Exercise is not a one-size-fits-all type of deal, according to a study released today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Different people have to work out at different intensities to burn the most fat, to reach what researchers call the "Fat Max."
For overweight 12-year-old boys studied by the researchers, moderate exercises can go a long way toward weight loss.
They figured this out by having 30 boys – 17 of them overweight, 13 of them skinny – do cycling exercises.
The results showed that the overweight boys reached their "Fat Max" at lower intensities than the healthier boys. Working out harder did not burn more fat for them.
Why does this happen? The researchers give a couple reasons:
1. If you are overweight, your muscles don't have as good a capacity to use fat as fuel.
2. Your weight affects the type of muscles you have. Leaner people have a higher proportion of type 1 muscle fibers that burn off more fat. Heavy people have more type 2 muscles that burn off more carbohydrates.
What's your Fat Max? Michael Stefano, author of The Firefighter's Workout Book, has worked out a formula.
There are a passel of questions that people who are having a baby together ask each other:
Such as, who's going to be the primary caretaker?
Or, do we want to know if it's a boy or a girl?
Maybe they should add another to the list: "Were you born feet first?"
A new study out of Norway suggests that genes play a strong role in determining whether a baby will be a risky breech delivery.
Scientists from the University of Bergen studied nearly 400,000 births in Norway between 1967 and 2004, and found that babies were two times as likely to be breech deliveries if either or both parents were born feet first.
The researchers say knowing the parents' history could help prevent breech births, which make up an estimated 5 percent of births and put the baby at higher risk of death and injury than babies born head first.
There are different exercises pregnant women can do to help turn the baby head-down. Or the doctor could try to manually move the baby from outside the abdomen. Like this:
"I had my appendix removed through my mouth. What d'ya do today?"
Up until the 1990s, surgeons cut out your appendix by making an inches-long incision in your stomach that would have taken over a week to heal.
Today, surgeons can remove the pesky organ with three small, strategically made cuts in your abdomen – what’s called laparoscopic surgery. You may get fewer sympathy cards but you're back at work within days, and the scarring is minimal.
Now, imagine this: just one incision, centimeters-long.
How is this possible? By taking diseased organs through the mouth.
Last week, surgeons at UC San Diego apparently performed the country’s first appendix removal via the mouth on a 42-year-old La Jolla man named Jeff Scholz. India is the only other place to have tried this, to their knowledge.
Take a look. (Skip this if watching "House" makes you queasy.)
I asked Dr. Santiago Horgan, professor and director of UC San Diego’s Center for the Future of Surgery, how he and his team of surgeons, co-led by Dr. Mark Talamini, did the procedure.
One incision was made to insert a small camera in the belly button, so surgeons could see the appendix. A tubular probe was moved through the patient’s mouth and into the stomach. Instruments were passed through the tube to make an incision in the stomach wall, so surgeons could get to the appendix for removal.
This is similar to what they used:
“We’ve been training for two years before doing this operation," Horgan said. "We’re trying to establish new territory and seeing if we can minimize pain, post-surgical hernias and improve cosmetic results. And if we can achieve those things, then this will be the standard.”
Horgan said surgeons are trying to make use of “natural orifices” like the mouth, vagina and rectum, so less cutting is necessary.
All well and good. But how did the patient feel afterward?
“A day after surgery, I have little pain, a ‘2’ on a scale of 1 to 10,” Scholz said in a press release from UCSD. “My father had the conventional appendix removal. I didn’t want the standard issue scar on the abdomen.”
Sample advice: Don't bother buying organic cosmetics. Says Consumer Reports: something can be labeled organic even if "it may be primarily water infused with only a small fraction of organic plant material."
The “risk-taker” personality has come up a lot this week as people try to wrap their heads around the Spitzer scandal.
What served the outgoing N.Y. governor well in his professional career clearly did little for his interpersonal relationships.
One psychology professor, Marvin Zuckerman of the University of Delaware, has indicated in an interview the happiest marriages are between non-Spitzer like people. Meaning, people who "have great tolerances for boredom" and won't be itching for a new partner.
He's developed a scale that measures people's need for thrills.
Sample True/False statements include:
•I sometimes do "crazy" things just for fun.
•I prefer friends who are excitingly unpredictable
•I like to explore a strange city or section of town by myself, even if it means getting lost.
How do you score? How does your partner?
Research from the University of Maine suggests that women are OK with their mates taking risks when they deem it necessary, but are not that into thrill-seekers.
For his study, "Neither Daredevils nor Wimps: Attitudes toward Physical Risk Takers as Mates," psych prof William Farthing surveyed UMaine undergraduate women to assess men's response to scenarios involving physical risk. He found that women are attracted to men who take risks for altruistic reasons (like saving somone's life) and less so to men who have non-heroic reasons (whitewater kayaking, for example.)
Did you buy Airborne between May 21, 2001 and Nov. 29, 2007? You could get a refund.
The maker of the herbal supplement earlier this month agreed to settle a class action suit over false advertising for $23.3 million.
Airborne was selling itself as a cold remedy, when its major ingredients weren't that different from a multi-vitamin.
Helping sales was the cutesy packaging and a fabulous backstory: Schoolteacher hangs out with second-graders every day. Keeps getting their gross germs. Invents effervescent tablet that you plunk into a glass of water and drink to fight viruses.
So...she wasn't a scientist. Didn't matter. Airborne sales topped $100 million a year.
The company’s bold health claims – one press release said Airborne could cure most colds within an hour – created skeptics and sparked an ABC News investigation in 2006 .
The ABC report, which led to the lawsuit, found that the clinical study supporting Airborne's claims was conducted by two people, neither of whom were scientists.
