David Zinczenko: Eat This Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution
You don't know how to shop for food if you haven't read this book. I'm telling you the truth. Get it and read it.
David Zinczenko: Eat This Not That: Thousands of Simple Food Swaps That Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds-or More!
I love this book. If you ever eat out, you'll love it too. Indispensable and surprising. From the editors of Men's Health, so it's rock-solid reliable. (****)
American Academy of Pediatrics: Immunizations & Infectious Diseases: An Informed Parent's Guide
Making the vaccination decision for your kids? This book is authoritative, easy to read, and compassionate.
Marion Nestle: What to Eat
Looking for food facts plus lots of common sense? Here it is between two covers.
Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Good advice here.
Lisa R. Young: The Portion Teller: Smartsize Your Way to Permanent Weight Loss
Carl's Jr's double cheeseburger contains a full pound of meat and 1,400 calories...American crossants are twice as big as those made in France...a single street-vendor pretzel consists of 6 servings...In her new book, Lisa Young, a nutrition consultant and faculty member at New York University, reveals many more disturbing facts about contemporary food portions and more important, explains how to "smartsize" the food you eat. This is a terrific book, whether you're trying to lose weight or want to avoid getting heavy.
Peter D. Kramer: Against Depression
Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one. This is the main point: We should drop our romantic illusions about depression and look at it for what it is: a disease.
You know about the cantoloup-related Listeria outbreak, but melons aren't the only possible sources of this dangerous organism. What's even stranger is that unlike many food-borne pathogens, Listeria can thrive in the fridge. So please cast your eyes over this latest guidance from the FDA on keeping your kitchen, and especially your refrigerator, clear of this bacterial menace.
Lookin' good
I admit to a strong pro-coffee bias, and I think that if coffee had just been invented, it might be a medication, or at least a health food of some sort. Writing in today's Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University report on their 10-year study, in which they followed more than 50,000 women who did not have clinical depression when the study started. They examined their coffee consumption during that time to see if there was any correlation with new-onset depression. This isn't a cause-and-effect demonstration, but it's interesting that there seemed to be a dose-response relationship between the amount of coffee women drank daily and the risk of depression: the more coffee, the lower the risk. The effect was pretty modest, with about a 20% decreased risk in women who drank at least 4 cups a day (yes, that would include me) compared to women who drank no more than 1 cup of caffeinated coffee each week. Decaf was not associated with depression in any way. Click here to read the study summary. This is not the first time that coffee has been associated with a mental health benefit of this type. A recent study suggested that coffee may slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease in women, but not men. A study from Finland, where they drink lots of coffee and have fairly high depression rates suggested the possibility that men who drink the most coffee have the lowest depression risk. Of course, if you let coffee ruin your sleep, you may not get depressed, but you will be exhausted. If it just doesn't agree with you, don't push it. And maybe depressed people just don't want to drink coffee...
Have a cup of coffee?
French researchers writing in the journal Neurology have described a condition they call restless abdomen, which seems to be associated clinically and genetically with the more familiar restless legs syndrome. Who knew? People with restless abdomen, of whom just 3 are reported in this case, experience strange gut symptoms when they try to rest. The feelings pass--or at least get better--when they move around. Strange stuff. Some of these patients also had a condition called period leg movements of sleep (which may be related to restless legs) but their guts were completely normal--at least in the imaging studies that were performed. Pramipexole, a drug sometimes used to treat restless legs, helped these folks, all of whom also carried a gene associated with restless legs. Click here to read the summary of this study.
Have you--or someone you know--ever experienced sensations like these?
