Month: December 2022

The #1 Diet and Exercise Plan

If you’ve ever tried just dieting or exercising to burn off belly fat and have been unsuccessful, you’re not alone. Burning stubborn belly fat and keeping it off for the long haul is best accomplished by a combination of healthy eating habits and exercise to ensure you not only melt your midsection, but also have some solid muscle to show once it’s gone. We’ve put together the ultimate diet and exercise plan that’ll help you lose inches off your waist, so listen up.

The following program calls for personal adjustment, depending on your fitness level and nutrition requirements, and it’s not a replacement for a dietetic-supervised meal plan. However, in my experience, the guidelines discussed successfully lead healthy individuals to burn fat and get fit when followed consistently for at least three months.

Without delay, let’s dive in! And next up, don’t miss Lose 5 Inches off Your Waist With This Bodyweight Workout, Trainer Says.

The ultimate diet plan for a slim waist:

The #1 Diet and Exercise Plan
Shutterstock

If you want to see sustainable weight loss with corresponding health improvements, follow the guidelines below.

Aim for a caloric deficit of 300 to 500 calories per day.

Eating about 500 calories per day fewer than you burn is a sustainable way to burn about a pound of fat per week. While you can go higher for faster weight loss, this is more difficult to sustain and puts you at greater risk of losing muscle mass and having reduced energy levels.

Focus on nutrient-dense foods.

Aim to eat three to five servings of fresh fruits and vegetables every day to lose inches off your waist. Lean proteins such as chicken, fish, and plant proteins, as well as unsaturated fats from olive oil, are also helpful for getting your body the maximum amount of nutrients while keeping your calorie intake lower.

Limit your intake of sweetened beverages and alcohol.

Sodas, fruit juices, and alcoholic drinks are essentially “empty calories” that spike your blood sugar. They make losing weight harder by racking up the calorie count without providing vital micronutrients.

RELATED: 5 Easy Daily Habits To Cut Calories and Lose Weight, Expert Says

Drink plenty of water.

Adult men and women need an average of 3.7 and 2.7 liters of water per day, respectively, according to the Mayo Clinic. If you do not meet your daily need, sugar and food cravings become harder to resist and so does preventing yourself from overeating. If you find yourself craving sweets, ask yourself, “Have I consumed enough water today?”

The ultimate workout plan to blast stubborn belly fat and find your waist:

woman holding pink dumbbell weight loss concept
Shutterstock

When it comes to how to lose inches off your waist through working out, you need a two-to-three-day-per-week plan that hits upper and lower body exercises at a high intensity.

For lower body workouts, select three to five leg exercises, then perform 10 to 20 reps with 30 seconds of rest between sets, for a total of three to five rounds.

For upper body exercises, select a horizontal push and pull, along with a vertical push and pull exercise, for a total of four exercises. Perform three sets of 10 on each.

If you prefer jogging, I recommend using HIIT-style training to maximize your calorie burn and fat loss.

RELATED: 5 Best Habits to Lose Belly Fat and Actually Keep it Off, Says Science

Example of a lower-body workout:

Perform each exercise for 10 to 15 reps using moderate resistance, then rest for 30 seconds, and complete the next exercise. Repeat for three to five rounds.

  • Squats
  • Lunges
  • Deadlifts
  • Side lunges

Example of an upper-body workout:

Perform each exercise for 10 to 15 reps using moderate resistance, then rest for 30 seconds, and complete the next exercise. Repeat for three to five rounds.

  • Pull-ups
  • Dumbbell overhead press
  • Dumbbell rows
  • Dumbbell bench press

Example of an interval workout:

Run for 10 to 15 minutes, alternating 30 seconds of intense running followed by a 30-second jog. You can start by performing a few interval cycles, then finishing with a slower jog, until you are able to complete a full 15 minutes of interval training.

The bottom line

Any program is only as good as your ability to stick with it long enough to see results. These guidelines give you a framework to follow a diet and exercise program that will lead you to sustainable fat loss, slimming down your waist to reveal a fit, toned physique and all-around healthy body. Following this program for at least three months is the best way to ensure sustainable weight loss results.

