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

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

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



30 September, 2007

SOME SOPHISTICATED EPIDEMIOLOGY AT LAST

Medical research normally ignores the role of social class -- even though it is known to have important and complex effects on health. In the case below, however, the original research appeared in a Sociology journal, and sociologists are acutely aware of the importance of social class. So if we read the original article (Abstract given) we find that an effect which could easily be attributed to social class was not wholly so caused. Women who have babies early tend to be of lower social class and so it could be class which predisposes them to illness in later life. The authors in this case, however controlled statistically for social class and found an effect that went beyond class. But the study is after all an epidemiological one so WHY women who have babies earlier tend to die young we simply do not know. Any number of possibilities spring to mind, however. That women who have babies young tend to be risk-takers and risk-taking has many hazards would be one possible explanation

Early childbirth risky for women

Women who have their first child before the age of 20 are at a higher risk of chronic diseases and death when they reach middle age, a new study shows. The study, which appears in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior , said that women who are single at the time they have their first baby could also be at risk of earlier death - an outcome that probably relates to socio-economic status later in life after having a child as a young, single woman. "Being unmarried at the time of first birth is associated with lower midlife income and a lower probability of being married in midlife," said study author John Henretta at the University of Florida. "It's not so much the characteristic of being unmarried at first birth that's important; it's what being unmarried at first birth tells us about the midlife status of these women."

Henretta evaluated data from the Health and Retirement Study, focusing on 4,335 women born in the United States between 1931 and 1941. These women were first interviewed in 1992 (at ages 51 to 61) and then followed until 2002. Interviewers were asked about their health, level of education, marital status, wealth, how many children they had and the age of each living child

Source

Journal Abstract:

Early Childbearing, Marital Status, and Women's Health and Mortality after Age 50

Author: Henretta, John C.

This article examines the relationship between a woman's childbearing history and her later health and mortality, with primary focus on whether the association between them is due to early and later socioeconomic status. Data are drawn from the Health and Retirement Study birth cohort of 1931-1941. Results indicate that, conditional on reaching midlife and controlling for early and later socioeconomic status, a first birth before age 20 is associated with a higher hazard of dying. In addition, having an early birth is associated with a higher prevalence of reported heart disease, lung disease, and cancer in 1994. Being unmarried at the time of the first birth is associated with earlier mortality, but this association disappears when midlife socioeconomic status is controlled. The number of children ever born does not significantly affect mortality but is associated with prevalence of diabetes.

Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Volume 48, Number 3, September 2007 , pp. 254-266(13)




Amusing: How is "junk food" defined?

Is salt better than sugar? Nonsensical though that enquiry is

A billion-dollar battle over selling sports drinks and "enhanced" water in public schools has spilled into Congress and threatens to derail a major attempt to cut back the sale of junk food from school vending machines and snack bars. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has introduced a bill that would have the government set new nutritional standards for the foods and drinks that schools sell to students outside cafeterias. But just what those standards should be is the issue, the Washington Post reports.

Public health advocates want the standards to ban the sale of Gatorade and Powerade, which typically contain as much as two-thirds the sugar of sodas and more sodium, as well as sweetened waters such as VitaminWater and SoBe Life Water. Excessive sodium intake by young people could fuel a surge in high blood pressure, which until recently was considered a health threat only in later life, they said, reports Post writer Jane Black.

The trade group representing Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other bottlers, whose annual sales of sports drinks reached $7.5 billion last year, counters that sports drinks and sweetened waters are lower in calories, "appropriate" for high school students and "essential" to young athletes. In 2006, sports drinks were the third fastest growing beverage category in the United States, after energy drinks, such as Red Bull, and bottled water, according to the trade journal Beverage Digest.

The current version of the legislation requires the Agriculture Department to begin developing the rules behind the standards, but industry and public health advocates both favor speeding things up by writing the standards into the legislation itself. Having agreed voluntarily to phase out full-calorie sodas from schools by 2009, bottlers are heavily promoting the sports drinks, and not just to athletes.

Harkin's bill, which he hopes to incorporate into this fall's farm bill, has been co-sponsored by 25 senators. More than 100 organizations, from the American Federation of Teachers to the Yale Prevention Research Center, support the plan. Eager to avoid bad publicity, even the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the American Beverage Association, which have historically resisted any regulation, say they are "open to discussing" federal standards to avoid a patchwork of state and county rules.

But the bottlers do not want the standards to prohibit sports drinks and enhanced waters. Without bottler support, it will be difficult to sign up members of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, which is chaired by Harkin but includes beverage industry supporters such as ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss, who represents Coke's home state of Georgia.

Nutrition experts contend that sports drinks are not as healthful as manufacturers claim. A 12-ounce bottle of Gatorade Rain contains 75 calories, 21 grams of sugar and 165 milligrams of sodium, compared with 150 calories, 40.5 grams of sugar and 52 milligrams of sodium in a can of Coke. [So it is saltier but less sweet]

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



29 September, 2007

Stupid bird flu hype

Your "objective" BBC again

Somehow I missed it, but a BBC video from June of this year, now available on YouTube, is the most alarmist thing I have seen or read on pandemic avian flu. "If you were a terrorist wanting to design a biologic weapon, you couldn't do better than designing a virus like this," claims Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic within the first few seconds. "This is really nature's bio-terrorism." Later he informs us that, "The best scientific evidence is that one or two mutations will be enough to allow this virus to attach easily to human cells and thereby spread from one human to another."

We know now, from the research of David Finkelstein and his colleagues, it would actually take 11 or 12 mutations. Perhaps news of this research hadn't reached Poland in time, but his "best scientific evidence" is a pure fabrication.

Poland also informs us that what "really sent chills through the spines of virologists and vaccinologists, was the recognition that this virus [avian flu H5N1] had now jumped species from birds into mammals." Doubtful. Birds and non-human mammals (particularly swine, apparently) appear to play a vital role in each year's seasonal influenza. A team of researchers led by St. Jude's Robert Webster wrote in the journal Virology that, "most of the influenza virus genes that have appeared in mammalian gene pools over the past 30 years have been shown ultimately to have an avian origin."

Yes, some people will do or say anything to appear on the "telly."

Repeatedly the fear-umentary makes bizarre personifications of the virus, with the narrator more than once insisting the virus seeks "world domination." A Scots doctor tells us, "The human population has never been faced by a virus like this before. This is an utterly evil virus." Do these tiny pieces of protein come complete with Adolf Hitler mustaches?

The narrator also claims, "The virus has started to jump from birds to humans." Actually, the first reported bird-to-human cases were in 1997. It's said that Europeans have a longer view than Americans, but I suspect even Britons wouldn't consider events of a decade ago to be "just." The only "just" aspect of this video is that it's just plain awful.

Source




Fast food: Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Report from Australia



FAST-FOOD makers have made efforts to stop using unhealthy trans fats - but the replacement oils are usually just as bad, an industry meeting was told yesterday. While some fast-food outlets have trumpeted their moves to abandon trans fats, the meeting was told they often turned to equally undesirable oils high in saturated fat. The nation's major fast-food chains, including McDonald's, Hungry Jack's and KFC, held the roundtable meeting to discuss their progress in switching away from frying oils linked to increased risk of heart disease.

"What we have seen, unfortunately, is in reducing trans fats, some of the industry groups have introduced fats that are very high in saturated fat, like palm oil," said Heart Foundation food strategy director Susan Anderson, who addressed the meeting in Sydney. "The commitment from the group today was to address both the trans fats and the saturated fats." Ms Anderson did not identify which fast-food providers had made the error.

A low-grade oil known to contain trans fats is also made up of 48 per cent saturated fat. Palm oil contains no trans fats, but its saturated fat content is 55 per cent. The companies were urged yesterday to switch to oils such as canola or grapeseed oil, which have no trans fat and are less than 10 per cent saturated fat.

Other fast-food chains represented at the summit include Domino's Pizza, Eagle Boys Pizza, Jesters, La Porchetta, Oporto, Red Rooster and Subway. The roundtable was chaired by federal Liberal senator Brett Mason, who said the sector had moved "very quickly" to address trans fat concerns and their focus was now on reducing the saturated fat in their food production. "It would be a bad thing if trans fatty acids left the diet and saturated fats went up," Senator Mason said. "Industry accepts that they do have a social responsibility to look at this issue. Let's face it, it harms people's health and it costs the community a lot of money." The fast-food industry is under threat of regulatory intervention unless sufficient progress is made towards cutting trans fatty acids by 2009.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



28 September, 2007

A MOST interesting study of ill health among war veterans

Anti-malaria drug PREVENTS cancer. A fascinating finding. Australia had conscription during the Vietnam war so the sample is unusually representative. Dapsone is quite an old drug but is still not well understood. It is related to the Sulfonamides

Australia's Vietnam veterans were not harmed by taking the drug Dapsone to protect against malaria, a new study has found. The finding has eased veterans' concerns that Dapsone might have contributed to health problems they suffered in later life. Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Billson said the study showed the incidence of cancer among those who took Dapsone was actually 10 per cent lower than in a comparison group of veterans.

But, like earlier studies into the cancer and mortality of Vietnam veterans, the study confirmed that Vietnam war service had adverse effects on the health of many veterans, he said. "The overall incidence of cancer in both groups of veterans is significantly higher than in the Australian population," he said in a statement. "For those who took Dapsone it was seven per cent higher and 20 per cent for those who didn't." [In other words, dapsone eliminated two thirds of the bad effects. Most impressive. IT WOULD SEEM TO SUGGEST A PREDOMINANTLY BACTERIAL CAUSE IN THE GENESIS OF CANCER AMONG VETERANS]

Vietnam Veterans Association national president Ron Coxon said veterans had been concerned that they might have been used as guinea pigs to test a drug that had health risks. "We had serious concerns that the veterans on Dapsone might have had some serious side effects from that medication," he said. "But from the controlled studies that have been done it would appear that is not the case ... this would seem to allay that."

Dapsone is an anti-bacterial drug most commonly used in the treatment of leprosy. During the Vietnam war, some Australian troops took the drug Paludrine as an anti-malarial agent, while some took both Paludrine and Dapsone. A royal commission into the effects of the herbicide agent orange on Australian troops in Vietnam, established in 1983, reviewed the use of Dapsone and recommended there be further study into whether it caused cancer.

The report released on Wednesday is the fourth and final volume of The Australian Vietnam Veterans Mortality and Cancer Incidence Study. This study, produced by the Department of Veterans Affairs in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, examined all army veterans deaths identified from the end of Vietnam service to 2001, and all cancers diagnosed from 1982 to 2000. It compared death and cancer rates among those who consumed a combination of Dapsone and Paludrine with those who used Paludrine alone and concluded there was little evidence that Dapsone was associated with an increased cancer risk.

"There are case reports of cancers among persons who have taken Dapsone, but no specific or unusual site of cancer consistently appears in these reports," it said. "None of the reports gives a biological argument for an association of specific cancers with Dapsone use." It said most cases described in scientific literature as developing cancer had been taking Dapsone in high doses over long periods to treat leprosy. "The study revealed no definite evidence that Dapsone exposure (among Australian servicemen in Vietnam) was associated with an increase in total cancer incidence," it said.

Source




Men who smoke risk erectile dysfunction

The dose-response relationship and the normal sample makes this study fairly convincing

OTHERWISE healthy men who smoke risk developing erectile dysfunction - and the more cigarettes they smoke, the greater the risk of erectile dysfunction, according to a new study. Erectile dysfunction is the consistent inability to achieve or maintain an erection sufficient for satisfactory sexual performance.

In a study of 4763 Chinese men aged 35 to 74 years who were free of blood vessel disease and who reported that they had been sexually active within the last six months, the researchers found a significant statistical link between the number of cigarettes smoked and the likelihood of erectile dysfunction. "The association between cigarette smoking and erectile dysfunction was found in earlier studies," said first author Jiang He of Tulane University School of Public Health, New Orleans. "However, most of those studies were conducted in patients with hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes and cardiovascular disease. What distinguishes this study is that it is the first to find this association among healthy men."

Overall, men who smoked had a 41 per cent greater risk of erectile dysfunction than men who did not, the team reports in the American Journal of Epidemiology. And there was a clear "dose-response" relationship, meaning that the more the men smoked, the higher was their risk of erectile dysfunction.

Compared with non-smokers, men who smoked up to 10 cigarettes per day had a 27 per cent greater likelihood of erectile dysfunction ; those who smoked 11 to 20 a day had a 45 per cent greater likelihood of erectile dysfunction; and those who smoked more than 20 cigarettes daily had a 65 per cent greater chance of suffering erectile dysfunction. The investigators estimate that 22.7 per cent of erectile all dysfunction cases among healthy Chinese men - or 11.8 million cases - might be caused by cigarette smoking.

And even when cigarette smokers quit, their risk of developing erectile dysfunction did not decrease. The risk of erectile dysfunction was statistically about the same for former cigarette smokers as for current cigarette smokers, the authors found. "This study really has a strong message for young men," He said. "It may get their attention if they know that smoking is associated with erectile dysfunction - even in the healthy population." "So the message is: Don't start."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



27 September, 2007

FISH DIET PREVENTS DIABETES?

Groan! Surely the defenders of the Omega 3 religion can come up with better than this! The study reports the usual crappy "association" (i.e. cause intrinsically unknown) and it not even based on actual Omega 3 intake -- only on REPORTED intake! I don't think I really need to say more but I could mention tiny study, weak effect, indirect criterion and non-normal "sample" etc.

There are many big studies showing Omega 3 to have no beneficial effects on cancer etc. but the belief in fish seems to be deep-seated so SOMETHING that it is good for must be found. Since most people enjoy eating fish, however, no harm is done

A diet rich in fish and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids helped cut the risk that children with a family history of diabetes would develop the disease, US researchers said. "It is a relatively large effect," said Jill Norris, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "It is exciting because it suggests we might be able to develop nutritional interventions to prevent diabetes."

Type 1 diabetes, formerly called juvenile diabetes, is the most common form of diabetes in children. It occurs when the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking insulin producing cells in the pancreas. No one knows exactly what triggers this process, but heredity and environmental factors such as diet are thought to play a role. Several studies in animals have suggested that omega-3 fatty acids - which are found in fish, flaxseed oil, walnuts, soybeans and other foods - may help.

To test whether omega-3 fatty acids offer a potential protective effect, Jill Norris and colleagues at the University of Colorado at Denver studied 1,770 children between 1994 and 2006 who were deemed at high risk for diabetes because of genetic tests or because they had a sibling or parent with type 1 diabetes.

Data about their dietary intake were collected in food frequency surveys. Fifty-eight children in the study developed antibodies for the disease. The researchers found at-risk children who ate a lot of foods rich in omega-3 were less likely to develop islet auto-immunity - antibodies against the cells in the pancreas that precede full-blown diabetes. "This is the first study to show this," Norris said in a telephone interview. "This is all omega-3 fatty acids, not just the kind that are found in fish. "It is certainly not time to make any recommendations until we can see this in other populations," she said, adding that it is a very promising result.

Omega-3 fatty acids interfere with enzymes that play a role in inflammation, a potential trigger for type 1 diabetes. Omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, and researchers are studying whether they can slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, some cancers and macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.

At least 194 million people in the world have diabetes, and the World Health Organisation expects that number to rise to more than 300 million by 2025. Most of these people have type 2 diabetes, which is linked with poor diet and lack of exercise. People with type 1 diabetes often must take insulin injections to control blood sugar levels.

Source

Abstract follows:

Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Intake and Islet Autoimmunity in Children at Increased Risk for Type 1 Diabetes

By Jill M. Norris et al.

Context Cod liver oil supplements in infancy have been associated with a decreased risk of type 1 diabetes mellitus in a retrospective study.

Objective To examine whether intakes of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are associated with the development of islet autoimmunity (IA) in children.

Design, Setting, and Participants A longitudinal, observational study, the Diabetes Autoimmunity Study in the Young (DAISY), conducted in Denver, Colorado, between January 1994 and November 2006, of 1770 children at increased risk for type 1 diabetes, defined as either possession of a high diabetes risk HLA genotype or having a sibling or parent with type 1 diabetes. The mean age at follow-up was 6.2 years. Islet autoimmunity was assessed in association with reported dietary intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids starting at age 1 year. A case-cohort study (N = 244) was also conducted in which risk of IA by polyunsaturated fatty acid content of erythrocyte membranes (as a percentage of total lipids) was examined.

Main Outcome Measure Risk of IA, defined as being positive for insulin, glutamic acid decarboxylase, or insulinoma-associated antigen-2 autoantibodies on 2 consecutive visits and still autoantibody positive or having diabetes at last follow-up visit.

Results Fifty-eight children developed IA. Adjusting for HLA genotype, family history of type 1 diabetes, caloric intake, and omega-6 fatty acid intake, omega-3 fatty acid intake was inversely associated with risk of IA (hazard ratio [HR], 0.45; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.21-0.96; P = .04). The association was strengthened when the definition of the outcome was limited to those positive for 2 or more autoantibodies (HR, 0.23; 95% CI, 0.09-0.58; P = .002). In the case-cohort study, omega-3 fatty acid content of erythrocyte membranes was also inversely associated with IA risk (HR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.41-0.96; P = .03).

Conclusion Dietary intake of omega-3 fatty acids is associated with reduced risk of IA in children at increased genetic risk for type 1 diabetes.

JAMA. 2007;298:1420-1428.




Germs taken into space return more dangerous

Worrisome if replicated

It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened. The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs, so they took some along - carefully wrapped - for the ride. The result: Mice fed the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.

"Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can't sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it's important that we understand ... how they're going to change," explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University. Nickerson added, in a telephone interview, that learning more about changes in germs has the potential to lead to novel new countermeasures for infectious disease.

She reports the results of the salmonella study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.

After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched. After 25 days, 40% of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10% of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth. The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.

Why? "That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100% certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes." However, they think it's a force called fluid shear. "Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects." "There are areas in the body which are low shear, such as the gastrointestinal tract, where, obviously, salmonella finds itself," she went on. "So, it's clear this is an environment not just relevant to space flight, but to conditions here on Earth, including in the infected host."

She said it is an example of a response to a changed environment. "These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive," she said.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



26 September, 2007

Mobile phones are safe, but let's panic anyway

The experts' schizophrenic message about mobiles captures society's curious love/dread relationship with new technologies

What is it with the mobile phone scare? Study after study has failed to find any evidence that using a mobile phone causes brain cancer (or `fries our brains' as the tabloids like to put it). And yet the authors of all the studies still warn us to be super-careful when it comes to mobiles: to avoid using them too often, and to think twice about giving handsets to our children. You know, just in case these little electronic bundles of bleeps and radiation might cause some unknown harm now or in the future. Like something out of a dimestore horror novel, the scientists' and politicians' message to society seems to be: `Mobile phones are safe.or are they?' (Indeed, Stephen King, the master of horror-writing, depicted the mobile as an evil machine that turns people into flesh-eating zombies and telekinetic psychos in his novel Cell, brilliantly capturing contemporary society's curious love/dread relationship with new technologies.)

Now, just as spiked has launched a new debate on the `mobile footprint' in conjunction with the mobile service provider O2, another study finds, yet again, that mobile phone-use is safe - and it warns, yet again, that we should err on the side of caution anyway. The continuing failure to uncover evidence that mobiles are bad for our health, coupled with the continuous warnings that mobiles might be bad for our health, shows that the mobile phone panic has little to do with science. This is not an `evidence-based' scare, to use the buzzphrase of the moment. Instead, the mobile has become a metaphor for a generalised free-floating feeling of fear, and for today's widespread sentiment that everything should be treated as dangerous unless it has been shown beyond a shadow of a doubt to be 100 per cent impeccably safe.

