Statins May Lead Some Patients To Pig Out, Study Finds

by | Apr 30, 2014 | Weight Loss | 0 comments

Statin Ten years of U.S. data suggest cholesterol-lowering statins are giving patients a license to pig out.

Calorie and fat intake increased among statin users during the decade — an indication that many patients might be abandoning heart-healthy lifestyles and assuming that drugs alone will do the trick, the study authors said.

They said the goals of statin treatment should be to help patients achieve benefits unattainable by other methods, “not to empower them to put butter on their steak.”

Statins may keep cholesterol low even if people eat less healthy food and slack off on exercise, but those bad habits can contribute to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other problems that are bad for the heart. The study was published online Thursday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Dr. Rita Redberg, the journal’s editor, said the study “raises concerns of a potential moral hazard of statin use,” in addition to already known potential side effects risks including muscle aches and diabetes.

“Statins provide a false reassurance,” she said. “People seem to believe that statins can compensate for poor dietary choices and sedentary life.”

The researchers examined 1990-2010 government health surveys involving nearly 28,000 adults aged 20 and older. Different people were surveyed each year, underwent physical exams and blood tests, and reported their food intake. The portion who used statins steadily increased, from 8 percent in the first year to 17 percent in the final year.

Statin users in the first year consumed on average 2,000 calories daily; those in the final year consumed 2,192 daily calories. Average fat intake also increased, from 72 grams daily to 82 grams daily. Experts generally recommend no more than 77 grams daily for adults consuming 2,000 calories daily. The increase was seen in total fat intake and saturated fats, the least healthy kind.

Average body-mass index among statin users increased from 29 — just below the cutoff for obesity — to 31, or one point higher than that cutoff.

Diabetes also increased — 29 percent of statin users had it in 2010 versus 22 percent in the study’s first year. A link between statin use and diabetes has been documented previously, but reasons for the trend in the study are uncertain.

Calories and fat intake were lower among statin users than nonusers early on, but by the final years that difference vanished.

Calories, fat intake and diabetes remained stable among adults not using statins, and there was a smaller increase in body-mass index among nonusers, although the average BMI remained in the overweight category throughout.

The study doesn’t prove that statin use prompted patients to slack off, or that there is a true link between the drugs and the changes seen. But the researchers said the results raise troubling questions.

If, for example, the average statin user is eating 192 more calories daily than 10 years ago, that could translate into many extra pounds each year — unless activity levels also increased, said Dr. Martin Shapiro, the senior author and an internist and researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles.

The study “certainly doesn’t mean that everyone responds this way, but the concern is that people who are on statins ought to be particularly careful about how many calories they eat and what kinds of foods they eat,” he said. “They don’t appear to be doing that.”

Shapiro said the results mirror his own experience taking statins.

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Trust Your Gut

by | Apr 29, 2014 | Digestive system | 0 comments

Antibiotics Quick: What do you say when someone tells you that your entire body is covered in bacteria?

A) “Yuck!”

or

B) “Yay!”

If your answer was A, you’re not alone, but your gut would certainly disagree.

That’s because, as Martin J. Blaser, M.D., describes in his new book, Missing Microbes, the bacteria that coat your skin, inhabit your mouth, and fill your intestines are essential to your health and well-being. They protect you from harmful pathogens, help digest your food, produce vitamins, and fine-tune your immune system.

Unfortunately, Blaser explains, we have not been giving these essential partners the respect they deserve. For the past 75 years we’ve been bombarding them with antibiotics without realizing that when we were shooting at the bad guys, we were also hurting the good guys. And the rising incidence of chronic conditions from obesity to asthma to allergies may be the price we are paying.

The trillions of microbes that make their home on the human body — known as the human microbiome — are not a random collection of bacterial passersby. Instead, the particular kinds of bacteria, the sites of the body they occupy, and the functions they carry out are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection. All the life forms we see around us — plants, insects, mushrooms, fish, mammals — evolved on a planet where life was entirely microbial for billions of years. We may think of evolution as a process of “higher” life forms leaving these “primitive” organisms behind, but in fact, every multicellular organism has a group of microbial partners that provide it with various selective advantages. There are a million wonderful stories to tell about these microbial partnerships, but Blaser’s book focuses on the one between humans and our microbiome, and the unintended consequences of one of humanity’s greatest inventions: antibiotics.

