The Checkup
Health in the News and in Your Life

By Adapted from voices.washpost.com/checkup
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Cancer: Here Today . . .

Can breast cancer just disappear on its own? Per-Henrik Zahl of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo and colleagues compared breast cancer rates in two groups of more than 100,000 women ages 50 to 64. One group got mammograms every two years, while the second got just one after six years. Surprisingly, the researchers found that the women who got more frequent mammograms had about 22 percent more cases of breast cancer.

That finding, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, raises the possibility that mammograms detect cancers that never cause any problems and just go away. If that proves to be true, the researchers say, the finding would raise new questions about routine mammography, which has long been controversial, and whether women who find out from an exam that they have breast cancer necessarily have to do anything about it.

-- Rob Stein

Happy Days

A widely reported study recently showed that happy people watch less TV than those who say they're not happy.

The study, headed by John P. Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and published in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research, set out to discover how happy people spend their time.

Reviewing data collected over 34 years from nearly 40,000 people ages 18 to 64, the researchers pinpointed a handful of activities -- such as socializing with relatives, neighbors or friends, using the Internet and going to bars -- and looked at how often people who rated themselves very happy, somewhat happy or not happy said they took part in those activities.

-- Jennifer Huget

choirgirl104 wrote:

I totally agree. Whenever I watch too much TV, I just get really lazy, which leads to all sorts of negative thinking. I've not noticed the same effect for movies, however.

cathrine wrote:

I think TV is an escape from life. People stress around all day. Come home, stress some more. And then instead of being present and relaxing in their lives, they escape into the lives of fictional and not-so-fictional people, ignoring their own.

Passing Up the Stuffing

Joan Salge Blake, a professor of nutrition at Boston University, offered some tips on how to avoid eating so much that it feels as if your belly might burst.

She advised that trimming fat from the meal while adding fiber and liquid (to fill you up fast and speed digestion) can go a long way toward avoiding the "agita" you feel after a large meal. As she noted in the Nov. 25 Eat, Drink and Be Healthy column, serving your meal in courses can help.

Start with a broth-based, vegetable-filled soup, then clear the table. Next up: a salad with low-fat dressing. By the time you clear that second course, everyone's bellies will have received signals from the brain (this takes 20 minutes) that they're already starting to feel satisfied, keeping folks from mindlessly devouring the rest of the meal.

-- Jennifer Huget

laura33 wrote:

Why is overdoing one meal a year deemed to be so horribly unacceptable? Must we be so obsessed with weight, with "perfect" everything, that we have to suck the joy out of one day of feasting? Why can't we celebrate without guilt, and eat in moderation the rest of the time?

I have two no-rules meals: Thanksgiving and Hanukkah (latkes, mmmmmmm). I want turkey, gravy, stuffing, potatoes, green beans and pie -- and crispy turkey skin, double yum. I will devote every inch of stomach space to those foods; I will savor them and enjoy them for all they're worth. And then the next day I will be back to salads (with turkey on top!) and treadmills.

No biggie.