Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week: study

Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You?

 This article reminded me of a recent study I read where it was found that Obese people are frequently vitamin deficient. This is contrary to what we believe. We assume that they are over nourished and therefore obese where the exact opposite it true-

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Vitamin Deficiency May Cause Modern Ills

The Independent – London

02-18-08

chronic shortage of vitamins and other “micronutrients” in the diet may be responsible for triggering many of the ills of modern life such as cancer, obesity and the degenerative diseases of ageing.

Professor Bruce Ames, of the University of California, Berkeley, who invented one of the standard tests for cancer-causing chemicals, said many people’s diets were deficient in one or more of the 40 micronutrients essential for a healthy life.

Taking dietary supplements in the form of vitamin pills could help to counteract many of the disorders associated with ageing, Dr Ames told the American Association meeting.

He said many people on a high-calorie diet in the West or poor diet in developing countries were short of micronutrients and this caused the body to go into an emergency “triage” response in which it tried to keep its metabolism in balance by a process of compensation. This ensures immediate survival, but the consequences are an increase in DNA damage, which causes future cancers, a lowered immune defence, and a decay of the mitochondrial “power plants” of the cells, which causes accelerated ageing,” he said.

He said a shortage of minerals, vitamins and other nutrients could also be partly responsible for obesity.

This is an informative video that lists the Top 10 worst drinks.  It is about 15 minutes long but well worth it….

Drink More Diet Soda, Gain More Weight?

The findings come from eight years of data collected by Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. Fowler reported the data at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.

“What didn’t surprise us was that total soft drink use was linked to overweight and obesity,” Fowler tells WebMD. “What was surprising was when we looked at people only drinking diet soft drinks, their risk of obesity was even higher.”

In fact, when the researchers took a closer look at their data, they found that nearly all the obesity risk from soft drinks came from diet sodas.

“There was a 41% increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day,” Fowler says.

More Diet Drinks, More Weight Gain

Fowler’s team looked at seven to eight years of data on 1,550 Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white Americans aged 25 to 64. Of the 622 study participants who were of normal weight at the beginning of the study, about a third became overweight or obese.

For regular soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:

• 26% for up to 1/2 can each day
• 30.4% for 1/2 to one can each day
• 32.8% for 1 to 2 cans each day
• 47.2% for more than 2 cans each day.

For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:

• 36.5% for up to 1/2 can each day
• 37.5% for 1/2 to one can each day
• 54.5% for 1 to 2 cans each day
• 57.1% for more than 2 cans each day.

For each can of diet soft drink consumed each day, a person’s risk of obesity went up 41%.… read more

Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person’s Memory Performance
ScienceDaily (2008-02-03) — A brief bout of non-REM sleep obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person’s declarative memory performance. It was discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for certain subjects. … > read full article

My boyhood baseball hero Rich “Goose” Gossage made it into the baseball Hall of Fame last week. His 98-mph fastball and 22-year career as a fearsome relief pitcher were achieved without the use of steroids. His best years were back in the ’70s and early ’80s when men were men and made their own testosterone naturally. But even the most macho among us face a decline in the quintessential male hormone as we age. Recent evidence points to a decline in testosterone levels in the general population of men, regardless of age.

A 20-year study of testosterone levels in men found that testosterone concentrations dropped about 1.2% per year, or about 17% overall, from 1987 to 2004. The downward trend was seen in both the population and in individuals over time….Read more here

  By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Jan. 21 (HealthDay News) — Caffeine consumption by pregnant women can increase the risk of miscarriage, a new study reports.

And, it doesn’t matter if the caffeine comes from coffee, tea, soda or hot chocolate. What does matter is the amount — the study found that when women drink more than 200 milligrams of caffeine daily, the risk of miscarriage increases twofold.”What we found was that if women have heavy caffeine intake — greater than 200 milligrams a day — they have double the risk of miscarriage than women that don’t have any caffeine,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist in the division of research at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif.

Results of the study were published online in the January issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Caffeine, the most frequently consumed drug in the world, crosses the placental barrier and reaches the developing fetus, according to the study. While previous studies have found an association between caffeine intake and miscarriage, it hadn’t been clear whether the problem was due to the caffeine or another substance in coffee, or if it had something to do with non-coffee drinkers’ lifestyles — perhaps people who didn’t drink coffee ate more fruits and vegetables, for example.

For the new study, the researchers looked at 1,063 women from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in San Francisco; they were interviewed at an average of 10 weeks’ gestation. During the study period, 16 percent of the women — 172 — had miscarriages.

