Health Archives - Page 12 of 18

Dr Art Hister – Food and Noise

The ultimate reason that airline food is so tasteless

One of the major changes in the way airlines work over the last few years is that they hardly ever feed you on a flight any longer, although given the way airline food generally tastes, that’s probably a very good thing for most of us.

In fact, for me, it’s been a real bonus because I’ve now learned to arrange a home-made tasty package to take with me onto a plane every time I fly, and believe me, when I take out my take-away sushi package, I often end up being the envy of my seatmates.

But here’s the thing: why does airplane food taste so, well, “bland” is the nice term I’ll use, since this is a nice column for nice people, after all.

Well, this will probably surprise most of you but the reason airline food tastes so “bland”, according to a recent study is not that airlines use the lowest common denominator ingredients for those mass-produced meals or that they pre-cook the meals several weeks in advance (pre-wash them may be more like it) or that they use the blandest recipes to try not to aggravate too many passengers.

Nope, turns out, according to this study in the little-read journal, Food Quality and Preference, that it’s flying itself that makes food taste so tasteless.

Apparently, when study subjects were blind-folded and asked to taste some dishes, the foods they ate tasted less salty and less sweet to them – more bland in other words – than when they were not wearing blindfolds, although the food also tasted “crunchier” with blindfolds on.

Bottom line: if you want to enjoy your mama’s cooking to the max, don’t eat her meals while parked beside a highway playing the boom box machine but rather try to eat them when locked in a sound-proof room.

Dr Art Hister – Food Handling and Germs

I don’t believe in very many rules, but I must say that the one rule that’s never let me down, at least not in the medical realm, is the Rule (or Law) of Unintended Consequences, which goes something like this: no matter how much good we think we’re doing for no matter how many people, somewhere along the line someone is going to suffer a negative consequence from all our intended do-gooding, and those people will suffer consequences that we never dreamed of, Horatio.

So, I was not at all surprised that according to a study in the Journal of Food Protection, food handlers who wear gloves – which those of us of a suspicious nature are always ensuring that our sandwich makers are wearing– may actually pass on infections more easily to the people who eat that food than people who handle food with only their bare hands but who wash their hands frequently and thoroughly, which is what you hope all food handlers are always doing, even your mom or spouse.

Apparently, you see, the heat and moisture that accumulate under gloves are a terrific breeding ground for germs, and since gloves are never much more than imperfect barriers to germs, those bacteria can then be more easily transmitted to the food those gloves hands are handling.

One of the more obvious solutions to this problem is to make sure that anyone who touches your food also changes their gloves quite often, although that’s clearly a very hard thing to establish.

So better yet, perhaps: make your own lunch.

Dr Art Hister – Smoking and Pregnancy

For any woman who is pregnant right now (or even one thinking of getting pregnant one day) and who is still smoking, here’s a very encouraging piece of news.

A study that looked at 50,000 pregnancies concluded that if a woman gave up smoking soon after she conceived, she had the same chance of a giving birth to a normal-weight baby as a woman who has never smoked.

And the reason that matters is that low birth-weight is a major marker for lots of other health problems. Not to mention that smoking is also related to other key problems during the pregnancy and during labour, as well as in the post-partum period. And, that smoking by a parent, either the mom or the dad, and worst of all by both, is linked to some pretty negative health measures in children forced to live in a smoky environment.

Anyway, the bottom line from this study is pretty simple and should hit home hard to any woman still smoking after conception: quit smoking early in your pregnancy, and there is no harm to the baby.

Dr Art Hister – A Prescription for Everyone

Here’s a very cute study from Scandinavia that should apply to nearly everyone reading this.

Apparently, doctors in Sweden have been able to “prescribe” physical activity to their patients for a few years now.

I’m not quite sure how they do it although they probably just write an (illegible) prescription that says something like: for Sven Peterson, 35 minutes of cardio every day, 15 minutes of weight-training three times a week, and no more than 2 hours of TV a night. Repeat 3 times a year as necessary.

But however it’s done, it’s apparently working to get more Swedes to be more active, because in this study, the researchers say that they followed 98 individuals in 4 different areas of the country, all of whom had been prescribed “physical activity” by their doctors. They found that the majority “follow their prescription and reduce their sedentary leisure time”.

Now, there may just be something about Swedes, that makes them more likely than people elsewhere to stick to a prescription like this (one that they could easily just ignore, just like so many people ignore medication prescriptions from doctors). But I doubt it and I think that many Canadians would also follow a prescription such as this if only someone prescribed it to them.

So, in my ongoing attempts to make every Canadian be as healthy as they can be, here’s a prescription for anyone reading this from your local media doctor (and hey, it’s also in a format that you are able to read properly): do some cardio exercise (but first make sure to check with your own doctor that your heart can take it) 3-4 times a week for 30 (or more) minutes, some weight-training (and make sure you know how to do this properly by getting someone who’s an expert in it to show you proper technique) for 15-30 minutes, 2-3 times a week, and work on your balance and flexibility as often as you can think of it.

And make an appointment to see me again in 6 months. Next, please.

Dr Art Hister – Prescription Drug Use

If you’re a typical senior, chances are you’re on at least 2 prescription drugs, and many of you are likely on several.

