MACDICTIVE?—"Researchers: popular fast foods may be just as addictive as hard drugs. 'It seems that the rats ingest more and more and the changes that we see in the brain are similar to what we would see if we gave a rat morphine or heroin nzoom.com, July, 13.'" "Americans spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined Fast Food Nation."  GOTO
We've Got A Big Problem Here

FATCALORIES.COM BIG MAC: DINNER OR DESSERT?

TRIGGER FOODS? STUDY FINDS SUGARY DRINKS CAUSE CHILDREN TO EAT MORE— "Cornell team's study of 30 children aged 6 to 12 found that on days when they drank sweetened drinks, they took in, on average, 244 more calories a day. The children did not eat any less food to compensate for the extra calories in the sodas, lemonades and other drink treats, the researchers said Jrnl. Pediatrics, June 2003." Trigger Diet   The School Lunch News

WORRIED ABOUT CHILDHOOD OBESITY EPIDEMIC?—"In response to rising obesity rates around the world, Kraft Foods Inc. said today it will initiate a new series of steps to further strengthen the alignment of its products and marketing practices with societal needs source." OR WORRIED ABOUT LAWSUITS?—"Dr. Henry Anhalt, director of pediatric endocrinology at New York's Infants and Children's Hospital of Brooklyn at Maimonides, said he thinks Kraft is trying to avoid lawsuits such as those that have hit the tobacco industry CBSNews, July 1." See Fighting Big Food  The School Lunch News

FIND GENE THAT FIGHTS OBESITY—"A gene that gets switched on only in the fat cells of obese mice may be a key to preventing obesity in humans, according to new research at The Rockefeller University in New York City and the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston source."

BABY FORMULA FATTENING?—"Infants who were fed breast milk more than infant formula, or who were breastfed for longer periods, had a lower risk of being overweight during older childhood and adolescence. In two studies looking at the effects of breast milk and formula on weight later in life, investigators found that breast-feeding significantly lowered the odds of being overweight by the early teen years, but showed less effect on weight during early childhood. Kids fed mainly breast milk for the first 6 months of life were 22% less likely to be overweight by age 14 source."

SHORT BOUTS OF EXERCISE EFFECTIVE—"Exercise accumulated in several short bouts has similar effects as one continuous bout with regard to aerobic fitness and weight loss during caloric restriction in overweight, young women source."

VARIETY SURPRISE CULPRIT IN PSYCHOLOGY OF OVERWEIGHT—Review of 39 animal and human studies concludes that "food consumption increases when there is more variety in a meal or diet. Increased variety in the food supply may contribute to obesity source."

HOW MUCH FAT SHOULD WE EAT? WE STILL DON'T KNOW—"Hooper et al present a systematic review of randomised controlled trials of dietary fat reduction or modification... The review shows only modest reductions in cardiovascular events in those remaining on diet for over two years. The authors found little evidence for optimal intakes of total or individual fats source."

WORLD HEALTH ORG. SAYS ACRYLAMIDE IN FAST FOODS IS 'SERIOUS PROBLEM'— "Foods in which acrylamide develops include potato chips, french fries, bread and processed cereals. We have concluded that the new findings constitute a serious problem source."  "AFFECTS CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS AND REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM source."  ACRYLAMIDE LEVELS IN FOODS  Nature Science Update  US FDA Plan  German Plan

OVERWORKED AMERICANS NOT SLEEPING—"Nearly two-thirds of adults in the U.S. (62%) experienced a sleep problem a few nights per week or more during the past year. Only 33% say they get at least the recommended 8 hours or more of sleep per night during the workweek source."

STUDY FINDS HERBAL ANTIDEPRESSANT EFFECTIVE—"St. John's Wort (hypericum) "therapeutically equivalent to imipramine in treating mild to moderate depression, but patients tolerate hypericum better." Imiprimine is a widely prescribed and highly profitable drug source.  Ireland bans over-the- counter sale of herbal antidepressant St. John's Wort. Although the herb has been used in Ireland, and around the world, for depression for 2000 years, govt. says: "The widespread availability and irresponsible advertising of St John's Wort as 'Nature's Prozac' created a major public health concern for the board source." (For more on non-drug antidepressants see Trigger Diet, Love Diet .) 

