Obese people can be healthy: study (AFP)

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WASHINGTON (AFP) - Some obese people are in good health and are not predisposed to heart ailments, according to a surprise study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

And yet another study showed that being slim doesn't automatically protect you from heart-related illnesses such as high blood impression and cholestrol, and diabetes.

In the first study, conducted by Norbert Stefan and a team at the University of Tubingen in Germany, the researchers studied the fat around the internal organs and under the skin of 314 individuals with an average age of 45.

The obese individuals in the study were divided into two groups: those who were resistant to insulin and those who were not. Insulin resistance is a pre-anti-diabetic condition, meaning some symptoms of diabetes are existing and progression to full-blown diabetes is likely.

Those who were obese and resistant to insulin had more pain relief/muscle relaxant fat, fat in their livers and thicker carotid-artery walls — an in good time sign of artery narrowing, which is a heart-disease risk commission merchant — than obese individuals without insulin resistance, the study found.

In addition, obese individuals who were not insulin-resistant had no differences in artery-wall thickness from the normal-weight group.

"We provide manifest that a metabolically benign obesity can be identified and that it may protect from insulin resistance and atherosclerosis," the researchers wrote.

The second study carried out by Rachel Wildman at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York examined body weight loss and cardio-metabolic abnormalities — including high blood compressing, elevated triglycerides and dejected levels of so-called good cholesterol — in 5,440 individuals between 1999 and 2004.

The study found that some fat people are metabolically healthy.

"Obese individuals with no metabolic abnormalities were more likely to be younger, black, more physically active and have smaller waists than those with metabolic risk factors," the authors wrote.

Those of normal weight with health risks were older, less active and had a larger middle part than the average population.

Among the US population aged 20 and older, more 23 percent (16 the public adults) of normal weight have metabolic abnormalities, while 51 percent (36 million) of overweight adults and 32 percent (19.5 million) of obese adults "were metabolically healthy," the authors wrote.

Weight Loss Tea

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Nine Healthy Snacks For Kids (And You!) While Traveling

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by Ali Hale It can be difficult to eat healthily whilst traveling, especially when you have kids who need orderly snacks. Often, motorway service stations consist of fast food outlets, vending machines full of chocolate, and shops selling supersized bags of chips - not the healthiest be entertained in spite of your family. A bit of pre-planning goes a long way: here’s nine snacks to pack in your bag before setting off.

Water

Top of the list is water: make assured you have enough with you. Carry a spare bottle in the car in case you get stuck in traffic or have to take a long detour. Buy bottled water at the airport (once past security) to take onto the plane - and whether fizzy drinks are available, limit the number your kids are allowed.

Fresh fruit

Small apples and easy-to-peel satsumas are ideal towards little hands, as are bananas. A handful of grapes in like manner works well - company them in a small Tupperware container so they don’t secure squashed.

Dried fruit

suppose that fresh crop is difficult to carry due to space restrictions or vacationing in a hot environment, take trivial packets of dried fruit. Mini boxes of raisins are always popular with kids, end try other fruits too - dried apricots, dates, figs, mango and pineapple are great ones.

Nuts

The fat found in nuts is the good, mono-unsaturated sort. Nuts are high-calorie, though, so dish them out in moderation, rather than giving the kids a huge packet to dig into. Peanuts are a crowd-pleaser, but small bags of mixed nuts be possible to provide more multiplicity. Pistachio nuts are merriment, if you have somewhere to dispose of the shells!

Granola bars

Easy to pop into a rucksack or pocket, granola bars are perfect for a quick “fill the gap” snack if you have to wait a long age between meals. They’re also easy to eat whilst walking, if you’re having an active holiday.

Trail mix

Another great one by reason of walking and camping holidays, trail mix provides lots of energy in compact form. Why not let the kids help you make your own? You can throw a whole range of things in there, though go easy on the chocolate chips and M&Ms in favor of some breakfast cereal - and of course, dried fruit and nuts.

