It seems that family behaviors can have a significant impact on preschool children, helping them maintain a normal weight, and perhaps delivering other benefits as well.

The three habits?

- Sit down to dinner together as a family five or more nights each week.

- Be sure children get enough (10.5 hours a night at this age) sleep.

- Limit time in front of the TV or game system to less than two hours a day.

“Four-year-olds who regularly ate dinner with the family, got enough sleep and watched less than two hours of TV a day were 40% less likely to be obese,” points out study lead author, Sarah Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health at Ohio State University.

Since there are so few easy, effective treatments for childhood obesity, preventing it in the first place must get special emphasis. Childhood obesity isn’t something to brush of; it’s a serious medical condition that gets kids started on a path to health problems (high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol) once only seen in adults.

The research included a nationally representative sample of 8,550 four year olds along with one parent per child who answered questions about family routine and behavior. In children, obesity is determined by the BMI being greater than the 95th percentile when compared to others of the same age and gender. The group of children in this study had an 18% obesity rate.

Only 14.5% of the children were regularly exposed to all three of the at home behaviors, and the obesity rate for this group was 14.3%. For those kids who were exposed to none of the three, the obesity rate shot up to 24.5%. Researchers were able to link each behavior to a 17% reduction in the rate of obesity.

These results held even after the team controlled for things that might impact a child’s risk of being obese. These included obesity of the mother, race, gender, socioeconomic status and living in a single parent household.

The results show an association between the three behaviors and obesity rates, but the study was not designed to demonstrate cause and effect. “We don’t know if it’s the routines per se, or if it’s the parenting associated with these routines or something else correlated with these routines, but we do know these routines are associated with a lower incidence of obesity,” continues Anderson.

The good news for parents is that all three of the behaviors are pretty simple – things you can do in your own home, in your own way, to help your children. Not only will you be denying childhood obesity a hold on your child, you’ll also be taking part in activities that have been shown to aid behavior and cognitive development.

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3 Home Habits to Stay Slim Continued…

Even if you can’t manage making all three steps part of your family routine, Anderson says that introducing at least one can have a positive impact. Or do one as much as possible for your lifestyle and schedule.

As a parent, you will need to make these behaviors a priority… perhaps limiting the number of activities or changing your own routine to make it work. You might start by trying the one behavior you think you’ll be able to do most easily and watch the results. If you’re already doing one (or more) of these, try adding another.

Young children aren’t the only ones who can be encouraged to get their weight under control, as shown by another study set to appear in the same March 2010 issue of Pediatrics.

This work involved 81 obese teen girls enrolled in the Duke University Healthy Lifestyles Program who were randomly assigned to read an intervention novel about an obese heroine who learns about eating right, being active and thus improving her self esteem, or a control novel.

The girls who read the intervention novel were more likely to reduce their BMI percentile than those who read the control book, or a third group of subjects who didn’t read anything.

Age appropriate fiction that addresses healthy behaviors might have potential as a supplement to a weight management program.

So parents, grandparents and others… if you’re worried about childhood obesity, there are simple steps you can take to make a difference… starting tonight.

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The research involved an analysis of data collected on 60,524 Chinese adults and looked at the role sweetened carbonated drinks and juices play in the development in this type of cancer in Asians. Earlier work has previously looked at the effect on Americans and Europeans.

The participants came from the Singapore Chinese Health Study that collected data on diet, physical activity and medical history among other things.

Those who drank two or more carbonated sodas (diet sodas and sports drinks were not included in the work) a week tended to be younger men who smoked, drank alcohol, ate calorie laden foods and were less active overall. These participants also ate more red meat, causing the researchers to adjust for dietary factors such as this.

“But the adjustments did not change the link between soda and the risk of pancreas cancer,” explains study author Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota’s division of epidemiology and community health. “We suspect sugar is the culprit, but we cannot prove it from this study,”

Generally a serving of carbonated soda is 20 ounces and has 65 grams of sugar. As a comparison, a typical serving of a fruit juice, like orange juice, is 8 ounces and has 21 grams of sugar. Quite a difference.

