Healthsifter by mary desmond pinkowish, since 2003

Organic Food?

This was probably the most controversial science story last week, and with good reason considering the amount of money--and hope--people invest in organic food. So far, data showing an actualy health benefit. Most surprising, many organic foods are not completely free of pesticides. Click here to read a good summary at e! Science News.

Organic produce still tastes better to me. What do you think?

Fat-Free Salad Dressings: Skip Them

I've heard this before: Using a fat-free salad dressing can be self-defeating, because fats help you take advantage of the nutrients in your salad vegetables. Click here to read about this recent study. Hint: Use dressings with monounsaturated fats to get most benefit from your salad with the least fat consumption.

Are You Going to Continue Taking Vitamins?

Never a huge believer in vitamins, I'll admit to a calcium/D supplement, a tablet containing smorgasbord of B, and an occasional multivitamin. But now I'm wondering about that even those few. As Shirley Wang wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week, the evidence of a benefit just ain't there in huge trials. And there's some hint of risks associated with some vitamins taken in tablet form. If you take vitamins, I urge you to read her update on the latest findings--you may be suprised at what you read.

• Earlier this month, it was reported that vitamin E might actually increase the risk of prostate cancer slighly. Or maybe if it's taken with selenium, it's ok. This is not a ringing endorsement.
• Elderly people who take multivitamins may have a slightly higher risk of death than similar folks who don't. Or mayble this uptick was caused by women who take iron even though they don't usually need it after menopause. Again, who knows?
• Vitamin studies are notoriously hard to conduct and interpret. What does it mean if you start taking a vitamin at age 40? Can you override any nutritional problems caused by years of eating too few fruits and vegetables?
• What we do know: Women of childbearng age should take folate. They should also consider taking iron.
• What we do know, part 2: Eat lots of plants. Keep your weight down. Exercise.

Here's food for thought from Ms Wang's article:

Roberta Anding, a nutritionist at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, says some people need multivitamins and other supplements, but she is cautious about the risk from high doses of micronutrients. "It's no longer nutrition when the doses become high, it's pharmacology," she says.

Read this article--even if you have to pay for access.

No Raw Milk

Raw milk is unpasteurized. Pasteurization is a simple process: heating milk for 20 seconds at just over 160 degrees F does the trick. This is enough to kill potentially deadly bacteria including some you've heard of: Campylobacter, Salmonella, and E coli. The development of pasteurization is one of the big success stories in food safety of the past couple hundred years. Even if the farmer or store selling raw milk assures you that the milk has been tested and is free of bacteria, stay clear. The tests are not reliable, according to the CDC. Click here for access to more sources of information about raw milk. Hear first-hand stories from people who got sick from raw milk here. Listen to an NPR story on this topic by clicking here, and read here why some New Yorkers are unpersuaded by the safety arguments.

Fast-food Breakfast Horror Show

Thanks to WebMD for providing this slide show featuring the worst and only-somewhat-better breakfasts at your favorite fast-food restaurants. Seriously, there's some helpful information here along with some completely fascinating menu choices. Who knew? Don't miss the stupendously bad Carl's Junior Breakfast Burger, a bun containing all of the following: a burger, an egg, bacon, cheese, and hashbrown nuggets. I'm sure it's delicious, but with 47 grams of fat? It just doesn't seem right to hit your system with that first thing in the morning. Better choices include the whole wheat bagel at Dunkin' Donuts and the spinach, roasted tomato, feta, and egg wrap at Starbucks.

If you really want to avoid the mid-morning shakes, sleepiness, and hunger pangs, try bowl of a low-sugar, whole-grain cereal with some raisins or something.
Not possible to improve on this...

Hold the Milk For Your Constipated Baby or Child

If your baby (older than 6 months) or child is constipated, it's probably worth repeating this simple experiment in your own home. Journal Watch reports on a small study conducted in Spain in which kids aged 6 months to 14 years who had chronic constipation were switched to a diet free of cow's milk for three weeks to see if the constipation resolved and then switched back to milk to see if the constipation worsened again. (Good experiment). The investigators found that 39% of the kids had less constipation when they did not drink milk; the constipation returned in these kids when cow's milk was restored to the diet as part of the experiment. Ask your pediatrician about this. Kids older than 2 years were given rice milk during the substitution phase of the experiment. Your doctor can tell you what to give a younger child or baby. The original study appeared in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.

Eating Less Meat And More Vegetables

I eat meat, but I really love good recipes for meatless or low-meat dishes. Fine Cooking has done a great job of presenting some suggestions for meatless meals and meals that use meat as the condiment rather than the feature. 

Eat Fish to Protect Your Hearing?

Remember the babel fish from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? It lives. Reporting in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers with the Blue Mountains Hearing Study say that compared with people who ate less than one serving of fish a week, those who ate two or more servings were 42% less likely to develop presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss. The investigators used each person's fish consumption to estimate intakes of omega-3 (n3) polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs, and they also found that the higher the estimated intake of n3 PUFAs, the lower the risk of presbycusis.

This was a decent-sized study group of almost 3,000 people aged 50 years and older that the investigators have apparently been following since 1997. The Blue Mountains Hearing Study is out of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. 

See how the Environmental Defense Fund rates the best/worst eating fish. Read what the Monterey Bay Aquarium says about eating fish in a sustainable way. Find out why cardiologists LOVE fish. Read some yummy fish recipes.  And find out how 70,000 fishermen and women answer the question, "What's the best fish to eat?"

 

You Should Eat More Fish

This is what the American Heart Association is saying about fish-eating:

Fish is a good source of protein and, unlike fatty meat products, it’s not high in saturated fat. Fish is also a good source of omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids benefit the heart of healthy people, and those at high risk of — or who have — cardiovascular disease. Research has shown that omega-3 fatty acids decrease risk of arrhythmias (abnormal heartbeats), which can lead to sudden death.  Omega-3 fatty acids also decrease triglyceride levels, slow growth rate of atherosclerotic plaque, and lower blood pressure (slightly).

You can buy fish, of course, but it's more fun to catch them. So....visit GoFishn.com and find out how to do that! GoFishn.com, where anglers connect to swap fishing stories and pictures, share angling tips, and find fishing guides and services. Because anybody can buy fish at the grocery store...You can also find them on Facebook, where they have, like, 30,000 fans. So, are you really going to open that can of tuna--or go catch one of those bad boys yourself?

Gluten Goblins?

Daniel Engber delves into the current anti-gluten movement today at Slate. He makes an important distinction between people with celiac disease and people who have made a decision to go gluten-free because they've made some assumptions about the health benefits. It's an interesting take on gluten issues and dietary fads (my wording--he doesn't call them that) in general.