Atheist kids better at sports: Swiss study
One wonders what the intervening variables were. A direct effect of religion is improbable. Does changing your religion make you run faster? I don't know enough about Winterthur to know what characterizes atheists there. Maybe they play sport instead of going to church.
The finding that education and income predict better performance is expected. Higher class people are generally fitter and healthier
Results of a study of 600 children conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EHT) have shown that religion has an effect on sporting ability, with Muslim girls the least skilled.
For the study, first grade school children in Winterthur in northern Switzerland underwent regular tests to measure their strength, coordination and agility.
After four years of following their development, the ETH's Institute for Movement Sciences and Sport cross-referenced the data with information about the origin of their parents, their native language and their religion.
Results showed that children with no religious background tend to be the most skilful athletes. These are followed by Protestants and Catholics. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Muslim children, who performed well below the average, especially girls.
According to the director of the school, Stefan Fritschi, Muslim girls are often reluctant to participate in sports that involve bodily contact with other children. Similarly, swimming lessons are problematic, as Muslim families try to remove their daughters from the classes.
Language also plays a role. German-speaking students show much better results than children with other first languages, such as Bosnian and Albanian.
"The differences are considerable, but not really surprising,” the head of the study, Andreas Krebs, told newspaper Tages Anzeiger. “Parents from south-eastern Europe often have a different level of access to sports. There's also a different beauty ideal,” he added.
However, for Krebs, the most important differences relate to the social status of the family. The richer and more educated they are, the better their children do in sports tests.
SOURCE
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Put down that Diet Coke! Low calorie substitutes might actually fool your body into GAINING weight
Rodent study only but it is an interesting warning
Low calorie fat substitutes used in snacks for dieters may actually make them pile on the pounds, scientists claim.
They discovered that when you taste them your bodies gears up to expect calories, so when it only gets a low-calorie hit it gets confused, making you eat more.
An American research team from Purdue University in Indiana carried out a series of experiments on laboratory rats.
Professor of psychological sciences Susan Swithers said: 'Substituting a part of the diet with a similar tasting item that has fewer or zero calories sounds like a common-sense approach to lose weight, but there are other physiological functions at work.
'These substitutes are meant to mimic the taste of fat in foods that are normally high in fat while providing a lower number of calories, but they may end up confusing the body.
'Tastes normally alert the body to expect calories, and when those calories aren't present we believe the systems become ineffective and one of the body's mechanisms to control food intake can become ineffective.
'When the mouth tastes something sweet or fatty it tells the body to prepare for calories, and this information is key to the digestive process.
'This is a reminder to not discount the roles that taste and experience with food play in the way the body's systems work together.'
Professor Swithers, based at the Ingestive Behaviour Research Centre, added: 'We didn't study this in people, but we found that when rats consumed a fat substitute, learned signals that could help control food intake were disrupted, and the rats gained weight as a result.'
Researchers fed laboratory rats with crushed crisps as a supplement to their diet, and they were then divided into two groups that were given either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet.
These groups were then each split into two smaller groups. One group on each diet was fed a mixture of high-fat crisps and the fat-substitute crisps, containing olestra, which is a synthetic fat with no calories, while the other group received only high-fat crisps.
After 28 days the rats maintained on the high-fat diet gained more weight and developed more fatty tissue when they were given fat-substitute crisps compared to the animals that ate only regular high-fat crisps.
Study co-author Professor Terry Davidson said: 'We are looking at an animal model, but there are similarities for humans, and based on what we found, we believe that our findings question the effectiveness of using fat substitutes as part of a long-term weight loss strategy.'
The findings appear online in Behavioural Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
SOURCE
Rodent study only but it is an interesting warning
Low calorie fat substitutes used in snacks for dieters may actually make them pile on the pounds, scientists claim.
They discovered that when you taste them your bodies gears up to expect calories, so when it only gets a low-calorie hit it gets confused, making you eat more.
An American research team from Purdue University in Indiana carried out a series of experiments on laboratory rats.
Professor of psychological sciences Susan Swithers said: 'Substituting a part of the diet with a similar tasting item that has fewer or zero calories sounds like a common-sense approach to lose weight, but there are other physiological functions at work.
'These substitutes are meant to mimic the taste of fat in foods that are normally high in fat while providing a lower number of calories, but they may end up confusing the body.
'Tastes normally alert the body to expect calories, and when those calories aren't present we believe the systems become ineffective and one of the body's mechanisms to control food intake can become ineffective.
'When the mouth tastes something sweet or fatty it tells the body to prepare for calories, and this information is key to the digestive process.
'This is a reminder to not discount the roles that taste and experience with food play in the way the body's systems work together.'
Professor Swithers, based at the Ingestive Behaviour Research Centre, added: 'We didn't study this in people, but we found that when rats consumed a fat substitute, learned signals that could help control food intake were disrupted, and the rats gained weight as a result.'
Researchers fed laboratory rats with crushed crisps as a supplement to their diet, and they were then divided into two groups that were given either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet.
These groups were then each split into two smaller groups. One group on each diet was fed a mixture of high-fat crisps and the fat-substitute crisps, containing olestra, which is a synthetic fat with no calories, while the other group received only high-fat crisps.
After 28 days the rats maintained on the high-fat diet gained more weight and developed more fatty tissue when they were given fat-substitute crisps compared to the animals that ate only regular high-fat crisps.
Study co-author Professor Terry Davidson said: 'We are looking at an animal model, but there are similarities for humans, and based on what we found, we believe that our findings question the effectiveness of using fat substitutes as part of a long-term weight loss strategy.'
The findings appear online in Behavioural Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
SOURCE
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Young women 'could reduce their heart disease risk by 90 per cent by eating fish once a week' (?)
Ya gotta laugh. The large effect reported in the article below immediately seemed fishy to me (pardon the pun) so I looked up the original journal article (Abstract also below). So I am now in a position to rephrase the first sentence below more accurately: "Young women who SAY THEY regularly eat oily fish are less prone to heart disease".
Unvalidated self-report data is of notoriously low quality so what the finding below most probably shows is that smart middle class people who are aware of the unremitting propaganda about the glories of fish oil SAY they eat oily fish whether they do or not. So it is simply the generally better health of middle class people that this study is again recording
Young women who regularly eat oily fish are less prone to heart disease say scientists. A groundbreaking study has found that a fish-rich diet could cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by 90 per cent.
Traditionally findings have highlighted the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, found in salmon, mackerel and sardines for men. However it is now believed because of gender differences fish oil might be even more beneficial for women of a child-bearing age, boosting blood pressure, cardiac and blood vessel function.
Lead researcher Dr Marin Strom, from the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen said: 'Our study shows that for younger women, eating fish is very important for overall health.'
The study involved 49,000 Danish women aged 15 to 49 whose health was monitored for eight years. Over the period their diet, lifestyle and family history were assessed, while 577 cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes were recorded, five of which resulted in death.
Researchers found women who rarely or never ate fish had 90 per cent more cardiovascular problems than those who ate oily fish every week. Dr Strom added: 'To our knowledge this is the first study of this size to focus exclusively on women of child-bearing age. 'Even though we found cardio-protective effects at relatively modest dietary levels, higher levels may yield additional benefits.'
The team now hope that the findings, published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, will encourage younger populations to eat more oily fish.
The NHS recommends that a healthy diet should include at least two portions of fish a week, including one of oily fish. However, pregnant women should have no more than two portions a week.
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the UK's biggest killer, causing around 94,000 deaths every year and around one in seven women die from the disease.
Symptoms can include chest pain (angina), palpitations and heart attacks but in some cases, people may not present any symptoms before diagnosis.
SOURCE
Your regulators will protect you -- NOT
Feds Allow Arsenic in Apple Juice!
This past year, I started writing a health and fitness column through Creators.com, titled "C-Force." It is no surprise that in researching for that column, I've discovered repeat offenses of food and beverage tampering by the federal government. But arsenic in apple juice?
Dr. Oz received significant flak when he reported in September that "some of the best-known brands of apple juice contain arsenic." Since then, however, Oz has been redeemed and his claims substantiated!
After Oz's initial comments, Dr. Richard Besser, a 13-year veteran of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ABC News' chief health and medical editor, publicly lambasted Oz and his warnings as "extremely irresponsible" and "fear-mongering" and equated them to yelling "'Fire!' in a movie theater." Amid the public debate, the Food and Drug Administration tried to steady the apple cart by saying that consumption of apple juice "poses little or no risk."
But just a few days ago, I watched a humbled Besser on "Good Morning America" recant his fury against Oz's conclusions, saying instead that new studies have just confirmed arsenic is indeed in many popular apple juices.
ABC News reported that Consumer Reports tested 88 samples of popular brands of grape and apple juice sold in the U.S., including Welch's, Minute Maid and Mott's. The results revealed that 10 percent of the juices "had total arsenic levels greater than the FDA's standard for drinking water of 10 parts per billion (ppb), while 25 percent of juices also had lead levels higher than the FDA's bottled water limit of 5 ppb."
Furthermore, data on arsenic in adult urine from the CDC demonstrated that men and women who drank apple or grape juice in a 24-hour period "had, on average, about 20 percent higher levels of total urinary arsenic than those subjects who did not."
Consumer Reports went on to report that the arsenic tested and detected is inorganic and a human carcinogen. CR further explained that there is "mounting scientific evidence suggesting that chronic exposure to arsenic and lead even at levels below federal standards for water can result in serious health problems, especially for those who are exposed in the womb or during early childhood. FDA data and other research reveal that arsenic has been detected at disturbing levels in other foods as well." So who wants organic or inorganic arsenic in his water, juice and food? (Oz further notes that though many say organic arsenic is safe, there is clear evidence that both forms are ultimately hazardous to our health.)
Tragically teetering on a huge U.S. health cover-up, the FDA posted eight "previously undisclosed test results" for apple juice samples from across the country that had arsenic levels that superseded even its own "level of concern" for inorganic arsenic. Two of those eight samples had an arsenic level of 27 ppb. One had a level of 42 ppb, and two others were at 45 ppb.
What's even worse is that the samples were discovered in 2008. And we're just finding out about them now? Such undisclosed elevated levels of arsenic give a whole new meaning to the saying, "Quit drinking the feds' Kool-Aid!"
Strangely, the FDA has limits for arsenic in water (including bottled) but no such regulations on fruit juices. At the very least, the FDA should not allow more arsenic in apple juice than it allows in Americans' drinking water. Until then, tides of arsenic will continue to flow from foreign produce fields into American bloodstreams. (If you want to weigh in on this issue, contact the FDA at http://www.fda.gov or call 888-463-6332.)
Dr. Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports, rightly delivered this staunch warning: "We're concerned about the potential risks of exposure to these toxins, especially for children who are particularly vulnerable because of their small body size and the amount of juice they regularly consume."
