Health Posts

I finally got a hold of my doctor back in Vancouver today to try to figure out what’s wrong with me and what I can do about it. It turns out that I have a fairly serious infection caused by a bacteria called “clostridium difficile.” C. Difficile sometimes lives in the intestines and is normally kept in check by a range of good bacteria that also live there. Unfortunately, as a result of the antibiotic treament I had in the hospital (which was clindamycin I believe), a large portion of the good bacteria have died off, leaving a pile of bad stuff to proliferate: Clostridium Difficile Infection (CDI), can range in severity from asymptomatic to severe and life threatening, and many deaths have been reported, especially amongst the aged. People are most often infected in hospitals, nursing homes, or institutions, although C. difficile infection in the community, outpatient setting is […]

Sylvain sent me this link today that basically concluded that one or more cans of diet soda can lead to health risks such as the metabolic syndrome “We found that one or more sodas per day increases your risk of new-onset metabolic syndrome by about 45 per cent, and it did not seem to matter if it was regular or diet,” Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, senior investigator for the Framingham Heart Study, said Monday from Boston. .. The study included nearly 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times. The study looked at how many 355-millilitre cans of cola or other soft drinks a participant consumed each day. The researchers found that compared to those who drank less than one can per day, subjects who downed one or more soft drinks daily had a: 31 per cent greater risk of becoming obese (with a body […]