Sugar should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes, scientists say - Sugar is so harmful to public health it should be controlled like alcohol and cigarettes, US scientists claimed.
Researchers from the University of California-San Francisco said Wednesday that the public's excessive consumption of sugar not only is contributing to a global obesity pandemic but also is critically altering people's hormones, metabolism and blood pressure and causing "significant damage to the liver."
In an article entitled "The Toxic Truth About Sugar," published in the journal Nature, the scientists said that sugar consumption tripled worldwide over the past 50 years and now is contributing to 35 million deaths a year.
"As long as the public thinks that sugar is just 'empty calories,' we have no chance in solving this," Dr. Robert Lustig said. "There are good calories and bad calories, just as there are good fats and bad fats, good amino acids and bad amino acids, good carbohydrates and bad carbohydrates. But sugar is toxic beyond its calories."
The researchers said that the effects of consuming an excess of sugary foods and drinks mimic the effects of drinking too much alcohol -- which, they pointed out, is made from distilling sugar.
They recommended using taxation, controlling access to sugary products and tightening licensing requirements to sell sweet snacks and drinks in schools and workplaces.
Dr. Laura Schmidt, who was involved in the research, said, "We're not talking prohibition. We're not advocating a major imposition of the government into people's lives."
She added, "We're talking about gentle ways to make sugar consumption slightly less convenient, thereby moving people away from the concentrated dose. What we want is to actually increase people's choices by making foods that aren't loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get." ( foxnews.com ) Blog : Brilliant Purple | Sugar should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes
Exercise as Housecleaning for the Body - When ticking off the benefits of physical activity, few of us would include intracellular housecleaning. But a new study suggests that the ability of exercise to speed the removal of garbage from inside our body’s cells may be one of its most valuable, if least visible, effects.
In the new research, which was published last month in Nature, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas gathered two groups of mice. One set was normal, with a finely tuned cellular scrubbing system. The other had been bred to have a blunted cleaning system.
It’s long been known that cells accumulate flotsam from the wear and tear of everyday living. Broken or misshapen proteins, shreds of cellular membranes, invasive viruses or bacteria, and worn-out, broken-down cellular components, like aged mitochondria, the tiny organelles within cells that produce energy, form a kind of trash heap inside the cell.
In most instances, cells diligently sweep away this debris. They even recycle it for fuel. Through a process with the expressive name of autophagy, or “self-eating,” cells create specialized membranes that engulf junk in the cell’s cytoplasm and carry it to a part of the cell known as the lysosome, where the trash is broken apart and then burned by the cell for energy.
Without this efficient system, cells could become choked with trash and malfunction or die. In recent years, some scientists have begun to suspect that faulty autophagy mechanisms contribute to the development of a range of diseases, including diabetes, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The slowing of autophagy as we reach middle age is also believed to play a role in aging.
Most metabolism researchers think that the process evolved in response to the stress of starvation; cells would round up and consume superfluous bits of themselves to keep the rest of the cell alive. In petri dishes, the rate of autophagy increases when cells are starved or otherwise placed under physiological stress.
Exercise, of course, is physiological stress. But until recently, few researchers had thought to ask whether exercise might somehow affect the amount of autophagy within cells and, if so, whether that mattered to the body as a whole.
“Autophagy affects metabolism and has wide-ranging health-related benefits in the body, and so does exercise,” says Dr. Beth Levine, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at U.T. Southwestern. “There seemed to be considerable overlap, in fact, between the health-related benefits of exercise and those of autophagy,” but it wasn’t clear how the two interacted, she says.
So she and her colleagues had lab mice run. The animals first had been medically treated so that the membranes that engulf debris inside their cells would glow, revealing themselves to the researchers. After just 30 minutes of running, the mice had significantly more membranes in cells throughout their bodies, the researchers found, meaning they were undergoing accelerated autophagy.
That finding, however, didn’t explain what the augmented cellular cleaning meant for the well-being of the mice, so the researchers developed a new strain of mouse that showed normal autophagy levels in most instances, but could not increase its cellular self-eating in response to stress. Autophagy levels would stubbornly remain the same, even if the animals were starved or vigorously exercised.
Then the researchers had these mice run, alongside a control group of normal animals. The autophagy-resistant mice quickly grew fatigued. Their muscles seemed incapable of drawing sugar from the blood as the muscles of the normal mice did.
More striking, when Dr. Levine stuffed both groups of animals with high-fat kibble for several weeks until they developed a rodent version of diabetes, the normal mice subsequently reversed the condition by running, even as they continued on the fatty diet. The autophagy-resistant animals did not. After weeks of running, they remained diabetic. Their cells could not absorb blood sugar normally. They also had higher levels of cholesterol in their blood than the other mice. Exercise had not made them healthier.
In other words, Dr. Levine and her colleagues concluded, an increase in autophagy, prompted by exercise, seems to be a critical step in achieving the health benefits of exercise.
