Spicy Food Can Prevent and Heal Disease
(NaturalNews) Spicy foods add an incredible amount of flavour to food. As ethnic foods become abundant, chilli and spicy food is increasingly popular. The good news is that adding spice to our food has a range of benefits for our health and wellbeing.
Chillies have long been used in traditional medicine, probably first by the Aztecs. In Russia, a drink called Nastoyka (made from chillies soaked in vodka) has also been taken as a healing remedy.
Reduced Cancer Death Rate
Scientists have proven that capsaicin, which is responsible for the burning sensation when we eat chillies, can kill cancer cells, indicating that people could at least prevent the onset of cancer by eating spicy food. This is because it is a natural antioxidant, meaning that it defends against disease causing toxins.
In a recent BBC article, according to the World Health Organization, countries where diets are traditionally high in capsaicin have significantly lower cancer death rates for men and women than in countries where little spicy food is consumed.
Dr Timothy Bates who made the discovery, says that "This is incredibly exciting and may explain why people living in countries like Mexico and India, who traditionally eat a diet which is very spicy, tend to have lower incidences of many cancers that are prevalent in the western world."
According to Bates, capsaicin attacks the power house of the tumour, thus killing the cancerous tumour cells and reducing tumour growth without harming the surrounding healthy cells. Capsaicin has been found to inhibit the growth of cancer cells in laboratory studies.
Prevents Dangerous Blood Clots
As well as preventing cancer, researchers have also noticed that people who consume large amounts of chilli peppers experienced a lower incidence of thrombo-embolism, or potentially dangerous blood clots.
Scientists have studied the medical records of countries where spicy foods are regularly consumed, and found that people who eat a diet high in chillies experience a much lower incidence of blood clotting diseases. It has now been scientifically proven that capsicum is able to break down blood clots.
Other Benefits of Hot Super Foods Include:
• Chillies are anti inflammatory, so they prevent and relieve arthritis.
• Lower Blood Pressure Naturally– Going hot increases the circulatory system and maintains strong cell walls.
• Chillies are a fantastic remedy for Cluster Headaches and Migraines, and can be put on the temples to sooth the pain. Some researchers are even investigating the effects of snorting it up the nose!
• A mood lifter, depression fighter, and powerful stress reliever. Capsicum increases endorphins and other mood elevating, "feel good" substances.
• Chillies can help protect us from common winter conditions. It may reduce flu symptoms, sinusitis, and respiratory problems. It opens everything up, makes you sweat, and boosts the immune system.
• A powerful remedy for Herpes Simplex flare –ups. You can rub a hot chilli straight on the skin to watch it disappear! Now available in the form of a prescription drug, capsicum ointment is applied to the skin to aid in controlling the pain associated with herpes zoster, also known as shingles.
• A natural muscle relaxant and pain reliever. We all know that putting something hot and spicy on muscular pain offers relief. Again, a hot chilli pepper straight on the skin will do the trick. There are also a number of creams that have capsicum in them to sooth and heal painful muscles.
•Chillies have been shown to have a positive effect on an overactive bladder and on people who have incontinence. It can block contractions that cause unpredictable loss of urine.
•Spicy foods can heal psoriasis and other skin conditions. Topical capsaicin creams have been prescribed to dry up psoriasis patches.
•Studies have shown that ulcers respond well to chillies. Hot peppers inhibit the growth of H. Pylori, the bacteria that causes certain kinds of ulcers.
• Capsicum is good for the skin because it is anti inflammatory and improves circulation.
•Spicy foods improve libido and sex drive.
So if you can handle your food hot, turn up the notch and enjoy the amazing healing benefits and added taste of spicy foods.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025223.html
Statins Raise Prostate Cancer Risk of Obese Men
(NaturalNews) A study conducted earlier this year at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research in Seattle found that the use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, especially when used long-term, seems to raise the risk of prostate cancer among obese men.
Background
Statin drugs inhibits the enzyme which controls the conversion of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A to mevalonate; mevalonate is an essential precursor of cholesterol. Thus, statins are used extensively to treat high cholesterol.
In some studies, statin drugs have been shown to lower the incidence and mortality rates of cardiovascular disease. This has contributed to the skyrocketing use of statins over the last decade or so.
With specific regard to prostate cancer, the use of statins has also recently raised interest. Without being too technical, it suffices to say that, by inhibiting certain processes and chemicals, statin drugs directly or indirectly influence cell signaling pathways, cell growth, cell apoptosis, cell proliferation, inflammation, oxidative stress, angiogenesis and metastasis. These factors all influence cancer in some way.
Some observational studies had previously shown that statin use lowers prostate cancer risk, while others have not found any connection. In fact, in two studies, statin use was linked to an increase in overall risk of getting prostate cancer. The Fred Hutchinson study, which was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, thus sought to further examine the relationship between statin use and prostate cancer risk.
Details and Findings of Study
In the study, which was population-based and case-controlled, 1,001 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2002 and 2005 were compared with 942 cancer-free controls from King County in Washington. The two groups of men were matched for age.
Overall, there was no connection observed between current or previous use of statin drugs and the risk of prostate cancer. Duration of statin use also did not seem to affect prostate cancer risk.
