Monday Oct 10, 2022

The Gary Null Show - 10.10.22

VIDEOS:

Quinoa-Based Diet Stabilizes Blood Sugar In Older Adults
University of Barcelona (Spain), October 2, 2022

According to a recent study published in the journal Nutrients, a quinoa-based diet was able to normalize glucose metabolism, and this effect was more pronounced among elderly people with impaired glucose tolerance, suggesting that quinoa is a healthy pseudocereal that is far more beneficial and nutritious than other cereal products.

This study examined the effects of a quinoa-rich diet on mediating hyperglycemia and other metabolic risk factors. Glycemic data was collected by glucose sensors operating over extended periods of time with regular prespecified recording points that could be analyzed using the functional data analysis approach to yield glucose concentrations over time.

All of the participants in this pilot study were aged 65+, without a history of diabetes, and fasting glucose levels were between 100-125 mg/dL. The participants ate grains, legumes, and tuber daily while also consuming quinoa, quinoa flakes, and quinoa flour as well as biscuits, brioche, sponge cake, baguettes, sliced bread, and pasta which all had a quinoa content of 70% or greater.

During the initial four weeks, the participants consumed their regular diets, then they were switched to the quinoa-based diet for the following four weeks, during this time all grains, grain-based products, legumes, and tubers were substituted with quinoa-based products without changing the overall composition of nutrients with exception to the cereal. During the study, all food products were provided to the participants who commonly consumed them. Additionally, eight recipes were introduced to the participants using quinoa substitutions.

At the beginning of the study most of the participants had an overweight profile, and hypertension, 45% had high blood lipids, and 33% had one or more close family members with disease. At the end of the study glucose levels were reduced before and after the quinoa-based diet, and glycated hemoglobin levels were reduced by the end of the study, as was weight and waist circumference by slight decreases.

Additional analysis revealed that multiple nutrients were associated with enhanced or reduced glucose concentrations: Gamma-tocopherol, soluble fiber insoluble dietary fiber, and ORAC were associated with enhanced glucose concentrations, while fatty acids, fructose, citric acid, cellulose, phytic acid, omega-6 PUFA, theobromine, and the proportion of total energy from proteins had a link with reduced glucose concentrations.

The nutritional profile of quinoa accounts for the difference in nutritional intake between the two diet phases. Consuming more carbs increases insulin levels, and fat storage and reduces the metabolic rate causing a cycle of fat accumulation. A high-fat diet with the same amount of calories reduces insulin secretion by triggering fat turnover in the cells making free fatty acids available for use in energy production. Dietary proteins also enhance the building of lean muscle during weight loss which also helps to expend more energy and improve the overall body composition.

Mediterranean diet improves immunotherapy response rates and progression-free survival in advanced melanoma, new study suggests
Eating a Mediterranean diet, rich in fibre, mono-unsaturated fatty acids and polyphenols, has been associated with improved immunotherapy response rates and progression-free survival in advanced melanoma patients.

University Medical Center Groningen (Netherlands), October 9, 2022

Eating a Mediterranean diet, rich in fibre, mono-unsaturated fatty acids and polyphenols, has been associated with improved immunotherapy response rates and progression-free survival in advanced melanoma patients, a new study has found.1

Experts anticipate that the diet will play an important role in the success of immunotherapy and trials are being expanded to investigate outcomes for different tumour types, including digestive cancers.

A Mediterranean diet, containing mono-and polyunsaturated fats from olive oil, nuts and fish, polyphenols and fibre from vegetables, fruit, and wholegrains, was significantly associated with an improved response to immunotherapy drugs called Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICIs). ICIs, which have been highly successful in treating melanoma, work by blocking immune system checkpoints, which then force the body’s own T-cells to attack cancers.2

The new multi-centre study by researchers from the UK and the Netherlands, recorded the dietary intake of 91 patients with advanced melanoma, who were treated with ICI drugs and monitored their progress with regular radiographic response check-ups.

