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by Christopher C. Barr

The much ballyhooed connection of overweight and even obesity issues to illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes have been brought into question by two studies in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

More than half overweight and nearly a third of obese adults in a national health/nutrition survey had healthful figures for such risk markers as cholesterol including the so-called “good” high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and blood sugar, as well as insulin sensitivities.

By contrast, almost one quarter of those recognized as having normal weights had unhealthful figures for the same risk markers.

“A considerable proportion of overweight and obese U.S. adults are metabolically healthy, whereas a considerable proportion of normal-weight adults express a clustering of cardiometabolic abnormalities,” wrote Judith Wylie-Rosett, Rachel Wildman and colleagues in their published report.

Wylie-Rosett of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York oversaw one study and according to Reuters News said in a telephone interview, “We really don’t know as much about obesity as we think we do.”

No kidding.

“Her team did not look at people’s diets,” stated the Reuters News report.

To ignore (the root of the word ‘ignorance’) “people’s diets” is to miss the most important part of the equation.

Size doesn’t matter

The often rotund peoples on traditional Mediterranean diets such as in Greece and Italy have been well documented for less coronary artery disease than skinnier western counterparts in studies dating back more than half a century.

These studies are neither small nor obscure.  The Framingham studies were large and long-term through four decades and well renowned.

The primary healthful differences came down to the type of oil – olive oil – and whole grains.

Much has been made of the olive oil.

That’s great.

Not so much has been made of the whole grains.

That’s too bad.

Simple breakdown

The biggest difference between whole grains and refined grains are three minerals that just happen to figure prominently in all of the observed markers and characteristics of the recent study.

The minerals silicon, selenium and chromium are abundant in whole grains and almost entirely absent in refined grains.

Chromium nourishes and strengthens muscle (like the heart) as well as offering some level of protection of the tissues.  Chromium also manages cholesterol.  Abundant chromium levels result in an abundance of the “good” HDL cholesterol.  Low chromium levels result in low HDL and high “bad” LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol.

Selenium provides protection of heart tissues from free radical damage, and assists with heart energy levels by way of production of Coenzyme Q10.  Selenium also assists chromium with cholesterol management.

Silicon (or silica) is responsible for both strength and elasticity of arteries and other tissues.

One more study

The other study noted that the liver may be the key.

Unseen fatty accumulations in the liver were noted as a more accurate indicator of heart risk than easily seen fat.

Both selenium and chromium were established as nutrients essential for life 50 years ago in liver studies.

Coincidence?

A wait problem … not a weight problem

Almost 100 years ago the minerals chromium, selenium and silicon began to be routinely removed more than 90 per cent from whole grains by refining and bleaching processes.  This was ruled a violation of the Pure Food & Drug Act by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915 yet the practice continued – and continues today.

It is the wait for government to enforce the law and for food providers to follow the law that is the key to heart health – and diabetes as well (chromium was specifically cited as essential for blood sugar metabolism by the National Institutes of Health 50 years ago).

The people await the all too serious wait problem of the government and food providers to be addressed as a far more weighty issue than the weight of the people.

By Byron J. Richards

Before the dust settles on the Bernie Mac tragedy it is important for everyone to understand two things:

1) It is abnormal to die from pneumonia at age 50.
2) There are millions of Americans with autoimmune problems of one type or another at risk for the same fate as Bernie Mac.

Conspicuously absent from the facts surrounding Bernie’s death is the lack of specific information about what actually caused his death. We are left to connect the dots based on non-specific comments made by family members that were reported in People magazine. Isn’t it convenient that doctors and hospitals can hide behind medical privacy, especially when their blunders and off-label experiments are the likely cause of death?

It is a national disgrace that more than 100,000 Americans needlessly die every year in a system they have turned to for help. Add Bernie Mac to the list.

Are Hospitals Even Safe?

Bernie Mac was hospitalized with serious pneumonia on July 24, 2008 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, considered one of the best hospitals in the city and above average nationally. Northwestern Memorial Hospital is also a teaching hospital.

