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30 September, 2006

Town planning blamed for obesity (!)

Poor town planning which limits opportunities for children to take exercise has been blamed for fuelling an increase in obesity. Leading US paediatrician Professor Richard Jackson called for a rethink in the way towns and cities are developed. He said living in a walkable neighbourhood helped people keep off an average of seven pounds (3.17kg). Professor Jackson made his comments at a lecture at London's Institute of Child Health.

He said humans were so adaptable that they quickly adjusted to the environment in which they found themselves. However, while this was an advantage in evolutionary terms, it spelled bad news when that environment provided little opportunity for exercise. Humans were designed to keep active, he said, and they were not designed for the modern, sedentary lifestyle that had become the norm. He said the environment should support people to make healthy choices, but increasingly children were not given the option of walking. "Prescribing a minimum of physical activity is useless if there is nowhere to exercise," he said. "How a neighbourhood is designed dictates how people get around, for example walking or bicycling versus automobile use."

Professor Jackson, who is professor in both public health and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley, said technology had brought both "good" and "bad" news. He said: "Technology has eliminated a lot of the really backbreaking labour from our lives. "But we have also "designed" a lot of incidental exercise out of our lives, such as walking. "In 1969, 48% of American students (90% of those who lived within a mile) walked or bicycled to school. "In 1999, only 19% of children walked to or from school and 6% rode bicycles to school."

Dr Ian Campbell, medical director of the charity Weight Concern, said Professor Jackson was "absolutely right". He said: "The development of obesity in the past 30 years is a direct result of environmental change. "The fact that environment sustainability and health are inextricably linked needs to be recognised by politicians and public health officials and definitive action taken. "Then, and only then, will we see decreases in levels of childhood obesity in this country."

Source



Trans fat frenzy in NYC too

Three years after the city banned smoking in restaurants, health officials are talking about prohibiting something they say is almost as bad: artificial trans fatty acids. The city health department unveiled a proposal Tuesday that would bar cooks at any of the city's 24,600 food service establishments from using ingredients that contain the artery-clogging substance, commonly listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated oil.

Artificial trans fats are found in some shortenings, margarine and frying oils and turn up in foods from pie crusts to french fries to doughnuts.

Doctors agree that trans fats are unhealthy in nearly any amount, but a spokesman for the restaurant industry said he was stunned the city would seek to ban a legal ingredient found in millions of American kitchens.

"Labeling is one thing, but when they totally ban a product, it goes well beyond what we think is prudent and acceptable," said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the city's chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association. He said the proposal could create havoc: Cooks would be forced to discard old recipes and scrutinize every ingredient in their pantry. A restaurant could face a fine if an inspector finds the wrong type of vegetable shortening on its shelves.

The proposal also would create a huge problem for national chains. Among the fast foods that would need to get an overhaul or face a ban: McDonald's french fries, Kentucky Fried Chicken and several varieties of Dunkin' Donuts. Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden acknowledged that the ban would be a challenge for restaurants, but he said trans fats can easily be replaced with substitute oils that taste the same or better and are far less unhealthy. "It is a dangerous and unnecessary ingredient," Frieden said. "No one will miss it when it's gone."

A similar ban on trans fats in restaurant food has been proposed in Chicago and is still under consideration, although it has been ridiculed by some as unnecessary government meddling. The latest version of the Chicago plan would only apply to companies with annual revenues of more than $20 million, a provision aimed exclusively at fast-food giants.

A few companies have moved to eliminate trans fats on their own. Wendy's announced in August that it had switched to a new cooking oil that contains no trans fatty acids. Crisco now sells a shortening that contains zero trans fats. Frito-Lay removed trans fats from its Doritos and Cheetos. Kraft's took trans fats out of Oreos. McDonald's began using a trans fat-free cooking oil in Denmark after that country banned artificial trans fats in processed food, but it has yet to do so in the United States. Walt Riker, vice president of corporate communications at McDonald's, said in a statement Tuesday that the company would review New York's proposal. "McDonald's knows this is an important issue, which is why we continue to test in earnest to find ways to further reduce (trans fatty acid) levels," he said.

New York's health department had asked restaurants to impose a voluntary ban last year but found use of trans fats unchanged in recent surveys. Under the New York proposal, restaurants would need to get artificial trans fats out of cooking oils, margarine and shortening by July 1, 2007, and all other foodstuffs by July 1, 2008. It would not affect grocery stores. It also would not apply to naturally occurring trans fats, which are found in some meats and dairy. The Board of Health has yet to approve the proposal and will not do so until at least December, Frieden said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration began requiring food labels to list trans fats in January. Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard University School of Public Health, praised New York health officials for considering a ban, which he said could save lives. "Artificial trans fats are very toxic, and they almost surely causes tens of thousands of premature deaths each year," he said. "The federal government should have done this long ago."

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.

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



29 September, 2006

"Healthy" food turns out to be pretty ordinary



Children would be better off sitting down to a big fry-up for breakfast than eating some commercially produced muesli bars, so loaded are they with fats and sugars. A test found seven were so laden with kilojoules that a Mars Bar presented a healthier breakfast alternative.

The analysis of more than 150 different cereal bars by Choice magazine found that seven - including three types of Kellogg's K-time muffin bars - contained more kilojoules than the much-maligned Mars Bar. Two varieties of muesli slices produced by Sunibrite contained more saturated fat than a breakfast of two bacon rashers. Many others, including a range of Uncle Toby's muesli bars and a collection of cereal bars with the words healthy, fit or natural featuring prominently in their names, were at least 20 per cent sugar.

Of the bars tested, only 13 met all the analysts' healthy nutrition requirements, based on kilojoules, sugar, saturated fat, dietary fibre and wholegrain content. On the other end of the scale, the Nice & Natural yoghurt natural nut bar met none of the requirements.

While the healthy connotations associated with the words cereal and muesli were dubious in many of the bars, the definition of fruit in others was also suspect. "The fruit often found in some bars was more likely to have come from a laboratory than an orchard," said Choice's media spokeswoman, Indira Naidoo. She said parents should think again if they thought their children were getting part of their daily serving of fruit by unwrapping a bar containing what appeared to be dried strawberries, apples, pears or plums. The chances are that they are snacking instead on maltodextrin, glucose, fructose, humectant, vegetable fat, modified maize starch, flavours, colours, vegetable gum, food acid, firming agent and emulsifier.

The findings led Choice's analysts to conclude that despite often being labelled with "healthy" names, many of the bars really belonged in the supermarket confectionery aisle. Ms Naidoo said that rather than snacking on cereal bars, children would be better off eating an apple, which gave plenty of fibre, less sugar, and no fat.

Source



TANNING NOW UNDER FIRE

Here come the health police. First they came for the cigarettes. Then they came for the sodas. Now it's the tanning salons. The cigarette war is winding down, as one country after another bans public smoking. A week ago, the top three soft-drink makers surrendered the first big battle of the junk-food war, agreeing to remove sodas from elementary and middle schools. A few days later, spooked by the outcry against fast food and childhood obesity, Disney fled an advertising deal with McDonald's. Nobody wants to be the new Joe Camel. But somebody will be. Look out your window: Summer is coming. Teens are getting ready for their proms. It's tanning season-time to stretch out on the beach, or under an ultraviolet lamp, and soak up a nice, warm dose of lethal radiation.

If you've had trouble seeing Cokes or cheeseburgers as the moral equivalent of cigarettes, brace yourself for the next public health menace: the sun. You thought it was our smiley-faced friend? Think again. Skin cancer rates are soaring. We're basking outside too long and with too little protection. The health cops want us to stop, but regulating a ball of fire 1 million times the size of Earth is somewhat more difficult than regulating corn chips. So, they're going after the radiation source they can get their hands on: tanning salons. A bill in Congress would stiffen health warnings on tanning machines. The American Medical Association is asking lawmakers to put these machines off-limits to anyone under 18, and the American Academy of Dermatology wants to outlaw them altogether.

About 30 million Americans use tanning salons. At least one of every four teenage girls, and nearly one of every two girls aged 18 or 19, has tanned indoors at least three times. Why? According to this month's Archives of Dermatology, "[ultraviolet] radiation, a classified carcinogen, is commonly and specifically marketed to adolescents through high school newspaper advertising" by salons. Why do kids keep coming back? A study in the current Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology suggests "frequent tanning is driven by an opioid-dependent mechanism." In other words, it's a physical addiction. It even has a street name: tanorexia. Harmful, addictive, marketed to kids-that's the three-count indictment that brought down tobacco and soft drinks.

Like the tobacco companies, the salons live in a bubble of denial that cries out for oversight. Last year, in a survey by Consumer Reports, one of every three salons denied that tanning could cause skin cancer or would age a client's skin. Their lobbying arm, the Indoor Tanning Association, asserts that "your body is designed to repair any damage to the skin caused by ultraviolet light exposure"-as though nobody ever died of melanoma-and hilariously suggests that exposing adolescents to the summer sun for two or three more hours per day would eliminate most cases of multiple sclerosis.

Still, there's something misguided about the crusade against tanning salons. Actually, two things: liberal bias against industry, and conservative bias against sensuality. Liberal bias puts too much scrutiny on indoor rather than outdoor tanning. Seeing nature as good and industry as evil, we treat salons as though they've perverted sunshine into a carcinogen. Politicians and medical associations say indoor tanning is worse because it cooks you faster and its risks are harder to recognize. That's exactly wrong. Outdoors, you have no clue how much radiation you're getting. Your estimate, based on the season or hour, is pure guesswork. You probably never think about altitude. You mistakenly assume that clouds, your white T-shirt, or being underwater are shielding you from more than a fraction of ultraviolet rays. You have no idea that the "SPF" factor advertised on your sunscreen tells you nothing about whether it blocks the rays that cause melanoma.

Yes, an indoor lamp can cook you faster. But you can choose the cooking rate, and knowing that rate, you can control the dose and customize it to your skin type. You can even regulate the composition of the light, avoiding rays that cause sunburns. A salon operator can program her machines to shut off after 20 minutes. Try shutting off the sun.

Conservative bias, meanwhile, puts too much emphasis on abstinence rather than moderation. Health advocates, determined to convince the public that tanning isn't risk-free, have simplified their message to the point of untruth. Even Cosmopolitan has suddenly gone prude. "A suntan is actually just as destructive to your skin as a raw, pink sunburn," the magazine warns in its May issue. Wrong again. The most thorough review of data, issued five months ago by a European Commission science panel, found clear correlations between sunburns and skin cancer, but no such clarity in studies of tanning salons and skin cancer. That's because a sunburn conveys how much radiation you got; a salon doesn't. The less often you tan, the softer the light, and the shorter your exposure, the lower your risk. It isn't the degree of risk that drives doctors crazy. It's that people are taking that risk, as the AAD puts it, "solely for cosmetic reasons." Pleasure! Superficiality! Yuck!

Listen to the arguments against tanning, and you'll hear echoes of the arguments against premarital sex. "Just one time in a tanning bed has the potential to cause harm," warns Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., co-author of the federal bill to regulate salons. The AAD says you should wear a broad-brimmed hat and long pants, apply sunscreen half an hour before you go out and again every two hours, and stay out of the sun until 4 p.m. You might as well be in a chador. As for the idea of getting a "base tan" to prevent sunburn, dermatologists protest that this flimsy shield will only embolden you to persist in risky activity. Sounds like the case against condoms, doesn't it?

Part these clouds of bias, and the truth shines through. You can't stop tanning; the best you can do is help people control it. Toward that end, the industrialization of ultraviolet light is a blessing. It gives us the power to clarify, modulate, and customize dosage. Salons need oversight to make sure they help clients understand and manage this power. But if you shut them down or lock out teenagers, be prepared to enforce a dawn-to-dusk curfew or face an epidemic of skin cancer. If you liked back-alley abortions, you'll love backyard tanning.

Technology without guidance can be dangerous. The emerging peril in the tanning world isn't staffed salons; it's coin-operated, unsupervised machines, already proliferating in Europe, in which kids can toast themselves for lunch money. But with guidance, technology often solves its own problems. It won't be Congress that stops teens from cooking their skin. It'll be tanning sprays and lotions, which continue to improve in appearance, durability, and popularity. And guess who's going to lead the way? Salons.

Source



Hay fever cure? "Allergies could soon be treated using new drugs that trick the immune system into thinking that it is under attack, according to scientists. Allergic reactions occur when the body's defences react to harmless substances, such as pollen, and research suggests that diverting the immune system could be a successful way of preventing them. Cytos Biotechnology, a company based in Zurich, Switzerland, has developed an experimental drug that fools the immune system into thinking that it is under attack from a germ called mycobacteria, found in dirt, and early results suggest a benefit for hay fever. When 10 people suffering from hay fever were injected with the drug, CYT 003-QbG10, their sensitivity to grass pollen was reduced by a factor of 100, New Scientist magazine reports. Cytos said that the patients remained symptom-free for up to eight months, but it is not yet known whether the results are permanent. A previous study indicated similar benefits for patients allergic to dust mites. They are symptom-free a year on. Cytos has begun a study on more than 100 people with hay fever, dust mite allergy and atopic dematitis. Mycobacteria, also found in soil, are pathogens to which people are exposed at much lower levels than in the past. Artificial exposure may "reboot" the immune system."

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

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.

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



28 September, 2006

Fatties suffer 'discrimination, depression'

And constant government condemnation of them does not exactly help. Why are fatties the only ones you are allowed to condemn these days? What about Muslims? Let us hear more governments condemning them. They certainly do more harm to others than fatties do

Depression, discrimination and humiliation, not just excess weight, are burdens for people who are obese, a Melbourne professor said today. Monash University Professor Paul Komesaroff is leading a study into the emotional burdens of being overweight. He said the physical risks of obesity were well known, but little had been done on how overweight people felt about themselves and society's attitudes to them. "Overweight people are often reviled and humiliated their whole lives," Professor Komesaroff said. "Public debates and comments often don't help ... they project an image of overweight people as lazy, fat slobs who, if they used some willpower, would not be overweight," he said. "The reality is that obese people often battle with weight their entire lives."

Professor Komesaroff said that overweight people often suffered depression. He said the study would also examine the nature of the relationships that developed between people living with obesity and their health professionals. The outcomes of the study would be used to develop new public health and clinical strategies to combat depression in obese people.

Researcher Dr Samantha Thomas said the study would initially involve interviewing 100 Victorians who were overweight, but may eventually be expanded nationally. "This research will give them the opportunity to tell their stories about what it is like to be overweight in Australia today," Dr Thomas said. Bellberry Ltd, a not-for-profit human research ethics company, has contributed $40,000 to the research.

Source



BENEDICTINE SCAPEGOAT IN SCOTLAND



A sleepy community of Benedictine monks in south Devon is the latest, and perhaps most unlikely, target in the battle against binge drinking. Alcopops come and go, but Buckfast wine is a perennial favourite among young drinkers keen to test their alcohol limit. Now the tonic wine produced by the Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey, Devon, has fallen foul of law makers, who believe it has much to answer for. Scottish health minister Andy Kerr is the latest politician north of the border to express concerns about the effects of the drink commonly known as Buckie - citing its link to binge drinking. "There's something different about that drink," says Mr Kerr, calling it "seriously bad".

Buckfast Tonic Wine originates from Roman Catholic monks - not a group traditionally associated with the drunken masses - and was first produced by them more than 100 years ago, using a recipe brought from France. It is red wine-based, with a high caffeine content. Tellingly, the label on the bottle reads "the name tonic wine does not imply health giving or medicinal properties." It is sweet and viscous. At 5 pounds for a 750ml bottle, it is cheap but powerful - alcohol content is 15% - and considered a rite of passage by many an ambitious young drinker. "It tended to precede a rather spectacular night, because it's horribly potent," recalls Paul, a former student at Manchester.

But it is the drink's prevalence in the so-called Buckfast Triangle - an area east of Glasgow between Airdrie, Coatbridge and Cumbernauld - that has raised concerns. It even spawned its own episode of the Scottish TV comedy Rab C Nesbitt and is known locally by several pet names: Buckie Baracas, a bottle of "what the hell are you looking at?", Wreck the Hoose Juice and Coatbridge Table Wine. More seriously, there have been calls to have it sold in plastic bottles, because of the mess created by broken ones on the street, and, in court, it has been implicated, along with vodka, in one car crash death in Doune, north of Stirling.

David, a Glasgow pub manager, confesses to having enjoyed Buckfast in his formative drinking days, and perceives a strong social stigma linked to its abuse. "There's a huge problem with it in the streets," he says. "Fifteen and sixteen-year-olds drink Buckfast and they'll have no qualms about tooting someone over the head. It all stems from boredom. They'll have two to three bottles and it's like lighting a touch-paper, they go wild." But the drinks industry, and Buckfast's maker, say it is being made a scapegoat for what is a wider social problem of alcohol abuse. Spokesman for distributors J Chandler & Co (Buckfast) Ltd, Jim Wilson, points out that Buckfast trails other drinks, like whisky, in sales. It has only a half a per cent of the total alcohol market and does not feature in the top 100 brands.

Of its £30m annual turnover, 10% is sold in Lanarkshire and much exported to Spain, Australia, and the Caribbean - where its not blamed for a society's ills, says Mr Wilson. At the request of the monks, Buckfast is not advertised in areas perceived to have difficulties, no two-for-one or 20p off offers here. Talks between the distributor and Mr Kerr have been slated for 30 October. "The problem with anything alcoholic is if it's abused," says Mr Wilson. "Why target Buckfast? If your policies aren't working, and you're looking for a scapegoat, have a go."

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.

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



27 September, 2006

Frankenfood linked to E. coli deaths!



Not really. But imagine if the spinach believed to be behind the outbreak of deadly E. coli had been genetically modified spinach. Of course the “green” opponents of genetic engineering would have a field day with it. It would be trumpeted all over the world how GM food was “killing” people. But the spinach linked to this outbreak was organic and the “greens” love organic so they are deathly silent in this case.

Now I have nothing against organic though I won’t eat it myself. I find it too pricey and know that there are no additional health benefits from eating it. I won’t begrudge others the right to eat it if they wish provided they respect my right to eat frankenfoods if I wish.

The number infected in this outbreak is now up around 130. The rise should slow significantly and stop any hour now. And we are lucky that only one person died from this outbreak (that I know about). But one television station is reporting that the federal government has said this outbreak of E. coli is the 20th such since 1995 which is linked to lettuce or spinach. I hope that figure is wrong. And I feel sorry for the farmers here, especially the ones who had nothing to do with the spinach in question, who are hurting. Some, no doubt will go out of business.

But I also remember the environmental extremists who made up the Alar scare with bogus science and lies to push their agenda. No one got sick from the use of alar which was a preservative, not a pesticide like some anti-science green groups claimed. Apple producers suffered because of an orchestrated media campaign that scared consumers with lies. No one had got sick. No one died. Unlike the E. coli outbreak we have just seen. People lost their jobs, businesses went under because of the alar fraud. The problem exists because organic food requires manure. Some is applied directly and some through composting. Composting usually kills the E. coli bacteria. But it doesn’t always. And some new strains of E. coli are heat resistant so the composting process may not kill it especially as routinely applied.

So what should we do? First, don’t apply the daft “precautionary principle” which says don’t act unless something is proven safe. Organic food will never been proven “safe” all the time. Nothing is. That is something the “greens” need to learn. Everything has risks. Organic has risks and so do regular foods.

Use a “cost/benefit” perspective instead. For the vast majority of people, over the majority of time the benefits from eating vegetables far outweigh the risks. This is true for conventionally grown crops and equally as true for organic crops. Neither has the benefit over the other except the cost advantage for conventional foods.

Don’t buy the bullshit that “natural” is good for you. Sometimes it is and sometimes it most certainly is not. E. coli is very natural. Using man-made fertiliser has some risks and so does using manure. Over all I think the risks are less with man-made. If you think otherwise fine for you -- buy the more expensive stuff. I don’t mind.

Remember that what is true about organic and convention crops is also true for genetically modified crops. There is no health risk from GM foods. If a food were genetically modified and grown with manure it would present exactly the same risks as that of organic foods grown in the same manner or for conventional produce using manure.

Remember that eating vegetables saves lives. For one poor woman her vegetable killed her due to unusual circumstances not routine circumstances. Even with 20 outbreaks of E. coli since 1995 we are talking about something that causes problems for a very small number of people nation-wide. And the lives saved by eating vegetables, especially due to their anti-carcinogenic properties, well outweigh their risks. When health experts say the crisis is over eat your veggies. It will be good for you and help get an industry back on it’s feet where it should be.

And in the future don’t pass judgement on the eating preferences of others. Don’t try to ban conventional, organic or GM products. Don’t assume that one is better than the other. If you are convinced one is better then go with it but leave others free to make their own choices as well. In this panic we need to keep perspective and use common sense. But that is the very opposite of what "greens" advocate when it comes to genetic modification.

Source



Jamie Oliver: what a 'tosser' [jerk]

St Jamie's school-dinners crusade returns tonight, providing yet another unhealthy serving of food fears with a side order of parent-bashing bile.

The man in the checked shirt wobbles towards the bus, ice-cream cone in hand, not sure whether to keep licking or run faster. Then disaster strikes: he drops the cone. As he looks down in horror, the bus pulls away. Unperturbed, the fat feckless f*** scoops up the ice-cream from the ground and stuffs it in his mouth.

The man in the checked shirt is Jamie Oliver, all padded up in a fat suit. And the scene is the trailer for the latest phase in his ‘school meals revolution’, Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, which airs tonight on Channel 4. The implication is that unless we all respond to Jamie’s call to arms, we’re ignorant scum condemning many of today’s children to a life of disabling obesity and chronic ill-health.

Giving children the option to eat relatively fresh and nutritious food during the school day is an attractive one. But Oliver’s crusade is based on distortions about the quality and importance of children’s diets, and a contempt for any parent who doesn’t fit in with his idea of how they should be raising their kids.

This contempt no doubt extends to Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker, two mums who have started a ‘junk food’ run for kids at a school in Rotherham, northern England. They’re taking orders and cash through the school fence and returning with food from local takeaways. ‘This is all down to Jamie Oliver. I just don’t like him and what he stands for’, Walker told the Sun. The Sun, never afraid to take a cheap shot, described the women as ‘junk mothers’ who exhibit ‘the kind of feeble parenting that turns kids into fat, lethargic burger addicts in the first place’ (1). Oliver is not the only one who thinks that parents who won’t toe the line are neglecting their kids.

In tonight’s programme, Oliver doesn’t hold back. ‘I’ve spent two years being PC about parents. It’s kind of time to say if you’re giving very young kids bottles and bottles of fizzy drink you’re a fucking arsehole, you’re a tosser. If you’ve giving bags of shitty sweets at that very young age, you’re an idiot.’

The programme demonstrates that running a one-man revolution is hard work. In Lincolnshire (a relatively poor farming county) he discovers that many children aren’t offered hot meals at all because school kitchens were closed under the last Conservative government. He tries to get local businesses to fill the gap – and then discovers that even those model ‘healthy schools’ he set up down south are running into problems. Kidbrooke School in the London borough of Greenwich, the place where it all started in the first series of Jamie’s School Dinners, is losing thousands of pounds because it no longer sells crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks at break times. The kids buy their treats on the way to school, handing their money to local shops rather than the school. The extra government money provided after the last series is insufficient to cover the shortfall.

