The Claim: A Sunscreen Chemical Can Have Toxic Side Effects

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Sunscreen is supposed to protect skin. But some people suspect that a chemical in sunscreen, absorbed through the skin, may be even more hazardous than the sun’s rays.

The concerns stem from a small body of research indicating that oxybenzone, which blocks ultraviolet light, may mimic the effects of estrogen in the body and promote the growth of cancer cells. One study found that rats eating high doses of the chemical experienced side effects like abnormal uterine growth.

But in March, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York published an independent report examining all the evidence on the subject and concluded that the alarming findings from early animal studies relied on unrealistic dosages. In rat study, for instance, the animals were fed levels of oxybenzone that would never be achieved in humans through normal exposure to sunscreen.

The researchers also reviewed the data on oxybenzone tested on humans. Men and women do seem to absorb small levels through normal sunscreen use, but there was no evidence that it set off hormonal changes. Nor did the researchers find evidence of toxicity. While the idea of a compound in sunscreen being absorbed through the skin may sound alarming, the report’s authors pointed out that this commonly occurs with skin care products.

For those who have reservations, some sunscreens are now made without oxybenzone, though they may not offer the same ultraviolet protection.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Exposure to oxybenzone, through normal sunscreen use, is safe, studies find.

Soda Makers Scramble to Fill Void as Sales Drop

By STEPHANIE STROM Published: May 15, 2012

In much the same way their ancestors on the prairie had to check their guns at the door of the saloon, the 320 students in the Faulkton Area School District in tiny Faulkton, S.D., will be required to dispose of all carbonated soda containers before stepping into school buildings.

“We’re not trying to be the pop police or anything, but we felt like we were sending a mixed message by having a healthy lunch program and yet letting everyone walk around with sodas with a bunch of sugar in them,” said Joel Price, superintendent of the district.

Although schools have been removing sodas and other sugary drinks from vending machines for the last few years, the Faulkton district is one of the first in the country to institute a ban, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which works to reduce childhood obesity.

The school cafeteria will serve water, low-fat milk and fruit juices, and those beverages, as well as sports drinks and noncaffeinated diet sodas sold in vending machines, are all that will be available on school property. “Sure, there will be some opposition to it, but this is the way things are changing, like it or not,” said Kyle Ortmeier, the 17-year-old behind the school’s wellness campaign.

Cold, bubbly, sweet soda, long the American Champagne, is becoming product non grata in more places these days. Schools are removing sugary soft drinks from vending machines at a faster pace, and local governments from San Antonio to Boston are stepping up efforts to take them out of public facilities as the nation’s concerns about obesity and its costs grow.

Last year, the average American drank slightly under two sodas a day, a drop in per capita consumption of about 16 percent since the peak in 1998, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication.

What began as a slow decline accelerated in the middle of the last decade and now threatens some of the best-known brands in the business. Coke and Pepsi are relying more than ever on the “flat” drinks and bottled waters in their portfolios and on increases in the price of sodas, forcing die-hard drinkers to pay more to feed their sugar habits.

“The question is, are we seeing a modest, multiyear decline that will bottom out? Or are we seeing the beginning of a paradigm shift away from carbonated soft drinks?” said John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest and a longtime observer of the industry. “I don’t think anyone knows yet, but I think there are continuing headwinds against the category that aren’t abating.”

Health advocates are cautiously optimistic about the decline. “It is really important because sugary soft drinks are the No. 1 source of calories in our diets,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “We get more calories from sodas and sugary drinks than any other individual food — cake, cookies, pizza, anything.”

But Ms. Wootan and others are worried about what may be taking the place of carbonated soft drinks in the American diet. They note the increasing appetite for energy drinks, loaded with sugar as well as caffeine, and noncarbonated sports drinks, which may have as much sugar as sodas.

