The excuses

The pressures of home and family life can also mean it feels as if there’s little time left to fit in exercise. It’s certainly tough to get started.

So, it’s worth thinking about what you gain from regular exercise and making even a partial improvement to your fitness.

• Physical inactivity is an independent risk factor for coronary heart disease – in other words, if you don’t exercise you dramatically increase your risk of dying from a heart attack

• Conversely, exercise means a healthier heart because it reduces several cardiovascular risks, including high blood pressure

• Being physically active can bolster good mental health and help you to manage stress, anxiety and even depression

• Regular exercise can help you achieve and maintain an ideal weight, which can be important in managing many health conditions, or may just make you feel happier about your appearance

• All exercise helps strengthen bones and muscles to some degree, but weight-bearing exercise, such as running, is especially good in promoting bone density and protecting against osteoporosis, which affects men as well as women

• Different exercises help with all sorts of health niggles, such as digestion, poor posture and sleeplessness, and physical activity can be beneficial for a range of medical conditions, from diabetes to lower back pain

Don’t be a statistic

There are lots of positive reasons for getting fitter, including meeting new people, discovering new interests and generally feeling better, but if you need to be scared into doing more exercise, consider the following:

• On current trends a third of men will be obese by 2010, according to a 2006 Department of Health report

• Between 2003 and 2006, obesity in adults rose by nearly 40 per cent

• The picture is just as worrying for youngsters – by 2010, it’s predicted 22 per cent of girls and 19 per cent of boys between the ages of two and 15 will be obese, with girls under 11 at particular risk

• Obesity is responsible for 9,000 premature deaths a year in this country, and is a major contributory factor to heart disease

• Coronary heart disease (CHD) is still the leading cause of death in the UK, accounting for about a fifth of all deaths, according to the Office for National Statistics

• About a third of deaths caused by CHD are among people aged under 75

Keep mobile

Almost half of adults in the UK will be aged over 50 by 2020. We tend to assume the benefits and pleasures of sport, exercise and fitness are only for younger people, but think again. The rewards of improved fitness later in life can be great – both for your health and social life.

Statistics show activity levels decline steadily with age, and by their mid-50s few people take regular exercise.

But regular activity is especially important as you age because it has beneficial effects on conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and helps you maintain mobility and mental well-being and, consequently, your independence.

There’s no reason you should give up the sport you love just because you’re getting older. There are plenty of exceptions to the statistical trend of decreased activity as we get older – at clubs up and down the country, for example, there are runners in their 50s, 60s and beyond whose fitness puts people 20 or 30 years their junior to shame.

And even if you weren’t especially active or sporty at a younger age, it’s never too late to start. Male or female, single or with a partner, there’s lots you can do, and enjoy.

Some of the health benefits you’ll get are the same as younger people, but there are things that are of particular benefit as you get older:

• More energy – exercise makes you feel more energetic, while sitting around not doing much makes you feel sluggish and unable to do anything

• Improved sleep – your body and mind feel as though they’ve done something and are ready for rest at night

• Stable weight – regular exercise helps to keep you at a healthy weight

• Improved circulation and lower blood pressure

• Delayed ageing – keeping active strengthens your muscles, joints and bones as well as helping with mobility and balance, important as it helps to prevent falls, which are the leading cause of injury and death for the over-75s

On top of the health benefits, exercise can be an excellent way to meet new people, whether it’s at a gym, a rambling or running club, or just people you meet while walking the dog.

It’s the “obesity paradox,” said Dr. Carl J. Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, and lead author of the review, which appears in the May 26 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Obesity is a major problem that contributes significantly to increased risk of heart disease and mortality,” Lavie said. “But once you get high blood pressure, blocked heart arteries and peripheral arterial disease, the obese patients do better than the lean patients. The obesity paradox has been written about for years, but still many doctors are not aware of it.”

His report looked at data from 40 studies of 250,000 people with heart disease, Lavie said. He wanted not only to remind doctors of the paradox, but also to warn them and the general public that it offers no excuse for being fat, he said.

Some physicians have misinterpreted the evidence to mean that obese people with heart disease should not be encouraged to lose weight, Lavie said.

“Obesity causes many of the known risk factors, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and it is an independent risk factor on its own,” he said. “The patients with heart disease who do the best are the obese who lose weight.”

There are several possible explanations for the paradox, Lavie said.

One is that obese people visit physicians earlier than others because they develop symptoms, such as fatigue and breathing problems. Heart disease is more treatable if identified early.

