Archive | July, 2009

Wanted: volunteers to eat chocolate every day for U.K. study

26 Jul

chocolate woman collage 4

Now here’s my kind of research study:  a U.K. university is looking for 40 women to find out if eating Belgian chocolate every day might help diabetics ward off heart disease.

The University of East Anglia, in its first round of this project, studied 150 women to assess the potential health benefits of eating dark chocolate.

Dr. Peter Curtis, of the UEA’s School of Medicine, says: “Our first volunteers are about to return for their final visit to see if the markers of heart health, such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels, have changed. A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease.” (more…)

Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised

25 Jul

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” That is the supremely simple healthy eating advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan.

“Another piece of advice from my book is: don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim,” adds Pollan, a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. “

My favourite heart-smart advice from Pollan:

“Simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. The broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised.” (more…)

When you’re having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

24 Jul

Lately, I’ve been nostalgically contemplating two classic books.  The first is a children’s story I used to read to my kidlets when they were little.

You may know it: Judith Viorst‘s wonderful book,  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, in which poor little Alexander has one of those days when everything goes from very bad to much worse as the hours go by.

To this day, my now-grown children will sometimes phone me and wail:

“Mum, I’m having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day today!”

The second book I’ve been reading is Harold Kushner‘s 1981 book When Bad Things Happen To Good People, which is recommended to patients and families facing death and bereavement at the Hospice where I’ve worked since 2000. Rabbi Kushner wrote this book after the death of his 14-year old son. It’s a useful guide for those desperately trying to make sense out of life events that make no sense at all.

The “Why?” question can easily morph into the “Why me?” question, inviting an avalanche of self-pity, isolation, anger and depression, especially for those of us with a diagnosis of heart disease. (more…)

What overweight women may have in common with drug addicts

23 Jul

My daughter Larissa and I have sometimes marvelled at a very strange packaging concept: re-sealable bags of chocolate chips.   Are there actually people out there, we wondered, who open a bag of these chips, pour out only the 3/4 cup they need for their cookie recipe, and then put the re-sealed bag back into the cupboard?

The August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition will help to explain this odd phenomenon for us. Apparently, some women don’t scarf down the entire bag on the spot – just because it’s been opened! When researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo gave similarly sinful snacks to both overweight and healthy-weight women, the healthy-weight women wanted less of the treat over time, but the overweight women kept wanting more.

In an earlier study, the same research team found that ‘food reinforcement’ (the term used to describe our motivation to eat) decreased in healthy-weight women but increased in overweight women when both groups were asked to consume large amounts of snack foods like M&M candies, potato chips or cookies for days at a time. Women in the overweight group shared characteristics like obesity and diabetes – both serious heart disease risk factors. (more…)

“But you don’t look sick…”

22 Jul

happy face hats

There have been some days when it would have been ever-so-handy if I were sporting a cast on my arm, or crutches, or a big fat neck brace. Now that would be a realistic indicator to the world ‘out there’ of how it can sometimes feel to have heart disease.

But instead, every day we heart attack survivors wake up, shower, get dressed in our usual clothes, comb our hair in the usual way, floss and brush just like we have always done – and go about our day, looking pretty much how we’ve always looked.

Few people ‘out there’ who don’t know us would look at us and even guess that we have heart disease.  Few would guess that I’m still unable to work at the PR  job I love, for example, or that even the smallest outing with family or friends takes every bit of stamina I can muster, or that I need to nap like a pre-schooler every day just to manage the ‘new normal’ that has become my life. (more…)

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