Dangerous "natural" remedies for women

Women are being urged to avoid so-called natural hormone replacement therapy because of health fears. Some women using the therapy, also known as bio-identical hormones, have suffered elevated hormone levels that could lead to excessive bleeding, increased risk of breast and uterine cancer and blood clots.

Dr John Eden, director of the Sydney Menopause Centre at Randwick's Royal Hospital for Women, said in the past year he had referred two cases of uterine cancer in patients who had been taking natural hormone replacement therapy, to the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Dr Eden said these "handmade hormones" were prepared by chemists - known as compounding chemists - without scrutiny. Although the process is legal, it is beyond the regulatory control of the TGA and state-based pharmacy boards. "There's a whole stack of women being treated out there with handmade hormones. It's untested hormone replacement therapy," he said. "Many women think they are getting a herbal treatment and are shocked to learn they are getting a hormone treatment."

One of the NHRT's major wholesalers, Professional Compounding Chemists of Australia, defended the practice, citing an exemption in the TGA Act that allows the preparation of medicines for individuals. The medication is usually made into troches, or lozenges, with the hormones absorbed through the lining of the mouth. NHRT contains the female hormones oestrogen and progesterone, sourced from yams or soy and synthesised in laboratories. However, NHRT can also include the male hormone testosterone, which has not been approved in Australia for use on women. Some compounds also include thyroid hormone, the little-understood sex steroid pregnenolone and a steroid called DHEA, which converts to testosterone and is banned from manufacture in Australia.

Dr Helena Teede, research director at Australia's leading women's health organisation, the Jean Hailes Foundation, said many women were unaware preparations were not approved by the TGA. "There has been very limited research into these preparations and women taking the compounds are essentially guinea pigs," she said.

A leading compounding chemist Richard Stenlake, in Bondi Junction, said he would welcome more regulation of the industry and there were discussions taking place about how it could be done. Mr Stenlake said he was one of the few compounding chemists with the expertise to do regular testing of NHRT preparations to make sure there was the correct dose of hormones. "There should be parameters put on compounding pharmacists that drug companies face," he said. "You have to make sure the dose prescribed by the doctor is the dose that goes out to the patient."

The PCCA defended the safety of the practice, citing an exemption in the TGA Act which allows the preparation of medicines for individuals. However, it acknowledged in a written statement there was no formal testing of the products. "Since compounded products are made on an individual basis according to the needs of a specific patient, it is not possible to test each product before supply to a patient without making the cost prohibitive. Many pharmacies do test samples of products that are made frequently," it said in the statement.

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Woad is good for you: "Woad, the plant that was used by Ancient Britons and Celts to make their striking blue warpaint, has been found to be one of the most potent natural sources of a compound used to fight cancer. A team of Italian scientists found that it contains 20 times more of the cancer-fighting chemical glucobrassicin than broccoli, a plant prized for its powers to combat the disease. The researchers, led by Stefania Galletti, of the University of Bologna, found that the glucobrassicin levels could be further enhanced to nearly 65 times. They hope that the discovery may advance research of disease treatments, particularly for breast cancer. The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, showed that the compound plays a defensive role in plants, with levels increasing by 30 per cent if a leaf is damaged. Derivatives of glucobrassicin can kill some plant pests, such as insects, and also appear to have antitumour properties, and are particularly effective against breast cancer."


Asthma mystery solved: "Asthma sufferers could one day be carrying a second "puffer" to help them battle attacks triggered by head colds. The speculation came after a breakthrough by British scientists which solves the riddle of why asthmatics often have an attack following a cold. The key lay in the immune systems of asthmatics, according to a team led by Professor Sebastian Johnston at the Imperial College London. They discovered that when asthmatics were infected by the virus causing the common cold they produced only half as many anti-viral proteins, called interferons, as non-asthmatics. That allowed the viruses to more easily irritate the lung cells of asthmatics and explained why inhalers or steroid drugs were often less effective when they had colds. The research, published yesterday in the journal Nature Medicine, was hailed as an exciting breakthrough. "I think this is the first time this has been shown," Asthma Foundation of Queensland spokesman Ian Yang said. "This is quite an exciting breakthrough because it leaves open a way to deal with the problem. "What they have found is these proteins are deficient in asthmatics. It could be if you supplemented these proteins using a second inhaler it might help with attacks." Dr Yang said if such an inhaler could be developed the timing would be critical as sufferers would probably have to use it within the first day or two of contracting a cold".

