Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

New findings in the journal Gut reveal too much fat surrounding internal organs increases risk of liver cancer recurrence after treatment. Scientists followed 62 people who received treatment for liver cancer. Of the participants, 27 had high amounts of belly fat and 35 had lower amounts. After one year, the high group had 15.9% risk of recurrence, while the low group only had 9.7% and three years later the figures were 75.1% and 43.1%, respectively; Reuters reports.

In April, a study claimed men with excess belly fat have a 15% higher risk of heart failure and women have a 30% higher risk. Too much abdominal fat seemingly affects everything. Other research has linked tummy fat to stroke, migraine headaches and even death risk.

In related news, the CDC reports Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama continue to lead the nation in obesity, but no worries. Australia is officially fatter than the United States.

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When you change your life, awesome things can happen. Take Robyn, she slimmed down and kissed her headaches good bye. Or Jacob, he was out of shape and chubby, but today he’s ripped. And check out Scott, he cut 260 pounds and now he’s a bike riding machine:

He wore size XXXXXXXXXXL pants and could not tie his own shoes. He could walk only nine steps at a time. Breathing was sometimes difficult. A doctor said he would be dead in six months without stomach–reduction surgery and heavy medication.

Scott turned down his doctor’s advice, and instead decided to change how he thought about food and his approach to eating by following Dr. Fuhrman’s high nutrient meal plan.

Recognizing his dire health situation and need for aggressive weight loss with optimal therapeutic effects he jumped right into Dr. Fuhrman’s most extreme plan for nutritional excellence. The food provided all the nutrients, protein and vitamins essential for good health…continue reading.

 

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Cleft lip is a fissure causing a gap in the top lip and findings of a new study in American Journal of Epidemiology reveal drinking coffee during pregnancy slightly ups the risk of cleft lip or harelip. Experts compared data on 573 women who had babies with cleft lip and 763 women whose kids did not. Women drinking a daily cup of coffee during the first 3 months of pregnancy were 1.39 times more likely to have a baby with harelip and the likelihood increased to 1.59 for women who drank 3 or more cups of coffee a day; Reuters reports.

Sometimes I have a cup of coffee. Luckily I can’t get pregnant. Coffee, i.e. caffeine, isn’t healthy. Drinking coffee has been shown to double arthritis risk, raise blood pressure and disturb heart function. Caffeine is a toxin, which can cause headaches, anxiety and detox symptoms similar to coming off drugs.

Recently, a study showed women drinking more than 3 cups of coffee a day had 17% smaller breasts. Oh, and instant coffee can make you hallucinate. Far out man.

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I admit, a little “chub” on a girl is super cute, but it’s probably not healthy. Published in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure, experts believe larger waist circumferences are associated with higher risk of congestive heart failure in both men and women. For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 36,000 women and over 43,000 men, ages 45-83, who filled out health questionnaires and were followed for seven years. Based on their answers scientists determined women with a normal body mass index (BMI) and a 10 centimeter larger waist measurement had a 15% higher risk of heart failure and men with normal BMI and a 10 centimeter larger waist size had a 30% higher risk; via EurekAlert!

Belly fat gets a lot of bad press. Over the past few months excess abdominal fat has been linked to impaired respiratory function, lame sex life, more headaches and migraines, and increased risk of stroke. And according to Dr. Fuhrman that extra umbilical fat is an excellent indicator that people are overweight, even if they’ve already lost weight.

Maintaining a healthy bodyweight is an important component of heart health. In the November 2003 Healthy Times, Dr. Fuhrman explains why heart problems are preventable and how nutrition helps reverse cardiovascular disease.

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Ladies, please stay thin. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism reveals obese women have unhealthier ovaries, associated with poorer reproductive outcomes. The excess fat may alter the metabolism of eggs which is harmful to embryo formation. Scientists followed 96 women looking to get pregnant and determined obese women had altered maturation of ovary follicles, metabolism and androgen activity, the precursor of all estrogen; ScienceDaily investigates.

Obesity is bad. That’s obvious. Obesity costs the United States $150 billion in healthcare spending each year. And recently reports show obesity leads to migraines, thyroid inflammation and even gum disease. In the experiment, obese mice had 40% more bone loss in their tooth sockets. Pretty hard to eat cheese with no teeth! Then again, eating cheese is a bad idea. It’s yucky.

