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New Zealand Herald via AP

Natasha Harris, stay-at-home mother of eight, died of a heart attack in February 2010. Experts say the New Zealand woman's two-gallon-a-day Coca-Cola habit probably contributed to her death, a conclusion that led the soft-drink giant to note that even water can be deadly in excessive amounts.

By The Associated Press

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Experts say a New Zealand woman's 2-gallon-a-day Coca-Cola habit probably contributed to her death, a conclusion that led the soft-drink giant to note that even water can be deadly in excessive amounts. 

Natasha Harris, a 30-year-old, stay-at-home mother of eight from Invercargill, died of a heart attack in February 2010. Fairfax Media reported that a pathologist, Dr. Dan Mornin, testified at an inquest Thursday that she probably suffered from hypokalemia, or low potassium, which he thinks was caused by her excessive consumption of Coke and overall poor nutrition. 

Symptoms of hypokalemia can include abnormal heart rhythms, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. 

Mornin said that toxic levels of caffeine, a stimulant found in Coke, also may have contributed to her death, according to Fairfax. 

 

Harris' partner, Chris Hodgkinson, testified that Harris drank between 8 and 10 liters (2.1 and 2.6 gallons) of regular Coke every day. 

“The first thing she would do in the morning was to have a drink of Coke beside her bed and the last thing she would do at night was have a drink of Coke,” Hodgkinson said in a deposition. “She was addicted to Coke.” 

 

 

Hodgkinson also said Harris ate little and smoked about 30 cigarettes a day. In the months before her death, he said, Harris experienced blood pressure problems and lacked energy. 

He said that on the morning of her death, Harris helped get her children ready for school before slumping against a wall. He called emergency services and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but couldn't revive her. 

Another pathologist, Dr. Martin Sage, said in a deposition that “it is certainly well demonstrated that excessive long or short term cola ingestion can be dramatically symptomatic, and there are strong hypothetical grounds for this becoming fatal in individual cases.” 

Inquests such as this are sometimes held for unusual or unexplained deaths in New Zealand, and can help shape future health policies. With the evidence in the case now complete, the coroner's office will compile and issue a final report into the death. 

In an interview with The Associated Press, Lisa Te Morenga, a nutritionist at the University of Otago, said excessive consumption of any type of liquid in a cool climate would be likely to play havoc with the body's natural systems and balance. 

Karen Thompson, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Oceania, said in a statement that its products are safe. 

“We concur with the information shared by the coroner's office that the grossly excessive ingestion of any food product, including water, over a short period of time with the inadequate consumption of essential nutrients, and the failure to seek appropriate medical intervention when needed, can be dramatically symptomatic.” 

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WASHINGTON — Medicare is wasting more than $8 billion on an experimental program that rewards providers of mediocre health care and is unlikely to produce useful results, federal investigators say in a new report. 

The report, to be issued Monday by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, urges the Obama administration to cancel the program, which pays bonuses to health insurance companies caring for millions of Medicare beneficiaries.

Administration officials, however, defended the project and said they would not cancel it because it could improve the quality of care for older Americans.

In the 2010 health care law, Congress cut Medicare payments to managed care plans, known as Medicare Advantage, and authorized bonus payments to those that provide high-quality care. Investigators found that most of the money paid under the demonstration program went to “average-performing plans” rated lower than the benchmarks set by Congress.

The report said the project would cost $8.3 billion over 10 years, with 80 percent of the cost occurring in the first three years.

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether Medicare officials had the legal authority to make the changes.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, and Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said the report suggested that Medicare officials had abused their authority.

In a statement, Mr. Hatch and Mr. Camp said they were concerned that the government might be “using taxpayer dollars for political purposes, to mask the impact on beneficiaries of cuts in the Medicare Advantage program.” Administration officials denied that.

A separate federal panel, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, also criticized the project, saying it increases “spending at a time when Medicare already faces serious problems with cost control and long-term financing.”

The panel denounced Medicare’s “overly broad use of demonstration authority” and said “limited Medicare dollars should go to truly high-performing plans.” It said “the extension of quality bonuses to the vast majority of plans is likely to result in far greater program costs than the reward system enacted” by Congress, and that by spreading the rewards so broadly, “the demonstration lessens the incentive to achieve the highest level of performance.”

The G.A.O. said the project “dwarfs all other Medicare demonstrations” in its impact on the budget, but is so poorly designed that researchers could not tell whether the bonus payments led to improved care. As a result, it said, it is unlikely to “produce meaningful results.” Insurers can use the bonuses to offer extra benefits, like vision and dental care, or to lower premiums.

