Category Archives: Health News

The recession is a good thing!

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charlie_chaplinThe economic recession that has crippled the world economy for the last few years is, according to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, “likely” to be over.  We won’t know for sure until well after the fact, but the indicators are currently pointing towards a growth in our Gross Domestic Product.  Unfortunately for those of us who don’t have lots of money in the stock market, the unemployment rate is going to remain high for a long time – possibly years.  Unemployment is always a “lagging factor” during a recovery and is the last economic indicator to show improvement.  This time around they don’t think the unemployment rate is going to come back quickly at all, so those of us who are out of work or stuck in a low-paying  job and unable to find anything else are going to be mired down for a while.

I’ve  mentioned before how difficult it is to maintain a healthy diet when you are poor due to the high cost of nutritious food, so imagine my surprise when I read recently that despite the fact that things, in general, tend to suck during an economic downturn the populace on the whole tends to get healthier.

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You’re never far from the golden arches

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Image courtesy of bryangeek

Image courtesy of bryangeek

One of the biggest challenges that we face in the modern era when it comes to having a balanced diet is that cheap, unhealthy food is considerably easier to get than the healthier alternatives.  Low-calorie, low-fat,  and nutritious food is frustratingly expensive when compared to the dollar menu at your local fast food chain, and if you’re dieting on a budget those pennies can add up quickly.   What’s worse is that when you are really hungry it sure seems like it’s a heck of a lot easier to run for the border than actually go through the effort of cooking something that is good for you.

Well, it turns out that perception may not be too terribly far from reality in America.  Unless, that is, you literally live in the middle of nowhere.

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Exercising with Aion

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Aion TreadmillA few years ago several World of Warcraft players with way too much time on their hands decided that it would be a good idea to rig their computers to a treadmill so they could virtually “run” across Azeroth.  Unfortunately the video and the page that originally linked to it have vanished into the virtual ether, but suffice it to say that the heroes of the story soon learned that they were not, in fact, nearly as fit as their digital selves.

It seems as though these days you can’t have a conversation about Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games without someone asking which one is going to be the World of Warcraft killer.  Personally?  I happen to agree with my buddy Kevin Stallard who boldly stated that there would never be a WoW killer.  Regardless of our opinion, though, people still speculate who is going to have the power to dethrone the 800 pound gorilla that Blizzard created, and many folks are wondering if the Asian inspired Aion from NCSoft has what it takes to become King of the Hill.

So what, you may be wondering, does dominance in the MMO industry have to do with a Health and Fitness blog?

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Television really IS bad for you

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Image courtesy of Aaron Escobar

Image courtesy of Aaron Escobar

As we human beings have raced through the modern era there seems to be, in every generation, some form of popular entertainment that the previous generation looks down upon as being a symbol of the impending doom of society as a whole.  I say modern era because I have a hard time picturing such a thing happening in ancient times, but I suppose it IS possible (“I worry about the boy, Banafrit.  He spends all day messing around with those damned hieroglyphics!  When I was his age I was dragging stones to Giza.  Uphill!”).  From Rock and Roll to Mini-skirts and everything in-between there has always been some crazy thing “the kids” were in to that was simply an affront to the sensibilities of those who came before them.

The big villain on the block these days is video games, but I grew up in the 80’s during the height of the Saturday Morning Cartoon era.  Back then our parents were convinced that television was going to rot our brains, give us cancer, and turn us into pasty blobs who lived on nothing but junk food.

Turns out that, in some ways, our parents were right.

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Denny’s apparently has salty food

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HAMMYAs someone who has the great fortune of living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida I have ready access to what Ronan from VNV Nation refers to as one of the best goth clubs in the country – The Castle.  While I haven’t been in a while, I truly find that one of the greater pleasures in life is to head out there for a late night of dancing, drinking, and socializing with some of the finest people on the planet.

