Enjoy the festive season with healthy diets, lifestyle

By Carol Aloysius

With the festive season drawing close, the temptation is for us to indulge in a lot of rich foods that could have adverse impacts on our health. While these impacts may not be felt overnight, they could lay the foundation for many life threatening illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, cardiac diseases in the future.

Since most of us are unaware of the danger of overeating and consuming rich, fatty foods with a high salt content and saturated with transfats, the Health Ministry has developed a series of simple guidelines known as Super 8, based on the concept of healthy living to help the public to maintain optimum health.

These guidelines are especially important during festive periods when over indulgence is the pattern.

Christmas is a time for celebration and merriment - but consuming high calorie foods will lead to extra weight and health problems.

The Sunday Observer spoke to Dr Susie Perera, Director, Organisation Development on the importance of the Super 8 guidelines and their objectives.

Excerpts...

Question: Since this is a time when many people old and young tend to eat a lot of rich food, what impact does such foods have on our bodies?

Answer: There can be short term and long time effects. For example, a person who by habit likes eating rich food, is likely to eat more than average since such foods are freely available in the form of cakes, Breudher, mince pies or pastries. Those who like drinking sweet drinks or fizzy drinks will have the opportunity of indulging in a lot more of such drinks during the festive season.

Alcohol and wines will also be consumed to a large extent with some young people being introduced for the first time to hard liquor at this time when they go out to dances and parties.

What people should be aware of is that, if they continue this trend of consuming a lot of sugar for example, they could become obese or overweight, which is the first step to getting diabetes.

Q. How can one get obese simply by consuming sugar?

A. Sugar gets deposited as fats in the body and affects the pancreas which controls the sugar level. It is the insulin from the pancreas that enters the body cells and keeps the sugar under control.

However, excessive ingestion of sugar over a long period can result in the failure of the pancreas and sugar levels will rise in the blood, and there will come a time when you end up with diabetes.

Q. What are the symptoms?

A. Initially you put on weight and then you lose weight. So weight is a good indicator. You'll feel sleepy, pass urine several times, become more prone to infections.

But the danger is that many people present these symptoms late as their body gets adjusted to these pre-diabetic symptoms. Their blood sugar levels can soar to even 200-300 without them noticing it until they develop complications.

Q. Such as?

A. Numbness of the feet, kidney infection and wounds that won't heal.

Q. What about smoking?

A. Constant smoking tobacco leads to complications such as hypertension, heart disease and cancer.

Smoking is a powerful determinant of heart diseases and cancer including lung and cervical cancer.

Q. And alcohol?

A. Alcohol is a very high energy dense drink which also helps put on weight.

Apart from that, people drink while eating a lot of salty bites which can lead to hypertension.

Q. So what do you recommend as healthy guidelines in the Super 8 concept?

A. The objective is to remind ourselves that we have to take responsibility for our health and can do so by following these simple rules.

Rule No 1 - Maintain an ideal body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9. BMI is an expression of weight and height by dividing your weight by your height in metres squared. The ideal BMI is 23.

Rule 2 - Minimise your salt intake as salt leads to hypertension. One teaspoon of salt per day is what you need.

Rule 3 - Don't take more than six teaspoons of sugar a day if you don't have diabetes. If you do have diabetes, avoid sugar completely since the food you eat, turns to starch and sugar.

Rule 4 - Exercise daily - a brisk walk for 30 minutes is good for anyone of any age and any size.

Rule 5 - Take 400 grams of fruit and vegetables per day. Variety is the best.

Rule 6 - Avoid food with transfats specially this season like puff pastries, flaky pastries. Repeated heating in oil (over three times) also increases the transfats in foods. Use olive oil for your salads and avoid dressings such as mayonnaise. A crushed lime and garlic paste will be much more healthy in a salad than topping it with unhealthy seasonings.

Rule 7 - Avoid smoking and alcohol.

Rule 8 - Check your blood pressure at least once a year if you don't have blood pressure, and once a month if you do have blood pressure.

The pressure should be below 140 X 90. For an average healthy person it should be 120 X 80. But if you have readings of over 140 X 90 constantly, you should consider seeing a qualified Western doctor and change your lifestyle.

