RxPG News : Food & Nutrition

Intake of low energy dense food better than skipping meals

Thu, 02 May 2013 22:05:10 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Many of us can personally attest that caloric deprivation weight loss diets typically do not produce lasting weight loss. Oregon Research Institute (ORI) senior scientist Eric Stice, Ph.D., and colleagues provide results in a recent issue of NeuroImage that further our understanding of how and why most weight loss diets fail and provide a more comprehensive description of the impact of caloric restriction.

Results suggest that restricting food intake increases the reward value of food, particularly high-calorie, appetizing food (chocolate milkshakes), and that the more successful people are at caloric-restriction dieting, the greater difficulty they will face in maintaining the restriction. Additionally, abstaining from food intake for longer durations of time also increases the reward value of food, which may lead to poor food choices when the individual eventually does eat. Results imply that dieting characterized by meal skipping and fasting would be less successful than weight loss efforts characterized by intake of low energy dense healthy foods.

"These results are unique," said Stice "in that these data are the first to suggest that elective caloric restriction increases the degree to which brain regions implicated in reward valuation and attention are activated by exposure to palatable foods."

Participants were two groups of adolescents (Study 1 n=34; Study 2 n=51) who voluntarily restricted their caloric intake so as to approximate what occurs with real-world dieters. Using a brain imaging paradigm, Stice and his team examined the responsivity of adolescent's attention and reward regions of the brain to the individual's exposure to and imagined intake of palatable foods, unpalatable foods, and glasses of water shown in pictures. By including both pictures of palatable and unpalatable foods, the team was able to determine whether degree of "self-imposed" caloric deprivation correlated with hyper-responsivity of attention and reward regions for palatable versus unpalatable foods. In a second paradigm, the team measured teen's neural responses to consumption and anticipated consumption of a chocolate milkshake and a calorie-free tasteless solution. Stice examined whether the number of hours since last caloric intake (which varied from 3 to 22 hours) correlated with neural activation in response to receipt and anticipated receipt of a palatable food. They also tested whether youth who were in a negative energy balance for a 2-week period versus energy balance or a positive energy balance showed aberrant neural response to food stimuli.

"The implications of this imaging study are crystal clear; if people want to lose excess weight, it would be more effective to consume healthy, low-fat/low-sugar foods during regular meals, rather than go for long periods of time without any caloric intake" says Dr. Stice.

Molecular hub links obesity, heart disease to high blood pressure

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Obesity, heart disease, and high blood pressure (hypertension) are all related, but understanding the molecular pathways that underlie cause and effect is complicated.

A new University of Iowa study identifies a protein within certain brain cells as a communications hub for controlling blood pressure, and suggests that abnormal activation of this protein may be a mechanism that links cardiovascular disease and obesity to elevated blood pressure.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, and hypertension is a major cardiovascular risk factor, says Kamal Rahmouni, Ph.D., UI associate professor of pharmacology and internal medicine, and senior study author. Our study identifies the protein called mTORC1 in the hypothalamus as a key player in the control of blood pressure. Targeting mTORC1 pathways may, therefore, be a promising strategy for the management of cardiovascular risk factors.

The hypothalamus is a small region of the brain that is responsible for maintaining normal function for numerous bodily processes, including blood pressure, body temperature, and glucose levels. Signaling of mTORC1 protein in the hypothalamus has previously been shown to affect food intake and body weight.

The new study, which was published April 2 in the journal

Youth with type 1 diabetes may suffer health risks when transitioning from pediatric to adult care

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) AURORA, Colo. (March 26, 2013) Adolescent type 1 diabetes patients face greater risk for heart attacks, strokes, blindness and kidney failure later in life if their transition from pediatric to adult care is not carefully managed, two CU researchers have found. The estimated median age at transition to adult care was 20.1 years and 77 percent of individuals with type 1 diabetes had left pediatric care by age 21. The study suggests that without support, they were 2.5 times more likely to have high blood glucose levels when transitioning from pediatric to adult care

The study is co-authored by Georgeanna Klingensmith, MD, professor, University of Colorado, Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and Dana Dabelea, MD, PhD, professor, University of Colorado, Colorado School of Public Health.

With these results and our Colorado experience, we are developing a program for high school students and young college students to better prepare them to transition into adult care within 2-4 years of graduating from high school. We hope through this program they will have the support and learn the skills they need to successfully transition to the more independent care expected by providers of adult diabetes care, said Klingensmith. Dabalea added, Our data highlight the importance of optimal health care transition during a critical period in the life of a teenage with type 1 diabetes. Additional research and programs focusing at improving health care services for this high risk population are urgently needed.

These data were analyzed from the multi-centered SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study, which has tracked children and young adults with diabetes from six centers across the U.S. since 2002. The cohort of youth studied included 185 adolescent and young adults with type 1 diabetes enrolled in the study in the year after their diabetes was diagnosed. Youth included in these analyses were cared for by pediatric diabetes physicians at the time of their initial study visit and were followed for an average of 4.5 years.

Previous research of youth with type 1 diabetes in the United States has primarily looked at youth from one diabetes specialty center or from one geographic area. Other research has looked at youth at one point in time, either before or after leaving pediatric care. This study is the largest national cohort of youth with type 1 diabetes in the U.S. to be followed over a period of time.

The authors did not find that type of insurance (such as public versus private) made a difference in switching to adult care, but they found that older age of the patient, less parental education and lower baseline blood glucose levels were independently associated with increased odds of transitioning to adult care.

The next stage of research is to study young adults who are leaving pediatric care directly as they are aging to see what happens as they get older, and look at how different types of help with the transition to adult care affect outcomes.

Type 1 diabetes is a condition where the body does not produce insulin and cannot convert sugar, starches and other food into energy and is often diagnosed during childhood or adolescence age. It requires life-long access to medical care and intensive daily self-management for people with diabetes to stay healthy.

Promoting poultry health through diet

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) URBANA -- Developing strategies to increase the amount of saleable product while reducing dietary inputs is a priority for animal scientists. University of Illinois researchers have been looking at how dietary components affect gut health and disease resistance in chickens.

An important nutritional outcome is how well an animal is able to digest and metabolize its diet, said Ryan Dilger.

Poultry and swine nutritionists are concerned about dietary fiber in alternative dietary ingredients, particularly the by-products of biofuel production. Fiber concentrations are very high in these ingredients because the starch content is removed during processing.

Dilger and his master's student Emma Wils-Plotz looked at how purified fiber fed to young chicks affects their dietary threonine (Thr) requirements, intestinal morphology, and ability to resist a disease challenge. Threonine is an essential amino acid accounting for as much as 11 percent of mucin, an important component of the mucus layer covering the intestine's absorptive surface, which promotes gut health by protecting the body against bacteria and digestive enzymes.

Previous research has suggested that mucin dynamics may be sensitive to Thr availability. Dilger and Wils-Plotz hypothesized that dietary Thr requirements would increase in the presence of two purified fiber sources, cellulose and pectin, which are natural components of many feed ingredients.

They fed diets containing purified cellulose, pectin, or silica sand (control) to chicks and found that body weight gain and feed efficiency (the conversion of feed into body-weight gain) were reduced when 7 percent supplemental pectin was added to the diet. Pectin creates a viscous environment in the gut that interfered with the birds' ability to access dietary nutrients, thus reducing growth performance. Feeding 7 percent purified cellulose did not provide any nutritional benefit.

In a second experiment, Wils-Plotz and Dilger quantified the dietary threonine requirement in the presence and absence of purified fiber sources. Chicks were fed one of the three fiber-containing diets. Within each diet, they were subdivided into seven groups, each fed a different level of Thr supplementation ranging from 0 to 9.6 grams per kilogram (g/kg). Contrary to the researchers' expectations, birds fed the diet with pectin had the lowest Thr requirements at 5.6 g/kg; birds fed the control diet had the highest, estimated to be 6.8 g/kg. Cellulose-fed birds required 5.8 g/kg.

Ileal tissue, which is at the end of the small intestine, was collected from chicks and examined for physical changes in the villi (small folds in the intestine), crypts (pockets next to the villi), and goblet cells, which produce and secrete mucin. Chicks fed cellulose or pectin had deeper crypts than chicks fed the control diet; crypts were deepest for birds fed cellulose and adequate Thr levels, and their outer intestinal muscle layer (serosa) was thicker. Chicks fed diets containing fiber had higher goblet cell counts than the birds fed the control diet, with highest levels in birds fed the pectin diet with adequate or high Thr levels.

The findings suggest that dietary Thr concentration and fiber source affect growth performance, intestinal morphology, and mucin secretion in young chicks. It also established optimal dietary Thr levels.

Having determined these levels, the researchers wanted to see if fiber and Thr in the diet could affect how chicks responded to a coccidiosis challenge. Coccidiosis is a parasitical disease of the intestinal tract caused by protozoa of the genus Eimeria maxima, which is responsible for major economic losses in the poultry industry.

Right now, there are few advancements in coccidiosis vaccine development, so we tried to develop dietary approaches to assist the bird through a coccidiosis challenge, Dilger said. Our hypothesis was that by providing adequate threonine, the bird would have better immune defenses through improved gut function and immunity.

Chicks received either a diet supplemented with pectin or a Thr-deficient control diet and either 75 percent or 125 percent of the previously determined optimal Thr supplement of 6.8 g/kg. Within each dietary treatment, one group of chicks was inoculated with E. maxima; the other was not.

The goal was to determine the interaction between dietary fiber and dietary threonine, knowing that pectin was going to negatively affect digestion and threonine was going to positively affect intestinal health, Dilger explained.

Growth and feed efficiency were monitored for 16 days; then ileal tissue, mucosal scrapings, and the ceca (the part of the digestive tract used for water absorption and fermentation) were collected. Researchers looked at growth performance, morphological changes in the intestine, changes in the cecal environment, and gene expression in the ceca and mucosa.

The most important part of the story was the cytokine response to the acute coccidiosis infection, Dilger said.

Cytokines regulate how the immune system communicates with the rest of the body and adjust the immune response. Interleukin-12 (IL-12) expression in the ceca was increased in birds fed the control diet with high threonine. Interleukin-1 beta expression increased with infection but only in birds fed the low-Thr diet.

Expression of interferon gamma (IFNG), a protein made and released in response to the presence of pathogens, increased in the ileal mucosa of birds fed high Thr, and was highest in the uninfected chicks. It increased with infection but only in control-fed birds

The researchers concluded that while pectin had some protective effects against coccidiosis infection, Thr supplementation had an even greater influence on the intestinal immune response and helped to maintain growth of chicks infected with coccidiosis. This study and others being conducted in Dilger's lab highlight the potential for using nutritional strategies to manage poultry and swine diseases.

Creeping epidemic of obesity hits Asia Pacific region

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Sophia Antipolis, 21 February 2013: Over eating, sedentary lifestyles, cultural attitudes, and lack of prevention programmes are to blame for the rising epidemic of obesity in the Asia Pacific region. Overweight and obesity has quadrupled in China and societies still label people of healthy weight as poor.

Prevention will be an important theme at the 19th Asian Pacific Congress of Cardiology held 21-24 February 2013 in Pattaya, Thailand. Experts from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) will lead a one day collaborative programme on 23 February.

Professor Kui-Hian Sim, President Elect of the Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology, said: In many of the countries in Asia Pacific the malnutrition problem nowadays is not undernutrition it is overnutrition, which has resulted in overweight and obesity.

He added: Asia Pacific has developed rapidly and technological advances mean that children now spend too much time on the internet and mobile devices so they don't take up much physical activity. The Asian culture revolves around food as a way of showing hospitality because in the past there was a lot of famine. As a result there is a cultural perception that if you're not fat or obese then you are not well off.

The Asia Pacific Cohort Studies Collaboration (APCSC) found that the prevalence of overweight and obesity among 14 countries in the Asia Pacific region varied considerably by country.1 The prevalence of obesity (BMI>30k/m2) in men ranged from 0.3% in India and 1.3% in Indonesia to 13.8% in Mongolia and 19.3% in Australia. In women the lowest rates were found in India (0.6%), China and Japan (both 3.4%) and the highest rates in Australia (22.2%) and Mongolia (24.6%).

But Dr Rachel Huxley (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA), APCSC co-investigator, said: Although the absolute prevalence of obesity in Australia was considerably higher than that of China and Japan, the relative increases in the prevalence over the last 20 years, has been much greater in these two Asian countries than in Australia.

The combined prevalence of overweight and obesity increased by 46% in Japan from 16.7% in 1976-1980 to 24% in 2000 and by 414% in China from 3.7% in 1982 to 19% in 2002.

The APCSC researchers also calculated the population attributable fraction for cardiovascular disease due to overweight and obesity in these 14 countries. Taking China as an example, despite the relatively low prevalence of overweight and obesity, it accounted for just over 3% of fatal coronary heart disease and 3.5% fatal ischemic stroke. At the other end of the scale, overweight and obesity accounted for nearly 8% of coronary heart disease in Mongolia and over 9% in Australia. It also accounted for nearly 9% of ischaemic stroke in Mongolia and more than 10% in Australia.

Dr Huxley said: There is convincing evidence that a sedentary lifestyle (due to a combination of reduced physical activity in the workplace and during leisure time), combined with energy dense diets are the key drivers of the obesity epidemic. Increasing 'westernisation' of lower- and middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific region is associated with increasing gross domestic product (GDP) and the adoption of more westernized patterns of physical inactivity and diets richer in calories and fat. The influx of fast food, confectionary and soft drink companies into the region is likely to further exacerbate the obesity problem.

She added: In high income countries there is an inverse association between income/education with obesity, whereas in lower-middle income countries the reverse is more commonly found.

The longest ongoing cardiovascular epidemiological study in India found that over a 20 year period BMI and overweight increased in urban middle-SES populations.2 More education was significantly associated with an increase in overweight. The authors concluded: The process of disease transition has started in the Indian middle class and a decline fuelled by socioeconomic changes and increasing education is inevitable in this group.

NOAA adds red tide alerts to Beach Hazards Statements

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) NOAA has added a new service to alert the public when red tides threaten human health at Tampa Bay area beaches. The new alert is timely since many of southwest Florida's beaches are experiencing or are under threat of red tide.

The alert is part of a broader experimental initiative NOAA's National Weather Service has been testing since June 2012, called the Beach Hazards Statement, which also alerts the public for coastal hazards such as rip currents. The Tampa Bay weather forecast office is the first to issue the Beach Hazard Statements to provide coastal residents and visitors with information to protect their safety. NWS is partnering with NOAA's National Ocean Service to provide these alerts to the public.

Red tides can have significant environmental impacts and threaten the health of some people, said Richard Edwing, director of NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services. Currently, the National Ocean Service forecasts harmful algal blooms to give state and local organizations advanced warning and therefore more options to manage the impacts. Through this partnership with the National Weather Service, we can broaden public awareness about harmful algal blooms, their potential impacts and possible precautionary measures.

Red tide can cause acute respiratory problems for people, especially those suffering from asthma, emphysema or other chronic respiratory disorder. The Tampa Bay weather forecast office will issue a Beach Hazards Statement for red tide when its sister organization at NOAA's National Ocean Service forecasts a potential for moderate or high respiratory impacts along southwest Florida, extending from Levy County south to Lee County.

Red tide is the common term for the harmful algal bloom species, Karenia brevis. NOAA's National Ocean Service has been providing operational forecasts for harmful algal blooms of Karenia brevis in the Gulf of Mexico since 2004. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., provide NOAA with expertise and data to identify and track harmful algal blooms in the Gulf.

Beach Hazards Statements for harmful algal blooms will be a valuable supplement to the FWC's statewide red tide status reports, said Gil McRae, director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. We look forward to continuing to share our monitoring information with NOAA to enhance this important resource.

Beach Hazards Statements for the Tampa Bay area are found here, and will be broadcast on NOAA Weather Radio and other National Weather Service systems, for broader dissemination. The public is invited to comment on the usefulness of the Beach Hazard Statements and to help NOAA evaluate whether the statements should be used in other parts of the country.

University-developed omega-3-rich ground beef available soon

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Thanks to Kansas State University research, part of a healthy diet can include a hamburger rich with omega-3 fatty acids.

Jim Drouillard, professor of animal sciences and industry, developed a technique that enriches ground beef with omega-3 fatty acids -- fatty acids that have been shown to reduce heart disease, cholesterol and high blood pressure. The enriched ground beef is named GreatO Premium Ground Beef and is being sold through Manhattan, Kan.-based company NBO3 Technologies LLC. It will be available mid-February at select retailers in Buffalo, N.Y., and expand to leading retailers and restaurants nationwide later this year.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish and plant oils. The U.S. currently does not have a recommended daily intake of omega-3s, though many doctors and nutritionists recommend between 1,200-1,600 milligrams daily, depending on a person's age and health.

A quarter-pound hamburger made of the enriched ground beef has 200 milligrams of omega-3s and tastes the same as regular ground beef, Drouillard said. This makes the ground beef an alternative for people who want to add or increase their omega-3 fatty acids intake but do not want fish or supplements to do so.

As a society, Americans' consumption of fish, especially fish that contributes to these omega-3 fats, is quite low compared to other proteins, Drouillard said. Reasons for this include cost, access to fish and personal preference. Americans do, however, like hamburgers. So if we can give people a hamburger that is rich in omega-3s, it's an alternative form of a product that they already eat and does not require a lifestyle change, which is difficult to make.

The health benefits of omega-3s are not limited to humans. Studies show that dairy and beef cattle with an enriched diet of flaxseed and other omega-3 rich grains have fewer respiratory diseases. The cattle also have higher fertility rates, which helps offset infertility among dairy cattle.

The technology to enrich ground beef with omega-3s is a spinoff of flaxseed research Drouillard began in 1998. Drouillard and his students studied flax for several of its omega-3 fatty acids that may suppress inflammation and reduce diabetes in cattle. Research showed that omega-3 levels dramatically increased in the cattle as more flaxseed was introduced into their diet.

Keeping the omega-3s from becoming saturated fats in cattle's digestive system is a challenge, however. Microorganisms in the rumen -- the largest chamber in the cow's stomach -- modify most of the ingested fats and turn them into saturated fats. This causes ground beef to have low levels of omega-3s. Christian Alvarado Gilis, a doctoral candidate in animal sciences and industry, is researching how to improve omega-3 levels in cattle diets to further enhance the fat profile of beef. Gilis is from Chile.

According to Drouillard, substituting omega-3 fatty acids for saturated fats does not change the ground beef's flavor.

Knowing that there are a lot of desirable flavor characteristics associated with the fat in beef, we performed tons of sensory panel tests with Kansas State University's meat science faculty and with the department of human nutrition throughout the years to ensure that the flavor is not compromised, Drouillard said. We found that our panelists were never able to detect appreciable differences in the flavor profiles of the omega-3 rich beef and non-omega-3 beef, even though the fats are quite different.

The owners of NBO3 Technologies LLC have worked closely with Drouillard in developing the concept, and after more than a decade of research on improving the enrichment process, have started to distribute omega-3 enriched ground beef to retailers and food vendors.

The ground beef is part of the company's line of omega-3 enriched foods, which includes pork, chicken, cheese, milk, butter and ice cream. It will be the first ground beef to carry the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's seal of approval for containing omega-3 fatty acids.

Todd Hansen, CEO of NBO3 Technologies LLC, said consumer response has been positive in test markets.

We have to leap two hurdles with GreatO Premium Ground Beef, which are that the omega-3 fatty acids are really in the beef and that it doesn't change the flavor, Hansen said. Based on our consumer response, we've cleared those hurdles. We really believe in the health aspect of this product and are using the slogan 'When Every Bite Counts' to emphasize that. I can't wait for consumers to have it available to them.

Iron deficiency and cognitive development: New insights from piglets

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) University of Illinois researchers have developed a model that uses neonatal piglets for studying infant brain development and its effect on learning and memory. To determine if the model is nutrient-sensitive, they have done some research on the effects of iron-deficient diets.

Iron deficiency is a major problem worldwide, said Rodney Johnson, professor of animal sciences and director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences. Infants who experience iron deficiency during the first 6 to 12 months of age can have irreversible developmental delays in cognition.

He said that, even in the United States, iron deficiency is a significant problem. Babies born to obese mothers are at risk for iron deficiency, said Johnson. Furthermore, the incidence of child obesity is increasing, and being overweight or obese is a risk factor for iron deficiency. Overweight toddlers are nearly three times more likely to suffer from iron deficiency than are those with a healthy weight.

Johnson and his collaborators took 2-day-old piglets and fed them one of three diets. The diet for the control group contained the recommended levels of iron, the second was mildly deficient, and the third was severely deficient.

The piglet brain grows to approximately half of its maximum volume in the first 4 weeks of life. It continues to grow rapidly for the next 8 weeks, which is very similar to the way that human infant brains grow in the postnatal period.

At 4 weeks, the researcher began testing the piglets in a T-shaped maze. In an acquisition phase, piglets were trained to locate a milk reward in a constant place in space as well as direction, using visual cues from outside the maze. Pigs on the control diet learned the task quite well.

Piglets provided the diet severely deficient in iron just didn't learn the task, Johnson said. It's a T-maze so they have a 50 percent chance of getting it right. Even after 6 days of training, they never performed above chance levels. The piglets given the mildly deficient diet showed intermediate performance, but their performance was not significantly different from that of piglets given the control diet.

In the second phase of the test, the reward location was reversed. The piglets were retested to assess reversal learning.

We changed the rules so the piglets had to change their strategy, Johnson explained. It's more demanding, cognitively speaking. The piglets fed an adequate diet learned this task very well. However, piglets fed a diet severely deficient in iron continued to perform poorly while those given a mildly deficient diet showed intermediate performance.

Johnson said that one of the strengths of this paper is that it shows that this test is sensitive to a nutrient in a dose-dependent fashion.

The researchers then examined iron levels in different parts of the brain. They found reduced iron levels in the hippocampus, a brain region that is important for spatial learning and memory, of pigs in both experimental groups.

Johnson said that this work highlights a new translational model for studying micronutrient deficiencies. Traditional rodent models are less suited for examining these kinds of questions because they cannot be weaned early and placed on experimental diets. Pigs, however, are a precocial species, which means that their motor and sensory skills are quite well developed at birth. This facilitates early weaning and behavioral testing.

Johnson has recently received a 5-year NIH grant to do further work with this model. We are investigating the effects of maternal viral infection during pregnancy, he said. At a critical period during pregnancy, gilts are inoculated with a virus that causes pneumonia. When the piglets are born, we study their brain and cognitive development.

Feeding the world fairly

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Fair access to good food is a challenge as old as civilization, and failing to meet it contributed to the fall of the French monarchy ('let them eat cake'), Babylon, Athens and the Roman Empire. As the global populace climbs toward an expected nine billion by 2050, an $800,000 grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation will fund collaborative work by three divisions of Johns Hopkins University to develop ethical guidelines to help meet the challenge in our day.

There is something profoundly wrong about a world in which nearly two billion people are undernourished while another two billion people are overweight, says Ruth Faden, PhD, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, who, along with Alan Goldberg, PhD, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Robert Thompson, PhD, of Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, will lead the project. This collaboration among Johns Hopkins institutions will examine one of the fundamental obstacles to achieving global food security: profound disagreement about what it means to feed the world ethically, Faden says.

The project leaders will recruit diverse experts and stakeholders from around the world to characterize differences in ethical assumptions and aims, and to search for moral common ground, Faden says. Participants will include those involved in high and low yield farming, agricultural technology and the welfare of animals, the environment and workers.

We expect that there will be negotiation and conflict among competing interests, but all the players need to be at the table, says Thompson. A working, weeklong conference is planned for 2014.

The goal of this meeting is to produce a document of shared moral principles or commitments that will provide the understanding of the basic issues that must be included to identify fair or ethical food guidelines, says Goldberg.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation funds diverse non-profit organizations and projects around the world that have the potential for broad, lasting and positive social impact, according to the foundation. In the 1930s, Niarchos expanded his family's grain business by thinking globally, buying the ships that transported wheat.

Mark Twain wrote that hunger is the handmaid of genius; I do believe that if we bring committed people together and treat these issues with the gravity they deserve, we will find a way to narrow what are now broad differences of opinion on a profoundly important question: how to feed everyone, ethically. It is doable, Faden says.

Michael Barnett of Boston College named Professor of the Year for Massachusetts

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Boston College Lynch School of Education Associate Professor of Science Education and Technology G. Michael Barnett has been named the 2012 Massachusetts Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in recognition of his teaching excellence and positive influence on the lives and careers of students. It is the only national program that recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring.

Barnett's focus is on urban science education, specifically exciting undergraduates and the youngsters they student teach about STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields through projects that utilize technology and link to real-world issues.

In his teaching, Barnett uses innovative tools such as indoor hydroponic vertical farms where BC undergraduates work with their K-12 students to grow vegetables and then sell the produce at their own farmer's markets. Through the project, which takes the participants from seed to market, his students learn about topics such as environmental science, engineering, botany, nutrition, sustainability and economics. Barnett has set up vertical farms in Boston elementary schools, high schools and a community center.

This month, he launched a National Science Foundation-funded indoor hydroponic gardening youth initiative in partnership with the Salvation Army's Kroc Center in Dorchester and the non-profit STEM Garden Institute. The out-of-school project will serve hundreds of middle and high school students in Boston.

I try to get everybody excited about science, from K-12 students to college students to the general public, said Barnett.

A self-described recovering astrophysicist from Kentucky, Barnett caught the teaching bug when he was tapped to teach a lesson about the moon to immensely inquisitive fifth-graders while he was working on his PhD in astrophysics.

Barnett says he is always looking for ways to engage students. You have to reach students where they are, he said. This philosophy has led him and his research team to develop a mobile app called Touch Tree that allows users to identify trees and their ecological value.

Rock star and the most genuinely inspiring role model of effective instruction are just some of the words students used to describe Barnett in his nomination papers.

[Professor Barnett] loves educating people on how to teach science. A self-proclaimed technical geek, he consistently encourages his students to find way to put new technologies in the hands of their students, including some that I have incorporated in my high school classroom, wrote former student Andrew Trossello who now teaches chemistry and biology at a Boston high school.

His teaching is about more than teaching future science teachers. He wants to get non-science majors interested in learning about science. If I can get non-science majors interested in how science works and want to read the New York Times Science section, then I consider that a success, Barnett added.

Limiting carbs to dinner reduces diabetes and cardiovascular risks

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) An experimental diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner could benefit people suffering from severe and morbid obesity, according to new research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The diet influences secretion patters of hormones responsible for hunger and satiety, as well as hormones associated with metabolic syndrome. In this way the diet can help dieters persist over the long run, and reduce risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The research was carried out by research student Sigal Sofer under the auspices of Prof. (Emeritus) Zecharia Madar, at the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition at the Hebrew University's Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment. (Prof. Madar is now Chief Scientist at Israel's Ministry of Education.)

Sofer randomly assigned 78 police officers to either the experimental diet (carbohydrates at dinner) or a control weight loss diet (carbohydrates throughout the day). 63 subjects finished the six-month program.

The researchers examined the experimental diet's effect on the secretion of three hormones: leptin, considered to be the satiety hormone, whose level in the blood is usually low during the day and high during the night; ghrelin, considered the hunger hormone, whose level in the blood is usually high during the day and low during the night; and adiponectin, considered the link between obesity, insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome, whose curve is low and flat in obese people.

The idea came about from studies on Muslims during Ramadan, when they fast during the day and eat high-carbohydrate meals in the evening, that showed the secretion curve of leptin was changed, explained Prof. Madar.

The researchers found that the innovative dietary manipulation led to changes in daylight hormonal profiles in favor of the dieters: the satiety hormone leptin's secretion curve became convex during daylight hours with a nadir in the late day; the hunger hormone ghrelin's secretion curve became concave, peaking only in the evening hours; and the curve of adiponectin, considered the link between obesity, insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome, was elevated. At the same time this dietary pattern led to lower hunger scores, and better anthropometric (weight, abdominal circumference and body fat), biochemical (blood sugar, blood lipids) and inflammatory outcomes compared to the control group.

The findings suggest there is an advantage in concentrating carbohydrate intake in the evening, especially for people at risk of developing diabetes or cardiovascular disease due to obesity. The findings lay the basis for a more appropriate dietary alternative for those people who have difficulty persisting in diets over time, said Prof. Madar. The next step is to understand the mechanisms that led to the results obtained.

Secondary osteoporosis: More than what meets the eye!

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) An SGH study has revealed that considering all osteoporotic patients as having simple osteoporosis and treating all of them alike by putting them on potent long term medication without finding out the cause of their osteoporosis may be ineffective and in most cases downright harmful.

Secondary osteoporosis is a rather common but lesser known type of osteoporosis that affects men and women of any age. It is caused by certain medical conditions that result in bone loss or interfere with development of peak bone mass. Contributors of secondary osteoporosis include conditions such as hypercalciuria, hyperthyroidism, hyperparathyroidism, vitamin D deficiency and hypogonadism. The study is the first of its kind in South East Asia.

To find out how common these secondary osteoporosis contributors are in our population, a team led by Dr Manju Chandran, Programme Director, Osteoporosis and Bone Metabolism Unit at SGH, evaluated 400 patients over two years. The study found that almost half of the patients with osteoporosis had one or more secondary contributors. Secondary osteoporosis, if not identified and treated, can lead to devastating consequences both in terms of fractures as well as from the disease that caused the osteoporosis in the first place.

Conditions that contribute to secondary osteoporosis may not be obvious without detailed history taking and laboratory testing. The study revealed that 22 per cent of the patients with a secondary cause had increased calcium excretion in the urine, which in most cases could be attributed to a high salt diet. Another 18.5 per cent had vitamin D deficiency, 10.1 per cent had hyperthyroidism and nearly 10 per cent of the men had hypogonadism or low sex hormone levels.

In our study, the prevalence of secondary osteoporosis in men was found to be high, almost 63 per cent. Our recommendation is for all men with osteoporosis to have some basic laboratory testing to look at their levels of male hormone, urine calcium, vitamin D, thyroid function, etc., said Dr Chandran, who is also Consultant, Department of Endocrinology, SGH and President, Endocrine and Metabolic Society of Singapore.

For post-menopausal women, laboratory testing may not be feasible or cost effective as post-menopausal osteoporosis is very common. However, directed testing based on their bone mineral density loss can be done to determine the appropriate treatment for these patients. The appropriate treatment for secondary osteoporosis is treating the condition, which caused it in the first place and not antiosteoporosis medicines, Dr Chandran added.

It is estimated that about 55,000 to 60,000 female Singaporeans above the age of 50 suffer from osteoporosis and that excludes men who are also hit by the disease. While secondary osteoporosis may not be completely reversible, the right treatment can halt the progress of bone loss and prevent excessive fracturing and in some cases even save the life of the patient.

Musculoskeletal Health Roundtable recommends action to sustain active and healthy aging

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and the Cyprus Society Against Osteoporosis and Musculoskeletal Diseases today hosted an event in Nicosia, Cyprus to call attention to the importance of musculoskeletal health for Europe's growing population of senior citizens.

The Roundtable is held in 2012 during the European Year for Active Ageing which aims to recognize and promote the important contribution of Europe's 30 million senior citizens to society. The event was hosted in conjunction with the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the European Union, with an opening address from the Cyprus Minister of Health, Dr. Stavros Malas.

Age-related chronic diseases, and in particular musculoskeletal health issues such as fragility fractures, osteoarthritis and sarcopenia, have a far-reaching impact on the health status of Europe's older population. Fragility fractures are common in older adults and at the age of 50 up to one in two women and one in five men will go on to suffer a fragility fracture.

