If your Mama was anything like mine, you no doubt grew up with the constant admonition that “you are what you eat.” And despite the silly position of the AMA back in the early 1980s that there was no evidence to support the idea that diet has any direct relationship with health, almost all mothers know better. Thus it’s not entirely unexpected that medical science should be learning about the many ways that diet does indeed affect health, but it is welcome to wise Moms everywhere.

First up, a paper published in the journal Science by a research team at the University of Wisconsin demonstrates that simply reducing the amount of food eaten works to blunt the effects of aging and significantly delay onset of age-relatted conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and brain atrophy. The research was conducted over 20 years on Rhesus monkeys at the National Primate Research Center at UW-Madison.

Conclusion? A restricted calorie diet will help you live longer and stay healthier.

The American Dietetic Association has also released an updated position paper on vegetarian diets that concludes a well-planned meatless diet is both healthful and nutritionally adequate and can help prevent or even treat chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart disease.

Vegetarian diets have long been associated with lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Because such diets are low-fat and generally provide more vitamins and minerals than a meat-based diet, the ADA has concluded that a meatless diet is appropriate for all stages of the human life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy and for athletes.

With ever increasing evidence that fewer calories, less meat and more fruits and vegetables can lead to a longer and healthier life, the number of vegetarians or semi-vegetarians among the population is expected to increase significantly over the next decade. Perhaps the most important take-away lesson from the evidence and research is that indulging in high-calorie processed foods and fatty meats to the point where a majority of the population weighs twice what they should weigh causes a huge chunk of the medical issues people suffer in the U.S.

It seems like the entire month of October has been one big Halloween Trick (not Treat) as the grotesque and blatantly illegal ‘melamine in food’ imported from China horror just keeps getting worse and worse. Some might wonder why all food products from China weren’t immediately banned back when tainted pet food cause the painful deaths of thousands of dogs and cats last year, once it was confirmed that Chinese state-owned food processors were adding the industrial plastic to wheat gluten to fool tests for protein content in this ubiquitous protein additive. Alas, imports were not banned, and now this dangerous adulterant is in hundreds of common food items.

Thousands of Chinese infants were poisoned when melamine was added to infant formulas and milk products. It’s in medicines exported and has caused sickness and death in Central and South America. Now it’s in candy and eggs and almost every wheat product from China. The US does not require country of origin labeling of foods, thus American consumers have no real way of knowing they’re buying poison.

Tainted Chinese Products Criminal Timeline traces the tainted Chinese food scandal back through 2004, and includes many other adulterants Americans have been ingesting. Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. It is not a pretty picture, and our FDA has been criminally lax in their duty of protecting the safety of our food supply.

As for melamine, here’s an Update: now coffee, Snickers, KitKat, M&Ms and Heinz products such as baby cereals and crackers. The latest contamination is being found in eggs, which got there via tainted animal feed. This has caused United Nations officials to worry that it is also in chicken, pork, farmed fish and other meats.

Melamine causes kidney stones and kidney failure. The Chinese babies who died all died of kidney and organ failure. So it comes as no surprise that doctors are now seeing a rise in kidney stones in US children as young as 5. The situation is very, very serious.

Educate yourself! Fused Report has a cache of reports on melamine contamination from news organizations all over the world, and Food Standards offers a detailed risk assessment of the adulterant. There is a constantly updated list of tainted products available at the Natural Remedies Blog too, and with Halloween coming this Friday pay special attention to the candy list. Also see FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy.

Protect yourself and your family, because our government’s FDA will not.

Links:

A Rise in Kidney Stones Seen in U.S. Children
Cache of News Reports on Melamine Contamination
Food Standards: detailed risk assessment
List of Contaminated Products
FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy

I don’t know about you, but in my family there is an unfortunate tendency to develop serious headaches. Two sisters have suffered migraines since childhood, my daughter gets them too, and her son has fairly regular headaches that end up sending him to his bed in pain. Lots of people get headaches not quite so severe, and various headache remedies have become part of urban legend lore as well as accounting for billions of dollars’ worth of pharmaceutical company profits over the years.

