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31 March, 2007

Alzheimer's tackled by testosterone boost

RESEARCHERS in Perth have made a groundbreaking discovery into the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, after showing that boosting testosterone levels in the body can lower levels of a toxic brain protein linked to the development of the crippling condition. Preliminary results from a clinical trial of West Australian men, presented at the prestigious Royal Society of Medicine in London, show that not only does the use of a testosterone cream lower the protein beta amyloid but importantly it appears to improve memory.

Professor Ralph Martins, of the Sir James McCusker Foundation for Alzheimer's Research at Hollywood Private Hospital, said from London that he was excited by early results from an ongoing trial of healthy men aged 50 to 72 who had a testosterone deficiency and only mild signs of memory loss. They have been treated at Perth's Well Men Centre using a WA-made testosterone cream, and the trial follows an earlier study of guinea pigs which showed the treatment reduced their levels of beta amyloid.

Professor Martins said that it was the first real evidence of cause and effect. "In the past we've shown an association, so when you lower testosterone, you raise beta amyloid levels, and we've also shown an association with people at higher risk of getting Alzheimer's, but we wanted to see what happens in the brain," he said.

Source



Cancer trigger mapped

A DEADLY "active ingredient" in almost all human cancers has been mapped by Australian scientists, bringing the world closer to a potentially life-saving treatment. The breakthrough, published today in the international journal Science, will speed up the global research effort to develop anti-cancer drugs that "switch off" tumour growth.

Cancer researchers at the Children's Medical Research Institute have discovered the composition of an enzyme called telomerase, overactive in almost 90 per cent of cancers. It makes both healthy and cancerous cells immortal and is regarded as one of the most important triggers in cancer. Telomerase was believed to contain a mixture of any of 32 different proteins, but Dr Scott Cohen and his team found only two were involved. "We discovered it was a really simple composition," Dr Cohen said. "All these researchers studying it can really focus now, and that should boost the productivity of research into new drugs, which is very exciting."

The team made the finding by growing cancer cells to collect the hard-to-find enzyme, then purified it down and used a $1 million telescope to work out what it contained. "The next step is to define its shape, if you can do that you can pretty effectively design drugs to very specifically target telomerase, turn it off and stop the cancer growth," Dr Cohen said. The researchers say it is one of the biggest achievements in the telomerase field since the enzyme was discovered by former Melbourne researcher Elizabeth Blackburn in the 1980s.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



30 March, 2007

PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY THAT FIZZY DRINKS ARE BAD FOR YOU

Journal abstract follows:

Effects of Soft Drink Consumption on Nutrition and Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

By Lenny R. Vartanian et al.

The authors are with the Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

In a meta-analysis of 88 studies, we examined the association between soft drink consumption and nutrition and health outcomes. We found clear associations of soft drink intake with increased energy intake and body weight. Soft drink intake also was associated with lower intakes of milk, calcium, and other nutrients and with an increased risk of several medical problems (e.g., diabetes).

Study design significantly influenced results: larger effect sizes were observed in studies with stronger methods (longitudinal and experimental vs cross-sectional studies). Several other factors also moderated effect sizes (e.g., gender, age, beverage type). Finally, studies funded by the food industry reported significantly smaller effects than did non-industry-funded studies. Recommendations to reduce population soft drink consumption are strongly supported by the available science.

The naivety of this paper is rather breathtaking. From their introductory courses onward, psychologists are told that correlation is not causation. So have they simply shown that fat kids drink more fizzy drinks? I would think so. In my observation they do, anyway. Fat kids eat and drink more in general. And if you drink more fizzy drinks, do you have as much room for milk etc? That gets close to being true by definition, I think. And if kids drank less softdrink, would that make them slimmer? Not if they drank more milk -- which is highly calorific. It is a disgrace that this bit of garbage "research" was ever published -- but intellectual standards in psychology have always been very low -- nearly as low as in sociology. See here. But it's good business-bashing so that ensured its publication



Brain mishaps produce "cold" morality

This finding does tend very strongly to reinforce the clinical impression that psychopaths have "a bit missing" -- a brain abnormality -- whether from genetics, trauma, intrauterine environment or other reasons

Imagine that someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?

Most people waver or say they couldn't, even if they agree that in theory they should. But a new study reports that people with damage to one part of the brain make a less personal calculation. The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many.

The research shows that emotion plays a key role in moral decisions, scientists claim: if certain emotions are blocked, we make decisions thatright or wrongseem unnaturally cold.

Past studies have linked damage to some brain areas with a lack of any discernible conscience, part of a syndrome commonly called psychopathy. The new study, by contrast, identified a region of brain damage tied to what the researchers portrayed as a narrower deficit: one that strips morality of an emotional component while leaving its logical part intact.

The scientists presented 30 males and females with scenarios pitting immediate harm to one person against future harm to many. Six participants had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a small region behind the forehead; 12 had brain damage elsewhere; another 12 had no damage.

The scenarios in the study were extreme, but the core dilemma isn't. Should one confront a coworker, challenge a neighbor, or scold a loved one to uphold the greater good? The subjects with ventromedial prefrontal damage stood out in their stated willingness to harm an individuala prospect that usually generates strong aversion, researchers said.

"They have abnormal social emotions in real life. They lack empathy and compassion," said Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., one of the researchers.

"In those circumstances most people. will be torn. But these particular subjects seem to lack that conflict," said Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, another of the scientists.

"Our work provides the first causal account of the role of emotions in moral judgments," added a third member of the research team, Marc Hauser of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The study appears March 21 in the advance online edition of the research journal Nature.

What's "astonishing," Hauser added, is "how selective the deficit is... [it] leaves intact a suite of moral problem solving abilities, but damages judgments in which an aversive action is put into direct conflict with a strong utilitarian outcome." Utilitarianism is the belief that the top priority in ethics should be what's best for the greatest number of people.

Humans often deviate from this principle because they recoil from directly harming one another. This aversion is "a combination of rejection of the act [and] compassion for that particular person," Damasio said. The question, Adolphs asked, is whether "social emotions" such as compassion are "necessary to make these moral judgments."

The study's answer will inform a classic philosophical debate on whether humans make moral judgments based on norms and societal rules, or based on their emotions, the scientists predicted. It also holds another implication for philosophy, they said: it shows that humans are neurologically unfit for strict utilitarian thinking, and thus suggests neuroscience could test different philosophies for compatibility with human nature.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



29 March, 2007

THE GREAT STATIN FRAUD

Lipitor is a common statin. There is a "Cholesterol Skeptics" site here

A doctor accused of wittingly prescribing useless or possibly lethal drugs would vehemently - and understandably - deny it. This makes it rather difficult to oppose the prevailing medical consensus on statins - the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to four million people in Britain at a cost of 1 billion pounds a year. That's quite a sum. It could pay the salaries of 700,000 nurses or build two spanking new teaching hospitals.

An even bigger sum is 15 billion. That is the profit the pharmaceutical industry made last year from this, the most profitable class of drugs ever invented. They are so profitable that the latest statins to reach the market came with a 600 million promotion budget, to "promote" the notion to family doctors and policymakers that the lower the cholesterol the better, and that at least half the population would benefit from the drugs.

But it is not so. Statins are useless for 95 per cent of those taking them, while exposing all to the hazard of serious side-effects. Hence my ever-growing file of letters from those who regrettably have had to find this out for themselves, illustrated by this all-too-typical tale from Roger Andrews of Hertfordshire, first prescribed statins after an operation for an aortic aneurism (that he had cleverly diagnosed himself).

Over the past few years Mr Andrews had become increasingly decrepit -what can one expect at 74? - with pain and stiffness in the legs and burning sensations in the hands so bad that when flying to his son's wedding in Hawaii he needed walking sticks and a wheelchair at the transfer stops. However, he forgot to pack his statins, and felt so much better after his three-week holiday that when he got home he decided to continue the inadvertent "experiment" of not taking them. Since October most if not all of his crippling side-effects have gone. Several friends can tell a similar story, and they have friends too.

The take-home message is that statins are only of value in those with a strong family history of heart disease or men with a history of heart attacks. For everyone else they are best avoided as they seriously interfere with the functioning of the nerve cells, affecting mental function, and muscles. This is all wittily explained in a recent book by a Cheshire family doctor, Malcolm Kendrick, "The Great Cholesterol Con" (John Blake Publishing, 9.99). There are, I suspect, many out there, like Mr Andrews, wrongly attributing their decrepitude to Anno Domini, when the real culprits are statins.

Source



Few benefits in stent surgery, researchers find

FOR patients with clogged arteries who have not had a heart attack, the widely used surgical treatment of balloon angioplasty with the insertion of a stent is no better than conventional drug treatment, researchers have found. In a study of more than 2000 patients, those receiving only drug therapy had the same number of heart attacks, strokes and deaths as those who received the drugs and underwent the artery-opening angioplasty, US Department of Veterans Affairs researchers told a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans on Monday. The only difference was a slight improvement in the quality of life for those receiving angioplasty because of fewer chest pains, known as angina.

The finding could rock an industry worth $US6 billion ($7.4 billion) a year, of which $US3.2 billion is done in the US. As many as 65 per cent of the estimated 1 million stenting procedures performed each year occur in such patients at a cost of about $US40,000 per procedure.

"This is good news for patients and physicians," said William Boden, of the University of Buffalo School of Medicine, who led the study. In the rush to perform angioplasty, the effectiveness of drug treatment "was lost in the shuffle", Dr Boden said. "It was considered old-fashioned, ho-hum. Now we can say to physicians … 'You are not putting patients in harm's way.' That is something we didn't know before."

Experts cautioned the results did not apply to patients who had suffered a heart attack because of a blockage in the coronary artery. Numerous studies have shown that angioplasty is the gold standard for those patients, and physicians urge that it be implemented as soon as possible to reopen the artery and restore blood flow to the heart. But in non-emergency situations, the drugs act fast enough to forestall the need for angioplasty.

Stent makers said the study provided little new information, did not include the newest generation of drug-eluting stents and did not address the key issue of whether stents prevented the need for further angioplasties. They also argued that the device's greatest benefit was improving quality of life.

The study, also published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large analysis examining the stent's value for those with what is known as stable disease. The mortality rate was about 8 per cent in both groups at the end of the study. Related risks such as death, heart attack and other cardiovascular incidents were 20 per cent and 19.5 per cent, respectively, a statistically negligible difference.

The study's results "should lead to changes in the treatment of patients with stable coronary artery disease, with expected substantial health-care savings," wrote the cardiologists Judith Hochman and Gabriel Steg in an editorial in the same edition of the journal.

The study enrolled 2287 patients at 50 medical centres and hospitals in the US and Canada. All the patients had at least a 70 per cent blockage of their coronary artery and chest pains several times a week. Most also had high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and many had diabetes. After an average of 4.6 years of monitoring, there were 211 deaths, heart attacks or strokes in the group receiving angioplasty and 202 in the group receiving only drug therapy. The only difference between the two groups was that angioplasty patients had fewer symptoms of angina, although even that difference was not as large as had been expected. After three years, 67 per cent of those in the angioplasty group were free of angina, compared with 62 per cent in the medication-only group, according to the study.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



28 March, 2007

The delicious rhetoric of the food police

The writer below has got part of the story but does not seem to realize that, like all leading Leftists, the food Fascists are motivated primarily by hatred and envy -- in this case hatred and envy of successful food and beverage companies. What the Fascists do makes little sense if helping people were their aim but it makes every sense as an attack on big companies

Earlier this month, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published a report analyzing the nutritional value of some commonly-ordered dishes at Ruby Tuesday, On the Border, the Cheesecake Factory, and other popular chain restaurants. Amazingly, CSPI found that bacon-cheeseburger pizza and peanut-butter-cookie-dough-chocolate cheesecake aren't healthy. As the report explained, without a hint of sarcasm, "the numbers were shocking." Turns out that today's "restaurants now dish out even more calories, even more bad fat, and even more sodium" than the restaurants of yesteryear. Who would've thought?

CSPI issued the report to rejuvenate its support for the Federal Menu Education and Labeling (MEAL) Act, which would force restaurant chains to publish nutritional info next to the name of every standard menu item. The measure was introduced in both the House and Senate in the last Congress and is expected to be reintroduced this year.

Schoolmarmish alarmism is nothing new for CSPI. The Columbus Dispatch once called CSPI "the nation's mirthless nanny about food and drink," and the organization has been sounding the alarm on soda, caffeine, salt, sugar, fat, alcohol, pizza, mozzarella sticks, and, well, everything else that's tasty for more than 35 years. Today, CSPI is one of the country's most influential advocacy groups, with an annual budget of $17 million and around 900,000 subscribers to its monthly newsletter. And thanks to its frequent studies and dependably inflammatory rhetoric, CSPI is popular with the press. Their latest report made it on CNN's American Morning and a host of local news outlets. Consequently, as Jacob Sullum once pointed out in Reason, "[CSPI] has the ability to grab headlines, kill sales of products it doesn't like, and shape regulatory policy."

Just look at Procter & Gamble's olestra, a fat substitute approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as a food additive in 1996. When first approved for consumption, there was much hope that olestra would shrink America's collective waistline, because the calorie-free additive gave foods the same texture as those fried in oil. But thanks to the efforts of CSPI, snacks made with olestra were forced to include an FDA label that warned of "abdominal cramping and loose stools," even though science was never able to demonstrate that olestra's gastrointestinal effects were any worse than those caused by foods high in fiber. And because of that warning label and the rhetoric of CSPI and its allies, olestra's sales never lived up expectations. After all, bran muffins and baked beans don't come with unappealing, government-mandated health warnings -- because few people are going to buy a product that warns of gastrointestinal problems. These days, olestra is nearly impossible to find.

Or look at soda, which CSPI has called "liquid candy" since 1998. In recent years, California, Connecticut, and several local districts have banned soda sales in their schools. Fearing lawsuits, the country's top three soft-drink companies started removing sweetened drinks like Coke and iced teas from school cafeterias and vending machines this past fall.

Or look at trans fat, which CSPI first warned about in 1993. In December 2006, New York became the first U.S. city to mandate the elimination of trans fats from all city restaurants, and just last month, Philadelphia followed suit. Chicago, Seattle, Washington, and several other major cities are also considering trans fat bans, as is the entire state of Massachusetts. So much for Tastykakes, Krispy Kremes, and greasy cannolis from Mulberry Street.

From olestra to soda to trans fat, the problem for CSPI is that it doesn't like the choices Americans make. So it wants to use the regulatory authority of the government to force businesses to follow its choices instead. Menu labeling is no different. First, it's incredibly impractical. Whereas pre-packaged foods are always the same size, restaurant portions are not standardized -- and simply cannot be. Burger King, for instance, can ensure that its Whoppers are made with 4-ounce burger patties on sesame seed rolls, but can it really ensure that every employee uses the same amount of mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, onion and pickle? And once menu labeling spreads -- as it certainly would -- does anyone actually want restaurants to serve identically-portioned slices of filet mignon and Chilean sea bass?

Further, menu labeling is unlikely to have any actual impact. Since the May 1994 introduction of mandatory nutrition labels on packaged foods, America hasn't slimmed down one bit. Instead, it's gotten fatter. Just like nutrition labels, the only people who would take advantage of menu labels are already health conscious. Indeed, because nutritional analysis an incredibly expensive undertaking, menu labeling will do little but drive up the cost of dining out and drive smaller restaurants out of business.

No one denies that Americans are fat. And if anything, we're getting fatter. Whereas 6.1 percent of American children between 12 and 19 were obese in 1974, nearly 16 percent are obese today. But, as DC-based writer Sam Ryan once wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "We're fat by choice, not because we're stupid or ignorant. Some of us enjoy stuffing our faces with double-burgers, extra cheese... We know that fruits and vegetables are healthier for us than ice cream and Cheetos." The problem for the folks at CSPI isn't that people don't know that the Cheesecake Factory's Outrageous Chocolate Cake is chock full of calories, but that they just don't care. After all, if demand for healthy foods were higher, then America's most-popular chain restaurants would be forced to revamp their menus. But maybe -- just maybe -- people who order Ruby Tuesday's Colossal Burger don't care about the nutritional value of their food.

When CSPI issued its most recent report, the organization's executive director, Michael F. Jacobson, complained about "lasagna with meatballs on top; ice cream with cookies, brownies, and candy mixed in; 'Ranchiladas,' bacon cheeseburger pizzas, buffalo-chicken-stuffed quesadillas, and other hybrid horribles that are seemingly designed to promote obesity, heart disease, and stroke." His rhetoric, as always, was designed to scare people into supporting CSPI's latest cause. Instead, it just made me hungry.

Source



Court date after schoolgirls find no C in Ribena

GLOBAL drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline faces a court case today for misleading advertising after two 14-year-olds from New Zealand found its popular blackcurrant drink Ribena contained almost no vitamin C. High school students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the children's drink against advertising claims that "the blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges" in 2004. Instead, the two found the syrup-based drink contained almost no trace of vitamin C, and one commercial orange juice brand contained almost four times more than Ribena. "We thought we were doing it wrong, we thought we must have made a mistake," Miss Devathasan, now aged 17, told New Zealand newspapers of the school experiment.

A GSK spokeswoman in New Zealand refused to comment ahead of the case on the grounds that it could affect the legal process. A GSK spokeswoman in Britain, which is the lead market for Ribena, said the company had been in discussion with the New Zealand Commerce Commission regarding Vitamin C levels and the way these levels had been communicated in New Zealand. "GSK has conducted thorough laboratory testing of Vitamin C levels in Ribena in all other markets," the spokeswoman said. "This testing has confirmed that Ribena drinks in all other markets, including the UK, contain the stated levels of Vitamin C, as described on product labels."

Ribena, first made in the 1930s and distributed to British children during World War II, is now sold in 22 countries. GSK paid little attention to the claims of Miss Devathasan and Miss Suo until their complaints reached the commerce commission. But it now faces 15 charges related to misleading advertising in an Auckland court, risking potential fines of up to $NZ3 million ($2.65 million).

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



27 March, 2007

Just Say No to this `radical rethink' on drugs

The latest British review of the drug problem peddles dangerous myths about helpless addicts, and suggests making the state drugdealer-in-chief

After a two-year review of the drugs problem in the UK, a prestigious commission established by the UK Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) has come up with a `radical rethink' aiming to influence the impending major government review of the National Drugs Strategy (1). Another current campaign against addiction - the `Get Unhooked' TV and cinema adverts featuring smokers impaled on fish-hooks - reveals the prevailing contempt for those regarded as being in the grip of a chemical dependency that also pervades the RSA report (2).

The common theme is that the user of drugs (whether nicotine, heroin or alcohol) is an automaton, a being without intentions and unable to make choices, a physiological system that requires pharmacological correction. To pursue the official metaphor, the drug user is on a par with a fish, a level of vertebrate life so low that only the most fundamentalist of animal rights activists can be bothered to protest against fishing.

The `Get Unhooked' adverts offer a powerful endorsement of the myths underlying both current drugs policy and the RSA's radical rethink. These myths are exposed by Theodore Dalrymple, whose devastating critique of `pharmacological lies and the addiction bureaucracy' is informed by the experience of working as a psychiatrist at a British prison (3).

The first myth is the notion that addiction is the result of an unfortunate accident: one minute the hapless victim is swimming happily in the pond of life and the next is impaled by the hook of the malign substance. The apparently random victim is instantly at the mercy of whoever holds the rod and line - and in the advert is agonisingly dragged along the floor. But, as Dalrymple shows, becoming addicted to heroin requires effort and discipline, determination and time. Though the notions that the drug is the active agent and the addict the passive victim are popular among users and drug workers alike, they deny both the responsibility of the individual for adopting this lifestyle and the possibility of rejecting it. The image of the pathetic addict squirming on the hook is also contradicted by the reality of the busy and purposeful life required to sustain a drug habit.

The second great myth is that withdrawal from drugs is a deeply traumatic process - like removing a barbed hook from your mouth. This myth has reached a high pitch of histrionic exaggeration in relation to heroin, in the familiar `cold turkey' horrors dramatised in novels and films. Reporting both extensive professional experience and the medical literature, Dalrymple confirms that heroin withdrawal is an uncomfortable, but not a serious condition, with a much lower rate of complications than withdrawal from alcohol, barbiturates or benzodiazepines.

A third myth is that once the victim is ensnared on the hook, addiction immediately becomes a chronic disease requiring medical treatment - in the forms of diverse regimes of detoxification and rehabilitation. This is contradicted by the familiar experience that many users of drugs abandon the habit spontaneously - if supply is interrupted (by imprisonment) or by some change in circumstances (a new relationship, having a baby). As Dalrymple observes, `a motive is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for them to give up'. This does not work for chronic diseases such as tuberculosis or rheumatoid arthritis. The `treatment' of opiate dependency with methadone - the mainstay of medical management of heroin addicts for decades - has had such a low success rate (in terms of achieving abstinence) that the goal of treatment has largely shifted to achieving `maintenance' on an indefinite supply of this stupefying drug.

Methadone has been associated with a steady expansion of heroin use (and a large number of deaths from methadone overdoses). The RSA's answer is more, but `better and more consistent' methadone prescribing, and - the ultimate badge of radicalism in drugs policy - `heroin prescribing wherever appropriate'. This is popular with the police who believe that it may reduce crime, but not with GPs who will be expected to do the prescribing. It is difficult to think of measures more likely to encourage both the scale of heroin abuse and the mortality and morbidity associated with it (apart, perhaps, from the provision of `shooting galleries' for intravenous drug use and rewarding addicts with residential rehab programmes of the sort promoted by celebrities - both measures approved in the RSA report).

The RSA report proclaims as the essence of its innovative approach its emphasis on `harm minimisation' as the central theme of drugs policy. Of course, `harm minimisation', the mainstay of official drugs `guidelines' since at least 1991, has been another spectacular failure (4). Depriving self-indulgent actions of their worst consequences is likely to encourage them to spread. Dalrymple is alert to the wider implications: `[I]f consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.' The concept of harm minimisation assumes that the authorities take over responsibility for the consequences of individuals' behaviour. It is `inherently infantilising'.