Carbonated drinks are the leading sources of added sugar in the US diet, contributing to both high blood sugar and hyperinsulinemia (a higher than normal amount of insulin in the blood).

The pancreas is a gland deep in the abdomen (between the stomach and spine), surrounded by other vital organs like the liver and intestines. This pear-shaped gland is about 6 inches long and produces insulin (and other hormones) that help to regulate blood sugar.

This organ, like others in the body, can develop cancer though the causes remain unknown. It’s most common in smokers and those who are obese, with risk increasing as you age. This form of cancer is slightly more common in women than in men.

Tragically, 95% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer won’t be alive in 5 years.

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This Increases Risk Of Pancreatic Cancer Continued…

When it comes to treatment, the picture is bleak – usually by the time this cancer is found, its quite advanced and has had time to spread to nearby organs.

In about 80% of cases the tumor cannot be removed, leaving chemotherapy and radiation as the most likely recommendations to shrink the size of the growth and prolong survival.

If the findings of this most recent study are confirmed by future work, this could provide a solid, sensible way to prevent a dangerous, deadly form of cancer.

Limiting these sweetened drinks as well as eating lots of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, exercising regularly and quitting smoking are all changes you can make to reduce your risk. In the case of pancreatic cancer, prevention is always the best, safest option.

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Following a Mediterranean style diet helps lower the risk of developing small areas of dead tissue that have been linked to thinking problems. Doctor’s call these brain infarcts, and cite them as involved in vascular dementia, the second most common form of disease after Alzheimer’s disease. The Mayo Clinic puts the numbers with vascular dementia at between 1-4% of those over 65.

The risks for vascular disease are similar to Alzheimer’s disease and include high blood pressure, a high fat diet, type 2 diabetes and low folate intake. In this latest study the subjects had never had a clinical stroke, but might have had smaller, unnoticed ones. MRI brain scans can detect such small strokes.

The study ties diet to stroke, and will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in April 2010. The subjects were 712 New Yorkers over the age of 65 who were asked about their diet and then six years later underwent an MRI. Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center, says that dietary patterns tend to remain consistent for at least seven to eight years.

Researchers found that those who most closely followed a Mediterranean style diet were 36% less likely to have areas of brain damage, compared with those whose eating habits were least like the diet.

When the researchers controlled for high blood pressure, the Mediterranean diet was still tied to a lower risk of brain damage. It could be this way of eating helps to protect the brain vessels themselves, without regard to other problems like hypertension Scarmeas says.

The researchers also looked at the individual components of the Mediterranean diet to see if one could be identified as especially beneficial. They found a stronger association between eating the whole diet and brain damage prevention than with any single food in the diet. It might just be that the combination of all the elements, including fish oil, may be producing the positive effect on the brain.

When it came to strokes, the subjects who followed the diet plan the least had an increased risk of strokes that was similar to those with high blood pressure. Those who stuck to the Mediterranean diet regimen had a level of protection that was similar to those who didn’t have hypertension. Other studies have suggested that this eating style might help in preventing a second heart attack, stopping the need for diabetes drugs and lowering cancer risk.

It’s important to understand that the results of the work show association, not causation, which tells us that there could be other factors linking the Mediterranean diet to resistance to this type of brain damage. Other research has shown that the more subjects stick to the diet, the better protection against hypertension they get, and this is also associated with these brain problems.

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Mediterranean Diet For Healthy Brain Continued…

The Mediterranean diet isn’t so much a diet plan as a way of eating for life, and is nothing like the typical American diet. The Mediterranean diet is:

- Very low in red meat and poultry

- Uses olive oil as the main fat source

- Very high in fruits, nuts, legumes, vegetables and cereals

- High in fish

- Permits low to moderate intake of wine

Future work will need to confirm whether subjects must follow the entire Mediterranean diet, or if there are parts that bring about the positive effects. Identifying specific foods might make changing the way we eat easier – adjustments could be centered on adding one or two elements to our current diet, rather than trying to reshape a lifetime pattern of eating.

