March 10th, 2011 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in Health Tips, Opinion
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Lately I’ve been worrying about Kevin’s refusal to eat broccoli, and wondering what exactly is so good about those green bunches of roughage. In browsing the Web for more detailed information on the matter, I found a helpful vitamin chart.
The table comes from the HHS–sponsored National Women’s Health Information Center — a good spot to know of if you’re a woman looking online for reliable sources. It’s a bit simple for my taste. In the intro, we’re told there are 13 essential vitamins our bodies need. After some basics on Vitamin A — good for the eyes and skin, as you probably knew already — the chart picks up with a quick review of the essential B vitamins 1, 2 ,3 ,5 ,6 , 9 and 12 (my favorite), followed by a rundown on Vitamins C, D, E, H (that would be biotin) and K:
| Vitamins, Some of their Actions, and Good Food Sources |
| Vitamin |
Actions |
Sources |
| A |
- Needed for vision
- Helps your body fight infections
- Helps keep your skin healthy
|
Kale, broccoli, spinach, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, liver, eggs, whole milk, cream, and cheese. |
| B1 |
- Helps your body use carbohydrates for energy
- Good for your nervous system
|
Yeasts, ham and other types of pork, liver, peanuts, whole-grain and fortified cereals and breads, and milk. |
| B2 |
- Helps your body use proteins, carbohydrates, and fats
- Helps keep your skin healthy
|
Liver, eggs, cheese, milk, leafy green vegetables, peas, navy beans, lima beans, and whole-grain breads. |
| B3 |
- Helps your body use proteins, carbohydrates, and fats
- Good for your nervous system and skin
|
Liver, yeast, bran, peanuts, lean red meats, fish, and poultry. |
| B5 |
- Helps your body use carbohydrates and fats
- Helps your body make red blood cells
|
Beef, chicken, lobster, milk, eggs, peanuts, peas, beans, lentils, broccoli, yeast, and whole grains. |
| B6 |
- Helps your body use proteins and fats
- Good for your nervous system
- Helps your blood carry oxygen
|
Liver, whole grains, egg yolk, peanuts, bananas, carrots, and yeast. |
| B9 (folic acid or folate) |
- Helps your body make and maintain new cells
- Prevents some birth defects
|
Green leafy vegetables, liver, yeast, beans, peas, oranges, and fortified cereals and grain products. |
| B12 |
- Helps your body make red blood cells
- Good for your nervous system
|
Milk, eggs, liver, poultry, clams, sardines, flounder, herring, eggs, blue cheese, cereals, nutritional yeast, and foods fortified with vitamin B12, including cereals, soy-based beverages, and veggie burgers. |
| C |
- Needed for healthy bones, blood vessels, and skin
|
Broccoli, green and red peppers, spinach, brussels sprouts, oranges, grapefruits, tomatoes, potatoes, papayas, strawberries, and cabbage. |
| D |
|
Fish liver oil, milk and cereals fortified with vitamin D. Your body may make enough vitamin D if you are exposed to sunlight for about 5 to 30 minutes at least twice a week. |
| E |
- Helps prevent cell damage
- Helps blood flow
- Helps repair body tissues
|
Wheat germ oil, fortified cereals, egg yolk, beef liver, fish, milk, vegetable oils, nuts, fruits, peas, beans, broccoli, and spinach. |
| H (biotin) |
- Helps your body use carbohydrates and fats
- Needed for growth of many cells
|
Liver, egg yolk, soy flour, cereals, yeast, peas, beans, nuts, tomatoes, nuts, green leafy vegetables, and milk. |
| K |
- Helps in blood clotting
- Helps form bones
|
Alfalfa, spinach, cabbage, cheese, spinach, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, tomatoes, plant oils. Your body usually makes all the vitamin K you need. |
(From womenshealth.gov; table accessed 2/19/2011.)
Overall I’d say the chart is useful — a good place to start if you want to know, say, what’s a good, non-citrus source of Vitamin C. It could be improved by provision of more details, like the precise amount of Vitamin B2 per cupful of Swiss chard, and how preparing foods in distinct ways — like roasting, sautéing, boiling, or serving them raw — affects the nutritional value.
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
March 4th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
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There are few medical conditions that people fear more than a stroke. We know that blood pressure control and lowering cholesterol levels reduces stroke risk. Now, thanks to a huge analysis from Italy published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, we know that higher dietary consumption of potassium is associated with lower rates of stroke and could also reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and total cardiovascular disease, too. What is even more remarkable is that the results apply to all parts of society and not just to specific “at-risk” subgroups.
Most doctors aren’t even aware of how important it is to eat potassium-rich foods. And what are these foods that have potassium? Surprise: It’s fruits and vegetables like bananas, tomatoes, oranges, apricots, most legumes, spinach, winter squash, avocado, kiwi, and cantaloupe. Actually, almost all fruits and veggies have moderate to high potassium content.
The researchers looked a number of well-done studies that included 247, 510 participants over age 30 and found that those patients with the higher potassium intake reduced their stroke risk by 21 percent. The Italian doctors say the protective effect of potassium against stroke is in part due to its blood pressure lowering effects and also due to other properties of the potassium mineral, such as the inhibition of free radical formation.
