Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Five Foods Prevent Heart Attacks
2. Drug Pressure Drug Helps Diabetes
3. Men Should Get HPV Vaccine
4. Cardio Workouts Build Stronger Hearts in Women
5. Antioxidant to Retard Wrinkles Discovered
1. Five Foods Prevent Heart Attacks
Cardiovascular disease is American’s top killer, but five foods have been proven to prevent heart attacks.
While it’s well-known that a diet high in fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and low in saturated animal fats, lowers the risk of heart disease, these five foods go a step further. Bonnie T. Jortberg, Registered Dietician and senior instructor in the department of family medicine at University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, told “Bottom Line/Personal” that these five super heart-healthy foods have been shown to be particularly effective in preventing heart disease.
The five foods proven to fight cardiovascular disease are:
- Spinach — Spinach is high in folate which helps prevent the accumulation of homoscysteine in the blood. Homoscysteine is a major risk factor for heart disease.
- Salmon — Salmon is high in omega-3 fatty acids which reduce inflammation and help prevent plaque from blocking arteries.
- Tomatoes — Tomatoes are rich in lycopene which lowers cholesterol.
- Oatmeal — Oatmeal is a great source of soluble fiber which absorbs excess cholesterol and removes it from your body.
- Pomegranates — Pomegranates are rich in polyphenols, which are antioxidants that keep hearts healthy by neutralizing cell-damaging free radicals, and may also reduce LDL “bad” cholesterol.
Editor's Note:
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The Five Absolute Worst Foods You Can Eat 10/18/03
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Doughnuts, Soda, French Fries (and contaminated fried foods), commercial chips-corn chips, potato chips, tortilla chips,etc., Fried Non-Fish Seafood- all shellfish
(MY NOTE: PORK is somewhat like shellfish, in that these are toxic SCAVENGER meats.-"Cheyenne Cin"- P.S. Of course, they're referring to the 'fried' part here, too.)
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Heart Talks
However, there are five foods that are particularly effective in preventing ... Heart Palpitations: What You Can Do? Are heart palpitations dangerous – is a ...
www.hearttalks.com/ - | |
2. Blood Pressure Drug Helps Diabetes
Vitamin C may benefit people with type-1 diabetes, but new research found that a blood pressure drug called telmisartan did the same thing as vitamin C and might be safer! The research team said both help remove free radicals that damage tissue.
The team from the University of Warwick in the UK found that high blood-sugar levels often experienced by type-1 diabetics can trigger changes to the mitochondria, which are the energy-producing components of cells. When such changes occur, the mitochondria can begin churning out high levels of free radicals. Even after blood sugar is normalized, the team found, free radicals are produced long afterwards.
The study team then found that the free radicals are neutralized by vitamin C. In addition, they also found that telmisartan stimulates cells to remove the free radicals naturally. Both treatments must be continued long-term in order to be effective. However, lead researcher Professor Antonio Ceriello said that long-term treatment with vitamin C “could be dangerous,” and for that reason telmisartan might be more useful. The team is currently looking for other drugs that will permanently stop free radical production.
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3. Men Should Get HPV Vaccine (NOTE: I DISAGREE- NOBODY should get this vaccine, nor most other 'vaccines' --"Cheyenne Cin")
Men should be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted wart virus to protect them against a type of mouth and throat cancer, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said the rate of oropharyngeal cancers — mostly cancers of the tonsil and base of tongue — appears to be rising in certain populations and the human papilloma virus or HPV transmitted by oral sex is likely to blame.
New vaccines that target HPV may help turn the trend around, the researchers reported in this week's issue of the journal Cancer. The vaccines are recommended for young women in Europe and the United States.
But young men should be offered the vaccines too, said Dr. Erich Sturgis and Paul Cinciripini of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
"(We) encourage the rapid study of the efficacy and safety of these vaccines in males and, if successful, the recommendation of vaccination of young adult and adolescent males," Sturgis and Cinciripini wrote.
There are several strains of HPV, which cause ordinary warts but also genital warts. These in turn can cause cancer in some cases. The researchers looked at various studies and concluded that HPV 16 was especially likely to be linked with certain cancers of the tonsil and base of tongue.
Smoking is a well known risk factor but rates of these cancer are staying fairly steady, despite declines in tobacco use.
In one study cited by Sturgis and Cinciripini, Dr. Maura Gillison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues studied 100 patients with oral or throat cancer and compared them to 200 healthy people. They found those who had six or more oral sex partners had a high risk of the cancer.
