New Hampshire Health News Digest

Vitamin B12 Deficiency Can Cause Symptoms That Mimic Aging - NYTimes.com It is an important question. As we age, our ability to absorb B12 from food declines, and often so does our consumption of foods rich in this vitamin. A B12 deficiency can creep up without warning and cause a host of confusing symptoms that are likely to be misdiagnosed or ascribed to aging. A Vital Nutrient B12 is an essential vitamin with roles throughout the body. It is needed for the development and maintenance of a healthy nervous system, the production of DNA and formation of red blood cells. A severe B12 deficiency results in anemia, which can be picked up by an ordinary blood test. But the less dramatic symptoms of a B12 deficiency may include muscle weakness, fatigue, shakiness, unsteady gait, incontinence, low blood pressure, depression and other mood disorders, and cognitive problems like poor memory.

New evidence for a neuronal link between insulin-related diseases and schizophrenia | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network When the body does not properly manage insulin levels, diabetes and other metabolic disorders are familiar outcomes. That hormonal imbalance, however, has also been linked to a higher risk for psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. And a new study has uncovered a potential pathway by which this metabolic hormone can upset the balance of a key neurotransmitter. "We know that people with diabetes have an increased incidence of mood and other psychiatric disorders," Kevin Niswender, an endocrinologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and coauthor of the study, said in a prepared statement. Previous researchers, including Aurelio Galli, a neurobiologist at Vanderbilt, had found that insulin was affecting more than blood sugar levels.

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition - Obesity and energy balance: is the tail wagging the dog[quest] The scientific study of obesity has been dominated throughout the twentieth century by the concept of energy balance. This conceptual approach, based on fundamental thermodynamic principles, states that energy cannot be destroyed, and can only be gained, lost or stored by an organism. Its application in obesity research has emphasised excessive appetite (gluttony), or insufficient physical activity (sloth), as the primary determinants of excess weight gain, reflected in current guidelines for obesity prevention and treatment. This model cannot explain why weight accumulates persistently rather than reaching a plateau, and underplays the effect of variability in dietary constituents on energy and intermediary metabolism. An alternative model emphasises the capacity of fructose and fructose-derived sweeteners (sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup) to perturb cellular metabolism via modifi...

Magnesium Research : To evaluate the association between severe hypomagnesemia and the low-grade inflammatory response in subjects with metabolic syndrome (MetS), ninety-eight individuals with new diagnosis of MetS were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. ----- Results of this study show that, in subjects with Metabolic Syndrome, severe hypomagnesemia, but not hypomagnesemia, is associated with elevated concentrations of CRP and TNF-α. (inflammation, which can lead to heart disease and other maladies.

My friend Andy is trying to answer this question on his blog, http://ghostlotto.blogspot.com/ . He uses a ghost box, especially tuned to communicate with the other side, and asks the ghosts which lotto numbers will win the lottery that night. He posts videos of the sessions with the ghost box, and info about the lottery as well. Great stuff!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Evolutionary Discordance of Grains/Legumes in Diet - PART B Up to this point, we have only briefly touched upon the role cereal grains have in inducing autoimmune disease (except for a brief look at celiac disease). There is substantial evidence (both epidemiological and clinical) showing the role cereal grains may play in the etiology of such diverse autoimmune diseases as multiple sclerosis (MS), insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), rheumatoid arthritis, sjogrens syndrome, dermatitis herpetiformis, and IgA nephropathy. Although this proposal may at first seem preposterous, there is strong data to suggest that cereal grains may be involved in all of these diseases through a process of molecular mimicry whereby certain amino acid sequences within specific polypeptides of the gramineae family are homologous to (have the same structural form as) a variety of amino acid sequences in mammalian tissue. These homologous amino-acid (AA) sequences can ultimately confuse our immune syste...

A fresh approach - Diet - Life & Style Home - brisbanetimes.com.au : Simply put, the rationale is that, to differing degrees, children lack the intestinal bacteria (perhaps due to hereditary factors, perhaps antibiotics, perhaps both) and enzymes needed to digest food, absorb nutrients and eliminate toxins, particularly casein and gluten, which break down in the gut into compounds with "opiate agonist" (or drug-like) properties. Children with autism are said to have "abnormal leakage" from the gut, allowing these substances to pass into the central nervous system and disrupt brain function - in effect fog up the brain, because they mimic the effects of endorphins. The "cellular malnutrition" throughout the body that also results from this gut dysfunction in a child is exacerbated if the diet includes processed food with additives, preservatives, emulsifiers and too much sugar.

Why the Low Carb Diet is Best - Diabetes Health Virtually the entire evolution of mankind occurred when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, well before the inventions of agriculture and animal husbandry. (2) These people had scarcely any access to dietary carbohydrate and certainly no access to animal milk, cereal grains, whole-grain and refined breads, refined sugars, and sweet fruits. They ate almost exclusively lean meat and fish, plus small amounts of leafy and other low carbohydrate vegetables. Some humans, such as Eskimos, consumed only fat and protein. Our pre-agriculture ancestors frequently had violent deaths, but no coronary, kidney, or arterial disease, no tooth decay, and no diabetes. By 1969, when I first began to measure my own blood sugars, I was already suffering from about 15 major and minor long-term complications of diabetes, thanks to the low fat, high carbohydrate diet I had been following for 23 years. By about this time, scientific studies of animals had demonst...

