Category Archives: News

Each additional daily serving of fruits and vegetables that smokers and former smokers eat is associated with a 4 to 8 percent lower risk of their developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the third leading cause of death in the United States, a new study found.

The study, in Thorax, looked at more than 44,000 Swedish men, ages 45 to 79, who completed detailed health and dietary questionnaires. Nearly two-thirds had smoked at some point, and roughly one in four were current smokers.

Over the 13-year course of the study, 1,918 new cases of C.O.P.D. were identified. Men who ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day were 35 percent less likely to develop lung disease than those who ate two servings or less. There was no benefit for nonsmokers.

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10 JANUARY 2017 | GENEVA - Policies to control tobacco use, including tobacco tax and price increases, can generate significant government revenues for health and development work, according to a new landmark global report from WHO and the National Cancer Institute of the United States of America. Such measures can also greatly reduce tobacco use and protect people’s health from the world’s leading killers, such as cancers and heart disease. But left unchecked, the tobacco industry and the deadly impact of its products cost the world’s economies more than US$ 1 trillion annually in healthcare expenditures and lost productivity, according to findings published in The economics of tobacco and tobacco control. Currently, around 6 million people die annually as a result of tobacco use, with most living in developing countries. Read more......

Narrowed, aging blood vessels, which put most older American adults at risk for heart disease and strokes, are not inevitable. This fact was underscored by a newly published study of a population in the Bolivian Amazon.

Among these indigenous South Americans, known as the Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay), coronary atherosclerosis was found to be one-fifth as common than in the United States. CT scans of the hearts of 705 Tsimane adults aged 40 to 94 revealed that nearly nine in 10 had clean coronary arteries and faced no risk of heart disease. The research team estimated that an 80-year-old in the Tsimane group has the same vascular age as an American in his mid-50s.

I’ll return to the likely reasons and the lifesaving lessons we can all learn from them even now after a discussion of a half-century of improvements in the heart health of Americans.

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As smokers turned to electronic cigarettes to reduce the health risks of smoking, big tobacco companies started buying e-cigarette makers and producing and selling their own. Now those companies are lobbying Congress to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from regulating electronic cigarettes and cigars, as it does conventional cigarettes. If they succeed, they will be able to sell and market addictive nicotine products to young people with few restrictions.

While promoters of e-cigarettes and e-cigars, which provide nicotine in vapor form, say they can help people quit conventional tobacco products containing harmful tar, there is not a lot of evidence for that claim. In addition, the devices are dangerous to young people because the nicotine they provide “can cause addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain,” according to a 2016 report by the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy. Health experts also say that the vapor those devices produce can contain carcinogens and metal particles.

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