Category Archives: health

Think Thin! Behavior Control of Dieting

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Don’t look in this article for menus, calorie counters or weight tables. Here, instead, is a scientific technique that can change your eating habits for the rest of your life—and become the key to making that life last longer.
The technique is called behavior control, and is based on the reward-and-punishment ideas of B. F. Skinner and the many psychologists• who followed him. I came upon it quite by accident. The year was 1956. 1 weighed 190 pounds. For a five-foot, ten-inch man at the age of 30, 1 was 35 pounds overweight. My father, too, had been overweight by 35 pounds when he died of a coronary heart attack in 1948, at the age of 44. His diet had been rich in high-calorie, high-fat foods, as mine was. As a science reporter, I understood well the relationship between overweight and his misfortune.
On the day my father died, I arrived a few minutes after his last heartbeat. The picture of his final agony was burned into my mind: jaw drawn back, mouth slightly open, skin gray. I shall never forget it.
I recount that sad, terrifying moment because of b curious phenomenon that occurred when I began to try to lose weight eight years later. Lunchtime. A cafeteria. Like an addict, I am drawn to the hot table with its corned beef and french-fried potatoes. At the sight of corned beef, I actually feel my jaw working. And then, an image of my father’s face as I last saw it flashes before me. I am appalled. I try to turn off the picture by moving away from the hot table. I take a salad. The picture returns. I shout silently to myself: “Stop!” I try to think of something pleasant: my forthcoming trip to Europe—anything to get that hospital scene off the screen of my mind. But note:
I ended up with the salad rather than the corned beef. And it happened day after day.
Unconsciously, I had altered my eating habits through behavior control. I did not hear about the technique until many years later. Indeed, it was not until the I 960s that psychologists showed that human beings can use thoughts to reward and punish themselves in order to bring unwanted behavior under control. And only more recently have the psychologists applied these techniques to eating behavior.
The use of thoughts as reward or punishment is enormously convenient if you can make it work, because thoughts are always available. However, each person must find the technique that fits his own life and convenience. And he must use it in a formal and systematic way—that is, set it up as if it were an operating manual for driving a car.
Let’s analyze how it worked with me. It depended on the fact that eating is automatic, my eating behavior and yours being governed by signals—stimuli. The sight of food is obviously a signal to start eating. Hunger may also be triggered by a glance at the clock, a TV commercial, a feeling of anxiety. On that day back in 1956:
I. I am confronted with a stimulus (a signal)—the corned
beef.
2. The stimulus initiates an automatic response—I start to reach for the corned beef.
3. At that moment, the unpleasant thought (punishment), the image of my father, appears in my mind.
4. Instead of the corned beef, I take the salad—a desired behavior.
5. Because the image of my father is disturbing, I shut it off by shouting, “Stop!” in my mind. I must do this or else the punishing image will overlap with the desired behavior and perhaps stop that, too.
6. Finally, a pleasant thought as a reward. I used a trip to Europe, imagining that picture immediately after—not before—the desired behavior. The sooner rewards are given, the better they work.
7. 1 move rapidly away from the food table, so as not to let the persistence of the corned-beef signal overwhelm me.
Such a system can be adapted to your own situation. By using thoughts in this way consistently and—it should be emphasized—over a long period, you will instill a new eating pattern. And the result will be a “permanent” weight loss.
The first concrete step in formalizing your own diet change is to make sure you can get your imagination under conscious control. You need to learn three skills: conjuring up an unpleasant thought, stopping that thought (remarkably, imagining yourself shouting, “Stop!” will momentarily clear it away), conjuring up a pleasant thought. Practice this sequence in your mind while lying down.
If you cannot imagine a scene that is sufficiently punishing,
perhaps one of these will do:
• An image that will make you nauseated, such as a bowl of ice cream covered with maggots.
• Someone you know who is so obese that he or she disgusts you. Then let that person’s face dissolve and replace it with
your own.
• Rolls of fat around your abdomen come off in your hands like sticky, hot taffy—and then grow back instantly.
The essence of such negative thoughts must be that they are sufficiently horrifying to deter you, even momentarily, from undesirable eating behavior. Indeed, the rougher a negative thought, the better will be its effect. Heart-attack victims often have no problem losing weight initially, because they unconsciously use scenes of themselves in the hospital or dead to deter eating behavior.
in the punishment-stop-reward sequence, the punishing thought loses its potency if you do not reward yourself—at once—for the desired action. The following scenes are suggestions for thought rewards:
• Walking arm in arm, thin and handsome or beautiful, with someone you love.
• A thin you standing before a mirror in a bathing suit.
• Playing with your children on a smooth, green lawn.
Whatever image you use, it must give you great pleasure; it should almost have the quality of a daydream.

