Proper nutrition vital for healthy living

By Nilma DOLE

Food is available everywhere and you can see where you can get it. The right food is prominently displayed in advertisements, on billboards and posters.

Even in your neighbourhood, there are more eating places, restaurants, milk bars and wayside eating stalls than other shops. Anyone investing in the business in food are assured of making money and this is why food is such a hot topic. We cannot live without food and food cannot live without us.

Eating a healthy, balanced diet and eating it on time is one of mankind's most difficult challenges. With busy lifestyles, demanding careers and family commitments, finding the time for healthy food is also difficult.

People want to meet over a coffee but this often leads to cake. Nowadays, teenagers meet at popular fast-food restaurants, executives have business ‘power’ lunches and parents take their children to wayside stalls to grab a bite. Whatever the outcome, the food decisions of today are different to what we had in place before and with no time to eat, we are vulnerable to easy and quick food decisions.

Compared to earlier times, we now have more cancers, heart ailments, diabetes and NCDs (non-communicable diseases). We have more problems with health today than ever before and the reason for this is that we don't make wise food decisions.

Consultant and Ayurvedic practitioner, Dr. Jayasri Jayawardena said, “With advertising and marketing of fast-food and food products that contain no nutritional value, people are giving up on traditional food habits in favour of more convenient ones. Today, it is more trendy to meet your client or eat with a work colleague for lunch than eat your rice and curry packet at the canteen.”

Dr. Jayasri Jayawardena

He said that food such as margarine have no nutritional value and take precedence over the traditional butter because it is cheaper. Margarine is high in trans-fatty acids and increases the risk of coronary heart disease. He said, “Your cholesterol and LDL (bad cholesterol levels) and lowers HDL cholesterol (good cholesterol).” Margarine also increases the risk of cancer, lowers the quality of breast milk, decreases the immune system and makes young children more aggressive. He said, “According to renowned American nutritionist Robert Atkins, margarine is in fact, one molecule away from being plastic which is a real cause of concern.”

Dr.Jayawardena said that people do not even know what they consume as products are not labelled correctly but what is surprising is that they don't think that the food they eat is the cause of their illnesses and not karma and fate.

He said, “When doctors advise their diabetic patients to stop eating bread, this doesn't mean you have to switch to cake and buns. Rather, any baked items, bakery products and products containing wheat flour should be avoided.”

The doctor said that by not eating products with wheat flour is not to ban the eating of bread rather make healthy choices by consuming products made with kurakkan, atta flour and wholemeal flour. The doctor said that big companies reap profits by manufacturing and marketing products that serve as cheap alternatives. He said, “Traditionally milled flour has now been crushed by machines into powder and chemicals added to preserve it for years. Consuming such products could severely impact your health because it is not natural.”

Fruits and vegetables found in markets today are not what was available years ago before pesticides and insecticides were sold to farmers. He said, “We should be cautious about what we partake and also we should go back to traditional eating habits. With pollution and chemicals added to preserve fruits and vegetables, they are doing more harm than good.”

We should try to get the freshest ingredients and even turn to home gardening if we want the most reliable food to eat. Dr. Jayawardena also said that drinking tea and coffee right after a heavy meal is also bad as it destroys the body's ability to absorb nutrition. He said, “Some say green tea is good for losing weight, but this is not true.

Green tea destroys your iron cells and contributes to a low haemoglobin count which is why it is bad to drink tea right after a meal as the nutrition content is not absorbed.”

“The only powdered product is soya milk which is healthy but powdered milk for babies is especially bad. As much as possible, use pasteurised and homogenised milk for babies and children,” he said. Dr.Jayawardena said that he knows that no matter how much companies advertise, it is up to us as consumers to make the right decision.

“I know I'll be in trouble as companies advertise their products to the public but prevention is cure and if we tackle the problem at the root cause, then we are sure to have more healthy citizens instead of wasting colossal sums on free healthcare,” he said.

Obesity in middle age linked to higher dementia risk

A study suggests that cognitive ability could be impaired earlier in overweight adults Obesity in middle age could significantly increase the risk of developing dementia in later life and could also affect cognitive ability earlier than previously assumed, new research has shown.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that overweight and obese adults are more likely to develop dementias such as Alzheimer's disease. More than 6,400 adults aged between 39 and 63 took part in the on-going study, published in the journal Neurology Today. Researchers examined cognitive function and body mass index (BMI) as well as conditions associated with obesity such as high blood pressure.

Obesity was found to have an increasingly negative impact on performance in memory and reasoning tests over a 12-year period.