It’s also conceivable that something in the excess fat cells of obese people might have a protective value, Lavie said.

“People who have more weight can have more reserve ability to fight disease,” he said. “Take breast cancer. Obesity may help cause breast cancer, but a 200-pound woman might be able to fight breast cancer better than a 100-pound woman because she has more metabolic reserve.”

It’s well-known that obesity leads to heart disease, and that’s a big part of the paradox, Lavie said. “These people wouldn’t have developed heart disease in the first place if they weren’t obese,” he said. “A thin person is getting it [heart disease] for a different reason, so he or she is getting a worse form of the disease, getting the disease despite being thin.”

Lavie worries that people might get the wrong idea from his report. “Obesity in the United States is a major problem,” he said. “It is increasing in skyrocketing proportions. It is a major contributor to the epidemic of heart disease. We don’t want people to be hearing that obesity is good.”

The study, presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association conference in New Orleans, found that the thickness of artery walls of children and teenagers who are obese or have high cholesterol resembled the thickness of artery walls of an average 45-year-old.

The study, which has not yet been published, was small, involving 70 children ages 6 to 19, and several experts said the results would need to be replicated to be considered conclusive. But they said the method used to measure artery wall thickness was considered a reliable indicator of heart disease risk, usually more reliable than cholesterol levels or other measures. The method, which uses ultrasound, has been applied to children in other studies in the last few years, but experts said this appeared to be the first time that results had been correlated to adults.

“I think this is a red flag,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Geetha Raghuveer, a cardiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. “These kids are more similar to middle-aged adults.”

Scientists not involved in the study said the findings supported a growing body of research suggesting that childhood obesity in the United States was likely to result in heart disease as the children age.

“These findings are potentially consistent with predictions that obesity and its complications would result in cardiovascular disease becoming a pediatric illness,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard, who was a co-author of a 2005 study predicting that obesity could shorten the average child’s lifespan by two to five years. “There are other indications that this might be the case, but much of that has been speculative, so this may well be significant hard data, which has been largely lacking. This is actually looking at the development of atherosclerosis, the process that we know will, if it is not dealt with, lead to heart attack or stroke.”

Childhood obesity is considered an epidemic in the United States, with about 16 percent of children ages 2 to 19 considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the number of new cases of childhood obesity appears to be leveling off, some experts say they are now seeing an increase in Type 2 diabetes in children, which they believe is a consequence of increased obesity.

The Kansas City study was one of several presented at the conference that looked at the link between childhood obesity and heart disease.

A study of 991 Australian children ages 5 to 15 found that children who were obese had greater enlargement of their hearts, as measured by the size of their left atrium, said the study’s leader, Dr. Julian G. Ayer, a heart researcher at the University of Sydney.

Another Australian study, of 150 10-year-olds, found that in the heart pumping process, the left ventricles were slower to untwist in children with a higher body-mass index, a relationship of weight to height, said a co-author of that study, Walter Abhayaratna, a researcher at Australian National University.

“These studies are interesting, imperfect corollary evidence of something we all believe is true,” said Dr. Lee Goldman, a cardiologist who is dean of the faculties of health, sciences and medicine at Columbia University. “The obesity epidemic in adolescents is the biggest adverse time bomb we’ve got going on in coronary diseases. These are high tech ways of adding more evidence.”

Dr. Goldman was a co-author of a study published in December 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine in which a computer model was used to predict whether heart disease deaths in the United States would rise. The authors predicted that by 2035, there would be 100,000 additional cases of heart disease attributed to current instances of obesity in children, an estimate especially noteworthy given that advances in treatment have reduced cardiac deaths in recent years.

Another study published in the same journal at that time further bolstered the link between childhood obesity and heart disease. Analyzing the records of 276,835 Danes who were examined as children in 1930, researchers from Denmark found that the higher the children’s body-mass index in 1930, the greater the chances they would develop heart disease.

While it is too early to know if the current generation of American children will suffer more heart attacks, strokes or other heart problems, or experience them sooner, many heart researchers consider the growing corroboration of links between childhood obesity and heart disease alarming. Still, Dr. Raghuveer said that for the children she studied, hope was not lost.

“A lot of these kids’ arteries, even though they are in the early stages of atherosclerosis, are not hardened or calcified, not really advanced,” she said. “There may be an opportunity to implement lifestyle alterations, be it exercise, be it diet, or perhaps even medication. Perhaps it may be reversed.”

