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A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".

"What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum

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31 October, 2007

Stupid Brits to jump on the folic acid bandwagon. Who cares if it gives people bowel cancer?

Because America does it, it must be OK, seems to be their reasoning. The article below says that the experts have found no evidence of harm from folates. They were not looking very hard. I can find plenty and I am only a desultory reader of the relevant literature. Note this recent expert comment about folates and bowel cancer:

"Other reasonable hypotheses about one-carbon metabolism and colorectal carcinogenesis, based on our current understanding of the biochemistry and underlying mechanisms, have also not been proven correct. In a recently published placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial among 1021 men and women with a recent history of colorectal adenoma, supplemental folic acid at 1 mg/d for up to 6 years did not reduce the incidence of subsequent colorectal adenomas and might have increased it."

WHOA! The folate that Americans get compulsorily added to their bread did no good and seems to have done harm?? And do we see a double blind controlled study contradicting epidemiological inferences?? Who would have believed it! They go on to admit that two animal studies have shown that folate INCREASES cancer. Aren't you glad that your government is dosing you up with the stuff and giving you no say in the matter?

The addition of folate to our bread is more and more looking like an iatrogenic disaster to come. I think I should note once again that a folate expert has reported that the addition of folate to bread seems to have caused an upsurge in bowel cancer among Americans.

Bread should be fortified with folic acid by law to cut the risk of birth defects, the Food Standards Agency decided yesterday. The FSA board, which was split on the issue when it was last discussed in 2002, decided unanimously to back a recommendation from its scientific advisers for mandatory fortification of flour or bread, whichever is the more practicable.

In the US, Canada and several other countries, mandatory fortification has already cut sharply birth defects such as spina bifida. But Britain has hung back because of doubts about possible side-effects, and fear that "compulsory medication" would cause a public outcry.

The recommendation will now go to ministers, who will decide whether to implement it. If they do they could face opposition in the House of Commons but will be able to cite a mass of evidence gathered by the FSA.

The mandatory fortification of bread would include regular white and brown bread, but not wholemeal, enabling objectors to opt out. It would also be accompanied by controls on food that are already fortified voluntarily by manufacturers, such as some breakfast cereals, to avoid any possibility of an overdose.

The FSA board was given a range of options to consider, including the present policy of advising women planning pregnancies to take folic acid supplements. But half of pregnancies are unplanned, and the advice does not reach women in lower social classes whose diets are the most likely to be deficient. It has had relatively little effect.

The levels of fortification recommended by the FSA are 300 micrograms per 100 grams of flour, which it estimates will increase the average intake of the UK population by 78 micrograms a day. That should cut the incidence of neural tube defects by between 11 and 18 per cent, or between 77 and 162 cases a year. Greater reductions than this have been achieved abroad, and range from 27 to 50 per cent. But direct comparisons are difficult because they depend on the level of folic acid in the diet of each country before fortification began, and on eating patterns. The US achieved much greater increases in folic acid intake, probably because the amounts added to food exceeded the recommendations.

Dame Deirdre Hutton, chair of the FSA, told the board meeting in Nottingham that she supported the measure. "I don't believe it is the ultimate solution. I believe it is the best pragmatic solution we can get," she said.

The FSA board wants further advice on how folic acid can be added to bread without affecting cakes or biscuits. It called for more debate on how products fortified with folic acid should be labelled. Andrew Russell, the chief executive of the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, said: "We are delighted that the FSA board has taken the decision to recommend mandatory flour fortification to ministers. "It is a rare opportunity to benefit from a vitamin, and significantly improve public health. Now that the science has been listened to, we look to health ministers to speedily implement this life-saving measure." Between 700 and 900 pregnancies per year in the UK are affected by neural tube defects (NTDs) such as spina bifida. The majority are terminated when the defects are detected in antenatal checks.

The FSA estimated that the cost of NTDs was 136 million pounds a year, of which the greatest cost was in treating babies who died soon after birth. Of the 800 affected pregnancies each year, 110 end in stillbirths or deaths early in life; 79 in births of children who require treatment but have good life expectancy, and 611 in terminations.

The FSA's decision is in stark contrast to that of 2002, when the measure was rejected. The fear then was that fortifying flour with folic acid would conceal vitamin B12 deficiencies in older people, leading them to medical problems. The unknown effect of excessive folic acid consumption on cancer risk also caused concern. Since then, the US has found no evidence of harm.

Source




'Magic bullet' devised to beat cancer

Sounds interesting

A new targeted therapy against cancer has shown impressive results in animal experiments. By using a beam of ultraviolet light to activate antibodies inside the tumour, a team at Newcastle University has created "magic bullets" that can use the body's immune system to destroy tumours while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

They use antibodies - the body's own natural defences - that are injected into the tumour. But before injection, the antibodies are "cloaked" by attaching them to an organic oil that renders them ineffective. Once in place, a beam of ultraviolet light breaks up the cloaking chemical, bringing the antibody back to life. The antibody then binds to T-cells, the body's defence system, and triggers them to target the surrounding tissue.

Antibodies are the big growth area in cancer therapy. Drugs such as Avastin and Herceptin have shown good results in shrinking tumours, and 20 antibody drugs have so far been licensed, with many more in the pipeline. But targeting them precisely and avoiding damage to surrounding healthy tissue have proved stumbling blocks. The team, led by Colin Self, believes that its technique could reduce or eliminate these problems.

Two papers published today in the journal ChemMedChem report that in a small animal trial, the technique elimated ovarian cancers in five out of six mice, and greatly reduced the tumour's size in the sixth mouse.

The body is not very effective at using its own defences to fight cancer, possibly because it fails to recognise the tumours as a threat. The aim of the technique is to activate the killer T-cells to attack cancer cells and destroy them.

There are risks in activating T-cells, as the failed human trial last year at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow proved. In that trial, an experimental antibody treatment called TGN1412 caused such a huge response that six healthy human volunteers suffered serious injuries as their activated T-cells attacked almost every organ in their bodies.

The trial showed just how powerful boosting the T-cell response can be. The Newcastle technique ought to avoid these dangers because the T-cell response will be local - inside the cancer - and not general.

However, the process will require extensive testing in animals and human trials before it has any chance of reaching a cancer clinic. David Glover, an expert in antibody technology and in drug trials, estimated yesterday that even if all went well it would be a decade before such a product could reach the market.

Light-activated therapies have achieved some success against cancers, particularly skin cancers, but have been used previously to activate chemotherapy drugs, not T-cells. There are some limitations, as light cannot always reach internal tumours very easily. But Professsor Self suggested yesterday that in an operation to cut out a prostate tumour, for example, the method could be used at the end of the operation to destroy any remaining tumour cells that the surgeon had been unable to remove, and hence prevent recurrence.

The method offers a further refinement, in which the cloaked antibody is linked to a second antibody directed against the tumour in a "double whammy". When uncloaked, it recruits T-cells to attack the tumour at the same time as the antitumour antibody also attacks it.

Professor Self said yesterday that his team had "very exciting" new results that confirmed the findings and that he was raising money for a human trial. This will be aimed at treating secondary skin cancers in patients who are already suffering cancers of the internal organs. The aim will not be to cure them, but simply to see if the skin cancers can be controlled, as a proof that the technique works in human beings.

Professor Self said: "I would describe this development as the equivalent of ultra-specific magic bullets. This could mean that a patient coming in for treatment of bladder cancer would receive an injection of the cloaked antibodies. She would sit in the waiting room for an hour and then come back in for treatment by light. Just a few minutes of the light therapy directed at the region of the tumour would activate the T-cells causing her body's own immune system to attack the tumour. "While our work indicates that sunlight doesn't activate these antibodies, patients may have to be advised to avoid direct sunlight for a short time."

BioTransformations Ltd, the company set up by Professor Self to develop the technology, hopes to begin clinical trials on patients with secondary skin cancers early next year.

Source

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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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



30 October, 2007

DOES GAINING WEIGHT GIVE WOMEN BREAST CANCER?

There are many articles just out which say that it does (e.g. here). They are all based on the study abstracted below. What the study in fact shows is that old ladies who say that they were once slim have more breast cancer. A rather different story, What? There is no objective data about fat in the article at all. Any interpretation is mere speculation. The fact that fat women overall get LESS breast cancer is glided over. If we were to take the findings below seriously, I think we would have to say to women: "Get fat while young to avoid breast cancer"! Excuse me while I laugh!

Adiposity, Adult Weight Change, and Postmenopausal Breast Cancer Risk

By Jiyoung Ahn et al.

Background: Obesity is a risk factor for postmenopausal breast cancer, but the role of the timing and amount of adult weight change in breast cancer risk is unclear.

Methods: We prospectively examined the relations of adiposity and adult weight change to breast cancer risk among 99 039 postmenopausal women in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study. Anthropometry was assessed by self-report in 1996. Through 2000, 2111 incident breast cancer cases were ascertained.

Results: Current body mass index (BMI) (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared), BMI at ages 50 and 35 years, and waist-hip ratio were associated with increased breast cancer risk, particularly in women not using menopausal hormone therapy (MHT). Weight gained between age 18 years and the current age, between ages 18 and 35 years, between ages 35 and 50 years, and between age 50 years and the current age was consistently associated with increased breast cancer risk in MHT nonusers (relative risk [RR], 2.15; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.35-3.42 for a ~ 50-kg weight gain between age 18 years and the current age vs stable weight) but not in current MHT users. Risk associated with adult weight change was stronger in women with later vs earlier age at menarche (RR, 4.20; 95% CI, 2.05-8.64 for ~15 years vs RR, 1.51; 95% CI, 1.11-2.06 for 11-12 years; P = .007 for interaction). In MHT nonusers, the associations with current BMI and adult weight change were stronger for advanced disease than for nonadvanced disease (P = .009 [current BMI] and .21 [weight gain] for heterogeneity) and were stronger for hormone receptor-positive than hormone receptor-negative tumors (P < .001 for heterogeneity).

Conclusion: Weight gain throughout adulthood is associated with increased postmenopausal breast cancer risk in MHT nonusers.

Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:2091-2102




AN ASPIRIN THEORY BITES THE DUST

Cochrane review abstract below. It was another great theory but reality is pesky, as it often is

Low-dose aspirin for in vitro fertilisation

By VJ Poustie et al

Background: Low-dose aspirin is sometimes used to improve the outcome in women undergoing in vitro fertilisation, despite inconsistent evidence of efficacy and the potential risk of significant side affects. The most appropriate time to commence aspirin therapy and length of treatment required is also still to be determined.

Objectives: To determine the effectiveness of low-dose aspirin for improving the outcome of in vitro fertilisation and intracytoplasmic sperm injection treatment cycles.

Search strategy: We searched the Cochrane Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group Trials Register, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (April 2007), MEDLINE (1966 to March 2007) and EMBASE (1980 to March 2007) databases using the following research terms: "(aspirin OR acetylsalicylic acid) AND (in-vitro fertilisation OR intracytoplasmic sperm injection)" combined with the Cochrane Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group's search strategy for identifying randomised controlled trials for reports which appeared to describe randomised controlled trials of low-dose aspirin for women undergoing in vitro fertilisation.

Selection criteria: Prospective randomised controlled trials, published or unpublished, which addressed the objectives of the review. Quasi-randomised trials were excluded.

Data collection and analysis: Two authors independently selected studies to include in the review, extracted data and assessed trial quality.

Main results: The searches identified nine trials which were eligible for inclusion in the review, including a total of 1449 participants. No significant differences were found between the treatment and control groups for any of the outcomes assessed. Only two studies (involving 401 participants) investigated the effect of low-dose aspirin on live birth rate, and no significant difference was found between the treatment and control groups (RR 0.94, 95% CI 0.63 to 1.39). No significant difference was found in clinical pregnancy rate between treatment and control groups, based on results from 1240 participants in seven studies (RR 1.09, 95% CI 0.83 to 1.43). No data were reported on adverse events related to aspirin treatment in any of the included studies.

Authors' conclusions: Use of low-dose aspirin for women undergoing in vitro fertilisation cannot currently be recommended due to lack of adequate trial data. There is a need for randomised controlled trials investigating the use of low-dose aspirin for different patient groups undergoing in vitro fertilisation. We used control group data from the largest trial included in this review to determine that a sample size of 350 women in each group would be required in order to demonstrate a 10% improvement from the use of aspirin with 80% power at the 5% significance level. Until evidence from appropriately powered trials is available, this treatment can not be recommended.

Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 4. Art. No.: CD004832

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

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



29 October, 2007

More stupid "organic" propaganda

It assumes that "antioxidants" are good for you -- a myth. Antioxidants are the medical equivalent of global warming -- used to explain just about anything purely on the basis of theory. They can actually be dangerous and can shorten your life

The biggest study into organic food has found that it is more nutritious than ordinary produce and may help to lengthen people's lives. The evidence from the 12m pound four-year project will end years of debate and is likely to overturn government advice that eating organic food is no more than a lifestyle choice. The study found that organic fruit and vegetables contained as much as 40% more antioxidants, which scientists believe can cut the risk of cancer and heart disease, Britain's biggest killers. They also had higher levels of beneficial minerals such as iron and zinc.

Professor Carlo Leifert, the co-ordinator of the European Union-funded project, said the differences were so marked that organic produce would help to increase the nutrient intake of people not eating the recommended five portions a day of fruit and vegetables. "If you have just 20% more antioxidants and you can't get your kids to do five a day, then you might just be okay with four a day," he said.

This weekend the Food Standards Agency confirmed that it was reviewing the evidence before deciding whether to change its advice. Ministers and the agency have said there are no significant differences between organic and ordinary produce.

Researchers grew fruit and vegetables and reared cattle on adjacent organic and nonorganic sites on a 725-acre farm attached to Newcastle University, and at other sites in Europe. They found that levels of antioxidants in milk from organic herds were up to 90% higher than in milk from conventional herds. As well as finding up to 40% more antioxidants in organic vegetables, they also found that organic tomatoes from Greece had significantly higher levels of antioxidants, including flavo-noids thought to reduce coronary heart disease.

Leifert said the government was wrong about there being no difference between organic and conventional produce. "There is enough evidence now that the level of good things is higher in organics," he said.

Source




New pill cuts urge to smoke

A REVOLUTIONARY new pill to help smokers quit is set to hit the Australian market - the first product which reduces the intensity of nicotine cravings. It is also claimed Champix reduces the pleasure from cigarettes if patients have a relapse.

But while the so-called wonder drug has helped thousands overseas to kick the habit, some patients have reported falling asleep at the wheel while on it. Britain's medicine watchdog issued a warning last week after two patients had car accidents. It was not known whether the drug caused the crashes, but it prompted authorities to recommend stronger warnings of possible side-effects. This included advising people that they should not drive or operate machinery until it is clear how the drug affects their abilities.

Developed by Pfizer, which also makes the anti-impotence drug Viagra, the pill targets the same "receptors" in the brain as nicotine. Unlike the anti-smoking drug Zyban, an antidepressant that lessens smokers' desire to smoke again, Champix is designed to block cravings and lessen withdrawal symptoms.

The Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods gave it approval in February. It has been recommended for listing on the PBS by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. The prescription tablets have to be taken for at least 12 weeks.

Anne Jones, the chief executive of anti-smoking lobby group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), said reports that the drug took away the enjoyment of a cigarette if a person had a relapse was "very promising".

Champix is the third pharmaceutical therapy available to smokers, joining Zyban and nicotine replacement therapy such as patches and gum. It is expected to be available from December. "It gives smokers who want to give up another choice of treatment," Ms Jones said. "If we have three drug types out there for smokers, that's got to be good. "Smokers, however, should not see it as a magic bullet. Motivation is the key to success."

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].

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



28 October, 2007

DO GERMS MAKE YOU FAT?

Obviously, excess food intake is the major cause but the body does not always store excess calories as fat. What makes it do so? One contributory cause is suggested below. It is a book review. I cannot keep up even with the journal literature, however, so I had no time to read the book. I therefore delegated the review job to my friend "Ken", who does not have any formal science education but is nonetheless a perceptive reader:

The Potbelly Syndrome - Book review

A health book by Russell Farris and Per Marin, M.D., Ph.D.

I am not a medical man and so I review this book as a layman. It can be very illuminating for an acute observer from another discipline to take an overview of research outside his field, especially if he has an invested interest in the object of that research; the necessity for micro research of a macro subject can often blur the big picture.

Russell Farris is a meticulous observer and researcher of a medical condition that affects him directly. He has been wise enough to enlist the aid of a qualified specialist in the field to overview his conclusions.

Farris' expertise in artificial intelligence is obvious in the flow-chart style of analysis he brings to his research and it makes following his train of logic very easy for the layman and professional alike.

He sets out to show by cause, effect, and process, how it is possible for untreated infections from middle-path germs to lead to obesity and all of its associated problems; arthritis, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, arterial occlusion, stroke, cardiovascular disease etc.

The author tells us that middle-path germs cannot kill us and we cannot kill them so we carry them to our graves; they (the germs) have a vested interest in allowing us to survive in order to keep them fed and comfortable and introduce them to our friends. In order to keep us infected but still breathing, they force us to raise our cortisol levels high enough to weaken us, but not high enough to kill us right away. This is the start of the cortisol loop; a balancing act between immune cell response and infection maintenance.

Every infection triggers an "Acute Phase Response (APR)" whereby immune cells leap into action to destroy the invaders. The immune cells are highly toxic and the ensuing battle leaves dead cells strewn across the battlefield. These cells form pus in the tissues which, when located in the arteries, can slowly narrow the channels of blood flow. Cholesterol shows a large presence in such arteries and has been blamed for the subsequent occlusion when it may be a result rather than a cause.

The thing that intrigued me throughout this book was that my previously held assumptions were being turned on their heads. The first was that germs cause inflammation. Farris tells me that it is the bodies own immune system that actually causes the inflammation that doctors prescribe anti-inflammatory medication for. Both of these mechanisms, i.e. inflammation and medication, increase cortisol levels, and excess cortisol is a major cause of hypertension.

Like an iterating loop in a computer program, Farris demonstrates how cortisol loops can affect our body's chemistry adversely in the process of protecting us from infection.

A brief look at a cortisol-loop flowchart will help to clarify Farris' contention. The following diagram is reproduced exactly from the book. The highlighting is the authors and is referenced in the text.



Having identified excess cortisol as the catalyst for many ills, Farris faces the enigma of cortisol testing and finds that because of natural diurnal fluctuations in cortisol levels (i.e. high in the morning with a peak after lunch and a low tail off towards evening) a single sample is simply insufficient to deduce overall levels. A flattened diurnal curve will go unobserved yet will produce excess levels of cortisol.

Apparently, one of the major causes of chronic illness is from the middle-path germ chlamydophila (Chlamydia) pneumoniae (CPN) which infects between 40 and 70 percent of all adults in the USA and has been linked to more than forty diseases and conditions. When an immune cell eats a CPN germ it becomes infected thus the cells that protect us from most germs keep themselves and us infected year after year. They are very difficult to eradicate permanently but, because they are not perceived to be life-threatening in themselves it is easier to ignore them.

Common germs like CPN seldom cause life-threatening illnesses in healthy people but many of them raise our cortisol levels.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this book is my slowly evolving realisation of how ineffectual medical diagnosis by GPs can be, and, to be fair, what an impossible position we put them in when we ask for a diagnosis. To properly test for all of the aberrations in the human body in a ten minute consultation is expecting the impossible. A thorough cortisol level test alone requires an extended stay in a regulated environment with constant round-the-clock testing and monitoring - intensive care for a non-life-threatening condition?

It is also apparent that medical fallacies abound in the literature which is offered to our GP's. Diet and cholesterol levels have long been blamed for heart attacks and as a consequence we are constantly being advised to reduce our intake of them and saturated fats. A quote from one coronary heart disease commentator (George V. Mann) is worth repeating:

The diet-heart hypothesis has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund-raising enterprises, food companies and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.

The scope of this extraordinary book is much deeper than the brief extracts I have chosen to highlight. The medical references, suggested reading and contextual clinical trial results that accompany the text would keep a more diligent reviewer busy for years and I have checked none of them. If the referenced material is accurately sampled and appropriately utilised, I am convinced that the logic behind Farris' conclusions is impressive and very worthy of serious consideration.

The author offers a few suggestions for counteracting the insidious effects of potbelly syndrome but none are particularly effective or life-changing. You might also take into account that medical fallacies proliferate because of the astounding complexity of all biological systems and offering simplistic explanations of the mechanisms for the observed behaviour, no matter how logical and attractive, could be fraught with esoteric errors.

Farris' book is eminently readable and thought provoking. It has the potential to change medical thinking but I doubt that it will because of the understandably slow uptake of new ideas by nervous doctors who only feel safe if they follow the procedures which have been advocated by generations of doctors before them. I applaud their conservative structure but suggest that we, the patients, take control of our own health and assist in the training of our doctors by understanding our own ill health and suggesting tests that seem relevant to us.

