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More evidence: Pesticides and Parkinson’s disease

April 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body responsible for our movement, behavior and personality. Medical conditions that originate in the brain are some of the most difficult to understand and treat. Among these conditions in Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that includes symptoms of shaking, rigidity, difficulty walking, as well as cognitive and behavioral problems.

The review analyzed 45 different studies looked pesticide exposure and risk for disease.  It found that people exposed specifically to herbicides and insecticides were more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.

Interestingly, the review also found that it didn’t matter whether participants were exposed to pesticides at work, or outside of work – the risk for developing Parkinson’s disease was approximately the same.

At the end of the review, the authors call for more research to help identify specifically which chemicals are linked to the disease.

As I type this, I look out at my lawn that has more than its fair share of weeds growing in it. But I’m happy that we chose all-natural, corn-based fertilizer’s this year. We’re surely going to be pulling more weeds than if we used stronger herbicides, but I’m happy to avoid anything that could impact my family’s health in the future.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: ,

New evidence on running shoes

April 10, 2012 By 6 Comments

If you frequent a trail or neighborhood that is popular with runners, you’ve most likely noticed a new trend: people running barefoot or with very odd-looking shoes that place for each toe. And if you’re a runner yourself, you’ve certainly come across – maybe even experimented with – the trend of barefoot running.

Books like ChiRunning and Born to Run make the case for lower-profile, less-cushioned shoes or none at all. Here at EBL, we’ve written about the phenomenon before – specifically the work of Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, who studies the biomechanics of barefoot running and how early humans survived by evolving the ability to travel long distances to hunt.

Now a new study – detailed by a New York Times blog – has found that wearing light-weight shoes, instead of going completely barefoot, is metabolically more efficient.

The researchers’ argument goes something like this:  Running with traditional running shoes, which weight 300 to 400 grams, increase the amount of energy required to run because with every step, the running is lifting those weights.  Over the miles, that extra energy adds up.

For this study, researchers compared runners in lightweight shoes – weighing 150 grams – to barefoot runners who ran with leaded strips weighing 150 grams taped to the top of their feet. Carrying the same weight, the study found that barefoot running was actually less efficient compared to wearing light-weight shoes.

“What we found was that there seem to be adaptations that occur during the running stride that can make wearing shoes metabolically less costly,” Jason R. Franz, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado who led the study, told the New York Times. Shoes, he says, “provide some degree of cushioning.” If you eschew shoes, “something else has to provide the cushioning.”

Without any shoes, a runner’s leg muscles require additional energy to provide this cushioning.

In fact, the study even found that unweighted barefoot running was slightly less efficient than running with light-weight shoes, even though the shoes added weight.

The study didn’t address other benefits that barefoot runners tout – namely a reduction in injuries from running without shoes. But the study does make the case for investing in a different kind of running shoe – not the cushioned, bulky trainer that was once popular, but a more protective, lighter shoe that protects feet without adding weight.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, In The Media Tagged With: , , ,

BPA: The answer is in the details

April 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided not to ban the chemical bisphenol A, also known as BPA, in food packaging last week. The decision may seem like a surprising one since so many water bottles and serving utensils are sold as “BPA-free.” So let’s look at the evidence behind their decision.

National Public Radio offered a good overview of the evidence available on the health effect of BPA. The story noted that evidence from government agencies typically weighs heavier in FDA decisions.

One worry with other studies in contamination – BPA accidentally getting into the blood after samples are drawn. Some studies have found high levels of BPA in the blood. But these studies used samples collected in hospitals or doctors’ offices, not research settings and did not include a common test to detect contamination.

One study performed by government scientists involved feeding 20 adults a diet high in BPA from packaged foods for a day, and then measuring how much of it ended up in their blood.  At the end of the day, there wasn’t enough BPA in participants’ blood to measure.

That’s because the human body can he human body can actually inactivate dangerous chemicals like BPA in the intestine and liver, Justin Teeguarden, a toxicologist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab who conducted the study, told NPR.  Contamination was also an issue in this study, but the researchers tested for it and overcame it, he said.

Other government studies found that very little BPA is transferred to a nursing mother’s breast milk, and that  newborn monkeys are able to inactivate BPA just like human adults. (Researchers aren’t able to conduct studies on newborn babies.)

While the evidence does not show that BPA is completely safe, the FDA found that the low levels of BPA that humans are safe.

