MEDICAL MATTERS

[Stanley]

Good news Wendy. Here's my blood analysis:



You'll notice that my blood sugar has fallen dramatically, just what I hoped for after the weight loss. The nurse was delighted and said that I am now officially not diabetic but pre-diabetic. It's all down to losing at least 20lbs. I shall continue with the same regime. She also said that she could see from my lipids that I am eating a very healthy diet. The cholesterol is a touch high but negligible. All the other results are bang on, 16 year old country.
Very satisfactory and it seems to show that the theory that Type 2 can be controlled by diet and weight is correct. She said that considering the mileage I am in superb condition.....
Yippee!!!

[plaques]

All the other results are bang on, 16 year old country.

Well done on the blood sugar measurement but your BMI is a bit on the high side. To get down to the recommended 24 value you need to grow an extra 5.5 inches. Considering you are past the '16 old country' its back on the rack for a couple of sessions.

[Tripps]

The nurse was delighted and said that I am now officially not diabetic but pre-diabetic."

Or let's be optimistic, and say 'post - diabetic' ?

PS I heard a piece on Radio 4 earlier in the week which was interesting, but does not seem to have hit the mainstream yet. A research team from Israel did blood sugar level tests every five minutes 24 hours a day, for a week. They then checked the results against a food consumption diary from the participants, and found that the same food produced different results in different people. The main man said he had higher blood sugar levels from sushi, but no change from ice cream - which seems counter intuitive. Early days , but he said - we must conclude that a weight loss diet must be tailored to the needs of an individual.

Th experts who spoke afterwards, said it made much of the glycaemic index theory (of which I know nothing) redundant. I'd need to listen again, but I think there was a just a bit of 'sour grapes' present.

[Stanley]

P, BMI is fine because I have very short legs.....

[Marilyn]

I have short legs too. We must be related!
( it's easy to be thin when you are 7 foot tall)

[PanBiker]

For any given weight your BMI will be higher the shorter you are.

[Tizer]

The experts who spoke afterwards, said it made much of the glycaemic index theory (of which I know nothing) redundant. I'd need to listen again, but I think there was a just a bit of 'sour grapes' present.

The `GI' theory was invented a long time ago and then resurrected around 2000 by companies selling whole grain foods and the like. They did a clever commercial job of promoting it through `experts', articles, TV, radio and social media. Many scientists would tell you that it does nothing more than provide a fancy name that encourages folk towards eating more veg, nuts and grains and less sugary, starchy food. Perhaps it's worthwhile for that alone but it does tend to cloud the true issues and much of any beneficial effect is simply down to eating less calories.

[Bruff]

In that sense it’s a bit like ‘gluten-free’ perhaps. If you do have an allergy to gluten then you are a coeliac, an autoimmune disease which means you have very real difficulties. Gluten-free food is essential for coeliacs. I suspect the current fad on ‘gluten-allergy’, and a whole host of others, is simply giving voice to too many folk’s neuroses, like that dreadful Paltrow lady who’s cookbook seemed to have 100 pages explaining why every food was essentially bad for you. What a bundle of laughs she is. Still, there’s big bucks to be made from this neurosis – develop a gluten-free product and sell it at 50% mark-up. Quids in.

Richard Broughton

[Wendyf]

"Perhaps it's worthwhile for that alone but it does tend to cloud the true issues and much of any beneficial effect is simply down to eating less calories."

Not if you have type 1 diabetes or type 2 and keep fit and thin! It's carbohydrates not calories that affect blood sugar levels. According to Diabetes UK 15% of people diagnosed with type 2 are not overweight.....sorry to keep harping on about this but it can be quite upsetting for someone in that 15% to keep hearing that their problem is caused by lifestyle and obesity!

[Stanley]

I agree Wendy and I apologise if anything I said was insensitive. Diabetes related problems are very complicated and the efficacy of different strategies depends largely on the individuals metabolism and original problem. In my case it seems that a normal balanced diet is OK and it was the fat round my internal organs that was the problem so I am lucky. I shall be keeping to the same regime and still taking the Metformin.
I have always been suspicious of 'gluten allergy'. I have seen reports that switching from bread baked using the Chorley Wood process to straight home baked bread cures it. It makes you wonder. I suspect that many allergies are rooted in bad diet, particularly eating processed foods instead of cooking from scratch with natural ingredients. 'Food Technology' has a hell of a lot to answer for!

[Tizer]

Wendy, I wasn't making comments about diabetes or weight but talking about the population in general. The GI diet at least encourages people not to take in too many calories, which is good for general health...although it's possible to do that without buying books about the GI diet if people simply eat good foods in sensible amounts.

[Stanley]

I think the bottom line with diet is whether the individual has enough interest to actually care about where food comes from and take steps to follow some simple rules. Of course this means that a large proportion of the population never give it a thought and they are the ones who suffer. As Wendy pointed out, diet isn't the cure-all for everything. I doubt if there is a couple who could compete with her and Col in respect of fresh home-grown natural food. This is why I keep banging on about the 'cure' for obesity is good food education from a very early age. I was lucky because my eating and cooking habits were formed during a period when some very intelligent people were dictating what we ate through food rationing and the dreaded food processors and supermarkets hadn't got in on the act. That's where policy and investment should be concentrated. I sincerely believe that the profit oriented policies pursued by these enormous companies are at the root of many of our problems but they are 'too big to criticise'. Their lobbying power is immense and they use it with no thought for the eventual consequences. As I have often pointed out, if proper dry cured fat bacon was put on sale in the Cathedrals of Choice, nobody would buy it..... The same applies to many other foods. I watched an advert by one of the major supermarkets last night showing a 'tender' cut of beef being carved. Pink and not a trace of fat. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole!
My shoulder and arm are slowly improving but still nagging me. Old age isn't for cissies. I am convinced that 50 years ago I would have shrugged it off....