In an interview with Reuters Health, Dr Janet L. Stanford, who led the study, said, "We also found no evidence that use of a statin was associated with risk of developing more aggressive subtypes of prostate cancer. Overall we found no support for the current hypothesis that statin use may reduce risk of prostate cancer."
However, the findings of the study also indicate a significant increase in prostate cancer risk for obese men who currently use statins. Longer durations of use of the drugs also increased risk. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index of 30 or more.
"Among obese men, current use of a statin was associated with a 50 percent increase in risk of prostate cancer; and use for 5 or more years was associated with an 80 percent increase in risk of the disease; both of these risk estimates were statistically significant," said Dr Stanford.
Bottom Line
With obesity on the rise and statin drugs routinely prescribed, there is probably a greater need for the medical community and the public at large to take note and take action. At least this study helps to debunk the theory that statin drugs may actually lower prostate cancer risk.
"Given the epidemic of obesity in the US and the frequent use of statins, the positive association we observed raises substantial concern as to the safety of these widely prescribed agents," added Dr Stanford.
High cholesterol sufferers on statin drugs may want to start exploring natural and safe solutions.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025218.html
Doctors to Earn Extra Money for "E-Prescribing"
(NaturalNews) Medicare is launching a new incentive program that will pay a bonus to doctors who use electronic prescribing systems rather than traditional written prescriptions.
According to research from the Institute of Medicine, pharmacists in the United States make more than 150 million phone calls each year in order to clarify the contents of hard-to-read prescriptions, while a total of 1.5 million people are injured due to prescription errors.
"That's a lot of people needlessly hurt and a lot of time spent trying to sort out bad handwriting," said Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "There are terrific human and financial costs to illegible prescriptions."
As of 2006, all pharmacies participating in the Medicare program must accept e-prescriptions. Now that the system is in place, Medicare wants to make sure that it is used.
"E-prescribing will help deliver safer or more efficient care to patients," Leavitt said.
Starting in 2009, doctors who use e-prescriptions will be reimbursed 2 percent more than doctors who use handwritten prescriptions. This bonus will fall to 1 percent in 2011 and 2012, and will fall to 0.5 percent in 2013. In 2014, Medicare will begin reimbursing doctors who do not e-prescribe at lower rates than those who do.
Doctors who can provide legitimate reasons for not using e-prescriptions will receive the regular reimbursements.
"We expect this will have a profound effect on the adoption and use of e-prescribing," Leavitt said.
Program advocates hope that the bonuses will help doctors who would like to shift to e-prescriptions but cannot afford the $3,000 per doctor startup costs, or the $80 to $400 a month for maintenance and operation.
"It is fairly costly for a small practice to begin to change over to e-prescribing," said James King, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "These incentives will help."
Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com.
http://www.naturalnews.com/025216.html
Study Links Osteoporosis Drugs to Jaw Trouble
THURSDAY, Jan. 1 (HealthDay News) -- The proportion of people taking widely prescribed oral osteoporosis drugs who develop a nasty jaw condition may be much higher than previously thought, a new study suggests.
Previous reports had indicated that the risk of developing osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ) from bisphosphonates in pill form were "negligible," although there was a noted risk in people taking the higher-dose intravenous form of the drug.
But Dr. Parish Sedghizadeh, an assistant professor of clinical dentistry at the University of Southern California School of Dentistry in Los Angeles, said his clinic is seeing one to four new cases a week, compared to one a year in the past. This led him to investigate the phenomenon and publish the findings in the Jan. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association.
"This is more frequent than everybody would like to think it is," said Sedghizadeh, lead author of the study.
ONJ is characterized by pain, soft-tissue swelling, infection, loose teeth and exposed bone.
Dr. James Liu, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at MacDonald Women's Hospital at Case Medical Center, University Hospitals in Cleveland, said the finding "does not mean that women should stop taking the drug if they're on it. It does mean that there may be more frequent side effects than was previously known."
Bisphosphonates are medications used to reduce the risk of bone fracture and to increase bone mass in people with osteoporosis. They're also used to slow bone "turnover" in people who have cancer that has spread to their bones, and in people who have the blood cancer multiple myeloma.
Use of bisphosphonates has been associated with other problems in the past, including an increased risk of atrial fibrillation (a type of abnormal heart rhythm), unusual fractures of the thigh bone, and inflammatory eye disease.
After searching the USC School of Dentistry's electronic medical records database, the study authors found that nine of 208 patients taking Fosamax had active ONJ, a prevalence of about 4 percent. All were patients who had undergone some kind of dental procedure, such as having a tooth removed.
Fosamax (alendronate) is the most widely prescribed oral bisphosphonate and has been the 21st most prescribed drug in the United States since 2006, according to background information in the study.
The jaw complication has been seen in patients taking Fosamax for as little as one year. It seems to occur most frequently after routine tooth extraction, the study authors said.
Although no one is sure why bisphosphonates seem to have this effect only on jaw bones, Sedghizadeh speculated that the drugs may make it easier for bacteria to adhere to bone that is exposed after a tooth extraction.
Previously, experts had thought that ONJ in people taking intravenous bisphosphonates was related to their underlying condition (for example, cancer) than to the actual drug, Liu explained.