In settling the lawsuit, Airborne denied any wrongdoing but agreed to pay back aggrieved customers.
If you don't have a receipt, you can receive a refund for up to six products. That's $10.50 per box of Seasonal Airborne, $2.75 per box of Gummi Airborne, and $6.99 for all other Airborne products.
To be on the safe side, Airborne now describes itself as a health formula that "boosts your immune system."
Doctor friends have jokingly warned me, "Don't get sick on the Fourth of July." At many teaching hospitals, that's around the time new interns and residents arrive.
While the so-called July Phenomenon is perenially up for debate, more and more studies are coming out that strongly suggest timing does influence the kind of hospital care you get.
One study has found higher mortality rates among infants admitted to neonatal intensive care units at night. Another saw worse survival rates among heart attack patients admitted to New Jersey hospitals on the weekend.
Now a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that hospital patients whose heart suddenly stops beating after 11 p.m. or on the weekend have a lower rate of survival than daytime or evening sufferers.
Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University studied nearly 87,000 heart patients at more than 500 hospitals who had in-hospital cardiac arrests from January 2000 through February 2007.
Rates of survival a day after the cardiac arrest were higher for the daytime/evening sufferers than nighttime sufferers – 35 percent versus 29 percent – and neurological outcomes were more favorable – 15 percent to 11 percent.
The researchers said the discrepancy could have to do with hospital staffing and training.
Some German researchers have concluded that just six minutes of napping can sharpen your memory.
The scientists did this by testing subjects' ability to memorize a list of 30 words. The team from the University of Düsseldorf found that those who napped for about 6 minutes in the hour before testing remembered on average one more word than people who stayed awake for the entire hour playing video games.
The researchers suggest that the mere onset of sleep may trigger memory consolidation.
Some caveats: The study, described in this month's Journal of Sleep Research, used just 26 subjects. And sleep experts stress that nothing replaces a good night's sleep. See the Insomnia Blog here.
The question also remains, where could you even take a six-minute nap during work? At your desk? In your car? In the bathroom?
I always thought George Costanza was onto something when he built a place to nap under his desk. Of course, he had his own office, and even then, not everything always goes according to plan...
Do you avoid the snake exhibit at the zoo? Did you turn away from watching Snakes on a Plane...the trailer?
You may have wondered whether you were being irrational about snakes. (When's the last time you saw a live one, anyway?) Research from the University of Virginia, though, suggests that snake phobia became hardwired in humans thousands of years ago as a survival tool.
A study published in this month's Psychological Science found that its subjects – who included preschool children with no prior experiences with snakes – appear to have a natural ability to quickly detect a snake from other things.
In one experiment, subjects were asked to find the image of a snake on a computer screen cluttered with photos of eight flowers, frogs or caterpillars. Another experiment called on subjects to look for the non-threatening item among a screen full of snake photos.
In each scenario, snakes were ID'd faster, with children picking the reptiles out as rapidly as the adults, despite the difference in age and experiences.
Researchers say this backs evolutionary theories that humans who mastered survival skills were able to reproduce and pass their abilities on in the gene pool.
As I write, a weather system is hurtling toward Maine, prepared to dump its "wintry mix" on the region starting tonight. (Black ice, I've missed you).
Maybe your family is one of those escaping to warmer environs. Here are some tips to make your trip safe and pleasant. They're aimed at kids, but really they can apply to anybody.
•Air travel. Kids' ears are particularly sensitive to changes in barometric pressure. Give older kids gum to chew during take off and landing, says the University of Michigan Health System. Smaller kids could try eating something. The swallowing motion will relieve ear tension. If your child tends to get motion sick, try reserving a seat in the middle of the plane, rather than on the wings.
•Create a travel kit with items such as a fever reducing medication, an antihistamine, bandages and a topical antibiotic ointment. KidsCanTravel.com recommends keeping the items dry in a zippered plastic bag, Tupperware container, or old lunchbox.
•Car travel. If your child starts feeling motion sick, stop the car when you can and let him or her walk around, recommends the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Back in the car, have your child focus on something else, like music on the radio. Ask them to look at things outside the car.
•Don't get mad. Expect your kids to act out a little during the vacation. Kids are creatures of habit, and traveling throws them off their routines, according to the University of Michigan Health System.
Here's a video featuring a pediatrician from the University of Michigan. It'll probably get you revved up for your vacation. It shows people having fun on waterslides, thankfully not children getting sick in the car.
In recent years, the physicians over at Harvard Men’s Health Watch have promoted multivitamins on the basis that taking them can’t hurt, and may even do the body some good.
In fact, half the doctors on the advisory board take a multivitamin themselves.
But now they’re so concerned that multivitamins create a greater risk for colorectal cancer that they’re advising men to stop taking the supplements until scientists can confirm their safety.
The problem? Supplements may be giving men more folic acid than they need, which could lead to colon polyps, the doctors say.
Men already get plenty of folic acid from what's added to grain products, like bagels and bread. The practice began about a decade ago as a way to get more folic acid, a preventer of birth defects, into Americans’ diets.
But, taking a multivitamin may push a man’s daily intake to more than 1,000 micrograms – 2.5 times more than the recommended daily amount.
Thinking about dropping your multivitamin (or your feelings of guilt about forgetting to take one)? Consider replacing the multivitamin with a vitamin D supplement, says Harvard Men's Health Watch.
The vitamin is important good for bone health and something that men and women often don’t get enough of, but it's hard to get naturally from food.
Josie Huang joined the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram as a general-assignment reporter in June 2001. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Huang has worked at the Springfield (Mass.) Union News/Sunday Republican and freelanced at the Taiwan News.
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