The latest study, published yesterday by the UK Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme, is the work of 28 teams of experts. With a budget of 8.8million, they spent the past six years exploring possible health impacts of mobile phone-use. Their conclusion? That there's no evidence that mobiles cause cancer. The experts said their findings were `reassuring', showing no association between mobile phone-use and brain cancer and `no evidence' of immediate or short-term harms to health from mobile phones. The six-year study also `failed to substantiate' any of the wild claims that have been made about mobile phone masts causing increased cancer rates amongst the communities in which they are erected. As Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman, said: `This report is good news for the public, phone users and the industry. There is no basis on health grounds for any further tightening of regulations or advice on mobile phone masts or the use of handsets.'

Phew. Except.the authors of the study decided to flag up what they don't know as well as what they do. Professor Lawrie Challis, chairman of the research programme, said: `We cannot rule out the possibility that cancer could appear in a few years' time, both because the epidemiological evidence we have is not strong enough to rule it out and, secondly, because most cancers cannot be detected until 10 years after whatever caused them.' So while the report was `reassuring' on the safety of mobile phone-use now, `we can't reassure people about the long-term use', said Challis. Some of the researchers even pointed out that it took 10 years for anyone to realise there was a link between smoking and cancer. It is true, of course, that it's impossible to rule out some potential future harm from mobile phone-use; it is impossible to prove a negative: that mobiles will never pose any risk at all. But should we really worry that chatting to our mates on a mobile might be doing to our brain what sucking in smoke does to the lungs? Surely health advice should focus on warning people of proven dangers, rather than pushing us to fantasise about hypothetical worst-case scenarios?

As well as talking up future unknowns, the research coordinators threw into the debate what we might call `present unlikelies'. They said there was a `very slight hint' of increased incidences of brain tumours among long-term users of mobiles, which is at `the borderline of statistical significance'. That sounds to my admittedly unscientific mind like a roundabout way of saying there is possibly a statistically insignificant risk of harm to some users.

Consequently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a study which found no association between mobile phone-use and cancer, and which was welcomed by sensible scientists as a green light for us to continue chatting and texting to our heart's content, has been transformed in some quarters into a document which foretells mankind's diseased doom. `Mobile phones could cause cancer to long-term users', said the London Evening Standard. `Mobile phones: they could cause major cancer explosion in years to come', bellowed an online alternative health magazine. It is a sad sign of the times when even a seemingly airtight scientific study which found no evidence that mobiles are bad for our health can generate handwringing headlines claiming that mobiles are.bad for our health!

A headline in The Times (London) captured the schizophrenic message sent out by this latest research project: `Mobile phones don't cause cancer in the short-term. Long-term, who knows?' This is not the first time that a study has found no evidence of harm yet posited the possibility of harm. `Who knows?' just about sums up officialdom's attitude to new mobile communications and their possible impact on our heads. In 2000, the report Mobile Phones and Health, generally known as the Stewart Report after Sir William Stewart, who chaired the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones that produced it, found that: `The balance of evidence to date suggests that exposures to RF radiation below [official] guidelines do not cause adverse health effects to the general population.' However, the report also said that `it is not possible at present to say that exposure to RF radiation, even at levels below national guidelines, is totally without potential adverse health effects'. So it recommended that `a precautionary approach to the use of mobile phone technologies be adopted until much more detailed and scientifically robust information on any health effects becomes available'.

In January 2005, Sir William Stewart launched a report by the National Radiological Protection Board, the government's advisory board on radiological issues. That report simply restated existing knowledge on mobile phone-use (that there is no evidence of harm to human health), yet Stewart chose the occasion of the report's launch to `speak from the heart'. He said: `I don't think we can put our hands on our hearts and say that mobile phones are totally safe.' Therefore we shouldn't give them to children under eight, he advised. Needless to say, Stewart's heartfelt but non-scientific feeling that mobiles might be bad for little'uns - his elevation of the heart over the mind, one might say - stole headlines away from the fact that, yet again, a report had failed to uncover evidence of mobiles damaging health. Also in 2005, a study published in the British Journal of Cancer, which surveyed data from five European countries and the health of 4,000 people, found that using a mobile for up to 10 years poses no increased risk of acoustic neuroma (a rare tumour of the nerve connecting the ear to the brain). How did the Health Protection Agency in Britain respond to this study? By saying: `This is good news.but we still need to be a bit cautious.'

From Stewart in 2000 to the big new study this week, this is the precautionary principle in action. The fear of mobile communications demonstrates the extent to which super-precaution - the idea that everything should be treated as dangerous until it has been proven safe beyond all doubt - dominates public discussion today. The evidence to date suggests there is nothing inherently dangerous about mobile phones or masts - and yet, precisely because they are so commonplace and now so central to our everyday lives, they have become the focus of general fears about new technologies, invisible signals, radiation, environmental destruction, bullying and just about everything else. This has led to a schism: on one hand, studies suggest mobile phone-use is safe, and sales figures show that people find them extremely useful for both work and play; on the other hand, there is ongoing political and public trepidation about the spread of mobiles and masts and what impact they might have on The Future. Consequently, even as millions of people enjoy the liberating aspect of always being communicado, there is also a lurking sense of unease that contributes to a general anxiety about everyday life, and especially its impacts on our children.

The mobile is the ideal metaphor for today's culture of fear. Society's discomfort with breaking technological boundaries, because of the impact it might have on the environment or human health, is projected on to the mobile and mobile phone masts. So is officialdom's fear of potentially `toxic' human contact. Some seem uncomfortable with the idea of millions of people talking and texting anywhere and anytime they please; witness the numerous shock stories about mobiles being used to bully people, or even to lure them into being kidnapped. This fear of mobiles is likely to be doing more damage than mobiles themselves, certainly in the here and now. While we can be fairly sure that mobile phones are not damaging our health, the precautionary principle is harming society: it is slowing down new technological developments, stunting investment in newer and improved forms of communication, and spreading fear and queasiness amongst the population.

Source




Arrogant bastards now dictating to SENIORS what they can eat



It was just another morning at the senior center: Women were sewing, men were playing pool - and seven demonstrators, average age 76, were picketing outside, demanding doughnuts. They wore sandwich boards proclaiming, "Give Us Our Just Desserts" and "They're Carbs, Not Contraband." At issue is a decision to refuse free doughnuts, pies and breads that were being donated to senior centers around Putnam County, north of New York City. Officials were concerned that the county was setting a bad nutritional precedent by providing mounds of doughnuts and other sweets to seniors.

The picketers said they were objecting not to a lack of sweets but that they weren't consulted about the ban. "Lack of respect is what it's all about," said Joe Hajkowski, 75, a former labor union official who organized the demonstration. He said officials had implied that seniors were gorging themselves on jelly doughnuts and were too senile to make the choice for themselves. C. Michael Sibilia said, "I'm 86, not 8."

Inside, some seniors said they missed the doughnuts but others said they were glad to see them go. "It was disgusting the way people went after them," said 80-year-old Rita Jorgensen. "I think the senior center did them a favor by taking it away."

Stan Tuttle, coordinator of nutritional services for the county's Office for the Aging, said the program had gotten out of control. As many as 16 cases of breads, cakes and pastries were delivered, by various means, to the William Koehler Memorial Senior Center each day. Some were moldy and some had been stored overnight in the trunks of volunteers' cars, he said.

Caregivers there and elsewhere say the doughnut debate illustrates the difficulty of balancing nutrition and choice when providing meals to the elderly. "Senior citizens can walk down to the store and buy doughnuts. Nobody's stopping them," said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. But he notes that older people have high rates of heart disease and high blood pressure and says senior citizen centers, nursing homes and assisted-living centers should not be worsening the health problems of seniors.

At the North East Bronx Senior Citizen Center, lunch is served five times a week (suggested contribution $1.50). "We don't tell them what to do, we don't force them to eat what's good for them. But we certainly don't give them anything that's bad for them," said center director Silvia Ponce. The church-basement senior center, one of 325 under the New York City Department for the Aging, has a mostly Italian-American clientele, a Naples-born cook and a menu that includes eggplant parmigiana, linguini with clams and manicotti. "We try to give them what they like," said the cook, Stella Bruno.

The lunches have to supply one-third of the federal minimum daily requirements in such categories as calories, protein, vitamin C and vitamin A, said Chris Miller, spokesman for the department. The Bronx center offers coffee, tea, bagels and rolls in the morning, but nothing in the doughnut family. "The sweetest thing here is the raisin in the raisin bagel," said Nicholas Volpicella, 87.

Maureen Janowski, director of nutrition resources for Morrison Senior Dining in Atlanta, which provides meals at more than 370 senior living communities, says residents' food preferences depend somewhat on their age. Those born between 1901 and 1925 generally prefer meat and potatoes, and those born between 1925 and 1942 are "a little more trendy, a little more adventurous, a lot more nutrition-savvy," she said. "They have choices, and we show them how to make good choices," she said.

At the Bronx center, Bruno said she tries to help the seniors avoid the bad buffet choices when they take a trip to Atlantic City. As a group was departing, she handed them bag lunches - with a roast beef sandwich, cranberry juice and carrot sticks. "Protein, vitamin C, vitamin A," she said.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



25 September, 2007

CLASS BIAS AND THE WAR ON FAT

Professors Brownell and Campos discuss how culture and class affect the debate over obesity. Note that Brownell simply assumes that fatness is a serious health problem and offers "solutions" that are completely empty-headed -- such as "safer neighborhoods". Safer neighborhoods are desirable on all sorts of grounds but how do you achieve that? If Brownell represents the conventional wisdom -- and he does -- it shows how empty that wisdom is. Amusing that it is lawyer Campos who looks at the obesity crusade as a psychological phenomenon, not psychologist Brownell. A psychologist who ignores the psychology of the matter is a rather good advertisement for how assumption-laden the whole obesity crusade is

Why poverty leads to obesity

By Kelly D. Brownell

It is a mistake to think that obesity is a problem only in certain social or racial groups. It is rampant in all races, in both genders, and across all ages. It would be mistake as well to believe that race and social class do not matter. The prevalence of significant obesity (body mass index over 30) in the U.S. population is 29% for Caucasians, 34% for Hispanics and 40% for African Americans. Fully 78% of African American females are overweight or obese.

Social class is also a big deal. The likelihood of being overweight in the poorest 25% of the population is twice that of people in the highest quarter of economic class. With obesity comes a wide array of serious diseases, including some, such as hypertension, that strike particularly hard at some ethnic groups. Children born into poverty will have illnesses far in excess of what confronts others, both in their childhood and later in life.

These stark effects of race and poverty on diet, activity and obesity might seem counterintuitive -- poverty should lead to food deprivation, plus poorer people are more likely to be engaged in hard physical labor. Toss away intuition. People living in poverty find it hard to be physically active. Leisure time is rare and concerns with neighborhood safety keep both children and adults indoors. Poor individuals are less likely to work for companies with fitness facilities, and there is no discretionary income to join health clubs, have personal trainers, etc. Poor schools have worse facilities and fewer organized sports, and safety issues prevent children from walking or biking to school.

Food is a major issue as well. Studies have shown that poor individuals have limited access to healthy foods and considerable exposure to high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods. Declining numbers of supermarkets in inner cities is part of the reason. In 1963, there were 34 full-service supermarkets in inner-city Los Angeles; that number had dropped to 14 in 1991. By 2002, there were only 5. If one does not own a car, a trip to a supermarket might require several transfers on a bus and then the task of carrying groceries on the return trip.

Poverty not only complicates access to stores with healthier foods, but drives people toward cheap foods. This encourages purchase of packaged snack foods, sugared drinks and fast foods, and discourages purchase of the more expensive fruits and vegetables. The reality stares us in the face - poverty discourages physical activity and encourages excess calorie consumption. Anything but sky-high rates of obesity, diabetes and other diseases would be surprising. So what does one do with this information? Blaming the victims for making bad choices is common, but more helpful would be an honest assessment of the conditions that create the problems, and solutions based on the causes.

Zoning laws and tax-incentive programs can encourage supermarkets to open in poor neighborhoods. Food stamps might be changed to allow bonus money for the purchase of fruits and vegetables. Safer neighborhoods would help encourage activity. Better funding of schools makes them less susceptible to deals with soft-drink and snack-food companies. Another step would be to reduce advertising for calorie-dense, low-nutrition foods, shown in studies to be directed disproportionately at minority populations. Bold action is necessary. The nation will make progress only by recognizing that real change requires real change.

Inflicting white neuroses on nonwhite women

By Paul F. Campos

Americans are obsessed with fat because fatness has become a symbol for poverty, downward mobility, nonwhiteness and socially marginal status in general. Fear and hatred of fat has very little to do with the health risks associated with being "overweight" and "obese" (which are wholly imaginary and highly exaggerated, respectively), and everything to do with the symbolic meanings that thin and fat bodies have in this culture.

The fundamental strategy of the war on fat is to universalize the attitudes of middle- and upper-class white American women toward weight, food, dieting and exercise. Such women are taught from a very early age to hate their bodies, to be terrified of fat and to turn eating into an endless moralistic struggle between the imperative to eat appropriately petite portions of supposedly "good" foods while avoiding the quasi-erotic seductions of "bad" foods.

This, of course, is a recipe for producing an epidemic of eating disorders, which is precisely what we've managed to do. Indeed, the current panic over "obesity" resembles nothing so much as the projection of a classically eating-disordered world view onto an entire society.

And, increasingly, we're successfully exporting this worldview. For example, until a few years ago, anorexia and bulimia were unknown in the western Pacific. But with the advent of cable television and programs such as "Baywatch," adolescent girls in these cultures have begun to act like so many of their American counterparts as they learn that they have the "wrong" kinds of bodies.

Recognizing a golden marketing opportunity, companies such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig have begun to target their advertising at African American and Latina women because, as Laura Fraser points out in her book "Losing It," most white women already "can't make it through a day without getting disgusted with themselves for not having a better -- meaning thinner -- body."

You claim that nearly four out of every five black American women are "overweight" or "obese," yet studies generally find that African American girls and women have much more positive views of their own bodies than white girls and women do. Is it a coincidence that studies also record no increased mortality risk associated with even very high levels of body mass among black women?

Needless to say, both diet companies and obesity researchers are doing their best to change this unacceptable situation. Thus we have researchers advocating "the development of culturally sensitive public health intervention programs ... to encourage black youth to achieve a healthy and reasonable (sic) body size." Translation: Let's make black and brown girls feel as bad about their bodies as we've managed to make the average white girl feel about hers.

Indeed, as long as they're fat, it's possible for even a double-plus good-thinking liberal in a magazine like Harper's to express the kind of horror and disgust at the sight of nonwhite poor people that would be considered somewhat problematic in any other context. Thus, after a stroll through downtown Pasadena, during which he encounters the horrifying and disgusting spectacle of fat black and Latino working-class people, Greg Critser asks, "For what do the fat, darker, exploited poor, with their unbridled primal appetites, have to offer us but a chance for we diet- and shape-conscious folk to live vicariously? Call it boundary envy. Or, rather, boundary-free envy."

Perhaps all we "diet- and shape-conscious folk" ought to put down the white man's (or more precisely, the white woman's) burden and stop inflicting our neuroses on everyone else. At the least -- to echo another narrator who traveled into the heart of darkness -- we ought to consider the possibility that, like Mr. Kurtz, our "methods have become unsound."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



24 September, 2007

Imaginary allergies and illnesses

Report from Australia below. I am myself aware of certain women whose health problems vanished when their relationships improved

MORE than five million Australians are suffering "imaginary" food allergies and intolerances, health experts say. Research shows food allergies have become society's new "'fad", with people suffering the symptoms - including rashes, breathing difficulties and stomach cramps - simply because they want to. "The brain is very powerful and can make people react because they think they are going to react," said Jack Bell, a specialist allergy dietitian at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and clinical lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at Queensland University of Technology.

His opinion is backed by research by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Another study carried out in Britain reached similar conclusions.

Figures show up to six million Australians claim to be allergic to foods ranging from milk to mustard - but only one in eight has had the condition medically diagnosed. Mr Bell warned people against diagnosing themselves with an allergy, saying it could lead to eating disorders, vitamin deficiences, unnecessary use of medication and costly medical bills. "It's not uncommon to see people on highly restricted diets that they don't need to be on because they don't actually have an allergy," he said.

Researchers said the latest food allergy to become "popularised" was an intolerance to monosodium glutamate (MSG). Others include milk, eggs, soya beans, wheat, fish, and even an intolerance to fruit and vegetables.

A food allergy is an immune system response to a food that the body mistakenly believes is harmful, and an intolerance occurs when the body finds it hard to digest a particular type of food. An intolerance is harder than an allergy to diagnose because it can take varying amounts to achieve a reaction and it is affected by other factors such as stress and hormones. With an allergy, only a small amount of food is needed for a reaction.

Brisbane nutritionist Anthony Power urged people to seek a medical diagnosis. "There is also a tendency for people to panic unnecessarily and think they have one when really it's just a bit of bloating after a meal," he said. People are advised to see an immunologist or accredited practising dietitian.

Source

A further comment on the above from an upper-class British lady. Excerpt:

Millions of people have imaginary allergies and food intolerances, according to a survey last week. Many of them have diagnosed themselves online; one in 50 says they only noticed their "problem" when a friend had similar symptoms; and 39% of people questioned think it is "trendy" to claim a food allergy. Twelve million people claim to suffer from allergy or intolerance, of which less than a quarter are medically diagnosed.

Is this not completely hilarious? There are more than 3m people walking around droning on about "lactose intolerance" this and "issues with wheat" that, and they're complete fantasists as well as the most tiresome and bad-mannered dinner party guests.

I understand that allergies (where the reaction is dramatic and occasionally life-threatening) and intolerances (where the reaction is unpleasant but less extreme) do actually exist; I have a small nephew whose medically diagnosed intolerances are so severe that he is under the care of St Thomas' hospital in London. His parents carry an EpiPen. So I'm not one of those people who think the very idea of allergies is nonsense.

But I do loathe the way in which people - usually women on a diet - turn something commonplace and understandable, such as not eating bread because it makes them fat, into a look-at-me-I'm-special, cod medical issue.

Source




`Quickie' breast surgery on way

WOMEN undergoing a new type of breast enlargement will be able to go out to dinner on the evening of their operation, British plastic surgeons will be told this week. John Tebbetts, a Texan plastic surgeon, will tell the annual meeting of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons the augmentation can be carried out in 30 minutes and will greatly reduce the damage to skin and breast tissue. Tebbetts, based in Dallas, said: "After the surgery we tell the women to go home, have a little nap then get up after two hours, wash their hair, which helps them stretch their muscles, then to go out to dinner. Between 80 and 85% of our patients go out on the evening of their surgery."

The operation, marketed as the "out to dinner" breast augmentation, involves carrying out exact measurements of the breast skin and tissue in advance so that exactly the right size of implant is inserted. Completing the operation in between 30 to 40 minutes means the woman requires low levels of anaesthetic drugs. Tebbetts avoids bleeding by using an extremely precise cutting device. His patients are promised no tubes, no visible bruising and no need for special bras. They can drive on the day of surgery and resume normal activities the next day.

But Tebbetts says women need to be educated out of thinking they require a period of convalescence. "Women have got to get out of the mindset that they are going to be ill after this operation."

Patrick Mallucci, a British consultant plastic surgeon, will this week unveil his formula for the perfectly proportioned breast to an augmentation symposium at the Royal College of Surgeons. Mallucci said the ideal breast has the nipple sitting about 45% from the top, pointing slightly skyward. "An attractive breast has a balanced proportion between the upper half and lower half. All the models I looked at conformed to those parameters."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



23 September, 2007

ANOTHER DANGEROUS ANTIOXIDANT

Popular summary below followed by abstract. The very popular antioxidant fad is beginning to show signs of being an iatrogenic disaster

BODY-BUILDING and nutritional supplements containing an antioxidant called N-acetylcysteine (NAC) may not be as safe as once thought. In the Journal of Clinical Investigation this week, scientists have reported that taking NAC can cause blood vessels to sense that they are not getting enough oxygen. This can lead to dangerously high blood pressure in the arteries that carry blood to the lungs -- a condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension -- and cause swelling of the right side of the heart. The research team gave NAC to mice in their drinking water for three weeks, and compared their blood pressure and heart function to that of mice that did not receive NAC. The next step, say the authors, is to work out whether the levels of NAC found in supplements may be harmful to humans.

