Ideal Health Doctor

As a people, we Americans -and an increasing proportion of the global population emulating our pattern- eat way too few fruits and vegetables, and our health is the worse for it.  We have been stuck at this dietary impasse for quite some time, and have made negligible progress in finding our way around it.

If there is one thing all legitimate nutrition experts agree on, it’s that health would benefit if most of us routinely ate more fruits and vegetables.  Most of us enthusiastically endorse Michael Pollan’s succinct advice: ‘eat food, not too much, mostly plants.’  I certainly do.

But alas- if that is the destination, it seems you can’t get there from here!   The bridge is out.  The road is closed.

This is a simple case of reaping what we have sown.  The

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Heathe Luz McNaughton Reyes, PhD, 2009 alumna in health behavior and health education at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, has received the Greenberg Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research.  The award carries a $2,500 prize. An abstract of Reyes’ dissertation paper, “Adolescent Alcohol Use and Dating Violence Perpetration: Three Studies Examining Concurrent and Longitudinal Relations across Grades 8 through 12,” is available online. “Luz completed an outstanding dissertation which was rigorous and sophisticated in terms of theory, methodology and statistical approach,” said Vangie Foshee, PhD, chair of Reyes’ dissertation committee and professor of health behavior and health education at the School. Read more…

A Harvard study just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine- showing higher mortality in men and women who consumed a meaty, Atkins-like diet- has likely come to your attention, given its high media profile.  Predictably, the Atkins camp was quick to weigh in and tell us why the study is flawed, and just as predictably, prominent Atkins’ diet detractors, such as my friend Dean Ornish, were quick to highlight the study’s importance.

When the smoke from the Hibachi clears, what does the study actually mean?  

As hastily noted by its detractors, the study is observational, and thus designed to show association- not prove cause and effect.  Men and women – over 120,000 of them- who, over time, ate more of their calories from animal sources and fewer of them from plants were more likely to get sick and die prematurely.   <

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MONDAY, Sept. 6 (HealthDay News) — Infants and preschoolers who don’t get enough sleep at night are at increased risk for later childhood obesity, a new study suggests.

The researchers also found that daytime naps are not an adequate substitute for lost nighttime sleep in terms of preventing obesity.

At the follow-up, 33 percent of the younger children and 36 percent of the older children were overweight or obese. Among the younger children, lack of sufficient nighttime sleep at baseline was associated with increased risk for later overweight or obesity.

Among the older children, the amount of sleep at baseline was not associated with weight at follow-up.

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