“This is the next stage of where battle lines being drawn,” said Dr. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who often totes around a jar filled with two and a third cups of sugar, the amount consumed by drinking a soda every day for one week. “Beverage companies are putting more and more emphasis on selling fortified beverages, as if fortified means healthier when in fact it often means more salt added to sugar.”

Not surprisingly, the country’s largest soda companies insist their carbonated soft drinks business will still grow, if not at as fast a clip as it has historically. “This is not a zero-sum game,” said Sandy Douglas, president of Coca-Cola North America.

But even they concede that unless the industry stumbles upon what it calls the holy grail, an all-natural sweetener with no calories, the future is going to be more firmly anchored in noncarbonated drinks. “The health and wellness trend is huge, permanent and important,” Mr. Douglas said. “My crystal ball says that a smart beverage company will sell a variety of products, and some of them will have bubbles and some of them won’t.”

Coca-Cola and its competitors have spent the last two decades decreasing their reliance on carbonated soft drinks anyway.

For most of its history, for instance, PepsiCo sold Pepsi. It bought Mountain Dew in 1964 and 20 years later, introduced a soda called Slice. It bought the international rights to 7Up and added Mug Root Beer to its lineup in 1986.

It played around with those brands, adding diet and other versions. Then, in 1992, it signed a deal with Lipton to sell ready-to-drink teas that initiated a spate of joint ventures, acquisitions and new product introductions. It added brands like Aquafina, SoBe and Sierra Mist — many not carbonated.

 “As a business, we first saw this coming several years ago, which led us to get ahead of it with things like Gatorade and Tropicana that have done very well for us,” said Simon Lowden, chief marketing officer for PepsiCo’s North American beverage arm.

The competition, Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper, pursued much the same strategy. All three companies amassed stables of brands that took them far beyond their foundations in carbonated soda, though it remained the cash cow.

At the time, Mr. Lowden said, they were driven by growing multiculturalism on the home front and their expanding global footprint, but their broad portfolios also have cushioned them from the impact of changing attitudes toward soda as the nation wages its war on obesity.

Rufina Cowboy realized how big a role it played in her weight when her daughters Tamara Lewis, 12, and Lisa Cowboy, 11, persuaded her to go on a diet after participating in a program in their hometown, Cuba, N.M. The program, aimed at teaching children about healthy eating, is underwritten by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Ms. Cowboy started walking more, eating fresh fruits and vegetables and cutting back on meats. “I kept in there, walking on the trail here and eating better, trying to lose weight, but it wasn’t working,” she said.

Her doctor told her it might be the soda she was drinking. “I said, ‘I don’t drink that much,’ but then he added up the sugar in what I was drinking, and it was 25 pounds a year,” Ms. Cowboy said. “I said, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ ” She now drinks mostly water.

Lisa used to drink Dr Pepper. “It makes you dehydrated,” she said. Both she and Tamara, who has juvenile diabetes, have lost weight. Their mother has lost 20 pounds.

In spite of consumers like the Cowboys, beverage companies have been making more money on carbonated soft drinks by raising prices. That allowed revenue from carbonated soft drinks to reach a record high last year of $75.2 billion in the United States, according to Beverage Digest.

In one effort to assuage health-conscious consumers, the companies have been making smaller packages with a wider range of calories. Coca-Cola used to sell roughly eight sizes of packaging, from six-packs of 8-ounce cans to 2-liter plastic bottles. Today it sells more than twice as many types of packages, from a 32-pack of cans sold in warehouse stores to six-packs of 7.5-ounce “mini” cans, sales of which, Mr. Douglas said, “are on fire.”

The big three beverage companies are also endlessly tinkering with combinations of sweeteners and sugars to lower calories without altering taste. PepsiCo, for instance, introduced Pepsi Next, which uses a blend of sweeteners to deliver half the calories of a standard Pepsi, and on Monday, Coke announced it would test-market similarly slimmed-down versions of Sprite and Fanta

Dr Pepper Snapple has gone even further with 10-calorie versions using a blend of artificial sweeteners and high-fructose corn syrup in many of its carbonated soft drinks. “We have to innovate in ways of getting calories out of beverages and still providing the taste experience people don’t find in today’s diet drinks,” said Jim Trebilcock, executive vice president at Dr Pepper.