The economic burden of fragility fractures exceeds that of many other age-related diseases, including stroke, MS and Parkinson's disease. Fractures, particularly of the vertebrae and hip, can result in substantial pain and suffering, disability, loss of quality of life and even early death, with 20% dying in the year following the fracture. Thirty-three per cent of seniors who suffer a hip fracture become physically impaired and lose their ability to live independently.

IOF President John Kanis commented, A recent IOF study revealed that, in Europe's five largest countries and Sweden alone, some 2.5 million new fragility fractures occur annually, or the equivalent of 280 fractures per hour. Osteoporosis and fractures occur primarily in seniors and prevalence generally increases with age. This is a cause for concern due to the projected growth in Europe's ageing population. Between the years 2000 and 2050, the population of seniors aged 65 and over has been projected to increase by 55% in women and 81% in men, and the increase in the numbers of seniors aged 80+ will be a staggering 160% and 239% respectively.

He added, We must brace ourselves for a tremendous increase in age-related musculoskeletal diseases and fragility fractures. Effective measures to mitigate the socio- and health-economic burden of chronic diseases in all countries of the EU are urgently required.

The upcoming publication of an 'EU Policy Scorecard' which will audit and compare osteoporosis-related data and policies in the EU is eagerly anticipated as it will highlight the areas and countries which require most attention by health policy officials. Another important focus of the IOF and other organizations worldwide is the improvement of secondary fracture prevention. IOF has launched the 'Capture the Fracture' programme to facilitate and promote the implementation of coordinator-based, multidisciplinary models of care in hospitals and clinics around the world. Such models of care have been shown to be the most effective in reducing the rates of secondary fractures.

Professor Juliet Compston, chair of the the EU Osteoporosis Consultation Panel, explained, People who have experienced a fracture are high-risk candidates for further fractures, and without treatment many will go on to suffer a cycle of debilitating and life-threatening fractures. Unfortunately, some 80% of fragility fracture patients are sent home without assessment or treatment for osteoporosis. Yet, osteoporosis treatment for fracture patients has been shown to reduce the overall incidence of costly hip fractures by 20-25%.

Dr. Kyriacos Christofi and Dr. George Georgiades, president and vice-president, respectively, of the Cyprus Society against Osteoporosis and Musculoskeletal Diseases, highlighted the need for policy support for large scale epidemiological fracture studies and the need for a Fracture Registry in Cyprus.

Given the immense importance of musculoskeletal health to the independence and quality of life of senior citizens, Roundtable participants urged health policy officials throughout Europe, in this EU Year of Active Ageing, to take immediate action to promote healthy ageing and to implement effective models of post-fracture care that will reduce the impact of secondary fractures.

From textbook to flexbook: Professor uses new collaborative tool in the classroom

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University professor is gaining attention for creating a textbook replacement that saves students money and provides instructors with teaching flexibility.

Brian Lindshield, assistant professor of human nutrition, has developed an online form of textbook called a flexbook. His flexbook is one of three nominees for an Education-Portal.com People's Choice Award for Most Open Resource.

Instead of buying a textbook, students in Lindshield's human nutrition course use a flexbook titled Kansas State University Human Nutrition (HN 400) Flexbook, which is free for students to use. A flexbook is an open collaborative platform for open course materials. Lindshield created the flexbook to help students save money on course materials and to help students and instructors gain access to rapidly changing information.

I believe the courses that can most benefit from a flexbook are the lower-level, high enrollment, textbook utilizing courses, Lindshield said. The content in these courses is more general, and there are likely resources and material available that can be used to make an open educational resource for them.

Lindshield teaches more than 100 on-campus students every spring semester and approximately 45 online students in his human nutrition course each semester. He used a wiki the first time he taught the course in 2009. After feedback from students, Lindshield developed the flexbook in Google Docs to share with his students.

Because flexbooks are designed to be read online, they contain links to videos, animations, relevant news stories, websites and other online material, Lindshield said. A flexbook is designed to have more figures and visuals than huge amounts of text.

To meet students' various learning styles, Lindshield created four ways to share the flexbook with his students: through Google Docs, a Web link, a PDF posted on K-State Online or a print copy that students could either get from a copy center or print themselves. Students do not have to choose only one of the four ways, and the majority of them access the flexbook in multiple ways, Lindshield said. The hard copy of the flexbook is the least-used version.

In addition to saving students textbook costs, flexbooks have learning advantages. Lindshield said that students create flexnotes, where they take the flexbook and add comments and notes from class. Flexbooks also help instructors because it is a living, evolving resource that can be easily updated.

There are times students have told me they didn't understand a certain concept in the flexbook, Lindshield said. I have been able to make changes and get their feedback so that it's clear to them and future students. As an instructor, making and updating the flexbook continues to make me reflect on everything that I include in the course.

Flexbooks also provide instructors with collaborative opportunities. Lindshield's flexbook is being used for a course at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, where an instructor is using the flexbook and other resources to replace a previously used textbook.

Instructors can customize flexbooks to match what they teach, Lindshield said. The collaborative nature of flexbooks means that instructors of similar courses or members of professional societies can work together to make a base flexbook, then each instructor can make a customized flexbook off of that for their course.

Lindshield spent hundreds of hours creating the flexbook, but he was also developing the course at the same time. Lindshield noted that keeping the flexbook updated requires minimal effort because he usually updates the flexbook as he is preparing to teach class. He continues to refine the content, organization and look of the book.

Lindshield has conducted student surveys with his on-campus and online students to obtain their feedback and find ways to improve the flexbook. He has received positive reviews. In the survey, the majority of students said they preferred the flexbook to buying a traditional textbook because they appreciate the affordability, flexibility and features of the flexbook. Online students did use the flexbook more than on-campus students and the online students reported using the online components -- such as videos and animations -- more.

Lindshield encourages interested professors and instructors to try flexbooks in their courses and he suggests collaborating and obtaining student input when making a flexbook.

Given the time involved, it was important for me to have a vision for what the ultimate goal was going to be and to take satisfaction in the small steps I was completing toward that goal, Lindshield said.

UIC study examines exercise and weight loss for older adults with osteoarthritis

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The University of Illinois at Chicago has been awarded a $3 million grant to study the effectiveness of two community-based health promotion programs for older adults with osteoarthritis.

The research is funded by the National Institute on Aging.

The study will compare Fit and Strong!, an evidence-based physical activity and health behavior change program, with Fit and Strong! Plus, the traditional program with an added weight management/dietary component.

Fit and Strong! has proven effective for older adults with osteoarthritis, the most common chronic condition and the primary cause of disability in older adults.

Fit and Strong! can improve joint stiffness, pain and function, anxiety/depression, lower extremity strength and gait speed and enhance maintenance of physical activity in older adults for up to 18 months, said Susan Hughes, co-principal investigator of the project and co-director of the Center for Research on Health and Aging at UIC's Institute for Health Research and Policy.

While the traditional program has been very successful, we felt that we needed to address the underlying weight issues that cause or exacerbate lower extremity osteoarthritis, Hughes said.

In the new study, researchers will enroll 400 adults ages 60 and older with lower extremity osteoarthritis who have a body mass index of between 25 and 50. Half will be enrolled in Fit and Strong! and half in Fit and Strong! Plus.

Participants in Fit and Strong! Plus will participate in the traditional program and will also receive dietary and weight loss interactive sessions. The goal is to achieve a minimum 5 percent weight loss by increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables, decreasing saturated fats and sugar sweetened drinks, reducing overall calorie consumption, and learning to manage triggers that can lead to overeating.

The weight loss component is adapted from a successful weight loss trial funded by the National Cancer Institute that was conducted by Marian Fitzgibbon, co-principal investigator of the project and deputy director of UIC's Institute for Health Research and Policy.

Participants who are randomly assigned to Fit and Strong! Plus will learn strategies to increase their intake of fruits and vegetables and whole grains as well as monitoring their food intake. Participants will also learn more about what may be triggers for overeating and mindless eating that can contribute to weight gain, said Fitzgibbon, who is also professor of medicine in the UIC College of Medicine.

Fit and Strong! was developed by Hughes and is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Administration on Aging. The program is used at 54 sites in Illinois, North Carolina, West Virginia and Florida.

The program provides 60 minutes of exercise and 30 minutes of education three times a week for eight weeks.

The focus is on making exercises easy to do, developing individual routines, and reinforcing new behaviors, said Hughes, professor of community health sciences in the UIC School of Public Health.

The U.S. is spending billions of dollars on hip and knee replacements and there is an urgent need to develop effective and affordable solutions that can be implemented in the community, according to Hughes.

UIC researchers will partner with the Chicago Park District to conduct the study at three sites: Eckhart Park, Washington Park and Columbus Park. Nationally certified exercise instructors will be trained to conduct the programming.

All participants will be evaluated at two, six, 12, 18 and 24 months. The researchers will assess dietary changes, weight loss, exercise participation, measurement of osteoarthritis symptoms, anxiety and depression.

The researchers will also analyze Medicare claims data for participants before and after the intervention to evaluate health care use and cost.

Co-investigators are Carol Braunschweig, Richard Campbell, H. Justina Chang, Pankaja Desai, Gail Huber, and Denise Hynes of UIC.

The project is supported by grant number 1R01AG039374 from the National Institute on Aging.

Piglets in mazes provide insights into human cognitive development

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) URBANA -- Events that take place early in life almost certainly have consequences for later cognitive development. Establishing the connections is difficult, however, because human infants cannot be used as laboratory subjects.

Rodney Johnson and his collaborators have developed an alternative model for studying infant brain development. Assistant professor Ryan Dilger and I became interested in establishing the neonatal piglet as a model of human brain and cognitive development 3 or 4 years ago, he said.

The idea came to Johnson when a former student, who was working for an infant formula company, asked about finding ways to determine differences in cognitive development between breast-fed infants and infants fed on formula.

Human breast milk is the gold standard, but not every infant can be breast fed. A major goal for many infant formula companies is to improve the formulation to capture all of the benefits of breast milk, he explained.

Johnson and his group had been working with rodent models to study learning and memory; they also had done some research looking at infectious disease in pigs. They wondered if it would be possible to develop tests to look at learning and memory using neonatal piglets.

It seemed like a reasonable idea because the growth and development of the piglet brain is similar to that of the human brain. The brain growth spurt is a perinatal event in both humans and pigs. At birth, the human brain is about 25 percent of adult size. In the first 2 years of life, it reaches 85 to 90 percent of adult size. The piglet brain grows in a similar way in a shorter time.

Johnson's team first developed structural MRI methods for quantifying brain volume in the neonatal piglet. They then used these techniques to determine total brain and brain region volumes in a cohort of male and female domestic pigs, taking repeated measurements every 4 weeks starting at 2 weeks of age and finishing at near sexual maturity at 24 weeks of age.

They found that at 4 weeks, the piglet brain had grown to approximately 50 percent of its maximum volume, and it continued to grow rapidly for the next 8 weeks. Human infant brains grow in a similar way in the postnatal period. The results suggested that environmental insults during this period could affect brain structure and function.

The researchers' next task was to develop a test to assess the piglets' learning and memory, using a T-maze. They thought that this would be easy. They were wrong.

It actually turned out to be very complicated because there were a lot of things that went wrong that we didn't predict, said Johnson. For example, when we first started these studies, we used things like Skittles and apple slices as a reward because that's what people using older pigs had done.

Helping pigs to digest phosphorus

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) URBANA -- Phosphorus is a vital nutrient for pig growth, but pigs do not always digest it well. Research conducted at the University of Illinois has determined how adding various levels of the enzyme phytase to the diet improves how pigs digest the phosphorus in four different feed ingredients. Improving phosphorus digestibility has positive implications for producers' bottom lines as well as for the environment.

The majority of the phosphorus in plant feed ingredients is bound in phytate, said U of I animal sciences professor Hans Stein. It is difficult for pigs to utilize that phosphorus because they cannot hydrolyze that phytate molecule. There is an exogenous enzyme called phytase that helps the pigs hydrolyze that phosphorus bond from phytate so the digestibility is increased.

However, there are no data on the response to different levels of phytase in the diet. It's not known if we need to add 500, or 1,000, or 1,500 units of phytase to get a maximum response, and it's also not known if the response is the same when we use different feed ingredients, Stein said.

Stein's team tested the digestibility of phosphorus in conventional corn grain, corn germ, distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), and high-protein distillers dried grains (DDG). They tested each ingredient with no phytate and with 500 units, 1,000 units, and 1,500 units of added phytate.

Supplementation with 500, 1,000, and 1,500 units of phytate increased phosphorus digestibility from 40.9 percent in corn grain with no added phytate to 67.5, 64.5, and 74.9 percent, respectively. Phosphorus digestibility in corn germ increased from 40.7 percent to 59.0, 64.4, and 63.2 percent, respectively. Digestibility of phosphorus in DDGS increased from 76.9 percent to 82.9, 82.5, and 83.0 percent, respectively, but the increase was not significant. Phosphorus digestibility in high protein DDG increased from 77.1 percent to 88.0, 84.1, and 86.9 percent, respectively.

What we discovered was that for corn and corn germ, we had a low digestibility without phytase, but as we added phytase to the diet, we increased the digestibility quite dramatically, Stein said.

For DDGS and high-protein DDG, the result was quite different. Because these two ingredients have been fermented, some of those phytate bonds are hydrolyzed in the ethanol plant and therefore, less of the phosphorus is bound to phytate in DDGS and high-protein DDG.

When we added phytase to DDGS, we did not see a significant increase in digestibility because the digestibility was already very high. And the same was true for HP DDG, said Stein. What this tells us is that the effect of phytase depends on the particular ingredient. If it's an ingredient that has a lot of phosphorus bound to phytate, we see a nice response, but if it doesn't have much phosphorus bound to phytate, we don't see nearly as much of a response.

The second finding was that the response to phytase is not linear. The response to the initial 500 units of phytase is much greater than if we add another 500 units or another 500 units after that, said Stein. It's a curvilinear response, even for the ingredients where a good response is obtained.

The researchers developed equations to predict the response to every level of phytase supplementation up to 1,500 units.

This research will help producers and feed companies to increase the digestibility of phosphorus in ingredients they are already feeding, thus avoiding the expense of adding dicalcium phosphate or monocalcium phosphate to swine diets.

With current prices, it's less expensive to use phytase than it is to use dicalcium phosphate or monocalcium phosphate, Stein pointed out. Use of phytase to improve phosphorus digestibility also reduces the amount of phosphorus excreted in feces, which in turn reduces the environmental impact of swine production.

Stein's lab is continuing its research into phytase supplementation and is currently testing different sources of canola meal and soybean meal. He and his team plan to conduct similar research for all major feed ingredients used in U.S. swine diets.

The study was published in a recent issue of the

Rising carbon dioxide in atmosphere also speeds carbon loss from forest soils, IU-led research finds

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerate carbon cycling and soil carbon loss in forests, new research led by an Indiana University biologist has found.

The new evidence supports an emerging view that although forests remove a substantial amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, much of the carbon is being stored in living woody biomass rather than as dead organic matter in soils.

Richard P. Phillips, lead author on the paper and an assistant professor of biology in the IU College of Arts and Sciences, said that after nearly two decades of research on forest ecosystem responses to global change, some of the uncertainty has been lifted about how forests are storing carbon in the wake of rising carbon dioxide levels.

It's been suggested that as trees take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a greater amount of carbon will go to roots and fungi to acquire nutrients, but our results show that little of this carbon accumulates in soil because the decomposition of root and fungal detritus is also increased, he said.

Carbon stored in soils, as opposed to in the wood of trees, is desirable from a management perspective in that soils are more stable over time, so carbon can be locked away for hundreds to thousands of years and not contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.

The research was conducted at the Duke Forest Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment site in North Carolina. At this site, mature loblolly pine trees were exposed to increased levels of carbon dioxide for 14 years, making it one of the longest-running carbon dioxide enrichment experiments in the world. Researchers were able to calculate the age of the carbon cycling through the soil by growing roots and fungi into mesh bags that contained uniquely labeled soils. The soils were then analyzed for their organic composition.

The authors also report that nitrogen cycled faster in this forest as the demand for nutrients by trees and microbes became greater under elevated CO2.

The growth of trees is limited by the availability of nitrogen at this site, so it makes sense that trees are using the 'extra' carbon taken up under elevated CO2 to prime microbes to release nitrogen bound up in organic matter, Phillips said. What is surprising is that the trees seem to be getting much of their nitrogen by decomposing root and fungal detritus that is less than a year old.

The two-fold effects of microbial priming, where microbes are stimulated to decompose old soil organic matter via an increase in new carbon and other energy sources, and the faster turnover of recently fixed root and fungal carbon, are enough to explain the rapid carbon and nitrogen cycling that is occurring at the Duke Forest FACE site.

We call it the RAMP hypothesis -- Rhizo-Accelerated Mineralization and Priming -- and it states that root-induced changes in the rates of microbial processing of carbon and nitrogen are key mediators of long-term ecosystem responses to global change, Phillips added.

Most ecosystem models have limited representations of roots, and none of them include processes such as priming. Our results demonstrate that interactions between roots and soil microbes play an underappreciated role in determining how much carbon is stored and how fast nitrogen is cycled. So including these processes in models should lead to improved projections of long-term carbon storage in forests in response to global environmental change' he said.

Long-term calcium and vitamin D supplement use may be linked to increased risk of kidney stones

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Calcium and vitamin D supplements are associated with high calcium levels in the blood and urine, which could increase the risk of kidney stones, a new study finds. The results will be presented Tuesday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston.

The use of calcium and vitamin D supplementation may not be as benign as previously thought, said principal investigator J. Christopher Gallagher, M.D., professor and director of the Bone Metabolism Unit at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, NE. Pending further information, people should not exceed the guidelines suggested by the Institute of Medicine, which are 800 international units of vitamin D, and 800-1,200 milligrams per day of calcium.

Taking vitamin supplements has become a widespread practice throughout many parts of the world. In the United States alone, it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of women take vitamin supplements, with calcium and vitamin D among the most commonly used. Despite their popularity, the precise health effects of long-term calcium and vitamin D supplementation remain unclear.

Previous research has indicated that high levels of calcium in the urine, or hypercalciuria, may increase the risk of kidney stones. Elevated calcium in the blood, or hypercalcemia, is associated with many complications, including bone and kidney problems.

Gallagher and study lead author Vinod Yalamanchili, M.D., research fellow in Creighton University's Bone Metabolism Unit, studied 163 healthy, postmenopausal women between the ages of 57 and 85 years. All participants were randomly assigned to receive a vitamin D supplement of 400, 800, 1600, 2400, 3200, 4000, or 4800 international units a day, or placebo. Then, their calcium intake was increased from an initial intake of 691 to 1,200-1,400 milligrams per day. Investigators measured blood and urinary calcium levels at the beginning of the study, and then every three months for one year.

They found that approximately 48 participants, or 33 percent, developed high urinary levels of calcium at some time in the study. These participants had 88 episodes of high urinary calcium. Hypercalciuria has been linked to an increased risk of kidney stones identified in previous studies. No incidents of kidney stones were reported during this one-year study, which was funded by The National Institute on Aging.

Additionally, about 10 percent of study subjects developed high blood levels of calcium. This translates into 25 episodes among 16 participants. In both cases, the increases were unrelated to the dosage of vitamin D.

Because of the unpredictable response, it is not clear whether it is the extra calcium, the vitamin D or both together that cause these problems, Gallagher said. However, it is possible that long-term use of supplements causes hypercalciuria and hypercalcemia, and this can contribute to kidney stones. For these reasons, it is important to monitor blood and urine calcium levels in people who take these supplements on a long-term basis. This is rarely done in clinical practice.

Treating vitamin D deficiency may improve depression

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Women with moderate to severe depression had substantial improvement in their symptoms of depression after they received treatment for their vitamin D deficiency, a new study finds. The case report series will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston.

Because the women did not change their antidepressant medications or other environmental factors that relate to depression, the authors concluded that correction of the patients' underlying shortage of vitamin D might be responsible for the beneficial effect on depression.

Vitamin D may have an as-yet-unproven effect on mood, and its deficiency may exacerbate depression, said Sonal Pathak, MD, an endocrinologist at Bayhealth Medical Center in Dover, Del. If this association is confirmed, it may improve how we treat depression.

Pathak presented the research findings in three women, who ranged in age from 42 to 66. All had previously diagnosed major depressive disorder, also called clinical depression, and were receiving antidepressant therapy. The patients also were being treated for either Type 2 diabetes or an underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism).

Because the women had risk factors for vitamin D deficiency, such as low vitamin D intake and poor sun exposure, they each underwent a 25-hydroxyvitamin D blood test. For all three women, the test found low levels of vitamin D, ranging from 8.9 to 14.5 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL), Pathak reported. Levels below 21 ng/mL are considered vitamin D deficiency, and normal vitamin D levels are above 30 ng/mL, according to The Endocrine Society.

Over eight to 12 weeks, oral vitamin D replacement therapy restored the women's vitamin D status to normal. Their levels after treatment ranged from 32 to 38 ng/mL according to the study abstract.

After treatment, all three women reported significant improvement in their depression, as found using the Beck Depression Inventory. This 21-item questionnaire scores the severity of sadness and other symptoms of depression. A score of 0 to 9 indicates minimal depression; 10 to 18, mild depression; 19 to 29, moderate depression; and 30 to 63, severe depression.

One woman's depression score improved from 32 before vitamin D therapy to 12, a change from severe to mild depression. Another woman's score fell from 26 to 8, indicating she now had minimal symptoms of depression. The third patient's score of 21 improved after vitamin D treatment to 16, also in the mild range.

Other studies have suggested that vitamin D has an effect on mood and depression, but there is a need for large, good-quality, randomized controlled clinical trials to prove whether there is a real causal relationship, Dr Pathak said.

Screening at-risk depressed patients for vitamin D deficiency and treating it appropriately may be an easy and cost-effective adjunct to mainstream therapies for depression, she said.

Low vitamin D level is linked to greater chance of risk factors for Type 2 diabetes

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new study presents more evidence of a possible link between low vitamin D levels and a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The results will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston.

The study found an inverse relationship between the level of vitamin D in the blood and the presence of the metabolic syndrome, which is a group of risk factors that increases the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. People with the highest blood levels of vitamin D had a 48 percent lower risk of having the metabolic syndrome than did those with the lowest vitamin D levels, the authors reported.

This association has been documented before, but our study expands the association to people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, said the lead author, Joanna Mitri, MD, a research fellow at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. These include minority groups that are already at higher risk of diabetes.

Furthermore, all study participants were at risk of developing diabetes because they had prediabetes, abnormally high blood sugar levels that are not yet high enough to be classified as diabetes. Prediabetes affects an estimated 79 million Americans ages 20 or older, according to 2010 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mitri and her co-investigators conducted the study using data from participants of the Diabetes Prevention Program, a large, now-completed study funded by the National Institutes of Health. They divided study subjects into three groups based on plasma 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, which is the most common way used to measure vitamin D status in the body, according to Mitri. The Institute of Medicine recommends a 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of 20 to 30 ng/mL as adequate for healthy people.

In the new study, the group with the highest levels of vitamin D had a median vitamin D concentration of 30.6 nanograms per milliliter, or ng/mL, and those in the lowest group had a median vitamin D concentration of 12.1 ng/mL. The risk of having the metabolic syndrome with a high vitamin D level was about one half the risk with a low vitamin D level, Mitri said.

The researchers also found an association between vitamin D status and some of the individual components of the metabolic syndrome, which includes a large waist size, low HDL (good) cholesterol, high triglycerides (fats in the blood), high blood pressure and high blood glucose (sugar). Study participants with the best vitamin D status had a smaller waist circumference, higher HDL cholesterol and lower blood sugar.

Mitri cautioned that their research does not prove that vitamin D deficiency causes Type 2 diabetes, or even that there is a link between the two conditions.

However, the metabolic syndrome is common, and progression to Type 2 diabetes is high, she said. If a causal relationship can be established in ongoing and planned studies of vitamin D, this link will be of public health importance, because vitamin D supplementation is easy and inexpensive.

Finding ways to feed pigs for less

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Results of a preliminary experiment conducted at the University of Illinois indicate that it may be possible to select pigs that can make efficient use of energy in less expensive feed ingredients, thus reducing diet costs.

Less expensive feed is usually higher in fiber than the corn-soy diets typically used in U.S. swine production, explained Hans H. Stein, professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, the white breeds that are used in commercial pork production use only about 40 percent of the insoluble fiber. If you can increase that number to 50 or 60 or 70 percent, then of course, you would get a much better use of the energy in those ingredients, Stein explained.

The white breeds have been selected for high efficiency and rapid gain for many, many generations, Stein continued. But that's all based on corn-soy diets. However, there are also indigenous breeds of pigs that have not been selected for commercial production, and these breeds have, therefore, not been fed the corn-soybean meal diets for as many generations as the white breeds.

Among those indigenous breeds are Meishan pigs, which have been raised in China for many centuries. Stein's hypothesis was that these pigs, which have not been selected for efficiency and rapid weight gain, would use fiber more efficiently than the white breeds.

Stein and his team compared the fiber digestion of Meishan pigs with that of two groups of Yorkshire pigs. They tested four diets that used high-fiber ingredients: distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), soybean hulls, sugar beet pulp, and pectin. When fed DDGS, the values for apparent total tract energy digestibility were higher for the Meishan pigs (83.5%) than for either weight-matched (77.3%) or age-matched (78.8%) Yorkshire pigs. Researchers observed no significant difference in energy digestibility for the other ingredients.

What we observed was that, particularly for the DDGS diets, the Meishans were quite a bit more effective at using that fiber, Stein said. That diet is high in insoluble dietary fiber. When we looked at more soluble fibers, there was no difference.

Although Meishan pigs would never be used for commercial pork production in the United States, the results indicate that differences exist among breeds of pigs. Thus, it is possible that differences also exist among the white breeds and that some may use fibers more efficiently than others.

Stein stressed that this study was preliminary and said that determining if white breeds can be bred to use insoluble fiber more efficiently will be quite costly because it requires selecting pigs for multiple generations. Stein said that he and colleagues at the University of Illinois' Institute for Genomic Biology are pursuing funding for further research.

I think it is exciting that there are some pigs that can use fiber better than we have thought in the past, and I think this will open up opportunities to think in different ways about how we can feed pigs economically, he said.

The study was published in a recent issue of the

Turmeric lowers post operative risk of a heart attack

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:40:02 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Turmeric may help lower heart attack risk in people post bypass surgery, thanks to curcumin, the yellow pigment present in the spice which has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Bypass surgery improves blood supply to the heart muscle. However, during the surgery that is usually performed with the heart stopped, the organ can be damaged by prolonged lack of blood flow, increasing the patient's risk of heart attack.

The new findings suggest that curcumins may reduce such risks when added to traditional drug treatments.

The results need to be confirmed through further research, said Wanwarang Wongcharoen from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, who led the study, the American Journal of Cardiology reported.

Researchers at the Thai university studied 121 patients who had non-emergency bypass surgery between 2009 and 2011. Half the patients were given one-gram curcumin capsules to take four times a day, starting three days before their surgery and continuing for five days afterwards. The other half took the same number of drug-free placebo capsules.

The researchers found that during their post-bypass hospital stays, 13 percent of the patients who'd been taking curcumins had a heart attack, compared to 30 percent in the placebo group.

After accounting for any initial pre-surgery differences, Wongcharoen and his colleagues calculated that people on curcumins had a 65 percent lower chance of heart attack.

It's very, very encouraging, said Bharat Aggarwal of the study. Aggarwal works with the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, which studies the use of curcumins in cancer therapy, according to the Daily Mail.

According to researchers, it is likely that the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of curcumin may have helped limit heart damage in the patients.

Approach to diabetes self-management too narrow, study suggests

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new study from researchers at Queen Mary, University of London reveals the many difficulties faced by people with diabetes in self-managing their disease.

People with diabetes have to invest a great deal of time and effort to manage their condition. This includes not only monitoring the level of sugar in their blood, organising their medication and following a restrictive diet but also social challenges such as negotiating relatives' input and gaining access to doctors when they need to.

In Britain the primary strategy for helping patients is a short educational course on how to self-manage the condition. The new research suggests that this approach is unlikely to succeed in isolation because it ignores the many factors that are outside the patients' control such as food labelling in restaurants, local availability of healthy foods and the expectations and behaviour of other people within family members, at school and at work.

Diabetes is an incurable disease which can have serious complications such as heart disease, kidney failure and blindness. It affects 2.6 million people in the UK and this figure is predicted to rise to four million by 2025.

Only around one per cent of a diabetic person's time is spent in the company of health professionals. The remaining 99 per cent of the time, the patient is managing their own diabetes.

The research was an 'ethnographic' study which looked in depth at a small group of 30 people with diabetes. Their ages ranged from 5 to 88 and they included different ethnic groups to reflect the fact that diabetes is particularly common in South Asians. Researchers shadowed the people for several periods of between two and five hours while they were going about their daily lives, noting how they managed their condition and the challenges they faced.

Trisha Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Health Care at Queen Mary, University of London, led the study. She said: Until now there has been very little research on what people with diabetes do and how they cope when health professionals aren't around. We have shown that self-management of diabetes is hard work both practically and emotionally, and that many but not all people with diabetes are skilful at undertaking and co-ordinating all the different tasks involved.

The research showed that people with diabetes and their families devoted a lot of time and hard work to managing their disease. For those who were not managing well, the reasons tended to be that they were overstretched by family responsibilities, had other illnesses, were struggling financially or a combination of these. Many had other medical conditions, some very serious for example paralysis following a stroke, visual impairment or heart failure. These factors severely limited people's opportunities to manage their condition, meaning that those who would benefit most from self-management were also those least able to achieve it.

Lack of food labelling in cafes and restaurants also proved challenging because it made calculating the correct dose of insulin difficult.

Some but not all health professionals were enthusiastic about people acquiring advanced knowledge about their diabetes and learning how to self-manage.

Professor Greenhalgh added: There is a trend towards encouraging individuals to look after their own health. This study highlights that whilst many people with diabetes are ready and able to do this, health professionals and wider society could be doing more to support them. Sadly there is still a great deal of ignorance, stigma and stereotyping.

We need to know a lot more about how patients manage their disease outside of the clinic. In the meantime, doctors should be aware of the work their patients put in to self-management and understand that many factors will influence how successful they are at controlling their diabetes.

The research is published in

Best time for a coffee break? There's an app for that

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Caffeinated drinks such as coffee and soda are the pick-me-ups of choice for many people, but too much caffeine can cause nervousness and sleep problems.

Caffeine Zone software app developed by Penn State researchers, can help people determine when caffeine may give them a mental boost and when it could hurt their sleep patterns. The software takes information on caffeine use and integrates it with information on the effects of caffeine to produce a graph of how the caffeine will affect the users over time.

Many people don't understand how caffeine levels in their bloodstream go up and how they go down, said Frank Ritter, professor of information sciences and technology, psychology, and computer science and engineering. It's important to understand the effect that caffeine can have at these various levels.

Ritter, who worked with Kuo-Chuan (Martin) Yeh, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said that if a person drinks a cup of coffee rapidly, they will experience a spike in mental alertness, but enough of the drug can linger in the bloodstream to cause sleep problems hours later.

The researchers used peer-reviewed studies as input data to determine that caffeine drinkers with between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in their blood stream are in an optimal mental alertness zone. For sleep, the researchers set a lower threshold of 100 milligrams. Drinkers may have sleep problems if they remain above this.

The researchers, who reported their findings at the 2011 Augmented Cognition International Conference, said people who drink too much caffeine, too quickly, may face other problems. A spike of caffeine above the optimal level can cause nausea and nervousness.

Maintaining proper caffeine balance is important for many workers. For example, sailors on submarines must carefully watch their sleep patterns because their sleeping and waking patterns vary each day, Ritter said.

If they, and others who drink coffee to stay awake, drink too much coffee on one shift, they may have trouble sleeping, said Ritter. So, the next day, they'll drink even more coffee and have even more trouble sleeping.

