• Archives

  • Mar1

    Child Obesity Starts Early…Two Books to Help

    Posted in: Wellness and Health

    The idea that childhood obesity is about food and starts early is not new, especially for my Paging Dr La Puma readers and for Jamie Oliver fans (I’m a huge fan).

    What is new is that parents do not recognize obesity in their kids, and that “normal weight” is now publicly perceived to be much greater than 85th percentile for age.

    90 per cent of excess weight gained by girls before puberty is before they are five years old. The figure is 70 per cent for boys.

    Preventing childhood obesity begins early…really early. Flavor preferences begin in the womb. Your baby will like what you eat. Btw, eat for 1.1 (about 10 percent more), not 2!

    Eat, Sleep, Poop (already a to-be-Hollywood movie by the producers of Four Christmases) is just on time. Pediatrician Scott Cohen writes about his baby’s first year, and predictably, finds that much of what he was taught in medical school doesn’t work for him as a new dad.

    Like American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed Pediatrician Laura Jana’s Heading Home with Your Newborn, Cohen’s book includes decking out the nursery, introducing your baby around, and everything about early child development.

    The average preschooler sees 642 cereal ads per year just on television, almost all for cereals with the worst nutrition ratings.”

    The kids cereals with the best ratings?

    Mini-Wheats, Organic Wild Puffs, Honey Sunshine, Mighty Bites and Clifford Crunch. You might not have heard of them, but I hope you will.

    And food companies have a great opportunity too: emulate their successful, heavily advertised marketing approaches for healthier ones. Make their sites totally engaging: other cereals turn into toys or playthings. Why not healthier cereals?

     

  • Jan19

    Grand Rounds: Can Food Be Health Care?

    Posted in: Wellness and Health

    When Food as Medicine Grand Rounds appeared 3 years ago, it was a toddler, pulsing with Inspiration and Experimentation.

    Now, it’s skipped adolescence and it’s going to Washington! But as Jake Sully notes: “…all energy is borrowed; at some point you have to return it.”

    Weight Loss
    @precordialthump unveils his Utopian College of Emergency for Medicine (UCEM) regimen for combating post-Christmas corpulence: ME (more exercise) and ELF (eat less food). Actually, EDF (E Different F).

    Healthline’s Nancy Brown dissects the data: a medium movie popcorn and soda gives 1610 calories and 60 grams saturated fat. BYO, please…a theme for 2010.

    Chef Paul Lynch cooked a week’s meals for diabetic Mrs. Ippolito in an Oldways Whole Grains Makeover for a Grand Prize Winner. No doubt a break from higher GL carbs.

    DiabetesMine offers much needed relief from the “daily manual pancreas” with an artificial pancreas, which is one way around all those Cheetos.

    And then there are adolescent females with Type-1 diabetes who have a two to four-fold higher incidence of eating disorders. Insulin omission is their weight loss MOA. Scholarly Terri Schmitt shows us why.

    Contrast that with MedLibLog’s touching food-for-thought post on childhood obesity, and the proper role of unsaturated fat in food.

    Money
    David Williams’ Business Blog smartly dissects the Cookie Diet (and its reported $18m 2008 revenues).

    Henry Stern can’t believe that you can donate blood and get beer, and wonders if pot (brownies?) is next.

    Reason sees low-methionine foods as both key to longevity and a potential pot of gold. That’s lots of peppers and berries, btw. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

    Pleasure
    Fitness Fixer’s Dr Bookspan, bless her heart, takes pleasure in the rhythm of cooking and giving and gardening.

    Theresa at thefoodhunter finds literal calf strength in learning to cook local, better than any trainer. You go girl.

    Dr Bates’ personal trainer is loyal, handsome and photogenic. Yours can be too.

    Eve Harris manages to tie together Food TV’s Alton Brown’s volitional weight loss and integrative oncology in a healthy piece of her mind. Wish there were more…she really gets it.

    Reform
    With photos of Martha Stewart and Dan Barber in the open air of a New York summer event, Eddie C’s beautiful story going from food activist to a prestigious botanical institution shows where reform could head. Grow more of your own. Get sick less.

    That poetry is complemented by Medical Whistleblower and his smart and funny Health Care Reform Reformed Christmas Carol in Rhyme.

    Colorado health insurance insider (the only U.S. state <19% obesity) states: “the main reason health insurance premia are out of control: we’re too fat and we overuse our healthcare system.” Ouch. Off the couch!

    Each TV hour watched increases the CVD death rate by 18%, according to Happy Hospitalist. Watching, not being on:). Though as hard as Dr Oz is working, I wonder.

    Barb at Florencedotcom suggests viewing the well-referenced AHRQ Patient Safety site.

