In a study published in The Lancet, investigators said they found no evidence to back the belief that higher levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol routinely reduce the risk of a heart attack.

High concentrations of HDL are one of the big markers for blood tests.

They are monitored as much as low levels of “bad” cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, or LDL) as a yardstick of dangerously clogged arteries.

The paper used a method called mendelian randomisation to compare heart-attack risk among people who inherited known genetic variants that gave them higher HDL levels.

According to conventional wisdom, these individuals would have a lower risk of a coronary.

But the study, which looked at nearly 12,500 people with a history of a heart attack and over 41,000 otherwise healthy counterparts, found this was not always the case.

The results are important because of the use of drugs, sometimes inflicting side effects, which are administered to boost HDL cholesterol levels.

“These results show that some ways of raising HDL cholesterol might not reduce risk of myocardial infarction [heart attack] in human beings,” said Sekar Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

“Therefore, if an intervention such as a drug raises HDL cholesterol, we cannot automatically assume that risk of myocardial infarction will be reduced.”

In contrast, the study said “bad” cholesterol remained an accurate marker of cardiac risk.

Separately, a study, also carried in Thursday’s Lancet, confirmed the benefits of LDL-lowering statins for protecting people with no previous history of cardiovascular disease. Khaleej Times

The brain freeze from that hot fudge sundae might last longer than you think.

A new UCLA study on rats is the first to show how a diet high in processed sugar slows the brain, hampering memory and learning.

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” study author Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information.”

Fortunately, the study also found that the omega-3 fatty acids in foods such as salmon, walnuts and flaxseeds can counteract the disruption, he said.

The UCLA team focused its study on high-fructose corn syrup — the inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar that’s commonly added to soft drinks, condiments and a host of processed treats.

“We’re not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants,” Gomez-Pinilla said.

The researchers studied two groups of rats that each consumed a fructose solution as drinking water for six weeks. The second group also received omega-3 fatty acids.

The animals were fed standard rat chow and trained on a maze twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet.

After six weeks on the fructose fluid, the researchers tested the rats’ ability to recall the route and escape the maze.

The rats that received the omega-3 fatty acids navigated the maze much faster than their counterparts, the researchers said.

“The (omega-3 deprived) animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats’ ability to think clearly and recall the route they’d learned six weeks earlier.”

HEALTHY SNACKS TIP

The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology published the study results in its May 15 edition.

“Our findings suggest that consuming (omega-3 fatty acids) regularly protects the brain against fructose’s harmful effects,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “It’s like saving money in the bank. You want to build a reserve for your brain to tap when it requires extra fuel to fight off future diseases.” By Nancy Dillon, New York Daily News

The results of a two-year dietary study led by Hans Guldbrand, general practitioner, and Fredrik Nystrom, professor of internal medicine at the Linkoping University, Sweden, show that this kind of diet could have a better effect on blood sugar levels and blood lipids.

Diabetes millitus type-2 is a lifelong disease in which there are high-levels of blood sugar (glucose). Diabetes is caused by a problem in the way your body makes or uses insulin. Insulin is needed to move glucose into cells, where it is stored and later used for energy.

In type-2 diabetes, your fat, liver, and muscle cells do not respond correctly to insulin. Consequently, blood sugar does not get into these cells to be stored for energy. Increased fat also makes it harder for your body to use insulin the correct way.

The study is based on 61 patients who were randomised into two groups, where they followed either a low-carbohydrate (high fat) diet or a low-fat diet, the journal Diabetologia reports.

In both groups, the participants lost approximately four kg on an average. Besides, a clear improvement in the glycaemic (blood sugar) control was seen in the low-carbohydrate group after six months, according to a Linkoping statement.

Despite the increased fat intake with a larger portion of saturated fatty acids, the HDL or ‘good’ cholesterol content increased on the high-fat diet.

In the high-fat diet, 50 percent of the energy came from fat, 20 percent from carbohydrates, and 30 percent from protein. For the low-fat group, the distribution was 30 percent from fat, 55-60 percent from carbohydrates, and 10-15 percent from protein.

