Category: Health

CNN.com – Delivered?meals gaining popularity – Apr 20, 2004

The idea is extremely appealing. Every morning a cooler with three home cooked meals and a snack are delivered to your doorstep. The entire day’s worth of food fit your diet plan, so as long as you stick to the food in the cooler, which is supposedly fresh and tasty, you’ll meet your weight and fitness goals.

That said, in order to benefit from a service like this, you must live in one of a few US cities (Seattle, Los Angeles and New York were listed in the article) and you must be willing to shell out $35-40/day.

I would like to encourage everyone who is able to sign up as a bone marrow donor with The National Marrow Donor Program. Only 30% of people in need of bone marrow find a match within their family. The rest of them rely on people in the donor database.

One of my collegues is currently still looking for a donor for his treatment scheduled in the spring.

See my health blog here: http://stormy.blogs.com/livingwell.

Working poor face higher obesity rates

The working poor are those that can least afford healthy food. Often they work long hours, have little free time, little access to stores with fresh fruit and little knowledge of how to prepare healthy food. After a long day of work, it’s easier to buy some hamburgers or pop in a frozen dinner.

Good grocery stores with good produce selections are also hard to find in inner cities and neighborhoods that the working poor tend to live in.

… at least for long periods of time, like the amount of time I spend on the computer. The Harvard Alumni magazine has an interesting article on health and exercise, The Deadliest Sin. The article covers all of the regular recommendations: exercise more, eat less, etc, but it really stresses how sedentary our lives have become in very recent history. The authors claim that even if you get the recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day, it’s still not good to sit for the rest of the day. That’s bad news for those of us who have computer jobs!

Another interesting tidbit from the article is that based on our anatomy they think that humans (in all except recent history) actually ran a lot. Not walked a lot, ran a lot.

Which reminds me of the Amish health study I read. Researchers, surprised by the low levels of obesity in Amish populations in spite of diets rich in eggs and bacon, strapped pedometers on several of them and found they walked between 10-20 miles a day!

There’s an article on CNN about a man who swallowed twelve pounds of coins, necklaces and needles over the course of a decade. He had a disease called pica, which comes from the Latin word for magpie. It’s a condition (such as when kids eat dirt), but this man’s was probably linked to a psychiatric disorder. I wonder if it was just a weird side effect or if it actually started with a rational decision, such as needing to hide money and spread from there …

The new diet guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) state that sugar should account for no more than 10% of the calories in a daily diet. The US Sugar Industry wants the Bush administration to pull funding for WHO unless WHO agrees to remove its recommended limits on sugar consumption!
Talk about a conflict of interest! I don’t think the person with the most money should decide what’s in a healthy diet. You can read more about it here Sugar Industry Threatens to Scupper WHO and here Sugar Industry Threatens WHO Budget Over Dietary Guidelines.

It looks like the Bush administration is ceding to the Sugar Industry’s demands. Their comment to the WHO’s proposed guidelines include lots of dubious statements, like there’s no link between junk food and the risk of obesity. You can read the whole response (and Commercial Alert’s response), Secret Document Shows Bush Administration Effort to Stop Global Anti-Obesity Initiative.