Ranting…

This concept seems pretty simple, yet I see and hear people ignoring it on a daily basis.

You see something you’d like to eat, say…a big bowl of fettuccine noodles with loads of alfredo sauce. Oh, and a side of steaming hot garlic bread.

Sounds yummy, right?

But you know that within fifteen minutes of finishing off that two pounds of garlicy noodles at Olive Garden you’re going to feel like a massive pile of junk (if you’re me, at least). Your body gives you almost immediate feedback that you just screwed up big time. Queasy stomach, bloat, and maybe even a dab of heartburn sets in.

You inevitably walk out of the restaurant saying to yourself, “Why did I just gorge on all that?”

It happens like clockwork. So why don’t we listen to our bodies? We know that certain foods and dishes, especially in the massive portion sizes of Chainrestaurantville, will make us feel like crap. We complain, yet continue on our merry way.

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Is intense running good for you?

Scientists attempting to answer that question have found that some endurance athletes might actually be increasing their risk for life-threatening heart rate and rhythm problems:

Ventricular arrhythmia (VA), a disturbance that occurs in the ventricles or lower chambers of the heart, is a condition that can cause sudden death in top athletes who have had no previous symptoms of the disorder.

After studying Dutch and Belgian endurance athletes with VA and other healthy sportspeople and volunteers, the researchers found that in the athletes with the problem the right ventricle (RV) of the heart was not functioning normally.

They believe VA, which could have many underlying causes, may be triggered by intense exercise or that endurance sports could promote the arrhythmia along with genetic or environmental factors.

Much more detail on this at Medscape.

New research shows a potential 50% risk reduction in pre-menopausal woman who ate more than 30g of fiber (I like the UK spelling, fibre) per day. That’s a lot of fiber, but it is very doable.

This BBC article suggests cereal. My call? Eat more nuts.

The study in question is no slouch. More than 35,000 women were studied over seven years by the University of Leeds Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Big proposals on health coming tonight from President Bush during his State of the Union address, but it’s complicated:

President Bush in his State of the Union address will propose changing how the money you pay for health insurance is taxed.

The move would make health insurance more affordable for those who are currently uninsured (46.1 million) and for those who buy coverage on their own (18 million) by offering them a tax break.

Here’s the skinny:

Everybody who buys health insurance, whether through work or independently, would get a standard deduction of $7,500 for individual coverage and $15,000 for family coverage.

This standard deduction would be available to everyone, whether they itemize on their tax return or not. And you can take the full deduction even if your health plan costs less.

So if you paid $10,000 for family coverage, you could still deduct $15,000.

The proposal differs from current law in two key ways: 1) under current law, people who buy insurance on their own typically don’t get a tax break at all; under the proposal they would; and 2) those who are insured through work can currently buy coverage with an unlimited amount of tax-free money. Under the proposal, a limit would be set.

Much more at CNN/Money…

What this highlights is that our “employer-based” healthcare approach is pretty messed up. Nobody has any idea what healthcare costs. Everybody is passing the buck. When the consumer has no price mechanism to go by it’s impossible to evaluate the level of value and the quality of care delivered. The fact that Bush is attempting to make it more attractive for individuals to buy health insurance on their own highlights this fact. There are screams that this will “break the employer-based system.” I believe that that’s a good thing, but this tax scheme idea strikes me as a sloppy half-fix.

Coffee may hold the key to reversing baldness:

Scientists have discovered caffeine stimulates the growth of tiny follicles in the scalp in men who are starting to lose their hair.

Don’t run out and drink an extra cup or two right away. There’s a catch:

The new study, published in the International Journal of Dermatology, found that caffeine works by blocking the effects of a chemical known to damage hair follicles.

But drinking plenty of coffee may not be the best answer.

Scientists estimate up to 60 cups a day would be needed for significant amounts to reach follicles in the scalp.

We’ve long heard about questionable supplement companies failing to deliver the product that is promised on the label, but what about your standard everyday multivitamin?