Once you get your imagination under control, you are now ready to put the technique of reward/punishment to work. As far as your diet itself goes, it really makes little difference what plan you use—counting calories, restricting or eliminating certain foods, or following a specific menu. The key is to be consistent. If you count calories, count them every day and eat a variety of nutritious foods. You must end up each day, however, having eaten less food than is required to keep the energy balance in your body.
Unfortunately, habit often overrules plan. Calorie-counters find themselves wolfing down a piece of apple pie when they “could not resist it any longer.” When they count up the calories later in the day, the thought of having “broken the diet” is so punishing that they give up counting. But remember that in the reward/punishment system, there is no such thing as “breaking the diet.” Instead, you are concerned with achieving control at the moment of eating. Occasional failures are not critical; the idea is to adhere to the method more often than not.
To keep track of your food intake, I suggest you make a chart. A graph that shows a line of what your basic weight loss should be over a period of time will suffice. (Don’t try to lose more than a pound or two a week.) Just remember as you go along to make another line on the chart of what your actual weight loss is. Such a chart has some reward/punishment features. For instance, you are about to reach for a slice of pie; in your mind you picture the chart with the line representing your actual weight crossing above the projected weight-loss line; the punishing image will deter you. Even without its psychological utility, the chart is essential as a method of monitoring the amount of food you eat.
After you have chosen your dieting plan—calories, food restriction or menus—and set up a chart, you still face the major problem of handling eating behavior in the presence of a stimulus. Learn to recognize the external signals that trigger your eating. Keep a diary in which you list for each eating occasion what happened to start you eating. Then develop tactics for avoiding these stimuli. If a commercial acts as stimulus, never have food near the TV set, or better, never have a high- calorie, ready-to-eat food in the house.
But behavior control is more powerful than avoiding stimuli,
because every refusal increases your resistance. To review the
sequence once more: stimulus, television commercial, for in-stance; food desire: punishment thought, a fat person—your’ self—unable to get off a sinking ship; alternate activity, you pick up a book or a magazine; stop the punishment thought; pleasant thought. walking along a beach, for instance, held long enough so that the eating stimulus (the commercial) ends,
Each success makes the next effort easier, because the power of the stimulus to make you feel hungry will be reduced—and that will reduce your food intake.
How well does all this work? Experiments indicate that reward/punishment methods can cause weight loss. If you are more than 50 percent overweight, you probably will need the help of a doctor and perhaps a behavior therapist to set things up for you and to keep you on track, If you are 15 percent to 50 percent overweight, you will find behavior changes on you own difficult but not impossible. People who are around 15. percent overweight have the best chance of changing on their. own, using the reward/punishment schemes.
They worked well for me. I now weigh 157. I’ve lost 33 pounds—and I never felt better in my life.

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Emotions And Health

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“For Two months I’ve had these spells,” Fran Wilson told the heart specialist. “1 get short of breath. My heart beats like a hammer and unevenly. I’m dizzy and I tremble. My chest hurts. ‘ice I’ve fainted. My doctor says that my blood pressure and electrocardiogram are abnormal.”
“Was there any upset in your routine before the spells began?” the specialist asked.
“My husband was transferred to Arizona,” said Fran. ‘1 stayed behind to let the children finish the school year. Since he left, I haven’t slept well. Do you think fatigue brought out my heart trouble’
“I suspect we’ll find,” said the specialist, “that you don’t have heart trouble at all. I suspect that your illness is caused by emotion.”
Although the doctor proved correct, Fran was not imagining her ailments. Nor was she mentally ill in the usual sense of the
phrase. Emotional stress can produce real illness—true changes
in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people.
And this phenomenon is amazingly common. Many specialists
agree that psychogenic (emotion-caused) disorders account for a large percentage of Visits to the doctor.
Physicians have long known that the mind could make the
body ill. But they did not know how to differentiate between
physically caused illness and that caused by emotional stress.

