Now what’s a random shark dive doing on a health and fitness blog I hear you ask? Fitness is all about challenges and extremes. It’s about how far you can push yourself and what you can achieve. Bootcamp. Circus fitness. Marathons. Triathlons. What’s your extreme challenge? Here’s mine. Diving with Sharks. I’ve always wanted to do it. I’m pretty sure I won’t have the balls to, but that’s what life is about. Always outdoing yourself and believing that if you try hard enough you can achieve your goals.

This reassures me that the government’s decision to keep the screening age at 25 was the right one. I had to write about this new study, because cervical cancer screening been the subject of previous posts where I considered the downsides of the screening mania since Jade Goody.

The study, led by Peter Sasieni and his colleagues at Queen Mary University, University of London (kudos to my old university) found that screening between the ages of 30 and 37 was associated with a reduction in cancer risk over the next five years of between 43-60%.

Nevertheless, I am still convinced that it should be our right to get a smear test if we want it. I have heard of women requesting smear tests and being refused. Lowering the cervical screening age may waste tight NHS budgets, but I’m certain that denying our right to healthcare is not fair either.

Cervical smear surgery ‘given needlessly’ to women with borderline results

Smear tests prevent cervical cancer, but under 25s are unlikely to benefit

My Aim- I want to back fly

Just a quick one, as it’s already quite late. I was thinking today when I managed to stretch further than I did before about how we measure our fitness. What gives us that sense of achievement? Is it weight loss, a toned body, the endorphin-induced feel-good factor, managing to go further each time that we did before or just the muscle-ache reassurance that we’re doing something to make us healthier? In a class today when I wasn’t doing my normal spout of fun fitness and instead doing a lunge that practically involves going into the splits, I couldn’t help but wonder what factors dominate in people’s motivation to exercise. Are the consistent gym-goers really dominated by an urge to lose weight? Or are the ones who keep going really concerned about their health? I might do a poll tomorrow.

It involves swinging around the gym studio on a trapeze. Jukari (which means “play” in Sicilian) was developed by Reebok in conjunction with the creative directors of Cirque du Soleil. Jukari came into the Reebok gym in Canary Wharf in May and will be rolled out to other gyms across the UK.

In an hour-long workout an instructor guides a maximum of 12 people per class through moves using a specially designed trapeze called a FlySet attached to the gym ceiling.

Swinging through 360 degrees will definitely strengthen your arm, legs
and core muscles more effectively by targeting muscles that often
remain unused. The 12 signature moves include the beginner’s straddle
jump, with your legs bent outwards as you swing through the air, and
the woodpecker, a push-up performed while leaning into the bar.

Find classes at the Reebok Gym. Far as I can see you have to be a member though. Boo.

Fats can't be so bad, can they!

I think the message in the new book by Jennifer McLagan that fat has a undeserved bad reputation is particularly worrying. Every now and then, we have these new studies, books or other authorities that refute what we know so far and claim that their evidence proves otherwise.

McLagan claims that fat’s bad reputation comes from flawed studies that were carried out between the 1950s and 1970s, mostly by the American physiologist Ancel Keys. The data wasn’t rock solid and in three of the countries studied there was no clear link.

However, I think such claims should be treated with caution, as with so many factors interplaying it’s difficult to prove a causal relationship between what we eat and heart disease.  A study of 80,082 women found that a five percent of energy intake from saturated fat, as compared with equivalent energy intake from carbohydrates, was associated with a 17 percent increase in the risk of coronary disease. Yet, her 49,000 women study, the Women’s Health Initiative, shows there’s no impact.

McLagan says that  “nobody has ever been able to prove the supposed link between a diet high in animal fat and cardiovascular disease, and that’s why we have people such as the Inuit, who eat a lot of animal fat and who do not have high rates of heart disease”. However, the Inuit people, from the Artic region, eat seafood meat, like seals and small whales, which is high in omega-3 fatty acids. This is indicated as responsible for their low incidence of heart disease. However, they have the same level of blood pressure as those industrialized countries! So all that animal meat isn’t so good after all!

Our intake of saturated fat is one-fifth more than the upper limit set by the government. So I’m not sure that telling us fats are not so bad is a sensible move, since deterring people from eating fatty foods isn’t working yet with almost 1 in 4 people in the UK overweight!

Me before the people piled in for Sequins and the City 2009

After trying AcroYoga and Kangoo, my love for fun fitness workouts grew!  I’ve just finished a 12 week course in belly dance hip hop and as faddy as it sounds it was fantastic. The course reached a climax with a performance, Sequins and the City, in Great Portland street. Doing hip drops and shimmies across the stage was more exhilirating than the usual dose of endorphins during a session in the gym. With the bright light blinding me and making me sweat, I tried to remember the steps to the medley of Ciara, Work, Enrique, Taking Back my Love, a drum song and lastly some random salsa.

I realised how important mind-body awareness is. My mind would tell my hip to move up and over, but that’s not necessarily what it did! When I did dance class in school, I came to realise that my co-ordination wasn’t amazing. Nevertheless, dancing gives you a goal to strive towards and you can always improve. I know my chest drops are better when I keep my shoulders back! Achieving that perfect move gives you a rush of confidence and exhiliration.  In yoga,  it can be the moment you finally do a difficult back bend or manage to do the scorpion pose.