The other side of the soda/fat scare story

"Americans have sipped and slurped their way to fatness by drinking far more soda and other sugary drinks over the last four decades, a new scientific review concludes," reported the Associated Press this week. It's too bad that the AP didn't report the full story as told -- and yet, not told -- in the review itself, rather than apparently just regurgitating the researchers' media release.

Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (August 2006), the researchers reviewed 30 studies published from 1966-2005 and made a judgment call to the effect that, "The weight of epidemiologic and experimental evidence indicates that a greater consumption of [sugar-sweetened beverages] is associated with weight gain and obesity." That's the media-ready, quick-and-dirty message that the AP and other reporters latched onto for alarmist headlines.

But the researchers acknowledge in their review article that, "Despite our overall findings of a positive association between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and weight gain and obesity, other investigators have suggested that such a relation does not exist. Multiple studies. did not find a significant association between consumption of soda or fruit drinks and [weight gain] in American children and adolescents." The researchers concede that, "interpretation of the published studies is complicated by several method-related issues, including small sample sizes, short duration of follow-up, lack of repeated measures in dietary exposures and outcomes, and confounding by other diet and lifestyle factors."

So there is clearly another side to the story that is nowhere to be found in this week's headlines. That other side not mentioned in the AJCN study includes a 2002 report from the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine that reviewed 300 studies -- 10 times more studies than were reviewed in the AJCN study -- and concluded, "There is no clear and consistent association between increased intake of added sugars and [body weight]." The AJCN study also omits mention of a May 2005 article in the journal Obesity Reviews that concluded, "Overweight status was not associated with the intake of fruits, vegetables, and soft drinks or time spent on the computer." The Obesity Reviews study involved 137,593 adolescents -- more than the total number of study subjects and more than twice the number of adolescents than included in all 30 studies in the AJCN study.

As if omission of these pertinent facts weren't bad enough, the researchers and AP reporter added insult to injury by summarizing the review with this outlandish sound-bite: "An extra can of soda a day can pile on 15 pounds in a single year, and the `weight-of-evidence' strongly suggests that this sort of increased consumption is a key reason that more people have gained weight."

While it's certainly true that the caloric content of 365 sodas (of 140 calories each) equates to about the caloric content of 15 pounds of body fat, it's not true that merely consuming one soda per day will translate to a 15-pound weight-gain over one year or that skipping one soda per day will translate to a 15 pounds weight-loss over one year. Bodyweight results from complex interactions between metabolism and lifestyle. An August 2004 study, for example, examined data on 1,007 women who increased their consumption of soda over a period of four years from less than one soda per week to one or more soda per day. After increasing their soda consumption at least 7-fold over a period of 4 years, the women only gained an average of 10.3 pounds. But according to the sort of mindless math espoused by the AJCN study's researchers, the women should have gained as much as 60 pounds. Obviously the notion that soda consumption goes straight to, or comes straight off, one's hips is wrong.

Even more interesting is the tie-in between the ACJN study and the August 2004 study - namely Harvard University researcher, Dr. Frank Hu, who led both studies. Though knowing through his own research that the 15-pounds-per-year factoid is wrong, he nevertheless sanctioned it for media consumption. Dr. Hu has a history of attempting to link soda with various health endpoints, including pancreatic cancer, diabetes, and weight gain - all of which are long on alarm, but short on science. It is, therefore, not surprising that Dr. Hu reached the conclusion he did in the AJCN study. Given the conflicting nature of the statistical studies on soda consumption and weight gain - which calls into question the notion of any general link between soda consumption and weight-gain - Dr. Hu could have concluded that it's premature to draw conclusions and that more research is necessary to definitively resolve the issue. Instead, Dr. Hu surrendered to his seemingly built-in bias against soda -- drawing a much over-blown conclusion, knowingly serving up a patently absurd sound-bite to incurious media and asking for more taxpayer money for research. The AJCN study fiasco gives a whole new meaning to "soda jerk."