Still, no matter what the experts end up concluding; we are seeing clearly that what you put into your body (good or bad) does indeed have an impact on both body and mind.

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Atrial fibrillation is a heart condition where the two upper chambers of the heart quiver instead of beating, as they should. This surprisingly common malfunction can lead to heart palpitations, shortness of breath, fatigue and increased stroke risk.

For this work, patients just diagnosed with the common heart arrhythmia were asked to give information about their dietary habits, including how much caffeine they consumed.

A control group of patients without atrial fibrillation also supplied dietary information. The data came from self-reported food frequency questionnaires that covered 116 different items, followed up by an interviewer asking subjects about the foods (and drinks) they consumed on a regular basis.

The subjects in the study were also ranked according to how faithful they were to the Mediterranean diet, an eating plan full of whole grains, fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds with olive oil as the source of fat, no eggs and limited amounts of red meat, fish and poultry and wine drunk in moderation.

Compliance to this eating plan was ranked from 0 (no compliance) to 55 (following faithfully) – the higher the score the greater the adherence to the Mediterranean-style eating plan.

This increasingly popular way of eating has been shown in earlier research to offer benefits to health in terms of death rates, coronary artery disease, blood pressure and cholesterol metabolism.

Those with atrial fibrillation were significantly less likely to stick to the Mediterranean diet than those without this cardiac condition. These subjects reported eating more red meat and full fat dairy products. Even more damaging, these patients got more of their total dietary antioxidants from coffee as opposed to other food sources like fruits, veggies and wine.

Daily coffee intake for the subjects was divided into 4 categories – no coffee, low (one cup/day), medium (2-3 cups/day) or heavy (more than 3 cups/day) intake.

Caffeine is a natural part of the leaves, seeds and fruits of more than 60 different plants – including coffee beans, tea leaves, cocoa beans and kola nuts. The researchers looked at all caffeine sources in evaluating the daily intake of the participants.

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Lots Of Coffee And An Unhealthy Diet Linked To Heart Risk Continued…

The researchers found that those who drank the most amount of coffee each day were more likely to have atrial fibrillation than those who drank less. “Our study suggests that high intake of coffee increases the risk of arrhythmias in people without known cardiac disease,” says study author Dr. Anna Vittoria Mattioli of the University of Modena in Italy.

This Italian research isn’t reason enough to cut your morning (or after dinner) coffee, but the results do suggest that getting antioxidants from other food sources is important to keeping your body healthy, and hopefully avoid symptoms of heart problems like the one in this article.

Two cups of coffee a day, as well as a diet full of natural foods and limited alcohol intake is a reasonable goal – though one most of us have yet to achieve.

To your good health,

Daily Health Bulletin
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A key ingredient in this delicious fruit is an enzyme called superoxide dismutase (SOD) that has helpful antioxidant properties known to prevent damage to body tissues. This remarkable enzyme may help to cut the damage caused by oxidative stress, which is the process that releases those troublesome atoms known as free radicals into the tissues of the body.

Melons, it turns out, are a rich source of an extract dubbed “the enzyme of life” when it was first discovered in 1968. It’s believed by many experts to be even more powerful than antioxidant vitamins because it encourages the body to produce its own antioxidants such as catalase and glutathione peroxidase.

The placebo-controlled, double-blind study involved representatives from Seppic France (the distributor of a commercial extract of SOD known as Extramel) working in collaboration with scientists from the University Henri Poincaré and Isoclin to investigate the anti-stress effects of this natural compound on 70 healthy volunteers aged 30 to 55.

Earlier work had shown that there may be a link between psychological stress and oxidative stress, and this team wanted to see if helping the body to deal with oxidative stress might also help people cope with mental stress too.

The lead researcher, Marie-Anne Milesi of Seppic points out, “Several studies have shown that there is a link between psychological stress and intracellular oxidative stress. We wanted to test whether augmenting the body’s ability to deal with oxidative species might help a person’s ability to resist burnout.”

