The Cuban diet: eat less, exercise more—and preventable deaths are halved

by Jeremy Laurence, The Independent

A country whose citizens collectively succeeded in losing weight and increasing their level of physical activity saw their health improve and death rates plunge.

Fat In Mom’s Butt And Thighs Are ‘Building Blocks’ For Babies’ Brains

The Inquisitr

Curvy moms with fat on their bottoms and thighs can now attest to the fact there’s at least one good reason for this. A new study just released uncovers the reason why women have fat they don’t want in these so-called “problem areas.”

If the food’s in plastic, what’s in the food?

By Susan Freinkel, Washington Post

In a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers put five San Francisco families on a three-day diet of food that hadn’t been in contact with plastic.

Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation

By Nilofer Merchant, HBR

I find myself, probably like many of you, spending way too much time in front of my computer. When I do face-to-face meetings, my colleagues and I typically met around some conference table, sometimes at an airport lounge (nothing like getting the most out of a long layover), and quite often at coffee shops (hello Starbucks!). But that means that the most common denominator across all these locations wasn’t the desk, or, the keyboard, or even the coffee. The common denominator in the modern workday is our, um, tush.

The bipolar/Ritalin Scandal

The Real Biederman Scandal

By Jacob Azerrad, PhD

 The real scandal perpetrated by Biederman has nothing to do with his consulting fee shenanigans and everything to do with the real life (and death) consequences of the methods now used by modern pediatric psychiatry to tag normal childhood behaviors with diagnoses – like “childhood bipolar” -- and the pediatric medical profession’s complicit acquiescence to such malarkey.

Plastic makes you fat!

Warnings From a Flabby Mouse

By Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times 

ONE of the puzzles of the modern world is why we humans are growing so tubby. Maybe these two mice offer a clue.

They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American.

First-Ever Lifetime Feeding Study Finds Genetically Engineered Corn Causes Massive Tumors, Organ Damage, and Early Death

Dr. Mercola, September 

 The first-ever lifetime feeding study evaluating the health risks of genetically engineered foods was published online on September 19, and the results are troubling, to say the least. This new study joins a list of over 30 other animal studies showing toxic or allergenic problems with genetically engineered foods.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, found that rats fed a type of genetically engineered corn that is prevalent in the US food supply for two years developed massive mammary tumors, kidney and liver damage, and other serious health problems.

The research was considered so “hot” that the work was done under strict secrecy. According to a French article in Le Nouvel Observateur, the researchers used encrypted emails, phone conversations were banned, and they even launched a decoy study to prevent sabotage.

According to the authors: “The health effects of a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup, and Roundup alone (from 0.1ppb in water), were studied 2 years in rats. [Editors note: this level of Roundup is permitted in drinking water and GE crops in the US]

In females, all treated groups died 2-3 times more than controls, and more rapidly. This difference was visible in 3 male groups fed GMOs.

All results were hormone and sex dependent, and the pathological profiles were comparable. Females developed large mammary tumors almost always more often than and before controls, the pituitary was the second most disabled organ; the sex hormonal balance was modified by GMO and Roundup treatments.

In treated males, liver congestions and necrosis were 2.5-5.5 times higher… Marked and severe kidney nephropathies were also generally 1.3-2.3 greater. Males presented 4 times more large palpable tumors than controls, which occurred up to 600 days earlier.

Biochemistry data confirmed very significant kidney chronic deficiencies; for all treatments and both sexes, 76% of the altered parameters were kidney related. These results can be explained by the non linear endocrine-disrupting effects of Roundup, but also by the overexpression of the transgene in the GMO and its metabolic consequences.”

Does 10 percent or more of your diet consist of genetically engineered (GE) ingredients? At present, you can’t know for sure, since GE foods are not labeled in the US. But chances are, if you eat processed foods, your diet is chock full of genetically engineered ingredients you didn’t even know about.

The study in question includes photos and graphs. They really are not exaggerating when they say it caused massive tumors… They are huge! Some of the tumors weighed in at 25 percent of the rat’s total body weight. This is the most current and best evidence to date of the toxic effects of GE foods.

Rats only live a few years. Humans live around 80 years, so we will notice these effects in animals long before we see them in humans. The gigantic human lab experiment is only about 10 years old, so we are likely decades away from tabulating the human casualties. This is some of the strongest evidence to date that we need to avoid these foods.

