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Healthy Living Newsletter
Welcome to the latest edition of our newsletter. Hopefully I can inform, entertain and support you in healthy living. Take a look at the articles and please contact me if you want more information. I’ve done my best to present what I feel are interesting topics over the past month, but I welcome your thoughts as well. You may also forward this Newsletter to a friend .
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Six Rules For Eating Wisely
Once upon a time Americans had a culture of food to guide us through the increasingly treacherous landscape of food choices: fat vs. carbs, organic vs. conventional, vegetarian vs. carnivorous. Culture in this case is just a fancy way of saying “your mom.” She taught us what to eat, when to eat it, how much of it to eat, even the order in which to eat it. But Mom’s influence over the dinner menu has proved no match for the $36 billion in food-marketing dollars ($10 billion directed to kids alone) designed to get us to eat more, eat all manner of dubious neofoods, and create entire new eating occasions, such as in the car. Some food culture. Read more…
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Home Food Handling Safety
Foodborne diseases remain an important cause of illness and disability in the United States. An important contributor is improper food handling and preparation practices in kitchens at restaurants and in private homes.
The Home Kitchen Self-Inspection Program from the Los Angeles Department of Health includes a Food Safety Quiz. The content of the questions are guided by food safety education principles from the U.S. Department of Agriculture: clean, separate, cook, and chill. The quiz emphasizes such food handling practices as the need to clean and sanitize cutting boards after handling poultry, the safe handling of raw eggs, and appropriate methods for the refrigeration of cooked and uncooked foods. The quiz also provides valuable instruction about better ways to maintain home food safety.
Here are some quiz results so far. When queried regarding food handling and preparation practices, approximately 27% reported not storing partially cooked foods that would not be used immediately in the refrigerator before final cooking, 28% said they did not remove all jewelry from hands and/or did not keep fingernails trimmed when cooking, and 26% reported that their kitchen shelves and cabinets were not clean and free from dust. Approximately 36% of respondents said that they did not have a properly working thermometer inside the refrigerator. Approximately 9% reported that they had flies inside the home; 6% reported cockroaches; and 5% reported rodents inside their homes.
If home kitchens were graded similarly to restaurants and were required to post letter grades in the kitchen based on results from the quiz, 34% of respondents would have received an A rating, 27% a B, 25% a C; 14% would have received a numeric score because they scored lower than 70%.
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September 17, 2010
“Too many people resign themselves to living with chronic pain or relying on a steady diet of medication to get through the day. I believe there is a better way.
We offer a knowledgeable diagnosis and evaluation with actual hands-on care, along with lifestyle counseling, focused on your well being.”
Dr. Brian Baker
REEF CHIROPRACTIC CARE
133 Reef Road Fairfield, CT
203.259.4939
www.reefchirocare.com
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Why You Need Chiropractic, Not Drugs, For Aches and Pains
Short-term use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) was associated with an increased risk of stroke in a Danish population study that included only healthy individuals. Results showed that NSAID use was associated with an increased risk of stroke. This increased risk ranged from about 30% with ibuprofen (ie: Advil, Motrin) and naproxen (ie: Alleve) to 86% with diclofenac (ie: Voltaren, Arthrotec).
“First we found an increased risk of MI (heart attack) with NSAIDs. Now we are finding the same thing for stroke. This is very serious, as these drugs are very widely used, with many available over the counter,” said the lead researcher Dr. Gislason. “We need to get the message out to healthcare authorities that these drugs need to be regulated more carefully.” He did not find the results that surprising in view of the accumulating evidence of increased MI risk with these drugs, adding that the mechanism was probably the same.
Gislason noted that there was also a dose-relationship found, with the increased risk of stroke with doses of ibuprofen over 200 mg and with diclofenac doses over 100 mg. He pointed out that the results were particularly striking, given that this study was conducted in healthy individuals.
For the current study, Gislason and colleagues examined the risk of stroke and NSAID use in healthy individuals living in Denmark. His team started with the whole population of Denmark aged over 10 years. To
select just the healthy individuals, they excluded anyone admitted to the hospital within the past five years or those prescribed chronic medications for more than two years. This left a population of around half a million, who were included in the study. By linking to prescribing registries, the researchers found that 45% of these healthy
individuals had received at least one prescription for an NSAID between 1997 and 2005. They then used stroke data from further hospitalization and death registries and estimated the risk of fatal and nonfatal stroke associated with the use of NSAIDs.
Gislason feels that there is reluctance among the medical profession to limit the prescribing of these drugs. “The problem is that we don’t have randomized trials, and it is very hard to change the habits of doctors. They have been using these drugs for decades without thinking about cardiovascular side effects.”
He also stressed that the public needs to be protected by not allowing NSAIDs to be bought without a prescription. He has had some success in this regard in Denmark at least, where diclofenac became available over the counter recently, but after some of the MI data came out, Gislason’s group campaigned the health authorities, and it has now become a prescription-only drug again. But he noted that many more NSAIDs are available over the counter in the US.
He believes the harmful effects of these agents are relevant to huge numbers of people. “If half the population takes these drugs, even on an occasional basis, then this could be responsible for a 50% to 100% increase in stroke risk. It is an enormous effect.”
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Vitamin E and Dementia. Vitamin D and Parkinson’s
A high intake of foods rich in vitamin E may lower the chance of dementia; high blood levels of vitamin D are associated with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease and cognitive decline. These are the new, preliminary findings from three studies published recently in Archives of Neurology and Archives of Internal Medicine.
The first study, which concentrated on blood levels of vitamin D, included 638 Italians over the age of 65 living in Tuscany. Their cognitive function was assessed at the start of the project and twice thereafter over the next six years. Here’s the bottom line: Those whose blood tests showed a severe deficiency of vitamin D were the most likely to show declines in thinking, learning, and memory.This is the first study to look at the association between dementia and vitamin D, which has long been known to be important to bone health. (Earlier research showed the lower the blood levels of vitamin D, the higher the incidence of a wide range of disorders including cancer, vascular disease, infectious conditions, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The second study found a relationship between higher vitamin D levels and a reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. More than 3,000 Finnish men and women, age 50 to 79, participated in this study, which was conducted in a region of Finland with limited sunlight exposure. After 29 years of follow-up, 50 people developed Parkinson’s disease. “Our results are in line with the hypothesis that low vitamin D status predicts the development of Parkinson’s disease.” Put another way: The study showed the higher the blood levels of vitamin D, the less likely the participants would have symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
The third study found that high consumption of foods rich in antioxidants is associated with lower risk of dementia. The authors of this study explain why they chose not to study antioxidant supplements: “Although clinical trials have shown no benefit of antioxidant supplements for Alzheimer’s disease, the wider variety of antioxidants in food sources is not well studied relative to dementia risk; a few studies, with varying lengths of follow-up, have yielded inconsistent results.” Read the article.
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