Living Well

You eat more than your parents did at your age

One of the Ten Surprising Nutrition Facts to come from the "Fourth Annual Nutrition and Health Conference" held in San Diego, Calif., May 14-16, 2007 is:

The average American is eating 300 more calories each day than he or she did in 1985. Added sweeteners account for 23 percent of those additional calories; added fats, 24 percent.

I'm sure we're not spending any more calories than we did in 1985.

Swallow an expanding jelly pill ...

This pill expands to the size of a tennis ball in your stomach - making you feel full and hopefully encouraging you to eat less.  It's supposed to mimic the effects of gastric bypass surgery without the surgery.

I think I would eat less just to avoid having to take a pill that would expand into a tennis ball in my stomach!

Contacts that restore 20/20 vision

You wear these hard contacts at night and then during the day you have 20/20 vision!  They reshape your eye while you are sleeping - this technique is based on an ancient Chinese tradition of putting sandbags on the eyes of people with myopia at night.  It helped shorten the eye and allowed them to see better during the day.

These "new" contacts are made by Ortho-K and while they've been popular in Europe for a while they are just now making their way to the US.  You can read about one reporter's experience in the article The contact lenses that could restore 20/20 vision.

How much alcohol should you drink?

Most people know that a drink or two makes you feel good and five or six makes you feel bad.  A recent study found that the optimum blood alcohol level for feeling good is .03-.12.  I read a blog post on calwineries that helps you figure out how much to drink to stay in that optimum level. 

Two quick comments:

• A drink an hour should keep most people in that level and might push some over.  (But watch people drink - they usually drink at a much fast rate than one an hour.)
• The optimum level for happiness is also lower than the DUI rate in most states.  (Although not necessarily lower than the DWI rate!)

So I don't want to encourage drinking but rather point out that if you are drinking socially, it takes a lot less than you might think to keep you in that optimum feeling good range!

New tool helps diagnosis

I don't recommend making your own diagnosis but it never hurts to have ideas about what might be happening to you to run by the doctor.  MEDgle is a new website that let's you type in a symptom per line and then shows you conditions that match your symptoms.  Definitely a useful tool!  Use it to get ideas, to find things to ask the doctor about and to learn about conditions.