Lifestyle « Weekly Gravy

San Francisco is on the verge of passing a ban on “forever chemicals” in the protective clothing firefighters wear while battling blazes. City lawmakers are expected to pass an ordinance on Tuesday that will prohibit the use of firefighting gear made with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS have been linked to health harms, including decreased fertility, low-birth weight and developmental delays in children, a greater risk of certain cancers and higher cholesterol levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. While the compounds, which linger for years in the environment, have been phased out of most manufacturing, they are still used in some firefighting foams and nearly all firefighters’ uniforms because they resist flames and extreme heat, NBC News reported. If passed into law, the city’s fire department would have until June 30, 2026, to buy new protective clothing made without PFAS for its more than 1,400 firefighters. San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who authored the legislation, said he believes the ban “is morally right and it is financially right.” “Cost is so small compared to a human life, is so small compared to the cost of health care, is so small compared to the cost of settling lawsuits,” he told NBC News. Lt. Magaly Saade, a firefighter and training instructor at the San Francisco Fire Department, has had cancer twice, forcing her to undergo… read on > read on >

Women who smoke during pregnancy run a higher risk of their kids becoming overweight or obese, and researchers now think they know one reason why. Children born of moms who smoked while expecting tend to have gut bacteria that is significantly different from that of kids whose moms didn’t light up, scientists reported recently in the journal Gut Microbes. It’s been known for some time that women who smoke in pregnancy tend to have babies who become overweight children, said co-senior researcher Anita Kozyrskyj, a microbiome epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta in Canada. “We just didn’t know how it happened,” Kozyrskyj said in a university news release. “There may be many ways, but in our study we showed one way is by changing the gut bacteria in the infant.” Obesity currently affects more than 18% of children and teens, up from only 4% back in 1975, researchers said in background notes. For the study, researchers used data from more than 1,500 children being tracked as part of a long-term study of child development. The kids’ weight was measured at ages 1 and 3, and stool samples were collected at 3 and 12 months of age. Researchers found that a child’s risk of excess weight was associated with higher levels of a type of gut bacteria called Firmicutes, and that smoking… read on > read on >

“Skinny” fat cells might actually make it harder to lose weight and easier to pack on extra pounds, a new study says. Researchers say it’s possible to predict if someone’s going to gain weight based solely on the size of their fat cells. People with large fat cells tend to lose weight over time, and those with small fat cells tend to gain weight, according to a Swedish study scheduled for presentation at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy. It concludes Wednesday. “Our results suggest that the loss of large fat cells makes more of an impact on weight than the loss of small ones,” said researcher Peter Arner, a professor emeritus of medicine at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “It is a bit like having a room filled to the top by few large balloons or many small ones,” he said in a news release. “It is easier to make empty space in the room by letting out air from the big rather than the small balloons.” On the other hand, he added, “it is easier to fill up the room if many small balloons increase their volume a bit, as compared with having few large balloons and filling them up just a bit.” For the study, researchers measured fat cell volume in the belly fat of 260 people with an average age… read on > read on >

About 1 in 8 U.S. adults (12%) have tried a weight-loss drug like Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound or Mounjaro, a new KFF Health Tracking Poll says. About 6% are taking one right now, the poll found. Most patients say they use the drugs (61%) to treat a chronic condition like diabetes or heart disease, which can make it easier to obtain a prescription, the report says. More than 2 in 5 using the drugs are diabetics (43%), KFF found. This makes sense, given that the class of medications — GLP-1 agonists — was first developed as a treatment for type 2 diabetes. Further, about 1 in 4 people using the drugs (26%) have heart disease. In March, Wegovy became the first weight loss medication to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a means of reducing risk of heart attack and stroke. Only about 22% are taking the drugs because a doctor diagnosed them as overweight or obese, but nearly 38% take the drugs solely to lose weight, the findings show. These drugs can be costly, with list prices topping $1,000 for a month’s supply before insurance coverage, rebates and discount coupons, KFF said. Insurance coverage for the drugs seems to make little difference in how patients perceive their affordability. About half of people (54%) who report having ever taken the drugs… read on > read on >

Colon cancer steadily increased among young people in the United States over the past two decades, with tweens enduring the most dramatic leap in cancer rates, a new study says. The rate of colon cancer grew 500% among kids 10 to 14 between 1999 and 2020, researchers will report at the Digestive Disease Week medical meeting in Washington, D.C., later this month. The rate also increased 333% among 15- to 19-year-olds, and 185% among 20- to 24-year-olds, researchers found. “Colorectal cancer is no longer considered just a disease of the elderly population,” lead researcher Dr. Islam Mohamed, an internal medicine resident physician at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in a news release. For the study, researchers calculated 1999-2020 trends in colon cancer for people between 10 and 44 years of age, using U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. Even though the rates rose among children and young adults, they still are much lower in sheer numbers than those of older adults, results show. Among 10- to 14-year-olds, 0.6 children per 100,000 were diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020, up from just 0.1 children per 100,000 in 1999. Similarly, diagnoses in 15- to 19-year-olds went from 0.3 to 1.3 per 100,000, and those among 20- to 24-year-olds rose from 0.7 to 2 per 100,000. The most common colon cancer symptoms were constipation,… read on > read on >