Source

Abstract:

S-Nitrosothiols signal hypoxia-mimetic vascular pathology

By Lisa A. Palmer et al.

NO transfer reactions between protein and peptide cysteines have been proposed to represent regulated signaling processes. We used the pharmaceutical antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) as a bait reactant to measure NO transfer reactions in blood and to study the vascular effects of these reactions in vivo. NAC was converted to S-nitroso-N-acetylcysteine (SNOAC), decreasing erythrocytic S-nitrosothiol content, both during whole-blood deoxygenation ex vivo and during a 3-week protocol in which mice received high-dose NAC in vivo. Strikingly, the NAC-treated mice developed pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) that mimicked the effects of chronic hypoxia. Moreover, systemic SNOAC administration recapitulated effects of both NAC and hypoxia. eNOS-deficient mice were protected from the effects of NAC but not SNOAC, suggesting that conversion of NAC to SNOAC was necessary for the development of PAH. These data reveal an unanticipated adverse effect of chronic NAC administration and introduce a new animal model of PAH. Moreover, evidence that conversion of NAC to SNOAC during blood deoxygenation is necessary for the development of PAH in this model challenges conventional views of oxygen sensing and of NO signaling.




Hormone link to cancers

This sounds reasonable but is not conclusive

HUMAN growth hormone could be responsible for several types of cancer, including breast cancer, a University of Queensland researcher has found. Mike Waters, from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said the hormone was needed for normal human growth and it worked by using a messenger protein called IGF1 (insulin-like growth factor). "There's quite a bit of work that implicates IGF1 in promoting cancers so this is an important way that growth hormone could be promoting cancers," Professor Waters said.

Growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland and stimulates even growth in the body after birth. It also plays a significant role in metabolism, minimising the amount of fat in the body and stimulating glucose production. Professor Waters said studies on people whose pituitary glands failed to produce growth hormone showed they remained cancer free. "In the absence of growth hormone the cancer rate is markedly lower and there's a worldwide survey that's just been done of 220-odd people that didn't find a single malignancy in people who had deficient growth hormone action," he said. "That also correlates with animal studies in rats and mice where without growth hormone you treat them with cancer-causing chemicals and they don't get tumours."

The research could have major implications for the global pharmaceutical industry where the sale of human growth hormone is worth more than $2 billion a year. Human growth hormone is often used by bodybuilders. Professor Waters said "knocking down" the hormone or blocking its action could inhibit cancer and stop tumour growth.

So far his research has only been able to partially disable the hormone. "We need to get the knock down more effective - if we can really knock it down we should be able to stop a hell of a lot of cancers," Professor Waters said. In a second-pronged attack on cancer, the professor has found that the target for growth hormone, its receptor, is within the cell nucleus. "So we've sent the receptor to the cell's nucleus using a special means and that's caused the cell to become cancerous," he said of the research that has been published by the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



22 September, 2007

THE WONDERS OF AVOCADOS

You haven't heard of avocado eaters not getting cancer? Nor have I but the test tube and white rat studies below tell us that it must be happening. Where are the epidemiologists when you need them? Popular summary below followed by journal abstract

AVOCADOS should be included on the list of cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables, according to a new study in Seminars in Cancer Biology this week. Avocados are rich in vitamin C, folate, vitamin E, fibre and unsaturated fats. By studying oral cancer cells in the laboratory, scientists have found that the active plant chemicals (phytochemicals) in avocados can kill these cells while leaving normal cells untouched. Avocado extract can also stop pre-cancerous cells from becoming full-blown cancer. The authors claim that avocado could help to treat or even prevent cancer of the mouth, and the same may hold true for other types of cancer. One of the phytochemicals in avocado known as quercetin is able to stop the growth of prostate tumours in mice and decrease the severity of colon cancer in rats.

Source

Chemopreventive characteristics of avocado fruit

By Haiming Ding et al.

Abstract

Phytochemicals are recognized as playing an important role in cancer prevention by fruits and vegetables. The avocado is a widely grown and consumed fruit that is high in nutrients and low in calories, sodium, and fats. Studies have shown that phytochemicals extracted from the avocado fruit selectively induce cell cycle arrest, inhibit growth, and induce apoptosis in precancerous and cancer cell lines. Our recent studies indicate that phytochemicals extracted with chloroform from avocado fruits target multiple signaling pathways and increase intracellular reactive oxygen leading to apoptosis. This review summarizes the reported phytochemicals in avocado fruit and discusses their molecular mechanisms and targets. These studies suggest that individual and combinations of phytochemicals from the avocado fruit may offer an advantageous dietary strategy in cancer prevention.

Source




Chocoholics not addicts, researcher says

A British psychologist says the 'naughty but nice' image is behind our love of chocolate. Resistance is futile. The more we try to fight off a craving for chocolate, the more our desire for it grows, a British researcher has said.

But chocoholics can take heart that such sweets are not addictive despite the fact many people consider themselves as having no control over their urges to eat them, said Peter Rogers, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. "Food behaviour can look like addictive behaviour in extreme situations but chocolate does not fit these criteria," Dr Rogers told a meeting sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Many people point to certain compounds found in chocolate - such as phenylethylamine - that produce a buzz when they reach the brain as evidence chocolate is addictive, Dr Rogers said. But many of these compounds also exist in higher concentrations in other foods with less appeal, such as avocados or cheese, and do not cause addiction despite what many chocoholics believe, he said. Instead, a social attitude that chocolate is "naughty but nice" may actually drive people to see chocolate as a forbidden pleasure and desire it even more, Dr Rogers said. "In other words, chocolate is a highly desirable food, but which according to social norms should be eaten with restraint," he said. "However, attempting to resist the desire to eat chocolate only causes thoughts about chocolate to become more prominent, consequently heightening the desire."

Other studies have suggested that dark chocolate contains more of the beneficial compounds linked with heart health, though experts note that the high sugar and fat content of most chocolate candy might cancel out some of the benefits.

But even health benefits do not make dark chocolate as popular as milk chocolate and chocolate covered confectionery, Dr Rogers said further research has shown. And the fact these favoured choices contain lower amounts of the so-called psychoactive compounds found in dark chocolate provides more evidence chocolate is not addictive, he said. "It is therefore far more plausible to suggest that a liking for chocolate, and its effects on mood, are due mainly to its principal constituents, sugar and fat, and their related orosensory and nutritional effects," he said in a statement.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



21 September, 2007

Laughing gas not a big laugh at all

PARALYSIS can be caused by nagging, but not the type many husbands complain about. The term "nagging" is also used to describe the dangerous recreational use of laughing gas, or nitrous oxide. Brisbane doctors have warned the practice can trigger paralysis, reporting the case of a woman in her 20s who presented herself to the Princess Alexandra Hospital's emergency department after inhaling laughing gas.

Writing in the latest Medical Journal of Australia, they said the woman had been abusing nitrous oxide – used as a propellant in whipped cream dispensers – to mask the pain caused by a sprained ankle. "She was in big trouble," said neurologist Peter Silburn, who consulted on the case. "Her arms were weak. Her bowel and bladder had stopped working and she had lower limb paralysis."

Professor Silburn said nitrous oxide – also commonly used as an anesthetic – interfered with vitamin B12 activity in the body and could cause nerve and spinal cord damage, when abused. "It can have serious consequences," he said. "I think the message is worthwhile getting out there because apparently nagging is on the rise. People take it to parties. "This is potentially very serious. Patients don't always recover. If we can alert the community to that, that's a service."

The woman "nagger" who developed paralysis spent two days in intensive care and was only discharged after seven months of rehabilitation. When she left hospital, she was only able to walk short distances with the aid of a walking frame. Professor Silburn, who divides his time between the PA and St Andrew's War Memorial hospitals, said the case was not unique.

Source




Lazy lizard source of diabetes drug

THE peculiar eating habits of a North American lizard have led to a new drug designed to help people suffering with Type 2 diabetes. Since the lazy lizard, known as the Gila Monster (Heloderma suspectum), spends most of its time doing very little in an underground burrow, it developed a biochemical system for controlling the storage and release of energy. The key to the system is a compound called exendin-4, a hormone found in the lizard's saliva. It slows the the creature's digestion, enabling it to get by on just 3 or 4 meals a year.

The international drug giant Eli Lilly and California-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals have exploited exendin-4 in an injectible drug, exenatide, now available in Australia under the trade name Byetta.

Noel Field, aged 55, has injected Byetta twice daily for three years as part of phase 3 clinical trials of the drug in Australia. He has had Type 1 (adult onset) diabetes for 12 years, a condition which reduces the ability of his body to automatically regulate blood-sugar levels. "It's a bit of a mystery how they got it from the saliva of the lizard," he joked.

According to Gregory Fulcher - head of the Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney - Byetta "mimic" a human version of exendin-4, a hormone known as GLP-1. It was designed for people like Mr Field whose Type 2 diabetes is not properly controlled by existing oral medications like metformin or sulphonylurea, drugs which increase the ability of insulin to control blood sugar levels. Dr Fulcher - who led one of the Australia clinical trails - said the compound does not work for people suffering from Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes because they have too few insulin-producing beta cells.

Type 2 sufferers, though, still have enough beta cells in their pancereas to produce at least some insulin. Drugs like Byetta work along with the remaining cells, controlling blood sugars follwing a meal, reducing the amount of sugar released by the liver, slowing the emptying of the stomach and enhancing insulin production. "It's not yet proven but there are hints (Byetta) will maintain the insulin-secreting function of beta cells," said Dr Fulcher. If so, that would mean people would not need to inject insulin, doses of which must be adjusted by patients after monitoring their own blood-sugar levels.

While Byetta is the first drug of its class to be available in Australia under private prescription ($99 per month), other classes of diabetes are being developed to compliment drugs like metaformin and insulin. Byetta was listed by the federal regulator , the Therapeutic Goods Administration, last June.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



20 September, 2007

Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong. Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined. Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes. Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. "People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual," Dr. Ioannidis said.

In the U. S., research is a $55-billion-a-year enterprise that stakes its credibility on the reliability of evidence and the work of Dr. Ioannidis strikes a raw nerve. In fact, his 2005 essay "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" remains the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine has ever published.

"He has done systematic looks at the published literature and empirically shown us what we know deep inside our hearts," said Muin Khoury, director of the National Office of Public Health Genomics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We need to pay more attention to the replication of published scientific results."

Every new fact discovered through experiment represents a foothold in the unknown. In a wilderness of knowledge, it can be difficult to distinguish error from fraud, sloppiness from deception, eagerness from greed or, increasingly, scientific conviction from partisan passion. As scientific findings become fodder for political policy wars over matters from stem-cell research to global warming, even trivial errors and corrections can have larger consequences.

Still, other researchers warn not to fear all mistakes. Error is as much a part of science as discovery. It is the inevitable byproduct of a search for truth that must proceed by trial and error. "Where you have new areas of knowledge developing, then the science is going to be disputed, subject to errors arising from inadequate data or the failure to recognize new matters," said Yale University science historian Daniel Kevles. Conflicting data and differences of interpretation are common.

To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.

Stung by frauds in physics, biology and medicine, research journals recently adopted more stringent safeguards to protect at least against deliberate fabrication of data. But it is hard to admit even honest error. Last month, the Chinese government proposed a new law to allow its scientists to admit failures without penalty. Next week, the first world conference on research integrity convenes in Lisbon.

Overall, technical reviewers are hard-pressed to detect every anomaly. On average, researchers submit about 12,000 papers annually just to the weekly peer-reviewed journal Science. Last year, four papers in Science were retracted. A dozen others were corrected.

No one actually knows how many incorrect research reports remain unchallenged. Earlier this year, informatics expert Murat Cokol and his colleagues at Columbia University sorted through 9.4 million research papers at the U.S. National Library of Medicine published from 1950 through 2004 in 4,000 journals. By raw count, just 596 had been formally retracted, Dr. Cokol reported. "The correction isn't the ultimate truth either," Prof. Kevles said.

Source




Daily pill may save blood clot patients

A pill taken once a day could save the lives of thousands of the people who die in English hospitals every year from blood clots, according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal. Venous thrombo-embolism (VTE) - or blood clot - kills 25,000 people a year in English hospitals, more than the number of people who die from breast cancer, Aids or road traffic accidents.

The current treatment used in hospitals to prevent blood clots after hip replacement surgery is the injection Heparin. Yet a number of elderly patients, often discharged a few days after surgery, could find it difficult to inject themselves or to return to hospital for injections. Data has shown that the pill Dabigatran, taken once a day for an average of 33 days, is as effective as Heparin in preventing blood clots after hip replacement surgery. It will be available early next year and will be the first medicine available as a pill to prevent blood clots in hospital.

Patients undergoing surgery are particularly at risk of getting blood clots - a third of patients who are readmitted are done so because of deep vein thrombosis. Evidence shows that it takes an average of 21 days for a patient who has undergone a total hip replacement to develop a VTE, and that in three quarters of cases this was after they had been discharged from hospital. Guidelines from the Department of Health and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which highlighted the problem, say that at-risk patients should receive treatment for a month following hip replacement surgery. A pill could therefore be more convenient.

Prof Simon Frostick, professor of orthopaedics at the University of Liverpool, who conducted the study, said: "Given the trend for shorter hospital stays following joint replacement surgery, it is becoming increasingly important to have anti-coagulant treatments available which are safe and easy to use. "Once-daily oral Dabigatran may be an attractive alternative to other regimens." This comes after Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer for England, said there was "room for improvement" in the treatment of patients at risk of blood clots. He said in a foreword to a Department of Health report in March: "The evidence suggested that in England around 25,000 people a year died from VTE in hospitals alone."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



19 September, 2007

Medical flip-flops

The generally excellent article below is from the NYT. The author is not quite up to date with the latest flip-flop though. Official British wisdom decided a few days ago that estrogen pills are good for women

Once upon a time, women took estrogen only to relieve the hot flashes, sweating, vaginal dryness and the other discomforting symptoms of menopause. In the late 1960s, thanks in part to the efforts of Robert Wilson, a Brooklyn gynecologist, and his 1966 best seller, "Feminine Forever," this began to change, and estrogen therapy evolved into a long-term remedy for the chronic ills of aging. Menopause, Wilson argued, was not a natural age-related condition; it was an illness, akin to diabetes or kidney failure, and one that could be treated by taking estrogen to replace the hormones that a woman's ovaries secreted in ever diminishing amounts. With this argument estrogen evolved into hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., as it came to be called, and became one of the most popular prescription drug treatments in America.

By the mid-1990s, the American Heart Association, the American College of Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had all concluded that the beneficial effects of H.R.T. were sufficiently well established that it could be recommended to older women as a means of warding off heart disease and osteoporosis. By 2001, 15 million women were filling H.R.T. prescriptions annually; perhaps 5 million were older women, taking the drug solely with the expectation that it would allow them to lead a longer and healthier life. A year later, the tide would turn. In the summer of 2002, estrogen therapy was exposed as a hazard to health rather than a benefit, and its story became what Jerry Avorn, a Harvard epidemiologist, has called the "estrogen debacle" and a "case study waiting to be written" on the elusive search for truth in medicine.

Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom - what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next - but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year's advice) is tested, and it fails this year's test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.

In the case of H.R.T., as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only after they've received the requisite support from a field of research known as epidemiology. This science evolved over the last 250 years to make sense of epidemics - hence the name - and infectious diseases. Since the 1950s, it has been used to identify, or at least to try to identify, the causes of the common chronic diseases that befall us, particularly heart disease and cancer. In the process, the perception of what epidemiologic research can legitimately accomplish - by the public, the press and perhaps by many epidemiologists themselves - may have run far ahead of the reality. The case of hormone-replacement therapy for post-menopausal women is just one of the cautionary tales in the annals of epidemiology. It's a particularly glaring example of the difficulties of trying to establish reliable knowledge in any scientific field with research tools that themselves may be unreliable.

What was considered true about estrogen therapy in the 1960s and is still the case today is that it is an effective treatment for menopausal symptoms. Take H.R.T. for a few menopausal years and it's extremely unlikely that any harm will come from it. The uncertainty involves the lifelong risks and benefits should a woman choose to continue taking H.R.T. long past menopause. In 1985, the Nurses' Health Study run out of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health reported that women taking estrogen had only a third as many heart attacks as women who had never taken the drug. This appeared to confirm the belief that women were protected from heart attacks until they passed through menopause and that it was estrogen that bestowed that protection, and this became the basis of the therapeutic wisdom for the next 17 years.

Faith in the protective powers of estrogen began to erode in 1998, when a clinical trial called HERS, for Heart and Estrogen-progestin Replacement Study, concluded that estrogen therapy increased, rather than decreased, the likelihood that women who already had heart disease would suffer a heart attack. It evaporated entirely in July 2002, when a second trial, the Women's Health Initiative, or W.H.I., concluded that H.R.T. constituted a potential health risk for all postmenopausal women. While it might protect them against osteoporosis and perhaps colorectal cancer, these benefits would be outweighed by increased risks of heart disease, stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and perhaps even dementia. And that was the final word. Or at least it was until the June 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Now the idea is that hormone-replacement therapy may indeed protect women against heart disease if they begin taking it during menopause, but it is still decidedly deleterious for those women who begin later in life.

This latest variation does come with a caveat, however, which could have been made at any point in this history. While it is easy to find authority figures in medicine and public health who will argue that today's version of H.R.T. wisdom is assuredly the correct one, it's equally easy to find authorities who will say that surely we don't know. The one thing on which they will all agree is that the kind of experimental trial necessary to determine the truth would be excessively expensive and time-consuming and so will almost assuredly never happen. Meanwhile, the question of how many women may have died prematurely or suffered strokes or breast cancer because they were taking a pill that their physicians had prescribed to protect them against heart disease lingers unanswered. A reasonable estimate would be tens of thousands.

The Flip-Flop Rhythm of Science

At the center of the H.R.T. story is the science of epidemiology itself and, in particular, a kind of study known as a prospective or cohort study, of which the Nurses' Health Study is among the most renowned. In these studies, the investigators monitor disease rates and lifestyle factors (diet, physical activity, prescription drug use, exposure to pollutants, etc.) in or between large populations (the 122,000 nurses of the Nurses' study, for example). They then try to infer conclusions - i.e., hypotheses - about what caused the disease variations observed. Because these studies can generate an enormous number of speculations about the causes or prevention of chronic diseases, they provide the fodder for much of the health news that appears in the media - from the potential benefits of fish oil, fruits and vegetables to the supposed dangers of sedentary lives, trans fats and electromagnetic fields. Because these studies often provide the only available evidence outside the laboratory on critical issues of our well-being, they have come to play a significant role in generating public-health recommendations as well

The dangerous game being played here, as David Sackett, a retired Oxford University epidemiologist, has observed, is in the presumption of preventive medicine. The goal of the endeavor is to tell those of us who are otherwise in fine health how to remain healthy longer. But this advice comes with the expectation that any prescription given - whether diet or drug or a change in lifestyle - will indeed prevent disease rather than be the agent of our disability or untimely death. With that presumption, how unambiguous does the evidence have to be before any advice is offered

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses' Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events - that women who take H.R.T. have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don't. But they cannot inherently determine causation - the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence - what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial - an experiment, not an observational study - and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses' Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials - first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women's Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women's Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the "disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence" for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 - that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later - is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

A Poor Track Record of Prevention

No one questions the value of these epidemiologic studies when they're used to identify the unexpected side effects of prescription drugs or to study the progression of diseases or their distribution between and within populations. One reason researchers believe that heart disease and many cancers can be prevented is because of observational evidence that the incidence of these diseases differ greatly in different populations and in the same populations over time. Breast cancer is not the scourge among Japanese women that it is among American women, but it takes only two generations in the United States before Japanese-Americans have the same breast cancer rates as any other ethnic group. This tells us that something about the American lifestyle or diet is a cause of breast cancer. Over the last 20 years, some two dozen large studies, the Nurses' Health Study included, have so far failed to identify what that factor is. They may be inherently incapable of doing so. Nonetheless, we know that such a carcinogenic factor of diet or lifestyle exists, waiting to be identified.

