The body doesn’t handle large amounts of fructose well. You can maintain life with intravenous glucose, but not with intravenous fructose; severe derangement of liver function results. There’s also evidence that a high intake of fructose elevates levels of circulating fats (serum triglycerides), increasing the risk of heart disease. I never use fructose in my home.  dr. andrew weil

So, there is a new criminal in town.  Seems to be the next generation of high fructose corn syrup.  But this guy is even more devious placing himself in “healthy” drinks.

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I am referring to crystalline fructose.  It is produced by allowing HFCS to crystallize. It is then dried and milled into the desired particle size for packaging.  As a result, it is 100% fructose.  

Fructose is not the best thing for your body.  Fructose exists in foods as either a monosaccharide (free fructose) or as a disaccharide (sucrose). Free fructose does not undergo digestion; however when fructose is consumed in the form of sucrose, digestion occurs entirely in the upper small intestine. As sucrose comes into contact with the membrane of the small intestine, the enzyme sucrase catalyzes the cleavage of sucrose to yield one glucose and fructose unit. Fructose, passes through the small intestine, virtually unchanged, then enters the portal vein and is directed toward the liver.

I know that is a lot of information, so lets see if I can make it a bit more understandable.  When fructose is in the presence of sucrose, your body has a better chance of understanding what to do with it in terms of breaking it down and processing it.  When it stands alone, your body does not know how to metabolize the molecule, so it sends it right to your liver.  This results in the fattening of the liver, or cirrhosis.  So, why is this important.  Well, HFCS is a blend of 45% sucrose and 55% fructose.  Therefore, to an extent your body knows what to do in its presence.  In contrast, crystalline fructose is 100% fructose.  This means you have an even higher chance of developing fatty liver.  

(edit. note.: I do not want this to be used as justification for allowing consumption of HFCS.  HFCS has its own list of harmful reasons to stop ingesting it.  In this example, I am just focusing on the metabolism of the fructose molecule.)

Here is another reason to avoid crystalline fructose…. arsenic.  Yes.  The processing of this molecule allows for acceptable levels of arsenic, heavy metals, lead and chloride.  Again, these are toxic chemicals that your body is unable to process.  The impact on your health is immeasurable.  While, a simple serving of the drink might not be bad, over time the build up of any one of these components can lead to death.  

The biggest reason this particular molecule is so bad is because of the products it is being placed in: health drinks.  Vitamin Water seems to be the most popular of the beverages, but other examples are FUZE, Mistic, SoBe, Snapple and W20 for Women.

There is an entire category of beverage, marketed as healthful for you and your body, most commonly encouraged to drink after your work-out.  In reality, you would be better off drinking a Coke after a hard exercise routine, as compared to Vitamin Water.

This is just another example of how the food industry and the corn industry have managed to get a toxic substance into the food you eat.  As people get away from HFCS, there is something to easily replace it.  And as people become more aware of CF, there will be another substitution.  This is an ongoing process that is damaging the health of Americans.

 A 10-year, $20 billion tax on medical device makers would begin in 2013 under President Barack Obama’s new healthcare reform proposal.

It’s déja vu all over again for medical device manufacturers that may have thought the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts would kill the dreaded $20 billion medical device tax.

That’s because President Barack Obama’s legislative proposal for overhauling the healthcare system, released by the White House today, includes the very same 10-year, $20 billion tax on the medical device industry that was included in earlier healthcare reform bills.

The excise tax, which would be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, will not be implemented until 2013, according to the 11-page proposal. The rollout deadline marks a change from the Senate’s healthcare reform bill, which passed on Dec. 24, 2009. That bill had the approximately $2 billion-per-year tax on the industry beginning in 2011. (In December, an amendment sponsored by Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to push the date back to 2013 wasn’t adopted in the final Senate bill.)

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But there was hope at the time that the amendment’s provisions would be adopted in the compromise bill between the House and Senate versions. In addition to pushing the tax back to 2013, the amendment would have exempted companies with less than $100 million in annual sales and would have required those reporting between $100 million and $150 million pay an excise tax on 50 percent of their revenues; the rate for companies with more than $150 million in annual sales would have been 100 percent. If approved, the amendment would also have made the excise tax deductible.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also signed on to that amendment.

Some industry officials had hoped that the election in January of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward M. Kennedy scuttled the healthcare bill altogether, as Brown’s win eliminated the Democrats’ so-called “super majority.” The industry spent more than $20 million lobbying Congress during the fourth quarter of 2009, trying to make sure its voice was heard.

The White House is determined to make another push at taking back the reins in the healthcare debate. The new proposal marks the start of what promises to be an eventful week of debate in Washington over the fate of healthcare reform. Congressional leaders from both parties are set to participate with the president in what’s being billed as a “summit” on healthcare reform Feb. 25. The all-day event will be televised on C-Span.

The White House proposal is expected cost taxpayers some $950 billion over 10 years.

Researchers hope to harness mind’s reaction to medication

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 30 (HealthDay News) — Researchers have long wondered why placebos — fake medications — sometimes help sick patients get better.

