MALE PATTERN FITNESS: health Archives

March 30, 2007

Friday Blog Meat: All Your Symptom Are Belong to Us

In the 15 years I've been writing about health and fitness, I've seen my share of nutritional panaceas rise and fall. Right now, vitamins are down, especially antioxidant vitamins. But back in the mid-'90s, when I started, they looked like the solution to everything.

Today, the anti-antioxidant backlash is in full swing; rarely is heard an encouraging word. My doctor asked me what vitamins I supplements I use during my last checkup, and scolded me for including vitamin E on the list. (I confess I stopped taking it after that.)

So it's remarkable, in the midst of this backlash, to read that antioxidant supplements might be good for something after all:

In a study published recently in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, University of Michigan scientists appear to have found a dietary approach to reducing noise-related hearing loss.

They fed five groups of guinea pigs vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium or a cocktail of all four nutrients, then exposed the unfortunate rodents to five straight hours of jet-level noise. Those in the cocktail group had better hearing afterwards.

The researchers think the compounds worked synergistically to absorb free radicals before they'd done damage, and expect to start testing an ear-saving dietary supplement within two years.

Okay, it's an animal study, has limited application, and appears to be linked to a profit motive on the part of whoever patents and produces this new supplement. But it is one small step back to respectability for a downtrodden nutritional wonderkind.

Green ... with envy

Green tea is the cutest girl at the panacea ball these days, with a new study showing it might actually help fight HIV. But is it all too good to be true? That's the question Jonathan Brown asks in The Independent:

In Britain, sales of green tea have been growing at the rate of 25 per cent a year, fuelled in no small part by the celebrity endorsements of stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez. ...

[N]ot everyone is convinced by the many health claims. Professor Mike Williamson of Sheffield University, whose laboratory tests this week suggested that epigallocatechin, a component of green tea, could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by coating immune cells, is unconvinced.

"There is a lot of rubbish talked about what green tea does and most of it I don't believe," he said. "I think a lot of claims have been exaggerated and the main way they have been exaggerated is that they have used far too much green tea. This can amount to several hundred cups a day -- something that presents its own toxicity risk. If you throw enough green tea at something you can show any effect you like," he said.

According to Professor Williamson, whose own study suggested benefits could be gained from drinking two to three cups a day, there is at least one other exciting area of research. Green tea has been found to have the ability to "switch off" stomach cancer cells, something which could one day inform a treatment, he said.

Dr Philip Coan, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, is if anything even more skeptical. He argues that there has yet to be a sufficiently large study conducted outside the laboratory with the correct controls to establish green tea as a bona fide medicine. "People tend to believe that there are cures for things in simple old remedies but there really is no scientific basis for this," he said.

Smells like yet another backlash brewing.

The omega code

Which brings me to fish oil, the alpha-dog panacea. Will it, too, travel the familiar path to Backlash City? If it does, it probably won't be anytime soon. Fish oil, for the moment, still has legs, according to a recent Japanese study.

The study looked at whether fish oil, in addition to statins, would help prevent people from having heart attacks. The sample size was huge -- 18,600 adults with high cholesterol, 3,660 of whom had established heart disease -- although the duration, four and a half years, seems kind of short.

Two keys:

1. Everyone in the study was taking statins.

2. Half the people took a purified form of EPA, one of the omega-3 fats in fish oil. So it wasn't the stuff you get by the jug at Sam's Club.

As for the results, they sound good until you look at the details:

During the study, the vast majority of patients had no major heart problems. However, 2.8 percent of those taking EPA along with statins experienced a major coronary event, compared with 3.5 percent of those only taking statins.

That's a 19 percent difference, note the researchers, who included Mitsuhiro Yokoyama, MD, of Kobe University in Kobe, Japan.

EPA pills weren't linked to any difference in fatal heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.

When Yokoyama's team took a closer look at the data, they found the EPA advantage only applied to patients with a known history of coronary artery disease.

Patients with high cholesterol but no history of coronary artery disease may also get some heart protection from EPA, but that's not certain, since so few of them had major heart problems during the study.

So if you have diagnosed heart disease, a purified form of one of the fats found in fish oil might help, when used in conjunction with statins. That's a pretty tepid finding, but I guess it's better than a backlash.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the study showing that Diet Coke prevents ... well, I'd settle for anything. Paper cuts? Good enough.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2007

Ya Think?

Here's a bit of news that isn't remotely surprising: David Wells, the beer-bellied pitcher for the San Diego Padres, has diabetes.

But on the bright side, he's saying the right things about it:

“From the time I found out, I made changes. No more starches and sugar. No more rice, pasta, potatoes and white bread. No more fast food. I've cut out alcohol.”

That's right, Boomer Wells has given up drinking. Well, not entirely.

“I can still have a glass of wine now and then,” said Wells. “I can still run with the guys. But I've got to watch what I'm doing."

But then he says things like this:

"I don't want this going to Type 1 diabetes."

And this:

"I'm eating like a rabbit . . . salads, fish, chicken.”

I just hope that none of the children listening come away thinking that what Wells has -- diabetes mellitus type 2 -- can become type 1. Or, for that matter, that rabbits eat fish and chicken.

Wells is no stranger to lifestyle-related health problems:

He has battled gout at times. He is allergic to shellfish. And he has a history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

I wish him luck, of course, but I do see one ominous sign: His manager's name is "Bud."

UPDATE: Just to clarify ...

Shortly after I posted this, I got emails from Steve Adam and Adam Campbell pointing out that I misunderstood what David Wells said about type 2 diabetes turning into type 1.

While one can't literally turn into the other, as a medical diagnosis, it's an unimportant distinction. If you have type 2 and leave it unchecked, your body eventually will become unable to produce insulin. Then you'll be insulin-dependent, same as if you had type 1 all along.

Adam Campbell says that Dr. Michael Eades calls this "type 3" diabetes.

So I apologize to Wells. But, in my defense, I'm pretty sure I'm right about rabbits ... unless they really do eat fish and chicken, in which case I'll have to apologize to Boomer for that, too.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:12 AM | Comments (2)

March 20, 2007

Real Men Recover Faster

Last week I teed off on this story in the Washington Post, a generic run-down of men that started with the conclusion that we would do ourselves a favor if we started acting more like women.

I like women just fine -- I'm married to one, and we're raising a crop of our own -- but I think there's a reason why men and women developed distinct gender traits. And researchers at my alma mater may have discovered one of them:

While many scientists have considered these masculine tendencies to be barriers to health and recovery, a small study of about 50 men suggests the opposite.

The man-of-steel mentality, often associated with military men and those in other high-risk occupations, can boost and speed up a guy's recovery from a serious and/or traumatic injury.

"It has long been assumed that men are not as concerned and don't take as good of care of their health [as women]," said lead study author Glenn Good of the University of Missouri, Columbia, "but what we're seeing here is that the same ideas that led to their injuries may actually encourage their recovery."

The researchers looked at middle-aged men with traumatic brain and spinal-cord injuries. Here's what they found:

[M]en who focused on their careers, success, power and competition ... showed greater improvement a year after their hospitalization. Perhaps, the scientists report, an inner narrative is the engine behind the boost in health.

For example, a brawny boy might think, "Yeah there are tough challenges, but nothing will stop me from reaching my goal," the scientists state in a report of this study published in a recent issue of the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.

I guess you could say those traits fall into the general category of "positive attitude." A guy who's aggressive and ambitious would probably have a better attitude toward his work in general, and perhaps toward his specific job. Chances are he's pushing forward and making his own breaks within his company, so it's sort of logical that he'd want to recover faster from his injuries.

This study isn't exactly comparable, but it shows that "job satisfaction" plays a role in how quickly workers return to their jobs following medical leave for lower-back injuries. (It also suggests that the attitude of the doctor treating the worker matters; the more positive the prognosis, the faster the worker returns to the job.)

I quickly scanned through some other studies on injury and recovery, and didn't find anything that adds a lot to this discussion. Employees who see themselves as overworked will take longer to recover from injuries, as will those who smoke or see themselves as having poor health in general. I don't see any big surprises there.

So I guess the news here is that there's some benefit to being ambitious, competitive, and career-focused: When the shit lands on your head, you'll dig out faster than someone who doesn't have those traits.

It makes intuitive sense, but it's also nice to see it quantified.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2007

Monday Blog Meat: The Pressure's Off

As a strength and conditioning specialist, I have to renew my CPR certification every two years. It's a pain in the ass, and I always feel as if I've forgotten the most important stuff the minute I pass the test for renewal. I still remember the protocols I learned when I took my first CPR course back in the mid-'70s, when I was a lifeguard, but I can't remember the ones from 18 months ago.