Damage from oxidative stress has been implicated in many diseases – life changing conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease – as well as how we age. Free radicals come from the natural intake of oxygen as your breathe, interacting with other molecules inside your cells. Beyond what happens inside the body, things from the environment such as pollution, sunlight and smoking can also trigger the production of dangerous free radicals.

The research randomly assigned stressed but healthy volunteers to two different groups. One group of subjects took a capsule with 10 mg Extramel, equal to 140 international units of the SOD enzyme, the other group got a capsule with an inactive starch compound.

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An All-Natural Way To Fight Stress – Eat Melon Continued…

The group taking the SOD enzyme reported fewer stress or fatigue symptoms than those who took the placebo capsule. In fact, the positive effects on stress and fatigue was much greater and longer lasting than the researchers had expected.

Taking the enzyme seemed to offer significant improvements to concentration, cut feelings of being tired, lessened irritability and improved sleeping problems.

There was a strong placebo effect in the 35 subjects who got the placebo capsule, though the effect only seemed to last for the first week of the study. This may have been because the levels of fatigue and stress were not out of the ordinary in these volunteers.

The authors suggest that the results might have been more pronounced if subjects with higher levels of stress or fatigue had been a part of the work.

Further research of a longer duration with a larger number of subjects will be needed to confirm these results that this can reduce cortisol levels. In the meantime, a serving of juicy, delicious melon might just be the natural answer to dealing with everyday stress.

To your good health,

Daily Health Bulletin
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Notice the growing vegetarian options on restaurant menus and the exploding number of vegetarian recipes – ample evidence that eating healthy is alive and well.

Today people are making plant based items – fruits, veggies, grains, nuts, and seeds – a major component of their diet. According to numbers out of the American Dietetic Association, almost 2.5% of the adult population of the U.S. eats a meat free diet.

Going meatless is easier than ever before. There are plenty of meatless products on the shelves of your local grocery stores – you can try several brands to find something you like.

There are also countless vegetarian cookbooks, magazines and online resources for great tasting, family friendly recipes. If you want to give going meatless a try, make the change a gradual one. Make a single day (or meal) meatless and see how you do.

Meatless meals most often feature veggies, beans and grains. Think of the foods that you like already that don’t have meat in them, like lasagna, pasta, soups and salads.

Lots of times you can use your own favorite recipes and just substitute beans or another vegetarian option in place of the meat. You might try:

- Beans and legumes – in casseroles or salads

- Vegetarian refried beans – in burritos or tacos

- Tofu – in stir fry

There’s a term being coined for those who follow a mainly plant based diet, but still eat some meat, poultry or fish – flexitarian.

A growing number of us are embracing this way of eating, and some consider it to be very similar to the Mediterranean diet – an eating plan that limits red meats and includes ample amounts of fruits, veggies, legumes, whole grains and healthy fats.

Research has consistently shown that eating this way cuts the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and perhaps even cancer, as well as helping out with weight loss.

Removing the meat from some of your meals also has benefits to your budget. In fact, cutting a meat meal from your weekly menu will almost certainly bring your grocery bill down.

To save on the meat you do buy, take advantage of special sales, separate the meat your bring home into meal sized portions (be sure to label and date the packages) and freeze these.

Another way to stretch a dollar is to buy a larger size roast than you need for a single meal and use it (creatively) as leftovers for 3 to 4 meals.

Protein isn’t just available in a cut of red meat. There are other sources that are just as natural, but cost a whole lot less. A large egg brings you 6 grams of protein. A glass of milk delivers 8 grams of protein a serving. Another often-overlooked protein source is cottage cheese, which is a healthy, and affordable, way to get your protein for the day. Lastly, tofu can cost as little as 6 cents for a full gram of protein.

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Going Meatless: Easy, Healthy, Affordable Continued…

Beyond saving you money, getting your protein from non-meat sources has some rather impressive benefits to the body-

- You to take in fewer calories and less fat, which can lead to improved cholesterol numbers and better weight management.

