Category: Featured Articles

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.

by Jessica Fraser

America was rudely awakened to a new kind of danger on September 11, 2001: Terrorism. The attacks that day left 2,996 people dead, including the passengers on the four commercial airliners that were used as weapons. Many feel it was the most tragic day in U.S. history.

Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn't it?

Well, forget "what if." The tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?

After 9/11, the White House gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security, designed to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Since its inception, billions of dollars have been poured into it. The 2006 budget allots $34.2 billion to the DHS, a number that has come down slightly from the $37.7 billion budget of 2003.

According to the study led by Null, which involved a painstaking review of thousands of medical records, the United States spends $282 billion annually on deaths due to medical mistakes, or iatrogenic deaths. And that's a conservative estimate; only a fraction of medical errors are reported, according to the study. Actual medical mistakes are likely to be 20 times higher than the reported number because doctors fear retaliation for those mistakes. The American public heads to the doctor's office or the hospital time and again, oblivious of the alarming danger they're heading into. The public knows that medical errors occur, but they assume that errors are unusual, isolated events. Unfortunately, by accepting conventional medicine, patients voluntarily continue to walk into the leading cause of death in America.

According to a 1995 U.S. iatrogenic report, "Over a million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined." This report was issued 10 years ago, when America had 34 million fewer citizens and drug company scandals like the Vioxx recall were yet to occur. Today, health care comprises 15.5 percent of the United States' gross national product, with spending reaching $1.4 trillion in 2004.

Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.

Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there's a pricey prescription drug to "treat" it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.

The problem is, prescription drugs don't treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.

American medical patients are getting the short end of a rather raw deal when it comes to prescription drugs. Medicine is a high-dollar, highly competitive business. But it shouldn't be. Null's report cites the five most important aspects of health that modern medicine ignores in favor of the almighty dollar: Stress, lack of exercise, high calorie intake, highly processed foods and environmental toxin exposure. All these things are putting Americans in such poor health that they run to the doctor for treatment. But instead of doctors treating the causes of their poor health, such as putting them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, they stuff them full of prescription drugs to cover their symptoms. Using this inherently faulty system of medical treatment, it's no wonder so many Americans die from prescription drugs. They're not getting better; they're just popping drugs to make their symptoms temporarily go away.

But not all doctors subscribe to this method of "treatment." In fact, many doctors are just as angry as the public should be, charging that scientific medicine is "for sale" to the highest bidder – which, more often than not, end up being pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-trillion dollar business. Companies spend billions on advertising and promotions for prescription drugs. Who can remember the last time they watched television and weren't bombarded with ads for pills treating everything from erectile dysfunction to sleeplessness? And who has ever been to a doctor's office or hospital and not seen every pen, notepad and post-it bearing the logo of some prescription drug?

Medical experts claim that patients' requests for certain drugs have no effect on the number of prescriptions written for that drug. Pharmaceutical companies claim their drug ads are "educational" to the public. The public believes the FDA reviews all the ads and only allows the safest and most effective drug ads to reach the public. It's a clever system: Pharmaceutical companies influence the public to ask for prescription drugs, the public asks their physicians to prescribe them certain drugs, and doctors acquiesce to their patients' requests. Everyone's happy, right? Not quite, since the prescription drug death toll continues to rise.

The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial's narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they've seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn't have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn't see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.

But advertising isn't the only tool the pharmaceutical industry uses to influence medicine. Null's study cites an ABC report that said pharmaceutical companies spend over $2 billion sending doctors to more than 314,000 events every year. While doctors are riding the dollar of pharmaceutical companies, enjoying all the many perks of these "events," how likely are they to question the validity of drug companies or their products?

Admittedly, not all doctors reside in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. Some are downright angry at the situation, and angry on behalf of an unaware public. Major conflicts of interest exist between the American public, the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. And although the public suffers the most from this conflict, it is the least informed. The public gets the short end of the stick and they don't even know it. That is why the pharmaceutical industry remains a multi-trillion dollar business.

Prescription drugs are only a part of the U.S. healthcare system's miserable failings. In fact, outpatient deaths, bedsore deaths and malnutrition deaths each account for higher death rates than adverse drug reactions. The problems run deep and cannot be remedied without drastic, widespread change in the system's money and ethics.

The first issue – money – is the main reason the medical industry cannot seem to change. Prescribing more drugs and recommending more surgeries means more profits. Getting more drugs approved by the FDA, regardless of their safety, means more money for the pharmaceutical industry. As the healthcare system stands today, physicians and drug companies can't seem to pass up earning loads of money, even if a few hundred thousand people lose their lives in the process. Even in drastic cases of deadly drugs, everyone involved has a scapegoat: Drug companies can blame the FDA for approving their product and the doctors for over-prescribing it, and doctors can blame the patients for wanting it and not properly weighing the risks.

What ultimately arises is a question of ethics. In layman's terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.

On the research side of the issue, "Death by Medicine" cites an ABC report that says clinical trials funded by pharmaceutical companies show a 90 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective, whereas clinical trials not funded by drug companies show only a 50 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective. "It appears that money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you any 'scientific' result you want," writes Null and his team of researchers.

The government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers. A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs, makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of "Death by Medicine" is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government's attention and money is not put into reforming health care.

Couldn't a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn't we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn't matter or weren't horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America's healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.

If the Bush Administration really wants to save lives — a lot of lives — it needs look no further than the chemical war has been declared on Americans by Big Pharma.

Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

"We are not trying to alter genes, we're just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones," said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

The research was presented at a scientific conference recently, but has not been published in a scientific journal.

The process aims to create healthy embryos for couples to avoid passing on genes carrying diseases.

The genes being replaced are the mitochondria, a cell's energy source, which are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria's genetic code can result in serious diseases like muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, strokes and mental retardation.

In their research, Chinnery and colleagues used normal embryos created from one man and one woman that had defective mitochondria in the woman's egg. They then transplanted that embryo into an emptied egg donated from a second woman who had healthy mitochondria.

The research is being funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, a British charity.

Only trace amounts of a person's genes come from the mitochondria, and experts said it would be incorrect to say that the embryos have three parents.

"Most of the genes that make you who you are are inside the nucleus," Chinnery said. "We're not going anywhere near that."

So far, 10 such embryos have been created, though they have not been allowed to develop for more than five days. Chinnery hoped that after further experiments in the next few years the process might be available to parents undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

"If successful, this research could give families who might otherwise have a bleak future a chance to avoid some very grave diseases," said Francoise Shenfield, a fertility expert with the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. Shenfield was not connected to the Newcastle University research.

Similar experiments have been conducted in animals in Japan, and has already led to the birth of healthy mice who had their mitochondria genes corrected.

Shenfield said that further tests to assess the safety and efficacy of the process were necessary before it could be offered as a potential treatment.

A bill to allow the procedure to be regulated as a therapy for couples — once it is proven to work — is expected to be discussed in Britain's House of Commons in March.