These steps could save you from a lifetime of blood sugar monitoring

6/13 Tim Boyle / Getty Images Indulge your coffee cravings If you’re a coffee fan, keep on sipping. The beverage may keep diabetes at bay. After they studied 126,210 women and men, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that big-time coffee drinkers — those who downed more than 6 daily cups — had a 29 percent to 54 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during the 18-year study. Sipping 4 to 5 cups cut risk about 29 percent; 1 to 3 cups per day had little effect. Decaf coffee offered no protection. Caffeine in other forms — tea, soda, chocolate — did. Researchers suspect that caffeine may help by boosting metabolism. And coffee, the major caffeine source in the study, also contains potassium, magnesium, and antioxidants that help cells absorb sugar. But before you become a VIP at Dunkin Donuts, remember that a medium chain-store cuppa is about 14 to 16 ounces — right there, that’s 2 “cups” by standard measures. Discover these 25 ridiculously healthy foods

Cool, juicy and incredibly refreshing, there’s nothing quite like the taste of melons on a sultry summer day. In addition to being a sweet, thirst-quenching reprieve, melons contain significant amounts of vitamins A and C and potassium.

But there are even more reasons for enjoying these colorful gems. Luscious red watermelons, a summertime staple, also provide a hefty dose of lycopene, an antioxidant that may help the body ward off certain cancers, particularly prostate cancer. Orange- and yellow-fleshed melons contain ample amounts of beta-carotene, necessary for maintaining cardiovascular health and protecting the eyes from the damage that can lead to cataracts.

“The American Dietetic Association recommends eating five servings of fruits and vegetables each day,” says Beth Anderson, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Liberty Medical. “A serving size of fruit is based on the natural amount of sugar in each.”

One serving of fruit should contain 15 grams of carbohydrates. Because watermelons are so full of water, you can eat as much as 1¼ cups cubed melon or 11 ounces as a snack or dessert. For more dense melons, such as cantaloupe and honeydew, a serving is 1 cup cubed fruit, or about 10 ounces.

Despite their sweetness, melons don’t contain a lot of sugar. But as with all fruits and foods containing carbohydrates, Anderson recommends spreading out the servings throughout the day to avoid a sudden rise in blood glucose levels.

So go ahead and enjoy a slice of honeydew for breakfast. Toss an assortment of melon cubes in a salad for a burst of color, or serve a wedge of cantaloupe with a small scoop of creamy frozen yogurt for dessert. Whether you favor melons for their nutritional value or simply their refreshing taste, summertime is melon time.

Selection & Storage

While there are a few varieties of melons available throughout the year, the peak of sweetness for this fruit is May though September. Choose melons that are heavy for their size and that give off a pleasant, sweet aroma. Gently press the stem end with your thumb; it should have a slight “give” to it.

When selecting watermelons, lightly tap them. They should sound hollow. Also, examine their undersides where the melons laid on the ground; this side should be yellowish, not white or light green.

Uncut melons can be kept at room temperature for two to four days or until fully ripe, then refrigerated for up to five days. To serve melons, always wash the outside with warm, soapy water before cutting into it. This will clean any dirt from the rind that could be carried from the knife blade to the flesh. Cut melons will keep for up to three days in the refrigerator.

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Critics say consequences of individual choice missing from reform debate

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JoNel Aleccia Health writer • E-mail

If you ask Dr. Steven Spady, there are two important words missing from the nation’s conversation about health reform: “personal responsibility.”

But Spady, a 54-year-old emergency physician in rural Kentucky, can’t talk about the topic right now. He’s too busy caring for people who he says don’t take care of themselves.

“I just had to go take care of man that left our hospital this morning and now has gone and got drunk and will suck up more health care dollars,” Spady wrote in a hurried e-mail late on a recent weeknight.

That same day, he cared for a 358-pound man with diabetes who didn’t take his medication for two days and then stayed up all night playing poker, plus five different people who overdosed on prescription drugs.

“It just makes me very upset when I have to pay more and more taxes to support government health care programs and have to work longer and longer hours to help a lot of people that just don’t seem to care,” he wrote.

It’s not that Spady lacks compassion. He’s been on medical missions to Mexico and Haiti and has donated thousands of hours of free care in the Appalachian community where he’s worked for nearly a quarter century.

