Cholesterol is a normal constituent of the human body. However excess cholesterol (hypercholesterolemia or sometimes called dyslipidemia) is one of the most important risk factors for developing heart attack and stroke.
Here are a couple of videos on cholesterol explaining why is cholesterol important to the body, how it causes disease and what lifestyle changes are required to decrease excess cholesterol.
What does high cholesterol do? (Time 4:11 min)
Lifestyle changes for high cholesterol (Time 7:40 min)
A new campaign “Read ‘em before you eat ‘em” led by NYC’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, hopes to make a dent in the preventable health problems and early deaths caused by obesity each year.
This campaign comprises a series of ads being but up in New York Subway cars and is designed to help New Yorkers see how quickly fast-food calories add up.
Michael Pollen’s new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto argues for simplification of dietary habits in this world of complicated food products. This is what he has to say in a nutshell:
What to Eat?
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food (non-dairy creamer?)
Avoid food products with ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than 5 in number, or that contain high-fructose corn syrup (none of these is necessarily bad in itself, but they raise red flags).
Avoid food products that make health claims. Broccoli and tomatoes are silent. If a product needs to crow about being healthy, chances are it isn’t.
Shop the periphery of the supermarket where the fresh food resides
Get out of the supermarket and shop at a farmers’ market
Eat mostly plants: more leaves than seeds
Choose quality over quantity
Eat until you’re no longer hungry, not until you’re full.
Sit down to real meals with other people; eat slowly and mindfully; enjoy your food
Or put simply in the authors own words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”
Does it mean that we should eat till our appetite is satisfied. Or does it mean that we should eat till we no longer feel hungry. There is an excellent article in Scientific American which explains that eating behavior is influenced by two mechanisms in the human brain:
Hypothalamic center which controls the need to eat
Higher cortical centers mediated by dopamine reward system which controls the desire to eat
The answer to “How much food should we eat” seems clear enough.
The desire to eat can override the need to eat, leading people to consume tasty foods even when they’re not hungry. The inability to forego these rewarding aspects of food intake override long-term homeostatic control, contributing to obesity.
This Medco analysis implies that the perceived therapeutic benefit of generics over brand name in the minds of patients may not be that significant as earlier thought.
The analysis also reveals that reaching the Coverage Gap dramatically stimulates the use of generics among all Medicare recipients. During the initial phase of the benefit, when the plan provides drug coverage, one-third of the medications used daily by beneficiaries were generics and two-thirds were brand-name drugs. Once beneficiaries reached the Gap and were responsible for the full cost of the drug, those numbers flip - generic usage rises to 71 percent and brand-name use falls to 29 percent.
What other factors could be playing a role and how do we counteract it?
Promote junk food, raise cholesterol levels and then prescribe cholesterol lowering drugs.
This is capitalism at its best. Can we fight it?
So if everybody hates the idea of giving statins to kids…..why don’t we restrict marketing junk food to children, improve the quality of nutrition at school, promote physical activity at school and increase funding for obesity prevention and treatment?
Your Child’s Lunch Box
What’s next?
Hamburger with a topping of statins!
Cheese fortified with statins!
Statin Water!…………..
Video: Reinventing the school lunch
Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, “renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school — local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food.