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

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].

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



27 October, 2007

The dangers of fried food and a fried planet

Claims that the `obesity epidemic' is as bad as climate change suggest that modern society is bingeing on scare stories

Just when you thought we were all going to fry because of climate change, it looks like our taste for fried food will do us in even sooner. According to headlines across the British media this week, obesity is `as bad as climate risk'. But the comparisons with climate change shouldn't leave us quaking in our boots. Rather, they show up how our fears for the future have become independent of any reason to be fearful. And once we recognise those fears for what they are - a product of political and social changes rather than real dangers - we will be in a better position to deal with them.

The UK health secretary, Alan Johnson, made the obesity and climate change comparison this week, when he said: `We cannot afford not to act [on obesity]. For the first time we are clear about the magnitude of the problem. We are facing a potential crisis on the scale of climate change and it is in everybody's interest to turn things round. We will succeed only if the problem is recognised, owned and addressed at every level in every part of society.' (1)

Johnson's comments were the prelude to a report published today by the obesity group of the UK government's Foresight programme. Foresight is an initiative to facilitate better planning by making forecasts decades ahead on how society might turn out.

The report's `key messages' document suggests that: `By 2050, Foresight modelling indicates that 60 per cent of adult men, 50 per cent of adult women and about 25 per cent of all children under 16 could be obese. Obesity increases the risk of a range of chronic diseases, particularly type-2 diabetes, stroke and coronary heart disease and also cancer and arthritis. The financial impact to society attributable to obesity, at current prices, is estimated to become an additional o45.5 billion per year by 2050 with a seven-fold increase in NHS [National Health Service] costs alone.' (2)

The report says that our modern, `obesogenic' environment is very bad for us. We eat more energy-dense foods while having less and less need to expend this extra energy because we use mechanised transport and have sedentary lives. While `personal responsibility plays a crucial part in weight gain', the reports suggests that we will need a society-wide response to the problem if we are not all to become great mounds of lard suffering from multiple chronic illnesses and facing an early grave.

As the chairman of the National Obesity Forum, Dr Colin Waine, told BBC News on Monday, the effects of the obesity crisis `will hit us much earlier than climate change'. Waine warned: `We are now in a situation where levels of childhood obesity will lead to the first cut in life expectancy for 200 years. These children are likely to die before their parents.' (3)

Things are looking bleak, it would seem. But like a portion of fries, we should take these claims with a pinch of salt. Firstly, the good news: while all these doom and gloom predictions are flying about, the reality is that we are living longer, healthier lives than before. Figures from the UK Office for National Statistics suggest that between 1981 and 2004, life expectancy rose for men from 70.8 years to 76.6 years, while for women the rise was from 76.8 years to 81 years (4).

As the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee noted in 2005: `Life expectancy in the UK and other developed countries continues to increase by about two years per decade.' (5) Given that people most often start families in their twenties and thirties, such figures suggest that each generation will live between four and six years longer than the previous one, all other things being equal. Even if obesity slowed that progress down, it is unlikely to reverse it. Statements like those from the National Obesity Forum are simply alarmist.

One of the main reasons for this success is our increasing ability to tackle the kinds of chronic diseases that are widely associated with obesity. According to the British Heart Foundation's Heartstats website: `Death rates from cardio-vascular disease (CVD) have been falling in the UK since the early 1970s. For people under 65 years, they have fallen by 46 per cent in the last 10 years.' (6) According to Cancer Research UK's CancerStats pages, overall mortality rates for cancer fell by 17 per cent between 1976 and 2005, despite the fact that incidence has been rising, mainly as a result of people living long enough to develop cancers (7).

Secondly, the basis on which the government's Foresight report has been produced is questionable. The authors assume that obesity is caused by an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. But as the Australian writers Michael Gard and Jan Wright point out, researchers have struggled to confirm this thesis. It might be true - but studies looking for an increase in calories consumed have tended to find that we're actually eating less than in the past, while studies looking to confirm we take less exercise have also been inconclusive. Yes, it's true we have many labour-saving devices and transport options now - but there are also many more options for physical activity, too. Women, in particular, would have been strongly discouraged from taking part in sport 50 years ago but now are as likely to be active as men.

Nor has the world of work changed as much people assume. In the past, only a quite small proportion of the population spent their days as miners or road diggers - most people had sedentary jobs back then, too. The kinds of jobs we do may have changed, but the energy involved may not. There is little reason to assume that manning a station on a production line, for example, was any more energetic than filling shelves in a supermarket or flipping burgers. Oh, and people may not have noticed, but despite all their physical activity, poor manual labourers have always tended to die at a younger age than double-chinned, deskbound bank managers.

Our scepticism should be further increased by the fact that the forecasts in the report are based on computer models. Such models have a laughable track record in relation to major health problems in the UK. Remember when millions of people were going to die from AIDS? Or when hundreds of thousands were going to die from variant-Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD)? In truth, the numbers of deaths were a fraction of those predicted by the models. We should be very wary of taking models seriously in such circumstances.

Thirdly, there is the assumption that `obesity equals disease'. But on closer inspection, people in the `overweight' or even the `mildly obese' categories have broadly similar health outcomes to people in the `ideal' weight range. And what are all these fat people going to be treated for? It would appear that cases of type-2 diabetes will rise, but the major diseases said to be caused by obesity are cardio-vascular disease and cancer: the things that are already killing most people, but for which mortality rates have been falling. The worst-case scenario is that, if we become obese, these diseases might get us a little bit quicker than they would have done anyway. How will that put an extra strain on health services?

Finally, the report is pretty damning in one respect: despite suggesting that there is a need for a national, we're-in-this-together approach to tackling the problem of obesity and exercise, there is no proof whatsoever that government intervention in these areas has a positive effect - a fact that the report admits. Today, there is ubiquitous advice to `eat healthily' or `be more active'. There is pressure from government, the media and society generally to get thin and get moving, with the message that being fat is going to kill you. And yet in Britain, as in many other countries around the world, people are still getting fatter.

If government intervention doesn't work, then the policies that the UK government is now hinting that it will implement - from more weighing of schoolkids and examinations of their body mass index, to greater labelling of foods and banning `trans' fats - are highly unlikely to transform Britain into a thin and healthy nation. They may well, however, make chubby schoolchildren feel stigmatised and guilty as they are weighed in the classroom, and ruin the joys of food for the rest of us.

In a sense, it doesn't matter if the latest government campaign doesn't make us all super-healthy - because the recurring panic about obesity doesn't really have anything to do with how much we weigh. Instead, what the Foresight report shows is that there is a template today for social panics. The comparison between obesity and climate change is striking: fears about both of these phenomena spring from the same source, a general sense of anxiety, and both the alleged dangers of obesity and climate change are increasingly framed in a similar way. So like reports on climate change, the Foresight report started out with a literature review; then it created `scenarios' about how the world might change over the next few decades; finally computer models were employed to predict how the disaster might unfold. We're even assured that the report is a product of the work of `250 scientists' - looking uncannily like a poor man's version of the `2,500 scientists' involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a straight rip-off of the IPCC method of working, with the aim of acquiring the kudos that the recent Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation has won in recent years.

There are other similarities between the fat and climate panics. According to anti-obesity campaigners, today's spread of flab highlights the essential problem of human greed, even more than global warming does. We want too much - and it's going to come back to haunt us in the future. We must learn to change our ways and the government will jolly well tell us how to do so if we don't make the necessary changes by ourselves. This fearful attitude towards future disaster, a disaster we have apparently brought upon ourselves, seems to float free of any particular issue. Just fill in the gaps with obesity/climate change/bird flu/whatever and you have a ready-made panic, complete with independent, neutral, evidence-based, scientific authority, in response to which Something Must Be Done - usually by the government, because we feckless individuals are too weak to do it ourselves.

A more useful approach to social problems would be to realise that society will face challenges of all sorts in the coming years. Through science, technology and innovation, we have been able not only to solve the immediate problems we face, but also to take society forward in the process. What is evident from the seemingly endless series of panics about the future is that society has lost confidence in its ability to solve problems. This gives rise to a view of the future as being filled with disease and destruction; the future is apparently something we must guard against, by making changes to our behaviour, rather than something we mould through positive human action.

As such, we cannot stop the obesity panic by trying to lose weight, nor allay fears about global warming by emitting less carbon. We can only solve the problem of these recurring panics by regaining confidence in our ability to shape the world rather than just our waistlines

Source




New hope for twisted spine sufferers

A painful and progressive spinal condition could be halted by drugs used to treat another disease, a genetic study has found. The IL23R gene has been found by scientists to be implicated in the development of ankylosing spondylitis, having already been shown to be involved in Crohn's disease.

Michael Brown, of the University of Oxford, said that the identification of the gene was a big breakthrough and meant that there was hope that an existing treatment could be used. "We already know that IL23R is involved in inflammation, but no one had ever thought it was involved in ankylosing spondylitis," Professor Brown said. "A treatment for Crohn's disease that inhibits the activity of this gene is already undergoing human trials. This looks very promising as a potential treatment for ankylosing spondylitis."

The gene was identified with a second, called ARTS1, in a study funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Arthritis Research Campaign. Details have been published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Source

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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].

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26 October, 2007

Groan! So middle class people have better health

Tell us something else we didn't know

Men who eat whole-grain cereal every day [Who are most unlikely to be your average worker] are nearly 30 per cent less likely to suffer heart failure than those who do not, a new study has shown. The findings add to existing evidence that whole-grain foods are healthy. But not all cereals contain whole grain, and the new study shows that those cereals that lack it do not have the same health benefits.

Luc Djousse and Michael Graziano, of Harvard Medical School, studied a group of more than 21,000 doctors taking part in the Physicians' Health Study, a long-running trial. Their results, published in Archives of Internal Medicine, are in line with other trials.

Source




Social class effect on health accelerates for British women

Life expectancy for professional women has shot up by 30 months to 85 years in only the last four years, while the gap between the top and bottom classes has widened. Figures from the Office for National Statistics published yesterday show that females in high-status, well-paid jobs such as medicine, law and finance are living longer than ever. Their counterparts in clerical and manual jobs, however, are struggling to keep pace as their lifestyles and life expectancy emulate their male colleagues.

Diet, drinking and smoking are taking their toll on women in the lower social classes but health experts suggest that females at the top are in better shape than ever, have quicker access to healthcare, are no longer dying from breast cancer and can afford better holidays. Some epidemiologists also suggest that women get a psychological boost from a high-status job where they are largely in control.

The figures show that the life expectancy at birth for women in the top social class, or those who married into it, jumped from 82.6 years in 2001 to 85.1 years in 2005, an increase of 2.5years. This rise is at a much faster rate than the rest of the past 30 years where life expectancy has gone up about two years in every ten. During the same period the life expectancy for women in the lowest social class - unskilled workers and labourers - rose from 77.9 to 78.1 years, an increase of only ten weeks.

In male mortality, the opposite appears to be happening. Life expectancy in men has been catching up with women over the past 30 years, but since 2001 the increase has dropped slightly and the gap between the social classes has slightly narrowed. Life expectancy for men in the professional classes rose from 79.5 years in 2001 to 80 years in 2005. At the same time the life span for unskilled workers rose from 71.5 to 72.7 years. A similar picture occurs in life expectancy from the age of 65. A women in Social Class 1 now aged 65 was expected to live to 85 in 2005, but is now expected to carry on to 87. However, the corresponding figures for women in Social Class 5 only rose from 81.9 to 82.7 years.

Eric Brunner, a reader in epidemiology at University College London, could not fully explain the acceleration in life expectancy for woman in the top social classes in the past four years. But he said that access to cash and high self-esteem has a big impact on health and longevity. "Money, wealth and resources, particularly psychological, mean that women feel more in control of their lives." Women are also categorised in Social Class 1 if they are married to men working in the professions, so many of them may be able to take on part-time jobs or not work at all.

Alcohol, smoking, poor diet and better health services in earlier life would all be factors in the widening gap between the social classes. "There are different smoking patterns in men and women over the last 40 years," said Dr Brunner. "The peak mortality rates for men with lung cancer was in the early 1970s while the peak rate for women was in the mid-1990s." In addition, there was a much greater class divide in obesity levels among women, with far more obese females in the lowest classes. There is no significant difference among men.

Professor Mel Bartley, a director of the Economic and Social Research Centre, said that women in the top social classes were more likely to get breast cancer but now less likely to die from it. Better screening techniques and drug treatments such as Tamoxifen had had a huge impact on mortality in recent years.

More here




Foolish use of "energy drinks" by students

College students relying on unregulated potions and elixirs to pull all-nighters and muscle their way through school have medical professionals fearful about just how badly they are treating their bodies in the pursuit of academic success. With midterm exams looming, students are fueling themselves on sugary coffee drinks and jazzy concoctions made of caffeine and herbs - all packaged as "energy drinks" with names such as Amp, Full Throttle and Rockstar. In some cases, students supplement the liquid buzz with drugs like Adderall and other amphetamines.

Neither regulated nor standardized by the Food and Drug Administration, energy drinks comprise a multibillion-dollar industry, with 65 percent of consumers under age 35, data show.

Doctors say these drinks do little for productivity and instead leave students jittery, anxious and sleep-deprived, not to mention hopped-up on a cocktail of ingredients scientists know little about.

Despite being marketed as "wellness boosters" and "herbal antioxidants," additives such as taurine, guarana and ginkgo-biloba are little understood and likely dangerous to student health, experts say. Taurine, the key ingredient in many energy drinks, including megaseller Red Bull, has been linked to the deaths of several athletes in Europe. A handful of countries, including France, have banned Red Bull from shelves. "These herbs have not been studied in a scientific manner, they are nutritional supplements that don't follow FDA guidance," said Dr. Caroline Apovian, director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University School of Medicine. "I think they are potentially dangerous because we don't know what they do."

Apovian, who works with students to maintain their health while under pressure to perform at school, suggests they "stay clear from all of this, stay clear from all these supplements that are not vitamins. Caffeine, we know what it does, it's a known entity. These other herbs, there's no science."

Susanna Barry, an educator at MIT's Medical Center for Health Promotion and Wellness, warns students, "If you feel panicky, anxious, gastric-upset and have sleep problems, you should know that your body is telling you very clearly that this doesn't work for you."

Dr. David S. Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Health Services, agrees, "There's no question that we're futzing around with various transmitters in the brain. It's something you don't want to mess with. These things can be very disruptive in everyday life."

Consuming energy drinks is counterproductive to academic success, he said. And compensating for lost sleep by drinking beverages high in sugar and caffeine takes a heavy hit on the body's wellness. "People take them for highs," he said. "But they cause lethargy. For many people, they have the opposite effects. We try to recommend strongly against them because they totally disrupt sleeping patterns."

Doctors Rosenthal, Apovian and others said they've met with students who exhibit such symptoms after consuming energy drinks and in extreme cases suffer much more serious side effects. "I've had students come to me with what mimics an almost full-blown panic attack due to the ingredients of energy drinks," said Barry at MIT. "It's very individual with what energy drinks do to our body."

More here

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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].

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25 October, 2007

Mental illness soars in UK's cannabis hotspots

I think that the claims below are probably broadly right but we must not discount that Britain has more and more blacks and that they tend to live in certain areas, that they are often drug users and that they are more prone to mental illness. These results should really be broken out by race for us to be sure of what is going on. It could just be that we are seeing nothing more than an effect of Britain's ever-increasing immigrant population

The devastating effects of skunk cannabis on the nation's mental health are revealed here for the first time, showing where the drug has hit hardest around the country. Some areas have suffered a tenfold increase in people mentally ill from using the drug. Nationally, skunk smokers are ending up ill in hospital in record numbers, with admissions soaring 73 per cent. The number of adults recorded as suffering mental illness as a result of cannabis use has risen sharply from 430 in 1996 to 743 in 2006. The government data shows how the damaging effects of the drug have swept across England. Hospital hotspots for cannabis abuse include Manchester, London, Cheshire and Merseyside.

And, as the debate over the drug's dangers continues, figures released by the National Treatment Agency for Substance Abuse (NTA) show that more than 24,500 people are in drug treatment programmes for cannabis - the highest ever. It is the most commonly misused drug by children, accounting for 75 per cent of those requiring treatment. That's 11,582 under-18s - more than double those in treatment for cannabis abuse in 2005. And more adults (13,087) are in drug treatment programmes for cannabis abuse than for crack or cocaine.

This news comes as pressure grows on the Government to reclassify cannabis to its former class B status, with the fears of police now being echoed by the Forensic Science Service, which says skunk cannabis - a highly potent form of the drug - accounts for 75 per cent of all seizures. Cannabis remains Britain's most commonly used illegal drug, with more than 4,000 kilos confiscated by police and customs officers in the first six months of this year.

Source




A "softer" paternalist



What gives HIM the right to make decisions for other people? Should we say "Sieg heil" to him?

A radical plan to improve the nation's health - including a workplace "exercise hour" - has been unveiled by a leading Government adviser. New figures today show England is the fattest country in the EU. Now Professor Julian Le Grand, chairman of Health England, hopes to encourage people to improve their diets, give up smoking and exercise more.

He proposed the introduction of a smoking permit, which smokers would be required to show each time they bought tobacco. It is then their choice to go smoke free and not buy a permit.

Companies with more than 500 staff would have an " exercise hour". Employees would have to deliberately choose not to join in. The proposalsare the opposite of the Government's approach which requires people to opt in to healthy lifestyles. Instead it would be up to them to make the unhealthy choice.

In his speech to the Royal Statistical Society last night the professor, a former aide to Tony Blair said: "It is not like banning something, it's a softer form of paternalism."

Source




More magic from broccoli

If anything is unpopular, it is sure to be "good for you". George Bush senior won the hearts of children everywhere when he said: "I am the President of the United States and I don't have to eat broccoli"

RESEARCH suggests that broccoli can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And, as many children would surely appreciate, you do not even have to eat it. In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage inflicted by sunlight.

The product is still in early stages of development. Among other issues to be worked out is how best to remove the extract's green pigments, which do not contribute to its protective effects and would give users a temporary Martian complexion. Scientists said the extract works not by screening out the sun's rays - which also blocks vitamin D production - but by turning on the body's natural cancer-fighting machinery.

While the study, published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stops short of proving that broccoli extracts can prevent skin cancer, it shows "direct protection" against ultraviolet radiation, say researchers. The research team exposed areas of skin to intense ultraviolet light one to three days after the broccoli sprout extract was applied to some areas. Spots treated with the extract had, on average, 37 per cent less redness and inflammation - key measures of future skin cancer development.

Source

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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].

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



24 October, 2007

Big surprise! Diet choices 'written in genes'

Our food likes and dislikes may have more to do with genes than choice, UK researchers believe. Experts from Kings College London compared the eating habits of thousands of pairs of twins. Identical twins were far more likely to share the same dietary patterns - like a penchant for coffee and garlic - suggesting tastes may be inherited.

Identical twins have exactly the same genetic make-up as each other, so scientists, by comparing them to non-identical twins, can work out the likelihood that their characteristics are due to "nature" or "nurture". The Kings College researchers looked at a total of more than 3,000 female twins aged between 18 and 79, working out their broad preferences using five different dietary "groups". These included diets heavy in fruit and vegetables, alcohol, fried meat and potatoes, and low-fat products or low in meat, fish and poultry.

Their results, published in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics, suggested that between 41% and 48% of a person's leaning towards one of the food groups was influenced by genetics. The strongest link between individual liking and genes involved a taste for garlic and coffee.

Professor Tim Spector, who led the research, said: "For so long we have assumed that our upbringing and social environment determine what we like to eat. "This has blown that theory out of the water - more often than not, our genetic make-up influences our dietary patterns."

The researchers suggested that healthy eating campaigns, such as the government's "five-a-day" fruit and vegetable initiative, might have to be re-thought in light of the findings, as people genetically "programmed" to eat less fruit and vegetables would be more resistant to health messages than thought.

Professor Jane Wardle, from University College, said that the findings, and other similar research, pointed to genetics playing a "moderate" part in the development of preferred foods. She said that it was possible that genes involved with taste, or the "reward" chemicals released by the body in response to certain foods, might play a role. "People have always made the assumption that food choices are all due to environmental factors during life, but it now seems this isn't the case. "It also suggests that what parents do to influence eating habits in childhood are not necessarily as important as we thought - and that a lot of effort may need to be made with young people as they become independent in adolescence to steer them onto the right course."

Source




Diabetes treatment from pig cells?

Promising but early days yet. Rejection problems might not be so bad as pig valves (politely called "tissue valves") are routinely used to replace faulty human heart valves -- which also makes the bans on this work extremely stupid

A RADICAL pig cell treatment being tested by an Australian drug company has raised hopes of a cure for diabetes. A Russian woman injected with pig cells four weeks ago has not needed the regular insulin injections she had relied on to keep her type 1 diabetes in check. A second patient, a Russian medical student, has seen his insulin injections cut by 40 per cent in the four months since receiving the pig cell transplant. Melbourne scientists have been conducting the trial in Moscow's Sklifasovsky Hospital because animal-to-human transplants have been banned in Australia until 2009.

