What’s the “Healthy” Dose of Alcohol?

Ned Koch opines here.

The traditional maximum recommended dose of alcohol is one drink daily for women, two for men.  Of course, many should not drink at all.

Fruit-Only Diet Sickens Ashton Kutcher

…as he prepared for role as Steve Jobs.  Details at USA Today.  I’ve never run across a patient eating only fruit.

Dietitians Weigh In On Mediterranean Diet for Diabetes

An eating pattern similar to the traditional Mediterranean diet can be integrated with existing national guidelines for the management of diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol. Existing data suggest that the Mediterranean diet has health benefits, including improved glycemic control and reduced cardiovascular risk, and may offer benefits to diabetes patients and clinicians alike in terms of palatability, ease of explanation and use, and promotion of improved health.

Olive oil and vinegar

Olive oil and vinegar

This excerpt is from an article by three dietitians writing in Diabetes Spectrum in 2009.  Click through for details if interested.

—Steve

Reference:  doi: 10.2337/diaspect.24.1.36 Diabetes Spectrum January 1, 2011 vol. 24 no. 1 36-40

Pull-Ups Are Making a Comeback

Read about it in the Sacramento Bee.

This Is How Our Brains Trick Us

“The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn’t mean our brains don’t have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we’re subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about.”

Read the rest at io9.

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

QOTD: Healthcare Insurance

Health care insurance doesn’t mean access to medical care any more than car insurance means you have access to a car.

—WhiteCoat’s Call Room, October 6, 2010

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.”