They found evidence of HPV-16 in 72 percent of the tumors.
U.S. health officials estimate that more than a quarter of U.S. girls and women aged 14 to 59 are infected with HPV.
Two vaccines protect people against HPV infection — Merck and Co's. Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended vaccination for 30 million women and girls aged 11 to 26 to prevent cervical cancer, which kills about 300,000 women worldwide each year.
Head and neck cancers, which include cancers of the larynx, nose and nasal passages, mouth, pharynx, and salivary glands, are three times more common in men than women, and 45,000 new cases are expected in 2007 in the United States alone.
© 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.
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4. Cardio Workouts Build Stronger Hearts in Women
The results of a new study may help explain why women's hearts benefit more from physical exercise than men's hearts do. Studies in exercising male and female mice found that moderate, long-term exercise provokes a sex-dependent cardiac change that is different for females.
The findings, reported at an American Physiological Society-sponsored meeting in Austin, Texas, may eventually lead to improved treatment strategies for women and men with heart disease.
Dr. Sebastian Brokat and colleagues from the Center for Cardiovascular Research, Charite Berlin, had male and female mice exercise for a little more than 5 weeks and they looked for structural and physiological changes in the animal's hearts in response to the physical activity.
They found that regularly exercising female mice showed a much higher level of exercise performance than their male counterparts. Compared with male mice, female mice ran on a running wheel farther, faster, and for longer periods of time.
"Surprisingly," Brokat said, the female mice developed bigger and stronger hearts than the male mice. This type of beneficial heart enlargement or "hypertrophy" frequently occurs with exercise. It differs from pathological hypertrophy, an abnormal enlargement that leads to problems such as heart failure, which is irreversible.
The study also found that only the female mice experienced a 20-percent decrease in a protein that is usually found in people with heart disease. "Also, a certain marker of fibrosis, which is normally increased in heart disease, was decreased in our exercising females compared to exercising males," Brokat noted.
Heart enlargement in the exercising female mice was inversely correlated with decreased expression of these two protein markers.
It is possible that women have a lower level of these two markers of heart disease to start with, Brokat noted.
While more research is needed, the current findings, Brokat concluded, "bring us a step closer to explaining the sex bias in physical activity that protects the heart."
Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited.
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5. Antioxidant to Retard Wrinkles Discovered
A new method for fighting skin wrinkles has been developed at the Hebrew University Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences.
In her doctoral research at the university, Dr. Orit Bossi succeeded in isolating a plant-based antioxidant that delays the aging process by countering the breakdown of collagen fibers in the skin. Dr. Bossi conducted her research under the supervision of Zecharia Madar, the Karl Bach Professor of Agricultural Biochemistry at the Hebrew University, and Prof. Shlomo Grossman of Bar-Ilan University.
Antioxidants operate against free radicals which cause a breakdown of many tissues in the body, including the skin. When found in small quantities in the body, free radicals are not harmful and are even involved in various physical processes. When there is an excess of free radicals, however, as occurs during normal aging or as a result of excessive exposure to ultra-violet radiation from the sun, the result, among other things, is a breakdown of the collagen and elastin fibers in the skin. When this happens, there is a loss of skin elasticity and the formation of wrinkles.
“A problem with many of the commercial antioxidants found today in the market that are said to retard the aging process is that they oxidize quickly and therefore their efficiency declines with time,” said Dr. Bossi. “Vitamin C, for example, oxidizes rapidly and is sensitive to high temperatures. This is also true of the antioxidant EGCG which is found in green tea, and vitamin E. As opposed to these, the antioxidant which I used in my research is able to withstand high temperatures, is soluble in water, and does not oxidize easily and thus remains effective over time.”
Dr. Bossi is looking towards a new generation of cosmetic products which will not only combat wrinkles but will be more effective against deeper levels of skin wrinkles than current products. Dr. Bossi did not reveal the plant source she used to derive the antioxidant, since the research is in the process of being patented.
In her research, Dr. Bossi conducted experiments on mice skin tissue, which, she says, resembles that of humans. She applied her antioxidant on two skin cell groups – those which had been exposed to the sun’s rays and received her antioxidant and those which also had been exposed to sun but did not receive the antioxidant. The untreated cells showed a rise in free radicals causing wrinkles, while those cells which had been treated showed no significant increase in the free radicals level.
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