Dr. David Koivuranta covers six health topics: maintaining a healthy weight cuts cancer risk by 17-39%, regular walking prevents dementia by 41% over ten years, and 80% of bus drivers experience neck or back pain. He also discusses diet changes cancer survivors make and kidney stone prevention.
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Hello everyone. It's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well. You had a nice start to your week. Looking forward to your day today. I hope it's a healthy one. Coming at you on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your daily health update for Tuesday, June 8th, 2021. Gonna look at 6 areas of health and wellness. Somewhere around this video, you can read through all 6 areas. If you have any questions or you'd like a copy, you can DM us on social, send us an email here at the clinic, or give us a call. We'd be happy to help you out. Not going to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, you just never know what that amazing body of yours is capable of doing when you give it some good thoughts, some good information, and take some positive action steps when it comes to your health and wellness. So we hope to encourage that Monday through Thursday with our video daily health update and on Fridays with our written format for you all for the weekend. All right, so good for you for being here. Let's see what we have for you today. The BMC Medicine report May 2021 talked about a healthy weight and how if you maintain close to an ideal or healthy weight, it may reduce the odds for many cancers. An analysis of data on more than 400,000 men and women concluded that maintaining a healthy weight can reduce one's risk for uterine cancer by 39%, renal cancer by 18%, liver cancer by 17%, and gastric cancer by 17% as well. So it's not necessarily the aesthetics, uh, being close to our ideal body weight, but it's also— it allows our body to perhaps perform at its best and not be stressed in a way where it's maybe forced to face some challenges. So do your best, not always easy, and, and just be positive about it. Sometimes we look at weight with a very negative connotation, and especially because of the aesthetics of it or how it looks, but it's not so much about how it looks because we're all great the way that we are. It's just a question of how healthy do we want to be and how healthy can we be if we try to maintain that ideal body weight. And the research shows there are probably many benefits, including a decreased risk perhaps of some cancers. Speaking of cancer, Support Care in Cancer, May 2021, talks about half of cancer survivors change their diet. In a— in questionnaires completed by 520 cancer survivors, it revealed that 55% altered their diet following their diagnosis. The most common changes included eating more fruits and veggies and reducing their intake of red meat, sweets, and fatty foods. Probably a good idea once you're faced with a challenge to rethink your strategy on a daily basis with some of the things you're doing to support your health, and certainly nutrition is one of them. So it's no wonder once we get that eye-opening event that we make some changes to our nutrition and maybe other aspects of our lifestyle and our healthy routine. One of those things you may want to add to your routine if you haven't already, or if you're faced with a challenge because there are many benefits, is walking. The Department of Health, Victoria, Australia, May 2021 lists the following health benefits associated with walking: increased cardiovascular and pulmonary fitness, reduced risk of heart disease and stroke, improved management of conditions like hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and joint and muscular pain or stiffness, stronger bones and improved balance, increased muscle strength and endurance, and reduced body fat. Walking is such a natural activity, very good for us, uh, good to get out at least every day for a good 20 to 30-minute stroll, and then maybe once or twice a week, try to get up to 60 or even 90 minutes. I know it seems like a long time, but very good for your body. What many people don't realize is that exercise or fitness, although it can be fun and we engage in activity and do some things that we might enjoy, also makes our body perhaps look a certain way and feel a certain way. It also helps to drive waste out of our tissues, and it helps get nutrients, clean water, air, and nutrient nutrition, or my goodness, what am I trying to say, fuel into our cells. And that one of the ways you do that is by getting active. And it actually helps filter out those tissues and give them what they need to survive. And tissues make up all your organs, glands, and blood vessels. So fitness exercise, just like walking, is very good for us, excuse me, on a physiological level. So get out there and do some walking. With fitness, they looked at the correlation between fitness and dementia in the Environment International report, May 2021. They looked at over 50,000— 57,000 older adults, and it revealed that those who regularly exercised were 41% less likely to develop dementia in the following decade than participants with a sedentary lifestyle. So again, some encouragement to include that activity in your life. Good for your cognitive function or your noggin, uh, keeps you focused and healthy in that respect as well. And that nervous system is vital, so walking has some benefit with that and fitness overall. Sedentary could be the problem. Healthline, May 2021, talks about how to reduce the risk for kidney stones. They're the result of hard mineral deposits that form in the kidney, which can cause excruciating pain when passing through the urinary tract. Though there is no sure way to prevent kidney stones, experts recommend the following to reduce one's risk: stay hydrated, eat more calcium-rich foods, eat less sodium, eat fewer oxalate-rich foods such as spinach, chocolate, peanut, and soy products, eat less animal protein, avoid vitamin C supplements, Explore herbal remedies and talk to your doctor about the medications you're taking. A lot of good steps there, uh, if you're concerned with getting kidney stones. And finally, for our bus drivers out there, very important part of getting us around in our urban centers and maybe beyond, the International Archives of Occupational Environmental Health, April 2021, looked at back pain and neck pain being very common among bus drivers. They surveyed 83 professional bus drivers and it revealed that almost 80% had one or more episodes of neck and/or back pain during the previous year. Additionally, 1 in 4 drivers with back pain had moderate disability in the back region, and half of those with neck pain had disability in the neck region. And driving, a sedentary repetitive task, not always easy, I would imagine, and, uh, very important. You wanna stay alert and you want to be able to comfortably do that task, uh, as you have probably some vital passengers with you. So good to get your neck and back checked, keep it in good shape. There are some preventative measures that people in those kinds of occupations where there could be some risk can take. And if you are in an occupation where you're getting some neck or back pain, you should seek some treatment to improve that neck or back pain so that it doesn't go from a discomfort or annoyance to an actual disability. All right, so that's your daily health update for Tuesday. Hope you enjoyed it. Great to have you here. Hope your day is a wonderful one. Get out there, share some smiles, and do something positive, happy for yourself, and make it a good Tuesday. I'll catch up with you again tomorrow, Wednesday. Daily health update will be coming at And then, take care, have a good one.
