Reading seemingly contradictory and irrelevant health information can cause confusion and anxiety, according to a just-released study.
The study, I should add, did not appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In fact, I did it, wrestling with my guilt while trying to resist raiding the refrigerator for leftover turkey.
Here’s what I found — right here in the pages of the Sentinel:
- Eating food cooked for a long time at high temperature — the way Americans prepare turkey — may damage blood vessels in diabetics.
- But eating nuts may help ward off diabetes — at least for the 83,000 nurses studied.
- And eating cranberries may offer protection against cancer, heart disease and stroke.
Weighing the pluses and minuses of the Thanksgiving meal is enough to drive you to drink — if you want to take your life in your hands. Here’s what the Sentinel reported about that activity:
- Having an average of one and a half alcoholic drinks a day can nearly double the risk of breast cancer among women undergoing hormone-replacement therapy.
- But drinking as much as 21 glasses of wine a week can lower the risk of dementia.
I’m not sure I could tell the difference between dementia and the effects of 21 glasses of wine, but there was some good news for those concerned about mental health:
- Using post-menopausal hormone-replacement drugs for 10 years may help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
- On the other hand, using hormone supplements and antioxidant vitamins seems to offer no heart benefits to older women with heart disease, according to a study described as “not statistically significant, but . . . worrisome.”
And, while we’re on hormones:
- Taking human growth-hormone injections can reverse some attributes of aging.
- But cutting calories severely in middle age is the only way scientists know to slow aging and extend lifespan.
That’s bad news for folks who live to eat. If their tastes run to bacon and eggs, though, there were these juicy tidbits:
- Eating high-fat, low-carbohydrate food may take off weight and lower bad cholesterol.
- And eating garlic, shallots and onions may ward off prostate cancer — for men in China.
- Eating mercury-laden fish, though, may or may not pose a risk to the heart.
Just when it seemed that navigating the grocery store was as treacherous as living next to a leaking nuclear-energy plant came news that neighbors of Three Mile Island have shown no disproportionate incidence of cancer.
But another study warned readers that practicing cleanliness may be hazardous to their health.
Those were just some of the past month’s health discoveries, but I have to wonder if the newspaper actually helps readers by publishing that seemingly contradictory information.
Or, as I suspect, does all that news of nut-eating nurses and garlic-gobbling guys in China produce something just as dangerous as the diseases being discussed: the Daily Useless Medical Bulletin syndrome?
