The Federal Fat Police: Bill Would Require Government to Track Body Mass of American Children
States receiving federal grants provided for in the bill would be required to annually track the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.
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Low Vitamin D Tied to Depression
Older men and women with lower levels of vitamin D in their blood are more prone to become depressed over time, new research shows.
Many studies have been published recently on the potential health benefits of vitamin D, and the potential risks of deficiency. Low vitamin D levels have been linked to heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and more severe asthma.
In older people, insufficient vitamin D is quite common, and has been linked to fractures, worse physical function, greater frailty, and a wide variety of chronic illness.
Spot the Early Warning Signs of Cancer
Discovering cancer early is key to survival. Unfortunately, there are more than 200 hundred different types of cancer, and more than 60 organs in the body where it can develop.
In addition, according to Cancer Help U.K., the same organ can develop different types of cancer. For example, squamous cells line the lungs, and there are also gland cells in the lungs called adenomatous cells. So, a patient can have squamous cell cancer of the lung or adenocarcinoma of the lung.
Being vigilant can save your life. Symptoms vary according to the type of cancer, and two of the most common symptoms are lumps and weight loss. Below are some of the most prevalent cancers and their early warning signs.
Skin. Non-melanoma skin cancer is the most common form of cancer. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, more than 1 million new cases will be diagnosed in 2010. Symptoms include ulcerations that never heal, moles that change color, size, or appearance, and flat sores that look like moles.
Lung. Watch for persistent coughs, coughing up blood, and chest pain.
Breast. Lumps, itching, redness or soreness of nipples, and unusual thickening should send you straight to the doctor.
Colon. Rectal bleeding, blood in your stool, and a change in bowel habits are warning signs.
Non-Hodgkin�s Lymphoma. Enlarged lymph nodes, night sweats, fevers, and weight loss are some of the symptoms that indicate lymphoma.
Leukemia. Warning signs of leukemia include fatigue, paleness, weight loss, nosebleeds, bone or joint pain, and easy bruising.
Bladder and Kidney. Watch for blood in urine, burning or pain, and increased trips to the bathroom.
Endometrial and cervical. Unusual discharge, bleeding between menstrual cycles, and heavy periods should require a doctor�s consultation.
Thyroid. Hoarseness, difficulty swallowing, enlarged lymph nodes in the neck, and pain in the throat or neck are warning signs of thyroid cancer.
Why Most Shampoos are a Waste of Money
It’s the dirty little secret shampoo companies don’t want you to know—when you wash your hair with one of those nutrient-rich shampoos, most of the nutrients and active ingredients in the product don’t actually end up in your hair, they wind up down the drain… along with all the money you spent on the shampoo.
Why does this happen? Because the shampoo molecules they contain are too large to penetrate the cells of hair and more importantly the tiny hair follicles where our hair actually grows. They sit atop the follicle until we wash them away.
Why is that a problem? Think about it this way—if you wanted to fertilize a plant, where would you pour the fertilizer? On the leaves? Of course not! You’d pour the fertilizer on the root and the soil where it’s needed most. Our hair works basically the same way—if you want to treat your hair right, you need to treat the roots.
But if regular shampoo can’t penetrate the hair follicles where our roots grow, what are we supposed to do? BUY CHEAP!!!!!!!
Chicken, turkey may sicken 55K fewer under new USDA rules
"These standards will have probably the greatest public impact for consumers' health since anything USDA has adopted in the last 15 years," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.
Under the new standards, only 7.5% of chicken carcasses at a plant would be allowed to test positive for salmonella, down from 20% allowed since 1996. Salmonella levels in chickens were tested at 7.1% nationally in 2009, says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council.
Salmonella can cause diarrhea, abdominal cramps and fever and can be life-threatening, especially for pregnant women, babies and the elderly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are 1.4 million cases of salmonella and more than 500 deaths annually in the USA.
The new rules for campylobacter, which had not been regulated before, are that companies fail if they have more than 10% positives for "highly contaminated" carcasses and 46% for "low level" contamination. The USDA estimates that about 50% of poultry plants are now at this level.
In 2008, an estimated 40.2% chickens tested positive for campylobacter, which causes diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain and fever. The CDC estimates campylobacter infects 2.4 million Americans a year and kills 124.
The poultry industry will work hard to fulfill customers' expectations "for safe and wholesome chicken," Lobb says.
Crunch your chances of cancer with an apple a day
Eating apples regularly may reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer
Eating apples regularly may reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer, according to new research in Poland and reported in the European Journal Of Cancer Prevention.
The tests compared 592 patients suffering from the disease with 765 patients without at the same hospital.
Research concluded that those with cancer had eaten 9.5 servings a week, compared to those without the disease, who had 11 servings a week.
A reduced risk was observed with those who ate one apple a day, with the odds at 0.65, while eating more than one apple a day reduced the risk by about half.
Eating other fruit or vegetables did not have the same effects on the risk of colorectal cancer.