The dogma promoted by the RSA report, that drug addiction is a chronic disease, is both absurd and irresponsible. Drug addiction, as Dalrymple insists, is `a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment'. The medicalisation of drug abuse is a combination of `moral cowardice, displacement activity and employment opportunity'.

I would heartily endorse Dalrymple's radical first step towards tackling the drugs problem: close down all clinics claiming to treat drug addicts (on the basis of my experience as an inner-city GP, I would also recommend closing down drug treatment programmes in primary care). Addicts would then have to face the truth: `They are as responsible for their actions as anyone else.' This measure might help to set them free - and it might also help to release doctors from the corrosive deceptions underlying current drug policies. It is striking that while the RSA report is piously non-judgmental towards drug users and eschews coercive policies, it seethes with righteous indignation at GPs who might refuse to follow its dogmatic approach and insists twice in the five pages of its executive summary that GPs should not be allowed `to opt out of providing drugs treatment'. The notion that doctors should be coerced into providing dangerous treatments for their patients in the hope that this might reduce the crime rate reflects the damaging effect of drug policy on the ethics of medical practice.

Dalrymple concludes with a discussion of the case for the legalisation of drugs, which he concedes is `not a straightforward matter'. After considering both philosophical and prudential arguments, `on balance' he does not favour legalisation - the only point on which he is in accord with the RSA. While recognising the enormous cost to individuals and to society of our relationship with our most familiar intoxicant, alcohol, I believe that we have to learn to live with other `substances', too, without resorting to criminal legislation. However, I strongly agree with Dalrymple's emphasis that `far more important in the long run than the question of legalisation.is our attitude towards addiction'.

The radicalism of the RSA's rethink of drugs policy is symbolised by its bold insistence on the repeal of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act - and its replacement with a Misuse of Substances Act. But changing the labels - while perpetuating the myths about drug use - will do nothing to tackle the damaging effects of drugs on individuals and society. The RSA report concedes that `drugs education' - a concept scarcely less mind-numbing than heroin addiction - has failed. The answer? Never mind that `there has been too little evaluation for anyone to be certain what works', we need more of the same, with the heart-sinking rider that it `should be focused more on primary schools'.

Why not teach children something interesting and inspiring, that might give them the truly radical idea that culture and society have more to offer than drug-induced oblivion?

Source



Medical Leftism

No wonder the intellectual standard of many medical journal articles is so low when we have the sort of shallow thinking displayed below. That lives are saved when tyrannies are deposed or faced down by democratic forces is obviously too deep a thought for these would-be wise ones

Physicians from around the world urged the publisher of The Lancet medical journal to cut its links to weapons sales, calling on the editors to find another publisher if Reed Elsevier refused to stop hosting arms fairs. The doctors made their appeal in the latest edition of The Lancet, released Friday. Editors at The Lancet responded by backing the doctors, calling the situation "bizarre and untenable." They wrote in Friday's edition that - in the interest of health - they may have to consider an "organized campaign" against their own publisher. "The Lancet is one of the most respected international medical journals and should not be linked to an industry involved in weapons designed to cause physical harm and death," wrote Dr. Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, and Dr. Michael Pelly, the association's international adviser.

Some scientists have called for a boycott of journals published by Reed Elsevier Group PLC. Editors at the British Medical Journal have appealed to researchers to stop sending certain studies to The Lancet and other Reed Elsevier titles. On Friday, The Lancet published three pages of protest letters from leading doctors and organizations, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Doctors for Iraq and the People's Health Movement, a public health watchdog.

Reed Elsevier said it supported The Lancet editors' right to free speech, but had no plans to stop its involvement with arms fairs. "We accept that Reed Elsevier publications may occasionally take editorial positions which are critical of their owners," the company said in a statement. "We do not, however, see any conflict between Reed Elsevier's connections with the scientific and health communities and the legitimate defense industry."

The Lancet first learned of its publisher's involvement in the arms industry in 2005. Supported by Britain's Ministry of Defense, Reed Elsevier hosts arms fairs around the world that have showcased weapons - including a 1,100-pound cluster bomb, one of the deadliest known bombs. At the time, editor Richard Horton informed the journal's international advisory board, which urged Reed Elsevier to divest itself of its arms trade business. Last month, criticism of the company gained renewed prominence when the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust withdrew $3.9 million of its investment from the company, because of the publisher's ties to the arms industry. "The Lancet has a particular commitment to child survival, and cluster bombs are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in children, and cause horrendous disabilities," Horton said. "It is completely incompatible for Reed Elsevier to be in this business and also to be a health science publisher." The Lancet's editors said they spoke regularly to Reed Elsevier about their concerns, and have asked for further meetings, but have yet to receive a response.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



26 March, 2007

Fresh food now bad for you!

FRESH fruit, vegetables and salad sprouts are responsible for an increase in food poisoning caused by the potentially deadly salmonella and E-coli bacteria. There were 27 outbreaks of gastroenteritis between January 2001 and June 2005 across Australia due to fresh, uncooked produce including orange juice, cucumbers, lettuce and alfalfa spouts, resulting in almost 700 people becoming ill, with 51 hospitalised, a conference has been told. At least half of the outbreaks occurred at restaurants and nearly one-fifth of gastro illnesses were linked to fast food or takeaway shops.

The Communicable Disease Control Conference was told this month that fresh produce in particular may cause outbreaks because it was often eaten raw. Adrian Bradley from the NSW Food Authority said the widely held assumption that fresh produce didn't harbour pathogens such as salmonella, norovirus and Campylobacter was now known to be incorrect. OzFoodNet, the national food-borne illness surveillance system, shows that three major salmonella outbreaks occurred in 2006. More than 120 people in Western Australia and Victoria fell ill in the first half of last year after eating alfalfa sprouts. In October 2006, more than 120 cases of food poisoning caused by eating rockmelons occurred along the eastern seaboard. In November there was a small outbreak of salmonella linked to pawpaw.

Overseas evidence suggests contaminated water, fertiliser, contact with pests or animal faeces or insufficient cleaning of produce prior to sale could cause contamination. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Ageing said centralised growing and distribution of fresh produce, as well as enhanced detection, might be a factor in the increase in outbreak numbers. Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) plans to introduce primary production and processing standards for high-risk fresh produce such as sprouts.

The NSW Food Authority said people considered "vulnerable" such as young children, the elderly, diabetics, pregnant women and those with cancer or suppressed immune systems should never eat any type of sprout. It advises avoiding any bruised, damaged, mouldy or slimy produce and washing all produce with cool tap water immediately before eating.

Source



Tamiflu troubles good for Relenza?

Relenza is the alternative to Tamiflu but has not been much marketed because it must be inhaled rather than injected. After the report below, it may now be marketed more energetically. Huge sales in Japan could be expected

The main line of defence against pandemic flu came under threat yesterday after the Japanese Government said that the drug Tamiflu should not be prescribed to teenagers. The warning to GPs came after the drug was linked to 18 deaths in Japan that were caused by suicidal or irrational behaviour. The Japanese Government also told the Japanese distributor of the drug to include a warning not to give it to patients aged between 10 and 19. Japan consumes 60 per cent of the world's Tamiflu.

Britain has bought 14.9 million doses of Tamiflu from the manufacturer, Roche. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said that it had received only two reports of psychiatric symptoms associated with Tamiflu - both involving confusion in elderly patients. It said that there were no reports of depression or suicide linked to the drug.

Last month the European Medicines Agency, which licenses Tamiflu in Europe, asked Roche to incorporate new advice in the "summary product characteristics" document sent to doctors. This will say that there have been reports of abnormal responses but that they cannot be causally linked to Tamiflu. It also urges the close monitoring of patients, especially children.

Roche said yesterday: "Reports of such events leading to death are extremely rare, occurring in around one out of every 5 million influenza patients treated . . . US databases indicate psychiatric symptoms are lower in influenza patients taking Tamiflu versus those not taking Tamiflu." Anti-Tamiflu campaigners in Japan urged the Government to remove the drug from sale.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



25 March, 2007

Is dieting good for you?

The authors of "Diet Nation" argue that efforts to lose weight are generally doomed to failure - and may possibly cause more harm than good

By this time of year, most New Year's resolutions to lose weight have long since bitten the dust. But actually, the prospects for successful dieting are never good. Out of every 100 people who diet, only four are able both to lose weight and to maintain their post-diet weight. When it comes to dieting, most of us are hopeless recidivists. Most of us also refuse to accept such glum news. Our image of what constitutes our correct weight and body size, dictated by a media and public health community obsessed with obesity, continues to drive both women and men to attempt something that is largely impossible. Worse, if there is a health effect of dieting, it may actually be detrimental rather than beneficial.

Research finds that 90 per cent of American high school girls are dieting, despite the fact that many are not overweight or obese. A 2001 study of female high school students by Brigham Young University researchers found that 11 per cent had used laxatives to lose weight, 15 per cent had taken appetite control pills, and nine per cent had made themselves vomit after eating. Almost half of these girls restricted their food intake to a mere 1,200 calories a day or less. The World Health Organisation defines starvation as a diet of less than 900 calories per day, yet many diets only allow between 950 and 1,200 calories per day. A recent survey of women's eating habits found that the median caloric intake is only about 1,600 calories per day, even though the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for adult women is 2,200 daily calories.

As Jane Ogden of King's College, London writes in Fat Chance: The Myth of Dieting Explained: `For the large majority of women, dieting does not work. Dieting creates more problems than it solves; dieting and overeating become a vicious circle. Dieters never stop dieting, and never stop using the dieting industry.'

The evidence that diets are doomed to failure is extensive. Several studies that have looked at dieting, diet types and weight-loss counselling have concluded that attempts at weight loss are largely unsuccessful, even in highly controlled situations. In a study that compared low carbohydrate and low fat diets, researchers found that adherence was poor and attrition was high in both groups. Another study that compared self-help diets with commercial diet plans found that after two years the differences in the two groups were negligible.

A review of the major commercial weight loss programs concluded that even the comparatively successful programmes were characterised by `high costs, high attrition rates, and a high probability of regaining 50 per cent or more of lost weight in one to two years'. One shudders to think about the odds of the less successful ones. As the US National Institutes of Health's review of weight loss programmes put it, `Regardless of the products used, successful weight loss. was limited'.

The reasons for such failures are not always found in a lack of willpower. Our metabolic rate conspires against sustained weight loss by decreasing in response to reduced caloric intake so the body can still function. Some experts suggest that a fortnight of dieting can lead to a 20 percent decline in metabolic rate. This sets up a vicious cycle in which it becomes progressively more difficult to lose each additional pound, as the dieter's body uses food more efficiently and draws less from its reserve of fat.

The difficulties of dieting are usually put to one side when compared to the alleged health benefits. After all, don't people who lose weight have a lower risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes? But those who accept the evidence about the dangers of obesity, based on epidemiological studies, should also be aware that there is equally strong evidence from such studies that dieting is bad for you. A National Institutes of Health conference that reviewed the evidence about dieting concluded: `Most studies, and the strongest science, shows weight loss. is actually strongly associated with increased risks of death - by as much as several hundred per cent.'

Dieters have double the risk of getting type-2 diabetes compared to those who are overweight but do not diet. The connection between weight loss and increased risk for an early death is particularly striking in two large studies - the Iowa Women's Health Study and the American Cancer Society study. In the follow-up to the American Cancer Society study, researchers found that healthy obese women were in fact better off not losing weight. Healthy women who lost weight had increased mortality risks from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and all other diseases when compared to healthy women who did not diet. A later study found comparable results for men.

Over the past 20 years, more than two dozen studies have found that weight losses of 20 to 30 pounds (between nine and 13 kilos) - the amount most dieters say they want to lose - lead to an increased risk of premature mortality. During the same period, only four studies have found that losing weight increases life expectancy. Commenting on the gain in life expectancy from such efforts, author and commentator Paul Campos notes that one study `found an eleven-hour increase in life expectancy per pound lost. the equivalent of an extra month of life in return for a permanent 50 pound weight loss'.

Rather than lamenting our inevitable fall off the dieting wagon, perhaps we should resolve to take our slightly plump selves as a testimony not to bad health but good health. Let's raise a well-laden fork to resolving not to think about dieting again until next year.

Source



New prostate cancer drug

An experimental drug designed to fight the spread of aggressive prostate cancer is showing great promise for future sufferers, Australian developers say. A team from the University of New South Wales is working on a new therapy for prostate cancer patients who stop responding to standard hormone treatments. The medication is still in the development stage but if new tests prove successful, it could bring relief for a group of men for whom there is currently no treatment, said study leader Dr Kieran Scott. "We've seen enough positive data to know it's worth testing in people," Dr Scott said.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in Australian men, with patients usually treated with some combination of surgery, radiation and hormone medications. These drugs effectively limit the spread of prostate cancer in the early stages by suppressing the male hormones that tumours need to grow. But over time cancers often stop responding to this treatment, putting men at risk of tumour growth and cancer spread to the bones.

Dr Scott said his team at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney believed it had a new oral medicine that could slow the growth of hormone-resistant cancer and stop its spread. The medication works by blocking an enzyme which releases Omega-6 fatty acids - fats which, when consumed in the diet, have been associated with increased rates of disease. "We think we can slow the growth of tumours that are resistant and we believe the drug may also help slow the growth of tumours in bones," Dr Scott said. "If we can help in those two areas then we'll have a therapy for prostate cancer patients who currently have no good treatment."

The team has been granted Cancer Council NSW funding for a new round of tests, with plans to manufacture and trial the experimental compound in the most severely-affected patients if they have success. "I've been working in this area for 10 or 15 years and to be honest I didn't think this would work," Dr Scott said. "But the data keeps me going because it keeps suggesting this approach really will work."

Other cancer grants awarded include an investigation of genes that predispose people to melanoma and a study of new techniques to minimise breast cancer surgery side-effects.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



24 March, 2007

Fertility clock may affect men

Prospective fathers should not leave it too long

WHEN it comes to fertility and the prospect of having normal babies, it has always been assumed that men have no biological clock. But mounting evidence suggests that as men get older, they face an increased risk of fathering children with abnormalities. Several recent studies are starting to persuade many doctors that men should not be too cavalier about postponing marriage and children.

Geneticists have been aware for decades that the risk of certain rare birth defects increases with the father's age. One of the most studied of these conditions is a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, but the list also includes the connective tissues disorder, Marfan syndrome, and skull and facial abnormalities, such as Apert syndrome.

Some studies suggest that the risk of sporadic single-gene mutations may be four to five times higher for fathers who are 45 and older, compared with fathers in their 20s, says Joe Leigh Simpson, the president-elect of the American College of Medical Genetics. Overall, having an older father is estimated to increase the risk of a birth defect by 1 per cent, against a background 3 per cent risk for a birth defect, he says.

A recent study on autism produced striking findings about this perplexing disorder. Researchers analysed a large Israeli military database and found that children of men who became a father at 40 or older were 5.75 times as likely to have an autism disorder as those whose fathers were younger than 30. "Until now, the dominant view has been, 'Blame it on the mother,' " said Avi Reichenberg, the lead author of the study, published in The Archives of General Psychiatry. "But we found a dose-response relationship: the older the father, the higher the risk. We think there is a biological mechanism that is linked to ageing fathers." The study controlled for the age of the mother, the child's year of birth and socioeconomic factors, but researchers did not have information about autistic traits in the parents. [But see my skeptical comment about that study of Sept. 6th, 2006]

Another Israeli study on schizophrenia, using a registry of 87,907 births in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976, found that the risk of illness was doubled among children of fathers in their late 40s when compared with children of fathers under 25, and increased almost threefold in children born to fathers 50 and older. "When our paper came out, everyone said, 'They must have missed something,' " says an author of the study, Dolores Malaspina, of New York University Medical Centre. But studies elsewhere have had similar findings, she says. "The fact it's so similar around the world suggests it's due to biological ageing."

Sceptics say the studies find an association but do not prove a causal relationship between an older father's genetic material and autism or schizophrenia, and note that other factors related to having an older father could be at play, including different parenthood styles. Another possibility is that the father's mental illness or autistic tendencies are responsible both for the late marriage and for the effect on the child. "'The problem is that the data is very sparse right now," says Larry Lipshultz, a past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "I don't think there's a consensus of what patients should be warned about."

Brenda Eskenazi, of the school of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, however, says men need to be concerned about their ageing. "We don't really know what the complete effects are of men's age on their ability to produce viable, healthy offspring."

Pamela Madsen, the executive director of the American Fertility Association says: "It takes two to make a baby, and men who one day want to become fathers need to wake up, read what's out there and take responsibility. Everyone ages. Why would sperm cells be the only cells not to age as men get older?"

Source



Cocoa 'Vitamin' Health Benefits Could Outshine Penicillin

Ho hum! Another bright-eyed promise of a "natural" miracle

The health benefits of epicatechin, a compound found in cocoa, are so striking that it may rival penicillin and anaesthesia in terms of importance to public health, reports Marina Murphy in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told C&I that epicatechin is so important that it should be considered a vitamin.

Hollenberg has spent years studying the benefits of cocoa drinking on the Kuna people in Panama. He found that the risk of 4 of the 5 most common killer diseases: stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes, is reduced to less then 10% in the Kuna. They can drink up to 40 cups of cocoa a week. Natural cocoa has high levels of epicatechin. [And they have a totally different lifestyle too]

'If these observations predict the future, then we can say without blushing that they are among the most important observations in the history of medicine,' Hollenberg says. 'We all agree that penicillin and anaesthesia are enormously important. But epicatechin could potentially get rid of 4 of the 5 most common diseases in the western world, how important does that make epicatechin?... I would say very important'

Nutrition expert Daniel Fabricant [Fabricant's doctorate is from the Center for Botanical Dietary Supplement Research of Chicago] says that Hollenberg's results, although observational, are so impressive that they may even warrant a rethink of how vitamins are defined. Epicatechin does not currently meet the criteria. Vitamins are defined as essential to the normal functioning, metabolism, regulation and growth of cells and deficiency is usually linked to disease. At the moment, the science does not support epicatechin having an essential role. But, Fabricant, who is vice president scientific affairs at the Natural Products Association [Is that another word for the Placebo Association?], says: 'the link between high epicatechin consumption and a decreased risk of killer disease is so striking, it should be investigated further. It may be that these diseases are the result of epicatechin deficiency,' he says.

Currently, there are only 13 essential vitamins. An increase in the number of vitamins would provide significant opportunity for nutritional companies to expand their range of products. Flavanols like epicatechin are removed for commercial cocoas because they tend to have a bitter taste. So there is huge scope for nutritional companies to develop epicatechin supplements or capsules. Epicatechin is also found in teas, wine, chocolate and some fruit and vegetables.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



23 March, 2007

Amazing authoritarianism from a food Fascist: Kids should only drink water!

PARENTS who give their children fruit juice as a healthy option could actually be making them fat, new research shows. Deakin University researchers found that children who drink more than two glasses of fruit juice - or cordial - a day are more likely to be overweight or obese.

Parents were asked by telephone about their children's intake of certain foods, including fruit juice. The study found intake of fruit juice and cordials was a bigger issue than soft drink for the almost-2200 Victorian four-to-12-year-olds whose parents were questioned. Children who drank more than 500ml of fruit juice a day were more likely to be overweight or obese than those who had none. And those who drank three or more glasses of soft drink or four glasses of fruit juice on a given day were more than twice as likely to be overweight or obese compared with children who did not regularly consume sweetened drinks. "Many more children were drinking the fruit juice and cordial than soft drinks," said nutritionist Andrea Sanigorski.

She said parents might be unaware that regular and large amounts of fruit drinks, including fruit juice, could be bad for their children's long-term health. "I think they think it's a healthier option than soft drink," Dr Sanigorski said. "The main message is that, day in and day out, what kids should be drinking is water; what they should be taking to school is water. "That should be their main drink. "Younger children, in particular, should also be having milk. "Sweetened beverages, whether it's soft drink or fruit juice or fruit drink, is a concentrated form of sugar that they shouldn't be having often or a lot of. "This work raises the awareness for parents that there is, in some cases, just as much sugar in fruit juice and fruit drinks . . . as in the soft drinks."

Dr Sanigorski said the study, published in the international journal Public Health Nutrition, also found few of the children were eating vegetables. "A large proportion of kids, about one in five, had no vegetables on the day that we asked about," she said. "Only 12 per cent had more than three - but the recommendation is for five serves a day." Dr Sanigorski said the study's findings were consistent with those for children in the US and the United Kingdom.

Source



Another field-test of fluoridation

THE teeth of Australia's "fluoride generation" - children born after 1970, when fluoride was added to drinking water - are twice as healthy as their parents' teeth, a landmark dental report has found. But Queensland children are missing out because successive state governments and most councils have always refused to add fluoride to water. Three-quarters of the rest of mainland Australia have fluoridated water supplies, and Brisbane is the only state capital without it. Queensland Health provides subsidies to councils to add fluoride, but will not make it mandatory. Only 5 per cent of Queenslanders - those living in Townsville, Dalby, Mareeba, Moranbah and Bamaga - have fluoride added.

Studies show Queenslanders have 30 per cent more tooth decay than average in Australia. Researcher Professor Gary Slade said the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, which was released yesterday, proved fluoridation improved teeth for life. "These results provide the first evidence within the Australian population that drinking fluoridated water during childhood translates into significantly better dental health in adulthood."

The survey of more than 14,500 Australians found people born between 1970 and 1990 had an average of 4.5 teeth affected by decay. They had only half the decay levels of the previous generation. However people born before 1930 had an average of 24 teeth affected by decay.

The World Health Organisation has urged governments to legislate to ensure access to fluoride in all countries. But a spokesman for Queensland Health Minister Stephen Robertson said there were no plans to fluoridate the water supplies. "We just offer the subsidies to councils," he said. "It's a decision that we want the councils to make with support from their local communities."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



22 March, 2007

EXERCISE AND OBESITY: CHICKEN OR EGG?