As for me, I’m still going to avoid BPA when I can. With the pressure on companies to remove from their products, there are plenty of BPA-free alternatives available, especially for kids. Any other BPA from canned food or juice containers, I’m not going to worry about for the moment.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, In The Media Tagged With: , , ,

What we know about mindfulness and meditation

March 29, 2012 By 1 Comment

The phrase “living in the moment” is a buzz word in our modern society that denotes a life well-lived. With its roots lie in Buddhism, the idea of “mindfulness” and “living in the moment” has taken root in modern American culture.

From best-selling books like Eat, Pray, Love to yoga classes offered at nearly every gym in the country, the idea of living in the moment is en vogue. But does it really lead to a happier life?

A systematic review of the evidence found  that mindfulness-based therapy – which encourages patients to focus on their breathing and their body, to notice but not judge their thoughts and to generally live in the moment – does yield positive benefits.

The review, published last year in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, is focused on mindfulness as a treatment for psychological disorders. It looked at 39 studies involving 1,140 participants who received mindfulness-based therapy for a range of conditions including cancer, generalized anxiety disorder and depression.

The review concluded that mindfulness-based therapy somewhat helped ease the mental stress of people recovering from cancer and other serious illnesses. The treatment had the strongest benefits for people diagnosed with mood disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and recurring depression.

That’s not to say that a daily meditation session can help cure severe depression or anxiety disorders, but it is a useful tool along with other treatment and for patient with more mild cases.

On a personal note, I don’t suffer from depression or mood disorders, but I do find that a few minutes spent focused on my breath and calming my mind helps me to focus and stay positive for the rest of the day. I find it’s a habit worth cultivating.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, In The Media Tagged With: , , , ,

The buzz on red meat

March 20, 2012 By 3 Comments

Last week, the headlines on meat consumption were inflammatory to say the least.

The Los Angeles Times: All red meat is bad for you, study finds Fox News: Red meat linked to premature death, research finds
The BBC: More Red Meat, More Mortality
The New York Times: Red Meat Increases Death, Cancer and Heart Risk

The researchers, from the Harvard School of Public Health, followed the diets and health outcomes of 37,000 men and 83,000 women over more than two decades. The found those who ate protein sources other than red meat were more likely to live longer. But what’s really at work here?

I found several systematic reviews on red meat consumption that give a broader look at this issue.

One published in the journal Circulation found 20 case-controlled studies and randomized controlled trials that assessed the effect of red meat consumption on health and concluded that eating processed meats, but not red meat, is associated with higher incidence of heart disease and diabetes.

Another review looked at the link between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, and found eating red meat on a daily basis is associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer and eating processed meats regularly is associated with an even higher risk of colorectal cancer.

And a third review found little evidence available on the links between red meat consumption and stroke risk.

As much as I love a good burger or juicy steak, the available evidence shows that eating red meat regularly is bad for your health. It is worth noting ,though, that in each study, the conclusions were drawn based on participants consuming red meat every day.

Personally, I’m going to stick with my motto of everything in moderation, and still enjoy a nice cut of beef once in a while.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, In The Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

The body of evidence on chocolate and heart disease

March 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

If you regularly read any health or wellness publications, you’ve likely heard the assertion that chocolate is good for you – usually phrased something like this: “Thinking about skipping dessert?  Think again. A new study shows that chocolate is actually heart-healthy.”

But what does all of the evidence say about chocolate?  Is it really good for your health?  A systematic review published in the Journal of Nutrition has found that, yes, chocolate is really good for your health.

The review looked at the effect of flavonoid-rich cocoa on all cardiovascular risk factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol and insulin sensitivity.  It also evaluated the dose-response relationships between cocoa and cardiovascular risk factors.

The review included a total of twenty-four studies with 1,106 participants.  It found that chocolate had positive effects on a number of cardiovascular risk factors – blood pressure, insulin resistance, lipid profiles and cholesterol.

While that’s good news for dessert-lovers far and wide, there was a limitation of the available evidence – the studies only looked at benefits over the short-term – days or weeks. The review concluded with a call for long-term investigations into effects of cocoa on the heart.

In the meantime, you can still pass the chocolate to me.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: , , , ,

A clearinghouse of education evidence

March 8, 2012 By 1 Comment

Parents across the nation send their children to public schools with the confidence that principals and teachers are providing an environment where children can learn, grow and thrive.

We hear so much about in the news about ways to improve our education system – especially in this presidential election year, when candidates are offering proposals and counter-proposals to fix our schools.

