Studies We Plan to Ignore

[By Crabby]


At Cranky Fitness, we generally prefer scientific studies over most other sources of health information. (Not that we don't appreciate late-night infomercials about the need to detoxify our feet, or suggestions from Annoying Bad Breath Neighbor Guy. (Leeches for migraines? Really?)

We especially love it when science tells us that our good healthy habits are paying off. Want to feel cheerful? There's a great round-up over at Mark's Daily Apple about the ways in which exercise and nutritious food choices are good for your brain.

However, while we believe in science, we have our issues with lots of research that goes on. So, we often bitch about these studies. Sometimes we even make up our own!

But mostly, if a study looks lame or it says something we don't want to hear, we just don't cover it. We're one small health blog in a huge blogosphere; we figure you can get your flawed conclusions or your bad news somewhere else.

Today though, for a change of pace, let's take a look at some recent studies and articles I was going to blow off because I didn't like what they said. But hey, changed my mind: they give me something to whine about!


More Things That Are Dirtier Than Your Toilet

The list of things that are dirtier than your toilet keeps growing. We've been told steering wheels, cell phones, and drinking fountains are all more germy and contaminated than toilets. And now, courtesy of Healthbolt comes a study scaring us with alarming news about how contaminated and dangerous and gross our kitchen sinks and sponges are. An environmental microbiology professor even said that according to his findings, "your post-flush toilet bowl is indeed cleaner than your kitchen sink."





But come on: you don't poop in your kitchen sink!

I don't care what the studies say, I refuse to believe that a cell phone or a kitchen sink is nastier than the toilet. If these benign-looking things I touch every day were really such a threat, why am I not good and dead now?

(And perhaps it was just a coincidence that the kitchen sink study was sponsored by Lysol?)


Thing You're Healthy? Weird Signs That You're at Risk

Prevention magazine recently published a compilation of several studies I'd been ignoring individually. The findings are intriguing, but depressing. A quick summary:

• A weak sense of smell (if you are older) suggests you're at 5 times the risk of getting Parkinsons.
• Women who have index fingers shorter than their ring fingers are more likely to get knee osteoarthritis. (They're also more likely to be gay).
• Women taller than 5' 2" are less likely to have a longevity gene that aids in reaching one's 100th birthday.
• Short women were more prone to having elevated enzymes indicative of liver disease.
• Women with short arms were more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.

Weird, huh? But don't you kinda wish you hadn't read it?


When Doctors are Not Nice

We already know that doctors sometimes lie about giving you a placebo, or they make up insulting nicknames; but a new study also says doctors (or, in this case, medical residents) have also been known to laugh at you behind your back. A full seventeen percent confessed to having laughed at a patient. (More on this at Vitamin G).

Heh heh heh heh.

Is this supposed to be shocking? Actually, I'm shocked (and skeptical) that it's only 17%. Of course doctors laugh at their patients!

Gosh, next we'll find out that bank tellers sometimes laugh at their customers and cops sometimes laugh at crooks and ministers laugh at members of their congregations. You're not allowed to laugh, ever, at the nutty people you deal with in your job even when they're not there?

As long as the people I deal with are not laughing at me to my face, I'm cool.


It Doesn't Pay To Think Too Hard

Mary Anne in Kentucky sent me a link to this depressing study about eating and thinking a while ago, but then I procrastinated and Healthbolt beat me to it. Basically, it says that doing challenging mental tasks leads to greater calorie consumption than if you were just sitting around vegging out. And no, thinking hard doesn't burn any extra calories, even though it sure feels like it should.

Doesn't that suck? Let's all get off the internet and find something less fattening to do, shall we?



And finally:


Worship Celebrities, It's Good For Your Health!

I confess: I couldn't even make myself read this Time Magazine article on the mental health benefits of celebrity worship.

Enough. Someone else will just have to report back on how this could possibly be true. I have my limits!

Placebo Power: Is Your Doctor In On It?

[By Crabby]

Cartoon by Mike Bannon at Mordant Orange

So you go to your doctor with some painful or otherwise bothersome medical problem, and after perhaps running some tests and/or poking around, the doc nods and mmmh-hmmms a lot and finally takes out the prescription pad.

"Take this twice a day for the next two weeks. It may help your condition--and it certainly won't hurt."

Would you be upset if you later found out that the "medicine" you were taking (and paying for) had no active ingredients that could do anything at all for your ailment?

Because it turns out that 45% of doctors in a recent placebo survey copped to prescribing medication to patients as a placebo. Only 4% of them told the patient that's what they were doing--which kind of make sense. "Take this, it won't help you at all unless you think it will" is somehow not nearly as persuasive.

But is it ethical? It's sort of misleading. But it's not an easy question to answer, because, well, placebos work for a lot of people. That's why they have to have control groups whenever they test a new medication. If you tell people you're giving them something that may help their arthritis or their hemorrhoids or their ear-wax build-up or whatever, a good portion of them will obediently get better even if the medicine itself is useless. The freaky thing about giving people placebos it that it actually results in physical changes in the brain that make people feel better.

Can the placebo effect actually cause you to lose weight? Kateio at Sister Skinny recently alerted us to the hotel maids study. This was a weird one: maids who were told that their hard physical jobs actually burned enough calories to meet the surgeon general's definition of an "active lifestyle" started losing weight and lowering their blood pressure. Those who were told nothing... didn't. Can abstract knowledge actually burn calories? Wouldn't that be weird if it did?