Smoking cigarettes while pregnant has long been known to harm the fetus, but new research shows things get even worse when marijuana is in the mix. The study by a team at Oregon Health & Science University (OSHU) in Portland involved more than 3 million pregnancies. It found heightened risks for underweight newborns, preterm delivery and even infant death among women who used tobacco and cannabis while pregnant. “With the growing legalization of cannabis around the country, there is often a perception that cannabis is safe in pregnancy,” study co-author Dr. Jamie Lo said in an OSHU news release. “Because we know that many people who use cannabis often use tobacco or nicotine products, we wanted to better understand the potential health implications on both the pregnant individual and the infant,” she explained. Lo is associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology (maternal-fetal medicine) at OHSU. The findings were published May 7 in JAMA Network Open. Lo’s team analyzed hospital discharge data and vital statistics on more than 3 million pregnant women in California averaging about 29 years of age. Of those women, just over 23,000 (0.7%) said they had used cannabis while pregnant; close to 57,000 (1.8%) had smoked tobacco; and more than 10, 300 (0.3%) had used both substances while pregnant. Compared to women who abstained from cigarettes or marijuana during pregnancy, the… read on > read on >

An experimental procedure could reduce levels of a hunger-triggering hormone by burning part of a person’s stomach lining, a new study reports. In the procedure, doctors snake a tube down the patient’s throat with a tiny device that singes the lining of the upper portion of the stomach, also called the gastric fundus. That’s the part of the stomach that produces ghrelin, the primary hormone that controls appetite, researchers said. A six-month clinical trial in which 10 obese women received the procedure resulted in a nearly 8% loss of body weight and a more than 40% reduction in fasting ghrelin levels, according to researchers. They’re slated to report the findings later this month at the Digestive Disease Week medical meeting in Washington, D.C. “This relatively brief, outpatient, non-surgical procedure can facilitate weight loss and significantly curb hunger, and it could be an additional option for patients who don’t want or aren’t eligible for anti-obesity medications, such as Wegovy and Ozempic, or bariatric surgery,” lead researcher Dr. Christopher McGowan, a gastroenterologist and medical director of the True You Weight Loss clinic in Cary, N.C., said in a news release. After snaking the tube into the stomach, doctors insert fluid to protect underlying stomach tissues and then burn (ablate) the mucosal lining of the gastric fundus. This reduces the number of ghrelin-producing cells in that part of… read on > read on >

More than 320,000 U.S. children lost a parent to drug overdose during the past decade, according to a new study reported May 8 in JAMA Psychiatry. What’s more, the death rate accelerated during the period, more than doubling between 2011 and 2021, researchers found. About 27 children per 100,000 had a parent die from an overdose in 2011. Ten years later, 63 children per 100,000 lost a parent to lethal drug use, results show. “This first-of-its-kind study allows us to better understand the tragic magnitude of the overdose crisis and the reverberations it has among children and families,” Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, administrator of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said in a news release. Nationwide death records show that nearly 650,000 people 18 to 64 died of a drug overdose between 2011 and 2021. Of those, an estimated 321,566 left behind a child, based on data from drug use surveys. “It is devastating to see that almost half of the people who died of a drug overdose had a child,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in a news release. “No family should lose their loved one to an overdose, and each of these deaths represents a tragic loss that could have been prevented.” These findings come on the heels of another study reporting a three-fold rise… read on > read on >

Nine of 10 American adults are in the early, middle or late stages of a syndrome that leads to heart disease, a new report finds, and almost 10% have the disease already. “Poor cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health is widespread among the U.S. population,” concludes a team led by Dr. Muthiah Vaduganathan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Researchers looked specifically at rates of what the American Heart Association has dubbed cardiovascular, kidney and metabolic (CKM) syndrome — interrelated factors that progress with time and, if left unchecked, lead to heart disease. CKM syndrome is divided into four stages: Stage 1: Excess fat buildup in the body (a risk factor for poor health) Stage 2: Emergence of other metabolic risk factors (for example, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes) Stage 3: Emergence of high-risk kidney disease and/or a high predicted risk of heart disease being diagnosed within the next 10 years Stage 4: A diagnosis of full-blown heart disease, with or without kidney disease To find out how many Americans might fall into one of these four categories, the Boston team tracked U.S. federal health survey data for 2011 through 2020. Among adults age 20 or older, only 10.6% did not have some level of CKM syndrome, the researchers reported May 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. … read on > read on >

Parents striving to be “perfect” will never attain that goal, and the aim isn’t even healthy for their families, a new study says. The risks of striving for perfection are such that researchers have now created a scale to help parents track their burnout and, if necessary, counter it. The first-of-its-kind Working Parent Burnout Scale is a 10-point survey that helps parents measure their stress and fatigue in real time, researchers say. “If maybe you’re prioritizing making sure your house is spotless all the time, but then you don’t feel like you have time to go for a walk every night with your children, maybe you need to reorganize or find a way to make both of those things work,” lead researcher Kate Gawlik, an associate clinical professor at the Ohio State College of Nursing, said in a news release. About 57% of parents who took part in a new survey said they’re burned out. Burnout can happen when a parent sets unrealistic expectations for themselves, as part of a “culture of achievement” that’s been spurred in part by social media. “You can look at people on Instagram or you can even just see people walking around, and I always think, ‘How do they do that? How do they seem to always have it all together when I don’t?’ ” Gawlik said. “We have high… read on > read on >