More than 12 million people are in Medicare Advantage plans. About one-third of them are in plans that would receive bonuses under the 2010 law. By contrast, under the demonstration program, 90 percent are in plans eligible for bonuses, the report said.

The administration said that by offering bigger bonuses to more health plans, it hoped to encourage larger, more rapid improvements in care. “All Medicare Advantage plans will be part of the demonstration,” a federal health official told James C. Cosgrove, the accountability office’s director of health care studies.

The Medicare commission said “demonstration authority is intended for smaller-scale projects” that test innovations in the way health care is financed and delivered.

The health care law cut payments to private Medicare Advantage plans after many studies found that they were being overpaid. President Obama said the private plans were getting “unwarranted subsidies” that “pad their profits but don’t improve the care of seniors.”

The commission said payments to private plans, including the bonuses, were still about 7 percent higher than what the government would pay for similar beneficiaries in the traditional Medicare program. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/health/policy/gao-says-medicare-test-project-is-wasting-8-billion.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

One of the greatest problems for India is undernutrition among children. The country is still struggling with this problem.

Malnutrition, the condition resulting from faulty nutrition, weakens the immune system and causes significant growth and cognitive delay. Growth assessment is the measurement that best defines the health and nutritional status of children, while also providing an indirect measurement of well-being for the entire population.

Methods: A cross-sectional study, in which we explored nutritional status in school-age slum children and analyze factors associated with malnutrition with the help of a pre-designed and pre-tested questionnaire, anthropometric measurements and clinical examination from December 2010 to April 2011 in urban slums of Bareilly, Uttar-Pradesh (UP), India.ResultThe mean height and weight of boys and girls in the study group was lower than the CDC 2000 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) standards in all age groups.

Regarding nutritional status, prevalence of stunting and underweight was highest in age group 11 yrs to 13 yrs whereas prevalence of wasting was highest in age group 5 yrs to 7 yrs. Except refractive errors all illnesses are more common among girls, but this gender difference is statistically significant only for anemia and rickets.

The risk of malnutrition was significantly higher among children living in joint families, children whose mother's education was [less than or equal to] 6th standard and children with working mothers.

 

Conclusions: Most of the school-age slum children in our study had a poor nutritional status. Interventions such as skills-based nutrition education, fortification of food items, effective infection control, training of public healthcare workers and delivery of integrated programs are recommended.

Author: Anurag SrivastavaSyed E MahmoodPayal M SrivastavaVed P ShrotriyaBhushan Kumar
Credits/Source: Archives of Public Health 2012, 70:8

The article below discuss the consept if a vegan diet is ok for the human body and if we can get all our nutritional needs with a vegan diet. 

 

The primary reason it’s hard to give up animals is because most of us have grown up eating animal products and don’t have the first inkling of how to eat anything else. But it’s a “piece of kale” to eat “plant-strong” in 2012. Sure, many people have to go through a steep learning curve for a few weeks, but once the body has lost its addiction to animal foods, it becomes easier and easier. (Food cravings follow the exact same neural pathways as drug addiction.)

I can assure you that athletes prosper on a plant-based diet.

A whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way for everyone to eat. Why? Because plants provide you with all the protein you need — and plant proteins do not cannibalize our bones, promote cancer or increase inflammation like animal proteins do. You can also get all the iron, calcium, and other vitamins and minerals that animal addicts claim you can get only from eating meat. Additionally, you get complex carbohydrates for sustained energy; healthy fats that don’t clog up your pipes; fiber to keep you as regular as a Swiss commuter train; water for hydration; and antioxidants and phytochemicals to zap free radicals. It’s also the best way to lose weight, because if you’re eating plant-based whole foods, you’re eating nutrient-dense foods that make you healthy without taking in extra calories.

This is true even for children and seniors. And as a former world-class triathlete, I can assure you that athletes prosper on a plant-based diet. It’s not just me who feels this way. So do the mixed martial arts fighter Mac Danzig, the Detroit Tigers home run slugger Prince Fielder, the golfer Phil Mickelson, the arm-wrestler Rob Bigwood, the tennis greats Martina Navratilova and Billy Jean King and the boxer Mike Tyson, as well as the ultra-distance athletes Rich Roll and Scott Jurek. The most recent convert? My swimming and plant-strong lunch buddy, Lance Armstrong. 

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We have laws that help protect us from medical misinformation given out by people who aren’t licensed to practice medicine and who don’t actually examine us. When we rely on friends, relatives, or anyone who voices an opinion on the Internet, we risk our health and even our lives.

But no laws can protect us from medical misinformation that our doctors, nurses, and nutritionists can sometimes give us. We have to remember that medicine is still largely an art rather than a science. Medical knowledge, particularly knowledge of nutrition, is always growing. It hasn’t yet arrived at total truth. We also have to remember that our medical team works for us, which means that we don’t have to obey them.