According to People magazine, Mary Ann Grossett, Bernie’s sister-in-law, stated “He was critically ill when he was in the hospital. He was in intensive care the whole time….and he contracted a second strain of pneumonia while in the hospital.”

While on average the care may be better in teaching hospitals, they also carry their own unique life-threatening risks. In an April 23, 2006 Time magazine cover story, reporting on why a doctor’s greatest fear is becoming a patient, the problem of teaching hospitals was explained, “For all their fame and all-star doctors, teaching hospitals carry risks of their own. The sickest patients often have compromised immune systems and may need to be treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics – which increases the chance that antibiotic-resistant strains of staph and other bacteria will make the rounds of the intensive-care unit.”

It is also known that the death rate in teaching hospitals jumps in July, as a new round of interns arrive on the scene. I wonder how many interns with three weeks experience were involved in Bernie’s care. Did someone forget to wash their hands?

The reality is that teaching hospitals struggle to teach themselves how to keep their intensive-care units in a condition suitable for the patients they need to treat. What responsibility does a hospital bear when it further infects a patient who is struggling for his life with an existing infection?

A Grossly Incompetent Medical System for Autoimmune Problems

Most of the commentary about Bernie’s underlying health problems have pointed out his long-term struggle with sarcoidosis, an autoimmune problem wherein a person’s immune system inappropriately attacks normal cells of their body. In this case cells stick together forming clumps that can affect any organ in the body, but most often restrict the function of the lungs. Since Bernie had the illness for several decades it is likely that his lungs had extensive tissue damage/scarring, making them a significant “weak spot” in his health. This point should have been well understood by any physician prescribing medication for his condition.

The focus relating to sarcoidosis in the aftermath of Bernie’s death has been to raise awareness of this somewhat infrequent problem. While it is fine to raise awareness on any health issue, this emphasis has shifted the concept of cause relating to his death to his condition, not to the care he received. My focus is much different – it is to raise awareness of the barbaric stone-age experiments carried on by physicians around the country treating millions of Americans with autoimmune problems – including much more common autoimmune problems like rheumatoid arthritis.

Working with a near-kindergarten intelligence level, the Big Pharma-sponsored model for dealing with autoimmune issues is to treat the immune system itself as the disease. The logic goes like this: since the immune system is excessively reacting against the person’s body, treatment means we need to kill off the immune cells doing the damage. Our strategy will be to poison them to death. We will use prednisone, chemo drugs, or malarial drugs – all drugs that poison immunity into a state of reduced function, thus containing the overactive immune system. Almost no thought is given to getting the person’s immune system to work normally again.

An appropriate analogy is to consider an autoimmune problem like a forest fire burning. You must do something to put out the fire. Medical treatments are like dumping fire retardant on the fire, not a bad idea when it is threatening to burn up valuable body parts. Such concepts have clear medical validity and utility – especially when they are used as temporary solutions to bring a problem under control.

However, you would never manage a forest on a long-term basis in this way, even if it were prone to fire flare ups. Most likely you would want to know how the fires are starting – something doctors almost never consider.

Here is where medicine gets in a lot of trouble and causes a lot of harm. The “fire fighting” strategy becomes long term care. Prednisone makes a person fat, destroys their bones over time (bones are where your immune cells are born), and induces Candida albicans to grow in the sinuses, digestive tract, and lungs. These factors alone significantly add to the inflammatory burden of the individual and further contribute to immune system confusion, in turn feeding fuel to the underlying autoimmune problem and locking it into place as a chronic health condition.

When the side effects of prednisone become unbearable or the drug is no longer effective, then the next levels of poison are pulled out. Chemo drugs and malarial drugs are high level toxins. Of course they have devastating side effects to healthy tissue – once again inducing more tissue inflammation and confusion to the immune system.

Any person with an autoimmune problem quickly finds themselves between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t take the toxic drugs then their “forest fire” flares back up. If they do take the toxic drugs they keep heading into a condition of overall worse health. Millions of Americans are stuck in this predicament, betrayed by false practitioners of health beholden to the Big Pharma golden idol and its system of “medical” training.