The finding is “extremely exciting,” says Zhen Yan, the director of the Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at the University of Virginia, who is also studying autophagy and exercise. The study, Dr. Yan says, “improves our understanding of how exercise has salutary impacts on health.”
The implications of Dr. Levine’s results are, in fact, broad. It’s possible that people who don’t respond as robustly to aerobic exercise as their training partners may have sputtering or inadequate autophagy systems, although that idea is speculative. “It’s very difficult to study autophagy in humans,” Dr. Levine says. Still, it’s possible that at some point, autophagy-prompting drugs or specialized exercise programs might help everyone to fully benefit from exercise.
In the meantime, the study underscores, again, the importance of staying active. Both the control mice and the genetically modified group had “normal background levels of autophagy” during everyday circumstances, Dr. Levine points out. But this baseline level of cellular housecleaning wasn’t enough to protect them from developing diabetes in the face of a poor diet. Only when the control animals ran and pumped up their intracellular trash collection did they regain their health.
“I never worked out consistently before,” Dr. Levine says. But now, having witnessed how exercise helped scour the cells of the running mice, she owns a treadmill. ( nytimes.com )
Blog : Brilliant Purple | Exercise as Housecleaning for the Body
Mental health services 'understaffed and overcrowded' - Mental health services are dangerously understaffed and overcrowded, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists has said.
Professor Dinesh Bhugra said that failing psychiatric wards were discharging sick people back into society who remained a risk to themselves and to others.
He warned that there was a "huge, massive problem" of depleting numbers of mental health doctors in the UK because not enough British medics were choosing to train as psychiatrists and visa restrictions meant that foreign doctors could no longer fill the gap.
A survey by the royal college found that 14 per cent of consultants' posts in the UK were either unfilled or filled by a locum, and an additional 209 consultants intended to retire or resign soon.
In an interview, Prof Bhugra said: "We will be left with a dangerous vacuum of help for people with mental health disorders or will be forced to get special dispensation from the government to recruit heavily from countries who can ill afford to lose their mental health professionals.
"Society will be overwhelmed by the demand of those in need if government doesn't act now."
Mental health services are understaffed and overcrowded, a leading psychiatrist has warned
A research paper by the royal college, to be published next month, found that the number of medical graduates who accepted an offer of a psychiatry training post in England and Wales fell from 184 in 2009 to 158 in 2010.
In another research paper, to be published next week, the royal college says that some psychiatric wards are running at 120 per cent occupancy and that average occupancy rates in psychiatric wards are higher than the 85 per cent standard.
Prof Bhugra said that overcrowded wards could result in patients “becoming more distressed and unwell, and likely to need more longterm care”.
The research paper said that access to psychological treatment and contact with nursing staff were both lower than that deemed acceptable or conducive to recovery.
Around 15 per cent of wards failed to provide separate sleeping accommodation for men and women, despite it being a government policy.
Significant numbers of patients in some psychiatric wards said they felt unsafe.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “Mental health is a cross-government priority. We published No Health Without Mental Health: our cross-government mental health outcomes strategy, to drive up standards in services and improve the nation's mental health.
“The strategy makes clear that mental health services should be just as important as physical health services such as those for cancer and heart disease.
“We have supported the Royal Colleges of GPs and Psychiatrists to develop advice and support for commissioning consortia to commission effective mental health services. The strategy emphasises the importance of improving quality and productivity across the system, while making efficiency savings that can be reinvested in the service to deliver quality improvements.
“In addition, we will invest around £400 million over four years in psychological therapies for those who need them in all parts of England, expanding provision for the entire population.” ( telegraph.co.uk )
Blog : Brilliant Purple | Mental health services 'understaffed and overcrowded'
Radioactive rain from Japan: Is Boston in danger? - Small amounts of radiation are found in rainwater from California to Massachusetts. Does it pose a health threat?
Trace levels of radiation have been detected in samples of rainwater in Boston. Researchers say it's almost certainly coming from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami earlier this month. Is the contamination bad enough to pose a health concern here in the U.S.? Here, a brief guide:
The city of Boston covered by an early spring fog: Very low levels of radiation have been detected in samples of rainwater in Boston. Photo: CC BY: Derek
Just how radioactive is this rain?
Not very. Only trace amounts of radiation have been detected. Radiation from natural sources, such as the sun and uranium in rocks, can be 100,000 times higher. Plus, Massachusetts authorities didn't find radiation in the air near the spot where they detected radiation in rainwater. Tests by the Environmental Protection Agency have found radiation in rainwater at dozens of other testing sites — including in California and Nevada — but the levels there are also extremely low.
Does this pose a health risk?
No. "We're talking about many orders of magnitude below what we would consider a risk," says Nevada radiation physicist Eric Matus, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Massachusetts health authorities say kids can still play safely in the rain, pets can still drink rainwater, and people can continue eating vegetables from their gardens.
Could the danger rise if Japan's nuclear crisis gets worse?
