JOURNAL
Understanding Ozempic: A Comprehensive Guide and Its Impact on Diabetes Management
Ozempic, also known by its generic name Semaglutide, is a prescription medication that is used to improve blood sugar control in adults with type 2 diabetes. It's a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, which means it works by mimicking the functions of the natural hormones in your body that help regulate blood sugar levels.
Ozempic is not insulin, but it is designed to work alongside a healthy diet and regular exercise to manage blood glucose levels. It is administered once a week via an injection under the skin (subcutaneously) and is available in two dosages: 0.5 mg and 1 mg.
Ozempic helps to control blood sugar levels by slowing down the digestion process, reducing the amount of glucose that your liver produces and releases into your bloodstream, and helping your pancreas produce more insulin when needed. This results in lower blood sugar levels and helps manage the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
Understanding the Connection: Nutritional Deficiencies and The Risk of Chronic Diseases
As we celebrate the new year and the development of resolutions such as healthier diets, weight loss, and increased exercise, it is essential to ensure we consume nutrient-based foods to avoid chronic diseases. While a segment of the population is consuming a healthy diet, there are many experiencing nutritional deficiencies, which can lead to morbidity and mortality.
Examining the Impact of Nutritional Deficiencies on Chronic Disease Risk
Nutritional deficiencies can significantly impact the risk of chronic diseases. The body's lack of essential nutrients can weaken its immune system, making it more susceptible to diseases. For instance, deficiencies in vitamins A, C, D, and E and zinc and selenium minerals can compromise immune function and increase the risk of infections and diseases.
7 Tips to Help Cope with Holiday Stress via Kaiser Permanente
As a public health educator, protecting your mental health is essential to healthy living and well-being. Family holiday parties can be stressful, whether it’s another political argument with your uncle or the absence of a loved one who passed. To help you tackle some of these challenging situations, Leigh Miller, LCSW, a therapist and social worker at Kaiser Permanente, shares tips on how to cope.
How to cope with stressful family situations
Managing stressful situations can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to prepare for seven complex — but familiar — family stressors during the holidays.
Political disagreements
Political discussions can lead to significant family disagreements or arguments in some families.
How to prepare: Make the topic off-limits, if possible. Miller suggests reaching out to your family before your holiday gathering. Let them know that rather than talk about politics, you’d prefer to focus on what’s going on in their lives.
Day-of tactics: If politics arise, gently remind your family that you’d prefer not to discuss the topic. You can also excuse yourself from the conversation and take a short break. Go for a 15-minute walk or chat with another family member.
Tips for Staying Healthy this Holiday Season via Kaiser Permanente
There are plenty of things to be stressed about but staying healthy this holiday season shouldn’t be one of them.
There are many ways to protect yourself and your family during celebrations and gatherings. According to Kaiser Permanente, there are three tips for safely celebrating this holiday season:
1. GET THE UPDATED COVID-19 BOOSTER AND FLU SHOT.
Both the Covid-19 booster and flu shot give greater protection during the winter months.
Why is wearing a face-mask so political?
Yesterday, a good friend of mine posted a passionate video of a woman on Facebook defending her choice not to wear a mask in public places. And I couldn't help but feel disappointed. Still, I decided not to post a personal response. Instead, I posted this video created by the University of Michigan School of Public Health explaining how all of the public health measures recommended by experts makes an impact on stopping the spread of COVID-19. Other individuals who responded were not entirely objective and were shockingly more political, which made me wonder how wearing face masks become a political debate in America? And, is it just as simple as Democrats support wearing masks but Republicans do not?
In early June, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll on American's face mask-wearing behavior. The survey discovered that mask-wearing is indeed becoming a partisan issue. Democrats are more likely to say they wore a mask all or most of the time in the past month (76% vs. 53%) (Igielnik, 2020). While only 49% of conservative Republicans have reported wearing a mask all or most of the time in the past month – 49% compared with 60% of moderate Republicans (Igielnik, 2020).
Easy tips on how to stay active while working from home. via Kaiser Permanente
Here are some tips that can help:
If possible, work at a standing desk. If you don’t have one available to use at home, try standing more throughout the day — for example, when you’re eating lunch, talking on the phone, or teleconferencing.
Even if you can’t go far, getting up and walk around a bit every hour. Consider setting the alarm to remind yourself to move regularly during the workday. Just taking the time to walk through each room of your home can help.
At night, instead of sinking into the couch to watch television, use an exercise ball to get some extra movement in for the day.
Give yourself credit for the steps you take during the day. If you set realistic goals, wearing an activity tracker to measure your progress might make sense. If you start standing and moving around your home more, you’ll see your activity level rise.
Getting Fit – It’s Never Too Late to Start
If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that regular exercise is good for our health, and that a sedentary lifestyle can have a negative effect on our physical wellbeing. National guidelines suggest that the average adult should partake in a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes vigorous exercise per week[1]in order to maintain a healthy body. Until recently, it’s been believed that this level of exercise needs to be relatively consistent throughout your life in order to reap the benefits and reduce the risk of death. A new study, however, suggests that actually, it’s never too late to start.