The finest medical treatment facilities in the country seldom bother trying to figure out why a person’s immune system is misbehaving in the first place. Instead, these practitioners take the fifth – saying they just don’t know what the cause could be. The sick part is they don’t even bother asking the person, who can often tell them exactly how their problems started and what inflammatory situations in their life caused their immune systems to overheat. Oftentimes the patients will volunteer to their doctors the data they need to know, and such information is simply ignored and the patient is told that what they have to say is not relevant and could not be causing their problem.

Autoimmune problems are triggered by traumatic stress, ongoing stress, chemical exposure, pollution, the use of many medications including antibiotics, digestive problems, sinus problems, estrogen, chemicals in food, junk food, etc. The “straw that breaks” the immune system’s back is almost always in plain view and relatively easy to figure out simply by questioning the individual – and is often different from person to person. Such low-tech, labor-intensive detective work is disdained at the Disney World technology centers pretending to be the authorities on health. Yes, these places can measure almost anything in the body down to the molecular level – can they talk to the patient?

Bernie’s Turning Point

Place yourself in Bernie’s shoes. You’ve been struggling with this problem for 20 years. You finally got it into remission on some cocktail of poisons, but they are either not working so well anymore or you just can’t take the side effects. You go to your doctor and ask for help. What else can be done?

And now you enter the world of medical experimentation. The off-label use of powerful new drugs that no longer act as poisons, rather this new generation of biological medicines throw gene switches that control function in a much more powerful way. In the case of autoimmune problems, these drugs are targeted to turn of inflammatory immune system messengers such as TNFa.

There is one major problem; your immune system needs TNFa in order to mount an immune response to fight an infection. What happens if you get sick when you are on one of these newfangled biologic drugs that have your immune system turned off?

Once again we turn to People magazine and Bernie’s sister-in-law to help us understand what likely happened, “He had sarcoidosis, but it was in remission….But because he had it, his immune system was compromised. He had an infection….He was on a new medication that suppresses the immune system, and that's where the pneumonia came from.”

Because sarcoidosis is not as common as rheumatoid arthritis, Big Pharma will not spend millions to prove the safety of the drug specifically for this problem. That means doctors will conduct what is known as an off-label experiment on sarcoidosis patients, giving them the new biologic medicine and seeing what happens – even though such drugs contain clear warnings of their powerful immune suppressing features that could pose a problem. The bumbling FDA stands by counting the deaths, assuming they are reported at all, while preoccupied damaging the tomato industry and watching tainted drugs come in from China.

There are currently three of these new TNFa medications on the market today (Remicade, Enbrel, and Humira), approved for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. The risk of the use of these drugs is highly problematic even in arthritis patients, but arthritis patients don’t typically have lungs as a primary weak spot that can easily become infected.

The death of Bernie Mac was most likely the result of off-label medical experimentation, occurring against a backdrop of general medical incompetence treating and solving autoimmune problems. Quality of care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital didn’t help.

By Miranda Hitti

Aug. 18, 2008 — The FDA today said it plans to strengthen warnings about life-threatening pancreas problems linked to the type 2 diabetes drug Byetta after getting two reports of deaths and four other hospitalizations in Byetta users.

Those patients had hemorrhagic pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas with bleeding) or necrotizing pancreatitis (in which the inflamed pancreas destroys itself).

All six patients were hospitalized, and their Byetta treatment was stopped. The four survivors were still recovering at the time that the FDA learned of their illness.

Byetta and other potentially suspect drugs should be promptly discontinued if pancreatitis is suspected and not restarted if pancreatitis is confirmed, notes the FDA. Byetta, given by injection, was approved by the FDA in 2005.

Last October, the FDA noted 30 reports of acute pancreatitis, which is sudden inflammation of the pancreas, in Byetta users. None of those patients had hemorrhagic or necrotizing pancreatitis.

At the time, the FDA asked Byetta's maker, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, to include information on acute pancreatitis in the "precautions" section of Byetta's label. Now, the FDA is working with Amylin to strengthen and draw attention to warnings about acute hemorrhagic or necrotizing pancreatitis.