Tyler Read

Tyler Read is a personal trainer and has been involved in health and fitness for the past 15 years. Read more about Tyler

Switzerland eyes allowing FDA-approved medical devices onto its market

Switzerland eyes allowing FDA-approved medical devices onto its market

Swiss Liberal Councilor Damian Müller (Source: Swiss Federal Assembly)wiss

The Swiss parliament has asked the country’s Federal Council to adapt its laws to allow medical devices that have been vetted by non-European regulators, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be marketed in Switzerland. Currently, only EU-certified products are allowed on the country’s internal market based on a mutual recognition agreement between Switzerland and the EU.
 
On 28 November, the lower house of the Swiss Federal Assembly, also known as the National Council, approved a motion that mandates the Swiss Federal Council to develop regulations to allow medical devices approved by non-EU regulators into the country. The motion had already been approved by the upper house, also known as the Council of States, on 30 May.
 
The Federal Council now must adapt its national law and present an implementation proposal to allow non-EU regulated medical devices for use in Switzerland, which could open the door to allowing FDA-approved devices onto the market.
 
The motion was first introduced into the Swiss parliament by Liberal Councilor Damian Müller in May 2020. He argued that the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR), Switzerland’s own legal requirements for medical devices and the country’s limited resources have created serious hurdles for medtech manufacturers that could deprive patients of treatments.
 
Peter Biedermann, managing director of the lobby group Swiss Medtech, called the decision “forward-thinking” in a press release.
 
“It is a response to circumstances that could no longer be ignored,” he said. “Specifically, problems with the implementation of the new European medical device regulation and the negative consequences concerning availability, product range, and quality of medical devices throughout Europe.
 
“As innovations are increasingly being introduced first to the market in the USA, new products reach Europe with a delay, at best,” he added.
 
By allowing products into the Swiss market that had already been vetted in the US, proponents argue that manufacturers will have easier access to the Swiss market, while the public can have confidence in the safety and efficacy of the products that have been reviewed by US regulators.
 
“The problems associated with the implementation of the new European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) are becoming increasingly apparent – throughout Europe,” Sandra Rickenbacher-Läuchli, legal counsel at Swiss Medtech told Focus. “The additional administrative workload leads to cost increases for medtech companies and ties up a lot of research and development capacities at the expense of innovations.”
 
The group says more than 1,000 of the approximately 5,000 foreign medtech manufacturers have already stopped supplying products to Switzerland. The lobby group Medtech Europe also says that according to its survey, half of medtech manufacturers in Europe say they plan to reduce their portfolio due to the added burdens from the MDR.
 
“Due to its size, Switzerland is – like other countries – not in a position to supply itself with all the medical devices it needs and is therefore dependent on imports,” said Rickenbacher-Läuchli. “At the moment, only medical devices with an EU certificate are allowed on the Swiss market.”
 
Rickenbacher-Läuchli did not address whether there are potential local legal hurdles the Swiss government may face trying to implement the decision and whether it would apply not just to FDA-approved products but also those that have been cleared or otherwise authorized by the agency. She said that for now, the Swiss government has two years to implement the proposal which will be written by the responsible administrative bodies. The issue will be examined by stakeholders in more detail in the coming months, she added. It also remains to be seen whether the proposal applies to any other foreign regulators besides FDA.
 
Rickenbacher-Läuchli added that Swiss Medtech plans to stay engaged to bring the industry perspective to policymakers as they go through the implementation process.

Medical terms used by doctors often baffling to patients

The words some doctors use are often misunderstood by patients and their families, leaving them feeling confused and vulnerable, according to researchers.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open, University of Minnesota researchers found that the language doctors often use tends not to translate easily into everyday English.

A positive test result, for example, generally suggests something negative: A disease like Covid, for example, has been detected.

The disconnect in terms has long bothered Dr. Michael Pitt, associate residency program director in the department of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. He teaches medical students how to communicate effectively with their patients and their families.

“You could be the smartest doctor in the world, yet you’re useless if your patients don’t understand what you are saying,” Pitt said. “It’s always driven me nuts.”

Pitt and his research team tested how well people understood medical jargon by going to one of the largest gatherings in Middle America: the 2021 Minnesota State Fair.

