Monday, April 21, 2003

Sugar - The Tobacco of the 21st century? This would *kill* Dr Atkins -- Big Sugar wants 25% of diet to be sugar. Big Sugar is furious that the World Health Organization is proposing to officially recommend that no more than 10% of our diets should consist of sugar. They don't even want the notion discussed in public. The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar. "Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science." Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!) [Boing Boing Blog] Sugar, Pop and Fat - Are Soft Drinks the New Tobacco? At the turn of the century the average American ate two pounds of sugar. Do you know what it is now? 160 pounds, and for many of us it's probably twice that. The human body didn't evolve to handle that kind of input. The pancreas works overtime to flood your system with insulin several times a day, every day. By the end of each day, it's completely exhausted and your bloodstream is still jacked up with dangerously elevated levels of sugar. Eventually your pancreas functionality is borderline to failure and you've got adult-onset diabetes. Eventually it fails for good and suddenly you're a diabetic. A study about a year ago got a lot of press. It showed that a child who drank two cans of soda a day WILL be overweight. That's two cans of soda, not "lots of high fat foods." At the turn of the century something like 2 or 3 percent of people were dying from heart attacks and stroke. What is it now? 70% and rising? You don't go from 2% to 70% with a slight decline in lifetime physical activity. But what about a typical lifetime sugar (carbohydrate) consumption increase of eight thousand percent? What do YOU think the connection is? 12:30:11 PM    comment []

SARS Travel Kit. New from our friends at the CDC: Guidelines for Persons Traveling to SARS-Affected Areas - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) If I go to Toronto next week .. I think I will pack one. (thanks to SARSWatch.org)... [Family Medicine Notes] A useful and comprehensive guide for those of us that will travel to a SARS site 8:43:38 AM    comment []

Sars - How deadly is it? Docs Wrangle Over SARS Death Rate. How deadly is SARS? The CDC estimates the death rate at 4 percent, but other researchers say the actual count may be much higher. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] "Instead, some say the rate should be calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the sum of the number of deaths plus the number of people who recovered, which would exclude those people who are still sick, resulting in a higher death rate. According to Niman's math, the death rate in Hong Kong would be 25 percent, in Canada 21 percent, in Singapore 15 percent and in Vietnam 10 percent. In China, the death rate would be only 5 percent." We still know so little about SARS - but if the death rate is in the 20-30% as mentioned in this article then we could face the type of challenge that the world faced in 1918. Here is an excellent short review of the Spanish Flu The Spanish flu did not come from Spain. It came as do most flu bugs from China. Why do dangerous viruses come from China? The issue is the type of food system in Guangdong. Intensely practical, the locals have a closed loop food system. Humans at the top who feed their feces to their pigs whose feces run off into ponds which feed fish and ducks. The humans eat the pigs, ducks and fish. In this loop animal virus can be altered by the inter species links. Pigs are especially capable of being a vector as they are omnivores and close biologically to the human system.  There seems to be something very dangerous about these types of feedback loops. Mad Cow disease was caused by feeding animal protein back to herbivores such as cows that should not have been eating animal protein. As well as working on vaccines for flu and SARS, should we not look at this process and stop this type of interaction at source. There is more for China to answer for than bad public health 7:53:14 AM    comment []