The protective properties of apples may be as a result of their high content of flavonoids.
These act as antioxidants found concentrated in the skin of apples, preventing molecules or free radicals from inflicting damage on tissue and which can inhibit cancer onset and cell proliferation.
Antioxidants were five times more prevalent in the apple skin than the actual flesh - so wash, but do not peel before you eat.
However, the World Cancer Research Fund says its research has shown that the risk of all cancers can be reduced by between 30 to 40 per cent by making simple lifestyle changes, such as eating more fruit and vegetables, taking regular exercise and watching our weight.
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The Problem with Factory Farms
If you eat meat, the odds are high that you've enjoyed a meal made from an animal raised on a factory farm (also known as a CAFO). According to the USDA, 2% of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40% of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you're a vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you. In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problems of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways. Kirby talks to TIME about large-scale industrial farming, the lack of government oversight and the terrible fate of a North Carolina river.
What exactly is a factory farm?
The industrial model for animal food production first started with the poultry industry. In the 1930s and '40s, large companies got into the farming business. The companies hire farmers to grow the animals for them. The farmers typically don't own the animals — the companies do. It's almost like a sharecropping system. The company tells them exactly how to build the farm, what to grow and what to feed. They manage everything right down to what temperature the barn should be and what day the animals are going to be picked up for slaughter. The farmer can't even eat his or her own animals. People who grow chickens for Perdue in Maryland have to go down to the market and buy Perdue at the store.
We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that's not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically, it's any farm that has 1,000 animal units or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They're never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.
What are the health and environmental hazards of CAFOs?
For one, you're often no longer feeding animals what they're genetically designed to eat. CAFO cows eat a diet of milled grains, corn and soybeans, when they are supposed to eat grass. The food isn't natural because they very often put growth hormones and antibiotics in it. That becomes a problem when you put that manure on the ground.
And the fact that there are thousands of animals packed into one farm is also a problem.
Oh, definitely. There are simply too many animals in too small of a place. In a traditional farm, a sustainable farm, you grow both crops and animals. There is a pasture, and you have a certain number of animals per acre. But when you have 2,000 cows per acre instead of two, you have a problem. You can't fit them in a pasture — you fit them in a building. You can't grow enough crops to feed them — you have to ship in their feed. You don't have enough land to absorb their waste. It has nowhere to go.
So what happens to it?
The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow. There's just so much of it, though. I've seen it sprayed into waterways and creeks. These lagoons filled with waste have been known to seep, leak, rupture and overtop. This stuff is untreated, by the way. We would never allow big, open cesspools of untreated human waste to just sit out on the ground near people's homes and schools. And yet because it's agriculture, the rules are different.
You write at length about North Carolina's Neuse River. What happened there?
Hundreds of massive pig farms came into North Carolina in the 1990s. In Animal Factory, I tell the story of Rick Dove, a former Marine who retired and bought a fishing boat. One day he noticed the fish were dying in really weird ways. First there were the algae blooms. Algae creates oxygen during the day through photosynthesis and expels carbon dioxide at night. When that happens, there's literally no oxygen in the water. Everything comes crawling up to the shore in the shallowest part of the river, trying to pump water through their gills. By the morning, they're all dead. Everything — shrimp, crab, little fish called menhaden, eels, bass. People call it a "fish jubilee," 'cause they can just wade into the river and pick up free food.
Soon after this started happening, Rick Dove noticed the menhaden fish were developing round red circles on their flanks. They'd go into what was called a "death spiral." They just start swimming into little circles and just die. Nobody knew what was causing this. Pretty soon after that, the fishermen, including Rick and his son, noticed they were getting round red sores on their skin in the parts that touched the water. Then they'd get very disoriented. Fishermen would forget where they lived or where they'd docked their boats. Rick started to do some research. One day he read in a science magazine about pfiesteria, this very odd plankton that emits toxins that stun a fish so it can suck the fish's blood. That's what the lesions were. But the toxin also gets in the air, and that's why fishermen were getting disoriented.
Rick wanted to know the source of this problem, so he went up in an airplane. That's how I open Animal Factory, with him looking down at these massive pig farms. Sometimes you can even see the waste runoff going directly going into the water. Other times they're out there spraying night and day because nobody is watching them. You can't see this from the road. There are very few inspectors, and they're not going to go out there and monitor everyone.
People probably assume this kind of stuff is regulated, but it's not. Or at least not enough. What should the government be doing?
A lot of the laws are on the state and county level, so it depends on the political will and political culture of the individual state. That doesn't mean Democrat or Republican. That means agriculture state vs. a state with not a lot of agriculture. What kind of laws have agriculture-friendly states passed? Some states say that if a company spills its manure, it doesn't have to pay to clean it up. The taxpayers pay. If you try to pass pollution standards, the industry complains that they're already too heavily regulated. They claim that if you force them to reduce how much they pollute, they're not going to be able to operate. They're essentially saying they can only make money by polluting and breaking the law. That should be unacceptable to everybody.
