The usually garrulous and attention-seeking Chavez’s disappearances from public view have become longer and more frequent this year. That has fuelled speculation his condition has worsened and may complicate a re-election bid in October.

Allies in the ruling Socialist Party say the 57-year-old leader remains on top of government affairs and is not mulling a succession. Chavez said he was working less than before his illness, but still about eight hours a day.

“Unfortunately, I can’t carry on being the wild horse I was. I will rest and get well again,” he said during the roughly 90-minute phone call, speaking in a firm voice and twice breaking into song.

“I didn’t used to sleep, now I’m working as the law dictates – just eight hours a day, resting, following a diet,” the former soldier said. “I’ve spent this week shut away here working … I’ll steadily be getting better.”

Chavez has been seen only twice in public since mid-April, presumably under strict doctor’s orders in his presidential palace. He made a half-hour appearance last Friday when he returned from Cuba after completing radiotherapy sessions.

Despite rumours he was wheelchair-bound, Chavez walked unaided down the airplane stairs and then inspected a military guard of honour.

Even on Twitter, where he is usually prolific and has a following of nearly 3 million people, Chavez has been uncharacteristically quiet.

The official line is that he is recovering from tough treatment and will soon be launching his campaign for the October 7 election in which he is being challenged by state governor Henrique Capriles.

Chavez wrongly claimed to be “completely cured” at the end of 2011, so many Venezuelans are sceptical about his condition, especially given the plethora of rumours and leaks from pro-opposition media citing medical sources.

With the details of his health a state secret, all that is officially known is that Chavez has had three operations. Two malignant tumours were removed from his pelvic area.

The second was removed after what he called a recurrence of cancer this year.

The implications of a downturn in his health are enormous less than five months from the election, when Chavez hopes to extend his 13-year rule of the OPEC member.

(Additional reporting by Mario Naranjo; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

Article source: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/venezuelas-chavez-breaks-silence-phone-call-000628483.html

In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory reported that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The study sought to determine whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles.

“It’s a dogma that a high-fat diet leads to obesity and that we should eat frequently when we are awake,” says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory and senior author of the paper. “Our findings, however, suggest that regular eating times and fasting for a significant number of hours a day might be beneficial to our health.”

Panda’s team fed two sets of mice, which shared the same genes, gender and age, a diet comprising 60 percent of its calories from fat (like eating potato chips and ice-cream for all your meals). One group of mice could eat whenever they wanted, consuming half their food at night (mice are primarily nocturnal) and nibbling throughout the rest of the day. The other group was restricted to eating for only eight hours every night; in essence, fasting for about 16 hours a day. Two control groups ate a standard diet comprising about 13 percent of calories from fat under similar conditions.

After 100 days, the mice who ate fatty food frequently throughout the day gained weight and developed high cholesterol, high blood glucose, liver damage and diminished motor control, while the mice in the time-restricted feeding group weighed 28 percent less and showed no adverse health effects despite consuming the same amount of calories from the same fatty food. Further, the time-restricted mice outperformed the ad lib eaters and those on a normal diet when given an exercise test.

“This was a surprising result,” says Megumi Hatori, a postdoctoral researcher in Panda’s laboratory and a first author of the study. “For the last 50 years, we have been told to reduce our calories from fat and to eat smaller meals and snacks throughout the day. We found, however, that fasting time is important. By eating in a time-restricted fashion, you can still resist the damaging effects of a high-fat diet, and we did not find any adverse effects of time-restricted eating when eating healthy food.”

Hatori cautioned that people should not jump to the conclusion that eating lots of unhealthy food is alright as long as we fast. “What we showed is under daily fasting the body can fight unhealthy food to a significant extent,” she says. “But there are bound to be limits.”

