Jan
13
2012
Okay my friends, I don’t want to be the “I told you” type but I did! The “you’re fat” tax is coming soon. So you ask, what in the world is a “fat tax”? I am glad you asked. As we all are aware, obesity is growing at an alarming rate. Most of us are already overweight and some of us are way overweight-yes face it we are obese. Come on, take a look at your waist line. Look down there now. You can see it as plain as day. Yes, say it with me, I am overweight. Good-that’s a start. You have tried dieting, exercising and nothing seems to work. Well, our government seems to think that it is now up to our elected public officials to help correct an epidemic. How, you may ask? How does the government respond to issues that threaten public safety-by making new laws and regulations and yes, you know it, it’s on the tip of your tongue-yes, taxes! Of course, taxes-a penalty for this indiscretion. Only this time, the indiscretion is being overweight. As many friends of mine point out, when injuries and fatal accidents as a result of car crashes became major issues, wearing seatbelts was advised. However this advisory didn’t help. So the next step was a law and regulation that made it mandatory for everyone to buckle-up. And it’s working. ...
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Dec
12
2011
DON’T EAT WHEN YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY!
We are all guilty of eating when we are not really hungry. Some call it stress, while others say they just need to have something to keep them busy. Others say they don’t know why they are eating-they just eat and eat and eat. Is it due to the TV commercial for that juicy burger or oven hot pizza? How about just sitting and watching television. Have you worn out the path to the kitchen?Whatever the reason is, it's not hunger that is stimulating this “extra” eating. And this “extra” eating piles on the calories, lots of them! In between snacks and non hunger related snacking made up of carbs and fats are responsible for a large amount of the overweight and obesity we are seeing. So how do we change this persistent habit? A new study by a group of researchers at the University of Minnesota led by Kerri Boutelle, Ph.D. and published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, demonstrates that by improving the responses to the clues of truly being hungry and decreasing the responses to non hunger related eating, children can be trained to respond better to hunger and less to other stimuli (e.g. television commercials focusing on food). Boutelle and her group were also able to train children to understand body clues better and to respond better to being satiated ...
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Oct
30
2011
STAY AWAY FROM BLACK LICORICE
As a kid, I loved licorice. The red swirly sticks were always a big hit in my group of friends. And once in a while we would eat the black licorice and even the chocolate ones. But ever since finding out that black licorice has a chemical that can cause high blood pressure, I have been advising my friends and family to stay away. Yes, the chemical is called “glycyrrhizin” and according to the FDA, if it is consumed in a large enough quantity-more than 2 ounces a day for two weeks, or more, glycyrrhizin has the potential to cause high blood pressure and irregular heartbeats. How does it do this? Well, first of all it can cause your kidneys to lose more potassium than usual and as a result, this imbalance (when the potassium is lower than it should be) may make the conditions in your heart vulnerable to set up an irregular heart rhythm. Secondly, the glycyrrhizin may cause your body to retain more salt and water-which can result in the body having a higher blood pressure and even a set up for heart failure (too much salt and water for the heart to handle). Thirdly, eating black licorice can interfere with other medicine that you may be taking including digoxin (a medicine used to control heart rhythms), laxatives and diuretics (a medicine that ...
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Jul
11
2011
Hello my fans and yes, we are getting fatter. A report released this past Thursday, July 7th, 2011
F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future*, reveals that the obesity rates across America are increasing. That’s right, there are more obese individuals in 16 states than in 2010. And there was no state in the United States, that reported a decline in obesity rates. Yes, we are all getting fatting-well most of us!
Here are the percentage of obese adults in all 50 states-see it for yourself**:
|
State
|
%
|
|
State
|
%
|
|
Mississippi
|
34.4
|
|
Maine
|
26.5
|
|
Alabama
|
32.3
|
|
Washington
|
26.4
|
|
West Virginia
|
32.2
|
|
Florida
|
26.1
|
|
Tennessee
|
31.9
|
|
Alaska
|
25.9
|
|
Louisiana
|
31.6
|
|
Virginia
|
25.9
|
|
Kentucky
|
31.5
|
|
Idaho
|
25.7
|
|
Oklahoma
|
31.4
|
|
New Hampshire
|
25.6
|
|
South Carolina
|
30.9
|
|
New Mexico
|
25.6
|
|
Arkansas
|
30.6
|
|
Arizona
|
25.4
|
|
Michigan
|
30.5
|
|
Oregon
|
25.4
|
|
Missouri
|
30.3
|
|
Wyoming
|
25.4
|
|
Texas
|
30.1
|
|
Minnesota
|
25.3
|
|
Ohio
|
|
...
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Feb
11
2011
Well, there it is my friends. The reports are finally out-over a half billion of us-that’s right us-the people and residents of planet Earth, are obese. And this represents a doubling since 1980. These studies, led by researcher Majid Ezzati of the Imperial College of London and Harvard University, were published recently in the Lancet journal. And you know what happens with 500 million people with obesity? You are right again-a rise in the secondary medical problems that result from the obesity like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Can you imagine a rising population of people with heart problems and diabetes? Our medical system will be overloaded with new patients. Not to mention-seeing many young obese individuals that develop secondary problems earlier and prior to adulthood. It’s catastrophic. What can be done? Cutting portion sizes and increasing exercise will help. Our medical treatment for elevated blood pressure and high cholesterol is getting better. But that won’t stop the tidal wave of kids and adults that will develop these problems. Maybe we should all feel better that we can treat these secondary problems effectively. But we really need to focus on primary prevention. We need to start the nutrition and fitness education at an early- preschool age and continue this until adult hood. We need to teach our young generation of kids how to eat, what to eat that ...
