Health & WellnessS


Cheeseburger

Not science fiction: First human-engineered 'meat burger' to be consumed in London

Shepard Ambellas
Intellihub
Tue, 21 May 2013 15:00 UTC
pink fluid
A scientist holds cultures containing a pink fluid to grow new Human-Engineered Meat for Human Consumption.
Starting with a very particular cell extracted from dead cows necks at a local slaughterhouse, a select team of scientists are now close to serving up the world's first human-engineered, cultured meat burger. That's right. A whopping 5 ounce burger will be freshly made from lab grown bits of cultured meat and muscle tissue. The burger, the first of its kind, will be served to curious diner's somewhere in London in the coming weeks.

The whole concept of the program takes us right into a science fiction nightmare made for TV, as billions of fetal cells are needed to make this burger.

In fact, scientists now claim they have proven through studies that if the human population of earth consumes "cultured meat", the world will then save a considerable amount of water and resources, essentially reducing environmental impact from humans. The study titled, Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production, basically outlines how humans are bad, and that we will need to eat all synthetic meat soon as we have become an overpopulated species.
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Magnify

The crazy amount of sugar hiding in random foods


tv.greenmedinfo.com
Mon, 06 May 2013 14:36 UTC

Comment: Concerned about how much sugar is really in your food? The Health Detriments of Sugar Revealed:

Addicted to Sugar?
Is America Too Sweet On Sugar?
Remember the Dangers of Refined Sugar
The Daily Diet That Has Up to 46 Teaspoons of Sugar
Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say
Ignore the Politics: We Would All Be Healthier Without Table Sugar
Sugar High: The Dark History and Nasty Methods Used to Feed Our Sweet Tooth
Food for thought: Eat your way to dementia - sugar and carbs cause Alzheimer's Disease

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Attention

Carcinogenic parabens contaminating U.S. food supply

Case Adams
Greenmedinfo.com
Wed, 15 May 2013 14:17 UTC
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Researchers may have solved a vexing mystery as to why parabens contamination in humans has been so pervasive in recent studies: Parabens are increasingly contaminating our food supply.

Researchers from the New York State Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, along with the University of New York at Albany have determined in a study of foods purchased from local markets that much of the U.S. food supply is contaminated with parabens - a group of chemicals thought previously to produce exposure in humans through the skin in cosmetics and lotions containing preservatives.

This likely explains an increasing body of evidence showing that humans have much higher blood and urine concentrations of parabens than could be explained with the use of body lotions and cosmetics.

The researchers tested 267 samples of food collected from stores and markets around Albany New York. These included juices, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, infant formula, dairy products such as milk, yogurt, cheese and ice cream, oils, fats, breads, flours, rice, pasta, corn, fruits, baked goods, meats, shellfish and seafoods and many others. Once collected and categorized, the foods were analyzed using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry - which measure the biochemical content of the food from the molecular level.

Five different types of parabens were tested. These were butyl-parabens, benzyl-parabens, propyl-parabens, methyl- parabens, and ethyl-parabens.

Comment: Learn more about how toxic Food Packaging is Affecting Your Health read the following articles:

Packaging - unwrapped
Get Plastic Out Of Your Diet
Chemicals Leach From Packaging
5 Reasons to Avoid Plastic Containers
Major Producers to Ditch BPA from Packaging
Food Packaging Harbors Harmful Chemicals
Chemicals in Fast Food Wrappers Show Up in Human Blood
Toxic Glue Used in Supermarket Food Packaging 'Poses Severe Risk to Health'

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Arrow Down

Malaria medicine could be toxic

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Wed, 22 May 2013 10:19 UTC
Soldiers
© U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley
San Francisco - A malaria drug once widely prescribed to U.S. soldiers could cause symptoms similar to traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), one researcher says.

The drug mefloquine may damage the brain stem and increase the firing of neurons, said Dr. Remington Nevin, a former Army physician and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Nevin discussed his research Monday (May 20) here at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

For decades, soldiers deployed to regions where malaria is common, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, have been given drugs aimed at preventing the mosquito-borne disease, one of which is mefloquine. But the Army stopped recommending the routine use of mefloquine as the preferred anti-malaria drug in 2009, according to the Army Times.

