Flip-flops are bad for your feet

This is something we long suspected at the Clarion Content, and not just because we find it offensive to look at men's hairy toes all Summer long.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there has been a lot of research conducted regarding flip-flops. Recent studies have found that flip-flop wearers tend to grip their footwear tightly with their toes, which causes shorter stride length and improper force when their feet hit the ground. This transfers stress up the leg. Overcompensation to fight against this trend can lead to painful plantar fasciitis.

The key, choosing flip-flops with good arch support, don't buy the cheapest ones you can. And don't wear them all Summer long, mix it up a little.

Read more here from Dr. John Whyte, Chief Medical Expert and VP, Health and Medical Education at Discovery Channel, writing for the Huffington Post.

More Gaian evidence

The Clarion Content is an unabashed support of the Gaia theory. We read several years back about work being done on parasitic worms, the human digestive tract and autoimmune disorders. The basic premise being that when human's used to spend a lot less time and energy sanitizing our food, we were a lot less susceptible to autoimmune disorders.

Naturally, this struck our Gaian heart as a likely candidate for a symbiotic relationship. Research has increasing born this theory out, although it is still highly controversial in the United States. Parasitic worms (likely worms in general) carry connotations far beyond the more common archetypes of natural healing; we are not talking wheat grass shots, yoga or even acupuncture here. We are talking extracting roundworm eggs from the stool of an eleven year-old infected girl, cleaning them and eating them. Or putting hookworm larva on a patient's arm so they burrow through the skin enter the bloodstream and make their way into one's intestines.

Yet the results have been compelling. Many of the Man's pigeons pooh-pooh evidence found on blogs. Read then an amazing tale on CNN backing the theories originally popularized by Dr. Joel Weinstock, chief of gastroenterology at Tufts University Medical School.

Humans lived with worms in our intestines for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Is it really so odd that our bodies and theirs learned to work together?

Shrooms help cancer patients cope

A new study reports a controlled dose of the main ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, psilocybin, appears to help reduce anxiety and lift spirits in people battling advanced cancer. The study, by Dr. Charles Grob, will be published in the January 2011 print issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The government, suffering from bad vibes dating back to the 60's, when its foundations actually shook, is still incredibly reluctant to fund this kind of research. Health Day reports that it took four years to get the funding and necessary approvals for this trial, even though it only involved a dozen patients (all with advanced cancer). It has been over thirty years since a similar study was conducted.

In the study, patients reported feeling calmer and happier, and that they felt closer connections to friends and family. They were better able to address end-of-life issues. This is very important according to Dr. Amy Abernethy, director of the Duke University Cancer Care Research Program in Durham, N.C. She told Health Day, "We know that with some people with advanced life-threatening illness, there is very truly a substantial existential component and importance and need for meaning-making in life, and that until people start making that transition they can be very, very distressed. It can be hard to get back to the business-of-life closures and other things you need to do at the end of life. This kind of intervention [may] allow people time and space and extended cognitive ability to reflect on life and see it in a different way, make that transition and then get back into a more relaxed space and get back to the business of living.

"Being in the business of living is about doing what is important and meaningful to you every day even if you don't have many days left, focusing on things like saying goodbye to loved ones, which can be hard to do if you're distressed."

Read the whole story here.

Laugh it up

The American Heart Association reports that one of the best ways to protect yourself against heart attack is to laugh often and exuberantly. Researchers compared patients who had suffered heart attacks or had undergone angioplasty or similar revascularization procedures with healthy aged-matched control patients. Results showed that the patients who had suffered heart problems were 40% less likely to laugh in a variety of situations than their healthy counterparts.

"The old axiom that, 'laughter is the best medicine' appears to hold true when it comes to protecting your heart," said Michael Miller, M.D. and Director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore. Miller and his team could only speculate about why this is so. "We don't know why laughing protects the heart, but we do know that mental stress is associated with the impairment of endothelium, the protective barrier lining in our blood vessels," said Dr. Miller.

So laugh it up people...

Not what you want to see

This is a link to a seriously twisted story and You Tube video. It is a two year-old Indonesian toddler puffing away on a cigarette. British media outlets broke the news about Ardi Rizal, who allegedly smoked his first rocket at eighteen months under the watch of his father, Mohammed, thirty. The boy’s habit hasn’t escaped public notice in Sumatra, Indonesia. Reportedly, concerned local officials have offered to buy the family a car if young Ardi quits smoking.

Toenails

Perhaps you already know this, dear readers. Or perhaps you don't suffer from ingrown toenails. However, if you do or know someone who does, maybe you will appreciate this tidbit.

Ingrown Toenails
Cutting tiny v-shaped notches in the center of the toenail (while not pretty) prevents ingrown nails very effectively. The nail is urged to grow toward the center of itself, rather than outward into the toe and cuticle area.