Oliver seems to spend his whole time firefighting. Up in Lincolnshire, he arranges for a local pub to provide meals to nearby primary schools. That means mass catering in a totally unsuitable kitchen before parents and taxi drivers deliver the food to the schools. Unsurprisingly, hygiene standards at the pub are well below what would be expected in a school, the food quality suffers as the chef tries to eke out a profit, and parents drop out as their initial enthusiasm fades. In the end, the pub pulls out, no doubt thinking they needed the whole loss-making operation and bad publicity like a hole in the head.

Oliver makes his life a lot harder by his prejudices about processed food and local production. Why a Panini filled with meat and a couple of sprigs of basil is any better in terms of nutrition than a ham sandwich made with white sliced bread is never explained. He insists on emphasising small and local provision – even when it is clearly unsuitable – over trying to persuade the big caterers with their economies of scale to alter what they provide. The whole operation is doomed to be unprofitable, so businesses quickly lose interest. His schemes only keep going because dinner ladies work unpaid overtime – which they eventually tire of, considering that even when they’re getting paid, it is only the measly minimum wage.

So Oliver’s tone becomes increasingly intolerant. He is unable to comprehend why others are not as motivated as he is. ‘This is not the Jamie Oliver show, this is not a fucking pantomime.… I’m here because I truly care. I’ve got other shit to do’, he says. When a mother drops out of the Lincolnshire pub scheme because her little boy isn’t keen on the pasta and rice served up, Oliver suggests dismissively that they have a chat with the nutritionist who came up with the menus, implying that she was letting her son down. And when a young teacher is found with some junk food ‘contraband’ in her bag, he charmingly suggests: ‘That’s no way to live, darling. You’ve got to have some pride in yourself.’

Oliver’s crusade is the product of the panic over obesity and children’s diets and his campaign only helps to stoke these fears further. Far from being an unwelcome critic, he is helpfully touting the New Labour line on food, health and the inadequacies of parents. No wonder that when he meets Tony Blair at the end of the latest programme, Blair says he will happily extend the increased funding for school dinners for another three years. Oliver leaves triumphant, perhaps forgetting that at the start of the show he was moaning that the same amount of money was inadequate.

If we were facing an impending health disaster, changing the kind of meals children are served during the school year would make little impact. But in fact, as we’ve noted elsewhere on spiked, no such disaster looms. A diet of Turkey Twizzlers, chips and beans is not perfect, but it is perfectly adequate. Oliver’s horror stories about children vomiting their own faeces and dying en masse before their parents have no basis in reality.

As for adult eating habits, they are not determined in the school canteen. Children have always been rather conservative eaters who prefer all the ‘wrong’ foods, yet experience shows that they still grow up healthy and that their tastes mature. If our childhood eating habits mattered that much, most of us would have long since perished. What Oliver fails to comprehend is that he could provide haute cuisine and lots of kids would still refuse. Rejecting school meals in favour of bunking off down the chip shop is just another minor act of teenage rebellion.

While Oliver has been received with almost universal praise in the media, there are signs of a backlash from catering staff sick of working longer hours and parents sick of being lectured on how to bring up their kids. If the Rotherham example is anything to go by, maybe eating junk food will become more than teenage rebellion – perhaps it’s a way for parents to tell the patronising ‘tosser’ where to go, too.

Source



Vitamin D wins again: "Taking vitamin D tablets may almost halve the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finds a study in the latest issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. The study used information from two large, long-term American health surveys, including 46,771 men aged 40 to 75 and 75,427 women aged 38 to 65. Between the two studies there were 365 cases of pancreatic cancer. By examining diet records, researchers found that taking vitamin D supplements at the recommended daily intake of 400 International Units (IU) reduced the risk of pancreatic cancer by 43 per cent compared to not taking vitamin D supplements. Those who took a lower dose of 150 IU per day had a 22 per cent reduced risk of pancreatic cancer. But there was no added benefit from taking more than the recommended daily intake of vitamin D."



Aspirin stops miscarriages: "Women who have experienced several unexplained miscarriages have a better chance of delivering a live baby if treated with aspirin or another blood thinner to prevent blood clots. The formation of blood clots, thrombosis, is considered one possible cause of recurrent miscarriage. However, it's not known whether the prevention of thrombosis could increase live birth rates. Researchers from the Sheba Medical Centre in Israel compared the effect of preventing blood clots with aspirin or enoxaparin - a form of heparin - in 104 pregnant women with a history of unexplained recurrent miscarriages. The live birth rate was over 81 per cent in both groups, exceeding the expected live birth rate of 40 per cent to 60 per cent among women with recurrent miscarriages."

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

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.

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



26 September, 2006

GENETIC ENEMY OF VEGETABLES

It's the perfect excuse for any child - some of us are born with a dislike of vegetables. Studies have shown that having a taste for bitter greens is in our genes. Those who baulk at the very thought of broccoli are born with taste buds which are highly sensitive to sharp tastes, while those who love the vegetable find it hard to register the bitterness.

The U.S. scientists said an aversion to vegetables may be the body's way of keeping us healthy. It is known that the chemicals behind the bitter taste stop iodine from working properly in the body. But iodine, found in seafood and some vegetables and processed by the thyroid gland, is crucial for growth and mental and sexual development. People living in areas where iodine levels are low may have evolved a dislike of foods that prevented them from making use of what little iodine there was.

The researchers from the Monell Chemical Sciences Centre in Philadelphia asked volunteers to rate a range of vegetables for bitterness. Each participant was then tested for variations of the genes which govern sensitivity to the bitter taste. There are two versions of the gene, one sensitive and one insensitive. Everyone has two of the genes, and those with a pair of the sensitive type found broccoli horribly bitter and cabbage and Brussels sprouts not much better. Those with two insensitive ones enjoyed eating the veg while volunteers with one of each type of gene fell somewhere in between.

The same genes are responsible for developing our taste, or otherwise, for watercress, turnip and horseradish. The experts believe, however, that it is possible for sensitive people to develop a taste for such vegetables as they grow older.

Source



Fast food gets a tick

Not all fast food is bad for you. In fact some of the most common types of frozen and canned vegetables, such as peas and tomatoes, are packed with as many vitamins and minerals as fresh varieties. Nutritionist Susie Burrell said working parents were often stressed about providing healthy meals for their children but they should not feel guilty about stocking the freezer with frozen vegetables. "Freezing vegetables is done by snap-freezing, which means they retain all of their original nutritional value," said Ms Burrell, nutrition writer for The Courier-Mail's new cooking liftout Simply Food. "For busy people who struggle to get to the supermarket, they are a great option because it allows them to always have a back-up supply for quick, convenient and healthy meal options."



Brisbane mother Belinda Pearse, 24, said frozen and canned vegetables were a convenient and nutritious way to feed her 13-month-old daughter Elizabeth, and husband James, 39. "Fresh vegetables tend to go off quickly. It's easier to throw in a handful of pre-prepared veges than spend all evening cutting and peeling," she said.

Source



Liver cure: "British scientists have discovered a drug that could cure liver disease, even in alcoholics who continue drinking. The medicine, found by a team of doctors and scientists at Newcastle University, could become a potential alternative to liver transplants. Until now cirrhosis of the liver, caused by alcohol, obesity or the hepatitis C virus, was considered incurable in all but the rarest of cases. The only option for patients in the final stages of liver disease was to wait for a liver transplant. However, because of organ shortages many die while on the waiting list. Clinical trials of the drug Sulphasalazine are expected to begin in Britain next year. If these prove successful, the drug could be used to treat heavy drinkers, whose plight was recently illustrated by George Best, the former Manchester United footballer who died from liver disease last year. Sulphasalazine, which already has a licence to treat arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, acts by preventing scarring from developing on the liver."



Weightlifting sends you blind: "Weightlifting causes a temporary increase in pressure within the eyes, and may be a risk factor for the eye disease glaucoma. In a new study in the Archives of Ophthalmology this week, researchers examined 30 men aged 18 to 40 without glaucoma. Participants performed two rounds of a bench press exercise, with four repetitions each time. In the first round, pressure was measured in the right eye and the weightlifters held their breath during the last repetition. In the second round, pressure was measured in the left eye and participants breathed normally throughout. During the first round, when the breath was held, pressure inside the eye increased in 90 per cent of the participants, by an average of 4.3mm of mercury. In the second round, eye pressure increased in 62 per cent of participants by an average of 2.2mm of mercury. The authors note that a type of glaucoma (normal-tension glaucoma) is more common in people who have frequent changes in eye pressure and can lead to blindness."



HRT sends you deaf: "Hormone replacement therapy could do more than simply ease the symptoms of menopause. New research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that women taking the most common form of HRT - the hormones estrogen and progesterone - have accelerated hearing loss compared to women on estrogen alone or those not taking any hormones. On average, women who took progesterone had the hearing of women five to 10 years older. Scientists assessed the hearing of 124 healthy women aged 60 to 86, half of whom had been on HRT for between five and 35 years. They were divided into three groups - 30 women taking estrogen alone, 32 women taking both estrogen and progesterone and 62 women who had never been on HRT. Women whose HRT included progesterone had hearing that was 10 to 30 per cent worse than the other groups. They not only had problems in the inner ear, but also in the parts of the brain used for hearing."

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

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.

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



25 September, 2006

Rebel mothers interviewed

Julie Critchlow, housewife turned Antichrist, is standing outside Chubby's sandwich bar drawing angrily on a cigarette and glaring at the secondary school opposite. Her children - Rachel, 15, and Steven, 11 - are coming home for lunch so she is buying crisps and pop. Although Chubby's is less than 200 yards from her front door, Critchlow has brought the car. Still, it's an improvement of sorts. This time last week she was in the graveyard over the road, with fellow "sinner ladies" Sam Walker and Marie Hamshaw, posting burgers and chips through the school fence to a throng of mutinous sugar-deprived schoolchildren. Pictures of the scene - which looked like some grotesque Little Britain sketch - were splashed across the newspapers and Critchlow was called "the worst mum in Britain".

The trouble began at the start of term when Rawmarsh community school in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, banned pupils from leaving the premises during their lunch break. Even more incendiary, the school then started peddling a Jamie Oliver-inspired school dinner menu of "healthy" fare, such as ratatouille pancakes and salad. Unlike the grateful urchins who feature on Jamie's School Dinners (Oliver's fiercely popular television crusade for better food in schools), the Rawmarsh children came home complaining of overpriced baked potatoes, yucky tomatoes and not enough chips. Some of the mothers began delivering them fast food in the lunch hour, first to their own children, then to 60 or more of their friends. The school freaked out and tried to ban the mums. The mums screamed bloody murder. The police were called and, last Monday, a very uneasy peace was reached.

To an outsider, Rawmarsh sounds like hell; a place where fat stupid mothers fight for the right to raise fat stupid children. Did these women care nothing for St Jamie, terrifying obesity rates or early onset diabetes? Did they not read the daily horror statistics? Only last week it was revealed that children who eat a packet of crisps a day end up drinking more than five litres of cooking oil a year. A first glance at the town suggests that the answer to all that is "nope". Rawmarsh is Jamie's worst nightmare; shop shelves lined with cherry colas, toddlers eating Monster Munch in the street and the locals either bandy-legged twigs or, more often, fat - really, really fat in some cases. Some aren't even ashamed of it: one fat man has taken his shirt off to eat a battered sausage in the afternoon sun.

Surprisingly, Critchlow, 43, having refused all other interview requests, invites me to join Walker, 39, and Hamshaw, 44, in her front room. As the place fills with fag smoke and cackling laughter, it seems impossible to imagine three women more at odds with the current trend for health obsessed parenting. Critchlow's favourite adjective is disgusting. This is how she describes the food that the school is now serving and "totally disgusting" is what she calls John Lambert, the headmaster. "None of this would have happened if he hadn't locked these kids up," she says. "I don't have a problem with the school not selling them fatty food. My problem is that some of these kids are 16 and they're not allowed to choose what they eat for lunch." "Next they'll be going through our cupboards telling us what we can feed them at home," says Hamshaw, who has two children, aged 13 and 16, at the school. "But we know how to give our children a proper meal better than any school."

Er, weren't you taking them chips every day for lunch? "That is such a lie," says Critchlow. "We were taking all sorts - baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won't touch the things." "There were a few chips," admits Walker, mother of an 11-year-old and 16-year-old, "but any nutritionist will say that a little bit of fat now and then isn't the end of the world." "But Lambert labelled us junk food pushers," says Hamshaw, "We're not stupid, though. I saw Supersize Me. No one in their right mind would feed their children fast food every day."

In fact, they say, the school's food laws are promoting bad habits. "All kids are fussy eaters," continues Hamshaw. "If they don't like something they won't eat it, so lots of the kids take one look at what's on offer at lunch and then eat crisps. "Every mother knows that it's an art to get your kids to eat good food, like I know my Gary won't eat greens but will eat carrots. This `we know best', one-size-fits-all attitude they've got at the school definitely means he ends up eating more rubbish. "But Jamie Oliver has come in his shiny armour and people think everything he says is right," says Walker, "like calling parents names if they let their kids have a can of Coke. Life isn't that simple though, Jamie. It's always a compromise." "You have to be clever," says Critchlow. "Kids have got their own minds and sometimes all you can do is try and persuade them to do the right thing."

Who could have expected such wisdom? While the mums don't have an A-level between them, when it comes to child rearing they've got more than 60 years' experience. "I don't want to sound hysterical," says Hamshaw, "but Adolf Hitler tried putting kids into summer camps to create perfect children and he faced the same problem this government is going to face - there is no such thing as a perfect child. You can't make carbon-copy kids who all love tomatoes. Schools should stick to educating children, not trying to raise them."

The school is not backing down, saying that for the children's safety they must stay in at lunch (unless collected by parents). The headmaster, uncharacteristically taciturn, declined to speak to me but released a statement to say he has now met the mums and progress was being made.

Sonia Sharp, of Rotherham council, insisted that the food at the school is very nice and cheaper than anything else on offer, and pointed out that uptake of school meals has risen from 350 to 600. She conceded that this might have something to do with the fact that the school has now got a captive audience.

More than food, what grates upon the Rawmarsh mums is the feeling that their choices as parents are being undermined by their government. "This country is turning into big brother," sighs Hamshaw, "and it's not like we need a nanny state. We nanny our kids quite enough on our own." The women nod gravely and light more cigarettes. "This battle," says Critchlow, "has only just begun."

Source



Another regulatory failure seen in British drug trial disaster

A "reckless" mistake apparently overlooked by government regulators lay behind the drug trial disaster that saw six young volunteers badly injured by an experimental medicine. Confidential documents obtained by The Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches programme reveal the drug was administered on average 15 times more quickly to the volunteers than to monkeys in earlier safety studies. The possibility that such a crude error led to the disaster is likely to raise questions over whether the government's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) scrutinises trials adequately and protects the public from the risks of new medicines.

After the "Elephant Man" trials at Northwick Park hospital, London, in March, which left two men fighting for their lives and all six in intensive care, the agency said the reactions resulted from an "unexpected biological effect". However, experts say the drug, TGN1412 - one of a new generation of "magic bullet" treatments targeting the immune system - was infused so quickly into the volunteers that the potential for life-threatening problems was foreseeable. "When you give an antibody . . . the quicker you put it in, the more likely you are to get an infusion reaction," said Professor Terry Hamblin of Southampton University, a leading authority on monoclonal antibodies, the family of drugs to which the trial medicine belonged.

The volunteers were given TGN1412 in only three to six minutes. "To quickly infuse it over three to six minutes in six individuals I think is . . . reckless," said Hamblin. Ryan Wilson, 20, a former apprentice plumber, who suffered total organ failure, was the most seriously injured. He was given the drug in just four minutes. The monkeys, by contrast, received the antibody by a one-hour "slow infusion".

Hamblin's judgment is backed by other experts, including Dr David Glover, formerly chief medical officer of Cambridge Antibody Technology. He concludes: "The drug was given too quickly."

The speed at which the monkeys received TGN1412 was set out in the application to the MHRA for permission to carry out the trial. This was submitted by Parexel International, a contract research company, on behalf of TeGenero, a tiny German drug developer. But the paperwork did not explicitly detail how quickly the volunteers would be given the drug, although this could be calculated from the information given.

Professor Kent Woods, the agency's chief executive, said this weekend the results of the monkey trial had reassured his staff that the human project should be allowed to go ahead. "They did not show toxicity and the dose was 500 times higher on a weight-for-weight basis than that first used at Northwick Park," said Woods. "That is the key issue."

There was another apparent oversight in the agency's scrutiny. Parexel's paperwork did not include data on test-tube experiments designed to show the drug's effect on human cells. One specialist said she was "pretty astonished" this was left out, although it is unlikely the data could have predicted the disaster. This omission was only revealed after an appeal by The Sunday Times and Dispatches under the Freedom of Information Act for the reinstatement of paragraphs cut from documents released by the MHRA.

While the agency suggests in its assessment of the trial that the problems could not have been foreseen, experts say the reactions to TGN1412 - pain, vomiting and organ failure - have long been linked to first doses of monoclonal antibodies, and in previous incidents infusion time has been a critical factor.

Parexel declined to comment, and in Thursday's Dispatches the company's chairman, Josef von Rickenbach, takes refuge in a hotel lavatory.

Wilson has severe injuries. He has had his toes and sections of his feet amputated. Parts of his fingers have dropped off; others have died and are hard as wood to the touch where the blood supply was cut off as his body reacted to the drug. He is the worst afflicted of the victims from the tests on March 13, but all suffered life-threatening injuries. For development of new medicines, it was the worst calamity since the 1960s Thalidomide disaster.

Source



"Organic": Nobody can tell the difference



Australia's peak consumer watchdog has called for urgent government action to stop what it claims is a multi-milliondollar organic food rort [racket]. The Australian Consumers' Association has accused the Federal Government of "dragging its feet" while consumers are being misled. The organic food industry is worth an estimated $450 million a year in Australia, and is one of the fastest-growing food sectors worldwide. Association spokeswoman Indira Naidoo said consumers were being ripped off. "There is no government regulation about what defines organic food," she said. "Consumers, in most cases, aren't getting what they pay for."

In many cases, they were paying two or three times as much as the cost of "ordinary" produce. "We are calling for a national government guideline that defines what standards organic food should meet. "Given the amount of organic products being consumed and the number of people being misled by incorrect labelling, we think it's an urgent priority. "We feel the Government has been dragging its feet on this issue. It's very misleading. It's definitely a rort."

Organic food labelling is controlled by the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. The self-regulatory system has seven private organic certifying groups in Australia plus several overseas groups. They are all accredited by AQIS, but there are variations on what is accepted as organic. There are also products on the market claiming to be organic that aren't associated with any certifying body. But Organic Federation of Australia chairman Andre Leu disputed the claim consumers were being misled. "I would challenge the ACA very strongly on that," he said. "The vast majority of organic food is reputable. If there's fraud, it's negligible. "I would say to consumers: If food is not accredited, we cannot guarantee it is produced according to our standard. Stay away from products that don't have certifying logos."

Standards Australia is developing a standard for organic food, but the ACA said this needed to be supported by tougher government guidelines. "While an Australian Standard is a step in the right direction, it isn't necessarily mandatory," Ms Naidoo said. "We would like to see it referenced in the Food Standards Code to give it the force of law. "It's very important people know what they are consuming is legitimately labelled organic."

However, Food Standards Australia New Zealand spokeswoman Lydia Buchtmann said the Food Standards Code was not the right place to define "organic". "The Food Standards Code is about ensuring food safety and not so much for descriptions," she said. "We are working with Standards Australia to define organic food, and we feel that is being addressed appropriately."

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.

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



24 September, 2006

A sobering truth

A call to put warnings on alcoholic drinks may be the first shot in a new public health battle

Not so many years ago, the attitude of many towards alcohol was that if you weren't actually straining metal cleaner into a cup through a cloth, or could refrain from reaching for the whisky bottle before about lunchtime, then you probably didn't have too much to worry about on the health front. Even perpetual drunkards came to be referred to from about the middle of the 19th century by the term "lush", which implies more exoticism than disease. Associations in the public's mind between all but extreme alcohol intake and ill-health have traditionally been weak, reflecting its importance in many social and even religious rituals.

Could this status be under threat? A call this week by the Salvation Army for tougher rules on alcohol suggests the intoxicant might be about to follow tobacco in being targeted as a public health enemy. This Christian charity released a research finding that 61 per cent of Australians did not know that alcohol increased the risk of various cancers, including cancer of the breast, larynx and even the liver - despite the well-known association between heavy drinking and liver cirrhosis. Although alcohol is listed as a group 1 carcinogen - the highest rank - by the Cancer Council of Australia for the development of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus and liver, only 12 per cent of Australians surveyed were definite that a link did exist.

And the Salvos said it was "high time clear warning labels in large type" were placed on drink cans and bottles "to spell out the dangers". The charity's suggested wordings for warning labels include the following: "alcohol can increase the risk of getting cancer including breast cancer and liver cancer"; "alcohol is a drug, you can become dependent on it", and the bald "alcohol can cause brain damage". "What is of such concern is that people don't know the facts - and they need to," says the Salvation Army's Gerald Byrne. "The Cancer Council Australia recommends that to reduce the risk of cancer alcohol consumption should be limited or avoided. The World Cancer Research Fund says even low levels of alcohol increase the risk of colorectal and breast cancer. The Cancer Council NSW says alcohol is a known risk factor for cancer . . . What we say is, why aren't people being told?"

Other experts concede the public is mostly ignorant of the added cancer risk caused by alcohol, but some are slightly more cautious about jumping in with warning labels. The Cancer Council Australia's CEO Ian Olver says the council is all for getting the risk message across, but warnings are only one method: "We haven't done any work about whether the best way to deliver that information is via warnings on bottles, and we'd probably want to do that before we looked at a specific strategy. But it's a strategy that clearly works with other products like cigarettes." At least the message with cigarettes has been consistent: for the sake of your health, quit.

For alcohol, however, things aren't that simple. To borrow the line from the public awareness campaign, every cigarette, even one, is doing you damage, but the picture for alcohol is muddied by the fact that at low levels any increased risk of cancer has to be offset against a probable health benefit in the form of lowered mortality from cardiovascular disease.

What this means, unfortunately, is that some of the messages being fed to the public about alcohol are contradictory. Australia's peak source of medical information and health guidelines, the National Health and Medical Research Council, issues official alcohol guidelines that set a general recommended limit of four standard drinks per day for men, and two for women (lower limits apply in some cases, for example pregnant women, pilots and people operating heavy machinery).

This is not a great deal of alcohol. As just 100ml of wine is about one standard drink, one glass of the size many people pour themselves for dinner or on arriving home from work can easily be twice this amount. But another set of guidelines put out by a separate NHMRC committee - the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults - say even this four and two-drink limit is too much, and recommend people drink half those amounts: just two standard drinks a day for men and one for women. (As a standard drink is defined as containing 10g of alcohol, the 100ml of typical-strength wine that that translates to equates to one middy of full-strength beer or a schooner of light beer.)

Olver defends the lower recommended alcohol intakes backed by the Cancer Council, saying they are appropriate because "the (cancer) risk starts with any alcohol consumption, and gets worse as you go on". According to figures on the Cancer Council NSW website, previous studies have established a link between alcohol and specific cancers, in some cases a strong link (see table). For cancers at all sites, the risk was unchanged for someone drinking less than 25g of alcohol a day, but increased by about 22 per cent if someone drank between 25g and 50g. For anyone drinking over 100g a day - 10 standard drinks - the cancer risk was nearly doubled. "We've got an overall figure (for how much alcohol increases cancer risk)," Olver says. "The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare put out a figure that in terms of the incidence of cancer, alcohol was a risk factor in 3.6 per cent of all cancers. They are 2001 figures." As there are about 88,000 cancers diagnosed a year, that means that in 2001 there were thought to be about 3168 people diagnosed with a cancer probably caused, or partially caused, by excessive alcohol.