The USC School of Dentistry now screens every patient for bisphosphonate use.
"As a school now, we don't have complications any more, we only have referrals," Sedghizadeh said. "We put patients on anti-microbial, anti-fungal rinse one week pre-operatively or post-operatively. If they have been on bisphosphonates six months or a year or longer, then we have a prevention protocol which has been very, very effective."
According to a statement released by Merck & Co., which makes Fosamax, the new study "has material methodological flaws and scientific limitations, making it unreliable as a source for valid scientific conclusions regarding the prevalence of ONJ in patients taking alendronate."
No reports of ONJ have been noted in controlled trials involving more than 17,000 patients, the statement said.
More information
To learn more about ONJ, visit the American Dental Association.
SOURCES: Parish Sedghizadeh, DDS, MS, assistant professor of clinical dentistry, University of Southern California School of Dentistry, Los Angeles; James Liu, M.D., chairman, department of obstetrics and gynecology, MacDonald Women's Hospital at Case Medical Center, University Hospitals, Cleveland; Merck & Co. statement; Jan. 1, 2009, Journal of the American Dental Association
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/01/AR2009010101198.html
Frugal is cool in cash-strapped US
The Observer (UK), Sunday 4 January 2009
When writer Héctor Tobar returned to America last year after seven years living in Latin America, he came back to a profoundly changed land. He had left a United States riding an economic boom. House prices were soaring, suburbs were gobbling up farmland and good times were rolling on Wall Street.
Now all that has gone. Tobar, an acclaimed author and essayist, was stunned to find America in the grip of an economic turmoil that was changing his native country before his eyes, plunging it into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. "There is a sense of mourning and confusion and a real feeling of living in the last days of empire," Tobar said.
This new America is what Barack Obama has inherited. It is in many ways a broken country. When Obama takes the oath of office on 20 January watched by millions of Americans, his burden will be heavy in the extreme. The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America's first black president will almost be a historical footnote. The numbers describe the extent of the catastrophe best. Seven trillion dollars has been wiped off a stock market that has dropped 33%, its biggest fall since 1931. Two million jobs have disappeared, wages are frozen and millions have lost their homes. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to keep the economy afloat. Banks have been part nationalised and the car industry of Detroit - once the symbol of the all-American lifestyle - is on life support and may not see the end of 2009.
These terrible facts are accompanied by a profound cultural shift. The era of individualistic consumption that swept aside the Great Society of the 1960s has come to an end. For three decades, American culture has celebrated the glories of unabashed capitalism and the ideals of the rich. No longer. From Hollywood movies to celebrity culture to television, frugalism is taking hold. Consumers are cutting back. Luxury brands are falling by the wayside. Even the excesses of the sporting world, from the Super Bowl to Nascar, are being curbed.
A national belt-tightening is having an impact on everything from restaurants and books to a collapse in the demand for cosmetic surgery. The recession is reshaping the cultural landscape in which ordinary people live their lives. As it prepares to inaugurate a new president, America is also trying to forge a fresh identity in a world unimaginably different from the one inherited by George W Bush only eight years ago.
Mike Levine, founder of leading Los Angeles PR firm Levine Communications, believes the cultural change is even hitting the ethereal world of the über-rich celebrities who inhabit La-La land. Gone are the days of bling and Beluga caviar, of quaffing Krug in high-end clubs and driving around Hollywood in a Hummer. "The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling 'Luxury Shame'," he said. "In the extraordinary recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one's luxurious lifestyle."
Paris Hilton - not usually a name associated with economic hard times - has already run foul of the new cultural mood. On a trip to Australia for New Year's Eve, a shopping splurge on luxury items earned her a barrage of negative headlines. On the TV show Entourage, which normally celebrates its male cast's acquisition of brand-name products, the rapper Bow Wow recently bought a Toyota Prius.
"I caution even the most successful celebrities to go bling-less," Levine said.
Perhaps not coincidentally, several forthcoming Hollywood movies, such as Clive Owen's The International, have as their main villains banks or financiers. In a recent trailer for the film, Owen's character is seen preparing to execute a rogue banker at gunpoint - no doubt a satisfying moment for many multiplex audiences.
Many experts see the cultural rejection of luxury and excess as a watershed moment which for many Americans seemed to descend out of a clear blue sky. "This is about a rethinking of the fundamentals that comes about because society is suddenly under a large amount of stress," said Miles Orvell, a professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
It certainly seems a cultural milestone every bit as significant as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ushered in an era of conservatism, deregulation, free markets and muscular nationalism. The Reagan revolution ended the progressive era of presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and John F Kennedy. It celebrated Wall Street and making money. It was the era of Gordon Gekko and Rambo.
The presidency of Bill Clinton did little to change its course, and it continued unabated into the Bush years as hedge funds became the new masters of the universe and America became the world's only superpower. In both high finance and global politics, it seemed that the wealthy and powerful had written their own rulebook.