To plot caffeine's effect with the app, drinkers type in information about how much caffeine they drank, or plan to drink, and when they plan to have a caffeinated beverage. They also can add how fast they drink the beverage.

The app can also help people determine when to modify their caffeine habits, so that they might choose to drink a decaffeinated beverage, or mix a blend of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffees.

The app is available on iTunes for free with advertisements and for purchase without ads. It only works on Apple devices -- the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Gene related to fat preferences in humans found

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A preference for fatty foods has a genetic basis, according to researchers, who discovered that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene may like high-fat foods more than those who have other forms of this gene.

The results help explain why some people struggle when placed on a low-fat diet and may one day assist people in selecting diets that are easier for them to follow. The results also may help food developers create new low-fat foods that taste better.

Fat is universally palatable to humans, said Kathleen Keller, assistant professor of nutritional sciences, Penn State. Yet we have demonstrated for the first time that people who have particular forms of the CD36 gene tend to like higher fat foods more and may be at greater risk for obesity compared to those who do not have this form of the gene. In animals, CD36 is a necessary gene for the ability to both detect and develop preferences for fat. Our study is one of the first to show this relationship in humans.

Keller and a tem of scientists from Penn State, Columbia University, Cornell University and Rutgers University examined 317 African-American males and females because individuals in this ethnic group are highly vulnerable to obesity and thus are at greatest risk for obesity-related diseases.

The team gave the participants Italian salad dressings prepared with varying amounts of canola oil, which is rich in long-chain fatty acids. The participants were then asked to rate their perceptions of the dressings' oiliness, fat content and creaminess on a scale anchored on the ends with extremely low and extremely high.

The team also gave participants questionnaires aimed at understanding their food preferences. Participants rated how much they liked each food on a scale anchored with dislike extremely and like extremely. Foods included on the questionnaire were associated with poor dietary intake and health outcomes, such as half-and-half, sour cream, mayonnaise, bacon, fried chicken, hot dogs, French fries, cheese, chips, cake, cookies and doughnuts. The researchers collected saliva samples from the participants to determine which forms of CD36 they had. From the saliva samples, they extracted DNA fragments and examined differences in the CD36 gene contained within the fragments.

They found that participants who had the AA form of the gene -- present in 21 percent of the population -- rated the salad dressings as creamier than individuals who had other forms of the gene. These individuals reported that the salad dressings were creamier regardless of how much fat was actually in them. The researchers also found that AA individuals liked salad dressings, half-and-half, olive oil and other cooking oils more than those who had other forms of the gene. The results are published in a recent issue of the journal

Eating smart: Researcher studies foods, dietary supplements that may reduce risk of prostate cancer

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University professor is turning to nutrition to tackle prostate cancer.

Brian Lindshield, assistant professor of human nutrition, is helping men make more informed diet decisions by studying foods and dietary supplements that may reduce the risk of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer among men in the United States.

I'm interested in researching ways to prevent prostate cancer rather than how to treat it after a person has been diagnosed with cancer, Lindshield said.

The goal of Lindshield's research is twofold: He is performing basic studies that examine specific drugs as well as dietary supplements. His research has been supported by grants from the Johnson Cancer Research Center and the National Institute of Health Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, or COBRE, for epithelial function in health and disease.

One project focuses specifically on two drugs -- finasteride and dutasteride -- that are used to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, which is an enlargement of the prostate. Both drugs inhibit enzymes that convert the male hormone testosterone to a more potent form, called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT. Finasteride inhibits one of these enzymes, while dutasteride inhibits both of these enzymes.

Because these drugs inhibit DHT production, they may also prevent the development of prostate cancer. Several clinical trials have shown that both drugs decrease prostate cancer incidence, but at a cost.

Among the men who took these drugs and still got prostate cancer, more of them had a high-grade or more aggressive prostate cancer, Lindshield said. It's kind of a double-edged sword. These drugs can lower the risk of developing prostate cancer, but they also might lead to worse outcomes for men who do develop the disease.

That's where Lindshield's research fits in: He is comparing finasteride and dutasteride to see if one is better than the other.

Our hypothesis is that dutasteride is a better option because it inhibits both enzymes while finasteride only inhibits one, Lindshield said.

For a second project, Lindshield is studying different dietary supplements that affect prostate cancer risk. He is focusing on extract from saw palmetto, a type of shrub that looks similar to a palm tree. Many men take saw palmetto extract because it is believed to benefit prostatic health and inhibit the same enzymes as finasteride and dutasteride. But a lack of regulation and research surrounding saw palmetto has not provided clear insight into whether taking the extract is beneficial.

The supplement market is kind of the wild world of whatever goes, Lindshield said. It is not regulated in the United States, so many different kinds of saw palmetto extracts exist.

Lindshield wants to determine the composition of different saw palmetto extracts and determine which ones may be most effective. So far the researchers have collected various saw palmetto extracts -- from small liquids to capsules. They are beginning to measure the active components of each of the extracts and then will look at different extracts to see if they are effective in decreasing prostate cancer.

We want to look at how they affect growth of prostate cancer cells and inhibit the enzymes that produce DHT, Lindshield said.

While both projects are in the early stages, Lindshield hopes that they can provide insight into ways that men can reduce their risk of prostate cancer.

Research aims to prevent obesity by reaching parents, young children through child care

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University research group is jumping ahead to improve nutrition and physical activity among young children and prevent childhood obesity.

The researchers -- led by David Dzewaltowski, professor and kinesiology department head -- have developed a program called HOP'N Home, which stands for Healthy Opportunities for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Home. The researchers have been working on obesity prevention for more than 15 years. The latest segment of the program partners with the Butler County Health Department and K-State Research and Extension to reach 3- to 5-year-olds and their parents through activities conducted at child care facilities.

Our research has moved to younger and younger age groups because we have found through the public health literature and surveillance that you need to start as young as possible, Dzewaltowski said.

The project works with child care centers to build the capacity of staff to help children and their parents offer more physical activity and more nutritious food options as well as understand the impact of advertising on their food and physical activity choices. The project has been supported by the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund.

The project is divided into four phases. The first phase evaluated a 12-week program with the university's Stone House Early Childhood Education Center. The second phase occurred last spring, when the researchers partnered with Butler County Research and Extension to work with four child care providers.

The researchers are currently in the third phase of the project and are working with the Butler County Health Department to develop a training model that helps child care providers deliver the 12-week program. For the final phase, the researchers will partner with agencies such as Child Care Aware of Kansas to make the training model available to child care providers statewide.

We've done rigorous evaluation of the program and we're finding preliminary evidence that some parents are improving the home environment, Dzewaltowski said. The parents are providing more fresh fruits and reporting that they are eating fast food fewer times per week. They are also increasing visits to parks and reporting that their children are asking to play outside more and asking for few cakes, doughnut and muffins.

The project's 12-week program reaches young children through elements such as adult-led activities, dramatic play and snack time. It uses a traffic light, which helps children understand healthy eating through green and yellow foods, called go and slow foods. The program also uses a traffic light to understand physical activity versus sedentary activity as well as media that promote healthy or unhealthy options.

The researchers focus on two types of traffic foods with the 3- to 5-year-olds: healthy go foods that can be eaten all the time and slow foods that should be eaten in moderation. The children learn about these foods by singing a song composed by Teri Holmberg, a Kansas State University instructor of music and certified music therapist.

Daily activities focus on go and slow foods to help children start thinking about healthy eating. For instance, during dramatic play, children use a toy stove to cook pretend fruits and vegetables. At snack time, child care providers prompt the children to think if they are eating a go or slow food. The children also learn the difference between active and sedentary toys.

Literature has suggested that the food industry has been very effective in marketing to young kids to nag their parents, Dzewaltowski said. What we are focusing on is positive nagging, or positive pestering, where kids start to think about asking their parents for healthy foods.

The project also includes a home connection, where the child care providers inform parents through weekly activities and newsletters to help them encourage children to make healthy choices at home.

I am excited about this age group because I think the children are receptive to the programs, but the parents are as well, Dzewaltowski said. Parents of this age group are at a time period where they are aware of the problems, they are hearing the media and they are looking for help.

AMD-like lesions delayed in mice fed lower glycemic index diet

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BOSTON (November 14, 2011) -- Feeding older mice a lower glycemic index (GI) diet consisting of slowly-digested carbohydrates delays the onset of age-related, sight-threatening retinal lesions, according to a new study from the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University.

The researchers studied middle-aged and older mice that consumed either a higher or lower GI diet. Mice fed the lower GI diet developed fewer and less-severe age-related lesions in the retina than the mice fed the higher GI diet. The lesions included basal laminar deposits, which typically develop after age 60 in the human retina and are the earliest warning sign of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD).

To our knowledge, we have established the first mature, mammalian model indicating a delay in the development of AMD-like lesions as the result of a lower GI diet, says Allen Taylor, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research at the USDA HNRCA. The only difference between the two groups of mice we studied is the GI of their meals, which suggests that diet alone is enough to accelerate or delay the formation of lesions. These results, coupled with similar observations made by our laboratory in earlier human epidemiologic studies imply that lower GI diets hold potential as an early intervention for preventing onset and progress of AMD.

The dietary glycemic index (DGI) measures the rate at which glucose is delivered to the bloodstream after consuming carbohydrates. Higher GI foods including white bread and white potatoes trigger a rapid delivery of glucose that pushes the body to work overtime to absorb, whereas lower GI foods, like whole grain bread and fruits and vegetables, initiate a slower release of glucose that is more easily processed by cells.

Compared to the mice on the lower GI diet, mice on the higher GI diet demonstrated elevated accumulations of debris known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in the whole retina, particularly in the cells of the RPE. The RPE plays a crucial role in maintaining vision and its dysfunction results in the gradual central vision loss that is the hallmark of AMD. AGE accumulation has also been linked to tissue damage in other age-related diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

We presume the elevated accumulation of AGEs we saw in the retina of the higher GI group is associated with toxicity. The AGEs result from the modification of proteins by excess glucose and this compounds the normal protein damage that happens as we age, says Karen Weikel, first author and a PhD candidate at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. While previous research has linked higher GI diets to AGE accumulation in the blood, ours appears to be the first to show diet-related AGE presence in tissue, such as the retina, which becomes the site of the eye disease.

The research, published online in October in the journal

Sugar-sweetened beverages may increase cardiovascular risk in women

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Drinking two or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day may expand a woman's waistline and increase her risk of heart disease and diabetes, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2011.

In this study, researchers compared middle-aged and older women who drank two or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day, such as carbonated sodas or flavored waters with added sugar, to women who drank one or less daily. Women consuming two or more beverages per day were nearly four times as likely to develop high triglycerides, and were significantly more likely to increase their waist sizes and to develop impaired fasting glucose levels. The same associations were not observed in men.

Women who drank more than two sugar-sweetened drinks a day had increasing waist sizes, but weren't necessarily gaining weight, said Christina Shay, Ph.D., lead author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. These women also developed high triglycerides and women with normal blood glucose levels more frequently went from having a low risk to a high risk of developing diabetes over time.

The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) included food frequency surveys in 4,166 African-American, Caucasian, Chinese-Americans and Hispanic adults 45 to 84 years old. At the beginning of the study the participants didn't have cardiovascular disease.

Researchers assessed risk factors in three follow-up exams spanning five years starting in 2002. Participants were monitored for weight gain, increases in waist circumference, low levels of high density lipoproteins (HDL good cholesterol), high levels of low density lipoproteins (LDL bad cholesterol), high triglycerides, impaired fasting glucose levels, and type 2 diabetes.

Most people assume that individuals who consume a lot of sugar-sweetened drinks have an increase in obesity, which in turn, increases their risk for heart disease and diabetes, said Shay, formerly of Northwestern University's Department of Preventive Medicine in Chicago, where the study was conducted. Although this does occur, this study showed that risk factors for heart disease and stroke developed even when the women didn't gain weight.

Women may have a greater chance for developing cardiovascular disease risk factors from sugar-sweetened drinks because they require fewer calories than men which makes each calorie count more towards cardiovascular risk in women, Shay said.

Researchers have yet to determine exactly how sugar-sweetened beverages influence cardiovascular risk factors such as high triglycerides in individuals who do not gain weight, Shay said, but further work is planned to try and figure that out.

Low vitamin C levels may raise heart failure patients' risk

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Low levels of vitamin C were associated with higher levels of high sensitivity C-Reactive protein (hsCRP) and shorter intervals without major cardiac issues or death for heart failure patients, in research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2011.

Compared to those with high vitamin C intake from food, heart failure patients in the study who had low vitamin C intake were 2.4 times more likely to have higher levels of hsCRP, a marker for inflammation and a risk factor for heart disease.

The study is the first to demonstrate that low vitamin C intake is associated with worse outcomes for heart failure patients.

Study participants with low vitamin C intake and hsCRP over 3 milligrams per liter (mg/L) were also nearly twice as likely to die from cardiovascular disease within one year of follow-up.

We found that adequate intake of vitamin C was associated with longer survival in patients with heart failure, said Eun Kyeung Song, Ph.D., R.N., lead author of the study and assistant professor at the Department of Nursing, College of Medicine, in the University of Ulsan in Korea.

The average age among the 212 patients in the study was 61, and about one-third were women. Approximately 45 percent of the participants had moderate to severe heart failure.

Participants completed a four-day food diary verified by a registered dietitian and a software program calculated their vitamin C intake. Bloods tests measured hsCRP.

Researchers divided participants into one group with levels over 3 mg/L of hsCRP and another with lower levels. Patients were followed for one year to determine the length of time to their first visit to the emergency department due to cardiac problems or death.

Researchers found that 82 patients (39 percent) had inadequate vitamin C intake, according to criteria set by the Institute of Medicine. These criteria allowed the researchers to estimate the likelihood that the patient's diet was habitually deficient in vitamin C based on a four day food diary. After a year follow-up, 61 patients (29 percent) had cardiac events, which included an emergency department visit or hospitalization due to cardiac problems, or cardiac death.

The researchers found that 98 patients (46 percent) had hsCRP over 3 mg/L, according to Song.

Inflammatory pathways in heart failure patients may be why vitamin C deficiency contributed to poor health outcomes, the data suggests.

Increased levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein means a worsening of heart failure, Song said. An adequate level of vitamin C is associated with lower levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. This results in a longer cardiac event-free survival in patients.

The use of diuretics may also play a role because vitamin C is water soluble and diuretics increase the amount of water excreted from the kidneys, said Terry Lennie, Ph.D., R.N., study author and associate dean of Ph.D. studies in the College of Nursing at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky.

Diet is the best source of vitamin C, Lennie said. Eating the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day provides an adequate amount.

More randomized controlled trials and longitudinal prospective studies are needed to determine the impact of other micronutrients on survival or rehospitalization, Song said.

UT study: Climate change affects ants and biodiversity

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Some people may consider them pests, but ants are key to many plants' survival.

In the eastern US, ants are integral to plant biodiversity because they help disperse seeds. But ants' ability to perform this vital function, and others, may be jeopardized by climate change, according to Nate Sanders, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Sanders and his collaborators have received a grant for nearly $2 million from the National Science Foundation to examine the cascading effects of climate change on ant communities and the ecosystem functions they provide.

Ants are critically important to most ecosystems, Sanders said. They eat other insects, circulate nutrients, increase turnover in the soil, and move seeds around.

Sanders and his colleagues are testing the effects of climate change on ants by heating up patches of forest and tracking how the ants respond. Inside Duke Forest in North Carolina and Harvard Forest in Massachusetts lie 12 five-meter wide, open-top chambers. Air temperature is incrementally increased by half a degree Celsius in each chamber for a total of a six-degree changes and ant behavior observed.

The researchers, led by Katie Stuble from UT and Shannon Pelini at Harvard Forest, noticed dramatic changes in the ants' daily activity in each chamber.

If the temperature increases by just a half a degree Celsius, the most important seed-dispersing ants basically shut down, said Sanders. They do not go out and forage and do the things they normally do.

Stuble observed that, on average, the ants foraged for about 10 hours a day at normal temperatures. When temperatures were raised just a half a degree, the ants stayed in their nests underground and foraged just an hour.

The absence of ants' seed dispersal and nutrient cycling could have profound influence on biodiversity. For instance, it is believed that more than half of the plants in the forest understory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park rely on ants for seed dispersal. Ants are found in ecosystems everywhere but in Antarctica and Iceland.

The researchers' goal is to provide information about the effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems.

We know that climate change is happening, Sanders said. Lots of models make predictions about how biodiversity is going to respond. It will either respond by adapting, moving or going extinct. If you can't keep up with climate change, you will go extinct.

Sanders and his team will collect data through 2015. He is collaborating with colleagues from Harvard University, North Carolina State University, and University of Vermont. The project began in 2007, with funding from the Department of Energy. The team's papers can be read at

On the menu: Research helps future restaurant managers reach out to customers with food allergies

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University research team is serving up improved food allergy education for future restaurant managers and staff.

Junehee Kwon, associate professor of hospitality management and dietetics, and Kevin Sauer, assistant professor of hospitality management and dietetics, are co-principal investigators on a project recently funded by a United States Department of Agriculture Higher Education Challenge Grant for more than $140,000.

We are developing food allergy education materials that educators in hospitality management and dietetics can use to supplement the education of future food service managers, Kwon said.

A recent national study showed that more than 40 percent of people who have a seafood allergy -- one of the most common allergies in the United States -- have experienced an allergic reaction from eating in a restaurant.

This high percentage of allergic reactions may be from hidden allergens in sauces or from mixed dishes coming in contact with a safe food item, Kwon said. Knowing that such cross-contact has occurred may be difficult to determine and declare to the customer. Additionally, restaurant employees may not often understand the true risks of food allergies for their customers.

Consumers with allergies are frustrated, Kwon said. They are actually putting their lives in danger by buying and consuming food prepared by someone else. There is a need for consumer education to make sure the customer clearly communicates what his or her specific needs are to the restaurant staff. But even with that communication, people are still frustrated by the apparent inability of food service operations to assure allergen-free food.

The researchers will use the grant to improve food allergy training for future restaurant and food service managers. They will develop educational materials to assist students in hospitality management and dietetics to be more proactive in working with customers who have food allergies.

However, we realize that just having knowledge about food allergies is not enough, Kwon said. Learning more about how food allergies can really impact someone's life can motivate these future managers to take food allergy precautions more seriously.

To motivate students, the researchers plan to use storytelling methods that feature video testimonials from individuals who have food allergies. These videos are meant to appeal to the students' emotions and show how food allergies have affected someone's life.

For preliminary data collection, we created a short storytelling video and measured students' attitudes toward food allergies before and after watching it, Kwon said. We saw an increase in how the students perceived the severity of the risks associated with food allergies and their motivation to learn more increased.

With the newly funded grant, the researchers will collect more testimonials, record them and incorporate them into new food allergy education curricula. In the future, they hope to expand their scope to work directly with employees and managers currently working in the food service industry.

Kwon and Sauer will also recruit undergraduate researchers for the project, particularly undergraduates involved in the Kansas Bridges to the Future program, the Developing Scholars Program and the Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

USDA Higher Education Challenge Grants support projects that address an educational need through a creative or nontraditional approach. Projects have the potential for regional or national influence and can serve as a model for other institutions.

Frequently used weight-loss method is light on evidence

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Although the transtheoretical model stages of change (TTM SOC) method is frequently used to help obese and overweight people lose weight, a newly published Cochrane systematic review indicates there is little evidence that it is effective. The use of TTM SOC only resulted in 2kg or less weight loss, and there was no conclusive evidence that this loss was sustained, says study leader Nik Tuah, who works at Imperial College London.

The transtheoretical model describes a step-by-step way in which individuals move from unhealthy behaviours to healthy ones. The model helps clinicians and patients by showing the sorts of benefits that can be expected for each step in the sequence. The five stages of change that the model anticipates are pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance.

A key assumption underlying this model is that people do not start off by being ready to change their behaviours, so any intervention that starts by asking for change is unlikely to be taken up, says Tuah. TTM SOC tries to overcome this by introducing stages that lead people to the place where they can see the need to change their behaviour and are willing to give it a go. Only then do you introduce the active interventions.

Leading a team of researchers, Tuah looked for studies that had investigated the effectiveness of TTM SOC. They identified five appropriate studies involving 1834 people who received an intervention and 2076 people who were placed in control groups. The trials varied in length from six weeks to 2 years. Drawing all the findings together showed that there was no convincing evidence that the intervention produced any significant sustainable weight loss. There was, however, some indication that when TTM SOC was combined with exercise and dieting, people's physical activity or eating habits did change a little.

One of the adverse outcomes noted by a single trial was that some people gained weight while using TTM SOC. None of the trials asked whether TTM SOC improved a person's health-related quality of life, or whether it reduced the risk of them getting ill. Also, none looked at the cost of taking patients through TTM SOC.

Given that obesity and overweight are such important issues, and that TTM SOC is so widely used, it is really important that we do more high quality randomised control trials, preferably with large numbers of people, and follow them for many years. Then we may get a better indication of how well it really works, says Tuah. This review does not necessarily challenge the notion that diet and exercise are effective weight loss strategies, but instead raises questions about how to approach lifestyle changes for individuals who want to adopt them.

Plant compound reduces breast cancer mortality

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Phytoestrogens are plant compounds which, in the human body, can attach to the receptors for the female sexual hormone estrogen and which are taken in with our daily diet. A number of findings have attributed a cancer protective effect to these plant hormones. At DKFZ, a team headed by Prof. Dr. Jenny Chang-Claude summarized the results of several studies in a meta-analysis last year and showed that a diet rich in phytoestrogens lowers the risk of developing breast cancer after menopause. Now the Heidelberg researchers wanted to find out whether phytoestrogens also have an influence on the course of breast cancer. Prior investigations on this topic had provided contradictory results.

The most important type of phytoestrogens in our Western diet are lignans, which are contained in seeds, particularly flaxseeds, as well as in wheat and vegetables. In the bowel, these substances are turned into enterolactone, which is absorbed by the mucous tissue and which was determined by the Heidelberg researchers as a biomarker in the patients' blood.

From 2002 to 2005, the DKFZ researchers used the MARIE study to take blood samples of 1,140 women who had been diagnosed with postmenopausal breast cancer. After a mean observation time of six years, they related enterolactone levels to clinical disease progression.

The result: Compared to the study subjects with the lowest enterolactone levels, the women with the highest blood levels of this biomarker had an approximately 40 percent lower mortality risk. When the scientists additionally took account of the incidence of metastasis and secondary tumors, they obtained a similar result: Women with the highest enterolactone levels also had a lower risk for such an unfavorable disease progression.

We now have first clear evidence showing that lignans lower not only the risk of developing postmenopausal breast cancer, but also the mortality risk, says Jenny Chang-Claude. There had been prior studies to determine the lignan intake by means of dietary surveys. But the results of such surveys are often unreliable and, in addition, there are big differences in the way individuals actually process the plant substances into effective metabolic products. Therefore, the Heidelberg team chose the more reliable measurement of biomarkers.

However, Chang-Claude narrowed down the result: The result was significant only for the group of tumors that have no receptor for the estrogen hormone (ER-negative tumors). This gives reason to suspect that enterolactone protects from cancer not only by its hormone-like effect. Indeed, studies of cells and animals had already provided evidence suggesting that the substance also has an influence on cancer growth irrespective of estrogen. Thus, it promotes cell death and inhibits sprouting of new blood vessels.

In order to find out whether enterolactone also inhibits the aggressiveness of estrogen receptors in estrogen-positive tumors, we would need to expand this study to include much larger groups of women, said Jenny Chang-Claude. Moreover, the scientist firmly emphasized: By eating a diet that is rich in wholemeal products, seeds and vegetables, which is considered to be health-promoting anyway, everybody can take in enough lignans. At the present time, we can only discourage people from taking any food supplements.

Phytoestrogens have been the subject of intense scientific debates in past years. On the one hand, the results of several studies of cells as well as epidemiological findings suggest that they have a cancer protective effect. Another observation that may be interpreted in this direction is that Asian women are less frequently affected by breast cancer. Their soy-rich diet contains large amounts of another type of phytoestrogens, isoflavones. On the other hand, scientists fear that isoflavones might imitate the growth-promoting properties of real hormones and, thus, accelerate hormone-dependent tumors such as breast cancer and prostate cancer. It has not yet been finally determined whether lignans in the body imitate the hormone effect or, on the contrary, counteract it, says Jenny Chang-Claude. Our studies will help achieve more clarity in this important question, which also concerns our daily diet.

Micronutrient powders reduce anemia and iron deficiency in infants in low-income countries

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Adding a powder that contains several vitamins and minerals, including iron, zinc and vitamin A, to the semi-solid foods taken by infants and children between six months and two years of age, can reduce their risk of anaemia and iron deficiency. This is the conclusion of a new Cochrane Systematic Review.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies, particularly those of iron, vitamin A and zinc, affect more than two billion people worldwide. Infants and young children are highly vulnerable because they grow rapidly and often have diets low in these nutrients. Micronutrient powders are single-dose packets containing multiple vitamins and minerals in powder form that can be sprinkled onto any semi-solid food immediately before eating at home or at any other place. Thus, this intervention is known as home or point of use fortification.

Led by Luz Maria De-Regil, a team of researchers set out to see whether using micronutrient powders could improve the health of young children. They found eight relevant trials that together involved 3748 children living in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, where anaemia is a public health problem. The studies lasted between two and 12 months and the powder formulations contained between five and 15 nutrients.

Overall, home fortification with the micronutrient powders reduced the risk of having anaemia by 31% and iron deficiency by 51% when compared with no intervention or placebo. The team found, however, that there was little or no evidence that this intervention has an effect on growth, survival or overall developmental outcomes. We still need to know more about possible positive and adverse side effects as only a few trials reported on this, says De-Regil, who is an Epidemiologist at the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

The researchers also found that these powders had a very similar effect to daily iron supplements. However, as they report, We need to treat this result with caution, however, because there was much less data for this comparison.

It seems that micronutrient powders can be helpful for infants and young children aged six to 23 months and living in places that have different amounts of anaemia and malaria, regardless of whether the intervention lasts two, six or 12 months or whether recipients are girls or boys.. Nonetheless, the authors add a word of caution: This intervention involves mixing the powders with homemade food as a vehicle, so it is important to assure that basic sanitation is available and food hygiene and handling is done properly with safe water.

The team believes that we now need more information about the best combination of vitamins and minerals to include in the mix, whether to give it daily or intermittently and for how long to give it to ensure that children receive the maximum benefits.

CWRU School of Dental Medicine receives $2.6 million in grants

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is supporting pre- and post-doctoral training programs in dental public health at Case Western Reserve University in an effort to combat disparities in oral health.

Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine received two, five-year grants, totaling nearly $2.6 million. The funding will support efforts to close the gap between those with and those without dental care.

The dental school is located near 10 Cleveland neighborhoods identified by HRSA as having fewer than one dentist for every 5,000 people.

The problem of limited access to dental care isn't going away, says Sena Narendran, associate professor of community dentistry and principal investigator of the new grants.

The first grant received focuses on pre-doctoral training programs and awarded $1.281 million for the school's Family First Program and soon-to-be-established dual degree in Doctor of Dental Medicine and Masters of Public Health. Family First is a collaborative effort of the Departments of Family Medicine and Nutrition, and the school is collaborating with Case Western Reserve School of Medicine's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics to implement the dual degree program.

The second grant focuses on a post-doctoral training program in dental public health and awards $1.29 million to support a residency program at the School of Dental Medicine. Dental public health residents will have placement in community health centers and public health agencies.

Addressing oral health disparities starts early in Case Western Reserve dental students' education. After their first-year cornerstone experience in the Healthy Smiles Sealant Program that provides free dental exams to the public, as well as cleanings and sealants for second and sixth graders in the Cleveland Municipal School District, second-year dental students engage in an experiential learning program called Family First.

Family First focuses on assessing risk for dental diseases from a whole-family and multigenerational perspective. Students look at factors from eating habits to general health problems in the family. Family First integrates family medicine and nutrition with dental care.

Most members of a family seek care from one dentist, Narendran said.

The Family First learning experience was formalized last year and is a win for both students and families in need of dental care.

Currently 18 families from Cleveland, most with three generations and one with five generations, are being assessed for their dental needs. Student teams from the sophomore dental school class are seeing a total of 72 family members.

Both grants also include partial faculty and administrative support to the programs. The post-doctoral grant will also offer a stipend, tuition, and travel.

Mount Sinai receives $3.4 million for largest study of personalized medicine in the clinical setting

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Mount Sinai School of Medicine has been awarded a $3.4 million grant over four years from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to begin the largest study of its kind, in which a patient's genomic risk for disease is revealed in a lab, and then entered into an electronic medical record for use in determining treatment in the clinical care setting.

Using DNA and plasma samples provided by patients, Mount Sinai researchers from the Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine (IPM) will identify genetic markers of disease for each patient enrolled in the study and input them into Mount Sinai's new electronic medical records system in a safe and secure way. Physicians who are treating these patients in the clinical setting may then electronically access this genomic information and determine susceptibility for heart disease, responsiveness to certain medications, and a personalized course of treatment.

Discovering genetic disease risk markers of major diseases such as heart disease through genome-wide genotyping was a major advance toward personalized medicine, but thus far the genomic information of individual patients has been limited to the laboratory and research setting, said Erwin Bottinger, MD, Director of the Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, and the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. This will allow us for the first time to bring that critical individual genetic-disease risk information to the patient setting, which we believe will eventually have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine.

The study, called the Biorepository for Genomic Medicine in Diverse Communities, is part of a consortium of seven leading genomic medicine institutions called Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE). As a member of the consortium, the IPM team hopes to have enrolled up to 20,000 patients from the Mount Sinai Biobank, which consists of consented patients representing the diverse communities surrounding The Mount Sinai Medical Center.

This grant is a significant achievement for Mount Sinai, propelling us to the forefront of personalized medicine and its application in the clinical setting, said Dennis. S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of The Mount Sinai Medical Center. The future of medicine lies in genomics research and translating it into a patient-care setting. Mount Sinai's commitment to translational research makes us uniquely poised to lead that revolution.

Mount Sinai Biobank patients have provided DNA and plasma samples to aid in genomic and personalized medicine research, allowing Dr. Bottinger's team to validate and customize 288 previously-reported single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as genetic risk markers of major diseases, including heart, kidney, and liver disease, for Mount Sinai's racially and ethnically diverse patient populations. The IPM team is committed to ensuring that this information is made available in culturally appropriate, easy to understand formats, and will have the potential to benefit all patients.

Scientists highlight link between stress and appetite

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers in the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have uncovered a mechanism by which stress increases food drive in rats. This new discovery, published online this week in the journal Neuron, could provide important insight into why stress is thought to be one of the underlying contributors to obesity.

Normally, the brain produces neurotransmitters (chemicals responsible for how cells communicate in the brain) called endocannabinoids that send signals to control appetite. In this study, the researchers found that when food is not present, a stress response occurs that temporarily causes a functional re-wiring in the brain. This re-wiring may impair the endocannabinoids' ability to regulate food intake and could contribute to enhanced food drive.

The researchers also discovered that when they blocked the effects of stress hormones in the brain, the absence of food caused no change in the neural circuitry.

Researchers Jaideep Bains, Ph.D. and Quentin Pittman, Ph.D., looked specifically at nerve cells (neurons) in the region of the brain called the hypothalamus. This structure is known to have an important role in the control of appetite and metabolism and has been identified as the primary region responsible for the brain's response to stress.

Bains explains, These findings could help explain how the cellular communication in our brains may be overridden in the absence of food. Interestingly, these changes are driven not necessarily by the lack of nutrients, but rather by the stress induced by the lack of food.

If similar changes occur in the human brain, these findings might have several implications for human health.

