Why Omega-3 Oils Help at the Cellular Level -
Findings suggest possibility of boosting their health benefit
For the first time, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have peered inside a living mouse cell and mapped the processes that power the celebrated health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. More profoundly, they say their findings suggest it may be possible to manipulate these processes to short-circuit inflammation before it begins, or at least help to resolve inflammation before it becomes detrimental.
The work is published in the May 14, 2012 online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The therapeutic benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in certain fish oils, have long been known, dating back to at least the 1950s, when cod liver oil was found to be effective in treating ailments like eczema and arthritis. In the 1980s, scientists reported that Eskimos eating a fish-rich diet enjoyed better coronary health than counterparts consuming mainland foods.
“There have been tons of epidemiological studies linking health benefits to omega-3 oils, but not a lot of deep science,” said Edward A. Dennis, PhD, distinguished professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry. “This is the first comprehensive study of what fish oils actually do inside a cell.”
The scientists fed mouse macrophages – a kind of white blood cell – three different kinds of fatty acid: eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (AA). EPA and DHA are major polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids, essential to a broad range of cellular and bodily functions, and the primary ingredient in commercial fish oil dietary supplements. AA is a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid prevalent in the human diet.
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In pill health
Half of all American adults take one or more dietary supplements, mostly multivitamins. Selling these supplements is a $30 billion-a-year industry in the United States, comparable to the National Institutes of Health’s entire budget for all medical research.
Yet, with very few exceptions, nutritional deficiencies in the United States are rare. Americans might not necessarily eat right, but they are not nutritionally deprived.
So why do most people take them? Their answer: “They’re healthy. They can’t hurt.”
Most people are wrong.In a recent commentary in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Maria Elena Martinez, PhD, a professor in the department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Co-leader of the Reducing Cancer Disparities program at the Moores UCSD Cancer Center, and colleagues discuss the benefits and risks of dietary supplements, particularly when taken to “prevent cancer.”
Their conclusion, after reviewing existing scientific literature on the subject: There is little empirical evidence to support the widely held and widely advertised notion that popular supplements like beta-carotene, folic acid, vitamin D and calcium reduce cancer risk.Indeed, the opposite may be true.
That’s not what people want to hear, of course. Axioms like “an apple-a-day” and “we are what we eat” have a sort of enduring resonance. They may be true, write Martinez and colleagues in their JNCI paper, but the nutritional supplement industry exploits it to excess, suggesting in often misleading fashion that if a little bit of a nutrient is good, then a lot must be better.
This is not just another case of economic exploitation in the marketplace. While there is little compelling evidence that nutritional supplements significantly prevent cancer, there is growing proof that too much might cause it.
For example, some studies have found that exogenous or added antioxidants like beta-carotene might, in fact, promote oxidative stress linked to carcinogenesis. Other trials have found that long-term folic acid supplementation boosts the risk of colorectal tumor growths. Several observational studies support an association between higher calcium consumption and reduced breast cancer risk, but higher calcium intake also appears to increase the chances of contracting prostate cancer.
The situation is, in a word, confounding. The observational studies that nutritional supplement-makers most often cite as evidentiary proof (along with testimonials utterly bereft empirical value) are inherently limited. They lack the standardized treatment regimens and controls required to scientifically prove or disprove efficacy and safety. They have value in terms of involving large numbers of test participants – the proverbial big picture – but the devil is usually in the details: Cancer risk is different in different tissues. Personal characteristics, from genetics to behaviors, are massively influential. What is the effect, for example, of taking many supplements at once? How do they interact with each other? How well do they work if the person is a smoker, drinker, obese or all three?
These are factors that must be – and are – addressed in the gold standard of scientific experimentation: the randomized controlled trial (RCT), which is rigorously designed to produce precise data without bias. Unfortunately, RCTs of nutritional supplements are relatively few in number, and their conclusions thus far have been mixed.Cancer does not give up its secrets easily. RCTs are expensive. It often takes decades for cancer to manifest itself, much longer than most RCTs attempting to reveal the cancer prevention benefits or cancer-causing dangers in nutritional supplementation.
Nonetheless, Martinez and colleagues argue in their commentary that more, longer and better-designed RCTs are needed, indeed essential to determining the benefits and risks of supplements.In the meantime, they call for improved oversight of the manufacture and marketing of dietary supplements, which has a short and sketchy history of regulation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration only began attempting to regulate these substances in the 1960s. Its efforts have been significantly and repeatedly constrained by a well-funded supplement industry and its political advocates.
Today, dietary supplements exist in a sort of legal limbo somewhere between foods and drugs. Manufacturers cannot make bold, direct assertions of cancer prevention benefits. The high-profile deaths from the supplement ephedra helped end that, but they can – and do – advertise the cancer prevention powers of supplements by implication.Take Pill X, which research has been found to reduce the growth of prostate cells in culture. Makers of Pill X advertise that it “supports prostate health.” They cite stories of real people who took Pill X and didn’t get prostate cancer. For the casual consumer, it’s easy to conclude that Pill X has anticancer properties, despite the lack of any real science to support that conclusion.
Of course, maybe Pill X does reduce cancer risk – and maybe it increases it. No one knows. The scientific data are lacking. Think about that next time you take a nutritional supplement you probably don’t need.
