More shoppers avoiding corn sweetener
LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- A growing number of U.S. shoppers are opting to buy foods containing pure sugar instead of corn syrup, statistics indicate.
The move away form high fructose corn syrup is so prevalent the Corn Refiners Association has organized a campaign on the Web site, www.sweetsurprise.com, to stand up for the syrup, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
"We have been very concerned about the misunderstanding of our product in the marketplace and want to provide the facts so that consumers can make their choices based on science rather than urban myth," the association's president Audrae Erickson said.
Health professionals have said high fructose corn syrup with may be contributing to obesity across the country. Others say because natural sugar has the same amount of calories, neither sweetener is to blame.
"Our message is that people should cut down on both," Center for Science in the Public Interest Director Michael Jacobson said.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International
'Exercise Pill' Is No Replacement For Real Exercise, Expert Cautions
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2008) — Recently, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a research organization focused on biology and its relation to health, published a study in the journal Cell on the results of a substance that increased exercise endurance without daily exertion when tested in mice. Media reports have described this substance as an “exercise pill,” potentially eliminating the need for exercise.
Frank Booth, a University of Missouri expert on the science of inactivity, says the “exercise pill” study did not test all of the commonly known benefits of exercise and taking the pill cannot be considered a replacement for exercise.
In the Cell paper “Exercise Mimetics” the researchers demonstrated that AMPK-PPARĪ“ pathways, which is a cellular messenger system, can be targeted by orally active drugs to enhance training adaptation or even to increase endurance without exercise. However, Booth cautions that some of the commonly known benefits of exercise were not tested in the Cell paper including:
* Decreased resting and submaximal exercise heart rate
* Increased heart stroke volume at all exercise work loads
* Increased maximal exercise cardiac output
* Lower blood pressure and arterial stiffness
* Increased aerobic capacity
A complete list of the 26 benefits not tested in the paper is included below. Read more.
ScienceDaily: Your source for the latest research news and science breakthroughs --
Testosterone And Body Fat Are Controlled By The Same Genes
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2008) — Genes that control percentage of body fat are also responsible for circulating levels of testosterone in men, research published in a recent edition of Clinical Endocrinology shows.
The research shows a 23% overlap between the genes that control testosterone and those that regulate body fat composition, suggesting that these two variables are partly controlled by the same set of genes.
The study led by Dr Jean-Marc Kaufman at Ghent University Hospital, Belgium was carried out on healthy male sibling pairs and estimated the extent to which sex hormones and body fat are controlled by the same genes. The research involved a cohort of 674 men from 274 independent families, as part of a larger study investigating the origins of body composition, sex steroid status and peak bone mass in healthy men. Read more.
Stand Up For Your Health
Physiologists And Microbiologists Find Link Between Sitting And Poor Health
June 1, 2008 — Physiologists analyzing obesity, heart disease, and diabetes found that the act of sitting shuts down the circulation of a fat-absorbing enzyme called lipase. They found that standing up engages muscles and promotes the distribution of lipase, which prompts the body to process fat and cholesterol, independent of the amount of time spent exercising. They also found that standing up uses blood glucose and may discourage the development of diabetes.
You're probably sitting down right now. Well, by the time you're done reading this, you may see sitting in a whole new way!
"Chair time is an insidious hazard because people haven't been told it's a hazard," Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, told Ivanhoe.
That's right -- the time you sit in your chair could be keeping your body's fat burning in park! More than 47 million adults in the United States have metabolic syndrome, which causes obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Biomedical researchers from the say the reason so many of us have the condition is because we sit too much!
Read more.
Burning Fat And Carbohydrate During Exercise
ScienceDaily (June 19, 2007) — In a paper published in The Journal of Physiology, Helge, Stallknecht, Richter, Galbo, and Keins from Copenhagen shed light on fat oxidation during exercise and physical activity. Their observations suggest that fat oxidation during exercise reflects a fine interplay between the cardiovascular, neurological, endocrine and muscle metabolic systems.
During exercise and physical activity, the primary fuels used by muscles are carbohydrate and fat. When mild exercise is performed there is a tendency to burn relatively more fat and less glucose, but as exercise becomes more intense, a higher fraction of the energy demands of the muscle are supplied by glucose, until at the highest intensities almost only carbohydrates are used. Is this shift in fuel source a property of the muscle itself, or does it represent the interplay between what is happening in the muscle and the exercise-related responses in the rest of the body?
The study, performed at the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, examined muscle fuel utilisation in response to graded exercise performed with only one leg. Nine healthy males performed one-leg exercise at 25, 45, and 85% of maximal workload. Their results showed that, when only a small mass of muscle is contracting, and blood flow and oxygen supply are not limited by central circulatory capacity, the shift in fuel source from fat to glucose as exercise intensity increases does not occur. Read more.
