Happy New Year! This is the time of year when many people make resolutions, with getting fit being amongst the most common. Of course, research shows that most people quit their new year’s resolutions by around March. So this year, I’d like to suggest you take a different approach: rather than giving yourself overly ambitious goals in the gym, instead learn to bake some very modest but high-yield habits into your life.
While this may not sound as sexy as committing to some kind of “beach body” program, the fact is that with exercise, a little goes a long way. A very long way. To this end, I’d like to highlight two threads of research for you.
One of the tools that I’ve gotten more interested in the past few years are Continuous Glucose Monitors (aka CGMs). These are patches that can be painlessly applied to the arm and that sync to an app on your phone, providing continuous information about your glucose levels. While they are not 100% accurate, they are close enough to more traditional methods for checking glucose (e.g. fingerstick) to give a pretty close estimate of your blood glucose at any particular moment, and since they can provide hundreds or even thousands of data points per day, can be used to track trends and see patterns.
Dr. Means trained as an ENT surgeon at Stanford University before deciding that our current profit driven sickcare model was the problem, not the solution, for most of the issues she was treating, and that she would rather serve patients in a different capacity. This led her to become a functional medicine practitioner, and later to help found the company Levels, which uses continuous glucose monitors to help people glean insights into their metabolic health and learn how to make improvements therein. Now, she’s written “Good Energy”, which has been on the NY Times bestseller list for the past few months.
If, like me, you came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably don’t remember a time when you weren’t warned to stay out of the sun. The message for the past few decades has been that sun exposure = skin cancer, and that if you absolutely have to go out during daylight hours for more than a nanosecond, to please not do so without first donning sunscreen and a full suit of body armor.
It’s true that excessive sun exposure can cause skin damage and increase the risk of skin cancers. But there’s (pun intended) a wrinkle to this. And that is that limiting sun exposure might also increase your risk of getting lots of other diseases, including heart disease and virtually every other known cancer. I’ll discuss some data about this in a moment, but first I want to just share some thoughts about sun exposure in general:
I’ve been meaning to review this study for some time now. A few years ago, a cardiologist at the University of Texas by the name of Dr. Ben Levine conducted a study that ought to be on the minds of anybody who is interested in living a longer and healthier life.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues put middle aged adults (around age 50) who were previously sedentary but otherwise healthy on an exercise protocol for two years, and performed various tests on their hearts before and after the study. They found that after two years, the subject’s hearts had effectively reverted back to those of a 30 year old’s. In other words, exercise made these people’s hearts age in reverse by almost twenty years.
In my last blog post, I took the New York Times to task for incorrectly suggesting that new research demonstrates a connection between alcohol consumption and the rise of cancer in younger adults. And then just a few days after I wrote that, a patient asked me my thoughts on the health risks of alcohol. So I thought I’d dedicate a post to the topic.
Let’s start with a simple fact: alcohol is toxic to the human body. There is now a lot of research to suggest that even moderate alcohol consumption may play a role in the development of some cancers and in neurological disease. It’s also well established that alcohol consumption is tied to an increased risk for atrial fibrillation, a common type of heart arrhythmia that can increase the risk of having a stroke. And the longstanding belief that moderate alcohol consumption is protective against cardiovascular disease has not held up under closer scrutiny. No, one glass of red wine per night will not cut your risk for a heart attack, and wine consumption is not the reason that countries like France, Italy, and Greece have lower rates of heart disease than we Americans do.
Add to this the long established fact that heavy alcohol consumption is terrible for the body, and substantially increases the risk for liver, cardiac, and brain disease, and we can reasonably conclude that alcohol is bad for humans. Period, full stop. And looked at purely as a substance examined in isolation, this is a correct conclusion. However…