CHEMICAL SWITCHES OFF APPETITE IN MICE—"When injected, the substance, which is apparently non-toxic to the mice, wipes out the animals' interest in food within 20 minutes. The effect of the chemical called C75 wears off a few days after injections stop, and the mice resume normal feeding...Scientists have long known that a hormone called neuropeptide Y (NPY), located in the appetite centers in the brain's hypothalamus, is a major appetite regulator. If animals fast, NPY increases and appetite jumps sharply. In C75-treated mice, though, NPY production drops sharply. This gives us a good idea that C75 stops feeding by blocking NPY production in the brain source."

VIRUS THAT TRIGGERS OVERWEIGHT?—Researchers find Ad-36 virus causes animals to gain weight without increasing food intake, and that a third of overweight persons in their study had signs of Ad-36 in their blood.

 CAN PLANT REPAIR ITS GENETIC CODE? "In a discovery that has flabbergasted geneticists, researchers have shown that plants can overwrite the genetic code they inherit from their parents, and revert to that of their grandparents." nature.com, March 23

"The Royal Society, together with 67 of the world’s national science academies, is calling for the convention to outlaw human reproductive cloning, but not therapeutic cloning [for stem-cell research]." Royal Society (UK), August 30

"Come November, Californians will vote on Proposition 71, a $3 billion initiative to finance publicly stem-cell research that promises cures for diseases from Alzheimer's to cancer."  San Francisco.com, August 29

"64 per cent of [U.S.] respondents are in favour of granting federal funds for this type of scientific investigation, while 28 per cent disagree." Center for Public Opinion and Democracy

"Researchers at NIH and New York Medical College-Valhalla used mice to show that injecting adult bone marrow stem cells into damaged hearts could rebuild heart tissue and help restore heart function. Newly formed heart tissue occupied over two-thirds of the damaged portion of the heart nine days after the transplant. In other experiments, significant repair of heart damage was achieved by simply stimulating the production and release of stem cells from bone marrow, with the cells migrating to the heart and repairing damage. The studies indicate that adult stem cells can generate new heart tissue, decreasing the damage of coronary artery disease." source

"For the study described in Nature, the researchers got around the need for male-derived DNA by turning to mutant mice. The female mice were missing a chunk of DNA, and as a result, two of their genes would behave in an embryo as if they had come from a male. What's more, the scientists took this mutated DNA from the egg cells of newborns, because at such a young age the DNA has not yet taken on the full "female" imprinting seen in mature eggs. That DNA was combined with genes from ordinary female mice to make reconstructed eggs. Only two of 457 such eggs produced living mice."

NO GENETIC BASIS FOR CONCEPT OF RACE—"From a scientific perspective there is no such thing as race. You cannot scientifically distinguish a race of people genetically from a different race of people. Now you can find a gene that affects skin color, and you can show that this gene has one form in people of African descent and is different form of people, let's say , of Danish descent. But that's just one little change. That doesn't make them a race. If you look at all the other things in their DNA that determine all the ways in which we're the same, in fact the two DNAs are indistinguishable source."

DISCOVERY OF WAY TO TURN GENES 'ON AND OFF'?—Researchers at MIT'S Whitehead Institute and Corning Inc. say they may have found the "user's manual for the cell's master controls...a booklet that matches the master switches to the circuits they control in the genome...the technique can correctly identify the circuits controlled by two known master switches in yeast. In addition, the technique allows researchers to unravel in a week what takes years to achieve by conventional methods source."