Do we really wait 50 years to see what GE foods will do to human health and lifespan?

Related news also sheds light on the massive devastation brought on the environment by GE crops, and how soil destruction ends up affecting your health by decimating the nutrient content in the foods you eat.

In response to a scientific study that determined Western corn rootworms on two Illinois farms had developed resistance to Monsanto’s YieldGard corn, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made an admission about genetically engineered crops: Yes, there is “mounting evidence” that Monsanto’s insecticide-fighting corn is losing its effectiveness in the Midwest. Last year, resistant rootworms infested corn fields in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska.

But YieldGard is just one of Monsanto’s problems. Roundup-Ready crops are creating super-resistant weeds that no longer respond to the herbicide. In fact, the problem is so bad that 20 million acres of cotton, soybean and corn have already been invaded by Roundup-resistant weeds.

Unfortunately, resistant weeds are not the only, or the worst, side effect of Roundup-Ready crops, genetically engineered to withstand otherwise lethal doses of glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup.

Mounting evidence tells us glyphosate itself may be far more dangerous than anyone ever suspected… Earlier this month, Purdue scientist Dr. Don Huber again spoke out about “the woes of GMO’s” and the inherent dangers of glyphosate in an article published by GM Watch.

“Corn used to be the healthiest plant you could grow. Now, multiple diseases, pests, and weak plants are the common denominator of ‘modern’ hybrids,” he writes.

“Over three decades ago we started the shift to a monochemical glyphosate herbicide program that was soon accompanied by glyphosate- and insect-resistant genetically engineered crops.

These two changes in agricultural practices—the excessive application of a strong essential mineral chelating, endocrine-disrupting chemical for weed control and the genetically engineered production of new toxins in our food crops—was accompanied by abandonment of years of scientific research based on the scientific precautionary principle. We substituted a philosophical ‘substantially equivalent,’ a new term coined to avoid accountability for the lack of understanding of consequences of our new activities, for science.”

Dr. Huber commented, “Future historians may well look back upon our time and write, not about how many pounds of pesticide we did or didn’t apply, but by how willing we are to sacrifice our children and future generations for this massive genetic engineering experiment that is based on flawed science and failed promises just to benefit the bottom line of a commercial enterprise.”

Foes of Modified Corn Find Support in a Study

By Andrew Pollack, NY Times

Rats fed either genetically engineered corn or the herbicide Roundup had an increased risk of developing tumors, suffering organ damage and dying prematurely, according to a new study that was immediately swept up into the furor surrounding crop biotechnology when it was released Wednesday.

The study, conducted by a prominent opponent of genetically engineered crops, was immediately criticized by some other scientists, who said the methods were flawed and that other research had not found similar problems.

But in California, proponents of a ballot measure that would require genetically modified foods to be labeled immediately seized on the study as support for their cause. The French government ordered a review of the findings, saying they could possibly result in the suspension of European imports of that type of corn.

The study, which is being published in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, was led by Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen in France. He is also a leader of the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering, which sponsored the research.

The study followed 200 rats for two years, essentially their entire lives, far longer than the typical 90-day feeding studies used to win regulatory approval of genetically engineered crops in some countries. While there have been some other long-term studies, none has involved as many animals or as many detailed measurements.

“The results were really alarming,” Dr. Séralini said in a telephone news conference conducted by an organization in Britain opposed to genetically modified crops. He said that the tumors did not develop until well after 90 days, meaning they might have been missed by shorter studies.

The rats in the study were split into 10 groups, each containing 10 male and 10 female rats. Six of the groups were fed different amounts of a corn developed by Monsanto to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup. In some cases the corn had been sprayed in the field with Roundup.

Three other groups were given different doses of Roundup in their drinking water, with the lowest dose corresponding to what might be found in tap water in the United States, the authors said.

The 10th group, the control, was fed nonengineered corn and plain water.

The study found that in groups that ate the engineered corn, up to 50 percent of the males and 70 percent of the females died before they would have from normal aging, compared with 30 percent of the males and 20 percent of the females in the control group.

Some 50 to 80 percent of the female rats developed tumors compared with only 30 percent of the controls. And there were several times as many cases of liver and kidney injury in the exposed rats.

Some critics pointed out that the new findings contradicted other studies. One review of long-term studies, published earlier this year, concluded that those studies did not present evidence of health hazards.