[Tizer]

Talking bout food companies...
Kraft
`Cadbury’s owner paid no UK tax' Sunday Times, 6 Dec 2015
"One of the world’s biggest food companies — which bought Cadbury in a controversial deal in 2010 — paid no corporation tax in Britain last year on more than £2bn in revenues. Mondelez International, formerly called Kraft Foods, has lawfully avoided tens of millions of pounds of corporation tax since its controversial £11.5bn takeover of Cadbury five years ago, which was funded with billions of pounds of loans. At the same time the company has cut hundreds of jobs from its British workforce."

[Stanley]

I saw that also, reported in PE. There are many more examples off shore I was talking to Janet in Oz yesterday and she mentioned that she had just been filing her UK tax return which is much more onerous than her Australian version. We agreed that HMRC are bearing down hard on the individuals but letting the higher end and corporations get away with murder.....
She was telling me that developments in access to big data are changing the world. At the moment she is working on a programme that draws sources together and makes the results available in usable form to anyone with the programme. She says that this will soon mean that individuals can get into what has previously been the preserve of the big corporations. She reckons it has got to the stage where four big firms could literally run the world. (apologies, I went off piste....)

[Tizer]

"..HMRC are bearing down hard on the individuals.."
I read that they are going to force some small businesses to file quarterly tax returns. They don't seem to have any idea of how much extra hassle and money that will cost those businesses!

[Tripps]

As an (ex) regular user of this product - I find this shocking. Well done to the Australian court who have done the right thing. Nurofen

I checked on the situation here - just as bad, if not worse, for those who trust the brand rather than the shop's own brand. Tesco sell ordinary Nurofen at £2 for 16 x 200 mg tablets. Their own brand caplets are just 30p for 16 x 200 mg. Even worse, they sold the Australian tablets for double the price of the 'ordinary' ones despite them being essentially the same thing. Seems the ruling will not apply in UK.

[Stanley]

When I was travelling regularly to the US I bought all my painkillers and vitamins in the supermarkets there at a fraction of the UK price. Echoes of the days when you could go into Boots and buy 500 aspirin at a time.... The 'possible suicide' argument was a license to print money!
Most of the common painkillers used in the US and the UK are produced in China and the mark up applied in this country is astronomical.
Tiz, watch the 'big data' thing that Janet was talking about. She is a smart cookie and knows her stuff!

[Tripps]

The Nurofen scandal hit Sky News late last night. It was well covered, but I had to smile when during the ad break, one of the ads was for Nurofen Plus.

[Tizer]

Nurofen is probably the tip of the iceberg. It's common for companies to put the same product in different packs with different labelling so that people buy more than one. But more often they are doing it at the same price simply to get more sales. Reckitt were greedy with Nurofen and made the mistake of selling at vastly different prices. They deserve to be in trouble, even if only at the other side of the world.

[Stanley]

All down to big corporations spending more time on working out ways to improve profits than caring about their customers. We are all cash cows these days....

[Tizer]

`Nurofen Express advertising claims probed by UK watchdog' BBC report
"The UK's advertising watchdog is probing the marketing of Nurofen Express, after receiving complaints about its television advert. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is examining if the advert is misleading by claiming it targets the source of headaches....The advert in question claims that "most headaches are caused by strained head muscles", and that the painkiller targets these muscles. The ASA received 12 complaints about the advert in February and launched its investigation in March. It said: "Complainants have challenged whether the ad is misleading because it implies that the product directly targets muscles in the head. They've also challenged whether the claim 'gives you faster headache relief than standard paracetamol or ibuprofen' is misleading."

[Stanley]

I think there is little doubt that many of these claims are pseudo-science. Give a company the results of one odd-ball study that supports whatever contention they want to make and they'll crash on using it but ignoring any studies to the contrary. They can always wave a bit of paper in court and claim they didn't know about the other evidence.

[Stanley]

See THIS for a account in the Daily Mail following a report published by the National Health Journal, normally a reliable source of such information. They say that 90% of acute care hospitals are not managing to achieve their own staffing rules during the day. For some reason night time figures are better. The shortage of nurses is blamed on government training policies and funding shortfalls. "Safe in our hands"......
One swallow doesn't make a summer but there is a rising tide of warnings from all quarters in the same vein. Are they all mistaken?

[PanBiker]

Regarding the shortage of nurses, I seem to remember earlier in the year hearing a report regarding deportation back to the Philippines of nurses trained by the NHS who were only allowed to work here for three years. This lot could not do any worse if they tried. It beggars belief really.

[plaques]

Yes but look at the broader picture, once the NHS collapses and we go totally private all those scrounging immigrants won't be able to claim medical treatment that they haven't contributed towards. That'll teach them. Also, if we go down the American road the system will be far more efficient with those who are able to pay privately or luckily enough to have insurance cover will enjoy the best of medical care, providing they can get through all the legal loopholes that the insurance companies put in their way. Just think of all those juicy profits. And what happens to those who can't afford it? Well they just crawl away and die as quickly and quietly as possible.
A shortage of nurses! All part of the master plan.