Sometimes it’s not just a matter of “take two aspirin, call me in the morning.” Luckily, Stephanie over at the blog One Big Health Nut has researched a total of 23 Ways To Get Rid Of & Prevent Headaches. These have solid science behind them and links to demonstrate that, so it’s definitely a blog post worthy of checking out and keeping in your bookmarks if you or anyone in your family suffers from debilitating headaches.

I was gratified to see that our own long-time “family recipes” are indeed supported by good science. Such as drinking lots of water, dehydration being a cause of headaches. Limiting caffine and alcohol, eating regularly and staying away from fried foods too. The only thing missing that I would add to the list is one that Stephanie semi-includes. She advises that a paste of cinnamon and water applied to the brow and temples can help relieve headaches, and this is supported enough to use if you can. The same idea using hot pepper powder has worked well in my own family, the capsaicin stimulating scalp circulation. Which I presume is the method that works with cinnamon paste.

This very useful resource is excellent, so do keep it on file!

It would be great to see some of these questions come up in the debates, so that follow-ups to the positions could be explored.

1918 Flu Antibodies Resurrected from Elderly Survivors

Back in 2005 some researchers journeyed to the Alaskan permafrost to dig up some bodies of victims of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million people worldwide as World War 1 came to a close. They were able to recover the virus from these bodies because they have been frozen since burial.

Now researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt have recovered antibodies against this deadly flu virus from survivors of the pandemic. They collected blood samples from 32 survivors age 91 to 101, and found that all samples reacted to the virus – indicating that immunity has been preserved for 90 years. This represents the longest immune system ‘memory’ thus far observed.

The real test came when researchers at the CDC infected mice with the 1918 influenza and then administered the antibodies. Those receiving the lowest dose of antibodies died, all mice given the highest dose survived. The “extremely rare” B cells that produced the antibodies in all the survivors’ blood are some of “the most potent antibodies ever isolated against a virus,” and may prove invaluable against other viruses or for developing new antibodies against expected future pandemics.

In the year 2030, what’s left of us ‘Baby-Boomers’ will be in our late 70s and early 80s. We will not likely be the largest demographic bump in the general population at that time, as more than half of us will have died off by then. 2030 is also the year that researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with researchers at other institutions, project that 86% of Americans could be obese if current trends continue.

Worse, projections show that 96% of non-Hispanic black women and 91% of Mexican-American men will be in those numbers. The costs of this situation amount to nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of obesity-related health care spending, or 1 in every 6 health care dollars.

The projection is based on three decades’ worth of collected data from national surveys. As the obese population ages the health care costs related to being fat will more than double every decade. In addition to hypertension, heart disease and stroke, there is also the link between being overweight and type-2 diabetes. Not to mention the fact that obese children – an increasing problem – have a shorter life expectancy than healthy children.

Obesity and obesity-related diseases – particularly type-2 diabetes – are quickly increasing in all developed countries enjoying a ‘modern’ diet of junk food. Among the dietary factors associated with diabetes, sugar-sweetened and fruit beverages appear to be among the worst, possibly due to the amount of fructose in fruit juices and high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks. Fructose more easily contributes to fatty tissue than other forms of sugar.

At the same time, research shows that actually eating fresh fruits and vegetables significantly reduces the chances of developing diabetes. Low-fat diets don’t seem to change the odds much, though significant weight loss itself does help reduce chances of developing diabetes.

Perhaps the best advice anyone could follow is simply not to get fat – or lose weight and get fit. Eat less, exercise more, eat more whole foods and less processed foods. Your body will thank you for it, and so will your pocketbook!

USPS Alzheimer’s Stamp

Rapid Alzheimer’s Improvement After New Immune-based Treatment

The open access journal BMC Neurology published research this week detailing some amazing results from the use of the anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha [TNF-alpha] drug to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease from a novel immune system approach. Researchers documented improvement in language function within minutes of administering the drug, tending to confirm preliminary evidence that disrupted neural communication in Alzheimer’s patients may be reversible.