Mefloquine may lead to anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations that can be misdiagnosed as other ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, Nevin said.

"The symptoms can overlap," Nevin told LiveScience. "It's very easy in military veterans to confuse the two conditions, or to mistakenly diagnose traumatic injury."
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Display

Terrible night's sleep? Blame your mobile phone: How exposure to artificial light 'fools' the brain into staying awake

Emma Robertson
The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 22 May 2013 13:35 UTC
Laptop and smartphone screens disrupt sleep and make us drink caffeine

Britons uses 4 times more artificial light today compared to the 1950s

Poor sleep associated with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression

Electric lights, including those which illuminate laptop computers, smartphones and tablets, often play a key role in causing people to sleep badly, a leading expert has warned.

Artificial lights disrupt the body's natural rhythm, affect chemicals in the brain and drive people to use stimulants like caffeine to stay awake longer, according to Harvard academic Professor Charles Czeisler.

Writing today in the journal Nature, the professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School called for research to help develop 'behavioural and technical' ways of counteracting the ill effects of artificial light on modern sleeping patterns.

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Screen breaks: Illuminated screens have been found to affect the body's circadian clock - the genetic mechanism which helps regulate sleep - 'more powerfully than any drug'

The decline in the number of hours slept per night is affecting public health, including a greater risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and stroke in adults and concentration problems in children, he said.

While all electric light affected circadian rhythms - the natural body clock - and sleep, night-time exposure to LED lights like those in phones and computers was 'typically more disruptive' than standard electric light bulbs, he said.

'There are many reasons why people get insufficient sleep in our 24/7 society, from early starts at work or school, or long commutes, to caffeine-rich food and drink,' he wrote.
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Ambulance

Mysterious respiratory illness strikes 7 in Alabama; 2 dead

JoNel Aleccia
NBC News
Tue, 21 May 2013 23:08 UTC
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© Tarleton State University
Two people have died and five others have been hospitalized in a mysterious cluster of respiratory illnesses in southeast Alabama, state health officials said.

The victims, all adults, had symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath, but the cause of the illnesses is unknown, said Dr. Mary McIntyre, the acting state epidemiologist for the Alabama Department of Public Health. The hospital is using respiratory precautions, which include requiring staff to wear special N95 masks that reduce the chance of infection.

State health officials have collected and analyzed samples of specimens from all patients. So far, one sample has tested positive for H1N1 influenza A, but it's not clear that that is behind the unusual illnesses. There's no evidence of other kinds of flu, including the H7N9 strain that has caused illness and death in China, McIntyre said.
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Health

Accidental find shows Vitamin C kills tuberculosis


The Express Tribune
Tue, 21 May 2013 16:19 UTC
Vitamin C
© The Express Tribune The authors of the new study urged further research into the potential uses of Vitamin C in TB treatment, stressing it was "inexpensive, widely available and very safe to use."
Scientists said Tuesday they had managed to kill lab-grown tuberculosis (TB) bacteria with good old Vitamin C - an "unexpected" discovery they hope will lead to better, cheaper drugs.

A team from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York made the accidental find while researching how TB bacteria become resistant to the TB drug isoniazid.

The researchers added isoniazid and a "reducing agent" known as cysteine to the TB in a test tube, expecting the bacteria to develop drug resistance.

Instead, the team "ended up killing off the culture", according to the study's senior author William Jacobs, who said the result was "totally unexpected".

Reducing agents chemically reduce other substances.

The team then replaced the cysteine in the experiment with another reducing agent - Vitamin C. It, too, killed the bacteria.

"I was in disbelief," said Jacobs of the outcome published in the journal Nature Communications.

"Even more surprisingly... when we left out the TB drug isoniazid and just had Vitamin C alone, we discovered that Vitamin C kills tuberculosis."
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Bulb

Brain develops new circuits to compensate for damage or injury


Science Daily
Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© © unlim3d / FotoliaArtist's rendering of human brain inside skull
When the brain's primary "learning center" is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways -- often far from the damaged site.

