Researchers Find Main Source of Pain in Blood Vessels

Researchers have found the main source of pain in Fibromyalgia patients, and contrary to what many believe, it does not stem from the brain. The findings mark the end of a decades-old mystery about the disease, which many doctors believed was conjured in patients' imaginations. The mystery of Fibromyalgia has left millions of sufferers searching for hope in pain medications. Up until recently, many physicians thought that the disease was "imaginary" or psychological, but scientists have now revealed that the main source of pain stems from a most unlikely place- excess blood vessels in the hand.

Living in an area with high levels of air pollution may increase a woman's chances of having a child with autism, according to the first national study to date that investigates the possible link.

"Women who were exposed to the highest levels of diesel or mercury in the air were twice as likely to have a child with autism than women who lived in the cleanest parts of the sample," study author Andrea Roberts, a research associate with the Harvard School of Public Health, told The Huffington Post.

Earlier studies have established a potential connection between air pollution and autism risk, but have concentrated on a few individual states. The latest study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on Tuesday, draws on a large sample of women across the whole country.

Researchers crossed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data on the level of air pollutants from year to year with data from the Nurses' Health Study, one of the longest running investigations of women's health in the U.S. They looked for associations between levels of pollutants in the time and place that a woman was pregnant and whether that woman went on to have a child with a diagnosed autism spectrum disorder.

The researchers split up the locations into fifths, and women who lived in the most polluted sections -- those with the highest levels of diesel particulates or mercury in the air -- were twice as likely to have a child with autism compared to those in the cleanest sections. Other types of air pollution, including lead, manganese and other hard metals, were also linked to a greater risk of autism, although the risk was not quite as high.

"All of the chemicals studied are known neurotoxins," Roberts said. "They are also known to pass from mother to baby while a woman is pregnant. It's very plausible that the 'stuff' the mother is taking in through the air is affecting her baby's brain development."

A study, Pre-Polluted by Canada's Environmental Defence examines the contaminants that are found in the blood of newborns in two of Canada's largest urban centres. Let's first put our chemical world into perspective.

At this point in time, there are 84,000 chemicals in use in North America. Around the globe, an estimated 143,000 chemicals are in use.

In Canada, only 200 of these chemicals have been reviewed for their impact on human health and the United States EPA has reviewed only 200 chemicals since 1976.

Scientists tested the umbilical cord blood from three newborns whose mothers live in the Greater Toronto/Hamilton areas and found a rather surprising cocktail of contaminants.

While the actual sample size is very small, the results mimic those found in larger studies undertaken in various nations.

The chemicals that were screened for in this study include the following groups:

Small increases in air pollution that are well below current safety limits can raise the risk of lung cancer and heart attacks, according to two new studies.

Researchers found that long term exposure to microscopic particles of soot at levels similar to those found in suburban areas of Britain can increase the risk of lung cancer by up to 36 per cent.

The short term impact of the same levels of these sooty particles, which are produced by diesel exhausts, also increased the risk of being admitted to hospital or dying from heart failure by two per cent.

The particles, which are more than 100 times small than a human hair, can become lodged in the lungs and pass through into the blood stream, causing inflammation.

The scientists behind the two studies say that their findings indicate that current safety limits on air pollution are still too high and need to be lowered.

"Everybody is exposed to air pollution and it is difficult to escape," said Dr Anoop Shah. "Our results indicate that the lower the levels, the better it is.

The men who ate nothing but meat for an entire year

Low-carb diets and paleolithic nutrition are all the rage these days, and for good reason. Compared to the Standard American Diet, both of them are superb.

Few of us would dare to take the two to their extreme, however. Giving up sugar and wheat is one thing, but what about giving up everything except meat? Yes, I'm talking about an ultra low-carb diet with even foods like nuts and berries removed. Unsurprisingly and understandably, studies on the long-term effects of such a diet are severely lacking.

There is at least one study that did just this, however. If the diet brings the Eskimos to mind, it's no coincidence. You may have heard of Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson - the Canadian ethnologist who spent more than a decade with the Inuit during his arctic explorations in the beginning of the previous century. For nine of these years, he lived almost exclusively on fish and meat (you can read about his experiences here). At the time, this was considered heresy and life-threatening, just as it is today (note that Stefansson apparently refers to both fish and meat with the word "meat"):

A belief I was destined to find crucial in my Arctic work, making the difference between success and failure, life and death, was the view that man cannot live on meat alone. The few doctors and dietitians who thought you could were considered unorthodox if not charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man was not intended to be carnivorous - you knew that from examining his teeth, his stomach, and the account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had no vegetables in meat. The kidneys would be ruined by overwork. There would be protein poisoning and, in general hell to pay.

To the surprise of many (including Stefansson himself), he suffered no health problems during his decade of pure carnivorism. When he told people of his amazing experiences, he was met with skepticism from medical authorities who asked him to undertake a study that would replicate the results. He and a fellow explorer named Andersen agreed to eat an all-meat diet for an entire year in a closely observed setting.