Obesity is a major health challenge in many developed countries, reaching global pandemic proportions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of American adults and 17 percent of youth are obese. Obesity increases the risk of a number of health conditions including: high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes. Lifestyle modifications, including eating a healthy diet and daily exercise, are first-line interventions in the fight against obesity. The Salk study suggests another option for preventing obesity by preserving natural feeding rhythms without altering dietary intake.

Scientists have long assumed that the cause of diet-induced obesity in mice is nutritional; however, the Salk findings suggest that the spreading of caloric intake through the day may contribute, as well, by perturbing metabolic pathways governed by the circadian clock and nutrient sensors.

The Salk study found the body stores fat while eating and starts to burn fat and breakdown cholesterol into beneficial bile acids only after a few hours of fasting. When eating frequently, the body continues to make and store fat, ballooning fat cells and liver cells, which can result in liver damage. Under such conditions the liver also continues to make glucose, which raises blood sugar levels. Time-restricted feeding, on the other hand, reduces production of free fat, glucose and cholesterol and makes better use of them. It cuts down fat storage and turns on fat burning mechanisms when the animals undergo daily fasting, thereby keeping the liver cells healthy and reducing overall body fat.

The daily feeding-fasting cycle activates liver enzymes that breakdown cholesterol into bile acids, spurring the metabolism of brown fat — a type of “good fat” in our body that converts extra calories to heat. Thus the body literally burns fat during fasting. The liver also shuts down glucose production for several hours, which helps lower blood glucose. The extra glucose that would have ended up in the blood — high blood sugar is a hallmark of diabetes — is instead used to build molecules that repair damaged cells and make new DNA. This helps prevent chronic inflammation, which has been implicated in the development of a number of diseases, including heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer’s. Under the time-restricted feeding schedule studied by Panda’s lab, such low-grade inflammation was also reduced.

“Implicit in our findings,” says Panda, “is that the control of energy metabolism is a finely-tuned process that involves an intricate network of signaling and genetic pathways, including nutrient sensing mechanisms and the circadian system. Time-restricted feeding acts on these interwoven networks and moves their state toward that of a normal feeding rhythm.”

Amir Zarrinpar, a co-first author on the paper from the University of California San Diego, said it was encouraging that a simple increase in daily fasting time prevented weight gain and the onset of disease. “Otherwise, this could have been only partly achieved with a number of different pills and with adverse side effects,” he says.

The multimillion-dollar question is what these findings mean for humans. Public health surveys on nutrition have focused on both the quality and quantity of diet, but they have inherent flaws such as sampling bias, response bias and recall errors that make the results questionable. Thus, says Panda, with the current data it is difficult to connect when we eat, what we eat with how much weight we gain.

“The take-home message,” says Panda, “is that eating at regular times during the day and overnight fasting may prove to be beneficial, but, we will have to wait for human studies to prove this.”

The good news, he adds, is that most successful human lifestyle interventions were first tested in mice, so he and his team are hopeful their findings will follow suit. If following a time-restricted eating schedule can prevent weight gain by 10 to 20 percent, it will be a simple and effective lifestyle intervention to contain the obesity epidemic.

Other researchers on the study were Christopher Vollmers, Amir Zarrinpar, Luciano DiTacchio, Shubhroz Gill, Mathias Leblanc, Amandine Chaix, Matthew Joens and James A.J. Fitzpatrick, from the Salk Institute; and Eric A. Bushong and Mark H. Ellisman, of the University of California, San Diego.

This work was partially supported by the Pew Scholars Program in Biomedical Sciences, NIH grant R01DK091618 to M.M., Sanofi Discovery Innovation Grant, and Anderson Foundation support to S.P.; JSPS fellowship to M.H.; Blasker Science and Technology Grant Award to C.V.; NIH grant T32DK007202 to A.Z.; and NIGMS grant 8P41GM103412 to M.H.E.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Salk Institute for Biological Studies, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

1. Megumi Hatori, Christopher Vollmers, Amir Zarrinpar, Luciano DiTacchio, Eric A. Bushong, Shubhroz Gill, Mathias Leblanc, Amandine Chaix, Matthew Joens, James A.J. Fitzpatrick, Mark H. Ellisman, Satchidananda Panda. Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet. Cell Metabolism, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Article source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120517131703.htm

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/healthy-dieting-pregnancy-may-helpful-130608435.html

The body clock’s effect on metabolism could be an overlooked factor driving obesity, scientists say.

