Health and Wellness Archives - Page 14 of 17

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

At least one of the reasons we are getting so much fatter on average is that we’re so surrounded by people who are overweight that we’ve lost the sense of what a normal weight should be.

At least that seems to be the case in the US, and I am sure it’s not much different up here.

A recent Harris Interactive/Health Day survey asked a representative group of American adults how much they weighed and how tall they were. The respondents were then asked whether they thought, by BMI status, if they were normal weight or overweight.

A substantial number of the survey takers – 30% – who were overweight by BMI criteria (a BMI over 25) replied that they felt they were normal weight, while 70% of those who were obese thought they were “merely overweight”.

BMI is not a perfect measure of weight. For example, since muscle weighs a lot, a very muscular person can have a high BMI but be normal weight.

That said, most of us are not too muscular (some of us – me, for example – aren’t even slightly muscular) and so for us, BMI is a pretty good measuring rod for what our weight should be.
Most experts say that you should be aiming for between 20 and 25, although I am a lot more liberal than that, so I figure that if you’re working out or just being quite active, you can allow yourself a few extra pounds without worrying about it (never mind “allowing” yourself; how about “accepting” instead because honestly, how do you keep those (few?) extra pounds off anyway as you get older, eh?)

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

As the days get colder, a reminder for all of you who are at higher risk of heart disease (which is just about anyone over the age of 40, I think) that when the weather turns cold, the number of heart attacks goes up.

In fact, a few months ago, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that when the temperature in the UK drops by one degree Celcius, the number of heart attacks goes up by about 200.

There are a number of potential reasons starting of course with the fact that people become more sedentary when winter sets in, that people who should know better still go out and clean snow off their driveways after a snowfall (well, if you’re like me, you better clean your walkway if you want to keep peace at home), and probably because cold temperatures have a biological effect on the body, perhaps by making the blood more “Sticky” and hence leading to more clots, such as those that occur in some heart attacks and strokes.

So, when the temperature goes down, remember to try to keep warm, to avoid overdoing it when working outside, to keep working on reducing your other risk factors for a heart attack, and if you can afford it, of course, to spend as much time as you can in Hawaii.

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

If your kids are fat, they’re dying too quickly.

I realize that’s a pretty scary headline but it’s really true and this is a very serious health matter, mainly because so many surveys reveal that many (perhaps even most) parents of overweight and especially of obese kids don’t realize how fat their kids are or how serious the situation is for their kids.

So to underline the seriousness, you should pay attention to a very depressing study presented at the recent Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2010.

The average age of the kids in this study of 63 obese kids was 13, and the researchers concluded that although they all still seemed to have normal blood pressures and normal cholesterol levels (compared to a control group of 55 non-obese kids), their blood vessels nevertheless had the kind of stiffness (the more stiff your arteries, the greater the risk of heart disease and strokes) normally not seen until middle age, and then only in middle-aged people with heart disease.

In other words, unless something was done to alter their status, these kids were in serious danger of developing heart disease probably as early as their young adult years.

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

One of the more intriguing pathways being followed by some researchers the last few years is the one that follows along the theory that lots of the health outcomes that we experience as mature adults are actually a function or a result of what happened to us not only 20 or 30 years earlier, that is, in adolescence or early adulthood, but rather that many of the health conditions we develop in midlife and our senior years are actually a consequence of what happened to us in early childhood, even infancy, and perhaps even in utero.

For example, it’s now very well established that the odds of developing osteoporosis in adulthood are highly related to the exercise we do – or that we don’t do – when we’re much younger. The same relationship – what we do or don’t do as kids or even younger leading to disease much later in life – holds for some cancers (breast cancer in adults, for example, has been linked to exercise in our young years, as the risk of melanoma is related to sun exposure in childhood, and others), some cases of high blood pressure and heart disease and strokes, and so on.

