Health & WellnessS


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Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest

Rachel Kaufman
National Geographic News
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Raul Touzon/National Geographic NewsA teenage boy naps on Marco Island, Florida's Tigertail beach
REM sleep boosts memory, creativity, and more, experts announce.

Dreaming may improve memory, boost creativity, and help you better plan for the future, new research suggests.

In a recent study, people who took naps featuring REM sleep - in which dreams are most vivid - performed better on creativity-oriented word problems. That is, the REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep helped people combine ideas in new ways, according to psychiatrist Sara Mednick, who led the study.

Part of the experiment's morning round involved a word-analogy test, similar to some SAT problems. For example, given "chips: salty::candy:_____" the answer would have been "sweet."

At midday, after the first round, the subjects were given a 90-minute rest period, during which they were monitored.
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Magnify

Secrets of Sleeping Soundly Uncovered

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic NewsCertain brain waves act as noise blockers during sleep. Above, a woman sleeps in an airport
Sound sleepers' brains have "blockades" against noise, study says.

Sleep like a log? You can thank your spindles, rapid-fire brain waves that act as blockades against noise during sleep, a new study says.

For the research, study co-author Jeffrey Ellenbogen of Harvard Medical School recruited 12 self-described sound sleepers to spend three nights in his "comfy" lab.

The first night, the sleepers were treated to quiet conditions. But during the next two nights, scientists bombarded the subjects with several types of sounds - including jet engine roars and toilet flushes - after the people had fallen asleep.

Brain wave readings revealed that the more spindles a person had, the more likely he or she could stay asleep through the barrage of noises, Ellenbogen said.
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Alarm Clock

Cloned Meat May Already Have Invaded Our Food Supply, Posing Alarming Health Risks

Martha Rosenberg
Alternet
Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:10 UTC
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It's just a matter of time before we are eating clones, if we are not eating them now.

When Canadian agricultural leaders asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week after a scandal about unlabeled clone products in Europe if "cloned cows or their offspring have made it into the North American food supply," he said, "I can't say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don't know."

And when AlterNet asked the USDA this week if cloned products are already in the food supply, a spokesman said the department was "not aware of an instance where product from an animal clone has entered the food supply" thanks to a "voluntary moratorium" - but that offspring of clones, at the heart of the Europe scandal," are not clones and are therefore not included" in the voluntary moratorium.

Sounds like Europe is not the only place eating milk and meat from unlabeled clone offspring. In fact, the BBC, UK newspapers and even a US grocer all report that US consumers are digging into clone food, whether or not they know it.

Comment: To learn more about the ongoing issue of cloned meat and milk entering the food supply read the following:

How Would You Fancy Cloned Beef?
U.S. Unsure if Cloned Meat has been Sold in North America
'Cloned Beef' On Store Shelves Causes Stir In Britain
Illegal Cloned Cow's Milk On Sale In UK
European Union Votes for Labels on Nano, Cloned and GM food

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Red Flag

Big Business Fights Against the Health of Children

Cindy Jones-Shoeman
Natural News
Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:44 UTC
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© schriftman.wordpress.com
The Children's Food and Advertising Beverage Initiative, initiated by the Better Business Bureau in 2007 and meant to curb what is advertised to easily-influenced children on television, has been delayed in Congress. The delay is being caused by an overdue report that is meant to define standards for what can be advertised to children in terms of a food's nutritional value, including calorie, fat, and sugar content.

The inherent problem of the initiative is that corporations, for now, voluntarily set their own standards for what is and is not acceptable to advertise to children. Many of the companies who voluntarily participate have agreed that half their advertising will be devoted to healthier foods, but the companies decide the acceptable limits for calorie, fat, and sugar content. That means that candy, sugary cereals and sodas, and fatty frozen dinners and fast-food meals can qualify as "healthy."
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Magic Wand

Tai Chi beats stretching in fibromyalgia study

Gene Emery
Reuters
Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:35 UTC
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© webmd.net
The slow, flowing movements of tai chi are better for relieving pain and other symptoms of fibromyalgia than conventional stretching exercises, doctors reported on Wednesday.