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Organic nonsense: "Consumers across the country are paying higher prices for fruits, vegetables, milk and bread that carry the USDA Organic label. What does the label mean? Apparently, not much. There's almost no testing of organic produce for pesticide residues, though all farmers use pesticides of some sort. The USDA Organic label means only that an independent certifier -- hired by the farmer -- did a once-a-year walk over the farm, looked briefly at the farmer's records, and took his or her word that all of the vague organic rules were being followed. There are only 56 organic certifiers to oversee some 20,000 organic farmers working more than 2 million acres of land, supposedly without synthetic pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers or genetically engineered seeds."


New bee therapy coming? "Queen honey bees may hold the answer to prolonging human life. The common worker bee lives just six weeks, but if the same egg is raised as a queen bee, not a worker, it can live for up to six years. La Trobe University's Professor David Vaux is trying to unlock the mystery. "I'm looking at the bees as a model, looking at how lifespan is determined," he said. A queen bee will lay up to 200 eggs a day in little wax cells in the hive. "The interesting thing is if you take one of those eggs with a pair of tweezers out of the wax cell in which it is laid and put it into a different shaped wax cell, called the queen cell, then the developing larva will emerge as an adult queen," Professor Vaux said. "So the same egg, the same genes, the same everything can turn into a worker bee or it can turn into a queen bee and live for 50 times longer." Professor Vaux said his research raised a number of questions including whether the human lifespan was genetically predetermined or determined by environment."

Preschool food Fascism in Australia



Preschool teachers are inspecting lunch boxes and decreeing which ingredients are acceptable in birthday cakes in a dramatic escalation in the war against childhood obesity. Chocolate frogs, lollies, cakes and fruit roll-ups are among foods banned at some NSW preschools and kindergartens. If daily lunch-box checks reveal such foods, they are sent home uneaten. And parents who send in a cake to mark their child's birthday are being left in no doubt: small plain cakes are in, big creamy chocolate cakes are out.

The crackdown in preschools comes as junk food is being officially phased out of canteens at the state's primary schools. But some experts, including leading nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, say lunch-box inspections take the healthy eating strategies too far. "There is no direction from anyone in an official position to examine children's lunch boxes or to forbid any child to eat any food and I would not support such draconian measures," she said. Dr Stanton said efforts to cut junk food from lunch boxes should be a group decision made by parents. But kindergartens say they are doing it with children's health in mind.

At Red Robin Kindergarten in Eastwood, parents had been told that birthday cakes should be as simple as possible, preschool teacher Jess Karhu said. "For birthdays we encourage a vanilla cupcake," Ms Karhu said. "It should be something little, not too big." And lunch boxes at the 40-child centre, which provides fruit platters for the children, do not escape scrutiny, with regular checks carried out. "If it is not appropriate it goes back in the lunch box," she said.

Council of Catholic School Parents executive director Danielle Cronin - who has a daughter at Red Robin Kindergarten - said the lunch-box checks and healthy birthday cake recommendations were helping youngsters develop good habits. "Preschools are probably leading the way with healthy-eating strategies in schools," Ms Cronin said, admitting lunch-box inspections could prove controversial. "Parents want to make sure that their kids are not hungry at school and they have the tendency then to load up the lunch box with all sorts of things," she said. "There is a sense that it is their right as a parent to fill their child's lunch box with whatever they choose or whatever their child is telling them they want. It possibly could be a bit a bit controversial. Some parents might object and some kids might object."

Ms Cronin is tackling the task of creating a healthy, but tasty, birthday cake that her daughter Virginia, who will turn five this week, can take to kindy to share with her friends. "The healthy cake option for us will probably be a plain homemade vanilla cake. We may put Smarties on top but we won't be doing the icing and cream option," she said.

Food and recipe writer Anneka Manning runs in-school cooking classes. She said parents of preschool- and school-age children must take responsibility for what goes into a child's lunch box. "It is just as much about educating parents as it is the children," she said.