Bed bugs are gross--no doubt about it. But unlike other common insects, including mosquitos and flies, they don't usually carry diseases. So this report from the CDC is disturbing because it suggests that people face more potential danger from insecticides used to kill bed bugs than the insects themselves. The culprits: improper use of the chemicals and use by people who haven't been trained/licensed to use them. Here's an excerpt from the CDC report describing some non-chemical solutions:
Nonchemical methods to effectively control bed bugs include heating infested rooms to 118°F (48°C) for 1 hour or cooling rooms to 3°F (-16°C) for 1 hour by professional applicators; encasing mattresses and box springs with bed bug--excluding covers; and vacuuming, steaming, laundering, and disposing of infested items. Any effective control measure for bed bugs requires support from all residents in affected buildings and ongoing monitoring for infestation from other housing units. Often, multiple inspections and treatments are needed to eradicate bed bugs.
Alarmed by some recent studies suggesting that long-term sitting is more dangerous than eating ice cream--leading to illness, death, and the dreaded malady flat-butt--the-man-of-the-house and I decided to try using large exercise balls at our desks for a portion of each day.
Who knows if these things will save our lives or help us fill out our jeans more becomingly, but we highly recommend giving this a try. We are both chained to desks all day, and this summer we heard that a distant colleague developed DVT (blood clot) and had to find another job involving much less seated time.
It's not so hard to stay balanced that you become distracted from what you're trying to write (we're both writers), but you do need to move around every so slightly--and pretty much continuously. I can't recommend this more highly. Give it a try. Want to know more about this? Have a look at this sensationalistic but fairly credible infographic. This is a good article from Time, with some useful tips. FYI: We bought the largest size we could find--85 inches.
It's hard to believe, but 25% of all babies are now delivered before 39 weeks, the length of time that is now recognized by obstetricians as a full-term pregnancy. In 1990, only 10% of babies were delivered this early. Until recently, many pregnant women had been assured by their doctors that having a baby induced or having a C-section a week or two early was totally OK for the baby. So mothers have been requesting convenient deliveries, and doctors have obliged, often because of their own scheduling conficts. But recent evidence suggests that babies who are born even a few days shy of the 39-week mark are at higher risk for seizures, respiratory problems, and bloodstream infections, as Laura Landro explains today in a great article in the Wall Street Journal. Brain development and function and psychological and behavioral problems have also been linked to delivery at weeks 37/38, says Ms. Landro. Insurers, hospitals, professional groups, and the March of Dimes are all working to reverse this trend. Read the article that started people thinking about this, which appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2009. Important stuff.
What is the nocebo effect? No, that's not a typo--NOCEBO, not placebo. Read about it at The Huffington Post and learn what scientist are beginning to understand about pain. Here's something to think about: Pessimism can hurt. In fact, it may hurt more than pain medications help.
And if you're interested, don't miss this week's cover story in Time magazine, Understanding Pain.
According to this report in The Economist, loneliness may harm your health. I bet you can't guess why, though. Here's a hint, it has something to do with the way that lonely people defend against viruses, as opposed to bacteria. Wild stuff. I urge you to read this really short report about the work by Dr. Steven Cole of UCLA.
Wild stuff!
"There is no reason, no medical justification, for any child younger than 18 to play football, period."
Wow. That's what neuropathologist Bennet Omalu, MD, told MedPage Today writer Nancy Walsh. Omalu is an expert in a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which has been linked to repeated brain trauma in football players, boxers, and other athletes. The topic was on the front burner again this week after the suicide of former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson on February 17th. Read the article and listen to a couple of audio reports with experts including Omalu, who are concerned about the effects of brain injuries, especially those starting at a young age.
Purchased from iStockphoto
The back story: The risk of shingles, a painful and often debilitating reactivation of chickenpox, can be lowered by a vaccine with the trade name Zostavax. It's not perfect: the vaccine lowers the risk of shingles by about 50% in older adults and reduces the risk of a nasty complication--postherpetic neuralgia (terrible persistent pain after the skin symptoms go away)--by close to 70%. Result: The CDC recommends that everyone age 60 and older get vaccinated.
