Check this video out and decide.

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Here is another interesting remedy that I have been reading about a lot in the few last months. I am publishing this article now.

When a good idea comes along, particularly in the health and wellbeing field, people often pick up on its essence rather than its detail.

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—————————————————– ——————- ————- ——– —— —-
Cure For Heart Disease – True Testimonial
Update Nov. 28, 2006

Background: 1995 first of four heart attacks, quadruple bypass, stent Operations, five total operations to date. I declined a pacemaker implant (TEST) in Dec. of 2003.
Continued problem: from 1995 to 2003 numerous heart attacks, operations, feeling almost hopeless. I had tried numerous things that my doctors recommended. I became a strict vegan, no: eggs, chicken, fish, etc. did not smoke, etc. these practices were put into place immediately after my first heart attack and quadruple bypass in fall of 1995 for a period of over five years.

On the edge of death: chest pain, no energy, the feeling of doom, fall of 2005. I did not think I would be alive on Christmas or new year of 2005. my health wasn’t good, but I was in a steep decline at about the end of ’05.

Rediscovery of vitamin c: I searched the Internet for anything that would help me stay alive. I was desperate, too sick to work, no health insurance.

Course change: Pauling protocol. I don’t know if I rediscovered Pauling before or after I discovered the vitamin c foundation web site. I ordered all of Pauling’s books at the local library and read them all. this was about the beginning of 2006, or the end of 2005. many years ago I remember seeing Pauling on TV. and hearing about his work with Vitamin c. I also recall the media in general as labeling him in a very subtle way a “kook”. this probably caused me to not read his work back
in those years. I started taking ten grams of vitamin c every day, spread out five times during the day, about the time i rediscovered Pauling and read his books on vitamin c. I continued to find everything I could about vitamin c. I learned on the vitamin c foundation about other supplements. I also discovered the rich history of vitamin c research. There were many people I read, including Dr. Rath.

I was soon taking as much vitamin c as I could tolerate, 18 grams, plus I added some other supplements. Being a very skeptical person I only started the Pauling protocol with ten grams of c and nothing else.

Currently taking each day, spread out:

vit. C 14 grams (had cut this down once before from 18 to 16)
Lysine 5 grams
Proline 1 gr
Natural E 2000iu
Q10 100 mg
B3 500mg, just recently raised from 250mg
B6 100mg (in the form of a super B complex)
Multi vitamin/mineral
vit. A 24,000iu
Argenine 1 gram
Magnesium 250mg
Vit.K 100mg
L Carnitine 250mg
Taurine 500mg
Omega 3 2000mg, just added this a week ago.
Sea Salt: Himalayan Pink (to season food)

Biggest surprise: I was doing very hard physical work for over two weeks just recently, lots of pain in muscles from head to toe…but NO CHEST, or HEART PAIN!

Recent blood pressure: 122 over 72, a big surprise and I thought it was a mistake. I had just had a big dinner with friends a few hours before. This may have caused the reading to be lower. My “usual” bp is around 135 over 79 and this is continuing to drop, without any bp meds, or any heart meds in almost a year. I would like to see it 120 over 80. my resting pulse is still high at 100. (My records indicate a bp of over 147 over 95 while previously on bp and heart drugs)

Weight: I have been of average height and weight all of my life. I am now fifty two years old. Not until I read Atkins and started eating accordingly did I feel really
good with no hunger between meals or fatigue, like I always used to experience. The major benefit seems to be a drastic reduction in hydrogenated oil, etc. found in bakery and prepared food.

Other body changes: my skin has cleared up and looks great, I had a small amount of acne on my face for most of my life. My joints are less painful and more flexible. I feel much stronger and better than I have in over twenty years!

Diet: two eggs for breakfast almost every day with some meat. I minimize carb’s due to reading and understanding the Atkins books. Most of my carb’s now are in the form of fresh green veg. or fruit. I tried his diet and feel much better. I eat lots of meat, some fresh veggies, and lots of water. I had given up refined sugar many years before my first heart attack, but still had enjoyed sweet carbohydrate deserts.

Bad habits: although I no longer eat cookies and other bakery, I still love pizza and ice cream. I will over do it on carb’s on occasion and feel worse for it. I read labels and try to avoid hydrogenated oil (Check your pizza label) like the poison it is.

Future: health is great and getting better! I feel physically and mentally great! I think I’m going to be ok! I have also found an interest in vitamin B 17 and will look into this.

I would count this website (http://www.vitamincfoundation.org) and the posters on it, Dr. Levy’s new book, other writers (forgive me for not mentioning them all by name (the list is growing rapidly!), (but Owen has provided a very good list on this website)and let us not forget Dr. Linus Pauling who spent the last decades of his life in the study of and publication of information about vitamin c and it’s benefits to mankind.

The Cure for Heart Disease: Theory, History and Treatment

By Owen R. Fonorow, Copyright 2004

OVERVIEW

The theory that Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is related to a deficiency of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) was first proposed by the Canadian physician G. C. Willis in 1953. Willis found that atherosclerotic plaques form over vitamin-C-starved vascular tissues in both guinea pigs and human beings. In 1989, after the discoveries of the Lp(a) cholesterol molecule (circa 1964) and its lysine binding sites (circa 1987), Linus Pauling and his associate Matthias Rath formulated a unified theory of heart disease and invented the cure.Vitamin C and lysine (and proline) in large amounts become Lp(a) binding inhibitors that restore vascular health and destroy atherosclerotic plaques.

THEORY

“Vitamin C is essential for the building of collagen, the most abundant protein built in our bodies and the major component of connective tissue. This connective tissue has structural and supportive functions that are indispensable to heart tissues, to blood vessels, –in fact, to all tissues. Collagen is not only the most abundant protein in our bodies, it also occurs in larger amounts than all other proteins put together. It cannot be built without vitamin C. No heart or blood vessel or another organ could possibly perform its functions without collagen. No heart or blood vessel can be maintained in a healthy condition without vitamin C.” Roger J. Williams

Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, (but it is not really a vitamin). The overwhelming majority of plants and animals make large amounts of ascorbic acid. Mammals synthesize it in the amount averaging 5,400 mg (when adjusted for body weight), and they make even more when under stress.  This is about 10-times the amount of CoQ10 that is synthesized in human beings, and roughly 100-times the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA).

Homo Sapiens, like the guinea pig, fruit bat and the high-order primates, cannot synthesize vitamin C because of a missing enzyme. [*] These species must obtain the vitamin in the diet or die of scurvy. A mere 10 mg of vitamin C prevents acute scurvy in humans resulting in the long-held hypothesis that ascorbic acid is a vitamin, required only in minuscule amounts. Those few species that fail to synthesize ascorbic acid all suffer similar ‘heart disease’, a form of the disease that is not prevalent in other species.

Also, heart disease is a misnomer; the underlying disease process reduces the supply of blood to the heart and other organs leading to angina (“heart cramp”), heart attack, and stroke. The disease is characterized by scab-like build-ups that grow on the walls of blood vessels. The correct terminology for this disease process is chronic scurvy, a slower form of the classic vitamin C deficiency disease.

The hypothesis that CVD is ascorbic acid (vitamin C) deficiency disease was first conceived and tested in the early 1950s [*]. Willis devised a method of photographing plaques with X-rays and observed a strange phenomenon in his heart patients. Willis saw that atherosclerotic plaques were not uniformly distributed throughout the vascular system; rather these “blockages” are concentrated near the heart, where arteries are constantly bent or squeezed.

Another Canadian, Paterson, had found that the tissues of heart patients were generally depleted of ascorbate (vitamin C) [*], and it was well known that vitamin C is required for strong and healthy arteries. Willis reasoned that only the mechanical stress caused by the pulse could explain the typical pattern of atherosclerosis that he so often observed in different patients. To Willis, the body was laying down plaque precisely where it was needed in order to stabilize the vascular system.

By the late 1980s, medical researchers had made several intriguing discoveries. First came the discovery that heart disease begins with a lesion, a crack or stress fracture, in the arterial wall. The question became, and remains, as to the cause of these lesions in human beings since they do not arise in most other animals. Then a variant of the so-called “bad” LDL cholesterol called lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a) for short, was studied and found to be really bad. It is sticky because of receptors on the surface of the molecule called lysine binding sites. Work that led to the 1987 Nobel prize in medicine discovered that lysine (and proline) binding sites cause the formation of atherosclerotic plaques. Then, Beisiegel et. al. in Germany examined plaques post mortem and found only Lp(a), not ordinary LDL cholesterol. [*]

Matthias Rath, a medical student and member of the German team, immediately understood the importance of the Lp(a) cholesterol molecule (there are scores of similar lipoprotein molecules) and made the connection with vitamin C. Lp(a) was the genetic difference between beings that suffer cardiovascular disease and those that do not. Lp(a) had evolved only in species that do not make their own vitamin C – e.g. humans and guinea pigs.

Rath brought Lp(a) to the attention of Linus Pauling and was asked to join Pauling’s Institute of Science and Medicine. There Pauling and Rath repeated the earlier Willis experiments, but this time they monitored Lp(a). They discovered that it becomes elevated in guinea pigs deprived of vitamin C, but not in the controls. These experiments connecting elevated-Lp(a) with low serum vitamin C — and atherosclerosis, provide the experimental support for their unified theory. They realized that in most species, sufficient ascorbic acid will prevent stress fractures, but in those species that suffer chronic scurvy, Lp(a) had evolved to patch cracked blood vessels.

Linus Pauling believed that chronic scurvy can be prevented with a daily intake of between 3,000 to 10,000 mg or more vitamin C. This amount approximates what the animals synthesize, and matching animal production is the reason Pauling ingested 18,000 mg daily.

Pauling’s invention for destroying existing atherosclerotic plaques is a large amount of another essential nutrient, the amino acid lysine. Pauling filmed a video lecture in which he recommended that heart patients take between 2,000 and 6,000 mg of lysine daily with their vitamin C (more if serum Lp(a) is elevated). Neither vitamin C nor lysine has any known lethal dose.

HISTORY

In the early 1950s the Canadian doctor Willis theorized that that plaque build-up are the healing response to a repeated insult – the heartbeat. Willis observed that the build-up of atherosclerotic plaques was uniform, and not found throughout the vascular system. It appeared only in the large arteries near the heart where the blood pressure is greatest and where the artery is constantly stressed. He used high-school physics to compute that plaques form precisely where the mechanical forces were greatest on the arterial wall. Willis reasoned that these plaques only form overstress fractures when the intake of vitamin C is low.

Is heart disease a mechanical problem exacerbated by a vitamin C deficiency? Willis decided to find out. His experiment with guinea pigs is described in his landmark 1957 paper THE REVERSIBILITY OF ATHEROSCLEROSIS 

Guinea pigs are one of the few species which, like humans, do not make vitamin C. The pigs were divided into several groups; all groups were fed an identical diet except for the vitamin C. At first, vitamin C was restricted in all groups. The control group was sacrificed first and every guinea pig group was found to have atherosclerosis. The remaining groups were then given various amounts of vitamin C, having already induced atherosclerosis. Only half of these pigs were found to have atherosclerosis providing strong evidence that vitamin C can reverse existing disease. In the other experiments, groups of guinea pigs that are given almost 10-times the RDA, or roughly 5000 mg of vitamin C, adjusted for body weight, do not exhibit any sign of atherosclerosis.

Willis noted the similarity of the vitamin C deprived pig’s atherosclerotic lesions to the human lesions, and how unlike these lesions are to the “fatty streaks” that can be created in experimental animals fed ultra-high cholesterol diets.

From this experiment we know that a single factor, low vitamin C, can cause the atherosclerosis commonly found in humans.

Willis conducted experiments on his patients. He divided patients into two groups. One group was given 500 mg of vitamin C, three times daily. Remarkable for the 1950s, Willis was able to take pictures and “see” the inside of human arteries for the first time. From these pictures, it was determined that 60% of those taking vitamin C improved, that is, their plaques were reduced. In 30% the plaques remained about the same and in 10% he saw their plaques increase slightly. None of the control’s plaques were reduced. These results were promising, Willis in this technique, was well ahead of his time. However, the scientific and medical communities showed little interest in the Willis experiments.

We now know that 1500 mg of vitamin C is not enough. The Lp(a) molecule and its binding sites were unknown and the amino acid lysine was not employed. Also, there was a theoretical problem: All animals have heart beats, but they rarely suffer the same type of CVD as humans. How could the beating heart only cause the disease process in humans? Willis did not have the answer as to why human hearts and vascular systems were so different from most animals.

THE KEY TO THE PUZZLE – Lp(a)

Forty years after the Willis experiments, and after it was discovered that only one form of cholesterol — Lp(a) creates plaques over the arterial lesions [*] , the American Nobel chemist Linus Pauling, and his associate Matthias Rath, MD, formulated a new theory that unified vitamin C and Lp(a).

In their view, the strange Lp(a) molecule explained everything. Lp(a), the friend who may become a foe, has evolved to replace vitamin C only in the very few species that do not make their own vitamin C. The Lp(a) molecule is important for human health, in the absence of vitamin C, providing many of the same functions that the missing vitamin C would have provided.

Now the Willis “problem” had become a cornerstone of their theory: Lp(a) is an evolutionary adaptation or surrogate for low vitamin C which most animals do not require. Lp(a) provides an alternate way to strengthen and stabilize vitamin-starved arteries in species that cannot make the vitamin.

Inside the wall of every blood vessel lies the collagen girder shaped into a triple helix. Wrapped around the artery, like steel buried in a concrete highway, collagen provides the artery with its strength and stability. Collagen is a living tissue and needs to be replenished periodically. If vitamin C is present, collagen will be strengthened before the artery fractures. When vitamin C is not present, collagen continues to deteriorate and the arterial wall weakens. Surface disruptions will emerge, especially where the pulse is great. Strands of lysine and proline become exposed in these “pot-holes” along our most crowded vascular highways. The floating Lp(a) comes to the rescue; it is attracted to lysyl or prolyl strands in the pothole and binds with it, forming a patch, unless — something happens that makes it unattractive.

NULLIFYING THE LYSINE BINDING SITES – REVERSING HEART DISEASE.

As chronic scurvy progresses, the liver produces more Lp(a) molecules. As the number of Lp(a) molecules increases, they tend to deposit on top of existing plaque formations. When the healing process overshoots, the arteries narrow and the flow of blood is reduced.

