Clipmarks | dmegivern's 'diet' clips

Nexium Approved for Children

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:34:39 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: In my humble opinion, children with lots of stomach acid are overly stressed or eating too much carb-laden food. I think diet interventions would be better.

Clip Source: www.healthday.com

GERD Drug Approved for Younger Children

Ages 1 to 11

THURSDAY, Feb. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Nexium, a popular drug to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) in adults, has been approved for the same short-term use in children ages 1 to 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.

Two forms of Nexium (esomeprazole magnesium) were approved for younger children -- a delayed-release capsule and a liquid form. Doses approved for this age group are half of those approved for older children, the agency said. The drug was previously approved for children ages 12 to 17.

Nexium is among a class of drugs called proton pump inhibitors, which limit production of stomach acid and help heal erosion of the lining of the esophagus.

Common side effects among younger children who used Nexium were headache, diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, gas, constipation, dry mouth, and fatigue. The drug's safety and effectiveness haven't been evaluated in children younger than 1 year old, the FDA said.

Hunger in the U.S.A.

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:36:45 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern

Clip Source: www.thehungersite.com

Hunger in the U.S.

Families in Crisis

It is a tragic reality that the United States, one of the richest nations in the world, is also plagued with a poverty-driven hunger crisis. The statistics tell the troubling story. In 2005:

Every day, millions of children in America go to bed hungry.

12.9 million (17.8%) children under the age of 18 were in poverty

20.5 million (11.3%) of people aged 18-64 were in poverty

Poverty is forcing millions of Americans into a hunger crisis. Their hunger emergency is defined by food insecurity, which is the lack of access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy life.² Families find themselves buying cheaper and less nutritious food, or cutting entire meals out of their diet, just to make ends meet. Increasing over time, this pattern leads to chronic malnutrition, affecting children and families in profoundly destructive ways.

The Hidden Poor

Working Poor

Children

Rural Poor

Solving Hunger

Chocolate and Bone Density

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:16:11 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: I think there is a hidden variable, like exercise, missing, but who knows?

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Eating chocolate could give you weaker bones

Eating lots of chocolate could lead to weaker bones and a greater chance of suffering a fracture, according to a study.

Women who ate chocolate every day were found to have less dense bones than women who ate it less than once a week, Australian scientists said.

The study comes less than a month after The Lancet journal warned against viewing chocolate as a health food because the antioxidants called flavanols are taken out because they taste bitter.

According to the new study, women who ate chocolate daily had an overall bone density 3.1 per cent lower than those who consumed it less than once a week.

Critics said the difference was extremely small, and it was likely healthy women ate a generally better diet and exercised more.

Genes Help Turn Carbs into Fat

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:13:01 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Gene Helps Turn Carbs Into Fat

A gene determines whether highly processed carbs get stored as fat or burned away. But deactivating the gene to prevent fat build-up has its own problems. Cynthia Graber reports.

It’s no secret that there’s an obesity epidemic going on. Many researchers blame highly processed carbohydrates, such as high-fructose corn syrup and white flour. Now scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison have started to tease out the role of the liver in converting those calorie-rich foods into fat. The researchers isolated a gene in the liver called SCD-1. The gene codes for an enzyme that synthesizes fatty acids. Mice with the normal gene were fed a diet high in processed carbs. The mice converted those carbs into fat and stored that fat in the body. But mice that lacked that SCD-1 gene just burned all those carb calories. And stayed skinny.

So the solution is, sadly, what you already knew: eat fewer processed carbohydrates.

New Diet Drug is the Anti-THC

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:10:55 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

New Diet Drug in Battle of the Bulge

Want to lose weight but lack the willpower to just say no to fatty foods and sweets? Help may be on the way. The first clinical trials of an experimental weight-loss drug show that it helps curb appetite—and burn more fat—even at low doses.

Researchers report in the journal Cell Metabolism that taranabant, developed by drug giant Merck, is the second drug found to be successful in fighting flab by blocking cannabinoid receptors (responsible for the psychological effects of marijuana a.k.a. Cannabis sativa) in the brain's reward circuitry.