ConsumerLab.com has run one of its classic product tests and the results for very common brands are rather poor:

Fifty-two percent of multivitamins recently selected for testing by ConsumerLab.com were found to be contaminated with lead, unable properly break apart, or to contain significantly more or less ingredient than claimed. Results were reported today on the website www.consumerlab.com. Multivitamins are the most popular supplement in the U.S., with sales growing 8.4% to $4.16 billion in 2005 according to Nutrition Business Journal.

Among twenty-one products for adults and children that ConsumerLab.com independently selected and tested, only ten met their claims and other quality standards

ABC News has more.

One of the products tested contained none of the Vitamin A advertised on the bottle.

Battling the brain disease by simple skin patch:

A safe and effective vaccine against Alzheimer’s disease may be back on track, this time by transdermal patch delivery, according to researchers.

In experimental mice, transcutaneous vaccine administration with beta amyloid peptide sharply reduced the levels of beta amyloid proteins that muddy the brain in Alzheimer’s, found Jun Tan, Ph.D., M.D., of the University of South Florida.

Meanwhile, research shows that trouble identifying odors may be an early indication of the disease.

Yes! Nina Planck hit it out of the park (I now have to pick up her book) in the Glenn and Helen podcast yesterday:

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“Official advice really lags behind science, it’s always slower.”

“In fact, I lost 25lbs going from a no-fat, vegan diet - beans and rice and vegetables - to real foods, fish, poultry and butter and so on.”
—–

Exactly.

Planck doesn’t dodge the role of smoking and exercise in heart disease, but she’s primarily an advocate of eating the things we’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years. Nothing that comes in a Kraft box, Lipton bag, or from the cereal aisle was around 100,000 years ago. And you cannot simply slap a “Good Source of Calcium” sticker on a box of Hot Pockets and pretend it’s not crap.

That is my exact position on diet: meats, beef, poultry, fish, nuts, real butter, real fats - essentially the “outside ring” of the grocery store. You’ll also notice that there’s not a lot of sugar in these real foods.
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The Crisper Features…

It’s no longer in question for me: Sleep is absolutely vital to good health and fitness.

For years I, like many young people, took adequate sleep for granted. No, wait. That’s putting it too nicely. For years I could care less about when or if I slept enough. Under the guise of being young, dumb, and having fun I threw caution to the wind and stayed up to all hours of the night with friends weekend after weekend.

But all of a sudden you wake up one day at 26…burned out and fat, with a brutal mix of depression and anxiety attacks that seemed to come out of the sky. Oh wait, that was just me.

One of the very first things my doctor, as well as my sister-in-law pharmacist, asked me about was my sleep schedule. Sleep schedule? What was that? “I sleep when I fall asleep,” was my stock answer to that. But eventually I managed to see the connection between my late-to-bed, early-to-rise tendencies (mixed with the occasional mega sleep-in), and declining health, both mental and physical.

When I finally managed to take sleeping seriously, the results were tremendous. Sticking to a schedule and getting adequate rest - for me, the magic number is right around 7.5 hours - showed almost immediate benefits. It took me a few weeks to program my body into a good cycle (meds can help make those first few nights happen), but with regular morning exercise part of my life I began to notice that I would get tired at about the same time each night. It follows that it is no coincidence the anxiety issue has greatly improved over this same timeline.

Observed benefits in my life of regular sleep:

1. More energy.

2. Mood stability.

3. Quality and quantity of food more balanced and on schedule (six small meals is my norm, which I find only possible if I begin my day early and on schedule).

4. Greater productivity.

5. A fitter, leaner body that snaps, crackles, and pops much less (and it feels great to be light on your feet, btw) as a result of all of the above.

There exists loads of research pointing to the correlation of sleep and mood disorders such as depression. Ask any cyclical bipolar patient whether a night of insomnia can trigger all kinds of symptoms and you’re sure to get an affirmative answer.
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