Living Cell Technologies medical director Prof Bob Elliott said the early trial results were stunning. "These early-stage results have exceeded our expectations," Prof Elliott said. "Both patients are doing very well, and we hope to continue to see such positive results as the trial progresses."

The middle-aged woman and young student are the first of six Russians to be implanted with DiabeCell, made from neonatal pig islet cells collected from the pancreas of disease-free pigs bred on a remote New Zealand island. Cells are then put in coated capsules and injected into the abdominal cavity of the type 1 diabetes patients. The pig cells are intended to produce insulin, mimicking a healthy body's natural production of the hormone that controls blood glucose levels.

Pig cell treatments have been tested before, but Prof Elliott's 12-month trial is the first to use the cells without the need for drugs to stop the human body rejecting them. About 520,000 Australians have been diagnosed with diabetes, but just as many don't realise they have the disease. Type 1 diabetes, in which the pancreas does not produce insulin, accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of all cases. It is usually diagnosed in childhood or early adulthood. Current treatment centres on daily insulin injections and regular tests to check blood glucose levels.

Source

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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].

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



23 October, 2007

Brilliant British crackdown on "obesity"

Make gyms MORE expensive. Yes, you read that right: MORE expensive. The right hand clearly does not know what the left hand is doing

Efforts to tackle the growing obesity problem risk being seriously undermined by a move to claim VAT on public gym memberships held by nearly three million people. While private gyms have to charge VAT on membership at 17.5 per cent, gyms run by leisure centres have enjoyed a partial exemption, allowing them to keep costs down. In addition, most of the not-for-profit trusts that run hundreds of leisure centre gyms on behalf of local authorities have not been charging VAT at all. But after a seemingly obscure court case in Scotland won by Revenue & Customs, tax officials have circulated a warning to all 2,597 public gyms saying that they must levy VAT on their full membership fees.

Experts say that the move will undermine Gordon Brown's attempts to bring obesity under control, with higher fees likely to push thousands of members - and those most at risk of obesity - into giving up going to the gym altogether. Average monthly fees at public gyms are 28.39 pounds , or 340 a year, according to the Leisure Database Company, compared with 42.07 at a private gym. Full VAT on top would increase the annual fee to 400.

Experian, a business consultancy, has analysed the backgrounds of the 2.8 million public gym members and forecast that at least 12 per cent, or 350,000 members, would give up their membership if the cost went up. "If public leisure centre operators are forced to put up gym fees as a result of this initiative, they risk putting prices beyond the reach of the very target groups the Government is trying to get to do more exercise. It will seriously undermine attempts to get the nation more active," said Patrick Gray, senior consultant at Experian. A regional breakdown of the data also indicated that charging full VAT on public gym membership would mean that in some areas, including Bristol and Southampton, they would be more expensive than private gyms.

Craig McAteer, chairman of the Sports and Recreation Trusts Association (SpoRTA), urged the Revenue to reconsider. The body represents 115 leisure trusts that run 550 leisure centres for local authorities. "A significant number of our customers are in the lower socioeconomic groups," he said. "If our public leisure centres are forced to apply VAT, considerably increasing the price, we could see a huge drop-off in visitors which will ultimately damage the Government's vision of increasing participation and tackling rising obesity problems."

The Revenue defended its actions, saying that it had not changed the rules but was simply reminding leisure centres of their VAT liabilities. The case involved the Highlands council, which levied only a small amount of VAT on fees at leisure centres to cover non-sport facilities at the gym, such as the sauna and steam room. The court ruled that since membership was all-inclusive, VAT had to be charged on the full amount.

After its victory, the Revenue dashed out a warning to all leisure centres and trusts. "Quick as a flash after the court case Revenue & Customs made clear that the whole membership payment is subject to VAT and that trusts must also charge VAT if the subscription covers any activity that is not strictly speaking sport, which is of course most gyms these days," said Steve Hodgetts, VAT partner at Baker Tilly, the accountant. "It also made clear it would chase up VAT retrospectively if leisure centres had not been paying it. We calculate a bill of about 20 million."

The Revenue said that it had not changed the guidelines and was only clarifying what should always have been the case.

Source




Why am I not surprised?

Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits that have shaped health policy in Britain for 20 years were "plucked out of the air" as an "intelligent guess". The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever. Subsequent studies found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers.

One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.

The disclosure that the 1987 recommendation was prompted by "a feeling that you had to say something" came from Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party that produced it. He told The Times that the committee's epidemiologist had confessed that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't" because "we don't really have any data whatsoever".

Mr Smith, a former Editor of the British Medical Journal, said that members of the working party were so concerned by growing evidence of the chronic damage caused by heavy, long-term drinking that they felt obliged to produce guidelines. "Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee," he said. Mr Smith's disclosure casts doubt on the accuracy of a report published this week that blamed middle-class wine drinkers for placing some of Britain's most affluent towns at the top of the "hazardous drinking" list. The study, commissioned by the Government, relied on the 1987 guidelines when it suggested that men drinking more than 21 units a week and women consuming more than 14 units put their health "at significant risk".

In a further attack on Britain's drinkers, it was revealed yesterday that a coalition of health organisations is mounting a campaign to force a 10 per cent increase in alcohol taxation. The group, headed by the Royal College of Physicians, is also seeking to secure the support of MPs for stricter regulation of the drinks industry and warnings on alcohol advertising. A total of 21 bodies, including Alcohol Concern and the British Liver Trust, will form the Alcohol Health Alliance, according to Harpers Wine and Spirit magazine.

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].

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



22 October, 2007

Recognition of deficient evidence when it suits

It is certainly deplorable that these things have not been tested properly but a few apparent adverse reactions out of billions of doses are unlikely to mean anything. This sounds more like an attack on the drug industry than any reasonable caution

Over-the-counter cough and cold medicines have not been proved to work, are potentially dangerous and should not be used in children ages 6 and younger, an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration decided Friday. The expert panel also voted to urge the FDA to require companies that make the popular products to conduct thorough research to finally determine whether they are effective in any group of children. "This one is really important because so many people are using it, there is so much money spent on it, there is no evidence that it works, and there is evidence of harm," said Dr. Jesse Joad, a UC Davis professor of pediatrics and pediatric lung specialist who served as a consultant on the committee. "Something really needs to be done about it."

The advisory panel's recommendations are not binding but, if adopted by the FDA, could lead to a major shift in the way these medicines are labeled, sold and used by parents. "We need to go back and review all these recommendations that we heard today and decide what the path forward might be," Dr. John Jenkins, director of the FDA's office of new drugs, said after the meeting. If the agency does adopt the committee's recommendations, it must undertake a rule-making process that can "take anywhere from one to many years," Jenkins said.

Manufacturers, who last week withdrew more than a dozen cold products labeled for use in infants and toddlers, said they would fight the new recommendations. "We believe these products will remain on the market," said Linda Suydam, president of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, an industry trade group.

There are about 800 pediatric cold products sold in the United States that use one or more of 39 drugs. Parents spend around $500 million every year buying nearly 95 million boxes containing 3.8 billion doses of medicine, according to Suydam. The products under review include common brand names including PediaCare, Robitussin and Triaminic, many of which are marketed for toddlers and other children younger than 6.

The FDA review was prompted by a petition from Baltimore's commissioner of health after the deaths of four children. Earlier this year, the FDA completed a review that found that between 1969 and 2006, there were 54 reported child deaths from decongestants and 69 from antihistamines. Most of the deaths occurred in children younger than 2. Joad said the 22-member committee looked at several types of cold medicine ingredients including pseudoephedrine, a decongestant, and antihistamines to combat runny noses and sneezing. She said products containing pseudoephedrine were linked to seizures, mostly in children younger than 2, and that the antihistamines caused sedation in children. In most cases, she said, the adverse reactions resulted from overdoses.

Speaking from her hotel room after the committee adjourned in Maryland, Joad said that while most pediatricians tell parents not to use the drugs, 80 percent to 90 percent of parents do anyway. "They really believe it works," she said. "But colds are diseases that get worse for a few days and then get better. You don't have to give them anything." Joad added, "Why would you give them something that might kill you, or cause a seizure or a cardiac event?"

Part of the problem, said Joad, is that the products' labels can be very confusing for consumers. She noted, for example, that while Tylenol used to be synonymous with acetaminophen, a non-aspirin pain and fever reliever, Tylenol-labeled products now may contain many other ingredients that have nothing to do with addressing pain or fever symptoms. Cold products for kids also vary dramatically in terms of the active ingredient concentrations, their dosing and dispensing instructions, she said. "We recommended there be standard concentrations and that everything should be measured in milliliters, not teaspoons," she said.

In addition, Joad said the committee wants the industry to stop depicting young children on packaging and to clearly state that the products have not been shown to be effective and have been linked to severe adverse effects. Pediatric cold medicines were approved in the early 1970s, despite almost no evidence that they worked, because regulators assumed that drugs that worked in adults would also be helpful in children. Physicians now know that is not necessarily true. The bottom line, Joad told the committee, "is that children are not little adults."

Source




Bishop too fat for surgery

In general, discrimination on the basis of weight sounds to me no different from discrimination because of skin colour. But I have to agree with the doctors here. The vast weight of the man would undoubtedly be a factor in why his knee has collapsed and leaving the weight as is could well make a replacement knee largely futile

A BISHOP who has dedicated his life to the church has been refused surgery by a Victorian hospital because he is too fat. Bishop R.J. Gow of St Mary's House of Prayer, at Elaine, west of Ballarat, is in desperate need of a left knee replacement. "It's my praying knee," the good humoured priest said. "I'm having a lot of trouble walking and standing at the altar."

Three months ago the clergyman, 66, was referred to an orthopedic surgeon. "The surgeon said the waiting list at Ballarat Hospital for that surgery was two years, but he was now doing surgery at Bacchus Marsh hospital so to go there," Bishop Gow said. "I made an appointment, but within five minutes of them seeing me they said "unless you lose weight you won't be having surgery here". Bishop Gow, who stands six feet tall, weighed 147kg (330 lb.). Since that first appointment he lost 15kg in 11 weeks and is now 132kg. "They told me to lose 17 kilos before I came back," he said. "But when I came back they told me I'd have to lose another five before I see the anaesthetist on October 26. "The only way I can do that is to starve myself."

Bishop Gow said he was annoyed at the level of discrimination towards overweight people. "This is a hospital discriminating against people who are overweight," he said. "They're excluding people and I'm not the only one. I heard them saying to the person in front of me that they would also have to lose weight before an operation. "I questioned her about it and she said it was hospital policy. She showed me a copy of minutes of a meeting where it was stated they would only operate on patients who had a BMI (body mass index) of below 40. "This is discriminatory. Obesity is a disease caused by pyschological or physical factors - people don't get fat because they want to. "But what really annoyed me was I had a look around the hospital and there were empty beds. What's happening with our health care?"

Bishop Gow, who has spent more than 20 years working with the poor, sick and disadvantaged, said his knee was deteriorating and he was in a lot of pain. "But I haven't private health insurance and the operation would cost thousands of dollars," he said. Bacchus Marsh Hospital's Acting CEO David Grace said the hospital had a policy on surgery for the obese "for patient safety. We use an objective BMI assessment. "If someone is higher than the cut-off point of 40 they're considered a high anaesthetic risk and we wouldn't allow treatment." He would not comment on a specific case, but said he didn't consider the practice discriminatory. "It's about patient safety," he 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].

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



21 October, 2007

An unfree country: The USA

What do Marriott, McDonald’s and New York City have in common? They’re all moving to protect you from trans fats in your diet. The difference is the first two are voluntary initiatives aimed to create customer goodwill, while New York’s dictates your customer’s choice. While America weighed the pros and cons of the Iraq surge strategy, New York City banned so-called “trans fats” in all food service establishments effective July 1. This aggressive assault on hydrogenated vegetable oils has an almost-militaristic feel to it, as secondary fronts are also being opened in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan, and “voluntary” trans fat phase-outs are popping up everywhere.

Sophisticated diners debate the culinary merits of trans fats (do those fries really taste better?), but that’s not the issue. No one laments trans fats on health grounds, though they offer a marginal cost advantage in food production and preparation. But when we recall that trans fats (now tied to unhealthy high cholesterol) were introduced as a replacement for animal fats (tied to unhealthy high cholesterol), we realize the issue is not this food input or that, but whether we as consumers have the right to make informed choices, even choices that may not be “nutritionally correct.”

There are good arguments why we should avoid trans fats — or at least limit their intake. Still, anything can kill in the wrong dosage: take carrot juice (a gallon could cause a fatal, toxic Vitamin A overdose) or high fructose corn syrup (merely a cost-saver, and all too effective in helping our youth grow horizontally rather than vertically).

Fearing high cholesterol, New York City did what seems to come naturally to the city administration under Mayor Michael Bloomberg: It proscribed nasty trans fats from city businesses serving food, just like it dictated that its businesses may no longer allow their patrons to smoke. If the new law seems a logical extension of the smoking ban, it is still more worrisome. With smoking, at least there is the pretense (with some research backing) that one does not just forbid the smoker to harm himself or herself, but that smoking puts others — employees and patrons of the establishment — in harm’s way. A specious argument, but with superficial merit. Even with smoking, consumer choice should probably still rule (perhaps leavened by smoking-related health insurance for workers and superior ventilation), although there is residual resistance to laws regulating personal behavior that, hypothetically, can injure or offend others.

But with trans fats, there is pure victimless crime: The consumer can only injure himself (the cholesterol linkage implies higher risk of coronary disease). Good intentions notwithstanding, it is difficult to see how New York’s patronizing, paternalistic interference doesn’t exceed rational bounds the state should observe in prescribing what its citizens may or may not consume.

If the state, either out of benevolence or fears of a heightened burden on the health care system, wishes that its residents be healthy, aggressive information and labeling campaigns ought to do the trick. The problem is not that trans fats are being “outlawed,” but that elected officials presume a right (and power) to “help” their citizen with lifestyle choices far beyond the proper purview of government. An equally well-inspired city council might think it a great idea if its citizens were only allowed to purchase organic food, or forbidden to engage in a number of high-risk sexual activities. Both would fit right into the Zeitgeist of the modern liberal community — neopuritan liberalism, choice and personal freedom be damned.

Here in the nation’s capital, just before the city also banned smoking in restaurants and bars, Council Member Carol Schwartz copied the anti-smoking language and proposed to outlaw alcohol consumption in restaurants and bars. She was roundly criticized, but her crisp sarcasm made the point better than any speech could have. Presuming legislative omniscience (and a scientific certainty that doesn’t exist), we are framing a one-size-fits-all lifestyle unbefitting a country founded on principles of liberty, freedom and individual choice. One notes, ruefully, that the finely crafted Snickers bar is labeled as containing “partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or hydrogenated palm kernel oil.” Better start stockpiling right now.

Source




An unfree country: The UK

The television chef Prue Leith has called for pupils to be barred from leaving school at lunchtime to prevent them buying junk food. Ms Leith, chairwoman of the School Food Trust, the Government's programme charged with improving school meals in England, argued that locking the school gates would ensure children ate healthier meals or packed lunches rather than burgers or chips. "If you can keep them inside, then you can begin to educate them about eating," she said. "It's a drastic measure but we are facing a drastic situation. We are denying children the real pleasure of eating and cooking good food. She added: "I agree that I am being rather nanny-ish but I think children need some nannying," she added.

She also advised parents to give pocket money to children in one go on a Saturday, rather than in instalments through the week so they would buy a long-lasting item such as a CD or baseball cap rather than snacks or chocolate.

Only 40 per cent of children eat school dinners. The majority opt for packed lunches or street food. Jamie Oliver's high-profile campaign to improve school nutrition during the Channel 4 series in which he exposed notoriously unhealthy Turkey Twizzlers, has not solved the problem. In many cases, hot meals have been replaced by packed lunches which, said Ms Leith, tended to be less healthy because their ingredients had been bought on supermarket shopping trips when parents were swayed by "pester power".

A new drive by the School Food Trust to encourage children to try the healthier meals and raise the number of pupil diners above 50 per cent got under way yesterday. The Million Meals campaign was launched by Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, at St Augustine's Secondary School in Kilburn, north-west London.

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].

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



20 October, 2007

Genes for overeating

Researchers say they've found a genetic explanation for why some people crave food more than others do. People who are driven to eat a lot may need more food than others do to get the same feeling of reward, the scientists claim.

The research, they said, found that people with genetically low levels of a brain chemical called dopamine find food to be more "reinforcing" than other people do. Dopamine, a neurotransmitteror substance that transmits nerve impulsesis associated with pleasure. Having less of it may prompt people to work harder to stimulate rewarding feelings, such as by eating, according to the scientists.

The findings, by investigators at the University at Buffalo, N.Y., appear in the October issue of research journal Behavioral Neuroscience. The lead researcher, Leonard Epstein, is also a consultant to comestibles giant Kraft Foods Inc. The team studied a gene variant carried by about half the population, called the Taq1 A1 allele. It leads to lower dopamine levels by producing lower amounts of a type of receptor, or molecular gateway, that allows dopamine transmission.

The researchers studied 29 obese and 45 nonobese adults, taking DNA samples and having them fill out questionnaires. They also asked the participants to rate various snack foodsbut this assignment was a sham. Actually, the investigators were examining how much participants ate when food was freely available.

Participants were also asked to perform a second task in which they could swivel between two computers. Pressing specified keys on one earned points to eat their favorite food; pressing keys on the other earned points to read a newspaper. The idea was for researchers to find out how hard the participants worked to obtain food, versus something else.

Both obesity and lowerdopamine gene variants predicted a significantly stronger response to food's reinforcing power, and more calorie consumption, the researchers found. Epstein differentiates reinforcing value, defined by how hard someone will work for food, from the "feel good" pleasure people get from food. "They often go together, but are not the same thing," he said.

"Food is a powerful reinforcer that can be as reinforcing as drugs of abuse," the scientists wrote. They added that the findings may help experts identify people at risk for obesity and develop treatments tailored to them. "Behavior and biology interact and influence each other," said Epstein. "The genotype [genetic makeup] does not cause obesity; it is one of many factors that may contribute to it," including learned habits.

Source




Aspirin against heart disease: just for men?

The feminists keep telling us that the only differences between men and women are the product of a "patriarchal" culture so this cannot be right

First it was an apple; now it's a small aspirin a day that may keep the doctor away. Aspirin has become standard for heart attack prevention. But new research suggests it may really be a man's drug.

Scientists have long puzzled over why aspirin's protective effects vary widely among clinical trials. Some studies find it has no special effect; others, that it cuts heart attack risk by over 50 percent.

A new study from researchers at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, highlights the influence of gender. Investigators examined 23 previously published clinical trials, involving more than 113,000 patients, and analysed how the proportion of men to women affected the the outcomes. "Trials that recruited predominantly men demonstrated the largest risk reduction in nonfatal heart attacks," said Don Sin, one of the authors.

"The trials that contained predominately women failed to demonstrate a significant risk reduction in these nonfatal events. We found that a lot of the variability in these trials seems to be due to the gender ratios, supporting the theory that women may be less responsive to aspirin than men for heart protection."

The reasons why are unclear, he said, though recent studies have shown that men and women have major differences in the heart's blood vessels. "We would caution clinicians on prescribing aspirin to women, especially for primary prevention of heart attacks," said Sin. "Whether or not other pharmaceutical products would be more effective for women is unclear; more sexspecific studies should now be conducted." The findings appeared Oct. 18 in the online research journal BMC Medicine.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last May recommended 75 to 81 milligrams of aspirin daily, taken in consultation with a physician, for longterm heart disease and stroke prevention

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].

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



19 October, 2007

Low-fat diet later may cut ovarian cancer risk (NOT)

The report below is essentially a fraud from beginning to end and totally misrepresents the actual findings of the study concerned. But for once I don't have to explain why. Sandy Szwarc explodes it all at length. It's just egregious data dredging. Please read Sandy's comments

Try fewer burgers and more veggies after menopause: Cutting dietary fat may offer a long-sought protection against deadly ovarian cancer -- if you stick with the diet long enough. Low-fat diets have long been promoted as a way to reduce the risk of different cancers, with decidedly mixed results when put to the test. But this week, researchers unveiled the first hard evidence that switching to a low-fat diet late in life can lower the odds of ovarian cancer, a malignancy with a particularly dismal survival rate.

The study tracked almost 40,000 women ages 50 to 79, some of whom were assigned to cut the total fat in their diets to 20 percent of calories -- from an average of 35 percent -- while others continued their usual diets. For the first four years, the menu changes didn't make a difference. But those who kept the fat low for eight years cut their chances of ovarian cancer by 40 percent, researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "This is really good news," said Dr. Jacques Rossouw of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the work. "But you have to stick with the diet."