Are people fat because they exercise less or do they exercise less because they are fat? The study below cannot not tell us. But why bother with proof when you KNOW what is going on? A pity that what people KNOW is often not true

The risk of children becoming obese could be halved with 15 extra minutes of moderately vigorous exercise each day, study results have suggested. All that is needed is a short game of football or a walk to school brisk enough to get slightly out of breath. The effects are greater in boys than in girls, but both sexes benefit. The findings point to a lack of exercise, rather than gluttony, as the key to obesity in young people. Researchers were surprised to find that boys have just 25 minutes of activity each day on average, and girls only 16 minutes.

The data comes from the Children of the 90s project, which has followed a group of children born in Avon in the 1990s. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children is one of the biggest and most ambitious cohort studies ever attempted and is producing some of the best evidence on the effects of diet and lifestyle on disease. Researchers fitted 5,500 children aged 12 with activity meters to measure how much exercise they took. The children wore the meters around their waists, taking them off only to sleep, bath or swim. Their body fat was measured using an X-ray emission scanner, which can distinguish between fat and muscle. The results are published in PLoS Medicine.

Professor Chris Riddoch, of the London Sport Institute at Middlesex University, one of the project leaders, said: "We know that diet is important, but what this research tells us is that we mustn't forget about activity. It's been really surprising to us how even small amounts of exercise appear to have dramatic results."

The boys who took the most vigorous activity were more than 30 times less likely to be obese than those who took the least. An extra 15 minutes a day of moderate and vigorous physical activity halved the risk of obesity. Among girls the effects were less dramatic, but still significant. The most active fifth of girls reduced their risk of obesity by two thirds compared with the least active fifth.

Professor Andy Ness, of the University of Bristol, said that the most important activity was the kind that got the children slightly out of breath, or in a sweat. "Recommending an extra 15 minutes of vigorous activity a day may not sound very much, but it is actually double what the average 12-year-old girl does," he said. "In the context of what they are doing, it is quite a lot."

Why the effects should be so much greater in boys remains puzzling. "It could be physiological differences but I think that's unlikely," Professor Ness said. "The other possibility is that boys and girls use activity differently. Boys tend to use activity as the main weight control mechanism, while girls tend to control their weight by eating less." He said that surveys and food production statistics suggested that total calorie intakes had not increased. Yet obesity was rising, so it was reasonable to suggest that this was the result of burning less energy. "Lots of opportunities for activity are factored out of children's lives these days," he said. "There are more sedentary opportunities - sitting in the car, watching television, playing computer games. There's less walking to school, and when they get home Mum and Dad don't want them wandering off into the woods or playing in the streets."

Source



Organic food is no better



ORGANIC food has no nutritional benefit over regular products despite the belief it is healthier and costs much more, scientists say. Shoppers who buy organic often believe they are getting nutritionally superior products - but experts say there is no evidence to support this claim. Research shows most fruit and vegetables on sale in Australia have the same levels of nutrients and no traces of pesticides, regardless of whether they are organic or not.

Jennie Brand-Miller, professor of molecular and microbiological sciences at Sydney University, says many consumers are paying more, mistakenly believing that organic is better. "We need to get the message out there that non-organic produce is genuinely good quality,'' she said. "We have got a lot to gain from eating fresh fruit and vegetables so the best message is eat as much as you like.''

Organic produce is usually more expensive than conventional foods - sometimes double in price. Consultant dietitian Shane Landon said Australian food standards were high, ensuring all produce was safe to eat. "If people do want to pay a bit more to buy organic and have an orange that looks a bit funny that's fine, but I'm not convinced it's healthier,'' he said. A consumer would have to eat truckloads of non-organic food to accumulate any meaningful amount of pesticides or chemicals in their body, he said. And analysis shows some organic produce does contain residual pesticides.

Suggestions of high levels of hormones in chicken have been proven to be an urban myth, as oestrogen has been banned as an ingredient in chicken feed in Australia since the 1960s.

Advocates prefer to eat organic food because it is likely to have travelled a shorter distance from harvest to shop than its non-organic counterparts, therefore making it more environmentally friendly. Professor Brand-Miller said there was some evidence that organic food, which should be produced without the use of pesticides and artificial chemicals, might be kinder to the planet in the long-term. Erin Pearson, a speech pathologist from Oatley, has bought organic food in the past but didn't notice any difference. "I feel the normal stuff is just as good and organic does tend to be more expensive,'' she said

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



21 March, 2007

The new dark age

What are the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals ("REACH") regulations really about? It's about killing you

In the 1970s, as a public relations consultant, I helped introduce a new pesticide to the American market. More specifically, to the pest control industry, as it was not available for use by the public. It was called "Ficam" and, after having undergone the costly Environmental Protection Agency registration process, it was quickly and widely used by pest control professionals, not just for its capacity to eliminate cockroaches and a variety of other pest insects, but because it was applied with nothing more toxic than water.

For two decades this pesticide thrived. I wrote case histories of where it was used in hotels, casinos, restaurants, and theme parks, as well as in homes and apartments. The pest control profession embraced it and there never was a single case of it causing any hazard to those who applied it or benefited from it. I never found out why, but for some reason the EPA demanded that the manufacturer re-register the product and the decision was made that it would be withdrawn instead. It was just too costly to prove what everyone already knew. It worked wonders protecting people against the diseases and property damage a wide variety of insect pest species cause on a daily basis.

The EPA did a similar number on a pesticide called "Dursban." This excellent pesticide had been around for decades and was widely used because it was a component in more than 80 products that the public could purchase off the shelf of the supermarket or garden supplies store. The EPA proceeded to restrict its consumer use against insect pests. If it posed such a health hazard, why wasn't there evidence of countless people being affected? Who benefited from its loss? The insects.

Some may remember the "Alar" crisis that impacted the apple growers, particularly in the Northwest. Millions of dollars were lost until it became clear that there was no threat whatever to the public from its use. People are still safely eating apples, just as they were before an environmental group perpetrated the manufactured crisis.

The reason cited for these actions is called "the precautionary principle" that says that, if anything poses a possible risk, no matter how small, a chemical cannot be used. Proof of its effective use, in the case of pesticides, in protecting the public against the vast range of diseases that insects or rodents routinely spread, was not to be considered.

What any chemist or pharmacist will tell you is "the poison is in the dose." It is the amount of exposure that determines the level of hazard and we routinely eat, drink, and use things that have chemicals as part of their structure in such minute quantities as to constitute no threat. As just one example, potatoes contain trace amounts of arsenic, a deadly poison, but no one is ever going to consume enough potatoes at a single sitting.

I was reminded of this when I recently read of still more fear mongering against a plastic ingredient called bisphenol-A, otherwise known as BPA. The food packaging industry has used BPA in the linings of metal cans since as far back as the 1950s. It is also used to make hard plastic as well as lacquers for bottle tops, water pipes, and even dental sealants and tooth coatings. The Environmental Working Group, a self-anointed "watchdog" organization, rolled out the usual scare campaign in early March, claiming that BPA "may be poisoning pregnant women and infants" according to a study by the Group. Typically, these "studies" involve force-feeding huge amounts of the chemical to laboratory rats until a correlation can be made that it poses a threat to humans, but correlation is not the same as causation.

I can assure you that the cost of the canned foods identified and probably all others is about to rise. Indeed, the cost of everything that uses chemicals in the course of its manufacture is going to rise. The reason for this is a program initiated by the European Union that has passed sweeping new chemical regulations that will go into effect in June. Based on that idiotic precautionary principle, the EU has instituted a program intended to rid the world of chemicals they deem to have an impact on the environment and human health. It is called "Green chemistry" and it has more to do with eliminating the use of beneficial chemicals than in offering any protection to Mother Earth and human beings.

The U.S. Commerce Department is putting on "roadshows" for U.S. businesses to bring them in line with the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals ("REACH") regulations. As Kathleen Morson of Stratfor, a private intelligence group that advises U.S. corporations, says, "The REACH regulation represents a shift from the Western regulatory world's reliance on risk assessment to something more precaution-based. Significantly, it shifts the regulatory burden from government agencies to the producers themselves to demonstrate that their chemicals are safe."

No chemical is safe if it is ingested in an amount wherein the dose becomes injurious. This includes the chemical we commonly call water.

Because American manufacturers commonly export their products all over the world and Europe represents a major market for them, they will have no choice but to submit to this EU plan to restrict chemicals, some of which have been safely in use for decades and longer. A little group of Green gnomes in Helsinki will decide the fate of every chemical in use today.

This is what I predict. At some point in the future, after most of the world's pesticides and herbicides, after chemicals used to clean water, after various chemicals used in the ways plastic is a part of our lives have been restricted, a huge plague will make its way across the world. It will be spread as the famed Black Plague was, by insect and rodent pests, and it will kill countless millions of people. A new Dark Age will follow. It will, in fact, have been in place since the imposition of the European Union's draconian anti-chemical program was imposed. What is REACH really about? It's about killing you.

Source



DIY contraceptive device 'better than the Pill'

THE first once-a-month contraceptive that women can insert themselves goes on sale nationally from today, in a move doctors say will revolutionise family planning options. The device - a small, squishy rubber ring - is impregnated with female hormones and is held in place inside the vagina, which absorbs the hormones directly into the bloodstream. Experts say this more direct route of administration allows the product, called NuvaRing, to deliver lower levels of estrogen compared with existing daily pills - reducing the risk of side-effects such as weight gain and tender breasts.

Until today, women have had the option of taking daily contraceptive pills, or seeing a doctor for longer-term treatments such as an injection or a contraceptive implant that sits beneath the skin.

NuvaRing releases its hormones over a three-week period, and can then be taken out for one week to allow women their monthly bleed, although this is much lighter than a normal period as the hormones will have prevented the walls of the uterus from thickening. A new ring is inserted after the fourth week. The makers say that often neither the woman nor her partner can tell it is there, and it should not affect intercourse. However, it can be taken out for up to three hours without reducing contraceptive protection.

The rings cost between $25 and $28, similar to the latest generation of oral contraceptive pills. NuvaRing is prescription-only and is not subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Fertility expert Ric Porter, a gynaecologist at IVF Australia, said that unlike the pill the ring would not lose effectiveness if women had stomach upsets, took antibiotics or drank alcohol. "Young girls taking the pill drink themselves silly, don't absorb the pill and then wonder why they get pregnant," Dr Porter said. "It (NuvaRing) is going to revolutionise women's contraception ability in this country. "Some women won't like it, but the women who forget to take the pill are going to be far better off with one of these."

NuvaRing contains the same hormones as other contraceptives - estrogen and progestin, a synthetic version of progesterone. The most commonly prescribed contraceptive pill delivers 30 micrograms (mcg) of estrogen, and the lowest dose available delivers 20mcg - compared to 15mcg for NuvaRing.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



20 March, 2007

Severe dieting makes you drunk!

PEOPLE on very low-calorie diets could be accused of drink driving, even if they have not had a drop. The rare phenomenon is documented in the latest issue of the International Journal of Obesity. Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital were approached by a 59-year old non-drinker after he registered positive for alcohol when blowing into an in-car ignition interlocking device that would not allow him to drive. As a glider pilot who supervised private aviation, the man had been surprised and upset about the positive result, which occurred while he was undergoing a weight loss program involving a very low calorie diet.

Researchers found the positive test to be the result of a chemical reaction that took place when fat was broken down at a fast rate. When this happened, ketone bodies (acetone, acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate) were produced, which could then be converted to a secondary alcohol known as isopropanol, said the lead researcher, Wayne Jones, who is also on Sweden's National Board of Forensic Medicine.

Edward Ogden, clinical forensic scientist and senior research fellow at Melbourne's Swinburne University, said it was possible that sober people could blow a false-positive test, however they would not be charged with drink-driving. Alcohol ignition interlock devices and roadside random breath testing units measure alcohol on the breath using fuel cells, which cannot distinguish between ethanol and isopropanol. "But with any random breath test, the police would then invite you to the booze bus for a second test using an evidential instrument which measures the presence of alcohol on the breath in three different ways, including the use of infra-red at two different wavelengths," Dr Ogden said. It was almost impossible that further testing would record a positive result, he said. "From the point of view of a police prosecution, it's a non-issue, but if you happened to have an interlocking device, it may pose a problem," he said.

The NSW Police Director of Clinical Forensic Medicine, Anthony Moynham, said the possibility of the alcohol interlock device giving a false positive reading "cannot be discounted". "This reported incident in one obese male subject in Sweden is interesting but not sufficient to change our thinking," he said.

Source



Cannabis: An apology from "The Independent"

In 1997, this newspaper launched a campaign to decriminalise the drug. If only we had known then what we can reveal today... Record numbers of teenagers are requiring drug treatment as a result of smoking skunk, the highly potent cannabis strain that is 25 times stronger than resin sold a decade ago.

More than 22,000 people were treated last year for cannabis addiction - and almost half of those affected were under 18. With doctors and drugs experts warning that skunk can be as damaging as cocaine and heroin, leading to mental health problems and psychosis for thousands of teenagers, The Independent on Sunday has today reversed its landmark campaign for cannabis use to be decriminalised.

A decade after this newspaper's stance culminated in a 16,000-strong pro-cannabis march to London's Hyde Park - and was credited with forcing the Government to downgrade the legal status of cannabis to class C - an IoS editorial states that there is growing proof that skunk causes mental illness and psychosis. The decision comes as statistics from the NHS National Treatment Agency show that the number of young people in treatment almost doubled from about 5,000 in 2005 to 9,600 in 2006, and that 13,000 adults also needed treatment.

The skunk smoked by the majority of young Britons bears no relation to traditional cannabis resin - with a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), typically found in the early 1990s. New research being published in this week's Lancet will show how cannabis is more dangerous than LSD and ecstasy. Experts analysed 20 substances for addictiveness, social harm and physical damage. The results will increase the pressure on the Government to have a full debate on drugs, and a new independent UK drug policy commission being launched next month will call for a rethink on the issue.

The findings last night reignited the debate about cannabis use, with a growing number of specialists saying that the drug bears no relation to the substance most law-makers would recognise. Professor Colin Blakemore, chief of the Medical Research Council, who backed our original campaign for cannabis to be decriminalised, has also changed his mind. He said: "The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn't 10 years ago."

Many medical specialists agree that the debate has changed. Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at London's Institute of Psychiatry, estimates that at least 25,000 of the 250,000 schizophrenics in the UK could have avoided the illness if they had not used cannabis. "The number of people taking cannabis may not be rising, but what people are taking is much more powerful, so there is a question of whether a few years on we may see more people getting ill as a consequence of that."

"Society has seriously underestimated how dangerous cannabis really is," said Professor Neil McKeganey, from Glasgow University's Centre for Drug Misuse Research. "We could well see over the next 10 years increasing numbers of young people in serious difficulties."

Politicians have also hardened their stance. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has changed his mind over the classification of cannabis, after backing successful calls to downgrade the drug from B to C in 2002. He abandoned that position last year, before the IoS revealed that he had smoked cannabis as a teenager, and now wants the drug's original classification to be restored.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



19 March, 2007

Cholesterol: You can't win

LOW Cholesterol seems to be bad for your brain

While a high total cholesterol level in middle age is a risk factor for developing dementia later in life, a drop in cholesterol after middle age may also be a sign of later cognitive problems, a study shows. It hints that falling total cholesterol levels after middle age may point to an ongoing disease processes in the brain, and could be a marker for risk of late-life cognitive impairment.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, from the Aging Research Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues investigated changes in total cholesterol levels in relation to cognitive functioning in late-life. The study involved some 2000 people who had their cholesterol level measured in midlife, and were re-examined an average of 21 years later. The team focused on 70 people who developed mild cognitive impairment during follow-up, 48 who developed Alzheimer's disease and a "control" group of 1,203 people who remained mentally intact. "Mid-life total cholesterol represented a risk factor for more severe cognitive impairment later in life," the researchers found, with significant differences between the controls, those with mild cognitive impairment, and those with dementia. On the other hand, a moderate drop in total cholesterol from mid-life to late-life "was significantly associated with the risk of a more impaired late-life cognitive status," the investigators report in the medical journal Neurology.

These findings remained unchanged after adjusting for factors that might influence brain function, including age, sex, education and even the presence APOE-4 gene, which is known to predispose people to develop Alzheimer's disease. Kivipelto and colleagues believe that declining cholesterol after middle age may "reflect ongoing pathological processes in the brain." Nonetheless, they say the relationship between cholesterol and dementia is "controversial," and meanwhile, they point out, high cholesterol "carries risk even in old age, and results from clinical trials in vascular diseases support the benefit of lipid-lowering treatment in elderly patients."

Source



US approves quicker test for meningitis

US health officials have approved a quicker test for meningitis that aims to help doctors more quickly diagnose and treat patients with the potentially fatal infection. The test, made by Cepheid Inc.'s, can determine within 3 hours whether a patient has the viral form of the condition rather than the more dangerous type caused by bacteria, the US Food and Drug Administration said. Other products can take as long as a week. While those with viral meningitis can usually recover within weeks without medical help, those with the bacterial version need urgent treatment with antibiotics to prevent brain damage and possible death, according to the agency. "Because this test is significantly faster than existing methods for diagnosing meningitis, it could minimize delays in treating patients," said Dr. Daniel Schultz, director of FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "Swift recognition of the cause and appropriate treatment is critical to patient recovery."

Meningitis, an infection of fluid in the spinal cord and around the brain, can cause fever headaches and neck pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those younger than two may seem inactive or irritable as well as experience vomiting. There are also several vaccines to help prevent the condition. Although wide outbreaks of meningitis are not seen in the United States, some data has shown it can occur more frequently among college students living in dorms. It is also seen more often overseas.

Dr. David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer, said one million tests are conducted nationwide each year for the viral infection. Shares of the company closed more than 9 percent higher at $9.44 on Nasdaq. Cepheid's test is designed to work with its GeneXpert system, which can also diagnose Group B streptococcal infections in pregnant women. Other tests are also being developed for the system, Persing told Reuters. "We think a lot of labs are going to buy a GeneXpert just for this test," he said, referring to meningitis. The disposable cartridges that hold spinal fluid samples cost $69 each and come in packs of 10, Persing said. The system to test the samples can cost between $25,000 and $125,000. The test can identify infections from a class of viruses called enterovirus, which make up about 90 percent of all viral meningitis cases, the FDA said.

A study of the product using samples from 255 patients, found 96 percent of those who tested positive had viral meningitis, while 97 percent of those who tested negative did not have it, it added.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



18 March, 2007

Cardiac arrest: forget the kiss of life

GEORGE BUSH the elder received one from a golfing buddy. Pierce Brosnan as James Bond laid one on Halle Berry in Die Another Day. Now the famous kiss of life - a mainstay of resuscitation for 50 years - should be allowed to slip back into history, a large Japanese study suggests. It shows people who collapsed suddenly with cardiac arrest had a 50 per cent higher chance of surviving if someone gave them heart massage alone rather than alternating it with breathing into their lungs.

There were several reasons why chest compressions might work better than traditional cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), said the study leader, Ken Nagao, from Tokyo's Surugadai Nihon University Hospital. Interrupting chest compression to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation might do more harm than good if blood flow to the heart was not properly re-established, he said. As well, many people were too squeamish to lock lips with a stranger, whereas more might be prepared to attempt hands-only resuscitation. "This reluctance is partly caused by fear of transmission of infectious diseases," Dr Nagao wrote yesterday in the medical journal The Lancet. "Another barrier to bystanders attempting CPR is the complexity of the technique as presently taught."

Dr Nagao and colleagues studied the medical histories of 4068 people who collapsed with a heart attack while someone else was present. Nearly three-quarters received no resuscitation at all, but of the others, those who were given heart compressions alone were 50 per cent more likely to be alive without brain damage a month later. Nevertheless, only a small proportion survived - 6 per cent in the heart-only group versus 4 per cent of those who also received the kiss of life. The results apply only to cardiac arrest and not to drowning, the other main use of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Dr Gordon Ewy, the chief of cardiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, wrote in the same journal that the results "should lead to a prompt interim revision of the guidelines for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Eliminating the need for mouth-to-mouth ventilation will dramatically increase the occurrence of bystander-initiated resuscitation efforts and will increase survival."

Carol Cunningham, the co-ordinator of a Heart Foundation campaign to improve early detection of heart attacks, said: "Most out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur in the person's home. The person who's on hand is usually a relative or friend and anything that simplifies [resuscitation] is important because it saves lives." But Ms Cunningham said the foundation would follow the advice of the Australian Resuscitation Council, whose chairman, Ian Jacobs, said he was not convinced that recommendations needed further change.

In a revision adopted last year, the council recommends 30 chest compressions followed by two mouth-to-mouth ventilations "in order to increase the number of compressions and reduce the number of interruptions", in line with the Japanese findings, Associate Professor Jacobs said. This advice had superseded guidelines that varied according to whether the patient was a child or adult and how many bystanders were able to assist. Ventilation of the lungs was crucial in children, Associate Professor Jacobs said, emphasising: "Any resuscitation attempt is better than no attempt."

Source



THE POMEGRANATE ENTHUSIASM



They have been a common sight in Brisbane suburban gardens over the years, but now the humble pomegranate is reaching celebrity status in the UK. And it's all because of their supposed health benefits. Demand for the fruit has grown by 76 per cent across stores over the past year, figures from market analysts TNS show. Dubbed a "superfood", the pomegranate has overtaken blueberries as Britain's fastest growing seller, according to supermarket chain Tesco which sold 3.8 million pomegranates in the past year - an increase of two million on the previous year. Other products dubbed "superfoods" because of their health benefits include spinach, broccoli, avocados and fish rich in omega 3 oils.

The pomegranate is a native fruit of the Middle East which grows well in Queensland's tropical conditions. Just one pomegranate provides around 40 per cent of the daily recommended vitamin C intake. They also contain high levels of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents and have been shown to help with the treatment of a range of illnesses including osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease.

