Why men need some weight at middle age

I am not advocating middle aged spread, but being too thin can be a real health risk for men. A study carried out at the University of Oslo on nearly 1,500 men over a 30-year period, has found that men who were relatively thin when young, or who lost weight as they aged, were at increased risk of osteoporosis, the brittle bone disease, when they were in their 70′s.

It’s often believed that it’s only women who are affected by osteoporosis, but this is just not the case. Because it is hard to identify without a bone scan, the first symptom is often an inexplicable bone break. I met one man who had only been diagnosed after his fourth fracture – as he played rugby it was put down to that, but his bones were breaking under very little pressure.

There are treatments available, usually your doctor will suggest drugs such as Fosamax, but excellent results have been seen in women using natural progesterone cream to rebuild bone. Not enough men have used it to say whether it is as effective for them, but it might be worth a try. Remember, your bones are constantly regenerating throughout your life. Old bone is drawn upon to supply instant demands for calcium (osteoclasts) and is replaced by new bone material (osteoblasts) to keep the skeleton strong. As we age, the process of rebuilding becomes less effective, and there is an overall loss of density, and the bones under examination can look almost lace-like when osteoporosis is well advanced.

If you want to avoid it, and there is a family predilection, then these are the factors that contribute most strongly to your losing bone density and strength – whether you are a man or a woman:

* Drinking too many colas as they are high in phosphorus which draws calcium from the bones.

* Not getting enough exercise – you need it to strengthen your bones.

* Eating too much fat from dairy and meat. Vegans and vegetarians have greater bone mass than meat eaters.

* Drinking too much alcohol as it interferes with calcium absorption.

* Excess coffee drinking as a study of nearly 83,000 patients showed a correlation between bone fractures and heavy coffee consumption.

* Smoking has been proven to increase bone loss.

* Some prescription drugs such as cortisone, blood thinners, antacids containing aluminum, chemotherapy, lithium, and certain antibiotics can increase bone loss.

* A junk food diet high in salt and sugar will leach calcium from the bones into the urine.

If you want to know more about the role of natural progesterone, a book I wrote with Dr Shirley Bond will give you more information. You will find details at the www.catalystonline.co.uk website. Plus, new research just presented to the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research is pointing towards compounds that could induce the body to treat itself for osteoporosis with the parathyroid hormone.

It is in the early stages of development, but it would probably involve a series of injections of a form of parathyroid hormone which triggers bone-building. Currently just using parathyroid drugs is extremely expensive – around £4000 a year – but it is hoped that the molecules reported here could be delivered much more cheaply and be more effective at promoting bone building.

Flame retardant clothing – Bad for children?

I wasn’t sure why this would be the case, but a warning put out on one of my natural news networks has confirmed that there are many hidden chemical dangers in even children’s clothing. I was reading about an 18-month old baby with sky-high levels of chemical flame retardants in her blood – two or three times the amount that’s known to cause major nerve damage in lab rats – and she had absorbed these chemicals through her skin. In the USA and the UK there are regulations in force relating to children’s nightwear and I am not suggesting you disregard them, but I do think it’s important to bear in mind the effect such chemicals have, particularly on infants and small children.

A recent study by the Environmental Working Group in the USA looked at 20 families and found that ALL the childen under school age had a level of chemical fire retardants in their blood that was an average of three times higher than their parents.

The chemicals in question are known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). Unlike the flame retardant antimony, which is generally the kind used to make clothing fire-resistant. Its found in every conceivable household item you can imagine: mattresses, TVs, computers, remote controls, and more.

Like antimony, PBDEs have been known to cause brain damage in animals, but now doctors are concerned that the possible effects on human children could range from hyperactivity to damage to hormone systems and reproductive organs.

Fortunately we are not so insistent on the high levels of fire retardant chemicals in clothing as they are in the USA, but it might be worth considering switching to natural, untreated, cotton garments and maintaining sensible fire precautions in the home – particularly if the child is sensitive to allergens or has a compromised immune system.

