Happy Channukah!

An estimated 24 million filled donuts (sufganiyot in Hebrew) are sold in Israel each Hannukah season. That adds up to $13 million in sales and 10.8 billion calories, at an average 450 per fried treat - depending on the filling and topping.

EVERY day, millions of American workers do something dangerous to their health: they sit down

The New York Times

By ERIC V. COPAGE

Published: December 3, 2011

Sitting for long periods is hard on the body. It strains the back and causes the muscles to become slack. It slows the processes that metabolize calories, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.

People might think they are protecting themselves from such problems if they exercise outside of working hours. And employers may pat themselves on the back if they offer their workers subsidized gym memberships. But regular exercise doesn’t entirely make up for the shutdown of chemical processes that occurs during long periods of sitting, research has shown.

There is a solution to the evils of sitting: make it a point to get up and move throughout the workday. Workers can take this insight to heart by sitting on an exercise ball or standing while working, by using the stairs instead of the elevator, or even by walking over to a co-worker’s desk instead of sending an instant message. Every little bit helps.

Now some employers are going a step further, by aligning the “move while you work” mandate with the corporate culture. They hope to improve their employees’ health and to lower medical costs in the process.

Salo, a financial staffing firm in Minneapolis, for example, encourages walking meetings. In a conference room, Salo has set up four treadmill desks, where a height-adjustable working surface is placed above the treadmill track. The desks face one another, so that people can walk and take care of business at the same time.

“It took a bit of adjustment,” said Craig Dexheimer, Salo’s director of operations and administration. “It’s normal to walk and talk at the gym, but in an office setting it was a bit strange at first.” In a separate room, Salo has set up six treadmill desks, complete with computers. Employees are free to use them for a session of walking and working. They can also take Ping-Pong breaks on a table set up in the office.

In 2007, Mr. Dexheimer helped organize a study headed by Dr. James A. Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, on the effects of increased movement in the workplace.

For six months, the activities of 18 employees — including Mr. Dexheimer — were monitored by a device on their belts. With the help of equipment like the treadmill desks and wireless headsets that permit walking while talking on the phone, the employees collectively lost more than 150 pounds, most of it in body fat. Their cholesterol and triglyceride levels also showed a collective decline. Mr. Dexheimer said he lost 25 pounds, and has kept the weight off.

For some workers, taking short exercise breaks may be practical and still effective. Toni Yancey, a professor in the department of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that while some professionals prefer to exercise while working, other workers do best with “structured group activity breaks,” or what she called a “10-minute recess.”

That’s a strategy used at HealthBridge, a clinic in Great Neck, N.Y., where an employees’ area often resembles a mini-exercise room. During a break, one employee might do bicep curls using water bottles, while another might have her back to the counter where the office copier sits, with her hands placed shoulder-width apart on the countertop, doing triceps dips.

Two years ago, when Dr. David G. Edelson, the clinic’s founder, suggested incorporating light exercise breaks and movement into the workday, the general reaction was: “Are we really going to get up and do these things?” said Jennifer Alexatos, the clinic’s marketing manager. “There was a lot of giggling and laughing.”

But the program has since been embraced by most of the clinic’s 25 employees, said Ms. Alexatos, who takes two 10-minute exercise breaks a day.

AS HealthBridge’s experience has shown, a push from management can help more employees keep active during the workday. That’s why New Balance, the footwear company based in Boston, tried a 30-day pilot program that included the sending of daily e-mail messages to employees with ideas for staying active at work. One suggestion was to do stretches and use resistance bands, even during meetings. The company plans to adopt the program next spring in its Boston and Lawrence, Mass., offices.

“I swapped out my chair for a balance ball,” said Lisa Mahoney, an associate marketing manager at the company. Sitting on the ball, “you’re always moving a little bit when you’re on the phone or typing your e-mail,” she said.

She also gets up more often and takes the stairs rather than the elevator. “You have a burst of energy when you come back to your desk,” she said.

The Rise in Type 2 Diabetes Among Children

Food Insecurity

more

Eating More Raw Fruits and Vegetables May Modify A Gene for Heart Disease.

----From LA Times----

By Jeannine Stein, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

October 12, 2011, 9:48 a.m.

Next time you're considering skipping the salad bar, think again: Eating more raw fruits and vegetables could alter the effects of a gene that's a marker for heart disease.