(Note: I'm still a bit skeptical of this study, perhaps because it just seems so amazing. But I wonder: if you were an overweight maid who thought you weren't getting any exercise, and then you suddenly found out you were getting plenty, would that change your attitude about the food you were eating? Might that not be an incentive to make some dietary changes?)

Still, if it turns out to be true, the study has amazing implications. You can think calories away! I'm going along with Katieo on this one, and am going to repeat to myself every day: "blogging burns 300 calories an hour." Or hell, make it 700!

So back to the question we started with. Given that placebos can actually trick some people into feeling better, would you be annoyed to find out you're been given one by your doctor?

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before (in a post about placebo doping in sports), I'm just not a very good placebo person. Being a cranky pessimist, I usually expect things NOT to work. So if I shelled out money on a fake drug that didn't help because my doctor thought she could trick me into feeling better, I might be less than grateful.

On the other hand, I've been doing better with knee pain since I started wrapping ice packs around my knees. Is it the ice? Or is it my tiny little suggestible brain believing the ice is helping? Who knows? (It's the ice, I swear).

How about you guys--would you whomp that lying doctor upside the head with your big bottle of fake pills? Or would you give that doctor a hearty thanks for creative thinking about pain management?

Friday Menu Special: Plenty of Bologna!

Ever Notice? Everything Just Tastes Better on a Tray!

Actually, it's "Bologna Lite" this week (did you know it even comes Fat Free?).

Unfortunately, Crabby is finding that Real Life Responsibilities are interfering with her compulsive web surfing scholarly research on Health Issues. Will she get back on track or is she heading down the slippery slope of Blog Slackitude? Only one way to find out--stay tuned to Cranky Fitness over the weeks and months to come! In the meantime, here's the usual Friday Fare, with far fewer calories but packed with tons of healthy preservatives.

Nitrites and Nitrates: Our new Best Friends?
Hidden within an article with the innocent title "Eating Your Greens Could Prove Life-Saving If A Heart Attack Strikes," was some news that Crabby found totally freaky. This study (which involved administering nitrite to mice) apparently suggested "that the chemical nitrite, found in many vegetables, could be the secret ingredient in the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet."

What?

Isn't nitrite (and nitrates, which are some sort of precursor or something) supposed to be really Evil and Carcinogenic and a good reason to either avoid processed meats or seek out special fancy expensive brands that don't have any?

The article went on to quote the researcher, Dr. Lefer as saying: "recent research has found no convincing evidence that nitrite and nitrate pose a cancer risk." He also noted that Europeans consume nearly 100 times the amount of nitrite and nitrate daily because they eat so many more vegetables. "This large intake of nitrite and nitrate poses no known risks and could certainly help explain why the Mediterranean diet is heart-healthy despite its relatively high fat content," he says. (Lefer hails from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University; Crabby has no idea if that's impressive or not, not being much of an Einstein herself).

Crabby actually ran into this issue before, when she reviewed some tasty nitrite-free lunch meat. She was sure there would be a ton of recent research saying nitrites were evil, but couldn't find much. She just put it down to her lack of Google skills. Still--seems best to take the "eat more vegetables" part to heart and don't go racing out to load up on lunch-meats. For whatever reasons, heavy consumption of red and processed meats is still thought to raise cancer risk.

Got Milk Thistle?
According to a recent study, silibinin, a compound found in milk thistle, may reduce cancer cell proliferation and help kill off cancer cells. Milk thistle is already a widely used folk remedy used for liver disease. But, well, what does it taste like in coffee?

Something They Don't Show Nearly Enough of On Grey's Anatomy:
The shows self-absorbed doctors-in-training very rarely accidentally poke themselves with needles--but real residents apparently do it all the time. Problem is, they're not reporting it. A survey by researchers at Johns Hopkins found that "99 percent of surgeons-in-training suffered an average of eight needle-stick injuries in their first five years. Of these surgeons, only 49 percent reported the injuries. “We know also that many residents resist reporting because the training culture suggests that needle sticks ‘go with the territory’ and reporting them may lower peer esteem,” said one of the authors. (Via That'sFit).

And so on to Randomness... after only three items of actual Health Research? Yeah, well, Crabby got distracted the pictures of Tree Root Man, which seem to be both disturbing and authentic. Next time you find yourself complaining about your stiff joints... a little perspective.

Hide the Falafel...
So Mary at the always-amusing Sheesh alerted Crabby to this bizarre FBI scheme to catch terrorists by tracking their tahini. According to Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly, "the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists... The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area."

And What the F*ck, More Research on Swearing! You can also thank Mary for finding us a high-brow article in The New Republic, revealing everything one needs to know about cursing, including how the interplay between the neocortex and the limbic system make it particularly effective! As it happens, obscenity is one of Crabby's favorite hobbies, so this was an excellent find.

Perhaps Not as Highbrow...
But not to be missed: Amy's hilarious illustrated account of social discomfort at the gym.

An Exercise Video with No Animals In It?
Crabby tried hard to find some animal fitness footage, but too many of the possibilities this week either seemed (a) boring or (b) a little cruel. So instead of animals, she'll direct you to this strange but amusing competition . And yes, it is Japanese, how did you guess?

Oh Wait, Do These Count?
If you have gotten this far down and are still sampling links, you might be goofy enough to appreciate this bit of cow weirdness. Or you could always take your cursor on a walk with a feisty little dog.

And sadly, that's all for this Friday, but notice how energetic you feel when your not totally stuffed? Anyway, enjoy your nitrites and have a great weekend!