Tag: health

eating · health · Uncategorized

Talk Review: Forks and Knives–Weapons of Mass Destruction or Instruments of Healing

Tracy I1 Comment
Fruits and vegetables in the shape of a heart, green on one side, red on the other. Photo credit goes to http://saladexpress.ca/en/blog/fruits-and-vegetables-canadas-food-guide-superstars
Fruits and vegetables in the shape of a heart, green on one side, red on the other. Photo credit goes to http://saladexpress.ca/en/blog/fruits-and-vegetables-canadas-food-guide-superstars

Can the way you eat change your life and transform your health?  If Hans Diehl, author of Dynamic Living: How to Take Charge of Your Health, is right, you bet it can.  Making the connection between what we eat and what’s healthy isn’t exactly a new idea.

Most people who go on diets are seeking “healthier” eating habits.  But beyond the idea that healthy eating habits will lead to weight loss, and weight loss will lead to improved health, few people think about further indicators.  They assume that if they lose a bit of weight and get into the right BMI range, then it’s all good.  Wrong.

Way back when we first started this blog, Sam talked about Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI.  We have repeatedly emphasized that weight and fat are not sole determinants of health and physical fitness.  We’re not into super-restrictive diets for weight loss.  They don’t even work.  We’ve talked about that tons, including here and here and here and here.

I attended Hans Diehl’s talk on campus the other day because I’m a member of the Western Ontario Vegan Society, an energetic and enthusiastic student group whose cause I believe in, and I like to support their events.  The abstract said that “Dr. Diehl’s research shows that most people with hypertension, Type-2 diabetes, elevated cholesterol, and heart disease can reverse these diseases and often become drug free within weeks.”

That kind of research interests me. It’s in keeping with the work of Physicians for Responsible Medicine, of which Diehl is a member. He advocates Lifestyle Medicine and has developed an affordable program called the Complete Health Improvement Program (C.H.I.P.).

In keeping with my commitment to writing only about empowering, positive, and optimistic things for the next little while (in honor of spring), his talk left me with a good feeling.

He went over the usual scary stats about our declining health as a population.  I did wonder at some points how much of the increased instances of things like diabetes and heart disease have to do with better diagnostics, but whether we as a population are actually less healthy or are only now discovering how unhealthy we are, the fact is, it’s possible to make relatively simple dietary adjustments and radically alter our health.

Diehl correctly cited BMI as a meaningful measure over populations not individuals.  And the BMI in North America is over 40, which indicates not just obesity, but increased risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, asthma, sleep apnea, cancer (especially prostate, breast, colon, and cervical).  Many of these are chronic diseases that, according to his and others’ research, correlate with lifestyle choices.

Apparently, french fries are the most eaten vegetable in North America and soda pop consumption accounts for 1/3 of all sugar in the American diet (not likely far off in Canada, although I think our fast food drink sizes are a bit smaller).  Without going into all the gory details that many of us know already, the upshot is that as a population we’re undernourished and overfed.  This could  be due to all sorts of things, but he attributes it largely to big food companies who pay scientists to do research into the pleasure centre in the brain that processed foods activate. It’s the brain’s “blisspoint” and the right amounts of sugar, salt, and fat make it come alive to produce pleasure.

I have no expertise from which to critically assess these findings. But I’ve eaten my share of sugar, fat, and salt, and it always made me feel temporarily good. I should stress the temporary nature of that boost.  No doubt many of us are familiar with it.

Anyway, the fact is, though I do not delude myself into thinking that the only reason to eat food is for its nutrients, I find claims about the health benefits of whole foods, mostly plants, to be quite persuasive.

Focusing on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes pretty much guarantees a low fat, low sugar, low salt diet.  Doctors like Dean Ornish, Neal Barnard, and Caldwell Esselstyn have all argued that it is possible to prevent and reverse heart disease.  Bill Clinton adopted a vegan diet after heart disease required quadruple by-pass surgery. I’ve faulted Clinton for just one thing: that he doesn’t draw any attention to the animal ethics side of the vegan debate.