Dr. Raghuveer’s study used an ultrasound method called carotid artery intima-media thickness or CIMT to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries, located in the neck. Scientists, who measure the carotid artery because it is easier to capture images of neck arteries than the coronary arteries directly connected to the heart, say increased thickness in the carotid artery wall indicates greater amounts of fatty plaque in the arteries leading to the heart and brain. When such plaque ruptures, it can result in clots that lead to heart attack or stroke.

Of the 34 boys and 36 girls in the Kansas City study, patients at Dr. Raghuveer’s cardiology clinic at Children’s Mercy Hospital, 40 were obese and 30 were not considered obese but had high levels of LDL or bad cholesterol. Many also had high levels of triglycerides. Their average age was 13; average weight was 140 pounds. Nearly 90 percent were white.

The researchers found that 52 of the 70 participants had a maximum CIMT of at least 0.5 millimeters, a thickness that corresponded with the CIMT of an average 45-year-old or what Dr. Raghuveer called a “vascular age” of 45. She did not measure CIMT in normal-weight children and said there was no standard CIMT chart for children.

Vascular age is “an interesting idea, and I hope it gets out there,” said Dr. Gerald S. Berenson, head of the long-running Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana, who has taken CIMT measurements of children in the last few years.

Dr. Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston, said that seeing risk factors like CIMT in children was especially worrying because “there’s not only a much longer period of time for it to be damaging the body, but it is also occurring at a stage of lifewhere the body is still forming and the physiological systems are still being fine-tuned.”

By PAM BELLUCK

A large waistline can double the risk of premature death even in people who are not ‘officially’ overweight, an alarming study has found.

Researchers concluded that waist measurement is a much better indicator of a person’s lifespan than the traditional ‘body mass index’ score used by the Government.

This divides people into obese, overweight and normal weight.

The disclosure means doctors could be missing vital chances to save people’s lives because they are looking at the wrong measurements.

The study, which involved more than 350,000 people from nine European countries, found that even those judged to be a healthy weight under the BMI could be at risk of heart attack or stroke if they had too much waistline fat.

It found that every inch added on the waist increases a man’s chance of dying early by 9 per cent and women’s by 7 per cent, no matter how thin the person is in the first place.

The research found that among people with similar BMIs, people with large waists had roughly double the risk of a premature death as those whose waists were defined as small.

A large waist was defined as 47 inches in men and 39 inches in women, while a small waist was 32 and 26 inches in men and women respectively.

In Britain, the average waist size is 38 inches in men and 33.5 inches in women.

Professor Edlio Riboli of London’s Imperial College, and coordinator of the study, said: ‘Although smaller studies have suggested a link between mortality and waist size, we were surprised to see the waist size having such a powerful effect on people’s health and premature death.

‘Our study shows that accumulating excess fat around your middle can put your health at risk even if your weight is normal based on BMI scores. There aren’t many simple individual characteristics that can increase a person’s risk of premature death to this extent, independently from smoking and drinking.’

Doctors have traditionally used the BMI, a measurement of the ratio between a person’s height and weight, to test a person’s risk of health complications.

A BMI of between 18.5 and 25 indicates that someone has a healthy weight. If their score is above 25 they are overweight, and if they are above 30 they are obese.

In Britain, the average person is now overweight according to the BMI, with an average score of 25.4.

But the BMI has come in for criticism because a super-fit athlete can come out as overweight or obese even though their high weight is accounted for by muscle and not fat.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found that measuring the ratio between the sizes of the waist and the hip is a better measure of health than the BMI.

Lower waist-hip ratios indicate the waist is comparatively small in relation to the hips.

In Europe, this ratio ranges from 0.78 to 1.1 in men and from 0.66 to 0.98 in women.

But each 0.1 increase in the ratio equates to a 34 per cent higher mortality risk of early death in men, and 24 per cent in women.

To measure the waist, doctors suggest people should measure around their body around four centimetres (1.5 inches) above their belly button.

Professor Riboli said: ‘The good news is that you don’t need to take an expensive test and wait ages for the result to assess this aspect of your health – it costs virtually nothing to measure your waist and hip size.

‘Doctors and nurses can easily identify people who need to take certain steps to improve their health by routinely monitoring these measurements.

‘If you have a large waist, you probably need to increase the amount of exercise you do every day, avoid excessive alcohol consumption and improve your diet. This could make a huge difference in reducing your risk of an early death.’

The participants in the study, aged 25 to 70, were monitored for an average of 10 years. During this time, a total of 14,723 died.

