Obesity & Diet -a new twist
It’s not what you eat but what your mother eats that could set your bodyweight, suggest scientists at Baylor College of Medicine. Robert Waterland and colleagues studying mice with a genetic tendency to overeat found that successive generations of the mice became fatter. This increasing obesity was prevented by a diet rich in folate and…
Pesticides persist in ground water
Numerous studies over the past 40+ years have established that pesticides & herbicides, typically applied at the land surface, can move downward through the soils unsaturated zone to the water table at detectable concentrations. This downward movement of pesticide degradation products, formed in situ, can also contribute to the contamination of ground water. Once reached…
New tool to fight viruses?
A new device caught my eye this week. Marketed by Aethlon Medical, it claims to treat HIV and other viral infections by removing viral particles from the blood. Aethlon claims the device could be used against HIV, hepatitis, and biological warfare agents such as Ebola and smallpox. Great news, but it sounds too good to…
Beijing in Bloom
The organizers of the Beijing Olympics have much to contend with at the moment – including a massive bloom of blue-green algae that is currently engulfing the Qingdao coastline. The BBC, reporting from the region, say that more that 10,000 recruits from the People’s Liberation Army have been drafted in to clear the blooms. The…
Nutrition at the extremes of life
The Rank Prize lecture yesterday afternoon was a very interesting romp through the world of public health nutrition with Professor Ricardo Uauy. A difficult name to pronounce for many of us non-Spanish speakers (he’s originally from Chile), but a clear message at least. Nutritionists need a common vision, a common mission to work towards. Together.
Go with the flow
This article in the Independent caught my imagination back in March. A company called Marine Current Turbines is using their SeaGen project (pictured) to generate electricity from the tidal movement of water in and out of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland using underwater turbines. This morning I spotted Tom Shelley’s article over at Eureka Magazine…
‘Wage war on obesity – not the obese’
Professor Jeffrey Friedman has spent well over a decade researching the biological basis for obesity and has come to the conclusion that we should be fighting a ‘war on obesity, not the obese’. His, name has become synonymous with the hormone leptin the topic of this year’s prestigious Boyd Orr lecture this afternoon at the…
F is for….
Firefighters…fishermen…or farmers? What do you think these three groups of professionals might have in common? All of them save lives, of course. Or they could be doing, as a result of new data presented yesterday in a satellite symposium held as part of the Nutrition Society’s 2008 Summer Meeting. Experts meeting to discuss the latest…
A word to the wise (Aspergillosis)
As I accidentally breathed in the blood, fish & bone powder I was feeding my plants yesterday, I was reminded of a case which made the front cover of The Lancet last week entitled: gardening can seriously damage your health. It highlighted a case report of an unfortunate man who succumbed to aspergillosis, a fungal…
From cats to sea otters, whales and maybe even humans
You may already have read, in one of the many magazines, news services and blogs that have picked up this story (see here, for example), about some findings presented the other week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, and more recently at the annual meeting of the Pacific division of the…