Entries by Chet Zelasko

It’s Not Over…

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Stunned silence. That’s what happened to almost 110,000 people Saturday night. Why? Because they witnessed the improbable, some would say close to the impossible. If you watch any news or read about it on the Internet, you know a University of Michigan player made only one mistake in the game against Michigan State. MSU took advantage of it and scored the winning touchdown with no time left on the clock.

I did not see it live; I was in the Detroit airport getting to my connecting flight. But even there, people simply did not believe what they saw . . .

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Exercise and Chemotherapy

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The last study on exercise I’m going to look at this week examines the possibility of using exercise as training before chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy drugs are toxic to the body. The closer they can be designed for cancer cells without harming normal cells, the better, but we haven’t advanced to the point where that’s possible in every case. One chemotherapy, doxorubicin, is highly effective for some cancers, but it’s toxic to the heart. Researchers split a group of rats into three groups. One remained sedentary, one was allowed to run on a running wheel in their cage . . .

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Exercise and Breast Cancer Treatment

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Cancer treatment isn’t for wimps. Surgery can be difficult as can radiation treatment. But of all the common treatments that really seem to knock people for a loop, chemotherapy is tops. Nausea. Fatigue. Hair loss. Fortunately, there are some medications that can help with those side effects, but one of the things that may help the most is exercise. Let’s take a look at a study published just this month.

Researchers in Germany put women undergoing chemotherapy on a weight-training program, an endurance program, or continued with standard care that included neither. They were interested in how . . .

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Start with Physical Therapy

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I talked with hundreds of people in Cincinnati this past weekend, and many had issues with pain and discomfort. I can relate—I’ve got a shoulder that’s killing me. While everyone wants to know which supplements can help, it all begins with physical therapy.

The most-asked question was about lower back pain, which afflicts more people than any other joint or joints. Many people claim to have bulging discs. You know something? That’s nothing special; it’s the results of walking upright combined with carrying too much weight on the front side. If you can get . . .

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Trial and Answer for Your Health

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We are alive today because our ancestors survived. That seems like stating the obvious, but think about it for a minute. They ate whatever gave them fuel to stay alive and didn’t kill them. It was trial and error, and I’m guessing many died from eating the wrong things. They experienced times of feast and times of famine. They ate what was available whether it was meat, roots, berries, greens, or whatever. They learned to grow food, both plants and animals. Their diets ranged from high-fat and protein like the Inuit to the plant-based diets of . . .

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We Adapt

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In a recent paper in the magazine Nature, researchers compared the genes of a group of Inuit Indians, Europeans, and Chinese. As you might expect, there are many similarities. We’re all human, after all. But there were some specific differences, including an area in the genes related to the way the Inuit processed fat and the hormones they produce and how it contributes to height and weight.

The typical Inuit diet involves high amounts of fatty fish, rich in omega-3 fatty acids and protein; they don’t have access to many vegetables or fruit. We would expect this . . .

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What We Don’t Know

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This past weekend, Paula and I along with our good friend Sharon went to the 100th Homecoming game of Michigan State University as they played Purdue; Sharon and I went to grad school together at MSU and Paula graduated from Purdue. Those pesky Boilermakers showed up in the second half and almost beat the Spartans. As you may suspect, that’s not the reason for this message.

When you sit in a single seat in a stadium as large as Spartan Stadium which holds just over 75,000 people, you can feel insignificant. In Dr. Chet World, it has a . . .

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The Bottom Line on the Saturated Fat Debate

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Finishing up this look at saturated fat and the Dietary Guidelines, those who oppose the limit on saturated fat argue that saturated fat is not related to cardiovascular disease. They go on to argue that if fat is limited, carbohydrates will take their place—and high carbohydrate intake is the real cause of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Before I go any further, if you’re reading this at home, write down three of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines that you remember. How about two? One? Exactly. Unless you’ve just taken a course in healthier eating, you don . . .

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Handpicking the Data

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I’m continuing my look at a recent paper that called into question the process for limiting saturated fat intake to less than 10% in the new Dietary Guidelines (1). What else should we know about how the conclusions were derived and who wrote the op-ed? Let’s start with the author.

Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and accomplished writer and has more of a scientific background than most health and nutrition writers today. That’s great, but it’s just not good enough. After reading the article, I watched a TEDx talk she gave. She has a . . .

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Saturated Fat Debate

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The new Dietary Guidelines for 2015 have stirred a lot of controversy this year and they aren’t even published yet. The latest headline related to the new Dietary Guidelines has been an op-ed piece written by a journalist and published in the British Medical Journal (1). It has everything a good mystery has: potential conspiracy, implied payoffs, big business, ignoring facts. I’m going to take a look at it this week.

The paper The Scientific Report Guiding the U.S. Dietary Guidelines: Is It Scientific? was written by Nina Teicholz, an investigative journalist who has . . .

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