SaluGenecists Science Blog

Currently, mothers are recommended to exclusively nurse their children for the first six months, and begin introducing solid foods thereafter. The reason for this delayed schedule is to slow the introduction of potential allergy triggers until the gastrointestinal tract matures.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics challenges this food introduction strategy. In fact, the authors of this study found that the longer the delay in adding several categories of foods, the more risk of allergy and asthma by the age of five.

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Generally speaking, when I talk to my colleagues in the CAM community, I hear a consensus that artificially sweetened beverages are an unhealthy choice. But other than persistent anecdotes of idiosyncratic reactions, evidence against diet soda has been remarkably thin.

A new report presented at the American Society of Nephrology meeting this week may change this consensus, however. The new study analyzed 3200 women from the Nurses’ Health Study, finding that the risk of significant decline in kidney function was much higher in older women drinking two or more artificially sweetened beverages daily.

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I saw a chart this morning that summed up my experience this week nicely:

Source.

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According to a study to be published next month in Environmental Health Perspectives, circulating levels of mercury are not elevated in children with autism compared to typically developing children. This study is particularly important, as parent advocacy and practitioner groups have focused on mercury toxicity and mercury chelation treatments as key interventions in the biological treatment of this common condition.

Blood mercury levels in both autistic children and typically developing controls were similar those found in previous population samples in the age group, and on average were far below levels toxicologists consider dangerous.

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A new survey published in the journal Pediatrics suggests that the prevalence of autism continues to rise. An estimated 1.1% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 are affected by conditions on the autism spectrum.

Estimates of autism prevalence prior to 1980 were below 0.05%. By the early 2000s, widely publicized estimates went as high as 0.7%. There is currently no scientific consensus on the reason for this dramatic change.

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Here’s an interesting resource I just found this week: CSPC. It is a database of cosmetic ingredients known to cause harm in humans. There is also an online reporting area.

Personally, I believe that there is so much noise in the conversation about toxins in the environment that it gets hard to hear the true signal (signal to noise ratio is radio engineering lingo for you young-’uns). This link is pure signal, no noise.

Thanks to the Breast Cancer Resource Center of Tacoma for bringing this one to my attention.

The conversation about keeping U.S. health care costs under control has oscillated from maddeningly vague to absurdly detailed, but with no real plan emerging. The main reason for this, I believe, is that whenever the topic of cost control comes up, industry (pharma, hospitals, physicians, etc) starts to holler about rationing.

I’m about to say something really controversial here: a little rationing would probably be a good thing in many ways. Let me give an example.

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Out here in the Pacific Northwest, most of our grocery chains have set up a section for “health food” - a couple of aisles with packaged foods, frozen items, green cleaning products, etc. Because every store I go in seems to be adopting this strategy, I have no doubt about whether this is a lucrative idea. But here’s the catch, many of the things in this “health food” aisle aren’t too healthy.

For the most part, my complaints aren’t all that sophisticated. Many of the low-fat packaged foods replace the lost flavor with extra salt. Organic frozen packaged foods are nearly as nutritionally bereft as their conventionally-grown counterparts. 

But then there’s this.  I see this product in pretty much every grocery story I go to (and I’ve got about 5 in heavy rotation). It is made from a soil fungus noted for its toxicity. I have been aware of complaints from consumers for nearly a decade, and pretty much since it came on the market. And it is still being sold as a health-food alternative to eating meat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 15 years, and I’d probably still rather have fast-food hamburgers before eating soil fungus burgers.

I rented a DVD over the weekend called Beautiful Truth. It caught my eye because it claimed to be the story of the Gerson Therapy for cancer, a treatment that has been in and out of favor in CAM practice for over 50 years.

Instead, the film turned into a grab bag of hot button issues in modern health - vaccines, amalgams, GMO foods, etc. Watching this stuff unfold on the same day as the march on Washington by opponents of the health care bill, I was struck by just how cynical Americans have become.

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According to a new study published by PLoS Medicine (a new online journal that is likely to end up in my regular rotation), less than half of the registered clinical trials in America over the past decade went unpublished. The trials sponsored by industry were the least likely ever to end up on the shelves.

This new research trial was elegant in its simplicity. The authors surveyed the clinicaltrials.gov website for all registered clinical trials between 1999 and 2007. Of these, they took a randomized subset of 10% of the 7515 total research trials. After eliminating incomplete trials and CAM studies (!), they were left with 677 data points.

Of these 677 trials, only 311 (or 46%) had been published. Of the studies sponsored by industry, only 40% had been published.

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