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(Reuters Health) – Following a diet that mimics fasting may reduce risk factors for disease in generally healthy people, according to a small study.
Dr. Min Wei of UCLA’s Longevity Institute and colleagues tested the effects of the fasting-mimicking diet on various risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, cancer or other conditions.
The diet (FMD; brand name ProLon) is low in calories, sugars and protein but high in unsaturated fats. Forty-eight study participants ate normally for three months while 52 ate FMD for five days each month and ate normally the rest of the time. After three months, the groups switched regimens. Although all participants were considered healthy, some had high blood pressure, low levels of “good” cholesterol, and other risk factors.
A total of 71 people completed the study, which was published in Science Translational Medicine. Body mass index, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol improved with FMD, but mainly for those who were already at risk. Side effects were mild, including fatigue, weakness and headaches.
Wei and Dr. Valter Longo of the University of California, San Diego, said in an interview published in the journal that while “the great majority” of participants had one or more risk factors for diseases such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer, “FDA trials will be necessary to demonstrate whether periodic FMD is effective in disease prevention and treatment.”
Dr. Joseph Antoun, CEO of L-Nutra, Inc., which produces FMD, told Reuters Health by email that FMD “is intended for use by individuals who want to optimize their health and wellbeing, by overweight or obese individuals who want to manage their weight in an easy and healthy way, and by people who have abnormal levels of biomarkers for aging and age-related conditions.”
That said, Antoun acknowledged that if you have common conditions associated with overweight and obesity such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, you should not use FMD without a doctor’s approval.
The product also should not be used by children under 18 or pregnant or nursing women. And it’s not for you if you have certain metabolic diseases, liver or kidney disorders that may be affected by the very low glucose and protein content of the diet, or if you have nut or soy allergies. What’s more, it “should never be combined with glucose-lowering drugs, such as metformin or insulin,” according to Antoun.
Registered dietitian Ashlea Braun of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus pointed out that researchers compared the fasting-mimicking diet to participants’ usual diet. “Therefore, we don’t yet know how this diet stands up against long-standing approaches already shown to be beneficial, such as the Mediterranean or DASH Diet.”
“It’s not clear if (FMD) enables individuals to consistently meet all micronutrient requirements,” she told Reuters Health by email. “It’s also not known how this type of restrictive diet affects muscle mass in the long term, and what impact this has on various indicators of health.”
“Although there is some evidence showing these type of restrictive diets can help ‘jump start’ people considering lifestyle changes, more research is definitely needed before this is recommended for individuals,” Braun concluded.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2keeNFn Science Translational Medicine, online February 15, 2017.
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As Republicans look at ways to replace or repair the health law, many suggest shrinking the list of services insurers are required to offer in individual and small group plans would reduce costs and increase flexibility. That option came to the forefront last week when Seema Verma, who is slated to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Trump administration, noted at her confirmation hearing that coverage for maternity services should be optional in those health plans.
Maternity coverage is a popular target and one often mentioned by health law critics, but other items also could be watered down or eliminated.
There are some big hurdles, however. The health law requires that insurers who sell policies for individuals and small businesses cover at a minimum 10 “essential health benefits,” including hospitalization, prescription drugs and emergency care, in addition to maternity services. The law also requires that the scope of the services offered be equal to those typically provided in employer coverage.
“It has to look like a typical employer plan, and those are still pretty generous,” said Timothy Jost, an emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University Law School in Virginia who is an expert on the health law.
Since the 10 required benefits are spelled out in the Affordable Care Act, it would require a change in the law to eliminate entire categories or to water them down to such an extent that they’re less generous than typical employer coverage. And since Republicans likely cannot garner 60 votes in the Senate, they will be limited in changes that they can make to the ACA. Still, policy experts say there’s room to “skinny up” the requirements in some areas by changing the regulations that federal officials wrote to implement the law.
