Ideas for 2008?

You are my readers - is there any topic[s] you would like me to write on?

Use the comment function to post your questions..

I'll use your comments to post more articles on those topics in 2008..

Have a great new year...

POST YOUR QUESTIONS BELOW - click on COMMENTS

Cause for concern?

Disclaimer - I take vitamins and supplements. I also market vitamins and supplements. And I do suggest that children, teens and adults need supplements....

But did you ever stop to wonder why the big pharmas and your docs tell you vitamins are a waste of money?


Medical School Department Heads Financially Connected to Drug Companies
Breaking News
By VRP Staff

A new survey indicates that almost two thirds of department heads at U.S. medical schools have financial ties to drug companies.

The survey, conducted by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was distributed to all 125 accredited medical schools and the nation’s largest teaching hospitals. A total of 459 of 688 eligible department chairs completed the survey.

The results indicated that many of the academic leaders at these institutions served as paid consultants to the pharmaceutical industry or accepted free meals and drinks from drug company representatives. Overall, 60 percent of the department heads had a personal financial relationship with the drug companies. Twenty-seven percent reported serving as a paid consultant to the pharmaceutical industry and an equivalent amount of respondents also reported serving on a drug company scientific advisory board. Furthermore, 21 percent of these academic leaders reported serving on speakers’ bureaus for the drug industry. Eleven percent of respondents were on the board of directors of companies involved in the medical industry. In short, the survey found that pharmaceutical companies are involved in every aspect of medical care.

The lead author of the study, Eric Campbell, pointed out that drug companies and makers of medical devices often take advantage of these academic connections to convince physicians to widely prescribe the companies’ products to patients, even if the products aren’t necessarily in the patients’ best interest. Campbell also co-authored a study last year, which found that these same links to drug companies occur on hospital review boards that oversee experiments on patients.

Reference:

Campbell EG, Weissman JS, Ehringhaus S, Rao SR, Moy B, Feibelmann S, Goold SD. Institutional academic industry relationships. JAMA. 2007 Oct 17;298(15):1779-86.

Help - there's a teen in the house!

My own mother once said she could no longer visit me because it was just too noisy in my house!

My son was 13 or so at the time and I couldn't hear what she heard...I had gotten so used to it - but she was in her 80's and lived in a very quiet area of Florida where no one under 50 could live - they could just visit. [ We never did figure out what length of visit was "acceptable" but a week was all I could do and that was fine.]

My house had a teenager, two dogs and two cats. When my son got home from school, he usually played with, fed and walked the dogs as I worked. Apparently this entailed too much noise for my mother - with happy barking dogs, cats deciding to be in another area of the house and my son having fun with his pets. After the dog walking, he turned on "his" music which was hip-hop or rap.

I related my mother's comment to a few friends and we all laughed - none of us was aware of how noisy our homes must seem to others! We never noticed it.

Parents of teens need to become very selectively deaf or you will go nuts. Of course you could ask for the noise level to be tuned down but didn't you do the same thing when you were a teen? Part of it is the rebellion aspect...Is it intended to tune out parents? drive parents crazy? or do teens not even think about others - including the parents?

I think it's a bit of all of the above.

I lived with it - figured it was part of the package of having a child who grows up. We worked out deals around who's music got played when and how loud - especially in the car. He is now in his late 20's and can still be quite noisy when playing video games - but now his significant other is dealing with it : - ).

Kids grow up so fast - you have to enjoy them at all ages - and yes that includes the teen years!

I'll get back to this blog - I promise

In the past few weeks I have been asked by many when I will again post about adolescence.

My reply has been when I am finished with my child development book - but it's now getting possible that I will include some information about pre and early teens in that book - [Not a lot thought or the book will never get done.]

But the way I work - if I add some info in the current book - I'll get started back writing for this blog - or a book for parents of teens - [well maybe parents of pre-teens so you can get prepared : - )]

Next week I am back to writing...

No - I haven't forgotten teens

I've just been busy finishing up the child development book and want to get it done before the end of summer...and there are just so many hours and words in a day....

Teens are important - but getting off to a good start with younger children is important too.

Vitamins

For those who have been regular readers of this blog, you know I prefer "real" food to products with unpronounceable names in them....It's why I have been taking a daily vitamin that is food based - and not one "made" in a lab with who-knows-what in it.

I was alerted to an article about vitamins - which you can read it here

In short it's an article about food-based vitamins v. synthetic ones and contained information I was not aware of concerning the synthetics and the idea of talking in terms of milligrams.