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Commuting good for you? "Thank heavens for commuting - without it we might all be much more stressed. Contrary to most people's experience, an hour a day in a cramped rail carriage is a "gift" for which we should be grateful, according to a study. A survey of 26,000 rail passengers suggests that train travel offers commuters vital "transition time" to adjust to their different roles at home and at work. Sensible travellers make the most of their journey by unwinding with a good book, playing games on a mobile phone, listening to music or watching a DVD on a laptop. At peak times, when passengers are packed in so tightly that staring out of the window is the only way to pass the time, they should rejoice. This is priceless "quality thinking" time. Glenn Lyons, who led the research, said: "Travel is assumed to be the price paid for reaching the destination. However, this apparent burden of travel can be viewed quite differently: as a gift."


Eat yourself beautiful? "The old saying "You are what you eat" could be rewritten as "You'll look like your last meal" if a big global trend finally takes off in Britain. Across Japan, America and continental Europe, customers are already buying expensive yoghurts, drinks, marshmallows, jams and even sweets on the promise that they contain special "scientific" ingredients, such as collagen, enzymes and even Botox that could make consumers look younger and more beautiful, simply by ingesting them. It's called the beauty-food revolution but, in Britain, the trend for "cosmeceutical" ingredients (cosmetic plus pharmaceutical) is in its infancy. Rufflets Country House Hotel, in St Andrews, Scotland, last month launched a new "wrinkle-free lunch", which it claims contains "ingredients known for their anti-ageing properties to help diners to have longer, more youthful lives". The range of lunches and dinners includes roast Gressingham duck with an acai berry sauce: duck is a good source of selenium, an antioxidant claimed to improve skin tone. The acai berry is one of the latest "superfoods" to hit the UK. Grown in Brazil, the purple wonder berry contains a remarkable concentration of anthocyanins, antioxidants that lower the risk of heart disease"

"Toxic environment" is making kids fat, propagandist claims

A "toxic environment" of unhealthy, addictive food is behind today's obesity epidemic, a new study says. Mass-produced Western foods, because they're low in fiber, sugary and fatty, cause hormonal imbalances that promote overeating, the scientist who authored the study claimed [Translation: "hypothesized"]. These imbalances leave a person hungrier, less willing to exercise, and feeling less good overall.

Although the research focused on childhood obesity, overweight kids tend to become overweight adults, he said. That, he added, helps explain why health experts throughout Western countries are lamenting an "obesity epidemic" population-wide. "If we don't fix this, our children will continue to lose," said the researcher, Robert Lustig of the Children's Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco. His findings appeared in a review of obesity research, published in the August edition of the research journal Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Obesity is now the most commonly diagnosed childhood ailment [medicalizing a normal condition], said Lustig, who directs the hospital's Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health Clinic. Diseases once seen only in adults, like type 2 diabetes, now are occurring in children. Weighty children are also ostracized and teased, sometimes causing long-term psychological damage, he said. Obese adults, meanwhile, face greater risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. [But live longer!]

Today's sugary, low-fiber, fatty foods boost levels of the hormone insulin, Lustig said. This, in turn, encourages overeating because insulin promotes a signal that encourages the body to seek a pleasurable feeling that comes from eating. This sensation comes from the brain chemical dopamine.

Insulin also promotes overeating in a second way, Lustig added, by suppressing the effectiveness of another hormone, leptin. Leptin, when functioning properly, "increases physical activity, decreases appetite, and increases feelings of well-being," he said. Its suppression result in greater appetite and lowered well-being.

Lustig blamed changes in food processing during the past 30 years, particularly the addition of the sugar fructose to a wide variety of foods that once never included sugar and the removal of fiber. Both changes promote insulin production, he said. Excessive fructose and inadequate fiber, in particular, "appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin," he added. High fat and low dairy content contribute to the problem, he added.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the number of children who are overweight in the United States has doubled during the past three decades. Currently one child in five is overweight. The increase is true for children and adolescents of all age groups and races and for boys and girls.