An often overlooked danger of obesity is the link to global warming. We burn more fuel hauling around heavier people than skinnier people. Fat people are Hummers and thin people are Mini Coopers.

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Some people think love handles are cute, but a new study claims carrying extra weight around the abdomen impairs lung function. Published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers examined data on 120,000 people in France, assessing smoking history, alcohol consumption and lung function with respect to Body Mass Index, determining participants with chubby waists, over 35 inches for women and over 40 inches for men, had impaired function; Reuters reports.

Belly fat gets a ton of bad press. In February, a study of 22,211 people with migraines revealed those with bigger waists had more headaches. According to Dr. Fuhrman a diet full of toxins, like alcohol, contributes to headaches and migraines as well. Belly felt has also been linked to greater risk of death.

I can relate to this. When I was slimming down and running a lot my breathing felt sort and shallow, but now it’s much deeper, especially when I do Yoga and I recover a lot faster after a run too.

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The obesity problem always raises some weird news, like to combat obesity New York City put posters displaying the number of calories in popular fast foods, like cheeseburgers and muffins, all over the subways. Then a city in Italy wanted to pay people to lose weight and some experts believe people are fat because they have sick fat cells.

But this news is not so light, no pun-intended, research in British Medical Journal claims obese young men, at the age of 18, are more likely to die prematurely later in life than normal weight teenagers. After reviewing the deaths of over 45,000 men, scientists determined the incidence of death was highest among the obese; Reuters reports.

And recently, studies have come out linking obesity to cancer, headaches, high blood pressure and thyroid inflammation in children.

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Overweight people between the ages of 20 and 55 may be more likely to get migraine headaches. To be presented at the upcoming American Academy of Neurology's 61st Annual Meeting in Seattle, new researcher involving 22,211 people who suffered from severe headaches or migraines showed those individuals with bigger waists, i.e. more belly fat, had more headaches. In overweight women the risk was 8% higher and 4% in men; ScienceDaily investigates.

And earlier study also linked fat to headaches, with obese men reporting 15% more headaches and 28% in women. I wonder why the risk always seems to be higher in women. Must be from dealing with all the fat men!

Actually, certain foods, unhealthy foods, like cheese, alcohol and sweets, can trigger migraines, so avoiding them is a pretty good idea.

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Well, its official, we’re doomed! According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of obese Americans now outweighs the total number of overweight people, 34% of Americans are obese, compared to 32.7% of people who are overweight. In 2005-2006, researchers say one-third of Americans were obese, a startling 72 million people, and the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled since 1980, however the trend of overweight has remained stable during that time; via Reuters.

We shouldn’t be proud of this milestone, especially since obesity has been linked to poor health and migraines, cancer, thyroid inflammation and other diseases. So, based on this research, we’ve got a wave, scratch that, a tsunami of sick people on the horizon.

But, oddly enough, a recent study actually claims obesity protects against heart disease. It’s cuckoo!

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• Hire somebody to grow you a garden? Kim Severson of The New York Times explains:

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

• The migraine medication, Topamax, main increase the risk of birth defects. From WebMD:

In a study published in the latest issue of the journal Neurology, taking Topamax (topiramate) during pregnancy was associated with a birth defect risk within the range of risk seen in other anti-epileptic drugs, researchers reported.


But the incidence of birth defects seen when Topamax was taken with other anti-epileptic drugs was higher than expected.

The study was small, but it is among the first to link Topamax to birth defects in humans, confirming what has been seen in previous animal studies.

"More research needs to be done to confirm these results, especially since it was a small study," researcher John Craig, MRCP, of the Royal Group of Hospitals in Belfast, Northern Ireland said in a news release.

• Here’s how to deal with treat giving grandparents. Via Tim Harford:

I am the mother of two young children, and extremely grateful to my own parents for looking after them for a few hours now and then. My problem is that they stuff the kids with chocolates, crisps and ice cream. This is not good for the children, their behavior and my own efforts to feed them something nutritious. Why do the grandparents have such a different philosophy, and can I do anything to change their thinking…


… Rather than reasoning with your parents, you must change their incentives. Unfortunately, this is not easy. You could try to bribe your parents, but threats will be useless because they are doing you a favor.