Though Diehl’s talk focused almost exclusively on the dramatic health benefits of a plant-based diet, he mentioned at the end of his presentation that there are plenty of other reasons to take such a change seriously.  In terms of animal welfare, 1,000,000 animals are slaughtered for food every hour in the United States.  And there is growing concern about the environmental impact of industrial livestock agriculture.

But even if we just focus on the health benefits, they are undeniable.  The American Heart Association reports that heart disease is the number one killer of women, causing one in three deaths each year (compared to one in 31 death each year from breast cancer).

Leaving the Diehl’s talk, I didn’t need to make many changes to my lifestyle or my way of eating to conform with his guidelines. But miraculously, my usually skeptical and reticent spouse is eager to sign up for the C.H.I.P. program when it’s offered in London next fall. That’s fairly strong evidence that the talk had a convincing impact on people who aren’t currently following the recommendations.

Diehl’s message isn’t new. You can get it from lots of other sources. But the views he expresses aren’t exactly mainstream yet, despite the amazing health transformation experienced by lots of people who adopt the basic diet strategy:

  • fruits
  • vegetables
  • legumes
  • whole grains
  • water

Sounds easy enough.  Enjoy! 🙂

fitness · motivation

Well being, health, and vitamin P

Sam B4 Comments

I was amused last week when Precision Nutrition posted the following message to Facebook:

*** ARE YOU GETTING YOUR VITAMIN P? ***

Did you know that research has shown real health benefits to pet companionship, including lower cholesterol, improved blood pressure, decreased depression, and improved blood vessel function?

Post a picture of your Vitamin P today and share the furry love.

I’m doing the Precision Nutrition Lean Eating program and every few weeks they add a new habit to our checklists: eat protein with every meal, eat veggies with every meal, eat to 80% full, etc. And now a new one, I thought, Vitamin P. What the heck is that?

Luckily I also looked at the picture and saw a coach running along the beach with her dog. Phew. “P” is for pet. I’ve got that one covered. I’ve written here about how dogs keep you active no matter what. Bad weather? They don’t care. They just love to fun and frolic outside and it’s contagious. See Injuries, exercise, and thank God for dogs.

Here’s the health benefits of Vitamin P:

  • Increase longevity after heart attacks

  • Lower cholesterol and triglycerides

  • Improve blood pressure

  • Reduce irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias)

  • Improve blood vessel (endothelial) function

  • Increase physical activity and functioning

  • Reduce medical appointments and minor health problems

  • Predict seizures

  • Alert to hypoglycemia

  • Decrease depression

  • Raise self-esteem

  • Boost levels of exercise and physical activity

  • Improve alertness and attention among elderly people who have pets

From Vitamin P: The Secret to Health and Longevity.

And then this morning I saw this in the New York Times, Owning a Dog Is Linked to Reduced Heart Risk.

“The nation’s largest cardiovascular health organization has a new message for Americans: Owning a dog may protect you from heart disease.

The unusual message was contained in a scientific statement published on Thursday by the American Heart Association, which convened a panel of experts to review years of data on the cardiovascular benefits of owning a pet. The group concluded that owning a dog, in particular, was “probably associated” with a reduced risk of heart disease.

People who own dogs certainly have more reason to get outside and take walks, and studies show that most owners form such close bonds with their pets that being in their presence blunts the owners’ reactions to stress and lowers their heart rate, said Dr. Glenn N. Levine, the head of the committee that wrote the statement.”

If you’re bored of the usual, walk, run, throw with dogs here’s a workout for you and your canine companion: A New Year, A New Way to Exercise With Your Dog.

Here’s my source of Vitamin P: Please, please take me for a walk? Who could say no?

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fitness

Healthism, fitness, and the politics of respectability

Sam B17 Comments

This blog is about the fitness journey of two feminist philosophers as we approach fifty. We’re aiming to be the fittest we’ve ever been in our lives at the age of fifty. Along the way Tracy and I are critically engaging with issues about physical fitness as feminists and as philosophers.

