Bovine Colostrum

When you tell a patient her hemoglobin A1c result is 8%, how does she relate that number to the blood glucose levels she measures at home in units of mg/dL? Is an A1c of 8% equivalent to an average glucose of 180?

As if diabetes management isn't complicated enough, dealing with different types of blood glucose measures can make it more so.

Washington -- Although most roads to pandemic flu readiness remain riddled with potholes, some communities are making steady progress.

Those cities and towns that have made exemplary advances in planning for a surge of ill patients and ways to mitigate the flu's potential devastation were honored, and the lessons they learned were shared during the Second National Congress on Health System Readiness: Pandemic Influenza Community Preparedness Planning, held July 18 to 20 in Washington, D.C.

Alcohol dependence manifests itself in many ways, but patients with this problem have enough in common that they can be placed in five categories, according to a study published online June 26 by the journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The authors hope that subtyping patients in this manner will lead to the discovery of genes that increase the risk for the disorder's specific variations and to treatments that may be more effective for particular individuals.

"Assuming that the subtyping holds up and meets the test of time, we hope to identify specific treatments for specific types of alcoholics," said Howard B. Moss, MD, lead author and associate director for clinical and translational research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "Some may be more amenable to medications to treat alcohol dependence than others, and researchers might find this information useful as they're putting together trials for new agents to treat alcoholism."

Recent research from New England (a study of 12,000 people) shows that when your friends get fatter it's likely that you will too.

It's not just a general trend in the population towards putting on weight - if your friends keep themselves in trim you're more likely to stay slim as well.

It makes sense in a lot of ways - after all if you are always eating out with your friends and they all have dessert and multiple drinks - what do you do? You'll likely go with the trend. And you don't feel too conspicuous putting on weight if everyone in your social group is carrying extra pounds too. There's safety in numbers.

Of course if your friends socialize at the gym and eat a light lunch together that's what you're going to do too. And you'll feel more ashamed if you're the only one who can't squeeze into a regular pair of jeans and have to go into the size for larger folk than when others in your group of friends are looking at the plus size rails too.

But the question is, do you choose your friends subconsciously so that you can eat too much or do you eat too much because of who your friends are? And do your friends sabotage (subconsciously or not) your attempts to lose weight so that they still have the comfort of being surrounded by equally large buddies? It could go very deep this one ...

The latest diet advice: don't hang around with fat people - Independent Online Edition > Health

This AP article via the Washington Post is typical of many articles that have been reporting on a recent study of 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women which was published Monday online in the journal Circulation.

The study has reported that “People who drank one or more diet sodas each day developed the same risks for heart disease as those who downed sugary regular soda.”

Needless to say this is somewhat of a surprising result since it’s definitely counter intuitive that the diet colas would have the same impact as fully sweetened sodas given the massive calories contained in the latter. Not surprisingly, a representative from the American Beverage Association opined:  "How can something with zero calories that's 99 percent water with a little flavoring in it ... cause weight gain?"

Still, the study found those who “drank one or more sodas a day diet or regular had an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, compared to those who drank sodas infrequently. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that increase the risk for heart disease including large waistlines and higher levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides.”

Some of the theories being put forth are as follows:

1.      Adverse selection problems.  One contingent of diet soda drinkers are already overweight and drink diet sodas in an attempt to keep from gaining more.  Their link to heart disease is due to their overweight status, not the fact that they drink diet sodas.

2.      Diet sodas condition the palette to sweetness and users over consume non diet sweetened products elsewhere in their dietary intake, increasing weight gain and heart disease.

3.      There is something about diet drinks that we don’t understand.

Still, according to the article, the American Heart Association still condones the use of diet sodas as part of a program to control weight.

In our opinion, the most useful function of diet drinks is to help wean yourself off of regular fully sweetened soft drinks.  If you are still drinking fully sweetened soft drinks you are definitely not serious about losing weight.  However, once you have successfully accomplished this goal, the next step should be to replace diet drinks with, yes you guessed it, water.  Over time, you can adjust your palette so that ice water or carbonated ice water is just as refreshing as diet sodas.  And when you drink water you don’t have to be concerned with the caffeine content, availability, or the risk that this recent study  may in fact be correct.  Dribbling a little orange juice into soda water over ice can also be a refreshing low calorie and healthful drink.