Another day, another miracle weight loss diet

This one is from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech where researchers claim to have reviewed the literature on the subject and concluded that a liter of water a day helps melt the pounds away.  

Another report covered at the same time concluded that people who drink 2 cups of water before every meal will lose more weight than people who don’t.

I suppose the theory is that water fills you up and you won’t eat as much consequently.

Maybe.

But count me as a skeptic: I figure that no matter how much you drink every day, if you are overweight and you tend to favour crap in your diet, you are going to have a very tough time eliminating enough of that garbage to make any serious dent in your weight.

Worth a try, though.

But only if you like water.

I hate the stuff, so thanks, but no thanks from me.

Placing kids on their backs to sleep

According to a Canadian study, the good news about more parents placing more kids on their backs to sleep is that the rate of SIDS has indeed declined, as was expected.

The corresponding negative news is that with this new trend, nearly half of infants are now diagnosed with “flat heads”, that is, a flattening of the skull because the bones in an infants skull are so soft and malleable.

Happily, most flat heads disappear with time, although a few cases are permanent, but all flat heads, even those that resolve spontaneously, will cause at least some consternation for the parents until the situation resolves.

Usual lesson here: the Law of Unintended Consequences says that for every good response to some change, there will be – at least one, often many – unintended negative consequence.

Reading is great for the brain

Full disclosure: my wife is co-owner of 3 kids’ bookstores, although to keep the stores being successful, given my track record in financial matters, I am not allowed to play any role whatsoever in how the stores are run (I married smart!).

But the reason for that disclosure is to tell you about a study in the journal Neurology that has concluded that the habit – I would call it the necessary task – of lifelong reading is great for the brain.

In this study, researchers were able to do repeated cognitive testing on just under 300 volunteers, who when they died, allowed their brains to be analyzed for Alzheimer’s disease changes.

Quite clearly, those subjects who had used their brains for more intellectual pursuits than the others had better cognitive functioning into later life – less deterioration, and starting their declines at a later age, too – and their brains also had fewer of the changes we associate with AD compared to their peers who were not as intellectually inclined.

The earlier in life that good habit was acquired, the better, although starting to do more intellectual pursuits – crosswords, reading, etc- at any age was associated with a positive change.

Read to your kids, folks! It’s great for them, but hey, it’s also good for you.

Sleep and diet

If you’re overweight and you’re also tired all the time, the two are probably connected.

It’s long been observed that sleep problems lead to weight problems but it’s never been totally clear why this is so although my own observation – one test subject, namely me, is that when I’m tired, I tend to visit the fridge much more often, and it’s not because I’m looking for veggies.

Rather, in my case, it’s nearly always to check out the ice cream stash.

And two new studies show that I’m probably a prototype for why weight problems and tiredness from lack of sleep are connected.

In one study, a small group of healthy volunteers were sleep deprived by getting locked in a sleep lab for a few days.

The researchers found that those subjects ate significantly more calories when sleep deprived than they did when fully rested.

In a second study, researchers have noted – this will shock you, I’m sure - that sleep deprived teens tend to eat more junk food and not more veggies when they’re tired.

What could be more tempting, eh, than to advise that if you want to watch your weight, you should sleep it off, although that’s also obviously very hard for many people to do in our stress-filled, hurry-up world.

Prostrate cancer interventions

Money talks. In fact, it often shouts.

And medicine alas, is often not an exception so that some things that are done in this business are done, well, more for a monetary gain than for the best interests of patients.

And as uncomfortable as that thought may be, it’s really very hard to come up with any other kind of explanation for a recent study published in JAMA that found that among American urologists, “advanced-treatment technologies for prostate cancer . . . has increased among men with low-risk disease (and) high risk of non-cancer mortality”.

In plain English, that means that there’s been a huge rise in expensive new technology diagnostic techniques and (way more important) surgical interventions for men who are very unlikely to be adversely affected by prostate cancer.

In other words, American urologists are doing lots of surgery to treat and lots of investigation to find prostate cancer in men who are very unlikely to die from prostate cancer, such as old, sick guys, who are much more likely to die of something else even if they end up with prostate cancer.

This is much less likely to be a problem in Canada, but still, we are increasingly doing things in this business outside of Medicare, so it’s always a good idea – when possible - to get 2^nd and even 3^rd opinions about interventions that may not be necessary, especially, I suppose, if they’re also costly.

Heart failure and cancer

Heart failure is a thoroughly depressing and frustrating form of heart disease in which the heart muscle simply, well, fails: it gets gradually weaker and weaker so that eventually any effort at all is too much effort – no capacity to do anything – and ultimately, ends in death.

The average time from diagnosis to death with heart failure used to be under 5 years although we’ve developed better treatments and we’ve begun to be able to diagnose it earlier (which allows earlier intervention) so that that prognosis is not quite as bad as it used to be, but it’s mostly still a relentless, progressive and terminal illness.

Not good, in other words.

But hey, if that isn’t enough to persuade you to work on keeping heart healthy, here’s yet another reason to minimize your risk of heart failure: apparently heart failure patients are being increasingly diagnosed with cancer, as well.

This is according to a review in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Now it could just be that heart failure patients are being monitored more closely than in the past, and a consequence of better monitoring is a greater likelihood in finding a malignancy.

It could also just be that the unfortunate consequence of keeping heart failure patients alive longer is that they also then are alive longer to come down with cancer – advancing age is the largest risk factor for most cancers.

Or it could also be that some of those treatments are increasing the risk of cancer.

Bottom line: stay heart healthy and this won’t be a worry for you.