The researchers found that 25 percent of the women who miscarried reported consuming no caffeine during their pregnancy. Another 60 percent said they had up to 200 milligrams of caffeine daily, and 15 percent regularly consumed more than 200 milligrams of caffeine each day.

In addition to asking about caffeine intake, the researchers also assessed the other known risk factors for miscarriage, such as smoking, a history of previous miscarriage, alcohol use and more. The researchers also compensated for nausea and vomiting during pregnancy.

“If you have a low risk of miscarriage, the effect of caffeine tends to show more,” said Li.

Li said that even among women who drank less than 200 milligrams of caffeine a day, the study found a 40 percent increased risk of miscarriage, but this finding didn’t reach the level of statistical significance.

“Women shouldn’t drink more than two regular cups of coffee a day, and hopefully they stop drinking totally for at least the first three months. It’s not a permanent stop. If they really have to drink, limit the amount to one or two cups — a regular cup is about seven and half ounces,” Li said.

But, not every doctor is convinced that there’s a direct cause-and-effect relationship between caffeine and miscarriage.

“The problem with this study is that when people miscarry, a large percentage of those miscarriages are due to genetic abnormalities, and the researchers didn’t say whether these were normal or abnormal fetuses,” said Dr. Laura Corio, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

“Women are always worrying and wondering, ‘What did I do?’ Before we say a woman drank too much caffeine and that’s why she had a miscarriage, let’s see if it was an abnormal or normal pregnancy, said Corio.

“I think about 60 to 80 percent of miscarriages are due to genetic abnormalities,” she added.

That said, however, Corio does advise her pregnant patients to limit caffeine consumption. “Women have a responsibility to the fetus — no cigarettes, no alcohol and just one cup of coffee a day,” she said, noting that many store-bought cups of coffee contain far too much caffeine, so a woman has to be aware of how much caffeine is in her favorite coffee.

“Have less than 200 milligrams a day,” no matter what the source — coffee, tea, cola, chocolate, etcetera, Corio advised. She said caffeine has also been linked to low birth weights and smaller head circumferences.

Li also advised limiting caffeine to less than 200 milligrams a day, especially in the early months of pregnancy and in the preconception period.

More information

To learn more about caffeine and pregnancy, visit the American Pregnancy Association.

As a family physician, I have always  tried my hardest to  avoid unnecessary x-rays and CT scans.  Patients often come in hoping for an x-ray for a sprained ankle, jammed fingers and bruised ribs.   In most cases, the diagnosis can be made clinically and I try to talk them out of it when appropriate.   CTs have been a great addition to modern medicine and I could not imagine no having them.  However, they have become too easy.

It is important to realize that not all headaches are likely cancer and don’t need a CT.  Patients and their doctors need to be prudent when deciding whether or not to do a head CT.  A recent report  in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reports that our exposure to radiation has doubled since 1980, most of this medical radiation. 

It is estimated that in the years to come, 2% of all cancers will be x-ray/CT  induced.

About 62 million scans were done in the U.S. last year (2006) while only  3 million were done  in 1980. More than 4 million were in children, usually to rule out appendicitis.   A big reason for this is fear of lawsuits.   I have seen many patients go to the ER for constipation and gas and end up having a CT exam.  If the doctor would have simply spent a few minutes and talk to the patient, they could have made a clinical diagnosis. 

However, due to understaffed ERs,  fear of lawsuits and a missed diagnosis,  CT exams are done.  Primary  care physicians are also just a guilty. A simple tension headache or migraine in the ER will usually result in head CTs and likely will cause a fair number of brain tumors. Not all headaches are brain tumors, although if one knows someone with a brain tumor, they are usually more concerned.

In the end, we will likely make more cancers  than we ever thought.  Studies show that more than 1/3 of all CTs are inappropriate,  in other words, 20 million adults and 1 million kids have unneeded CTs.   At an average cost of $1500 per CT, over $31,500,000,000 will be wasted, that is $31 Billion, or $105/yr for every person in this country.  

How much radiation does a CT emit? A CT scan of the chest involves 10 to 15 millisieverts (a measure of dose) versus 0.01 to 0.15 for a regular chest X-ray, 3 for a mammogram and a mere 0.005 for a dental X-ray. 

In other words:

• 1 CT is  equivalent to 10 to 100  x-rays, depending on the type.
• 1 CT is equivalent to 3 to 5 mammograms
• 1 CT is  equivalent to  3000 dental xrays 

To sum it up, CT exams are life saving and a very vital part of medicine in 2007. However, discuss with your physician if it is really the right thing to do.

 For more about this article, visit here