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But Spady is part of a growing chorus of medical professionals, researchers and ordinary citizens who contend that the touchy topic of individual responsibility has been all but ignored in the debate about how to reform the nation’s health care system — and how to pay for it.

“Seldom does anyone suggest how — or if — the individual’s role should be reformed,” argued Lisa Herrington, 46, a former health industry administrator who launched a discussion of the topic in May on the blog “Thoughts that Make You Think.”

“Having health insurance coverage doesn’t make a person healthy. It’s what you do with that coverage and your personal choices that make the difference,” she added.

Critics say members of Congress who’ve headed home for summer recess leaving no fewer than five Democratic health reform plans up in the air should be as concerned about encouraging individual accountability as they are with extending insurance coverage to 46 million Americans.

‘It’s simple fairness’
“If you talk about costs, there’s something here and now that you can do,” said John F. Banzhaf, director of the anti-smoking agency Action on Smoking and Health, which has pressured members of Congress to enact a $60 a month user fee to make smokers pay part of the health insurance costs of their habit.

“If you don’t have a user fee on smokers, that forces everyone else to pay those health care costs,” said Banzahf, who is also a professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School. “One argument is that it’s simple fairness.”

But other experts caution that the conversation about personal responsibility is not so simple.  For one thing, many Americans don’t agree that smokers, the obese or others should pay higher costs for health care based on their unhealthy habits.

Only 37 percent of U.S. adults thought it was fair to charge people with unhealthy lifestyles more for their care in 2007, down from 53 percent just a year earlier, according to Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Healthcare polls.

Asked specifically about smoking versus obesity, they came down harder on the puffers, with 57 percent favoring higher insurance rates for smokers, but only 36 percent saying the same for those who are overweight. Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, said that’s not surprising in a country where two-thirds of adults are overweight and 20 percent still smoke.

In some ways, those with insurance are already helping to cover those without. Insured patients pay higher costs on hospital fees, for example, to help balance out the bills of those who don’t have coverage.

Growing outrage over high health care costs racked up by others’ excess isn’t hard to find. Message boards on msnbc.com stories related to health and health reform are filled with frustrated posters.

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“People need to get their lives together. If you can get down to a healthy weight, I suggest you do so,” one commenter noted. “You will save yourself, and everybody else, a lot of stress and money.”

“Make fat people pay more for health care, tax them where you can, just like smokers pay more for everything,” wrote another. “Ride a motorcycle and pay more and so on. Tired of paying for everyone else’s stupidity.”

The catch is, not everyone can agree which health problems are the responsibility of the individual, and which are wider social concerns. Rob Gould, president of the Partnership for Prevention, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit agency aimed at decreasing disease, said he’s all for individuals becoming invested in their own good health, but notes that the community must make it easier.

“We can’t allow ‘personal responsibility,’ in quotes, to become a polite way of saying, ‘You’re on your own, Mac,’” Gould said. “When kids don’t have a way to safely bike or walk to school because there are no sidewalks, that’s not personal responsibility.”

There’s also the question of where to draw the line on personal responsibility. If smoking and obesity can be fined, and motorcycle riders need to pay higher insurance rates, it opens the door to penalizing other preventable risks. Could the same logic be applied to people who have unprotected sex and turn up with a disease? Those who eat their beef on the rare side despite warnings about E. coli contamination?

Obesity health costs: $147 billion a year
There’s no doubt that the bulk of the nation’s health care costs are self-inflicted. Smoking, high blood pressure and being overweight are the top risks for early death, accounting for more than 1 million premature deaths each year, with physical inactivity, high blood sugar and alcohol use not far behind, according to an April study by the Harvard School of Public Health.

The price tag for obesity has soared to $147 billion a year, new government studies show, and smoking costs about $193 billion in medical expenses and lost productivity.

“To have hundreds of thousands of premature deaths caused by these modifiable risk factors is shocking,” noted Goodarz Danaei, a co-author of the Harvard risk study.

Campaign seeks first daughters’ help to make school-lunch menus healthier

HealthySchoolLunches.org On posters plastered near the Capitol in Washington, D.C., 8-year-old Jasmine Messiah makes a plea to have more vegetables and fruits appear on lunch menus in public schools. View related photos

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She’s cute, sassy, playful and sincere. At age 8, Jasmine Messiah makes an ideal poster child for a campaign that targets the Obamas and Congress and amounts to an old-fashioned food fight.