The improvements continued throughout the three months of lessons for 33 volunteers receiving the movement and breathing exercises, study leader Dr. Chenchen Wang of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston said in a telephone interview.

"Week by week they changed. The pain and depression improved, and a lot of people were depressed," said Wang, whose study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"They feel better. People said it changed their life. Only two or three feel it didn't help."
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Health

Stomach Bacteria Need Vitamin to Establish Infection, Research Finds


Science Daily
Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:09 UTC
Scientists have determined that Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes peptic ulcers and some forms of stomach cancer, requires the vitamin B6 to establish and maintain chronic infection, according to research published in the online journal mBio™. This finding, along with the identification of the enzyme the microbe requires to utilize the vitamin, could lead to the development of an entirely new class of antibiotics.

"Approximately half the world's population is infected with H. pylori, yet how H. pylori bacteria establish chronic infections in human hosts remains elusive. To our knowledge, this study is the first to describe a link between this vitamin and bacterial pathogenesis," says Richard Ferrero of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a researcher on the study which also included scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, Australia.
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Umbrella

"Really Important" to Note That "Oil Mixed with Dispersants is More Toxic than Just Oil Alone" Says Valdez Expert


Florida Oil Spill Law
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:26 UTC
.Excerpt from Dispersants in Gulf concern Alaskan residents after Exxon Valdez, WWL-TV New Orleans, August 18, 2010:
“We’re living with a potential time bomb waiting to explode in our faces," said Rosina Phillipe, a Grand Bayou, Louisiana leader. …

[There] is concern about how poisonous dispersants are… “What’s really important is oil mixed with dispersants is more toxic than just oil alone… and now we have dispersants on an unprecedented scale put into the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico," [Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council executive director Mark] Swanson said…”
Read the report here.
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Alarm Clock

Vitamins are the New Satan as Poisoned Junk Food Branded Healthy

Neil Foster
Sovereign Independent
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:50 UTC
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In today's Irish Independent an article asks the question 'Are your vitamins actually killing you?' in which it tries to convince the reader that they shouldn't be taking supplementary vitamins because all our nutrition should come from our food.

I agree wholeheartedly that all our nutrition should come from our food but as I'm sure the author of this ridiculous piece knows, the vitamins and minerals our bodies require to maintain a healthy lifestyle are at best minimal and in many cases absent completely from our food. We are led to believe that if we eat a certain quantity of vegetables, fruit, fish etc then we should be supremely healthy.
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Attention

Illnesses Linked to Eggs Will Likely Grow

Mary Clare Jalonick
Associated Press
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:48 UTC
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© blog.cleveland.com
Washington - A salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds and led to the recall of hundreds of millions of eggs from one Iowa firm will likely grow, federal health officials said Thursday.

That's because illnesses occurring after mid-July may not be reported yet, said Dr. Christopher Braden, an epidemiologist with the federal Centers for Disease Control.

Almost 2,000 illnesses from the strain of salmonella linked to the eggs were reported between May and July, about 1,300 more than usual, he added. No deaths have been reported. The CDC is continuing to receive information from state health departments as people report their illnesses.
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Red Flag

Researchers: Pregnant Women Should Avoid 'Diet' Soft Drinks

Rebecca Smith
Telegraph.co.uk
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:39 UTC
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© Katie Collins/PA Research has suggested that artificially sweetened drinks may be linked to premature birth in pregnant women.
Pregnant women should avoid 'diet' soft drinks that have been artificially sweetened, experts have said, after a study linked them with premature birth.

Research carried out on almost 60,000 pregnant women in Denmark found that those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks, whether fizzy or still, were more likely to give birth early.

It was found that those who drank one serving per day of artificially sweetened fizzy drink were 38 per cent more likely to give birth before 37 weeks gestation and those who consumed four servings a day were 78 per cent more likely to have their baby prematurely.
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