Now I learn that the most important component of all the classes I've taken in the 30 years I've been taking them might be useless:

Chest compression -- not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation -- seems to be the key in helping someone recover from cardiac arrest, according to new research that further bolsters advice from heart experts.

A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published in Friday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

More than a year ago, the American Heart Association revised CPR guidelines to put more emphasis on chest presses, urging 30 instead of 15 for every two breaths given. Stopping chest compressions to blow air into the lungs of someone who is unresponsive detracts from the more important task of keeping blood moving to provide oxygen and nourishment to the brain and heart.

Another big advantage to dropping the rescue breaths: It could make bystanders more willing to provide CPR in the first place.

I agree with that last part; nobody wants to do mouth-to-mouth on a stranger. (The odds of a beautiful woman suffering cardiac arrest in your presence are ridiculously small.) But the older I get, and the more I learn, the harder it is to keep straight what I'm supposed to retain and what I'm supposed to forget. At least in this case I'll get to forget something I struggled to remember in the first place.

When telling Americans to "eat more" doesn't work

Here's a shocker -- Americans don't eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables:

People should eat at least five daily servings -- two or more servings of fruit, and three or more servings of vegetables -- as part of a balanced diet, says the CDC.

But today the agency reported that in 2005, fewer than 33 percent of U.S. adults reported eating at least two daily servings of fruit and barely 27 percent claimed to eat three or more daily servings of vegetables.

The government wants at least 75 percent of people age 2 and older to meet the fruit consumption goal, and at least 50 percent to meet the vegetable consumption goal, by 2010.

Say it along with me: Nagging doesn't work. Nag people about exercise, and they don't want to do it. Nag people about nutrition, and they don't want to do it.

But there's also a bigger question here: Who in America in 2007 believes the government's advice is infallible? Instead of making the argument for better nutrition, it seems that the CDC and other government agencies assume their scientific authority is beyond reproach, and that we should all start line-dancing on their command.

That said, their advice is perfectly reasonable, to the best of my knowledge. But even I don't get five servings of fruits and vegetables every single day. On days I don't exercise, I don't want the extra carbs from the fruit. And my menu just doesn't allow for the extra vegetables on days I skip fruit.

BTW, here's a new reason to add some fruit juice to your post-workout shake:

Drinking purple grape or cloudy apple juice reduces the risk of heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's by more than orange, grapefruit or pineapple juice, scientists say.

The top five juices for polyphenol content were Welch's Purple Grape. Copella Cloudy Apple, Tropicana Tropical Fruit, Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Drink and Pomegreat Pomegranate Juice Drink.

The drink with the lowest polyphenol content was Tesco's Own Brand White Grape, followed by Own Brand Clear Apple, Del Monte Tomato, Own Brand Pineapple and Own Brand Red Grape.

I'm not sure this tells us anything we didn't already know about dark-purple fruit drinks, but it's still good to have the reminder. And the news about cloudy apple juice is actually new, to me at least.

But I can't let this go without mentioning the story's opening paragraph. Nobody knows if any type of fruit juice reduces the risk of anything, much less that purple juice reduces Alzheimer's incidence more than orange juice. All we know is that certain juices have more polyphenols than others. Like I said, that part is good to know. But the disease-fighting claims? File that under "horseshit."

Death by sanitation

I've been working my way through the Season Two DVDs of Deadwood, my new favorite show. Aside from remaining confused about the meaning of "hooplehead," I enjoy both the familiarity and strangeness of the series.

I've actually been to Deadwood, which lives on as a tourist trap. And I've read two novels set there: Pete Dexter's Deadwood and Larry McMurtry's Buffalo Girls.

The strangeness comes when I try to figure out how any of those characters stay alive, given the complete lack of sanitation and general lack of anything we'd consider good nutrition. It might be fun to try to live for a week on whisky and buffalo steaks, but the people in Deadwood have few options beyond that.

Still, there may be a downside to our fully sanitized modern existence -- more children have type one diabetes, the type that's not caused by obesity and lack of exercise:

Research found that the number of under-fives with type one diabetes increased five-fold between 1985 and 2004. The numbers of under-15s with the condition doubled.

One theory about the cause of the huge rise is that young children are no longer exposed to as many infections as they were in previous decades because of higher hygiene standards.

Type one diabetes occurs when the immune system destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone that regulates levels of sugar in the blood.

Bristol University researcher Professor Polly Bingley said it could be a result of people being exposed to fewer infections because of changes in hygiene. "The immune system is supposed to fight infection but in type one diabetes it gets misdirected," she said.

The rise also could be linked to changes in children's diet, the decline of breast feeding or increased pollution.

Of course, it's just a theory. But at least it's an interesting one.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2007

Thursday Blog Meat: It's All in the Timing

Here's the most useless advice you'll get all week -- if you're going to have a heart attack, try to have it on a weekday:

People who have weekend heart attacks are more likely to die than those admitted to hospitals during the week, largely because they're less likely to get care that meets scientific guidelines for saving lives, a study reported Wednesday.

"One of every hundred heart patients over a weekend will die unnecessarily," which amounts to several thousand people each year, says lead author William Kostis of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. "Once you lose those people, you don't get them back."

The stats: About 12 percent of weekday heart-attack patients die, vs. 12.9 percent on weekends. The reason seems to be that fewer doctors are in the house on weekends, which means it takes longer for them to get to the patients, and fewer angioplasties are performed.

Granted, the timing of your heart attack isn't under your control; that's why it's called an "attack," as opposed to "a scheduled visit."

But here's some advice you can use:

Nevertheless, Kostis says, "we don't want people to think that if they have a heart attack on Sunday they should wait until Monday. Absolutely not."

Do the wrong thing

If you've ever wondered how someone could do something that's morally reprehensible, the answer might have nothing to do with his upbringing or exposure to video games:

Army researchers found that when they subjected a group of volunteers to two sleepless nights, the lack of shut-eye seemed to hinder participants' ability to make decisions in the face of emotionally charged, moral dilemmas.

The dilemmas in this case were hypothetical scenarios, and not actual events. But the study authors say the findings could have implications for people who are both routinely sleep-deprived and often need to make quick decisions in a crisis -- such as soldiers in combat and medical professionals. ...

It's possible, they speculate, that sleeplessness slows the brain's ability to integrate cognitive and emotional information, which is needed to address serious moral dilemmas.

Then again, one's upbringing might factor into it, even with 53 hours of sleep deprivation. Subjects who had high emotional intelligence scores before the experiment began still made "morally appropriate" decisions.

Sleep was in the news for other reasons this week, with the FDA issuing new cautions on sleep drugs like Ambien, and this guy showing what happens when you don't get enough sleep at night.

"Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a woman's man, no time to talk ..."

It's not what you have, it's how you move it:

New York University researchers have found that to be found attractive, a woman had to move in a feminine way -- swaying her hips. Men, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper found, were more attractive if they moved with a "shoulder swagger."

You probably wonder how researchers could come to this conclusion -- assuming they didn't just sit outside on a warm day and watch people walking past them. Here's how they managed to quantify what every libidinally cognizant human on the planet could've figured out without conducting scientific research:

The team carried out a series of studies involving over 700 participants who were shown a variety of animations and videos of people moving. Some showed shadow figures, where it was not possible to see if it was a man or a woman, while others obviously showed a man or a woman.

No matter which format was being used, the participants rated women or "female" figures as more attractive if their hips swayed as they walked, while men were more attractive if they had the characteristic shoulder movement.

Come on, science guys:

If half your theory can be summed up in a Bee Gees song, and the other half in a song recorded by the Rolling Stones when they were at their most besotted and depraved, you have to figure that the result was predictable.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:11 AM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2007

Man Down!

The Washington Post has a package of stories on men's health this morning, leading off with this one by Harvey Simon, founding editor of the Harvard Men's Health Watch newsletter.

The information is all the boring and obvious advice you expect to find in something that comes from an "official" source. See a doctor more often, don't try to sew your own leg back on when you accidently amputate it with a chainsaw, blah, blah, blah.

But what really struck me were the opening paragraphs:

Many men would rather diagnose the roar of their muffler than the rasp in their throat; they'd sooner talk about what's going on with their engine's fuel injection system than about their own cardiovascular health.

Those are sweeping generalizations, of course, but they are borne out by 33 years of experience working as a primary-care internist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Women, I have discovered, tend to pay attention to their own health and the health of other family members, while men busy themselves keeping everything running -- in the garage, in the office and in the house. Everything, that is, apart from their own bodies.

