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Friday 31 October 2014

Statins linked to thyroid, breast , and other cancers

A new study conducted by Shih-Han Hung at Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taiwan, and colleagues Herng-Ching Lin, and Shiu-Dong Chung, shows that regular statin use is linked to a significantly greater risk of thyroid cancer.

Researchers examined 500 patients with thyroid cancer, and 2500 subjects without thyroid cancer. They found that thyroid cancer was significantly associated with previous regular statin use in women, but not in men.

The study was published in the journal Clinical Endocrinology.

This link might be due to the immunomodulatory effects of statins.

A recent study published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention also shows disturbing effects on breast cancer. Long-term use of statins has been linked to an almost two-fold greater risk of some types of breast cancer, according to a study at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The study showed that statins were associated with an increased risk of invasive ductal carcinoma and invasive lobular carcinoma.

A recent study publishd in the journal The Prostate examined if statins have a link to prostate cancer. Researchers examined 388 prostate cancer patients and 1,552 age-matched controls. The use of any statins was linked to a significant increase in prostate cancer risk. With increasing cumulative dose, a significant trend toward higher prostate cancer risk was observed.

Cholesterol is essential for proper physical and psychological health, and lowering it too much will have negative effects. Statins can increase the risk of some types of cancer, and their use should be questioned.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/

Graham

Asparagus spears with shell fish



You can use whatever shellfish you can get your hands on for this.

16 medium asparagus spears with the woody ends removed 
16-20 medium prawns, cooked and peeled 
200-250g freshly-cooked cockles or clams, removed from the shell 
200-250g freshly-cooked mussels, removed from the shell 
4-5tbsp olive or rapeseed oil 
The juice of 1 lemon 
½ tbsp chopped fennel or dill 
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Serves four

Cook the asparagus in boiling salted water for 4-5 minutes, then drain.
Mix the shellfish with the oil, lemon and dill or fennel, then season to taste.
Arrange the asparagus on serving plates and top with the shellfish.

Recipe by Mark Hix from here.

All the best

Jan

Jimmy Moore Halloween special on twitter.

  1. Jeez Jimmy never let it be said you ever give up, I think your friend has messed up his keto diet, clearly not enough fat.

DCUK Sid Bonkers 'the protected one' goes completely batshit !

Those who follow this blog and read the antics that go on at the DCUK forum know Sid 'the enforcer' Bonkers is arguably the rudest member in the forums history. Ex main henchman and enforcer for the long gone Kenny boy and darling of the low carb anti clique and beloved by the more bent and cranial disadvantaged forum moderators, Sid is giving it large again. Sid has been protected for years by certain mods and as can be seen by clicking on the link below, Anna the senior moderator 'likes lots of Sid's posts, it was ever thus. 

A member started a thread and said.

"I wonder whether we could gather together examples of Healthcare Professionals who have told people that it is either unnecessary or just plain wrong to test their blood sugars. It is a scandal that needs highlighting."

The bonkers one went straight on the attack bellowing.

"To what point, so you can have them shot after the revolution? Just seems a totally pointless thread to me, its not going to change anything"

Another member said



Part of this comment was swiftly edited by an un-named mod. Even with an anonymous forum name, certain mods lack the courage and integrity to post with a known forum name. The comment "Or an Interesting thread answered by a totally pointless person..." went, we can't have that said about poor old Sid can we. But when Sid labels low carbers idiots and liars, rail roads people like Dr. Jay Wortman from the forum, and calls the Southport Doctor a troll, that's cool with the certain mods. Yet again we see the bias against low carbers on the forum of flog, yet again we see the complete lack of integrity displayed by certain mods, yet again we see the corruption shining through. I suspect it will ever be thus.

To be fair, the forum administrator is a non diabetic and not too long out of school, as such cannot be blamed when surrounded by some of the most duplicitous, conniving liars that ever assembled on a forum.


Giverny may be an honest and very likeable young lady with many admirable qualities, but surrounded by gutless anonymous sharks, she stands no chance in ever getting that forum on the straight and narrow.


