October 29, 2009

10 Flu-fighting Foods

Mclatchy-Tribune News Service. 10-28-09

Buried in the controversy over whether to get the H1N1 vaccination (or even where to find one), is that one of the best ways to ward off any flu is to build up your overall immunity. Dave Grotto, author of "101 Foods That Could Save Your Life," reveals 10 foods that provide top doses of the vitamins and nutrients you need to protect and defend against illness.

MUSHROOMS

Mushrooms used to get overlooked as a health food, but they possess two big weapons you need this flu season: selenium, which helps white blood cells produce cytokines that clear sickness, and beta glucan, an antimicrobial type of fiber, which helps activate "superhero" cells that find and destroy infections.

FRESH GARLIC

Strong smelling foods like garlic can stink out sickness thanks to the phytochemical allicin, an antimicrobial compound. A British study found that people taking allicin supplements suffered 46 percent fewer colds and recovered faster from the ones they did get. So start cooking with it daily - experts recommend two fresh cloves a day.

WILD-CAUGHT SALMON

In a recent study, participants with the lowest levels of vitamin D were about 40 percent more likely to report a recent respiratory infection than those with higher levels of vitamin D. Increase your intake with salmon, a 3.5-ounce serving provides 360 IU some experts recommend as much as 800 to 1000 IU each day.

TEA

Researchers at Harvard University found that drinking five cups of black tea a day quadrupled the body's immune defense system after two weeks, probably because of theanine. Tea also contains catechins, including ECGC, which act like a cleanup crew against free radicals. Grotto suggests drinking one to three cups of black, green or white tea every day.

YOGURT

The digestive tract is one of your biggest immune organs, so keep disease-causing germs out with probiotics and prebiotics, found in naturally fermented foods like yogurt. One serving a day labeled with "live and active cultures" will enhance immune function according to a study from the University of Vienna in Austria.

DARK CHOCOLATE

Nutrition experts agree that dark chocolate deserves a place in healthy diets, and a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition says it can boost your immunity, too. High doses of cocoa support T-helper cells, which increase the immune system's ability to defend against infection. Sweet!

OYSTERS

Zinc is critical for the immune system - it rallies the troupes, or white blood cells, to attack bacteria and viruses like a flu or cold. One medium oyster provides nearly all of the zinc you need for a day, while a portion of six gives you more than five times the recommended amount.

ALMONDS

Heart-healthy almonds boast immune-boosting antioxidant vitamin E, which can reduce your chance of catching colds and developing respiratory infections according to researchers at Tufts University. You'll need more than a serving of almonds for your daily dose though, so try fortified cereals, sunflower seeds, turnip greens and wheat germ, too.

STRAWBERRIES

Even though vitamin C-rich foods (hello oranges!) are probably the first thing you think of when you feel a cold coming, Grotto says the illness-preventing power of the antioxidant is debatable. That said, some studies show it can reduce the intensity and duration of cold and flu, so it's worth a try. One cup of strawberries provides 160 percent of your daily needs.

SWEET POTATO

Beta-carotene improves your body's defenses. It's instrumental in the growth and development of immune system cells and helps neutralize harmful toxins. Sweet potatoes and other orange foods like carrots, squash, pumpkin, egg yolks and cantaloupe are top sources.

http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=8943&Section=Nutrition

Many U.S. children may suffer from suboptimal levels of vitamin D

Xinhua News Agency  0-28-09

LOS ANGELES, Oct 26, 2009 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Millions of U.S. children may suffer from suboptimal levels of vitamin D, which would put them at risk, according to a study released in the November issue of Pediatrics.

Medical professionals are still debating on the optimal amount of vitamin D supplementation and the healthy blood level of vitamin D.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children should have vitamin D levels of at least 50 nmol/L (20 ng/ml). But other studies in adults suggest that vitamin D levels should be at least 75 nmol/L (30 ng/ml), and possibly 100 nmol/L (40 ng/ml), to lower the risk of heart disease and specific cancers.

Jonathan Mansbach at Children's Hospital Boston and his collaborators from the University of Colorado Denver and Massachusetts General Hospital used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to look at vitamin D levels in a nationally representative sample of roughly 5,000 children from 2001-2006.

Their analysis suggests that roughly 20 percent of all children fell below the recommended 50 nmol/L. More than two-thirds of all children had levels below 75 nmol/L, including 80 percent of Hispanic children and 92 percent of non-Hispanic black children.

This is the most up-to-date analysis of vitamin D levels in U.S. children. It shows levels have fallen below what is considered healthy, and black and Hispanic children are at particularly high risk.

"If 75 nmol/L or higher is eventually demonstrated to be the healthy normal level of vitamin D, then there is much more vitamin D deficiency in the U.S. than people realize," said Mansbach.

Mansbach and his collaborators suggest all children take vitamin D supplements to boost vitamin D to normal levels.

Researchers said vitamin D improves bone health and prevents rickets in children, and recent studies suggest it also may prevent a host of common childhood illnesses, including respiratory infections, childhood wheezing, and winter-related eczema.

"We need to perform randomized controlled trials to understand if vitamin D actually improves these wide-ranging health outcomes," Mansbach added.

He said at present there are a lot of studies demonstrating associations between low levels of vitamin D and poor health. Therefore he believes many children in the United States would likely benefit from more vitamin D.

http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=8942&Section=Vitamins

Mum’s veggie-rich diet may protect baby from diabetes

Nutraingredients.com, 28-Oct-2009

Mothers-to-be should eat a vegetable-rich diet in order to protect their babies from type 1 diabetes, according to results of a new Swedish study.

Mothers who ate vegetables only three to fives times per week increased the risk of type 1 diabetes in their children by 70 per cent, compared to women who consumed vegetables daily during pregnancy, according to findings published inPediatric Diabetes.

“This is the first study to show a link between vegetable intake during pregnancy and the risk of the child subsequently developing type-1 diabetes, but more studies of various kinds will be needed before we can say anything definitive,”said lead author Hilde Brekke from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg.

The new study was performed in collaboration with Linköping University, which is conducting a population study called ABIS (All Babies in Southeast Sweden).

Type-1 diabetes occurs when people are not able to produce any insulin after the cells in the pancreas have been damaged, thought to be an autoimmune response.

While it is not currently known what initiates the autoimmune process, many experts believe that both genetic and environmental factors may contribute to the disease process.

Study details

Applying the term ‘vegetables’ to all vegetables except for root vegetables, the researchers looked at daily consumption of mothers. Blood samples of 5,724 five year-olds were analysed to measure levels of the antibodies indicative of the autoimmune response - glutamic acid decarboxylase (GADA), tyrosine phosphatase (IA-2A), insulin autoantibodies (IAA).

Of the almost 6,000 children tested, 3.3 per cent (191 children) had either elevated levels of these antibodies or fully developed type 1 diabetes. According to the findings, these risk markers were up to twice as common in children whose mothers rarely ate vegetables during pregnancy. Furthermore, the risk was lowest among children whose mothers stated that they ate vegetables every day.

 “We cannot say with certainty on the basis of this study that it's the vegetables themselves that have this protective effect, but other factors related to vegetable intake, such as the mother's standard of education, do not seem to explain the link,” said Brekke. “Nor can this protection be explained by other measured dietary factors or other known risk factors.”

Active constituents

“To our knowledge, vegetable intake has not previously been associated with type 1 diabetes or with islet autoimmunity,” wrote the researchers.

Commenting on the potential active ingredients, they note that vitamins C and E have both been shown in previous studies to protect against type-1 diabetes.

“Recently, flavonoids, the powerful antioxidants, have been suggested to be potentially therapeutic agents for type 1 diabetes,”they added.“The most frequently consumed vegetables in Sweden during 1996-1999 when ABIS pregnancy data were collected were tomatoes, cabbage, onions, lettuce and cucumbers.”Source: Pediatric Diabetes Authors: H.K. Brekke, J. Ludvigsson

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Mum-s-veggie-rich-diet-may-protect-baby-from-diabetes

Vitamin D supplements show anti-diabetes potential

Nutraingredients.com , 27-Oct-2009

Supplements of the sunshine vitamin may improve insulin resistance and sensitivity, both of which are risk factors for diabetes, says a new study from New Zealand.

Insulin resistance, whereby insufficient insulin is released to produce a normal glucose response from fat, muscle and liver cells, was significantly lower in women following high-dose vitamin D supplementation, according to results of a randomised, controlled, double-blind trial published in the British Journal of Nutrition.

The optimal effects were observed when blood vitamin D levels were in the range 80 to 119 nanomoles per litre, said the researchers, “providing further evidence for an increase in the recommended adequate levels”.

D for diabetes

This is not the first time that vitamin D has been linked to diabetes. A recent meta-analysis of data from observational studies and clinical trials in adults showed a "relatively consistent association" between low intakes of calcium, vitamin D, or dairy intake and type-2 diabetes (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Vol. 92, pp. 2017-2029).

The new study involved 81 South Asian women with insulin resistance living in New Zealand. The subjects, aged between 23 and 68, were randomly assigned to receive either 100 micrograms (4,000 IU) of vitamin D3 or placebo daily for six months.

At the end of the test period, women in the vitamin D group experienced“significant improvements” in both insulin sensitivity and resistance, said the researchers, which was also accompanied a decrease in fasting insulin levels, compared to placebo.

The greatest improvement in insulin resistance was observed when blood levels of vitamin D, measured as 25- hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) – the non-active 'storage' form of the vitamin – were at least 80 nanomoles per litre.

“Improving vitamin D status in insulin resistant women resulted in improved IR and sensitivity, but no change in insulin secretion,” wrote the women. “Optimal vitamin D concentrations for reducing IR were shown to be 80 to 119 nmol/l, providing further evidence for an increase in the recommended adequate levels,” they concluded.

Shedding light on the sunshine vitamin

Vitamin D refers to two biologically inactive precursors - D3, also known as cholecalciferol, and D2, also known as ergocalciferol. The former, produced in the skin on exposure to UVB radiation (290 to 320 nm), is said to be more bioactive.

Both D3 and D2 precursors are hydroxylated in the liver and kidneys to form 25- hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), the non-active 'storage' form, and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)2D), the biologically active form that is tightly controlled by the body.

Source: British Journal of Nutrition “Vitamin D supplementation reduces insulin resistance in South Asian women living in New Zealand who are insulin resistant and vitamin D deficient–a randomised, placebo-controlled trial”
Authors: P.R. von Hurst, W. Stonehouse, J. Coad

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Vitamin-D-supplements-show-anti-diabetes-potential

Soy isoflavones may slow bone loss for women

Nutraingredients.com, 28-Oct-2009

Supplementation with soy-germ derived isoflavones may reduce the loss of bone in postmenopausal women, according to results of a new study from the US.

However, the isoflavones did not slow bone loss at common fracture sites, according to results published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Over 400 postmenopausal women participated in the multicenter, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled two year, which used either 80 or 120 mg ofsoy hypocotyl aglycone isoflavones (Frutarum’s SoyLife) plus calcium (400 mg) and vitamin D (400 IU).

Only the 120 mg per day produced benefits, with significantly reduced loss of whole body bone mineral density (BMD) after both one and two years.

“The attenuated whole body bone mineral density in healthy postmenopausal women for 2 y probably translates to minimal clinical benefits; yet the long-term significance, particularly with regard to fracture prevention, remains to be determined,” wrote the researchers, led by William Wong from the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

“The benefit of soy isoflavone supplementation at 120 mg/d in reducing the loss of whole body BMD, however, was not reflected in bone mineral content values among the regional sites or among the serum biochemical markers of bone metabolism,” they added.

With the World Health Organisation calling osteoporosis its biggest global healthcare problem, limiting bone loss in post-menopausal women could ease the burden of osteoporosis. According to the International Osteoporosis Foundation, the total direct cost of osteoporotic fractures is €31.7 bn in Europe.

Previous studies have reported conflicting results concerning soy isoflavones (40 to 99 mg/d doses) and bone health for postmenopausal women.

Study details

Wong and his co-workers recruited 403 postmenopausal women aged between 40 and 60 were recruited to participate in the study. Smokers and women already suffering from osteoporosis were not allowed to participate.

The women were randomly assigned to receive daily supplementation of soy hypocotyl aglycone isoflavones (80 or 120 mg) or placebo for two years. All the women were given calcium and vitamin D supplements.

After two years, the researchers recorded statistically significant smaller reduction in whole body BMD in the women receiving the 120 mg soy isoflavones, compared to the placebo group.

However, when compared with the placebo, soy isoflavone supplementation had no effect on changes in regional BMD, bone mineral content, or other biochemical markers of bone metabolism, said the researchers.

“It is possible that lifetime intake of soy is needed to see a significant protective association on bone mass conservation,” wrote the researchers.

The study was funded by the USDA and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Previous data

A meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition(doi: 10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602748) concluded doses of soy isoflavones less than 90 mg per day may improve bone density.

Previous studies from China have linked soy isoflavones to increases in bone mineral density (BMD), while a recent large study in the Archives of Internal Medicine (2005, Vol. 165, pp. 1890-1895) reported that high soy consumption was linked with a 48 per cent decrease in fractures for women who had been menopausal for less than 10 years.

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Soy-isoflavones-may-slow-bone-loss-for-women

Power at work can take a toll on health

Last Updated: 2009-10-27 10:00:02 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study on job authority and health suggests that the top is not only lonely, but can also take a toll on physical and mental well-being.

Using data from 1,800 U.S. workers, researchers found that the negative aspects of having a power position at work seemed to cancel out the positive aspects when it came to people's physical and psychological health.

That is, while job authority generally meant higher pay and more engaging work -- both associated with health benefits -- people in these positions were also more likely to report conflicts with co-workers and to say that work intruded on their home life. And both of those factors, the researchers found, were related to more health complaints and higher levels of anger.

The findings, reported in the journal Social Science & Medicine, help explain a paradox in research on work life and health. For years, studies have shown that people in lower-status jobs generally have higher rates of heart disease and other ills, and die earlier, than those in higher-status positions. In particular, work with high demands but little to no decision-making power has been linked to poorer health. Yet, job authority -- which often goes hand-in-hand with higher status, more pay and greater independence -- has generally shown no association with workers' health.

These latest findings suggest that the pros and cons of authority positions essentially cancel each other out -- giving the general impression that job authority has no health effects.

"One way to view it is, were it not for their greater exposure to interpersonal conflict at work and work-to-home interference, individuals with higher levels of authority would tend to report fewer physical symptoms, symptoms of psychological distress, and less anger," explained lead researcher Dr. Scott Schieman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto in Canada.

"This isn't to suggest that having authority is 'bad' -- in fact, we show it has benefits," he told Reuters Health in an email. "But," Schieman added, "it is important to identify the downsides and deal with them."

For the study, the researchers surveyed participants about various aspects of their work life and well-being. Job authority was gauged based on whether a person managed other employees and had power over hiring, firing and pay.

Physical health complaints included problems like headaches, body aches, heartburn and fatigue; psychological complaints included sleep problems, difficulty concentrating and feelings of sadness, worry and anxiety.

For people in authority positions, conflicts with co-workers or intrusion of work into home life may chip away at physical and mental well-being by creating chronic stress.

"These are key stressors that can tax individuals' capacity to function effectively," Schieman noted.

While research has typically focused on the negative health effects of lower-status work, he said, it is also important to recognize the "stress of higher status."

SOURCE: Social Science & Medicine, online September 30, 2009.

http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/10/27/eline/links/20091027elin003.html

Antipsychotics tied to weight gain in kids, teens

Last Updated: 2009-10-27 16:00:25 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In children and adolescents, treatment with "second-generation" antipsychotic drugs is associated with significant weight gain and increased cholesterol levels, researchers warn in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week.

In the US, children and adolescents with psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, and other mental disorders are often treated with second-generation antipsychotic medications. Examples of these agents include aripiprazole (Abilify), olanzapine (Zyprexa), quetiapine (Seroquel), and risperidone (Risperdal).

Increasingly, the side effects of these antipsychotic medications have "raised concern," Dr. Christoph Correll and associates from North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Glen Oaks, New York, note in their report.

The harmful effects of these drugs -- such as weight gain, obesity, high blood pressure, and cholesterol and blood sugar abnormalities -- are particularly worrisome during adolescence because they predict adult obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Correll's team studied 272 children and adolescents aged 4 to 19 years old with mood disorders, schizophrenia, or disruptive or aggressive behavior who had not previously received antipsychotic medication. Fifteen patients who refused to participate or who did not take their antipsychotic medication as prescribed served as a comparison group.

Patients were treated with the antipsychotic medications aripiprazole, olanzapine, quetiapine, or risperidone for 12 weeks.

After a median of 10.8 weeks of treatment, weight increased by an average of 18.7 pounds in children taking olanzapine, by 13.4 pounds in those on quetiapine, by 11.7 pounds in those taking risperidone, and by 9.7 pounds in aripiprazole users, compared with minimal weight change of 0.4 pounds in the untreated comparison group.

"Each antipsychotic medication was associated with significantly increased fat mass and waist circumference," the investigators report. "Altogether, 10 percent to 36 percent of patients transitioned to overweight or obese status within 11 weeks."

The researchers also noted unhealthy changes in total cholesterol levels and triglycerides in children taking olanzapine and quetiapine and in triglycerides in children taking risperidone. Children taking quetiapine and olanzapine also showed increases in their blood sugar levels. Only aripiprazole was not associated with significant changes in these "metabolic" parameters.

Correll's team warns that "the benefits of second-generation antipsychotic medications must be balanced against their cardiometabolic risks through a careful assessment of the indications for their use, consideration of lower risk alternatives, and proactive adverse effect monitoring and management."

In an editorial published with the study, Drs. Christopher K. Varley and Jon McClellan at Seattle Children's Hospital urge that "the widespread and increasing use of atypical antipsychotic medications in children and adolescents should be reconsidered."

"Much of the support for (these) agents is provided by industry-sponsored investigations," they write. "It is critical that large-scale, independently funded investigations be conducted to establish the long-term safety and benefit of atypical antipsychotic medications in children and adolescents."