Food Rules

Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food announced on his website recently that he has a new book forthcoming. It will be called Food Rules. Pollan in his own words explains the premise,

"The idea for this book came from a doctor—a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read In Defense of Food, which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. “What I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for eating wisely,” they would say. “I don’t have time for the big nutrition lecture and, anyway, they really don’t need to know what an antioxidant is in order to eat wisely.” Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say “you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.” So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it – a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet-- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists –what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex—would have us believe. After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refine grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors, scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the vocabulary of science but rather culture—a source of wisdom about eating that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional science does.

Pollan says that his is a simple and unconventional diet book. It consists of sixty-four basic rules, each with a paragraph of explanation. It sounds like a powerful tool to the Clarion Content.

Check out Pollan's website here.

Drinking and dementia

Sots everywhere rejoice! A new study conducted by Wake Forest University and presented at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease found that moderate drinkers have a 37% lower risk of dementia amongst those who were cognitively normal at the start of the study.

Drink more, think more, is not quite the conclusion though. The study also found that if you are over the age of seventy-five and still consuming more than 14 drinks a week you are at twice the normal risk of developing dementia.

The BBC reports that, "lead researcher Dr. Kaycee Sink said: "There are several possible ways in which moderate drinking might be associated with reduced risk of dementia.

"One is the same as the way we think moderate alcohol reduces the risk of heart disease, by beneficial effects on HDL cholesterol and blocking platelets.

"Additionally, animal studies have shown that low amounts of alcohol stimulate the release of acetylcholine, a chemical in the brain that is important in memory."

Read the whole story here.

New Label

It is never a good sign when a food product one consumes fairly regularly suddenly adds a new safety label. Cook thoroughly is an especially unappealing notice. It was just added to the outside of the Totino's Combination Frozen Pizza box. What happened? Somebody cook it less than thoroughly and croak? Keel over? Fall out?

Don't take our food that we wish not to think about in that manner and make it scary.

Gruesome Scientology

Children, one more reason to hope your parents aren't Scientologists: not only won't they get you the medical care required to save your life, but after you croak they may leave you sitting around on the bathroom floor for a few hours, (allegedly.) That is what the Boston Herald is reporting happened to John Travolta's sixteen year old son Thursday night in the Bahamas. The boy had a history of seizures and according to some reports autism (which is not recognized by the cult of Scientology.) He was last seen going into the bathroom in his family's private suite at the Old Bahama Bay Hotel on Grand Bahama Island on Thursday night, a caretaker found him on the bathroom floor around 10am Friday morning.

Gruesome and tragic, our sympathies go out to all involved. All accounts say Travolta and wife Kelly Preston were dearly devoted to their son Jett.

CDCP?

Julie Louise Gerberding, CDC Director

Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC in the shorthand parlance of the health community, is really the CDCP? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Neither did the Clarion Content. The name change occurred all the way back in October of 1992. In the intervening sixteen years have you ever heard anyone call it by the full name or use the initials CDCP? Us either. Heck even their website is cdc.gov not cdcp.gov, which incidentally doesn't even a redirect back to their website!

Obviously they are doing a less than stellar job publicizing the prevention portion of their mission. It seems to follow that America has chronic health problems that have worsened to do the persistent lack of a prevention ethos in this country; among them obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and their ilk.

What kind of prevention are Americans doing? Getting a flu shot at Walmart along with their bag of potato chips and corn syrup based soft drink!

Diabetes spike

The Centers for Disease Control(CDC) reported on the results of a massive diabetes study today. Their study of more than 250,000 households will be published in the Oct. 31 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. They found that the rate of type 2 diabetes amongst the American population had nearly doubled in the last decade from from 4.8 people per 1,000 to 9.1 people per 1,000.

The Clarion Content would love to see those numbers graphed along side a study of incomes. US News & World Report cites Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center, "as obesity and poverty are strongly associated, and obesity is the predominant risk factor for type 2 diabetes..." The Clarion finds this fascinating because we think the initial inclination might be to think the opposite. One could easily posit that rapidly increasing obesity and therefore diabetes is about America getting rich and fat, sitting on its bum. "Why the richer those Americans get, the lazier and fatter they get," might be the take.

But it is the poor that are getting fatter, while the rich take better care of themselves. Is it about the diet of poor people and the paucity of healthy choices for cheap in America? (Or the plethora of unhealthy food options for cheap?) The rich can join health clubs, get massages, buy vitamin supplements, the list could go on and on. We wonder. Is this just a reminder of a grim statistic that is well known to actuaries but little known to the public? Is there a significant difference in life expectancy by income disparity in America?

Type 2 diabetes is treatable, but incurable. Complications from type 2 diabetes can include blindness, limb amputation, heart disease and kidney failure.