As well as having a significant association with overall response rate, a Mediterranean diet was significantly associated with progression-free survival at 12 months.

The study also found that eating whole grains and legumes reduced the likelihood of developing drug induced immune-related side effects, such as colitis. In contrast, red and processed meat was associated with a higher probability of immune-related side effects.

Music practice can sharpen the brain

University of St Andrews (Scotland) October 1, 2022

A new study by researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland concludes that people who practice playing musical instruments have sharper brains because they pick up mistakes in their performance and fix them more quickly than other people.

Writing about their work in a recent issue of the journal Neuropsychologia, psychologist Doctor Ines Jentzsch and colleagues suggest playing music may help guard against mental decline, either through age or disease.

“Our study shows that even moderate levels of musical activity can benefit brain functioning.” For their study, the researchers compared the mental performance of musicians versus non-musicians as they challenged them to complete simple conflict tasks.

There were 36 young adult participants in total, divided into four groups of 8 to 10, according to the number of accumulated hours of practicing a musical instrument over their lifetime (from “high,” over 5,000 hours, through “intermediate,” 2,000 to 5,000 hours and “low,” between 200 and 2,000 hours, to “no,” under 200 hours).

The researchers tested each participant’s mental ability in a single session that lasted about 2 hours. During the session, they measured the participant’s reaction times to the simple mental tasks and also took various physiological measurements.

Their results show that the amount of musical practice was positively linked to response speed – the more-practiced musicians responded faster than those with little or no musical training, with no loss in accuracy.

“This result suggests that higher levels of musical training might result in more efficient information processing in general […] and confirms earlier reports indicating a positive link between mental speed and musical ability,” write the authors.

However, what this study particularly highlights is that more hours of musical practice were also linked with “better engagement of cognitive control processes,” which came through in more efficient error and conflict detection, and reduced levels of post-error interference and post-conflict adjustments.

In other words, the more practice hours musicians had accumulated, the faster their reaction times in completing mental challenges, the better they were able to recognize and correct mistakes, and the less likely they were to go back and adjust their responses when they made mistakes.

“The research suggests that musical activity could be used as an effective intervention to slow, stop or even reverse age- or illness-related decline in mental functioning.”

3 Weeks Of Vitamin C Supplements Reduces Inflammation In Cystic Fibrosis Patients
Oregon State University, October 6, 2022

Cystic fibrosis, being the aggressive disease that it is, often presents new clinical obstacles tied to treatment. Now, a new study by Oregon State University researchers may help improve patient outcomes, revealing that CF patients who take vitamin C supplements can help increase their uptake of vitamin E, which reduces inflammation.

“Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that is associated with increased inflammation, and like many inflammatory diseases, it comes with a large amount of oxidative stress,” says Maret Traber of OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute in a university release.

Traber also notes that CF patients have difficulty absorbing fat, limiting their body’s ability to use fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin E. This generally means that this patient population has to take in more fat than an average person to break even. Studies have connected vitamin C to reducing inflammation and making use of oxidized vitamin E that the body wouldn’t otherwise absorb.

The team found that after 3.5 weeks of daily vitamin C supplementation at a dose of 1,000 milligrams, the patients had lower concentrations of malondialdehyde (MDA), which is a marker of oxidative stress. Additionally, they noticed that vitamin E wasn’t leaving the bloodstream as quickly.

These findings aren’t just promising for CF patients, but also for smokers and people with metabolic syndrome since they normally also struggle with oxidative stress in their bodies, which may also suggest that vitamin C and E supplements could help them find relief. Traber also explains that while this study reinforces that getting ample vitamin C and E through a varied and nutritious diet is important, the effects have more to do with adding high amounts of vitamin C to a healthy diet.

“This study used vitamin C far in excess of what someone can easily obtain from the diet,” Traber concludes. “One thousand milligrams is the equivalent of 15 oranges or four or five medium bell peppers. But the research does suggest a high dosage may be beneficial in inflammatory conditions.”

