Medications for Kids – When will adults take responsibility?

A few days ago, a colleague sent a message to my professional listserv, asking for advice. A friend with an obese 8-year-old daughter called her for help because her daughter’s pediatrician just scolded them because of her daughter’s health condition. This 8-year-old is not only obese but has high blood cholesterol and also has high blood pressure. Not only is the health of this child an issue, but a more harmful issue is how the doctor handled the problem. Now the daughter looks at herself and scolds herself for being so fat, and stress in the house has risen to an unhealthy level.

This is a tragedy in many ways. First of all, any female who is made to feel so bad about herself because of her weight is an eating disordered child in the making! Studies show over and over again that this is the ripe age for such problems that could not only last a lifetime, but could SHORTEN this child’s life! Second, now the mother is trying to police what her daughter eats, the father is scolding the mother for not feeding her more fruit and the daughter is mad at her mother because there is so much junk food in the house to begin with.

The third tragedy is that this is an issue at all! Any child of eight years old with weight issues is USUALLY the result of what they are allowed/provided to eat by the parents. The parents set the example! I have seen toddlers drinking sodas and eating French fries MUCH too often! These are not foods young children should even be exposed to!

But then this morning I watched a report stating that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending that children as young as eight years old start on cholesterol-lowering drugs!

When will parents start to take responsibility for the health of not only themselves, but of their own children?? This is awful that these ‘adult’ medications should be suggested for children. Apparently it is the Academy’s red flag in trying to slow down the incidence of heart disease and pre-mature death of these young people.

If you have children in your home, what are YOUR eating habits like? What is the health of your children? Are they a bit overweight? Really consider what habits you are teaching your children. Do you want your kids on drugs to treat these lifestyle conditions? Do you want your children to suffer from health problems when they should be enjoying their young adulthood? If not, first look at your own habits, and make decisions to improve what you do at home. Children learn from what we teach them, first. Only when they are older do they learn from their peers.

For tips on obesity and overweight in children, go to this link: http://www.aap.org/healthtopics/overweight.cfm

Potatoes – The Misunderstood Starchy Vegetable

A new report was released, showing that if you cube or shred potatoes before boiling, you can lose as much as 75% of the potassium in an average potato! Now, this is great news for people who undergo kidney dialysis, but for the rest of us, the more potassium we can get in our diets, the better!

People on some of the still-popular fad diets still believe that the poor potato is responsible for obesity in the US. Never mind all the bags of chips and crackers and double cheeseburgers or FRIED potatoes that people eat! However, the potato is still considered America’s most popular vegetable, with the average American eating 130 pounds of potatoes a year!

But what makes a potato so good? First of all, an average potato is low in calories, providing only 100 calories per potato. This means you could bake a potato, you could cut it up and oven fry them, or you could mash it up and it would STILL be less than 12 potato CHIPS. Second, 45% of your daily need for vitamin C can be supplied by just one potato, and that potato also provides as much potassium as a banana. And there’s fiber in a potato, too! One potato, with the skin, will provide 3 grams of fiber, which is as much as some ‘high fiber’ cereals.

So how can you incorporate potatoes into a healthy diet? Easy! Add a baked potato to your lunch, topped by either bean chili or steamed broccoli. A good topping for a baked potato is non-fat sour cream. Don’t squint your nose until you’ve tried it! A popular addition to dinner is to cut up a washed potato into ‘fat fries’, rub them with a little bit of olive oil, shake them in a bag of seasonings, and lay them out on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Bake in a 450 degree oven for about 30 minutes, checking for the doneness you prefer. You actually have a low fat potato dish!

One of my favorite dinners is home-made potato soup. I cut up washed potatoes (with skins), boil them in chicken broth, add sautéed onions, and cook until the potatoes are tender. I then blend some of the cooked potatoes with added non-fat milk to create the desired thickness. Add seasonings and heat up. I love adding shredded cheddar cheese to my soup, but you don’t have to. Serve with some whole wheat roles and a green salad and you have an excellent and complete meal.