For example, if we elect to pass over a meal, the brain appears to simply increase the drive in pathways leading to increased appetite, explains Pittman. Furthermore, the fact that the lack of food causes activation of the stress response might help explain the relationship between stress and obesity.

These results lay the foundation for future studies to investigate the use of therapies that affect these systems in order to manipulate food intake. They also open the door to studies looking at whether or not the stress brought about by lack of food affects other systems where endocannabinoids are known to play a role.

One thing we can say for sure, is that this research highlights the importance of food availability to our nervous system. The absence of food clearly brings about dramatic changes in the way our neurons communicate with each other, says Pittman.

Scientist urges government ruling on genetically engineered salmon

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- A Purdue University scientist is urging federal officials to decide whether genetically engineered salmon would be allowed for U.S. consumption and arguing that not doing so may set back scientific efforts to increase food production.

William Muir, a professor of animal sciences, said that based on data made available by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, AquAdvantage (AA) salmon poses little real risk to the environment or human health. AA salmon were given a gene from Chinook salmon that speeds growth and improves feed efficiency in farm-raised fish. Developed by AquaBounty Technologies, the fish would be spawned in Canada and grown to full size in Panama, both of which are land-based, contained facilities.

We realize that any new technology can have risks, and those risks need to be assessed in a thorough and convincing manner, Muir said. However, once the assessment has been completed and the agency concludes from the weight of evidence that risks of harm, either to the environment or to consumers, is negligible, the next step, which is to allow production and sale of the product, needs to be taken.

Muir and Alison L. Van Eenennaam, an animal genomics and biotechnology Extension specialist at the University of California Davis, made the call for FDA approval in a peer-reviewed commentary in the early online version of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The salmon would be the first genetically engineered animal used as a food in the United States, but it has been tied up in FDA regulatory proceedings since 1995. Muir said that becomes a disincentive for those working to increase food supplies for a growing world population.

This tells us that no entrepreneur is going to invest in these new projects because they can't get them approved, Muir said.

Muir has not received any funding or support from AquaBounty Technologies.

Alan Mathew, head of Purdue's Department of Animal Sciences, served on the FDA's Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee, which did not find any significant concerns for AA salmon. He said after considering the issues, he was convinced that the genetically engineered salmon is safe.

We determined there was not added risk. This is generally the same food as farm-raised and wild salmon, Mathew said.

Mathew said crops and animals have been selected for favorable traits for centuries, keeping the value-added genes and eliminating unfavorable ones. He said genetic engineering simply shortens the time it takes to gain those favorable traits.

Our methods are doing it more strategically rather than randomly, Mathew said.

The commentary goes point by point to refute concerns raised by special interest groups over genetically engineered salmon.

One of the most significant environmental concerns about genetically engineered salmon is that if they were introduced into the wild salmon population, they would cause its extinction. This is a theoretical scenario discovered earlier by Muir, which he termed the Trojan gene effect. However, Muir examined fitness data and concluded that AA salmon are less fit than their native counterparts, meaning that natural selection would simply purge them from the wild population.

The Trojan gene effect does not apply in this case, and there is no evidence to support concern for an extinction event, Muir said.

Muir also points out that AquaBounty has developed multiple redundant safeguards to prevent the fish from entering natural populations.

Mannan oligosaccharides offer health benefits to pigs

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Feeding mannan oligosaccharides (MOS) can fine-tune the immune system of pigs, suggests a new University of Illinois study.

When it comes to keeping pigs healthy, there are some potentially powerful tools we can use in the diet besides antibiotics, said James Pettigrew, U of I professor of animal science. We have a tendency to think that we can administer health through a needle, by giving pigs antibiotics, and even through systems like all-in/all-out pig flow. These are important, but there are also many health benefits we can realize through the diet.

MOS is a product made from the cell wall of yeast. It contains carbohydrates that may provide special benefits, Pettigrew said. Previous research showed that it increased the growth rate in newly weaned pigs and changed the microbial populations in the digestive tract.

Tung Che, a postdoctoral research associate in Pettigrew's laboratory, led two studies looking at MOS and its effect on pigs experimentally infected with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV).

In these studies, researchers evaluated how feeding MOS can modulate immune responses in pigs infected with PRRSV.

We found MOS can enhance immune responses in pigs, but it can also alleviate the overstimulation of the immune system, Che said. MOS increases the total number of immune cells such as leukocytes and lymphocytes in the blood at the early stage of infection.

This could be quite a benefit for producers fighting PRRSV, a respiratory disease that causes a reduction of immune cells.

This is important because the increase in leukocytes and lymphocytes can help the animal to fight not only PRRSV, but also secondary bacterial co-infections that are common with PRRSV, Che said.

Seven days after this PRRSV inoculation, pigs experienced a reduction of fever and had a better feed efficiency, indicating a reduction of ongoing inflammation.

We wanted to find out why MOS enhances the immune system, but at the same time alleviates the overstimulation of the immune system as observed by reduced fever, Che said. So we collected white blood cells and measured gene expression by using a broad microarray technique followed by the more specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR).

The results were consistent with the clinical signs and showed that in non-challenged pigs, MOS increased the expression of genes for cell receptors and those involved in immunity.However, in the PRRSV-infected pigs, MOS reduced the expression of cytokine and chemokine genes involved in inflammatory responses. This combination of responses explains the enhanced immune response and the reduction of fever, Che said.

MOS stimulates the immune system and enhances the immune response, except when the immune system is already challenged, Pettigrew explained. MOS actually reduces the inflammatory response in pigs with challenged immune systems. This may be how the product improves growth performance because it redirects nutrients to growth rather than the immune system.

Che said MOS also improves feed efficiency from Day 7 to 14 after inoculation with PRRSV.

PRRSV interferes with the immune response and makes pigs more susceptible to bacterial infections, Pettigrew said. This product seems to counteract this effect. It may even reduce bacterial infections associated with PRRSV, although we did not test that specifically.

This team of researchers is also repeating this experiment with a second generation of MOS-like products to learn more about how this mechanism in MOS works.

We are increasingly concerned about the importance of keeping pigs healthy, so we direct much of our research program to looking at things we can do in the diet to improve the health of pigs, Pettigrew said.

Mannan oligosaccharide modulates gene expression profile in pigs experimentally infected with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus and Mannan oligosaccharide improves immune responses and growth efficiency of nursery pigs experimentally infected with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus were both published in the

Can soda tax curb obesity?

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) EVANSTON, Ill. --- To many, a tax on soda is a no-brainer in advancing the nation's war on obesity. Advocates point to a number of studies in recent years that conclude that sugary drinks have a lot to do with why Americans are getting fatter.

But obese people tend to drink diet sodas, and therefore taxing soft drinks with added sugar or other sweeteners is not a good weapon in combating obesity, according to a new Northwestern University study.

An amendment to Illinois Senate Bill 396 would add a penny an ounce to the cost of most soft drinks with added sugar or sweeteners, including soda, sweet iced tea and coffee drinks. Related to the purpose of the tax, the legislation excludes artificially sweetened and diet sodas.

After doing the analysis, it really turns out to be the case that obese people like diet soda so much more than regular soda that you can do whatever you want to the price, said Ketan Patel, a fourth-year doctoral student in economics. You're not going to get that much change in obese people's weight because they already drink diet soda.

Patel, who recently presented his paper The Effectiveness of Food Taxes at Affecting Consumption in the Obese: Evaluating Soda Taxes at a U.S. Department of Agriculture conference on food policy in Washington, D.C., said he initially didn't know if the diet soda preference was going to be a large factor in evaluating the effectiveness of the soda tax.

The concern I had was that maybe obese people are less price sensitive, Patel said. So if obese people are less price sensitive, then raising the price through a tax will affect their behavior less.

But that concern became irrelevant since diet drinks are not being considered in the proposed obesity tax.

Beyond its ineffectiveness in reducing obesity, such a tax also would punish consumers that are not overweight or obese, Patel said.

Is there a scenario in which increasing the tax would have an effect on weight? Patel said that could depend on whether people are at a stable weight or whether people are already eating too many calories and therefore their weight will continue to increase. If increasing weights are the status quo, then a tax could prevent people who are currently overweight or normal weight from becoming obese. More research needs to be done on this aspect, however, Patel said.

For this study, Patel used a large data set of sodas price and sales data with individual level data on demographic characteristics and body mass index (BMI) to estimate consumer preferences while allowing for substantial diversity in those preferences. After obtaining estimates of consumer preferences, Patel simulated how a tax would change the choices that consumers make and used the results of the simulation to estimate changes in weight using a weight change model from existing nutrition literature.

In the meantime, however, lawmakers say it does not look likely that the tax will be imposed anytime soon as there is little support for the measure after a recent income tax hike in Illinois.

Sport doctors say non-alcoholic wheat beer boosts athletes' health

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Many amateur athletes have long suspected what research scientists for the Department of Preventative and Rehabilitative Sports Medicine of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen at Klinikum rechts der Isar have now made official: Documented proof, gathered during the world's largest study of marathons, Be-MaGIC (beer, marathons, genetics, inflammation and the cardiovascular system), that the consumption of non-alcoholic weissbier, or wheat beer, has a positive effect on athletes' health. Under the direction of Dr. Johannes Scherr, physicians examined 277 test subjects three weeks before and two weeks after the 2009 Munich Marathon.

The study focuses on the health risks for marathon runners and the potential positive effects of polyphenols. These aromatic compounds occur naturally in plants as pigment, flavor, or tannins, many of which have been credited with health-promoting and cancer-preventative properties. Unique to this study was the combination of different polyphenols that were tested on the large pool of participants. The research team met the scientific requirements of the study by conducting a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

Non-alcoholic Erdinger wheat beer was selected as the test beverage, chosen for its rich and varied polyphenol content and its popularity with marathoners and tri-athletes. The active group drank up to 1.5 liters of the test beverage per day, while a second group consumed an equal amount of an otherwise indistinguishable placebo beverage that contained no polyphenols and was especially produced for the study.

One result from the study was the discovery that, after running a marathon race, athletes experience intensified inflammatory reactions. The immune system is thrown off balance and runners are much more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections. This heightened susceptibility to illness following strenuous sport activity has been identified as an open window. Furthermore it was shown that non-alcoholic wheat beer containing polyphenols has a positive, health promoting effect on the human body: inflammation parameters in the blood were significantly reduced, and there was a lower frequency of infection with milder symptoms.

Reduced Inflammatory Reaction: Dr. Scherr, who also serves as physician to the German National Ski Team, explains: The analysis of the leukocytes, or white blood cells, which constitute one of the most important parameters for inflammation, revealed values in the active group that were 20% lower than in the placebo group.

Support for the Immune System: Compounds in the test drink had a compensatory or balancing effect on the immune system. Dr Scherr: We were able to prove that it strengthens an immune system that has been weakened by physical stress. It also prevents the system from over-performing.

Prevents Colds: Runners who drank the non-alcoholic wheat beer were up to three times less susceptible to infection than those in the placebo group. Dr. Scherr: Drinking the non-alcoholic test beverage reduces your risk of developing a cold by one third.

Improvement with Upper Respiratory Infections: People in the active group who did succumb to a cold experienced a milder or briefer infection than those in the placebo group. Dr. Scherr: Results showed a Number Needed to Treat (NNT) of eight. That means that for every eight people who had the test drink, one of them was prevented from succumbing to a cold.

In summary, Dr. Scherr explains: The potential for foods containing polyphenols to have a positive effect on athletes' health has already been suggested in several articles. Nevertheless we were ourselves sometimes surprised at how clearly evident this was in the results. We now have scientific confirmation of those assumptions for this test beverage, with its particular combination of polyphenols, vitamins and minerals.

Dr. Scherr presented this study to the approximately 5,000 scientists, physicians, and trainers attending the world's largest congress for sports medicine in Denver (USA) hosted by the American College of Sports (ACSM) at the beginning of June 2011. The study will be published in the January printed edition of the professional journal

BUSM names Deborah Frank, M.D., inaugural professors in child health and well-being

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) announces the establishment of an endowed Professorship in Child Health and Well-Being in the department of Pediatrics. This anonymously donated endowment reinforces the importance of supporting clinical practice focusing on public policies related to ending hunger and hardship in young children.

The inaugural incumbent of this professorship is Deborah A. Frank, MD. Frank serves as BUSM professor of Pediatrics; director, Grow Clinic for Children at Boston Medical Center (BMC); and founder and principal investigator of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatric and public health researchers working to improve child health. A highly respected national authority, she has testified before both the United States and Massachusetts legislatures on the growing national problem of hunger and its effects on children. Frank also leads research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse on the effects of intrauterine exposure to cocaine and other substances on children's long term development. She advocates at hearings and in the media against criminalizing addicted mothers or stigmatizing their children.

Frank has served on numerous committees and advisory boards including the Mayor's Hunger Commission, the Massachusetts Child Hunger Initiative and the Physicians Task Force on Childhood Hunger in Massachusetts. She has received awards in recognition for her work including the 2004 Standing Ovation Award, Massachusetts Human Services Coalition; 2007 Woman of Valor Award, Jewish Funds for Justice; 2008 Woman of Justice Award, Boston Lawyer's Weekly, and more recently in 2010 Dr. Frank received the Massachusetts Health Council Outstanding Leadership Award and the Physician Advocacy Merit Award from the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University. Frank is the author of more than 50 papers and articles.

An endowed professorship is one of the most significant means by which BUSM can honor its highly esteemed teachers and researchers. They are important to the mission of BUSM because they offer our school the opportunity to attract highly distinguished faculty, said BUSM Dean Karen H. Antman, MD. Dr. Frank's long-standing commitment to caring for and training others to care for children and to understanding and preventing child hunger makes her a deserving candidate to be the first to hold this professorship. By selecting Dr. Frank for this important honor we show continued commitment to serving the most basic needs of the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society.

A summa cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School, Frank did her residency at Children's Orthopedic Hospital in Seattle and completed a fellowship in Child Development with T. Berry Brazelton at Children's Hospital in Boston. She joined BUSM as a clinical assistant professor of Pediatrics in 1981 when she also established the Failure to Thrive Program at Boston City Hospital, now known as the Grow Clinic for Children at Boston Medical Center (BMC). Frank was named BUSM professor of Pediatrics in 2001.

Rigorous study confirms video game playing increases food intake in teens

Tue, 17 May 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that almost 18% of US teens are obese. Although most experts agree that our growing obesity epidemic is driven by both inadequate physical activity and excessive caloric intake, implementing solutions is extraordinarily difficult. One area that has caught the attention of health researchers is the observation that trends in video game playing parallel obesity rates on a population basis. Furthermore, several studies have documented a positive association between how much time a child plays video games and his or her chance of being obese. However, correlation does not necessarily imply causality, and controlled intervention studies are required to test whether playing video games causes children to increase their food intake and/or decrease their energy expenditure. In the first such study of this kind, Canadian and Danish researchers tested their hypothesis that video game playing is accompanied by increased spontaneous food intake.

This study is an especially important piece of the scientific puzzle in this arena because it went beyond simply simultaneously documenting the relationship between video game playing and food intake in kids, said Shelley McGuire, PhD, American Society for Nutrition spokesperson. Instead, it actually studied the same group of children during two separate, experimentally-administered periods of rest and video-game play, and then used gold-standard methods to measure important outcomes such as food intake, energy expenditure, and feelings of hunger and appetite. Consequently, the results can be used with a high degree of confidence to suggest that playing virtual soccer can affect food intake. Very interesting! Given our current obesity crisis in kids, I will be curious to follow the results of follow-up studies. For instance, do violent games or educational games have the same effect as sports-related games?

Healthy, normal-weight male teens (mean age: ~17 y) were studied in this crossover intervention trial consisting of two 1-h periods. In one period, subjects rested (control period); in the other, they played video games. For both study periods (which occurred at 10:30 AM), the youth reported to a research laboratory after an overnight fast and were provided with a standardized breakfast (8:00 AM). During the intervention periods, blood samples were collected every 10 min, and energy expenditure was assessed by using indirect calorimetry. Immediately thereafter, each participant was offered full access to a spaghetti lunch. Food intake and measurements of hunger, satiety, fullness, and appetite were assessed.

Blood glucose concentrations increased more when playing video games than during the control period, but there was no differential effect on insulin or ghrelin (a hormone thought to signal the sensation of hunger to the brain). Energy expenditure was 21 kcal/h higher during video game play than during the resting condition. However, subjects ate 80 more kilocalories after playing the video games than they did after the control period. This resulted in a net positive energy of 163 kcal during the entire day when video games were played compared with when subjects rested, despite the fact that the subjects reported similar appetite ratings during these periods.

The authors concluded that their results provide preliminary evidence that male teens playing video games for 1 h consume more calories in the short-term than they do after 1 h of rest. Moreover, overconsumption of food after playing video games occurs without changes in perceived hunger and appetite. Additional studies are needed to determine the long-term effects on weight gain and health.

Egyptian princess was first person with diagnosed coronary artery disease

Tue, 17 May 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Embargo: 17 May 2011 18:00 CET-- The coronary arteries of Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon - as visualised by whole body computerised tomography (CT) scanning - will feature in two presentations at the International Conference of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Imaging (ICNC) this week in Amsterdam (15-18 May). ICNC is now one of the world's major scientific event in nuclear cardiology and cardiac CT imaging.

The Egyptian princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon, who lived in Thebes (Luxor) between 1580 and 1550 BC and who is now known to be first person in human history with diagnosed coronary artery disease, lived on a diet rich in vegetables, fruit and a limited amount of meat from domesticated (but not fattened) animals. Wheat and barley were grown along the banks of the Nile, making bread and beer the dietary staples of this period of ancient Egypt. Tobacco and trans-fats were unknown, and lifestyle was likely to have been active.

The coronary arteries of Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon - as visualised by whole body computerised tomography (CT) scanning - will feature in two presentations at the International Conference of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Imaging (ICNC) currently taking place in Amsterdam (15-18 May). ICNC is now one of the world's major scientific event in nuclear cardiology and cardiac CT imaging.

Both presentations will be based on findings from the Horus study, in which arterial atherosclerosis was investigated in 52 ancient Egyptian mummies. Results have shown that recognisable arteries were present in 44 of the mummies, with an identifiable heart present in 16. Arterial calcification (as a marker of atherosclerosis) was evident at a variety of sites in almost half the mummies scanned, prompting the investigators to note that the condition was common in this group of middle aged or older ancient Egyptians; the 20 mummies with definite atherosclerosis were older (mean 45.years) than those with intact vascular tissue but no atherosclerosis (34.5 years).

Although relatively common at other vascular sites, atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries was evident in only three of the mummies investigated, but was clearly visualised in Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon (in whom calcification was present in every vascular bed visualised).

The CT scan image below shows that the princess, who died in her 40s, had atherosclerosis in two of her three main coronary arteries. Today, said Dr Gregory S Thomas, director of Nuclear Cardiology Education at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and co-principal investigator of the Horus study, she would have needed by-pass surgery.

Overall, it was striking how much atherosclerosis we found, said Dr Thomas. We think of atherosclerosis as a disease of modern lifestyle, but it's clear that it also existed 3500 years ago. Our findings certainly call into question the perception of atherosclerosis as a modern disease.

If, however, the princess enjoyed a diet deemed to be healthy and pursued a lifestyle probably active, how could this disease of modern life affect her so visibly? Dr Thomas and his co-principal investigator Dr Adel Allam of Al Azhar University, Cairo, suggest three possibilities.

First, that there is still some unknown risk factor for cardiovascular disease, or at least a missing link in our understanding of it. Dr Allam noted a likely effect of genetic inheritance, pointing out that much of the human predisposition to atherosclerosis could be secondary to their genes. He similarly raised the possibility that an inflammatory response to the frequent parasitic infections common to ancient Egyptians might predispose to coronary disease - in much the same way that immunocompromised HIV cases seem also predisposed to early coronary disease. Nor can a dietary effect be excluded, despite what we know of life in ancient Egypt. Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon was from a noble family, her father, Seqenenre Tao II, the last pharaoh of the 17th Dynasty.

So it's likely that her diet was not that of the common Egyptian. As a royal, she would have eaten more luxury foods - more meat, butter and cheese. Moreover, foods were preserved in salt, which may also have had an adverse effect.

Despite the suggestion of a genetic, inflammatory or unknown effect, Drs Thomas and Allam were keen not to discount those risk factors for heart disease which we do know about. Indeed, even in the study's apparent association of atheroma with increasing age, there was a pattern of prevalence consistent with our own epidemiology today. Recent studies have shown that by not smoking, having a lower blood pressure and a lower cholesterol level, calcification of our arteries is delayed, said co-investigator Dr Randall C Thompson of the St Luke's Mid-America Heart Institute in Kansas City, USA. On the other hand, from what we can tell from this study, humans are predisposed to atherosclerosis, so it behoves us to take the proper measures necessary to delay it as long as we can.

Hosagunda, India joins the international Sacred Seeds project

Fri, 13 May 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) (ST. LOUIS, MO. USA): Sacred Seeds, a non-profit organization committed to preserving both sacred medicinal plant species and the ancient wisdom about their therapeutic and sustainable use, is pleased to announce that Sri Uma Maheshwara Seva Trust (Hosagunda), in the state of Karnataka, India, has become a foundational garden in the international Sacred Seeds movement. Developed to help stem the loss of biodiversity and health practices that depend on biodiversity, Sacred Seeds is helping local communities and institutions create gardens around the world that contain plants traditionally used for primary health care as well as nutritionally important species to improve local diets. These gardens serve as living genetic repositories helping to preserve the diversity of healing plants used by humankind. Sacred Seeds foundational gardens serve as vanguards of integrative ethnobotanical conservation and models for other communities across the globe.

It was also announced that Semillas Sagradas at Finca Luna Nueva in Costa Rica and Hosagunda have become sister gardens in the family of Sacred Seeds Sanctuaries. They, along with all of the Sacred Seeds gardens, are united in a shared devotion to the highest principles of plant conservation and traditional botanical wisdom.

Tom Newmark, chairman of Sacred Seeds and co-founder of Semillas Sagradas in Costa Rica, welcomed Hosagunda to our international family of medicinal plant sanctuaries. He further noted that the great Ayurvedic and Sidha medical systems of India have brilliantly appreciated the healing power of medicinal plants for thousands of years, and Sacred Seeds is delighted that Hosagunda will represent those healing traditions in our family of plant sanctuaries.

CMN Shastry, managing trustee of Hosagunda, expressed his hope that Hosagunda's programs will inspire similar projects around the world. Hosagunda, he observed, is a Sacred Forest rich with archeological relics of religious and cultural significance. We are reintroducing native herbal species of sacred and medicinal uses to create a living expression of ancient traditional medicine. By joining the international Sacred Seeds movement, we will study best practices from other sanctuaries and we hope inspire other cultures to integrate medicinal gardens with archeological restoration.

The Sacred Seeds Project is administered by the William L. Brown Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Dr. Rainer Bussmann, director and William L. Brown Curator of Economic Botany, expressed his enthusiasm about the addition of Hosagunda to the Sacred Seeds Project. Hosagunda is one of the few remaining fragments of forest in the densely populated agricultural landscape of Karnataka. With its 600 acres of sacred forest and temples, Hosagunda forms a real Eco-Spiritual Center, and is a wonderful example of conservation by revitalizing local traditions. We are thrilled to have it as part of Sacred Seeds.

Vitamin E can fight fatty liver disease in kids

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 14:17:57 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A specific form of Vitamin E can improve the most severe form of fatty liver disease in some children.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease - is the most common chronic liver disease among US children. It ranges in severity from steatosis - to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or NASH -.

The symptoms of NAFLD and NASH are identical. They are very bland and non-specific. They can occur at any adult age and, in children, usually appear after 10 years of age.

Fatty liver increases a child's risk of developing heart disease and liver cirrhosis. The only way to distinguish NASH from other forms of fatty liver disease is with a liver biopsy.

Using liver biopsies, researchers found that after 96 weeks of treatment, 58 percent of the children on Vitamin E no longer had NASH, compared to 41 percent of the children on metformin -, and 28 percent on placebo.

Vitamin E was better than placebo because it significantly reduced enlargement and death of liver cells, reports the Journal of the American Medical Association.

'These results suggest that Vitamin E improves or resolves NASH in at least half of children, which we previously showed to be true in adults,' said Stephen P. James, director of the digestive diseases at National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases -, which funded the study.

Weight loss may reverse the disease in some children, but other than dietary advice, there are no specific treatments. Excess fat in the liver is believed to cause injury by increasing levels of oxidants, compounds that damage cells, according to an NIDDK statement.

The Treatment of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Children - trial studied whether Vitamin E - or metformin could improve fatty liver disease.

Most children with fatty liver disease are overweight and resistant to insulin, a critical hormone that regulates energy. Boys are more likely to be affected than girls.

Study shows hunger hitting closer to home

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new study on hunger entitled Map the Meal Gap is the first study to identify the county-level distribution of over 50 million food-insecure Americans.

Until now, we could only compare the data by state, said Craig Gundersen, University of Illinois associate professor of agricultural and consumer economics and executive director of the National Soybean Research Laboratory who led the data analysis on the project. Having this data by county has the potential to redefine the way service providers and policy makers address areas of need.

Gundersen explained that the term meal gap refers to the additional number of meals the food insecure population in the selected area requires to meet their food needs. On the national level, the average cost of a meal is $2.54. The study shows this shortfall represents an estimated $21.3 billion on an annual basis.

Per person this is only about $56 more each month on average to address the shortages in their food budget, Gundersen said.

Among the key findings of the study is that there are 44 counties in the United States that fall into the top 10 percent categories for both food insecurity and food prices. These counties struggle with multiple stressors, including high food insecurity, high poverty, high unemployment and above-average food costs, Gundersen said. At the time the most recent data were collected, on average, one in every four persons in these counties was food insecure and 27 percent lived at or below poverty. The counties are typically rural and one-third are majority African American.

This study also demonstrates the distribution of food-insecure persons who are not eligible for food assistance programs. In Illinois, for example, 41 percent of the almost 2 million people who are identified as being food insecure are also ineligible to receive federal assistance from SNAP, which is limited to people with incomes up to the 130 percent level of federal poverty. (SNAP, The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was formerly known as the Food Stamp Program.)

A summary of the findings, an interactive map of the United States showing data for each county, and the full report are available on Feeding America's website at www.feedingamerica.org. The study was funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the Nielsen Co.

The executive summary of the report features additional information that describes how Latinos and American Indians are disproportionately affected by high rates of hunger and high food prices.

Gundersen is also working with James Ziliak of the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research to coordinate a research program on childhood hunger with $5.5 million from the USDA.

In order to address the problem of hunger in our communities, we have to understand it, Gundersen said. The results from Map the Meal Gap will help researchers to better identify the populations and develop strategies to reach those who are most in need of food assistance.

Religious young adults become obese by middle age

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHICAGO --- Could it be the potato salad? Young adults who frequently attend religious activities are 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age as young adults with no religious involvement, according to new Northwestern Medicine research. This is the first longitudinal study to examine the development of obesity in people with various degrees of religious involvement.

We don't know why frequent religious participation is associated with development of obesity, but the upshot is these findings highlight a group that could benefit from targeted efforts at obesity prevention, said Matthew Feinstein, the study's lead investigator and a fourth-year student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. It'spossible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity.

Previous Northwestern Medicine research established a correlation between religious involvement and obesity in middle-age and older adults at a single point in time. By tracking participants' weight gain over time, the new study makes it clear that normal weight younger adults with high religious involvement became obese, rather than obese adults becoming more religious.

The research is being presented at the American Heart Association's Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism/Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention Scientific Sessions 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia.

The study, which tracked 2,433 men and women for 18 years, found normal weight young adults ages 20 to 32 years with a high frequency of religious participation were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age after adjusting for differences in age, race, sex, education, income and baseline body mass index. High frequency of religious participation was defined as attending a religious function at least once a week.

Obesity is defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher. A woman who is 5'5 and 180 pounds has a BMI of 30, for example.

The men and women in the study were part of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) multi-center study, supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Obesity is the major epidemic that is facing the U.S. population right now, said senior study author Donald Lloyd-Jones, M.D., chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. We know that people with obesity have substantial risks for developing diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer, and of dying much younger. So, we need to use all of the tools at our disposal to identify groups at risk and to provide education and support to prevent the development of obesity in the first place. Once the weight is on, it is much harder to lose it.

The authors caution that their findings should only be taken to mean people with frequent religious involvement are more likely to become obese, and not that they have worse overall health status than those who are non-religious. In fact, previous studies have shown religious people tend to live longer than those who aren't religious in part because they tend to smoke less.

Here's an opportunity for religious organizations to initiate programs to help their congregations live even longer, Feinstein said. The organizations already have groups of people getting together and infrastructures in place that could be leveraged to initiate programs that prevent people from becoming obese and treat existing obesity.

Feinstein noted Northwestern is leading such an educational intervention in a church on Chicago's West Side where members are taught how dietary changes and increased physical activity can lower cardiovascular disease risk factors such as obesity, cholesterol and high blood pressure. Church-based interventions have shown promising results, he said.

Load up on fiber now, avoid heart disease later

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHICAGO --- A new study from Northwestern Medicine shows a high-fiber diet could be a critical heart-healthy lifestyle change young and middle-aged adults can make. The study found adults between 20 and 59 years old with the highest fiber intake had a significantly lower estimated lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease compared to those with the lowest fiber intake.

The study will be presented March 23 at the American Heart Association's Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism/Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention Scientific Sessions 2011 in Atlanta, Ga. This is the first known study to show the influence of fiber consumption on the lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease.

It's long been known that high-fiber diets can help people lose weight, lower cholesterol and improve hypertension, said Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, corresponding author of the study and chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The results of this study make a lot of sense because weight, cholesterol and hypertension are major determinants of your long-term risk for cardiovascular disease.

A high-fiber diet falls into the American Heart Association's recommendation of 25 grams of dietary fiber or more a day. Lloyd-Jones said you should strive to get this daily fiber intake from whole foods, not processed fiber bars, supplements and drinks.

A processed food may be high in fiber, but it also tends to be pretty high in sodium and likely higher in calories than an apple, for example, which provides the same amount of fiber, Lloyd-Jones said.

For the study, Hongyan Ning, M.D., lead author and a statistical analyst in the department of preventive medicine at Feinberg, examined data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a nationally representative sample of about 11,000 adults.

Ning considered diet, blood pressure, total cholesterol, smoking status and history of diabetes in survey participants and then used a formula to predict lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease.

The results are pretty amazing, Ning said. Younger (20 to 39 years) and middle-aged (40 to 59 years) adults with the highest fiber intake, compared to those with the lowest fiber intake, showed a statistically significant lower lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease.

In adults 60 to 79 years, dietary fiber intake was not significantly associated with a reduction in lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease. It's possible that the beneficial effect of dietary fiber may require a long period of time to achieve, and older adults may have already developed significant risk for heart disease before starting a high-fiber diet, Ning said.

As for young and middle-aged adults, now is the time to start making fiber a big part of your daily diet, Ning said.

The study suggests that starting a high-fiber diet now may help improve your long-term risk, Ning said.

Sea grant awards more than $1.1 million for research under EPA's Long Island Sound study

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) STONY BROOK, NY, March 8, 2011 - The Sea Grant programs of Connecticut and New York have awarded Long Island Sound Study research grants valued at $1,130,832 to six projects that will look into some of the most serious threats to the ecological health of Long Island Sound, a water body designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as an Estuary of National Significance.

Research results from five two-year projects and a one-year pilot project are expected to provide valuable information to resource managers throughout the Long Island Sound watershed. Most projects involve nitrogen, known to be the biggest driver of low oxygen conditions in the Sound. The research also addresses emerging issues of red tide and the effects of climate change on the Sound's ecosystem.