A natural face lift

In keeping with helping you avoid the surgeon’s knife, I thought I would remind you that there is an alternative to botox, chemical peels and the trauma of a surgical face lift if you want to go the DIY route to preserve your looks – or even enhance them if you are lucky. Of course it won’t cost you as much – in fact it’s free – but it does require some of your time. This entirely natural facelift will improve circulation, eliminate toxins and reduce stress and tension so you will lookmore relaxed, and the skin will be smoother with more radiance and that helps you look younger.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
You are going to stimulate the acupressure points on the energy meridians of your face by using your fingers to apply firm pressure to each point and the whole thing shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. To eliminate crows’ feet and tone the eye area:

Place your middle fingers on the inside edges of your eyebrows. Apply light pressure going along your eyebrow, round to under the eye, pressing your fingers on the top of your cheekbones. Then continue to the inside corners of your eyes. Repeat in a circular motion around the eyes 30 times.

To soften fine linesand wrinkles around the eyes:

Put your fingers on the outside end of each eyebrow, then trace down until they are parallel with the centre of your eye. Lightly touch these points for three seconds, then release. Repeat 30 times. Now do the same for the points directly under your pupil on the top edge of your cheekbone.

There are also some other points to rejuvenate the rest of your face: For each of these points, again lightly touch them for three seconds and release, repeating 30 times.

* Either side of each nostril, on the face not the nose itself.

* The point between your top lip and nose, and the point between your bottom lip and tip of the chin. Touch both of these at the same time using your index and ring finger.

* Put your finger directly between your eyebrows, then trace up until just before you reach the slight bump in your forehead, about midway to your hairline. Massage this point gently with a circular motion to release tension. It might help to do these actions facing a mirror for the first few times so you can be sure you are pressing in the right place. Ten minutes a day, every day, and you should see results within a few weeks. No before and after photos please, I will be happy to just take your word for it!

Scarless surgery

Surgery is a big deal. It can seem scary, even when it’s essential for our health we can’t help worrying about what is going to happen, and if we are going to have a big ugly scar. Well the good news is that you can avoid the scar, if not the scare, by having what’s being called ‘Natural Orifice Surgery’.

You won’t be cut open, instead there are now at least two dozen Americans who have undergone a new operation designed to hurt less, get you back to work more quickly and leave no visible scars. For one patient, Albert Pagliuca, who needed his gallbladder removed, he nearly balked when told that doctors would pull it out through his mouth. Not unnaturally he was worried it might get stuck in his windpipe and he would choke, but after doctors guaranteed that it would not happen, he agreed – makes a frog in the throat seem quite normal doesn’t it?

This is not entirely new, as three years ago surgeons realised they could enter the body through natural openings with flexible endoscopes, which are routinely used for diagnostic purposes such as colon cancer screening. After experimenting for years on pigs and human cadavers, a team in India announced in 2005 the first successful procedure in humans.

To remove a gallbladder or an appendix through the mouth, surgeons give patients a general anaesthetic and slide an endoscope down the throat and into the stomach. They inflate the abdominal area to make it easier to see and sterilise the stomach. In addition to a camera that transmits images, the endoscope is equipped with a variety of small instruments, including a tiny scalpel that cuts a hole in the stomach wall, allowing the surgeon to snake the endoscope to the organ needing removal. Other instruments enable the surgeon to move the organ, cauterize bleeding blood vessels, suture and clip the internal incisions and pull out the organ.

Surgeons have now performed the procedures on more than 400 patients worldwide, mostly in South America and India. The technique has been used mostly to remove gallbladders through the mouth or the vagina. But a few patients have had appendectomies, and doctors are experimenting with stomach surgery for obesity and other conditions.

Doctors in Europe are also now experimenting with them, and many surgeons are already enthusiastic about the possibilities, but some question the need for the new procedures when safe, only slightly invasive alternatives exist. And they fear that doctors will rush ahead before they have perfected their techniques and made sure that the benefits are worth the risks.

Worryingly, other surgeons agree: “That’s exactly what’s going to happen,” said Ira J. Kodner, a surgery professor and a bioethicist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Those who haven’t been trained are going to go out and do it. They are going to take a weekend course and start offering it. It’s going to happen. I guarantee it.”

The idea of a ‘weekend course’ is frightening enough in itself, and I find myself sympathetic to the views of David Cronin, an associate professor of surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin who said: “Not every idea is a good idea. I’ve been following this one with clenched teeth.”

