Get Fit With Dieldra: News

In a review of randomized clinical trials, researchers found that eating 4.5 ounces of cooked legumes — or about three-quarters of a cup — a day reduced LDL levels by about 5 percent compared to similar diets without them. Lowering LDL by that amount suggests a 5 percent to 6 percent reduction in heart attacks and other major cardiovascular events, the researchers write.

Eating modest amounts of legumes — peas, chickpeas, beans and lentils — appears to reduce levels of LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol

“I love eating beans and peas, in fact my wife cooks them almost every night,” said Paul Grahmn a certified personal fitness trainer.

The analysis, published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, covered 26 trials involving 1,037 volunteers, average age 51. The average duration of follow-up was six weeks.

The trials found no effect of legumes on other predictors of cardiovascular risk such as apolipoprotein B and non-HDL cholesterol (total cholesterol minus HDL or “good” cholesterol).

“Beans are my least favorite food to eat but now that I know they can help my cholestrol I’m going to start eating more,” said Rodger Grant a Tallahassee resident.

One of the report’s authors, Dr. John L. Sievenpiper, a researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, said the average American diet includes less than one ounce of legumes per day.

“There’s a great opportunity here because people are not consuming a lot of dietary pulse,” he said, using another term for legumes. “We have to think of this as one more way of lowering cholesterol and achieving cardiovascular benefit, something that is complementary to drugs.”

By: Dieldra Clark

With contributions to the New York Times

Picture: allaboutyou.com

Video:

EDUCATE YOURSELF

Fit Bit Recalls Force Device After Complaint of Rashes

TALLAHASSEE, FL – Fitbit , a workout activity tracker company, said on Friday that it is issuing a voluntary recall for the Fitbit Force wrist-worn fitness tracker. Fitbit will stop selling the device immediately after finding out why the device caused serious skin irritation for some users.

nytimes.com

The Fitbit company said tests found that the Fitbit Force was causing allergic contact dermatitis. The condition occurs when substances touching the skin cause irritation or red, itchy rash reaction.

“While only a small percentage of Force users have reported any issue, we care about every one of our customers,” the company said in a statement. “We have stopped selling Force and are in the process of conducting a voluntary recall, out of an abundance of caution. We are also offering a refund directly to consumers for full retail price.”

Jean Altidor is a Tallahassee resident who has been using the Fitbit for about six months. He will continue using it.

“I use my Fitbit everyday when I work out and it hasn’t caused me any problems,” Altidor said.

The recall is a serious setback for the company. When people started wearing the Fitbit Force wrist device the reviews were largely glowing. This device is the company’s latest wearable computer for tracking one’s health,

But after just a couple of weeks, that excitement became a concern to some customers. Customers began developing rashes on their wrists and took to the forums on the company’s site to voice concern about the issue.

In response, Fitbit hired independent labs and medical experts to determine what was happening to some of the people who used the device and developed rashes. In a statement, the company He also said the company planned to continue working on a “next-generation tracker and will announce news about it soon.

In January, The Consumerist website wrote about some customers who said they loved their Fitbit Force, but they had started to see a rash near the battery port of the tracker.

In a post on the company’s website, Fitbit’s chief executive and a co-founder, James Park, issued an apology to customers. Park said the materials in the Fitbit Force were commonly used in other consumer products, and the rashes could be a result of a number of different components.

“Some users may be reacting to the nickel present in the surgical grade stainless steel used in the device,” he wrote on the site. “Other users are likely experiencing an allergic reaction to the materials used in the strap or the adhesives used to assemble the product.”

By Dieldra Clark

With contributions from The New York Times

Photo, NYTimes.com

Video, DHTV - Dan

EDUCATE YOURSELF
Fitbit
Recalled Products
Activity Tracker Comparison
Facebook/Fitbit
Twitter/Fitbit

What Running Can Do for your Heart

TALLAHASSEE, FL- An ingenious new study of marathon runners and their non-running spouses done at the University of Hartford should reassure anyone headed for a spring marathon that prolonged training doesn't damage the heart, a concern that has been raised in previous research. At the same time, becoming fit as a marathoner doesn't seem to protect the heart to the extent you might expect, although it may have unexpected benefits for your spouse.

nytimes.com

While we all know that exercise is healthy, some research has begun to raise questions about whether it’s possible to overdo a good thing. A few studies have found that long-time endurance athletes can have a heightened risk for abnormal heartbeats, and even for scarring of the heart muscle. Likewise, experiments with lab animals have found possible links between prolonged, extremely strenuous running and undesirable changes in the structure and function of the heart.

But the actual incidence of runners having a heart attack during a marathon race is vanishingly small, a finding that seems to suggest that marathon training can’t be excessively hard on hearts or there would be greater, obvious consequences.

Such inconsistencies in the data about prolonged endurance exercise and heart health prompted researchers to wonder if perhaps past studies had been too imprecise. “It’s difficult to isolate the risks associated with strenuous exercise from other lifestyle factors,” said Beth Taylor, an assistant professor in the health sciences department at the University of Hartford who led the new study, which was published last month in BMJ Open. Runners whose hearts seemed to have been affected by their exercise habits might also have smoked, gorged on junk food or otherwise imperiled their hearts, separately from how much they worked out.

So Dr. Taylor and her colleagues decided to better control for such factors by studying marathon runners along with their domestic partners, who presumably would be sharing their lifestyles if not their physical exertions. If cardiac health differed among these couples, the scientists felt, they could reasonably conclude that training had played a role, since so many lifestyle factors would be the same.

