High School Sports Concussions: Girls at Greater Risk

The little guy's preschool sports.

Girls soccer is apparently second only to boys football in concussion rates. When playing similar sports, girls are twice as likely to have a concussion. (Girls soccer is considered an incidental contact sport rather than a collision sport.)
Football had a concussion incidence of 0.6 cases per 1,000 athletic exposures. This was followed by girls’ soccer, at 0.35 per 1,000 athletic exposures, and boys’ lacrosse, at 0.30 per 1,000. Baseball and cheerleading had the lowest rates at 0.06 per 1,000. That means the incidence of concussion was 10.9-fold greater in football than in baseball, and 6-fold more in girls’ soccer than in cheerleading.  An 11-year study of 12 sports at 25 high schools in Fairfax County, Virginia found that in the three sports that are similar for boys and girls – basketball, soccer, and baseball/softball – the concussion rate was consistently twice as great for girls. This gender disparity has previously been observed in college sports, but this is the first study to demonstrate it at the high school level.
The findings were reported by Internal Medicine News on Dec. 8, and released at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in November.
This begs the question - why? Why are girls more likely to get concussions? Are they truly more delicate? Do they feel the need to dispel stereotypes and push themselves beyond their limits? 
The January issue of Prevention magazine devotes an entire article to concussions in women. It says: "Although recent media attention has focused on concussions in pro football players, research indicates that adult women may be especially at risk. 'Women have smaller frames and neck muscles than men, which may make them more prone,' says Daniel Labovitz, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY. Once a woman is injured, the effects can be much more dire. In a 2010 study, women took longer than men to recover from concussions; this was especially true among women of child-bearing age. Fluctuating hormones may affect how the brain recovers from trauma, says Jeffrey Kutcher, MD, a sports neurologist at the University of Michigan. Other research found that female soccer players performed worse on neurological testing after concussions than men with comparable injuries."
Never thought I'd be in favor of cheerleading, but at least it seems a little safer. I loved playing soccer in school, and if I ever have a daughter I will still support her if she chooses to play; but remind her of the importance of playing safely.
Concussion defintion from The Mayo Clinic.

Low-fat diets are unhealthy

Homemade pizza and salad.

Experts at last month's American Dietetic Association Food and Nutrition Conference warned that the conventional dietary wisdom of healthy=low fat is an inaccurate and unfortunate simplification of a truly healthy diet. In fact, this widely practiced - if not almost inescapable - notion of low fat as best for you, is in fact dangerously unhealthy. It turns out that replacing dietary saturated fat with carbohydrates can actually increase your risk of heart disease. 

"The emphasis should be on displacing saturated fat and trans fat with unsaturated fat because that is where the data is," Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the HNRCA Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory, said at the conference. "Displace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat has been simplified to 'low fat.' That oversimplified ... message remains pervasive." 

Other experts called for eliminating "total fat" numbers from Nutrition Facts panels. They also reported that slightly higher-unsaturated-fat diets are actually healthier, especially when compared to diets high in refined carbohydrates. For longtime purveyors of slow/real food diets, or anyone that's ever bothered to read a few books or articles on nutrition, this come not exactly as "news". In my personal opinion, most food that have had the fat drained out of them taste terrible, and are markedly less filling. This recent "mainstream" reporting of the fact that fats are a necessary part of a healthy diet, is really an awesome confirmation that we should in fact be eating foods that taste good. By eating real food I think you not only consume fewer calories, but you actually enjoy it more.