Obesity Costs U.S. $147 Billion a Year
Jul 28, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: WebMD
Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Louise Chang, MD
July 27, 2009 – Obesity costs the U.S. health care system up to $147 billion a year: An extra $1,429 per year for each obese person.
It’s not obesity itself that costs so much. It’s the bad health that comes with it, says a new study.
“The medical costs attributable to obesity are almost entirely a result of costs generated from treating the diseases obesity promotes,” lead study author Eric A. Finkelstein, PhD, director of North Carolina’s RTI Public Health Economics Program, says in a news release.
Those diseases include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and stroke.
If nobody in the U.S. were obese, we’d spend 9% less on health care. But more than a third of us are obese — and another third of us are overweight.
That’s a scary statistic. …
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Cut Hypertension Drugs With Low-Salt Diet
Jul 22, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: MedicineNet
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Study Shows Low-Salt Diet Reduces Need for Blood Pressure MedicationBy
Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By
Elizabeth Klodas, MD, FACC
July 20, 2009 — Lowering daily salt intake may reduce the need to prescribe additional medications to control high blood pressure, according to a new study.
Patients with resistant hypertension are those who take three or more medicines to try and control their blood pressure, but their readings are still high. “These patients especially benefit from a low-salt diet,” says study lead author Eduardo Pimenta, MD, a clinical research fellow in the hypertension department of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
“Doctors tend to add more and more antihypertensive medications,” he says, but “these patients could have their blood pressure controlled with a low-salt diet and fewer medications.” Based on his study, he says, doctors should consider additional lifestyle intervention, reinforcing to patients the importance of a low-salt diet before adding more drugs.
The study is published in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association. In the same issue, another study found that modest salt reduction reduced blood pressure in blacks, whites, and Asians who had mildly elevated pressures, and that the low-salt diet also produced other health benefits.
Salt and Resistant Blood Pressure Study: Details
While many studies have found a link between dietary sodium and blood pressure, exactly how dietary sodium affects the resistant form of high blood pressure isn’t well-known, according to Pimenta.
In his study, he assigned 12 men and women, average age 55, all with high blood pressure even while taking an average of 3.4 medicines, to eat a high-salt diet for one week and a low-salt diet for one week, separating the two diet experiments by a two-week “washout” period.
The average body mass index (BMI) was nearly 33, considered obese. At the study start, the average blood pressure while taking the medications was about 146/84. (Ideal blood pressures are below 120/80. If pressures are repeatedly over 140/90, it is considered hypertension.)
When the participants were on the high-salt diet, they …
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Weight Loss Without Drugs
Jul 18, 2009 Author: Susan | Filed under: LifeTipsUnless your doctor prescribed you diet pills for your specific health condition, do your best to avoid over-the-counter weight loss drugs. It is possible and by choosing this drug-free way , you will avoid serious complications, sometimes even fatal. Side effects of such drugs may include fast heart beat, mood swings, sleeplessness, restlessness, high blood pressure, etc. Even the toughest weight losers like competing bodybuilders (if they are "natural" of course, and not on steroids) achieve very low body fat percentage by eating right and exercising a lot. Any diet can be right or wrong for you, the question is, which one to choose. Here are three things to consider.
- If you are not an elite athlete or a heavy labor worker, a low fat diet is probably not your best choice. Research showed that low fat diets were inferior of low carb diets on both short term and long term plans.
- The low carb group of diets attracts many dieters because …
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Walking, Biking to Work Pays Off
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: MedicineNet
Latest Exercise & Fitness News
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TUESDAY, July 14 (HealthDay News) — People who walk or cycle to work have fewer risk factors for heart disease, a U.S. study has found.The study included 2,364 men and women who worked outside the home. At physical examinations conducted in 2005 and 2006, the participants reported details about their commute to work, including length in minutes and miles, and the percentage of the journey taken by car, public transit, walking or cycling.The researchers found that 16.7% of the participants walked or cycled to work (active commuting), and those men and women appeared to be more fit. Those who …
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Job Stress, Economy Weighing on Americans
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: MedicineNet
Latest Mental Health News
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FRIDAY, July 10 (HealthDay News) — Stress can keep you up at night, make you snap at your spouse and children, and make your job seem overwhelming.If that’s not bad enough, stress can also make you gain weight — especially if you’re overweight to begin with, new research shows.”Today’s economy is stressing people out, and stress has been linked to a number of illnesses — such as heart disease, high blood pressure and increased risk for cancer,” study author Dr. Jason Block, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Harvard University and an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s …
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Food Allergies: Types, Triggers, and Eating-Out Tips
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: WebMD
Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD
WebMD Feature
Louise Chang, MD
An estimated 12 million Americans suffer from food allergies. Dairy and wheat are just a few of the foods that can cause reactions and allergies in adults and children.
Food allergies and reactions can be confusing. Often, it’s not easy to figure out which foods contain ingredients that may trigger a reaction. Further, many people who think they are allergic to a food may actually be confusing a food reaction for an allergy — and may not need to eliminate certain foods.
Expert Interviews
Got a question about diet or nutrition? WebMD asked the experts for answers
about eating healthy and losing weight.
- Anti-Aging Diet
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Diet - Losing a Lot of Weight
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Study: Overweight People Live Longer
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: WebMD
Salynn Boyles
WebMD Health News
Louise Chang, MD
June 25, 2009 — There is more evidence that people who are overweight tend to live longer than people who are underweight, normal weight, or obese.
In a newly published study, people who were underweight and those who were extremely obese died the earliest.
People who were overweight, but not obese, actually lived longer than people whose weight was considered normal, based on body mass index (BMI).
The research is not the first to suggest that those who carry a little, but not too much, extra weight tend to survive longer than people who don’t.
CDC researchers found the same thing in a widely reported study published in 2005, and last month a separate group of investigators reported that overweight heart patients live longer than lean ones.
The Obesity Paradox
It is becoming known as the ” obesity paradox,” but this is something of a misnomer. That’s because few …
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Mediterranean Diet May Boost Longevity
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: WebMD
Caroline Wilbert
WebMD Health News
Louise Chang, MD
June 23, 2009 — Want to live a long time? When you prepare dinner tonight, go heavy on the vegetables, skip the meat, and enjoy a bit of wine.
Past research already has linked the so-called Mediterranean diet with longevity. A new study finds that certain aspects of the diet — such as high consumption of vegetables and olive oil, low consumption of meat, and moderate consumption of alcohol — may be more strongly linked to longevity.
Researchers looked at the Greek participants in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. This included 23,349 men and women not previously diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, or diabetes.
Researchers examined their diets and followed them for 8.5 years, on average, until June 2008. …
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Sky-High Calories in Some Restaurant Meals
Jul 17, 2009 Author: Mary | Filed under: WebMD
Elizabeth Lee
WebMD Health News
Louise Chang, MD
June 2, 2009 — Restaurants are serving ever-larger portions of super-bad food to entice customers to start eating out again, according to a consumer watchdog group.
In a list of the most over-the-top, unhealthy restaurant foods, the Center for Science in the Public Interest singled out some dishes that provide more saturated fat or sodium than most people should eat in three days. The foods were also high in calories.
U.S. dietary guidelines call for healthy Americans to get less than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day, about the amount in a teaspoon of table salt, to lower blood pressure and reduce risk of heart disease, stroke, heart failure, and kidney disease. But for the 70% of Americans who are middle-aged or older, African-American, or have high blood pressure, no more than 1,500 milligrams a day is recommended.
Federal nutrition guidelines also advise that less than 10% of daily calories come from saturated fat, about 20 grams for a 2,000-calorie diet. Eating lots of saturated …
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