Wheat Belly -- The Toll of Hubris on Human Health Dr. William Davis, Milwaukee-based "preventive cardiologist" and Medical Director ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giff the Track Your Plaque program, argues in his new book, Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, that "somewhere along the way during wheat's history, perhaps five thousand years ago but more likely fifty years ago, wheat changed." And not for the better. William Davis, MD, hosted at The Wheat Belly Blog According to Dr. Davis, the introduction of mutant, high-yield dwarf wheat in the 1960s and the misguided national crusade against fat and cholesterol that caught steam in the 1980s have conspired together as a disastrous duo to produce an epidemic of obesity and heart disease, leaving not even the contours of our skin or the hairs on our heads untouched. Indeed, Dr. Davis argues, this mutant monster we call wheat is day by day acidifying our bones, crin...

New video from Armen Moradians! Spaceship of the imagination

In diet studies, big question goes unexplored My Turn August 23, 2010|By Bob Kaplan, Special to the Los Angeles Times After losing weight and keeping it off on the Atkins diet, it seems odd that no one wants to find out why this higher-calorie option appears to be more effective. Researchers (funded by the National Institutes of Health) randomized half their subjects to a diet that limited both calories and fat — women ate no more than 1,500 calories a day; men no more than 1,800. The other half were told to avoid carbohydrate-rich foods, as I've been doing for 15 years, but could eat all the protein and fat they wanted. The study's authors concluded both diets were equally effective for weight loss, and that is how the press reported it. But the low-carb diet also was associated with better heart health. Let that sink in for a moment. The people on the low-fat, low-calorie diet were enduring what nutritionists used to call "semi-starvation diets." They were presumabl...

Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer? By Richard Friebe The theory is simple: If most aggressive cancers rely on the fermentation of sugar for growing and dividing, then take away the sugar and they should stop spreading. Meanwhile, normal body and brain cells should be able to handle the sugar starvation; they can switch to generating energy from fatty molecules called ketone bodies — the body's main source of energy on a fat-rich diet — an ability that some or most fast-growing and invasive cancers seem to lack. The Würzburg trial, funded by the Otzberg, Germany–based diet food company Tavartis, which supplies the researchers with food packages, is still in its early, difficult stages. "One big problem we have," says Schmidt, sitting uncomfortably on a small, wooden chair in the crammed tea kitchen of Kämmerer's lab, "is that we are only allowed to enroll patients who have completely run out of all other therapeutic options." That means that most people in the ...

Low-salt diet increases insulin resistance in healthy subjects Low-salt diet was significantly associated with higher homeostasis model assessment index independent of age, sex, blood pressure, body mass index, serum sodium and potassium, serum angiotensin II, plasma renin activity, serum and urine aldosterone, and urine epinephrine and norepinephrine. Low-salt diet is associated with an increase in IR. The impact of our findings on the pathogenesis of diabetes and cardiovascular disease needs further investigation.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Eat your salt without fear!

Nutrition and Alzheimer's disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet Alzheimer's disease is a devastating disease whose recent increase in incidence rates has broad implications for rising health care costs. Huge amounts of research money are currently being http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifinvested in seeking the underlying cause, with corresponding progress in understanding the disease progression. In this paper, we highlight how an excess of dietary carbohydrates, particularly fructose, alongside a relative deficiency in dietary fats and cholesterol, may lead to the development of Alzheimer's disease. A first step in the pathophysiology of the disease is represented by advanced glycation end-products in crucial plasma proteins concerned with fat, cholesterol, and oxygen transport. This leads to cholesterol deficiency in neurons, which significantly impairs their ability to function. Over time, a cascade response leads to impaired glutamate s...

Comparing Effects of a Low-energy Diet and a High-protein Low-fat Diet on Sexual and Endothelial Function, Urinary Tract Symptoms, and Inflammation in Obese Diabetic Men Introduction.  Abdominal obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus are associated with sexual and endothelial dysfunction, lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), and chronic systemic inflammation. Conclusions.  Diet-induced weight loss induces rapid improvement of sexual, urinary, and endothelial function in obese diabetic men. A high-protein, carbohydrate-reduced, low-fat diet also reduces systemic inflammation and sustains these beneficial effects to 1 year.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049511001764 http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif The high-fat diet was also associated with a significant increase in LDL particle size (255.0 vs 255.9 Å; P = .01) and a significant decrease in the proportion of small LDL particle ( (larger particles are much healthier for you, and come about after only days on a low carb diet)

http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=16721831571j7360&size=largest http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Low calorie, low carb diet leads to remission of type 2 diabetes within a week.

ScienceDirect - European Journal of Internal Medicine : Nutrition and Alzheimers disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet Abstract Alzheimer's disease is a devastating disease whose recent increase in incidence rates has broad implications for rising health care costs. Huge amounts of research money are currently being invested in seeking the underlying cause, with corresponding progress in understanding the disease progression. In this paper, we highlight how an excess of dietary carbohydrates, particularly fructose, alongside a relative deficiency in dietary fats and cholesterol, may lead to the development of Alzheimer's disease. A first step in the pathophysiology of the disease is represented by advanced glycation end-products in crucial plasma proteins concerned with fat, cholesterol, and oxygen transport. This leads to cholesterol deficiency in neurons, which significantly impairs their ability to function. Over time, a cascade response leads to impaired...

- WWW.THEDAILY.COM Interesting article that says some scientists would like to add lithium to the water supply to decrease suicides and violence, make us all happier.

Eating less salt doesn't cut heart risks: study - Yahoo! News : "NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People who ate lots of salt were not more likely to get high blood pressure, and were less likely to die of heart disease than those with a low salt intake, in a new European study. The findings 'certainly do not support the current recommendation to lower salt intake in the general population,' study author Dr. Jan Staessen, of the University of Leuven in Belgium, told Reuters Health."