Now, a new study says placebos can help psoriasis patients get by on smaller doses of a steroid drug that dampens their immune systems.

The study authors, from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, think they may be able to develop other treatments that rely on the placebo effect to boost the power of lower doses of existing drugs.

“Our study provides evidence that the placebo effect can make possible the treatment of psoriasis with an amount of drug that should be too small to work,” lead investigator Dr. Robert Ader, a professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, said in a news release from the school. “While these results are preliminary, we believe the medical establishment needs to recognize the mind’s reaction to medication as a powerful part of many drug effects, and start taking advantage of it.”

There are limitations, however. Placebos can’t help people who are unconscious or stimulate the release of substances in the body, such as insulin, Ader said.

The researchers tested creams on 46 patients with mild and moderate cases of psoriasis. One group got fully medicated creams, while others got mixtures that were partially medicated or received full doses only part of the time.

In some cases, the patients seemed to do well despite not getting the full dose, suggesting a psychosomatic effect.

The study was published online Dec. 22 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

More information

For more on the placebo effect, see the American Cancer Society.

– Randy Dotinga

SOURCE: University of Rochester Medical Center, news release, Dec. 22, 2009

ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2010) — Children whose parents refuse the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine appear more likely to develop the disease, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Routine childhood immunizations have reduced illness and death related to a wide variety of vaccine-preventable diseases, according to background information in the article. Recent trends, however, suggest that public trust in the national immunization program is declining.

“Expanding childhood immunization requirements and increased media coverage of alleged associations between vaccinations and chronic illnesses have heightened parental concerns regarding vaccine safety,” the authors write. “Parents have also expressed concerns that children are at low risk of infection and that many vaccine-preventable diseases are not serious. During the last decade, as a consequence, the number of parents who claimed non-medical exemptions to school immunization requirements has increased significantly.”

Jason M. Glanz, Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Research, Denver, and colleagues studied 133 children enrolled in one health plan who developed chickenpox between 1998 and 2008. Each case was matched to four randomly selected children who were the same age and sex and had been enrolled in the plan for the same amount of time, but had not developed chickenpox.

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Among the 133 children who developed chickenpox, seven (5 percent) had parents who refused the varicella vaccine, compared with three (0.6 percent) refusals among the 493 controls. “Compared with vaccine acceptors, children of vaccine-refusing parents had a nine-fold increased risk of varicella illness,” the authors write. “Overall, 5 percent of varicella cases in the study population were attributed to vaccine refusal. We believe these results will be helpful to health care providers and parents when discussing decisions about immunizing children.”

The findings suggest that if more parents refuse vaccines, the incidence of varicella and related complications also may increase over time, especially among individuals at high risk of severe infection (such as pregnant women, infants and those with compromised immune systems), the authors note. “These results provide evidence to counter the misperception among some parents that unvaccinated children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” they conclude.

This study was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and in part by Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research.

New York, January 6 – Most of us have a habit of grabbing the kitchen spoons while taking liquid medicines. However, a new study warns that wrong spoon size may cause dosing errors as people tend to pour either too little or too much of the medicine.

“Clearly we know that there are a lot of people — despite all the alternatives they are offered — who open the kitchen drawer and grab a spoon to serve up their liquid medicine,” observed study co-author Koert van Ittersum, an assistant professor of marketing in the College of Management at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

“But previous work has already shown that the size of your mug or glass influences how much one pours,” he noted. “Just as the size of a plate influences how much one eats. So, here we have found that utensils also have an effect on dosing because our mind plays tricks on us. And so spoon size matters.”

195 students studied
To find out whether spoon size may cause medicine dosage errors, Ittersum and colleagues focused on 195 students who had visited the university clinic during the cold and flu season.

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They were asked to pour 5 mL (equivalent to one teaspoon) of liquid cold medicine into different sizes of teaspoons.

To give them a basic understanding of the volume of a teaspoon, the volunteers were first asked to pour 5 mL of the medicine in a normal/ actual sized teaspoon.

Following this exercise, they were asked to pour the same amount in a medium sized and then a larger teaspoon.

At the end of each exercise, the volunteers also reported how confident they felt that they had poured the correct 5 mL dose.

Spoon size found to cause dosing errors
The researchers found that the doses significantly varied according to the size of the spoon used, even though the participants reported an above-average confidence that they had poured the accurate dose while using one or the other tablespoon.

For instance, while using a medium sized tablespoon, the participants poured an average of 4.58 mL, which was around eight percent underdosed than the prescribed limit.

And they poured 5.58 mL when using a large tablespoon which was nearly 12 percent more than prescribed.

The researchers cautioned that these types of dosing errors may really add to ineffectiveness for the tired and sick people who are prescribed such doses every four to eight hours for several days.

Therefore, one should use more reliable and exact measuring dosing devices such as measuring caps or droppers, dosing spoons and/or dosing syringes when taking liquid medicines, they concluded.

Findings of the study are published in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.