Health Adda

Exercise and diet are the two most important pillars of good health, and both have as many options and controversies as there are people to give advice on them.  Choosing an exercise regime that fits your specific requirement could be a good starting point for a long term investment in well-being. You first need to take stock of your current status and then your requirements. How do you assess your present physical state? Start with the following: How old are you? Do you have any medical problems (heart, knees, anaemia etc)? Are you a strong willed person who can go it alone or do you need company and entertainment? What are your constraints (no playground, unsafe roads, no gym nearby etc)   The role of Age: In general, the younger the age, more vigorous should be the exercise. A 16 year old, for instance, should play a vigorous out-door game, sprint and run, undertake long distance cycling and so on, but a 60 year old would have to choose from oth...

Wheat, the staple diet of over half the world’s population, could paradoxically be the cause of several of our vexing health problems. A recent study in the journal ‘Nutrients’ points out that proteins in this cereal could be triggering a wide a range of disorders from autistic behaviour in children to liver cirrhosis in adults. Wheat does not seem to go down well in 5% of its consumers. In its most well recognized form called Celiac Disease, one of its proteins called gluten evokes an immune reaction from the small intestines, typically causing diarrhoea, malabsorption and growth failure in children. Funnily, despite having literally grown up on chappatis all through childhood, Celiac Disease often appears suddenly in adulthood with loose motions, weight loss, weakness, anaemia and fatigue. Celiac Disease can also masquerade and present in atypical forms such as delayed puberty, weak bones, deficient dental enamel, neuritis, diabetes, itchy skin rash or an abnormal body move...

Winter is a season when many find themselves not quite at their best: low on energy and gloomy in mood, resonating with the chill and fog outside the window. Seasonal depression, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD) as it is now called by mind-scientists, is indeed rather common affecting one of ten people. It often gets passed off as laziness or excess sensitivity to cold, but can also manifest as social withdrawal, oversleeping, appetite changes and weight gain. Many get unduly sluggish during these times. It affects women more often, plunging many into depression. The insidious entry of winter, with temperatures dropping, days getting shorter and the feeble sun peeping occasionally between fog and cloud, makes it difficult for many of us to notice the link between the weather and our mood. If however we think back on what we did at these times over the last few years, a recognizable pattern often begins to emerge. Patients are often able to link their feelings to this pa...

Alcohol, once tabooed in Indian society, has gained wide social acceptance today. Parties are no longer always as ‘dry’ as to keep the conversation hovering for hours around the weather, the boss, children’s school or politics. A couple of drinks make guests mingle better, voice their honest opinions about Katrina’s lips or Shakira’s hips, crack jokes and even sing a soulful gazal! Ladies have also started preferring spirits to Sprite as they join their men in the ‘wet’ soiree with equal gusto. Exposure to alcohol is not really recent; humans and their forefathers (apes) have tasted alcohol through the ages while munching or sucking over-ripe fruits, most of which have fermented cores.  The difference is in the concentration; it is a meager 1-3% in naturally fermented foods as the yeasts die when the alcohol levels rise. And these low levels can’t make one tipsy!  It is through the process of “distillation”, discovered by man a few centuries ago,  that alcohol can b...

One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Doctors may not be the brainiest in society; yet the fascinating ways in which they think and make decisions has been the subject of interesting research. A book by Dr Jerome Groopman that deals with the subject has hit the best-seller list. There are some parts of the brain that a doctor uses preferentially over others, memory being perhaps one of the most important to start with.  It begins from the time a youngster thinks of taking the entrance exam to medical school – he is required to read, retain and reproduce a large number of factual information and names of body parts and functions. Unlike the engineering, management, or law students, medical aspirants are hardly required to use mathematical problem solving, creative thinking, logic or thinking out of the box.  But ask them names and profiles of thousands of organs, tissues, cells and drugs, and they will have it on their fingertips! In the next phase as they progress to clinical work, doctors learn to rec...