foxridgecountryclub - Healthy Life

The arguement about the health benifits of milk have been raging for years. One website even goes as far as to say “Milk is a deadly poison,”. If you visit the site, notmilk.com, you’ll find dozens of articles about the purported evils of this popular beverage. One claim, for example, is that milk from cows contains cancer-causing hormones and dairy industry dollars have kept that fact bottled up. All of which may leave you second-guessing your next sip.

However, as a nutritionist, I’ve found that most people thrive on milk, whether their goal is to lose fat or build muscle. So to be sure it’s safe, I’ve investigated all the anti-milk claims, sifting through the research while also turning a critical eye to pro-milk propaganda. After all, the only agenda I have is my clients’ health. The result: all your milk questions, answered.

Is milk really a fat-burning food? Maybe. In a 6-month study, University of Tennessee researchers found that overweight people who downed three servings a day of calcium-rich dairy lost more belly fat than those who followed a similar diet minus two or more of the dairy servings. In addition, the researchers discovered that calcium supplements didn’t work as well as milk. Why? They believe that while calcium may increase the rate at which your body burns fat, other active compounds in dairy (such as milk proteins) provide an additional fat-burning effect. Of course, the key to success is following a weight-loss diet to begin with. After all, downing your dairy with a box of doughnuts is no way to torch your gut. Personally I would like to see some additional studies to confirm these findings.

Medtronic on has received federal approval to sell its drug-coated stent, the first to hit the U.S. market since safety concerns sank their popularity two years ago. The Food and Drug Administration said it cleared the company’s Endeavor stent for use in patients with clogged arteries. Medtronic said it expects to ship 100,000 units to hospitals in February.

Endeavor is one of a new generation of stents the industry hopes can rejuvenate U.S. demand for the drug-oozing devices, sales of which plummeted to $2 billion last year, down from a peak of $3.1 billion in 2005.

Stents are tiny, mesh-wire tubes that prop open arteries after they have been surgically cleared of fatty plaque. They became one of the most lucrative medical devices in modern history after companies began adding drug coatings to stents in 2003 to prevent blood clotting.

An estimated 6 million people worldwide have had one implanted. Hopefully this new one is going to be problem free.

Scientists have pinpointed genetic variations that make people more likely to get hooked on cigarettes and more prone to develop lung cancer — a finding that could someday lead to screening tests and customized treatments for smokers trying to kick the habit.

The discovery by three separate teams of scientists makes the strongest case so far for the biological underpinnings of nicotine addiction and sheds more light on how genetics and lifestyle habits join forces to cause cancer. A smoker who inherits these genetic variations from both parents has an 80 percent greater chance of lung cancer than a smoker without the variants, the researchers reported. And that same smoker on average lights up two extra cigarettes a day and has a much harder time quitting than smokers who don’t have these genetic differences.

The researchers disagreed on whether the variants directly increased the risk of lung cancer or did so indirectly, by causing more smoking. The three studies, funded by governments in the U.S. and Europe, are being published Thursday in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics.

The scientists studied the genes of more than 35,000 white people of European descent in Europe, Canada and the United States. Blacks and Asians will be studied soon and may yield different results, scientists said.They aren’t quite sure if what they found is a set of variations in one gene or in three closely connected genes.

The gene variations, which govern nicotine receptors on cells, could eventually help explain some of the mysteries of chain smoking, nicotine addiction and lung cancer. These oddities include why there are 90-year-old smokers who don’t get cancer and people who light up an occasional cigarette and don’t get hooked. The smoking rate among U.S. adults has dropped from 42 percent in 1965 to less than 21 percent now.

The new studies are surprising in that they point to areas of the genetic code that are not associated with pleasure and the rewards of addiction. That may help explain why some people can quit and others fail, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., which funded one of the studies.

One clue is in the location of the just-discovered variants, on the long arm of chromosome 15, Volkow said. It is in an area that, when damaged during tests on animals, makes them depressed and anxious. While some people smoke because it helps them focus or gives them a physiological reward, others do it to stave off depression.

That suggests that adding antidepressants to some smokers’ treatment could help them kick the habit. Anti-depressants have been used for quite a while now but I guess they did not know exactly why they worked.