Role of sun over-emphasised in melanoma skin cancers

But suntanning does give you wrinkles! From what I have seen elsewhere, the advice below is rather confused, however. Fair skin certainly gives you more cancers, but BCCs and SCCs rather than melanomas -- and it is melanomas that are the dangerous ones. Melanomas are actually quite rare among very fair-skinned people, from my reading in the matter. It is people who tan well who get the melanomas



WARNINGS that too much time spent in the sun can lead to the most deadly form of skin cancer have been over-emphasised, a controversial study has claimed. It found that, although sunbathing is a risk factor, the number of moles on a person's skin is the most important indicator of whether they will go on to develop melanoma. The scientists also identified two genes that dictate how many moles someone will have, and their risk of getting skin cancer.

The research, published in the journal Nature Genetics, is likely to reopen the debate over whether official health warnings about avoiding the sun are overstated and too general. The study's authors said such warnings would be more useful if they focused on those most at risk – namely anyone with more than 100 moles on their body, redheads and people with fair skin and taught them how to check their moles for changes in shape, size or colour.

Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London, and one of the new study's authors, said: "The number of moles you have is one of the strongest risk factors for melanoma – stronger even than sunshine."

Dr Veronique Bataille, a dermatologist at West Hertfordshire NHS Trust, added: "You often read that nearly all melanomas are caused by sunshine, which is not supported by the evidence. "Let's keep sunshine in the picture because it does make you age and causes you wrinkles. But let's move away from scaring people by saying they are going to die because they go in the sun."

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The dangerous "Homeopathic" loophole

Homeopathic remedies, except when people rely on them to treat serious conditions, are usually safe as water--which they actually are. But sometimes they contain dangerous ingredients which are released on a unsuspecting public with little or no testing

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has caught itself in a trap of precedent and logic that should force it, finally, to regulate homeopathic products. FDA regulations require that drugs and treatments be “scientifically proven safe and effective.” Homeopathic remedies, except when people rely on them to treat serious conditions, are usually safe as water—which they actually are. Some homeopaths claim that shaking and serial dilutions—even to the point that not one molecule of the “active” ingredient remains—create a “memory” of the long-gone ingredient. So far, though, the FDA has ignored the multi-million dollar fraud. After all, what’s the harm?

Well, one harm, according to hundreds of people and dozens of lawsuits, is that some of Matrixx Initiatives’ homeopathic Zicam cold “treatments” cause anosmia—the loss of smell, a sense necessary both to enjoy a summer day and to detect gas leaks, fires and spoiled food.

Rather than the usual homeopathic magic water, some Zicam products contain pharmaceutically significant amounts of zinc, which was shown in the 1930s to cause anosmia when used intranasally. Some Zicam homeopathics also include an unspecified amount of benzalkonium chloride, which “disrupts signaling between molecules, a mechanism that could allow it to have widespread unanticipated effects,” says Peter Montague of Rachel’s Democracy and Health News. The U.S. Material Safety Data Sheet lists it as a hazardous, potentially mutagenic chemical; Canada bars it from products “applied to mucous membranes.”

But the giant regulatory loophole that is homeopathy allowed Matrixx, either by accident or design, to slap on the label “homeopathic,” slip under the regulatory wire and sell 1 billion doses of untested Zicam. Despite Zicam’s decade on the market and numerous lawsuits, the National Center for Homeopathy never condemned the mislabeling.

Under the Obama administration, the FDA requested that Matrixx recall a number of Zicam intranasal products. On June 16, the FDA warned, “Because they are not generally recognized as safe and effective for their labeled uses, these products [must undergo] well-controlled clinical investigations … regardless of their homeopathic status [before re-marketing.]”

While there is conflicting evidence that oral zinc shortens colds, it likely does little harm. The FDA, however, found Zicam ineffective, thereby fitting it under the agency’s definition of “health fraud.” It also ruled that Zicam’s moneymaking innovation of delivering the chemical into the nose rendered it unsafe.

The Zicam recall followed an earlier tough (and witty) FDA ruling that if General Mills continued to claim whole-grain Cheerios reduces cholesterol, the cereal would be regulated as a drug. In June, the agency made Bayer withdraw claims that One A Day for Men “supports prostate health.”

In addition to the 130 anosmia reports received by the FDA, Matrixx failed to notify the agency of more than 800 Zicam-related complaints. Furthermore, since Zicam was labeled for use by children, a class of underage victims may have gone unnoticed.

Nonetheless, Matrixx CEO William Helmut called the Zicam recall “a complete surprise.” And it is an expensive one. The zinc-based nasal products comprised 40 percent of Matrixx’s $112-million sales last year. The Scottsdale, Ariz., firm used some of the profits to pay $12 million in 2006 to settle hundreds of lawsuits by Zicam users claiming anosmia, plus $4 to $6 million in annual legal costs. Matrixx is currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its handling of the FDA warning and by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing.

Questionable marketing may come naturally to Zicam through its co-founders Robert Steven Davison and Charles B. Hensley. Davidson got his Ph.D. from an unaccredited, now-defunct diploma mill in Spain. Hensley, who holds the Zicam patents, got a warning letter from the FDA about the online sale of an unapproved drug that his current company, PRB Pharmaceuticals, claims treats bird flu and SARS. And the Washington Post reported: “Hensley previously developed a weight-loss remedy that involves sniffing ‘specially developed aromas.’ “

Meanwhile, Zicam users, who can no longer smell a rat, might develop a nose for bullshit and discover that sometimes the only thing worse than homeopathic products that have no effect are the ones that do. 

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Unintended use of drug restores hearing

Obama's FDA will now do its best to prevent this use of the drug -- because it is "off label"

It was the honeyed drawl of her professor that first pierced the silence enveloping Edith Garrett for an entire year, since the day she had lost her hearing. But she dismissed it, thinking she was just having a good day. That was until she was woken from her nap later that November afternoon by a racket from a neighbor’s apartment. “I said, ‘What is that?’ My roommates looked at me, and they said: ‘It’s the dog barking downstairs. It’s been there since August when we moved in,’ ’’ Garrett recalled.

Today, Garrett’s hearing is near-perfect in one ear, her rare neurological ailment treated by a drug called Avastin. But the wonder here isn’t simply that her hearing has been restored. The real wonder is how.

Garrett’s recovery, highlighted yesterday by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, represents a powerful tale of scientific discovery that illustrates how millions of dollars in spending and years of research into a drug - in this instance, Avastin, approved to treat late-stage colon, breast, and lung cancers - can yield a treatment for seemingly unrelated diseases.

For rare conditions, finding unintended uses for off-the-shelf drugs is often the best approach - saving time and money - because the potential financial payoff for a new medication is too little to attract interest from big drug companies.

The beneficiary in this case was Garrett. As a 19-year-old college student, she was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 2, which causes tumors to sprout inside the brain. Traditionally, as the tumors engulf nerves that regulate hearing, balance, swallowing, and other vital functions, patients are left with two options: surgery and radiation, both with worrisome complications.

Mass. General researchers’ findings on the unexpected value of Avastin, chronicled online yesterday by the New England Journal of Medicine, are preliminary. Researchers warn the drug is not a cure for the condition, most often diagnosed when people reach their 20s and estimated to afflict about 12,000 Americans. But it offers a shard of promise for patients often left hopeless by the rarity of their disease. “We really felt we stood on the shoulders of the oncology community,’’ said Dr. Scott Plotkin , director of Mass. General’s Neurofibromatosis Clinic and lead author of the study. “Our goal was to build on the scientific successes to date and not to have to go back to square one.’’