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, October 28, 2009.

http://www.reutershealth.com/en/index.html

Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'

An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown.

BBC News, October 28, 2009

The chemical - curcumin - has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.

Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.

Cancer experts said the findings in the British Journal of Cancer could help doctors find new treatments.

Dr Sharon McKenna and her team found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours.

'Natural' remedy

The cells also began to digest themselves, after the curcumin triggered lethal cell death signals.

Dr McKenna said: "Scientists have known for a long time that natural compounds have the potential to treat faulty cells that have become cancerous and we suspected that curcumin might have therapeutic value."

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is interesting research which opens up the possibility that natural chemicals found in turmeric could be developed into new treatments for oesophageal cancer.

"Rates of oesophageal cancer have gone up by more than a half since the 70s and this is thought to be linked to rising rates of obesity, alcohol intake and reflux disease so finding ways to prevent this disease is important too."

Each year around 7,800 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the UK. It is the sixth most common cause of cancer death and accounts for around five percent of all UK cancer deaths.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8328377.stm

Weekly curry 'may fight dementia'

Eating a curry once or twice a week could help prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, a US researcher suggests.

BBC News, June 30, 2009

The key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric. Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques - thought to cause dementia - in the brain. But the theory, presented at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' annual meeting, has been given a lukewarm reception by UK experts.

“ If you have a good diet and take plenty of exercise, eating curry regularly could help prevent dementia ” 
Professor Murali Doraiswamy Duke University

Amyloid plaques, along with tangles of nerve fibres, are thought to contribute to the degradation of the wiring in brain cells, eventually leading to symptoms of dementia. Professor Murali Doraiswamy, of Duke University in North Carolina, said there was evidence that people who eat a curry meal two or three times a week have a lower risk of dementia. He said researchers were testing the impact of higher doses - the equivalent of going on a curry spree for a week - to see if they could maximise the effect.

Animal studies

Professor Doraiswamy told the meeting: "There is very solid evidence that curcumin binds to plaques, and basic research on animals engineered to produce human amyloid plaques has shown benefits."

"You can modify a mouse so that at about 12 months its brain is riddled with plaques. If you feed this rat a curcumin-rich diet it dissolves these plaques. The same diet prevented younger mice from forming new plaques. The next step is to test curcumin on human amyloid plaque formation using newer brain scans and there are plans for that."

Professor Doraiswamy said a clinical trial was now underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, to test curcumin's effects in Alzheimer's patients. He said research had also examined turmeric's therapeutic potential for treating conditions such as cancer and arthritis. He stressed that eating a curry could not counter-balance the increased risk of dementia associated with a poor diet.

However, he said: "If you have a good diet and take plenty of exercise, eating curry regularly could help prevent dementia."

Professor Doraiswamy predicted it might be possible to develop a curry pill which had the same therapeutic effect.

However, Rebecca Wood, of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, stressed that people would need to eat a lot of curry - over 100g of turmeric curry powder - to get a clinical dose of curcumin.

She said: "Professor Doraiswamy's unpublished research applies only to animal models; his hypothesis has not been confirmed in human clinical trials. We look forward to the results of the human curcumin trial at UCLA."

Dr Susanne Sorensen, of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "Indian communities that regularly eat curcumin have a surprisingly low incidence of Alzheimer's disease but we don't yet know why. Alzheimer's Society is keen to explore the potential benefits of curcumin in protecting the brain and we are conducting our own research into this area. A cheap, accessible and safe treatment could transform the quality of life of thousands of people with the condition."

Curry spice 'help for arthritis'

Extract of a spice used in curry could help prevent rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, US research suggests.

BBC, October 30, 2007

Turmeric has been used for centuries in Asian medicine to treat inflammatory disorders and its extract can be found in western dietary supplements. Now lab work by University of Arizona researchers, in Arthritis & Rheumatism, shows just how the spice's curcuminoid extracts have a therapeutic effect.

Experts say new drugs may be found, but eating more spices is unlikely to work. The researchers said clinical trials were needed before turmeric supplements could be recommended for medicinal use.

Earlier work by the University of Arizona team showed turmeric could prevent joint inflammation in rats. In their latest study, they set out to find exactly what ingredient in turmeric was having the anti-inflammatory effect.  They prepared extracts from the rhizome, or root of the turmeric plant, and compared them against the commercially available products that contain turmeric extracts.

“ Results of tests in animal models of arthritis are not always reproduced in human rheumatoid arthritis. ” 
Dr Ann Barton, Manchester University

A version of turmeric extract that was free of essential oils was found to most closely match the composition of the commercial supplements. And it was this extract, containing curcumin, that was most effective at blocking the onset of rheumatoid arthritis in the rats. The extract appears to work by preventing a protein that controls when genes are switched on or off from being activated in the joint. Once the protein known as NF-KB is activated, it binds to genes and increases the production of inflammatory proteins, which attack the joints.

Dr Janet Funk and her colleagues believe their findings also suggest turmeric extract could treat other inflammatory disorders, including asthma, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease.

The extract also blocked a pathway in the body linked to bone loss, suggesting it could treat osteoporosis as well.

Future work

Professor Robert Moots, professor of rheumatology at Liverpool University and spokesman for the Arthritis Research Campaign, said people with arthritis will have to wait to see if the study results in new treatments.

"It will come as no surprise if naturally occurring compounds have a drug-like effect," he said. "I do not think there is any evidence that countries that eat a lot of turmeric have a lower frequency of rheumatoid arthritis. So simply eating more spices is not likely to be effective clinically. What is more likely is these results will lead to the targeted development of new compounds."

Dr Anne Barton, senior lecturer and honorary consultant rheumatologist at the University of Manchester said: "The findings are interesting but should be interpreted with some caution at this stage. "Results of tests in animal models of arthritis are not always reproduced in human rheumatoid arthritis.

"As the authors point out though, there are a number of successful drug therapies that have been developed from plants."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6090460.stm

Secret Documents Reveal AstraZeneca Knowingly Promoted Psych Drugs for Unapproved Use in Children

David Gutierrez, NaturalNews.com October 28, 2009 

(NaturalNews) Internal documents acquired as part of a series of lawsuits show that pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca planned as early as 2001 to market its antipsychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved by the FDA.

Under U.S. law, drug makers are prohibited for marketing their drug for any use not approved by the FDA. Doctors are still permitted to prescribe drugs, however, for any use they wish.

Seroquel (generic name quetiapine) was approved for the treatment of psychotic disorders in adults in 1997. In 2001, the FDA extended this approval to cover schizophrenia. In 2004, it was approved for use of bipolar mania, and in 2006 it was approved for bipolar disorder. 

Yet AstraZeneca is now the defendant in thousands of lawsuits claiming, among other allegations, that the company actively marketed the drug for use in children and adolescents, and also sought to market it as a treatment for dementia in the elderly.

In some of the retrieved documents, AstraZeneca employees and employees of a consulting firm hired by the company reference plans to "broadenSeroquel use on- and off-label," specifically mentioning adolescents and people suffering from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. Areas where the company could promote this use are listed, including sales calls and meetings with medical professionals or patient advocacy groups.

In a 2001 public relations plan, the company says that it seeks to "encourage and support [Seroquel] use outside schizophrenia into a broad range of other patient populations including bipolar disorder and the elderly." The document calls for "aggressive market penetration" of the drug in the demographics of adolescents, the elderly and bipolar patients.

This came five years before the drug's approval as a treatment for bipolar disorder. To date, the drug has never been approved for use in children, adolescents or patients with dementia or Parkinson's disease. 

AstraZeneca has applied for FDA approval to use Seroquel as a treatment for adolescent schizophrenia and acute bipolar mania in children and adolescents. No antipsychotic drugs have yet been approved for use in children, as there is nearly no evidence on their safety or effectiveness in that population.

The Seroquel lawsuits are only one of a number of recent scandals in which pharmaceutical giants have been accused of illegally promoting off-labeldrug use. Eli Lilly recently agreed to pay a $1.42 billion settlement to end charges that it promoted its antipsychotic Zyprexa (olanzapine) off-label.

AstraZeneca is also facing almost 10,000 lawsuits filed by more than 15,000 people who claim that they suffered from serious side effects of Seroquel, including diabetes, weight gain and a dangerous disorder known as tardive dyskinesia, which the company knew about but actively concealed. 

Tardive dyskinesia is an incurable neurological disorder that causes involuntary grimacing and muscle spasms. Although atypical antipsychotics such as Seroquel are supposed to pose a lower risk of the condition than older drugs, some researchers suspect that the drugs simply have not been in use long enough for many cases of the condition to develop, as it normally takes prolonged drug use for tardive dyskinesia to emerge.

The first of the side-effect lawsuits was scheduled to go to trial on June 29, but the case was dismissed by the judge, who ruled that expert witness and endocrinologist Valerie Peck failed to disprove other risk factors that could have contributed to defendant Nina Scaife's contraction ofdiabetes after taking Seroquel as an off-label insomnia treatment. Even though it has been conclusively proven that Seroquel can cause severe weight gain and diabetes, the court system requires each plaintiff to prove that the drug caused their individual health problem.

Internal documents acquired as part of these lawsuits reveal that AstraZeneca knew of the increased risk of weight gain and diabetes associated with Seroquel as early as 1997, but continued to deny the connection to doctors.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027344_Astrazeneca_Seroquel_drugs.html

All About Chelation

Dr. Julian Whitaker, NaturalNews.com October 28, 2009 

(NaturalNews) Abundant, durable, malleable, resistant to corrosion: No wonder lead has been such a popular metal throughout human history. Ancient Romans found a multitude of uses for it, from lining water pipes and drinking vessels to sweetening wine. What they didn't realize were the detrimental health effects of this metal. It is now believed that lead poisoning was responsible for the bizarre behavior, mental incompetence, gout, stillbirths, and sterility that afflicted the Roman aristocracy- and quite possibly contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

Fast forward to 1921, when General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley, Jr., came up with another use for lead. As a gasoline additive, it reduced engine knock and improved performance. Of course, it was known to be toxic. Thomas Midgley himself was plagued with a "mysterious illness" while experimenting with it and, in 1924, 15 refinery workers died and 300 more became severely psychotic as a result of working with leaded gasoline.

But that didn't matter. Thanks to corporate greed and government complicity, lead's well-documented adverse effects were ignored, and for more than 60 years this potent toxin spewed into our environment. Leaded gas was finally phased out in 1986, and air levels of lead dropped dramatically. But even today, 20 years later, 7 million tons of lead remains in our soil, water, air- and bodies.

Bones Bear the Burden of Lead

More than 90 percent of your body's total burden of lead exists in your skeleton. And for those of us who grew up in the days when lead was also in paint, pipes, water tanks, cans, and a plethora of other consumer products, that's a lot of lead. In fact, we harbor a whopping 650 times more of this heavy metal in our bones than people did 100 years ago.

Lead is a neurotoxin that causes mental retardation and developmental delays in children and a multitude of cognitive problems in people of all ages. It also damages the endothelial cells lining the arteries and curbs production of nitric oxide, impairing circulation, raising blood pressure, and increasing risk of cardiovascular disease, kidney dysfunction, cancer, and premature death.

If lead would stay put in the bones, it might not be such a problem- but it doesn't. Along with other minerals, lead is released into the bloodstream and transported to tissues throughout the body. Generally, this release is slow, gradual, and unnoticed. But there are times when it picks up speed. During pregnancy, when extra calcium is needed for fetal bone development, blood lead levels rise, increasing risk of hypertension for women with high levels, and often causing low birth weight and physical and mental developmental delays for their children.
Lead is also mobilized during mid-life and old age. Women are especially vulnerable after menopause, when bone loss increases. It is estimated that blood lead levels go up 30 percent during the five years after menopause! Men also lose bone mass as they age, and the resultant increase in blood lead levels negatively affects them as well.

Chelate the Lead Out

As you can see, we all need to take steps to get the lead out, and the fastest way to do this is to undergo a course of intravenous (IV) EDTAchelation. EDTA is a synthetic amino acid that forms a tight chemical bond with lead and other minerals and carries them out of the body in the urine.

EDTA chelation has been the number one FDA-approved therapy for lead poisoning since 1948. After World War II, sailors suffering with lead toxicity acquired while painting battleships and docks with lead-based paint were treated with EDTA chelation, and their results were remarkable. Not only did these men have the expected restoration of memory, energy, vision, and hearing, but those who also had heart disease experienced unexpected improvements in angina and circulation.

That's how the broad benefits of chelation were serendipitously discovered. Astute physicians took heed and began using chelation for patients with cardiovascular disease and circulatory problems and, for a decade or so, its popularity mushroomed. Then the politics and economics of modern medicine intervened.

To make a long story short, this relatively inexpensive, office-based therapy had no chance against the Goliaths of cardiology (surgery and drugs). Chelation became embroiled in controversy, where it remains to this day. But a few thousand physicians refused to give up on it. I've been using EDTA chelation in my clinic for about 20 years, and I've seen it eliminate angina, improve exercise tolerance, lower blood pressure, increase circulation, and save limbs on the verge of amputation. The following story, from subscriber William Tessier from Cotuit, MA, is a perfect example.

"Fourteen years ago, my doctor told me I needed angioplasty, and if I didn't have it, I wouldn't live more than two years. Something told me that I should not do it, so I lived with angina and blocked arteries, along with asthma, for the next 12 years. I was overweight, could not walk any distance without getting out of breath, and regularly experienced uncomfortable chest pain. I was taking 11 different drugs for all of my healthproblems."

"Through those years I had to care for a very sick wife who passed away over five years ago. I met a friend three years ago whom I had not seen for quite some time. She told me about vitamins, nutrition, and chelation therapy, which she learned about from your newsletter."

"After undergoing chelation treatment, exercising, and eating a low-fat diet, I am a new person. People cannot get over the change in me; some don't recognize me at all. I lost 80 pounds, my asthma is now a thing of the past, and my arteries are fine. I can walk greater distances and spend nearly an hour a day on a treadmill and other exercise machines. I am also rid of all those killer drugs."

"By the way, before I started chelation, I brought the information to my doctor, who had put me on all those drugs. He said, "You will be wasting your money." He is now retired from his practice because of heart-related problems. Chelation saved my life. I am 78 years old and the friend that I met up with is now my lovely wife. I thank God that she receives Dr. Julian Whitaker's Health & Healing newsletter."

What About Oral Chelation?

I am often asked if oral chelation is the same as IV chelation. Yes and no. All chelating agents bind to minerals and move them out of the body. However, no one can convince me that oral chelators have the same effect as IV chelation.
This doesn't mean I don't recommend oral chelation. Although giant strides have been made in eliminating lead, it lingers in our environment. Even if you scrupulously avoid all known sources of exposure, you still have to contend with the lead that's stored in, and being released from, your bones. And lead is only one of many environmental toxins out there. Therefore, I support any and all efforts to chip away at the body's toxic burden.

What is the best oral chelator? Vitamin C is surprisingly good. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco looked at blood levels of lead and ascorbic acid and found that children and adults with the highest levels of ascorbic acid were 89 and 65 percent, respectively, less likely to have elevated blood lead levels.

Other chelators are as close as your kitchen. Phytic acid (also called inositol hexaphosphate or IP6), which is found in the hulls of fiber-rich nuts, seeds, and grains, removes toxins from the intestinal tract. Garlic and cilantro are also natural chelators. In addition to eating more of these healthful foods, look for them in concentrated supplement form.

I've also been researching PectaSol Chelation Complex. It contains modified citrus pectin, a type of fiber derived from citrus pulp, along with natural chelators in seaweed called alginates, and has been shown to effectively remove a wide range of heavy metals. Other helpful supplements include N-acetyl-cysteine, zeolite, and, of course, EDTA.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027338_chelation_health_blood.html

Exposure to Earlier Flu Viruses Provides Many with Natural Immunity to H1N1, Scientists Find

Sherry Baker, NaturalNews.com October 27, 2009 

(NaturalNews) Despite all the panic and hype about the H1N1 pandemic and the rush to immunize people in droves against the virus, the fact is -- so far -- the outbreak has been fairly mild. Now University of California (UC) Davis, researchers studying H1N1, formerly referred to as "swine flu," have identified a group of immunologically important sites called epitopes in the virus that are also present in seasonal flu viruses, which have been circulating for untold years. So what does this mean? If you were exposed to the earlier influenza viruses, you probably already have some level of immunity to H1N1.

The new study would explain why so many people over the age of 60 -- whose bodies were likely exposed to similar flu viruses over the decades -- have been found to carry antibodies or other kinds of immunity against H1N1. In fact, the CDC now admits pre-existing antibodies against the virus are found in about one third of H1N1 2009 patients over the age of 60, a fact that shows some natural immunity to the new H1N1 virus exists in many people.

"These findings indicate that human populations may have some level of existing immunity to the pandemic H1N1 influenza and may explain why the 2009 H1N1-related symptoms have been generally mild," researcher Carol Cardona, a veterinarian and Cooperative Extension specialist at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, said in a media statement.

Cardona and UC scientist Zheng Xing recently posted their findings online in the journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases. The study is also slated for publication in the November print edition of the journal, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Our hypothesis, based on the application of data collected by other researchers, suggests that cell-mediated immunity, as opposed to antibody-mediated immunity, may play a key role in lowering the disease-causing ability, or pathogenicity, of the 2009 H1N1 influenza," Xing said in the media release.

Curiously, the new research suggests that although previous similar flu viruses seem to have produced antibodies in exposed people, these antibodies are not what are providing protection for those infected with the H1N1 2009 strain of influenza. Instead, Cardona and Xing theorize that instead of stimulating protective antibodies, the epitopes of the new H1N1 virus produce an immune response in a different way. The virus triggers production of cytotoxic T-cells that kill infected cells, attack the invading virus, and rev up the immune system.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027337_H1N1_viruses_natural_immunity.html

Oregano oil eliminates parasites in humans

Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews.com October 27, 2009 

(NaturalNews) It's not widely known, but oregano extracts are extremely effective at eliminating parasites in humans. And a lot of people have parasites they simply don't know about.

