Archive for March, 2007
Friday Blog Meat: All Your Symptom Are Belong to Us
Friday, March 30th, 2007In the 15 years I’ve been writing about health and fitness, I’ve seen my share of nutritional panaceas rise and fall. Right now, vitamins are down, especially antioxidant vitamins. But back in the mid-’90s, when I started, they looked like the solution to everything.
Today, the anti-antioxidant backlash is in full swing; rarely is heard an encouraging word. My doctor asked me what vitamins I supplements I use during my last checkup, and scolded me for including vitamin E on the list. (I confess I stopped taking it after that.)
So it’s remarkable, in the midst of this backlash, to read that antioxidant supplements might be good for something after all:
In a study published recently in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, University of Michigan scientists appear to have found a dietary approach to reducing noise-related hearing loss.
They fed five groups of guinea pigs vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium or a cocktail of all four nutrients, then exposed the unfortunate rodents to five straight hours of jet-level noise. Those in the cocktail group had better hearing afterwards.
The researchers think the compounds worked synergistically to absorb free radicals before they’d done damage, and expect to start testing an ear-saving dietary supplement within two years.
Okay, it’s an animal study, has limited application, and appears to be linked to a profit motive on the part of whoever patents and produces this new supplement. But it is one small step back to respectability for a downtrodden nutritional wonderkind.
Green … with envy
Green tea is the cutest girl at the panacea ball these days, with a new study showing it might actually help fight HIV. But is it all too good to be true? That’s the question Jonathan Brown asks in The Independent:
In Britain, sales of green tea have been growing at the rate of 25 per cent a year, fuelled in no small part by the celebrity endorsements of stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez. …
[N]ot everyone is convinced by the many health claims. Professor Mike Williamson of Sheffield University, whose laboratory tests this week suggested that epigallocatechin, a component of green tea, could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by coating immune cells, is unconvinced.
“There is a lot of rubbish talked about what green tea does and most of it I don’t believe,” he said. “I think a lot of claims have been exaggerated and the main way they have been exaggerated is that they have used far too much green tea. This can amount to several hundred cups a day — something that presents its own toxicity risk. If you throw enough green tea at something you can show any effect you like,” he said.
According to Professor Williamson, whose own study suggested benefits could be gained from drinking two to three cups a day, there is at least one other exciting area of research. Green tea has been found to have the ability to “switch off” stomach cancer cells, something which could one day inform a treatment, he said.
Dr Philip Coan, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, is if anything even more skeptical. He argues that there has yet to be a sufficiently large study conducted outside the laboratory with the correct controls to establish green tea as a bona fide medicine. “People tend to believe that there are cures for things in simple old remedies but there really is no scientific basis for this,” he said.
Smells like yet another backlash brewing.
The omega code
Which brings me to fish oil, the alpha-dog panacea. Will it, too, travel the familiar path to Backlash City? If it does, it probably won’t be anytime soon. Fish oil, for the moment, still has legs, according to a recent Japanese study.
The study looked at whether fish oil, in addition to statins, would help prevent people from having heart attacks. The sample size was huge — 18,600 adults with high cholesterol, 3,660 of whom had established heart disease — although the duration, four and a half years, seems kind of short.
Two keys:
1. Everyone in the study was taking statins.
2. Half the people took a purified form of EPA, one of the omega-3 fats in fish oil. So it wasn’t the stuff you get by the jug at Sam’s Club.
As for the results, they sound good until you look at the details:
During the study, the vast majority of patients had no major heart problems. However, 2.8 percent of those taking EPA along with statins experienced a major coronary event, compared with 3.5 percent of those only taking statins.
That’s a 19 percent difference, note the researchers, who included Mitsuhiro Yokoyama, MD, of Kobe University in Kobe, Japan.
EPA pills weren’t linked to any difference in fatal heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.
When Yokoyama’s team took a closer look at the data, they found the EPA advantage only applied to patients with a known history of coronary artery disease.
Patients with high cholesterol but no history of coronary artery disease may also get some heart protection from EPA, but that’s not certain, since so few of them had major heart problems during the study.
So if you have diagnosed heart disease, a purified form of one of the fats found in fish oil might help, when used in conjunction with statins. That’s a pretty tepid finding, but I guess it’s better than a backlash.
Personally, I’m still waiting for the study showing that Diet Coke prevents … well, I’d settle for anything. Paper cuts? Good enough.