When 2:00 AM rolls around and they kick on the lights, though, I’m seldom in a mood to head home and call it a night.  Several hours of high energy booty shaking mixed with what is often an unwise combination of concoctions puts me in a mood for salty, greasy, goodness.  What better place to quench that desire than a 24 hour Denny’s?

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New obesity drug nears approval

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Red Pill/Blue PillOrexigen, a San Diego based pharmaceutical company, announced on Monday that a new drug designed to help patients overcome obesity had passed three clinical trials and was now one step closer to FDA approval.

Contrave combines buproprion and naltrexone, two drugs used to combat a variety of mental afflictions such as depression and addiction, to reduce food cravings in obese patients.  Instead of attempting to create feelings of fullness the drug works to curve the desire to eat simply as a reward or to feel better.

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Washington Doctor writes a prescription for American obesity

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I'm Just A Bill - Schoolhouse RockWith all the talk coming out of Washington these days about health care, and specifically the impact that obesity has an our rising health care costs as a nation, it is not difficult to imagine a time when our elected officials may see fit to try and regulate our waist lines.  We’ve written here about several incidents where the government has seemed to do just that.  From taxing sugary soft drinks to removing a morbidly obese child from his Mothers care, several states have taken a very hands-on approach to dealing with obesity.  With those kind of precedents being set it is only a matter of time before slippery slope logic dictates we will have some kind of federal intervention into our daily caloric intake.

Contrary to popular belief, though, not everything that comes out of Washington, D.C. is going to be the equivalent of the next $400 hammer.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the federal government is taking a closer look at what can be done about the obesity epidemic in America, and one doctor has outlined a plan that could really make a significant difference without infringing on our personal freedoms.

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Socially acceptable starvation diets

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Image courtesy of Ethan Hein

Image courtesy of Ethan Hein

One of the things that I hear often at my WeightWatchers.com® meetings is that those of us on program are not “dieting” but attempting to change our lifestyle.  There’s a very valid reason they try to make that distinction.  For most of us diet is a four letter word, albeit one you’re allowed to say on television (Link contains profanity and is NSFW).   If you tell the world you are on a diet not only are you letting everyone around you know that you are not comfortable with your current weight (and thus do not “love yourself for who you are”), you also open yourself up to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny in social situations (“Are you sure you should be eating THAT?”).   So instead of packaging their program as “diet” (and all the negative baggage that goes along with it) the folks at Weight Watchers instead choose to say they are promoting a healthy lifestyle change.

The positive labeling trend seems to be catching on, but some of these new “healthy lifestyle changes” are nothing more than good old fashioned starvation diets wrapped up in a pretty name.

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Treating Parkinsons Disease with the Wii Fit

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Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel

Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel

Health care is big business.  Just ask President Obama.  Even with our twenty-four hour news cycle being overrun with updates about the Iranian Elections or the latest round of tragic celebrity deaths, there is still almost daily coverage of the debate in Washington about the future of health care in America.  While there is a great deal of conflict over what exactly the cure is for our ailing health care system, it seems as though everyone agrees that something needs to be done to reign in the rate at which health care spending continues to grow.  If nothing changes the current estimates indicate that by 2017 health care expenses will top nearly $4.7 trillion dollars (nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product).

With all of that money floating around in the health care system it should not come as much of a shocker to learn that in the last 18 months exergames have generated nearly $2 Billion dollars in worldwide sales.  Despite our ever-expanding waist lines (or perhaps as a direct result of them) video game fans are flocking to fitness related video games like Wii Fit and EA SPORTS Active.

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Crazy Cupcake Lady is crazy

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the evil cupcakeThere’s nothing quite like the crazy of an extremist to make a movement look really bad.  From politics to religion and everything in between we are constantly bombarded with examples of people who take hold of an idea so fiercely that they actually do more harm than good for the cause they are trying to prop up.  These kind of people make great headlines and are, unfortunately, usually more interesting to read about than those of us who are trying to make rational arguments.

The proponents of healthy living are not immune from this phenomenon.

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