This is a very hopeful development, as are results from clinical drug trials in recent years slowing the progression of the disease in elderly patients as well as ongoing research into substances that may help clear the beta amyloid placques in the brain tissue, characteristic of the disease. As the Baby Boomer generation ages, it is estimated that up to 10 million of them will get this awful disease.

Some doctors are expressing concern about unduly raising hopes in patients and their families on these very early findings. Dr. Sam Gandy, chairman of the Alzheimer’s Association’s medical and science council, has expressed suspicion due to the private nature of the research because the lead researcher has a financial interest in the drug. It is hoped that other laboratories and scientists will be able to duplicate the results, but that more rigorous clinical work remains to be done.

UCLA associate professor of neurology John Ringman and colleagues have reported in the journal Neurology that there may be a way to detect Alzheimer’s even before symptoms appear by measuring the level of certain proteins in the blood and spinal fluid. These proteins are potentially useful biomarkers to identify and track progression of the disease before the patient shows any signs of deteriorating mental acuity.

The amount of suffering for the families of those 10 million people could be reduced drastically if there were effective treatments, so there is a good deal of public and private research ongoing. Hopefully when the Boomers reach an age where they have ready access to medical care via Medicare, diagnosis and treatment will be available to them.

Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.

Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs – and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases – can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.

The study by Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin used data from 2004 (the latest available to them) from doctors and the pharmaceutical industry itself. Their analysis showed that drug companies spend nearly 25% of every sales dollar on promotion, but less than 13.5% on research and development. Out of domestic expenditures in 2004 on drugs of $235.4 billion.

Back in 2006 the New York Times published an article about another aspect of drug marketing, entitled Doctors Object to Gathering of Drug Data. This article describes the practice of pharmaceutical companies keeping computerized dossiers showing which physicians are prescribing what drugs. This lets drug sales representatives pressure a doctor to write more prescriptions for a name-brand medicine, or offer a means to use high-pressure tactics to convince a doctor to prescribe their company’s version of a drug instead of a competitor’s version or generic alternative.

Seems that so many doctors were complaining about this use of their prescription records to enable high-pressure salesmen to waste their precious clinical time, that Big Pharma became concerned that states would start applying restrictions. So the AMA decided it would be generous and give individual physicians the choice of keeping their prescribing practices off limits to drug companies and their sales forces (90,000 strong, per 2006 estimate).

The Times quotes Jamie Reidy, a former drug salesman for Eli Lilly who was fired for writing Hard Sell, an exposé of pharmaceutical industry sales practices, talking about the use of prescription data…

“It’s the most powerful tool a drug rep has, for sure.” He goes on to describe the targeting of “cowboys,” the term used for physicians who start prescribing a drug as soon as it hits the market. Drug sales reps will go see that doctor in the first week to enlist him in prescribing their newest, most expensive drugs. Reidy revealed that the prescription data for doctors is updated every two weeks.

The high cost of drugs in the U.S. is contributing significantly to our current (and worsening) health care crisis. It’s also limiting availability of Medicaid and other government programs in many states designed to insure the poor, because too much of the funding goes toward expensive, name-brand drugs instead of less expensive or generic alternatives. It’s also contributing to the overall Medicare crisis that is not solved by the maze of prescription drug benefit plans hardly anyone can understand.

There are other issues involved in the crisis related to overprescription generally, the tendency to treat all conditions with drugs rather than actual medical therapies, and the extension of our drug-dependency to increasingly younger and younger patients who may not need drug therapies at all. It’s an issue to keep an eye on for sure!

Links:

Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development

Doctors Object to Gathering of Drug Data

Health Spending Exceeded Record $2 Trillion in 2006

Drug Marketing Fraud: Whistle-Blower Awarded $1.6 Million