    But where are food allergens, chemical contaminants (no BPA, via ChefMD’s blog) in hospital food, no cheeseburgers after bypass, and soda as off-limits for pediatric patients? Food as medical error is not on the safety radar. Yet.

    Follow Dr Gawande: his last New Yorker piece was about farming. And food.

    N.b. I liked other submissions too, though they were not about food: the heroicism of clinicians volunteering in Haiti (Inside Surgery); docs leaving medicine (Dr Gwenn); fighting tamponade (with dayglo photos) from Bongi; social media in Aussie hospitals from @sandnsurf; the musings of distractible internist Dr Rob; and epinephrine auto-injectors from AllergyNotes.

     

  • Dec16

    Give Me the Recalled Flu Shots and I'll Give You Flu Fighting Foods

    Posted in: Wellness and Health

    By now, most people know that nearly 20% of kids’ Swine Flu Shots are less potent than when they left the lab.

    And that 800,000 doses are being recalled, even though most of them have already been given!

    The CDC says not to worry, and not to re-administer. Kids up to 9 years old should get two doses about a month apart.

    But if you’ve been following along, you know there are powerful weapons in your kitchen medicine cabinet that can help you fight the flu.

    Flu fighting foods. Imagine if your kid got a bowl twice monthly of my Simple Sopa Azteca (an easy chicken soup rich with chicken flavor and vegetables, and btw, antioxidants and anti-inflammatories). A meal and just maybe, a medicine too.

    And yes, there’s real research and tastier recipes to boot: check out Epicurious’ feature on flu fighting foods as well.

    Are you using foods to stay well in Winter?

     

  • Sep13

    Flu Prevention: Best Foods for Exercisers

    Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging, Wellness and Health

    Health reform, including flu prevention, starts in the kitchen.

    One misconception: H1N1 (swine flu) virus is not spread by food. And though there are other reasons you may not want to eat pork, you cannot get swine flu (or influenza A or B) from eating pork or pork products.

    You also cannot get it from tap water or from drinking water. Or from flu shots: 5-10 percent of people have mild flu-like symptoms for about 24 hours after a flu shot, but that is not the flu.

    What you can do is wash your hands often, for 15-20 seconds, with soap and water or with an alcohol-based hand cleaner until your hands are dry. This is the best and easiest prevention.

    H1N1(Swine flu) virus and all other flu is likely spread in the same way: person to person through coughing or sneezing, by other people who have the flu.

    The best foods for flu prevention are

    *those rich in the flavonoid quercetin (research done in mice, post-exercise, showed stressful exercise increased flu susceptibility, quercetin canceled it out; same thing in research done in cyclists!): apples, onions, broccoli, all high in quercetin…and flavonoids reduce inflammation

    *(as a bonus, organic tomatoes have higher quercetin levels than conventionally grown ones!)
    *chicken soup (actually reduces mucus and facilitates coughing it up: fantastic ChefMD Sopa Azteca de Pollo to help (disclaimer: it’s mine).

    *green tea: high in flavonoids, and anti-viral activity against influenza.

    Enjoy! And stay healthy!

    John La Puma, MD
    www.drjohnlapuma.com

     

  • Apr17

    Lower Your Health Care Costs with What You Eat

    Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging

    Your Financial Prescriptions: Seven Tips for Cutting Your Medical Costs (Wall Street Journal 04.07.09) completely missed the biggest potential tip of all: what you eat.

    The right health insurance? Check. Compare hospitals? Check. The right health insurance again? Check. Check your hospital bill? Check. Taking the meds you need? Check again.

    Food? Exercise? One line, out of hundreds.

    Dollars re-allocated from a conventional diet to a better one have been shown to deliver a significant return on investment. Not to mention a potentially tasty one.

    An Australian 2007 cost-effectiveness review of ten nutrition interventions found that each were more cost-effective per life-year gained than antihypertensive medications and the cholesterol-lowering medication simvastatin. Cost savings ranged from $1364 to $13,939 per life-year gained.

    A Swedish 2007 cost-effectiveness study found the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study for men and women at risk to be “cost-saving from the healthcare payers’ perspective,” and increase survival by 0.18 years.

    A French 2006 cost-effectiveness study based on the randomized, controlled Lyon Diet Heart Study and conservative assumptions, found the Mediterranean Diet to be “highly cost-effective for persons after a first myocardial infarction and represents an exceptional return on investment.”

    But you don’t need to wait for better food in the cafeteria to lower your direct medical costs and improve productivity. Although that would help.

    Spend a little more at the grocer’s and you’ll spend a lot less at the doctor’s. And be happier, too.

     
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