So here, we've collected a number of supporting statements about the anti-parasitic properties of oregano. You'll learn a wealth of information by reading what follows. But before we present the list, let me recommend three sources for oregano oil that you might want to check out after reading this:

Global Healing Center: www.GHChealth.com

North American Herb & Spice: www.P-73.com

Vitacost: www.vitacost.com

Just search for "oregano" on any of these three websites and you'll find what you're looking for. I strongly recommend all three of these companies, and I personally know their owners. (I have no financial relationship whatsoever with any of these companies and don't earn anything from the sales of oregano products.)

Oregano vs. parasites

Also called wild marjoram and Mexican wild sage, oregano has a peppery flavor with a hint of sage and thyme. Chinese doctors have used oregano for centuries to treat fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin problems. It helps to loosen and remove mucus. It is a digestive aid and is thought to help get rid of intestinal parasites. Oregano is known to have powerful antioxidant and anticancer activity. In a study at Georgetown University, essential oil of oregano inhibited the growth of Staphylococcus (staph) bacteria in the test tube as effectively as antibiotics did.
- Prescription for Dietary Wellness: Using Foods to Heal by Phyllis A. Balch, CNC

Some herbs and their extracts, too, may be helpful, such as oil of oregano, garlic, citrus seed extract, berberine, plant tannins, undecylenate, and caprylic acid. Intestinal parasites are not uncommon and also should be identified and treated. A stool sample sent to an experienced lab can identify most intestinal parasites. Treatment often requires medications such as Flagyl, Humatin, or Yodoxin, although some herbals, such as artemisia, oil of oregano, and berberine, may also be helpful.
- Ultraprevention : The 6-Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy for Life by Mark Hyman, M.D.

The essential oil of Oregano has been demonstrated to be a potent antioxidant. The non-polar fraction of the residue obtained after the essential oil is removed from Oregano also exhibited antioxidant activity. Tocopherols, especially gamma tocopherol, have been identified as the major antioxidative components of the non-polar fraction, accounting for as much as 1% of the constituents of the non-polar fraction. Oil of Oregano inhibited enteric parasites in adults.
- PDR for Herbal Medicines, Fourth Edition by Thomson Healthcare, Inc.

In one study, 77 percent of patients treated for enteric parasites were parasite free after taking oil of oregano in tablet form for six weeks. At this writing, it has inhibited the growth of at least ten different microbes, including Candida albicans (yeast). To top it off, oregano - like its relative rosemary - contains the powerful compound rosmarinic acid, which has been found to have anti-mutagenic and anti-carcinogenic properties.
- The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Eat and Why by Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.

Medicinal oregano grows wild in mountainous areas of Greece and Turkey and is rich in minerals such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, potassium, copper, boron, and manganese, which adds to its therapeutic value. Oregano oil has become popular in recent years as an alternative to prescription antibiotics. Grapefruit seed extract is derived from the bioflavonoids found in the seed and pulp. Its anti-germicide action has shown a growth-inhibiting effect on bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses in several in vitro studies.
- Disease Prevention and Treatment by The Life Extension Editorial Staff

In another test tube study, volatile oils of oregano, thyme, cinnamon, and cumin were individually able to stop the growth of another food-borne pathogen called Aspergillus parasiticus. Higher concentrations of these volatile oils were also able to stop the production of aflatoxin, a potent poison from the food mold Aspergillus. Together these facts suggest the volatile oils in oregano used during food processing have an important role in preventing the spoilage of food and in reducing the risk of ingesting harmful bacteria, fungi, and parasites.
- The Natural Pharmacy: Complete A-Z Reference to Natural Treatments for Common Health Conditions by Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.

Nearly all our common kitchen herbs and spices have a beneficial effect, including basil, oregano, marjoram, parsley, thyme, celery seed, peppermint, spearmint, bayberries, caraway seed, cardamom seed, catnip, cloves, coriander, lemon balm and sarsaparilla. You can find many digestive herbal tea blends in health food stores. Some symptoms of parasites appear to be like any other digestive problem. Chronic diarrhea is often a sign of a parasitic infection.
- Digestive Wellness: How to Strengthen the Immune System and Prevent Disease Through Healthy Digestion by Elizabeth Lipski

Antifungal and antibacterial herbs include garlic, German chamomile, aloe vera, ginger, cinnamon, rosemary, licorice, oil of oregano, and tea tree oil. Hydrogen peroxide therapy works as a defense system, directly destroying invading bacteria, viruses, yeast, and parasites. Ayurvedic medicine and acupuncture may also be helpful for ridding the body of Candida. 
- Alternative Medicine the Definitive Guide, Second Edition by Larry Trivieri, Jr.

Of the spices tested, garlic, onion, allspice and oregano effectively killed all the bacteria they were stacked up against, including salmonella and staphylococcus, while other spices killed between 50% and 75% of the harmful bacteria. The plants themselves use these chemicals to protect against parasites, which explains how they protect us. 
- Alternative Medicine the Definitive Guide, Second Edition by Larry Trivieri, Jr.

Oil of Oregano from Nature's Answer is full of vitamins and minerals and contains thymol and carvacrol, compounds that discourage the growth of microorganisms, viruses, and parasites. Picrorrhiza, an Indian herb used in Ayurvedic medicine, is a powerful immunostimulant that boosts all aspects of immune function. St. John's wort is a natural blood purifier and fights viruses such as HIV and Epstein-Barr virus. Take an inventory of the factors that may be compromising your immune system and take steps to correct them.
- Prescription for Nutritional Healing, 4th Edition: A Practical A-to-Z Reference to Drug-Free Remedies Using Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs & Food Supplements by Phyllis A. Balch, CNC

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO MINIMIZE PARASITES: Get in the habit of using garlic, oregano, and coconut, which are naturally anti-parasitic and anti-microbial. Eat onions, figs, and pumpkin seeds to create an uninhabitable environment for worms. Eat a diet rich in protein and vitamins. As absorption in the intestines is impaired by infestations, the body requires large amounts of nutrients found in fresh organic vegetables, almonds, and blackberries. Take a daily high quality probiotics supplement (friendly bacteria, such as those found in fermented foods).
- Super Health 7 Golden Keys to Unlock Lifelong Vitality by KC Craichy

http://www.naturalnews.com/027333_parasites_oregano_health.html

FDA Oversight of Unproven Drugs is Lacking: Government Report

AboutLawsuits.com: October 27th, 2009

A new congressional report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicates that the FDA has failed to follow up on unproven drugs that are put on the market through an accelerated approval process, and has no mechanism in place to remove those drugs when they prove to be unsuccessful or dangerous.

The report, which was released this week, looks at a group of 90 drugs approved since 1992 through FDA’s accelerated approval process. The GAO found that although pharmaceutical companies often fail to provide FDA-required post-marketing data which shows that the drugs are working, the FDA has never removed any of the drugs from the market.

The accelerated approval process allows critical drugs designed to treat life-threatening or serious illnesses to go through an expedited approval process without years of testing and studies required by normal drugs. To obtain approval, drug makers must show that the drug is likely to work through surrogate endpoints, such as showing that a cancer drug shrinks tumors or an AIDS drug lowers the viral count.

In return for FDA’s expedited approval, the drug makers must provide post-marketing data that demonstrates the drugs are working as predicted. However, the GAO report found that 36% of drugs approved by the FDA under the process do not have the post-marketing data as required. In some cases, the drugs have been available for over a decade and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the drug makers without such follow-up studies being completed.

The GAO report recommends that FDA clarify under what conditions it would withdraw one of these drugs off the market, most of which are used to treat cancer or HIV/AIDS. However, the report states that the FDA disagreed with GAO, saying that it did not need to clearly indicate when it would enforce its own rules to remove potentially dangerous or ineffective drugs approved under the accelerated approval process.

FDA officials have said that in many cases, the drugs approved under this process are life-saving drugs for which there are no replacements, and if the drugs are taken off the market, the patients will have no alternatives. However, the GAO report indicates that in some cases the drugs could be harmful to patients, and without the required post-marketing data the FDA may never know.

The GAO noted that the drug makers are under no pressure by the federal drug regulatory agency to provide the data or prove their drugs benefits actually pan out, since the FDA has not acted against a single drug approved under the accelerated approval process since its inception. The GAO found that not only has the FDA never enforced its accelerated approval process rules, but it has no rules or established procedures on how to do so.

The GAO report noted that enforcement of accelerated approval post-marketing requirements does not appear to be a priority for the FDA. “Although FDA has authority to expedite the withdrawal of a drug from the market if a sponsor does not complete a required confirmatory study with due diligence, or if a study fails to confirm a drug’s clinical benefit, it has not specified the conditions that would prompt it to do so,” the report states. “It has never exercised its authority, even when such study requirements have gone unfulfilled for nearly 13 years.”

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/fda-oversight-of-unproven-drugs-lacking-6627/

FDA Slow to Debar Doctors Who Commit Crimes, Report Says

Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2009

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration is slow to debar health professionals who have been convicted of crimes from doing research for the agency or overseeing the safety of patients in clinical trials, according to a government watchdog report released Thursday.

In one instance, it took the FDA 11 years to debar a doctor who had been convicted of 53 counts of criminal offense for, among other things, bribing an employee to conceal information about the attempted suicide of a clinical-trial patient and prescribing a drug without a license.

The FDA has the authority to bar doctors from overseeing the safety of patients in clinical trials if those health professional flout federal regulations. The FDA is required to disqualify doctors who are convicted of fraud or other crimes. However, it takes the agency an average of four years to strip doctors of their powers, according to a report by the independent Government Accountability Office. Types of misconduct that can get doctors debarred include submitting false information to the FDA, forging patient consent forms and not reporting when a patient has an adverse reaction to an experimental drug.

The FDA said, in a response to the GAO, that it has tightened its debarment proceedings over the last several years and has established rigid deadlines to ensure health professionals who break the law get quickly stripped of their powers. The agency has also added extra staff to deal with these issues.

The report also shows that even when the FDA bars a doctor from participating in a clinical trial for a drug, that person can still oversee patients in experimental trials that involve medical devices. The process also works the other way: A doctor barred from overseeing trials involving medical devices can still participate in drug trials.

Further, the FDA doesn't have the authority to debar doctors, regardless of their misconduct, from participating in any form of the medical-device industry. The report says a health professional who was convicted of falsely advertising a laser device for treating eye disorders can't be debarred.

It's this loop hole and the FDA's slow response that Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, hopes to close with a proposed bill that would require the FDA to debar doctors within one year of their being convicted of a crime or found committing fraud.

"I think it is especially inexcusable that the agency can't seem to quickly and consistently debar even convicted felons," Mr. Barton said in a press release.

Mr. Barton highlighted what he calls a "notorious" case. It took the FDA about five years to debar Anne Kirkman-Campbell, an Alabama physician who pled guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to more than four years in jail related to a clinical trial for Sanofi-Aventis SA's antibiotic, Ketek.

The GAO says it recommends that the FDA be given debarment authority for medical devices, and that regulations be rewritten so any doctor debarred from one area of agency regulation is barred from participating in all others. The report notes that three doctors who either didn't follow FDA regulations or committed crimes still haven't been debarred. One of the cases stretches back to 2005.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125622345164801405.html

Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet

The Times, October 27, 2009

Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.

He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.

He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.

Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees centigrade. Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes.

UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.

Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry.

Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: “Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It’s not a view shared by the NFU. Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us.”

On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day — the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern’s remarks. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment,” she said. “Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet.”

The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6891362.ece

USA Today, October 23, 2009

New research suggests a link between women's exposure to household insecticides — including roach and mosquito killers — and the autoimmune disorders rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

The scientist did not find a direct cause-and-effect relationship between insecticide exposure and the illnesses, and it's possible that the women have something else in common that accounts for their higher risk. But epidemiologist Christine Parks, lead investigator of the study, said the findings do raise a red flag.

"It's hard to envision what other factors might explain this association," said Parks, an epidemiologist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who was to present the study over the weekend at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Previous research has linked agricultural pesticides to higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, two diseases in which the immune system goes haywire and begins to attack the body. Farmers, among others, appear to be vulnerable.

Parks and her colleagues wanted to find out whether smaller doses of insecticides, such as those people might encounter at home from either personal or commercial residential use, might have a similar effect.

The researchers examined data from a previous study of almost 77,000 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79. Their findings were to be released Monday at the American College of Rheumatology's annual scientific meeting in Philadelphia.

Women who reported applying insecticides or mixing them — about half — had a higher risk of developing the two autoimmune disorders than women who reported no insecticide use. This was the case whether or not they had lived on a farm. Those who used or mixed the insecticides the most — judged by frequency or duration — had double the risk.

Even so, the risk of developing the diseases remained very low. Overall, Parks said, about 2% of older adults develop the conditions.

Parks said the insecticides that the women used included insect killers, such as those designed to eradicate ants, wasps, termites, mosquitoes and roaches. They didn't include insect repellents.

There are some caveats to the research. For one, it's not clear exactly what products the women used or when. "Over time, there have been major changes in what products were available for home use," Parks said.

And while researchers tried to take into account the influence of factors like age that may boost a woman's risk of getting autoimmune diseases, it's possible they missed something that boosted the risk of illness.

Could gardening, which often entails insecticide use, be a contributing factor? That's possible. But Parks said a lot of insecticide use takes place inside the home, not outside in the garden.

For now, she said, the findings indicate the need for "more research on environmental risk factors and better understanding of what factors might explain these findings, what chemicals might be associated with these risks."

She declined to speculate on how insecticides might cause problems in the body.

"I would recommend that people read the labels and take precautions to minimize their personal exposure" to insecticides, she said. "This is the case regardless of whether these results are implicating a chemical that's on the market now or was before."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-22-insecticides-autoimmune_N.htm

Does Diabetes Speed Up Memory Loss In Alzheimer's Disease?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2009) — Research has shown that diabetes increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease and the risk of memory loss in people who don't have Alzheimer's disease. But it hasn't been clear whether people with Alzheimer's disease and diabetes have more rapid memory loss than those who have Alzheimer's disease but no diabetes.

New research published in the October 27, 2009, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, suggests that those with both diseases actually have a slower rate of memory loss than people who had only Alzheimer's disease.

"This result was surprising," said study author Caroline Sanz, MD, of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Toulouse. "Our initial hypothesis was that diabetes would increase the rate of cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer's disease."

For the study, researchers followed 608 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease for four years and tested their memory and thinking skills twice a year. A total of 63 people, or 10.4 percent, had diabetes.

At the beginning of the study, both those with and without diabetes had average scores of 20 points on the cognitive test. Over each six-month testing period, the overall group declined by an average of 1.24 points on the test. However, those without diabetes declined by 0.38 points more per six-month period than those with diabetes.

Researchers say it is not clear yet why the rate of memory loss was slower for people with diabetes. "One possible explanation is that diabetes in the elderly differs from that in younger people and in addition, elderly people with diabetes may be more likely to receive cardiovascular medications such as drugs for high blood pressure than people who don't have diabetes," Sanz said. "These drugs have been reported to decrease the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and also the rate of cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer's disease. Other possible explanations for these findings may relate to differences in brain lesions in those people with diabetes compared to those without diabetes."

The study was supported by the French Ministry of Health and the Toulouse University Hospital.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027161521.htm

Weekly And Biweekly Vitamin D2 Prevents Vitamin D Deficiency

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2009) — Boston University School of Medicine researchers (BUSM) have found that 50,000 International Units (IU) of vitamin D2, given weekly for eight weeks, effectively treats vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D2 is a mainstay for the prevention and treatment of vitamin D deficiency in children and adults. Continued treatment with the same dose of vitamin D2 every other week for up to six years after the initial eight-week period prevents vitamin D deficiency from recurring with no toxicity.

The BUSM study appears online in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

Vitamin D is essential for strong bones because it helps the body absorb calcium and phosphorus from the food we eat. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to rickets in children and the painful bone disease osteomalacia in adults. Vitamin D deficiency can also cause osteoporosis and has been linked to increased risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and infectious diseases including influenza, according to senior author Michael F. Holick, PhD, MD, director of the Bone Healthcare Clinic and the Vitamin D, Skin and Bone Research Laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine.

Of the 86 patients researchers studied, 41 patients who were vitamin D deficient received eight weeks of 50,000 IU of vitamin D2 weekly prior to starting maintenance therapy. For those patients, the mean pre-treatment 25-hydroxyvitamin D status (25(OH)D) level was 19 ng/ml, which increased to 37 ng/ml after eight weeks of weekly therapy. These patients were then treated with 50,000 IU of vitamin D2 every other week and had a mean final 25(OH)D level of 47 ng/ml.

For the 45 patients who received only maintenance therapy of 50,000 IU of vitamin D2 every two weeks, the mean pre-treatment 25(OH)D level was 27 ng/ml and the mean final level was 47 ng/ml.

"Vitamin D2 is effective in raising 25(OH)D levels when given in physiologic and pharmacologic doses and is a simple method to treat and prevent vitamin D deficiency," said Holick, who is also director of the General Clinical Research Unit and professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at BUSM. "While treating and preventing vitamin D deficiency, these large doses of vitamin D2 do not lead to vitamin D toxicity."

According to Holick, this is the first study demonstrating the efficacy of a prescription therapy to prevent vitamin D deficiency longterm in routine clinical practice.

Quest Diagnostics, the nation's leading provider of diagnostics testing, information and services, analyzed the specimens used in the study.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091026161850.htm

Location Of Body Fat Affects Risk Of Blood Clots In Men, Women

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2009) — The risk of life-threatening blood clots increases with obesity, but may also depend on the location of excess body fat and gender. Women are at higher risk when they carry extra pounds on their hips, while men are at elevated risk when fat is around the waist. The results challenge research that has suggested increased hip circumference is protective against blood clots.

The location of extra pounds appears to affect the risk of blood clots in middle-aged people, but affects men and women differently, researchers report inCirculation: Journal of the American Heart Association.In a 10-year prospective study, Danish scientists assessed the relationship between body mass, weight distribution and incidence of blood clots in veins, a condition known as venous thromboembolism (VTE), among 27,178 men and 29,876 women ages 50 to 64 years old at study entry. VTE includes deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. During the 10 year study, 641 VTE events occurred according to medical records.