I think this is why courses, rather than drop ins, and types of fitness with different levels can help you push yourself harder.  You get the best fitness and mental benefits this way. Rather than the competition being with other players, it’s yourself that you have to beat.

To find belly dance classes in london go to try http://www.bellydanceclasses.net/united-kingdom/

I did classes with Melissa at Mia Serra Belly Dance.

The research was led by Senior Research Fellow Dr Manuel Mayr and his team at the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence at King’s College London. From blood samples collected from human volunteers, the King’s team isolated mononuclear cells, in order to grow endothelial progenitor cells. These can develop into endothelial cells, which form the lining of our blood vessels.

EPCs are a type of stem cell that originate in the bone marrow and circulate in the blood. They have been suggested as a source of stem cell-based therapies to contribute to the repair of heart tissue.

The scientists used a technique called proteomics to examine the characteristics of these cells.

Dr Mayr explains: “Surprisingly, we found that conventional isolation methods used by scientists and doctors do not result in a pure cell sample because they are also contaminated with markers from another type of blood cell called platelets.” So the markers scientists use to identify EPCs were also present in the platelets. Some of the cells used in clinical trials seemed like EPCs, but were a different type of cell.

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the BHF, said: “This research demonstrates the value of carrying out fundamental cell biology research to fully understand the sources of stem cells before they proceed into clinical trials, so we understand exactly which cells are able to contribute to any repair to the heart and whether they are safe.”

However, there has been less focus on the main areas that damage the possibility of surviving cancer. That is treatment, investigation and care. An article in The Independent reads:

“Improvements in care have had much greater impact on the death rate for most cancers than advances in treatment. A cancer caught early is easier to treat, and having a cancer specialist administer the treatment is more effective than a general surgeon.”

Light bulb. ‘I have to be screened regularly to catch it early.’ However, excessive screening is not necessarily the holy grail, as Michael Fitzpatrick, a GP in Hackney London, points out: “As a GP, I encounter delays in investigation and treatment.” For cancer to be caught early there needs to be the resources for fast investigation. Investment into investigation, care and treatment is likely to make more of an impact than screening.

The risks of screening fall by the wayside and are not highlighted enough. Dr Fitzpatrick helpfully outlines them in his comment in Community Care. These are false positives (diagnosing cancer where none exists) and some false negatives (failing to diagnose a cancer where it does exist). A review published in the BMJ indicated that if 2,000 women are screened regularly for 10 years, one will benefit while 10 healthy women will become cancer patients and undergo unnecessary treatment. 200 women will experience the psychological stress of a false alarm.

This is why I’m happy that Cancer Research UK are rolling out 20 centres around the country in a £1.5bn, five- year programme aimed at tackling hard-to-treat cancers with the lowest survival rates. I just hope they get the focus right.

1. “Using a sunbed once a month or more, can increase your risk of skin cancer by more than half.”

2. “Another study estimated that sunbeds cause 100 deaths from melanomas every year in the UK.”

3. “UVA can also damage the skin and the levels of UV-A from sunbeds can be over 10 times higher than that of the midday sun.”

I have done some digging behind these assertions:

1. The NHS Health and Safety Executive recommends you should not use sunbeds for more than a maximum of 20 sessions a year. This means that using a sunbed nearly every three weeks is safe. Yet  Cancer Research says that if we go once a month, we increase our skin cancer risk by half. Something clearly does not add up.

2. “Another study estimated that sunbeds cause 100 deaths from melanomas every year in the UK,” says Cancer Research. Yet the researchers of that same study said: ”While cosmetic tanning using sunbeds should be discouraged, prohibition is not warranted especially as exposure to the sun, which cannot be regulated, remains the major contributory factor to the risk of melanoma.”

3. Indeed the sun is the major cause of melanoma, but the assertion that “UVA can also damage the skin and the levels of UV-A from sunbeds can be over 10 times higher than that of the midday sun” implies that the UVA from sunbeds are lethal in comparison to the sun, its less fierce accomplice. Cancer Research admits itself that “recent studies have shown that intense, intermittent sun exposures, such as holiday sunbathing, pose the greatest risk of malignant melanomas.”

So research on tanning using sunbeds should be looked at more carefully and opposing information weighed up.  Cancer Research’s announcement that “One 20-year-old a day is diagnosed with dangerous skin cancer” should be approached with scepticism, especially as it coincides with the launch of its 2009 SunSmart campaign today.

I’m not sure if we need any more cancer angst after the tragedy of Jade Goody.

The newspaper says that a new study has shown that one in three severely obese adults who fail to lose weight have undiagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

The researchers behind this study suggest that untreated ADHD stops the severely obese “from having the willpower to lose weight” and that ADHD drug treatment ‘dramatically’ improves their ability to lose weight.

However, drugs used to treat ADHD are also stimulants and known to induce weight loss, even in people without ADHD. Therefore, these drugs may be inducing weight loss not through specifically treating ADHD but by some other mechanism, such as increasing alertness and activity. These drugs can have side effects and are not licensed for use to aid weight loss.

Source- NHS Choices- Obesity ‘linked to ADHD’