Neurofibromatosis type 2 - known in medical shorthand as NF-2 - typically arrives with quiet stealth. During high school in Atlanta, Garrett experienced bouts of facial paralysis. “I just thought I had a crooked smile,’’ Garrett said.

But then, as she was starting her sophomore year at Rhodes College in Memphis five years ago, she noticed a small, painful protrusion on her shin. Tests ultimately revealed that the bump on her leg was a harbinger of the genetic ailment already spawning tumors inside her brain. One night, prowling the Internet for details, Garrett discovered something that stunned her: Patients with the tumors frequently lose their hearing. “I called and I asked my mom, ‘Am I going to go deaf?’ And she said, ‘We just don’t know.’ ’’

Without realizing it, Garrett had already lost hearing in her right ear. She had begun, unconsciously, compensating for that deficit, something doctors have witnessed in other patients. When she strolled into a classroom, she later realized, she would veer toward desks on the right side - so that her left ear could hear the instructor. When her cellphone jangled, she would always put it to her left ear.

In the language of doctors, the tumors caused by the condition are considered benign, because their cells lack the capacity to rapidly and destructively divide, a key trait of malignant cancers. But the complications that can result from neurofibromatosis are anything but benign. “NF-2 is a disorder that’s like fighting a forest fire,’’ said Dr. Dade Lunsford, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center neurosurgeon. “What you try to do is put out the fire that’s burning at that moment. So if there’s a hearing nerve tumor that’s getting bigger and causing pressure on the brain, normally we try to do surgery.’’

But both surgery and radiation can exact a toll. Operations on patients with tumors as large as limes - like those enmeshed with Garrett’s hearing nerves - almost always result in deafness. And while radiation can stop tumors from growing, it can spur scarring and may cause cancer. That is why researchers had long been eager to find some other way to tame the tumors. Traditional chemotherapy seemed unlikely to help because it targets those rapidly dividing cells that aren’t found in benign growths.

Newer drugs, pioneered by Boston scientists, aim at a different pathway, known as angiogenesis. Those medications starve cancerous tumors of the blood they need by disrupting blood vessels spawned by the tumor. But it wasn’t clear - until now - that the benign tumors of neurofibromatosis type 2 patients had the ability to grow those vessel networks.

By using old tissue samples, the Mass. General researchers showed that the tumors are indeed associated with excess blood vessel development. So the scientists decided to give 10 patients Avastin, one of the new class of angiogenesis inhibitors.

Garrett’s hearing declined precipitously in December 2006; before taking the medication, she scored 8 percent on a standard hearing test known as word recognition. Now, she stands at 98 percent in one ear, but still lacks hearing in the other. “You’re lucky as a physician,’’ Plotkin said, “to see a response like this once in your career.’’

Of the 10 patients in the study, the tumors of six shrank by 20 percent or more, with the reduction lasting 11 to 16 months so far. Seven patients had hearing loss prior to treatment, and after taking Avastin, the hearing of six either improved or remained stable. The patients experienced some side effects from the drug, including high blood pressure and liver toxicity, but none was considered severe.

Lunsford, who was not involved in the research, described the findings as “extraordinarily preliminary data,’’ but added that the study “offers a glimmer of hope, and it certainly warrants further exploration.’’

It remains unclear, for example, whether patients would need to take the drug regularly or if they could stop and start. The Boston scientists are looking for financing to expand their research to other centers.

Garrett isn’t taking Avastin at the moment because she underwent surgery in June designed to ease her facial paralysis. Still, she’s well enough that she’s preparing to start a new job. In the fall, she will begin teaching high school math in Atlanta - at a school for hearing-impaired children.

SOURCE

The links between physical attractiveness and grades

The article below from Newsweak is unusually good for them -- even more so because it is written by the often-batty Sharon Begley. Our Sharon does drift off into nuttiness towards the end of the article but I have left that bit out. Taranto has a comment on that bit, though. What puzzles Sharon and many others is WHY attractive and good-natured people get better grades at school. I don't pretend to have all the answers to that but I want to suggest two things that are probably important:

1). As a former teacher, I think I can assert with confidence that there is an undeniable arbitrary element in marking and, as in life in general, one tends to give the benefit of the doubt to people whom one likes for one reason or another. It is for that reason that all schools once graded students solely on the basis of anonymous formal exams marked by markers who did not know the person they were marking. That procedure now seems to be deemed "unfair", however -- for some reason that is not apparent to me.

2). As I occasionally mention, there does seem to be a syndrome of general biological fitness, such that some people seem to hold just about all the good cards. As Terman & Oden discovered decades ago, high-IQ people also tend to be healthier, taller, more long lived, more attractive and less likely to divorce (etc.). So the more attractive people and the people who are more pleasant to others in general are also likely to be the more intelligent ones -- and that alone could explain much of their advantage at school. I know several very bright people, including my own son, who use their intelligence to help them get on well with people. My son has just gained a distinguished degree in Mathematics and you don't get that through personality alone but using your intelligence to think about how you relate to other people and then applying that to make all interactions with others more pleasant is probably one of the more important uses of intelligence. So more intelligent persons will often be more pleasant people socially as well -- and the advantages of that at school and everywhere else are clearly undeniable.

If you survived high school, or hope to, you probably made your peace with the fact that life is unfair: looks can compensate for a lack of brains and conscientiousness. Or to put it more bluntly, teachers give good-looking kids higher grades than homely ones, all other factors being equal, as numerous studies have found. The phenomenon is so well documented in science it even has a name: the attractiveness effect.

Now sociologist Michael T. French of the University of Miami and his colleagues have discovered yet another reason for plain kids with less-than-winning personalities to feel that the deck is stacked against them. In a paper on "Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Personality and Grooming on Academic Performance in High School", to be published in the August issue of Labour Economics, they find that the three factors in their title indeed affect students' GPA in high school. (Attractiveness, personality and grooming might affect grades in K-8, as well as college, too, but the researchers looked only at high school.)

Physical attractiveness, they conclude, "has a positive and statistically significant impact on GPA for female students," as other studies have found (the effect also exists for males, but not in a statistically significant way—that is, it may be due to chance). But in a departure from past studies, they find that personality and grooming can boost GPA even more than beauty.

"Being very well groomed is associated with a statistically significant GPA premium," they write. "While grooming has the largest effect on GPA for male students, having a very attractive personality is most important for female students." More specifically:

Physical attractiveness alone boosts GPA for both genders. Nevertheless, physical attractiveness was a weaker predictor of grades than grooming (for boys) and personality (for girls). That suggests that teacher bias plays a significant role in what grades students get. Teachers reward some physical and personality types and penalize others.

The findings raise a host of intriguing questions. For instance, how do "beauty premiums" and "plainness penalties" work?(That's economist-speak for the fact that attractive people get paid more than homely ones—not just actors or waiters: good-looking accountants and even engineers generally earn more than plain ones).

In particular, might the extra earnings reflect not a direct effect of beauty (bosses and customers unconsciously think more highly of attractive people, or are inclined to overlook their mistakes, and thus pay them more than their skills and experience justify) but an indirect one: that years of extra attention and rewards from teachers made attractive people more confident, smarter (because they received lots of positive feedback, they studied more) and thus genuinely more capable? For now, all we can say is that attractiveness and a winning personality boost grades when you're young, and may have an enduring effect once you enter the work force.

