Archive for the ‘strategies for healthy aging’ Category

Do our kids have a bleak future?

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

As close to a salad as he'll get

I'm taking a break today from my series of posts on greenhouse gases, alternative energy source, volcanoes and global warming. All of those will affect the generations to come and those now growing up, but I want to re-examine another side of their issues. This morning I read two articles and one newspaper report on the heart health prospects for our American kids (and, by extension, kids elsewhere in the developed/rapidly developing world). The initial article came from a section of the Wall Street Journal I hadn't gotten around to reading yesterday and was about to recycle. Then I saw a title that caught my eye, "Kids' Hearth Health Is Faulted."

I found a CDC website with an explanation of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, NHANES. This is a continuation of a US Public Health Service effort started 40 years ago and is updated annually. Medically-trained interviewers may well come to your town and even to your front door someday. The data they obtain is used in many ways (I'll paste in a website that leads you to some comments on NHANES as well as to a link to a video).

Now a portion of the survey/study looked at 5,450 kids between 12 and 19, finding they were a long ways from matching the American Heart Association's (AHA) seven criteria for idea cardiovascular health (see 2nd link below to Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's article on the subject). The adult health measures, known as Life's Simple 7, are: 1). Never smoked or quit more than a year ago; 2). Body Mass Index (a measure of height versus weight) <25; 3). Physical activity on a weekly basis for 75 minutes (vigorously) or 150 minutes (moderate intensity).; 4). a healthy diet (four or more components meeting AHA guidelines); 5). total cholesterol <200 mg/dL; 6). blood pressure (BP) <120/80; and fasting blood glucose (AKA blood sugar) <100 mg/dL. The original article was published in the journal Circulation January 20, 2010 and is available free online. The metrics are slightly different for kids.

So where do our kids stack up? If you exclude eating a healthy diet, only 16.4% of boys and 11.3% of girls meet the standards for the other six criteria; if you include diet, none of them do. They don't eat four to five servings of fruits and vegetables a day; they also don't get enough whole-grains or fish and they consume far to much salt and sugar-sweetened drinks. Only one fifth of them even eat "fairly well."

drop that hamburger and run for an hour

Many of then also don't exercise on a daily basis for at least sixty minutes (50% of the boys do and 40% of the girls). More than a third are overweight or obese.

There's some hope: a just-published article in the New England Journal of Medicine, examining the data from four studies following 6328 kids, found that those who do manage to lose weight had lower risk for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, abnormal lipids and carotid artery disease.

So I'm heading to the health club and will read the 2010 Circulation tome on an exercise bike.

Thus far my one biologic grandson, about to be 12,  is physically active and slender. I'll encourage him to stay that way and the non-biologic grandkids to follow his example.

More on this subject to come.

Check out these articles:

Survey Results and Products from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

AHA Defines "Ideal" Cardiovascular Health

 

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Posted in Complications of Obesity, diabetes type 2, Exercise possibilities, Food Choices, Food-related disease, Life Expectancy, medically-oriented background info, our kids and their weight issues, physician initiatives, Publications, strategies for healthy aging, Unhealthy eating | 3 Comments »

Post-exercise protein choices, part 1

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Maybe a few more pounds than this

I received a comment recently on one of my April 2011 posts asking if I still had the April edition of the Nutrition Action Health Letter (NAHL) published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. My reader had lost her copy and wanted to know what protein supplement CSPI thought was reasonable. I found the info (it was creatine monohydrate with background research done by an associate professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan), emailed it to her and decided to review the whole topic in more depth.

I'm in the gym six or seven days a week for ~two hours or a tad more. I'm not trying to bulk up and never attempt the weights I see some of the really husky guys lifting.

As I walk in, I pass a lineup off supplements and see men especially, mixing up powders from large containers. I've never even considered the idea. I told my reader that the professor's credentials seemed reasonable, but she should ask her own physician before starting any supplements from a bottle. I also mentioned that I hard boil eggs, compost the yolks and eat the whites at meals that are otherwise low in protein.

But I reread the article in the April NAHL "Staying Strong: How exercise & diet can help preserve your muscles." The opening quote caught my eye. Miriam Nelson, the director of Tuft's Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity Prevention said, "Muscle is the absolute centerpiece for being healthy, vital and independent as we grow older."

I turned seventy in April, so it made sense to pay attention to her. I'm already active and doing some "resistance training" as was recommended later in the article. I saw also quotes from Ben Hurley, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Maryland (and husband to Jane Hurley, an RD on the NAHL staff).

Hurley has been a longtime student of strength training AKA resitance or weight training and feels it is the mode of choice for preventing muscle loss.

Notice I said preventing loss of muscles, not muscle building. I see men in our gym who are only a few years younger than me and are still bulking up deliberately. The sixteen to twenty-year-old youngsters are presumably doing so to impress the young women or because their friends do so, but why do that at age sixty plus?

I actually bought Stonyfield Organic Oikos yogurt

But back to protein intake; experts like the woman who holds the Distinguished Chair in Geriatric Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, say we should consume 30 grams of protein soon after exercising and that smaller amounts won't work in older adults.