"This needs to be put into proportion," Olver adds. "In that same (AIHW) document, smoking was a factor in 21.6 per cent of cancers. We don't want to get the message out of whack - alcohol's a risk factor, but it's nothing like the risk factor of cigarettes." Olver is cautiously supportive of warning labels on drinks, but only in the wider context that it's a good idea to get this health message out there. "I think it's important that all the risk factors are understood by the public - the public make lifestyle choices, just as they do with diet, and they can't make lifestyle choices if they don't know," he says. "We don't have a lot of evidence about which is the best way of doing it, but all we can say is that it's certainly worked in tobacco control. It's not an inappropriate method at all."

Stephen Leeder, professor of public health and community medicine at the University of Sydney and director of the Australian Health Policy Institute, says there is "no question that alcohol abuse represents a major public health problem. If you had to nominate major public health problems, if alcohol wasn't in someone's top three or four, you'd want to know what kind of book the person had been reading," he says. "It's a major problem." But Leeder says while the the "draconian" measures used to discourage tobacco use are not appropriate for alcohol - because unlike tobacco, moderate alcohol use is not associated with great harm - other measures may be. "There's a role for reminding people of the risks, if they can be expressed simply and clearly. I've no objection to that at all - people don't have to read them if they don't want to." Alcohol is thought to wreak its carcinogenic effects indirectly - either by interacting with tobacco, and increasing the damage tobacco's ingredients can wreak on tissues, or by making it easier for other cancer-causing compounds to pass through cell membranes.

Another alcohol expert, professor Paul Haber, says he thinks the NHMRC's Alcohol Guidelines - the ones that recommend up to four drinks a day for men and two for women - are the more relevant for Australians seeking overall health guidance. "It is clearly true that there are conflicting NHMRC-sponsored guidelines concerning alcohol use at present," says Haber, director of the Drug and Alcohol Service at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, who supports warning labels. "The key reason for this that I can identify is that differing health authorities consider issues from a sectarian approach: the cancer people think about alcohol and cancer, the nutritionists think about alcohol and nutrition, and the general people take an overall view. "Guidelines that focus on the risk of cancer alone will recommend that no one drinks. That is because alcohol does not protect against any form of cancer. "Alcohol promotes some cancers in a dose-dependent manner, and it not relevant to the causes of others. Therefore, the more you drink the higher the overall risk of cancer. With low levels of alcohol, the increased risk of cancer is tiny, and in many studies it may be so low that it cannot be discerned from zero risk."

Haber and the cancer gurus agree that excessive alcohol is harmful, that the risks include cancer, and the more you drink, the greater the risk. "The point of difference is whether a woman can drink one drink safely a day or two," Haber says. "Close to the border of safety, if there is an excess risk, it is very small and therefore difficult to measure confidently. Large studies, at high cost, are required to resolve these remaining doubts."

Source



Calcium supplements useless

While calcium supplements have been touted to prevent broken bones in adults, providing them to children may not help prevent fractures as they age, Australian researchers report. "At two of the areas where we worry about fractures in later life ""the spine and the hip "" the giving of calcium supplements had no effect on bone health in children," said study lead author Dr. Tania Winzenberg, a musculoskeletal epidemiologist at the Menzies Research Institute, in Tasmania. "It had been thought that calcium supplements would be more helpful than that in children," she said. "So, giving calcium supplements to children has little effect on fractures, and fractures is what we worry about."

Her team's report is published in the Sept. 16 edition of the British Medical Journal. In their review, the researchers analyzed data collected from 19 different studies. The studies included nearly 2,900 children between three and 18 years of age, and focused on the benefits of calcium supplementation lasting at least three months. The studies tracked bone outcomes after at least six months of follow-up.

Winzenberg's team found only a small effect of supplementation on total-body bone mineral content and upper arm bone density. Children taking the supplements only had 1.7 percent better bone density in their upper arms compared to kids not taking the supplements. The team also found no effect on the rate of fractures seen later in life among people given calcium supplements as children. This was particularly true for common fracture sites, such as the hip and lumbar spine.

Based on the findings, Winzenberg's group recommends other approaches to improving kids' bone health, especially increasing vitamin D intake and eating more fruit and vegetables. Vitamin D is sourced mainly from exposure to sunlight, and is essential to the intestinal absorption of calcium.

The findings don't apply to children who may have significant problems with their bones or who can't eat dairy products, Winzenberg said. For healthy children, calcium remains an important part of the diet, she noted.

One expert agreed that calcium supplementation probably doesn't benefit healthy children. "Healthy children, with an adequate diet, may have all the calcium they need to build bone," said Dr. David L. Katz, an associate professor of public health and director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. "Growing bone might need a combination of materials, such as calcium combined with vitamin D, to grow stronger," he said. This study does not exclude a possible benefit of calcium supplementation for children with low intake of dietary calcium, or children with certain health problems, Katz said. "But it does indicate that calcium supplementation in healthy children is a questionable practice," he said. "For now, the tried-and-true approach to the early prevention of osteoporosis remains a healthful, balanced diet, and plenty of exercise," Katz 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.

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



23 September, 2006

BRAIN EXCERCISE?

The giant Nintendo store in Manhattan was swarming with silver-haired citizens and their grandchildren. The elders, gathered on a recent Saturday, weren't there to spoil the kids, however. Nintendo was hosting a video game competition to determine the "Coolest Grandparent," and the aging gamers in the store were competing for a Nintendo DS handheld game player. They weren't playing Super Mario Bros. either, but a product called Brain Age, a mind challenger targeted at one of the fastest-growing segments of the game market: people over 40 worried about losing their mental edge.

Meanwhile, at The Hallmark retirement community in Chicago, 16 residents just completed a complex memory training program developed by neuroscientist Michael Merzenich of the University of California at San Francisco. While Brain Age advertises that it can "train your brain in minutes a day," the Brain Fitness Program, marketed by Merzenich's Posit Science Corp., is a computer-based set of exercises that a user must sit down with an hour a day for eight weeks.

Posit executives are emphatic that their programs are not video games, and the company published a scientific study in August that lays out the memory-enhancing bona fides of Brain Fitness. Hallmark resident Sadelle T. Greenblatt, age 85, is already convinced. After going through the Brain Fitness course she says "my memory, I think, is in some ways better. When I play bridge now, I can always remember if all the trumps are out."

Nintendo and Posit are both profiting from the memory decline that is one of the more disquieting markers of aging. As baby boomers march toward senior citizenship, hiding their mental age may prove as important to them as concealing their gray hair. Nintendo says its recent emphasis on what it calls "gray gamers" already pushed second-quarter profits up eightfold.

The industry must face down one potentially large obstacle, however. There is no empirical proof that brain teasers, crossword puzzles, or any of the other mental exercises out there will slow mental decline, or thwart Alzheimer's disease.

Efforts to improve the aging mind are one of the more contentious areas of science. Shelf after shelf of books call on seniors to "use it or lose it," arguing that brain activity will prevent cognitive losses. So far, it's only a catchphrase. Last spring, University of Virginia neuroscientist Timothy A. Salthouse analyzed a large number of studies meant to show that mental challenges arrest brain decline. He found none that proved its thesis. So far, he concluded, "the mental-exercise hypothesis is more of an optimistic hope than an empirical reality."

"LITTLE EVIDENCE"

Salthouse discovered that most brain-training studies suffer from a "chicken or the egg" problem. It could be that people who performed well in studies involving mental exercises were more mentally agile to begin with. It is true that practice makes perfect, says Matthew L. Shapiro, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "The more you try to remember, the better your skill at remembering." Still, he says there is little evidence that those improvements will lead to overall mental improvement, and a brain disease "will ultimately overwhelm any efforts to better your skills."

The most skillful game-playing grandparents at the Nintendo event were proof that practice pays off. Lynn Lipton, a 66-year-old retired teacher from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., says she has been an avid video gamer since Pong was introduced some 30 years ago. "I don't have the data to prove that it helps my memory, but I know it helps me to read faster. It keeps me sharp," she says.

Not everyone can make that claim at 66, which is why brain training is getting so much attention. The human brain reaches its maximum weight by the age of 20 and then slowly starts shrinking. By age 50 or so memory formation usually slows down, and by 70 some 12% of the population suffers from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), characterized by frequent short-term memory lapses. People with MCI are three to four times more likely than their peers to develop Alzheimer's disease.

For decades, researchers thought that little could be done once the brain started to decline. But in the early 1990s Merzenich and others discovered that the brain remains plastic throughout life. With training, it can be rewired to learn new skills. From this discovery grew the belief -- now an industry -- that the aging brain can be taught to be young again.

Nintendo is quick to disavow any scientific claims for its Brain Age games, which cost $19.95 each. "We're in the entertainment business," says Perrin Kaplan, head of marketing for Nintendo's U.S. operations. But Nintendo does boast that Brain Age was developed with the help of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a respected Japanese neuroscientist whose face pops up at the start of every game. Kawashima believes brains can be kept young and nimble through the rapid repetition of simple mental challenges. The game is wildly popular in Japan, and 4 million copies have been sold worldwide since Brain Age was introduced 15 months ago.

Posit, founded by Merzenich in 2003, is all about the science. He lends the company plenty of scientific street cred; he made some of the key early findings about brain plasticity, helped pioneer cochlear ear implants, and developed well-regarded training programs for children with learning disabilities. He says his $395 Brain Fitness program is grounded in hard data.

This summer Posit released two studies that Merzenich says prove its worth. One, involving 182 healthy people 60 and over, assigned half the group to Posit's brain exercises for eight weeks. The rest were asked only to watch educational DVDs. The researchers found that 93% of the Brain Fitness group significantly improved their memory function, while the control group did not.

In a second study released this summer, Posit's program was tried on 45 people diagnosed with MCI. PET scans of the brains of 15 participants were taken before and after the study. There was some evidence of memory gains in the Brain Fitness group, and the PET scans revealed a decline in brain activity in those who did not use the brain exercises. Brain activity held steady for the rest. "We've seen 80-year-old people improve from being sluggish and slow to having the mental performance level of a 35-year-old," says Merzenich.

Whether these people will be able to stave off further cognitive decline remains to be proven. Salthouse, at the end of his paper debunking such efforts, wrote that there's no harm in trying. Even if there is no beneficial evidence, he wrote, engagement in such mentally demanding activities at least serves as proof of existence: "If you can still do it, then you know that you have not yet lost it."

Source



The latest wonder food: "An alternative to white sugar that is about to become more widely available could help slimmers to lose weight. Agave nectar, a honey-like liquid derived from the same plant as tequila, is 25 per cent sweeter than sugar. More importantly, it helps to burn rather than store fat and is thought to reduce the craving for sweet foods. Its high fruit sugar content is absorbed by the body more slowly than white sugar, and does not need insulin to break it down. Agave nectar, which can be used in tea and coffee and to bake with, is usually sold in health food shops but Tesco is about to become the first big supermarket chain to stock it." [We'll be hearing that it gives you either cancer or heart attacks in a few years time]



Surgery hope for paralysed: "A new treatment to repair damaged nerves could help thousands of patients regain movement in their arms and legs. Using a finely woven plastic tube, surgeons will regrow and reconnect severed nerves in road and work accident victims. The neural prosthesis is attached to the ends of the damaged nerve and acts as a scaffold to aid repair. Victorian doctors say the advanced surgical technique is more effective than nerve grafts and will restore sensation in the limbs of victims. St Vincent's Hospital neurosurgeon Assoc Prof Michael Murphy said the device was a vast improvement. "You can't stretch severed nerves," he said. "You can do a graft, taking nerves from elsewhere in the body, but the end result is poor. "If the tubular scaffold works, it will speed up repair and improve the outcome." Chemicals in the polymer tube accelerate regrowth of nerve cells, allowing the nerve to grow up to 4mm a day."

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

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.

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



22 September, 2006

VINDICATION FOR THE ATKINS DIET?

There is a very good reason the Mormon crickets of western North America keep advancing, like a well-rehearsed marching band, across the landscape. These crop-eating insects are driven by a need to consume a fixed amount of protein. And the best source is the cricket in front of them. "Stop, and you get eaten," says Professor Stephen Simpson, a Federation Fellow at the University of Sydney. Cannibalistic crickets may appear to have little to do with the world's obesity epidemic. But Simpson's research on these pests, as well as on locusts, cockroaches, rats, minks - and human volunteers kept in a Swiss chalet for almost a week - suggests people have a similar need for protein.

Ballooning waistlines are the result of consuming too much low-protein, high-energy, processed foods in a bid to get our daily dose, he says. Simpson's research on caterpillars, on the other hand, shows that today's high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet may not always make us overweight. Our species could eventually evolve, like the caterpillars in the lab, to become less prone to obesity. This would occur if those with a propensity for stacking on the kilograms cannot reproduce or they have less healthy children, while the lean survive to pass on their skinniness genes.

Signs of this are emerging. Children are developing type 2 diabetes. Overweight women are having difficulty conceiving. "For the first time we are seeing obesity-related health problems affecting significant numbers of reproductive aged and pre-reproductive aged humans," Simpson says. Fat people now outnumber the world's starving. Studying why insects, with brains the size of a pinhead, are better than humans at balancing their food intake has given Simpson a fresh perspective on the issue.

He hit on the importance of protein after finding that insects given a diet low in protein but high in carbohydrates gorged themselves until they reached their protein target. With colleague Professor David Raubenheimer, of the University of Auckland, he devised an experiment to find out if humans did the same. "We incarcerated 10 people in a chalet for six days." For the first two days they could eat what they wanted from a buffet. For the next two days, one group was restricted to high-protein foods, such as chicken and meat, the other to fatty, sugary, low-protein foods, such as croissants. The first group consumed exactly the same amount of protein as on the first two days. "The second group went way off the mark and just kept on eating until eventually, through their over-consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods, they managed to fill their protein intake."

Source. For more on the wicked Atkins, see here.



Coffee 'doesn't deserve bad rap'

Bad for the heart, heavy on the stomach and even cancer-causing - coffee has been the target of years of negative press, but scientists now say many of those criticisms are unfair. Not only are some health fears misguided but coffee can actually reduce the chances of developing illnesses such as Parkinson's disease or diabetes, a meeting of the International Association on Coffee Science was told in Montpellier, France. Up to six mugs of the beloved pick-me-up beverage a day will not in fact lead to heart or digestive damage in a healthy person, experts say.

The myriad misunderstandings about coffee stem from the fact that for nearly two centuries, medical studies about it have been confined to the effects produced by a key component - caffeine. "For a long time research has been too simplistic, by largely being centred on just caffeine, while coffee is an extremely complex drink," said Astrid Nehlig, a leading French specialist on the link between coffee and health.

The drink's benefits far surpass the lift it brings to the morning routine of its devotees, experts believe. Coffee contains chlorogenic acids and melanoids which trap so-called free radicals, or atomic particles which damage DNA, and are also powerful antioxidants, involved in the prevention of cellular damage. Coffee can also cut the risks of cirrhosis by up to 80 per cent, according to Carlo La Vecchia, of the Milan-based Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research.

Bertil Fredholm, of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, highlighted at the conference,which wraps up today, "strong epidemiological evidence" that coffee consumption can prevent Parkinson's disease in men. And diabetes expert Jaakko Tuomilehto, from Helsinki University, said the risk of type 2 diabetes, linked to poor eating habits and a lack of exercise, can be halved by drinking five to six cups of coffee daily. Indeed, 10 cups a day - nothing unusual in Finland which tops the world's coffee consumer list - can cut the risk by 80 per cent. Coffee is more efficient than fruit and vegetables in preventing the oxidation of DNA, the source of a number of serious illnesses, especially cancers, notes Siegfried Knasmueller of the Medical University of Vienna.

But, at the same time, coffee harbours a number of potentially carcinogenic substances. US toxicology consultant James Coughlin has recorded about 30 such substances, though no study has so far established a definitive link between coffee and cancer. While research has tended to measure coffee consumption, it has been unable to distinguish what kind of coffee is being drunk, or, often, how it is taken - with or without sugar, milk, or even caffeine. Most of the studies presented here were based on an American-style cup of coffee, corresponding to trends in northern Europe and the United States, with 600 millilitres a day considered a reasonable amount.

Epidemiologist Cuno Uiterwaal, of the University Medical Centre of Utrecht, has studied the risk of heart attacks in coffee-drinkers and believes that based on current knowledge, a heavy consumer can safely continue to indulge. But he is less willing to suggest a recommended amount. "It's always very difficult to translate observational results into medical advice," he says.

Source



WARNING: Living can increase the risk of cancer

With the latest calls by the Salvation Army to label another one of life's little pleasures with a grim caveat, perhaps it's time we just accepted this fact. Then I suggest we all have a quiet drink and get on with enjoying life. Because while I generally consider the Salvos to be a top bunch, on their latest campaign, I wish they'd just put a cork in it. They have called for warning labels on alcohol because, according to a study they've done, more than 60 per cent of Australians didn't know that drinking can increase the chances of breast, liver and larynx cancers. At the risk of proving their point, since when?

The last thing I remember reading about alcohol was that the odd glass or two could lower the risk of dementia. There was another report which said it could lower the risk of developing heart disease. Or something like that. Their call for the warnings comes as part of their latest alcohol awareness campaign, which also targets binge drinking and other forms of alcohol abuse. It has jumped on the findings of the World Cancer Research Fund that show even low levels of alcohol consumption can increase the risk of breast cancer and colorectal cancer.

The Salvation Army says about 3000 people die each year through excessive drinking and an estimated 65,000 people are hospitalised each year because of alcohol abuse. Alcohol is also a factor in about one in six fatal car crashes and it fuels violent crime. But that's alcohol abuse, not use, and it's hardly cause for a constant cancer scare every time, on those rare occasions, when I reach for a cold one.

The Australian Medical Association, while supporting the Salvation Army's calls to a degree, has no formal position on the connection between alcohol and cancer. The Cancer Council NSW recommends that to reduce the risk of cancer, avoid or limit alcohol consumption. Hardly a deafening condemnation from either body about the demon drink. So until there's a unanimous verdict, I'd like my cheeky chardies fear-free, thanks all the same. I've already reluctantly given up two of my favourite pastimes thanks to doomsaying medicos: Smoking and endless hours of sunbaking - which, when carried out simultaneously, would induce a state of bliss - are, sadly, habits of the past. I've been convinced that although both of those occupations are thoroughly enjoyable, even a small amount of either can give you cancer. Growing old also increases the risk of getting cancer, yet no one seems to be advising against that

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



21 September, 2006

Omega 3, probiotic and vitamin myths

Ever since Cleopatra bathed in milk to keep her skin radiant, people have sought short cuts to health and beauty. Alchemists chased the elixir of immortality, snake-oil salesmen touted dubious concoctions claimed to cure, as one brand had it, "all painful complaints and weaknesses". (It turned out to be 20% pure alcohol.). Government regulation of medicines and food stopped the more outlandish claims, but now a new phenomenon has emerged: the collision of science and nutrition.

Consumers have grown more health-conscious just as researchers are discovering more about how nutrients work. It has enabled the makers of smart foods, health supplements and other "nutraceuticals" to promote claims based on what, to consumers, may appear to be sound scientific grounds. Take fish oils. Scientists agree that omega-3 fatty acids known as DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) are important constituents of our brains. The body cannot make the substances, so they are absorbed from food such as fish, nuts, seeds and to a lesser extent certain vegetables. Food manufacturers have latched onto this and started adding omega-3 to their products, as well as selling supplements. St Ivel, a large manufacturer, promotes milk with added omega-3 as "Clever Milk"...

But for the average child with a varied diet does extra omega-3 have any benefit? Last week an expert at a British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) conference in London said the science did not justify such hype. Professor Peter Rogers of Bristol University presented a review of studies into fish oils and behaviour. He concluded that there is no firm evidence that omega-3 improves cognitive function or mood. "A few years ago I was enthusiastic about this area because I thought it was very plausible that fatty acids could improve mood and cognitive function," he said. "But we haven't found striking effects in studies. Some research has shown benefits, but other studies have failed to find those effects. "We have to look at the totality, not cherry-pick - and more research needs to be done."

The Food Standards Agency agrees. "There is no clear evidence that increased intakes of omega-3 fatty acids improve cognition for the majority of children or adults," it says.

Other scientists believe that such fatty acids will eventually be shown to be beneficial in many ways, for the elderly as well as the young. A trial is now under way, for example, to study the effect of fish oils on Alzheimer's disease. But even these optimists have warnings about supplements. "The labelling is rubbish," said Dr Ann Walker, an expert in human nutrition at Reading University, who regards fish oils as potentially very beneficial - at the right dosage. "Many say `one a day', or something like that. But there's a huge difference between a capsule and a spoonful. You have to look at the actual quantities of EPA and DHA and do your own calculations." Two portions of oily fish a week - as the government recommends - equates to about 500mg of omega-3 a day.

Nor are all fatty acids free from risk. Oily fish can be contaminated with pollutants such as heavy metals. Omega-6, found in sunflower oil, is also an essential fatty acid, yet in large quantities it can cause inflammation.

What about probiotics? Supermarket shelves are now infested with yoghurts, drinks and other concoctions that claim to provide bacteria that promote good health. They are supposed to counter harmful bacteria, especially in the gut. But Professor Glenn Gibson, another expert at Reading University's renowned Food Biosciences department, recently reported that many probiotic products were useless. "They've got the wrong bacteria or the wrong numbers," he said. To be effective, he said, products had to have lactobacilli or bifidobacteria in minimum quantities of 10m per bottle.

Laboratory studies have also shown that the bacteria in some probiotic products are destroyed by the digestive system before they reach the part of the gut where they can take effect. Again, there's no clear benefit, let alone a panacea. Claire Williamson, a scientist at the BNF, said: "Not all products are effective, though my understanding is that in some the bacteria do survive the digestive system - and there are thought to be some health benefits. But that's not to say you're going to be dancing in the street or living another 20 years." ...

What about vitamins? Surely vitamin supplements are a no-brainer? But it's not that simple, said Williamson. Not all vitamins are well absorbed if taken as supplements. Nor may they be the ingredients that make fruit and vegetables so healthy for us. Trials with vitamin supplements have failed to show the same positive health effects as studies of fruit and vegetable consumption. This is probably because other compounds in foods, known as phytochemicals, play an important part in promoting good health. "It shows that it's hard to replace the benefits from food with supplements," said Williamson.

Phytochemicals include substances called polyphenols which are found in green tea and red wine. They may account for the reputation green tea and red wine (in moderation) now enjoy for preventing certain diseases. But these are no miracle elixirs either: polyphenols are also found, albeit at lower quantities, in ordinary English breakfast tea...

It's also difficult and time-consuming to follow all the twists and turns of health claims. Judith Wills, author of The Food Bible and other books on nutrition, said: "People must go barmy when they try to understand what is going on. They see all these claims but don't realise all the ins and outs. They see a big headline, but it's based on just one small study - and the next week there will be another study saying something completely different."