These studies have also been invaluable for identifying predictors of disease - risk factors - and this information can then guide physicians in weighing the risks and benefits of putting a particular patient on a particular drug. The studies have repeatedly confirmed that high blood pressure is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and that obesity is associated with an increased risk of most of our common chronic diseases, but they have not told us what it is that raises blood pressure or causes obesity. Indeed, if you ask the more skeptical epidemiologists in the field what diet and lifestyle factors have been convincingly established as causes of common chronic diseases based on observational studies without clinical trials, you'll get a very short list: smoking as a cause of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, sun exposure for skin cancer, sexual activity to spread the papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer and perhaps alcohol for a few different cancers as well.

Richard Peto, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University, phrases the nature of the conflict this way: "Epidemiology is so beautiful and provides such an important perspective on human life and death, but an incredible amount of rubbish is published," by which he means the results of observational studies that appear daily in the news media and often become the basis of public-health recommendations about what we should or should not do to promote our continued good health.

In January 2001, the British epidemiologists George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim, co-editors of The International Journal of Epidemiology, discussed this issue in an editorial titled "Epidemiology - Is It Time to Call It a Day?" They noted that those few times that a randomized trial had been financed to test a hypothesis supported by results from these large observational studies, the hypothesis either failed the test or, at the very least, the test failed to confirm the hypothesis: antioxidants like vitamins E and C and beta carotene did not prevent heart disease, nor did eating copious fiber protect against colon cancer.

The Nurses' Health Study is the most influential of these cohort studies, and in the six years since the Davey Smith and Ebrahim editorial, a series of new trials have chipped away at its credibility. The Women's Health Initiative hormone-therapy trial failed to confirm the proposition that H.R.T. prevented heart disease; a W.H.I. diet trial with 49,000 women failed to confirm the notion that fruits and vegetables protected against heart disease; a 40,000-woman trial failed to confirm that a daily regimen of low-dose aspirin prevented colorectal cancer and heart attacks in women under 65. And this June, yet another clinical trial - this one of 1,000 men and women with a high risk of colon cancer - contradicted the inference from the Nurses's study that folic acid supplements reduced the risk of colon cancer. Rather, if anything, they appear to increase risk.

The implication of this track record seems hard to avoid. "Even the Nurses' Health Study, one of the biggest and best of these studies, cannot be used to reliably test small-to-moderate risks or benefits," says Charles Hennekens, a principal investigator with the Nurses' study from 1976 to 2001. "None of them can."

Much more here




Slow food more fattening

People who opt for a meal at a "healthy" restaurant often consume more calories than they would dining at fast food joints that make no health claims, a new study shows. The researchers found that individuals underestimate the calorie content of foods served at restaurants they see as healthier, to a degree that could easily lead to weight gain.

For example, "People think that the same 1,000-calorie meal has 159 fewer calories if it comes from Subway than if it comes from McDonalds," Dr. Pierre Chandon, at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, told Reuters Health. "If they choose to consume this fictitious 'calorie credit' on other food, and it they eat at Subway twice a week, they could gain an extra 4.9 pounds a year."

While restaurants presenting themselves as healthy have grown at a much faster rate over the past five years than traditional fast food restaurants, Americans' waistlines have not been shrinking; in fact, the nation's population is fatter than ever, note Chandon and his colleague Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell University in Ithaca in their report in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers theorized that people might take in more calories when they eat in "healthy" restaurants, and conducted a series of studies to test this notion. In the first, they asked people who had just finished eating at Subway or McDonalds to estimate how many calories they had just consumed. On average, Subway patrons rated their meals as having 151 fewer calories than did McDonalds patrons. In fact, for a meal at either restaurant containing 1,000 calories, people would estimate it to contain 744 calories if they'd eaten at McDonalds and 585 calories if they'd dined at Subway.

In the second experiment, they asked people to estimate the calorie content of four different sandwiches: a six-inch ham and cheese sandwich (330 calories) and a 12-inch turkey sandwich (600 calories) from Subway; and a McDonalds cheeseburger (330 calories) and a Big Mac (600 calories). Study participants consistently rated the Subway sandwich as having fewer calories than the McDonalds sandwich with the same calorie content.

Next, the researchers offered people a coupon for a Big Mac (600 calories) or a Subway 12-inch Italian BMT sandwich (900 calories), and asked them whether they would like to order a drink or cookies with their sandwich. People eating the Subway sandwich were more likely to choose a large drink, less likely to opt for diet soda, and more likely to get cookies. This meant that, on average, they wound up consuming 1,011 calories, compared to 648 calories for the people given a McDonalds coupon.

People who want to control their weight or trim down need to think objectively about calorie content, and not let their perceptions be clouded by whether a food is supposed to be good or bad for them, Chandon said. "We have to move away from thinking of food in 'good food / bad food' (terms) and think also about 'how much food.' In France, for example, people enjoy relatively fat diets but are less overweight simply because portion sizes in restaurants and at home are smaller."

Chandon suggested one technique to help people judge calorie counts more accurately: "Instead of estimating the number of calories of the whole meal (which leads to undercounting) look at the sandwich, the side, the beverages, and the drink and add that up. Our research showed that this 'piecemeal' method is very effective."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



18 September, 2007

Guinness 'may be good for you' after all

Ignore the "antioxidant" explanation given below. Antioxidants are the medical equivalent of global warming -- used to explain just about anything. The only interesting thing is whether the study was double blind or not. I suspect not but I have been unable to find the journal article behind the report below. It seems to recycle a 2003 report -- perhaps because the 2003 report has finally reached journal publication. The author would appear to be Prof. J.D. Folts but Medline does not yet list the Guinness article. Prof. Folts is normally a grape-juice enthusiast



The old slogan "Guinness is Good For You" may actually be true, according to new medical research that suggests the stout may help prevent heart attacks. University researchers in the US claim that drinking a pint of the black stuff each day may be as effective in preventing heart attacks as an aspirin because it can reduce heart clots.

Trials at the University of Wisconsin used dogs with narrowed arteries similar to those in people with heart disease to compare effects of drinking stout with those of drinking lager. They found Guinness reduced clotting activity but lager did not. The research concluded that the "antioxidant compounds" found in Guinness are similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, making the stout work as well as aspirin in the prevention of heart clots. The researchers said that the most benefit they saw was from taking 24 fluid ounces of Guinness - just over a pint - at meal times.

Blood clots can trigger heart attacks if they lodge in arteries that supply blood to the heart. Many patients at risk of heart attacks are prescribed low-dose aspirin, which reduces the blood's ability blood to form clots.

Guinness was ordered to stop using its famous "Guinness is Good For You" advertising slogan decades ago. The original 1920s campaign stemmed from market research which found that Guinness drinkers felt good after a pint. At one point in England post-operative patients used to be given Guinness, as were blood donors, because of its high iron content. Pregnant women and nursing mothers were also advised to drink the stout - but present advice is against this. Diageo, which now manufactures Guinness said "We never make any medical claims for our drinks" and reiterated their calls for "responsible drinking."

The UK is the largest market in the world for Guinness.

Source




Psychosis discovery looks like a big leap forward

ANTIDEPRESSANTS could prevent the onset of schizophrenia if prescribed before the first psychotic episode, a ground-breaking study by a Sydney researcher has found. The research found that the brains of people who showed early signs of the disorder, such as impaired thinking or reduced social skills, had less of a protein which helps produce and maintain neurons and their pathways. That protein - brain-derived neurotrophic factor - can be regulated by second-generation antidepressants, such as Prozac or Zoloft, preventing the development of full-blown psychosis which can cripple a sufferer's relationships and job prospects.

Dr Cyndi Shannon-Weickert, the professorial chair of schizophrenia research at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, has spent five years studying the neurobiology of schizophrenia and is excited by what could be the disorder's "first pharmacological change in treatment in 60 years". "This is exciting work because if we have prevented schizophrenia, we have cured it," she said.

Studies on prevention have focused on the prodrome, which is the phase of illness before psychosis. During that time, which lasts between two and 10 years, people may show changes in the way they process information or deal with others, but not suffer from hallucinations or delusions. "They may be paying less attention at school, have less motivation or be withdrawing socially from their friends," Dr Shannon-Weickert said. It is that window of opportunity she wants doctors to seize, because if the prodromal phase is not recognised and treated, the person will eventually suffer psychosis and be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sufferers are usually treated with antipsychotic medications after they experience their first psychotic episode, but the medications are not well-tolerated due to side effects such as weight gain, lethargy, constipation and blurred vision. In one study of 13 prodromal adolescents who became psychotic, 12 had gone off their medication for one month or longer. Antidepressants were better tolerated because their side effects were milder so the compliance rate was much higher, she said.

In post-mortem studies, Dr Shannon-Weickert found the level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in those on antidepressants was double that of those who were not. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is found in the hippocampus, cortex and basal forebrain and is vital to learning, memory and higher thinking. Low levels have been linked with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and dementia. Mice born without brain-derived neurotrophic factor suffer developmental defects in the brain and the nervous system, and usually die soon after birth.

"We now know we have this window where we can reverse this disorder so we really need to start focusing on early intervention," she said. "People at risk need to start taking antidepressants as early as possible." Schizophrenia affects about 200,000 Australians. One in six will take their life. "Within a decade I think we will see quite a paradigm shift with this disorder," Dr Shannon-Weickert said. "It won't help the people who currently have schizophrenia, but it stop future generations from developing it."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



17 September, 2007

New hope for blood cancer treatment

A WORLD breakthrough by Australian researchers - solving the riddle why some people do not respond to a "magic bullet" for chronic myeloid leukemia - holds new hope for treating a variety of cancers. Scientists have been puzzled why most patients have excellent responses to a recently developed drug, Glivec, but some do not respond well. Glivec is a tiny molecule targeting a specific enzyme which triggers leukemia in blood cells, blocking it and killing off the leukemic cells. The drug has had dramatic success in about two-thirds of patients but researchers have been baffled why other people don't respond as well.

However, work by researchers at the Hanson Institute and the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide has found the reason. IMVS haematologist Professor Tim Hughes said Glivec specifically blocked the rogue enzyme in leukemia cells. "The development of 'targeted drugs' has been a huge development in anti-cancer therapy in the past decade, and we have been looking at how we can make further improvements in the field," he said. "The two-thirds of patients had great responses purely by switching off the enzyme, but we were mystified why one-third did not respond as well.

"We recently found the reason: the one-third just don't take up the drug into their leukaemic cells as efficiently, even though they are given exactly the same dose. "You can give two patients exactly the same dose but the amount that actually gets into the leukaemia cells will vary greatly. "Remarkably, the leukaemic cell itself determines how much of the drug is able to enter - the drug depends on the cell saying: 'Come inside and destroy me'."

Glivec is taken as a tablet which enters the bloodstream and finds its way to leukaemia cells, entering the cells and blocking the faulty enzyme. The discovery that some people's cells do not take it up as efficiently as others has led the Adelaide team to examine drug transport pathways into blood cells.

Researcher Deb White has now developed a blood test that can detect each patient's efficiency at taking up the drug. The test requires only 10ml of blood, takes just 24 hours and is being patented by the IMVS for expected worldwide commercial use. Patients identified as not being likely to respond well to standard doses of Glivec may be given higher doses or put on newer targeted drugs now coming into use, increasing survival rates.

The discovery that some people's cells do not accept cancer drugs as well as others has important implications for a range of cancers including some gastric and lung cancers. "We are moving towards individualised therapy, where we can predict what dose of a cancer drug each different person needs for maximum effect," Prof Hughes said. "I think with this tailored approach we may get a success rate greater than 90 per cent in chronic myeloid leukaemia."

The work has been published in the international journal Blood and already has attracted wide attention from haematologists.

Source




Blueberry the super brain food?



Groan! Yet another bright-eyed hymn of praise to the miracle powers of fruits and berries. We would all be living to 150 if a fraction of it were true

BLUEBERRIES are being hailed by experts as a superfood that can slow the ageing process and even stall the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Researchers say a cup of blueberries a day will keep the mind young, with a study finding they can slow ageing in the brain. But, if a punnet of berries is too much to stomach, spinach, walnuts or grapefruit juice will also keep the mind healthy, the study found.

Professor James Joseph, from Tufts University in Boston, believes blueberries could be the key to a youthful mind. "We don't as yet understand fully the mechanisms involved in these behavioral/neuronal communication benefits of the berries," he said. "But our recent studies suggest that berries may actually reduce the signals created by inflammatory and oxidative stressors and increase the signals that are important in facilitating information concerned with learning and memory. "We've been testing on old rodents and have had positive results, but early trials on human brains are showing that people's reaction times can increase," he said.

A study by CSIRO researchers also found bush nuts and berries - which are a rich source of antioxidants - could help reduce the risk of cancers.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



16 September, 2007

Salt fraudulently linked to higher blood pressure in kids

The journal abstract is here. The finding is that a tiny and clinically insignificant increase in blood pressure was found to be associated with how much salt kids say they sprinkle on their food. I have made some comments in the body of the article below but let me make the usual comments here about this epidemiological crap. It seems likely that the "disobedience" to health directives by working class people is all that is shown here. Working class people are less likely to be scared off salt and it is also known that they tend to have poorer health due to various factors such as lack of exercise -- not excluding genetic factors. So working class kids both say they use more salt and have higher blood pressure. Class is the probable causative factor behind the results, not salt. And research showing that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER is not mentioned, of course. What a crock!

Children and adolescents consuming higher levels of salt in their diets have higher blood pressure, confirms a UK study published today. The new study, based on data collected in the 1997 National Diet and Nutrition Survey for young people in Great Britain (NDNS), will add further urgency to food industry efforts to reduce the salt content of their products.

"Currently, salt intake in young people is unnecessarily high due, in most countries, to hidden salt added to food by the food industry," wrote the authors in The Journal of Human Hypertension

The researchers examined the salt intake and blood pressure of 1,658 children aged between 4 and 18, with salt intake assessed by a seven-day dietary record. The average salt intake, which did not include salt added in cooking or at the table [So they have no idea what the total salt intake was!], was 4.7g/day at the age of 4 years. With increasing age, there was an increase in salt intake, and by the age of 18 years, salt intake was 6.8g/day. The findings revealed that for each extra 1g of salt eaten by the participants, there was a related 0.4mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure.

"This is an important finding which confirms that eating more salt increases blood pressure in childhood and also adds extra weight to the current public health campaign to reduce salt in the UK diet," said Professor Malcolm Law, professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine. "The differences in systolic blood pressure between children with higher and lower salt diets may appear small, but making reductions of this order in childhood is likely to translate into lower levels of blood pressure in adult life, with reduced risk of developing heart disease and stroke and potentially huge gains in public health being possible."

Although increased blood pressure is uncommon in children, blood pressure follows a tracking pattern, which means that individuals who have a higher blood pressure in early life are more likely to develop high blood pressure when they grow older. High blood pressure (hypertension) - a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease - has been repeatedly linked to an increased salt intake, spurring global campaigns to reduce the sodium levels in processed foods.

In the UK, Ireland and the USA, over 80 per cent of salt intake comes from processed food [Which is what the study did NOT examine!], with 20 per cent of salt intake coming from meat and meat products, and about 35 per cent from cereal and cereal products.

The new findings, which are consistent with the findings from a recent meta-analysis of controlled salt reduction trials in children and adolescents, suggest that anything that lowers blood pressure in children is likely to reduce the number of people developing high blood pressure in later life. "The message for parents is to check labels, especially on foods such as breakfast cereals and snack products, which they may not expect to contain high levels of salt, and choose the lower salt options. 1.5g of salt may not sound much, but parents need to know that it is half a six year-old's maximum recommended upper limit of salt for a whole day (3g) and 30 per cent of a ten year-old's (5g)," said Jo Butten, nutritionist for Consensus Action on Salt and Health.

According to the researchers, the strengths of their study are that the data were from a large nationally representative sample of British young people, and that salt intake was estimated from a 7-day dietary record, which could characterize individuals' usual intake more accurately than a dietary record taken over 1-2 days. [Big deal!]

Limitations include that the NDNS is a cross-sectional study, and no cause-effect relationship can be drawn from such a study. In addition, the salt intake estimated from the NDNS underestimated the actual amount of salt consumed by children as it did not include salt added in cooking or at the table.

Source




Salt is a crime?

A McDonald's employee spent a night in jail and is facing criminal charges because a police officer's burger was too salty, so salty that he says it made him sick. Kendra Bull was arrested Friday, charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct and freed on $1,000 bail.

Bull, 20, said she accidentally spilled salt on hamburger meat and told her supervisor and a co-worker, who ''tried to thump the salt off.'' On her break, she ate a burger made with the salty meat. ''It didn't make me sick,'' Bull told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But then Police Officer Wendell Adams got a burger made with the oversalted meat, and he returned a short time later and told the manager it made him sick. Bull admitted spilling salt on the meat, and Adams took her outside and questioned her, she said.

''If it was too salty, why did (Adams) not take one bite and throw it away?'' said Bull, who has worked at the restaurant for five months. She said she didn't know a police officer got one of the salty burgers because she couldn't see the drive-through window from her work area.

Police said samples of the burger were sent to the state crime lab for tests. City public information officer George Louth said Bull was charged because she served the burger ''without regards to the well-being of anyone who might consume it.''

Source




Honey reduces anxiety and improves memory?

The anti-oxidant religion, again. It's a great theory but it's a pity that antioxidants shorten your life, though

HONEY could help counter the effects of ageing and decrease anxiety, according to a new study. The study in New Zealand, revealed today in the New Scientist journal, found honey improved memory and reduced anxiety.

Lynne Chepulis and Nicola Starkey at the University of Waikato in Hamilton conducted their tests on rats. They raised them on diets of 10 per cent honey, eight per cent sucrose or no sugar at all for a year. The rats were two months old at the start of the trial, and were assessed every three months using tests designed to measure anxiety and spatial memory.

The honey-fed rats spent almost twice as much time in the open sections of an assessment maze then sucrose-fed rats, suggesting they were less anxious. They were also more likely to enter novel sections of a Y-shaped maze, suggesting they knew where they had been previously and had better spatial memory.

Starkey said: "Diets sweetened with honey may be beneficial in decreasing anxiety and improving memory during ageing.'' She believes this could be due to the antioxidant properties of honey, which have previously been demonstrated in humans. The study was funded by Fonterra, a dairy company interested in sweetening yoghurt with honey.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



15 September, 2007

The aspartame saga continues

I have received the following article from Dr. Joe Schwarcz, Director, McGill University Office for Science and Society. It originally appeared in The Montreal Gazette

We are up to our ears in scientific publications. Over 9000 peer-reviewed journals bombard us with thousands of new research findings every day. They deal with all aspects of science, ranging from highly theoretical quantum mechanical calculations to studies of what goes into our mouths or comes out of our nose. It’s a real challenge for our brain to make sense of this tsunami of information! For most of us, the studies that arouse the greatest interest are the ones that have a potential impact on our daily lives, especially on our health. There’s certainly no lack of these. Virtually every day we hear of some study that urges us to eat more of a certain food or avoid another. There are studies that warn us about risks of specific chemicals in our environment and others that offer hope for the treatment of disease. To confuse matters, and people, studies are often at odds with each other!

There are several points to remember in the face of this publication onslaught. Science aims for a consensus opinion arrived at by examining all the available information. Rarely are single studies compelling enough to cause a major shift in thinking. Results that are reproduced by different researchers merit more attention. Negative studies are less likely to be reported than positive ones, leading to “publication bias,” and research that is funded by vested interests can raise questions about reliability. Keep in mind also that not all peer-reviewed journals are equally demanding in the quality of papers they accept for publication, and that scientists are not immune to human foibles.

