Archive for December 4th, 2005
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Coffee and tea may reduce the risk of serious liver damage in people who drink alcohol too much, are overweight, or have too much iron in the blood, researchers reported on Sunday.
The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day.
The study, conducted by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., found that coffee provided no protection to people at risk of liver disease from other causes, such as viral infections.
“While it is too soon to encourage patients to increase their coffee and tea intake, the findings of our study potentially offer people at high-risk for developing chronic liver disease a practical way to decrease that risk,” said Dr. Constance Ruhl, who helped lead the study.
“In addition, we hope the findings will offer guidance to researchers who are studying liver disease progression.”
Writing in the American Gastroenterological Association journal Gastroenterology, Ruhl and colleagues said caffeine seemed to hold the key.
They analyzed the records of 9,849 participants in a government survey whose coffee and tea intake was evaluated and who were followed for about 19 years.
Source: news.yahoo.com
December 4th, 2005
By Carolyn Poirot
Knight Ridder Newspapers
FORT WORTH, Texas — High-fructose corn syrup isn’t completely
responsible for the nation’s 6 million overweight children — but Dr. George Bray says it’s a big part of the problem.
Nurture trumps nature in the current childhood-obesity epidemic, says Bray. It’s the environment we’re creating for our kids that’s the problem, and that environment includes increasing numbers of products high in high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS.
Bray, who served as founding president of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity and organized the first international congress on obesity in 1973, points out that between 1970 (when HFCS was introduced) and 2000 (when average yearly consumption of the ultra-sweet liquid sugar hit 73.5 pounds per person in this country), the prevalence of obesity more than doubled, from 15 percent to almost one-third of the adult population.
And worse, much worse, obesity among children 12 to 19 — who consume a disproportionate amount of the soft drinks, fruit juice, sports drinks and packaged cookies and other baked goods that are sweetened with HFCS — increased from 4.2 percent in 1970 to 15.3 percent in 2000.
Dangers of obesity
The implications for our children’s future are clear: “We know that if it’s not caught early, one in three of these overweight children will grow into overweight adults at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and early death,” Bray said at an October presentation in Fort Worth.
But there is hope. Obesity is largely preventable through changes in lifestyle, especially diet, says Bray, who called for removing soda machines from schools and reducing portion sizes of commercially available sodas in his now-famous commentary in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in April 2004.
Larger portions, more high-fat fast foods, less exercise of any kind, irregular sleep patterns, lower consumption of milk and other high-calcium foods, and increased consumption of HFCS in beverages go a long way toward explaining the obesity epidemic, Bray says.
“Genetic factors play an important role in the development of obesity, but given the rapidity with which the current epidemic of obesity has descended on the U.S. and many other countries, environmental factors are a more likely explanation,” he says. “Whatever its genetic and biochemical determinants, obesity in man is susceptible to an extraordinary degree of control of social factors. Environment is very important.”
You stop feeling full
Bray says the problem with HFCS is not only that it is sweeter than other forms of sugar, but also that it does not affect appetite. Fructose adds to overeating because it does not trigger chemical messengers that tell the brain the stomach is full and no longer hungry, like food and drinks that contain regular refined sugar do.
An internist whose pioneering research helped establish the connections between weight gain and the development of type 2 diabetes, Bray is a research professor and former director of the Pennington Center at Louisiana State University, the largest nutritional research center in the world.
He says consumers would be a lot better off without added sugar in any form, but that artificial sweeteners are much preferred over calorically sweetened drinks, even for children.
“Children less than 5 probably shouldn’t have any sweetened drinks, and for older children, diet drinks are better than regular soft drinks and fruit drinks,” Bray said. “A lot of parents are concerned about the ‘chemicals’ added to sweeten diet soft drinks, but all forms of extra added sugar and artificial sweeteners are bad. We don’t need added sugar in our diet.”
Bray is calling for improved packaging and labeling for food meant to be consumed as a single serving. Too many ready-to-eat foods and drinks are labeled as single servings but packaged as two or even three servings.
“It’s hard to find a single-serving soft drink,” he said. “Portion size is something government (the Food and Drug Administration) can and should do something about.”
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
Source: seattletimes.nwsource.com
Image: ncga.com
December 4th, 2005
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 02 December 2005
Every dieter knows that shedding excess pounds is far simpler than maintaining a new slimline self. Now Obesity specialists at Columbia University claim to have remedied the problem. They say that by restoring the hormone leptin to its level before weight loss, patients maintained their slim figures.
Leptin is thought to play a key evolutionary role in survival by signalling how much fat the body stores. As fat is lost, the level of leptin declines reducing energy expenditure to conserve calories.
The effect is the reverse of what dieters want. The reduction in energy expenditure means fewer calories are burnt. Dieters on the same calories gain weight.
