Diets tend to adopt capital letters: The Paleo or The Zone Diet…suggesting their universal application to all. But a new medical study reveals that people given identical meals (and healthy foods) metabolize them very differently, given their individual gut microbes and how that impacts their glucose response. For instance, some people can have intense blood sugar spikes after eating tomatoes, which, in “common knowledge,” is a low-glycemic food.
Wellness Evidence: Obese Children Who Cut Back on Sugar Turn Their Metabolic Health Around in 10 Days
A new, rigorous study shows that when obese children cut back on sugar (and not carbs or calories), they saw dramatic improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol levels and other key health markers in ten short days. This new research provides some insight on long-debated medical questions. Are all calories created equally? Is it sugar – or the weight gain from eating sugar – that is so bad for people? (can we give the answer to that here also…)
Wellness Evidence: Stress Messes with Brain to Make Healthy Food Choices Harder
A recent University of Zurich study suggests that if you want to help people lose weight, you need to help them relax. People who underwent a somewhat stressful experience were 24 percent more likely to opt for unhealthy snacks afterwards than those who didn’t. And the brain scans on the participants may illustrate why stress is the enemy of self-control and healthy eating: for the stressed subjects, the neurological connectivity between areas of the brain that are associated with value judgments, long-term planning and tastiness were affected.
Read more on wellnessevidence.com
Wellness Evidence: Long Work Hours Kill: Increase Stroke Risk by 33 Percent
A new University College London meta-review of studies on 600,000-plus U.S., European and Australian workers had some sobering findings about people that toil more than 55 hours a week: their risk of stroke is 33 percent higher than those that work the “old” 35-40 hour week. And long work weeks also up the risk of coronary heart disease by 13 percent. Read more about why long work hours may increase stroke risk so significantly.
Wellness Industry’s Attention to 9 Lifestyle Risk Factors Could Be Key to Reducing 2/3 of Alzheimer’s Cases
Alzheimer’s Disease is one of the most urgent healthcare crises today, and a large new study reveals just how powerful lifestyle choices—and hence, wellness establishments—could be in preventing it. Protecting against it involves things like: a healthy diet; folate, Vitamin C and E intake; coffee and fish consumption; and exercising the brain. And the researchers concluded that if nine risk factors (from obesity to carotid artery narrowing) were eliminated, then two-thirds of Alzheimer’s cases could also be stopped. Read more to see what factors best protect against this terrible disease. READ THIS STUDY
Women: Step Away from the Desk and Lower Your Risk of Cancer & Early Mortality
Few medical studies have analyzed the relationship between sitting and total mortality. But a large (123,216 individuals) new study from the American Cancer Society found that women who sit for more than six hours/day were 37 percent more likely to die (over the 13-year study period)—and 10 percent more likely to get cancer—than those who sat less than three hours/day. Surprisingly, the “sitting risk” was lower for men: six-plus-hour-a-day male sitters were 18 percent more likely to die, but the cancer risk was not considerably higher.