New evidence from studies of mice published in the journal Cell Metabolism suggests that 24-hour snacking, especially at night, can pile on the pounds.

Restricting eating to sensible meal times, on the other hand, may help fight the flab – even with big helpings.

Researchers compared mice fed the same amount of high-fat food round the clock or over a period of eight hours. The mice given a restricted time in which to eat were protected against obesity and also suffered less liver damage and inflammation.

Lead scientist Dr Satchidananda Panda, from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US, pointed out that every organ has a “clock”.

Livers, intestines and muscles worked at peak efficiency at certain times and were more or less sleeping at others. These metabolic cycles were critical for a wide range of biological processes, from cholesterol breakdown to glucose production.

“When we eat randomly, those genes aren’t on completely or off completely,” said Dr Panda.

He added there was evidence that eating patterns had changed, with people having greater access to food and reasons to stay up late, for instance to watch TV. When people were awake, they tended to snack.

The timing of food consumption should be given more consideration by obesity experts, said Dr Panda. “The focus has been on what people eat,” he said. “We don’t collect data on when people eat.”

Article source: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/weight-may-depend-eat-160141487.html

When mice on a high-fat diet are restricted to eating for eight hours per day, they eat just as much as those who can eat around the clock, yet they are protected against obesity and other metabolic ills, the new study shows. The discovery suggests that the health consequences of a poor diet might result in part from a mismatch between our body clocks and our eating schedules.

“Every organ has a clock,” said lead author of the study Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That means there are times that our livers, intestines, muscles, and other organs will work at peak efficiency and other times when they are — more or less — sleeping.

Those metabolic cycles are critical for processes from cholesterol breakdown to glucose production, and they should be primed to turn on when we eat and back off when we don’t, or vice versa. When mice or people eat frequently throughout the day and night, it can throw off those normal metabolic cycles.

“When we eat randomly, those genes aren’t on completely or off completely,” Panda said. The principle is just like it is with sleep and waking, he explained. If we don’t sleep well at night, we aren’t completely awake during the day, and we work less efficiently as a consequence.

To find out whether restricted feeding alone — without a change in calorie intake — could prevent metabolic disease, Panda’s team fed mice either a standard or high-fat diet with one of two types of food access: ad lib feeding or restricted access.

The time-restricted mice on a high-fat diet were protected from the adverse effects of a high-fat diet and showed improvements in their metabolic and physiological rhythms. They gained less weight and suffered less liver damage. The mice also had lower levels of inflammation, among other benefits.

Panda says there is reason to think our eating patterns have changed in recent years, as many people have greater access to food and reasons to stay up into the night, even if just to watch TV. And when people are awake, they tend to snack.

The findings suggest that restricted meal times might be an underappreciated lifestyle change to help people keep off the pounds. At the very least, the new evidence suggests that this is a factor in the obesity epidemic that should be given more careful consideration.

“The focus has been on what people eat,” Panda said. “We don’t collect data on when people eat.”

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

1. Megumi Hatori, Christopher Vollmers, Amir Zarrinpar, Luciano DiTacchio, Eric A. Bushong, Shubhroz Gill, Mathias Leblanc, Amandine Chaix, Matthew Joens, James A.J. Fitzpatrick, Mark H. Ellisman, Satchidananda Panda. Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet. Cell Metabolism, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Article source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120517132057.htm

The high court has set oral arguments in the case for June 13 at 11 a.m. in Frankfort.

The case stems from a lawsuit brought by former clients of three now-disbarred lawyers who once represented them in a $200 million settlement.