My question: Do guys actually get under the hoods of their cars anymore? I'm not and never have been a gearhead, so I admit I don't know much about the inner workings of vehicles, or the obsessions of men who love them. But with cars running on computers these days, does anyone actually do any diagnosis and maintenance on his own car?

When I drive through the neighborhood, I never see guys working on their cars. Washing cars, sure. But I can't remember the last time I saw a neighbor under the hood of his own car.

I suspect a lot of readers will react the way I did: If the metaphor he uses to get my attention at the beginning of the story is an anachronism, will the rest of the material be any better? Check out this passage:

[I]f men want to close the health gap and live longer, we should learn to live more like women: We have to gain a better understanding of our bodies, take better care of ourselves and get the medical care we need. We need to pay more attention to our health.

I guess when you're at Harvard you don't get the memo saying that the worst way to get a man's attention is to tell him to be more like a woman. You also don't get anyone worked up with information like this:

[W]hen it comes to our five leading causes of death -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lung disease and accidents -- men die at rates 40 percent to 220 percent higher than women do.

Check out these numbers: American men are almost four times as likely to contract AIDS; they are more than three times as likely as women to develop kidney stones, to become alcoholics or to have bladder cancer. And they are about twice as likely to suffer from emphysema, a duodenal ulcer or a heart attack.

Yeah, men have more dangerous jobs, so they're more likely to die of accidents. Yeah, gay men have anal intercourse, so they're more likely to get AIDS. It's not news, and getting nagged about it isn't likely to change anyone's behavior. I suspect that part of the reason guys get drunk and take risks in the first place is because they're sick of getting nagged.

So why is the Washington Post filling its health section with the kind of hectoring that men spend their entire lives ignoring? Maybe the idea is to get women to read it, so they can go nag their husbands about visiting a doctor. But even then, the chance of getting guys to pay attention is pretty close to zero.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:37 AM | Comments (3)

March 01, 2007

Pills Kill, Wine Is Fine, and Chunky Monkey Produces Unexpected Dividends

Around and around and around we go. Today, antioxidant vitamins are the kiss of death:

The Copenhagen team reviewed more than 815 clinical trials into the benefits of vitamins A, E, and C, alongside beta-carotene and selenium -- all commonly used supplements. They selected 68 whose methods were more likely to produce an accurate picture of vitamin benefits, then added their results together to form one, large-scale study.

This overview suggested that taking antioxidant supplements neither increased, nor reduced, the risk of early death.

However, when the researchers eliminated a further 21 trials which had a slightly higher possibility of producing a skewed result, the picture changed considerably.

While the risk of death was unchanged among selenium and vitamin C users, a statistically significant increase in risk emerged for the other three supplements. Beta-carotene produced an approximate 7 percent increased risk, vitamin E a 4 percent increase and vitamin A, a 16 percent increase.

There is an interesting reason why antioxidant vitamins might have a negative health consequence:

They said there were several different explanations for this increase in risk -- and suggested that knocking out "free radicals" might actually interfere with a natural defense mechanism within the body.

Of course, you could also use that argument against any medication or medical treatment -- you're interfering with something the body does naturally.

Anyway, a supplement-industry spokesperson disputes the entire premise of the study:

Dr. Ann Walker, of the Health Supplements Information Service, said the findings of the study were "worthless". She said some of the studies which had been examined by the Copenhagen team involved patients who were already seriously ill.

"How sensible scientists can suggest that a modest intervention of a single antioxidant supplement can have a major effect in reversing life-threatening pathology, where patients already have advanced cardiovascular disease, is ridiculous."

Fruit of the vine

So if antioxidant vitamins aren't the life-extending panacea we thought they were, what does work? Hint -- it comes with a cork:

Drinking a small amount of wine appears to extend men's life expectancy by a few years, Dutch researchers said on Wednesday in the latest study to find benefits in moderate drinking.

Dutch researchers sought to gauge the impact on health and life expectancy of long-term alcohol consumption, tracking 1,373 men born between 1900 and 1920 who lived in Zutphen, an industrial town in the Netherlands.

The researchers followed alcohol intake in seven surveys carried out over four decades starting in 1960, tracking some men until they died and the rest until 2000. The men were asked about drinking, eating and smoking habits, weight, and prevalence of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

Drinking a small amount of alcohol -- less than a glass per day -- was associated with lower rates of death from cardiovascular causes and overall causes, the study found.

Drinking wine appeared to be more protective than spirits and beer. Drinking an average of about half a glass of wine per day was associated with lowest mortality levels, it found.

I'm convinced! Okay, I like wine anyway, so this wasn't exactly a hard sell. Again, the really interesting part is in the potential mechanisms for this health benefit:

The study did not look at how alcohol may provide health benefits, but Streppel said it could be due to an increase in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, or to a reduction in blood clotting. Also, red wine has compounds that may ward off the build-up of fatty tissue in the arteries that can cause a stroke or heart attack.

The study didn't distinguish between red and white wine, alas. Maybe when all the data are published (this was a paper presented at a medical conference), we'll see if it's really better to drink one over the other. If I were a gambling man I'd put my money on red, although I have a personal preference for white. (Yes, I'm a chardonnay-sipping liberal. At midlife, I've come to embrace the fact that in some ways I'm just a character in someone else's cartoon.)

Ben and Jerry are fertility gods

I've finally figured out why my wife and I were so reproductively prolific in our baby-making days. (Our third was conceived while we were practicing birth control.) It's because we enjoyed the occasional bowl of ice cream -- and not the low-fat kind:

Women who eat low-fat dairy foods may have a higher risk of infertility than those who treat themselves to full-fat ice cream or cheese, surprised U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat dairy foods a day had an 85 percent higher risk of a certain type of infertility than women who ate less than one serving of low-fat dairy food a week.

Women who ate one serving of high-fat dairy food a day were 27 percent less likely to be infertile than women who avoided full-fat dairy foods.

That's a roundabout way of saying that full-fat dairy foods improve fertility. And since ice cream is the only full-fat dairy food Americans eat with any kind of regularity these days, it appears that Rocky Road could put you on the path to a baby bump.

In this case, it seems to me that there's an easy and clear interpretation: We know that dietary fat is linked to production of steroid hormones in men. More fat, more testosterone. Estrogen is also a steroid hormone, and we know that it's highly sensitive to nutrition. When women are undernourished, fertility declines. So why wouldn't a high-fat indulgence like ice cream be linked to fertility? My guess is that you could probably do the same study looking at consumption of fatty meat or cold-water fish, and reach the same finding.

However, the same researchers looked at the question of total fat in the diet and found no connection to fertility, although trans fats were linked to infertility.

That's why the researcher, Harvard's Jorge Chavarro, seems stumped by his own study:

"It was a bit of a surprise to us that high-fat dairy foods were positively related to fertility," he said. "There is really not a very clear explanation. It is possible that dairy fat or something along with dairy fat such as the hormones in pregnant cows may be affecting ovulation in women."

He said more study was needed before conclusions could be drawn.

Chavarro's team had earlier found that women who ate more iron from supplements and from plant foods were less likely to be infertile, and found no link between fertility and various types of fats.

For now, we'll just have to live with the joyous news that ice cream has one previously unforeseen benefit.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2007

Too Buff for His Own Good

I'm old enough to remember the days when football coaches cautioned their players not to lift weights because they didn't want them to get musclebound. The idea was that too much muscle would make a player tight and slow, which of course explains why today's football players are twice as big than they were in the bad old days, and still manage to be a step or two faster.

But there is one potentially serious side effect of being too buff, as Lisa Sanders, M.D., explains in this column in the New York Times Magazine:

When the patient undressed for the exam, Duffy was immediately struck by the highly developed muscles of his upper body. “He looked like one of those young men in a men’s fitness magazine,” he told me later. Otherwise his exam showed nothing abnormal.

Then Duffy remembered a physical-exam maneuver he learned years ago when he was a medical student. He straightened the patient’s arm and held it parallel to the floor. Carefully placing a finger over the pulse at the young man’s wrist, he moved the arm behind the patient. Then he asked the patient to tilt his head up and face the opposite direction. The pulse disappeared. When the patient looked forward again, the pulse returned. He repeated the maneuver. Again, the pulse disappeared when the patient turned his head. Immediately Duffy suspected what had caused the clot.

The vessels that carry the blood from the heart to and from the shoulders and arms travel through a narrow space under the clavicle and above the top of the rib cage. The presence of hypertrophied muscles of the shoulder or neck, or in some cases an extra rib, can make this small opening even tighter.