In preliminary trials in 10 patients on a diet, three of whom were of normal weight and seven obese, researchers found that twice daily injections of leptin helped maintain low weight. The experiment was run for seven weeks. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the authors, led by Michael Rosenbaum, say that the body interprets the weight-reduced state as one of “relative leptin insufficiency”.
“This decrease in energy expenditure is of sufficient magnitude to account - in part - for the very high recidivism to obesity in otherwise successfully weight-reduced subjects.”
Every dieter knows that shedding excess pounds is far simpler than maintaining a new slimline self. Now Obesity specialists at Columbia University claim to have remedied the problem. They say that by restoring the hormone leptin to its level before weight loss, patients maintained their slim figures.
Leptin is thought to play a key evolutionary role in survival by signalling how much fat the body stores. As fat is lost, the level of leptin declines reducing energy expenditure to conserve calories.
The effect is the reverse of what dieters want. The reduction in energy expenditure means fewer calories are burnt. Dieters on the same calories gain weight.
In preliminary trials in 10 patients on a diet, three of whom were of normal weight and seven obese, researchers found that twice daily injections of leptin helped maintain low weight. The experiment was run for seven weeks. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the authors, led by Michael Rosenbaum, say that the body interprets the weight-reduced state as one of “relative leptin insufficiency”.
“This decrease in energy expenditure is of sufficient magnitude to account - in part - for the very high recidivism to obesity in otherwise successfully weight-reduced subjects.”
Source: news.independent.co.uk
December 4th, 2005
Cleveland Clinic may be advertising its bariatric surgery in UPMC’s back yard, but there are still plenty of candidates to go around
Sunday, December 04, 2005
By Christopher Snowbeck, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A battle of the bulge is brewing between hospitals in Pittsburgh and Cleveland over patients who need bariatric surgery, an increasingly popular treatment for severe obesity that has become a lucrative revenue source for hospitals.
The Cleveland Clinic began running newspaper ads in Pittsburgh last month courting patients who are more than 100 pounds overweight and considering the gastric bypass.
While the marketing director for the Cleveland hospital said it was unintentional, a line from the new ad campaign closely echoes a former slogan for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center by stating: “Choose a bariatric program as if your life depends on it.”
Officials at UPMC and other hospitals in the Pittsburgh area say they aren’t scared by the competition. They say hospitals and surgeons that perform bariatric surgeries here are plenty good, so patients don’t need to travel.
And they say they aren’t noticing any drop-off in demand for the procedure. Considering the number of number of obesie people in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and across the country, there’s plenty of business to go around, the local hospitals contend.
“Four percent of American adults are morbidly obese,” said Dr. Anita P. Courcoulas, director of bariatric surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, referring to patients who are potential candidates because they have body mass indexes above 40, which often correlates to being 100 pounds overweight. People with slightly lower indexes might be candidates if they also have certain health problems related to weight.
That means that even while the number of gastric bypass operations performed each year is increasing dramatically, it’s still reaching “only a fraction” of the number of people who could benefit from surgery, Dr. Courcoulas said.
The Cleveland Clinic is reaching out to bariatric surgery patients not just in Pittsburgh but also in Akron, Canton and Erie this year, and will extend the effort to other parts of Ohio and Michigan next year, said James Blazar, chief marketing officer. Pittsburgh doesn’t represent a uniquely large market of obese patients compared to Cleveland, he added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not rank cities in terms of the proportion of obese residents, but it does collect the results of phone surveys about health risks in all 50 states. During 2002, those surveys found that the statewide populations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, respectively, were 23 percent and 23.9 percent obese — greater than the national average of 22.2 percent.
While it’s unclear whether Pittsburgh is the fatter city, it likely has a larger number of patients who know Dr. Philip Schauer, the staff director of the bariatric surgery program at the Cleveland Clinic. That’s because Dr. Schauer left UPMC last year after practicing here for several years, and building a large practice.
Bariatric surgery patients often undergo tests and counseling for months prior to undergoing surgery, so it wouldn’t be surprising if some patients who met Dr. Schauer at UPMC followed him to Cleveland for care, said Dr. Neil Hutcher, a bariatric surgeon in Richmond, Va., and president of the American Society of Bariatric Surgeons.
He said patients often are willing to travel long distances for surgeons they’ve never met personally but have learned about on the Internet.
“My understanding is that it’s only 100 miles from Cleveland to Pittsburgh,” said Dr. Hutcher. “Even though it’s different states, 100 miles is not an inordinate distance for a bariatric patient to travel.”
The Cleveland Clinic says more than 100 patients have traveled from Western Pennsylvania already. But Dr. Courcoulas, the UPMC surgeon, insists the Pittsburgh program isn’t suffering a lack of demand. On the contrary, UPMC has a waiting list of patients seeking the surgery.
Nor have patients been bypassing the North Side in favor of the drive to Cleveland, according to officials at Allegheny General Hospital, which is one of least seven medical centers in the region that perform bariatric surgeries.