This problem has a solution. The Lp(a) molecule has a finite number of lysine binding sites – points of attachment to lysine. Pauling’s invention – the cure for heart disease – is to increase the serum concentration of the amino acid lysine enough to make the Lp(a) unattractive. As more lysine enters the bloodstream, the probability increases that floating Lp(a) molecules will bind with it (rather than with the patches of plaques growing on the arterial walls.)

After all the Lp(a) molecule’s binding receptors are filled with the free lysine floating in the blood, the Lp(a) molecule becomes as harmless as ordinary LDL cholesterol.

Pauling and Rath called the substances that treat chronic scurvy and destroy existing plaques Lp(a) binding inhibitors. Vitamin C, to increase collagen production and to improve the health and strength of arteries, and lysine, to prevent and to dissolve Lp(a) plaques, are the primary binding inhibitors. These substances taken together are clinically effective.

Pauling and Rath have been awarded three U. S. patents for Lp(a) binding inhibitors that destroy atherosclerotic plaques in vitro and in vivo. [*]

The Lp(a) binding inhibitors become the Pauling Therapy for heart disease only at high dosages, between vitamin 3 to 18 g ascorbic acid and 3 to 6 g lysine. In his video, Pauling recounts the first cases where his high vitamin C and lysine therapy quickly resolved advanced cardiovascular disease in humans. The effect is so pronounced, and the inhibitors are so nontoxic, that Pauling doubted a clinical study was even necessary.

More than 10-years of consistent testimony[*] demonstrate that Pauling’s recommended dosages of the Lp(a) binding inhibitors are almost always effective reversing advanced heart disease within 10-days after achieving the recommended dosage. 

Recently, the amino acid proline was found to be an even more effective Lp(a) binding inhibitor than lysine in vitro. Adding between .5 and 2 g proline may be of significant additional benefit.

When serum Lp(a) is elevated, Lp(a) binding inhibitors can profoundly interfere with the disease process. Binding inhibitor formulas that include proline have been documented to lower Lp(a) in six to 14 months [*]. In cases where Lp(a) is not reduced, binding inhibitors become even more important regardless of their effect on serum Lp(a).

THE BASIC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CONTROLLING HEART DISEASE

AUG 2004: UPDATED PROTOCOL HERE
Cardiologists have been kept in the dark about the vitamin C connection. Few cardiovascular drugs benefit heart patients. Several exacerbate heart conditions and should be eliminated in favor of the following orthomolecular protocols:

• Take Vitamin C as ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate up to bowel tolerance (3 to 18 g) daily.
• Take Lysine. 2 to 3 g daily for prevention and from 3 to 6 g daily for the greatest therapeutic benefit.
• NEW: Eliminate man-made/processed fats, such as trans and hydrogenated fats, and supplement Omega-3 rich oils. “Research has shown that an Omega-3 Index of 8 percent to 10 percent reduces a person’s relative risk of death from coronary heart disease by 40 percent, and from sudden cardiac death by 90 percent.” This benefit probably results from restored insulin-mediated glucose/vitamin C uptake into cells. Note: Following an Atkins-style diet will eliminate most trans fats because these “poisons” appear mostly in processed carbohydrate foods such as cookies, crackers, snacks, etc. Butter is vastly supperior to margarine. Natural saturated fats are vastly superior to any fats or oils processed for longer shelf life.
• 
  NEW: Eliminate ordinary sugar and refined carbohydrates. New research confirms Dr. John Ely’s 30-year theory that sugar (glucose) competes with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) for insulin-mediated uptake into cells. Taking sugar can effectively crowd out the Ascorbate. The effect of the Pauling Therapy is reportedly much more pronounced and immediate when sugar is eliminated.
• Take Proline from 250 mg to 2000 mg daily. (This added factor may lower elevated Lp(a) within 6 to 14 months.)
• Follow Paulings general heart and cardiovascular recommendations provided in his book HOW TO LIVE LONGER AND FEEL BETTER
  Linus Pauling’s Basic Vitamin Program

  Vitamin E – 800 to 3200 iu
  Vitamin A – 20,000 to 40,000 iu
  Super B-Complex, esp. Vitamins B6 and B3

• Supplement Coenzyme Q10 (100 – 300 mg) (High vitamin C and several vitamins will help stimulate your own synthesis of CoQ10 which is vital for proper heart function.)
• Supplement the mineral Magnesium (300 to 1500 mg) and avoid Manganese (No more than 2 mg. USDA researchers report that elevated manganese, more than 20 mg daily, competes with magnesium uptake in the heart causing irregular heart beats.)
  

  Manganese alters mitochodrial integrity in the hearts of swine marginally deficient in magnesium … These results suggest that high Mn, when fed in combination with low Mg, disrupts mitochondrial ultrastructure and is associated with the sudden deaths previously reported.

• Supplement the amino acids Taurine, Arginine and Carnitine (1 to 3 g).
• Avoid supplemental calcium.
• Add a good mineral/multivitamin – to cover all possible nutritional needs.

The following link to the Pauling Therapy and Video provides the scientific rationale for the Linus Pauling vitamin C/lysine therapy on a 1 hour video:
http://www.paulingtherapy.com

SUMMARY

The unified theory explains that heart disease, as do many natural healing processes, begins only after a stress fracture appears on the wall of an artery. The Lp(a) molecule is attracted to remnants of a broken collagen strand within the fracture. The most probable cause for lesions forming in a pattern so familiar to Willis is the mechanical stress caused by the beating heart. Dr. Willis theorized that heart disease was ultimately a vitamin C deficiency.

Most animals do not have Lp(a) in their blood, Lp(a) acts as a surrogate for vitamin C, extending life in the few species unable to synthesize ascorbate. Lp(a) binds to “lysyl” residues and in this way forms plaque. The Lp(a) molecule itself was discovered circa 1964 and was unknown to Willis. Lp(a) has a similar molecular weight to LDL cholesterol and most studies grouped it with LDL prior to 1989. Recently a reevaluation of these studies found that Lp(a) and not ordinary LDL is highly predictive of CVD and that elevated Lp(a) increases the risk of heart attack and stroke by 70%.

The on-going lack of scientific curiosity or interest by organized medicine in the Pauling/Rath theory and Pauling’s high-dose therapy may well be recognized as the greatest lapse of the 20th century.

Owen Fonorow, Naturopath, Ph.D.
Vitamin C Foundation
PO Box 3097, Lisle IL 60532
www.VitaminCFoundation.org
630-416-1438

PaulingTherapy.com

REFERENCES AND RECENT SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT FOR THE UNIFIED THEORY

Harvard Nurses Study

The 15-year Harvard study of 85,000 nurses found that a single vitamin C pill reduces the incidence of heart disease by almost 30%. According to the numbers in  A 360 mg vitamin C pill daily would save more than 300,000 lives per year.

British/Enstrom CVD Mortality Findings

In 1992 Dr. James E. Enstrom of the UCLA School of Public Health, published his latest research on how men taking vitamin C, about 300 milligrams or more per day, on average live six years longer than those who receive less than 50 milligrams of vitamin C daily. In late 2003, British researchers confirmed the finding that low vitamin C is related to higher CVD mortality. (They found no relationship between either vitamin E or vitamin A and mortality.)

CVD Mortality Curves

It is not controversial that total mortality from all forms of heart disease peaked between the years 1950 and 1970, and that deaths from coronary heart disease peaked around 1970. It is interesting that in 1970, Nobelist Linus Pauling published his best-selling book Vitamin C and the Common Cold. 

Oxford meta analysis of 27 clinical studies

A meta-analysis of 27 large studies (09/04/2000) at Oxford University found that people with high Lp(a) are 70% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than people with normal or low Lp(a). 

JAMA Jan 23/30 2002 RANDOMIZED, DOUBLE-BLIND CONTROLLED TRIAL IN HUMANS FOUND STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT 60-SECOND TREADMILL EXERCISE IMPROVEMENTS IN 5000 MG VITAMIN C GROUPS

[Chelation Therapy for Ischemic Heart Disease: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Knudtson, et. al. JAMA, Jan 23/30, 2002 – Vol 287, No 4. Pp 481-486]

Vitamin C transforms stem cells into heart muscle

Stem cells, undifferentiated cells that can become other cells, have become the subject of intense scientific research. Patients given their own stem cells have avoided heart transplants, according to recent news stories, and stroke patients have recovered more quickly after being given stem-like cells. See this [ article ] on the Harvard finding that only 1 of 880 substances tested – vitamin C – converted mouse stem cells into heart muscle.

Genetically-engineered Mice

Mice, like most other mammals, produce their own engodenous vitamin C, so experiments with these creatures usually have little to say about chronic scurvy in humans. Scientists recently engineered a strain of mice that are unable to synthesize ascorbate. 

1700+ studies show Lp(a) is a major CVD risk factor

There are few studies of Lp(a) in the MEDLINE medical database prior to 1989, the year Pauling began his lecture tour. Since 1989, the Lp(a) science has exploded. There are now more than 1700 studies and articles that have investigated Lp(a). 

Cholesterol drugs do not lower Lp(a) and some raise it

A little known fact is that the top-selling statin cholesterol drugs actually cause Lp(a) to increase! See this [ article ] for more information on the dangers in the popular statin drugs.

CoQ10 connection

There are several reports of the remission of congestive heart failure in heart patients who have adopted Pauling’s therapy. It is known that CoQ10 is a good treatment for this condition, and it is known that vitamin C is required for the body to synthesize CoQ10. See this [ article ] for more information on the vitamin C and CoQ10 connection.

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The health benefits of one ingredient of cocoa are so striking that it “may rival penicillin and anaesthesia in terms of importance to public health”. Roger Highfield reports

The ingredient – epicatechin – can reduce the risk from diseases such as stroke and heart failure, Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the journal Chemistry & Industry.

Prof Hollenberg has spent years studying the benefits of cocoa drinking on the Kuna people on the San Blas islands off the coast of Panama. They drink up to 40 cups of cocoa a week. Among the Kuna, he found that the risk of stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes was reduced to less than 10 per cent.
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“Epicatechin could potentially get rid of four of the five most common diseases in the western world,” Prof Hollenberg told the journal.

The cocoa that the Kuna drink is homemade and very rich in chemicals called -flavanols, notably epicatechin, which is known to have cardio-vascular benefits.

Flavanols are removed from commercial cocoas because they tend to have a bitter taste.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/03/12/nteens112.xml

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In addition, the enzyme operates best in just the kind of physiological environment found in the human stomach and works 60 times faster than an earlier promising enzyme, which was not effective in acidic conditions and was inactivated by pepsin, both of which are found in the stomach.

“On the basis of our results, there now is a realistic chance that oral supplementation with an enzyme can ensure gluten degradation in the stomach before reaching the small intestine, where it causes problems for people with celiac disease,” according to Frits Koning, researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands, who headed the team that has published a new research paper on its work.

The paper, “Highly efficient gluten degradation with a newly identified prolyl endoprotease: implications for celiac disease,” is in the online American Journal of Physiology- Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, published by The American Physiological Society. Research was by Dariusz Stepniak, Liesbeth Spaenij-Dekking, Cristina Mitea, Martine Moester, Arnoud de Ru, Renee Baak-Pablo, Peter van Veelen and Frits Koning of Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands, and Luppo Edens of DSM Food Specialties, Delft.

Clinical trials are likely next step

The new prolyl endoprotease (PEP) that was studied is derived from Aspergillus niger (AN), a common fungus. Strains of A. niger are used in industrial production of citric and gluconic acid as well as producing several food grade enzymes.

Because there are no animal models of celiac disease, “the in vivo efficacy of AN-PEP for gluten detoxification will ultimately have to be addressed in clinical studies involving celiac patients. AN-PEP appears to be a prime candidate for such clinical trials,” the paper concluded. As for the timing of any such trials, Koning said: “This is an option the team hopes to explore in the future.”

A disease of many paradoxes

Celiac disease affects about 2 million Americans and is also found in Europe, India and parts of the Middle East. It’s caused by an uncontrolled immune response to wheat gluten and similar proteins of rye and barley that cause diarrhea, malnutrition and failure to thrive because it inhibits nutritional uptake.

“It’s a Caucasian disease with a wide spectrum of symptoms; not all patients are equally affected, but we do not understand why this is the case,” Koning said. “It is known to be associated with the HLA-DQ2 gene,” he noted, “but while about 25% of the white population has this gene, only about one in 100 get the disease, so it’s really a quite puzzling disease in many ways.”

Currently the only way to elude the disease symptoms is by avoiding wheat, barley and rye products. “It sounds easy, but gluten especially is widespread in Western diets,” Koning said. Gluten is often used as a food additive because it adds protein content inexpensively and also gives dough its elasticity and stickiness, which helps in manufacturing. For instance, Koning said: “Celiac patients can eat potato chips, but not if they have added paprika or other spices because they’re ‘glued’ to the chip with gluten.”

AN-PEP outstrips earlier enzyme by 60-fold

Earlier attempts at finding non-human proteases for gluten detoxification (first proposed in the late 1950s) focused on prolyl oligopeptidases (POP), most notably FM-POP, which was able to break down gluten sequences in vitro. However FM-POP’s optimal operating pH is between 7 and 8, so it didn’t work well in the more acidic stomach pH that goes down to 2 at one stage. A combination of pH 2 and pepsin “immediately inactivated FM-POP,” the paper said. AN-PEP, on the other hand, is active from pH 2-8, with optimum effect around pH 4. The combination of pH 2 and pepsin didn’t affect AN-PEP activity.

“An effective enzymatic treatment for celiac diseases requires means of destroying all or at least the vast majority of gluten derived T cell stimulatory sequences,” the paper said. The key to this is to break the large gluten molecules (large peptides and intact proteins) into smaller pieces before they leave the stomach. Because food stays in the stomach one to four hours, speed of protein degradation is also important. Mass spectrometry comparisons showed that “degradation of gluten peptides by AN-PEP was on average [about 4 minutes, or] 60 times faster than degradation by FM-POP,” the paper reported.

In addition to its ability to perform as a potential oral enzymatic therapy because it “is capable of degrading intact gluten molecules and T cell stimulatory epitopes from gluten into harmless fragments” AN-PEP has several additional commercial advantages, the paper said: “The enzyme is extremely stable and can be produced at acceptable cost at food grade quality in an industry setting.”

