Archive for July, 2006
The Center for the Advancement of Health has recently published a report (see article in HealthDay) that could be taken right out of the Hilton Head Health Institute’s playbook. There’s only one sure thing you can do to age well: live the healthy lifestyle.
And again, the issue isn’t that you don’t KNOW these things. It’s that you don’t do them. As Nancy Whitelaw of the Center for Healthy Aging puts it, “people know the message…the challenge is to make it operational in our daily lives.”
July 31st, 2006
If you’ve been to H3I, you have heard a lot about portion control. Now there’s a study reported in HealthDay (yes, research even on this) that says if you use smaller dishes, you will tend to eat smaller portions. And smaller portions is a good thing.
Lead author Brian Wansink of Cornell University said “doubling the size of someone’s bowl increased how [food] much people took by 31 percent.” If you are a member of the clean plate club like most of us are, that’s a 31 percent increase in calories, too.
July 31st, 2006
A new study by Dr. Peter Muennig and others of Columbia University finds that women suffer more loss of quality of life due to being overweight than men do. See the summary by Reuters Health.
This unusual study compared the number of perfectly healthy years a person of ideal weight would have to the number an overweight person would have. This makes intuitive sense when you think that being overweight is associated with so many acute and chronic diseases.
Why do women lose more quality of life? No one knows for sure, but the researchers speculate that women experience more stress from their weight because they are confronted with much more social stigma than men. Living a Healthy Lifestyle might mean you need to deal with social perceptions and how they affect your feelings.
July 28th, 2006
One of our favorite newsletters is beginning a feature called Foundations of Wellness. We have been referring to the Hilton Head Health Institute’s Healthy Lifestyle program as the “foundation of health“. We like the idea of “wellness”, too. Check it out.
July 27th, 2006
“Glycemic index” is a measure of how quickly a food is broken down and produces sugar in the bloodstream. Low glycemic index foods include complex carbohydrates like whole grains that break down slowly as compared to sugars which break down fast and shoot a spike of glucose in the blood.
A recent study from the Archives of Internal Medecine showed that diets with a low glycemic index promoted weight loss better than diets otherwise comparable but with a higher “dietary glycemic load” (see the report from Reuters Health). A diet high in complex carbohydrates with a low glycemic load (i.e., few foods that create a blood sugar spike) yielded weight loss plus lower total and LDL (”bad”) cholesterol.
This diet is consistent with the recommendations of the Hilton Head Health Institute’s meal planners and educators (click here for the H3I website).
Roger Sargent
July 26th, 2006
Here’s a really compact way to define the healthy lifestyle, taken from Circulation, the Journal of the American Heart Association. The study found that middle aged and older men who met the following guidelines had a significantly lower risk of developing heart disease than those who had few healthy habits. The 5 healthy lifestyle behaviors were:
- Not smoking
- Maintaining a BMI of less than 25
- Exercising at least 30 minutes a day
- Drinking alcohol in moderation (defined as 1/2 to 2 drinks a day)
- Eating healthfully, including a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, cereal fiber, lean meats, nuts, and legumes, with a minimum of saturated and transfats, over a period of at least 5 years.
The payoff? An 87% lower risk of heart disease!
July 25th, 2006
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