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

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

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

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



31 January, 2008

Health Officials and News Media Complicit In Ongoing Lie That Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs Save Lives

20 Years After Introduction Of The First Statin Drug, Americans Achieve Ideal Cholesterol Number. But Mortality Rates Are About The Same

For the first time in 50 years, America has reached the ideal cholesterol number! Twenty years after introduction of the first statin cholesterol-lowering drug, Americans have reached the 199 figure. In 1960 the average circulating cholesterol number in Americans was 220. [Associated Press Dec. 13, 2007] A Centers of Disease Control report says use of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, particularly by older Americans, is thought to be the main reason for the improvement. But how could this be? Only about 6 million out of an adult population of 225 million actually take statin drugs, many of them inconsistently. Statin drug users represent just 2.6% of the adult population.

The effect of statin drugs in a minority of the population would have to be a whopper to affect the overall number in the population at large. In fact, the 6 million Americans on statin drugs would have to have such low cholesterol numbers to affect the aggregate number that they would likely be ill from liver disease. Very low total cholesterol (below 160) increases the risk for mental depression and cancer.

Dr. John Abramson, MD, of Harvard Medical School, says statin drug therapy for primary prevention of heart attacks in people over age 65, or women of an age, is not supported by the bulk of the evidence. Using statin drugs, the absolute risk reduction for adverse cardiac events (heart attacks, strokes) is small, only 1.5% (94.5 of users derive no benefit).

Of nine statin drug trials used to produce the current cholesterol-lowering guidelines relied upon by doctors, none provide evidence for use of statins. [Sources: Abramson J, Wright J. Are lipid-lowering guidelines evidence-based? Lancet 2007; 369:168-169; Lancet Comment Questions Benefit of Statins in Primary Prevention, from Heartwire, WebMD, Shelley Wood, 2007]

The assumption is that a low cholesterol number equates with heart health. But the number of sudden cardiac deaths remains about the same, about 50% of the annual deaths due to heart disease annually. There are about 325,000 sudden cardiac deaths annually in the U.S. out of 652,486 annual deaths due to heart disease. The incidence of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has declined modestly in the past 2 decades, but the proportion of sudden coronary artery disease deaths in the U.S. has not changed. [Source: Sudden Cardiac Death, Ali A Sovari, MD, July 17, 2006, EMedicine WebMD]

The release of this data by the Centers for Disease Control, and its widespread dissemination by the news media, shows that government health authorities and the news media are willingly participating in this long-standing ruse upon the American public. Not one news reporter dared to report whether cholesterol reduction actually saves lives.

Source




Laugh at lard butts - but just remember Fatty Fritz lives longer

Some British satire with a serious point at the end

The government is considering a scheme to pay hideously obese people to lose weight, offering them "vouchers and rewards" for shedding enough pounds to enable them to see their own genitals for the first time in 30 years. This is part of a programme which will cost the rest of us, those of us who are merely "chubby" or "fat", some œ327m. If you take the health advice at face value, almost the entire nation is overweight, encased in blubber, our poor arteries clogged like the straws of a McDonald's vanilla milk shake when you get to the bottom of the carton. We are all afflicted and all to blame, etc.

For years we have been cautioned against stigmatising people for a whole array of unfortunate situations - teenage single mothers, divorcees, fat people. But, of course, stigma is the means by which society expresses its disapproval of people who choose lifestyles which, one way or another, cost the rest of society money. Remove the stigma and people think such behaviour is perfectly fine. As a result we have become a nation of obese, sexually incontinent lunatics.

Perhaps instead of offering fat people money, which they will only spend on pies, we should once again stigmatise them. School children could be encouraged to pelt fat classmates with cakes, exclude them from playground activities and subject them to cruel jibes. And pinch them on their horrible fleshy arms during assembly (if schools still have assemblies). Fat adults could be forced to pay for two seats on public transport, could be given the worst seats in restaurants and scolded over their choice of dessert. "Have the fruit salad, you fat pig," and so on. Most obesity is, after all, a consequence of stupidity and indolence and not of some genetic affliction. It is a lifestyle choice which people would be less inclined to adopt if they knew we all hated them for it.

There is another, better approach, of course, which is to leave people alone to live the lives they wish to lead. I was in Austria recently where everybody is truly, grotesquely fat. All of them are huge, flatulent, pasty-skinned spheres of compacted frankfurter sausage, fried potato, sour cream and stale beer, rolling around their pretty mountains belching and singing in a tuneless, guttural manner.

The average life expectancy in Austria is 79.21 years - one of the highest in the world and a good five or six months longer than we can expect to live - and increasing rapidly. In fact, much though the quacks and government ministers might hector us, there is very little correlation between obesity and early death, according to recent studies. So you might conclude that this is a sort of fashionable meddling for the sake of it by a government which is never happier than when telling us how to conduct our lives.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



30 January, 2008

Tamiflu effectiveness weakening rapidly

Revival for Relenza? So much for all those millions of doses that our wise governments have stockpiled. The money would have been better spent on research and on emergency manufacturing facilities

Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu may be losing potency against seasonal influenza in Europe after tests showed resistance to the drug in more than one of 10 samples. Tests on 148 virus specimens from patients with the H1N1 flu strain in 10 European countries found 19 that harbored resistance to the pill, most of them in Norway, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said today.

The results show viruses capable of evading Tamiflu, also known as oseltamivir, may be spreading. Some resistant viruses were also found in the U.S., leading doctors to consider GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Relenza and other treatments for a disease the World Health Organization estimates causes 250,000 to 500,000 deaths globally each year. ``These preliminary results are in contrast to previous years where little or no resistance to oseltamivir was observed,'' Martina Rupp, a Roche spokeswoman, said in an e-mail today. More surveillance is needed to establish the prevalence and geographical distribution of the resistant H1N1 variants and to assess the impact on Tamiflu's effectiveness, she said. Basel, Switzerland-based Roche has ``informed health authorities worldwide about this situation,'' Rupp said. Roche fell 1.8 Swiss francs, or 0.9 percent, to 192.2 francs in Zurich trading. The shares have dropped 1.7 percent this year.

The H1N1 viruses identified in Europe that aren't susceptible to Tamiflu carry a so-called H274Y gene mutation that confers ``high-level resistance,'' said Frederick Hayden, a researcher with the WHO's Global Influenza Program in Geneva. Preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta ``indicate that there have been some of these kinds of resistant variants detected, albeit at low frequency, in the U.S.,'' Hayden said. Teleconferences will be held this week to gauge their geographic distribution, he said. Of 204 viral samples tested by the CDC during the 2007-2008 flu season, six, or 2.9 percent, were resistant to Tamiflu.

All those resistant samples were among 109 H1N1 viruses, for a rate of 5.5 percent in that strain, said Joseph Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch of CDC's influenza division in Atlanta. ``It bears watching,'' he said today in a telephone interview. ``Our recommendations for use of oseltamivir haven't changed, but we're going to continue to do close monitoring on flu viruses from here on out.'' There's no evidence the mutation is associated with increased transmissibility or increased likelihood of causing disease, Hayden at the WHO said by telephone from Geneva today. ``This is an unexpected circumstance to see the circulation of H1N1 viruses harboring this particular mutation,'' he said.

Relenza and amantadine, an older class of antiviral medicine, are capable of fighting the mutant variant, health officials said. However, large numbers of flu viruses have other mutations that make them resistant to amantadine and a related drug, called rimantadine, Bresee said. Neither drug is recommended for treatment of seasonal flu in the U.S.

A WHO report last April said 2.2 percent of H1N1 samples from Japan, the world's biggest user of Tamiflu, had the H274Y mutation. There have been no reports from Japan of recent cases. The samples tested in Europe were taken from patients who hadn't been treated with Tamiflu, and resistance rates varied from country to country, Hayden said.

In Norway, 12 of 16 H1N1 samples taken from patients across the country this winter showed ``a high degree of resistance,'' the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said in a Jan. 25 statement. An H1N1 variant from the Solomon Islands is the dominant flu strain now circulating in the Scandinavian country and other parts of Europe, the Oslo-based institute said.

``It is disturbing that resistant viruses are now being detected in Europe, which has a very low level'' of antiviral use, said Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin, a virologist at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization in Melbourne. ``This suggests that resistant viruses have obtained a growth advantage elsewhere on the globe, and have been sufficiently fit to now start spreading possibly globally even in the absence of widespread drug use.''

Tamiflu, which generated 2.63 billion francs ($2.4 billion) in sales for Roche in 2006, is the company's fourth-best-selling drug. Relenza, an inhaled medicine, had sales of 91 million pounds ($180 million) in the same year for London-based Glaxo. The medicines are being stockpiled by the Geneva-based WHO and governments around the world for use in the event of a pandemic, and to treat the H5N1 avian flu strain that's spread to more than 60 countries, infecting people in 14 of them.

``With the global focus on oseltamivir as the drug of choice for treating influenza, many clinicians are not even aware that there is an effective alternative: Relenza,'' McKimm-Breschkin said in a telephone interview today. Relenza and Tamiflu work by blocking neuraminidase -- one of the two surface proteins in influenza viruses and the ``N'' in H5N1 and H1N1 -- that allows the virus to spread from infected cells to other cells in the body.

The H5N1 bird flu strain could trigger a global outbreak if it adopts some of the characteristics of seasonal flu that enable it to be spread easily through coughing and sneezing. Seasonal flu strains with resistance to Tamiflu and other so-called neuraminidase inhibitors could potentially exchange genes with the pandemic strain, making the medicines a weaker weapon to fight the global contagion. ``Antiviral resistance to neuraminidase inhibitors has been clinically negligible so far, but is likely to be detected during widespread use during a pandemic,'' the WHO says on its Web site.

Source




New AIDS drug

A new class of drug for people with HIV is being introduced in Britain today, having been described by researchers as a huge step forward in treating the deadly infection. Raltegravir, available as tablets to be taken twice a day, is approved for use with other antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV in about one in ten patients whose therapy has stopped working. Because of their potential to prolong life by decades, HIV drugs are considered cost-effective and raltegravir is likely to be available on the NHS for all infected patients.

Doctors believe that the drug could become standard treatment, potentially preventing HIV progressing into full-blown Aids. Three quarters of trial patients showed a significant reduction in viral load - the prevalance of the virus in their bloodstream - compared with 40 per cent taking current medication alone. Some patients had a marked improvement to the point where levels of the virus were "undetectable", doctors said.

An estimated 73,000 people in Britain are infected with HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, which culminates in Aids (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Although HIV infection is still considered serious, early diagnosis and appropriate treatment can allow for a relatively normal lifespan.

HIV continually changes and can become resistant to treatment, leading to a continuing search for new drugs. Raltegravir is the first in a new class of HIV treatments called integrase inhibitors, which it is hoped will avoid the risks of heart attack and cancer associated with existing medication. It works by blocking integrase, an enzyme that HIV relies on to replicate itself. It affects the ability of the virus to infect other cells, thus reducing the blood's viral load.

During the trials, patients were given raltegravir or the dummy drug plus optimised background therapy (OBT), a regime of antiretroviral drugs tailored to individual patients.

One study published in The Lancet in April last year was based on 178 patients with advanced HIV. They had been taking regular antiretroviral drugs for about ten years but were not responding to them. Patients taking raltegravir had an average of a 98 per cent drop in their HIV ribonucleic acid (RNA) count, compared with 45 per cent in the dummy group. The number of CD4 cells, an indicator of the immune system's ability to fight disease, was also boosted.

Made by the US-based company Merck, the drug is also known by the brand name Isentress. Mark Nelson, director of HIV services at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, said that it had already provided a life-line to 30 of his patients. "While this is not a `cure' for HIV it does mean we can suppress the virus to where it is virtually undetectable."

Dr Nelson added that the drug's long-term safety record would be very important, given that more adverse effects from existing treatments were emerging after many years of therapy.

"Raltegravir is going to be popular because it's very effective and it seems to have a good safety profile," he said. "Previous drugs have done a terrific job keeping people alive. But now we have to start thinking about safety."

Eight years and four different drug cocktails after Philippe B, 41, learnt that he had HIV, he almost gave up.

"Ten years ago nobody told you anything about the drugs or how to take them, so I stopped for a few months. I became resistant and had to change my combination. Every new combination meant new side effects - nausea, diarrhoea. Sometimes the fatigue was so bad, I couldn't get out of bed."

Philippe, who works for the Terence Higgins Trust, had a viral load of 500,000 (more than 100,000 is considered high) and was in hospital with toxoplasmosis, ulcers and paralysis. After three months, he started a new regime that was the first to work - his viral load is below 50.

Philippe says that he is lucky because he has yet to run out of drug options. "It's very important that there are new drugs. HIV is not a death sentence any more but there's still no cure. After you become resistant, you start running out of options."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



29 January, 2008

Vitamin D can be bad for you

It looks like even I was not skeptical enough. Journal reference: Marshall TG. Vitamin D discovery outpaces FDA decision making. Bioessays. 2008 Jan 15;30(2):173-182.

Low blood levels of vitamin D have long been associated with disease, and the assumption has been that vitamin D supplements may protect against disease. However, this new research demonstrates that ingested vitamin D is immunosuppressive and that low blood levels of vitamin D may be actually a result of the disease process. Supplementation may make the disease worse.

In a new report Trevor Marshall, Ph.D., professor at Australia's Murdoch University School of Biological Medicine and Biotechnology, explains how increased vitamin D intake affects much more than just nutrition or bone health. The paper explains how the Vitamin D Nuclear Receptor (VDR) acts in the repression or transcription of hundreds of genes, including genes associated with diseases ranging from cancers to multiple sclerosis. "The VDR is at the heart of innate immunity, being responsible for expression of most of the antimicrobial peptides, which are the body's ultimate response to infection," Marshall said. "Molecular biology is now forcing us to re-think the idea that a low measured value of vitamin D means we simply must add more to our diet. Supplemental vitamin D has been used for decades, and yet the epidemics of chronic disease, such as heart disease and obesity, are just getting worse."

"Our disease model has shown us why low levels of vitamin D are observed in association with major and chronic illness," Marshall added. "Vitamin D is a secosteroid hormone, and the body regulates the production of all it needs. In fact, the use of supplements can be harmful, because they suppress the immune system so that the body cannot fight disease and infection effectively."

Marshall's research has demonstrated how ingested vitamin D can actually block VDR activation, the opposite effect to that of Sunshine. Instead of a positive effect on gene expression, Marshall reported that his own work, as well as the work of others, shows that quite nominal doses of ingested vitamin D can suppress the proper operation of the immune system. It is a different metabolite, a secosteroid hormone called 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, which activates the VDR to regulate the expression of the genes. Under conditions that exist in infection or inflammation, the body automatically regulates its production of all the vitamin D metabolites, including 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the metabolite which is usually measured to indicate vitamin D status.

Vitamin D deficiency, long interpreted as a cause of disease, is more likely the result of the disease process, and increasing intake of vitamin D often makes the disease worse. "Dysregulation of vitamin D has been observed in many chronic diseases, including many thought to be autoimmune," said J.C. Waterhouse, Ph.D., lead author of a book chapter on vitamin D and chronic disease. "We have found that vitamin D supplementation, even at levels many consider desirable, interferes with recovery in these patients."

"We need to discard the notion that vitamin D affects a disease state in a simple way," Marshall said. "Vitamin D affects the expression of over 1,000 genes, so we should not expect a simplistic cause and effect between vitamin D supplementation and disease. The comprehensive studies are just not showing that supplementary vitamin D makes people healthier."

Source




New info on scent and sexual attraction

I have put up below just an excerpt but it is a "read it all" article. It suggests that taking the pill derails the scent selection process and leads to women choosing incompatible partners!

When you're turned on by your partner's scent, taking a deep whiff of his chest or the back of her neck feels like taking a powerful drug-it's an instant flume ride to bliss, however momentary. Research has shown that we use scent-based signaling mechanisms to suss out compatibility. Claus Wedekind, a biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, created Exhibit A of this evidence by giving 44 men new T-shirts and instructing them to wear the shirts for two straight nights. To ensure that the sweat collecting on the shirts would remain "odor-neutral," he supplied the men with scent-free soap and aftershave.

After the men were allowed to change, 49 women sniffed the shirts and specified which odors they found most attractive. Far more often than chance would predict, the women preferred the smell of T-shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to them. The difference lay in the sequence of more than 100 immune system genes known as the MHC, or major histocompatibility complex. These genes code for proteins that help the immune system recognize pathogens. The smell of their favorite shirts also reminded the women of their past and current boyfriends, suggesting that MHC does indeed influence women's dating decisions in real life.

Women's preference for MHC-distinct mates makes perfect sense from a biological point of view. Ever since ancestral times, partners whose immune systems are different have produced offspring who are more disease-resistant. With more immune genes expressed, kids are buffered against a wider variety of pathogens and toxins.

But that doesn't mean women prefer men whose MHC genes are most different from theirs, as University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Martha McClintock found when she performed a T-shirt study similar to Wedekind's. Women are not attracted to the smell of men with whom they had no MHC genes in common. "This might be a case where you're protecting yourself against a mate who's too similar or too dissimilar, but there's a middle range where you're OK," McClintock says.

Women consistently outperform men in smell sensitivity tests, and they also make greater time and energy sacrifices on their children's behalf than men do-in addition to bearing offspring, they look after them most of the time. These factors may explain why women are more discriminating in sniffing out MHC compatibility.

Men are sensitive to smell as well, but because women shoulder a greater reproductive burden, and are therefore choosier about potential mates, researchers are not surprised to find that women are also more discriminating in sniffing out MHC compatibility.

Unlike, say, blood types, MHC gene complements differ so much from one person to the next that there's no obvious way to reliably predict who's MHC-compatible with whom. Skin color, for instance, isn't much help, since groups of people living in different areas of the world might happen to evolve genetic resistance to some of the same germs. "People of different ethnicities can have similar profiles, so race is not a good predictor of MHC dissimilarity," Thornhill says.

And because people's MHC profiles are as distinct as fingerprints-there are thousands of possible gene combinations-a potential sex partner who smells good to one woman may completely repel another. "There's no Brad Pitt of smell," Herz says. "Body odor is an external manifestation of the immune system, and the smells we think are attractive come from the people who are most genetically compatible with us." Much of what we vaguely call "sexual chemistry," she adds, is likely a direct result of this scent-based compatibility.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



28 January, 2008

Mother's diet shapes offspring's future weight?

Another study of rats, not people and another despicable attempt to prey on the anxieties of pregnant women. The full report is not public yet but all these creeps seem to have discovered is the earth-shattering finding that fat mothers have fat children. Anything to do with genetics? No mention of genetics. That would be against the prevailing religion. And do mothers on a restricted diet get all the nutrients that the baby needs? Even if the baby appears to be OK, is the individual concerned OK in the long term? No mention of that! It is totally inappropriate to be making recommendations to the public based on this scrap of unreviewed research. But we see that the article below is full of confident recommendations from attention-seeking knowalls who obviously would not know the meaning of scientific caution

Australian scientists have made the world-first discovery that a pregnant woman's diet determines whether her baby grows into a fat adult or a skinny one. The research suggests women who are overweight before they fall pregnant, and during it, may condemn their children to a life of overeating and obesity. It reveals that a mother's diet during pregnancy affects the baby's brain circuits, determining appetite and energy expenditure in their offspring. "This suggests that mothers should think twice about overindulging, or using the excuse that they're eating for two during pregnancy," University of NSW professor Margaret Morris said.

Unlike previous studies, the groundbreaking work highlights the pre-natal period as a critical time for "programming of post-natal and adult appetite". It found that even before a woman falls pregnant, she is potentially "programming" a child's future appetite. "The major finding is the dramatic increase in body fat in offspring of overweight and obese mothers," Professor Morris said. Mothers fed a high-fat diet had offspring that were heavier, with more body fat and altered appetite regulators in the brain, meaning they overate, she said.

The results are supported by a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition last year. It found that mothers who eat junk food during pregnancy may produce children who crave the same foods. Professor Morris will present her findings at the Australian Neuroscience Society conference in Hobart this week. She said the study was particularly relevant, given that about 30 per cent of mothers enter pregnancy in an overweight or obese condition.

The study was conducted using overweight female rats who mated with healthy males. The females continued to be fed a high-fat Western diet during and after pregnancy, Professor Morris said. "The mums were overeating for that whole period. We found the offspring were a third heavier than the rats fed a low-fat diet," she said. Professor Morris said the brain pathways regulating appetite in rats were similar to those in humans, suggesting similar trends could be expected in people.

