Testing - Children. Testing the cholesterol level of children by the age of 11. I hate the idea and the recommendation for one reason - medication. At the same time, I respect the National Heart Lung Blood Institute and its expert panel. It suggests that all children should be tested for high cholesterol by age 11 and as early as age 9. They also recommend testing for diabetes at age 9 and every 2 years thereafter. I GET it. Our children are overweight and obese. They are eating foods high in saturated fat and sugar. We do need to let parents know when their children are showing adverse health effects so that they can DO something. I would hope that the strategy involves better foods and more exercise and NOT medication. The medications for treatment of both conditions have serious side effects and no one knows what would happen if the drugs were taken by younger persons and for the decades that could follow. I think that the title of the guidelines, which includes the words cardiovascular health and risk reduction in the same sentence with the word 'children' should give us all pause.
Love of Bread - I love the smell of baking bread. I love bread. When I was a little girl, my mother made homemade bread. She made both regular white bread and crusty Italian bread. The smell that filled our house was pure heaven - ah, to think of it now. What a comfort! She would give me a little bit of her dough and I would make tiny breads in my EasyBake oven. As a young woman, bread consumption added most conspicuously to my waist line. These days I still eat and love bread, but I use Joseph's Pita Bread. It is very low calorie and still smells great in the toaster oven and tastes great for wraps and pizza and even as cinnamon toast.
A New Experience - My swimming adventure (though I am really saving the best for the end) continued this week. I told you that a fellow swimmer challenged me for my slow, torturous pool immersion, and that I was the first one in the pool the next time. I also jumped in. But this week, I dove in (both days) and on the first day I received the most awesome surprise. I kid you not. The water was WARM. I had no idea they would or could heat it, because I had already bailed on swimming by this time last year. OF course, the second time I dove in this week I didn't know which "experience" to trust! Would it still be warm? It was - but seemed a bit less so. Wonder what tomorrow will bring:)
Cardio Myopathy Takes a Four Legged Friend - Cardiomyopathy is a catch phrase to some extent. It means diseases of the heart and it often results in heart failure. It occurs in people and in dogs. In dogs it is called dilated cardiomyopathy. I read about it today because it took the life of a dog that I used to see "around." In the last month or two, I gave another example of a runner with a knee injury that wasn't from running. In that story, I recalled a conversation I had with a woman who walks in the neighborhood where I run. We struck up a conversation the day she saw me walking backwards up a hill. She was walking her dogs and she shared that her husband was a runner, but not able to run as much as he'd like. I see her several times a week. But for the last week or two, she has had only one of her dalmatians with her. Today I saw her and stopped to inquire about the dog. (recall that I am notoriously self centered when I am running so stopping is sort of an event for me) It turns out that the other dog had recently died of cardiomyopathy. She was very surprised when the dog was diagnosed and she told me that this dog often went running with her husband. In a way she was telling me that the dog lived a healthy life style and his heart disease was therefore a shock (it happens). The disease causes the heart(or its chambers) to enlarge and the heart cannot pump properly.
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