When it comes to health-related issues, the fundamental question raised by any new study is whether it is persuasive enough to change any recommendations that are currently in effect. Recently an Italian study on aspartame, the most widely used artificial sweetener in the world, aroused a great deal of interest. This isn’t surprising, given the title of the paper: “Lifespan Exposure to Low Doses of Aspartame Beginning During Prenatal Life Increases Cancer Effects in Rats.” If such a common product increases our risk of cancer, changes in recommendations about its use would certainly be warranted. But what does this rat study mean for humans?

The current “Acceptable Daily Intake” (ADI) for aspartame in North America is 50 milligrams per kilogram body weight, while in Europe it is 40 mg/kg. Based on numerous laboratory, animal and human studies, adverse effects below these levels are unlikely. Using the lower European value, the ADI for an average adult weighing sixty kilograms is then 2400 mgs, which is the amount of aspartame found in roughly four liters of diet drink. Average consumption of course is way below this, but unfortunately there are people who drink abusive amounts. Perhaps they will re-evaluate their habit after hearing about what researchers at the European Ramazzini Foundation found.

Dr. Morando Soffritti and colleagues fed pregnant rats aspartame-laced food, and then did the same to their offspring throughout their natural lives. The rats were then autopsied and all signs of cancer recorded. One group of rats was fed aspartame at a dose of 100 mg per kilogram of bodyweight, another group at 20 mg/kg, and a third group, given no aspartame, served as a control.

Soffritti was following up on similar research he had published in 2005 which had concluded that aspartame was a carcinogen. That study was criticized by a group of toxicologists assembled by the European Union as having poor methodology and coming to an unwarranted conclusion. Soffritti was understandably angered by the criticism and undoubtedly vowed to “show them.” And apparently he has. The current results do show that animals fed at 100 mg/kg per day developed more tumours than those fed no aspartame. This is the amount of aspartame found in ten liters of diet drink. However, when it comes to the 20 mg/kg dose, the incidence of tumours found was essentially the same as in the rats given no aspartame. Based on these results, Soffritti and colleagues correctly conclude that their study showed aspartame to be a carcinogen, and that the effect is dose related.

What do we make of this? It is surprising that a carcinogenic effect was found, given that a large number of other studies have failed to find a link between aspartame and cancer. But the important finding here is the dose-response relationship. As the dose is decreased, so is the risk of tumour formation. At the equivalent of two liters of diet drink a day, the percent of animals bearing tumours is the same as in the control group. So, are these results convincing enough to alter the Acceptable Daily Intake? Before taking such an action, at the very least, we need to see if the experiment can be reproduced by another lab.

The Ramazzini Foundation study [by Soffritti] comes on the heels of a paper recently published in the Annals of Oncology, in which researchers from Italy and France examined the potential association between the risk of cancer and the consumption of artificial sweeteners. They evaluated the rates of consumption of saccharin, aspartame, and other sweeteners in approximately 7,000 individuals with various types of cancers and compared these with a similar number of people who did not have the disease. No link between artificial sweeteners and cancers of the esophagus, colon, rectum, larynx, breast, ovaries, prostate, kidney or mouth was found. And this was a human, not a rat study. Let’s remember also that the amount of aspartame found in a couple of diet drinks and artificially sweetened yogurts is way less than the 20 mg/kg per day dose that was shown to cause no increase in tumours in the Ramazzini study. In any case, there is no reason for anyone to be consuming more artificially sweetened products than these.

For now, there seems to be no reason to change recommendations about consuming moderate amounts of aspartame, but rest assured that it won’t be long before some new study comes along that either accuses or exonerates aspartame of some nutritional crime. Many scientists will be ready to evaluate that study and change their views if warranted (myself included). That’s the way of science.




Cellphones: No evidence will ever be enough

Mobile phones do not pose a health risk, according to one of the biggest studies into their dangers. But this is only in the short term; long-term damage cannot be ruled out. Six years of research by 28 teams, at a cost of £8.8 million, have failed to substantiate any of the health claims made about mobile phones or the masts that broadcast their signals.

But the fears could not be entirely laid to rest, said Professor Lawrie Challis, chairman of the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme, which oversaw the study. This was because cancer had a long latency period, and mobile phones had not been in use long enough to rule out risk. A second study, for which 6 million pounds has been earmarked, would follow mobile-users over a long period to see if intensity of use has any link with the frequency of cancers.

Professor Challis said that the results so far were “reassuring” – there was no evidence of immediate or short-term damage and no association between use and cancer. He said that experiments on tissue had produced no effects, and the committee responsible for the programme believes that there is no need for further work in this area.

The researchers tested people who complained that they were hypersensitive to electromag-netic fields and found that they were able to tell whether the fields were turned on or off. Their symptoms must have some other cause, he said.

Professor Challis emphasised that although the mobile phone industry had jointly funded the research with the Government, the committee had been protected from any undue influence. He said that the best researchers had been sought and their work published in peer-reviewed journals. Of the 28 projects funded, 23 were now complete and resulted in 23 published papers. Yesterday’s report summarises the conclusions.

Professor Challis said: “We cannot rule out the possibility that cancer could appear in a few years’ time, both because the epidemiological evidence we have is not strong enough to rule it out and, secondly, because most cancers cannot be detected until ten years after whatever caused them.” The research must continue, he added. “We can’t reassure people about the long-term use.”

The only worrying sign was a “very slight hint” of increased incidences of brain tumours among longer-term users, he said, but this was at the borderline of statistical significance and needed further investigation. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats’ science spokesman, said: “This report is good news for the public, phone users and the industry. There is no basis on health grounds for any further tightening of regulations or advice on mobile phone masts or the use of handsets.”

A cohort study involving 200,000 people will take place in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Britain, in which mobile users will be identified and followed for a prolonged period. Any symptoms they suffer will be recorded and compared with their use of mobile phones, using billing records. A senior doctor whose research contributed to the development of a vaccine against cervical cancer is to be the next chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC).

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, who has a strong background in clinical science, will succeed Professor Colin Blakemore at the end of the month. His appointment may help to allay fears that the Government is pressing a heavy business agenda on the body, which distributes 460 million pounds in public funds to biomedical research. Ministers are pushing the MRC to support more science with commercial applications, in line with a review of funding arrangements by Sir David Cooksey, a venture capitalist.

Source






A modest proposal from Australia: Government-funded health "Trainers" for all

The Fascist writer below recognizes that people mostly ignore "health" messages so "make people behave" is the proposed solution. That people have any right to eat what they want is not recognized. Nor is it recognized that "health" wisdom often goes into reverse.

THE idea that taxpayers should subsidise weight loss programs sparked an outcry this week, but it is the first solid policy proposal we have seen to stem a health problem that is costing Australia billions. It comes on the back of calls for cartoon characters to be banned from food packaging, for a tax to be placed on high sugar breakfast cereals and as some hospitals ban surgery on obese people and smokers. Unlike a weight loss program, none of these proposals does anything to change behaviour. That's why both sides of politics say they are seriously considering the weight loss subsidy.

Sixty per cent of our population is overweight. The problem - in defiance of government advertising campaigns to eat more fruit and vegetables and do more exercise - is, like Australians, only getting bigger.

A study in the Medical Journal of Australia has found these public health messages are being absorbed by the public. But it also found this knowledge does not readily translate into behavioural changes. We know what's good for us - but we won't do it.

Every year our public hospitals treat 500,000 people for preventable illnesses. Every year over 50,000 people die from illnesses caused by their poor lifestyle. It's time we asked whether scarce public health dollars should be spent fixing up health problems that are caused by our own unhealthy habits. We're making the unemployed take some responsibility for the public funding they get by working for the dole. In Aboriginal communities bureaucrats have taken control of welfare payments so they can't be spent on alcohol and drugs. The health system is the next area ripe for the new responsibility agenda.

Why should taxpayers fund repeated heart by-pass operations unless the patient receiving them signs a contract agreeing to give up smoking, do 30 minutes of exercise a day and lose weight? What's the point of the public subsidising diabetes or cholesterol tablets if the patient won't exercise and continues eating fatty foods?

A National Heart Foundation study estimates that seven lifestyle factors - obesity, low fruit and vegetable consumption, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, low physical activity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure - cause 52,738 deaths in Australia every year - 39 per cent of all deaths. If we don't start heeding these public health messages (and it doesn't seem likely we will) that number is bound to get even worse.....

The answers aren't necessarily expensive or difficult. We all know what we've got to do to address these health problems: eat healthier food, eat less food overall, quit smoking, take up regular exercise, and control our alcohol intake. But knowing isn't doing. That's why we need to consider a more interventionist approach to preventive health.

The health fund Australian Health Management, which runs an intensive diet and exercise preventive health program, has found spending $600 a year on a personalised health management program for its chronically ill members saves the fund $1800 a year per person. This health fund has found a much more intensive personalised coaching approach to preventive health does pay off.

Instead of spending millions kitting out our ambulances, hospitals and morgues with beds and stretchers that can cope with the morbidly obese, perhaps we should be spending the money on personal coaches that help the chronically ill reinvent their lifestyles. This health fund shows why a subsidy for weight loss programs is worth a trial. The doctors group proposing the plan wants to keep its costs down to $27 million by restricting it to obese people at risk of a chronic illness . But the extra expense of extending it to all overweight Australians could save us much more than it costs.

Telling people what's good for them hasn't worked. If we want cheaper health insurance and lower taxes, it's time to make people take that 30 minute walk and cut down on their calorie intake.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



14 September, 2007

Fad exercise system bad for backs



Sadly, this stuff is very popular among middle-class women

PILATES exercises could cause more harm than good to some back-pain sufferers, controversial research suggests. Studies into the ``drawing in'' method, a fundamental Pilates technique, have found the process may exacerbate pre-existing back conditions. The technique involves participants drawing in their stomachs to their spines - and lifting the pelvic floor.

Stuart McGill, professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, told The Sunday Telegraph that by targeting the core, transverse abdominal muscle, people were potentially weakening their spines. "If you hollow in, you bring the muscles closer to the spine, which reduces the stability of the back, so inherently you create a more unstable column,'' he said. Professor McGill said he had reached this conclusion after analysing how varying loads and forces affected the way the spine functioned.

"Consider a fishing rod upright, with the butt on the ground," he said. "It would buckle with a few grams of load placed on top, (but) attach wires to the rod at different levels ... and the rod will bear many kilos without buckling. "Now bring the wire attachments on the ground closer to the base of the rod. Not only is the rod weakened, but it will buckle at a lower load. Your spine acts the same way.''

Pilates has long been trumpeted as helping its millions of followers stay toned and slim, while improving their posture and relieving back pain. Its popularity has surged in recent years as people flock to classes. Celebrities such as Madonna and Liz Hurley swear by its results.

Professor McGill said that although he believed Pilates in its purest form was advantageous for some, instructors should target all core muscles in the body and take into account their students' fitness levels and injury history. He said people should forget about "drawing in'' and the transverse abdominal muscle and simply stiffen all the muscles and the abdominal wall at a level to match each task.

But Dr Chris Cain, a leading Australian spinal surgeon, believes Pilates is an effective, low-impact activity for all people, regardless of age. "Pilates is not a cure for back problems, but it does help people manage their symptoms and reduce the impact of activities,'' Dr Cain said. "The original form of Pilates is actually a very good principle in terms of establishing core stability.''

Source




Male brain and autism

The theory that autism is caused by an extreme version of the “male brain” has won strong support from new research showing that male hormones in the womb are linked to social and emotional skills in childhood. Scientists at the University of Cambridge found that both boys and girls who are exposed to high levels of testosterone before they are born are more likely than usual to develop traits typical of autism, such as a preference for solitary activities and strong numerical and pattern-recognition skills.

The study included only children who are not autistic, but it gives some of the firmest biological evidence yet that the social impairments that characterise the condition may be affected by prenatal hormone exposure. This in turn backs the theory that autistic people are best understood as having extreme versions of a brain type that is common in the population at large, particularly among men.

The idea advanced by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who leads the Cambridge team, is that human brains are predominantly attuned either to empathising with others, or to understanding how systems work. Women are more likely to be in the first group and men in the second, while autistic people are extreme systemisers whose social problems emerge from a fundamental difficulty with empathy. The model fits with the observation that autism is four times more common among boys. One possible explanation is that male hormones in the womb could promote systemising at the expense of empathy. Very high exposures may thus trigger autism.

Professor Baron-Cohen’s study, conducted with his graduate student, Bonnie Auyeung, looked at prenatal testosterone levels in 235 foetuses whose mothers had had amniocentesis. When the children were born, they were followed up to assess their psychological development. The latest data, from questionnaires given to mothers when the children were eight, were presented yesterday at the British Association Festival of Science in York. While all the children were developmentally normal, boys and girls who had higher levels of foetal testosterone were significantly more likely to have a large number of autistic traits such as preferring playing alone to joining in at birthday parties, and being good at remembering numerical patterns, such as car numberplates. About 20 per cent of the variation between children’s autistic traits appeared to match foetal testosterone levels, with the remainder likely to be caused by genetic and environmental factors. [Weak effect, in other words] Previous research with the same group of children has shown that at 12 months, children with high foetal testosterone make less eye contact with their parents and look at others’ faces less frequently. At 18 months, they have a smaller vocabulary than children exposed to lower concentrations of the male hormone.

Professor Baron-Cohen said that the results did not prove that the link between male hormones and autistic traits was causal: both could be the result of something else. He also said that his team had not yet examined autistic children, only autistic traits in the normal population. Even so, he said, the work added strong biological evidence to his extreme male brain theory. “The hypothesis was based on observed sex differences,” he said. “Simply put, girls tend to show better empathy, and boys tend to have a stronger interest in systems. Children with autism seem to have an exaggerated version of typical male preferences. They have a strong interest in systems, and difficulty empathising. “We are now moving from a psychological level down to a biological level. It is an exciting development.”

Professor Baron-Cohen has won funding from the Medical Research Council to conduct a study using two large databases in Denmark, an archive of 90,000 amniocentesis samples, and a national register of people with psychological or developmental disorders. He said: “We are going to look at who has a diagnosis of autism and then pick out their amniocentesis sample and look at testosterone.” Professor Baron-Cohen said it was unlikely that it would be possible to prevent autism by controlling foetal testosterone, not least because doing so might adversely affect other aspects of foetal development.

Source




Senator Tom Harkin, School Nutritionist

The latest newsworthy assault by the Nanny State on freedom and federalism is Senate Bill 771, or The Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2007. Actually, call it a renewed assault. The legislation's chief sponsor is Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry. Harkin is conspicuous for his leadership on health and nutrition issues. Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) has sponsored an identical measure (House Resolution 1363). The measures, if passed, would continue Washington's iron grip on school cafeterias and extend the Feds' reach to what foods and beverages are sold in schools anywhere at any time.

On the face of it, the measures seem innocuous enough, do-good attempts by Senator Harkin, Representative Woolsey and cosponsors to fight childhood obesity by improving the diets of kids from pre-school through high school. But it begs the questions: "What business is it of Washington politicians to decide what kids eat at schools in Des Moines, Santa Rosa, Anchorage or Canton? And why does Senator Harkin, the prime mover behind this effort, and a handful of government-approved experts, know better than parents and local schools what kids should eat?"

The Senate and House bills are yet more evidence of what happens when Washington gets its hooks into activities that are historically and naturally the province of individuals and communities. Federal support for school meals began when the school lunch program was created by Congress in 1946. However well-intended, the program was, in large part, a sop to farmers and other agricultural interests that benefited from taxpayer money. Those tax dollars were earmarked for the purchase of "nutritious agricultural commodities"-a lot of surplus milk, butter and cheese, in other words. In 1966, school breakfast programs were added conditionally and, then, permanently, in 1975.

The rationale for the 1946 program and its extension in 1966 was that too many kids were going hungry, and if not hungry, then malnourished. No doubt, in pockets throughout the country, many rural, where large concentrations of poor children lived, school meals were a benefit. But these programs weren't targeted only at the neediest school districts-in the Ozarks, for example-but in time, grew to encompass all districts. As of 2005, Washington spent approximately $9.5 billion annually on school meal and commodities programs.

The argument put forward now is that kids from Appalachia to upscale Westchester County aren't hungry anymore. In fact, they're overeating, and, according to research, began doing so in the 1960s, despite claims then that hunger or malnutrition was the primary threat to kids. The kicker is that due to rigid federal regulations, meant to give hungry kids plenty of fat, starch and calories in school meals, Washington has been contributing handsomely to the "Childhood Obesity Epidemic" for decades. If schools wanted federal dollars for meal programs, then they had to abide by Washington's rules, and those rules were designed for hungry kids-not for kids who are adding inches to their waistlines.

Now, Senator Harkin wishes to remedy the problem by updating the definition of "food of minimal nutritional value," as well as aggregate to Washington broad authority over what foods are sold "outside the school meal programs, on the school campus and at any time during the school day." While this may be meritorious in one sense, in another, it raises questions: "Where has Congress been all these years?" Why has it taken so long for Congress to recognize that Washington is actually doing harm by insisting on nutritional standards for school meals that are so out of sync with the changing realities of kids' diets?

The answer isn't simple, but it can be simplified. Washington's tendency, in the first place, is to create one-size-fits-all rules to accompany the taxpayer dollars it redistributes. And not only does Washington lack the capacity to adapt its rules to the thousands of communities that comprise this large and diverse nation, it lacks the ability to change quickly, due to the inherent cumbersomeness of the national legislature and the federal bureaucracy. Contributing to this inertia are the many interests that have a stake in the status quo, largely financial. And, in the case of Washington politicians who curry favor with these interests, it's about contributions, prestige and the power that goes with dispensing billions of dollars and overseeing gargantuan programs. If change comes, more often than not, these politicians need to see their advantage.

Given that Washington hasn't proven to be a very adept or adroit school nutritionist, what makes anyone think that yet another uniform approach to nutrition, coupled with controls over what other foods are sold on campuses, will do the trick? And why is Washington in the business of writing menus in the first place?

Parents and Schools Should Decide What Kids Eat

One can go very deeply into the weeds finding fault with Washington's meddling with school meal programs. The same holds true for the Senate and House bills. But what these initiatives represent is a reissuing of a decades-old proclamation, in stronger terms, by Congressional leaders: that Washington knows better than parents and schools what is best for their children. More broadly, it is an article of no faith. Parents and schools either can't, or won't, act in the best interests of their kids. Without Senator Harkin writing school menus, without the Feds padlocking soda and snack machines, and without an army of junk food police patrolling school halls to confiscate stashes of Twinkies or Fritos, why, kids would go from fat to freakish.

Certainly, no one is trivializing good nutrition. In recent years, there has been an increasing flow of information from the health community about what constitutes good diets. Most certainly, this information is getting to parents and will have a positive influence on most of them, not only in how kids are fed at home but how they're fed in schools. It is the hallmark of a free society that most people, being sensible, make changes when presented with reliable information and persuasive arguments.

But that may not be good enough for Senator Harkin and his cohorts. Senate Bill 771 and House Resolution 1363 betray a fundamental lack of trust by Mr. Harkin and Ms. Woolsey in the very people who elect them to office. It demonstrates that they don't believe that change will come, not unless, very belatedly, Washington dictates it.

These measures are another assault, among many assaults, on the notion that free people make the best decisions and that government closest to the people governs most effectively. Proper Congressional legislation would liberate school cafeterias from the shackles of federal government mandates. And Washington should keep its hands off any other foods sold on campuses. If Washington wants to provide guidelines or recommendations, fine. But let schools across the nation, in concert with parents, assess the dietary needs of their kids and write the menus.

But, then, for Senator Harkin, and too many of his colleagues, such would appear to be a radical and dangerous idea: the idea the Founders called federalism.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



13 September, 2007

"The Pill" is back in favour!

