HealthyConcerns.com

The continuing saga of Vitamin D deficiency

When you blog, your friends send you links. Links to stories similar to what you've been writing about. Sometimes stories they simply think you should be writing about.

Today my friend Maria NIles contributes to my ongoing series of posts about Vitamin D, or Vitamin D deficiency to be more specific.

The post: Why Black People Need More Vitamin D from TheRoot.com.

This I already knew, but the article goes into some detail about why.

Bottom line: The melanin in the skin of people of color does something great: It protects them from harmful UV rays. but it also does something not-so-great: It blocks Vitamin D production.

And since the medical community has evolved from thinking Vitamin D only impacts bone health, but also may lower the risk of diabetes, hypertension and other very common illnesses and conditions, they are thinking that epidemic Vitamin D deficiency is really not a great thing!

The article's bottom line is that it is very very difficult to get enough Vitamin D naturally from either our diet or from foods. They recommend supplements all the way.

Kind of a bummer, but there it is...

Is 4% too much to ask? And if it's not why do only patrons pay?

I spent last weekend up in San Francisco, something I do very rarely. It was a gastronomic delight, as we visited four different restaurants and had four different wonderful meals over the course of the weekend.

At one of them, Palomino on the Embarcadero, I noticed this note on the menu:

Now, at first glance, this didn't bother me at all. After all 4% of a $40 lunch bill is $1.60. I would gladly pay $1.60 so that restaurant workers can have health care benefits. If I can afford to eat at this restaurant, I can afford this surcharge.

But as always there is more to the story.

I've always been most aware of health care for restaurant workers as a political issue because of one blogger: Shuna Fish Lydon from Eggbeater.

As early as 2006 she was blogging passionately about this issue, at her own blog and for KQED.

And her perspective on this surcharge is a little more nuanced than mine. She asks why it is the patron alone who bears this cost? Why does this one cost get passed through, and shouldn't it be managed as one more cost of doing business like any other? Why this gets tacked on as a surcharge, when rising rent or food costs are not? 

Of course counter-arguments are that many businesses tacked on surcharges when gas prices were so high, one assumes because they were potentially temporary surcharges. But this one is permanent and legislated.

There are more, obviously peeved, diners sounding off about it at Eater SF.

I'm not sure I see the difference between calling out the surcharge (allowing angry diners to take their business elsewhere) or raising your prices (where again, diners can take their business elsewhere if prices get too high.)

Are we just angry to be reminded about the ridiculous state of our health care system? If so, then I agree with at least one commenter who said the notice about the surcharge is good if it starts conversations about health care.

I saw the notice. I didn't mind it. I thought it was kind of cool that San Francisco was trying to do something instead of just talk about it.

That was my gut reaction, as an occasional diner in SF.

What's yours?

Wow, Americans have a slow-death wish

Hat tip to Daily Green for pointing me to Food Politics, if for no other reason than learning about how the most famous cookbook in America (The Joy of Cooking, natch) has adjusted its portion sizes over the year.

One example cited:

That recipe calls for about 4 pounds of ingredients to make only 18 cookies, each of which runs 500 calories — one quarter of the amount needed by most people for an entire day. I’d call one of those cookies lunch or share it with three friends. By the way, a similar recipe in the 1975 “Joy of Cooking” made 45 cookies with just half the ingredients. These would be just under 100 calories each.

Wow, right?

I, too, would like to know how the editors justified this ballooning of portion sizes over the years. Certainly, as people with free will, we could always choose to serve more than the recipe calls a portion if we protested against their original small portion size, but when recipes (and restaurants) put portions of immense size in front of us, it does sort of re-set our expectations of how much we should eat.

Seems like this is just another way that our culture is killing us slowly and insidiously.

Am I being over-dramatic?

Cool project: Diabetes365

There's a pretty robust diabetes blogging community, led, I'm happy to say, by such powerful women bloggers as Kerri from SixUntilMe and Amy from Diabetes Mine.

Through Kerri I discovered a cool project called Diabetes365. from their "About" description:

This is a group for diabetes-related pictures that you take as a 365-day project.

Basic rules: You must post a daily picture by the end of each week. Number each one consecutively and tag them with 'diabetes365'.

Each daily photo should show some aspect of daily living with diabetes and help explain what it's like to live with diabetes every day of the year.

Let's try and show the world how Diabetes is something that we work at and live with all year round.

You can watch Kerri's slideshow she made of her efforts, which is very cool, and if you click through to her own Flickr set, you can get a little story behind each shot. The S.O. and I spent quite a bit of time clicking through on various pictures and getting the background. I encourage you to do the same.

Non-stick cookware a threat to your health? Or just for the birds?

Sigh. The list never ends. Whether it's hidden animal ingredients or testing, unfair business practices or environmental policies, or just plain safety: The list of products to eschew grows longer the more attention you pay.

This time the culprit is non-stick cookware. Hat tip to Green LA Girl on BlogHer for pointing me to this study from the Environmental Working Group on how Teflon releases toxic fumes within minutes of being heated up...and that it's known and acknowledged to kill birds.

I think it's safe to say these are modern canaries in the coal mines of our kitchens. And while their lungs may be much, MUCH tinier than ours, so we can all debate how long it would take to kill us...I'm really not comfortable with using something that would kill a bird if I had one. Are you?

Unfortunate that we just received a bunch of Calphalon cookware as wedding gifts. Guess I unknowingly registered to be slowly poisoned.

There are three suggestions:

-Cast Iron

-Stainless Steel

plus

-A new non-stick alternative called GreenPan

The question is whether you'll trust that GreenPan is truly safe...or if we just haven't figured out yet how it's dangerous.

