In-Digest (#3)

In-Digest (#3)

Heretical medical studies, papers and articles.

( Selected and commented by Stan Bleszynski, 18-March-2007 )

Back to Heretical home

Contents

a1 Insulin Not Sodium May Be Hypertension’s Bad Actor

a2 Chinese study - more bad news for vegetarians

a3 Does a high fat diet cause diabetes t2 in mice? - Yes if it contains hydrogenated coconut fat!

a4 The Cure for Diabetes against 51M$

a5 Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

a6 Fat, cholesterol and degenerative brain diseases

a7 Five studies supporting the idea that saturated fat is healthy

a8 Beyond Pritkin

#1 Insulin Not Sodium May Be Hypertension’s Bad Actor

A journalistic article by Peggy Beck titled:
"AACE: Insulin Not Sodium May Be Hypertension’s Bad Actor"
describing Dr. James Hays study on hypertensive patients using very high fat diet (50% calories from saturated fat).

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Endocrinology/AACE/tb/3196
backup source for the article (pdf, 20k)

Quote:

AACE: Insulin Not Sodium May Be Hypertension’s Bad Actor
By Peggy Peck, MedPage Today Staff Writer
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
April 28, 2006
... Insulin rather than salt is the major driver of hypertension, according to an analysis of data from a prospective study of 23 patients with confirmed
atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Comment:
Insulin means carbohydrates .... .

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#2 Chinese study - more bad news for vegetarians

"Homocysteine, circulating vascular cell adhesion molecule and carotid atherosclerosis in postmenopausal vegetarian women and omnivores "
Ta-Chen Su et al., Atherosclerosis, Volume 184, Issue 2, February 2006, Pages 356-362
Study link
Dr. M.R. Eades' commentary on the study

Comment:

In addition to the usual lower B12, higher homocysteine and lower HDL level among vegetarians, they found also that they had a pulse pressure of 56.6 mmHg compared to 52.6 mmHg in the omnivores. By the face value a higher pulse pressure being the difference between systolic and diastolic may be indicative of more hardened arteries among vegetarians. Curiously the authors published that result only in the full text but not in the abstract and they refrained from commenting it.

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#3 Does a high fat diet cause diabetes t2 in mice? - Yes if it contains hydrogenated coconut fat!

Comment:
read pdf (300kB):
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#4 The Cure for Diabetes against 51M$

TheCureForDiabetes (pdf 20kB)

Original at:

http://health.msn.com/centers/diabetes/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100150895&GT1=9029

... Since 1999, the 52-year-old family doctor has been treating diabetic patients in Lawrence, Kan., with an approach that was abandoned by most physicians in the 1930s. Worse, this Depression-era remedy is the opposite of the current guidelines established by the American Diabetes Association, a nonprofit organization that spent nearly $51 million on research in 2005, and so should know a thing or two about how to handle diabetes. There's no question that Dr. Vernon is trouble - but for whom? Not her patients, that's for certain. They just won't stay sick. People walk into her office afflicted with type-2 diabetes and, by every objective medical measurement, walk out cured. There's $51 million that says that isn't supposed to happen, not in a clinic in Kansas, and definitely not as a result of cleaning out the refrigerator.

..."My first line of treatment is to have patients remove carbohydrates from their diets," explains Dr. Vernon, a petite, energetic mother of two who also serves as the president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. "This is often all it takes to reverse their symptoms, so that they no longer require medication."

..."They're contradicting themselves," says Richard Feinman, Ph.D., director of the Nutrition & Metabolism Society and a professor of biochemistry at SUNY Downstate medical center, in New York City. "They want diabetics to take medication to lower their blood sugar, but recommend a diet that has the opposite effect."

..., in 2003, researchers at Duke University set out to test Dr. Vernon's findings in a laboratory setting. The results of their 16-week study: 17 out of the 21 diabetic patients who participated were able to significantly reduce their medication or discontinue it altogether.