Popcorn

Small bags of popcorn are not straitened for little hands and mouths, and make a much better snack than crisps or chocolate. chivalrous for the back of the car (though you may need to vacuum dropped bits of popcorn off the upholstery afterwards…) or long train journeys.

Rice cakes

Try mini rice-cakes for a healthy, filling and kid-friendly snack. There’s a great range of flavored ones from Snack-a-Jack, which you can persuade your kids to eat instead of crisps. Great car food, but not ideal if space is limited or if they’re likely to get crushed by other baggage.

Boiled sweets

Okay, this last one is hard to claim as the healthiest snack ever - but boiled sweets are much better than chocolate. Let your kids pick a few favorites (you can in like manner get sugar-free versions if you’re worried about their teeth). They’re especially useful on planes, as sucking a sweet helps your kids’ ears to “pop”.

What snacks do you stash in your wallet when traveling? Do you have an easy-eating favorite for walking, plane journeys or the car?

Pregorexia: Pregnant AND Skinny

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by J. Foster

Yet another buzzword (file alongside Drunkorexia) has found its way into the papers.

women’s hale condition by pregorexia, as it has been dubbed, speak proudly of not looking pregnant when viewed from behind - while wearing ‘normal’ jeans into the second trimester has become event of a shield of office of honour. (src)

Apparently it’s fueled by celebrities like Nicole Kidman, who appear to stay slim during pregnancy, and fall back to a light shape within weeks of birth.

Pregnancy is the worst time to be embarking on a starvation premium diet patch - leaving both mother and infant. malnourished.

The considerable tabloid press devoted to reputation mothers-to-be has no doubt changed attitudes toward pregnancy and body image. However, we need to overplus this to counter-poise health issues related to obesity and pregnancy.

Daily Calorie Needs During Pregnancy:

  • First Trimester - 85 Extra Calories
  • Second Trimester - 285 Extra Calories
  • Third Trimester - 475 Extra Calories

Source - Prentice AM, Spaaij CJ, Goldberg GR et al. ( 1996) Energy requirements of pregnant and lactating women. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 50 ( Suppl. 1): 82- 110. Photo by mahalie / flickr.

Can You Blame the Laziness Gene?

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by Ali Hale On a sunny day at the beach, buff Joe is constantly on the stir up: rallying friends into a volleyball game, swimming, throwing a Frisbee around. Chubby Jack, meanwhile, spends the day lounging on a beach towel, eating ice-women’s intimacy enhancer cream.

You force think Jack is just plain lazy and Joe is self-disciplined … but new careful search suggests that their different activity levels could be down to genetics.

Time Magazine reported on a study carried out at the University of Carolina on mice specially bred according to their activity levels. The difference betwixt the most and least active mice was clear:

Exercise-prone mice put in a good 5 to 8 miles per day (the equivalent of an average man running 40 to 50 miles a day) vs. 0.3 miles per day for inactive mice.

J. Timothy Lightfoot, the kinesiologist who led the study team, said that:

When we used to talk about activity, it was whether or not people decided to be active. Now it’s clear that there’s an inherent drive as to whether individual is active or not active.

But perform humans also have the “laziness gene”?

So, it seems that mice have a “laziness gene” - but can we use this to suggest that humans do as well? The researchers emphasise that they focused upon the areas which the mouse genome might share in common with humans - and in that place are now plans to follow up the study with one looking at men and women’s health.

I expect you can think of families to which place grandparents, parents and kids are active and fit - and families where all members are very overweight. In the out of the reach of, we’d probably have steer this down to lifestyle factors (if children are brought up on a premium diet patch of junk food , they’ll probably carry on doing so as teens and adults and pass poor eating habits on to their kids) … but in the light of this study, it might be worthiness considering whether there are also genetic factors at work.

Should people with “lazy genes” just give up?

The worst notice that readers could take from this research is to assume that if they come from a family of inactive, overweight men, it’s not worth even trying. Your genes aren’t your destiny - but it’s worth being mindful that more of us have to work a little bit harder to encourage ourselves to stay active. As the Time article says:

Lightfoot hopes to practice his research to help end what one. patients may necessity a bigger boost to get moving — he thinks that perhaps close supervision by trainers or rewards for exercising will encourage genetic lazybones to get to the gym.