As with all epidemiological data, this must be taken with a large grain of salt. The women who took the pill might have been healthier to start with and almost certainly led less risky lives (drug-taking etc.). The amazing thing is that official positions are being taken on the basis of these findings

Taking the Pill reduces the risks of a woman getting cancer later in life, according to one of the largest studies ever undertaken. The conclusion will reassure millions of women who took the Pill 30 or 40 years ago and are now of an age when the risks are growing. The study found that overall cancer risk was up to 12 per cent lower for women who took the Pill for less than eight years. But, for the minority of women who took it for more than eight years, the news was less good: for them, the risk of cancer increased by 22 per cent. The risk of developing bowel and rectal, uterine and ovarian cancers was most reduced. There was no evidence that the risk of developing breast cancer either increased or decreased with short-term usage.

“Many women, especially those who used the first generation of oral contraceptives many years ago, are likely to be reassured by our results,” the authors of the new study say. “The cancer benefits of oral contraception outweigh the risks.” Maria Leadbeater, of Breast Cancer Care, said: “The findings of this research will be welcomed by the thousands of women across the UK who have used, or are currently using, an oral contraceptive.”

The team, from the University of Aberdeen, used data gathered by the Royal College of Physicians since 1968, which asked 1,400 GPs to provide information on women who were taking the Pill, and a matched group who were not. A total of 46,000 women were recruited, aged 29 on average. All were married or in a stable relationship. The women were then monitored until 2004, and any cancers they developed were recorded. The team also had more limited data up to 1996 provided by the women’s GPs, giving them two sets of statistics from which to work.

The results, reported in the British Medical Journal, show that the Pill reduced the overall risks of cancer for most women, though the degree of benefit depended on which dataset was used. Using the main dataset, the team found a reduction of 12 per cent in the risk of getting any cancer. That represents one fewer case of cancer for every 2,200 women who have used the Pill for a year. The smaller dataset also showed a benefit, but a smaller one: a 3 per cent reduction in overall risk, equivalent to one fewer case for every 10,000 women per year.

The exception was for women who used the Pill for more than eight years – about a quarter of Pill-users. Their risk of cancer was significantly increased. The average Pill user in the research took the contraceptive for 44 months. Professor Philip Hannaford, who led the research team, said: “These results show that, in this UK cohort, the contraceptive Pill was not associated with an overall increased risk of any cancer; indeed it may produce an important net public health gain.” About three million women use the Pill each year in Britain and 100 million around the world. More than 300 million women have used the Pill since its launch in 1961.

Source




Attack on restaurants

Nobody is mentioning the stupid bans on schoolyard activities that are the probable MAIN cause of any increase in childhood "obesity"



As America gets fatter, policymakers are seeking creative approaches to legislating health. They may have entered the school cafeteria -- and now they're eyeing your neighborhood. Amid worries of an obesity epidemic and its related illnesses, including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, Los Angeles officials, among others around the country, are proposing to limit new fast-food restaurants -- a tactic that could be called health zoning.

The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference. "The people don't want them, but when they don't have any other options, they may gravitate to what's there," said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan.

In just one-quarter of a mile near USC on Figueroa Street, from Adams Boulevard south, there are about 20 fast-food outlets. "To be honest, it's all we eat," Rey Merlan said one recent lunch hour at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. "Everywhere, it's fast food everywhere." Merlan said it wasn't likely that a limit on new restaurants would change peoples' habits, even though he thinks it's a good idea.

A Times analysis of the city's roughly 8,200 restaurants found that South Los Angeles has the highest concentration of fast-food eateries. Per capita, the area has fewer eating establishments of any kind than the Westside, downtown or Hollywood, and about the same as the Valley. But a much higher percentage of those are fast-food chains. South L.A. also has far fewer grocery stores.

Thirty percent of adults in South L.A. are obese, compared with 20.9% in the county overall, according to a county Department of Public Health study released in April. For children, the obesity rate was 29% in South L.A., compared with 23.3% in the county. And the figures are higher than a decade ago. In 1997, the adult rate was 25.3% in South L.A. and 14.3% in the county. South L.A. also has the highest diabetes levels in the county, at 11.7%, compared with 8.1% in the county.

"While limiting fast-food restaurants isn't a solution in itself, it's an important piece of the puzzle," said Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College. This is "bringing health policy and environmental policy together with land-use planning," he said. "I think that's smart, and it's the wave of the future."

Fast-food restaurants haven't missed the cue: From their menus, diners can choose salads over burgers, yogurts over shakes and grilled over fried these days. And many food manufacturers have reconfigured their recipes to eliminate trans fats, the most unhealthful unsaturated fats made of partially hydrogenated oils.

But especially for children, what's to eat is not completely a matter of choice. Legislators in California and elsewhere are giving closer scrutiny to school food. In 2002, the Los Angeles Unified School District was one of the first school districts in the country to ban soda, candy and other high-fat snack foods from school vending machines as of July 2004. The next year the school board decided to reduce sodium, sugar and fat in school lunches. At the federal level, there are proposals in the farm bill to spend an additional $3 billion over five years on fruits and vegetables for school programs.

A California law banning sugary drinks and limiting the fat and sugar content of foods sold in middle and high schools took effect in July. And the state enacted legislation last year to increase the purchase of fruits and vegetables to be sold in corner stores in lower-income communities. Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) introduced a bill in Congress in June that, among other things, would try to increase the availability of nutritious foods in economically depressed areas.

Source




Australians to be paid to lose weight?



Many Australians who have recently been through what now passes for an Australian education will probably be unaware that the quote in the above cartoon is from a much-loved Australian poem by A.B. Paterson, called "The Man from Snowy River". Zeg appears to think that money might get results

TAXPAYERS should subsidise 12-week weight loss programs for overweight Australians, a leading doctors group says. The Australian General Practice Network also wants $40 million spent on a national program to teach good parenting techniques. And it is pushing for general practice nurses to visit nursing homes and carry out home visits to check on elderly and frail patients.

The network is calling on major parties to commit in this year's election to pay 75 per cent of the cost of a 12-week weight loss program, such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. The $170 subsidy would be triggered by a doctor's referral. Doctors would get feedback about a patient's progress six weeks into the program.

Subsidising weight-loss courses would cost taxpayers $27 million a year. The GP Network says evidence shows obesity is linked to low-income status. "Effective weight management programs do exist but access to them can be difficult," it says. "Fees to attend can be prohibitively high."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



12 September, 2007

More amusing correspondence from the Aspartame (Nutrasweet) foes

Further to my post of yesterday, I received or had copied to me the following:

We are not in any way associated with Betty Martini whose rants embarrass us all. She is what one of my colleagues called "a self-appointed general"

There is a list on Yahoo, The Aspartame Victim's Support Group that at all times, for the last 10 years has had 1,000 people who list and share their experiences with aspartame.

I replied:

Testimonials are the stock in trade of the quack. They are of no worth in determining cause. Give me double blind studies.

Then the following was copied to me:

Mary... do you know what he's talking about...

A more sophisticated person replied, also copying to me:

He's saying all you're giving him are 'anecdotal' accounts - not double blind human tests with a large number of subjects made up of a 'control' group and an 'aspartame' group. Walton's was too small by scientific standards.

You get mired down in debating this guy, it could go on forever and you won't win because he is there to prove his predetermined point and to make you look bad. Like Martini, he will out-argue you and drag you down. We don't have to prove anything to this character. Those who believe will survive. Those who don't won't. Don't waste valuable time arguing with him. He isn't worth it.

These are obviously sincere people who have themselves had bad experiences that they attribute to aspartame -- but they are badly lacking in scientific understanding. The fact that some academic researchers will hop onto any bandwagon that will give them publications is a serious disservice to them.

Because of their lack of scientific background, they fail to understand that I am asking only for normal scientific caution and so interpret my comments as evilly motivated in some way. I noted at the beginning that I myself do not use ANY artificial sweeteners that I know of so my personal inclination would be to agree with them. I just ask for a conventional standard of proof before I do so.




Non-smokers suffer fewer heart attacks after ban

This could be just a statistical blip but it is an interesting straw in the wind

The ban on smoking in public places in Scotland is already beginning to have an impact on the nation's health, a conference in Edinburgh heard yesterday. The number of nonsmokers admitted to hospital after heart attacks fell by 20 per cent in the ten months after the ban came into force in March 2006, compared with the same ten months in the year before, Jill Pell, of Glasgow University, said. Other studies have shown that children's exposure to secondhand smoke has fallen, except among children whose mothers smoke, or those with two parents who smoke.

Professor Pell's study covered nine hospitals, which between them account for two thirds of all hospital admissions for heart attacks in Scotland. In the ten months of the year leading up to the ban, there were 3,235 admissions, while in the matching period after the ban, the figure was 2,684. Patients were asked if they were smokers or nonsmokers, and their answers double-checked through blood tests to detect levels of cotinine, the product into which nicotine is converted by the body. In nonsmokers, the fall in heart attack admissions was higher, at 20 per cent.

Professor Pell said that the reduction among nonsmokers was biologically plausible, because smoke contained a lot of toxins that could trigger heart attacks in people with coronary heart disease. "The difference between our study and earlier ones is that we have been able to show an effect in people who have never smoked. That can only be due to lower levels of passive smoke," she said.

Rates of heart disease are falling everywhere, but not as fast as this. Over the same period of ten months after the ban, admissions in England fell by 4 per cent, and the reduction rate in Scotland over the decade before the ban was 3 per cent per year. Sally Haw, principal public health adviser to NHS Scotland, who collaborated in the study, said she was confident that the figures were reliable. "It's a large study, we have confirmed people's smoking status, and we have used a robust definition to count admissions" she said.

Sir Richard Peto, of Oxford University, an expert in the epidemiology of smoking, said many things could affect admissions for heart attacks, including the weather. Fewer people suffer heart attacks when the weather is mild. "I'd be surprised if this drop were due solely to the smoking ban," he said. "I would like to see cigarette sales figures, to see if there has been any fall."

Jon Ayres, head of the University of Aberdeen environmental and occupational medicine department, said: "It's very difficult to believe there is anything fundamentally wrong with the results. I think the 20 per cent figure is good. If you look at the figures month to month, the effect seems to creep up since last year. This also suggests that the important thing was the smoking ban."

The study has yet to be published, but the conference coincided with the publication online by the British Medical Journal of three other studies. One found a reduction of 39 per cent in exposure to secondhand smoke in 11-year-olds and a similar decrease among adult nonsmokers. Cotinine levels in blood were used to measure exposure, and showed that most children have benefited. But in those with two parents who smoke, or with a mother who is a smoker, the drop was not statistically significant.

A study by Aberdeen University of nearly 400 staff at 72 pubs in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh also found health improvements in bar staff. The two-day conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre has attracted an international audience of health experts and policymakers.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



11 September, 2007

Aspartame revisited

It looks like I poked a beehive when I criticized the anti-aspartame campaign yesterday. I got several accusatory emails, including one from the chief anti-aspartame evangelist herself, Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum. I have never heard of a D.Hum before. Maybe you get them out of cornflakes packets. I reproduce below part of my correspondence with the D.Hum one:

I initially reiterated my point about the lack of human double-blind studies. She replied:

Dr. Walton's study was double blind. Who do you work for?

I was rather amused by the implicit suggestion of bad faith so I replied:

I work for BIG PHARMA, of course. No honest person could question your beliefs, could they? You can see more about my evil affiliations here:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com

With the lack of any sense of humour that one expects of fanatics, she did not apparently detect the sarcasm at all. She replied:

I figured as much. I'm not surprised. If you had read Dr. Walton's report you would have seen the link and the fact that it was double blind. Here is the link.

http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Aspartame-Adverse-Reactions-1993.htm

And what a link it is! She had to go all the way back to 1993 to find something and then it concerned ill-effects among a non-random sample of 13 clinical depressives who were fed doses of aspartame seven times a day in pill form, rather than in food.

Quite aside from the ridiculous "sampling", the fact that they got the stuff in pill form quite vitiates the study. Aspartame is supplied IN FOOD and unless you study it in food, you are pissing into the wind. As I have previously pointed out, the potentially bad metabolites of it have been shown to be susceptible to breaking down by other food components or their metabolites so it is the actual bottom line after that happens that we have to look at, not intermediary processes in isolation. And NOBODY seems to have shown any adverse effects from normal use of aspartame in a double-blind study.

I am sure the anti-aspartame evangelists will be sticking pins into a voodoo doll of me by now.




Popcorn addiction dangerous

A MAN who microwaved and ate two to three bags of extra-buttered popcorn a day for a decade has come down with a dangerous lung disease, apparently the first public case of "popcorn lung". Popcorn lung, or broncheolitis obliterans, permanently scars airways, eventually leaving victims fighting for breath and dependent on oxygen. When safety experts identified the disease in workers in popcorn factories in 2002, they said consumers were not at risk because of the relatively low exposure.

But after treating a Colorado furniture salesman, 53, earlier this year, doctors at the National Jewish Medical and Research Centre in Denver warned federal agencies. "We cannot be sure that this patient's exposure to butter-flavoured microwave popcorn has caused his lung disease," wrote the hospital's Cecile Rose."However, we have no other plausible explanation."

In response to the news, the Flavour and Extract Manufacturers Association on Tuesday recommended that members who made butter flavours with diacetyl consider cutting its concentration. The association made it clear there was no suggestion of risk from eating popcorn. "No, it's inhalation," Ms Rose said. "This patient described enjoying the smell so much he was actually inhaling the steam."

Ms Rose said she had been surprised by the man's condition. "So I turned to him and apologised and said, 'This is a really weird question. But are you around a lot of popcorn?' His jaw dropped, and he said, 'How did you know to ask me that? I am popcorn.' He described himself as a two-pack-a-day user. Sometimes more." Ms Rose and her colleagues tested the air in the man's home for diacetyl, a chemical used to produce a buttery flavour, while he was microwaving popcorn.

Ms Rose said the man's lungs have stabilised since he gave up eating popcorn - and he shed almost 15 kilograms in weight.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



10 September, 2007

The campaign against Nutrasweet (aspartame)

Coming as I do from a big sugar-producing area (Far North Queensland), I always read carefully the little sachets that one gets with one's coffee in coffee lounges. I make sure that I am putting real sugar in my coffee and not some substitute junk. So I should be in sympathy with the campaign against aspartame, right? Wrong! As far as I can see, the campaign is founded on little more than the usual self-glorifying belief that if something is popular it must be bad.

There is a list here of 13 recent anti-aspartame studies and, unless I have missed something, there is not one study of the type that would be decisive: A double-blind study in humans. There are plenty of in vitro ("test tube") and in vivo (rats and mice) studies but that's about it.

And even some of the studies listed there admit that some of the potentially bad byproducts of aspartame metabolism can be broken down rapidly by other food components or metabolites. So showing that rats on a rat diet cannot handle aspartame well tells us nothing about humans. What is needed are studies of humans on a human diet as it seems probable that the human metabolism CAN safely break down aspartame. One has to look at the bottom line, not intermediate processes in isolation.

Since a double blind study in humans should not pose any great difficulty, I think it is the absence of such a study which is most telling.

The attention-seeking studies have however had an effect. There are now various bans on aspartame, particularly in Europe and the UK. Seeing how crazy such places also are about "obesity", it is strange indeed that something which could help combat obesity is restricted on such flimsy grounds. It reinforces the impression that the attack on obesity is insincere too. It adds to the evidence that the anti-obesity campaign is really an expression of middle-class contempt for the working class, who are indeed fatter on the whole: Good old class-prejudice again. The more things change ....

The amusing thing is that all the food and health rhetoric goes right over the heads of most working class people. They very wisely just don't listen. They just eat what they like and damn the consequences. I do too. But my father was, after all, a lumberjack. Heh!




Are baby milk additives rotting babies' bowels?

Prebiotics: Another fad goes bad. If this one causes Crohn's disease it is a real disaster. If baby formula makers don't act on this immediately, they could be in big trouble. They might be in big trouble already

DOCTORS have warned that infant milk formula containing added fruit sugars could be causing gut disorders in children. Several new milk formula products, including Nutricia and Aptamil, contain prebiotics such as fructose or other short-chain carbohydrates to improve digestive health.

But Melbourne researchers have found prebiotics in the diet can cause gastrointestinal problems. They are worried that the latest nutrition fad could be doing "more harm than good" in children with a predisposition to gut problems. Gastroenterology expert Prof Peter Gibson expressed concerns about adding prebiotics to infant formula. "Excessive intake of sugars that escape digestion and absorption in the small intestine contribute to susceptibility and symptom generation in Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis," he said. "And excessive intake of such sugars are particular to the Western diet. "But for those who are susceptible to these diseases, the short-chain carbohydrates or prebiotics extend the bowel and make it worse."

Prof Gibson said drugs did not work well with these conditions and there "are few ways of dealing with them". "People appear to be getting better by taking these foods out of the diet. People with IBS who take these out of their diet that we have studied -- three out of four have shown a significant improvement."

His team has measured the prebiotic contents of food in the Australian diet in order to generate a nutritional database. They are studying the dietary intake of 100 people with Crohn's disease over the next 12 months to confirm the findings of a pilot study. That study found more than half of the 52 patients with Crohn's disease who removed prebiotics from their diet improved their symptoms. "Prebiotics provide good bacteria to maintain good digestive health," Prof Gibson said. "But they are likely to make bowel conditions worse."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



9 September, 2007

The despised pacifier is a good thing after all

Advice that dummies [pacifiers] could dramatically reduce the risk of cot death is being overlooked by nursery staff, who still regard them as the lazy way to pacify a child. New research has found that years of anti-dummy prejudice means that child care professionals are failing to implement the potentially life-saving advice and passing it on to parents.

Staff at government and private nurseries are still heavily focused on weaning children off dummies. All those involved in the study had "dummy curbing strategies", and only a tiny fraction of managers and staff had heard that dummies had an important role in helping to prevent cot death.

The findings will be presented today by Dr Judy Whitmarsh, senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, at the British Educational Research Association annual conference in London. "The guidance is clearly not filtering down. Child care professionals are usually very quick to respond to new advice on child safety so this is very surprising," she said.

In 2005, the American Academy of Paediatrics found the risk of sudden infant death syndrome could be halved if babies fall asleep with dummies in their mouths, although the researchers could not identify the reason why dummies could save lives. In Britain, the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths and the Department of Health issued new advice encouraging the use of dummies.

Dr Whitmarsh said several factors may deter dummy use. There may be concerns that parents will fail to act on other advice regarding cot death, such as putting babies to sleep on their backs, and not overheating the room.

Dr Whitmarsh said the "demonising" of dummies was getting in the way. "Many people associated dummies with inadequate parenting. There is a myth that only lazy, working-class mothers use dummies whereas plenty of middle-class mothers use them too."

Source




Ritalin for weight loss?

The drugged society marches on -- but that will be OK if "obesity" is the target, of course

A single dose of Ritalin appears to dampen adults' taste for calories and fat -- suggesting, researchers say, that the ADHD drug should be studied as a weight-loss medication. Weight loss is known to be a potential side effect of methylphenidate, best known by the brand-name Ritalin. Whether the drug stands as a potential weapon in the battle of the bulge has been little studied, however.

Theoretically, Ritalin could help overweight people control their appetite because the drug increases brain levels of the chemical dopamine, which is involved in feelings of pleasure and ``reward.'' Dopamine levels increase in response to food, and some research has suggested that people with normally low dopamine levels may be more vulnerable to becoming overweight because of the reward value they get from food. ``This is the theoretical basis for using Ritalin or other drugs that boost brain dopamine,'' explained Dr Gary Goldfield, the lead author of the new study. ``We hope it will reduce appetite, possibly by reducing craving, wanting and/or the reinforcing value of food.''

