Isa News Sept Oct2007

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Isa News Sept Oct2007

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A horse named charley

Although we may fight for it, in the end we just can't stop people from naming their horses "Charlie". But maybe we can help them with an involuntary contraction or spasm causing a muscle cramp, sometimes called a "charley horse". Usually they occur due to an overused or injured muscle, but can also be caused by lack of minerals such as potassium (1). So, before and after exercise, eat your bananas. Reference List 1. MedlinePlus. Charley Horse. Medline Encyclopedia. Available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002066.htm
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Half-hearted Atkins diet and cardiovascular disease

I would like to comment on a recent  article comparing the Atkins, Ornish and South Beach diets (Miller et al., 2009; full reference at the end of this posting), which has been causing quite a lot of commotion among bloggers recently. Especially low carb. bloggers. An excellent post by Michael Eades clarifies a number of issues with the study, including what one could argue is the study's main flaw. Apparently the study compared a half-hearted Atkins diet, with probably equally half-hearted Ornish and  South   Beach  diets. I refer to the study's Atkins diet as half-hearted because it seems to rely on a daily consumption of between 120 and 180 grams of carbohydrates. This is unlikely to lead to ketosis, the cornerstone of the Atkins diet, where the body uses ketone bodies (made from dietary as well as body fat) as a source of energy. As I see it, the main findings of the study were that the participants in the half-hearted Atkins diet, after a period of 4 weeks on the diet,
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Men who are skinny-fat: There are quite a few of them

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The graph below (from Wikipedia) plots body fat percentage (BF) against body mass index (BMI) for men. The data is a bit old: 1994. The top-left quadrant refers to men with BF greater than 25 percent and BMI lower than 25. A man with a BF greater than 25 has crossed into obese territory, even though a BMI lower than 25 would suggest that he is not even overweight. These folks are what we could call skinny-fat men. The data is from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), so it is from the USA only. Interesting that even though this data is from 1994, we already could find quite a few men with more than 25 percent BF and a BMI of around 20. One example of this would be a man who is 5’11’’, weighing 145 lbs, and who would be technically obese! About 8 percent of the entire sample of men used as a basis for the plot fell into the area defined by the top-left quadrant – the skinny-fat men. (That quadrant is one in which the BMI measure is quite deceiving; another is t
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