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Monday, March 13th, 2017

How healthy are low-gluten diets anyway?

Sara Chodosh,    -  Popular Science/The Raw Story

Stephan:  Where I live giving a dinner party has become a study in trying to plan a menu around the dietary restrictions of the people you want to invite. One of the biggest issues is gluten, its presence or absence. Most of this is affectation based on faux-science. And I am sorry to say that it is a few holistic doctors and chiropractors using applied kinesiology muscle testing who are responsible. First applied kinesiology is not a reliable test of anything, no medical decisions should be made on the basis of muscle testing. Why do I say that so categorically, and how do I know? Because, supported by the BIAL Foundation, and Atlantic University, I spent more than a year doing experimental research on this topic, and the results were stark and unequivocal: Applied kinesiology did not work. Period. Full stop. If you want to get the paper, go to Academia.edu and search on my name, then search on "applied kinesiology" and you will find the paper which you can freely download. Please do so. But it is worse than that, many of these diet fads, produce negative unintended consequences, and that includes eliminating gluten. Here's the story.

Credit: shutterstock

Eating less gluten is associated with a higher risk of diabetes, but it’s more complicated than that. (emphasis added)

In the pantheon of fad diets, there is perhaps none more hated on than gluten-free. And despite how annoying fad dieters are (if I hear one more person order a salad because they’re ‘gluten-free’ and then ask for croutons…), it’s not unreasonable to want to avoid foods that might possibly be bad for you. But is gluten actually bad for people who don’t have a problem with it?

There’s no real evidence that avoiding gluten leads to tangible health benefits, assuming that you don’t have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity. But there also haven’t been many studies that actually asked that question—there’s just not much information out there. On Thursday we got some preliminary answers…kind of.

People who eat low gluten diets are at a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes, according to results presented on Thursday at the American Heart Association […]

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Monday, March 13th, 2017

As obesity keeps rising, more Americans are just giving up

Melissa Healy,  Reporter  -  Los Angeles Times

Stephan:  Roughly two-thirds of  Americans are overweight or, even worse, morbidly obese. It is the largest percentage of a population in history. We are a nation of fatties, with all the health problems that come with that. And the sad news is many of us are just giving up. Here's the latest research.

It stands to reason that if you know you’re overweight or obese, and you know your extra pounds are unhealthy, that you’ve made a stab at losing weight. Right?

Not so much anymore, new research shows.

The proportion of American adults who were either overweight or obese has been growing steadily for decades, rising from about 53% a generation ago to roughly 66% more recently. (emphasis added)

But the share of these adults who had gone on a diet dropped during the same period, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The study relied on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an ongoing project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the first survey period, between 1988 and 1994, about 56% of overweight or obese adults reported they had tried to lose weight in the last year. By the last survey period, between 2009 and 2014, the proportion of overweight or obese respondents reporting recent weight-loss attempts had declined to about 49%.

That trend […]

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Monday, March 13th, 2017

Americans now drink more bottled water than soda: What has changed?

Mengqi Sun,  Staff Writer  -  The Christian Science Monitor

Stephan:  Here is one of those health stories that has some good news, and some bad news. We'll start with the good news. Americans increasingly are turning to bottled water instead of drinking bubbly caffeine and sugar water. The bad news is that one of the reasons they are doing this is that increasingly Americans do not trust what comes out of their taps to be safe. And of course there remains the issue of all those bottles.

Credit: Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Bottled water surpassed carbonated soft drinks to be the largest beverage category by volume, according to the latest report from market research and consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp. While the new data confirms a decades-long shift in consumption habits from soda to water, largely driven by health concerns, some argue it also suggests a need to improve water infrastructure in the United States.

US bottled water sales grew from 11.8 billion gallons in 2015 to 12.8 billion gallons in 2016, BMC said. While annual per capita consumption of bottled water reached 39.3 gallons, carbonated soft drinks slipped to 38.5 gallons. That’s a dramatic drop from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the average American drank more than 50 gallons of soft drinks per year.

