Dr. Chet’s Health Memos
If it’s in the health news today, I’ll be writing about it as soon as I read the research, both old and new. With my email Health Memos, you’ll know more about making lifestyle choices that will help you get and keep good health. These free, concise updates on health are emailed to subscribers twice a week. Subscribe today and get a free MP3, in English or Spanish, of Dr. Chet’s Top Ten Tips—Small Changes for a Healthier Life.
How to Assess Food Intake
If you’ve been reading the Memo for any length of time, you know that I’m not fond of the methods used for determining food intake in free-living individuals, especially the Food Frequency Questionnaire. When looking at the validity of the doubly-labelled water technique for last week’s Memos on metabolism, I happened upon a review article […]
Metabolism Across Our Lifespan
It might not surprise you to learn that adjusted for body weight, infants under one year have the highest metabolism of all age groups. It makes sense; they’re growing so fast at that point. From there it’s all downhill, metabolically speaking, at a rate of about 3% per year until about 20 when metabolism stabilizes. […]
What Happens to Our Metabolism?
Have you ever said or heard someone else say, “I could eat whatever I wanted when I was young and I never gained weight!” What usually follows is something like, “Now I seem to gain weight just by thinking about a donut!”—the type of food may vary depending on the individual. Kids seem to eat […]
Rehabilitation Becomes Prehabilitation
After giving some thought to the discussion I had with our physical therapist, I’ve scheduled my knee-replacement surgery. I’ve already been doing everything he recommended to rehab the knee: avoiding any high-impact exercise, using an exercise bike, stretching. His verdict is that none of those will help the problem. The compounding issue is that my […]
Overcoming Discomfort
Last month, I did 70 push-ups on my 70th birthday. They were not full push-ups; they went about halfway. It took a year to be able to overcome shoulder weakness and discomfort because of torn bicep muscles in both arms. But by doing push-ups every day, I gradually pushed out the number every few weeks, […]
What It’s Like to Have a Colonoscopy
A colonoscopy is a procedure designed to examine your colon, and for that to happen effectively, the colon must be clear of all food and waste material. Based on my personal experience as well as Paula’s, the preparation for the colonoscopy is infinitely worse than the actual colonoscopy. There are several medical websites that will […]
Protecting Your Colon Health
I’m sure you’ve heard the Benjamin Franklin quote “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That axiom is true about many things from fire prevention, as Franklin intended, to our cars and lawn mower. The same is true when it comes to our bodies. Paula just had a colonoscopy, so I thought […]
Addressing the Systems of Health and Disease
A systems approach to dealing with diseases and conditions is not what we currently do: if you have pain, you want to relieve the pain. That approach may fix the symptom, but it also may not fix the failure of a complex system that caused the problem. If you’ve broken a bone or had a […]
How Complex Systems Fail
If we acknowledge that the human body is itself a complex system and is made up of individual complex systems, then we can examine where things may go wrong to cause disease. In order to “fix it,” we have to be able to identify where things can go wrong. For ideas on that, I’m going […]
The System Theory of Disease
I first heard about systems and disease in a TED talk by Dr. David Agus, an oncologist in Southern California. (You can watch that TED talk by clicking the link above or copying the one in the references.) In it, he talks about how cancer is being treated: attack the cancer directly wherever it’s located. […]