So that's four ounces of skinned chicken breast (170 calories) or my egg white plus some Greek yogurt (with twice the protein of regular yogurt). I'll try that a while and then comment on the idea.

Posted in Exercise possibilities, Life extension, medically-oriented background info, Publications, strategies for healthy aging, supplements | No Comments »

Brian Wansink's "Mindless Eating" concept

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Don't fill your plate this way

I just read Brian Wansink's book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Wansink got a PhD in Consumer Behavior from Stanford and from 2007 to 2009 was the USDA's Executive Director for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. He's currently in an Endowed Chair at Cornell and won the humorous Ig Nobel Prize in 2007.

If you've never heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes, Google the term. They started in 1991 and were originally given for discoveries "that cannot, or should not be, reproduced." They are presented by Nobel laureates in a ceremony  sponsored by three Harvard groups, broadcast on NPR, on the Internet and on Science Friday the day after Thanksgiving. Some are thinly veiled criticism (BP was a co-winner in 2010 for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix). Most are for serious work that has a humorous slant (malaria-carrying mosquitoes are equally attracted to the smell of Camembert cheese and human feet; this led to insect traps in Africa being baited with that cheese).

In Wansink's case, his award was given in the Nutrition category for studying people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.

His work has focused on how our environment influences our eating habits. Wansink says we all make well over 200 food choices a day (what to eat, what to drink, how much of each) and we rarely know why we make those decisions or if they are helpful/healthy choices.

For instance, one of his experiments showed using smaller plates can help you serve and eat less. Another concerned fat-free foods, which may have nearly as many calories (and sometimes more) than the standard version of the same food item. In one of his studies, normal-weight subjects given low-fat foods actually consumer one-sixth more calories and overweight subjects took in nearly 50% more calories.

Wansink says low-fat foods have a "health halo;" we think they're better for us and therefore, in a sense, give ourselves permission to eat more of them.

Container size is another of his "food trap" areas. When presented with a larger package, a larger bottle of a soda or a short, fat glass to pour a drink into, we end up eating or drinking more.

He suggests a series of food trade-offs and food policies (if I want that doughnut, I need to spend an hour walking; I'll only eat snacks when I'm sitting at the table).

Try eating with these instead of a knife and fork

I liked Wansink's books, already had been using many of his strategies, but found others I can adopt. I think his studies and concepts are valid and his ~300-page publication well worth reading.If you do so, you may find yourself using chopsticks the next time you eat Chinese food. You'll likely eat less per bite and eat slower.

I may try them for American food.

 

Posted in Complications of Obesity, Life Expectancy, medically-oriented background info, Obesity, Publications, strategies for healthy aging, Unhealthy eating, Weight Loss | No Comments »

exercise and eating as you get older

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

you may not want to try this much weight

I was reading a food and exercise article this morning in a Nutrition Action Healthletter, a publication from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group whose watchdog goals I often support. CSPI has been around for forty years and when I looked at its board member list I saw the familiar name of David A. Kessler, MD, JD, the former FDA head and ex-dean of two medical school.

The April 2011 article my wife showed me was titled "Staying Strong: How exercise and diet can help preserve your muscles." Well I'm two days shy of my 70th birthday and a gym rat, there six days a week. And I eat well or so I thought. What's there for me to learn from this article?

I agreed with the opening quote from Dr. Miriam Nelson, the director of Tuft's Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity Prevention, "Muscle is the absolute centerpiece for being healthy, vital and independent as we grow older." Of course, having a functioning brain helps. But I wasn't about to quibble with a distinguished figure like Dr. Nelson, who is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, an Assocatiate Professor at Tufts and founder of the Strong Women program.

The Healthletter said most of us lose muscle mass starting in our late 30s and early 40s. I had certainly noticed that a few years back, in spite of being physically active. To reverse the process, or at least keep a decent amount of muscle, resistance training is advocated, I've been doing lower body exercise mostly (an hour+ on a recumbent bike), but recently added back some weight training for both upper and lower body.  Ben Hurley, a PhD Exercise Physiologist at the University of Alabama, feels muscle power is the key to fall prevention, a critical factor in the elderly.

Even if you fall and break a bone, like the oldest member of my wife's Strong Women, Strong Bones class, did, your chances of having a rapid recovery are considerably increased. Her docs were amazed at how she bounced back. Strength training, in several studies, has been shown to increase bone density.

What else did I need to do? The new information in this Healthletter was of the amount of protein we need as we age. I read the article and added a hunk (~4 ounces) of leftover beef to my cereal, milk and fruit breakfast. That advice came from researchers at UT Galveston (and numerous other universities), especially a PhD Associate professor, Dr. Douglas Paddon-Jones, who's worked with NASA on usingartificial gravity and amino acids to preserve muscle mass in astronauts.

Is leucine the key?

The bottom line was to eat more protein and to add some to your breakfasts and lunches as you age. One particular amino acid, leucine, appears to be most crucial. it's found in whey (in milk and cheese) and in fish, poultry, eggs and meat. I'll write more about timing of amino acid intake another time.

 

Posted in Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info, Publications, strategies for healthy aging | 2 Comments »