Imbalances in the microbial community in your intestines may lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes.

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?
Imbalances in the microbial community in your intestines may lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes. What does science say about how to reset our bodies?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Mother Jones
Apr. 22, 2013

A few years before Super Size Me hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona, a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body's response to McDonald's—specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties.

Dandona is a professor at the State University of New York-Buffalo who also heads the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of Western New York, and what he observed has informed his research ever since. Levels of a C-reactive protein, an indicator of systemic inflammation, shot up "within literally minutes." "I was shocked," he recalls, that "a simple McDonald's meal that seems harmless enough"—the sort of high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal that 1 in 4 Americans eats regularly—would have such a dramatic effect. And it lasted for hours.

Inflammation comes in many forms. The swelling of a sprained ankle indicates repairing torn muscle and tendon. The redness and pain around an infected cut signifies the body's repulsion of microbes. The fever, aches, and pains that accompany the flu represent a body-wide seek-and-destroy mission directed against an invading virus. They're all essential to survival, the body's response to a perceived threat or injury. But inflammation can also cause collateral damage, especially when the response is overwhelming—like in septic shock—or when it goes on too long.

Chronic, low-grade inflammation has long been recognized as a feature of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of dysfunctions that tends to precede full-blown diabetes and that also increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, and even dementia—the top killers of the developed world. The syndrome includes a combination of elevated blood sugar and high blood pressure, low "good" cholesterol, and an abdominal cavity filled with fat, often indicated by a "beer belly." But recently, doctors have begun to question whether chronic inflammation is more than just a symptom of metabolic syndrome: Could it, in fact, be a major cause?

For Dandona, who's given to waxing grandiloquent about the joys of a beer on the porch in his native Delhi, or the superb ice wines from the Buffalo region, the results presented a quandary. Food was a great pleasure in life. Why would Nature be so cruel, he wondered, and punish us just for eating?

Over the next decade he tested the effects of various foods on the immune system. A fast-food breakfast inflamed, he found, but a high-fiber breakfast with lots of fruit did not. A breakthrough came in 2007 when he discovered that while sugar water, a stand-in for soda, caused inflammation, orange juice—even though it contains plenty of sugar—didn't.

The Florida Department of Citrus, a state agency, was so excited it underwrote a subsequent study, and had fresh-squeezed orange juice flown in for it. This time, along with their two-sandwich, two-hash-brown, 910-calorie breakfast, one-third of his volunteers—10 in total—quaffed a glass of fresh OJ. The non-juice drinkers, half of whom drank sugar water, and the other half plain water, had the expected response—inflammation and elevated blood sugar. But the OJ drinkers had neither elevated blood sugar nor inflammation. The juice seemed to shield their metabolism. "It just switched off the whole damn thing," Dandona says. Other scientists have since confirmed that OJ has a strong anti-inflammatory effect...

Mice used to find best drugs to fight boy's cancer

Mice save boy from cancer June 2013
(Video) Michael, 9, is battling a rare form of bone cancer -- but thanks to an 'unorthodox measure' involving a tiny animal, his tumor is shrinking.

Exercise Alters DNA within minutes

How Exercise Can Change Your DNA
By Alice Park
Time
March 07, 2012

Just 20 Minutes of Exercise Can Change Your Genes MyHealthNewsDaily

Exercise does a lot of good things — it burns calories, helps keep your weight in check and lowers your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Now add one more thing to the list: physical activity can change your DNA.

Unlike the aberrations and genetic mutations caused by carcinogens and toxins, exercise-induced alterations to DNA are more like tune-ups, helping muscles to work better and more efficiently. What’s more, these changes occur even after a single 20-minute workout.

Juleen Zierath, a professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, reports with her colleagues in the journal Cell Metabolism about these very early changes that muscle cells undergo the first time you get off the couch and into the gym. The researchers worked with a group of 14 young men and women who were relatively sedentary, and asked them to work out on an exercise bike that measured their maximum activity levels. The participants also volunteered to give up a little bit of muscle, from their quadriceps, in a relatively painless biopsy procedure performed under local anesthesia. The researchers took the biopsy of muscle cells once before the participants exercised, and again within 20 minutes afterward.

VIDEO: Walking While Working: Healthland’s Belinda Luscombe Tries the Treadmill Desk

Using the biopsied samples, researchers compared the activity in a series of muscle-related genes before and after exercise. More genes were turned on in the cells taken after the exercise and the participants’ DNA showed less methylation, a molecular process in which chemicals called methyl groups settle on the DNA and limit the cell’s ability to access, or switch on, certain genes. By controlling how much methylation goes on in certain cells at specific times, the body regulates which genes in the DNA are activated — that’s what differentiates the development of an an eye cell, for example, from that of a liver cell.

