Type 1 diabetes Archive

Conventional medical wisdom has held that taking antibiotics for longer periods of time produces better results and lowers the risk for antibiotic resistance. But the evidence for this is slim, and researchers are now questioning this approach.

Mounting evidence suggests that eating nuts and seeds daily can lower your risk of diabetes and heart disease and may even lengthen your life.

If your idea of healthy eating was formed a few decades ago, it may be hard to shake the notion that you should avoid nuts, which are high in calories and fat. But new evidence has overturned that assumption. In fact, a recent analysis of the nation's eating habits and health outcomes suggests that eating too few nuts and seeds is associated with an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

For that study, in the March 7, 2017, Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy relied on a model that used data from scores of observational studies on diet and health, including the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, which provided detailed information on Americans' eating habits over the decade ending in 2012. They estimated that in 2012, over 300,000 deaths from heart disease, stroke, or type 2 diabetes — about 45% of all deaths from those conditions — were associated with eating either too much or too little of 10 nutrients.

Millions have prediabetes and don't know it. Here is why it's important to find out and act to lower your diabetes risk.

 Image: © shelma1/Thinkstock

An estimated one out of three American adults is prediabetic, which means blood sugar levels are higher than normal but below the threshold for type 2 diabetes. Yet 90% of these people do not realize they are in this dangerous gray zone.

"You are not going to have symptoms for prediabetes," says Dr. David Nathan, director of the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Center. "Instead, you or your doctor should determine if you have any of the common risk factors, get your blood sugar levels checked to determine if you have prediabetes, and then make the necessary lifestyle changes you need to stop type 2 diabetes from occurring."

Those extra inches around the middle may signal increased fat around abdominal organs and rising health risks.

It's a rare woman over age 50 who has the same waist measurement she had as a teenager. But in the past decade or so, women's waistlines have been expanding regardless of age. A 2014 report from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that from 1999 to 2012, the average body mass index (BMI) for women age 20 or older held steady. But during the same period, the average female waistline grew slowly and steadily, from 36.2 inches to 37.8 inches. Researchers are still searching for an explanation for this phenomenon, but they do know one thing: increasing waistlines are linked to greater risks for heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

What's in a waistline?

Regardless of whether your weight has changed over the years, your height is likely to have decreased, the result of declining volume in the intervertebral discs of the spine. As your torso shortens, your abdominal organs have less vertical space to inhabit, so they move horizontally. If you haven't gained weight, an increase of an inch or two around the waist may simply reflect lost height.