Thromboembolism, an important cause of disease and death in adults, results when a clot breaks free from one blood vessel and blocks another -- typically from the legs to the lungs.

The Danish team found statistically significant positive associations between VTE and all measurements of body size, including body weight, body mass index (BMI), total body fat mass, waist circumference and hip circumference, among both men and women. The associations were the same regardless of the type of VTE. The researchers observed a direct relationship between VTE and weight distribution in both genders. When adjusted for waist and hip circumference, hip circumference was positively associated with VTE in women but not men, while waist circumference was positively associated with VTE in men but not women.

This relationship was independent of other risk factors, such as smoking, physical activity, height, hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol, and, among women, the use of hormone replacement therapy.

"The BMI is a marker of excess weight and correlates well with body fat content in adults; however, it fails to consider the distribution of body fat," said Marianne Tang Severinsen, M.D., lead author of the study and researcher in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University Hospital in Aalborg, Denmark.

"The implications to the public are that all types of obesity increase the risk for VTE, but the location of body fat also plays some unknown role. For health professionals, the implication is that all types of fat distribution should be taken into account when evaluating risk for VTE."

The results, which should help physicians improve risk evaluation, challenge previous research suggesting that large hip circumference might be protective against arterial thrombosis. "Our study clearly shows that this is not the case for venous thrombosis," Severinsen said.

The new findings didn't include differences between types of fat tissue. But the results indicate that there is some distinction between the type of fat distribution in VTE as compared to coronary heart disease. Peripheral obesity measured by hip circumference has not been previously reported in association with coronary heart disease, she said. "Until now, the importance of fat distribution and VTE risk has not been evaluated," Severinsen said. "Our hypothesis was that fat tissue was a risk factor for VTE, independent of the distribution of the fat, and we established this."

Limitations of the study include possible weight change of participants during follow-up, particularly obese participants who gained more weight than leaner participants, which could have led researchers to underestimate the effect of obesity.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091026162535.htm

Junk Food Diet Causes Rats’ Brain Pleasure Centers To Become Progressively Less Responsive

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — Brain pleasure centers became progressively less responsive in rats fed a diet of high-fat, high-calorie food, a new study has found. As the changes occurred, the rats developed compulsive overeating habits -- and became obese. The overeating continued even when it meant the rats had to endure an unpleasant consequence (a mild foot shock) in order to consume the food.

The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

The researchers also found that as the activity of the brain's pleasure centers decreased, the rats became less likely to eat a well-balanced, nutritious diet -- even when the less palatable healthy food was the only food available to them.

"Not only did we find that the animals' brain reward circuits became less responsive as they continued to overeat and become obese," said senior author Paul J. Kenny, PhD, of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., "but that decrease in responsiveness was similar to what our laboratory has seen previously in rats as they become addicted to cocaine or heroin. The data suggest that obesity and addiction may result from common neuroadaptations," he said.

The finding may have implications for humans, as the diets fed the rats (unlimited access to such high-caloric foods as bacon, sausage, cheesecake, and chocolate) were similar to those of millions of people who live in developed countries. Such diets are considered a major contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic in the United States.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091026231950.htm

Why Antidepressants Don't Work For So Many

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — More than half the people who take antidepressants for depression never get relief.

Why? Because the cause of depression has been oversimplified and drugs designed to treat it aim at the wrong target, according to new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The medications are like arrows shot at the outer rings of a bull's eye instead of the center.

A study from the laboratory of long-time depression researcher Eva Redei, presented at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week, appears to topple two strongly held beliefs about depression. One is that stressful life events are a major cause of depression. The other is that an imbalance in neurotransmitters in the brain triggers depressive symptoms.

Both findings are significant because these beliefs were the basis for developing drugs currently used to treat depression.

Redei, the David Lawrence Stein Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern's Feinberg School, found powerful molecular evidence that quashes the long-held dogma that stress is generally a major cause of depression. Her new research reveals that there is almost no overlap between stress-related genes and depression-related genes.

"This is a huge study and statistically powerful," Redei said. "This research opens up new routes to develop new antidepressants that may be more effective. There hasn't been an antidepressant based on a novel concept in 20 years."

Her findings are based on extensive studies with a model of severely depressed rats that mirror many behavioral and physiological abnormalities found in patients with major depression. The rats, after decades of development, are believed to be the most depressed in the world.

Little Overlap Between Stress and Depression Genes

Redei used microarray technology to isolate and identify the specific genes related to depression in these animals. She examined the genes in the brain regions -- the hippocampus and amygdala -- commonly associated with depression in rats and humans.

Then she took four genetically different strains of rats and exposed them to chronic stress for two weeks. Afterwards, she identified the genes that had consistently increased or decreased in response to the stress in all four strains in the same brain regions.

Redei now had one set of depression-related genes that came out of an animal model of depression and one set of stress-related genes that came our of her chronic stress study.

Next she compared the two sets of genes to see if there were any similarities. "If the 'stress causes depression theory' was correct, there should have been a significant overlap between these two sets of genes," she said. "There weren't."

Out of a total of over 30,000 genes on the microarray, she discovered approximately 254 genes related to stress and 1275 genes related to depression, with an overlap of only five genes between the two.

"This overlap is insignificant, a very small percentage," Redei said. "This finding is clear evidence that at least in an animal model, chronic stress does not cause the same molecular changes as depression does."

Antidepressants Treat Stress Not Depression

Most animal models that are used by scientists to test antidepressants are based on the hypothesis that stress causes depression. "They stress the animals and look at their behavior," she said. "Then they manipulate the animals' behavior with drugs and say, 'OK, these are going to be good anti-depressants.' But they are not treating depression; they are treating stress."

That is one key reason why current antidepressants aren't doing a great job, Redei noted. She is now looking at the genes that differ in the depressed rat to narrow down targets for drug development.

She said another reason current antidepressants are often ineffective is that they aim to boost neurotransmitters based on the popular molecular explanation of depression, which is that it's the result of decreased levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. But that's wrong, Redei said.

Drugs Aim at Wrong Molecular Target

In the second part of the study, Redei found strong indications that depression actually begins further up in the chain of events in the brain. The biochemical events that ultimately result in depression actually start in the development and functioning of neurons.

"The medications have been focusing on the effect, not the cause," she said. "That's why it takes so long for them to work and why they aren't effective for so many people."

Her animal model of depression did not show dramatic differences in the levels of genes controlling neurotransmitters functions. "If depression was related to neurotransmitter activity, we would have seen that," she said.

Similarities Between Human and Rodent Brains

Her findings in depressed rats, she said, are very likely applicable to humans.

"The similarities between these regions of the human and rodent brain are remarkable," Redei explained. "The hippocampus and amygdala are part of the so-called ancient lizard brain that controls survival and are the same in even primitive organisms."

Contributors to the study from Redei's lab include Brian Andrus, Kristen Dennis and Daniel Schaffer, research assistants, and Pradeep Shukla, a postdoctoral fellow. Jelena Radulovic, M.D., Dunbar Scholar and associate professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School, also contributed as did Peter Vedell, a postdoctoral associate in professor Gary Churchill's group at The Jackson Lab, Bar Harbor.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091023163346.htm

Exercise Is Good Medicine For Lymphoma Patients

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — A healthy dose of exercise is good medicine, even for lymphoma patients receiving chemotherapy, University of Alberta researchers have found.

The Healthy Exercise for Lymphoma Patients (HELP) trial, a three-year study led by Kerry Courneya, Canada Research Chair in physical activity and cancer in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, found that a regimen of aerobic exercise training produced significant improvements in physical functioning and overall quality of life benefits in patients with lymphoma.

Researchers recruited 122 patients with Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, then stratified participants by disease type and treatment status; whether they were undergoing chemotherapy at the time or receiving no treatments. Participants were randomly assigned to an exercise program designed to maximize cardiovascular fitness or to usual care, which did not include an exercise component.

Exercisers trained three times a week for 12 weeks and were encouraged to stay the course with behavioural support techniques that included perks like free parking, a well-equipped gym, flexible exercise schedules, variation in exercises, follow-up phone calls reminders and positive reinforcement by staff.

Lymphoma patients who received the exercise intervention reported significantly improved physical functioning, overall quality of life, less fatigue, increased happiness, less depression and an improvement in lean body mass. Cardiovascular fitness in the exercise group improved by over 20 per cent. The group receiving chemotherapy benefited as much as the group that was off treatments.

Perhaps most importantly, says Courneya, was that the vigorous intensity exercise program did not interfere with lymphoma patients' ability to complete their chemotherapy treatments or benefit from the treatments. He found that 46.4 per cent of patients in the exercise group had a complete response to their treatment (no evidence of disease) compared to only 30.8 per cent in the usual care group. Courneya cautions that the trial was not designed to look at this issue, but it at least suggests that lymphoma patients can achieve important health and quality of life benefits from exercise during treatment without worrying about compromising their treatment outcomes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027162005.htm

Phytochemical index measure may aid obesity battle

Foodnavigator-USA.com, 23-Oct-2009

A phytochemical index (PI) that ranks the number of calories consumed from plant-based foods compared with overall daily calorie intake could be a useful tool to optimise dietary intake for disease prevention, says a new US study.
The study, led by researcher Heather Vincent, was published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics and aimed to determine whether the PI score is related to adiposity, weight gain, oxidative stress and inflammation.
Phytochemicals, bioactive compounds linked with chronic disease reduction, include substances such as allin from garlic, lycopene from tomatoes, isoflavones from soy, beta carotene from orange squashes and anythocyanins from red wine, among others.
‘Potential mechanisms of protection by a phytochemical rich diet includes the lowering of cardiovascular disease precursors, the lowering of oxidative stress and inflammation, and the preservation of vascular function as well as a lower incidence of obesity,’ said the authors.
The researchers explain that the premise of the PI measure is to divide the energy supplied by foods high in phytochemicals by the total energy consumed from all foods as a ratio score:
‘A vegan diet (excluding potato products, hard liquors and refined sugars) could have a score of 100, whereas less optimal dietary patterns, such as those in Western diets may range below 20,’ they added.
Method
The researchers studied a group of 54 young adults, analyzing their dietary patterns over a three-day period, repeating the same measurement eight weeks later.
The participants had to meet certain criteria prior to enrolment in the study such as no participation in regular physical activity, no chronic health problems or smoking, no history of cardiovascular, metabolic or respiratory disease, and no consumption of antioxidant supplements within the past six months.
They said that participants were broken into two groups: normal weight and overweight-obese, with three-day dietary records analysed for food items, food groups, energy and the PI score at repeated time points.
After a 12 hour fast blood plasma samples were collected from the cohort and analysed by colorimetric or an enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay for cholesterol subfractions, glycated haemoglobin, total antioxidant status, lipid hydroperoxides, cytokines (interleukins-1b and -6) and C-reactive protein), added the researchers.
Results
According to the team, the trial results showed that PI scores for the normal weight and overweight groups were 23.5 and 13.2 respectively.
“Body mass, BMI, waist circumference, waist-to hip ratio, body fat percentage, fat and fat free mass values were significantly greater in the overweight/obese group,’ states the article.
The researchers said that although the adults in the two groups consumed about the same amount of calories, overweight-obese adults consumed fewer plant-based foods and subsequently fewer protective trace minerals and phytochemicals and more saturated fats.
The results showed that the overweight group also had higher levels of oxidative stress and inflammation than their normal-weight peers, said the study.
The authors concluded that the PI score was inversely related to several indices of adiposity, weight gain and oxidative stress but not inflammation, and that all of the participants would benefit from increased consumption of phytochemical rich foods.
"The PI index might be an ideal, simple assessment that could provide important feedback to encourage the intake of these protective foods,’ they added.
Source: Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics  Title: Relationship of the dietary phytochemical index to weight gain, oxidative stress and inflammation in overweight young adults  Authors: H. K. Vincent, C.M. Bourguignon and A. G. Taylor
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Phytochemical-index-measure-may-aid-obesity-battle

Aerobic exercise no big stretch for older adults but helps elasticity of arteries

Canada NewsWire 0-26-09
EDMONTON, Oct. 25, 2009 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) -- Just three months of physical activity reaps heart health benefits for older adults with type 2 diabetes by improving the elasticity in their arteries - reducing risk of heart disease and stroke, Dr. Kenneth Madden told the 2009 Canadian Cardiovascular Congress, co-hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society.
Dr. Madden studied adults between the ages of 65 to 83 with controlled Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high blood cholesterol to see how increased activity might affect stiffness of the arteries.
"The theory is that aerobic activity makes your arteries less stiff and makes artery walls more elastic," says Dr. Madden, a geriatric specialist at the University of British Columbia.
An improvement was seen in the elasticity of the arteries of the group that performed the activity compared to those who didn't exercise. "There was an impressive drop in arterial stiffness after just three months of exercise. In that time we saw a 15 to 20 per cent reduction."
The subjects were divided into two groups to either receive three months of vigorous physical activity (one hour, three times per week) or to get no aerobic exercise at all. Subjects were classified as sedentary at the beginning of the study but gradually increased their fitness levels until they were working at 70 per cent of their maximum heart rate, using treadmills and cycling machines. They were supervised by a certified exercise trainer.
Dr. Beth Abramson, spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, stresses the importance of lifestyle factors on heart health, especially with our aging population. "Almost everyone can benefit from active living," she says. "The Foundation recommends that, like adults of any age, older adults - with the consent of their physicians - need 30 to 60 minutes of moderate activity most days of the week."
Dr. Madden says that the exercise requirements may be viewed as controversial because of the age of the participants but the exercise level was safe and well tolerated. "There seems to be a knee-jerk reluctance to getting these older adults to exercise yet we used a vigorous level of activity and didn't have any trouble keeping participants in our study. They enjoyed the activity," Dr. Madden says. "People always underestimate what older adults can do."
Dr. Madden notes that realistically, seniors need someone to help them get started. "We need to learn how to do it effectively and how to do it safely," he says. "It could mean visiting your family doctor to find out about provincially funded programs, or joining programs for seniors that are offered at many local community centres."
Dr. Abramson recommends that seniors choose activities they enjoy, such as walking, gardening, golfing, dancing, or joining a yoga or tai chi class. If weather is a barrier, she suggests climbing stairs at home, joining a mall-walking group, or strolling the halls of their apartment building or retirement residence.
In his next project, Dr. Madden wants to find out if there is a less expensive but equally effective way to reduce the stiffness of arteries in older adults. "Our first step was to prove that it was at all possible for older adults to have reduced narrowing in their arteries due to exercise," he says. "Now we want to find out just how rigorous the levels of activity need to be to demonstrate the same results. The next step is to try studying a home-based walking program using pedometers. This is something easy for doctors to prescribe and cheap and easy for participants."
The HeartWalk Workout, a special activity program developed by the Heart and Stroke Foundation to help people with cardiovascular problems get regular, healthy physical activity is available online at heartandstroke.ca. It helps people slowly build up exercise tolerance until they can walk at least 30 minutes, five times a week.
Statements and conclusions of study authors are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect Foundation or CCS policy or position. The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society make no representation or warranty as to their accuracy or reliability.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation (heartandstroke.ca), a volunteer-based health charity, leads in eliminating heart disease and stroke and reducing their impact through the advancement of research and its application, the promotion of healthy living, and advocacy.
SOURCE: HEART AND STROKE FOUNDATION OF CANADA
http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=8937&Section=Disease

Physical Scientists at Arizona State University will Apply Laws of Physics in Cancer Fight---12 institutions to share $22.7 million in 1st year of federal funding

PR Newswire 10-26-09
TEMPE, Ariz., Oct 26, 2009 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Instead of killing cancer cells, researchers at Arizona State University will use the laws of physics to figure out how to control them. And, rather than treating cancer as a disease and seeking a cure, ASU scientists will view cancer cells as physical objects and study them the way a physicist would, using simple variables like temperature, pressure and force.
That fresh approach is behind a new research center at Arizona State University - one of 12 Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers receiving some of $22.7 million in funding this fiscal year from the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute. Each center will bring a non-traditional approach to cancer research with the goal of developing new methods of arresting tumor growth and metastasis.
In addition to ASU, other institutions receiving funding include: Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Northwestern University, Princeton University, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Cornell University, Scripps Research Institute, University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California and University of Texas Health Science Center.
The new Center for Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology at ASU will receive about $1.7 million in funding for each of the first two years of a five-year proposal. Part of the plan is the establishment of a "cancer forum," hosted by the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at ASU.
"What is new about this initiative is that it is going to be tackling the root causes of cancer on a conceptual level," says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist who is leading the ASU cancer initiative. "We want physical scientists to think about why cancer exists in the first place. What is its role in the great biological scheme of things as life has evolved over the last several hundred million years? Within the human body, how does cancer behave as a physical object?"
Davies is experienced at asking these types of big questions. As director of the BEYOND Center in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Davies' work has focused on applying the laws of physics to the early universe, from the first split second. He is noted for his work on the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime, the thermodynamics of black holes, the arrow of time, the nature of the laws of physics and the emergence of life in the universe.
"When I first began thinking about the problem of cancer, it occurred to me that physicists can do some pretty fancy things. If we can build the Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs Boson amid one trillion proton collisions, maybe we can find clever ways of locating and zapping individual cancer cells in the human body. So I began to get excited about the prospect of just throwing the full panoply of toys that physicists use at the problem of diagnosing and killing cancer cells.
"Then, I came to realize that 'think big and zap the problem' was probably not the best way to go. A more subtle approach to really understand cancer cells is to regard them as physical objects rather than as enemies to be destroyed," Davies says.
Other collaborators on the ASU team include Stuart Lindsay, a Regents' Professor of physics and chemistry and director of the Center for Single Molecule Biophysics at the Biodesign Institute; Deidre Meldrum, dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and director of the Center for Ecogenomics at the Biodesign Institute; Timothy Newman, professor of physics and director of the Center for Biological Physics; Robert Ros, associate professor of physics; Peiming Zhang, an associate research professor in the Biodesign Institute; Roger Johnson, a research scientist and laboratory manager; and Pauline Davies, a professor of practice in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.
"We are also collaborating with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which will provide the cell lines for us, and the Mayo Clinic, which will provide tissue samples," Davies says.
"And, we will be looking at the mechanical properties of the cells. We have state-of-the-art equipment to examine individual cells in suspension in three dimensions. The problem when you look at a cell usually is that it's a slide, it has been squashed flat and stuck to a surface, it's a two-dimensional picture. We can examine cells in a three-dimensional suspension, we can examine them from all sides," says Davies.
"It's well known that cancer cells get more squishy. The reason they get bent out of shape is because of the squishiness, they become less elastic. Nobody really knows what the reason for that is or whether this is something just to do with the membrane of the cell or the cytoskeleton - little tubes inside the cells that pull like ropes. We want to know what's going on in these cells. Why they are getting squishy? How does that effect the survival chances of the cancer cell?"
The center at ASU will be a think tank that hosts several workshops each year on topics related to the intersection of physical science and cancer. "The goal of the workshops is to serve as a catalyst to establish new lines of inquiry, both theoretical and experimental," Davies says. "We are aiming for that big conceptual breakthrough that would transform the subject, as opposed to the slow incremental progress that's been made so far using traditional approaches."
The center will also create a Web site to serve as a window on the research program and to host research papers, podcasts, webcasts and news items, Davies notes.
"The traditional approach to cancer is it is a disease to be cured. We are taking the approach that it is part of life's intrinsic exuberance that we wish to control," Davies says. "We don't have to cure cancer. All we have to do is to find ways of preventing it from taking over and destroying the body of the host."
SOURCE Arizona State University's BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science
http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=8936&Section=Disease

