The Plain Truth's: Your Health Today ONLINE

10 Reasons Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat

1. The ingredients simmering in a Japanese kitchen are a simple variety of foods eaten on a consistent and daily basis:
Fish
Sea Vegetables
Land Vegetables
Soy
Rice
Fruit
Green Tea

2. The Japanese enjoy home cooked meals on a daily basis. A traditional meal consists of grilled fish, a bowl of rice, simmered vegetables, miso soup, sliced fruit for dessert and green tea. The Japanese consume almost 10 percent of the world’s fish, although they make up about 2 percent of the world’s population. That’s 150 pounds per year, per person compared to the world average of 35 pounds. And this daily dose of omega-3 fatty acids may well explain why they live long and healthy lives. That, and the fact they consume 5 times the amount of cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, that Americans do.

3. The emphasis of Japanese cooking is to use what is fresh and in season. According to author Moriyama, “Japanese supermarkets are cathedrals of freshness. Food is not only dated, it’s timed—Japanese women buy fish, meat, vegetables, or prepared meals that are timed by the half hour they were packed that day.”

4. The Japanese eat small portions of a variety of courses at a meal. According to Moriyama, from childhood they are taught to eat slowly, savoring every bite. And the food is served on plates at least a third the size of American tableware. Moriyama includes the basic foundations of Japanese home-cooked food presentation:

Many Grocery Carts Infected With E-coli

A University of Arizona researcher says you may want to grab one of those disinfectant wipes right before you grab a grocery cart.

Professor Charles Gerba, the lead researcher, swabbed the handles of 85 carts in four states for bacterial contamination.

Gerba says 72 percent of the carts had a positive marker for fecal bacteria. When they examined some of the samples, they found Escherichia coli, also known as E. coli, on half of them.

Researchers say they actually found more fecal bacteria on grocery cart handles than you would typically find in a bathroom, mainly because bathrooms are disinfected more often than shopping carts.

Genital Measurement Tied to Fertility

When it comes to male fertility, it turns out that size does matter.

The dimension in question is not penis or testicle size, but a measurement known as anogenital distance, or AGD.

Men whose AGD is shorter than the median length - around 2 inches (52 mm) - have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD, according to a study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Was Henry VIII to blame for his wives’ miscarriages? Monarch had rare blood disease that also sent him mad

A rare blood disorder could be the reason why King Henry VIII had so few children, despite marrying six times.

The condition could also be behind the King’s transformation from a witty and athletic youth to an overweight and unstable tyrant by the time he was in his forties.

Henry, King of England from 1509 until his death in 1547, was desperate for a male heir to continue the Tudor line.

He did in fact produce three children, one from each of his first three wives – but many others were stillborn or lost through miscarriages.

Researchers say there is compelling evidence that he was ‘Kell positive’, a rare blood type which can cause serious health and fertility problems.

Those with Kell positive blood can pass it down to future generations.

If a man with the disorder conceives a child with a Kell negative partner, each child has a 50-50 chance of inheriting the condition. When a baby is conceived with the same rare blood group as its father, then the mother will have difficulties with further pregnancies.

The antibodies she produces during that first pregnancy will attack future Kell positive babies she carries – triggering miscarriages.

Dr Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer, of the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, believe that Henry’s first two wives Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn suffered this fate.

Catherine apparently had six pregnancies. All but the fifth child, Mary, were stillborn or died shortly after birth. Anne also produced just one child, Elizabeth, and also had at least two miscarriages. Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour provided a male heir, Edward, but died soon after a difficult labour. None of his other wives are known to have had children by him.

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Regulatory Protein Lowers Blood Sugar

Researchers at the Children's Hospital in Boston, led by Umut Ozcan, MD, have found a regulatory protein that lowers blood sugar when it is high due to either lack of insulin or a decreased sensitivity to insulin.

The functioning of the regulatory protein, called XBP-1s, is impaired in the presence of obesity and insulin resistance. When it was artificially activated in the livers of obese mice with type 2 diabetes, their blood sugar came down sharply.

XBP-1s also regulates blood sugar in another way, by causing the degradation of FoxO1. FoxO1 increases glucose output from the liver and stimulates feeding behavior in the brain. Therefore, degrading FoxO1 reduces blood glucose levels and increases glucose tolerance (faster clearance of glucose from the blood).