This problem, known as thoracic outlet syndrome, is most commonly seen in young athletes who use their upper extremities extensively -- baseball pitchers or weight lifters -- or in workers who use their arms above the level of their shoulders, like painters, wallpaper hangers or teachers who write on a blackboard. When these patients put their arm in certain positions, the extra muscle or bone constricts the space between the two structures and cuts off the flow through the vessels like a kink in a garden hose. Blood can’t get into the arm, so the pulse disappears. And blood can’t get out of the arm, so it pools and can clot. When the arm is moved and the vessel reopens, the blood flows once more, but if a clot has formed, it can break lose and travel to the lungs.

That sounds scary -- I think I'll skip my workouts for a while. After all, I wouldn't want to get too muscular.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:27 AM | Comments (2)

February 13, 2007

That'll Be the Day

Every now and then, science comes up with a wonderful finding that's utterly useless to 99 percent of us. Here's the latest:

In a study of more than 23,000 Greek men and women ages 20 to 86, researchers found that napping at least three times a week for a half-hour was associated with a significantly decreased risk of death from heart disease. After controlling for factors like smoking, body mass index, physical activity and diet, the researchers found that people who regularly took a siesta had a 37 percent lower coronary death rate than those who never napped. The effect was even greater in working men.

If you want those working men to become non-working men -- which is to say, unemployed men -- by all means, advise them to take naps during business hours.

I mean, I'm self-employed and work at home, and I can't imagine taking time out to nap, unless I told my wife I'm trying to fight off a cold or bubonic plague or something. Otherwise ... well, I don't know what she'd think, but I can guarantee it wouldn't be, "Terrific! He's reducing his risk of a heart attack by 37 percent!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

Monday Linkage

Just because I'm too busy to organize these stories with a unifying theme ...

Why extreme stress makes you stupid

This story shows that when you lose sleep, your brain stops making new brain cells.

This test was pretty extreme, since it kept subjects awake for 72 hours. In real life, that would only happen in times of war, personal tragedy, or natural disaster. And it doesn't really say anything about what happens to brain cells when people just lose a few hours of sleep here and there.

But the news is still kind of scary: If you're involved in something so traumatic that you don't sleep for 72 hours, it takes two full weeks for your brain to catch up.

Sleep it off

It's not news that sleep is important to weight control. So this short item about kids and sleep isn't surprising, but it reinforces what we already know:

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used detailed diaries kept by families to examine children's sleep behavior and its relationship with weight. They determined that an extra hour of sleep cut the likelihood of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent in children ages 3 to 8, and from 34 percent to 30 percent in those ages 8 to 13.

Not a huge difference, but it's still something. Parents, turn off the TV or computer or PlayStation, and enforce a consistent bedtime. And if you have any of those things in your kids' bedrooms, where you can't monitor whether they're on or off, get them out.

And make sure they get a good breakfast when they wake up.

There. I just solved the childhood obesity problem in two easy steps.

Cut it out

I meant to blog last week about the rise in obesity surgeries for teenagers. But like so many things, I never got around to it. So this morning's L.A. Times has a handy roundup story about how weight-loss surgery is getting safer across the board:

What really improved safety, experts say, was the introduction, in 1994, of laparoscopic procedures into weight-loss surgery. Using lasers and cameras, surgeons make a few small incisions and perform procedures without cutting a person's belly.

Between 1998 and 2004, the death rate of patients undergoing obesity surgery dropped 80 percent, according to a 2006 report by William Encinosa of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. -- probably due to simpler surgery.

Maybe someday surgery will be as common for people tired of being overweight as Lasik is for people who're tired of wearing glasses. If it's truly as safe as it now seems, it's hard to argue against it.

Use it ... and lose it anyway

I spent the weekend watching my older daughter skate. She probably skated four hours on a friend's frozen pond on Saturday, and then another three hours Sunday at an indoor rink -- she had her regular lesson, then tore around on the ice with friends for another hour and change.

At 50, I'm lucky if I get in three hours of exercise a week, but for her that's just a regular old Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I'm only doing what my body tells me to do -- I'm supposed to slow down with age. This is a process that occurs naturally in every species. It's not just activity levels that downshift. Performance declines as well after about the age of 30, even with elite-level talent and serious conditioning.

A new study sheds some light on why our bodies persist in getting older and slower:

The team from the Howard Hughes Medical School at Yale University School of Medicine compared the skeletal muscle of three-month-old rats and two-year-olds. They found that a process called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slowed down in the older animals.

AMPK's role in skeletal muscle is to stimulate the body to burn off fat and to fuel cells, via the production of mitochondria -- cells' power sources. ...

The animals were exposed to a chemicals which stimulates AMPK and were also fed more food, which also stimulates the process. They found that the older rats had lower AMPK activity than the younger animals.

What's funny about this story is that it portrays this loss of muscle function as all-or-nothing:

Dr. Anne McArdle, an ageing specialist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we age is a major problem which has a significant effect on quality of life of older people." ...

But she added: "The data suggest that the ability to increase AMPK activity is completely abolished and so there is little evidence to suggest that 'working harder' would overcome these deficiencies."

There's still a pretty big gulf between "doing nothing" and "working harder." No one walking around with a 70-year-old body thinks he just needs to work a little harder to make his body perform like a 20-year-old's. But there's plenty you can do that falls in between the extremes. Some exercise is always better than none, and exercise in combination with a good diet will do wonders to delay the inevitable -- to slow the slowdown.

So what'll you bet the next time we see the acronym "AMPK" in a news story, it'll be about a drug company that's invented a product to increase AMPK activity in older people? "It's Viagra for your muscles!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2007

Drano for Humans

Following up on yesterday's post about the endless quest for pharmaceutical solutions to the problem of heart disease, here's something fun from Dr. Michael Eades' blog:

I just got my February issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which contains a wonderful article on the heart disease preventing properties of caffeine. In a prospective study of 6596 subjects, aged 32-86, lasting 8.8 years, researchers found that caffeine (delivered via coffee, primarily) prevented the development of heart disease and heart-disease mortality in numbers that would make the CEOs of any statin-manufacturing pharmaceutical companies wet themselves.

Based on the data, adults over the age of 65 who consumed the equivalent of greater than 4 cups of coffee per day had a whopping halving of the risk (actually, a little greater than half) for death from heart disease, a statistic that no statin research can even come close to.

The great thing about the caffeine data is that there is a dose-response curve. A dose-response curve is one that shows an increasing effect with increasing dose of the drug in question. In the case of caffeine, the smaller the dose, the smaller the benefit: from a half cup to two cups per day, the risk drops about 23 percent; from 2 cups to 4 cups per day, the risk drops by 32 percent; more than 4 cups per day, a 53 percent decrease in risk.

Here's an abstract of the study.

(Thanks, as always, to Rannoch Donald for the link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:02 AM | Comments (2)

February 07, 2007

Time Off for Good Cholesterol

I guess I haven't been keeping up with some issues as well as I should. I had no idea that the case for increasing HDL -- the "good" cholesterol -- had never before been made in a major study:

Scientists have shown for the first time that raising "good" cholesterol levels is almost as important as lowering levels of "bad" cholesterol in reducing heart-threatening plaque in arteries. ...

"A little bit of HDL [high-density lipoprotein, or "good" cholesterol] goes a long way. A small increase in HDL produces nearly as much of a benefit as LDL [low-density lipoprotein or "bad" cholesterol] reduction," said Dr. Steve Nissen, senior author of the study and chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. "In general, when we've found a therapy that slowed progression of disease, that translated into major clinical benefits. This makes a lot of sense."

Yes, it makes a lot of sense, but haven't nutritionists, researchers, and fitness professionals been making this case for years? Here's something my coauthors and I wrote in The Testosterone Advantage Plan, way back in 2001:

The Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing study of over 5,000 people spanning five decades, found that a low level of HDL indicates an increased risk for heart disease, regardless of total cholesterol level. A level below 40 milligrams per deciliter is considered dangerous. On the other hand, an HDL level above 60 is considered protective against heart disease.

Thus, elevating LDL is a bad idea, while elevating HDL is great for you. So knowing your total cholesterol level is meaningless if you don't also know your ratio of LDL to HDL.

We went on to show, in chart form, how different dietary fats affected the fats that form in your bloodstream -- LDL, HDL, triglycerides, and total cholesterol. The chart showed that trans-fats are the worst, since they lower HDL while raising LDL and total cholesterol. And it showed that monounsaturated fats raise HDL while lowering LDL, total cholesterol, and triglycerides.