But there's something else I'm wondering. In this age of DNA, scientists are hunting for genes associated with intelligence. None have yet been found and verified, and two high-profile candidates recently flamed out (though press coverage of the failure to find a link between the genes, called microcephalin and ASPM, and IQ didn't get nearly the attention as the initial claim). But you can be sure such genes will eventually be discovered, and a study will report that people who carry them have a higher IQ than people who do not.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Daily dose of baking soda ‘can keep kidney patients off dialysis’

Hard to believe but great if a proper double-blind study confirms it. I sometimes take the stuff for indigestion so maybe I have been doing myself more good than I thought

Research by British scientists has found that sodium bicarbonate — otherwise known as baking soda — can dramatically slow the progress of the condition. About three million people in Britain suffer from chronic kidney disease, which can lead to complete kidney failure, requiring regular dialysis. Patients commonly suffer from low bicarbonate levels, a condition called metabolic acidosis.

The pilot study conducted at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, was the first controlled test of the treatment in a clinical setting. In the study, published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, researchers studied 134 patients with advanced chronic kidney disease and metabolic acidosis.

One group was randomly allocated a small daily dose of sodium bicarbonate in tablet form in addition to their usual care. Over a period of one year, the kidney function of these patients declined about two thirds more slowly than that of individuals who were not given the tablets. Their rate of decline was little different from what would be expected with normal ageing. Rapid progression of kidney disease occurred in just 9 per cent of patients given baking soda, compared with 45 per cent of the non-treated group.

Patients taking sodium bicarbonate tablets were also less likely to develop end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis, which takes over the function of the kidneys. Although their sodium levels were increased, it did not lead to problems with raised blood pressure.

An estimated 37,800 patients in Britain receive renal replacement therapy, which may involve dialysis or a kidney transplant. The cost of looking after kidney failure patients accounts for 3 per cent of the entire NHS budget. On average, each patient on dialysis costs the NHS £30,000 per year.

Magdi Yaqoob, professor of Renal Medicine at the Royal London, described the results as “amazing”. “This study shows that baking soda can be useful for people with kidney failure ... as long as the dose is regulated and under supervision,” he said. “This cheap and simple strategy also improves patients’ nutritional wellbeing and has the potential to improve quality of life and of course a clinical outcome that can remove the need for dialysis. Baking soda is not classed as a drug so this study has never been tried before.”

The scientists pointed out that their research was limited by not having a “placebo group” of patients receiving a “dummy” treatment. It was also not “blind” - the researchers knew which patients were receiving the baking soda. “Our results will need validation in a multi-centre study,” Professor Yaqoob said.

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The pill that could some day reduce body fat by half in a week

Scientists are working on an anti-obesity pill that could reduce the fat stored by overweight people by almost a half in a week. Tests on mice have shown that the drug could decrease body weight by a quarter and their fat content by 42 per cent after seven days. After a month, the weight of the mice had been reduced by 28 per cent and their fat mass by 63 per cent.

But experts warned that it could take a decade for the potential wonder drug to be developed for use by patients. The researchers, whose findings are published online in Nature Chemical Biology, say further research is needed before the drug is tested on humans. But they say the results point to a new approach for the treatment of obesity and adult-onset diabetes.

The drug is an artificial hormone that regulates glucose metabolism. Previous studies have found this substance can suppress appetite or lead to weight loss by increasing the body's calorie usage. Dr Richard DiMarchi and colleagues at Indiana University in the U.S. created the synthetic hormone and carried out the trials on mice. He said: 'Obesity and its associated consequences, including adult-onset diabetes, remain a primary health and economic threat for modern societies.'

At the moment surgical interventions such as gastric bypass remain the only therapeutic options with the potential for a cure. Dr DiMarchi said acute glucagon administration reduces food intake in animals and in humans, and may also promote weight loss. He added: 'Pharmacological treatment of obesity using single agents has limited efficacy or presents risk for serious adverse effects. 'No single agent has proven to be capable of reducing body weight more than 5 to 10 per cent in the obese population. 'Combination therapies using multiple drugs simultaneously may represent the preferred pharmaceutical approach to treat obesity, and there is ample precedent for combination therapy in treatment of chronic diseases. 'Here we present results that prove the principle that single molecules can be designed that are capable of simultaneously activating more than one mechanism to safely normalise body weight.'

Last night, he said it would be ten years before the drug is available and tests needed to be completed on humans. Cambridge University professor of clinical biochemistry Stephen O'Rahilly said: 'It is important that these are demonstrated to be effective and safe in animal models before going forward with trials in humans.'

He added: 'Many promising drugs fall down when tried in humans either because they don't work sufficiently well or because of side effects. 'It is far too early to tell whether this molecule will be one of the exceptions and become a safe and effective treatment for obesity in humans.' But he concluded: 'I hold out considerable hope for the discovery of safe and effective anti-obesity therapies.' Professor O'Rahilly said that patients being treated with the drug could take one pill a day, or an injection.

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Brighter people live longer, says Glasgow scientist David Batty

Yet more evidence that high IQ is usually a part of general biological fitness

Greater intelligence may in part partially explain why people from a high socio-economic background live longer than those of lower social status, researchers have suggested. A study of former soldiers in the United States has indicated that differences in IQ may explain almost a quarter of the differences in mortality between people of higher and lower social classes.

It has long been accepted that social status affects mortality, with a particular influence on death from cardiovascular events such as strokes and heart attacks. Many of these differences have been ascribed to stress, to income, and to behavioural factors such as smoking and diet — but these cannot explain the whole gap in longevity between the highest socio-economic groups and the lowest ones.

The new study, from a team led by David Batty, of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow, compared outcomes from a group of 4,289 former American soldiers drawn from diverse social backgrounds. It found that variations in IQ explain about 23 per cent of the survival differences between different social groups. Details of the study are published in European Heart Journal.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, of University College, London, who leads the Whitehall II study of civil servants, which has uncovered many of the effects of social class on mortality, and his colleague Mika Kivimaki, offered three possible explanations for the effect in a commentary for the journal. [The Marmot is associated with the dubious WCRF and some equally dubious dietary claims so his interpretations should be treated with caution]

“Intelligence might lead to greater knowledge about how to pursue healthy behaviours,” he wrote. Intelligence may “cause” socio-economic position; that is, more intelligence leads to more education, and greater income and occupational prestige. “Intelligence may be a marker for something else, and it is that something else, early life exposures, for example, that leads to mortality,” Dr Batty said.

“We already know that socio-economically disadvantaged people have worse health and tend to die earlier from conditions such as heart disease, cancer and accidents. Environmental exposures and health-related behaviours, such as smoking, diet and physical activity, can explain some of this difference, but not all of it. This raises the possibility that as-yet-unmeasured psychological factors need to be considered. One of these is intelligence or cognitive function, commonly referred to as IQ. This measures a person’s ability to reason and problem-solve. IQ is strongly related to socio-economic status.

“IQ wasn’t a magic bullet in this study, but this psychological variable had additional explanatory power on top of the classic variables such as smoking, high blood pressure, high blood glucose and obesity. It has partially explained the differences in death from heart disease and all causes.”

