AAHH: updates and questions answered

Physical Fitness: less heart disease, less cancer, but how do we sustain it?    Let's start thinking about this together with some shared recollections. Some of my favorite childhood and young adult memories have to do with being physically active, and I wonder if yours are too. As young people, we took delight in discovering what our bodies can do as we grow.  Think of the look of amazed delight on the face of a toddler learning how to walk... or run!  Recall what it felt like to be 6 years old and running in exuberant circles in the grass on a summer evening. Maybe you enjoyed throwing a ball, catching a Frisbee, playing table-tennis, dancing, gymnastics, or a team sport. There was a sense of pride and satisfaction even with the hard breathing and the sweat, or even a bruise or a scrape from rough competition. It is natural for young humans (and other animals too!) to stretch and test the limits of our bodies and to enjoy activity.  I think that recalling tha...

  Maybe we'll start this one with a not-so guilty pleasure, now that you know I'm going to say good things about coffee!  If you're like me, it's not hard at all to bring to mind the intense aroma of coffee.  Grinding coffee, brewing coffee, the steamy delicious smell wafting from the top of your favorite mug, or the warm taste of the first cup in the morning... take your time, close your eyes if you wish and imagine. And now, here are some facts that maybe you didn't know, about what a good choice this is as your beverage! A 2017 article in the British Medical Journal by Poole et al. reviewed the findings from well over 200 studies that had analyzed the relationship between coffee intake and health outcomes. After all the details were sorted out, they concluded that on balance, drinking coffee was more likely to be associated with health benefit than harm to health, over a wide range of health conditions that had been studied.  The comparison held up when looking a...

  How do I make sense of all the talk about COVID19 vaccines? First, it's important for you to understand how I think about vaccines in general.  My primary specialty is pediatrics and adolescent medicine, since 1986.  Following my training years, I immediately spent a year studying at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene (now the Bloomberg School of Public Health) in Baltimore. My focus there was on international child and adolescent health, disease prevention on a population level, and how to improve health quality of life around the world. My own personal history of education and medical practice forms the foundation for how I think about vaccines.  A number I will never forget may surprise you. Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, an average of 2.6 million children were dying of measles every year. Every year. 2.6 million. Widespread use of this safe and effective vaccine was responsible for saving millions of lives, so that betwee...

Today is a great day to be talking about how our relationship with food shapes our lives.   As I am writing this, I can look out the window to a springtime garden, and I am hopeful that we will see fresh vegetables in our kitchen soon from our own back yard!  Growing our own food has deep family roots for me.  As a child, I lived next door to my grandparents, who kept a large vegetable garden that I remember vividly to this day.  My mother and grandmother both canned and put away produce for the family to have plenty of vegetables in the winter months. Gail and I have grown vegetables almost every year since we were newlyweds. We enjoy cooking and eating good food, so it is once again a real pleasure to see new scientific data published on its value! In the February issue of the journal Nutrients, a group of dedicated researchers shared findings on how food impacts the onset (or not) of dementia.  The study population was in Spain, and they followed over ...

 Here we are again, ready to extol the virtues of the Mediterranean diet.  In our last post, we shared some new information about how a pregnant mother's food choices impact that child's growth in childhood and risk of obesity.  Now we know that following that time-honored eating tradition is not only good for mothers, but also good for developing babies in the womb!  But today we will travel to the other end of the life spectrum and share good news about an issue that is of crucial importance to older men (and the grandchildren who love them!) In a study published just last month, in the prestigious journal Cancer, from the equally prestigious M.D. Anderson Cancer Center,  ( Cancer . 2021 Mar 1; 127(5):720-728. doi:10.1002/cncr.33182) we find new data on how the Mediterranean diet slows the progression of prostate cancer.  First, you should know that nearly half of men who are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer are found to be eligible for "active surve...

I have lost track of the number of times I have recommended that one of my patients follow a traditional Mediterranean diet, and lost track of all the reasons I may have said that.  But after all that, it's great to know there is still more to learn about this gift that has been passed down to us over generations and oceans.  For the next three blog posts, I will give a short summary of some things you may not have known, in addition to some food ideas you can cook up in your own kitchen!  Let's talk about food! Did you know... ... that a pregnant mom's food choices affect a child's growth and risk of obesity later in life? Absolutely.  Researchers from Harvard tracked 1459 mother-child pairs for up to 18 years after they had collected data on mom's food choices in pregnancy.  It turns out that when pregnant moms eat a diet that is pro-inflammatory and less closely adheres to a traditional Mediterranean diet pattern, children born of those pregnancies are more l...

Question: should you take vitamin D? Answer: yes. End of blog. Let me explain...   Here's what I think you need to know about vitamin D, not too little, not too much, just right.  Some years ago, when the data began to emerge on how important vitamin D was to human health, I started doing blood tests on teenagers in my practice.  But I stopped pretty quickly.  Almost everyone was deficient.  How can that be?  These are "normal" young people.  First reason: we don't spend enough time in the sun.  Adults working indoors, kids in schools, in fact anyone living north of a latitude that roughly passes through Atlanta, GA, cannot get enough sunlight exposure year round to avoid vitamin D deficiency.  Sunlight is the very best way to make vitamin D, because the skin converts other steroid compounds in the body to vitamin D on exposure to the UV rays in sunlight.   Second reason: it's hard to get vitamin D from foods. Without added supplementati...