New research suggests that maternal mental health is a significant influence on childhood obesity. In particular, maternal depression seems to correlate with overweight in young children.
The current obesity epidemic is really an epidemic among men, said John La Puma, MD, at Holistic Primary Care’s fifth annual Heal Thy Practice conference in Long Beach earlier this month.Though the attention is most often focused on women, overweight is more common in men and has devastating long-term consequences.
Lifestyle interventions that help diabetic people lose weigh confer many health benefits—including marked reductions in depression, retinopathy, renal disease, hospitalization, healthcare costs. But they may not reduce cardiovascular events, according to a massive new study.
It is no secret that as a nation, the United States is getting fatter.
Over the past 50 years, the prevalence of obesity in adults has nearly tripled, from 13.4% in 1962 to 35.7% in 20101-3. The economic, social, and medical burden this places on our society cannot be overstated. It is a healthcare crisis of immense proportions.
Swimming in chlorinated water increases risk of asthma and respiratory problems in children, says Alfred Bernard, PhD, research director at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In a study of nearly 2,000 children, those who spent 30 or more hours in chlorinated pools before age 3 had triple the risk of respiratory problems.
The idea of “pre-diabetes” is a comforting delusion, says functional medicine pioneer, Mark Hyman, MD. In metabolic reality, the condition so described is not “pre” anything; it is dysregulated glucose metabolism that will eventually cause serious problems. Doctors and patients alike would do well to rid themselves of this naive notion.
A cohort study of over 64,000 people found that those with allergies to grass, plants and trees were more likely to develop hematologic malignancies compared with people who don’t have allergies. The surprising observation runs contrary to studies, and has investigators and clinicians scratching their heads.
Getting less than forty winks has a profound effect on metabolic processes that determine not only how we seek out and utilize food, but also how adept our bodies are at burning or storing calories.
Elevated cholesterol and high blood glucose are the obvious features of diabetes and heart disease but they’re hardly the whole picture. Other, less obvious factors including environmental toxins like BPA and lead, gastrointestinal disorders, and frequent use of artificial sweeteners are also important drivers of disease. According to Dr. Mark Hyman, author of the popular book, The Blood Sugar Solution, these oft-overlooked factors warrant closer attention.
Drug therapies to reduce cardiovascular risk and prevent the onset of diabetes may be effective in the short term, but as people age, the efficacy of drugs like statins and metformin tends to diminish, while the risk of adverse effects increases. The benefit of nutritional and lifestyle interventions, on the other hand, remains robust even as people enter their final decades.
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