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Grapefruit again

Women have long used grapefruit in dieting but I have never quite understood why or how. We now read however that grapefruit 'makes liver burn fat instead of storing it' (in overfed laboratory mice). So maybe there is something in it after all

The humble grapefruit could prove to be a mighty - if bitter tasting - weapon in the fight against diabetes, scientists say. A study found naringenin, a flavonoid found in citrus fruit, makes the liver burn fat instead of storing it after a meal. Researchers believe the chemical would also help obesity sufferers and even fight diabetes, because it also helped balance insulin and glucose levels.

Naringenin gives citrus fruit, in particular grapefruit, its bitter taste. But since the tests involved far higher doses of naringenin than those found naturally in the fruit, anyone interested in its fat-busting benefits will have to wait for scientists to develop a concentrated supplement. Once available, it could help treat patients suffering from Type 2 diabetes, a main cause of heart disease.

The tests were carried out on mice by a team at the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, and published in the journal Diabetes. Two groups of mice were both fed the equivalent of a Western diet to speed up their ‘metabolic syndrome’ - the process which leads to Type 2 diabetes in humans. One of the groups ate food that had been treated with naringenin. The non-naringenin mice became obese, their cholesterol levels rose and their bodies became resistant to insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels.

The mice given the chemical did not suffer from these ailments, despite eating identical diets to the others. Any rise in cholesterol-was corrected by the naringenin which also ‘reprogrammed’ their livers to burn fat rather than store it.

Lead researcher Professor Murray Huff added: ‘Furthermore, the marked obesity that develops in these mice was completely prevented by naringenin. ‘What was unique about the study was that the effects were independent of calorific intake, meaning the mice ate exactly the same amount of food and the same amount of fat.’ The team will now try to develop the chemical into a treatment for humans.

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Living together kills joy of marriage (?)

More stupid reasoning. Did it occur to the researchers to ask WHO were the people who did not cohabit before marriage? Could it be that many of them were religious and that the shared religion helped to keep the subsequent marriage together?

COUPLES living together before marrying stand a higher chance of divorce than those who wait until they are engaged or married before moving in together, according to the Journal of Family Psychology. The study, carried out by researchers from the University of Denver, also found that couples who lived together before marrying reported lower marriage satisfaction.

"We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting," study co-author Galena Rhoades said.

More than 70 per cent of couples in the United States live together before marrying, according to the article. Yet the researchers "have found evidence that cohabiting before engagement, even only with one's future spouse, is associated with lower marital quality and higher divorce potential".

In a separate study that appeared in the Journal of Family Issues, the researchers studied the reasons why couples chose to live together. The most common answer was because they wanted to spend more time together, followed by convenience.

Earlier research suggested that people cohabited before marrying because they wanted to test their relationship. "Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships," Ms Rhoades said.

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People in poor health tend to have lower incomes

And the sky is blue and grass is green. Why this exceedingly obvious finding was deemed worth reporting is the surprise. And the inference drawn from it is equally nutty. It assumes that good health is a matter of choice. If only that were so! Exercise would indeed seem to have some benefit at the margins but the normal recommendations for what constitutes "healthy" eating are not supported by the double-blind research

PEOPLE who are healthy are more likely to have higher incomes and better job prospects, according to the latest AMP.NATSEM report Healthy, Wealthy and Wise?. It found people who were unhealthy earned less than half of the average income of healthy people. The unhealthy also had poor participation in the workforce, with one in every two unhealthy working-age people not working, compared to one in five working-aged people who had good health. And unhealthy workers were more likely to be in casual work rather than full-time positions, meaning most lost access to the sick pay benefits that full-time workers had. The average income of healthy people rose from $41,000 in 2001/02 to $54,000 in 2006/07 while those with "persistent poor health" found their incomes fell from $24,000 to $22,000 in the same period.

"The message is clear," said AMP financial planner Andrew Heaven. "Investing time and effort in good health is worth the effort in terms of having a job and a good income. "Staying fit and healthy generally requires strong discipline in terms of eating habits and exercise. "Applying that same discipline to money management will provide financial benefits down the track."

The report found Australians were in good financial shape, experiencing the fourth highest level of quality of life in the world. But many were unprepared for life-changing circumstances such as unexpected illness or injury.

SOURCE

Australia: Offensive food fanatic and the evils of cake

I have always had a fair deal of respect for nutritionist Rosemary Stanton but realised yesterday that this is only because I haven’t been paying attention.



The Irwin children above with their mother and the cake mix, Bindy on the right

Not sure if the rest of you caught it, but Mrs Stanton has launched a pretty out-there tirade against Bindy Irwin’s new commercial deal as the public face of a particularly sinister company. Not Union Carbide or Exxon or British Aerospace but the baking products conglomerate Greens General Foods, one of the shadiest players in the evil cake trade.

We’re not speaking here of the mythical drug also known as “cake”, made famous in the British news parody Brass Eye, but package cake mix, made from flour, sugar, baking powder, and flavourings such as cocoa, vanilla and orange. Greens has been peddling the stuff for years. Pushing it onto time-poor mums, getting kids hooked on it from an early age, using its addictive sweetness and energy-giving qualities to lure them into eating it by the slice after school - even hiding it in their lunch boxes so they can take it onto school grounds and get a fix at little lunch.

Well, Mrs Stanton has now blown the whistle on this practice - and taken aim at those irresponsible Irwins as part of the deal.

The first troubling thing about Mrs Stanton’s spray is the small matter of Steve Irwin’s death. That tragedy should make the Irwin family pretty much immune on the grounds of decency from any kind of frivolous sledging. It should also be factored into the thinking of any would-be critic as perhaps being the very reason why Terri Irwin needs to form a business partnership with a reputable family company such as Greens.

Mrs Stanton managed to negotiate her way past the taste question as she had a bigger target in mind. Cake. Mrs Stanton took issue with the images of Bindi and little Bob helping their Mum bake a cake in the kitchen, and even licking the spoon. “The message that comes across to kids is “it’s OK to eat cake because Bindi Irwin does” - I think it’s very sad,” Stanton said.

“Children are very trusting, so they actually think Bindi wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t right.” “I think it’s a bit of exploitation of her as well because she wouldn’t possibly be old enough to understand the impact that this could have.” “It’s wrong to target kids in trying to sell stuff to other kids. It makes it very difficult for parents to then resist the pleas of their children.”

It’s a good thing Mrs Stanton doesn’t know our address, or the addresses of our many mates with young kids, as we’ve all adopted a totally reckless attitude to child-rearing where we regard baking the odd cake with the kids as enjoyable family time, a great way to introduce them to cooking, especially with a good packet mix because they can do it all by themselves, with the added bonus that you can eat something tasty afterwards or take it down to the park for a picnic. We’re lucky DOCS [a famously bungling government child-welfasre agency] haven’t come around.

It’s cloud cuckoo land stuff which wouldn’t matter if not for the fact that Rosemary Stanton, author of 25 books on diet and nutrition, is on the Federal Government speed-dial for advice on health and wellbeing issues, one of those superficially innocuous right-thinking people who only has all our interests at heart.

(Googling her last night I found an interesting link to a lecture of hers on “Ethical Eating” on the ABC’s Fora website, where she suggested food prices could be artificially inflated so that our farmers no longer had to export produce, which would not only make food production more sustainable, but solve the “starving pensioner” problem once and for all.)

