Public Health

  The question asked most often about being overweight is, “How come I keep gaining weight? I don’t really eat that much.” Well, the truth of the matter is that we get heavier as we grow older because our physical activity tends to decrease even though our food intake remains the same. The majority of obese people are much less active than the majority of thin people. It is their sedentary lifestyle that accounts for their excess weight and not their overeating. The only way to beat the battle...

Cholesterol - that yellow, waxy, fatty stuff – in your blood is the main culprit that narrows the blood vessels and shortens the gap between you and heart disease. You should eat in a way that lowers one type of cholesterol, called LDL, and boosts another type, known as HDL. That is because the LDLs are “bad-guys” that serves as raw materials to clog arteries. In contrast the “good-guy” HDLs gobble up the LDL and transport them to liver, where they are crushed. Obviously, the more HDL and less...

Mobile phones and laptops have become an integral part of our lives in the past few hours. We have lost count of the number of hours we spend daily working on our laptops or texting on our mobile phones. But all this is taking a heavy toll on our spine. According to a paper published in the journal Surgery Technology International by spinal doctor Kenneth Hansraj, when we hunch over our phones, we are putting an additional weight of 60 pounds on our cervical spine. As per Dr. Hansraj, a good...

  Herbs have been in use to treat a variety of ailments from the prehistoric times. In fact much of the ancient medical systems like Ayurveda, Siddha etc make use of medicinal herbs extensively. But over the last century, with the advent of the scientific ability to isolate and extract chemical compounds to make drugs, the role of herbs as medical remedy has diminished. A study published in American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food chemistry by Elvira Gonzalez de Mejia and...

According to a study published in the European Journal of General Practice, Hemoglobin A1c can be used to predict the risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus. A person has an increased risk of developing diabetes if his HbA1c levels are more than 5.5%. The results obtained from the study once again emphasize the importance of checking HbA1c levels as a screening test, in order to predict the risk of developing diabetes mellitus type 2. The term HbA1c refers to glycated hemoglobin. When our...