Here’s ways you could help yourself to beat the “lazy gene”:

Do you suspect that your struggles with your weight loss are due to hereditary factors? Or does all this talk of a “laziness gene” sound preference an excuse for being, well, lazy?

Don’t Like Your Subway? Call 911

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by Gerald “Gerry” Pugliese

There are plenty of reasons to call the police: home invasion, armed robbery, kidnapping, heck, even locking your keys in the car is a rich excuse to call the cops, except calling them because a fast-food restaurant messed up your order is NOT one of them!

And nevertheless, it distilling vessel happens. Reginald Peterson, a 42-year old construction handicraftsman and antecedent felon, dialed 911 TWICE because a neighborhood Subway forgot to add sauce to his spicy Italian sandwich.

“We put everything that he asked for on it, and he comes back hollering at everyone,” one Subway employee told The Florida Times-Union, “He was mad because we didn’t entice any sauces on it.”

When police arrived Peterson would not go quietly and he ended up getting arrested on the charge of material false 911 calls. As for the sandwiches, Peterson told the police to throw them away.

Clearly this guy is a full blown whacko, but calling 911 over a food mishap is all too common. Take this lady who called the cops because her hamburger wasn’t made correctly. You can be stirred the dispatcher’s pang relief/muscle relaxant:

I think years of consuming fast-food willy-nilly is polluting America’s gene pool. I weep for our realm.

Save the Economy: Start Dieting

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by Mike Howard

Please put on’t say go vegetarian, please don’t say go vegetarian, please don’t….ah crap!!!! (More on this later).

According to ecologists, an energy crisis could be averted if Americans cut their calories.

David Pimentel of Cornell University and colleagues estimate that energy demands could easily be halved, which could stave off the prospect of further rises in the costs of combustible matter. Here are some of their conclusions based on their research;

  • The average American consumes relative to 3747 kcal per day compared to the 2000 to 2500 kcal per day recommended by the US victuals and Drug Administration.
  • The 3747 kcal per day figure does not include any junk food consumed - which Pimentel estimates is near to an adscititious 1/3.
  • Producing those daily calories uses the equivalent to 2000 litres of oil per person each year. That accounts for about 19% of US total energy use.
  • Using data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Pimentel estimates that half of the energy used to make food in the US is spent making animal products - meat, dairy and eggs.
  • If Americans maintained their 3747 kcals per day, but switched to a vegetarian diet, the fossil fuel energy required to generate that recompense diet patch would be cut by one third part.

Boooooooooo!!!

  • If people cut out 80% of the junk food they consume, this would reduce caloric consumption by 30%. This could have a substantial impact put on energy consumption as junk food is energetically expensive to produce.
  • Better farming practices such as; using more efficient light bulbs, less fertilizer and pesticides and greater amount of of the hand labor would also have a positive impact.
  • Producing food locally would cut the energy expended transporting it by half.

What we can (are willing to) finish

I think some of these proposals are sensible and some of them are…emulous (euphemisms - love ‘em!). I think reducing our carbon footprint is at the forefront of our minds and there are some smaller-scale, realistic steps we can take to help the administration/environment and our health.

I love the idea of trying to eat locally as much as possible. Also, I think many of us could benefit from cutting back on the junk - with the energy cost adding extra encouragement. (Cheetos: bad for your arteries AND your planet).

As for eschewing meat… I think I’ll uncorrupt change to fluorescent light bulbs. But seriously, the unrelenting omnivore be able to be more environmentally friendly by dint of. eating locally raised subsistence, meat with less packaging or simply by cutting back a little.

I think having the awareness that our dietary choices affect our economy and our planet in addition to our own personal health is crucial. If everybody made atomic changes, we can collectively make a big disagreement.

Disclaimer: I am not against Vegetarianism. My quips were meant to be light-hearted and more of a sardonic commentary on my own rebuff to change. Also, the article focused on the U.S. but to be clear, this is a puzzle in most of the Westernized world.

