Health & WellnessS


Bulb

CSPI's "Top 10 Risky Foods" List Gets It Wrong: We Need More Leafy Greens, Not Less

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:28 UTC
This week, the CSPI released a "risky foods" list aiming to reveal the top ten riskiest foods responsible for most food-borne illnesses. Number one on the list is "leafy greens." Does this mean people should stop eating leafy greens? Of course not: The list itself is flawed from the very start.

There's nothing inherently "risky" about leafy greens. There has never been a single food-borne illness caused by a leafy green. What causes food-borne illnesses are the bacteria that get onto the leafy greens. Putting the focus on the food item itself is not only scientifically inaccurate; it's also misleading to consumers.

The real question is how do foods get contaminated with e.coli? And that answer involves the growing and processing of those foods. Foods that are grown near factory animal farms are far more likely to be contaminated with e.coli than those grown in more natural settings. Foods grown using methods of biodynamic gardening are far more likely to be free from e.coli than those grown as monoculture crops.
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Attention

Swine flu's bigger impact on blacks and Hispanics is not being addressed

Juan Gonzalez
NY Daily News
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:13 UTC
H1N1 vaccination
© Giancarli / NY Daily NewsBrandon Marty, 13, gets his H1N1 vaccination in the form of a nasal spray at Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY.
During all their swine flu briefings the past few months, city and federal health officials have been virtually silent about the outsize impact the pandemic appears to be having on blacks and Hispanics.

The Centers for Disease Control alluded to the problem in a small Sept. 4 report, but only in a passing mention.

That report, an analysis of the first H1N1-related deaths among U.S. children, revealed that 33% (12 of 36) were among Hispanics. All told, half of the H1N1 children's deaths between April and August were among African-Americans and Hispanics. That's considerably more than the percentage of both groups in the population.

Comment: Although the author's support for vaccination is questionable at best, he does make an important observation about the disproportionate spread of the disease. But are "disparities in health conditions" the cause, or are we seeing the result of something more sinister, such as an ethnic specific virus?

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Sun

Skin Cancer Can Be Inherited: Studies


Reuters
Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:56 UTC
Sunbath
© Reuters/Jamal SaidiA woman sunbathes on a beach in Jounieh, north of Beirut June 10, 2007.
New York - Want to reduce your risk of skin cancer? Wear sun screen, of course. But two new studies suggest that choosing your relatives carefully could also be helpful.

One found that having an identical twin with melanoma increased a person's own risk of developing the disease much more than having a fraternal twin with this type of skin cancer. The other found that having a sibling or parent with one of several different types of non-melanoma skin cancer increased risk as well.

Several studies have suggested melanoma and other skin cancers run in families, but it can be difficult to tease out the difference between the influence of genes and environment. In the Australian study, Dr. Sri N. Shekar of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and his colleagues attempted to do so by looking at twin pairs in which at least one sibling had been diagnosed with melanoma.
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The Why of Sleep

Tina Hesman Saey
Science News
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:00 UTC
Silent activity
© LaurentIn sleep, the body may be still, but the brain is active.
Brain studies may reveal the purpose of a behavior both basic and mystifying

In a lab at MIT, a small black mouse named Buddy sleeps alone inside a box. A cone resembling a satellite dish sits atop his head. But the dish doesn't receive signals from outer space. Instead it sends transmissions from deep inside Buddy's brain to a bank of computers across the room.

Scientists like Jennie Young eavesdrop on the transmissions, essentially reading Buddy's mind, or at least that part of his mind occupied with a recent trip along a Plexiglas track littered with chocolate sprinkles. Young and her colleagues in Susumu Tonegawa's laboratory are monitoring nerve cells inside the hippocampus, one of the brain's most important learning and memory centers. Some of the cells in the sea horse - shaped hippocampus fired bursts of electrical energy as Buddy moved along the track. As he sleeps in his black box, those same cells spark to life again, replaying progress along the track in fast-forward or rapid reverse.

By recording the slumbering Buddy's brain cell activity, the scientists hope to glean clues to one of biology's greatest mysteries: the reason for sleep. Although sleep is among the most basic of behaviors, its function has proved elusive. Scientists say sleep's job is to save energy, or to build up substances needed during waking or to tear down unneeded connections between brain cells. Some emphasize sleep's special role in learning and memory. Others suggest that sleep regulates emotions. Or strengthens the immune system. And some scientists believe sleep is simply something that emerges naturally from having networks of neurons wired together.
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Dying to Sleep

Tina Hesman Saey
Science News
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:00 UTC
Sleepy
© Tommy LeonardiSleepy volunteers put pedal to the metal in a University of Pennsylvania driving simulator.
Getting too little sleep can impair body and brain and could even be deadly

For many people, days just don't seem long enough. In order to cram everything into one 24-hour period, something has to give. Judging by many surveys of Americans, it's sleep.