Methylation also helps to prime muscle cells for a bout of exercise, getting them to pump out the right enzymes and nutrients the muscle needs to get energy and burn calories while you’re pounding the pavement during that mile-long jog. “We are trying to get at the early messages that the muscle is [receiving in order] to say, ‘Something is happening here, we need to coordinate so we can get more enzymes and more machinery on board so we can cope with the demands of this exercise,’” says Zierath.

The more intense the exercise, she says, the more the methyl groups are on the move. She and her team were able to see this firsthand by comparing gene activity in participants who also agreed to exercise at two different intensities over a period of a week. On one visit, they were asked to cycle until they reached 40% of their maximum capacity; on another occasion, they biked until they reached 80% of their maximum. The muscle biopsies following the 80% sessions showed a lower concentration of methyl groups — and therefore more RNA, which is the first byproduct of gene activity — than samples taken after the 40% sessions.

MORE: Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

To confirm the role of exercise on gene expression in muscle, the scientists then studied how calcium affected the entire system. When muscle cells start to gear up for intense activity like exercise, they release calcium, which fuels the contraction process. When the scientists blocked calcium production, the effect disappeared, and the muscles didn’t contract as much.

That’s when Zierath threw in some coffee — or more specifically, caffeine. Caffeine triggers the release of calcium, and can enhance the way methyl groups move aside to turn on the genes that help muscles contract. When she added caffeine to a lab dish containing cells from the leg muscles of rats, the muscle cells showed lower concentrations of methyl groups and more mRNA — a similar effect as seen after exercise — as she expected.

But, says Zierath, that doesn’t mean you can skip the workout for a cup of coffee instead. “Most of the physiological effect of the caffeine we drink is on the central nervous system, and not dispersed to all the muscles,” she says. “In order to get the same kind of effect we saw in the cells, you would have to drink 50 cups of coffee a day, which is close to the lethal dose. In my mind, half an hour of moderately high intensity exercise is sufficient to do the same thing.”

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/07/how-exercise-can-change-your-dna/#ixzz2UXQNygP3

Simple Test Predicts Longevity

Simple Test Predicts Longevity
By Lisa Collier Cool
Dec 18, 2012
Yahoo

Don’t be surprised if your doctor asks you to sit on the floor at your next checkup. A new study says testing a person’s ability to sit down and then rise from the floor could provide useful insight into their overall health and longevity.

Brazilian researchers discovered an interesting link between a person’s ability to sit and rise from the floor and the risk of being 6.5 times more likely to die in the next six years. The study, published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention, included a simple test in which more than 2,000 people ages 51 to 80 attempted to sit down on the floor and then stand back up using as little support as possible.

Floors are Replacing Chairs

Chairs used to be a helpful tool to measure a person’s strength and lower body fitness. Having a person stand up from a seated position helped doctors assess a person's overall frailty and also if he or she is likely to fall (and thereby at an increased risk of fracture). It also measured a person’s lower-body strength and agility.

But this new test has some real life applications.

Instead of simply gauging a person’s ability to get up off the couch, the sitting test helps identify risks associated with picking up vital items—such as medicine or eyeglasses—that may drop on the floor. It also can identify those at risk of spending hours (or longer) on the floor after a fall—unable to get up or call for help.

Aiming for a Perfect Score

The test used by the researchers required people to sit on the floor from a standing position and then return to a standing position. Speed wasn’t a factor in the scoring, but support was.

The more support a person required—including bracing with a hand or knee or both—the lower the score for each action. A perfect score of five for each action (sitting and standing) was the goal. Points and half points were deducted for things like touching a hand or knee on the ground or pushing off with a hand on one knee to stand up. Looking wobbly on the way up or down cost participants half a point.

More than half the participants ages 76 to 80 failed the tests, scoring 0 to 3. Not surprising around 70 percent of those under 60 earned a near perfect or perfect score of 8, 9, or 10.

Scores and Life Expectancy

People who scored 0 to 3 were 6.5 times more likely to die during the course of the 6.3 year study, compared to people who scored from 8 to 10. Those with scores of 3.5 to 5.5 were 3.8 times more likely to die as the high scorers—and those who scored in the 6 to 7.4 range were 1.8 times more likely to die than those with the highest scores.

During the course of the study 159 of the 2,000 volunteers died, with the majority of the deaths coming from the group that had the most trouble getting up and down.

“Just two subjects that scored 10 died in the follow-up of about six years,” said Claudio Gil Soares de Araújo, a professor at Gama Filho University in Rio de Janeiro who worked on the study. If someone between the ages of 51 and 80 scores 10, “the chances of being alive in the next six years are quite good,” he said.

“A 1-point increment in the [sitting-rising] score was related to a 21 percent reduction in mortality," reported the investigators who noted this is the first study to demonstrate the prognostic value of the sitting-rising test,” said Araújo.



