SUGAR IS SAID BY SOME TO BE MORE DEADLY THAN SMOKES OR ALCOHOL???

We’ve seen what excessive amounts of alcohol can do to the body, remember Nicolas Cage’s performance in Leaving Las Vegas? Cirrhosis of the liver, behavioural changes, and finally complete metabolic shutdown. We know that alcohol in excess is toxic but a group of scientists are claiming that ‘added sugar’ is more detrimental to our health.

Scientists Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis from the University of California, San Francisco are calling for governments worldwide to regulate foods and drinks with ‘added sugar’ as strictly as alcohol and tobacco. They are also calling for the sugary foods to be banned in and around schools, placing age limits on purchases as not only is it taxing to the liver, causing fatty liver disease, and ultimately leading to insulin resistance, but claim it to be the underlying causes of obesity and diabetes.

Dr. Lustig and his colleagues are prompting debate as they argue, citing numerous studies and statistics that indicating that sugar has a bigger impact on public health than alcohol and tobacco, as fructose can trigger processes that lead to a chronic disease pandemic including liver toxicity. They concede that a little is not a problem, but a lot kills — slowly.

Related article: Healthier sugar alternatives

No stranger to making provocative statements, in 2009 Dr. Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” was posted on YouTube and has been viewed by almost two million people, not bad for a 90-minute discussion on the evils of sugar.

Many health experts are disagreeing with the controversial article published in the journal Nature, such as Dr Alan Barclay, head of research at the Australian Diabetes Foundation. He told Lifehacker that “many of the statements simply do not apply to Australia and on certain issues there is little evidence to support their views. Sugar is not the issue” he said, “it is far more complicated than that.”

Professor Peter Clifton, head of nutritional interventions at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute says, “sugar is just another form of over-consumed calories — easily available and very palatable but no more metabolically deadly than starch or fat calories and certainly not equivalent to alcohol”. “Alcohol toxicity is not just metabolic — it causes violence and road deaths and sugar in any of its forms cannot compete with this statistic,” he said.

However Lustig does highlight that the level of consumption of sugar is many times higher than what nature intended. As our ancestors found sugar in fruit, unprocessed and only available seasonally, and honey is well guarded by bees.

“Over the past 50 years, consumption of sugar has tripled worldwide. Nature made sugar hard to get; man made it easy,” the authors stated. The World Health Organisation states that worldwide the obese outnumber the undernourished. Will there be commercials made asking for donations to help prevent obese people dying of related disease?

Related article: Salt or sugar: which is worse?

Dr. Lustig and his colleagues may not be seeing their recommendations introduced by governments anytime soon, but as the paper points out, diet related diseases are costing around 75 percent of the total health-care dollars in the U.S., and that possibly regulation of the amount of sugar food and drink industries can add to their products should be introduced.

The article states, “Ultimately, food producers and distributors must reduce the amount of sugar added to foods. But sugar is cheap, sugar tastes good and sugar sells, so companies have little incentive to change.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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EMBRYONIC stem cells have been used to treat human illness for the first time, improving the sight of two women with severe vision loss.

The controversial development could give hope to hundreds of thousands of people suffering macular degeneration – one of the most common forms of blindness in First World countries – and has been hailed a historic step by stem cell scientists.

In a US trial last year, two legally blind women reported sight improvements after receiving a small dose of embryonic stem cell transplantations in their eyes.

Both had different forms of macular degeneration, a group of diseases that affect the retina, causing loss of central vision.

After the transplant in July, the first woman, who suffers from dry age-related macular degeneration, went from being able to read 21 letters on a sight test chart to 28. The second woman, who has Stargardt’s disease, went from being unable to read any letters to reading five. While the scientists who conducted the study are cautious about the results, tests indicate that healthy cells have grown where the treatment was injected.

They said the patients had shown no negative reactions.

The study, reported in The Lancet this week, was led by Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in the US – the stem cell company that funded the trial.