Dr. Chassy said that people and livestock had been eating genetically modified grains for years without evidence of the high death rates and tumors in the study. “Curious that no increase in tumor incidence has been reported in animals eating large amounts of such grains,” he said.

Monsanto, in a statement, said it would review the study, but that other studies had confirmed the safety of its crops.

In India, Henry Ford’s Assembly Line Inspires the High-Tech Hospital of the Future

By Julien Bouissou, Le Monde, BANGALORE

Dr. Devi Shetty in Bangalore created a low-cost hospital franchise, offering open-heart surgeries for only $2,000, compared to a minimum of $20,000 in the U.S. and Europe. The Narayana Hrudayalaya group has 14 hospitals in 11 Indian cities, and performs 12% of all heart operations in this country of a billion inhabitants. “A century after the first heart operation, only 10% of patients worldwide can afford it. Lives are lost because of the hefty price tags on these operations. It’s a crime,” complains Shetty, who was Mother Teresa’s doctor. But behind his well-rehearsed speech —one of the reasons why he is known as the “Messiah of the poor”— there is an acute businessman. His group makes $250 million in revenue, and a profit margin most American hospitals can only dream of. The reason behind these unbeatable prices is not compassion for the poor but rather a keen sense of management.

In his hospital, Shetty rationalizes every task, from surgical scrubs in the locker room to the nurse handing the instruments to the surgeon in the operating room. A century ago, Henry Ford chose the same method to assemble cars for a lower cost and in record time. What worked for Ford also works for surgery: the time has come for assembly-line operations. The Bangalore hospital’s 29 surgeons operate 70 hours a week. Each one of them is specialized in two or three types of operations, so that they can work faster. “The more a surgeon operates, the better he becomes,” Shetty explains.

As he operates patients the same way one would assemble cars, Shetty applies methods inspired by Toyota: “They invented quality groups. Now, in my hospital too, I want nurses to be able to tell the surgeon if he needs to change his gloves because they are dirty.”

Unlike the U.S., wages are not the hospital’s main expense. The most expensive post is medicine and disposable materials. So Shetty asked himself a question: who in the world knows the best way to buy? His answer: Wal-Mart. To learn how to reduce inventory and handling costs by implementing Just in Time ordering (JIT), the hospital’s managers read all the manuals and bestsellers written on Wal-Mart.

In the near future, temperature curves and medical charts will be replaced by electronic tablets, connected to a main computer, where skilled nurses will be able to follow the patients’ progress. Technology also solved another problem: Previously, patients needed to be examined closely by a doctor. Now, in most cases it can be done through a Skype consultation. In Narayana Hrudayalaya hospitals, more than 53,000 patients have been healed thanks to e-medicine services. “Computer-aided diagnosis will be a norm in the next five years,” Shetty affirms.

Shetty wants to reinvent the hospital, in the way the Indian carmaker Tata revolutionized cars by building the world’s cheapest automobile- the Nano. A 300-bed hospital is about to be built in Mysore, a city 150 kilometers from Bangalore. It will have only one floor, to avoid the expense of installing elevators—the latter will be replaced by passageways. The hospital won’t be air-conditioned because it contributes to the spread of nosocomial diseases; there will be a natural ventilation system instead. The building will be built in record time for only 6 million dollars. All together, Shetty’s group plans to invest 830 million euros in the construction of 100 low-cost hospitals in India, and three “medical towns” with a capacity of 30,000 beds.

Following heart surgery, eye operations and cancer treatments are about to make an entrance into medical Fordism. Next to his cardiology clinic, Shetty has built a hospital specialized in oncology, as well as ophthalmologic, orthopedic and dental clinics. It is like a huge supermarket, where golf carts take patients from one specialty to another.

The low-cost hospital model now interests other countries. The Narayana Hrudayalaya group has invested in a new hospital in the Cayman Islands. Others are expected to follow suit in Ethiopia and European Eastern countries. “I’m going to countries in which Indian doctors are authorized to practice medicine,” Shetty explains.

The Narayana Hrudayalaya empire was built on the ruins of the public health system. In state-owned hospitals, there aren’t enough doctors, and patients often wait months before being operated. Public health expenses represent only 1.4% of the Indian GNP—less than in Bangladesh or Nepal. Private hospitals are often the only solution, even for very poor people.

