Health & WellnessS


Info

Fat Can Be Healthy: Some Obese People Live Long Lives

Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:47 UTC
OverWeight
© Benis Arapovic | Dreamstime

Not everyone who is obese needs to lose weight - it's possible to carry extra pounds and still be healthy, a new study says.

Although obesity brings an increased risk of many health complications, the new study shows that people who are obese but do not have such complications might live as long as normal weight individuals.

"This illustrates that you can't have one sweeping brush to categorize all obese individuals," said study researcher Jennifer Kuk, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto. People need to look at whether they have additional risk factors indicating poor health to determine whether they should lose weight, Kuk said.

In fact, the results suggest that "yo-yo dieting," in which individuals lose weight but gain it back later, might be more unhealthful for some obese people than simply maintaining their weight, Kuk said. Participants in the study who lost the most weight over their lifetime, but hadn't necessarily kept the weight off, were more likely to have additional health complications from their obesity than those who lost less weight.

The researchers are working to develop a scaling system that could help physicians determine which obese patients would benefit from weight loss. The study was published today (Aug. 15) in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism.
Read More...
Health

Magnesium, Leptin and Obesity

Dr. Mark Sircus
Dr. Sircus' Blog
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:16 UTC
Image
© blog.imva.info
One would think that eating too much would result in an abundance of nutritional support for cells. But being overweight and undernourished at the same time is a reality that is just beginning to be understood. It is quite strange to say to people that the more they eat, the more malnourished they are destined to be.

Overweight people more often than not suffer from gross malnutrition because the nutritional values of the basic foods available to us have been steadily dropping for the last 50 years even as toxic exposures increase. Obese people tend to eat too many processed white foods with the fiber removed along with many of the vitamins and minerals. Not enough fiber is another common problem with the obese.

Excessive calorie intake is the fast track to leptin resistance. Since it's hard to eat excess of the so-called "clean" foods, excess calories usually come from junk foods as do magnesium deficiencies.

Jennifer Welsh, a LiveScience staff writer explains that when dieters starve themselves of calories, they starve their brain cells as well. New research finds that these hungry brain cells then release "feed me" signals, which drive up hunger, slow down metabolism and thus cause diets to fail. Neurons sense nutrients in the body and tell the body when it's time to eat and time to stop eating. The point is that dieters are not just starving themselves of calories, they are starving themselves of vital minerals and this comes on top of already existing mineral deficiencies that are characteristic of overweight and obese populations.
Read More...
Magnify

A No-Nonsense Look at Toxins and How Your Body Deals with Them

Dr. Ben Kim
Drbenkim.com
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:16 UTC
Image
© revolutionp.com
The world wide web is overflowing with information on toxins and countless programs and products that are touted to cleanse your body of them. I hope that this post provides you with a clear understanding of what toxins are, how they can affect your health, and a sensible approach to preventing accumulation of toxins in your body.

First, let's differentiate between the two main types of toxins that you're exposed to on a day-to-day basis.

Comment: For more information about toxins in the body and their negative effects on human health read Detoxify or Die By Sherry A. Rogers, M.D.:
We are all a toxic cesspool of the lifetime accumulation of chemicals from our air, food, and water. U.S. EPA studies of chemicals stored in the fat of humans show that 100% of people had dioxins, PCBs, dichlorobenzene, and xylene while another analysis of the exhaled breath of humans showed carcinogenic benzene in 89% and perchloroethylene in 93%. And these chemicals are just the tip of the iceberg. For now we have the proof that it is the steady silent accumulation over a lifetime that produces most diseases, including cancer. But medicine merely sees every disease as a deficiency of some drug or surgery, or tells us there is no known cause or cure.

There is now no question that these accumulated toxins are behind nearly every disease, symptom, injury and malfunction of the body. But get ready for the greatest medical discovery of the decade. If we get these ubiquitously unavoidable toxic chemicals out of the body, we can reverse and even cure the most hopeless diseases.

