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Low-carb diet best for lowering blood pressure

By Anne Harding - Tue Jan 26, 2:21 PM PST
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with high blood pressure who want to drop some pounds may want to choose a low-carb diet, a new study shows.

Fresh vegetables are chopped in the kitchen of Revolution Foods in Los Angeles

August 19, 2009. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
In the study, overweight or obese individuals who went on a low-carb diet lost about the same amount of weight as those who cut down on their fat intake and took the weight-loss aid orlistat (sold as Xenical or Alli). However, the low-carb diet produced more favorable effects on blood pressure.

Most studies of weight loss methods have enrolled overweight or obese volunteers who were healthy, aside from weighing too much. The current study, in contrast, enrolled "real patients" with common conditions like diabetes and heart disease, William S. Yancy Jr. of the VA Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, told Reuters Health. People with these health issues are often excluded from weight loss studies, Yancy said.

He and his colleagues assigned 146 patients to either receive instruction on eating a low-carbohydrate diet, and to start out by eating fewer than 20 grams of carbohydrate daily, or to take 120 mg of orlistat three times a day and receive instructions on eating a lower calorie, lower-fat diet. All of the study participants received diet instructions at group meetings, which were every two weeks for the first six months of the study, and monthly thereafter.

After 48 weeks, the low-carb group had lost about 9.5 percent of their body weight, compared to 8.5 percent for the orlistat group, which wasn't a significant difference. There also were similar improvements in cholesterol levels between the two groups. But the low carb diet did offer an advantage in terms of blood pressure reduction.

The low-carb group showed about a 6 percent drop in their systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading) and a 4.5 point drop in their diastolic pressure (the lower number). In contrast, the orlistat group did not see a drop in blood pressure; the corresponding changes for the orlistat group were 1.5 (systolic) and 0.4 (diastolic).

The two "fairly powerful weight loss treatments were equally effective, and one of them was more effective for lowering high blood pressure," Yancy said.
Orlistat works by blocking the body's absorption of fat from food so people who use the drug need to cut down on their fat intake or risk unpleasant side effects like gas and even incontinence.

Patients using orlistat in the current study were more likely to report gas, bowel incontinence, and diarrhea than those in the low-carb group. However, only one person stopped taking the drug due to these side effects. "Orlistat can work quite well if it's used correctly," Yancy said.

The group meetings for diet advice were a key element of success, Yancy added, with those who came to 80 percent or more of these visits losing an average of 14 percent to 15 percent of their body weight.

"I don't think that too many insurance (policies) would cover this," he said, "but I think it's something that needs to happen."

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, January 25, 2010.

Family fat explains some of family diabetes risk

Family fat explains some of family diabetes risk

Reuters – People line up to buy food at a fast food restaurant in Harlem in New York December 16, 2009. REUTERS/Finbarr …

Thu Jan 28, 3:21 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Having type 2 diabetes in the family more than doubles a woman's own risk of developing the disease, new research shows.
But the fact that fat -- and certain dietary habits -- also run in families accounts for a "substantial part" of this increased risk, Dr. Rob van Dam of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and his colleagues found.

Having a close relative with type 2 diabetes -- the kind closely linked to obesity --is a key risk factor for the disease, but known gene variants that increase diabetes risk only explain part of this relationship.

To investigate whether excess weight and lifestyle factors might also be involved, van Dam and his team looked at 73,227 women participating in the Nurses' Health Study. Over the course of 20 years, 5,101 developed type 2 diabetes, they report in the journal Diabetes Care.

Having at least one parent or sibling with type 2 diabetes boosted the risk of developing the disease more than two-fold, the researchers found. Women with a family history of diabetes were also more likely to be overweight, as were their family members, and this accounted for about 20 percent of the link between family history and diabetes risk.

And certain dietary habits shared by women and their relatives -- specifically, drinking alcohol, eating red meat, and consuming sugar-sweetened beverages -- also helped explain the association between family history and diabetes risk. The influence was smaller, though; alcohol accounted for 5 percent of the link, red meat 1 percent, and sugary drinks 3 percent.

The new findings, coupled with recent studies on diabetes-associated gene variants, van Dam and his team say, "suggest that most of the association between family history of diabetes and diabetes risk remains unexplained."

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, online January 12, 2010.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Soup Therapy: Detoxify, Lose Weight, and Boost Immunity

Soup Therapy: Detoxify, Lose Weight, and Boost Immunity

By Dr. Maoshing Ni - Posted on Fri, Jan 15, 2010, 5:59 pm PST
Dr. Mao's Secrets of Longevity
by Dr. Maoshing Ni a Yahoo! Health Expert for Alternative Medicine
VISIT ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE HOME »
MORE BY THIS EXPERT
• Soup Therapy: Detoxify, Lose Weight, and Boost Immunity
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The healing power of soup: something that both scientists and grandmothers can agree on. From helping you lose weight to warming you up from the inside out to boosting your immunity, soup is a winter staple that you shouldn’t be without. Maybe that is one reason that it is celebrated this month with its very own National Soup Month. Here's a closer look at what you can do to benefit from soup's amazing healing powers.

