Rising Obesity Rates Put Strain on Nursing Homes

RED BAY, Ala. — At 72, her gray hair closely shorn, her days occupied by sewing and television, Wanda Chism seems every bit a typical nursing home patient — but for her size.

Ms. Chism is severely obese, unable to leave her bed without a mechanical lift and a team of nurses. She has not walked in years. Her life is circumscribed by the walls of her room.

Obesity is redrawing the common imagery of old age: The slight nursing home resident is giving way to the obese senior, hampered by diabetes, disability and other weight-related ailments. Facilities that have long cared for older adults are increasingly overwhelmed — and unprepared — to care for this new group of morbidly heavy patients.

“The population is shifting faster than the ability of nursing homes to deal with them,” said Cheryl Phillips, a senior vice president at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of services for older adults. “We don’t have adequate staff. We don’t have adequate equipment. We don’t have adequate knowledge.”

New tool to speed up antibiotic discovery

A team of scientists has come up with a new method that allows them to screen natural products for antibiotics.

Biologists at UC San Diego have found that a method they developed to identify and characterize new antibiotics can be employed to screen natural products quickly for compounds capable of controlling antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The researchers say their latest discovery could permit chemists and others to understand how mixtures of potential antibiotics from microorganisms work without first purifying them. It builds on their development two years ago of a new way to rapidly identify new compounds capable of killing bacteria.

Researcher Kit Pogliano said that the method is a powerful way to identify antibiotics from natural products and understand how they work before they are ever purified, potentially shaving years off of screening efforts by identifying which organisms and growth conditions produce interesting bioactive molecules.

Pogliano noted that some bacteria have evolved resistance to every known class of antibiotic and when these multi-drug resistant bacteria cause an infection, they are nearly impossible to treat. There is an urgent need for new antibiotics capable of treating infections caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Antibiotic resistance is increasing at an alarming rate. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, a publication established to produce an analysis of the global problems of antimicrobial resistance, recently predicted that by 2050, the worldwide toll from drug resistant bacterial infections could reach 10 million deaths per year, more than cancer (8.2 million) and diabetes (1.5 million) combined.

Obesity isn’t the half of it: fat or thin, our eating is disordered

Sally Davies, the UK’s chief medical officer, is right to highlight women’s health issues. Her report, published at the end of last week, is comprehensive and thoughtful but her implicit claim, that obesity poses a threat to the nation comparable to terrorism, is concerning (she wants it to be elevated to the level of a “national risk”). This generated headlines but closed down the complex thinking that’s desperately needed.

What is obesity? Is it one thing? No. It is an arbitrary number on a scale which counts people with a BMI of over 30 as obese. Bundled together in Davies’ figures are the “overweight” who, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics, are not necessarily unhealthy. Health and weight are not the same. There is health at different sizes.


Obesity endangers health of women and babies, warns UK's chief medical officer
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Is obesity a result of overeating? Yes, maybe, and no. There’s science and then there is the agenda of the various health, fitness and diet businesses mixed up in this. Sometimes fatness is the result of inadvertent repetitive dieting which can upset our metabolism. Sometimes it’s a result of eating the non-food foods that industry peddles. These drench our tastebuds with fat, salt and sugar combinations that overstimulate without giving a sense of satisfaction – other than reaching the end of the packet. Sometimes it is because these same non-food foods take a too-quick journey through our body without being properly digested.

Sometimes, as epigeneticists are discovering, it is to do with changes that occurred two generations ago, when food was very scarce. Sometimes, as Tim Spector of King’s College London, proposes, it is to do with changes caused by early and frequent antibiotic use which alter the flora in our gut.

Top 5 foods to lower blood cholesterol

New Delhi: A good diet is necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle. Believe it or not but the diet to eat plays an important role in keeping the cholesterol level in check. One can easily lower their cholesterol levels by doing some exercise with a good diet.

Here are some foods that can lower cholesterol level:

Olive oil

One should use olive oil in their diet to get its heart-healthy benefits. It also helps in lowering the cholesterol level in the body because it contains a potent mix of antioxidants.

Nuts

Nuts like walnuts, alomonds not only us healthy but also reduces the risk of heart disease. Try eating a handful of nuts everyday but make sure that it's not salted or coated with sugar.

Also Read: Top five health benefits of radish!