Until now, the only known prescription against ovarian cancer -- aside from surgically removing the ovaries -- was for women of childbearing age to use birth control pills. Use for five years can lower the ovarian cancer risk by up to 60 percent, protection that lingers years after pill use ends. The new findings offer an option for postmenopausal women to try. It's arguably the most promising finding of the mammoth Women's Health Initiative dietary study, which enrolled tens of thousands of healthy women to track the effects of teaching them to cut fat and eat more fruits and vegetables.

So far, the diet has had seemingly little impact on rates of breast cancer, colorectal cancer and even, surprisingly, heart disease. There are a number of theories: Maybe the women started healthier eating too late; most were overweight, a major risk factor, and the diet wasn't designed to shed pounds. Nor did most women actually cut enough fat. Despite all those hurdles, a low-fat diet did appear protective against ovarian cancer -- and the women who started with the worst diets and cut fat the most, got the most benefit.

Ovarian cancer is fairly rare, affecting one in 60 women compared with the one in 9 who will get breast cancer. But it is particularly lethal because it usually is detected only after it has spread throughout the abdomen, making it much harder to treat. Only 45 percent of patients survive five years. The American Cancer Society estimates that 22,430 U.S. women will be learn that they have ovarian cancer this year; 15,280 women will die of it. Ovarian cancer can strike anytime in adulthood, but risk increases with age. Mutations in the so-called breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 also increase the risk of ovarian cancer -- and women in the new study have not yet been tested for those genes, to see if the low-fat diet proves more or less beneficial for them.

Why would diet affect ovaries? The theory is that fat intake increases the amount of estrogen circulating in the blood, which may in turn overstimulate sensitive ovaries. Indeed, blood tests showed study participants on the low-fat diet experienced a 15 percent reduction in estradiol, a key form of estrogen, while non-dieters experienced no change, said study co-author Dr. Ross Prentice of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "It's quite noteworthy," Prentice said of the ovarian protection. "We're really pleased to have something positive to say to American women -- that undertaking a low-fat diet likely reduces your risk of ovarian cancer and perhaps other cancers as well."

Estrogen plays a role in breast cancer, too. Yet when researchers last year checked women in this same study, they found only a 9 percent drop in breast cancer risk, not quite large enough to be sure it wasn't due to chance. Perhaps a bigger estrogen drop is required for breast cancer. Still, the women who cut the most fat fared better -- just like with the new ovarian cancer data.

Most of the dieters cut their fat intake to 24 percent of calories, not quite as much as recommended. And over time, the fat crept back: Eight years later, they were up to 29 percent -- still lower than the average American diet, noted Rossouw, of NIH's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. "It's feasible," he said of the diet. "Once there is news that this does work, it may be easier to motivate people to do

Source




Obesity link to life loss: More Fraudulent "consensus" science

Once again we see a hope that majority votes will trump the facts. The facts are summarized here

OBESITY is more dangerous than smoking and will dramatically shorten the lives of millions, a landmark study has found. While smoking reduces life by an average of 10 years, the research says being seriously overweight can cut life expectancy by as much as 13 years. The Foresight report, written by 250 leading scientists, says the obesity crisis in some Western countries is so severe it would take at least 30 years to reverse. It warns modern life -- with the easy availability of cheap, unhealthy food and a sedentary lifestyle -- means it is almost impossible for many to avoid putting on weight.

About 7.4 million Australians -- more than 50 per cent of the adult population -- are obese, says an Australian Bureau of Statistic report released this year.

Lead Foresight report author David King [Also famous as a champion of global warming] said: "We must fight the notion that the current obesity epidemic arises from individual over-indulgence or laziness alone. "We live in a consumer society which encourages us to eat. We have a sedentary lifestyle. It's an environment which means that if we just behave normally we will become obese." Professor King said. "We may only put on a bit of weight a day but there are 365 days in the year."

The report found that being obese, with a body mass index of more than 30, knocks nine years off a person's life, while men with a BMI of more than 45 face 13 years less life. It says the human body is biologically predisposed to put on weight because this was an advantage in our evolutionary past and the current high rate of obesity means it is becoming accepted as a societal norm.

Pointing out the design of many towns and cities was based around the needs of the car, it suggests more should be done to ensure that it is easier to walk and cycle to encourage residents to take more exercise. The availability of unhealthy food and drink should be controlled the report says, perhaps by restricting advertising or certain food ingredients such as trans fats.

Nutrition Australia's senior nutritionist, Aloysa Hourigan, said in some ways Australia was one step ahead in the obesity fight thanks to diet overhauls in school tuckshops and a push towards healthier eating. But it would still take about 30 years to overhaul the obesity rates, which were on par with the US and Britain among adults and among the highest in the world for children, Ms Hourigan said. "The current generation of kids are likely to be the first generation of Australians that don't outlive their parents because of health issues that arise from obesity so then you have got to take a whole another generation to expect that to change," she said.

Source

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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].

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



18 October, 2007

Secondhand smoke: More spurious "consensus" science and "the debate is over"

More than a year has passed since U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, "The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard." At the time, Carmona released a seemingly impressive 727-page report on secondhand smoke, the introduction of which claims secondhand smoke killed approximately 50,000 nonsmoking adults and children in 2005. Carmona's report stated the new orthodoxy in the anti-smoking establishment: There is a "consensus" on the dangers of secondhand smoke. But did his report actually make the case?

Understanding Carmona's report requires familiarity with a different report--the Federal Judicial Center's 2000 "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Second Edition," the official guide for judges to understand and rule on science introduced in courtrooms. According to the manual, nearly all the studies cited in Carmona's report wouldn't pass muster in a court of law because they are observational studies, the sample sizes are too small, or the effects they show are too negligible to be reliable.

For example, the Reference Manual states, "the threshold for concluding that an agent was more likely than not the cause of an individual's disease is a relative risk greater than 2.0." Few of the studies Carmona cites found relative risks this large, and most found risks in a range that included 1.0, which means exposure to secondhand smoke had no effect on the incidence of disease. In the world of real science, that's a knockout blow.

Most of the research Carmona cites was rejected by a federal judge in 1993, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first tried to classify secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen. The judge said EPA cherry-picked studies to support its position, misrepresented the most important findings, and failed to honor scientific standards. Carmona's report relies on the same studies and makes the same claims EPA did a decade ago.

Did Carmona and coauthors cherry-pick the data? Absolutely. They ignore the largest and most credible study ever conducted on spouses of smokers, by Enstrom and Kabat, published in the May 12, 2003 issue of the British Medical Journal. The authors found: "The results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality. The association between tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed."

Carmona mentions the Enstrom study just once, in an appendix listing studies too recent to include in the report. But Enstrom's study was published four years ago, and Carmona cites more recent studies. In fact, Carmona's principal "findings" were taken from a 2005 report--not a scientific study, merely another report--from California's Clean Air Resources Board, mostly citing the very studies the federal judge rejected in 1993.

The Enstrom study isn't the odd exception among all the available studies on secondhand smoke. A 2002 analysis of 48 studies, also published in the British Medical Journal, found only seven showed a relationship between secondhand smoke exposure and lung cancer, while 41 did not. A 1998 World Health Organization (WHO) study covering seven countries over seven years actually showed a statistically significant reduced risk for children of smokers and no increase for spouses and coworkers of smokers.

No one is saying being around smokers is good for kids' health. The WHO study simply shows the largest and longest studies on secondhand smoke are most likely to find no effects. There is a reason for this. In an August 2005 essay in PloS Medicine, Tufts University epidemiologist John Ioannidis explains: "There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false."

Ioannidis writes that when tens of thousands of researchers are conducting thousands of small and short-term epidemiological studies, all of them seeking to find evidence of a small or nonexistent effect, and when academic journals are predisposed to publish studies claiming positive correlations (no matter how small) that support the conventional wisdom, the result is that "most published research findings are false."

Far from being the last word on the health effects of secondhand smoke, Carmona's report and its uncritical acceptance by frequent commentators on smoking raise questions about bias, error, and the deliberate orchestration of public opinion. The commentators who echo the Surgeon General's claim fall into one or more of five groups:

* Liberal advocacy groups such as the Center for Tobacco Free Kids, American Cancer Society, and American Legacy Foundation, which clearly profit from increased public attention to secondhand smoke.

* Government agencies, including the Office of the Surgeon General, the Department of Health and Human Services, and EPA, which exist largely for the purpose of discovering and publicizing health risks, even if they are backed by dubious research.

* Some corporations--notably Johnson & Johnson, which makes smoking-cessation aids--which give liberal advocacy groups hundreds of millions of dollars to demonize smoking and compel more consumers to use their products.

* The news media, which simply publish the news releases from the first three groups.

* Politicians, who read the newspaper stories and hear from the advocacy groups and rationally calculate their odds of being reelected improve if they proclaim deep concern over secondhand smoke and propose solutions that will cost taxpayers and consumers billions of dollars annually.

The idea that smokers and nonsmokers might solve this problem voluntarily is dismissed out of hand by those who claim secondhand-smoke exposure is a public health crisis. The "solutions" they want all require bigger government: higher taxes on cigarettes, bans on smoking in public, restrictions on advertising and health claims, etc. Oddly, these solutions all work to advance the self-interest and agendas of the five groups that repeat Carmona's claim of "consensus." What are the odds this correlation is coincidental?

Source




Blood test may give Alzheimer's warning

A blood test has been developed that may be able to predict the onset of Alzheimer's disease up to six years in advance. It is said to be 90 per cent accurate and could have a major impact on the diagnosis and treatment of the most common form of dementia.

One disturbing feature of the disease is the difficulty in determining whether mild memory problems are the beginning of an inevitable mental decline. The test, developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, is a step toward giving people an answer two to six years in advance of the onset. It could provide a tool that will ensure sufferers can be treated sooner and also establish whether new treatments are having an effect.

The test, which could lead to the first non-invasive test for the disease, identifies changes in a handful of proteins in blood used by cells to convey messages to one another. "Just as a psychiatrist can conclude a lot of things by listening to the words of a patient, so by 'listening' to different proteins we are measuring whether something is going wrong in the cells," said Tony Wyss-Coray, the senior author of the study that was reported in the journal Nature Medicine yesterday. "I am quite excited. I really think it has enormous potential," said Prof Lennart Mucke, the director and senior investigator of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California.

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].

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



17 October, 2007

Sperm count: More accepted "wisdom" crumbles

Men who suffer fertility problems because of low sperm quality may be able to improve their chances of fatherhood by having sex every day, research has suggested. While those trying for a baby are often told to refrain from ejaculating too often to protect their sperm count, Australian scientists have shown that this can be counterproductive and may lower male fertility.

Among men whose fertility problems stem from genetic damage to their sperm rather than a low sperm count, abstaining from sex can make their difficulties worse, research led by David Greening, of Sydney IVF, has shown. The pilot study of 42 men whose sperm showed significant DNA damage found that daily ejaculation reduced this by 12 per cent. While the results are preliminary and no direct effect on fertility has yet been measured, they suggest that certain men could benefit from having sex more often, or from abstaining less before providing semen for use in IVF.

Dr Greening, who presented his results at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Washington yesterday, said: "I'm convinced that ejaculating more frequently, ie daily, improves sperm DNA damage in most men by a decent amount. "Prior to IVF, for example, men are abstaining a lot more than normal and perhaps sperm DNA increases more than usual. Men think if they abstain for longer times before, say, ovulation that their sperm will be better. [There may be] more volume and numbers but DNA damage may increase."

Abstaining from sex does increase the number of sperm that are ejaculated, and this has led to advice that couples trying for a baby should have sex every two to three days. Longer periods of abstinence, however, achieve little because while the quantity of sperm might increase, its quality declines. As sperm is produced, it is stored in the epididymis at the top of the testicle, but the longer it sits there the more damage it accumulates from exposure to free radicals. Regular ejaculation empties this sperm reservoir, making sure that newly produced sperm of higher genetic quality can get out.

Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said that clearing the reservoir was more important when sperm had high levels of genetic damage. "If you get above 30 to 40 per cent damaged DNA, a man is highly likely to be infertile," he said. "When you put people on a daily ejaculation regime, it reduces that figure for DNA damage. If you can go from 30 per cent down to 20 per cent that is quite a big shift, that should have implications for fertility. "There is a trade-off between genetic damage and quantity, so when a couple are first trying to get pregnant a wait of two to three days is probably advisable. But if you are a guy who has high DNA damage and a decent sperm count, it is probably in your interest to ejaculate every day. "I remember one couple in which the woman would only let the man ejaculate when she was in her fertile period, so the poor chap was going without for almost a month at a time. "Even leaving aside the frustration that must have caused, it would have had no benefits."

Source




The government cannot stop us from being overweight

Yesterday the outward problem of obesity got it with both barrels at the conference of the gold-standard organisation in the field, the National Obesity Forum. The chairman of the forum argued that "levels of childhood obesity will lead to the first cut in life expectancy for 200 years. These children are likely to die before their parents." Some have called for what I suppose would become known as a Lard Czar to coordinate the fight against flab.

I have to admit that, knowing what I know (and I know quite a lot about fat), I find this debate, as it is carried out in public, intensely irritating. The campaigners for change are always on the edge of exaggeration ("worse than climate change"), so fearful are they of inaction. This gives credence to the deniers who will invariably claim that the whole idea of obesity is a scare got up by the Government so as to deprive the public of its pleasures....

Lordy, though, how we do look for the quick fix. Every year for the past decade there have been several stories in which scientists have either discovered the part of the brain, or the chemicals, responsible for our gluttony, and therefore the route to the possible magic cure, which will miraculously deprive us of our appetites and cause us to turn away the offered nibbles or pass by the cake-shop door. This summer fatties-in-denial everywhere were cheered by the suggestion from Louisiana that a virus might be changing stem cells into fat cells, thus helping to cause obesity.

All that was needed was the remedy, and I have lost count of the number of times that this or that antidepressant has been touted as an appetite suppressor, or the claim that - within a few years - a spray or a pill will be marketed to save us from ourselves. And then disappointment attends the realisation that the only tangible result from that magic fat-replacement food substitute is something distressing called "anal leakage".

Yet we know the truth, just like Alice did: if you stick in more calories than you use up, you will get fatter; if you use up more calories than you consume you will get thinner. A fatter society tends to be one where people eat more high-density calorie foodstuffs and take less exercise. And that's it folks, there is no more. No cure. No magic.

Of course, at this point it all gets complicated, because changing highly engrained and destructive patterns of behaviour is the hard part. As an educated man I allowed my weight to rise to nearly 19 stone three years ago, committing slow suicide with the aid of Lindt chocolates, until packing myself off to an American reeducation institution to be told inescapably what I should already have known.

This amazing deliberate blindness doesn't deter the easy-answers brigade. Some blame the food industry, as if they forced us to consume pizzas against our will. "It is the Government," said the Lib Dem health spokesthing, Norman Lamb, at the weekend, "that must take responsibility for failing to do enough to halt the rise of this public health crisis." Mr Lamb demanded urgent, though unspecified, action by the Government "to encourage healthier eating". Something, perhaps, like the Indian Government's sterilisation campaign of the 1970s, with forcible stomach-clamping for the recalcitrant. Nor is the answer "more school sports". One part of the solution is certainly more exercise, and that could just as well be tap-dance as rounders. In fact tap-dance would be better.

Here's a measure of the problem. The National Childhood Obesity Database, the largest database of its kind in the world, has found it difficult to garner accurate statistics because, it is thought, "heavier children" fail to turn up for weighing. Meanwhile, following Jamie Oliver's campaign on school meals, Ofsted has discovered that the numbers of children taking the improved school meals has fallen. Analyse that for a second: the meals are healthier so the kids turn away from them. Instead their parents furnish them with lunchboxes, comprising, according to Oliver, "a cold, half-eaten McDonald's, multiple packets of crisps and a can of Red Bull. We laugh and then want to cry."

It is obvious that the problem is what is going on at home. Public policy can take down the barriers to healthier living by doing something to promote, say, safe cycling and walking at the expense of the bloody all-conquering motor car. But the message about obesity and lifestyle has to be internalised, as it eventually was over cigarettes, in order to work. We are going to have to convince ourselves that overfeeding and underexercising the kids amounts to neglect.

Best of all is the power of example. I am not a model for virtue when it comes to food, and the battle - as my colleagues can attest - is continual. But when I started running in 2005 I had no idea what would happen. Two years on, out of a family of five, three of us run regularly, and a fourth is about to begin. No mystery, just one bloody foot in front of the other.

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].

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



16 October, 2007

Stupid computer panic

This is just anecdotal nonsense. In any case, neck and back pain from computer use may be a problem for some but it is one that should usually be fixable by mild exercise whenever it becomes evident. It is probably a lot safer than jogging, for instance, with jogging's toll of knee problems and heart attacks

COMPUTERS are causing back and neck problems in Australian children as young as five, a conference has in Western Australia has been told. Curtin University physiotherapy researcher Leon Straker warned muscular-skeletal problems in children, triggered by computer use, were becoming a major health issue. A study of 1600 West Australian five-year-olds found more than half used computers at least weekly and almost one per cent had complained of sore or tired muscles after watching television or using a computer.

Professor Straker said two out of three children reported discomfort related to computer use by the time they reached adolescence. Of those, a minority reported pain so severe they were consulting health professionals, taking medication, missing school or avoiding their usual physical activities as a consequence. "I'm getting reports from clinical physiotherapists who are saying they're seeing more children coming through with neck and back pain that is related to their amount of computer use," Professor Straker said, after addressing an Australian Physiotherapy Association conference in Cairns.

"This is the first generation of children who've really used computers from when they were very young. "I'm worried that as adults . . . these children are going to be experiencing much more severe pain and more disability related to computer use than adults do now. "If you walk into any office of any workplace and ask if they've had any back or neck pain associated with computer use in the past 12 months, two out of three will say they have. "That's about the same rate that high school children are reporting already. People often discount neck and back pain in children as being trivial but if . . . children are having to miss school, it's not trivial."

Professor Straker advised that children should not be allowed to stay on a computer for more than 30 minutes at a time. He said computer desks should be at elbow height, the top of the screen should be just below eye height and children should be able to plant their feet on a stable surface.

Source




Gardasil problems?

Making cause-effect linkages is the problem. Apparent adverse results in less than 1% of cases may not be of concern

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, yesterday released new documents obtained from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, detailing a total of as many as eleven deaths related to Merck's HPV vaccine Gardasil. Those deaths resulted between June 8, 2006 - when the vaccine received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - and August 2007 when the latest data was available.

The adverse reports coming from the HPV vaccine are increasing daily at an alarming rate. A LifeSiteNews.com report which scanned a publicly available database of adverse affects coming from the HPV vaccine found 3,137 adverse effects reported on September 28, 2007. Today the U.S. Government's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) lists 3,779 adverse effects. 52 of the cases were deemed "life threatening" and 119 required hospitalization.

In one case highlighted by Judicial Watch a 17 year old girl who was vaccinated in June 2007 died the very day she was vaccinated. According to the report, she "was vaccinated with a first dose of Gardasil.During the evening of the same day, the patient was found unconscious (lifeless) by the mother. Resuscitation was performed by the emergency physician but was unsuccessful. The patient subsequently died."

Other serious reported side effects associated with Gardasil include paralysis, Bells Palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and seizures. Says one report: "Initial and follow-up information has been received from a physician concerning an "otherwise healthy" 13 year old female who was vaccinated with her first and second doses of Gardasil. Subsequently, the patient experienced.paralysis from the chest down, lesions of the optic nerve.At the time of the report, the patient had not recovered."

"In light of this information, it is disturbing that state and local governments might mandate in any way this vaccine for young girls," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "These adverse reaction reports suggest the vaccine not only causes serious side effects, but might even be fatal."

The toll from the HPV vaccine may be greater still. Judicial Watch filed its request on August 20, 2007, and received the adverse event reports from the FDA on September 13, 2007, in what the agency described as a "partial response." On October 3, 2007, Judicial Watch filed a new lawsuit against the FDA for its failure to fully respond to Judicial Watch's FOIA request as required by law.

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 October, 2007

British government still blaming everyone but themselves

It's so easy for a Leftist government to kick business as the cause of childhood obesity instead of blaming real causes -- such as the great reduction in exercise that kids now get at school due to "safety" paranoia. And if you are using totally discredited science about the importance of a low fat diet, who cares? And the identification of trans fats in particular as a cause of obesity is bizarre. Some medical research suggests that very high consumption of them may have a weak link to heart disease but linking them to obesity seems to be a completely unfounded invention of the British government themselves. But Britain's government is Leftist and what Leftist needs evidence for any of their assertions?