Link Found Between High-Fat, High-Calorie Diet and Pancreas Cancer

University of California Los Angeles, Oct. 1, 2022

Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) have found that mice made obese by being given high-calorie, high-fat diets (HFCD) developed abnormally high numbers of lesions known as pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasias (PanINs), which are known to be precursors to pancreas cancer. This is the first study to show a direct causative link in an animal model between obesity and risk of this deadly cancer.

Cancer of the pancreas (scientifically known as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma or PaCa) is one of the most deadly forms of the disease in humans. Overall five-year survival rates are approximately three to five percent and the average survival period after diagnosis is just four to six months. It is a particularly aggressive disease and often beyond the point of effective treatment by the time symptoms appear.

Dr. Eibl and colleagues set out to develop diet-induced obesity and development of pancreas cancer in a set of mice and then compare them to another set of mice that are genetically identical but not given a high-fat, high-calorie diet. Obesity in these mice resembles several important clinical features of human obesity such as weight gain and disturbance of metabolism, and this mouse model was ideal for unraveling any underlying biological mechanisms of pancreas cancer that are put in motion by obesity.

Mice that ate the normal diet gained an average of approximately 7.2 grams, plus or minus approximately 2.8 grams over 14 months. Mice that ate the high-fat, high-calorie diet gained an average of 15.9 grams, plus or minus 3.2grams. Mice fed the normal diet had mostly normal pancreases with very few scattered PanIN lesions. Mice fed the high-fat, high-calorie diet had significantly more PanIN lesions and fewer overall healthy pancreases.

The study showed that the mice fed a diet high in fats and calories gained significantly more weight, had abnormalities of their metabolism and increased insulin levels, and had marked pancreatic tissue inflammation and development of PanIN lesions. These observations strongly suggest that such a diet leads to weight gain, metabolism disturbances, can cause pancreas inflammation and promotes pancreas lesions that are precursors to cancer.

“The development of these lesions in mice is very similar to what happens in humans,” Dr. Eibl said. “These lesions take a long time to develop into cancer, so there is enough time for cancer preventive strategies, such as changing to a lower fat, lower calorie diet, to have a positive effect.”

The vegetable that treated gunshot wounds
National Geographic, October 9, 2022

One of the most expensive meals ever eaten—barring Cleopatra’s show-stopping vinegar cocktail with dissolved pearl—was an onion.

At least, the eater thought it was an onion. He was a (nameless) sailor in the 1630s, on board a ship transporting a cargo of tulip bulbs at the height of the European tulip craze. Now nicknamed tulipomania, this was the dot-com bubble of the day, in which speculators drove the price of tulip bulbs, recently introduced from the seraglios of the Middle East, to unsustainably astronomical heights. (Predictably, the market crashed, leaving many tulip investors ruined.) The clueless sailor, who said only that he thought his meal remarkably blah-tasting for an onion, had chowed down on a bulb of Semper Augustus, then worth 5,500 florins—a fortune on the open market.

It’s an interesting story because, frankly, it’s hard to miss an onion. Onions—members of the odoriferous Allium genus that includes some 700 species, among them garlic, leeks, shallots, chives, rakkyo, and kurrats—are crammed with smelly, eye-stinging, volatile chemicals that are distinctly absent from tulip bulbs. Collectively, these pack such a powerful sensory punch that onions and relatives have an historical reputation for effectively fending off everything from devils, demons, and vampires to witches, serpents, tigers, the black plague, and the common cold.

