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Tweaking tongue receptors could encourage people to consume more of the vital nutrient.

It may be time to add calcium to the types of tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory — that can be detected by humans, according to U.S. researchers.

They found that a taste for calcium exists in mice. Since mice and humans share many of the same genes, the finding suggests that people may also be able to taste calcium. If that’s true, it could have a number of implications.

“People don’t consume as much calcium as nutritionists would like, and one reason for this is that foods high in calcium don’t taste good to many people. Tweaking its taste could encourage a calcium-deficient population to consume more of this key nutrient,” Michael G. Tordoff, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said in an American Chemical Society news release.

“By understanding how calcium is detected in the mouth, we can either make it easier to consume by reducing its bad taste or even make pharmacological agents that make it taste better,” Tordoff said.

He and his colleagues identified two receptors on the tongues of mice that are involved in tasting calcium. One is a calcium-sensing receptor called CaSR that has been found in the parathyroid gland, kidney, brain and gastrointestinal tract.

“We didn’t know it was on the tongue before,” Tordoff said.

The other receptor is T1R3, which plays a role in sweet taste. The discovery that T1R3 also plays a role in tasting calcium was “very unexpected.”

Tordoff and his team were expected to presented the research Wednesday at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting, in Philadelphia.

More information

The HealthDesigns Library has more info on calcium

It may, in fact, be possible to outrun death — and even the creeping ravages of time — at least for a while.Research spanning two decades has found that older runners live longer and suffer fewer disabilities than healthy non-runners.

And the findings probably apply to a variety of aerobic exercises, including walking, said the study authors, from Stanford University School of Medicine, whose findings are published in the Aug. 11 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“This is telling you that being a runner, being active is going to reduce your disability, and it’s going to increase your survival,” said Marcia Ory, professor of social and behavioral health at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health in College Station. “Late in life, you still see the benefit of vigorous activity.”

In 1980, the study’s lead author, Dr. James Fries, emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford, wrote a landmark paper outlining his “compression of morbidity” hypothesis. The theory held that regular exercise would compress, or reduce, the amount of time near the end of life when a person was disabled or unable to carry out the activities of daily living, such as walking, dressing and getting out of a chair.

“Illness would be compressed between later age of onset and age of death, and that paradigm was controversial, because it went against conventional wisdom and had no proof,” Fries explained.

At the time, many experts believed that vigorous exercise would actually harm older individuals. And running, in particular, would result in an epidemic of joint and bone injuries.

But this new study proves otherwise.

Two hundred and eighty-four runners and 156 healthy “controls,” or non-runners, in California completed annual questionnaires over a 21-year period. The participants were 50 years old or over at the beginning of the study and ran an average of about four hours a week. By the end of the study period, the participants were in their 70s or 80s or older and ran about 76 minutes a week.

At 19 years, just 15 percent of the runners had died, compared with 34 percent of the non-runners.

Also, said Fries, who is almost 70, runs 20 miles a week and plays tennis, “Running delayed the onset of disability by an average of 16 years, and that is largely a conservative number, because the control group was pretty darn healthy.”

And the slew of predicted orthopedic injuries never materialized.

Surprisingly, the health gap between runners and non-runners only increased with time. “I always thought that the two curves would start to parallel each other and that eventually aging would overpower exercise,” Fries said. “I think that will happen, but we can’t find even a little twitch toward that gap narrowing in the present time.”

Which is not to say that running is the only activity that’s good for you.

“Vigorous activity has a really dramatic impact, but we can’t ignore that there are also helpful benefits to people who are active at all levels, meaning those people who are just out walking” said Ory. “It’s so important to be physically active your whole life, not just in your 20s or 40s, but forever.”

Added Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City: “Exercise is like the most potent drug. Exercise is by far the best thing you can do.”

More information

The HealthDesigns Library has more info on healthy aging

Ratio of ‘good’ to ‘bad’ cholesterol determined chances of trouble in postmenopausal women, study shows

Supplements to Support

Metagenics UltraMeal Plus 360

Vital Nutrients Garlic 600

Metagenics Fem Osteo HRT

(HealthDay News) — Standard cholesterol evaluations may help predict which women are at risk for heart problems while taking hormone replacement therapy, and which women are not.Simply put, those with good cholesterol levels experience no increased risk for heart attacks while taking hormone therapy, while women with high levels do have a heightened risk, a new study suggests.

But this doesn’t mean that all women whose cholesterol levels are within normal range should feel comfortable taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal symptoms.

“You have to look at the total health of the woman and not just the heart,” said study author Dr. Paul Bray, director of hematology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “Our study is confined to heart and coronary disease outcomes, which is important, because there was a substantial amount of bad press related to hormones and coronary outcomes, so that put women in the position of either feeling guilty for using hormones when they really had no other good therapy or denying themselves when they perhaps didn’t need to.”

Hormone replacement therapy can also affect the risk of cancer, blood clots, strokes and more, pointed out Bray, whose report is published in the June 1 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.

“It’s an individualized program,” emphasized Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “It depends on the woman, and you have to weigh the risks and benefits. Clearly, you’re not going to use hormones in a woman who has risk factors for heart disease.”

Some studies, notably earlier results from the U.S. government-sponsored Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) have shown an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes among women who use hormone therapy. HRT also carries with it an increased risk of breast cancer.