Celiac disease is an HLA-linked disease related to Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis in which autoimmune reactions cause the disease; similarly, immune reactions can lead to organ transplant rejection. Koning said it “isn’t likely that AN-PEP would be of any therapeutic value in any of these HLA-associated diseases” because Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis are real autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attacks parts of the body. In celiac disease, it is the gluten that is the target, not the body.

Reminder warning on early introduction of gluten products

Koning said feeding wheat (or barley or rye) products to infants before they’re 6 months old isn’t recommended because once an immune response develops “immuno-memory builds up and it doesn’t go away.” Indeed, Koning noted that in Sweden some years ago gluten was introduced into baby food, which led to a five-fold increase in celiac disease. The problem disappeared when gluten was removed.

Source and funding/support

The paper, “Highly efficient gluten degradation with a newly identified prolyl endoprotease: implications for celiac disease,” is in the online American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, published by The American Physiological Society. Research was by Dariusz Stepniak, Liesbeth Spaenij-Dekking, Cristina Mitea, Martine Moester, Arnoud de Ru, Renee Baak-Pablo, Peter van Veelen and Frits Koning, Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, and Luppo Edens of DSM Food Specialties, Delft, a subsidiary of Koninklijke DSM N.V., a Dutch chemical conglomerate.

Research supported by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, Celiac Disease Consortium, Centre for Medical Systems Biology (the latter two partly backed by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative). DSM supplied A. niger-derived PEP (AN-PEP) on which it holds a patent.

The American Physiological Society was founded in 1887 to foster basic and applied bioscience. The Bethesda, Maryland-based society has more than 10,500 members and publishes 14 peer-reviewed journals containing almost 4,000 articles annually.

APS provides a wide range of research, educational and career support and programming to further the contributions of physiology to understanding the mechanisms of diseased and healthy states. In 2004, APS received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM).

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Farmers fear a supermarket price war

A farmer has been warned to stop selling raw milk to customers from his shop, following a ruling by a food watchdog.

Deeside farmer Steve Oultram said he was amazed at the decision by the Food Standards Advisory Committee for Wales to halt raw milk sales in Wales.

Mr Oultram, 59, sells the raw milk in glass bottles, clearly labelled, and customers are told what they are buying.

The Ewloe farmer has argued the committee’s ruling is yet another example of “red tape” and does nothing to promote diversity on Welsh farms.

A study in 1998 by scientists at the Public Health Laboratory Service, based in London, found that more than one in five bottles of green top milk were contaminated with bacteria.

But campaigners say raw milk has been consumed for over 1,000 years without ill effect.

The Queen Mother is reportedly a fan of raw milk.

Mr Oultram sells an average of 300 pints of milk through the shop each week, at 30p a pint – 20p more than farmgate prices.

The family has been selling milk privately for nearly 40 years, using a retail licence that once belonged to Mr Oultram’s father.

“This ban is not proposed for England and it is not an European Community regulation,” said Mr Oultram, who runs Newbridge Farm with his wife and two children.

“We depend on this income, as prospects for the milk industry in general are gloomy.”

Two years ago, the UK government dropped moves to ban raw milk sales, following extensive consultations with consumers and the general public.

Mr Oultram said he was surprised the issue was back on the agenda and he hit back by urging health chiefs to focus their attention on real issues of concern, such as smoking and alcohol.

“The public must have freedom to choose,” he said.

“The government is continually encouraging us to diversify our farm businesses,” he said.

“I have a regular stream of customers who buy six to eight pints at a time,” said Mr Oultram. It’s very popular.”

‘Ridiculous’

Mr Oultram has received support from Eifion Huws, a dairy farmer and the Anglesey chairman of the Farmers’ Union of Wales.

“If green top milk is banned in Wales we will be left with the ridiculous situation of people crossing over the border to England to buy their supplies,” he said.

“This matter has been thoroughly investigated only a few years ago.

“It is made perfectly clear to the public that green top milk is raw, untreated milk.

“It would be wrong if the freedom to choose to drink raw milk is taken away from them,” said Mr Huws.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1899228.stm

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John Langlois feels so strongly about the benefits of unpasteurized goat milk that he pays $19 a gallon to have it shipped from a South Carolina dairy to his home in Estillfork, Ala. He credits it with giving him more energy, curing his grandson’s chronic diarrhea when he was an infant and keeping the boy “steady” rather than “bouncing off the walls” now that he’s 5.

Elizabeth Benner of Rochester, N.Y., drives 45 minutes each way to a dairy to get a week’s worth of raw cow’s milk for nine families in the milk club she organized. She says she was “really struggling” on a low-fat, vegan diet but regained her strength when she added whole raw milk and cream to her diet.

Christina Trecaso of Copley, Ohio, is in a herd share program. She and 150 other families pay boarding costs for “their” cows and take their profits in milk, butter and cream. For her, it’s about “buying food that is minimally processed, food that is procured in a 100-mile radius. … It’s about relationships and shaking the hand that feeds you.”

Each of them is a strong believer in the importance of unpasteurized milk. Each of them is also breaking the law. Selling raw milk is illegal in 25 states and the District of Columbia. In New York, dairies providing raw must be state certified. Benner’s is not.

THE RAW MILK DEBATE:

But each believes that the benefits outweigh the expense, inconvenience and illegality. They’ve got lots of company.

Advocates of raw milk are behind legislative efforts in Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky and Nebraska to legalize selling raw milk. Moves to introduce legislation have begun in North Carolina and Maryland.

Raw milk appeals to consumers who seek natural and unprocessed foods, to those with health concerns who believe it has curative powers, and most recently to a new wave of evangelical Christians who follow the teachings of Jordan Rubin’s The Maker’s Diet, a Bible-based diet of unprocessed foods.

But this is a dangerous game, public health officials say.

• In June, more than 58 people in Wisconsin became ill with Campylobacter jejuni from unpasteurized cheese curds.

• In January, five people became ill with campylobacteriosis after drinking raw milk from a dairy in Larimer County, Colo.

• In December 2005, six children in Washington state were infected with a potentially deadly form of E. coli O157:H7 bacteria from drinking unpasteurized milk.

No matter how clean the cows or the barn, all milk contains fecal material, says William Keene, senior epidemiologist in Oregon’s Acute and Communicable Disease Program. “This is what happens when you hose down a cow and then put a vacuum down at the south end of it.”

Sally Fallon disagrees. She is president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which follows the teachings of a Cleveland dentist who wrote on the power of natural foods in the 1930s and ’40s. She believes cows raised on pasture grass, rather than in pens eating corn, are healthy and pathogen-free. A statement on the foundation’s website says pasteurized milk “is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.”

That’s simply not supported by science, says John Sheehan, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Dairy and Egg Safety. Drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health,” he says.

Advocates are employing various strategies in states where they can’t legally buy the milk, including selling it as pet food, selling it frozen because it’s not in “final consumable form,” and selling cow shares, because in most states farmers can drink unpasteurized milk from their own cows.

For those who are convinced that pasteurized milk is unhealthy, there’s little that health workers can do to change their minds, says Michael Lynch, a food-borne-illness expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“But we want to get the word out to people who may not understand,” he says. “If you explained the dangers to them, they would probably not want to drink the raw milk. They’re confusing it with organic, and organic has positive connotations.”

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-08-06-raw-milk-usat_x.htm

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Half of UK children “drink” almost five liters of cooking oil every year as a result of their pack-a-day crisp habit, experts warn.

Nearly a fifth of children eat two packets of crisps per day, says the British Heart Foundation.

Its Food4Thought campaign aims to expose hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods.

Pictures of a girl drinking cooking oil with the caption “What goes into crisps goes into you” will appear nationwide.

But the campaign has been criticized as “scare tactics”, by the food industry body.

And the Snacks, Nuts and Crisps Manufacturers Association claims the BHF “over-estimated” the oil content by basing its calculations on large crisp packets.

A typical 35g bag of crisps contains about two-and-a-half teaspoons of oil.

A larger 50g pack contains three-and-a-half.

Figures from Mintel reveal that we eat a tone of crisps every three minutes in the UK.

This would be enough to fill a telephone box every 43 seconds and an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours.

Another recent survey found nearly three quarters of mothers said they fed their children ready meals or takeaways more than three times a week.

By 2020, it is thought that a quarter of UK children will be overweight.

BHF is calling for a ban on the marketing of junk food products to children, particularly on the TV and the internet.

It also says cooking skills should be a compulsory part of schooling.

BHF medical director Professor Peter Weissberg said: “Daily unhealthy snacking is a worrying habit.

“Rising rates of childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes paint a particularly grim picture for the future.

“The campaign is about challenging our children about what’s lurking in their snacks, takeaways and ready meals.”

Ambassadors

Teaching resources in the shape of over-sized burger boxes will be sent to 2,500 UK schools. Student packs will be delivered to 400,000 children later this year.

More than 200 schoolchildren have volunteered to become BHF Young Ambassadors, who will be lobbying their schools, MPs and local media.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Government is committed to halting the rise of childhood obesity but we cannot do it on our own.

“Ofcom recently consulted on restricting food advertising to children and we await the outcome of that consultation.

“We are working with the food manufacturers and retailers to reduce fat, salt and sugar in their foods and to provide clear labeling.”

Neil Campbell, general manager for Walkers, said: “We wholeheartedly agree that people should avoid products that are high in saturated fat, which is why we invested millions of pounds in developing Sunseed oil, one of the healthiest oils there is.

“We introduced sun seed oil in February this year, resulting in a 70% reduction in the saturated fat content of Walkers Crisps.”

Julian Hunt of the Food and Drink Federation said: “One of the great things about our industry is that we strive to give consumers genuine choice, whether it is a better for you version or a completely reformulated standard product.”

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In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But what was so impressive to me was the fact that not all fat people eat too much.”

One of Atkinson’s most memorable patients was Janet S., a bright, funny 25-year-old who weighed 348 pounds when she finally made her way to U.C.L.A. in 1975. In exchange for agreeing to be hospitalized for three months so scientists could study them, Janet and the other obese research subjects (30 in all) each received a free intestinal bypass. During the three months of presurgical study, the dietitian on the research team calculated how many calories it should take for a 5-foot-6-inch woman like Janet to maintain a weight of 348. They fed her exactly that many calories — no more, no less. She dutifully ate what she was told, and she gained 12 pounds in two weeks — almost a pound a day.

“I don’t think I’d ever gained that much weight that quickly,” recalled Janet, who asked me not to use her full name because she didn’t want people to know how fat she had once been. The doctors accused her of sneaking snacks into the hospital. “But I told them, ‘I’m gaining weight because you’re feeding me a tremendous amount of food!’ ”

The experience with Janet was an early inkling that traditional ideas about obesity were incomplete. Researchers and public-health officials have long understood that to maintain a given weight, energy in (calories consumed) must equal energy out (calories expended). But then they learned that genes were important, too, and that for some people, like Janet, this formula was tilted in a direction that led to weight gain. Since the discovery of the first obesity gene in 1994, scientists have found about 50 genes involved in obesity. Some of them determine how individuals lay down fat and metabolize energy stores. Others regulate how much people want to eat in the first place, how they know when they’ve had enough and how likely they are to use up calories through activities ranging from fidgeting to running marathons. People like Janet, who can get fat on very little fuel, may be genetically programmed to survive in harsher environments. When the human species got its start, it was an advantage to be efficient. Today, when food is plentiful, it is a hazard.

But even as our understanding of genes and behavior has become more refined, some cases still boggle the mind, like identical twins who eat roughly the same and yet have vastly different weights. Now a third wave of obesity researchers are looking for explanations that don’t fall into the relatively easy ones of genetics, overeating or lack of exercise. They are investigating what might seem to be the unlikeliest of culprits: the microorganisms we encounter every day.

One year ago, the idea that microbes might cause obesity gained a foothold when the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana created the nation’s first department of viruses and obesity. It is headed by Nikhil Dhurandhar, a physician who invented the term “infectobesity” to describe the emerging field. Dhurandhar’s particular interest is in the relationship between obesity and a common virus, the adenovirus. Other scientists, led by a group of microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis, are looking at the actions of the trillions of microbes that live in everyone’s gut, to see whether certain intestinal microbes may be making their hosts fat.

If microbes help explain even a small proportion of obesity, that could shed light on a condition that plagues millions of Americans. Today 30.5 percent of the American public is obese; that is, nearly a third of Americans have a body-mass index over 30 (which for someone of Janet’s height is 186 pounds). The Department of Health and Human Services says obesity may account for 300,000 deaths a year, making it the second-most-common preventable cause of death after cigarette smoking. It’s been linked to various diseases: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis and some cancers. “Individuals who are obese,” the department states on its Web site, “have a 50 to 100 percent increased risk of premature death from all causes, compared to individuals with a healthy weight.”

If microbes do turn out to be relevant, at least in some cases of obesity, it could change the way the public thinks about being fat. Along with the continuing research on the genetics of obesity, the study of other biological factors could help mitigate the negative stereotypes of fat people as slothful and gluttonous and somehow less virtuous than thin people. There is, of course, the risk of overemphasizing how potent the biological forces are that make some people prone to gaining weight. Biology sets the context, and that is critical, but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough. The danger in bending too far in the direction of a biological explanation — whether that explanation is genetics, infectobesity or some theory yet to be discovered — is that it could be misinterpreted, by fat and thin alike, as saying that behavior is irrelevant.

Jeffrey Gordon, whose theory is that obesity is related to intestinal microorganisms, has never had a weight problem. He’s a rangy man, and when I met him he was dressed in a plaid shirt and clean chinos stretching over long, long legs. He wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, but he was too tall, 6-foot-2 by the time he was a teenager, and he says that back then, NASA was training only astronauts short enough to squeeze into the little space capsules of the day. Gordon has a big friendly face and curly brown hair that make him look younger than 58. He was a competitive swimmer as a child, from age 9 through his undergraduate years at Oberlin, but these days he seems more nerd than athlete: he continually makes puns, for one thing, and he alludes frequently to “Star Trek.”

“Are you ready to begin our Vulcan mind meld?” he asked when he collected me at my hotel in St. Louis, where I went to meet him and his colleagues at the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, which he directs. In a way, I was indeed hoping for a mind meld; I wanted to find out everything Gordon knows about the bugs in our guts, and how those bugs might contribute to human physiology — in particular, how they might make some people fat.