It’s Not Just About Getting Up

The ease with which a person stands and sits clues doctors in to a person’s ratio of muscle power to body weight. But the researchers say there are other relevant issues. “It is well known that aerobic fitness is strongly related to survival, but our study also shows that maintaining high levels of body flexibility, muscle strength, power-to-body weight ratio, and coordination are not only good for performing daily activities but have a favorable influence on life expectancy,” said Araújo.

What You Can Do

All is not lost if you don’t score a perfect 10. Doctors say physical activity like walking, swimming, yoga, and weight-resistance training can help improve scores on the sit/stand test and add years to your life.

In addition, you can boost your level of physical activity with a few little things too.

You can burn up to 100 more calories a day if you park in the spot furthest from the door at the grocery store, use the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator at the mall, or make multiple trips up and down the stairs when you’re putting away laundry. “Those little things add up to a lot of beneficial exercise you don’t realize you’re doing,” says Rose Marie Robertson, M.D., chief science officer, American Heart Association.

They can also help you increase your sit/stand score.

Social isolation 'increases death risk in older people'
BBC
25 March 2013

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Social isolation is associated with a higher risk of death in older people regardless of whether they consider themselves lonely, research suggests.

A study of 6,500 UK men and women aged over 52 found that being isolated from family and friends was linked with a 26% higher death risk over seven years.

Whether or not participants felt lonely did not alter the impact of social isolation on health.

Age UK says cuts to services for older people are compounding the problem.

It is not the first time that loneliness and social isolation has been linked with poor health.

But researchers wanted to find out if it was the emotional aspect of feeling lonely that was having an impact or the reality of having little social contact.

Those who were socially isolated - that is had little or no contact with friends or family - were more likely to be older and unmarried and have long-standing illnesses limiting their mobility, such as lung disease and arthritis.

People who described themselves as feeling lonely were more likely to be female and have a wider range of health conditions, including depression.

Both social isolation and feeling lonely were associated with a higher chance of death.

This study shows more clearly than before that being lonely and isolated is not only miserable, it is a real health risk”

But after adjusting for factors such as underlying health conditions, only social isolation remained important.

That risk did not change when researchers added in whether or not someone felt lonely in their isolation.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said they were surprised by their findings.

Study leader Prof Andrew Steptoe, director of the Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care at University College London, said: "Social connections can provide emotional support and warmth which is important but they also provide things like advice, making sure people take their medication and provide support in helping them to do things.

"It would suggest that those practical aspects are quite important for older people's survival.

"There's been such an increase in people living alone. In the last 15 years, the number of 55 to 64-year-olds living alone has increased by 50%.

"And it might be that people in those circumstances aren't looking after themselves so well."

Michelle Mitchell, director general at Age UK, said: "This study shows more clearly than before that being lonely and isolated is not only miserable, it is a real health risk, increasing the risk of early death."

She added that cuts to local authority budget cuts may exacerbate the problem of isolation for many older people.

"Across the country day care centres, often the only regular social life that many older people enjoy, are closing, social care support which can enable older people to leave the house is being cut down to the bare minimum, and too many older people are hidden behind closed doors struggling to cope."

7 walnuts a day deliver health benefits

7 walnuts a day deliver health benefits UPI March 28, 2011 ANAHEIM, Calif., March 28 (UPI) -- Walnuts may be considered the king of nuts for health benefits, with a combination of more healthful and higher quality antioxidants, U.S. researchers say. "Walnuts rank above peanuts, almonds, pecans, pistachios and other nuts," Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania said in a statement. "A handful of walnuts contains almost twice as much antioxidants as an equivalent amount of any other commonly consumed nut. But unfortunately, people don't eat a lot of them. This study suggests that consumers should eat more walnuts as part of a healthy diet." Vinson noted that nuts in general have an unusual combination of nutritional benefits. They contain plenty of high-quality protein that can substitute for meat; vitamins and minerals; dietary fiber; and they are dairy- and gluten-free. Vinson said it takes only about seven walnuts a day to get the potential health benefits. Research has found consumption of small amounts of nuts or peanut butter is linked to decreased risk of heart disease, certain kinds of cancer, gallstones, type 2 diabetes and other health problems. Antioxidants in walnuts were two to 15 times as potent as vitamin E -- renowned for its powerful antioxidant effects, which protect the body against damaging natural chemicals involved in causing disease, Vinson says. Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/03/28/7-walnuts-a-day-deliver-health-benefits/UPI-93441301365744/#ixzz2MbvpmK00

How to change your metabolism: partial fast two days a week

England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet
By JENNIFER CONLIN
New York Times
March 1, 2013

PHOTO: Dr. Michael Mosley, a co-author of “The Fast Diet,” cooking a frittata of mushrooms and scallions at home last week. He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through a regimen of intermittent

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” written by Dr. Mosley and Mimi Spencer, has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems...