Overweight Will Killing You?

There’s good news and bad news about the nation’s health.
Good: More than 80 percent of adults 25 and older always buckle their seat belts—four times the rate two decades ago. It’s saving 10,000 lives a year.

Bad: A more important figure has reached 80 percent: adults 25 and older who are overweight. And the surplus fat is killing far more of us than seat belts are saving, because extra pounds carry greater health risks than most of us know—especially if you’re a couch potato or have a potbelly.
Is your weight risky? And if so, what’s the easiest way to drop the pounds? Here’s what science says.

Is Your Fat over?
Technically, the problem is not overweight but overfat. Some chunky folks really are “all muscle”—although you’re more likely to run into them at a weightlifters’ convention than on the street. Women are overfat when their weight is more than 33- to 36-percent fat; men when it’s over 20- to 25-percent fat. (The lower percentage is for people under 40, the higher for those 60 and older.)

It’s hard to measure your fat percentage, however, unless you own an electronic body-fat scale ($60 to $120). Otherwise, you need a special test. The most reliable involves weighing yourself under water, where your buoyancy reveals how much of you is muscle, skin, and bones and how much is not. Another test measures the fat beneath your skin by pinching you with spring-loaded calipers.

Over the past few decades, Americans have been bulking up in amazing numbers. Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled and overweight has climbed 40 percent. Two-thirds of U.S. adults are now officially overweight, and half of those are obese. Among major industrialized nations, we are now officially the fattest.
Overweight used to be a mark of poverty and ignorance, but this is changing. Obesity rates have risen faster among the affluent and college-educated. Sex differences, too, are changing. Nowadays, women—especially in middle age—are almost as likely to be overweight as men.

Geographical skews haven’t changed. The skinniest people still live in New England and the mountain states, the tubbiest in the South. As of 2006 (latest reliable figures), the fattest state is Mississippi, with a 29.5-percent obesity rate; the leanest Colorado, at 16.9 percent.

Public-health authorities blame America’s weight gain on three trends:
• Food is plentiful and cheap. Thanks to globalized competition and more efficient farming, processing, packaging, and retailing, the cost of feeding an average family (in inflation-adjusted dollars) is 5- to 10-percent lower than 30 years ago. Meanwhile, the number of items in a modern supermarket has passed 30,000.
• People are busier. A freer labor market compels people to work more hours per week. As a result, they eat oftener in restaurants and out of packages—where the seller, not the buyer, controls the helpings. They also have less room on their schedules for burning off those calories. Three-quarters of adults get no regular exercise.
• Portions are bigger. Because food is cheaper than labor, marketers find it easier to raise profits by pushing bigger helpings than by serving more meals. That’s why “super-sizing” has swept the fast-food industry. But homemade portions are bigger, too. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the average fast-food burger has grown from 6.1 ounces to 7.2 ounces in 20 years—but Mom’s burger has swelled even more, from 5.7 to 8.4 ounces. Meanwhile, the average dessert has risen from 4.2 to 4.8 ounces
An Expensive Problem
Most people know that obesity can lead to heart attack. Many understand that fatty foods contribute to cancer. But obesity carries many other risks. Here’s a partial list:

• • Diabetes • Heart disease • Stroke
• Hypertension
• Gallbladder disease
• Osteoarthritis
• Sleep apnea
• Asthma
• Cancer
• High cholesterol
• Menstrual problems
• Birth defects
• etc

Your Overall Risk
The American Obesity Association has developed a one-minute “Weight Wellness Profile” that weighs all of the factors discussed above. Most people who score higher than 3 in the profile could benefit from weight loss, additional exercise, or both. To get your profile,
Best Weight-Loss Method
As many studies have shown, quick weight loss and fad diets don’t work. They may yield amazing results, but only for a few weeks or months. In more than 90 percent of cases, the weight comes back. And according to some studies, repeating this cycle may be riskier than staying overweight.

The only way to lose weight permanently is slowly, by lowering your calorie intake a little or burning a few more calories in exercise. Getting more calories from carbohydrate or protein and fewer from fat may also help, partly because 100 calories worth of protein or carbs is a lot bulkier and fills you up better than 100 calories worth of fat.

Lowering your fat intake and eating less or exercising more will take a little effort at first—just as wearing your seat belt did. But in time, it will be a habit instead of a chore. And you’ll be the picture of health.

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Control Your Neclace Medicine

Georgia Institute of Technology’s researchers find a solution for the one in three adults who fail to take their medicines as prescribed by their doctors, as well as for everyone else who occasionally forgets: a sensor necklace that records the exact time and date when specially-designed pills are swallowed, and reminds the user if any doses are being missed.
“Forgetfulness is a huge problem, especially among the elderly, but so is taking the medication at the wrong time, stopping too early or taking the wrong dose,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Studies show that drug noncompliance costs the country billions of dollars each year as a result of re-hospitalization, complications, disease progression and even death.”

