Health & WellnessS


Attention

Study Finds Hundreds of Pollutants in Nation's Tap Water


Environmental Working Group
Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:19 UTC
Tap water in many large metropolitan areas is polluted with a cocktail of chemical contaminants. These pollutants usually don't violate any legal standards, but they often come in potentially toxic combinations that raise serious questions about the long-term safety of drinking the water. Pensacola, Fla.; Riverside, Calif.; and Las Vegas top the list of major cities with the most contaminated tap water.

In an unprecedented analysis of 20 million tap water quality tests performed by water utilities between 2004 and 2009, Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that water suppliers detected a total of 316 contaminants in water delivered to the public. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set enforceable standards for only 114 of these pollutants.

Another 202 chemicals with no mandatory safety standards were found in water supplied to approximately 132 million people in 9,454 communities across the country. These "unregulated" chemicals include the toxic rocket fuel component perchlorate, the industrial solvent acetone, the weed killer metolachlor, the refrigerant Freon and radon, a highly radioactive gas.
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Western Diet Triggers Genes that Cause the Body to Store More Fat

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
New research published in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has found that the "Western" diet, typically high in sugar and fat, may be responsible for activating genes that signal the body to become fatter. According to scientists, the body's response to high amounts of energy-dense food is to activate the kappa opioid receptor which triggers increased fat storage.

Researchers arrived at this conclusion by conducting an experiment on two groups of mice. One group had its kappa opioid receptors genetically deactivated while the other remained intact. Both groups were fed diets high in fat and sugar for 16 weeks. At the end of 16 weeks, the group with the deactivated receptor remained lean while the control group gained significant weight.

Besides limiting their bodies' ability to store energy-dense food in their fat stores, the mice whose receptors had been deactivated were noted to also have a limited ability to assimilate and store nutrients from the foods they ingested.
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Fructose May Promote Metabolic Syndrome

Ethan Huff
NaturalNews
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
A research team from the University of Washington (UW) recently published a study in Physiology & Behavior revealing that moderate consumption of fructose- and high fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverages leads to significant alterations of lipid metabolization in the liver. Conducted on rats, the study also noted marked increases in both cholesterol and triglyceride levels in rats that fed on fructose-sweetened beverages.

Fructose is a monosaccharide sugar that is found in various fruits. It is a simple sugar that is often promoted as being a healthy "fruit" sugar, however the reality is that fructose is just one component of the complex sugar composition that occurs naturally in fruit. Most granulated fructose available today, called crystalline fructose, is derived from fructose-enriched corn syrup.

Similarly, high fructose corn syrup is a fructose-enriched form of highly-processed corn syrup that is commonly found in soda, ketchup, candy, dressings, and many other processed foods. The biggest concern about fructose is the fact that, unlike sucrose, it passes undigested through the small intestine where it enters the portal vein and heads directly to the liver.
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Bad Guys

How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care

Robert Reich
Robert Reich's Blog
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:44 UTC
The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point because the Senate bill Harry Reid came up with contained a public option available only to 4 million people, which would have been far too small to exert any competitive pressure on private insurers anyway.

To provide political cover to senators who want to tell their constituents that the intent behind a robust public option lives on, the emerging Senate bill makes Medicare available to younger folk (age 55), and lets people who aren't covered by their employers buy in to a system that's similar to the plan that federal employees now have, where the federal government's Office of Personnel Management selects from among private insurers.

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.
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Coffee

Flashback Odd Remedy Said to Slow Deadly Cancer

Judy Foreman
Boston Globe
Mon, 09 Aug 1999 00:00 UTC
Four years years ago, Betty Frizzell, a retired schoolteacher from Cookeville, Tenn., was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest malignancies there is. Normally, people with advanced tumors, like Frizzell's, live only about five months after they are diagnosed. Frizzell, now 64, is thriving on a diet of fruits and vegetables plus a regimen of dietary supplements including pancreatic enzymes and - believe it or not - coffee enemas.

