Some People Are Protected From Type 2 Diabetes — What We Can Learn From Them

Diabetes is one of the top public health concerns in the United States, with no cure — 29.1 million Americans, or 9.3 percent of the population, have diabetes. Only 1.25 million of those cases are type 1 diabetes, the type you’re born with. The rest suffer from type 2 — the seventh-leading cause of death in the country.

Researchers are beginning to dive into genetics to determine better treatment and prevention tactics. The latest finding? According to a new study, a specific gene mutation appears to protect people from developing type 2 diabetes — a finding that may help experts develop new interventions.

Source: Some People Are Protected From Type 2 Diabetes — What We Can Learn From Them

Please do not use this information to believe you are protected from type 2 diabetes.

Use a “Reverse Diet” to Raise Your Metabolism After Aggressive Dieting

Starvation mode is a myth. There is no such thing as eating too little to lose weight.

No one has ever needed to eat more calories to lose weight.

Metabolism does decline when a person diets, but you do not go into any such “starvation mode” if you haven’t lost significant amounts of weight.

Source: The Facts on “Starvation Mode” and Reverse Dieting

It’s a rather long and in depth article.  Lots to digest 😉

The Man Who Ate 25 Eggs a Day (Or, Why Cholesterol’s Not All Bad)

Each morning at the retirement community, the healthy 88-year-old man received a delivery of 25 soft-boiled eggs, which he would consume during his day. This had been his way for many years. He’d had one experience of chest pain that might have been angina, but aside from that, he had a healthy cardiovascular system. He recognized that his only problem was psychological: “Eating these eggs ruins my life, but I can’t help it.”

I think of the Eggman, a brief case report from 1991 in the New England Journal of Medicine, whenever “news” of cholesterol’s unsuitability as a one-size-fits-all biomarker resurfaces, as it does every few years and did again just last month.

Source: The Man Who Ate 25 Eggs a Day (Or, Why Cholesterol’s Not All Bad)

Just 25 eggs? My man can eat 50…

The article paints an interesting picture of the state of health care with relation to pharmaceuticals and doctor education.  It’s along the lines of a recent post suggesting caution about trusting a physicians recommendation – they are only human.  I had a similar experience with a previous doctor pushing for cholesterol medication, and subsequently encountered other family members with similar experiences.  My most recent test demonstrated a dramatic improvement in my HDL & LDL levels, though as the article points out – these aren’t considered to be truly indicative of cardiovascular health.  But everyone is different, so you’re best to find out for yourself.

FYI: Bodybuilders and powerlifters routinely, especially when adding weight, eat a dozen or more eggs/day. From a $/gram of protein and $/calories perspective, eggs are fantastic. Even from a macronutrient perspective, eggs are quite good for you- depending on size, you get 60-80 calories, 5-7 grams of protein, and 5-7 grams of fat, to no carbohydrates.

Being Colder May Be Good For Your Health

Ken K. Liu, a principal at a hedge fund in Los Angeles, has been wearing the vest under his suit jacket on and off for about a year. He told me that some people’s first reaction to the unwieldy getup is “What the hell are you doing?” As soon as Liu explains the concept, though, many of them say it sounds like a good idea. Others still think it’s “stupid”—as did my colleagues, when I wore one—but Liu has not been deterred. Each morning while his coffee is brewing, he takes his vest out of the freezer and dons it without shame. Liu was never “fat,” by his estimation, but he says he did carry a few extra pounds that he had trouble dropping, despite exercise and attention to diet. The Cold Shoulder closed that gap.

Hayes’s ice vest was inspired by the work of Ray Cronise, a former materials scientist at NASA who now devotes himself to researching the benefits of cold exposure. During the swimmer Michael Phelps’s 2008 Olympic gold-medal streak, Cronise heard the widely circulated claim that Phelps was eating 12,000 calories a day. Having been fastidiously trying to lose weight, he was incredulous. Phelps’s intake was more than five times what the average American eats daily, and many thousands of calories more than what most elite athletes in training need. Running a marathon burns only about 2,500 calories. Phelps would have to be aggressively swimming during every waking hour to keep from gaining weight. But then Cronise—who knows enough about heat transfer to have been employed keeping astronauts alive in the sub-zero depths of space—figured it out: Phelps must be burning extra calories simply by being immersed in cool water.

Source: The Benefits of Being Cold

Couple of things to consider:

• The article is talking about 19-24 degrees Celsius
• Thailand doesn’t have a lot obese people. It’s hot. Very hot…

While I’m not Phelps, and high profile athletes have notorious diets leading up to events, I have encountered the need for more [and better] food.  I’ve been woken in the middle of the night with hunger pains.  The tricky part about dealing with these moments is the nutrition in what I’m eating.  Fueling between activities can also be really tricky – time to make food is the immediate problem, but also time to digest.  Ah, the fun of trying to do something at a reasonable pace when food is occupying your stomach…

Immune Cells Tweak the Body Metabolism to Help Control Obesity

…in mice.

Obesity has reached epic proportions in the United States and is rising in other developed and developing countries as they adopt our diet and lifestyle. Autoimmune diseases, like celiac disease and multiple sclerosis, and allergies, also immune-mediated, have blossomed recently, too.

These conditions have exploded within too short of a time period to be attributable to genetic changes, so environmental factors, from synthetic pesticides to plastics to antibiotics, have been blamed for their increased prevalence. While it’s probably simplistic to search for one cause to explain away both these types of modern ills, some studies are indicating that immune cells and molecules are important for regulating metabolism—and are dysregulated in obesity.

Source: Immune cells tweak the body’s metabolism to help control obesity

Arsenic in the Water: Heart Risk

Ana Navas-Acien can’t quite recall the moment when she began to worry about arsenic in drinking water and its potential role in heart disease.  Perhaps it was when she read a study suggesting a link among people in Bangladesh.  And a similar study in Taiwan. And in Chile.

Several years ago, Dr. Navas-Acien, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, decided to see if similar links could be found in the United States.

Source: A Heart Risk in Drinking Water

Sadly, the article doesn’t have any suggestions for preventative measures.  Only that they were looking at filters on wells.  Ground/well water is largely the focus.

How Much Coffee You Need Is a Genetic Trait

An international research team has found six new genes underlying our coffee-slurping ways.

The work, led by Marilyn Cornelis, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found a total of eight genes, two of which had been identified in prior work by Cornelis and others. Two of the new genes were related to metabolism of caffeine and two were related to its psychoactive effects.

Source: Java in the genes

While the finding may not be hugely surprising, they should prove useful. Pinpointing a genetic link to caffeine reaction could allows medics and nutritionists to more accurately identify who can and can’t cope with the stimulant in their diet—and provide advice accordingly to target benefits and minimize health risk.

Related:

• Genes don’t just influence your IQ—they determine how well you do in school
• ‘Smart genes’ prove elusive
• GIANT study reveals giant number of genes linked to height

5 Reasons to Skip Breakfast?

The belief that we won’t have our get-up-and-go unless we down our Cheerios has turned the concept of eating upon rising into a die-hard dietary rule. Original research on whether breakfast made an impact on health did find that healthier people ate breakfast. But data, as we know, doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Source: 5 Reasons to Skip Breakfast

Everybody is different, figure out what works for you.  I eat when I’m hungry, or preparing for activity.  Paying attention to the glycemic index can help with the insulin factor the article mentions, rather then abstaining.  Likewise, eating less carbs doesn’t mean not having any breakfast at all – low fat trumps low carb diets.