“There’s certainly no shortage [of hospitals] here,” said Dr. Joe Colella, director of bariatric surgery at Allegheny General. “Patients who would want access to surgical medical care for weight problems would really be hard-pressed to do better elsewhere.”
The Cleveland Clinic’s marketing push comes at a time when more health insurers are trying to restrict access to bariatric surgery. At a cost of about $25,000 each in simple cases — and much more in more complicated ones — the growing popularity of the celebrity-promoted procedures has been troubling to health plans.
A 2004 report from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council found that 6,791 gastric bypass surgeries were performed in the state in 2003, up tenfold from 1999 when only 674 were performed. Between 1999 and 2003, the number of surgeons performing gastric bypass surgery increased from 31 to 84, the council reported, and the number of facilities increased from 26 to 49.
At a time of runaway health care costs, some employers and insurers are drawing the line at the surgery.
HealthAmerica decided that, effective June 1, groups renewing their health benefits with the insurer no longer will receive obesity surgery coverage in their basic medical plan. Firms with more than 250 employees can obtain coverage if they purchase a rider for obesity surgery. HealthAmerica’s move follows similar steps taken by national insurers Aetna and Cigna.
Gastric bypass surgery is still part of basic health insurance coverage at Highmark, but the number of surgeries covered by the region’s largest health insurer dropped during 2004 after the insurer tightened the criteria for patients seeking operations.
While insurers say they are restricting access due to safety concerns — and doctors fire back that such claims are vastly overstated — proponents of the surgery noted that Medicare appears poised to cover more of the procedures for patients under age 65.
“I think it’s a major positive,” said Dr. Schauer, the Cleveland Clinic surgeon, in reference to Medicare’s decision late last month to seek public comment on a proposal to expand coverage. A final decision from Medicare is expected next year.
“That may influence the national market in this area in terms of whether other payors will cover the procedure,” Dr. Schauer said.
Source: post-gazette.com
December 4th, 2005
Sales in schools targeted by group
By Caroline E. Mayer, Washington Post | December 2, 2005
WASHINGTON — The fight against sugary soft drinks is beginning to foam over.
A coalition of lawyers who have actively and successfully sued tobacco companies says it is close to filing a class-action lawsuit against soft-drink makers for selling sugared sodas in schools. The lawyers, who have been trying to develop a case against the soft-drink makers for more than two years, say a lawsuit could be filed within the next few weeks, probably in Massachusetts, which has one of the nation’s most plaintiff-friendly consumer-protection laws.
As reports of the pending lawsuit proliferate, the beverage industry is shoring up its defenses. The American Beverage Association released a study yesterday that showed a 24 percent drop in purchases of full-calorie carbonated soft drinks at schools from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, the study showed, high-school students drank the equivalent of one 12-ounce can of such soda a week, while younger students drank less.
The reduction in soft-drink consumption in schools ‘’started long before there were trial lawyers looking for an industry to sue,” said Susan Neely, president of the beverage association. ‘’Litigation isn’t the answer to a complex social problem like childhood obesity,” she added.
The beverage association’s study showing the decline ‘’reflects the overall trend of the industry,” said John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest. ‘’Carbonated soft drinks are down across the board.”
Leading the litigation effort is Richard Daynard, an associate dean at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, who is also president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center and chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, both of which have provided legal support to lawyers suing tobacco companies. Daynard was involved in many of the state cases against the tobacco firms that led to the landmark $246 billion settlement in 1998.
Joining Daynard is Stephen Sheller, a Philadelphia lawyer who came up with the legal theory that tobacco firms deceived consumers into thinking their low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes were safer to smoke than regular cigarettes. That theory helped lead to a $10 billion consumer-fraud verdict against Philip Morris USA in an Illinois state court two years ago. That verdict is under appeal.
Also involved in the prospective lawsuit is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that has aggressively pressed for more detailed food labels and less fat and sodium in all kinds of food. Earlier this year, the group called for federally mandated health warnings similar to those on cigarettes.
‘’The idea is to get soda machines out of schools because they are clearly making a substantial contribution to the obesity epidemic,” Daynard said yesterday in an interview. ‘’This is an unfair practice under state consumer-protection laws,” he said.
The suit’s legal basis will be tied to the concept of ‘’attractive nuisance: If somebody has something on his land like a swimming pool that he knows is attractive to kids and dangerous, then he has some obligation to keep the kids away from it,” Daynard said. ‘’You want to keep kids away from dangerous objects, and a soda machine is demonstrated to be a dangerous object for kids.”
Daynard said the challenge is finding the right set of parents to sign on as plaintiffs for the class-action case.
Victor Schwartz, a Washington lawyer who has advised companies on product-liability policies, said the case ‘’would require a radical modification of traditional liability laws with an expansion of statutory consumer-protection claims.” However, he noted, Massachusetts is one of the few states in the country where plaintiffs do not have to demonstrate actual damage in a consumer-protection case — just that a violation occurred.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
Source: boston.com
December 4th, 2005