The study authors said sedentary lifestyles, poor diet and genetic predisposition caused the expansion of the waistline.

Dr Tobias Pischon, lead author of the paper from the German Institute of Human Nutrition, said: ‘The most important result of our study is the finding that not just being overweight, but also the distribution of body fat, affects the risk of premature death of each individual.

‘Abdominal fat is not only a mere energy depot, but it also releases messenger substances that can contribute to the development of chronic diseases. This may be the reason for the link.’

Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said: ‘This underlines the fact that waist measurement is what doctors should be using with their patients, rather than the BMI. The BMI should really only be used with children.

‘But people need to know where their waist is – if you go up and down each time you’re not comparing like with like. They need to measure about 4cm up from their belly button.’

On Tuesday another study showed the arteries of obese children were as bad as would be expected in people aged 45 – meaning that they should be treated as being at the same risk of heart attack as middle-aged people.

Source: dailymail

About 5 million people in the United States suffer from heart failure (HF). While some reports indicate that changes to diet can reduce HF risk, few large, prospective studies have been conducted. In a new study researchers observed over 14,000 participants for more than 13 years and found that whole grain consumption lowered HF risk, while egg and high-fat dairy consumption raised risk. Other food groups did not directly affect HF risk. The results are published in the November 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Diet is among the prominent lifestyle factors that influence major HF risk factors: coronary artery disease, obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance and hypertension. Using data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, researchers from the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota and the Department of Epidemiology and Cardiovascular Diseases Program, University of North Carolina, analyzed the results of baseline exams of more than 14,000 White and African American adults conducted in 1987-89, with follow-up exams completed during 1990-92, 1993-95, and 1996-98. Four field centers participated in the study: Forsyth County, NC; Jackson, MS; northwest Minneapolis suburbs, MN; and Washington County, MD. The study also collected demographic characteristics and lifestyle factors, as well as other medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and hypertension.

Writing in the article, Jennifer A. Nettleton, Ph.D., states, “Although risk estimates were modest (7% lower risk per 1-serving increase in whole grain intake; 8% greater risk per 1-serving increase in high-fat dairy intake; 23% greater risk per 1-serving increase in egg intake), the totality of literature in this area suggests it would be prudent to recommend that those at high risk of HF increase their intake of whole grains and reduce intake of high-fat dairy and eggs, along with following other healthful dietary practices consistent with those recommended by the American Heart Association.”

The article is “Incident heart failure is associated with lower whole grain intake and greater high-fat dairy and egg intake in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study” by Jennifer A. Nettleton, Ph.D.; Lyn M. Steffen, Ph.D.; Laura R. Loehr, MD; Wayne D. Rosamond, Ph.D; and Aaron R. Folsom, MD. It appears in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Volume 108, Issue 11 (November 2008) published by Elsevier.

Jennifer A. Nettleton, Ph.D., Lyn M. Steffen, Ph.D. and Aaron R. Folsom, M.D., are from the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. (Dr. Nettleton is currently an assistant professor in the Division of Epidemiology & Disease Control at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston.)

Laura R. Loehr, M.D. and Wayne D. Rosamond, Ph.D. are from the Department of Epidemiology and Cardiovascular Diseases Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

About The Journal Of The American Dietetic Association

The official journal of the American Dietetic Association (http://www.eatright.org) the Journal of the American Dietetic Association is the premier source for the practice and science of food, nutrition and dietetics. The monthly, peer-reviewed journal presents original articles prepared by scholars and practitioners and is the most widely read professional publication in the field. The Journal focuses on advancing professional knowledge across the range of research and practice issues such as: nutritional science, medical nutrition therapy, public health nutrition, food science and biotechnology, foodservice systems, leadership and management and dietetics education.

About The American Dietetic Association

The American Dietetic Association is the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals. ADA is committed to improving the nation’s health and advancing the profession of dietetics through research, education and advocacy.”

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Elsevier.com

Scientists have expressed genes from snapdragon in tomatoes to grow purple tomatoes high in health-protecting anthocyanins.

Anthocyanins are naturally occurring pigments found at particularly high levels in berries such as blackberry, cranberry and chokeberry. Scientists are investigating ways to increase the levels of health-promoting compounds in more commonly eaten fruits and vegetables.

“Most people do not eat 5 portions of fruits and vegetables a day, but they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and veg can be developed that are higher in bioactive compounds,” says Prof Cathie Martin from the John Innes Centre.

