Summer is over, but hopefully you have frozen some blueberries for use over the winter months. As with many colorful fruits and vegetables, blueberries are rich in a variety of healthy anti-oxidants. Blueberries seem to carry a specific advantage in their ability to
Reading on this site, I see, under “Eating for a Healthy Pregnancy”, under the Foods to Avoid list is
In a study focusing on health professionals, attention focused on the association between fruit consumption and risk of developing type 2 diabetes. What they found was that simply eating three servings a week of fruit didn’t seem to affect whether or not the fruit-eater subsequently developed diabetes. Reasonable as that seems, one might find it surprising to learn that the actual numbers associated with specific fruits varied widely.
Researchers in Scotland report that when after reviewing the health records of over 37,000 people born since 1950, they found that those people whose mothers had been obese at their first prenatal checkup tended to die prematurely from various causes, compared to the children born to normal weight mothers.
It has been previously noted that diabetes raises the risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis, although the mechanism has not been well understood. Rather than focusing on blood sugar levels, the researchers in a newly published study compared bone density readings to fasting blood tests that looked at both blood sugar and insulin levels.
So far just one small pilot study, but what an amazing finding! Jennifer Stamps and colleagues working with patients at the University of Florida’s Brain Institute have noted in Alzheimer’s patients a consistent defect in the sense of smell and describe an easy way to test for it.
The last part of my series addresses the fitness questions and challenges for those who are metabolically healthy, who even carry the right amount of body weight, but want to know what nutritional steps they can take to optimize their performance.
I guess we aren’t: despite concerted effort on the part of the CDC, state and professional educators, it seems that physicians are still over-prescribing antibiotics, and probably that many people are over-consuming them.
A fascinating study was released this summer that addressed the worrisome problem of sacropenia, discussed previously on this site. In general the risk of sarcopenia (muscle wasting or muscle loss) has been feared to be inevitably increased during periods of weight loss, assuming that the body would always burn both fat and muscle for fuel in the process of losing excess body weight.
I know your physician has your best interests at heart when he or she notices a slight increase in your LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and suggests that you further eliminate fats from your diet, or consider starting a statin medication.