Category Archives: Health

Jogging 3x A Week Helps You Live 6 Years Longer

Posted by apt46 on May 7, 2012 None comments

The Copenhagen City Heart Study was started in 1976 and tracks about 20,000 people in that city in order to learn more about heart disease and other health issues. After 35 years, there’s a lot of data there, so the reseearchers decided to crunch it and find out if jogging really is good for you. They looked at about 2,000 joggers at various periods within the 35 years, recorded the amount of time they jog per week and the intensity they do it with, and compared their age at death with that of non-joggers. On average, jogging men lived 6.2 years longer than the non-jogging ones, and the women lived 5.6 years longer.

 

They also tried to figure out the best jogging regimen: the data shows that running three times a week for about 35 minutes (+/- 15) had the optimum correlation with life expectancy.

“The relationship appears much like alcohol intakes. Mortality is lower in people reporting moderate jogging, than in non-joggers or those undertaking extreme levels of exercise,” said [chief cardiologist of the Copenhagen City Heart Study, Peter] Schnohr. The ideal pace can be achieved by striving to feel a little breathless. “You should aim to feel a little breathless, but not very breathless,” he advised.

Jogging, like exercise in general, does all kinds of good things for the body: boosts the immune system, makes the heart work more efficiently, lowers blood pressure, makes the body more sensitive to insulin, prevents cancer, migraines, the weakness of old age, and Alzheimer’s among other things. Therefore, even though the joggers probably took better care of themselves in other ways too (e.g., diet, not smoking), it’s clear that there is causation at play here, not just correlation.

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From European Society of Cardiology, via The Atlantic

Laziness Correlated With Alzheimer’s

Posted by apt46 on April 19, 2012 None comments

A study used Philips’ Actical device to measure the amount of energy 700 old people (average age of 82) expended. Over the course of the study, about 10% of those people developed clinical Alzheimer’s disease. The ones that did develop Alzheimer’s tended to consume less energy per day. And the lazier they were, the more demented they became. Sloth: just one of the deadly sins.

Sloth in the Amazon. Photo by Carol Schaffer

 

In related news, Nike makes a very cool energy-measuring device, called Fuelband, that looks like a futuristic watch, and it works with your iPhone. It has a “fuel” display that goes up throughout the day as you use more energy, so you can easily tell if you’ve been too lazy. If your fuel display is down in the red, you’re not doing well. It sells for 150$ in the Nike Store.

Nike Fuelband

From Neurology, via NPR

Number Needed To Treat

Posted by apt46 on April 16, 2012 1 comments

In March, news came out that LSD was an effective way to treat alcoholism. (The thinking is that the profound hallucinogenic experience changes one’s view of the world, kind of like a spiritual awakening. Hallucinogenics have been shown to also reduce the rate at which criminals return to crime.) But how effective is LSD as an alcoholism treatment? The answer is 6.

That’s a measure called Number Needed To Treat (NNT), and it’s the number of people that will statistically be treated in order for one person to benefit from the treatment. So if 6 drunks are treated with LSD, 1 will give up the bottle. That works out to about 16% effectiveness, which means 84% of alcoholics would take LSD and the only thing they would get out of it is a psychedelic trip.

LSD is a highly-concentrated liquid, commonly distributed on the backs of stamps which are then placed on the tongue for absorption

 

Sounds like pretty meager results, but it turns out that medicine is a pretty poor science, and 16% effectiveness is actually pretty high. Things are so bad, that if the NNT is below 10 — that’s benefits for just 1 in 10 patients, or 10% effectiveness — that’s considered a very successful drug or treatment. Keeping in mind that an NNT of 1 means everyone treated will benefit and that the higher the number, the less effective the treatment, here are the NNT numbers for some well-known treatments:

A related measure is the Number Needed To Harm (NNH), which is complementary to the NNT. For example, the drug Vioxx had a great NNT of 2.2, but it’s NNH of 42 was a little too low for comfort, so it was pulled from the market. The moral of the story: find out the NNT and NNH of the drugs and treatments you’re prescribed.