Consumers also have to contend with the law of unintended consequences. A recommendation for healthy action in one direction may turn out to be bad in another, unexpected way. "There's now a big debate on vitamin D, which is important against cancer," said Walker. "One group are saying you mustn't go in the sun because of the risk of skin cancer; but another is saying you need sunlight to make vitamin D to prevent other cancers. "We could be doing more harm than good by avoiding the sun."

Where does this leave parents and other consumers? Wills recommends a diet of healthy scepticism about fads and panaceas. Vitamins may be worth it if your food is dominated by processed junk; and the very young or elderly may benefit from fish oils, though there's no guarantee. But the best option, say most experts, is a good, varied, natural diet. And a cup of tea, green or otherwise, while you ponder reports of the next miracle cure.

More here



Fat switch dangerous

After a spate of bad publicity, large manufacturers of food are quietly dumping trans fats from their products, even at the cost of increasing saturated fats, which Federal Government policy regards as more dangerous. The food companies, including McDonald's, are reacting to increasing overseas evidence that there is no safe level of trans fat consumption. But Food Standards Australia New Zealand says saturated fats here are at a more dangerously high level of consumption than trans fats. While it is mandatory for manufacturers to list on the label the saturated fat content, the labelling of trans fat content is only needed if the product makes a nutritional claim, such as being low in fat or cholesterol.

McDonald's confirmed yesterday that it would switch from a partly hydrogenated canola oil to a blend significantly lower in trans fatty acids but only fractionally lower in saturated fat. And Ferrero, the maker of Nutella - which was singled out by Choice magazine last year for its high trans fat content - confirmed it had recently switched from vegetable oil to palm oil, thereby reducing trans fat content from 4 per cent to less than 0.1 per cent. But the new recipe raises the level of saturated fat from 6 per cent to 10 per cent.

A recent report by the Harvard School of Public Health found that at a conservative estimate replacing partially hydrogenated fat (trans fat) in the US diet with natural unhydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent between 30,000 and 100,0000 premature coronary deaths a year.

The moves by McDonald's and Ferrero contrast with the stance by Food Standards. Under instruction from the Federal Government, that stance is now being reviewed, but a report is not expected until early next year. At a forum on trans fats in state Parliament on Monday, the Greens spokesman John Kaye said that based on the Harvard study's figures, between 1000 and 3400 Australians would die of trans fat-related premature coronary heart disease while the Government waited for its report to be completed. Countries such as Denmark, the US and Canada had already legislated to ban or order the labelling of trans fat content, Dr Kaye said, and companies such as McDonald's and Ferrero could see the writing on the wall. "While maintaining a brave public face that everything is fine, some of the big operators are scurrying around reducing the trans fat content in their products," he said. "But FSANZ and the ministerial council are being left behind. They are waiting around until next year to complete a study of what Australians eat."

The parliamentary secretary to the federal Minister for Health, Christopher Pyne, who heads the ministerial council, said he expected to view the preliminary results of the study when the council met late next month, "but I won't respond to every wild claim by the Greens. A lot of people will die in the next six months for a whole host of reasons." Mr Pyne said the council would decide whether to ban trans fat as Denmark had, introduce mandatory labelling as the US had, or do nothing. The decision would be based on Food Standards' findings.

Source. See here for the other side of the trans fat story.

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

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.

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



20 September, 2006

"REBEL" BRITISH MOTHERS FORBIDDEN TO FEED THEIR KIDS

A headmaster said yesterday that there could be "no compromise" with the rebel mothers who have been making daily deliveries of junk food to his pupils. Rawmarsh School, in South Yorkshire, has become a reluctant focal point for the national debate on healthy eating since it emerged that two mothers were passing chips, burgers and fizzy drinks to children through the school railings.

For the past two weeks, Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker have been taking orders for up to 60 meals in defiance of the school's decision to ban pupils from leaving the premises during the lunch break. A temporary truce was called yesterday after the mothers visited the school, near Rotherham, spoke briefly to senior staff and agreed to return for a meeting to discuss their concerns later in the week. On each side, the battle lines are firmly drawn. Mrs Critchlow and Mrs Walker have cast themselves as standard-bearers for freedom of choice in an age of food fascism. Their bˆte noire is Jamie Oliver, whose high-profile television campaign to improve the quality of food served in school canteens has resulted, they claim, in their children being forced to eat "disgusting, over-priced, low-fat rubbish".

John Lambert, the school's headmaster, yesterday issued a strong defence of its healthy-eating policy and insisted that there would be no going back on a strategy designed "to improve the wellbeing of our young people". The controversy has aroused strong emotions in the community. Petitions have been circulating and Neil Beaumont, the owner of Chubby's, a local sandwich shop that has been supplying the rebel mums, disclosed yesterday that one of his staff had been verbally abused. Mr Beaumont, 34, charges 1.10 pounds for a bacon sandwich and has no regrets about his decision to take orders from Mrs Critchlow and Mrs Walker. "If they don't want their children to eat school dinners, that's up to them," he said, before claiming that one supermarket had lost up to œ1,000 a week since the school barred pupils from eating outside.

Mr Beaumont said he could accept that some local residents were unimpressed by the mothers' decision to stand each day in the grounds of the cemetery which adjoins the school to take and deliver orders for pupils. But he added that this did not justify the actions of one woman who pulled her car alongside a female member of his staff before accusing her of "taking blood money" and "demanding to know how she could sleep at night". He said: "It's all got out of hand. There's people dying on the front line in Iraq, yet people are going crazy because of two ladies passing sandwiches through the school railings."

Mr Lambert, whose 1,100-strong school has specialist status as a sports college, chose his words carefully yesterday when he was asked for his views on the mothers' determination to continue their junk food service. "I think the parents have stated a case, although I would have preferred it if they had stated it in a different way. There is no room for compromise here. The stance they have taken is not one the school can accept," he said. "We know from evidence nationally that eating proper food at lunchtime makes a difference to learning and success. It is my belief that, whatever their intentions, they are potentially undermining the success of their own children and also undermining the success of other parents' children."

At 12.50pm yesterday, the school canteen, its carpet and walls decorated in pastel shades of green and lilac, was packed with hungry 11-year-olds who seemed to have no problem with the fare on offer. For 1.70 pounds, children were able to choose from a range of "meal deal" items, including ratatouille pancakes, jacket potatoes, pizza slices with salad and wholemeal sandwiches. Enticing posters promoted different food sections. There was "classic cuisine", "chef's choice" and "4NRG". Drinks ranged from fruit juice and milk to bottled water and among the puddings were fresh fruit salad, melon and yoghurt. Health-obsessed to the point of puritanism it was not. One option was a mixed grill - bacon, sausage, burger, poached egg and baked beans - which would not have looked out of place on the menu at Chubby's.

Carl Mason, 11, was sitting with three friends at one of the tables. The quartet said that they ate in the canteen every day - packed lunches are the official alternative - and declared the food was "very nice". "It keeps you healthy and helps your brain," explained one of the boys, before Carl gave his verdict on the mothers' school railings deliveries. "I think it's silly. The lunches here are perfectly fine. If they don't like them, the pupils can always just bring in a sandwich. They're just making a big fuss."

Source



Even a taste for coffee is genetic: "A taste for espresso in the morning may be genetic, according to research that has identified the first known receptor cells for caffeine. Scientists have discovered that a single protein determines whether fruit flies eat sugar laced with caffeine or avoid its bitter taste. It is not yet known whether the gene that controls production of the protein, Gr66a, has a similar effect in humans, but the discovery of a caffeine receptor does suggest that a taste for coffee is likely to be affected by genes. Despite their fondness for human foods, Drosophila fruit flies normally avoid caffeine because of its bitter taste. When the scientists removed the Gr66a gene from the flies, the flies overcame their dislike of caffeine. Without the Gr66a protein, the flies seem to have been unable to taste caffeine. Craig Montell, who led the research at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, said: "The bottom line is that our mutant flies willingly drink caffeine-laced liquids and foods because they can't taste its bitterness - their taste receptor cells don't detect it." The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Current Biology, ran tests on the flies' brains to prove that the change originated in the flies' taste bristles, the equivalent of human taste buds..."



Saved by cabbage: "New Zealand researchers have discovered that some compounds from vegetables in the cabbage family can help kill cancer cells that are resistant to other treatments. The research showed naturally occurring chemical compounds known as isothiocyanates, found in vegetables such as brussels sprouts, broccoli and watercress, cause cell-suicide in cancer cells. The Otago University researchers' findings were published in the American journal Cancer Research.



Crusading CDC thinks nearly everybody is overweight: "Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia have the highest percentages of obese residents, while Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii and Vermont have the lowest, the government reported on Thursday. The survey of 300,000 adults by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that overall, 60.5 percent of Americans were overweight, 23.9 percent were obese, and 3 percent were extremely obese. Obesity was as common in men as in women - 24 percent in both. Among ethnic groups, non-Hispanic blacks had the highest rates, with just under 34 percent of those surveyed considered obese, according to the survey known as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System" [For background on CDC dishonesty, see here]

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

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.

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



19 September, 2006

Science in the media sausage grinder



Recent weeks have offered a rich harvest of new "health" threats with splashy headlines warning us about the supposed dangers from processed meats, hair dyes, and tanning parlors. While all of these stories are all a little odd, perhaps the oddest is the one about how meat increases the risk of stomach cancer. This story was featured on the networks and in several major papers. One news outlet even went so far as to tell its readers just how much bacon they could eat before being at risk for cancer!

What makes the meat and stomach cancer story odd from the get-go is the fact that compared to the rest of the world, North America has one of the lowest rates of stomach cancer incidence and mortality in the world at 10 per 100,000. The highest rates are found in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. And the pattern of declining incidence found here is repeated throughout much of the Western world.

But the really peculiar thing about the meat and stomach cancer scare is how fundamentally at odds the news reports were from the actual science. Back in the Spring the Journal of National Cancer Institute in the United States published a study on meat intake and the risk of stomach and esophageal cancer by a research team led by Carlos Gonzalez of the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Barcelona, "Meat Intake and Risk of Stomach and Esophageal Adenocarcinoma Within the European Prospective Into Cancer and Nutrition". The researchers looked at cancer and nutrition involving some 520,000 Europeans for over six years. According to Gonzalez, there was an increased risk of stomach cancer associated with total meat intake, red meat intake and processed meat consumption. But a mere 330 subjects developed stomach cancer, and in those most at risk of developing it -- those over 60 -- the absolute risk of developing it over 10 years was 0.33% for the heaviest meat eaters groups versus 0.26% for the near vegetarian crowd. Where's the epidemic, and the big difference?

But then came another study, "Processed Meat Consumption and Stomach Cancer Risk: A Meta-Analysis," by Susanna Larsson from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Larsson conducted a meta-analysis of 15 previous studies on the relationship between processed meat consumption -- including bacon, sausage, hot dogs, salami, ham and various smoked meats -- and stomach cancer risk that were published between 1966 and 2006. She found that "increased consumption of processed meat is associated with an increased risk of stomach cancer."

The world media dutifully reported this frightening news, scaring people off their BLTs and sausage at breakfast, and no doubt saving many a pig's life. Only the conclusion was compromised. To start, only seven of the 19 studies included in the study had results that were statistically significant. Of the seven studies linking bacon and stomach cancer -- the headline grabber -- only two were statistically significant; while of the nine regarding sausage only three had statistical significance. And to top it off, Larsson's own study of processed meat and cancer, which she included in the meta-analysis, showed no statistically increased risk of stomach cancer associated with eating bacon, sausage and hot dogs, and ham and salami.

The studies that were statistically significant reported relative risks that were so small as to be indistinguishable from chance. For example, the relative risks for stomach cancer from an increase in processed meat consumption of 30g a day was 1.38, where relative risks below 2 are considered not to indicate a causal connection. Even eating ham, which had the highest reported risk, had a relative risk of only 1.64.

Meanwhile, contradicting Larsson's metaanalysis was an enormous prospective study, "A Prospective Study of Diet and Stomach Cancer Mortality in United States Men and Women" in 2001 done by the American Cancer Society. It involved 436,000 Americans and found no increased risk of stomach cancer associated with eating processed meats. That study, during 14 years of follow-up, documented 439 stomach cancer deaths in women and 910 in men. It found that: "none of the food groups examined were associated with risk of stomach cancer except for an unexpected increased risk with vegetable consumption in women."

Why hasn't anyone warned women not to eat their veggies? It would have been ridiculous, of course, just as it is now to exaggerate dangers from processed meat. All of this highlights a major flaw in the way in which the media covers food and health stories that was pointed out recently by the International Food Information Council's Food for Thought, a report on how the media reports on food issues. According to the IFIC, there were more than 3,000 assertions of harm or benefit of some food based on a scientific study in news stories in 11 leading North American newspapers in 2005. Yet only 2% mentioned whether the study found a statistically significant connection between something like the food and the disease. In other words, whether the connection was real or not was never reported in the overwhelming majority of the stories. With reporting like that, we can be assured of a continued run of headlines warning that bacon causes stomach cancer and ... whatever. Let the pigs rejoice.

Source



New diabetes drug: "A drug that makes the body more sensitive to insulin can help to prevent patients developing diabetes, scientists say. An international trial has found that taking the drug rosiglitazone can reduce the chance of people getting type 2 diabetes by up to two thirds among those at high risk. Type 2 diabetes is strongly associated with obesity and is increasing on the scale of a global epidemic. It is diagnosed in more than 5 per cent of all adults, accounting for 85 to 95 per cent of all diabetes cases, and this rate is rising rapidly throughout the world. In addition, about 300 million people worldwide are estimated to have an impaired ability to regulate their use of glucose, a condition sometimes referred to as “pre-diabetes”, which puts them at especially high risk of developing the disease."



Bread good for you again: "Trying to lose weight by giving up your daily bread? You could be losing out on a whole lot of nutrition if you do. The anti-carb brigade has carved bread up a bit lately, but people who shun a slice are missing out on essential nutrients in a delicious and simple form. Bread is a perfectly packaged source of protein, fibre and complex carbohydrates, and is still one of the simplest lunch options around. Let's face it; the options for fillings you can use are virtually limitless. "Bread's a great source of nutrients because the grains themselves contain a lot of nutrients," says dietitian Alison Miles. Miles says that for optimum health we need to make sure we eat a wide range of foods from all the food groups, and plenty of research is stacking up to say that weneed to include more wholegrains."

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

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.

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



18 September, 2006

Down with the fertility police

Proposals that women who are too fat, too thin or over 40 should be denied IVF are draconian attempts to define what is a `good parent'

Fat people, apparently, don't deserve to have children. Nor do people who are too old or too young, too thin, or, by default, too poor. Such are the recommendations of the British Fertility Society (BFS), a group of IVF specialists, which this week has set out to try to clarify guidelines on who should receive fertility treatment on the NHS. It's a good job most people can get pregnant naturally, or the fertility rate really would be in trouble.

The headlines went along the lines of `Call for fertility ban for obese', and focused on the proposal to refuse treatment to women with a body mass index (BMI) above 29 (about 12 stone for a woman of average height) until they initiated a `weight reduction programme', and to refuse free treatment point blank to women with a BMI over 36. But fat women were not the only ones in the firing line: underweight women (about eight stone) would be made to gain weight, and women over 40 would be barred automatically from treatment.

In fairness to the BFS, its intention is to reduce current `unequal access' to NHS-funded IVF treatment, which arises from Primary Care Trusts' arbitrary use of `social criteria' to determine who should be allowed free IVF. For example, some PCTs refuse to fund couples who already have children, some refuse to treat smokers, and many set different obesity limits, resulting in a bewildering array of restrictions. And some of the BFS's recommendations are progressive - for example, that single women and same-sex couples should be treated the same way as heterosexual couples, and that couples with children from a previous relationship should not be excluded from access to NHS treatment.

But any use of `social criteria' to bar people from IVF treatment is a problem, because it draws a moral distinction between those who are worthy of being given the chance to be a parent, and those who are not. By these criteria, fat women and older women are being labelled undeserving of a treatment offered to everybody else - being told that they don't deserve to have a baby, because they've left it too late or eaten too many pies.

Medics will argue that there are medical reasons for these restrictions - that IVF treatment is less likely to work for women who are old or fat, and that if it does work, the pregnancy will carry greater risks for mother and child. Well, if that's the case, tell your patients of the risks, and let the decision about whether to proceed be made by the doctor and the patient, not by a list of standard regulations.

While young women in the peak of health are doubtless the fertility specialist's preferred patients, presumably they are the least likely to need assistance. Pregnancy, for any woman, is reasonably risky: and if fat women can choose to take that risk when conceiving naturally, why not when they are having fertility treatment? IVF, like most medical procedures, is not something that people generally do for the hell of it; they turn to assisted fertility when nature, or other circumstances, let them down. It's unpleasant, unreliable and can be bad for your health - yet still people do it, because their desire for a child outweighs those other concerns.

Fertility treatment gives society the ability to overcome one of the unfairnesses caused by nature. Why should we want to compromise that by adding some socially-constructed unfairnesses of our own?

As things currently stand, the BFS's recommendations probably won't have a practical impact upon that many people - largely because provision of IVF treatment on the NHS is so limited. PCTs have been instructed by the government to offer women at least one free cycle, which is arguably neither use nor ornament - the need for speed (often precisely because women seeking treatment are older) and for more than one treatment cycle means that many people go private anyway. As ever, it is those who can't afford the thousands of pounds that fertility treatment requires who end up suffering the consequences of these restrictions most directly.

But the moral impact of these recommendations is widespread, reaching beyond IVF patients to everybody who wants a child. Once again, we are presented with an official viewpoint on what it means to be an acceptable parent - a non-drinking, non-smoking, mature-but-not-old, slim-but-not-too-thin caricature straight out of the New Labour Book of Boring. Fertility treatment is supposed to offer people more choices; instead it has become another stick with which to beat us into conformity.

Source



Botox restores speech! "Botox, the drug better known for its cosmetic effects, is restoring the speech of laryngectomy patients such as Jack. In a joint clinical trial by the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and the Royal Melbourne Hospital, seven patients received Botox injections into their throat muscles. Senior speech pathologist Nadine Manison said Botox relaxed the muscles and reduced the spasms that prevent speech. With all patients now speaking again, doctors have hailed the trial a huge success and hope to keep it operating. Mr Howitt's speech was restored just three days after his Botox injection. Mr Howitt has an open valve in his throat, which he has to close with his hand in order to speak. This action closes off his airways, so Mr Howitt is still mastering the art of speaking without breathing."



Breast implants OK: "A large Canadian study adds to evidence that women with breast implants do not face a higher risk of cancer or other major diseases, but they may have a higher-than-average rate of suicide. Among the more than 40,000 women in the study, those who'd received cosmetic breast implants had lower-than-average risks of dying from breast cancer, heart disease and a host of other major diseases. The findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, are in line with those of several past studies. Despite concerns that implants might be a risk factor for cancer or other major illnesses, researchers have generally found lower risks among breast implant recipients... Together with past studies, the new findings should be generally reassuring to women with implants, according to Morrison, whose colleague at the health agency, Dr. Paul J. Villeneuve, led the study. But the research also confirmed another finding that several studies have now uncovered: women with breast implants commit suicide at a higher-than-average rate. "These findings agree fundamentally with those of past reports," Morrison said. "The one thing that lights up is this increased suicide risk." Though this study could not dig for the reasons, Morrison noted that other studies have found poorer self-esteem and elevated rates of depression and other psychiatric disorders among women who opt for breast augmentation."





Horror over normal mothering: ""I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third. These readers weren't complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine - yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains greater support from the government and medical community. Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies".

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

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.

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



17 September, 2006

ANOTHER REPLY TO A SELF-RIGHTEOUS BRITISH TV COOK

It seems that I am "an a***hole, a tosser, an idiot" - otherwise known as a parent, in loveable Jamie Oliver's description of those who give their children "fizzy drinks" or "bags of crisps". He might think I am one, but I am certain that Oliver is talking out of his.

After Oliver's television series denouncing school dinners won widespread acclaim and changed government policy, a lot of children stopped eating them. Now with a follow-up on Channel 4 next Monday, Oliver has turned to roasting "the biggest evil" - packed lunches. He claims that while some parents give four-year olds a cold, half-eaten McDonald's and can of Red Bull, even the best packed lunch is "shit" and should be banned.

Oliver says that he is "bored" with "being PC about parents", and has to "tell it like it is". A worthy sentiment. Except that his arguments are packed with more half-digested junk than any lunchbox. As Professor Stanley Feldman pointed out in a letter to The Times this week, children need a varied diet, but it does not matter if the protein comes from burgers or best steak. If the road to an early grave were paved with crisps and fizzy drinks, my generation would hardly have survived to have kids and enjoy Oliver's sermons.

This moral crusade seems aimed less against packed lunches than "junk" parents - particularly those whom Oliver branded "what we have learnt to call `white trash' ". St Jamie of Our School Dinner Ladies is now worried that his criticism of parents will make him a martyr.

But in truth, Oliver has only expletive-ly spelt out the prejudices towards parents that inform much government policy. Official agencies may talk soothingly of giving parents "support" to make "informed choices" (ie, choose what they inform us is best), but the message is much the same. We are essentially seen as idiots and a***holes who could not find our behinds with two hands, far less bring up children, without guidance from the experts.

I confess to the heinous crime of giving our kids a diet of things they will actually eat. That means everything from the Sunday roast to a takeaway from the local tandoori, washed down with fizzy drinks. It used to include school dinners. But this term, our two young daughters rejected the fare at their local school in favour of packed lunches (including crisps) - a move that coincided with the introduction of compulsory "healthy menus", with less fried food and no salt available.

The Government has yet to respond to Oliver's demands for a ban by sending in the packed-lunch police, but there are reports of some schools searching lunchboxes and confiscating "contraband" junk food. I always thought that what mattered at school was the knowledge they fed children in the classroom, in the bits between meals. But then I am only an idiot parent.

Source



San Francisco food freaks

Schools weren't always citadels of health. For years, they were more like junk food coliseums. Now, as this school year begins, cafeteria menus are being scrutinized as closely as the curriculum in preparation for compliance with recently passed legislation to better students' diets. School officials from Santa Clara to Sonoma counties are planning inventive programs to rid their halls of high-calorie and fatty foods. But for four people in the Bay Area, changing the way kids eat has become their life's mission....

Since 1980, the percentage of overweight young people in the nation has more than tripled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The American Obesity Association attributes the growing number of cases of youth asthma, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, orthopedic complications and psychological disorders to bulging waistlines. "This is just the tip of the iceberg,'' said Howell Wechsler, director of adolescent and school health for the CDC in Atlanta. "There's no question that schools can play a profound role'' in fighting the epidemic, he said. "If all they do is get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables or reduce their saturated fat or trans fat intake, that's a major accomplishment."

Farm-fresh cafeteria food: Miguel Villarreal, director of food and nutritional services for seven Marin County school districts, including Novato and San Rafael, is trying to get kids to substitute jicama and carrots for their Snickers bars. And he's going straight to the farm to do it. "It's not easy," Villarreal admits. "Just getting them to sample the food is an exercise." He believes that if he brings it in fresh, the food will be richer in nutrients, and the kids will be more likely to eat it. So he's been working with Marin Organic, a group of local producers, on a Farm-to-School program.