Research from the US also has revealed that eating pomegranates slows down the progress of prostate cancer. Last year, a team at the University of California, Los Angeles found drinking just one glass of pomegranate juice a day could allow a man aged 65-70 years who already has prostate cancer to complete his normal lifespan without harsh medical treatments. More than 2500 men die from prostate cancer in Australia each year.

That US research team found pomegranate juice dramatically slowed prostate cancer in mice. "Our study, while early, adds to growing evidence that pomegranates contain very powerful agents against cancer, particularly prostate cancer," said Professor Hasan Mukhtar who led the study. "There is good reason now to test this fruit in humans, both for cancer prevention and treatment."

Source

Journal abstract follows. Note that the research showed effects only in the test tube and in specially prepared mice. It is a big leap from that to an effect on human lifespan

Pomegranate fruit juice for chemoprevention and chemotherapy of prostate cancer

Arshi Malik et al

Prostate cancer is the most common invasive malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among U.S. males, with a similar trend in many Western countries. One approach to control this malignancy is its prevention through the use of agents present in diet consumed by humans. Pomegranate from the tree Punica granatum possesses strong antioxidant and antiinflammatory properties. We recently showed that pomegranate fruit extract (PFE) possesses remarkable antitumor-promoting effects in mouse skin. In this study, employing human prostate cancer cells, we evaluated the antiproliferative and proapoptotic properties of PFE. PFE (10-100 æg/ml; 48 h) treatment of highly aggressive human prostate cancer PC3 cells resulted in a dose-dependent inhibition of cell growth/cell viability and induction of apoptosis. Immunoblot analysis revealed that PFE treatment of PC3 cells resulted in (i) induction of Bax and Bak (proapoptotic); (ii) down-regulation of Bcl-XL and Bcl-2 (antiapoptotic); (iii) induction of WAF1/p21 and KIP1/p27; (iv) a decrease in cyclins D1, D2, and E; and (v) a decrease in cyclin-dependent kinase (cdk) 2, cdk4, and cdk6 expression. These data establish the involvement of the cyclin kinase inhibitor-cyclin-cdk network during the antiproliferative effects of PFE. Oral administration of PFE (0.1% and 0.2%, wt/vol) to athymic nude mice implanted with androgen-sensitive CWR22Rnu1 cells resulted in a significant inhibition in tumor growth concomitant with a significant decrease in serum prostate-specific antigen levels. We suggest that pomegranate juice may have cancer-chemopreventive as well as cancer-chemotherapeutic effects against prostate cancer in humans.

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



17 March, 2007

The mega-vitamin mega-myth

This study was mentioned here on March 1st but it is discussed at greater length below by Steven Milloy

Another nutrition myth went down the drain this week. It seems that antioxidant vitamins don't quite live up to their hype. Researchers reviewing 68 studies on the effect of antioxidants on life span reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week that consumption of beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium, whether singly or combined, did not reduce the risk of premature death. If anything, the researchers concluded, there was actually a slight increase in risk of premature death among antioxidant supplement takers (with the exception of vitamin C and selenium).

Antioxidants have been hypothesized to reduce the oxidative damage to the body caused by so-called "free radicals." Some have suggested that antioxidant supplements may reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. Such claims helped fuel the growth of the multi-billion dollar nutritional supplement industry.

The researchers didn't conduct new experimental research. Instead, they conducted a systematic review of the results of 68 studies involving 232,606 antioxidant supplement users, combing their results using a controversial statistical technique known as "meta-analysis." The conclusion that antioxidant supplements don't appear to help you live longer is likely on a sound footing. Even without statistically combining the studies through meta-analysis, it's fairly clear that antioxidant supplements are ineffective for increasing longevity. Of the 68 studies examined, 66 studies reported no statistically significant association between supplement use and longevity. The remaining two studies actually reported statistically weak increases in premature death with supplement use.

One strength of this analysis is that longevity is perhaps the most objective measure of health. A potential weakness of the study - at least in terms of putting the myth to bed - is that the researchers didn't examine whether supplement use reduced the risk of cancer or heart disease - two diseases often touted as preventable by antioxidant use. This shortcoming may enable the supplement industry to keep making unproven claims about antioxidants preventing those two diseases.

The study's other conclusion concerning the risk of antioxidant supplements increasing the risk of premature death rests on shaky ground, however. The researchers reported that beta-carotene supplements taken singly, vitamin A supplements taken singly or in combination with other antioxidant supplements; and vitamin E supplements taken singly or in combination with other antioxidant supplements were associated with 6 percent, 16 percent and 4 percent, respectively, increases in risk of premature death among the study group.

Although the three reported increases in risk were statistically significant, this is not likely a reason to fret about supplement use. All three results are relatively weak statistical correlations that would require large, well-designed, and carefully controlled clinical trials to confirm. But since there's no apparent health benefit from taking these supplements to begin with, there's probably little reason to take them or to study them further.

It will be interesting to see what impact this study has on the nutritional supplement industry. A Google search on "antioxidant" produced advertisements proclaiming, "Natural Antioxidant = Better Health"; and "Naturally Remove Free Radicals." A search on "beta-carotene" produced, "Reduce Cancer and Disease." A "vitamin E" search produced "Feel Strong. Be Healthy" and "You can look and feel 20 years younger than you actually are."

Then there's the vitamin C industry that's been built around double-Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, perhaps the most prominent promoter of the notion that mega-doses of vitamin C improve health. In his highly publicized 1970 book "Vitamin C and the Common Cold," Pauling claimed that taking 10 times the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C reduced the incidence of colds by 45 percent. In his 1986 book, "How to Feel Better and Live Longer," Pauling claimed that mega-doses of vitamins "can improve your general health . increase your enjoyment of life and can help in controlling heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and in slowing down the process of aging."

As Quackwatch.org's Dr. Stephen Barrett points out, "Although Pauling's mega-vitamin claims lacked the evidence needed for acceptance by the scientific community, they have been accepted by large numbers of people who lack the scientific expertise to evaluate them. Thanks largely to Pauling's prestige, annual vitamin C sales in the United States have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many years."

While the jury is probably still out on whether typical use of antioxidant supplements pose any sort of long-term health risk, it is possible to overdose on antioxidants, particularly vitamin A. With respect to Pauling and mega-doses of vitamin C, Dr. Barrett says, "The physical damage to people he led astray cannot be measured."

None of this is to say that no nutritional supplement can have any value under any circumstances. But before falling blindly for claims made by the nutritional supplement industry, you should probably do your own research and check with your physician.

Source



A demented approach to the ageing population

Scary headlines about a 'dementia timebomb' expose today's miserabilist view of the human success story that is longer life.

A report published last week by the UK Alzheimer’s Society, Dementia UK: a report into the prevalence and cost of dementia, confirmed what many people already knew: that dementia is one of the main causes of disability in later life. What was disappointing was the way the research was framed as another ‘ageing timebomb’.

Today, about one-in-five people over the age of 80 has a form of dementia. As a progressive disease, the impact on the individual ranges from mild to severe, so that only a small proportion lose most of their capacity for independent living. But for those worst affected it is extremely distressing for themselves and especially for their caring relatives.

The study could have been greeted simply as a rational contribution to helping society adjust its priorities to an ageing population. With demographic shifts, the types of illnesses that society should focus on change. With substantially reduced infant mortality and more people living to an old age compared to 100 and even 25 years ago, less medical research can be devoted to defeated or contained diseases such as polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles or typhoid, and more can be devoted to heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia. That’s rational social adaptation.

Unfortunately, a review of the media headlines illustrates a much more alarmist and miserabilist message: ‘Dementia timebomb warning’, ‘The country’s looming dementia crisis’, ‘Dementia timebomb will cost NHS millions’. Such a reaction to the underlying research in this report is not only unjustified but also counter-productive. The Alzheimer’s Society itself warns that such alarmist talk is misleading. It argues with reason that: ‘The use of phrases such as the demographic timebomb, or the view that older people are a burden on our society, does not encourage the view that a sustainable system can be developed.’ (2)

There is nothing new here. The threat of a ‘timebomb’ is frequently invoked in relation to ageing - just look at the debate about pensions. But this fear and anxiety is not a good way to plan transformation and progressive adaptation. Instead, fear-mongering today tends to reinforce a fatalist resignation to the future, epitomised by a naturalist view of ageing: we’re ageing, old age historically brings negative consequences, so we have to put up with it.

Knee-jerk responses in the face of an ‘emerging crisis’ make things worse, more often than not. (That’s also the story of the perverse, counter-productive impact of pension reforms over the past 20 years.) For example, the report draws attention to the ‘starkly different ordering of [research] priorities: cancer 23.5 per cent, cardiovascular disease 17.6 per cent, musculoskeletal disorders 6.9 per cent, stroke 3.1 per cent and dementia 1.4 per cent’. I’m sure it is not the authors’ intention but when legitimate calls for more specific research funding are made in the hyperbolic context of a perceived looming ‘cost crisis’, one can easily imagine the response will be ‘okay, let’s cut funding to these other areas and reallocate to dementia instead’. In the short term, this might seem to support the prospects for potential dementia sufferers, but overall could produce a worse future for old people if other age-related chronic disorders lose funding as a result.

These anxieties about the social and economic impact of ageing are unjustified. We need to challenge an intensifying paradox of our times: that even though we are living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than ever in human history, we are also more negative about ageing and old age. In the past, old age had both positive and negative connotations – experience and wisdom, not just decrepitude. Today, we only seem to recognise the negative: a timebomb bringing about an intolerable economic and social strain based on millions more dependent people.

Whatever the specific issue, there are always three ways to expose this paradox of ageing.

Firstly, society is getting wealthier all the time. Whatever the extra costs associated with an older population, the trend of rising productivity means that we will have even more resources in the future, so we can bear these costs easily.

History justifies that perspective. There is nothing new or unprecedented about ageing. Developed countries will age over the next half-century at much the same rate that they have for the last hundred years. In contrast to the warnings today that ‘ageing will slow down future economic growth’, this demographic shift hasn’t stopped us from getting more prosperous as a society and older people have benefited from this greater social wealth.

Secondly, a narrow ‘telescope’ view of the future tends to mislead when broader social consequences are drawn. Focusing on one particular feature of the future can fail to incorporate offsetting factors.

The most obvious example as it applies to ageing is that fewer young people necessarily offset more old people. Hence, more absolute spending on old age-related costs is offset by less on younger sections of the population - for example, on education and the specific health costs of the young.

Even in the narrow area of health within wider social spending there are inevitable offsets. Some forms of morbidity rise with age, so more old people mean more illness to be treated. But we are living not just longer lives but longer healthier lives. This trend counteracts the impact of increased health spending related to old age.

This is even more the case when the main influence on the ageing of society is no longer falling birth rates but longer life. For most of the twentieth century, ageing populations mostly represented a changed ratio between young and old people – falling fertility reduced the size of younger cohorts producing an automatic increase in the average age and in the proportion of old people in the population. More recently, since about the 1960s, greater longevity has become a bigger influence on the age structure. The fact that we are living longer is partly attributable to the defeat, or better treatment, of diseases that used to debilitate or kill off younger people. People, including those who are already old, are living to a greater age. Postponed death of this sort tends to go along with people being fitter and healthier during their lives because they are both reflections of social progress and higher living standards.

Most of us are getting through youth and middle age without requiring much medical support, and much less than our parents and grandparents needed. Lower health costs earlier in life means a healthier society, which is good, and which brings about an inevitable concentration of health resources on the older segment of the population because of the higher probability of disease and death with advancing age. 

A related factor that is often downplayed in discussions of age-related health costs is that the cost of dying is more relevant than the cost of ageing. The highest costs arise in the final six-to-18 months prior to death, whatever the age of death. Focusing on the costs of people with dementia in their final years forgets that this means we are paying the cost of these final months for fewer younger people - and in the context of dementia, ‘younger’ means people below the age of 80. 

In other words, just because there will be more people with dementia in an ageing population doesn’t tell us anything about total social expenditures in the future.

Thirdly, the future is one of transformation and adaptation, not extrapolation. This is the statistical distinction between ‘projections’ and ‘forecasts’, which invariably get mixed up in everyday discussion. This confusion is a boon to those who make fearful speculations about the future. A statistician can make a projection about the future based on certain present-day assumptions and extrapolating from them. But every serious professional statistician will add the warning that this is not a forecast of the future, because things will change - society progresses - and therefore the assumptions made for the projection will become invalid.

This misleading shorthand applies to the dementia study itself. It claims: ‘The total number of people with dementia in the UK is forecast to increase to 940,110 by 2021 and 1,735,087 by 2051, an increase of 38 per cent over the next 15 years and 154 per cent over the next 45 years.’ Hence the alarmist BBC News headline: ‘1.7m “will have dementia by 2051“‘. (3) These figures are really projections, not forecasts, based on the researchers’ assumptions about the numbers of elderly people, the incidence of conditions such as high cholesterol and blood pressure, and levels of exercise. Many of these assumptions will not work out exactly.

More importantly, the prevalence of dementia could fall if some means of preventing or, in the shorter term, postponing dementia were discovered. This is the message of the report that should be heeded – more research can accelerate building upon the existing indications of scientific and medical progress in this area. But this gets a little lost in the hyperbole. 

More broadly we can reasonably expect further improvements in standards of health in the future. The general trend is that in most countries a symptom of living longer healthier lives is that the age of onset of particular illnesses is postponed. The average 65-year-old today is much healthier than one in 1950 due to a combination of improvements in living standards and medical progress; healthy life expectancy is growing with increases in overall life expectancy.

The only uncertainties are the pace of improvements in healthy life expectancy and total life expectancy - and the relation between them. In general, morbidity is being postponed. There are indications for some illnesses, though not yet dementia, of tendencies to their compression as well as postponement. This means that some chronic disorders might be concentrated into a smaller proportion, and even a shorter absolute period, at the end of a person’s life. That’s because the older you are when you become ill, the quicker you may finally succumb to that illness.

This report on dementia is one more example of the unjustified negativity with which an ageing population is perceived these days, alongside the ongoing fears and panics about the cost of pensions and other age-related phenomena such as the cost of long-term care. All this pessimism about the human success story of people living longer older tells us more about society’s collective sense of uncertainty and anxieties about where we are heading, than it does about a rational understanding of any of these age-related issues.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



16 March, 2007

Walking beats addiction?

As little as five minutes of exercise could help smokers quit, says a new study. Research published in the international medical journal Addiction showed that moderate exercise, such as walking, significantly reduced the intensity of smokers' nicotine withdrawal symptoms. "If we found the same effects in a drug, it would immediately be sold as an aid to help people quit smoking," said Dr. Adrian Taylor, the study's lead author and professor of exercise and health psychology at the University of Exeter.

Taylor and colleagues reviewed 12 papers looking at the connection between exercise and nicotine deprivation. They focused on exercises that could be done outside a gym, such as walking and isometrics, or the flexing and tensing of muscles. According to their research, just five-minutes of exercise was often enough to help smokers overcome their immediate need for a nicotine fix. After various types of moderate physical exertion, researchers asked people to rate their need for a cigarette. People who had exercised reported reduced a desire.

"What's surprising is the strength of the effect," said Dr. Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College London. West was not involved in the review. "They found that the acute effects of exercise were as effective as a nicotine patch," he said. West cautioned that it was unknown how long the effects of exercise would last. "You could in theory use exercise to deal with short bouts of nicotine cravings, but we don't know if it would help in the longer term," he said. It is likely that exercise would have to be combined with a larger strategy of other anti-smoking techniques to be successful in helping people quit.

Nearly anything that distracts people from smoking is thought to help, but scientists have long suspected that exercise might have a more potent effect. Taylor theorized that exercise could produce the mood-enhancing hormone dopamine, which could, in turn, reduce smokers' nicotine dependence.

Still, experts were not convinced about the study's practical applications. "Doctors can tell patients to do things until they're blue in the face, but the limiting factor may be getting people to actually take up exercise," said Dr. Peter Hajek, professor of clinical psychology at Queen Mary University Hospital in London. Hajek was not involved in the study. Hajek said that if people were taught simple exercises, including isometric exercises they could do at their desk, they could potentially stave off their need for a cigarette break. "When you are dying for a cigarette, you can try to exercise instead," he said.

Source

Journal abstract

The acute effects of exercise on cigarette cravings, withdrawal symptoms, affect and smoking behaviour: a systematic review

Aim: To review the effects of a single session of exercise on cigarette cravings, withdrawal symptoms and smoking behaviour.

Methods: A systematic search and critical appraisal of all 14 relevant studies.

Results: All 12 studies that compared a bout of exercise with a passive condition reported a positive effect on cigarette cravings, withdrawal symptoms and smoking behaviour. Two other studies that compared two intensities of exercise revealed no differences in outcomes. Single and multi-item measures of cigarette cravings, withdrawal symptoms and negative affect decreased rapidly during exercise and remained reduced for up to 50 minutes after exercise. Effect sizes for seven studies that assessed ‘strength of desire to smoke’ showed a mean reduction, 10 minutes after exercise, of 1.1 (SD 0.9). Four studies reported a two- to threefold longer time to the next cigarette following exercise. Cravings and withdrawal symptoms were reduced with an exercise intensity from as high as 60–85% heart rate reserve (HRR) (lasting 30–40 minutes) to as low as 24% HRR (lasting 15 minutes), and also with isometric exercise (for 5 minutes). All but one study involved participants temporarily abstaining for the purposes of the experiment. Distraction was probably not the primary reason for the effects. [What if I say that it probably was and that any distraction would do equally well?]

Conclusions: Relatively small doses of exercise should be recommended as an aid to managing cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Further research to understand the mechanisms involved, such as stress reduction or neurobiological mechanisms, could lead to development of more effective and practical methods to reduce withdrawal phenomena.



Now living together makes you fat!

It's all men's fault, of course

Men and women might belong to the same species but they can have very different eating habits. Women are generally fruit eaters who are able to eat their fruit whole. Men, on the other hand, tend to eat less fruit unless someone (usually a woman) cuts it into pieces for them. They're also likely to eat fewer vegetables, are more likely to be meat eaters, while women are more likely to eat chicken and fish or be vegetarian. So what happens when they move in together - whose eating habits rule and can it be a recipe for becoming overweight?

While some research suggests the first year of living together is a time of increased risk of weight gain for both sexes, a review of research into the eating habits of cohabiting and married couples in the UK, USA and Australia found that in general, women came off worse. Although men often picked up healthier food habits when they moved in with a woman, women ended up eating more foods high in fat and sugar, and put on weight, according to the report by the Human Nutrition Research Centre at the University of Newcastle in the UK.

"It's hard to eat as many vegetables as I'd like because my partner will only eat potatoes, corn, salad leaves, carrot and avocado - unless you count baked beans. He's into English stodge and I like a Mediterranean diet," complains a friend who moved in with her partner last year. "I tend to tailor my choices to what he eats because I don't want to cook two different meals at night - but I'm trying to find more ways to adapt our meals so I get more vegetables."

So far she's not gained any extra kilos, but ask would-be weight losers when they gained weight, and many will tell you it's when they got married. That's the observation of Marie Elliott, who leads four Weight Watchers' meetings a week in Camden in Sydney. "I lost weight for my wedding, but I started gaining it once I was married. Maybe it's because you get a bit more relaxed. If you're cooking for someone else and you want to impress them you might make dessert more often, and whereas you might not drink while you're alone, when you're living with a partner there's always someone to share a drink with. Women who start cooking for a man might also start serving larger portions," she says.

But once the weight is on, men and women need different approaches to getting it off, according to dietitian Karen Miller-Kovach, Chief Scientific Officer with Weight Watchers in the US. "Both men and women are emotional eaters, but women overeat when they're sad, while men tend to overeat when they're happy - when they're out with the boys or they're celebrating an anniversary," says Miller-Kovach, who is the author of She Loses, He Loses: The Truth About Men, Women and Weight Loss (to be published in the US in April).

And while it's common for women to believe they're fat when they're not, it's common for men to think they're not overweight when they are - some men have to be obese before they think they're overweight, she adds. "But the things that inspire men and women to lose weight or to eat healthier are different. While women are more likely to change their eating [habits] to prevent a health problem, men often wait until they get a problem."

If you're a woman who wants to encourage her partner to eat better or lose weight, Miller-Kovach's advice is to give him a problem that can be fixed by having a healthier diet or losing weight. "Men are problem solvers - if you can present him with a problem, like the fact that he now needs clothes in a larger size, or needs to lower his cholesterol or blood pressure, a guy will fix it," she says.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



15 March, 2007

Australia: Hip woes hit under-50s

High-impact exercise blamed

More middle-aged people are having hip replacements because high-impact exercise has wrecked their joints. While osteoarthritis used to be a disease of the elderly, it is increasingly common in the under 50s. Road jogging, strenuous aerobics and skiing are just some of the activities that take a toll on joints, leading to knee and hip replacements.

Bill Donnelly, a surgeon at Brisbane Orthopaedic Specialist Services, estimates 90 per cent of the 30,000 joint replacement operations in Australia every year are because of osteoarthritis. "There is an increase of people under 50 having the operations because of an increase in competitive and contact sports and also high- impact activity," he said.

Twenty years ago, patients under 55 were told they were too young lor surgery, but increased demand and improved technology has changed that. The old-style full hip replacement involved a large part of the femur being removed as well as the ball and socket of the hip joint, but a new technique, hip resurfacing, conserves the damaged areas. The operation is recommended for younger patients who want to continue an active lifestyle.

"In six or seven years, this operation has increased from 2 per cent to 10 per cent of the joint-replacement market," Dr Donnelly said. "There are restrictions, however, and if people go back to jogging, and playing contact sports, the joint will become loose. We tell patients to switch their activities to cycling, walking, swimming and golf."

Dianne Dixon is only 43, but has had a knee operation and hip resurfacing, after years of netball and road jogging. A car accident escalated the problem. The mother of four, from Maroochy Waters on the Sunshine Coast, said that without the surgery she would have been in chronic pain. "I've had to give up the netball and the jogging, but I do keep active with low-impact exercise," she said. Dr Donnelly said joint replacements shouldn't be taken lightly. "They're fantastic, but they are a last resort."