To put that theory to the test, Goldfield and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada had 14 adults take either a dose of methylphenidate or a placebo shortly before offering the volunteers a buffet lunch. They found that although the volunteers' pre-lunch hunger ratings were no different whether they took methylphenidate or the placebo, the drug did cause them to eat less. On average, they downed 11 per cent fewer calories, and 17 per cent less fat, Goldfield and his colleagues report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Since methylphendiate did not affect hunger, this suggests it might have dampened the rewarding effects of the food, according to the researchers. ``I would say that since methylphenidate ... reduced food intake and fat intake in only one administration, it should definitely be studied further as a potential weight-loss medication,'' Goldfield said. He cautioned, however, that it's too soon for people to ask their doctors for a Ritalin prescription. He said he and his colleagues are conducting a longer-term clinical trial to see whether the drug does in fact spur weight loss, and whether its effects on dopamine explain the benefit.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



8 September, 2007

"Organic" food is no different

The most interesting thing about the article below is the tables that go with it. See the original for those

By picking up a food labelled "organic" you might assume you're taking a positive step towards a more nutritious and healthy diet. Indeed, an Organic Market report by the Soil Association revealed that annual spending on organic food, cosmetics and clothes is o2bn, and that health is the prime motivation for buying organic. But while the sustainable farming methods used to produce organic foods make them kinder to the environment, they are not necessarily kinder to your health or waistline.

In fact, many products carrying the organic label are packed full of fat, sugar and salt and are no better than regular varieties of the same food. A recent report highlighted the confusion surrounding organic food labels designed to woo health-conscious shoppers. In a survey of soups, the Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) group found that organic products are often the worst offenders when it comes to sodium content.

According to Anna Denny, nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation: "Organic is not necessarily any different to conventionally produced food when it comes to its nutrient content". Too much salt in any food has been linked to high blood pressure and an increase risk in heart disease, she says. Likewise, a high amount of fat - and in particular the more harmful saturated fat - can increase the likelihood of obesity and health problems such as diabetes, stroke and arthritis.

"The best advice for people who want to shop organically for environmental reasons is to check the label carefully," says Denny According to Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, organic food is typically 63 per cent more expensive than conventional produce.

More here




"Lean gene" may help keep you trim

An "antiobesity" gene may explain why some people always stay thin, researchers say. The gene apparently serves to keep animals lean during times of plenty, and future weight-control treatments might work by stimulating it, they add. The gene, first discovered in flies, also keeps worms and mice trim, according to a report in the September issue of the research journal Cell Metabolism. If the gene works similarly in humans, the findings could lead to a new weapon against our burgeoning waistlines, according to the researchers.

Animals without a working copy of the gene, known as Adipose, become obese and diabetes-prone, while those with increased Adp activity in fat tissue become slimmer, scientists found. Moreover, the gene's "dose" seems to determine how slender an animal turns out to be. If treatments could stimulate this gene "even just a little bit, you might have a beneficial effect on fat," said Jonathan Graff of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

He noted that people often become overweight very gradually -- adding just one or two pounds a year. "After 30 years, that's a lot." While worms and flies are routinely studied as models of human health and disease, that trend has been less true in fat biology, Graff said. That's because unlike mammals, worms and flies store their fat in multifunctional cells rather than in dedicated fat cells known as adipocytes. However, those differences didn't preclude the possibility that the animals might use similar genes to accomplish their fat storage goals, he added.

Graff's team found that worms lacking Adp activity became fat, although they appeared to be otherwise healthy and fertile. Indeed, another scientist, Winifred Doane, had found a naturally occurring strain of plump flies in Nigeria almost 50 years ago that carried a mutation in their Adp gene. The flies lived in a climate marked by cycles of famine, where they may have benefited from being highly efficient at fat storage, Doane had suggested.

Graff and his colleagues produced a strain of mutant flies like those that Doane had found years earlier. They found that the mutant flies were indeed fat and also had trouble getting around. Flies with only one copy of the Adp mutation fell somewhere in between the fat and normal flies, evidence that the gene's effects are "dose dependent," they reported. Treatments that increased Adp in the insects' fat tissue led them to lose weight, suggesting the gene works within fat cells themselves.

In mice in which the gene functioned in in fat-storing tissues, the same patterns emerged. "We made mice that expressed Adp in fat-storing tissues, and lo and behold... they were skinny," Graff said. They "weighed less with markedly less fat -- and their fat cells were smaller." Smaller fat cells usually translate into better metabolic function, he said, including better blood sugar control.

The search for molecules underlying weight gain and poor blood sugar control "has taken on additional urgency due to the recent dramatic increase in obesity and diabetes," Graff said. But in a modern world where many people have essentially unlimited access to food, it's a wonder that even more people aren't overweight, he added. If this gene plays a similar role in humans, "it may be that some people's Adp works very well."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



7 September, 2007

THE FOOD ADDITIVE PUTSCH

The food additive warriors have obviously got desperate but their last fling has won them the publicity battle by fraud. The extraordinary study below (Summary from The Times plus journal abstract) tells us NOTHING about actual food. Prior studies have not given the adverse effects hypothesized so this time they just gave kids cocktails of chemicals in fruit juice. And some kids were slightly affected by some of the cocktails.

But the procedure is scientifically amazing. Components of any complex process must be examined in situ if we are to draw any bottom-line conclusions -- witness the poor transferability of in vitro to in vivo results. It is entirely possible for a chemical to be deleterious in one situation or combination and not in another. And it is known that the interaction of chemicals in food is very complex. So this research tells us nothing about what effects the chemicals would have in their normal applications.

Furthermore, the practice of giving a cocktail of chemicals also renders the whole exercise a virtual nullity. For all we know, the adverse effects could all have been caused by just one chemical in the mix! Normal scientific procedure is one of control. We try to vary NOTHING BUT the one variable under examination. That is the only way we can be sure that any given variable has some effect. So this study tells us nothing about any of the variables concerned.

It is of course possible that the various chemicals have to interact to produce a deleterious effect but that just underlines how negligent it was not to test their effect in situ. If interactions are important, it is important to show that the interactions being examined are real-life ones.

Sadly, however, despite its scientific nullity, the study would seem to have given the food fanatics the ammunition to get banned many useful additives that make food safer and more attractive. That they published such irresponsible rubbish is however another blot on the escutcheon of Lancet and shows again what a political propaganda outfit they have become. The irrational Greenie nature-worshippers have been facilitated in another one of their Quixotic crusades.

Update:

I thought that a quote about the study preceding this one was pretty amusing:

A further limitation of the earlier study design was the observed 'placebo effect'. A large proportion of children in the first study were unaffected (or, in some cases, showed an improvement in behaviour) when on the additives mix, but showed worsening when on the placebo

What pesky results! The additives were actually good for some children!

Another amusing point: There were two additive mixes in the study below and only one had "bad" effects. But the one that had bad effects on the 3 year olds overall did not affect the 8 year olds overall and the one that affected the 8 year olds overall did not affect the 3 year olds overall! What the heck can anybody conclude from that?

By being very strict about which data they allowed into the analysis, the researchers find find both mixes to be bad in the 8 year olds but that simply underlines how marginal the effects were.

Looking at both the prior study and the latest one, it is hard to avoid the impression that the results were essentially random. That some results in the study below apparently reached statistical significance rules out only one source of random effects: small sample size. That is all that a test of statistical significance does.

Britain's food watchdog is warning all parents today of a clear link between additives and hyperactive behaviour in children. Research for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and published in The Lancet has established the "deleterious effects" of taking a mixture of artifical extras that are added to drinks, sweets and processed foods. It has led the FSA to issue the advice to parents who believe their children to be hyperactive that they should cut out foods containing the E numbers analysed in the study.

Scientists from the University of Southampton, who carried out research on three-year-old and eight-year-old children, believe that their findings could have a "substantial" impact on the regulation of food additives in Britain. But the FSA has been accused of missing an opportunity to protect children and all consumers by failing to impose a deadline on manufacturers to remove additives such as Sunshine Yellow and Tartrazine from their products.

In the biggest study of its kind the researchers recorded the responses of 153 three-year-olds and 144 eight to nine-year-olds to different drinks. None suffered from a hyperactivity disorder. The children drank a mix of additives that reflected the average daily additive intake of a British child. The mixture was not a product currently on sale.

After consuming the drinks - a cocktail of controversial E numbers and the preservative sodium benzoate - the children were found to become boisterous and lose concentration. They were unable to play with one toy or complete one task, and they engaged in unusually impulsive behaviour. The older group were unable to complete a 15-minute computer exercise. Results varied between different children but the study found that poor behaviour was observed in children who had no record of hyperactivity or attention deficit disorder.

The results are certain to cause concern and it is likely many parents will remove or cut down on food and drink products that might provoke such reactions in their children. The problem for many parents will be how to police children's eating; although most foods are labelled, some sweets are sold loose in shops and school canteens. Schools can now expect to be inundated with requests for the ingredients of food and drink on offer to their pupils to be made known.

Jim Stevenson, head of psychology at the University of Southampton, who led the research, said yesterday that he thought there could be swift action against artificial colourants but that it could take longer to phase out use of the preservative sodium benzoate. At a briefing to publicise the results, however, he said that the FSA's advice was the most sensible course of action at present. Hyperactive behaviour was also caused by genetic, developmental and emotional factors and a change of diet was not a panacea.

But Richard Watts, food campaigner for the pressure group Sustain, said that the advice would cause confusion. "The agency needs to toughen up the rules quickly. I don't know why they did not give food companies a deadline to remove the additives. I think as an urgent next step any food with these additives should be classed as junk food and banned from TV advertising to children." He was also concerned about soft drinks available in schools and wanted the School Foods Trust to review the use of sodium benzoate. Ian Tokelove, spokesman for the Food Commission, said: "Manufacturers should clean up their act and remove these additives, which are neither needed or wanted in our food".

The FSA defended its stance and said the matter had to be resolved by the European Commission. Dr Clare Baynton, of the FSA, made it clear that the additives were safe and approved for use in food, and that further assessment was required. She put the onus on parents to monitor their children's diet. "It is for a parent to know what foods their children are susceptible to and whether their children react to to specific types of food."

The study builds on tests conducted on the Isle of Wight in 2002 which were inconclusive about links between additives and hyperactivity. Julian Hunt, of the Food and Drink Federation said: "It is important to reassure consumers that the Southampton study does not suggest there is a safety issue with the use of these additives. In addition, the way in which the additives were tested as a mixture is not how they are used in everyday products.

Source

Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial

By Donna McCann et al.

Background: We undertook a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, crossover trial to test whether intake of artificial food colour and additives (AFCA) affected childhood behaviour.

Methods: 153 3-year-old and 144 8/9-year-old children were included in the study. The challenge drink contained sodium benzoate and one of two AFCA mixes (A or B) or a placebo mix. The main outcome measure was a global hyperactivity aggregate (GHA), based on aggregated z-scores of observed behaviours and ratings by teachers and parents, plus, for 8/9-year-old children, a computerised test of attention. This clinical trial is registered with Current Controlled Trials (registration number ISRCTN74481308). Analysis was per protocol.

Findings: 16 3-year-old children and 14 8/9-year-old children did not complete the study, for reasons unrelated to childhood behaviour. Mix A had a significantly adverse effect compared with placebo in GHA for all 3-year-old children (effect size 0.20 [95% CI 0.01-0.39], p=0.044) but not mix B versus placebo. This result persisted when analysis was restricted to 3-year-old children who consumed more than 85% of juice and had no missing data (0.32 [0.05-0.60], p=0.02). 8/9-year-old children showed a significantly adverse effect when given mix A (0.12 [0.02-0.23], p=0.023) or mix B (0.17 [0.07-0.28], p=0.001) when analysis was restricted to those children consuming at least 85% of drinks with no missing data.

Interpretation: Artificial colours or a sodium benzoate preservative (or both) in the diet result in increased hyperactivity in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the general population.

The Lancet, September, 2007

Kidney treatment forsaken for 'natural cure' -- patient dies

People should not have to die before these quacks are pursued

VECKO KRSTESKI was desperate for a cure and Jeffrey Dummett advertised one, based on what he called the "eight laws of health: nutrition, exercise, water, sunshine, temperance, air, rest, and trust in divine power". Krsteski, a 37-year-old with chronic kidney disease, followed the program for two weeks - and died on day 14. Now Dummett is on trial for the manslaughter of Krsteski, who had suspended his conventional treatment to follow the naturopath's regimen.

Krsteski's doctors had prescribed dialysis four times a day, as well as regular medication, a controlled diet and no more than a litre of fluids a day, a Supreme Court jury was told yesterday. Then his sister told him about Dummett's program; Dummett advertised his services with the slogan "Need a cure?"

When Krsteski signed up for a live-in detoxification program in February 2002, he had no reason to distrust Dummett, who he believed was a doctor, the prosecutor, Paul Leask, told the court. He stopped his conventional treatment and started a liquid diet, the court heard. After nine days he noticed chest pains and numbness in his fingers, Mr Leask told the court. By day 10 he had lost 11 kilograms. On the morning of day 14, Krsteski was found dead.

Mr Leask said Krsteski had died of a heart attack, and the Crown sought to prove he had died prematurely because of Dummett's gross negligence. He had had a duty of care and a reasonable person would have realised the risk of injury, Mr Leask said. Dummett was guilty of manslaughter, he argued, because he had failed to inquire about Krsteski's kidney condition, or consult his doctors.

But Dummett's barrister, John Doris, SC, said Krsteski's autopsy revealed he had a "severely diseased heart" that had not been diagnosed by years of conventional treatment. "It was the direct cause of his death," he said. The doctor who performed the autopsy had found: "Mr Krsteski suffered from a severe disease which would have caused his death at a relatively young age," Mr Doris said.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



6 September, 2007

DOES THE PILL STOP MS?

Popular summary followed by journal abstract below:

ESTROGEN may be the next treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS), with research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week showing that the hormone can protect the brain from degeneration without increasing the risk of breast and endometrial cancers. Previous studies have shown that the symptoms of MS greatly improve in women during pregnancy, when estrogen levels are high. In the current study, scientists studied young adult female mice aged five to six weeks old with a condition similar to human MS called encephalomyelitis. Some mice were given a specific form of estrogen, while a control group received an inactive placebo. Those receiving estrogen did not develop any of the disease symptoms seen in the control group, including slower movement, difficulty maintaining balance and nerve damage.

Source

Differential neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory effects of estrogen receptor (ER)beta ligand treatment

By Seema Tiwari-Woodruff et al.

Abstract

Treatment with either estradiol or an estrogen receptor (ER)alpha vs. an ERbeta ligand treatment abrogated disease at the onset and throughout the disease course. In contrast, ERalpha ligand treatment was antiinflammatory in the systemic immune system, whereas ERalpha ligand treatment reduced CNS inflammation, whereas ERalpha or the ERbeta selective ligand, we have dissociated the antiinflammatory effect from the neuroprotective effect of estrogen treatment and have shown that neuroprotective effects of estrogen treatment do not necessarily depend on antiinflammatory properties. Together, these findings suggest that ERbeta ligand treatment should be explored as a potential neuroprotective strategy in multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, particularly because estrogen-related toxicities such as breast and uterine cancer are mediated through ERalpha

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Sept, 2007




Some gene damage from smoking is permanent: study

The sample is derisory but there is probably something in it nonetheless

A new study may help explain why former smokers are still more prone to lung cancer than those who have never smoked. It found that smoking causes some permanent genetic damage. Quitting still offers huge health benefits, researchers stressed, as the risk to former smokers is much lower than for current smokers.

A team led by Wan Lam and Stephen Lam from the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, Canada, took samples from the lungs of 24 current and former smokers, as well as from people who have never smoked.

They used the samples to create libraries using a technique called serial analysis of gene expression, which helps to identify patterns of gene activity. Only about a fifth of the genes in a cell are switched on at any given time, but smoking leads to changes in gene activity. The researchers found that some of these changes, though not all, persisted even years after quitting smoking.

The reversible genes were particularly involved in "xenobiotic" functions -- managing chemicals not produced in the body and metabolism of genetic material and mucus secretion, scientists found. The irreversible damage was to some DNA repair genes, and to the activity of genes that help fight lung cancer development.

"Those genes and functions which do not revert to normal levels upon smoking cessation may provide insight into why former smokers still maintain a risk of developing lung cancer," said Raj Chari, first author of the study. Tobacco smoking accounts for 85 percent of lung cancers, and former smokers account for half of those newly diagnosed with the disease.

The gene findings are published in the Aug. 29 issue of the online research journal BMC Genomics.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



5 September, 2007

EMPTY-HEADEDNESS IS FATAL

This is one I won't argue with

Rock and pop stars are more than twice as likely to suffer a premature death as other people, according to new research. A study of more than 1,000 stars who shot to fame between 1956 and 1999 found they were much more likely to die, especially within a few years of becoming famous.

While the deaths of stars such as Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain have been recorded as involving drugs or mental health problems, little has been reported on their overall likelihood of dying, the authors said. More studies are also needed to examine the effect of rock stars' lifestyles on their fans, they added.

The research, published ahead of print in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, studied celebrities from North America and Europe from the All-Time Top 1,000 albums from the genres rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronica and new age. The earliest date of fame was 1956 for Elvis Presley and the latest was 1999 for Eminem.

The study found that, between two and 25 years after fame, the risk of death was two to three times higher for North American and European pop stars when matched against US and UK populations. Overall, the study found that 100 pop stars died between 1996 and 2005 - 7.3% of women and 9.6% of men. The death rate among European artists was around half that for North American artists. Among the Europeans, the average age of death was 35 and 42 among the Americans.

In both the North American and European samples, a chronic drug or alcohol-related problem or overdose was identified as associated with over a quarter of deaths. The authors, led by Mark Bellis from the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, concluded: "Pop stars can suffer high levels of stress in environments where alcohol and drugs are widely available, leading to health-damaging risk behaviour. "However, their behaviour can also influence would-be stars and devoted fans."

Source




"Healthier" British school meals 'a failure'

Thousands of pupils have been shunning school meals since the Jamie Oliver inspired crusade to make them healthier, it was claimed. Atotal of 428,000 children rejected food cooked at school in the two years after the campaign was launched in 2005, according to the Liberal Democrats. They said two-thirds of secondary and 60 per cent of primary school pupils do not now eat meals provided by schools. The Government launched the crusade after TV chef Oliver attacked school meals for being junk-food based.

Lib Dem schools spokesman David Laws said: 'These figures show the English school meals service is in meltdown. 'The new standards for healthier school meals have been introduced too quickly, too inflexibly and with too little education of pupils and parents.' He added that prices of school meals 'have been rising too quickly'.

Kevin Brennan, the minister responsible for school meals, defended the scheme. 'It is true there has been a dip in take-up in some secondary schools, but some have actually seen an increase,' he said.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



4 September, 2007

WILL YOUR NON-STICK FRYPAN STUNT YOUR BABY?

The article "Perfluorinated Chemicals and Fetal Growth: A Study within the Danish National Birth Cohort" (PDF here) by Chunyuan Fei et al. is another despicable attempt to worry pregnant women. Because they are popular, non-stick pots and pans MUST be bad for you, right? Nasty arrogant horrible elitist thinking but all too common.

The article is a classical example of the tendency in medical researchers to make mountains out of pimples. If you look at the plot of the "non-stick" chemicals against birthweight it is a blob (See their Figure 1). To find any trend there requires great ingenuity. Expressed as a Pearsonian correlation, it would be less than .10, from a quick look.

The only thing they actually found was that women with a very low exposure (bottom quartile) to the bad chemicals had slightly bigger babies. The other three quartiles did not differ in birthweight.

So what do you conclude from that? In the absence of any linear effect, I conclude that your non-stick cookware has been given a clean bill of health. But that is not what the authors claim.

So what do we make of the one small difference that they did find? My suggestion is that the women with very low exposure to the chemicals were from rural areas and that there is a slight tendency (for whatever reason -- maybe lower stress) for rural women to have bigger babies.

The chemical concerned -- PFOA -- is very useful but is not very biodegradable (suggesting that it is probably inert in humans) so has long been a target of the Greenies and other health hysterics. It is found in food wrappers and many other things than Teflon cookware. This is just the latest attempt to find something wrong with it. If a few pregnant women are distressed by the "findings", too bad. Propping up the Greenie religion trumps any care about people.