Here's something written a few years ago by my friend Len Kravitz, Ph.D., and two of his colleagues at the University of New Mexico:

High-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels are inversely and independently associated with reduced risk of CHD (Neiman 1998). The risk of CHD increases by 2 to 3 percent for every 1.0 mg/dl decrease in HDL-C (Durstine & Haskell 1994).

In other words, lowering HDL increases the risk of heart disease. I guess it never occurred to me that the case for raising HDL had never been made. I just assumed that if lower HDL produces bad consequences, then raising HDL must do the opposite.

Switching gears, here's something curious about this new report:

For the new study, published in the Feb. 7 issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association, the researchers revisited four previously conducted studies involving 1,455 participants.

All patients had coronary artery disease and were taking statins. They underwent two ultrasound exams 18 moths to 24 months apart to determine changes in the amount of plaque in a coronary artery.

All four studies were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

I have no problem with anybody funding research. But I do have a problem with the idea that high cholesterol levels, or unfavorable HDL/LDL ratios, is a pharmaceutical problem. For many, perhaps most, it's a lifestyle problem.

Len makes the case for exercise as a way to raise HDL:

Exercise is involved in increasing the production and action of several enzymes that function to enhance the reverse cholesterol transport system (Durstine & Haskell 1994). The precise mechanisms are unclear, but evidence indicates that other factors including diet, body fat, weight loss, and hormone and enzyme activity interact with exercise to alter the rates of synthesis, transport and clearance of cholesterol from the blood (Durstine & Haskell 1994).

Len and his coauthors go on to say that the threshold for raising HDL via exercise is pretty high. For men, you'd need to run 7 to 10 miles a week at a 10- or 11-minute-mile pace, or at 75 percent of your maximum heart rate.

Volume seems to matter more than intensity -- you'd need to burn at least 1,000 calories a week in exercise, with more benefit shown when you exceed 2,000 calories a week.

That's a lot of exercise, certainly more than you're going to get with strength training three times a week. (For women, the numbers are even less conclusive. High volumes of exercise are associated with higher HDL, but we're talking about a shitload of running -- more than 37 miles a week.)

Still, I suspect (without having the time right now to dig out the studies) that you could accomplish a lot more with your diet. Given what we know about nuts, which tend to be rich in monounsaturated fats, shouldn't we start there, instead of going straight to the pharmacy?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:31 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

Monday Link Dump

Kevin Drum asks if Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player in the universe.

I have a humbler suggestion: Tiger Woods is the best athlete in America right now.

It seems odd to talk about tennis and golf during Super Bowl Week, but really, does anyone dominate any sport the way these two dominate theirs?

The tooth is out there

Straight teeth don't make you any happier, according to this:

A 20-year study found that orthodontic treatment had little positive impact on future psychological health.

But what about future earnings? You can't tell me that having messed-up teeth won't affect your career path. Just try getting on TV without perfectly straight and glow-in-the-dark-white teeth.

Acceptance

I've never once seen an episode of House, but now, thanks to the vagaries of channel-surfing, I've seen Hugh Laurie accept two major awards -- the Golden Globe and one from the Screen Actors Guild.

Speaking of acting awards:

Forest Whitaker is considered the frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. As it happens, over the weekend, I saw much of Platoon on cable. He only had a minor role, but you always notice him when he's on screen.

By contrast, he shared several scenes in Platoon with Johnny Depp. But if you didn't know it was Depp, you'd never pay any attention to that character. He's just a guy in the background. Whitaker had a different kind of presence, even then. Even when he's in the background, you notice him.

I can't quantify this is any way -- writing about movies is pretty far from my paying gig -- but I think I can remember more minor roles by Whitaker than by just about any other actor.

The bit he did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as the force-of-nature football player, was just a cartoon, like a purely physical version of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli (interesting that neither actor ever played similar characters again), but in The Color of Money and The Crying Game, I remembered his scenes more clearly than I did just about anything else in the movie.

And who says there aren't any good roles for overweight black men with weird eyes?

The big picture

In this massive essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, argues that nutrition science misses the forest for the trees.

I can't argue with his point that eating real food is better than eating anything "enriched" or "fortified." I made the case for "clean eating" in New Rules of Lifting, although I suspect I'm more enthusiastic about protein supplements than Pollan is.

Right on cue, I found a news report this morning that bolsters Pollan's argument that we spend far too much time looking at the bits and pieces of nutrition, instead of the big picture:

Children who eat too little fat can end up overweight, a new study has found. Researchers in Sweden discovered that eating the right sort of fat kept the weight of children down.

Those who were significantly overweight consumed low amounts of unsaturated fat, the type found in fish, olive oil and vegetables.

Another point that could be made is that these bitsy-piecey studies do all tend to point to the same place -- eat more fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods, and skip anything that comes in a box.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:22 AM | Comments (2)

January 24, 2007

Mid-Week Blog Meat

Time to play catch-up on some of the stories I've missed.

Exercise -- even deadlier than you thought

Doctors have an intriguing explanation for how some elite endurance athletes put themselves at higher risk of heart failure:

Endurance sports may cause changes in the hearts of some athletes that can lead to a rare but life-threatening condition which causes an abnormal heart rate and rhythm, Belgium researchers said on Monday.

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.

(Thanks to Rob Duffield and Rannoch Donald for this one.)

Whooping it up

At my last visit to a doctor, he gave me a vaccination for whooping cough, something I'd been vaccinated against as a kid and hadn't thought about since. He said there's been a resurgence in the disease, which Gina Kolata of the New York Times discusses here:

Before the 1940s when a pertussis vaccine for children was introduced, whooping cough was a leading cause of death in young children. The vaccine led to an 80 percent drop in the disease’s incidence, but did not completely eliminate it. That is because the vaccine’s effectiveness wanes after about a decade, and although there is now a new vaccine for adolescents and adults, it is only starting to come into use. Whooping cough, Dr. Kretsinger said, is still a concern.

The disease got its name from its most salient feature: Patients may cough and cough and cough until they have to gasp for breath, making a sound like a whoop. The coughing can last so long that one of the common names for whooping cough was the 100-day cough, Dr. Talbot said.

The issue, Kolata explains, is that it's not always clear what is and isn't whooping cough, which is how a major hospital completely misdiagnosed a recent illness going around among its employees, with expensive and disruptive results.

Widebodies

I can't decide whether to laugh at this, or take it seriously:

Researchers at Iowa State University found nearly half of the offensive and defensive linemen playing on Iowa high school teams qualify as overweight, and one in 10 meet medical standards for severe obesity.

"These are 15- and 16-year-old boys that have a weight and body-mass ... that as they enter adulthood puts many at a very adverse health condition," said Dr. Joe Eisenmann, co-author of the study and a professor in pediatric exercise physiology at Iowa State.

On the one hand, reporting that football linemen are heavier than average is like saying basketball players are tall. If you were a natural widebody, wouldn't you gravitate toward football? (I had the opposite body type, and played anyway.) On the other, I guess it's newsworthy if it turns out that overweight kids are making themselves even more overweight to play their sport.

But that's not really what the study found:

The study's researchers began by gathering height and weight data of 3,686 varsity linemen available from rosters from all classes of Iowa high school football teams. They used that data to calculate a body-mass index, the same tool used for the NFL study.

Of the players analyzed, 28 percent were deemed at risk of being overweight and 45 percent fit the standards for being overweight, including 9 percent who met adult severe obesity standards.

Common sense tells us that a healthy kid whose natural playing weight might be 220 pounds would see the benefit in bulking up to 280 to get a major-college scholarship, where the coaches would hope that they could get him up north of 300 to make him a championship-caliber lineman.

So of course that kid would do what he could to put on that weight. He'd lift like a maniac and eat like a horse.

What we don't know is whether the weight kids put on for a specific purpose, like football, creates long-lasting health problems. I could guess that the kids who put weight on easiest are also the ones who are most susceptible to obesity and obesity-related diseases. But I don't know if those are the same kids who're playing football and on the cusp of getting athletic scholarships.

Do the kids who try to bulk up in high school, but fall short of the size and skill needed to play at the next level, keep the weight on? Do they lose it? Do they keep gaining weight, even when they aren't trying?

I honestly don't know, and I don't know if anyone else does either.

So studies like this, as stand-alone piles of statistics, probably offer less than meets the eye. Really, who didn't know that the biggest kids will exploit their natural advantage by playing football in high school? The real question is what happens to them later in life, when their bulk is no longer an asset.

The road to hell is paved with good cuts of meat

It's not just the meth freaks who shoplift. It might be someone you know:

According to the Food Marketing Institute, meat was the most shoplifted item in America's grocery stores in 2005. (It barely edged out analgesics and was a few percentage points ahead of razor blades and baby formula.)