Sydney University nutritionist Dr Jenny O'Dea said it had become "quite well accepted" that a woman's diet during pregnancy impacted on the fetus. "We also know that obesity during pregnancy more often than not causes gestational diabetes and high blood pressure," Dr O'Dea said. She said that although nutritional needs were high during pregnancy, women should not be "eating for two".

Professor Morris studied mothers who were already overweight before they fell pregnant. The experiment results also found their offspring were showing signs of developing diabetes at a young age.

The findings are particularly relevant for overweight mothers, highlighting the importance of maintaining a normal weight before and during pregnancy. Further research will examine how methods of intervention during breastfeeding can reverse bad nutritional habits and overeating.

Susie Burrell, a pediatric dietitian at The Children's Hospital at Westmead, said the study sent a powerful message to women planning to fall pregnant. "They need to get their weight under control before conceiving, and those who are pregnant need to have minimum weight-gain during pregnancy," Ms Burrell said. She said an increasing number of women were overweight before they fell pregnant, creating a "snowball effect". "Their babies are more likely to have a high birth weight. This then leads to lifestyle diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease."

Source




Anything you really like is now an addiction

Last summer at their annual policy meeting, the American Medical Association considered having "excessive video gaming" formally certified as a psychiatric disorder and listing it in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of mental diseases to which psychiatrists are addicted. Official bureaucratic legitimization will accomplish a vital goal of the professional psychotherapy community: enable the condition's victims to get medical coverage so psychotherapists can suck insurance companies dry with their $400-per-hour behavior-modification and rehabilitative-therapy programs.

Used to be we knew what addiction was - the inability to kick booze or cigarettes or drugs. But then a second tier of addictions was identified, and we were introduced to the shocking, secretive world of obsessive gamblers and caffeine freaks and sex addicts and suburban chocoholics

Since those relatively innocent days, our world has exploded with addictive behaviors. Now we are all substance abusers, tormented with bottled water syndromes and new-car-smell obsessions and iPod fixations and ringtone manias and Britney-watching compulsions and reality-show fanaticisms and cutesy-wutesy baby-talking to your poochie-woochie dysfunctions.

This is professional stalking at its worst - the endless cycle of concocting supply to satisfy escalating demand. Not only are new addictions being discovered every day, but new discoverers of new addictions are being discovered as well. Everybody, it seems, knows what addiction is. What people used to call "food cravings" the American Heart Association now calls "carbohydrate addiction. AOL did a survey claiming that people are addicted to e-mail. (And, since AOL is a major supplier of e-mail access, doesn't that make them pushers?) The Web site Switched.com reported on a Harvard Business Review study under the title "Rise of the BlackBerry-Addicted Work Zombie.

Computer-industry professionals, in fact, seem to be exceptionally proficient, and prolific, at identifying addiction. After coining a new discipline, psychotechnology (not to be confused with technopsychology), they quickly identified such human aberrations as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), Internet Behavior Dependence (IBD), Internet/Computer Addiction, Online Addiction, and addiction to Web-surfing.

Even as new addictions are being discovered, all the trusty old dependencies are exploding exponentially. CNN quoted a UN report that used the phrase "runaway train of drug addiction" and followed it with "5 percent of the world's population aged between 15 and 64 used drugs at least once in the previous 12 months.

The implication is that partaking of a governmentally disapproved substance once a year makes one a drug addict. This would be like counting every shopping-cart door ding as an auto accident or declaring every blink, wink, and nod as an instance of sexual abuse.

Funny how neither the UN nor the AMA nor the American Psychiatric Association has ever concluded that any psychiatrist who has psychoanalyzed one person between the ages of 15 and 64 during the past year is afflicted with the runaway train of psychoanalization addiction

Why are hardworking business people called "workaholics" while people who invest thousands of hours raising millions of dollars while telling hundreds of lies just to get elected to public office are never called "powerholics"? Why is it that people who incessantly use a PDA to communicate with people have their handhelds referred to as "crackberries" while people who incessantly use their rosaries to communicate with the Blessed Virgin never have their handhelds referred to as "bead speed"

Perhaps, then, the definition of "addiction" has more to do with contrived self-serving sociopolitical constructs than with medicine. Addiction is in the eye of the professional beholder, who can charge $400 an hour to "cure" it.

Then again, maybe not all addictions are bad. Case in point: While Republicrats are control freaks hopelessly addicted to taxbucks and world empire, people who call themselves "libertarian" are addicted to a philosophy of maximizing freedom and minimizing coercion. In the meantime, something has to be done about those delusional sufferers hopelessly addicted to reading opinion articles such as this one.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



27 January, 2008

Where's the Beef?

The nonsense about food from cloned animals

It's not often that American food companies join hands with environmental and consumer activists to call for greater government control over the nation's food supply. But that's just what happened last week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs, and goats are safe for consumers.

Despite the overwhelming science behind that finding, industry and activists have called for a ban on cloned food products. Naturally, you might think that lockstep agreement from such unlikely bedfellows is a little fishy. And you'd be right. The losers would be American consumers, farmers, and the environment.

Since 1996, when Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, thousands of animal clones – including other sheep as well as cows, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits, and several other species – have been born and studied more intensely than the progeny of almost any other animal breeding technique. Critics claim the process will create monstrous new hybrids in some kind of barnyard “Boys from Brazil ,” but the reality is that consumer safety is not seriously in doubt.

FDA took more than six years investigating the matter, and its comprehensive, 968-page report shows that thousands of nutritional and other compositional comparisons reveal no differences between the safety of clones and conventionally bred animals. Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said at a news conference last Tuesday that agency scientists have “done a very extensive job of looking at anything that could possibly be a food hazard, and to be honest, we found nothing.”

Regulatory authorities in New Zealand , France , and the European Union agree. And government scientists in Australia , Canada , and Japan are expected to issue their own clean bills of health in the next year or two.

This overwhelming agreement among scientists should pave the way for animal clones – or to be more exact, their offspring – to come to market. Cloning is expensive, costing as much as $17,000 for cows and $4,000 for pigs. So, the vast majority of clones will be used just for breeding. Only their naturally produced off-spring should find their way into grocery stores during the next few decades.

Since there are no real questions about consumer safety, the critics have had to capitalize on zany scare stories and the public's ambivalence about unfamiliar technologies. The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) says that a “flood of milk from highly productive cloned cows is not good for the taxpayers” who buy surplus milk from dairy farmers. The group also claims cloning will make our kids fat because “[s]urplus milk is turned into high fat products that then go to school children.”

At one FDA meeting, CFA's Carol Tucker Foreman even exploited religious and ethical concerns, criticizing the agency for studying food safety without first considering any ethical and religious implications. Of course, FDA is not legally permitted to consider religious objections, as the activists point out when the agency evaluates controversial products they want approved.

More importantly, humans have been using sophisticated scientific methods to control animal reproduction for decades, so we have already settled the ethical arguments critics of animal cloning now raise in opposition. Cloning is really just a technological extension of methods such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer that are now commonplace in animal breeding, though it uses one animal's DNA to create an exact genetic copy, essentially an identical twin born a generation later.

While it has been just a decade since Dolly was born, most of the individual steps that make cloning possible are a close to a century old. The transfer of living embryos from one animal's womb to another, for example, dates to the 1800s. Cloning itself has been conducted with invertebrates, amphibians, and other non-mammalian animals since the turn of the 19 th century. And IVF was developed for animal breeding in the 1950s.

Even today's proven method of cloning mammals – transferring an adult animal's genetic material to an unfertilized egg – was first envisioned in the 1930s. Its use simply had to wait until these intermediate steps were perfected over the following decades. As a consequence, scientists know today far more about the health and well-being of cloned animals than the skeptics would have us believe.

Furthermore, none of the technical difficulties that cloning critics highlight is unique. Many clonal pregnancies result in miscarriage, and some clones have neonatal health problems, so critics insist that moving forward now is inhumane and unethical. But, each of these problems is also present in other assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF and embryo transfer, as well as natural mating. Animal breeders have managed them for decades, so their presence in cloned animals presents no unique ethical or consumer safety issues.

The abundant evidence of safety is why the critics have had to focus attention away from the science. Instead they ask, even if we can clone animals safely, why should we? The answer is simple. Breeders can produce better and safer food by cloning rare animals that produce leaner meat, for example, or are especially resistant to common livestock diseases. Researchers in Asia have even cloned a cow that appears to be resistant to mad cow disease. The ability to drastically reduce illness among animals and to improve consumer safety arguably makes cloning more, not less humane than traditional breeding.

But that's not all. Producing more meat or milk per animal helps reduce farming's ecological footprint by, for example, allowing for a reduction in the size of herds and lowering the amount of waste the animals generate. And cloning is already being used to help increase populations of threatened and endangered animals, such as the gaur and banteng, which are related to our beef and dairy cattle. Many scientists hope that, one day, cloning can help recover endangered species such as tigers, rhinos, and pandas.

Still, the activists' antics have scared one group of influential Americans: the dairy and packaged food industries. Rising demand in the U.S. for organic products makes many food companies believe consumers will reject meat and milk from clones. Others fear a trade backlash from technophobic consumers in places like France and Italy . That's why several major food companies, including the largest U.S. meat producer Tyson Foods, have already announced that they had “no immediate plans” to buy cloned livestock.

They may not have the chance. Ever since 2001, animal cloners have complied with a “voluntary” moratorium on selling food products from clones while they awaited FDA's safety study. Yet, even as FDA unveiled its final assessment last week, the U.S. Agriculture Department bowed to food industry pressure and asked to extend the moratorium until consumer concerns could be resolved – possibly as long as two or three more years. And Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski introduced legislation that would keep cloned animals off the market indefinitely.

Knowing that they are ultimately at the mercy of consumers and retailers, Texas-based Viagen and Iowa-based TransOva Genetics – two of three private sector U.S. cloning companies – developed a system to track cloned animals so that farmers, meat packers, and retailers who wish to do so can avoid them. John Kleiboeker, of the Missouri Beef Industry Council told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “the FDA may say it's not required, but consumers may want labels, so discerning marketers will do it.”

Kleiboeker is right, of course. From organic milk and free trade coffee to kosher and halal meats, many consumers have shown a preference for foods produced in certain ways. But, that is exactly why extending the moratorium is unnecessary. American farmers and the food industry have proven perfectly capable of segregating foods from various new and old production systems whenever a genuine consumer demand for it exists. Whether it's religious, ethical, or environmental concerns, all that is needed is for regulators to make a science-based judgment on safety and then get out of the way.

Source




The pill is good for you/bad for you, good for you/bad for you, good for you/bad for you...

There is such a regular oscillation in the findings about the effects of taking oral female hormones that I think it is clear that we are looking at a random walk here: There is no systematic effect -- just random fluctuations due to factors other than sample size

Women taking the contraceptive pill are protected against ovarian cancer for decades after they stop using the medication, a British study has found. Oxford University scientists found evidence that women taking the pill for 15 years halved their chances of developing the disease in a study published in The Lancet medical journal. They believe the pill has prevented some 200,000 cases of ovarian cancer and 100,000 deaths from this disease since its introduction nearly half a century ago.

Lead author Professor Valerie Beral, an Australian who is director of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University, and her colleagues found the risk remained low more than 30 years later, although the benefits diminished over time. "It's been known for over 20 years that the pill protects against ovarian cancer but most of the effects of the pill are short - only really just while women are taking the pill," Professor Beral said. "But for cancer of the ovary that gets much more common in older women, the really important question was, how long does protection last. "What we've shown here is that it lasts for over 30 years. It's really very long-term protection."

The research reviewed data from 45 studies covering more than 100,000 women. The scientists gathered data from 23,257 women who had developed ovarian cancer and 87,303 who had not. Of the first group, 31 per cent had used the pill, while 37 per cent of the second group had taken the medication. Ovarian cancer can be particularly aggressive and the symptoms are such that it is often detected at an advanced stage. "Worldwide, the pill has already prevented 200,000 women from developing cancer of the ovary and has prevented 100,000 deaths from the disease," Professor Beral said. "More than 100 million women are now taking the pill, so the number of ovarian cancers prevented will rise over the next few decades to about 30,000 per year."

Other research has found a statistically significant increased risk of cancer of the breast, cervix or central nervous system among users of the pill. But, in an editorial, The Lancet called for the pill to be made available over the counter rather than restricted by a doctor's prescription, given that, in its view, the benefits for cancer prevention and reproductive health outweighed the risks. "We believe the case is now convincing," the British journal 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



26 January, 2008

Transplant teenage girl changes blood types

A major rethink of what we know about blood types coming up, I suspect

FIFTEEN-year old Demi-Lee Brennan defies belief. Dubbed the "one-in-six-billion miracle girl", the NSW South Coast teenager is the first transplant patient ever to change blood types and take on the immune system of her organ donor. Her body's ability to accept a new liver - and then produce new blood cells on its own - has left doctors mystified. The rare phenomenon now means Demi no longer has to take a cocktail of anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. It also gives hope to the 1800 gravely ill Australians awaiting a transplant.

Demi, of Kiama, resembles a healthy teenager who displays no signs of her ordeal - other than the scar on her body. And, in an unexpected medical first, she has experienced a change in blood type from Onegative to Opositive, as a result of her body seeming to perform its own bone marrow transplant.

"It's kind of hard to believe," Demi said. "When I look back, it doesn't feel like it happened." When Demi was nine she became seriously ill and needed a life-saving liver transplant. Doctors at the Children's Hospital at Westmead believe a yet-to-be-identified virus caused her liver to fail. A donor was found but after nine months Demi fell ill again - with doctors unable to identify the problem. During that first nine months, Demi was put on routine anti-rejection drugs after her liver transplant surgery.

Then doctors found that Demi's body had begun to destroy its own blood cells and, at the same time, the donor's blood stem cells took over her immune system. Doctors then halted the anti-rejection drugs, realising her blood type - and immune system - had taken on the characteristics of her organ donor.

Their discovery is now the subject of medical research being pursued around the world. Former head of Westmead's liver transplant unit, Dr Stuart Dorney, said there is no explanation for what occurred. "We now need to go back over everything that happened to Demi and see why, and if, it can be replicated," he said. "It may not be (replicated). We think because we used a young person's liver and Demi had low white blood cells that could have been a reason."

It has been almost four years since Demi received her liver and is hoping to permanently stay off anti-rejection drugs. "I am really thankful (to the donor's family) and I hope that so many people can do this too," she said. "I would say to other transplant patients, 'stay strong and determined'.

In Australia, about 100 liver transplant procedures are carried out each year. Of those, paediatric liver transplantations account for 20 per cent. Recipients have an 85 per cent survival rate one year after successful surgery but the rate reduces to 70 per cent after five years due to possible organ rejection complications.

Source




D'Oh! Correcting nutritional deficiencies is helpful

Perhaps I am being a bit cynical but this sounds a bit like a proof that grass is green to me. It DOES confirm the importance of vitamin D but did anybody doubt that? I suppose we should at least be glad that it was one of the rare double-blind studies and not the usual epidemiological crap. Note that it does NOT show that ALL older women should take vitamin D. Popular summary followed by abstract below

VITAMIN D supplements may help to prevent falls among older women, and should be given to those with a history of falling and low vitamin D levels, concludes an Australian study in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week. Richard Prince and colleagues from the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth recruited 302 women aged 70 to 90 years with low blood vitamin D levels and a history of falling in the previous year. They were randomly assigned to take either 1000 international units of vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) or an inactive placebo, and all received 1000mg of calcium citrate per day. Information about falls was collected from participants every six weeks. During the year-long study, 53 per cent of those in the vitamin D group and 63 per cent in the control group fell at least once. After adjusting for height, which affected the risk of falling, vitamin D therapy reduced the risk of having at least one fall by 19 per cent.

Source

Effects of Ergocalciferol Added to Calcium on the Risk of Falls in Elderly High-Risk Women

By Richard L. Prince et al.

Background: Ergocalciferol (vitamin D2) supplementation plays a role in fall prevention, but the effect in patients living in the community in sunny climates remains uncertain. We evaluated the effect of ergocalciferol and calcium citrate supplementation compared with calcium alone on the risk of falls in older women at high risk of falling.

Methods: A 1-year population-based, double-blind, randomized controlled trial of 302 community-dwelling ambulant older women aged 70 to 90 years living in Perth, Australia (latitude, 32øS), with a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration of less than 24.0 ng/mL and a history of falling in the previous year. Participants were randomized to receive ergocalciferol, 1000 IU/d, or identical placebo (hereinafter, ergocalciferol and control groups, respectively). Both groups received calcium citrate, 1000 mg/d. Fall data were collected every 6 weeks.

Results: Ergocalciferol therapy reduced the risk of having at least 1 fall over 1 year after adjustment for baseline height, which was significantly different between the 2 groups (ergocalciferol group, 53.0%; control group, 62.9%; odds ratio [OR], 0.61; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.37-0.99). When those who fell were grouped by the season of first fall or the number of falls they had, ergocalciferol treatment reduced the risk of having the first fall in winter and spring (ergocalciferol group, 25.2%; control group, 35.8%; OR, 0.55; 95% CI, 0.32-0.96) but not in summer and autumn, and reduced the risk of having 1 fall (ergocalciferol group, 21.2%; control group, 33.8%; OR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.28-0.88) but not multiple falls.

Conclusion: Patients with a history of falling and vitamin D insufficiency living in sunny climates benefit from ergocalciferol supplementation in addition to calcium, which is associated with a 19% reduction in the relative risk of falling, mostly in winter.

Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(1):103-108.

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

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



25 January, 2008

"Cheating" in medical research

I must say that I am not surprised at all. Most of what I see in the field is deeply unserious and irresponsible

Cheating is on the rise in academic circles, as scientists increasingly claim fradulent glory by plagiarising the work of others - and even themselves. In medical research alone, the number of such "duplicate" scientific reports has roughly trebled since 1975, as scientists face increasing pressure to publish or perish and the likelihood of escaping detection is high.

The disturbing claim comes from Mounir Errami and Harold Garner at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center in Dallas. They developed and used an automated text-matching tool, eTBLAST, to trawl through more than 7 million related scientific abstracts held in the online database Medline, which indexes more than 5000 international journals. "We estimate there are potentially more than 200,000 duplicates in Medline (now)," they reported last night in the journal Nature.

They claimed that not only can eTBLAST detect suspect publications, it could be used to discourage "unscrupulous scientists" from behaving badly. "The fear of having some transgression exposed in a public and embarrassing manner could be a very effective deterrent," they suggested.

Ken Baldwin, head of the umbrella group Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies, agreed that tools such as eTBLAST could be wielded against cheats once checks were built into the system to prevent false identification. "There is the potential for even stronger deterrence of this sort of practice which is already at a very low level (in Australia)," he said.

That's why Dr Errami and Dr Garner will not reveal names and insitutions flagged by eTBLAST until they have manually checked each duplicate and contacted the individuals and journals affected. They have, though, broken their data down by country of origin and posted results in an online database called Deja Vu.

More than 600 duplications originated in Australia. Most duplicates came from countries that submitted the most papers for publication: the US, Japan, Germany, China, Britain, Italy, France and Canada. But the duplication rate for China and Japan was twice that expected.

Source




Marijuana deadlier than cigarettes

HEAVY pot smokers will suffer serious lung disease two decades earlier than their cigarette-smoking counterparts, researchers have found. The deep, slow inhalation and long breath hold is predisposing cannabis smokers to a condition of rapid lung destruction much younger in life, a study by Melbourne scientists has found.

A team from the Department of Allergy, Immunology and Respiratory Medicine at Monash University reviewed the lung condition of middle-aged chronic cannabis smokers. They found high rates of bullous lung disease, a debilitating condition where air trapped in the lungs causes obstruction to breathing and eventual destruction of the organ. It is often caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or long-term exposure to tobacco smoke.

Studies have shown the disease will most likely strike tobacco smokers around the age of 65, but the new review, published in the journal Respirology, shows dope smokers are being hit 20 years earlier, while in their early 40s. Lead author Dr Matthew Naughton said the disease could easily go undetected as patients suffering lung breakdown may show normal chest X-rays and lung functions.

"What is outstanding about this study is the relatively young ages of the lung disease patients, as well as the lack of abnormality on chest X-rays and lung functions in nearly half of the patients we tested," Dr Naughton said.