Of the trillions and trillions of cells in a typical human body — at least 10 times as many cells in a single individual as there are stars in the Milky Way — only about 1 in 10 is human. The other 90 percent are microbial. These microbes — a term that encompasses all forms of microscopic organisms, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and a form of life called archaea — exist everywhere. They are found in the ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus, as well as every inch of skin, especially the armpits, the groin and between the toes. The vast majority are in the gut, which harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion of them. “Microbes colonize our body surfaces from the moment of our birth,” Gordon said. “They are with us throughout our lives, and at the moment of our death they consume us.”

Known collectively as the gut microflora (or microbiota, a term Gordon prefers because it derives from the Greek word bios, for “life”), these microbes have a Star Trek analogue, he says: the Borg Collective, a community of cybernetically enhanced humanoids with functions so intertwined that they operate as a single intelligence, sort of like an ant colony. In its Borglike way, the microflora assumes an extraordinary array of functions on our behalf — functions that we couldn’t manage on our own. It helps create the capillaries that line and nourish the intestines. It produces vitamins, in particular thiamine, pyroxidine and vitamin K. It provides the enzymes necessary to metabolize cholesterol and bile acid. It digests complex plant polysaccharides, the fiber found in grains, fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be indigestible.

And it helps extract calories from the food we eat and helps store those calories in fat cells for later use — which gives them, in effect, a role in determining whether our diets will make us fat or thin.

In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn’s skin. From that moment on, every mother’s kiss, every swaddling blanket, carries on it more microbes, which are introduced into the baby’s system.

By about the age of 2, most of a person’s microbial community is established, and it looks much like any other person’s microbial community. But in the same way that it takes only a small percentage of our genome to make each of us unique, modest differences in our microflora may make a big difference from one person to another. It’s not clear what accounts for individual variations. Some guts may be innately more hospitable to certain microbes, either because of genetics or because of the mix of microbes already there. Most of the colonization probably happens in the first few years, which explains why the microflora fingerprints of adult twins, who shared an intimate environment (and a mother) in childhood, more closely resemble each other than they do those of their spouses, with whom they became intimate later in life.

No one yet knows whether an individual’s microflora community tends to remain stable for a lifetime, but it is known that certain environmental changes, like taking antibiotics, can alter it at least temporarily. Stop the antibiotics, and the microflora seems to bounce back — but it might not bounce back to exactly what it was before the antibiotics.

In 2004, a group of microbiologists at Stanford University led by David Relman conducted the first census of the gut microflora. It took them a year to do an analysis of just three healthy subjects, by which time they had counted 395 species of bacteria. They stopped counting before the census was complete; Relman has said the real count might be anywhere from 500 species to a few thousand.

About a year ago, Relman joined with other scientists, including Jeffrey Gordon, to begin to sequence all the genes of the human gut microflora. In early June, they published their results in Science: some 78 million base pairs in all. But even this huge number barely scratches the surface; the total number of base pairs in the gut microflora might be 100 times that. Because there are so many trillions of microbes in the gut, the vast majority of the genes that a person carries around are more microbial than human. “Humans are superorganisms,” the scientists wrote, “whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of microbial and human attributes.” They call this amalgamation — human genes plus microbial genes — the metagenome.

Gordon first began studying the connection between the microflora and obesity when he saw what happened to mice without any microbes at all. These germ-free mice, reared in sterile isolators in Gordon’s lab, had 60 percent less fat than ordinary mice. Although they ate voraciously, usually about 30 percent more food than the others, they stayed lean. Without gut microbes, they were unable to extract calories from some of the types of food they ate, which passed through their bodies without being either used or converted to fat.

When Gordon’s postdoctoral researcher Fredrik Bäckhed transplanted gut microbes from normal mice into the germ-free mice, the germ-free mice started metabolizing their food better, extracting calories efficiently and laying down fat to store for later use. Within two weeks, they were just as fat as ordinary mice. Bäckhed and Gordon found at least one mechanism that helps explain this observation. As they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, some common gut bacteria, including B. theta, suppress the protein FIAF, which ordinarily prevents the body from storing fat. By suppressing FIAF, B. theta allows fat deposition to increase. A different gut microbe, M. smithii, was later found to interact with B. theta in a way that extracts additional calories from polysaccharides in the diet, further increasing the amount of fat available to be deposited after the mouse eats a meal. Mice whose guts were colonized with both B. theta and M. smithii — as usually happens in humans in the real world — were found to have about 13 percent more body fat than mice colonized by just one or the other.

Gordon likes to explain his hypothesis of what gut microbes do by talking about Cheerios. The cereal box says that a one-cup serving contains 110 calories. But it may be that not everyone will extract 110 calories from a cup of Cheerios. Some may extract more, some less, depending on the particular combination of microbes in their guts. “A diet has a certain amount of absolute energy,” he said. “But the amount that can be extracted from that diet may vary between individuals — not in a huge way, but if the energy balance is affected by just a few calories a day, over time that can make a big difference in body weight.”

In another line of research, Gordon and his postdoctoral researcher Ruth Ley compared the microflora in two kinds of mice: normal-weight mice and mice with a genetic mutation that made them fat. Like humans, the mice had microflora consisting almost exclusively of two divisions of bacteria, the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes. But the proportions differed depending on whether the host was thin or fat. The normal-weight mice had more Bacteroidetes than Firmicutes in their gut microflora. The genetically obese mice had the opposite proportions: 50 percent fewer Bacteroidetes, 50 percent more Firmicutes.

It isn’t clear what the functional significance is of having more Firmicutes in the gut, nor whether the observed difference is a cause of the obesity or an effect. But Gordon wanted to see whether something comparable happened in humans of different weights. Over the past year, he and his colleagues have evaluated stool samples from 12 obese patients at a weight-loss clinic at Washington University, along with some normal-weight controls. They want to see if there’s such a thing as lean-type and obese-type microflora, and whether weight loss leads to a change in a person’s microbial community.

Gordon says he is still far from understanding the relationship between gut microflora and weight gain. “I wish you were writing this article a year from now, even two years from now,” he told me. “We’re just beginning to explore this wilderness, finding out who’s there, how does that population change, which are the key players.” He says it will be a while before anyone figures out what the gut microbes do, how they interact with one another and how, or even whether, they play a role in obesity. And it will be even longer before anyone learns how to change the microflora in a deliberate way.

You might think a microbial theory of obesity could change people’s views about the obese, perhaps even lessen the degree to which people think that obesity is the fat person’s own fault. But anti-fat sentiments seem to be deeply ingrained and resistant to change, as reflected in a rather unlikely place: New Scientist, a British magazine. In an article last year describing the work of Gordon and two groups of researchers in England who were also investigating the link between obesity and gut microflora, the author, Bijal Trivedi, was quite sympathetic to Gordon’s hypothesis. But the article — which is, remember, about a possible biological cause of obesity — was presented with a headline that still managed to depict obese people as lazy and gluttonous. It was called “Slimming for Slackers” and was illustrated with a fat man in a sweatsuit — the “slacker” of the title — sitting beside a partly eaten chocolate doughnut, waiting passively for thinness to arrive.

This is not to single out the New Scientist editors; they are just reflecting the generalized belief that there’s an element of laziness in anyone’s obesity. “Gluttony and sloth are two of the seven deadly sins,” said Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of “The Hungry Gene.” “We ascribe obesity to a character flaw.” This is what leads to the psychic pain of being fat, the social isolation of having a condition that everyone believes to be completely within your control — as if it were a voluntary purgatory, a case of willfully digging your own grave with your dinner fork.

I found that this attitude exists even among obese people, including a woman who was a research subject in Gordon’s clinical study. Joan was one of the obese patients at Washington University who sent Gordon stool samples as she lost weight (15 pounds over the course of a year, which she eventually gained back when she stopped dieting) so they could be tested for various microbes. She said she hasn’t been curious enough to try to find out about her microflora; she’s too busy, and besides, she already knows where to place the blame for her excess weight — not on a microbe but on herself. “I know that I’m not being obedient, I’m not using my body the way God intended,” said Joan, who asked me to refer to her only by her middle name. “I know how I’m supposed to eat, but I’m not having a healthy appetite, you know what I’m saying? I’m not wanting to be obedient.”

But it’s not about obedience — or at least not only about obedience. “The biochemistry of the body of the obese person is very different from that of a lean person,” said Richard Atkinson, Janet S.’s former physician. “If the obese person gets down to a lean person’s weight, their biochemistry is not the same.” Losing weight is hard, keeping it off is harder and, especially for some unfortunate souls, the body seems to work against itself in the struggle.

There’s another way that biological middlemen might be involved in obesity — in this case, not the gut microbes (mostly bacteria) with which we co-exist but the viruses and other pathogens that occasionally infect us and make us ill. This is the subspecialty that is being called infectobesity.

The idea of infectobesity dates to 1988, when Nikhil Dhurandhar was a young physician studying for his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Bombay. He was having tea with his father, also a physician and the head of an obesity clinic, and an old family friend, S. M. Ajinkya, a pathologist at Bombay Veterinary College. Ajinkya was describing a plague that was killing thousands of chickens throughout India, caused by a new poultry virus that he had discovered and named with his own and a colleague’s initials, SMAM-1. On autopsy, the vet said, chickens infected with SMAM-1 revealed pale and enlarged livers and kidneys, an atrophied thymus and excess fat in the abdomen.

The finding of abdominal fat intrigued Dhurandhar. “If a chicken died of infection, having wasted away, it should be less fat, not more,” he remembered thinking at the time. He asked permission to conduct a small experiment at the vet school.

Working with about 20 chickens, Dhurandhar, then 28, infected half of them with SMAM-1. He fed them all the same amount of food, but only the infected chickens became obese. Strangely, despite their excess fat, the infected obese chickens had low levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood — just the opposite of what was thought to happen in humans, whose cholesterol and triglyceride levels generally increase as their weight increases. After his pilot study in 1988, Dhurandhar conducted a larger one with 100 chickens. It confirmed his finding that SMAM-1 caused obesity in chickens.

But what about humans? With a built-in patient population from his clinic, Dhurandhar collected blood samples from 52 overweight patients. Ten of them, nearly 20 percent, showed antibody evidence of prior exposure to the SMAM-1 virus, which was a chicken virus not previously thought to have infected humans. Moreover, the once-infected patients weighed an average of 33 pounds more than those who were never infected and, most surprisingly, had lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels — the same paradoxical finding as in the chickens.

The findings violated three pieces of conventional wisdom, Dhurandhar said recently: “The first is that viruses don’t cause obesity. The second is that obesity leads to high cholesterol and triglycerides. The third is that avian viruses don’t infect humans.”

Dhurandhar, now 46, is a thoughtful man with a head of still-dark hair. Like Gordon, he has never been fat. But even though he is so firmly in the biological camp of obesity researchers, he ascribes his own weight control to behavior, not microbes; he says he is slim because he walks five miles a day, lifts weights and is careful about what he eats. Being overweight runs in his family; Dhurandhar’s father, who still practices medicine in India, began treating obese patients because of his own struggle to keep his weight down, from a onetime high of 220.

Slim as he is, Dhurandhar nonetheless is sensitive to the pain of being fat and the maddening frustration of trying to do anything about it. He takes to heart the anguished letters and e-mail he receives each time his research is publicized. Once, he said, he heard from a woman whose 10-year-old grandson weighed 184 pounds. The boy rode his bicycle until his feet bled, hoping to lose weight; he was so embarrassed by his body that he kept his T-shirt on when he went swimming. The grandmother told Dhurandhar that the virus research sounded like the answer to her prayers. But the scientist knew that even if a virus was to blame for this boy’s obesity, he was a long way from offering any real help.

In 1992, Dhurandhar moved his wife and 7-year-old son to the United States in search of a lab where he could continue his research. At first, because infectobesity was so far out of the mainstream, all he could find was unrelated work at North Dakota State University. “My wife and I gave ourselves two years,” he recalled. “If I didn’t find work in the field of viruses and obesity in two years, we would go back to Bombay.”

Dhurandhar’s battle against the conventional wisdom was reminiscent of the struggle a decade earlier of two Australian scientists, who were also proposing an infectious cause for a chronic disease, in their case, a bacterium that causes ulcers. The Australians were met with skepticism at first, but eventually they accumulated enough evidence to make it hard to ignore the connection between ulcers and the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. It helped that one of them, Barry J. Marshall, dramatically swallowed a pure culture of H. pylori — and promptly came down with symptoms of gastritis, the first stage of an ulcer. (The H. pylori story ended with the ultimate vindication: Marshall and his collaborator, J. Robin Warren, won the Nobel Prize in 2005.)

One month before his self-imposed deadline in 1994, Dhurandhar received a job offer from Richard Atkinson, who was then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Atkinson, always on the lookout for new biological explanations of obesity, wanted to collaborate with Dhurandhar on SMAM-1. But the virus existed only in India, and the U.S. government would not allow it to be imported. So the scientists decided to work with a closely related virus, a human adenovirus. They opened the catalogue of a laboratory-supply company to see which one of the 50 human adenoviruses they should order.

“I’d like to say we chose the virus out of some wisdom, out of some belief that it was similar in important ways to SMAM-1,” Dhurandhar said. But really, he admitted, it was dumb luck that the adenovirus they started with, Ad-36, turned out to be so fattening.

By this time, several pathogens had already been shown to cause obesity in laboratory animals. With Ad-36, Dhurandhar and Atkinson began by squirting the virus up the nostrils of a series of lab animals — chickens, rats, marmosets — and in every species the infected animals got fat.

“The marmosets were most dramatic,” Atkinson recalled. By seven months after infection, he said, 100 percent of them became obese. Subsequently, Atkinson’s group and another in England conducted similar research using other strains of human adenovirus. The British group found that one strain, Ad-5, caused obesity in mice; the Wisconsin group found the same thing with Ad-37 and chickens. Two other strains, Ad-2 and Ad-31, failed to cause obesity.

In 2004, Atkinson and Dhurandhar were ready to move to humans. All of the 50 strains of human adenoviruses cause infections that are usually mild and transient, the kind that people pass off as a cold, a stomach bug or pink eye. The symptoms are so minor that people who have been infected often don’t remember ever having been sick. Even with such an innocuous virus, it would be unethical, of course, for a scientist to infect a human deliberately just to see if the person gets fat. Human studies are, therefore, always retrospective, a hunt for antibodies that would signal the presence of an infectious agent at some point in the past. To carry out this research, Atkinson developed — and patented — a screening test to look for the presence of Ad-36 antibodies in the blood.