That’s according to a survey just carried out in the US where 88.4 % of people over the age of 60 were found to be on at least one prescription drug (I figure the other 11.6 % were probably not seeing a doctor), and 31 % of all Americans (not just seniors) were taking 2 or more prescription drugs, while a staggering 11% were taking 5 or more prescription drugs.

And note that those are drugs by prescription; most of those people, I am sure, were also taking at least one, and probably several over-the-counter preparations.

Now there would be nothing wrong with those numbers, if all those drugs were 1) prescribed for very good reasons, in other words, they were being taken either to prolong life or promote health, 2) they were all safe, 3) they were all effective at doing what they are supposed to do, and 4) there were very few drug interactions to worry about.

The sad truth, however, is that many prescription drugs are iffy in their effectiveness, their safety is always at issue (even after many years), and drug interactions are a huge concern, so that the more drugs you take, the greater the potential problems.

And unfortunately, the way our health care system works, it’s not always possible to go through all those variables in the typical visit with the family doctor.

Not only that but indications are always changing, that is, what the doctor told you about why you need a certain drug when you first got that prescription may no longer be valid, yet many people continue on prescriptions for years and years without asking if it’s still necessary to do so.

That’s why one of the most important friends you can make is your pharmacist. Your pharmacist is often the best person to ask about what a medication is supposed to be doing, what side effects you should expect, what potential complications to look for, what drug interactions you should be aware of, etc, etc.

Go ahead, the next time you get a prescription filled, talk to your pharmacist about that drug – you’re going to be pleasantly surprised at what you learn.

Dr Art Hister – Male Menopause

Male menopause? Really doubtful

This one is close to my heart for a couple of key reasons: 1) I wrote a book about it (Midlife Man – you can still buy a copy from my web site. Trust me, it’ll be the best buy you make this year; would I lie to you?), and 2) I am just “so there” personally, by which I mean whether or not there’s such a thing as “male menopause” is of intense interest to me.

But not just for me.

That issue is in fact a huge debating point among medical health professionals. Many doctors argue that there is no such thing as a “male menopause” (this has been my opinion for years, and if your read that book, you’ll see why), and many others saying that yes, male menopause is a big problem among aging men. Those doctors prescribe various forms of testosterone in order to treat a certain set of symptoms that have been labeled as those of “male menopause”.

I, however, have always argued that (based on what I have understood and studied about hormones in men, especially aging men)

that group of symptoms that are clustered under the umbrella of male menopause are just so vague that they can actually be due to anything at all. Most likely simply getting older. And that there is no proof that a man with such symptoms needs or will benefit from testosterone therapy.
we simply have no idea what normal testosterone levels should actually be because they can fluctuate so much with normal events. For example, if an average man’s team wins an important game – and we all know how much stock “real” men put into having favorite teams – his testosterone levels shoot up, which might be sort of scary news for men who are fans of the Vancouver Canucks.

And to illustrate just how little we really know about “normal” testosterone levels, in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism researchers measured testosterone levels in aging men in 5 different countries and found that there was as much as an 18 % variation in testosterone levels among men from different parts of the globe. This is just another indication that this issue needs way more study.

Bottom line: there are a few men who suffer clear and dramatic drops in testosterone levels with age, and for such men, there is some good reasoning behind the use of testosterone therapy.

For most men getting extra testosterone, however, the rationale behind its use is much, much, much more iffy.

Dr Art Hister – Multitasking is Harder as You Get Older

In an intriguing study based on people’s abilities to resume a task after being interrupted to do a second task, researchers have concluded that the older you get, the harder it is to multi-task. Although why they needed a study to come to that conclusion, god only knows, because anyone over the age of 30 could have verified that for them in an instant. That’s as long as the elderly verifier could remember what the researcher had asked, of course.

But they did spend money on this project so here’s what they found: that while younger people could easily go back to a task they’d interrupted and resume it at top speed, people over the age of 60 could not do that. This is mostly because the older folks kept focusing attention on whatever task the interruption had involved rather than on the task that had preceded it.

Ergo, older folks have trouble keeping 2 things going at the same time.

Which is true, of course. But what the researchers didn’t find out – the study wasn’t set up to do that – is that unlike young people, who are obsessed with feverishly fiddling with their iPods, iPads, and phones at the same time and keeping it all straight, once we get to a certain age, about the middle of our lives, most of us stop caring whether we can do two things at once. This may be mainly because we can either hire someone to do some of those stupid things for us or because we realize that most of the things we thought were so important to do are not. Another thought is that when you’re a certain age, by the time a second task has rolled around, you can’t even remember that you had another task you were working on.

Dr Art Hister – Food and Noise

Dr Art Hister – Food Handling and Germs

Dr Art Hister – Smoking and Pregnancy

Dr Art Hister – A Prescription for Everyone

Dr Art Hister – Prescription Drug Use

Dr Art Hister – Male Menopause

Dr Art Hister – Multitasking is Harder as You Get Older

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Dr Art Hister – Food and Noise

Dr Art Hister – Food Handling and Germs

Dr Art Hister – Smoking and Pregnancy

Dr Art Hister – A Prescription for Everyone

Dr Art Hister – Prescription Drug Use

Dr Art Hister – Male Menopause

Dr Art Hister – Multitasking is Harder as You Get Older

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