Marijuana smokers inhale more and hold their breath four times longer than cigarette smokers. Dr Naughton said the breathing style increased the concentration and pulmonary deposition of inhaled particulate matter, causing greater and faster rapid lung destruction. "Marijuana is inhaled as extremely hot fumes to the peak inspiration and held for as long as possible before slow exhalation," he said. "This predisposes to greater damage to the lungs and makes marijuana smokers more prone to bullous disease as compared to cigarette smokers."

The researchers said the effects of marijuana smokers on the lung were rarely reported and poorly understood considering the popularity of the habit. A recent Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report suggested 11 per cent of Australians smoke marijuana. Rates are must higher among teenagers, with almost one in five trying the substance.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



24 January, 2008

DO SHORTER BABIES GROW UP SUICIDAL?

The short answer: Some do but not many. This is nonetheless a matter of some concern as older mothers are now very common and older mothers are more likely to have difficulties resulting in premature birth. And premature birth is a major cause of smaller babies being delivered.

As usual, however, the social class connection appears to have been ignored. Do lower class mothers have more premature deliveries and shorter babies generally? I am pretty sure they do. The workers are in general less healthy and adult height is class-correlated. So are we seeing just a class effect here? Is it just working class people who are more suicidal? I suspect it is. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

Pregnant women may wish for a smaller baby to ease the pain of labour, but babies born small could have serious mental health problems in later life. New research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health has found that male babies born less than 47cm [18"] in length are more than twice as likely to attempt violent suicide as adults compared to normal-length babies, regardless of the height they reach as adults. The findings are based on 318,953 Swedish men who were followed from birth (between 1973 and 1980) to the date of attempted suicide, date of death, emigration or to the end of 1999, whichever came first. Those born prematurely, both short and underweight, were more than four times more likely to attempt violent suicide, including hanging, drowning and use of a knife or gun, as those born after 38 weeks of pregnancy. The brain chemical serotonin, which can decrease aggression and suicidal behaviour, may be lower in men who were born small, say the authors, and these men may need to be monitored more closely for psychiatric disorders.

Source. Another summary here

Fetal and childhood growth and the risk of violent and non-violent suicide attempts: a cohort study of 318,953 men

By E Mittendorfer-Rutz et al.

Background: Inverse associations of birth length with suicide attempts have recently been reported. Whether growth during childhood alters this association is not known. The influences on patterns of growth in fetal life and childhood might be different for violent and non-violent suicide attempts.

Objective: To investigate the effect of fetal and childhood growth and possible effect modification on suicide attempts, both violent and non-violent, adjusting for potential maternal confounding factors.

Method: 318,953 Men were followed by record linkage from the date of birth in Sweden (1973-1980) to the date of attempted suicide, date of death, emigration or to the end of 1999.

Results: The risk of suicide attempt was increased for men with reduced linear growth in fetal life across all levels of adult stature. Men with appropriate birth length for gestational age but short adult height also experienced a raised risk of suicide attempts: 1.56 (95% CI 1.2 to 2.1). Tall adult stature was protective. Short birth length for gestational age was more strongly related to violent (2.39; 95% CI 1.1 to 4.9) than non-violent (1.53; 95% CI 1.1 to 2.1) suicide attempts. The risk of violent attempts was most strongly increased for men with low birth weight and adequate adult stature: 2.54 (95% CI 1.1 to 5.7).

Conclusions: The inverse association of linear growth in fetal life and suicide attempt does not seem to be modified by linear childhood growth. Short adult stature entails an additional risk. Short birth length seems particularly to increase the risk of violent suicide attempts

J Epidemiol Community Health 2008;62:168-173




NYC revives push for calorie disclosure by area fast-food restaurants

The city Board of Health is poised to reenact Tuesday a bitterly contested rule requiring restaurants to post the calorie contents of each dish on their menus. The proposed regulation - part of Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to reduce obesity and diabetes - would make eateries with 15 or more outposts around the country prominently display calorie counts before patrons order.

City health officials expect the regulation to result in 150,000 fewer New Yorkers becoming obese over the next five years and to prevent at least 30,000 cases of diabetes. "The more fast food people eat, the more likely they are to become obese," Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden told the Daily News. "Some people may choose to ignore [the calorie information], and that's totally fine. But other people will use it to choose healthier food."

The original rule applied only to restaurants that were already voluntarily offering customers calorie information. A judge threw it out in September after the New York State Restaurant Association sued, but opened the door for the city to tweak it. This version would impact 10% of the city's 23,000 eateries. Since the board is led by Frieden and appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, the provision is expected to pass. It would go into effect on March 31.

Restaurant association officials could not be reached yesterday, and it was unclear whether they would sue again.Justin Wilson of the Center for Consumer Freedom attacked the city's "nanny-state public health policies." "It doesn't take a Ph.D. in nutrition, let alone a high school diploma, to tell the difference between a 12-piece bucket of chicken and a salad," he said.

While the rule's immediate intention is to affect New Yorkers' food choices, Frieden expects it to translate into the food industry offering lower-calorie, smaller portions. "When restaurants post the information prominently, they'll make healthier options available, so I don't think we'll be seeing 2,700 calorie appetizers or 1,400 calorie breakfasts," 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



23 January, 2008

Black breast cancer is different

Leftists have a religious belief that all races are the same except for hair, lips and skin. Why there are no differences other than the visible ones is never explained. And they only admit the visible differences because they cannot be denied. We repeatedly find that the truth is very different, however -- including a quite stark difference noted below:

Black British women in Hackney, East London, are diagnosed with breast cancer 21 years younger than white British women, according to a Cancer Research UK study published online in the British Journal of Cancer. In the first UK study to look at the patterns of breast cancer in black British women, the researchers studied 102 black women and 191 white women diagnosed with breast cancer at Homerton University Hospital in Hackney, East London, between 1994 and 2005. They found the black patients were diagnosed with breast cancer at an average age of 46 while the white patients were diagnosed at an average age of 67.

Researchers based at the Institute of Cancer and Cancer Research UK clinical centre at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry also found that survival was poorer among black women with smaller tumours. In addition, their initial findings suggest that tumours in the younger black patients were more likely to be aggressive, and a higher proportion of tumours were basal-like - meaning they were less likely to respond to newer types of targeted breast cancer treatments like Herceptin. If these results are confirmed in larger studies, the findings could have implications for diagnosis, screening and treatment of black British breast cancer patients in the future.

Study author Dr Rebecca Bowen, said: "Twenty five per cent of all breast cancer cases diagnosed in London during the period studied were in women aged 45 or younger - but this figure rose to 45 per cent among the black population in Hackney. We think the differences in the way tumours of black and white women behave can be put down to the biological differences between the two ethnic groups. We're now trying to find out why the tumours are so different so that we can develop new treatments to target the aggressive forms of breast cancer seen in young black women."

Until recently, UK cancer registries have not collected ethnicity data routinely, but incidence of breast cancer among black British women is thought to be lower than the white population. American research has suggested that African-American women get breast cancer at a younger age and at a more advanced stage - but this is the first UK study to draw these conclusions.

Dr Bowen added: "We've just received funding for the next stage of our research which will allow us to determine the type of cancers these women are getting at this young age. It's important that we use the information learnt from this study to raise awareness of breast cancer risk factors and the importance of early detection among the black population."

Dr Lesley Walker, Cancer Research UK's director of cancer information, said: "This is very interesting research. The fact that black women are being diagnosed with breast cancer at a much younger age than white women is clearly worrying. If these results are confirmed in follow-up studies, it might be appropriate to alter screening services offered to black women to better reflect the age at which they are diagnosed with breast cancer - but at the moment it's too early to suggest any changes to the screening programme because the study was so small. "These findings highlight the need for all women to be breast aware, report any changes to the doctor promptly and attend screening appointments when invited, as early detection is important for successful treatment."

Source

Abstract:

Early onset of breast cancer in a group of British black women

By RL Bowen et al.

Since there are no published data on breast cancer in British black women, we sought to determine whether, like African-American women, they present at a younger age with biologically distinct disease patterns. The method involved a retrospective review of breast cancer to compare age distributions and clinicopathological features between black women and white women in the UK, while controlling for socioeconomic status. All women presented with invasive breast cancer, between 1994 and 2005, to a single East London hospital.

Black patients presented significantly younger (median age of 46 years), than white patients (median age of 67 years (P=0.001)). No significant differences between black and white population structures were identified. Black women had a higher frequency of grade 3 tumours, lymph node-positive disease, negative oestrogen receptor and progesterone receptor status and basal-like (triple negative status) tumours. There were no differences in stage at presentation; however, for tumours of ~2 cm, black patients had poorer survival than white patients (HR=2.90, 95% CI 0.98-8.60, P=0.05).

Black women presented, on average, 21 years younger than white women. Tumours in younger women were considerably more aggressive in the black population, more likely to be basal-like, and among women with smaller tumours, black women were more than twice as likely to die of their disease. There were no disparities in socioeconomic status or treatment received. Our findings could have major implications for the biology of breast cancer and the detection and treatment of the disease in black women.

British Journal of Cancer 8 January 2008




Study Suggests Nano-sized Ultrafine Particles May Be Most Damaging Component of Air Pollution for Heart Disease

Among genetically modified and badly maltreated mice, anyway. The journal abstract is here

A new study indicates that ultrafine particles-particles of less than 0.18 micrometers-from vehicle emissions may be the most damaging components of air pollution in triggering plaque buildup in the arteries, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. The findings appear in an open access article in the 17 January online edition of the journal Circulation Research.

A team from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the University of Southern California; the University of California, Irvine; and Michigan State University contributed to the research, which was led by Dr. Andre Nel, UCLA's chief of nanomedicine. The study was primarily funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA currently regulates fine particles at 2.5 micrometers, but doesn't monitor particles in the nano- or ultrafine range. These particles are too small to capture in a filter, so new technology must be developed to track their contribution to adverse health effects.

The UCLA research team previously reported that diesel exhaust particles interact with artery-clogging fats in low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol to activate genes that cause the blood-vessel inflammation that can lead to heart disease. In the current study, researchers exposed mice with high cholesterol to one of two sizes of air pollutant particles from downtown Los Angeles freeway emissions and compared them with mice that received filtered air that contained very few particles. The study, conducted over a five-week period [Five whole weeks!] , required a complex exposure design that was developed by teams led by Dr. Michael Kleinman, professor of community and environmental medicine at UC Irvine, and Dr. Constantinos Sioutas, professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC. Researchers found that mice exposed to ultrafine particles exhibited 55% greater atherosclerotic-plaque development than animals breathing filtered air and 25% greater plaque development than mice exposed to fine-sized particles.

Pollutant particles are coated in chemicals sensitive to free radicals, which cause the cell and tissue oxidation. Oxidation leads to the inflammation that causes clogged arteries. Samples from polluted air revealed that ultrafine particles have a larger concentration of these chemicals and a larger surface area where these chemicals thrive, compared with larger particles, Sioutas noted.

Scientists also identified a key mechanism behind how these air pollutants are able to affect the atherosclerotic process. Using a test developed by Dr. Mohamad Navab, study co-author and a UCLA professor of medicine, researchers found that exposure to air pollutant particles significantly decreased the anti-inflammatory protective properties of HDL cholesterol.

To explore if air particle exposure caused oxidative stress throughout the body-which is an early process triggering the inflammation that causes clogged arteries-researchers checked for an increase in genes that would have been activated to combat this inflammatory progression. They found greater levels of gene activation in mice exposed to ultrafine particles, compared to the other groups. The next step will be to develop a biomarker that could enable physicians to assess the degree of cardiovascular damage caused by air pollutants or measure the level of risk encountered by an exposed person.

Previous studies assessing the cardiovascular impact of air pollution have taken place over longer periods of exposure time, such as five to six months. The current study demonstrated that ill effects can occur more quickly, in just five weeks.

The research team included investigators from the fields of nanomedicine, cardiology and genetics. Additional co-authors included Berenice Barajas, Xuping Wang, Brian J. Bennett and Ke Wei Gong of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Jack Harkema from the department of pathobiology and diagnostic investigation at Michigan State University.

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



22 January, 2008

Just two cups of coffee per day could double risk of miscarriage (?)

Another stupid epidemiological study based on self-reports. There is a common polydrug pattern among drug addicts and where better to find polydrug abusers than in SF? The effect could be due to other drugs also used by caffeine addicts there. Heavy coffee drinking is very common among addicts "coming down"

Drinking two cups of coffee a day during pregnancy can double the risk of miscarriage for expectant mothers, researchers say. A US study has confirmed that high doses of caffeine during pregnancy, from coffee, tea, caffeinated soft drinks or hot chocolate, can increase the risk of losing a baby. Women who consumed 200 mg or more of caffeine per day - equivalent to two or more cups of regular coffee or five cans of cola - had twice the miscarriage risk of women who consumed no caffeine, the study found. Even those who consumed less than 200 mg of caffeine daily had a more than 40 per cent increased risk, the study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology says.

Caffeine is known to cross through the placenta from mother to the foetus, and is thought to influence cell development and decrease blood flow, causing harm to the developing child. Current guidelines from the Food Standards Agency recommend 300 mg of caffeine a day as the safe upper limit for pregnant women. Experts said the new findings would prompt them to advise women to cut out caffeine altogether, at least for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Miscarriage occurs in about one in six confirmed pregnancies, usually within 12 weeks, when the foetus is especially vulnerable. While previous research showed a link between high caffeine consumption and increased risk of miscarriage and stillbirth, this is the first study to take fully into account morning sickness, which causes many pregnant women to avoid caffeine and cut down their intake.

It examined data on 1,063 pregnant women in San Francisco from October 1996 to October 1998 who did not change their pattern of caffeine consumption during pregnancy. Women in the study were asked about the amount and frequency of their intake of caffeinated beverages. Pregnancy outcomes up to 20 weeks of gestation were determined for all participants.

Overall, 172 of women in the study (16.18 per cent) miscarried. Whereas 264 women reported no consumption of any drinks containing caffeine during pregnancy, 635 women (60 per cent) reported consuming between 0-200 mg of caffeine a day, and 164 women drank 200 mg or more. Other risk factors for miscarriage were also accounted for in the study, which found that miscarriage was associated with consumption of caffeine overall, rather than particular drinks.

DeKun Li, who led the study for Kaiser Permanente, a US health insurance company, said: "This strengthens the association between caffeine and miscarriage risk because it removes speculation that the association was due to reduced caffeine intake by healthy pregnant women. "The main message for pregnant women is that they probably should consider stopping caffeine consumption during pregnancy."

Pat O'Brien, a consultant obstetrician at University College Hospital, London, and spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecol-ogists, said: "This is the best evidence we now have on the subject and I will advise patients to avoid caffeine completely, at least for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Good studies have shown it may be safer to drink caffeine after that, but no more than 200 mg a day is still to be recommended."

Source




GENES FOR LUPUS

One of the now boringly regular demonstrations that at the deepest level all men are NOT equal. Lupus is pretty nasty so it is good to see some slow progress with it

Polymorphism at the TNF superfamily gene TNFSF4 confers susceptibility to systemic lupus erythematosus

By Deborah S Cunninghame et al.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a multisystem complex autoimmune disease of uncertain etiology (OMIM 152700). Over recent years a genetic component to SLE susceptibility has been established. Recent successes with association studies in SLE have identified genes including IRF5 and FCGR3B. Two tumor necrosis factor (TNF) superfamily members located within intervals showing genetic linkage with SLE are TNFSF4 (also known as OX40L; 1q25), which is expressed on activated antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and vascular endothelial cells, and also its unique receptor, TNFRSF4 (also known as OX40; 1p36), which is primarily expressed on activated CD4+ T cells. TNFSF4 produces a potent co-stimulatory signal for activated CD4+ T cells after engagement of TNFRSF4. Using both a family-based and a case-control study design, we show that the upstream region of TNFSF4 contains a single risk haplotype for SLE, which is correlated with increased expression of both cell-surface TNFSF4 and the TNFSF4 transcript. We hypothesize that increased expression of TNFSF4 predisposes to SLE either by quantitatively augmenting T cell-APC interaction or by influencing the functional consequences of T cell activation via TNFRSF4.

Nature Genetics 40, 83 - 89 (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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



21 January, 2008

DOES EXERCISE PREVENT ALZHEIMERS?

Short answer: No. These guys were smart enough to adjust for measures of social class and that wiped the initially apparent effect. Good to see that some medical researchers don't go around with their eyes closed. It makes yet another demonstration of how apparent physical causes can in fact be sociological causes.

Dementia due to problems in the supply of blood in the brain did however seem to be slightly reduced by exercise. Popular summary followed by abstract below.

Walking and moderate exercise may help to prevent dementia, claims new research in Neurology this week. A total of 749 men and women aged 65 and older took part in the study. They were surveyed about their levels of physical activity, including time spent walking, climbing stairs, doing housework and gardening. Over the next four years, 54 of the participants developed Alzheimer's disease and 27 developed dementia. Those with the highest physical activity levels were 24 per cent less likely to develop dementia than those with the lowest levels. When the different types of exercise were considered separately, researchers found walking provided the same level of protection against dementia as more demanding activities. The authors suggest exercise may protect the brain by improving its blood flow.

Physical activity and dementia risk in the elderly. Findings from a prospective Italian study

By G. Ravaglia et al.

Objective: To examine the effect of physical activity on risk of developing Alzheimer disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) in the elderly.

Methods: Data are from a prospective population-based cohort of 749 Italian subjects aged 65 and older who, in 1999/2000, were cognitively normal at an extensive assessment for clinically overt and preclinical dementia and, in 2003/2004, underwent follow-up for incident dementia. Baseline physical activity was measured as energy expenditure on activities of different intensity (walking, stair climbing, moderate activities, vigorous activities, and total physical activity).

Results: Over 3.9 - 0.7 years of follow-up there were 86 incident dementia cases (54 AD, 27 VaD). After adjustment for sociodemographic and genetic confounders, VaD risk was significantly lower for the upper tertiles of walking (hazard ratio [HR] 0.27, 95% CI 0.12 to 0.63), moderate (HR 0.29, 95% CI 0.12 to 0.66), and total physical activity (HR 0.24, 95% 0.11 to 0.56) compared to the corresponding lowest tertile. The association persisted after accounting for vascular risk factors and overall health status. After adjustment for sociodemographic and genetic confounders, AD risk was not associated with measures of physical activity and results did not change after further adjustment for vascular risk factors and overall health and functional status.

Conclusions: In this cohort, physical activity is associated with a lower risk of vascular dementia but not of Alzheimer disease. Further research is needed about the biologic mechanisms operating between physical activity and cognition.

Neurology, December, 2007




NEW SLIMMING DRUG?

Side-effects are the worry. It may be worth noting that a related drub, rimonabant, was banned because it caused people to go mad! Popular summary followed by abstract below.

Marijuana is well-known to increase appetite, and it does this by stimulating receptors in the brain. Now scientists have designed a new drug that blocks these receptors and suppresses appetite, leading to significant weight loss in obese people in just 12 weeks. The drug, called taranabant, has been tested in people for the first time, and the results are reported in the current issue of Cell Metabolism. The trial involved 533 obese patients, who were randomly divided into five groups and given 0.5, 2, 4 or 6mg per day of taranabant or a placebo for 12 weeks. Compared to the placebo, taranabant caused significant weight loss at all of the doses studied. In a shorter trial involving 36 overweight or moderately obese patients, those taking a single dose of 12mg of taranabant consumed 27 per cent less calories in a 24-hour period than those taking a placebo. At higher doses, side effects of the drug included nausea, vomiting and irritability.

Taranabant Cuts the Fat: New Hope for Cannabinoid-Based Obesity Therapies?

By Tim C. Kirkham

Endocannabinoid/cannabinoid receptor signaling acts centrally and peripherally to govern appetite and energy balance. While system stimulation promotes eating and energy storage, receptor blockade can reduce food intake and facilitate weight loss. In this issue of Cell Metabolism, Addy et al., 2008 test the therapeutic antiobesity potential of taranabant, a cannabinoid 1 receptor inverse agonist.

Cell Metabolism, Vol 7, 1-2, 09 January 2008

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

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



20 January, 2008

Oatmeal good for your heart?

