Drinking MILK could prevent a cardiac arrest: Low calcium levels double the risk of the heart suddenly stopping

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Drinking milk may lower the risk of suffering cardiac arrest, according to researchers.

They found people with the lowest blood calcium levels are twice as likely to have their heart suddenly stop working.

Raising such levels by drinking more milk or snacking on cheese offers protection, scientists at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles believe.

Cardiac arrests, which are often confused by the public with heart attacks, are fatal in more than 90 per cent of cases.

It occurs when the heart suddenly stops pumping blood around the body – if it is not restarted with defibrillator the patient will die within minutes.

It is far more serious, for example, than a heart attack, in which a blood clot cuts the oxygen supply to the heart but patients often survive.

Figures suggest that 100,000 lives are lost in Britain each year from cardiac arrests. The number is almost four times higher in the US.

How was the study carried out?

The new study, which was based on blood calcium measurements from 712 patients, was published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Those with blood calcium levels in the lowest quartile had twice the odds of sudden cardiac arrest compared to those in the highest quartile.

The findings kept true even after accounting for risk factors of heart disease, often a cause of cardiac arrest, and medication usage.

What did the researchers say? 

Lead author Dr Sumeet Chugh said: ‘Our study found that serum calcium levels were lower in individuals who had a sudden cardiac arrest than in a control group.’

Dr Hirad Yarmohammadi, who was involved in the study, said the findings are a ‘step towards’ discovering less-established risk factors.

Patients in the lowest quartile had calcium levels of less than 8.95 milligrams per decilitre, which is just within the normal range of 8.5-10.2mg.

Researchers said that more investigations are needed to determine why lower blood calcium levels are linked to cardiac arrest.

Cardiac arrest guidelines 

Their findings come after experts warned in June that airplanes need to carry more medical equipment in case someone on board has a cardiac arrest mid-flight.

Defibrillators and ECGs should be made available on all journeys in case of such an emergency, draft guidelines by the German Society for Aerospace Medicine stated.

And data last month suggested that triathlon competitors may be more likely to die suddenly and suffer a fatal trauma or cardiac arrest than previously thought.

A study of more than nine million participants found cardiac arrests struck 1.74 out of every 100,000 competitors – almost double that of marathon runners.

Reference: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

The Case Against Low-fat Milk Is Stronger Than Ever

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For years you’ve been told to go for skim over full-fat dairy. Even the latest dietary guidelines for Americans urge people to avoid the full fat, and following this lead, school lunch programs provide only low-fat milk and no whole milk at all, even though they do allow chocolate skim milk with its added sugars. But large population studies that look at possible links between full-fat dairy consumption, weight and disease risk are starting to call that advice into question. And some research suggests people who consume full-fat dairy weigh less and are less likely to develop diabetes, too.

In a new study published in the journal Circulation, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian and his colleagues analyzed the blood of 3,333 adults enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study of Health Professionals Follow-up Study taken over about 15 years. They found that people who had higher levels of three different byproducts of full-fat dairy had, on average, a 46% lower risk of getting diabetes during the study period than those with lower levels. “I think these findings together with those from other studies do call for a change in the policy of recommending only low-fat dairy products,” says Mozaffarian. “There is no prospective human evidence that people who eat low-fat dairy do better than people who eat whole-fat dairy.”

Since full-fat dairy products contain more calories, many experts assumed avoiding it would lower diabetes risk. But studies have found that when people reduce how much fat they eat, they tend to replace it with sugar or carbohydrates, both of which can have worse effects on insulin and diabetes risk. In the current study, Mozaffarian adjusted for the role that weight plays, and found the connection between full-fat dairy intake and lower diabetes risk remained strong independent of weight gain.

In fact, in a separate study published in the American Journal of Nutrition, another group analyzed the effects of full fat and low fat dairy on obesity and found that among 18,438 women in the Women’s Health Study, those who consumed the most high-fat dairy products lowered their risk of being overweight of obese by 8%.

Together, the body of data is beginning to reveal both that full-fat dairy has a place in a healthy diet, and also how focusing on one nutrient in the diet may backfire. When dietary guidelines began urging people to lower the amount of fat they ate, the idea was to reduce the amount of cholesterol and unhealthy fats in the body. But by focusing just on cutting out fat, experts didn’t count on the fact that people would compensate for the missing fat and start loading up on carbohydrates, which the body converts into sugar—and then body fat.

“This is just one more piece of evidence showing that we really need to stop making recommendations about food based on theories about one nutrient in food,” says Mozaffarian. “It’s crucial at this time to understand that it’s about food as a whole, and not about single nutrients.”

While it’s not entirely clear how whole fat is helping to lower risk of diabetes, it’s possible that it’s working on several different levels to regulate insulin and glucose. At the simplest level, people eating more high fat dairy products will have enough calories so they won’t feel hungry enough to need additional calories from sugary foods. It’s also possible that the fats in dairy may be acting directly on cells, working on the liver and muscle to improve their ability to break down sugar from food. And then there’s the possibility that for certain high fat dairy foods, like cheese, which is fermented, microbes may be working to improve insulin response and lower diabetes risk too.

Mozaffarian isn’t advocating that people start consuming vast amounts of high fat dairy products if they’re worried about their diabetes risk. More studies need to be done in order for dietary guidelines to start recommending full fat dairy in order to improve health. But the results so far do support backing away from recommending just low fat options, he says. “In the absence of any evidence for the superior effects of low fat dairy, and some evidence that there may be better benefits of whole fat dairy products for diabetes, why are we recommending only low fat diary? We should be telling people to eat a variety of dairy and remove the recommendation about fat content.”

Reference: http://time.com