Flu shots and pneumonia

An important flu follow-up

I told you a while ago about the benefits of the flu vaccine – fewer infections, fewer hospitalizations.

And that it was much less risky than many thought – no increased risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, for example.

Well, here’s yet another pro-flu vaccine report.

It’s in the journal, Science Translational Medicine, and the upshot here is that the researchers conclude that infection with a flu virus increases the risk of developing bacterial pneumonia 100-fold.

Underline that: that’s a 100 times higher risk of getting pneumonia if you get the flu than if you don’t get it.

Why this matters so much is that pneumonia is the world’s number one infectious disease killer, and while vaccines against pneumonia lower the risk of getting pneumonia, they clearly don’t eliminate that risk.

So it’s nice to note that there is something else you can do to prevent coming down with pneumonia: get your flu shot when it becomes available.

Health risks of extreme sports

The harder you work out, the greater your risk of some kinds of heart disease.

Huh?

Yup. That’s sort of the conclusion of a 20-year-long study of more than 52000 Swedish cross-country skiers that was published in the European Heart Journal.

In this study, the researchers were able to get this huge data base from a very popular – and elite (these skiers all have to work out intensely all year long) - cross-country ski race in Sweden and were then able to analyze the runners’ histories.

And what they found is quite remarkable.

These athletes had a significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with one of several different types of heart arrhythmia including atrial fibrillation than a non-athlete.

Not only that, there was a direct linear “dose” link with exercise so that the athletes who completed the most races had the highest risk of Not only that, the more races completed, the higher the risk.

And even more interesting, the better the finishing time, the higher the risk, that is, the fastest athletes – presumably the most fit – had a much higher risk for an arrhythmia than slower racers.

Bottom line: participation in exercise in moderation is a healthy lifestyle habit, participating in extreme exercise may not be (I think, is not) healthy.

Chicken lickin' cancer

Coffee is the ultimate health drink; chicken is the ultimate health food.

Well, maybe chicken is not the ultimate health food – a good case can be made for beans, nuts, some berries – but chicken is a great food to eat a lot of for several reasons.

First, chicken contains lots of nutrients.

After all, it’s where those great eggs come from.

Second, if you’re a meat-eater (and if you aren’t, nothing I write about chicken matters anyway), if you eat lots of chicken, you’re much less likely to eat lots of red meat and there’s no doubt that eating lots of red meat and other meat foods like hot dogs is tied to extra health risks.

Third, it’s very hard to screw up a chicken dish, although my wife once made avocado/salsa chicken which our entire family – including the cook – judged to be inedible.

But that was a once off. Never again.

So – chicken is great and no wonder it’s linked to lots of positive health benefits, the latest being a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology which found that among 20000 women, those ate the most chicken as a teenager had the lowest risk later in life of being diagnosed with a colonic polyp, one of those pre-cancerous lesions that very often goes on to become cancerous.

I guess the headline should read: Chicken lickin’ cancer.

Head injuries and strokes

Yet another reason to really, really, really take concussion in kids seriously.

“Concussion” is a term that is gradually being replaced by the term “traumatic brain injury” in large part because the latter is a much better expression of what happens when you get your bell rung, and in part, too, I guess because it sounds more serious when it’s called a traumatic brain injury so perhaps we’ll finally pay these injuries the attention they’ve long deserved, especially in kids.

TBIs have been linked not only to potentially serious immediate consequences – reduced ability to perform, reduced cognition, significantly higher risk of re-injury – but also to longer term serious consequences,  particularly those on cognition and memory.

And now, in a new study published in the journal Neurology, researchers have linked traumatic brain injuries to a future higher risk of stroke, especially in younger individuals, those under age 65.

How significant is this link?

According to the lead researcher,” the overall link between TBI and stroke was . . . as large as the link between the strongest stroke risk factor, high blood pressure.”

Keep your kids – and yourself – protected as best you can from head injury, starting with more attention to protecting the head in sports, not to mention with always wearing a helmet on a bike and on the ski hill – yes, you, and not just your kids.

Cutlery affects how you eat

This is won’t shock too many cooks, and probably not that many easters: presentation matters, by which I mean that how food is presented has a lot to do with what we think of it and in the end, how much of it we eat.

In an interesting study, a couple of researchers focussed their attention on cutlery, you know, knives, spoons, etc to see what effect different coloured and different sized cutlery had on the sensation of eating because it matters, it really matters what tools you choose to help you eat, and they found lots of differences such as for example, white yogurt tasting better – according to the test subjects – that pink yogurt when both were served on a white spoon but the reverse was the case when they used a black spoon.

So you want your kids to eat plain Greek yogurt, which they should, they really should?

Serve them only with white spoons.

This has much wider implications, however, than simply getting kids to eat more yogurt.

In the words of the researchers on a press release that accompanied the story , "How we experience food is a multisensory experience involving taste, feel of the food in our mouths, aroma, and the feasting of our eyes. Even before we put food into our mouths our brains have made a judgment about it, which affects our overall experience."

They go on:” So, when serving a dish, one should keep in mind that the color of the food appears different depending on the background on which it is presented (plate or cutlery) and, therefore, tastes different. This may also be used to help control eating patterns such as portion size or how much salt is added to food."