With apple juice lacing children's cereals, snack bars and holiday party tables, we need to heed this countrywide health warning and blow the trumpet to our neighbors. The fact is that the U.S. is getting more and more of its fruits and vegetables from other countries, and many of them do not preclude or limit arsenic in their pesticides or even their water supplies as the U.S. does. Oz reported that apple concentrate comes from up to seven countries; 60 percent of it is imported from China alone.
I agree with Oz, Rangan and Consumer Reports; it's best for consumers to reduce their exposure to these juices. CR is recommending, until this juice fiasco is remedied, that you not give any type of juice to infants younger than 6 months. Also, no more than 6 ounces daily should be given to children up to 6 years old, and older children should have no more than 12 ounces daily.
SOURCE
Ya gotta laugh. The large effect reported in the article below immediately seemed fishy to me (pardon the pun) so I looked up the original journal article (Abstract also below). So I am now in a position to rephrase the first sentence below more accurately: "Young women who SAY THEY regularly eat oily fish are less prone to heart disease".
Unvalidated self-report data is of notoriously low quality so what the finding below most probably shows is that smart middle class people who are aware of the unremitting propaganda about the glories of fish oil SAY they eat oily fish whether they do or not. So it is simply the generally better health of middle class people that this study is again recording
Young women who regularly eat oily fish are less prone to heart disease say scientists. A groundbreaking study has found that a fish-rich diet could cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by 90 per cent.
Traditionally findings have highlighted the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, found in salmon, mackerel and sardines for men. However it is now believed because of gender differences fish oil might be even more beneficial for women of a child-bearing age, boosting blood pressure, cardiac and blood vessel function.
Lead researcher Dr Marin Strom, from the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen said: 'Our study shows that for younger women, eating fish is very important for overall health.'
The study involved 49,000 Danish women aged 15 to 49 whose health was monitored for eight years. Over the period their diet, lifestyle and family history were assessed, while 577 cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes were recorded, five of which resulted in death.
Researchers found women who rarely or never ate fish had 90 per cent more cardiovascular problems than those who ate oily fish every week. Dr Strom added: 'To our knowledge this is the first study of this size to focus exclusively on women of child-bearing age. 'Even though we found cardio-protective effects at relatively modest dietary levels, higher levels may yield additional benefits.'
The team now hope that the findings, published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, will encourage younger populations to eat more oily fish.
The NHS recommends that a healthy diet should include at least two portions of fish a week, including one of oily fish. However, pregnant women should have no more than two portions a week.
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the UK's biggest killer, causing around 94,000 deaths every year and around one in seven women die from the disease.
Symptoms can include chest pain (angina), palpitations and heart attacks but in some cases, people may not present any symptoms before diagnosis.
SOURCE
Fish, n-3 Fatty Acids, and Cardiovascular Diseases in Women of Reproductive Age: A Prospective Study in a Large National Cohort
By Marin Strom, et al
Abstract
Previous studies have indicated a protective effect of long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCn3FAs) against cardiovascular disease; however, women are underrepresented in cardiovascular research. The aim of this study was to explore the association between intake of LCn3FAs and the risk of cardiovascular disease in a large prospective cohort of young women (mean age at baseline: 29.9 years [range: 15.7-46.9]). Exposure information on 48 627 women from the Danish National Birth Cohort was linked to the Danish National Patients Registry for information on events of hypertensive, cerebrovascular, and ischemic heart disease used to define a combined measure of cardiovascular diseases.
Intake of fish and LCn3FAs was assessed by a food-frequency questionnaire and telephone interviews. During follow-up (1996-2008; median: 8 years), 577 events of cardiovascular disease were identified. Low LCn3FA intake was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (adjusted hazard ratio for women in lowest versus highest LCn3FA intake group: 1.91 [95% CI: 1.26-2.90]). Restricting the sample to women who had consistently reported similar frequencies of fish intake across 3 different dietary assessment occasions tended to strengthen the relationship (hazard ratio for lowest versus highest intake: 2.91 [95% CI: 1.45-5.85]).
Furthermore, the observed associations were consistent in supplementary analyses where LCn3FA intake was averaged across the 3 dietary assessment occasions, and the associations were persistent for all 3 of the individual outcomes. Our findings based on a large prospective cohort of relatively young and initially healthy women indicated that little or no intake of fish and LCn3FAs was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
SOURCE
Your regulators will protect you -- NOT
Feds Allow Arsenic in Apple Juice!
This past year, I started writing a health and fitness column through Creators.com, titled "C-Force." It is no surprise that in researching for that column, I've discovered repeat offenses of food and beverage tampering by the federal government. But arsenic in apple juice?
Dr. Oz received significant flak when he reported in September that "some of the best-known brands of apple juice contain arsenic." Since then, however, Oz has been redeemed and his claims substantiated!
After Oz's initial comments, Dr. Richard Besser, a 13-year veteran of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ABC News' chief health and medical editor, publicly lambasted Oz and his warnings as "extremely irresponsible" and "fear-mongering" and equated them to yelling "'Fire!' in a movie theater." Amid the public debate, the Food and Drug Administration tried to steady the apple cart by saying that consumption of apple juice "poses little or no risk."
But just a few days ago, I watched a humbled Besser on "Good Morning America" recant his fury against Oz's conclusions, saying instead that new studies have just confirmed arsenic is indeed in many popular apple juices.
ABC News reported that Consumer Reports tested 88 samples of popular brands of grape and apple juice sold in the U.S., including Welch's, Minute Maid and Mott's. The results revealed that 10 percent of the juices "had total arsenic levels greater than the FDA's standard for drinking water of 10 parts per billion (ppb), while 25 percent of juices also had lead levels higher than the FDA's bottled water limit of 5 ppb."
Furthermore, data on arsenic in adult urine from the CDC demonstrated that men and women who drank apple or grape juice in a 24-hour period "had, on average, about 20 percent higher levels of total urinary arsenic than those subjects who did not."
Consumer Reports went on to report that the arsenic tested and detected is inorganic and a human carcinogen. CR further explained that there is "mounting scientific evidence suggesting that chronic exposure to arsenic and lead even at levels below federal standards for water can result in serious health problems, especially for those who are exposed in the womb or during early childhood. FDA data and other research reveal that arsenic has been detected at disturbing levels in other foods as well." So who wants organic or inorganic arsenic in his water, juice and food? (Oz further notes that though many say organic arsenic is safe, there is clear evidence that both forms are ultimately hazardous to our health.)
Tragically teetering on a huge U.S. health cover-up, the FDA posted eight "previously undisclosed test results" for apple juice samples from across the country that had arsenic levels that superseded even its own "level of concern" for inorganic arsenic. Two of those eight samples had an arsenic level of 27 ppb. One had a level of 42 ppb, and two others were at 45 ppb.
What's even worse is that the samples were discovered in 2008. And we're just finding out about them now? Such undisclosed elevated levels of arsenic give a whole new meaning to the saying, "Quit drinking the feds' Kool-Aid!"
Strangely, the FDA has limits for arsenic in water (including bottled) but no such regulations on fruit juices. At the very least, the FDA should not allow more arsenic in apple juice than it allows in Americans' drinking water. Until then, tides of arsenic will continue to flow from foreign produce fields into American bloodstreams. (If you want to weigh in on this issue, contact the FDA at http://www.fda.gov or call 888-463-6332.)
Dr. Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports, rightly delivered this staunch warning: "We're concerned about the potential risks of exposure to these toxins, especially for children who are particularly vulnerable because of their small body size and the amount of juice they regularly consume."
With apple juice lacing children's cereals, snack bars and holiday party tables, we need to heed this countrywide health warning and blow the trumpet to our neighbors. The fact is that the U.S. is getting more and more of its fruits and vegetables from other countries, and many of them do not preclude or limit arsenic in their pesticides or even their water supplies as the U.S. does. Oz reported that apple concentrate comes from up to seven countries; 60 percent of it is imported from China alone.
I agree with Oz, Rangan and Consumer Reports; it's best for consumers to reduce their exposure to these juices. CR is recommending, until this juice fiasco is remedied, that you not give any type of juice to infants younger than 6 months. Also, no more than 6 ounces daily should be given to children up to 6 years old, and older children should have no more than 12 ounces daily.
SOURCE
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Crap drug research: Two thirds of published claims cannot be reproduced
Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33. Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug.
It proved to be a waste of time and money. After six months of intensive lab work, Amgen found it couldn't replicate the results and scrapped the project.
"I was disappointed but not surprised," says Glenn Begley, vice president of research at Amgen of Thousand Oaks, Calif. "More often than not, we are unable to reproduce findings" published by researchers in journals.
This is one of medicine's dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can't be reproduced.
Researchers at Bayer's labs often find their experiments fail to match claims made in the scientific literature. "It's a very serious and disturbing issue because it obviously misleads people" who implicitly trust findings published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, says Bruce Alberts, editor of Science. On Friday, the U.S. journal is devoting a large chunk of its Dec. 2 issue to the problem of scientific replication.
Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can't be validated by others, there are major consequences.
Drug manufacturers rely heavily on early-stage academic research and can waste millions of dollars on products if the original results are later shown to be unreliable. Patients may enroll in clinical trials based on conflicting data, and sometimes see no benefits or suffer harmful side effects.
Unlike pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers rarely conduct experiments in a "blinded" manner. This makes it easier to cherry-pick statistical findings that support a positive result. In the quest for jobs and funding, especially in an era of economic malaise, the growing army of scientists need more successful experiments to their name, not failed ones. An explosion of scientific and academic journals has added to the pressure.
When it comes to results that can't be replicated, Dr. Alberts says the increasing intricacy of experiments may be largely to blame. "It has to do with the complexity of biology and the fact that methods [used in labs] are getting more sophisticated," he says.
It is hard to assess whether the reproducibility problem has been getting worse over the years; there are some signs suggesting it could be. For example, the success rate of Phase 2 human trials—where a drug's efficacy is measured—fell to 18% in 2008-2010 from 28% in 2006-2007, according to a global analysis published in the journal Nature Reviews in May. "Lack of reproducibility is one element in the decline in Phase 2 success," says Khusru Asadullah, a Bayer AG research executive.
In September, Bayer published a study describing how it had halted nearly two-thirds of its early drug target projects because in-house experiments failed to match claims made in the literature.
The German pharmaceutical company says that none of the claims it attempted to validate were in papers that had been retracted or were suspected of being flawed. Yet, even the data in the most prestigious journals couldn't be confirmed, Bayer said.
In 2008, Pfizer Inc. made a high-profile bet, potentially worth more than $725 million, that it could turn a 25-year-old Russian cold medicine into an effective drug for Alzheimer's disease.
The idea was promising. Published by the journal Lancet, data from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and elsewhere suggested that the drug, an antihistamine called Dimebon, could improve symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. Later findings, presented by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles at a Chicago conference, showed that the drug appeared to prevent symptoms from worsening for up to 18 months.
"Statistically, the studies were very robust," says David Hung, chief executive officer of Medivation Inc., a San Francisco biotech firm that sponsored both studies.