This is basically a bit of nonsense. There is much research to show that you cannot affect your serum cholesterol (let alone your lifespan) by what you eat (though you can extend your lifespan by not eating!). But as someone who grew up on oat porridge for breakfast, I liked the thought below anyway. The journal abstract is here. It is a literature review with all the hazards of selectivity that are so often found with reviews

A new scientific review of the most current research shows the link between eating oatmeal and cholesterol reduction to be stronger than when the FDA initially approved the health claim's appearance on food labels in 1997. Dr. James W. Anderson, professor of medicine and clinical nutrition at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, co-authors "The Oatmeal-Cholesterol Connection: 10 Years Later" in the January/February 2008 issue of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. Anderson presents a contemporary analysis to determine if newer studies are consistent with the original conclusion reached by the FDA. His report says studies conducted during the past 15 years have, without exception, shown:

* total cholesterol levels are lowered through oat consumption;

* low-density lipoprotein (LDL, the "bad" cholesterol) is reduced without adverse effects on high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL, the "good" cholesterol), or triglyceride concentrations.

"Whole-grain products like oatmeal are among some of the best foods one can eat to improve cholesterol levels, in addition to other lifestyle choices," Anderson said. "Lifestyle choices, such as diet, should be the first line of therapy for most patients with moderate cholesterol risk given the expense, safety concerns, and intolerance related to cholesterol lowering drugs." More recent data indicate that whole-grain oats, as part of a lifestyle management program, may confer health benefits that extend beyond total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol reduction, Anderson said. Recent studies suggest eating oatmeal may:

* Reduce the risk for elevated blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and weight gain

* Reduce LDL cholesterol during weight-loss

* Provide favorable changes in the physical characteristics of LDL cholesterol particles, making them less susceptible to oxidation (oxidation is thought to lead to hardening of the arteries.)

* Supply unique compounds that may lead to reducing early hardening of the arteries

"Since the 80's, oatmeal has been scientifically recognized for its heart health benefits, and the latest research shows this evidence endures the test of time and should be embraced as a lifestyle option for the millions of Americans at-risk for heart disease," said Anderson. Anderson co-authored the comprehensive research review with Mark Andon, a researcher and nutrition director for Quaker-Tropicana. [Who sell oats]

Source




Kids hate clowns, research shows

BAD news for Coco and Blinko – British children don't like clowns and even older kids are scared of them. The news that will no doubt have clowns shedding tears was revealed in a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who examined how to improve the decor of children's wards in hospitals.

The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all of the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary. "As adults we make assumptions about what works for children," said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university. "We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



19 January, 2008

"Unprecedented" results after new Alzheimer's treatment

A bit too good to be true but interesting

In findings described as "dramatic and unprecedented," researchers say they have found an injection treatment that leads to marked, sustained improvements in Alzheimer's disease symptoms. The study's lead author owns stock in a company that could profit from the findings, and the scientists acknowledged that other biases could have colored the results. Nonetheless, the improvements in patients with the notoriously intractable, memory-erasing illness were tested, widely noticed and are "worthy of further investigation," they wrote in a paper on their results.

Drawing of a crosssection of a typical healthy brain (above) compared to an Alzheimer'saffected brain (below). (Courtesy U.S. Nat'l Inst. on Aging)

The findings are of "significant scientific interest," added Sue Griffin, another Alzheimer's researcher. She is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroinflammation, which published the study online Jan. 9.

More than five million Americans have the devastating, fatal brain disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The few effective treatments known generally do little more than delay its progression. By contrast, the new therapy, using a drug already approved to treat other illnesses, would seem to reverse key Alzheimer's symptoms within minutes -- though scientists aren't speaking of a "cure" because the treatment isn't expected to hold off the effects forever.

The study, from the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California, focused on a molecule called tumor necrosis factor-alpha, or TNFalpha, a critical component of the brain's immune system. Normally, the molecule fine-tunes the transmission of electrical signals in the brain. But excesses of it seem to disrupt this regulatory process in Alzheimer's, the researchers said. They explored the effects of reducing levels of the molecule through injections of a drug called etanercept. The lead author, Edward Tobinick of UCLA, owns stock in Amgen, the company that makes the drug.

Within minutes of a spinal injection of etanercept (trade name Enbrel), molecules of the drug latch onto the TNFalpha protein, causing it to stop working, the researchers said. Etanercept is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat certain immune-related disorders.

There has already been considerable buzz around the use of anti-TNF therapeutics for various diseases; the new findings justify some of that excitement, the researchers said. Griffin discussed the results and their implications in a commentary in the journal alongside the research paper.

Although the paper itself focuses on only one patient, scientists said others with mild-to-severe Alzheimer's have also gotten the treatment. There was "sustained and marked improvement" in each case, according to an announcement of the findings from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where Griffin conducts research. The statement also called the results "dramatic and unprecedented."

The study's authors said some biases could have crept into the outcomes. "All participants, including the examining physicians, were aware of the treatment," they wrote in the paper, which focused on an 81-year-old doctor sick with Alzheimer's. This awareness could "bias the results, and a placebo effect cannot be ruled out." The placebo effect occurs when patients feel better simply thanks to knowing they've been treated.

However, family members, friends and objective tests all attested to considerable improvements in the patient's memory, they wrote. He went from not being able to state the date, day of the week, year, place, city, or state, to being able to give the day of the week, month, and state, California. The improvements lasted for at least seven weeks with weekly treatment, wrote Tobinick and his research colleague, Hyman Gross of the University of Southern California.

However, they noted, only some of Alzheimer's effects are likely to be reversible, as structural damage to brain cells eventually sets in for which there is no known cure.

Nonetheless, "it is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes" of treatment, Griffin said in the University of Arkansas annnouncement. "It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiological mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer's research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed."

Source




Leukaemia hopes

Identical twin sisters have led British scientists to a breakthrough in leukaemia research that promises more effective therapies with fewer harmful side-effects. By comparing Olivia Murphy, 4, who is in remission from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and her healthy sister, Isabella, researchers have traced the tumour stem cells that drive the most common form of childhood cancer. The discovery will enable doctors to screen young leukaemia patients to establish the severity of their illness and spare some the harrowing side effects of aggressive chemotherapy.

Olivia, from Bromley, southeast London, is a prime example of how hazardous this can be: although her treatment has been successful, it left her unable to fight off a chicken pox infection that blinded her in one eye. Chemotherapy has such harsh effects on children with leukaemia that between 1 and 2 per cent die because of the drug regime, according to Philip Ancliff, the consultant who treated Olivia at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

The stem-cell advance, from a team led by Tariq Enver, of the University of Oxford, and Mel Greaves, of the Institute of Cancer Research in London, will also open new approaches to treating the disease more effectively. It should allow the scientists to develop ways of targeting the stem cells that drive the blood cancer and cause relapses, so that patients can be cured. This form of the disease accounts for about 85 per cent of the 450 childhood leukaemias diagnosed in Britain each year.

The study, published in Science, could have further implications for the cancers that cause lung and colon tumours, as these are also thought to be propagated by rogue stem cells. Another application could be preventive treatment for children like Isabella who are known to be at high risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, whose “pre-leukaemic” cells could be killed before they cause any damage.

Professor Enver said: “This research means that we can now test whether the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in children can be correlated with either the disappearance or persistence of the leukaemia stem cell. Our next goal is to target both the pre-leukaemic stem cell and the cancer stem cell itself with new or existing drugs to cure leukaemia while avoiding the debilitating and often harmful side effects of current treatments.”

Professor Greaves said: “This study of a twin pair discordant for leukaemia has identified the critical stem cells that initiate the disease and maintain it in a covert state for several years. We suspect that these cells can escape conventional chemotherapy and cause relapse during or after treatment. These are the cells that dictate disease course and provide the bullseye to target with new therapies.”

The twins have been crucial to the new research, as they are genetically identical but one has developed cancer whereas the other has not. The scientists found that the girls’ blood contains genetically abnormal cells known as pre-leukaemic cells. These were formed by a mutation known as translocation, in which two genes fuse to create an abnormal new one. This random event happened in a single cell in one of the twins — it is impossible to tell which one — while they were still in the womb. As the twins shared a placenta, the original mutant’s daughter cells populated the blood of both sisters.

Analysis of Isabella’s blood suggests that about one in 1,000 of her lymphocyte blood cells is preleukaemic. About 1 per cent of these pre-leukaemic cells are also stem cells that can start and sustain the cancer. As Isabella is still healthy, it is clear that the translocation cannot trigger leukaemia by itself. About one in 100 children has the translocation, but only one in 100 develops cancer. “The crucial question is in which cells does this start,” Professor Enver said. “What is the critical hit? Isabella gave us an opportunity almost to look back in time, to see which cells the cancer begins in.”

They did this by comparing the twins’ blood. In Olivia, but not in Isabella, some pre-leukaemic stem cells had acquired a second genetic mutation that turned them cancerous. This could have begun in a single cell, possibly because of an infection.

The discovery will help doctors to monitor Isabella, and children like her, so that further genetic damage in her pre-leukaemic stem cells is caught early. Her risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is estimated at one in ten, compared with one in 10,000 among children with no family history. It will fall with every year that she remains healthy. By the time she is 14, her pre-leukaemic stem cells should have died naturally. “Pre-leukaemic cells are still evident, so the sword of Damocles is still hanging there,” Dr Ancliff said. “Hopefully, we will see them disappear.”

The study also identifies precisely the cancerous stem cells that propagate the cancer. This should enable doctors to adjust the strength of chemotherapy to match a child’s condition. As cancer stem cells can survive conventional chemotherapy, the research could also help scientists to design drugs that kill 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



18 January, 2008

Four healthy habits to give 14 more years?

This is probably just a class effect -- particularly as it based on self-reports. Middle class people are healthier and use more "virtuous" self-descriptions. There also seems to be a foolish assumption that the various "effects" are cumulative rather than correlated

People who adopt four healthy habits seem to live on average 14 years longer than those who adopt none of them, a new study indicates. The habits are not smoking, exercising, drinking alcohol in moderation and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables daily.

KayTee Khaw and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council in the U.K. studied records of 20,000 older British adults who had filled out health questionnaires between 1993 and 1997.

After factoring in age, the researchers found that over an average of 11 years, people who undertook none of the four health habits were four times more likely to have died than those who adopted all four. People in this less healthy group had on average the same risk of dying as people 14 years older in the second group, the researchers said.

The participants were aged 45 to 79 when they filled out the questionnaires. Deaths among the participants were recorded until 2006. Moderate drinking was defined as between one-half and seven pints of beer, or glasses of wine, weekly.

The study formed part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, conducted across ten European countries, billed as the largest study of diet and health ever undertaken.

The findings need to be confirmed in other populations, but the results "strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people," the researchers said in an announcement of the findings. The research appeared online Jan. 8 in the research journal PLoS Biology.

Source




Cloned 'Frankenfoods' are given the all clear

About time!

The US food health authority has authorised the sale of meat and milk from cloned livestock, declaring the controversial products as safe to eat as those from normal animals. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will issue a long-awaited risk assessment report ruling that products from cloned animals are safe, contrary to critics' claims. The body has been deliberating for six years whether to give the green light for marketing foods from clones.

In 2006 it declared that products from cloned animals were no different from those of beasts raised normally, but told producers not to market them until it had issued food safety rules. The prospect of so-called "Frankenfoods" has caused concern among food safety and animal rights groups and the US dairy industry, which fears its image and exports will be damaged.

The European Commission vowed yesterday to consult consumers about meat and milk from clones, before giving its own ruling in May. The European Food Safety Authority on Friday had said that meat and milk from healthy cattle and pig clones was probably safe for humans to eat.

The FDA's ruling has been held up by strong resistance. A Washington-based campaign group, the Centre for Food Safety, condemned the US plan to approve food from clones. "The impacts on US agriculture, trade, and the integrity of the food supply are still largely unknown," it said in a statement last month, responding to earlier reports that the FDA was set to make its ruling. "There are still all those unanswered questions," biologist Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union said. "The samples (used by the FDA in its research) are very small."

It will still be years before meat and milk from clones appears on US supermarket shelves, reports said. The animals involved, clones of the highest quality livestock, are too valuable to slaughter or milk and better used for breeding, the Washington Post said, in a report that cited a pre-release copy of the FDA report.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



17 January, 2008

Thimerosol vaccines now decisively vindicated

The vaccine preservative Thimerosal is not linked with autism, a new study reports. The data also suggest that the dilettante "scientist" Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. should perhaps go back to practicing law and stop exploiting parental fear and suffering for his own political agenda.

Despite an absence of intriguing, let alone compelling, evidence that mercury-containing Thimerosal was associated with autism, vaccine makers voluntarily began removing Thimerosal from their products in 1999 -- providing a perfect opportunity to study whether the removal (and, therefore, Thimerosal) had any effect on autism rates.

So using data reported to the California Department of Development Services from 1995 to 2007, researchers from the California Department of Health compared the prevalence of autism with exposure to Thimerosal. Their results were published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry (Jan. 2008). The data showed that the prevalence of autism for children at each year from 3 to 12 years increased throughout the study period -- even after 2000 when Thimerosal began disappearing from vaccines. From 1999 to 2004, average exposure to Thimerosal among infants and 2-year olds was reduced by more than 90 percent and 84 percent, respectively - yet reported cases of autism continued to increase in unabated fashion.

A classic test in epidemiological study is to observe what happens to the rate of disease when the suspected agent is removed. When Thimerosal was removed, the rate of disease was unaffected. Ironically, it has taken the removal of Thimerosal to vindicate it.

This result is not unexpected since there has never been any reason to believe that Thimerosal was a causal factor in autism spectrum disorders, which have reportedly increased in recent decades. Use of Thimerosal began in the 1930s in response to tragedies such as the January 1928 deaths of 11 of 21 children given a diphtheria vaccine inadvertently contaminated with staphylococci. Thimerosal was then used without incident for more than 65 years before the panic began in 1998 with the publication of a paper in British medical journal The Lancet reporting autistic regression and diarrhea among a small number of patients following administration of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination.

As retold in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the Internet enabled the controversial report to cross the Atlantic and spawn a coalition comprised of parents of autistic children and groups opposed to compulsory vaccination. Political muscle was soon added when Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), whose grandchild had been diagnosed with autism, began a series of congressional hearings. But despite the emergence of the anti-Thimerosal movement as a cause celebre, there has never been a single credible study implicating Thimerosal in any way with autism. The new California Department of Health study should be the end of the controversy.

That brings us to Kennedy who seems to revel in his profound scientific ignorance. In a June 20, 2005 Rolling Stone article entitled "Deadly Immunity", he wrote, "It was only after reading the [testimony of a Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist at a closed door government meeting], studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between Thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real."

Kennedy's article had so many significant inaccuracies that Rolling Stone was forced to append to it five paragraphs of corrections. Undeterred, two years later Kennedy wrote an article entitled "Attack on Mothers."

Recounting the onset of autism in a 2-year old, Kennedy wrote, "After hearing that story a couple dozen times, a rational person might do some more investigation. That's when one encounters the overwhelming science -- hundreds of research studies from dozens of countries showing the undeniable connection between mercury and Thimerosal and a wide range of neurological illnesses." Kennedy went on to accuse the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the pharmaceutical industry of "ginning up" studies "designed to disguise the link between autism and Thimerosal." So Mr. Kennedy, is the California Department of Health also a member of the vast Thimerosal conspiracy?

There may be some ideological overlap between Kennedy's anti-Thimerosal rantings and his jihad against coal-fired electric plants whose emissions include small amounts of mercury. He recently blogged about the "calamitous externalized costs" of coal, including "global warming.dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days and thousands dead annually from ozone and particulates."

It's quite possible that Kennedy chooses to exploit the Thimerosal-autism controversy in order to broaden his base of support for his anti-coal/global warming agenda. Anti-Thimerosal parents groups have proven to be extremely passionate about their cause and they would be a formidable force were they to campaign against coal-fired electricity with the same zeal as they did with Thimerosal.

Though use of Thimerosal has for the most part ended, its vindication is not merely of academic interest. It should serve as yet another data point against Kennedy and others who foment panic and urge a rush-to-action based on flimsy facts and misdirected anger.

Source




'Heart risk' from calcium supplements

The findings below are pretty weak but it should serve as another reminder of the narrow focus in much medical advice

Older women who take calcium supplements to maintain bone strength may have an increased risk of heart attack, researchers in New Zealand said on Tuesday. The researchers cautioned that they do not consider their findings the definitive word on the subject, but said the higher heart attack risk they saw merits further study. "This effect could outweigh any benefits on bone from calcium supplements," researchers led by Ian Reid of the University of Auckland wrote in the British Medical Journal. Many women take calcium supplements to try to prevent osteoporosis, a condition in which bones become weak and brittle, leading to fractures.

The study involved 1,471 healthy post-menopausal women, average age 74, who already had participated in a study on the effects of calcium on bone density and fracture rates. Of them, 732 were given a daily calcium supplement and 739 were given a placebo. They were followed for five years. Heart attacks were more common in the women taking the calcium supplements, with 31 women who took supplements experiencing a heart attack compared to 21 women who got a placebo, the researchers said.

The researchers noted that previous research had suggested that taking calcium supplements might protect against vascular disease by lowering levels of bad cholesterol in the blood. They said that because calcium supplements raise blood calcium levels, this possibly accelerates the formation of deposits in the arteries that could lead to heart attack. The new results "are not conclusive but suggest that high calcium intakes might have an adverse effect on vascular health," the researchers wrote. "In the meantime this potentially detrimental effect should be balanced against the likely benefits of calcium on bone, particularly in elderly women," they wrote.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



16 January, 2008

California: The phthalate folly

In addition to the remarks below, readers might want to look at this study, which even suggests that phthalates may be beneficial in some ways

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a statewide ban in October on children's toys that contain more than minuscule amounts of chemicals called phthalates, he was simply carrying on a California tradition of misguided, often damaging "health" regulations. This is, after all, a state that requires most commercial establishments, from supermarkets to pet stores to hotel lobbies, to display "Proposition 65" signs proclaiming that customers are being exposed to trace amounts of chemicals that can cause cancer or birth defects.

Now, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is eager to expand California's folly to the entire nation. Undeterred by the judgment of experts but swayed by a few experiments with rats and a single flawed epidemiological study, Feinstein has introduced a bill that would ban six types of phthalates in toys. These chemicals are widely used to soften plastic toys and are found in shower curtains, traffic cones and scores of other common items. They also have crucial applications in surgical instruments and intravenous tubing.

Unfortunately, Feinstein's legislation ignores the basic principles of toxicology. For starters, a rat's metabolism differs significantly from a human's. Although rat studies may be useful for suggesting what sorts of toxicity to look for in humans, often they do not predict effects on humans. Indeed, the toxicity of phthalates in rats appears not to be replicated in humans or other primates.

Second, the dose makes the poison. This means that the mere presence of something in the body does not imply harm; one needs to know the dose and length of exposure, what the substance does (if anything) in the body, how it is disposed of and so forth. Virtually any substance, including water, can be toxic at high enough levels. Consider an example taught to all medical students. Part of the work-up for hypertension (high blood pressure) is to inquire whether the patient eats large amounts of licorice, which contains glycyrrhizin, a chemical that promotes sodium and fluid retention and raises blood pressure.

Extremely versatile and cost-effective, phthalates have been rigorously studied in the U.S. and Europe. A panel of scientists chaired by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop reviewed the scientific literature on phthalate exposure in 1999. "[Phthalate-containing] toys and medical devices are safe," said Koop. "The panel's findings confirm what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been saying about these products all along. There is no scientific evidence that they are harmful to children or adults."

Numerous studies have shown that human exposure to phthalates under ordinary circumstances is low and harmless. In fact, according to a review performed by the National Institutes of Health, the source of about 85% to 90% of phthalate exposure in adults, and 44% to 60% in infants, is not toys or consumer products but food. Nor are phthalates harmful even at high levels of exposure -- in patients undergoing regular hemodialysis or oxygenation of their blood in an intensive-care unit, for example.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission rejected a national ban on vinyl toys in 2003, after calculating likely exposure to diisononyl phthalate (DINP), the most common phthalate in children's toys. The total time babies from 3 months to 12 months spend mouthing objects is about 10 minutes an hour. Pacifiers (which do not contain phthalates)account for most of babies' sucking time, with their own body parts next. Soft vinyl toys containing DINP were sucked on for under 11 seconds an hour, or under 5 minutes a day. Even those whose sucking was in the 99th percentile were chewing on their DINP-containing toys for no more than 12 minutes a day. The Consumer Product Safety Commission concluded that a baby would have to suck about 10 times as long before he or she could consume enough DINP to have any potential adverse effects.

International scientists agree. In 2003, for example, the European Union's Institute for Health and Consumer Protection concluded in a risk assessment: "The end products containing DINP (clothes, building materials, toys and baby equipment) and the sources of exposure (car and public transport interiors, food and food packaging) are unlikely to pose a risk for consumers (adults, infants and newborns)." Despite the reassuring risk assessments, politicians overruled them, and the EU instituted a "permanent" ban on phthalates in children's toys in 2005.