The participants were recruited from two primary health care centres and met for four group meetings during the first year of the study. All 61 participated in the study for the follow-up.

“In contrast to most other studies of this type, we lost no patients at all, which vouches for the good quality of our data,” Guldbrand says. Khaleej Times

Here’s the skinny (well, not really): Virtually all commercially-available chickens now have what many call the “obese gene,” which makes birds gain weight quickly to speed up production from birth to slaughter. That, combined with no exercise and a constant supply of high-energy (caloric) food, makes today’s chicken the opposite of lean: The amount of fat in modern chicken may be five or even 10 times what it used to be, according to a UK-based study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition. So if you serve a whole chicken to your family like grandma did, you may be serving them 10 times as much fat than the days of yesteryear. That’s a whole lotta fat, and big trouble for the waistline.

The nonprofit Farm Forward explains that this is another consequence of inhumane factory farming.

“This type of chicken husbandry needs to be reviewed with regard to its implications for animal welfare and human nutrition,” wrote lead researcher Dr. Yiqun Wang. “The cocktail of gene selection for fast weight gain, lack of exercise and high-energy food available 24 hours a day, is a simple and well-understood recipe for obesity.”

Farm Forward is on to something important, and they are taking the research even further. They teamed up with Kansas State University to compare the fat and protein content of heritage birds to commercial ones found in the grocery store. KSU professor Dr. Liz Boyle started the research in February with heritage chickens from Frank Reese Jr. of Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in central Kansas. Heritage birds are the genetic breeds that existed before the days of industrialized meat. Reese’s chickens take at least 120 days to mature. Most all chickens available at the grocery store take about 40.

Fast-growing chickens go right alongside chicken welfare problems, explains Farm Forward, so the worse the conditions they are raised in (cramped and barely able to move or support their unnatural weight), the fatter (and more fattening) the chicken meat is. For chickens raised in factory farms (99 percent of the meat at market is from factory farms), their pitiless fate seems to be accompanied by a drastic rise in fat grams. “The fat went from less than 2 grams to 23 grams of animal fat per serving, twice as much fat than ice cream,” says physician and author Dr. Michael Greger, who has his own interesting commentary on Dr. Wang’s study. “So now chicken has 10 times more fat and ten times more calories, so that could explain why chicken has been tied to human abdominal girth.”

Ten times more fat and 10 times more calories can be related to a fat belly, that’s for sure. It makes sense that our crisis of obesity might very well be closely tied to the daily consumption of chicken by many millions of Americans.

Farm Forward and KSU plan on conducting more studies when this one is complete. “The consequences of disregarding animal welfare go far beyond the question of cruelty,” Dr. Aaron Gross of the University of San Diego and CEO of Farm Forward explained to me. “What we are discovering more and more is that many of the environmental and public health problems with meat are intimately connected with animal welfare.” So basically, what’s bad for the chickens is bad for us; it’s all related.

We’ve all seen chicken portrayed as the low-fat, heart-healthy alternative to red meat for years, but it no longer adds up. You might want to lean away from eating birds and lean toward more plant-based options of protein like black beans, lentils, tofu, chickpeas and whole grains. No cruelty, far less fat, zero cholesterol. It’s a sensible swap for the waistline and good news for the birds!  By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post

The study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers is the first research to show that a small protein, apolipoprotein C-III (apoC-III), that sometimes resides on the surface of HDL cholesterol may increase the risk of heart disease and that HDL cholesterol without this protein may be especially heart protective.

“This finding, if confirmed in ongoing studies, could lead to better evaluation of risk of heart disease in individuals and to more precise targeting of treatments to raise the protective HDL or lower the unfavourable HDL with apoC-III,” said Frank Sacks, professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at HSPH and senior author of the study.

A high level of HDL cholesterol is strongly predictive of a low incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD). But trials of drugs that increase HDL cholesterol have not consistently shown decreases in CHD, leading to the hypothesis that HDL cholesterol may contain both protective and non-protective components.

