Health & WellnessS


Pills

Sensa weight loss may be more hype than fact

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The Sensa diet boast an average weight loss of 30 pounds in 6 months. No Drugs, No Pills, No Stimulants. But are their claims legitimate?
Want to know the Sensa secret to weight loss?

We thought so . . . now let us explain.

If you're somewhat of a weight loss veteran, and have access to the net, you will surely have come across all the Sensa hullaballoo by now.

Wherever you look, it's "Sensa this" and "Sensa that," with every second health related website or blog having published at least one Sensa review. And the manufacturers (Alan Hirsch and co.) make some pretty outrageous claims indeed. They say that just by sprinkling this product over your food, you can lose in excess of 30 pounds within a six month period, yet there's no concrete evidence to support this. There may be a better option though.

So what is SENSA Exactly?

Sensa is commonly referred to as The Sprinkle Diet, although the Sensa weight loss regime isn't really a diet as such, but something you would add to your current diet. Sensa sprinklings are in fact flavor-enhancing 'flakes' made from maltodextrin, tribasic calcium phosphate, silicon dioxide, and flavorings. You simply sprinkle a dash over your food (as you would salt or pepper) and it then amplifies both scent and flavor. Sensa is actually meant to work using your sense of smell, tricking your brain and belly into thinking that you're full.

Does SENSA Actually Work?

Well, if you look around on the net you'll find a wealth of Sensa weight loss information, advertising, reviews, etc., with some suggesting that Sensa is the best thing since sliced bread in terms of weight loss. But questions need to be asked as some claims seem too good to be true.

They state that Sensa is 'clinically proven' to work - this is not entirely true. In fact, Dr. Hirsch maintains that there was a 'study' reviewed by peers of The Endocrine Society supporting the claim that test subjects lost 30lbs+ using Sensa, yet The Endocrine Society says they never reviewed such a study.

Some super diets are too good to be true, don't get caught up in marketing hype.

Comment: Following a low-carb paleo / ketogenic diet would be a much better and healthier way to lose weight. For more information read the following articles and visit the forum for a discussion of the benefits of the ketogenic diet.

Solve Your Health Issues with a Ketogenic Diet
Why We Get Fat - and What to do About it
Your brain on ketones


Nuke

Aspartame in milk without a label? Big Dairy petitions FDA for approval

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Two powerful dairy organizations, The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), are petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to allow aspartame and other artificial sweeteners to be added to milk and other dairy products without a label.

The FDA currently allows the dairy industry to use "nutritive sweeteners" including sugar and high fructose corn syrup in many of their products. Nutritive sweeteners are defined as sweeteners with calories.

This petition officially seeks to amend the standard of identification for milk, cream, and 17 other dairy products like yogurt, sweetened condensed milk, sour cream, and others to provide for the use of any "safe and suitable sweetener" on the market.

Gear

Corrupt them while they are young: National survey shows medical students and residents have frequent interactions with pharmaceutical companies

A first-of-its kind national survey of medical students and residents finds that despite recent efforts by medical schools and academic medical centers to restrict access of pharmaceutical sales representatives to medical trainees, medical students and residents still commonly receive meals, gifts, and industry-sponsored educational materials. The study was completed by a team of researchers led by fourth-year Harvard Medical School student Kirsten Austad and Aaron Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., an internist and health policy researcher in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital and is scheduled to publish online this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

"In medical school and residency, as trainees are learning the fundamentals of their profession, there is a need to ensure the education they receive is as unbiased as possible," said Dr. Kesselheim. "However, it is well known that promotional information and gifts from pharmaceutical companies can encourage non-evidence-based prescribing. Though many institutions have tried to insulate trainees from these effects, trainees' exposure to industry promotion is still quite high."

Cheeseburger

Eat too much? Maybe it's in the blood

Bone marrow cells that produce brain-derived eurotrophic factor (BDNF), known to affect regulation of food intake, travel to part of the hypothalamus in the brain where they "fine-tune" appetite, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, in a report that appears online in the journal Nature Communications.

"We knew that blood cells produced BDNF," said Dr. Lawrence Chan, professor of molecular and cellular biology and professor and chief of the division of diabetes, endocrinology & metabolism in the department of medicine and director of the federally funded Diabetes Research Center, all at BCM. The factor is produced in the brain and in nerve cells as well. "We didn't know why it was produced in blood cells."

Dr. Hiroshi Urabe and Dr. Hideto Kojima, current and former postdoctoral fellows in Chan's laboratory respectively, looked for BDNF in the brains of mice who had not been fed for about 24 hours. The bone marrow-derived cells had been marked with a fluorescent protein that showed up on microscopy. To their surprise, they found cells producing BDNF in a part of the brain's hypothalamus called the paraventricular nucleus.

"We knew that in embryonic development, some blood cells do go to the brain and become microglial cells," said Chan. (Microglial cells form part of the supporting structure of the central nervous system. They are characterized by a nucleus from which "branches" expand in all directions.) "This is the first time we have shown that this happens in adulthood. Blood cells can go to one part of the brain and become physically changed to become microglial-like cells."

Health

Lack of sleep 'switches off' genes

One week of bad sleep can "switch off" hundreds of genes and raise the risk of a host of illnesses including obesity and heart disease, scientists claim.

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© AlamyStudies have also shown a lack of sleep can lead to cognitive impairment.
Getting fewer than six hours' sleep per night deactivates genes which play a key role in the body's constant process of self-repair and replenishment, according to a new study.