Meat's dubious triumph is due in part to a law enforcement crackdown on methamphetamine use. Meat used to be the shoplifting runner-up to health-and-beauty-care items, a category that includes cough medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in home-cooked meth. In 2003, for example, a quarter of shoplifted products were HBCs, while meat took second place at 16 percent. But states began passing laws that require stores to move medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind secure counters. That was enough to cut the pinching of HBCs, which fell by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005. ...

Stores have had particular problems with cuts bearing the Certified Angus Beef brand, which are often displayed near ostensibly less succulent offerings. With only enough money to purchase an ordinary chuck-eye roast, many otherwise ethical shoppers make a snap decision to lift the Angus instead. Store detectives speculate that these meatlifters feel entitled to have steak instead of hamburger on occasion, as a reward for their hard work; swiping an expensive bottle of dish soap doesn't provide the same sense of satisfaction. Though men and women shoplift in equal numbers, such aspirational meatlifters are most likely to be gainfully employed women between 35 and 54, according to a 2005 University of Florida study; men prefer to lift Tylenol or batteries, often for resale and often to support a drug or alcohol habit.

So the next time your wife puts filet mignon on the table, you might want to check the grocery receipt. Then again, you might not want to know.

(Thanks again to Rannoch for this one.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:48 AM | Comments (2)

January 16, 2007

Heavy Petting

I'm not a pet guy. However, since my wife and children are pet people, I currently live with a dog and two cats. I could do without the expense, noise, smells, and occasional destruction of property, like the dining-room carpet the dog shredded in two different places. But the animals make my family happy, and on most days I consider that more important than floor coverings. (I confess I give more weight to the carpeting when we have company over.)

For as long as I've been writing about health and fitness, the prevailing notion has been that pets improve the health of their owners. I accepted that, assuming I was among the few outliers who were unlikely to get those benefits. After all, how many pet owners don't actually like their pets?

But a recent Finnish study -- which I thought I'd mentioned on this blog but can't find in my archives (I did write about fat pets here) -- piddles on the idea that pet owners are healthier than their pet-free counterparts. The Washington Post digs into the data here:

Pet owners, the study finds, smoke cigarettes more but drink alcohol less than those without pets. They also have a higher body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight relative to height. Pet owners spend slightly less time playing organized sports than non-owners but take part more often in such activities as hunting, fishing and boating. Pet owners are also less likely to report having good health than non-owners.

The findings point in a different direction from many previous studies, which have suggested that pet owners enjoy such health advantages as lower cholesterol, triglyceride and blood pressure than non-owners, even after accounting for such variables as exercise. Previous studies also have shown that owning pets may relieve feelings of loneliness and encourage pet owners to exercise more, spend more time outdoors and socialize more, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But this area of research is filled with inconsistencies, with one study's findings often contradicting another's.

That said, there's only so much you can read into one study. And if you're American, it doesn't necessarily follow that the results of Finnish research apply to you. Plus, the pet owners in the Finnish study were less educated than the non-owners, so there's an important confounding factor that wasn't controlled.

But the conclusion that makes the most sense is that the early studies describing the health benefits of pet ownership were probably exaggerated:

In 2005 BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) published a review examining studies that helped popularize the idea that pet ownership positively affects human health. The review found that while some studies reported pet-owning benefits such as better physical and psychological well-being in the elderly and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, many later studies failed to confirm these findings.

So I'm going with my theory: Owning a pet may or may not bring you health benefits, but you can tip the odds in your favor if you actually like the pets you own.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:50 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

Monday Blog Meat

If it's Monday, that means there's a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it's Martin Luther King day. Next month it'll be Presidents' Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.

I'm not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids' Christmas vacation.

I don't say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It's just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements.

Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they'd like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country's history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy.

Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I'm on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today's blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.

Downward-facing devil

When Rannoch Donald sent along the link to this story, his only comment was, "I'm not sure what to make of it."

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.'s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn't be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and "to put his hands together." Brears, a Christian, said she doesn't want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

"It's not fair to take prayer out, and yet they're allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools."

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn't believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all. "There's God and there's the devil, and the devil's not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that."

This is a new one on me. I guess there's a line of thought in contemporary fundamentalist Christianity that insists every idea not mentioned in the Bible is a competing belief system. Evolution isn't discussed in the Bible, so it must be a competing religion. Jesus and the Apostles didn't practice yoga, so it must be a competing religion.

It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft ... which of course are competing belief systems.

Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There's good and there's evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world.

Granted, there's no God in Harry's world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it's like Star Wars. There's The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there's no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas.

What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.

Eat a steak, save your brain

According to this, low levels of LDL -- the "bad" cholesterol -- are linked to Parkinson's, a secondary symptom of which is dementia. That's right: Low levels of cholesterol are linked to a debilitating disease.

Another way to prevent dementia -- learn a foreign language:

Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said.

"There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic," Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said.

Since I only speak one language, I sure hope those cholesterol-raising steaks are enough to protect me.

The height of fashion

I've been reading more and more about height the past few years -- and blogging about it from time to time -- so it's no surprise the L.A. Times would devote a major health feature to the topic, including this:

Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

"There's still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature," says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring."

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

What I didn't know is that some parents are giving normal, healthy kids drugs to make them taller:

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller -- but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

The added height comes at a cost of $52,634 per gained inch, according to a study in the March 2006 issue of the same journal. About 410,000 U.S. children qualify under the FDA guidelines. If they were all treated with growth hormone, the total healthcare cost would be more than $8 billion a year, wrote Dr. Leona Cuttler, pediatric endocrinologist at Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, in a February 2004 editorial in the journal.

I look at that as a parent who gives one of his children powerful stimulant medication to help him function normally. Nobody who saw our son in school before he started taking the meds doubted that he needed them. We waited as long as we could before starting the treatment. It's helped him in profound ways, but we still struggle with issues the drugs can't treat. That's fine; it's the deal you accept when you decide to become parents.

But to take those kind of risks with children just because they're short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow.

That said, I do understand that it's kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren't going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults -- I'm 5-10, she's 5-4. I'm two inches shorter than my dad, and she's about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me -- he's about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again -- but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages.

Our siblings' children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick?

I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents' decisions, but this is a tough one to understand.

* Actually, she's the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where's regression to the mean when you really need it?

UPDATE: Water, water everywhere, but don't let any of it out unless you want to lose the contest

Craig Ballantyne wondered how I could possibly miss this story about a 28-year-old woman who died after a water-drinking contest she'd entered for the chance to win a video-game system for her three kids.

I didn't actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2006

In a Family Way

I come from a big family, with six brothers and sisters, 15 nieces and nephews and a grand-nephew. One other niece is married, and I expect another nephew to get engaged any day now. My wife has four siblings, giving us another four nephews on her side of the family. And, of course, we have three children of our own.

If there's ever a time when it's good to come from a big family, it's the holidays. I've never once said to myself, "Damn, I wish I had fewer people to hang out with on Christmas."

But this morning I found two stories that suggest smaller is better.

The first says a big family is bad for the health of parents:

U.S. researchers looked at 21,000 couples living in Utah between 1860 and 1985, who bore a total of 174,000 children. It was found the more children couples had, the worse their health and the more likely they were to die early.

The study looked at Mormon families, who provide a perfect laboratory for this story of research -- lots of offspring (an average of eight per family studied), and detailed, centralized family records.

You could guess that squeezing out a high number of rugrats would be tough on the women, but the really interesting finding here is that it's also tough on the dads and even the kids themselves:

They found 1,414 women died within a year of the last child's birth, and another 988 by the time the child was five.

In comparison, 613 men died in the first year after their last child was born, with another 1,083 dying within five years.

And the larger the family, the more likely children were to die before the age of 18, particularly if they were among the youngest.

The second story focuses on one previously unknown danger to the kids born into big families:

The more siblings you have, the more likely you may be to develop a brain tumor, a new study reports.

Researchers writing in the Dec. 12 issue of Neurology reviewed the records of 13,613 Swedish brain cancer patients and found that those with four or more siblings were almost twice as likely to develop a brain tumor as those with no siblings at all. The risk increased with the number of younger siblings and in children under 15, where it increased nearly four-fold for one type of tumor. ...

The authors suggest that infection may also be involved. Having large numbers of siblings increases the overall pool of infections, and children coming into close contact with one another share exposures to many infectious agents.