Anthocyanins offer protection against certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases. There is evidence that anthocyanins also have anti-inflammatory activity, promote visual acuity and hinder obesity and diabetes.

Tomatoes already contain high levels of the antioxidant lycopene. Highly processed tomatoes are the best source, or tomatoes cooked in a little oil, which helps to release the lycopene from cells. Flavonoids meanwhile are soluble in water, and foods containing both water soluble and fat-dissolved antioxidants are considered to offer the best protection against disease.

In this study the scientists expressed two genes from snapdragon that induce the production of anthocyanins in snapdragon flowers. The genes were turned on in tomato fruit. Anthocyanins accumulated in tomatoes at higher levels than anything previously reported for metabolic engineering in both the peel and flesh of the fruit. The fruit are an intense purple colour.

The scientists tested whether these elevated levels actually had an effect on health. In a pilot test, the lifespan of cancer-susceptible mice was significantly extended when their diet was supplemented with the purple tomatoes compared to supplementation with normal red tomatoes.

“This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease,” says Professor Cathie Martin.

“And certainly the first example of a GMO with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers. The next step will be to take the preclinical data forward to human studies with volunteers to see if we can promote health through dietary preventive medicine strategies.”

—————————-
Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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The research, to be published in Nature Biotechnology, was funded by the EU and by JIC’s core strategic grant from Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Notes:

* Reference: ‘Enrichment of tomato fruit with health-promoting anthocyanins by expression of select transcription factors’, Nature Biotechnology doi: 10.1038/nbt.1506

* The John Innes Centre, http://www.jic.ac.uk/, is an independent, world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences with over 800 staff. JIC is based on Norwich Research Park and carries out high quality fundamental, strategic and applied research to understand how plants and microbes work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains scientists and students, collaborates with many other research laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the general public. The JIC is grant-aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

* The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £420M in a wide range of research that makes a significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/

* EU funding was through two research projects to elucidate the contribution bioactive compounds in food can make to improving health through diet:

ProFood (http://profood.ipk-gatersleben.de/), focused on improved antioxidant content for food applications

FLORA (http://www.flora-flavonoids.eu/cms/), focused on the effects of flavonoids and related phenolics on cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer.

Source: Zoe Dunford
Norwich BioScience Institutes

Heart attacks are hitting the overweight more than a decade sooner than “normal” weight people, researchers are reporting.

A study of more than 111,000 people is one of the first to put real numbers to the risk of obesity and suggests “excess adiposity” – fat tissue – is more dangerous to the heart than smoking.

“The leading theory in cardiology right now is that the fat tissue is actually producing factors that precipitate heart attacks,” says lead author Dr. Peter McCullough, consultant cardiologist and chief of nutrition and prevention medicine at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.

The theory is that cholesterol builds up in the coronary arteries and inflammatory or other chemicals produced by fat cells trigger the plaque to suddenly rupture, causing a blood clot to form and unleashing an acute heart attack.

But until now, earlier studies “simply just didn’t have enough patients of different body sizes having their first heart attack to really evaluate” whether obesity is associated with premature heart attacks, McCullough says.

His team analyzed data from a nationwide U.S. registry of people hospitalized for heart attack and unstable angina, or chest pain, from 2001 to 2007.

A total of 111,847 men and women who had experienced a first heart attack were included in the final analysis. They were grouped according to their body mass index, or BMI, a measure of body fat based on height and weight.

Researchers found that, the heavier the person, the younger the age of a first heart attack.

The most obese people had their heart attacks on average when they were 59. That compares to about 75 for the leanest group (average body weight 47 kilograms, or about 103 pounds, meaning they were actually considered underweight), and 71 for people of “normal” weight, where the average weight is 65 kilograms, or about 142 pounds.

The most obese group had a BMI of 40 or more and weighed on average 127 kilograms, or 280 pounds.

“It’s not uncommon in daily life to see people at that size,” McCullough says. “I’m sure there are people in your office and people you see all the time at that body weight.”

The rate of diabetes was 17 per cent in the leanest group, and 49 per cent in the most obese. “You can get a feeling of how obesity-driven diabetes is,” McCullough says.

All the patients, regardless of body size, had about the same level of LDL cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol thought to be a major risk factor for heart attacks. That means the excess fat is causing heart disease in other ways, McCullough says.

In addition, rates of smoking were equal across the board. “We really can’t blame it on smoking.”

