People who consume fructose instead of sugar derived from cane or other natural sources feel less satisfied by their food and tend to consume more, according to research published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Compared with individuals who consumed sugar-based glucose beverages, people who drank liquids containing fructose exhibited a weaker connection between the hypothalamus, thalamus and striatum, brain scans taken by researchers revealed.

Stacked next to brain scans of individuals who consumed glucose, the results showed a clear divergence in areas of the brain regulating appetite and reward processing.

It's a sweltering late February afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. "He's going to ask you to buy him tea," Hew says. "Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can't resist pinching pennies."

An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken.

"I'll talk to you," the man says, "but only if you buy me tea." He grins.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," says Hew, laughing. "A rich man like you."

At a bustling open-air café nearby, we order tea and ais kacang, giant shaved-ice desserts laden with chopped-up jello and sweet, sticky red beans. I dig in, but the station owner - I'll call him Esso Man, since he doesn't want me to use his real name - is moodily stirring his into a slushy puddle. We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth, co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical, that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry.

Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load - the quicker the trip, the more money they earned. "Sometimes they would tell us it was fertilizer, so we would take it to local farms," Esso Man says. "My uncle was a vegetable farmer, so I gave some to him." Other times, the refinery officials said the stuff was quicklime, so one driver painted his house with it. "He thought it was great, because it made all the mosquitoes and mice stay away."

This is your brain on sugar - for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal - even though they contain the same amount of calories - because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

It will be if author Robert Lustig, the man behind the YouTube sensation "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," has his way.

Among the least likely viral megahits on YouTube is a 90-minute lecture by the food scold and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." He delivers it in a windowless room at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The talk is simultaneously boring and powerful, combining the gravitas of a national health crisis, the thrill of conspiracy theory, and the tedium of PowerPoint slides. Midway through the talk he scans the hall for approval. "Am I debunking?"


The UCSF extension students mutter "yeah" - most of them, at least. Lustig has a way of seeking validation and pissing off people at the same time. His combined love of showmanship and need for approval led to acting in 12 musical-theater performances during his three years as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His greatest role yet may be as the loudest, most contrarian voice in the public-health debate over why we get fat and what we should do about it.

Lustig is an imperfect frontman for abstemious eating. At age 55, his face is puffy. He looks disheveled even in a coat and tie. People love him and people love to hate him, especially after he proposed in the journal Nature that sugar should be regulated like alcohol and that people who buy soda should be carded. Almost three million people have watched "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." Alec Baldwin publicly lost 30 pounds by following Lustig's rules and giving up toxic foods, even trying to avoid the sugar in a dish his mother calls "Love Pie." Still, a leading endocrinologist, who asked to go unnamed, called Lustig an "idiot."

Depression in a group of Medicare recipients ages 65 years and older appears to be associated with prevalent mild cognitive impairment and an increased risk of dementia, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology, a JAMA Network publication.

Depressive symptoms occur in 3 percent to 63 percent of patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and some studies have shown an increased dementia risk in individuals with a history of depression. The mechanisms behind the association between depression and cognitive decline have not been made clear and different mechanisms have been proposed, according to the study background.

Edo Richard, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues evaluated the association of late-life depression with MCI and dementia in a group of 2,160 community-dwelling Medicare recipients.

There's some serious confusion about cholesterol, and whether high cholesterol levels are responsible for heart disease.

Chris Masterjohn, who recently received his PhD in nutritional sciences from the University of Connecticut, has published five peer-reviewed papers on vitamins and supplementation, and he's currently researching fat-soluble supplements - A, D, and K - at the University of Illinois. (Please note that the opinions expressed here represent Dr. Masterjohn's own positions, and may not represent the position of the University of Illinois.)

He also maintains a blog, The Daily Lipid¹, and his website, Cholesterol-And-Health.com², which are dedicated to the issue of cholesterol. He's also active with the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Cholesterol has been demonized since the early 1950's, following the popularization of Ancel Keys' flawed research. As a result, people now spend tens of billions of dollars on cholesterol-reducing drugs each year, thinking they have to lower this "dangerous" molecule lest they keel over from a heart attack.

As a testament to the power of this incredibly effective marketing system, Lipitor was the number one selling drug for 2011. This also reveals why challenging this belief system is met by such intense resistance. There are very powerful, financially-motivated forces backing the continued belief in the cholesterol myth.

Cholesterol is Essential for a Healthy Life

The Weston A. Price Foundation has been a major leader in helping people understand the truth about cholesterol, and Dr. Masterjohn has also lectured on this important topic.

"If we want to understand why cholesterol is really an incredibly important molecule and is really our friend rather than our enemy, I think what we should look at is the question, "What happens without cholesterol?" he says.