Former clients of attorneys William Gallion, Shirley Cunningham Jr., and Melbourne Mills claim the men improperly kept a significant portion of the funds, while keeping clients in the dark about the full amount of the agreement to end the litigation.

Gallion and Cunningham, one-time owners of champion racehorse Curlin, are serving federal prison sentences.

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/ky-high-court-hear-diet-drug-suit-june-145049984--finance.html

“We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men,” write authors Paul Rozin (University of Pennsylvania), Julia M. Hormes (Louisiana State University), Myles S. Faith (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Brian Wansink (Cornell University). The answer, they found, was a strong connection between eating meat — especially muscle meat, like steak — and masculinity.

In a number of experiments that looked at metaphors and certain foods, like meat and milk, the authors found that people rated meat as more masculine than vegetables. They also found that meat generated more masculine words when people discussed it, and that people viewed male meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters.

Most of the studies took place in the United States and Britain, but the authors also analyzed 23 languages that use gendered pronouns. They discovered that across most languages, meat was related to the male gender.

“To the strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American male, red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American food,” the authors write. “Soy is not. To eat it, they would have to give up a food they saw as strong and powerful like themselves for a food they saw as weak and wimpy.”

If marketers or health advocates want to counteract such powerful associations, they need to address the metaphors that shape consumer attitudes, the authors explain. For example, an education campaign that urges people to eat more soy or vegetables would be a tough sell, but reshaping soy burgers to make them resemble beef or giving them grill marks might help cautious men make the transition.

“In marketing, understanding the metaphor a consumer might have for a brand could move the art of positioning toward more of a science,” the authors conclude.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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1. Paul Rozin, Julia M. Hormes, Myles S. Faith, and Brian Wansink. Is Meat Male? A Quantitative Multi-Method Framework to Establish Metaphoric Relationships. Journal of Consumer Research, October 2012

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Article source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120516152532.htm

Think walking doesn’t really count in the fitness stakes? Think again.

Walking for 10 minutes (or, ideally, more) a day contributes to the 150 active minutes a week you should be aiming for to help improve your overall health and wellbeing, reduce your risk of cancer or heart disease, and combat obesity.

Walking just one mile (20 minutes) will burn more than 100 calories – and try and keep it brisk. You’ll know you are pushing yourself if you find yourself breathing harder than usual (you should be able to speak in full sentences, but unable to sing comfortably).

Make your walking work harder for your health by crossing a variety of terrain: soft ground, a sandy beach, heathland, even through the grass in a park; while adding some uphill walking will bring even more benefits.

Not sure you’ve got time to walk? Try a brisk walk at lunchtime – it will not only burn calories, but will leave you fresher and invigorated for the afternoon. If you travel by bus, try walking an extra 10 minutes at the start or end of your journey to fit in your daily walk.

Majorca: perfect for a walking holiday

UK: choose your route for a walking holiday

Article source: http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/walk-fitness-075352607.html

Their views come ahead of the 65th World Health Assembly taking place in Geneva on 21-26 May 2012 where prevention and control of non-communicable diseases will be a key issue for discussion.

As an increasing number of countries introduce taxes on unhealthy food and drinks, Oliver Mytton and colleagues at the University of Oxford examine the evidence on the health effects of food taxes.

Evidence suggests that taxing a wide range of unhealthy foods or nutrients is likely to result in greater health benefits than narrow taxes, they say, although the strongest evidence base is for tax on sugary drinks.

For example, a US study found a 35% tax on sugar sweetened drinks ($0.45 (£0.28; €0.34) per drink) in a canteen led to a 26% decline in sales.

Meanwhile modelling studies predict a 20% tax on sugary drinks in the US would reduce obesity levels by 3.5%, and suggest that extending VAT (at 17.5%) to unhealthy foods in the UK could cut up to 2,700 heart disease deaths a year.

Opinion polls from the US also put support for tax on sugary drinks at between 37% and 72%, particularly when the health benefits of the tax are emphasised.

