News Item: Strokes Among Middle-Aged Women Triple

Strokes Among Middle-Aged Women Triple

This article reports that strokes in middle aged women have tripled recently, and blames the obesity epidemic. They're looking for easy answers and are looking in the wrong direction!

It happened even though more women in the recent survey were on medicines to control their cholesterol and blood pressure — steps that lower the risk of stroke.

Really? Have they been reading the news lately about those kinds of medications being far less effective than they thought?

Women's waistlines are nearly two inches bigger than they were a decade earlier, and that bulge corresponds with the increase in strokes, researchers said.

That's because of excess insulin, which causes fat accumulation around the midsection.

In addition, women's average body mass index, a commonly used measure of obesity, rose from 27 in the earlier survey to 29. They also had higher blood sugar levels.

High carb, low fat diet - and insulin again!

In a "pre-stroke population" of middle-age women, a tripling of cases is "an alarming increase," said Dr. Ralph Sacco, neurology chief at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

I wonder how researchers will respond to this alarming news? Develop more drugs, and tell women it's their own fault they're fat and they need to just eat less fat.

Researchers saw that the stroke rate had spiked in middle-aged women but stayed about the same — around 1 percent — in middle-aged men. So they looked deeper at the responses to see if they could learn why.

Belly fat stood out, Towfighi said. The portion of women with abdominal obesity rose from 47 percent in the earlier survey to 59 percent in the recent one. The change in men was smaller, and previous studies have shown that "abdominal obesity is a stronger risk factor for women than men," she said.

No mention of insulin here, just obesity. It's the insulin, people!

Obesity "sets the stage for all the other risk factors to come in" like
diabetes and heart disease, Gorelick added.

Don't you think maybe the word obesity should be replaced with excess insulin there? Being FAT doesn't cause the problem. It's how the people got fat that matters! Instead, it becomes a blame game - are patients too weak to lose weight? Where have we heard that before?

The article stops short of drawing any conclusions at this point, and moves on to say how much more likely you are to die if you have a stroke during off hours. Um. OK. Thanks.

Spreading half information about obesity is counterproductive. Worse, you can pretty much bet that Heidi Diaz will be blogging about how much more dangerous it is to be obese than to starve yourself thin on her yo-yo Kimkins crash diet, as a twisted and dangerous marketing ploy. Don't fall for it! Trading one set of health problems for another is not the way to go. Heidi Diaz is a stroke waiting to happen - she's diabetic, stressed out to the max, obese despite her own miracle diet and the millions she makes selling it, and her metabolism is shot. Heidi Diaz is not the right person to dispense medical advice!