Freeze Now, Or Forever Fall to Pieces
Thursday, March 29th, 2007If you haven’t already frozen some of your stem cells, you could be behind the curve:
Some doctors and researchers say that in a few years the use of primitive stem cells from infants’ umbilical cord blood could grow new knee ligaments or elbow tendons creating a therapy that becomes the vanguard of sports injury repair.
Already, some sports agents are preparing to advise clients about banking stem cells from their offspring or from tissue taken from their own bodies as an insurance policy against a career-ending infirmity. Stem cell blood banks are promoting the benefits of stem cell therapies for the practical healing and rehabilitation of tendons, ligaments, muscle and cartilage.
I love the line I put in bold — could any statement possibly be more speculative than “preparing to advise”? I mean, I’m preparing to advise my publisher to pay me a million-dollar advance for my next book. And if my talent and popularity increase a hundredfold in the near future, I just might follow through.
This, though, is the scariest part of the New York Times piece:
“If you have a child who has exceptional athletic talent at the age of 5 or 6, you might want to get a muscle or fat biopsy to draw and freeze some young stem cells,” said Dr. Johnny Huard, the director of the Stem Cell Research Center of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and a leading gene therapy researcher. “To have a pool of stem cells already removed would be enormously valuable. The practical use might be years away, but that’s the future of sports medicine.”
I hope that would qualify as child abuse.
No!
Thursday, March 29th, 2007Who would’ve guessed that getting kicked in the head repeatedly would cause brain damage?
Married to the Media: A Bad Deal All Around
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007Rannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:
A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.
“Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone,” said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory.” …
The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.
So how do you “intervene” when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?
I was also curious about how “all women” are defined (the study’s abstract isn’t any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were “European-American” — white chicks.
If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:
According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to “better connect with themselves.” …
It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.
Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn’t change with marriage.
Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:
[M]en’s self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men’s body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.
So we’re all screwed, which is only fair.
Mother and Child Disunion
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007I once knew a pregnant vegetarian. She was one of the most judgmental people I’ve ever known, a self-righteous scold who took offense at pretty much everything. Unfortunately, she was married to a friend of mine, so we had to find ways to engage in polite conversation when we found ourselves in the same room.
About the only time I ever liked her was when she was pregnant. She told me she’d started craving beef, and had to back off from her militant vegetarianism for a while. I liked hearing that, not because I care one way or the other what vegetarians do, but because it seemed to give her an insight into what it means to be human. Sometimes you have to do what your instincts tell you to do, and instincts rarely follow a strict ideology.
I bring that up because of this story about the perils of maternal meat-eating:
U.S. women who eat a lot of beef while pregnant give birth to sons who grow up to have low sperm counts, researchers reported Tuesday.
They believe pesticides, hormones or contaminants in cattle feed may be to blame. Chemicals can build up in the fat of animals that eat contaminated feed or grass, and cattle are routinely given hormones to boost their growth.
“In sons of ‘high beef consumers’ (more than seven beef meals a week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction.
More than seven burgers or steaks a week? How many pregnant women actually eat that much beef? Turns out, that’s a telling question:
The team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York studied data on the partners of 387 pregnant women in five U.S. cities between 2000 and 2005, and on the mothers of the fathers-to-be.
Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.
“The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers’ beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions,” said Shanna Swan, who led the team.
You start with 387 pregnant women. You track down their baby daddies. Then you track down the mothers of the baby daddies. Of those, you find 51 who remember eating beef more than seven times a week when pregnant. And you discover that nine* of the men who sprang from the loins of those 51 women have low sperm counts.
Quick show of hands: If you asked your mother what she ate when she was pregnant with you, do you think she’d remember accurately?
Dr. Swan thinks she would:
“When you are pregnant you are very aware of what you eat — you are watching your weight and some things make you sick and you need to get enough of x and y so you focus on that,” she said.
The mothers of the men were asked only if they ate beef more than once a day or less — something Swan believes they could remember accurately.
She’s studying something important — low sperm counts in contemporary men — so I’ll give her some slack on this. But still, it seems like a pretty big conclusion to make based on such shaky evidence. Pregnant women are already freaked out over the mercury in fish. Is it really worthwhile to get them freaked out over the hormones in beef?
* Reader Rob Siders pointed out a typo in my original version of this post. I misread the article I was quoting, and thought it referred to 18 people, when it clearly said 18 percent of 51 people. He did the math for me — that’s nine moms who bore sons with low sperm counts, which actually makes a better argument against taking the study seriously.