In the meantime, LSD is still classified in the “most dangerous drugs” category by the UN and US, along with drugs like heroin and cocaine. This, in spite of the fact that LSD has yet to cause a single death, which is more than can be said about many legal drugs, like Vioxx. In fact, LSD is a fairly safe drug and was only banned as a backlash to its use by the counterculture of the 1960s, and in particular, by its leading proponent, Harvard psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary. The graphic above shows a rating of common legal and illegal drugs done in 2007 by a team of scientists; the drugs are ranked by how much harm they have the potential to do to society: LSD was on par with Ritalin, and both were well below alcohol and tobacco.

And below, a very interesting video of a 1950s housewife tripping on acid in a clinical setting at the Veteran’s Administration, back when it was legal.

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From NPR

Diet Sodas Definitely Aren’t Good For You

Posted by apt46 on April 13, 2012 None comments

NPR highlights three studies on diet sodas, none of which do them any favors:

  • A study on how diet sodas relate to metabolic syndrome, which is generally found in fat people and causes heart disease and diabetes. The researchers created three groups and measured how many of them developed the disorder. The first group drank diet sodas and had an awful diet (think McDonald’s all the time). The second group drank diet sodas and were on a healthy diet (fruit, fish, nuts, veggies). The third group didn’t drink sodas at all and were on the healthy diet, too. Metabolic syndrome was highest in the diet soda + bad food group, followed by diet soda + healthy food one, and lowest in the no soda + healthy food collective.
  • A study on how weight change relates to various lifestyle factors, including amount of exercise, of TV watched and various foods eaten, found that diet sodas didn’t affect people’s weight. The study did find out factors that correlated with people losing weight: exercising and eating healthy (fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts and yogurt). They also found out what factors correlated with people gaining weight: watching TV, drinking, smoking, sleeping too little or too much, and a poor diet (potatoes, potato chips, sugary drinks, processed meat, and red meat).
  • Just to conflict with the one above, another study showed that people who drank diet sodas gained more weight than ones who didn’t.

But no studies showed that there’s anything diet about diet sodas. They either do nothing, or make you fat. What all of this sums up to is diet soda being at best a crutch that doesn’t help your health; more likely though, it’s a crutch that slowly kills you. Just stick to water.

 

From The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The New England Journal of Medicine, via NPR and CBS News

More Evidence For The Toxicity Of Sugar

Posted by apt46 on April 3, 2012 None comments

Almost a year ago, The New York Times reported on Dr. Robert Lustig’s theory that the amounts of sugar present in the typical Western diet is toxic, because it causes heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome and probably cancer. Since then, it’s been confirmed that sugar consumption does indeed raise the risk of heart disease, and Lustig and his team have begun lobbying that the government regulate sugar like it does alcohol.

The heart of Lustig’s theory is that in nature, sugar is locked away inside fibrous fruit, which makes it impossible for us to eat too many sweets. But in these modern times, through the wonder of technology, we can cheaply extract the sugar like heroin from poppy, then add it to everything under the sun because it tastes good and acts like a preservative: drinks, desserts, bread, sauce, peanut butter, etc, etc, ad nauseam. As a result, the amount of hidden sugar we actually eat is so heavily disguised, that we don’t even notice the raw quantities we eat — quantities that would make us sick in the form of table sugar, and quantities that would be physically impossible to eat solely from fruit.

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes got into the game too, with a segment featuring Dr. Lustig and other scientists, all telling us why they’ve quit eating added sugar:

  • A study at UC Davis showed that within two weeks of eating 25% of their calories in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (which is the same thing as sugar), subjects had increased levels of LDL cholesterol and were are higher risk for plaque in their arteries, as well as heart attacks.
  • A Harvard professor and biochemist explains how eating sugar increases the risk of cancer: a third of common cancers have insulin receptors; eating sugar causes insulin to spike, which in turn is ingested by the receptors on tumors, which fuels the tumors and causes them to grow
  • A neuroscientist shows, via fMRI brain scans, how sugar activates reward centers in the brain in the same way that drugs like alcohol and cocaine do, which makes it very addictive. As with those other drugs, people also develop a tolerance to it, and need more and more to get the same pleasure from eating it.
  • A spokesman for the sugar industry is skeptical, and says the science “is not completely clear”.