Today, answers to this problem are beginning to appear. And many doctors are using this new information as regularly as they employ their stethoscopes and tongue depressors.
Fran Wilson’s case illustrates one of the easiest means of recognizing such ills: identifying characteristic “clusters” of physical symptoms which often point to emotional causes. Since Fran’s spells resembled a common cluster called “neurocirculatory asthenia,” the heart specialist tried a simple test. For two minutes he had her breathe deeply and rapidly. She grew dizzy. Her heart pounded. She gasped that she was having an attack.
When she had rested, the doctor explained: “Those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breathing produces many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen. Hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety. Yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alant.”
Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband. “I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” Fran admitted to the doctor. “When I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left—the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight—I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still there.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.
Everyone knows that the mind evokes certain automatic responses from the body. Think about food and you salivate. Words or thoughts can prepare sexual organs for function, and cause a blush or goose-flesh. But more serious effects can be wrought by emotion. Take the case of Ruth Chadwick.
Four times Ruth had conceived a child but miscarried. On her fifth pregnancy, the obstetrician asked Ruth how she felt about motherhood. He learned that, though she wanted a child, girlhood tales of the rigors of labor and terrified her. The doctor decided to let Ruth talk out her fears at each prenatal visit.

With no other treatment, Ruth delivered a healthy full-term baby.
Why? Researchers at the University of Colorado have said that a woman fearful of pregnancy might, after weeks or months of carrying a baby, produce special hormones of a type normally produced only at the end of pregnancy. They cause contractions, dilate the opening of the cervix, and bring about birth. Indeed, many women like Ruth Chadwick, who habitually miscarry, may need only a little office counseling to carry a child to term.
How can thought work such changes? There is a pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reactions to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemicals that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism, it yields yet another chemical that regulates adrenal secretion.
The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. “We have just opened the door,” says one researcher, “and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.”
With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion.
One such patient was Jean Becker, whose low back pain had grown steadily worse for a year. with no apparent cause. The symptoms seemed to suggest a ruptured spinal disc, which sometimes cannot be seen on X ray. During an office visit her doctor gave her a 20-question test. When he had scored it, he asked, “Have you been depressed lately?”
“Ever since a year ago, when my father died,” she said. “Mother died when I was small, and Dad brought me up alone.
Although my husband and children give me plenty of family,
without Dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.”

The doctor gave her anti-depressant pills and told her to
come in for a chat every few days. Within a week Jean’s back
pain had disappeared. Moreover, the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband
was too occupied with his business to give her much attention.
Only her father had seemed to depend on her.
When the situation was explained to Jean’s husband and
children, they’ quickly gave her the assurance of love she needed, and the pills could be stopped. Had the back pain persisted once Jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.
One test devised by doctors at Duke University. Durham, N.C., sought out unexplained fatigue, lack of sex interest, loss of weight, constipation, hopelessness, feelings of uselessness, difficulty in making decisions and restlessness. All of us sometimes have such feelings, of course. The key to the Duke test is whether a number of such factors are present much of the time. Sleep disturbance is one of the prime clues: the person with a psychogenic disorder is likely to wake early in the morning or during the night and have a chronic feeling of fatigue.
Sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. In one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four were found to have recently suffered some major loss—loved ones, jobs, homes. Even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble. The tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place. More- over, susceptibility to minor illnesses, such as colds, may be caused by small emotional stresses.
Are doctors other than psychiatrists really able to handle
such emotional problems? Numerous experiences show that
they are And some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates Most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patient as psychiatrists do. But so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. They need, primarily, ye- assurance that their ills can be dealt with.
As doctors learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psychogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as
always, must rest with the patient. He should make an effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. He can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. He should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. The heroic view that “everything is just fine” may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know.