...In fact, says Volek, more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies published since 2003 show that a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet is more effective at reducing overall heart-disease risk than a high-carb, low-fat regimen. And, just like the diet that Dr. Vernon prescribes, each of these meal plans ranged from 50 percent to 70 percent of total calories from fat.

... "Which do you think people would find more practical?" asks Dr. Vernon. "Avoiding bread and sugar, or taking an insulin shot every day?" Before you answer, consider that the ADA, America's leading authority on diabetes, refuses even to pose this question to millions of diabetes sufferers, leaving them unaware that there may actually be an alternative to leading a medicated life.

Comment:
Insulin is the most profitable drug ever invented, surpassed only recently by statins.

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#5 Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fdn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

* 11:58 17 January 2007
* Andy Coghlan

What makes cancer cells different - and how to kill them

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to

be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

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#6 Fat, cholesterol and degenerative brain diseases

1) Possible link between low LDL cholesterol and Parkinson's disease

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6255717.stm

Do statin users risk Parkinson's?

By Michelle Roberts
Health reporter, BBC News

Statins are used by nearly 2m UK people to prevent heart attacks and stroke by lowering harmful blood cholesterol. But US scientists are concerned after a small study found people with low cholesterol upped their risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Now the North Carolina University team is to study 16,000 people to see if the link is real and causal. If it is, a surge in Parkinson's cases is imminent they say. But experts argue statins may in fact protect against it.

What evidence?

Indeed, Dr Huang's group discovered themselves that people on statins were less likely to have Parkinson's disease. Their study, published in Movement Disorders, included 124 patients with Parkinson's and 112 of the patients' partners, who acted as controls. I'm definitely concerned which is why I'm conducting a prospective study of 16,000 people Researcher Dr Xuemei Huang. They found that patients with lower "bad" LDL cholesterol levels were more than three times more likely to have Parkinson's than those with higher LDL cholesterol levels. Paradoxically, those on statins were less likely to have the condition. Dr Haung says this could be because those who develop Parkinson's have had low LDL cholesterol all their life and so have never needed to take statins. She told Chemistry & Industry that past studies linking Parkinson's with a gene (apoE2) associated with lower cholesterol support her theory that low LDL is the culprit.

Because statins lower LDL cholesterol, the concern is they may trigger Parkinson's. Dr Huang said: "I'm definitely concerned which is why I'm conducting a prospective study of 16,000 people." Nobody should stop taking statins on the basis of this report Professor Peter Weissberg British Heart Foundation. But Dr David Dexter, senior lecturer in neuropharmacology at Imperial College, London, said: "With the evidence we have at the moment, I would say there is not much cause for concern that statin use may cause Parkinson's disease."

He said previous studies had demonstrated that statins can increase brain dopamine concentration - the chemical transmitter deficient in Parkinson's - and that statins protect nerve cells.

"Also one of the secondary symptoms some patients with Parkinson's experience is dementia, similar to Alzheimer's disease, which may result from vascular changes in the brain. Statins would be expected to protect the brain against such vascular changes," he explained.

Benefits outweigh

Professor Peter Weissberg, of the British Heart Foundation, said he was concerned that any suggestion of a link between statins and Parkinson's disease would unnecessarily scare the millions of people benefiting from statins in the UK. "There is no evidence to suggest that statins cause Parkinson's disease. There is, however, overwhelming evidence that statins save lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes.

"Nobody should stop taking statins on the basis of this report. If they do, they will be putting themselves at increased risk of heart attack or stroke," he warned. Dr Huang agreed that the medical value of statins far exceeded any possible additional risk of Parkinson's.

Professor Yoav Ben-Shlomo, professor of clinical epidemiology at Bristol University, said patients had a right to know the risks of any medication they were taking. He said a prospective study - tracking the lifestyle of people before Parkinson's develops - should help provide more answers.