Insulin Resistance, Inflammation and a Muscle-Saving Protein -
In the online May 2 issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine publish three distinct articles exploring:
- the complex interactions of lipids and inflammation in insulin resistance
- the roles of omega 3 fatty acids and a particular gene in fighting inflammation
- how elevated levels of a particular protein might delay the muscle-destroying effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions around the world, fueled in large part by the equally alarming expansion of obesity as a global health problem. But while it’s well-known that obesity is the most common cause of insulin resistance – the primary metabolic abnormality in type 2 diabetes – researchers have only recently begun to effectively parse the underlying, complicated relationships between lipids (fats and related molecules essential to cell structure and function) and chronic tissue inflammation (a key cause of obesity-induced insulin resistance).
(Source: fyeahanatomy)
"Link Between Fast Food and Depression" -
EurekAlert article.
“According to a recent study headed by scientists from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada, eating commercial baked goods (fairy cakes, croissants, doughnuts, etc.) and fast food (hamburgers, hotdogs and pizza) is linked to depression.
Published in the Public Health Nutrition journal, the results reveal that consumers of fast food, compared to those who eat little or none, are 51% more likely to develop depression.
Furthermore, a dose-response relationship was observed. In other words this means that “the more fast food you consume, the greater the risk of depression,” explains Almudena Sánchez-Villegas, lead author of the study, to SINC.
The study demonstrates that those participants who eat the most fast food and commercial baked goods are more likely to be single, less active and have poor dietary habits, which include eating less fruit, nuts, fish, vegetables and olive oil. Smoking and working more than 45 hours per week are other prevalent characteristics of this group.”
My first job was working at McDonald’s when I was 16. Then I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Those two combined essentially ruined fast food for me forever. After reading this, I’m not too bummed out about it.
Yeesh. Good article, depressing findings.
By the way, you should consider following aspiringdoctors — a pre-med advice blog with a VERY wide array of topics. Good stuff there!
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How to Best Help Your Child Lose Weight: Lose Weight Yourself -
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and The University of Minnesota indicates that a parent’s weight change is a key contributor to the success of a child’s weight loss in family-based treatment of childhood obesity. The results were published today in the advanced online edition of the journal Obesity.
“We looked at things such as parenting skills and styles, or changing the home food environment, and how they impacted a child’s weight,” said Kerri N. Boutelle, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at UC San Diego and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego. “The number one way in which parents can help an obese child lose weight? Lose weight themselves. In this study, it was the most important predictor of child weight loss.”
Recent data suggests that 31 percent of children in the United States are overweight or obese, or between four and five million children. Current treatment programs generally require participation by both parents and children in a plan that combines nutrition education and exercise with behavior therapy techniques.
“Parents are the most significant people in a child’s environment, serving as the first and most important teachers,” said Boutelle “They play a significant role in any weight-loss program for children, and this study confirms the importance of their example in establishing healthy eating and exercise behaviors for their kids.”
The researchers looked at eighty parent-child groups with an 8 to 12-year-old overweight or obese child, who participated in a parent-only or parent + child treatment program for five months.
The study focused on evaluating the impact of three types of parenting skills taught in family-based behavioral treatment for childhood obesity, and the impact of each on the child’s body weight: the parent modeling behaviors to promote their own weight loss, changes in home food environment, and parenting style and techniques (for example, a parent’s ability to help limit the child’s eating behavior, encouraging the child and participating in program activities).
“If you don’t touch pubic hair, you’re doing it wrong.” —
clinical skills professor explaining how to check for a femoral pulse (via wayfaringmd)
When a trauma comes into the ER and you need blood for labs and a blood gas, make sure you remember this. Otherwise, you will look like a fool when you are the med student constantly missing the artery and the other docs in the room break out the doppler to show you how wrong you are.
Wonklife: The cost of not controlling health-care costs -
Welcoming Ezra Klein, one of my favorites, to tumblr:
RAND Health researchers combined data from multiple sources to depict the effects of rising health care costs on a median-income married couple with two children covered by employer-sponsored insurance. The analysis compared the family’s health care cost burden in 1999 with that incurred in 2009. The take-away message: Although family income grew throughout the decade, the financial benefits that the family might have realized were largely consumed by health care cost growth, leaving them with only $95 more per month than in 1999. Had health care costs tracked the rise in the Consumer Price Index, rather than outpacing it, an average American family would have had an additional $450 per month — more than $5,000 per year — to spend on other priorities.
(Source: rand.org)
My heart aches knowing the lifestyle of western civilization is making not only people, but also their pets overweight and experiencing health problems. Right in the beginning of the article there is a quote from a random person who was interviewed that I believe sums up the experiences of most Americans: “I didn’t notice the weight creeping on — it was like all of a sudden he was just this fat dog.” The unshocking, old news is that we as people have been experiencing this for the last few decades. Not only have the health problems related to excess weight and lack of exercise caused a giant shift in society, but now these problems have found their way to domestic animals. The only solution consists of three words: “Do something. Anything.”
Take a minute today to think about the important work your heart does for you and thank it by: 1- Exercising 30 minutes a day (a brisk walk is all you need.) 2- Eat more veggies and fruits! 3- Quit smoking (or never start) 4- Take a fish oil supplement. 5- Seriously, get some exercise. Tumblr will be here for you when you get back.
I’ll probably post random heart/blood vessel facts throughout the month. You’ve been warned.