Category Archives: Uncategorized

Major Diabetes Complications on the Run

Here’s a quote from a recent Diabetes Care:

Improved therapeutics and health care delivery have brought remarkable declines in the incidence of … complications, with a 50% reduction in amputations from their peak in 1997 and ∼35% reduction in the incidence of end-stage renal disease. Similarly, 10-year coronary heart disease risk dropped from 21% in 2000 to 16% in 2008.

Exercise helps prevent and control diabetes

Exercise helps prevent and control diabetes

Nevertheless, diabetes remains the leading cause of blindness, renal failure, nontraumatic lower-limb amputation, in adults 18 to 65 years of age.  We gotta stay after it!

In addition to lower rates of major diabetes complications, we now have 11 classes of drugs for treating diabetes, compared with just three or four a generation ago.

The essay by Dr. Robert Ratner also notes 79 million Americans with prediabetes.  They need my Conquer Diabetes and Prediabetes book.  It’s only $9.99 (USD), a drop in the ocean compared to the $174 billion spent on diabetes in 2007 in the U.S.

—Steve

Michelle Fields on the Looming Inter-Generational Conflict

One-minute YouTube video.

Sean Preuss Notes That U.S. Obesity is NOT Increasing Any More

Details at his blog.

“The subjectivity of CDC data leads to misreporting. People may misreport due to estimating instead of actually measuring, lie because they are uncomfortable with their weight, overstate their height (which leads to incorrect body mass index calculations), etc. In exercise studies, it’s well-known amongst researchers that people generally overestimate the amount of physical activity that they participate in. In general, we are not perfect when it comes to estimating.”

Is Modern Wheat Making Us Sick?

Monica Reinagel has an answer at her blog.

“All of which suggests that, even if the recent charges against modern wheat don’t hold much water, your New Year’s resolution to cut back on wheat might still be a good one—but not if you simply replace one grain with another. Instead, consider replacing some of the grains in your diet with vegetables and other nutrient-dense foods.”

U.S. Cancer Deaths Down 20% From 1991 Peak

Details at MedPageToday.

The 10 Warning Signs of Serious Low Back Pain

By “serious” back pain, I mean potentially life-threatening or disabling.

The warning signs in no particular order:

  1. recent trauma
  2. recent intravenous drug abuse
  3. unexplained weight loss
  4. osteoporosis
  5. history of cancer
  6. prolonged pain
  7. disabling symptoms
  8. immunosuppression (compromised immune system for any reason)
  9. age over 70
  10. progressive focal neurologic deficits, such as loss of bowel or bladder control, numbness, weakness on one side, impaired gait
A position you'll see in the Five Tibetan Rituals for prevention and treatment of back pain

A position you’ll see in the Five Tibetan Rituals for prevention and treatment of back pain

Low back pain is the most common musculoskeletal disorder worldwide.  Eighty percent of us will suffer from it at some point.  For most, a specific cause cannot be established with certainty.  But if you have one of the 10 warning signs of serious back pain, be sure to see a doctor soon.

Steve Parker, M.D.

Mass Murder and Mental Illness

“Taking guns away from single women who live alone and other law-abiding citizens without mental illnesses will do nothing about the Chos, Loughners, Holmeses or Lanzas. Such people have to be separated from civil society, for the public’s sake as well as their own. But this is nearly impossible because the ACLU has decided that being psychotic is a civil right.

Consequently, whenever a psychopath with a million gigantic warning signs commits a shocking murder, the knee-jerk reaction is to place yet more controls on guns. By now, guns are the most heavily regulated product in America.

It hasn’t worked.”

– Ann Coulter

189 Reasons to Set Up a Home Gym

Health on Today reports on a survey of gym gross-outs.

I have a home gym: Schwinn Air-Dyne stationary bike, treadmill, weight bench, and a set of dumbbells.  No gym fees, travel time, or gross-outs.  

Should You Wear a Lumbar Weight Belt When Strength Training?

“…weight belts seem to provide one major benefit (limiting rotation). On the other hand, they provide no protection from another vulnerable movement (flexion), pose an additional threat for the cardiovascular system, and provide a sense of overconfidence that could increase orthopedic or muscular injury risk.”

Read the rest at Sean Preuss’ blog.  He’ll remind you how to lift heavy objects more safely.

Is Sugar Replacing Fat as the Cause of Heart Disease?

In the 1950s, John Yudkin wrote a book, Pure, White, and Deadly, blaming sugar as the primary cause of heart disease (coronary heart disease).  The idea didn’t gain enough traction and the dietary fat theory of heart disease became the reigning dogma.  Now that the latter theory has been discredited, researchers are looking at sugar again.

The British Medical Journal has a pertinent article you may enjoy, if you enjoy these sorts of things.  I quote:

“In recent years, and slowly, the sugar hypothesis has been making a comeback, driven in part by the emerging perception of heart disease as a consequence of what’s now described as the metabolic syndrome: obesity, dyslipidaemia, raised blood pressure, and insulin resistance. Although there is still no consensus about the causes of the syndrome, an excess of fat in the liver—a response to dietary sugar—is one of the acknowledged possibilities.  Fructose, found in large quantities in nearly all added sugars, is known to increase lipogenesis in the liver and the synthesis of hepatic triglyceride.”