The healing power of soup
An ancient Chinese proverb states that a good doctor uses food first, then resorts to medicine. A healing soup can be your first step in maintaining your health and preventing illness. The therapeutic value of soup comes from the ease with which your body can assimilate the nutrients from the ingredients, which have been broken down by simmering.

Here are some healing soup tips that will preserve your wellness and longevity:
1. Lose weight with soup
Obesity is on the rise throughout the industrialized world, resulting in a startling increase in the rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. You can count yourself out of the statistics if you eat a bowl of soup at least once a day. Nutritious low-salt soups will nourish you as they flush excess wastes from your body. It has been found that people who eat one serving of soup per day lose more weight than those who eat the same amount of calories, but don’t eat soup. Homemade soup is your best bet, because canned soups tend to be loaded with salt and chemicals. My advice is to use organic vegetables whenever possible. The herbicides and pesticides that can be present in conventional produce can assault the immune system and overload it with toxins.

2. Build your immunity
Your immune system needs a lot of minerals to function properly and the typical Western diet does not always hit the mark. When you slowly simmer foods over low heat, you gently leach out the energetic and therapeutic properties of the foods, preserving the nutritional value of the foods. Keep in mind that boiling can destroy half of the vitamins found in vegetables, so cook soup over a low heat.

Immune-Boosting Soup
Simmer these ingredients for 30 minutes: cabbage, carrots, fresh ginger, onion, oregano, shiitake mushrooms (if dried, they must be soaked first), the seaweed of your choice, and any type of squash in chicken or vegetable stock. Cabbage can increase your body’s ability to fight infection, ginger supports healthy digestion, and seaweed cleanses the body. Shiitake mushrooms contain coumarin, polysaccharides, and sterols, as well as vitamins and minerals that increase your immune function, and the remaining ingredients promote general health and well-being. Eat this soup every other day to build a strong and healthy immune system.

3. Detoxify your body
As a liquid, soup is already helping you flush waste from your body. When you choose detoxifying ingredients, such as the ones featured in the recipe below, you are really treating your body to an internal cleanse. The broth below boasts many benefits: it supports the liver in detoxification, increases circulation, reduces inflammation, and replenishes your body with essential minerals.

Super Detoxifying Broth
Simmer the following for 1–2 hours over a low flame: anise, brussels sprouts, cabbage, Swiss chard, cilantro, collards, dandelion, fennel, garlic, ginger, kale, leeks, shiitake mushrooms, mustard greens, daikon radish, seaweed, turmeric, and watercress. Drink 8 to 12 ounces twice a day. You can keep this broth in your fridge for up to one week; however, it is always best to serve soups when fresh because each day, the therapeutic value decreases.

In addition to using cleansing herbs in soups, you can take cleansing herbs in supplements. For a gentle but powerful cleanse using Chinese herbs, Internal Cleanse increases the ability of the liver to cleanse the body of internal and environmental toxins.

4. Warm up with a hearty soup
You always want to eat for the season. Soups provide something the body craves in cold weather. When you cook foods into a soup, you are adding a lot of what Chinese nutrition would call “warming energy” into the food. Warming foods to feature in your soups include: leeks, onions, turnips, spinach, kale, broccoli, quinoa, yams, squash, garlic, scallions, and parsley. As a spice, turmeric aids with circulation, a great boost against the cold weather.

5. Get well faster
As you mother may have instinctively known, when you are sick, there is no better healing food than soup. The reason for this is that soups and stews don’t require as much energy to digest, freeing your body up to fight the infection.

It would be impossible to talk about soup’s healing abilities without putting the spotlight on homemade chicken noodle soup. Studies have found that chicken noodle soup does seem to relieve the common cold by inhibiting inflammation -- helping to break up congestion and ease the flow of nasal secretions.

While chicken soup may not cure a cold outright, it does help alleviate some of the symptoms and can help as a preventative measure. Many of my patient’s keep the herbal formula Cold & Flu in their medicine cabinets so its there to support recovery when a cold strikes.

In Chinese medicine, you would traditionally be given a tonic soup specifically tailored to your needs, and for that level of personal care, it is a good idea to consult a health practitioner knowledgeable in Chinese nutrition.

I hope you have gotten a taste of the healing power of soup! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you live long, live strong, and live happy!

—Dr. Mao

This blog is meant to educate, but it should not be used as a substitute for personal medical advice. The reader should consult his or her physician or clinician for specific information concerning specific medical conditions. While all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that all information presented is accurate, as research and development in the medical field is ongoing, it is possible that new findings may supersede some data presented

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

RISIKO OBESITY/kegemukan

Source: CDC/NCHS, Health, United States, 2006

Q: What is the mortality rate associated with obesity?