The research has taken place amid debate about whether the stem cells should be used because they are derived from five- to six-day-old human embryos.

The disease affects one in seven people over 50, the Macular Degeneration Foundation says.

IT MAY sound like a strange brew, but green tea and red light could provide a novel treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Together, the two can destroy the rogue “plaques” that crowd the brains of people with the disease. The light makes it easier for the green-tea extract to get to work on the plaques.

Andrei Sommer at the University of Ulm in Germany, and colleagues, have previously used red light with a wavelength of 670 nanometres to transport cancer drugs into cells. The laser light pushes water out of the cells and when the laser is switched off, the cells “suck in” water and any other molecules, including drugs, from their surroundings.

Now, Sommer’s team have found that the same technique can be used to destroy the beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s. These plaques consist of abnormally folded peptides, and are thought to disrupt communication between nerve cells, leading to loss of memory and other symptoms.

The team bathed brain cells containing beta-amyloid in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) – a green-tea extract known to have beta-amyloid inhibiting properties – at the same time as stimulating the cells with red light. Beta-amyloid in the cells reduced by around 60 per cent. Shining the laser light alone onto cells reduced beta-amyloid by around 20 per cent (Photomedicine and Laser Surgery, DOI: 10.1089/pho.2011.3073).

It can be difficult getting drugs into the brain, but animal experiments show that the green-tea extract can penetrate the so-called blood-brain barrier when given orally together with red light. The light, which can penetrate tissue and bone, stimulates cell mitochondria to kick-start a process that increases the barrier’s permeability, says Sommer.

There is no reason why other drugs that attack beta-amyloid could not be delivered to the brain in the same way, he adds.

“This important research could form the basis of a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s, with or without complementary drug treatment,” says Mario Trelles, medical director of the Vilafortuny Medical Institute in Cambrils, Spain.

“The technique described could help to regulate and even stop the appearance of this disease,” he adds.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Growing numbers of young people have been hospitalised with caffeine poisoning after consuming energy drinks, suffering symptoms such as hallucinations and seizures, a new study has found.

Researchers have called for the caffeine-laced drinks to be regulated by health authorities with additional labelling and warnings about the potential danger of overdosing.

Energy drinks such as Red Bull, V and Mother are popular with young people and often contain ”energising” extracts such as guarana or ginseng alongside caffeine and sugar.

Researchers Naren Gunja and Jared Brown analysed data from the  Poisons Information Centre, which fields 110,000 poison-related calls a year. They looked at 297 calls related to energy drinks over a six-year period and found the number of people seeking help for caffeine poisoning leapt from 12 in 2004 to 65 in 2010.

Nearly half of the victims – 46 per cent – had mixed their energy drinks with other substances, such as alcohol, drugs or caffeine tablets, while 43 per cent had symptoms that were serious enough to need treatment at a hospital emergency department.

Victims were often young, with a median age of 17, and more than half were men.

Most people experienced stomach trouble or anxiety but a minority, about 7 per cent, suffered severe poisoning symptoms such as hallucinations, seizures or heart problems.

”The phenomenon of mixing energy drinks with alcohol, stimulants and other co-ingestants is clearly occurring and is a serious concern,” the authors wrote.

The report, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, said a typical can of energy drink could contain up to 300mg of caffeine.

”Consumers are likely to be unaware of the variation in chemical composition and caffeine dosage in energy drinks, and with little or no warnings on products the potential for overdose remains ever-present,” the report says.

Another concern was the 68 young children, including babies as young as seven months, who accidentally consumed the energy drinks over the period studied and suffered symptoms such as hyperactivity.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

A close friend of the two victims of a deadly death cap mushroom dish wants better warnings in the ACT about the dangers of picking wild mushrooms.

Tom O’Dea wants a public health campaign that will prevent future fatalities from the poisonous death caps, which claimed the lives of chef Liu Jun, 38, and kitchenhand Tsou Hsiang, 52.