Every Friday, Villarreal and his staff order fresh fruits and vegetables from local growers, including Paradise Valley Produce and Star Route Farms. Straus Family Creamery supplies yogurt for fruit and granola parfaits. On Monday mornings, a truck rolls in with his delivery. All of it comes from less than 20 miles away. "The carrots are coming out of the ground the day before we serve them," said Villarreal.

Every Thursday, Villarreal offers kids an organic salad. Three days a week, elementary school students can substitute an entree-size salad for anything on the menu. Middle and high school students can make the substitution five days a week. The 47-year-old nutrition director is also creating a schoolyard farmers' market with donated produce from Marin Organic that otherwise might go to waste because it's not "pretty enough" to sell. The students can take bags of it home for free, along with recipes and a note about where it came from. "Of all my ideas, this is the one I'm most excited about," says Villarreal, whose parents were migrant farm workers and raised him in the fields. "This way, the kids can teach the parents."

Translating health: In Santa Clara County, Maria Mosquera, a pediatric senior resident at Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, noticed that her patients were fat. "Some were off the charts," she said. So the 29-year-old doctor and her colleague, Heather Iezza, spent their summer in East Palo Alto conducting focus groups and classes on nutrition and exercise with Head Start parents. The mothers and fathers said they wanted to learn how to read food labels and understand portion sizes. They also wanted to make their traditional recipes more nutritious. "Food is a huge part of my culture," said Mosquera, whose mother is Panamanian and father is Colombian. "It's how we celebrate parties. It's how we tell people we love them. I would hate to see that taken away. So we have to figure out how to make it healthy."

These days, Mosquera spends a lot of time talking about the virtues of water and fruit. She explains that if a child has a bag of potato chips, a soft drink and a candy bar, that pretty much exhausts the recommended calories for the day. She's showing parents that calories and fat grams on labels are per serving and not for the whole package. "It's confusing to a lot of people," she said. "Especially if they can't read English."

Mosquera translates labels into Spanish to show parents how to evaluate the food. She's taught them to bake their tortilla chips instead of frying them and has created a fruit salsa that can be eaten as a dessert. "Our goal is not only to keep children from gaining weight, but to help the whole family learn about eating right," she said.

Mom with an agenda: Three years ago, Nora Cody became preoccupied with trans fat and its links to childhood obesity. "I read every book I could get my hands on," said the 45-year-old mother of two and former director of a health nonprofit. "Then I sat my children down and explained to them that we were going to start eating differently. I taught them to read food labels, gave them guidelines and then turned them lose in the supermarket to make smart choices." But protecting her own kids' health wasn't enough. When her son, Patrick, was in the fifth grade, she led his class at Oakland's Chabot Elementary in a discussion about nutrition.

Cody devised games the students could play and conducted experiments in which she'd have kids demonstrate how much sugar was in a can of soda and rub foods on brown paper bags to show how much grease they left behind. Before long, other teachers were begging her to teach their classes. Soon she was instructing groups of 50 kids. And it didn't stop there. She taught park and recreation department employees from San Leandro and Emeryville how to lead similar classes for their camp programs. In January 2005, Cody was hired by the Oakland Unified School District to coordinate its wellness program. She's spent much of this summer preparing for the implementation of the district's new policy to comply with a 2004 federal law. The legislation requires that all schools educate students about nutrition as well as provide healthful foods and opportunities for exercise. "I see this as a real opportunity to push the health agenda," she said....

In 2003, California was the first state in the nation to ban soda sales in elementary and middle schools. Three years from now, a state law will go into effect requiring high schools to get rid of them as well. By next summer, state law will require that vending machine snacks and cafeteria meals sold on California campuses during school hours have fewer calories and less fat...

More here



Gulf War illness "doesn't exist": "There is no such thing as Gulf War syndrome, even though U.S. and foreign veterans of the war report more symptoms of illness than do soldiers who didn't serve there, a federally funded study concludes. U.S. and foreign veterans of the Gulf War do suffer from an array of very real problems, according to the Veterans Administration-sponsored report released Tuesday. Yet there is no one complex of symptoms to suggest those veterans -- nearly 30 percent of all those who served -- suffered or still suffer from a single identifiable syndrome. 'There's no unique pattern of symptoms. Every pattern identified in Gulf War veterans also seems to exist in other veterans, though it is important to note the symptom rate is higher, and it is a serious issue,' said Dr. Lynn Goldman, of Johns Hopkins University, who headed the Institute of Medicine committee that prepared the report."





French fashionistas support anorexia: "The shape and size of fashion models cannot be regulated, the head of the French couture federation has said, after models deemed too skinny were reportedly banned from the catwalk in Spain. Didier Grumbach, president of the couture federation and chamber of haute couture, told AFP late Thursday that "everyone would laugh" if France attempted to follow suit. . Excessively-thin models have been barred from a major Madrid fashion show later this month for fear they could send the wrong message to young Spanish girls, local media reported last week. Madrid's regional government, which is co-financing the Pasarela Cibeles, has vetoed around a third of the models who took part in last year's show because they weigh too little. "That worries me," Grumbach commented: "We are not going to regulate in tastes and colours." "If Jean Paul Gaultier wants to take fat people for his catwalk shows, we are not going to stop him. "When (John) Galliano puts on the catwalk people who are not pretty pretty, no one thinks to reproach him," he added."



Unhealthy spinach (What would Popeye say?): "US supermarkets cleared shelves of bagged fresh spinach on Friday after the Food and Drug Administration warned the produce could be the source of a deadly E. coli outbreak across the nation. One person died, eight suffered kidney failure and more than 40 were ill after eating suspected contaminated fresh bagged spinach in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin, the agency said... Whole Foods Market Inc. and Wild Oats Markets Inc., the top two natural and organic grocers, and Supervalu Inc., the No. 2 U.S. grocery chain, said they have pulled all fresh spinach from their stores... The early FDA warning has probably saved lives, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said, adding that fresh produce is too often contaminated with E. coli, salmonella or other life-threatening pathogens. "Contamination can come from use of untreated manure used as fertilizer, irrigation water contaminated with waste from animal agriculture, or cross-contamination during processing," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, the center's food safety director." [So fresh food is bad for you! What a laugh!]

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

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.

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



16 September, 2006

Could the panic about obesity be making things worse?

Panic: Scare stories about obesity have been coming thick and fast over the last few days. On Friday 25 August, we were told that England would have 13million obese people by 2010 - one million of them children. The government appointed health minister Caroline Flint to co-ordinate action on increasing our activity levels as a result. This week, the British Fertility Society recommended that women with a body mass index (BMI) above 36 should be denied free fertility treatment on the grounds that they were less likely to conceive - although they were only suggesting a national strategy to replace the current hotch-potch of local restrictions that are often even more severe. Thursday saw the release of an `obesity map' of England, with the slimmest areas all being London boroughs, while the areas with the greatest risk of obesity are mostly in the north.

Don't panic: While the grim reports of early death and chronic disease associated with obesity are used to scare us into staying thin, the truth is that while we're getting fatter, we're also living longer. In fact, the government seems to be promoting two contradictory panics at the same time: that life expectancies may fall due to obesity, while the country will be bankrupted by pensioners living too long.

The relationship between obesity and ill-health is much more complicated than the simplistic fat=unhealthy story we are typically given. In fact, being `overweight' is associated with lower mortality than `ideal' weight - and being `overweight' is certainly healthier than being underweight. BMIs above 30 are not necessarily unhealthy either. The key seems to be activity - fat but active people have similar or better health prospects than thin but sedentary people. In any event, obesity is only relatively important as a health risk in younger people. Since young adults don't get sick very often, this relative increase in risk still represents a low absolute risk. As people get older, the effect of age far outweighs the effect of weight.

Not only is the concern about obesity overstated, the anxiety about our weight has all sorts of negative consequences: it screws up our relationship with food; it creates a nation of hyperchondriacs fretting every time they step on a scale; it promotes misery about our appearance. Worse, by encouraging dieting, which in turn leads to most people yo-yoing in weight, it may actually increase the risk of ill-health: people who lose weight and regain it have a greater risk of mortality than those who never tried to lose weight.

Incredibly, because two-thirds of us are categorised as overweight or obese, the panic about obesity manages to demonise the majority of the population. We have created a carnival of self-loathing that surely outweighs any possible benefit from being thinner. As the American commentator Paul Campos shrewdly notes about the `war on fat': `In the end nothing could be easier than to win this war: all we need to do is stop fighting it.'

Source



Landmark Obesity Report: Kids Need To Move, Move, Move

Yesterday the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a "progress report" on fighting childhood obesity in America, and the news wires are burning up. Most impressive about the new report is that, despite being commissioned by the let's-fight-obesity-like-tobacco crowd at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, it places strong emphasis on the role of physical activity in promoting good health.

In particular, the IOM committee took the Bush administration to task for killing the funding of the federal VERB program, which "claimed it led to a 30 percent increase in exercise among the pre-teenagers it reached," the Associated Press reported this morning. Considering the various scientific findings indicating that caloric intake among the young has not increased in the last several years, while physical activity has dropped like a stone, this might have been one of those rare government initiatives that did more good than harm.

Recommendations like those made by the IOM's committee fly in the face of the more paternalistic demands made by the would-be fat-taxers at the World Health Organization (WHO). The panel's praise for the physical activity promotion campaign directly contradicts the claim made by WHO's Robert Beaglehole, who was quoted yesterday: "Let's be very clear -- the answer to this epidemic is not going to come from physical activity."

Naturally, the self-appointed "food police" at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) took the occasion of the report to go nuclear. Margo Wootan, CSPI's chief cupcake crusher, said "the current national response is like putting a Band-Aid on a brain tumor ... We need a whole shift in thinking about how often to eat, what to eat and how much to eat."

As a report in USA TODAY indicates, however, the Big Brother so adored by CSPI isn't likely the man for the job. Instead, it looks like Father, and, even more so, Mother:

Obesity begins at home.

That's the conclusion of nutrition experts who are sorting through a parade of studies released this summer that shows children in all age groups in the USA are gaining too much weight - even babies. And those experts are laying the lion's share of the responsibility on parents, many of whom also are heavy ...

Children say they depend on their parents for the ABCs of good health: 71% say they get information about how to be healthy from their mothers, according to a survey of 1,487 children, ages 8 to 18, conducted for the America on the Move Foundation. And Dad is the resource for 43% of the children.

Source



ARROGANT BRITISH TV COOK CHIDED BY ADVERTISER WHO PAYS HIM



Jamie Oliver, the public face of Sainsbury's, has been slapped down by the supermarket's boss for his attack on the standards of packed lunches offered by parents. The chef and food guru, who has achieved huge success in improving school meals, is angry his work is being undone by parents who provide "junk" packed lunches. He let rip last week, saying those adults who put crisps, chocolate and sugary fizzy drinks into packed lunches are "idiots", coupled with a host of colourful expletives....

However, the food industry claims there is no such thing as bad food and that it is wrong to demonise products high in fat, sugar and salt. Mr King said: "While I agree with Jamie's drive to get children eating healthily, his attack is neither correct nor the best way to achieve a change. "I ate crisps when I was young and drank fizzy drinks. My children do the same and they should be allowed to enjoy them. "There is no such thing as bad food - just bad diets." He added: "Dictating to people - on unleashing an expletive-filled tirade - is not the way to get engagement."

The comments, in a piece written by Mr King in the Guardian, represent a very public dressing down. They suggest that the relationship is strained and put a question mark over whether the annual contract with Oliver will be renewed. Last year, Mr King ordered a full review of Sainsbury's advertising. This included the possibility of dropping Mr Oliver.

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.

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



15 September, 2006

'WTC cough' nonsense

A large study was widely reported as confirming that Ground Zero workers may have been poisoned by toxins. Some healthy scepticism is required -- particularly considering the Greenie preconceptions of one of the authors

The largest study yet of workers who participated in the rescue efforts and clean-up at the site of the World Trade Center attack has been reported as evidence that a spectrum of mysterious health problems were caused by the fumes from the disaster. In a sense that's true, in that we don't know the precise nature and cause of all the respiratory ailments reported five years later by participants in the study. But that is partly a function of the study's strangeness rather than the fumes' strangeness.

Just as the media and politicians should take care not to heighten terrorism's impact by exaggerating the risk it poses to the public, so too should we be cautious about making an already-nervous population think they have been `poisoned'. This does not mean that WTC-related respiratory problems - sometimes referred to as `WTC cough' - are non-existent or that the clean-up workers did anything less than a heroic job by sorting through the Hell-on-Earth that was Ground Zero in September 2001. But we have an obligation to weigh the facts cautiously.

The new study, from Mount Sinai Medical Center, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, should immediately send up some red flags in the minds of sceptics. For one thing, the study is based on reported lingering respiratory problems of a somewhat subjective nature: chest tightness, shortness of breath and dry cough, which are to some extent things that could be exacerbated by stress or more emphatically reported due to stress.

Second, though the report is only being released as I write this, it will be interesting to see if its future critics - and those attempting to replicate its results - discover some selection bias at work in the creation of Mount Sinai's worker cohort (this is only an example of a possible problem and may not prove in the long run to be a decisive one). Since government spending on special health measures for the Ground Zero workers has been a hot-button political issue - as the Mount Sinai scientists doing the study well know - the scientists have been eager to stress the financial dire straits of the workers in their study. As Dr Robin Herbert, co-director of Mount Sinai's World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Programme, told the New York Times, `Our patients are sick, and they will need ongoing care for the rest of their lives' (such a confident long-term projection about ostensibly mysterious illnesses is itself a troubling sign that there is something more than scientific objectivity at work at Mount Sinai). But in stressing the neediness of Ground Zero workers, Mount Sinai inadvertently draws attention to the fact that their cohort of workers is an unusual one in at least one way: a full 40 per cent of them are reportedly lacking health insurance.

A Census Bureau study released the same week as the Mount Sinai report shows that only 16 per cent of Americans lack health insurance. The Mount Sinai study reported a doubling - to 28 per cent - in the number of people reporting breathing problems among Ground Zero workers in their study relative to the number among the general population. Might the stress of being without insurance itself increase the frequency of self-reported breathing difficulties? This is made more likely if the breathing difficulties are defined broadly enough that some 13 per cent of the general American population report such problems, as the study says. The percentage of the general population reporting severe lung impairment or other more clearly physically-measurable problems would be far lower. Socioeconomic considerations are not a vague excuse to dismiss the workers' complaints, but we know, for instance, that asthma rates are substantially higher among New York City poor than among the general population, without knowing exactly why.

It would be unsurprising, of course, if the Ground Zero workers, who were exposed to, among other things, clouds of broken glass particles, have some real problems. Even if those problems are occurring at something like the rate suggested by the Mount Sinai study, though, we should be cautious about leaping to the conclusion that toxic chemicals (rather than more mundane effects such as smoke inhalation) from the Twin Towers are to blame, which seems to be the favoured conclusion of study co-author Dr Philip Landrigan, a founder of the Mount Sinai screening programme.

Landrigan, a pediatrician and environmental health specialist, has blamed an array of health problems over the years on exposure to trace levels of chemicals in the environment, from developmental problems in children to dementia in the elderly. He has called for a complete restructuring of the US food regulatory system based on his belief that children are being harmed by pesticide residues on vegetables. In the ongoing medical evaluation of workers from Ground Zero, he has a globally-watched podium from which to repeat his message that the modern world is a deadly chemical soup from which we need protection.

And politicians have been eager to show that in this case, they will provide protection. Despite claims of government negligence - caused by quick assurances from normally quite risk-averse authorities after 9/11 that most New Yorkers had nothing to fear from Ground Zero fumes - politicians have in fact been rushing to prove their willingness to spend money on care for and further study of the Ground Zero workers. New York Senator Hillary Clinton is leading the way. Campaign ads for Clinton's current Senate re-election campaign stress her effort to boost spending for Ground Zero workers, and even New York City's somewhat more fiscally-restrained mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has combined his assurances that self-reported illnesses are not necessarily caused by Ground Zero with assurances that New York will spend whatever it takes to help workers and do further study anyway.

Bloomberg can't afford to look uncompassionate in the current environment. He has to compete for attention with politicians such as Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who goes beyond wanting to help those exposed to the thick fumes at Ground Zero itself and fears lingering poisonous residues in New York apartments and businesses, saying `I am particularly troubled at the inadequate attention given to contaminated indoor spaces and chronic exposure populations.' Worse, from a public relations perspective, Bloomberg has to compete with figures such as Sister Cindy Mahoney, a nun dying of lung disease who spent six months blessing human remains at Ground Zero and who says she wants her body autopsied to prove that her ailment was caused by being a Ground Zero worker. Perhaps she's right, but one person, however beloved, does not a statistical analysis make.

Maybe future studies will reaffirm Mount Sinai's conclusions, but there is reason to worry that an old and familiar formula in the creation of health scares may also be at work: when the government does not appear to its critics to be reacting quickly enough, all subsequent complaints - and even conspiracy theories - are readily accepted, out of guilt and the desire to avoid looking uncompassionate again. Disasters and highly emotional conflicts often have such side effects: Baghdad veterans have their mystery-illness claims, post-hurricane New Orleans is now rife with conspiracy theories about Republicans and real estate developers dynamiting the city's levees to wash away poor residents (see When swing was again the thing, by Todd Seavey). And in a world where 75 American professors can be found willing to sign off on a statement that 9/11 was actually an inside job orchestrated by the US government (complete with a controlled demolition-by-explosives of the WTC), it would hardly be surprising if we soon hear charges that a conspiracy of silence is imperiling the health of poisoned Ground Zero workers.

At least the Mount Sinai researchers, politicians and common sense are in agreement that further study, not panic, is the rational course.

Source



Green tea saves lives?: "If you are a regular green tea drinker your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease is probably 25% less than most other people who are not regular drinkers, according to a new study by scientists at Tohoku University, Japan. The study, which began in 1994, looked at 40,530 adults aged 40-79 in North Eastern Japan - a region where green tea is commonly consumed - three quarters of the people drink green tea regularly, most of them have two or three cups a day. At the beginning of the study none of them had a history of stroke, coronary heart disease, or cancer. The researchers monitored these people for 11 for 11 years, during which time 4,209 died. During those 11 years 892 died of cardiovascular disease while 1,134 died of cancer. They found that those who consumed five or more cups of green tea a day were 16% less likely to die from any cause than people who consumed one cup or less per day (during those eleven years). The large green tea drinkers' chances of dying from cardiovascular disease was 26% lower than the one-cup-per-day or less people. No link was found between drinking green tea and higher or lower cancer deaths".



Pesky! Working mothers cause obesity: "Consider the issue of obesity. Eberstadt looks at possible reasons for this, but then focuses on the real culprit: absent parents. When kids are kept home alone, they are usually kept inside for safety sake. Thus, they usually end up in front of the TV or computer, instead of running around outside. Also, without a parent at home to prepare a healthy meal, children are often left to live on junk food. These two factors alone explain much of the childhood obesity problem. Common sense bears this out, and research helps to confirm it. For example, we know that children are less at risk of obesity problems if breastfed. But absent mums means little or no breast-feeding."



Work is good for your health: "Working 'makes us happy', an expert has claimed. He found being unemployed could be as dangerous as smoking 400 cigarettes a day. Unemployed young adult males are 40 times more likely to commit suicide than their working counterparts and are also more likely to suffer depression, illness or even die, it was claimed. Statistically, the health risks of being out of work for six months or more are equivalent to smoking 20 packet of cigarettes a day, said a professor at Cardiff University. Prof Mansel Aylward advised us to wander to work with a spring in our step and a smile on our face, happy to avoid the depression of unemployment. He said doctors should be concerned about getting people back to work rather than writing sicknotes because being out of work could be more risky that working on an oil platform or as a safari guide. His analysis of figures from the Office of National Statistics show the depressed unemployed risk serious illness and even death, with young unemployed men 40 times more likely to commit suicide than their working peers. But Professor Aylward, Director of Cardiff University's Centre for Psychosocial and Disability research, also said work can only make us so happy because we each have a threshold that limits how happy we can be."



Anarcho-kitchen: "Nowadays, we are besieged with decrees from the legions of health Nazis that want to take control of our lives. These interfering ninnies want to regulate what we put into our bodies. Many so-called crises are providing the basis for lifestyle fascism, with the most popular being the 'obesity crisis.' One only needs to observe that which is around him to know that obesity, indeed, is a huge problem. But it is an individual's problem, not a social welfare cause from which to bring forth countless totalitarian decrees punishing a majority for the alleged benefit of a minority. Your kitchen is perhaps your first line of defense against the state."

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

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.

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



14 September, 2006

Strangely selective weight loss

Odd that they forgot to mention the $14,050 worth of plastic surgery below



Big Brother bum-dancer Sara-Marie Fedele hopes to inspire overweight young people with her stunning new body. Once tipping the scales at 86kg, the gregarious reality star is now 24kg lighter due to a regime of balance and moderation. The new slimmed-down Fedele will act as a mentor for a group of 16 to 25-year-olds on Channel 9's The Great Weight Debate tonight.

Fedele said she believed young people often battled with their weight because they did not realise how flexible healthy living can be. "Everybody and their body is different," the 2001 Big Brother contestant said. "Don't put pressure on yourself to lose 10kg in 10 weeks. Choose a diet that suits you and your lifestyle. "You don't want to be waking up every day thinking you're on a diet."

Fedele said she dropped the 24kg last year by taking a long-term approach. "I didn't weigh myself, I just took measurements. "And I probably eat more than I ever did before. I just eat healthier food and I make myself eat breakfast, lunch and snacks. "It's all about moderation, which is how I have kept the weight off." Fedele said young people should be wary of thinking weight loss would solve all their body image issues. "I didn't actually change within myself."

Source



BIG HOUSES MAKE YOU FAT?

"Obesity" is being used to push every elitist whelbarrow in sight

Governments have inadvertently encouraged Australia's obesity epidemic by allowing "McMansion" type developments that pay no heed to healthy living, an expert on diabetes has warned. Addressing an international conference in Sydney today, Monash University professor Paul Zimmet said "these ugly dwellings" had been developed across entire residential blocks with no attention to pavements, bike paths, playing fields or exercise areas.

Professor Zimmet, director of the university's International Diabetes Institute, told more than 2000 delegates to the International Congress on Obesity that the obesity pandemic was as big a threat as global warming and bird flu. "This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world, led by affluent western nations, whose physical activity and dietary habits are regrettably being adopted by developing nations," Prof Zimmet said.

He said the problem needed urgent solutions - not just widespread changes to diet and exercise but the rethinking of national policies on urban and social planning, agriculture policy, education, transport and other areas. "In particular, have our state and local governments inadvertently contributed to this epidemic by permitting property developers to give us urban social problems, most noticeably manifest in the ubiquitous McMansion," he said in his opening address to the conference. "These ugly dwellings which are now sprawled across entire residential blocks at the expense of backyards, have also been a key feature of developments without attention to sidewalks, bike paths, public transport corridors, playing fields and friendly exercise areas, attractive and accessible to people who want to maintain their level of fitness and a healthy lifestyle."

World Health Organisation figures show Australia has fast growing obesity rates, with rates among children now double that of the US and triple that of the UK.

Prof Zimmet also warned that the "diabesity" pandemic was set to bankrupt health budgets all over the world. He cited the cost to Australia of treating obesity-related conditions, with the pharmaceutical benefits scheme contributing $1.7 billion to the treatment of heart disease and $220 million towards diabetes remedies last year. He told academics from Australia, Japan, the US, UK, Canada, Sweden, Indonesia and New Zealand that the six-day conference must mark a turning point in the battle against the scourge. "Let us aim to produce debate, analysis and a direction out of this meeting to offer to and partner with our respective governments throughout the world in search of sensible and do-able solutions to this crisis," he told the audience.

