New Hampshire Health News Digest

Nutrition & Metabolism | Full text | Ketogenic diets and physical performance Abstract Impaired physical performance is a common but not obligate result of a low carbohydrate diet. Lessons from traditional Inuit culture indicate that time for adaptation, optimized sodium and potassium nutriture, and constraint of protein to 15–25 % of daily energy expenditure allow unimpaired endurance performance despite nutritional ketosis. Introduction In the opinion of most physicians and nutrition scientists, carbohydrate must constitute a major component of one's daily energy intake if optimum physical performance is to be maintained [1]. This consensus view is based upon a long list of published studies performed over the last century that links muscle glycogen stores to high intensity exercise. It has also been reinforced by the clinical experience of many physicians, whose patients following low carbohydrate formula or food diets frequently complain of lightheadedness, weakness, and ea...

Nutrition & Metabolism | Full text | A low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet to treat type 2 diabetes Abstract Background The low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet (LCKD) may be effective for improving glycemia and reducing medications in patients with type 2 diabetes. [...] Conclusion The LCKD improved glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes such that diabetes medications were discontinued or reduced in most participants. Because the LCKD can be very effective at lowering blood glucose, patients on diabetes medication who use this diet should be under close medical supervision or capable of adjusting their medication. Background Prior to the advent of exogenous insulin for the treatment of diabetes mellitus in the 1920's, the mainstay of therapy was dietary modification. Diet recommendations in that era were aimed at controlling glycemia (actually, glycosuria) and were dramatically different from current low-fat, high-carbohydrate dietary recommendations for patients with diab...

Watch out for the wrong kind of sugar Watch out for the wrong kind of sugar WE KNOW about good and bad fats. Now suspicion is growing that not all sugars are created equal either. Overweight adults who consume large amounts of fructose have been found to experience alarming changes in body fat and insulin sensitivity that do not occur after eating glucose. Pure fructose is found in fresh fruit, fruit juice and preserves. But much of it sneaks into our diets though high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in soft drinks - which gets broken down into 55 per cent fructose and 45 per cent glucose in the body - or via sucrose (ordinary sugar), which is broken down into the same two sugars. Fears that fructose and HFCS are fuelling the obesity epidemic and triggering insulin resistance and diabetes have been circulating for years (New Scientist, 1 September 2001, p 26), but there have been few direct investigations in humans. So Peter Havel at the University of California, Davis, persuaded 33 overwei...

Daily pill that halts Alzheimers is hailed as "biggest breakthrough against disease for 100 years" | Mail Online : "A new drug halts the devastating progress of Alzheimer’s disease, say British scientists. It is said to be more than twice as effective as current treatments. A daily capsule of rember, as the drug is known, stops Alzheimer’s disease progressing by as much as 81 per cent, according to trial results. Patients with the brain disorder had no significant decline in their mental function over a 19-month period. ‘We appear to be bringing the worst affected parts of the brain functionally back to life,’ said Dr Claude Wischik, who led the research. It is the first time medication has been developed to target the ‘tangles’ in the brain that destroy nerve cells, leading to deteriorating memory. The drug helps to disrupt this process, preventing the formation of new tangles and loosening those already created. Last night the findings were hailed as the biggest breakt...

The ketogenic diet may have mood-stabilizing prope...[Med Hypotheses. 2001] - PubMed Result The ketogenic diet may have mood-stabilizing properties. El-Mallakh RS, Paskitti ME. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Louisville School of Medicine, Kentucky 40292, USA. The ketogenic diet, originally introduced in the 1920s, has been undergoing a recent resurgence as an adjunctive treatment for refractory epilepsy, particularly in children. In this difficult-to-treat population, the diet exhibits remarkable efficacy with two-thirds showing significant reduction in seizure frequency and one-third becoming nearly seizure-free. There are several reasons to suspect that the ketogenic diet may also have utility as a mood stabilizer in bipolar illness. These include the observation that several anticonvulsant interventions may improve outcome in mood disorders. Furthermore, beneficial changes in brain-energy profile are noted in subjects on the ketogenic diet. This is i...