They surveyed 215 fairgoers on their knowledge of potentially confusing health terms. None of the participants had medical training, but all spoke and read English.

While nearly all, 96{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f}, of the respondents understood that a negative result on a cancer screening was actually a good thing, the medical meaning of other common words and phrases was often misinterpreted.

An ‘impressive’ chest X-ray

Take the word “impressive.” To most of us, getting straight-A’s in school, making a half-court shot in basketball or running a marathon are all “impressive” accomplishments.

But when doctors say a patient’s chest X-ray is “impressive,” they really mean, “This worries me.”

That translation was lost on 79{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of survey respondents.

The word “impressive” is a particular pet peeve for Dr. Giridhar Mallya, a former family physician and current senior policy director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“It borders on disrespectful because we’re describing something as impressive that is causing real harm for patients,” Mallya said.

What’s more, 21{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of survey respondents did not understand that the phrase, “Your tumor is progressing,” meant that cancer was getting worse.

“If our patients don’t understand what we think is going on, what our treatment plan is, what we’re asking them to do to get cured, better, healthy,” Pitt said, “we actually could be causing physical harm.”

“They might be less inclined to actually follow up on the actual steps necessary, which could delay care,” he said.

“It is so clearly obvious why people can misunderstand” such language when “our typical terminology is the direct opposite meaning of the medical terminology,” said Dr. Holly Andersen, director of education and outreach at the Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. Neither Andersen nor Mallya were involved in the new research.

“We as a profession have jargon oblivion,” Pitt said. “We forget that there was a time when we learned these words, and didn’t know them.”

Is it a hidden infection or witchcraft?

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, is frequently called upon in the media for his ability to help translate complicated science in terms that anyone can understand. He said the new research is “very important.”

“It’s a message to medical professionals that they need to speak very clearly with their patients, rather than to them,” Schaffner said.

By far, the most misunderstood medical term in the study was the word “occult,” a word that conjures up an idea of witchcraft in most people.

“People thought it meant demonic or that we thought you were possessed,” Pitt said. In medicine, “occult” simply means that a problem was hidden, or not immediately apparent to health care providers.

‘We’re gonna put you to sleep’

Pitt, a pediatrician, takes the lessons in effective communication to heart when treating children.

“A phrase that could be heard very differently by a kid would be ‘we’re gonna put you to sleep’ before a procedure,” Pitt said. “Think about ways that they may have heard that before. It probably means their dog was killed.”

Patients should feel empowered to ask doctors, nurses and any other health care personnel to explain themselves clearly, even if it feels uncomfortable, Schaffner said.

“Don’t hesitate,” he said. “If somebody is using medical jargon, a phrase that you don’t understand, feel free to say, ‘Excuse me, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Could you be a little more clear about that?'”

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Amazon’s Creep Into Health Care Has Some Experts Spooked

Smith told WIRED that Amazon keeps patient health information confidential and secure in compliance with federal law and regulations, and in line with industry standards; Amazon Clinic customer data will be protected through the use of HIPAA-compliant encryption methods. “Protecting patient information is an important part of our business; we are not in the business of selling or sharing it,” Smith wrote.

Amazon’s recent efforts to break into health care raise a more fundamental question: Should Big Tech even be allowed in the sector? The motivations of a private company—efficiency, optimization, and above all, profit—don’t exactly square with serving the public good, says Tamar Sharon, a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose work explores the politics and ethics of Big Tech in health and medicine—or as she dubs it, the “Googlization of health.” 

Amazon Care, a telehealth service Amazon piloted among its employees and then rolled out to other customers, shows how things can go wrong. Its shutdown was announced a few months ago, with the senior vice president in charge of the program, Neil Lindsay, writing in an internal memo Amazon shared with WIRED: “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”  

But it was plagued by other problems, too. A Washington Post investigation alleged that moving at top speed and efficiency sometimes conflicted with best practices in medicine: For example, nurses were asked to process patient blood samples in their personal cars, the paper reported, and to store and dispose of medical supplies at home, which they protested. (Amazon told the Post that they could not find records of complaints about these matters.)  

“Amazon Care followed common practices for in-home care and know them to be safe and appropriate,” Smith told WIRED. “For example, Amazon Care clinicians were always equipped with Stericycle medical waste return equipment to properly and securely return or dispose of supplies.” 