For more on potatoes, check out the Washington Potato Commission website at; http://www.potatoes.com/

Beauty of Coaching

If you have been paying attention to the progress of health/wellness, you may notice that coaching is becoming HOT! My guess is that in another 5 years, coaching will be as mainstream as personal training is, today.

What is the benefit of coaching? It makes you, the person, in charge of you! No longer is an expert telling what works best for you to do in order to improve your health. As the expert in you, you come up with what you want to accomplish and then determine how you will make it happen! And, a coach makes you feel like you can actually do it, too! How much more empowering can that be?

But there are still a lot of people who don’t trust coaching. They don’t understand it; don’t understand the value of having someone in their corner. Many men feel that ‘I don’t need someone to tell me what I should be able to figure out on my own!’ However, today many of the most successful people in the world have coaches in order to accomplish more!

How can you find a coach, though? If you are reading this online, you already have the tools to find a qualified coach! Now, it’s important that you understand that anyone can call themselves a coach. However, look for what school they attended, and then research the school. Although there are a few quality coaching schools that are not affiliated with the International Coach Federation (ICF), this is the gold standard. When I look for a coach, I prefer they have attended a school that is listed on the ICF website. WellCoaches is one of the schools not affiliated with ICF, yet, but is an excellent school.

Once you have found where the coaches are, though, then you must determine which coach is for you! One of the many beauties of looking for a coach is you can ‘try them on’, so to speak. Many coaches offer a free coaching interview to see if the two of you are a good fit. Many coaches today specialize, too.

So, since our primary focus is health on here, if you are looking for a wellness/health coach, look for someone with a medical background who is also educated in coaching techniques. Avoid coaches who say their education is because they lost weight, or because they have a particular disease. These are NOT the experts you want helping you move forward with your own health issues. If you had cancer, would you choose a physician who specializes in cancer or the woman down the street who had cancer and beat it?

The beauty of coaching is you are in the driver’s seat. Get control of your health and life and treat yourself to feeling in control again by finding yourself a coach to help.

For WellCoaches, go to this link: http://www.wellcoach.com/
For ICF, go to this link: http://www.coachfederation.org/ICF/

Statins for Blood Cholesterol

I subscribe to Dr. Jeffry Bland’s Functional Medicine Update monthly CD with several other RDs. For any RDs reading this, I highly recommend it! This month’s issue interviewed Dr. James M Wright, who has been questioning the benefits of prescribing blood cholesterol drugs for prevention of heart disease. When the lipid-lowering guidelines were updated in 2001, it increased the number of Americans who ‘should’ be taking statins from 13 million to 36 million. Wow! I have had clients whose physicians have recommended medication for this very reason.
However, Dr. Wright’s analyzed the research that supports this guideline and actually found no support for this policy. They found that most of the research on statins is for people, who have already been diagnosed with heart disease, but that clinicians decided to extrapolate that information to suggest that if it helps when already diagnosed, it should help prevent disease.

What Dr. Wright and his colleagues did find, however, was that for high-risk men between the ages of 30-69, that 50 of them being treated for 5 years might see a benefit. Two problems here (if you don’t already see a problem): First, these statistics mean, in research terms, this is INSIGNIFICANT. Second, we are discounting the problems statins cause!

Statins tend to cause a high frequency of muscle damage. And that frequency increases with exercise. So, if you had a 50 year old man who had some weight to lose and his cholesterol is 200, and he has no other risk factors, he may decide to improve his diet and start an exercise program at the time his doctor put him on a statin. Although he quickly starts to see improvement as a result of the exercise, he also starts to see a complication because of his medication. So, traditionally, the doctor will tell him to stop exercising! Research repeatedly shows the health benefits from diet and exercise, but does not show benefit from taking a statin as a preventative measure. I won’t point out the obvious.

What is the answer, then? If you have no other risk factors or have not been diagnosed with any heart disease, when your doctor suggests starting a medication to lower your cholesterol, do your research and come back with questions for him/her before you agree. It’s your body, it’s your life. It’s your choice and you should have all the information.