Fish

Regular consumption of fish helps in keeping the heart healthy as it contains high levels of omega-3 fatty acids which reduces your blood pressure and risk of developing blood clots.

Oatmeal

Oatmeal contains soluble fiber that reduces your low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the bad cholesterol. It reduces the absorption of cholesterol into your bloodstream as well.

Also Read: 5 natural foods to provide instant gas relief!

Foods with plant sterols or stanols

Eating of foods with added sterol and stanol like grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes helps you in lowering your cholesterol level. It also reduces the risk of heart disease.

News digest – oxygen scan, tiny tech, Chief Medical Officer’s report, ovarian cancer drug approval and… contradicting articles?

Our scientists revealed a new approach to MRI scanning that could help doctors spot areas of low oxygen inside tumours in a less invasive way. This could be important for guiding treatment, but the Mail Online and Express got a little carried away with this, as the research is still at an early stage.

An analysis of data from the Million Women Study – which we part-fund – found that being unhappy or stressed doesn’t shorten your life. So it’s ok if you’re not feeling festive just yet.

A new report from England’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, warned of the growing need to tackle obesity. The BBC has more on this, and we’ve blogged before about the leading theories on how obesity can cause cancer.

Scotland’s new food standards body warned that the country had made little progress in hitting certain dietary targets like fibre consumption. The BBC covered this.

Asking patients to keep track of certain symptoms and report them online to their doctor could help improve their quality of life. Reuters has the details.

Sticking three twisted strands of genetic material inside a special gel could help get an experimental treatment into cancer cells, according to early US research. Gizmag has more.

Gizmag also covered more tiny technology, as US scientists found that microscopic nanobubbles could help sneak drugs into cancer cells. It’s still early days on this one though.

Obesity 'biggest threat to women's health' in England

Obesity is the biggest threat to women's health and the health of future generations, warns England's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies.
In her annual report, which focuses on women, she said tackling obesity should be a national priority to avert a "growing health catastrophe".
She said either the food industry needed to do more or it would face a sugar tax.
Dame Sally is also calling for better treatment of ovarian cancer and more open discussion on incontinence.
England's top doctor said obesity was so serious it should be a priority for the whole population, but particularly for women because too often it shortened their lives.
In England in 2013, 64% of women aged 34-44 and 71% of women aged 45-54 were classified as overweight or obese.
Obesity increases the risk of many diseases including breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Sugar tax
Dame Sally warned that if the food industry did not clean up its act then new taxes may be the only option.
She told the BBC: "I think it is inevitable that manufacturing has to reformulate and resize, that supermarkets and others need to stop cheap promotions on unhealthy food and putting unhealthy food at the check-out, and limit advertising dramatically.

Plus-size models fuel obesity, says study

Washington DC: On a day we saw actor Parineeti Chopra’s dramatic new photoshoot to announce to the world how much weight she’s lost in the last few months, comes this new debate: Can plus-size models be held responsible for triggering an obesity epidemic in the world?

As the spotlight on plus-size fashion is getting bigger and brighter, it is feared that its runway walkers may be fuelling obesity epidemics with their natural body shapes. The increasing use of plus-sized models in advertising campaigns may be contributing to growing rates of obesity, according to the study from Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.

The study found that as advertising campaigns increasingly use fewer images of models that are underweight and aesthetically flawless, instead utilising non-traditional models with larger body types, the tactic can have a detrimental effect on the public’s lifestyle and eating behaviour.

The study’s authors posit that efforts to increase acceptance are resulting in increasing the amount of thought consumers put into their appearance and heightening body anxiety -- ironically the opposite of what many of these marketing campaigns are trying to achieve.

The findings have implications for both public policy makers and advertisers. The researchers advise both to be mindful of how individuals’ bodies are portrayed in the media, and develop new strategies that don’t focus on suggesting any shape is “good” or “bad”.

Although, this study demonstrates that accepting larger bodies results is associated with negative consequences, research also shows that ‘fat-shaming’ or stigmatising such bodies fails to improve motivation to lose weight, says co-author Brent McFerran.

He noted that since neither accepting nor stigmatising larger bodies achieves the desired results, it would be beneficial for marketers and policy makers to instead find a middle ground -- using images of people with a healthy weight and more importantly, refraining from drawing attention to the body size issue entirely.