The food industry faces a government inquiry into its role in Britain's surging obesity and heart disease rates with ministers considering a ban on trans fats as the first decisive step. Trans fats, which are entirely artificial, have been shown to raise the risk of heart disease and might also have important roles in obesity and diabetes.

The inquiry, ordered by Alan Johnson, the health secretary, follows a series of warnings from successive health ministers that the food industry needed to improve the healthiness of its products - most of which have been ignored. Johnson said: "We know we must act. We cannot afford not to act. For the first time we are clear about the magnitude of the problem: we are facing a potential crisis on the scale of climate change and it is in everybody's interest to turn things around."

The proposed ban on trans fats is being seen as a warning shot to the food industry as well as an important measure in its own right. Trans fats are used widely by the food industry because they are up to 85% cheaper than natural fats such as butter, lard and palm oil. But researchers have repeatedly warned that they act as long-term toxins and have no benefit for consumers.

A recent report from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), which will carry out the new inquiry, said: "The trans fats found in food containing hydrogenated vegetable oil are harmful and have no known nutritional benefits. They raise the type of cholesterol in the blood that increases the risk of coronary heart disease. Some evidence suggests that the effects of these trans fats may be worse than saturated fats." However, even though such dangers have been known for nearly two decades, there is no obligation for food manufacturers to display the amount of trans fats on product labels. Johnson's decision to hold an inquiry follows cabinet discussions in which Gordon Brown made it clear that preventive healthcare was one of his top priorities. "There is high-level commitment across government," Johnson said. "We will provide the leadership, vision and sustained commitment required to help to start this cultural and societal shift."

His move follows surveys looking at the rising proportion of the population who are overweight. They show that the British tip the scales as Europe's fattest people, with 60% of adults and 30% of children overweight, defined as more than 25% of their body mass comprising fat tissue. Of these, 20% were obese, meaning their bodies were at least 30% fat. That proportion could reach 40% by 2025. Such changes could, ministers have been warned, threaten the viability of the National Health Service. It already spends between 10% and 20% of its hospital budget on obesity-related diseases such as diabetes.

Johnson's decision could mark a sea change in the government's dealings with the food industry. Until now ministers had accepted manufacturers' claims that the best approach was to educate consumers about sensible eating and let them make their own choices. Johnson seems to be moving towards the views put forward by health campaigners who say the government must take more responsibility for the nation's deteriorating dietary health. They say few people have the time or ability to read complex food labels and design healthy diets and that many such labels are misleading.

Similar changes are already afoot in America where New York last year banned the use of trans fats in city restaurants and the government compelled manufacturers to list trans fat contents on food labels. The British inquiry will consider further action on food advertising. There is already a ban on advertising foods such as crisps and chocolate during children's television programmes. This could be extended to commercial breaks in adult programmes such as The X Factor and Big Brother, which attract many younger viewers.

The Food and Drink Federation, which represents Britain's food manufacturers, accepted that Britons were eating too much saturated fat, but said the government should focus on people with the highest levels of fat intake rather than on regulating the industry. Johnson points out that the problem cannot be solved by government action alone. "There is no single solution for obesity," he said. "We will succeed only if the problem is recognised, owned and addressed at every level of society." His cabinet colleague Ed Balls, the schools secretary, will tomorrow announce measures to increase the amount of sport played by school pupils. Only 50% of schoolchildren do two hours or more of physical exercise or sport every week, well below targets set in 2004.

Source




More on British food follies

Information overload? Forget about it. According to a newly published survey, we can barely satisfy our hunger for the stuff - when we're out shopping, anyway. And to meet this demand, the eggheads in retail engineering have come up with the latest must-have consumer accessory - the `intelligent' supermarket trolley. Now we can find out how our food got made, what's in it, where it came from, and what it will do to us. Since when did buying groceries get so complicated?

"Shopping Choices: Attraction or Distraction?", released this week by the retail technology group EDS and the food and grocery information group IGD (1), is a mixture of opinion poll and focus group evidence that suggests that we are so disconnected from the food we eat, so mistrustful of what goes into it, and so terrified of what it might do to us, that we need a slim volume of nutritional, environmental and ethical information before we'll drop an item into our baskets. Thankfully, according to the report, the two pieces of information people want to know above all are the price and the `best before' date - we haven't gone completely doolally just yet.

Providing lots of information is easy enough on something reasonably large, like a loaf of bread or a family-size pizza. But it's a complete pain when you've got to pack it on to a small packet. That's where the intelligent trolley comes in. With a built-in barcode scanner and a screen, the trolley can tell you anything you want to know about the product before you commit to it. From the point of view of retailers, it will also handily highlight any special offers and discounts available on the aforementioned product and, if you swipe your loyalty card before you use it, the trolley could no doubt feed back lots of juicy data on your preferences. The intelligent trolley not only soothes our food fears, it helps retailers flog stuff, too. Smiles all round, then.

There's a lot of information to pack in. For example, the `traffic light' labelling system used by British food manufacturers details total fat, saturated fat, sugars, salt and calories. For each measure, there's a colour: green is `go ahead', amber is `proceed with caution', and red is `run a mile'. Then you need to be told if the stuff inside the package will set off an allergy. Is it tolerant of your intolerances?

According to the survey, we want ethical information, too: fairtrade, organic, rainforest-conserving, dolphin-friendly. Should we stick the `food miles' on there somewhere? And if we stick all this information on the packaging, will there be. too much packaging, causing more problems for the environment? It's a minefield. It's a wonder that shoppers aren't paralysed by indecision before they get past the fruit and veg.

Now that politics has been left on the shelf, it's the nitty-gritty of our individual experience that seems to feed our imaginations. What we eat has become the bread-and-butter of our personal-is-political lives. This is pretty perverse. The developed world has long since solved the problem of providing enough food to eat, and yet the question of food seems to have become even more central to political life - undeservedly so.

Food can be fuel; food can be an excuse for conversation and bonhomie; if you are so inclined, food can be a vehicle to geek out in just the same manner as people obsess about Star Trek. Thanks to the wide availability of interesting and exotic ingredients (a product, for most of the UK, of the expansion of supermarkets), we can use food to get all creative, too.

Yet today we also treat food with the same level of mistrust as an unexploded hand grenade. All that information on the packet is just to reassure that the contents of our shopping trolley aren't, in fact, a ticking timebomb of ill-health or environmental destruction. Over the last few years, the risks associated with food have become as important in assessing what we eat as the joy we might have in eating it. But food isn't a toxin. Food is highly unlikely to make your children hyperactive; there's no ADD in additives. Food won't make you sick - despite the non-stop hysteria about obesity. Food won't cost the Earth or save the planet. Placing so much importance on what we eat can only destroy the simple pleasure we experience when satisfying our hunger while tantalising our tastebuds.

We should just chill out at the chilled cabinets, feel free at the freezers and proceed at peace to the processed produce. If you want to be a food slob, or a food snob, that's your choice - or at least, it should be. Let's tell the government, the health `experts' and the green campaigners where they can shove their organic, fairtrade, five-a-day ideas. If we allow our pleasure to be ruined by their obsessions, we'll definitely be off our trolleys.

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 October, 2007

Cleaning sprays cause asthma?

Asthma can be triggered by many things so it is not suprising to find that some household sprays may trigger it in some people. The claim that one in seven asthma cases could be accounted for by cleaner use is however an excessive extrapolation. Many of the asthma sufferers concerned presumably did lots of other things as well as clean their houses so how can we know that it was their use of cleaning products that was the critical factor? And maybe big users of cleaners are obsessional or neurotic personalities who do other crazy and unhealthy things and it is those things that cause the problem. Neurotic personalities certainly report more illnesses generally. Or maybe people who are already aware of a susceptibility to asthma (for familial or other reasons) use more cleaning products! One would in any case think that anyone who had an adverse reaction to a particular spray would stop using it! The effect must be very weak indeed if people are unaware of it: Asthma is a very conspicuous and distressing ailment with rapid onset. This would appear to be another data-dredged relationship with causal inferences made purely on faith. Abstract here

Using cleaning sprays and air fresheners while doing housework could account for up to one in seven cases of asthma in adults, a study has found. The modern penchant for using labour-saving cleaning sprays and air fresheners has been found to raise significantly the risk of symptoms. Just spraying a cleaner once a week can trigger an attack, according to the research. The risk rose the more that the sprays were used. "Frequent use of household cleaning sprays may be an important risk factor for adult asthma," said Jan-Paul Zock, of the Municipal Institute of Medical Research, in Barcelona. "The relative risk rates of developing adult asthma in relation to exposure to cleaning products could account for as much as 15 per cent, or one in seven, of adult asthma cases."

Furniture sprays, glass-cleaners and air freshener sprays were associated with the highest risk of a person developing asthma after doing the housework. No link was identified between the onset of asthma and the use of cleaning products that were not sprayed. Cleaning sprays have previously been found to be associated with an increased incidence of asthma among people who clean for a living but it is thought to be the first time the link has been made to everyday use.

Howard Stoate, a GP, MP and chairman of the asthma all-party parliamentary group, said that a link between chemicals and asthma has long been suspected. He hoped that it might explain why countries such as New Zealand, which have low air pollution levels, have increases in asthma levels. "There are a lot of gaps in our knowledge about asthma. Anything that fills those has to welcomed. Although asthma is on the increase worldwide no one can say why," he said.

Asthma UK, a charity dedicated to helping the 5.2 million asthma patients in Britain, said that it was particularly interested in the finding that people without asthma go on to develop it after using the sprays. "This report . . . highlights significant findings regarding the link between asthma and the use of spray cleaning products in the home," Victoria King, of Asthma UK, said. "Although further research is needed, we do already know that air fresheners and bleach trigger symptoms in people who already have asthma."

The international study involved 3,503 people aged 20 to 44 in ten European countries who used cleaning and air freshener sprays. Their details were first logged, on average, nine years before they were interviewed by the study team. Two-thirds were women but only 9 per cent were, at the end of the survey period, looking after the home full time. It was found that 6 per cent of the subjects had developed asthma symptoms and that there was a link between the disease and using sprays in the home at least once a week. Analysis revealed that using the sprays at least once a week, as 42 per cent of the study group did, increased the risk of asthma symptoms by 30 to 50 per cent.

The study team reported: "Consistently positive associations for most asthma definitions were observed for cleaning sprays in general, and glass-cleaning, furniture and air-refreshing sprays in particular." Cleaning sprays and air fresheners contain chemicals such as ammonia, chlorine-releasing agents and sodium hydroxide. Researchers suggested that the chemicals being released into the air in spray form significantly increased their exposure to people.

The results of the study were published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, by the American Thoracic Society. The researchers used data from the European Community Respiratory Health Survey, one of the largest epidemiologic studies of airway disease in the world. A spokesman for the UK Cleaning Products Industry Association said: "The safety of consumers is the highest priority of our industries and the safety of our products is regularly checked and subject to rigorous controls, as well as stringent European legislation."

Source




Getting a cold while pregnant causes your baby to be schizophrenic or autistic??

It's a wonder there is anybody normal. I think the report below is another reason why we should be skeptical of mouse studies and their generalizability

A mother's flu could hold the key to whether her child is born with schizophrenia or autism, a team of Caltech biologists announced Tuesday. Working with mice that carry the genes for a schizophrenia-like condition, the researchers found that the health of newborn mice depended on whether or not their mothers had an immune response to illness during pregnancy. Baby mice born to mothers who had become ill, the scientists showed, had the behavioral and brain abnormalities of a schizophrenic or autistic human. Those from mothers whose immune response to the flu had been blocked did not.

The experiments were based on previous studies that showed schizophrenia is more common among people born in the winter or spring or after influenza epidemics. Some research suggests that even one respiratory infection in a mother's third trimester can multiply her child's risk of schizophrenia three to seven times. "The work is extremely solid and very interesting," Dan Geschwind, a UCLA neurogeneticist, said Tuesday of the Caltech team's work. "There are some things that are very unexpected."

The schizophrenia-causing culprit was a protein in pregnant mice's immune response known as interleukin-6, or IL-6, the Caltech researchers found. "In the mouse model, if you block the protein IL-6, you completely normalize the behaviors of the offspring," said Paul Patterson, a Caltech biologist. "On the converse experiment, if you just inject IL-6 into the mother, that will give rise to offspring with abnormal behaviors. "It doesn't mean there wouldn't be other proteins that would be involved, but it does mean that this one is really critical," he said.

That a single injection of IL-6 during the middle of gestation would cause behavioral deficits was "amazing," Geschwind said. "Nobody's ever shown that this can happen," he said. As in people with autism and schizophrenia, the affected mice had problems with social interaction, anxiety and attention span, Patterson said.

Finding the link between a pregnant mouse's immune response and her newborn's mental health is the first step, Geschwind said, to understanding whether there could be a similar biological connection in humans. The scientists still don't know what it is about the IL-6 protein that could be wrecking havoc in the newborns' brains, but they have some theories. "Now we're trying to find where this protein acts," Patterson said. "Does it act on the placenta or does it act on the fetal brain itself?" The protein could be limiting the passage of oxygen or nutrients through the placenta, he said. Alternately, it could affect the production or movement of new brain cells or cause inflammation in the fetus' brain. "We tend to think of the cold or the flu as a minor annoyance, but for pregnant Women it's really not," Patterson said. "I think not just our work, but the previous work, emphasizes the importance of infection in pregnancy."

However, he added, a genetic predisposition to the mental disorders was required for the protein to have its dire effect. "That would explain why everybody who gets an infection doesn't have schizophrenic offspring," he 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

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



13 October, 2007

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

And another fraud -- Ancel Keys -- who received great honours

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of "comparable" magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: "The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964". That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Haagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn't it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal "food pyramid" telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn't sure of the answer, he's liable to go along with the first person's guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she's more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an "informational cascade" as one person after another assumes that the rest can't all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group's members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert - or at least someone who sounds confident.

In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors. There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn't clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet. Second, there wasn't really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.

To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)

The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease "does not stand up to critical examination," the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position - not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that "the best scientific evidence of the time" warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.

The association's report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic - and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys's diet advice was "still questioned by some researchers." That set the tone for decades of news media coverage. Journalists and their audiences were looking for clear guidance, not scientific ambiguity.

After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. "McGovern's staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy," Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee's report was written by a nonscientist "relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted." That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture's advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its "food pyramid."

Meanwhile, there still wasn't good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report's authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a "consensus conference" that concluded there was "no doubt" that low-fat diets "will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease" for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.

But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.

Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn't been seriously studied because it couldn't be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.

Mr. Taubes told me he especially admired the iconoclasm of Dr. Edward H. Ahrens Jr., a lipids researcher who spoke out against the McGovern committee's report. Mr. McGovern subsequently asked him at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the low-fat recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of "the world's leading doctors."

"Senator McGovern, I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority," Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn't work in this field themselves. "This is a matter," he continued, "of such enormous social, economic and medical importance that it must be evaluated with our eyes completely open. Thus I would hate to see this issue settled by anything that smacks of a Gallup poll." Or a cascade.

Source




Cell transplant 'can ease slipped disc pain'

The results so far are not very impressive, however

A new treatment for slipped discs reduces pain, improves mobility and cuts the likelihood of further surgery, research revealed yesterday. Two years after undergoing the procedure, which involves injecting soft tissue cells into damaged discs, patients had less than a third of the pain they experienced beforehand. They reported 20 per cent less pain than those who had standard slipped disc operations and greater ability to move and function normally, according to the study.

There are around 14 million consultations with doctors about back pain in Britain every year. More than 20,000 operations a year are carried out for degenerative back problems such as slipped discs in England.

Vertebral discs form the cushioning and connecting material between the 24 vertebrae that make up the spine. Ageing or injury can cause the cartilage that makes up the outer wall of the disc to tear, allowing the soft inner part to bulge out - known as a slipped disc herniation. The escaped soft tissue can press against and potentially damage sensitive nerves, causing back and leg pain. In serious cases an operation is needed to remove material, relieving pressure on spinal nerve tissue.

However, the loss of the tissue leads to reduced disc height and shock absorption. Some 70 per cent of patients are left with continued pain and around one in 10 faces further surgery.

The new treatment - autologous disc-derived chondrocyte transplantation (ADCT) - involves growing soft tissue cells from the removed material, which are later re-injected into the damaged disc. The aim is to return the disc to its former size and health to delay the degeneration that usually follows a slipped disc. The procedure was developed at Co.don, a biotechnology company based near Berlin in Germany.

Researchers compared the experiences of 120 patients who had the treatment with 120 who had traditional surgery. The full study will only be completed five years after all patients had their operations, however interim results are available for 52 patients who were questioned two years after treatment. Those who had the new treatment reported 20 per cent less pain and a third less disability than those who had conventional surgery. They also reported having an average of 30 per cent of the pain they had been experiencing.

Jeremy Fairbank, professor of spinal surgery at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, said he would be sceptical until the full results of a large-scale clinical trial were published. He said: "Cell death occurs as part of disc degeneration and I am not convinced that the new cells that are injected in will be any more likely to survive."

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 October, 2007

Cheap trainer shoes as good as (or better than) expensive ones

RUNNERS who buy expensive training shoes in the belief they are less likely to cause injury are deluding themselves, according to a new study. Researchers in Scotland tested running shoes, made by three manufacturers, that fell into three price bands - low (40-45 pounds or $90-$102), medium (60-65 pounds) and high (70-75 pounds).

After masking the manufacturer's logo and other tags with tape, the scientists slipped a thin pressure plate, shaped like an insole, into the shoes. The device, called a Pedar, measured the pressure at three points on the sole of the foot: under the heel, across the forefoot and under the big toe. The goal was to get an idea of the effectiveness of the cushioning that manufacturers add to the shoe to dampen the shockwave to the foot. Thus, the higher the pressure, the greater the force that is transmitted to the runner when his or her foot makes contact with the ground.

They then asked 43 young male volunteers to put on the shoes and walk along a 20m walkway in the lab. The volunteers each wore a small backpack which held a box that picked up data signals from the pressure gauge. Nine volunteers then wore the shoes as they ran on a treadmill, to see if this made any difference in sole pressures as compared to walking.

"Plantar pressure was lower overall in low- and medium-cost shoes than in high-cost shoes,'' says their paper, which appears in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. "This may suggest that less expensive running shoes not only provide as much protection from impact forces as expensive running shoes, but that in actual fact they may also provide more.''

The volunteers were also asked to assess the masked shoes for comfort. But their preferences were subjective and bore no relation to the distribution of plantar pressure or the cost of the shoe, the investigators found.

Running is a high-impact activity. With every footfall, a middle-distance runner experiences an impact equal to 2.5 times body weight - and this force increases with speed and fatigue. The impact transmits shock waves that are transmitted by the bones of the foot to the rest of the body, with the potential to cause knee damage, shin splints, muscle tears, Achilles tendonitis and other injuries.

Athletic footwear can reduce the impact by a third through good cushioning, as compared to the impact from walking barefoot, according to the study headed by Rami Abboud of the Institute of Motion Analysis Research at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, Dundee.

Source




More irresponsible statin evangelism

No mention of their often disastrous effect on quality of life -- which is WHY alleged "former" takers are focused on. It takes a lot for most people to continue with them. This is obviously such a careless study (see the rubrics and italics below) that I am not even going to bother looking at the abstract

People who take cholesterol-lowering drugs are protected from heart disease and premature death years after they stop taking them, a major study has shown. New research into statins - the world's biggest-selling medication - offers dramatic evidence of their long-lasting ability to halt and even reverse the progression of heart disease. The study, involving 6,500 men, found that those who took statins were still showing benefits of the drugs ten years after they had finished taking them. The chances of suffering a fatal heart attack over the period dropped by more than 25 per cent, the scientists found, while there was no evidence of unexpected side-effects. This remarkable result will increase pressure on GPs to prescribe statins to an even greater number of middle-aged people with raised cholesterol levels.

Professor Stuart Cobbe, of the University of Glasgow, the leading cardiologist on the study, said that he had been extremely surprised. "The benefit appeared to extend to at least ten years after the original trial," he said. The findings do not suggest that people on statins should give up; rather it is better to continue taking them. But even those who do give up continue to enjoy a benefit, Professor Cobbe said.

The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, come three months after a government adviser suggested statins should be offered to all men over 50 and women over 60 as an effective "shortcut" to prevent heart disease. Statins are currently taken daily by an estimated three million Britons to tackle high chloresterol. Heart disease is Britain's biggest killer, accounting for one in three deaths. The annual cost to the economy is about œ26 billion a year, the bulk of which is treatment costs.

Professor Chris Packard, a co-author of the study, said: "The impact of the statin treatment appeared to persist long after the active phase of the trial. This suggests that the drugs have lasting beneficial effects on the artery wall, possibly by stabilising plaques that might be about to rupture and cause an heart attack." Breakaway plaques can cause attacks by blocking the blood vessels and starving the heart of blood. Statins appear to stabilise the lining of the blood vessels, as well as damping down inflammation.