In 2010, Medivation along with Pfizer released data from their own clinical trial for Dimebon, involving nearly 600 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease symptoms. The companies said they were unable to reproduce the Lancet results. They also indicated they had found no statistically significant difference between patients on the drug versus the inactive placebo.
Pfizer and Medivation have just completed a one-year study of Dimebon in over 1,000 patients, another effort to see if the drug could be a potential treatment for Alzheimer's. They expect to announce the results in coming months.
Scientists offer a few theories as to why duplicative results may be so elusive. Two different labs can use slightly different equipment or materials, leading to divergent results. The more variables there are in an experiment, the more likely it is that small, unintended errors will pile up and swing a lab's conclusions one way or the other. And, of course, data that have been rigged, invented or fraudulently altered won't stand up to future scrutiny.
According to a report published by the U.K.'s Royal Society, there were 7.1 million researchers working globally across all scientific fields—academic and corporate—in 2007, a 25% increase from five years earlier.
"Among the more obvious yet unquantifiable reasons, there is immense competition among laboratories and a pressure to publish," wrote Dr. Asadullah and others from Bayer, in their September paper. "There is also a bias toward publishing positive results, as it is easier to get positive results accepted in good journals."
Science publications are under pressure, too. The number of research journals has jumped 23% between 2001 and 2010, according to Elsevier, which has analyzed the data. Their proliferation has ratcheted up competitive pressure on even elite journals, which can generate buzz by publishing splashy papers, typically containing positive findings, to meet the demands of a 24-hour news cycle.
Dr. Alberts of Science acknowledges that journals increasingly have to strike a balance between publishing studies "with broad appeal," while making sure they aren't hyped.
Drugmakers also have a penchant for positive results. A 2008 study published in the journal PLoS Medicine by researchers at the University of California San Francisco looked at data from 33 new drug applications submitted between 2001 and 2002 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency requires drug companies to provide all data from clinical trials. However, the authors found that a quarter of the trial data—most of it unfavorable—never got published because the companies never submitted it to journals.
The upshot: doctors who end up prescribing the FDA-approved drugs often don't get to see the unfavorable data.
"I would say that selectively publishing data is unethical because there are human subjects involved," says Lisa Bero of UCSF and co-author of the PLoS Medicine study.
In an email statement, a spokeswoman for the FDA said the agency considers all data it is given when reviewing a drug but "does not have the authority to control what a company chooses to publish."
Venture capital firms say they, too, are increasingly encountering cases of nonrepeatable studies, and cite it as a key reason why they are less willing to finance early-stage projects. Before investing in very early-stage research, Atlas Ventures, a venture-capital firm that backs biotech companies, now asks an outside lab to validate any experimental data. In about half the cases the findings can't be reproduced, says Bruce Booth, a partner in Atlas' Life Sciences group.
There have been several prominent cases of nonreproducibility in recent months. For example, in September, the journal Science partially retracted a 2009 paper linking a virus to chronic fatigue syndrome because several labs couldn't replicate the published results. The partial retraction came after two of the 13 study authors went back to the blood samples they analyzed from chronic-fatigue patients and found they were contaminated.
Some studies can't be redone for a more prosaic reason: the authors won't make all their raw data available to rival scientists.
John Ioannidis of Stanford University recently attempted to reproduce the findings of 18 papers published in the respected journal Nature Genetics. He noted that 16 of these papers stated that the underlying "gene expression" data for the studies were publicly available.
But the supplied data apparently weren't detailed enough, and results from 16 of the 18 major papers couldn't fully be reproduced by Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues. "We have to take it [on faith] that the findings are OK," said Dr. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist who studies the credibility of medical research.
Veronique Kiermer, an editor at Nature, says she agrees with Dr. Ioannidis' conclusions, noting that the findings have prompted the journal to be more cautious when publishing large-scale genome analyses.
When companies trying to find new drugs come up against the nonreproducibility problem, the repercussions can be significant.
A few years ago, several groups of scientists began to seek out new cancer drugs by targeting a protein called KRAS. The KRAS protein transmits signals received on the outside of a cell to its interior and is therefore crucial for regulating cell growth. But when certain mutations occur, the signaling can become continuous. That triggers excess growth such as tumors.
The mutated form of KRAS is believed to be responsible for more than 60% of pancreatic cancers and half of colorectal cancers. It has also been implicated in the growth of tumors in many other organs, such as the lung.
So scientists have been especially keen to impede KRAS and, thus, stop the constant signaling that leads to tumor growth.
In 2008, researchers at Harvard Medical School used cell-culture experiments to show that by inhibiting another protein, STK33, they could prevent the growth of tumor cell lines driven by the malfunctioning KRAS.
The finding galvanized researchers at Amgen, who first heard about the experiments at a scientific conference. "Everyone was trying to do this," recalls Dr. Begley of Amgen, which derives nearly half of its revenues from cancer drugs and related treatments. "It was a really big deal."
When the Harvard researchers published their results in the prestigious journal Cell, in May 2009, Amgen moved swiftly to capitalize on the findings.
At a meeting in the company's offices in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Dr. Begley assigned a group of Amgen researchers the task of identifying small molecules that might inhibit STK33. Another team got a more basic job: reproduce the Harvard data.
"We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in downstream investments" if the approach works," says Dr. Begley. "So we need to be sure we're standing on something firm and solid."
But over the next few months, Dr. Begley and his team got increasingly disheartened. Amgen scientists, it turned out, couldn't reproduce any of the key findings published in Cell.
For example, there was no difference in the growth of cells where STK33 was largely blocked, compared with a control group of cells where STK33 wasn't blocked.
What could account for the irreproducibility of the results? "In our opinion there were methodological issues" in Amgen's approach that could have led to the different findings, says Claudia Scholl, one of the lead authors of the original Cell paper.
Dr. Scholl points out, for example, that Amgen used a different reagent to suppress STK33 than the one reported in Cell. Yet, she acknowledges that even when slightly different reagents are used, "you should be able to reproduce the results."
Now a cancer researcher at the University Hospital of Ulm in Germany, Dr. Scholl says her team has reproduced the original Cell results multiple times, and continues to have faith in STK33 as a cancer target.
Amgen, however, killed its STK33 program. In September, two dozen of the firm's scientists published a paper in the journal Cancer Research describing their failure to reproduce the main Cell findings.
Dr. Begley suggests that academic scientists, like drug companies, should perform more experiments in a "blinded" manner to reduce any bias toward positive findings. Otherwise, he says, "there is a human desire to get the results your boss wants you to get."
Adds Atlas' Mr. Booth: "Nobody gets a promotion from publishing a negative study."
SOURCE
Call for council 'diet police' to inspect private sector employees in Britain
What evidence do they have that lectures on diet would reduce illness?
Council inspectors should start monitoring what private sector employees eat at work in order to help improve the country’s health and to reduce sickness rates, a report has concluded. Drastic action is needed to halt the cycle of ill health amid an alarming “sick note culture”, it found.
The report from 2020Health, a think tank, found that the economy is losing tens of billions of pounds in productivity because of a high number of sick days.
The report recommended the role of council “diet police” be increased to offer advice to the private sector. The authors said the proposals in the report, released today, would help reduce the “sick note culture”.
The suggestion is likely to lead to claims of more “meddling” from council inspectors.
Latest figures show that up to three per cent of the active workforce is off sick at any one time. About 175 million working days are lost each year due to ill health, costing the economy more than £100 billion.
Among the report’s recommendations is a move to allow the role of local authority health and safety inspectors to be expanded. This would mean better advice and information on private sector employee diets, the set-up of workstations, and the importance of exercise could be given, the report says.
It also recommended that the private sector be able to increase the amount of “home-based working” for those recovering from ill health, and be able to stipulate a “workplace health” clause when awarding building contracts.
The report’s authors called for services provided by the NHS to reduce illness such as increased cancer and cardiac screening in the workplace.
The report also said people should be allowed to register with health services that are close to their workplace. The authors said that their recommendations were put forward to “complement the Government’s recent announcements on getting the sick back to work”.
It is estimated that about 3.4 million working days could be saved annually in the NHS, Europe’s largest employer, alone if it improved the health of its workforce.
Julia Manning, the think tank’s chief executive, said: “Our proposals would go a long way towards repairing both the nation’s health and its economic fortunes. The importance of health to economies is well established. “Good health improves educational outcomes, enhances performance at work, increases savings rates and reduces the burden on the public purse by decreasing the demand for health services and benefits payments.”
Earlier this month, an independent review for the Government recommended that independent assessment of sickness claims be introduced.
David Cameron has warned that Britain's sicknote culture in the workplace was acting as a "conveyor belt to a life on benefits". The Prime Minister said he would act on expert advice that recommended that family doctors should be stripped of the power to sign people off work long-term.
"‘Of course some of these people genuinely can’t work, and we must support them. That’s only fair," the Prime Minister said. "But it’s also fair that those who can return to work should be supported to do so. We need to end the something for nothing culture.
"‘While 90 per cent of sickness cases are short-term – that stomach bug or flu that we all suffer from occasionally – nearly half of all days lost to sickness absence are because of cases that last four weeks or more."
Ministers believe that about one in five of those who are absent on long-term sick leave should either never have been signed off in the first place or could go back to work.
The expert report, commissioned for Downing Street, suggested more than three-quarters of GPs admitted they had signed people off sick for reasons other than their physical health.
Mr Cameron said he was alarmed by evidence of the scale of the problem from a report by Dame Carol Black, an expert on health at work, and David Frost, the former director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.
SOURCE
Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33. Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug.
It proved to be a waste of time and money. After six months of intensive lab work, Amgen found it couldn't replicate the results and scrapped the project.
"I was disappointed but not surprised," says Glenn Begley, vice president of research at Amgen of Thousand Oaks, Calif. "More often than not, we are unable to reproduce findings" published by researchers in journals.
This is one of medicine's dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can't be reproduced.
Researchers at Bayer's labs often find their experiments fail to match claims made in the scientific literature. "It's a very serious and disturbing issue because it obviously misleads people" who implicitly trust findings published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, says Bruce Alberts, editor of Science. On Friday, the U.S. journal is devoting a large chunk of its Dec. 2 issue to the problem of scientific replication.
Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can't be validated by others, there are major consequences.
Drug manufacturers rely heavily on early-stage academic research and can waste millions of dollars on products if the original results are later shown to be unreliable. Patients may enroll in clinical trials based on conflicting data, and sometimes see no benefits or suffer harmful side effects.
Unlike pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers rarely conduct experiments in a "blinded" manner. This makes it easier to cherry-pick statistical findings that support a positive result. In the quest for jobs and funding, especially in an era of economic malaise, the growing army of scientists need more successful experiments to their name, not failed ones. An explosion of scientific and academic journals has added to the pressure.
When it comes to results that can't be replicated, Dr. Alberts says the increasing intricacy of experiments may be largely to blame. "It has to do with the complexity of biology and the fact that methods [used in labs] are getting more sophisticated," he says.