- Improved longevity – a National Cancer Institute study found that those who ate 4 ounces (114 grams) of red meat daily were 30% more likely to die of any cause over 10 years than those who ate less red meat. Even sausage and lunch meat increased the risk.

- Less disease risk – including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and some types of cancer.

If meat simply must be a part of all your meals, at least be sure you’re eating a proper portion size. A serving of protein should really be no more than 3 ounces (85 grams).

This is about the size of a standard deck of playing cards, and should take up no more than a quarter of your dinner plate. Veggies and fruits should take another half, with the last quarter left to whole grains.

The benefits to your health of replacing a few “with meat” dinners with tasty and nutritious meatless dinners are plain.  Just experiment and try a few different options and you are sure to find something you like.

To your good health,

Daily Health Bulletin
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Well, new research appearing in the September 2009 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation may have uncovered the answer.

It appears that molecules of certain kinds of fat can actually travel to your brain, which tells your body to ignore built in “stop eating” signals and just keep right on eating.

“Normally, our body is primed to say when we’ve had enough to eat, but that doesn’t always happen when we’re eating something good,” explains study senior author Deborah Clegg, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern.

Recognizing that the brain might be involved since it incorporates some of the fat (good and bad) that we eat into its structure, the team wanted to isolate the effects of fat on signals in the brain that might be related to how much we eat.

The fatty acid that appeared to cause the most trouble was palmitic acid, one of the most common saturated fatty acids, found in both dairy (butter, cheese, milk) and beef products. The fats in olive oil were given a clean bill of health by the study.

Researchers tested their idea by exposing subject rats and mice to fats in different ways – injecting some types of fat into the brain, infusing fat through the carotid artery or feeding the animals through a stomach tube.

All the animals got the same amount of calories and fat – only the type of fat (palmitic acid, monounsaturated fatty acid and oleic acid) was different.

The work reveals that brain chemistry can be changed in a very short period of time. What happens when you indulge in a fat-laden but delicious treat is that your brain gets hit with the fatty acids, making your body resistant to both insulin and leptin (chemicals that tell you to stop eating) and encouraging you to continue to indulge.

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Tasty Foods Tell The Brain To Keep On Eating Continued…

This mechanism can even be triggered in the brains of those without any current sign of obesity. What’s more, the effect appeared to last a full three days after the subjects ate the fatty food.

Bad news if you’re trying to get back on track with a healthy eating plan after slipping up a bit. These findings might also explain why those who overeat on a Friday or Saturday night out are still feeling hungrier (and likely taking in more calories) on Monday.

Even though the research was conducted using rodents, the results reinforce what nutritionists have been saying for some time – limit the number of saturated fats you consume. Dr Clegg points out, “The action was very specific to palmitic acid, which is very high in foods that are rich in saturated fat.”

The findings of this first-of-its-kind research might also have implications for diabetes patients. While science has known for a long time that a high-fat diet can cause insulin resistance, until now no one has understood the precise mechanism at work, or whether some types of fats are more dangerous than others.

Follow up studies by this team will likely investigate how long it takes to reverse the effects of exposure to all those bad-for-you-fats.

And with obesity rates rising steadily, and the selection of saturated fat laden foods more plentiful than ever before, work like this can’t come soon enough to educate people in their dietary choices and reduce the amount of compulsive over eating.

To your good health,

Daily Health Bulletin
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Until now both of these eating plans had been recommended for weight loss in overweight (or obese) patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but there have been few direct comparisons of the eating plans.

Seeing this and wanting to asses the effectiveness, durability and safety of the two diets, Dr. Dario Giugliano of the Second University of Naples in Italy and his team randomly assigned 215 subjects with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes who had never treated with medication to either a low carb Mediterranean style diet or a low-fat diet.

This was a lifestyle, not a fat diet tried on for a few weeks. Both groups received monthly counseling sessions from nutritionists and dietitians for the first year, every other month for the remaining three years.