A similar study last year found that people who are obese in middle age are nearly four times more likely to develop dementia. “A picture is building up to suggest that dementia is linked to weight in mid-life,” said Jessica Smith, a research officer for the Alzheimer's Society. “We all know that piling on the pounds is bad for your physical health, but this robust study suggests it is bad for the head as well as the heart.

Anything that reduces blood flow to the brain, such as high blood pressure associated with obesity, could increase the risk of dementia later in life.”

The exact nature of the link between obesity and associated cardio-vascular problems and cognitive decline is not yet clear, but diseases of the blood vessels supplying the brain, and the release of proteins by fatty tissue that can affect the ageing brain, have been suggested by scientists as possible causes.

Prof Archana Singh-Manoux, the research director at the French medical institute INSERM, who co-wrote the report, said our understanding of dementia was changing, but that more research was needed before the specific causal factors could be identified.

Decline

“The whole idea that dementia happens later in life is changing,” she said. “Our research is based on looking at early cognitive decline.

“We've been looking at whether there is cognitive decline earlier than the onset of dementia and what the risk factors could be.

The study is ongoing and hopefully we will continue to be funded to see who develops dementia and who does not.”Research by the Alzheimer's Society has shown that 800,000 people in the UK currently have a form of dementia, more than half of them Alzheimer's.

In less than 10 years’ time, that number is projected to increase to one million. The number of obese people in the world could reach 700 million by 2015 and the link to dementia will lend urgency to worldwide efforts to tackle what is a growing public health problem.

“One in three people over the age of 65 will die with some form of dementia,” Ms Smith said. “Overall the message is [that] having a normal weight during mid-life is much better for you in many ways.

“The best way of reducing your risk of developing dementia is to eat a balanced diet, maintain a healthy weight, exercise regularly and get your blood pressure and cholesterol checked.”

Earlier research has shown that people who smoke, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes are all at increased risk of developing Alzheimer's.

- The Independent

New technology addresses global pandemic of drug counterfeiting

Drug counterfeiting is so common in some developing countries that patients with serious diseases in Southeast Asia and elsewhere are at risk of getting a poor-quality drug instead of one with ingredients that really treat their illness, a scientist involved in combating the problem said.

Speaking at the 244th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, Facundo M. Fernández, Ph.D., described how his team has developed technology that reduces the time needed to check a sample for authenticity from a half hour to a few minutes. And they are working on the prototype of an affordable, portable version of the device that could be used in the field.

“It would enable medical officials in developing countries to check on whether a drug for malaria, tuberculosis or other diseases is the real thing, or a fake that contains no active ingredients, or the wrong one,” Fernández said. “They could sort the good medicine from the bad immediately, without shipping samples to laboratories abroad and waiting days or weeks for the results.”

Fernández, said new ways of fingering fake medicines are important because the problem is spreading with the globalisation of pharmaceutical production - almost like a global pandemic - with drug counterfeiters becoming more sophisticated.

“In some of our studies, 50 percent of the drug samples from Southeast Asia have been counterfeit,” Fernández said. “And it is hard to tell from looking at the packaging. The packages look absolutely professional and authentic, sometimes right down to the hologram seal introduced to discourage counterfeiting.”

Counterfeiting involves all kinds of medications, from the acetaminophen used for headaches and fever to lifestyle medications such as Viagra to drugs for cancer malaria and tuberculosis, diseases that cause millions of deaths annually. The World Health Organisation says that about 10 percent of medications worldwide are counterfeit.

Estimates run even higher in poor, developing countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, where past reports have stated that as much as one-third of tested drugs are fake. Patients in these countries often cannot afford the real treatments, and supplies of the real drugs may run dangerously low in some regions, prompting desperate patients to seek medications from shady sources.

Fake medications sometimes contain the correct active ingredient, but at the wrong dose. Too much could result in an overdose and possibly death.

- eurekaelert.com

Targeting male malaria mosquito to control epidemic

Using information about the unique mating practices of the male malaria - which, unlike any other insect, inserts a plug to seal its sperm inside the female - scientists are zeroing in on a birth-control drug for Anopheles mosquitoes, deadly carriers of the disease that threatens 3 billion people, has infected more than 215 million and kills 655,000 annually.

They reported at the 244th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society on development of an approach for screening substances that could prevent formation of the plug, thus preventing mosquitoes from reproducing and spreading malaria.