Many women abandoned HRT after the first WHI results were released in 2002.

This study aimed to see if standard biomarkers could predict which women would have heart problems while using HRT.

Researchers obtained cholesterol and C-reactive protein (CRP) levels related to 271 coronary heart disease “events” occurring in women during the first four years of the WHI, and compared them to a group of more than 700 controls.

As it turned out, the ratio of LDL (”bad”) cholesterol to HDL (”good”) cholesterol at the beginning of the trial did seem to predict which women were prone to problems while taking HRT.

“If the ratio was less than 2.5, then there was no increased risk of heart attacks when using hormones,” Bray said. “If it was greater than 2.5, there was an increased risk. We did not find that CRP substantively helped us in this prediction.” The findings were true both among women taking estrogen alone and among those taking estrogen plus progestin.

Women with high ratios of “bad” to “good” cholesterol have a higher risk of coronary heart disease anyway. Taking hormones just increased that risk, the researchers said.

The tests did not predict the risk of stroke.

“If a woman were to come in, after assessing all of her organs, if you decide her heart is one of the things you’re worried about most, you would assess her blood cholesterol level, and if the ratio was greater than 2.5, I would discourage her from using HRT,” Bray said. “If the ratio were less than 2.5, you could provide some reassurance that the risk of having a heart attack is not increased.

Supplements to Support

Metagenics UltraMeal Plus 360

Vital Nutrients Garlic 600

Metagenics Fem Osteo HRT

More information

Visit the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for more on the Women’s Health Initiative.

New research suggests birth order, method of delivery all play a part.

HealthDay News) — At least some of the biological risk for childhood asthma and allergies traces back to the womb, new research suggests.

Both the order of birth and even the way a baby is delivered have a significant impact on the long-term strength of a child’s allergic defenses, scientists say.

The findings were presented Wednesday during the American Thoracic Society’s International Conference, in Toronto.

At the meeting, one team of scientists said it had evidence indicating that when a specific genetic marker for allergic and asthmatic development is present among a first-born child, it appears to raise the risk for allergic conditions as far as 10 years down the road. However, when the exact same marker is present in a family’s second or third child, the gene seems to have exactly the opposite effect — actually lowering such risk.

“This is the first time it has been demonstrated that birth order can affect the behavior of genes related to asthma and allergies, and that birth order can therefore affect the risk for developing one or the other,” said study author Dr. Wilfried Karmaus, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

On a second front, another team of researchers suggested that regulatory cells associated with proper immune function may be impaired in babies delivered by Caesarean section.

“We found a dysfunctional cellular response in the normally protective immune system among C-section babies,” observed Dr. Ngoc Ly, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco. “And although more work needs to be done to follow how long this response might endure, we think this disrupted immune pathway may influence the development of asthma later on.”

To explore the relationship between birth order and asthma/allergy risk, Karmaus and his team tracked more than 1,200 newborns from Great Britain’s Isle of Wight.

After recording birth orders, the researchers tested each newborns allergic status by examining indicators present in umbilical cord blood. As well, they conducted standard skin prick allergy tests at both age 4 and age 10.

The authors found that among firstborn children, the presence of a particular gene strain — known as the IL-13 gene variant — was associated with a higher risk for having an “allergic response.” This link continued to persist a decade later.

By contrast, among second or later-born children no such association between IL-13 and higher risk was found. In fact, the role of IL-13 seemed to “switch over” to that of a risk protector.

“The fetus is, in effect, a foreign body,” noted Karmaus. “And a foreign body can be exposed to a lot of immune arousal or not, depending. So we think that something during pregnancy — probably the immune system of the mother — stimulates the IL-13 gene to act differently, depending on birth order. We haven’t shown how this works yet, but that’s the idea.”

Karmaus suggested that the finding could theoretically lead to the crafting of interventions — perhaps therapeutic, perhaps simply lifestyle changes — which could reduce the allergic response risk for firstborns.

Meanwhile, Ly and her colleagues explored similar risks associated with Caesarean sections by analyzing the cellular immune regulatory activity present (in the form of so-called treg cells) in the umbilical cord blood of 50 babies born by Caesarean and 68 babies delivered vaginally. All the babies had a least one parent with allergies and/or asthma.

The authors found that among C-section babies, treg cells were more likely to fail to operate properly, raising the risk for the early onset of immune system disruption. This, in turn, may increase the likelihood that a child could grow up to develop an allergy or asthma.

Ly and her team said that the suggestion that the manner of delivery could actually influence immune system development and ultimately asthma/allergy risk could be due to the fact that vaginal labor provides beneficial exposure to birth canal microbes that simply aren’t available to a C-section baby.

“But still I think it’s important to reiterate that while this is interesting research, it is a small study and the first of its kind,” noted Ly. “So there is much more follow-up work that needs to be done to see if these newborns in fact start developing symptoms of asthma or allergies as they grow.”

Approaching the root causes of asthma and allergies from yet another angle, a third team of German researchers presented findings suggesting that mothers who visit farms and drink farm milk confer a anti-allergy benefit to their future babies.

The study involved 18 farming mothers and 59 non-farming mothers. Farm-based mothers appeared to give birth to babies with better-functioning treg cells.

More information

For details on childhood asthma, visit the American Lung Association.