July 1st, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Health Tips, Research
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Without meaning to, you’ve gained a few pounds over the last few years. How did that happen? Certain foods, especially the humble potato, may be partly to blame.
In a fascinating study of 120,000 healthy, non-obese women and men taking part in long-term studies of diet and health, the participants gained an average of 3.3 pounds every four years over a 13-year period. When the researchers tallied up the foods that contributed most to this weight gain, potatoes topped the list—twice:
- potato chips
- potatoes
- sugar-sweetened beverages
- red meat
- processed meats
Other contributors to weight gain included sleeping less than six hours a night or more than eight hours, drinking alcohol, and watching television. The results were just published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The study offered some good news and tips for losing weight, too. Foods and lifestyle choices associated with losing weight included Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
June 15th, 2011 by admin in Health Tips
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My left knee hurts. When I put weight on it with my leg bent, like when I get out of the car, I feel a dull pain in my knee. My doctor and physical therapist have given me a diagnosis of patellofemoral pain syndrome, also known as “runner’s knee” or patellar knee-tracking syndrome. Simply put, my kneecap doesn’t run smoothly up and down its track—a groove called the trochlea.
Anyone can get patellofemoral pain syndrome, but for some reason it is more common in women than men—especially in mid-life women who’ve been running for many years. The problem, say researchers who just published a study in the journal Gait and Posture, is that lots of “mature” women develop alignment problems with their knees. The researchers compared younger female runners to older female runners and found misalignment of the knee to be much more common in the older women. Some knees sagged inward, others bowed outward or were rotated.
When the alignment is off, the kneecap can’t smoothly follow its vertical track as the knee bends and extends. This causes wear and tear on the joint. That leads to overuse injuries like runner’s knee and, down the line, osteoarthritis, which can really put a cramp in a runner’s career.
My physical therapist recommended that I Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
June 10th, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Health Tips, News
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If the recent announcement by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that cell phones may cause brain cancer has you worried, you might want to wait a bit before trashing your mobile phone and going back to a land line.
Last week, the IARC convened experts from around the world to assess what, if any, cancer threat cell phones pose to the 5 billion or so people who use them. After reviewing hundreds of studies, the IARC panel concluded that cell phone use may be connected to two types of brain cancer, glioma and acoustic neuroma.
That sounds mighty scary. But the IARC said the evidence for this conclusion was “limited.” Most studies have shown no connection between cell phone use and brain cancer. In the relatively small number of studies that have observed a connection between the two, the positive result could be due to chance, bias, or confounding.
The decision puts cell phones in IARC’s Group 2B category of agents that definitely or might cause cancer. Group 1 are things like asbestos, cigarette smoke, and ultraviolet radiation. Things in Group 2B are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Other denizens of this group include coffee, pickled vegetables, bracken ferns, and talcum powder.
I think the IARC decision puts cell phones on notice—a formal “we’ve got our eyes on you” warning—more than it fingers phones as a cause of brain cancer. For one thing, the evidence so far is pretty weak. Writing on the Cancer Research UK Web site, blogger Ed Yong offers a peak at the data through 2009, taken from a review by Swedish researchers. A graph from the paper shows that only one of 28 studies shows a statistically significant association between cell phone use and cancer. We’ll know more about the strength or weakness of the evidence when the panel publishes its report online later this week and in the July 1 issue of The Lancet Oncology.
For now, I’m far more concerned about being rammed by someone talking on his or her cell phone while driving than I am about getting brain cancer from a phone. If you think the IARC report warrants action, the FDA offers suggestions for reducing your exposure to radiofrequency energy from a cell phone, like using the phone less, texting instead of talking, and using speaker mode or a headset to place more distance between your head and the cell phone.
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
May 31st, 2011 by ErikDavis in Health Tips, Research
3 Comments »
Here at Skeptic North, we’ve often been a sharp critic of those herbal remedies that are unable to withstand the scrutiny of science. Yet nature does indeed house many pharmacologically active compounds, and it stands to reason that some of them will have medicinal value. So today, we’re going to turn the tables and look at 5 herbal remedies that have held up well in repeated studies and are generally regarded as effective.
1) St. John’s Wort for Depression
If there’s one herbal medicine that consistently gets high marks for effectiveness, it’s St. John’s Wort as a treatment for mild depression. A 2008 Cochrane Review looked at 29 trials totaling over 5000 patients, including 18 comparisons with placebo and 17 comparisons with synthetic standard antidepressants, and found significant effects in both cases. The Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database indicates that St. John’s Wort is likely as effective as both first generation antidepressants (low-dose tricyclics) and the current generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*
May 31st, 2011 by admin in Health Tips, Research
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One of the big health news stories of 2007 was a study showing that your friends influence the size of your waist (and the rest of your body). Like any study, it raised as many questions as it answered, including why this happens. A new study from Arizona State University looked into that question by testing three pathways by which friends might influence one another’s body size:
- Collaboration. Over time, you might start to share the ideas of the people close to you after talking with them about what the proper body size is. Then you might choose your food and exercise habits in order to reach that body size, whether that means eating more food to look like your plus-sized friends, or less food to look like your thin ones.
- Peer pressure. You feel bullied into trying to look like your friends and family members. They make you feel bad about your body, so you go about eating and exercising to look like them.
- Monkey see, monkey do. You change your habits to mirror those of your friends without necessarily thinking or talking about an ideal body weight. Alexandra Brewis Slade, PhD, one of the Arizona State researchers, gave an example of this pathway that most of us can relate to: You’re at a restaurant with friends and the waiter brings over the dessert menu. Everyone else decides not to order anything, so you pass, too, even though you were dying for a piece of chocolate mousse cake.
All three of these pathways are based on the idea that loved ones share social norms, the implicit cultural beliefs that make some things okay, others not. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
