The results published online May 18 in the journal Annals of Neurology has shown that the cognitive function of older women who ate monounsaturated fats was better than those who ate saturated and trans fats.
Compared with those women who ate the lowest amounts of saturated fats, women in the highest saturated-fat category showed worse overall cognition and memory over the four years of testing. Women who ate the most mono-unsaturated fats, which can be found in olive oil, had better patterns of cognitive scores over time. Trans fats weren’t associated with changes in cognition over time, the researchers reported.
With diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia on the rise, the benefits could be greater that simply better memories and improved cognition.
Preventive measures to stem the increase of debilitating brain illness could benefit millions.
Overall, in the U.S. about 64 percent of adults drink coffee daily, according to Joe DeRupo, spokesman for the National Coffee Association. At 3.2 cups a piece, that amounts to some 479 million cups a day, agency figures indicate.
Those coffee fans can take the new results seriously. The mortality reduction is modest but solid, said Freedman, whose study offered the size and power to document associations other researchers had only suspected.
He and his team in NIC’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics reviewed the coffee habits of more than 402,000 people followed between 1995 and 2008, including more than 52,000 who died.
Denmark and Hungary have already introduced such a tax and France has a tax on sugary drinks.
Skyrocketing obesity and diabetes has made it necessary for countries to control health care costs and a fat tax seems to be the answer.
Discouraging high calorie, nutritionally deficient foods and subsidizing healthy foods could help mitigate the problem.
“Soft drinks consumption is simpler in comparison with food, and we can be more confident of the likely effects,” says Mytton in an email. According to Mytton, when one food item is taxed, people tend to switch consumption to other food items that are not necessarily healthier. For example, if there’s a tax on foods higher in saturated fat, consumers may switch to foods high in salt. “These effects don’t really happen with drinks as the economic data suggests. They either buy a similar drink that is untaxed or they don’t buy a drink at all,” says Mytton.
The reason for this could be that the body doesn’t register liquid calories in the same way it does food calories, so it’s easier to overdo it with drinks. “People don’t tend to feel full from drinking a high-calorie drink, so it seems less likely that people will buy foods to replace taxed liquid calories,” says Mytton. “People need food, but as with alcohol and tobacco, they don’t need the extra calories they get from sugar-sweetened beverages.”
Breast feeding has become a heated and divisive topic lately and, quite frankly, the messages are confusing.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breastfeed for a full year or longer if the mother is willing and able.
Mothers are getting mixed messages and little support for their parenting decisions.
Dr. Bill Sears, the father of a child-rearing philosophy called attachment parenting and author of the well-known parenting manual, The Baby Book, is credited with redefining motherhood.
It turns out that he and his wife Martha had written a lot of earlier books about attachment parenting before The Baby Book, including one with an evangelical approach. I also came across a book the Searses wrote in 1982 based on another book called The Continuum Concept, which I traced back to a college dropout who had become fascinated by child care in the Venezuelan jungle. “We read the book and thought, Well, this is neat,” says Sears.
High blood pressure is the culprit in most deaths worldwide and salt only exacerbates hypertension which causes heart attack and stroke.
It is not simply table salt, however, which contributes to alarmingly high sodium intake.
Fast food, packaged foods even breads and cereals contain a high amount of sodium to preserve shelf life and enhance the taste of otherwise low quality food products.
Reducing daily sodium intake by 2,000 milligrams at the population level could prevent 1.25 million deaths from stroke and almost 3 million deaths from cardiovascular disease each year, according to an analysis published in the British Medical Journal in 2009. A 1,200-milligram reduction could save up to $24 billion annually in U.S. health costs, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010.
The CDC’s Weight of the Nation conference released it’s findings and will be highlighted in a four-part HBO documentary airing next week.
Cheap and easily available calorie dense food and sedentary lifestyles are largely to blame.
The stress on the health care system could be 550 billion dollars in additional medical expenditures.
Finkelstein and co-authors estimate that 11% of the population will be severely obese by 2030. Severe obesity is defined as a body mass index over 40 or being roughly 100 pounds overweight. Obese people have shorter life expectancies and greater lifetime medical costs, “suggesting that future healthcare costs may continue to increase even if obesity prevalence levels off,” wrote the authors.
“Those individuals have much greater risk of early mortality, diabetes, heart disease,” said Finkelstein. “They’re much, much more expensive and they’re on the rise, partly because 50 years ago, it was really, really hard to weigh that much. You’d have to eat all the time.”
Dr. Mark Hyman, author of “The Sugar Solution: The Ultra Healthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease and Feeling Great Now!”, points out that 2 million kids are now morbidly obese.
Diabetes and pre-diabetes are just around the corner and the treatments are failing.
Hyman noted the the average child in the U.S. has 34 teaspoons of sugar a day. He said, “The food industry have hijacked our brain chemistry, our taste buds, our homes, our kitchens, our schools, and we need to take them back. We need to do things like have soda taxes, change food marketing practices to kids because this is not a problem solved in the doctor’s office.”
Berries may help your brain fight off forgetfulness.
Antioxidants help protect against free radicals that destroy cells.
Flavonoids in berries may be the boost your brain needs to maintain memory and cognitive function.
The latest target of interest is berries. A study of more than 16,000 women over age 70 suggests there is a connection between berries and memory problems. Specifically, women who ate the most berries per week were likely to have up to a 2.5-year advantage in terms of when they showed signs of memory decline.
The health benefits of berries come in a tasty package with no side affects.
By making a yummy food choice you do yourself a favor.
When you calculate cost, waste, availability and nutrition there is a scale on which to measure the value of canned versus fresh foods.
The conclusion: when price, waste and preparation time were factored in, canned foods won out as the most convenient and affordable source of nutrients. For instance, canned pinto beans cost $1 less per serving as a source of protein and fiber than dried beans. That’s because it takes about six minutes to prepare a can of pinto beans, compared to 2½ hours for dried beans, after soaking and cooking. (The researchers calculated meal prep and cooking time at $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage in New Jersey where the research was conducted.)
“While all forms of the foods — canned, frozen, fresh and dried — were nutritious, when you added the cost of the inedible portions and the cost of the time to prepare to the price, in most cases the canned versions delivered nutrients at a lower total cost.”
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