"Activating XBP-1s could be another approach to type 2 diabetes and could be very beneficial for type 1 diabetes, too," said Ozcan in a press release. "Even in mice with no insulin, increased expression of XBP-1s lowered the blood glucose level significantly. This suggests that approaches that activate XBP-1s in the liver of type 1 diabetics could control blood glucose levels, with potentially much less requirement for insulin."

Ozcan is now looking for ways to activate XBP-1s that might lead to development of a medicine for diabetes.

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Source:

Children's Hospital Boston press release

FDA Approves Edarbi to Treat High Blood Pressure

(PharmPro.com.com) — The FDA has approved Edarbi tablets (azilsartan medoxomil) to treat high blood pressure (hypertension) in adults.

Data from clinical studies showed Edarbi to be more effective in lowering 24-hour blood pressure compared with two other FDA-approved hypertension drugs, Diovan (valsartan) and Benicar (olmesartan).

“High blood pressure is often called the ‘silent killer’ because it usually has no symptoms until it causes damage to the body,” said Norman Stockbridge, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Cardiovascular and Renal Drug Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “High blood pressure remains inadequately controlled in many people diagnosed with the condition, so having a variety of treatment options is important.”

Edarbi will be available in 80 milligram and 40 mg doses, with the recommended dose set at 80 mg once daily. The 40 mg dose will be available for patients who are treated with high-dose diuretics taken to reduce salt in the body.

Blood pressure is the force of blood pushing against the walls of the arteries as the heart pumps. If blood pressure rises and stays high over time, it can damage the body in many ways. Nearly 1 in 3 adults in the United States has high blood pressure, which increases the risks of stroke, heart failure, heart attack, kidney failure, and death.

Gastric Bypass or Lap Band Surgery?

If you're one of the millions of overweight Americans and has been considering weight-loss surgery, the results of a new study comparing the safety and effectiveness of gastric bypass surgery and lap-band surgery may interest you. The study, titled "Better Weight Loss, Resolution of Diabetes, and Quality of Life for Laparoscopic Gastric Bypass vs. Banding," written by Guilherme M. Campos, M.D., et al. appeared in the February publication "Archives of Surgery."

The study's design was to match 100 pairs of people, one of whom had undergone the laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and the other the laparoscopic gastric banding surgery. The pairs were carefully matched so various criteria such as age, weight, sex, presence of Type 2 diabetes and body mass index were close to identical for the two people chosen for each pair.

This study measured outcomes during and after the surgical procedure, including a one-year period post-surgery. The measured outcomes included weight loss, quality of life and Type 2 diabetes resolution. Although many experts expected the outcomes to be more positive for those people who had had the gastric bandings performed, this study's conclusions demonstrated that the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass had a similar rate of overall complications as did the gastric banding, but fewer re-operations were needed with the gastric bypass.

Those people who had undergone gastric bypass surgery lost more weight in the year following surgery and showed a 76 percent resolution rate of Type 2 diabetes versus a 50 percent resolution rate in those who had gastric banding.

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Breast-Feeding May Cut Obesity Risk in Kids of Diabetic Moms

Infants whose mothers had diabetes during pregnancy are at increased risk for childhood obesity, but breast-feeding lowers that risk, a new study suggests.

Among babies exposed to diabetes in utero, those who were breast-fed for six months or more were no more likely to put on extra weight when they were 6 to 13 years old than children whose mothers did not have diabetes during pregnancy, the investigators found.

The findings were the same across all ethnicities. However, this protective effect was not seen in babies who were breast-fed for less than six months.

The study is published in the February issue of the journal Diabetes Care.

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Oral sex now main cause of oral cancer: Who faces biggest risk?

CBS) What's the leading cause of oral cancer? Smoking? Heavy drinking?

Actually, it's oral sex.

Scientists say that 64 percent of cancers of the oral cavity, head, and neck in the U.S. are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), which is commonly spread via oral sex, NPR reported. The more oral sex you have - and the more oral sex partners you have - the greater the risk of developing these potentially deadly cancers.

"An individual who has six or more lifetime partners - on whom they've performed oral sex - has an eightfold increase in risk compared to someone who has never performed oral sex, Ohio University's Dr. Maura Gillison, said at a recent scientific meeting, according to NPR.

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The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women

The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt. Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

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