 For Julie Ralston Aoki, director of Healthy Eating and Active Living at the Public Health Law Center in St. Paul, Minn., the trend is driven by health-conscious consumers.

“People want to make a healthier choice,” she tells The Christian Science Monitor […]

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Sunday, March 12th, 2017

Majority of Americans Oppose Transgender Bathroom Restrictions

Daniel Cox, Ph.D., Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., ,    -  Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)

Stephan:  The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) like Gallup, and Pew provides well conducted scientifically sound research data, and here is their latest. Although the headling is about transgender bathrooms for me there are two big takeaways from this survey: First, White Christian Fundamentalists (almost all of whom are Republicans) think they are a persecuted minority -- more persecuted than Muslim or Jews. As I have pointed out before religious fundamentalism of whatever denomination always has the same four defining attributes: 1) A sense of self-righteous superiority; 2) A conviction they are being persecuted; 3) Obsessive sexual dysfunction; and, 4) An urgent need to subordinate and control anyone with a vagina. My second takeaway is: the enormous and growing disparity  between the increasing intolerance and exclusionism of the old, and the growing tolerance and inclusionism of the young. Both conclusions explain a lot. This is why the Republican Party has become an aging White racist "Christian" fundamentalist political movement manipulated by the uber-rich to the detriment of the peasant class.

I. Religious Liberty Issues

Religiously based Refusals to Serve Gay, Lesbian People

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans oppose allowing small business owners in their state to refuse to provide products or services to gay or lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs. Roughly one-third (32%) support such religiously based service refusals.

A majority (52%) of Republicans believe small business owners should be allowed to refuse products or services to gay and lesbian people if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs; fewer than one-third of political independents (31%) and Democrats (16%) agree. More than eight in ten (81%) Democrats and about two-thirds (66%) of independents say small businesses should not be allowed to refuse to do business with gay and lesbian people on religious grounds.

Use regions/landmarks to skip ahead to chart and navigate between data series.

Most Religious Groups Oppose Allowing Businesses to Refuse Service to Gay and Lesbian People on Religious Grounds. Do you favor or oppose allowing a small business owner in your state to refuse to provide products or services to gay or lesbian people, if doing so violates their religious beliefs?
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Sunday, March 12th, 2017

Deadly fungal infection that doctors have been fearing now reported in U.S.

Lena H. Sun,    -  The Washington Post

Stephan:  If you have been reading SR for some time you know that for almost a decade I have been tracking a very concerning trend: the collapse of antibiotic medicine. By which is meant that "super bugs" and infections are beginning to show up that are highly resistant to every known antibiotic. It was not until 1940 that penicillin could be purified and turned into an antibiotic, the first use of this new class of drugs.  Only the very elderly remember what the world was like pre-antibiotic, but those that do will tell you it was very scary. Fungal infections could kill you and routinely did so. Bacteria could end your life in days, and it happened frequently.  A scratch, or an infected blister could be deadly then, and it looks like we are headed in that direction again. Here is an excellent report on what is happening.

A strain of Candida auris cultured in a petri dish at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Credit: Shawn Lockhart/CDC

Nearly three dozen people in the United States have been diagnosed with a deadly and highly drug-resistant fungal infection since federal health officials first warned U.S. clinicians last June to be on the lookout for the emerging pathogen that has been spreading around the world.

The fungus, a strain of a kind of yeast known as Candida auris, has been reported in a dozen countries on five continents starting in 2009, when it was found in an ear infection in a patient in Japan. Since then, the fungus has been reported in Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, Venezuela and the United Kingdom.

Unlike garden variety yeast infections, this one causes serious bloodstream infections, spreads easily from person to person in health-care settings, and survives for months on skin and for weeks on bed rails, chairs and other hospital equipment. Some strains are resistant to all three major classes of antifungal drugs. Based on information from […]

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