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The following list includes an array of resources and helpful articles aimed at helping our customers better understand their own health. Our team of caring professionals at Livadi Pharmacy is committed to making sure everyone who comes through our door is well informed and takes a more active role in their own health and wellbeing. Read below and subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates.
Improving Health Care by Gamifying It
May 7, 2019
Physicians often struggle to help patients change their health behaviors. Patients may know that they need to quit smoking, lose weight, or exercise more, but summoning the will to change is hard. It’s particularly difficult for the highest-risk patients who may have life circumstances — challenges such as unemployment or homelessness — that make it harder for them to focus on the long-term. But combining behavioral economics and “gamification” — putting game elements such as points and achievement levels into non-game contexts — holds promise for driving behavior change when a doctor’s advice, and patient’s good intentions, are not enough.
Read more: https://hbr.org/2019/05/improving-health-care-by-gamifying-it
Does Skipping Breakfast Lead to Weight Loss or Weight Gain?
May 1, 2019
Back in 1917, the same year that she cofounded the American Dietetic Association (now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics), Lenna Frances Cooper authored an article in Good Health magazine that noted “in many ways the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started.” Good Health was published by the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a Michigan health resort run by Cooper’s mentor, John Harvey Kellogg, MD, the coinventor of corn flakes (his brother started the cereal business that would become the Kellogg Company).
More than a century after Cooper’s article appeared, scientists are debating whether breakfast is important at all, let alone the most important meal, at least as far as weight management is concerned.
Although research into the health benefits of intermittent fasting suggests breakfast is the one meal that shouldn’t be skipped, a recently published systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials looking at breakfast’s effect on weight and energy intake concluded that skipping it, rather than eating it, might help people lose weight.
The finding by Australian researchers challenges the widely held notion that skipping breakfast slows metabolism and leads to overeating later in the day.
“We are told that breakfast helps our metabolism and that skipping it will make us much hungrier so we’ll overeat and put on weight,” Tim Spector, MB, MD, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London and self-described breakfast eater, wrote in an opinion piece accompanying the study. Spector noted that despite many national guidelines stressing the importance of eating breakfast, around a third of people in developed countries skip it.
One reason experts were misled, Spector wrote, is “because multiple observational studies have shown that obese and diabetic people skipped meals more often than thin people.”