Today (May 8, 2006) Disney Corporation announced that it would no longer cross promote with MacDonald’s by putting figurines in happy meals. The reason being that too many children are gaining weight and MacDonald’s is implicated in that weight gain. Now if Disneyland and Disneyworld could be persuaded to serve Healthy Meals to its visitors it would be a perfect world.
The Los Angeles Times reports that, according to the April 24th issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, older women who took calcium supplements twice a day reduced their risk of breaking a bone, but getting them to take the pills proved to be a problem.
There’s a huge caveat in this announcement. Nearly half the 1,460 healthy women older than 70 who participated in the study did not consistently take the twice-daily 600-milligram pills, which led the researchers to doubt whether supplements could be useful as preventive therapy. Taking extra calcium in supplement form did help those women who took them consistently.
The study found that among the 310 women in the study who took at least 80% of their allotted calcium, 10% suffered a fracture within one year compared with 15% of the 320 women who regularly took a placebo.
At first glace 10% compared to 15% doesn’t look like a huge number. But, it’s a five percent difference. Multiply it out across the huge numbers of senior citizens facing this life-threatening problem and you begin to see a huge difference. There’s a 5% difference between the group that did take the calcium and those that didn’t. That’s 5 out of every 100 seniors, 50,000 out of every million. That’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of money – when you think in terms of hospitalization and nursing home care, the explosion of baby boomers entering the senior’s realm. Most of all, it’s a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. There is a direct link between bone fractures and death in the senior community. Some of it is linked directly to nursing home care and nursing homes are where seniors go when they have fractured hips or thighs.
Something that doesn’t seem to have been factored into this equation is exercise. Bones respond to weighted exercise by getting thicker and stronger. By taking up more calcium. Walking for 15 minutes a day, with two-pound hand weights in each hand or even heavy shoes can make a huge difference to your long-term health. Waling in the morning is best because it helps clean out your lymphatic system and set your metabolism for the day. Don’t stroll – push your pace.