It is hard to assess whether the reproducibility problem has been getting worse over the years; there are some signs suggesting it could be. For example, the success rate of Phase 2 human trials—where a drug's efficacy is measured—fell to 18% in 2008-2010 from 28% in 2006-2007, according to a global analysis published in the journal Nature Reviews in May. "Lack of reproducibility is one element in the decline in Phase 2 success," says Khusru Asadullah, a Bayer AG research executive.
In September, Bayer published a study describing how it had halted nearly two-thirds of its early drug target projects because in-house experiments failed to match claims made in the literature.
The German pharmaceutical company says that none of the claims it attempted to validate were in papers that had been retracted or were suspected of being flawed. Yet, even the data in the most prestigious journals couldn't be confirmed, Bayer said.
In 2008, Pfizer Inc. made a high-profile bet, potentially worth more than $725 million, that it could turn a 25-year-old Russian cold medicine into an effective drug for Alzheimer's disease.
The idea was promising. Published by the journal Lancet, data from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and elsewhere suggested that the drug, an antihistamine called Dimebon, could improve symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. Later findings, presented by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles at a Chicago conference, showed that the drug appeared to prevent symptoms from worsening for up to 18 months.
"Statistically, the studies were very robust," says David Hung, chief executive officer of Medivation Inc., a San Francisco biotech firm that sponsored both studies.
In 2010, Medivation along with Pfizer released data from their own clinical trial for Dimebon, involving nearly 600 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease symptoms. The companies said they were unable to reproduce the Lancet results. They also indicated they had found no statistically significant difference between patients on the drug versus the inactive placebo.
Pfizer and Medivation have just completed a one-year study of Dimebon in over 1,000 patients, another effort to see if the drug could be a potential treatment for Alzheimer's. They expect to announce the results in coming months.
Scientists offer a few theories as to why duplicative results may be so elusive. Two different labs can use slightly different equipment or materials, leading to divergent results. The more variables there are in an experiment, the more likely it is that small, unintended errors will pile up and swing a lab's conclusions one way or the other. And, of course, data that have been rigged, invented or fraudulently altered won't stand up to future scrutiny.
According to a report published by the U.K.'s Royal Society, there were 7.1 million researchers working globally across all scientific fields—academic and corporate—in 2007, a 25% increase from five years earlier.
"Among the more obvious yet unquantifiable reasons, there is immense competition among laboratories and a pressure to publish," wrote Dr. Asadullah and others from Bayer, in their September paper. "There is also a bias toward publishing positive results, as it is easier to get positive results accepted in good journals."
Science publications are under pressure, too. The number of research journals has jumped 23% between 2001 and 2010, according to Elsevier, which has analyzed the data. Their proliferation has ratcheted up competitive pressure on even elite journals, which can generate buzz by publishing splashy papers, typically containing positive findings, to meet the demands of a 24-hour news cycle.
Dr. Alberts of Science acknowledges that journals increasingly have to strike a balance between publishing studies "with broad appeal," while making sure they aren't hyped.
Drugmakers also have a penchant for positive results. A 2008 study published in the journal PLoS Medicine by researchers at the University of California San Francisco looked at data from 33 new drug applications submitted between 2001 and 2002 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency requires drug companies to provide all data from clinical trials. However, the authors found that a quarter of the trial data—most of it unfavorable—never got published because the companies never submitted it to journals.
The upshot: doctors who end up prescribing the FDA-approved drugs often don't get to see the unfavorable data.
"I would say that selectively publishing data is unethical because there are human subjects involved," says Lisa Bero of UCSF and co-author of the PLoS Medicine study.
In an email statement, a spokeswoman for the FDA said the agency considers all data it is given when reviewing a drug but "does not have the authority to control what a company chooses to publish."
Venture capital firms say they, too, are increasingly encountering cases of nonrepeatable studies, and cite it as a key reason why they are less willing to finance early-stage projects. Before investing in very early-stage research, Atlas Ventures, a venture-capital firm that backs biotech companies, now asks an outside lab to validate any experimental data. In about half the cases the findings can't be reproduced, says Bruce Booth, a partner in Atlas' Life Sciences group.
There have been several prominent cases of nonreproducibility in recent months. For example, in September, the journal Science partially retracted a 2009 paper linking a virus to chronic fatigue syndrome because several labs couldn't replicate the published results. The partial retraction came after two of the 13 study authors went back to the blood samples they analyzed from chronic-fatigue patients and found they were contaminated.
Some studies can't be redone for a more prosaic reason: the authors won't make all their raw data available to rival scientists.
John Ioannidis of Stanford University recently attempted to reproduce the findings of 18 papers published in the respected journal Nature Genetics. He noted that 16 of these papers stated that the underlying "gene expression" data for the studies were publicly available.
But the supplied data apparently weren't detailed enough, and results from 16 of the 18 major papers couldn't fully be reproduced by Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues. "We have to take it [on faith] that the findings are OK," said Dr. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist who studies the credibility of medical research.
Veronique Kiermer, an editor at Nature, says she agrees with Dr. Ioannidis' conclusions, noting that the findings have prompted the journal to be more cautious when publishing large-scale genome analyses.
When companies trying to find new drugs come up against the nonreproducibility problem, the repercussions can be significant.
A few years ago, several groups of scientists began to seek out new cancer drugs by targeting a protein called KRAS. The KRAS protein transmits signals received on the outside of a cell to its interior and is therefore crucial for regulating cell growth. But when certain mutations occur, the signaling can become continuous. That triggers excess growth such as tumors.
The mutated form of KRAS is believed to be responsible for more than 60% of pancreatic cancers and half of colorectal cancers. It has also been implicated in the growth of tumors in many other organs, such as the lung.
So scientists have been especially keen to impede KRAS and, thus, stop the constant signaling that leads to tumor growth.
In 2008, researchers at Harvard Medical School used cell-culture experiments to show that by inhibiting another protein, STK33, they could prevent the growth of tumor cell lines driven by the malfunctioning KRAS.
The finding galvanized researchers at Amgen, who first heard about the experiments at a scientific conference. "Everyone was trying to do this," recalls Dr. Begley of Amgen, which derives nearly half of its revenues from cancer drugs and related treatments. "It was a really big deal."
When the Harvard researchers published their results in the prestigious journal Cell, in May 2009, Amgen moved swiftly to capitalize on the findings.
At a meeting in the company's offices in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Dr. Begley assigned a group of Amgen researchers the task of identifying small molecules that might inhibit STK33. Another team got a more basic job: reproduce the Harvard data.
"We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in downstream investments" if the approach works," says Dr. Begley. "So we need to be sure we're standing on something firm and solid."
But over the next few months, Dr. Begley and his team got increasingly disheartened. Amgen scientists, it turned out, couldn't reproduce any of the key findings published in Cell.
For example, there was no difference in the growth of cells where STK33 was largely blocked, compared with a control group of cells where STK33 wasn't blocked.
What could account for the irreproducibility of the results? "In our opinion there were methodological issues" in Amgen's approach that could have led to the different findings, says Claudia Scholl, one of the lead authors of the original Cell paper.
Dr. Scholl points out, for example, that Amgen used a different reagent to suppress STK33 than the one reported in Cell. Yet, she acknowledges that even when slightly different reagents are used, "you should be able to reproduce the results."
Now a cancer researcher at the University Hospital of Ulm in Germany, Dr. Scholl says her team has reproduced the original Cell results multiple times, and continues to have faith in STK33 as a cancer target.
Amgen, however, killed its STK33 program. In September, two dozen of the firm's scientists published a paper in the journal Cancer Research describing their failure to reproduce the main Cell findings.
Dr. Begley suggests that academic scientists, like drug companies, should perform more experiments in a "blinded" manner to reduce any bias toward positive findings. Otherwise, he says, "there is a human desire to get the results your boss wants you to get."
Adds Atlas' Mr. Booth: "Nobody gets a promotion from publishing a negative study."
SOURCE
Call for council 'diet police' to inspect private sector employees in Britain
What evidence do they have that lectures on diet would reduce illness?
Council inspectors should start monitoring what private sector employees eat at work in order to help improve the country’s health and to reduce sickness rates, a report has concluded. Drastic action is needed to halt the cycle of ill health amid an alarming “sick note culture”, it found.
The report from 2020Health, a think tank, found that the economy is losing tens of billions of pounds in productivity because of a high number of sick days.
The report recommended the role of council “diet police” be increased to offer advice to the private sector. The authors said the proposals in the report, released today, would help reduce the “sick note culture”.
The suggestion is likely to lead to claims of more “meddling” from council inspectors.
Latest figures show that up to three per cent of the active workforce is off sick at any one time. About 175 million working days are lost each year due to ill health, costing the economy more than £100 billion.
Among the report’s recommendations is a move to allow the role of local authority health and safety inspectors to be expanded. This would mean better advice and information on private sector employee diets, the set-up of workstations, and the importance of exercise could be given, the report says.
It also recommended that the private sector be able to increase the amount of “home-based working” for those recovering from ill health, and be able to stipulate a “workplace health” clause when awarding building contracts.
The report’s authors called for services provided by the NHS to reduce illness such as increased cancer and cardiac screening in the workplace.
The report also said people should be allowed to register with health services that are close to their workplace. The authors said that their recommendations were put forward to “complement the Government’s recent announcements on getting the sick back to work”.
It is estimated that about 3.4 million working days could be saved annually in the NHS, Europe’s largest employer, alone if it improved the health of its workforce.
Julia Manning, the think tank’s chief executive, said: “Our proposals would go a long way towards repairing both the nation’s health and its economic fortunes. The importance of health to economies is well established. “Good health improves educational outcomes, enhances performance at work, increases savings rates and reduces the burden on the public purse by decreasing the demand for health services and benefits payments.”
Earlier this month, an independent review for the Government recommended that independent assessment of sickness claims be introduced.
David Cameron has warned that Britain's sicknote culture in the workplace was acting as a "conveyor belt to a life on benefits". The Prime Minister said he would act on expert advice that recommended that family doctors should be stripped of the power to sign people off work long-term.
"‘Of course some of these people genuinely can’t work, and we must support them. That’s only fair," the Prime Minister said. "But it’s also fair that those who can return to work should be supported to do so. We need to end the something for nothing culture.
"‘While 90 per cent of sickness cases are short-term – that stomach bug or flu that we all suffer from occasionally – nearly half of all days lost to sickness absence are because of cases that last four weeks or more."
Ministers believe that about one in five of those who are absent on long-term sick leave should either never have been signed off in the first place or could go back to work.
The expert report, commissioned for Downing Street, suggested more than three-quarters of GPs admitted they had signed people off sick for reasons other than their physical health.
Mr Cameron said he was alarmed by evidence of the scale of the problem from a report by Dame Carol Black, an expert on health at work, and David Frost, the former director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.
