There’s a lot physicians can do to help people fend off the flu besides doling out flu shots. Roby Mitchell, MD, aka Dr. Fitt, offers some outside-the-box thinking and practical suggestions.
Teaching children to “clean their plates,” and “eat every last bite,” made a lot of sense in times of want. In the era of supersized meals full of saturated fat, sugar and salt, it is a set-up for obesity. Interestingly, human infants have an innate capacity to regulate food intake based on energy need, but as they grow, they’re taught to eat more than they really need.
Even mild elevations in blood and tissue acid levels may have detrimental effects over the long term. A growing body of research indicates that hyper-acidity, due largely to over-consumption of foods that are metabolized into acidic compounds, can contribute to osteoporosis, arthritis and inflammatory disease. A guide on how to shift diet toward alkalinizing foods, and a look at supplements that can help reverse acidic stress.
Recently, the Big Yellow Clown said “Bye-bye” to his longstanding habit of “supersizing,” and “Hello” to a new series of adult “Go Active Happy Meals.” But a closer look at those supposedly healthy alternatives reveal some facts that are hard to swallow.
The food and beverage industry spends on the order of $30 billion each year on advertising for processed convenience foods, far outstripping public health funds allocated for obesity prevention. For the most part, their message is “Eat more.” According to author Marion Nestle, medicine must reckon with the realities of food industry economics in order to have any impact on the obesity problem.
Data from the National Weight Control Registry, a database tracking 3,200 formerly obese people who lost weight without drugs, indicate that there is no single “magic” diet that will ensure weight loss. However, all successful dieters reduced intake of fats, especially saturated fats, and regularly engaged in moderate-intensity physical exercise.
Exercise need not be overly intense to produce marked reductions in body fat. In fact, studies show that moderate activity has the greatest overall long-term impact on body mass. A report from an international conference on obesity.
Genistein and daidzein are the two best-known phytoestrogens identified in soy. But roughly one-third of all people who eat soy can metabolize diadzein into equol, which is among the most potent plant estrogens known. This could account for the widely variant outcomes in clinical trials of soy for prevention of breast cancer, menopausal symptoms and other clinical conditions.
The core tenet of the emerging discipline of functional medicine is that nutrition is the major determinant of gene expression, and therefore of health and disease. Functional medicine pioneer Jeff Bland, PhD, explains how, in a sense, food is information that tells the genes what to do. Depending on the signals we send our genes, they can produce health and happiness or depression and disease.
A new imaging technique called Breast Enhanced Scintigraphy Testing has provided the first visual evidence that routine supplementation with soy isoflavones can reduce the size of pre-malignant breast lesions in women at increased risk of breast cancer.
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