Mr Liu and Ms Tsou died from liver failure after eating the death cap mushrooms in a stir-fry Mr Liu prepared after work at the Harmonie German Club in Narrabundah on New Year’s Eve.

Speaking after a memorial service for the pair at the weekend, Mr O’Dea said, ”We’ve got to make sure this never happens again.

”The message has got to be do not pick wild mushrooms.”

Signs warning people about death cap mushrooms already exist in parts of the ACT where the world’s most deadly mushrooms are known to grow.

ACT Health issued a reminder on New Year’s Day that Canberra residents should steer clear of death caps, and runs education campaigns in schools about the dangers of wild mushrooms.

Fact sheets about the mushrooms are also available on the Health directorate’s web page, and last year were published in a Chinese publication available in Canberra.

Representatives of ACT Health, including its chief officer Paul Kelly, met with members of Canberra’s Chinese community last week to begin discussions about whether public warnings about death cap mushrooms could be improved.

At Saturday’s memorial service, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher said further meetings would determine what steps could be taken. Canberra Multicultural Community Forum chairman Sam Wong, who is part of the consultations, said the ACT Government might have to consider more focused campaigns that target new Canberra residents, recent migrants or specific age groups, such as the elderly.

He said the message about the dangers of wild mushrooms could be made clearer through new multimedia advertisements, or by changing warning signs around the ACT so they could be understood by residents and visitors who did not speak English.

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A couple of years ago, the Willow Garage robotics company gave ten of its PR2 robots away to deserving research groups. The idea behind the project was that these groups would use the PR2s for robotics research, then share their discoveries with each other, thus advancing the field farther than would be possible if they each had to build their own unique robots from scratch. Now, a similar but unrelated project is underway, and this time the robots are designed specifically to perform surgery.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

A new study pinpoints the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a very critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses within the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interacy adversely with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.

The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.

The use of anti-TNF therapeutics as a new treatment choice for many diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and potentially even Alzheimer’s, was recently chosen as one of the top 10 health stories of 2007 by the Harvard Health Letter.

Similarly, the Neurotechnology Industry Organization has recently selected new treatment targets revealed by neuroimmunology (such as excess TNF) as one of the top 10 Neuroscience Trends of 2007. And the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives has chosen the pilot study using perispinal etanercept for Alzheimer’s for inclusion and discussion in their 2007 Progress Report on Brain Research.

The lead author of the study, Edward Tobinick M.D., is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the Institute for Neurological Research, a private medical group in Los Angeles. Hyman Gross, M.D., clinical professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, was co-author.

This study is accompanied by an extensive commentary by Sue Griffin, Ph.D., director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock Arkansaw and at the Geriatric Research and Clinical Center at the VA Hospital in Little Rock, who along with Robert Mrak, M.D., chairman of pathology at University of Toledo Medical School, are editors-in-chief of the Medical Journal of Neuroinflammation.

Griffin and Mrak are pioneers in the field of neuroinflammation. Griffin published an extensive landmark study in 1989 describing the association of cytokine overexpression in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease. Her research helped pave the way for the findings of the present study. Griffin has recently been selected for membership in the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a nonprofit organization of more than 200 leading neuroscientists, including ten Nobel laureates.

“It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention,” said Griffin. “It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”

While the article discusses one patient, many other patients with mild to severe Alzheimer’s received the treatment and all have shown sustained and significently marked improvement.

The new study, entitled “Rapid cognitive improvement in Alzheimer’s disease following perispinal etanercept administration,” and the accompanying commentary, entitled “Perispinal etanercept: Potential as an Alzheimer’s therapeutic,” are available on the Web site of the Journal of Neuroinflammation (http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/5/1/2/abstract).