She does get a bit tired of carrot juice, she says, and the coffee enemas - two in the morning, two at night - are ''very time consuming.'' But she's convinced it's worth it: ''I'm sure I wouldn't be alive today if I had not chosen this route.''

''Pancreatic cancer strikes almost as many people as leukemia, yet so far, less progress has been made,'' says Dr. Robert Mayer, director of the center for gastrointestinal cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

In fact, pancreatic cancer is so tough to detect that by the time it is discovered, survival is often counted in weeks: 36 to 40 weeks if the cancer hasn't spread to nearby organs, 16 to 20 weeks if it has.
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Memories Mirror Childhood Relationships


Medical News Today
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:00 UTC
Memory recall mirrors relationship changes across childhood. This is the finding of a study published online in the British Journal of Psychology.

Dr Carole Peterson of Memorial University of Newfoundland, along with Dr Alice Bonechi, Dr Andrea Smorti, and Dr Franca Tani of the University of Florence carried out the study which investigated the number and content of memories that people could recall from different periods of childhood, to see whether their memories reflected the people and emotions that were key to their experiences.

One hundred and 94 participants with a mean age of 22 took part in the study at the University of Florence. They were asked to recall as many memories as they could from four specific periods of their early lives: pre-school, primary school, secondary school, and high school or university. Participants were split into two groups, one group was asked to only recall memories involving their parents, and the other group, only memories involving friends. They were also asked to give a short summary of the emotions involved in each memory.
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With Amino Acid Diet, Mice Improve After Brain Injury


ScienceDaily
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
Neurology researchers have shown that feeding amino acids to brain-injured animals restores their cognitive abilities and may set the stage for the first effective treatment for cognitive impairments suffered by people with traumatic brain injuries.

"We have shown in an animal model that dietary intervention can restore a proper balance of neurochemicals in the injured part of the brain, and simultaneously improves cognitive performance," said study leader Akiva S. Cohen, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The study appears December 7 in the online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Info

CDC Analyzes Toxics In Humans


Environmental Working Group
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:19 UTC
With its fourth and most ambitious edition of its National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, released today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) casts the issue of pollution in people in sharp focus.

The CDC has detected 212 contaminants in the blood and urine of thousands of people tested from 1999-2004, the most extensive survey of the American body burden ever published by the federal government.

CDC's testing focuses on adults and children age 6 and older, leaving EWG and other environmental health groups and academic scientists to investigate the extent to which pollutants were invading the womb.

Last week, EWG released its second cord blood study, reporting detections of up to 232 contaminants in the cord blood of 10 minority infants born between 2007 and 2008. EWG's study was the first to find the plastic ingredient bisphenol A (BPA), an endocrine-disrupting chemical, in American cord blood. EWG's first cord blood study, published in 2005, found up to 287 chemicals in 10 cord blood samples.
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Cheeseburger

USDA Will Offer Lawmakers a Sampling of School Lunches

Jane Black
Washington Post
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:46 UTC
Image
© Katherine Frey/the Washington PostUSDA Secretary Tom Vilsack samples food the agency provides to public schools, some of which will be served to lawmakers next week.
Agency seeks boost in funding to continue reworking menus

Chicken fajita strips, sliced ham and canned green beans: That's what's for lunch one day next week for some lawmakers and congressional staffers, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The menu offers the same products, known as commodity foods, that the agency provides every day to public schools across the nation.

The goal of next week's tasting is to show lawmakers the improvements the department has made in the nutritional quality -- and taste -- of the $1.2 billion in school commodity foods and to win support to fund further improvements. With one-third of American children overweight or obese, the USDA has been working to cut salt and fat and provide more fruits and vegetables.
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Info

Spice Compounds May Stem Tumor Growth


U.S. News
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:20 UTC
Image
Tumeric (curcumin)
Lab study suggests possible action against breast cancer

Compounds derived from two spices -- pepper and turmeric -- could help prevent breast cancer by limiting the growth of stem cells that promote tumor growth, a new study shows.

When curcumin (from turmeric) and piperine (from black peppers) were applied to breast cells in the laboratory, the number of stem cells decreased, but there was no change in normal cells, say researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
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