Health News

First up, Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It will be on the Dr. Oz show tomorrow. Catch it if you can.

EDITED: Taubes filmed today but the episode won't air until 3/7. Sorry about the confusion. I got bad info intially.

Next, Ketogenic Diets and Physical Performance.

"Impaired physical performance is a common but not obligate result of a low carbohydrate diet. Lessons from traditional Inuit culture indicate that time for adaptation, optimized sodium and potassium nutriture, and constraint of protein to 15–25 % of daily energy expenditure allow unimpaired endurance performance despite nutritional ketosis."

Hibiscus Powder and Metabolic Syndrome.

"Significant differences in total cholesterol, HDL-c, and the TAG/HDL-c ratio were found when the means of absolute differences among treatments were compared. Therefore, in addition to the well documented hypotensive effects of Hibiscus sabdariffa (HSEP), we suggest the use of HSEP in individuals with dyslipidemia associated with Metabolic Syndrome."

The study used a powder in a standardized dose, but no one is really selling this as supplement yet as the studies seem to be newish. Amazon has a loose powder you could buy, but who wants to deal with that? Fortunately, lots of herbal tea blends use Hibiscus--look for the Celestial Seasonings Zingers at the grocery store.

The FDA knew there were quality issues with the manufacturer of contaminated baby wipes that killed a toddler.

Court upholds law blocking patients from suing vaccine manufacturers. Interesting read. To date, more than $1.9 billion has been paid out to compensate patients for vaccine injuries.

Oral magnesium supplementation reduces insulin resistance in non-diabetic subjects – a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial

"The results provide significant evidence that oral Mg supplementation improves insulin sensitivity even in normomagnesemic, overweight, non-diabetic subjects emphasizing the need for an early optimization of Mg status to prevent insulin resistance and subsequently type 2 diabetes"

Health News

Googling Symptoms Helps Patients and Doctors. Medicine has to accept that patients Google and that doesn't make all patients cyberchondriacs either.

Oddly, I actually went on the quest for an answer prior to the internet's heyday. I had to take premed classes (earning straight As, thank you).

And walk 12 miles in the bitter cold with no shoes to do it. Old school, people. Hard a$$.

Here's the contrarian view of a whiny a$$ doctor: When the Patient is a Googler. Frankly, this guy can Suck It. My diagnostic accuracy has routinely been higher than that of medically trained personnel. So why would I think I don't know anything? Because experience proves me right time and time again and the doctors are always behind the eight ball.

Medicine is fallible. It fails patients miserably ALL THE TIME. Forget Google, what we need to be talking about if we want things to get better is how and why medicine fails patients.

Patients may be annoying (so are the doctors, FYI people in general are annoying) but they aren't anyone's enemy.

Gabrielle Giffords has great insurance and access to health care. What about the rest of the people in her home state? I did a cursory search to see if any media outlet has bothered to look at health care access, insurance and costs of the shooting as a socioeconomic exercise. This has not been part of the public discourse at all, which is unfortunate considering all the hoopla over health care reform.

Did everyone who got shot that day get care and access the same as Giffords? I would like to know.

The newlywed couple I blogged about earlier, they are from Arizona. Fighting to get health care while Giffords flies to Texas for state-of-the-art care simply because of who she is and how much money she makes.

It's pretty clear our care is rationed by class and that good, innocent people are suffering.

Listen up? You want good medical coverage? Get elected to Congress. Better yet, become President. Otherwise forget it because health care reform isn't even close to bridging the gap.

All but one of published studies on statins flawed. No good news on statins this week. The drug companies aren't looking at all for adverse side effects. Don't know, don't care. Looks like science is, rightfully so, calling Big Pharma on it.

Here's the original Cochrane Review abstract that blew the whistle. However, it's kind of devoid of meaningful data. The info I'm seeing in mainstream media is not reflected, which is annoying because the news bytes don't jive with the data from which they are derived. It's all 'statins are evil and useless' in the media and that's not really what the abstract says. Hopefully, a more authoritative article will come out and connect the dots.

Okay, so now for the most interesting news of this post: How I outsmarted my toddler.

She was recently determined to stay up all night.

In fact she was so riled up that we let her get up and hang out with us while we watched the last of Easy A (cute cute movie). The plot went waaaaaay over her head, but I just told her when she was in trouble to come talk to her momma. I hope she remembers that.

So the movie ended and I tucked her into bed (for the umpteenth time) around 11:30pm.

"Mommy, I'm going to stay up alllllllllll night."

"Oh. Great idea. Do you know how you do that?"

"How?"

"You lay really quiet and still in your bed. If you don't, you won't be able to stay up all night, okay?"

"Okay."

And that's what she did, right up until she fell asleep.

Don't mess with momma.

I almost started singing "Stay awake, don't go to sleep." Ha.

Health News

Weight loss pollutes your blood. I would also say that weight loss triggers autoimmune issues although I can't say if that is independent of or because of the pollutants. I don't think it's a coincidence that I rapidly lost 20lbs, got sick and ended up in the hospital last year. In my body, weight loss is not benign and I notice that I am actually sicker when losing weight than when overweight.

Still waiting for science to catch up to this observation.

1/2 of the people in the US have pre-existing conditions. It's not death panels I am worried about, it's the chronic disease panels trying to economize management of conditions like asthma that worry me.

Genes influence friendships. Fascinating stuff. The science says alcoholics flock with other alcoholics as part of their DNA. Also, by the way, most of us are related by virtue of the fact that Charlemagne was quite prolific in the bedroom. This was explored in a Smithsonian article years ago. All it takes is some guy powerful enough to 'sow his seed' wherever and whenever he wants to genetically link millions of people.

Low carb is gaining ground. An excerpt says it all:

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

It's a confusing message. For years we've been fed the line that eating fat would make us fat and lead to chronic illnesses. "Dietary fat used to be public enemy No. 1," says Dr. Edward Saltzman, associate professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University. "Now a growing and convincing body of science is pointing the finger at carbs, especially those containing refined flour and sugar."

Americans, on average, eat 250 to 300 grams of carbs a day, accounting for about 55% of their caloric intake. The most conservative recommendations say they should eat half that amount. Consumption of carbohydrates has increased over the years with the help of a 30-year-old, government-mandated message to cut fat.

And the nation's levels of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease have risen. "The country's big low-fat message backfired," says Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "The overemphasis on reducing fat caused the consumption of carbohydrates and sugar in our diets to soar. That shift may be linked to the biggest health problems in America today."