Author: World Vitamins Online

While caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and taking in a grandchild, the last thing on Donna Black’s mind was what she was eating.

“You live in a state of total exhaustion,” said Black, 59, of Belvedere. “There’s not time to plan out a healthy meal. You just take whatever is there in front of you.”

That contributed to a 60-pound gain, but since September she has whittled away more than half of that by eating sensibly, with help from University Hospital Diabetes Services.

“It’s becoming my lifestyle,” she said.

Unfortunately, not enough people are joining her, experts say. Though the rates of adult and childhood obesity appear to have leveled off, experts say it is too early to say whether that will continue.

The problem is still staggering. More than two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese, and they racked up $147 billion in health care costs from heart disease, diabetes and other related diseases in 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Worse, the long-term trend points to nearly half the country becoming obese by 2018 at a staggering cost of $343 billion a year, more than 21 percent of all health care spending, according to a study from Emory University.

Obesity is such a serious public health problem that it could wipe out gains in health from declining smoking rates, suggests a recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association .

Obesity risk increases with age, but the problem starts young. Those born between 1966 and 1975 and between 1976 and 1985 reached a 20 percent obesity rate by ages 20-29 — younger than any previous generation, according to a study from the University of Michigan published in the International Journal of Obesity . Read more…

New research to be published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology points to a strong association between maternal obesity and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Previous research has shown that maternal obesity is associated with pregnancy complications such as hypertensive disorders, gestational diabetes and maternal death; and fetal/neonatal complications such as stillbirth, birth defects, macrosomia (big baby syndrome) and shoulder dystocia.

The data for this research was from the Hyperglycaemia and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes study (HAPO) which examined the associations of mild hyperglycaemia with pregnancy outcomes. There was strict selection and researchers looked at the records of 23,316 pregnant women from 15 centres in nine countries. All participants had their BMI measured and underwent a standard oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) between 24 and 32 weeks gestation. Samples of their random plasma glucose (RPG) were taken at 34 – 37 weeks. Ethnicity was recorded and lifestyle data were also collated (eg. smoking levels, alcohol consumption, history of diabetes and hypertension etc) using standardised forms. After delivery (within 72 hours), the size of the babies was assessed using standard measures. Read more…

To hear opponents of natural medicine say it, vitamins and herbs are extremely dangerous for your health. They should be regulated, we’re told, because they’re so dangerous!

Statistics from the U.S. National Poison Data System prove otherwise. According to a 174-page report just published, the number of people killed in 2009 across America by vitamins, minerals, amino acids or herbal supplements is exactly zero.

Compare that to the 100,000 (or so) Americans killed each year by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals — and that’s even according to studies published in JAMA. Also consider the thousands of women harmed or killed by medically-unjustified cancer treatments following false positives from faulty mammograms. And don’t forget about the more than 16,500 Americans killed each year from internal bleeding caused by NSAIDs (over-the-counter painkillers).

As the July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains:

“Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone.” (Singh Gurkirpal, MD, “Recent Considerations in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Gastropathy”, The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S)

So if NSAIDs alone are killing 16,500 people a year (or likely much more now, as use of these drugs has risen significantly since 1998), and nutritional supplements are killing zero people a year, why do health regulators try to scare everybody about vitamins being so “dangerous?”

Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, are openly allowed to be prescribed for off-label use, meaning that doctors can prescribe them for diseases and health conditions for which they’ve never even been tested! Read more…

January is National Birth Defects Prevention Month, and the week of Jan. 4-10 is Folic Acid Awareness Week. As you may know, there is a relationship between folic acid and birth defects.

Many birth defects of the brain and spine, called neural tube defects, occur in the first few weeks of pregnancy, often before a woman knows she is pregnant. The good news is that 70 percent of neural tube defects are preventable by taking folic acid, a B vitamin, every day before a woman becomes pregnant.

Even if you are not planning to get pregnant in the near future, we know that at least 50 percent of pregnancies are not planned. For teens and women in their early 20s, the rate increases to about 80 percent. That is why it is so crucial that all women of childbearing age get 400 micrograms of folic acid daily.

Most multiple vitamins contain the recommended amount of folic acid, as well as many other vitamins that protect women’s and infants’ health such as vitamins A, C, and E and minerals such as calcium. Read more…

Federal scientists say AstraZeneca’s cholesterol pill Crestor lowers the risk of heart attack, death and stroke in patients without a history of heart disease, though some safety concerns remain.

In documents posted online Friday, the Food and Drug Administration cites the findings of AstraZeneca’s study released last November. The study showed that patients with lower cholesterol and few heart risks could still benefit from taking Crestor, setting the stage for a dramatic expansion in use of the drug that already exceeds $1 billion in annual sales.