The public is harmed when lawmakers proscribe the use of a product that has been proved safe and useful. Inevitably, manufacturers will turn to -- and consumers will be exposed to -- alternatives that are likely to be less well tested. Simply put, Feinstein's bill represents bad science, bad law and disregard for the public interest.

Source




Children exposed to lead 'at risk of Alzheimer's'

Children exposed to lead in old paint, Victorian water pipes and unsafe toys could be at risk of Alzheimer's later in life, scientists have said. A study shows that even small amounts of the dangerous metal in the first few years can cause changes in the brain associated with the devastating disease.

Although lead has been banned in petrol and paint, it is still present in older buildings. Last year, millions of toys imported from China were recalled after tests showed they were made with lead paint. The Alzheimer's Society warned, however, against overreacting to the findings, which came from a study of monkeys.

A spokesman said there was no proof that lead exposure caused the disease. The U.S. researchers behind the study say their work shows that lead has toxic side effects that can appear decades after children are exposed. "We're not saying that lead exposure causes Alzheimer's disease, but it's a risk factor," Dr Nasser Zawia of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston told the New Scientist.

His team fed infant formula milk laced with low doses of lead to baby monkeys - and then followed their progress for 23 years. Although the animals did not show any symptoms of dementia, a post mortem of their brains revealed plaques - harmful deposits of protein normally found in Alzheimer's patients.

Source

Comment below from Panic Watch:

Pertinent details of the study which didn't make it above the fold:

The study was performed on monkeys, not humans. But of course the headline doesn't read 'Monkey children exposed to lead at risk of Alzheimer's.'--that's definitely not as exciting.

The Alzheimer's Society has reacted to this study by saying that there is no proof that lead exposure caused the disease. This is correct. One of the scientists leading the study even told the media: "We're not saying that lead exposure causes Alzheimer's disease."

Even then, "the animals did not show any symptoms of dementia, a post mortem of their brains revealed plaques - harmful deposits of protein normally found in Alzheimer's patients." So the monkeys showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's; they merely had protein deposits that are present in many people after death--both with and without Alzheimer's.

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

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



15 January, 2008

Cholesterol drugs good for diabetes patients?

Very narrowly-focused thinking here. Diabetics have their systems messed up enough already without messing them up even further with statins. Furthermore the logic seems poor. The research found that people with low levels of serum cholesterol were better off than those with high levels but how do we know that the advantage concerned was solely or at all due to their intake of statins? A large enough proportion of the lucky ones may have had naturally lower levels of cholesterol -- sufficient by itself to produce the observed differences.

Note that some high quality studies (e.g. the the recent 4D and ASPEN trials) have not produced similar results and that meta-analyses can be corrupted by selective inclusion of results. This meta-analysis did not in fact include the recent negative trials - 4D, ASPEN, and CORONA. It also did not include small trials, unpublished trials, or trials published in languages other than English: Not reassuring.

CHOLESTEROL-LOWERING drugs called statins should be automatically considered for nearly all patients with diabetes, after a study showed the drugs cut heart attacks and strokes even in people with no prior signs of heart disease. Australian and British experts analysed the results of 14 previous trials involving a total of 90,000 people, and found that over nearly five years the number of deaths among the nearly 19,000 diabetes patients fell by nine per cent for every one-unit drop in their level of LDL, or "bad" cholesterol. The drop was almost the same seen in the 71,000 non-diabetic patients, and applied equally to men and women, and both main types of diabetes. Each major cut in LDL cholesterol cut the numbers of heart attacks, strokes and blocked arteries by 21 per cent in diabetic and non-diabetic groups.

Any increase in statin use may place more pressure on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. One statin drug alone, Pfizer's Lipitor (atorvastatin), was the biggest drain on the PBS in 2005-06, costing the scheme nearly $490 million for 8.5 million prescriptions.

The study's authors - from the National Health and Medical Research Council's Clinical Trial Centre at the University of Sydney and the Epidemiological Studies Unit in Oxford - said "most people with diabetes should now be considered for statin therapy", with the exception of children and pregnant women. The study was published yesterday in The Lancet.

Jonathan Shaw, deputy director of the Melbourne-based International Diabetes Institute, said the PBS eligibility criteria for statins should be widened. Currently, diabetes patients only qualify for subsidised statin drugs if they are over 60, or if their blood cholesterol exceeds 5.5 millimoles per litre of blood.

Source

Journal abstract follows:

Efficacy of cholesterol-lowering therapy in 18,686 people with diabetes in 14 randomised trials of statins: a meta-analysis

Background: Although statin therapy reduces the risk of occlusive vascular events in people with diabetes mellitus, there is uncertainty about the effects on particular outcomes and whether such effects depend on the type of diabetes, lipid profile, or other factors. We undertook a prospective meta-analysis to help resolve these uncertainties.

Methods: We analysed data from 18,686 individuals with diabetes (1466 with type 1 and 17,220 with type 2) in the context of a further 71,370 without diabetes in 14 randomised trials of statin therapy. Weighted estimates were obtained of effects on clinical outcomes per 1ú0 mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol.

Findings: During a mean follow-up of 4.3 years, there were 3247 major vascular events in people with diabetes. There was a 9% proportional reduction in all-cause mortality per mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol in participants with diabetes (rate ratio [RR] 0.91, 99% CI 0.82-1.01; p=0.02), which was similar to the 13% reduction in those without diabetes (0.87, 0.82-0.92; p<0.0001). This finding reflected a significant reduction in vascular mortality (0.87, 0.76-1.00; p=0.008) and no effect on non-vascular mortality (0.97, 0.82-1.16; p=0.7) in participants with diabetes. There was a significant 21% proportional reduction in major vascular events per mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol in people with diabetes (0.79, 0.72-0.86; p<0.0001), which was similar to the effect observed in those without diabetes (0.79, 0.76-0.82; p<0.0001). In diabetic participants there were reductions in myocardial infarction or coronary death (0.78, 0.69-0.87; p<0.0001), coronary revascularisation (0.75, 0.64-0.88; p<0.0001), and stroke (0.79, 0.67-0.93; p=0.0002). Among people with diabetes the proportional effects of statin therapy were similar irrespective of whether there was a prior history of vascular disease and irrespective of other baseline characteristics. After 5 years, 42 (95% CI 30-55) fewer people with diabetes had major vascular events per 1000 allocated statin therapy.

Interpretation: Statin therapy should be considered for all diabetic individuals who are at sufficiently high risk of vascular events.

The Lancet 2008; 371:117-125. Extended commentary here




Caesareans heading to danger level

Although sometimes necessary, I think there is little doubt that they are overdone

THE number of caesarean births in Australia is reaching unmanageable levels, placing lives at risk and tying up thousands of hospital beds, operating theatres and health workers with a costly elective procedure. With caesarean rates now about 30 per cent, anxious governments and health groups in Australia and overseas are trying to turn back the tide, as evidence of the harm caused by repeat surgical births mounts and doubts emerge about the protection a caesarean birth is thought to provide. Modelling by the NSW Department of Health, which has been obtained by the Herald, shows that a rise of just 1 per cent in elective caesareans would come at the cost of a huge rise in "occasions of service", diverting scarce clinical resources from other areas.

About 90,000 babies are born in NSW each year, so that 1 per cent increase would mean hundreds more caesarean sections, as well as more bed days, in already overstretched public hospitals. If the caesarean rate rises to 39 per cent - which many experts fear will happen soon - it will mean thousands more surgical births every year. In a public system that is hundreds of beds and thousands of staff short, and in the midst of a mini-baby boom, that extra strain would be unbearable, obstetricians and midwives warn.

Doctors are quick to point out that, when the health of the mother or baby is at risk, or in an emergency, a caesarean is often the safest way to give birth. There is further evidence that private obstetricians' fees are eating away at the Medicare safety net, meaning taxpayers are bearing the brunt of the increases in elective caesareans at state and federal levels.

Such is the concern that NSW Health organised a meeting of the state's leading midwives and obstetricians to develop strategies to reduce the number of women choosing elective caesareans. Six months later many who attended that meeting despair at the absence of a coherent, statewide plan to reduce the number of women who elect to give birth surgically without a medical reason. The director of women's and children's health at St George Hospital, Michael Chapman, believes the rate of elective caesarean sections could be reduced by at least 5 per cent if women were presented with "accurate information in a believable manner".

Professor Chapman said there were strong health and economic arguments for reducing the number of elective caesareans. A caesarean was at least twice as expensive as a vaginal delivery, he said. "The State Government has to face this issue - we have gone up from 2260 births three years ago to 2700 this year [at St George Hospital] and, with a 30 per cent caesarean rate, that is an extra 100 caesars . it is pushing our operating lists to the limit."

A professor of women's health, nursing and midwifery at the Royal Hospital for Women at Randwick, Sally Tracy, said that not only was it far riskier for women to have caesareans when there was no medical reason, but there was now overwhelming evidence that it carried great risk for babies, too. "Up until now . caesarean section was first and foremost done to protect the baby," she said. Yet a study by Professor Tracy, published in the journal Birth last month, found babies born in an elective caesarean at full term were almost twice as likely to be admitted to a neo-natal intensive care unit as those born vaginally. Professor Tracy's research is one of a dozen studies in the past year cataloguing the harm from elective caesareans.

Last month, in its "committee opinion" on elective caesareans, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said surgical birth resulted in a longer hospital stay for the mother, increased respiratory problems for the baby and greater complications in later pregnancies.

A spokesman for the Minister for Health, Reba Meagher, said a policy was released last year to prevent elective caesareans before 39 weeks of gestation unless there were medical reasons. Maternity services were being reviewed, and the Government expected a new policy to be finalised this year, he said. [Don't rush, now!]

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



14 January, 2008

Now fruit juice is under attack

Juice makes you FAT! I have long been pointing out that banning fizzy drinks while approving juices is quite crazy and possibly fattening but it seems that the basic facts of the matter have now percolated through to the food freaks too. You can see where this leads, though: BAN EVERYTHING!



THE nation's love affair with fruit juice could be making us fat, experts say. Juice junkies who quench their thirst with super-size drinks might be shocked to know their daily refreshment has more sugar and calories than a can of Coke. As post-Christmas diets and the summer heat send Australians flocking to juice bars, nutritionists have warned that their health-kick efforts could make them put on weight. "Juice is a good, nutritious way to gain weight," dietitian Melanie McGrice said. "Most of us already have a high-kilojoule diet, so for people who are weight conscious they really don't want the extra kilojoules contained in juice. A piece of fruit and water is always going to be a far better choice."

An examination of popular fruit juice brands conducted by Fairfax Media reveals some contain more sugar and kilojoules than soft drinks, and up to half the average daily energy requirement. And compared with fresh fruit and vegetables, they contain less fibre and fewer nutrients. Even red cordial has fewer kilojoules than some fruit juices.

Ms McGrice said that many consumers who believed juices were a healthy alternative to soft drinks were unaware of the number of calories they contained, particularly in large-size concoctions offered by juice bars. For example, a 650-millilitre Boost Juice Tropical Crush has 1391 kilojoules, while a Nudie blueberry and blackberry crushie has 237 kilojoules per 100 millilitres. Coles's Farmland apple juice contains 180 kilojoules per 100 millilitres - the same as Coke.

Dietitians Association of Australia spokesman Alan Barclay said that, although most juice contained nutritious vitamins and minerals, for most people the health benefits were outweighed by the kilojoule content. "Juice will only make you put on weight, so any health benefit will be counteracted by extra kilos," he said.

Catherine Saxelby, author of Nutrition For Life, said the problem with juice was that it contained all the fruit sugar, or fructose, and kilojoules of fruit without the fibre, meaning it was all too easy to overconsume. A 650-millilitre cup of apple juice, she said, contained the kilojoules of four apples but took only a fraction of the time to consume. She called on juice bars to stop offering big sizes at only slightly higher prices and to include a smaller-size alternative. "Those big size portions are a bargain people can't refuse," she said.

"Fibre is the thing that fills you up and stops you overeating, but the juicing process removes that. I would like to see drinks produced in 200-millilitre sizes, not 650 millilitres, which would fit into our diets a lot better. "The bottom line is that half a cup a day, or 125 millilitres, of juice is the maximum we should drink."

Boost Juice marketing manager Jessica Cleeve said the chain had recently sold 250-millilitre smoothies as part of a promotion and was considering making them a permanent option. "If customers haven't been active, it requires a more measured intake of all food and beverages, including juice. If they have been active, then go for it - if not, go for a smaller size. It's all about balance." Nudie marketing manager Sally Draycott said its drinks were meant to be drunk in 250-millilitre serves. "Our drinks are very filling so you can't really overindulge in them - you have to be pretty gluttonous," she said.

A Deakin University survey last year found that juice and other fruit drinks, including cordial, were a bigger problem than soft drinks in childhood obesity.

Source




IVF mothers conceiving after childbirth

It's almost certainly a relaxation effect. The same thing happens after adoption

IT'S a mystifying phenomenon - IVF mothers conceiving spontaneously months after childbirth - and experts say it may be on the rise. Women who have resorted to IVF after years of failure are regularly falling pregnant naturally soon after baby No. 1. According to some doctors, the number of IVF parents conceiving naturally second time around may be growing. "Twenty-five per cent of women who've been through IVF will conceive within the next two years," said IVF Australia director Prof Michael Chapman. "It's probably increasing, and that's because IVF is being used more and more to treat unexplained infertility."

The IVF couples conceiving naturally second time around are not completely infertile, but rather have reduced fertility. So they may have fallen pregnant naturally the first time if they had kept trying. Other experts say the rise in the phenomenon may simply be because more people are using IVF as it becomes more affordable.

Some experts believe the secret to falling pregnant naturally after IVF lies in a relaxed state of mind. "I have a personal belief that part of it is related to relaxation," Prof Chapman said. "You've got your baby, and you're not trying any more. That's one factor, and maybe the body does know how to get pregnant."

Spotswood bookkeeper Penny Stevens tried for 18 months to conceive naturally before having IVF baby Jack 14 months ago. So she was stunned to discover only months after Jack's birth she was pregnant naturally. Ms Stevens, 39, is convinced the stress of desperately wanting a baby, combined with work stress, was the reason she failed first time, and the absence of that stress was why she succeeded for baby No. 2. "You think you're doing the right thing - you go to uni, work really hard, you get a beautiful house. It wasn't until I got to 34 or 35 I thought, 'OK, I'll have babies now'," said Ms Stevens, who is due in weeks. "And suddenly I couldn't. It frightened the living daylights out of me. It was my worst fear to not have a baby. "This time there was no stress, no pressure, because I had Jack. " I was amazed that we were pregnant naturally because I just had it in my head that we wouldn't."

Prof Chapman recently advised the mother of two IVF babies to use contraception if she didn't want another baby. Eleven weeks later she was pregnant. Monash IVF national medical director Gab Kovacs treated one woman who tried for seven years to conceive naturally before having an IVF baby. Prof Kovacs said the woman tried naturally for two more years before having a second IVF baby, then about six months later conceived a third naturally. Prof Kovacs believes the phenomenon of IVF mums conceiving naturally for subsequent pregnancies comes down to pure chance. "The longer you try, the greater the chance," 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



13 January, 2008

Most destined to lose battle of the bulge

MILLIONS of Australians are locked in the battle of the bulge - and most are destined for defeat. New research shows about half the adult population made New Year's resolutions to fight the flab. And most of the estimated 2 million Victorians who plan to lose weight in 2008 want to shed at least 10kg. But experts say many are heading down the wrong track, turning to fad diets, self-help books and other doomed quick fixes. "We know that most people who lose weight on a diet will regain it and most of those will regain it with interest," Deakin University nutrition expert Dr Tim Crowe said. "Not seeking out the latest quick-fix Hollywood fad diet should be No.1 priority."

But the national Newspoll survey found such quick fixes were exactly what most people pinned their hopes on. It found 55 per cent of people surveyed were looking for an easy answer, while just 42 per cent of men and 32 per cent of women intended to consult a doctor.

Dietitians Association of Australia spokesman Dr Trent Watson said individually tailored advice from a professional was essential. Dr Watson said diets, pills and wonder foods proclaiming fast weight loss should be avoided. "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is," he said. Dr Watson, from Clued on Food, said sensible weight loss of 1kg a week for men and 500g a week for women could be achieved with healthy eating plans. Healthy diets were based around foods from the four core food groups: fruits and vegetables, breads and cereals, meat and dairy. But it was important to allow for the odd treat....

The Newspoll survey of more than 2000 adults, commissioned by drug manufacturer Abbott Australasia, found half of Australians made New Year resolutions to lose weight. But just a quarter of them believed they would achieve their goal. Of those who went on a diet at the start of 2007, 68 per cent had gone back to their old ways within six months. The weight loss rollercoaster is fuelling a boom in sales of self-help literature, with eight diet books in the top 10 bestsellers list this year.

Source




Cancer breakthrough may stop spreading through the body

Cancer could be stopped from spreading throughout the body following breakthroughs from researchers in the US and Britain. Scientists from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York have discovered that a handful of tiny scraps of genetic material, known as ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, may control whether or not breast cancer travels to the lung and bone. When "microRNAs" are missing, cancer can spread freely, the scientists found. When they are restored, however, the cancer cells lose some of their ability to metastasise, putting the brakes on the proliferation of cancer.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, could help with the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer patients, according to Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Associate Prof Jane Visvader. "If we can understand how these microRNAs work, in the long term we can design therapeutic mimics," she said.

In Britain, by studying the growth of human embryonic stem cells, Dr Chris Ward and his team of scientists at the University of Manchester have discovered a key process in the spread of cancer. The study, published in the journal Cancer Research, used the stem cells to investigate how some tumours are able to migrate to other parts of the body, making cancer treatment much harder. The research, funded by the Association for International Cancer Research, found the protein E-cadherin stopped cells from migrating during normal growth. As well as helping cells stick together, researchers found that E-cadherin blocked the action of another protein known to increase the mobility of cells, opening up the potential for new targets to prevent tumour cells from spreading.

Australian Stem Cell Centre CEO, Prof Stephen Livesey, said the breakthrough could help pave the way for new drugs. "An understanding of this mechanism will allow researchers to develop and target more effective treatments to prevent the cancer spreading to other tissues," Prof Livesey said.

Dr Ward said the finding could be applied to 90 per cent of all cancers. "Finding out more about the mechanism that controls the spread of cancer cells will help us find new treatments that can prevent tumours spreading and make them essentially harmless," he said.

However Prof Livesey cautioned the cancer treatment was still far off. "While each new breakthrough such as this one from the University of Manchester is a step closer to more effective cancer treatments, it is also practical to remember that the development of new drugs is a complex process that can take many years," Prof Livesey 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



12 January, 2008

Obesity now a 'lifestyle choice'

Given the genetics of it, it is often a difficult choice

As adult obesity balloons in the US, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book says. "Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labour-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein said. In The Fattening of America, published this month, Finkelstein says adult obesity more than doubled in the US between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 per cent to around 33 per cent.

Globally, only Saudi Arabia fares worse than the US in terms of the percentage of adults with a severe weight problem - 35 per cent of people in the oil-rich desert kingdom are classified as obese, the book says, citing data from the World Health Organisation and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

With the rising tide of obesity come health problems and an increased burden on the healthcare system and industry. "But the nasty side-effects of obesity aren't as nasty as they used to be," Finkelstein said. "When you have a first-rate medical system that can cure the diseases that obesity promotes, you no longer need to worry so much about being obese," he said. "With our ever-advancing modern medicine there helping to save the day (at least for many people), are government and the media blowing the magnitude of the 'obesity crisis' out of proportion?" his book says.

A study in which Finkelstein and colleagues at the RTI International, an independent research institute in North Carolina that works on social and scientific problems, asked overweight, obese and normal weight people to predict their life expectancy came up with a total difference of four years. Normal weight respondents predicted they would live to 78, the obese to 74, and the overweight 75.5.

Other studies that looked at death data back the conclusion that people who carry excess weight tend to die slightly earlier, the book says, and draws the conclusion that "many individuals are making a conscious decision to engage in a lifestyle that is obesity-promoting". "People make choices, and some people will choose a weight that the public health community might be unhappy about. Why should we try to make them thinner?" Finkelstein said.