The law requires that plans cover “rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices.” Many employer plans don’t include habilitative services, which help people with developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy or autism maintain, learn or improve their functional skills. Federal officials issued a regulation that defined habilitative services and directed plans to set separate limits for the number of covered visits for rehabilitative and habilitative services.
Those rules could be changed. “There is real room for weakening the requirements” for habilitative services, said Dania Palanker, an assistant research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms who has reviewed the essential health benefits coverage requirements.
Pediatric oral and vision care requirements, another essential health benefit that’s not particularly common in employer plans, could also be weakened, said Caroline Pearson, a senior vice president at Avalere Health, a consulting firm.
The health law requires all individual and small group plans cover mental health and substance use disorder services. In the regulations the administration said that means those services have to be provided at “parity” with medical and surgical services, meaning plans can’t be more restrictive with one type of coverage than the other regarding cost sharing, treatment and care management.
“They could back off of parity,” Palanker said.
Prescription drug coverage could be tinkered with as well. The rules currently require that plans cover at least one drug in every drug class, a standard that isn’t particularly robust to start with, said Katie Keith, a health policy consultant and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. That standard could be relaxed further, she said, and the list of required covered drugs could shrink.
Republicans have discussed trimming or eliminating some of the preventive services that are required to be offered without cost sharing. Among those requirements is providing birth control without charging women anything out of pocket. But, Palanker said, “if they just wanted to omit them, I expect that would end up in court.”
Before the health law passed, just 12 percent of health policies available to a 30-year-old woman on the individual market offered maternity benefits, according to research by the National Women’s Law Center. Those that did often charged extra for the coverage and required a waiting period of a year or more. The essential health benefits package plugged that hole very cleanly, said Adam Sonfield, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and advocacy organization.
“Having it in the law makes it more difficult to either exclude it entirely or charge an arm and a leg for it,” Sonfield said.
Maternity coverage is often offered as an example of a benefit that should be optional, as Verma advocated. If you’re a man or too old to get pregnant, why should you have to pay for that coverage?
That a la carte approach is not the way insurance should work, some experts argue. Women don’t need prostate cancer screening, they counter, but they pay for the coverage anyway.
“We buy insurance for uncertainty, and to spread the costs of care across a broad population so that when something comes up that person has adequate coverage to meet their needs,” said Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
Please visit khn.org/columnists to send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column.
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PORTLAND, Maine — On a chilly December evening, King Middle School students and their families streamed into Ocean Gateway, a party space with sweeping views of Casco Bay. They had come to celebrate the culmination of a school project on freedom, just as many of the families were getting a taste of liberty themselves.
The students, a number of whom are Muslim immigrants from Somalia, had created posters and written essays that proclaimed their vision of American ideals. Some of their families had fled the war-torn nation that became subject to the ban announced by President Donald Trump in late January for travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations.
In a divisive political climate, public schools are taking on the challenge of helping refugees who feel unsafe in a country that seems increasingly intolerant of them. The students’ work took on an even deeper meaning after a January 27 racially charged assault near Casco Bay High School, which spurred pro-immigrant rallies throughout the city.
“Islam is blamed for terrorism, but Christianity isn’t blamed for radical groups like the KKK,” said eighth-grader Zakaria Ali, 13, a student of Somali heritage who argued in his project that Muslims lose their freedom when Americans equate Islam with terror.
Portland is a progressive coastal city of trendy restaurants and Victorian homes, as well as housing projects and homeless shelters, in one of the whitest states in the country. Its diversity is evident — from the assistant principal at Deering High School, who is a Somali immigrant, to the former student and current math teacher at King Middle School, a Ugandan immigrant, to the Somali restauranteur whose son is studying for his law school entrance exams. Republican governor Paul LePage has said he supports President Trump’s travel ban and has sought to deny government benefits to asylum seekers, but Portland city officials have proclaimed support for their immigrant community.
“It’s a lightning-rod issue,” said Judy Katzel, a spokesperson for Catholic Charities Maine, the agency that resettles refugees in the state. “But welcoming refugees is not a political issue. It’s about people.”
