9 Nutrients to Boost Your Memory

Ginkgo biloba. Numerous studies have found that ginkgo biloba improves mental alertness, clarity, and memory. Standard capsules contain 24 percent ginkgo flavonoids and 6 percent perpene lactones. Follow label recommendations, and check with your doctor first if you take blood thinners.

Ginseng. A Chinese study found that a compound in ginseng boosted memory in scores of people suffering from dementia, and a British study found that combining ginseng with ginkgo biloba produced even better memory-boosting results. Check labels for dosage recommendations.

B vitamins. While the entire complex of B vitamins is important for a top-notch memory, inositol and choline are particularly effective at reducing stress and jump-starting memory. In addition, B6 reduces levels of homocysteine in the blood, which causes brain aging. Many experts recommend a B complex supplement of 50 to 100 mg daily.

Omega-3 oils. These oils come from fatty fish such as salmon, and also from flaxseed oil. Omega-3 oils contain fatty acids essential for a healthy brain and also for fighting depression. A study from Louisiana State University found that eating fish helps protect the brain from problems associated with Alzheimer's disease, and a study from Australia's Aberdeen University found that fish oil slows the aging process while helping the brain to work faster. Many experts suggest eating two portions of fish each week or taking a 1,000 mg supplement three times a day.

Vitamin C. Vitamin C is an antioxidant that helps control the free radicals that damage brain cells and help improve the flow of oxygen through the brain. Experts recommend 1,000 mg daily.

Turmeric. A laboratory study at the University of Illinois found that anti-inflammatory compounds in the spice turmeric protected cells from damage caused by beta-amyloid, a main component of the plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's victims. The compounds in turmeric, called curcumin, can be part of a spicy diet (typically found in Indian food) or can be taken in pill form. Follow instructions on supplement bottles.

Ginger. The anti-inflammatory properties of ginger help protect the brain against memory-robbing diseases. Research has shown that ginger, in addition to increasing the supply of nutrients to the brain, can block the creation of inflammatory chemicals, such as prostaglandins, which are associated with Alzheimer's.

Hawthorn. Rich in bioflavonoids, this herb is a great antioxidant that fights free radicals as well as increases oxygen supply to the brain to carry important nutrients vital for the functioning of neurotransmitters. It's often combined with ginkgo.

Gotu kola. Sometimes called "food for the brain" this Asian herb improves concentration and memory. Oregon Health & Science University researchers found it supports brain function and memory retention.

Losing weight quickly is key to staying slim

People who lose up to1.5lbs a week are up to five times more likely to keep the weight off than those who manage to shed only half a pound a week, found the study.

Nutrition experts have been divided over whether losing weight quickly or slowly is the best approach to long-term weight control.

The latest research, by a team from the University of Florida, examined whether losing weight at a slow rate initirally resulted in larger long-term weight reduction than losing weight at a fast initial rate.

The authors analysed 262 middle-aged overweight women who had followed a six-month lifestyle programme encouraging them to cut their calorie intake and increase physical activity.

The aim of the programme was to achieve an average weight loss of 1lb a week.

Researchers split the women into three groups according to how much weight they lost in the first month of the trial.

Women in the fast weight-loss group shed almost 1.5lbs per week, those in the moderate weight-loss group lost between half a pound and 1.5lbs a week and those in the slow weight-loss group lost less than half a pound per week.

The authors then looked at the womens' weight loss after six months and 18 months, as well as any weight regain, and found those who lost weight quickly to begin with fared best.

Women in this group lost more weight overall, maintained their weight loss for longer and were less likely to put weight back on than the more gradual weight losers.

They were five times more likely to achieve the clinically significant figure of 10 per cent weight loss after 18 months than those in the group who lost least weight to begin with.

The study was reported in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine.

SOURCE

Cancer's sweet tooth becomes a target

A DRUG that blocks the way cancer cells generate energy could lead to a new class of cancer treatments.

The first human trial of the drug, published this week, is reported to have extended the lives of four people with an aggressive form of brain cancer.

The result is preliminary, but it suggests that, as an approach, tackling "cancer metabolism" is sound. "We are still a long way from a treatment, but this opens the window on drugs that target cancer metabolism," says Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who led the trial.

Elsewhere, researchers have started experimenting with a host of other molecules that might target cancer metabolism. "It's about identifying which target is best," says Lewis Cantley of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, whose company Agios Pharmaceuticals is screening for such targets.

Most of these efforts stem from an observation dating back to the 1930s - that cancer cells generate energy via glycolysis. This is different to the way cells normally make energy, through aerobic respiration in specialised chambers called mitochondria. Ordinary cells do use glycolysis but only if they are short of oxygen, as it is hugely inefficient, gobbling up large amounts of glucose for very little energy (see diagram).

At the time, it was assumed that the switch to glycolysis was a product of the cell becoming cancerous, rather than the other way around. "It was seen as a follower, not a leader or driver," says Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

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The Federal Fat Police: Bill Would Require Government to Track Body Mass of American Children

CNSNews.com) - A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are.

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.

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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.

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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

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

As many as 39,000 fewer Americans could get campylobacter and 26,000 fewer could get salmonella poisoning from chicken and turkey under new food safety rules announced Monday by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The bacteria, which can be life-threatening, are two of the most common causes of food-borne illness.

"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.

FOOD POISONING: '09 a mixed year for food-borne illnesses

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.

VIDEO: Mom describes 3-year-old's salmonella symptoms

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.

SOURCE

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.

SOURCE

The Problem with Factory Farms

Hogs are raised on a farm in Elma, Iowa

Scott Olson / Getty Images

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.

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