Kicking the habit may be contagious

Did I tell you that I am blue in the face? Yes, I’m blue in the face from passionately and unashamedly promoting the benefits of health and fitness and maintaining an ideal weight to everyone that will listen.

I do that by telling everyone that in order to be successful you need support and guidance from someone who wants you to be successful, peer support and having a sense of community where everyone is working toward the same goal and no one is trying to lead you astray and cause you to fail.

I am that someone who cares about your success and I work full time as a Fitness and Success Coach. By becoming a member of Beachbody’s online fitness club you also get the peer support and sense of community that will make all the difference in your success or failure.

Backing up those statements are Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston and Dr. James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego and they have studied 12,067 people who have been taking part in the Framingham study — a study of the health and habits of nearly an entire town in Massachusetts — for the past 32 years.

In an article from Reuters Health News, Maggie Fox, the Health and Science Editor says, “Nothing may feel lonelier than trying to quit smoking, but in fact, people kick the habit in clusters, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The same team of experts who found that obesity may be socially contagious said they found similar patterns among smokers, with people clearly influencing others in their social and family networks.

In fact, the most isolated people are now those who remain the most addicted as their personal networks get pushed to the fringes, they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This study tells us that social relationships have a critical impact on health behaviors and decisions, and that people are strongly influenced by those in their social sphere,” said National Institute on Aging director Dr. Richard Hodes, whose institute paid for the study.”

To read more of Maggie Fox’s article and to learn how changing lifestyle habits can be contagious, please click here.

Obesity contributes to global warming

Obesity contributes to global warming, too.

Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says.

This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school’s researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday.

“We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility,” Edwards said in a telephone interview. “Obesity is a key part of the big picture.”

At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.  Continued…

U.S. obesity rates alarmingly high

New research shows “alarming levels” of obesity in most ethnic groups in the United States, principal investigator Dr. Gregory L. Burke, of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina told Reuters Health. The study also confirms the potentially deadly toll obesity exacts on the heart and blood vessels.

“The obesity epidemic has the potential to reduce further gains in U.S. life expectancy, largely through an effect on cardiovascular disease mortality (death),” Burke and colleagues warn in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Among 6,814 middle-age or older adults participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or “MESA” study, researchers found that more than two thirds of white, African American and Hispanic participants were overweight and one third to one half were obese.

Obesity rates were far lower in Chinese Americans in the study, with 33 percent overweight and just 5 percent obese, suggesting, Burke said, that high rates of obesity should not considered “inevitable.”  Continued…

Early exercise aids against breast cancer

As a parent of an active 3 1/2 year old, I was heartened to see this article and know that she is starting out life on the right foot so to speak.  This article appears in CNN Health and is from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis:

“New research shows exercise during the teen years — starting as young as age 12 — can help protect girls from breast cancer when they are grown.

Middle-aged women have long been advised to get active to lower their risk of breast cancer after menopause.

What’s new: That starting so young pays off, too.

“This really points to the benefit of sustained physical activity from adolescence through the adult years, to get the maximum benefit,” said Dr. Graham Colditz of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the study’s lead author.

Researchers tracked nearly 65,000 nurses ages 24 to 42 who enrolled in a major health study. They answered detailed questionnaires about their physical activity dating back to age 12. Within six years of enrolling, 550 were found to have breast cancer before menopause. A quarter of all breast cancer is diagnosed at these younger ages, when it is typically more aggressive.

Women who were physically active as teens and young adults were 23 percent less likely to develop premenopausal breast cancer than women who grew up sedentary, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”  Continued…

Half of Americans on Medicine

Yikes! That to me is pretty shocking. I don’t go to the doctor and don’t take any prescription medicines. No, I don’t have a death wish and it may not be smart in some people’s minds, but I exercise, eat to nourish my body, take supplements and keep my stress down and that formula is now working for me quite well. Here’s an excerpt from the article that appeared in Time, if you want to read what other people are doing:

“For the first time, it appears that more than half of all insured Americans are taking prescription medicines regularly for chronic health problems, a study shows.

The most widely used drugs are those to lower high blood pressure and cholesterol — problems often linked to heart disease, obesity and diabetes.

The numbers were gathered last year by Medco Health Solutions Inc., which manages prescription benefits for about one in five Americans.” Continued…