But is there any evidence as to what really works?  As a parent of young children, our schools are one important place where I want to see evidence-based guidelines put in place.

The best place I’ve found for evidence-based information on education is called the What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative by the U.S. Department of Education that conducts systematic reviews on education research to provide educators with the information they need to make evidence-based decisions.

The project is a true treasure trove of information, with research reviews on a myriad of topics including dropout prevention, school choice, early childhood education and student behavior, to name just a few.

On a recent cruise through the site, several topics piqued my interested including:

I’m certainly going to share this amazing resource with my son’s teachers, and use to gather information about the curriculums he’ll be learning in elementary school.  As a parent, it’s a relief to know there’s a place to look for reliable, evidence-based information on education.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, policy, The Learning Center, Youth Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

How your working environment impacts your health

March 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Adopting a healthy lifestyle can be tough these days, especially for parents working hard to make ends meet. Yes, there are gyms and organic grocery stores, on-demand yoga and healthy cooking magazines.  But for working parents, long hours and irregular schedules make can make it difficult to eat healthily and exercise.

A cadre of researchers are Cornell’s College of Human Ecology are working on this problem, conducting the research and pulling together the best evidence to help families exercise more and eat healthier.

Among them is nutritional sciences professor Carole Devine, who has created and evaluated a program that helps change workplace environments to support physical activity and healthy eating.

The program, called Small Steps are Easier Together, is an active collaboration between Cornell faculty, Cooperative Extension educators and worksite leadership teams across New York. Pilot studies have been conducted in 23 sites since 2006. It involves worksites creating wellness leadership teams, who work with Cornell researchers to implement evidence-based strategies – like creating walking groups, posting maps, and offering more fruit and vegetable options in the cafeteria – to increase walking and promote healthier eating.

The most recent analysis of the program included 188  participants in 10 rural worksites. It found the percentage of sedentary women had declined to from 42 percent to 26 percent. A total of 35 percent of the women moved to a higher activity level.

Devine is also pulling together the evidence on how working conditions impact food decisions for families at home and on the job.

Her research has found that the stress of a busy job impacts parents’ ability to serve healthy meals, leading them to serve quicker and less healthy meals, such as fast food. She’s investigated a variety of coping strategies such as negotiating a more flexible work schedule and teaming up with a neighbor to take turns preparing meals.

Devine’s work highlights the connections between work environments and health, and provide some evidence-based strategies to improve public health.

Filed Under: Cornell Cooperative Extension, Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Playground time pays off in the classroom

March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes when I drive past our local elementary school playground, I think back fondly to my time spent hanging upside down on the monkey bars and swinging as high as I could muster.

It has long been recognized that children need physical activity to break up the day.  But in recent years, it has become clear that school recess has even broader effects.  A new systematic review published this week in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine shows a positive relationship between physical activity and academic performance – essentially demonstrating that recess helps kids learn.

The authors reviewed 14 studies over the past 20 years that collected data about physical activity or fitness and academic performance or cognition on children ages 6 to 18, and found that children who were more physically active performed better in school.

Researchers believe that exercise increases blood and oxygen flow to the brain. It also leads bodies to produce more of the neurotransmitters responsible for improving mood and boosts growth factors that help create new nerve cells.

But the available evidence has a fault. Of the studies included in the review, only two of them were classified as high-quality, primarily because of the measurements instruments used.

What’s needed, the researchers concluded are more studies that examine the dose-response relationship between physical activity and academic performance – essentially, how much exercise is optimal for helping kids in the classroom.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, Youth Development Tagged With: , , ,

Moms working outside of the home: Good for kids?

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How to balance work and raising children is a critical question that most mothers face today.

Many women (my own mother fell into this category) do not have the option to stay home to raise their children because their families need their incomes to get by. Other women (myself included) get an education, start a career, and then decide to have children – leaving them with some big choices about if and how much they should work outside of the home.

To be sure, the solution to this conundrum is different for every family. Our family has decided its best for me to work part-time from home – a choice that provides us with some extra spending money and me with some time to interact with adults on an intellectual level.

But no matter what our circumstances and choices, all mothers are concerned with one thing: what is best for their children.

There is an interesting column this week in the L.A. Times this week that addresses this very question, and delves into the evidence about working moms.

It turns out – according to a systematic review by researchers at the University of California-Irvine – that children whose mothers who return to work while they are infants and toddlers fare the same in school and behaviorally compared to children whose mothers stay home. The review looked at 69 studies over a period of 50 years that included data about children’s school performance and behavioral problems.

