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September 6, 2011  In This Issue... - Is "The Silent Killer" a Threat to Your Health?
- A Painkiller More Effective Than Morphine
- Erase Tumors in 2 Months
- Yo-Yo Dieting? You Might Want to Say Yes-Yes!
Is "The Silent Killer" a Threat to Your Health? The experts at Harvard Medical School reveal the dangers. It’s earned the nickname "the silent killer" because it has no symptoms or warning signs. More than 73 million people suffer from it, yet many are not even aware they have it. It’s hypertension -- high blood pressure -- and it’s important to protect yourself from the damage it can cause. The good news is that huge strides have been made to prevent, control and reduce hypertension. And reducing your blood pressure even a little bit can dramatically improve your health and life expectancy. Click here to learn more...
A Painkiller More Effective Than Morphine Opium-based painkillers (such as morphine, hydrocodone and oxycodone) are made in sleek glass and steel manufacturing plants, and yet what’s being produced behind those shiny walls is really nothing new. These are, in essence, the same painkillers we’ve been using for hundreds of years, going as far back as the Civil War. To put it mildly, when it comes to painkillers, we’ve learned little. Worse yet, opioids are addictive and can cause hallucinations and mental disorientation, not to mention nausea, difficulty breathing, chronic constipation and many other distressing side effects. Now, finally, it looks like scientists may have come up with a lead on a new painkiller -- a compound derived from an Asian tree bark that appears to alleviate serious pain without causing addiction or serious side effects. Can a Stick Do the Trick? At The Scripps Research Institute in Florida, researchers have undertaken a study of Tabernaemontana divaricata, also known as crepe jasmine, a tropical flowering plant that has long been used in traditional medicine in China, India and Thailand. Natural practitioners in these countries prescribe various parts of the plant (from flowers to leaves, roots and bark) to heal wounds, fight toothaches and treat skin diseases, fever, pain, scabies and dysentery, notes Daily Health News contributing medical editor Andrew L. Rubman, ND. When it comes to pain, it turns out that one of the most promising elements in crepe jasmine is conolidine, an extremely rare constituent of the stem bark of Malayan T. divaricata. In the Scripps laboratory, researchers looked for a way to get sufficient quantities of this hard-to-obtain substance and for the first time created a synthetic conolidine compound. Once they accomplished this feat, they tested its effectiveness on mice. In various pain models (the researchers used acid to cause pain and inflammation on the paws of the mice), investigators found that the newly synthesized compound... - Was present in high concentrations for up to four hours after administration and passed readily through the blood-brain barrier. This is important as many areas in the brain are involved in the perception of pain.
- Effectively relieved acute and longer-lasting inflammatory pain in mice. Scientists measured this by observing such things as how often mice attended to and licked injured paws.
- Did not show harmful side effects. Mice demonstrate certain characteristic movements when exposed to morphine -- for instance, they become disoriented and walk in circular patterns -- which did not happen after conolidine injections.
These findings were published in the May 23, 2011 issue of Nature Chemistry. Researchers are not sure exactly how conolidine relieves pain. It does not bind to opiate receptors in the body and thus is not an opiate like morphine. But it certainly appears to be effective. Much more study is needed, but this may finally turn out to be the alternative to opiates we’ve been hoping for. Its broad and effective usage over time in India, Thailand and China is yet another reason for hope. Source(s): Andrew L. Rubman, ND, founder and director, Southbury Clinic for Traditional Medicines, Southbury, Connecticut. www.SouthburyClinic.com.
Erase Tumors in 2 Months "Within two months, every tumor had shrunk, dried up and fallen off," said Tom to Dr. Gary Null about the miraculous disappearance of his rapidly spreading cancer. Tom had already gone through surgery once for skin cancer on his forehead. Unfortunately, his skin cancer was melanoma. Just 10 days after the operation, the cancer was back with a vengeance. It reappeared on his forehead, and quickly spread to his arm, upper body and chest. Four doctors all agreed: There was nothing they could do to cure this cancer. They all still wanted to operate. But Tom wanted to live -- not just get sliced up. Read on to learn what Tom did to save his life...