The original trial, the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (Woscops), was launched between 1989 and 1991. More than 6,500 men aged between 45 and 64 who had not had a heart attack but had elevated cholesterol levels were recruited and divided into two groups. Half were given pravastatin and the other half a placebo. They were followed up for five years, until May 1995. The results showed that the risks of death from heart disease, or of suffering a heart attack, were significantly reduced in the statin users. The new study follows up the same men for another ten years. It compares heart attack and death rates in the original statin group against the original placebo group. Since the trial, both groups have changed. The statin group have tended to give up taking the tablets, while many of those in the placebo group have started to take them. No account was taken of these changes [Thus rendering the implications of the results completely indeterminate. Perhaps the group given a statin placebo have been so disillusioned by "their" statins that moved on to more harmful "natural" remedies], and a simple comparison was made of the 15-year experience of the original statin group against the original placbo group.

Professor Ian Ford, lead author of the study, said: "Remarkably, five years of treatment with a statin resulted in 27 per cent fewer nonfatal heart attacks or deaths due to heart disease over the period of 15 years. There was a significant 12 per cent reduction in deaths over the entire period, with deaths due to heart disease reduced by 22 per cent." The gap between the groups narrowed after the trial ended, and their use of statins tended to converge. But up to the end of the 15-year period, the original statin group did better than the original placebo group, showing a persistence of the effect. [Or showing that most high-risk people end up taking statins for a while; some sooner, some later. And maybe those given it when younger tend to tolerate it better. It is all pure speculation]

Professor Ford said: "The results of the follow-up provide strong support for the safety of five years of statin use. "When fatal and nonfatal heart disease events were studied it was found that, despite the fact that most of the participants were not treated with a statin after the first five years of the trial, there was evidence of the group originally receiving the statin continuing to be at lower risk of having a heart disease event."

Statin prescriptions have risen by 150 per cent in England in the past five years. The trial raises the question of whether they should be given to an even wider group, including younger people in whom heart disease has yet to get a start.

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 October, 2007

IS THIS A JOKE?

No wonder this research is described as "unfunded"! They say that two ailments have a common cause but out of more than 900 patients with either condition, they found only FOUR cases of overlap! Better proof that the ailments are NOT related would be hard to come by. Another pet theory bites the dust. Popular summary followed by journal abstract below

MULTIPLE sclerosis (MS) and ulcerative colitis (UC) -- a type of inflammatory bowel disease that causes colon ulcers and diarrhoea -- may have common causes, according to new Australian research published in the Internal Medicine Journal. Led by Dr Christopher Pokorny from Liverpool Hospital and the University of NSW in Sydney, the research team examined medical records at Liverpool Hospital dated between 1996 and 2006 and identified 496 patients with MS and 414 patients with UC. There were four patients with both UC and MS, two of whom developed UC after they were diagnosed with MS. Given that some treatments for UC can damage the protective covering of brain cells -- the same process that occurs in MS -- the authors claim that common underlying causes of the two diseases should be further investigated.

Source

Association between ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis

By C. S. Pokorny et al.

An association between inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and multiple sclerosis (MS) has been described. The current study was undertaken to explore this association further. Personal records of patients with IBD and MS were reviewed. In addition, a search of medical records at a large tertiary teaching hospital in Sydney was carried out for the years 1996-2006. Four patients (three women and one man) with both ulcerative colitis and MS were identified. MS did not occur in any of our patients with Crohn's disease. The association between ulcerative colitis and MS appears to be real and may help identify common factors involved in the cause of these two diseases. No association was found in this study between MS and Crohn's disease, sparking consideration why such difference should occur. With the increasing use of biological therapies in IBD and their reported propensity to cause demyelination, recognition of an association is all the more important.

Internal Medicine Journal, Volume 37 Issue 10 Page 721-724, October 2007




Chilli anaesthetic turns off pain



An injection that can block the pain of a dentist's drill but does not cause, numbness, paralysis or drooling could be available within a few years, thanks to an advance that could benefit millions of people. "We've introduced a local anaesthetic selectively into pain-sensing neurons," explains Harvard's Prof Bruce Bean, an author on the paper today in Nature. "Now we can block the activity of pain-sensing neurons without disrupting electrical signalling of other kinds of neurons that control movements or non-painful sensations." "The expectation is that it should block pain but avoid general numbness when applied in dentistry. Also it may minimise drooling."

"We're optimistic that this method will eventually be applied to humans and change our experience during procedures ranging from knee surgery to tooth extractions," adds Prof Clifford Woolf of Massachusetts General Hospital, senior author. "I think by 2010 proof of concept trials in humans are likely and the appropriate safety and efficacy studies will take a few years more."

Despite enormous investments by industry, pain management has changed little since the first successful demonstration of ether general anaesthesia at MGH in 1846. General and local anesthetics work by interfering with electrical signalling by all nerve cells, not just pain-sensing ones. Thus, these drugs produce dramatic side effects, such as loss of consciousness in the case of general anaesthetics or temporary paralysis for local anaesthetics. "We're offering a targeted approach to pain management that avoids these problems," says Prof Woolf.

The new work, done in the lab by Alexander Binshtok, builds on research done since the 1970s showing how the signals sent along nerves depend on microscopic openings in them, in proteins called ion channels. Previous research showed that a protein channel called TRPV1, which is unique to pain-sensing neurons, could be put to work to deliver the anaesthetic.

TRPV1 channels are usually shut but can be opened either by painful heat or by the chilli-pepper ingredient capsaicin. When the TRP1 channels are propped opened by capsaicin they form a pore large enough to be traversed by QX-314, which unlike its close chemical relative lignocaine, normally has no anaesthetic effect because it cannot penetrate cells. Presented in combination with capsaicin, it can selectively enter pain sensitive nerves and shut down their electrical activity.

The team must overcome several hurdles before this method can be applied to humans, notably working out the right blend of agents with similar actions to OX-314 and capsaicin to work with the minimum of pain and side effects. But Prof Woolf said "We have very good leads and I am therfore optimistic that progress will be relatively rapid." "Eventually this method could completely transform surgical and post-surgical analgesia, allowing patients to remain fully alert without experiencing pain or paralysis," he added. "In fact, the possibilities seem endless. I could even imagine using this method to treat itch, as itch-sensitive neurons fall into the same group as pain-sensing ones."

"The Holy Grail in pain science is to eliminate pathologic pain without impairing thinking, alertness, coordination, or other vital functions of the nervous system. "This finding shows that a specific combination of two molecules can block only pain-related neurons. It holds the promise of major future breakthroughs for the millions of persons who suffer with disabling pain," commented Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, Maryland.

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 October, 2007

Donated blood quickly loses vital gas

Aha! Now we know why Jehovah's Witnesses survive better

Donated blood quickly loses some of its life-saving properties as an important gas dissipates, US researchers say, in a finding that explains why many patients fare poorly after blood transfusions. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, have found that nitric oxide in red blood cells is the key to transferring oxygen in the blood to tissues. This gas appears to break down almost immediately after red blood cells leave the body, rendering much of the blood stored in blood banks impaired, said Dr Jonathan Stamler, a Duke researcher whose work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "If you don't have nitric oxide in there, you can't get oxygen into the tissues," he said. But if you restore this gas, banked blood appears to regain this ability, Stamler said.

"The medical community for the past five to eight years has really been struggling with this issue of blood not being quite as good as we'd hoped," Stamler said. He noted that study after study has shown patients who receive blood transfusions have higher incidents of heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and even death. "This is not a new issue. It has been a long struggle," he said.

While researchers have understood that banked blood is not the same as the blood in the body, the exact difference was not well understood. "I think we have a good explanation and I think we have a solution," Stamler said. He and colleagues at Duke measured levels of nitric oxide in stored human blood obtained from a commercial supplier and found that nitric oxide levels started dropping quickly. They also tested the theory on dogs. When given stored blood, the flow of oxygen-rich blood was impaired. But when they added nitric oxide back to stored blood, blood flow was restored.

A second team at Duke led by Dr. Timothy McMahon documented the depletion of nitric oxide in banked blood. "We were surprised at how quickly the blood changes; we saw clear indications of nitric oxide depletion within he first three hours," he said in a statement. His study appears in the same journal. Both researchers called for clinical trials to study exactly who might benefit from banked blood. And they said researchers should begin studying ways to safely add nitric oxide back into banked blood to see how this might improve its effectiveness. Currently, about five million Americans receive blood transfusions each year, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Source




On scientific medicine

When doctors attack alternative medicine or appear sceptical to its much-trumpeted claims, we are often accused of being bigots with closed minds, protecting a closed shop. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it has taken a layman, the late, great John Diamond, to find the words to set the record straight. For that reason, I would like to quote from his posthumously published book Snake Oil and other Preoccupations (1). Diamond wrote: `I am not an academic and this is not an academic book, even though the facts I list in it have a perfectly good scientific basis to them but when it comes to human motivation I am working blind. I can only guess why most people seem to prefer the unproven to the proven, the anecdotal to the rigorously demonstrated, and the so-called natural to the scientific.' There is much within that passage on the nature of proof, the nature of the scientific method, and the use and abuse of anecdotal evidence.

The alternative practitioner can trace his roots back to Galen in the second century, and a metaphysical belief system based on the balance of natural humours. For example, Galen believed that breast cancer was due to an excess of black bile (melancholia). Inductive support for this belief came from the observation that breast cancer was more common in post-menopausal women than pre-menopausal women, and this was thought to be because the menstrual flux in pre-menopausal women got rid of the putative excess of black bile. The therapeutic consequences of this belief therefore were purgation and venesection (bloodletting). The inductive `proof' that this approach worked were the anecdotes about women with breast cancer who were treated by purgation and venesection, and who lived for several years after diagnosis. Those who died were the victims of the blood-letter who didn't have the courage of his convictions, or the patient herself who lacked the constitutional vigour to sustain prolonged bloodletting.

There is a neo-Galenic doctrine, based on the view that breast cancer is indeed due to an imbalance of nature, only substituting energy fields for the natural humours. According to this view, to restore perfect health you have to restore the balance of these metaphysical energy fields. This might be achieved by acupuncture balancing out the yin and the yang, homeopathy (simularis simulabum curantur), or strange balancing diets.

The Gerson diet, in particular, is very fashionable. In fact, one of my patients, seeking to improve my education, gave me a book describing this approach (2). The first half of the book formulates the hypothesis why this strange diet should improve the balance of the immune system, and the second half of the book consisted of 50 anecdotes of patients with cancer, who were only given six months to live by the medical profession, and who took to the diet and lived for a long time.

The trouble with that kind of evidence is that although we know the numerator (50) we don't know the denominator - for example, 50 out of 1,000 cases treated by neglect could indeed live for many years while the indolent disease progresses on the chest wall. Furthermore, from the evidence available in the book, some of the diagnoses were a little bit shaky and the author neglects to mention whether or not these patients receive conventional treatment at the same time as the magic diet. Finally, I know of no oncologist who gives a patient six months to live. We may say that the median survival for a group with advanced cancer is six months, but among this group certain individuals may lie at extremes of survival. These individuals are the substance of the anecdote.

Perhaps I should leave the last word on this subject to Robert Parks, author of the wonderful book Voodoo Science. Parks wrote: `Alternative seems to define a culture rather than a field of medicine - a culture that is not scientifically demanding. It is a culture in which ancient accretions are given more weight than biological science and anecdotes are preferred over clinical trials. Alternative therapies steadfastly resist change often for centuries or even millennia, unaffected by scientific advances in the understanding of physiology or disease.' (3) If that is the case, then who are the bigots and the ones with the closed minds?

Deductive logic and the randomised controlled trial

The alternative to alternative medicine should be scientific medicine, not `orthodoxy'. By science I mean the application of deductive logic. The deductive approach starts with the formulation of the hypothesis, but for a start the hypothesis must be rational in its explanation of the disease process or therapeutic intervention. By `rational' I mean built upon the growth of knowledge of human biology and physiology from the past 100 years or so, without invoking magic or metaphysical principles.

Even so, the new hypothesis is still perceived as a fictional account of reality and subjected to rigorous test by the design of experiments challenging the new theory with the `hazard of refutation'. These experiments in medical or surgical therapeutics must have control groups treated by observation, placebo or `best available therapy'. Without the control group, we merely have a series of anecdotal reports. What I have just described is in fact a randomised controlled trial.

Breast cancer and the randomised controlled trial

As I have mentioned, up until the eighteenth century, if breast cancer was treated at all it was treated according to the principles of Galen. It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that it became widely accepted that cancer was a disease of cellular pathology originating within the breast and spreading centrifugally along the lymphatic system. The therapeutic consequence of this belief led surgeons to embark on radical surgery that involved removing the breast and all the regional lymphatics. It was left to William Halsted in the 1890s to refine the operation into the classic radical mastectomy, with the intention of ridding the body of the primary cancer and its lymph node secondaries. Sadly, the only support for this radical treatment was anecdotal. If the patient survived it was due to the success of the surgeon. If the patient died it was either because the patient came too late or the surgeon lacked the courage of his convictions to complete a truly radical operation.

It was only when Dr Bernard Fisher in the 1960s challenged the conceptual model of the disease that progress started to be made. In other words an antithesis was constructed to challenge the prevailing dogma. Fisher taught that contrary to popular belief, breast cancer cells spread throughout the body through the venous drainage of the breast, and at the time of clinical presentation of the disease, the majority of breast cancers were in fact systemic disorders. If that was indeed the case then there are two therapeutic consequences. Firstly, that radical surgery is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Therefore the role of local therapy is local control, which would equally well be achieved by breast-conserving techniques such as lumpectomy and radiotherapy. The second therapeutic corollary is that if indeed the disease is systemic at the time of diagnosis, then the only way to improve cure rates is through chemotherapy or hormone therapy.

However, the greatness of Dr Fisher, ably supported by surgical acolytes all around the world, was not simply to accept a new set of beliefs in place of an old set of beliefs, but to challenge the new paradigm using deductive logic: in other words, through randomised controlled trials. One of the great success stories of modern medicine has been the painstaking series of randomised controlled trials in the management of early breast cancer over the past 30 years. We now know with extreme confidence that breast conservation is a safe alternative to radical mastectomy; although not in itself improving cure rates, it greatly enhances the patient's quality of life. We also know with extreme confidence that treatment using either endocrine or cytotoxic regimens will improve survival. The final demonstration of that truth has been the dramatic fall in breast cancer mortality in the UK and North America since 1985, following the first publication of the world overview of trials (4).

Using breast cancer as an example, we can demonstrate that the philosophy of science that underpins the randomised controlled trials has led to the dramatic improvement in length of life and quality of life for women inflicted with this dread disease. However, this isn't the end of the story, as new biological hypotheses are being generated with new therapeutic consequences, all of which will be tested in the randomised controlled trial, which is now accepted as the most scientific and ethical way of conducting medicine in times of uncertainty.

The impact of government interference

For both political and humane reasons, governments of all persuasions like to meddle in this process and add guidelines, targets and unwelcome advice on top of our carefully collected evidence. Two examples from the recent past illustrate the dangerous law of unintended consequences when well-meaning meddling is applied on top of clinical science. The first is teaching the practice of breast self-examination (BSE) and the second, applying the two-week target for the urgent diagnosis of cases suspected of having breast cancer.

BSE is superficially attractive in making it the responsibility of women themselves to `catch their breast cancers early' and thus reduce breast cancer mortality. It's a good theory and was introduced as policy in many countries, and also provides an excuse for the women's magazines to publish photographs of beautiful young women fondling their own breasts (which in itself gives out the wrong message that breast cancer is a disease of young women). However, the important point to note is that the advice is based on an assumption - not on evidence. Over the past 10 years, three large randomised controlled trials have compared the outcomes of women who have been intensively trained in BSE with a matched population of women left to their own devices. The outcomes of all three studies were counterintuitive. There was no difference in breast cancer mortality, but those women practising BSE were twice as likely to experience false alarms and unnecessary surgery. This prompted the Canadian Medical Association to issue a warning against the practice!

A more recent example is the two-week rule. Primary care doctors in the NHS were advised to prioritise women with breast symptoms as urgent or not urgent. Those in the former group had to be seen within two weeks and the rest could take their turn. Note the two false assumptions in these guidelines: a) breast cancer is an emergency and even a few weeks can affect outcome; and b) women with breast symptoms atypical of breast cancer can happily wait for up to 12 weeks. Pretty much as predicted, the law of unintended consequences kicked in. So many worried-well pushy middle-class women were seen as emergencies, and so many cancers appeared in the non-urgent group that the net result was a greater delay in cancers being diagnosed than before (6).

Finally, I wish to illustrate the extreme folly of the two-week target for seeing patients suspected of cancer, with an anecdote about a patient I saw recently. The patient who attended my NHS clinic was a charming and sensible woman in her early fifties, with a family history of breast cancer. Three weeks before, she had seen her GP complaining of passing bright red blood at stool. He referred her urgently under the two-week `target' rule to the colo-rectal clinic. The referral was flagged up by some clerical officer in the audit department and the clock started its countdown. Since the colo-rectal clinics are overwhelmed with patients with lower bowel symptoms, nurse-led clinics were set up to take the pressure off the specialist surgeons. The nurse ticked the boxes and the patient was referred for colonoscopy. This examination showed haemorrhoids (piles), the commonest cause of bleeding at stool, and no signs of cancer. Her next appointment followed soon afterwards and she had a CT scan of her abdomen and chest. This was reported as showing a secondary cancer in her right lung. She was then referred for positron emitting tomography, which suggested that she might have cancer in her right breast not her right lung. Note that at no time had anyone actually examined her.

By the time she came to see me she was a confused nervous wreck. After taking a careful history I asked her to disrobe and sit up on the couch. One glance was enough to confirm the breast cancer from the dimple in the lower outer quadrant on the right side. Palpation and biopsy confirmed the diagnosis. After counselling at length she was booked for the next vacant slot on the operating list, which was just over two weeks off. She went off satisfied, but the audit office was not. Apparently we were in breach of the two-week target for cancer.

So in the end, all these delays and unnecessary investigations wasted about 3,000 pounds, and caused substantial anxiety for the patient - and yet they passed the two-week target rule. At the point when the patient is diagnosed and treatment ordered, the computer finds that targets have not been met. This upside-down logic shows the unintended consequences of ill-considered and non-evidence-based political interference.

Conclusion

I hope those examples illustrate the dangers of government intervention in the practice of evidence-based medicine. This is what I choose to describe as ignorance-based interference (IBI). Other examples of IBI include so-called `patient's choice', censoring the right of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) to evaluate alternative medicine, and the constant `re-disorganisation' of the NHS (7). My call to the government is this: provide us with the tools to practice evidence-based medicine and then please leave us alone.

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 October, 2007

Breakthrough test promises to cut cancer trauma

A SYDNEY scientist has created a world-first test which could save or extend the lives of cancer patients by drastically reducing the trauma of chemotherapy - and make tens of millions of dollars for the University of NSW. The test uses a dye to determine whether cancer cells are being destroyed, allowing for rapid changes in treatment and eliminating one of the most traumatic aspects of the cancer patient's ordeal: long, debilitating chemotherapy courses that can be found months later to be a waste of time.

Professor Philip Hogg, the director of the university's NSW Cancer Research Centre, has developed a family of molecules which attach themselves to dying or dead cancer cells, allowing doctors to determine if a particular course of treatment is working within 24 hours of the first dose. The US pharmaceutical giant Covidien has bought the development rights in an undisclosed worldwide deal worth tens of millions of dollars in royalties to the university. It hopes to have the dye on the market within five years.

Patients receiving chemotherapy or radiotherapy now have to undergo a full cycle of treatment, which can take up to six months, before doctors can determine whether the tumour has been reduced or has grown.

Professor Hogg said the dye would stop patients suffering unnecessarily from side effects if their combination of cytotoxic drugs proved ineffective. It would also allow doctors to personalise treatment. "Chemotherapy has three outcomes - the tumour is reduced, stays the same, or it grows and spreads - but we have no way of knowing which way things are going until the end of a cycle of treatment, or several cycles," he said. "If, at the end of a cycle, we find out the tumour has not been reduced, the oncologist must prescribe a new combination of drugs, or a different treatment, and the patient starts again. This means patients go through a lot of trauma and many don't have the time to waste on ineffective therapies."

Patients would be injected with the dye within 24 to 48 hours after the first dose of chemotherapy or radiotherapy. A CT scan would then show any dead or dying cancer cells. If there were none, or less than expected, an oncologist could immediately change the treatment. "This discovery stems from more than 10 years of research focused on the design of molecular probes to study cellular processes," Professor Hogg said. "We were working on another project when we found that these molecules attached to dead, cultured cells, so we decided to follow our noses and see where it took us. It is very exciting to be able to tailor treatment and to prevent people from the trauma of going through a chemotherapy cycle for months only to find out it didn't work."

