Tag: health

Broccoli is good for your heart

“Research has shown eating broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and brussels sprouts to be particularly beneficial for the hearts of elderly women,” The Guardian reports.

Researchers investigating the benefit of a vegetable diet in Australia found that women who consumed the highest number of vegetables displayed less thickening of the walls of a vessel that supplies blood to the brain. The blood vessel is known as the common carotid artery and it has been linked to incidences of stroke, as a blockage in the artery prevents blood getting to the brain.

 

Might it have been a case of merely the consumption of vegetables? After all, we know that vegetables are good for you. Did the consumption of broccoli specifically have health benefits?

When looking at specific types of vegetables, researchers in Australia found that cruciferous vegetables seemed to provide the most benefits. These are a range of vegetables that belong to the same cabbage “family” (Brassicaceae) and include broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and kale.

While previous research has linked a healthy diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables to lower risk of heart attacks and stroke, this study looks at the potential effect of specific types of vegetables.

The study could not merely narrow down the benefits solely to the consumption of vegetables, particularly broccoli But after variances in other factors was taken care of, the results held true after taking account of other factors such as women’s lifestyle, medical history and other components of their diet.

Cruciferous vegetables are good for you and the evidence suggests that older women in particular should make an effort to include them in their diet.

The researchers who carried out the study came from Edith Cowan University, the University of Western Australia, Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Flinders University and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, all in Australia. The study was funded by Healthway Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. It was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Heart Association, and is available to read free online.

Surprisingly enough, the Mail Online reported the study results accurately. Nevertheless, as is often the case, did not make it clear that this type of study cannot prove that one factor (cruciferous vegetables) is a direct cause of another (carotid artery wall thickness).

The Guardian headline and introduction said the study showed vegetables provided “heart benefits”, although thickening of the carotid artery is more closely linked to risk of stroke.

The new wonderfood?

Wow, pasta is in the news again. In the 1990s it was claimed that eating pasta would mean consuming large anount of calories, which then get deposited as fat.

And now the surprising media focus is now on how pasta can help you lose weight? It is incredible to think how two pieces of research can have such different results over time.

The latter fact was what was reported in newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph and the Independent.

Carbs have become a common focal point for newspapers because it is almost unavoidable that we have to consume them every day. Newspapers tend to focus on common foods such as pasta, rice and bananas because the majority of readers consume them and this makes the news relevant, newsworthy, and inclines the reader to purchase a newspaper or read a web page loaded with adverts.

The common carbohydates that feature in news are white flour, rice and potatoes. They have been criticised for causing weight gain, alongside sugar.

Pasta is a low-glycemic index food, which means the carbohydrates don’t release sugar in the bloodstream when broken down.

But the abundance of carbohydrates in daily food also means that when it is absent, it is newsworthy. Which is why when celebrities go on a zero-carb diet, like the Adkins diet, the news is jumped on.

In the cited research, researchers looked at pasta that was used as a part of an overall low-glycemic index diet, compared to a high glycemic index food.

When pasta was eaten as part of a low GI diet, it was more likely to cause weight loss than if it were eaten as part of a high GI diet.

The research is still out on that one really. But is eating a low GI diet part of the solution that it appears to be? I would suggest not.

I would suggest that those who eat a low-GI diet anyway would be more inclined to eat a high fibre type of pasta.

High fibre pasta keeps you full and you feel fuller on less calories. Thus less calories remain with the body and get deposited as fat. Excess calories end up as fat, you see.

Those who ate pasta as part of a high GI diet would be less likely to be health conscious and hence the type of pasta would be less specific, less high-fibre and more ordinary pasta, requiring one to eat more calories to feel full.

Look at it this way. Less health concious people drink norrmal tea. Health conscious people drink peppermint tea (or some other sort).

Those who drink peppermint tea as part of their daily diet would be more likely to be health conscious, while those that consume normal tea are likely not. But that doesn’t mean you should stretch research and say peppermint tea helps you lose weight.

To summarise, what I would propose is not that pasta helps you lose weight, but that high-fibre pasta means you consume less calories and hence lose weight. It has nothing to do with being used as part of a low glycemic index diet or a high glycemic index diet. But low GI diet followers are more likely to eat high fibre pasta.

This was the bit of information that was not supported by articles.

The researchers found that “when pasta is consumed in the context of low GI dietary patterns, there is no weight gain but marginally clinically significant weight loss.”

