Tag: "exercise"

Exercisers Also Sit a Lot

We previously reported on a finding that the more hours the men and women sat every day, the greater their chance of dying prematurely.

In a new study from Finland a group of healthy, physically active volunteers donned special shorts that measure muscular activity in the legs. The results:

There was, in fact, virtually no difference in how much time people spent being couch potatoes on the days when they exercised compared with days when they did not. On nonexercise days, about 72 percent of volunteers’ waking time, or about nine hours, was spent sitting.

When they formally exercised, volunteers used about 13 percent more energy overall than on days they didn’t exercise. But they still sat 68 percent of the time.

Source: New York Times articleworth reading.

Apr 12, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Employers Get Tough

Once a year, employees of the Swiss Village Retirement Community in Berne, Ind., have a checkup that will help determine how much they pay for health coverage. Those who don’t smoke, aren’t obese and whose blood pressure and cholesterol fall below specific levels get to shave as much as $2,000 off their annual health insurance deductibles.

Julie Appleby’s article in USA Today.

Apr 05, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Designer Diets

Researchers at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine are studying the theory that nutrition and exercise can be affected by a person’s genetic makeup…The Studies question long-held beliefs about food selection and weight loss. For example, could 1,000 calories of turkey cause more weight gain in some people than 1,000 calories in cashews? If so, could a person lose weight through food selection without cutting calories?

Dec 09, 2011 | 6 comments | by

Employer Knows Best

The share of companies that used financial rewards in health management programs increased to 54% in 2011 from 36% in 2009. In 2012, about 80% of companies plan to offer financial rewards… The percentage using penalties, such as for smoking, more than doubled — from 8% in 2009 to 19% in 2011. Nearly 40% of the companies surveyed plan to use penalties next year.

More from USA Today here.

Dec 07, 2011 | 4 comments | by

The Changing Body

The basic argument is rather simple: that the health and nutrition of pregnant mothers and their children contribute to the strength and longevity of the next generation. To take just a few examples, the average adult man in 1850 in America stood about 5 feet 7 inches and weighed about 146 pounds; someone born then was expected to live until about 45. In the 1980s the typical man in his early 30s was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed about 174 pounds and was likely to pass his 75th birthday. Across the Atlantic, at the time of the French Revolution, a 30-something Frenchman weighed about 110 pounds, compared with 170 pounds now. And in Norway an average 22-year-old man was about 5 ½ inches taller at the end of the 20th century (5 feet 10.7 inches) than in the middle of the 18th century (5 feet 5.2 inches).

Full article on the correlation between human evolution and technology.

May 03, 2011 | 5 comments | by

30 Years Ago All these Baby Boomers Would Have Been in Wheel Chairs

Joint-replacement patients these days are younger and more active than ever before. More than half of all hip-replacement surgeries performed this year are expected to be on people under 65, with the same percentage projected for knee replacements by 2016. The fastest-growing group is patients 46 to 64, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery.

Many active middle-agers are wearing out their joints with marathons, triathlons, basketball and tennis and suffering osteoarthritis years earlier than previous generations. They’re also determined to stay active for many more years and not let pain or disability make them sedentary. To accommodate them, implant makers are working to build joints with longer-wearing materials, and surgeons are offering more options like partial knee replacements, hip resurfacing and minimally invasive procedures.

Full article on the baby boomer joint replacement craze.

Apr 21, 2011 | 6 comments | by

Professor Loses Weight on Twinkie Diet

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate [a Twinkie, a Nutty bar or a powdered donut] every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

Full article on one man’s success with the “Twinkie Diet.”

Nov 10, 2010 | 7 comments | by

Docs Declare “No Confidence” in AMA, Exercise as Anger Management, and the Upcoming Nursing Shortage

Florida docs vote “no confidence” in the AMA. Finally, the doctors get some backbone.

Can exercise make you less angry? Apparently.

Congress already has the power to deny citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. No other developed country gives citizenship to “anchor babies — children born after a mother briefly crosses the border to give birth.”

Projected nursing shortage could be worse than doctor shortage. So where will the newly insured get their care?

Aug 17, 2010 | 5 comments | by

Mystery Revealed: How Exercise Really Works

After 10 minutes of treadmill jogging or stationary-bicycle riding, the healthy adults showed enormous changes in the metabolites within their bloodstream, as did the less-fit group, although to a lesser degree. In particular, certain metabolites associated with fat burning were elevated. The fit adults showed increases of almost 100 percent in many of these molecules. The less-fit group had increases in those same metabolites of about 50 percent. As for the marathoners, their blood contained up to 10 times more of the fat-burning markers.

These findings suggest that exercise has both “acute and cumulative” effects on your body’s ability to use and burn fat…

Read More » »

Jun 23, 2010 | 6 comments | by

Life is Unfair to Women

18 overweight men and women walked on treadmills in multiple sessions while either eating enough that day to replace the calories burned during exercise or not. Afterward, the men displayed little or no changes in their energy-regulating hormones or their appetites, much as in the other study. But the women uniformly had increased blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin and decreased concentrations of insulin after the sessions in which they had eaten less than they had burned. Their bodies were directing them to replace the lost calories.

In physiological terms, the results “are consistent with the paradigm that mechanisms to maintain body fat are more effective in women,” Braun and his colleagues wrote. In practical terms, the results are scientific proof that life is unfair. Female bodies, inspired almost certainly “by a biological need to maintain energy stores for reproduction,” Braun says, fight hard to hold on to every ounce of fat. Exercise for many women (and for some men) increases the desire to eat.

Full article on exercise’s role in weight loss.

Apr 22, 2010 | 6 comments | by
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