He warned people not to "live in their silos with their pet beliefs on fast food, banning TV advertising or taxing junk foods". "We must take a kaleidoscopic view, a panoramic vision, to look at the big picture and acknowledge how our lives and the environment has changed in the last two or three decades," Prof Zimmet said. "Our path to eliminating obesity involves you, government departments of health, sport, education, agriculture, urban planning and transport, industry and the whole community."

Source



Voltaren now bad for you: "Popular over-the-counter painkiller diclofenac - best known under the brand name Voltaren - has been found to increase the risk of stroke or heart attack by 40 per cent. The increase is similar to the extra heart-attack risk created by the now-withdrawn anti-arthritis drug rofecoxib, sold as Vioxx, whose US manufacturer, Merck, is fighting thousands of product-liability claims by patients blaming it for heart attacks or other injuries. The worldwide withdrawal of the bestselling Vioxx two years ago created safety fears over similar "Cox-2 inhibitor" drugs, such as celecoxib, sold as Celebrex. It helped increase sales of alternative anti-inflammatory and painkilling drugs, such as Voltaren. The latest study on diclofenac, published online today by the Journal of the American Medical Association, concludes there are "serious questions over the safety of diclofenac", which is available in Australia both on prescription and over the counter. It is sold as Voltaren, Dinac, Fenac, Diclohexal and under other names. The 50mg diclofenac tablet is one of the top 50 drugs subsidised by the federal Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, with almost 800,000 scripts written in the year to June last year."



Bionic eye?: "Some blind people are a step closer to having sight restored following a breakthrough by Australian researchers developing a "bionic eye". Early tests by scientist at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital have succeeded in stimulating limited visual sensation in people suffering a rare form of genetic blindness. After almost five years of testing on animals, Professor Minas Coroneo said recent human trials had produced positive results using the same technology employed in cochlear hearing implants. "We started with the tests earlier this year using a different approach to other groups," he said. "Instead of putting electrodes on the retina to try and stimulate the eye we have actually been putting them on the outer wall of the eye which we think gives us an advantage. "What we've been able to show is that we seem to be able to get signals through to the brain by stimulating the eye in that way." After the small electrodes were placed on the surface of the eye using a small contact lens, a video camera attached to a pair of glasses was used to pick up images and transfer them to the electrodes via a computer. The electrodes then stimulate the retina to send messages down the optic nerve to the visual area of the brain. "Most of the patients we tested it on see a spot of light and the light gets brighter the more we turn the power up," Prof Coroneo said. "The next step from here is that we want to implant a whole bunch of these electrodes and then run a little wire under the skin to behind the patients' ear where we will have a little plug which we can attach to the computer." However, the professor warned against premature celebrations, saying it would be probably five years until the devices were available.



Germans would be amazed: "The House is once again confronting the slaughter of horses for meat, a practice lawmakers thought they had ended last year. Congress voted in 2005 to stop horse slaughter. But they didn't ban it outright -- lawmakers yanked the salaries and expenses of federal inspectors. In response, the Bush administration simply started charging slaughter plants for inspections. A vote was planned Thursday on whether to put an end to horse slaughter. Critics call the industry un-American." [To be unsentimental about it, horses are basically just cattle that run fast]

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

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.

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



13 September, 2006

Fast food not to blame for fat kids

Children are getting fat because they are missing out on playing with their parents, who are tired when they get home from work, switch on the television and drink a beer. Indeed, children today are eating less fat than they were 30 years ago. A University of South Australia academic yesterday told a state parliamentary inquiry that lack of exercise - not increased fast-food consumption - was a key factor behind the nation's growing childhood obesity epidemic.

Tim Olds, an associate professor of the university's Health Sciences School, contradicted the growing body of evidence linking junk foods with fatter kids. Dr Olds said he had reviewed 1700 published studies around the world researching children's diets over 30 years. He discovered the data showed "a clear drop" in the energy intake of children today compared with up to 30 years ago. He said he was shocked to find that even allowing for under-reporting of food eaten, children aged up to 20 today were eating less, not more - including less fat. "I think it is the 'energy-out' side of the equation that's been affected," Dr Olds said. "No matter which way you turn the data, kids are eating less than they usedto." Two-year-olds in Australia ate 16 per cent less than a decade ago, while the energy intake of 11-year-olds was down 5.6per cent over the same period.

The inquiry into fast foods and obesity has previously heard that higher calorie intake, not less exercise, is the "main determination of weight gain in children". Peter Clifton, co-author of the CSIRO bestselling diet book CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet, gave evidence to the inquiry last month that parents needed to cut sugar-laden drinks and high-fat processed foods from their children's diet.

Dr Olds said social and urban changes meant smaller backyards, with children less likely to play unsupervised outdoors, being driven to school and spending more time playing computer games and watching television. Tired parents did not take their children to the park after work but wanted to "sit down, have a beer and watch the news". Dr Olds called for an active curriculum in schools, which studies indicated would be more effective than dedicated physical activity lessons.

Studies also showed "there was no clear association between consumption of soft drink and the likelihood of (children) becoming overweight" on a population basis, he said. Although bans on junk food advertising "could be a useful strategy", it was "unlikely to cause a change by itself".

Source



Beware of Turkish honey! "Mad honey disease is among the rarest afflictions in the world, but it appears to be on the increase. Only 58 cases have been reported worldwide, but eight people were treated in 2005 alone. The trend towards eating more natural products may be driving a rise in cases of the disease, whose symptoms can include convulsions, low blood pressure, fainting and temporary heart problems, according to a new report. "Mad honey disease has the potential to cause death if untreated," say the researchers. "Because of the increasing preference for natural products, intoxication induced by consumption of honey will increase in the future." Just a spoonful of the wrong honey can cause problems, according to researchers, who report their findings this week in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Mad honey poisoning is most prevalent in honey from the Black Sea region of Turkey. Compounds called grayanotoxins, found in the nectar of rhododendrons, mountain laurels and azaleas, are thought to be responsible for the disease. Though harmless to bees, they are psychoactive and poisonous to humans. Affected honey is said to have a very bitter taste."



Miracle mandarin oranges: "The humble mandarin is being hailed as the latest "super food" after two Japanese studies found that it may dramatically reduce the chance of getting liver cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. A team at the National Institute of Fruit Tree Science studying the health effects of carotenoids - the vitamin A compound that gives mandarins their orange colour - surveyed 1,073 people in the town of Mikkabi, in Shizuoka, who ate a large number of the citrus fruits. They found chemical markers in the population's blood samples that were linked to a lower risk of liver disease, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and insulin resistance (a condition associated with diabetes). A second study found that drinking mandarin juice appeared to cut the chance of developing liver cancer in patients with chronic viral hepatitis. Researchers at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine studied 30 patients suffering from viral hepatitis for a year. Each had a daily drink containing carotenoids and mandarin juice. After a year, no liver cancer was found in the group, compared to a rate of 8.9 per cent among a group of 45 patients with the same condition but who did not drink the juice."

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

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.

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



12 September, 2006

Milk: It (Still) Does a Body Good



With its ideological ties to the radical animal rights movement and ne'er-do-well status among the medical mainstream, the PETA-affiliated Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has repeatedly embarrassed itself publicly with its unsurprisingly science-lite "public health" campaigns. The group's anti-milk crusade stands out as a particularly offensive example of this trend. And, as reported in today's Wall Street Journal, yet another well-regarded medical charity has released dietary advice about dairy that directly contradicts the spook stories and hyperbole propagated by PCRM's activists-cum-nutritionists.

According to new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), "children who are lactose-intolerant should consume some dairy products to ensure that they get enough calcium and vitamin D." As a member of the AAP's committee on nutrition, Melvin Heymann, told the WSJ, "It's OK to take some dairy if you're intolerant. Most people do tolerate some degree of lactose-containing products." Winston Price, a co-author of a report commissioned by the National Medical Association on dairy in the diet of African-Americans, hopes that the AAP recommendations will encourage parents of intolerant children not to unnecessarily "turn away from dairy."

Contrast that with PCRM's stance on milk in children's diets. Neal Barnard, PCRM's founder and president, has written that feeding kids milk is a "form of child abuse." Its annual school-nutrition report cards mark down cafeterias that offer dairy products. And just this year, the group unsuccessfully sued Washington, DC supermarkets in an attempt to mandate lactose-intolerance warnings everywhere milk is sold. But as the AAP recommendations make clear:

Staying away from dairy, which is the richest source of calcium in a traditional Western diet, could be having long-term effects on U.S. children's health. Most older children and teenagers fail to meet their daily calcium requirements, according to a previous AAP study. Calcium intake in childhood and adolescence helps to build bone mass and is thought to protect against osteoporosis. Inadequate calcium is linked with a higher risk of developing high blood pressure and other problems.

It's clear that PCRM is misguided about dairy and always has been. Their track record on this issue should call into question their advice on beef, chicken, bacon, or any other non-vegan-friendly food they decide to talk to about.

Don't expect findings like these to stand in the way of PCRM's anti-dairy propaganda. Its members are part of a movement that sees no moral distinction between human beings and cows, pigs, and sheep. A campaign that jeopardizes children's health for the sake of a few cows is the practical extension of its philosophy.

Source



ORGANIC MILK NONSENSE

The popular press is going cow-wild over research that supposedly proves `organic' milk is healthier than `conventional' milk. Not quite. Just as two cents might be twice as much as a penny, neither amounts to wealth. The issue is omega-3 fatty acids, found abundantly in oily fish (such as salmon, herring and cod), fish oil, walnut and flaxseed oil. Omega-3s have been thought to protect against cancer and heart disease, though the scientific evidence for these benefits has been thin and somewhat elusive.

Now a group of researchers - funded by the organic industry - is claiming that milk from 19 `conventional' farms only contains 60 per cent as much omega-3s as milk from 17 `organic' farms. They claim the finding is `significant', and the press believed it. One newspaper headline in the UK declared: `Organic milk: it looks good, it tastes good and by golly they've proved it does you good.'

The researchers found no other differences, but the increased omega-3 levels were enough for the British organic industry to lobby the government to allow it to claim that its milk is `healthier'. The British Food Standards Agency says it will review the matter but has yet to be convinced that organic milk is any more nutritious. The FSA is right to be wary. The organic food industry has been claiming superior nutrition without evidence for nearly 100 years, and there is little in the new research to change that conclusion.

First, the study really compared pasture-fed cows to cows fed hay and grain. British organic rules mandate that at least 60 per cent of a cow's feed over the course of a full year come from pastures or stored pasture hay produced on the farm. This limits the amount of grain and feed rations the animals can consume. Conventionally raised cows given a primarily pasture-based diet would have the same minor omega-3 levels as organic cows. In contrast to the UK, where the climate allows for pasture-based dairying for much of the year, the majority of organic milk in the US and Canada is from cows fed grain, soy and hay. Many conventional dairies in both countries pasture their cows when they can, but feed during the cold and dry months.

Second, omega-3 levels varied widely, both by season and between farms, including the organic ones. You really have no way of knowing if you're getting the higher omega-3 levels that the organic marketers seem to promise.

Third, milk simply isn't a major source of omega-3 in our diets no matter how it is produced. A modest four ounce serving of salmon provides 60 to 90 times more omega-3s than the difference between an eight ounce glass of UK organic and conventional whole milk.

`Healthy' reduced- and low-fat milk have even less omega-3s because those are removed with the other fats. You'd have to drink six to nine gallons of expensive UK organic low-fat milk to equal the amount of omega-3 in a 2 pounds stg. salmon fillet. And remember, US and Canadian organic milk has even less omega-3 because most is from cows fed grain and hay.

Feed manufacturers are aware of the consumer allure of omega-3s and are adding omega-enhancing oils to animal feeds. They are also researching ways to breed or bioengineer new crop varieties to produce omega-rich feeds at lower cost and with far fewer natural resources than organic farming.

A far more important question, however, is whether omega-3s even have the health benefits claimed for them. The most recent research indicates they don't. An extensive review of past research published early this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association says consuming more omega-3s isn't likely to reduce your cancer risk. The researchers concluded, `A large body of literature...does not provide evidence to suggest a significant association between omega-3 fatty acids and cancer incidence.' Another review of studies from 2002 to 2006 published in April in the British Medical Journal concludes that, `Long chain and shorter chain omega 3 fats' - such as those found in milk - `do not have a clear effect on total mortality, combined cardiovascular events, or cancer.'

So the research funded by the organic industry doesn't add up to any meaningful health benefits whatsoever. Empty nutritional superiority claims are the norm in the multi-billion dollar organic food industry and have been for over 50 years. The bottom line is that milk is milk. If you're really concerned about getting enough omega-3s in your diet, save the organic price premiums and buy your family a good salmon dinner instead.

Source



ANOTHER MENTION OF THOSE WICKED GENETICS

Steinbeck said fighting obesity was not simply a matter of people eating less and exercising more, but discovering environmental and genetic contributors to obesity. "We know this is not about gluttony -- it is the interaction of heredity and environment," said Steinbeck

New obesity research has found that too little sleep and fats from fast food can alter a person's biology, making them more susceptible to overeating and less active, said the International Association for the Study of Obesity. "Research into obesity should be given top priority to have any hope of combating the global pandemic," said Arne Vernon, president of the association. Vernon said millions of obese people were being discriminated against and stigmatized, and often denied access to medical services. "A growing proportion of morbidly obese people are at the extreme end of the spectrum but are stigmatized and ignored," he said.

DIETARY EVOLUTION

Dietary supplements and alternative treatments promising weight loss have minimal or no effect because they cannot match evolutionary influences that cause the body to conserve energy in times of famine, Dr Anne-Thea McGill told the conference. McGill, senior lecturer in Population Health at the University of Auckland, said humans were designed to maximize their energy intake because their large brains used about one-quarter of their total energy expenditure. "Early humans sought energy-dense food with high levels of fats, starches and sugars. We are genetically programmed to find foods with these qualities appealing," said McGill. However, highly energy-dense Western diets have had many of the flavor and micronutrients processed out of them. The artificial replacements in starchy, fatty and sugary foods make them over-palatable and easy to eat quickly."

But too much processed food results in an excess energy intake deficient in micronutrients, producing a state of "malnutrition", which in turn sees the body react to a "famine stress" by storing fat around the upper body, said McGill. "Many over-the-counter remedies such as concentrated herbal preparations, food extracts, minerals and vitamins are promoted as helping to decrease body weight," she said. "However, they do not redress the nutrient imbalance from poor diets that produce obesity."

More here

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

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.

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



11 September, 2006

FAST FOODS STILL WINNING IN BRITAIN



Fast-food chains are having it their way again, and loving it. Despite the best efforts of healthy-eating campaigners it seems that they are losing the battle against junk food. The burger is back - and restaurants are throwing away thousands of salads a day. A Times survey in six British cities this week confirmed that the industry's brief flirtation with healthy eating is over.

During a day of observation in branches of McDonald's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken only two customers in Manchester and one in London ordered a salad. No one in Newcastle, Bristol, Birmingham or Maidstone was tempted. Sales of other healthy options such as "grapple bags" of apple slices, carrot sticks and fruit juice were only slightly better, and in several restaurants there were no fresh salad options in stock at all. Hassan Ahmed, the manager of the Burger King on Martineau Way in Birmingham, said that his customers were not interested in using the restaurant to pursue the "healthy, balanced diet" endorsed on the company's website. "We buy in three cases of salad each week. I only order them in because I have to. But we bin most of them at the end of the week because they don't sell. "It's the same with the bags of fruit, we waste more than we sell. Last week we sold 28 salads and it's usually about half that."

The picture is the same in fast-food restaurants across the country. Damian Wills, the manager of a McDonald's in Filton, Bristol, said that his customers had stopped ordering salads as soon as the novelty wore off. "As with most promotions, when they were introduced they were `the flavour of the month' - and about a month later people had moved on. People will always go for chips over lettuce." A Burger King spokesman said that salads were a "very small part of our sales".

Salads and sandwiches make up less than 10 per cent of McDonald's sales. As Steve Easterbrook, the president of McDonald's UK, announced this year: "We are a burger business. Our traditional menu - hamburger, cheeseburger, Big Mac, quarterpounder, chicken sandwich - is front and centre of our plans." He probably would not have said that a year ago at the height of Jamie Oliver's school dinners campaign and amid the success of Morgan Spurlock's stomach-churning documentary Super Size Me, which raised awareness of the health risks posed by fast food.

This came after a period of sustained pressure on the fast-food industry, during which McDonald's reported its first loss in almost 50 years and restaurant chains were forced into concessions to healthy-eating campaigners, including providing more varied menus and publishing extensive nutritional and sourcing information about their products.

Now it appears that the industry has weathered the storm. A ban on junk food advertising for children is no nearer despite Britain having the highest level of obesity and the highest rate of "on-the-go" eating in Europe. Oliver is reduced to swearing at parents for continuing to feed their children fatty foods and sugary fizzy drinks despite all the warnings.

Predictably, the counter-attack against healthy eating is fiercest in the United States. A new generation of "indulgent offerings" for the hungrier American has culminated in the Burger King Stacker Quad: four beef patties, four slices of cheese, four strips of bacon and no vegetables in a bun. It contains 1,000 calories and as much saturated fats as one person should consume in a day and a half, according to US government recomendations. Fast-food companies say that they are merely providing what their customers want. "We listened to consumers who said they wanted to eat fresh fruit," a spokesman for Wendy's, an American burger chain, said. "Apparently they lied."

Source



RAMPANT ALLERGY OPTIMISM



A cure for allergies that affects millions including asthma and hayfever will be available within the next few years, experts have revealed. Cutting-edge research from around the world will yield a treatment for hay fever by 2009, with a cure for asthma following shortly afterwards. Treatments for potentially fatal food allergies are also in the pipeline - and vaccines capable of preventing a host of dehabilitating conditions in a single jab could be available in just ten years. The injections, pills - and even drops that dissolve under the tongue - will transform the lives of the millions of Britons whose lives are blighted by conditions from hay fever to potentially lethal nut allergies.

Researcher Dr Ronald van Ree said: 'This is not science fiction, it is realistic.' Jonathan Brostoff, Professor of Allergy at King's College London, said he believed treatments for peanut allergy based on manmade proteins have 'a big future'. Vaccines could be even more successful. 'If there is an effective vaccine for peanut allergy, it will transform the lives of patients,' he said. 'If there was a vaccine that was amazingly effective for all asthma and all hay fever, then who wouldn't want in on it? Anything that improves the lives of allergy sufferers is a boon.'

The astonishing news comes as the health service spends 1billion pounds a year struggling to cope with an allergy epidemic, with one in three Britons - 18million people - developing an allergy in their lifetime. Rates of asthma have doubled in the last 20 years, with the condition affecting five million people in England alone. Figures for hay fever have also soared, with one in four Britons suffering an allergy to pollen. There has also been a sharp rise in anaphylaxis, the most severe form of allergic reaction, with more than 3,000 people taken to hospital and up to 20 dying last year.

The research, which is being conducted at labs around the world, centres around finding ways to or dampen down allergic reactions. Symptoms, such as rashes, itching and swelling, occur when the immune system reacts badly to a food, a pollen or something else 'foreign' to the body. Scientists have worked out that the problem lies not in the entire food or pollen grain, but in proteins that form just a small part of them. They are now looking for the key proteins, studying their structures and then recreating them in harmless forms. Injected into the body, these manmade proteins could prevent the immune system from going into overdrive the next time it encounters a rogue pollen or food.

French and German firms have successfully identified the critical proteins in pollen and are now testing a treatment on humans. The result could be an effective hay fever treatment in three to five years. A therapy for asthma is expected to follow shortly afterwards, the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich heard yesterday. In New York, scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital are making inroads into the protein responsible for peanut allergy. Other researchers are trying to tackle the problem by keeping the immune system in check.

Studies have shown that people regularly exposed to bacteria and other germs - such as farmers who drink unpasteurised milk - are up to ten times less likely to develop allergies. It is thought that some of the bacteria in the milk dampen down the immune system, and so prevent it from reacting badly to pollen and other foreign invaders.

Scientists at Sussex-based drug firm Allergy Therapeutics are among those looking at ways to coax these bugs into keeping the immune system in check. Dr van Ree, of Amsterdam University, said the two approaches will be combined by the end of the decade - creating a cure for hay fever. 'I think that is realistic within three to five years,' he said. 'For peanut allergy, from the product in the lab to the product in the market, we will need at least seven years.' Pills for shellfish and other food allergies would follow....

More here

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

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.

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



10 September, 2006

Inconvenient centenarians challenge Left ideology

Early man was thought to have an average life span of about 20 years. Of course a large number died when they were quite young. Living into your teens probably meant you would live into your 50s before dying. Yet today one of the fastest growing age groups are people over 100 years of age. The world average is dragged down by the death rates in Africa. In the developed world people are easily living into their 70s and 80s. It certainly is not unusual anymore to reach this milestone. The Queen Mother lived to over 100 and so did entertainer Bob Hope.

Not only are people living longer but they are living healthier. The elderly are far more active than they were in the past. The UN says "the world is literally being turned upside-down." What they mean is that in the past the number of very young was high while those who were elderly were very low. But with low birth rates and long life spans the young form a smaller and smaller base while the elderly, at the top of the pyramid, increase in numbers at rates never before seen.

The UN says the number of elderly will increase from 580 million in 1998 to almost two billion in 2050. In 1998 there were some 66 million people over the age of 80 by 2050 they expect the number to grow to 370 million. Those over 90 years old will grow from 56.6 million to 311 million over the same time period. And those over 100 years of age will grow from around 135,000 to 2.2 million. China, which will have one of the fastest ageing populations in the world, is expected to have 472,000 centenarians by 2050. The US will have around 298,000, Japan 272,000 and India 111,000.



There are a few lessons we can draw from this. One is that the hysteria about how modern life is so unhealthy is so much cow manure. The only place in the world where life span is low, Africa, is also the one place in the world where the "unhealthy" modern lifestyle hasn't been developed. Modernisation leads to longer lives not shorter ones.

A second lesson comes from that inverted pyramid the UN was talking about. Modern welfare states are based on the idea of the normal pyramid. They can't survive the inverted pyramid. They survive because they assume that the generation of elderly will be easily outnumbered by the working young. So older recipients of pensions and large shares of health care will be supported by a growing number of young.

But birth rates are low and the old aren't dying the way they used to. So the numbers paying into the system are declining while the numbers relying upon it are growing. And the politicians in the welfare states are too cowardly to do anything about it now. They are hoping the collapse will come on someone else's shift. In other words the old are bad news for the ideological Left which who condemn modern living while worshipping the welfare state. I want to see the old, especially the very old, as something good. Someday I want to be one of them.

Source



Death to cleanskins! "Shaving less than once a day could increase a man's risk of having a stroke by around 70%, researchers have found. The link between needing to shave infrequently and stroke risk emerged from a 20-year study of over 2,000 men aged 45-59 in Caerphilly, south Wales. At the time the study began, in the late 70s, the prevailing trend was to be clean-shaven, so infrequent grooming is unlikely to be due to a desire for designer stubble. Researchers from the University of Bristol say it is more likely to be because a man needed to shave infrequently, due to having less testosterone in their bodies."