Linda Gotthelf, a doctor who heads research at Health Management Resources, a private, nationwide firm that specialises in weight loss and management, agreed that Americans now live longer but stressed that quality of life declines with age. "People are living longer but with more chronic diseases," Dr Gotthelf said. "That brings a diminished quality of life, especially for the obese who have more functional limitations as they age and tend to be on multiple medications."

Dr Gotthelf disagreed that people chose to be obese. "There are studies in which people have said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than obese. Being obese is not a desire," she said. "For many, this is a problem they have struggled with for many years... it gets discouraging after a while," she said. "I would not doubt that if you asked obese people if they could push a button and not be obese, close to 100 per cent would say they would push the button."

Finkelstein says he wrote The Fattening of America to "encourage discussion of what I understand is probably an uncomfortable position for a lot of people." Even if private industry and government take steps to protect society against the costs of obesity, many Americans "will likely continue to choose a diet and exercise regimen that leads to excess weight," because losing weight requires too many lifestyle sacrifices, his book warns.

Source




Health warning over sugar-free gum

A nasty one for the food freaks

Chewing large amounts of sugar-free gum could lead to chronic diarrhoea and damaging weight loss, according to a study by German doctors.

A 21-year-old woman had diarrhoea and abdominal pain for eight months, and lost 11 kilograms (24lb), the British Medical Journal reports. A 46-year-old man lost twice as much in over a year. After no cause was found they were asked about diet. Both heavily consumed sorbitol, a sweetener found in chewing gum and sweets. Every day the woman ate up to 20 grams of sorbitol, the man 30 grams. The source was gum, and the man also ate sweets. After being told to stop, they got better. "The investigation of weight loss should include detailed dietary history with regard to sorbitol," Juergen Bauditz and his colleagues conclude. Linking sorbitol to diarrhoea is not new: just 20 grams causes it in about half the general population, the team says, but warnings are usually in small print.

Wrigley's said that the evidence was that up to 40 grams of sorbitol could be consumed. It labels such products: "Excessive consumption may produce laxative effects."

Source

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

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



11 January, 2008

2.5 bottles of wine a week can save your life

Not three? Probable middle-class effect in the results again

People who drink up to almost 2.5 bottles of wine a week have a lower risk of premature death than those who abstain from alcohol, research has suggested. Moderate drinkers are less likely than either teetotallers or heavy drinkers to die of heart disease and other causes, and the protective effect is magnified if they also take plenty of exercise, scientists have found. A weekly consumption of up to 14 drinks --- classified as a glass of wine, a bottle of beer or a single measure of spirits ? offers the greatest health benefits, a 20-year study of almost 12,000 Danish men and women has concluded.

The healthiest were those who were moderate drinkers and moderately or very physically active. Their risk of dying from heart disease was about half that of inactive nondrinkers. Martin Gronbaek, of the University of Southern Denmark in Copenhagen, who led the research, said: "Our study shows that being both physically active and drinking a moderate amount of alcohol is important for lowering the risk of both fatal ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and death from all causes. For both men and women, being physically active was associated with a significantly lower risk for both fatal IHD and all-cause mortality than being physically inactive, and drinking alcohol was associated with a lower risk of fatal IHD than abstaining. "A weekly moderate alcohol intake reduced the risk of all-cause mortality among both men and women, whereas the risk among heavy drinkers was similar to nondrinkers."

In the study, published in the European Heart Journal, a team led by Professor Gronbaek, Berit Heitmann and Jane Ostergaard Pedersen, analysed data collected by the Copenhagen City Heart Study, a long-running research cohort assembled in the 1970s to investigate cardiovascular health.

In the mid1970s, almost 20,000 Danish men and women from the same area of Copenhagen were selected randomly from electoral rolls. About 70 per cent agreed to participate, and 11,914 adults eventually answered detailed questionnaires between 1981 and 1983 about many aspects of their behaviour that were considered possible influences on cardiovascular health, including exercise and drinking habits. The goal was to follow up a large group of ordinary people over a long period to find out whether different behaviours among a people of broadly similar social background were associated with any health effects.

There have been 5,901 deaths, including 1,242 from ischaemic heart disease. Ms Ostergaard Pedersen said: "The lowest risk of death from all causes was observed among the physically active moderate drinkers and the highest risk among the physically inactive non and heavy drinkers."

Source




Elective Caesarean for Term Infants Hikes Respiratory Risks

This is not a strong study methodologically but the differences observed are large and orderly so it would seem to be an argument against "frivolous" caesareans. Journal article here

Waiting a little longer for an elective caesarean may be key to avoiding neonatal respiratory problems in term infants, according to investigators here. Babies delivered by elective caesarean from 37 through 39 weeks carry a two- to fourfold increased risk of overall and serious respiratory morbidity compared with babies delivered vaginally or by emergency caesarean, Anne K. Hansen, M.D., of Aarhus University Hospital, and colleagues, reported in an observational study in BMJ Online. The relative risk in their prospective cohort decreased with even small amounts of increasing gestational age, so that waiting until 39 weeks' gestation halved the 37-week risk, the researchers added. Yet even at 39 weeks an increase in morbidity remained, possibly due to a lack of hormones associated with labor.

If no medical indication is present, the investigators said, evidence-based information about the risks and benefits for mothers and newborns becomes all the more important for adequate counseling.

Respiratory morbidity included transitory tachypnea of the newborn, respiratory distress syndrome, persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, and serious respiratory morbidity (oxygen therapy for more than two days, nasal continuous positive airway pressure, or need for mechanical ventilation).

The study included 34,458 live-born singleton babies without birth defects and with gestational ages of 37 to 41 weeks who were born from January 1998 through December 2006 at the Aarhus hospital. In an intention-to-treat methodology, the infants were categorized in two groups, elective caesarean section and intended vaginal delivery (all vaginal deliveries and emergency caesareans). Of these, 2,687 infants (7.8%) were delivered by an elective caesarean. Compared with newborns given intended vaginal delivery, a fourfold increased risk of respiratory morbidity was found for elective caesarean infants delivered at 37 weeks of gestation (OR: 3.9, 95% CI: 2.4 to 6.5). The risks decreased with increasing gestation. At 38 weeks, the risk was three times greater (OR: 3.0, 95% CI: 2.1 to 4.3), and at 39 weeks, the risk was almost double (OR: 1.9, 95% CI: 1.2 to 3.0).

For example, at 37 weeks, 2.8% of infants delivered by intended vaginal delivery had general respiratory problems compared with 10% of those delivered by caesarean. At 38 weeks, the proportion was 1.7% compared with 5.1%, and at 39 weeks it was 1.1% versus 2.1%. The increased risks of serious respiratory morbidity showed the same pattern but with higher odds ratios than those for general respiratory problems. For elective caesarean at 37 weeks, the researchers reported a fivefold increased respiratory risk (OR: 5.0, 95% CI: 1.6 to 16.0).

These results remained essentially unchanged after exclusion of pregnancies complicated by diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and intrauterine growth retardation, or by breech presentation, they wrote.

The mechanisms behind these findings are not known, the investigators said, but the lack of hormones associated with labor could explain the association. During spontaneous labor there is a decrease in the secretion of fetal lung liquid and an increase in its absorption while the release of surfactant is stimulated. This may be mediated by a raised level of catecholamines in the infant in response to rupture of the membranes and labor. This surge, however, is absent when caesareans are carried out before labor, they wrote.

One study limitation, the researchers noted, was the fact that information on the type of delivery was validated by research midwives before data entry, and information on respiratory problems was provided by neonatologists. However, they said, variation may have existed in the use of the international classification of diseases.

The authors noted that while waiting until 39 weeks of gestation halves the 37-week risk, there may be other consequences. Carrying out elective caesareans at greater gestational ages "may result in higher rates of intrapartum caesareans because some women would go into spontaneous labor (in our population 25% of spontaneous intended vaginal deliveries started before 39 weeks' gestation)," they wrote. "Compared with elective caesarean sections, intrapartum caesarean sections may carry an increased risk of complications such as uterine rupture in women with previous caesarean section, infections, or even maternal mortality."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



10 January, 2008

THE SUN IS GOOD/BAD FOR YOU

I am a bit tired of debunking this stuff (see the second post here, for instance) so I will just ask one question: If vitamin D is so good for cancer etc. (dubious), what is wrong with adding the stuff to butter and margarine? -- which most countries have been doing for decades anyway

Enjoying a little sunshine may not be as bad for you as people think. Research from the scientist who alerted the world to its role in skin cancer has suggested that its health benefits may outweigh the risks. The hazards of moderate sunbathing have probably been exaggerated, according to a study that shows how sunlight’s effect of boosting vitamin D production may actually protect the body against cancer.

While ultraviolet (UV) light from the Sun is the chief cause of malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, the new work from the US shows that synthesis of vitamin D can compensate in other ways. The vitamin appears to protect against tumours of the breast, lung, colon and prostate, the study found. The overall effect of sunshine on cancer risk may therefore be positive.

The findings come from a team headed by Richard Setlow, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, who played a leading role in establishing that UV radiation can damage DNA and cause melanoma. Though Dr Setlow still considers sunlight a serious health risk, and advises people to protect themselves against excessive UV exposure, his new data show that it can also have health benefits because of vitamin D.

The work could lead to new formulations for sunscreen, so that it filters out harmful UVA radiation that can trigger melanoma, while allowing through more of the UVB radiation that stimulates vitamin D production. It does not suggest that sunbeds are safe, as these rely on UVA radiation.

Though many people regard a tan as healthy, medical opinion changed in the 1950s and 1960s when sunlight’s role in skin cancer was discovered. Dr Setlow led much of the key research. Public health campaigns have since encouraged people to cover up or wear sunscreen when exposed to direct sunlight. In Britain, 8,900 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed annually and it causes 1,800 deaths.

However, some scientists have begun to question whether safety advice is too extreme. While the link to melanoma is not disputed, sunlight is also the principal source of vitamin D, which research suggests improves prognosis in many cancers. It may even help the body to fight melanoma.

In his latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Setlow calculated vitamin D synthesis at different latitudes. People living near the equator in Australia produce 3.4 times more vitamin“ D in response to sunlight than UK residents. Incidence of all skin cancers also increases towards the equator. The scientists also found that incidence rates for other cancers, such as breast, lung and prostate, increased from north to equator too. When they examined survival rates, however, they found that people exposed to more sunlight had a better prognosis. Dr Setlow said: “In previous work, we have shown that survival rates for these cancers improve when the diagnosis coincides with the season of maximum sun exposure.”

Joanna Owens, senior science information officer for Cancer Research UK, said: “A little bit of sun goes a long way. The amount of exposure you need to top up your vitamin D is always less than the amount needed to tan or burn, which increases the risk of skin cancer.”

Source




Patients regret apnoea surgery

An important warning, I think

ALMOST two-thirds of people who undergo surgery for sleep apnoea suffer persistent side-effects and almost a quarter regret their decision to go under the knife. The findings were made by researchers at the University of Adelaide, whose study, published in this week's edition of the British Medical Journal, recommends surgery for obstructive sleep apnoea be performed only after a case review by an ethics committee.

Between 2 and 4 per cent of Australians have sleep apnoea, with middle-aged, overweight men the main sufferers, about 24 per cent of them experiencing the condition, which collapses the upper airways during sleep, sometimes stopping breathing. Treatment usually begins with weight and alcohol management and use of breathing apparatus applying continuous pressure while sleeping before surgery is considered.

Adam Elshaug, a lecturer at the University of Adelaide, reviewed reports from around the world, including his own audit of 94 patients in Adelaide. He found that up to 62per cent of 21,346 patients who had surgery reported persistent side-effects such as a dry throat, difficulty in swallowing, voice changes and disturbances of smell and taste. Up to 22 per cent regretted having surgery. "The success rates were relatively low, ranging from 13 per cent for certain procedures, up to 47 per cent for the more advanced procedures," Dr Elshaug said.

The number of patients undergoing surgery for obstructive sleep apnoea is growing, with 3585 private patients recorded nationally in 2005, up from 3242 in 2004. Sleep specialists and surgeons agree surgery should not be the first port of call for apnoea sufferers, but say it is a viable option for patients who do not benefit from other treatments.

Sam Robinson, an ear, nose and throat surgeon who works with the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, said it was "nonsense" to restrict surgery to clinical trials overseen by an ethics committee. "Modern reconstructive surgery will give a satisfactory response in 70 to 80per cent of patients, maybe up to 90per cent," Dr Robinson 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



9 January, 2008

Britain: Despite all this stuff about well clinics, there's no evidence that government campaigns alter behaviour

By Mick Hume

Say what you like about the nanny state, but I do think it's a bit much when the Prime Minister takes it upon himself to make our new year's resolutions for us. In his message to mark the 60th year of the NHS, Gordon Brown resolves that we will all live healthier lives ? stop smoking, drink less, exercise more. As a reward, the health service will still treat us should our personal regime inexplicably fail and we fall sick. This generous offer is to be made in a patient's contract spelling out "the rights and responsibilities associated with entitlement to NHS care".

Some protest that this could mean smokers or the obese being denied healthcare. But such "ethical rationing" is already happening. Mr Brown's plans for a more "personal and preventative service" involve a bigger risk to us all. They mark the next step in an unhealthy trend, begun under Margaret Thatcher and accelerated under Tony Blair, to make it a role of the NHS to send people to the Naughty Habits Step.

Where the "old-fashioned" health service merely treated the sick, today's NHS seeks to beat well people into shape as clean-living citizens through advice and guidance. As Michael Fitzpatrick, an East London GP, observed when such contracts were first proposed, they involve "a major shift of general practice away from the treatment of patients who are ill towards the regulation of the lifestyles of the population".

Despite this being the age of "evidence-based" medicine, nobody can provide proof that such government drives to alter behaviour improve public health. Yet the authorities press on regardless, seeking a magical cure for an ailing political class that hopes to reconnect with people around "ishoos" of personal health. Politicians who have no clue how to change society for the better are reduced to cajoling us to sort ourselves out.

These unwieldy plans can only further undermine the efficiency of the health system, the role of doctors as clinical professionals ? and most importantly, the autonomy of individuals. They turn the purpose of healthcare on its head. As Ren‚ Dubos wrote in 1960, "it is part of the doctor's function to make it possible for his patients to go on doing the pleasant things that are bad for them ? smoking too much, eating and drinking too much ? without killing themselves any sooner than is necessary". There must be more to life than healthy living. Amid the talk of rights and responsibilities, one that gets ignored is the individual's right to make the "wrong" choices.

The other fact often missed out is that we already live longer, healthier lives than ever before. So why not leave us alone to enjoy it? Modern clinical care is capable of wonders, and the health service should stick to that. How about an alternative, informal contract for the 60th anniversary of the NHS: we promise to come to you when we are sick, if you will pledge only to try to cure what ails us

Source




Eat your heart out, food freaks

US fast-food giant McDonald's is selling more burgers in Britain than at any time in the 34 years since it opened its first outlet here, The Times said Monday, quoting company figures. The newspaper said there were more than 88 million visits to the "golden arches" in Britain in December 2007 alone, up nearly 10 million on the previous 12 months and the equivalent of about 320,000 more each day. The findings follow a study by pollsters Synovate in conjunction with the BBC published January 2, which suggested that Britons are now the world's biggest fans of fast food, just ahead of Americans.

McDonald's UK chief executive Steve Easterbrook was quoted as saying that the fast-food business had stalled in the wake of recent British government initiatives to target a growing obesity epidemic with healthy eating schemes. But he said in an interview: "This is one of our strongest years for 20 years, and we feel pretty confident about the momentum we have built up."

McDonald's has changed its menu in recent years, cutting salt, sugar and trans-fats in its products and offering healthier alternatives such as porridge, fruit smoothies and chicken wraps.

But The Times said about 90 percent of sales in Britain were still for traditional fast-food fare like burgers, french fries and ice-cream while more than two million children's "Happy Meals" were sold each week in November 2007.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



8 January, 2008

Eating large fish poisons young children?

The article below says it does. I guess we must not mention that tuna is a very large predatory fish, that the Japanese eats heaps of large tuna and that the Japanese have unusually long lifespans. Note that no actual harm was reported below -- just opinion. If I was a Leftist, I would accuse these guys of being in the pocket of the sardine industry

Parents have been warned against feeding large fish species such as swordfish, marlin and shark to young children because of the danger of mercury poisoning. High levels of mercury - linked to developmental delay and brain problems - have been found in three children in Sydney. Health officials said yesterday the children, aged 15 months to two years, had eaten fives times the recommended amount of fish. In all three cases, details of which were published in the Medical Journal of Australia, they were fed congee - a rice and fish porridge used in Asian communities as a weaning food.

Health experts yesterday said that "small children should eat small fish". NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher said too much of certain types of fish could be "detrimental to children's health". "Incorporating two to three serves of fish per week into kids' diets is a good thing, but some parents may be overdoing it with certain species known to be high in mercury," she said.

Study co-author Stephen Corbett, of the Sydney South West Area Health Service, said children should still have fish in their diets. "Including fish in an infant's diet has many health benefits including building a strong heart and nervous system," Dr Corbett said. "But some fish may also contain mercury which is not good for young, developing children. "It is important to be aware how children can enjoy the many important benefits of seafood while reducing exposure to mercury."

Acting Minister for Primary Industries Linda Burney said: "An easy rule ... is that when whole the fish should be the size of an average plate." Chief Scientist with the NSW Food Authority Lisa Szabo said most fish were low in mercury but longer-living predatory fish built up mercury levels. "These fish such as shark or flake, swordfish, marlin and broadbill should not be included in the diet of small children," Dr Szabo said. "If they are eaten they should be limited to one serve per fortnight with no other fish eaten that fortnight.

"Examples of low mercury fish commonly available are rainbow trout, ocean trout, flathead, kingfish and whiting - canned tuna and salmon are also good low mercury options." Processed fish products such as fish fingers, patties, cakes, balls and bakes are made from a variety of fish including species low in mercury such as hoki and hake.

Source

The following excerpt from Wikipedia gives some background on tuna

Due to their high position in the food chain and the subsequent accumulation of heavy metals from their diet, mercury levels can be relatively high in some of the larger species of tuna such as bluefin and albacore. As a result, in March 2004 the United States FDA issued guidelines recommending pregnant women, nursing mothers and children limit their intake of tuna and other types of predatory fish. However, most canned light tuna is skipjack tuna and is lower in mercury




More medical ideology bites the dust

Drugs that are commonly used to treat aggressive or violent outbursts in intellectually disabled people are less effective than a placebo and should not be used as a standard form of treatment, research shows. The finding, by Australian and British experts, strongly challenges routine medical practice throughout the world of using antipsychotic drugs to treat aggression in intellectually disabled patients. Up to 45 per cent of people with an intellectual disability in hospital and about 20 per cent of those in the community are prescribed antipsychotic drugs, although there is no clear connection between aggressive behaviour and psychotic illness.

The study, published in The Lancet, examined 86 adults with a mild intellectual disability in group housing in England, Wales and Australia over more than a month of treatment. It found a 79 per cent reduction in aggressive behaviour among patients taking placebo pills, compared with a reduction of 65 per cent or less in those taking antipsychotic drugs. Researchers compared the placebo with two antipsychotic drugs - haloperidol and risperidone - although the findings would almost certainly apply to all similar medications, they said.

The lead author, Peter Tyrer, a professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London, said that although all treatments led to a reduction in aggression after four weeks, the greatest decrease was by those taking the placebo. "Our trial has shown that aggressive challenging behaviour in people with intellectual disability decreases whether or not active medication is given," he said. There had been no differences between drugs and dummy pills when measuring aggressive behaviour, quality of life, effect on carers and adverse drug effects, Professor Tyrer said.

The study's authors, including researchers from the University of Queensland, said the results "should not be interpreted as an indication that antipsychotic drugs have no place in some aspects of behaviour disturbance". Dr David Harley, who worked on the study while at the Queensland Centre for Intellectual and Developmental Disability, said he was not surprised that the drugs had little more effect than the placebo, given they had not been used for the purpose in which they were created. "They are being used to treat [aggression] which is not a recognised medical diagnosis," he said. "We might expect drugs like this to work if the aggression was caused by schizophrenia or psychotic illness." Dr Harley said when intellectually disabled people became aggressive, doctors were left to feel "like the only avenue they have is to prescribe". He has been advocating against the use of medication in this group for years and preferred to treat most patients with behavioural therapy.