The scientists found 502 volunteers from Wisconsin, Florida and New York willing to be screened for antibodies, 360 of them obese and 142 of them of not obese. Of the leaner subjects, 11 percent had antibodies to Ad-36, indicating an infection at some point in the past. (Ad-36 was identified relatively recently, in 1978.) Among the obese subjects, 30 percent had antibodies— a difference large enough to suggest it was not just chance. In addition, subjects who were antibody-positive weighed significantly more than subjects who were uninfected. Those who were antibody-positive also had cholesterol and triglyceride readings that were significantly lower than people who were antibody-negative — just as in the infected chickens — a finding that held true whether or not they were obese.

Were fat people just more prone to infection? Probably not, because the scientists also screened for antibodies to two other strains of adenovirus, and there was no difference between those who were obese and those who were not. Could the differences be explained by genes instead of by viruses? Probably not, because the scientists controlled for genes in a follow-up study that involved 90 pairs of twins. In the twin study, they found 20 identical-twin pairs who were “discordant” for antibodies to Ad-36, meaning one twin had been exposed to the virus and the other twin had not. In the discordant pairs, the infected twin tended to be fatter, with an average of almost 2 percent more body fat (29.6 percent versus 27.5 percent) than the uninfected twin — even though they shared exactly the same genes.

If Ad-36 is a cause of obesity, Atkinson says, you’re more likely to catch it from a newly infected and still-contagious thin person than from someone who has already gained weight because of its effects. Exactly what the virus does to create this kind of long-term perturbation is still being investigated. In a paper published last year in The International Journal of Obesity, Atkinson and Dhurandhar, along with five of their colleagues, presented evidence for how Ad-36 might affect fat cells directly, “leading to an increased fat-cell number and increased fat-cell size.”

As for the other pathogens implicated in infectobesity — nine in all — certain viruses are known to impair the brain’s appetite-control mechanism in the hypothalamus, as happens in some cases of people becoming grossly obese after meningitis. Scientists also point to a commonality between fat cells and immune-system cells, although the exact significance of the connection is unclear. Immature fat cells, for instance, have been shown to behave like macrophages, the immune cells that engulf and destroy invading pathogens. Mature fat cells secrete hormones that stimulate the production of macrophages as well as another kind of immune-system cell, T-lymphocytes.

Another line of investigation in the field of infectobesity concerns inflammation, a corollary of infection. Obese people have higher levels of two proteins related to inflammation, C-reactive protein and interleukin-6. This may suggest that an infectious agent has set off some sort of derangement in the body’s system of fat regulation, making the infected person fat. A different interpretation is not about obesity causation but about its associated risks. Some scientists, including Jeffrey Gordon’s colleagues at Washington University, are trying to see whether the ailments of obesity (especially diabetes and high blood pressure) might be caused not by the added weight per se, but by the associated inflammation.

Infectobesity has its critics, among them Stephen Bloom, a researcher at Imperial College London. Bloom said that if he were working at a research agency, he’d give money for studies into the viral causes of obesity, just in case there’s something there. But he said he wouldn’t put the theory into a medical-school textbook just yet. His main objection, he said, is that “I don’t think we need that explanation, since we have a perfectly good other explanation.” Like Dhurandhar and Atkinson, Bloom suspects that obesity has a biological cause — but rather than turning to gut microflora or adenovirus infection for an explanation, he is partial to what he calls “the lazy-greedy gene” hypothesis, his slightly disparaging shorthand for what is more generally known as the thrifty genotype.

The thrifty-genotype hypothesis holds that there was, once upon a time, an adaptive advantage to being able to get fat. Our ancestors survived unpredictable cycles of food catastrophes by laying down fat stores when food was plentiful, and using up the stores slowly when food was scarce. The ones who did this best were the ones most likely to survive and to pass on the thrifty genotype to the next generation. But this mechanism evolved to get through a difficult winter — and we’re living now in an eternal spring. With food so readily available, thriftiness is a liability, and the ability to slow down metabolism during periods of reduced eating (a k a dieting) tends to create a fatter populace, albeit a more famine-proof one.

Bloom, by the way, does not give much credence to Dhurandhar’s analogy between the Ad-36-obesity connection and the recent history of H. pylori and ulcers — even though each started out looking like just another wacky idea. “There are so many crazy theories,” he said. “But just because one in a hundred turns out to be correct doesn’t mean all the crazy theories are correct.”

Obesity has turned out to be a daunting foe. Many of us are tethered to bodies that sabotage us in our struggle to keep from getting fat, or to slim down when we do. Microbes might be one explanation. There might be others, as outlined in June in a paper in The International Journal of Obesity listing 10 “putative contributors” to obesity, among them sleep deprivation, the increased use of psychoactive prescription drugs and the spread of air-conditioning.

But where does this leave us, exactly? Whatever the reason for any one individual’s tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more. Behavioral interventions are all we’ve got right now. Even the supposedly biological approach to weight loss — that is, diet drugs — still works (or, more often, fails to work) by affecting eating behavior, through chemicals instead of through willpower. If it turns out that microbes are implicated in obesity, this biological approach will become more direct, in the form of an antiviral agent or a microbial supplement. But the truth is, this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

On an individual level and for the foreseeable future, if you want to lose weight, you still have to fiddle with the energy equation. Weight still boils down to the balance between how much a particular body needs to maintain a certain weight and how much it is fed. What complicates things is that in some people, for reasons still not fully understood, what their bodies need is set unfairly low. It could be genes; it could be microbes; it could be something else entirely.

Janet S. is one such person. Thirty years after her obesity surgery, 170 pounds lighter than when she started, she still needs to restrict her food intake to keep from gaining it all back.

“I definitely have to diet — damn it, I should have a pass on that, don’t you think?” said Janet, now 55, a human-resources administrator in Southern California, married and with a teenage daughter who is tall and slender. Even with the surgery, and even maintaining a weight that is borderline obese (at least according to the government definition; Janet weighs 180 pounds, plus or minus 15, meaning her body-mass index hovers around the magic number of 30), she can never enjoy food with complete and carefree abandon.

This is typical of people who have lost weight — not only a lot of weight, as Janet has, but even a little weight. According to Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who was involved in the discovery of the first human gene implicated in obesity, if you take two nonobese people of the same weight, they will require different amounts of food depending on whether or not they were once obese. It goes in precisely the maddening direction you might expect: formerly fat people need to eat less than never-fat people to maintain exactly the same weight. In other words, a 150-pound woman who has always weighed 150 might be able to get away with eating, say, 2,500 calories a day, but a 150-pound woman who once weighed more — 20 pounds more, 200 pounds more, the exact amount doesn’t matter — would have to consume about 15 percent fewer calories to keep from regaining the weight. The change occurs as soon as the person starts reducing, Leibel said, and it “is not proportional to amount of weight lost, and persists over time.”

For many people, then, losing weight and keeping the weight off requires a constant state of hunger — and when you’re hungry, you’re miserable. You think of nothing but food every moment of the day. All morning you think about lunch, all afternoon you think about dinner, and when you’re asleep, you dream of food.

Or, as Judith Moore put it in her memoir, “Fat Girl”: “Some people daydream heroic deeds or sex scenes or tropical vacations. I daydream crab legs dipped in hot butter.” She wrote about fellow warriors who, like her, struggle to keep off the weight they worked so hard to lose. As they approach the all-you-can-eat buffet, she wrote, “they square their shoulders. They ready for combat with Virginia baked ham, sweet-potato soufflé and those puffy dinner rolls with butter and a three-layer chocolate mousse cake. Food is the enemy. Food is also the mother, the father, the warmhearted lover, the house built of redbrick that not even the wolf can blow down.”

Current public-health messages deny this harsh reality. They make losing weight sound easy, just a simple matter of doing the math and applying some willpower. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, government documents say, and if you cut down a week’s worth of food intake or increase exercise by a total of 3,500 calories, then, voilà — you lose a pound. “To lose weight, you must use more energy than you take in,” states the Web site of the Office of the Surgeon General. “A difference of one 12-oz. soda (150 calories) or 30 minutes of brisk walking most days can add or subtract approximately 10 pounds to your weight each year.”

But if genes or viral infection or gut microflora are involved, then for some people 3,500 calories might not equal a pound of fat, and 150 fewer calories a day might not mean they’ll lose 10 pounds in a year. As scientists continue to investigate how obese people are different, we can only hope that a side benefit will be a more largehearted understanding of what it means to be fat and how hard it is to try to become, and to remain, less fat.

A more concrete benefit would be to develop ways to interfere with the action of the offending microbes. Atkinson, for one, foresees a day when Ad-36 antibody screening becomes as routine as cholesterol screening. He has a financial stake in making this happen; when he moved to Virginia two years ago, he started a company called Obetech to market his Ad-36 antibody test, for which he charges $450. But he said he has an altruistic motive as well. The people most likely to benefit from such testing, he said, are not fat people but thin people, whose infections are so recent that they haven’t yet begun to gain weight. But they are the least likely to pay to have it done without it being part of a routine checkup.

Based on animal studies, Atkinson assumes that people infected with Ad-36 have a better than even chance of becoming obese. “But if they watch their diet, and if they exercise, they can avoid it.” Further in the future, he said, there might be a way to administer antiviral drugs to infected individuals early enough to block the effect of Ad-36 on the fat cells.

Gordon, too, is hoping that his research will eventually lead to new strategies for treating obesity. It’s a long way off, he said, but it’s the beacon that keeps him and his colleagues working.

“How can you manipulate the microbial community to more broadly affect energy balance?” he asked, enumerating the research questions still to be tackled. “Can one size fit all, or can you match nutrition to the microbes in your gut?” After obese-type microflora are differentiated from lean-type, Gordon said, the next step would be what he calls “personalized nutrition” — matching diet to the digestive properties of each person’s unique microflora.

Such deliberate manipulation of the gut microflora is a long way off — years and years off, according to Gordon — but its possibility “is what this first phase of our work is underscoring, and we hope it will turn out to be an important tool in the fight against obesity.”

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/magazine/13obesity.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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Read more…. UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — The early reviews are mostly positive at the Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood where the menu changed on Christmas Eve to cut unhealthy trans fats from many junk food favorites.

Twelve-year-old Jack Xu noticed something different about his french fry. “It tastes drier and not too salty,” he said, then added: “I still like it.”

The self-described junk food addict, an exchange student from Beijing who’s visited the park before, was on a field trip this week and enjoying a basket of chicken tenders and fries.

Universal Parks & Resorts, home to movie-inspired thrill rides, is the latest theme park operation to ban artery-clogging trans fats and offer healthier menus at its three domestic attractions in California and Florida. The action follows entertainment giant Walt Disney Co., which announced in October it will serve more nutritious kids’ meals and phase out the artificial fats at its resorts.

Last week, over 90 percent of foods at Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure in Florida and Universal Hollywood were cooked with trans fat-free oils. Others snacks such as the churro, a Spanish fried-dough pastry, will be trans fat-free by the end of next year, said Ric Florell, a senior vice president with Universal Orlando Resort.

Customers also have more healthy side options, too, including salads and fruit bowls.

Florell said the goal is to give customers options and not dictate what to eat.

“If guests come in, they’re not forced to have fruit if their little hearts desire french fries,” he said. But if they insist on fries, those will be trans fat-free.

Trans fats are made when manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oil in a process called hydrogenation. Although they’re cheaper to produce and give food a longer shelf life, trans fats also increase the risk of heart disease by raising the level of bad cholesterol in the blood.

The average American eats almost 5 pounds of trans fats a year.

At Universal Studios Hollywood, Xu’s teacher Michael Fang welcomed the healthier alternatives. Since his students want to hit as many heart-thumping rides as possible, Fang usually buys them fast food because it’s cheap and convenient.

Now the food is healthier, and Fang says the taste is just as good.

“I can’t even tell the difference,” he said, munching on a fried chicken leg.

The healthy options are also important to Todd Medwed, whose family often visits to ride the rollercoasters and tour the backlot studio.

“It’s better for everybody. It’s healthier,” he said as he watched his 6-year-old son Blake eat a salad.

Food scientists at Universal experimented for months to find trans fat alternatives, holding blind taste tests with customers and using their feedback to create menus with more variety, including fruit juices and skim milk.

Earlier this month, New York City became the first U.S. city to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant foods. Nationwide, trans fats must be listed on packaged foods.

Since Disney’s venture into healthier eating at its global theme parks, it has received positive feedback from parents, with more than half choosing fruits and low-fat milk over french fries and soda, said Mary Niven, a vice president with the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim.

The ESPN Zone restaurant there and the ABC Commissary at Walt Disney World Resort currently fry chicken, fish and french fries without trans fats and the ingredient will be cut from all eateries by next year.

As for Universal, it will monitor the progress of its trans fat ban in the United States before deciding whether to expand it to overseas theme parks. Universal’s Florell declined to say how much the switch in oils would cost the company, but said it would be “a little more expensive.”

Besides Disney and Universal, SeaWorld Orlando also pledged earlier this year to limit fats and calories in some meals and created a whole food restaurant where food is prepared without trans fats and preservatives.

Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/health/4429594.html

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The US gave the go-ahead yesterday for milk and meat from cloned animals to be sold to consumers in a move likely to be seized upon by manufacturers who want to sell cloned meat in Britain and the European Union.

The Food and Drug Agency, a government department in charge of food safety, issued a draft ruling allowing the sale of cloned cattle, pigs and goats to go on sale with no obligation to state the origin of the meat on labels. The ruling, which decided that meat from cloned animals and their offspring was “as safe to eat” as that from naturally-raised animals, came after a five-year review.

Sheep were not included in the list as the agency did not have the evidence to prove that it was currently safe to eat, an official said.

The decision was heavily criticised by American consumer groups in the US, including the Consumer Federation of America, which said the FDA had not investigated the safety, ethical and religious issues surrounding biotechnology – the science behind cloning – to a sufficient extent.

The decision will help manufacturers lobbying to distribute cloned meat in the UK. Despite the ruling, it was reported that importers of American products containing cloned animal produce would still have to gain the approval of both the UK government’s Food Standards Agency and the European Union.

But the agency said yesterday that it had not yet received any applications from any of the companies wishing to distribute cloned meat in the UK.

Although there are currently several hundred cloned cattle in America, the cost and complexity of cloning – planting an egg from a donor animal into the uterus of another animal – means it is likely to be years before the manufacture of cloned meat products becomes widespread.