SOURCE
Monday, December 5, 2011
Fascist Britain
Child of five taken from parents for being obese: Social workers say they didn't do enough to control weight. "Danger to health" is given as the reason but the obese live roughly as long as slim people so that is fraudulent
A five-year-old has become one of the youngest children to be taken into care for being obese, it emerged last night. Social workers decided the parents were doing too little to bring the youngster’s weight under control.
The child, whose identity is protected by law, had a body mass index of 22.6 – clinically obese for a five-year-old. He or she is thought to have weighed around 4st 4lb – a stone and a half more than average.
The decision was taken by officials at Tameside Council in Greater Manchester. The local authority has also taken a 14-year-old into care, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The teenager had a BMI of 30.3, giving a weight of 13 stone – five stone more than average.
Another child was removed by Sunderland council, but officials refused to provide details of their age or weight, claiming it would breach data protection laws.
The Freedom of Information request sent to all local authorities asked how many children, in the past financial year, have been taken into care where obesity was cited as a contributing factor. The vast majority responded and where care proceedings were instigated, gave general neglect as the reason.
In the previous year, 2009/10, four children were taken into care for obesity reasons: three from the London borough of Lewisham aged three, ten and 15, and an 11-year-old from Northumberland.
In September this year, social workers in Dundee provoked outrage by removing four obese children from their parents. Three girls aged 11, seven and one and a boy of five were placed into care to be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.
The most recent NHS figures show that one in ten children starting primary school is obese. Overweight children are at far higher risk of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, asthma and cancer in later life.
Experts predict that obesity will cost the Health Service up to £6.3billion a year by 2015.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the former Chief Medical Officer, warned in 2006 that healthcare chiefs would look at removing children from their families if they became so obese their health was at risk.
The first reported case came in 2007 when an eight-year-old girl from West Cumbria was taken into care weighing ten stone.
In 2008, seven children were removed from homes in England. These included a six-year-old boy from Derby, an eight-year-old girl from Cumbria who had to wear size 16 clothes, and children from Lincolnshire, Wolverhampton and Tower Hamlets in London.
A spokesman for the National Obesity Forum said it supported placing obese children into care, but only after everything possible had been done to try to reduce their weight.
Social workers use their professional judgment about how best to keep children from harm’ ‘We sincerely hope that such occasions would be rare…but make the point that this would be the automatic response to a child at the other extreme – severe malnutrition,’ the spokesman said.
A spokesman for Tameside Council said: ‘The point at which obesity turns into a child-protection issue is a complex and difficult area, and in these two cases there were other determining factors that led to the children being placed in local authority care.
‘Parents should be supported to address their child’s obesity, and social workers should only act if parents fail to engage with the proposed plan to improve their child’s safety and wellbeing.’
David Simmonds, of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: ‘Social workers use their professional judgment about how best to keep children from harm.’
SOURCE
Australia: Queensland Government plan for fast-food calorie counts to beat obesity
The evidence that this has zero effect on what people eat doesn't bother anyone, of course
FAST-FOOD chains will be forced to display the calorie count of every burger, fries and soft drink in the latest attack in the war against obesity.
New rules to be announced today will give customers the chance to weigh up the nutritional value of meals before ordering their meal over the counter - and whether their waistlines can handle the super-sized option.
The legislation being drafted by the Bligh Government means fast-food outlets must display the energy content of all items on their menus. The scheme has targeted super-sized servings that can almost chew up the recommended daily energy intake in one meal.
Customers will be confronted with the daunting kilojoule content - the energy value of food - of items under new-look menu boards in a bid to drive them towards healthier meal choices.
Some meal deals contain more than half the average adult daily limit of 8700 kilojoules. Kilojoule counts would be listed beside every item of sale, including meal deals. The average daily kilojoule limit must also be displayed on menus.
The recommended average energy intake for a six-year-old is about 6700 kilojoules a day, and about 7600 kilojoules a day for a 10-year-old. A Happy Meal at McDonald's can contain up to 2800kj.
It is expected the law will apply to fast-food and snack food chains with more than 20 outlets in the state, or 50 outlets nationally.
Health Minister Geoff Wilson said it was about helping people eat healthier, with obesity rates now as high as one in five Queenslanders. "If current trends continue, it is expected that about two- thirds of Queensland adults will be overweight or obese by 2020," he said.
Heart Foundation chief executive Cameron Prout said the move would help people make more informed choices. "It is not just the usual suspects in terms of offering unhealthy meals," he said. "There are a lot of meals that people think are healthier but might be surprised when they see how many kilojoules are in them."
The laws will be introduced early next year, but the Heart Foundation hopes the plan would gain support from both main parties in the case of an early election.
More than four million Australians buy from fast food outlets each day and many already feature some nutritional information.
Australian Medical Association Queensland president Dr Richard Kidd urged lawmakers to go even further by forcing fast-food chains to list items such as fat content on menu boards. "The AMA along with a lot of other health groups is very concerned at the epidemic of obesity, particularly in our children, and we are now seeing Type 2 diabetes appearing in our children, which is just dreadful," he said.
"It doesn't matter what age you are, by the time you develop diabetes your risk of having a heart attack is the same as someone who has already had a heart attack and we are inflicting this on our children now."
Childhood obesity expert Professor Geoff Cleghorn, from the University of Queensland, said the plan was a positive step forward in the battle of the bulge.
SOURCE
Child of five taken from parents for being obese: Social workers say they didn't do enough to control weight. "Danger to health" is given as the reason but the obese live roughly as long as slim people so that is fraudulent
A five-year-old has become one of the youngest children to be taken into care for being obese, it emerged last night. Social workers decided the parents were doing too little to bring the youngster’s weight under control.
The child, whose identity is protected by law, had a body mass index of 22.6 – clinically obese for a five-year-old. He or she is thought to have weighed around 4st 4lb – a stone and a half more than average.
The decision was taken by officials at Tameside Council in Greater Manchester. The local authority has also taken a 14-year-old into care, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The teenager had a BMI of 30.3, giving a weight of 13 stone – five stone more than average.
Another child was removed by Sunderland council, but officials refused to provide details of their age or weight, claiming it would breach data protection laws.
The Freedom of Information request sent to all local authorities asked how many children, in the past financial year, have been taken into care where obesity was cited as a contributing factor. The vast majority responded and where care proceedings were instigated, gave general neglect as the reason.
In the previous year, 2009/10, four children were taken into care for obesity reasons: three from the London borough of Lewisham aged three, ten and 15, and an 11-year-old from Northumberland.
In September this year, social workers in Dundee provoked outrage by removing four obese children from their parents. Three girls aged 11, seven and one and a boy of five were placed into care to be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.
The most recent NHS figures show that one in ten children starting primary school is obese. Overweight children are at far higher risk of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, asthma and cancer in later life.
Experts predict that obesity will cost the Health Service up to £6.3billion a year by 2015.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the former Chief Medical Officer, warned in 2006 that healthcare chiefs would look at removing children from their families if they became so obese their health was at risk.
The first reported case came in 2007 when an eight-year-old girl from West Cumbria was taken into care weighing ten stone.
In 2008, seven children were removed from homes in England. These included a six-year-old boy from Derby, an eight-year-old girl from Cumbria who had to wear size 16 clothes, and children from Lincolnshire, Wolverhampton and Tower Hamlets in London.
A spokesman for the National Obesity Forum said it supported placing obese children into care, but only after everything possible had been done to try to reduce their weight.
Social workers use their professional judgment about how best to keep children from harm’ ‘We sincerely hope that such occasions would be rare…but make the point that this would be the automatic response to a child at the other extreme – severe malnutrition,’ the spokesman said.
A spokesman for Tameside Council said: ‘The point at which obesity turns into a child-protection issue is a complex and difficult area, and in these two cases there were other determining factors that led to the children being placed in local authority care.
‘Parents should be supported to address their child’s obesity, and social workers should only act if parents fail to engage with the proposed plan to improve their child’s safety and wellbeing.’
David Simmonds, of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: ‘Social workers use their professional judgment about how best to keep children from harm.’
SOURCE
Australia: Queensland Government plan for fast-food calorie counts to beat obesity
The evidence that this has zero effect on what people eat doesn't bother anyone, of course
FAST-FOOD chains will be forced to display the calorie count of every burger, fries and soft drink in the latest attack in the war against obesity.
New rules to be announced today will give customers the chance to weigh up the nutritional value of meals before ordering their meal over the counter - and whether their waistlines can handle the super-sized option.
The legislation being drafted by the Bligh Government means fast-food outlets must display the energy content of all items on their menus. The scheme has targeted super-sized servings that can almost chew up the recommended daily energy intake in one meal.
Customers will be confronted with the daunting kilojoule content - the energy value of food - of items under new-look menu boards in a bid to drive them towards healthier meal choices.
Some meal deals contain more than half the average adult daily limit of 8700 kilojoules. Kilojoule counts would be listed beside every item of sale, including meal deals. The average daily kilojoule limit must also be displayed on menus.
The recommended average energy intake for a six-year-old is about 6700 kilojoules a day, and about 7600 kilojoules a day for a 10-year-old. A Happy Meal at McDonald's can contain up to 2800kj.
It is expected the law will apply to fast-food and snack food chains with more than 20 outlets in the state, or 50 outlets nationally.
Health Minister Geoff Wilson said it was about helping people eat healthier, with obesity rates now as high as one in five Queenslanders. "If current trends continue, it is expected that about two- thirds of Queensland adults will be overweight or obese by 2020," he said.
Heart Foundation chief executive Cameron Prout said the move would help people make more informed choices. "It is not just the usual suspects in terms of offering unhealthy meals," he said. "There are a lot of meals that people think are healthier but might be surprised when they see how many kilojoules are in them."
The laws will be introduced early next year, but the Heart Foundation hopes the plan would gain support from both main parties in the case of an early election.
More than four million Australians buy from fast food outlets each day and many already feature some nutritional information.
Australian Medical Association Queensland president Dr Richard Kidd urged lawmakers to go even further by forcing fast-food chains to list items such as fat content on menu boards. "The AMA along with a lot of other health groups is very concerned at the epidemic of obesity, particularly in our children, and we are now seeing Type 2 diabetes appearing in our children, which is just dreadful," he said.
"It doesn't matter what age you are, by the time you develop diabetes your risk of having a heart attack is the same as someone who has already had a heart attack and we are inflicting this on our children now."
Childhood obesity expert Professor Geoff Cleghorn, from the University of Queensland, said the plan was a positive step forward in the battle of the bulge.
SOURCE
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Federal effort to commandeer the nation’s salt shakers is based on bad science
"Put down the salt shaker and back away from the table. And don't even think about going for the chips." Those are lines you may hear on a TV police drama of the future, when the federal drive to curb salt consumption reaches cruising speed.