Perhaps your best bet is to try to arrange for longer bouts of childcare. Your parents will have a fresh perspective on the merits of carrots after trying to put a three-year-old to bed in the midst of a sugar high.

• Researchers believe cultural sensitivity may improve diabetes outcomes. Joene Hendry of Reuters reports:
  

"There is some evidence suggesting culturally tailored health education can improve some clinical outcomes in the short-term," co-author Dr. Yolanda Robles of Cardiff University the UK told Reuters Health. However, "further research is needed to assess long-term effects," Robles said.


Language and cultural barriers may hinder the delivery of quality diabetes health education to ethnic minorities, yet education is a vital aspect of diabetes care, Robles and colleagues report in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews from The Cochrane Collaboration.

To assess the overall efficacy of culturally tailored diabetes education versus the "usual" care, the researchers combined findings from 11 published research articles that compared the two approaches among minority groups living in middle- or high-income countries. All of the 1,603 study participants were older than 16 years.

• U.S. inspectors believe a single jalapeño pepper may have caused salmonella outbreak. More from Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press:

They found the same bacteria strain on a single Mexican-grown jalapeno pepper handled in Texas -- and issued a stronger warning for consumers to avoid fresh jalapenos.


But Monday's discovery, the equivalent of a fingerprint, doesn't solve the mystery: Authorities still don't know where the pepper became tainted -- on the farm, or in the McAllen, Texas, plant, or at some stop in between, such as a packing house.

Nor are they saying the tainted pepper exonerates tomatoes sold earlier in the spring that consumers until last week had been told were the prime suspect.

Still, "this genetic match is a very important break in the case," said Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's food safety chief.

• Scientists are trying to make a cancer vaccine from the tobacco plant. Sharon Begley of Newsweek is on it:
  

Fully aware of the irony here, biologist Ronald Levy of Stanford University and his team used tobacco plants to grow the vaccine, which would act against follicular B-cell lymphoma. This chronic, incurable form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma strikes some 16,000 people in the United States each year. For all its horrors, however, follicular B-cell lymphoma just may be tailor-made for a cancer vaccine: all of the malignant cells are the descendants of a single bad actor and have an identical molecule on their surface. But the molecular signature of one patient’s cancer cells is slightly different from every other patient’s; hence the need for potentially expensive personalized vaccines.


The scientists therefore spliced the DNA for the molecular sequences of the antibodies from each of the 16 patients into tobacco cells. The DNA triggered production of antibodies in the tobacco plants’ leaves which were tailor-made for each patient’s lymphoma cells. The scientists ground up the leaves and isolated the antibodies, injecting them into each patient.

The patients’ immune systems got cracking: 70 percent of the patients developed an immune response to the plant-produced vaccine, and 47 percent produced a response specific to the antigen.

• It seems women are more likely to suffer tattoo regret than men. Via Alan Mozes of HealthDay News:

"We saw that for women there is still some negative societal fallout to having tattoos", said study author Myrna L. Armstrong, a professor in the school of nursing at Texas Tech University's Health Sciences Center, in Lubbock, Texas. "This isn't a problem for men. Society supports men, because tattoos are related to a macho image, so we don't question it. But for women, having a tattoo seems to be a transgression of gender boundaries."


Armstrong and her colleagues outlined their observations in the July issue of the Archives of Dermatology.

The authors pointed out that about one-quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a tattoo, and women constitute between 45 percent and 65 percent of the tattoo market.

Prior studies show that more than 80 percent of the inked crowd are pleased with their decision to get a tattoo. Among the fifth that are not, about 6 percent ultimately remove their marking.

• According to a new study obstetricians overlook alcohol consumption in pregnant women. From Blackwell Publishing:

Almost half of the obstetricians interviewed said they did not routinely ask about alcohol consumption in pregnancy.


An editorial by Professor Elizabeth Elliot from the University of Sydney titled "Alcohol and Pregnancy: the Pivotal Role of the Obstetrician", discusses the state of awareness about the adverse effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy and the obstetricians’ participation in educating against maternal drinking.

Only 16% of the obstetricians routinely provided information about the consequences of alcohol in pregnancy, while only 5% gave advice which were consistent with the latest guidelines of The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) - which states that, for pregnant women, ‘no drinking is the safest option’.

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