For Sharon, a big concern is how reliant we risk becoming on big companies as mediators of fundamental public needs. “This is a dangerous situation—that we would become dependent on a handful of private actors for the distribution of very basic goods, like health, or education, or public services,” she says. For instance, as these companies increasingly fund and perform their own research, it’s possible they could influence how the research agenda is set. That could be a problem if tech founders’ penchant for wanting to live forever results in a focus on funding longevity research over, say, cancer treatments.

Yet private companies entering public spaces isn’t always inherently bad, says Wachter. Arguably, the multitrillion-dollar American health care system is the perfect target for new players. As Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, points out in his newsletter, health care spending in the US far surpasses that of other rich countries, yet life expectancy is lower, creating an opportunity for new services to offer better value to patients. “The US health care industry is a wounded 7-ton seal, drifting aimlessly, bleeding into the sea. Predators are circling,” he wrote. “Amazon is the lurking megalodon, its 11-foot jaws and 7-inch teeth the largest in history.”

You could argue that Amazon is simply filling a gap in a broken system. With its new service, the company appears to be applying the same principles that made it so successful as a retailer: easy access, rapid delivery, competitive pricing—hard-to-refuse conveniences that appeal to humans’ inherent laziness, for sure, but which might also make good health care more affordable in a system divided between the haves and have-nots. 

In exchange for convenience and better access, there are likely to be tradeoffs. “If we do that, we want to do it right,” says Wachter. “We just have to think about all the possible negative consequences to make sure that they don’t happen.”

From needles To MRI Machines, Medical ‘Device’ Exports Up 8.14{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f}

Good news and bad news. Sort of.

The value of medical-instrument exports, one of the top U.S. exports this year, is growing at less than half the rate of overall U.S. exports.

That’s the bad news.

The category, which includes everything from needles and sutures to MRI and ultrasound machinery, are still increasing at a pace sufficient to lead to a record year, when annual totals are released in early February.

Now, the good news: Through September, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, exports in the category were up 8.14{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} to $26.46 billion. U.S. exports increased 21.04{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} and stand a chance of topping $2 trillion for the first time in 2022.

This post, focused on medical instruments, which ranked 10th when this series on U.S. exports began, is the 12th and final post in a series of columns about the nation’s exports. It currently ranks 12th, trailing gold, which entered the top 10 earlier this year and low-value shipments, which I chose to step over since the data on the category. largely unspecified e-commerce and courier shipments, is insufficiently detailed.

This series follows similar series I did for the countries that were, at the time, the nation’s top 10 trade partners and one for the airports, seaports and border crossings that were, at the time, the nation’s top 10 “ports.”

The first article in this series focused on an overview of the top 10 exports. The second looked at the top 10 countries that are markets for U.S. exports and how they differ from our overall trade partners, which would include imports.

The third was about refined petroleum, the top export; followed by one on oil, which ranks second; natural gas, which includes LNG and ranks third; the primary commercial jet category, which ranks fourth; passenger vehicles, at No. 5; computer chips, which actually rank seventh, though at the time this series started, ranked sixth; vaccines, plasma and other blood fractions, which ranked seventh when the series started; motor vehicle parts, the No. 8-ranked U.S. export; and medicines, largely in pill form, which ranked No. 9 when the series began but had slipped to No. 10 by the release of the September data.

In the same way that the low-value shipments category is relatively opaque, so too is the medical instrument category, though far less so. Nonetheless, $11.21 billion of the $26.46 billion total, is categorized as “not elsewhere specified or indicated” — or more than 42 percent.

The top 10 markets are, not surprisingly, advanced economies in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania (Australia). The top five have already topped $2 billion this year, the top seven having topped $1 billion.

Increases in exports to China, Canada and Japan are all in the single digits while those to the Netherlands, a transshipment hub for Europe, and Mexico have increased 28.48{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} and 12.81{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f}, respectively.

Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and what is quite possibly New Orleans International Airport are the three dominant gateways for these exports. (The New Orleans port data comingles air and ocean cargo in the Census Bureau data.) Those three account slightly less than 30{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of the total this year.

The top seven all topped $ billion through September.