The focus of many of the projects is on nitrogen-- its sources, impacts, and removal processes-- with the overall goal of improving the water quality of Long Island Sound for the benefit of its coastal communities and businesses, said Dr. James Ammerman, director of New York Sea Grant.

A study by Shimon Anisfeld and Gaboury Benoit at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies will examine characteristics of constructed wetlands and wet ponds (manmade retention basins) to find out if and under what conditions they are effective at reducing the amount of nitrogen that enters Long Island Sound via stormwater. The results will help in future Best Management Practice designs to improve water quality.

Two geoscientists at Stony Brook University (SBU), Gilbert Hanson and Teng-Fong Wong, will examine the source, transformation, and fate of nitrogen as it travels from shallow groundwater aquifers to two harbors on Long Island's north shore. The information will be important to municipalities evaluating the potential impacts of on-site wastewater disposal systems. In another project, University of Connecticut (UConn) marine scientists Jamie Vaudrey and Charles Yarish will look at the impacts of nitrogen on habitats in some of the many small embayments that surround the Sound in Connecticut and New York. They will assess the uncertain ability of these habitats to support eelgrass under conditions of eutrophication and changing climate. Eelgrass is ecologically and economically valuable, particularly as bay scallop habitat.

A project led by Darcy Lonsdale and Christopher Gobler at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at SBU will look at how increasing populations of gelatinous zooplankton, such as comb jellies and jellyfish, might affect hypoxia and food webs in the Sound.

Harmful algal blooms, increasing globally, have negative effects on fisheries and economies. In a separate project, SBU's Gobler will determine possible anthropogenic causes of fundamental changes in the Sound that may encourage toxin-producing algal bloom events. The blooms can cause PSP and DSP, two different types of shellfish poisoning that impact human health.

Finally, in a small-scale pilot project, Craig R. Tobias, UConn Department of Marine Sciences, and Bongkuen Song, University of North Carolina at Wilmington Biology Department, will team up to quantify seasonal removal rates of nitrogen in tidal reaches of a Connecticut estuary. The results will be mapped and provide clues to whether hot spots for these processes persist over time and space or are transient. This information will help inform future management choices.

Nitrogen plays an invaluable role in society as fertilizer, but we know that too much nitrogen in coastal waters such as Long Island Sound can degrade water quality and contribute to harmful algal blooms, said Mark Tedesco, director of the EPA Long Island Sound Office which manages the Long Island Sound Study partnership, and provided the funds for the Sea Grant- administered research projects.

Since 2000, the Long Island Sound grant program has awarded 26 grants to scientists whose work helps meet the needs of decision-makers to improve the management of Long Island Sound, for a total of 32 projects.

The range of projects we are funding reflects the complexity of the problems we are facing, and will contribute to providing a strong scientific basis in support of management decisions for healthy ecosystems, said Dr. Sylvain De Guise, director of Connecticut Sea Grant. The results will help to conserve the Sound for current and future generations.

Research sheds light on fat digestibility in pigs

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Producers and feed companies add fat to swine diets to increase energy, but recent research from the University of Illinois suggests that measurements currently used for fat digestibility need to be updated.

It's critical that we gain a better understanding of the energy value of fat, said Hans H. Stein, U of I professor in the Department of Animal Sciences. If we don't know the true energy value of fat, we can't determine if it's economical to add to the diet.

In a recent experiment, Stein and his team of researchers studied how different types of diets affect endogenous losses of fat (fat excreted from pigs that did not originate from the diet). They measured endogenous losses of fat to determine the true digestibility of both intact and extracted corn oil. The intact corn oil was provided in the form of corn germ, and the extracted fat was provided as liquid corn oil.

Endogenous losses differed depending on the type of fat in the diet, he said. The intact fat was less digestible than extracted fat.

We believe that the main reason intact fat is less digestible than extracted fat is that it is easy for the enzymes to gain access to the fat in corn oil. In contrast, the corn germ is encased in the feed ingredient among the fiber complexes, which makes it difficult for enzymes to access and digest it, Stein said.

His team also discovered that measuring fat digestibility at the end of the ileum results in a more accurate value than measuring the total tract digestibility of fat.

The microbes in the hindgut can synthesize fat, Stein explained. This fat is not absorbed in the hindgut; it's just excreted in the feces. Because of this, it's easy to underestimate the amount of fat that was absorbed in the small intestine by the pig.

Stein said this research has opened new doors for swine nutrition.

We knew that the concentration of fat in the diet affects the value that is determined for apparent digestibility, Stein said. However, by correcting these values for the endogenous losses, we can calculate the true digestibility of fat fed to pigs.

Results of the research indicate that more information on fat digestibility is needed to ensure that diets are formulated economically.

We now know that fat digestibility should be determined as ileal digestibility rather than total tract digestibility to avoid the influence of the microbes in the hindgut of pigs, he said. We also know that for practical feed formulation, it is more accurate to use values for true ileal digestibility than for apparent ileal digestibility because these values are not influenced by the level of fat in the diet.

However, Stein said we still don't know many of the factors that influence fat digestibility in different feed ingredients and we do not have good data for the true ileal digestibility of fat in most of our feed ingredients. A better understanding of how fat is utilized by the pig after absorption is also needed. Stein believes follow-up research should focus on addressing these questions and determining the energy value of the different sources of fat used in swine diets.

Hershey scientists improve methods for analysis of healthful cocoa compounds

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Two scientific publications report on improved methods for determining the amounts of flavanol antioxidants in cocoa and chocolate. The research, sponsored by The Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition, was a collaboration between scientists at The Hershey Company and other scientific laboratories.

Scientists at Planta Analytica (Danbury, CT) isolated and separated cocoa flavanol antioxidants on a large scale. The Hershey scientists and collaborating scientists at the Pennsylvania State University-M.S. Hershey Medical Center (Hershey, PA) teamed up to determine the purity of these flavanols by HPLC and by Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectroscopy. The isolated compounds were then used as standards in the determination of flavanol cocoa antioxidants in a cocoa powder and a dark chocolate.

We believe this represents the first large scale purification of standards for flavanol antioxidant determination said Dr. Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition. Prior to this, only dimers were commercially available. With a full series of standards, our flavanol determinations are not only more accurate, but the values are much higher, between 40% to 100% higher, than previously published methods using proprietary standards. This also means that standards are commercially available to various laboratories. This collaborative work was published in the online journal

In other research published in the Journal Association of Official Analytical Chemists, scientists from The Hershey Company and Brunswick Laboratories (Newton, MA) reported on the development of a new method for determining total procyanidins. This method is a colorimetric test based on the specific reaction of dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde (DMAC) with flavanols. The method measures flavanol monomers, including EGCG, as well as higher flavanol polymers. The method which is standardized using a commercially available flavanol dimer, was validated at two Brunswick Laboratories facilities and at Hershey with all three laboratories providing comparable results at the 95% confidence level. The specific reaction of DMAC with the flavanols has been known since the 1950s. This method is a simple and quick way to measure total procyanidins in cocoa and chocolate said Dr. Mark Payne of the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition. Compared to the HPLC method, which separates individual compounds, this method gives one number, which importantly includes polymers of flavanols beyond ten.

These reports are part of an ongoing series of publications, by Hershey and its collaborators, designed to improve upon the methods to determine flavanol antioxidants from cocoa and chocolate, said Dr. David Stuart, of the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition. We want to make these methods generally available to the chocolate industry initially, with the intent of having uniformly agreed upon methods of determining the level of these important molecules.

These new methods can be used in research and other applications involving dietary intake of cocoa and chocolate, clinical interventions and food standardization.

Want more efficient muscles? Eat your spinach

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) After taking a small dose of inorganic nitrate for three days, healthy people consume less oxygen while riding an exercise bike. A new study in the February issue of Cell Metabolism traces that improved performance to increased efficiency of the mitochondria that power our cells.

The researchers aren't recommending anyone begin taking inorganic nitrate supplements based on the new findings. Rather, they say that the results may offer one explanation for the well-known health benefits of fruits and vegetables, and leafy green vegetables in particular.

We're talking about an amount of nitrate equivalent to what is found in two or three red beets or a plate of spinach, said Eddie Weitzberg of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. We know that diets rich in fruits and vegetables can help prevent cardiovascular disease and diabetes but the active nutrients haven't been clear. This shows inorganic nitrate as a candidate to explain those benefits.

In fact, up until recently nitrate wasn't thought to have any nutritional value at all. It has even been suggested that this component of vegetables might be toxic. But Weitzberg and his colleague Jon Lundberg earlier showed that dietary nitrate feeds into a pathway that produces nitric oxide with the help of friendly bacteria found in our mouths. Nitric oxide has been known for two decades as a physiologically important molecule. It opens up our blood vessels to lower blood pressure, for instance.

The new study offers yet another benefit of nitrate and the nitric oxides that stem from them. It appears that the increased mitochondrial efficiency is owed to lower levels of proteins that normally make the cellular powerhouses leaky. Mitochondria normally aren't fully efficient, Weitzberg explained. No machine is.

Questions do remain. The new results show that increased dietary nitrate can have a rather immediate effect. But it's not yet clear what might happen in people who consume higher levels of inorganic nitrate over longer periods of time. Weitzberg says it will be a natural next step to repeat the experiment in people with conditions linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, to see if they too enjoy the benefits of nitrates.

Among the more consistent findings from nutritional research are the beneficial effects of a high intake of fruit and vegetables in protection against major disorders such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, the researchers concluded. However, the underlying mechanism(s) responsible for these effects is still unclear, and trials with single nutrients have generally failed. It is tempting to speculate that boosting of the nitrate-nitrite-NO pathway may be one mechanism by which vegetables exert their protective effects.

As an interesting aside, Weitzberg says that the benefits of dietary nitrates suggest that powerful mouthwashes may have a downside. We need oral bacteria for the first step in nitrate reduction, he says. You could block the effects of inorganic nitrate if you use a strong mouthwash or spit [instead of swallowing your saliva]. In our view, strong mouthwashes are not good if you want this system to work.

Insects that deter predators produce fewer offspring

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Scientists studied the defences used by caterpillars that transform into large white butterflies, called Pieris brassicae. The insects regurgitate semi-digested cabbage leaves to make them smell and taste unpleasant to predators. The team found, however, that frequent use of this defence reduces the caterpillars' growth rate and the number of eggs they produce. It remains unclear why their defences affect them in this way, but the loss of nutrition from frequent regurgitation is thought to play a part.

Caterpillars are a target of pest control, as they destroy food crop by eating the leaves of cabbages and other vegetable crop. This new study, however, suggests that natural predators, such as farmland birds, do not necessarily have to consume large numbers of insects, to have a significant effect on the size of the population. Researchers found that 40% of caterpillars that defended themselves from predators by regurgitating food, died before transforming into a butterfly, despite successfully surviving the initial attack.

The study also showed that on average large caterpillars have 60 eggs, but those that used their defences against daily predator attacks produced approximately 30 eggs. It is thought that this effect could be widespread amongst herbivorous insects, suggesting that predators may have a larger impact on reducing the population of agricultural pests than previously thought.

Dr Mike Speed, from the University of Liverpool's Institute of Integrative Biology, explains: Research has shown that large insects produce more eggs than smaller ones. This is commonly assumed to always be the case, but we have found that those that regurgitate food as a defence against predators, have fewer eggs, similar to the numbers of offspring smaller insects have. We also found that these insects grow at a slower rate and even those that successfully change into a butterfly, are smaller than normal.

Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Glasgow, said: Interestingly, the caterpillars that grew at a slower rate were not forced, as a result of the attack, to metamorphose prematurely. They could have fed for longer, grown larger and produced more offspring, despite the daily use of their defences, but they appear to 'choose' to change into a smaller butterfly. More study is required to understand why they do this, but it could be that the threat of a fatal attack is too large for them to remain at the larval stage for too long and prompts them to transform into a butterfly early.

Dr Speed added: This work demonstrates that it is important to maintain the diversity of predators such as wild birds, particularly in areas where large numbers of insects can destroy food crop. We now need to look at the defence mechanisms of a variety of insects to understand if other species react in similar ways.

Quick school cafeteria lines could lead to healthier food choices

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Middle schools soon might add fast cafeteria lines to their menu of tools to help students eat healthier, according to Penn State researchers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently awarded $40,000 from the Economic Research Service to Amit Sharma, assistant professor; Martha Conklin, associate professor, hospitality management; and Lisa Bailey-Davis, senior instructor of public health sciences, College of Medicine.

The project will use economic concepts to study the effect of fast cafeteria lines on healthy lunch choices for middle school students, Sharma said.

Students have only a little over 30 minutes to eat lunch, and that includes time spent in the lunch line, Sharma said. Our idea is to create a conducive environment where it is more convenient for students to make healthier food choices.

Sharma said convenience is the key. When students are pressed for time and face multiple food choices, they usually pick foods that are familiar and popular.

Those choices, as you can imagine, usually aren't the most healthy ones, Sharma said.

To limit the time spent in line, the researchers worked on designing a fast service lane option for school cafeterias with limited food choices, called meal deals. Students can select a main dish from limited options, for instance, but most of the side selections would be predetermined. Sharma expects that the strategy will reduce the time that students spend in the lunch lane and encourage them to chose fast lanes more often. The researchers will test the fast service lane at a local middle school.

The researchers will first collect information from students, parents, administrators and food service personnel about how students currently make food choices and which choices are the most popular. From that data, they will develop the food combinations for the fast service lane.

We have to strike the right balance when we create the meal deals, said Sharma. The food choices should be exciting enough for the students, but also healthy.

Once the food combinations are selected and the fast service lane is in place, the researchers will collect data on fast lane use and food combination sales for two or three weeks. The sales of the meal deals will continue for a week after the experiment to determine if students continue to make healthy food choices.

If we can counter those unhealthy choices, we can slowly have the students choose healthier foods rather than food that might be unhealthy, Sharma said.

Middle school students make ideal candidates for the experiment because previous research suggests they are beginning to develop the cognitive capacity to make choices, such as decisions on food and health, according to Sharma. Students also face more health and diet options at this age.

Sharma said it is important that the fast service lane concept fits the school district budget, as well.

Obviously, for the program to work, it has to be affordable, said Sharma. If the fast lane meals incur significant costs for the food service, we will have to go back to the drawing board and find the solutions that are more financially viable.

Widespread vitamin D deficiency a concern in Asia

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Bone health experts attending the 1st Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting in Singapore this week have flagged vitamin D deficiency as a major concern in the region, particularly in South Asia where the problem is especially severe and widespread across the entire population.

Dr. Nikhil Tandon, Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences of New Delhi, India highlighted the results of various studies which show severe deficiency across India and Pakistan in all age groups, as well as insufficiency in populations of South-East and East Asia. A lack of exposure to sunshine, genetic traits and dietary habits are all factors which influence vitamin D levels. In certain regions, vitamin D deficiency can also be attributed to skin pigmentation and traditional clothing, as well as air pollution and limited outdoor activity in urban populations, he stated.

Vitamin D is primarily made in the skin when it is exposed to sunlight, with limited amounts obtained from food sources. However, in people with low sunlight exposure vitamin D is principally obtained from nutritional or supplemental sources. In the elderly, vitamin D deficiency is linked to reduced physical performance and increased risk of fall-related fractures. In children, severe vitamin D deficiency results in inadequate mineralization of bone, leading to growth retardation and bone deformities known as rickets. As well, there is evidence that children born to mothers who are vitamin D deficient during pregnancy may have reduced bone mass, which could in turn be a risk factor for osteoporosis later in life.

At a Vitamin D Roundtable held in conjunction with the meeting, nutrition and bone health experts discussed the importance of encouraging further studies on vitamin D status and risk factors in countries where data are scarce. The group is developing interactive vitamin D maps based on published data of 25(OH)D serum levels, the biomarker used to measure vitamin D status in the blood. Chair of the Roundtable, Professor Robert Josse, Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, Canada commented, The maps will track vitamin D levels by region and different population groups, giving a valuable overview of the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency around the world. The global maps are innovative tools that will help identify problem areas, encourage awareness and stimulate research studies. By facilitating global comparisons, the maps should provide an incentive for health authorities to implement strategies to improve vitamin D status in the population.

Vitamin D deficit doubles risk of stroke in whites, but not in blacks

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Low levels of vitamin D, the essential nutrient obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, doubles the risk of stroke in whites, but not in blacks, according to a new report by researchers at Johns Hopkins.

Stroke is the nation's third leading cause of death, killing more than 140,000 Americans annually and temporarily or permanently disabling over half a million when there is a loss of blood flow to the brain.

Researchers say their findings, to be presented Nov. 15 at the American Heart Association's (AHA) annual Scientific Sessions in Chicago, back up evidence from earlier work at Johns Hopkins linking vitamin D deficiency to higher rates of death, heart disease and peripheral artery disease in adults.

The Hopkins team says its results fail to explain why African Americans, who are more likely to be vitamin D deficient due to their darker skin pigmentation's ability to block the sun's rays, also suffer from higher rates of stroke. Of the 176 study participants known to have died from stroke within a 14-year period, 116 were white and 60 were black. Still, African Americans had a 65 percent greater likelihood of suffering such a severe bleeding in or interruption of blood flow to the brain than whites, when age, other risk factors for stroke, and vitamin D deficiency were factored into their analysis.

Higher numbers for hypertension and diabetes definitely explain some of the excess risk for stroke in blacks compared to whites, but not this much risk, says study co-lead investigator and preventive cardiologist Erin Michos, M.D., M.H.S., an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart and Vascular Institute. Something else is surely behind this problem. However, don't blame vitamin D deficits for the higher number of strokes in blacks.

Nearly 8,000 initially healthy men and women of both races were involved in the latest analysis, part of a larger, ongoing national health survey, in which the researchers compared the risk of death from stroke between those with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D to those with higher amounts. Among them, 6.6 percent of whites and 32.3 percent of blacks had severely low blood levels of vitamin D, which the experts say is less than 15 nanograms per milliliter.

It may be that blacks have adapted over the generations to vitamin D deficiency, so we are not going to see any compounding effects with stroke, says Michos, who notes that African Americans have adapted elsewhere to low levels of the bone-strengthening vitamin, with fewer incidents of bone fracture and greater overall bone density than seen in Caucasians.

In blacks, we may not need to raise vitamin D levels to the same level as in whites to minimize their risk of stroke says Michos, who emphasizes that clinical trials are needed to verify that supplements actually do prevent heart attacks and stroke. In her practice, she says, she monitors her patients' levels of the key nutrient as part of routine blood work while also testing for other known risk factors for heart disease and stroke, including blood pressure, glucose and lipid levels.

Michos cautions that the number of fatal strokes recorded in blacks may not have been statistically sufficient to find a relationship with vitamin D deficits. And she points out that the study only assessed information on deaths from stroke, not the more common brain incidents of stroke, which are usually non-fatal, or even mini-strokes, whose symptoms typically dissipate in a day or so. She says the team's next steps will be to evaluate cognitive brain function as well as non-fatal and transient strokes and any possible tie-ins to nutrient deficiency.

Besides helping to keep bones healthy, vitamin D plays an essential role in preventing abnormal cell growth, and in bolstering the body's immune system. The hormone-like nutrient also controls blood levels of calcium and phosphorus, essential chemicals in the body. Shortages of vitamin D have also been tied to increased rates of breast cancer and depression in the elderly.

Michos recommends that people maintain good vitamin D levels by eating diets rich in such fish as salmon and tuna, consuming vitamin-D fortified dairy products, and taking vitamin D supplements. She also promotes brief exposure daily to the sun's vitamin D-producing ultraviolet light. And to those concerned about the cancer risks linked to too much time spent in the sun, she says as little as 10 to 15 minutes of daily exposure is enough during the summer months.

If vitamin supplements are used, Michos says that daily doses between 1,000 and 2,000 international units are generally safe and beneficial for most people, but that people with the severe vitamin D deficits may need higher doses under close supervision by their physician to avoid possible risk of toxicity.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) previously suggested that an adequate daily intake of vitamin D is between 200 and 600 international units. However, Michos argues that this may be woefully inadequate for most people to raise their vitamin D blood levels to a healthy 30 nanograms per milliliter. The IOM has set up an expert panel to review its vitamin D guidelines, with new recommendations expected by the end of the year. Previous results from the same nationwide survey showed that 41 percent of men and 53 percent of women have unhealthy amounts of vitamin D, with nutrient levels below 28 nanograms per milliliter.

Gastric bypass alters sweet taste function

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Gastric bypass surgery decreases the preference for sweet-tasting substances in obese rats, a study finding that could help in developing safer treatments for the morbidly obese, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery is the most common effective treatment for morbid obesity, said Andras Hajnal, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Neural and Behavioral Science and Surgery. Many patients report altered taste preferences after having the procedure.

This surgery involves the creation of a small gastric pouch and bypassing a portion of the upper small intestine. Unlike other weight-reduction methods, it produces substantial and durable weight loss and significant improvements in obesity-related medical conditions including diabetes.

Study results in obese rats suggest that post-surgery changes in the gastrointestinal anatomy affect change in the brain that relate to taste.

Obese rats given gastric bypass surgery showed a reduced preference for high concentration sucrose water when compared to obese rats that did not have surgery. Researchers observed a similar decrease in preference with other sweet-tasting substances, but not for salty, sour or bitter substances. Researchers observed no change in preference in lean rats that had gastric bypass surgery.

The obese rats used do not have the ability to produce the receptor for feeling satiated shortly after a meal because they lack the gut hormone CCK-1. As a result, these rats consumed larger meals and, over time, became obese and developed type-2 diabetes. Interestingly, previous studies lead by the Penn State investigators found an increased sweet preference in these rats, which is also often seen in people struggling with weight management.

It appears that an uncontrolled appetite may get further boost from altered taste functions during development of obesity and diabetes, Hajnal said. How much of this vicious circle is due to changes in the neurons inside the brain, which receive taste sensations from the tongue and report to the higher order motivational brain centers, we don't know.

The researchers recorded the activity of 170 taste-responsive neurons in the brain. These showed a shift in the neurons' firing activity similar to the behavioral response, which was measured in lick rates of the rats within a ten-second time period. Neurons in the obese rats' brain responded more vigorously to higher-concentration sucrose water placed on the tongue when compared to lean rats. These effects were reversed by gastric bypass surgery and matched the response of lean rats -- a preference for lower concentration sucrose.

The rats that had gastric bypass surgery lost weight comparable to humans who received the surgery -- 26 to 30 percent of their weight -- and maintained the loss for a long period of time after surgery. Following surgery, the obese rats also showed a higher tolerance for glucose, indicating improvement in diabetes.

This supports the applicability of this rat model of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass to humans and also suggests that the observed taste changes following the surgery were not related to 'human factors' such as awareness and compliance to dietary and behavioral interventions, Hajnal said.

The researchers published their findings in the October issue of the

Restaurant Customers Willing To Pay More For Local Food

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Not only are restaurant patrons willing to pay more for meals prepared with produce and meat from local providers, the proportion of customers preferring local meals actually increases when the price increases, according to a team of international researchers. A recent study of how customers perceive and value local food shows that restaurant patrons prefer meals made with local ingredients when they are priced slightly higher than meals made with non-local ingredients, said Amit Sharma, assistant professor, School of Hospitality Management, Penn State. The research will appear in the fall/winter issue of the International Journal of Revenue Management. In the experiment, researchers first set prices for both non-local and local selections on the menu of a student-led restaurant at $5.50. When the price was the same for non-local and local food, customers showed no significant preference for either option. However, when the local food selection was priced at $6.50, or 18 percent higher than the non-local option, a higher proportion of the customers picked the meal made with local foods and ingredients, said Sharma, who worked with Frode Alfnes, associate professor, department of economics and resource management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. This is partly good news for restaurants, said Sharma. It shows that customers were willing to pay slightly more for a local dish, with the emphasis on 'slightly.' Customer preference for premium-priced local food has its limits, however, Sharma warned. Once researchers raised the price of the local option to $7.50, or 36 percent higher than the non-local alternative, a higher proportion of customers chose the regular menu. Value cues--signals that attract increased attention from consumers--may influence the customers' preference for the higher-priced local option. The results indicate that the main value cue of local food for customers is its freshness. The higher price of the local dish was an indicator of higher value, said Sharma. So, customers were comfortable with a slightly higher price for the local food. Sharma said the research could help restaurant owners decide how to set prices for local foods and estimate whether the potential to charge higher prices will compensate for the additional costs associated with adding local food to the menu. The study helps restaurants make decisions on whether it makes sense to offer local foods, said Sharma. If local foods are a natural fit for some of these restaurants, then it would definitely be a good strategy to price the food higher because there is an indication of value with fresh food. Sharma said another important finding of the research was that customers indicated they had no preference between restaurants that offered local foods and ones that did not. The study of 322 customers was conducted at a training restaurant on a Midwest university that serves between 45 and 85 customers each day. Researchers designed a real-time choice experiment to meet several challenges they anticipated from conducting an in-restaurant experiment. Customers who dine at a restaurant are less inclined to fill out long questionnaires. To avoid bias, the researchers asked questions only after the customers chose their food. We literally put the customers in the situation and let them choose, said Sharma. Then we asked them why they made the choices they did. The project was funded by the Leopold Centre for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

Eating mostly whole grains, few refined grains linked to lower body fat

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BOSTON (October 20, 2010) - People who consume several servings of whole grains per day while limiting daily intake of refined grains appear to have less of a type of fat tissue thought to play a key role in triggering cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, a new study suggests. Researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Researcher Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University observed lower volumes of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) in people who chose to eat mostly whole grains instead of refined grains.

VAT volume was approximately 10 % lower in adults who reported eating three or more daily servings of whole grains and who limited their intake of refined grains to less than one serving per day, says first author Nicola McKeown, PhD, a scientist with the Nutritional Epidemiology Program at the USDA HNRCA. For example, a slice of 100% whole wheat bread or a half cup of oatmeal constituted one serving of whole grains and a slice of white bread or a half cup of white rice represented a serving of refined grains.

McKeown and colleagues, including senior author Caroline S. Fox, MD, MPH, medical officer at The Framingham Heart Study of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), examined diet questionnaires submitted by 2,834 men and women enrolled in The Framingham Heart Offspring and Third Generation study cohorts. The participants, ages 32 to 83, underwent multidetector-computed tomography (MDCT) scans, to determine VAT and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) volumes.

Visceral fat surrounds the intra-abdominal organs while subcutaneous fat is found just beneath the skin. Prior research suggests visceral fat is more closely tied to the development of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors including hypertension, unhealthy cholesterol levels and insulin resistance that can develop into cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, explains co-author Paul Jacques, DSc, director of the Nutritional Epidemiology Program at the USDA HNRCA and a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. Not surprisingly, when we compared the relationship of both visceral fat tissue and subcutaneous fat tissue to whole and refined grain intake, we saw a more striking association with visceral fat. The association persisted after we accounted for other lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol intake, fruit and vegetable intake, percentage of calories from fat and physical activity.

Published online September 29 by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the present study builds on prior research that associates greater whole grain intake with reduced risk of metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. However, because these studies are observational, future research that specifically investigates whole grain intake and body fat distribution in a larger, more diverse study population is needed to identify the mechanism that is driving this relationship, Jacques adds.

Additionally, in the present study, the authors observed that participants who consumed, on average, three daily servings of whole grains but continued to eat many refined grains did not demonstrate lower VAT volume. Whole grain consumption did not appear to improve VAT volume if refined grain intake exceeded four or more servings per day, says McKeown, who is also an assistant professor at the Friedman School. This result implies that it is important to make substitutions in the diet, rather than simply adding whole grain foods. For example, choosing to cook with brown rice instead of white or making a sandwich with whole grain bread instead of white bread.

2 studies present new data on effects of alcohol during pregnancy

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Scientific data continue to indicate that higher intake of alcohol during pregnancy adversely affects the fetus, and could lead to very severe developmental or other problems in the child. However, most recent publications show little or no effects of occasional or light drinking by the mother during pregnancy. The studies also demonstrate how socio-economic, education, and other lifestyle factors of the mother may have large effects on the health of the fetus and child; these must be considered when evaluating the potential effects of alcohol during pregnancy.

A very large population-based observational study from the UK found that at the age of 5 years, the children of women who reported light (no more than 1-2 units of alcohol per week or per occasion) drinking did not show any evidence of impairment on testing for behavioral and emotional problems or cognitive ability. There was a tendency for the male children of women reporting heavy/binge drinking during pregnancy (7 or more units per week or 6 or more units per occasion) to have poorer behavioural scores, but the effects were less clear among female offspring.

A second study, published in Pediatrics, based on a population in Western Australia examined the associations between dose, pattern, and timing of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) and birth defects and found similar results, that there was no association between low or moderate prenatal alcohol exposure and birth defects.

Data from a randomly selected, population-based cohort of non- indigenous women who gave birth to a live infant in Western Australia (WA) between 1995 and 1997 (N = 4714) were linked to WA Midwives Notification System and WA Birth Defects Registry data. Information about maternal alcohol consumption was collected 3 months after birth for the 3 month period before pregnancy and for each trimester separately.

Low alcohol consumption was defined as less then 7 standard drinks (10g) a week, and no more than 2 drinks on any one day. Women who consumed more than 70g per week were classified as heavy drinkers and women consuming more than 140g were classified as very heavy drinkers.

The study results indicate that the prevalence of birth defects classified as ARBDs by the IOM was low. Compared with abstinence, heavy prenatal alcohol exposure in the first trimester was associated with increased odds of birth defects classified as ARBDs (adjusted odds ratio: 4.6 [95% confidence interval: 1.5-14.3]), with similar findings after validation through bootstrap analysis. There was no association between low or moderate prenatal alcohol exposure and birth defects.

Overall, current scientific data indicate that while drinking during pregnancy should not be encouraged, there is little evidence to suggest that an occasional drink or light drinking by the mother is associated with harm. Heavy drinking, however, is associated with serious developmental defects in the fetus.

High death and disability rates due to fractures in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Preliminary findings from an upcoming new report by the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) show alarming projections and reveal the poor state of post-fracture care in the Russian Federation and many other countries in the region. The findings were announced today at a press conference in St. Petersburg at the IOF Summit of Eastern European and Central Asian Osteoporosis Patient Societies.

Osteoporosis, a disease of the bone which leaves people at increased risk of fracture, is most common in the older population. Population projections for most countries in the region predict that by 2050 there will be a decrease of the total population, but a significant increase (up to 56%) in the percentage of people aged 50 and over. As a result, in the Russia Federation alone the number of people with osteoporosis is expected to increase by a third by 2050.

Despite the major public health burden of osteoporosis-related fractures, the disease suffers from severe under recognition - mainly due to the lack of solid epidemiological and economic data which would help convince health authorities of the urgency of osteoporosis prevention. There are no formal hip or fragility fracture registries in most countries within the region and data on vertebral fractures, the most common osteoporotic fracture, are completely lacking. IOF President John Kanis stated, It is clear from the key findings that governments need to support wide scale epidemiological studies to collect data on the incidence of osteoporotic fractures.

DXA technology, diagnostic equipment which provides the most accurate method of diagnosis, is usually only accessible in main cities - yet in about one-third of the countries, more than 40% of the population lives in a rural area. In most countries, drug treatment for those at high risk of fracture is not, or is only partially, reimbursed - effectively making treatment unaffordable for the majority of citizens.

Low levels of calcium and vitamin D intake impact negatively on bone health. The average daily calcium intake in nearly all countries outlined in the report falls far below the FAO/WHO recommendations. In addition the majority of populations in the region suffer from severe vitamin D insufficiency. This not only affects fracture rates, but also causes rickets. In recent years the incidence of rickets (pediatric vitamin D deficiency) among Russian infants has ranged from 54% to 66% in some regions.