With that idea in mind, Dr. Taylor and her colleagues contacted a slew of runners who had qualified and signed up for the 2012 Boston Marathon, inquired if they had non-running spouses or partners, and asked if both would be willing to have their hearts scanned and cardiovascular disease risk assessed.

Forty-two of the runners said yes, along with their spouses or partners. Half of the runners were women. Their ages ranged from 33 to 59, although most were in their mid- to late 40s. Their partners were around the same age but considerably less active, averaging fewer than two sessions of moderate exercise per week. Many did not formally exercise at all, although most reported frequently walking, gardening or undertaking other types of moderate activity.

Not surprisingly, the marathon runners were significantly thinner than their partners, although few of the partners were overweight. The runners also generally had lower blood pressure, heart rates, bad cholesterol and other indicators of cardiac health.

Research from the American heart association has shown that exercises like walking and running can not only help lower the risk of heart disease but lower blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.

“30-60 minutes of cardio a day can help build a healthier heart and prevent atherosclerosis,” said David Wheeler, a health and fitness specialist at premier fitness.

But running did not insulate the racers altogether from heart disease, the scientists found. Some of the racers, particularly the oldest ones, carried large deposits of plaques in their arteries, a worrying sign. These older racers also tended to have the highest tallies on a numerical assessment of heart attack risk called the Framingham risk score, which considers medical and lifestyle factors that, along with genetics, can contribute to the development of atherosclerosis plaques.

Perhaps the more surprising takeaway of the study, Dr. Taylor said, is that marathon training’s cardiac benefits may be transferable. “The spouses of the runners were quite healthy, too,” she pointed out. More so than many people, they walked and moved around frequently, and had generally robust cardiac risk profiles. Dr. Taylor’s conclusion: if you want improved heart health but can’t be a runner, marry one.

I suffered from a heart attack five years ago. Ever since then I have been working out like I should and my heart is getting better,” said Wendell Dumas a Tallahassee resident.

By Dieldra Clark

With contributions from The New York Times

Photo, NYTimes.com

Video, Sunnybrook Hospital

EDUCATE YOURSELF

American Heart Association

Run For Your Heart

Competitor

Facebook.com/HeartHealthHot

Twitter.com/Exercise4NCDs

Chick-fil-A Commits to Stop Sales of Poultry Raised With Antibiotics

TALLAHASSEE, FL - Chick-fil-A said on Tuesday that within five years it would no longer sell products containing meat from chickens raised with antibiotics at all of its locations due to customers demand.

southernsavers.com

The company said consumer demand was responsible for the change. “We have an ongoing process of constantly monitoring what our consumers prefer in terms of health and nutrition and what’s in our food, and this issue surfaced as the No. 1 issue for our customers,” said Tim Tassopoulos, executive vice president for operations at Chick-fil-A.

A growing number of restaurant chains, including Chipotle and Panera Bread, have made commitments to serve meat only from animals raised without antibiotics, and consumers have responded enthusiastically.

Subway announced last week that it would eliminate azodicarbonamide, a chemical that commercial bakers use to increase the strength and pliancy of dough, but, as noted by the consumer crusader Vani Hari, is also used for the same purposes in yoga mats and shoe soles.

And on Tuesday, Kraft said it was taking sorbic acid, an artificial preservative that had come under attack by consumers, out of some individually wrapped cheese slices.

Those were among dozens of product changes announced by major food companies in the last year. “All of this is makes for great P.R., but it doesn’t mean the products are necessarily any more nutritious,” said Michele Simon, a public health lawyer who writes the blog eatdrinkpolitics.com.

Ms. Simon said that Chick-fil-A’s decision was different because antibiotic resistance is such an important issue. “This doesn’t make fried chicken nuggets good for you, but given the public health crisis caused by the practice of giving animals antibiotics, I think this is an important decision,” she said.

Concern is growing among public health officials about the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Last fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the first time quantified the toll such resistance is taking, estimating that at least two million Americans fall ill and at least 23,000 die from it each year.

"I think this is a very important decision the company is making in order to satisfy our customers," said Chris Welch, manager at Chick-fil-A in Tallahassee, FL.

The C.D.C. report said that “much of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary and inappropriate and makes everyone less safe.” Then in December, the Food and Drug Administration announced a plan to curtail the use of antibiotics in animals.

Meat producers use antibiotics to prevent sickness in animals that are raised in close quarters in industrial farming operations. Chickens are treated, for example, with a small dose of gentamicin while still in ovo in an effort to prevent infection through a tiny hole made when the egg is administered a drug that prevents Marek’s disease and infectious bursal disease, highly infectious viral diseases that can wipe out flocks.

Chick-fil-A already uses chicken breasts free from fillers, additives and steroids.

Rob Dugas, vice president for supply chain management at Chick-fil-A, said the shift would take time because it required changes by producers from the hatchery to the processing plant. “For instance, any flock treated with antibiotics today is aggregated into the larger production facility,” Mr. Dugas said. “For us, birds will have to be segregated all the way down to the egg production.”

Chick-fil-A executives said they could not say yet whether the changes would result in a price increase for consumers. Typically, antibiotic-free chicken is more expensive than traditionally processed poultry.

“We do know that it has a potential cost ramification, both to us and to our customers,” Mr. Tassopoulos said. “We are going to do everything we can to minimize the impact on the price of our products, and the growing interest in antibiotic-free meat may help with that by increasing supplies.”