I’ve written before about the DASH diet, which also found that reduction of sodium and addition of fruits and vegetables to the diet is an effective way to control blood pressure. The DASH diet is high in potassium.
Think about it: Did you have five servings of fruits and vegetables today? Numerous studies have shown their life-prolonging benefits. This new study just adds to what we already know. I challenge all readers to keep a diet count and make sure you are eating five fruit and vegetable servings a day — every day — to help reduce your risk of stroke, cancer, and heart attack.
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
February 24th, 2011 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
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I was surprised to get this e-mail from a reader:
Surely, Dr. Hall, the public mania for nutritional supplements is baseless. All the alleged nutrients in supplements are contained in the food we eat. And what governmental agency has oversight responsibility regarding the production of these so-call nutritional supplements? Even if one believes that such pills have value, how can the consumer be assured that the product actually contains what the label signifies? I have yet to find a comment on this subject on your otherwise informative website.
My co-bloggers and I have addressed these issues repeatedly.Peter Lipson covered DSHEA (The Diet Supplement Health and Education Act) nicely. It’s all been said before, but perhaps it needs to be said again — and maybe by writing this post I can make it easier for new readers to find the information.
Food, Medicine, or Something In Between?
The FDA regulates foods and has been instrumental in improving the safety of our food supply. It regulates prescription and over-the-counter medications, requiring evidence of effectiveness and safety before marketing. Surveys have shown that most people falsely assume these protections extend to everything on the shelves including diet supplements, but they don’t.
Under the 1994 Diet Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), a variety of products such as vitamins, minerals, herbs and botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, organ tissues, and hormones can evade the usual controls if they are sold as diet supplements. Under the DSHEA, the manufacturer doesn’t have to prove to the FDA that a product is safe and effective; it is up to the FDA to prove that it isn’t safe, and until recently there was no systematic method of reporting adverse effects (required reporting is still limited to serious effects like death).
So far the FDA has only managed to ban one substance, ephedra, and it took the death of a prominent sports figure and considerable skirmishing with the courts to accomplish that. Independent lab tests of diet supplements have found a high rate of contamination (with things like heavy metals and prescription drugs) and dosages wildly varying from the label. A striking example was Gary Null’s recent poisoning with vitamin D from one of his own products which contained 1,000 times the intended amount.
The FDA has issued rules on good manufacturing practices, but standardization is not required and it remains to be seen whether the new rules will effectively improve product quality. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
February 21st, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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Virtually all bottled beverages you can buy have handy-dandy nutrition labels from which you can access information about calories, carbs, and so forth. All beverages except the ones containing alcohol, that is. Why is that?
Maybe it’s because alcoholic beverages contain little to no protein, sodium, cholesterol, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium and iron (remember that alcohol is metabolized as a fat, not a carbohydrate) — so why bother? Then again, alcohol does contain calories — a lot of them. Would people drink less if they knew how many calories they were consuming? Would they drink less if they knew how many “servings” of alcohol were contained in the bottle they just purchased?
Maybe it’s because of the cost of performing nutritional analyses on each vintage of wine, each and every year, would turn profitable vineyards into money losers? Then again, plenty of niche beverage producers who run reasonably narrow margin businesses have never complained about the requirement to provide nutritional information.
The Tax and Trade Bureau is the federal agency that decides what information must appear on the labels of alcoholic beverages. Currently, it does not require manufacturers of wine, beer and the hard stuff to list ingredients. It does require them to list chemicals that folks might have an adverse reaction to things like sulfites, aspartame, and dyes.
The Tax and Trade Bureau also mandates that wines containing 14 percent or more alcohol by volume must state this fact on a label. Wines containing less than 14 percent can either specify the alcohol content or affix the words “light wine” or “table wine” to their labels. In addition, “light” beer bottlers must state calorie and carbohydrate content, and distilled liquor bottlers must specify the alcohol content by volume. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
February 20th, 2011 by John Mandrola, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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It tastes sweet. It’s pleasurably fizzy. And free of calories. What’s more, the FDA says NutraSweet (aspartame) is safe. So what’s not to like about diet soft drinks?
A bunch. The ongoing debate about the healthiness of diet soft drinks reminds me of the old adage, “If something sounds to be true, it probably is.”
Artificially-sweetened “diet” drinks get touted as healthy alternatives to sugary drinks because they contain no calories or carbohydrates. On paper it seems plausible to think they are inert, no more dangerous than water. The Coca-Cola Company sublimely strengthens this assertion by putting a big red heart on Diet Coke cans.
But diet-cola news (Los Angeles Times) presented at the International Stroke Conference 2011 suggests otherwise. This widely-publicized observational study of 2,500 older patients (average age=69) from New York showed that drinking diet soda on a daily basis increased the risk of having a heart attack or stroke by 61 percent. The abstract — not a peer-reviewed study — stated that this association persisted after controlling for other pertinent variables.
Sure, this is only a look back at 559 patients who had a vascular event. The study asserts only an association, not that diet colas cause heart attacks and strokes. That’s a big difference.
That said, however, I don’t view these results as trivial either. This trial builds on the results of prior studies of diet drinks which strongly suggest that despite their lack of calories, diet drinks don’t prevent obesity. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