However, they point out that understanding the overall effect on health is complicated, and that policy makers need to be wary of negative effects, like changes in other important nutrients and compensatory behaviour that may increase energy intake or reduce energy expenditure.

The food industry also argues that the taxes would be ineffective, unfair, and damage the industry leading to job losses. And from a legislative point of view, it is still unclear how such taxes are best introduced and enforced.

Meanwhile, others have advocated that the taxes be used to raise funds to treat diet related diseases, subsidise healthy foods, or to stimulate industry reformulation of food (such as removal of salt, sugar, or saturated fats from foods).

In conclusion, Mytton and colleagues say that health related food taxes have the potential to improve health, but the tax would need to be at least 20% to have a significant effect on population health.

In a second analysis paper, Corinna Hawkes from the Centre for Food Policy at City University London says that, although governments are beginning to implement food policies to encourage healthier eating, “there remains a long way to go for food policies to reach their full potential.”

She points out that changes to the food supply system since the 1980s have “coincided with rises in obesity and non-communicable diseases” and argues that health must be made a priority for the modern food economy.

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Journal References:

1. O. T. Mytton, D. Clarke, M. Rayner. Taxing unhealthy food and drinks to improve health. BMJ, 2012; 344 (may15 2): e2931 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e2931
2. C. Hawkes. Food policies for healthy populations and healthy economies. BMJ, 2012; 344 (may15 2): e2801 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e2801

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Article source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515203023.htm

The case, one of France‘s worst health scandals, has put authorities under scrutiny for allowing the sale of Mediator long after the medicine had been pulled in other European countries.

Although licensed as a diabetes treatment, the drug was widely prescribed, with a state subsidy, as an appetite suppressant to help people lose weight.

It is now suspected of causing heart valve disorders and was withdrawn in France in November 2009, around a decade after being pulled in Spain, Italy and the United States.

Several hundred civil plaintiffs who have joined the criminal case argue that Servier intentionally misled doctors about the drug, even though the dangers had been known since the 1990s.

State health inspectors also say the drug should have been withdrawn in France a decade earlier, and the plaintiffs are seeking damages and interest of 100,000 euros ($129,000) each.

“Servier let people use a toxic product for years. There is no debate about it,” said Charles Joseph Oudin, one of the presumed victims’ lawyers.

The focus of the Nanterre trial is on whether Servier made misleading claims, while a second, broader trial in Paris is due much later after an investigation that will examine allegations of manslaughter and corruption.

The defendants in Nanterre deny the allegations against them and are seeking to stop the trial on grounds that they should not be tried in two separate cases.

Servier’s founder and president, 90-year-old Jacques Servier, and four other executives risk custodial sentences of up to four years plus fines. The privately-owned Servier and its subsidiary Biopharma also face fines and the possibility of being banned from some activities.

Mediator – designed as an add-on treatment for diabetes patients who were overweight – was sold to as many as 5 million people in France between 1976 and November 2009.

However, many of those were not diabetics but simply seeking help to lose weight.

The offices of the Afssaps healthcare regulator were searched by investigators in February in connection with the case.

Concerns about the agency – whose head resigned over the case – have grown following a scandal over defective breast implants manufactured by the now-bankrupt French company PIP.

The Mediator case has also drawn attention to pharmaceutical companies’ influence in France’s public health system as well as their sway over politicians.

It has also triggered a push at European Union level to step up monitoring of drug safety.

According to the health ministry, at least 500 people died of heart valve trouble in France because of exposure to Mediator’s active ingredient, benfluorex. Other estimates based on extrapolations put the death toll closer to 2,000.

Less than a year before the drug was pulled, Servier was awarded France’s national merit medal, the Legion d’Honneur, by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had previously served as his lawyer.

($1 = 0.7726 euros)

(Writing by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/french-drugmaker-trial-over-weight-loss-pill-145922967.html