At the end of the four year study, one of the longest running of its kind, 44% of those on the Mediterranean style diet needed medication to lower their blood sugar, compared to 70% needing medication from the low-fat diet group.

At the one-year mark, subjects following the Mediterranean diet lost more weight – a difference of 4.4 pounds. These dieters also had slimmer waistlines. This group even saw greater increases in HDL (good) cholesterol and bigger decreases in harmful triglycerides. The heart healthy benefits remained for the duration of the study.

“Eating Mediterranean prevented anti-hyperglycemic drug therapy in about one-third of patients,” explains study author Giugliano, a professor of endocrinology and metabolic diseases at the Second University of Naples. He described the Mediterranean eating plan as, “a safe and tasty means to delay the introduction of anti-diabetic drug therapy in newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic people.”

Understand there’s no one “Mediterranean” diet, at least 16 countries all with their own tastes combine to create the eating plan that’s taken on the name. It’s best to think of the Mediterranean diet as a way of living and eating that all about plenty of fruits, vegetables, fish and whole grains, with limits on red meat and processed foods.

Fat come from olive and canola oils as well as small portions of nuts such as walnuts, pecans, almonds and hazelnuts. Herbs and spices (not salt) are used to flavor foods. Carbs are few. Red wine, in moderation (5 ounces daily for women or men over age 65, no more than 10 ounces daily for men under age 65) is in there too.

But it’s not all about food; the Mediterranean diet is also about eating meals with family and friends. The chance to socialize and enjoy companionship as well as food.

The low fat diet used in the research was based on the American Heart Association guidelines. It had lots of whole grains, limited sweets and allowed no more than 30% of calories to come from fat, keeping to 10% from saturated (animal) fats.

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Mediterranean Diet Tops Low Fat Diet Continued…

If this type of eating plan is working for you, this latest study isn’t any reason to change your eating plan, but you can be aware, so you’re making an informed decision about your diet plan.

What’s worrisome for the medical community is that the numbers with type 2 diabetes is growing quickly, with an estimated 380 million cases by 2025.

Today diabetes affects over 20 million Americans and brings symptoms like blurred vision, fatigue, increased appetite, thirst and need to urinate. Since type 2 diabetes develops slowly, some people don’t experience many symptoms.

The definitive way to know if there’s a problem is to visit your doctor for testing to include a fasting blood glucose test or others your physician may order for you.

In the meantime, this intriguing study clearly shows that lifestyle changes, especially a key one like adopting a healthier way of eating, can impact your disease and maybe keep you from having to rely on medication to manage your condition.

Even if the receommended diet for diabetes, the Mediterranean diet, isn’t for you, a dietician can help you come up with an eating plan that accounts for your likes and dislikes and still keeps your body healthy.

To your good health,

Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
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The details of the work suggesting that green vegetables provide protection against heart disease appears in Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

You might remember from your biology class that our arteries are blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. When they’re healthy, arteries are flexible, elastic yet strong.

Over time too much pressure can cause artery walls to thicken and stiffen. This can restrict the flow of blood to organs and tissues – a process known to the medical community as atherosclerosis, or more descriptively, hardening of the arteries. Atherosclerosis can lead to angina, stroke and heart attack.

What this new work out of the U.K. shows is that arteries don’t get clogged with these plaques in the same way – bends and blood vessel branches where blood flow is disrupted are more prone to buildup.

And while nature has given us a protein (called Nrf2) that’s supposed to protect against this sort of buildup, the team found that this substance isn’t active in the places in arteries more vulnerable to disease – those bends and blood vessels.

Straight sections appear to have adequate levels of Nrf2 that help prevent inflammation, one of the earliest stages in the development of atherosclerosis.

What’s really encouraging about this particular study is that treatment with a naturally occurring chemical found in green vegetables (gardeners often call these brassicas) seems to switch on the Nrf2 in the disease-prone areas.