Yo-Yo Dieting? You Might Want to Say Yes-Yes! Up, down, up, down... the cycle of weight loss and weight gain is widely known as "yo-yo dieting," and while no one would argue that being overweight is good for you, it has become conventional wisdom that this particular dieting pattern (which describes a way of life for a whole lot of people) does such long-term harm to your health that it can be even worse for you than just staying overweight. But is that really true? I just read a research study that, while preliminary, reveals some surprising health benefits of yo-yo dieting! Eat This...No, Eat This It’s important to acknowledge that this is a mouse study, so for now it’s only speculation that the findings would apply to us two-legged types -- not to mention that their yo-yo diet was compressed to fit the time frame of the research and the shorter mouse lifespan, so it was not exactly like what happens for a man or woman who works hard for six months to lose 50 pounds, then regains it over the next two years. All that said, there are strong correlations between what happens with mice and what happens with human beings, so researchers at Ohio University divided 30 mice into three groups... - One group ate a high-fat diet and remained overweight throughout the study.
- A second group ate a low-fat diet and maintained a normal, healthy weight.
- A third group of mice yo-yoed, alternating between the two regimens, with four weeks on one and then four weeks on the other for the length of the study. The study lasted just over two years -- until the mice had all died.
Throughout the study, researchers measured several important biomarkers of health, including amount of body weight and fat, blood glucose levels and signs of prediabetes such as glucose tolerance. As you would expect, the always-overweight mice were consistently unhealthy, while the ones of normal weight had excellent health. As far as the yo-yo group, well, suffice it to say that if these mice wore jeans, their health status would have matched the sizes that fit them at any given time during the study. While they were on the high-fat diet, their weight and blood glucose levels were oversized -- they became prediabetic (glucose intolerant) -- but when they returned to the healthy eating plan and lost weight, their glucose levels slimmed down to normal healthy levels as well. A Good Long Life But the gold standard for judging a healthful lifestyle isn’t just how your blood looks on a given day -- it’s also how long you live. So researchers also tracked the lifespans of all the mice. The result: The always-fat group died prematurely, surviving an average of just 1.5 years. The always-trim mice lived an average of 2.09 years. And the yo-yo dieting group -- subjected to what supposedly is a very unhealthful way to eat -- lived for an average of 2.04 years, quite nearly as long as the normal group’s lifespan. In other words, their lives were only about 2.4% shorter than the always-trim mice’s lives and were much longer than the always-overweight mice’s lives. So how did yo-yo dieting get the truly horrible reputation it has? That’s one of the questions I asked of the study author, Edward List, PhD, of the university’s Edison Biotechnology Institute. He told me that our great fear of yo-yo dieting was largely based on the results of a body of observational research studies -- the kind of study where researchers look for associations among things that happen together rather than trying to determine cause and effect. Dr. List’s work was of a far more reliable type, a controlled study. His team designed the study to investigate the direct impact of diet and weight alone, and, he says, there turned out to be "a nice, clear difference" in physiological results between the yo-yo group and the other groups -- the yo-yo group’s health went reliably back and forth, into and out of a high-glucose, prediabetic state, as their diet flip-flopped. More Good News Dr. List told me that there has been previous research in many laboratories that really underscored the value of losing weight even if you eventually regain it. Excess fat tissue in the body creates protein molecules called cytokines, and these cause inflammation and damage to organs in a variety of ways, he explained. The researchers measured these, too, and found that when yo-yo mice were in their thinner phases, with less fat tissue to create cytokines, they had fewer of them, as you might expect... and then their cytokine levels remained consistently lower than those in the overweight group even during the weeks when the yo-yo mice were eating the high-fat diet. Dr. List says that his study shows how important it is to never give up trying to achieve a healthy weight. Instead of throwing up your hands and saying "why bother," he suggests thinking of this as we do of smoking. Any day you don’t have a cigarette is a favor to your health -- and now it appears that any time an overweight person loses weight is likewise a benefit -- even if history suggests that you will gain it back. And who knows -- maybe one day you won’t! Source(s):
Edward List, PhD, scientist, Edison Biotechnology Institute, Ohio University, Athens.
Be well, 
Carole Jackson
Bottom Line's Daily Health News
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