The other thing about the cake issue - Terri Irwin has only agreed to the deal because Greens has made a sizeable contribution to Steve’s ongoing wildlife and conservation protection programs, and are using their products to increase childrens’ awareness of endangered species through school bag tags. Which if you’re Rosemary Stanton probably just proves that, like any other pusher, cake dealers will do anything to get people hooked.

Anyway here’s a link to Greens Traditional Chocolate Cake. Buy some and feed it to your kids.

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A wonderful and instructive heart transplant story

A BRITISH girl who had a donor heart grafted onto her own after suffering cardiac failure as a baby has had the transplant removed and is living a healthy life with her own heart. The case of Hannah Clark is thought to be the only one in the world where a child's failing heart recovered enough for the donor organ to be removed, the British surgeons told reporters ahead of their report in The Lancet journal.

"The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic,'' Professor Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London, said. Prof Yacoub treated Hannah from the beginning and co-authored the journal paper.

Hannah, now 16, suffered as a baby from severe heart failure due to cardiomyopathy, a problem with the muscle of the heart, and in July 1995, when she was two years old, doctors transplanted a donor heart next to hers. The new organ soon took over much of the functioning of her own heart and Hannah began to recover.

However, she suffered from a type of cancer known as EBV PTLD, a common side-effect of the drugs given to transplant patients to stop their immune systems rejecting new organs. She was treated with chemotherapy and other drugs but the cancer kept returning. Doctors reduced her dosage of immunosuppression drugs to stem the disease, but as a result, her transplanted heart began to fail. In contrast however, her own heart recovered and began functioning normally.

In February 2006, the team decided to remove the donor organ so the immunosuppression could be stopped - something that had never been done before. Just over three years later, Hannah has completely recovered from the cancer and her heart is functioning normally.

Prof Yacoub and the team responsible for her remarkable treatment said her case offered vital clues to the study of transplantation, heart recovery and malignant disease. The report's co-author Victor Tsang said the research was also useful in the development of temporary artificial hearts for children suffering from cardiomyopathy. "This is an important piece of knowledge as we are now gaining more experience with mechanical support for the failing heart in children,'' he said.

Hannah had to take about seven tablets morning and night for the immunosuppression treatment, went through several rounds of cancer treatment, suffered kidney failure and at one point was left barely able to breathe. At one point her family were told she would not survive the next 12 hours.

Prof Yacoub praised her courage and that of her family, saying: "The lesson is don't give up.'' Hannah's mother Liz thanked the donor family whose five-month-old baby daughter provided the transplant heart, saying: "They lost a child, we've gained our child - how can I ever thank them?''

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Alzheimer's patients do not benefit from eating fish... but Omega 3 appears to slow deterioration in the early stages

The study which showed benefit was of people "who had a mild memory complaint". Generalizing that to Alzheimer's is a stretch. I have had a problem with certain types of memory (e.g. remembering appointments and anniversaries) all my life and I don't THINK I have Alzheimer's. Note also that the study concerned was of a proprietary product. One wonders how well experimenter expectation effects were excluded and just what the exact analysis of the product was (Were small amounts of caffeine included, for instance?). As it is only a conference report at this stage, such questions are not readily resolved

Omega-3 fatty acid supplements did nothing to slow memory declines in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, US researchers said on Sunday. The findings from an 18-month, government-backed study suggest taking supplements of docosahexenoic acid, or DHA - an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish - does not arrest Alzheimer's in people who have already developed the mind-robbing disease. 'These trial results do not support the routine use of DHA for patients with Alzheimer's,' Dr Joseph Quinn of Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, who led the study, said in a statement.

But a six-month company study that looked at people whose memory was slipping just a bit found Martek Biosciences Corp's DHA supplements helped restore some of the mental acuity they had lost. 'The benefit is roughly equivalent to having the learning and memory skills of someone three years younger,' Martek researcher Karin Yurko-Mauro said in a telephone interview.

Both studies, which are being presented at an international Alzheimer's Association meeting in Vienna, Austria, show the difficulty of treating the disease. Taken together, the findings along with other studies suggest treating Alzheimer's must begin early in the disease process, before sticky amyloid plaques begin forming toxic clumps in the brain. 'It may be that ... by the time you have Alzheimer's disease, it is too late,' Dr Ronald Petersen, director of Alzheimer's research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said in a telephone interview.

Plenty of studies in both mice and people had suggested that a diet rich in DHA - an omega-3 fatty acid found in fatty cold-water fish - could dramatically slow Alzheimer's disease, and hopes were high for DHA as a possible new treatment. DHA is naturally found in the body in small amounts, and is the most abundant omega-3 fatty acid in the brain.

In the Alzheimer's study supported by the National Institute on Aging, Quinn and colleagues compared Martek's DHA supplements to a placebo in 402 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Although blood levels of DHA increased, the team saw no change in two widely accepted Alzheimer's tests. But the study did suggest some benefit in people with Alzheimer's who do not have the ApoE4 gene, which raises their Alzheimer's disease risk.

Quinn called the finding 'intriguing' because other trials have shown different response rates based on this gene, and said future studies should look at this.

In the six-month Martek study, researchers looked at the effects of a 900 mg daily dose of DHA on 485 healthy people with an average age of 70 who had a mild memory complaint. People in this study were tested using a computer memory test. At the end of six months, those who took DHA made far fewer mistakes than those in the placebo group. The effect was 'almost double,' Yurko-Mauro said.

Petersen, a former vice chairman of the Alzheimer's Association, said the study was promising, but needs to be confirmed before healthy people start taking DHA supplements. 'The association is not recommending normal elderly people take DHA based on this study,' he said.

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Swearing can help reduce pain

Even the most mild-mannered of individuals have been known to utter the odd expletive in moments of intense pain. Now it seems they have the perfect excuse. Swearing helps reduce pain, according to new research.

A study of responses to pain found that people who cursed in response to pain could cope with being hurt for nearly 50 per cent longer than their clean-speaking peers.

When they started their research, experts at Keele University's School of Psychology thought that cursing would lower pain tolerance. But after monitoring the reactions of 64 volunteers, stunned research leader Dr Richard Stephens and colleagues John Atkins and Andrew Kingston found that swearing actually had a beneficial effect. Last night Dr Stephens told how he came up with the idea for the study after blurting out a swear word when he accidentally hit his thumb with a hammer as he built a shed in his garden.

The 64 undergraduates were subjected to a gruelling ice water test to see how the cursing affected their pain tolerance. First they had to submerge their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swearword of their choice. Then they repeated the exercise - but using a word they would choose to describe a table. Despite initial expectations, researchers found volunteers could keep their hands in ice for longer when repeating the swear word. On average, the students could put up with the pain for nearly two minutes when swearing. By contrast when they refrained from using expletives they could only endure the ice for one minute and 15 seconds.

Researchers believe swearing has a pain-reducing effect because it triggers the body's natural fight-or-flight response. They suggest that the accelerated heart rates of the volunteers repeating the swearword indicates an increase in aggression, in a classic fight-or-flight response of downplaying being hurt in favour of a more pain-tolerant machismo.

Dr Stephens said it was clear the swearing triggered both an emotional and a physical response. 'We are not sure why swearing works like this, but when it happens it's accompanied by an increase in heart rate,' he said. 'It could be the aggression of swearing, the machismo, makes you more pain resistant.'

While surprised by the results he added: 'It might explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and still persists today.' For those who think that the results may give a green card to turning the air blue, Dr Stephens did, however, have a word of warning. 'If they want to use this pain-lessening effect to their advantage they need to do less casual swearing and only do it when they really need it.'

