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Monday, June 4, 2012

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Good eating is not a punishment, but an opportunity

Turn on your TV, open a newspaper, or boot up your computer and you're bound to get some confusing news about diet and health. Don't let it drive you to distraction or to the donut shop. Instead, remember four key facts:
   1. What you eat affects your appearance, your energy and comfort, and—above all your health.
   2. America is on the wrong track. Two out of every three of us are overweight or obese. Diabetes and high blood pressure are on the rise. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are distressingly common. Many factors contribute to these complex problems, but the basic reasons are simple: we eat too much, we choose the wrong foods, and we don't get enough exercise.
   3. Scientists know what diet is best for health (see below). The fine print has changed and is likely to change some more, but the key facts are in.
   4. Good eating is not a punishment, but an opportunity. If you know why it's important and what to do, you'll find it enjoyable and satisfying. And if you establish an overall pattern of healthful nutrition, you'll have plenty of wiggle room to savor the treats that matter most to you.

A software for predicting bone loss risk

Iranian researchers have managed to develop software that predicts the risk of osteoporosis, the silent bone disease associated with fragile fractures, with high accuracy.
Osteoporosis is the thinning of bone tissue and loss of bone density over time. The silent disease, which is more common in women older than 50, is often diagnosed too late when the patients suffer severe bone loss or related fractures.
Physicians usually diagnose osteoporosis through measuring bone mass using different techniques including Bone Mineral Densitometry (BMD) which exposes the patients to certain amounts of x-ray radiation.
The Dual-emission X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which is considered as the most common and standard method in this regard, lacks desirable accuracy especially in studying lumbar spines.
The new software developed by Amirkabir University of Technology researchers showed promising results in determining the risk of bone loss as well as diagnosing patients with osteoporosis, said lead researcher Maede Mohammadifar.
The accuracy of the new software in predicting the risk of osteoporosis is higher than 97 percent, said Mohammadifar, adding that the new method can also help physicians detect individuals who need to undertake BMD as a screening test.
According to the evaluation study, the software, which provides the radiography images of the five lumbar spines, has also showed 81 percent accuracy in diagnosing individuals suffering from the disease.

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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Combating childhood obesity may start in the womb

children whose mothers developed diabetes while pregnant are at increased risk of being overweight by age 11, a new study shows.
The study also found that children born to obese mothers are more likely to have a weight problem than children born to lean mothers.
“The best advice is to get lean and fit before you get pregnant,” Dr. Lois Jovanovic of the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute in Santa Barbara, California, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
Earlier this week, First Lady Michelle Obama launched an action plan to combat childhood obesity. Number one in the list of recommendations was the need to stress the importance of starting a pregnancy at a healthy weight and maintaining a healthy weight throughout.
The new study, Jovanovic said, offers elegantly measured data to support this recommendation. “In order to prevent obesity in the next generation we have to do a whole lot for women in their childbearing years,” she said.
Diabetes that develops during pregnancy when there is no history of the disease is called gestational diabetes. Up to 8 percent of pregnant women will develop gestational diabetes. Being overweight, when combined with the “right” genes, is an important risk factor.
children born to mothers with gestational diabetes are often heavier at birth than children born to mothers without pregnancy-related diabetes. In the current study, Dr. Sandra Hummel and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich, Germany set out to determine the impact of mom's gestational diabetes and weight status on the child's risk of being overweight in childhood and becoming “insulin resistant” -- a precursor to full blown diabetes.
They examined data from two large German studies involving 1,420 children born between 1989 and 2000. Two hundred thirty-two children were born to mothers with gestational diabetes, 757 to mothers with Type 1, or “insulin-dependent,” diabetes and 431 to non-diabetic mothers. Blood samples and body measurements were taken several times until the children were 14 years old.
The researchers found that mother's weight early in pregnancy was the strongest predictor of her child's overweight status and resulting insulin resistance.

Dolphins offer clues for wound healing

The ability of dolphins to curb infections and quickly heal their injuries may offer new clues for the treatment of human wounds, scientists say.
"Much about the dolphin’s healing process remains unreported and poorly documented," wrote Michael Zasloff, adjunct professor at Georgetown University Medical Center who interviewed dolphin handlers and marine biologists to find answers about the miraculous self-healing power of the species.
In his letter published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Zasloff recounts several documentations about how quick dolphins manage to heal the wounds caused by severe shark bites, adding that some of these wounds which are larger than a basketball are cured in weeks without causing notable pain or infection or leaving a significant scar.
"If I saw this in a human being, I wouldn’t believe it," Zasloff added. "It should awe us. You have an animal that has evolved in the ocean without hands or legs, which swim faster than we can, has intelligence that perhaps equals our social and emotional complexity, and its healing is almost alien compared to what we are capable of."