SaluGenecists Science Blog

A new report in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that a blue dye found in M&Ms may have a specific anti-inflammatory effect that aided in the healing of damaged neurons. The authors speculated that this action might be worthy of further study to see if it would help humans with spinal injury.

Three comments on this:

1. Hundreds of these types of basic sciences articles come out every month, and most never make it to human research trials. I frequently find myself baffled by how one of them ends up being newsworthy.
2. Now that we’ve got a potential beneficial effect of a food additive, can we start having a realistic conversation about potential health risks related to other similar chemicals? We could maybe start with yellow #5 or red #3.
3. Perhaps the whole brown M&M controversy of the early 1980s was an early indication of folk use of this food dye as medicine. The tour manager for Van Halen was unavailable for comment.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past couple of weeks, we’ve had some technical problems with the blog access, but I think we now have them fully resolved.

A couple of new studies published this week in the online version of the journal Hypertension shed more light on the relationship between dietary sodium and hypertension (what did you think this journal would be writing about? tennis?).

The relationship between sodium intake and blood pressure is a complex one, and for that reason can be difficult to distill into a quick public health sound bite. Reducing sodium intake can reduce blood pressure by several points (about 3-5 mmHg in most research) in the majority of hypertensive adults. There is also a subset of hypertensives - roughly 20-25% by the estimates I’ve read - who have a much larger magnitude of response to salt restriction.

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I apologize for the lack of posts over the past two weeks. We’ve been switching servers over, and I hadn’t realized the posts weren’t posting. Here’s a brief recap of a longer one that never made it.

An International Expert Committee with members from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) issued a new recommendation this month about diagnostic testing for diabetes. For the first time, the hemoglobin A1c test is considered the standard for diagnosis of diabetes, with values above 6.5% and greater being considered abnormal.

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Need an excuse for your addiction to that morning cuppa? Quenching your morning thirst for java may help you remember what day it is and where you left those keys.
When aged mice specially bred to develop the mouse equivalent of Alzheimer’s Disease were given caffeine — in amounts a human would get from drinking about 5 cups of coffee a day — their memory impairment was not just slowed down but actually reversed!
Studies by researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center showed that caffeine rapidly reduces levels of beta-amyloid protein in the blood and in the brain. (The appearance of clumps of beta-amyloid in the brain is a signature finding in Alzheimer’s.) The Florida research group also determined that caffeine given to elderly non-demented humans also quickly affects their beta-amyloid levels, just like it does in the Alzheimer’s prone mice.
The Alzheimer’s mice got a daily caffeine dispensation comparable to a human tossing back 500 milligrams of caffeine — the amount found in 2 espresso drinks, 14 cups of tea or 20 caffeinated soft drinks.
After two months, the caffeinated mice demonstrated memory and thinking skills identical to normal aged mice without dementia. The Alzheimer’s mice drinking plain old water just continued to wonder where on earth they had left the keys.
When the mice were sacrificed (yes, these little critters gave their lives for you), the brains of the caffeinated critters showed nearly a 50% reduction in levels of beta-amyloid. Other experiments by the same research group indicate caffeine protects and restores memory by inhibiting the activity of the enzymes involved in producing beta-amyloid, and also suppress inflammatory changes in the brain that promote beta-amyloid formation.