Students said King Middle School feels like a safe haven, but added that the world outside the school building has lately felt more dangerous. They hear their parents talking about being accosted in the street and worrying about relatives abroad who may be affected by the ban. (A federal appeals court has upheld a temporary order blocking the ban, but the Trump administration is considering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.)
leThe school’s freedom project, which is in its 19th year, is based on President Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II concept of the “four freedoms” that everyone in the world is entitled to enjoy. The students initially explored these concepts — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear — through the oil paintings of the quintessential American painter Norman Rockwell, and then deepened their understanding through individual research projects and field trips. This year in the project, which encompassed social studies, English, math and science, the topic of Islamophobia was popular.
Umulker Ugas, 13, an eighth-grader whose family fled Somalia for Kenya before she was born, wears a hijab and goes to a mosque after school to study the Koran. In her project on freedom of worship, she focused on discrimination against women who wear the hijab in the workplace.
“I feel like it’s not fair,” she said. “Not everyone from the countries they are banning is starting trouble.”
Related: Muslim girls in Trump’s America: ‘I’m not going to cower into fear’
The federal government has resettled about 3 million refugees since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. Roughly 44,000 immigrants, including refugees, have made their homes in Maine, according to Catholic Charities Maine. In the 1980s, most refugees were from Vietnam; now the majority come from Africa and the Middle East.
Most Somalis arrived in the United States after 1991, when their government collapsed, civil war broke out and the country faced famine and anarchy. United Nations estimates showed that roughly 150,000 Somali immigrants were living in the United States in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.
Last year, at Ohio State University, a Somali refugee, apparently inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, rammed a car into pedestrians and then stabbed people with a butcher knife. The attacker was shot dead within minutes, but his act added to the tension surrounding U.S. refugee communities.
Katzel said such violence hasn’t affected her work in Maine. “Most people understand that there can be isolated events and tend to not really translate that onto an entire population,” she said.
Islam is blamed for terrorism, but Christianity isn’t blamed for radical groups like the KKK.
In Maine, most Somalis first settled in Portland, the state’s largest city. They then moved north to the Lewiston-Auburn area, where housing is cheaper, said Elizabeth Eames, a Bates College associate professor of anthropology. Population estimates suggest that the Lewiston-Auburn area now has the largest percentage of Somali refugees in the country, with about 8,000 of its 35,000 residents of Somali origin, she said.
Such an increase in students who need extra services can test a school district. On February 7, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, along with local disability rights groups, released the results of a two-year investigation of the Lewiston schools for violations of federal civil rights and disabilities laws. In a letter to Lewiston Schools Superintendent Bill Webster, the group alleged that students of color, including Somali refugees and students with disabilities, are disciplined more often and are less likely to get the support they need.
Webster defended the school district’s work in meeting the needs of all students. He noted that the ACLU’s data is several years old, and that last year the system’s five-year completion rate for students from immigrant homes was greater than that for students from homes where English is the primary language. He cited a 78 percent rate for immigrants and a 73 percent rate for native English speakers.
In Portland, in addition to teaching newly arrived students English, school officials reach out to immigrant parents through the system’s Multilingual & Multicultural Center. The center also connects volunteer mentors to students and trains teachers to help children who may have endured trauma.
The Portland school district currently serves students who speak 60 languages other than English, with Somali and Arabic being the most common, according to Grace Valenzuela, the center’s director. Overall, about 30 percent of the district’s 6,800 students speak a language other than English as their first language. Of those English language learners, almost a third speak Somali, she said.
The immigrant experience is familiar to Portland Schools Superintendent Xavier Botana; he came to America from Cuba in the early 1960s. In an open letter after the Casco Bay High confrontation, Botana affirmed the school system’s commitment to all its students, whether they are immigrants, refugees or native-born Americans.