It no longer matters what you call your disease. The label your doctor gives you is meaningless. What matters is what caused it. Learn how to find the underlying causes and get rid of them with the only proven way to reverse disease and slow down aging.


Read More...
Attention

Drug Waste Harms Fish

Natasha Gilbert
Nature
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:03 UTC
Contaminated Fishes
© D. GonseauGudgeon downstream of a wastewater-processing plant had swollen abdomens and other abnormalities.

Consumers who flush unwanted contraceptives down the drain have long been blamed for giving fish more than their fair share of sex organs. Drugs excreted by patients can also taint rivers, even after passing through wastewater-processing facilities.

But evidence is accumulating that the effluent coming from pharmaceutical factories could also be carrying drugs into rivers. Many ecotoxicologists had assumed that water-quality standards, along with companies' desire to avoid wasting valuable pharmaceuticals, would minimize the extent of bioactive compounds released by factories into wastewater, and ultimately into rivers.

A string of studies suggest otherwise. In 2009, for example, researchers1,2 reported very high levels of pharmaceutical ingredients in treated effluent coming from a plant that processes wastewater from factories near Hyderabad, India. The following year, a similar discovery was made at two wastewater-treatment plants in New York, both of which received discharges from drug-production plants.3

Now, researchers have provided the first evidence of similar problems in Europe,4 and have linked it to sex disruption in wild fish populations found in the Dore River in France. "People thought this could not happen in a country that has high environmental standards and good manufacturing practices," says Patrick Phillips, head of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program at the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York, and lead author of the US study. "The evidence from the United States and now from France shows that this is not the case."
Read More...
Question

Can The Spanish Flu Devastate Us Again?


redOrbit
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:24 UTC
Spanish Flu
© redOrbit

TAU researchers work to determine how H1N1 becomes pandemic.

The last century has seen two major pandemics caused by the H1N1 virus - the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 2009's Swine Flu scare, which had thousands travelling with surgical masks and clamoring for vaccination. But scientists did not know what distinguished the Swine Flu from ordinary influenza in pigs or seasonal outbreaks in humans, giving it the power to travel extensively and infect large populations.

Until now. Prof. Nir Ben-Tal of Tel Aviv University's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and his graduate student Daphna Meroz, in collaboration with Dr. Tomer Hertz of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, have developed a unique computational method to address this question. Published in the journal PNAS, the research presents a valuable tool for identifying viral mutation strategies, tracking various virus strains and developing vaccinations and anti-virals which can protect the population. It may also lead to more precisely designed vaccines to combat these viral mutations.

Their method reveals that mutations in the virus' amino acids in specific positions, such as antigenic receptor sites, may explain how the new strain successfully spread throughout the population in 2009. These alterations allowed the strain to evade both existing vaccines and the immune system's defenses.
Read More...
Health

US: Fecal Matter Found In 8 Out Of 9 Restaurant Play Areas


redOrbit
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:49 UTC
Play Areas
© redOrbit

A report by ABC's Good Morning America found that play areas at fast food restaurants may be harboring harmful germs and bacteria.

The report said a mother who is trying to get standards in place for how restaurant play areas should be cleaned helped make the discovery.

Erin Carr-Jordan, the mother who performed the research, said she found clumps of hair, rotting food and gang graffiti, among other things, when she followed her toddler into a play tube at a fast-food restaurant play area.

"It was like getting hit with a brick, it was so disgusting," she told ABC's Good Morning America. "There was filth everywhere, there was black on the walls and it was sticky and there was grime inside the connecting tubes."

Carr-Jordan said she felt restaurant managers were not responsive to her complaints so she felt compelled to start taking video cameras with her to post what she had found on YouTube.

She also spent several thousand dollars of her own money on testing samples at nine restaurants in seven states from restaurants like McDonald's, Burger King, and Chuck E. Cheese's.
Read More...
Cow

US: Tainted Beef Leads to Grocery Recalls


The Associated Press
Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Flickr/benfrantzdaleThe USDA has called back more than 60,000 pounds of ground beef products believed to be contaminated with E. coli from the National Beef Packing Co. LLC.
At least three major grocery store chains have recalled some of their ground beef packages because they could be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.

Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., Publix Super Markets Inc. and Kroger Co. announced the recalls mainly in the southeastern U.S. and said they stem from problems at the National Beef Packaging Co. of Dodge City, Kan.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Friday that National Beef was recalling more than 60,000 pounds of beef after the Ohio Department of Agriculture found the bacteria during routine testing.

The recalls affect products sold mainly in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee, but the meat was sent to several distributors and could have been repackaged for consumers and sold nationwide.

The agriculture department says there have been no reports of illnesses. A spokesman for National Beef said the company has never had a problem with E. coli. It is checking processes and procedures in an effort to find the cause and prevent it from happening again, the spokesman said.
Read More...
Light Saber

Challenging the Theory of Artificial Immunity

Keith Wassung
Alignlife.com
Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:55 UTC
Image
© Alignlife.com
The control and eradication of childhood disease has been heralded as one of medicine's finest accomplishments. Yet there is a growing suspicion that intervening in infections may have an adverse effect on children, exemplified by the fact that as childhood infections have decreased, chronic afflictions have increased. This comes along with a swell of complaints from groups and individuals about the side effects of vaccines and the lack of long-term scientific studies and safety data. At a time when there are more than 200 vaccines in the pipeline, concern is mounting that high-profile vaccine advocates and the lobbies they represent are exerting inordinate influence on the setting of vaccine policy by the government.

It may seem incredulous to challenge the practice of vaccination, since it has claimed responsibility for the eradication of many diseases in the past 100 years including polio, smallpox, whooping cough and diphtheria. But these claims are largely based on epidemic studies rather than on clinical evidence of effectiveness. Europe for example, experienced the same rise and decline of polio cases as were seen in the U.S. yet never had the polio vaccine. In addition, many diseases that were once thought to be eradicated simply take on different forms and are given different names. Spinal meningitis and polio have almost identical symptoms and cases of spinal meningitis have increased since the decrease in polio cases.
Read More...
Target

New Dietary Ingredient Draft Guidance is a Big, Fat Gift to Big Pharma


Alliance for Natural Health
Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:25 UTC
Image
© Alliance for Natural Health
Want to let the drug industry take your favorite supplements off the market, patent them, and sell them back to you - by doctor's prescription only - for 10 or 100 (or even more) times what you're paying now?

As Big Pharma becomes more desperate to boost flagging profits, the industry will likely use this tactic to find new sources of revenue - and shame on the FDA for so blatantly aiding and abetting it!

This coming year, seven of the world's twenty bestselling drugs will lose their patent protection and can be sold in generic forms. On this list are the top two money-makers ever created: cholesterol fighting (but overall health-threatening) Lipitor and blood thinning (but bone-destroying) Plavix. This wave of expiring drugs patents will have unprecedented and devastating effects on the industry bottom line. One drug recently made available in generic form - Protonix, a medication for severe heartburn (again, not a drug we would use, and especially dangerous when used with the blood-thinner mentioned above) - previously cost about $170 per month when it was still under patent; its generic version now costs $16. With seven of the top-selling drugs expected to see similarly drastic drops in prices, the drug industry is in a panic - especially considering the fact that there are no new "blockbuster" drugs in the pharmaceutical industry pipeline. Under these circumstances, why not try to turn some supplements into drugs?
Read More...
Clock

The Importance of Melatonin


bewellbuzz.com
Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:39 UTC
Image
© bewellbuzz.com
Melatonin is a natural hormone produced by the pineal gland. It is the hormone responsible for the regulation of our internal body clock which is also referred to as the "circadian rhythm". The production of melatonin is influenced by the amount of light in the external environment. Darkness stimulates the production of melatonin while brightness produces the opposite effect.

Aside from the regulation of our biological clock, melatonin also aids in the regulation of other body hormones. In females, it regulates the timing of the releases of reproductive hormones which helps set the pattern of the menstrual cycle.
Read More...