Obese Men Face Twin Threat From Prostate Cancer (HealthDay)

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FRIDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) — The standard screening test for prostate cancer may not be accurate for gross men, leaving them more liable to injury to the disease, and surgery is less likely to be effective for them, a new pair of studies found.

"Obese men are more likely to be diagnosed with an aggressive conformation of the disease," said Dr. Stephen Freedland, an associate professor of urology and pathology at the Duke University Prostate Center, and an author of one of the studies.

The reason: The blood test that looks for elevated levels of the protein prostate-specific antigen (PSA), indicating a heightened cancer expose to danger, doesn't seem as reliable for obese men, Freedland said.

"Our self-importance is that these men have more blood turn, so PSA gets diluted, he said. "By the time obese men get to elevated levels, the cancer is more advanced."

The apply the mind to, published online Friday in the journal BJU International included nearly 3,400 men who had PSA tests. The researchers found that the risk of an aggressive cancer was doubled in obese men diagnosed because of high PSA levels. No such association was found for obese men diagnosed by a digital rectal examination, in which the physician feels for an abnormally large prostate gland.

Prostate cancer is suspected when the PSA reading is 4 or higher. The current good opinion is for men aged 50 and older to be offered an annual PSA test, with explanations of its possible risks and benefits. A federal prophylactic medicine committee this week said that PSA screening should not be done for men aged 75 and older because the risks outweigh the benefits.

"I'm not sure that we should check obese men more often," Freedland said. "But we should have a higher [PSA] index of suspicion of which is not normal — 3.4 rather than 4; for really obese men, 3.2."

The Duke study measured obesity using body-mass index, which is a ratio of weight to altitude.. Obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 or more.

A second common fame from Duke in the same issue of the journal found that excess weight loss influenced the outcome of surgery for prostate cancer. Men with a BMI of 35 or higher were nearly 60 percent more likely to have a resort of the cancer than thinner men, the study of 1,434 men found.

One intuitional faculty is "the difficulty of operating on obese men in general," said study author Dr. Jayakrishnan Jayachandran, a urology oncology fellow at the Duke Prostate Cancer Center. "The prostate is a attentive thing to operate on, and when there is a big wad of fat in your way, if the abdominal wall is thick, it becomes a technical issue."

The result is that not all the cancer may be removed, which means a recurrence after time, Jayachandran said. "The only thing we be possible to think of is that when you operate on obese people, you have to be more troubled," he said.

The studies results apply to men who force not regard themselves at the same time that obese, Freedland said. "We can't forget that when we use the term, we are not just talking encircling very large men," he said. "A man who is 5 foot 9 and weighs 203 pounds would be considered obese."

Jayachandran added, "We are not screening these obese men effectively and are not doing as good a job surgically as could be done."

More information

To learn more about prostate cancer, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Prostate cancer prognosis worse in obese men (Reuters)

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Prostate cancer diagnosis tends to be delayed and surgical treatment more difficult in obese men than in lean men, according to two studies published Friday.

The primary reason for the later diagnosis, and consequently poorer prognosis, seems to be that the PSA test used to screen according to prostate cancer is "biased" against obese men, according to researchers.

The problem, they explain, may stem from obese men's larger blood volume, which dilutes their PSA levels. High blood levels of PSA — or prostate specific antigen - can signal the presence of a prostate tumor.

"We know that obese men tend to have lower PSA values than their normal-weight counterparts, possibly caused by larger blood volumes which dilute their readings," Dr. Stephen J. Freedland, who led the studies, related in a written statement.

"Now we know some of the real implications of this — that these men are at a disadvantage in terms of prophasis compared to normal-weight men."

Freedland, of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues report their findings online in the journal BJU International.

In one study, the researchers looked at the outcomes of nearly 3,400 prostate cancer patients who had undergone surgical removal of the prostate between 1988 and 2007. Some had had their cancer detected by PSA, while the rest had had it discovered for the period of a digital rectal exam.