It's worth a read if you take vitamins or if your teens and other children take synthetic ones..

Happy Healthy New Year

Healthy living for the 21st Century

When we were young we heard what are called "old wives tales" about health and food...We rolled our eyes and looked at our mothers as if they were aliens...Now we are learning that our mothers were correct. Maybe they knew what Hippocrates said:

"Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food."
"Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food."

Or maybe they read Maimonides:
"Let nothing which can be treated by diet be treated by other means."

Or maybe they knew this Chinese proverb:
“He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician.”

Whatever knowledge they had - those old wives - our parents and grandparents - they seemed to know a lot about nutrition.

My mother was adverse to seeing a physician unless absolutely necessary - something I took note of as she lived to 95. She believed in eating well and letting one's body take care of itself. She fed us well and grew most of the vegetables we ate. But - and it's a big BUT.... the soil was in better shape when I was a kid.... and that was in New York City!

Today we have depleted the soil and no matter how organic our food - it is missing what it used to have way back when - and what is missing are many essential nutrients. The environment is more toxic than it was, food is more processed, and it is usually picked before it is ripe and very often cooked to death.

If the soil and environment have worsened, is there anything we can do to grow older better? Yes - we can supplement our diets with glyconutritional products.

“Glyconutritional products will play a leading role in the 21st century's emerging wellness industry. The driving determinant will be the growing realization that optimal cell-to-cell communication is one of the most critical functions of the life process and is fundamental to immune system health."

And if our cells do a better job of talking to one another, who knows what they can start talking about! So listen to your body now - it talks to you and tells you what it needs - and it can do a lot more communicating if given the appropriate equipment.

Newer equipment

I'm a skier so let me use a ski analogy. Skiing can be tiring and it's even more so with older bodies and older equipment. When I first skied we had leather boots with laces and very heavy long skis with heavy bindings. But I was a lot younger then - in my 20's and I hardly noticed how tiring it was - it was too much fun. As I aged - into my 50's - I began to think there had to be a solution to all the work the skiing knees do and I fell in love with what were called shaped skis or parabolic skis. I was the first I knew to buy a pair and it made all the difference for my body. The skis do the work! I'm into a newer shorter pair these days and will continue to monitor newer models of skis as it makes more sense to let the equipment do the bulk of the hard work.

At the same time I learned of the new ski equipment, I also came across new inner body equipment - glyconutrients. For sports fans, think of glyconutrients as the nutritional version of shaped skis, lightweight bikes or titanium softball bats. It's all about that new equipment helping us do what we do better and to doing it as we age.

The ingredients in glyconutrients are not "new" - they have been around probably forever and used to be found in our daily food - but no more. The ingredients have been re-discovered and combined into products; products that protect and nourish our cells and regulate our organs and organ systems.

Way back when we were in school the up-to-date science of the time was adequate for then but it was missing a lot of information we now know about. I know from my own field of Developmental Psychology that advances in technology lead to advances in developmental knowledge. The same is true of all sciences, including glycobiology. In this new field, over 20,000 articles have been written in a few short years. Why so many and why so fast? "This breakthrough discovery exposed the missing link that has the scientific community, health researchers, and pharmaceutical companies scrambling to get up to speed on this incredible science. "

Science and medicine have long tried to break the code by which the cells of the body communicate with one another in order for its complex functions to occur. Just as biochemistry is the chemistry of life, this mysterious code is the language of life. For years, scientists focused on proteins as the primary communication molecules. Early in this century however, a theoretical mathematician at the Weisman Institute calculated the number of molecular configurations possible with protein molecules and the number of known chemical command signals needed to run the body. She concluded that there were not enough protein configurations possible to supply all the messages. Another code was required - a sugar code.

Of the 200 monosaccharides [sugars] that occur naturally in plants, eight are known to be components used in cell-to-cell communication. These eight sugars are glucose, fucose, mannose, galactose, xylose, N-acetylglucosamine, N- acetylgalactosamine and N-acetylneuraminic acid. Only two of these, glucose and galactose, are commonly found in the foods we eat. The others need to be put into our bodies in the form of nutritional supplements.

Glyconutritional products will play a leading role in the 21st century's wellness industry. The driving determinant will be the growing realization that optimal cell-to-cell communication is an important function for the life process and is fundamental to immune system health. And - it is what will allow us to be healthier as we age.