Dietary Enigmas
asking questions about our diet
-
Archive of "minerals" Category
Vitamins - may stave off illness
Oh boy - how long have people being arguing over this one. The Medics and the Pharmaceutical lobby say all you need is drugs for health but the alternative view that good quality food and where necessary vitamin and mineral supplementation is the right approach to take. So which one is right - i know what works for me.- a good Low GI diet first and foremost with minimal processed food
- supplementation of key vitamins and minerals known to be deficient in our diets and lifestyles
- short term use of pharmaceutical drugs only where essential - antibiotics etc. and only for short periods
At last the real research is showing the truth. The pharmaceutical led research into vitamins is always going to be suspect as they ahve a vested interest in proving it doesn’t work and the invariably use synthetics which we know don’t work. See below:
By Steve Connor
Saturday, 16 February 2008A 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.
The Greatest Tragedy of All Time
This film was a personal response to our over reliance on the established medical treatments and it expresses some of my personal views. If you want to see more please go to website www.squidoo.com/greatesttragedye mail me
Healthy Mentors - here to help you
Trehalose - the safe sugarToo fat - not fat enough - where is the truth
OK - i am going crazy with this whole thing of overweight/obesity - lets get one thing straight - well several actually.
- Carrying too much fat around our middle puts us at far greater risk of developing cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more.
- being undernourished also damages our health.
- eat the right food, supplement the nutrients that are missing, combat the chemical toxins with antioxidants, exercise
Now Doctors Say Its Good to be Overweight
By David Usborne, The Independent
November 13, 2007
A startling new study by medical researchers in the
The study, published yesterday in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association, runs counter to almost all other advice to consumers by saying that carrying a little extra flab — though not too much — might help people to live longer.
Struggling dieters, used to being told that staying thin is the best prescription for longevity, are likely to be confused this morning if not heartily relieved. While being a bit overweight may indeed increase your chances of dying from diabetes and kidney disease — conditions that are often linked with one another — the same is not true for a host of other ailments including cancer and heart disease, the report suggests.
In fact, scanning the whole gamut of diseases that could curtail your life, being over weight is, on balance, a good thing. The bottom line, the scientists say, is that modestly overweight people demonstrate a lower death rate than their peers who are underweight, obese or — most surprisingly — normal weight.
The findings will be hard to dismiss. They are the result of analysis of decades of data by federal researchers at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in
Being overweight, the report asserts in its conclusions, “was associated with significantly decreased all-cause mortality overall”.
“The take-home message is that the relationship between fat and mortality is more complicated than we tend to think,” said Katherine Flegal, the lead researcher. “It’s not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all situation where excess weight just increases your mortality risk for any and all causes of death.”
That the CDC has even published the report and thus threatened to muffle years of propaganda as to the health benefits of staying slender has enraged some medical experts.
“It’s just rubbish,” fumed Walter Willett, the professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s just ludicrous to say there is no increased risk of mortality from being overweight.”
Not that the CDC results are an invitation to throw caution to the winds and take cream with everything. The scientists are careful to stress that the benefits they are describing are limited to those people who are merely overweight — which generally means being no more than 30 pounds heavier than is recommended for your height — and certainly do not carry over to those who fall into the category of obese.
Obesity has been declared one of the main threats to health in the
The scientists at the CDC first hinted at the upside of being overweight a few years ago. Since then, however, they have expanded the base of their analysis, with data that includes mortality figures from 2004, the last year for which numbers were available, for no fewer than 2.3 million American adults.
Highlighting how a bit of bulge might help you, the scientists said that in 2004 there were 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in the
Aside from escaping diseases, tipping the scales a little further may also help people recover from serious surgery, injuries and infections, Dr Flegal suggested. Such patients may simply have deeper bodily reserves to draw on in times of medical crisis.
Not everyone in the medical profession was surprised or angry about the study. “What this tells us is the hazards have been very much exaggerated,” said Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science and biostatistics at the
“I believe the data,” added Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who believes that a BMI of 25 to 30 — roughly the the so-called overweight range — “may be optimal”.
Critics, however, were quick to point out that the study was concerned with mortality data only and did not take account of the quality of life benefits of keeping your weight down. The study “is not about health and sickness”, noted the obesity researcher Barry Popkin of the
The report “definitely won’t be the last word”, said Dr Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society, who pointed out, in a report released last week by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, that staying slim was the main recommendation for avoiding cancer.
Others in the American medical community, while a little bemused, were withholding judgement. “This is a very puzzling disconnect,” said Dr JoAnn Manson, the chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The suggestion that a bit of extra weight may assist patients recovering from an infection or surgery was of no surprise to Dr Flegal. “You may also have more lean mass — more bone and muscle,” she said. “If you are in an adverse situation, that could be good for you.”
In their conclusions, the authors of the study note: “Overweight … may be associated with improved survival during recovery from adverse conditions, such as infections or medical procedures, and with improved prognosis for some diseases. Such findings may be due to greater nutritional reserves or higher lean body mass associated with overweight.”
Those of us mostly likely to benefit from a little bulge beneath the belt, the study adds, are between 25 and 59 years old, although there were also some advantages for people over 60.
Strontium: An Alternative Treatment For Osteoporosis
This article caught my eye the other day and as i know several people who are potentially at risk from Osteoprosis I thought that it would be a worthy post.
Paul Barton
by Teri Lee Gruss
(NewsTarget) Research spanning a century has shown that strontium, a naturally occurring trace mineral, is an important component of healthy bone tissue. Researchers from around the world have found that, in pharmaceutical doses, it dramatically increases bone density and reduces risk for fractures in women with osteoporosis.
National Osteoporosis Foundation statistics indicate that “osteoporosis causes more than 1.5 million fractures annually: 700,000 vertebral, 300,000 hip, 250,000 wrist and 300,000 fractures at other sites”. [1] Sadly, “an average of 24% of hip fracture patients aged 50 and over dies in the year following their fracture.” [2]
As our population ages in huge numbers, finding a safe and effective treatment for osteoporosis is more important than ever before. Dr. Susan Brown, director of the Osteoporosis Education Project (OEP) in East Syracuse, N.Y., says “Our bone crisis worsens each year, despite intensive public health and disease treatment efforts”. [3]
(more…)