Chinese vaccine looking good: "A Chinese vaccine against H5N1 bird flu has raised hopes of swift protection if the virus mutates into a pandemic form. Trials of the vaccine in 120 volunteers showed that it produced a good immune response at low doses. In an emergency, enough could be produced for 675 million people. The Chinese vaccine consists of the H5N1 avian flu virus inactivated so that it cannot cause disease, combined with an additive (adjuvant) that enhances the immune response. A group of 120 volunteers aged between 18 and 60 were given either a dummy formula or the vaccine at doses of 1.25, 2.5, 5 and 10 micrograms with aluminium hydroxide as the adjuvant. After 56 days, the researchers report in The Lancet online, all of the vaccine doses produced antibodies against the virus, with the best response in the 10-microgram group. This dosage stimulated 78 per cent protective antibodies, exceeding the European Union minimum requirement of 70 per cent"

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

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.

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



9 September, 2006

PILL FOR LONGER SEX

In the Woody Allen film Play It Again, Sam, the technique used was to think of the names of famous baseball stars, whereas some sexologists recommend the more mechanical “stop, start, squeeze” method. Now scientists may have come up with the first pharmaceutical means of tackling premature ejaculation — using a class of drug usually associated with treating depression. In trials involving 2,600 men, researchers in the US have shown that a new drug could prolong sexual intercourse by more than three times the duration previously experienced.

If approved after more tests, the drug will be the first designed to tackle the problem, which is experienced by 20-30 per cent of men. Participants in the trial typically concluded intercourse in less than a minute. Speed may be desirable in a racing pigeon or a sports car, but in sex the laurels tend to be won by the slow. A “normal” time between penetration and climax, the drug manufacturers Johnson & Johnson discovered, with the aid of obliging couples and a stopwatch, is 7.3 minutes.

Men on anti-depressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — SSRIs, the class to which Prozac and Seroxat belong — typically complain of dulled sexual sensation and delayed orgasm. But what is a curse for them may be a benefit for others, so Johnson & Johnson set out to develop an SSRI specifically for delaying orgasms.

Today The Lancet publishes the results of trials carried out at 121 centres in the United States. Men were randomly given either placebos or different doses of dapoxetine. As is typical in sexual studies, the placebo proved pretty effective, prolonging intercourse from less than one minute to 1.75 minutes. But the drug did better. A 30mg dose produced 2.78 minutes and a 60mg dose 3.32 minutes. While hardly Don Juan standard, this was a significent result, marred only by some side-effects. Nausea, diarrhoea, headache and dizziness were reported.

Nevertheless, the team, led by Professor Jon Pryor, of the University of Minnesota, concluded that dapoxetine was “an effective and generally well- tolerated treatment for men with moderate-to-severe premature ejaculation”.

During the trial, which lasted twelve weeks, couples were asked to attempt intercourse six times or more per month. The tablets were to be taken between one and three hours before starting intercourse, and the time to ejaculation and any side-effects were to be noted in a logbook. “Dapoxetine also improved patients’ perception of control over ejaculation, satisfaction with sexual intercourse and overall impression of change in condition,” the team noted. “Partners benefited through improved satisfaction with sexual intercourse.” Dapoxetine, although an SSRI, is not designed to ease depression, though that may be a useful side-effect in some cases. It takes only an hour to achieve maximum concentration in the blood and is virtually eliminated from the body within 24 hours.

Dapoxetine is made by Alza Corp, of Mountain View, California, a wholly owned subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Given the prevalence of premature ejaculation, it could become a money-spinner. If so, it will eliminate an opportunity for perfect sexual manners of the kind exhibited by caring women. “It’s not that you’re too fast, but that I’m too slow,” may be a lie, but it has consoled many a despairing man.

Source



Know-all British chef fails to convince the kids: "Eighteen months after successfully campaigning for healthier school meals, the celebrity chef finds in his new programme that the national take-up of school dinners has fallen by 2 per cent. Instead, children are eating more packed lunches — most bursting with crisps, biscuits and fizzy drinks. The answer, says Oliver, is clear. Parents must stop sending their children to school with junk food. Although many parents work, he also urges them to cook a Sunday roast or breakfast once a week. “I’ve spent two years being PC about parents, but now is the time to say, ‘If you’re giving your young children fizzy drinks you’re an a*******, you are a t*****. If you give them bags of crisps you’re an idiot,’ ” he tells viewers. Oliver says he would like there to be a ban on all packed lunches but does not expect to see that happen. While they exist, however, he says parents could make them healthier. “I have seen kids of the ages of 4 or 5, the same age as mine, open their lunchbox and inside is a cold, half-eaten Mc- Donald’s, multiple packets of crisps and a can of Red Bull. We laugh and then want to cry,” he said after the screening. He said that if a teacher told parents that their child was very tired at the end of the day, it was wrong for parents to think the solution was a can of Red Bull because “it gives you wings”. “You might as well give them a line of coke,” he argued. By the end of the documentary, Oliver has extracted a further 240 million pounds until 2011 from Tony Blair, a voluntary ban on junk food advertising for children, which he denounces as “a bit wet”, and a commitment for a kitchen- rebuilding fund."





Herbal fat-pills a con: "Herbal supplements designed to help shed weight are virtually ineffective because they cannot beat the body's efforts to conserve fat, an obesity expert claims. New Zealand academic and doctor Anne-Thea McGill has told the International Congress on Obesity in Sydney that the modern diet is lacking in nutrients... The University of Auckland researcher said this combination of too much processed food, excess energy and micronutrient deficiency produces a state of malnutrition. In the face of nutritional stress, the body predicts tough times and adapts by creating fat stores. "The body reacts to the famine stress by storing fat around the upper body,'' Dr McGill said. People who struggle with their weight are often enticed into buying over the counter vitamins and herbal remedies to help shed their kilograms. But Dr McGill said such concoctions had not been effectively tested in large-scale medical trials and were virtually ineffective in the face of the body's 'famine'. "Many over-the-counter remedies such as concentrated herbal preparations, food extracts, minerals and vitamins were promoted as helping to decrease body weight,'' Dr McGill said. "However, they do not redress the nutrient imbalance from poor diets that produce obesity.'' ... She said supplements, beyond being ineffective, could even produce serious adverse effects if taken in large doses. For example, large doses of beta carotene had been associated with an increased risk of lung cancer in smokers and studies giving vitamin E in people with cardiovascular disease had been shown to increase risk of heart failure, the doctor said."

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

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.

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 September, 2006

CANCER-PREVENTION VACCINES

Probably oversold but hopeful



A vaccine could cut the number of cervical cancer deaths in Britain by more than three quarters - saving more than 800 lives each year. The figures were revealed by a computer model that is used by experts funded by GlaxoSmithKline - which makes the Cervarix vaccine - to work out its effectiveness.The model was based on the assumption that all 12-year-old girls in the UK (376,385) were vaccinated, and that women continued to participate in the cervical screening programme. It means that the lives saved would be in addition to deaths prevented by screening.

The vaccine is targeted at girls who are not yet sexually active and protects them against infection from the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. The vaccine is used against HPV 16 and HPV 18, the commonest cause of the disease. However, in trials the vaccine has also been effective against two other HPVs, 45 and 31, the third and fourth most common strains. If this is the case deaths could be cut by a further 3 per cent.

In practice, it is unlikely that every girl would be reached. But if only 80 per cent were vaccinated cancer cases and deaths are predicted to fall by 61 per cent. It is believed that HPV 16 and 18 are also involved in cancers of the vulva and vagina. While they are comparatively rare, the vaccine could also protect against them.

The study, which was carried out by a team that included the HPV researcher Dr Eduardo Franco, of McGill University in Canada, and Michael Drummond, of York University, will be presented today at the International Papillomavirus Conference in Prague.

Yesterday the conference heard of new results from a rival vaccine, Gardasil, made by Merck and to be marketed in the UK by Sanofi Pasteur. Gardasil is designed to protect against HPV 6, 11, 16 and 18 and the results reported yesterday suggest that it is also effective against 31, 45, 52 and 58. Margaret Stanley, professor of epithelial biology at the University of Cambridge, said: "These data are very exciting as they show that Gardasil may potentially provide some protection against additional cancer-causing human papillomavirus strains to those specifically targeted by the vaccine. "This means there is the potential that it could protect against strains which are responsible for approximately 85 per cent of cervical cancers."

Both vaccines should also protect against the precancerous stages of cervical disease, causing fewer abnormal smears. When such smears occur women need further investigations and treatments. The GlaxoSmithKline study suggests that its vaccine will reduce abnormal smears by half and treatments for pre-cancerous lesions by up to 59 per cent.

Source



Obesity warriors not listening to the people

Most Australian parents believe exercise, rather than banning junk food ads, is the way to combat childhood obesity. At my research company, Crosby/Textor, we monitor the opinions of hundreds of thousands of people every year. I can confirm that many of these people agree with the host of commentators on obesity: Australia has a fat problem and it needs to be addressed.

It's at this point that the public (that's you and me) seem to part company with so many of the commentators on how to tackle the problem. I haven't done a scientific study of opinions expressed recently in the media by these people - professional or otherwise - but I have been surprised by the lack of balance in the debate.

For most of us it is an equation that necessarily has two sides: calories in, calories out. Yet most of the prescriptions for action focus on the calories in component (food) and give little or no attention to the calories out bit (exercise). Read this newspaper regularly and you'll see several articles with various people demanding that television advertising of food be restricted or that so-called fat taxes be added to some products.

Something didn't seem to add up with this approach, but I couldn't understand it until I took off my pollster's hat and put on my parent's hat. Then it was clear enough: the remedies suggested didn't line up with my experience as a parent. Life is not as simple as controlling what ads the children see or the price of a chocolate bar. Any parent knows that raising children is a jigsaw of demands and opportunities and the challenge is to make the pieces fit.

I wondered how other parents felt about this, so I put my pollster's hat back on and asked them. This was the question put to a scientifically representative group of 400 Australians: "Thinking now about the issue of childhood obesity. Would you say that addressing childhood obesity is more about getting children to eat less fatty foods, or more about banning television ads for so-called 'junk' foods, or more about getting children to exercise more and have more active lifestyles? And would that be much more or somewhat more?"

The results were remarkable. Seven per cent said the answer was much more about children eating less fatty foods and 6 per cent said it was somewhat more about fatty foods. So that's only 13 per cent in total who think the focus should be on restricting fatty foods. Another 7 per cent said it was much more about banning TV ads for so-called junk food and 4 per cent thought it was somewhat more about food ad bans. So that's 11 per cent who think the answer lies in banning TV advertisements.

How many thought it was much more about getting children to exercise more and have more active lifestyles? A little more than 56 per cent. And another 17 per cent said it was somewhat more about exercise and active lifestyles. In all, more than 73 per cent of the 400 people we surveyed across Australia think solving obesity is more about the calories out side of the equation. And fully four in five (80 per cent) people with dependent children agreed that exercise and an active lifestyle are the solution.

So why do a majority of ordinary Australians think so uniformly about the type of practical action needed? Again, I think it's about common sense and common experience. Except for people who live way out in the bush, Australians have access at every supermarket and shopping centre to an amazing variety of food. They can choose between fresh food or processed, high fat, low fat, lots of sugar or none at all, high GI or low GI. A key word here is choice; people choose from this huge range what they want to eat and unless we're planning to fundamentally change our society, they will be free to do so for a long time to come.

None of this is to underestimate the daily personal struggle necessary to ensure we and our children have a healthy, balanced diet. Generally, we know children will get their fair share of lollies and soft drink and chips, and that we have to see to it that they also have water, fruit, dairy, meat and vegetables: good, commonsense food. I don't know one parent who finds this easy but we all accept that the responsibility lies with us.

We also know that many children aren't as active as we were when we were kids. Television, DVDs and computer games are implicated but, like soft drinks and lollies, they are products that we as parents have to regulate.

Much more fundamentally, we have become frightened to let our children out of our sight, worried about the risk of pedophiles or busy roads or some other concern. Many of us are unwilling to allow our children to walk or ride to school, or to disappear on their bikes for an afternoon. We don't like them running around the neighbourhood unless another parent is prepared to watch over them, and we don't feel comfortable about them going to the corner park to kick a ball around.

Yet with both parents working or obligated in some other way, or simply having to prepare dinner or get the housework done, or ensure that the children do their homework, there is often no time to take them to the park or the local pool.

If we're serious about the threat posed by obesity, we must look far more realistically at the circumstances that are creating it and take practical steps towards real change. We need to ensure we have the community infrastructure and physical infrastructure in place to support parents. For example, we should re-examine the role of schools in this issue, including ideas such as health tests and organised activity before and after normal school hours (given that on-site care is already a fact of life for many, we might as well use the opportunity).

We also need to properly assess our fears for our children. If roads are unsafe for cycling, let's build more bike tracks. If we need more police on patrol, let's have more police. If we need public transport to be more frequent and closer to our homes, then let's urge our governments to make that kind of infrastructure investment. If we need to build more healthy activity into the school day, then let's do that.

Parents bear the greatest responsibility when it comes to childhood obesity, but they don't bear it alone. We are collectively responsible for the society we live in and must collectively respond to threats to our collective wellbeing.

That's why we give authority to governments and bureaucracies. These have the power to act on some of the systemic barriers to exercise and active lifestyles.

In the meantime, commentators on obesity need to move outside the five-star comfort of the conference circuit and start connecting with the real issues real people face rather than push simplistic solutions that miss the point entirely. They need to listen to what the public is saying. In this survey, the public is speaking very clearly.

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.

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.

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



7 September, 2006

MOTHER IRELAND IS ON THE OBESITY BANDWAGON TOO

Following is an editorial and letter in reply that appeared in The Irish Times

When it comes to food on the Irish table, a multiplicity of concerns confronts consumers. Likewise, producers and food companies are faced with a different set of ever-changing and demanding issues. The need for nutritional value, safety, traceability and quality, however, arises from both perspectives. The "What We Eat" series in this newspaper over the past week served as a valuable audit of consumer eating trends and food production in 2006.

Above all, it signalled how obesity is the most complex issue of all. It is set to take a terrible toll on future generations if a co-ordinated and sustained response is not pursued by governments, health authorities, those in the food chain - from farm to table - and individual consumers. The new super-sized Irish generation is all too evident. But where does responsibility lie for this disturbing picture of public health?

Prof Michael Gibney of UCD has shifted the focus on to the individual and away from the popular target of blame - the corporate food industry. Some 94 per cent of calories consumed are "home-based". So the problem is largely in our kitchens and is linked to a rushed lifestyle where convenience and indulgence seem to have the upper hand. A majority of people are overeating.

Given the scale of the problem, it is not sustainable for food companies to cling to their view of choice and free trade. Insisting that consumers are demanding lower-fat foods but that their purchasing and eating practices are far different is a cop-out which ultimately restricts genuine choice. Not all companies are guilty on this front. Many, including some multinationals, sense what's coming down the line. Their preferred aim is to generate a product that is healthy, convenient and indulgent. Among others, there are too many instances of shameless pushing of an indulgent and/or a larger portion strategy. Products highlight a benefit such as low fat content that, in effect, conceals high salt or sugar content.

Co-operation with health agencies is possible, as shown by work with the processed food sector in reducing salt levels in Irish foods. An unprecedented preventative health crusade is equally vital. The cost of major health promotion programmes should be tied into social partnership agreements and placed against the savings made in reducing risk factors for chronic disease.

What we eat, however, should not be dominated by negativity. The range and quality of foods has never been better. Food continues to be central to great social gatherings. What's more, in the new Europe the days of blind over-production in agriculture are ending and the food consumer is becoming king.

The reply:

Your Editorial of September 2nd propagates the notion that the alleged obesity epidemic can be blamed on food manufacturers. The thesis seems to be that food, somewhat like cigarettes, is prepared in such a way that it contains dangerous and addictive ingredients and unwitting consumers are forced to eat it, thereby damaging their health. The objective seems to be to blame the food companies in the same way that the tobacco companies were (quite rightly) blamed.

This position is not supportable by rational argument. The food we eat is not poisonous. By and large, there is no such thing as unhealthy food, only unhealthy portions. Someone who eats nothing but lettuce will have as many health problems as someone who eats nothing but hamburgers - probably more, actually. In order to survive and maintain health, the human body requires all of the ingredients contained in our food, and that includes fat, carbohydrates and salt as well as protein, minerals and vitamins. The notion that fatty foods or sugary foods are inherently unhealthy, or just plain bad, is simply nonsense.

The key is how much we eat. Practically all of the food on our supermarket shelves and all of the food in our restaurants is perfectly healthy if eaten correctly, i.e. in the right quantities and proportions.

This is where the focus must shift to individual responsibility. Only the individual can ensure that his or her diet is sensible, balanced and healthy and compatible with his or her daily exercise regime. Food companies cannot possibly do that, nor can restaurant owners, nor can the Government. In this regard, your assertion that the food companies' defence is a "cop-out" is most unfortunate.

Diverting responsibility away from the individual and on to the food companies is the real cop-out. It allows people who might have health problems due to diet to simply blame someone else and do nothing. As long as that persists, nothing the food companies can do, nothing the Government can do, will be of any avail.

I have to confess I am pretty sceptical anyway of media stories of widespread health problems and very confused by media reports. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we are bombarded with scare stories of how we all have lousy diets, and as a consequence are overweight and unhealthy. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, we are terrified by reports that we are and living so long that a pensions crisis is resulting. Which is it to be?

Dr NORMAN STEWART, Malahide, Co Dublin.



THE TRIUMPH OF THE FIDGETERS!

Genetics at work again

People who fidget are less likely to be obese, a new study shows. Associate Professor Catherine Kotz, from the University of Minnesota, in the US, will present the new research at the International Congress on Obesity in Sydney on Thursday. The study indicates orexin-A, a chemical found in the brain which triggers spontaneous physical activity like fidgeting, is more reactive in thin people. It results in them moving for up to two hours longer in a day than obese people, it found.

"You often see some people who are always fidgeting, getting up, in-and-out of their seat, or just really don't sit around much," Prof Kotz said. "And we know other people who do tend to be much more sedentary throughout the day (are heavier)."

To prove the theory, she injected the brains of rats of varying weights with orexin-A to see to what extent their weight affected their response. "We injected orexin-A into normal rats and it caused increased movement," she said. "When we inject it into lean rats they're very sensitive to it, they really increase their movement. The obese rats don't seem to respond. "So that said, to us there is some difference in the orexin-A signalling in their brains."

She said the results are significant because humans also have orexin-A in their brains. She said the results of her study corresponded to the results of another study in Minnesota which found that thin people fidgeted much more than people who were overweight.

Dr James Levine, of the Mayo Clinic, put sensors into the underwear of lean and fat people to measure their movements every half a second throughout the day. The results showed that thin people spent two hours more a day making spontaneous movements than their heavier counterparts.

Prof Kotz said her team were also investigating whether the involuntary movements could be induced to help wheelchair-bound patients. "We're actually studying wheelchair-bound patients who can't exercise," she said. "We know forced exercise can make you lose weight (but) we're (trying) to think of ways of trying to increase non-volitional activity."

Prof Kotz said that while it was not possible for humans to have the chemical injected into the brain, and a pill would be digested before the chemical reached the brain, humans could eventually be treated with orexin-A in the form of a patch on their arm that delivered the chemical straight into the bloodstream.

Source



Junk food tax 'won't stop obesity'

Taxing unhealthy foods in a bid to put the brakes on the obesity epidemic would be ineffective, inefficient and unfair to the poor. Access Economics health expert Lynne Pezzullo said the growing clamour from health experts for a so-called "fat tax" was misguided and would hurt the poor much more than it would hurt the rich. Low-income people who were not obese would suffer unduly as a result, she told an international obesity conference in Sydney.

A "fat tax" also incorrectly assumed that the type of food consumed was the problem rather than the amount of food - a point that was also made this week by federal Health Minister Tony Abbott, who said there was nothing wrong with the occasional "treat". A fat tax was also likely to be ineffective because it assumed consumers would switch to healthier options, although "analyses show demand for food is insensitive to price", she said. "Subsidies that change the price of food haven't been shown to be effective at this stage," she told The Australian. "There's no strong evidence one way or the other."

Experts in Australia and overseas have called on governments to discourage the consumption of unhealthy foods. The chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce, Philip James, and Australian diabetes expert Paul Zimmet made a joint call for intervention last month, urging a ban on all marketing of food to children, strict food and physical activity requirements in schools and the adjustment of "fiscal policies" to increase the price of sugary and fatty foods relative to healthier alternatives.

Ms Pezzullo spoke in a conference debate on the issue of whether childhood obesity "can be improved without the heavy hand of government". She argued that taxes and regulation, such as advertising or marketing bans, qualified as a "heavy hand" and were unnecessary. She said lighter intervention - such as partnerships with the private sector to encourage healthier products, and subsidies - might be warranted. However, she said subsidies were best used to support after-school physical activity programs and other things shown to be cost-effective. The only circumstances where food subsidies might be warranted was in small rural areas where healthy food was significantly more expensive, she said.

One of her opponents in the debate, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation chief executive Rob Moodie said there was "a role for regulation, absolutely" and without it there was "absolutely no way we are going to curb this epidemic". "We have an environment and a culture and an economy that promotes obesity - every message you get is about how you can consume more and be more inactive," he said.

Obesity researchers at the conference yesterday called for a global ban on the advertising of all junk foods and unhealthy foods to children to help curtail the global obesity epidemic, effectively giving junk food similar treatment to the tobacco industry. The International Association for the Study of Obesity is the first member of an alliance of five health bodies, including the World Heart Federation, to back the ban and increase pressure on the World Health Organisation to make a strong stand against marketing techniques that exploit children. There was enough evidence to conclude that food advertising adversely influenced children's health, said Gerard Hastings, professor of Social Marketing at Scotland's Stirling University.

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.

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.

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



6 September, 2006

OLDER men are far more likely to father autistic children

Since autism seems to be linked to high intelligence, these results may mean that smart older guys tend to have more children than dumb older guys

A study involving more than 100,000 children found that those born to fathers aged 40 and over were nearly six times more likely to suffer from autism and related disorders than those with a father under 30. Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said that their research supported the theory that men also have a "biological clock" when it comes to producing healthy babies.

They described the findings as "the first convincing evidence that advanced paternal age is a risk factor for autism spectrum disorder". However the authors could not find a link between a mother's advancing age and autism.

The exact causes of autism remain unknown, but cases of it and related conditions such as Asperger's syndrome - known collectively as autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) - have increased tenfold in the past two decades. They now affect the lives of more than half a million families in Britain. A recent study suggested that the rate could be as high as 116 ASD cases per 10,000 children...

The latest study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, analysed 132,271 Jewish children born during the 1980s in Israel. The researchers found that, if the father was aged 15 to 29 when the child was born, the risk of autism was 6 in every 10,000 children. If the father was 30 to 39, then 9 in 10,000 children suffered autism (1.6 times higher), going up to 32 in 10,000 (5.75 times higher) for fathers aged 40 to 49. The risk was even higher for older fathers.

"This research adds to our knowledge that men also have a biological clock when it comes to reproducing," Dr Reichenberg said. "The sample size for the over-50s was small, so we added it to the results for fathers aged over 40, but our research suggests that very old fathers have around nine times the risk. "The research shows a linear effect - with every ten years, the risk doubles."

The researchers emphasised that the results related to autism and could not necessarily be generalised to apply to related disorders such as Asperger's syndrome. But they added: "This data suggests a significant association between advancing paternal age and risk of ASD."