Maybe a little, but not much. Scientists believe the radiation we're seeing now was probably emitted when Japan's crisis was at its worst. Iodine-131, the radioactive isotope detected in the rainwater samples, has a half-life of just eight days, so any current contamination will soon dissolve to an undetectable level. And a nuclear engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that even if the Japanese plant experienced a complete meltdown, radioactive rainwater would be unlikely to pose a health threat in Massachusetts.
Are we even sure the radiation is coming from Japan?
Yes — scientists have little doubt the contamination drifted across the Pacific from Japan. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio found trace amounts of iodine-131 that match what was leaked from the damaged Fukushima reactors. Indeed, the scientists were expecting radioactive rain from Japan, says Case Western professor Gerald Matisoff. "We knew that the weather pattern was bringing it in this direction." ( theweek.com )
Blog : Brilliant Purple | Is Boston in danger?
Out of the sack, cat! Sleeping with pets carries disease risk - Staph infections, plague, meningitis have been spread to people by animals, study shows
Karen Curtis wouldn’t dream of kicking her cats out of her bed, or the beds of her two teenage kids. After all, the felines, named Bob and Blixa, are part of the family, and Curtis thinks it’s “very sweet” the cats make the rounds of the bedrooms, choosing to spend a few hours every night sleeping with their human companions.
“We love sleeping with our pets,” says Curtis, 45, a registered nurse who lives in Cleveland. “We’re healthy and the cats are healthy, so I don’t see a problem.”
Some veterinary scientists don’t agree.
Karen Curtis and her kids routinely share their beds with their cats, Blixa (shown here) and Bob. But experts warn that sleeping with and kissing your pets can put you at risk for serious medical problems
Sleeping with and “kissing” your animals on their little pet lips puts you at risk for some serious medical problems — even when those pusses and pooches are seemingly healthy, according to “Zoonoses in the Bedroom,” a study published in the February issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
“The risk of contracting something is rare, but if you’re that person who gets a disease from a pet, rare doesn’t matter that much,” says the paper’s co-author Bruno Chomel, a professor at the University of California-Davis school of veterinary medicine and an expert in zoonoses, the transmission of disease from animal to human. “I know this will make me unpopular, but pets really don’t belong in your bed.”
Chomel and co-author Ben Sun, chief veterinarian with the California Department of Public Health, combed through medical journals to find examples of pets making people ill after sharing a bed. Among them: a 9-year-old Arizona boy developed plague after sleeping with his flea-infested cat. (Fleas are notorious plague carriers, especially in western states.) And then there’s the 60-year-old British woman who contracted meningitis after repeatedly kissing the family dog. Add in some cases of nasty parasitic and drug-resistant staph infections and it’s enough to make one purchase a futon for Fluffy and Fido.
At greatest risk are the young, elderly, and those whose immune systems are compromised, such as transplant patients, diabetics and people who are HIV-positive.
Picking up a disease from the family pet is indeed rare, as the paper shows. But there are issues that you should know. Approximately 60 percent of all human pathogens could have been transmitted by an animal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And more than 100 of the 250 zoonotic diseases identified come from domesticated pets, says Chomel.
For example, one CDC study shows that about 14 percent of the U.S. population is infected with roundworms, leading to a zoonotic infection called toxocariasis. The mode of transmission occurs when humans come into contact with sand or soil that is contaminated with infected roundworm eggs and larvae found in dog or cat waste. Human roundworm infections, though rare, can cause blindness, among other problems.
Healthy pets carry little risk
But everyone needs to make like a cat and relax. That’s because the important message is pretty simple: Healthy pets carry little risk of disease.
The American Veterinary Medical Association doesn’t have a formal recommendation about pets sleeping with their humans. But “a little common sense will go a long way,” in reducing risk, says AVMA president Larry Kornegay, who affirms that zoonotic diseases are “uncommon, if not rare.”
“I’ve been in practice for 40 years and I see the bond between people and their pets and the positive effects pets can have on humans, which I believe outweighs any risk, whether you sleep with a pet or not,” says Kornegay, who admits his own teenage daughter sleeps with the family’s miniature Schnauzer.
Common-sense approaches include regular wellness exams for pets, parasite control, vaccinations appropriate for your geographical area, and dental care. “If people would remember to wash their hands, that would help, too,” Kornegay says.
So, obviously scrub up with soap and running water if you’ve handled feces, and do it again if you’ve handled your pet and plan on preparing food. Wash bites and scratches immediately and cover sandboxes when not in use. Try and keep your animals from drinking from toilet bowls or eating feces. And be good to your pets, by keeping outdoor areas feces-free and kitty’s litter box clean.
What’s clear is that it’s unlikely that people are going to kick their pets out of their bed. “I’m not going to put on a biohazard suit every night,” says Joseph Doles, a Cleveland veterinarian, who has six cats, some of which snooze with him and his wife.
Doles has seen "a few cases" of zoonoses during his three decades of practice and agrees that common sense and veterinary care will “further reduce an already rare risk.”
“If you have a healthy pet, you probably have a healthy family,” he says. ( msnbc.msn.com)
Blog : Brilliant Purple | Out of the sack, cat! Sleeping with pets carries disease risk