"THERE IS NO ONE SINGLE FORM OF ANY GIVEN GENE—We have found that there are on average 14 versions of each gene that can be inherited by a human being source." In addition to "reducing the complexity of genetic information to a practical form," this also makes possible individualized medicines and treatment. Deep background: Haplotypes 1  Haplotypes2

FIND INTERCELLULAR COMMUNICATION GENE WHICH LEADS TO 'ADVANCED LIFE'?— "Sean Carroll, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of genetics, and his colleagues believe they have found a clue to the origin of multicellularity—a major landmark on the road to advanced life, including ourselves. In the Dec. 18 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Carroll et al. report the discovery of a key intercellular-communication gene in modern, single-celled microbes known as choanoflagellates. In other words they have found a set of instructions needed by a multicelled organism in a creature consisting of only a single cell. This supports the long-held suspicion that choanoflagellates living at least 600 million years ago were ancestral to all today's animals (for a primer on choanoflagellates, go here). But it also leads to a tricky chicken-and-egg problem. If this cell-to-cell communication gene is only useful to a multicelled organism, what is it doing in something that's unicellular? source."

GENE THERAPY DEBATE CONFUSED?—Need a new liver, heart? Parthenogenesis, the Greek word for 'virgin birth', allows eggs to develop without fertilization and not become embryos. Says encylopedia.com: " In 1900, Jacques Loeb accomplished the first clear case of artificial parthenogenesis when he pricked unfertilized frog eggs with a needle and found that in some cases normal embryonic development ensued. Artificial parthenogenesis has since been achieved in almost all major groups of animals, although it usually results in incomplete and abnormal development source." "The nuclei of donor eggs were extracted and replaced with adult human skin cells that were coaxed to activate then divide, forming a blastocyst -- a hollow ball of roughly 100 cells that holds a clump of stem cells, the building blocks of all organ and tissue cells within the body source." Says Advanced Cell Technology Corp.: "Ooplasmic Transfer involves the removal of the cytoplasm of an oocyte and transferring it into the body cell of a patient thereby transforming the patient’s cell into a primitive stem cell source."

HOW TO EXPLAIN EVOLUTION'S DIVERSITY GIVEN THE DISCOVERIES SO FAR—"Whole- genome sequence assemblies are now available for seven different animals, including nematode worms, mice and humans. Comparative genome analyses reveal a surprising constancy in genetic content: vertebrate genomes have only about twice the number of genes that invertebrate genomes have, and the increase is primarily due to the duplication of existing genes rather than the invention of new ones. How, then, has evolutionary diversity arisen? Emerging evidence suggests that organismal complexity arises from progressively more elaborate regulation of gene expression Nature, September, 2003."

US GOVT. ALLOWS PATENTS OF GENES— Says the Patent & Trademark Office website, "An excised gene is eligible for a patent as a composition of matter or as an article of manufacture because that DNA molecule does not occur in that isolated form in nature. Synthetic DNA preparations are eligible for patents because their purified state is different from the naturally occurring compound source.'' 

McCHEAPER COWS?— University of Georgia biologists have cloned eight calves using a technique they say can markedly improve the success rate of cattle cloning source.  

GENE MANIPULATION CAN NOW MAKE VIRUSES MORE DEADLY—"'There is a need to strengthen the global Biological Weapons Convention to take account of the discovery', according to Dr Annabelle Duncan, the Chief of CSIRO Molecular Science and former deputy head of a United Nations team that investigated the development of biowarfare agents in Iraq following the Gulf War. The best protection against any misuse of this technique was to issue a worldwide warning. We also want researchers to use this new knowledge to help design better vaccines source."

JUST WHAT IS GENDER?— "Surprised scientists said nearly half of all genes related to the earliest stages of sperm production reside not on the male sex Y chromosome as expected, but on the X chromosome, universally considered the female sex chromosome. The finding, made by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts and Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, may cause scientists to have second thoughts about the gender identity of the X chromosome source."

83 PRISONERS IN US HAVE BEEN RELEASED, AFTER EXONERATION BY DNA EVIDENCE source

MAJOR MILESTONE IN BIOLOGY— The first complete map of the genes of a plant has been achieved. "The sequencing and analysis of the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, (Thale Cress) the 'model' plant for research... sequences of its remaining three chromosomes, and an overview of the annotation and analysis of the whole genome source." The fruit fly, the nematode worm, 600 viruses and two dozen bacteria as organisms have revealed their entire DNA blueprints.

US CENSUS RACIAL CATEGORIES CONTRAST WITH GENOME PROJECT FINDING NO GENETIC BASIS FOR RACE— "Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin, showed the following for the 274.6 million people who reported only one race." source