Monthly Archive for June, 2010
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Clean eating means choosing fruits, vegetables, and meats that are raised, grown, and sold with minimal processing.
Often they're organic, and rarely (if ever) should they contain additives. But in some cases, the methods of today's food producers are neither clean nor sustainable. The result is damage to our health, the environment, or both. So we decided to take a fresh look at food through the eyes of the people who spend their lives uncovering what's safe-or not-to  eat . We asked them a simple question: "What foods do you avoid?" Their answers don't necessarily make up a "banned foods" list. But reaching for the suggested alternatives might bring you better health-and peace of mind.
NICHOLAS WADE June 12, 2010, The New York Times Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits. For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human
Genome Project - to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like  cancer and  Alzheimer's and then generate treatments - remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.
One sign of the genome's limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.
The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
In announcing on June 26, 2000, that the first draft of the human genome had been achieved, Mr. Clinton said it would "revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases."
At a news conference, Francis Collins , then the director of the genome agency at the  National Institutes of Health , said that genetic diagnosis of diseases would be accomplished in 10 years and that treatments would start to roll out perhaps five years after that.
"Over the longer term, perhaps in another 15 or 20 years," he added, "you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine."
The pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars to reap genomic secrets and is starting to bring several genome-guided drugs to market. While drug companies continue to pour huge amounts of money into genome research, it has become clear that the genetics of most diseases are more complex than anticipated and that it will take many more years before new treatments may be able to transform medicine.
"Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who in July will become the director of the National Cancer Institute.
So, did you eat the in-flight meal, then?" I cheekily ask Michael Pollan, mainly because he looks fresher and rosier and happier than any 55-year-old has a right to after 13 hours on a non-stop flight from San Francisco. The writer is in England to talk about his new book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual.
Nearly all of Pollan's rules ("eat slowly, eat well-grown food from healthy soils") are routinely broken by the junk served to paying hostages trapped behind tray tables and wired like battery chickens to the dictates of the flight schedule. Feed NOW. Watch godawful movie NOW. Get drunk on 15 per cent Tempranillo NOW (but only so much that it will help you to snooze so the crew can have a giggle in the galley while chowing down). Pollan owns up to ordering the Vegetarian Special, which, he says, was in a beetrooty way "not too bad".
We agree that at least this got him out of being stuck with the supremely depressing Seasonal Salad, which is not much of either: usually ancient leavings from the school of suicidal cucumber keeping company with leaves wilted in grief at having been torn from the life support plastic bags in which, as Pollan explains in his 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma , inert gases have unnaturally prolonged their existence. At least the Salad of Despond obeys Pollan's cardinal rule that we should eat "not too much and mostly plants" - since you'll never want to eat much of this stuff, which technically is "mostly plant".
Pollan and I are sitting in Acorn House Restaurant, on the ground floor of a nondescript corner office block in an unglamorous patch of King's Cross. The establishment describes itself as London's first "truly eco-friendly training restaurant" and is owned by the Shoreditch Trust, which does genuinely decent things in urban communities. So it seems just the kind of place that Pollan, who spends most of his life trying to alert the American public to the inexorable food-death brought about by the empire of agribusiness, might like: civic but tasty.
How do we address public health epidemics like obesity, heart disease, depression, and diabetes? The answer may lie in the environments we inhabit. In Designing Healthy Cities , community leaders and citizens alike construct roads, parks, schools, and offices to transform our lives.
Outside Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, what was called the largest nurses strike in U.S. history began Thursday to the sounds of "Amazing Grace" played on Michael Redmond's bagpipe.
The 50-year-old nurse, wearing a red Minnesota Nurses Association T-shirt and green plaid kilt, said he picked the song because of its history as an old abolitionist rallying cry. He played as night-shift nurses walked off the job early Thursday.
He said he sees a connection between the old fight against slavery and the strike by 12,000 Minnesota nurses. "The rally cry is that we're standing up for patient care and we're standing up for ourselves," he said.
A key issue in the dispute was the nurses' demand for strict nurse-to-patient ratios, rejected by hospitals as inflexible and unnecessary. Sue Stamness, a cardiology nurse at Abbott for 24 years, said patient safety was the nurses concern.
Alfalfa sprouts, lettuce , spinach, and ground beef have all been subject to recent food recalls. In fact, hardly a month goes by without a notice about some unwelcome bug or another finding its way into the food supply.
And, the agency that watches over most of the food we eat is being bashed once again for being reactive - rather than out front - when it comes to keeping the food supply safe.