Don’t think that just because you live a healthy lifestyle you are immune to lung cancer.

Don’t think that just because you live a healthy lifestyle you are immune to lung cancer.

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Poor air quality obscures the Oquirrh Mountains and downtown Salt Lake City, as seen from the University of Utah on Friday, Dec. 3, 2021.

By Angela Deneris and Cordelia Schaffer | Special to The Tribune

  | Dec. 1, 2022, 1:00 p.m.

We are two women with one too many things in common. We both lived our adult lives in Salt Lake City, are nurses, college professors, were never exposed to radon or occupational hazards and are non-smokers. We shared the mistaken belief that our healthy lifestyles would protect us from serious diseases.

The one-too-many things we have in common is that we were both discovered to have advanced non-small cell lung cancer caused by a common genetic mutation activated by Salt Lake valley air pollution.

Even though we were/are college of nursing professors and read medical literature, neither one of us realized breathing polluted air put us at higher risk for lung cancer, according to the CDC. We blithely assumed non-smokers didn’t get lung cancer. Too late we learned many studies have shown long-term air pollution exposure is toxic enough to cause lung cancer in people like us.

We learned the hard way that, in most cases, lung cancer can remain early stage and asymptomatic for many years and solid tumors usually take decades to develop. But in 2013 lung cancer in an 8-year-old girl in China, attributable to air pollution, set off alarm bells throughout the world.

In 2019, 300,000 lung cancer deaths globally were linked to exposure to outdoor air pollution. According to the CDC, up to 20{bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of lung cancers occur in non-smokers.

We learned our ignorance isn’t uncommon. We were both initially worked up by our family physicians for other possible reasons for our fatigue, persistent cough and shortness of breath with exercise, delaying our diagnoses and treatment. This is typical of lung cancer, the number one cancer killer in the U.S.

Because non-smokers aren’t screened for lung cancer, and the early-stage symptoms are subtle and self-reported, it isn’t usually diagnosed until Stage III or IV, when it is much more difficult to treat, and survival is low — exactly our situation. Too late we also learned that air pollution also increases the size and grade of lung cancers, and even impacts our ability to survive by decreasing the effectiveness of our treatment and by making us more susceptible to recurrence.

Fortunately for us, there is an oral chemotherapy medication we take that can extend our lives by a few years, but this isn’t the way we expected to live them, with debilitating symptoms, extensive medicine-generated side effects and very expensive medical costs.

The World Health Organization has declared air pollution a leading cause of cancer, and there is no safe level of air pollution, just like there is no safe number of cigarettes a person can smoke. But air pollution also causes a list of other diseases nearly as long as those from smoking — virtually every type of lung disease, heart and blood vessel diseases, impaired fetal development, chromosomal damage, pregnancy complications, brain and neurologic disorders like strokes and Alzheimer’s, type II diabetes, accelerated aging and premature death.

We share our stories in the hope you and your health care providers won’t wait until it is too late to learn more about the negative consequences of chronic exposure to air pollution. Lung cancer is a real possibility, and it shouldn’t be considered only after everything else has been ruled out. It is only one of many poor health outcomes that needs to be considered when symptoms first appear in non-smoking patients.

We also issue a call to arms for all who live in this beautiful state to work with our elected officials to change public policy and to fight against proposals that will increase air pollution, such as the inland port and water rights causing Great Salt Lake to become a dry, toxic dust generating wasteland. We must advocate for healthier air to protect ourselves and those who come after us, and an end to public policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Behind every abstract statistic on the health hazards of air pollution is a human face — someone’s spouse, mother, father, grandparent, brother, sister or newborn baby — someone who was denied a long, healthy life simply because of the air they breathed. We hope hearing our stories and seeing our faces can lead to fewer stories like ours.

Angela Deneris, Ph.D., CNM, FACNM, is a professor, clinical emeritus, at the University of Utah College of Nursing, was a practicing nurse-midwife for 40 years and faculty in the Nurse-Midwifery and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program for 30 years, retired and resides in Sugar House.

Cordelia Schaffer, RN, MSN, CHPN, has been a nurse educator at Westminster College since 2008. She has worked in health care since 1985, specializing in hospice, and resides near Rose Park.