... [L]ook at Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome or SLOS, which is a symptom of genetic deficiency in cholesterol. It's when people can't make enough cholesterol on their own. In order to actually have this full-blown syndrome, it's a recessive trait, which means you need a defective gene for cholesterol synthesis from your father, and you need one from your mother as well. Now, the number of people who carry this defective gene in the population is about one to three percent of the population. However, the number of babies who are born with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome is far lower than we would expect. ... It turns out that if [the fetus] has both of these genes and the unborn child can't synthesize its own cholesterol, then this usually results in spontaneous abortion. So right away we see that cholesterol is needed for life itself..."

In those rare cases where a baby is born with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, the child is susceptible to and can present a wide range of defects, such as:

Autism or mental retardation
Failure to thrive
Physical defects in hands, feet and/or internal organs
Visual problems
Increased susceptibility to infection
Digestive problems

Cholesterol plays a key role in regulating proteins involved in cell signaling and may be important to many other cell processes, an international team of researchers has found.

The results of their study are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Cholesterol's role in heart disease has given it a bad reputation. But inside the thin membrane of a cell, the tight regulation of cholesterol at high levels (30 to 40 percent) suggests that it plays an important role in cellular processes, says Wonhwa Cho, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago and principal investigator on the study. Cho and colleagues had previously found evidence that cholesterol was directly interacting with many proteins found in the interior of the cell. The interaction seemed necessary for the proper functioning of these proteins.

"This was quite a surprising finding," said Cho, because cholesterol resides within the membrane, sandwiched between its inner and outer face. Cell biologists had thought it could only interact with other biomolecules within the membrane.

In the new study, Cho and his colleagues showed how cholesterol interacts with a scaffolding protein, one of a class of proteins that plays an important role in cell signaling. The researchers showed that cholesterol binds to a region on the protein molecule where one of its signaling partners also binds -- and that disrupting cholesterol binding to the protein makes it unable to activate its partner.The researchers describe in detail how the protein hooks onto and reaches inside the membrane to find and bind cholesterol.

Cho believes that this strategy for interacting with cholesterol may be used by many interior cellular proteins and offers an insight into what is known about the importance of cholesterol to well-functioning cells.

Toxic flame retardants pervade the nation's households, especially California's, and little can be done to keep them out of our bodies, two new scientific studies find.

The studies, published Wednesday, arrive as state and federal lawmakers are pushing for stricter regulations on potentially hazardous chemicals that go into furniture, electronics and other products.

California has been a prominent force behind fire retardants because of a 1975 state law, the only one of its kind in the nation, which requires foam in furniture to withstand a 12-second open flame without catching on fire.

Gov. Jerry Brown now wants regulations to reduce the number of chemicals permitted in furniture, but experts say the law has already done damage nationwide. In a bow to California's powerhouse economy, they say, manufacturers saturated furniture with flame retardants.

Consumers rarely know what chemicals are in the furniture products they buy because they are considered trade secrets. As a likely result, levels of flame-retardant chemicals in California children are among the world's highest, according to 2010 studies.

Some fire-retardant chemicals were banned and phased out in 2005. But the new studies, which were conducted separately and appear together in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, add to a growing body of research that shows that homes have not become significantly safer.

Healthy organisms rely on tightly controlled pathways of cellular signals that pass from protein to protein, each protein modifying the next in some way. Now an international team of researchers has discovered that cholesterol plays a key role in regulating the proteins in these pathways, and may also be important for other processes inside cells.

Principal investigator Wonhwa Cho, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and colleagues, write about their discovery in a paper published earlier in December in the journal Nature Communications.

Usually, news about cholesterol tends to focus on its role in heart disease, as a result of which it has acquired somewhat of a bad reputation. But cholesterol is an essential component of healthy cells.

Until recently, however, because it is found sandwiched between the inner and outer surfaces of cell membranes, cell biologists thought cholesterol's main work was confined to interactions with other molecules in the membrane.

For instance, in 2011, a team of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of California, Irvine, using neutron diffraction, revealed how cholesterol helped to "maintain order" within the cell membrane.

But Cho and colleagues have discovered cholesterol also appears to interact with proteins in the interior of the cell.

Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues

Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds", according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people.

The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the US about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares (3.7bn acres) of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises.

The report claims that hunger has reached "epic proportions" since the technology was developed. Besides this, only two GM "traits" have been developed on any significant scale, despite investments of tens of billions of dollars, and benefits such as drought resistance and salt tolerance have yet to materialise on any scale.

Most worrisome, say the authors of the Global Citizens' Report on the State of GMOs, is the greatly increased use of synthetic chemicals, used to control pests despite biotech companies' justification that GM-engineered crops would reduce insecticide use.