On February 6, a little more than a week after the incident, local police charged a white 20-year-old Portland resident with a hate crime and assault, and he pleaded not guilty. He is accused of confronting two Casco Bay students, and brandishing a sharp object after shouting racial slurs to a group of students on the street near the high school. The January 27 incident sparked several rallies and marches in support of the students and against hate. On the following Monday, someone hung pink papers that said “You Are Loved” on the bus shelter in front of the school, near where the incident took place.
“Our students acted exactly as we would want them to act,” Botana wrote in his open letter. “They exemplified the ideals on which Casco Bay High School was founded and made us all proud.”
Botana’s letter became a political flashpoint in Maine. In it, Botana also criticized President Donald Trump’s travel ban, as well as the president’s intention to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The head of the Maine Republican party accused Botana of using taxpayer money to advocate a political point of view. Botana countered that January’s unsettling local and national events had created a negative climate for immigrant students, and it was his duty as an educator to put them in context.
Related: Schoolchildren “have a lot of questions and a lot of fear” in aftermath of Trump victory
Nimo Saeed, a Somali immigrant who owns the Mini Mogadishu restaurant, said the police had stopped by recently to check on her and offer assistance if she needed it. She hasn’t experienced any problems, she said, but they would likely pale in comparison with what she experienced back in Somalia.
“The American people don’t know what bad is,” she said as she served sweet tea spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. “We’ve been through a Civil War, we know what bad is.”
But Casco Bay High senior Samira Ahmed, 17, who came to the United States with her Somali family when she was only seven and has thrived in Portland, said the alleged assault burst the protective bubble of the school where she has always felt accepted. “It showed the reality of what is happening in the U.S.,” she said.
The American people don’t know what bad is. We’ve been through a Civil War, we know what bad is.
Elizabeth Szatkowski and Sarah Compton, members of the Casco Bay High School parent advisory group, strongly support the multicultural environment in Portland schools.
“It has given my daughters the opportunity to hear from other people in authentic ways,” said Szatkowski, whose older daughter is in college and whose younger daughter is a junior at the high school. “It’s not just an add on. It’s part of the fabric of their education.”
Compton, who has two sons at the school and is the advisory group’s president, said, “Most of my older son’s friends are Muslim. It’s a world he wouldn’t have been exposed to because our day-to-day community is not that diverse.”
Both women, who are white, said one of the biggest challenges has been integrating parents from other cultures into the school’s parent community. Language is a barrier, and also a sense that schools should take care of school life, while parents take care of home life.
“We had a group of parents who reached out to multilingual parents to come to school activities and it was difficult,” said Szatkowski, a clinical social worker who runs programs for the mentally ill. “It’s such a …. Western way of being involved in the school.”
Across town, at Deering High School, where several student council co-presidents are Muslim immigrants, a few hundred students rallied on the school sidewalk on a recent Friday afternoon. They called it a “Stand of Solidarity” with Casco Bay students and immigrants in general. They held posters that read: “A country built by immigrants should stand tall by its immigrants” and “Spread Love, Not Hate.” Drivers honked their horns in support as they passed in their cars. On the opposite side of the street, mothers in hijabs stood smiling, holding signs of their own: “No Hate, No Fear, No Wall, No Ban” and “Immigrants are Great Neighbors.”
Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed, Deering’s assistant principal, watched but did not participate. Earlier, in an interview, with a mixture of pride and amazement, he told the story of his own refugee experience. He escaped poverty in Mogadishu, Somalia, attended university in Pakistan and eventually came to America, where he started out as an interpreter in the Portland schools. A principal noticed his teaching talent and encouraged him to pursue a degree in education. He now has a family, a doctorate and a high-profile job.
It takes courage for an immigrant to put down roots in an unfamiliar place, Ahmed said, just as it takes courage for a community to open its doors to the strangers in their midst. Schools are on the frontline of this march toward integration and acceptance as they welcome students to life in America. Those children can then help their parents navigate this new world.
But both the community and the immigrant must adapt, Ahmed said. “It’s a two-way street.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about education and immigration.
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An Oklahoma father paid tribute to his pregnant wife’s selflessness in a beautiful viral post.