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Microwave ovens unsafe for kids: Study

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Microwave ovens pose a serious safety hazard to young children. Researchers from America studied 140 children below 5 years of age who were admitted with scald burns to investigate the mechanism of significant scald burns and to discover insights into prevention, Health News reported.

Two types of patterns of injuries were discovered one was burns due to water heaters and the other due to microwave ovens.

It was found that, out of 140 children with scald injuries, 118 children had unintentional injuries. Of those unintentional injuries 14 were tap water scalds and 104 were non-tap water scalds.

Out of non-tap water scalds, 94 scalds were related to hot cooking or drinking liquids. Nine children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years were scalded after opening a microwave oven and removing the hot substance themselves.

Seventeen children were scalded while an older child 7 to 14 years of age, was cooking or carrying the scalding substance or supervising the younger child.

Efforts to prevent scald injuries focus on asking parents to turn down their water heaters so that water temperature never exceeds 120 degrees.

For injuries caused due to microwave, it was suggested to install mechanisms to prevent children from opening a microwave after something had been heated to prevent injuries. It could be difficult to keep young children away from kitchen hazards, especially if an adult is alone at home and trying to cook dinner.

Tap water scalds represent just a fraction of scald injuries overall; but hot foods or liquids from microwave ovens were the fourth leading cause of scald injuries in children under 5 years old.

The researchers suggested that parents should teach their children that the microwave is a potential source of danger as much as the stove is.

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Fatty food can help improve exam result during exams

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Studying for exams? Remember to load yourself with fatty food before you attempt the test, for a new study says that it could boost your results.

An international team has found that indulging in a fatty meal after studying for exam could help in remembering the facts as fat produces a hormone which aids the brain in cementing short-term memories into long-term ones, BBC TV reported.

Researchers, led by Daniele Piomelli of California University, have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment on rodents.

The team trained rats to complete two tasks — avoid an area that gave them a shock, and find a platform in a pool of water.

Immediately after the training, they injected some of the rats with oleoylethanolamide — a chemical produced in the small intestine of vertebrates which creates a sense of fullness after eating fat.

When the rats were retested one or two days later, the ones that received OEA performed better, suggesting they had stronger memories of their training.

More experiments with the rats showed OEA activates the same areas of the brain that mediate the formation of emotionally charged memories in humans, which are more vivid than typical memories.

“The findings make sense from an evolutionary perspective. When foraging animals find a fatty meal, they do well to remember exactly where and how they found it.

Since humans also produce OEA, there is a good chance that it boosts our memory too.

“OEA is only produced after eating a healthy unsaturated fat called oleic acid, so a cheeseburger after a night of cramming may not work — try food with olive oil or soybean oil,” Piomelli said.

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Swine flu vaccine could be ready soon: US researcher

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A US researcher at work developing a vaccine for the swine flu said Thursday he hopes to have it ready for testing in mice in two to three weeks.

Purdue University professor Suresh Mittal said the vaccine could be ready for production in a few months.

“We would like to have a vaccine in two to three weeks to start testing in mice,” said Mittal, a professor of comparative pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mittal and collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use a method he developed for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu to accelerate work on the H1N1 swine flu.

They will use a common cold virus to carry a gene of the H1N1 flu virus and stimulate cells to create both antibodies and cell-based protection that will guard against mutated forms of the flu virus.

“The adenovirus is incapable of replicating and does not seem to cause disease in humans,” Mittal said in a press release.

“That makes it a suitable virus to work with for flu vaccines.”

The vaccine Mittal created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

A number of different institutions, both private and public, are working on the development of a vaccine for swine flu.

The latest WHO figures show 2,371 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infections have been reported by 24 countries, not including Brazil and Argentina which reported their first cases later Thursday. Forty-six people have died; 44 of them in Mexico and two in the United States.

“If things go well, and we achieve full scale production, it will be several months until the vaccine will be available,” a spokesman for the CDC cautioned.

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Blood thinner plus aspirin can cut strokes: study

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:Combining an anti-plaque forming drug with aspirin could cut the risk of strokes and heart attacks by more than 20 percent, a new study said on Tuesday.

