Category Archives: nutrition

healthy habits, nutrition

Junk food trashes your memory

  • high fat/sugar affected rat memory
  • sugar water also affected rat memory in context of healthy diet
  • only took a week to manifest, prior to any weight gain
  • preliminary data suggests this phenomenon is non-reversible
  • hippocampal inflammation detected

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159113005758

18-Dec-2013

A new study has suggested that even a short-term diet of junk food can have a detrimental and damaging effect on the brain’s cognitive ability.

http://www.foodnavigator-asia.com/Policy/Junk-food-can-junk-your-memory-in-a-week-suggests-new-study

Junk food trashes memory

complex adaptive systems, healthy habits, nutrition

Human evolutionary biology and mismatch diseases

  • Book: The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease
  • Questions our culture’s overwhelming focus on treatment of symptoms instead of prevention
  • We’re adapted to put on fat, not lose it. We’re adapted to be physically active, not inactive

Type 2 diabetes a ‘mismatch disease’ for our Paleolithic bodies

21-Oct-2013

When we examine the long list of noninfectious diseases that trouble modern society—which run the gamut in severity from flat feet to acid reflux, anxiety, certain cancers, high blood pressure, obesity and type 2 diabetes—it helps to look back, way back, to the root causes to find answers, said Daniel Lieberman, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/R-D/Type-2-diabetes-a-mismatch-disease-for-our-Paleolithic-bodies

mismatch diseases

facts & data points, healthy habits, nutrition

Six percent of strokes avoided by reduced salt intake – Netherlands

Six percent of strokes can be avoided by meeting sodium reduction recommendations: Study

18-Dec-2013

Achieving salt intakes in line with the recommendations may reduce stroke cases by 6%, but many consuming are still consuming way too much, says a new analysis from The Netherlands.

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/R-D/Six-percent-of-strokes-can-be-avoided-by-meeting-sodium-reduction-recommendations-Study

salt reduction leads to stroke reduction

 

facts & data points, healthcare, healthy habits, nutrition, policy

BMJ: Exercise just as good as drugs in war on major disease

  • BMJ article highlights relative effectiveness of exercise vs drugs for common conditions
  • Only drug/condition combo that was better than exercise was heart failure/diuretics

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10515917/Exercise-just-as-good-as-drugs-in-war-on-major-disease.html#!

Exercise just as good as drugs in war on major disease

Photo: Alamy

By , Health Correspondent

1:00PM GMT 13 Dec 2013

Exercise could be as effective as some of the best drugs which protect against major diseases, research has found.

A study of more than 300 trials has found that physical activity was better than medication in helping patients recovering from strokes – and just as good as drugs in protecting against diabetes and in stopping heart disease worsening.

The research, published in the British Medical Journal, analysed data about studies on 340,000 patients diagnosed with one of four diseases: heart disease, chronic heart failure, stroke or diabetes.

Researchers said the findings suggested that regular exercise could be “quite potent” in improving survival chances, but said that until more studies are done, patients should not stop taking their tablets without taking medical advice.

The landmark research compared the mortality rates of those prescribed medication for common serious health conditions, with those who were instead enrolled on exercise programmes.

The research found that while medication worked best for those who had suffered heart failure, in all the other groups of patients, exercise was at least as effective as the drugs which are normally prescribed.

People with heart disease who exercised but did not use commonly prescribed medications, including statins, and drugs given to reduce blood clots had the same risk of dying as patients taking the medication.

Similarly, people with borderline diabetes who exercised had the same survival chances as those taking the most commonly prescribed drugs.

Drugs compared with exercise included statins, which are given to around five million patients suffering from heart disease, or an increased risk of the condition.

The study was carried out by researcher Huseyin Naci of LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science and Harvard Medical School, with US colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine.

He said prescription drug rates are soaring but activity levels are falling, with only 14 per cent of British adults exercising regularly.

In 2010 an average of 17.7 prescriptions was issued for every person in England, compared with 11.2 in 2000.

Mr Naci said: “Exercise should be considered as a viable alternative to, or alongside, drug therapy.”

Dr John Ioannidis, the director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said: “Our results suggest that exercise can be quite potent.”

Other medications compared with exercise included blood-clotting medicines given to patients recovering from stroke, and alpha-glucosidase inhibitors given to patients on the cusp of developing diabetes.

Only the patients who were recovering from heart failure fared best when prescribed drugs, where anti-diuretic medication was most effective.

However, they said their analysis found far more trials examining drugs, than those which measured the impact of exercise.

They said there was a need for more research into the benefits of exercise for those suffering from serious health problems.

