Best Life Diet

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Driving a taxi for a living can be exhausting. Just ask 62-year-old Stephen Belcher of Atlanta, Georgia. “I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day normally,” Belcher said. “I just thought I was tired and maybe if I got a good night’s sleep I’d feel better.”

Like millions of Americans, Belcher was really suffering from fatigue. It’s a common complaint among an estimated 20 to 30 percent of patients who see their primary care physician. “Most of the time you know why you are tired and the tiredness goes away after adequate sleep or rest,” said Dr. Susmita Parashar, who specializes in internal medicine at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta. “Fatigue on the other hand, is a persistent daily lack of energy that impairs your ability to function normally.”

Belcher described it as feeling burned out. “I would go to the grocery store and park my car. By the time I would go to the front door I would have to sit down and rest before I actually started shopping.” Parashar called fatigue an important marker that patients and doctors shouldn’t ignore. “The list of causes of fatigue is quite long,” Parashar said. “It includes anemia, underactive thyroid, diabetes, depression, sleep apnea, insomnia, chronic pain, liver, kidney and heart disease and in some cases cancer.” Belcher knew something was wrong. After months of putting it off, he finally went to the emergency room. He was found to have myriad ailments, from sleep apnea to emphysema to a heart blockage. Read the rest of this entry »

Drinking green tea may reduce the risk of advanced prostate cancer, according to a study by researchers at Japan’s National Cancer Center.

It said men who drank five or more cups a day might halve the risk of developing advanced prostate cancer compared with those who drank less than one cup a day.

“This does not mean that people who drink green tea are guaranteed to have reduced risk of advanced prostate cancer,” said Norie Kurahashi, a scientist who took part in the study.

“We are just presenting our results. But the study does point to the hope that green tea reduces the risk of advanced prostate cancer.”

Prostate cancer is much less common among Asian men than Western men, and that may be partly due to the effects of the high consumption of green tea in Asia, the study said.

But it said further studies are needed to confirm the preventive effects of green tea on prostate cancer, including well-designed clinical trials.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, compiled data from 50,000 men aged 40-69 over a period of up to 14 years from 1990. Read the rest of this entry »

ATLANTA - Health officials are investigating more than 180 reports of illness in people who took dietary supplements containing toxic levels of the mineral selenium.

Last month, federal officials warned consumers about harmful doses of selenium — a mineral considered healthful in small amounts — in plastic bottles of liquid Total Body Formula and Total Body Mega Formula.

The manufacturer recalled the product March 27, but reports of 184 illnesses indicate many people are still taking it, health officials said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration found up to 200 times the label level of selenium in the products. The agency also found 17 times the label level of chromium but has not yet concluded if those levels are toxic.

Toxic levels of the minerals were in about 1,200 bottles distributed in 16 states and over the Internet, said Dr. James Lando, who is leading the team working on the investigation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health officials are looking into an escalating number of illnesses in 10 states — Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina.

Read full story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24206868/#storyContinued

For thousands of years, magicians, alchemists, even a few fringe medical practitioners have fueled an unbounded optimism that we can blunt the ravages of time, stay younger for longer, maybe even defeat death itself. Their pitches have usually hinged on some drug, food or device — everything from electricity to yogurt to surgically installing the gonads of animals into our own bodies — that will slow or reverse the aging process. Every decade or so, “anti-aging” promoters grasp onto news coming out of research labs and trumpet those developments as the answer we have all been awaiting.

Lately, the buzzwords are “nano,” which refers to the science of the ultra small (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter), and stem cells. One “nano” face cream, for example, promises to stave off wrinkles with “nano-encapsulated technology” into which the makers have “packed microscopic bundles of Prodew, a nourishing skin humectant.” A dietary supplement advertised as “The World’s FIRST Stem Cell Enhancer,” promises to “Rebuild, Renew, Rejuvenate” — giving you more stem cells and keeping your organs healthy — if you take the blue-green algae capsules. The claims are based on wispy science and hype. Read the rest of this entry »

Why do women gain weight at menopause? What can they do to shed those extra pounds? And can an older woman exercise too much? Smart Fitness answers your workout queries.

Q1: As a menopausal woman, my fitness routine consists of some Pilates (one to two times a week) and the treadmill (30 to 50 minutes, three times a week). I have always been rather trim, but over the last six to eight months I’ve been gaining weight and am now about 10 pounds overweight. I try to watch my diet. What exercise advice would you give me to trim off the “matronly look” I am now sporting?

Q2: I’m a 53-year-old woman who has always been slim. Since menopause the weight has been creeping on. I don’t overeat, so why is belly fat my problem? Some days I eat little and walk an awful lot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patients seeking out procedures on belly buttons, toes — and elsewhere : By Shaun Dreisbach

In his 18 years as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, David Alessi, M.D., has gotten a lot of strange requests: the woman who wanted a forehead implant, the one who asked for “ankle lipo” and the patient who requested he break and reshape her jaw for a bigger smile. “Nothing much shocks me anymore,” he says. But even he was taken aback by a 25-year-old who recently came in for a consultation. “When I asked what she was here to see me about, she said, ‘I want to have my belly button removed.’ Completely removed,” says Dr. Alessi.

As unusual as that may sound, more and more young women are monkeying around with their body parts. They’re shortening their toes, padding their butts with implants and downsizing their labia (yes, labia) to make them more “attractive.” These are the new extreme — or, as some docs have dubbed them, “fashion” surgeries. And while they aren’t nearly as common as, say, breast implants or nose jobs, they’re getting more popular. According to the most recent figures from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), 1,030 “vaginal rejuvenations” were done in 2006 — a 30 percent increase from just the year before. The number of butt implants rose 18 percent in that same time frame. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK - A simple saliva test may one day be used in ambulances, restaurants, neighborhood drug stores, or other places in the community to quickly tell if a person is having a heart attack.

“Proteins found in the saliva have the ability to rapidly classify potential heart attacks,” Dr. John T. McDevitt, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters Health.

McDevitt and colleagues developed a nano-bio-chip sensor that is biochemically programmed to detect sets of proteins in saliva capable of determining whether or not a person is currently having a heart attack or is at high risk of having a heart attack in the near future.

With the saliva heart attack diagnostic test, a person spits into a tube and the saliva is then transferred to credit card-sized lab card that holds the nano-bio-chip containing a standard battery of cardiac biomarkers. The loaded card is inserted like an ATM card into an analyzer that determines the patient’s heart status in as little as 15 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

Middle-aged men should limit consumption, study suggests

WASHINGTON - Middle-aged men who ate seven or more eggs a week had a higher risk of earlier death, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study adds to an ever-growing body of evidence, much of it contradictory, about how safe eggs are to eat. It did not examine what about the eggs might affect the risk of death.

Men without diabetes could eat up to six eggs a week with no extra risk of death, Dr. Luc Djousse and Dr. J. Michael Gaziano of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School found.

“Whereas egg consumption of up to six eggs a week was not associated with the risk of all-cause mortality, consumption of (seven or more) eggs a week was associated with a 23 percent greater risk of death,” they wrote. Read the rest of this entry »