Sleep is regarded by some as unproductive, wasteful downtime. People who would rather hit the hay than the dance floor are told that only losers snooze and that they can sleep when they're dead.

But new data about sleep's benefits suggest that losing sleep might speed up death's arrival. Recent research also shows that people who don't snooze enough face a higher risk of losing their health than those who regularly get a good night's sleep.

"What is certain is that we can't do without sleep," says Peter Meerlo, a neuroscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
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Sleep Gone Awry

Laura Sanders
Science News
Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:00 UTC
Sleep
© Oscar BurrielMore than a third of U.S. adults suffer occasional bouts of insomnia, with 10 to 15 percent experiencing a long-term, chronic form of the sleep disorder.
Researchers inch closer to causes, cures for insomnia, narcolepsy

If Ben Franklin had been able to live by his own advice, he might have been even healthier, wealthier and wiser. But he was a notorious insomniac, rumored to have been such a poor sleeper that he required two beds so he could always crawl into one with cool sheets when he couldn't sleep. Getting a good night's sleep turned out to be more difficult than taming lightning, heating houses or designing bifocal specs.

Today millions of people afflicted by sleep disorders know how Franklin felt. Some people can't fall asleep even when they're exhausted. Yet other people fall asleep when they should be wide awake. Although sleep disorders take many different forms, they do have one thing in common: The more researchers learn, the more they have left to figure out. Sleep problems present a constellation of symptoms, trigger overlapping diagnoses and divulge no clear causes.

"We always feel like we're one step away from getting all of the answers," says Adi Aran of Stanford University, "but I really believe that in the next decade we will understand much more about sleep disorders."
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When the Economy is in the Red, Are People Really in the Pink?

Carina Storrs
Scientific American
Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:00 UTC
Depression
© Flickr/Ethan StockDRIVEN TO DEATH?: While the Great Depression forced people to give up luxuries, it may also have improved the nation's life expectancy.
A recent study finds that economic expansion could be worse for your health than a downturn, revealing a possible upside to today's recession

Unemployment reached 23 percent and the GDP shrank by as much as 14 percent, so it's hard to imagine a silver lining to the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. But could the general health of the U.S. population actually have improved when the nation's economic fitness took multiple nosedives? And, if a floundering economy improves longevity, what does this say about our current recession?

It turns out that the bleakest years of the Great Depression, as gauged by GDP and unemployment rate, saw the greatest gains in life expectancy and drops in mortality rates. And during the years that the economy perked up, the nation paid the price in terms of health, according to a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To look at the relationship between economic and population well-being, social scientists José Tapia Granados and Ana Diez-Roux of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor amassed U.S. Census Bureau data on mortality rates, life expectancy, unemployment and GDP for each year from 1920 to 1940. "What this [study] does is to look in detail at data that have now been available for some years but have not been looked at in detail," Tapia says.
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Are You Asleep? Exploring the Mind's Twilight Zone

Laura Spinney
New Scientist
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:00 UTC
Blurred Lines
© TessarloBlurred lines between asleep and awake
Earlier this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report's authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair's brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down (Sleep Medicine, vol 10, p 247).

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.
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Scientists Seek to Manage Dopamine's Good and Bad Sides

Robert S. Boyd
PhysOrg
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:00 UTC
The good, the bad and the ugly: That's a quick summary of the effects of dopamine, a natural brain chemical that's linked to pleasure, addiction and disease.

This little molecule -- it consists of only 22 atoms -- is essential to life but can be a curse sometimes. Too much or too little of it can lead to drug abuse, reckless thrill-seeking, obesity, the tremors of Parkinson's disease, even restless leg syndrome, an irresistible urge to move your legs.

Although dopamine was identified almost a century ago, brain scientists are still trying to figure out how to manage its undesirable effects, such as cocaine or nicotine addiction.

"There is no currently approved medication for treating cocaine addiction," Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said Monday as she announced the successful preliminary test of a possible future vaccine for the dangerous drug.
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Info

Fluoride Tide Halted by Ancient Court

Matt Smith
Southern Daily Echo
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:18 UTC
Fluoride tide
© Daily EchoFluoride tide halted by ancient court
It took three times of asking and the casting vote of Southampton's sheriff.

But Southampton's ancient Court Leet agreed to ask the city council to rethink its support for adding fluoride to tap water.

Anti-fluoride campaigners seized the chance to put their case for councillors to vote again on the scheme, which would affect 160,000 city residents, following the extent of public opposition.

Some 72 per cent of the 10,000 responses to a consultation by the South Central Strategic health Authority were not in favour and its decision to press ahead is now subject to a judicial review.

The jury of court, which has sat since the 14th century to hear "presentments" from citizens on matters of local concern, at first refused two requests for a fluoride rethink. A third request evenly split the jury after a couple of members left the session early and the sheriff, Councillor Carol Cunio, used her casting vote to accept it. The city council will now have to consider the court's plea for another fluoride debate.
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