Composing a diet of nothing but meat and fat

Because Food Safety News holds an important perspective in the industry, I was surprised to see the website publish a commentary by Mr. Mischa Popoff.

Mr. Popoff has spent the last few years promoting his self-published book, Is It Organic. He has made irresponsible and unsupported claims that 80 percent of all organic food in North America is imported and riddled with fraud - a grave disservice to the hard-working organic farmers in this country and their loyal customers.

The subtitle of his book says it all: The Inside Story of Who Destroyed the Organic Industry, Turned It into a Socialist Movement and Made Million$ in the Process, and a Comprehensive History of Farming, Warfare and Western Civilization from 1645 to the Present.

Whoa Nelly! If you connect the dots, by looking at the other issues that Mr. Popoff writes about, and commonly published on ultraconservative websites (challenging climate change, defending genetically engineered food production, challenging the efficacy of hybrid automobiles and even parenting issues) you would have to conclude that organic food is a component of some kind of Bolshevik plot to take over this country.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 69 percent of US adults are overweight or obese. How did this happen? In a long article in the current Atlantic, David H. Freedman offers a mechanistic explanation: People are ingesting too many calories, particularly "energy-intense" fat, sugar, and "other problem carbs." The simple diagnoses leads to an easy solution: The food industry should apply its flavor-engineering wizardry to churn out lower-cal products that people will still scarf up, preserving its own bottom line while solving the obesity crisis. Indeed, he writes, this remedy is already playing out under our noses:

Popular food producers, fast-food chains among them, are already applying various tricks and technologies to create less caloric and more satiating versions of their junky fare that nonetheless retain much of the appeal of the originals, and could be induced to go much further.

Among the examples Freedman cites are McDonald's Egg White Delight McMuffin, a "lower-calorie, less fatty version of the Egg McMuffin," a "new line of quarter-pound burgers, to be served on buns containing whole grains," and Carl's Jr.'s "Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich."

A chemical found in everyday cosmetics and household cleaning products may be responsible for an "epidemic" of painful skin allergies, doctors have warned.

The preservative - known as MI - is used in a wide range of shampoos, moisturisers and shower gels as well as make-up and baby wipes.

But dermatologists warn people are being exposed to much higher doses than before, leading to a steep rise in allergies known as contact dermatitis where the skin becomes red and itchy and can sting and blister.

Experts say the chemical is second only to nickel in causing contact allergies. One in 12 adults and one in five children in the UK now have eczema, of which contact dermatitis is one of the most common types.

MI, which is short for methylisothiazolinone, is a preservative which is also found in paint. It is added to products to prevent unwanted growth of bacteria and yeasts.

Well-known products that contain MI found on sale in shops included Nivea body lotion, Wet Ones and Boots men's face wash.

A new technique for detecting cancer by imaging the consumption of sugar with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been unveiled by UCL scientists. The breakthrough could provide a safer and simpler alternative to standard radioactive techniques and enable radiologists to image tumours in greater detail.

The new technique, called 'glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer' (glucoCEST), is based on the fact that tumours consume much more glucose (a type of sugar) than normal, healthy tissues in order to sustain their growth.


The researchers found that sensitising an MRI scanner to glucose uptake caused tumours to appear as bright images on MRI scans of mice.

Lead researcher Dr Simon Walker-Samuel, from the UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI) said: "GlucoCEST uses radio waves to magnetically label glucose in the body. This can then be detected in tumours using conventional MRI techniques. The method uses an injection of normal sugar and could offer a cheap, safe alternative to existing methods for detecting tumours, which require the injection of radioactive material." Professor Mark Lythgoe, Director of CABI and a senior author on the study, said: "We can detect cancer using the same sugar content found in half a standard sized chocolate bar. Our research reveals a useful and cost-effective method for imaging cancers using MRI - a standard imaging technology available in many large hospitals."

There is no biological requirement for cow's milk. It is nature's perfect food but only if you are a calf. The evidence of its benefits is overstated, and the evidence of its harm to human populations is increasing.

The white mustached celebrities paid by the Dairy Council promote the wonders of milk in their "Got Milk" ads. Scientists are increasingly asking, "Got Proof?" Our government still hasn't caught on, in part because of the huge dairy lobby driving nutrition guidelines. When I once lamented to Senator Harkin that all we wanted to do was to make science into policy, he cocked his head and with a wry smile and said, "that would make too much sense."

And the media is also influenced heavily by advertising dollars. Once, when I was on Martha Stewart's television show, the dairy lobby sponsored the episode, and her trainer was forced to mouth the talking points of the Dairy Council touting milk as a fabulous sports drink. Studies may show some benefit, but studies funded by the food industry show positive benefits eight times more than independently funded studies.

In a new editorial by two of the nation's leading nutrition scientists from Harvard, Dr. David Ludwig and Dr. Walter Willett, in JAMA Pediatrics, our old assumptions about milk are being called into question. Perhaps it doesn't help you grow strong bones, and it may increase the risk of cancer and promote weight gain.