The Food and Drug Administration lacks a plan to assess risks posed by certain foods, doesn't prioritize surveillance and research, and is putting the public's trust on the line, according to a report released by the Institute of Medicine this morning.
"As recent illnesses traced to produce underscore, foodborne diseases cause significant suffering, so it's imperative that our food safety system functions effectively at all levels," said Dr. Robert Wallace , an epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa, who chaired the report committee.
Uh-oh. Looks like genetic testing companies that have worked so hard to make investigating your DNA sound like a hip, celebrity-filled party finally woke up the parents.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee wants answers from three test makers - Navigenics, Pathway Genomics, 23andMe - on what exactly they're testing for and how accurate they are in getting answers. The House panel also wants to know how and when they provide genetic counseling.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee wants answers from three test makers - Navigenics, Pathway Genomics, 23andMe - on what exactly they're testing for and how accurate they are in getting answers. The House panel also wants to know how and when they provide genetic counseling.
As the questions mount, drugstore chain CVS Caremark has followed Walgreens in deciding against selling Pathway Genomics test in stores just yet. Walgreens got cold feet after the Food and Drug Administration piped up earlier this month with questions about whether the test should be reviewed and approved first.
The hubbub over the tests hit a new level as Pathway looked to put them in retail stores. But just because you may not see the tests in drugstores right away doesn't mean you can't try one while the regulators and overseers sort things out.
Over at the virtual aisles of Amazon.com, for instance, 23andMe's $499 test for ancestry and health information is in stock now.
Oh, and if you're enrolling at University of California, Berkeley, this fall you could be part of a big genetic experiment. The university will be test incoming freshman for three genes related to metabolism. The results could help them figure out if they're prone to trouble breaking down dairy products or alcohol, for instance.
The Berkeley researchers "may think these are noncontroversial genes, but there's nothing noncontroversial about alcohol on campus," bioethicist George Annas told the New York Times . "What if someone tests negative, and they don't have the marker, so they think that means they can drink more? Like all genetic information, it's potentially harmful."
Or another healthy breakfast-the meal is a no-brainer for power days at school and better health down the road.
Landmark studies link even the simplest morning meal (a bowl of cereal, a splash of milk, a few banana slices) with better attention spans, sharper fact recall, and happier moods for kids. Newer research links morning eating with less obesity, stronger bones, and healthier teeth. Yet kids are dropping out of the healthy breakfasts club at an alarming rate: Although 95 percent of elementary school kids (and 87 percent of teens ) ate breakfasts in 1965, fewer than 86 percent (and fewer than 70 percent of teens) do so today. The reason: rushed mornings, busy families. You can eat a bowl of instant oatmeal and fruit in less than 5 minutes-so set the clock a few minutes earlier and make sure your children eat up at home before school.
Ten minutes of brisk exercise triggers metabolic changes that last at least an hour. The unfair news for panting newbies: The more fit you are, the more benefits you just might be getting.
We all know that exercise and a good diet are important for health, protecting against heart disease and diabetes, among other conditions. But what exactly causes the health improvement from working up a sweat or from eating, say, more olive oil than saturated fat? And are some people biologically predisposed to get more benefit than others?
They're among questions that metabolic profiling, a new field called metabolomics, aims to answer in hopes of one day optimizing those benefits - or finding patterns that may signal risk for disease and new ways to treat it.
"We're only beginning to catalog the metabolic variability between people," says Dr. Robert Gerszten of Massachusetts General Hospital, whose team just took a step toward that goal.
Lloyd Morgan, an old man with a hole in his head, had no business discovering the fatal flaw. After all, this was a $30 million effort to answer the question of whether cellphones can give you brain cancer. (Uncover eight ways to prevent any kind of cancer .) Morgan, 68, is a survivor of brain cancer. Based in Berkeley, California, this retired electronics engineer and self-trained epidemiologist has made it his mission to spread the message that cellphone radiation is carcinogenic. He does this more or less as a wireless communications vigilante, however. The American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the World Health Organization all regard the radio waves emitted from cellphones as safe. But another growing body of experts believes cellphone use can promote tumors, and momentum has been shifting to their side. A researcher in Sweden, for instance, recently reported that people who started using cellphones before the age of 20-including 80 percent of the readers of this magazine-have four to five times the odds of developing one type of brain tumor. An unpublished (and therefore not peer-reviewed) analysis by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute shows an increase in brain tumors among Americans in the under-30 age group.