Cheap drug could save diabetics' lives

The effect sounds very weak. May not be real at all

Thousands of lives could be saved in Britain if a blood pressure treatment that costs 50p a day was used to treat obese patients with type 2 diabetes, an international research team said yesterday.The drug also has virtually no unwanted side-effects. [Unlikely to have any main effects, then]

A study of more than 11,000 patients with type 2 diabetes found that patients who were put on Coversyl Plus were 18 per cent less likely to die from heart-related illnesses than if they were not taking the drug.

There are two million people with type 2 diabetes in Britain. The condition is caused mainly by obesity [What crap. It's mostly genetic] and the number of sufferers is expected to increase. The study, presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna, suggested that if all British patients with type 2 diabetes were placed on the drug, 22,500 deaths could be prevented within the next five years.

Researchers said that if the drug were given to half of the sufferers of type 2 diabetes worldwide, more than a million deaths could be avoided in the same period.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



3 September, 2007

NOISE POLLUTION A HEALTH PROBLEM

I have not seen the research that the article below is based on but the conclusions seem reasonable

The myriad pressures of modern life are often blamed for causing stress-related illness, but research from the world's leading health watchdog suggests it's not so much the pace of life, but the accompanying volume that's killing us. New evidence from the World Health Organisation (WHO) reveals that thousands of people around the world may be dying prematurely, or succumbing to disease, through the effects of chronic noise exposure.

"We live in a far noisier society than previous generations," says associate professor Bob Cowan, CEO of The Hearing Co-operative Research Centre. Cacophony descends on us from all directions: constant traffic, the wail of emergency services sirens, the roar of aircraft overhead, the hammer of heavy machinery, the squeal of car alarms, the endless trill of mobile phones and the staccato barking of the next door neighbour's dog. This relentless racket has reached such a fever pitch that many of us have forgotten what silence sounds like.

Cowan points out that restaurants in the 1970s, for instance, covered their tables with damask cloths, hung heavy drapes at the windows and placed hangings on the walls -- all of which acted to absorb unwanted sound: "You wanted quiet, so you could have intimate conversations." Times have changed. Restaurants now are "reverberant environments" which create a trendy buzz and the illusion of busyness with bare tables, hard floors, reflective surfaces and vaulted ceilings.

This creeping tide of surround sound occurs in countless other settings, and many of us are resigned to it. We dismiss it as an inevitable fact of modern life -- but it's making us sick. "The level of background noise today might not damage your hearing directly, but it can lead to other health problems such as an increase in stress, negative effects on concentration, and others," says Cowan.

Many previous studies have made weak links between noise pollution and ill-health, but the WHO findings provide the clearest and most disturbing connection yet between unwanted noise and sudden, early death. As reported in New Scientist this week, WHO's findings, though preliminary, show that long-term exposure to traffic noise may account for 3 per cent of deaths from ischemic heart disease in Europe -- typically strokes and heart attacks. "Given that 7 million people around the globe die each year from heart disease, that would put the toll from exposure to noise at around 210,000 deaths," the report notes. As well as the projections for deaths from heart disease, the WHO figures suggest that 2 per cent of Europeans suffer severely disturbed sleep because of noise pollution, and at least 15 per cent suffer severe annoyance.

The researchers calculate that chronic exposure to loud traffic noise causes 3 per cent of all cases of tinnitus, in which sufferers hear constant noise in their ears. They also estimate the damage caused by noise pollution to children's ability to learn, and the damage to hearing caused by "leisure noise", such as listening to loud music on MP3 players or attending pop concerts and discos.

Local research indicates Australians are no less susceptible to assaults on their eardrums. Doctor Tharit Issarayangyun, a research analyst with the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at The University of Sydney, was one of a team which studied the health of residents living near Sydney Airport along with residents in a matched control suburb unaffected by aircraft noise. The results, published this year in Journal of Air Transport Management (13, 2007 264-276), revealed that people chronically exposed to high aircraft noise levels were more likely to report stress, and more likely to report elevated blood pressure compared with those not exposed to aircraft noise.

The mechanisms by which noise causes illness are complex, but a 2004 federal government report, The Health Effects of Environmental Noise - Other Than Hearing Loss, noted that hearing evolved from a basic need to alert, warn and communicate: "As a result, sound -- wanted or unwanted -- directly evokes reflexes, emotions and actions, which can be a stimulant and a stressor."

Subsequent research revealed in New Scientist explains that the body's reaction to this sound raises levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenalin and noradrenalin -- hormones which, if in constant circulation, can cause long-term physiological changes that could be life-threatening. The health effects report identified certain groups of people who were more sensitive to the effects of noise pollution, and thus faced greater health risks. These included infants and school children, shift workers, the elderly, the blind and those suffering hearing impairment, sleep disorders and physical and mental health conditions.

The susceptibility of children correlates with a report in Lancet (2005 Jun 4-10; 365 (9475):1942-9), which found that chronic exposure to environmental noise, in particular aircraft and road traffic noise, leads to impaired cognitive function and health in children. It assessed almost 3000 children aged 9-10 years from 89 schools out of of 77 approached in the Netherlands, 27 in Spain, and 30 in the UK located in local authority areas around three major airports. "Our findings indicate that a chronic environmental stressor -- aircraft noise -- could impair cognitive development in children, specifically reading comprehension," the researchers concluded. "Schools exposed to high levels of aircraft noise are not healthy educational environments."

According to Queensland's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), one of the bodies responsible for controlling unwanted racket, more than 40 per cent of Australians are disturbed at home or lose sleep because of noise pollution. Yet compared to the public health issue of smoking, which becomes subject to ever more robust legislation and social stigma each year, community awareness of noise hazards remains relatively low.

More here




Men with younger women have more children

And grass is green

A woman should get together with a man several years older than herself if she wants a lot of children - at least in Sweden. The analysis of Swedish birth records reveals that men who partner with women six years younger than themselves produce the most offspring. Across many cultures men and women prefer younger and older mates respectively, says Martin Fieder, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna in Austria. In theory these age preferences make evolutionary sense, he says. However, there has been little reliable data on whether the preferences translate into a real advantage in terms of having children.

To find out more, Fieder and Susanne Huber - his two-years-younger wife and a researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna - examined population data from Sweden. This country keeps meticulous records of births, including the names and ages of both parents, regardless of whether they are married or not. They randomly selected the records of about 5600 men and 6000 women born between 1945 and 1955, and looked at the number of children born to each individual before 2003. This is the most recent generation that could be assumed to have stopped having new children. Previous studies have shown that in Sweden only 2% of people have a child past the age of 45.

An analysis of the records revealed that men who had partners aged six years younger than themselves had the greatest number of children: about 2.2 children on average, a relatively high number in a country that has long had low fertility rates in the past. By comparison, men who had partners six years older than themselves had 1.8 children on average. Women bore the greatest number of children when they chose men four years older than themselves. Those who partnered with such men had 2.1 children on average. The age-gap figures and numbers of children do not match up because the people studied were randomly selected from a large number of the Swedish population and therefore not likely to have been partners with each other, explain the researchers.

Fieder speculates that men evolved a preference for younger women because these women have a longer fertility span than older female counterparts. He adds that women, meanwhile, might give birth to more children when they choose older partners because such men are likely to have greater financial resources to support a family than younger men do.

However, men partnered with a much younger woman did not produce the maximum number of children. Mothers more than 10 years younger than their partners had about 2.0 children on average. When too much of an age difference exists, there is perhaps a greater chance of male fertility problems and disagreement over family planning, suggests Fieder.

Fieder notes that his study relied on birth records and so did not include data on childless couples. He says that this could have skewed the results and hopes that future analyses will be able to include childless couples.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



2 September, 2007

DO FATTIES HAVE FEWER CHILDREN?

The article below says that both skinnies and fatties have fewer children. The conclusions are however naive. The authors assume that the effect is due to lower fertility. That fatties might be less popular as partners and hence late starters in having children does not seem to be considered. The results may also be dated. I sometimes get the impression that it is MAINLY fatties who are having children these days

Body Mass Index in Adolescence and Number of Children in Adulthood

By Jokela, Markus et al.

Abstract:

Background: Body weight is associated with reproduction and related behaviors, but it is unknown whether it has significance for fertility differences in the general population. We examined whether adolescent body mass index (BMI; kg/m2) predicted the number of children in adulthood 21 years later.

Methods: The participants were 1298 Finnish women and men (ages 12, 15, and 18 years at baseline) followed in a prospective population-based cohort study (the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns) from year 1980 to 2001.

Results: There was an inverted J-shaped association between BMI and the number of children, such that underweight adolescents had 10-16% fewer children in adulthood, overweight adolescents 4-8% fewer, and obese adolescents 32-38% fewer than individuals with normal adolescent weight. This association was similar in women and men, and independent of age, education, urbanicity of residence, and timing of menarche (in women). Adolescents with low or high BMI were less likely to have lived with a partner in adulthood, which partly accounted for their decreased number of children. The influence of adolescent BMI was independent of adulthood BMI in women but not in men. Age at menarche also predicted the number of children, such that women with early or late menarche had more children than those with average age at menarche.

Conclusion: Underweight and especially obesity may have a negative impact on fertility in the general population. The increasing prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents may represent a concern for future reproductive health.

Epidemiology. 18(5):599-606, September 2007




SCANS NOT BAD FOR BUB

Anything that is popular will of course be condemned by the self-ordained superior folk so prophecies of doom about ultrasound scans of babies in the womb are entirely to be expected. Could it even send your babies mad? The following article examines that and draws reasonable conclusions

Prenatal Ultrasound Scanning and the Risk of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses

By Stalberg, Karin et al.

Abstract:

Background: Prenatal ultrasound exposure has been associated with increased prevalence of left-hand or mixed-hand preference, and has been suggested to affect the normal lateralization of the fetal brain. Atypical lateralization is more common in patients with schizophrenia. We evaluated possible associations of prenatal ultrasound with schizophrenia and other psychoses.

Methods: We identified a cohort of individuals born in Sweden 1973-1978. During this period, one Swedish hospital (Malmo University Hospital) performed prenatal ultrasound on a routine basis, and all individuals born at that hospital were considered exposed to ultrasound. Children born at hospitals where ultrasound was not used routinely or selectively were considered unexposed. We used Poisson regression analysis to estimate the effect of ultrasound exposure on the incidence of schizophrenia and other psychoses.

Results: In all, 370,945 individuals were included in the study, of whom 13,212 were exposed to ultrasound. The exposed group demonstrated a tendency toward a higher risk of schizophrenia (among men, crude incidence rate ratio = 1.58 [95% confidence interval = 0.99-2.51]; among women, 1.26 [0.62-2.55]). However, men and women born in several of the 7 tertiary level hospitals without ultrasound scanning also had higher risks of schizophrenia compared with those born in other hospitals. For other psychoses there were no differences between groups.

Conclusions: No clear associations between prenatal ultrasound exposure and schizophrenia or other psychoses were found. Other factors related to place of birth might have influenced the results.

Epidemiology. 18(5):577-582, September 2007.

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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



1 September, 2007

Compound In Broccoli Could Boost Immune System, Says Study

This is just a test-tube and mice study so far but further exploration is clearly warranted. The fact that the compound worked only when eaten (not when injected) suggests that understanding of it is still at an early stage. Possible harmful effects have also not been explored

A compound found in broccoli and related vegetables may have more health-boosting tricks up its sleeves, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Veggie fans can already point to some cancer-fighting properties of 3,3'-diindolylmethane (DIM), a chemical produced from the compound indole-3-carbinol when Brassica vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage and kale are chewed and digested. Animal studies have shown that DIM can actually stop the growth of certain cancer cells.

This new study in mice, published online Monday, Aug. 20 in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, shows that DIM may help boost the immune system as well. "We provide clear evidence that DIM is effective in augmenting the immune response for the mice in the study, and we know that the immune system is important in defending the body against infections of many kinds and cancer," said Leonard Bjeldanes, UC Berkeley professor of toxicology and principal investigator of the study. "This finding bodes well for DIM as a protective agent against major human maladies."

Previous studies led by Bjeldanes and Gary Firestone, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, have shown that DIM halts the division of breast cancer cells and inhibits testosterone, the male hormone needed for growth of prostate cancer cells. In the new study, the researchers found increased blood levels of cytokines, proteins which help regulate the cells of the immune system, in mice that had been fed solutions containing doses of DIM at a concentration of 30 milligrams per kilogram. Specifically, DIM led to a jump in levels of four types of cytokines: interleukin 6, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, interleukin 12 and interferon-gamma. "As far as we know, this is the first report to show an immune stimulating effect for DIM," said study lead author Ling Xue, who was a Ph.D. student in Bjeldanes' lab at the time of the study and is now a post-doctoral researcher in molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley.

In cell cultures, the researchers also found that, compared with a control sample, a 10 micromolar dose of DIM doubled the number of white blood cells, or lymphocytes, which help the body fight infections by killing or engulfing pathogens. (A large plateful of broccoli can yield a 5-10 micromolar dose of DIM.). When DIM was combined with other agents known to induce the proliferation of lymphocytes, the effects were even greater than any one agent acting alone, with a three- to sixfold increase in the number of white blood cells in the culture. "It is well-known that the immune system can seek out and destroy tumor cells, and even prevent tumor growth," said Xue. "An important type of T cell, called a T killer cell, can directly kill certain tumor cells, virally infected cells and sometimes parasites. This study provides strong evidence that could help explain how DIM blocks tumor growth in animals."

DIM was also able to induce higher levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), substances which must be released by macrophages in order to kill some types of bacteria as well as tumor cells. The induction of ROS - three times that of a control culture - after DIM was added to the cell culture signaled the activation of macrophages, the researchers said. "The effects of DIM were transient, with cytokine and lymphocyte levels going up and then down, which is what you'd expect with an immune response," said Bjeldanes. "Interestingly, to obtain the effects on the immune response, DIM must be given orally, not injected. It could be that the metabolism of the compound changes when it is injected instead of eaten."

To examine the anti-viral properties of DIM, the researchers infected mice with reoviruses, which live in the intestines but are not life-threatening. Mice that had been given oral doses of DIM were significantly more efficient in clearing the virus from their gut - as measured by the level of viruses excreted in their feces - than mice that had not been fed DIM. "This means that DIM is augmenting the body's ability to defend itself by inhibiting the proliferation of the virus," said Bjeldanes. "Future studies will determine whether DIM has similar effects on pathogenic viruses and bacteria, including those that cause diarrhea."

The discovery of DIM's effects on the immune system helps bolster its reputation as a formidable cancer-fighter, the researchers said. "This study shows that there is a whole new universe of cancer regulation related to DIM," said Firestone, who also co-authored the new study. "There are virtually no other agents known that can both directly shut down the growth of cancer cells and enhance the function of the immune system at the same time."

Two co-authors of the study are from Michigan State University's Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition - James Pestka, professor of food science, and Maoxiang Li, a visiting research associate. DIM is currently under investigation in government-funded clinical trials as a treatment for prostate and cervical cancer. The University of California has filed patent applications on the use of DIM and its derivatives for immune modulation. Berkeley BioSciences, Inc., a company co-founded by Bjeldanes and Firestone, has licensed the related patent applications from the University of California and is researching and developing immune-enhancing nutritional supplements and therapeutics based on this discovery.

Source. Journal abstract here. The title of the original article is: "3,3'-Diindolylmethane stimulates murine immune function in vitro and in vivo"




New booster vaccine for TB

One of the most feared diseases in the world is making an alarming comeback in the UK. Cases of tuberculosis increased by 10 per cent in 2005, with 8,494 cases, and are set to continue rising, as the bug becomes increasingly resistant to drugs, and international travel extends its global reach. TB kills about 1.6 million people a year, largely in developing countries, and experts believe that its global resurgence goes hand in hand with the Aids pandemic. However, Helen McShane, a British scientist, announced today that a groundbreaking new vaccine - the first in 80 years, which has taken ten years to develop - is being tested in human clinical trials for the first time.

The areas most affected by the disease in Britain are cities such as London, Birmingham and Leicester, with immigrant communities from areas where the disease is still common: Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of Africa. One in five cases of TB is found in new arrivals into the country. However, the disease is not something you could simply catch on a train; only frequent or prolonged contact with someone with TB puts a person at risk (hence why it's passed within families), and it can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly. Nevertheless, the Government is so concerned at the growing number of people with TB that it is considering screening visitors to the UK from countries such as China and India, it was revealed this week.

If the new TB vaccine passes its trials, as it is expected to do, it could be available in your GP's practice by 2015, when it would work as a booster for the childhood BCG injection (now given only to children in high-risk groups), conferring long-lasting immunity on all adults and thus preventing the spread of this disease.

Symptoms include a persistent cough, weight loss and fever. Before the First World War there were more than 100,000 UK cases a year, but numbers have fallen steadily since the BCG vaccination was introduced in 1953.

Dr McShane, the scientist behind this latest booster vaccine, is a 40-year-old medical doctor-turned-vaccinologist. It's impossible not to share her excitement, particularly when she describes the day in her Oxford University laboratory when she realised she was on to something. "It was a little tense," says Dr McShane, who was then 35 and five years into a project that she had started as a PhD student in 1997. "I went into the lab to check blood tests taken the day before, looked at the plates and couldn't believe my eyes. The results were excellent. We knew the vaccine would stimulate the production of some antibodies but there were ten times the number we had predicted. I ran down the corridor to show my professor immediately." Dr McShane knew she had created a vaccine that could potentially save two million lives a year worldwide. The Wellcome Trust will today announce her project as the first new vaccine for TB in 80 years.

There are two main reasons why a new vaccine has taken so long to develop. The first is that it's a difficult bug to vaccinate against as it disguises itself efficiently in the body. There are different strains of the bug, but Dr McShane believes that they are similar enough for the vaccine to be effective against them all. The other reason for the delay, according to the charity TB Alert, is that there wasn't any funding. Until recently TB was prevalent only in the developing world and so drug companies were reluctant to plough money into a vaccine.

A potential vaccine is an achievement that Dr McShane would not have dared to imagine when she first joined Professor Adrian Hill at the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford to begin a PhD. "Most students were working on a malaria project; no one was looking at a TB vaccine, so I thought it would be a good idea," she says. Dr McShane had first started to study the tuberculosis bacterium when, as a young doctor, she was working in an HIV clinic in London. The two diseases often present hand-in-hand because TB is an opportunistic infection and finds the weakened immune system of an HIV-infected person an easy way in. Dr McShane says she found it frustrating that she could offer the latest antiretrovirals for the HIV infection but she had nothing to prescribe except traditional antibiotics for the TB. She could see that as different strains of TB bacteria became resistant to these drugs, her armoury was looking more and more depleted. Surely something could be done?

She decided to take her curiosity into the laboratory. Most contagious diseases can be vaccinated against by priming the immune system to recognise the pathogen and building armies of immune cells to attack it if it invades the body. A vaccine against measles, for example, introduces a highly weakened strain of the disease into the body. This allows the immune system to target the responsible bacteria, deal with them, and prepare defences for attacks in the future.

But TB is more complicated as it is able to hide inside cells and avoid normal antibodies. Instead it requires a subgroup of white blood cells, called T cells, to be activated, which are better at seeking out the bug to destroy it. Immunologists have begun to use recombinant viruses to teach the body how to recognise TB bacteria and prepare its T cells correspondingly. These are modified viruses that carry cloned genes containing a simple protein, harvested from the disease to be fought. The "tweaked" virus is harmless to human beings. It arrives in the body, unloads the cloned protein, and dies. The protein, however, is spotted by the immune system, which prepares T cells for attack. Afterwards, the patient's body is left ready for further invasion.

Dr McShane found that her vaccine worked particularly well at boosting the weak immune response primed by the traditional BCG. "It would be fantastic if this vaccine was proven to work and became available," she says. "It's been a huge team effort with units in The Gambia and South Africa and Oxford working to a common end. The real challenges now are to see if it really does stop people getting TB, and if it does, to make sure that it gets to the people who need it."

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans fats:

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

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

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