On Feb. 17, Royce Young posted a photo of his wife, Keri, on Facebook. The photo shows Keri, who is seven months pregnant with their second child, sleeping peacefully on their couch.
In the long caption, Royce explained why his wife is so inspiring to him and shared the tearjerking details of this pregnancy.
Keri is pregnant with a baby girl, whom she and her husband have decided to name Eva. Tragically, the couple learned at their 19-week ultrasound that their daughter did not have a brain. Royce described that moment in his Facebook post.
“Somehow through full body ugly crying, Keri looked up and asked, ‘If I carry her full term, can we donate her organs?’ … There I was, crestfallen and heartbroken, but I momentarily got lifted out of the moment and just stood in awe of her. I was a spectator to my own life, watching a superhero find her superpowers. In literally the worst moment of her life, finding out her baby was going to die, it took her less than a minute to think of someone else and how her selflessness could help. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever experienced. In the eight years we’ve been married (and 15 years together) I’ve had a lot of moments stop me in my tracks where I thought, “holy crap, this woman I’m married to, lucky me.” But this one was different. It hit me that not only am I married to my very best friend, but to a truly remarkable, special human being.”
Royce, who writes about basketball for ESPN.com, noted in the post that he went to New Orleans for NBA All-Star Weekend and met an “awesome” kid named Jarrius, who needs a liver transplant. Royce said meeting Jarrius inspired him to post the photo of his wife and his thoughts about her strength.
“Keri has been in the trenches the entire time, feeling every little kick, every hiccup and every roll,” he wrote. “She’s reminded every moment of every day that she’s carrying a baby that will die. Her back hurts. Her feet are sore. She’s got all the super fun pregnant stuff going on.”
He added, “But the light at the end of her nine-month tunnel will turn into a darkness she’s never felt before a couple hours or days after Eva is born. She’s the one that is going to deal with all that comes with having a baby ― her milk coming in, the recovery process, etc, but with no snuggly, soft, beautiful newborn to look at to remind you that it was all worth it.”
Ultimately, Royce wrote, they take comfort in knowing that their daughter can be a “miracle” for another family in need of an organ donation for their baby ― just as Jarrius and his family are hoping for their own miracle.
Royce and Keri also have a 2-year-old son named Harrison. “Whenever Harrison gets hurt, or has to pull a bandaid off or something, Keri will ask him, ‘Are you tough? Are you BRAVE?’ And that little boy will nod his head and say, ‘I tough! I brave!’” Royce wrote at the conclusion of his post.
“I’m looking at Keri right now and I don’t even have to ask,” he added. “She’s TOUGH. She’s BRAVE. She’s incredible. She’s remarkable.”
Royce’s post received over 9,000 likes. He told The Huffington Post he did not think anyone other than friends and family would read it and has been shocked and overwhelmed by the response.
The dad said he wrote it as a journal entry of sorts ― and a tribute to his wife. “I love her, and watching her courage and strength is just something that’s inspires me,” he explained.
“Keri, like me, is pretty private, and it’s hard to be vulnerable and expose your emotions,” he added. “But this is a unique situation, and throughout everything we’ve talked about trying to minimize regret. And I don’t want to look back years from now and think about how I missed an opportunity to tell people about how terrific Keri is handling this. We want to live in the present with this, and have something tangible to remember it with as we get older. “
Royce said he also wants to shed light on another aspect of reproductive freedom ― that “choice” does not exclusively refer to termination but can mean choosing to bring their baby into the world and letting her life save others.
“We love seeing the impact our little girl is having,” the dad told HuffPost, adding that parents love to talk about their kids and this is their chance to do that with Eva.
“We won’t get to brag about her grades or how pretty her hair is,” he said. “This is what we get to tell people about, and we want to take advantage of it.”
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Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have blocked funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions and other health services.
The bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature would have barred the state from providing funds to clinics that perform abortions not covered by Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor.