Professor Hogg said clinical trials would begin within two years, but the dye was expected to work on all solid tumours, such as lung, breast, colon and prostate cancers. It would not be suitable for leukaemia. Mark Bennett, the chief executive of NewSouth Innovations, which brokered the deal, said he was thrilled with Professor Hogg's discovery. He said the deal validated the university's cancer research expertise. Covidien believes the dye could also be used for people suffering strokes and heart attacks.

Source




Hope for the mentally ill

A PROGRAM designed to keep the mentally ill out of emergency departments and psychiatric units of hospitals has produced spectacular results, an evaluation by the charity Mission Australia shows. Hospital admissions fell by "an astonishing" 92 per cent in the year after people were enrolled in the program, potentially saving taxpayers thousands of dollars. "We've got great results from doing what appears quite simple - helping people get back into life," said Bronwyn Howlett, the charity's mental health operations manager.

The State Government-funded program, known as the Housing and Accommodation Support Initiative, is a joint effort between non-government agencies, the Department of Health and the Department of Housing. It aims to help the mentally ill find or maintain stable housing, and then get the support they need to manage their illness and forge ties in the community.

The evaluation, based on a sample of 24 Mission Australia clients, showed they had spent a combined 28 days in hospital in the year since having joined the program compared to 356 days in the previous year. "It's been successful because you have someone helping the whole person, not just the illness," Ms Howlett said.

Under the $29 million program, to reach 1000 people by the end of the year, a mental health worker from the Health Department visits to monitor medication and doctors' appointments, and a support worker from a non-government agency helps the client with the rest - cooking classes, outings, shopping, social groups, and simply lending an ear.

Tom Shimhame, 42, is typical of those who have benefited. Life has been tough since his diagnosis with schizophrenia 20 years ago. He spent two or three years on the street, he says. And in the year before he joined the program, he spent 30 days in hospital. But in the past 18 months, he has not spent a day in hospital thanks to regular visits from Laurie Bassett and Pat Smith, from Mission Australia, and from a mental health worker. "The main problem was his housekeeping," Mr Bassett said. "The Department of Housing was concerned they would have to evict him because his unit was in such a state." Mr Shimhame agrees: "It was very dirty."

Evictions and homelessness are common fates for unsupported people with mental illness, says Ms Howlett. Mission Australia estimates 70 to 80 per cent of people who seek help from its homeless services have mental illness. By helping Mr Shimhame maintain his tenancy, and sending him to cooking classes, the program has boosted his independence. "I'd rather be at home than in hospital," he said. "More liberty, you don't have to have regulations."

The Mission Australia evaluation is consistent with a bigger study of the program earlier this year by the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW. Based on 600 interviews, including 219 with clients, it concluded the results were "remarkable". Not only had hospital admissions fallen but there was measured improvements in clients' mental health, and gains in their abilities to handle their own banking, diet, exercise and cooking. And the way they looked after their property, "is as good or better than other (public and community housing) tenants." Ninety-four per cent reported making friends compared to nearly a quarter who had none before entering the program.

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 October, 2007

Scientists discover purpose of appendix

Evolutionists used to upset creationists by calling it a "vestigial" organ but that was itself a leap of faith -- faith in the completeness of their own knowledge. Being myself a REAL atheist, I am pleased to see that the appendix may be functional after all.

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for the gut. That is the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week. For generations the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors could find no function for it. Surgeons removed them routinely. People live fine without them.

And when infected the appendix can turn deadly. It becomes inflamed quickly, and some people die if it is not removed expeditiously. Two years ago, 321,000 Americans were hospitalised with appendicitis, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria that populates the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. More bacteria inhabit the typical body than human cells. Most of the bacteria are good and help digest food. But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case. The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author.

The location of the appendix, just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac, helps support the theory, he said. Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts as a bacteria factory to cultivate the good germs, Parker said. That use is not needed in a modern industrialised society, Parker said. If the gut flora dies, they usually can be repopulated easily with germs picked up from other people, he said.

But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it was not as easy to grow back that bacteria, and the appendix came in handy. In less developed countries, where the appendix may be still useful, the rate of appendicitis is lower than in the United States, other studies have shown, Parker said.

The appendix, which is about six to 10 centimetres long, may be another case of an overly hygienic society triggering an overreaction by the body's immune system, he said. Even though the appendix seems to have a function, people should still have them removed when they are inflamed because it could turn deadly, Parker said. About 300 to 400 Americans die of appendicitis each year, according to the CDC.

Five scientists not connected with the research said that the Duke theory makes sense and raises interesting questions. The idea "seems by far the most likely" explanation for the function of the appendix, said Brandeis University biochemistry professor Douglas Theobald. "It makes evolutionary sense." The theory led Gary Huffnagle, a University of Michigan internal medicine and microbiology professor, to wonder about the value of another body part that is often discarded: "I'll bet eventually we'll find the same sort of thing with the tonsils."

Source




"EXCESSIVE HYGEINE" AS ASTHMA CAUSE CHALLENGED

This is a pretty good study but is far from conclusive. The short time period of the intervention (1 year) and a possibility of restricted range are considerable limitations. It seems likely that even the "unhygeinic" Finns were still pretty hygeinic (restricted range) and one year of low exposure to pathogens may not matter much in terms of overall exposure. Popular summary below followed by abstract

The idea that an increase in allergies and asthma is a result of a reduction in childhood infections seems not to hold up, researchers report. Preventing common respiratory infections and stomach infections in child daycare centres had no impact on the later development of asthma, nasal allergies or eczema, according to a follow-up survey conducted 12 years later.

The findings do not support the "hygiene hypothesis," which theorises that reduced exposure to infections in childhood leads to greater allergic sensitisation, conclude Dr Teija Dunder and colleagues from the University of Oulu, Finland. The magnitude of the reduction in early infections "should have led to an increase in asthma rates if the hygiene hypothesis were to apply to common childhood infections," Dunder and colleagues point out in the Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine for October.

Between 1991 and 1992, a total of 1376 children attended daycare centres that were either part of a hygiene intervention effort or not. The intervention included several steps, the most important of which was improvement of hand hygiene using an alcohol-based hand rub, the authors note. Children attending hygiene intervention centres had 15 per cent fewer days with symptoms of infections and 24 per cent fewer prescriptions for antibiotics than those attending "control" daycare centres.

A follow-up survey of 928 adolescents who attended the daycare centres as young children showed no differences between the two groups in the development or severity of asthma, allergic rhinitis or eczema. Asthma was diagnosed in 48 of 481 adolescents from intervention daycare centres (10 per cent) and in 46 of 447 controls (10 per cent). Similarly, no difference was found in the number of children who had a diagnosis of other allergic diseases or who had reported such symptoms. The researchers conclude that this shows that a reduction in infections in children attending daycare centres can be achieved by simple infection prevention practices. "We can now say that it proved to be safe because it had no effect on later (allergic illness)."

Source

Journal abstract follows:

Infections in Child Day Care Centers and Later Development of Asthma, Allergic Rhinitis, and Atopic Dermatitis

By Teija Dunder et al.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of successful prevention of common infections in child day care centers on the later development of allergic diseases.

Design: Prospective follow-up survey with a questionnaire administered 12 years after a controlled randomized hygiene intervention.

Setting: Twenty municipal child day care centers in Oulu, Finland.

Participants: A questionnaire was sent to 1354 prior participants (98%) in the intervention trial. The response rate was 68% (928 of 1354 participants).

Main Intervention: Hygiene intervention from March 1, 1991, to May 31, 1992.

Main Outcome Measures: The number of respondents who had a diagnosis of asthma, allergic rhinitis, and/or atopic dermatitis made by a physician, and the number of those who reported symptoms of atopic diseases.

Results: Asthma was diagnosed by a physician in 48 of the 481 respondents (10%) from the intervention child day care centers, with markedly fewer infections, and in 46 of the 447 controls (10%) (relative risk, 1.0; 95% confidence interval, 0.7-1.4). Similarly, no differences were found in the numbers of children who had a diagnosis of other atopic diseases or who had reported such symptoms.

Conclusion: The prevention of common respiratory tract and enteric infections during early childhood does not change later allergic morbidity.

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007;161:972-977

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

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 October, 2007

KIDS OF SMOKERS DO BADLY AT SCHOOL

That's not the least bit surprising -- as smokers tend to be lower class anyhow and class is a strong predictor of school success. The interesting thing is that there is an effect that goes beyond class. What might it be? IQ, I suspect. Smokers are less likely to be bright and IQ is highly hereditary. This study is therefore NO evidence that secondhand smoke is harmful (though it may be). It probably shows simply that dumber parents have dumber kids. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract

Smoking parents may not only affect their children's health with secondhand smoke, they may also damage their academic performance

Surprising findings in the Journal of Adolescent Health this week show that exposure to secondhand smoke at home decreases the chances of passing school exams by 30 per cent. The study was based on information from 6380 pregnant women and their children. Academic performance was measured on the British Ordinary Level (O-Level) and Advanced Level (A-Level) exams, usually taken at age 16 and 18, respectively. Information was gathered on children's exposure to smoking prior to birth and as teenagers, as well as their gender and socio-economic status. Even after accounting for these other factors, passive smoking at home still increased the chances of failing exams. The findings should further encourage parents to stop smoking around their children, or quit altogether, say the authors.

Source

Adolescent Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure Predicts Academic Achievement Test Failure

By Bradley N. Collins et al.

Purpose: Research has linked prenatal tobacco exposure to neurocognitive and behavioral problems that can disrupt learning and school performance in childhood. Less is known about its effects on academic achievement in adolescence when controlling for known confounding factors (e.g., environmental tobacco smoke [ETS]). We hypothesized that prenatal tobacco exposure would decrease the likelihood of passing academic achievement tests taken at 16 and 18 years of age.

Methods: This study was a longitudinal analysis of birth cohort data including 6,380 pregnant women and offspring from the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS). Academic pass/fail performance was measured on British standardized achievement tests ("Ordinary Level" [O-Level] and Advanced Level: [A-Level]). Prenatal tobacco exposure plus controlling variables (ETS, teen offspring smoking and gender, maternal age at pregnancy, maternal smoking before pregnancy, and socioeconomic status) were included in regression models predicting O- and A-Level test failure.

Results: Significant predictors of test failure in the O-Level model included exposure to maternal (OR = 0.71, p < .0001) and paternal (OR = 0.70, p < .0001) ETS, as well as teen smoking, female gender, and lower SES. Prenatal tobacco exposure did not influence failure. Similar factors emerged in the A-Level model except that male gender contributed to likelihood of failure. Prenatal exposure remained nonsignificant.

Conclusions: Our model suggests that adolescent exposure to ETS, not prenatal tobacco exposure, predicted failure on both O- and A-Level achievement tests when controlling for other factors known to influence achievement. Although this study has limitations, results bolster growing evidence of academic-related ETS consequences in adolescence.

J Adolesc Health 2007;41:363-370




YIKES! IATROGENIC ILLNESS IN PREMMIES?

Very small numbers here so the cerebral palsy finding may not mean anything but it obviously deserves further investigation. Overall, the results are in fact reassuring. Popular summary below followed by abstract:

Pregnant women at risk of premature labour are usually given a single injection of corticosteroids to help the baby's lungs to mature. Some women are given multiple injections, but a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that giving multiple doses of corticosteroids increases the risk of cerebral palsy in babies. Women given an initial dose of corticosteroids between 23 and 31 weeks of pregnancy were randomly assigned to receive either weekly injections of the corticosteroid betamethasone or placebo injections. In total, 556 children born to these women were given physical and brain function tests at two to three years of age. Six children whose mothers received multiple corticosteroid injections had cerebral palsy, compared to only one child in the placebo group. While the number of affected children was small, the authors conclude that the increased risk is concerning and warrants further study.

Source

Long-Term Outcomes after Repeat Doses of Antenatal Corticosteroids

By Ronald J. Wapner et al.

Background: Previous trials have shown that repeat courses of antenatal corticosteroids improve some neonatal outcomes in preterm infants but reduce birth weight and increase the risk of intrauterine growth restriction. We report long-term follow-up results of children enrolled in a randomized trial comparing single and repeat courses of antenatal corticosteroids.

Methods: Women at 23 through 31 weeks of gestation who remained pregnant 7 days after an initial course of corticosteroids were randomly assigned to weekly courses of betamethasone, consisting of 12 mg given intramuscularly and repeated once at 24 hours, or an identical-appearing placebo. We studied the children who were born after these treatments when they were between 2 and 3 years of corrected age. Prespecified outcomes included scores on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, anthropometric measurements, and the presence of cerebral palsy.

Results: A total of 556 infants were available for follow-up; 486 children (87.4%) underwent physical examination and 465 (83.6%) underwent Bayley testing at a mean (~SD) corrected age of 29.3~4.6 months. There were no significant differences in Bayley results or anthropometric measurements. Six children (2.9% of pregnancies) in the repeat-corticosteroid group had cerebral palsy as compared with one child (0.5% of pregnancies) in the placebo group (relative risk, 5.7; 95% confidence interval, 0.7 to 46.7; P=0.12).

Conclusions: Children who had been exposed to repeat as compared with single courses of antenatal corticosteroids did not differ significantly in physical or neurocognitive measures. Although the difference was not statistically significant, the higher rate of cerebral palsy among children who had been exposed to repeat doses of corticosteroids is of concern and warrants further study.

N Engl J Med 2007;357:1190-1198

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

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 October, 2007

British food Fascism failing

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's school dinners revolution, aimed at encouraging healthy eating habits in children, has backfired, British inspectors say. Oliver was the driving force behind a campaign to have junk food banned from school canteens and to teach pupils about the benefits of a healthy diet. But Ofsted, the government body responsible for inspecting British schools, said fewer pupils were eating school meals in 19 of the 27 primary and secondary schools they visited to assess the success of the healthy eating push. Some pupils felt the healthier meals were too expensive while others simply preferred to go to the chip shop at lunchtime, Ofsted said.

Ofsted's assessment comes a year after new rules came into force banning school canteens from selling junk food in the wake of Oliver's TV campaign, Jamie's School Dinners. "The take-up of school meals had fallen overall since the introduction of the new food standards," the report said. "Reasons for this decline are complex and include lack of consultation with pupils and parents about the new arrangements in schools; poor marketing of the new menus; the high costs for low-income families and a lack of choice in what is offered. "If this trend continues, the impact of the Government's food policies will have limited effect. "Several headteachers believed that the cost of a meal was prohibitive."

The report said some pupils were simply taking unhealthy packed lunches into school or going shopping for junk food. One teenager quipped to inspectors that he had "become far fitter as a result of regular walks to the nearby chip shop", the report said.

Children's Minister Kevin Brennan said schools should take notice of Ofsted's report, and the issue of childhood obesity was not going to go away. "We are in this for the long-term," he said. "Cutting childhood obesity and unhealthy eating needs the backing of every local authority, school, teacher and parent in England. "We are urging schools to make the most of our STG477 million ($A1.1 billion) investment in raising nutritional standards and keeping prices down."

Source




Government drug pushers

Despite political rhetoric about a War on Drugs, federally-funded programs result in far more teenage drug use than the most successful pill pusher on the playground. These pills are given out as a result of dubious universal mental health screening programs for school children, supposedly directed toward finding mental disorders or suicidal tendencies. The use of antipsychotic medication in children has increased fivefold between 1995 and 2002. More than 2.5 million children are now taking these medications, and many children are taking multiple drugs at one time.

With universal mental health screening being implemented in schools, pharmaceutical companies stand to increase their customer base even more, and many parents are rightfully concerned. Opponents of one such program called TeenScreen, claim it wrongly diagnoses children as much as 84% of the time, often incorrectly labeling them, resulting in the assigning of medications that can be very damaging. While we are still awaiting evidence that there are benefits to mental health screening programs, evidence that these drugs actually cause violent psychotic episodes is mounting.

Many parents have very valid concerns about the drugs to which a child labeled as "suicidal" or "depressed," or even ADHD, could be subjected. Of further concern is the subjectivity of diagnosis of mental health disorders. The symptoms of ADHD are strikingly similar to indications that a child is gifted, and bored in an unchallenging classroom. In fact, these programs, and many of the syndromes they attempt to screen for, are highly questionable. Parents are wise to question them.

As it stands now, parental consent is required for these screening programs, but in some cases mere passive consent is legal. Passive consent is obtained when a parent receives a consent form and fails to object to the screening. In other words, failure to reply is considered affirmative consent. In fact, TeenScreen advocates incorporating their program into the curriculum as a way to by-pass any consent requirement. These universal, or mandatory, screening programs being called for by TeenScreen and the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health should be resisted.

Consent must be express, written, voluntary and informed. Programs that refuse to give parents this amount of respect, should not receive federal funding. Moreover, parents should not be pressured into screening or drugging their children with the threat that not doing so constitutes child abuse or neglect. My bill, The Parental Consent Act of 2007 is aimed at stopping federal funding of these programs. We don't need a village, a bureaucrat, or the pharmaceutical industry raising our children. That's what parents need to be doing.

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 October, 2007

Australian system spots autism in toddlers

Hmmmm... probably useful but much care about misdiagnosis would be warranted

CHILDREN as young as 14 months of age can be reliably diagnosed with autism, according to an Adelaide psychologist who has devised a tool to help experts detect the telltale signs of the lifelong disability. Robyn Young, head of the Early Intervention Research Program at Flinders University, said the assessment tool could even be used to identify risk in children as young as 12 months. Until now, there have not been widely available systems for accurately assessing autism because there are no biological markers or tests. People with the disorder have impaired social interaction, communication and imagination, and often engage in repetitive patterns of behaviour.

Associate Professor Young's system - called Autism Detection in Early Childhood - is the first method to assess 16 behaviours linked to the core brain deficits driving autism. "I had two little ones, 12 and 14 months, this week," Professor Young said. Using ADEC, she found the older child had been misdiagnosed as autistic, while the younger was very likely to have the disorder.

According to Professor Young's colleague, psychologist Carrie Partington, very young children with autism spectrum disorders frequently displayed three types of behaviours: they didn't recognise their name, they didn't imitate adult facial expressions and they didn't switch their gaze. "Most kids will look around the room to share their experience of, say, a new toy," she said. The inability to do that, "gaze switching", is a predictor of ASD.

The exact causes of autism remain unknown. One in every 160 children has the disorder or related conditions such as Asperger's syndrome, according to recent findings from the Australian Advisory Board on Autism Spectrum Disorders. Using Centrelink data, the board found that 10,625 children aged six to 12 had an ASD. It also found most Australian youngsters were not diagnosed until they were two or three. That meant children missed out on early interventions known to improve their functioning, Mrs Partington said. "Age at diagnosis is an important predictor of how well children will do," she said. "If we can get them early, we can make a lot more significant changes."

The type of intervention is also critical. Comparative international research has consistently indicated that the only effective evidence-based approaches are based on behaviour modification. Such programs cost $40,000 to $60,000 a year for each child because they require 14 to 40 hours a week of one-on-one work. To overcome the cost barrier, Professor Young in 2003 established the EIRP, a research body aimed at making home-based therapy possible by providing information, training and services to parents or caregivers.

The EIRP has an eight- to 10-month waiting list for the program, which is free. It consists of a two-week clinic-based program for each autistic child and their parents, during which parents are trained to provide the therapy, and follow-up support for 18 months. In a forthcoming report on the first 87 of 150 children and their families, Professor Young's team claim their approach works as well as conventional behavioural modification programs.

Source




Early intervention important for autistic childrten

In a converted church 10 minutes from Brisbane's CBD, the dedicated staff of a centre for young children with autism have been making little miracles. After a two-year intensive program of speech therapy, occupational therapy and tailored teaching, the first dozen graduates of the AEIOU Centre at Moorooka in Brisbane's south included two boys who no longer fitted the criteria for autism and nine children who were now in mainstream schooling.

One of them is six-year-old Riley Foulis, whose family moved from Melbourne to Brisbane in 2005 so he could attend AEIOU. His mother, Lynda, yesterday cried with pride as she recounted her son's journey from a toddler who would not speak, wasn't toilet-trained and had no self-help skills to the "quirky" young boy who was named student of the month at his mainstream school this year. "He's talking, he's self-sufficient, he answers back and he's cheeky," said Ms Foulis, who now works at AEIOU. "We are so proud. It's so amazing and overwhelming. He still has speech therapy; sometimes he might have a bit of trouble understanding long instructions but generally he's your average six-year-old. "If he hadn't had the full-time early intervention, we don't think he would be were he is today."

The federal Government yesterday announced a $190million package that includes subsidies for approved centres offering intensive early intervention of up to $20,000 a child over two years. The package will cover up to 1200 children nationwide. AEIOU founder and chief executive James Morton said the package was "ground breaking" and praised the inclusion of Medicare items for early diagnosis. "Some parents face a two-year wait to get a diagnosis," Dr Morton said. "A child with autism has specific learning deficits but they've also got specific learning skills, those early learning years is your greatest opportunity to overcome them."