But, culturally at least, that book is being redrawn in the face of the recession and the election of a president whose mantra was based on rejecting conflict and trying to forge a consensus. Cultural historians now see echoes of the 1930s when the Great Depression inspired works that focused on the troubles of ordinary people, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the non-fiction of James Agee, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men examined poverty in the south. Orvell believes the coming recession will see a similar flowering of art and literature, reflecting the changed times. He is predicting a greater focus on community and an end to individualism as the dominant ideal.
"Stress brings new ways of thinking. This will have a profound effect on culture from people at the bottom to people at the very top, like Obama," he said. The new president is likely both to lead and to encapsulate these changes. Dealing with the economy is the number one topic in America, greater than Iraq, greater than the "war on terror". Obama's actions there are the yardstick by which he will be judged.
But the recession is already reshaping people's lives in ways trivial and profound. Sales of red meat are falling, while cheaper foodstuffs, such as pasta, are going up. Car sales have collapsed by up to 30%, perhaps meaning that the greatest American icon of the 20th century is struggling.
Frugal is the new cool, putting an end to hyperconsumption. The orgy of credit card abuse is over. A website called Debt Proof Living launched a daily email tipsheet last summer which now has 100,000 subscribers. Oprah Winfrey forsook her annual holiday list of expensive gift suggestions in favour of more modest "favourite things". Salons and spas are seeing customers desert them as women pamper themselves on the cheap at home.
The demand for cosmetic surgery has collapsed with some clinics reporting a fall in patients of 30-40%. What was once seen as a standard luxury for the wealthy elite - inspiring the TV series Nip/Tuck - is now regarded as grotesque excess, alongside owning a polluting big car. "It's the new SUV," declared Victoria Pitts-Taylor, author of Surgery Junkies
Tobar sees the changes in America reflected in his own life. While living in Latin America he would return to the US with his young son. "He would always say: why are the cookies so big here? And he was right. Everything was bigger, including the people." That sort of excess, on everything from cookies to cars, is now on the way out. The era of supersizing is over. There has been a cultural humbling that makes consumption and sheer size more unacceptable than at any time in the past three decades.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has tapped into the zeitgeist better than most. In a recent column that became a huge hit across the blogosphere and a talking point on cable news, he took America to task. "I've got a new year's resolution and a new slogan for the country," he wrote before going on to eviscerate the culture of debt-spending, blind consumption and rampant consumerism which, he said, had created everything from the Iraq war to the housing crisis. Herbert's new slogan was simple enough: "Stop Being Stupid."
Hollywood is rightly often seen as the psyche of the American public. So perhaps it is no wonder that the villain of 2008 was Heath Ledger's chilling portrayal of the Joker. Transcending the comic book genre, Ledger created a villain who sowed anarchy and chaotic destruction with little regard to motivation or the consequences for the innocent. For many Americans, who have seen their houses repossessed, their pension funds wiped out and millions of jobs vanish, that is a pretty accurate reflection of what 2008 felt like. And that sort of destruction produces a cultural cost as well as a cultural shift.
Across America, theatres from Broadway to Hollywood are closing shows as crowds stay away. Attendances at the cinema are falling, hitting the production of new movies and putting actors and support workers out of jobs. Art galleries are closing, auction houses are laying off workers. The art market is going into a recession as deep as the rest of the economy. The great US sports are all being hit hard in a major blow to national pride. The National Football League has laid off 10% of its staff. Major league baseball has followed suit. Nascar, whose roaring car fans and Nascar dads became a demographic, has a hiring freeze in place.
And while luxury may fall out of fashion, it is not as if quality is replacing it. The stores that are booming in these grim times are the huge big-box outlets of Walmart and Target. Anyone expecting the recession to drive Americans back into the arms of quaint family-owned shops on Main Street is likely to get an ugly wake-up call. Low-paying Walmart, stuffed with cheap goods from China and with a famously union-busting management, is booming. So busy were the crowds at one recent sales day at a Long Island Walmart that one employee was crushed to death.
Neither will the recession and the collapse of the car industry immediately bring about a greener, more public transport-friendly America. Faced with hard times, Americans are not going out to buy electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They are too expensive. Instead, they are patching up and mending their old gas guzzlers and keeping them on the road longer. America's sense of rugged individualism and distrust of government solutions will remain, for good or for ill. In this sense Obama's new America will be just like the old one.
"It is too deeply ingrained, that sense of the individual. It was right there at the founding of the republic," said Tobar.
The hard times are also bringing real pain to the most vulnerable. In Los Angeles, calls to suicide hotlines are up 60%. Like the first wave of a pandemic, the crisis is picking off the weak first. It is hitting the young, who cannot find jobs in a marketplace where employers are not hiring and the old are refusing to retire because of their wrecked pensions. It is destroying the lives of ten million or more illegal immigrants, who are the first to lose their jobs in a weakened economy.
Americans have even started doing their own gardening, which may be great for them but has put thousands of mainly Mexican landscape crews out of business. Similarly with restaurants. As Americans stay at home more, eateries across the nation are closing down and their mostly immigrant kitchen staffs are being laid off. Money sent back to Mexico by illegal immigrants, which supports many communities there, is down about 7% on last year.
The truth is that the rippling impact of the broken America that Obama is inheriting has spread out across the world, just as the influence of Reagan's policies once did. America now is more frugal, less consumerist and more community-minded. But it is also poorer, angry and afraid.