Researchers stressed that they were not suggesting that anyone should stop taking medications they had been prescribed, but suggested patients should think “long and hard” about their lifestyles, and talk to their doctors about incorporating more exercise into their daily routines.

complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthcare, healthy habits, nutrition, policy, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology, storytelling

Forcing the prevention industry – a 10 year journey

Vision

  • The Future of Human API www.thehumanapi.com
  • Forcing the prevention industry into existence
  • Stage Zero disease detection and treatment

Critical trends:

  • lab-in-a-box diagnostics
  • quantified self
  • medical printing

When these trends converge, there’ll be an inflection point where a market is established.

Health data moves from system of record >> system of engagement.

Promoting the evolution from a Product mentality to a Market mentality

As treatment starts to focus on Stage Zero/pre-clinical disease,  it turns into prevention.

 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gJHaoqeucX8

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnnosta/2013/12/12/the-asymptotic-shift-from-disease-to-prevention-thoughts-for-digital-health

The Asymptotic Shift From Disease To Prevention–Thoughts For Digital Health

It’s been said that good artists borrow and great artist steal.  And I believe that Picasso was right.  So, I guess I’m somewhere between a thief and a artist and that suits me just fine.

I’ve stolen from two great thinkers, so let’s get that out of the way.  The first isDaniel Kraft, MD. Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. He’s the founded and Executive Director of FutureMed, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. He’s also a go-to source on digital health. I’m stealing “zero stage disease” from Dr. Kraft. Simply put, it’s the concept of disease at its most early, sub-clinical stage.  It’s a point where interventions can halt or change a process and potentially eliminate any significant manifestation of disease.

The second source of inspiration is Richie Etwaru.  He is a brilliant and compelling speaker and a champion for global innovation, Mr. Etwaru, is responsible for defining and delivering the global next generation enterprise product suite for health and life sciences at Cegedim RelationshipManagement. His inspiring video, The Future of Human API really got me thinking.

At the heart of Mr. Etwaru’s discussion is the emergence of prevention–not treatment–as the “next big thing”.

EtwaruSlide

Ok, nothing new so far.  But the important changes seen in the digital health movement have given us a profound opportunity to move away from the conventional clinical identification of a that golf-ball sized tumor in your chest to a much more sophisticated and subtle observation. We are beginning to find a new disease stage–different from the numbers and letters seen in cancer staging.  The disease stage is getting closer and closer to zero.  It’s taking an asymptotic path that connects disease with prevention. The point here is that the holy grail of prevention isn’t born of health and wellness.  Prevention is born out of disease and our new-found ability to find it by looking closer and earlier.  Think quantified self and Google Calico.

And here lies the magic.

We all live in the era of disease.  And the vast majority of healthcare costs are spent after something happens. The simple reality is that prevention is difficult to fund and the health-economic model is so skewed to sickness and the end of life that it’s almost impossible to change. But if we can treat illness earlier and earlier–the concept of an asymptote–we build a model where prevention and disease share the very same border.  They become, in essence, the same. And it’s here that early, early, early disease stage recognition (Stage Zero) becomes prevention. The combination of passive (sensor mediated) observation and proactive life-style strategies for disease suppression can define a new era of health and wellness.

Keep Critical! Follow me on Twitter and stay healthy!

 

healthy habits, nutrition, policy

A Big Fat Crisis

From: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2013/12/weekend-reading-a-big-fat-crisis/

Weekend reading: A Big Fat Crisis

Deborah A. Cohen.  A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Forces Behind the Obesity Epidemic—And How We Can End It.  Nation Books, 2013.

Cover: A Big Fat Crisis

Here’s my blurb:

Deborah Cohen gives us a physician’s  view of how to deal with today’s Big Fat Crisis.  In today’s “eat more” food environment, Individuals can’t avoid overweight on their own.   This extraordinarily well researched book presents a convincing argument for the need to change the food environment to make it easier for every citizen to eat more healthfully.

And from the review on the website of the Rand Corporation, where Deborah Cohen works:

The conventional wisdom is that overeating is the expression of individual weakness and a lack of self-control. But that would mean that people in this country had more willpower thirty years ago, when the rate of obesity was half of what it is today. Our capacity for self-control has not shrunk; instead, the changing conditions of our modern world have pushed our limits to such an extent that more and more of us are simply no longer up to the challenge.

complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, musings, nutrition, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Prevention Economics

Right. So I’m now comfortable with the idea that the greatest failing of modern healthcare is for it to have extended lifespan without having extended healthy life years. The challenge then, is to extend fully productive life to something far closer to our life expectancy. This can be done with a plant based diet, fasting and moderate exercise. No pills. No fads. Jus a new norm.

But how do we pay for it? Determine the economic cost of extending a life’s productivity by a year seems like a reasonable first step. Then take a piece of that?

Bring in the direct beneficiaries of such a change – the life insurers, super funds and broccoli farmers.

What a great bunch of business partners they’d be.

Giddy up….