Early on we distinguished between thinness and fitness and made it clear that our goals were about athletic, not aesthetic, achievement (see here) and about staying healthy, not about getting thin.

We recognize that not everybody shares our goals or sets their sights on achieving and maintaining physical fitness. But we hope enough of you are engaged with our goals and our project and want to follow us along and read about what we’re up to.

We’re about health and fitness, not about visible abs and hitting target weights on the scale. (Tracy has stepped off the scale in fact and you can read about that here.)

Health seems like a perfectly reasonable goal to have, to the extent that it’s in one’s control. We’re both leading happy, productive, active lives and want to stay healthy insofar as we can control that. However, recently I got in a discussion with a friend about the language of health and whether or not that language was coercive.

Philosophers’ ears perk up when we say something we think is uncontroversial and others say they disagree. We thought talk of health being a good thing was trivially true. What’s this? Disagreement? How interesting. Let’s have a closer look. That’s how philosophers roll.

Here’s an example of the controversy over health. Lots of fat activists lay claim to the language of ‘health’ and ‘healthy.’ Indeed I refer to my own health in this post here, though I’m also ambivalent about the label ‘fat’ and I have plans to get leaner, if I can.

We’re constantly trying to make the point that fat people can be healthy. I describe myself this way on the blog. I wrote: “I’m a bit of a healthy living rock star. Yes, I’m significantly overweight but I have excellent blood pressure and heart rate, excellent good-bad cholesterol ratios, and excellent blood sugar levels. I’m also an over-achiever in the bone density department but that’s from years of living large and lifting heavy weights.”

But here’s a worry. In claiming the language of health for larger women are we assuming that there are respectable healthy fatties and others who aren’t, drawing a line between the good girls and the bad girls, rescuing some, while throwing others to the anti-fat wolves as it were?

This is the worry raised in Virgie Tovar’s post Interrogating the language of health in the fat movement.

In short, Tovar is accusing the fat positive movement of ‘healthism.’ This is really interesting because I think that claiming health for fat people, claiming that fat people can be healthy in spite of our size, is one of the goals of the fat positive movement.

‘Healthism’ is sometimes used to refer to a government’s preoccupation with the behavior of its citizens (eating well, not smoking etc) and sometimes it’s used to refer to an individual’s preoccupation with these behaviors and outcomes. These two senses of ‘healthism’ are discussed here. At the heart of both senses is the idea of an ideology of health.

I first heard the term ‘healthism’ at the Canadian society for women in philosophy conference in Calgary last year. The conference theme was embodiment and there was one paper that criticized health as a value that’s forced upon women. The paper was by Talia Welsh (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and was called  “Violating the Good Health Imperative: The Ethics of Altering Bodies by Modifying Bad Health Habits.” You can read her paper “Healthism and the Bodies of Women: Pleasure and Discipline in the War against Obesity” available for download here. In that paper Welsh writes, “I posit that a feminist position on the war against obesity clearly argues against a focus on weight, but that the larger issue of behavior modification for health remains much more difficult to solve.”

On first hearing these ideas, I confess that I felt sort of perplexed. Of course, healthy is better than unhealthy, I naively thought. Given a choice, who wouldn’t opt for good health? That isn’t an ‘ism’ and it’s just rational, I thought.

But of course like many subjects that are the topics of papers at philosophy conference, things aren’t quite that simple. Health seems, at first glance, to be a primary or basic good, the sort of good that you want or need no matter what what you want or need. Indeed, at first blush it seems you need health to pursue all the other goods. And so an appeal to health ought to speak to all of us. It’s a good candidate for a liberal value, something the state can promote because we all care about it.

And yet…

Most of us routinely make trade offs between health and other goods. I’m not just thinking here of those of us who choose to smoke, drink, or do other forms of drugs.

Consider athletes who make trade offs between the pursuit of excellence in competition and their overall health and well being. It’s not just retired football and hockey players who are damaged.

But we don’t even need to go there. Think of musicians who suffer overuse injuries. It’s not healthy to do what they do either.

