Eating Dark Chocolate Can Curb Diabetes, Heart Disease Risk

Fancy eating chocolates every day? You may soon have the recommendation of doctors to indulge a little as researchers have found that a dark chocolate bar daily could reduces the risk of developing diabetes and heart diseases.   For the study, the researchers analysed data of 1,153 people aged 18-69 years old who were part of the Observation of Cardiovascular Risk in Luxembourg study. It was found that those who ate 100 g of chocolate a day — equivalent to a bar — had reduced insulin resistance and improved liver…

New Initiative Promises Diabetics Better Control on the Disease

Researchers from various prominent health institutions, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Emory University of the US, have said that a new Multi-Component Diabetes Quality Improvement (QI) initiative can help patients with diabetes double their likelihood of controlling the disease in comparison with the usual doctor care. Led by researchers at the Public Health Foundation of India, AIIMS, and Emory University (Atlanta, USA), the initiative, comprising non-physician care coordinators and decision-support electronic health records, is a result of years of trial at ten clinical centres in…

​Taste this: Your salt intake is double and dangerous

Many know they have to worry about salt, particularly if they have hypertension and abnormal amounts of lipids and fats in the blood. Scientists, however, have found that even patients with these diseases take more than two times the quantity recommended for a normal person. The National Institute of Nutrition’s dietary guidelines for Indians say salt intake higher than 8 gm/day is considered a risk factor for hypertension. Yet, a multi-centric study done on 500 patients in five metros showed that the mean total daily salt consumption was 10.9gm, with…

Heal with food

If you remember the previous article – Part 1 of PCOS and diabetes care through nutrition, you may remember that what both diseases had in common was excess fat. Figure out the way to deal with the excess fat, and you’ve figured out a way to deal with both diseases and, in many cases, eliminate impending diabetes entirely. For those who don’t have these health conditions, you’d be nipping these diseases in the bud, should you decide to surface. In order to stave off disease and lose fat, say no…

Certain high BP drugs cut spread of cancer in body

A team of researchers has found that drugs used to treat high blood pressure can block the spread of cancer. The findings were published in journal of Nature Communications. Calcium channel blockers are currently used to treat hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, but their potential use in blocking cancer cell metastases has not been previously reported. By screening already approved drugs, the team led by Postdoctoral Researcher Guillaume Jacquemet and Academy Professor Johanna Ivaska from University of Turku in Finland discovered that calcium channel blockers can efficiently stop…

Tired and Weak? Don’t Assume it’s Just Your Age

When Christopher Callahan examines older patients, he often hears a similar refrain. “I’m tired, doctor. It’s hard to get up and about. I’ve been feeling kind of down, but I know I’m getting old and I just have to live with it.” This fatalistic stance relies on widely held but mistaken assumptions about what constitutes normal aging. In fact, fatigue, weakness and depression aren’t to-be-expected consequences of growing older, said Callahan, director of the Center for Aging Research at Indiana University’s School of Medicine. Instead, they’re a signal that something…