Amylin and the drug company Eli Lilly and Company collaborate on Byetta. Amylin spokeswoman Anne Erickson emailed a joint statement from Amylin and Lilly to WebMD.

The companies state that pancreatitis is rare in the general public but more common among type 2 diabetes patients.

In patients using Byetta, there have been "rare" case reports of pancreatitis and "very rare" case reports of pancreatitis with complications or fatalities, and the proportion of complicated or fatal cases is "similar" to that observed in the general public with pancreatitis, according to Amylin and Lilly.

By Shaya Tayefe Mogajer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Eighteen hospitals in California were fined for state health code violations in which patients received shoddy care that in some cases led to deaths.

Violations included an improperly inserted catheter, a ventilator that wasn't turned on and surgical tools left inside patients after operations.

The fines made public Monday stem from investigations by the California Department of Public Health.

The hospitals were fined $25,000 for each violation — the latest of dozens of penalties the state has issued in recent years to more than 40 hospitals.

"The number of penalties will decrease and the quality of care will dramatically improve as hospitals take action to improve," said Kathleen Billingsley, director of the health department's Center for Healthcare Quality. "The entire intent of these fines is to improve the overall quality of care in California."

The report detailed a death at a La Mesa hospital in which a worker failed to turn on a ventilator for a patient who was being transferred. Another patient in Los Alamitos died after falling from a wheelchair with no seat belt on, and a Santa Ana hospital lost a patient from a medication overdose.

At Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo, a registered nurse improperly inserted a catheter into a patient's neck vein on Sept. 1, and the patient died as a result of an air bubble from the tube. The report found the nurse had not completed a required anatomy class or the hospital's training on protocol.

Defending himself in the report, the unidentified male nurse told investigators, "I am the pro of the hospital. The other nurses call me to put in IVs that they cannot get in."

A message seeking comment from the medical center was not returned Monday.

In other cases, patients had surgical instruments or sponges left inside their bodies during surgery, requiring a second surgery to retrieve the items. The report also found some patients experienced surgical awareness during their procedures due to improper anesthesia.

The state has issued 61 such penalties to 42 hospitals, Billingsley said.

By Steven Reinberg

MONDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — Recently discovered so-called free radicals that are attached to small particles of air pollution could cause lung damage and perhaps even lung cancer, researchers report.

If confirmed through further research, the finding could help to explain why nonsmokers develop tobacco-related diseases like lung cancer, said lead researcher H. Barry Dellinger, the Patrick F. Taylor Chair of environmental chemistry at Louisiana State University.

It has been known for years that free radicals exist in the atmosphere, and these atoms, molecules and fragments of molecules can damage cells. It had been thought that these particles, which can be produced by combustion, exist for less than a second and then disappear.
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"What I found out is that combustion-generated particles contain environmentally persistent free radicals," said Dellinger. "When the radicals are associated with particles, they can apparently exist indefinitely."

These free radicals are remarkably similar to the free radicals found in cigarette tar, Dellinger said. "The implication is you can have the same environmentally related diseases by exposure to airborne fine particles that you can get from cigarettes," he said.

Dellinger noted, however, that one would have to smoke about 300 cigarettes a day to be exposed to the same level of environmental free radicals found in moderately polluted air.

The findings were to be presented Monday at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, in Philadelphia.

The persistent free radicals (PFRs) discovered by Dellinger's team attach themselves to small particles of air pollution as they leave smokestacks, car exhaust pipes and household chimneys, and continue to exist as free radicals. Particles of air pollution containing metals, such as copper and iron, are more likely to remain in the atmosphere and can carry these PFRs great distances, Dellinger said.

As PFRs are inhaled, they're absorbed by the lungs and other tissues and cause cell damage that can lead to problems such as asthma, emphysema and lung cancer. However, there's still no direct evidence linking PFRs to any of these diseases, he said.

Dr. Neil Schachter, a professor of pulmonary medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, thinks it's premature to blame persistent free radicals for the adverse effects of air pollution.