Although older people who sustain a hip fracture are at increased risk of death and suffer long term disability throughout the world, the report indicates that this problem is far more severe in the Russia Federation and in many other countries of the region. Professor Olga Lesnyak, Vice-President of the Russian Association on Osteoporosis and author of the report, called for action, There is an urgent need for health care providers to improve post hip fracture surgical care, she said. While in Western Europe most hip fracture patients receive operative treatment (the optimal standard of care), in the Russian Federation there is an extremely low rate of surgical treatment. Consequently there is high mortality rate after a hip fracture, reaching up to 45-52% during the first year after fracture in some Russian cities. Of the surviving hip fracture patients, 33% remain bed-ridden and 42% are capable of only very limited activities. Only 9% are able to return to the same level of daily activity as they had before their fracture.

IOF Chief Operating Officer Judy Stenmark stated, Wider and more equitable access to diagnostic tests and appropriate medication are required to stem the growing tide of fractures in the region.

Veterinarian says natural foods not always best for pets

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- While natural food is a rising trend among humans, pet owners should be careful before feeding similar types of food to their pets, according to a Kansas State University veterinarian.

All too often pet owners assume that because certain foods, such as fruits and vegetables, are healthy for them, they are also healthy for their pets, said Susan Nelson, K-State assistant professor of clinical services.

Natural and veggie-based pet foods are based more on market demand from owners, not because they are necessarily better for the pet, she said.

Natural pet food isn't necessarily unhealthy for pets, and there are good brands on the market. But cats and dogs have specific nutritional needs that some of these foods may not provide, Nelson said.

For instance, a natural dog food may provide antioxidants through fruits and vegetables, but it may be deficient in other nutrients the dog needs. If pet owners opt for natural pet food, it's important to make sure pets still receive a well-balanced diet, she said.

Before buying any pet food that is labeled natural, owners should make sure it comes from a reputable company. Nelson said the Association of American Feed Control Officials, or AAFCO, sets guidelines for the production, labeling and distribution of pet food and sets minimum standards for the nutritional adequacy of diets.

To ensure that food contains the proper nutrients a pet needs, pet owners should only buy pet food that has at least one of the two AAFCO nutritional adequacy statements on its label, Nelson said. The association's standards determine whether a pet food company's product is complete and balanced for a specific life stage according to one of two criteria: the diet's formula meets the minimum nutrient requirements established by the association or the diet has undergone association feeding trials.

Feeding trials, while not perfect, generally give the best assessment on how well the food performs for a specific life stage, Nelson said. Owners should look closely at the feeding statement on the label, as some foods are intended for intermittent feeding or only for specific life stages, and they could be detrimental to a pet if fed long-term.

Nelson said it is important to differentiate between terms such as natural, organic and holistic. Organic and holistic currently have no specific definitions for pet foods under the Association of American Feed Control Officials guidelines. Organic is defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for human food, but the department has no definition of natural foods for humans.

The feed control association defines natural products as those that don't contain any chemically synthesized ingredients except vitamins or minerals. The labels for natural products containing any of these ingredients must state: Natural with added vitamins, minerals and other trace nutrients. Consumers should be wary of any pet food company that claims to have organic or holistic food because they don't exist by the association's definition, Nelson said.

Consumers should also pay attention to food ingredients. For instance, cats and dogs should not eat onions or garlic. While flaxseed oil can provide fatty acids for dogs, cats can't use it for this purpose. Any manufacturer that uses these ingredients should be avoided, Nelson said.

Most reputable companies have a veterinary nutritionist on hand, Nelson said. These companies also conduct nutritional research and have their own internal quality control in place.

Because dry pet food needs preservatives, there is often debate about whether artificial or natural preservatives are better. Studies show that synthetic preservatives seem to work better and aren't bad for pets at the levels contained in the food. However, market demand is for using vitamins E and C because they are natural preservatives.

As with any pet diet, pet owners who opt for natural pet food should keep an eye on their pets to make sure the food is not negatively affecting them, Nelson said.

Assuming the diet you have chosen meets AAFCO minimum standards of nutritional adequacy, and if your pet looks healthy, has good coat quality, is in good body condition, has good fecal consistency and is able to do its job, the diet is probably adequate for him, she said.

Male maturity shaped by early nutrition

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) EVANSTON, Ill. --- It seems the old nature versus nurture debate can't be won. But a new Northwestern University study of men in the Philippines makes a strong case for nurture's role in male to female differences -- suggesting that rapid weight gain in the first six months of life predicts earlier puberty for boys.

Males who experienced rapid growth as babies -- an indication that they were not nutritionally stressed -- also were taller, had more muscle and were stronger, and had higher testosterone levels as young adults. They had sex for the first time at a younger age and were more likely to report having had sex in the past month, resulting in more lifetime sex partners.

The researchers think that testosterone may hold the key to understanding these long-term effects.

Most people are unaware that male infants in the first six months of life produce testosterone at approximately the same level as an adult male, said Christopher W. Kuzawa, associate professor of anthropology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and author of the study. We looked at weight gain during this particular window of early life development, because testosterone is very high at this age and helps shape the differences between males and females.

The study provides more evidence that genes alone do not shape our fate.

The environment has a very strong hand in how we turn out, Kuzawa said. And this study extends that idea to the realm of sex differences and male biology.

The study found men, on average, tend to be taller and more muscular than females, and the magnitude of that difference appears to be the result of nutrition within the first six months of an infant male's life, according to the study.

There is a perennial question about how important heredity is versus the environment as shapers of who we turn out to be, said Kuzawa. In the last 20 years, a lot has been learned about a process called developmental plasticity -- how the body responds early in life to things like nutrition and stress. Early experiences can have a permanent effect on how the body develops, and this effect can linger into adulthood. There is a lot of evidence that this can influence risk of diseases like heart attack, diabetes and hypertension -- really important diseases.

Kuzawa and his collaborators applied the same framework in this study and found evidence that male characteristics -- such as height, muscle mass and testosterone levels as opposed to disease characteristics -- also relate back to early life developmental plasticity.

Another way to look at it is that the differences between the sexes are not hard wired, but are responsive to the environment, and in particular to nutrition, Kuzawa said.

Testosterone has long been known to increase muscle mass and puts a person on a higher growth trajectory to be taller. The Northwestern study suggests that the age of puberty also is influenced by events in the first six months of life.

The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation, was conducted among a group of 770 Filipino males aged 20 to 22 who have been followed their entire lives. Since 1983 a team of researchers in the United States and the Philippines (including Kuzawa for about the last 10 years) has been working to understand how early life nutrition influences adult health, such as risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Rapid Weight Gain After Birth Predicts Life History and Reproductive Strategy in Filipino Males was published Sept. 13 in the

Talented bacteria make food poisoning unpredictable

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) While we are often exposed to bacteria in our food which could cause food poisoning, we don't always become ill - why should this be so?

Professor Colin Hill who is presenting his work at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting in Nottingham today describes how bacteria use different tricks to aid their survival inside the body, helping to explain why food poisoning can be so unpredictable.

One of the biggest challenges faced by food-borne bacteria is acid. Acidic conditions, particularly in the stomach and in the gut will kill most microbes found in contaminated food.

Professor Hill's group at University College Cork has revealed that Listeria bacteria, which may be found in soft cheeses and chilled ready-to-eat products, can overcome harsh acidic conditions by exploiting key food ingredients. Listeria that survive are able to cause serious and sometimes fatal infections, particularly in the elderly and pregnant women.

Certain food constituents such as the amino acid, glutamate, can help the bacteria neutralise acid, allowing the bacteria to pass through the stomach unscathed. Professor Hill explains the significance of this. People who consume foods that are contaminated with Listeria and are also high in glutamate, such as soft cheese or meat products, have a higher chance of developing serious infection than someone eating the same quantity of bacteria in a low-glutamate food, he said. Of course this is further complicated by the fact that a contaminated, low-glutamate food could be eaten in combination with a high-glutamate food such as tomato juice, which could also increase the risk of infection.

Listeria can also take advantage of food processing and storage conditions to help them survive. Bacteria that are exposed to low pH before entering the body may adapt to become more acid-tolerant and therefore better equipped to deal with acidic conditions in the body. For example, Listeria contaminating naturally acidic foods such as cheese may be more likely to cause infection than Listeria carried at a more neutral pH in water.

Professor Hill explains how his group's work could help reduce the incidence of Listeria infections. The number of cases of listeriosis has nearly doubled in the last decade in Europe. This is because the bacterium is so good at overcoming the challenges it faces in food and in the body, he said. Our studies show that consuming Listeria in one food may be quite safe, while eating the same amount in another food might be lethal. By understanding the role of the food matrix we may be able to identify and eliminate high-risk foods from the diet of susceptible people.

Americans struggle with long-term weight loss

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Only about one in every six Americans who have ever been overweight or obese loses weight and maintains that loss, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

While that number is larger than most weight-loss clinical trials report, the majority of Americans are still unable to lose weight and keep it off. Identifying those who lose weight and successfully maintain that loss may aid health professionals in developing approaches to help others maintain weight loss, the researchers say.

Two-thirds of the United States adult population is overweight, defined as a body mass index (BMI) of at least 25, or obese, a BMI of at least 30. Obesity rates, which doubled between 1980 and 2004, increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. The recommendation is often to lose at least 5 to 10 percent of initial body weight with these conditions.

Weight loss and weight maintenance programs need significant changes in their effectiveness and availability to affect these numbers, note the researchers.

It is important for health professionals to understand the true prevalence of long-term weight loss, as it may help to change the underlying beliefs and influence clinical practice, said Jennifer Kraschnewski, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences. Studies have shown that physicians may not believe offering weight loss advice and counseling is a worthwhile activity in clinical practice. An awareness of our findings may encourage health professionals to pursue weight loss counseling for overweight patients.

Previously, data came from either published clinical trials or the National Weight-Control Registry, comprised only of those able to lose at least 30 pounds and keep it off for a year. The registry does not represent the entire population, so it is not useful for providing estimates of long-term weight loss in the country.

Penn State College of Medicine researchers analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999-2006, a nationwide survey evaluating the health and nutrition of a representative portion of the population. Participants of this survey self-reported weight status and history.

Researchers calculated BMI for each individual and determined if they achieved 5, 10, 15 or 20 percent long-term (long than one year) weight loss maintenance. The sample included 14,306 people: 52.3 percent men and 47.7 women. One-third stated a current goal of losing weight, with 82.6 percent classified as overweight or obese.

Thirty-six percent of the sample had maintained a weight loss of at least 5 percent of their initial body weight. This is a higher rate than clinical trials, which have shown only 10 to 20 percent of individuals able to maintain a loss of at least five percent. This difference may be that while those who participate in clinical trials are a selected population, the numbers in the current study include unintentional weight loss, or the current study captures temporary weight gain that is typically lost at specific instances, such as the so-called freshman 15.

In the sample, women, adults age 75 to 84, non-Hispanic whites and those with less than a high school education showed stronger longer-term weight management.

Identifying a significant percentage of the population that is succeeding in some weight loss may be an important target population for weight maintenance programs, Kraschnewski said. Although the amounts lost are modest, if a substantial number of individuals achieved such losses, it would have a significant public health effect. Particularly, those individuals who have lost at least five percent and kept it off -- one in three Americans who have ever been overweight -- may represent a unique opportunity to reach a target population who has had some success but could benefit from greater weight loss efforts.

Other key findings of this study:

Co-products and cornstalk residue can cut cow feed costs by a dollar a day

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) University of Illinois researchers recently discovered that feeding co-products and cornstalk residue in the winter can save cow-calf producers up to $1 per day per cow as compared to feeding hay.

Feed costs continue to be the number one detriment to profitability in cow-calf operations. With feed comprising 60 percent of a producer's costs, any measures producers take to minimize expenses can make the difference between profit or no profit at the end of the year.

Most feed costs occur in the winter when cows can't graze and utilize pasture, said Dan Shike, U of I assistant professor of animal sciences. Typically cow-calf producers feed large round bales because they are easy, but that can be pretty expensive, especially when prices hit record highs like they did in 2008. Feeding harvested and stored feeds is a common practice, but it's also costly.

As ethanol production increases, so has the availability of corn co-products. Shike said more corn residue such as cornstalks are also being used as an energy source.

Cornstalk bales are an adequate source of energy, but they are low in protein and need to be supplemented, especially when fed to cows in early and peak lactation, he said.

Researchers conducted two experiments on a herd of Angus and Simmental cows at the Orr Research Center in Baylis, Ill., and discovered many ways producers can save money. The cows calved between January and March and were evaluated from calving until breeding.

The first experiment compared new co-products developed from improved fractionation processes. The study compared free-choice cornstalk residue with 14.3 pounds of distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), free-choice cornstalk residue with 9.7 pounds of corn bran and 4.8 pounds of DDGS, free-choice cornstalk residue with 11.2 pounds of corn bran and 3.3 pounds of high-protein (HP) DDGS (a low-fat distillers grain with 40 percent or more crude protein content), and free-choice hay.

We wanted to find the most economical way to feed cows in the winter without sacrificing performance, Shike said. Our study revealed that producers could save about $1 a day per cow when feeding a combination of cornstalk residue and co-products as compared to hay.

Feeding methods and delivery systems formed the basis of the second experiment. Researchers compared free-choice cornstalk residue and 14.3 pounds of DDGS, a total mixed ration of 14.1 pounds of ground cornstalk residue and 14.3 pounds of DDGS, a total mixed ration of 9.9 pounds of ground cornstalk residue and 16.5 pounds of HP-DDGS, and free-choice hay.

Again our goal wasn't to find performance differences in this study, Shike said. We fed diets that should achieve similar performance results. In this experiment, we wanted to find the most economical delivery method within various herd sizes ranging from 50 to 350 cows.

In a 50-cow herd, the least expensive winter feeding strategy is to offer free-choice cornstalk residue and handfeed DDGS, he said. If producers use a tractor to feed DDGS instead of buckets, they are better off to feed free-choice hay. Feeding total mixed rations requires more equipment which in turn increases cost for the producer.

In a 100-cow herd, handfeeding with buckets is not the most practical, but it's the cheapest. With this size of a herd, producers can use a tractor to deliver DDGS to the cattle at a more economical price per day than free-choice hay.

The major savings occurs in a bigger cow herd with more than 200 cows. The total mixed rations at $2.33 per cow a day become even more comparable to feeding free-choice cornstalk residue and DDGS at $2.21 per cow a day. In contrast, the free-choice hay is $3.21 per cow a day.

We thought one of the advantages of grinding cornstalk residue was reducing wasted feed as compared to free-choice hay, Shike said. But whatever we saved in unwasted stalks did not compensate for the added equipment cost to have both a grind and mix wagon as compared to a conventional feeding wagon. Even though those treatments were close, putting out a bale of cornstalks and feeding DDGS was always a little cheaper than grinding them together.

The key to profitable cow-calf production is to keep feed costs at a minimum. This information will help producers of various herd sizes not only select which feedstuffs to use, but also which delivery method best fits their operation, reducing feed costs and maximizing profitability.

Our goal is to help producers identify which feedstuffs and delivery methods best fit their operation, resulting in the lowest possible feed cost for their operation and the most profitability, Shike said. This will vary whether they are a smaller or larger operation. Regardless, producers have options and can increase their profitability using combinations of co-products.

Despite the heat, it's time to start planning winter feeding strategies, he said.

If you decide to wait until February to decide to feed cornstalks, they will be hard to find, Shike said. Now is a great time to contact area corn producers to identify who will have cornstalk bales for purchase. It appears we are on track for a substantially earlier harvest which will allow for a nice window to bale high-quality cornstalks this fall.

It's also a good time to price co-products depending on what you have available for storage, he added. Prices tend to go up in the winter, and it's best to have stored feeds in order before the winter sets in.

Penn State, government, industry helping children pick healthier foods

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new initiative to improve children's nutrition education and increase the amount of healthy foods available in schools is a collaboration among Penn State researchers; Pennsylvania's Departments of Health, Education, and Agriculture; Pennsylvania food manufacturers and food distributors; and school districts across the state.

The project, led by Penn State and supported for two years by an $800,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seeks to improve children's understanding of nutrition and help them make smarter food choices. The funds come through the Pennsylvania Department of Health as part of the CDC's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding.

Researchers will increase the amount of nutrition information available in schools and at home, including innovative menu labeling systems for use in cafeterias across Pennsylvania. These menu systems will be age appropriate and will target everyone from kindergarteners to high school seniors. Children will have a baseline level of nutrient information, which will help them make healthier choices. Then, in conjunction with school districts and foodservice providers, Penn State will test the effectiveness of the labeling system.

Penn State, with its tradition in nutrition and food innovation, was the perfect partner to develop and implement these initiatives, said Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Everette James, who is playing a significant role in the project. The College of Health and Human Development and the Center for Food Innovation are centered on how to improve nutrition for children in Pennsylvania. The health of children is already important to schools and now we're making it the top priority.

A major focus of the project is finding effective ways to share nutrition information with parents. Peter Bordi, associate professor of hospitality management and principal investigator on the project, plans to take a multimedia approach by using the Internet, new technologies and old technologies such as informational handouts.

What may work for one school district may not work for another, said Bordi. This component is designed so that parents can sit down and teach their children to make healthier choices -- in practice, not in theory, says Secretary James.

Penn State's Center for Food Innovation, directed by Bordi, will work with foodservice organizations to ensure that children have access to healthy, affordable foods in schools. The research team will identify ten foods that meet or exceed nutrition guidelines for both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Prices of these foods' prices will be reduced to be more competitive with other foods in the schools.

Progress made in addressing food marketing to children, but challenges remain

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) STOCKHOLM, Sweden: The last six years have seen significant progress in efforts to curb the marketing of unhealthy food to children, with an increasing number of governments taking on the issue, but considerable challenges remain, a leading expert on the topic said today (Tuesday).

At the International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm, Tim Lobstein presented an analysis of the European policy landscape, undertaken as part of the European Commission's effort to gather evidence to support policy making on the marketing of foods to children.

For many years, public health experts have argued that the marketing of calorie-packed food and drinks to children contributes to the global obesity problem, but the issue has gained more traction over the last few years as concern over the scale of childhood obesity and has grown and as efforts to combat it have progressed.

An increasing number of countries are trying to address this issue, with some introducing regulations addressing television advertising during children's programming or the use of familiar personalities or fictional characters to promote products during that television time slot. There is real progress, but the challenges are numerous, said Lobstein, director of policy at the International Association for the Study of Obesity, which coordinated the European Union PolMark study. Firstly, most countries do not address advertising to children by the calorie content or other nutrient quality of the food product and marketing channels beyond broadcast advertising have been largely ignored. Secondly, our research has shown that there's a certain amount of anarchy at the moment and concluded that the terms need to be set by government, not the industry itself, because although they appear to be willing, there's chaos within the details, with a lot of contradiction in what industry is offering.

Internationally, several countries are considering strong measures, Lobstein noted. Brazil is developing legislation on broadcast advertising, Thailand has legislation to limit the quantity of advertising to children, Korea and Malaysia have a ban on junk food marketing to children, while South Africa, Colombia and Chile have a draft law in waiting, he said.

In Europe, two-thirds of countries now have, or are proposing, statements on food marketing to children in their national health plans.

That is a big shift, Lobstein said. Six years ago, there were only about two or three countries out of the 50 or so in European region doing this, so this decade has seen a rapid increase in awareness by government policy makers, who are increasingly writing it into their strategies.

Also, the UK took a lead in 2006 by banning ads for specific types of food during children's viewing hours. This was considered a major step, Lobstein said, because it introduced a legal definition of junk food, using a formula based on the nutrient profile of food products.

In the United States, a federal interagency working group established last year is developing proposals for voluntary nutritional standards for food and drink marketed to children and adolescents under the age of 18. The final proposals are scheduled to be submitted in a report to the U.S. Congress by July. Lobstein also noted that U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama's childhood obesity initiative does not rule out the possibility of regulation if voluntary measures prove insufficient.

He said the passage of a resolution - without dissent - at the annual meeting of member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva in May is another mark of progress. The resolution urged countries to implement recommendations contained in a report on restricting food and drink marketing to children and instructed WHO to provide technical support. A general resolution endorsing a set of recommendations doesn't look dramatic, but it consolidates the progress made so far. If they had tried to debate the recommendations one-by-one, they may have found countries unwilling to endorse them and that would have unravelled quite a lot of the work that has been done to get this far, Lobstein said.

One of the major challenges is that voluntary action has some impact, but not enough, Lobstein said. Food companies are making pledges and showing that they are sticking to those, but the pledges have loopholes. They don't all stick to the same criteria around the definition of marketing, what age group of children and what foods are covered. Companies have been pushing the boundaries into children's social marketing networks, school playgrounds, text messaging to mobile phones and so on, undermining any likely parental controls. We need a system that supports, rather than hinders, the efforts of parents to prevent obesity in their children. You cannot expect the industry to reform itself when so much money would be lost, he said.

In a separate presentation at the conference, Brazilian researcher Fabio Gomes reported an analysis of advances and setbacks in his country's effort to address food marketing. The Brazilian government is proposing statutory regulation that would require health warnings to be included in advertisements for food. Gomes said that challenges in Brazil include weak consumer criticism and the abandonment of early government proposals for a watershed for advertising to children. Also, while multinational companies have made pledges on the issue in the United States and in Europe, they have not made their pledges or self-regulation rules effective in Brazil, he said. We are in a deaf dialogue in Brazil, said Gomes, a nutritionist and senior analyst at the National Cancer Institute of Brazil.

Lobstein said it is less important whether measures are voluntary or statutory. What matters, he said, is that governments need to agree a clear set of targets that include cross-border marketing applied to products based nutrient profiling, a timeline and monitoring to ensure progress is being made.

Defensin-1 in honey can work as antibiotic

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:34:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Bees make a protein called defensin-1 that they add to honey, which could one day be used to treat burns and skin infections and to develop new drugs that could combat antibiotic-resistant infections.

'We have completely elucidated the molecular basis of the antibacterial activity of a single medical-grade honey, which contributes to the applicability of honey in medicine,' said Sebastian A.J. Zaat, researcher in medical microbiology at the Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam.

'Honey or isolated honey-derived components might be of great value for prevention and treatment of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria,' Zaat said.

To make the discovery, Zaat and colleagues investigated the antibacterial activity of medical-grade honey in test tubes against a panel of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing bacteria. 3

They developed a method to selectively neutralise the known antibacterial factors in honey and determine their individual antibacterial contributions.

Ultimately, researchers isolated the defensin-1 protein, which is part of the honey bee immune system and is added by bees to honey.

After analysis, the scientists concluded that the vast majority of honey's antibacterial properties come from that protein.

This information also sheds light on the inner workings of honey bee immune systems, which may one day help breeders create healthier and heartier honey bees, said a release of Academic Medical Centre.

'We've known for millennia that honey can be good for what ails us, but we haven't known how it works,' said Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of FASEB Journal, which published these findings.

'Now that we've extracted a potent antibacterial ingredient from honey, we can make it still more effective and take the sting out of bacterial infections,' he said.

A key mechanism links virgin olive oil to protection against breast cancer

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The researchers decoded a complete cascade of signals within breast tumour cells activated by virgin olive oil, and concluded that benefits include decrease in the activity of the oncogene p21Ras, changes in protein signaling pathways, stimulation of tumour cell death and prevention of DNA damage. The study was carried out in an experimental model and researchers have already begun a new study with human cell lines.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in Western countries. Research carried out with animal models demonstrate that a diet rich in fats is directly related to the incidence of cancer. Some types of fats however can play a protective role against the development of these tumours. Such is the case of virgin olive oil, rich in oleic acid, a mono-unsaturated fatty acid, and containing several bioactive compounds such as antioxidants. A moderate and regular intake of virgin olive oil, characteristic of the Mediterranean diet, is associated with low incidences of specific types of cancer, including breast cancer, as well as with having a protective role against coronary diseases and other health problems.

The study carried out by UAB researchers decoded the mechanisms operating within the tumour cell and induced by the intake of olive oil, in comparison to those activated by corn oil, rich in n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which increase the aggressiveness of tumours.

Scientists demonstrated that virgin olive oil is associated with higher incidences of benign breast tumours and at the same time with a decrease in the activity of the p21Ras oncogene, which spurs uncontrolled cell proliferation and stimulates the growth of tumours. In addition, olive oil suppresses the activity of some proteins, such as the AKT, essential for the survival of cells since they prevent apoptosis, the cell's suicide programme. Between proliferation and apoptosis in tumour cells, these effects tip the balance towards cell death, thereby slowing the growth of tumours.

Another result obtained by researchers is the protection of DNA in the cell nucleus. Cells from animals fed a diet rich in virgin olive oil contained less DNA lesions than those fed a control diet.

Scientists of the UAB Breast Cancer Study Multidisciplinary Group (GMECM) have spent over twenty years working to determine the effects fats have on breast cancer, and in particular the effects of virgin olive oil. Previous studies of the group revealed the beneficial effects of this component of the human diet on the clinical conduct of mammary tumours and on their histological grade (malignancy). Scientists also described several molecular mechanisms producing these effects and in 2004 the same group was the one to identify the four genes involved in the effects dietary fats have on experimental breast cancer. The mechanism recently discovered was published in the journal

More than skin deep, tanning product of sun's rays

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) People who remain pale and never tan can blame their distant ancestors for choosing to live in the northern reaches of the globe and those who easily achieve a deep tan can thank their ancestors for living in the subtropical latitudes, according to Penn State anthropologists.

The variation of ultraviolet radiation, especially in the middle and high latitudes is great, said Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology and chair of Penn State's anthropology department. Tanning has evolved multiple times around the world as a mechanism to partly protect humans from harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation.

Jablonski, working with George Chaplin, senior research associate in anthropology and an expert in geographic information systems, looked at the way the sun illuminates different parts of the Earth. They looked at levels and angles of incidence of both ultraviolet A and B radiation at various latitudes. Ultraviolet B radiation is much more variable than ultraviolet A as latitude increases due to atmospheric scattering of the light and absorption by oxygen.

Ultraviolet B radiation produces vitamin D in human skin. Ultraviolet radiation can, however, destroy folate. Folate is important for the rapid growth of cells, especially during pregnancy where its deficiency can cause neural tube defects.

What we now recognize is that some of the medical problems seen in darkly pigmented people may be linked at some level to vitamin D deficiency, said Jablonski. Things like certain types of cancer in darkly pigmented people and in people who use a lot of sunscreen or always stay inside could be partly related to vitamin D deficiency.

Scientists have understood for years that evolutionary selection of skin pigmentation was caused by the sun. As human ancestors gradually lost their pelts to allow evaporative cooling through sweating, their naked skin was directly exposed to sunlight. In the tropics, where human ancestors evolved and where both ultraviolet radiations are high throughout the year, natural selection created darkly pigmented individuals to protect against the sun.

Past arguments about the selective value of dark pigmentation focused on the protective effects of melanin against sunburn, skin cancer, and overproduction of vitamin D. These factors can no longer be considered significant selective pressures, the Jablonski and Chaplin report in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sunburn and most skin cancers do not alter an individual's ability to procreate, so they are not selection factors. The human body also has a mechanism to prevent overproduction of vitamin D.

Previously, the researchers concluded that dark skin pigmentation in the tropics protects people from folate destruction by ultraviolet B, but, because levels of ultraviolet B are high year round, the skin can still allow enough in to manufacture vitamin D.

As humans moved out of Africa, they moved into the subtropics and eventually inhabited areas up to the Arctic Circle. Ultraviolet radiation in these areas is neither consistent nor strong. North or south of 46 degrees latitude, which includes all of Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Western Europe and Mongolia, there is insufficient ultraviolet B through most of the year to produce vitamin D. Populations in these areas evolved to have little skin pigmentation.

In the latitudes between 23 and 46 degrees, an area that encompasses North Africa, South America, the Mediterranean and most of China, ultraviolet B radiation is much more variable. Heavily pigmented skin in the winter would block the development of vitamin D, and lightly pigmented skin during the summer would allow destruction of folate.

We actually demonstrate that in those middle latitudes where highly fluctuating levels of ultraviolet radiation occur throughout the year, tanning has evolved multiple times as a mechanism to partly protect humans from harmful effect of the sun, said Jablonski.

The tanning process evolved for humans who by and large were naked all the time. As the ultraviolet B radiation began to increase in the early spring, the skin would begin to gradually darken. As the sun became stronger, the tan became deeper. During the winter, as ultraviolet B waned, so did the tan, allowing Vitamin D production and protecting folate.

The researchers note that the ability to tan developed in a wide variety of peoples and while the outcome, tanablity, is the same, the underlying genetic mechanisms are not necessarily identical. They also note that depigmentated skin also developed at least three times through different genetic mechanisms.

Implications for today focus on the fact that depigmented people now live in tropical and subtropical areas where besides getting sunburned they run the risk of losing folate. Highly pigmented people live in higher latitudes where they may become vitamin D deficient, especially if they use sunscreens.

It is a conspiracy of modernity, said Jablonski. The rapidity at which we can move long distances and live far away from our ancestral homelands. The fact that we can live and work indoors. All this has happened within the last 500 years and especially within the last 200 years.

FDA should adopt risk-based approach to food safety

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's abilities to discover potential threats to food safety and prevent outbreaks of foodborne illness are hampered by impediments to efficient use of its limited resources and a piecemeal approach to gathering and using information on risks, says a new report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council.

To more proactively tackle food safety problems, FDA should implement a risk-based approach in which data and expertise are marshaled to pinpoint where along the production, distribution, and handling chains there is the greatest potential for contamination and other problems, the report says. The agency would then be able to direct appropriate amounts of its resources and attention to those high-risk areas and increase the chances of catching problems before they turn into widespread outbreaks, said the committee that wrote the report.

The report offers FDA a blueprint for developing a risk-based model. It also outlines several organizational steps the agency should take to improve the efficiency of its many food safety activities, such as increasing coordination with state and other federal agencies that share responsibility for protecting the nation's food supply. In addition, the report says Congress should consider amending the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to explicitly provide the authority FDA needs to fulfill its food safety mission.

As recent illnesses traced to produce underscore, foodborne diseases cause significant suffering, so it's imperative that our food safety system functions effectively at all levels, said committee chair Robert Wallace, professor, College of Public Health, University of Iowa, Iowa City. FDA uses some risk assessment and management tactics, but the agency's approach is too often reactive and lacks a systematic focus on prevention. Our report's recommendations aim to help FDA achieve a comprehensive vision for proactively protecting against threats to the nation's food supply.

FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of approximately 80 percent of the nation's food supply, including seafood, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. Although it is not the sole organization overseeing food safety -- the U.S. Department of Agriculture handles meat, poultry, and egg products, and state and local agencies share in conducting food production facility inspections, surveillance, and investigations of outbreaks -- recent outbreaks of foodborne illness led to a congressional request for a review of gaps in FDA's food safety system.

The agency has been criticized for not adequately monitoring and inspecting food suppliers and distributors and for not taking a proactive approach to food safety overall. However, given that FDA is responsible for more than 150,000 food facilities, more than 1 million restaurants and other retail food establishments, and more than 2 million farms, as well as millions of tons of imports, it lacks the resources to sufficiently monitor the entire food supply, the committee noted.

A risk-based approach would give FDA's food safety officials the strategic vision needed to evaluate and plan for food safety concerns rather than tackling problems on a case-by-case basis, the report says. Without good information, agency officials cannot identify where its resources are needed most or determine which policy interventions are most effective. FDA has insufficient analytical expertise and infrastructure to gather, manage, and use data effectively. The agency should identify its data needs and review its policies for sharing data with other agencies and organizations.

The federal government should establish a centralized food safety data center outside of the regulatory agencies to collect information and conduct rapid, sophisticated assessments of food safety risks and appropriate policy interventions. This center would go a long way toward developing much-needed capacity and would reduce interagency competition for resources, the committee said. It could also serve as an intermediate step toward consolidating food safety activities within a single agency, which many individuals and organizations have called for.