I'm torn. I really can't imagine throwing out all of this very new and very expensive cookware. I don't cook a lot or for extended periods. I don't own birds. The EWG mostly wants warnings affixed to warn bird owners, not humans.

What would you do?

Cross posted at Elisa's Green Scene

Soy un perdidor, but let's get to it with healthy tips for the holidays

I could go on and on about why I haven't posted in over a month. I could explain my life (too much work, too many blogs, and not enough time). I could talk about how talking health care during the election season was just frustrating for me because I didn't feel enough of an expert to comment on anything or anyone. I could look on the bright side and say, gee, I've just been so healthy I had nothing to write about regarding health. (True, except those allergies and sleep deprivation I actually have been good.)

But let's forget all that ad just move forward, shall we? And what better way than to point you to a wonderful daily series over at BlogHer: 61 Days to Better Health, by Health contributing editor (and RN) Catherine Morgan.

OK, it's a minor detail that the series actually started on November 1st, so I'm tell you about three weeks late. But you can catch up and thus learn about many simple things you can do to be healthier this holiday season.

Today's installment is how to get through holiday parties without overeating.

I feel like commenting and telling everyone to go veg for the holidays...bet that would work, don't you think?

Today is World Vegetarian Day...and a vegan diet turns out to be good for Type 2 Diabetes

Today happened to be World Vegetarian Day. Which, as you may know, is something I basically celebrate every day as a practicing vegan! In fact all of October is Vegetarian Awareness Month (according to the North American Vegetarian Society).

Now, i could encourage you all to give veganism a try by pointing you also to VeganMoFo, spearheaded by noted vegan chef, cookbook writer and cupcake aficianado Isa Moskowitz. That's short for the Vegan Month of Food, and is a project where scores of bloggers commit to blog as much wonderful stuff about food...recipes, reviews etc...as they can for the entire month of October.

But this is a health blog, so I will point you to the latest medical study indicating a vegan diet is effective for staving off, in this case, cardiovascular disease, particularly in patients with Type 2 diabetes. Honestly, I thought we already knew that, but i think the differentiator about this study was that it was specifically looking at Type 2 diabetes patients because heart attacks or strokes kill two-thirds of those patients! Which is pretty shocking.

So take advantage of VeganMoFo and Vegetarian Awareness month and give peace (and peas) a chance in October. Let me know how it goes, m'kay?

Should I be surprised?

Apparently a very small study published by the The Lancet Oncology showed that "comprehensive lifestyle changes", including a vegan diet, daily exercise and meditation, "increase the body’s ability to fight premature aging, cancer, heart disease, and other chronic diseases."

Honestly, who can be surprised that a vegan diet, daily exercise and meditation would have that kind of positive effect? What I'm really curious about, though, is whether they will be able to allocate the responsibility for the positive results to these various lifestyle changes. I doubt this small study did it, but I'd love to see a study where different groups did various combinations of these lifestyle changes, and see how the results differ. Oh, and can we take into account their starting genetic factors and starting vital stats too?

Still, never anything wrong with continuing to bolster the argument for a healthy, cruelty-free and zen lifestyle :)

Source PCRM

Three health links to close out Labor Day

Three links struck me today while browsing the Health folder in my feed reader, so I thought I'd share:

1. Let the Mind Help Tame an Irritable Bowel [NY Times]

I'm probably one of the half that isn't seeking medical help as described in this statement from the article: "Up to 15 percent of the population is affected, though only half seek medical help." I have no doubt that stress has an incredible affect on what upsets my stomach and what doesn't. But I could be happy as a clam and still be unable to process certain foods very well.

Many years ago I did one of those elimination diets where you eliminate all possible reaction-causing foods from your diet for a couple of weeks and then add them back one at a time. I went two weeks with nary a stomach issue, and so I stayed on the 100% elimination part of the diet for a week longer than I was supposed to. But the diet was sooo restrictive that by the time I finally took myself off of it, I was adding back foods willy-nilly, thus destroying the point of the effort to begin with.

I should try that again. And do it right. And yes, I should probably try to figure out some regular stress-relieving thing to do too.

2. Addiction Doesn’t Discriminate? Wrong [NY Times]

I actually don't get this essayist's point. She wants to dispel what she calls a myth that anyone can be an addict, but I have no idea why. She says: : "The idea that addiction doesn’t discriminate may be a useful story line for the public — if we are all under threat then we all should urge our politicians to support more research and treatment for addiction. There are good reasons to campaign for those things, but not on the basis of a comforting fiction."

OK, then what is your problem, exactly?

I honestly don't get what she wants a reader to walk away with. Do you?

3. Older fathers linked with bipolar [BBC]

I just found this article fascinating because I'm so used to reading about all the risk factors associated with the mother's age. That is all.

Glad to hear it: Soy and Juice are good for you

As a vegan I suppose most people assume I'm wildly healthy, at least nutritionally. (Well, except for the people whoa re convinced I may just die if I don't eat animal products.)

But the truth is that you can eat a lot of crap even when you're a vegetarian or vegan.

But this morning I read two different items on the Yahoo! Eat Right, Stay Fit blog that validated a couple of my nutritional staples:

1. Soy

Sometimes it's soy milk in my latter, sometimes it's tofu, sometimes it's edamame. I eat a lot of soy products. And according to even the FDA that's good for me and my heart.

2. 100% Fruit Juices

Yes, too much fruit juice can lead to an overload of sugars, but it's also a good source of vitamins and nutrients...and way better for you than soda. I try to drink mostly water, but I also have a penchant for Odwalla Grapefruit Juice. And we also buy organic juices via our bi-weekly Organic Express delivery, mostly Limeade and Pineapple Juice, and sometimes Pomegranate juice. I like my juice, so I'm happy to hear that reasonable portions of it are more than A-OK, they're good for you!