You spent three years reporting this story. What stands out?
One time I visited a pig farm, a regular farm — not a factory farm — in Illinois. Right across the street was a hog CAFO. The owner didn't live there, of course. There's no farm house on a factory farm, just business offices. At night, all the workers would leave, and all I'd hear as I was trying to fall asleep was the sound of the pigs fighting each other, biting each other, squealing, screeching all night long. It was like nothing I've ever heard before in my life, and it just didn't stop. It sounded like kids being tortured over there. I'll never forget that sound. It was very sad.
Hourglass Figures Affect Men's Brains Like a Drug
Watching a curvaceous woman can feel like a reward in the brain of men, much as drinking alcohol or taking drugs might, research now reveals.
These new findings might help explain the preoccupation men can have toward pornography, scientists added.
Shapely hips in women are linked with fertility and overall health. As such, it makes sense evolutionarily speaking that studies across cultures have shown men typically find hourglass figures sexy.
To explore the roots of this behavior, researchers had 14 men, average age 25, rate how attractive they found pictures of the naked derrieres of seven women before and after cosmetic surgery that gave them more shapely hips. These operations did not reduce weight but just redistributed it, by implanting fat harvested from the waists into the buttocks.
Brain scans of the men revealed that seeing post-surgery women activated parts of the brain linked with rewards, including regions associated with responses to drugs and alcohol.
It might not be especially surprising that evolution wired the male brain to find attractive bodies rewarding.
"Hugh Hefner could have told us that by showing us how many zeroes are in his bank account," said researcher Steven Platek, an evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. "But there's more to it than buying Playboy, Maxim, or FHM."
For instance, "these findings could help further our understanding pornography addiction and related disorders, such as erectile dysfunction in the absence of pornography," he explained. "These findings could also lend to the scientific inquiry about sexual infidelity."
The scientists also found that changes in a woman's body-mass index or BMI — a common measure of body fat — only really affected brain areas linked to simple visual evaluations of size and shape. This may be evidence that body fat influences judgments of female beauty due more to societal norms than brain wiring.
"The media portrays women as wholly too skinny," Platek said. "It's not just about body fat, or body mass index."
What do women think?
Future research could also investigate the effects that attractive figures have on the female brain.
"It turns out women find similar optimally attractive female bodies as attention-grabbing, albeit for different reasons," Platek said. "Women size up other women in an effort to determine their own relative attractiveness and to maintain mate guarding — or, in other words, keep their mate away from optimally designed females."
These findings should not be construed as saying that men are solely programmed by their biology, nor that "women without optimal design should just hang up their mating towel," Platek added.
Platek and his colleague Devendra Singh detailed their findings online Feb. 5 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Elvis Presley died of chronic constipation, reveals his doctor
For years Elvis Presley's death has been the subject of ever more far-fetched conspiracy theories.
But it seems that the real mystery may have been missed - the cause of his death.
Rather than an irregular heartbeat, as had previously been reported, his personal doctor has revealed Elvis died of chronic constipation.
Revelations: Elvis Presley, centre, with Dr Nick George Nichopoulos and friends shortly before his death; the doctor has revealed that he thinks Elvis's constipation led to his premature death
The debilitating problem caused the singer severe problems, according to Dr George Nichopoulos, Elvis's doctor for the last 12 years of his life.
The doctor, who attempted to resuscitate Elvis on the day of his death, said that it wasn't until the autopsy that he realised had severe the constipation had been.
According to Dr Nichopoulos, the autopsy found Elvis’s colon to be five to six inches in diameter, compared to an average of two to three inches. And rather than the standard four to five feet long, Elvis's colon was eight to nine feet.
'After he died we weren’t sure [of his cause of death] so I continued to do some research and I had some doctors call me from different places and different med schools that were doing research on constipation and different problems you can get into with it.
'I just want to get the story straight – it all made sense with the new research that was done,' he told Pop Tarts.
He said that although he offered Elvis a colostomy, to remove part of his bowel, his pride meant he rejected the treatment.
And Dr Nichopoulos thinks that if Elvis had undergone the treatment he might still be alive today.
'He would get embarrassed, he’d have accidents onstage,' said Dr Nichopoulos.
'He’d have to change clothes and come back because of the way we were trying to treat his constipation.
'So if they had done the colostomy then, he’d probably still be here. But it wasn’t acceptable treatment at that time. Now the treatment is short.'
Dr Nichopoulos also says that Elvis's weight gain in the years before his death was at least partly due to his constipation.
'During the last few years we were going back and comparing pictures, some of them were taken just two weeks a part but he looked like he’d gained 20 pounds when the only difference was that he had a good healthy bowel movement and then lost a lot of weight from that,' he said.
Elvis died on August 16, 1977, at the age of just 42. His body was found in the bathroom at his home Graceland.
The Doctor recently released his book The King And Dr Nick, about his time with Elvis.