Activate muscles, brain with stand-up desk
“Standing is stupid/Crawling’s a curse/Skipping is silly/Walking is worse,” Shel Silverstein wrote in the illustrated children’s book “A Light in the Attic.” He was funny, for sure, but wrong, oh, so wrong. It turns out it’s too much sitting that’ll do you in before your time. By not moving your muscles, you lower the production of good-for-you HDL cholesterol, elevate blood levels of triglycerides and glucose, and make it harder to recover if you get sick.
Luckily, there are solutions that don’t require you to do a Forrest Gump across America! Our favorite: Use a stand-up desk. It’s a great way to activate your muscles and your brain while you’re at work or school. And you can have a tall stool nearby for occasional sit-downs. Researchers are calling that combo a “stand-up-biased” desk and say you burn 15 percent more calories using them. When they’re used in classrooms, teachers report that kids pay more attention and are more engaged than when they’re sitting down. No reason to think that isn’t true at work, too!
Another great move: If you can’t get a standing desk in your classroom or at work, set your smartphone alarm to get you moving once an hour: Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine found that trading two minutes of sitting for two minutes of light-intensity activity each hour lowered the risk of premature death by 33 percent. You certainly can stand for that!
Q: I thought mammograms were the best way to find breast cancer. Now there’s all this news about how they aren’t reliable. I’m confused. Help!
Sally J., Joplin, Missouri
A: You must be referring to the study out of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program that looked at 700,000 women ages 40-59 who had routine mammograms from 2011 to 2013. The researchers determined how many falsepositive results there were and how often breast cancer was overdiagnosed.
A “false positive” was defined as a mammogram that initially ID’d cancer that was later revealed not to be there. “Overdiagnosis” was defined as identifying a lesion as if it were cancer and then unnecessarily treating it.
They found that 11 percent of mammograms returned false positives. This means that 3.2 million U.S. women annually are initially told they have breast cancer when they don’t (more than 20,000 women are told they have invasive breast cancer when they don’t). And the rate of overdiagnosis for ductal carcinoma in situ is a shocking 86 percent. The price tag for this? $2.8 billion for costs associated with false positives, and $1.2 billion in overdiagnoses for invasive breast cancer and DCIS!
What’s best for you? Be an informed consumer.
The Cleveland Clinic recommends a baseline mammogram at 35 and then annually from age 40. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends biennial tests after 50 and stopping at age 75. To decide what’s the right schedule for you, you and your doctor need to evaluate your risk factors for breast cancer: family history; dense breast tissue; obesity, etc. If you have dense breasts, insist on getting an ultrasound, too. And an MRI is recommended for women who carry a gene for breast cancer, such as BRCA1 or 2.
If your mammogram indicates something suspicious, get a second opinion — no ifs, ands or buts. Also, get an additional exam using other screening techniques (ultrasound, for example) before you proceed with a biopsy or cancer treatment. Although mammograms aren’t perfect, don’t skip them. They can provide early detection.
Don’t let kids get drunk on sugar
When SpongeBob SquarePants gets drunk on ice cream in his self-titled movie, he rants, reels and generally steps in it! Seems a sugar buzz can put even a high-strung animated character on a Rocky Road. Well, now researchers are declaring that cartoon story is not so make-believe.
“Sugar is the alcohol of childhood!” says a panel of doctors, professors, researchers and nutritionists who founded Action on Sugar (actiononsugar.org). Their declaration of war on companies that target kids with obesity-inducing, sugar-rich foods — and their plea to adults to avoid them, too — builds on the info in a 2012 paper in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that revealed that added fructose (from corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup and a zillion other products), when consumed in excess, is “a chronic, dose-dependent liver toxin” that damages the liver just like alcohol does! And on top of that, it’s metabolized directly into fat, not energy!
You’ve heard us say time and again that all added sugars and syrups are Food Felons, and a healthy life depends on avoiding them! Now there’s one more reason to protect your kids and yourself from the damage they can do.
So, start with this: Check ingredients listings for added sugars, such as sucrose, glucose, syrup, dextrose, fructose, corn syrup or HFCS. Refuse to buy anything that has more than 4 grams per serving of those ingredients. You can enjoy natural sweetness from fresh fruit, 100 percent whole grains and big-flavor herbs such as basil, mint and lavender.