Folic acid over-intake not an issue: Study

Nutraingredients.com, 26-Oct-2009

Less than five percent of Americans are exceeding safe limits of folic acid despite intakes from a multitude of sources, both enriched and natural, says a new study.
Intakes of folic acid from enriched cereal-grain products, ready-to-eat cereals, and supplements do not lead to excessive intakes of the B vitamin, according to a study that may allay the fears over folic acid build-up, and weaken the arguments of anti-fortification groups around the world.
“At current fortification levels, US adults who do not consume supplements or who consume an average of 400 micrograms folic acid/d from supplements are unlikely to exceed the upper limit in intake for folic acid,” wrote the researchers in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Robert Berry from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his co-workers analysed data from 8,258 participants of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003 to 2006.
B for baby benefits
An overwhelming body of evidence links folate deficiency in early pregnancy to increased risk of neural tube defects (NTDs) - most commonly spina bifida and anencephaly - in infants.
This connection led to the 1998 introduction of public health measures in the US and Canada, where all grain products are fortified with folic acid - the synthetic, bioavailable form of folate.
Preliminary evidence indicates that the measure is having an effect with a reported 15 to 50 per cent reduction in NTD incidence. A total of 51 countries now have some degree of mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid.
However, similar measures in other countries have been opposed by concerns that the folate/folic acid may mask vitamin B12 deficiency, which leads to a form of neurological problems.
Concerns over B12 and bowel health
The results of the new study found however, that consumption of the ready-to-eat cereals and/or supplements with folic acid was actually associated with higher than usual vitamin B12 intakes.
Opponents of folic acid fortification also point to studies raising concerns about increased risks of colorectal cancer. Epidemiological evidence suggests a slight increase in colorectal cancer rates following the introduction of fortification. Such associations have been noted in the US, Canada, and Chile.
According to Joel Mason from USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, high folate levels in certain people who harbour pre-cancerous or cancerous tumours may actually promote cancer.
The complex links between folate and cancer have created a “global dilemma”, he said. Indeed, a new study published in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that our ability to convert folic acid to folate may be relatively slow, leading to extended exposure to unconverted folic acid.
The new study, however, challenges such arguments by showing that less than 3 per cent of the study population exceeded the tolerable upper level of 1,000 micrograms a day.
Of the 60 per cent of the study participants who consumed folic acid from foods only, none exceeded 1,000 micrograms, report the researchers.
Furthermore, of the 34 per cent of the study participants who consumed supplements with 400 micrograms per day of folic acid or less, less than 1 per cent exceeded 1,000 micrograms.
Take home
“Because the vast majority of RTE and supplements with folic acid also contain vitamin B12, consumption may reduce the risk of vitamin B12 deficiency among older adults,” wrote Berry and his co-workers.
“[Previous studies and] our data suggest that US adults aged at least 60 years old who do not consume supplements with vitamin B12 may be at increased risk of vitamin B12 deficiency, even those with median usual vitamin B12 intakes of about 3 micrograms per day from RTE (greater than the Recommended Dietary Allowance of 2.4 micrograms per day),” they added.
Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Published online ahead of print, doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.28401
“Folic acid source, usual intake, and folate and vitamin B-12 status in US adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003-2006”
Authors: Q. Yang, M.E. Cogswell, H.C. Hamner, A. Carriquiry, L.B. Bailey, C.M. Pfeiffer, R.J. Berry
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Folic-acid-over-intake-not-an-issue-Study

Healthcare system wastes up to $800 billion a year
Last Updated: 2009-10-26 10:00:22 -0400 (Reuters Health)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.
The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.
"America's healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial," the report reads.
"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill," Kelley said in a statement.
"The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care."
One example -- a paper-based system that discourages sharing of medical records accounts for 6 percent of annual overspending.
"It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient's record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed," the report reads.
Some other findings in the report from Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters:
* Unnecessary care such as the overuse of antibiotics and lab tests to protect against malpractice exposure makes up 37 percent of healthcare waste or $200 to $300 a year.
* Fraud makes up 22 percent of healthcare waste, or up to $200 billion a year in fraudulent Medicare claims, kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services and other scams.
* Administrative inefficiency and redundant paperwork account for 18 percent of healthcare waste.
* Medical mistakes account for $50 billion to $100 billion in unnecessary spending each year, or 11 percent of the total.
* Preventable conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year.
"The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada," reads the report, citing dozens of other research papers.
"American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada," it says, quoting a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine paper by Harvard University researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.
Yet primary care doctors are lacking, forcing wasteful use of emergency rooms, for instance, the report reads.
All this could help explain why Americans spend more per capita and the highest percentage of GDP on healthcare than any other OECD country, yet has an unhealthier population with more diabetes, obesity and heart disease and higher rates of neonatal births than other developed nations.
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said on Sunday that Senate Democratic leaders are close to securing enough votes to pass legislation to start reform of the country's $2.5 trillion healthcare system.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/10/26/eline/links/20091026elin005.html

Regular exercise may help battle the flu
Last Updated: 2009-10-23 13:20:57 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Regular exercise may help reduce the misery of the flu by boosting the immune system's response to the virus, a study in mice hints.
Studies have suggested that people who exercise moderately suffer fewer and less severe colds and flu infections than couch potatoes do -- while exhausting workouts may increase a person's vulnerability to these infections.
In theory, the benefits of moderate exercise may stem from its effects on immune defenses. Research has found that exercise boosts activity in various parts of the immune system that help limit a viral attack or help clear an invading virus from the body more quickly.
In the new study, researchers found that when they had a group of mice regularly run on a treadmill over 3.5 months, the animals developed less-severe symptoms when infected with the flu virus, as compared with mice not subjected to the rodent workouts.
In addition, mice that exercised right before flu infection, but not regularly over the preceding months, also showed some protection against severe symptoms -- which in mice means dampened appetite and weight loss.
Those benefits, however, were only apparent in the couple days after infection, whereas regular long-term exercise reduced flu symptoms over the whole course of infection.
Dr. Marian L. Kohut and colleagues at Iowa State University in Ames report the findings in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Whether the findings translate to humans is unknown. But they offer possible clues as to why regular exercisers have been found to suffer fewer or at least less-severe respiratory infections.
Compared with their non-exercising counterparts, mice that exercised showed lower levels of various inflammatory substances in their lungs soon after being infected with the flu virus. Those levels stayed lower in mice that exercised regularly, whereas they rose over the next several days in mice subjected to just one workout.
The regularly exercising mice also showed lower concentrations of virus in their lungs early on.
These findings, Kohut's team writes, suggest that exercise boosts "early innate antiviral defenses" -- though the exact mechanisms remain unclear.
For now, the results offer one more potential reason to get regular moderate exercise.
SOURCE: Journal of Infectious Diseases, November 1, 2009.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/10/23/eline/links/20091023elin002.html

Music makes you smarter
Faulty of 1000 Medicine, October. 26, 2009
Regularly playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain and may be used in therapy to improve cognitive skills.
There is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians. In particular, the areas of the brain used to process music are larger or more active in musicians. Even just starting to learn a musical instrument can changes the neurophysiology of the brain.
Lutz Jäncke, a member of Faculty of 1000 Medicine, proposes using music in neuropsychological therapy, for example to improve language skills, memory, or mood. In a review for Faculty of 1000 Biology Reports, an online publication in which leading researchers highlight advances in their field, Jäncke summarizes recent studies of professional musicians.
The brain regions involved in music processing are also required for other tasks, such as memory or language skills. "If music has such a strong influence on brain plasticity," writes Jäncke, "this raises the question of whether this effect can be used to enhance cognitive performance."
Several studies indeed show that musical practice increases memory and language skills, and Jäncke suggests expanding this field: "Hopefully, the current trend in the use of musicians as a model for brain plasticity will continue ... and extend to the field of neuropsychological rehabilitation."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/fo1b-mmy102609.php

Latest analysis confirms suboptimal vitamin D levels in millions of US children

Children’s Hospital, Boston,  October 26, 2009
Boston, Mass. -- Millions of children in the United States between the ages of 1 and 11 may suffer from suboptimal levels of vitamin D, according to a large nationally representative study published in the November issue of Pediatrics, accompanied by an editorial.
The study, led by Jonathan Mansbach, MD, at Children's Hospital Boston, is the most up-to-date analysis of vitamin D levels in U.S. children. It builds on the growing evidence that levels have fallen below what's considered healthy, and that black and Hispanic children are at particularly high risk.
Both the optimal amount of vitamin D supplementation and the healthy blood level of vitamin D are under heated debate in the medical community. Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children should have vitamin D levels of at least 50 nmol/L (20 ng/ml). However, other studies in adults suggest that vitamin D levels should be at least 75 nmol/L (30 ng/ml), and possibly 100 nmol/L (40 ng/ml), to lower the risk of heart disease and specific cancers.
Mansbach and collaborators from the University of Colorado Denver and Massachusetts General Hospital used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to look at vitamin D levels in a nationally representative sample of roughly 5,000 children from 2001-2006. Extrapolating to the entire U.S. population, their analysis suggests that roughly 20 percent of all children fell below the recommended 50 nmol/L. Moreover, more than two-thirds of all children had levels below 75 nmol/L, including 80 percent of Hispanic children and 92 percent of non-Hispanic black children.
"If 75 nmol/L or higher is eventually demonstrated to be the healthy normal level of vitamin D, then there is much more vitamin D deficiency in the U.S. than people realize," Mansbach says.
Mansbach and his co-authors suggest that all children take vitamin D supplements, because of the generally low levels that they found and the potential health benefits of boosting vitamin D to normal levels. Vitamin D improves bone health and prevents rickets in children, and recent studies suggest that it also may prevent a host of common childhood illnesses, including respiratory infections, childhood wheezing, and winter-related eczema.
Although sun exposure generates healthy doses of vitamin D, it can also cause skin cancer. Dermatologists and the AAP recommend wearing sunblock, but this actually blocks our skin's ability to make vitamin D. Furthermore, children with more highly pigmented skin require much more sun exposure than fair-skinned children to obtain healthy levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D can also be obtained from certain foods, like liver and fatty fish, but almost all children in the U.S. don't consume these foods in high enough quantities to match the vitamin D that could be provided by summer sunshine or vitamin D supplements.
In the study, children taking multi-vitamins that included vitamin D had higher levels overall, but this accounted for less than half of all children. Mansbach recommends that all children take vitamin D supplements, especially those living in high latitudes, where the sun is scarce in the wintertime.
"We need to perform randomized controlled trials to understand if vitamin D actually improves these wide-ranging health outcomes," Mansbach says. "At present, however, there are a lot of studies demonstrating associations between low levels of vitamin D and poor health. Therefore, we believe many U.S. children would likely benefit from more vitamin D."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/chb-lac102209.php

Herbicides and cholesterol drugs interfere with taste, could damage metabolism
S. L. Baker, NaturalNews.com  October 26, 2009 

(NaturalNews) It's not unusual to hear about herbicides having suspected toxic effects or prescription drugs producing side effects. But a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry has found another negative and surprising way common herbicides and fibrate drugs (which are used to lower elevated blood lipids) impact the human body: they block a nutrient-sensing taste receptor on the tongue called T1R3. 

So what's the big deal about this? It turns out there's emerging evidence these taste receptors are also found in hormone-producing cells in the intestine and pancreas. When working properly, these internal taste receptors in the gut trigger the release of hormones involved in the regulation of normal homeostasis (the ability of the body to maintain internal physiological stability) of glucose as well as energy metabolism. Simply put, screwing up the ability of T1R3 to sense certain nutrients could possibly wreak havoc on the human body in a variety of ways -- from playing a role in unhealthy blood sugar levels to causing people to gain weight .

"Compounds that either activate or block T1R3 receptors could have significant metabolic effects, potentially influencing diseases such as obesity, type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome," said Monell geneticist and study leader Bedrich Mosinger, MD, PhD, in a statement to the media.

For their study, Dr. Mosinger and his research team tested the ability of two classes of chemical compounds to block the T1R3 taste receptor. These compounds were selected because they have strong structural similarities to lactisole, a sweet taste inhibitor that is known to block T1R3. Specifically, the researchers investigated fibrates (a class of drugs often used to lower blood cholesterol, especially triglycerides), and phenoxyherbicides.

Fibrate drugs are sold in the U.S. under several names including gemibrozil (brand name Lopid) and fenobribrate (brand name Tricor). Phenoxy herbicides are chemicals widely used in agricultural fields, on golf courses, rights-of-way and lawns to control broad-leaf weeds. The best known, called 2,4-D, is one of the most extensively used herbicides in the world. According to the Oregon State University Extension Service web site, popular brands of phenoxy herbicides include MCPA, Crossbow, Banvel, Garlon, Weed-B-Gone, and Brush Killer. They are also incorporated into a host of "weed and feed" and brush control products for use on grass.

In laboratory experiments, the researchers found that both classes of compounds were very potent in blocking activation of the human sweet taste receptors. Additional tests showed that this ability of both fibrates and phenoxy herbicides to block T1R3 is specific to humans. 

"The metabolic consequences of short and long-term exposures of humans to phenoxy herbicides are unknown. This is because most safety tests were done using animals, which have T1R3 receptors that are insensitive to these compounds," Dr. Mosinger said in the press statement. "Given the number of compounds used in agriculture, medicine and the food industry that may affect human T1R3 and related receptors, more work is needed to identify the health-related effects of exposure to these compounds."
http://www.naturalnews.com/027329_herbicides_drugs_cholesterol.html

Flexibility exercises like Pilates and yoga could prevent, treat stiff arteries
S. L. Baker, NaturalNews.com  October 24, 2009 

(NaturalNews) From a sitting position, how far can you reach past your toes? Especially if you are middle-aged or older, the answer could indicate how flexible you are -- and also how flexible your arteries are. However, if you are stiff and can't reach too far, don't despair. New research suggests stretching exercises that increase flexibility could prevent or reverse stiffening of arteries.

In a study entitled "Poor trunk flexibility is associated with arterial stiffening", just published in the October edition of the American Journal of Physiology, researchers found that how well people age 40 and older performed on a sit-and-reach-past-their-toes test was an accurate way to assess the flexibility of their arteries. So, because arterial stiffness often precedes cardiovascular disease, this simple, non-drug, non-invasive test could become a quick measure of a person's risk for early death from heart attack or stroke.

"Our findings have potentially important clinical implications because trunk flexibility can be easily evaluated," scientist Kenta Yamamoto of the University of North Texas and the National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Japan said in a statement to the media. "This simple test might help to prevent age-related arterial stiffening."

Healthy blood vessels are elastic and that flexibility helps to moderate blood pressure. But as we age, arterial stiffness often increases, upping the risk for cardiovascular disease. In previous studies, scientists have documented that physical fitness can delay age-related arterial stiffness, although exactly how that happens in the body is not understood. Because people who exercise and are fit are usually more flexible than those who are out of shape, the researchers hypothesized that a flexible body could be a quick way to check for arterial flexibility. 

To test this idea, the scientists investigated 526 healthy, non-smoking adults between the ages of 20 and 83 who had a body mass index (BMI) of less than 30. Then the research subjects were divided into three age groups: the young (20 to 39 years old), middle-aged (40 to 59 years old) and the elder (60 to 83 years old).

The research participants were asked to perform a sit-and-reach test by sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall and legs straight. The volunteers bent at the waist and slowly stretched, reaching their arms forward. Depending on how far they could reach, the research subjects' flexibility was rated by the scientists. The research team also recorded the participants' blood pressure and measured how long the pulse took to travel between the arm and the ankle and between the neck and the leg. Other measurements were collected from some of the research subjects, too, including their cardiorespiratory fitness, endurance and muscle strength.

Overall, the scientists discovered that trunk flexibility was the best predictor of artery stiffness among those who were middle-aged and older but not among the younger participants. In the middle-aged and older groups, the systolic blood pressure (the top number of a blood pressure measurement that indicates the pressure as the heart contracts) was higher in those with poor flexibility than in the people with good flexibility. 

Why is arterial flexibility related to the flexibility of the body in middle-aged and older people? The scientists say that remains unclear but one possibility is that stretching exercises like yoga and Pilates may put into motion physiological reactions that slow down age-related stiffening of the arteries. Moreover, they cited additional recent research that found middle-aged and older adults who began a regular stretching exercise program significantly improved the flexibility of the carotid arteries in their necks. 

