The Year is Dead. Long Live the Year.

 

 

No sharing, educating or preaching today my friends. I just want to take the time to wish you a safe and happy New Year's Eve and a successful and fulfilling 2022. 

This has been a strange year for me, a hard to understand mixture of successes and failures, happiness and loss, excitement and fear. With all the challenges we have faced this past year, it has been in some ways a wonderful year for me.

My next year will be one of transition, leading to major life changes that I have planned for 2023. That is both encouraging and intimidating.

I hope that you have had your fair share of successes in 2021 along with its challenges, and wish you much joy, wellness and empowerment for 2022.

Want to Stay Mentally Sharp? Forget Reitiring!

A 2021 study published in SSM Population Health concluded that working past the usual retirement age is protective against age-related cognition issues compared with people who do retire.

The study authors concluded that continuing to work in the labor market up until the age of 67 helps slow cognitive decline and protects against the type of cognitive impairment often associated with Alzheimer's disease. Notably, these findings held up across genders, education levels, and job fields. In short, the study suggests that continuing to work past retirement age helps keep the brain sharp.

Don't much care for your job? The study showed that it doesn't matter what job you have and that part-time and volunteer work have similar benefits. So if you like what you do, keep doing it as long as you are able. If not, or if you just feel the need for a change, then find something else and do that. Turns out that Nike was right: Just Do It!

How Much Does Exercise Lower Stroke Risk?

 

I doubt it will come as much of a surprise to anyone reading this that regular exercise helps lower blood pressure and avoid or control hypertension. Old news, right? But you may not be aware of just how great the benefit to your health might really be.

Regular physical activity makes your heart stronger. A stronger heart can pump more blood with less effort. As a result, the force on your arteries decreases, lowering your blood pressure. Becoming more active can lower both your top and bottom blood pressure numbers. How much lower isn't entirely clear, but studies show reductions from 4 to 12 mm Hg diastolic (bottom #) and 3 to 6 mm Hg systolic (top #). That is as much as some commonly used hypertension medications.

High blood pressure can lead to a vast number of serious health consequences over time including: heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, vision loss and dementia.

A 2021 study by researchers in Portugal and published in JAMA Cardiology sheds some light on just how significant the benefit of exercise can be. Sixty participants aged 40 to 75 years with a diagnosis of drug resistant hypertension were enrolled and observed at hospitals' hypertension outpatient clinics. Half of the participants exercised on a stationary bicycle and/or walked daily for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks blood pressure had fallen enough to lower the risk of heart attack or stroke an average of 25% for those who exercised compared with those who did not.

If you are getting some exercise every day, keep it up. If you aren't, what are you waiting for? A stroke?

Poultry Safety

 

 

Who really knows why chickens cross the road? Who really cares? In any case this post is not about poultry making it safely to the other side of the street.

The CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States. Of course that is from all sources, but nearly 2 million people are sickened annually just from poultry contaminated by bacteria (principally salmonella and campylobacter). 28,000 of them end up in the hospital and nearly 500 die, but it is an experience that nobody wants to have. Reducing the incidence of these bacterial illnesses has been a stated national public health goal in the US for over a decade, yet the same number of people get ill from eating contaminated poultry today as in 2010.

Maybe this is at least partly because the US Department of Agriculture, who is responsible for regulating food safety, allows contaminated chicken to go from slaughterhouse to market legally. The USDA, in fact, allows 9.8 percent of the whole chickens it tests to be contaminated with salmonella. The percentages are even higher for chicken parts (15.4 percent) and ground chicken (25 percent). Campylobacter, too, is allowed in poultry—15.7 percent of samples for whole chickens, 7.7 percent for parts, and 1.9 percent for ground.

As if that is not bad enough, the USDA applies the limit to all bacterial strains in total. "What this means," says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports,"is that a manufacturer can meet the USDA's target by reducing strains that rarely make people sick without targeting the strains that tend to cause more severe illnesses."

But wait! No one eats raw poultry, right? Doesn't cooking kill salmonella and other bacteria?

“The short answer is yes, cooking will kill salmonella, but it has to be the right type of cooking,” says Trevor Craig, corporate director of technical consulting for Microbac Laboratories. As a general rule of thumb, cook all poultry to an internal temperature 165℉. The only way to ensure that you have hit the right temperature is using a meat thermometer to check. If you don’t cook your food to a certain temperature you’re not actually going to kill off that bacteria.

It is also very easy to spread the contamination from poultry to other foods by using, say, the same utensils or cutting board to prepare them. Always clean your tools and prep area after working with poultry. Better yet, use different ones.

