category : Nutrition

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Have you ever wondered why Asian cultures tend to be thin? Part of the answer may be green tea. Fat cells, like every cell in your body, eventually wear out and need to be replaced. Green tea contains chemicals that inhibit the formation of new fat cells. They don’t do anything to the fat cells that already exist, but they do make it harder for your body to make new fat cells. This means that green tea will not cause you to lose weight in the short run. But consistent consumption over a long period of time will make it harder and harder for your body to replace those fat cells as they wear out. And here’s a hint for those who don’t like the taste of green tea. You don’t need to drink it. You can eat it. Try sprinkling tea

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We don’t have a health care system. What we have is a disease management system, but disease management is just second rate. We should be working to make you as healthy as possible. Failing that, our fallback should be treating disease. Unfortunately, most doctors spend virtually all of their time treating disease rather than improving health. But improving health requires active participation by Dr. and patient, while treating disease is often done with the patient in a passive role. Unfortunately, most physicians have focused on treating disease for so long they don’t even know what the optimal laboratory and physiologic ranges are anymore. When you see your doctor don’t accept normal as the goal. Ask what the optimal

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When your doctor tells you to lose weight, it’s not because they care what you look like in a bathing suit. We used to think that fat was just energy stored against the future, and that someday there will be a famine so the skinny would starve and the chubby would inherit the earth. But that famine never came. We now know that fat produces a variety of hormones, peptides, and enzymes that can have wide-ranging impact on your health. Overweight people have increased risk of diabetes, dementia, cancer, sexual dysfunction, heart disease and strokes. It costs Medicare 50% more every year to treat an obese American compared to one of normal weight. The problem is only 20% of Medicare patients are normal weight. If we Americans lost our

In medicine as in so many walks of life, one thing we have to learn over and over is the law of unintended consequences. A series of new studies about vitamin D proves this in spades!

For many years, medical societies and government committees have warned us all to avoid sun exposure as much as possible. These same experts have cautioned us to use sunscreens on a daily basis to minimize the amount of inadvertent sun exposure we get in our day-to-day lives. But a new study indicates that this may be a bad idea, with far-reaching (and completely unintended) health consequences. It’s true that avoiding excess sun exposure and using sunscreen may well minimize your risk of getting malignant melanoma, and can certainly improve the look of your skin as you get older. But since exposure to sunlight causes our bodies to produce vitamin D, all these precautions can dramatically decrease the amount of vitamin D in our systems. These low levels of vitamin D have been linked to

A recent study of prostate cancer, funded by the federal government, linked high cholesterol levels with doubling the risk of developing an aggressive cancer that is more likely to result in death. The study, which involved over 6000 men, showed there was a clear correlation between a cholesterol level over 200 and a doubling in the incidence of high-grade malignancies of the prostate. As a result, some have leapt to the conclusion that placing men on statin drugs, which are a class of drugs that lower cholesterol levels, should lower the risk of prostate cancer (or at least lower the risk of high-grade aggressive prostate cancer).

I wish life was that straight forward, but the data on statin use and prostate cancer incidence is complex. There are studies indicating that long-term use of statin drugs may decrease the overall risk of prostate cancer to some modest degree. On the other hand, a large study, published in September of 2009 and done here at the Seattle Fred