See also:

From 60 Minutes, via a vigilant reader

Cleanliness Is Next To Sickliness

Posted by apt46 on March 30, 2012 None comments

When germ theory firmly took hold in the public mind some 150 years ago, hindsight kicked into high gear: of course everyone was sick and dying, catching diseases from all the filth in which humanity was immersed, ripe with bacteria from all manner of rodents, vermin and dirty, sickly people. Ergo, if dirt made you sick, lack of dirt kept you healthy. Of course, the concept wasn’t new: religions had commanded cleanliness for centuries, and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached that cleanliness was next Godliness in the 18th century. Until science brought it home though, cleanliness was seen as kind of like praying: good, but not necessary outside of church. This paradigm shift brought with it all manner of life-saving cleaning measures: soap, detergent, toothpaste, bleach and ammonia — all popularized around the beginning of the 20th century.

19th Century Babbitt's Soap Advertisement

 

And so the pendulum swung the other way: it was much easier to be clean, and being clean became the norm. In the middle of the 20th century, urban enclaves — once cesspools that served as fodder for plague – became cleaner than the sparsely populated farms their inhabitants had always envied. Fast forward a few more decades and we find ourselves in the meticulously clean present in which each household has a handful of cleaning agents under the sink, anti-bacterial soap is ubiquitous, and Purell is in every proper lady’s handbag. Along with that, however, came the rise of chronic diseases of the immune system, which, while very rare in farm-dwellers and less-developed (meaning, less-clean) countries, abound in city folk: asthma, allergies, intestinal problems, and autoimmunity.

Buy the Lysol to clean, then the Benadryl for the side effects. Buy the pizza and Coke to enjoy, then the gym membership for the side effects. Selling the poison and its antidote: a cornerstone of the modern economy.

 

Scientists weren’t quite sure why that was, until recently, when a study found out that bacteria in our intestines keep iNKT cells of the immune system from getting too vigilant, which if they do, leads to the chronic diseases mentioned above. And so, a century later, after realizing they overstated the whole cleanliness issue, scientists swing the pendulum back the other way: some exposure to dirt is good for you, especially as a kid. To summarize:

  • modern, germ-free environment: not good
  • 19th century urban filth: bad
  • moderately clean farm: good

So stop using Purell and anti-bacterial soap, enforce the five-second rule (or even lengthen it), and take up dirty activities like gardening or rugby. Pretend you’re on a farm, get back in touch with nature and re-learn to tolerate some amount of dirt: it will help keep your immune system functioning properly.

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From Science, via NPR

Cadbury Eggs Of Sugar

Posted by apt46 on March 28, 2012 None comments

The method in this xkcd comic makes it really easy to visualize exactly how much sugar is in sweet drinks.

 

As we’ve seen before, excess sugar — like its cousin, excess alcohol — causes heart disease and probably diabetes and cancer. The movie Supersize Me had a similar visualization in the form of a tub of the 30lbs of sugar Morgan Spurlock ate during the month of filming, but the Cadbury egg is much easier to relate to on a daily basis.

 

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From xkcd

Overheating Is A Serious Barrier To Exercise

Posted by apt46 on March 14, 2012 None comments

A study done by Stanford had two dozen middle-aged obese women walk on a treadmill for a mile and a half. Half the women got their bodies cooled by sticking their palms in a device that runs ice water through itself — kind of like a car radiator cools the engine. The other half also had their hands in the device, but water at room temperature ran through it. After three months: the cool women shaved five minutes off their walk, lost 3″ off their waist, and were more likely to not quit the study early.