ApoC-III, a proinflammatory protein, resides on the surface of some lipoproteins-both HDL and low-density lipoproteins, or LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.

The researchers, led by Sacks and Majken Jensen, research associate in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, examined whether the existence or absence of apoC-III on HDL cholesterol affected the “good” cholesterol’s heart-protective qualities, and whether its existence could differentiate HDL cholesterol into two subclasses-those which protect against the risk of future heart disease and those which do not.

Blood samples collected in 1989 and 1990 from 32,826 women in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses’ Health Study were examined, along with blood samples collected from 1993 to 1995 from 18,225 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. During 10 to 14 years of follow-up, 634 cases of coronary heart disease were documented and matched with controls for age, smoking, and date of blood drawing.

The researchers compared plasma concentrations of total HDL, HDL that has apoC-III, and HDL without apoC-III as predictors of the risk of CHD.

After adjusting for age, smoking status and other dietary and lifestyle cardiovascular risk factors, the researchers found that two different subclasses of HDL have opposite associations with the risk of CHD in apparently healthy men and women.

The major HDL type, which lacks apoC-III, had the expected heart-protective association with CHD. But the small fraction (13pc) of HDL cholesterol that has apoC-III present on its surface was paradoxically associated with a higher, not lower, risk of future CHD.

Those men and women who had HDL apoC-III in the highest 20 percent of the population had a 60 percent increased risk of CHD.

The results suggested that measuring HDL apoC-III and HDL without apoC-III rather than the simpler measure of total HDL may be a better gauge of heart disease risk (or of HDL’s protective capacity).

“Reduction in HDL-apoC-III by diet or drug treatments may become an indicator of efficacy,” said Jensen. Newstrack India

This could be because eating very quickly encourages weight gain, which can trigger the illness.

Scientists in Lithuania presented their finding at the International Congress of Endocrinology and European Congress of Endocrinology in Florence, Italy, the Daily Mail reported.

They looked at 702 people, including 234 who had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

They all filled in a detailed questionnaire about their lifestyles, which included sections on diets, exercise and whether they smoked.

Overweight women miss out on jobs because of ‘fat discrimination’ne question asked them if they ate faster, more slowly or at the same speed as others.

They were also measured and weighed to calculate their body mass index, which determines whether they are obese.

The researchers found that those who admitted they ate more quickly than most other people were two-and-a-half times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

They claimed that this trend existed even once they had accounted for other causes such as obesity, smoking, diet and a family history of the illness.

“The prevalence of type 2 diabetes is increasing globally and becoming a world pandemic. It appears to involve interaction between susceptible genetic backgrounds and environmental factors,” said lead researcher Dr Lina Radzeviciene from Lithuanian University of Health Sciences.

“It’s important to identify modifiable risk factors that may help people reduce their chances of developing the disease,” she noted.

The scientists did not explain why eating fast appeared to be linked to type 2 diabetes.

But obesity has long been recognised as one of the main causes of the illnesses.

Previous studies have found that people who eat quickly also eat more, and consequently are more likely to be overweight.

Experts think this is because their digestive system doesn’t have a chance to send a signal to the brain that it is full.

But David Speigelhalter, a professor in the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, warned that the study was too small to be meaningful.

“This is one of those many small studies that raise an interesting question but don’t prove causation. It is a huge and unjustified jump to say that eating slower reduces your risk of getting diabetes,” he stated. Newstrack India

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that obese rats fed a high-fat, low-carb diet — comparable to what many humans consume — had more damaging and deadly heart attacks than obese rats fed a low-fat diet.

Worse, the findings suggest that this type of diet also impairs recovery immediately following a heart attack.

Although the researchers say that low-carb diets do have benefits, they advise caution.

“Right now, if I were considering a high-fat, low-carb diet, I would ask myself if the benefits outweigh the heart-attack issues this research has revealed,” said Steven Lloyd of UAB, who led a set of four complementary studies. “If I had heart disease or I was predisposed to having a heart attack, I would think carefully before starting this type of diet.”

