An article in ScienceDaily for July 3, 2008 reported on red wine and meat.
In the study, Joseph Kanner and colleagues point out that scientists attribute wine's health benefits, including protection against cancer and heart disease, to its high levels of polyphenols, powerful antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables. However, the body does not absorb polyphenols easily, and scientists have been puzzled about how and where these substances exert their beneficial effects.
ScienceDaily for July 3, 2008 reported on smoking and back-pain.
Smokers suffer more chronic back pain. In 2003, the Robert Koch Institute interviewed more than 8000 private persons in the course of a telephone health survey (GsTel03). This included questions on social and demographic themes, as well as health and life style. On the basis of the collected data, the authors examined whether there was an association between smoking and chronic back pain.
This study, conducted and supported in part by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, is a follow-up to 2006 findings that resveratrol improves health and longevity of overweight, aged mice. The report confirms previous results suggesting the compound, found naturally in foods like grapes and nuts, may mimic, in mice, some of the effects of dietary or calorie restriction, the most effective and reproducible way found to date to alleviate age-associated disease in mammals.The World Science article is here.
Glycogen, the muscle's primary fuel source during exercise, is replenished more rapidly when athletes ingest both carbohydrate and caffeine following exhaustive exercise, new research shows. Athletes who ingested caffeine with carbohydrate had 66% more glycogen in their muscles four hours after finishing intense, glycogen-depleting exercise, compared to when they consumed carbohydrate alone, according to the study.
Chewing tobacco and snuff are less dangerous than cigarettes but the smokeless products still raise the risk of oral cancer by 80 percent, the World Health Organisation's cancer agency said on Tuesday.
NewsDaily for July 2, 2008 reported on effects of green tea on heart disease.
The study showed that green tea improves blood flow and the ability of arteries to relax, said Charalambos Vlachopoulos, a cardiologist at the Athens Medical School in Greece who worked on the study.
ScienceDaily for July 2, 2008 reported on minimum ages for drinking and driving.
One of the most comprehensive studies on the minimum drinking age shows that laws aimed at preventing consumption of alcohol by those under 21 have significantly reduced drinking-related fatal car crashes.
New research by U-M economist Joel Slemrod of the Ross School of Business and colleague Michael Lovenheim of Stanford University shows that 18- and 19-year-old drivers who live in another state—but within 25 miles of a state with a lower drinking age—are more likely to be involved in a fatal crash.
The researchers found an answer in tests with laboratory rats fed either red meat or red meat with red wine concentrate. Wine concentrate substantially reduced formation of two byproducts of fat digestion, malondialdehyde and hydroperoxide, which are toxic to cells, the investigators said.
LiveScience for June 30, 2008 reported on caffeine and Multiple Sclerosis.
Giving mice the equivalent of 6 to 8 cups of coffee a day prevented mice from getting the animal model equivalent of MS, said Dr. Linda Thompson, of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and a member of the team reporting the finding in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
ScienceDaily for June 29, 2008 reported on the use of marijuana for Neuropathic pain.
The growing body of evidence that marijuana (cannabis) may be effective as a pain reliever has been expanded with publication of a new study in The Journal of Pain reporting that patients with nerve pain showed reduced pain intensity from smoking marijuana.
ScienceDaily for June 28, 2008 reported on reasons why youth binge drink.
A study conducted at Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study and Volterra Consulting UK shows that social networking is a key factor in the spread of the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol -- binge drinking - which is blamed for serious anti-social and criminal behaviour.
ScienceDaily for June 27, 2009 reported on coffee consumption and risk of liver cancer.
La Vecchia notes, however, that, “It remains difficult, however, to translate the inverse relation between coffee drinking and liver cancer risk observed in epidemiological studies into potential implications for prevention of liver cancer by increasing coffee consumption.”
ScienceDaily for June 25, 2008 reported on the effect of a mother's drinking to the ability of her children to choose pleasant odors.
How children respond to the smell of alcoholic beverages is related to their mothers' reasons for drinking, according to a new study from the Monell Chemical Senses Center. When asked to choose between the odor of beer and an unpleasant odor, children of mothers classified as 'Escape drinkers' were more likely than children of Non-escape drinkers to choose the unpleasant odor.
ScienceDaily for June 23, 2008 reported on the effect of alcohol on insulin receptors.
Too much alcohol can cause permanent brain damage, such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which is largely related to thiamine deficiency. Previous animal studies have shown that alcohol can also cause brain injury and degeneration by inhibiting insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF). A new study using postmortem human brain tissue has found that chronic alcohol abuse can decrease levels of genes needed for brain cells to respond to insulin/IGF, leading to neurodegeneration similar to that caused by Type 2 diabetes mellitus.
An article in ScienceDaily for June 8, 2008 reported on health benefits of grapes.
Do you need to drink red wine in order to get the potentially beneficial compounds found in grapes that act as antioxidants? Apparently not, according to a new chemical report in the June 4th Web edition of the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
ScienceDaily for April 17, 2008 reported on the effect off red wine and obesity.
Resveratrol, a compound present in grapes and red wine, reduces the number of fat cells and may one day be used to treat or prevent obesity, according to a new study.
"Coffee consumption has been linked to various beneficial and detrimental health effects, but data on its relation with death were lacking," says Esther Lopez-Garcia, PhD, the study's lead author. "Coffee consumption was not associated with a higher risk of mortality in middle-aged men and women. The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on heart disease, cancer, and other causes of death needs to be further investigated."
An article for June 12, 2008 in ScienceDaily reported on the effect of tobacco, body weight, and alcohol on hearing loss.
In contrast, moderate alcohol consumption (at least one drink a week) was seen to have a protective effect. In the study, one alcoholic drink was defined as one glass of wine, spirit or beer. The effect of heavy drinking was not investigated
An article in ScienceDaily for June 12, 2008 reported on a decline in cigarette smoking but an increase in other forms of smoking.
While trends in cigarette smoking and sales have declined in the U.S. for the past decade, sales of non-cigarette tobacco products have been on the rise. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Professor Greg Connolly, director of the Tobacco Control Research Program at HSPH, and Hillel Alpert, research associate in the program, sought to compare trends in sales of all tobacco products in the U.S. and found that 30% of the recent decline in cigarette sales may be offset by the robust sale of small cigars, snuff and roll-your-own products. Thus, the apparent magnitude of overall decline in tobacco use in the U.S. may be illusory. The comparative research of tobacco sales of all kinds across the past decade is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It is the first study to examine concurrent sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products.
ScienceDaily for June 10, 2008 reported on smoking and memory problems.
A recent meta-analysis concluded that smoking is a risk factor for dementia, according to background information in the article. However, research regarding the link between smoking and cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) function is difficult in older adults because many study participants do not return for follow-up visits or die of smoking-related diseases.