One last point, why Sid sits on his arse retired long before retirement age, due to invalidity, many of the low carbers he so obviously hates are working to ensure his benefit cheque gets paid every month. He tells us he gets adequate tests strips on free prescription for his needs, the thread was highlighting many diabetics get none. Sid is clearly in the I'm alright f**k you jack mould, as are so many of his friends.


Eddie


Link to the "Interesting thread answered by a totally pointless person"
 is here.

Post edit.

Just to prove my point 100% a very well mannered and even handed long time poster posted this on the thread. The post was deleted by a mod within seconds.




Thursday 30 October 2014

The USDA Finally Got The Food Pyramid Right

Diabetes 'out of control' in most parts of England

Warning that diabetes is 'out of control' in most of England, with 120 amputations a week, and those living in East London and West Suffolk faring worst for uncontrolled disease.

Diabetes is “out of control” in swathes of the country, with 120 limbs amputated a week and no areas in which treatment targets are being met, new statistics reveal. The data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that on average, just one in three patients have their blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels properly controlled.

Experts said the failings were alarming because uncontrolled disease can result in complications, such as amputations, blindness, kidney failure, and early death. Barbara Young, Chief Executive of Diabetes UK, said: “It is deeply worrying that there is a postcode lottery in diabetes healthcare and also huge variation in the proportion of people who have their diabetes under control.”

She said she hoped the figures would act as a spur for the NHS and Government to draw up urgent plans to improve diabetes healthcare – but suggested she was not hopeful.


More than 70,000 deaths a year occur among those suffering from the condition - one in seven of all deaths.Patients with Type 2 diabetes are 36 per cent more likely to die in any given year than those of the same age without the condition.

Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary, said: “We know that diabetes can have a devastating impact on people and we want everybody to get excellent care and support, regardless of where they live.


Full story here.

While the NHS and DUK promote a diet almost guaranteed to cause diabetic complications in the long term no progress will ever be made.

Eddie

Healthy Halloween treats



Hop over to the ditchthecarbs site here a wonderful site for low carbers, diabetics and non diabetics alike. Remember children are not best served by a diet based on sugar and starch.



One of our grandsons with this years Halloween pumpkin.

All the best Jan

Wednesday 29 October 2014

NINA TEICHOLZ: USDA The Last Anti-Fat Crusader

The low-fat-diet regimen is turning out to be based on bad science, but the USDA has been slow to catch on

The top scientist guiding the U.S. government’s nutrition recommendations made an admission last month that would surprise most Americans. Low-fat diets, Alice Lichtenstein said, are “probably not a good idea.” It was a rare public acknowledgment conceding the failure of the basic principle behind 35 years of official American nutrition advice.

Yet the experts now designing the next set of dietary recommendations remain mired in the same anti-fat bias and soft science that brought us the low-fat diet in the first place. This is causing them to ignore a large body of rigorous scientific evidence that represents our best hope in fighting the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans—jointly published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) every five years—have had a profound influence on the foods Americans produce and consume. Since 1980, they have urged us to cut back on fat, especially the saturated kind found mainly in animal foods such as red meat, butter and cheese. Instead, Americans were told that 60% of their calories should come from carbohydrate-rich foods like pasta, bread, fruit and potatoes. And on the whole, we have dutifully complied.

By the turn of the millennium, however, clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were showing that a low-fat regime neither improved our health nor slimmed our waistlines. Consequently, in 2000 the Dietary Guidelines committee started to tiptoe away from the low-fat diet, and by 2010 its members had backed off any mention of limits on total fat.

Yet most Americans are still actively trying to avoid fat, according to a recent Gallup poll. They are not aware of the USDA’s crucial about-face because the agency hasn’t publicized the changes. Perhaps it did not want to be held responsible for the consequences of a quarter-century of misguided advice, especially since many experts now believe the increase in carbohydrates that authorities recommended has contributed to our obesity and diabetes epidemics.

Such a humbling reversal should have led the expert committee preparing the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, which holds its next-to-last public meeting Nov. 6-7, to fundamentally rethink the anti-fat dogma. But instead it has focused its anti-fat ire exclusively on saturated fats. Recent guidelines have steadily ratcheted down the allowable amount of these fats in the diet to 7% of calories “or less,” which is the lowest level the government has ever advised—and one that has rarely, if ever, been documented in healthy human populations.