Author Hyman Gross, M.D., has no competing interests. Author Edward Tobinick, M.D. owns stock in Amgen, the manufacturer of etanercept, and has multiple issued and pending patents assigned to TACT IP LLC that describe the parenteral and perispinal use of etanercept for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders, including, but not limited to, U.S. patents 6015557, 6177077, 6419934, 6419944, 6537549, 6982089, 7214658 and Australian patent 758523.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Debbie Frederick hopes that her father’s death in last September in one of the most lethal outbreaks of food-borne illness in U.S. history will force the federal government to increase the safety of the country’s food supply.

It took more than ten years, a series of deadly outbreaks tied to foods like peanuts, spinach and ground beef, as well as a coalition of odd bedfellows — victims, public health advocates and food industry reps — to push through the first major restructure of food safety laws since the 1930s.

Advocates and other experts say the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) signed by U.S. President Barack Obama last January still has shortcomings and ware concerned that it will be watered down through a lack of finances.

The United States by all account has some of the safest food in the world. Still, approximateley one in six people get sick from eating tainted food products each year, according to the  Disease Control and Prevention groups.

“The whole system was built to react to people getting sick” or to discoveries of contaminated food, said Erik Olson, the Pew Health Group’s director of food programs.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates allmost all of the U.S. food supply, including melons and other produce, requires major structural changes to become primarily focused on prevention, as FSMA envisions. While lawmakers recently have given FDA more money for food programs, it still has a lot of catching up to do, Olson said.

Eighty-seven-year-old William Beach, Frederick’s father, lived in Oklahoma and was one of the 28 people killed by listeria infection after eating cantaloupe contaminated in what regulators called an “unsanitary” Jensen Farms packing plant in Colorado.

“My father was terrified … nobody should have to go like that,” said Frederick, a Phoenix aesthetician and newly minted activist who is the driving force behind her family’s lawsuit against Jensen Farms. “The system broke down. It shouldn’t have happened. This is very much a preventable thing.”

Herb Stevens, of suburban Denver, also became ill after eating tainted cantaloupe, but had survived. The World War Two veteran, 84, lived at home with his wife before falling ill and now requires full-time care.

“We’d like to see better food safety laws and more inspectors,” Jeni Exley, Stevens’ daughter, said in an interview. Her family is suing for current and future medical expenses.

THE TIGER HAS NO TEETH?

FSMA aims to be a step in the right direction.

The law requires FDA to set standards for produce safety and mandates more frequent inspections of domestic and foreign food processing facilities. It also gives FDA stronger enforcement tools, such as mandatory recall authority and the ability to cancrl the registration of a processing plant.

While inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture must be present at meat and poultry plants they regulate during operating hours, FDA had no frequency mandate for inspections prior to FSMA. As a result, lapses of as long as 10 years were not uncommon.

All high-risk domestic facilities, or those that handle foods with a high potential to cause harm, must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years thereafter, according to the FDA. In addition, the law rapidly steps up the number of required inspections for foreign facilities.

Jeff Almer and Randy Napier, who lost their mothers to the salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine people and sickening 700 others who ate contaminated products from Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) in 2008 and 2009, fought to get FSMA passed and now are pushing more FDA funding.

“The needs are substantially greater than what is covered by current funding,” said Steven Grossman, deputy executive director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA, which said FDA’s food funding rose $52 million to $836 million in fiscal 2011.

The U.S. House of Representatives wants to cut that funding to $750 million in fiscal 2012, while the Senate is proposing increasing funding to $867 million. It is still not known where the final number will come out.

The issue is personal for Almer and Napier, who frequently work with reporters and button-hole lawmakers.

PCA, now bankrupt, is accused of knowingly shipping contaminated products in violation of federal law. The men want to see company President Stewart Parnell criminally charged & convicted.

Handing down an indictment of Parnell would “send a loud and clear message to producers of food to literally clean up their acts,” Almer said.

“We believe there is absolutely no basis for criminal prosecution,” said Parnell’s attorney Bill Gust, a partner at – Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore.

Napier said he has made at least six trips to Washington, D.C., since his mother’s death. Almer testified before Congress in 2009 and said he met with federal law enforcement representatives regarding the PCA criminal case.