"Together with our results, these findings suggest a possibility that improving flexibility induced by the stretching exercise may be capable of modifying age-related arterial stiffening in middle-aged and older adults," Dr. Yamamoto said in the press statement. "We believe that flexibility exercise, such as stretching, yoga and Pilates, should be integrated as a new recommendation into the known cardiovascular benefits of regular exercise."
http://www.naturalnews.com/027320_flexibility_yoga_pilates.html

Kava Kava has Many Health Benefits and Uses
Henri Junttila, NaturalNews.com  October 26, 2009 

(NaturalNews) Kava is a well-known herb that originated in the Pacific. Also scientifically known as Piper Methysticum, the roots and stem hold the key ingredient that has been used for medicinal purposes both in traditional and modern times.

Traditionally chewed or crushed to form a liquid, Kava can now be commonly found in capsules, teas and liquids aimed at reducing a variety of stress and anxiety related conditions and illnesses.

Scientific research has pinpointed its effectiveness whereby in terms of neurotransmission, feel good vibes are sent to the brain which then aids muscle relaxation, increases concentration, decreases insomnia, lowers inhibitions and can also be suitable for pain such as back aches or hyperactivity in children. Although there is no absolute evidence, it has been suggested that Kava may affect serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitters.

Extracts of the Kava root have been processed to provide the population with immediate access to the various associated health benefits. Other health benefits of this herbal remedy include help for asthma, urinary tract infections, depression and menopausal symptoms. Due to its calming and muscle relaxing qualities, it has provided a health improvement to many that would have otherwise still have been suffering.

In recent times, sports persons and business people, to significantly improve performance by reducing daily stresses, have used Kava. It is also interesting to note that the use of Kava has been employed by the military, in some parts of the world, to reduce anxiety and improve the focus of its soldiers.

Concerns have been raised as to the safety of regularly consuming Kava. One of these main concerns involves the liver, where liver toxicity and failure occurred in some patients that were found to be taking a supplement containing the Kava extract - although, this could not be clarified as the patients had also consumed alcohol and other medications.

The effects of prolonged use of this natural substance are yet to be substantiated; however, there have been suggestions that ingesting high doses of Kava can lead to headaches and skin rashes. A single dose of this herbal remedy has found little to no side effects.

Scientists have advised that Kava is not to be used in conjunction with other medicines, alcohol or by pregnant women. As with anything new, it is still recommended to consult a health care provider as your first point of call.

Some federal departments have sought to ban the use of Kava among the general population; however, they have since retracted their statements, due to the growing evidence of Kava related health benefits provided by scientists and researchers.
http://www.naturalnews.com/027328_health_benefits_kava.html

Dairy: Beware of the Great White Hype (Opinion)
Hesh Goldstein, NaturalNews.com  October 25, 2009 

(NaturalNews) Milk, it is said, is "the" source of calcium that helps kids grow up big and strong. Milk is alleged to contain vital nutrients and to help prevent osteoporosis. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, through its food dietary guidelines, says that everyone should get 2-3 servings of dairy every day. Milk is advocated by various government agencies, hoards of physicians, and a $200 million annual advertising budget of the dairy industry. Can we ever forget the mustachioed faces of countless numbers of celebrities decorating everything from newspaper ads to roadside billboards?

And yes, America has a love affair with milk. So much so that the average person consumes 600 pounds of dairy products every year, including about 420 pounds of fluid milk and cream, 70 pounds of various milk-based fats and oils, 30 pounds of cheese, and 17 pounds of ice cream (obesityepidemic anyone?). In total, the U.S. dairy farmers produce about 163 billion pounds of milk and milk products a year. It is udderly horrendous, if you'll pardon the pun.

But what if the celebrities we love and trust were lying to us? What if milk doesn't do a body good? Instead, what if milk is a major contributor to breast and prostate cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and more? What if the U.S. government and dairy industry are in bed together to hide the ill effects of dairy consumption? They wouldn't do that, would they? Well, according to Amy Lanou, Ph.D., the nutrition director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), besides the above, "milk has been linked to anemia, allergies, obesity, and ovarian cancer".

So why, then, is milk regarded as wholesome, especially with the U.S. Dept of Agriculture? According to its mission statement, it is charged with "enhancing the quality of life for the American people by supporting the production of agriculture"?

Today's USDA has the dual responsibility of assisting dairy farmers while promoting healthy dietary choices for Americans. Would you think that this creates a conflict of interest that puts at risk the objectivity of government farm policy and the health of the dairy-consuming public? Duh! Six of the eleven members assigned to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have financial ties to the meat, dairy, and egg interests. Prior to the PCRM winning a lawsuit against the USDA claiming that they "unfairly promoted the special interests of the meat and dairy industries through its official dietary guidelines and the Food Pyramid", the USDA refused to disclose such conflicts of interest to the public.

Historically, the USDA's dietary guidelines have consistently reflected the industry's push for greater consumption of both flesh and dairy. The USDA counters this by saying that the guidelines should be "reality-based", arguing that what people should really be eating is moot because it doesn't fit with the American lifestyle. Whaaat? What they are saying is that the USDA doesn't even think it is reasonable to aspire to what constitutes as ahealthy diet.

May 13, 2002 marked the passage of the farm bill in which dairy farmers and processors received, over 3 1/2 years, an additional $2 billion in subsidies, largely realized through price supports that inflate costs for consumers. Understand that dairy subsidies are a carryover from the Depression era when survival of small dairy farmers was considered essential to maintaining a national food supply. By the way, most of that $2 billion went to larger dairy farms in 12 northeastern states, hanging small farmers out to dry and actually encouraging the demise of family farms.

Another assertion of the suit brought by the PCRM against the USDA is that milk, as a staple in school lunch programs unfairly discriminates against non-whites who have a high incidence of lactose intolerance. There are about 50 million lactose intolerant adults in the U.S., including 15% of the white population, 70% of the blacks, and 80 to 97% of Asian, Native Americans, and Jews of European descent. These 50 million people suffer from a variety of digestive symptoms resulting from milk consumption and other dairy products, including gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation and indigestion.

Currently, the USDA requires that every public school in the country serve milk with a push by some of our elected officials to offer financial incentives to schools that install milk vending machines. To add insult to injury, students cannot get free or subsidized alternatives to milk, like juice or soy milk, without a doctor's note. So, for the 70% of the black kids and the 90% of the Asian kids in public schools, a negative response to lactose intake is practically mandated by the U.S. Government. In essence, these huge dairy subsidies and broad-based promotions of milk by the government's school lunch program is a form of economic racism that isolates minorities and encourages them to ingest something they are intolerant of or allergic to.

Girls in the U.S. are beginning to menstruate at younger and younger ages. According to the Cancer Prevention Coalition, some girls are now experiencing the effects of puberty as young as three years of age. Fifty years ago the incidence of breast cancer risk among U.S. women was one in twenty. As of 2001, that percentage has grown to one in eight women.

Why is that? Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH)! BGH is a naturally occurring hormone produced by milk cows. Closely resembling the natural growthhormones in human children, the presence of BGH in milk has been shown to significantly elevate hormone levels in people, creating many growth problems. And that's not even accounting for the use of artificial hormones. Enter Recombinant BGH (rBGH), an unnaturally occurring, genetically engineered hormone produced by Monsanto. As you know, Monsanto has made other fine humanitarian and ecological contributions such as Agent Orange and PCBs.

Through a series of research cover-ups and a network of conflicting interests with government policymakers, and we'll get to that in Part 3, Monsanto, in 1994, managed to get approval for Posilac, which is Monsanto's commercial form of rBGH and increases cow's milk production by 15-25%. According to Monsanto, over a quarter of U.S. milk cows are now herds supplemented with Posilac. The majority of the country's 1,500 dairy companies mix rBGH milk with non-RBGH milk during processing to such an extent that an estimated 80-90% of the U.S. dairy supply is contaminated.

What Monsanto doesn't tell consumers is that this supplementation of additional growth hormones is causing secondary sex characteristics to appear earlier in young children, especially girls. Monsanto also doesn't tell consumers that rBGH injected cows produce extremely high levels of Insulin Growth Factor -1 (IGH-1), a cancer promoter that occurs naturally in the human bloodstream at levels that generally do not result in tumors. Monsanto and the FDA refuse to acknowledge research directly linking elevated levels of IGF-1 to increased risk of breast and prostate cancer. To make matters worse, Monsanto and the FDA colluded in '93 and '94 to block labeling requirements for rBGH milk (even today Monsanto and the FDA block labeling of genetically engineered food). So, the average dairy consumer has no idea that they are increasing their own risk of getting cancer.

Since 1994, every industrialized country in the world, except the U.S., Canada, and Japan, and the 15 nations of the European nations, have banned rBGH milk. Yet, in the face of facts and the majority opinion of the global political and scientific community, Monsanto and the U.S. continue to endorse rBGH milk for general consumption. At the same time try to figure out why there is an increase in breast cancer deaths and the continually declining age of puberty for girls.

It's not rocket science to see that milk is bad for people and that money is more important than concern for the welfare of the people, but what about the effect on the cows that produce that milk? The life expectancy of the average cow under natural conditions is about 25-30 years; on the typical factory farm, where well over half of U.S. milk cows live, they live only 4-5 years. Think about how you would feel if your life span was decreased by over 80%. What happens, because of adding Monsanto's Posilac to the cow's feed, is that it causes them to suffer from mastitis, which is a bacterial infection of the udder, cystic ovaries, and uterus disorders. Aside from the harm to the cows, guess where these illnesses wind up? Yes, through discharges that go into the milk and ultimately to you.

By keeping dairy cows constantly pregnant, which is the only way the cow can produce milk, it creates baby calves. Enter the veal industry. Since the male calves are useless to the farmers and have no economic value, an economic value had to be created. "Hey, let's figure out a way to sell 'em and make money". As the true caring and compassionate farmers that they are, these male calves are taken away from their mothers, immobilized in small wooden crates to keep their flesh tender, and fed fake food so people can "enjoy" their soft flesh after they are slaughtered. In 2001, over a million veal calves were slaughtered in the U.S.

The bottom line is that it boils down to an all familiar story: big business and the U.S. Government have joined forces to dupe the American consumer. The USDA tells us to drink more milk while subsidizing large dairy farms and federally mandating dairy consumption and flesh eating for schoolchildren. The government spends billions to buy unused milk and dairy products, while the industry spends almost $200 million every year promoting dairy consumption. Meanwhile, the FDA and Monsanto conspire to pollute the already unhealthy dairy supply with a genetically engineered hormone banned virtually everywhere else in the world. Ain't the road to profit at any cost, grand?

So while the American public can answer the absurd industry question, "Got Milk?" with a resounding, mustachioed "YES", the better question might be whether people have gotten screwed in the process. In 1990, the Monsanto Company commissioned scientists to inject a bunch of laboratory rats with an early variant of recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rBST), aka rBGH. The 90-day study demonstrated that rBGH was linked to development of prostate and thyroid cancer in rats.

Monsanto, our friend who gave us Agent Orange and spent 40 years covering up the effects of PCBs, was about to seek approval for Posilac, the company's commercialized form of rBGH. The study linking rBGH to cancer was submitted to the FDA , but somehow Posilac was still approved in 1994. With fingers pointing in both directions, those with opinions argue about who had the bigger part in the cover-up - Monsanto or the FDA. The results of the study, in fact, were not made available to the public until 1998, when a group of Canadian scientists obtained the full documentation and completed an independent analysis of the results. Among other instances of neglect, the documents showed that the FDA had never even reviewed Monsanto's original studies (on which the approval of Posilac had been based), so in the end the point had no bearing on whether or not the report had contained all of the original data.

The FDA's complicity continued; Michael Taylor, a Monsanto lawyer for many years, left in 1976 to become a staff lawyer for the FDA (Taylor was recently appointed by President Obama as the Dept of Agriculture head). In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the office of FDA's Deputy Commissioner, serving in that capacity until 1994. The administration approved rBGH in 1993. While at the FDA, Taylor also wrote the policy exempting rBGH and other biotech foods from special labeling, considered by most to be a major victory for Monsanto. Ten days after Taylor's policy was finalized, his old law firm, still representing Monsanto, filed suit against two dairy farms that had labeled their milk rBGH free.

As soon as the Government Accounting Office released a report covering all of this, Taylor was removed to work for the USDA, as the Administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, a position he held from 1994 to 1996. After holding positions at both the FDA and the USDA, Taylor went back to working for Monsanto, this time directly as the corporation's Vice President of Public Policy.

Michael Taylor wasn't the only government employee with an obvious conflict of interest. At the same time that Taylor left Monsanto for the FDA, Dr. Margaret Miller, once Monsanto's top scientist, was also hired by the FDA to review her own scientific research conducted during her tenure at Monsanto. This is worth repeating. A woman who was once Monsanto's top scientist was hired by the FDA to review her own scientific research while she was with Monsanto. So much for "...for the people". In her role as FDA scientist, Miller made the official decision to increase the amount of permissible antibiotic residues in milk by a hundred-fold, in part to counter the increase of mastitis in cows due to overuse of artificial growth hormones. These incestuous relationships between industry and the U.S. government are the norm rather than the exception. Decisions at the FDA are made primarily by advisory boards comprised of scientists and executives from the dairy and meat industries, with a few university academics thrown in for good measure.

A word of good advice to adhere to: If man made it and you can't pronounce it, don't eat it!

We live in a world governed by greed, dishonesty, and lack of compassion. To survive we must rely on our innate intelligence and on what our bodies tell us. We must shake ourselves free from the pharmaceutical-medical-insurance cartel and put the control of our health back into our hands. We, in order to achieve good health and a good quality of life, must transcend the endless messages we are bombarded with through the various media outlets and be sensible. To get on the road to recovery, to lose our dependence on prescription meds, to cure our ills and not just relieve symptoms, we must eliminate the causes from touching our lips. Flesh foods, found in anything that walks, runs, flies, crawls, or swims and dairy products, are loaded with artery clogging saturated fat.

Processed foods, refined grains, sugary foods like sodas, cookies, cakes, etc., and eggs, have to go. The yolks are high in cholesterol and the whites because of their hardening effect, are used as a base in aircraft paint because they can withstand the effects of extreme weather conditions.

If you don't believe this and you still eat eggs, the next time you eat eggs, don't wash your dish for a day or two and see what happens. Then decide if you want to continue putting this in your body.

Take the time to prepare you own meals, slow down, and try to relax. Even get involved in a meditation process. There are so many avenues of education available to you.

Life is too short to not make the most of it. Only you can make you truly well. You are your own best investment.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027319_Monsanto_BGH_rBGH.html

Research Reveals that Certain Forms of Astragalus Contain Molecules that Reverse Aging
Ethan Huff, NaturalNews.com  October 24, 2009 

(NaturalNews) The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine was awarded jointly to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak for their discoveries into cell division and into how chromosomes can be copied without degradation. The key was found in maintaining healthy telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, by reigniting the growth of telomerase, the enzyme that forms them. Certain astragalus molecules have been found to contribute to telomere growth, effectively reversing the aging process.

When cells divide to repair, renew, and maintain the body, the DNA molecules that contain the body's genetic code are copied in order to reproduce a new, identical cell. The telomeres on the ends of the chromosomes act as protective coverings to guard the cells' delicate sequences from degradation as they are copied. The telomerase enzymes continue to form new telomeres in order to facilitate this constant process of rejuvenation by maintaining these protective ends.

Because this process does not operate optimally, the body ages over time. Geneticist Leonard Hayflick discovered in 1965 that most cells only divide a certain number of times before they die, illustrating the existence of a biological clock of sorts that limits cell division and instigates the gradual slowing of cell replication.

The journal Nature published an article in 1990 that further explained this process through an understanding of cellular telomere. While acting to protect the ends of DNA strands, telomere shorten ever so slightly each time a cell divides. Early in a person's life, telomerase enzymes work to replenish the diminishing telomeres, but later in life the telomerase enzymes cease to be produced within the genes and the telomeres gradually recede, leading eventually to death.

Thanks to tortuous research into telomeres, doctors and scientists interested in anti-aging therapies have been able to make significant inroads into the discovery of viable therapies for jump-starting the gene that produces telomerase enzymes.

The astragalus root contains cycloastragenols and astragalosides, two powerful molecules that have been implicated in activating telomerase enzyme production. Research suggests that large doses of these molecules have the potential to not only prevent telomere depletion but to actually rebuild the telomere that has been already lost.

While a patented form of the highly-concentrated extract called "TA-65" is available through a proprietary regimen, other extracts and derivative formulas are hitting the supplement market that contain potent levels of these isolated molecules as well. Certain specific varieties of astragalus root naturally contain high levels of these powerful molecules and the extracts can be purchased inexpensively in bulk powders or in capsules.

Heavy doses of astragalus extract that is rich in astragalosides are said to have the same effect as TA-65 in rejuvenating telomere growth and increasing the amount of telomere base pairs. In other words, the extract is capable of turning back the age clock. Jim Green, a scientist out of Wichita, has been experimenting with various forms of astragaloside-rich astragalus and has seen amazing anti-aging results which he has documented on his website.

Further research into this amazing subject is sure to reveal more as time progresses. In the meantime, certain steps can be taken to reverse the effects of aging. One step suggested by Al Sears, MD is to have one's homocysteine levels checked to make sure they are not too high. High homocysteine levels increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, impotence, and heart disease. He suggests supplementing with B vitamins in order to keep homocysteine levels in check, as well as trimethylglycine (TMG). Astragaloside-rich astragalus is also a worthy contender that is both inexpensive and demonstrably efficacious in reversing the effects of aging.
http://www.naturalnews.com/027312_astragalus_aging_health.html

Who Killed All Those Honeybees? We Did

Discover Magazine, 10.19.2009

The great bee die-off is not such a mystery after all: Industrial agriculture has stressed our pollinators to the breaking point.