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Recipe of the Month: Low Carb Hash Browns

by | Apr 28, 2014 | Recipe | 0 comments

2014-04-28_0919Hash Browns are one of those things that are denied to us as low carbers as they are so high in carbohydrates – around about 40 g each. However, after much persuasion I have been encouraged to release one of my favourite recipes for a low carb version of a hash brown that only has one and a half grams of carbohydrates. The other nice thing about these is the slightly sweet coconut flavour which goes so nicely when when dipped in your fried egg.

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Is Buying Organic Produce For Your Kids Worth It?

by | Apr 25, 2014 | Natural food | 0 comments

Healthy Most organic shoppers choose the produce aisle first when it comes to organic food. It’s much more tangible to smell a luscious organic strawberry and know it’s not listed on the Environmental Working Group’s dirty dozen list. We all have to start somewhere, and the visual appeal, along with incredible taste of organic produce is a good place to commence when buying healthy food for children. Organic food offers earthly delights as well as principles, practices and government-backed rules that produce cleaner and healthier food.

Yet some folks think otherwise.

An article in Slate titled, “Organic Shmorganic,” does its best to question many assumptions about the benefits of organic food. The author of the Slate piece notes “… there is little evidence that the differences [between organic and conventional] translate into actual health benefits.” Those of us who have been enjoying organic food for years know the benefits, but for many consumers, stories like the one in Slate sow confusion and raise unnecessary barriers to exploring the organic produce aisle.

Environmental Working Group (EWG) posted a blog by Alex Formuzis, “The Case for Organic Fruits and Veggies,” which offers a broad view on the issue. Chemical agriculture has enormous effects on other vital resources that every American relies on, such as drinking water, air and soil, and well-documented harm that pesticide exposure does to farm workers and their families. Dr. Philip Landrigan, Dean of Global Health and Director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, is quoted as saying, “Strong and well-conducted studies published in leading peer-reviewed journals have shown that families who consume an organic diet have 90 percent lower levels of pesticides in their bodies than families who consistently consume ‘conventional’ pesticide-treated foods.”

Back in 1993, The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report on the effect of pesticides in the diets of infants and children. This historic report concluded that many of “the pesticides applied to food crops in this country are present in foods and may pose risks to human health.” The report demonstrated that infants and children have special sensitivities to these toxic inputs. Children consume notably more of certain foods relative to their body weight than do adults. Thus, their ingestion of pesticide residues on these foods may be proportionately higher than that of adults. Certain chronic toxic effects such as cancer, exposures occurring early in life may pose greater risks than those occurring later in life. For these reasons, risk assessment methods that have traditionally been used for adults may require modification when applied to infants and children.

In short, the NAS committee stated bluntly that EPA-set pesticide tolerances governing allowable levels in food were set to protect adults, based on laboratory data collected from experiments with healthy, adult mice and rats, and that infants are not just “little adults.” The Committee emphasized that pregnant women and unborn children, as well as infants and children, are much more vulnerable to possibly life-long adverse impacts from even very low pesticide exposures. This is true for several reasons, including: Read more

Fat Facts

by | Apr 24, 2014 | How Your Body Works | 0 comments

Obese While a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, I became known as the “fat doctor,” a title I held with great pride. My work entailed tag-teaming with surgeons in the operating room and harvesting human fat cells during surgery. Bless every one of the wonderful research subjects who agreed–rather happily, I might add!–to let me remove a small sample of fat from various parts of their bodies, both deep inside (deep in the belly) and just under the skin (subcutaneous). Next, these gleaming gelatinous globs of fat were carefully placed in the portable liquid nitrogen cylinder that accompanied me everywhere. Then it was off to my lab to prep the specimens for our experiments.

Hunched over my lab bench, I would marvel at the beauty, power, and mystery of the fat cells, or adipocytes (adip=fat, cyte=cell), I beheld under my specialized microscopes. It also occurred to me that most people probably don’t have a clue as to what fat cells do other than inspire torment and angst when they’re trying to crowbar themselves into a pair of jeans.

So how about a quick primer on all things fat, so that you can, as I have, learn to appreciate, not disparage, these incredible and integral parts of our anatomy? I’m only talking about fat as a physical entity and won’t be speaking to any issues related to why people are under- or overweight. This is just an anatomy lesson!

So here’s a brief summary of fat facts