Why Starting Later is Still Beneficial
The study, carried out at the National Cancer Institute and published in JAMA Network Open, examined people’s exercise patterns and subsequent death records, recording the correlation between an active lifestyle and age and cause of death[2]. Researchers looked at data from 315,059 Americans between the ages of 50 and 71 who had completed questionnaires rating their activity level in the 1990s. The study then tracked who had died and why, up until the end of 2011, taking into account other factors such as age, sex, whether they smoked, their diet, and so on[3]. Of those examined, over 71,000 had died – 22,000 of heart disease, and 16,000 of cancer[4]. Of those examined, 56% claimed they had remained consistently active throughout their lives, 30% stated their exercise levels had declined, and 13% said they started getting fit in later life[5].
Of course, those who consistently exercised had a lower risk of death when compared to those who didn’t exercise at all (around 42% less chance of dying from heart disease, and 14% less chance of dying from cancer[6]). What the researchers found really interesting, however, is that those who started getting fit in later life had a similar result (43% less likely to die from heart disease, and 16% less chance of dying from cancer). That means that even if you’ve not been active in your early life, it’s not too late to start – you can reap the benefits! Dr. Pedro Saint-Maurice, lead author of the study, explained, “if you maintain an active lifestyle or participate in some sort of exercise […] you can reduce your risk of dying. If you are not active and you get to your 40-50s and you decide to become active, you can still enjoy these benefits”[7].
The Three- or Four-Day Workweek: Bogus or Beneficial?
Trying to find that perfect work-life balance is notoriously difficult and sometimes, it feels as though we’re working so many hours that we don’t get to enjoy the money we’ve earned. We miss out on family occasions or are simply too tired to enjoy them, and with the explosion of mobile technology, it seems that work can creep into every corner of our lives. It’s becoming increasingly unavoidable, but could there be a better way? Perhaps there is. Many are claiming that the three- or four-day workweek is the perfect solution to our work-life balance issues, and many scientists and business executives suggest it’s both beneficial for our health and great for business.
When around 80% of people believe that it’s acceptable to telephone an employee outside of work hours, and when it seems that modern technological advances have led to an increase rather than a decrease in hours, things are getting out of hand. Many suggest then, condensing the workweek so that the same number of hours are worked but over fewer days – four days of ten working hours rather than five days of eight, for example. This idea is not new either. John Maynard Keynes famously (and perhaps incorrectly) predicted the progression of technology would lead to more leisure and less work time, suggesting that by the year 2030, we’d all be working a 15-hour week[1]. Herman Kahn believed something similar in the 1960s, claiming that all Americans would soon be enjoying a massive 13-weeks’ annual vacation and a four-day workweek[2]. Nowadays, the campaign for reducing the weekly work days, whether to three or four days, is gaining in popularity from all walks of life, from employers and employees, to health practitioners, scientists, and business moguls. So why aren’t we doing it yet?
Does Being Vegetarian Actually Save Any Animals?
There are lots of reasons that people become vegetarians or vegans – health, sustainability, up-bringing, but by far the most common explanation given is a moral one, that the unnecessary suffering and killing of billions of animals per year is unethical. It’s not a surprisingly conclusion, given the massive amount of animals slaughtered for food alone in the US. In 2013, 8.1 billion animals died to feed Americans, and meat eaters will consume an average of 2,088 animals in their life-time[1]. Surely then, it stands to reason that abstaining from eating meat will save the lives and prevent the suffering of animals. Whether this is true or not, however, is under some debate – and if it is true, just how many animals does vegetarianism actually save?
Calculating Saved Lives
There have been numerous studies and calculations discussing just how many animals are saved each year by a vegetarian diet – and the numbers vary wildly, from as little as 50 to as large as hundreds. Noam Mohr, of the animal charity PETA, suggests that the average meat-eater in the US consumes 26.5 animals per year and that is made up of of a cow, of a pig, of a turkey, and 25 chickens (which includes 1 allowance for eggs)[2]. On the other end of the scale, some argue that the average meat-eater consumes 406 animals per year, made up of 30 land animals, 225 fish, and 151 shellfish[3]. It is then assumed that a vegetarian, by abstaining from meat, saves the same amount of animals that a meat-eater kills.
Diet and nutrition: Our instinctual tendencies to consume more calories than needed
It’s hard to look anywhere without finding some dismal statistic about the weight problems prevalent in our society. The 2011-2012 CDC statistics for the rate of obesity in Americans found that 35% of adults were obese; the 2009-2010 statistics found that 18% of children above 6 were obese, too.[i] It’s considered such a problem that First Lady Michelle Obama has developed a campaign to address the prevalence of childhood obesity. We are bombarded with information like this and told that we must, simply must, change for the sake of our health, yet still there’s only been modest improvement in the numbers. A 2007 study in Australia found that although people trying to change their diet usually undertook that change, only 26% of those people were sticking to it rigidly six months in.[ii] Even when faced with the life-or-death decision to change one’s diet following a heart attack or stroke, in a 2013 study only 39% of patients reported eating healthier food after such a life-shattering event.[iii] Why is it so hard to maintain healthy eating habits, even in the face of so much societal pressure and personal incentive to do so?