Rohan Byrt, spokesman for the Casual Swearing Appreciation Society, said he thought the study was the first time swearing's benefits had been proved. He said:'"I've always thought that swearing does have some real therapeutic merit. 'Even for those who consider themselves clean spoken, the odd swear word will just slip out. For me, it's almost a natural instinct, a gut reaction'

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Everyone in Britain will soon get untested vaccine against swine flu

This seems amazingly precipitous. The reasoning is clearly that MOST people will be OK and damn the minority. I think I would rather take my chances with the flu rather than risk Guillain-Barré syndrome

The NHS is preparing to vaccinate the entire population against swine flu after the disease claimed the life of its first healthy British patient. A new vaccine is expected to arrive in Britain in the next few weeks and could be fast-tracked through regulatory approval in five days. As many as 20m people could be inoculated this year. Ministers have secured up to 90m doses, and the rest of the population is likely to be offered vaccinations next year.

A man from Essex was confirmed on Friday as the first person without underlying health problems to have died from the virus. The health department said most people with the virus had only mild symptoms.

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, said GPs’ surgeries were ready for one of the biggest vaccination campaigns in almost 50 years. “If this virus does [mutate], it can get a lot more nasty, and the idea is to give people immunity. But the sheer logistics of dealing with 60m people can’t be underestimated,” he said. The health department said a vaccination programme would be drawn up based on expert advice.

The path of a popular medicine from the laboratory to the chemist or doctor’s surgery can involve years of clinical trials on a select group of patients. When the new vaccine for swine flu arrives in Britain, regulators said this weekend, it could be approved for use in just five days.

Regulators at the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) said the fast-tracked procedure has involved clinical trials of a “mock-up” vaccine similar to the one that will be used for the biggest mass vaccination programme in generations. It will be introduced into the general population while regulators continue to carry out simultaneous clinical trials.

The first patients in the queue for the jab - being supplied to the UK by GSK and Baxter Healthcare - may understandably be a little nervous at any possible side effects. A mass vaccination campaign against swine flu in America was halted in the 1970s after some people suffered Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder of the nervous system.

However, regulators said fast-tracking would not be at the expense of patient safety. “The vaccines are authorised with a detailed risk management plan,” the EMEA said. “There is quite a body of evidence regarding safety on the trials of the mock-up, and the actual vaccine could be assessed in five days.”

The UK government has ordered enough vaccine to cover the entire population. GPs are being told to prepare for a nationwide vaccination campaign. Dr Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, who has been attending Department of Health meetings on the outbreak, said GPs’ surgeries were prepared for one of the biggest vaccination campaigns in almost 50 years.

He said although swine flu was not causing serious illness in patients, health officials were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, starting first on priority groups. First, the jabs would reduce the chances of a shortage of hospital beds because of people suffering from swine flu. Second, it would reduce the effect on the economy by ensuring workers were protected from the virus. “The high-risk groups will be done at GPs’ surgeries. People are still making decisions over this, but we want to get cracking before we get a second wave, which is traditionally far more virulent.”

Holden said it was likely the elderly would be given their seasonal flu jab as well as the swine flu vaccination. The new vaccine is likely to require two doses.

Details of the inoculation plans emerged after the death of a patient, reportedly a middle-aged man, at a hospital in the Basildon area of Essex. The victim had no underlying health problems, but officials say there is no evidence the swine flu virus had mutated into a more dangerous strain.

Holden said it would be the biggest campaign in response to an outbreak since mass vaccination against smallpox in 1962. He said surgeries would be aiming to inoculate about 30 people an hour in a “military-style operation”. The Department of Health said it had still not finalised which groups would be vaccinated first, but children, frontline health workers, people with underlying illnesses and the elderly are likely to take priority.

The European Commission is also identifying population groups which it believes should get priority. It is keen to ensure that countries such as the UK, which had ordered supplies of the vaccine in advance, do not cause inequities in treatment elsewhere in Europe. It warned health ministers in a note circulated last month that if the vaccines were more readily available in some countries it could cause “vaccine tourism/shopping in other member states”.

About 15 people have died of swine flu in Britain, but most of those infected get only mild symptoms. According to the latest figures from the Health Protection Agency, the UK has had 9,718 confirmed cases of the disease.

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How Much Fish For Health?

I don't think that the health benefits of fish eating are established beyond reasonable doubt and the health risks seem to be entirely theoretical -- but the approach below is better balanced than most

This week we launched HowMuchFish.com, the only online seafood calculator that quantifies both the health risks and benefits of a diet rich in seafood. Fed up with fishy activists like Greenpeace (a group more concerned with “saving” the fish than with your health) and Jeremy Piven (who, let’s face it, is just trying to save his own hide), we analyzed USDA nutritional information and worked with registered dieticians to explore both sides of the fish equation. And guess what? Seafood scored high marks across the board.

HowMuchFish.com puts conflicting information about seafood and health into a useful context (finally!) by displaying the nutritional content of the top ten most popular seafood species—the positive impact of fish consumption as well as the hypothetical risks from trace amounts of mercury.

Here’s an example: A 130-pound woman who enjoys canned light tuna would need to eat 123 ounces (7.7 pounds) of it every week in order to risk any negative health impact from mercury. But in just one 6-ounce serving, she gets all of the protein and selenium she needs for the day, as well as high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, potassium, and iron. All of those health benefits clearly outweigh the miniscule amount of mercury detectable in that can of tuna (as well as activists’ scaremongering).

As we’re telling reporters today:

“The Internet is full of doom-and-gloom seafood calculators that only tell half the story. We’re trying to bring some balance to the discussion. The entire medical literature contains zero cases of fetal mercury poisoning related to fish consumption in the United States. But it’s full of evidence that fish is a health food.”

This message is crucial given how successful anti-seafood activists have been in scaring people away from such a healthy and important dietary staple. In our recently updated “Tuna Meltdown” report, we found that more than a quarter-million underprivileged American children were born at risk of having abnormally low IQs between 2000 and 2006, just because their low-income mothers were afraid to eat fish during their pregnancies.

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Fruity San Francisco: Leave no windowsill unturned!

Here's betting that meetings and conferences held by city workers will in future be much less well-attended. What would YOU rather have: Doughnuts or a nice plate of broccoli? Bagels and Lox or Brussells sprouts?

He's already banned spending city money to buy bottled water and mandated composting citywide. Now, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is taking on something as basic as water and trash: food. Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive directive he hopes will dramatically change how San Franciscans eat.

All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land - including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips - that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers' markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.

The mayor will send an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors within two months mandating that all food served in city jails, hospitals, homeless shelters and community centers be healthy. And effective immediately, no more runs to the doughnut shop before meetings and conferences held by city workers. Instead, city employees must use guidelines created by the Health Department when ordering food for meetings. Examples include cutting bagels into halves or quarters so people can take smaller portions and serving vegetables instead of potato chips.

"We have an eating and drinking problem in the United States of America," Newsom said Wednesday. "It's impacting our health, and it's impacting our economy."

The directives are the product of an "urban-rural roundtable" of food experts from around California convened by Newsom last year. The group was charged with finding ways to get more of the food grown on farms within 200 miles of San Francisco onto the plates of city residents, especially those who depend on government meals. The idea is to decrease the need to import food, reconnect people to homegrown food rather than processed food, and to provide more options in neighborhoods like Bayview-Hunters Point that lack easy access to grocery stores.