Plavix, known under the generic name of clopidogrel, is used to stop the platelets in blood from coagulating and forming clots.

Researchers combined it with aspirin, in clinical trials known as ACTIVE-A of 7,554 patients, to show that it could help patients with a trial fibrillation (AF) who are unable to take other blood thinning medications such as warfarin.

“The purpose of the ACTIVE-A trial was to determine if the addition of clopidogrel to aspirin would reduce major vascular events and stroke in patients with AF at an acceptable risk of increased haemorrhage,” said Stuart Connolly, from Ontario’s McMaster University.

Oral anticoagulants such as warfarin and aspirin have been the only therapies proved effective so far in treating patients suffering from atrial fibrillation, in which the heart’s two upper chambers, the atria, quiver instead of beating effectively.

This increases the risk of the blood clotting or pooling in the chambers, which in turn could trigger a heart attack or stroke.

“For the first time in 20 years, there is a new treatment for atrial fibrillation,” Connolly told the annual conference of the American College of Cardiology in Orlando.

According to the American Heart Association, some 2.2 million Americans suffer from atrial fibrillation and often need to be fitted with a pacemaker.

But many of them cannot be treated with warfarin to stop blood clots forming because it increases the risk of an internal haemorrhage by up to 70 percent.

The study found that a combination of clopidogrel and aspirin reduced major vascular events by 11 percent, including a 28 percent reduction in stroke and a 23 percent reduction in myocardial infarction.

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Omega-3 of no added benefit for heart patients: study

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Taking supplements of Omega-3, the fatty acids found in fish, showed no added benefits for heart attack patients, a German study found on Monday, contradicting previous research.

“The Omega trial found no significant differences in the rates of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death or death from any cause among patients assigned to guidelines-based optimal medical care alone or optimal medical care plus Omega-3 fatty acids,” the study said.

It was unveiled at the 58th conference of the American College of Cardiology which has been meeting since Saturday in Orlando, Florida.

But it goes against the findings of earlier studies which have said Omega-3 extracts can prolong the lives of heart attack patients.

The study authors said, however, that those studies had been conducted when the treatment for heart conditions was not as advanced as it is today.

“In our study, we saw no beneficial effect. In patients who are already taking optimal medical therapy, cardiac event rates become very low and Omega-3 do not further improve them,” said Jochen Senges, a professor of cardiology at the Heart Center Ludwigshafen, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

The study involved 3,827 patients from 104 German hospitals, heart centers and university hospitals.

Between three to 14 days after suffering a heart attack, patients were randomly prescribed one year’s treatment with highly purified Omega-3 fatty acids or a placebo.

“It would be incorrect to say that Omega-3 fatty acids are not effective, but we could not find any additional benefits after optimizing medical therapy,” Senges said.

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‘Superpill’ may cut heart disease: study

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Healthy people could cut their risk of heart disease in half with a new ‘super pill’ that combines low doses of aspirin and drugs that lower blood pressure and cholesterol, a study said Monday.

“We believe that the polypill probably has the potential to reduce heart disease by 60 percent and stroke by 50 percent,” lead investigator Salim Yusuf told reporters at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, where the study was presented. “The thought that people might be able to take a single pill to reduce multiple cardiovascular risk factors has generated a lot of excitement. It could revolutionize heart disease prevention as we know it,” Yusuf said.

In the three-month study cardiologists compared the impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate of the combination “polypill” and the medications that make it up, taken individually or together.

The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centers around India between March 2007 and August 2008.

The polypill contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure; simvastatin, which lowers LDL — or bad cholesterol — and aspirin, a known blood-thinner. “Before this study, there were no data about whether it was even possible to put five active ingredients into a single pill,” the study said.

“We found that it works,” the researchers said.

Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the polypill or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin.

The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the polypill group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.

Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24-percent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 percent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said.

The polypill reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the polypill group, the study found.

Heart rates in the polypill group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups.

Side-effects in patients taking the polypill were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found. The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Yusuf.

Dr Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist from Harvard University, said the polypill took the medical world a step closer to beating heart disease, a leading cause of death worldwide. Some 80 percent of heart disease cases are thought to occur in developing countries.