Prof. Richard H. G. Baxter of Yale University, who presented the report, described the search for a new birth-control strategy for mosquitoes. Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes mate in airborne swarms, but only females bite and feed on blood from people - the bite that transmits the malaria parasite to humans. To ensure mating success, an Anopheles male produces a special “mating plug” to seal its sperm inside the female's mating chamber. The Yale researchers purified the specific enzyme, a transglutaminase, responsible for coagulating another protein called Plugin within the male's seminal fluid to form the plug. They went on to purify the Plugin protein and reconstitute the coagulation reaction in the lab, setting the stage to search for chemicals that inhibit this reaction.

The technology is based on a discovery about the plug in 2009 by Flaminia Catteruccia, then at Imperial College London. Catteruccia's research detailed the biochemical composition of the plug, identified the transglutaminase enzyme and showed that blocking the enzyme prevents females from storing sperm to fertilise their eggs. Catteruccia is collaborating with Baxter and his team at Yale to translate that knowledge into technology to put a dent in the population of malaria mosquitoes.

“We have completed the groundwork to start screening for chemicals that inhibit the enzyme,” Baxter said. “I think that there's a good chance that we will find a compound because there are many existing compounds that inhibit other transglutaminases. Ideally, it would be a substance that could be fed to males, sterilising them so that they mate but no offspring result. It's a well-established biological insect-control technology called the sterile insect technique and has been used for decades.”

The sterile insect technique was first used to control the screwworm fly in the southern United States and other areas. The screwworm fly was once responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to the cattle industry and consumers. The approach is used against tsetse flies in Africa that transmit sleeping sickness and can be effective against mosquitoes, which mate only once or twice in their lifetime. Male mosquitoes would be reared under controlled conditions, fed a transglutaminase inhibitor and released to mate with wild females, reducing the population without the use of insecticides. The new approach may help to deploy the sterile insect technique against mosquitoes by overcoming previous logistical and environmental concerns.

“By developing a chemical that is specific to the Anopheles mosquito and applied in a contained environment, we can minimise both cost and environmental impact,” says Baxter.

The technology is compatible with other methods such as genetic modification, pioneered by the British firm Oxitec.The sterile insect technique is a different approach than traditional malaria control strategies, such as the indoor spraying of insecticides and the use of insecticide-treated bed nets. “Mosquitoes are adapting to the traditional control measures,” warns Baxter.

“They are becoming resistant to the commonly used insecticides such as DDT and pyrethroids, and they are avoiding bed nets by biting during the day and out-of-doors. The sterile insect technique moves us away from trying to deliver chemicals to female mosquitoes by spreading them around people. Instead, we feed a chemical to the male, and he finds the females for us.”AbstractMale Anopheles mosquitoes secrete a specific transglutaminase (AgTG3) into their seminal fluids. AgTG3 crosslinks a subrate protein called Plugin, producing a gelatinous “mating plug” that is important for proper sperm storage by the female. We have reconstituted this reaction in vitro through heterologous expression, purification and biophysical analysis of both enzyme and substrate protein.

- MNT

Brain scans don't lie about age of young people

It isn't uncommon for people to pass for ages much older or younger than their years, but researchers have now found that this feature doesn't apply to our brains. The findings reported in Current Biology, show that sophisticated brain scans can be used to accurately predict age, give or take a year.

It's a “carnival trick” that may have deeper implications for both brain science and medicine.

“We have uncovered a ‘developmental clock’ of sorts within the brain - a biological signature of maturation that captures age differences quite well, regardless of other kinds of differences that exist across individuals,” says Timothy Brown of the University of California.

Together with UCSD's Anders Dale and Terry Jernigan and researchers from nine other universities, Brown used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 885 people ranging in age from three to 20. Those brain scans were used to identify 231 biomarkers of brain anatomy that, when combined, could assess an individual's age with more than 92 percent accuracy. That's beyond what's been possible with any other biological measure, the researchers say.

While others had looked at some of the same brain biomarkers in the past one by one, the key was finding a way to combine them to capture the multidimensional nature of brain anatomy and characteristic patterns of developmental change with age. Brown says that they are excited to further explore the new approach and its potential for use in the clinic.

“The fact that we found a collection of brain measures that so accurately captures a person's chronological age means that brain development, or at least certain anatomical aspects of it, is more tightly controlled than we knew previously,” Brown said.

“The regularity in this maturity metric among typically developing children suggests that it might be sensitive to detecting abnormality as well.” It's not yet clear how these anatomical changes in the brain will relate to maturity in terms of human behaviour, which we all know isn't necessarily reflected by our chronological age.

“The anatomy and physiology of these dynamic, interacting neural systems,which we can probe in different ways with MRI scans, have to account for the changes we all observe in human psychological development,” Brown said.

“We're still figuring out exactly how.”

- sciencedaily