The above article by HANNAH DAVIES appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on March 11, 2007



Britain: The exercise craze that crippled a generation

They were promised the body beautiful and their mantra was "No pain no gain". Two decades later they are feeling it again - in their knees, hips and lower backs. They are the casualties of the aerobics boom. The craze began in the late 1970s but it was the actress Jane Fonda who really got people moving. Following her lead, thousands climbed into Spandex, donned headbands and twisted and punched the air in church halls across Britain.

Now they are more likely to be seen in physiotherapy. Nicki de Lyon, of Sports and Spinal Clinics, London, said: "They have knee and hip and lower back problems. It was not just the constant impact on hard floors, which put pressure on joints, but the twisting movements. And in the 1980s there had not been any research into the right footwear."

The fitness industry was in its infancy. Robin Gargrave, of the YMCA, said: "People didn't know what they were doing. They were just following America. Now we know that jogging on the spot waving your arms in the air isn't the best thing for your body."

Derrick Evans, who went on to become Mr Motivator, visited a leisure centre in Harrow in 1981 and saw hundreds of women doing "Popmobility". He hired the two women leading them and set up a class at a church hall in Neasden. "After a few months I decided I could do this," he said. Before long he had become the presenter Gloria Hunniford's trainer and was motivating millions of viewers on This Morning. "In those days it wasn't critical to have qualifications. There weren't really any around." Now 54, he claims to be "fitter than a fiddle" - but his routines were always "moderate". Others were less so. Andy Jackson, of the Fitness Industry Authority, says that, in the first flush of the craze, "a lot of deconditioned people suddenly started exercising with the intensity of Linford Christie".

Disciples were told that pain was good for them. "It's positive pain, just like childbirth," devotees in America shouted. As the craze took off in Britain, Geri Livingston bought a cat-suit and joined an energetic group in a church hall in Cheshire. All through the 1980s she sought out the toughest classes, attending up to four a week. "My knees just kill me now," said Mrs Livingston, now 44. "I can't jog any more, and I have lower back problems."

Hardest hit were the instructors. "I would be taking 20 classes a week," said Ebony Williams, who now teaches Pilates. "My knees are painful and swollen, I'm seeing a chiropractor for my back, and I have to have regular massages. All the instructors I knew have had the same problems with their knees, back, joints and shoulders."

Aerobics is now in decline. In Britain it has been supplanted by a bewildering array of low-impact routines and "conditioning" programmes aimed at people in their mid50s. There, in softly lit studios, next to Japanese fountains and no longer wearing Spandex, the walking wounded of the aerobics boom may seek to soothe their battered bones.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



14 March, 2007

Do cities make us sick?

By Prof. James Woudhuysen

Next Wednesday's spiked seminar `Building for the Future: Housing Need and Sustainability', which I am speaking at, comes at a useful moment. To be held at the London headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, it comes in the wake of the publication of the twenty-sixth report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP). Titled The Urban Environment, the report came out on 6 March (1). Weighing in at more than 200 pages, it is a remarkable document. It is the first official suggestion, in Britain, that cities, and especially new housebuilding in the South East of England, represent health problems. This medicalisation of cities and housing marks a new low in today's suspicion of mankind's works, and indeed of mankind.

After an opening paragraph eulogising cities as synonymous with civilsation, the tone swiftly changes. We learn in the third paragraph that cities can provide people with `a wide range of services with low personal transport requirements'. Ah, so cities are good because they obviate the human need to move around. We also learn that cities `have the potential to release land for nature': cities - especially `compact' cities - are apparently good because they allow us to preserve the 98 per cent of the world's land surface that is un-urbanised (p2). In other words, to the extent that cities should be cheered, it is only because they get people `off the land' and leave it for trees and plants and wildlife.

Next, and importantly, an obscure 1973 paper by one Professor Horst Rittel is cited to suggest that UK urban environmental management presents `a classic case' of a `wicked problem'. Defects in urban health - and of course `wellbeing' - cannot be solved definitively, we are told, `but rather must be managed for better or worse'. Indeed, `urban environmental issues owe much of their wickedness to the nature of towns and cities as complex systems' (p5).

Complex they certainly are. In an early diagram (p7), containing no fewer than 33 arrows of causality, increased car ownership and use - familiar villains - are held responsible for flash flooding, property damage, loss of shade, and dodgy impacts on rivers, flora and fauna. But the Royal Commission's main concern is that cities `still appear to be missing from the sustainability agenda' (p10).

Perhaps the Commission's chairman, Professor Sir John Lawton, should get out a bit more. When a biologist at the University of York, it's true, his investigation of the insect fauna of bracken on Skipwith Common, near Selby, stood `as a model of sustained and intensive ecological research' (2). But if this complete non-specialist in urban matters had bothered to read the website of Ruth Kelly's Department of Communities and Local Government, he would find that the words `cities' and `housing' are rarely written nowadays in Whitehall without the adjective `sustainable' in front of each.

Indeed, the RCEP itself indulges in the same kind of monotony. Early on, it identified four `priority themes', these being `sustainable urban transport; sustainable urban management (Local Agenda 21, EMAS, indicators); sustainable urban construction (resource and energy efficiency, demolition waste, design issues); and sustainable urban design (land use-regeneration, brownfield sites, urban sprawl, land use densities)' (3).

I will leave it to the reader to find out more about Local Agenda 21 (a derivative of Agenda 21, the UN's Rio Declaration on Environment and Development) and EMAS (the EU's Eco-Management and Audit Scheme). But this much is clear: for the Commission, the UK's progress towards sustainability is hindered by `the current drive to create new urban areas', and in particular by proposals to build 3.3million new homes in England by 2016 (p15). Rough translation: the move towards being more green is hampered by plans to build more homes in order to house all those pesky people. This gives a telling insight into the priorities of the environmentally-minded.

Again, perhaps Commission members should listen less to Greenpeace, Ken Livingstone's deputy Nicky Gavron, the deep green environmentalist Herbert Girardet or London School of Economics professor Anne Power, who - with the architect Richard Rogers - believes that all new housing in Britain must be built to London densities. Perhaps, instead, they should take more seriously the affordability of UK housing, and the demographic trends that make it so essential that the UK builds more homes. The Commission, however, has not `sought to unpick the rationale behind' such issues, `beyond noting that the predict-and-provide approach has been found wanting in other areas of policy' (p27).

Commission worries

So. Predict a need for more housing, but do not provide for it. Why? Because new housing `is difficult to reconcile with the idea of respecting environmental limits' (p27). Forget about young people - let them live with their parents and grandparents. Rather, we should worry about air quality, despite the fact that, in the case of particulates, there was until 2000 a steady reduction in concentrations in UK cities (succeeded by circumstances in which `concentrations have at best plateaued') (p37). We should worry not so much about the 27,500 additional deaths in the UK caused by cold in 2005, but rather about hotter summers, the `urban heat island effect' and the 2,000 people who supposedly died of heat-related causes in 2003 (p41).

Our old friend, sick building syndrome, gets an outing, too. We are told that SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and avian flu `may pose a particular threat to city dwellers', and that there is strong evidence that, `in some circumstances', the urban environment `can lead to impaired mental health' (p44, mentioned 47 times), as well as that well-known scourge, obesity (p46). Indeed, in a lurid diagram on `the pathways that can link residential environments to cardiovascular risk', it is seriously proposed that cities lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammation, heart rate variability and more besides (p49). All this despite the fact that the report concedes that `the nature of the relationship between health and place is poorly understood. It is difficult to establish whether and how the urban environment causes unfavourable health outcomes.' (p33)

Is there no malady for which cities are not culpable? And if cities are to blame for so much, why is life expectancy rising in the way that it is? The influx of millions and millions of people into cities over the past century and more has gone hand-in-hand with improvements in quality and longevity of life.

However, the Royal Commission does not bother to ask itself difficult questions about the benefits of city life. It is so fearful of the possibility of 3.3million homes being built that it has not stopped to ask whether possibility will lead to actuality, and whether the `proposals' for new homes will result in new homes. Take the Thames Gateway housing development in East London. According to Stan Hornagold, senior partner at management consultants Hornagold & Hills, it will `require building a city the size of Leeds in the most populated part of the country'. But after surveying about 400 firms, local authorities and government officials connected with the Gateway, Hornagold found that almost nothing has actually been done over the past 12 months. About the `additional Leeds' factor, Hornagold stated: `We don't get any sense that is being planned for in some government departments.' (4)

The energy question

Few houses are being built. But those that the Royal Commission imagines are being built will apparently wreck our lives. The Commission completely underplays, too, the fact that, under Ruth Kelly's December 2006 Code for Sustainable Homes: A Step-Change in Sustainable Home Building Practice (two mentions of `sustainable' just in the title!), new houses will be subject to stringent rules on carbon emissions in a way that old houses will not. (5)

There is more. The likely meaning of the DCLG's enormously complex Code is that each new home should be in `balance', partly through supplying zero carbon (ZC) energy to the National Grid … la the David Cameron/B&Q rooftop windmill, partly from drawing Grid energy that is itself ZC. Moreover, some environmentalist zealots will say that ZC is not enough; that we need to generate more Grid-exportable ZC energy from the home than is consumed by it. Some will also argue that ZC energy generated on top of 100 kWh/m2 a year should be used to pay off embodied energy in construction, periodic upgrade, and eventual demolition, within the life of structures that could, perhaps, have lifetimes of just 60 years (6). Indeed, the DCLG is already thinking that it may want to provide some way of accounting for embodied energy. `A probable future development regarding the environmental impact of materials', it says, `is to reward resource efficiency, as well as the use of resources that are more sustainable, by developing "Ecopoints per m2" as a measure for this item' (7).

All the discussion on housing today is not about how many, or how large, but about the need for `zero carbon' homes. Not content with that, however, the Royal Commission wants the Code extended to all new buildings, not just residential ones (p100).

Altogether, it seems, houses are the bad guys. Indeed, if the political economy of UK land and the UK planning system - in its sixtieth year in 2007 - has acted to prevent new build in the past, it seems that official strictures around energy, and the Royal Commission's strictures on health, will join the land as barriers to housebuilding in the future. What is the solution, then? To leave people homeless? To force us all to live in overcrowded accommodation?

The Commission's insouciance is breathtaking. Might multiple generations of a family living together in a cramped setting just lead to mental health problems? Isn't it a problem, as the report notes, that `at current rates of turnover an average dwelling in the UK would have a lifetime of around 1,000 years' (p85)? And why refer to Bill Dunster's tawdry BedZED zero-energy development in East London, and the speculative refurbishments of hip property developers Urban Splash in Manchester and Birmingham? (pp99, 101) These examples of greenness are endlessly repeated in the construction trade. If they're so successful, why are there not more of them?

Like the DCLG, the Commission is exercised by the energy embodied in homes, not just that involved in operating them. But once again it ties itself in knots, trying to prevent new construction. After 60 years, it observes, `the total cumulative energy of the new-build home is significantly less than the total energy consumed in running the existing home. Therefore, the embodied energy in dwellings is no reason not to demolish.' (p104)

That sounds rational. But the report goes on to say, in the same sentence: `. but there may be other reasons why demolition is not appropriate, including social, community or heritage reasons.' (p104) So even if new homes are more energy efficient than old ones, we probably shouldn't have any.

It is impossible to read the next 100 pages of this report without laughing or crying. It provides a striking snapshot of officialdom's reluctance to prioritise people's housing needs, and our comfort, and to build the homes that young people, families, immigrants and everybody else requires. Next Wednesday's debate should allow us to interrogate these issues further, and hopefully to put forward an alternative.

Source



THE TRANS-FAT RELIGION GETS OFFICIAL SUPPORT IN AUSTRALIA

It gives believers the feeling that they are doing something useful -- and hassling big, successful businesses is SO satisfying! No mention that the research findings are consistent only with very weak effects and then only at high levels of exposure. Two reports below:

Nutritionists and health campaigners have welcomed plans by fast-food and baked-goods giants to phase out harmful trans-fatty acids from their products following federal government pressure. A meeting of food industry representatives in Sydney yesterday agreed to come up with a plan by September to remove trans-fats, which are suspected of raising the risk of heart disease and have already been banned in some overseas jurisdictions.

Federal Assistant Health Minister Christopher Pyne, who called yesterday's meeting, had threatened to force food companies to declare trans-fat levels on nutrition information panels if a voluntary reduction were not agreed. At present, information panels only have to include details about trans-fats if the food in question is making a health claim about the fat it contains. Mr Pyne said the agreement was "a major breakthrough" and would bring much greater benefits than simply including trans-fats on labels, which he claimed many consumers did not read. "There are some companies that have moved to remove all saturated fats, and I think most other companies will follow suit," he said.

Companies represented at the meeting included McDonald's, Domino's Pizza, Hungry Jacks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Pizza Haven, Oporto, Red Rooster and Subway as well as the Baking Industry Association.

However, experts called on the federal Government to "keep on the case" to ensure the food industry followed its words with action. Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton welcomed the phase-out plan, but added that the "absurdity is that they (trans-fats) were ever there in the first place". "We just need to make sure this isn't a delaying tactic - McDonald's got kudos for saying several years ago they were going to take trans-fats out of their products, and they are only just doing it now," she said. "The real message to the public ought to be: don't eat these foods."

Trans-fats occur naturally at low levels in meat and dairy products, but they are also made artificially by dissolving hydrogen in oils to make them solidify. Trans-fats extend shelf life and improve texture, and are widely used in fast foods and baked goods. They are thought to be even more damaging to health than saturated fats, because as well as raising levels of dangerous low-density lipoprotein cholesterol they also reduce levels of the good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein.

Source

One tenth of one percent of trans-fat is "harmful"? So it says below: Totally unproven, to say the least. Lots of foods would naturally have higher concentrations

A leading fast-food company has refused to bow to the Federal Government's demand it remove harmful fats from its products. The Assistant Health Minister, Chris Pyne, hosted a meeting of industry leaders in Sydney yesterday but failed to secure unanimous support from fast-food groups for healthier cooking. Yum! Restaurants, which owns the KFC and Pizza Hut brands, attended the meeting, and according to sources there remained silent throughout, despite being given three chances to speak against an undertaking to meet a September deadline for a plan to remove trans fats from all products and reduce the use of saturated fats.

Yum! Restaurants said in a statement released after the meeting that KFC Australia had been using palm oil - which is 52 per cent saturated fat - "for many years" and had no intention of converting to a healthier cooking oil. "Palm oil has less than 1 per cent trans fats, and as a result our chicken and chips all contain less than 0.1 per cent trans fat," the statement said. "As these levels are already extremely low, we have no plans to change our recipes or processes from this." Yum! Restaurants declined to comment further.

The Australian Heart Foundation says the palm oil used by KFC is far from healthy. Its view is backed by a 2003 World Health Organisation report that found consumption of palm oils contributed to an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.

The burger chain McDonald's announced last year it was swapping its liquid canola oil blend for a canola-sunflower blend with about 12 per cent saturated fat content. Palm oil and canola-sunflower oil have identical trans fat content (1 per cent).

Responding to Yum! Restaurants's statement after yesterday's meeting, Mr Pyne said: "Everyone made a commitment to return in September with a plan how to reduce both trans fats and saturated fats. [Yum! Restaurants] were part of that meeting, and they signed up by omission. I will be insisting they, too, return in September with a plan for [reducing] both . We are expecting the industry to co-operate in the removal of unhealthy cooking processes, but [if they don't] there are other tools available to government to achieve this aim."

Mr Pyne denied he had undertaken to also broach the subject of industry disclosure of trans fat content at the meeting. Under present regulations, trans fat content need be declared only if the product makes a health claim such as "99 per cent fat free". This means that trans fats on most food are lumped in with beneficial unsaturated fats, which help lower cholesterol. Trans fats, on the other hand, not only raise cholesterol levels but also destroy the benefits of the "good fats" present in a food.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



13 March, 2007

Fish to the rescue -- again

Fish seems to be as popular as McDonalds is unpopular. In the study below, fish oil supplements were shown to alter brain chemistry and behaviour also improved but connecting the two is mere theory. In the absence of a double-blind trial, the behaviour improvement was most likely a "Hawthorne" effect.. Prof. Puri is a fatty acids evangelist with a huge number of academic publications extolling their benefits but I could not find the study mentioned below in the maze of his publication list so I presume that it is as yet unpublished.

Fatty acids can help children in exams and improve their behaviour in class and at home, a study suggests. Overweight children who took fatty acid dietary supplements showed dramatic improvements in concentration, reading, memory and mental agility. The advances that their brains made in three months would normally take three years, researchers found. One teenage boy who was hooked on watching television and hated books before the experiment became an avid reader after and dismissed programmes as too boring to bother with.

Researchers said that the results, while based on a small sample, supported recent findings that fatty acids boost brain development and suggest that fast food may stunt mental growth, because processed foods do not contain these acids.

Improvement were made in every area of academic activity but the most surprising change, said researchers, was in levels of Nacetylaspartate, or NAA, a biochemical indicator of brain development. According to brain scans carried out at St George's Hospital, southwest London, the levels of NAA rose far more than expected in the three boys and one girl taking a supplement containing the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. "The results were astonishing," said Professor Basant Puri, who led the study. "In three months you might expect to see a small NAA increase. But we saw as much growth as you would normally see in three years. It was as if these were the brains of children three years older. It means you have more connections and greater density of nerve cells, in the same way that a tree grows more branches. "For all the children there was a marked change, but in the three boys there was a massive, massive increase in NAA. I was quite startled by what I saw."

The children taking part in the research were classified as overweight. Zach, aged 8, weighed 8st (51kg), George and Rachael, both aged 11, weighed 11st, and Gareth, who was 13, weighed 12st. At the start of the pilot study, the children were given a supplement called VegEPA. They took two capsules a day and were encouraged to cut down on fatty snacks and fizzy drinks and be more active. After three months the children's reading abilities were a year ahead, their handwriting was neater and more accurate and they paid more attention in class.

"Gareth's parents told me how he had suddenly found TV boring, as he wanted to read. Three months earlier he was saying he couldn't understand people who loved books," said Professor Puri, of the Division of Clinical Sciences at Imperial College, London. "The concentration of all the children improved enormously and they seemed a lot calmer and happier. Even before I started testing them their parents were saying how much better they were."

The children were asked to change their diet but there was no evidence that they did to any great extent and Professor Puri believes that the changes were caused by the supplement, which is derived from oily fish and evening primrose oil. It contains an essential fatty acid called EPA, but significantly, another type of fatty acid, DHA, is absent. Previous studies by Professor Puri have shown this formula can improve brain function in adults. His study features in a Five TV documentary, Mind the Fat: Does Fast Equal Food Slow Kids?, to be broadcast on Thursday.

Professor Kishore Bhakoo, of the the Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial, said: "The thing that amazed me was how much change in biochemistry you could see in three months . . . You'd expect some variation, but they were all going in the same direction." He said that the results had implications for the "junk food" debate: "Processed food doesn't contain these substances."

Source



Taking the drugs out of ADHD

An about-face by the godfather of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has renewed debate about medicating children, writes Angela Kamper below. The Dore program mentioned below got a critical mention here on Feb. 16th.

US Professor of psychiatry Dr Robert Spitzer has been a saviour for thousands of parents around the world who want answers for their child's frequent outbursts of clumsiness and bad behaviour. While others just called them brats he gave parents a label for the erratic symptoms, placing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), attention deficit disorder (ADD) and other conditions on a chart they could all follow. The groundbreaking classification table, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), meant doctors could diagnose with greater confidence and prescribe medication that would produce instant results.

Now, more than 25 years since his global revelation, Dr Spitzer's own attitude towards doctors using his chart has taken a dramatic turn. He says 30 per cent of children diagnosed with a mental disorder don't actually have it and are instead showing perfectly normal signs of being happy or sad. "Many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders," Dr Spitzer said. He also acknowledged that some parents could pressure doctors to diagnose and prescribe drugs. "We don't know to what extent that's been happening inappropriately," he added.

His latest views have renewed debate over the diagnosis of children and use of prescription drugs as well as questions whether DSM-III, designed to be more specific and objective, still has major flaws.

About one in every 100 Australian kids are on medication for ADHD. The two main stimulant drugs are dexamphetamine and methylphenidate, or Ritalin. Some are also on the adult depression drug Risperdal.

Many scientists argue ADHD is a genetic disorder that continues into adulthood. However others say it is an excuse - developed from a culture that is too eager to medicate any supposedly antisocial behaviour. Glynis Howard, medical services manager for Sydney's Dore Achievement Centres, which use a drug-free alternative approach, says you cannot diagnose a child based on filling out a form with the right criteria. "The whole picture needs to be taken into account," she said. "You need to look at the child's environment or things that have recently occurred that may have caused the disorder."

The registered nurse says a death in the family, parents separating or even an allergy can trigger some of the supposed symptoms. "His (Dr Spitzer's) comments are very significant for us," Mrs Howard said. "When we started what we were doing it was really taboo. We were treated like outcasts but now people are starting to see the results and question things."

The Dore method, which has been available for five years, addresses the issue by taking the child through ten-minute daily exercises which stimulate the cerebellum in the brain instead of using drugs. The process is believed to increase the child's ability to process information more rapidly. Mrs Howard said the centre, which has no government funding, has more than 10,000 children on its books and boasts an 80 per cent success rate. "It's alarming when you see these kids - it amazes me that they have been given this medication," she said. "About three out of 10 kids can go off this medication and stay off it."

Don Ulich says his 12-year-old daughter Kristina has returned to mainstream school having used the Dore program. Kristina was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome - a type of autism-dyspraxia - and ADHD. She had a short memory span, difficulty expressing herself verbally, poor co-ordination and difficulty making friends. When first diagnosed she was more than four years behind other kids in her school year. But after six months on the program her parents noticed a dramatic improvement. "In her most recent assessment she was learning at the same rate as the other kids in her year," Mr Ulich says. "We didn't want to put Kristina on any drugs so we're very happy with her improvement. We've noticed a dramatic change in her confidence, having friends, participating in sport and generally opening up."

