Use it or lose it
Published 11.11.2016For the first time all year, five postings in five days. Here's to finishing the year strongly, despite it all. Or is it only in my yoga classes that the focus this week has become letting go of the bad to try and create good?
- Exercise testing can indicate underlying health issues that would counter-indicate prescribing exercise as treatment. My interpretation: it's use it or lose it, and if you've been sedentary for a long time then you may have lost it. My experience is that most efforts to move more fail because people try to go from nothing to full-out gym rat too fast. It's not unlike weight loss, which is going to be slow if it's going to stick. You didn't get fat in size months, you won't healthily get thin in six months. If you haven't move much for years, you'll need to develop new habits to increase your movement slowly.
- More evidence that there is no obesity paradox. Being obese long term has health consequences, it's just a matter of how those consequences manifest. Long term obesity increases the risk for some cancers, including breast cancer. Adipose tissue is an endocrine organ that secretes hormones. Those hormones then affect the body.
A longer overweight duration significantly increased the risk of all obesity-related cancers combined (multivariable-adjusted hazard ratio 1.07 per 10-year increment, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.09). For postmenopausal breast cancer and endometrial cancer, every 10-year increase in adulthood overweight duration was associated with a 5% and 17% increase in risk, respectively, with these rates rising to 8% and 37% after adjustment for degree of overweight.
- Endometrial cancer rates have increased apace with obesity incidence in women.
Yes, it's a correlation, which means causation cannot be assumed only hypothesized then tested. As for me, I prefer to lower the odds in any way I can, and that means avoiding obesity.Disease-specific mortality more than doubled for women with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 to 34.9 kg/m2 and increased six-fold in association with a BMI >40 kg/m2. All-cause mortality rose, as well, as two thirds of deaths among women with early-stage endometrial cancer died of obesity-related causes. Driven by obesity prevalence in women, the incidence of endometrial cancer in the United States is expected to increase by 55% from 2010 to 2030.
- There's an association between drinking caffeinated, sugar sweetened drinks and sleep deprivation. The researchers can't say whether it's the caffeine or the sugar, but there's a simple test for that: Do people who drink non-caffeinated, sugar sweetened sodas also lose sleep? That seemingly obvious comparison, however, was not made because sugar is the "new baddy" on the block, responsible for all that ails society. Caffeine is known to affect sleep patterns. Except that sugar is the new food villain of choice, I'm not seeing why this research is looking for alternate reasons. Not to mention that of course this research is based on self-reports, which are notoriously inaccurate.
- There's an association between sugar sweetened beverages and pre-diabetes, but not between artificially sweetened beverages and pre-diabetes. Drinking diet sodas is an easy way to cut calories, and yes sugar, out of a diet.
- Tobacco use in the US is down to 15% of the population. This is excellent news, though it's too early to know if vaping will alter these number or become a new source of worry.
- Menopause affects women's memory. That still doesn't make menopause a disease to be corrected. Essentially post-menopause women only recall memory tests as well as men ever did. Prior to menopause, women perform better than men on memory tests.
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