Laparoscopic surgeries in the early 1990s were also hailed as a great innovation, but caused medical complications so this time round there is a call for making sure that patient safety is paramount and the technique developed in a responsible and careful manner. For the most part, the benefit is there’s no visible hole on the patient’s body but there is a risk that the incision in the stomach wall might leak, you may perforate an organ and cause a patient a really serious complication such as a life-threatening infection. All this just to avoid a cosmetic scar, and you have to ask if it’s worth it.

One patient who had no doubts is Awilda Sanchez of New York, who went home the same day she had her gallbladder removed through her vagina in March. She said: “I think everybody should get this. Now when it’s bikini time, I won’t have to worry about a scar. I think it’s great.” On the other hand, Colleen Caddell, from Oregan was not so thrilled as she described experiencing several days of throat pain so intense and excruciating she could barely swallow, and a week of vomiting, after having her gallbladder removed through her mouth.

One more optimist is Marc Bessler, director of laparoscopic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital who said: “So far it doesn’t seem to be risky, the patients definitely have a cosmetic benefit, recovery seems to be better, and they seem to have less pain. If we can get to recovery-free, pain-free, and scar-free surgery, then that would be a revolution.”

My concern, given the very high value US society places on physical beauty and fast response, is the desire for quick, no-scarring surgery could move too fast for safety. So don’t ask your surgeon for it just yet!

Celery and the brain

Researchers at the University of Illinois report that a plant compound found in abundance in celery and green peppers can disrupt a key component of the inflammatory response in the brain. This could be important news for the research on ageing, and on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.

Inflammation plays a key role in many neurodegenerative diseases and also is implicated in the memory and behaviour problems that can arise as we get older. Inflammation is not always a bad thing; it is a critical part of the body’s immune response that in normal circumstances reduces injury and promotes healing, but when it goes wrong then it can lead to serious physical and mental problems.

The new study looked at luteolin, a plant flavonoid in celery and green peppers which is known to impede the inflammatory response in several types of cells outside the central nervous system. Herbalists have known about the cooling properties of celery for decades and prescribe it for arthritis and hot flushes, but now it seems scientists are also taking it seriously. Add celery and green peppers to your diet and you will whizzing through the crossword in record time. If you don’t like the taste of them – and I know some people who don’t – then if you have a juicer add it to your mix. I juice celery regularly with apples and carrot to boost my immune system and help with arthritis and even celery-haters love the taste of the juice.

Aspartame – The sweet deception

I know I have mentioned aspartame before – probably too often – but I can’t emphasise strongly enough that sweeteners do you no favour, especially if you are trying to lose weight. Your body does not recognise a sweetener as sugar, and so you unconsciously seek it out in other ways. Many experts now believe that Aspartame is one of the most dangerous substances ever added to food, not only because it has been proven to make you fatter, but because of its links to serious health problems such as cancer and neurological diseases.

Why am I mentioning it now? Because many people just don’t think it’s true, or that I am a scaremongering killjoy (only on Halloween and never when it concerns your health!) Can I just point out that Aspartame has brought more complaints to the Food and Drug Agency in the USA than any other additive-ever. It’s responsible for a staggering 75% of the complaints they receive and from 10,000 consumer complaints, the FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.

Now I think death is a pretty serious symptom – so if you are addicted to diet drinks and sweeteners, could you at least cut down and stop me worrying about you?

Criminals watch your diet!

This story is irresistible to a woman who writes so often about the effects of diet on health. What I didn’t realise is that what you eat could also get you banged up! Dr John Bond, a researcher at the University of Leicester and scientific support officer at Northamptonshire Police, is the inventor of a revolutionary forensic fingerprint technique that will help put unhealthy criminals behind bars.

He claims that criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be discovered by police because their fingerprint sweat corrodes metal – just shows you what fast food does to your stomach if just the sweat can eat away an external surface like that! Apparently the police already love consumers of processed foods as they tend to be leave better fingerprints for the police to identify.

It’s down to the fact that sweaty fingerprint marks made more of a corrosive impression on metal if they had a high salt content – and processed food, fish and chips and burgers tend to be high in salt as a preservative. The body needs to excrete excess salt, which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers, and so when you touch a surface it will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods – the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.