They said that there were several genetic factors which could be at play, including spontaneous mutations in sperm-producing cells, or discrepancies in how genes are expressed.

Although the fact that all the children were Jewish was a limitation of the study, Dr Reichenberg did not believe it affected the results. More research was needed to see if the findings were replicated across other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

More here



A weighty problem: Neither Australia nor the world can tax itself thin

Robert Malthus, call your office. Contrary to your 1798 prediction that the world would face starvation as population outstripped food supply, the greatest consumption problem of the 21st century is that the world is eating too much. Around the world, humans are getting fatter and experts are tipping all manner of health crises as a result, from an epidemic of diabetes to the possibility that today's young may be the first generation in recent history not to live longer than their elders.

Making the problem particularly difficult for Australia is that ours is thought to be the only country in the world where the childhood obesity rate has overtaken that of adults. At the International Congress on Obesity presently being held in Sydney, experts from around the world have gathered to discuss what to do about the problem. But too many solutions on offer focus on simplistic state action such as taxes on junk food, regulation of fat content and bans on advertising.

At the heart of the matter is choice and what people choose to put in their bodies. Given that obesity rates tend to increase as one moves down the socio-economic ladder, calls for regulation of how people eat have more than a whiff of elitism about them. But there is little evidence that taxing something as vaguely defined as "junk food" would steer consumption in more healthy directions. Processed food and fast food are all more expensive ways to feed a family than some fresh vegetables, pasta or meat quickly and simply prepared; there is more to people's food choices than economics.

Rather than micromanaging menus, governments would do far better to encourage healthy eating through public awareness campaigns demonstrating that eating healthily leaves one with less fat on the waistline, more money in the pocket and more years of life. Demonising weight problems only contributes to eating disorders at the other end of the spectrum. Schools can play a part in ensuring that students are physically active every day, not just for a couple of hours a week. Obese people and parents with overweight kids require positive encouragement to help them change, not the punitive cudgel of taxes and regulations.

Source



5 September, 2006

THE GENETICS OF OBESITY ARE BEGINNING TO BECOME KNOWN

Stocky people battling the bulge may legitimately be able to put their predicament down to being big-boned, according to new research presented at the International Congress on Obesity in Sydney. While the news that a genetic defect causes an increase in fat, muscle mass and bone density may come as a welcome excuse for some, the downside is that it only accounts for about 1 per cent of obese people. "Approximately one in 100 people with clinical obesity defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) more than 30, may have an MC4R gene problem which explains their obesity," said British researcher Dr Sadaf Farooqi.



Dr Farooqi said the MC4R gene is one of the most common genetic causes of obesity. "Working out how the MC4R gene and other genes in this pathway regulate appetite and weight will be important in developing ways to prevent and treat obesity," she said. "This work shows that appetite is very tightly biologically determined and not simply a moral failing." Studies have shown that in severely obese children affected by mutations in the MC4R gene, injections of leptin led to normal appetite and weight.

But Queensland Institute of Medical Research scientist Professor Emma Whitelaw cautioned against viewing genes as an "excuse" for weight gain and said treatment would not come fast enough to save the next generation from the perils of obesity. "You are going to have to do something about the obesity epidemic … we can't wait for gene therapy to solve this problem," she said. "I don't think we can rely on our genetic knowledge to help us save a generation."

Dr Farooqi and a colleague are the lead researchers in an international gene study of more than 2000 severely obese children, which aims to improve the understanding of appetite regulation and body weight.

Source



Food allergy fears are nuts



Unnecessary panic is being spread by warnings over dangerous food allergies in children, says a leading doctor. Professor Allan Colver from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, said the risks were being 'overstated'. Many children are being prescribed adrenaline injection kits for use in emergencies triggered by conditions such as nut allergies but they are more likely to fuel anxiety rather than save lives, he said.

Prof Colver, in an analysis published today in the British Medical Journal, said the public had an exaggerated perception of the dangers of food allergies. This was leading to unnecessary alarm for many families and schools and also to medical advice and management that may be disproportionate to the risk, he argued. In particular, food allergies were often thought to be more dangerous and frightening than conditions like pneumonia, asthma, or diabetes. But the public was wrong in believing severe reactions and deaths - in a small number of cases - were always preventable.



In reality, the risk of dying is very small, with just eight children under 16 dying from food allergy between 1990 and 2000 in the UK, equal to one death per 16 million children each year. Of these, milk caused four of the deaths and no child younger than 13 died from eating peanuts, he said. 'Two of the children died despite receiving adrenaline before admission to hospital, and a further child with a mild food reaction, died from an overdose of adrenaline' he added.

Prof Colver said 229 children were admitted to hospital with a food allergy between 1998 and 2000, with 58 suffering a severe reaction. Just six of the 58 children might have benefited from autoinjectors (adrenaline pens) because the others already had an autoinjector, did not need adrenaline, received adrenaline within 10 minutes from ambulance workers or primary care staff, or were having their first attack, he said. Research showed half of all children testing allergic to peanuts could actually eat them without ill effect. Children may go on to outgrow a nut allergy and most outgrew allergies to milk and eggs, he said. Only a third of families who had an autoinjector for their child could use it properly.

Doctors must recognise that 'liberal prescription' of autoinjectors can cause anxiety and may not prevent death, he added. Prof Colver said 'Even if autoinjectors could prevent all deaths, the cost of giving injectors - which have a shelf life of 15 months - to all UK children with food allergy, for both home and school, is estimated at 20 million pounds per life saved. 'This is in addition to the psychosocial cost of the anxiety.'

However, Professor Jonathan Hourihane from University College Cork in Ireland, took the opposite viewpoint in the same journal article. He said food allergies are at least as prevalent as epilepsy and the most common cause of anaphylaxis - a life-threatening acute reaction - outside hospital. At least two per cent of adults and up to six per cent of pre-school children have had allergic reactions to food. He argued it was wrong to say injector kits were not needed and called for better training for doctors. He said 'Although there are worries that the provision of autoinjectors may increase anxiety I know of no evidence to support this notion. 'My experience is precisely the opposite. Anxiety can be minimised by expert review and support. 'We just don't have enough experts' he added.

Source



4 September, 2006

Don't be deluded that this is the cancer breakthrough

Last week's news of a melanoma 'cure' is the latest in a series of advances that lack staying power, says John Cornwell

It's been a heady fortnight for medical science. First there was thrilling news from the great stem cell bazaar. The boffins, it was claimed by the US biotech company Advanced Cell Technology, had got around a tricky ethical conundrum that would now allow researchers to experiment with human stem cells without actually killing off viable human embryos. Stem cell research could go full steam ahead to the final frontiers - cures for everything from damaged spinal cords to blindness - free of George Bush's evangelical scruples.

Hot on the heels of this comes a revival of the fortunes of that other "Next Big Thing" that never quite made it despite an ethical clean bill of health (save that the cure all too often turned out worse than the disease). The return of gene therapy. Two dying men with malignant melanoma, it was announced on Friday in the American journal Science, had been cured after their genetically engineered white blood cells turned into "cancer hunters" and mopped up proliferating malignant cells. If it works for this virulent form of skin cancer, argue the exultant scientists, then it could work for other cancers.

But before cracking open the champagne, there's more than a shiver of deja vu about the news. Is this the same gene therapy that was promised in the dying days of the old century? The $3 billion Human Genome Project, widely announced as the cracking of nature's code, was promoted through the 1990s as the beginning of the end of the 4,000 diseases that affect humankind: just find the faulty gene, send in a harmless carrier virus to knock it out or correct it, and Bob's your uncle.

Well, there was clearly no doubt genetic testing would reveal many of the secrets of the human body: including breakthroughs in isolating genes for specific cancers or who was likely to get Huntington's disease, or early heart disease, or diabetes - if you really wanted to know. But gene "therapy" was another matter.

On the eve of the millennium an Arizona teenager, Jesse Geslinger, suffering from a mild form of ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, which affects the body's ability to process ammonia, volunteered for genetic therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. A gene correction aimed at curing him was attempted in the form of an engineered "carrier" virus injected into his liver. He developed an infection and three days later he was dead.

It was a tragedy not only for Jesse's family but for the entire genetic medical science community. But genetic therapy researchers held their breath and tried again. The following year, 2000, two infants suffering from SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency disorder), causing them to live inside bacterium-free bubbles, were treated by a similar gene "correction" strategy at Necker hospital in Paris.

In October 2002 one of the children was found to have leukaemia. When the second child developed leukaemia a year later the trials were halted. As James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, remarked laconically: "Gene therapy seems to have cured the children's SCID but caused leukaemia as a side effect."

The record of gene therapy, so far, should give us pause before rejoicing over the melanoma cures in the US. In the first place they were just two claimed successes out of 17 similarly treated patients, and melanoma has a way of coming back after a patient has been declared free of it. In the second, scientists in the business of battling with cancer these past 40 years have given up on discovering anything like a magic bullet.

Winning the war against cancer, as the preponderance of the world's oncologists repeatedly stress, is a long hard slog on a great many fronts. The surest and longest-term successes appear to be in the middle ground of hormone and protein research rather than at the level of genes: the kind of strategies that have made Herceptin, the breast cancer drug, an apparent success.

As Professor Bruce Ponder, one of the British contributors to the discovery of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes, tells me: "We have come a long way in the past two decades and what we see is dauntingly complex. It's like walking on a waterbed: resolve one problem and five or six others pop up somewhere else. It is not one disease, it's hundreds."

Ponder's belief in the multi-dimensional nature of cancer and its treatment is a crucial aspect of his direction of one of the largest cancer research sites in Europe at Cambridge, where 500 scientists will eventually be studying the disease in collaboration with clinicians. Genetic therapy is a crucial and continuing part of the war, he avers - he is, after all, a geneticist.

But three years back, on the 50th anniversary of his great discovery with Francis Crick, Watson reflected sadly on the fact that genetic therapy had not lived up to anything like its great expectations. "Diagnostics," he declared, "are now our most powerful weapons . . . in the case of prenatal diagnosis it is the prospective mother who should make the decisions."

Which brings us, ironically, back to an ethical connection between genes and stem cells. The supposed breaking of the moral scruple of human embryonic research involves the discovery that it is possible to extract a single cell from the embryo at the 8-cell stage of development and to nurture that extracted cell into a stem-cell line for potential therapies. Such extractions are being done routinely in diagnostic testing of embryos for suspected genetic faults such as Down's syndrome; and objections persist.

Those who would quarrel with prenatal diagnostic testing as well as human embryonic experiment form, of course, a much wider constituency than George Bush and the Pope. Discovery of Down's syndrome in prospect, or cystic fibrosis, is one thing. But where, ask many ethicists, does it end? Choice of sex? Colour of eyes?

Furthermore, there are as yet no controlled experiments to prove that individuals who have grown from embryos deprived of a cell at the 8-cell stage will be normal. One can only speculate about the day when an accused villain in the dock cops the plea that his embryo was deprived of a crucial totipotent stem cell.

Source

The above article might also have mentioned that there is a certain degree of spontaneous remission in cancer -- remissions that are attributed by the recovered patient to everything from intercession by St John Ogilvie to a diet of fruit and nuts. The two survivors out of 17 in the trial mentioned above would not seem to be readily distinguishable from that



The poor are the fattest in Britain too: "Old mining and steel towns top the league for overweight people on an obesity map of England. The London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has the lowest levels. Research by the analysts Experian and Dr Foster Intelligence point to a clear North-South divide. Poorer former industrial towns dominate the ten fattest areas, while the well-to-do people from more affluent areas in London and the Home Counties dominate the ten slimmest. The data can be broken down so that it is possible, for example, to name Oak Road in Easington, Co Durham, as the street where residents are at highest risk of obesity, and St Mary's Gate, Kensington and Chelsea, as the lowest risk. Researchers used a combination of health survey analysis and social profiling to identify hotspots for obesity risk. First they drew data from two national surveys - the Health Survey for England and the British Research Market Bureau's Target Group Index - to extract information on height, weight and "lifestyle choices" of 33,000 people across the country."



3 September, 2006

Evangelicals guilty of the sin of obesity

The Ten Commandments are old hat to Leftists but obesity is the unforgivable sin

"America is becoming known as a nation of gluttony and obesity, and churches are a feeding ground for this problem," says Ken Ferraro, a Purdue sociology professor who studied more than 2,500 adults over a span of eight years looking at the correlation between their religious behavior and their body mass index.

"If religious leaders and organizations neglect this issue, they will contribute to an epidemic that will cost the health-care system millions of dollars and reduce the quality of life for many parishioners," he says.

Ferraro's most recent study, published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, is a follow-up to a study he published in 1998, where he found there were more obese people in states with larger populations of folks claiming a religious affiliation than elsewhere -- particularly in states with the most Baptists.

So it's not surprising that Ferraro's latest study found that about 27 percent of Baptists, including Southern Baptists, North American Baptists, and Fundamentalist Baptist, were obese.

Surely there are several contributing factors to such a phenomenon, but when Ferraro accounted for geography (southern cooking is generally more high-caloric), race and even whether overweight folks were attracted to churches for moral support, the statistics still seem to indicate that some churches dispense love handles as well as the love of the Lord.

Having attended a Southern Baptist church for most of my formative years, I was hardly shocked by Ferraro's discoveries. From the coffee (and doughnuts) hour after Sunday-morning worship, to the huge potluck dinners and the Sunday-night ice-cream socials, there was always food around, and it was rarely the lo-cal variety. Ambrosia salad. Seventeen different kinds of chicken/broccoli/cheese casserole. Banana-and-Nilla-wafer-pudding. Fried chicken. Barbecue chicken. Sweet tea. Those were the elements of our social sacraments at the Baptist church.

In religious traditions where drinking alcohol, smoking anything and even dancing are vices regularly preached against from the pulpit, overeating has become the "accepted vice," Ferraro says.

More here



Naturopathic killing: "A self-proclaimed naturopath accused of killing one of his patients has faced a Sydney court for the first time. Jeffery Dummett appeared in the NSW Supreme Court today, charged with the manslaughter of Vecko Krsteski. An inquest held last year into Mr Krsteski's death was terminated by deputy state coroner Jacqueline Milledge, who referred the matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration of criminal charges. The inquest was told that Mr Krsteski died during a live-in detoxification program at a natural therapies clinic run by Dummett at Oatley, in Sydney's south. The 37-year-old security guard, who had chronic renal disease, died from a heart attack and renal failure on February 26, 2002."



Foolish fears: "Many asthmatic women stop taking vital medication during pregnancy because of unfounded fears the drugs will harm their unborn child. Scientists say this worrying practice – which endangers the child rather than protecting it – was uncovered by recent Australian research. Asthma affects more than two million Australians and is one of the most common chronic diseases to complicate pregnancies. A literature review by scientists at the Hunter Medical Research Institute in Newcastle found more than half of Australian women with asthma will have an inflammation in their condition during pregnancy. About 20 per cent will need treatment. The problems usually occur in the second trimester and are triggered by a viral infection or failure to take the inhaled steroid medications to prevent or relieve asthma. Co-author Vicki Clifton said this was particularly concerning given that pregnant women who suffered asthma complications were more likely to have low birth weight or premature babies. "Many women stop taking their asthma medications during pregnancy because they are concerned about side-effects," Professor Clifton said. "This study clearly shows that the medications do not impact negatively on the baby, but not taking them is placing their babies' health at significant risk."



2 September, 2006

Body the enemy in battle of bulge

There's bad news for people trying to slim down - the body is programmed to resist weight loss, new Australian research reveals. It is well known that dieters and people exercising to shed kilos often hit a plateau - a point where weight loss stops which is difficult to push past. Queensland University of Technology researcher Neil King has found this plateau can remain in place for a prolonged period even when people exercise or diet. "But I found out that if people keep exercising and taking energy out of their system they can still stay at a constant body weight," Dr King said yesterday.

The research, to be presented at the International Congress on Obesity in Sydney next week, involved two studies of obese and overweight people. In the first, 30 obese men and women from Britain took part in a 12-week, lab-based program in which they exercised five times a week. The second study looked at weight loss in 200 Australian men on a continuing commercial weight-loss program which involved both exercise and dietary advice. Both groups plateaued despite the regime differences.

Members of the British group lost an average of 3kg during the first eight weeks. But progress levelled out drastically at week eight, with participants shedding just 0.7kg in the last four weeks. Dr King believed the body struck a plateau because it was designed to cope with famine, "not the current obesogenic environment which enforces inactivity and a plentiful food supply".

Source



A six-pack pill coming?While achieving a toned and muscular physique is hard enough, maintaining it can become a chore. For the would-be Brad Pitts among us, help is at hand. Scientists are on course to develop a drug that would allow people to maintain their six-packs without the need for exercise. Research into muscle wastage - intended primarily to treat weakness in the sick and elderly - could lead to therapies that enable healthy people to preserve a buffed look without lifting a finger. While muscles can be built up with exercise, they start to break down quickly without it, so it is necessary to keep exercising to prevent muscles wasting away... "Those in the field agree that the question is no longer if we can develop anti-wasting treatments, but when," New Scientist says. "While there are valid medical applications for anti-wasting drugs, as a safer alternative to steroids they will inevitably be hugely tempting for athletes too, not to mention the lazy well." Two independent teams, one at Harvard University and one from a pharmaceutical company called Regeneron, have identified genes named atrogin1 and muRF1 which are active only during muscle atrophy. In rats, when these are knocked out, the animals suffer much less muscle wastage from disease or disuse. A third team, at Purdue University, Indiana, has found another gene, erg1, which also contributes to the process. Its influence can be affected by an existing drug called astemizole, although this has been withdrawn because it can interfere with healthy heart activity."





A win against cancer: "A postmaster dying of the most dangerous form of skin cancer is one of two men to have been saved after their white blood cells were genetically engineered to fight their tumours. The trial in the US provides the first direct evidence that normal immune system cells can be altered genetically to become tumour-hunters, raising the prospect of a new generation of treatments for cancer. While the therapy has been tried on only the most virulent form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma, which accounts for about 3 per cent of cancers in Britain, scientists are convinced that it should work eventually for other tumours, such as those of the breast or lung. The team at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) have already tailored human white blood cells to recognise and destroy other cancers in the laboratory and are planning to test these on patients soon... Of 17 melanoma patients who were given cells tailored to fight their tumours, only two responded. Even so, these two cases offer proof of the principle that the adapted cells can survive, then shrink tumours"



1 September, 2006

Boomers targeted in new waistline scare

Below is Steven Milloy's comment on the same study that I critiqued yesterday. He also points to the unrepresentativeness of the sample, plus other difficulties

"Just a few extra pounds could mean fewer years, study finds," headlined a front-page, above-the-fold story in the Washington Post this week. The study, however, is another pointless exercise in the statistical torture of data that have nothing to confess. "The 10-year study of more than 500,000 adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next decade," reported the Post.

It appears to be scary stuff for baby boomers -- the exceedingly health-conscious demographic group targeted by the New England Journal of Medicine study (Aug. 24). But boomers ought not fret over this study. First, the researchers' statistical methodology is simply incapable of reliably identifying small increases in risk -- that is those on the order of 20 percent to 40 percent. This fact alone qualifies this study as a prime example of junk science. But you don't have to take my word for it -- take the word of one of the study's own sponsors, the National Cancer Institute. "In studies of disease patterns in human populations, risks of less than 100 percent are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident," the National Cancer Institute once stated in an effort to defuse alarm over a study that attempted to link abortion with breast cancer.

The new study is rife with the very problems mentioned by the NCI. The study data is based on questionnaires collected from 567,169 members of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) aged 50-71 living in six U.S. states in 1995-1996. These data are likely biased to some unknown extent since no effort was made by the researchers to ensure that they aren't biased. Not only are the data unlikely to be representative of 50-71 year-olds in the U.S., they're not likely even representative of AARP members since only 18 percent of AARP members completed and returned the questionnaires. Which 18 percent of an already selective demographic? Who knows?

Moreover, none of the data were validated -- not a single study subject's bodyweight, height, smoking status, physical activity level, alcohol intake or any other key lifestyle or genetic factor that might be relevant to mortality was verified by the researchers. Such "self-reported" data are notoriously unreliable.

The study subjects' vital status -- that is, whether they are dead or alive -- were obtained from the Social Security Administration's Death Master File. But the Death Master File doesn't contain cause of death, so the researchers have no idea what killed any of the study subjects. It could very well be that overweight study subjects killed in automobile accidents or violent crimes are counted by the researchers as being killed by their bodyweight. The only thing more appalling than the trying to pass off this study as "science" is the shameless effort to prey on the fears of baby boomers.

The editorial accompanying the study, entitled "Overweight and Mortality Among Baby Boomers - Now We're getting Personal," written by Dr. Tim Byers of the University of Colorado School of Medicine starts out, "I am a baby boomer and my body-mass index (BMI) is 27.3. Now that studies are beginning to describe the risk of death associated with even modest levels of adiposity among baby boomers, this issue is getting personal for me."

The researchers, however, didn't study any baby boomers. The average study subject was born in the early 1930s. The youngest study subject was born in 1945 - a year before the baby boom officially began according to demographers. It's hardly a study about baby boomers. More than two years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted to jump-start panic about bodyweight by claiming that obesity killed 400,000 people per year. Readers of this column knew that figure was junk science more than a year before the CDC was forced to revise it downward more than 90 percent to about 25,000.

Recent studies that have also debunked the notions that low-fat diets make us healthier, dietary fiber reduces cancer risk, dietary salt is unhealthy - to name just a few of the health myths that many of us long ago incorporated into our lifestyles. Though sound science is steadily shattering myths long-advanced by our health nannies, they apparently think that the way to reestablish their dubious trade is by marketing new fears to whom they seem to perceive as society's weak link -- aging, health-obsessed boomers. Maybe their ploy will work -- of course it would help if the nannies actually studied boomers before they scared them.

Source



Aspirin prevents miscarriage? "For women who have had unexplained recurrent miscarriages, treatment with aspirin or another blood-thinner to prevent blood clots seems to improve their chances of delivering a live infant, researchers in Israel report. The formation of blood clots, or thrombosis is believed to be one possible cause of recurrent miscarriage, they explain in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility, but it is unclear whether prevention of thrombosis can increase live birth rates. Mordechai Dolitzky,a doctor and colleagues, from Sheba Medical Centre, Tel Hashomer, compared the effect of preventing blood clots with aspirin or enoxaparin -- a form of heparin -- in 104 pregnant women with a history of unexplained recurrent miscarriages. The live birth rate was over 81 percent in both groups, the researchers reported. They said this rate exceeded the expected live birth rate of 40 percent to 60 percent among women with recurrent miscarriages. Five women in each group had preterm deliveries and neonatal complications which was more common in the aspirin group. "Both treatment regimens were associated with a good pregnancy outcome in terms of live births and late pregnancy complications," Dolitzky and colleagues said."

Boob job good for cancer, bad for suicide: "A large Canadian study adds to evidence that women with breast implants do not face a higher risk of cancer or other major diseases, but they may have a higher-than-average rate of suicide. Among the more than 40,000 women in the study, those who'd received cosmetic breast implants had lower-than-average risks of dying from breast cancer, heart disease and a host of other major diseases. The findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, are in line with those of several past studies. Despite concerns that implants might be a risk factor for cancer or other major illnesses, researchers have generally found lower risks among breast implant recipients" [Lots of chicken and egg questions there]