Archive for the ‘Fitness’ Category
(Reuters) From Google Health to Wii Fit, Americans have an increasingly wide array of tools for tracking their health backgrounds and statistics but their understanding of what that data means is poor, threatening their health and costing the economy billions of dollars.
Just 12 percent of American adults are health literate at a level that allows them to manage their care, the latest News and Numbers statement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showed.
The AHRQ release is based on information from the 2007 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report , which found that the majority of Americans lacked the skills required to correctly complete health care-related activities like reading a prescription bottle, figuring out medication dosage, filling out forms or calculating insurance coverage. That lack of literacy can negatively affect the quality of care a patient receives and costs the U.S. economy between $106 billion and $236 billion annually, the University of Connecticut said in a report last year. That’s enough to insure all of the more than 47 million Americans currently without coverage.
“There is a number of areas and ranges within the health care system where low health literacy really leads to vast inefficiencies and resource utilization,” said John Vernon, the report’s lead author.
A survey done in 2003 classified Americans into four health literacy categories: proficient, intermediate, basic and below basic. Twenty-two percent were classified as having basic health literacy while 14 percent were below basic. In other words, more than a third of the respondents likely couldn’t determine medication dosage from the instructions on a prescription bottle, said Cindy Brach , a health literacy expert with the AHRQ.
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“(Reuters) — A bran muffin and a flavored coffee drink are not unusual choices for a breakfast on the run. But along with fiber and caffeine, you may be getting something you hadn’t bargained for: a day’s worth of added sugar in just one small early morning meal.
We shouldn’t consume more than 40 grams — about 10 teaspoons — of sugar a day, based on a 2,000-calorie diet, said Andy Bellatti, a graduate student at New York University’s department of nutrition and food studies who blogs about diet and health at Small Bites. ‘It’s very easy, though, to go way above that because that’s basically one can of soda,’ Bellatti said. ‘So although 10 teaspoons sounds like a lot, it’s actually not really that much.’
Though the World Health Organization recommends that added sugar should make up no more than 10 percent of our daily caloric intake, the average American eats about double that. A muffin could have 11 teaspoons of sugar added, and a grande vanilla latte at Starbucks has about seven teaspoons.
There are a few different chemicals we may be referring to when we talk about sugar, although teaspoon-for-teaspoon their calorie content is virtually the same. Sucrose is essentially table sugar. Lactose is a naturally occurring sugar found in milk. Fructose is also found naturally i”
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