The research, conducted by UCLA's Michael Fanselow and Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the neuroscience research program at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, appears this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that parts of the prefrontal cortex take over when the hippocampus, the brain's key center of learning and memory formation, is disabled. Their breakthrough discovery, the first demonstration of such neural-circuit plasticity, could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, stroke and other conditions involving damage to the brain.

For the study, Fanselow and Zelikowsky conducted laboratory experiments with rats showing that the rodents were able to learn new tasks even after damage to the hippocampus. While the rats needed more training than they would have normally, they nonetheless learned from their experiences -- a surprising finding.

Comment: For more information on the amazing ability of the brain to heal itself read:
Rewiring a Damaged Brain
Scots doctors to help stroke patients 'rewire' their brains by stimulating the vagus nerve
Human Brains Grow, Change and Can Heal Themselves
Reading Remediation Seems to Rewire the Brain

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Health

Magnesium deficiency symptoms and diagnosis

Dr. Mark Sircus
Greenmedinfo.com
Mon, 20 May 2013 19:48 UTC
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We thirst for magnesium rich water.
Magnesium deficiency is often misdiagnosed because it does not show up in blood tests - only 1% of the body's magnesium is stored in the blood.

Most doctors and laboratories don't even include magnesium status in routine blood tests. Thus, most doctors don't know when their patients are deficient in magnesium, even though studies show that the majority of Americans are deficient in magnesium. Consider Dr. Norman Shealy's statements, "Every known illness is associated with a magnesium deficiency" and that, "magnesium is the most critical mineral required for electrical stability of every cell in the body. A magnesium deficiency may be responsible for more diseases than any other nutrient." The truth he states exposes a gapping hole in modern medicine that explains a good deal about iatrogenic death and disease. Because magnesium deficiency is largely overlooked, millions of Americans suffer needlessly or are having their symptoms treated with expensive drugs when they could be cured with magnesium supplementation.

One has to recognize the signs of magnesium thirst or hunger on their own since allopathic medicine is lost in this regard. It is really something much more subtle then hunger or thirst but it is comparable. In a world though where doctors and patients alike do not even pay attention to thirst and important issues of hydration it is not hopeful that we will find many recognizing and paying attention to magnesium thirst and hunger which is a dramatic way of expressing the concept of magnesium deficiency.

Few people are aware of the enormous role magnesium plays in our bodies. Magnesium is by far the most important mineral in the body, After oxygen, water, and basic food, magnesium may be the most important element needed by our bodies, vitally important yet hardly known. It is more important than calcium, potassium or sodium and regulates all three of them. Millions suffer daily from magnesium deficiency without even knowing it
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Health

The Deeper Roots of Health and Diet as Told by Our Ancestors


GreeMedTV
Mon, 20 May 2013 18:40 UTC

Ron Rosedale, M.D. presenting at the 2nd Annual Ancestral Health Symposium (AHS12) on Saturday, 11 August, 2012.

Abstract:
Ancestral science includes paleoanthropology and precedes it by billions of years, and we must not be blind to this. Thus, we need to include science as it pertains to our ancestor's ancestors such as the biology of aging, for paleolithic nutrition to be viewed in the proper context.
For instance, evolution does not select for a long post-reproductive life but rather for reproductive success, and modern people may be the only species ever to seek a long post-reproductive lifespan. Furthermore, we have all been raised and live in a modern society that can lead to the accumulation of damage and disease since even before birth. Therefore, in order to find answers about what best to eat now, we may need to modify a paleo diet to include what the modern science of the ancient biology of aging tells us about what to eat today, for a healthier and longer life tomorrow.
I will talk about some of the key points of this science that are common to all animal life, and that lay the foundation for optimal dietary intake as it pertains to nutrition, disease, and extending the current boundaries of youthful longevity.

Bio:
Ron Rosedale M.D. is an internationally known expert in nutrition, aging, and metabolic medicine. His now famous lectures on insulin nearly 20 years ago foretold of its importance to the chronic diseases and aging. He has done the same for the hormone leptin with his book "The Rosedale Diet".
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