“The concept is simple. Several different drugs are available (generically and thus inexpensively) to treat many of the cardiac risk factors. So, combining them in one pill could reduce heart disease by 80 percent,” Cannon said in a comment piece in The Lancet, in which the results of the study were published.

“This approach has obvious appeal and vast implications for global health, because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” he wrote.

Still, some said the pill was unlikely to provide panacea for all heart patients.

Dr. Robert Bonow, a former president of the American Heart Association and co-director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, told ABC News that while the pill might be better than nothing for many who would otherwise receive no care, a one-size-fits-all approach makes individualized treatment difficult.

“This is not a tailored treatment, and it’s low doses,” he told the television network.

“So maybe in people with high blood pressure, it is not enough to lower their blood pressure. Or in people with high cholesterol, it is not enough to get them to the target cholesterol levels that their physicians would like to see.”

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Sun exposure slashes risk of blood clots: report

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While sun exposure has long been linked to skin cancer, a new Swedish study shows it also dramatically reduces the risk of suffering blood clots, one of the authors of the report said on Wednesday.

“We found that women who suntan had about 30 percent lower risk of suffering blood clots,” said Pelle Lindqvist, an associate professor at the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.

“There is also a 50-percent higher risk of blood clots in December, January and February in Sweden, when there is the least sun here,” he told AFP.

Lindqvist and two colleagues at Lund University in southern Sweden studied the sunning habits of 40,000 Swedish women surveyed in 1990 about their habits, including whether they suntanned in the summer, the winter, used a sun bed or travelled south to catch the golden rays.

The researchers then followed the women’s medical development for the next 12 years, and found that 312 had developed thrombosis, or blood clots.

Even adjusted for factors like exercise, smoking and alcohol habits and weight, the research showed that any amount of suntanning helped lower the risk of blood clots.

The study, which was published in the March edition of the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, only looked at women, but Lindqvist said he suspected men drew similar benefits from sunning.

“By sunning, you avoid a shortage of Vitamin D in the winter when people here in Sweden very often suffer a deficiency of that vitamin. It is only during the summer that we really have enough Vitamin D,” he said.

It remained unclear why Vitamin D was important for the prevention of blood clots, Lindqvist said, adding that and other questions raised by the research would be the focus of future studies.

As for balancing the benefits of sun exposure against the risks of contracting skin cancer, he stressed that people should always avoid sunburn.

“But you should go out a bit every day, and it’s not true that it’s enough to go out late in the afternoon. You really should go out in the middle of the day, because that is when the production of Vitamin D occurs,” he said.

A US study published early last year also showed that moderate sun exposure and the related production of Vitamin D improved survival rates for cancer victims, suggesting the benefits of sunning outweighed the skin cancer risks, especially in northern latitudes.

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Iodine deficiency affects children’s mental growth

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Iodine deficiency disorder affects mental growth of children and they become dull minded while it also creates gynaecological complications resulting in abortion as well as other problems.

Director General (Health) Punjab, Dr Muhammad Aslam Chaudhary said this while addressing awards ceremony of Iodine Salt Processors, here Friday.

Dr Aslam said that government has launched iodized salt programme successfully with the cooperation of Micronutrient Initiatives (MI) in 20 districts of the province under Pure Food Rules and this programme would be expended in the remaining 16 district till June 2009.

National Programme Officer Dr. Tauseef Janjua informed that health Department Punjab and MI with the collaboration of salt processors (salt industries) launched this programme and now 80 percent edible salt prepared in Punjab is iodized which will help control mental weakness and abortion of pregnant women. He appealed to the people to use only iodized salt in their food. He added that government has registered district-wise salt processors throughout the province.

On this occasion, five owners of salt processors were awarded shields and net cash awards.

Sarfraz Ahmad Aulakh of Sheikhupura achieved first prize, Zulfiqar Ali of Khanewal and Pir Mehdi Shah of Khushab got second and third position respectively whereas special encouragement award was given to Fida Hussain of Rawalpindi and Haji Farooq Ahmad of Lahore.

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