Largest study ever provides compelling evidence of the benefits of a diet high in fibre:
Eat More Fiber, Live Longer, Large Gov't Study Shows
-- Sent from my Palm Pixi
Tuesday 15 February 2011
Eat More Fibre, Live Longer
Sunday 13 February 2011
A Cardiologist's Lament
Here is a very revealing article on how the health system sometimes can only deal with symtoms of serious disease:
I mend hearts. Then I see my patients served junk food by our hospitals | Aseem Maholtra | Comment is free | The Observer
-- Sent from my Palm Pixi
Friday 4 February 2011
A Wave of Obesity
How tiny Nauru became world's fattest nation
Fri, 04 Feb 2011
The world is facing a "population emergency" as soaring rates of obesity threaten a pandemic of cardiovascular disease, scientists have warned.
The spread of Western fast food was blamed as the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru was named as the fattest in the world. Its average Body Mass Index is between 34 and 35, 70 per cent higher than in some countries in South-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
More than one in 10 of the world's population is obese - more than half a billion adults - and rates have doubled since 1980. The biggest increases are in the richer nations but almost every country has seen rates rise.
Only Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo and a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa and east and south Asia have escaped the rise. Yet even in these regions neighbouring countries have had widely differeing experiences. The women of Southern Africa are among the fattest in the world.
The rise is being driven by increasing urbanisation, the growth of sedentary, office-based lifestyles and the substitution of Western-style fast foods for traditional diets. Researchers from Imperial CollegeLondon and McMaster University in Canada, writing in The Lancet, describe it as a "tsunami of obesity that will eventually affect all regions of the world".
In its wake comes an epidemic of heart disease and stroke, linked with high blood pressure and raised cholesterol levels. Remarkably, high-income countries such as the US and UK have managed to avoid this, by reducing blood pressure and cholesterol with drugs and dietary changes, such as reducing salt and fats. Smoking too, one of the key causes of heart disease, has fallen.(Japan is an exception where historically low cholesterol levels, associated with the nation's high consumption of fish, have risen to levels seen in western Europe, as the Japanese adopt a Western diet.)
But in middle and low-income countries the outlook is "dismal"."Considering all risk-factor trends together, the forecast for cardiovascular disease burden... comprises a population emergency that will cost tens of millions of preventable deaths, unless rapid and widespread actions are taken by governments and health care systems woldwide," the researchers say.
Treating the consequences of the obesity explosion with drugs will create an "unsustainable financial burden" in these countries and there is an "urgent need" to understand why unhealthy behaviours are adopted by both individuals and communities.
-- Sent from my Palm Pixi
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