Onions, traditionally, have also been known as fighting food. Onions were fed to Greek athletes in training for the brutally competitive Olympics, and gladiators were massaged with onion juice before entering the arena. The Roman legions, who had a passion for all things onion, distributed alliums across Europe. (One authority claims that it’s possible to follow the advance of the Roman Empire by plotting range maps for garlic.) For the legionnaires, alliums were not only tasty, but militarily helpful, believed to promote strength and courage in face of the enemy. In ancient times, gamecocks and warhorses were fed garlic to boost their fighting spirit; and in Aristophanes’s 5th-century BCE play The Knights, warriors stuff themselves with garlic in preparation for battle. Garlic, in Rome, was dedicated to Mars, the god of war.

Onions themselves are fine-tuned biological fighting machines. The compounds generated when an onion is bitten, nibbled, sliced, chopped, diced, or otherwise disrupted are the onion’s anti-pest defense mechanism, a phenomenal battery of repellants nasty enough to discourage most onion attackers from ever coming back again. When onion cells are damaged, the onion goes into red alert, releasing enzymes that act upon ordinarily benign sulfur-containing organic compounds to produce a barrage of malodorous, painful, and highly reactive molecules. It doesn’t pay to mess with an onion.

The Onion Equivalent of Tear Gas
Some allium-generated chemicals simply smell awful: onions and garlic, for example, contain some of the same sulfurous ingredients found in skunk spray. (American cowboys once called onions skunk eggs.) Others make us cry. An abused onion undergoes chemical reactions that lead to the production of syn-propanethial-S-oxide—known as a lachrymator, from the Latin lacrima meaning “tear.” Fast-acting and potent, syn-propanethial-S-oxide, is the onion equivalent of tear gas.

When syn-propanethial-S-oxide hits the cornea of the eye—which happens within seconds of chopping knife meeting onion—it activates nerve endings that, detecting an irritant, send a signal to the lachrymal glands to pump out tears to wash the invader away. And well it should; onion irritant is really irritating. Chemist and onion expert Eric Block compares its effect to a punch in the eye-socket. Combined with the water in tears, syn-propanethial-S-oxide breaks down to make sulfuric acid, which is something nobody wants in the eye. Solutions to the onion-slicing lachrymator problem—none of them totally foolproof—include goggles, fans, or dicing up your onion under cold running water.

Mean as onions are, they’ve got a lot going for them. Onion and garlic juices are both mild antibiotics. In the Civil War, onion juice was routinely used to treat gunshot wounds. General Grant, deprived of it, sent a testy memo to the War Department in Washington: “I will not move my troops without onions.” (They promptly sent him three cartloads.) Garlic was used as an antiseptic in both World Wars I and II.

Modern research shows that these weren’t bad picks in a medical pinch: garlic juice, for example, inhibits Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and the causative agents of typhus and dysentery. Alliums, if not optimal, were certainly better than nothing.

Healing Properties of Onions
Today onions are considered more than food. They’re now touted as nutraceuticals—a portmanteau word cobbled together from “nutrient” and “pharmaceutical”—indicating that as well as adding flavor to spaghetti sauce and stew, they also have substantial medicinal and health-promoting qualities. Onions not only inhibit bacterial and fungal growth, but are laden with antioxidants, effective at protecting us from cancers and cardiovascular disease. Various chemicals in the versatile onion have been found to ameliorate everything from allergies and asthma to diabetes; and onions are lush sources of vitamins and minerals.

Foodwise, it’s hard to imagine living without onions. Onions are essential components of any number of global cuisines. Perhaps the best plug for the culinary versatility of the onion is the story of the 18th-century French caterer who-faced with hungry customers and nothing in the larder-served up a pair of leather gloves, shredded, and sautéed with onions, mustard, and vinegar. The recipients thought it delicious.

Nowadays we may soon even be able to have all the pleasures and perks of onions without the pain. Colin Leady and colleagues, of New Zealand’s Crop and Food Research, along with collaborators in Japan, have come up with a tear-free onion. It was created using a gene-silencing technology in which the gene for the enzyme that generates the onion lachrymator is shut down. The result is an onion with all the flavorful and nutritional bennies of a conventional onion, but without the tear-inducing syn-propanethial-S-oxide.