On posters that began popping up this week near the Capitol in Washington, D.C., little Jasmine beams at the camera with her arms crossed and shares this message: “President Obama’s daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don’t I?”

The posters are part of a campaign that will run through the month of August in an effort to influence Congress to reform the Child Nutrition Act, which dictates the nutritional content of lunches in public schools. Masterminded by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the campaign seeks to have more vegetables, fruits and low-fat vegetarian options appear on school-lunch menus.

“At most schools, children have no alternative at all to the meaty, cheesy, high-calorie fare that contributes to childhood obesity and health problems,” Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said in a statement. “Congress needs to help all schools, no matter how disadvantaged, to provide vegetables, fruits and healthy nondairy vegetarian choices, and should provide the funding to make that feasible.”

Pepperoni pizza vs. vegetarian chili
Sasha and Malia Obama attend Sidwell Friends School, an exclusive private school in the Washington area that makes vegetarian meals available to its students.

Jasmine, who attends a public school in Miami, wrote a letter to the first daughters and asked for their help with her enthusiastic push to bring more veggies and fruits to kids across America.

“I’m glad that your school, Sidwell Friends, already has lots of healthy options in the cafeteria, including vegetarian chili and roasted vegetable pizza,” Jasmine wrote.

“The problem is that most students eat unhealthy foods, like hot dogs, pepperoni pizza, ham sandwiches and cheeseburgers, every day at school,” Jasmine added in her letter. “A lot of schools, including mine, don’t offer enough healthy fruits, vegetables and vegetarian meals.”

The White House has yet to respond to the campaign; Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act in the coming weeks. The posters are plastered around the Union Station Amtrak and commuter rail station in D.C., where many lawmakers are likely to see them.

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A story on the Web site Politico.com speculated that the campaign could anger the Obamas and spark a negative backlash because it targets Malia and Sasha so prominently.

“This is not the way to win the heart of the president,” Darrell West, governance studies director at Brookings Institution, told Politico.com. “It’s dangerous to target Obama’s daughters because many people view family members as off-limits for political advocacy. That’s especially relevant in this case because his daughters are so young.”

Officials with the Physicians Committee, which spent $20,000 producing the posters for the campaign, said that’s a risk they’re willing to shoulder.

“I am not concerned with the White House being disappointed in this ad,” Susan Levin, nutrition education director of the Physicians Committee, told Politico.com. “I’m more concerned that Congress gets the message. And if they get it because it raises Obama’s eyebrow, so be it.”

Childhood obesity on the rise
In its campaign, the Physicians Committee notes that childhood obesity is at a record high and that “one in three young people born in 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in his or her life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

“Vegetarian, especially vegan, meals are typically low in fat and calories,” the committee said. “Scientific evidence shows that consuming more plant-based foods can help prevent obesity, heart disease and diabetes.”

Jasmine Messiah said she brings fruits and vegetables to school with her because she genuinely enjoys them.

“Sometimes I bring in broccoli and carrots and my friends are like, ‘Ewww, this is disgusting,’ ” she told The Miami Herald. “But I think if they tried it more, they’d like it.”

Original article posted here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32301383/ns/today-parenting_and_family/

Backbeat the word was on the street
That the fire in your heart is out
I’m sure you’ve heard it all before
But you never really had a doubt
I don’t believe that anybody feels
The way I do about you now

And all the roads we have to walk along are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
I don’t know how

Because maybe
You’re gonna be the one who saves me ?
And after all
You’re my wonderwall

Today was gonna be the day?
But they’ll never throw it back to you
By now you should’ve somehow
Realized what you’re not to do
I don’t believe that anybody
Feels the way I do
About you now

And all the roads that lead to you were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
I don’t know how

I said maybe
You’re gonna be the one who saves me ?
And after all
You’re my wonderwall

I said maybe
You’re gonna be the one who saves me ?
And after an
You’re my wonderwall

Said maybe
You’re gonna be the one that saves me
You’re gonna be the one that saves me
You’re gonna be the one that saves me

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