You can read more about the issue of bacteria contamination here and here.

Enjoy those holiday turkeys!

Nutrition Issues with Vegan Children

 

A study by researchers the the University of Helsinki in Finland and published in EMBO Molecular Medicine concluded that vegan diets do not provide very young children (the median age of study participants was 3 1/2 years) with enough of certain key vitamins and nutrients. 

Vegan diets often include supplementation with vitamins D and B-12 as well as certain minerals like iodine that can be challenging to get enough of from solely plant-based foods. Supplementing usually resolves the issue. But the study found that even with supplementation children on strict vegan diets had significantly lower vitamin D levels than did children eating a more traditional omnivore diet.
the vegan children also had lower levels of vitamin A.

On the positive side, vegan children had higher levels of folate (folate - aka vitamin B-9 - is important in red blood cell formation and for healthy cell growth and function) and lower levels of LDL cholesterol.

The study calls for larger studies before early-life vegan diet can be recommended as a healthy and fully nourishing diet for young children, despite its many health-promoting effects in adults and suggests that the metabolic effects of vegan diet in adults cannot be generally extrapolated to children.

This is a preliminary result and not a call to avoid a vegan diet for young children. But caution should be exercised to ensure that they receive a supplement regimen that compensates for the observed deficiencies. Also, the study results apply only to young children and not to older children or adults.

Is 10,000 Daily Steps Fact or Fiction?

 

Does walking 10,000 steps per day elude you no matter how much you try to do it? Well, relax. 

There is no scientific evidence supporting 10,000 daily steps as a standard. In fact, this often-cited guideline originated as an ad campaign for a Japanese-made podometer. In 1965, Japanese company Yamasa Toki introduced their new step-counter, which they called Manpo-Kei. This translated into “10,000 steps meter” and they marketed their device with the slogan, “Let’s walk 10,000 steps a day.” Japanese walking clubs were fairly popular at that time and the idea of a 10,000-step target seems to have caught on because the slogan was catchy and people tend to like nice round numbers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Of course this is not to suggest that being sedentary is ok. It's just not. But what does the science suggest as a target for how much walking you should do to enjoy significant health benefits from it?

A recent study by University of Massachuestts Amherst physical activity epidemiologist Amanda Paluch and published in JAMA Network Open has the answer. She recently determined that walking at least 7,000 steps a day reduced middle-aged people’s risk of premature death from all causes by 50% to 70% — compared to that of other middle-aged people who took fewer daily steps. “You see this gradual risk reduction in mortality as you get more steps,” Paluch said. “There were substantial health benefits between 7,000 and 10,000 steps, but we didn’t see an additional benefit from going beyond 10,000 steps.”

If even 7,000 steps seems more than you can achieve, do what you can. Any walking will benefit your health. No kidding.

 

How Long Have You Got Left?

 

 

 

As 2021 moves toward its conclusion, most of us are not thinking about how we all are doing the same thing. We know when 2021 will end. Our own conclusion is unknown to us. But if you are curious about how much more time you have, there are a number of life expectancy calculators online that would be happy to ballpark it for you. 

Some, like the free calculator available on the Social Security Administration web site, are overly simplistic but quick to use. Others will analyze the personal information that you provide on your family, health and lifestyle and provide an eerily specific result.... sometimes right down to the day you can expect to...err, conclude.

If you want a quick (less than 5 minutes) and reasonably good estimation, try the unfortunately named Death Clock. With just a few quick questions it will let you know when to call the undertaker. (March 22, 2043 for me.)

If you want a much more accurate forecast, and don't mind spending a bit more time answering questions (about 15 minutes), the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator is for you. Unlike many of the other calculators, this one will give you personalized feedback on your answers, customized lifestyle change suggestions and specific things you could review with your healthcare provider.

For the ultimate in life expectancy forecasting, try the Actuaries Longevity Illustrator. Developed jointly by the US American Academy of Actuaries and the UK Society of Actuaries, it will evaluate your answers against the databases used by insurers to set life insurance premiums. Since there is money involved, you can expect it to be as accurate as something this inherently inaccurate can be.

Besides morbid curiosity, what would be the point of doing this?

For me, I find knowing my "use before date" to be personally motivating. It is much harder for me to justify wasting even one day when I know that I have only 7,747 of them left. Yeah it sounds like a lot of days, but once one is gone, its gone for good.

It may also motivate you to make changes that can add more days to your clock. As Ebeneezer Scrooge said to the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come when faced with his own gravestone, "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change."

Happy New Year.