The British drugmaker wants the FDA to broaden Crestor’s labeling based on those results.

But the FDA’s review also cites several safety concerns, including a higher rate of diabetes in patients taking Crestor.

About 2.8 percent of patients taking Crestor in the 17,000-patient Jupiter study developed diabetes, compared with 2.3 percent of patients taking a dummy pill. The difference was statistically significant, according to the FDA. Read more…

Physicians and other medical professionals should screen children age 6 and older for obesity and refer obese kids to comprehensive weight-management programs, an expert panel says in today’s Pediatrics online.

The statement comes from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which makes medical-care recommendations based on the latest research.

After reviewing more than a dozen studies, the panel concluded that obese children who participated in moderate to high-intensity weight-management programs (frequently with their parents) for 25 or more hours over a six-month period often had improvements in their weight. Many programs included help from dietitians, psychologists, exercise trainers and physicians.

Currently there aren’t enough weight-management programs for parents to take their children, and it’s not a covered benefit by most insurance, family physician Ned Calonge, chairman of task force and chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “But now that there is evidence of effectiveness and this new recommendation — that may change.” Read more…

Should new vitamin D recommendations be made? According to a new study carried out at the University of California at Davis, the recommended dose of vitamin D that most experts recommend taking is too low during the winter months when there’s less direct sunlight. This conclusion was reached after a Chinese study showed that a whopping 94% of people between the ages of fifty and seventy were deficient in this vitamin. The health benefits
of vitamin D are growing in number and more experts are recommending that new vitamin D recommendations be made in order to reduce the widespread deficiency that exists in this country.

Should There Be New Vitamin D Recommendations?

According to this research which was published in the Journal of Nutrition
, University of California researchers believe that the recommended dose of vitamin D during the winter months should be between 2100 and 3100 International Units per day. The current recommendation is 200 International Units per day for those fifty and under, 400 International Units for men and women between fifty-one and seventy, and 600 International Units per day for those over the age of seventy.

Why is Sun Exposure so Important?

Vitamin D deficiencies become more common in the winter months due to the lack of sun exposure. This is a problem for people who live in Northern parts of the country where the winters are long and there’s less sun exposure. Exposure to sunlight is the best source of vitamin D since good natural food sources of this vitamin are limited. Sunlight exposure causes a chemical reaction to occur on the surface of the skin that’s used by the body to manufacture vitamin D. When there’s little direct sunlight and the body is completely covered, this reaction can’t take place and vitamin D deficiency can occur. READ MORE…

Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday.

Skip to next paragraph The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among men and for closer to 10 years among women and children — long enough for experts to say the percentage of very overweight people has leveled off.

But the percentages have topped out at very high numbers. Nearly 34 percent of adults are obese, more than double the percentage 30 years ago. The share of obese children tripled during that time, to 17 percent.

“Right now we’ve halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” said Dr. William H. Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the disease control centers. “The data are really promising.

“That said, I don’t think we have in place the kind of policy or environmental changes needed to reverse this epidemic just yet.” Read more…

America’s obesity epidemic now poses an equal or greater threat to health-related quality of life than smoking, according to a new study.

Researchers say that as obesity in America has risen dramatically in recent years — and smoking rates have declined — the contribution of obesity to the burden of disease and shortening of life has increased while smoking’s role has decreased.

The study showed that from 1993 to 2008, the proportion of smokers among U.S. adults declined by 18.5% while the proportion of obese adults increased 85%.

Using information from nationwide annual health-related quality-of-life surveys conducted during the same time period, researchers calculated the Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) lost due to these two major health risk factors.

The results, published in the American Journal of Preventive Health, show that smoking-related QALYs lost remained relatively stable during this time period at 0.0438, or 16 days of healthy life lost per adult population.

Meanwhile, as the obesity epidemic increased the quality-of-life problems caused by obesity increased and accounted for 0.0464 QALYs lost.

Researchers say smoking had a bigger impact on deaths while obesity had a bigger effect on illness. Read more…

All mothers-to-be should be weighed regularly during pregnancy to help combat the many dangers to women’s and babies’ health from maternal obesity, a group of medical experts is urging.

The National Obesity Forum (NOF) – an influential group of doctors and nurses specialising in weight problems – wants ministers to introduce the change because excessive weight gain among expectant mothers is becoming such a serious problem.

“A pregnant woman should have her weight monitored regularly during pregnancy at all antenatal appointments with midwives, GPs and obstetricians, because every risk of pregnancy, both to the mother and to the baby, is increased with maternal obesity,” Dr David Haslam, the NOF’s chairman, told the Observer.

