Wellness Weekly

The News:

Migraines and Me: Today I do not have a headache…. I have not known such gratefulness since I experienced severe back pain, which also resolved. A long time ago, pre 2002, I had a migraine on Christmas Day… my first. After that experience I would always be clear in stating that I had a severe headache or even a submigraine, from time to time, but having had a migraine I would NEVER mis categorize a headache. Since that Christmas Day I may have had two more migraines and I have never sought assistance for them as I am determined NOT to be someone who suffers from migraines. That changed this week. I have had more migraines in the last ten days than in my over 40 years of life. I did everything I usually do and could not barrel through them. I saw my doctor. Good news is that he believes something in the environment triggered a severe episode that just cascaded into migraine after migraine with remission but not resolution. He did say we had to break the cycle. He did say we had to do it with a medication. Readers know that I do not do prescription medication. And my bigger fear is (was) to become someone who has to keep medication on hand. He believed that this is or was an isolated incident and I trust him in that. I also appreciate how he presented the options, there were three. He discussed cost, side effects and other people’s responses. I accepted a sample of a medicine by Pfizer… I know, that alone almost killed me, but I was beyond my capacity to withstand any more pain. I am a distance runner.. I CAN endure pain and thus it was THAT bad. So I took my samples home and I took the first pill and lied (or laid) there two hours waiting for it to work. I was under the impression that I was going to have almost immediate relief and feel like I took morphine or something. HA. The pain trickled away, it did not stop abruptly. That was Wednesday night. Thursday I was traumatized and scared to tears that it would come back… today I feel somewhat more confident. I am writing mostly to address the prescription drug issue as I continue to think pills should be a very last resort, that they are entirely too expensive and the side effects are not to be taken lightly. That being said, Wednesday I did not read the label of my new medicine. The doctor warned of GI upset and that I thought would be tolerable. I can tell you that as I lie there I considered that this prescription drug could kill me and I did not care. So maybe this experience offers me a little empathy to why some people risk horrible side effects when they take meds though it does not change my belief that wherever possible prevention of disease is the better “medicine”.
Attention Parents: Childhood Obesity: I am taking a course through the University of Tennessee for my health educator credential (CEUs) and have a few interesting pearls to share with you. The course is taught by MDs, RDs, and PhDs. Dr. Velasquez-Mieyer noted that what we see in adults started as children. Dayle Hayes, M.S., R.D. encourages people who are concerned about children’s nutrition to join their school health advisory committee, also known as SHAC. And Dr. Hollie Raynor offers important strategies for dealing with the treatment of obesity in children. Dr. Raynor is by far my favorite lecturer in this series. She and her team do provide intensive treatment to overweight elementary school aged children. They do this within the university setting and thus can apply rigorous research protocols as well. There are things in her methodology that you can apply at home right now whether or not your child is obese. This includes focusing on behaviors. For example, she does have young children weigh themselves (not a standard thing you should do, this is for children in a targeted obesity treatment program) but when there is a 2 pound weight loss, for example, she offers positive reinforcement and encourages the child to pinpoint what behavior may have led to that. Which of the actions is the cause of the weight change - less TV time, more walking or riding the bike, or even more green foods then red foods (my favorite traffic light program!)? It is also part of this family centered program that the parents adopt the SAME behavior as the child. If the child has to eat less of the red foods, so does the parent! Parents must also increase the physical activity. Even better, she talks about covert and overt food restriction. Dr. Raynor prefers covert. Covert restriction involves not having the food in the house at all. Overt is like buying ice cream but telling the child they can’t have any. This might lead to tantrums and all kinds of issues, but if the food isn’t there it isn’t there! Sure they might eat it somewhere else, but they aren’t eating it at home. Another good point she made was that in children we want to change the food preference. So there may be a less bad option of a food, say baked chips instead of regular chips, but they are still chips. Don’t serve chips! Changing preferences. Serve wheat and or whole grain bread, no other kind. I could go on. Ok one last thing. We want kids to be more active, so TVs out of their bedrooms and action toys available. If they like to ride their bike, then make sure the tires are good and the bike is easily accessible.
Generics: Okay, even though Pfizer appears to have helped me out, I am not going to abandon my quest for fairness with pharmaceuticals. I am happy then to report that there are a few versions of bills circulating in the US Congress which attempt to stop drug companies from paying generic makers to HOLD OFF on the release of their cheaper versions. Often times during this extension, the brand name company works to tweak the medicine in question, as I have described before, perhaps making it a long acting type or a liquid type and then convincing the user that they need the new kind. So months later the generic of the medicine you have taken for years is available but your doctor has switched you to the extended release formula and the generic doesn’t come in that. What a bunch of bunk. I hope this is addressed by our legislators.
HFCS: High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad. We don’t really need to get into the hows and whys, but it is a highly processed thing and is worse than sugar, even simple white sugar. I bring it up now because I made a comment at work this week regarding one of my favorite portion controlled snacks. These sugar wafer cookies made and or marketed by a Mexican company are lower in calories than other brands. Four of the wafers (chocolate, strawberry or vanilla) have 120 calories. They are long and thin and compared to other sugar wafers, even ones that say they are sugar free, these have less calories. I think the label must be wrong. Still, one of my awesome coworkers (many of my coworkers are indeed awesome) said it is because the other types have HFCS and that is more caloric. HMM. Intuitively I think that the corn syrup is just a big vat of sticky sweet stuff and way high in cals yes, but wouldn’t that mean you’d use less of it than you would sugar. I did check my cookie label, and YES Beth is right so far… NO HFCS. Now, let me do a little Google check and see if I learn anything to uphold the theory…. BRB>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh My Gosh. I should have seen this coming…now HFCS is still evil, but it does not have more calories than sugar, in fact it has less. Sugar is a carb with 4 kcals per gram while HFCS has 3/g. So I started looking up all the sugar wafers, esp. the sugar free ones, which mine are not. The culprit isn’t the sugar it is FAT. Mine have 4g of fat per serving whereas the Voortman and Murray…have 8g. That is it right there; they replaced the sugar with fat. I will be damned. Oh and be assured it is not monounsaturated fat. Now I am not claiming my Mexican sugar cookies are a green (GO) food, but that I like sweets too and these are lower in calories. YEAH! Remember neither fat free nor sugar free means calorie free and yes, there is more calorie per gram of fat than sugar – 5 more to be exact.

Okay, let’s do some cooking. A Stir Fry Volumetrics Dinner is featured today.

Ingredients include:

Spices: Onion and Garlic Powder, Cumin and Turmeric
Veggies: Zucchini, Sweet Potato, Red Pepper
Stir Fry ingredients: Shredded cabbage, onion, mushroom and tomato
Protein: Smart Strips steak style (found in the produce section – no nitrates)
Fruit: Apple with Waldon Farms SF Marshmallow Dip

Oh non fat spray and water is also needed.

That will bring us to today’s cooking video. The point of these videos is to assist you in eating food, lots of food really, without adding non nutritive and even disease promoting extras.. like saturated FAT and sugar.
BTW, I may have had one of those headaches in this video… I apologize if I am less than bubbly today. Seriously.

Live Well
Deirdre