Last year, the government's Institute of Medicine urged the Food and Drug Administration to "gradually step down the maximum amount of salt that can be added to foods, beverages, and meals." The FDA is listening. In September, it published a notice concerning issues "associated with the development of targets for sodium reduction in foods to promote reduction of excess sodium intake."
It is currently focusing on voluntary steps to "promote gradual, achievable and sustainable reduction of sodium intake over time." But if it doesn't get its way, it may go beyond gentle encouragement. "Nothing is off the table," a spokesperson declared last year.
Salt has always been prized as a culinary marvel —perking up flavors, masking bitter elements and preventing spoilage. Soup without salt is excellent for nourishing your garden, but unfit to eat. Any number of dishes taste better with a dash or two.
But many experts and public health organizations see salt as a killer, which in excess amounts causes high blood pressure and heart disease. They think we would all be better off eating less, and they want the government to make sure we do. Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, says that "we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority."
But this clear certitude keeps getting clouded by confounding evidence. "For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not," an article this year in Scientific American noted.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has reported that people who consume less salt are actually more likely to die of heart disease. Recently, a study in the American Journal of Hypertension found that reducing dietary sodium can cause a harmful response from the body. "I can't really see, if you look at the total evidence, that there is any reason to believe there is a net benefit of decreasing sodium intake in the general population," the chief researcher told Reuters.
Nor is it clear that third parties can get people to reduce their ingestion of sodium. We have been hearing for decades about the alleged hazards of a high-salt diet, and anyone looking for alternatives can easily find them. But today, Americans consume the same amount of salt as they did 50 years ago, when bacon, eggs and hash browns were regarded as a wholesome breakfast.
One survey of 33 countries found that despite vast differences in cuisine, people generally take in about 3,700 milligrams of sodium a day, well above what the FDA recommends, decade after decade.
How come? The theory is that we are all biologically predisposed to seek out that much and no more. The Salt Institute, which represents salt companies, makes the argument —self-serving but not implausible— that if it is reduced in food, people will up their calorie intake to satisfy their craving.
But even if we assume too much salt is a bad thing, federal regulators have no grounds to dictate how much our food may contain. Any consumers who want less sodium, after all, are free to spurn restaurant meals and grocery items laden with heavy doses.
Food companies don't use salt because they like it but because their customers do. If consumer preferences change—say, in response to incessant warnings from medical groups—food products will change as well.
Classifying excess sodium consumption as a "public health" danger mutilates a useful concept. Air pollution, West Nile virus, and E. coli are matters of public health because they inflict harm on broad groups of people against their will and often without their knowledge. No one, however, ingests salt without raising fork to mouth.
If I burn toxic waste in my yard, I may force you to inhale compounds that cause illness or death. If I make a meal of pretzels and Virginia ham, by contrast, I pose no hazard to anyone but myself. You can avoid this "public health" threat without the FDA barging into your kitchen. Eating foods with salt is not a public decision but a private one. That's private, as in: Keep out.
SOURCE
New IVF technique helpful in certain cases
Microarray comparative genomic hybridisation, or CGH, involves a full chromosome count of embryos and allows doctors to ensure only the healthiest embryos are implanted. Fertility clinic Genea will today release data showing almost nine out of 10 patients aged under 38 whose embryos underwent CGH achieved a pregnancy with a foetal heartbeat seen at seven weeks gestation.
The data, to be presented at the World Congress on Human Reproduction in Melbourne this week, shows a success rate of 65 per cent for women older than 38.
Fertility specialist Dr Devora Lieberman said random chromosome abnormalities were one of the main causes of failed IVF cycles and of repeated miscarriages in women who conceive naturally. By using CGH, only embryos containing the correct number and sequence of chromosomes were considered.
Dr Liberman said CGH, which adds about $3000 cost to a cycle of IVF treatment, was not recommended for all IVF patients. "It most appropriate for women who have had multiple, unexplained miscarriages," she said. "Those women often have a "quality control" problem which allows embryos with chromosome abnormalities implant, but they generally go on to miscarry."
SOURCE
"Put down the salt shaker and back away from the table. And don't even think about going for the chips." Those are lines you may hear on a TV police drama of the future, when the federal drive to curb salt consumption reaches cruising speed.
Last year, the government's Institute of Medicine urged the Food and Drug Administration to "gradually step down the maximum amount of salt that can be added to foods, beverages, and meals." The FDA is listening. In September, it published a notice concerning issues "associated with the development of targets for sodium reduction in foods to promote reduction of excess sodium intake."
It is currently focusing on voluntary steps to "promote gradual, achievable and sustainable reduction of sodium intake over time." But if it doesn't get its way, it may go beyond gentle encouragement. "Nothing is off the table," a spokesperson declared last year.
Salt has always been prized as a culinary marvel —perking up flavors, masking bitter elements and preventing spoilage. Soup without salt is excellent for nourishing your garden, but unfit to eat. Any number of dishes taste better with a dash or two.
But many experts and public health organizations see salt as a killer, which in excess amounts causes high blood pressure and heart disease. They think we would all be better off eating less, and they want the government to make sure we do. Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, says that "we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority."
But this clear certitude keeps getting clouded by confounding evidence. "For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not," an article this year in Scientific American noted.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has reported that people who consume less salt are actually more likely to die of heart disease. Recently, a study in the American Journal of Hypertension found that reducing dietary sodium can cause a harmful response from the body. "I can't really see, if you look at the total evidence, that there is any reason to believe there is a net benefit of decreasing sodium intake in the general population," the chief researcher told Reuters.
Nor is it clear that third parties can get people to reduce their ingestion of sodium. We have been hearing for decades about the alleged hazards of a high-salt diet, and anyone looking for alternatives can easily find them. But today, Americans consume the same amount of salt as they did 50 years ago, when bacon, eggs and hash browns were regarded as a wholesome breakfast.
One survey of 33 countries found that despite vast differences in cuisine, people generally take in about 3,700 milligrams of sodium a day, well above what the FDA recommends, decade after decade.
How come? The theory is that we are all biologically predisposed to seek out that much and no more. The Salt Institute, which represents salt companies, makes the argument —self-serving but not implausible— that if it is reduced in food, people will up their calorie intake to satisfy their craving.
But even if we assume too much salt is a bad thing, federal regulators have no grounds to dictate how much our food may contain. Any consumers who want less sodium, after all, are free to spurn restaurant meals and grocery items laden with heavy doses.
Food companies don't use salt because they like it but because their customers do. If consumer preferences change—say, in response to incessant warnings from medical groups—food products will change as well.
Classifying excess sodium consumption as a "public health" danger mutilates a useful concept. Air pollution, West Nile virus, and E. coli are matters of public health because they inflict harm on broad groups of people against their will and often without their knowledge. No one, however, ingests salt without raising fork to mouth.
If I burn toxic waste in my yard, I may force you to inhale compounds that cause illness or death. If I make a meal of pretzels and Virginia ham, by contrast, I pose no hazard to anyone but myself. You can avoid this "public health" threat without the FDA barging into your kitchen. Eating foods with salt is not a public decision but a private one. That's private, as in: Keep out.
SOURCE
New IVF technique helpful in certain cases
Microarray comparative genomic hybridisation, or CGH, involves a full chromosome count of embryos and allows doctors to ensure only the healthiest embryos are implanted. Fertility clinic Genea will today release data showing almost nine out of 10 patients aged under 38 whose embryos underwent CGH achieved a pregnancy with a foetal heartbeat seen at seven weeks gestation.
The data, to be presented at the World Congress on Human Reproduction in Melbourne this week, shows a success rate of 65 per cent for women older than 38.
Fertility specialist Dr Devora Lieberman said random chromosome abnormalities were one of the main causes of failed IVF cycles and of repeated miscarriages in women who conceive naturally. By using CGH, only embryos containing the correct number and sequence of chromosomes were considered.
Dr Liberman said CGH, which adds about $3000 cost to a cycle of IVF treatment, was not recommended for all IVF patients. "It most appropriate for women who have had multiple, unexplained miscarriages," she said. "Those women often have a "quality control" problem which allows embryos with chromosome abnormalities implant, but they generally go on to miscarry."
SOURCE
Dads pass on obesity to children
There is a claim below that you can alter your genetics by what you eat. Have they resurrected Trofim Lysenko? The academic article behind the report below is not listed on the website of Robinson Institute Research Centre for Reproductive Health, where it allegedly came from
CHILDREN inherit obesity from overweight fathers, with daughters particularly at risk, new research has found. Sperm from overweight fathers carried a molecular signal that causes their children to become obese, researchers at the University of Adelaide have discovered.
A team from the university's Robinson Institute Research Centre for Reproductive Health made the find as part of a study looking at reproduction and obesity.
The team tested two groups of mice - one fed a high-fat diet and the other a balanced diet. Offspring from fat males were regularly obese and suffered from diabetes and infertility, with researchers tracking the trigger to a class of genes in sperm known as microRNAs.
"In the group fed the high-fat diet we discovered that male obesity alters the microRNA profile of sperm, resulting in obesity in offspring," researcher Maria Teague said.
But changes to sperm resulting from obesity were non-genetic, indicating that would-be fathers who slimmed down before trying for a child could avoid triggering obesity in their children.
SOURCE
Jab that may halt Alzheimer's before it can destroy lives
A jab that could transform millions of lives by tackling Alzheimer’s in its earliest stages is being tested on British patients. Some 50 men and women with mild memory problems will be given monthly injections of a drug described as their best chance of warding off the disease.
The first jabs have just been given and there is still time for volunteers to join the trial. It could be in widespread use in five years.
Unlike other drugs, which are given once dementia has taken hold, the new medication is designed to set to work when symptoms are confined to slight memory lapses. The drug, called gantenerumab, is not expected to be a cure, but slowing the development of dementia would allow people to live normally for longer, delaying the time when they have to give up work and perhaps go into care.
Experts say this would be ‘life-changing’, and estimate that delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years could halve the number who die with the condition, currently a third of over-65s.
Dr Richard Perry, the Alzheimer’s expert leading one of the British trials, said: ‘There is no guarantee but this is the best chance of a medication that is going to affect the underlying condition at the earliest stage.’
Current drugs tackle the symptoms of Alzheimer’s rather than the underlying damage, and are given once it has taken hold. They do not work for everyone and the effects wear off after time. In contrast gantenerumab, made by Roche, is designed to be given up to four years before the disease has been diagnosed. It is aimed at people with memory problems that have caused them concern but who are still able to go about their day-to-day lives.
It contains an antibody that homes in on amyloid, the toxic protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer’s, and speeds up its clearance from the body.
In small-scale early trials on men and women who already had Alzheimer’s, it cut the amount of amyloid in the brain by up to a third in just six months, the journal Archives of Neurology reports.
It is hoped that giving it earlier would be even more effective and the drug is now being tested on 360 people in 15 countries with mild memory problems that are expected to progress to dementia.
To take part in the trial, people must be aged between 50 and 89 and have memory problems that are causing them concern. A lumbar puncture will confirm that amyloid is building up in their system, although they have yet to be diagnosed with dementia. Those taking part in the Scarlet Road Study trial will be given gantenerumab every month for two years, or a dummy drug.