 

Avacore Rapid Thermal Exchange

 

Walking 1.5 miles should take somewhere around 27 minutes, give or take, so shaving off five minutes is a pretty big deal: almost 20% faster; three inches thinner is also nothing to sneeze at. The NPR article on the study implies that overheating is mostly a psychological problem, possibly because if you overheat too much you’ll likely just faint. Elite athletes also overheat, but they push through it. Novices on the other hand, especially fat ones, think it’s the end of the world. It also doesn’t help that fat is an insulator, so the feeling of overheating gets worse the more of it there is.

The bottom line is that psychological or not, overheating is a significant deterrent to working out, and the more weight you need to lose, the more of a deterrent it is. As such, it’s important that measures are taken against overheating, because the less barriers there are in front of exercising, the better. The ice-water device used in the study is a non-starter because it costs 4,000$. But there are less expensive workarounds:

  • When working out, always wear clothing made out of moisture-wicking technical fiber. These fabrics use capillary action to make the sweat evaporate faster, which helps you sweat more, which helps to cool down more.
  • Run outside when it’s cool (around sunrise, after sunsent, in the winter) or work out indoors, with serious air conditioning
  • Put a lot of ice in your water bottle
  • Hold something cold in your hand and touch it to your face when overheating — ice pack, bottle of ice water, etc
  • Go swimming instead of running: the 80° pool water is like a giant cooler, and swimming is one of the best forms of exercising due to the use of the whole body and its low-impact nature
  • Go biking instead of running: even when it’s hot out, the breeze generated at 14mph does a lot to both cool you down and evaporate sweat; and it’s also a low-impact sport

Via NPR

Eating Fruits And Veggies Makes You More Attractive

Posted by apt46 on March 9, 2012 None comments

A study from the University of St. Andrew in Scotland found that white people who ate at least three servings of fruit or vegetables a day (as opposed to living on pizza and French fries) had a significantly different skin hue — more yellow or red. This hue in turn made them more attractive to other test subjects. So fruits and veggies give you a kind of rosy glow that show you’re healthy, which is part of what makes people look good. Also, they don’t make you fat. Any questions?

 

From PlosOne, via NPR

Scientists Say Sugar Should Be Treated Like Alcohol

Posted by apt46 on February 18, 2012 1 comments

In April of 2011, Robert Lustig was featured in a New York Times article as leading the charge that sugar, in the quantities we are consuming it, is toxic. He is a neuroendocrinology professor at UCSF, and his theory is that the amount of fructose we get from the excessive quantities of sugar we eat (sugar is half fructose) wreaks havoc on various systems in our bodies, most notably the cardiovascular and endocrine ones. This in turn is responsible for the Western epidemic of heart disease (the leading cause of death), diabetes (7th leading cause of death) and some cancers (2nd leading cause of death). To bolster his theory, in late 2011, a study verified that eating a lot of sugar causes heart disease even in thin people.

Robert Lustig

 

A couple of weeks ago, Lustig and two other scientists from UCSF wrote an opinion piece in Nature (paid subscription required — Time has a good synopsis) arguing that sugar is dangerous enough that it should be regulated like alcohol: sale to minors should be curbed, a sin tax should be enacted, and vendors should be licensed for the sale of sugar.

It’s an unfortunate habit that America has gotten into:

  1. Discover something is bad
  2. Ban or regulate it
  3. Problem solved

It definitely worked with the War on Drugs. But consuming half a cup (1/4lb) of sugar a day is also an unfortunate habit America has gotten into it. Of course, turning to the nanny state because we have no sense of personal responsibility is not the answer to kicking that habit. Education, however, is a good answer, and for example, is probably the sole reason smoking rates are half of what they were 50 years ago: no one ever quit because smoking was too expensive, just like no one ever gave up heroin because they ran out of money.

Morgan Spurlock ate over 30lbs of sugar while filming Supersize Me

 

People quit or cut back because most humans want to live as long as possible; and the ones that don’t care if they die tomorrow, that’s their prerogative as members of a free society. But while their political recommendations may be misguided, the scientists’ hearts are certainly in the right place: sugar is bad news, and it’s time to quit.

And if you’re still on the fence about the science, Lustig has a good hour and a half lecture on YouTube. It’s been viewed 2 million times.

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From Nature, via Time