Our bodies depend on genes to produce a constant supply of proteins which are used to replace or repair damaged tissue, but after a week of sleep deprivation some of these stopped working.

The findings suggest that chronic lack of sleep could prevent the body from fully replenishing itself and raise the risk of a host of diseases, researchers said.

Scientists from Surrey University divided 26 volunteers into two groups, one of which slept for less than six hours per night for an entire week, and one which slept for ten hours per night.

At the end of the week each group was kept awake for 40 hours and donated blood samples, which were studied to examine the effects of their sleep regimes.

Stock Down

50 signs that the U.S. health care system is a gigantic money making scam that is about to collapse

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The U.S. health care system is a giant money making scam that is designed to drain as much money as possible out of all of us before we die. In the United States today, the health care industry is completely dominated by government bureaucrats, health insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations. The pharmaceutical corporations spend billions of dollars to convince all of us to become dependent on their legal drugs, the health insurance companies make billions of dollars by providing as little health care as possible, and they both spend millions of dollars to make sure that our politicians in Washington D.C. keep the gravy train rolling. Meanwhile, large numbers of doctors are going broke and patients are not getting the care that they need. At this point, our health care system is a complete and total disaster. Health care costs continue to go up rapidly, the level of care that we are receiving continues to go down, and every move that our politicians make just seems to make all of our health care problems even worse.

In America today, a single trip to the emergency room can easily cost you $100,000, and if you happen to get cancer you could end up with medical bills in excess of a million dollars. Even if you do have health insurance, there are usually limits on your coverage, and the truth is that just a single major illness is often enough to push most American families into bankruptcy. At the same time, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical corporations and health insurance company executives are absolutely swimming in huge mountains of cash. Unfortunately, this gigantic money making scam has become so large that it threatens to collapse both the U.S. health care system and the entire U.S. economy.

The following are 50 signs that the U.S. health care system is a massive money making scam that is about to collapse...

Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Polluted America

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© Mother Jones Magazine
In the United States everything is polluted.

Democracy is polluted with special interests and corrupt politicians.

Accountability is polluted with executive branch exemptions from law and the Constitution and with special legal privileges for corporations, such as the Supreme Court given right to corporations to purchase American elections.

The Constitution is polluted with corrupt legal interpretations from the Bush and Obama regimes that have turned constitutional prohibitions into executive branch rights, transforming law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of government.

Waters are polluted with toxic waste spills, oil spills, chemical fertilizer run-off with resulting red tides and dead zones, acid discharges from mining with resulting destructive algae such as prymnesium parvum, from toxic chemicals used in fracking and with methane that fracking releases into wells and aquifers, resulting in warnings to homeowners near to fracking operations to open their windows when showering.

Whistle

FDA gives sole herbal product rights to Big Pharma

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© Arab Fancy
The FDA has taken a freely-available herbal product, sap of the dragon's blood tree, defined it as the drug Fulyzac, & handed it to Big Pharma. Nature's gift is being polluted. What you get after Big Pharma and & the FDA get their hands on it has lost much of its value and often been rendered into a poison, the very nature of a drug.


An extract from a South American tree known as dragon's blood is now classed as a drug and the FDA has handed sole rights to a single pharmaceutical corporation. The drug, which is made by Salix Pharmaceuticals, will be sold by Napo Pharmaceuticals of San Francisco under the brand name of Fulyzac. The generic term for it is crofelemer. It will be sold as a treatment for the diarrhea that's a common adverse effect of harsh HIV drugs.

The tree is botanically named Croton lechleri and called sangre de grado in Spanish and Portuguese, long known to have several health benefits, extract from the tree is commonly available in health food stores around the world. This, though, is likely to change in the face of the FDA's action. It signals their role in facilitating Big Pharma's takeover of the natural world's largesse. Piece by piece, anything that holds any health value is being declared a drug. Exclusive rights to that drug are then handed over to a private corporation.

Info

New device better traps viruses, airborne pathogens

Washington University engineering researchers have created a new type of air-cleaning technology that could better protect human lungs from allergens, airborne viruses and ultrafine particles in the air.

The device, known as the SXC ESP, was created by a team led by Pratim Biswas, PhD, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

A recent study of the device, published inApplied and Environmental Microbiology, found that it could help to prevent respiratory and viral infections and inhalation-induced allergic reactions more efficiently than existing filter-based systems.

Asthma, a chronic respiratory disease that can be triggered by inhaling allergens, pollen, pet dander and other particles, is one of the most costly health-care expenses in the United States at more than $50 billion.

"Because many people in developed countries spend the majority of time indoors, properly maintaining indoor air quality is an absolute necessity to protect public health," Biswas says.

Health

Thousands possibly exposed in a tuberculosis outbreak among Los Angeles homeless

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© Flickr user mil8
Health officials and rescue mission leaders are trying to stop a unique type of tuberculosis that has infected 78 people and killed 11.

Public health officials have launched a new, coordinated attack to contain a persistent outbreak of tuberculosis on downtown Los Angeles' skid row, including a search for more than 4,500 people who may have been exposed to the disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched scientists to Los Angeles to help local health officials determine why the disease is spreading and how to stop it.

Officials say 11 have died since 2007. Sixty of the 78 cases were among homeless people who live on and around skid row.

Scientists have recently linked the outbreak to a tuberculosis strain that is unique to Los Angeles, with a few isolated cases outside the area.

"This is the largest outbreak in a decade," said Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "We are really putting all of our resources into this."