More Belly News

The word "belly" is funny, isn't it? Well, bellies are no laughing matter, and research continues to support the fact that it's unhealthy to sport one, even if they make you look jolly.

There is research from Kaiser Permanente that suggests a link between bellies during a person's middle age and a later Alzheimer's risk. There has already been a link established between belly size and increased coronary heart disease risk.

Drudge linked to the Associated Press article on My Way News.

MQOTD

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

Tax Time!

If you're using TurboTax to file your taxes this year, be aware that it has become a little more difficult to deduct Health Savings Account contributions from your gross income on Form 1040.

This comes from Inside Consumer-Directed Care, via AIS Health.com -

"Searching TurboTax’s help files, consultant and former White House health policy advisor Roy Ramthun found the answer — HSAs are addressed under 'misc. income' rather than 'misc. deductions.' 'I’m not sure why TurboTax would put it this way,' says Ramthun, of Silver Spring, Md.-based HSA Consulting Services. 'I would think it would be more obvious that it is ‘misc. deductions.'"

Worst...Food...Ever

If you eat healthy most of the time, then you are allowed to go out and have an awful(ly delicious) meal once in a while at a place like Chili's or The Cheesecake Factory. But don't do it often if you want to be thin and healthy. The meals at such restaurants have high fat and calorie content, as well as unhealthy levels of sodium. That's why the food tastes so good.

So, Men's Health has a new list of specific foods to avoid at popular American eateries. It's called The 20 Worst Foods in America. It helps to keep in mind, before ordering the Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing, that they contain 2,900 calories and 182 grams of fat. Ha ha! 182 grams of fat??? Do you realize how much that is? A Whopper with Cheese has 64 grams, so the Aussie Cheese Fries have practically three times that amount. And 2,900 calories is way more than a whole day's worth of calories that you should consume. How about this for a thought? You'd have to run a marathon to burn off that number.

Now, the best part about this list is that Men's Health mentions a healthier alternative. It's part of their "Eat This, Not This" series.

I Hope This Doesn't Affect Their Delicious Cream Pies...

From today's Boston Globe -

Boston Trans Fat Ban Receives Final Approval

Ah, Push It

It's nice to see that this is the most popular article on the New York Times' website.

"Based on national averages, a 40-year-old woman should be able to do 16 push-ups and a man the same age should be able to do 27. By the age of 60, those numbers drop to 17 for men and 6 for women. Those numbers are just slightly less than what is required of Army soldiers who are subjected to regular push-up tests."

I Think This Is Campaign Issue #2 (After Iraq)

From Fortune Magazine -

Why McCain Has the Best Health-care Plan

"Here's where [McCain's plan] gets interesting. Employers would no longer be able to buy more health care with $9,000 of their employees' money than the workers could buy on their own. The raison d'être for corporate health benefits would vanish. Employers have another compelling reason to pass the ball to the employee: While wages are rising around 3% ayear, their health-care costs are growing at three times that rate. 'I predict that most companies would stop paying for health care in three to four years,' says Robert Laszewski, a consultant who works with corporate benefits managers. Hence, an employer that pays $9,000 for your benefits would simply pack an extra $9,000 a year into your paycheck. (Why? Because in a competitive labor market, companies would have to hand over that cash to employees or risk losing them.) So you'd have $6,000 after tax, plus the $5,000 family credit, to buy insurance. That's $11,000 in new cash that employees can set aside for health care."

"The [Democrat] standard benefits package isn't just a bad idea because it will substantially raise the cost to taxpayers. It will also make it virtually impossible for Americans to buy insurance tailored to their needs. Suppose you're one of those 25-year-olds. You probably don't want to spring for a full-blown plan that covers old-age diseases like Alzheimer's and would rather save some money and go with a low-premium, high-deductible plan. But the Democrat approach requires that any competing plans be "actuarily equivalent" (Clinton's term) to the federal employee plan - which translates as a generous minimum standard for health insurance. 'With that mandate, you rule out high-deductible plans,' says Gruber. 'It would make it very difficult to design one that would qualify.'"

"The Democrat proposals have some additional drawbacks. First, the Dems want to heavily regulate the insurance industry by limiting everything from profits to marketing expenses. If the earning power of insurers is determined by federal regulators, their pricing will be too, and thus they will evolve into the equivalent of public utilities. Would you rather have medical prices set by fiat or by nationwide market competition?"

"Second, the Democrat plan exacerbates the fundamental problem in the American health-care system, which is that no one has any incentive to care about price. (How much is that MRI center charging for your ankle scan? Who cares? Just hand over the $50 co-pay and never you mind.) Creating a huge new medical superstructure would shift far more spending to third-party providers, chiefly the federal government, giving consumers even less incentive to concern themselves with the price of an MRI - or any other service, from an elective wart-removal procedure to a life-saving heart bypass. 'The Clinton and Obama plans would enormously increase total health-care spending, but disguise the extra costs by shifting them to taxpayers,' says John Sheils of the Lewin Group, a research firm that does statistical modeling for health-care plans."

Live to Be 100

Sounds good to me.

Fat on the Inside

I've been thinking a lot about this since attending a talk on childhood obesity at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, as well as the author of "Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World", discussed the fact that doctors and scientists are now finding fat around internal organs, like the liver, and that this will be a serious health problem in the near future. It was the first I'd heard of it, but it wouldn't have been if I'd read an article that my brother sent me back in May (he sends me a lot of articles).

Futurist Ray Kurzweil publishes a newsletter that has all kinds of cutting edge information, and in his May 14th issue, he includes an article called "Thin People Can Be Fat on the Inside". This basically says it all -

"According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. “The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined,” said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council."

I watched an episode of Penn & Teller's show on Showtime recently; one in which they sought to disprove the obesity epidemic. The argument they proposed did not convince me, and one of the main reasons for that was a physical fitness test they conducted in which the control was a very obviously out of shape guy, but one who happened to be thin(ish). He didn't win a single event. Wow, Penn, you're some sort of scientist. The obvious fact is that the guy didn't exercise, so someone who had a little more heft to him, but who was in better physical shape, beat him in various foot races and other events.

The point is that you need a proper diet and regular exercise to be healthy. We'll just keep beating that drum.