Carbs vs. fats

Carbohydrates from foods such as vegetables, nuts and grains have been the primary source of calories for most of the world’s people for millennia. The World Health Organization advocates a diet in which 55 percent to 75 percent of daily calories come from carbohydrates; 15 percent to 30 percent from fats; and 10 percent to 15 percent from proteins. [7 Perfect Survival Foods]

The low-carb Zone Diet advocates a 40:30:30 ratio of carbs, fats and proteins, respectively; the Atkins Diet can be as low as 20 percent carbohydrates, with less concern about the protein-fat ratio. There is considerable scientific support for these low-carb diets as weight-loss programs. And Lloyd emphasized that his research does not suggest that high-fat, low-carb dietscause heart attacks.

Nevertheless, the long-term impact of high protein intake and fat on the heart and other organs is not well known.

At the heart of the damage

Lloyd and his colleagues focused only on naturally occurring heart attacks. They found that for obese rats on a high-fat diet, when a heart attack hit, it was larger and more punishing, causing more damage to the heart muscle and leaving less chance of recovery compared with equally obese rats on a low-fat diet.

One reason might be the role of fat in inducing oxidative stress and creating free radicals, which are highly reactive atoms and molecules that damage DNA and cellular walls, ultimately killing heart muscle cells.

Another reason, Lloyd said, could be that for the rats on a high-fat diet their hearts may have been starved for energy. Carbohydrates are the most efficient fuel when the heart is trying to recover from a damaging event, he said. In the high-fat diet, the primary fuel is ketones from fat metabolism, which is adequate for a healthy heart but not a damaged one. The lack of glucose that would have been supplied by carbohydrates leaves the heart less able to heal itself.

Many advocates on both sides of the diet debate — the low-fat and low-carb camps — have reached some common ground in recent years. Both camps now emphasize “good carbs,” which are complex carbohydrates found in whole grains and beans, as opposed to the simple carbs found in sugar, white bread and potatoes; and “good fats,” such as the healthful omega-3 fatty acids found in some fish, and unsaturated fats found in poultry. By Christopher Wanjek, Fox News

Deaths due to heart attacks were way ahead of deaths due to traffic accidents. The other killers were stress and high blood pressure, according to the annual report released by the Ministry of Health yesterday.

Dr Mahmoud Fikri, Assistant Undersecretary of Health Policies Affairs at the Ministry of Health and Chair of Higher National Committee for Diabetes, said: “What really worries us is the less physical activity among adolescents.”

A school survey showed that children between 13 to 15 years of age spend more than three hours every day on TV and computer games.

Inactivity

This inactivity is expected to turn a large number of residents obese by the year 2015.

The report warns the obesity rates among women will reach 44.6 percent by the year 2015.

“The high obesity rate among children and adolescents is dangerous and this goes back to less physical activity, fast food consumption and high consumption of energy drinks and sugars,” Fikri said in the annual report.

The health ministry is also worried that more young adults are smoking and that tobacco consumption was growing despite taking stringent steps.

A school survey showed increasing rates of smoking among school boys which went up to 17 per cent in 2010 as against 14.9 per cent five years ago. Smoking is the main cause of lung cancer and also adversely affects non-smokers in homes such as children and women.

The report highlights the vital role of preventive measures in surmounting the health challenges that pose a danger to society in general, the health policy chief said.

The good news is that infant mortality is down and polio has been eradicated and that the UAE is malaria-free, according to the report.

But to offset the good news the report notes that about 20 per cent of the population will turn diabetic by the year 2030. By Mahmood Saberi, Gulf News

The study, conducted by Sarah A Mustillo from Purdue University, was based on data from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study.

“We found that obese black and white teenage girls who transitioned out of obesity continued to see themselves as fat, despite changes in their relative body mass,” Mustillo said.

“Further, obese white girls had lower self-esteem than their normal-weight peers and their self-esteem remained flat even as they transitioned out of obesity,” she said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 17% of American children ages 2-19 are obese.