The only children who struggled more were those whose mothers returned to very intensive full-time employment early on – a finding that makes a case for longer maternity leaves, the researchers said.

Several factors help explain why maternal employment does not have adverse effects on child outcomes, says Sharon Sassler, associate professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell.

For starters, the data shows that most women in the United States work, even after having a child (although many work part-time). Also, most children spend considerable amounts of time away from their families in school, Sassler explained, even as young as three and four years old.

But the biggest factor may be a cultural shift in parenting norms, she said.

“Even though more mothers are working, and more married families contain two working parents than in the past, various studies have revealed that children are spending more time with parents – fathers as well as mothers – than they did in the 1960s,” she said.

“The value of spending time with children has clearly increased, even if working mothers – and fathers – must decrease their own personal leisure time, devotion to house cleaning, or sleep to achieve that end.  And one of the more interesting research findings is that fathers – especially men with a college degree – have increased the amount of time spent with children, both when they are married and when they do not live with their children.  Not only does that offset any potential reduction resulting from working mothers time away from home, but it strengthens ties between all family members – husbands and wives or partners, as well as parents and children.”

In fact, Sassler herself is a working mother with a child in elementary school. On a personal note, she’s found that having two working parents has taught her son the value of cooperation. “He realizes that this is a team affair, and that sacrifices are sometimes required of all family members – but that we all benefit as well from the fruits of all of our labor,” she said.

To sum it up, navigating decisions about working outside of the home can certainly be a source of stress. But knowing the evidence shows that children thrive in both cases can help moms to make the decisions that are best for their families.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Youth Development Tagged With: , , ,

New evidence: Marijuana and driving don’t mix

February 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

We’ve all heard the warnings about drinking and driving, but what about driving while under the influence of other substances?

A new study published this week in the British Medical Journal found that drivers who use marijuana up to three hours before driving are twice as likely to cause a traffic accidence compared to those not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

While it may seems obvious that driving under the influence of any substance would lead to more accidents, this is the first systematic review to gather all of the evidence on traffic accidents and marijuana use.

“To our knowledge this meta-analysis is the first to examine the association between acute cannabis use and the risk of motor vehicle collisions in real life,” the researchers wrote.

The study reviewed nine studies of nearly 50,000 across the globe involved collisions on public roads. It found the increased risk was most pronounced in studies of fatal collisions, and that the impact of acute cannabis consumption on the risk of minor crashes remains unclear.

This type of review adds to the body of evidence that ultimately helps policy-makers understand public health threats. In this case, it seems clear that lawmakers and public health officials need to do more to help the public understand the dangers of driving while under the influence of marijuana.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness Tagged With: , ,

The evidence on child abuse

February 14, 2012 By 2 Comments

No one needs an academic study to understand that child abuse and neglect has horrible effects on children and families.  The toll on young people and their caregivers – emotionally, socially and developmentally – is tremendous. But the problem also takes a broader toll on our health care system and society as a whole.

A new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control quantifies the toll on society in financial terms. The study examined nearly 600,000 confirmed child maltreatment cases over the course of a year. Approximately 1,740 of the cases resulted in the death of a child. It found the financial costs associated with these cases to be $124 billion, which includes the costs of medical care, special education, the criminal justice system and lost productivity.

Researchers totaled the lifetime cost for each victim of child maltreatment who lived at $210,012 – a figure the matches the cost of other health conditions such as stroke, which has lifetime cost per person estimated at $159,846, or type 2 diabetes, which is estimated between $181,000 and $253,000.

Much of the data for the study came from a project at Cornell called the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN), housed in the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR). The project makes high-quality datasets available to researchers, including data from individual studies and  annual federal data collection efforts, such as state child abuse and neglect and foster care statistics.

“This study very likely underestimates the actual burden as we learn more about the impact of early childhood adversity on brain development and health and well-being  across the life span,” said John Eckenrode, director of NDACAN, professor of human development and director of the BCTR.

“Fortunately, there are now evidence-based programs that may prevent child maltreatment and the associated costs to society,” he said. Among them is the Nurse Family Partnership, a program founded at the College of Human Ecology that aims to improve the lives of disadvantaged mothers and their children.

The take home message: Child abuse and neglect is a big problem. The better we can understand its intricacies and impacts, the better we’ll be able to prevent it in the future.

Filed Under: Evidence-Based Living, Health and Wellness, Youth Development Tagged With: , , ,
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