However, there is good news for people who're obligated to spend time with their families, don't particularly enjoy it, and have a few drinks to make it more tolerable:

Having low levels of alcohol in the blood may protect the brain from the effects of a head injury, a study says. The University of Toronto team found head injury patients who had drunk low amounts were 24 percent less likely to die than those who had not had any alcohol.

So if you really can't stand your family, big or small, and fear someone in it may want to use your head as a kettle drum, a couple drinks could save your life.

That's good to know.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:35 AM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2006

Scrooge on the Couch

A year ago, I wrote about two characters from A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim. I linked to a story about the possible root of Tiny Tim's illness, which included the possibility that it was rickets, a deficiency of vitamin D. If that had been the case, the thick, sunlight-blocking cloud of industrial pollution covering 19th-century London would've made the disease nearly impossible to cure.

Here's what I wrote:

So Tim may still have been a goner, even with the best medical care of that era.

One possible solution -- and this is just off the top of my bald head, with no particular insight into 19th century medicine -- is that if Scrooge had somehow arranged to send Tim out to the countryside for treatment, he might've gotten somewhat better with exposure to sunlight, a better diet (with perhaps more protein), and regular exercise (to help strengthen his growing muscles and bones).

Again, that's just a guess.

And it wasn't a bad guess, if I do say so myself. Here's Lisa Sanders, M.D., writing in today's New York Times Magazine:

In A Christmas Carol, much attention has been paid to Tiny Tim. What did he have that could cripple him, that could kill him, but that could be treated at a time when very few effective therapies were available? The two theories most discussed postulate that he had tuberculosis or a deficiency of vitamin D. Either would have responded to the most likely treatment of the day -- a visit to a sanatorium.

Assuming that sanitorium would have been outside the city, where's there's more sunshine and cleaner air ... well, give me props: That's a pretty good guess for a guy who wasn't even accepted into his high school's advanced biology class.

But the really interesting aspect of Dr. Sanders' story is the new diagnosis of Scrooge. I didn't know before reading her story that Charles Dickens is well-known among modern doctors for describing diseases and conditions long before they were diagnosed. She gives example of an obese man with sleep apnea in The Pickwick Papers, and of a shop owner with dyslexia in Bleak House.

Which breaks her to Scrooge. What did he have? A year ago, I guessed that he had a type of high-functioning autism, which, combined with an abusive upbringing, left him without empathy for his fellow humans. But Dr. Sanders' nephew, neurologist Chance Algar, M.D., thinks Dickens could've been describing something much more interesting:

This was dementia, he told me, but not the most common forms -- not Alzheimer’s or a dementia caused by multiple small strokes. No, this was a recently described variety known as Lewy body dementia.

Symptomatically, this disease lies at the intersection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and was first fully recognized in 1996. Although I saw Scrooge as a man without any medical problems, Chance explained, I had missed some subtle clues in Dickens’s description. The words used to portray Scrooge might apply to many with Parkinson’s disease: expressionless, rigid, nearly immobile. Dickens writes, “The cold within him froze his old features ... and stiffened his gait.” He also has a tremor, a symptom common in Parkinson’s as well as in this strange dementia.

But the hallmark of Lewy body disease is the real clincher in this diagnosis: vivid and detailed hallucinations featuring friends and relatives are common. And like Scrooge’s visions, these phantasms are distressing, often terrifying. Finally, in Lewy body dementia, hallucinations occur early in the disease, frequently before the cognitive deficits are apparent.

Alas, there was no 19th-century sanitorium in which Scrooge might've recovered from this illness.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2006

Pot: Not

Here's a story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, in a just world, would be on the front page of every major newspaper:

Contrary to popular belief, smoking marijuana need not be a steppingstone between using alcohol and tobacco and experimenting with illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Researchers led by Ralph E. Tarter, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Pharmacy, found that nearly a quarter of the young men they studied used marijuana before they began drinking or smoking cigarettes.

It's the reverse of what's known as the "gateway hypothesis," in which drug use is thought to progress from alcohol and tobacco to marijuana to hard drugs.

The researchers determined also that the likelihood of developing a substance abuse problem was similar in youngsters who followed the traditional gateway drug use pattern and those who followed the reverse pattern.

"This is actually quite novel, this idea," Dr. Tarter said. "It runs counter to about six decades of current drug policy in the country, where we believe that if we can't stop kids from using marijuana, then they're going to go on and become addicts to hard drugs."

But the data doesn't support that contention, he noted. The findings were published in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry.

I'm an advocate of legalizing marijuana, even though I haven't touched the stuff in more than a quarter-century and would hate to see my kids even experiment with it. But the news that some users started smoking cigarettes after they'd already tried pot gives me pause. If the chronic is a gateway to tobacco, maybe that's the argument for keeping it illegal.

Just kidding.

Another interesting finding of the study:

Among those who used marijuana, nearly a quarter followed the reverse of the gateway pattern. They tended to have less parental supervision and to live in neighborhoods with poor physical environments where illegal drugs were more available.

In general, the marijuana-users were more behaviorally deviant, less involved with school and had friends their parents didn't like, the researchers found.

So how's this for a message to send to our children: "If you want to stay off drugs, let your parents pick your friends." Yeah. That'll work.

Finally, from the department of ironies:

It was easier to obtain marijuana than alcohol or cigarettes as a teenager, [a rehab patient] added.

"You always had to show a form of ID to get those," he said. "But I could always go to the person who was selling the weed to get it, and they wouldn't ask for ID. It was never hard to get for me."

In a twisted way, that reminds me of something Jim Carroll wrote in The Basketball Diaries: He started using heroin because he was afraid of marijuana. The Reefer Madness mythology had even drug users believing that pot was more addictive than opiates.

So, thanks to the anti-pot propaganda, he became a heroin addict. And thanks to the fact pot is illegal, largely because of that same propaganda, kids find it easier to get weed from neighborhood dealers than it is to get tobacco or alcohol. Start selling pot over the counter, and regulating and taxing the shit out of it, and kids will find it just as hard to acquire as any other legal intoxicant.

And at that point it becomes boring. Which, of course, is the goal. Tedium will work just fine, whereas prohibition always fails.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2006

The Empire Strikes Back

I wrote about Adam Campbell's excellent takedown of the American Diabetes Association here. Now the ADA has written to protest ... and Adam lets them have it again.

(Thanks to Steve Adam for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:38 AM | Comments (1)

"Your Mother Was a Hamster, And Your Father Smelt of Resveratrol!"

More news about red wine. (For old news, start here.) First, another health benefit:

In the latest research, Roger Corder of Queen Mary's School of Medicine in London and colleagues analyzed various components of red wine. They found that substances called procyanidins appeared to have the most potent beneficial effect on the cells that enable arteries to power the heart.

Moreover, the researchers discovered that levels of procyanidins were highest in red wines produced in southwestern France, where French men tend to live the longest, according to a report in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The winemakers of that region tend to use more traditional techniques in which Tannat grapes are soaked with their seeds longer, boosting the procyanidins.

The research suggests that one or two glasses a day of cabernet sauvignon or other Madiran wines made with similar grapes and methods would be enough to get the health benefits, Corder said.

If these were French researchers concluding that French wines are the healthiest, I'd be skeptical. And I'd really want to know who funded the research. But I have to think that the Brits didn't have a financial stake in the outcome of their study. Plus, you know, Nature isn't exactly a haven for pay-to-play science.

So the best reaction is to giggle at the fact that anything French comes out on top in any category. That's sure to get a rise out of certain individuals.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2006

The Best Back Is Laid Back

Stories like this are why I love blogging about health and fitness:

Using advanced scanning equipment, doctors have concluded that the best way to avoid back pain is not to sit bolt upright but to perfect a more laid-back posture, a sprawl that is halfway between upright and horizontal.

Researchers at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen used positional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) capable of taking snapshots of 22 volunteers' spines as they sat upright, slouched and hunched forward or laid back at an angle of 135 degrees.

We all know that slouching forward, and thus rounding your back, is bad; it stretches out and eventually deforms the ligaments and other structures that keep the back tight and healthy. But this study shows that sitting upright, which our parents and teachers have been telling us to do since time began, isn't good for the spine, either.

I tend to be a leaner anyway, so it's good to know that it's the best posture for my back. I just love studies that validate what I already do.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:48 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2006

Monday Math

A handful of fun and interesting stories to check out this morning:

TV + exercise = weight loss.

A schizophrenia drug + a blood-pressure drug = an ejaculation-preventing contraceptive pill for men.

Slow reaction times + poorly functioning memory = heart attacks.