“Those patients at the highest body weight on average lost 12 years of life before their first heart attack.” The second most important factor was smoking, “where they lost just under 10 years of life before a first heart attack.

“This is really the first study that shows now that some factors are more powerful than smoking in terms of the prematurity of myocardial infarction (a heart attack),” McCullough says.

The study involved a type of heart attack called non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction. They always require hospitalization and have an in-hospital fatality rate of about 10 per cent, and about 20 per cent over the next six months, McCullough says. “They are not trivial events. They account for a leading cause of patients to lose time away from work and actually seek medical disability.”

The study clearly shows “that, contrary to some of the arguments out there about whether or not excess weight may be protective … there is a tremendous risk difference in terms of having your first heart attack if you are overweight or obese,” says Dr. Arya Sharma, chair of obesity research and management at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

“You’re having a heart attack a decade before those who don’t have a weight problem,” Sharma says. “And 59 is actually a very young age. These are people who aren’t even close to retirement.”

McCullough says people could reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease by losing weight and body fat. According to the Canadian Community Health Survey, 23 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and older are obese.

The study appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Source: Canada.com

North Americans eat less fat than ever recorded in history and yet we have an obesity epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, obesity is doubling every 5 years and at the current rate everybody in North America will be obese by the year 2230.

Fat is a very functional source of energy. It is stored as adipose tissue in times of plenty and metabolized when we need the calories. Insulin is the hormone, known as the storage hormone derived from the “thrifty gene”, responsible for most of this storage. It is responsible for transporting surplus carbohydrates and some proteins out of the blood and into the cells where it is stored as glycogen or fat.

It is true that fat goes from your lips to your hips and all over the body very easily. However most do not understand that if your insulin is under control (not elevated), fat is the energy source of choice by a resting or light exercising body. Even when you exercise at 65% of your maximal capacity, 50% of your energy will come from fat, unless you have very high insulin from eating too many sugars.

Good Fats

Misconception: “all fats are bad!!
This is not true. There are some fats that you must eat – called “Essential Fatty Acids” or EFA’s – so you can metabolize other fats and produce hormones and immune cells. That is why the American Heart Association’s position is that any diet with less than 30% fat is “unproven and potentially dangerous”.

We get good fats, sometimes referred to as omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids from raw nut and seeds, cold pressed oils like flax seed, walnut, pumpkin seed and soybean oils or lecithin (usually derived from the soybean) and cold water fish like salmon and sardines. These are the polyunsaturated fats which can go rancid very quickly and require refrigeration and air tight storage.

Many dietary interferences like low zinc, high cholesterol, alcohol, cheap oils, saturated fats, viral infections, and antibiotics, interfere with the activation of EFA’s. Many have to use the “activated” versions known as GLA (gamma linolenic acid, an omega 6 fatty acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid – an omega 3 fatty acid) for optimal health. Olive and sesame oils are considered high in Mono-unsaturated fats and are considered neutral with some benefits. (Canola oil would require another column to discuss).

Bad Fats

An excessive intake of saturated fats from animal sources and from certain tropical oils have been implicated as contributors to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and inflammatory diseases.

Unfortunately most the these implications are based on large cross sectional – after the fact – correlation studies and not intervention clinical studies. There is very little discussion about the how and why this occurs. There is some evidence that if saturated fat intake is balanced with EFA’s, many of the risk factors like high cholesterol and triglycerides are reduced.

Current advice would suggest you moderate (not eliminate) saturated fat intake but don’t get paranoid about it. There are differences in how the body handle certain saturated fats. “Short Chain and Medium Chain” triglycerides like those found in butter can be easily metabolized for energy – particularly if you control your insulin levels through moderate carbohydrate intake. Many saturated fats also carry and store other nutrients like Vitamins A, E & K plus CLA (conjugated linoleic acid which has a host of benefits). So do not treat Saturated fat like it is poison.

Ugly Fats

A group of polyunsaturated fats, exposed to heat, light, oxygen and hydrogen (hydrogenated) become altered in processing and storage. When altered they are know as Trans Fatty Acids.

This group is now considered toxic and is implicated in the causes of cancer, some heart disease and immune system challenges. These nasty fats, found in deep fried fast food, most margarines, anything rancid, processed or packaged can shorten your life. My standard recommendations are to never eat cheap oils, deep fried grease and margarine.

Note
Your diet should be 30% fat divided equally between EFA’s, mono-unsaturated and saturated fats. Avoid Trans Fatty Acids like you would an infectious disease.