Recess Newsletter April 2010
Good Eats on the Cheap, the Pitfalls of Overdoing It
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| Be In The Know
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A Penny Saved...
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Is a calorie earned?
 Typically, we don't condone tons of TV watching, but if you've caught any of Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution," you've seen the astonishing role that penny pinching plays in school lunches across the country. The tight budgets and head-scratching requirements (french fries count as a serving of vegetables, but pasta with seven different kinds of fresh veggies does not) means that schools have turned by and large to frozen, processed food.
While Jamie tries to win over the hearts and minds of West Virginia, we're here to tell you that for your own meals, things don't have to be so grim.
On the New York Times Health Blog, you can find recipes for five delish dinners that go easy on the wallet.
As farmers' markets across the country begin to open for the season, now is the perfect time to sample some fresh produce and try some new recipes. Not sure about a market near you? You can look up locations across the country here.
Start your own wellness revolution!>>
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Summer Swimwear Season is Calling Your Name
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Sign up for Recess Health Immersion Today!
Join us for eight weeks this summer to skip, stretch, cook, crunch, and karate chop your way to better health. Recess Health Immersion is open to anyone and everyone. All athletic abilities embraced!
 Dates:
July 10 - September 4
Mon & Wed, 6:15-7:30 p.m.
Sat 10:00-11:00 a.m.
The program includes:
* Pre and post body composition/fitness assessment
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All of our personalized reports
* Seminars on nutrition, cooking, exercise and integrative arts like yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, Budokon, etc.
* A cool group of "campers" and Recess instructors
* Participant-only web portal access
* Goodie bags and prizes worth over $200
Cost:
$250 a month
Deals?
From now until May 15th, if you sign up with a friend or family member, we'll throw in a sweet Recess t-shirt for you both!
More questions?
Email Kaitlin at kaitlin@recesswellness.com
Sign up today for your best summer yet! >>
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An Ounce of Prevention...
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Is worth a pound of over-medication.
Today we bring you the tale of two medications, Crestor and Fosamax. The former is given for high cholesterol and the latter for low bone density. But more recently, they're being prescribed to patients with only kinda high cholesterol and kinda low bone density.
Who cares? Better to be safe than be bedridden with a broken hip ad high cholesterol, right?
Perhaps. But in the midst of this carefully formulated prescription plan, there are some scary implications.
The first is that taking a medication for a problem you don't actually have can be bad for your health. While this may seem pretty obvious, what if the advice comes from your doctor.
In the case of Crestor, the government has given the go-ahead for this cholesterol medication to be prescribed as a preventative measure for those that don't even have high cholesterol.
While people with high cholesterol have been taking this kind of medication (known as statins) for years without many side effects, a new study suggests that taking statins purely as a preventative measure could actually increase your risk for Type 2 diabetes.
In the story of Fosamax, which is now being prescribed to younger and younger women to deal with losing bone density (which happens over time anyway), studies show that the drug does help prevent spinal fractures, but not other kinds of more common fractures.
And this story has the added twist of a drug company, in this case Merck, capitalizing on a term, "osteopenia" that was originally created by the World Health Organization not to name a disease, but simply to categorize a group of people.
Anna Tosteson, a Dartmouth Medical School professor tells the story of that WHO meeting this way:
Since after the age of 30 all bones lose density, how much bone loss
was normal? And, how much put women at risk and therefore should be
considered a disease?..Over a
two- or three-day period the experts in the room went back and forth
and back and forth, looking at research and trying to decide precisely
where on a graph of diminishing bone density to draw a line.  "Ultimately it was just a matter of, 'Well ... it has to be drawn somewhere,' "
Tosteson says. "And as I recall, it was very hot in the meeting room,
and people were in shirt sleeves and, you know, it was time to kind of
move on, if you will. And, I can't quite frankly remember who it was
who stood up and drew the picture and said, 'Well, let's just do this.'
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So there in the hotel room someone literally stood up, drew a
line through a graph depicting diminishing bone density and decreed:
Every woman on one side of this line has a disease. Then a new question arose: How do you categorize the women who are just on the other side of that line? To
address this issue, Tosteson says, the experts - more or less off the
cuff - decided to use the term osteopenia. Tosteson says they created
the category mostly because they thought it might be useful for public
health researchers who like clear categories for their studies. They
never imagined, she says, that people would come to think of osteopenia
as a disease in itself to be treated.
What both these developments have in common is that they hugely increase
the potential audience for the drug. We're talking millions of people
here. And while that's good news for the pharmaceutical companies,
just do your research before deciding if it's the right thing for you.
It's kind of like the point in Michael Pollan's Food Rules where he advises staying away from "foods" that are advertised on television. While McDonald's has plenty of funds to advertise their new chipotle burger (which looks disgusting, btw), the humble broccoli farmer is out of luck. So if you catch a spot telling you to ask your doctor for a drug for a disease you don't even have, it could be time to think twice.
So in the midst of all of this corporate manipulation and arbitrary naming of diseases, is there any good news? As we see it, yes! High cholesterol and low bone density can both become super-serious issues. However, before things get to that scary place, there's tons of preventative measures you can take in the form of exercise. No fancy schmancy gym membership here either. We're talking a brisk walk around the block on weeknights and occasionally lifting some weights. Other weight bearing exercises like yoga can help too. 
One of our mottoes at Recess is that whatever kind of exercise you're doing--you should enjoy it--you'll do more of it! So find something that works, that gets you outside for a lil' natural vitamin D (did we mention there may be dangers in swallowing too much of that one too?), and you'll be feeling better in no time--no pills necessary!
Our Recess has always been a drug-free zone! >> | |
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Sign up with a
friend, get cool gear!
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Sign up for Recess Health Immersion 2010 with a friend by May 15th and score t-shirts for you both! Sign up online by clicking here, or, call us toll-free at1-866-578-7118. Local to Portland, OR? Call 503-282-5560. |
Offer Expires May 15, 2010
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