Month: February 2008

If you listen to science writer Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, you will see that we actually live in a world in which all these beliefs are untrue.

He argues that most of the conventional diet wisdom that has been given to Americans in popular health writing has been wrong, and that in fact most of our health ills, including obesity, heart disease, cancer and maybe even Alzheimer’s can be blamed on people eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates.

The Truth About What We Eat

Taubes got his start writing about America’s diet and the problem with conventional dietary wisdom with a 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine called “What if it’s All Been a Big, Fat Lie?”

The article, like the book that followed last year, argues that ever since the government started telling us that the key to losing weight was eating less, people on the whole have actually gained more weight.
 
While medical experts were calling the Atkins Diet the worst thing you could do for your body — since conventional wisdom had it that fat was the problem — more and more people were having success with these diets, and more diet writers were coming up with successful variations on the theme.
 
He explains the value of low-carb diets as follows: The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in testing carbohydrate-restricted diets as obesity levels have risen and a new generation of clinicians have come to question the prevailing wisdom on weight loss. Six independent teams of investigators set out to test low-fat semi-starvation diets of the kind recommended by the American Heart Association in randomized control trials against ‘eat as much as you

like’ Pennington-type diets, now known commonly as the Atkins Diet, after Robert Atkins and Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet — unrestricted in calories — than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet.

That’s a long quote, but it’s also a long book, more than 600 pages with notes and index. It’s a dense read that will often go over the average reader’s head, but the conclusion of his words is clear: instead of cutting fat and calories to lose weight, people should instead be cutting carbs and sugar.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book is interesting (to food geeks, anyway) for its tracing of how the low-fat diet came to be the most  popular one advocated by health experts, and how he reached his conclusion that excess body fat, not dietary fat, is the problem, and that fat accumulation is caused by excess insulin, which is produced by eating excess carbohydrates.
 
If you can’t bring yourself to read the whole book, seek out a copy of January’s Ladies Home Journal, which includes a handy summary of Taubes’ findings written by the author himself. Even if it doesn’t change the way you eat, it will probably change the way you think about diet news.

A big challenge for the food sector would be to transform its products to reduce the promotion and abundant array of high energy foods, he said.

Alok Jha
The Guardian
Monday February 18 2008

Dieters who have managed to shed their excess weight need to do 90 minutes of exercise a day to keep the pounds off in the long term, according to a study.

The finding comes as a leading nutritional researcher called on world leaders to tackle obesity with the same urgency as global efforts to tackle climate change.

Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston yesterday that exercising 60 to 90 minutes a day was essential to long term weight loss. By studying data on more than 5,000 men and women who have, on average, lost 70 pounds and kept the weight off for six years, she found that successful dieters had high levels of physical activity and consciously controlled their eating habits. This meant frequent weighing, following a consistent diet across the week and taking quick remedial action at the first sign of weight gain.

"There's no way around it," Wing said. "If you want to lose weight and keep it off you need to really change your lifestyle, particularly if you're overweight or have a family history of obesity. The obesity epidemic won't go away simply because people switch from whole to skimmed milk. They need to substantially cut their calories and boost their physical activity to get to a healthy weight – and keep minding the scale once they do."

In Britain more than one-fifth of adults are obese and, of the remainder, half of men and a third of women are overweight. Obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. By 2015, 2.3 billion adults are forecast to be overweight, including 700 million obese.

Philip James, of the International Obesity Taskforce, told the seminar urgent steps were needed to transform the environment that makes people fat. James, who chaired the UN Commission on the Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century, said obesity was a problem for all of society, arguing that blaming individuals for their vulnerability to gain weight was no longer acceptable when the "environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic".

He added: "It is even more naive to tell people that they just need to make a little change in their eating habits or their daily activity and suddenly the obesity problem will be remarkably easily solved."

A big challenge for the food sector would be to transform its products to reduce the promotion and abundant array of high energy foods, he said.

Jacksonville Business Journal – by Stewart Verney
A local company has begun shipping a washable keyboard and mouse made of antimicrobial plastic.

Seal Shield LLC's Silver Seal keyboard is aimed primarily at the health care market, said CEO Brad Whitchurch, though he expects other markets to latch onto the product as well.

"The health care market is definitely the low-hanging fruit," he said. "Two million people a year get a hospital infection, and close to 100,000 die."

The company estimates U.S. hospitals have two keyboards for every three employees, meaning the domestic market alone could be worth $450 million. Seal Shield has deals with Tenet Healthcare Corp. and Banner Health.

Seal Shield introduced a washable, dishwasher-safe keyboard last year and has shipped about 10,000 of them. The new product is the same design, Whitchurch said, but silver ions are embedded in the plastic in the manufacturing process. Silver is a natural antibacterial agent.

"The antibacterial plastic we're using is kind of the latest and greatest based on silver ion technology," he said.

The new keyboards retail for about $70, though the price drops to about $45 if ordered through certain distributors, such as Dell.

Whitchurch said 48 states require hospitals to report infections acquired at the hospital. That requirement and the advent of resistant strains of MRSA and Norovirus make the keyboards even more attractive to health care companies.

And after hospitals, he said, there are other natural markets, such as libraries, schools and food processing companies.

Colloidal Silver & Colloidal Silver Soap

Enzyme Levels Quickly Rise In Subjects Who Supersize Theselves From Diet, Lack of Exercise Feb. 14, 2008

By Miranda Hitti

(WebMD) Consistently overdoing it at the fast-food counter and leading an idle life may not bode well for the liver, not to mention the waist size.

So say Swedish researchers who studied 18 lean, healthy students – mainly medical students – who agreed to supersize themselves for science's sake.