In Narayana Hrudayalaya hospitals, the wealthy and the poor have the right to the same treatment. Patients arrive either in luxury cars with drivers or by foot, sometimes wearing only a loincloth. This is Shetty’s revolutionary idea: a private hospital which doesn’t only cater to the wealthy. His hospital is now part of a case study taught in Harvard Business School.

Fewer Lies, Better Health?

By Kathleen Doheny, WebMD Health News

 People who make an effort to lie less say they have better relationships and report fewer health complaints, according to new research.

“Our findings support the notion that lying less can cause better health through improving relationships,” says researcher Anita Kelly, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. “Improvements in the relationships accounted for a significant improvement in health.”

Although other research has focused on how to detect a lie or how often people lie, Kelly wanted to look at whether she could convince people to lie less, then look at the effects of less lying.

She presented her research at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Orlando.

On average, Americans lie about 11 times a week, says Kelly, citing surveys by others.

Some of those are whoppers. Other are white lies, often meant to spare feelings or save face.

Kelly and her co-researcher, Lijuan Wang, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, assigned 110 people, aged 18 to 71, to one of two groups.

Both groups came to the lab each week to take a polygraph test.

One group was encouraged to stop telling major and minor lies for the 10-week study. The researchers suggested strategies for lying less, such as declining to answer questions.

The comparison group got no special instructions about lying. They were simply told that they would have to tell the researchers how many lies they had told that week when they were given the lie detector test.

Each group answered questions about their close relationships and about their mental and physical health each week.

For instance, they reported if they had trouble falling asleep or had headaches.

Over the 10-week study, both groups lied less. However, the group told they couldn’t lie told fewer lies than the comparison group.

By week 10, the no-lie group was telling, on average, less than one white lie, down from more than three in week two. The comparison group was still telling more than three, down from nearly six in week two.

Both groups reduced their major lies, but the no-lie group reduced those lies much more.

The link between less lying and improved health was seen in both groups, Kelly found.

“In a given week, if they told fewer lies, they also reported their health was better,” Kelly says.

“The connection between lying less and improved health, following the people over 10 weeks, was amplified by being in the no-lie group,” she says. “The connection was even stronger.”

For instance, in a given week, if a member of the no-lie group reduced white lies by three, they had more than four fewer mental health complaints.

In the comparison group, if someone reduced their white lies by three, they had just two fewer mental health complaints, she says.

“When a given person was lying less, they also reported their relationships were better,” she says.

That, she says, explains the link between lying less and better health.

Why? “What we are suggesting is, not violating others’ expectation of honesty is likely to build trust, which may be key to good health through improving our relationships.”

Sugar can make you dumb, US scientists warn

 AFP 

Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brainpower, according to US scientists who published a study Tuesday showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats' memories.

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup -- a common ingredient in processed foods -- as drinking water for six weeks.

One group of rats was supplemented with brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), while the other group was not.

Before the sugar drinks began, the rats were enrolled in a five-day training session in a complicated maze. After six weeks on the sweet solution, the rats were then placed back in the maze to see how they fared.

"The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

"Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall the route they'd learned six weeks earlier."

A closer look at the rat brains revealed that those who were not fed DHA supplements had also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates brain function.

"Because insulin can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the hormone may signal neurons to trigger reactions that disrupt learning and cause memory loss," Gomez-Pinilla said.

In other words, eating too much fructose could interfere with insulin's ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar, which is necessary for processing thoughts and emotions.

"Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning," Gomez-Pinilla said.

"Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new."

High-fructose corn syrup is commonly found in soda, condiments, applesauce, baby food and other processed snacks.

The average American consumes more than 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

While the study did not say what the equivalent might be for a human to consume as much high-fructose corn syrup as the rats did, researchers said it provides some evidence that metabolic syndrome can affect the mind as well as the body.

"Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Gomez-Pinilla.

"Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."

The study appeared in the Journal of Physiology.

If the food’s in plastic, what’s in the food?

By Susan Freinkel, Washington Post, April 16, 2012
In a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers put five San Francisco families on a three-day diet of food that hadn’t been in contact with plastic. When they compared urine samples before and after the diet, the scientists were stunned to see what a difference a few days could make: The participants’ levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to harden polycarbonate plastic, plunged—by two-thirds, on average—while those of the phthalate DEHP, which imparts flexibility to plastics, dropped by more than half.

