Adolescent Obesity Leads to Adult Obesity

Approximately two thirds of American adults are obese or overweight. More and more studies are being done to try to help doctors and people prevent or reverse this problem.

Now a new study has come out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that shows a direct link between adolescent obesity and the risk of severe obesity in adulthood.

In this study, almost 9000 young people, aged 12 to 21 were followed from 1996 to the present.

In this study 70% of the adolescents who were obese remained severely obese in adulthood. In addition another almost 8% of adolescents who were not severely obese became severely obese when they reached adulthood.
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Childhood Obesity and Vitamin D

A new University of Michigan study has shown that children who are deficient in vitamin D gained weight around their waist and gain weight more quickly than children who got enough vitamin D. The study was done by E Villamor and colleagues in Columbia.

Accumulation of fat around the abdomen can lead to what is called an "Apple body shape". This shape is linked to increased risk for heart disease, diabetes type 2, and other chronic degenerative diseases.

In this study the researchers followed over 470 schoolchildren from age 5 to 12, starting in 2006. The children were followed for about 30 months. The study looked at the vitamin D levels in the blood of children at the beginning of the study and then looked at the link between vitamin D and changes in three different indicators of body fat over the course of the study. Specifically they looked at body mass index, waist circumference, and scapular - to- triceps skinfold ratio.

Dr Villamor summarized his study by saying "We found that the kids with the lowest vitamin D levels at the beginning tended to gain weight faster than the kids with higher levels" He went on to say  that  children with the lowest vitamin D levels had more drastic increases in central body fat measures.

Diane Gilbert-Diamond, M.D., another of the authors said "Our findings suggest that low vitamin D status may put children at risk of obesity. This is significant because vitamin D insufficiency is highly prevalent across the globe and childhood obesity rates are dramatically increasing worldwide".

Dr Villamor went on to say "Interestingly, Bogota, Colombia, is in a subtropical zone where one may not expect to find a lot of vitamin D deficiency since the assumption is that sunlight is abundant there, but there could be many reasons people in subtropical climates may not get enough sun exposure."

My reply to this statement would be that Columbia is the same as the United States. Specifically parents rub sunblock on their children before they let them go out to play. The sunblock, as my readers know, also blocks the vitamin D rays of the sun. In addition, children spend much more time indoors than they did 50 years ago because of television and computer games.

Dr Villamor points out that "These findings should motivate some discussion on ways to enhance vitamin D status of children there, although it will be necessary to confirm in intervention studies whether improvements in vitamin D status decrease the risk of childhood obesity and early development of chronic diseases."

This means that we need prospective studies to prove that giving children vitamin D will help prevent overweight and obesity. Until the studies are done, as I frequently say, there is absolutely no harm in normalizing children's vitamin D blood levels by supplementation.

If the prospective studies were to show that there was NO benefit from vitamin D on obesity prevention, there would still be many other  benefits from the children taking the vitamin D.

Are you giving your children vitamin D? If they were overweight and you gave them vitamin D have you seen any benefit for their weight?

Children from birth should be getting supplementary vitamin D, as I discuss in my book.

REFERENCE
 

Why Does Vitamin D Prevent Heart Atacks?

Elina Hypponen, M.D., wrote one of the most profound articles showing
the importance of adequate vitamin D in childhood in preventing type
I diabetes. I have extensively written about her article in my book.

Now I am delighted to see that Dr. Hypponen has recently published
another landmark study that looks at vitamin D and heart disease.
Specifically, in this article she was studying how and why people
with deficient vitamin D have over a 200% higher risk of heart attack
compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

We know that there are vitamin D receptors in many aspects of the
cardiovascular system. This includes the blood vessels on the inside
of the coronary arteries as well as heart muscle cells themselves,
and the inner muscle lining of the coronary arteries.

In this article she specifically looks at some of the underlying
biochemical markers that predispose to heart disease, and their
relationship with vitamin D. In this study she used the information
from the nationwide 1958 British birth group. This consisted of over
6500 now middle-aged people.

Dr. Hypponen looked at the individual's blood levels of five
markers*  that predispose to heart disease. Some of these markers
were associated with inflammation which is known to be related to
heart disease. Other of the markers had to do with stickiness of the
blood, which affects the creation of blood clots that can lead to a
heart attack.

In summary the findings showed that current vitamin D status was
associated with three of the five markers that were evaluated. The
conclusion of the article was that this data suggests that vitamin D
status/intake may be important for maintaining the body's ability to
to prevent blood clots that lead to heart attack.

In this seminal study, I believe we are now beginning to understand
the mechanism of action and biochemistry of how this amazing molecule
we call vitamin D produces its benefit in protecting us from heart
attacks.