The students were asked to gain 5% to 15% of their body weight in a month by eating at least two daily meals at fast-food restaurants and adopting a sedentary lifestyle. Their fast-food diet featured hamburgers and other foods high in saturated animal fat. The researchers reimbursed the cost of those meals.

Before-and-after measurements show a ballooning of the students' weight, waist, fat, and liver enzymes.

On average, the students gained 14 pounds, added 2.6 inches to their waistline, and padded their body fat percentage by 3.7% during the study.

Blood samples provided by the students throughout the study show a spike in levels of the liver enzyme alanine aminotransferase (ALT). ALT levels rose quickly – typically within a week – after the students started the fast-food diet.

High ALT levels can be a sign of liver damage. But other tests show that most of the students didn't develop fatty liver disease during the month-long study.

The researchers – who included Fredrik Nystrom, MD, PhD, of Sweden's University Hospital of Linkoping – aren't focused on the occasional burger, but on a habitual pattern of being idle and overeating fattening foods from any source.

The study, published in the advance online edition of Gut, doesn't show which was more damaging – bingeing on fatty food or being sedentary. And it doesn't mean that all fast-food meals are bad choices. It's possible to make healthier choices at many fast-food chains.

 Liver Support Products

The drug maker and the FDA say it's too early to tell whether a plant in China is at fault. Some see an issue with U.S. oversight.
By Don Lee and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
2:05 PM PST, February 14, 2008

WASHINGTON — Scientific testing has found possible irregularities in some samples of a blood thinner ingredient linked to several deaths and hundreds of life-threatening reactions, part of a broadening international investigation, a company spokeswoman said today.

Baxter Healthcare Corp. said advanced testing had found "trace differences" in some lots of the blood thinner heparin, including quantities in which the active ingredient was produced at a supplier's plant in China, spokeswoman Erin Gardiner said.

Baxter and the Food and Drug Administration said it was too early to say whether the problems were caused by the ingredient made in China. But the disclosure is likely to add to consumer worries about goods from China after product safety scares in the past year involving Chinese-made pet food ingredients and toys. The disclosure also raised questions about FDA oversight, since the agency has never inspected the plant in China.

Several leading lawmakers in Congress said the case underscored a gaping hole in the FDA's inspection program: Although as much as 80% of the bulk drug ingredients used by U.S. manufacturers are shipped from abroad, the FDA inspects only about 7% of foreign establishments in a given year. Many have never been inspected.

Baxter emphasized that the investigation was continuing and that no conclusions had been reached.

"Baxter has detected differences between lots [of the active ingredient] but it's unclear what the impact of these differences is," Gardiner said. "They are not necessarily the root cause of the increase in adverse reactions, but they are certainly a central part of our investigation."

Some of the samples that were found to have differences "are definitely from China," she added. Earlier testing before the drug was shipped to hospitals and dialysis centers fully complied with industry and regulatory requirements, but the tests failed to detect any possible problems, Gardiner said.

Baxter announced Monday that it had suspended manufacturing of multiple-dose vials of heparin after receiving reports of 350 bad reactions, including four deaths. The drug is used to prevent the formation of dangerous blood clots during complex surgical procedures.

Heparin is a naturally occurring substance extracted from pig intestines and cow lungs. Some independent experts said contamination could have occurred at any point in the production process, from a problem with raw materials to the wrong kind of solvent being used to clean equipment.

Consumer advocates today urged a recall, but the FDA said that could do more harm than good by creating an acute shortage, since Deerfield, Ill-based Baxter accounts for about 50% of the market.

Also today, Baxter identified the supplier of the heparin as Scientific Protein Laboratories of Waunakee, Wis. A company official did not immediately return phone calls, but the firm's website says it maintains manufacturing facilities in Waunakee and Changzhou, China, about two hours' drive west of Shanghai.

Baxter said it inspected both plants last year and found no problems. FDA spokeswoman Karen Riley said the agency was planning to send inspectors to the plants in China and Wisconsin.

Industry sources in China identified the producer as a joint venture between Techpool Bio-Pharma Co. in Guangzhou and the Wisconsin-based SPL. A representative at the joint-venture plant's quality-control department confirmed that it made the ingredient for Baxter and that its production was under scrutiny by U.S. regulators.

"We are taking initiative to cooperate" with the FDA and Baxter, said the representative, who declined to give his name. "We put great emphasis on the investigation. After all, it involves people's lives."

He said the company was expecting FDA inspectors to arrive soon, but he declined to comment further. At the moment, he said, the plant was not producing heparin components.

Mike Stobbe in Atlanta The Guardian,

Friday February 15 2008 Article history

At least 82 youths in the US have died from a "choking game", according to the first official tally of such fatalities.

In the so-called game, a leash or rope is wrapped around the neck to temporarily cut the blood supply to the brain. The goal is a dreamlike, floating-in-space feeling when blood rushes back into the brain. Up to 20% of teenagers and pre-teens play the game, sometimes in groups, according to some estimates based on local studies. But nearly all the deaths were of those who played alone, according to the count compiled by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It took reports in the media and by advocacy groups from 1995 to 2007, and found 82 fatalities of young people aged from six to 19 – 90% of whom were boys. The CDC did not include cases in which it was unclear if the death was from the choking game or if it was a suicide. They also did not include deaths that involved autoerotic asphyxiation, which is self-strangulation during masturbation.

The authors of the report said the real total is probably higher – but they were unable to rely on death certificates, which do not differentiate between choking-game deaths and other unintentional strangulation deaths.

The CDC started the study after receiving a letter last year from a doctor in Tacoma, Washington, who said her 13-year-old son died from playing the game in 2005. CDC officials urged parents to be aware the fad exists.

Many of the children who died from the choking game were described as bright, athletic students who apparently were intrigued by a method of getting high that does not involve drugs or alcohol.