Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2008
Advertised 'fun foods' lack serious nutrition
With cartoon characters printed on the package, the food you buy for your children may look like fun. But it is likely bad news for their bodies, Canadian researchers report in the current issue of the journal Obesity Reviews.
In the analysis of 367 products aimed at kids, nearly 90 percent were found to be of poor nutritional quality - having too much sugar, fat or sodium - even excluding candy and soft drinks.
Yet 62 percent of these poor foods made some sort of nutrition-related claim on the package, such as "made with real fruit juice" or "no artificial flavors."
The researchers from Carleton University used healthy-food cutoffs from the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. For example, a food failed to pass muster if over 35 percent of its calories came from fat, excluding nuts and nut butters.
- Tom Avril
Diabetic Hispanics may not know of risk of eye disease
Many U.S. Hispanics with diabetes are unaware that a potential complication of their condition is eye disease, and they do not get regular eye exams that could identify any problems.
That's the finding of a new survey led by Johns Hopkins University, published in the current Archives of Ophthalmology. The researchers focused on Hispanics because their rate of diabetes is especially high - 1.9 times the rate in non-Hispanic white people - and because for some, the language barrier impedes good care. One in five Hispanics over 40 has diabetes, and almost half of those have diabetic retinopathy - a condition that may be characterized by the swelling and leaking of blood vessels in the eye.
The researchers interviewed 553 Hispanic residents of Baltimore, 204 diabetics and 349 without the disease. Only 36 percent of newly diagnosed diabetics knew that eye disease was a potential consequence; the percentage rose to 52 percent among those who had known they had diabetes for more than a year. Just 30 percent of the diabetics had been to the eye doctor in the previous year.
- Tom Avril
The secret to health might be all in your head
If you've thought that research claiming health benefits from things like being happy is a bunch of hooey, look at a study out of New England in the current Annals of Family Medicine. Doctors asked 2,816 adults over 35 with no heart attack history how they rated their risk of an attack or stroke in the next five years compared to peers.
Nearly half the men who rated their risk as "low" would have been classified by tests as high risk. Yet when researchers checked the accuracy of their predictions against death records 15 years later, it turned out that men who
believed they were at lower-than-average risk actually had a three times lower rate of death from heart attacks and strokes even after smoking, cholesterol and other factors were considered.
No such link was found for women, which the researchers speculate may be because the study began in 1990, when heart disease was seen as a threat mainly for men.
The authors' working theory has to do with perception of risk. When a healthy outcome can be achieved by a simple behavior, such as getting a shot, a heightened sense of risk can be a motivating factor, they write.
But preventing cardiovascular disease involves complicated factors involving diet, exercise, drugs, and knowledge of evolving medical theory. With progress hard to achieve, a heightened sense of risk is less likely to motivate and more likely to cause stress and fear, the researchers say - and to trigger unhealthy coping behaviors like overeating, alcohol abuse, and avoiding the doctor.
Believing you are at less risk may make it so.
- Don Sapatkin
Suicide risk could rise with sight trouble
Visual impairment affects more than a person's eyesight. It can hinder daily activities, cause social isolation, depression and more dependence on others, and lead to more falls.
Now, researchers have concluded that it heightens a person's risk of suicide - by up to 18 percent.
Byron L. Lam of Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine and colleagues reviewed data from 137,479 participants of national surveys done between 1986 and 1996.
During 11 years of follow-up, they identified 200 suicide deaths. Analyzing those, they found that while the visual impairment raised a person's suicide risk, the indirect health effects were a more significant risk factor.
The authors suggest better treatment of visual problems may reduce suicide risks.
- Sandy Bauers
email this
print this