But lest you think more is less—literally—take note: The medical team said higher doses had some potential negative side effects, most notably nausea, vomiting and moodiness. This was not entirely unexpected, Heymsfield said, given that it has the opposite effect of marijuana, which has been known to quell nausea associated with cancer treatments and, also, to calm rather than irritate people.

Many Americans Cannot Afford to Eat Right

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:48:03 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern

Clip Source: healthday.com

Many Americans Can't Afford to Eat Right

THURSDAY, Nov. 22 (HealthDay News) -- In this land and season of plenty, low-income and rural Americans continue to have difficulty finding healthy foods that are affordable, a new study finds.

One study shows that low-income Americans now would have to spend up to 70 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables to meet new national dietary guidelines for healthy eating.

And a second study found that in rural areas, convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and grocery stores -- even though the latter carry a much wider choice of affordable, healthy foods.

People with more money eat more fruits and vegetables than those with less money, research shows. In turn, poorer people also assume a greater disease burden relative to their wealthier counterparts.

However, a low-income family of four would still have to spend a very large percentage of its food budget on fruits and vegetables in 2005 to meet national healthy-diet guidelines.

Tags: diet, income, nutrition, poverty

Sleep, Food, Exercise, and Weight

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:23:06 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: There are more and more articles linking poor quality sleep with weight gain and vice versa.

Clip Source: www.healthday.com

High-Fat Diet Can Disrupt Body's Clock

Like a midnight raid on the fridge for junk food -- sleep often suffers, study says

TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- There's more bad news about a high-fat diet -- it disrupts the body's 24-hour internal (circadian) clock, which regulates sleeping, waking, eating, as well as the daily rhythms of many metabolic functions, U.S. researchers say.

The team also found that a high-fat diet caused changes in genes that encode the circadian clock in the brain and in peripheral tissues (such as fat), resulting in reduced expression of these genes.

"The answer is, yes; alterations in feeding affect timing. We found that as an animal on a high-fat diet gains weight, it eats at the inappropriate time for its sleep/wake cycle -- all of the excess calories are consumed when the animal should be resting. For a human, that would be like raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night and binging on junk food," Bass said.

Tags: sleep, weight, food, diet, exercise, health

Good Grief, Our American Diet is Deadly

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:52:33 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: I've heard a lot of conservatives claim that poor people in the U.S. are obviously well-fed, because they are more likely to be overweight. This flies in the face of science suggesting that unhealthy and fattening foods are cheap and readily available, while healthy foods are hard to find in poor communities and they are expensive.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Immigrant children struggle with America's junk food

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Adrian McHargh grew up active and skinny in Kingston, Jamaica. An enthusiastic swimmer, he had the pristine waters of the Caribbean for a playground until two years ago, when he and his family moved to America.

In suburban Atlanta, things changed fast. The new foods were cheap, unhealthy and hard to resist: toaster waffles, corn dogs and the chocolate syrup Adrian liked so much he guzzled it straight from the bottle.

Within months, Adrian was in trouble. He'd packed on 30 pounds. Doctors said he had hypertension, high cholesterol and was at high risk for type 2 diabetes.

"We really would like to encourage immigrant families to continue the kinds of eating that they ate in their country of origin because our studies show that the longer they've been in this country the more likely that their children are going to get fat," Crawford says.

Tags: immigration, obesity, nutrition, diet, exercise, culture, u.s.

I Blame Sugar

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:10:51 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: Americans have easy access to high starch and high carb foods. More than low fat, this constant strain on blood sugars is the issue to address.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Report: National strategy needed to fight fat

(CNN) -- Americans are already among the fattest people in the world, and they just keep packing on the pounds. A new report finds that obesity rates have swelled during the last year in 31 states with not one state reporting that its obesity rate shrank.

Nationwide, two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight, according to the fourth annual report from the Trust for America's Health, titled "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America." The report's co-author says the government needs to treat this trend as an epidemic that threatens the health of Americans and put in place a national plan to combat obesity.

"We need something like that in obesity that says this is what every agency of the federal government is doing. [It's] what we can do to directly affect this problem and motivate individual communities and businesses to play their role as well," Levi said.

Tags: diet, obesity, fat