Q. Your message for the season?

A. These targets are for everyone and are meant to empower people to take responsible decisions regarding their health such as knowing what to serve and what not to serve themselves at a social meal, or removing the fatty skin from a roasted chicken at the Christmas table, before eating it.

Be active, have healthy habits, and most of all avoid EXCESS of anything, whether eating or drinking or even exercising, as moderation is the key word.

The smell of fear can be inherited, say scientists

Study shows scents associated with terror may be passed on for two male generations

by Steve Connor

Experiments on mice have demonstrated that they can be trained to associate a particular kind of smell to a fearful memory and that this fear can be passed down through subsequent generations via chemical changes to a father's sperm cells.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, left, whose idea was supplanted by Charles Darwin, right

The findings raise questions over whether a similar kind of inheritance occurs in humans, for example whether men exposed to the psychological trauma of a foreign war zone can pass on this fearful behavioural experience in their sperm to their children and grandchildren conceived at home.

The researchers emphasised that their carefully controlled study was carried out on laboratory mice and there are still many unanswered questions, but they do not discount the possibility that something similar may also be possible in people.

"I think there is increasing evidence from a number of studies that what we inherit from out parents is very complex and that the gametes - the sperm and eggs - may be a possible mechanism of conserving as much information as possible from a previous generation," said Kerry Ressler, professor of psychiatry at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

"The biggest interpretation of this research, if it holds up across mammals, is that it may be possible for certain traits such as the fearful experience of a parent to be transmitted to subsequent generations," Prof Ressler said.

The findings also lend some support to a discredited theory known as the "inheritance of acquired characteristics", promulgated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the late 18th Century. Lamarck postulated that organisms can pass on physical features they developed during their lifetime to their offspring, such as the long neck of giraffes which stretched to reach the highest leaves on a tree.

Butt this idea was later supplanted by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was further supported by the discovery of genes and Mendelian inheritance.

The latest study, however, shows that a kind of Lamarckism may in fact exist in nature as a result of environmental influences directly affecting epigenetic changes to an organism's DNA.

The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, trained male mice to associate the smell of the chemical acetophenone, which smells like cherry blossom, with a mild electric shock.

These mice soon displayed fear whenever they were exposed to acetophenone on its own.

Breeding experiments showed that this fear of acetophenone could be transmitted to two further generations, the sons and grandsons of the original male mice.

This inheritance must have passed on in sperm as the original males were not allowed to come into contact with their offspring. Further experiments involving the fertilisation of mouse eggs using IVF techniques confirmed that the fear trait, which was resulted in specific changes to the brains of the mice involve the sense of smell, was transmitted in the sperm as "epigenetic" changes to the proteins surrounding the DNA of the sperm cells.

"While the sequence of the gene encoding the receptor that responds to the odour is unchanged, the way that gene is regulated may be affected," Prof Ressler said.

"There is some evidence that some of the generalised effects of diet and hormone changes, as well as trauma, can be transmitted epigenetically," he said.

"The difference here is that the odour-sensitivity-learning process is affecting the nervous system - and, apparently, reproductive cells too - in such a specific way," he said.

Similar studies on female mice, where their pups were immediately fosteredby other females, showed that the same kind of mechanism may also occur through egg cells.

However, it is more difficult in this instance to eliminate the possibility that the changes occurred in the foetus rather than in the DNA of the females' eggs.

The study concluded that "ancestral experience before conception" may be an under-appreciated influence on the behaviour of adults, particularly when psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias and anxieties are involved.

"Knowing how the experiences of parents influence their descendants helps us to understand psychiatric disorders that may have a trans-generational basis, and possibly to design therapeutic strategies," Prof Ressler said.

Prof Marcus Pembrey, of the University College London, said that the study is important because it provides compelling evidence for the biological transmission of the "memory" of a fearful ancestral experience.

"It is high time public health researchers took human trans-generational responses seriously.

"I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multi-generational approach," Prof Pembrey said.