A: Most studies show an increase in mortality rates associated with obesity. Individuals who are obese have a 10- to 50-percent increased risk of death from all causes, compared with healthy weight individuals (BMI 18.5 to 24.9). Most of the increased risk is due to cardiovascular causes.[1] Obesity is associated with about 112,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. population relative to healthy weight individuals.[9]
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Complex Weight-Loss Plans Erode Dieters'

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Complex Weight-Loss Plans Erode Dieters'

TUESDAY, Jan. 19 (HealthDay News) -- The more complex a person's diet plan, the sooner the person will abandon it, a new study finds.

The finding came from a study of 390 German women who were using one of two diet plans. The simpler plan provided shopping lists for dieters and a meal plan they were to follow. The more complex plan assigned point values to every food and instructed participants to eat only a certain number of points each day.

The women completed questionnaires over an eight-week span.

"For people on a more complex diet that involves keeping track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression of the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it," Peter Todd, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, said in a university news release.

The effect endured even after the researchers accounted for the influence of significant social-cognitive factors such as self-efficacy -- people's belief that they're capable of achieving a goal, such as adhering to a diet regimen to lose weight.

"Even if you think you can succeed, thinking that the diet is too cognitively complex can undermine your efforts," the study's co-author, Jutta Mata, a psychology professor at Stanford University, explained in the news release.

The study was published online in Appetite.

Mata suggested that people considering going on a diet should look at a number of diet plans and consider how many rules a plan has and how many things a dieter needs to keep in mind while using the plan.

"If they decide to go with a more complex diet, which could be more attractive, for instance, if it allows more flexibility, they should evaluate how difficult they find doing the calculations and monitoring their consumption," she said. "If they find it very difficult, the likelihood that they will prematurely give up the diet is higher, and they should try to find a different plan."

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has suggestions for selecting a weight-loss program.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Menonton TV mungkin memendekkan Usia Anda

TV Watching May Shorten Your Life
Too much sitting raises your risk of dying from heart disease, researchers say By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Jan. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Every hour spent watching TV each day may increase your risk of an early death from cardiovascular disease by as much as 18 percent, Australian researchers say.

What's on the television is not the problem; it's the time spent sitting while watching.

"This research provides another clear link between too much sitting and death from disease," said lead researcher David Dunstan, head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria.

"The findings have serious implications for Americans and Australians when you consider that aside from sleeping, watching television is the behavior that occupies activity of four hours viewing a day," he added.

The good news is research has shown that moving the muscles frequently throughout the day is one of the most effective ways of managing weight and protecting against disease, Dunstan added.

"We tend to underestimate the value of incidental, non-sweaty activity throughout the day when we are either not sleeping or exercising -- the more you move, the greater the benefits for health," he noted.

Dunstan pointed out that while obesity can add to these problems, even normal-weight people can have increases in blood sugar and cholesterol if they sit too much.

The report was released online Jan. 11 in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of Circulation.

For the study, Dunstan's team collected data on the lifestyles of 8,800 healthy men and women aged 25 years and older. In addition to lifestyle habits, the researchers tested participants' cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Over more than six years of follow-up, 284 people died. Among these deaths, 87 were due to cardiovascular disease and 125 from cancer.

The participants were grouped into three TV-watching categories: those who watched less than two hours a day; those who watched two to four hours a day; and those who watched more than four hours a day.

The researchers found that every hour of daily TV watching increased the risk of dying from any cause by 11 percent. For cardiovascular diseases the increased risk was 18 percent, and for cancer it was 9 percent. Compared with those who watched less than two hours per day, those who watched TV for more than four hours each day had an 80 percent increased risk of dying early from cardiovascular disease and a 46 percent increased risk of dying from any cause.

The association between TV watching and death remained even when the researchers took into account risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, unhealthy diet, excessive weight and exercise.

Although the study was done in Australia, the findings are applicable to Americans, Dunstan said. Average daily television watching is about three hours in Australia and the United Kingdom, and up to eight hours in the United States, where many people are either overweight or obese, he noted.

"What we are now starting to understand is that the risks associated with sedentary behavior are not necessarily offset by doing more exercise," Dunstan said.

"In other words, irrespective of how much exercise you do, if you sit watching television for four hours on a daily basis you still have a substantially increased risk of early death from all causes and a much greater risk of cardiovascular disease," he said.

Experts agreed that to stay healthy you need to keep on the move.

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that "regular exercise has been consistently demonstrated to result in improved cardiovascular health and lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and premature death."

He added that "reducing time spent inactive may be of benefit in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and should be considered as part of a comprehensive approach to improve cardiovascular health."

David Bassett Jr., a professor of health and exercise science at the University of Tennessee, said that "when one looks at time trends in physical activity over the past century, it is clear that people are doing more structured, purposeful exercise than before."

However, what has changed is that people are doing less walking, household chores and manual labor than in the past, he said. "We are also spending more time in sedentary activities like television watching, computer use and desk jobs," Bassett explained.

"This study adds to a growing body of evidence that the amount of time spent in sedentary activity, as distinct from the amount of time spent in purposeful exercise, can affect your health," he said.

More information

Maklumat Kesihatan Sana Sini

Friday, February 19, 2010

Protect Your Heart at Every Age

Monday, February 1, 2010

Low-Carb Diet Best for Lowering Blood Pressure