Lustig said that the notion that children are responsible for their own weight, or excess of it, no longer holds up. Society is to blame [The usual Leftist refrain] for giving kids toxic food, he said, and it has to stop. "No child chooses to be obese," he said. "Furthermore, young children are not responsible for food choices at home or at school, and it can hardly be said that preschool children, in whom obesity is rampant [Consistent with the condition being genetic], are in a position to accept personal responsibility."

Moreover, he said, research shows that in recent times even thin people are gaining weight, belying the notion that a small number of gluttons alone are behind the obesity crisis. "Whatever is happening is happening to everyone," he wrote. [Really! I thought he just said it was one in 5!]

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Singledom kills you



People who have never married run a significantly higher risk of dying early, even though they are more likely to exercise and less likely to be overweight in later life. A study of census and death certification data for more than 67,000 American adults has revealed that those who stayed single were more likely to die first, while a surviving marriage was strongly associated with a longer life.

The scientists, from the University of California, suggest that the findings show that marriage is a rough proxy for social connectedness, while a life without it is more closely associated with isolation.

The data, covering the years from 1989 to 1997, showed that at the start almost 50 per cent were married and just under 10 per cent were widowed. A total of 12 per cent were divorced and 3 per cent were separated. Of the remainder, 5 per cent were cohabiting, and one in five had never married. After taking into account age, health and several other factors likely to influence the findings, scientists found that those people who had been widowed were almost 40 per cent more likely to die over the eight-year period. Those who had been divorced or separated were 27 per cent more likely to have done so.

However, those who had never been married were 58 per cent more likely to have died during the period than peers who were married and living with their spouse in 1989. The never-married "penalty" was larger for those in very good or excellent health, and smallest for those in poor health. It was also found to be greater among men than women. The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, covered a range of age groups, from 19 to 24-year-olds to pensioners.

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Obesity panic now extends to babies

Must be all the fizzy drinks and Big Macs that they eat. The findings below do seem to have squeezed out some faint recognition of the fact that your tendency to weight is largely hereditary and that it is now mainly fat working-class women who are having the kids. Heaps of slim bourgeois women now consider themselves too good to marry and have children -- hence proportionately fewer slim children around

With the constant warnings about growing obesity in children and adults alike, it is alarming to find that even babies are getting fatter. A Harvard University study is the first to document the spread of the obesity epidemic in infants. It has reported that in the US state of Massachusetts, children under the age of six have become heavier since 1980, but the risk of being overweight has jumped most for babies under six months.

The findings, published in the journal Obesity, add to concerns that the growing number of children who are born heavy or gain weight quickly in early life are likelier to face future health problems, including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and possibly asthma. It may be time for mothers to give up the traditional idea that a fat baby is a healthy baby, said Dr Matthew Gillman, the study's senior author. "We no longer have grave threats to the lives of infants such as diarrhoea … and malnutrition," he said. "Our problem in the 21st century is chronic disease."

But Dr Gillman and others do say that parents should not panic if an infant is heavy. Many lose their baby fat. And breast-feeding has been shown to reduce the risk of infant obesity, said Dr Wendy Slusser, a specialist in childhood obesity. No definitive data has shown that being overweight as an infant means a person will be overweight later on, said Dr Slusser, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California. But, she added, "If we're seeing a trend of a population increasing in size, that does raise questions about their health habits."

Since babies are usually fed only breast milk or formula until five or six months, it seems unlikely that the new figures reflect poor food choices by parents. Rather, the growing prevalence of obesity among the youngest babies may begin in the womb, said Dr Laura Riley, medical director of labour and delivery at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Pregnant women in general are more overweight these days," said Dr Riley. "More obese women become pregnant, and more women who are overweight when they become pregnant then gain too much weight during pregnancy."

Obstetricians tend to recommend that normal-weight women gain between 11 and 16 kilograms during pregnancy, while obese women should gain only five to seven kilograms. In general, the study considered children to be overweight if they fell in the top 5 per cent on a measure that divides a child's weight by height. They were considered at risk of becoming overweight if they fell between the 85th and 95th percentile.

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