HUB's LIST of medical fun facts

“Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.” – Hippocrates

Many people say that most doctors don’t know enough about diets to be helpful to their patients, and I agree.  Medical schools are under new pressure to add more nutritional content to their curricula. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has just recently taken it upon itself to help educate practicing physicians about nutrition, and its most recent review article is about health benefits of diets.  To me at least, the article suggests why I, as a medical student in the 60’s and a practicing pediatrician for 50 years, did not retain a whole lot of information about complicated nutritional data, except for maybe two or three specialized infant formulas. My brief summary of this NEJM review article may illustrate why it was, and still is, hard for me to retain a lot of useful information about healthy diets :

• The  8 page article cited 81 scientific references from 1986 to 2023 from both clinical and non-clinical sources.
• Most diets have been driven by the desire to control body weight, which they can do if they reduce the number of calories ingested. This review considers other important health benefits of diets independent of weight loss.
• It contained a graph of 11 separate diets each with the amounts of 21 food elements with two added icons for the two types of  “time-restricted eating” aka “intermittent fasting” (5:2 fasting 2days/wk. or fasting 14-16 hrs/day).

The copy of the graphic is too small for you to read so here’s the list of diets:
Mediterranean
Vegan
Lacto-ovo-vegetarian
Pescatarian
Low-Fat
Ketogenic/Atkins
Ketogenic/LowCarb
Paleolithic
DASH
MIND
Weekly Fasting (5:2 by full days)
Daily Fasting (for 8-12 hours)

• Evidence supporting the long term clinical benefits (other than weight loss) of intermittent fasting is debatable.
• It is very difficult to conduct rigorous scientific studies of a diet’s health benefits because of all the variables involved, including compliance of participants over long periods of time.
• Evidence comparing the health benefits of one potentially healthy diet compared to another potentially healthy diet is limited.
• Some of the diets do suggest health benefits in some specific diseases or conditions. eg. a ketogenic diet for epilepsy.
• My son-in-law wanted to try the Paleo diet at one time, but he gave up  because none of the stores carried saber-toothed tiger steaks.

Conclusion:  “Review of the literature suggests that the plant-based diet with moderate lipid content, low to moderate amounts of poultry and seafood, and low amounts of red meat and sugar (aka the Mediterranean diet) MAY offer substantial health benefits . . .  at least for some population groups.”

“An umbrella review of studies with data from more than 12,800,000 participants suggests that adherence to the Mediterranean diet improves health outcomes in 7 of 37  conditions examined: eg. heart disease (3 conditions), cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, and “death from any cause”. How those benefits are actually mediated by the Mediterranean diet is unknown.  Multiple likely mechanisms are being studied.”

I hope you can see why most primary care providers, and the media, currently jump right to the recommendation of the “Mediterranean diet for your health”. when asked about a healthy diet.  But, you can also now appreciate how complex nutritional options can be, and how much room there is for debate and conversations.

Ice Bath Plunging
Speaking of fads, what about ice bath plunging? Smarter people than myself have recently summarized what we know about the health benefits of ice baths. . . and how thin the scientific data ice is. “Ice baths fall into the category of ‘ it doesn’t hurt to try’, but there are risks for some people with health issues.”

The ideal temperature of an ice bath is 60 degrees F, about the temperature of the water coming out of your cold water faucet . Add several trays of ice cubes from your freezer or a bag of ice from the store. Gradually immerse yourself as much as possible, initially for 10-30 seconds, and work up to 1, 2, or 5 minutes. There is no evidence that “longer is better”. Shivering is a sign to get out of the bath. There is no ideal number of times a week you should do this, but “for general wellness, 2 or 3 days a week is good”. If your not ready for an ice bath yet, “take a cold shower.” 

But does it really work? “While evidence is still thin (pun not intended), there is some scientific support that cold plunging may have some beneficial health effects. That said, many of the potential health benefits are based on small studies. For this reason, more evidence-based scientific research documenting the potential health benefits is needed.”

Ever wonder how some music makes you want to dance while other doesn’t?
Scientific American magazine explains why. It’s the syncopation. “Syncopation is the rhythmic patterns of beats that appear in surprising places relative to the standard beat of a melody”. The more syncopation there is, the less accurately you can guess the rhythm of the next few bars of music. A medium degree of syncopation, not too high or not too low, causes a strong desire to move with the music. By counting the tapping of listeners’ fingers moving in imagined dance steps the researchers discovered that listeners almost exclusively moved to a 2-Hz beat from the melody. A 2-Hz beat is one that you can easily keep up with and count. 2-Hz is the beat of a clock clicking off the seconds (if you can remember when we had clocks that ticked). The researchers discovered this fun fact during their primary study of our sense of time. “We have specialized systems for processing sound and light, but the perception of time remains elusive.”  Just imagine, if today a musician put the request for a 2-Hz beat next to the melody into his composing AI app, the composer would be guaranteed a dance hit!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 15th, 2024 at 9:26 AM and is filed under evidence-based medicine, fitness, nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.