The most current and rigorous science on saturated fat is moving in the opposite direction from the USDA committee. A landmark meta-analysis of all the available evidence, conducted this year by scientists at Cambridge and Harvard, among others, and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, concluded that saturated fats could not, after all, be said to cause heart disease. While saturated fats moderately raise “bad” LDL-cholesterol, this does not apparently lead to adverse health outcomes such as heart attacks and death. Another meta-analysis, published in the respected American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010, came to the same conclusion. The USDA committee has ignored these findings.

No doubt, accepting them would be another embarrassing reversal for nutrition experts. The USDA, the NIH and the American Heart Association have spent billions trying to prove and promote the idea that saturated fats cause heart disease.

In place of saturated fats, these agencies have counseled Americans to consume ever-larger quantities of unsaturated fats, which are found mainly in soybean and other vegetable oils. Yet a diet high in these oils has been found in clinical trials to lead to worrisome health effects, including higher rates of cancer. And the USDA, which espouses a commitment to finding healthy “dietary patterns” based in history, is now in the paradoxical position of telling Americans to derive most of their fats from these highly processed vegetable oils with virtually no record of consumption in the human diet before 1900.

The most hopeful path lies in a different direction: An enormous trove of research over the past decade has shown that a low-carbohydrate regime consistently outperforms any other diet in improving health. Diabetics, for instance, can most effectively stabilize their blood glucose on a low-carb diet; heart-disease victims are able to raise their “good” HDL cholesterol while lowering their triglycerides. And at least two-dozen well-controlled diet trials, involving thousands of subjects, have shown that limiting carbohydrates leads to greater weight loss than does cutting fat.

The USDA committee’s mandate is to “review the scientific and medical knowledge current at the time.” But despite nine full days of meetings this year, it has yet to meaningfully reckon with any of these studies—which arguably constitute the most promising body of scientific literature on diet and disease in 50 years. Instead, the committee is focusing on new reasons to condemn red meat, such as how its production damages the environment. However, this is a separate scientific question that is outside the USDA’s mandate on health.

Rates of obesity in the U.S. started climbing dramatically right around 1980, the very year in which the Dietary Guidelines were first introduced. More than three decades later, more of the same advice can only be expected to produce similarly dismal health outcomes. And the cost, in human and dollar terms, will continue to be catastrophic.

These are compelling reasons for Congress to ask the USDA and HHS to reconstitute the Dietary Guidelines committee so that its members represent the full range of expert opinion. The committee should then be mandated to fundamentally reassess the Guidelines’ basic assumptions, based on the best and most current science. These measures would give millions of Americans a fighting chance in their battle against obesity, diabetes and heart disease—and at last start to reverse the ill effects of our misguided Dietary Guidelines.

Ms. Teicholz is the author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet” (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

http://online.wsj.com/

Graham

Low carb salmon and asparagus crustless quiche


Ingredients:
6 eggs
One tin of whole asparagus spears 244 grams
100 grams of flaked pre-cooked salmon
6 tablespoons of double cream
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 2-4

Mix the eggs and cream in a bowl or pyrex jug
Pour into a non stick baking dish 8" x 1.5"
Place the asparagus spears and salmon
Place into a pre heated oven at 190c and cook for twenty minutes.
Serve with a mixed salad. Great lowcarb food and won't break the bank. Tastes great hot or cold.

All the best Jan

This Government wants to sell off the NHS don't let them do It !


Embedded image permalink

Banned and missing DCUK low carbers found



The Low Carb Diabetic Forum is not for the feint hearted


The Low Carb Diabetic Forum is Here all most welcome to read or join

How Margarine breaks your bones !


