Tag Archive for: Nurses Health Study

News on Food as Medicine

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As a conventional medical journal and one of the leading medical journals in the world, The Journal of the American Medical Association doesn’t often publish reviews of the impact of food on health. However, a recent edition of the Journal included a summary of three such studies, and that’s the topic for this week.

The first study examined whether mushrooms, which are full of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) or type 2 diabetes (T2D). The researchers re-analyzed the data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. When they compared more than five servings of mushrooms per day with less than one serving per day, they found no differences in the rate of symptoms or markers associated with CVD or T2D. One interesting note was that if mushrooms were substituted for meat, there was a decreased risk of T2D.

This is one of the first studies to acknowledge the problems with nutrition data in these types of studies. The data on mushrooms were only collected at the beginning of the studies; that doesn’t allow for comparisons over time. Further, the questionnaire didn’t allow for data on a variety of types of mushrooms. The best observation at this point is that we don’t know whether mushrooms or specific types of mushrooms are beneficial for reducing the risk of disease until more research is done.

We do know they’re good for you, so enjoy your mushrooms; sautéed mushrooms are a great addition to many dishes. Here’s another way to enjoy mushrooms: Creamy Mushroom Soup from the Health Info page at drchet.com. Check out the other recipes while you’re there.

We’ll look at another study on Thursday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

P.S. Don’t forget to complete the survey on Dr. Chet’s Traveling Health Show. I could be coming to a city near you in 2020! Click the link below to go to the survey.

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Reference: AJCN https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqz057.

U.S. Life Expectancy Is Down—Again

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Life expectancy is the average time a person might live; a baby born in 2017 will be expected to live 78.6 years according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. That’s a long time, but it could be better. After reaching a high in 2015, U.S. life expectancy decreased in 2017 (1). It was only a tenth of a year, just over a month, but it’s the second year in a row life expectancy in the U.S. decreased.

Where do other major countries stand on life expectancy? Japan still leads the world at 85 years (2). Other notable countries are Australia and Italy at 82.3 and Sweden at 82.1. Our neighbors to the north in Canada are at 81.9 years, tied with France and Norway. The lowest quartile is mostly African countries; click the second reference below to find where other countries rank. Where does the U.S. rank? In the mid-40s. Seems like we should be higher, doesn’t it?

Researchers decided to examine how lifestyle could impact life expectancy. They used data from the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study with a combined subject pool of over 120,000 men and women who’ve been followed since the 1980s. They then calculated a health score for each subject, examined who died and what they died from over the past 30 or so years, and examined how health habits related to mortality. We’ll check out the results in Thursday’s Memo.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

References:
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db293.pdf.
2. http://bit.ly/2sl8TcH
3. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047.

 

Health Headline: Diet and Hearing Loss

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Researchers examined nutrition data collected between 1991 and 2013 in the second Nurses Health Study to examine whether adherence to a healthier diet reduced the risk of hearing loss. They developed a scoring system for three dietary approaches: the Alternate Mediterranean Diet (AMED), the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), and the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010). They also gave the subjects a hearing health questionnaire to ascertain hearing loss in 2009 and 2013. The researchers divided the diet scores into quintiles and examined the trend across increasing adherence to each of the three diets as determined by the scoring system.

Researchers reported that as the adherence to each diet increased, hearing loss decreased. Those subjects who adhered to their diet best reduced their hearing loss by as much as 30%.

Headline worthy? A split decision. I’m in favor of any reason for nurses or anyone else to eat a healthier diet with more vegetables and fruit.

Why not headline worthy? The first issue was use of the food frequency questionnaire, which relies on recall for the number of typical servings of over 150 items during the past year. Yes, you read that right; the questionnaire asks, for example, how many times you had chicken in the last year and how big was the serving. Maybe you could answer questions like that accurately, but I couldn’t. And as the old axiom about data goes: garbage in, garbage out.

Second, it used a poorly validated self-report of hearing loss from fewer than 700 subjects in just two studies. That’s good enough for a pilot study, but not good enough to make a recommendation.

Third was that when examining the median values for scores in the highest quintile across all three diet assessments, adherence was no better than 67% and as low as 50%. That means 33–50% of the time, the subjects ate foods that were not part of each diet. What made up the other half to a third? Maybe that was the secret to success.

So while these are promising results, they simply point the way to a bigger, better study to see if a better diet makes a significant difference in reducing hearing loss. However, if fear of hearing loss will motivate you to eat healthier, that’s a good outcome. But if I suspected hearing loss to be in my future, I’d take other steps in addition to eating better.

The Bottom Line

That’s my look at last week’s health headlines and the science behind them. In every case, the science did not merit the conclusions. The rush to publicize results gets headlines, but really? That’s all it does.

We can say that they provide interesting results that need further study. Even without complete info, you could take positive steps such as eating better to perhaps help avoid the conditions studied—you’ve got nothing to lose by eating more fruits and veggies.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

Reference: The Journal of Nutrition, nxy058, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxy058.