To enhance its efficiency, FDA should explore alternative approaches to regulating food safety, such as delegating food facility inspections to the states, the report says. FDA should establish national standards for the intensity and frequency of these facility reviews and help states and local municipalities bring their safety programs up to those standards. Once all programs are standardized, FDA should train and certify state inspectors with the goal of turning over the majority of inspections to them under the agency's supervision. This change would build on current practices in which roughly 60 percent of inspections are already conducted by state inspectors under contract with FDA. This integration and leveraging of resources would increase the quality of inspections and eliminate duplication of effort, the committee said.

Despite the dramatic developments in food production and distribution that have occurred over the years, the main statutory provisions under which FDA carries out its food safety responsibilities remain largely unchanged. Although various provisions give the agency broad discretion and flexibility through which it has been able to control potential problems, there are instances in which FDA lacks specific authority, which can make its actions vulnerable to court challenge. Congress should examine how the legislation could be revised to detail FDA's authorities in facility registration, preventive controls, risk-based inspection, mandatory recall, reporting of adulteration, and banning of food imports if the public's health is at risk, among other areas.

Obesity remains an economic issue, Seattle obesity study finds

Mon, 24 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Ensuring access to healthy, affordable foods is a top priority in tackling the obesity epidemic in the United States. Over the course of the last six months, the Institute of Medicine, United States Department of Agriculture, The White House and First Lady Michelle Obama have taken an interest in improving access to affordable and nutritious foods.

Here in Seattle, Adam Drewnowski, UW professor of epidemiology, and his team are tackling the same issue. Remember the fat zip codes that predicted obesity rates from a few years ago? Drewnowski and his team were the brains behind that, as well as last summer's study which showed that grocery prices in Seattle varied greatly between one supermarket chain and another.

Now, researchers at the UW Center for Public Health Nutrition, UW Urban Form Lab and the Nutritional Sciences Program in the School of Public Health are asking: Who buys what foods, why, where, and for how much?

The answers might surprise you. Most studies have used distance to the nearest supermarket as the best predictor of whether people have good diets and better health. But Drewnowski and team say that's not true. Six out of seven people shopped for food outside their immediate neighborhood, he said The closest supermarket for most people was less than a mile away, but people chose the market that was more than three miles away. Driving further to save money on groceries is common. For that reason, physical proximity to a supermarket may not, by itself, assure a healthy diet. Money does matter, Drewnowski said.

Areas where access to healthy affordable foods is scarce have become known as food deserts. Seattle, however, is well-supplied with supermarkets, grocery stores, farmers markets and other vendors, said Drewnowski. We do not see evidence of significant food deserts, he said. In comparison with other areas in the state, public transportation is also prevalent and accessible, so people can take a bus to a supermarket or grocery store with relative ease.

Researchers combined a telephone survey, modeled on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System, with new geo-coding techniques and methods of spatial analysis for the new study.

Economic access has also become a primary research focus in public health nutrition, including the work by Drewnowski and team. Supermarket chains have specific demographics--consumers differ by age, education, income, health, and even obesity rates. The county-wide obesity rate in 2007 was 19.8 percent, but our research found that the obesity rate was only four percent among Whole Foods and PCC shoppers, said Drewnowski. Consumers who shop at most area supermarket chains have obesity rates at 25 percent and higher. Clearly, not all supermarkets are the same and economic access is determined by price.

UW researchers recently discussed the Seattle Obesity Study results at Shopping for Health conference, which brought together public health agencies, academicians, supermarket representatives and policymakers from Seattle, King County and Washington state. Additional findings include:

Food insecurity leads to adverse health consequences in pregnancy

Sat, 22 May 2010 14:39:32 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A recent research study has shown that food insecurity, a person's inability to obtain adequate amounts of food due to resource constraints, can lead to greater weight gain and increased complications during a woman's pregnancy.

"Prior studies have shown that women living in food insecure households are more likely to experience health complications," said Craig Gundersen, a University of Illinois associate professor of agricultural and consumer economics and co-author of the study. "An area that hadn't been closely examined is the impact of food insecurity on pregnant women."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, 14.6 percent of households were food insecure at some time during 2008, up from 11.1 percent in 2007. This is the highest recorded prevalence rate of food insecurity since 1995, when the first national food security survey was conducted.

"In the United States, we are very concerned about issues related to food insecurity," Gundersen said. "We are of course concerned about people going hungry and not having enough to eat. We are also concerned about the negative health consequences associated with food insecurity."

For the study, a total of 810 low- and middle-income pregnant women were surveyed during January 2001 to June 2005. Women were surveyed at the beginning of their pregnancy and a follow-up survey was administered after the birth of their child.

"We looked at the effect of food insecurity on a variety of health factors related to pregnancy," Gundersen said. "We found that food insecurity is associated with a higher body mass index, greater weight gain during pregnancy, and a higher risk for the development of gestational diabetes. These health issues are a concern as they can lead to assorted negative medical conditions."

Gundersen said an important federal program is already in place to address food insecurity in the United States. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, provides assistance to low-income individuals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that the number of Americans receiving food stamps reached 39.68 million in February 2010, the highest number since the program began in 1962.

"Food insecurity is a growing concern for many U.S. citizens," Gundersen said. "The expansion of the SNAP program could offer major health benefits for people struggling to afford nutritious foods during these difficult economic times."

IOM report recommends framework to evaluate science behind health claims for foods and drugs

Wed, 12 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should apply the same rigor to evaluating the science behind claims of foods' and nutritional supplements' health benefits as it devotes to assessing medication and medical technology approvals, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. There are no scientific grounds for using different standards of evidence when evaluating the health benefits of food ingredients and drugs given that both can have significant impacts on people's well-being, said the committee that wrote the report. It recommended a new framework the agency can use to consistently and transparently judge the appropriateness and validity of the scientific benchmarks used in studies that companies provide to support health and safety claims for their products.

Because it can be time-consuming and difficult to test products against actual clinical outcomes -- such as whether they cure or reduce the risk of a disease -- companies often conduct studies measuring effects on biomarkers, which are used as biological yardsticks or substitutes for clinical outcomes. For example, tumor size is used as a way to measure a cancer drug's effectiveness. Blood level of harmful cholesterol is often used as a biomarker for the risk of heart disease, and drug and food companies make claims about the heart health benefits of their products based on their ability to lower cholesterol levels, even if the products have not been shown to actually decrease heart disease.

FDA has been hampered in its ability to assess the proliferation of health claims being made by food and supplement manufacturers in part because it lacks a process broadly accepted across the regulatory, food, and medical communities to evaluate biomarkers as valid and appropriate measurements to substitute for clinical outcomes. The committee's proposed three-part framework gives the agency a way to consistently and rigorously assess the selection and use of biomarkers across the food, device, and drug areas.

In addition, the report calls on Congress to boost the agency's authority to require further studies of drugs and devices after they are approved if their approval is based on studies using biomarkers as surrogate clinical outcomes. And Congress should give FDA the authority to conduct studies of how well consumers understand food and supplement health claims and require manufacturers to make changes if needed to promote greater clarity.

Many people naturally assume that the claims made for foods and nutritional supplements have the same degree of scientific grounding as those for medications, and this committee thinks that should in fact be the case, said committee chair John Ball, executive vice president, American Society for Clinical Pathology, Chicago. Without changes in the way biomarkers are used and assessed, however, health care providers, regulators, and consumers will not be able to reliably collect or judge information to support claims.

The proposed framework entails validating that a biomarker can be accurately measured, ensuring that it is associated with the clinical outcome of concern, and confirming that it is appropriate for the proposed use. Committee members demonstrated the kinds of information and lessons the framework can provide by doing several case studies, looking at tumor size as a biomarker for cancer, blood level of beta-carotene as a surrogate for cancer and cardiovascular disease risk, and cholesterol level as an indicator of heart disease, among others.

The report calls for Congress to enhance FDA's abilities to study how health-related information can be communicated more effectively to consumers to help them better understand the science behind claims they see on packaging. The typical consumer is not aware that claims for food ingredients and supplements are often made based on studies using biomarkers instead of actual health outcomes, and that this introduces a measure of uncertainty.

FDA also needs the resources and authority to act on claims when they are found to cause confusion or to exceed regulatory limits. A report issued by Rep. Henry Waxman's office noted that FDA enforcement of food and supplement health claims declined by more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2005. However, recent actions by the FDA indicate it is engaging in heightened enforcement of food labeling, including health claims.

Social context may be a better indicator of obesity disparities than race

Thu, 06 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) When analyzing obesity disparities among women, socioeconomic status and social context may be more important than race, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. The authors examined race disparities in obesity among black and white women living in the same social context with similar income and compared these estimates to national data. Nationwide, black women were twice as likely to be obese when compared to white women. However, the researchers found that obesity rates were comparable in a sample of white and black women living in similar social and environmental conditions. The results are featured in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

In a national sample not accounting for race differences in social context, black women had twice the chance of being obese as compared to white women, Sara Bleich, PhD, lead author and assistant professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Health Policy and Management. To date, efforts to explain the disparity in obesity prevalence have primarily focused on individual level factors and little research has focused on social context as a possible explanation. When we examined poor, urban women exposed to the same environment, race disparities in obesity virtually disappeared.

Bleich, along with colleagues from the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions examined race disparities in obesity among black and white women living in the same social context with similar income in Baltimore. Using the data from the Exploring Health Disparities in Integrated Communities-Southwest Baltimore (EHDIC-SWB) study, a cross-sectional face-to-face survey of the adults ages 18 and older, researchers compared estimates to national data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to determine if the race disparity in obesity was attenuated among women living in the same social context. Obesity was calculated from self-reported height and body weight and logistic regression was used to examine the association between race and obesity.

Accurately accounting for social and environmental exposures is particularly important for the study of obesity disparities given the growing literature linking individual body weight to a host of environmental factors, both positively and negatively associated with body mass index, said Thomas LaVeist, PhD, senior author of the study and director of the Bloomberg School's Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. Developing policies that focus on modifying social aspects of the environment may reduce disparities in obesity among low-income women living in urban communities.

New and improved gluten-free foods developed for patients with celiac disease

Wed, 05 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A wide range of gluten free cereals have been studies in detail as part of the HEALTHGRAIN project of the European Union, and their impact on product quality has been assessed. Enzyme technology, bioprocessing as well as high-pressure processing technology have been successfully applied to improve the quality, safety and nutritional attributes of gluten free cereal products.

In genetically susceptible individuals, the ingestion of gluten and related proteins triggers an immunemediated enteropathy known as Coeliac Disease (CD). Recent epidemiological studies have shown that 1 in 100 people worldwide suffer from CD. Such a rate establishes CD as one of the most common food intolerances. Coeliac patients eating wheat or related proteins such as hordeins (barley) or secalins (rye) undergo an immunological response, localized in the small intestine, which destroys mature absorptive epithelial cells on the surface of the small intestine.

Currently, the only way that CD can be treated is the total lifelong avoidance of gluten ingestion. Therefore, CD suffers have to follow a very strict diet and avoid any products which contain wheat, rye or barley. Some authors also include oats. Avoidance of these cereals leads to a recovery from the disease and significant improvement of the intestinal mucosa and its absorptive functions. Coeliac patients are not in position to eat some of the most common foods such as bread, pizzas, biscuits or drink beer.

Due to the unique properties of gluten, it is a big challenge for food scientists to produce good quality gluten free products. The majority of products currently on the market are in general of very poor quality. Therefore part of the HEALTHGRAIN project focused on the development of nutritious and tasty gluten free breads.

The areas covered during the project were a detailed characterisation of gluten free cereals and the assessment of these cereals as potential ingredients for gluten free breads. The characterizations ranged from a detailed chemical characterisation to rheological evaluation of the resulting doughs, structural properties of the doughs and breads using advanced microscopic methods as well as pilotscale baking trials and sensory evaluation. Novel methods to improve the quality of gluten free cereal products were also covered; one example being the use of specially selected Lactic acid bacteria with properties such as antifungal activity, exopolysaccharide production and enzyme production. The use of specifically selected Lactic acid bacteria can significantly improve the quality and shelf-life of gluten free breads.

One of the major problems associated with gluten free products is their texture. Part of the project was therefore to investigate the influence of a range of enzymes such as transglutaminase, glucose oxidase and protease on wide range of gluten free cereals. It was shown that enzymes can play an important role in improving the structure of gluten free bread, but the enzymes showed different interactions with the various gluten free flours.

Creating new healthy ingredients by innovative milling techniques and processes for cereal grains

Wed, 05 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The bioactive compounds of cereals are concentrated in the peripheral layers of the grains (bran) but most of them have a low bio-accessibility. In the HEALTHGRAIN project of the European Union, new tools for process monitoring were developed that support commercial implementation of innovative milling techniques including partial grain debranning, fine grinding and classification of grain fractions, resulting in flours and ingredients with enhanced nutritional properties.

The wheat grain is a heterogeneous structure with bio-active compounds unevenly distributed within its different parts. The bioactive compounds (fibres, micronutrients and phytochemicals) are mostly concentrated in the grain outer layers, each having its own compositional profile. Therefore levels of bioactive compounds in whole meal flour are at least two times higher than those in white flour. However, some of the bioactive compounds have a low bio-accessibility in peripheral layers as they are trapped in strong cell wall structures which resist conventional milling. They can also be localized close to undesirable contaminants such as microbes, mycotoxins, pesticide residues, heavy metals. Therefore novel technologies have been developed for the transformation of the grains to better exploit their nutritional potential and to ensure food safety requirements.

In order to develop new dry processing techniques, new tools based on new insights in grain tissue composition, structure and properties have been obtained. Biochemical markers of the different grain tissues (pericarp, intermediate layers, aleurone layers, germ) have been identified and allow to determine the tissue composition of the technological fractions and deduce the behaviour of the different grain parts upon fractionation operations. More rapid methods for fractionation monitoring using spectral signature of tissues are on the way. New mechanical devices coupled with microscopy and microspectroscopy have been developed to determine the local properties of tissues and of their interfaces to help the development of fractionation with improved resolution. Especially, the effects of temperature, water content and enzymatic pre-treatments have been investigated.

A way to enrich cereal products with bioactive compounds is to manufacture flours with high levels of selected parts of the outer layers. To remove the very outermost layers, partial debranning of grains in using friction (peeling) or abrasion (pearling), was combined with milling (grinding and sieving) to produce flours with tailored tissue composition and thus controlled in content of bioactive compounds, as monitored by the marker methodology. Flours made from peeled grains, peeled and pearled grains and grains with removed outermost layer and crease parts exhibited high contents of bioactive compounds and improved nutritional effects as compared to common flours.

Another way of exploiting cereal potential is to use the miller's bran, a by-product of the milling industry, as a source of healthy ingredients. Careful limited grinding and sieving of the bran allowed to prepare a concentrate of aleurone cells and aleurone layer, where most of the bioactive compounds of the grain are located. Further purification by electrostatic classification yielded practically pure aleurone cells that exhibited excellent nutritional properties.

Another approach used ultrafine grinding of the bran in ambient or cryogenic conditions, to provoke a full dissociation of the material at a sub-cellular level. This resulted in an increase in bioactive compounds bioaccessibility. Classification of the fine particles in using a electrostatic separator made it possible to prepare fractions of very contrasted compositions in starting from bran. One of these ingredients, concentrated in fine aleurone particles, showed a good accessibility of anti-oxidants and mineral compared to bran and untreated aleurone. These technologies have been experimented at large-scale by industrial partners, to determine their feasibility and economics.

The work was conducted by INRA, in close collaboration with difent partners in charge of analyses (VTT, KU Leuven, University of Helsinki, University of Uppsala, Puratos, TNO), development of analytical equipment (Branscan) and industrial demonstration and cost evaluation (Barilla, Buhler, SD-Tech).

Children living in apartments with nonsmoking adults still exposed

Sat, 01 May 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The majority of children living in apartments are exposed to secondhand smoke, even when they don't live with smokers. This study from the University of Rochester Medical Center is the first to examine whether housing type is a potential contributor to children's exposure to cigarette smoke. The abstract was presented this morning at the Pediatric Academic Society Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Among children who lived in an apartment, 84 percent had been exposed to tobacco smoke, according to the level of a biomarker (cotinine) in their blood that indicates exposure to nicotine found in tobacco, and this included more than 9 of 10 African-American and white children. Even among children who lived in detached houses, 70 percent showed evidence of exposure.

We are starting to understand the role that seepage through walls and through shared ventilation may impact tobacco smoke exposure in apartments, said Karen Wilson, M.D., MPH, author of the study and an assistant professor of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Golisano Children's Hospital. We see that children are being exposed in ways we are not picking up, and it's important, for their health, that we figure out where this exposure is taking place, and work to eliminate it. Multi-unit housing is one potential source, but a very important one.

Previous studies have shown that children with cotinine levels indicating tobacco smoke exposure have higher rates of respiratory diseases, decreased cognitive abilities and decreased antioxidant levels.

The study analyzed data from almost 6,000 children between 6- and 18-years-old in a national database (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2006) to see if there was any relationship between their smoke exposure and their housing type. Apartment living was associated with a 45 percent increase in cotinine levels for African American children and a 207 percent increase for white children. About 18 percent of U.S. children live in apartments, and many of these children are living in subsidized housing communities where smoking is more prevalent.

Wilson said many parents are trying to limit their children's tobacco smoke exposure by not allowing smoking in their apartments, but they say they can smell tobacco smoke coming from other apartments or from common areas. Last summer, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released a memo recommending that their housing developments enact smoke-free policies. A smoking ban within multi-unit, subsidized housing could further reduce the tobacco smoke exposure for children and reduce smoking rates among residents.

Better vitamin D status could mean better quality of life for seniors

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) According to legend, it was The Fountain of Youth that the famed Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon was seeking when he landed on the Floridian coast in 1513. It has long been said that he who drinks from the Fountain will have his youth restored. Without a doubt, the quest for eternal youth is as ancient as any pursuit. However, although we are now living longer than ever, there is now growing concern that quantity of years is not nearly as important as quality of those years. Indeed, as we experience the many joys of living longer, we also must deal with myriad consequences accompanying this aging trend. For instance, osteoporosis, arthritis, and other serious and often painful bone and joint diseases are much more common as we get older. And, not surprisingly, seniors often struggle daily with what was once the simple task of getting around. Hence, the obvious question in today's society concerning our longevity is What choices can we make to help ease these inconveniences of aging?

One area of particular interest is the role that diet plays in keeping bones and muscles strong from infancy to old age. For instance, a limited number of studies point to the possibility that optimal intake of vitamin D (the sunshine vitamin) might help keep our muscles strong and preserve physical function. Although there are only few longitudinal studies investigating this relationship, their findings have been mixed. To help understand this diet-health association, Dr. Denise Houston from the Sticht Center on Aging at Wake Forest University and her collaborators studied the relationship between vitamin D status and physical function in a group of relatively healthy seniors living in Memphis, TN and Pittsburgh, PA. Their results will be presented on Sunday, April 25 as part of the scientific program of the American Society for Nutrition, composed of the world's leading nutrition researchers, at the Experimental Biology 2010 meeting in Anaheim.

This study was part of the Health, Aging, and Body Composition (Health ABC) study initially designed to assess the associations among body composition, long-term health conditions, and mobility in older adults. For Houston's segment of the investigation, she studied 2788 seniors (mean age: ~75 years) for 4 years. At the beginning of the study, they assessed vitamin D status by analyzing each person's blood for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a precursor for activated vitamin D. At baseline and then 2 and 4 years later, the research team then determined whether circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D was related to the participants' physical function. Specifically, they looked at how quickly each participant could walk a short distance (6 meters) and rise from a chair five times as well as maintain his or her balance in progressively more challenging positions. Each participant was also put through a battery of tests assessing endurance and strength.

When the results were tabulated, participants with the highest levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D had better physical function. And, although physical function declined over the course of the study, it remained significantly higher among those with the highest vitamin D levels at the beginning of the study compared to those with the lowest vitamin D levels. The scientists were not surprised to learn that, in general, vitamin D consumption was very low in this group of otherwise healthy seniors. In fact, more than 90% of them consumed less vitamin D than currently recommended, and many were relying on dietary supplements.

The good news: higher circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D is related to better physical function in seniors. But it's impossible to tell from this type of research whether increasing vitamin D intake will actually lead to stronger muscles and preserve physical function. This is partly due to the fact that our bodies can make vitamin D if they get enough sunlight. So, it is possible that the participants with better physical function had higher vitamin D status simply because they were able to go outside more often. Indeed, the ominous chicken-or-the-egg question can only be answered by carefully controlled clinical intervention trials. Nonetheless, it is possible that getting more vitamin D from foods (like fortified milk and oily fish) or supplements will help maintain youth and vitality as we enjoy longer lifespans. As Houston points out: Current dietary recommendations are based primarily on vitamin D's effects on bone health. It is possible that higher amounts of vitamin D are needed for the preservation of muscle strength and physical function as well as other health conditions. However, clinical trials are needed to definitively determine whether increasing 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations through diet or supplements has an effect on these non-traditional outcomes.

Will vitamin D research lead us to The Fountain of Youth? Probably not. But paying attention to how much vitamin D we get is likely important at every age and will help enhance the quality component of life as we enter our senior years.

Keeping the weight off after a very low-energy diet

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Simple advice can reduce the risk of weight regain after a very-low-energy diet: the secret to keeping the weight off is to switch back to normal food gradually, reveals a dissertation from the Sahlgrenska Academy, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, which also contains new research results for patients who have undergone obesity surgery.

For 12 weeks a group of just over 260 patients swapped their normal food for a very-low-energy diet in the form of soups and milkshakes. 169 of the patients lost a lot of weight, averaging 16 per cent of their body weight. They were then divided into two groups so that they could switch back at different rates from the very-low-energy diet to energy reduced portions of normal food. One group completed the refeeding in a week, while the other took six weeks.

After ten months the patients with the six-week refeeding period had gained 4 per cent in weight from their minimum weight, while the patients with the one-week refeeding period had gained eight per cent, says Lena Gripeteg, researcher at the Sahlgrenska Academy.

Very-low-energy diets have been used for many years in the health service to achieve rapid and safe weight loss in obese patients. While this treatment method is well-studied, there is a risk that patients will gain weight when they start to eat normal food again.

We therefore want to look at the importance of different treatment advice on the transition from the very-low-energy diet back to normal food, and assess what actually works, says Gripeteg. A simple tip that seems to work for patients is to revert slowly to normal food after losing weight on a very-low-energy diet.

Her dissertation also includes research results from the current national SOS (Swedish Obese Subjects) study, which has followed 2,010 patients who have undergone surgical treatment for obesity and 2,037 matched control patients for up to 20 years. It shows that men who have undergone obesity surgery are less likely to need a disability pension, while obese women are just as likely to need a disability pension whether they lose weight or not.

On the basis of this study, we can't explain why there is a difference in the sexes, says Gripeteg. It may well be that the underlying health problems differ between women and men, which could explain why there is a significant improvement in the ability to work in men, but no effect in women after surgical obesity treatment.

Studies find treating vitamin D deficiency significantly reduces heart disease risk

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Preventing and treating heart disease in some patients could be as simple as supplementing their diet with extra vitamin D, according to two new studies at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Murray, Utah.

Researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute last fall demonstrated the link between vitamin D deficiency and increased risk for coronary artery disease. These new studies show that treating vitamin D deficiency with supplements may help to prevent or reduce a person's risk for cardiovascular disease and a host of other chronic conditions. They also establish what level of vitamin D further enhances that risk reduction.

Study findings will be presented at the American College of Cardiology 59th annual scientific session in Atlanta at 3:30 pm, EST, on March 15, 2010. PLEASE NOTE EMBARGO REQUIREMENTS.

Vitamin D replacement therapy has long been associated with reducing the risk of fractures and diseases of the bone, says Dr. J. Brent Muhlestein, MD, director of cardiovascular research at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute. But our findings show that vitamin D could have far greater implications in the treatment and reduction of cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions than we previously thought.

For the first study, researchers followed two groups of patients for an average of one year each. In the first study group, over 9,400 patients, mostly female, reported low initial vitamin D levels, and had at least one follow up exam during that time period. Researchers found that 47 percent of the patients who increased their levels of vitamin D between the two visits showed a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease.

In the second study, researchers placed over 31,000 patients into three categories based on their levels of vitamin D. The patients in each category who increased their vitamin D levels to 43 nanograms per milliliter of blood or higher had lower rates of death, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, heart failure, high blood pressure, depression, and kidney failure. Currently, a level of 30 nanograms per milliliter is considered normal.

Heidi May, PhD, a cardiovascular clinical epidemiologist with the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute, and one of the study's authors, says the link between low levels of vitamin D and increased risk for a variety of diseases is significant.

It was very important to discover that the 'normal' levels are too low. Giving physicians a higher level to look for gives them one more tool in identifying patients at-risk and offering them better treatment, says Dr. May.

Dr. Muhlestein says the results of these studies will change the way he treats his patients.

Although randomized trials would be useful and are coming, I feel there is enough information here for me to start treatment based on these findings, he says.

Treatment options in this case are simple, starting with a blood test to determine a patient's vitamin D level. If low levels are detected, supplements and/or increased exposure to sunlight may be prescribed.

Increasing vitamin D intake by 1000 to 5000 international units (IU) a day may be appropriate, depending on a patient's health and genetic risk, says Dr. Muhlestein. He says supplements are the best source of vitamin D because they are relatively inexpensive and can be found at almost any supermarket or drug store. Most supplements provide an average of 400 IU per tablet.

While exposure to 20-30 minutes of sunlight can provide up to 10,000 IU, Dr. Muhlestein says it is important to use sunscreen and avoid the hottest parts of the day in order to avoid sunburn and the harmful UV rays associated with skin cancer.

Multicenter study finds little effect of soy isoflavones on bone loss in postmenopausal women

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) AMES, Iowa -- A previous six-month study by Iowa State University researchers had indicated that consuming modest amounts of soy protein, rich in isoflavones, lessened lumbar spine bone loss in midlife, perimenopausal women. But now an expanded three-year study by some of those same researchers does not show a bone-sparing effect in postmenopausal women who ingested soy isoflavone tablets, except for a modest effect at the femoral (hip) neck among those who took the highest dosage.

The multi-center clinical trial of 224 postmenopausal women -- led by D. Lee Alekel, professor of nutrition and interim associate director of the Nutrition and Wellness Research Center (NWRC) at Iowa State, and supported by the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, one of the research institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- was the longest ever conducted on the effects of soy isoflavones on bone mineral density (BMD). It compared the effects of either ingesting daily 80-mg daily or 120-mg soy isoflavone tablets, compared to placebo tablets on BMD and other health outcomes.

Iowa State NWRC researchers collaborated with research physiologist Marta D. Van Loan and her colleagues at the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Western Human Nutrition Research Center, located at the University of California, Davis. The primary results of their study were published in the January issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Our six-month preliminary study, published in 2000, indicated that soy protein, rich in isoflavones, exerted the greatest impact in slowing the loss of bone mineral density in the lumbar spine, Alekel said. But we believed that we needed to replicate these results in a study with a greater sample size and longer duration, which is what we did with this three-year intervention.

In this longer study, we had sufficient power to detect change, she continued. We monitored adverse events, had excellent compliance throughout, and accounted for potential confounding factors.

NWRC research staff members Laura Hanson, Jeanne Stewart and Kathy Hanson also joined Kenneth Koehler and C. Ted Peterson from statistics as part of the eight-member ISU team that conducted the research.

The researchers ran statistical analyses to determine change in BMD at the lumbar spine, total proximal femur (hip), femoral neck and whole body. They accounted for treatment, age, whole body fat mass and bone removal (using a biochemical marker).

While the 120-mg dose soy isoflavones did reveal a small protective effect on femoral neck bone BMD, researchers found no significant effect of treatment on lumbar spine, total hip, or whole-body BMD.

This trial used isoflavones extracted from soy protein, compressed into tablet form, consumed over the course of three years, which is very different than either providing soy protein or soy foods, Alekel said. In our recent study, we did not demonstrate an important biological effect on BMD or bone turnover.

The new study calls into question the value of postmenopausal women consuming soy isoflavone tablets to help lessen bone loss and minimize the effect of osteoporosis.

The preponderance of studies that have been published -- particularly the longer term, more carefully conducted studies, like our own -- have shown little to no biological effects of soy isoflavones on BMD, she said. This field of research has attracted 'believers,' making it difficult to convince them otherwise. They may continue to believe what they want to believe, rather than what the evidence shows.

And when it comes to minimizing the consequences of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women, Alekel urges a more holistic approach.

People in general, would like an easy fix. We would all like soy isoflavones to be that magic pill, but this study has found that they are not, she said.

Results from other health outcomes from this research have been published in six manuscripts to date, with six additional manuscripts underway. The NWRC research team will continue to study factors that influence bone mineral density and health outcomes in postmenopausal women.

Antioxidants aren't always good for you and can impair muscle function, study shows

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Antioxidants increasingly have been praised for their benefits against disease and aging, but recent studies at Kansas State University show that they also can cause harm.

Researchers in K-State's Cardiorespiratory Exercise Laboratory have been studying how to improve oxygen delivery to the skeletal muscle during physical activity by using antioxidants, which are nutrients in foods that can prevent or slow the oxidative damage to the body. Their findings show that sometimes antioxidants can impair muscle function.

Antioxidant is one of those buzz words right now, said Steven Copp, a doctoral student in anatomy and physiology from Manhattan and a researcher in the lab. Walking around grocery stores you see things advertised that are loaded with antioxidants. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that the antioxidant and pro-oxidant balance is really delicate. One of the things we've seen in our research is that you can't just give a larger dose of antioxidants and presume that there will be some sort of beneficial effect. In fact, you can actually make a problem worse.

David C. Poole and Timothy I. Musch, K-State professors from both the departments of kinesiology and anatomy and physiology, direct the Cardiorespiratory Exercise Laboratory, located in the College of Veterinary Medicine complex. Researchers in the lab study the physiology of physical activity in health and disease through animal models. Copp and Daniel Hirai, an anatomy and physiology doctoral student from Manhattan working in the lab, have conducted various studies associated with how muscles control blood flow and the effects of different doses and types of antioxidants.

Abnormalities in the circulatory system, such as those that result from aging or a disease like chronic heart failure, can impair oxygen delivery to the skeletal muscle and increase fatigability during physical activity, Copp said. The researchers are studying the effects antioxidants could have in the process.

If you have a person trying to recover from a heart attack and you put them in cardiac rehab, when they walk ona treadmill they might say it's difficult, Poole said. Their muscles get sore and stiff. We try to understand why the blood cells aren't flowing properly and why they can't get oxygen to the muscles, as happens in healthy individuals.

Copp said there is a potential for antioxidants to reverse or partially reverse some of those changes that result from aging or disease. However, K-State's studies have shown that some of the oxidants in our body, such as hydrogen peroxide, are helpful to increase blood flow.

Eating less may help you live longer

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:05:57 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life, a new study has confirmed.

University of Alabama-Birmingham - researchers have shown exactly how restricted calorie diets, specifically in the form of restricted glucose -, help human cells live longer.

This discovery could help lead to drugs and treatments that slow human ageing and prevent cancer.

'Our hope is that the discovery that reduced calories extend the lifespan of normal human cells will lead to further discoveries of the causes for these effects in different cell types...,' said Trygve Tollefsbol, researcher at the Centre for Aging and Comprehensive Cancer Centre UAB.

'We would also hope for these studies to lead to improved prevention of cancer as well as many other age-related diseases through controlling calorie intake of specific cell types,' he added.

Tollefsbol and colleagues used normal human lung cells and pre-cancerous human lung cells that were at the beginning stages of cancer formation.