While the subjects used here were genetically engineered mice, the discovery that the arteries were vulnerable in different places, and this vulnerability could be addressed was important.

More work is needed on human subjects diagnosed with hardening of the arteries to see if ingesting this natural compound helps improve their condition.

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Healthy Greens Protects Your Heart Continued…

Dr. Paul Evans, who led the research explains, “We found that the innermost layer of cells at branches and bends of arteries lack the active form of Nrf2, which may explain why they are prone to inflammation and disease. Treatment with the natural compound sulforaphane reduced inflammation at the high-risk areas by switching on Nrf2″. The team believes that this will allow the disease-prone regions of the arteries to stay healthy and perhaps even slow the progression of existing disease.

Sulforaphane is a natural compound in broccoli and other cruciferous veggies – cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, bok choy, rocket and kale. Once inside the body sulforaphane appears to be able to reactivate Nrf2, which restores the cells’ ability to keep themselves from becoming inflamed.

Officials from the British Heart Foundation, who funded the research, are pleased with the discovery of benefits from such good-for-you-foods. “As well as adding evidence to support the importance of eating ‘five-a-day’, the biochemistry revealed in this research could lead to more targeted dietary or medical approaches to prevent or lessen disease that leads to heart attacks and strokes.”

So, although this research points to natural ways to prevent heart disease, it is yet another example of research proving what Mom knew all along – eat up those green, leafy veggies, they’re good for you!

To your good health,

Daily Health Bulletin Editor
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Add exercise to this healthy eating choice and your risk plummets even further.

Earlier work has already studied either diet or activity in relation to Alzheimer’s, but a study that looks at both of these together has been carried out.

The study, and an accompanying editorial appear in the August 12, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Columbia University Medical Center population-based, observational study began in 2006 and involved a group of 2,258 elderly New Yorkers, finding those who ate most like the Mediterranean diet had almost a 40% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease than those who didn’t eat this way.

Now a new French study of over 1,400 older men and women confirmed that those who ate most closely to the Mediterranean diet had slower age related cognitive decline than those whose diets were least like this way of eating.

Columbia University Medical Center researcher Nikolaos Scarmeas, MD and colleagues, in an update to the earlier 2006 work, report that of the 1,880 mixed race/ethnicity subjects, those who get the most exercise have even lower rates of Alzheimer’s.

The effects appear to add up, building on each other’s healthful benefits to the body.

Those who stuck to the Mediterranean diet and were most active had a 61-67% lower risk of Alzheimer’s than those who did not.

Cut Alzheimer’s Risk With Mediterranean Diet And Exercise Continued…

In the U.S., those not following the Mediterranean diet are more likely be eating lots of fast food and sweet treats, and the bad part of these foods might have more of an impact on brain health than the good that comes from the Mediterranean diet.

More work is needed as the research is based on self-reported information on diet and exercise, and no randomized interventions were done.

The best the experts can say today is that you need to eat well and be active. Even a little bit of regular activity can be helpful when it comes to Alzheimer’s.

“If two people are eating the same healthy diet, that person who also gets physical activity has much lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease compared with the person who is not active,” Scarmeas points out. “And if both are active, the one with the healthy diet has much lower risk than the person with a less healthy diet.”

The Mediterranean diet isn’t so much a diet plan as a way of eating for life, though it isn’t at all like most Americans eat. This plan is…

- Low in red meat and poultry

- Uses olive oil as the main fat source

- Very high in fruits, nuts, legumes, vegetables and cereals

- High in fish

- Permits low to moderate intake of wine

But if you think you can start living (and eating) healthy in your later years, think again.

Mayo Clinic neurologist David S. Knopman, MD who wrote a supporting editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association disagrees, seeing diet as a key part of a healthy lifestyle. What’s more, healthy foods and activity probably exert their influence over decades, not just months.

While the research has yet to prove that a mediterranean diet plan along with exercise is protection against cognitive decline or prevents Alzheimer’s disease, the strong hint that they might is certainly worth considering when it comes to your brain health.

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