Of course, I don’t know the total truth either. Nobody does. Besides, as we often say, “YMMV,” which stands for “your mileage may vary,” meaning that everyone’s body reacts a little different for anyone else. That’s why they call us individuals.

While I can’t dispense medical information, I can tell you a story. The moral of the story is to encourage you to learn as much as you can about your body and about diabetes. Fortunately, Big Brother, the authoritarian character in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, can’t stop me from telling a story or stop you from learning and thinking and deciding for yourself how you want to live.

This story starts, as many stories that I tell nowadays, with an email message that someone who reads my posts here wrote. “I was recently diagnosed with an A1C of 6.3, and I've read several of the books you recommend,” Rachel began. “I am testing many times a day, and I am finding that my BG ranges between 77-163, with spikes rare but primarily after ‘healthy carbs’ like brown rice and steel-cut oats. I am exercising, have lost 14 pounds since my diagnosis a month ago, and have followed the diet my nutritionist gave me.”

That diet, Rachel wrote, has 210 grams of carbs per day. Not surprisingly, her blood glucose levels are all over the place.

“I am interested in a low carb diet,” Rachel writes. “But my nutritionist tells me that it will be really bad for my liver, and without enough glucose, my liver will start producing glucose, and I will put stress on that organ.

“She also says I will stress out my kidneys and gave me all kinds of scary info about that. Despite that, I really want to see some BG stabilization and it seems like low carb is the way to do that. I saw your article dated 2008 about eating low carb and the benefits you have experienced, and I wondered if it is still working for you.”

My reply told Rachel that I continue to follow a low-carb diet. It is indeed working very well for me both to manage my blood glucose level and my weight. I take no medicine for my diabetes or cholesterol or blood pressure. The only medicine I take is for hypothyroidism. I remain very healthy and active at age 76.

In a nutshell, I see her question as having two parts. “First you have to persuade yourself that a very low-carb diet is safe and healthy, no matter what your nutritionist believes,” I wrote her.

That means she can’t rely on anybody’s opinion. She simply has to become more familiar with the literature. It was the same for me as I wrote in the 2008 article that she mentioned. I had to study the book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. I suggested that she read that as soon as she could.

Meanwhile, I told her that I would contact an expert on the liver question. The kidney question implies that her nutritionist doesn’t understand a very low-carb diet, thinking that it means a high protein diet. It isn’t. Too much protein may well be hard on the kidneys for people who already have kidney problems, but it is not relevant to a low-carb diet.

The expert who I contacted on Rachel’s behalf was Ron Rosedale, M.D. His were the brains behind my recent series of articles on coconut oil and other medium-chain triglycerides starting with “The Trouble with Saturated Fat.” Dr. Rosedale also wrote one of the best diet books I ever read, The Rosedale Diet.

“The paleo community has perpetuated a myth about ‘glucose deficiency’ when on a very low carbohydrate diet,” he replied. “I rebutted this and other very low carbohydrate myths recently in my blog. Anyway, in no shape, way, or form is a very low carbohydrate diet bad for the liver and certainly not from gluconeogenesis. In fact, a higher carbohydrate diet will, in fact, cause greater gluconeogenesis as the liver becomes resistant to insulin that normally would suppress this. Furthermore, eating a higher carbohydrate diet forces the burning of, and therefore dependence on, glucose. Therefore, when one doesn’t eat, such as when one is sleeping, the liver is forced into making lots of glucose to feed the ‘habit’ since we store relatively little, and that which we do store we reserve for anaerobic emergencies. Instead, when one gets habituated to burning fat, then that is what one will do even when one sleeps and does not eat.

“Lastly, Rachel needs a new and different nutritionist. She herself has seen the detriment of eating carbohydrates — when one eats sugar it raises blood sugar. I believe that any nutritionist that does not understand that should not be a nutritionist. I congratulate her for taking control of her own health.”

When I wrote Rachel about Dr. Rosedale’s message, she sent her thanks to him and to me while expressing some concern about fat. I told her that I certainly can understand her fear of fat. After all, that’s simply mirroring what much of the American medical establishment has taught for half a century. Still, during that time we Americans have become much fatter and have much more diabetes. That is no coincidence.

You must have noticed that I turned to a medical doctor to rebut the medical misinformation Rachel got from her nutritionist. To me, Dr. Rosedale makes the most sense. But who should we believe?

No one. We must believe our bodies and what they tell us. When the diet that our nutritionists tell us to follow makes our blood glucose levels go up, that is valuable information. But when our diet keeps our levels low, that is the story that we need to obey.

