Lifestyle choices matter
Published 11.9.2016Recent items of interest found while reading around the web, plus brief commentary on each.
- How is this even news at this point? Yes, level of sodium intake is directly related to the ingestion of industrial processed foods. Preparing food takes time and energy, but to choose eating a more convenient diet of primarily processed foods means ceding control over the sodium content of the food. As I've written numerous times previously, there isn't any easy way to remove the sodium from industrial processed foods because of the scale of processing. This is one of those facts that too many wring their hands over as a societal problem that must be fixed, when the fix is an option already for almost every one. Heck, if people simply cut back on the amount of packaged, processed foods they eat, sodium consumption would decline. And until consumer begin to make that choice, food manufacturers aren't going to change their formulations.
- Doctors don't talk to patients about their weight, even though they think they should.
Barriers to communication included lack of time, but bizarrely somehow employers were considered responsible in some way for employees weight management. No, no, no— a thousand times no— each individual is responsible for their weight management. At best, a physician can discuss options and suggest goals, but if patients don't wanna do it, they aren't gonna do it. That's not the doctor's fault.The survey results also showed that nearly three-fourths of healthcare providers (72%) stated that they felt they had "responsibility to actively contribute" to patients' weight loss efforts, yet only 55% of patients with obesity reported receiving an obesity diagnosis from that provider, and only 16% of patients had a follow-up appointment with their healthcare provider after initial conversations about obesity, the authors reported in presentations at Obesity Week, a joint meeting of The Obesity Society and the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.
- Lifestyle changes can significantly improve type two diabetes (T2D) symptoms. As regular readers will know 9or just readers who visit the archive), I make an even stronger statement. T2D can be reversed with lifestyle changes— IF those lifestyle changes are maintained in perpetuity. If someone returns to previous habits, the disease will reoccur. In this study, a group that had intensive intervention was compared to a control group that did not. The two groups lost about the same amount, but the intervention group lost more fat mass. As Roy Taylor's work shows, it's fat loss, particularly ectopic fat in the pancreas and liver that matters, not simply weight loss. Lean body mass loss and bone health were similar in both groups— which is important, because too often the elderly are considered too frail to undertake an intervention that includes physical activity. The reality is "use it or lose it." And of course, additional and longer term studies are recommended.
- Diabetics might not need to test their blood glucose level as often and still be safe. Blood glucose strips are expensive and insurance companies and Medicare limit the number of strips per day covered. But difference in outcome was seen with less testing.
- The benefits of time restricted eating (also called intermittent fasting) have yet to be formally documented for humans. That is certainly not the impression you'd be left with after a Google search of the topic though. Restricted time eating does wonders for rodent metabolic health, however, I am not a rodent.
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