Your Lifestyle Choices: Are You Preventing Disease – or Inviting It?
Maverick Health and my book, A Nurse Practitioner’s Guide to Smart Health Choices, are all about using your lifestyle behaviors to prevent or control chronic diseases. I’ve been at this for over a decade now and every day I read studies and hear news-bites that only validate what I write about on this blog and talk about in my book.
But until you know what I know and, more importantly, act on what you know all this information is useless. Read this post about a study in Europe that looked at how well people controlled their risk factors after they’d already had a heart attack or serious cardiac event. Hint: reviewers that read the study found its results “ominous”.
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Synch to Your Body’s Own Clock and to Mother Earth for Better Health
In March 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published research done at the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Researchers studied 10 subjects – 5 men and 5 women – to see what happened to their cardiovascular and metabolic systems if their behavioral and circadian rhythms were disrupted.
If you want to know what effect being out of synch with your body’s own clock and the rhythms of the Earth has on your health, read this post.
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High Blood Pressure Rx – Keeping It Simple
Successful treatment of high blood pressure is difficult to achieve for a couple of reasons. First, health practitioners have many drugs and multiple guidelines from which to choose when making a treatment plan for individual patients. Second, patients do not like taking medications, so often they don’t take them as they should - if they take them at all.
Researchers in Canada looked at this problem to see if they could come up with a simpler and more effective approach that would make it easier for prescribers and easier for patients. They published their findings in the April 2009 issue of Hypertension.
Read this post to see which drugs helped 20% more people reach their BP goals.
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What Is Insulin Resistance and Why Should You Care?
Insulin resistance is a silent condition that, unrecognized and untreated, leads to diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 57 million adults are estimated to have insulin resistance – also known as “impaired glucose tolerance”, “impaired fasting glucose”, “prediabetes” and “metabolic syndrome”.
And you know what? You have more power over this condition than your health professional does. A diagnosis of diabetes is a life changing event. Read this post to see what you can do to head diabetes off at the pass and prevent it.
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Eat Whatever You Want and Still Lose Weight
A two-year study funded by National Institutes of Health called Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategies had 811 overweight participants who consumed four different types of reduced calorie diets and, guess what? It doesn’t matter what you eat, it’s the number of calories consumed that determine weight loss or weight gain in the human body.
If you are a chronic dieter, if there is not a single diet you haven’t tried, if your bookshelf is mostly diet books, and if all you seem to think about is your weight, please read this post. I want to set you free!
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How Much Exercise is (Really) Enough?
In February 2009, the American College of Sports Medicine published Appropriate Physical Activity Intervention Strategies for Weight Loss and Prevention of Weight Regain for Adults. In this position statement they revised their 2001 position and raised the bar on the amount of exercise they recommend - from 150 minutes to 250 minutes a week.
In my book, A Nurse Practitioner’s Guide to Smart Health Choices, I went out on a limb and exceeded the ACSM guidelines at the time and recommended 240 minutes of exercise a week at your target heart rate as the minimum amount of exercise needed for good health and weight maintenance. I went even further and, in the book, recommended 300 minutes of exercise a week if you are really serious about losing weight.
Before you click me off, just read this post.
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NP World News: We Are on the Edge of Tomorrow
NP World News is the official news publication of nurse practitioners. Its contributors and columnists are thought leaders in the NP profession.
This is the first of 5 columns I will write for NPWN this year on subject of NP practice, health and health care reform.
Click “Read Full Post” if you would like to leave a comment.
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Do You Want to Prevent a Stroke? Behave This Way
Working on my book over 10 years ago, I already knew from experience that behaviors - not mysterious diseases - are the cause most of today’s illnesses. After years as a critical care nurse, I saw how medical treatments arrive too late in the game – way too late – to spare people the pain and suffering that comes from having a chronic disease or suffering a catastrophic health event like a stroke. Nobody was talking much back then about health risks or the behaviors that create them, but they are now.
Study after study keeps proving that certain lifestyle behaviors promote health and prevent disease. Two recent studies – one published in the British Journal of Medicine and one in the journal Circulation- both showed how specific lifestyle behaviors dramatically reduce stroke risk.
Read this post to see what those behaviors are.
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Vitamin D Update – Are 3 out of 4 Americans Really Deficient?
Six months ago, in September 2008, I wrote a post on vitamin D. Since then info keeps pouring in about the apparent benefit of this supplement. This month researchers at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine reported that three out of four Americans are deficient in vitamin D. They claim that’s up from about one out two 20 years ago. Some have argued that it might just seem that way because of how vitamin D was measured then and now.
After I researched and wrote that post 6 months ago, I started measuring my patients’ vitamin D levels. I am shocked at the results.
Read this post to see what vitamin D levels are like here in the “Sunshine State” of Florida.
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Do You Think You Are Following a Low Salt Diet? You Probably Aren’t
This week Time Magazine ran a really good article online by Tiffany Sharples about the pitfalls and difficulties of following a low salt diet. Here’s a link to it. If you are African American, a woman, have CHF (congestive heart failure) or high blood pressure, this would be a good link to follow.
First read my post about the story of a patient of mine who had to dramatically cut his sodium intake after a stroke.
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