"These airborne free radicals are of interest, but I am not sure we are at a point where our scalpel is sharp enough to dissect the individual components of air pollution that cause problems for people," he said.

It's possible that persistent free radicals are responsible for the respiratory damage caused by pollution, Schachter acknowledged. "There are studies that show that modifying free radicals can alter the course of disease," he said. "But the implications of this — what it means to clinics, what it means to doctors, what it means to regulators — I think we are a long way from pulling that together."

Despite the many public efforts to promote physical activity and good nutrition in recent years, despite the constant warnings about the obesity crisis, Americans just keep getting fatter. According to an annual state-by-state look at the problem, adult obesity rates increased in 37 states in the past year, and only the District of Columbia saw a decrease—down a mere 0.1%. More than 25% of adults are now obese in 28 states, up from 19 states last year.

In 1991 no state had an obesity rate above 20%. Today more than 20% of adults are obese in every state except Colorado, where the number stands at 18.4%, according to the survey by two nonprofits, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Trust for America's Health. Mississippi, the worst performer of all 51 on the list (which includes the District of Columbia), stands at 31.7%. Similarly disturbing increases were found in the percentage of adults with Type 2 diabetes, a weight-related disease. The survey found higher incidence of diabetes in 26 states. Four states are above 10%.
No Magic Pill

Overall, adult obesity rates have doubled since 1980, from 15% to 30%, and two-thirds of U.S. adults are now considered overweight or obese. The national rate for diabetes in adults has grown from 5.2% in 1980 to more than 8% now, and one in three Americans has hypertension—often weight-related. The report estimates that the direct health-care costs of obesity exceed $61 billion annually.

The U.S. "is not treating the obesity crisis with the seriousness it deserves," said Jeff Levi, executive director of Trust for America's Health at a press conference. He complained that while obesity rates keep climbing, federal funding for programs to address the problem has been steadily reduced over the last several years. "The only thing going down is the money spent to prevent this epidemic."

Plenty of money is also spent by individuals attempting to lose weight, apparently to little avail. The market for weight-loss treatments in the U.S., including diet programs, herbal products, and the like, is worth some $33 billion a year. About $200 million of that comes from prescription products (BusinessWeek.com, 3/8/08) such as Roche's (RHHBY) Xenical and Abbott Laboratories' (ABT) Meridia, none of which work especially well, say obesity experts.
Obesity Policies Receive Failing Grades

The survey found a correlation between poverty and obesity, with 7 of the 10 states with the highest obesity rates also in the top 10 for poverty rates. But wealthy states such as Connecticut, with an obesity rate of 20.8%, have not escaped the problem. There is also a geographic correlation—11 of the 15 states with the highest obesity rates are in the South, while Northeastern and Western states have the lowest rates.

The survey, published in the report F As In Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing In America 2008, combines three years of surveillance data spanning 2005-2007 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Individuals with a body-mass index of 30 or above, a calculation based on height and weight, are considered obese. For instance, a person who is 5 ft. 8 in. and weighs 200 pounds has a BMI of 30.4.

The two foundations also reviewed state and federal policies aimed at reducing obesity in children and adults and found that, while all 50 states have some sort of law addressing the issue on the books, only 13 back up these regulations with enforcement language, and of those, only four call for sanctions or penalties if the laws are not implemented.
Medicaid Guidelines on Obesity

Only Georgia and Vermont have specific guidelines for treating obese adults in their Medicaid programs. On the other hand, 20 states do not cover nutritional assessments for obese adults under Medicaid, and in Nebraska and South Carolina the Medicaid programs specifically state that obesity is not a disease and treatment cannot be covered.

"There needs to be a sense of urgency and outright alarm," said Dr. James Marks, senior vice-president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "This is the fifth F As In Fat report and each year we see more evidence that our nation's obesity epidemic continues to gain speed and destructive force." Marks and Levi attributed the steady rise in overweight Americans to large serving-sizes in restaurants, the high cost of nutritional food, and more time spent in front of TVs and computer screens. "No single action or effort led to this change," said Levi, and in the same way no single action will solve it.