If you have people in your family who have heart disease or who have
had a heart attack, do you know if they have had their vitamin D
levels measured? How were their vitamin D levels? Are your loved ones
with heart disease taking vitamin D every day? Let me know your
thoughts.
*The 5 markers that were followed in this study are C-reactive
protein (CRP), fibrinogen, D-dimer, tissue plasminogen activator
(tPA) antigen, and von Willebrand factor (vWF)

Reference

Does Hormone Replacement Cause Breast Cancer-Part 2

In part 2 of this blog post I reprint with permission David Zava, Ph.D's article entitled Hormones and Breast Cancer: The Latest Findings from WHI.

In this article Dr Zava clarifies the differences between the chemical hormones and the bio-identical hormones. He shows that real human progesterone does not "have a cancer-promoting effect on breast cancer".

Please open the article links to the medical literature in his article and give copies of these articles to your doctors!

Here is Dr Zava's article:

Hormones and Breast Cancer: The Latest Findings from WHI
by Dr David Zava
 
I was sent a link to the Today Show, broadcast on October 20th which featured an interview with Dr. Nancy Snyderman, discussing further findings from the Women's Health Initiative Study (WHI), published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this week. This news may confuse your patients and I wanted to take this opportunity to explain the study and assure you this study does not include natural hormones, but refers to the combination of Premarin and Provera.

The experts stated that there is an increase in risk of death from breast cancer when you are taking the combination of estrogen and progestin. In this case, the drugs that were used were Premarin and Provera. Premarin is known as conjugated equine estrogens and is horse estrogen which has some similarities to human estrogen but is not the same. Provera is a progestin known as medroxyprogesterone acetate and is very different in function from natural progesterone.

"Experts" who are saying that synthetic progestins increase breast cancer risk are right, but, we've known that since 2002. Unfortunately, these same "experts" are now claiming an association of natural progesterone with breast cancer by default. They espouse that there is no clinical evidence to show natural progesterone is any safer than synthetic progestins. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect assumption and they have not done their homework. Natural progesterone has a much safer profile than all forms of synthetic progestins, not only for the breasts, but for nearly all tissues of the body, including the reproductive tissues, the cardiovascular systems, and the brain. There is a plethora of published literature on this subject.

For those who are unsure about the striking differences in safety profiles of synthetic progestins versus natural progesterone as regards breast cancer risk, several clinical trials have clearly shown the superiority of natural progesterone.

In a 2005 review of clinical studies comparing synthetic progestins to natural progesterone, Campagnoli and coauthors (J Steriod Biochem Mol Biol 96, 95-108)concluded that: "The balance of the in vivo evidence is that progesterone does not have a cancer-promoting effect on breast tissue. …..We therefore suggest that when HRT is indicated, preparations containing progesterone and not a synthetic progestin should be used, according to a sequential or cyclic-combined regimen. In this way the risk of endometrial cancer is minimized without increasing the risk of BC."

In another 2005 clinical trial comparing synthetic progestins to the natural progesterone, Fournier and coworkers (Int J Cancer 114, 448-454) found that: "The risk was significantly greater than p0.001 with HRT containing synthetic progestins than with HRT containing micronized progesterone, the relative risk being 1.4 and 0.9, respectively." Yes, that's right; progesterone users had a lower risk.

So why are the news media confusing synthetic progestins with natural progesterone? Too often information such as this is streamlined in mainstream media by those who have power, money and the ability to shout through the megaphone the loudest. We know all too often that large pharmaceutical companies have a strangle hold on funding for universities, who gets grants, what gets published, whose opinions get press, the success of women's health organizations and journals they represent. Unfortunately, because of this ability to present one-sided research in such a commanding way, it is not unusual that the news media doesn't spend much time researching the science and the evidence based data and studies that are available; and in this case, available about the difference between progestins and natural progesterone as well as the benefits of natural progesterone.

The decision on natural hormone therapy is one between a patient and physician; you cannot extrapolate what happens in the body using Premarin and Provera to discuss what happens in the body with its own natural hormones. Natural hormones, when properly balanced, allow the body to function at its optimal level.

Thank goodness for women's intuition that senses right from wrong.

 

Dr Zava's Original Article from his ZRT website

Diabetes Rates Surge in the US-How is Your Body Weight?

Diabetes is a increasingly frequent disease in the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control currently estimate that one in 10 Americans have diabetes currently. This amounts to 24 million Americans.

Now a new article that was published by the journal Population Health Metrics  is estimating that by the year 2050, one in three Americans could be diabetic if the current trends continue.

As most of my readers know, diabetes is a disorder of the body's blood sugar. In diabetes, the body cannot regulate the sugar level and blood sugar levels go up.  Long-term elevated sugar levels lead to increasing damage to many organs from the eyes to the kidneys to the nerves. Diabetics often die of one of the complications of this chronically elevated blood sugar.
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