Dr Perry, a consultant neurologist at London’s Charing Cross Hospital and at the Re:Cognition Health memory clinic, said: ‘We know that the amyloid is there for many years beforehand and it is thought that if you are going to reduce the amounts to have an effect, we have got to do that before people have significant damage.’
Barbara Sahakian, a professor at Cambridge University’s psychiatry department, said she was ‘thrilled’ by the launch of the trial. She said: ‘The implications are far-reaching. ‘On a personal level, being able to stay at work and maintain your family life and all your hobbies and interests would be just fabulous.
‘There are also great implications for relatives and for society. Institutional care is extremely expensive and if we had effective treatments, we could use that money in a different way.’
Dr Marie Janson of Alzheimer’s Research UK said: ‘Although research into gantenerumab is still in its early phases, initial results have looked promising.’
SOURCE
There is a claim below that you can alter your genetics by what you eat. Have they resurrected Trofim Lysenko? The academic article behind the report below is not listed on the website of Robinson Institute Research Centre for Reproductive Health, where it allegedly came from
CHILDREN inherit obesity from overweight fathers, with daughters particularly at risk, new research has found. Sperm from overweight fathers carried a molecular signal that causes their children to become obese, researchers at the University of Adelaide have discovered.
A team from the university's Robinson Institute Research Centre for Reproductive Health made the find as part of a study looking at reproduction and obesity.
The team tested two groups of mice - one fed a high-fat diet and the other a balanced diet. Offspring from fat males were regularly obese and suffered from diabetes and infertility, with researchers tracking the trigger to a class of genes in sperm known as microRNAs.
"In the group fed the high-fat diet we discovered that male obesity alters the microRNA profile of sperm, resulting in obesity in offspring," researcher Maria Teague said.
But changes to sperm resulting from obesity were non-genetic, indicating that would-be fathers who slimmed down before trying for a child could avoid triggering obesity in their children.
SOURCE
Jab that may halt Alzheimer's before it can destroy lives
A jab that could transform millions of lives by tackling Alzheimer’s in its earliest stages is being tested on British patients. Some 50 men and women with mild memory problems will be given monthly injections of a drug described as their best chance of warding off the disease.
The first jabs have just been given and there is still time for volunteers to join the trial. It could be in widespread use in five years.
Unlike other drugs, which are given once dementia has taken hold, the new medication is designed to set to work when symptoms are confined to slight memory lapses. The drug, called gantenerumab, is not expected to be a cure, but slowing the development of dementia would allow people to live normally for longer, delaying the time when they have to give up work and perhaps go into care.
Experts say this would be ‘life-changing’, and estimate that delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years could halve the number who die with the condition, currently a third of over-65s.
Dr Richard Perry, the Alzheimer’s expert leading one of the British trials, said: ‘There is no guarantee but this is the best chance of a medication that is going to affect the underlying condition at the earliest stage.’
Current drugs tackle the symptoms of Alzheimer’s rather than the underlying damage, and are given once it has taken hold. They do not work for everyone and the effects wear off after time. In contrast gantenerumab, made by Roche, is designed to be given up to four years before the disease has been diagnosed. It is aimed at people with memory problems that have caused them concern but who are still able to go about their day-to-day lives.
It contains an antibody that homes in on amyloid, the toxic protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer’s, and speeds up its clearance from the body.
In small-scale early trials on men and women who already had Alzheimer’s, it cut the amount of amyloid in the brain by up to a third in just six months, the journal Archives of Neurology reports.
It is hoped that giving it earlier would be even more effective and the drug is now being tested on 360 people in 15 countries with mild memory problems that are expected to progress to dementia.
To take part in the trial, people must be aged between 50 and 89 and have memory problems that are causing them concern. A lumbar puncture will confirm that amyloid is building up in their system, although they have yet to be diagnosed with dementia. Those taking part in the Scarlet Road Study trial will be given gantenerumab every month for two years, or a dummy drug.
Dr Perry, a consultant neurologist at London’s Charing Cross Hospital and at the Re:Cognition Health memory clinic, said: ‘We know that the amyloid is there for many years beforehand and it is thought that if you are going to reduce the amounts to have an effect, we have got to do that before people have significant damage.’
Barbara Sahakian, a professor at Cambridge University’s psychiatry department, said she was ‘thrilled’ by the launch of the trial. She said: ‘The implications are far-reaching. ‘On a personal level, being able to stay at work and maintain your family life and all your hobbies and interests would be just fabulous.
‘There are also great implications for relatives and for society. Institutional care is extremely expensive and if we had effective treatments, we could use that money in a different way.’
Dr Marie Janson of Alzheimer’s Research UK said: ‘Although research into gantenerumab is still in its early phases, initial results have looked promising.’
SOURCE
Friday, December 2, 2011
Happy Meals live on in SF
I protested when San Francisco began cracking down on Happy Meals with its cleverly worded edict to prohibit restaurants from giving away toys aimed at children with food that did not satisfy its nutritional standards. But perhaps I despaired too soon. As it turns out, the magic of the market, the ingenuity of McDonald’s, and the incompetence of lawmakers have liberated the Happy Meal toy from the clutches of the paternalistic progressives posing as public health promoters.
The fast-food chain has figured out how to comply with the ordinance while giving customers what they want: From now on, the restaurant will charge ten cents for the Happy Meal toy, giving the proceeds to the Ronald McDonald House charity. What a heroic way of dealing with those pesky local planners! Parents win. Kids win. McDonald’s wins. And charity gets a boost as well!
Liberty has still suffered, however, since now customers are forced to buy the food if they want the toy. Before, parents could purchase a Happy Meal toy by itself for a little over $2. Because of the way the law is written, this option is now gone—another unintended consequence of a bad law, since now, on the margin, customers will sometimes opt to buy the greasy food targeted by the law just so they can get the toy, when before they would have not bought the food.
Still, the Happy Meal lives, and this is just one more reminder that the market will outsmart the state in ways even those of us always on the lookout will miss. Last year, I was enraged that San Francisco (and my home county of Santa Clara) would wage war on American childhood in this manner. Yet I should have stopped and realized that as horrible as this law was, it was not going to stop the wonders of the market from bringing a smile to all those children.
How excellent that, just in time for Christmas, we once again see the market triumph over the efforts of politicians to destroy what fun is left in this country. To all the Hamburglers and Grinches in the world, I plead that you join in the holiday spirit of commerce and voluntarism, and reject the Scroogish sanctimony of socialistic city planning. Do I believe in magic? Of course I do. We see it every day in the glory of the market economy.
SOURCE
Could a simple pill costing 30p a day be the answer to getting pregnant?
A small study on an a-typical group
A 30p multi-vitamin pill could more than double a woman’s chance of having a baby, according to a study. It found that 60 per cent of those taking the supplements while undergoing IVF became pregnant compared to just a quarter who did not take them.
Researchers say the pills contain nutrients that may boost fertility such as vitamins A, C and E, zinc and selenium, that are often absent from our diets.
The study carried out at University College London involved 56 women aged 18 to 40, who had all tried unsuccessfully to fall pregnant using IVF for at least a year.
Half were given a multi-nutrient pill to take every day and the other half given folic acid pills to take daily. The micronutrient pill also contained folic acid which prevents birth defects and has also been shown to help boost fertility.
The team found that 60 per cent of women taking the multi-nutrients fell pregnant, and did not miscarry in the first three months when it is most common.
This compared to 25 per cent of women in the group taking folic acid who were still pregnant after three months.
The study published in the journal Reproductive Biomedicine also found that women taking the micronutrients needed far fewer attempts to become pregnant. Of those who fell pregnant, 75 per cent conceived in the first course of IVF.
By comparison just 18 per cent of those on folic acid who became pregnant did so after the first IVF course.
The particular pill, Vitabiotics Pregnacare-Conception,contains folic acid, vitamin B, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin C, zinc, selenium and some antioxidants. It costs just over £10 over the counter for a month’s supply.
Lead researcher Dr Rina Agrawal said: 'The implications of this study are far reaching as they suggest that prenatal micronutrient supplementation in women undergoing ovulation induction improve pregnancy rates. 'There is a large body of evidence establishing the relationship between placental development, foetal growth, pregnancy outcomes and adequate nutrition, particularly vitamin intake.'
But other scientists pointed out that the study was very small so the results should not be taken too seriously.
Dr Allan Pacey who specialises in fertility at the University of Sheffield said: 'The influence of nutrition on our fertility is of general interest to the public and professionals, but there are relatively few studies which have examined this systematically and few which have shown direct benefits of taking supplements to enhance things.'
'Therefore, on the face of it, this study is interesting but we should acknowledge that this is a relatively small number of patients and the study would need to be repeated in a larger trial before we could be certain of the results.'
A woman’s fertility is known to be affected by a number of factors including her age, weight, alcohol consumption, whether she smokes. High levels of stress and even drinking too much coffee have also been shown to reduce the chances of falling pregnant.
SOURCE
I protested when San Francisco began cracking down on Happy Meals with its cleverly worded edict to prohibit restaurants from giving away toys aimed at children with food that did not satisfy its nutritional standards. But perhaps I despaired too soon. As it turns out, the magic of the market, the ingenuity of McDonald’s, and the incompetence of lawmakers have liberated the Happy Meal toy from the clutches of the paternalistic progressives posing as public health promoters.
The fast-food chain has figured out how to comply with the ordinance while giving customers what they want: From now on, the restaurant will charge ten cents for the Happy Meal toy, giving the proceeds to the Ronald McDonald House charity. What a heroic way of dealing with those pesky local planners! Parents win. Kids win. McDonald’s wins. And charity gets a boost as well!
Liberty has still suffered, however, since now customers are forced to buy the food if they want the toy. Before, parents could purchase a Happy Meal toy by itself for a little over $2. Because of the way the law is written, this option is now gone—another unintended consequence of a bad law, since now, on the margin, customers will sometimes opt to buy the greasy food targeted by the law just so they can get the toy, when before they would have not bought the food.
Still, the Happy Meal lives, and this is just one more reminder that the market will outsmart the state in ways even those of us always on the lookout will miss. Last year, I was enraged that San Francisco (and my home county of Santa Clara) would wage war on American childhood in this manner. Yet I should have stopped and realized that as horrible as this law was, it was not going to stop the wonders of the market from bringing a smile to all those children.
How excellent that, just in time for Christmas, we once again see the market triumph over the efforts of politicians to destroy what fun is left in this country. To all the Hamburglers and Grinches in the world, I plead that you join in the holiday spirit of commerce and voluntarism, and reject the Scroogish sanctimony of socialistic city planning. Do I believe in magic? Of course I do. We see it every day in the glory of the market economy.
SOURCE
Could a simple pill costing 30p a day be the answer to getting pregnant?