It was mid-July, and Sam Comfort was teetering at the top of a 20-foot ladder, desperately trying to extract a cluster of furious honeybees from a squirrel house in rural Dutchess County, New York. Four stingers had already landed on his face, leaving welts along the fringe of his thick brown beard. That morning, the owner of the squirrel house had read an article in the local paper about Comfort’s interest in collecting feral honey bees, so he called and invited him over. Commercial bee colonies, faced with massive mortality rates, are not faring so well these days, and unmanaged hives like this one could be their salvation. Comfort hurried over, eager to capture the hive’s queen and bring her home for monitoring and, if she fares well, breeding.
The nation’s great bee die-off has provoked a furious debate: What has caused a third of all commercial honeybee colonies to perish each year since 2006? Although widespread bee deaths have occurred before, the current sharp decline is different. This time some bees have simply vanished, abandoning their hives. The phenomenon, known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), has been attributed in part to the same viral and bacterial infections, pesticide poisonings, and mite infestations that devastated bees in the past.
Whatever the proximate cause, it increasingly appears that the bees are succumbing to a long-ignored underlying condition—inbreeding. Decades of agricultural and breeding practices meant to maximize pollinating efficiency have limited honeybees’ genetic diversity at a time when they need it the most. Addressing CCD may therefore require more than a simple fix. “We need to have a diverse set of genetic raw material so we can find bees resistant to disease,” says Steve Sheppard, an entomologist at Washington State University. “Genetic diversity is an important part of the solution.”
The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today’s honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. “We’ve looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what,” says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. “They can’t be pushed and pushed.”
In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an explosion of natural diversity. While most bees preferred a specific type of plant, honeybees were equal-opportunity pollinators—“pollen pigs,” beekeepers called them. The most socially complex of the bees, they thrived in colonies led by the egg-laying queen, who ensured the genetic fitness of her progeny by breeding with multiple male drones from other colonies.
All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.
And lately those threats have been profound. During the 1980s, tracheal mites and then varroa mites arrived in North America, decimating honeybee populations. One entomologist studying the mite invasion was Michael Burgett of Oregon State University, who spent much of his career searching for pesticides that would kill the mites but not the bees. In 1995 he published the results of a 10-year bee survey. The average annual honeybee loss, attributed to both mites and chemicals, was about 23 percent.
The stresses endured by honeybees became clear to Sam Comfort earlier in this decade when he was working for a Montana pollination outfit called Arlee Apiaries. Every February at the start of pollinating season, Comfort and fellow contract workers used fork lifts to move 12-foot-tall towers of wooden hives onto flatbed trucks. “Five hundred hives to a truck, all of them covered by a giant net,” he says. With the loads jammed in tight, drivers set out for the almond groves of California, where the bees’ whirlwind pollination tour began. Every month brought a new destination: apple orchards in Washington, cherry groves in Montana. During each assignment, the bees fed on row after row of the same crop. After pollinating throughout the spring and producing honey in the summer, Arlee Apiary bees were sent to a sandy lot near San Francisco, where they spent the winter living on corn syrup—a scene that Comfort describes as “fear and loathing in a city of 5,000 hives.” One worker would pop off the hive lids and set them aside, a second would use a gasoline nozzle to pump corn syrup from a 300-gallon tank into the hives, and a third followed to put the lids back on. When warm weather arrived in Montana, the drivers would truck their worn-out bees home, only to begin the whole process again.
One of the most devastating pressures on the bees, according to Mattila’s research, is the limit on what they can eat. “Vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins—all the same things we need to survive come from pollen,” she explains. In the wild, honeybees get different nutrients from different types of plants, but industrial agriculture limits bees to monoculture crops. “Once nutritionally stressed, honey bees burn through their body’s reserves; then they shut down brood rearing,” Mattila adds. “It’s all tied together.”
The bees not only receive an insufficient diet but must compete strenuously for it. “Hundreds of colonies go into an almond orchard at a time,” Mattila says, “so food can get spread pretty thin.” With so many bees around, some will also get lost and go home to the wrong hive. After all, she notes, “bees are used to nesting in trees, not in one of a thousand boxes that all look the same.” The upshot is that a malnourished, disoriented bee carrying mites could end up infecting a whole new colony. “It’s like having the flu and going on a crowded subway. Bees spread disease the same way.”
Jammed in tight, The bees set out for the almond groves of california to begin their whirlwind pollination tour.
Inbreeding then provides the devastating final insult to the bee colonies. The looming genetic crisis made its first blip on the entomological radar more than a decade ago, after Sheppard began comparing the mitochondrial DNA of commercial and feral queens. The differences were stunning. About 30 percent of bees in the 700 feral colonies he studied showed traces of genetic code from northern European ancestors, compared with just 2 percent in commercial stock. “It was a genetic bottleneck,” he says. And the problem persists. A study published by Sheppard in July revealed that breeders use only 500 select mothers annually to produce almost a million queen bees, which then get shipped out to lead commercial hives. Making matters worse, the severe loss of wild honeybees due to mite infestation virtually eliminates any chance that feral drones will mate with commercial queens and liven up the gene pool.
Mattila explores the grim effects of loss of genetic variety in the glass-walled bee colonies she keeps in her lab, where video cameras capture it all—bees building honeycombs, producing honey, rearing offspring, doing waggle dances. One of her studies compared colonies having 15 different drone fathers (similar to the natural state) with those having only one. The more diverse colonies stored more honey, spent more time foraging, and experienced faster growth; the single-father colonies could not even amass enough supplies to survive a winter. “They’re not aggressive. They don’t communicate, their approach to food is lackluster, and they don’t put on weight,” Mattila says.
In response to the sharp decline in commercial bee populations, scientists and beekeepers like Comfort are working to wind back the clock. “It’s all about diversity,” he says. After years in industrial beekeeping, he had an epiphany in 2007 while sitting on an elk path in Montana thinking about the situation: dead bees, missing bees, mites thriving on chemical strips meant to kill them. He decided to pack it in and head back East. He drove to Dutchess County in the truck he now lives in, with an empty honey comb dangling from the mirror and a Montana license plate that read BEESWAX.
Today Comfort shuttles around in his truck, fetching hives out of local squirrel houses, conducting a one-man breeding project. His goal is not to furnish the large-scale migratory beekeepers with more robust stock but rather to create an infrastructure of small-scale beekeepers. After he collects a new colony, he monitors it for a while, watching to see if it survives the winter, resists pathogens, and produces a good amount of honey. The ones faring well are the keepers. He uses the progeny from those hives to establish new queens, then sells those queens to local beekeepers, mostly hobbyists who “just want to let the bees do their thing.”
Fortunately, Comfort is not alone. Michael Burgett is doing similar work in his lab space at Oregon State. Firemen and other locals call him up when they come across feral hives, and Burgett snaps them up. He hangs on to queens from hives that survive the stress of winter and mates them with bees from other healthy colonies. At North Carolina State University, entomologist Debbie Delaney is lending a hand as well, seeking out feral colonies that have survived the spread of the varroa mite in the hope that she will find genes that confer resistance.
Slowly, beekeepers like Comfort and Burgett are trying to ease bees away from their troubled state, allowing them to drift back toward a healthier, more natural way of life. “Bees have been doing this for 80 million years,” Comfort says. “All we have to do is get out of their way.”
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/19-who-killed-all-those-honeybees-we-did

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-22-insecticides-autoimmune_N.htm

Obama Supports Food Inc.'s World Domination and All We Get Is the White House Garden?

Alexis Baden-Mayer, Esq. 
Organic Consumers Association, October 23, 2009 
I'll admit it. I'm an unabashed fan of the First Lady. I read every article about theWhite House organic garden and I go to Michele's farmers' market every Thursday. I’m a fan and I’m a little jealous, too. She’s managed to educate DC school children and provide farm fresh food to state dinners. The garden I started at my daughter’s DC public school this spring was abandoned to the office and maintenance staff this summer, then plowed under in a schoolyard renovation before school started in the fall, and has yet to feed any students.
Because I admire the First Lady’s good example, I am shocked by the chemical agribusiness and biotech cheerleading of her husband’s administration. FromUSDA and FDA appointments of biotech and chemical industry insiders, to support for the preposterous idea that genetic engineering can feed the world, it is obvious that the Obama Administration is happy to assist agribusiness in its quest for world domination.
World domination sounds a little histrionic, doesn’t it? But, there’s no other way to describe the profit-at-any-cost business model of companies like Monsanto that seek to patent and control access to seeds and food and decide for the world what we can eat. The question that faces humanity today is, “Shall we let Monsanto,Cargill, McDonald’s and a handful of other multinational corporations decide the future of food?”
Proponents of the so-called Second Green Revolution, led by the chemical, biotech and industrial biofuels lobby, are spending millions each year on advertisementsand donations to politicians, universities, and non-profits to convince us that the only way to feed the world and survive climate change is through high technology—relying on factory farm animal production, genetic engineering, toxic pesticides,nitrate chemical fertilizers, and compliant farmers, farm workers, and consumers.
With far fewer resources, the organic movement is generating the science to support an alternative view. Organic agriculture can feed the world, turn backclimate change and make food production more resilient to droughts and floods. Organic agriculture can do it with biodiversity instead of biotech, greenhouse gas sequestration instead of emissions, integrated pest management instead of toxic pesticides, humus-rich compost instead of fossil fuel fertilizers or sewage sludge, more family farmers and better conditions for farm workers.
The question of which agriculture model will dominate food production is a question we only have one opportunity to answer. Once a seed or animal variety isextinct or contaminated with foreign genes, we will never get it back. In an age when a billion people are stuffed while a billion people are starved, most people on the planet suffer from either poor nutrition, exposure to toxic ingredients, diet-related diseases, or all three. Agriculture is a life and death issue for all of us.
So, which side is the Obama Administration on? The first answer to that question is, well, what is the president saying?
In announcing his Innovation Strategy, President Obama said, "From biotechnology to nanotechnology, from the development of new forms of energy to research into treatments of ancient diseases, there is so much potential to change our world and improve our lives."
The First Lady champions organic, while the President promotes biotechnology (a.k.a. genetic engineering) and nanotechnology, two untested technologies whose ubiquitous appearance in food and cosmetics has driven concerned consumers to organic in droves. 
According to the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America, "Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are one of  the most dangerous and radical changes to our food supply. These largely unregulated ingredients [are] found in 60-70% of the foods in the US."
Last December, a report by the National Research Council found serious gaps in the government's plan for determining if nanomaterials pose a risk and called for an effective national plan for identifying and managing potential risks. In a March 2009 commentary, a Lloyd's of London analyst drew parallels between the global financial meltdown and risks from nanomaterials. The financial collapse reflected "blithe acceptance of complex products that many didn't understand." With regard to nanomaterials, he commented that "the importance of getting to grips with and quantifying complex sources of risk has never been more obvious."
To be fair to the Obama Administration as a whole, I understand the EPA is considering taking a more precautionary approach to nanomaterials. In the meantime, the only thing an informed consumer can do is try to avoid these products. The problem is that they are not labeled! Buying organic is the only sure way to avoid biotechnology and nanotechnology. If she's the conscientious as well-informed consumer she appears to be, you can bet Michelle Obama doesn't let her kids near the stuff!
The second way to figure out which side the Obama Administration is to ask, who's in the Obama Administration? It's sort of a "one for you, two for me" kind of arrangement.
President Obama and the biotech industry gets the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. While Iowa Governor, he was a leading advocate for Monsanto, genetic engineering, and factory farming. He was recently caught in the act of trying to promote biotechnology as the answer to world hunger. 
The First Lady and the sustainable agriculture movement get the Deputy Secretary. Kathleen Merrigan is a stellar organic advocate who is working hard to facilitate local food systems through the Know Your Farmer program. But, as the political director of the Organic Consumers Association, I have to admit, it doesn't look like Bush Administration policies that weakened organic are unlikely to be overturned quickly. Concentration is increasing in the organic dairy industry, with bad-actor brands like Horizon expanding factory farm-style feedlots, but Merrigan doesn't want to admit there's any such thing as a "factory farm." She also says she has no plans to address blatant fraud in the organic cosmetics industry where brands like "Jason: Pure, Natural & Organic" advertise themselves as “organic” without being USDA certified.
Of the Under Secretaries named so far, Rajiv Shah, Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist, Kevin Concanon, Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, Jim Miller, Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services,Dallas Tonsager, Under Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development, and Edward M. Avalos , Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs, none are champions of organic agriculture, and only Shah is a outright biotechnology advocate. (Under Secretaries for Food Safety or Natural Resources and Environment have yet to be appointed.)
Rajiv Shah, Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist
Agricultural policy experts initially that Shah, Director of Agricultural Development Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, lacked real experience in agriculture. Shah was the founding director of the Gates Foundation's agriculture program, which has donated $37 million to GM research.
Directly under Shah is Roger Beachy who is steering the direction of US agricultural research at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Beachy is a long time Monsanto collaborator who directed an institute established by Monsanto and academic partners with a $70-million pledge from the corporation. It's effectively a Monsanto front.
Shah’s senior adviser for energy and climate is Maura O'Neill. O'Neill ran a public-private life sciences venture called Explore Life, dedicated to drawing biotech companies to the Seattle area where the Gates Foundation is based.
Shah has brought in Rachael Goldfarb to work for him as counselor. At the Gates Foundation, Goldfarb was special assistant to Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program.
Shah’s team has already awarded $11 million in Coordinated Agricultural Project grants to four research universities to study “plant genomics and ways to improve the nutrition and health values of important crops.” Expect more GMO tomatoes, potatoes, barley, soybean, and trees. And be on the lookout for new, GMO legumes embedded with cholesterol and diabetes drugs.
According to a USDA press release on the awards, “Because humans consume more legumes than any other crop, this research has the potential to reduce cholesterol and sugar levels, which in turn can prevent or alleviate certain types of cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.”
The irony is that there’s a GMO legume already on the market, soy, that has found its way into just about all processed and fried foods in the form of partially hydrogenated soybean oil (a.k.a. trans fat). Will the result of this research be a new GMO trans fat that treats diet-related diseases caused by other GMO trans fats? It would certainly be a first for the field of genetic engineering. In fact, any new GMO crop that actually improved the nutrition and health value of an important crop would be a first. Contrary to popular belief, to date, there is not one health or nutritional benefit associated with any GMO crop. They’re all genetically modified to either withstand or produce pesticides (usually manufactured by the chemical company that genetically engineered the crop).
Jim Miller, Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services
Jim Miller was the President of the National Association of Wheat Growers, which has taken a pro-biotech position, but his term was in the 80s, before GMOs were an issue. In 2002, while Miller was the National Farmers Union’s chief economist, NFU asked the government for amoratorium that would temporarily discontinue granting patents on GMOs. The organization wanted to prevent large companies from gaining control of genetically modified products. So, Jim Miller can’t be characterized as a biotech booster, but one of the divisions he oversees, the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS), always has been and that doesn’t seem to have changed with new appointments.
Michael Michener, a former lead Iraq policy officer at the State Department who was a foreign policy adviser to Vilsack during his brief presidential campaign, now heads the FAS. On May 26, 2009, the FAS posted a pro-GMO report titled, “The Unexplored Potential of Organic-Biotech Production.” After thousands of angry letters from Organic Consumer Association activists, the agency was forced to pull the report and print a retraction explaining, “[T]he report does not represent the policy of the United States Government.” Nevertheless, the USDA, along with 3 of the world’s top 5 seed companies (Monsanto, Syngenta, Land O’ Lakes) and a host of other multinational agribusinesses, sponsored the 2009 Borlaug Dialogue. On the agenda was “Harmonizing Organic and Sustainable Agricultural Practices with Modern Technology and Genetics.”
Dallas Tonsager, Rural Development
Tonsager’s top priorities for USDA's Rural Development include expanding economic opportunity from bioenergy, including biofuel, biomass and cellulose. This is likely to result in short-term economic gain for many farmers and rural communities. Unlike other parts of his plan, including capitalizing on the economic benefits of local food systems and increasing broadband access, bioenergy can have hidden long-term costs for the economies and ecology of rural communities. On one hand, there are small farmers who produce biofuels responsibly and local biodiesel collectives that recycle spent cooking oil. (What’s not to like? I’m the proud driver of a veggie diesel car, myself!) But, that’s not where the majority of government subsidies go. According to theRainforest Action Network:
Agribusiness, oil, energy and auto companies are rapidly consolidating control over the entire agrofuel sector. The power of these corporations is staggering: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) lobbied the U.S. government for three decades to promote adding ethanol to gasoline, resulting in $2 billion of government subsidies—most of which has gone directly to ADM. Automakers exploit a biofuels loophole in fuel economy regulations to avoid reducing vehicle oil consumption and tailpipe greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 
That $2 billion makes the $13 million in loans and grants the USDA recently awarded to 233 renewable energy projects under the Rural Energy for America Program look pretty puny. Between 2003 and 2008, the Department of Agriculture awarded $140 million in grants and $197 million in loan guarantees to more than 2,000 projects in all 50 states, including wind farms, anaerobic digesters, biofuel production, solar electric systems, and efficiency upgrades. $99.3 million has been appropriated for REAP in 2010.
Edward Avalos, Marketing and Regulatory Programs
Edward Avalos is the USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs, which includes the National Organic Program. This uncontroversial figure worked for 29 years at the NM Department of Agriculture. In 2008, he named Sunland Peanut, the largest producer of organic peanut butter in the country, the New Mexico Agricultural Marketer of the Year.
Kevin Concannon, Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services
Concannon, another uncontroversial state administrator, has been director of health and human service agencies in Iowa (under Governor Tom Vilsack), Maine, and Oregon. He’s taking on food assistance at a time when nearly half of U.S. newborns are eligible for the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program. WIC is available to families with incomes up to $33,874 for a household of three — 185% of the federal poverty level. He recently presided over a change at WIC that, while not increasing benefits, will allow WIC vouchers to be used, for the first time, for fruits, vegetables and whole grains, in addition to milk, cheese, juice and eggs. Currently, there is a de facto ban on organic in WIC, but big conventional food processors like Sara Lee are alreadycashing in on the new market that’s been created for them.
Concannon's Deputy is Janey Thornton. She's a school nutrition director who played a leadership roles in both the School Nutrition Association and the School Nutrition Foundation. Grist.org food editor Tom Philpott was the first to look into SNA's industry ties:
The SNA’s list of “industry members” is password-protected, but it does name its “industry member advisory board,” which includes execs from high-fructose-corn syrup giant Archer Daniels Midland and Conagra. And its “current industry patron list” makes bracing reading for anyone who would like to see school-lunch reform. It includes ADM, Campbell Soup Company, Cargill Kitchen Solutions, PepsiCo Foodservice, Sara Lee Foods Foodservice, Coca Cola, Tyson Foods, Chicken of the Sea International—a kind of roster of our nation’s most powerful food processors.
The Grist.org piece, "Obama's school-lunch chief not much of a reformer," reviews Thornton's resume of cafeteria menus:
When we think of the sugar, fat and salt children are consuming, we cringe. When we think about the multi-national agribusiness companies this type of school food service system supports, we cringe. And when we think about the negative overall effect that this system has on People, Planet and Sustainable Profit, all sense of optimism just drains away.
If the state of affairs at USDA weren't depressing enough, many biotech and pesticide promoters have been appointed to other agencies dealing with food and farming, as well, notably:
Michael Taylor, FDA
The senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner on food safety is Michael Taylor. The Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Corp. from 1998 until 2001, Taylor exemplifies the revolving door between the food industry and the government agencies that regulate it.
Islam Siddiqui, USTR
Islam Siddiqui has been nominated as the Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. If Congress confirms him, he will use the post to continue the lobbying he has done for CropLife (a front group for chemical agriculture), promoting chemical-intensive, genetically modified products that undermine local food security in developing countries. CropLife didn’t like the First Lady’s pesticide-free garden.
Jill Long Thompson, Farm Credit Administration Board
Jill Long Thompson has been nominated for a seat on the Farm Credit Administration Board. After a political career, she became CEO of the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, a non-profit founded to research biotechnology, pesticides, U.S. farm and food policy and international trade and development. The National Center produces a yearly “Update On Impacts On US Agriculture Of Biotechnology Der... that attempts to make the case that biotechnology-derived crops increase yields, reduce the use of chemicals and improve economic conditions for farmers. National Center trustees include university administrators, a former cabinet secretary, and representatives of agribusinesses including Altria, Blythe Cotton and ConAgra.
Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer
According to a press release for the "Emerging Technologies/Emerging Economies: (Nano)technology for Equitable Development" conference, to be held from November 4-6, 2009, in Washington, D.C., Chopra will address the conference to " discuss using technology to solve environmental, energy, water, food security and health problems in developing nations."