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Nov
17
2010
You all know by now the incredible benefits that you can get by exercising and eating healthy. Well now there is additional research which has come to us from the British Journal of Sports Medicine*(1), which demonstrated that individuals who exercised a minimum of five days a week had 43% fewer days with an upper respiratory tract infection. Wow-that’s right, exercise, five days a week helped reduce the number of colds this group of subjects had. And that’s not all. Those subjects that did the most exercise that developed a cold (upper respiratory infection) had a shorter course of infection symptoms and less severity than their shorter exercise time peers. Okay, are you getting up from that chair yet?
As reported in the current meetings of The American Heart Association (AHA)*(2), salt (sodium chloride) may be harming the health of teens now and will affect them in the future. The recommendation: cut down on your salt consumption. What’s the problem associated with eating too much salt? Well for one thing, too much salt can raise your blood pressure (called high blood pressure or hypertension). By raising your blood pressure, you are putting more stress on the heart muscle. This then may cause heart problems like a heart attack or stroke. A big problem is that most high blood pressure is silent-you just don’t feel it. That’s right, you can have a silent killer ...
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Oct
26
2010
A new study from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center* found that Type 2 diabetes among adolescents has increased dramatically. Why? Well, it is related to the increasing rates of childhood obesity that we are seeing. With the rates of overweight and obese children rising, we are seeing the secondary medical problems that are surfacing-type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Additional problems such as arthritis, cancer, sleep difficulty and respiratory disorders will also be seen. And my friends this is not just a domestic issue. As adult and childhood obesity spreads throughout our world, we can expect these associated medical problems to increase as well. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)*, 1 billion adults are overweight; 300 million adults are obese; there are over 285 million people with diabetes and 42 million children in the world currently classified as overweight or obese with 22 million children under the age of five estimated to be overweight! By the year 2030, almost 500 million people world-wide will have diabetes. This is an epidemic!
What about in the United States? According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)*, one in three adults will have diabetes by the year 2050 and the rates of diabetes will double and even triple in that time period. Over 24 million Americans (adults and kids) have diabetes and 25 % of them don’t even know it! ...
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Oct
12
2010
I am back, my friends after a brief respite. Since my last column, I have had many long hours to read the papers, journals and listen to the chatter. So I guess that means I am ready to resume my ranting. Are you ready?
Well, this week’s column pertains to those derogatory and disparaging names that we hear all the time: terms like fat, obese, and overweight. That’s right, I am taking this time to discuss the categories that most of us feel we fit into. Many research studies point out that we don’t appropriately categorize our own body type. And in fact we don’t do it for our children either. Many overweight people consider themselves in the normal weight range. Individuals that are obese and even morbidly obese consider themselves a “bit overweight.” So is being fat the new “normal”? What really is in a name?
When was the last time you looked at your child and felt he or she was “obese,” or even “overweight?” And certainly we never would call our kids fat! Or have anyone call them fat for that matter! Do we as parents look at ourselves or our children based on the BMI scale? I don't think so. I can recall my mom calling me “chunky.” That didn’t make me feel any better, ...
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Aug
11
2010
This seems like a no brainer-but I will ask you anyway-when we take our kids to the supermarket-how many times do they chose a particular item on the basis of their prior knowledge of the brand and or characters on the packaging? Dah! As my daughter would politely say. Of course they do. Kids are sponges for the thousands of advertisements they hear, see and read. I hear my daughter reciting those ads in the car with her friends when I take them to dance class. They laugh about the ads. But it shows that these ads stick. And when they go into an environment like a market or mall, these colorful, sometimes celebrity driven, musical and rhythmic ads have their way of influencing their shopping decisions and eating decisions. So it is not unusual to discover that ads can influence even a younger age group-which we know spends a lot of time in front of the TV and are starting to spend even more time on the computer. Even at the age of three, kids food choices are being manipulated by what they are viewing-which is then is passed along to the purchasing selection by their parents. A study from 2007, Effect of Fast Food Branding on Young Children’s Taste Preference, demonstrated that, “By the early age of 3 to 5 years, low-income preschool children preferred the tastes of foods ...
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Jul
26
2010
I was running on the treadmill last night and listening to a news story about a research study that showed the benefits from “light or moderate intensity physical activity.”* It made me think about all the times I have recommended to my friends and readers of this column, that all you need to start with is ten minutes of exercise a day (read “Take Ten”). The results are now proven scientifically: even a low level (low intensity) of exercise, over a small amount of time, can be helpful at improving your life* in quantity and quality. So then I started to think about whether we can correlate this to eating and did some preliminary research into the calorie restriction concept. From very early studies in mice and monkeys*, calorie restriction has led to longer life spans and has delayed the onset of many chronic diseases (e.g. cancer, heart disease and stroke).
In the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent estimates, there are over 36 million people over the age of 65 and about 200,000 people over the age of 100. And according to the United Nations, by 2013, there will be over 3 million people in the world over the age of 100. So our population is growing and living ...
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