“If the current national movement to end childhood obesity is successful, we can anticipate many young people moving from obese into the normal weight range, which will result in better physical health.

“I wanted to know if the same thing would happen for psychological health. Girls often struggle with self-esteem anyway during adolescence and, therefore, it is troubling to find that the negative effects of larger body size can outlive the obesity itself,” she said.

For the study, the health and weight of more than 2,000 black and white girls was followed for 10 years starting at ages 9 to 10 as part of the national study.

The girls were separated into one of three groups – normal weight, transitioned out of obesity and chronically obese – based on their body mass trends during the 10-year period.

There was a difference in self-esteem levels between races. Self-esteem for black girls transitioning from the obese to the normal range did rebound, however, both races continued to have negative body perceptions.

“The self-esteem for black girls was lower overall to begin with, but for those who moved into the normal weight range, self-esteem increased more than it did for any other group of girls.

“We would like to look at this at more closely to understand how subcultural norms influence this process.

“We did not show that self-esteem stayed flat because girls continued to see themselves as heavy, but just that they happened at the same time.

“Even so, providing mental health assistance during the weight loss process could be a benefit. Understanding and addressing body image, identity and self-esteem issues could ultimately help keep the weight off. Why keep dieting and exercising if you are still going to see yourself as fat?” Mustillo said.

Although more research is needed to understand why girls feel this way, but Mustillo, who focuses on the trajectories of obesity in adolescence, said the feeling of lesser self-worth might be difficult to shake because society is full of negative stereotypes and messages about obesity.

“Studies show that children internalise stereotypes and negative perceptions of obese people before they ever become obese themselves, so when they do enter that stigmatised state, it affects their sense of self-worth.

“Then, whether they are gaining or losing weight, the negative message they have internalized and feelings of worthless may stick with them,” she said. DNA India

In fact, when Dr. Abrar Qureshi and his team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston first set out to study whether there was a link between the skin disease and java, they thought the anti-inflammatory properties of caffeine might actually protect against psoriasis.

That had been reported by a group of Irani researchers, who applied caffeine directly to the skin of volunteers with psoriasis and found an apparent benefit.

Scientists believe psoriasis is caused by an abnormal immune system attack on the body’s own cells, which causes them to form red, scaly patches all over the body that usually itch.

Typical treatments for psoriasis include topical creams, ultraviolet light exposure and systemic drugs that target the immune system.

To see whether consumed caffeine had any influence on whether a person developed psoriasis, Qureshi and his colleagues looked at more than 82,000 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study.

All of the participants had filled out questionnaires about their daily food and beverage intake in 1991 and were free of psoriasis at that point.

Over the next 14 years, nearly 1,000 people in the study developed psoriasis, the team reports in the Archives of Dermatology.

Initially, the risk did seem a bit higher among those who got a lot of caffeine in their diet, whether from coffee, tea, soft drinks or chocolate.

But coffee drinkers also smoked more than people with a smaller caffeine intake.

Earlier studies from Qureshi’s team have tied psoriasis to both alcohol and tobacco, so when the researchers took the latter into account they found there was no longer any link between caffeine and skin problems.

Although the earlier research doesn’t prove that either smoking or drinking causes psoriasis by itself, the findings are another good reason to cut back on unhealthy habits, Qureshi told Reuters Health.

“From a lifestyle point of view,” he said, “I’d recommend exercising more, drinking less and quitting smoking.”

Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia, who was not involved in the new work but has studied the health effects of coffee, said there is good evidence that the brew — at least when filtered — isn’t harmful for healthy people.

“There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that coffee drinking may decrease the risk of diabetes, stroke and some types of cancer,” Lopez-Garcia, of Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, told Reuters Health in an email.

But she warned that the drink can worsen problems like insomnia, anxiety and high blood pressure.

“Because of these side effects of coffee, it is prudent to recommend moderate coffee consumption,” she said. By Frederik Joelving, Reuters