Sydney Children's Hospital paediatric psychiatrist Florence Levy says we have to be careful how we medicate - and there must be guidelines. "I've always been a conservative medicator. I believe there certainly has to be a rule for medication and it has to be carefully administered," Dr Levy said. She also argues we cannot generalise between Australia and the US because in NSW only paediatricians and psychiatrists can diagnose a child, while in the US, most GPs are permitted to diagnose. "Diagnosis is not restrained in the way it is here," she said.

Dr Levy does not discount the Dore program but says she needs to see more evidence before making any comment. She admits medicating is a much cheaper alternative for parents instead of using methods like Dore. "I haven't seen any evidence that any of it works," she said.

Despite the debate over his controversial chart, Dr Spitzer says he is not too concerned about children being misdiagnosed. "By and large the treatments for these disorders don't have serious side effects," he said. "I mean some do but they're not that serious, whereas the failure to treat can often be very hard on the child and on the family." [Making a kid into a druggie is not a serious side-effect?]

Source



Britain: Most spiking cases 'just drunk'

Most patients who believe they have had their drinks spiked test negative for drugs, research at Wrexham Maelor Hospital has found. The study aimed to assess the scale of drink-spiking in the area and identify problems at specific clubs and pubs. But the year-long investigation of hospital patients found fewer than one in five showed any trace of drugs. The research concluded the patients' symptoms were more likely to be the result of excess alcohol.

So-called "date rape" drugs include ketamine, Rohypnol and GHB. During the 12-month study there were 75 alleged cases of drink-spiking. Patient samples were analysed for alcohol and drug levels, and information was recorded about where the alleged spiking had happened. The alleged incidents took place in 23 different locations, although two locations accounted for 31% of the cases. Only 14% of the patients had informed the police. The research, which was published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, found 65% were twice the legal drink-driving limit, and 24% were three times the drink-drive limit.

Dr Peter Saul, a GP in Wrexham, said the report's findings "should not belittle the danger" people faced either from drink-spiking or drinking too much alcohol. He told BBC Radio Wales: "There had always been a suspicion that people would say that their drinks had been spiked when perhaps they had misjudged how much alcohol they were taking. "If you go home and your parents are there, and you are vomiting on the path, and you come in in a terrible state, you get sympathy if you say 'oh, my drink was spiked.' "You don't get sympathy if you say 'we spent too long in the bar'."

Dr Saul said the report did not make it clear if people's drinks had been spiked by alcohol, as opposed to drugs. He said: "It could explain the figures of people with very high alcohol levels." He added: "The message has to be to be careful, not just about having your drink spiked but the total amount of alcohol you have when you are going out for the night."

Professor Jonathan Shepherd is a Cardiff-based surgeon who has pioneered a method for hospital casualty units to compile statistics on the drink-related assaults. He told the same programme: "It really puts to bed a myth that's very widely held that drinks are spiked when in reality they are not." Prof Shepherd's research has included breathalysing up to 900 late-night drinkers in Cardiff city centre. He said: "There is certainly a sizeable minority who are drinking huge amounts of alcohol. "For all of us, it's a cautionary tale - we ought to be deciding beforehand how much are going to drink on a night out."

However, Prof Shepherd acknowledged that drink-spiking was a still a risk, which he said was easier to prevent by drinking from a bottle rather than a large glass. Dr Hywel Hughes, who led the study at the Wrexham Maelor Hospital, said the survey's results should not obscure the risks of drink spiking, as one-in-five people tested showed signs of "drugs of abuse". He said: "The bigger picture is probably the alcohol but spiking does go on, so people do need to take precautions against that."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



12 March, 2007

Now sitting down is bad for you

Office workers are more at risk of developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) than passengers sitting for long spells on long-haul flights, according to startling new research. Sitting immobile at a desk for hours at a time has also been revealed as a serious risk factor for so-called "economy class syndrome".

A study - due to be presented at the annual conference of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand - has found prolonged immobility at work is the most common factor shared by DVT patients. Researchers found one in three people attending an outpatient clinic reported sitting for eight hours or longer before suffering a venous thromboembolism, whereas only one in five had travelled on a long-haul flight. The worst-affected were managers, IT workers and taxi drivers, according to the new studies carried out by the Medical Research Institute in Wellington, New Zealand.

Latest figures show that Australians work among the longest hours in the world, with many spending more than 50 hours of their working week at their desks, and almost a third regularly working on weekends.

DVT is the formation of a blood clot in a deep vein, most commonly in the legs, which may cause death if left untreated. Symptoms include pain, swelling, redness and dilated surface veins seen on the skin. Immobility from sickness or post-surgery, taking the oral contraceptive pill, obesity and air travel are among other risk factors. Reg Lord, professor of surgery at the University of Western Sydney and a leading expert in thrombosis, said that sedentary workers were at risk because blood flow was impeded. "If you get someone in a sitting position and look at the blood flow in their veins, you can see that it is reduced," he said.

Source



Frozen food now a danger for children

Any hope regarding Crohn's disease is however welcome

World-first research by Melbourne experts has found that frozen food may be the cause of a dramatic rise in immune disorders in children. Studies reveal a bacteria that thrives in freezing temperatures is present in almost half of Victoria's cases of childhood chronic inflammatory bowel disease. Murdoch Children's Research Institute and Royal Children's Hospital experts proved Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis is present in the digestive system in about half of newly diagnosed cases of Crohn's disease. It is also found in cattle and it is the first time it has been linked to Crohn's disease in children.

More than 45,000 Australians diagnosed with the incurable disease and the youngest patient is only two. The breakthrough research could relieve sufferers, who have difficulty eating and can have weight loss, diarrhoea, fatigue and stunted growth. "The worldwide increase in Crohn's disease far exceeds anything that can be explained by a genetic predisposition alone," RCH head of gastroenterology Dr Tony Catto-Smith said. "We know the bug is present in our environment. And 41 of the 100 CD cases have the bug present in blood, and biopsy suggests some form of association. Whether this bacteria is the trigger is unknown, though."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



11 March, 2007

HO HUM! MORE JUNK "SCIENCE" ABOUT OBESITY

Conception harder if father overweight? See if you can see the old familiar omission in the report below

Women are not the only ones who need to watch their weight if they want to get pregnant. New research in Human Reproduction this week shows that if both partners in a couple are overweight or obese, they are likely to have a longer wait before successfully conceiving a child.

Researchers studied 47,835 Danish couples who had a child between 1996 and 2002, calculating their body mass index (BMI) as weight in kilograms divided by squared height in metres. In this group, 6.8 per cent of men and 8.2 per cent of women were obese (BMI of 30 or more), and there were 1.4 per cent of couples where both partners were obese. Fifty-three per cent of men and 68 per cent of women were of normal weight. If both partners were obese the couple was nearly three times more likely to wait more than a year for pregnancy to occur than a normal weight couple. If both partners were merely overweight (BMI between 25 and 29.9), they were 1.4 times more likely than a normal weight couple to wait longer than a year.

Source

Journal abstract:

Subfecundity in overweight and obese couples

By C.H. Ramlau-Hansen et al.

BACKGROUND: Recent studies indicate that not only women's but also men's obesity has adverse effects on fecundity and since fecundity is a couple concept, we examined fecundity in relation to overweight and obesity of the couple. We also examined the association between weight changes and fecundity over time.

METHODS: Between 1996 and 2002, 64,167 pregnant women enrolled in the Danish National Birth Cohort were interviewed during and 18 months after pregnancy. Information on body mass index (BMI) and waiting time to pregnancy (TTP) was available for 47,835 couples.

RESULTS: Among men and women with a BMI of 18.5 kg/m-2 or more, we found a dose-response relationship between increasing BMI group and subfecundity (a TTP of more than 12 months): Odds ratio (OR) = 1.32 (95% CI: 1.26-1.37) for women and OR = 1.19 (95% CI: 1.14-1.24) for men. Among 2374 women with an initial BMI of 18.5 kg/m-2 or more, who participated more than once in the Danish National Birth Cohort, each kilogram increment in weight between the two pregnancies was associated with a 2.84 (95% CI: 1.33-4.35) days longer TTP.

CONCLUSIONS: Couples have a high risk of being subfecund if they are both obese.

So WHY do fat fathers take longer to father children? Do they have fatter sperm? Only Trofim Lysenko would think so. What the study overlooks is, as usual, social class. Working class people tend to be fatter and have more health problems. So a study that lacks an apparent causative mechanism acquires a very obvious one once we realize that. The study is yet another demonstration that working class (fatter) people have poorer health -- and so they also have lower sperm counts, more aspermia, more azoospermia, lower libido etc, etc. And the fatter women became over time (again likely to be class related and hence health related), the more trouble they had in getting pregnant. Yawn!



Vitamins 'reduce infant cancers'

Within 5 years we will of course hear that some of the vitamins concerned are harmful to babies or their mothers. The all-singing, all dancing folate story is already beginning to unwind

Women have been advised to take multivitamin supplements during pregnancy, after a new study found those who do so slash the risk that their babies will develop any of the three main types of cancer affecting young children.

Folic acid supplements - a Bgroup vitamin - are already recommended before and during early pregnancy, to reduce the risk of the baby being born with spina bifida, a defect in the development of the spinal cord. But a meta-analysis by Canadian researchers of seven previous studies, published online by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, found taking multivitamins including folic acid during pregnancy also cut the risk of leukemia by 36 per cent. In addition, the risk of the baby developing neuroblastoma, a cancer of the adrenal gland or spinal nerves, was slashed by 47 per cent, and the risk of paediatric brain tumours was cut by 18 per cent.

The three types of cancer are the most common malignancies to affect children. In Australia, one child in 600 develops cancer, with leukemia the most common, at 30 per cent of cases. Brain tumours account for a further 20 per cent of childhood cancers, and neuroblastoma 7 per cent.

The study's authors said the findings suggested that if women took multivitamin supplements, 900 cases of child leukemia and 300 to 400 cases of pediatric brain tumours could be prevented every year in the US alone. "Given that women who are considering pregnancy are generally advised to supplement with folic acid, the results from this study suggest that supplementation with a folic-acid-containing multivitamin may be a preferred method," the study concluded.

The authors said they could not be sure which vitamins or minerals in the supplements were responsible for the lower cancer rates. Geoffrey McCowage, a pediatric oncologist at the Children's Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, said the findings would have "very significant implications" if confirmed by further research. While neuroblastoma accounted for only 7 per cent of childhood cancers, in 70 per cent of cases the disease was very difficult to treat - so an effective prevention method would have a huge impact, Dr McCowage said. "If this study were confirmed in further studies, it would have very significant implications for efforts to decrease the risk of childhood cancer," he said. The latest findings "would support taking a multivitamin that contained folate" during pregnancy.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



10 March, 2007

Chocolate good for oldies

At last, the news that we were all hoping for - eating chocolate makes for a healthier old age, a slimmer waist and a positive outlook. Research, which was not funded by the chocolate industry, suggests that elderly men who ate chocolate were fitter, more optimistic and had enjoyed psychological wellbeing.

Since the 1960s a team from the Finnish universities of Oulu and Helsinki have been studying a group of Helsinki businessmen born between 1919 and 1934. The group were asked how they felt about life, including a question about what sort of sweets they preferred? Of the 1,367 who responded, just over 100 said that they didn't eat sweets. Of the rest 860 preferred chocolate and 399 some other sort of sweets. Their average age was 76, the team reports in European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The chocolate-lovers tended to be leaner, with smaller waist sizes, and suffer less diabetes than those who ate other sweets. They were also slightly better educated. But the biggest difference was in psychological wellbeing and attitudes towards life. Chocolate eaters rated their own health significantly higher, felt happier, less lonely and were less likely to be depressed. They were also more likely still to be planning for the future.

Previous research has shown that eating chocolate releases endorphins, which produce a feeling of pleasure and reduce sensitivity to pain.

Source



Australian scientists discover effective malaria treatment

Scientists from the Northern Territory Menzies School of Health Research say they have discovered an effective treatment for the strand of malaria found in the Asia-Pacific region. Senior researcher Ric Price says two treatments for the vivax strain of malaria have been successfully trialed in Papua New Guinea.

The treatment combines a Chinese herbal extract and a longer-acting anti-malarial drug used to combat the more deadly strain of the disease found in Africa.

Dr Price says the disease costs developing countries tens of billions of dollars a year. He says this treatment will help relieve that strain. "Forty per cent of the world's population is at risk of vivax malaria and there are nearly 250 million cases a year in the region," Dr Price said. "So not only does this treat the infection but it also protects you from reinfection, so that has special relevance for people in endemic environments."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



9 March, 2007

Global warming bad for health?

This is hilarious deception. It is COLD weather that promotes flu etc. Warm weather is good for you in many ways. Brisbane is warmer than Sydney. Does that mean it is less healthy? There is no sign of it. Australia is so big that people can choose just about any climate they like to live in. They do so now and they always will. Tropical North Queensland or chilly Tasmania? Take your pick!

And the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports: "There were no clear patterns in reporting of health-related actions between States and Territories" (p. 6 here). And note that one of the Territories concerned was the very hot Northern Territory! Both hot and cold climates have their advantages and disadvantages but overall there is a balance.

And if the 0.6 degrees C. warming observed across the 20th century is repeated in the 21st, they will not notice the difference even if they stay exactly where they already are

Children in rural Australia will face health problems as climate change starts to bite, and the impact on adults will go much further than the depression that is already affecting some drought-hit farming communities. A national rural health conference heard yesterday that health effects of climate change on rural communities would also include family stress, breathing and respiratory problems caused by more airborne dust and domestic hygiene and infection problems caused by poorer-quality drinking water.

Disruption to agriculture would affect food production, raising prices and lowering the quality and availability of vegetables and other healthy products. Rates of smoking, alcohol and other drug use could also be expected to rise.

Tony McMichael, director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, said in a keynote speech to open the conference in Albury, NSW, last night that there would also be direct effects, such as the increases in numbers of people killed by heatwaves, storms, floods and bushfires. Research by the centre and the CSIRO has forecast that, among people aged over 65 in Sydney, the death rate caused by heatwaves could rise from the 40 deaths per 100,000 people to between 79 and 239 deaths per 100,000.

Dengue fever and other tropical or mosquito-borne diseases - currently confined to the Top End between Broome and the Cape York peninsula - would also extend southwards as far as Carnarvon on the west coast and just north of Rockhampton on the east. Professor McMichael said recent research by his centre had also shown that parents' stress was conveyed into the family home and increased stress hormones in young children "with immediate and long-term implications for their emotional development and their general bodily health". "We need to be aware of the emerging problems here, and do proper research, and develop intervention strategies," Professor McMichael told The Australian. "We are not talking about new problems that people haven't had before in severe droughts. We are talking about them becoming long-term, and at some level permanent." Suitable strategies included better early-warning systems for severe weather events, better community supports and better infrastructure design.

Tony Hobbs, a GP in the NSW Riverina town of Cootamundra, and chairman of the Australian General Practice Network, said rural doctors were already under pressure and said a significant rise in ill-health would probably force some care to be delivered by nurses and other health workers instead of GPs. "This drought has already had an impact - we have already seen rising rates of depression, including at my practice," Dr Hobbs said. "If this cycle were to continue, that would put an added burden on general practice."

Source



OBESITY IS PARTLY DUE TO A HORMONAL FAILURE

Obese people may have an excuse for being fat - their brains fail to tell them they are overweight. Tests on obese mice found the sensors which detect the fat hormone leptin fail to work. Leptin sends signals to the brain about the body's fat reserves, modifying appetite and energy use. Obesity is therefore due to a lack of leptin response. 'Obesity is not a failure of will power, it is a biological failure,' US researcher Michael Cowley told the journal Cell Metabolism.

Source

Journal abstract follows:

Diet-Induced Obesity Causes Severe but Reversible Leptin Resistance in Arcuate Melanocortin Neurons

By Pablo J. Enriori et al.

Despite high leptin levels, most obese humans and rodents lack responsiveness to its appetite-suppressing effects. We demonstrate that leptin modulates NPY/AgRP and ?-MSH secretion from the ARH of lean mice. High-fat diet-induced obese (DIO) mice have normal ObRb levels and increased SOCS-3 levels, but leptin fails to modulate peptide secretion and any element of the leptin signaling cascade. Despite this leptin resistance, the melanocortin system downstream of the ARH in DIO mice is over-responsive to melanocortin agonists, probably due to upregulation of MC4R. Lastly, we show that by decreasing the fat content of the mouse's diet, leptin responsiveness of NPY/AgRP and POMC neurons recovered simultaneously, with mice regaining normal leptin sensitivity and glycemic control. These results highlight the physiological importance of leptin sensing in the melanocortin circuits and show that their loss of leptin sensing likely contributes to the pathology of leptin resistance.



Exposed: the great brussels sprout power struggle

Most parents could have told the pollsters a survey was hardly necessary. But it's official. The brussels sprout is the vegetable most universally loathed by children. But the much-maligned brassica oleracea may be the victim of prejudice. While 77 per cent of the 500 children polled said they did not like the taste, others said "because everyone hates them" and "it's a family tradition". Some said they hated brussels sprouts even though they had never tasted them.

The survey by the food manufacturer Birds Eye - as part of the launch of a new product - showed children ranked broccoli as their fourth favourite vegetable, after corn and carrots. The potato, preferably deep-fried, came out tops. Peas and mushrooms ranked poorly. And while taste was the criterion for most children, smell, appearance and texture were other reasons why vegetables in general were on the nose. There is hope though. Two-thirds of the children aged two to 14 said they would rather eat a plate of vegetables than clean their bedroom, so parents may have stumbled on the ultimate dinner table threat - or reward. Almost one-third of children said they ate vegetables only if they were forced or bribed.

But parents relying on coercion and bribery may have bitten off more than they can chew. "Once you go down the reward track, kids start approaching any request with 'What's in it for me?'," the parenting educator Michael Grose warns. Offering rewards may be seen as an admission that vegetables do not taste very good, while there was also the danger of turning the dinner table into a battleground. "It comes down to the parent saying 'I will make you' and the child saying 'I'll do what I want'. The food is really secondary."

Mr Grose said he thought the battle to get children to eat greens developed with the baby-boomer generation. "They were the first generation who had plenty of food around," he said. "The depression-era parents certainly didn't have battles with their children over eating the food put on the table." Mr Grose suggested getting children to help prepare vegetables, serving small portions and not being afraid to serve vegetables raw.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



8 March, 2007

Folate rots elderly brains

But only if the person is low on B12. That is, however, common

To protect the offspring of folate-deficient mothers against neural tube defects, the US diet has been fortified with folic acid since 1998, and this vitamin is also widely consumed in multivitamin supplements. Folic acid and vitamin B-12 share metabolic interactions, and there is concern that excessive folic acid could be harmful in elderly people, who are at increased risk of vitamin B-12 deficiency with attendant cognitive defects and anemia.

Publishing in this month's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Morris and colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, MA, assessed the potential risks of excessive folic acid in more than 1000 elderly subjects who had provided data to the 1999-2002 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The mean age of the subjects was 70 years, and two-thirds took dietary supplements.

Of the group, 21% had high folate status with serum folate concentrations > 59 nmol/L, and 25% had low vitamin B-12 status with low serum vitamin B-12 concentrations (<148 pmol/L) and/or elevated methylmalonic acid (>210 nmol/L). Standardized testing identified cognitive impairment in 32% of the group with low vitamin B-12 status compared with 15% in the group with normal vitamin B-12 status.

Compared with subjects with normal vitamin B-12 and folate status, those with high folate and normal vitamin B-12 status were protected against both anemia and cognitive defect with odds ratios of 0.6 and 0.56, respectively. By contrast, the odds ratios for anemia and cognitive defect in those with low vitamin B-12 and normal folate status were 2.0 and 1.9, respectively, and increased to 5.2 and 4.9 in those with low vitamin B-12 and high folate status (4% of all subjects).

Thus, folic acid fortification and supplementation may have deleterious consequences in a significant number of elderly US subjects. An accompanying editorial by Smith points to several other studies showing that folic acid fortification and supplementation contribute to high concentrations of unmetabolized circulating folic acid in about 80% of people, whereas high folate concentrations were associated in one study with an increased risk of colon cancer and in another with decreased immune function due to a decrease in the effectiveness of natural killer cells.

In view of the large number of elderly subjects at risk of vitamin B-12 deficiency, Smith poses the public health question whether the routine use of folic acid fortification and supplementation carries a much greater risk of cognitive decline and anemia in the elderly than the potential benefit of protection against neural tube defects in infants.

Source

Journal abstract follows:

Folate and vitamin B-12 status in relation to anemia, macrocytosis, and cognitive impairment in older Americans in the age of folic acid fortification

By Martha Savaria Morris et al.

Background: Historic reports on the treatment of pernicious anemia with folic acid suggest that high-level folic acid fortification delays the diagnosis of or exacerbates the effects of vitamin B-12 deficiency, which affects many seniors. This idea is controversial, however, because observational data are few and inconclusive. Furthermore, experimental investigation is unethical.

Objective: We examined the relations between serum folate and vitamin B-12 status relative to anemia, macrocytosis, and cognitive impairment (ie, Digit Symbol-Coding score <34) in senior participants in the 1999-2002 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Design: The subjects had normal serum creatinine concentrations and reported no history of stroke, alcoholism, recent anemia therapy, or diseases of the liver, thyroid, or coronary arteries (n = 1459). We defined low vitamin B-12 status as a serum vitamin B-12 concentration <148 pmol/L or a serum methylmalonic acid concentration >210 nmol/L-the maximum of the reference range for serum vitamin B-12-replete participants with normal creatinine.