The agency will issue its final decision next year following a public consultation on labelling, but said that it did not have the authority to force manufacturers to make clear that the product was cloned if the food was indistinguishable from naturally-reared produce.

Some companies are already planning ways in which to optimise their opposition to using modified foods. A spokesman for Ben & Jerry’s said it planned to make clear that its products would not include produce from cloned animals.
Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2110367.ece

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Pooled data from six case-control studies suggest that higher consumption of tap water-based drinks may slightly increase the risk of bladder cancer among men.

The increased risk of bladder cancer with tap water consumption was “consistently found in all six studies, making chance an unlikely explanation,” write investigators in the International Journal of Cancer.

They caution, however, that for now, the study finding that tap water “is associated with a slight increased risk of bladder cancer” does not readily translate into public health recommendations.

The results are based on 2,749 bladder cancer cases and 5,150 cancer-free controls. Most of the subjects resided in the US, Canada or Finland, with data from subjects in France and Italy also included.

The investigators observed that the risk of bladder cancer was 50 percent higher in men who drank more than 2.0 liters of tap water per day compared with those who drank 0.5 liters or less of tap water per day. Results among women were less consistent.

Coffee made up, on average, about one third of the tap water intake and heavy coffee consumption, defined as more than 5 cups per day, increased bladder cancer risk, especially among men who smoked.
However, consumption of tap water excluding coffee was also associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer.

Drinking fluids other than tap water was not associated with bladder cancer risk, reports the study team led by Dr. Christina M. Villanueva from Institut Municipal d’Investigacio Medica in Barcelona, Spain.
The association between bladder cancer and tap water consumption, but not with non-tap water fluids, suggest to investigators that the increased risk may be related to the cancer-causing contaminants in tap water, such as disinfection by-products.

Disinfection by-products are chemicals generated through reactions of disinfectants (such as chlorine) with organic matter naturally occurring in water. Trihalomethanes are usually the most prevalent by-products of chlorination.

However, in the current study, the increased risk of bladder cancer among those who drink large amounts of tap water was independent of trihalomethane exposure.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, April 15, 2006.

Source:Yahoo

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Richard DeWilde has a long history with organic farming. His grandfather, Nick Hoogshagen, adopted the organic approach five decades ago on his farm in South Dakota, well before it became popular with consumers and fueled the popularity of retailers like Whole Foods Market (WFMI ).

Now, DeWilde, 57, is a working farmer himself, carrying on the family tradition of avoiding pesticides and other chemicals that can contaminate food in favor of a more natural approach. He’s co-owner of Harmony Valley Farm, which grows Swiss chard, parsnips, turnips, and kale on 100 acres in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin.

So you might think that DeWilde would be overjoyed at the news that Wal-Mart (WMT) has finally come around to his grandfather’s philosophy. The juggernaut retailer said recently that it plans to double its offerings of organic products, including produce, dairy, and dry goods.

But DeWilde isn’t thrilled. Instead, he’s dismayed at the prospect of Wal-Mart becoming a player in the organic market. He fears that the company will use its market strength to drive down prices and hurt U.S. farmers. “Wal-Mart has the reputation of beating up on its suppliers,” says DeWilde. “I certainly don’t see ‘selling at a lower price’ as an opportunity.”

CHINESE FOOD. He’s hardly the only one. Many farmers who have benefited from the strong demand and healthy margins for organic goods are fretting that the market’s newfound success also brings with it newfound risks. As large companies enter the market, from Kraft (KFT ) and Dean Foods (DF ) to Wal-Mart, farmers worry that the corporatization of organic foods could have negative consequences.

Large corporations have taken sizeable steps into the organic market, even if it isn’t always obvious from the brands on store shelves. Silk, the best-selling branded soy milk, is a product from Dean Foods, the $10 billion behemoth that sells the most milk in the country. Cascadian Farms, which makes organic cereal, frozen fruits, and other products, is a brand of cereal giant General Mills (GIS ). And Kraft owns Boca Burgers.

The farmers’ concerns go beyond simply pushing down prices. DeWilde and others fear that companies like Wal-Mart could try to lower the standards for what is classified as organic food and begin to import more supplies from China and other overseas markets. “Wal-Mart already sources a majority of its products from China, because it’s so cheap to produce anything there. Why not foods?” asks Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Assn., a nonprofit organization that promotes natural and organic food.

SHIFTING STANDARDS. The worries that the corporatization of organics could lead to more imports aren’t unfounded. Cummins estimates that already 10% of organic foods like meat and citrus are imported into the U.S. Silk soy milk, for instance, is made from organic soybeans that are bought in China and Brazil, where prices tend to be substantially lower than in the U. S. Cascadian Farms buys its organic fruits and vegetables from China and Mexico, among other countries (see BW Online, 3/27/06, “Imports From China Aren’t Pricier — Yet”).

And large companies have tried to use their muscle in Washington to their advantage. Last fall, the Organic Trade Assn., which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a rider to the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would weaken the nation’s organic food standards by allowing certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing, and packaging of organic foods. That sparked outrage from organic activists. Nevertheless, the bill passed into law in November, and the new standards will go into effect later this year.

Organic farmers are straining to meet rising demand, one of the reasons that legislators have been willing to drop certain requirements for organic foods. In the past year, the demand for organic milk outstripped the supply by 10% and created acute shortages. That even prompted organic dairy company Stonyfield Farms to stop producing its fat-free 32-ounce cups of yogurt. Now Stonyfield has resumed its production, but organic milk consumption nationwide is growing 30% annually.

Wal-Mart is making its aggressive move into organics at the same time it’s trying to improve its environmental image. Last year, it embarked on a new green policy and has several initiatives to demonstrate how serious it is. The company recently said that it will require that all its wild-caught fresh and frozen fish meet the Marine Stewardship Council’s standard for sustainable and well-managed fisheries. Fish accounts for a third of all the chain’s seafood sales.

AFFORDABLE ORGANICS. While Wal-Mart didn’t return phone calls seeking comment, CEO Lee Scott has been clear about his company’s goals. “We know that customers at all ends of the income spectrum want organic and natural foods,” he said at the company’s last annual general meeting.

“But, frankly, most of them just can’t afford the high prices the specialty stores charge.Well, we don’t think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods” (see BW Online, 11/29/05, “Selling Luxury to the Masses”).

CEO Scott recently bragged about stocking organic cotton yoga outfits at its Sam’s Club division. “We sold out in just 10 weeks…by using organic cotton instead of regular cotton, we saved the equivalent of two jumbo jets of pesticides,” says Scott.

Scott is also determined to get affluent customers to spend more when they come in to buy basics like detergent at Wal-Mart. And what better way to lure them than with a range of organic produce. After all, organic foods purveyor Whole Foods typically attracts shoppers who have incomes over $50,000, while Wal-Mart’s customers typically earn around $35,000 (see BW, 10/24/05, “Eating Too Fast at Whole Foods”).

“CREATING MARKETS.” While some farmers are concerned that Wal-Mart may try to squeeze them financially, there could be a more benign impact. Farmers who now use pesticides and other chemicals could turn to organic farming, as they see increased demand. Consider what’s happening in California.

Last year, the state showed an increase of 40,000 acres, or 27%, in organic livestock production. The number of acres dedicated to organic vegetable production increased by 5,000 acres, or 12%, according to the California Certified Organic Farmers, an organics trade association. “Strong demand is creating markets here,” says Jake Lewin, director of marketing at the organization.

Meanwhile, back in Wisconsin, DeWilde is preparing for warmer weather and the spring planting season. He is worried about how the increasing attention from Wal-Mart and other large companies may change the business of organic foods. Yet he’s more convinced than ever of the benefits of the approach his grandfather helped champion. “It’s the future of farming,” he says.

Source: businessweek.com

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Young boys who drink fluoridated tap water are at greater risk for a rare bone cancer, Harvard researchers reported yesterday.

The study, published online yesterday in a Harvard-affiliated journal, could intensify debate over fluoridation and mean more scrutiny for Harvard’s Dr. Chester Douglass, accused of fudging the findings to downplay a cancer link.

“It’s the best piece of work ever linking fluoride in tap water and bone cancer. It’s pretty damning for (Douglass),” said Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group, which filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health against Douglass.

Douglass, an epidemiology professor at Harvard’s School of Dental Medicine, is paid as editor of the Colgate Oral Care Report, a newsletter supported by the toothpaste maker.

Harvard and the NIH are investigating whether Douglass misrepresented research findings last year when he said there was no link, despite extensive research to the contrary by one of his doctoral students. The NIH gave Douglass at least $1 million for the research.

That student, Dr. Elise Bassin, wrote in yesterday’s Cancer Causes and Control that boys who drink water with levels of fluoride considered safe by federal guidelines are five times more likely to develop osteosarcoma than boys who drink unfluoridated water. About 250 U.S. boys each year are diagnosed with osteosarcoma, the most common type of bone cancer and the sixth most common cancer in children. Bassin notes that more research is needed to “confirm or refute this observation.”

Douglass, in a letter to the editor published in the same issue, said Bassin’s study was a “partial view of this ongoing study,” and urged readers to be “especially cautious” when interpreting the findings.

Source: Boston Herald (article was deleted from original site)

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WASHINGTON – Cancer-causing benzene has been found in soft drinks at levels above the limit considered safe for drinking water, the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged Wednesday.

Even so, the FDA still believes there are no safety concerns about benzene in soft drinks, or sodas, said Laura Tarantino, the agency’s director of food additive safety. “We haven’t changed our view that right now, there is not a safety concern, not a public health concern,” she said. “But what we need to do is understand how benzene forms and to ensure the industry is doing everything to avoid those circumstances.”

The admission contradicted statements last week, when officials said FDA found insignificant levels of benzene. In fact, a different study found benzene at four times the tap water limit, on average, in 19 of 24 samples of diet soda. Tarantino said chemists may have overestimated the amount of benzene and that levels in diet soda were still relatively low compared with other sources of benzene exposure.

The samples were collected as part of the FDA’s ongoing Total Diet Study, which looks for contaminants and nutrients in many foods and beverages. FDA has been doing a separate study of benzene in soft drinks, but it is not ready to release the results, Tarantino said. The Environmental Working Group has accused the FDA of suppressing information about benzene in soft drinks. “If they’re so confident the situation is not a safety risk, they need to release the data to prove it,” said Richard Wiles, the group’s senior vice president. “The only data available to the public contradict their claim.”

Benzene, a cancer-causing chemical linked to leukemia, can form naturally and is found in forest fires, gasoline and cigarette smoke. It’s widely used in industrial production to make plastics, rubber, detergents, drugs and pesticides. Benzene can also form in soft drinks made with Vitamin C and sodium or potassium benzoate.

Heat, light and shelf life can affect whether benzene will form, according to FDA. A spokesman for the American Beverage Association said the amount of soft drinks people consume is far less than the amount of tap water they are exposed to. “You can crunch the numbers any way you want; it’s still adding up to safe products,” said the spokesman, Kevin Keane. “We’re going to continue to work with FDA to ensure the safety of our products.”

Source: Yahoo

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WEDNESDAY, April 5 (HealthDay News) — Ordinary ginger causes ovarian cancer cells to die, highlighting the spice’s potential in fighting the killer disease, a new study found.

Not only did ginger trigger ovarian cancer cell death, it did so in a way that may prevent tumor cells from becoming resistant to treatment, a common problem with chemotherapy.
The preliminary findings from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center were presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C.

The Michigan team dissolved ginger powder in a solution and applied it to ovarian cancer cells in a laboratory. Ginger caused two kinds of cancer cell death. The first is called apoptosis, in which the cells essentially commit suicide. The second type of cell death is autophagy, in which cells digest or attack themselves.

“Most ovarian cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes resistant to standard chemotherapy — which is associated with resistance to apoptosis. If ginger can cause autophagic cell death in addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent resistance to conventional chemotherapy,” study author Dr. J. Rebecca Liu, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, explained in a prepared statement.

The researchers’ next step is to determine if ginger can achieve similar results in animals.

It’s already known that ginger helps control inflammation, which contributes to the development of ovarian cancer cells. By halting inflammation, ginger may stop cancer cells from growing, the researchers suggested.

Source: Yahoo News

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The participants were already on a heart-healthy diet. They were then prescribed a diet that included more specific foods, such as raw almonds, tofu and other soy foods, viscous fibers such as oatmeal, barley, okra and eggplant, and plant sterol-enriched margarine.

After a year, the group who stuck faithfully to the new eating plan lowered their cholesterol by an average of 29 percent. Jenkins said the rate was comparable to results from participants who had taken a statin drug for one month before starting the diet, as well as general studies of patients on such drugs.
The group of participants who did not follow the diet as strictly still lowered their cholesterol by 10 percent to 20 percent. “That’s still pretty good, and the point is, the more closely you follow the diet, the better you do,” said Kendall.

Cholesterol for those who didn’t stick to the new diet remained about the same.

The soy, nut and fiber diet is promoted by the Almond Board of California, which helped fund the study along with Unilever. Unilever makes Take Control margarine, a cholesterol-lowering spread that’s available in the United States, Europe and Australia, but not Canada.

The diet includes low-fat dairy products, smaller portions of lean meats and skinless poultry and substituting soy products for animal foods when possible. The more dieters combine foods rich in viscous fiber — oat bran, barley, okra and eggplant — as well as raw almonds, peanuts and walnuts, the more their cholesterol dropped, according to the study.

Dr. Alice H. Lichtenstein, a professor of public health and nutrition at Tufts University in Boston, said the study was scientifically solid, but the diet is so strict she believes most North Americans would find it hard to follow in the real world.

“It’s a great diet and they started with a very motivated group of individuals who were used to consuming a low-fat or vegetarian diet,” Lichtenstein said in a telephone interview. “But I think that for the general population, we have to be realistic — and it’s unlikely that they’re going to be able to adhere to something like this.”

That mind-set is what Jenkins hopes to change.
The real world is “a relatively hostile place” when it comes to healthy eating, he said. “We’re asking people to buck the trend.”

Source:

http://www.ctv.ca/

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Vegetables such as broccoli and spices like red chili pepper could be used to combat cancer, researchers have said. Scientists believe the foods may have a cancer-fighting benefit by slowing or preventing the growth of cancerous tumour cells.
Two studies, conducted at the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine in the US, looked at the effects of chili pepper and vegetables like broccoli and cabbage on cancer cells.