Overall, Freedland's team found, obese men were more likely to be seized of more-aggressive tumors and to suffer a cancer resort after surgery.

However, the link between weight loss and disease progression was limited to men treated since 2000, when PSA screening had be changed to the norm.

By contrast, obesity had no effect on the risk of progression according to cancers detected by digital rectal exam. The tools and materials support the conception that PSA testing, in particular, confers a bias in opposition to obese men, according to Freedland.

In the second study, the researchers found that obese prostate cancer patients tend to have a higher standard of "positive surgical margins" after prostate removal — which means the odds are higher that some tumor cells were left behind.

"The aggressiveness of obese men's tumors, coupled with the fact that they may be more difficult to remove, is like a double whammy for being obese," Dr. Jayakrishnan Jayachandran, another researcher on the studies, said in a statement.

The tools and materials of both studies, according to Freedland, build up the case for developing alternative prostate cancer screening methods for obese men — or for lowering the PSA threshold for these patients.

"The least we can do is find a way to level the playing province when it comes to diagnostic tools," Freedland said.

SOURCE: BJU International, online August 8, 2008.

Body Electric: Workouts for Women

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by Mike Howard

The embrace of this book features a fit-looking, 40-something lady who looks preference she takes fitness seriously and wants you to do the same. Start reading the book and you’ll exist amazed to find out she’s actually in her 60’s. Body Electric is a manual on how to beat the effects of father time with exercise. The sexagenarian I’ve alluded to is the long-standing multitude of the fitness show “Body Electric”, Margaret Richard.

Here are my thoughts on her book.

Background

To begin, the book is formatted quite nicely and has a reader-friendliness to it that would appeal to even the chiefly entry-level enthusiast.

She gives some tips to “fan the flames of motivation”, including the suggestion of clear goals and a mission statement. The basic message is that you CAN do it - and it’s not ever in addition late to start.

Richard gives the basics of exercise physiology including strength drill, aerobic training, flexibility and posture.

She lays out some surpassingly good information about the benefits of exercise - particularly as it impacts menopause. Having been through this stage of life herself, Richard offers the facts and backs it up with her own experiences. She tells of her own weight get and redistribution of fat despite her high level of sprightliness and healthy premium diet patch. In this regard, she is advocating making the transition easier and not telling people you can train away all the menopausal effects.

There are excellent explanations on how erection pain relief/muscle relaxant leads to health benefits, specifically the benefits of building bone. There is every in-depth explanation on how to turn away the movables of osteoporosis

The Exercises/Program

Basically, the program calls for high reps to “tone” muscles. Arrrggghhhh! (Sorry, I HATE that word - tone!). She recommends 3.5 minutes per exercise and includes exercises for all the major muscle groups. While it is difficult to prescribe sets and reps for the masses, I think this recommendation has two major flaws:

  1. It is limiting. You are focusing solely on the endurance of the muscles and not deriving the full benefit of weight loss training.
  2. There will have existence major discrepancies in level of difficulty. You can tweak this to an
  3. extent by varying angles/changing weight loss, but the fact remains that some of these exercises force of will be much easier than others to complete.

In terms of the exercises themselves, squats would be an essential one to hold - especially given that you are appealing to an older crowd. Also, there isn’t a single exercise that specifically hits the lats.

The exercises themselves are for the most part sound, but the pictures (as high quality in the same manner with they are) don’t always show good form. It is evident that Margaret is accustomed to doing this for television as she is looking at the camera in many of the shots. Now, it may be obvious to the more seasoned exerciser that you aren’t supposed to tilt your head strong in one direction, but the beginner may not be sure this.

The warm-up exercises appear to be a cabal of held and continuous air stretches. The recent literature tells us that static stretching before working out isn’t of much benefit and may decrease performance.

Overall Impression

I think it’s a great book in terms of the information and how it is presented. I think this book would be being in favor suited to those new to exercise and looking for honest education on the basics.

While the exercise section leaves something to be desired, I think that a newbie would derive some meaningful benefit from doing them - however limiting it may be. I also think an accompanying DVD of the exercises would be vastly beneficial.

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