Results: After control for demographic characteristics, cancer, smoking, alcohol intake, serum ferritin, and serum creatinine, low versus normal vitamin B-12 status was associated with anemia [odds ratio (OR): 2.7; 95% CI: 1.7, 4.2], macrocytosis (OR: 1.8; 95% CI: 1.01, 3.3), and cognitive impairment (OR: 2.5; 95% CI: 1.6, 3.8). In the group with a low vitamin B-12 status, serum folate >59 nmol/L (80th percentile), as opposed to ~ 59 nmol/L, was associated with anemia (OR: 3.1; 95% CI: 1.5, 6.6) and cognitive impairment (OR: 2.6; 95% CI: 1.1, 6.1). In the normal vitamin B-12 group, ORs relating high versus normal serum folate to these outcomes were <1.0 (Pinteraction < 0.05), but significantly <1.0 only for cognitive impairment (0.4; 95% CI: 0.2, 0.9).

Conclusion: In seniors with low vitamin B-12 status, high serum folate was associated with anemia and cognitive impairment. When vitamin B-12 status was normal, however, high serum folate was associated with protection against cognitive impairment.



GREEN TEA STOPS PROSTATE CANCER

In mice and in the test tube

A combination of an anti-arthritis drug and green tea could slow the growth of prostate cancer, scientists say. American researchers have previously shown both celecoxib, sold as Celebrex, and a chemical in green tea called pigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) can independently reduce the progression of prostate tumours in laboratory animals. Experiments have shown that while tumours in mice given one or the other substance grow at around half the normal speed, those in mice given both spread at about a quarter of the usual rate.

Hasan Mukhtar, professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: "Celecoxib and green tea have a synergistic effect - each triggering cellular pathways that, combined, are more powerful than either agent alone. "If tests in human trials replicate these results, we could see a powerful combined therapy that is both simple to administer and relatively cost effective." Prof Mukhtar's research was published yesterday in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Celecoxib, one of a group of drugs called Cox-2 inhibitors, is usually used by osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis sufferers to relieve joint pain, stiffness and swelling. Last year a study found those taking high doses for long periods were at more than twice the normal risk of suffering a heart attack.

Prof Mukhtar said: "Our studies showed that the additive effect of green tea enables us to utilise the cancer-fighting abilities of Cox-2 inhibitors, but at lower, safer doses."

Source

Abstract follows:

Combined Inhibitory Effects of Green Tea Polyphenols and Selective Cyclooxygenase-2 Inhibitors on the Growth of Human Prostate Cancer Cells Both In vitro and In vivo

By Vaqar Mustafa Adhami et al.

Purpose: Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors hold promise for cancer chemoprevention; however, recent toxicity concerns suggest that new strategies are needed. One approach to overcome this limitation is to use lower doses of COX-2 inhibitors in combination with other established agents with complementary mechanisms. In this study, the effect of (-)epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), a promising chemopreventive agent from green tea, was tested alone and in combination with specific COX-2 inhibitors on the growth of human prostate cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo.

Experimental Design: Human prostate cancer cells LNCaP, PC-3, and CWR22Rv1 were treated with EGCG and NS398 alone and in combination, and their effect on growth and apoptosis was evaluated. In vivo, athymic nude mice implanted with androgen-sensitive CWR22Rv1 cells were given green tea polyphenols (0.1% in drinking water) and celecoxib (5 mg/kg, i.p., daily, 5 days per week), alone and in combination, and their effect on tumor growth was evaluated.

Results: Combination of EGCG (10-40 ‘mol/L) and NS-398 (10 ‘mol/L) resulted in enhanced (a) cell growth inhibition; (b) apoptosis induction; (c) expression of Bax, pro-caspase-6, and pro-caspase-9, and poly(ADP)ribose polymerase cleavage; (d) inhibition of peroxisome proliferator activated receptor kB compared with the additive effects of the two agents alone, suggesting a possible synergism. In vivo, combination treatment with green tea polyphenols and celecoxib resulted in enhanced (a) tumor growth inhibition, (b) lowering of prostate-specific antigen levels, (c) lowering of insulin-like growth factor-I levels, and (d) circulating levels of serum insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 compared with results of single-agent treatment.

Conclusions: These data suggest synergistic and/or additive effects of combinatorial chemopreventive agents and underscore the need for rational design of human clinical trials.

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



7 March, 2007

Coffee good for oldsters



Researchers have found that caffeine can protect seniors from heart disease including coronary vascular disease and heart attacks. Researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Brooklyn College did the study and found that caffeine can protect seniors from heart disease mortality.

The researchers surveyed people of 65-years-old and older with a higher intake of caffeine than normal elderly. It found that they had a lower relative risk of heart disease compared to those who took the survey and had lower caffeine intake. The protection came for the elderly who were not hypertensive. No protective effect was found in patients below the age of 65.

Dr. John Kassotis stated that the protection of heart disease in the elderly from caffeine is due to the enhancement of blood pressure from it. The higher the caffeine intake the higher the protection level.

Source

Journal abstract follows:

Caffeinated beverage intake and the risk of heart disease mortality in the elderly: a prospective analysis

By James A Greenberg et al.

Background:Motivated by the possibility that caffeine could ameliorate the effect of postprandial hypotension on a high risk of coronary events and mortality in aging, we hypothesized that caffeinated beverage consumption decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality in the elderly.

Objective: The objective of the study was to use prospective cohort study data to test whether the consumption of caffeinated beverages exhibits this protective effect.

Design: Cox regression analyses were conducted for 426 CVD deaths that occurred during an 8.8-y follow-up in the prospective first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidemiologic Follow-up Study. The analysis involved 6594 participants aged 32-86 y with no history of CVD at baseline.

Results: Participants aged ~65 years with higher caffeinated beverage intake exhibited lower relative risk of CVD and heart disease mortality than did participants with lower caffeinated beverage intake. It was a dose-response protective effect: the relative risk (95% CI) for heart disease mortality was 1.00 (referent), 0.77 (0.54, 1.10), 0.68 (0.49, 0.94), and 0.47 (0.32, 0.69) for <0.5, 0.5-2, 2-4, and ~ 4 servings/d, respectively (P for trend = 0.003). A similar protective effect was found for caffeine intake in mg/d. The protective effective was found only in participants who were not severely hypertensive. No significant protective effect was found in participants aged <65 y or in cerebrovascular disease mortality for those aged ~65.

Conclusion: Habitual intake of caffeinated beverages provided protection against the risk of heart disease mortality among elderly participants in this prospective epidemiologic analysis.



A hot chocolate a day found to help bloodflow

Interesting how once-demonized foods like wine and chocolate are making a comeback. Given the considerable health and longevity benefits of being moderately overweight, will fat one day be rehabilitated too?

Hot chocolate lovers can raise their mugs in a toast to Adelaide researchers who have found that drinking cocoa daily has positive effects on blood vessel functions and could help lower blood pressure. The University of South Australia's Nutritional Physiology Research Centre has found that cocoa - rich in flavanols - relaxes blood vessels.

ATN director Peter Howe said the chemical components of cocoa were similar to those found in grape skins and seeds. "They're very similar to other polyphenols found in grapes," Professor Howe said. "Therefore we can also link that to the French theories that drinking wine is good for circulation."

The team's research focuses on purified cocoa. "We're building on studies that show the blood vessels on the peripheral part of the body react to a certain stimulus," he said. Diabetes sufferers, smokers, obese people and those with high blood pressure all have impeded blood flow.

The researchers will now begin a non-invasive study examining whether daily doses of cocoa can have a sustained impact on blood pressure over 24 hours. "It ties in with other research on polyphenols, including red wine and particularly green tea," he said. But Professor Howe said lovers of rich chocolate should not get overexcited yet as researchers were studying a refined cocoa product, rather than products on shop shelves.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



6 March, 2007

"Youth" pills, hawked online, win over top scientists

The old "ad hominem" fallacy at work: A thing is true because of the person who said it

For centuries, shady salesmen have pushed nostrums claimed to conquer that eternal scourge, aging. Virtually all have been garbage. China's king Zhao Mei may have even died from his own "immortality pills" 2,000 years ago, archaeologists say. But one brand of pills hawked on the Internet as containing "youth-prolonging" molecules has a curious distinction. A Harvard Medical School biologist who is a leading expert on aging takes them daily, persuaded by his own research that they may work, according to people familiar with his activities. He also once served as consultant to the pills' maker, but said he did so at no charge.

A small but growing band of people, hearing of his use of the pills, has followed his lead in hopes of living longer and more vigorouslyas have a diverse array of animals on which the pills' key ingredient has been tested. A Nobelprize winning physicist counts himself among the converts. The capsules in question are called Longevinex (longevinex.com).

The Harvard researcher, David Sinclair, has said in interviews that he takes supplements containing the ingredient, called resveratrol. But he wouldn't specify which of the more than 20 available brands he takes, or advise their use to others. The medical school's rules forbid doing that, an article in the June 22, 2004 Harvard Gazette said. Nonetheless, three people familiar with Sinclair's activities said his brand of choice has been Longevinex.

Grapes and red wine also contain resveratrol, but far too little for these products to confer the dramatic lifespan boost seen in animal studies, researchers say. Nonetheless, even moderate alcohol drinking is tied to slightly higher lifespan in humans, according to a study in the Dec. 1125 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

But pills may have much more resveratrol, so some people want themthough their effects are little studied, and how the substance works is still debated. Confusion has set in among potential buyers of these supplements, thanks to a slew of competing and contradictory claims from the manufacturers. The silence from Sinclair, perhaps the bestknown researcher of resveratrol's effects, hasn't helped. He declined to comment for this article.

Enigmatic tests

A few years ago, Sinclair conducted tests that suggested Longevinex worked far better than a dozen competing products, according to a news article in the Feb. 27, 2004 issue of the research journal Science. Details of the results haven't been published or opened to the wider scientific community's scrutiny.

Around then, Sinclair has said he also served as a consultant to Longevinex's maker; all this took place during the product's development, according to the company president. But Sinclair announced in a mailing at the end of 2003 that he had cut the tie because the company had used his name in publicity. He later launched his own company, Sirtris, to develop a related prescription product.

Nonetheless, he keeps taking the prescriptionfree Longevinex, according to an email attributed to him by Justin Loew, treasurer of the Immortality Institute, a San Franciscobased nonprofit group that promotes antiaging research.

Last November, Loew said in an online forum that Sinclair had emailed him: "I take 4 pills of longevinex with bfast and 4 at dinner, but I don't recommend anyone else take any resveratrol pills until we know more." (Note: late last month, the manufacturer raised the amount of resveratrol per capsule, so Sinclair's reported eight pills would be equivalent to 3.2 now. Either way, his reported regimen amounts to about 320 mg daily. Three pills daily would cost about $3.50 a day currently.)

Bill Sardi, president of Resveratrol Partners LLC, maker of Longevinex, confirmed Loew's account. Sinclair told The New York Times in early November that he has used resveratrol for three yearsabout the same length of time Longevinex has existed. He added that his wife, parents, and ``half my lab'' of two dozen members pop resveratrol too.

To some observers, the bets Sinclair makes for his own body are far more persuasive than any recommendations or nonrecommendations he might have for the rest of us. "Sinclair is a Harvard dude, okay?" one user of the Web forum wrote. "We can debate all day, but the proof that the guy takes the stuff is good enough for me."

A similar sentiment, expressed more reservedly, came from a 2004 Nobel Laureate in physics, Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. He said he takes Longevinex. That Sinclair uses it was "certainly one of the things that impressed me," he added, as did a recent study on resveratrol by Sinclair in the research journal Nature. While not a biologist, "I know how to read critically," Wilczek added; as far as the pills go, "there doesn't seem to be much possible downside, and the upside is very considerable."

Not everyone agrees.

A downside?

"The right place now with resveratrol is to say that this is really intriguing data, but mice aren't humans," Brent Bauer, director of the complementary and integrative medicine program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told The Wall Street Journal in late November, after the latest spate of major resveratrol studies were published.

"Do we know the right dosage? No. Do we know the side effects? No. Do we know if there are potential contaminants? No," said Tod Cooperman, president of consumerlab.com, a provider of independent test results, in a National Public Radio interview in November. "Personally, I would wait."

Resveratrol has been tied to both greater lifespan and vigor in animals. Since 2003, it has been found to extend lifespan in worms and flies by nearly 30 percent; fish and yeast by almost 60 percent; and obese mice by an estimated 15 percent, though that study, by Sinclair and colleagues, is unfinished.

Hope that humans might benefit similarly stems from the consistency of the animal results, and the fact that humans and other animals are genetically closely related. Ninetynine percent of genes are similar in mice and humans, for example.

But resveratrol's effects on human lifespan are unknown because our relatively long lifespans make studies difficult. Some anecdotal reports have sufficed to raise eyebrows, though. Sardi said some users of his product have reported some reversal of hair graying. An editor of World Science (which has no ties to anyone selling resveratrol) tried it and experienced the same thing.

As far as ill effects, researchers say the jury is out, but nothing has raised alarms yet. "About 10,000 people in this country take this product with no apparent side effects," the Harvard Gazette article quoted Sinclair saying.

Compared to what Sinclair reportedly takes, fish and mice in the longevity studies got doses roughly five to seven times higheradjusting for their weightwith no reported problems. In rat studies, researchers found that they had to multiply those higher doses again, by somewhere between 10 and 30, for harmful effects to become evident. But no longterm safety studies have been done in humans, or with specific commercial products. Sardi recommends that his not be taken by growing children or pregnant women, or simultaneously with other medications.

Just why Sinclair's tests evidently favored Sardi's product is unclear. Sardi has commissioned some tests of his own, with similar results, but using a methodology whose merits scientists have since debated.

Sardi says his advantage is that his capsules are specially made to keep the molecule stable, and competitors' aren't. But a June 2005 study in the journal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Bulletin tested five competing brands and found that they contained close to the labeled amounts of resveratrol; the makers apparently hadn't lied about the content. Sardi counters that his and Sinclair's tests assessed not only the resveratrol content, but its biological activity. The issue remains unresolved.

James Betza competitor of Sardi's and general manager of Biotivia Bioceuticals (bioflu.com)said he believes Sardi and Sinclair may have, or have had, a "financial relationship." Sinclair wrote in his 2003 mailing that he "never received any money" from Sardi's firm. But he didn't say whether he might have been compensated in other ways, such as discounted pills. Was he? Sardi, asked that this week, became enraged and refused to answer. His company lawyer, Tracy Augustine, said there was no compensation of any kind, and that Sardi may have reacted angrily because "He hears that all the time... At some point it got to him."

Other marketers of resveratrol supplements include Biotivia, which boasts the highest resveratrol content per pill; andamong those whose resveratrol content was verified in the 2005 studyFood Science of Vermont (fslabs.com); Nutraceutical (nutraceutical.com) and Source Naturals (sourcenaturals.com).

Source



New perils of smoking while pregnant

Women who smoke while pregnant may cause permanent cardiovascular damage to their children that could heighten the offspring's risk for a stroke and heart attack, US researchers say. Doctors long have known about health dangers for babies whose mothers smoked while pregnant, but the new Dutch study showed that these children as young adults tended to have thicker walls of the carotid arteries in the neck. This thickness can be used to determine a person's level of atherosclerosis, the process in which deposits build up in the inner lining of an artery, increasing the likelihood of stroke and heart attack.

"There are still substantial numbers of mothers who smoke during pregnancy," Dr Cuno Uiterwaal at the University Medical Centre Utrecht said. "This is just another reason for expectant mothers not to smoke."

Uiterwaal's team examined 732 people who were born from 1970 to 1973. They found that the children of the 215 women who had smoked while pregnant had thicker walls of the carotid arteries than children whose mothers did not smoke during pregnancy. The people whose mothers had smoked the greatest number of cigarettes while pregnant had thicker arterial walls than those whose mothers smoked fewer cigarettes, they found. "There is the possibility that the compounds in tobacco smoke go through the placenta and directly damage the cardiovascular system of the fetus," Uiterwaal said in a statement. "The damage appears to be permanent and stays with the children."

The findings were presented at an American Heart Association conference in Orlando.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



5 March, 2007

Protein and weight control

The eating habits of locusts and caterpillars might hold the key to discovering the perfect diet, researchers say. At the University of Sydney, obesity experts are conducting a three-year trial that aims to prove people keep eating until they have satisfied their appetite for protein. The study will involve groups of volunteers kept in laboratory conditions for a week at a time and fed carefully manipulated diets. The project's chief investigator, Professor Stephen Simpson, said the study will test his "protein leverage hypothesis" that high-protein diets, such as the CSIRO Total Wellbeing and Atkins, work not because they cut out carbohydrates but because they are high in protein.

The theory follows the observation that insects such as locusts move in swarms to areas providing enough protein for their diet. Humans don't move, they eat more. "If you eat a diet with a high proportion of fat and carbohydrates - the typical modern Western diet - you will keep eating until you get the amount of protein the body needs before you feel full," Professor Simpson said. "And that means you will grossly overeat."

The researchers will soon begin recruiting volunteers - 24 lean and 24 obese - who will live in a special unit at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital for three periods of one week. Monitored 24 hours a day by research staff, the volunteers will be given a low, medium or high protein diet and the amount they eat and their weight will be measured. "In the week they eat a high-protein diet they should eat fewer calories," co-researcher Professor Ian Caterson said.

The discovery comes as Israeli scientists have stumbled on a "super pill" that helps people lose weight at a staggering rate. The drug, betahistine, has been used for years to treat balance disorders such as vertigo. It is now being trialled on 280 people in the US and Canada to investigate its effect on weight loss. In a pilot study in Israel, 20 volunteers shed 1.8 kilograms a week for three months while taking the drug, which is thought to affect appetite by interacting with histamine receptors in the brain, reducing the desire for food, particularly fatty meals. British reports say the drug is expected to be fast-tracked by British and US drug safety regulators and should be available for treating obesity in 2009.

But Deakin University's Professor of Population Health, Boyd Swinburn, said the drug "won't be a magic bullet". The average weight loss attributed to such medication was only two to three kilograms and significant weight loss came from major lifestyle and behaviour changes.

Source



ATKINS A WINNER

The Atkins diet arouses strange passions. For background, see here

A scientific study into the controversial Atkins diet suggests that it can be one of the most effective ways for women to lose weight. At the end of 12 months, overweight subjects on the Atkins regime had lost twice as much weight on average as women on three competing diets. Atkins minimises carbohydrates, such as bread and sugar, in favour of meat and other proteins.

However, amid increasing concern that its devotees miss out on vital nutrients, it has recently been supplanted by new regimes such as the GI diet, which consists of foods that release glucose slowly and evenly into the bloodstream. This week, however, the study will say Atkins produced more weight loss with no signs of undesirable side-effects. "So many people have been asking questions about diets for years. We think it's time to give them some answers," said Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford University's disease prevention research centre in California, who led the study. "We have an epidemic of obesity that's still on the rise, and the ideas of our best and brightest people haven't been able to change that."

In the study, 311 pre-menopausal, overweight women were asked to follow one of four regimes: the Atkins, Zone, Learn or Ornish diet. Each involve a different level of carbohydrate intake. The Atkins diet recommends the lowest level, the Zone diet a little more. The Learn (Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships and Nutrition) diet follows the American government's recommendations for a diet low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The Ornish diet is very high in carbohydrates and extremely low in fat.

After a year, the 77 women in the Atkins group lost an average 10lb - about twice as much as those on the Learn and Ornish diets. Women on the Zone lost an average of 3.5lb. Women in the Atkins group also achieved larger reductions in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure - all signs of improved health.

Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council, said the reason for Atkins's success was that people found a diet that allowed high intakes of meat and fat easier to follow than other more spartan regimes. In Britain, the Atkins diet reached its peak popularity around 2003 when a survey indicated that 3m people were on it. It was endorsed by celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston. Its popularity has since waned.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



4 March, 2007

THE VACCINE SCARE

Consider vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the mercury in them has "poisoned an entire generation! It's causing IQ loss, mental retardation, speech delay, language delay, ADD, hyperactivity!"

The news media love this kind of story. They repeatedly invite Barbara Loe Fisher, who heads the Vaccine "Information" Center, to tell parents about vaccine risks. She warns of "seizures, brain inflammation, collapse shock, and of course the most serious effect is death."

Causing autism is the biggest accusation. "Before kids received so many vaccines," says Fisher, "you didn't see autistic children. ... We can't build the special-education classrooms fast enough now to accommodate all these sick and disabled children."

Do vaccines cause autism? Almost certainly not. Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia told me, "It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about anything you put into your body, including vaccines. And vaccines do have side effects. But vaccines don't cause autism." He speaks with confidence because the National Academy of Sciences recently reviewed the research and concluded that 19 major studies tracking thousands of kids show no link between vaccines and autism. "The question has been raised; it's been answered!" Dr. Offit says.

Then why are so many kids diagnosed as autistic today? Because kids we once said had other conditions now are being called autistic. As March of Dimes researchers put it, "Changes in diagnosis account for the observed increase in autism." Sure enough, California data show the rise in autism diagnoses almost exactly matches a decline in cases of retardation. "People that we once called quirky or geeky or nerdy are now called autistic," Dr. Offit said, "because when you give that label of, say, autistic spectrum disorder, you allow that child then to qualify for services." Imagine that. A trendy diagnosis being driven by government-paid services.

Vaccine opponents are unconvinced. After my recent TV program "Scared Stiff," they have filled my mailbox with comments like, "how long will you keep sucking pharmaceutical ----?!" Calmer correspondents tell me they "know" that vaccines caused their child's autism. "Nothing else could have done it." My heart goes out to parents struggling to help their autistic children, but I fear they have been misled by another anti-drug industry scare campaign.

I know something about those from personal experience. Twenty years ago, "20/20" interviewed Allen McDowell, a lawyer who said the whooping-cough vaccine was defective. After our alarming report, many parents told their kids' pediatricians they didn't want the vaccine. Some doctors became vaccine shy. When my daughter got a fever after one of the vaccines, her doctor decided not to give her the final shot. He said my being a "20/20" correspondent made him even more anxious about giving her the vaccine.

And a short time afterward, my daughter got whooping cough. Luckily, she recovered. But after media reports like "20/20's" and well-publicized lawsuits, many people refuse to vaccinate their children. And America now sees more cases of whooping cough, mumps, and measles.