Well, according to a fascinating recent study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some cases of dementia in adulthood may even be traced to what happened to our moms while we were still in utero.

In this study, the researchers conclude that people who’d been exposed to severe prenatal malnutrition in the Netherlands during World War II (that is, their moms were literally starving while pregnant with them) had significantly higher odds of suffering early cognitive decline in adulthood compared to those who’d not been similarly exposed to malnutrition in utero, that is, people who’d been fetuses carried by moms suffering severe malnutrition during the war were at higher risks of cognitive deficits in midlife than their peers who had been carried by moms who had enough to eat while pregnant.

Just another clear indication why a village raises a child, because when a pregnant woman doesn’t get enough good food to eat, we all pay the costs eventually.

London Drugs bettercare – Foot Care

If you have trouble with your feet, you are not alone. It is estimated that over 85% of the population suffers from some sort of foot problems. About one-quarter of all the bones in the human body are located in the feet, and in a lifetime the average person will have walked enough miles to have travelled around the world nearly five times! Given all that wear and tear, it’s not surprising that so many things can go wrong.
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Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

One of the most important lessons I try to leave with my audiences, especially when I’m addressing a group of seniors, is this: it’s never too late to change and to start doing healthy lifestyle things you’ve long neglected or even never done.

So even when you get into your nineties – and the great thing is that the over-80 demographic is probably the quickest-growing demographic in Canada – there is always something more you can do to make your life more pleasant, to give you more energy, to help you cope with the inevitable conditions that accompany aging, to reduce your risk of illness, to keep your brain sharper, and even perhaps to prolong your life. Although, if you are going to make a change, one other bit of advice: go about it slowly because there’s really no rush.

And to illustrate the truth of that advice, that is, that it really is never too late to make healthy lifestyle changes, a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston followed 2231 patients who had what is called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction, that is, in these people, the left ventricle of the heart (the bearing chamber that sends blood into the rest of the body) wasn’t working properly any more as a result of a heart attack.

Of these people, 463 had been smokers at the time of their heart attack, and although most of us would think that none of them would continue to smoke after suffering a heart attack, we know from many studies that a majority of smokers continue to smoke after a heart attack, which was the case in this study, too: 268 of these people continued to smoke.

At the end of 5 years, comparing the smokers with the ones who’d quit, 15 % of the non-smokers had had a 2nd heart attack compared to 23 % of the smokers.

So repeat after me: it’s never too late to quit, to start doing more exercise, to eat better, etc. It just takes will.

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

I’m often asked by viewers, readers, listeners, my public forum attendees for: the “best” form of exercise, and to that there’s really only one answer, to wit, the best form of exercise is the form of exercise you will actually do. So, although swimming is a terrific exercise, if you hate water like I do (loathe the stuff, either in me or to lie in it), then there’s really no point in undertaking a swimming program because you’ll quit the 2nd time you realize you have to get wet to swim.

If I had to recommend one form of exercise for a typical large population, however, I would instantly pick walking.

Walking has many benefits: it’s aerobic (or it can be), it’s easy to do anywhere (even in a hotel room or a mall), it can be done inside (on crummy weather days), it’s cheap (if you’re spending a lot on “great” runners, you’re probably wasting a lot of money) , and it’s social (it’s easy to walk with friends).

Plus, regular brisk walking has been linked to multiple health benefits, such as improved brain function, which is nicely illustrated in a study from the University of Illinois (published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience), in which researchers took 65 previously sedentary seniors and split them into two groups.

One group was told to do stretching and toning exercise, the others were put into a brisk walking group.

At the end of a year, the “toners” showed no improvement in cognitive scores (compared to when they entered the study) while the brisk walkers had significantly improved cognition scores, and had good improvements in certain measures of brain functioning that were investigated via functional MRIs.

Bottom line: walk more – it’s good for your brain.

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

London Drugs bettercare – Foot Care

Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

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Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

London Drugs bettercare – Foot Care

Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

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