The first study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, looked at the potential of capsaicin – the hot ingredient in red chilli pepper – to fight pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer, which is diagnosed in around 7,000 people a year in the UK, is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer with a low survival rate.
The researchers treated human pancreatic cells with capsaicin in the lab.
They found that it affected the activity in the cells which induced programmed cell death – apoptosis – in the cancerous cells without affecting normal pancreatic cells.

Lead researcher Dr Sanjay Srivastava said: “Our results demonstrate that capsaicin is a potent anti-cancer agent, induces apoptosis in cancer cells and produces no significant damage to normal pancreatic cells, indicating its potential use as a novel chemotherapeutic agent for pancreatic cancer.”

A second study looked at benefits of phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) – a constituent of cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage – in ovarian cancer.

The scientists said this exposure led to significant inhibition of the protein expression of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which plays a crucial role in the growth of ovarian cancer cells.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

The post Spicy Food Against Cancer appeared first on Alternative Complementary Medicine.

When you don’t feel well, stop eating and go to juices

SCHULZE: The first thing an animal does when it is sick is to stop eating. They fast themselves. Likewise, the first thing we need to do when we don’t feel well is: stop food. There are a lot of reasons for that. Food takes a tremendous amount of energy to digest–and that’s blood and energy. Our digestive system, basically the muscles and the tissues, fill with blood. When you stop eating, your digestive system rests, and all that blood and energy can be put somewhere else to heal you.

People have said to me, “What do I do for this particular disease?” Juice fasting. “What do I do for degeneration?” Juice fasting. “What do I do for heart disease?” Juice fasting.

Juice fasting is for the incurables. Juice fasting is the answer because it allows your body to rest – and it lets your body choose what it wants to heal.

If you just keep cramming food down your mouth, you’ll just get more tired. Your body has to digest large amounts of food, and it’s the opposite of what you should do when you’re not well.
“One of my first patients had lost a tremendous amount of blood from surgery–and doctors wanted to do a transfusion. In 24 hours on juices, I brought her blood levels back up.”

BISER: What does juice fasting do?

SCHULZE: Food has nutrition in it, but it takes a lot to break those nutrients down.

Juices are like a blood transfusion

A glass of fruit and vegetable juice takes very little digestion, if any. It goes right into your body. We look at juices in the same way a doctor would look at an I.V It’s something that can go right into your bloodstream.

One of my first learning experiences was a woman patient who was undergoing a surgery, a female surgery. The doctors nicked an artery, and she had tremendous hemorrhaging and bleeding. By the time they got her patched up, she was in intensive care, and had lost a tremendous amount of blood.

The doctors wanted to do a transfusion. She was scared to do a transfusion and the doctor said, “You’re very anemic and your hemoglobin count is at the lowest end for a woman.”

She said, “Is there anything you can do?”

And I said, “Sure,” and I got the juicer out and juiced some juices. I made some carrot juice and some beet juice. I took it to the hospital and said, “Just let the doctors give you 24 hours.”

They did, and, in 24 hours on juices, they said that her hemoglobin count was over the top end of the scale for a man, not even a woman, and men’s hemoglobin counts are higher.

This was my first realization of the power of what juices can do to build the blood up.

BISER: Wait a minute, you gave her juices. How did she get juices when she went into the hospital for 24 hours?

SCHULZE: Oh, I went to the hospital too. I juiced the juices, put them in quart canning jars. Fresh beet juice, fresh beet greens, fresh carrot juice. I took it right to her hospital room and she drank it.

That’s all she had for 24 hours and not only did her blood hemoglobin go up, but it went over the top of the scale for a man. The doctors said they were shocked, they had never seen anything like that.

Man cures his colon cancer by juice fasting. The cancer came out in the toilet.

SCHULZE: I had a man who had a colon cancer and he basically refused to do anything, but he said he would stop eating and go on juices. This was early on in my practice, too. These were learning experiences.

He started on a multitude of fruit and vegetable juices and, I remember it was about a month later into his long juice fast, he pooped his cancer right out. It was 18″ long.

It looked like a rope with figs attached to it. I had seen things like that before in pictures and books – but that was the first time I ever saw one come out.

BISER: A rope?

SCHULZE: Yeah, it was like a rope with sacs on it, they were about the size of figs. And, he actually eliminated his cancer just through juice fasting. He wasn’t using any herbs or doing anything else, something I wouldn’t recommend.

Juice fasting, through my experience and his, is more powerful than just water fasting. Juices not only fill you with nutrition – but they empty you out.

If you have any doubt about that, go home and drink a quart of prune juice and you tell me what happens.

Juices are flushing and cleansing to organs of the body.

Juices are enzyme therapy

SCHULZE: Juices contain gigantic amounts of enzymes. And a lot of people nowadays are taking enzymes because of the benefits, but you don’t have to, they’re in the juices.

Enzymes are heat sensitive, meaning that when you cook food, you destroy all the enzymes. Now, when you eat that food or juice, it’s okay. Your body will produce enzymes in order for you to digest that food. But when your body does that – it can’t do something else. It only has a limited amount of energy.

So, one of the things that juices do, because they are loaded with enzymes, is they give your body a vacation.

Most of us live enzyme-free diets. If all we eat is cooked food, there are no enzymes in it. By supplying your body with high doses of enzymes, it gives many of your organs like your pancreas, your liver, your digestive system a holiday, because they don’t have to try to manufacture chemicals that are coming in through your juices.

BISER: So it’s an enzyme holiday!

Thinning the blood is one the most important things you can do when you are sick, and juices do that

SCHULZE: Yes, an enzyme holiday. And it also thins your blood. This is a major key.

Most of us who are ill are trying to do something to get blood to the area that is sick.

But our body is trying to pump around mud – and it can’t get there. Thinning our blood is one the greatest keys to getting healthy. It increases our circulation because the blood becomes more like water than molasses. The bottom line is, juice fasting thins your blood. That allows your circulation to get deeper in your body into the vital areas, into the capillaries that were filled with fat and all clogged-up.

Juice-fasting allows your body to balance its hormones and replace chemicals it is deficient in.

SCHULZE: Many people are sick because they don’t produce enough insulin in their body. Or, they don’t produce enough thyrox in their thyroid. Or, they don’t produce enough interferon or immunoglobulin for the immune system to be strong. They don’t produce enough estrogen or progesterone or testosterone.

Those chemicals are all built from nutrition. One of the things that juice fasting does is, it supplies your body with a tremendous amount of nutrition. So it balances your metabolism, balances your hormones, balances your endocrine system, your thyroid, your pancreas, and your reproductive organs.

And it does one other important thing: It allows you to get more work done. Juice fasting clears the mind.

BISER: How can you get more work done when you’re hungry? Because you’re not eating solid foods?

SCHULZE: Let me tell you, it’s just the opposite of what you think. If you want a gigantic change, stop eating for a couple days. It will feel like the fog is cleared.

You will be amazed at your sense of smell, your sense of taste, your eyesight, your perception, your thoughts.

All through history, from the Greek and Roman writings, to the Egyptians, from Jesus to Shakespeare, people talked about fasting for better mental clarity.

One thing I can guarantee you is that if you have a confusing problem, or a stressful issue that you don’t know the answer to, stop eating. It enhances mental clarity.

We are drunk on food. Overeating makes you dull. Your blood, instead of going to your brain, is going to your digestive tract.

You read it in the Bible, Jesus going to the woods for his fasting. Everybody, throughout history, would go out of the city and go onto juices and water, and fast. Fasting clears the mind, and so it is a physical and emotional cleanse, and maybe even a spiritual cleanse when you stop your food from coming in.

No-one realizes how powerful juice-fasting is— until they do it. Then they will never live without it. Everybody should do this periodically. I guarantee everybody who is reading this, if they just do a fast, for a couple of days, they will be amazed.”

BISER: When you worked in Hollywood, you had all those people in the movie industry, did you give them the same advice?

SCHULZE: Yes, in fact many people came to me and they were worried about the first week, or a difficult part of the movie that they were having a problem with, or that they were worried about, “Can I do this?”, or, “Is it going to go okay?”, and I would suggest the five-day program.
The five day program is 2 days of light eating of fruits and salads only, with 2 days of juice fasting in the middle, and one day of fruits and salads at the end.

They would say to me, “Oh, God, I can’t do that, that would even be more stress.”
And, I would say, “Yes you can. It will be less stress when your body is using all its blood and energy to help you do what you need to do, and figure it out, and not be loaded down with food.”

And those that would do it came back to me and said, “Oh my God, thank you.”
I had one woman who hadn’t worked in a couple of years, a quite famous actress.
She had to go out for four interviews during the week and these were the most interviews she had been to, in a long time. She said, “What should I do?” and I said “Fast.” She said, “That sounds horrible. I need all my strength and energy.” I said “Believe me, fast.”

She fasted and got all four parts that she went out for. I’ve always seen it happen with all my clients.
I remember as a kid, I used to eat a big meal, thinking it was going to make me feel stronger. I felt more tired. So, I’d eat more and I felt more tired. And I’d eat more, then I felt more tired.
I’ve done many fasts – short fasts. I’ve done two thirty day fasts and one sixty-day juice fast. We can go months without food – – as long as we’re getting our nutrients.

BISER: But did your body get run down without it?

SCHULZE: Oh no, in fact, in the last couple days of my thirty-day juice fast, I kick-boxed 17 rounds and I was better than ever before. No one could come near me and touch me. I had better vision, I had better reflexes, I had better timing. And I had endless amounts of strength. This is something we have to get away from – the idea that fasting weakens you. It’s not true.
When you fast, there are some things you need to be aware of.

Sometimes when you fast, you have a little less body heat. So take a sweater with you when you go out. Every once in awhile, you may feel a little colder and it’s because it is calories from heat units in food that warms up our body.
So, since you are reducing your food and you’re on juices only, dress a little warmer and have a little blanket in the car or a sweater with you. That’s one thing I tell people.

The other thing is, you have energy lows. And what that is, when you’re fasting, is all of sudden, you might feel, especially if you’re doing a longer fast, like a week or more, you might feel like, oh my gosh, I have no energy at all.

Don’t pay any attention to that–because it will be gone in ten minutes. This is very common as your body is used to a solid fuel and now it’s on a liquid fuel. And just like a machine, if you change its fuel, it adjusts a little bit. We have to make adjustments and once we make those adjustments, it’s fine. So don’t pay any attention to that.

A couple other things I’ll throw in here. One thing I always tell people is, you get hunger pains when you’re fasting.
Most of the time they’re not real. All of a sudden, you have a dream or a vision of a baked potato covered with sour cream and chives. If that’s real, you’ll still have the urge in three or four hours. So, one of the ways to get by that, is just to ignore it and it will go away.

Most people think a fast means deprivation. I see it differently. A fast is a flush – a flush with liquids. Okay?
You are only going without solid food – but you are getting liquid food that does you more good.
A fast is a flush and people need to consume a gallon a day of liquids: juices, water, herb tea. Most people make a mistake by not consuming enough – and if you’re hungry drink more.

BISER: What juice do you use when you want to detoxify heavily?

SCHULZE: Wheat grass is great. It can detoxify when some people don’t get a detoxification any more from anything. Or, when they’ve used a few herbs and they think they are clean.

I remember my own story. I thought I was very clean. It was after I spent six months at Dr. Jensen’s eating only raw food and juice fasting and years after I had healed my heart. I started drinking wheat grass, an ounce a day, then two ounces a day, then three ounces a day, and then four ounces a day, and I got up to eight ounces one morning and I remember feeling horrible – and I started vomiting. It was just too strong of a dose, but at that point, wheat grass started creating all sorts of cleansing in my body – of old things I remembered I had. It finally cleaned them out and brought them to the surface.

BISER: What do you mean “old things’?

SCHULZE: Well, when I started cleaning out my bowel years earlier, my hemorrhoids went away and I hadn’t noticed any hemorrhoids for years. Then – in the middle of this wheat grass purge, the hemorrhoids flared up again – and it wasn’t because I was having diarrhea or straining or anything. I think it was because there were small capillaries there that were still blocked, and that wheat grass was cleaning them out. I started noticing things with my bronchials and my sinuses, and all sorts of problems that I had cleared away. But now they were kind of coming back again.

When you do a really good final cleansing and healing, a lot of your oldest problems come back, but just for a few days – as you clear them out. So I noticed some tremendous differences in my skin, and to this day I still drink wheat grass. People always come up to me and say, “Your skin looks so great.” I get this comment all the time, so I know that it’s really done some good work inside me.

How to make wheatgrass juice to detoxify yourself.

BISER: What does a reader have to know to get going on this? It sounds powerful.
SCHULZE: They might have to grow their own wheatgrass, and actually purchase a wheatgrass juicer, or something they can juice with. If they don’t have a wheatgrass juicer, just soak the wheatgrass in water and blend it up in your blender and drink it, grass and all. Anybody can grow wheat. You grow wheat and it just grows into the grass. You can grow it yourself. It’s very easy to grow. You just buy wheat, and you take organic wheat kernels, and you soak them for a few days until they actually sprout. You can soak them for about 24 hours and then put them into a damp cotton cloth for another two or three days, until the wheat sprouts, and then you can just make them like other sprouts. Rinse them in water two or three times a day until they have tails on them about an inch long, and then you can go ahead and plant them right in the soil.
Some people plant them right away and then just keep the soil damp the first couple of days, and you grow your own wheatgrass. Now you have what looks like your front lawn in a tray in your house.

What do you do with it? Well, you can run it through your juicer. A lot of people think you have to have a wheatgrass juicer. A wheatgrass juicer just gets more juice out of the wheatgrass. There are hand-operated ones and there are electric ones. The hand-operated wheatgrass juicers are about $70-80, and the electric ones are usually $300, but you could run the wheatgrass right through your Champion juicer.

You can just cut it up and even soak it with water and put it in a blender. I’ve had many patients in areas just take the wheatgrass, cut it up and put it in a blender, fill that blender with water and blend it up and you’ll get greenish water.

Or, you can run it through your juicer with other things like carrots, and it gets caught up in your juicer.

So wheatgrass is something that everybody should consider as a medicinal cleansing and building juice, very bitter tasting. Start out with a little bit. I suggest people start out with an ounce a day and don’t take it on its own. I like an ounce of wheatgrass with 16 ounces of fresh carrot juice. It just gives the carrot juice a little greenish tint and it’s very palatable.