Dr Kieran Breen, of the Parkinson's Disease Society, said: "We hope that the proposed study will shed further light on this.

"Some people have found a relationship and others have not. The evidence is inconclusive. The jury is very much still out on this." He stressed that the most likely cause was a mixture of genetic and environmental factors. Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6255717.stm

2) Possible protective role of ketogenic metabolism of high fat diets against Alzheimer's

Paper:
"A ketogenic diet reduces amyloid beta 40 and 42 in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease"
Nutrition & Metabolism 2005, 2:28 doi:10.1186/1743-7075-2-28

KetogenicDietReducesAmyloidBeta.pdf

Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that primarily strikes the elderly. Studies in both humans and animal models have linked the consumption of cholesterol and saturated fats with amyloid-beta (Ab) deposition and development of AD. Yet, these studies did not examine high fat diets in combination with reduced carbohydrate intake. Here we tested the effect of a high saturated fat / low carbohydrate diet on a transgenic mouse model of AD.

Results
Starting at three months of age, two groups of female transgenic mice carrying the “London” APP mutation (APP/V717I) were fed either, a standard diet (SD) composed of high carbohydrate / low fat chow, or a ketogenic diet (KD) composed of very low carbohydrate / high saturated fat chow for 43 days. Animals fed the KD exhibited greatly elevated serum ketone body levels, as measured by beta-hydroxybutyrate (3.85 + 2.6 mM), compared to SD fed animals (0.29 + 0.06 mM). In addition, animals fed the KD lost body
weight (SD 22.2 + 0.6 g vs. KD 17.5 + 1.4 g, p=0.0067). In contrast to earlier studies, the brief KD feeding regime significantly reduced total brain A? levels by approximately 25%. Despite changes in ketone levels, body weight, and A? levels, the KD diet did not
alter behavioral measures.

... For the KD we used Bio-Serv Inc. F3666 chow: 0.76% carbohydrates, 8% protein, 79% fat, 12% water, fiber, and ash. F3666 is a
ketogenic chow composed of lard, butter fat, dextrose, casein, fiber, corn oil, mineral mix, and a vitamin mix. F3666 is rich in saturated fats. Greater than 29% of the F3666 chow is composed of saturated fats by weight: 2.4% myristic acid (C14:0), 18.9% palmitic acid (C16:0), and 8.4% stearic (C18:0) (see Table 1).

Comment:
It is interesting to compare that with the another study that fed mice hydrogenated fat rather than lard and butter, and found them developping diabetes, see #3.

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#7 Five studies supporting the idea that saturated fat is healthy

1) One may find some comments on MONICA data from 1998 and the relevant graphs at the end of an article titled

"June 11, 2006 How To Bury $400M"
by Malcolm Kendrick:
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm2006.htm#june11

(scroll down to the middle of the web page then go little bit more down to the end of that article where he discusses MONICA study, specifically)

Quote:

* The French consumed three times as much saturated fat as was consumed in Azerbaijan, and had one-eighth the rate of heart disease.

* Every single country in the top eight of saturated fat consumption had a lower rate of heart disease than every single country in the bottom eight of saturated fat consumption.

The MONICA graphs:

http://www.thincs.org/image005.gif

http://www.thincs.org/image006.gif

--------

2) "Dietary fat intake and early mortality patterns - data from The Malmo Diet and Cancer Study. "

Leosdottir M, Nilsson PM, Nilsson J-A, Mansson H, Berglund G (Lund University, Malmo, Sweden).

J Intern Med 2005; 258: 153-165.

Quotations:

"... Men in the fourth quartile of total fat intake, receiving almost 50% of their total energy intake from fat, had the lowest cardiovascular mortality."

Conclusions. With the exception of cancer mortality for women, individuals receiving more than 30% of their total daily energy from fat and more than 10% from saturated fat, did not have increased mortality. Current dietary guidelines concerning fat intake are thus generally not supported
by our observational results."