A small study on an a-typical group
A 30p multi-vitamin pill could more than double a woman’s chance of having a baby, according to a study. It found that 60 per cent of those taking the supplements while undergoing IVF became pregnant compared to just a quarter who did not take them.
Researchers say the pills contain nutrients that may boost fertility such as vitamins A, C and E, zinc and selenium, that are often absent from our diets.
The study carried out at University College London involved 56 women aged 18 to 40, who had all tried unsuccessfully to fall pregnant using IVF for at least a year.
Half were given a multi-nutrient pill to take every day and the other half given folic acid pills to take daily. The micronutrient pill also contained folic acid which prevents birth defects and has also been shown to help boost fertility.
The team found that 60 per cent of women taking the multi-nutrients fell pregnant, and did not miscarry in the first three months when it is most common.
This compared to 25 per cent of women in the group taking folic acid who were still pregnant after three months.
The study published in the journal Reproductive Biomedicine also found that women taking the micronutrients needed far fewer attempts to become pregnant. Of those who fell pregnant, 75 per cent conceived in the first course of IVF.
By comparison just 18 per cent of those on folic acid who became pregnant did so after the first IVF course.
The particular pill, Vitabiotics Pregnacare-Conception,contains folic acid, vitamin B, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin C, zinc, selenium and some antioxidants. It costs just over £10 over the counter for a month’s supply.
Lead researcher Dr Rina Agrawal said: 'The implications of this study are far reaching as they suggest that prenatal micronutrient supplementation in women undergoing ovulation induction improve pregnancy rates. 'There is a large body of evidence establishing the relationship between placental development, foetal growth, pregnancy outcomes and adequate nutrition, particularly vitamin intake.'
But other scientists pointed out that the study was very small so the results should not be taken too seriously.
Dr Allan Pacey who specialises in fertility at the University of Sheffield said: 'The influence of nutrition on our fertility is of general interest to the public and professionals, but there are relatively few studies which have examined this systematically and few which have shown direct benefits of taking supplements to enhance things.'
'Therefore, on the face of it, this study is interesting but we should acknowledge that this is a relatively small number of patients and the study would need to be repeated in a larger trial before we could be certain of the results.'
A woman’s fertility is known to be affected by a number of factors including her age, weight, alcohol consumption, whether she smokes. High levels of stress and even drinking too much coffee have also been shown to reduce the chances of falling pregnant.
SOURCE
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Government meddling with what people eat goes back a long way
As early as 1886, Washington took a hand in what Americans could, and supposedly should, eat. That year lawmakers passed the “Oleomaragerine Act” as a sop to the butter industry. Oleo was subject to a two-cent per pound tax, and anyone who aimed to make or sell the butter substitute was required to obtain a margarine license.
Eventually, 32 states would pass laws preventing margarine makers from coloring their product yellow, and the federal government chipped in with a higher tax on yellow margarine than on the white version.
According to the exhibit “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” at the National Archives, violators were subject to harsh penalties. It “includes the story of felons convicted of violating sections of the Oleomargarine Act and sent to the Federal prison at Leavenworth. Some tried to pass the margarine off as butter; others tried to evade the tax by reusing tax stamps again and again.”
The exhibit is funded, in what may be an ironic twist, “in part by Mars, Inc.” Keep in mind that, “The U.S. government has devotedly jacked up American sugar prices far above world market prices since the close of the War of 1812,” as author James Bovard noted in 1998. Last year, “the price per pound of raw sugar in the U.S. was 78 percent higher than the global price,” the CATO Institute reports.
Oddly, there’s nothing in the exhibit about how federal subsidies and tariffs have driven up the price of sugar, a crucial ingredient in Mars’ candy products, although it does mention sugar beets, which enjoyed some $242 million in federal subsidies through the early-2000s.
“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” shows that the government has long been concerned about what Americans eat. W.O Atwater was the U.S. Department of Agriculture's first chief of nutrition investigations. The exhibit says he “concluded in 1890 that Americans eat too much fat and sweets and do not get enough exercise.” Some things, apparently, never change.
Of course, the exhibit makes clear that Washington’s policies have often led to poor eating habits. During World War II the government encouraged children to eat doughnuts (donuts without the “dough” hadn’t been invented yet, apparently) fortified with Vitamin B1. No doubt they’d have tasted even better had they been topped with oleo, but you can’t have everything, I guess.
The display glosses over one of the most destructive federal interventions, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. At the height of the depression, Washington paid farmers to not grow crops and to slaughter livestock. It’s axiomatic, of course, that you cannot feed people by destroying crops. The government’s moves were aimed at increasing the price of food, although that seems an odd goal at a time when unemployed Americans were starving in the streets. Maybe those who are today advocating for higher natural gas prices could explain.
As the exhibit makes clear, the turning point for federal intervention in our food supply came after Upton Sinclair published his gut wrenching book “The Jungle.” Sinclair showed how the sausage was being made, and Americans were appalled. The Archives’ exhibit contains a long letter from Sinclair to President Theodore Roosevelt calling for federal intervention.
After the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the exhibit notes, “the government found itself in the business of protecting Americans from unsafe steak, misbranded mushrooms, and tainted tomatoes.” Some intervention may have been necessary 100 years ago, but these days the free market would do a much better job of protecting us against tainted meat.
Remember the Topps Meat Company of New Jersey? Probably not.
In the fall of 2007 it shipped frozen hamburgers tainted with E. coli. It recalled the meat, but ended up shutting down almost immediately. “In one week we have gone from the largest U.S. manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large,” COO Anthony D’Urso announced. No government bureaucracy could react that quickly or decisively. No doubt other meat companies took note.
The lesson of “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” is that federal intervention warps our food supply in many ways. We’d all be better off if Washington got out of the kitchen and let the free market provide what we want to eat.
SOURCE
Australian Federal Government rejects traffic light food labelling
HEALTH groups have reacted angrily after the Federal Government rejected traffic light food labelling.
The Gillard government reported back on 61 recommendations in an independent review of the nation's food labelling laws. Generic health warning labels on alcohol were also rejected, but it will be mandatory within two years to caution pregnant women against its dangers.
Fast food chains will have to declare kilojoule content on their menu boards, and the standard of health claims on foods will improve.
The Government said there wasn't enough evidence that traffic light labelling would be effective. The system uses traffic light colours - green, orange or red - to indicate whether the levels of fat, sugar and salt in a product are low, medium or high.
But Obesity Policy Coalition senior policy adviser Jane Martin accused the Government of bowing to food industry pressure and ignoring evidence that traffic light labelling helped people make healthy choices. "There is evidence it changes consumer behaviour in a real world situation," she said. "Traffic light labelling has been found to be the most effective scheme in helping people understand the nutritional content of food."
SOURCE
As early as 1886, Washington took a hand in what Americans could, and supposedly should, eat. That year lawmakers passed the “Oleomaragerine Act” as a sop to the butter industry. Oleo was subject to a two-cent per pound tax, and anyone who aimed to make or sell the butter substitute was required to obtain a margarine license.
Eventually, 32 states would pass laws preventing margarine makers from coloring their product yellow, and the federal government chipped in with a higher tax on yellow margarine than on the white version.
According to the exhibit “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” at the National Archives, violators were subject to harsh penalties. It “includes the story of felons convicted of violating sections of the Oleomargarine Act and sent to the Federal prison at Leavenworth. Some tried to pass the margarine off as butter; others tried to evade the tax by reusing tax stamps again and again.”
The exhibit is funded, in what may be an ironic twist, “in part by Mars, Inc.” Keep in mind that, “The U.S. government has devotedly jacked up American sugar prices far above world market prices since the close of the War of 1812,” as author James Bovard noted in 1998. Last year, “the price per pound of raw sugar in the U.S. was 78 percent higher than the global price,” the CATO Institute reports.
Oddly, there’s nothing in the exhibit about how federal subsidies and tariffs have driven up the price of sugar, a crucial ingredient in Mars’ candy products, although it does mention sugar beets, which enjoyed some $242 million in federal subsidies through the early-2000s.
“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” shows that the government has long been concerned about what Americans eat. W.O Atwater was the U.S. Department of Agriculture's first chief of nutrition investigations. The exhibit says he “concluded in 1890 that Americans eat too much fat and sweets and do not get enough exercise.” Some things, apparently, never change.
Of course, the exhibit makes clear that Washington’s policies have often led to poor eating habits. During World War II the government encouraged children to eat doughnuts (donuts without the “dough” hadn’t been invented yet, apparently) fortified with Vitamin B1. No doubt they’d have tasted even better had they been topped with oleo, but you can’t have everything, I guess.
The display glosses over one of the most destructive federal interventions, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. At the height of the depression, Washington paid farmers to not grow crops and to slaughter livestock. It’s axiomatic, of course, that you cannot feed people by destroying crops. The government’s moves were aimed at increasing the price of food, although that seems an odd goal at a time when unemployed Americans were starving in the streets. Maybe those who are today advocating for higher natural gas prices could explain.
As the exhibit makes clear, the turning point for federal intervention in our food supply came after Upton Sinclair published his gut wrenching book “The Jungle.” Sinclair showed how the sausage was being made, and Americans were appalled. The Archives’ exhibit contains a long letter from Sinclair to President Theodore Roosevelt calling for federal intervention.
After the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the exhibit notes, “the government found itself in the business of protecting Americans from unsafe steak, misbranded mushrooms, and tainted tomatoes.” Some intervention may have been necessary 100 years ago, but these days the free market would do a much better job of protecting us against tainted meat.
Remember the Topps Meat Company of New Jersey? Probably not.
In the fall of 2007 it shipped frozen hamburgers tainted with E. coli. It recalled the meat, but ended up shutting down almost immediately. “In one week we have gone from the largest U.S. manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large,” COO Anthony D’Urso announced. No government bureaucracy could react that quickly or decisively. No doubt other meat companies took note.
The lesson of “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” is that federal intervention warps our food supply in many ways. We’d all be better off if Washington got out of the kitchen and let the free market provide what we want to eat.
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Australian Federal Government rejects traffic light food labelling
HEALTH groups have reacted angrily after the Federal Government rejected traffic light food labelling.
The Gillard government reported back on 61 recommendations in an independent review of the nation's food labelling laws. Generic health warning labels on alcohol were also rejected, but it will be mandatory within two years to caution pregnant women against its dangers.
Fast food chains will have to declare kilojoule content on their menu boards, and the standard of health claims on foods will improve.
The Government said there wasn't enough evidence that traffic light labelling would be effective. The system uses traffic light colours - green, orange or red - to indicate whether the levels of fat, sugar and salt in a product are low, medium or high.
But Obesity Policy Coalition senior policy adviser Jane Martin accused the Government of bowing to food industry pressure and ignoring evidence that traffic light labelling helped people make healthy choices. "There is evidence it changes consumer behaviour in a real world situation," she said. "Traffic light labelling has been found to be the most effective scheme in helping people understand the nutritional content of food."
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