The Mail Online, England’s favourite Health Daily, of course stretched the truth by saying that one should forgetting eating courgettes and going to the gym. Who ever knew a humble common daily event like eating pasta would have such a great effect?

That was the Mail Online’s spin to it, but don’t rush to eat lots of pasta. The extra consumption of pasta would merely make you pile on the pounds again. It is unethical to report like this but in this day and age it sells articles and is inportant though, even if it is peddling mistruths!

Obese children now from lower-income households

In bygone times having large children were prized. It was a sign that you were rich, had the wealth to feed your children and that they ate well. Unlike those skinny people who had no food to eat. Larger children were a mark of status, coming from higher income households where there was more disposale wealth.

This trend appears to be reversing. A study of obese children in England found that many of them were of poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

How has this happened? It is easy to point the finger at an abundance of high fat, high calorie, cheap food. In short, fast food.

Take a walk down your high street. Start by counting how many chip shops you can see, or shops selling fried chicken. You would probably see a fair few. And see what happens when the kids are dismissed after school. You will see many crowding around these shops, getting their fill of fried chicken and chips.

To top that all off: to quench their thirst after consuming the oily, high sodium food, many opt for sugary fizzy drinks.

The high fat, high calorie, high sugar diet is repeated over many days and weeks. We may talk of the social responsibility in allowing fast food places to target school children but that is what happens because fast food shops know where the bulk of their clients lie. To make matters worse, some children assume that eating fried chicken gives them protein to grow big, which is what they want. Chicken is a source of protein, but when fried it is high in fat and the combination of caloric drinks does not help either.

The consumption of such a high fat diet is a ticking time bomb for the NHS. In two or three decades from now many people will increasingly be obese, and there will be a higher population of middle-aged obese that threatens to burden the NHS.

The NHS should encourage exercise, but unfortunately many of the measures – such as to take 10,000 steps a day – are ill conceived. You could do 10,000 steps a day, but if that is done at a slow pace that hardly taxes your heart rate, you are not burning fat. In addition, fat burning only takes place after the body has been active for at least twenty minutes, at a heart rate of at least 60% MHR (Maximal Heart Rate).

The overabundance of cheap fast food has meant that lower income families see it as a cheap affordable way to feed their children. And when their children get obese, they are viewed as being “big” which many think is good for them.

We are at a point of disconnect, but what we have to address is this. Better, nutritional food costs more. And it doesn’t taste as good at the same price. Unless we can introduce subsidies on healthy food, we will only evolve into a society that increasingly consumes junk food. The price we pay for promoting healthy eating through subsidies will go a longer way towards reducing the ticking time bomb of poor social health.

Going to bed with your smartphone is not a good idea

Okay, let’s be clear. When I say going to bed with your smartphone, what I really mean is you have your smartphone on a table by your bedside.

Research has shown that thee quality of sleep is affected for those who have smartphones nearby within arm’s reach.

Why should this research not surprise us? Firstly, those of us who have them nearby are more likely to be more responsive to emails, alerts and vibrations which all signify that more information for us to process has come in. Going to sleep with such a mindset, with work lingering in the mind, interferes with our restful periods when this happens for a long time.

Secondly, the backlight from your smartphone can cause you to waken up earlier than you intend to. While is good news for those of us who have problems waking up and keep having to hit the snooze button, perhaps we should consider that the reason we keep hitting the snooze button is we have not sleep well.

Imagine it is summer and gets light earlier. Even if you sleep in a dark room, the light from your phone will hit your visual sensors and trick you into thinking that it is already later than it is. Even if you glance at the phone and realise it is only 5am (I say only because most people are still asleep then, but maybe you are one of the early risers) you have difficulty going back to sleep now because your restful period has been disturbed and this affect your body clocks.

Do you notice how unseasonal temperatures affect wildlife? If you get a week of warmer weather in the winter, flowers and insects start to think that winter has passed and spring is here, and then emerge, only for the cold to hit again, leaving them vulnerable.

The smartphone provides unwanted stimulus in terms of light and sound. Even if it is fully muted and the screen is completely dark, its presence by the side of the bed means you can never fully switch off.

The solution, even is to go low-tech. Get an alarm clock, or a watch if you need to set an alarm as a wakeup call. Leave your phone in a different room like the living room. Try to keep your bedroom sacrosanct, as a place where work does not intrude. You will find it makes a difference to your restful periods.