The federal funding package would enable AEIOU to meet its goal of having 120 full-time places for children in the early intervention program by 2009. Early intervention increased the chances of children with autism becoming independent, he said.

Dr Morton was motivated to establish a full-time early intervention program after being frustrated by the lack of resources following the diagnosis of his son, Andrew, with autism: "By the time we got this all set up, Andy had already moved on to school stage, so he really got very little out of the program."

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 October, 2007

Dangerous excess of exercise

More casualties of the obesity war

Nearly one-quarter of gym-goers exercise at levels that can be dangerous to their health, new research shows. A study of more than 200 gym users at the Brunswick City Baths, in Melbourne, revealed that 23 per cent of people exercised between six and 20 hours a week and had become dependent on their physical fix. This group, defined as excessive exercisers, did more vigorous levels of exercise for longer periods than their non-excessive counterparts, according to the study, presented in Brisbane last week at the Australian Psychological Society's annual conference.

Jane Fletcher, a psychologist and co-author of the study, said people who exercised excessively often did so when they were sick or injured. "Exercise is not bad in itself. It is whether it interferes with your work, social life and family life that may indicate whether you have a problem," she said. Some of the worst cases were of people being sick off work and still going to the gym or those insisting on exercise in 40-degree heat, Dr Fletcher said. "It's more than just the number of hours they exercise each week. It's about … the reasons behind why they might be exercising." Overdoing it can lead to repetitive-use injuries and chronic infections due to lowered immunity - and women can experience stopped periods and osteoporosis.

The executive director of the Eating Disorders Foundation of NSW, Amanda Jordan, said addiction to exercise was often the first sign of an eating disorder. She said anti-obesity messages encouraging exercise and healthy living could be misconstrued by those already vulnerable to eating disorders. "It can begin as something which is quite moderate and contributing to fitness and then you start getting into real strife because people do not know when to stop."

Jo Kildea, 24, of Kensington, understands the obsession with keeping fit. When she was 17, she began working out at the gym and going for walks "to get healthy and lose a bit of weight". Soon she was doing squats in the shower, star jumps and sit-ups in her room and running up and down the stairs of her house when nobody was home. Ms Kildea also began reducing her food intake and rapidly lost weight. She was treated for anorexia and now has a healthy exercise regime that includes walking and boxercise.

Source




MORE DOUBTS ABOUT PARACETAMOL

Long touted as the "safe" alternative to aspirin, there are signs that paracetamol is anything but. The study below is not very persuasive, though, as it is a classic "give huge doses to rats" study. There is however independent evidence that paracetamol causes liver damage. See also here

Reaching for the paracetamol alongside your morning coffee may be bad for your health, researchers say. A study indicated that a combination of large quantities of the pain-killer and caffeine appeared to increase the risk of liver damage. Scientists found that caffeine tripled the amount of a toxic by-product created when paracetamol was broken down. However, the University of Washington team so far has plied only bacteria and rats with large doses. British scientists emphasised that far more research would be needed to prove any danger to humans.

US researchers, writing in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, recommend that people should limit the amount of coffee or energy drinks they consume while taking paracetamol. Even relatively small overdoses of paracetamol can cause permanent damage to the liver. Scientists already know that heavy alcohol consumption can make the drug even more toxic, but this is the first suggestion that combining paracetamol and caffeine could produce a similar effect. Caffeine is added to many commercially available paracetamol tablets as it is believed that this increases their effects.

Sidney Nelson, who led the study, said: "You don't have to stop taking acetaminophen [paracetamol] or stop taking caffeine products, but you do need to monitor your intake more carefully when taking them together, especially if you drink alcohol." The study used E. coli bacteria that had been modified genetically to produce a key liver chemical which, in humans, helps the body to break down paracetamol.

When the bacteria were exposed to very large doses of paracetamol and caffeine together, the amount of the toxic by-product produced was tripled. This is the toxin that causes liver damage after a paracetamol overdose.

Dr Nelson said that the quantities of caffeine and paracetamol used in the study were far higher than most people would consume daily but added that the amount needed to produce a harmful effect in humans had not been calculated. Previous studies showing that high doses of caffeine can increase the severity of liver damage in rats with paracetamol-induced liver damage support this finding.

Some people are thought to be more vulnerable than others. These include those taking antiepileptic medication or St John's wort, which have been shown to boost levels of the enzyme involved. People who drink a lot of alcohol are also at higher risk because it can trigger another enzyme that produces the liver toxin.

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 October, 2007

Peanut policy 'wrong'

Hmmmm.... The House of Lords is well-known for independent thinking so the conclusions of their expert committees deserve much respect. It seems to me however that societies who expose children to peanut products from an early age might simply be killing off the susceptible ones -- with the outcome misattributed to cot death etc. Peanuts are absolutely pervasive in Southeast Asian cuisine (Thai, Vietnamese etc.) so I supect that any peanut allergies there must have been bred out of the population (by killing off susceptible infants) long ago

PARENTS who shield their children from peanut products may be fuelling the peanut allergy epidemic. Repeated exposure of a child's immune system to peanut allergen at an early age might result in tolerance and prevent the development of a dangerous allergy, research suggests.

Peanut allergy rose 117 per cent between 2001 and 2005 in Britain, despite guidelines advising pregnant and breastfeeding women, as well as children up to age two, to avoid nuts. The dramatic rise is echoed in Australia, with one in 200 infants having a peanut allergy.

Commenting on the research, provided to the influential British House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, Australian experts are divided about whether avoidance or consumption reduces the risk of an allergy. The Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy said although avoiding all nuts and shellfish may be recommended until age two in most children, and until age four in children with a family history of allergy or those born premature, there is no evidence to support this. It said avoiding certain foods during pregnancy and breastfeeding has not been shown to cut the risk of allergic disease.

President of Anaphylaxis Australia Maria Said said many mothers without a history of allergy were unnecessarily avoiding nut products because they had been scared by stories of children dying from severe reactions....

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, who chaired the House of Lords committee's investigation, said: "Academics and clinicians have told us that a growing body of evidence has suggested this guidance may not only be failing to prevent peanut allergy, but might possibly even be counterproductive." The committee supported a Learning About Peanut Allergy study, which is investigating a theory that repeatedly exposing a child's immune system to peanut at an early age teaches their body to tolerate peanut proteins.

In parts of Africa, where peanuts are made into soup for weaning babies, and Israel, where they are incorporated into a babies' rusk, allergy levels are low or non-existent. However, University of Sydney clinical immunologist Rob Loblay said "there are big dangers in extrapolating from one community to another".

Source




Wealth, education and health: More politically correct idiocy

All that the findings below prove is that people who seek out education tend to be healthier. It does NOT prove that education makes you healthier. It's just the old, old story of middle class people being healthier generally.

And that being richer buys you better health care is an iron law that nobody has ever succeeded in repealing, despite many attempts

The more educated you are, the less likely you are to become chronically ill or disabled, but the amount of money you make plays a bigger role in whether your illness progresses, a new study shows. Based on the findings, the most effective single policy strategy for improving health might be to make higher education more accessible, Dr. Pamela Herd of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

Instead of focusing exclusively on getting people to lose weight and exercise, she explains, "you can do something earlier in the causal chain to improve people's health outcomes," noting that the more educated people are, the more likely they are to exercise, maintain a healthy weight, and eat a healthy diet.

Most studies of socioeconomic status and health have looked at status, and health, as single dimensions, Herd and her colleagues note. To get a better sense of how socioeconomic status affects health, the researchers looked at the separate effects of educational attainment and income in 8,287 men and women who were followed from 1986 to 2000-2001. Rather than evaluate health as a "unitary construct," they looked at the onset of functional limitations and chronic illness, the progression of both, and mortality.

When the researchers adjusted for income, they found that level of education independently determined a person's likelihood of becoming ill or disabled. People who hadn't finished high school were twice as likely as college graduates to develop functional limitations, while high school graduates who hadn't finished college were at 61 percent greater risk of becoming disabled than their college-educated peers. There was a similar relationship between the risk of becoming chronically ill and educational attainment.

"It is clearly not just the economic resources that come from higher educational attainment that drive the postponement of ill health, in some cases until very late in life," Herd and her colleagues write the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

But level of education didn't play a role in whether people's health would further decline, or in mortality. Instead, the researchers found, income predicted whether people would become chronically ill, whether their illness would progress, and whether they would die during the course of the study. For example, ill or disabled people with incomes below $10,000 a year were nearly three times as likely as those who made $30,000 or more annually to have their health condition worsen.

The findings are "really about the way that poverty has negative ramifications for health," Herd said, noting that poor people may live in worse housing, have a more difficult time obtaining healthy foods, and have a tougher time getting health care. And poverty can increase stress levels, she adds, which in itself can worsen health

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

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



2 October, 2007

British bar staff "healthier" since smoking ban (NOT)

What utter crap! Why could these pathetic individuals not do some REAL research? Why not examine disease incidence or symptom incidence? All they have shown is that people who are less exposed to smoking show signs of being less exposed to smoking! D'oh!

Bar staff have seen huge health benefits from the ban on smoking in public places, a study by the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre in Warwick - funded by Cancer Research UK - has found. Researchers tested the air quality in 40 pubs, bars and restaurants across the country and measured the level of cotinine - the metabolic byproduct of nicotine - in the blood of those who worked there.

Today they will tell the National Cancer Research Institute Conference in Birmingham that staff have four times less cotinine in their blood than they did in June and thatair quality, measured by the number of particles in the air from cigarette smoke, dropped from near hazardous levels in June to levels that are similar to the outside air in August.

Hilary Wareing, co-director of the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre, said: "This study proves beyond doubt that smokefree workplaces are helping to improve the health of the nation's hospitality workers."

Source




WINE HELPS YOU REMEMBER?

It certainly does not help my memory! I was an enthusiastic wine drinker for decades -- decades which are now an almost total blank to me. But I did drink too much. The study below is actually yet another demonstration of hormesis -- that something toxic in high doses can be beneficial in low doses

A glass or two of wine can boost our ability to remember, according to a new study. Scientists have found that moderate amounts of alcohol challenge the brain and it responds by improving the memory. The findings rubbished the notion of drinking to forget, as they also show drinking enough to exceed the limit for driving means you are more likely to remember the embarrassment of a boisterous binge - from making an indecent proposal to dancing without your trousers on. "Contrary to popular belief, we also found that excessive levels of alcohol enhanced memories of highly emotional stimuli," said Prof Matthew During of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. "Our work suggests that heavy drinking actually reinforces negative memories."

With Dr Maggie Kalev he studied the effects on memory of moderate levels of alcohol consumption, equivalent to a glass or two of wine a day, and found they can enhance memory. Moderate levels of alcohol challenge the brain and it responds by improving memory, said Prof During. "It is like the best way to build strength in a muscle is to challenge the muscle. But you have to get it just right." Dr Kalev added that low levels of alcohol "promoted neutral memories, such as remembering objects."

Their research has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. An earlier study by a scientists from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, suggested that alcohol affects our memory for details more than our memory of a major event. That suggested why, after recovering from a binge, one may not remember dancing on a table, or much about the place where drinking occurred. However, you may still have a lingering feeling that a good (or bad) time was had.

Source

Abstract:

Paradoxical Facilitatory Effect of Low-Dose Alcohol Consumption on Memory Mediated by NMDA Receptors

By Maggie L. Kalev-Zylinska and Matthew J. During

Epidemiological studies have suggested a negative correlation between alcohol intake and Alzheimer's disease. In vitro, ethanol negatively modulates NMDA receptor function. We hypothesized that chronic moderate alcohol intake leads to improved memory via adaptive responses in the expression of NMDA receptors and downstream signaling. We fed liquid diets containing no, moderate, or high amounts of ethanol to control and matched rats with hippocampal knock-down of the NR1 subunit. Rats with increased hippocampal NR1 expression were also generated to determine whether they had a phenotype similar to that of ethanol-fed animals. We found that moderate ethanol intake improved memory, increased NR1 expression, and changed some aspects of neurotrophin signaling. NR1 knock-down prevented ethanol's facilitatory effects, whereas hippocampal NR1 overexpression mimicked the effect of chronic low-dose ethanol intake on memory. In contrast, high-dose ethanol reduced neurogenesis, inhibited NR2B expression, and impaired visual memory. In conclusion, adaptive changes in hippocampal NMDA receptor expression may contribute to the positive effects of ethanol on cognition.

The Journal of Neuroscience, September 26, 2007, 27(39):10456-10467

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

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 October, 2007

Fat is no good, meat is no good and now carbohydrates are no good either

Obvious conclusion: Eat what you like -- your food will kill you anyway. Pesky how lifespans keep growing, though. Most people have a fair bit of variety in their diet (there is a variety of ingredients even in a Big Mac) so that is the situation which needs to be modelled. It rarely is, though. Only a dummy or a medical scientist would think that dietary components don't interact

Nutritionists call them carbohydrates. To most of us, they're simply sugars and starches. And although the fructose in soft drinks and the refined flour in white bread taste quite different, "nutritionally and metabolically they're the same as table sugar," explains endocrinologist David S. Ludwig. That's because the body digests all carbohydrate-rich foods into glucose, or blood sugar.

However, all carbs don't break down at the same rate. The body digests those in many whole-grain products quite slowly. Others become converted to glucose almost immediately. Rapidly digested carbs aren't healthy for people with diabetes and others watching their blood sugar. A new study by Ludwig and his colleagues at Children's Hospital Boston suggests that such carbs are also problematic for people looking to shed body fat. Indeed, the findings indicate that consumption of the wrong carbs can spur the development of body fat, even with no gain in weight.

In the study, mice that chowed down on a type of rapidly digestible starch didn't gain any more weight than did animals eating a starch that digests slowly. But the first group did accumulate lots of excess fat. The data indicate that something about rapidly digesting carbs signaled the body to convert more of a meal's energy into body fat, into fatty lipids that circulate in blood, and into deposits of fat throughout the liver.

Ludwig considers the observed effect on the animals' livers the most troubling one. Fatty-liver disease has traditionally been regarded as the first stage of damage from alcoholism that can progress to hepatitis, cirrhosis, and death. But researchers in recent years have discerned the beginnings of an epidemic of fatty-liver disease unrelated to alcoholism but correlated strongly with being overweight. Recent data suggest that as much as one-third of children and even a higher proportion of adults have the condition. Ludwig told Science News Online that he suspects that "up to half of the [U.S.] population" now has fatty-liver disease.

The question has been what's fueling this epidemic. Because the disease so often accompanies obesity, many researchers have suspected that high-fat diets and junk foods are responsible. Ludwig's group had another idea. In recent years, the mushrooming incidence of obesity in the United States has led to a push to get people to lower their intakes of fat. However, reducing fat consumption almost always translates into increasing the intake of carbs (see Counting Carbs). Moreover, the carbs most people reach for first are the refined-easy to digest-types found in white flour, white rice, pasta, and potatoes.

Ludwig's team decided to see whether a diet rich in a similar carb promotes fat buildup. They used a proportion of carbs that people on a low-fat diet might eat and compared its effects with that of a diet equal in all respects except that its carbs were mainly a slowly digested starch. In the September Obesity, the researchers show that animals eating rapidly digested carbs accumulated more fat throughout their bodies-including their livers-than did animals eating primarily the slow-to-digest starch. Says Ludwig, "This is the first study in which a single dietary factor-varied within normal ranges-affected whether the liver remained normal or accumulated seriously elevated levels of fat."

In the new study, Ludwig's team fed 18 recently weaned mice food pellets containing 13 percent fat, 19 percent protein, and 68 percent carbohydrates from corn starch. Half the animals got pellets containing the starch called amylopectin, which is made up of a string of glucose molecules that the gut easily degrades into sugar. The remaining mice ate pellets containing some amylopectin but mostly the starch called amylose. That type of corn starch resists breakdown in the gut.

All the animals ate and drank as much as they wanted for 25 weeks. Throughout the study, the researchers charted weight gain, body fat, fecal excretion of starch, and blood concentrations of glucose and insulin. At the end, the researchers killed the animals and measured their livers' fat contents.

Weight gain didn't differ between the two groups of animals, suggesting that the mice found the diets comparably palatable. However, the animals' bodies responded differently to the two food-pellet recipes. Mice dining on amylopectin-enriched chow became twice as fat as those eating the slower-digested amylose recipe. Mice eating this starch grew a little longer in body, so they looked leaner that the "roly-poly" mice eating easily digested starch, Ludwig says. The latter mice "felt squishy," whereas the slow-digested-starch eaters felt firm, he adds.

Although blood sugar concentrations didn't differ between the two groups, mice on the amylopectin-rich food developed higher insulin values after a meal. The body uses the hormone to shepherd energy into its cells. Higher blood insulin after a meal, Ludwig explains, indicates that an animal needs more insulin to fully use the food it's eaten. Needing more of the hormone can be a first sign of insulin resistance and impending diabetes.

Ludwig notes, "Insulin is a powerful anabolic hormone, meaning it promotes the storage of fat. In fact, that's arguably one of [the hormone's] main roles." One of the first places newly made insulin ends up is in the liver, where it can trigger the localized creation and stockpiling of fat. Although the rodents' livers weighed the same whether they ate fast- or slow-digested starch, fat made up 12 percent of the liver in mice fed the amylopectin-rich diet. That's double the fat content of livers in animals that had eaten the slow-digested starch. For perspective, Ludwig notes, people whose livers contain 10 percent fat are considered to be suffering from "advanced" nonalcoholic fatty-liver disease.

What about people?

This isn't the first study to indicate that foods that rapidly break down to glucose in the body-characterized as having a "high glycemic index" (see The New GI Tracts)-can fuel nonalcoholic fatty-liver disease. For instance, last year Silvia Valtuena of the University of Parma in Italy and her colleagues reported findings from a study of 247 apparently healthy men and women. The volunteers' diets were evaluated and given a glycemic-index (GI) rating.

Low GI foods included corn, dairy products, and fruit. High GI fare included bread, pizza, and baked snacks. The volunteers were grouped into four categories based on the ascending GI rankings of their diets.

Participants with the highest-GI diets were twice as likely to have undiagnosed fatty-liver disease as were other study participants. People in the highest group were also far likelier to be insulin resistant, the researcher reported in the July 2006 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. [Epidemiological crap. Was social class controlled for?]

In an editorial accompanying the Valtuena report, David J.A. Jenkins and his colleagues at the University of Toronto argued that the "implication of this study is that a low-GI diet, or selection of lower-GI rather than higher-GI foods, may benefit persons with nonalcoholic fatty liver." Indeed, the commenters suggested, it might be possible for doctors to treat nonalcoholic fatty liver by lowering the glycemic index of an individuals' diets.

That's what Ludwig's group is now investigating: "We hope to enroll 46 kids to a diet for 6 months," he says. The 8- to 17-year-olds and their parents will receive dietary counseling. Half of the recruits will be assigned to a low-fat diet. The rest will receive counseling to lower the glycemic index of their diets. The general guidelines for a low-GI diet call for substituting whole-grain foods for ones made from highly processed cereal fibers and reducing refined sugars in favor of sweet fruits. "Conceptually," Ludwig says, "fatty liver should be reversible-we've seen it anecdotally in practice many times, such as when someone loses weight or changes the quality of their diet."

Source




Distracted? Tea might help your focus

Being a keen tea-drinker, I am not going to say anything bad about this report! A pity it did not actually involve tea though (See. I can't help myself!)

Many people reach for a cup of coffee when they need to concentrate. People with flagging focus might, however, get more bang for the buck with a cup of tea. Theanine, an uncommon amino acid found almost exclusively in tea, works with caffeine to boost the activity of brain neurons, new data show.

John J. Foxe of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, N.Y., and his colleagues recruited 16 people for tests of attentiveness on four days. Before testing, each individual drank a glass of water. On 3 days, the drink was spiked with 100 milligrams of theanine, 60 mg of caffeine, or both. The theanine dose was equivalent to that in 4 to 5 cups of tea, and the caffeine translated to about 2.5 cups of tea.

In the difficult tests, participants watched a computer screen and pressed a button when a designated shape appeared on the side of a busy visual field to which an arrow had previously pointed. Participants' accuracy differed little between days when they got water alone or with only one additive.

Accuracy improved dramatically, however, on the day that they got the theanine-caffeine combination. The attention benefit lasted throughout the 3 hours of testing. Brain activity, measured throughout each test, showed that theanine induced strong alpha waves in neurons, suggesting restfulness. But that lasted only until focus was required. Then, Foxe says, alpha activity dropped precipitously if a person had gotten theanine-especially in combination with caffeine-indicating that idling neurons had suddenly revved up their activity.

Source

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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

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