Among my academic friends and colleagues, there are many of us with worn eyes, strained tendons, voices suffering over use. And yet would we read and write less to save our bodies?

And then there are those of us who like risky sports.

Why privilege the health conscious?

In a country with publicly funded heath care there’s an economic argument of course, but we ought to admit it’s an economic argument. But don’t dress it up in the language of rational choice and caring about what’s good for persons. Persons want different things and weight concern for health differently.

I’m looking forward to reading the book pictured here. I bought it after the CSWIP conference last year. In the meantime, I’m still mulling over the importance of health.

Although Tracy and I might seem like health living cheerleaders, you are free not to care about your health and fitness. If you do, we hope you enjoy reading about our adventures and reading our reflections on fitness. But if you don’t care as much about health and fitness as we do that’s fine too.

weight loss

Obesity, health, and fitness: some odd connections

Sam B4 Comments

The connection between obesity and health isn’t as straightforward as we might think.

Those of us who puzzle about the connection between obesity and health  ask whether it’s possible to be fat and healthy. I’d like to think that it is.

But until recently it didn’t ever occur to me that some people could be healthy because they’re fat and that for them not only is losing weight not necessary it might even be had for their health.

It does seem though that not only can fat people be healthy, in some people it seems losing weight increases a variety of disease risks. Researchers call this the “obesity paradox” though as they come to understand it it might be a misnamed phenomena. What matters, they think, is metabolic health, not obesity after all.

I find this fascinating but it does make me worry about weight loss in my case. I’m a clear case of a metabolically healthy, significantly overweight person.

See the following story from the Vancouver Sun, http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Obesity+some+healthy+others/7607904/story.html.

I’ve italicized the bits that make me nervous!

“According to a recent study funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Research, people who are obese are less likely to die from pneumonia than people of normal or low weight. The study of patients at six Edmonton hospitals found that obese patients were 56-per-cent less likely to die, an example of what the researchers call “reverse epidemiology.”

It is far from the only example. The authors cite studies that reveal paradoxical outcomes for obese patients suffering from coronary artery disease, end-stage kidney disease and heart failure.

Other recent CIHR-funded studies have revealed that some obese people appear to be protected against the very illnesses most associated with obesity, specifically type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

These seemingly contradictory findings are fuelling research into the so-called Obesity Paradox, according to CIHR researcher Antony Karelis at the University of Quebec.

Karelis has found that about 30 per cent of obese people appear to display metabolic health indistinguishable from those of young lean individuals, including normal blood pressure, low levels of bad fats, high levels of healthy fats, high insulin sensitivity and low inflammation.

Metabolically healthy obese (MHO) adults also have less fat in their livers, muscles and around their vital organs, but more subcutaneous fat under their skin, he said.

“Some [obese] people collect fat under their skin where it is less likely to go into the liver and the heart or the pancreas and cause all kinds of trouble,” said Karelis. “Fat on their thighs is associated with health benefits, but abdominal fat is more associated with [poor health].”

Karelis argues that identifying people by their metabolic health, rather than their weight, is key for doctors making decisions about how to treat their patients.

“We know these people exist and that they have a lower risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” Karelis said. “They have a better inflammation profile, a better hormonal profile and they are physically stronger.”

There are signs that weight loss may be harmful to people who are metabolically healthy but obese.

MHO individuals who participated in a six-month weight-loss study showed deteriorated insulin sensitivity, a risk factor for diabetes and heart disease. Metabolically abnormal obese study participants — those who display inflammation and unhealthy fat profiles usually associated with obesity — showed improved insulin sensitivity, suggesting their health could benefit from weight loss.

A 2009 study in the journal Epidemiology of middle- and older-aged obese adults found an increased risk of death associated with weight loss. Another CIHR study found that weight loss in obese post-menopausal women increased their risk of developing diabetes.”

Since diabetes seems to be the main risk caused by messing with a good thing, i.e. losing weight when you’re metabolically healthy to start, I think I’ll keep on eye on this in my case if I make progress to a leaner me by year 50. We’ve got a type 2 diabetic in the house so monitoring my blood sugar at least is easy.