 

Ultra-processing the causes of cancer

Diet is one of the most basic human concerns. And why shouldn’t it be? The human body needs food and water to survive. But perhaps over the last few decades there has been a sort of over-focus on foods, fads, low-carb diets, low-fat diets, high protein-diets and others that have been taken a bit to extreme. And when you realise that another of the human obsessions (at least the media one anyway) is exercise – low-intensity? high intensity? intervallic? strength? – you realise that these two can be a deadly combination. While they purport to help you lose inches, the amount of column inches they generate is amazing!

It is no surprise to find the Guardian reporting that ultra-processed foods can be linked to cancer in a recent study done by French researchers. Ultra-processed foods are those that have undergone processing that relies on chemicals outside the normal realm of preservation. In the kitchen, we normally put salt on meat to preserve it, but an ultra-processed food could be one that is cooked and then preserved using special chemicals to allow it to be stored in a can and have a long shelf life.

The diets of 100,000 people were studied and those individuals who consumed the highest proportion of processed food were found to have increases in the overall rate of cancer.

But because the consumption of processed foods covered a wide umbrella, it was difficult to isolate the specific chemical purporting to create a rise in cancer.

The rise in cancer may not necessarily be linked to a specific chemical either.

Certain chemicals might work in combination to create an increased cancer risk. The chemicals themselves may be safe, but may interact in unknown ways.

Furthermore, it might be a lifestyle issue anyway – as those who eat more ultra-processed foods are more likely to live a more stressful or hectic lifestyle, consume a higher-fat diet, exercise less and be more likley to smoke.

The risk of cancer is minimised with a reduction in smoking, and increased in physical activity, and a healthy diet that includes minimising the consumption of alcohol and eating fruits and vegetables. It is also perhaps managed by a comfortable level of stress. We could take the combination of these factors to give a “lifestyle score” to assess the risk of developing cancer, instead of looking at individual factors and trying to determine their individual impact. While certain individual factors do have a pre-dominant influence when taken far beyond the boundaries of normal well-being – for example, a person who drinks excessively and then develops cancer can have his cancer retrospectively linked to his alcohol consumption – the examination of how factors combine within a smaller boundary is perhaps useful research for the future. For example, if a person does not exercise, but eats healthily, is he or she more likely to develop cancer than someone who eats healthily but has a stressful lifestyle?

It is these kinds of combinations that could form the basis for useful research in the future.

The higher cost of body embarrassment

If you were a bloke, would you avoid going to the doctor’s if it meant you had to strip off for the doctor to examine an area of your body you had concern about? Chances are men who have found a lump in their testicles might put off going to the doctor’s for a couple of days, drinking lots of water in the hope that it would go down, and if the lump remained, then work up the courage to make an appointment to see a doctor about it. Why put it off for a few days? It is probably down to the fact that it is slightly awkward and embarrassing to strip off to your private areas in front of someone else, despite the fact that doctors are professional and the health concerns are pressing. Despite the risk that the lumps may need to be operated on, some leave it late – and even a bit too late – because of the embarrassment.

But the embarrassment is not just down to men. Women put off going for tests and checkups because of the awkwardness around their perceived bodies. The BBC News website reported that women were avoiding smear tests to detect cervical cancer, with some either delaying making an appointment, or skipping screening altogether.

Cervical cancer accounts for an average of more than two deaths a day. Over 900 women die annually from it. Each day an average of nine women a day are diagnosed with it. All women aged 25 to 49 are invited for a screening test every three years. From the ages of fifty to sixty-four, this is reduced to once every five years.

Among those aged 25 to 29, more than one in three skip the cervical screening, a statistic that is worrying as the women more likely to get such cancer is the age group most likely to avoid the screening tests meant to catch it.

For what reasons do women avoid such tests?

One survey of around 2000 women found that their embarrssment about body shape was the most largely quoted reason for not attending. In other words, women were not comfortable with their own bodies in front of others. Other women also thought that they were healthy, being regulars of exercise or the gym, and thought that they were of a lower risk than others. A third did not believe that cervical screening reduces the risk of cancer at all. The results of the survey suggest that more importance needs to be placed on educating women of the benefits of screening.

The test only takes five minutes but perhaps one of the biggest barriers facing women was the awkardness if a male doctor or nurse was the one conducting the cervical screening. But women do have the option of asking in advance for a female to carry out the test, and many already do.