Scientists have known for more than a decade that the omega-6 fats contained in vegetable oils (like those used to manufacture margarine) degrade human bone density.  Now new research has thrown light on how that happens and why anyone concerned about osteoporosis needs to immediately stop consuming them.
One in twenty Australians have osteoporosis (Greek for ‘porous bones’) and 1 in 4 have low bone density (the precursor to osteoporosis). The number of people affected is accelerating wildly. In the last 10 years the number of GP visits related to osteoporosis has doubled in Australia.
Our bones are not static lumps of rock.  They are living tissue which constantly accumulate and dispose of minerals.  Osteoporosis occurs when bones lose minerals, such as calcium, more quickly than the body can replace them.  This causes a loss of bone thickness (bone density or mass).
As bones become thinner and less dense, even a minor bump or fall can cause a serious fracture. Unfortunately most people don’t know they have the disease until after they suffer a break.  Eight out of ten cases are recorded in people over the age of 55 but the age of onset is becoming progressively younger.
Osteoporosis medicines work by making the cells that break down bone (osteoclasts) less active.  This tips the balance towards accumulation of minerals by the cells that form bone (osteoblasts).
Every processed food on the supermarket shelves is loaded with omega-6 fats (in the form of seed oils).  Every fried food has been boiled in omega-6 fats (seed oils again). Our National Heart Foundation actively encourages us to eat margarines brimming with omega-6 fats (yep, seed oils).  And the charity responsible for advice about Osteoporosis doesn’t even mention the known link between omega-6 fats and the disease.
Read the full article here.
Eddie

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Heart Failure, Saxagliptin, and Diabetes Mellitus: Observations from the SAVOR-TIMI 53 Randomized Trial

Abstract

Background—Diabetes mellitus and heart failure frequently coexist. However, few diabetes mellitus trials have prospectively evaluated and adjudicated heart failure as an end point.
Methods and Results—A total of 16 492 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and a history of, or at risk of, cardiovascular events were randomized to saxagliptin or placebo (mean follow-up, 2.1 years). The primary end point was the composite of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or ischemic stroke. Hospitalization for heart failure was a predefined component of the secondary end point. Baseline N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide was measured in 12 301 patients. More patients treated with saxagliptin (289, 3.5%) were hospitalized for heart failure compared with placebo (228, 2.8%; hazard ratio, 1.27; 95% confidence intercal, 1.07–1.51; P=0.007). Corresponding rates at 12 months were 1.9% versus 1.3% (hazard ratio, 1.46; 95% confidence interval, 1.15–1.88; P=0.002), with no significant difference thereafter (time-varying interaction, P=0.017). Subjects at greatest risk of hospitalization for heart failure had previous heart failure, an estimated glomerular filtration rate ≤60 mL/min, or elevated baseline levels of N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide. There was no evidence of heterogeneity between N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide and saxagliptin (P for interaction=0.46), although the absolute risk excess for heart failure with saxagliptin was greatest in the highest N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide quartile (2.1%). Even in patients at high risk of hospitalization for heart failure, the risk of the primary and secondary end points were similar between treatment groups.
Conclusions—In the context of balanced primary and secondary end points, saxagliptin treatment was associated with an increased risk or hospitalization for heart failure. This increase in risk was highest among patients with elevated levels of natriuretic peptides, previous heart failure, or chronic kidney disease.
Graham

No evidence that a person's low level of vitamin D leads them to develop type 2 diabetes.

A new study from the University of Cambridge in the UK challenges findings of earlier research that concludes having higher levels of circulating vitamin D might prevent type 2 diabetes.

These earlier observational studies raised suggestions that low vitamin D contributes to the development of type 2 diabetes. But because they were not designed to investigate cause and effect, they could not prove it: they could only establish a link.

Now a large genetic study published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal, concludes there is no evidence that a person's low level of vitamin D leads them to develop type 2 diabetes.

The researchers found no evidence of a link between the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and the different gene variants that control blood levels of vitamin D.

They also found no links between varying levels of vitamin D and several features of type 2 diabetes, such as glucose and glycated hemoglobin, and neither did they find evidence that low vitamin D causes the disease.

Dr. Forouhi says their results echo those of randomized controlled trials - the classic way to test cause and effect links - which have generally concluded taking vitamin D supplements does not stop people developing type 2 diabetes.

"Our findings suggest that interventions to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes by increasing concentrations of vitamin D are not currently justified," she notes.

Full article here.


Eddie

Twitter still luvin it !

  1. Do you like to keep up to date with the latest research? Find out about new projects & research trials on our website
  2. When will you people be keeping up on latest research re the best diet for diabetics? You are years behind the times!