How High Fructose Corn Syrup Makes you Gain Weight How High Fructose Corn Syrup Makes you Gain Weight High Fructose Corn Syrup CandiesNew research from UT Southwestern Medical Center shows the amazing speed that our bodies make body fat from fructose. One of the reasons why low carb diets help you lose weight is that they reduce your intake of fructose. Even though fructose, a type of sugar, is found naturally abundance in fruit, it is also added to many processed foods. Fructose is probably best known for its presence in the sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is typically 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. It unfortunately has become the preferred sweetener for many food manufacturers. This is because it is cheaper, sweeter and easier to blend into beverages than table sugar. Sugar Type As Important as Calories Dr. Elizabeth Parks, lead author of the study , said her team’s findings infer that the right kind of carbohydrates you eat may be just as importa...

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Related To Advantageous Gene Between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, anthropologists concur that humans were developing the first signs of complex societies, replete with agriculture, rudimentary governments and the creation of cities for the first time. Humans also were rapidly expanding and exploring the planet. These revolutionary changes in human societies may have changed the forces that selected for certain genetic traits. "Our data show that the creation of the 7R allele was an unusual, spontaneous mutation, which became an advantage for humans," Moyzis said. "Because it was an advantage, the gene became increasingly prevalent. This is very different from other genes that predispose to genetic disorders, where the mutations are detrimental. We believe this helps explain why a disorder with such a strong genetic association is so common today." The researchers are now working on determining how the genetic variations in D...

Is ADHD An Advantage For Nomadic Tribesmen? ScienceDaily (June 10, 2008) — A propensity for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be beneficial to a group of Kenyan nomads, according to new research. Scientists have shown that an ADHD-associated version of the gene DRD4 is associated with better health in nomadic tribesmen, and yet may cause malnourishment in their settled cousins.

The two Obamas - International Herald Tribune But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He's the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he's too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside. But he's been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in "Entourage" and it all falls ...

Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study - Yahoo! News WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday. ADVERTISEMENT In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy. The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation. As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes. After th...

Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned Michael Arrington 165 comments » The stories over the weekend were bad enough - the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions. Drudge Retort is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor. After heavy criticism over the last few days, the A.P. is in damage control mode, says the NYTimes, and retreating from their earlier position. But from what I read, they’re just pushing their case further. They do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law. They claim that the activity is an infringement. A.P. vice...

Memory Loss - Aging - Alzheimer's Disease - Aging Brains Take In More Information, Studies Show - Health - NYTimes.com “For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.” Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact. “A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more a...

Religion a figment of human imagination - being-human - 28 April 2008 - New Scientist Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists. Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died. Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the i...

Study identifies new regulator of fat metabolism Study identifies new regulator of fat metabolism Over the past several years, animal studies have shown that high-fat, low-carbohydrate “ketogenic” diets cause demonstrable changes in metabolism and subsequent weight loss. Now, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have identified a key mechanism behind this turn of events. Their findings, which appear in the June 2007 issue of Cell Metabolism, demonstrate that a liver hormone known as FGF21 is required to oxidize fatty acids – and thereby burn calories. [...] "When the diet is extremely low in starches and sugars, blood sugar levels drop substantially so that muscle and brain have to turn to alternative fuels,” explains senior author Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, MD, an investigator in the Department of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Consequently, fatty acids are broken down in the l...

Diabetes Drug May Hold Potential As Treatment For Epilepsy, Using Same Mechanism As Ketogenic Diet Two years ago, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists reported they had suppressed epileptic seizures in rats by giving them a glycolytic-inhibitor, inhibiting the brain's ability to turn sugar into excess energy and blocking the expression of seizure-related genes. The discovery was greeted with excitement and hope for a new class of drugs for epilepsy, which afflicts more than 50 million people worldwide. Now, in a presentation at Experimental Biology 2008 in San Diego,* Dr. Avtar Roopra describes a next step in this research that may mean a drug already widely used by people with diabetes could also be an effective and safe therapy for epilepsy, especially for that one third of patients who have recurrent seizures despite therapy with the best available antiepileptic drugs. Although the earlier work by Dr. Roopra and his colleagues marked the first time a compound had been used...