Many of the details have yet to be worked out, including how much it will cost. Newsom bristled when asked how it would be funded because there's no money to implement the food policy in the budget agreed to by the mayor and the board's budget committee just last week. "We have plenty of resources," he said. "This is not a budget buster."

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, a member of the budget committee, said he likes the idea - and in fact, supervisors have been calling for the creation of an urban farm in San Francisco for years. He said that he wanted one included in the redevelopment of the former UC Berkeley Extension site on Laguna Street, but that the idea was never embraced by the mayor's administration. "Even if it's a good idea, the timing's a little odd," Mirkarimi said of the unfunded proposal coming just days after the budget compromise. "I like the notion if we're able to get this at a very low cost."

It's also unclear how much land could be converted into community farms. The Public Utilities Commission has thousands of acres outside San Francisco that could be used, and the Real Estate Division and the Recreation and Park Department own some unused parcels in the city.

Newsom made the announcement Wednesday at a junkyard-turned-farm in West Oakland that could serve as a model for how land could be converted in San Francisco. A stone's throw from BART, it used to be home to old cars and one angry dog, but now is run by the nonprofit City Slicker Farms. With a handful of staff members and scores of volunteers from the neighborhood, the nonprofit operates six small farms in West Oakland and sells the produce, along with honey and eggs, on a sliding scale to local residents at a Saturday farm stand.

The 2,000-square-foot former junkyard now produces 2,000 pounds of food every year, including lettuce, squash, tomatoes, parsley, sage, collard greens, grapes, cherries and plums. "This speaks to people's soul," said Barbara Finnin, director of City Slicker Farms. "It's a place people can relax, be outside, and nourish themselves and their families." Newsom toured the farm, biting off a piece of kale to taste, munching on an apricot and admiring sunflowers taller than him.

Back in San Francisco, it was apparent Newsom's idea may take some getting used to. Michael Summers, who operates a hot dog stand in Civic Center Plaza that contracts with the city, said the dogs made of tofu don't sell nearly as well as the old-fashioned meat kind. That was evidenced by the line of people ordering hot dogs just after noon - and not a tofu order among them.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is calling for city-funded food to be healthy and sustainable. His administration provided the following directives for what this means:

* Safe and healthy: Avoids excessive pesticide use and has high nutritional value.

* Culturally acceptable: Acceptable culturally and religiously to San Francisco's diverse population. An example would be providing Chinese seniors with bok choy and other vegetables they're familiar with at local farmers' markets. [And EVERYTHING must be both Halal and Kosher, of course]

* Sustainable: Grown in a way that maintains the health of agricultural lands and advances self-sufficiency among farmers and farmworkers. An example would be using manure as a fertilizer rather than chemicals. [Yeh! Shit in the garden. Don't waste good shit in restrooms. That's the way they do it in India and we need to learn from more "sustainable" cultures, don't we?]

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Britain's obesity capital resists health drive

Officialdom have tried it all but people still insist on eating what they like

On the front line of Britain’s fight against obesity lies a town with a guilty secret — it has an abiding passion for pork pies. Stockton-on-Tees eats more of them than anywhere else in the region according to suppliers, who sell off surplus pies to local butchers. Perhaps that’s one reason why the town was named as the country’s capital for childhood obesity in Department of Health figures released this week.

One in six children starting primary school in the borough is obese and by the time they leave for secondary school, 20 per cent of pupils fall into the same category. More than one in three 11-year-olds are either overweight or obese.

Another community confronted by such statistics might have shuffled away behind closed doors into chipmunching, couch-potato denial. However, when the scale and cost of the problem became apparent two years ago, Stockton’s leaders decided to tackle the issue head on. Treating diseases related directly to obesity cost local NHS trusts £26.9 million in 2007. By 2015, unless action is taken, the bill could rise to £33.5 million.

To visit this post-industrial town today is to encounter a testing ground for every conceivable initiative designed to help people to lose weight. Whether any of them will work remains to be seen, but almost every public or private body with an interest in the long-term health of the population seems to be on board. So are some, but not all, of the residents.

Elizabeth Shassere, Stockton’s director of public health, says it is imperative to move beyond the excuses for poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. Pockets of significant social deprivation? Yes, but Stockton has fewer than many of its neighbouring boroughs. What about the majority, even in the poorest communities, who manage to stay fit and healthy? And affluent families who struggle with their weight? Ignorance of a sensible diet? Educate them. Nowhere to exercise? Provide it. Specialist help for the clinically obese? Provide that, too. Can’t afford to use the leisure centre? Give the children free admission. It is a whole-life approach that begins with ante-natal visits by midwives.

Advice is offered on nutrition and cookery, physical activity programmes for pregnant women and the importance of breastfeeding, which, at 54 per cent, is below the national average in Stockton. Young women are also encouraged to join Fit to Push, a programme of organised walks for mothers with prams and buggies. School initiatives include Clean Your Plate. Stickers are awarded for a clean plate at the end of every meal and the pupil with the most stickers wins a prize. Evidence shows this has reduced portion sizes. There are healthy workplace programmes, free leisure facilities for 7,400 children and Sporting Start, which gives children aged from 3 to 16 a free introduction to activities including gymnastics, badminton and street dancing.

In the past two years 8,150 pedometers have also been issued to Stockton residents in the hope that a third of the borough’s 189,000 population will be walking 10,000 steps daily by 2010. Attempts are being made to curb the proliferation of fast-food outlets, improve the physical environment and cycling routes and create more safe areas for children to play outside.There are even “walking school buses”, in which children are led by adults on walks to and from school.

It all sounds admirable. The reality, on a sun-dappled afternoon this week in the old railway town from which Harold MacMillan took his title, was not quite so inspirational — though there were some true believers. Young mothers Jill Herbert and Tracey Watson emerged from the Splash Centre, where their children had enjoyed a free swimming session, to evangelise about diet and exercise. Nathan, 4, eats a lot of fruit, fish and pasta, while three-year-old Isabelle loves “all sorts of vegetables, even broccoli and cauliflower”.

Enter the Castlegate shopping centre and the picture changes. Here is the world of the budget shopper: Pound World, More4Less, Poundland and Home Bargains. Les Meynell, who runs a family butcher’s shop and delicatessen, says that his business has survived, while rivals have been forced to close, by selling hot, rich, juicy pre-cooked meat and poultry, which vastly outsells his raw, fresh products.

“It’s all changed. The young ’uns don’t want to go home and cook fresh joints. They can manage a pan of chips and that’s about it. People want their meat already cooked and that’s what’s kept us afloat,” he said. Mr Meynell was visited by a well-meaning health official, who encouraged him to use low-fat mayonnaise in his sandwiches. He tried it for a week and gave up. “The regulars came back and asked us what the hell we were doing? They said the low-fat sandwiches were tasteless, and they were right. Ask most of my customers and no one gives a stuff about healthy eating, except well-to-do people who want to look after their figure. They buy a salad sandwich, we charge them the earth for it and they go away happy.”

Warming to his theme, Mr Meynell confided Stockton’s best-kept secret. A company well known nationally for its pork pies often turns to butchers such as Mr Meynell to offload bulk deliveries deemed surplus to supermarket requirements. “I can sell £1,000-worth of pork pies in my shop every week. The supplier told me that in Newcastle they can’t sell them for any money. Nowhere else in the North East eats pork pies like we do in Stockton,” he said.

