One in three U.S. adults has high blood pressure, and almost 1 billion people worldwide. Hypertension in turn is a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. And while being overweight and inactive raises blood pressure, too much salt is a big culprit as well.
Very little sodium actually comes from the salt shaker or home-cooking: Most, about 77 percent according to one small study, comes from processed and restaurant foods.
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.
This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
Unfortunately, ethics have low priority in science nowadays. Powerful scientific committees, such as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics take the side of the establishment most of the time, regardless the merit of the case. Additionally, most of the important decisions are taken by the wrong people who have long retired from active scientific work and these people on the committees have little time to properly read anything. Many of them also either directly or indirectly receive funding from the industry and/or the allied scientific establishment. It is thus not surprising that the whole industrial and political complex came down so heavily on me and on our findings. However, it may have become obvious by now even to those who condemned our work at the time because it was against their interest that suppression of ’unpleasant’ but true facts uncovered by independent scientists is not only against the interest of society but in the long run also of their own. Hopefully, it is now generally realized that when Academic freedom is denied to professional scientists progress in science becomes impossible .
Scientists have discovered the key to the ability of spicy foods to kill cancer cells.They found capsaicin, an ingredient of jalapeno peppers, triggers cancer cell death by attacking mitochondria - the cells' energy-generating boiler rooms.
The research raises the possibility that other cancer drugs could be developed to target mitochondria.
The Nottingham University study features in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.
The study showed that the family of molecules to which capsaicin belongs, the vanilloids, bind to proteins in the cancer cell mitochondria to trigger apoptosis, or cell death, without harming surrounding healthy cells.
I think it is also anti-genotoxic.
No study will ever prove or disprove the meat contention. The random, unaccountable differences between individual humans make strict science and human nutrition mutually exclusive fields.
In order for a study to say anything conclusive, the scientists would have to do something like grow 100 genetically identical clones, and then make sure each one got exactly equal amounts and types of water, sleep, stress, excercise, exposure to illness etc etc etc. Feeding half of this group a carefully controlled omnivorous diet and the other half a carefully controlled vegetarian diet with identical levels of macro and micronutrients for 12 months and then measuring their resultant "health" would be somewhere APPROACHING scientific.
For all the discussion on teeth, I saw a lecture on skull bones once.
From it, I learned that human teeth are:
-Not like dogs - some of their teeth are for gripping, some for chopping up bones to get at the marrow, and some for ripping flesh
-Not like cats, large or small - their teeth are mostly for ripping and slicing flesh
-Not exactly like baboons - males have huge canines for fighting other males
-Not like horses - front teeth for tearing and back teeth for grinding with a gap in between
-Not like rodents - front teeth for gnawing, always growing-A lot like bears and pigs - people have mistaken their skulls for the skulls archaic skeletons because of the similarities between the teeth
Bears and pigs eat a lot of the same things that humans like to eat, basically everything. In fact, a certain grizzly bear in Yellowstone really liked an entire case of beer he found in a camp and was nicely drunk at the camp when they found him. But then again, when I think of bears eating meat, I think of them clawing at salmon...
