A host of top athletes have hailed the recovery powers of milk on the back of two new pieces of groundbreaking research.

Champion decathlete Dean Macey, Olympic sprinter Marlon Devonish and long jumper Greg Rutherford were all quick to celebrate the news that milk may promote better recovery after exercise than both water and isotonic sports drinks.

The key new study, conducted by Loughborough University and published in the British Journal of Nutrition, indicated that milk is significantly more effective than water or isotonic drinks at re-hydration after training.
And it’s more good news for dairy as a second study, which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month, also backed milk as a post-exercise drink.

This study suggested that milk can help increase muscle size and strength, whilst reducing body fat.  Several other studies have also noted milk’s positive effects on exercise and recovery, while athletes and sports teams are already experiencing the benefits by consuming milk after training.

Dean Macey said: “I can’t say it comes as a huge surprise to me that this research says milk is the best thing for athletes, it makes perfect sense. If you want a great, natural drink to help performance then it’s got to contain milk every time.” Read more »

Obese people may be less likely to develop prostate cancer but more likely to die of the disease, a study says.

Researchers found the cancer was much less likely to develop in people who are insulin resistant - a pre-diabetes condition linked to obesity.

But they were more likely to develop an aggressive form of the disease likely to spread to other parts of the body.

The study involving 784 men, by Sweden’s Umea University, is published in the International Journal of Cancer. Click here for full article

Adults who had so-called metabolic syndrome when they were children have a substantially increased risk of having heart disease in their 30s, researchers report.

The metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors — such as high blood pressure, obesity and high blood sugar levels — that together increase the likelihood of developing heart problems or diabetes.

Individual components of metabolic syndrome are known to track from childhood into adulthood, but the association between metabolic syndrome in childhood and cardiovascular risk later in life has not been established, Dr. John A. Morrison and his associates explain in the medical journal Pediatrics.

The researchers analyzed data, collected between 1973 and 1976, on levels of blood glucose, triglycerides, “good” cholesterol, body weight, and blood pressure in 771 children aged 5 to 19 years. Click here for full article

Children as young as eight should be given the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins to reduce their risk of heart disease, say doctors.

A week after the Government’s heart adviser caused controversy by suggesting every man over 50 and every woman over 60 should take a daily statin, researchers in the Netherlands recommend that the medication should be offered to children at high risk.

But unlike Professor Roger Boyle, who argued that a blanket approach to treatment of heart disease in middle age would be the most effective strategy, the Dutch researchers do not suggest handing out statins so freely.

They recommend the treatment only for those children with a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), which causes very high levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol, commonly called “bad” cholesterol, from birth onwards. Click here for full article

It has thousands of devotees, but can cider vinegar really cure arthritis?

Sarah Gall, a church organist from Rochdale, Lancashire, believes that she has been cured of arthritis in her spine by following a diet that included apple cider vinegar and honey.

The use of cider vinegar follows in a long tradition: people have been using natural cider vinegar as a medicine for centuries.

As far back as 3,000 BC, Egyptians were using it for health benefits including weight loss. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, was said to have used cider vinegar for its healing qualities.

While doctors remain sceptical, many sufferers have embraced it, including the explorer and adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Click here for full article

Latest figures show over a fifth of UK men and women are obese and 2.9% of women and 1% of men are obese to the point that it threatens their health. However, it’s not just in the UK that overweight or obese people are causing concerns to their health.

Reuters reports that more than two-thirds of Australians living outside major cities are overweight or obese, and extremely obese corpses are creating a safety hazard at mortuaries.

Nearly three quarters of men and 64 percent of women were overweight in a study of people in rural areas. Just 30 percent of those studied recorded a healthy weight, said research published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Click here for full article

Women in their 40s are more likely to drink potentially harmful amounts on a night out than younger people, researchers in Cardiff have found.

While men’s drinking peaked in their late 20s, women’s alcohol intake reached its heights among the over-40s.

In a year, 893 people were breathalysed late at night in the city centre for the Cardiff University study. It found 40% of men and 20% of women had drunk over a level which put them more at risk of injury and ill-health. Click here for full article

A survey of young people in their early thirties has found those in high-stress jobs run twice the risk of suffering serious depression or anxiety as those in lower-stress occupations.

Top of the stress league are men who are head chefs in big restaurants and construction workers under pressure to complete a building on time. They are six times more likely to buckle under stress, researchers report. Click here for full article

Experts confirm what we at Fitness-etc already knew. Using the Body Mass Index (BMI) to monitor changes in your body composition is “outdated and flawed”. In addition, using a formula or height/weight chart to determine your “ideal weight” can be misleading. They do not take into consideration your lifestyle, health issues, body composition, metabolism, or ethnic background.

For more than 100 years a healthy weight has been defined by calculating a persons BMI. Using height and weight measurements, a person is categorised as underweight, normal, overweight or obese. Click here for full article

Men over 50 should take a so-called ‘polypill’ to cut down the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

That is according to the Government’s leading cardiac expert, Professor Roger Boyle. He says it will provide a much-needed boost to the nation’s health and relieve the pressure on the NHS. The pill would contain statin, which attacks cholesterol, aspirin and drugs to combat blood pressure.

It’s estimated the pill would cost about £6bn to prescribe to all men over 50, but heart disease and strokes currently cost the NHS about £14bn a year. There are no polypills currently on the market but one is being tested in New Zealand, and would cost one pound a day.

Professor Boyle told the Daily Mail: “Although we have seen a decrease in death rates, heart disease remains our biggest killer. It kills more than all the cancers put together.“The short cut to all this is to say that when you are a man of 50, you need treatment.”

Critics of the scheme claim it will make otherwise healthy people into patients.They also say it will lead to some neglecting other parts of their life - such as dietary habits and exercise.

Source: Skynews