 40 percent of people with metabolic syndrome — the key metabolic changes that lead to diabetes, heart disease and cancer — are not clinically obese.

“As long as the public thinks that sugar is just ‘empty calories,’ we have no chance in solving this,” said Lustig, a professor of pediatrics, in the division of endocrinology at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and director of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Program at UCSF.

“There are good calories and bad calories, just as there are good fats and bad fats, good amino acids and bad amino acids, good carbohydrates and bad carbohydrates,” Lustig said. “But sugar is toxic beyond its calories…

…”We’re not talking prohibition,” Schmidt said. “We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. We’re talking about gentle ways to make sugar consumption slightly less convenient, thereby moving people away from the concentrated dose. What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”..

Related articles

• Societal control of sugar essential to ease public health burden (eurekalert.org)
• Is There a Growing Concern About Fructose?(Food, Facts, and Fads)
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  …HFCS produced significantly higher fructose levels in the blood than the sugar-sweetened drinks.  The HFCS drinks also increased uric acid levels implicated in blood pressure.  In this study, the HFCS drinks also resulted in a 3 mm Hg greater rise in systolic blood pressure….

  …Another recent study found that teens that consume large amounts of fructose in foods and beverages show evidence of heart disease and diabetes risk in their blood…

  …The Institute of Medicine (IOM) also found that diets with more than 25% of caloric intake from added sugars from processing were associated with significantly decreased levels of essential nutrients (e.g., calcium, magnesium, and zinc) in some population groups….
• Public Health Burden Could Be Eased By Societal Control Of Sugar (medicalnewstoday.com)

• Drinking Large Amounts of Soft Drinks Associated With Asthma and COPD (ScienceNewsToday)

• Sugar Should Be Regulated Like Alcohol And Tobacco Say Scientists (medicalnewstoday.com)
• UCSF scientists declare war on sugar in food – San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com)
• Sugar: Should Feds Make It A Controlled Substance? (aarp.org)
• Tax and regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco, urge scientists (junkscience.com)
• Tax and regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco, urge scientists (guardian.co.uk)
• Should Sugar Be Supervised or Treated As Toxic? (tellsworld.wordpress.com)
• Why Banning Sugar Will Not Solve Obesity (drsharma.ca)
• Sugar as harmful as tobacco, alcohol, experts say (smh.com.au)
• Sugar tax needed, say US experts (bbc.co.uk)
• Report calls for ‘toxic’ sugar to be regulated like alcohol, though not everyone agrees (theprovince.com)
• Tax ‘toxic’ sugar, doctors urge (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)

• Tax ‘toxic’ sugar, doctors urge – CBC.ca (cbc.ca)

• Soda’s Evil Twin – The Dangers of Fruit Drinks (Infographic) [With Added Item on Environmental Degradation by Soda Manufacturer Processes]

Preventable Chronic Disease on the Rise; Obesity, Diabetes Undermining Country’s Overall Health

From the American Public Health Association 2011 Press Release

America’s Health Rankings Finds Preventable Chronic Disease on the Rise; Obesity, Diabetes Undermining Country’s Overall Health

• Nation made no progress in improving health in 2011 after three years of gains
• Modest decreases in smoking and preventable hospitalizations
• Dramatic increases in obesity and diabetes, combined with still-too-high levels of tobacco use, are putting more people at risk for preventable illness and higher health expenditures
• The Rankings indicates that every person that quit smoking in 2011 was offset by a person becoming obese
• 2011 is the first year no state had an obesity prevalence under 20 percent
• United Health Foundation launches “Take Action for Change” Facebook campaign to incent healthy behavior

Washington, D.C., Dec. 6, 2011 – United Health Foundation’s 2011 America’s Heath Rankings® finds that troubling increases in obesity, diabetes and children in poverty are offsetting improvements in smoking cessation, preventable hospitalizations and cardiovascular deaths. The report finds that the country’s overall health did not improve between 2010 and 2011 – a drop from the 0.5 percent average annual rate of improvement between 2000 and 2010 and the 1.6 percent average annual rate of improvement seen in the 1990s…..

Related articles

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• New Ways Calories Can Add Up to Weight Gain(wsj.com) “t isn’t so much what you eat, the study suggests, but how much you eat that counts when it comes to accumulating body fat.”
• Glimmer of Hope in U.S. Obesity Picture(Medical News Today)

• iOverweight people have a weight thermostat that is turned up too high (KevinMD.com)
• Prevalence of Obesity in the United States, 2009–2010 (full text reports)
  Key findings 
  + More than one-third of adults and almost 17% of youth were obese in 2009–2010.
  + There was no change in the prevalence of obesity among adults or children from 2007–2008 to 2009–2010.
  + Obesity prevalence did not differ between men and women.
  + Adults aged 60 and over were more likely to be obese than younger adults.
• Vermont keeps title of healthiest state, report shows – Reuters (reuters.com)
• America’s Health Rankings 2011: Which state scored worst? (cbsnews.com)
• Obesity And Diabetes Undermining America’s Overall Health (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Cough-cough, puff-puff. Oklahoma looks a little sick (newsok.com)
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• America’s Health Report Card: Needs Improvement (webmd.com)
• Report: America’s Health Deteriorated In 2011 (thinkprogress.org)
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Exercise helps us to eat a healthy diet

Exercise helps us to eat a healthy diet

From the 29 November Eureka News alert 

		IMAGE: Exercise helps us to eat a healthy diet.Click here for more information.

A healthy diet and the right amount of exercise are key players in treating and preventing obesity but we still know little about the relationship both factors have with each other. A new study now reveals that an increase in physical activity is linked to an improvement in diet quality.

Many questions arise when trying to lose weight. Would it be better to start on a diet and then do exercise, or the other way around? And how much does one compensate the other?

“Understanding the interaction between exercise and a healthy diet could improve preventative and therapeutic measures against obesity by strengthening current approaches and treatments,” explains Miguel Alonso Alonso, researcher at Harvard University (USA) who has published a bibliographical compilation on the subject, to SINC.

The data from epidemiological studies suggest that tendencies towards a healthy diet and the right amount of physical exercise often come hand in hand. Furthermore, an increase in physical activity is usually linked to a parallel improvement in diet quality.

Exercise also brings benefits such as an increase in sensitivity to physiological signs of fullness. This not only means that appetite can be controlled better but it also modifies hedonic responses to food stimuli. Therefore, benefits can be classified as those that occur in the short term (of metabolic predominance) and those that are seen in the long term (of behavioural predominance).

According to Alonso Alonso, “physical exercise seems to encourage a healthy diet. In fact, when exercise is added to a weight-loss diet, treatment of obesity is more successful and the diet is adhered to in the long run.”

The authors of the study state how important it is for social policy to encourage and facilitate sport and physical exercise amongst the population. This should be present in both schools and our urban environment or daily lives through the use of public transport or availability of pedestrianised areas and sports facilities….

Related articles

• Exercise can make it easier to eat healthy (news.bioscholar.com)
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