Around the corner, Brian Peacock, a greengrocer, says many young people do not even recognise many of the vegetables he sells. “It’s only older people who buy the veg. And the students. As for the rest of them, they don’t know what half of them are called, let alone how to cook or eat them.” Stockton’s target is to cut child obesity rates back to their 2000 level by 2020. If the council and health authorities fail to deliver, it will not be for want of trying.

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British "reforms" see pupils reject school food

The number of children having school meals has stalled after the increase in nutritional standards pioneered by Jamie Oliver, official figures show today. Only a third of secondary age pupils eat a cooked lunch. Participation has decreased ever since the standard of food rose after Oliver’s School Dinners campaign in 2005 which resulted in the banning of Turkey Twizzlers and daily helpings of chips.

The School Food Trust, a government agency responsible for improving the quality and take-up of school meals, claimed a victory because the figures rose marginally when comparing schools that had used exactly the same method of calculation last year. But the figures are an embarrassment for the Government, which pledged three years ago to achieve an increase of 10 percentage points in the number of children eating school meals, by this autumn — a target that has been missed whichever set of data is used.

The School Food Trust claimed this year’s was the first “statistically robust national survey” of school meal take-up, but did not say in previous years that the figures were unreliable. When comparing schools that had collected the figures in the same way year-on-year, it said the number of children eating school meals had risen by 0.1 per cent, from 43.8 per cent to 43.9 per cent at primary level, and from 35.5 per cent to 36 per cent in secondary schools.

But figures from all local authorities that responded show the overall national figures were 39.3 per cent in primary schools, compared with 43.6 per cent last year, and 35.1 per cent at secondary level, compared with 37.2 per cent in 2008. The School Food Trust said that this year's figures had been collected in a different way, so that the years could not be compared.

The Local Authority Caterers’ Association(LACA) described the increase as “marginal”. Neil Porter, its chairman, said: “We recognise that this year we are using a different way to calculate the data on the take-up of school lunches. LACA is encouraged by the apparent marginal upward trend in meal take-up in both primary and secondary schools. “However, we believe that we are on a longer journey when it comes to secondary school students. Increasing secondary meal take-up will continue to be a challenge for all of us.”

It was at a secondary school in South Yorkshire that mothers of pupils took orders from the local fast food shop for pupils at lunchtime, after children refused to eat the new healthy school meals. They were seen pushing burgers, fish and chips through the school gates.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said the figures showed a “massive drop” in the number of children eating school meals, and had missed its target to increase participation by “well over one million children”. He added: “We now know that barely a third of secondary school pupils are eating school meals. “There are a number of reasons why the Government has missed its target — including the rushed introduction of new food standards before the groundwork had been done to ensure children will eat the new healthier option.

“The Government stands little chance in meeting its targets unless there is both more investment in the school meals service and a massive change in expectations, so that sitting down for a proper lunch once again becomes the norm for every child.”

Prue Leith, chairwoman of the School Food Trust, said: “We now have a genuine picture of take-up across the country and we can see that real progress is being made the length and breadth of England. “I am heartened that take-up has increased slightly in primary schools following the introduction of new nutrient-based standards and am convinced we are winning the battle for the hearts, minds and tastebuds of children and parents. “It is particularly pleasing that secondary schools have turned the corner. This has always been a long-term project.”

Diana Johnson, the Schools Minister, said: “Four years ago, the majority of children were eating unhealthy meals at school. Chips, chocolate and sugar-filled fizzy drinks were available everyday as a choice for school lunch. Today there is no school where this can now happen — all schools must provide a portion of vegetable and fruit as part of a nutritionally balanced main meal. Now millions of children across the country are eating healthy school lunches. “We know that it is often the state of dining facilities and poor organisation, not nutritional changes that put children off schools dinners. That is why we have invested significant funds in improving dining facilities and the School Food Trust is supporting schools to improve the way they organise their meals services.”

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Third of women with breast cancer 'don't need treatment'

Clearly, treatment should only be undertaken in most cases after monitoring over time is done -- to disclose whether tumor growth is occurring. But such repeated imaging would be too costly for Britain. Paying the wages of an army of bureaucrats gets first call on the British budget. Because of the high risk of false positives, some authorities even discourage breast self-examination these days -- on the grounds that it does more harm than good

A third of women diagnosed with breast cancer have gone through unnecessary treatments, a study revealed yesterday. Routine breast screening produces a high rate of 'false positives' - because it is not sensitive enough to detect which lumps will lead to dangerous cancers and which will not. This means that thousands of British women have been 'over-diagnosed' - forcing them to endure invasive and painful treatment such as needless mastectomies, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The study showed that in more than a third of cases, lumps which were flagged up as a cause for alarm were harmless - either because the tumour was growing so slowly that the patient would have died of other causes before it produced any symptoms, or because the cancer remained dormant or even regressed.

In an editorial accompanying the research, H Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute in the U.S., said that women needed to be aware of the risks, as well as the benefits, of cancer screening. 'Mammography is one of medicine's "close calls" - a delicate balance between benefits and harms - where different people in the same situation might reasonably make different choices,' he said. 'Mammography undoubtedly helps some women, but hurts others. No right answer exists, instead it is a personal choice.'

Cancer charities were keen last night to stress that routine screening is estimated to save 1,400 lives every year in England alone. All women from 50 to 70 are invited to the checks every three years. Across the UK, more than 45,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year and 12,000 die.

Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Centre, who carried out the study, analysed breast cancer trends seven years before and seven years after the introduction of screening programmes in five countries - the UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden and Norway. Taking into account other factors, such as changes in background levels of breast cancer, they estimated the level of overdiagnosis as 35 per cent.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, the study's authors said: 'Screening for cancer may lead to earlier detection of lethal cancers but also detects harmless ones that will not cause death or symptoms. 'The detection of such cancers... can only be harmful to those who experience it.' They said that perhaps doctors doing the screening should request biopsies only for breast masses larger than a certain size.

Dr Sarah Cant, from Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: 'We hope this research will not discourage women from attending breast screening. 'Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to predict which cancers found through screening will develop aggressively and which will grow very slowly. 'Based on all the current evidence, we believe the benefits of detecting breast cancer early still outweigh the risks.'

But good news, death rates at new low The British death rate from three of the most common cancers has fallen to its lowest level in almost 40 years, research has shown. The toll from breast, bowel, and male lung cancer is at its lowest since 1971, an analysis by Cancer Research UK found. This means Britain could be at last turning the tide on its appalling record of cancer survival compared with the rest of Europe. The UK has the worst cancer record in Western Europe. Its survival rates are on a par with Poland and the Czech Republic, even though these countries spend two-thirds less on cancer treatment.

Critics have claimed the UK's poor showing proves that the vast amount of extra funding poured into the NHS by Labour has been wasted - although ministers say the new figures should be a cause for optimism. Breast cancer deaths among women peaked in 1989 at 15,625 but dropped to 11,990 in 2007, according to the data. Bowel cancer deaths among both sexes peaked in 1992 at 19,598, but fell to 16,007 in 2007.

Meanwhile, the number of men dying from lung cancer peaked in 1979 at 30,391 but dropped to 19,637 in 2007. The number of people developing cancer is on the rise as we live longer than ever before. But fewer people are dying from the disease - partly due to improved screening and new and better treatments.

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