Not sure whether I should be encouraging fast food diets in criminals, to aid their capture, or encourage them to switch to the Mediterranean diet!

Diabetes and memory loss solution

Another story that interested me this week, also came from Canada and the Baycrest Center. This time they were reporting on the link between diabetes, high-fat foods and memory loss.

Apparently, adults with type 2 diabetes who eat unhealthy, high-fat, meals can suffer from some reduction in their ability to remember things immediately after eating such a meal. Possibly because they have fallen asleep while digesting such a heavy meal, but there is hope as the temporary memory loss can be offset by taking antioxidant vitamins C and E with the meal.

It is already known that diabetes is linked to the ability to retain information, but now it seems that adults with type 2 diabetes are especially vulnerable to acute memory loss after eating unhealthy foods. The new findings appeared in a recent issue of Nutrition Research, a professional peer-reviewed journal, and suggests that taking high doses of antioxidant vitamins C and E with the meal may help minimize those memory slumps.

Type 2 diabetes is associated with chronic oxidative stress, a major contributor to cognitive decline and Alzheimer disease. If you have an unhealthy diet, then that raises your level of free radicals and those unstable molecules can damage tissue, including brain tissue. These destructive molecule reactions typically occur over a one-to-three hour period after you have eaten but don’t think that popping a supplement pill will do the trick on its own. It’s a place to start, and the study used vitamin C of 100mg and vitamin E of 800 mg taken with the meal, but do check with your doctor as there are contraindications for taking high doses.

Specifically, tell your doctor if you are taking warfarin as you may not be able to take vitamin E without special monitoring during treatment, and also consult your doctor if you are pregnant or breast-feeding a baby.

Ideally you will change your diet to one that is high in antioxidants to chase down those free radicals – look back at the article on the Mediterranean Diet as it is generally accepted to be one of the most health-giving there is.

Using your head after trauma

One of the most worrying concerns for patients who suffered a head trauma is how well they will recover. Now there may be increased hope for them and their families, as a new study shows that our brain can adapt to help improve our ability to cope with mental tasks, we just have to use more of it than before the trauma.

Canada’s Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care is an academic health sciences centre, internationally-renowned for its aging brain research, clinical treatments and cognitive rehabilitation strategies. Their latest research has found that brain injury patients used more of their brains for similar performance on mental tasks compared with healthy participants that they studied as a control.

Traumatic brain injury often results in impaired working memory, particularly executive control, as we have seen in previous reports, and in this study the patients completed a series of tasks that tested how they performed specific tasks. The patients underwent a series of trials in which they were asked to maintain or alphabetize a set of letters. They performed the tasks as well as the healthy control group, but they were using different areas of the brain to access the information and process it. They were, it is true, processing information more slowly, but this seemed to have no significant difference in their overall ability to perform the task in roughly the same time frame as the control group.

It gives hope to those suffering traumatic brain injury that recovery of normal tasks and abilities can be achieved although the authors were cautious in saying that such injury is often associated with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety, and that can influence the rate and extent of recovery.

Blue light for cancer treatment

A blue curing light used to harden dental fillings also may stunt tumour growth, according to researchers at the Medical College of Georgia in the USA. Before you rush off to your dentist to request a quick blast, this research has so far only been tried on mice.

So what are they basing this on? According to a quartet of professors at the College, the light dentists use sends wavelengths of blue-violet light to the composite used in your filling, and it then, which triggers it to set and harden. Or in professor-speak “The light waves produce free radicals that activate the catalyst and speed up polymerization of the composite resin” The important thing is that in oral cancer cells, those radicals cause damage that decreases cell growth and increases cell death.” Or in other words, it can stop the tumour from growing and kill off cancerous cells.

The results so far indicate an approximate 10% increase in cell death in tumours treated with the blue light and almost 80% decrease in cell growth. It also appears that the non-cancerous cells appear unaffected at light doses that kill tumour cells and this could mean using this method alongside conventional cancer therapy so that patients could receive lower doses of chemotherapy – and reduce the unpleasant side effects that such exposure can bring.

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