Welcome to Wednesday! Is anyone else finding this week incredibly long? It’s time for your open thread, so tell us what’s on your mind.
Hey, I love this news but with all news about diet take it with a grain of salt:
Led by Dr. Lu Wang, preventive-health experts at Brigham conducted the first long-term study of women’s drinking habits and weight gain. The study involved 19,220 women over the age of 38 who were of normal weight. Researchers asked the women about their alcohol consumption over the past year and recorded how much of four different types of alcoholic beverages they consumed — beer, red wine, white wine and liquor. The researchers measured the average ethanol content of each beverage and then calculated each volunteer’s average alcohol intake; they also weighed each woman five times over the course of the follow-up period.
After 13 years, women consuming the highest amount of alcohol per day (more than two drinks daily) were 30% less likely to be overweight and nearly 70% less likely to be obese than nondrinkers, the team found. “We certainly don’t want to encourage nondrinkers to adopt alcohol as a method for weight control, but we were surprised by the strength of the association,” says Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s and a co-author of the study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
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The association led the team to consider several possible explanations. First, it could be that women who drink more simply substitute alcohol for other sources of calories — in essence adopting a form of the liquid diet. Indeed, when the researchers analyzed the data, it appeared that the women who drank the most got fewer of their total calories from nonalcoholic sources than other women, but also consumed the most calories overall. Women having one to two drinks daily, for example, consumed 1,738 kcal/day, compared to the 1,670 kcal/day of teetotalers, but they took in 177 fewer kcal/day from nonalcoholic sources. Whether or not this substitution is a conscious decision on the women’s part still isn’t clear and the study wasn’t designed to find out.
My thoughts on this study is that the source of calories is as important as the amount of calories. Now we shouldn’t all get excited and start drinking two drinks a day thinking this will cause us to lose weight. The best way to control weight is to eat less and exercise.
Pain-in-the-ass Congressman Bart Stupak is getting a lot of attention, not all of it good. Rachel Maddow has been investigating his membership in the Family and his residence at the C Street (Cheat Street House). He’s also got a primary challenger, one who is specifically citing his blockade of health care reform.
Connie Saltonstall, a former commissioner in Charlevoix County, told me this evening she’s challenging Stupak over his refusal to allow health care reform to move forward without abortion language attached.
Saltonstall told me her “two passions” are health care reform and choice. And after spending the last 20 years voting for Stupak, Saltonstall said he managed to run afoul of both of them.
“I’ve had to vote for him because he’s a Democrat and not a Republican — he was not as bad as the other side,” she said. But Saltonstall said Stupak’s stance on abortion in the health care debate “crossed the line” for her.
We’ll see if a primary challenger affects Stupak’s behavior.