Ghovanloo and graduate student Xueliang Huo have designed a sensor necklace that records the date and time a pill is swallowed, which they hope will increase drug compliance and decrease unnecessary health care costs. The device could also be used to ensure that subjects in clinical drug trials take the study medications as directed by the research team. The details of the proof-of-concept device were published in the December 2007 issue of the IEEE Sensors Journal.
The necklace, called MagneTrace, contains an array of magnetic sensors that could be used to detect when specially-designed medication containing a tiny magnet passes through a person’s esophagus. And for persons who may not want to wear a necklace, MagneTrace sensors can be incorporated into a patch attached to the chest.
The date and time the user swallowed the pill can be recorded on a handheld wireless device, such as a smartphone, carried on the user’s body. The information can then be sent to the patient’s doctor, caregiver or family member over the internet. The device can notify both the patient and the patient’s doctor if the prescribed dosage is not taken at the proper time.
According to a 2005 Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Health Care Poll, one in three U.S. adults who had been prescribed drugs to take on a regular basis reported that they did not follow the doctor-recommended course of treatment, with two-thirds reporting that they simply forgot to take their medication

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Detect Diseases on the Breath by Laser

A team join institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, has shown that by sampling a person’s breath with laser light they can detect molecules in the breath that may be markers for diseases like asthma or cancer. While many studies have been done to showcase the potential of optical technologies for breath analysis, the JILA approach takes an important step toward demonstrating the full power of optics for this prospective medical application. Their findings are published in the latest issue of the Optical Society of America’s open-access journal Optics Express.

The technique, called cavity-enhanced direct optical frequency comb spectroscopy, may one day allow doctors to screen people for certain diseases simply by sampling their breath. “This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once,” says Jun Ye, who led the research. He is a fellow of JILA, a fellow of NIST and a professor adjoint at CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics.
Optical frequency comb spectroscopy was developed in the 1990s by Ye’s JILA colleague John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch of Germany’s Max-Planck Institute (they shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Roy J. Glauber for their invention). In the paper, Michael Thorpe, a graduate research assistant, Ye, and their colleagues describe the novel application of this technique to breath analysis. Optical comb spectroscopy is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath, Ye says, but it is also sensitive enough to find those rarest molecules that may be markers of specific diseases.

Every time we breathe in, we inhale a complex mixture of gasses—mostly nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, but also traces of other gasses, such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Each time we exhale, we blow out a slightly different mixture with less oxygen, more carbon dioxide, and a rich collection of more than a thousand types of other molecules—most of which are present only in trace amounts.

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Remove Your Toxin With Detox

What is your answer with this queries. Do you smoke,drink alcohol? have the habit of taking sugar/salt mixed with your food? If your answer is an ‘yes’ then that’s indicated you are entertaining toxic waste in your body. Detox your body to remove the toxins for they may impede your weight loss and may force you to retain water content within your body.
The toxicants that get collected in your body is the root cause of your frequent illnesses like headaches, common cold, cough, skin irritation, allergies and afflictive muscles and any other unhealthy.The effective and best solution to this problem of yours is to detox your body using ‘Body Wrap’
Definition of Body Wrap is the process of wrapping your unclad body with binds of cloth soaked in oil followed by exercising and squeezing the body to detox your body which assists in the process of removal of toxins.
The process of body wrap to detox your body involves the following

• Unclad your body. Exclude thongs and brazier
• Wrap your body with binds of cloth
• Shove your body using the tight bandages and allow the beautician to squeeze your body
• Perform a few simple exercises to release the toxins present
• Undo the wrappings and rinse solution
• Measurements taken at different points in your body before and after you detox your body will reveal the loss of 6-20inches

Drink as much water as you can before and after you detox your body with body wraps to give out the toxins.

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Allergies and Asthma Relationship

Do you have both allergies and asthma ? you may wonder what they have in familiar besides a irritating ability to make you miserable. A lot, as it turns out. The most common type of asthma in the United States is Allergy-induced asthma, 60% of people with asthma have the allergic type.
What is relation between allergies and asthma ? its simple thing, allergies can cause or encourage asthma. Many people with allergic asthma, breathing in substances such as pollen, mold, dust mites and animal dander triggers the inflammation and swelling of the airways, leading to symptoms of asthma.

The lining of the nose and the lining of the airways are related and are affected similarly by the allergic inflammatory process. Allergies are caused by the production of an antibody called IgE. The IgE antibodies cause a cascade of reactions in the body, including itchy skin or scratchy eyes or, for some, tightening of the airways. Simply put, if your immune system produces IgE antibody toward cat proteins, you’re said to be allergic to cats. Exposure to cats triggers inflammation and swelling of the lining of the nose, bronchial tubes or both.

Some studies suggest that handling of allergic rhinitis actually improves asthma. Allergen immunotherapy (desensitization allergy shots) is a type of allergy treatment that can significantly improve asthma. In addition, if you have allergic asthma, reducing your exposure to the allergic substance can reduce your asthma problems and in some cases, completely control it.

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