Obama's job is to address those fears. America is a country desperately looking for a new president who can provide the answers to its problems. But this will be no easy task. Obama is truly inheriting a different country than his predecessor did. It is too early to say whether it is a better one.
Scale of the problem
The size of the US economic collapse is huge. Here are some of the main problems Barack Obama will have to face as 44th US president.
• Almost $7 trillion has been wiped off the stock market as Wall Street posted its worst performance since 1931. Millions of retirement plans and pensions were devastated.
• Some reports predict as many as eight million home repossessions in the next four years.
• Obama aides are working on a fiscal stimulus plan worth $850bn over the next two years, much of it for infrastructure projects, in effect a second New Deal.
• More than 1.9 million Americans lost their jobs in 2008 up to November, and the year may end up at 2.3 million, the worst total since 1945.
• Consumer spending has dropped at the worst rate since 1980.
• House prices have declined at the fastest rate since the 1930s. The economy has been shrinking for 12 months with no end in sight, making it the largest downturn for a generation.
Mind-body therapy eases chronic pelvic pain
Last Updated: 2009-01-02 15:10:44 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A type of mind-body treatment popular in Europe known as Mensendieck somatocognitive therapy can help ease chronic pelvic pain in women, with effects lasting several months after treatment ends, Norwegian researchers report.
Women with chronic pain often experience "somatic dissociation," or a loss of awareness of their own bodies, Dr. Gro K. Haugstad of the University of Oslo and colleagues note, suggesting that therapies that help restore this awareness could be helpful.
With Mensendieck therapy, patients are instructed on understanding the causes of pain and gradually increasing body movement, "experiencing new body awareness and motor patterns," the researchers explain. The therapy emphasizes correcting posture, movement, and breathing patterns.
In a previous study, Haugstad and colleagues found that Mensendieck therapy improved symptoms of pain and restored normal movement in a group of women with chronic pelvic pain. In the December issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, they report one-year follow-up of these patients.
In the study, 40 women with chronic pelvic pain with no apparent biologic cause were randomly assigned to standard care (emotional support and help with other gynecological problems) or standard care plus 10 weeks of Mensendieck therapy.
All of the women in the Mensendieck therapy group saw significant improvements in posture, gait, movement, sitting posture, and respiration, while women in the control group stayed about the same.
And at one year after the beginning of the study, the women given the therapy showed additional improvement. Their pain scores had improved by 64 percent, while the pain scores were almost the same before and after a year of treatment for the control group.
Women in the movement therapy group also showed significant improvements in several measures of psychological distress.
Chronic pelvic pain may be a kind of "vicious circle," in which the patient adopts certain habits to protect the pelvic area that impair normal movement, Haugstad and her colleagues say. "It is important to break this chain of events, and move the focus from pain experience to coping with pain and coping with the fear of movement," they write.
The additional improvements seen among patients treated with Mensendieck therapy, the researchers add, suggests that these women "have learned to move in a more natural and relaxed manner."
It is estimated that 2 to 3 percent of the general female population complain of chronic pelvic pain, while as many as 40 percent of women visiting their gynecologist may be suffering chronic pelvic pain.
SOURCE: American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, December 2009.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/01/02/eline/links/20090102elin019.html
Fast food near schools means fatter kids
Last Updated: 2009-01-02 12:30:13 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adolescents who go to school within a half-mile of a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be overweight or obese than kids whose schools are further away, new research suggests.
The young people in the study also ate fewer servings of fruits and vegetables and drank more soda if there was at least one fast food restaurant within a half-mile radius of their school, Drs. Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California and Christopher Carpenter of the University of California at Irvine found.
"Overall, our patterns are consistent with the idea that fast food near schools affects students' eating habits, overweight, and obesity," they conclude in a report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Several studies have demonstrated that fast food restaurants are often clustered within walking distance of schools, but studies looking at whether this affects students' weight or eating habits have not found a link.
In their study, Davis and Carpenter used detailed 2002-2005 data on more than 500,000 middle- and high-school students from the California Healthy Kids Survey to examine whether proximity to fast food restaurants was related to eating habits or body weight.
Roughly 28 percent of the study participants were overweight and 12 percent were obese. Over half (55 percent) attended schools within a half mile of a fast-food restaurant.
According to the researchers, students who attended schools located near a fast-food establishment were heavier than were other students of similar age, ethnicity and activity level. The effect was the same whether there was one or more fast food restaurants close by.
Kids going to school near fast food restaurants also were less likely to report eating any vegetables, any fruit, or drinking any juice the day before; they were more likely to say they drank soda on the previous day.
Policies for helping adolescents eat more healthy food could range from offering them healthier alternatives to the "more drastic" approach of restricting the number of fast food restaurants allowed within walking distance of schools, Davis and Carpenter say.
"Regardless of which option policymakers choose, the need for intervention is clear," they assert. "The sheer magnitude of the problem of childhood obesity demands attention."
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, March 2008.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/01/02/eline/links/20090102elin020.html
Doctors test tea tree oil body wash for MRSA
Last Updated: 2009-01-02 13:19:13 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study is investigating whether a tea tree oil body wash can prevent the drug-resistant super bug MRSA in critically ill hospitalized adults.