McAuliffe, a Democrat, said the measure would harm thousands of Virginians who relied on Planned Parenthood healthcare services and programs. He vetoed a similar measure last year.
“Attempts to restrict women’s access to health care will impede the goal of making Virginia the best place to live, work, and run a business,” he said in a statement.
Advocates for the law had said it would underpin organizations that provide the widest range of services.
Planned Parenthood draws the ire of many Republicans because it provides abortions. Republican President Donald Trump has pledged to defund the organization.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by James Dalgleish)
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Several Muslim-led initiatives are fighting back against a spate of anti-Semitic incidents that have rattled the American Jewish community in recent days.
Jewish community centers in 10 states were shaken by a wave of bomb threats on Monday. That same day, reports emerged that more than 100 headstones at a historic Jewish cemetery outside St. Louis had been desecrated by vandals.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, announced a $5,000 reward Monday evening for tips that could lead to arrests and convictions in the bomb threats.
“It is the duty of American Muslims to offer support to the Jewish community and any minority group targeted in the recent spike in hate crimes nationwide,” CAIR executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
CAIR frequently decries attacks against marginalized groups, but doesn’t usually post rewards for those targeting non-Muslim communities.
“Due to the widespread nature of this series of threats, we believed it was our responsibility to take some concrete action,” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s director of communications, told The Huffington Post.
The phoned-in bomb threats were reported at Jewish community centers in St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo and Amherst, New York; Birmingham, Alabama; Houston; Cleveland ; Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tampa, Florida; and Chicago. Law enforcement authorities have found no explosive devices.
At the Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery in St. Louis suburb University City, the threat wasn’t empty. More than 100 headstones have been toppled or vandalized in the last week, police said on Monday. The cemetery has served as a burial site for the local Jewish community since the late 1800s.
A LauchGood campaign initiated Tuesday by Muslim activists Linda Sarsour, an organizer for the Women’s March on Washington, and Tarek El-Messidi, founder of Islamic nonprofit CelebrateMercy, is raising money to help rebuild the damaged tombstones.
“Muslim Americans know all too well the impact that vandalism and desecration of our sacred places have on our communities, and we wanted to send a message to our Jewish sisters and brothers that we stand with them,” Sarsour said.
Despite common notions of Muslim-Jewish antagonism, El-Messidi noted there’s a long tradition of mutual respect and support between the communities, dating back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
“Today, we have countless bomb threats, arson attacks, and vandalism directed at mosques and synagogues across American,” El-Messidi said. “So it’s even more critical for us to work together to rebuild what haters try to destroy.”
The campaign aimed to raise $20,000. It surpassed its goal by Tuesday afternoon.
“Solidarity is a verb, and we are committed to put action behind our words through raising these funds,” Sarsour said.
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Baby powder. Flour. Glitter. Vaseline. Hershey’s Syrup. You may not realize it but these are all dangerous, dangerous substances when paired with a mischievous child.
We asked the HuffPost Parents community to share their most epic kid messes ― the ones that took them hours to sweep, vacuum, mop and/or scrub up.
Keep scrolling to find out which substances to keep out of reach next time you dare to take that shower or nap.
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Amber Rose and Wiz Khalifa threw their son a super birthday party and offered an important lesson in co-parenting all at the same time.
This week, both parents posted photos on Instagram of the superhero-themed birthday party they threw for their 4-year-old son, Sebastian. For part of the celebration, the former couple dressed as Batgirl and Batman, while Sebastian opted for a Catboy costume from the series “PJ Masks.”
Followers on Instagram applauded the parents for celebrating their son’s big day together.
“Much respect to you … great example of co-parenting,” one commenter wrote. “This is unconditional love and sacrifice for your child. You guys look more like ‘The Incredibles.’ Too cute!” wrote another.
Rose has been open in the past about co-parenting her son with Khalifa. In an interview with People, she said they “try to have family days with him.” And in 2015, she told MTV News that co-parenting certainly takes work, but is worth it.
“You have to do what’s best for your baby,” she said. “That’s the most important thing.”
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