Jo’s Cervical Cancer Turst, the only charity in the UK dedicated to women suffers of this form of cancer, is working to improve detection rates and hence reduce the emotional impact of cancer on women and their families. The current screening is the greatest form of protection against such cancer, and helps save the NHS money by preventing the need for later surgery. The treatment of early stage cancer iis estimated by the charity to cost less than a tenth of later stage cancer.

It is not clear from the survery whether the women were representative of different regions, beliefs, or socio-economic groups. Women from certain cultures may find it more socially unacceptable to be naked in front of other individuals, let alone male doctors, and hence not attend screening for such reasons and are likely not to.

Appearance of the body shape and the vulva accounted for 84% or cervical smear absentees. Of these, 38% were also concerned that they might not smell normal, while 31% would not have gone had they not shaved or waxed their bikini area.

A senior nurse mentioned that nurses are aware of the awkwardness of showing an intimate part of the body to someone else but are sensitive to make the procedure less embarrassing so that women continue to have acceptable experiences that do not put them off screening for cancer. A chaperone is always offered and if women prefer to take a friend or partner with them that is fine too. It would be a great shame if women were put off seeking medical advice because of their embarrassment – it would be too great a price to pay for a small period of minimal inconvenience. The same goes for men and visits to their doctors too.

Why health articles in newspapers should be retired

What is it that people look forward to? Most want time to pursue their interests and doing things they love. Some people have managed to combine all this by the traditional interest-led approach, doing things they love, starting up a blog, gaining readership, and then selling advertising space on their blog, or affiliate marketing and other things associated with making money from a website. For others, this lure for things they like is compromised by the need of having to make a living, and hence this is shelved while having to earn a living and put off until retirement.

For most people, retirement would be when they would be able to have the time and money to indulge in things they put off earlier. Some people have combined the starting of a blog and retirement, and made a living by blogging (and gaining a readership) about how they have or intend to retire early.

Retirement. Out of the rat race. All the time in the world. For most people, retirement is the time to look forward to.

A recent study however suggests that retirement is not all that wonderful. Despite it being seen as the time of the life where financial freedom has been achieved and time is flexible, it has been suggested that the onset of mental decline starts with retirement.

The Daily Telegraph reported that retirement caused brain function to rapidly decline, and this information had been provided by scientists. It further cautions that those workers who anticipate leisurely post-work years may need to consider their options again because of this decline. Would you choose to stop work, if this meant your mental faculties would suffer and you would have all the free time in the world but not the mental acuity?

Retired civil servants were found to have a decline in their verbal memory function, the ability to recall spoken information such as words and names. It was found that verbal memory function deteriorated 38% faster after an individual had retired than before. Nevertheless, other areas of cognitive function such as the ability to think and formulate patterns were unaffected.

Even though the decline of verbal memory function had some meaningful relevance, it must be made clear that the study does not suggest anything about dementia or the likelihood of that happening. There were no links drawn with dementia. Just because someone retires does not mean they are more likely to develop dementia.

The study involved over 3000 adults, and they were asked to recall from a list of twenty words after two minutes, and the percentages were drawn from there. The small sample size, not of the adults, but of the word list, meant the percentage decline of post-retirement adults may have been exaggerated.

Look at this mathematically. From a list of twenty words, a non-retiree may recall ten. A retiree may recall six. That difference of four words is a percentage decline of 40%.

Ask yourself – if you were given a list of twenty words, how many would you remember?

It is not unsurprising if retirees exhibit lower abilities at verbal memory recall because the need for these is not really exercised post-retirement. What you don’t use, you lose. We should not be worried about the decline, because it is not a permanent mental state, but it is reversible; in any case the figure is bloated by the nature of the test. If a non-retiree remembers ten words, and a retiree makes one-mistake and remembers it, that would be promoted as a 10% reduction in mental ability already.

Furthermore, decline is not necessarily due to the lack of work. There are many contributing factors as well, such as diet, alcohol and lifestyle. Retirement is not necessarily the impetus behind mental decline. Other factors may confound the analyses.

The research did not involve people who had retired early. For example, hedge fund managers might have retired in their forties. But you would struggle to think that someone in their forties would lose 38% of verbal memory recall.

Would a loss of 38% of verbal memory have an impact on quality of life? It is hard to tell if there is the evidence to support this. But the results point to a simple fact. If you want to get better at verbal memory, then practice your verbal memory skills. If you want to get better at anything, then practice doing it.

Was this piece of news yet another attempt by mainstream media to clog paper space with information – arguably useless? You decide.