Says Dr. Offit. "Watch a child come into the hospital and die of measles, knowing that it can be safely and easily prevented by vaccines. It's very hard to live with that."

But Barbara Fisher of the Vaccine Information Center is unmoved. When I asked if vaccines have done more good than harm, she said the matter is "complex."

Lawyer McDowell claims his lawsuits made the vaccine safer. "I'm doing a service for the public," he says. Nonsense, says Dr. Offit. Lawyers didn't make the vaccines better: "There was always an interest in trying to make that vaccine safer, but the science had to catch up to that." He added, "There's a certain profiteering that comes with fear."

Lawyers, the media, and interest groups do profit from spreading fear. I call it the Fear Industrial Complex. McDowell is now debating whether to file new lawsuits claiming that vaccines cause autism. I said to him, "You scare people and make money off it!" After a pause, he replied, "True."

Source



EPHEDRINE BAD?

After billions of usages? With such a huge base of usage, some adverse events among users are to be expected on a purely random basis. I suspect that a desire for self-dramatization among some doctors is behind this stir -- or maybe a self-interested push to get more things onto the "prescription only" list

Drug licensing authorities in the United States have begun a review of the safety of cough and cold remedies in young children after three children died when they were given over-the-counter medicine. The move from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came as a study showed that, as well as the three deaths, more than 1,500 children under two had suffered serious health problems after taking the remedies. In all three deaths, the ingredient held responsible was pseudoephedrine, a decongestant commonly used in cold and cough remedies and present in more than 100 such products on sale in Britain.

The Medicines and Health-care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said that there was no evidence of similar problems arising in Britain and that it had no plans to start a similar inquiry here, but it would do so “should an issue arise”, a spokeswoman said.

The children who died in America were very young, all less than six months old, and in two cases had been given two different medicines, leading to an overdose. US paediatricians who had asked the FDA to carry out the review said that overdoses were common, sometimes because parents gave children different brands, unaware that they actually contained the same ingredients.

The products have been in use for decades without apparent harm, but few have ever been adequately tested in children, Dr Charles Ganley of the FDA said. “We have no data on these agents of what’s a safe and effective dose for children” he told the New York Times. The FDA’s action was triggered by a petition by a group of paediatricians and public health specialists. One of the petition’s authors, Dr Joshua Sharfstein, who is Health Commissioner of Baltimore, Maryland, said there was now enough evidence for the FDA to act. “So many people use these products even though they have no effect on colds, and there’s a real risk of a problem,” he said.

Sunayana Shah, of the Proprietary Association of Great Britain, which represent pharmacists, said that regulations for sale differed in Britain and that parents seeking a cold remedy for a child could not simply take one off the shelf, as in the US, but would have to ask a pharmacist. The MHRA spokeswoman said: “Most over the counter children’s cough and cold remedies in the UK, particularly those that are available for self-selection are not licensed for use in children under two years old.”

She said it was up to the companies holding the licences to inform the agency of any new safety data, which would then be considered. The medicines available in the US often had higher levels of active ingredients than in Britain. An MHRA expert said that parents should read medicine labels with care and be wary of giving their children two different drugs, since they often contained the same active ingredients.

Source



MAC-HATRED GOES DEEP

During a visit to the United Arab Emirates yesterday, Charles reportedly said to a nutritionist at the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in Abu Dhabi: `Have you got anywhere with McDonald's? Have you tried getting it banned? That's the key.' His comments have been splashed across the press, and he's been praised by health campaigners because apparently `it is important that high-profile figures make the connection between healthy eating and wellbeing'.... Charles' comments chime with the times. It is positively fashionable to be anti-McDonald's, and to blame the Golden Arches for everything from obesity to the warping of children's minds to the destruction of local communities.

Alongside Charles' concern about McDonald's, there is the radical campaign group McSpotlight, which agitates against the building of new McDonald's restaurants on the basis that they `result in noise and disturbances at all hours' and `the smell from the kitchens, from waste storage and from litter discarded by customers may become offensive and attract vermin'. Here McDonald's is depicted as dirty, a blight on towns and villages which apparently invites vermin (are they talking about rats or the people who eat at MaccyD's.?) There was Morgan Spurlock's big-bucks box office hit Super Size Me in 2004, in which Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's grub for an entire month and discovered - surprise, surprise - that it wasn't especially good for his health. Spurlock argued that McDonald's was `manipulating' children through advertising and claimed that junk food can make kids slothful and stunt their intellectual growth. There are books about the apparently nasty contents of McDonald's food, claims that McDonald's is turning out a new generation of fat, sick kids, and calls for its ads to be banned. In Britain, Ofcom has heeded these calls by enforcing a ban on all junk food advertising during children's TV programmes.

What's behind this posh/radical campaign against a fast-food chain - the meeting of a royal mind with leftish minds over the apparent `evil' of McDonald's? It's hardly as if one restaurant chain can be held responsible for ill-health. The terms in which McDonald's is discussed - `vermin', manipulative, destructive - suggests that this is about more than food and wellbeing. Indeed, as one newspaper points out, items in Charles' organic food line, Duchy Originals, contain more calories and fat than some McDonald's fare. Where an apparently wicked Big Mac has 229 calories, 11.12g of fat and 0.93g of salt, a Duchy Originals Cornish pasty has 264 calories, 13.6g of fat and 1.25g of salt. So if you're the kind of person who worries about things like fat and salt intake, you would be wiser to wolf down a Big Mac rather than one of Charles' expensive pies.

No, this is moralism - McMoralism, perhaps - dressed up as health concern. Behind today's McDonald's-bashing there lurks a prejudice against big corporations, against industrialisation itself, the `soulless' mass production of food; there is also more than a smattering of anti-Americanism. And there is a barely concealed disdain for the McMasses, the kind of people who eat in McDonald's. What is presented as pseudo-medical concern for people's health and wellbeing is often really a judgement on the lifestyle and behaviour of a certain class of people who are presumed to be lazy, feckless, easily swayed by garish adverts, unconcerned for the wellbeing of their children and not sufficiently clued-up about how to make fresh and healthy pasta dishes from scratch. Do Charles and his strange bedfellows hate junk food, or `junk people'?

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



3 March, 2007

WINDOWS ARE GOOD FOR YOU

The fresh-air lovers are on to something

Preventing the spread of disease in a hospital may be as simple as opening a window, an international team of researchers reported on Monday. The low-tech solution could help prevent the spread of airborne infections such as tuberculosis -- and ironically, old-fashioned hospitals with high ceilings and big windows may offer the best design for this, they reported. They worked better than modern "negative pressure" rooms, with expensive design aimed at pumping out infected air, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

"Opening windows and doors maximizes natural ventilation so that the risk of airborne contagion is much lower than with costly, maintenance-requiring mechanical ventilation systems," wrote Rod Escombe of Imperial College London and colleagues in their report. "Old-fashioned clinical areas with high ceilings and large windows provide greatest protection. Natural ventilation costs little and is maintenance free," they added.

For their report, Escombe and colleagues tested the air in eight hospitals in Lima, Peru. Wards built more than 50 years ago, with large windows and high ceilings, had better ventilation than modern rooms that relied on natural ventilation. And they were also superior to the mechanically ventilated rooms, they reported in their study, available online here.

Tuberculosis is spread by bacteria that can float in the air and the researchers calculated what their findings might mean for the spread of TB. They estimated that in mechanically ventilated rooms, 39 percent of susceptible people would become infected after 24 hours of exposure to an untreated TB patient. This compared to a 33 percent infection rate in modern rooms with windows open and 11 percent in a pre-1950-style room. "We found that opening windows and doors provided median ventilation of 28 air changes/hour, more than double that of mechanically ventilated negative-pressure rooms ventilated at the 12 air changes an hour recommended for high-risk areas," they wrote.

Experts are looking at these factors in trying to prepare for a pandemic of influenza. "The current practice of sealing in the local environment is probably the wrong route for hospital wards," Peter Wilson of University College London Hospitals added in a commentary on the study.

Source



Star British chef backs the Big Mac

Marco Pierre White, the chef turned restaurateur, came out as an unexpected champion of McDonald's yesterday claiming that it offered better food than many restaurants. White, the first and youngest chef in Britain to be awarded three Michelin stars, said he especially admired the consistency of the food served by the hamburger chain and its excellent value for money.

Speaking after Prince Charles's call to ban the fast food chain, he said the prince was "wrong and foolish" and that he, like many chefs, regularly enjoyed a Big Mac. "McDonald's offers better food than most restaurants and the general criticism of the company is very unfair," he said. "Their eggs are free range and the beef is from Ireland, but you never hear about that. You have to look at whether restaurants offer value for money, and they offer excellent value. "It is wrong and foolish for the prince to call for a ban especially as I suspect he has never tried a Big Mac."

White, 44, who quit the kitchen and now runs several restaurants including L'Escargot and Mirabelle, said: "With McDonald's you know exactly what you are getting. "I have been to restaurants where I have paid 15 pounds for a main course and thought I would have preferred to have gone to McDonald's." "I am not saying that you should live off them but there is a time and a place for McDonald's. "I don't eat there every day, but if I feel like one, I just stop off and you know what you get. I'm quite happy to go in there."

However his views were not shared by other chefs who sided with Prince Charles. The Prince made his remarks on a trip to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Antony Worrall Thompson, the television chef, said he agreed that fast food outlets were a problem. "What he's basically saying is correct. We need to get back to cooking from scratch. "But why didn't he mention Burger King and the other fast food outlets? It's the whole industry producing ready meals and fast food that is the problem. The Michelin-starred chef Georgio Locatelli said: "I'm fully behind Prince Charles. He is spot on. McDonald's should be banned."

A spokesman for McDonald's welcomed White's support. He said: "It is good that he is so well informed. He has expressed an opinion based on fact." He said the ingredients for their food were almost entirely sourced from British farmers and producers. In all more than 17,000 farmers supplied the chain.

Source



Britain: Honey cures superbug?: "A new method could be used to tackle MRSA: the honey of Australian bees. The natural remedy is being used by the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, a centre of excellence for heart surgery. It uses honey from a colony of bees only found in Queensland to clean infected wounds, along with dressings containing a gum extracted from seaweed. The honey seals the injury and the seaweed extract draws and absorbs the harmful bacteria."

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



2 March, 2007

Common cold virus 'kills' cancer

The common cold virus is about to be put to the test as a new weapon against cancer. Australian studies have found the Coxsackie virus can kill cancer cells in a test tube and in mice but leaves normal tissue largely unaffected. Researchers are about to start trialling a purified form of the virus, trademarked Cavatak, in Australian patients with late-stage breast cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer who have not responded to conventional treatments or refused them.

Biomedical scientist Kathryn Skelding, of the University of Newcastle, said if the treatment proved successful, the hope was that it may eventually replace chemotherapy and radiation, which both have debilitating side effects for patients, including nausea and hair loss.

Ms Skelding, a PhD student, has been studying the effect of the virus on breast cancer in mice with help from a National Breast Cancer Foundation grant. "What I've been able to show is that this virus ... is able to cause a reduction in tumour volumes in a mouse model of breast cancer as well as eliminate secondary tumours," she said.

Her supervisor, Darren Shafren, who has been studying the virus since the mid-1990s, said two molecules that it used to infect cells were expressed in higher numbers on malignant cancer cells than on normal tissue. Associate Professor Shafren stressed much more research was necessary before scientists could say whether Cavatak offered significant hope to cancer patients. He said that initially Cavatak may be used in combination with conventional therapies if early human trials showed promise. Two hospital trials about to begin are designed mainly to assess the safety of the potential new therapy. The trials will be funded by publicly listed company Viralytics Ltd

Source



LOW FAT = LOW FERTILITY?

Women who consume low-fat milk and yoghurt may find it harder to become pregnant, a new study has found. A team at Harvard School of Public Health found that women who eat a lot of low-fat dairy foods were 85 per cent more likely to suffer from a failure to ovulate. Women who had a least one serving a day of a high-fat dairy food were 27 per cent less likely to suffer from this form of infertility than were those who consumed high-fat dairy food only once a week.

The finding suggests that the obsession with low-fat foods, driven by nutritionists trying to protect against heart disease and by consumers trying to lose weight, may have a downside. Anovulatory infertility - the type studied here - is just one of a variety of ways in which infertility can be caused. In the population studied, it was responsible for one in eight cases of a failure to conceive. The data comes from the Nurses' Study, a long-running research project in the US that draws comparisons between diet and lifestyle and medical history.

A team led by Jorge Chavarro of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard and colleagues used a subset of more than 18,000 married nurses from the study who had either become pregnant or attempted to do so during an eight-year period in the 1990s. Their success, or lack of it, was compared with their dietary habits, which had been recorded several years earlier. There were 3,430 cases of infertility, of which 438 were identified as having been caused by a failure to ovulate. By comparing the diet of these women with that of women who conceived successfully, the team were able to draw their conclusions.

The scientists, whose work is published in Human Reproduction, say that the total intake of dairy foods shows no link with anovulatory infertility. But when high-fat and low-fat dairy foods were considered separately, a difference emerged. Women consuming at least five portions week of low-fat foods had a higher than average risk of being infertile. If women ate two or more servings of low-fat dairy foods a day, they increased their risk of ovulation-related infertility by more than four fifths (85 per cent) compared with women who ate less than one serving of low-fat dairy food a week. And if women ate at least one serving of high-fat dairy food a day, they reduced their risk by more than a quarter (27 per cent) compared with women who consumed one or fewer high-fat dairy servings a week. High-fat foods include ice-cream and whole milk.

Dr Chavarro said that his advice to women wanting to conceive would be to change their diet. "They should consider changing low-fat dairy foods for high-fat dairy foods; for instance, by swapping skimmed milk for whole milk and eating ice-cream, not low-fat yoghurt." But he added that it was important that women did this within the constraints of maintaining their normal calorie intake and limiting saturated fats. He said that once they are pregnant "they should probably switch back to low-fat dairy foods as it is easier to limit intake of saturated fat by consuming low-fat dairy foods".

Just why low-fat dairy foods should have this effect is not yet clear. High-fat dairy products have a higher concentration of the female sex hormone oestrogen than do their low-fat counterparts. Alternatively, greater insulin sensitivity among high-fat dairy consumers may improve ovulatory function. "Given the scarcity of studies in this area, it is important that our studies are confirmed or refuted," the team said. Dr Chavarro added: "Clarifying the role of dairy foods intake on fertility is particularly important since the current dietary guidelines for Americans recommend that adults consume three or more daily servings of low-fat milk or equivalent dairy products. "This is a strategy that may well be deleterious for women planning to become pregnant as it would give them an 85 per cent higher risk of anovulatory infertility."

Source



Weight-loss pill maker slams ad ban

But you can buy all sorts of stuff that DOESN'T work??

The maker of the weight-loss pill Xenical has slammed an official U-turn that once again bans advertisements for the controversial drug, describing it as inconsistent with the free rein given to "hocus pocus" alternative products. The federal Government's National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee last week announced it would overturn a previous decision to allow Xenical, marketed by Roche Products, to be advertised direct to the public. The advertising rules were relaxed after Xenical was delisted as a prescription-only drug last year and made available over the pharmacy counter.

The committee last week decided to keep Xenical as a non-prescription drug, but said it had heeded warnings that direct-to-consumer advertising "increased pressure on pharmacists" to sell it. It said the committee "decided that, on balance, there was insufficient public health benefit associated with allowing direct-to-consumer advertising" of Xenical, also known by its chemical name orlistat.

Xenical is only intended for use in a relatively small group of obese patients with a body mass index above 27. But last year consumer group Choice raised concerns after advertisements for Xenical were screened during the TV program Australian Idol. Choice sent a 19-year-old girl with a healthy weight to 30 pharmacies, and found 24 were prepared to sell her the drug contrary to the guidelines.

Roche Products managing director Fred Nadjarian said the reimposition of the advertising ban was inconsistent as "products with dubious ingredients largely based on green tea extract, eye of newt, wing of bat and guinea pig tail can be (advertised)". "The inconsistency in the NDPSC process has left us with no confidence in their decision-making abilities and we are now at a loss as to how to make Xenical available to those who need it," he said.

Choice spokeswoman Indira Naidoo welcomed the advertising ban, but regretted the committee did not also reimpose the requirement for a doctor's prescription for Xenical. "We hope that the actions of the committee will put added pressure on pharmacists to make sure they are providing the drug appropriately," she said.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



1 March, 2007

Tuberculosis and illegal immigration

The article below is from a nationalist site but makes a good point. Why is London a world headquarters of TB? The demographics give a clear answer: Immigrants are only a small proportion of the overall British population but are a massive proportion of the TB sufferers. And since the immigrants concerned undoubtedly live at close quarters with others of similar ethnic origins, that some of those others become infected in no way detracts from the immigrant origin of the problem. Many of the "British born" TB sufferers mentioned would no doubt be relatives of immigrants. The fact that many sufferers lived in Britain for 2 years before presenting to a doctor is also of course meaningless, given the slow progress of TB. I presume that Britain, like any other advanced country, has some health screening for legal immigrants so the problem undoubtedly is a direct consequence of Britain's large illegal immigration problem

"Lazy hacks at the Labour supporting Daily Mirror have made some very strange claims concerning TB (Tuberculosis)!

Apparently, despite all the reports from various health agencies and trusts, TB has little to do with immigration and everything to do with poverty! That's why, presumably, it is at sky-high levels in places such as Leicester, Slough, Bradford, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney - but not in Liverpool, Newcastle, Swansea and Plymouth!

Daily Mirror claim: "Half of all TB diagnosed is in British People that were born in the UK!" and "It's a disease of the poor rather than a disease of immigrants"

Government's Health Protection Agency says: "As in previous years the London region accounted for a substantial proportion of cases in 2005 (43%) and had the highest rate of disease (46.3 per 100,000). Most tuberculosis cases continue to occur in young adults (61% were aged 15-44 years) and in the non-UK born population (72%)."

Daily Mirror claim: "Most immigrants with TB tend to have already lived here for two years and contract it due to stress and poor living conditions".

NHS says: "It is true that over half of the people diagnosed with TB in this country were born abroad but immigration alone does not explain the recent rise in TB cases. Around 40% of people born overseas who develop TB in this country have lived here for more than 10 years (but - presumably - have maintained physical contact with their home countries and with people from those countries - Ed.)

If the Mirror tells lies about TB what other subjects does this Labour supporting rag lie about?

And according to the World Socialist Web Site:

"Medical experts are warning about the developing threat of tuberculosis (TB) in Britain, and especially in London. The Annual Public Health Report 2000/2001 produced by the East London & The City Health Authority highlights some of the conditions that have enabled TB to take a hold."

"Districts in East London have been particularly affected: Newham with 108 cases per 100,000 of its population has made London "tuberculosis capital of the affluent Western world". The figures even put it ahead of Russia, where the collapse of the public health system has led to 91 cases per 100,000, whereas in India the figure is 41 per 100,000."

In other words your average Londoner has a higher chance of contracting TB in, say, Barking - than he ever has in, say, Turkey!"

Source



Vitamins 'raise death risk', big study finds



The study below may not be the last word on ill-effects from vitamin supplements but I think it is clear that the "antioxidants" beloved of the health-food freaks at least do no good. The abstract of the original article by Bjelakovic et al is here. I also noted the mildly harmful effects of antioxidants on February, 16th. (Scroll down).

Antioxidant supplements including vitamins A and E, taken by millions to fight disease may actually raise the risk of death, a review of 68 studies on nearly 250,000 people has said. The report relates only to synthetic supplements and not to fruits and vegetables in everyday diets which are natural and contain less concentrated levels of antioxidants, said the study from the Centre for Clinical Intervention Research at Denmark's Copenhagen University Hospital. It said the increased death risk is about 5 per cent higher than those not given supplements and that figure is probably conservative. It was reported the study found Vitamin A was the worst offender, raising the death risk by 17 per cent.

The finding drew fire from critics who said it was flawed and based largely on studies of people who were already chronically ill before they were treated with the supplements. While the review did not pinpoint any biochemical mechanism that may be behind the increased death risk, it may be that "by eliminating free radicals from our organism, we interfere with some essential defensive mechanisms," the study concluded. Antioxidants are believed to fight free radicals, atoms or groups of atoms formed in such a way that they can cause cell damage.

"Beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E given singly or combined with other antioxidant supplements significantly increase mortality," the study found. It also found no evidence that vitamin C increases longevity and though selenium tended to reduce mortality, more research is needed on that topic.

Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, said the study and the data studied are both flawed because more than two-thirds of the previous research that was examined involved people with heart disease, cancer or other risks who were being treated to see if the supplements worked. "This kind of approach does not work," he said. "Over the years it has become clear from these clinical trials that antioxidants don't work in disease treatment."

The Complementary Healthcare Council (CHC), which represents the industry in Australia, said the results were based on old data [so old data is bad?? Goodbye history!] and included trials which allowed doses of vitamins not accepted in Australia. CHC executive director Tony Lewis would not comment on the study's claims but said the evidence was "weak".

Australian expert Luis Vitetta, from the Centre for Complementary Medicine and Research, said the results were "very concerning" and added strength to evidence that vitamins could do more harm than good. "There's a billion dollar vitamin industry based on this idea that people can prevent disease when they're actually just putting themselves at extra risk," said Professor Vitetta.

Australian Medical Association spokesman Chris Cain said there was really no need for anyone to take vitamin supplements unless prescribed by a doctor. "It is important for people to take these vitamins with the advice and support of their doctor," he said. "The reality is that if people have a healthy and balanced diet, they will get all of the vitamins they need. Of course there are special circumstances where people develop problems in metabolising vitamins, but in that case they will be prescribed them by a doctor."

The study, published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, said that 10 per cent to 20 per cent of adults in North America and Europe - up to 160 million people - may consume the supplements involved. "The public health consequences may be substantial," it said. "We are exposed to intense marketing" which holds the opposite view of what the researchers found, it added. "We did not find convincing evidence that antioxidant supplements have beneficial effects on mortality," concluded the study. "Even more, beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E seem to increase the risk of death."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************