Eating less may help you live longer

Both sets of cells were lab grown and received either normal or reduced levels of glucose. As the cells grew over a period of a few weeks, researchers monitored their ability to divide, and tracked how many cells survived over this period.

They found that the normal cells lived longer, and many of the precancerous cells died, when given less glucose. Gene activity was also measured under the same conditions, said a UAB release.

'Western science is on the cusp of developing a pharmaceutical fountain of youth,' said Gerald Weissmann, medical expert and editor-in-chief of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology - Journal, which published these findings.

UIC receives $1 million grant to study 'fat taxes,' diet, obesity

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have received $1 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study the relationship between fat taxes and food consumption, diet quality and obesity.

The funding for the two-year project was made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The study will link state tax rates associated with restaurants and with specific sugar- and fat-laden foods and beverages (soda, candy, baked goods and chips) to individual survey data.

Using multiple data sets from a 10-year period -- 1997 through 2007 -- the researchers will determine if differential tax rates equate to differences in consumption, diet quality and body mass index, or BMI, for children, adolescents and adults.

The study will separately examine these relationships among low-income food stamp recipients and non-food stamp recipients.

Previous economic studies suggest that food prices do change consumption. However, the researchers want to determine if, for example, consumers will seek out another high-sugar drink such as Kool-Aid if, say, soda is too expensive. If they do, then a tax on soda may reduce soda consumption but will not necessarily reduce weight, improve diet quality, or reduce overall sugar intake.

We want to know if this price sensitivity is just for a specific good, such as soda, or if it translates into changes in diet quality and weight outcomes, said Lisa Powell, senior research scientist at UIC's Institute for Health Research and Policy and principal investigator of the study. It will help lay the foundation on the extent to which these taxes may be effective policy instruments to generate behavior change and potentially reduce obesity.

Current fat-tax rates are fairly low, ranging, for example, from 0 to 7 percent for soda.

Taxing soda is an easy target because it is clear there is not a lot of nutritional value, said Powell. But if you look at taxing all foods or beverages with a certain amount of sugar or fat, that might include a fortified cereal that could also be healthy.

Defining healthy and unhealthy when there are many different components to food can be difficult, she said.

According to the researchers, the study is critical because Americans are increasingly consuming poor diets, which have contributed to a public health crisis with more than 17 percent of children and 32 percent of adults being obese.

Powell's co-investigators at UIC are Frank Chaloupka, distinguished professor of economics and director of the Health Policy Center; Carol Braunschweig, associate professor of human nutrition; Jamie Chriqui, senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy; and Euna Han, health economist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy.

Owners should count calories for obese pets, consider several factors for good health

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) You might watch your daily calorie intake or glance over nutritional information on food packages, but do you do the same for your pet?

Dr. Susan Nelson, a veterinarian and assistant professor of clinical sciences at Kansas State University, said there are several guidelines to follow when feeding your pet to ensure that it maintains good health.

Just like human food packages, many cat and dog food packages contain nutritional information, Nelson said. Packages often list the kilocalories, protein, fat, carbohydrates and fiber per cup. In recent years, manufacturers started listing some nutritional information, including calorie content, for dog and cat treats.

In the past, we didn't know how many calories were in various treats, Nelson said. Now that's becoming more available, and that's because more pets are becoming obese and their owners are asking for that information. Pets are overeating and underexercising, and they're eating too many high-fat foods and treats.

Nelson said these plumper pets are not only benefitting from improvements in pet food quality, but also from the increased calorie content caused by the higher fat content of many premium diets. But does that call for owners to start counting calories for their pets?

It's important to count calories if the pet is overweight, but it's probably not necessary if you have a pet that is of normal weight, Nelson said. If it starts to get pudgy, you need to take a look at how much exercise it is getting, how much food you are feeding it, and how many treats you're giving it.

Calories from treats should be no more than 10 percent of your pet's diet. If owners want to count their pet's calories, Nelson said, veterinarians can make diet calculations for dogs and cats. The overall recommendation for the amount of food to feed your pet is based on several factors, including the type of food you are feeding your pet, your pet's metabolism and how much exercise it gets.

Generally, I tell people that unless your pet is overweight, go with the guidelines on the food bag, she said. If the pet is a little overweight, you should feed it for its ideal weight and not for its current weight.

Nelson said if you want to compare different pet food brands' nutritional information, you have to look at the nutritional content calculations based on the dry matter content. Often, this is not listed on the bag, so you might have to look online or call the company to find the information.

What most bags list is the nutritional analysis that is formulated on an as-fed basis, she said. To truly compare the nutrient content of foods, you have to look at the dry matter basis, which takes out water content.

Nelson said it's typically best to start by following the feeding guidelines on the bag. She said people shouldn't assume that feeding one cup of one diet is the same as feeding one cup of another, because pet foods can vary greatly in calories. She also suggests using a standard 8-ounce measuring cup for dry food.

To determine if a pet is too heavy or light, Nelson said owners should look at several factors. You should not be able to see the animal's ribs, but you should be able to feel them easily with a thin layer of fat over them. When you look at the animal from the side, its tummy should tuck up at the flank area and not hang in a straight line.

If you look over the top of a dog, you should see an hourglass shape where it's broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist and broader at the hips. If the dog starts to thicken out, you should cut back on its calories and/or have it exercise more.

In general, make sure you're feeding the appropriate diet for the life stage of your pet, Nelson said. If your pet is pregnant, a puppy or kitten, has special health condition needs or is a senior, there are foods formulated that best meet the nutritional demands for that condition.

There are breeds of dogs and cats that have high metabolisms and have trouble putting weight on, Nelson said. For these pets, there are pet foods that have higher fat contents because it gives the food more calories. If the pet is extremely overweight, it might need diet food along with other recommendations. These foods are lower in calories, nutritionally complete and often contain extra fiber, which helps make the animal feel full. Conversely, if you feed the animal much less of their regular food, your pet is not going to get enough of the nutrients it needs.

Nelson said many people do not realize how many calories they're feeding their pet because they don't account for table scraps or treats. These hidden calories can add up significantly over the day and be the main contributor to obesity. Putting your pet on a diet requires attention and effort from the whole family, she said. If you have a small child, inside pets are going to eat everything the child drops, and those calories will add up.

Sometimes you'll try to put your pet on a diet, and then someone else living in the house will slip it treats, Nelson said. You should talk with the whole family when putting your pet on a diet. Tell them the diet is necessary to keep the pet at a good weight, which in turn will make it healthier and can help it live a longer life.

Coconut oil keeps fat at bay

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:57:59 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Sydney, Sep 9 - A diet rich in coconut oil keeps fat away and also protects against insulin resistance, a new study shows.

The study also helps explain how people who incorporate medium chain fatty acids found in coconut oil into their diets can lose body fat.

Obesity and insulin resistance are major factors leading to the development of Type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance is an impaired ability of cells to respond to insulin.

Nigel Turner and Jiming Ye from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research compared fat metabolism and insulin resistance in mice fed coconut oil and lard based diets.

'The medium chain fatty acids like those found in coconut oil are interesting to us because they behave very differently to the fats normally found in our diets,' said study leader Turner.

'Unlike the long chain fatty acids contained in animal fats, medium chain fatty acids are small enough to enter mitochondria - the cells' energy burning powerhouses - directly where they can then be converted to energy.'

'Unfortunately the downside to eating medium chain fatty acids is that they can lead to fat build up in the liver, an important fact to be taken into consideration by anyone considering using them as a weight loss therapy.'

Fat storage is determined by the balance between how much fat is taken in by cells and how much of this fat is burned for energy.

When people eat a high fat diet, their bodies attempt to compensate by increasing their capacity to oxidise fat, said a Garvan release.

'Obese humans usually eat 40-50 percent of their calories as fat. Our mice were fed 45 percent of their calories as fat,' Turner said.

Their findings are now published online in Diabetes.

K-State researchers say after-school programs should promote activity, healthy nutrition

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Children's after-school activities often consist of sedentary behavior such as watching television, but after-school programs that offer physical activity and healthy snacks could be the best place for children's health.

David Dzewaltowski, head of the department of kinesiology at Kansas State University, and other K-State researchers have found that quality after-school programs are an important contributor to children's physical activity.

Participation in after-school programs tends to drop with increasing age as parents believe their children can be at home without adult supervision, Dzewaltowski said. Parents should strive to place their children in healthy environments that are supervised by adults and that provide physical activity and healthful food options.

The researchers conducted the Healthy Opportunities for Physical Activity and Nutrition, or HOP'N, After-School Project, which was designed to prevent obesity by enhancing the quality of after-school programming. The study found that some existing after-school programs lack in quality and do not provide adequate nutrition or physical activity, especially for different genders and fitness levels.

The HOP'N After-School Project includes four elements: a daily healthy snack, daily physical activity, weekly nutrition and physical activity education sessions. It also provides continuous staff training.

Eight elementary schools and after-school programs in Lawrence participated in the K-State study during a three-year period. The after-school settings were observed throughout the school year. Participating children has their height and weight measured in the fall and spring. Children also wore pedometer devices to measure their physical activity. After a baseline year, the HOP'N program was implemented at four of the sites for two years, and the other sites continued their regular programming as a project control.

Baseline findings of the study showed that, on average, the after-school programs provided 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, which fulfills one-third of the recommended 60-minute daily physical activity for youth. However, the researchers found that the students spent the majority of their time participating in sedentary and light-intensity activities.

For two subsequent program years, the HOP'N program staff trained after-school program leaders to increase physical activity in their programs. Results showed that program leaders could modify the existing activities to include more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity throughout the session.

The findings showed that boys were significantly more active than girls during indoor free play and organized outdoor activities; however, moderate activity levels for both genders were similar. This shows that the girls had lower participation in vigorous-intensity physical activity.

Dzewaltowski said after-school programs can better cater to the interests of genders and provide various activity choices, which could increase physical activity levels, self-efficacy and enjoyment of physical activity.

The results also showed that overweight students were substantially less active than the students who were not overweight during organized outdoor activities, which might be related to differences in aerobic fitness. Dzewaltowski said future research should include understanding the activity preferences of overweight children.

During the baseline year, the researchers also found that there was a significant difference in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels recorded during the free play and organized physical activity sessions. Children were more active in free play than when led by adults who were not well trained to promote physical activity.

After-school program leaders who attempt to provide physical activity through structured games may do more harm than good, Dzewaltowski said. Leaders should encourage children's natural inclination to move and play to promote physical activity in the after-school time period if there is not opportunity for training to be an effective physical activity leader.

Dzewaltowski said it is important for children in middle school to learn healthy lifestyle behaviors, and the after-school setting is an effective place for obesity prevention. Since many schools do not provide opportunities for physical activity during the school day, the after-school hours provide an opportunity for children to be active without having to change the structure of the school day.

The baseline findings of the study have been published in numerous publications, including in the

Researcher finds Girl Scout meetings provide an opportunity to increase girls' physical activity

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Girls typically are less physically active than boys, but a Kansas State University researcher has found that organizations like Girl Scouts provide an ideal setting to get girls moving early in life and to develop lifelong healthy habits.

Richard Rosenkranz, assistant professor in human nutrition at K-State, did a study using interventions with Girl Scout troops. He trained group leaders to instruct exercise sessions and promote healthful eating, and in effect taught the girls about a healthy lifestyle and increased their participation in exercise activities.

We were striving to get the girls and parents to spend some of their leisure time together being active and taking steps together for fun and health, he said.

Rosenkranz worked with 10- and 11-year-old girls who were members of Girl Scout troops in Manhattan and the surrounding area. The two-year study involved nine troops, with five of the troops receiving an intervention.

What we saw in the control troops was an environment where girls were sedentary for the vast majority of time at the meeting, combined with snacks that were less than health-promoting, he said. This is just one part of a girl's weekly or bi-weekly experience, but it offers the chance to provide an opportunity and a message for health promotion.

Rosenkranz trained the group leaders as part of the intervention. They learned about the background of intervention activities, which included nutrition, family meals, physical activity and family connection. They also were taught the expectations of being role models and providing a healthful environment at Girl Scout meetings, as well as new physically active games for the girls.

Federal physical activity guidelines recommend that all children perform at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, Rosenkranz said. The intervention focused on having the girls participate in walking, dancing, active games and yoga.

The intervention was focused on physical activities that could be done in or around the home, without special equipment, ideally involving the parents, Rosenkranz said.

He said the girls in the intervention troops were less sedentary than those not in the interventions. Additionally, the girls involved in the intervention performed higher levels of both moderate-intensity and moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise during troop meetings.

Statistically, Rosenkranz said, minorities acquire lower amounts of physical activity. However, the interventions created the same amount of activity for all demographics and there was no difference by minority or weight status.

An important step of the intervention was involving the adults. Rosenkranz said adults should be involved in promoting physical activity to children, which can be done through providing formal and informal opportunities for children to be active, being active along with them and encouraging physical activity -- or at least not discouraging it.

The key for this project to achieve lasting effectiveness is to make an impact on the adults who structure the environments where children spend time; for this study these are the parents and troop leaders, he said. Both these sets of adults need to recognize that getting sufficient physical activity is essential for the children's health and for their own health.

New supplement may help slow sight loss in elderly

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Queen's University Belfast academics have helped develop an antioxidant supplement which may slow down sight loss in elderly people.

The supplement may help those affected by the leading cause of blindness in the Western World, a five-year research programme has found.

Professor Usha Chakravarthy, from Queen's Centre of Vision and Vascular Science (CVVS), co-ordinated the study, which looked at nutritional supplements for patients with early age-related macular (AMD) degeneration and found they helped sharpen vision.

Details of the findings are being presented in Belfast today (Friday) by Professor Chakravarthy and Dr Stephen Beatty, Head of Vision Research at the Waterford Institute of Technology.

They co-designed the study and the antioxidant supplement was developed with the advice of Professor Ian Young from the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen's and scientists in eyecare companies Dr Mann Pharma and Bausch and Lomb.

AMD is an incurable eye disease which causes blurring of central vision because of its effects on the macula, the central part of the retina.

Over 400 people across Ireland took part in clinical trials investigating whether carotenoids, rich antioxidants which are found in fruit and vegetables, could prevent progression to the more serious late AMD.

When the eye disease progresses to late AMD patients are unable to read, watch television or recognise people's faces as they only have peripheral vision, not central vision.

Professor Chakravarthy, who is also a Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon at the Royal Hospital in Belfast, said: Late AMD causes severe sight loss and has a huge economic impact both in terms of the effects of sight loss itself and in terms of the expensive treatments that are needed to deal with the condition.

Up to 500 people a year in Northern Ireland will lose sight in one or both eyes as a result of late AMD.

We wanted to carry out the study as prevention of progression to late AMD can result in a reduced financial and societal burden.

As the macula of the eye is very rich in antioxidants the researchers wanted to see if a supplement called CARMA (Caroteneoids and Co-antioxidants in Age-related Maculopathy) containing the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin could help slow down AMD.

The supplement also contained vitamins C,E and Zinc, which had been used in a previous study.

The latest study showed that intake of high levels of both carotenoids preserved the macular pigments, slowing down the progression from early AMD to late AMD.

In contrast, the macular pigments of participants in a placebo group declined steadily.

Dr Chakravarthy added: These findings are important because this is the first randomised controlled clinical trial to document a beneficial effect through improved function and maintained macular pigments.

Further research is needed to confirm these findings and to identify the numbers needed to treat to prevent 1 case from progressing from early to late AMD.

Study suggests obese women should not gain weight

Fri, 29 May 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) For years, doctors and other health-care providers have managed pregnant patients according to guidelines issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). In 1986, ACOG stated, Regardless of how much women weigh before they become pregnant, gaining between 26-35 pounds during pregnancy can improve the outcome of pregnancy and reduce their chances of having the pregnancy end in fetal death. Until its revised guidelines were released yesterday, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) had recommended that overweight women should gain about 15 pounds during pregnancy.

The current study was undertaken to test whether these guidelines make a difference in maternal-fetal outcomes among obese women. In the study, conducted at several hospitals, the researchers followed 232 obese pregnant women, all of whom had a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater. Half of the women followed conventional prenatal nutritional guidelines, which is essentially eat to appetite (control group). The other half were placed on a well-balanced, nutritionally monitored program, which included a daily food diary (study group). The average weight gain in the control group was 31 pounds, compared to 11 pounds in the study group. Twenty-three extremely obese patients lost weight during their pregnancy.

The findings showed that there were no fetal deaths and no growth-restricted infants in the study group. Also, there were fewer babies weighing more than 10 pounds in the study group than in the control group. (A birth weight over 10 pounds poses significant hazards to both infants and mothers.) Moreover, women in the study group gained less weight, had fewer cesarean deliveries, were less likely to develop gestational diabetes, and retained less weight after they delivered than women in the control group.

The researchers concluded that obese pregnant women may be placed on a healthy, well balanced, monitored nutritional program without adverse maternal-fetal outcomes.

Women who are obese when beginning a pregnancy are, by definition, unhealthy, says study leader Yvonne S. Thornton, MD, MPH, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology and board-certified specialist in maternal-fetal medicine at New York Medical College. To say that they should gain even more weight is counter-intuitive, and our study bears that out. Rather than focusing on numerical endpoints with respect to weight gain, we need to focus on making these women healthier by getting them to eat a well-balanced diet.

The study grew out of Dr. Thornton's personal experience with obesity and pregnancy. Despite being overweight, she gained a substantial amount of weight during her first pregnancy, exacerbating her life-long battle with obesity. During her second pregnancy, she followed a well-balanced diet and gained little weight, with no adverse consequences for mother or baby.

Dr. Thornton observed the same pattern in her own clinical practice, leading her to question prevailing guidelines for weight gain during pregnancy. Adding to her skepticism was the fact that women who develop gestational diabetes are routinely put on diets that effectively limit weight gain, with no ill effects.

It is the mindset of our specialty, and our society, that we need to have round, chubby pregnant women in order make sure they are healthy, adds Dr. Thornton. Pregnancy has become a license to eat. We talk about 'eating for two,' but it's really more like eating for 1 and 1/20th.

These attitudes have contributed to the obesity epidemic in the U.S., where 35 percent of women are considered obese, says the researcher. The situation is even worse among African-American women, four out of five of whom are overweight or obese.

Gaining weight during pregnancy contributes to obesity, and it makes it that much harder for overweight women to return to their normal weight after pregnancy, says Dr. Thornton.

Study: Vibration plate machines may aid weight loss and trim abdominal fat

Fri, 08 May 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Amsterdam, the Netherlands: New research suggests that, if used properly, vibration plate exercise machines may help you lose weight and trim the particularly harmful belly fat between the organs.

In a study presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity, scientists found that overweight or obese people who regularly used the equipment in combination with a calorie restricted diet were more successful at long-term weight loss and shedding the fat around their abdominal organs than those who combined dieting with a more conventional fitness routine.

These machines are increasingly found in gyms across the industrialized world and have gathered a devoted following in some places, but there has not been any evidence that they help people lose weight. Our study, the first to investigate the effects of vibration in obese people, indicates it's a promising approach. It looks like these machines could be a useful addition to a weight control package, said the study's leader, Dirk Vissers, a physiotherapist at the Artesis University College and the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

Vissers and his colleagues studied the effects of the Power Plate in 61 overweight or obese people - mostly women - for a year. The intervention lasted six months, after which the scientists advised all the volunteers to do the best they could with a healthy diet and exercise regime on their own for another six months. Body measurements, including CT scans of abdominal fat, were taken at the beginning of the study and after three, six and 12 months.

The researchers divided the volunteers into four groups. One group was prescribed an individually calculated calorie restricted diet. Dietician visits were scheduled every fortnight for the first three months and every month for the second three months. The dieters were asked not to engage in any exercise for the duration of the six-month intervention.

A second group received the same diet intervention, with the addition of a conventional fitness regime. They attended supervised exercise classes twice a week for an hour and were urged to exercise on their own a third time each week. The sessions included group cycling, swimming, running, step aerobics and some general muscle strengthening exercises.

A third group got the diet intervention plus supervised vibration plate training instead of conventional exercise. They were asked not to do any aerobic exercise during the six-month intervention phase. The physiotherapists gradually increased the speed and intensity of the machine each week, as well as the variety and duration of the exercises from 30 seconds for each of 10 exercises to 60 seconds for each of 22 exercises, such as squats, lunges, calf raises, push-ups and abdominal crunches. The average time spent on the machine was 11.9 minutes per session in the first three months and 14.2 minutes in the second three months.

A fourth group got no intervention. There were no significant differences between the groups in obesity and abdominal, or visceral, fat at the start of the study.

Over the year, only the conventional fitness and vibration groups managed to maintain a 5% weight loss, which is what is considered enough to improve health, Vissers said.

During the first six months, the diet only group lost about 6% of their initial body weight, but could not maintain a 5% weight loss in the subsequent six months. The group that got diet plus conventional fitness lost about 7% of their initial body weight in the first six months, but they didn't put much of it back on and by the end of the study, they had managed to keep off a 6.9% loss. The vibration group lost 11% of their body weight during the intervention phase and by the end of the follow-up period they had maintained a 10.5% loss. The control group gained about 1.5% of their original body weight.

The vibration group lost 47.8 square centimetres of visceral fat during the first six months and still had a loss of 47.7 square centimetres at 12 months. Visceral fat shrank by 17.6 square centimetres in the conventional fitness group in the first six months, but by the end of the year, it was only 1.6 square centimetres less than at the beginning. The diet group had a visceral fat loss of 24.3 square centimetres after six months and 7.5 square centimetres after a year.

These are very encouraging results, but it doesn't mean people trying to lose weight can ditch aerobic exercise and jump on the vibration plate instead. They still need a healthy diet and aerobic exercise, but this could be a viable alternative to weight lifting, Vissers said, explaining that the plate works by making muscles rapidly contract, which builds lean muscle mass.

People say vibration machines are fitness for lazy people. It may feel like a short cut, but if it's easy, you are not doing it properly, he added. Supervision in the beginning is imperative and the longer the better. What we see in gyms very often - people just standing on the machine holding the handles - is not going to do anything.

Vissers said further research on a larger group of obese patients is needed to confirm how beneficial the machines are. His team is also planning to study why vibration seems to be more effective than aerobic exercise in trimming visceral fat, including whether increased blood flow to the abdomen and hormonal response to vibration might play a role in more efficient fat breakdown. His study was funded by the Artesis University College of Antwerp.

Increased food intake alone explains the increase in body weight in the United States

Fri, 08 May 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Amsterdam, the Netherlands: New research that uses an innovative approach to study, for the first time, the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the development of the obesity epidemic has concluded that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake.

How much of the obesity epidemic has been caused by excess calorie intake and how much by reductions in physical activity has been long debated and while experts agree that making it easier for people to eat less and exercise more are both important for combating it, they debate where the public health focus should be.

A study presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity is the first to examine the question of the proportional contributions to the obesity epidemic by combining metabolic relationships, the laws of thermodynamics, epidemiological data and agricultural data.

There have been a lot of assumptions that both reduced physical activity and increased energy intake have been major drivers of the obesity epidemic. Until now, nobody has proposed how to quantify their relative contributions to the rise in obesity since the 1970s. This study demonstrates that the weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. It appears that changes in physical activity played a minimal role, said the study's leader, Professor Boyd Swinburn, chair of population health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Australia.

The scientists started by testing 1,399 adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn in total under free-living conditions. The test is the most accurate measure of total calorie burning in real-life situations.

Once they had determined each person's calorie burning rate, Swinburn and his colleagues were able to calculate how much adults needed to eat in order to maintain a stable weight and how much children needed to eat in order to maintain a normal growth curve.

They then worked out how much Americans were actually eating, using national food supply data (the amount of food produced and imported, minus the amount exported, thrown away and used for animals or other non-human uses) from the 1970s and the early 2000s.

The researchers used their findings to predict how much weight they would expect Americans to have gained over the 30-year period studied if food intake were the only influence. They used data from a nationally representative survey (NHANES) that recorded the weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s to determine the actual weight gain over that period.

If the actual weight increase was the same as what we predicted, that meant that food intake was virtually entirely responsible. If it wasn't, that meant changes in physical activity also played a role, Swinburn said. If the actual weight gain was higher than predicted, that would suggest that a decrease in physical activity played a role.

The researchers found that in children, the predicted and actual weight increase matched exactly, indicating that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the weight increase.

For adults, we predicted that they would be 10.8 kg heavier, but in fact they were 8.6 kg heavier. That suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain, Swinburn said.

To return to the average weights of the 1970s, we would need to reverse the increased food intake of about 350 calories a day for children (about one can of fizzy drink and a small portion of French fries) and 500 calories a day for adults (about one large hamburger), Swinburn said. Alternatively, we could achieve similar results by increasing physical activity by about 150 minutes a day of extra walking for children and 110 minutes for adults, but realistically, although a combination of both is needed, the focus would have to be on reducing calorie intake.

He emphasized that physical activity should not be ignored as a contributor to reducing obesity and should continue to be promoted because of its many other benefits, but that expectations regarding what can be achieved with exercise need to be lowered and public health policy shifted more toward encouraging people to eat less.

Study in pregnant women suggests probiotics may help ward off obesity

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Amsterdam, the Netherlands: One year after giving birth, women were less likely to have the most dangerous kind of obesity if they had been given probiotics from the first trimester of pregnancy, found new research that suggests manipulating the balance of bacteria in the gut may help fight obesity.

Probiotics are bacteria that help maintain a healthy bacterial balance in the digestive tract by reducing the growth of harmful bacteria. They are part of the normal digestive system and play a role in controlling inflammation. Researchers have for many years been studying the potential of using probiotic supplementation to address a number of intestinal diseases. More recently, obesity researchers have started to investigate whether the balance of bacteria in the gut might play a role in making people fat and whether adjusting that balance could help.

The results of our study, the first to demonstrate the impact of probiotics-supplemented dietary counselling on adiposity, were encouraging, said Kirsi Laitinen, a nutritionist and senior lecturer at the University of Turku in Finland who presented her findings on Thursday at the European Congress on Obesity. The women who got the probiotics fared best. One year after childbirth, they had the lowest levels of central obesity as well as the lowest body fat percentage.

Central obesity, where overall obesity is combined with a particularly fat belly, is considered especially unhealthy, Laitinen said. We found it in 25% of the women who had received the probiotics along with dietary counselling, compared with 43% in the women who received diet advice alone.

In the study, 256 women were randomly divided into three groups during the first trimester of pregnancy. Two of the groups received dietary counselling consistent with what's recommended during pregnancy for healthy weight gain and optimal foetal development. They were also given food such as spreads and salad dressings with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, as well as fibre-enriched pasta and breakfast cereal to take home. One of those groups also received daily capsules of probiotics containing Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, which are the most commonly used probiotics. The other group received dummy capsules. A third group received dummy capsules and no dietary counselling. The capsules were continued until the women stopped exclusive breastfeeding, up to 6 months.

The researchers weighed the women at the start of the study. At the end of the study they weighed them again and measured their waist circumference and skin fold thickness. The results were adjusted for weight at the start of the study.

Central obesity - defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more or a waist circumference over 80 centimetres - was found in 25% of the women who had been given the probiotics as well as diet advice. That compared with 43% of the women who got dietary counselling alone and 40% of the women who got neither diet advice nor probiotics. The average body fat percentage in the probiotics group was 28%, compared with 29% in the diet advice only group and 30% in the third group.

Laitinen said further research is needed to confirm the potential role of probiotics in fighting obesity. One of the limitations of the study was that it did not control for the mothers' weight before pregnancy, which may influence how fat they later become.

She said she and her colleagues will continue to follow the women and their babies to see whether giving probiotics during pregnancy has any influence on health outcomes in the children.

The advantage of studying pregnant women to investigate the potential link between probiotics and obesity is that it allows us to see the effects not only in the women, but also in their children, she said. Particularly during pregnancy, the impacts of obesity can be immense, with the effects seen both in the mother and the child. Bacteria are passed from mother to child through the birth canal, as well as through breast milk and research indicates that early nutrition may influence the risk of obesity later in life. There is growing evidence that this approach might open a new angle on the fight against obesity, either through prevention or treatment.

Latinen's study was funded by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, the Academy of Finland and the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, a Finnish medical research charity.

Consumers more likely to identify healthy food using traffic light nutrition labels

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:00 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Consumers are five times more likely to identify healthy food when they see colour-coded traffic light nutrition labels than when labels present the information numerically by showing what percentage of the recommended daily nutrient intake each portion provides, new research finds.

Some governments are trying to improve the quality of nutrition information that consumers have access to in supermarkets by adding labels to the front of food packages, but there is no standard approach, not all products have labels and in many countries several different systems are used.

Food manufacturers are currently allowed to use any labelling system they prefer on the front of food packages. In some countries this has led to a plethora of different systems appearing on supermarket shelves, which only serves to confuse consumers more and does not allow them to quickly and accurately identify healthy products, said Bridget Kelly, whose study was presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity.

The food industry tends to favour the percentage daily intake method (known as Guideline Daily Amount in some countries), but our research indicates that the traffic light system is the most effective and that a consistent labelling approach across all food products is needed. This is unlikely to be achieved without government regulation, said Kelly, a nutritionist at the Cancer Council, New South Wales in Australia.

Kelly and her colleagues aimed to determine the most acceptable and effective food labelling system for consumers. Four different approaches were tested on 790 Australians to determine their preferences and ability to compare the healthiness of mock food products, using two variations of the traffic light system and two variations of the percentage daily intake system. Each person was exposed to only one type of nutrition label, allowing each system to evaluated on it own merits without the influence of the others.

Traffic light labelling uses colours to rate the nutritional content of food according to how healthy it is. A common version uses a panel with red, amber or green dots to rate the food's salt, sugar, saturated fat and total fat content separately. A variation adds a single coloured dot to give an overall rating, rather than just rating separate nutrients.

The percentage daily intake system and its variations present, for each of the key nutrients, the proportion of the government recommended adult daily intake that a serving of the product contains.

The study found that consumers favoured a consistent labelling format across all products. In addition, those who were shown the traffic light labels were five times more likely to identify healthier foods than those shown a single colour version of the percentage daily intake label and three times more likely to do so than those shown a colour-coded version of the daily intake label.

As a result of these findings, we are recommending that mandatory traffic light labelling regulation be introduced in Australia. The labels should be applied to all processed retail grocery food and drinks at first, and consideration should be given to extending that to restaurant chains with standard menu items, Kelly said.

The findings are relevant to other countries, Kelly said, adding that regulations being considered by the European Union favour a system similar to the percentage daily intake approach.

Kelly said that further research is needed to determine whether the traffic light system proves to be as effective in other countries, but that the study showed it could be used equally well by all consumers, regardless of ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status.

The study was funded by the New South Wales Health Department, the University of Sydney and several Australian public health and consumer organisations.

Now chicken soup for blood pressure, too

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 10:12:32 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Washington, April 11 - Chicken soup with matzoh balls, a staple of the traditional Jewish dinner, may be good in reversing high blood pressure - too, according to the latest findings.

Japanese scientist Ai Saiga and colleagues cited previous studies indicating that chicken breast contains collagen proteins with effects similar to ACE inhibitors, mainstay medications for treating high BP.

But chicken breast contains such small amounts of the proteins that it could not be used to develop food and medical products for the condition.

Chicken legs and feet, often discarded as waste products in the US but key soup ingredients elsewhere, appear to be a better source.

Saiga and colleagues extracted collagen from chicken legs and tested its ability to act as an ACE inhibitor in lab studies. They identified four different proteins in the collagen mixture with high ACE-inhibitory activity, said a release of the American Chemical Society.

Given to rats used to model human high BP, the proteins produced a significant and prolonged decrease in blood pressure, the researchers say.

These findings were published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.