Finally, science agrees with herbalYODA on fructose

Food sweetener could be 'fuelling' childhood diabetes, study finds


The sweetener fructose, a cheap sugar substitute found in thousands of processed foods and soft drinks, may be increasing childhood diabetes and the obesity crisis, new findings suggest.

Fructose


By Amy Willis, Daily Telegraph, 13 Dec 2009

In a study by researchers at the University of California, 16 volunteers were put on a controlled diet with high-levels of fructose – a sweetener derived from corn.

After 10 weeks, the volunteers had developed more fat cells around the heart, liver and other major organs as well as showing signs of food processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease.

Another group of volunteers, who were also on a controlled diet but without the fructose, did not show the fat cell increase or the food processing abnormalities.

Both groups put on the same amount of weight.

Children are said to be in a higher risk group as they are more likely to eat products with high-levels of sweeteners over longer periods of time.

"This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain," Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study, told a Sunday newspaper.

More problems for Women's Health

The difficulty here from my perspective is that you aren't being told that anyone treated for any type of cancer can later develop other cancers. Usually people are told that if they achieve the 5 year window successfully following treatment they are cancer free. The other side of this is that if you do develop cancer again after the end of the 5 year window, it is statistically interpreted as a "new"cancer, although that may not in fact be the case.

What I wonder is why don't more women get told about the real and effective benefits from herbs and other nutritional supplements along with diet that will off set menopausal symptoms bone loss concerns. At time is is important to consider liver health because of its role in recycling neurotransmitters and detoxification, all interfered with by chemotherapy and other synthetic hormone pharmaceuticals.

Menopause drug linked to breast cancer relapse
Tue Feb 17, 2009
PARIS (AFP) – A synthetic steroid used to treat menopause symptoms and prevent osteoporosis significantly increases the risk of a relapse in breast cancer patients, according to a study released Tuesday.

The steroid, called tibolone, should not be prescribed to a woman who has had or is suspected of having breast cancer, concluded the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet Oncology.

Women with breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy are often beset with the debilitating symptoms of menopause, including hot flushes, night sweats, and bone loss.

Tibolone is licensed for use in 90 countries for alleviating these symptoms, and 55 countries have approved its use in treating osteoporosis, according to the study.

But concern that the drugs might also cause a recurrence of cancer have led to their being ruled out for patients with breast cancer.

Still, many patients with breast cancer use the drug -- often available without prescription -- to counteract the effects of menopause.

In clinical trials led by Peter Kenemans of the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, 3,098 women who had been surgically treated for breast cancer and who were experiencing hot flushes along with other related symptoms were divided into two groups.

The first was given a daily dose of 2.5 milligrammes of tibolone, and the second a look-alike placebo.

Just over 10 percent of the women who had taken the dummy medication suffered a cancer relapse, compared to more than 15 percent of the women who had taken the steroid -- an increased risk of 40 percent.

Seventy percent of the recurrences among the tibolone group were so-called "distant metastatses," which are invariably fatal.

The increased risk was so pronounced that the trial was stopped six months early.

"Although the trial was intended to show the non-inferiority of tibolone compared with placebo, the findings clearly show that -- although effective against hot flushes -- tibolone does increase the risk of breast-cancer recurrence," the study said.

Copyright © 2009 Agence France Presse.