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19436.cfm

Hormones in U.S. Beef Linked to Increased Cancer Risk

Dr. Samuel S. Epstein 
Cancer Prevention Coalition, Oct 21, 2009 
Beef produced in the United States is heavily contaminated with natural or synthetic sex hormones, which are associated with an increased risk of reproductive and childhood cancers, warns Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition.

"Increased levels of sex hormones are linked to the escalating incidence of reproductive cancers in the United States since 1975 - 60% for prostate, 59% for testis, and 10% for breast," Dr. Epstein says.

The hormones in past and current use include the natural estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, and the synthetic zeranol, trenbolone, and melengesterol.

When beef cattle enter feedlots, pellets of these hormones are implanted under the ear skin, a process that is repeated at the midpoint of their 100-day pre-slaughter fattening period, Dr. Epstein explains. These hormones increase carcass weight, adding over $80 in extra profit per animal.

Also, Dr. Epstein says, "Not surprisingly, but contrary to longstanding claims by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), residues of these hormones in meat are up to 20-fold higher than normal."

"Still higher residues result from the not uncommon illegal practice of implantation directly into muscle. Furthermore, contrary to misleading assurances, meat is still not monitored for hormone residues," Dr. Epstein emphasizes.

Nevertheless, he points out, the FDA and USDA maintain that hormone residues in meat are within "normal levels," while waiving any requirements for residue testing.

Following a single ear implant in steers of Synovex-S, a combination of estrogen and progesterone, residues of these hormones in meat were found to be up to 20-fold higher than normal.

The amount of estradiol in two hamburgers eaten in one day by an 8-year-old boy could increase his total hormone levels by as much as 10%, particularly as young children have very low natural hormone levels.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Epstein says, the incidence of childhood cancer has increased by 38% since 1975.

These concerns are not new. As evidenced in a series of General Accountability Office investigations and Congressional hearings, FDA residue-tolerance programs and USDA inspections are in near total disarray, aggravated by brazen denials and cover-ups.

A January 1986 report, "Human Food Safety and the Regulation of Animal Drugs," unanimously approved by the House Committee on Government Operations, concluded that "the FDA has consistently disregarded its responsibility - has repeatedly put what is perceives are interests of veterinarians and the livestock industry ahead of its legal obligation to protect consumers, thus jeopardizing the health and safety of consumers of meat, milk and poultry."

On January 1, 1989, the European Community placed a ban on meat imports from animals treated with growth inducing hormones. This had a direct impact on the U.S. beef industry, which uses hormones in more than half of the cattle sent to market each year.

Twenty-years later, on May 6, 2009, the European Union and the United States settled their long- running dispute over hormone-treated beef. Under terms of the four-year deal the EU will be permitted to maintain its ban on hormone-fed beef. In return, the EU has agreed to increase the amount of hormone-free beef that can be imported from the U.S. without duty.

It is well recognized that American women have about a five-fold greater risk of breast cancer than women in countries that do not permit the sale of hormonal beef.

However, as recently confirmed by studies of cancer rates in Los Angeles County, the most highly populated, ethnically diverse county in the U.S., the low risk in Japanese women in Japan increases sharply in Japanese immigrants to the United States after one to two generations.

This, and a wide range of other studies in migrant populations, is evidence that avoidable causes of breast cancer include adoption of Western dietary habits, particularly the consumption of hormone- laced beef.

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; and a former President of the Rachel Carson Trust. His awards include the 1989 Right Livelihood Award and the 2005 Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medal for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention. Dr. Epstein has authored 250 scientific articles and 15 books on cancer prevention, including the groundbreaking The Politics of Cancer (1979), and most recently Toxic Beauty (2009, Benbella Books: www.benbellabooks.com) about carcinogens in cosmetics and personal care products.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19434.cfm

Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought
ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2009) — A report examining the impact of a global biofuels program on greenhouse gas emissions during the 21st century has found that carbon loss stemming from the displacement of food crops and pastures for biofuels crops may be twice as much as the CO2 emissions from land dedicated to biofuels production. The study, led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo, also predicts that increased fertilizer use for biofuels production will cause nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) to become more important than carbon losses, in terms of warming potential, by the end of the century.
Using a global modeling system that links economic and biogeochemistry data, Melillo, MBL research associate David Kicklighter, and their colleagues examined the effects of direct and indirect land-use on greenhouse gas emissions as the production of biofuels increases over this century. They report their findings in the October 22 issue of Science Express.
Direct land-use emissions are generated from land committed solely to bioenergy production. Indirect land-use emissions occur when biofuels production on cropland or pasture displaces agricultural activity to another location, causing additional land-use changes and a net increase in carbon loss.
No major countries currently include carbon emissions from biofuel-related land-use changes in their carbon loss accounting and there is concern about the practicality of including such losses in a system designed to reduce fossil-fuel emissions. Moreover, methods to assess indirect land-use emissions are controversial. All quantitative analyses to date have either ignored indirect emissions altogether, considered those associated from crop displacement from a limited area, confused indirect emissions with direct or general land-use emissions, or developed estimates based on a static framework of today's economy.
Using a modeling system that integrates global land-use change driven by multiple demands for land and that includes dynamic greenhouse-gas accounting, Melillo and his colleagues factored in a full suite of variables, including the potential of net carbon uptake from enhanced land management, N2O emissions from the increased use of fertilizer, environmental effects on carbon storage, and the economics of land conversion.
"Our analysis, which we think is the most comprehensive to date, shows that direct and indirect land-use changes associated with an aggressive global biofuels program have the potential to release large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere," says Melillo.
Melillo and his colleagues simulated two global land-use scenarios in the study. In Case 1, natural areas are converted to meet increased demand for biofuels production land. In Case 2, there is less willingness to convert land and existing managed land is used more intensely. Both scenarios are linked to a global climate policy that would control greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel sources to stabilize CO2 concentrations at 550 parts per million, a target often talked about in climate policy discussions. Under such a climate policy, fossil fuel use would become more expensive and the introduction of biofuels would accelerate, ultimately increasing the size of the biofuels industry and causing additional effects on land use, land prices, and food and forestry production and prices.
The model predicts that, in both scenarios, land devoted to biofuels will become greater than the total area currently devoted to crops by the end of the 21st century. Case 1 will result in more carbon loss than Case 2, especially at mid-century. In addition, indirect land use will be responsible for substantially greater carbon losses (up to twice as much) than direct land use.
"Large greenhouse gas emissions from these indirect land-use changes are unintended consequences of a global biofuels program; consequences that add to the climate-change problem rather than helping to solve it," says Melillo "As our analysis shows, these unintended consequences are largest when the clearing of forests is involved."
In their model, Melillo and his colleagues also simulated N2O emissions from the additional fertilizer that will be required to grow biofuel crops in the future. They found that over the century, N2O emissions will surpass CO2 in terms of warming potential. By 2100, Melillo and his team estimate that in both study scenarios, biofuels production will account for more than half of the total N2O emissions from fertilizer. "Best practices for the use of nitrogen fertilizer, such as synchronizing fertilizer application with plant demand, can reduce N2O emissions associated with biofuels production," the scientists say.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091022141117.htm

Amino Acid May Help Reduce Cocaine Cravings

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2009) — A new study in rats has found that N-acetylcysteine (NAC), a commonly available and generally nontoxic amino acid derivative, reverses changes in the brain's circuitry associated with cocaine addiction. The reversal appears to lessen the cravings associated with cocaine, thus providing protection against relapse.
The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
"Our finding suggests a promising therapeutic strategy for cocaine addiction, for which there is no approved treatment," said lead author Khaled Moussawi of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Cocaine is a highly addictive drug characterized by frequent relapses. Recent advances in brain imaging are helping scientists uncover what happens in the brain when an addicted person is exposed to the drug-associated "cues" that trigger craving -- and lead to relapse. They've found that repeated exposure to psychoactive drugs such as cocaine causes an imbalance in the brain circuits regulating reward and cognitive control.
One of these circuits is a pathway involving the neurotransmitter glutamate. In the current study, Moussawi and his colleagues found that NAC restored normal functioning to this circuit in rats that had been previously addicted to cocaine. In addition, after receiving NAC, the previously cocaine-addicted rats did not reengage in drug-seeking behavior, even in the presence of drug-associated cues.
"Clinical trials involving people addicted to cocaine and nicotine have already suggested that N-acetylcysteine may be useful in decreasing cravings for those drugs," said Moussawi. "Our research adds support to that suggestion." A phase III clinical trial using NAC to treat cocaine addiction is currently underway.
Research was supported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091023102504.htm

Cellular phones lead to weak bones

Times of India, 26 October 2009
Do you wear your cell phone on your belt? Well, here's some news for you-the electromagnetic rays from mobiles lead to decreased bone density in an area of the pelvis that is commonly used for bone grafts. 

A study by Dr. Tolga Atay and colleagues of Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Turkey, found that with long-term exposure, electromagnetic fields from cell phones could weaken the bone, potentially affecting the outcomes of surgical procedures using bone grafts. 

The researchers measured bone density at the upper rims of the pelvis (iliac wings) in 150 men who were cell phone users and carried their phones on their belts. 

They took the measurements via a technique called dual x-ray absorptiometry-the same test used to measure bone density in patients with osteoporosis and other bone diseases. 

Bone density was compared on the side where the men wore their phones (the right side in 122 men and the left side in 28) versus the opposite side. 

The men carried their phones for an average of 15 hours per day, and had used cell phones for an average of 6 years. 

The results showed a slight reduction in iliac wing bone density on the side where the men carried their phones. 

The difference was not statistically significant, and did not approach the reductions seen in osteoporosis. 

However, the researchers have noted that the men were relatively young-average 32 years-and that further bone weakening may occur with longer follow-up. 

The results raise the possibility that bone density could be adversely affected by electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones. 

The ilac wings are a widely used source of bone for bone grafting, so any reduction in bone density may be of special importance to reconstructive surgery. 

However, the researchers emphasize that their findings are preliminary. 

Meanwhile, Atay and colleagues concluded: "It would be better to keep mobile phones as far as possible from our body during our daily lives." 

The study has been published in the September issue of The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Cellular-phones-lead-to-weak-bones/articleshow/5157480.cms

A kiwifruit a day can keep doctor at bay

Times of India, 25 October 2009
Kiwi fruit has been labelled as the best source of vitamin C, which can have wonderful health benefits, according to an expert. 

Professor Robin Fraser, of Otago University's Christchurch School of Medicine, has said that the furry fruit could be the key to living longer as it appears to be the perfect food for preventing all sorts of liver problems, as well as keeping white blood cells health. 

Fraser, who has seen many unhealthy livers in his time as a pathologist, is a convert to the benefits of the fruit. 

"It just seems as though it works. I'm so convinced that I eat kiwifruit every morning for my breakfast," Stuff.co.nz quoted him as saying. 

Fraser compared the liver to a sieve that when working properly effectively filtered the carrier of cholesterol. 

But, he said, those holes could be closed because of excess drinking, an overly fatty diet, smoking, illicit drug use and stress, which could lead to atherosclerosis- a major killer through heart failure, strokes, gangrenous feet and aortic aneurism. 

But he pointed out that a daily dose of kiwifruit, along with a healthier lifestyle, appeared to be able to reopen those holes in the liver-which, in his opinion was an exciting development. 

He said kiwifruit was the most efficient way of getting the recommended dose of vitamin C, the active ingredient that appeared to fix the liver. 

Dr Margreet Vissers, the dean of research at Otago University in Christchurch, said that vitamin C was also needed by white blood cells to kill bacteria and ensured they did not kill off everything else in the process. 

Fraser presented his findings at the annual scientific meeting of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia in Christchurch yesterday.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/A-kiwifruit-a-day-can-keep-doctor-at-bay/articleshow/5160329.cms

Even low alcohol intake is bad for health
Times of India, 23 October 2009
Low alcohol consumption has a negative impact on overall health, claims a new study 

To reach the conclusion, researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation studied the relationship between alcohol onsumption and health. 

Johan Jarl, from Lund University, Sweden, worked with a team of researchers to determine the effect of low alcohol consumption on health by measuring alcohol-related medical care costs and episodes collected during the Swedish Cost of Alcohol Project in 2002. 

They found that, with the exception of people more than 80 years old, men who consumed up to five units a day and women who consumed up to 2.5 units a day cost the health service more than those who do not drink. Their finding calls into question the previous assumption that low alcohol consumption is good for your health. 

Several studies show that people with low alcohol intake are more highly paid. One common, but untested, explanation for this link is that low consumers spend more time at work and therefore gets better pay due to the protective effect of alcohol on some diseases. 

According to Jarl, "In this study, however, we found that, when including also those diseases where low consumption increases the risk of morbidity and mortality, low-to-moderate alcohol intake actually has a net negative health impact", adding, "It is therefore doubtful if the common explanation of health as the link between alcohol consumption and increased wages is valid in its existing form." 

Speaking about other factors that, in the light of these findings, could account for the alcohol-wage link, Jarl said, "Family background, social networking and subjective health benefits may be responsible. It is not unlikely that the link is actually compiled of several different factors that together give a significant effect of low alcohol consumption on wage. 

It should come as no surprise that the nature of links such as this is normally complex and care should be taken not to oversimplify".
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Even-low-alcohol-intake-is-bad-for-health-/articleshow/5152432.cms

Cherry juice can treat pain after exercise

Times of India, 23 October 2009
A glass of unsweetened cherry juice can work like common non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, used by millions to treat pain and inflammation after exercise, say experts . 

In the US study, Oregon Health and Science University researchers found that runners who drank the juice before training for a long-distance relay had 23 per cent less muscle pain than those on an artificial fruit drink. 

After analyses, boffins discovered that the juice of tart cherries contains flavonoids, naturally occurring antioxidants with anti-inflammatory powers, reports The Daily Express . 

Dr Kerry Kuehl, a sports medicine specialist at the university, said: Our research suggests that tart cherry juice may work like common non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, used by millions to treat pain and inflammation after exercise. 

Also, drinking tart cherry juice may help people avoid negative side effects of these drugs.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Cherry-juice-can-treat-pain-after-exercise/articleshow/5152087.cms

Too much light at night leads to depression

Times of India  22 October 2009
Exposure to light during night can lead to symptoms of depression, a new study conducted on mice has found 

It was found that rodents kept in a lighted room 24 hours a day showed symptoms of depression unlike mice that had a normal light-dark cycle. A total of 24 male laboratory mice were used for the research. 

Half were housed in light for 16 hours a day and darkness for 8 hours, while the other half had 24 hours of light. Also, half of each group had opaque tubes in their units that let them escape the light when they chose. The other half had similar tubes that were clear and let the light in. 

It was observed that mice which was kept in constant light, but could escape into a dark showed less evidence of depressive symptoms than those that had 24-hour light, but only a clear tube in their housing. 

Laura Fonken, lead author of the study and a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State University, said: “The ability to escape light seemed to quell the depressive effects. But constant light with no chance of escape increased depressive symptoms.

Co-author Randy Nelson, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Ohio State, suggested that artificial lighting can have similar affects on humans. 

He said: The increasing rate of depressive disorders in humans corresponds with the increasing use of light at night in modern society. Many people are now exposed to unnatural light cycles, and that may have real consequences for our health. 

The researchers presented the study in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. It will also feature in the December issue of the journal Behavioural Brain Research.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Too-much-light-at-night-leads-to-depression/articleshow/5148683.cms