Farmed Tilapia and Catfish are More Like Chicken than Fish

Fish are heart-healthy foods because they usually have high levels of omega-3 fatty acids and low levels of omega-6's.. However, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine show that farm-raised tilapia and catfish contain less than one-eighth the amount of omega-3's found in farmed salmon or trout. The tilapia and catfish also had much larger amounts of omega-6 acids than salmon or trout. The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in tilapia and catfish averaged 11 to one, about the same as that of chicken (Journal of the American Dietetic Association, December 2008).A crucial part of a healthful diet is the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s. Your immunity is supposed to be good for you by killing gems before they can harm you. However, if your...

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Nuts Combat Metabolic Syndrome (Syndrome X)

Nuts are concentrated sources of fat and calories, but they are high in monounsaturated fats which are healthful. A new study from Spain shows that adding nuts to a Mediterranean diet helps to reverse Metabolic syndrome, defined as having three or more of the following: 1) abdominal obesity, 2) high triglycerides, 3) low HDL (good) cholesterol, 4) high blood sugar and 5) high blood pressure. More than 20 percent of North Americans have metabolic syndrome and are at high risk for diabetes. Many of these people will die prematurely, usually from a heart attack.This study involved 1,200 men and women from 55 to 80 who followed one of three diets for one year. Sixty-one percent of the study group had metabolic syndrome. The first group followed...

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Understanding Delayed Muscle Soreness

If you exercise properly, you are supposed to work hard enough to damage your muscles so they feel sore on the next day. This is called delayed-onset muscle soreness. You should then exercise at reduced intensity for as many days as it takes for the soreness to go away.An article from St Mary’s University College in New Zealand reviews scientific studies on exercise-induced muscle damage (Sports Medicine, December 2008). When muscles feel sore from exercise, they are swollen and leak proteins from inside their cells into the bloodstream, and they cannot generate their usual force. You really have no choice. You must put far less pressure on sore muscles or you will injure them, delaying recovery and your ability to exercise intensely again.Sore...

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Cold weather may increase risk for various health problems

Nobody really knows why, but recent research show that sudden drops in environmental temperature are associated with increased risk for disease and death (American Journal of Epidemiology, December 2008).Researchers at the University of Athens in Greece studied people in 15 European cities. They plotted the average temperature for that day against the number of deaths in that city and showed that a 1?Centigrade decrease in temperature from one day to the next is associated with a 1.72 percent increase in daily heart attack deaths, a 3.30 percent increase in respiratory deaths, and a 1.25 percent increase in stroke deaths.This study does not tell you to move to warmer climates because those who live in warmer cities are far more susceptible...

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Exercisers Age Better

Athletes who compete into their eighties suffer few medical problems, but those who lapse into inactivity regress toward the general population norms for fitness, weight control and health problems, according to a study in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine (November 2008). People who compete into later life in sports such as running or cycling can maintain their competitive edge into their eighties. Each muscle is made up of millions of muscle fibers. With aging, particularly after age 50, you lose muscle fibers so you become weaker. You cannot slow the loss of muscle fibers, but you can compensate for the loss of fibers by increasing the size of each remaining muscle fiber with regular vigorous exercise. If the results of this study can...

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Eggs Increase Risk for Diabetes?

Research from Harvard Medical School suggests that eating an egg a day may increase a person’s risk for developing diabetes (Diabetes Care, December 2008). This is the first large study to support the general belief that eating eggs frequently may harm you. However, animal studies have failed to show any association between eating eggs and diabetes, and the authors of this study did not offer any explanation for the increased risk.The authors studied 20,703 male physicians without diabetes from the Physicians' Health Study (1982-2007) and 36,295 non-diabetic female health professionals from the Women's Health Study (1992-2007). The men were followed for 20 years and the women for 11 years. Men who ate seven or more eggs per week were 58 percent...

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Eating Before Exercise OK for Most People

Many people believe that exercising right after you eat will cause stomach cramps, but that doesn't usually happen. Whenever your stomach fills with food, its muscles contract and require large amounts of blood. When you exercise vigorously, your heart pumps large amounts of blood to your skeletal muscles. If your heart is not strong enough to pump blood to both your stomach and your skeletal muscles, blood is shunted from your stomach muscles, the muscles lack oxygen, lactic acid builds up in muscles and they start to hurt. However, most people can exercise after eating without suffering cramps because their hearts are strong enough to pump blood to both their exercising muscles and their stomach muscles.Some researchers believe that you shouldn't...

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