Philip Mitchell, head of the school of psychiatry at the University of NSW, said the study was a "wake-up call" to psychiatrists that the drugs were "of limited benefit" for patients with intellectual disability. "It should hopefully make clinicians and doctors more circumspect about their prescribing practices," 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



7 January, 2008

A pesky bowel cancer gene

Pilgrims who sailed from England to America around 1630 appear to be the ancestors of hundreds of people that are today at risk for a hereditary form of colon cancer, according to genetic detectives. The married couple introduced to America a "founder mutation" - a DNA fault that has been traced back to a common ancestor - which may contribute to a significant percentage of colon cancer cases today in the United States.

Researchers from Huntsman Cancer Institute at The University of Utah publish the evidence in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. based on a study of two large families, one in Utah and one in New York, that both carry a specific genetic mutation responsible for increased risk of colorectal cancer. The two families share common ancestors-a couple who came to America from England in the 1630s, about the time of the Pilgrims. "The fact that this mutation can be traced so far back in time suggests that it could be carried by many more families in the United States than is currently known," says Dr Deborah Neklason, leader of the study. Indeed, the report shows 13 additional American families with the identical genetic change who are likely to be related. "In fact, this founder mutation might be related to many colon cancer cases in the United States."

There was also report of the mutation in a German registry and, given this individual had a sibling with the same condition in America, once again they seem to be part of this American family. "So, at this point, we hypothesize that all individuals with this mutation link back to this American founder," says Dr Neklason.

The mutation causes a condition called attenuated familial adenomatous polyposis. Without proper medical care, people with the mutation have a greater than 2 in 3 risk of colon cancer by age 80, compared to about 1 in 24 for the general population. Yet the cancer can be prevented with proper screening and care.

Dr Ian Tomlinson, Molecular and Population Genetics Laboratory, London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK has not observed this specific mutation in English patients today, suggesting that the couple that immigrated to America around 1630 were indeed the founders of the genetic change and that, if any British relatives had the mutation it may have helped to extinguish that line. The results "are very interesting," he commented.

Source




Hospitals serving junk food

This attack is crazy. People are not in hospital long-term. The important thing for hospital food is for it to be appetizing -- so that patients will eat it and keep their strength up

ARTERY-clogging junk food [Pure ignorance speaking there. Careful research has found NO EFFECT of dietary fat intake on cardiovascular disease] is widely available at hospitals across the state and Queensland Health has no plans to ban it. Despite implementing some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in the country, Queensland Health says it will not follow the lead of Western Australia, which last week moved to rid its hospitals of all unhealthy foods.

Queensland's Chief Health Officer, Dr Jeannette Young, admitted serving up food with a low nutritional value at health-care facilities was sending the public the "wrong message". "It is about everything in moderation," Dr Young said. "The problem is we need to provide more alternatives (to calorie-dense, less nutritional foods)."

Under the WA initiative, all unhealthy food and drinks must be removed from hospital and clinic cafeterias and vending machines by January 1 next year. But there are no rules on what food can be sold at Queensland hospitals and some serve up exactly the kinds of food they warn their patients to avoid. Prince Charles Hospital, for example, is one of the top specialist coronary-care facilities in the country - but just 100m from the doors to the cardiac-care unit are artery-clogging snack foods sitting under heat lamps waiting to be eaten, The Sunday Mail discovered last week. Hot chips, burgers, chicken, pizza, various fried snacks and hot dogs were just a few items on the menu at the hospital's Breeze Cafe. A plated meal bought from there featuring a hamburger and fried chips carried hundreds of calories and levels of dangerous saturated fats far in excess of the recommended daily intake.

Ironically, the cafe raises money for medical research, including coronary care. It was a similar story at food outlets and vending machines at other Brisbane hospitals, including the Mater, Princess Alexandra, Prince Charles and the Royal Brisbane and Women's. While all had a healthy option on their menus, the fare on offer is dominated by fried foods and sugary snacks.

Dr Linda Selvey, population health senior director for Queensland Health, said the department would monitor the WA initiative, but would leave the Queensland public to make their own food choices. "Queensland Health has, at this stage, chosen to use a colour-code system as we believe that when Queenslanders are given access to healthy foods, they have shown they can make the correct choices," she said. Under the Queensland plan, all private, commercially-run food outlets in facilities operated by Queensland Health will be required to comply with the department's Better Choice strategy.

Greg Johnson of Diabetes Australia is surprised more is not being done to reduce the availability of unhealthy foods, particularly as it had been proven that obesity is a main factor in Type 2 diabetes. He said 60 per cent of adults and 30 per cent of children and adolescents in Australia were overweight or obese. "We're not a lucky country of healthy athletes," 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



6 January, 2008

SNAKE OIL STILL IN DEMAND

If the food Fascists really wanted to do some good, they would ban all this diet advertising, not fizzy drinks. Dieting makes most people FATTER in the long run

Dieting companies are seizing the moment this year, starting with the festivities in New York earlier this week. Both Weight Watchers and Special K sponsored electronic billboards Times Square, the most televised (and, perhaps, densely populated) location on New Year's Eve. Revelry, it seems, is all well and good, but self-improvement must never stray too far out of the picture. The Kellogg Company, which makes the Special K brand, took over three of the largest digital billboards in Times Square for two minutes starting at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, the NY Times reports.

The first 60-second ad appeared on the ABC billboard starting one minute before midnight, and two more ran on the Reuters and Nasdaq boards from midnight till 12:01. "That's the biggest moment of self-evaluation of the year. We want to be part of the resolution," Per Jacobson, a creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago, which created the ads, told Times writers Lia Miller and Douglas Quenqua. All three were promoting the Special K Challenge, a diet program developed four years ago that includes a range of Special K products - not just cereal, but also protein bars, waffles and protein water.

The campaign will continue throughout January with two 15-second television spots and near-total ad domination of New York's Penn Station and Boston's South Station. "What we've learned is that women resolve to lose weight not just on New Year's Eve, but throughout the whole month of January," said Kim Miller, vice president for marketing for Kellogg's morning foods division. "Even if they fall off track, they will re-commit. So we're working hard to make sure we're there at every point of recommitting," she told the Times.

Central to the promotion is a partnership between Kellogg's and Yahoo. Several of the ads ask consumers to search for "Special K Challenge" on Yahoo, which leads them to both www.SpecialK.com and a discussion group run by the search engine.

Visitors to the Special K site can create a custom two-week diet plan - consisting entirely of Special K products - by answering questions about their dieting challenges and food preferences. The discussion group lets users share their dieting experiences. "In this day and age, it's not enough to have your own message out there," Jacobson said.

Not to be outdone, Weight Watchers International has introduced what it says is its biggest and most integrated ad campaign, and which also relies in part on the Reuters billboard in Times Square. Other components are television spots, print ads, an Internet video and a MySpace page.

The campaign's tagline, "Stop Dieting. Start Living," is meant to emphasize a more sensible approach to weight loss than the ever popular crash diet. The print ads, with headlines like "Go on a Diet Diet" and "Di*t," will run through the first quarter of 2008 in publications ranging from entertainment magazines to Time and Newsweek. Cheryl Callan, the director for marketing of Weight Watchers, told the Times that the company wants potential customers to "think in terms of a really successful path through a change in lifestyle and not through dieting."

Source




Energy-saving light bulbs blamed for migraines



The energy-saving light bulbs that will be made compulsory in homes in a few years can trigger migraines, campaigners have claimed. The Migraine Action Association (MAA) said some of its members alleged the fluorescent bulbs had led to attacks of the powerful headaches.

By 2011, Britain will be the first European country to phase out traditional bulbs as part of a strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The MAA is calling on the Government to avoid a complete ban on old-style bulbs, by providing an opt-out for people with health problems.

Last year it was claimed that the "green" bulbs can cause people with epilepsy to experience symptoms similar to the early stages of a fit. There have also been complaints from people with lupus, a chronic immune disease that causes pain and extreme tiredness.

Low energy light bulbs use only a quarter of the energy consumed by traditional versions and are estimated to save 2,000 times their weight in greenhouse gases. They are often five times more expensive but the greater efficiency means they can pay for themselves within months. Several versions use a technology similar to fluorescent strip lights and some migraine sufferers say they produce a flickering effect that triggers their condition.

Karen Manning, from the MAA, said: "When the Government announced that traditional light bulbs would be phased out, we were inundated with over 200 calls and emails from members who said the flickering had caused migraines. "This is a debilitating condition which can often leave people bed-ridden for days. "The bulbs do not necessarily affect every sufferer, but we are talking about up to six million people in the UK who suffer migraines - so this is a serious concern. "We would ask the Government to avoid banning them completely and leave some opportunity for conventional bulbs to be purchased."

The Lighting Association, which represents manufacturers, denied that modern designs produced a flicker. A spokesman said: "A small number of cases have been reported by people who suffer from reactions to certain types of linear fluorescent lamps. These were almost certainly triggered by old technology."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



5 January, 2008

One in the eye for the diet knowalls:

A healthy 15-year-old girl described below who only eats chips (fries) and drinks milk -- and has done so since babyhood. Whither the "balanced diet"? No fruit & veg.?

Go here to see a picture of the perfectly healthy-looking teenager concerned

While most of us were eating our Christmas dinners last week, 15-year-old Faye Campbell was missing out. She has never tasted turkey, gravy or Christmas pudding. Nor has she ever eaten satsumas or mince pies. Instead, for most of her life, Faye has eaten nothing except chips - one bowl a day, with lots of milk to drink.

Over the years, her parents, Carolyn, 37, and Mark, 39, have endured despair and fear due to their daughter's peculiar diet. They have ignored the many doctors who, dismissing Carolyn's concerns, said that Faye was simply fussy and should be made to eat. At one point, a paediatrician warned that unless Faye, then six, was force fed, the development of her brain and body would be affected because of her poor nutrition. "I left the paediatrician's surgery crying," says Carolyn. "But I knew there had to be something physically wrong with Faye. I went straight to my GP, who prescribed iron tablets for Faye to prevent a deficiency. But I knew I could never force food down Faye's throat."

It wasn't until Faye was 12 years old that the Campbells, who live in Stowmarket, Suffolk, learned that Faye had a physical condition which made her feel so ill every time she ate anything other than chips that she learned not to take the risk.

More here




Suntans now incorrect

Everything is bad for you



Supermodel and businesswoman Elle Macpherson has been slammed by cancer authorities as irresponsible after she was quoted as saying "I tan safely". The experts say all tans are dangerous. The 44-year-old's comment come as the Cancer Institute of NSW is running a $2.16 million summer advertisement campaign with the message that "tanning is skin cells in trauma, trying to protect themselves from cancer".

Comment is being sought from Macpherson but the founder of the company whose products she was spruiking said the supermodel's comments had been misinterpreted. "What she means by that is she can go outside safely because she uses the zinc," said Andrea Horwood, founder of Invisible Zinc. Ms Horwood said she knows there is no such thing as a safe tan and that "the only safe tan is a fake tan".

But Acting NSW Assistant Minister for Health, Kristina Keneally said Macpherson had got it wrong. "Elle Macpherson might be a great model but she's hardly a dermatologist or cancer expert. There is no such thing as a safe tan. "When the skin changes colour from being in the sun, it is damaged. Even the smallest melanoma, as small as a millimetre, can grow into skin cancer." Ms Keneally said that beach-goers should ignore Macpherson's uninformed comments. "She might look great but if people want to stay healthy I encourage them to take their advice from the Cancer Institute NSW," she said. "It's an uninformed comment. It demonstrates the challenge of getting out the message that a tan is not a healthy thing. I'm not trying to be wowser, it's summertime, let's go to the beach, have a good time but let's do it safely." Asked if the comment was irresponsible, Ms Keneally replied: "Yes. There's no such thing as a healthy tan."

Macpherson, spruiking an Australian sunscreen she will launch in the US, appears on the front page of today's The Daily Telegraph stating: "I don't have the skin of an English rose but I know my skin and I tan safely."

A spokesman for Cancer Institute NSW repeated that all tans are unsafe. "There is no safe way of tanning when exposure to UV is involved," spokesman Adrian Grundy said, "That means any exposure to the sun, especially in the peak hours of 11am to 3pm during daylight saving, and through tanning devices like solarium." Mr Grundy said sunscreen, which Macperhson was spruiking in the interview, was "just one of the methods you use to protect yourself from the sun".

"It's only one of five methods. The first really important method is staying out of the sun, especially between 11am and 3pm; the second is covering up with protective clothing especially around the shoulder area, arms,leg and neck; a broad-brimmed hat which protects the top of the head and the ears; and sunglasses that meet Australian standards. The fifth method, sunscreen ... needs to be used properly. It needs to be applied at least 20 minutes before heading out into the sun and then reapplied every two hours after that."

He pleaded with the public to be sun safe this summer. "We would advise anybody who's thinking about tanning to think again, because there is no safe tan. The darkening of your skin is actually your skin in trauma. And this trauma can lead to skin cancer, particularly damaging melanoma. There's nothing wrong with pale or less than dark skin. It's actually a sign of good health to not have a tan."

The "Dark Side of Tanning" campaign, featuring a ghoulish animation of a melanoma spreading through the body of a tanning woman, also states that one damaged skin cell can start a melanoma growing and a melanoma need only be 1mm deep to spread to other parts of the body through the bloodstream. The TV and print campaign will run until March.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



4 January, 2008

Secrets of Weight Loss Revealed!

BOOK REVIEW of: "Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss-and the Myths and Realities of Dieting", by Gina Kolata and

"Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think", by Brian Wansink

Gina Kolata says losing weight is nearly impossible. Brian Wansink says it's easy. But they don't really contradict each other, because they're talking about different kinds of weight loss.

Although their new books offer very different messages for dieters, Kolata and Wansink share a suspicion of collectivist responses to the "obesity epidemic." Both writers are intensely interested in the question of why people weigh as much as they do, but they do not leap from research findings to policy prescriptions aimed at making us thinner by restricting our choices. At a time when almost every discussion of weight in America seems to end with a list of things the government should do about it, their restraint is commendable.

In Rethinking Thin, Kolata, a veteran New York Times science reporter, focuses on a group of obese people enrolled in a University of Pennsylvania diet study. They exhibit the usual pattern of initial success followed by setbacks, typically ending up about as fat as they were to begin with. She uses these case studies to illustrate her general point that "very few people lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off" because genetic factors play a large role in determining how much a given person will weigh as an adult.

By contrast, in Mindless Eating, Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University who has studied consumers' food-related decisions for decades, focuses on the sort of gradual, modest weight loss that Kolata concedes is achievable. Declaring that "the best diet is the one you don't know you're on," he urges small changes in everyday behavior that over the course of a year can result in a weight loss of 10 to 25 pounds. His book will not be much help to people like the research subjects Kolata interviews, who generally want to lose 50 to 100 pounds.

Kolata's message, as it pertains to the very fat, is mostly discouraging, while Wansink's, which is addressed mainly to the somewhat overweight, is relentlessly upbeat. But both distinguish themselves from the "obesity epidemic" doomsayers by casting a skeptical eye on efforts to make Americans thinner through social engineering. They show that it's possible to discuss the issue of weight without laying out a Plan of Action that treats us all as an undifferentiated blob of blubber.

Kolata, whose reporting on subjects ranging from breast implants to pesticide residues has been admirably resistant to the health scare du jour, questions the conventional wisdom that weighing "too much" is unhealthy. Like other dissenters from the War on Fat, such as University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos and University of Chicago political scientist Eric Oliver (see "Lay Off the Fatties!," November 2006), she tells fat people they will probably stay that way but simultaneously reassures them that the medical implications are not as dire as they've heard.

Many of the health risks associated with obesity may be due to the poor diets and sedentary habits associated with fatness rather than the extra pounds per se. Kolata notes that it's unclear whether exceeding the government's recommended weight range is inherently hazardous or whether fat people who become thinner thereby become healthier. Yet scientists who point out such inconvenient facts can expect to be pilloried for failing to toe the party line. Kolata describes the dismay of two researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Katherine Flegal and David Williamson, at the anger they provoked from their colleagues by suggesting that the death toll the government had attributed to excessive weight was greatly exaggerated.

In a 2005 study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, Flegal, Williamson, and two other researchers reported that people the government considers "overweight" have lower mortality rates than people with supposedly "healthy" weights. They were criticized not so much for being wrong as for being unhelpful. "Your patients likely did not read the original article," said an editorial in the journal Obesity Management, "but they did likely hear about it in the news and the message they got was not to worry so much about overweight and obesity. I do not think this is the message you want them to have." That response was typical, Flegal tells Kolata: "Everyone thinks they already know the answer..All these people who just know weight loss is good for you. It's just taken for granted regardless of the evidence."

So is the feasibility of major, permanent weight loss, Kolata argues, for the most part persuasively. Her litany of diet fads, ranging from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's 1825 bestseller The Physiology of Taste to The Atkins Diet Revolution, The Zone, and The South Beach Diet, shows that hope springs eternal in the plump torso, a point confirmed by her often poignant personal histories of dieters. A fat man who, like most of the subjects in the University of Pennsylvania study, has tried many different diets, losing and regaining hundreds of pounds, tells her: "In your brain, you say, `I have 100 percent free will. I have total control over what I eat.' But in the experience of my life, in the experience of my day, in the experiences that have been thrust upon me, I don't have that control."

Kolata's discussion of obesity research suggests that false hope is not limited to people trying to lose weight. Scientists too are perpetually reaching for a weight loss key that always seems just beyond their fingertips: the right diet, the right drug, the right hormone.

Kolata's main explanation for the failure of these efforts is that people are genetically programmed for a certain weight range, which varies widely from one individual to another. Twin studies indicate that genetic differences account for something like 70 percent of variation in weight. "The body's metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range" of "20 to 30 pounds," Kolata writes. While losing 20 or 30 pounds would count as success for most Americans whom the government considers overweight, it would be just a start for the study subjects on whom Kolata focuses.

The idea of predetermined weight ranges is consistent with much everyday experience: People tend to return to a particular weight after gaining a few pounds from holiday overeating, for example, or after losing pounds during an illness. It also jibes with the complaints of people who say they easily gain weight while friends can eat whatever they want and stay thin.

Kolata describes research that backs up these anecdotes, including experiments showing the difficulty that thin people have in gaining weight as well as the difficulty that fat people have in losing it. In both cases, the weight tends to spring back after the experiment is over. One reason: Fat people have more fat cells than thin people, and when they lose weight the cells don't disappear; they just get smaller. Likewise, thin people have fewer fat cells, and when they gain weight the cells don't multiply; they just expand. Partly because of the signals sent by these fat cells, but also because of how those signals are conveyed to and interpreted by the brain, obese people do not feel satiated as soon as thin people do.

There is also evidence that their hunger is more intense. Kolata notes that the food-obsessed, sneaky, guilt-ridden behavior of fat people on diets is similar to the behavior of thin experimental subjects who are deliberately underfed. "A lot of thin people think that because they can skip a meal and feel a bit hungry, everyone can do the same," one obesity researcher tells her. "They assume the sensation of hunger is the same for everyone." They're wrong, says Kolata: "Fat people are fat because their drive to eat is very different from the drive in thin people."

In Kolata's view, that point is not contradicted by the fact that some people, such as former Arkansas governor (and current GOP presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee, have gone from obese to thin and managed to stay that way. It can be done, she concedes, but it takes a strong exercise of willpower-more willpower than most people need to avoid being obese in the first place-and a lifelong struggle. The fact that people like Huckabee are famous for losing a lot of weight (more than 100 pounds in his case) and keeping it off suggests how rare that accomplishment is, as does obese people's eagerness to undergo radical weight-reduction surgery that messes around with their stomachs and intestines. "In trying to lose weight," Rockefeller University obesity researcher Jeffrey Friedman writes in an article Kolata quotes, "the obese are fighting a difficult battle. It is a battle against biology, a battle that only the intrepid take on and one in which only a few prevail."

But predetermined weight ranges take us only so far. They do not explain why some people are thin for decades and obese thereafter. Nor do they account for the "obesity epidemic" of the last few decades. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (which includes actual measurements of height and weight), the share of American adults who qualify as obese has more than doubled since the late 1970s, reaching 33 percent by 2004. The official cutoff for obesity is based on body mass index (BMI), which is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A man who is five feet, nine inches tall-me, for example-is deemed obese at a BMI of 30, equivalent to a weight of 203 pounds.

Meanwhile, the share of Americans who are considered merely "overweight," with BMIs from 25 to 29.9 (170 to 202 pounds for me), has increased only slightly, hovering around a third. At 175 pounds, I am "overweight" but not "obese," with a BMI of 25.8. If I lost six pounds, as my doctor has advised me to do, I would achieve the magical BMI of 24.9, giving me a "healthy" weight. But if I fail to do so, I suppose I shouldn't feel too bad, since two-thirds of American adults weigh more than the government thinks they should.