Tea tree oil body wash "may be a simple intervention to prevent MRSA," Dr. Bronagh Blackwood from Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, told Reuters Health.
MRSA -- short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - is a growing problem. MRSA is untreatable with most antibiotics and can cause potentially deadly complications like pneumonia, bloodstream infections and surgical wound infections.
Hospitals and nursing homes remain the bug's prime breeding ground, with patients with weakened immune systems being most vulnerable. Critically ill patients are at particular high risk, in part because of the number of invasive procedures that they require in the intensive care unit (ICU).
In some prior studies, washing with tea tree oil has been shown to be effective in removing MRSA on the skin.
Therefore, Blackwood and colleagues are evaluating the effect of daily washing with a 5 percent tea tree oil preparation on new MRSA infections among ICU patients. The 5 percent tea tree oil wash is being compared with a standard body wash (Johnson's Baby Softwash).
"We started this trial in November 2007," Blackwood said. "We aim to complete it in November 2010."
If tea tree oil body wash proves effective against MRSA, widespread implementation of such a simple prevention tool has the potential to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs, the researchers say.
SOURCE: BMC Infectious Diseases 2008.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/01/02/eline/links/20090102elin026.html
The Culture Of Medicine
ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2009) — Everybody is familiar with the stereotypes of medical education from the student perspective: grueling hours, little recognition, and even less glory. Now a novel Brandeis study published in Academic Medicine this month pulls back the curtain on the dominant environment of academic medicine from the perspective of faculty, the providers of medical education in medical schools.
The study raises questions about how the prevailing culture of academic medicine shapes the delivery of healthcare—from the quality of patient care and physician professionalism, to faculty burnout and leadership opportunities for women, minorities and primary care physicians. The article reports on how medical faculty experience the culture in which they work by examining their relationships to each other, to medical students, and to patients, as a reflection of the broader environment within academic medicine.
Brandeis University senior scientist Dr. Linda Pololi and her colleagues conducted in-depth one-on-one interviews with faculty members in a variety of specialty areas at five prominent medical schools across the country. While the study determined that positive relational aspects of the culture in academic medicine exist, it found that faculty often experienced disconnection, competitive individualism, undervaluing of humanistic qualities, deprecation, disrespect, and the erosion of trust.
"These negative experiences are undermining the central task of medical schools pointed out by the Pew-Fetzer Task Force in the 1990s, to help students, faculty, and medical practitioners to form caring, healing relationships with patients and their communities and with each other," said Pololi.
The study found that serious problems exist in the relational culture affecting medical faculty vitality, professionalism, and general productivity, and are linked to retention. "These aspects of the culture undermine the goals of medical institutions and are antithetical to fostering superior patient care, biomedical research, and educational excellence," explained Pololi. "It is highly laudable that the deans in our participating schools have taken this trail-blazing initiative to explore the extent and causes of this dissatisfaction and to do something about it."
The implications for healthcare are significant. "We have the most technologically advanced and most expensive medical system in the world, but we need compassionate healthcare as well," said Pololi. "We cannot teach compassion for patients without practicing it among ourselves; we cannot learn to be sensitive to cultural diversity in our patients without incorporating the perspectives of women and minority physicians who make up a larger portion of the medical workforce than ever before. We cannot be optimally successful in researching the causes of disease and finding new treatments without rewarding collaboration and openness, rather than competitive individualism."
The study, funded by the Macy Foundation, is part of an ongoing project, the National Initiative on Gender, Culture and Leadership in Medicine, known as C – Change.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081231182014.htm
Nutrigenomics: Developing Personalized Diets For Disease Prevention
ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2009) — The emerging field of nutrigenomics, which aims to identify the genetic factors that influence the body's response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression, is explored in a series of interdisciplinary reports and analyses in the December 2008 Special Issue (Volume 12, number 4) of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.
Nutrigenomic's bidirectional approach to investigating how the genetic traits of an individual or population interact with their diet offers many possibilities for targeted clinical interventions and preventive medicine. These may include modifying either diet or the biochemical response to food exposure to prevent disease in individuals shown to be susceptible to the consequences of unfavorable dietary/genomic interactions. In the future, nutrigenomics may potentially help guide the development of customized diets based on an individual's genetic make-up.
"In contrast to previous applications of genomics technologies where the goal is to distinguish existing disease from absence of disease, nutrigenomics aims to discern nuanced differences in predisease states such that personalized dietary interventions can be designed to prevent or modify future disease susceptibility," write Guest Editors Béatrice Godard, PhD, and Vural Ozdemir, MD, PhD, from the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Montreal, Québec, Canada.
"Nutrigenomics opens new and amazing frontiers in 21st century biomedical and clinical research," says Eugene Kolker, PhD, Executive Editor of OMICS and Chief Data Officer at Seattle Children's Hospital, Seattle, Washington.
This compendium of papers describing the innovative new area of study encompassed by nutrigenomics research is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 will be published in Spring 2009.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081229200740.htm
Amazon Deforestation Trend On The Increase
ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2009) — Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon forests has flipped from a decreasing to an increasing trend, according to new annual figures recently released by the country's space agency INPE.