 

By David Mendosa, Health Guide

 

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Prostate Cancer

A new technique to treat early prostate cancer may have far fewer side-effects than existing therapies, say experts.

A 41-patient study in the journal Lancet Oncology suggests targeted ultrasound treatment could reduce the risk of impotence and incontinence.

Researchers say it could transform future treatment if the findings are repeated in larger studies. 

The Medical Research Council (MRC), which funded the study, welcomed the results, which it said were promising.

Each year 37,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Many face a difficult dilemma: the disease kills about 10,000 men every year, but for some it may not get worse if left untreated.

Standard treatment with surgery or radiotherapy involves treating the whole prostate gland, and can harm surrounding tissue, with a serious risk of side-effects, including urinary incontinence and impotence.

Targeted treatment

Doctors at University College Hospital in London have carried out the first trial using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) aimed at small patches of cancer cells on the prostate….More at Prostate trial 'very encouraging'

More Reading

• Vital Signs: Urologist’s Stake in Laboratory Affects Number of Prostate Biopsies
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Diet soda and triglycerides

Information About Diet soda and diabetes.

The Article below gives some insides about the consumption of diet sodas from people suffering from type 2 diabetes.

There is a lot of debate about whether diet soda is bad for you. Does aspartame causes cancer? Does diet soda help promote weight loss or weight gain? I am no scientist. I don’t know what the truth is. I do know that health benefits or problems aside, we all should be drinking more water. And no… diet soda is not a replacement for water.

Water is THE best thing you can give your body to drink. So we all know that water makes up roughly 70% of your body. We are water. Our muscles, blood, organs and brain are all mostly water. Water helps everything from our skin, to our hair to our joints and all of our systems. Ever notice when you are dehydrated that you feel lethargic? Well, dehydration can also be the cause of chronic pains in the joints and muscles, lower back pain (hi DAD!), headaches, and constipation. No fun….More at 5 Healthy and Delicious Alternatives to Diet Soda

More Reading

• The Best Diabetes Diet (According to the Research)
• CT Scans Deliver More Radiation to Obese People: Study
• What Nutritionists Order When Eating Out

What are tryglycerides, the srticle below gives you brief information about them.

Triglycerides are fat molecules that can be found in your body. Along with cholesterol, they are one of the blood lipids. In fact, 99% of body fat is made up of triglycerides. The medical term for having elevated levels of triglycerides is hypertriglyceridemia.

 

In fasting laboratory tests, a normal triglyceride level is below 150 mg/dL. Borderline high is 150 to 199 mg/dL. High is considered 200 to 499 mg/dL. Very high is over 500 mg/dL.

High triglyceride levels can increase your risk for heart disease, stroke, and nerve damage. There is a link between chronically elevated triglyceride levels and atherosclerosis, as well as insulin resistance….More at Causes of High Triglycerides in Diabetes

Causes of Candida

A diet to eliminate Candida is a long-term lifestyle – and in fact diet is your best defence against candida. Yeast loves sugar and simple carbohydrates; if you keep feeding yeast cells they will multiply, and even the best anti-microbial herbs won’t keep them in check. Eat a disciplined diet for at least 3 months, then When your symptoms disappear, you can expand your diet. But don’t revert to old habits, or the candida symptoms will quickly return.

A Candida Cleanse seeks to eliminate Candida from the body. However, it’s important to realize that candida albicans will never totally be eliminated as these microscopic fungal cells are all around us in our environment, no matter how clean we are.

However, a Candida cleanse can greatly reduce their numbers to a point where they don’t cause problems and are manageable by the body. It’s also important to note that a Candida cleanse is a process and won’t happen overnight.

Eventually through diet and lifestyle changes Candida albicans can be cleansed from the body to manageable levels.

It is no secret that millions of people suffer from Chronic Yeast Infections,

Lifestyle considerations that will enhance your treatment program:

 Take control of your diet by preparing most of your food yourself. Eat nutrient-rich, organic, minimally-processed whole foods.Optimize your intake of essential-fatty-acid rich food sources through the use of       healing fats and oils. Eat a wide variety of foods, preferably by following the four-day rotation diet.Drink plenty of purified water. Drink half your body weight in ounces (for example if you weigh 140 lbs, you should drink at least 70 ounces of water). Whether you have city water or well water, consider investing in a water purification system (i.e. reverse osmosis) or buy high quality purified water that is stored in non-porous plastic or glass.Drug use, alcohol consumption and smoking lower your immunity – so avoid them.

Exercise regularly, allow adequate time for sleep. Develop effective stress management and relaxation skills to help combat both physical and emotional stress.

Avoid unnecessary use of antibiotics, steroid drugs and birth control pills when possible since they promote the overgrowth of candida.