Obesity needs to be tackled in the same way as climate change, a top nutritional scientist has said.

The chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce wants world leaders to agree a global pact to ensure that everyone is fed healthy food.

ABSTRACT: There has been a statistically significant increase of common primary malignant brain cancers since 1985, and perhaps as early as 1984, according to the National Cancer Institute SEER data. This phenomenon occurred within 1-2 years following licensing of the chemical aspartame for beverages in July 1983. Furthermore, the annual incidence rates of primary brain tumors appear to be increasing. The SEER data also reveal an increased incidence of primary brain lymphoma in 1982- 1984. Others have reported a tripling of the incidence of this condition, previously rare. Again, the licensing of aspartame for "dry" use in July 1981 is relevant. The significance of these associations is underscored by the high incidence of brain tumors in rats after the experimental administration of aspartame.

Ban artificial sweetener, FDA is urged
Date: Friday, October 17, 1986

WASHINGTON - Charging that aspartame - the widely used artificial sweetener marketed as NutraSweet - causes blindness, a consumer group yesterday petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to ban it.

The petition was another step in a long and so far fruitless campaign by the Washington based Community Nutrition Institute against aspartame, which also is sold in stores under the name Equal.

Three women who said their eyesight was seriously damaged or destroyed joined in the citizens' petition to the FDA, which they asked "to expeditiously remove [the] product from the market without an administrative hearing."

RESEARCHERS CALL FOR FURTHER STUDIES AFTER IDENTIFYING A POSSIBLE LINK BETWEEN ASPARTAME AND BRAIN TUMORS

In the November 1996 issue of the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, John Olney, M.D. and his colleagues Nuri Farber, M.D., Edward Spitznagel, Ph.D. and Lee Robins, Ph.D, all from Washington University in St. Louis, report that brain tumor rates have risen in the United States over the past 17 years in two distinct phases.

"The first phase occurred in the mid l970's and might be explained primarily by improved diagnostic methods. The second phase occurred abruptly in the mid l980's, resulting in a 10 per cent higher rate of brain tumors which has persisted to the present. This increase also was associated with a shift from a lower to a higher grade of malignancy."

New Orleans - While the Federal Emergency Management Agency rushes to move thousands of Gulf Coast storm victims out of government-issued trailers, scientists are tearing the units apart to learn why many have exposed occupants to dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes.

Los Angeles - The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.

Diabetes is known to impair the cognitive health of people, but now scientists have identified one potential mechanism underlying these learning and memory problems. A new National Institutes of Health (NIH) study in diabetic rodents finds that increased levels of a stress hormone produced by the adrenal gland disrupt the healthy functioning of the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for learning and short-term memory. Moreover, when levels of the adrenal glucocorticoid hormone corticosterone (also known as cortisol in humans) are returned to normal, the hippocampus recovers its ability to build new cells and regains the "plasticity" needed to compensate for injury and disease and adjust to change.

Researchers have identified a key reason why people make mistakes when they try to predict what they will like. When predicting how much we will enjoy a future experience, people tend to compare it to its alternatives - that is, to the experiences they had before, might have later, or could have been having now. But when people actually have the experience, they tend not to think about these alternatives and their experience is relatively unaffected by them.

In new research funded by the National Science Foundation and presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, shares the findings in a presentation titled, "Why People Misimagine the Future: The Problem of Attentional Collapse." The research was done with Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University, Karim Kassam of Harvard, Kristian Myrseth of the University of Chicago, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

Before the handshake that may have saved his life, Mark Gurrieri thought his hands were getting bigger because of too much DIY and working in his restaurant kitchen. But a chance meeting with a doctor revealed the growth was related to a rare disease which could have cost him his sight.

Alarm bells rang for GP Chris Britt when he spotted Gurrieri's fleshy hand and large features. Gurrieri, 36, had acromegaly, a condition caused by excessive growth hormone from the pituitary gland, usually prompted by a tumour, that affects three in a million people.

Britons are three times more likely than the French to die from heart disease, according to a new European league table.

©European Society of Cardiology

Age-standardized mortality from ischaemic heart disease in European regions (men; age group 45 - 74 years; year 2000)