There is also what I consider the wheatgrass *censored*tail, which is a base of apple juice with, say, about 12 ounces of apple juice, a couple of ounces of lemon juice, a thumb-size piece of ginger and an ounce of wheatgrass.

One thing that is very interesting, is that lemon and lime tend to cover up the taste of wheatgrass, which is good because a lot of people find it very strong to eat or drink, and lemon especially seems to cover up the taste.

The watermelon flush for the kidneys. If you need it, you will be urinating fire

BISER: What do you do with juices for the kidneys?

SCHULZE: I use two different things, one a vegetable, parsley, and the other, a fruit, watermelon.

I tell my patients to sit down for dinner and instead of dinner, crack open and eat a whole watermelon.

BISER: Is this one of those wellness things or does it really cure?

SCHULZE: Oh, my gosh. I was down at Dr. Jensen’s and they had some organic watermelon and I said “Okay, I’m just going to have watermelon tonight.” I cracked open one, about the size of a basketball, and I ate that really quick, and I thought I want another one, so I ate one of those red-meated ones, and I basically went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up, and when I urinated it was like urinating fire. It burnt my prostate, my penis— it was so painful I was moaning in the bathroom.

Watermelon juice, watermelon itself, and watermelon seeds are all diuretic and disinfecting. When you’re juicing the watermelon, a lot of people just juice the meat, but you want to juice the rind too.

The rind has minerals. You run it through the Champion juicer. You run the watermelon and the rind right through there, and it is delicious. You can taste the salt, the sodium, in the rind, and the minerals in the rind – very cleansing to the kidneys.

BISER: Why do people eat watermelon and not get any kidney cleansing or kidney cures?

SCHULZE:I think because they don’t juice the rind, and I think that a lot of the watermelons today are seedless. And I would suggest that people do not buy seedless. Juice the watermelon, seeds and all.

Make parsley juice – not parsley tea. It’s a whole lot more healing.

BISER: I thought parsley was just one of these feel-good, wellness herbs. Not for heavy curing.

SCHULZE: No, it’s an intense one. The problem is that people only make tea out of it. When you just pour boiling water over dried parsley you’re going to get a little bit of the essential oils.

Now, if you use fresh parsley and grind it in a Champion juicer, it’s a lot more intense.

It’s like the herb plantain. Dr. Christopher talks about plantain for blood poisoning. You can make a little plantain tea, or mash up a plantain leaf. Or, you can take plantain and run it right through the juicer. If you’ve got blood poisoning, who the heck wants to worry about making plantain teas with a little boiling water over it?

Get it through the juicer and get yourself two or three ounces of plantain juice. I’ve done that.

Juice radishes to cleanse the liver

SCHULZE: If you want to add a juice in to stimulate the liver more, all the radishes work real well.

Some people talk about black radishes or other kinds, but you can use the red radishes and even use wild radishes you have growing wild in the United States. Remember, where you have mustard growing, you also have wild radish growing.

You can even pick the pods off, or use the radish leaves or sprouts, but radishes of all types stimulate the liver and clean it out. As far as bad digestion, I’ve seen a lot of people helped in their digestion with celery and cabbage juices.

BISER: You mean cabbage juice doesn’t cause gas?

SCHULZE: No. Cabbage is a great cleanser and healer to the digestive tract. I’ve seen a lot of people with ulcers and digestive problems have great results drinking cabbage and celery juice.

Cabbage juice is excellent and I’ve had patients drink about 8 ounces of cabbage juice a day in one-ounce doses. It can be mixed with other juices too. The celery juice works really nice to cool the system, especially with ulcerative conditions.

It’s important with vegetables, but especially fruit, if you’re not getting organic, you need to wash it. Use a little bit of soap and water, good natural soap and even a scrub brush, because most of the sprays and things are put right on the fruit themselves.

Leukemia: A man regenerates his bone marrow with months of juice-fasting

SCHULZE:I had a man with leukemia. He had fairly severe leukemia. He had undergone a couple of different treatments and a couple of shots of chemotherapy. He felt so horrible, he said that death would be better than his experience on the chemotherapy.

He quit chemotherapy and came to me right away. He wanted to do something quite radical and I turned him onto juice fasting. He really got into it.

The first month he didn’t get any better. In fact, some of his blood counts were even worse. Then, he ate a few raw foods, took a break for about a week. Then he went back onto a juice fast and the second month he was stabilizing and some of his blood counts were coming up. Then he went back on some raw foods and health building.

Then we went into the third month of juice fasting – and that’s when we really saw the big changes.

His blood chemistry changed dramatically. He didn’t start really showing cancer changing greatly until the end of the second month and into the third month, but, by the fourth to fifth month, he was clean.

BISER: Why do you think in the first month his blood counts got worse in spite of . .

SCHULZE: Well, I think because he was so sick. He had spent 40 years – he was about 55 years old – but he spent about 40 of those years basically trying to kill himself…

BISER: What do you mean, trying to kill himself?

SCHULZE: Well, you know with his food program, no exercise, high cholesterol, family history…

BISER: You mean the numbers had a downward trend and you couldn’t stop them, right?

SCHULZE: Yes, and a lot of people expect that, the minute they take three herb capsules and stop eating for a day, their disease is going to start to go away.

BISER: What juices did you use to build his blood?

SCHULZE: When people are thinking about building that blood, I like beets and beet greens. So go to your organic market, but make sure you get your greens.

In some studies, I’ve seen the beets and beet greens analyzed. They have three times the iron in the beet greens than in a beet root, and sometimes, I’ve seen it the other way around. But greens are loaded with different minerals than the beets have. Together, they are a perfect food.

The beet and the beet greens, added to the carrot juice, is the one that I use with patients that have had either a lot of blood loss due to surgical trauma, or from cancer, where the body won’t build blood any more.

When you start getting that beet and beet greens in, along with the carrot juice, you see a big change. Now if you want to build the blood, the extra juices to remember, the fruit ones, are the dark blue, red and purple – that would be raspberries, blackberries and blueberries or prunes, plums and cherries – these are all the super blood builders.

They are loaded with iron, and you start getting a blue purple juice, and you start drinking that, and now you have the fruit blood builders.

Getting children to drink healthy juices

BISER: How do you get kids to get on juices for their health?

Juices help thin people to gain weight

BISER: Wouldn’t a juice fast be bad for people who are underweight?

SCHULZE: No – it’s how I brought people’s weight back, even when they had AIDS.

I had a man come to see me that had a complete turnaround and he had a T-cell count which would fluctuate between five and twenty-five, depending on when they took it. That’s about as low as it gets. He had loads of opportunistic AIDS infections. We started him on juice fasting right away.

This is one I want to talk about – because he was quite thin and a lot of people think “I can’t juice fast or I’ll lose weight.” I’ve had people gain weight on juice fasting and this man was one of them.

He started juice fasting and started gaining weight and people asked, “How is that?” It’s very simple. A lot of food that people eat, they can’t assimilate. When you are sick, your digestion, your assimilation, and elimination don’t work very well. But, you start putting juices in your body, and you’ll see the weight come back. This is why I call juices “the natural healers IV.”–it’s like a hospital I.V. naturally. Within a couple of weeks, from juices and the other programs I used, the man’s T-cell count was over a thousand.

BISER: How much weighs did he gain?

SCHULZE:I think he gained about 15 pounds in the first couple of months, and he was mainly on a liquid diet.

BISER: You would think he’d lose twenty-five pounds.

SCHULZE: Absolutely. But now he was getting the nutrition that he couldn’t get, so I think the main thing I’ve really come to see is that juice fasting builds blood, and I believe personally that it turns on the bone marrow.

Fresh citrus juices with their rind are great liver cleansers

SCHULZE: The bitter oils in citrus are big-time liver cleansers. They disinfect and create more bile flow. And you have to get in the rind, which contains pectin. Run that rind through your juicer or your Vita-Mix.
I look at citrus more as kidney and liver cleansing. It’s also very effective for cleaning the blood and joints, like with arthritis.

Removing parasites with fruits

SCHULZE: I remember my first bowel cleanse because I didn’t know about herbs yet. I drank two quarts of apples, freshly squeezed apple juice, and a quart of fresh-made prune juice.

Not only did I have parasites, but I had casing from my colon. I also had all sorts of dark flecks of things of old come out of my bowel. That was my first bowel cleanse.

BlSER: Just from fruit?

SCHULZE: Just from fruit.

BISER: But you took more of it. Most people don’t take enough to cause parasites or anything else to come out.

SCHULZE: No, they don’t. Take two quarts of apple and a quart of prune as your juice for the day on a juice fast and you will notice a dramatic bowel cleanse.

You can also make fig water by just taking figs and putting them in a blender with water. The problem is that a lot of people eat dried prunes and dried figs. They are constipating.

On a juice fast, you should only have the juices that come out of the juicer. You should have no pulp at all. The pulp that’s in most fruit is fiber that’s not digestible. All it does in a juice fast is it might cause your digestive tract to work a little bit more.

BISER: Okay, so a juicer would be slightly preferable.

SCHULZE: Yes, it would. If you’re doing your fast to really shut down your digestive tract and to really put all your body’s energy into healing something, yes— avoid the pulp.

However, if you are using a juice fast to clean your bowel out, you’re better off with the pulp, because it activates the digestive system, and, of course, this will give you bowel movements

The number one mistake people make on a juice fast

BISER: Why do so many people fail to get results on juice-fasting?

SCHULZE: It’s because they don’t cleanse their colon before they do it. Every day, have that bowel flushed out, and a person might want to use herbs for a couple of days and then do it with enemas; see the difference; see what happens and experiment that way.

High enemas are also something to do during a juice fast, to get all the pulp and solid bits out of our system and they work very nice too. But, the main thing is, during a fast you need to have your bowels work every day. They don’t have to work necessarily three times a day.

With some people they’re bowels will work seven times a day, depending on the person, but those who have a tendency towards slower, sluggish, sleepy bowels, they can go on a fast for a week and not have a bowel movement at all, so they don’t want to do that.

Use powdered superfoods during a fast

SCHULZE: Fasting can be even more powerful when people maximize their nutrition. Super nutrition can cause the body to detoxify more by flushing your body with vitamins and minerals, and it can also build your blood faster.

So, I always suggest people add superfoods to their juice fast. Some of the best ones are spirulina and chlorella.

If someone can’t get fresh wheatgrass, you can use wheatgrass powder, barley grass powder and alfalfa grass powder or alfalfa herb. They’re detoxifying, and they have vitamins and minerals. I usually, once a day during a fast, tell people to add some of these particular foods to their fruit smoothie.

Seaweeds are also good. You can get seaweed powders in the health food stores like Dulse or Kelp. I have many patients that have fasted using the nutritional yeast too. I’ve really seen the results when people have done a juice fast on just juices and juice fast using superfood powders.

BISER: You mean they feel a lot better.

SCHULZE: Well, they have a lot more energy when they do it on superfoods – and it can also cause the body to purge and eliminate more. It builds the blood faster.

Heart patients need juice-fasting

BISER: Some people say a heart patient should never do a fast. It would be a strain on the system.

SCHULZE: That’s the first thing a heart patient should Do – a juice-fast. The first thing is to stop eating because 99 percent of the time the heart patient’s blood cells are like mud and their coronary arteries are congested.

When the circulation is that bad, even becoming a vegetarian won’t unclog the blood. You have to do a juice fast to thin the blood back to a healthy state.

BISER: What does it feel like when the blood is thick?

SCHULZE: When you feel very sluggish, you feel – full, bloated, not only in your digestion, but you run two blocks and you’re sweating and you just feel full of fat.

You feel it. You feel like blood doesn’t even want to pump around your body. You are breathing heavy. Then you stop eating – and it’s just the greatest cure for anything, just stop eating. Stop eating food and get the juicer going.

How I helped my heart disease with long fasts

BISER: I know from your beginnings that you weren’t always such a believer in juice fasts?

SCHULZE: Oh no. I took lots of vitamins and mineral pills. I didn’t realize that when you thin your blood, you improve your circulation to every capillary in your body.

So, I did my first fast and didn’t expect much. But when I finished, I felt so much better, I said, “Wow, this is something that is much more powerful than anyone ever told me.”

I remember I did a fast for about a week. Then one for about ten days. Then I thought, okay, “I’m going to do a thirty-day fast and see what happens.”

That was probably the biggest change that I had in my health, and this was early on, when I was living in New York, and I did that thirty-day fast. I think that after the first couple of days, I never felt a heart palpitation from that point on. I never felt my heart dysfunctioning. It was like the missing link in my health program that I hadn’t seen.

Then, about a year later, I did a two-month fast. That one was really life transforming to me. I have barely had a down day since then.

What I suggest to most of my patients is, two or three days fast in the middle of five days of raw foods, once a season. That’s what my five-day program is.
“But to anybody who came to me dying – when you’re dealing with someone who has a life-threatening situation, stop all food. ”
SCHULZE: Many of my patients walked in the door and they had done just about every program under the sun, and sometimes even all at once or almost at once, but they hadn’t really fast.

Many people are afraid to fast. They are afraid of the one treatment that can cure them. We have this old American idea, that we need to have that bacon and eggs breakfast to get us going, and, of course, that’s one of the things that gets us dead. I always called that the heart attack plate.

BISER:I thought before I met you that juices were mainly a feel-good, wellness kind of thing, but not powerful enough for serious diseases.

SCHULZE: Many people feel that way. I myself thought that way – until I started investigating the classic old healers.

BISER: So, this is the therapy that people never do?

SCHULZE: That’s right. Everybody in America, we have this conveyor belt that’s going from the health food store or the herb shop into our mouth, and we think, “Well, it’s chromium and kola nut.”

Or it’s goldenseal. Or it’s garlic. Or it’s cayenne. Or it’s a colonic. We’re all looking for something more, but very few people actually stop eating. The old herbalists didn’t have the juicers. Juicers weren’t a common household item back then. But nowadays – everybody should have a juicer.

Food is the foundation of healing

But doctors are unbelievable. According to them, drugs are the foundation of healing. And according to the health food people, vitamin tablets are. They’re all wrong.

Food is.

by Sam Bisers for Sam Biser’s Newsletter “Herbal Therapy for Serious Illness” featuring medical Herbalist Dr. Richard Schulze.

The post Dr.Schulze Interview – Juice Fasting appeared first on Alternative Complementary Medicine.