If you are interested in the analyses that Dr Wright conducted, here are the details:
Are lipid-lowering guidelines evidence-based?
J Abramson, JM Wright
The Lancet - Vol. 369, Issue 9557, 20 January 2007, Pages 168-169

Statins for primary prevention of coronary artery disease – Authors' reply
James M Wright, John Abramson
The Lancet - Vol. 369, Issue 9567, 31 March 2007, Page 1079

Breast cancer and Vitamin D

There has been interesting developments around Vitamin D for some time, now. We were taught in school to be careful of the amount of Vitamin D to supplement, because it’s a fat soluble vitamin that can build up in the liver and cause more harm than good! However, we also learned about the ‘pre-vitamin’ stage of vitamin D when in school.

The latest study is particularly interesting because it was so dramatic; that women diagnosed with breast cancer are nearly twice as likely to see it spread and 73% more likely to die if they have low levels of vitamin D! This is huge and I’m sure will be researched more.

I won’t go into all the benefits other research is starting to show related to vitamin D. You can do a Medline search. But did you know that we can actually have our levels tested by measuring 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

How do you get more vitamin D? Sunlight exposure is a natural way to increase vitamin D. It’s particularly important that the forearms are exposed. But what if you don’t have much sun, such as in northern locations of the world during the winter? Then supplementation can be in order. However, just randomly taking high doses of vitamin D is STILL not a good idea. Get your levels checked; many insurance companies will now cover the test, then have a discussion with your doctor about how much to start taking. We may need more than we originally thought, but we still could cause ourselves more harm than good by taking more than our bodies need.

For a good article on Vitamin D, click here:
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/are-you-getting-enough-vitamin-d

Colon Cleansing

With spring, I’m reading a lot of things on colon cleansing. It upsets my stomach! What bothers me is the wealth of mis-information many of those who promote it spread.

There are several reasons people may consider colon cleansing, but a popular reason is for weight loss. Not that there is ANY good reason to go on a colon cleansing diet, but this is probably the LAST reason. Some people believe it could help kick start a new, healthier diet. Yea, it could do that.

Other people believe that a colon cleanse will ‘clean’ their colon. The belief is that going on a diet of either just fruits or some concoction of juices and other substances will slough off the dead cells lining the gastrointestinal tract. However, most people who benefit from this aren’t eating a healthy diet high in fruits and vegetables and whole grains to begin with. If they just switched to a ‘healthy’ diet, nothing would need to be ‘cleaned out’.

Finally, the last justification people give for colon cleansing is that it will remove toxins from the body. This probably drives me the nuttiest. There are two phases of detoxification the liver goes through (which is where detoxification takes place, NOT the colon), and in order to most effectively do this, which it is quite good at, it needs all macronutrients – carbohydrates, proteins and fats. However, this does not mean a diet of cheeseburgers, French fries and diet sodas! An excellent example would include fresh fruits and veggies, whole grain starches, such as brown rice, plant-based proteins, such as beans and legumes, and healthy, plant-based fats, such as olives and avocado. Once the body has the nutrients it needs, the liver manages to prove that the body is a miraculous machine.

Sometimes one or another of the phases of detoxification needs help. Then modification of the diet can support healthy detoxification, but not from eliminating whole food groups.

So, the bottom line is this: Clean your house, clean your skin and hair clean your car. Be kind to your colon and feed it ‘happy, healthy‘ food, not cayenne pepper in a glass!

For three excellent articles on the topic, click these links:
http://acudoc.com/Detoxification.PDF
http://acudoc.com/Intestinal_Health.PDF

Changes to MEGFit Health Blog

I have made some changes to my MEG Fitness Health Blog. I have decided to write little blurbs that are more related to MY take and opinion on hot topics related to health. Be sure to check out the latest postings and share your opinions. As health professionals, we tend to avoid taking a stand on how we REALLY feel, but I’ve decided it’s time for a soapbox approach! Sometimes you may agree, sometimes you may not, but discussion is great for everyone.