The findings seemed to confirm what many experts suspected: Plastic food packaging is a major source of these potentially harmful chemicals, which most Americans harbor in their bodies. Other studies have shown phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) passing into food from processing equipment and food-prep gloves, gaskets and seals on non-plastic containers, inks used on labels—which can permeate packaging—and even the plastic film used in agriculture.

The government has long known that tiny amounts of chemicals used to make plastics can sometimes migrate into food. The Food and Drug Administration regulates these migrants as “indirect food additives” and has approved more than 3,000 such chemicals for use in food-contact applications since 1958. It judges safety based on models that estimate how much of a given substance might end up on someone’s dinner plate. If the concentration is low enough (and when these substances occur in food, it is almost always in trace amounts), further safety testing isn’t required.

Meanwhile, however, scientists are beginning to piece together data about the ubiquity of chemicals in the food supply and the cumulative impact of chemicals at minute doses. What they’re finding has some health advocates worried.

This is “a huge issue, and no [regulator] is paying attention,” says Janet Nudelman, program and policy director at the Breast Cancer Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the environmental causes of the disease. “It doesn’t make sense to regulate the safety of food and then put the food in an unsafe package.”

How common are these chemicals? Researchers have found traces of styrene, a likely carcinogen, in instant noodles sold in polystyrene cups. They’ve detected nonylphenol—an estrogen-mimicking chemical produced by the breakdown of antioxidants used in plastics—in apple juice and baby formula. They’ve found traces of other hormone-disrupting chemicals in various foods: fire retardants in butter, Teflon components in microwave popcorn, and dibutyltin—a heat stabilizer for polyvinyl chloride—in beer, margarine, mayonnaise, processed cheese and wine. They’ve found unidentified estrogenic substances leaching from plastic water bottles.

Finding out which chemicals might have seeped into your groceries is nearly impossible, given the limited information collected and disclosed by regulators, the scientific challenges of this research and the secrecy of the food and packaging industries, which view their components as proprietary information. Although scientists are learning more about the pathways of these substances—and their potential effect on health—there is an enormous debate among scientists, policymakers and industry experts about what levels are safe.

The issue is complicated by questions about cumulative exposure, as Americans come into contact with multiple chemical-leaching products every day. Those questions are still unresolved, says Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, part of the National Institutes of Health. Still, she said, “we do know that if chemicals act by the same pathway that they will act in an additive manner”—meaning that a variety of chemicals ingested separately in very small doses may act on certain organ systems or tissues as if they were a single cumulative dose.

According to Jane Muncke, a Swiss researcher who has reviewed decades’ worth of literature on chemicals used in packaging, at least 50 compounds with known or suspected endocrine-disrupting activity have been approved as food-contact materials.

“Some of those chemicals were approved back in the 1960s, and I think we’ve learned a few things about health since then,” says Thomas Neltner, director of a Pew Charitable Trusts project that examines how the FDA regulates food additives. “Unless someone in the FDA goes back and looks at those decisions in light of the scientific developments in the past 30 years, it’s pretty hard to say what is and isn’t safe in the food supply.”

“The whole system is stacked in favor of the food and packaging companies and against the protecting of public health,” Nudelman, of the Breast Cancer Fund, says. She and others are concerned that the FDA relies on manufacturers to provide migration data and preliminary safety information, and that the agency protects its findings as confidential. So consumers have no way of knowing what chemicals, and in what amounts, they are putting on the table every day.

It’s not just consumers who lack information. The companies that make the food in the packages can face the same black box. Brand owners often do not know the complete chemical contents of their packaging, which typically comes through a long line of suppliers.

What’s more, they might have trouble getting answers if they ask. Nancy Hirshberg, vice president of natural resources at Stonyfield Farm, describes how in 2010, the organic yogurt producer decided to launch a multipack yogurt for children in a container made of PLA, a corn-based plastic. Because children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of hormone disrupters and other chemicals, the company wanted to ensure that no harmful chemicals would migrate into the food.

Stonyfield was able to figure out all but 3 percent of the ingredients in the new packaging. But when asked to identify that 3 percent, the plastic supplier balked at revealing what it considered a trade secret. To break the impasse, Stonyfield hired a consultant who put together a list of 2,600 chemicals that the dairy didn’t want in its packaging. The supplier confirmed that none were in the yogurt cups, and a third party verified the information.