Yeshiva World News

YWN Health Columnist Alan Freishtat Wishes Readers K'siva V'chasima Tova

To my loyal YWN readers, Although this space is normally used for my weekly columns on health, fitness, and weight loss, I will allow myself the liberty once a year to use this space for a personal message. Hashem granted us the gift of a healthy body and expects us to do our best to take care of it. This requires healthful eating, exercise, the proper amount of sleep and an active lifestyle. We all are capable of helping ourselves. When we don’t take care of ourselves and watch over ...

An Immune System Trained To Kill Cancer

A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose. Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his ...

Mid-Life Cravings: The Chocolate Challenge

If you are a middle-aged woman and you find yourself dealing with food cravings, welcome to the club.  Statistics tell us that just about 100% of women report regular food cravings.  And unlike men, you may also be experiencing sleep difficulties and seasonal depressions.  Ladies, it’s not just that you have different hormones than men have, but your hormones have a certain agenda and they need attention and management in order for you to get through this time of your life.  You ...

'Painless' Tooth Fillings Without Drilling To Make Dentist Trips Less Irksome

It is the sound that can make the toughest men moan and the calmest women weep. But the whine of the dentist’s drill could soon be silenced for good, according to researchers. Scientists believe they have found the secret of a ‘completely painless’ filling by identifying a material which repairs decaying teeth – with no need for a drill. Professor Jennifer Kirkham, who led the study at Leeds University’s Dental Institute, said: ‘The results that have now been analysed show there ...

Stress & Heart Disease

The ill effects of stress are unending.  Both in this column and in many other places, you have undoubtedly read about all the results of being overstressed, including pain of any kind, digestive disorders, sleep disorders, depression, obesity (and the inability to properly lose weight), autoimmune diseases and skin conditions such as eczema.  But perhaps the most frightening result of all is the direct correlation between being overstressed and heart disease.  We generally think about ...

Hospitals Speed Up Heart Attack Response Times

Hospitals are speeding up their response times when treating heart attack patients. New research shows the average waiting time for heart attack patients once they reach the hospital was 64 minutes last year. In 2005, the average response time was 96 minutes. The dramatic decrease comes after the government and several private groups provided research on response time techniques. (Source: WABC)

Food! Can't Live with It, Can't Live without It (Part II)

(Last week, we explored our poor eating habits and the some of the options available to us for improving our diets and our overall health. That discussion continues.)  Last, but certainly far from least on the list of foods to avoid is trans fats.  I don’t know if anything man-made, as opposed to grown or raised, truly constitutes food to begin with.  If you are my age or older, you certainly remember when the “health experts” declared margarine to be far more healthy than butter.  ...

Food! Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It (Part 1)

Food... Everyone’s favorite topic.  Without it, we cannot sustain basic life functions.  It is our primary source of nutrition, vitamins and minerals.  It gives us energy to perform our daily tasks and to go from place to place.  It certainly tastes good, so we make a bracha on it.   Yet for many people, food is the enemy, causing us to engage in a lifetime battle in order to maintain a normal and healthy weight. And that battle can often be unending and can wear us down.  So, in order ...

How Sweet it is!

It all makes sense.  Sugar is the enemy!  It is high in calories and short on nutrition.  And in this generation of type two diabetes, who wants the white powdery stuff around anyway?  The perfect solution would be to find a substitute for sugar and use it to sweeten beverages, desserts, yogurts and puddings.  It cuts the amount of calories you consume per food item and it should go a long way to solving the epidemic of overweight and obesity.  Sounds good, right? But guess what? It ...

Tylenol Maker Sets New, Lower Doses

The manufacturer of Tylenol announced new, lower dosing instructions for the painkiller on Thursday in an effort to reduce accidental overdose from acetaminophen, the product's active ingredient. McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson & Johnson, is recommending the maximum dosage for extra strength Tylenol be lowered to six pills - or a total of 3,000 milligrams (mg) a day, down from eight pills or 4,000 mg which is the current maximum daily dose. "Acetaminophen is safe ...

Why We Need To Be At A Normal Weight

Someone recently asked me if it is really so terrible to be overweight.  This person mentioned her grandmother, who live to age 91 and was always pudgy.  And so I got to thinking about her question.  And the bottom line is that it is hard to argue with statistics all of which indicate that for the general population, being overweight diminishes your quality of life and even shortens your life.  There are people who live long who are overweight, but how is the quality of their ...

The Truth About Risk Factors

Chaim is 46 years old and goes to see his doctor for his yearly physical examination.  After checking him thoroughly and doing standard blood work, we find that Chaim has blood pressure of 144/92 and his cholesterol, particularly his LDL (the bad stuff) is borderline high.  The physician prescribes drugs to lower his blood pressure and begins 10mg of a statin drug to control his cholesterol levels, thus dealing with two risk factors for heart disease and stroke through drug intervention.  ...

The Cost Of Poor Health & Obesity

The two most common excuses people give for not exercising and taking care of their general health are lack of time, and finances. In previous articles, I have addressed the time issue, but I would like to add the following: If you don’t make the time to exercise, you won’t have much time to do anything. Eventually, as we age and don’t make the time to compensate for its effects, we end up with one or more debilitating condition. But what is just as shocking is how much it actually costs ...

The Quantity & The Quality Of Life

Long life, Arichus Yomim, has been said as a bracha (blessing) from one Jew to another for thousands of years.  We also say L’chaim!, to Life!, as a blessing to each other as we take a drink.  Two blessings we give, but very different in their ramifications.  According the the Harvard School of Public Health, beginning in the year 2012, 10,000 people a day will start turning 65.We are aging differently than previous generations, however. Physically and mentally, the health of today’s ...

Diabetes Cases Double To 347 Million

The number of adults with diabetes has doubled world-wide over the last three decades to nearly 350 million and increased nearly threefold in the U.S., a sign that the epidemic will impose an ever-greater cost burden on health systems. The latest calculation, based on a study published in the British journal Lancet, found that the number of adult diabetics jumped to 347 million from 153 million in 1980. According to the study, the U.S. had 24.7 million diabetics in 2008, nearly triple the ...

Eat Some Fat!

Over the past 40 years, the “public enemy number one” of food has been fat.  We spend billions of dollars per year on low-fat foods, fake-fat chips, pills that block the absorption of fat into the digestive system, and all types of specials diets and cookbooks.  And, in the past 30 years, we have reduced the amount of fat in our diet by 34% on average.  The problem is, we aren’t any thinner or healthier for all this effort.  Actually, we are larger and unhealthier than ever.  One ...

Food! Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It (Part II)

(Last week, we explored our poor eating habits and the some of the options available to us for improving our diets and our overall health. That discussion continues.) Last, but certainly far from least on the list of foods to avoid is trans fats.  I don’t know if anything man-made, as opposed to grown or raised, truly constitutes food to begin with.  If you are my age or older, you certainly remember when the “health experts” declared margarine to be far more healthy than butter.  ...