---

FOR THE RECORD: A headline on an earlier version of this post incorrectly said eating more fruits and vegetables altersgenes.

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Researchers genotyped 27,243 people from two separate studies to see if they had a certain gene variant. The 9p21 gene has been shown in previous studies to be linked with a higher risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease, including a 2010 meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that found a statistically significant link between people who had the 9p21 gene variant and a greater chance of developing heart disease.

Despite the luck of the draw, people may be able to do something about it.

The participants in this study represented a number of ethnicities: South Asian, Latin American, Arab, Chinese and European. They were asked about their dietary habits, including how many raw fruits and vegetables they ate, and how often.

Among all the study subjects, those who had the high-risk genotype and ate a diet low in raw vegetables and fruits had a higher risk of heart attack or cardiovascular disease. However, eating a diet high in vegetables and fruits seemed to have a protective effect -- that group had a heart attack risk that was comparable to people with a low-risk genotype.

"Our research suggests there may be an important interplay between genes and diet in cardiovascular disease," said lead author Ron Do, in a news release. Do, who did the study while at McGill University (he's now at Massachusetts General Hospital) added, "Future research is necessary to understand the mechanism of this interaction, which will shed light on the underlying metabolic processes that the 9p21 gene is involved in."

The study was published this week in the journal PLoS Medicine.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

If you want kids to eat it, make it pretty.

Cheap Marketing Techniques Help Kids Choose More Fruit

iStockphoto.com

If you want kids to eat it, make it pretty.

Published: October 03, 2011

by Allison Aubrey

Kids will choose to take a step towards healthier eating by choosing fresh fruit — if you give them a little nudge.

Researchers at Cornell's Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs went into three school cafeterias that had been keeping their fruit in stainless-steel bins behind sneeze guards in the lunch line where kids could barely see it. And they did some strategic rearranging. They moved the fruit into colorful bowls or attractive baskets, and placed them near the cash register.

The result? A 103 percent increase in the purchase of fruit. "We were shocked by the sheer size of the effect," David Just of Cornell tells The Salt. He'd anticipated no more than a 30 percent increase, but it seems that moving the fruit to the bottleneck are at the end of the line was a big hit. "Kids spend more time looking at it" while they're waiting to check out, Just says.

Just's goal is to come up with low-cost or no cost lunchroom changes can help kids to make healthier choices. And the redesign efforts so far are encouraging.

Healthstyle by Darya Pino

By: Darya Pino
http://summertomato.com/
When I was 18 few things were further from my mind than health. Sure I enjoyed my status as a thin, relatively fit teenager, but there was virtually no connection in my brain between what I put in my body and how long or happily I would live.

At that time I saw healthy eating as a fringe activity, for granola crunching hippies or men over 60 with beer bellies. I had no reason to worry about heart disease at my age and organic food was way more expensive, so why bother?



But that wasn’t the only reason I avoided the issue. As a self-conscious girl from Southern California, I was very concerned with my weight. People considered me thin, and I had every intention of staying that way. I knew that my obsession with my body image and constant dieting was considered “unhealthy,” but I didn’t care.

From my perspective the message from the media was clear: healthy is the opposite of thin. And when you’re young and think you’re invincible, the choice is obvious. Getting kids to worry about something in the distant future is difficult enough, but when you set it up as the antithesis of their immediate goals you make it nearly impossible.



It wasn’t until years later that I started to appreciate the value of health as an objective. I now understand that healthy is beautiful, and that thin and healthy are not mutually exclusive. Your ideal size is determined largely by genetics, but if you eat well, exercise and take care of yourself not only will your body look the way you want, you’ll also have nicer hair, a clear complexion and brighter eyes. You’ll likely have more energy and feel happier as well.

Sadly, body size is still the focus when most people talk about health. When you’re “too thin,” healthy means eating more regardless of quality. When you’re overweight, healthy means losing weight no matter how you accomplish it. But in the long term health is a reflection of your daily habits and is determined by things like the quality and diversity of your diet, how often and vigorously you exercise, exposure to environmental toxins and other factors.

While body weight can certainly be an indicator of health problems and sometimes reflect improvements, it’s important to understand that the message we send about health can backfire if these two things are inextricably linked.

How do you define health?