Prof Wolf Reik, head of epigenetics at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said: "These types of results are encouraging as they suggest that trans-generational inheritance exists and is mediated by epigenetics, but more careful mechanistic study of animal models is needed before extrapolating such findings to humans."

- The Independent

Promising new drug target: key found to restoring HIV-fighting immune cells

Researchers have identified a protein that causes loss of function in immune cells combating HIV.

The scientists report in Journal of Clinical Investigation that the protein, Sprouty-2, is a promising target for future HIV drug development, since disabling it could help restore the cells' ability to combat the virus that causes AIDS.

"A large part of the reason we lose wars against viruses that cause chronic infection is that immune cells called T cells get turned off," says Jonathan Schneck, a professor of pathology, who led the study. "We've been trying for some time to find out why that is, and in our study we were able to identify a family of proteins called Sprouty, specifically Sprouty-2, as a culprit."

T cells, a type of white blood cell, are programmed to recognise and kill cells infected with a specific virus or other disease-causing agent. Doing so effectively requires a T cell to perform multiple functions - par for the course when the cells are fighting a fresh infection. But when infection drags on, as HIV does, T cells often become "exhausted," losing two or more functions, except among so-called "elite suppressors" - rare HIV-infected patients whose T cells never seem to tire.

To investigate the source of exhaustion, the Johns Hopkins team first sought a way to recreate that phenomenon in the laboratory.

Yen-Ling Chiu, a graduate student in Schneck's laboratory, was able to simulate the effects of long-term chronic infection by growing influenza-fighting T cells and dosing them with large amounts of antigen, a type of molecule that, like a red flag waved at a bull, signals immune cells to attack.

Doing this "made the T cells dysfunctional - they looked like exhausted T cells in HIV," Chiu says. Chiu next looked for differences in proteins made in the dysfunctional cells compared to those in fresh T cells.

It turned out, he says, that many of the proteins whose quantities were different between the two groups of cells were involved in a biochemical chain of events called the MAPK/ERK pathway.

That pathway controls a variety of important processes, such as cell division.

One of the proteins that was more abundant in the exhausted T cells than in the fresh T cells was Sprouty-2, which, other studies had shown, slows down the MAPK/ERK pathway.

Suspecting that Sprouty-2 could be the culprit in T cell exhaustion, Chiu used a specially engineered virus to disable the Sprouty-2 gene in some T cells and found that they were more likely to retain all of their functions than were the cells with working Sprouty-2.

- Medicalxpress

Can sexual frustration be bad for health?

Sex may in fact be one of the secrets to good health, youth and a longer life - at least for fruit flies - suggests a new finding that appears in Science.

Male fruit flies that perceived sexual pheromones of their female counterparts - without the opportunity to mate - experienced rapid decreases in fat stores, resistance to starvation and more stress.

The sexually frustrated flies lived shorter lives. Mating, on the other hand, partially reversed the negative effects on health and ageing. "Our findings give us a better understanding about how sensory perception and physiological state are integrated in the brain to affect long-term health and lifespan," says senior author Scott D. Pletcher.

"The cutting-edge genetics and neurobiology used in this research suggests to us that for fruit flies at least, it may not be a myth that sexual frustration is a health issue. Expecting sex without any sexual reward was detrimental to their health and cut their lives short."

U-M scientists used sensory manipulations to give the common male fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, the perception that they were in a sexually rich environment by exposing them to genetically engineered males that produced female pheromones.

They were also able to manipulate the specific neurons responsible for pheromone perception as well as parts of the brain linked to sexual reward (secreting a group of compounds associated with anxiety and sex drive).

"These data may provide the first direct evidence that ageing and physiology are influenced by how the brain processes expectations and rewards," Pletcher says.

"In this case, sexual rewards specifically promoted healthy ageing."

Fruit flies have been a powerful tool for studying ageing because they live on average 60 days yet many of the discoveries in flies have proven effective in longer-lived animals, such as mice.

For decades, one of the most powerful ways to slow aging in different species was by limiting their food intake. In a previous study, Pletcher and his colleagues found that the smell of food alone was enough to speed up aging, offering new context for how dietary restriction works.

- Medical xpress