“Obesity in pregnant women can lead to all sorts of problems, including the death of the mother, or the death of the baby through stillbirth or the baby having fetal abnormalities, or the woman suffering pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes, or needing a Caesarean section because either she or the baby is too big,” he added.

Piling on the pounds in pregnancy beyond the recommended amount can be dangerous, Haslam said. “The risk of rapid weight gain in pregnancy is that every single complication of pregnancy gets worse for both the mother and the baby. The benefits of regular weighing of women would be enormous. It would create awareness of the problem and lead to measures being put in place to reduce the risk.” For example, if a pregnant woman was gaining excess weight, a dietician could start giving her advice on her diet and level of physical activity, said Haslam, who is a GP and also a hospital doctor specialising in obesity medicine at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital in Bedfordshire. Read more…

Yoga instructor Sadie Nardini and her husband got an early start on their New Year’s resolution: In December, the New York couple decided to have sex every day for the entire month.

Nardini and her husband, a professional photographer, initially decided to have sex like bunnies in the hopes that all the activity might help them overcome his-and-her bad habits: cigarettes and chocolate, respectively. And indeed, the nightly trysts did help. But they also found, unexpectedly, that frequent sex made them feel better in other ways, too.

Nardini says they both slept better and had more energy, and she didn’t get a cold or the flu all month as she usually does in the winter. “Sex doesn’t seem at first glance to be the cure for what ails you, but there’s so many health benefits of having more sex,” Nardini says. “Anyone can be better served by having more sex.”

In fact, the experiment was so successful, the couple plans to have daily sex in January, too.

Researchers have long known that not only is sex fun (when done with the right person, of course), but that people who have frequent sex tend to live longer and have healthier hearts and lower rates of certain cancers. These studies also show that men with an active sex life have healthier sperm, and sexually active women have fewer menopause symptoms. Read more…

Obesity has reached what some feel is epidemic proportions in this country as well as around the world. Today nearly two thirds of American adults are considered overweight or obese. Even more concerning is that 15% of children in this country are considered overweight. Just a few decades ago this number stood at 4%.

We are starting to see diseases that were contracted in adulthood now affecting children and adolescents. Children that are overweight or obese have a much higher chance of dying of heart disease when they get older. This is even affecting the youngest among us with 10% of preschoolers being overweight.

Being obese has many risk factors for children. Childhood obesity is the leading cause of pediatric hypertension. It also increases the risk of heart disease, childhood diabetes, and osteoarthritis. But the most important consequence may be what is does as far as psychological pressure and peer pressure that may cause periods of depression in a child. Social and peer pressures that a child goes through are the main consequences of childhood obesity. Read more…

At any given time 15 to 35% of people are trying to loose weight and the statistics are not in their favor. The fact is that 90 to 95 % of those people will fail to loose weight and successfully keep it off. Most nutritionists agree that diets are not worth the paper they are written on. Yet millions of Americans will spend billions of dollars this year on the latest fad diet that they see advertised as the one that really works. Nutritionists realize that the key to loosing weight and keeping it off is to adopt and sound eating plan that can be sustained over a lifetime and not opting for some quick fix.

PROBLEM #1 DIETS ARE TEMPORARY FIXES THEY DON”T LAST

Diets have a short term time horizon. Perhaps you have gone on a diet to get into that dress you wanted to fit into for an upcoming event only to gain the weight back in a short period of time. This is because you had a short term mindset. You need to be thinking more long term. Use your diet to introduce yourself to new foods that you do not normally eat and that you can maintain in your everyday life. You need to be thinking lifestyle changes. A good rule of thumb here is that small changes last a long time while large changes do not. Saying that you are going to change everything that you are doing wrong at 8:00 AM Monday morning may sound impressive but it does not address the underlying problem. Changing behavior is a slow steady process that works for the long run. Read more…

A new year has arrived, and with it, a new list of resolutions. If “eating better” is on your list, experts say, there are a few items you can slip into to your diet that can improve your health and help you ward off certain diseases in 2010.

Katherine Tallmadge, national spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association and a registered dietitian in Washington, D.C., says you can find these foods in most stores. Best of all, they’re high in benefits but low in calories.

Grains

Add oat, barley and rye to your daily diet. Doctors have known that oat can bring down cholesterol levels — but so can rye, which may become the new “in” grain for 2010. In a study in the current issue of the journal Nutrition, Finnish doctors found that men who had borderline high cholesterol could lower their numbers by eating dense rye bread.

The American Diabetes Association also recommends increasing your intake of dietary fiber and whole grain products, such as rye, to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes. “Rye lowers cholesterol like oats do, and it evens out blood glucose for diabetics,” Tallmadge says. Read more…

Medical statistics are often misunderstood (perhaps up to 72.381672 percent of the time).