Levi and Marks called on governments, parents, schools, and corporations to come up with ways to reverse the fat trend, particularly in children. But leadership, they say, must come from the federal government, which they say has put few resources into fighting obesity. Although they support in principle the Federal Obesity Prevention Act legislation introduced in July by Senators Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Tom Harkin (D-Ind.), and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), calling for a national strategy for combating obesity, they worry the funding won't be there. "A strategy alone is insufficient if resources are not placed behind it," said Levi.

"These findings have potential clinical implications," the researchers wrote, "as they suggest that long-term rosiglitazone usage in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance may cause osteoporosis, owing to a combination of decreased bone formation and increased bone resorption."

Researchers monitored the effects on bone breakdown and formation in mice that had been given Avandia. They found that the activity of osteoclasts was increased in the animals, leading to a loss of bone mass.

Osteoclasts are cells that continually destroy old bone in the body. In a healthy body, the same amount of bone is then created by cells called osteoblasts. In the mice taking Avandia, increased osteoclast activity without a concurrent increase in osteoblast activity lead to bone loss.

When the researchers blocked the gene that Avandia targets, however, the mice's osteoclasts failed to mature properly, leading to an increase in bone mass instead. According to the researchers, this suggests a new area of research for treating osteoporosis.

GlaxoSmith Kline has reported a greater risk of hand, upper arm and foot fractures in patients taking Avandia, but a company spokesperson said that GlaxoSmith Kline is not aware of any increase in the spinal fractures that are commonly associated with osteoporosis.

Controversy over Avandia erupted in May, when the FDA issued a warning that the drug raised the risk of heart attack and death among patients taking it. Since that time, prescription of the drug has dropped in the United States, but has continued to increase in parts of Europe. More than 1.5 million prescriptions for rosiglitazone and the related drug pioglitazone were given out in 2006.

by Lyndsay Moss

Injections of vitamin C could halve the growth of cancerous tumours, research suggested yesterday. A study in the United States found that the vitamin could prove useful in treating cancers for which few other options currently exist.

The breakthrough, which comes following tests on mice, follows decades of research into the potential of vitamin C in tackling cancer.

However, experts warned that the benefits of the vitamin had yet to be demonstrated in human patients.

For the latest study, researchers from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, examined the effects of vitamin C on cells grown in laboratories. Two hours of exposure to the vitamin significantly cut the survival of ovarian, pancreatic and brain tumour (glioblastoma) cancer cells.

Similar results were seen when cancer-ridden mice were injected with vitamin C. The therapy halved the growth of aggressive tumours, killing cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

It is thought the discovery could provide a new lifeline for patients with a poor prognosis and few other options.

Tackling cancer with vitamin C would also have the added advantage of being cheap compared with many of the very expensive cancer treatments.

Usually the body keeps a tight rein on high vitamin C levels in the blood. But the scientists found that the mechanism can be by-passed if the vitamin is injected straight into the blood instead of passing through the digestive system. When this is done it releases the powerful anti-cancer potential of the vitamin, according to the researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments showed that high levels of vitamin C in the blood generate hydrogen peroxide, which is lethal to tumours. The chemical forms in the spaces between cancer cells, damaging membranes, upsetting metabolism and scrambling the DNA of the tumour.

Even the growth of aggressive cancers was held back in the experiments. But healthy tissues appeared to resist the effects.

The use of high-dose vitamin C as an alternative cancer treatment has a long history dating back to the 1970s. Patients have taken the vitamin both by mouth and intravenously, but with mixed results in scientific trials. For this reason, claims that vitamin C can treat cancer have been dismissed by conventional cancer experts. But the new investigation, led by Dr Qi Chen, may help to start changing attitudes towards this approach.

The scientists said: "Pharmacologic concentrations of ascorbate (the chemical name for vitamin C] decreased tumour volumes 41-53 per cent in diverse cancer types known for both their aggressive growth and limited treatment options."

Dr Alison Ross, science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is encouraging work but it's at a very early stage because it involves cells grown in the lab and mice."