Making more money may or may not = more happiness. (And check out this New York Times story on how the really rich are separating themselves from the merely successful and affluent. Is anyone happier because he's making millions instead of hundreds of thousands?)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:51 AM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2006

Pick Your Parents Well

I love health stories where the bottom line is that you can't do a damned thing to act on the information.

Consider:

Firstborn children of women younger than 25 are nearly twice as likely to defy the average life span and go on to live beyond 100, according to a new study.

Leonid A. Gavrilov and his colleagues at the University of Chicago's Center for Aging have relied on a wealth of Internet data -- including genealogy websites and federal death indexes -- to figure out why so many firstborns seem to outpace their younger siblings in the longevity race.

Although there is no clear answer yet, scientists believe the phenomenon may be related to the physical youthfulness of young mothers and the eggs they produce. ...

Besides the youthfulness of the eggs, another theory, still unexplored, is that younger women haven't been exposed to as many viruses and diseases as older women, which in turn makes for a healthier uterine environment.

So I'm screwed, because I was the third child, born when my mother was 30. All three of my children are screwed, because my wife was 33, 36, and 38 when they were born. Not a single one of 'em enjoyed that "healthier uterine environment."

But then there's this:

People from broken homes may be more prone to psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, research suggests. Researchers said their findings suggest the illnesses are not simply brain diseases, but linked to factors such as social adversity. ...

[T]hey found that separation from one or both parents for more than a year before the age of 16, as a consequence of family breakdown, was associated with a 2.5 fold increased risk of developing psychosis in adulthood.

Which raises this question: Aren't women who marry and have children at the youngest ages the most likely to get divorced, and thus raise the risk of psychosis in their children?

According to this (which is from the very conservative Focus on the Family, so it may not be entirely trustworthy), a handful of factors are consistently shown to contribute to marital longevity. Among them:

* higher family income (over $50,000)

* being older than 25 when you get married

* having some college education

All three of those -- especially the obvious one in the middle -- would mitigate against the success of a marriage in which children were born before the mother turned 25. So that "healthier uterine environment" comes with the baggage of a greater chance that the child will be raised by a single parent and/or as part of a stepfamily -- and, thus, have a greater chance of serious mental illness.

Isn't that just great to know, especially the day before the ultimate family holiday?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

They'd Rather See You Die than Admit They're Wrong

I'm an excitable guy, but I don't think I'm going too far off the deep end when I say this story by Adam Campbell in Men's Health has some of the best reporting I've ever seen in a mainstream health and fitness magazine.

Here's how it opens:

It's a wonder no one has tried to have Mary Vernon's medical license revoked.

Since 1999, the 52-year-old family doctor has been treating diabetic patients in Lawrence, Kansas, with an approach that was abandoned by most physicians in the 1930s. Worse, this Depression-era remedy is the opposite of the current guidelines established by the American Diabetes Association, a nonprofit organization that spent nearly $51 million on research in 2005, and so should know a thing or two about how to handle diabetes.

There's no question that Dr. Vernon is trouble -- but for whom? Not her patients, that's for certain. They just won't stay sick. People walk into her office afflicted with type-2 diabetes and, by every objective medical measurement, walk out cured. There's $51 million that says that isn't supposed to happen, not in a clinic in Kansas, and definitely not as a result of cleaning out the refrigerator.

"My first line of treatment is to have patients remove carbohydrates from their diets," explains Dr. Vernon, a petite, energetic mother of two who also serves as the president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. "This is often all it takes to reverse their symptoms, so that they no longer require medication."

That's it?

That's it -- a simple strategy, but one that's controversial. If Dr. Vernon and a growing cadre of researchers are correct about carbohydrates, we may be looking at an epic case of ignorance on the part of the medical community. That, however, pales next to the implications for the American Diabetes Association, namely that the very organization dedicated to conquering diabetes is rejecting what could be the closest thing we have to a cure.

I'll let you read the rest on your own, and just add this:

Not only do we know the cure for diabetes, we know how to prevent it, just as we know how to prevent obesity. Cut the carbs, kill the disease.

The lengths to which we go to ignore the obvious are astounding now, and promise to get even more absurd as society pays an ever-greater price for our corpulence and the diseases associated with it. For example, in the UK, the national health service may soon pay for gastric-bypass surgery for the most obese adults and teens.

The argument in favor of public financing of these surgeries is that they'll save lives, and perhaps even save money in the long run. It might be cheaper to spend thousands now to staple stomachs rather than spend multiples of that when the obese patients have advanced diabetes and heart disease, requiring expensive drugs and perhaps even amputations.

The argument against?

Dr. Geoff Rayner, a public health expert at City University, said: "We are medicalising something that is actually to do with how we live as a society. People become overweight because of their environment -- because we take a car rather than walk, because we spend hours in front of the TV, and because we are saturated by a junk-food industry. If you take a purely medical approach to this, you start to normalise what is a deeply abnormal state."

Oh, and did we mention the carbs?

(Thanks to Steve Adam and Rannoch Donald for the links.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:36 AM | Comments (1)

November 17, 2006

So Should We Start Testing Athletes for Red Wine?

Is there anything resveratrol can't do? Two weeks ago we learned it can prevent diabetes and heart disease in overweight mice, as well as giving them unusual balancing skills.

Now we learn resveratrol can also boost endurance:

Mice given high doses of the compound were able to run twice as far on treadmills than they normally could, French researchers reported.

Resveratrol might even help the rodents live longer, they say.

"The compound resveratrol, found in the skin of red grapes and cranberries, was known to activate SIRT1, an enzyme known to be involved in lifespan extension," explained lead researcher Dr. Johan Auwerx, from the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

These results, published in the Nov. 16 issue of Cell, add to findings from a recent study that showed that resveratrol improved health and lengthened survival of mice placed on a high-calorie diet.

The researchers think that what they found applies to humans as well as mice. SIRT1, they say, works the same way in humans, signaling cells to burn more energy. That not only would help obese people lose weight, it might help patients with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's.

This is all coming from Sirtris, the company that's developing the resveratrol-based drug and sponsored the research, so take that for what it's worth.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2006

At Least They Didn't Tell Us to Eat More Soy

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association lays out a pretty simple formula for longevity for men:

* Don't be overweight

* Maintain physical strength (grip strength is highly correlated with longevity in multiple studies)

* Control blood sugar -- hyperglycemia kills

* Control blood pressure

* Don't smoke

* Don't drink to excess

* Get as much education as possible

* Don't have high triglycerides

* Get married and stay married

The researchers started with a group of 5,820 middle-aged men; 42 percent lived to age 85, but just 11 percent made it to 85 without chronic diseases, physical disabilities, or mental impairments. Those exhibited what the researchers called "exceptional survival." And you can see their point: Living to 85 is one thing. Living to 85 with the ability to lift your grandchildren and have sex with your wife is something entirely different, and exponentially better.

Two of the nine factors -- higher education and lower triglycerides -- are associated with "exceptional survival." The rest just get you to 85 in one piece.

I haven't seen the full study (if anyone wants to send it along, I'd greatly appreciate it), but from what I've read in the abstract and news reports, it looks like four of the nine elements of longevity are related to obesity and the metabolic syndrome -- excess weight, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high blood sugar.

What I've seen so far doesn't specify belly fat, but it's not hard to extrapolate that it would be a factor, since the other hallmarks of diabetes and heart disease are right there.

One possible reason to be skeptical about these findings is that the researchers studied a group of Japanese-American men in Oahu. So that makes them pretty homogenous. But then again, most of the big, ongoing longevity studies we have start with homogenous populations -- the Harvard Alumni Health Study, for example, is mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class white guys.

And there's nothing in here that seems as if it would only apply to a specific population in an isolated place. It's not like they studied Japanese farmers on Okinawa and came to the conclusion we should all build our diets on rice and tofu.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

Go Long, Live Short?

I don't find this surprising:

Healthy men over 50 who had finished at least five marathons in the last five years were more likely to have major calcium deposits in their arteries than healthy men who did not run as much, according to a study presented yesterday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.

Calcium buildup is a sign that arteries are hardening, even when patients lack other symptoms. ...

About 36 percent of the 108 male marathon runners in the study had coronary artery calcium scores above 100, possibly a sign of increased cardiovascular risk. Similar scores were seen in 22 percent of 216 men who did not run and had risk factors for heart disease similar to those of the marathon group.

Dr. Möhlenkamp said he got the idea for the study after hearing about some healthy older male runners who had heart attacks when running marathons. As a man who runs about 12 miles a week, he said, he was surprised by the possibility that long-distance running might pose heart risks.

To my scientifically untrained eyes, that doesn'