Now the story: For ages, doctors have thought that shingles was a one-time deal and that one episode protected you from subsequent episodes unless your immune system was punky. But according to a study in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the risk of shingles appears to be the same whether you've already had it--or not. Investigators looked at data from 1700 people who had a first episode of shingles and followed them for an average of 8 years. They found that 5% had a second episode; if they had been looking at a similar population of folks who had never had shingles, they would have expected about the same percentage to get shingles. The risk of a second episode was higher among women and in people who'd had pain for 30 or more days after the first one. You can read the summary of the original article or read the story at ScienceDaily.
Should people who've had shingles should get the vaccine to protect against another shingles outbreak?To my knowledge, no one has looked at the effectiveness of the vaccine when given to people who've already had shingles, so there's no data on which to base that decision. I hope my mother is reading. Stay tuned.
According to the hygiene hypothesis (and at this time it's still just a hypothesis), when kids grow up sheltered from allergens, microorganisms, and parasites, the immune system doesn't learn its job properly. The result? More allergic and autoimmune disease later in life. Remember, it's just a hypothesis, but a researcher at Oregon State thinks that it may explain why women are more likely than men to have these diseases as adults. Little girls tend to get less dirty, says Dr. Sharyn Clough, and this may lead to more allergic-based diseases as adults. Read more about this--and a common sense solution--at PsychCentral. Click here to read the original story from OSU.
UPDATED February 6: Read the NPR blog story on this topic.
Jack LaLanne, often called a fitness "nut" when his career was at its peak, passed over the weekend at his California home. Way ahead of his time--and of Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and others--LaLanne passed along what had worked for him as he transformed from a sickly, unhappy kid into a fit, slim, and seemingly happy adult. His formula? Daily exercise with weights, cardio work, lots of veggies and fish, and a cheerful attitude. He credited Paul Bragg, father of the Natural Health movement, for putting him on the right path. LaLanne was a contemporary of Bonnie Prudden, who apparently is still alive and who received the Lifetime Achievement Award from President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Obits today in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And check out this vintage video. It was good advice in the 50s, and it's good advice now. And what can I say? Jack died at 96, and Bonnie is still going at 97. (Yes, those are ballet slippers the big-gunned-one is wearing with his famous exercise suit.)
According to Today Celebrities web site, Drew Pinsky, MD, got sick with leptospirosis somewhere in the West Indies and is currently hospitalized. Leptospirosis is caused by exposure to the spirochete bacteria Leptospira, to which humans and animals are susceptible. Leptospirosis is quite common in warm/tropical areas and among people who work outside and with livestock, a fact that's reflected in some of the other names it goes by, like Swineherd's disease, Rice-field fever, Cane-cutter fever, Swamp fever, and Mud fever. (What kind of a vacation was Dr. Drew on?? :-))
Some people are symptomless and never know they are infected with Leptospira, while others get a high fever, aches, fatigue, and severe vomiting and diarrhea. Left untreated, the infection can lead to liver or kidney problems, and even meningitis, according to the CDC. Interestingly, leptospirosis is not transmitted person-to-person. That means the good folks (patients and staff) at the Pasadena Recovery Center, Sober House, and Celebrity Rehab are in the clear. The infection usually responds to common antibiotics.
Get better fast!
Really? Do people really care what their medications (pills, tablets) look like? Do we really prefer pink pills over blue ones? That's what researchers at the University of Bombay, India say, writing in the International Journal of Biotechnology. Reported by ScienceDaily today, this is actually interesting. Take this, for example:
R.K. Srivastava and colleagues report that red and pink tablets are preferred over other colors. Their survey of 600 people showed that for three quarters of people the color and shape of their tablets act as a memory tag for compliance. Strangely, they found that 14 percent of people think of pink tablets as tasting sweeter than red tablets whereas a yellow tablet is perceived as salty irrespective of its actual ingredients. 11% thought of white or blue tablets as tasting bitter and 10% said orange-colored tablets were sour.
I wonder if I could get some with custom decals on them, like little girls get at the nail salon.