Commenting on the figures, Brazilian environment minister Carlos Minc confirmed that the government will on Monday announce forest related carbon emission reduction targets, which will link halting deforestation to the national climate change campaign.
From August 2007 to July 2008, Brazil deforested 11,968 square kilometers of forests in the area designated as the Legal Amazon, a 3.8 per cent increase over the previous year and an unwelcome surprise following declines of 18 per cent over the previous period.
From 2003-2004 to 2006-2007, annual deforestation totals from the agency fell from 27,423 km2 to 11,532 km2. There were fears that the current trend could have been worse but for new measures introduced part way through the year when it became apparent that annual deforestation was accelerating towards a possible 15,000 hectare level.
WWF-Brazil has praised in particular restraints on credit for properties not complying with environmental rules on deforestation licenses, legal reserve and permanent preservation areas, strengthened land ownership rules, increased patrolling activity and a sharing of responsibility for halting deforestation with states and municipalities.
“Credit restrain prevents effects linked to illegal land occupation and exploitation (“grilagem”), which is the main direct and specific cause for deforestation in the Amazon”, says WWF-Brazil’s CEO, Denise Hamú.
“Nevertheless, we are concerned with such a deforestation which is equivalent to almost 40% the size of Belgium or the size of Jamaica.
“WWF-Brazil favors that which was established in the Amazon Pact for Forest Value Acknowledgement and Deforestation Decrease, which proposes concrete actions and urges the government and society to endeavor all efforts to curb deforestation to zero level in seven years”.
The Pact was an initiative by a group of NGOs and the proposed actions have an estimate cost of R$ 1 billion (1,000,000,000 reais) per year, which is relatively cheap as compared to the social costs (droughts, floods, deaths, economic difficulties and so forth) inflicted on everyone by deforestation.
WWF-Brazil’s CEO says that it is necessary to adopt a wider conservation strategy. “We favor a definition of clear deforestation mitigation targets, besides economic and fiscal mechanisms to encourage conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources, as well as to discourage predatory practices”, says Denise Hamú.
WWF Brazil welcomed the forthcoming carbon emission reduction targets, noting that deforestation and forest fires together are responsible for 75% of Brazilian green house gas emissions. The targets add to a range of other new measures announced in October, following preliminary assessments that deforestation rates in August 2008 had reached triple those a year earlier.
“Negligence towards our forests causes Brazil to rank fourth among the larger contributors to the planet warming,” Hamú said.
The decrease in the Amazon deforestation rate achieved in the last two years shows that it is viable for Brazil to adopt emission curb targets. The adoption of targets to decrease emissions from deforestation could place Brazil in a forefront position for the international climate negotiations due to start in a few days, in Poznan, Poland.
WWF-Brazil’s Conservation Director, Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza, explains that actions to fight deforestation must run on four tracks. The first one is the effective protection of forests through creation and implementation of protected areas. Secondly, there is the promotion of sustainable use of natural resources, through forest management capacity building in the Amazon states. Then there are patrolling actions to tackle illegal activity threats which are linked to land property and occupation (“grilagem”), to agribusiness and to large infrastructure works. Finally, we must have financial offset actions to reward those who protect the forest.
“We acknowledge some positive actions taken by the federal government, but we urge some improvements,” Scaramuzza said. “In particular, we call for the continuation of the protected areas creation process, the strengthening of implementation efforts in the already created protected areas, the allocation of personnel and their management capacity building, plus the effective implementation of the new forest policy, including forest management capacity development in the Amazon states.”
The Amazon Fund, created by the government in August 2008, is also an important policy to make financial offset viable for those who protect the forest. Nevertheless, WWF-Brazil claims that funds should be applied in the end of the chain.
“It is crucial that funds reach the field, direct to local communities, land owners and protected areas”, Scaramuzza said. “We hope that the Amazon Fund implementation will encourage innovation, creativity, experimentation and the involvement of civil society; and that it will be complemented by public funds, instead of being used to fulfill the blanks and gaps in governmental programs”.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090104093542.htm
Science proves existence of true love
TIMES OF INDIA 4 Jan 2009, 1213 hrs IST, ANI
LONDON: If you thought true love was something just restricted to movies and soaps, then here's a piece of information: brain scans have revealed that couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.
Shakespeare once said that "love is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken". Now, it seems, he was telling the truth, at least that's what researchers at Stony Brook University in New York think.
Scanning the brains of people who have been together for 20 years, the scientists found that about one in 10 couples still display elements of "limerence", the psychologists' term for the obsessive behaviour of new lovers.
They enjoy "intensive companionship and sexual liveliness" but without the anxieties and tensions of early love. They are generous, calm and deeply attached.
The scientists call them swans (swans mate for life).
The reactions of the swans to pictures of their beloved were identified on MRI brain scans as a burst of pleasure-producing dopamine more commonly seen in couples who are gripped in the first flush of lust, reports Times Online.
"The findings go against the traditional view of romance - that it drops off sharply in the first decade - but we are sure it's real," said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook.
Aron said when he first interviewed people claiming they were still in love after an average of 21 years he thought they were fooling themselves: "But this is what the brain scans tell us and people can't fake that."