Although almost all of the BMI shift has occurred in the "obese" category, that doesn't mean the weight gains have been big. If I weighed 202 pounds, for example, and gained a pound, that would make me obese instead of just overweight. So small changes in weight in large numbers of people, shifting some from "healthy" to "overweight" and others from "overweight" to "obese," would be enough to account for the BMI trends bemoaned by public health officials. In other words, the "obesity epidemic" is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that adults tend to stay within a 20-to-30-pound weight range.

Still, the question remains: Why did so many people gain weight during the 1980s and '90s? Since it takes longer than a couple of decades for genetic predispositions to change, Kolata suggests that early-life factors such as better nutrition, vaccination, and the availability of antibiotics somehow affected "the brain circuits that control eating" in people who came of age during the last few decades. But this hypothesis is highly speculative, with only limited animal studies to support it. For reasons that are unclear, Kolata rejects more plausible explanations, implying there's no evidence that Americans are eating more or exercising less than we used to. But that's not quite true.

In addition to weighing and measuring people, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey asks them what they eat. These numbers indicate that food consumption by both men and women jumped by about 200 calories a day between the late 1970s and the late '80s to early '90s. Self-reports on this subject may not be completely reliable, but the increase is striking, especially since it coincides with a spike in obesity.

As for calorie expenditure, a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report found that, contrary to popular belief, survey data do not indicate a decline in exercise during leisure time in the last few decades. But the report also noted that American jobs, housework, and transportation became less and less physically demanding throughout the 20th century, resulting in "a substantial decline in physical activity levels in the workplace, at home, and in travel over a long period." Although this trend is by no means restricted to the 1980s and '90s, it suggests that we could be burning fewer calories overall even if we are spending just as much time deliberately exercising. Modest increases in calorie consumption and/or decreases in calorie expenditure would be enough to cause the seemingly dramatic shift in weight the government has labeled an "epidemic."

Enter Brian Wansink. He's all about little changes that add up over time. He concedes that the body resists big, sudden movements in weight. "It's estimated that over 95 percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back," he writes. "Deprivation diets don't work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against then; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them." Wansink's recommendations, which are derived from his research on the cues that lead people to overeat, are designed to achieve the loss of up to half a pound a week, which he says is below the threshold that would trigger a metabolic response. He urges readers to use "the mindless margin"-the 100 or 200 calories a day they would not really miss if they gave them up-to gradually move toward the bottom of their weight ranges.

Even if you have no interest in following Wansink's advice, the book is worth reading for his breezy, entertaining accounts of Candid Camera-ready studies in which people stuff themselves with stale popcorn because it's in a big container, keep slurping soup from a surreptitiously replenished bowl, or eat more in restaurants because of music, menu language, or the ostensible origin of a complimentary glass of cheap red wine. Wansink's overarching point is that, when it comes to food, we're not paying attention. "It takes up to 20 minutes for our body and brain to signal satiation," he notes, and Americans often finish their meals in less time than that. Instead of internal signals we rely on external cues to tell us when we're done: Is the plate clean? Is everyone else done? Is there more in the serving dish?

To counteract such cues, Wansink recommends such tactics as using smaller plates (which make portions seem larger), keeping serving dishes in the kitchen (which discourages second helpings), replacing short, wide glasses with tall, thin ones (which make drinks seem bigger), keeping food scraps and bones on your plate (which reminds you how much you've eaten), and dividing snacks from big packages into smaller bags or plastic containers (which discourages you from devouring the entire package). Wansink, who wants readers to know that he "enjoys both French food and French fries each week," advocates eating more mindfully, to increase enjoyment as well as to improve nutrition. But he thinks it's unrealistic to expect people to constantly count their calories in the face of the myriad food-related decisions they make each day. In his view it pays to plan ahead, in effect tricking yourself into eating less.

Despite their differences in tone and focus, Kolata and Wansink are equally unenthusiastic about proposals by fat warriors such as Yale obesity expert Kelly Brownell to reshape Americans by reshaping our "food environment" through propaganda, censorship, taxes, and regulation. Kolata says there's no reason to think the government knows how to make people thinner. She notes that even well-funded, intensive efforts aimed at slimming down captive audiences of schoolchildren have produced disappointing results, making proposals such as restricting cereal commercials, banning soda machines from schools, and distributing federally funded fruit to students look even lamer.

Wansink, for his part, says labeling and education don't make much of a difference, and "we cannot legislate or tax people into eating Brussels sprouts." Although he has spent much of his career studying ways in which businesses encourage people to buy, he recognizes the limitations of these techniques and does not portray them as inherently sinister. "Do food companies put ingredients in their food that they know we will eat and love?" he writes. "Absolutely-they are guilty as charged. So is your grandmother." Wansink emphasizes consumer self-help rather than protection from conniving capitalists. A chapter called "The Hidden Persuaders Around Us," a phrase that echoes the title of the 1957 Vance Packard book that portrayed advertisers as insidious manipulators of desire, is mostly about tricks people can use to avoid eating mindlessly. Instead of remaking the world to discourage overeating, Wansink says, "we can reengineer our personal food environment to help us and our families eat better."

Kolata and Wansink share a concern about the experiences of actual individuals, a welcome respite from the cold collectivism that characterizes most discussions of obesity. Kolata devotes much space to the struggles of particular dieters, while Wansink emphasizes that he is offering not a one-size-fits-all diet but a set of suggestions that readers who want to lose weight can use to put together plans that work best for them. Instead of asking what the government should do about our flab, these books leave us alone with our bathroom scales to weigh the question for ourselves.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



3 January, 2008

Another resurrection for Thalidomide

It's already been found useful in treating leprosy etc.

NOTORIOUS morning sickness drug Thalidomide, which caused severe birth defects in the 1950s and 1960s, is about to be trialled as a treatment for asbestos-related mesothelioma. Cancer specialist Nick Pavlakis said Thalidomide had been shown to inhibit blood vessel growth within tumours and he planned to test its value in mesothelioma patients.

He hopes to recruit about 100 patients Australia-wide for the study, which will compare those receiving chemotherapy with others given the standard treatment as well as Thalidomide. "We want to find out after they've had chemotherapy . . . if we give Thalidomide can we then control the disease for longer and maintain quality of life for longer?" Professor Pavlakis said. He said the results of the trial would be combined with a similar study taking place in the Netherlands. Thalidomide is already listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme as a treatment for multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer.

Studies have found the standard chemotherapy cocktail increases survival of mesothelioma patients by an average of three months as well as improving quality of life. Professor Pavlakis, of Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, said even if Thalidomide extended that to five months, it would be considered significant. "That doesn't sound like a lot but . . . everything's a stepping stone," Professor Pavlakis said. "If you look at breast cancer and other diseases where there's been major changes, at any given time point the changes didn't seem as big when they actually were discovered. "It's the cumulative effect of little changes over time that add up to a big effect."

About 600 Australians are diagnosed with the disease each year but that is expected to double by 2020. "Everyone acknowledges it's going to get worse . . . based on when the maximum asbestos exposures in the community were," Professor Pavlakis said. "There's a lag time of 30 to 40 years on average from the time of exposure to the time of disease." Only about 5 per cent of those diagnosed with mesothelioma were alive five years later, Professor Pavlakis said.

Mesothelioma patient Trevor Stagg, 70, and his wife, Eileen, of Victoria Point, said they were grateful for every extra day they had together after his diagnosis in June. "I really feel more for the families of people who go out one day, have an accident and don't come home. I wonder how they cope with that," Mrs Stagg said. "Each day is really precious to us. We've been married 51 years last Saturday. We've even got closer."

Source




Fussy foodie

Strong on ideology but no sign of science. But America's supposedly highbrow and impartial NPR is promoting it. How surprising! (NOT)

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That's the advice journalist and author Michael Pollan offers in his new book, In Defense of Food. "That's it. That is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy," Pollan tells Steve Inskeep.

The implication of Pollan's advice, however, is that what we're eating now isn't food. "Very often, it isn't," he says. "We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods."

Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and "food products" takes work. His tip: "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt, Pollan says. "Imagine your grandmother or your great-grandmother picking up this tube, holding it up to the light, trying to figure out how to administer it to her body - if indeed it is something that goes in your body - and then imagine her reading the ingredients," he says. "Yogurt is a very simple food. It's milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients."

A large part of the conversation about food - like debating low-fat and low-carb diets - serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we're just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says "has failed us when it comes to food, by and large," and more on culture. "Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite," he says. "Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don't have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices."

One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. "The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don't get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don't have seconds, they don't snack." In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called "Hara Hachi Bu" instructs people to eat until they are just 80 percent full, Pollan says. "You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment . if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit," he says.

Finally, eating plants is very important, Pollan says. "There is incontrovertible but boring evidence that eating your fruits and vegetables is probably the best thing you can do for preventing cancer, for weight control, for diabetes, for all the different, all the Western diseases that now afflict us," he says.

But can you follow Pollan's advice and avoid processed foods without spending a ton of time and money? "You're going to have to spend either more time or more money, and perhaps a little bit of both," Pollan says. "And I think that's just the reality. It's really a question of priorities, and we have, in effect, devalued food. And what I'm arguing is to move it a little closer to the center of our lives, and that we are going to have to put more into it, but that it will be very rewarding if we do.

"And if we don't, by the way, we are going to suffer from this - you know, we hear this phrase so many times - this epidemic of chronic disease. But the fact is, we are at a fork in the road. We're either going to get used to chronic disease, and be . in the age of Lipitor and dialysis centers on every corner in the city, or we're going to change the way we eat. I mean, it's really that simple. Most of the things that are killing us these days - whether it's heart disease, diabetes, obesity, many, many cancers - are directly attributed to the way we're eating."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



2 January, 2008

Britain: Regulation frenzy over milk

The way that milk companies are allowed to market their products is changing today as health chiefs attempt to get people to reduce their intake of fat. Until now, European Commission regulations meant that milk could be marketed only within tightly defined ranges as whole or full-fat, semi-skimmed or skimmed. Strict rules governed the fat content of each.

From today, after lobbying by Britain, dairy products containing 1 per cent fat - above the level of skimmed milk, but below semi-skimmed - can also be marketed as milk. So can products with 2 per cent fat, above semi-skimmed but well below full fat. Health chiefs are convinced that this extra choice will encourage consumers to switch to products that have lower fat than their usual intake.

Currently, semi-skimmed milk - which contains 1.5 to 1.8 per cent fat - accounts for 63.9 per cent of the market. Whole, or full-fat milk, important for children's development, accounts for 24.7 per cent of all milk sales. It contains 3.5 per cent fat. Skimmed milk, which contains less than 0.5 per cent fat, accounts for 11.3 per cent of sales. Dairy industry experts believe that the change could boost milk consumption. Between 1995 and 2005 average consumption per adult fell from four pints per week to three.

In the US "1 per cent milk" is a popular concept. Wiseman's Dairy in Glasgow introduced "The One" three years ago, a product containing 1 per cent fat which until now could not be labelled milk. Sales have increased by 38 per cent in a year. Experts also believe that consumers can easily adapt to the taste if fat content is adjusted only mildly. Many people may switch from semi-skimmed to 1 per cent milk because there is only a little difference in taste. Similarly, adults who prefer full-fat milk could switch to a 2 per cent product. Food manufacturers are also expected to use low-fat milks and cheeses in sauces, ready meals and dairy-based puddings.

A recent scientific report for ministers by the Foresight Programme suggested that without urgent action to tackle diet, almost half of adults and a quarter of all children will be dangerously overweight by 2050. The cost to the country was estimated at 45 billion a year; of this, 6.5 billion would be needed to pay for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, strokes, high blood pressure, cancer and heart disease and the rest of the cost would be in absenteeism and benefits.

Judith Bryans, of the Dairy Council, said that introducing 1 per cent and 2 per cent milk would help to open up the market and result in products to suit modern tastes. "Some people like semi-skimmed but won't touch skimmed, but they might like something in between," she said. Rosemary Hignett, director of nutrition at the Food Standards Agency, said: "Using 1 per cent milk could help to reduce saturated fat levels in some foods and would be a positive move for the consumer."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "This provides an opportunity for the dairy sector to satisfy demand for innovative, transparently labelled, lower-fat products, adding further value to the dairy supply chain and helping the consumer to make informed decisions." Reducing the fat content does not lower milk's nutritional value in any way, said Susan Jebb, a nutrition scientist at the Medical Research Council.

Source




Oldsters now kindly permitted to have a drink or three

These clots seem to think that oldsters will be listening to them

The over-65s should not be bullied into abstaining from alcohol by the belief that drink is more harmful to older people than it is to the young or middle-aged. Regular, moderate drinking poses no additional risks to the over-65s and can even bring health benefits, according to two studies from the Peninsula Medical School in the South West of England. For men and women, better brain functioning, a better sense of wellbeing and fewer depressive symptoms are linked to moderate drinking when compared with abstinence.

Researchers led by Iain Lang assessed the drinking levels of more than 13,000 people in England and the US who were aged 65 and over, and looked at the effects on physical disability, mortality, cognitive function, depression and wellbeing. They concluded that moderate drinking is fine for the over-65s - and, in some cases, it is better than not drinking at all.

"We are not advocating that elderly people should go out and get ridiculously drunk," Dr Lang said. "What we are saying is that current guidelines on drinking for the elderly are too conservative. A couple of drinks a day will do no harm and will have a more beneficial affect on cognitive and general health than abstinence. In the UK, the guidelines on alcohol consumption in older people are vague," he said. "Alcohol Concern recommends that older people `cut down' their alcohol consumption and that moderate consumption `might be too much for some older people'.

"In Australia and New Zealand, older people are advised to `consider drinking less'. In the US, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism sets limits for the over-65s of one drink a day, which is half of what they recommend for younger men. "These recommendations are based on assumptions about what happens to the body as it ages, and that it becomes less tolerant of alcohol. Our findings show that this isn't supported. There is no evidence to suggest drinking at moderate levels is harmful to older people. It can provide health benefits."

The research showed that 10.8 per cent of the US men, 28.6 per cent of the British men, 2.9 per cent of the US women and 10.3 per cent of the British women drank more than one drink a day. But the research also showed that those drinking on average more than one to two drinks a day achieved similar health results as those drinking up to one drink a day. "The worst results were from those who did not drink at all and from those who were heavy drinkers. The studies also found lower levels of risk of death or disability among English drinkers than Americans, although the authors did not understand why this should be.

Men and women who drank moderately enjoyed better brain functioning, a better sense of wellbeing and fewer depressive symptoms than those who abstained. The shape of the relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of disability were similar in men and women.

The results were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and Age and Ageing. The research by the team concluded that overrestrictive limits could do harm because people ignore them or because effort is wasted trying to persuade them to give up alcohol when it is doing them no harm. "Because overrestrictive limits risk encouraging nihilistic responses or fruitless clinical effort, a review is needed of the evidence base for the lower hazardous drinking definitions for older adults," they concluded in their report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Dr Lang said: "There is no reason why older people should not enjoy a tipple, as long as they are sensible about it. "Previous research has shown that middle-aged people can benefit from moderate drinking. These findings show the same applies to the over-65s."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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



1 January, 2008

Anorexia inherited through sex hormones in womb?

The stuff about estrogen below is all speculation. The results could be equally well-explained by genetics

Sex hormones in the womb could be a cause of the eating disorder anorexia, a study has found. The suspicion is that oestrogen may be overproduced by some mothers, affecting the baby’s brain and making it susceptible to the eating disorder. Psychiatrists investigating the cause of the illness did so by studying records of thousands of Swedish twins, held in a database. They found, not unexpectedly, that the risk of developing anorexia was higher in girl twins than in boy twins. Anorexia is far commoner in girls than in boys.

But an exception to the pattern arose in the case of twins of different sexes. Boys who shared the womb with girl twins were found to be ten times more likely to develop the disorder in later life. Many claims have been made that girls who become anorexic have been influenced by images of stick-thin models. The findings do not disprove this, but suggest that biology as well as culture plays an important part.

Marco Procopio, a psychiatrist from the University of Sussex and one of the authors of the study in Archives of General Psychiatry, said: “We know that women are ten times more likely to develop anorexia than men and this study goes a long way to explaining why. We know that oestrogen and other hormones can have a powerful effect on the body and it would seem that there is an ‘overexpression’ of oestrogen by the mother and the girl twin in some pregnancies. “Oestrogen would be present in the amniotic fluid that bathes babies in the womb and would be swallowed by both the male and female twin. Oestrogen is needed in development of females but it is possible that too much affects the structure of the brain.”

The new study supports research from the United States that found that the brains of anorexics behaved in a different way to non-anorexics. Dr Procopio said: “Research into twins is a way to examine the factors involved, as the single most important period for brain development is during the months of pregnancy. “The one thing we are certain of is that there is a genetic disposition to anorexia. Some scientists have suggested that upbringing may be a factor in the gender difference in rates of occurrence of the disorder, but studies haven’t borne this out.”

Dr Procopio does not believe that thin models account for the condition. “If that were the case, we would have many more anorexics,” he said. “There might be an effect on some girls but I doubt if these are truly anorexic but more likely a passing phase.” He believes it may be possible one day to monitor pregnant women for higher than normal oestrogen levels.

Dee Dawson, who runs the pioneering North London Rhodes Farm clinic for teenage anorexics said: “It’s an interesting study and there may well be some truth in the findings. “I think that there is a genetic predisposition and the problem may well be to do with the formation of the brain in pregnancy. “But often the triggers are problems at home so if you are susceptible in your brain make-up it could be triggered off by events in a teenager’s life.”

Source




Bone Density Tests Do Predict Women's Fracture Risk

Largest, longest study ever supports screening and prevention of osteoporosis

One bone mineral density test can accurately predict a woman's chance of spinal fractures 15 years down the line, new research shows. And, according to the largest and longest prospective study of osteoporosis ever, women who had a spinal fracture at the beginning of the study had four times the risk of sustaining another fracture later on. The bottom line: "Women need to talk to their doctors about the risk of osteoporosis," according to Jane Cauley, lead author of the study and professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Her team published the findings in the Dec. 19 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I agree with the guidelines that all women after the age of 65 have bone density tests, and Medicare will pay for that," Cauley said. "Women who are postmenopausal, 50 to 64 years of age, should consider having a bone density test if they have other risk factors for osteoporosis or if they want to know what their bone density is before they consider any other treatment."

The findings don't change current standard practice, experts said, and they don't change the basic message to women: Don't ignore bone health, especially in middle and old age. "The only really major advance here is that it's a longer term study. Mostly studies are five years typically. This one went out 15 years," said Paul Brandt, associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in College Station. "Women need to get their bone mineral density tested after they start menopause and if they stay on hormone replacement therapy or an anti-osteoporotic treatment." he said.

Postmenopausal women are particularly vulnerable to fractures resulting from osteoporosis, a degenerative weakening of the bones. Some 10 million Americans, including one in five American women over the age of 50, suffer from osteoporosis, which is the most common type of bone disease. Spinal fractures are the most common type of fracture resulting from osteoporosis, affecting 35 percent to 50 percent of women over 50 (about 700,000 vertebral fractures annually in the United States).

But many, if not most, of these fractures go undetected. "Osteoporosis is sometimes called the silent thief," Cauley said. "It basically robs the skeleton of strength and resources, and women don't really know about it. About 75 percent of all spine fractures actually occur silently." "Identifying risk factors for spine fractures is less well developed. You have to systematically look for them by repeated X-rays," Cauley continued.

The findings from this study are based on bone mineral density data from 2,300 women over the age of 65 who enrolled in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), initiated in 1986. After 15 years of follow-up, it was evident that 25 percent of women who had low BMD at the beginning of the study developed fractures of the spine, compared with only 9 percent of women with normal BMD.

"It was pretty much a strong gradient of risk," Cauley explained. "If you had normal bone density when you entered and did not have an [existing] fracture, the risk of having a new spine fracture was about 9 percent, compared to a risk of 56 percent in women who had osteoporosis and who had an existing fracture. So, the range of risk varied dramatically depending on bone density and previous spine fractures."

According to Brandt, one interesting finding from the study is that a previous vertebral fracture topped even bone mineral density as a predictor for future fracture. This indicates that women with an existing vertebral fracture should be treated for osteoporosis regardless of their BMD, the authors reported. "People think osteoporosis is an inevitable consequence of aging, but it is preventable and treatable," 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

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

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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

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