Sometimes they’re consciously spun. More often they’re just phrased in an opaque way.

Given all the stories in recent weeks on cancer screening (mammograms, psa tests, pap tests), the effectiveness of medicines, drugs and supplements (statins, tamoxifen, vitamin D), not to mention the focus on the health care bill, it is a good time to briefly discuss a few better ways to present medical results.
Relative Risk vs. Absolute Risk

To make my points general, I’ll refer to an abstract cancer X rather than any particular real cancer, which is anything but abstract.

That being said, imagine that a headline announces that screening for cancer X reduces deaths from it by 25 percent. Imagine as well that another headline announces that screening cuts deaths from cancer X by about 1 in 1,000, reducing the rate from 4 in 1,000 to 3 in 1,000. Read more…

Do you have big New Year’s Eve plans? Are you going to ring the new decade with a concert or party? Well, come New Year’s Day — America’s adopted National Hangover Day — you’ll be thinking those plans were a bad idea when the headache kicks in and you can barely make a fist. Jan 1, 2010 may find you on a couch — or worse — thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t have chased that bottle of champagne with half a bottle of Jameson.”

When you stumble to your medicine cabinet, there will no magic bottle labeled “Hangover-Rx,” or at least not one that works. In that spirit, Spinner asked some musicians to dish their best hangover remedies, because at the end of the day, there is no true cure.

Alison Mosshart (The Kills, the Dead Weather): “It’s usually play a show and then I feel fine because you sweat like crazy. I don’t get hangovers too much, but when I do I drink Berocca. My doctor told me to take it everyday because it’s basically the multi-vitamin in a drink. It’s incredible. It doesn’t make you feel better, but you know that it’s good for you so mentally you’re like, ‘I needed all those vitamins, thank you.’”

B-52s‘ Keith Strickland: “Green Tea is about the best one I have used. Coconut water is really good too.”

B-52s’ Kate Pierson: “I don’t believe in the hair of the dog. I think drinking a ton of water and getting a lot of sleep is the best remedy.” Read more…

Planning a party this New Year’s Eve? Just as important as the liquor, the hats and the noisemakers could be the B12 and C vitamins, bananas, milk and asparagus extract.

Sure, the first few items make it a memorable night. But, the last few could make it a bearable morning and help alleviate that all too familiar and dreaded hangover.

“When your body is taking in alcohol, you’re using up your reserves of nutrients and vitamins,” says Karyn Calabrese, a raw foodist and owner of Karyn’s Raw Cafe and Karyn’s Cooked in Chicago. “You become depleted and that’s what causes a headache, which is basically an alarm button for toxicity.”

Alcohol dehydrates the body by increasing urine production, which in turn rids the body of water and key vitamins. This can lead to everything from headaches to dry mouth and listlessness. To help combat some of the potentially damaging effects Calabrese recommends drinking lots of water and tucking away some vitamins C and B12 in a pocket or purse to take in between drinks at the bar or party.

At Whole Foods Market you can pick up packets of Emergen-C, which combine 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C with various B vitamins and trace minerals. The packets, which can be purchased individually, are dissolved in water for an added overall boost before and while you drink. Read more…

Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don’t need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It’s all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients — things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.

The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a “preventive” medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.

This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy. Read more…

Food for children is a subject that calls for great attention, as it is directly connected to their mental, physical, and emotional development.

Experts note the range of vitamins and minerals that are needed by children for appropriate development.

Some families, however, have certain problems when it comes to providing these nutritional needs for their children. Especially when the children in question are picky eaters, or have meager appetites. Here then is a list of foods that kids love to eat, and that are also very healthy:

1. Meat–Rich in protein and vitamin B. Meat also provides the niacine, copper, and iron that a developing body needs. Meat is also one way to get more choline, which helps brain development. The same cholesterol and fat that some adults try to avoid are actually good for the bodies and brains of children. For a balanced meal that includes meat, you could try a meat and vegetable stew. And of course, every now and then children should be allowed to eat hamburgers and such, though not always. Another great way to bring together meat with vegetables is through barbeque-ing and grilling. Read more…

The entire pharmaceutical industry is based on the idea that for whatever’s wrong with you, there’s a patented chemical pill that can make it better. Feeling some anxiety? There’s a pill for that. Have high blood pressure? There’s a pill for that, too. Suffering from sleepless nights? There’s yet another pill for that, too.

Importantly, modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry both believe there is no limit to how many prescription medications you can simultaneously take. If you have ten health problems, they’ve got ten different pills for you. And when those pills cause twenty different dangerous side effects, they’re ready for twenty more prescriptions for you to dutifully swallow. Read more…