Science_proves_existence_of_true_love
Antioxidants may be pain relievers in pancreatitis patients: Study
Nutraingredients.com-Europe, 05-Jan-2009
Supplements containing selenium, beta-carotene and alpha-tocopherol may alleviate pain in people suffering from pancreatitis, suggests a study from India.
One hundred and twenty-seven people took part in the randomised, placebo-controlled study, published in the January issue of Gastroenterology, which found that at the end of the intervention period 32 per cent of pancreatitis patients became pain-free, compared to only 13 per cent in the placebo group.
"We are encouraged by our findings, as significant improvement was noted with antioxidants in respect to all the parameters of pain in this study,” said Pramod Kumar Garg of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and lead author of the study.
“In addition, reduction in pain resulted in fewer man-days lost, thus providing functional employment gain to the patients. The findings should spur further research in this exciting area."
Study details
The researchers investigated the potential of antioxidants since oxidative stress is implicated in the development of chronic pancreatitis (CP).
The researchers recruited 127 patients with pancreatitis, and assigned them to receive daily supplements of antioxidants (600 micrograms of organic selenium, 0.54 g ascorbic acid, 9,000 IU beta-carotene, 270 IU alpha- tocopherol and 2 g methionine), or placebo for six months.
At the end of the intervention period, Garg and his co-workers report that patients in the antioxidant group experienced a 7.4 per cent reduction in the number of painful days per month. This was significantly more that the 3.2 per cent reduction in the placebo group.
Moreover, a significant reduction in the number of analgesic tablets taken per month was also reported in the antioxidant group (10.5 versus 4.4 in the placebo group).
The researchers add that the beneficial effect of antioxidants on pain relief was noted early at three months.
Markers of oxidative stress decreased in the antioxidant group, as measured by both TBARS and FRAP assays.
Implications
Garg and his co-workers said that the results suggested two important implications: Firstly, an initial increase and subsequent decrease in levels of oxidative stress after supplementation indicated that CP is partly characterized by a state of heightened free radical mediated injury. Moreover, the subsequent reduction suggested that this injury is reversible.
“Even if oxidative stress is not the sole factor or the initiating factor for pancreatic inflammation, it seems to be playing an important role in either precipitating or perpetuating pancreatic inflammation,” wrote Garg.
Secondly, the trial showed that antioxidant supplements could be effective as pain relief in patients with CP.
“This assumes significance since no effective medical therapy exists for pain relief for such patients,” they said.
“Antioxidant supplementation was effective in relieving abdominal pain in patients with CP and that it led to a significant decrease in oxidative stress in these patients supporting the oxidative stress hypothesis in the etiopathogenesis of CP,” concluded the authors.
Source: Gastroenterology
January 2009, Volume 136, Issue 1, Pages 149-159.e2
“A Randomized Controlled Trial of Antioxidant Supplementation for Pain Relief in Patients With Chronic Pancreatitis”
Authors: P. Bhardwaj, P.K. Garg, S.K. Maulik, A. Saraya, R.K. Tandon, S.K. Acharya
Antioxidants-may-be-pain-relievers-in-pancreatitis-patients-Study
High fat diet linked to body clock disruption
Nutraingredients.com-Europe, 05-Jan-2009
Researchers in Israel have observed a link between a high fat diet and disruption to circadian rhythms in mice, which could have a bearing on metabolic disorders.
Circadian rhythms are the body’s ‘clock’ that regulates expression and activity of enzymes and hormones involved in metabolism The researchers at The Hebrew University of Israel noted that disruption of the circadian rhythms may lead to obesity and metabolic disorders. Such disorders may include hormone imbalance, psychological and sleep disorders, some forms of cancer, and obesity.
The study findings, if relevant to humans, would show a cause and effect relation between diet and biological clock imbalance.
Dr Oren Froy and colleagues from the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition set out to uncover whether the biological clock controls the adiponectin signaling pathway in the liver of mice. Adiponectin is a protein hormone that is involves in glucose and fat metabolism, and is secreted from fat tissues known as adipocytes.
They wanted to know whether this control is affected by fasting and/or a high fat diet in a mouse model.
The experiments showed that “under low-fat diet, adiponectin signaling component pathways exhibited circadian rhythmicity”. However they noted that this circadian expression was altered by both fasting and a high fat diet.
In the case of fasting, phases were advanced; with the high fat diet, they were they were delayed.
In addition, levels of adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (a protein involved in fatty acid metabolism) were high during fasting and low during the high fat diet.
“Changes in the phase and daily rhythm of clock genes and components of adiponextin signaling pathways as a result of HF diet may lead to obesity and may explain the disruption of other clock-controlled output systems, such as blood pressure and sleep/wake cycle, usually associated with metabolic disorders,” wrote Froy and collegues.
Methodology
The study involved feeding mice either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet, then put them on a one-day fast. They then measured components of the adiponectin metabolic pathway at the RNA, protein and enzyme activity level, as well as serum levels of glucose, adiponectin and insulin.
Source
Endocrinology Vol. 150, No. 1 161-168
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/High-fat-diet-linked-to-body-clock-disruption\
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