Most recently, the beverage companies have gone on the offense against New York City’s longstanding campaign against soft drinks with their first advertising ever in the city subways, promoting these strategies as strides to combat obesity. “We’re dedicated to helping you choose what’s right for you,” one ad says. 

Taking Calcium May Pose Heart Risks

Body | By ANAHAD O'CONNOR| May 24, 2012, 1:07 pm

Calcium supplements, long recommended for stronger bones, may be bad for the heart, a large new study confirms. The study found that taking extra calcium may raise the risk of a heart attack.

In recent years, some health authorities had hoped that calcium supplements, in addition to building bones, might also provide consumers with cardiovascular and other benefits. Some research, for example, has shown that people with higher levels of the mineral in their diet tend to have lower rates of hypertension, obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

But while higher levels of calcium from food intake may yet prove to be good for the heart, research suggests that the same does not hold true for calcium purchased over the counter. A study from 2010, for example, a large meta-analysis that looked at data on more than 8,000 adults over four years, found that those who were taking calcium supplements — a minimum of 500 milligrams a day — had nearly a 30 percent greater risk of heart attack than those who were not.

Researchers caution that dietary studies can be unreliable, since so many factors come into play, and people may not recall their dietary or supplement-taking histories accurately in questionnaires. In addition, the findings reflect a correlation, which does not necessarily mean causation when it comes to linking certain foods or nutrients with a particular health outcome.

The latest study, published online in the journal Heart, was the largest and most detailed to date on calcium intake and disease, involving more than 24,000 people who were taking part in a large continuing analysis called the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. The subjects, ages 35 to 64 at the start of the research, were followed for 11 years and questioned about things like their health, their food intake and their supplement use.

In an attempt to rule out or minimize the effects of other factors that contribute to heart disease and could complicate the results, the authors took into account age, physical activity, body mass index, diet, and alcohol and cigarette use when conducting their analyses. After adjusting for these factors, they found that people who had what they called a “moderate” intake of calcium — 820 milligrams a day of calcium from all sources, both dietary and supplements — had a roughly 30 percent lower risk of a heart attack than those with the lowest calcium intake. People who had had a greater intake, above 1,100 milligrams daily, did not see their risk lowered any further.

But looking specifically at supplements presented a more alarming picture. People who got their calcium almost exclusively from supplements were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack compared with those who took no supplements. The researchers speculated that taking calcium in supplement form causes blood levels of the mineral to quickly spike to harmful levels, whereas getting it from food may be less dangerous because the calcium is absorbed in smaller amounts at various points throughout the day.

The authors of the study said their findings indicate that people getting their calcium from supplements should do so “with caution.”

“Sufficient calcium intake is important, but my recommendation would be to get calcium from food, like low-fat milk and dairy products and mineral water rich in calcium, rather than from supplements,” said Dr. Sabine Rohrmann, an author of the study and a professor with the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Zurich. Health authorities recommend that most adults get about 1,100 milligrams a day.

An editorial that accompanied the study reflected a similar sentiment, saying that the safety issues and doubts swirling around calcium supplements should lead doctors and health officials to discourage their use.

“We should return to seeing calcium as an important component of a balanced diet,” the editorial stated, “and not as a low-cost panacea to the universal problem of postmenopausal bone loss.”

The Lingering Effects of Whiplash

The Lingering Effects of Whiplash

Soft-tissue Injuries of the Cervical Spine 15-year Follow-up

Key Points from Dan Murphy

1)      At a mean of 15.5 years post whiplash trauma, 70% of whiplash-injured patients continued to complain of symptoms referable to the original accident.

2)      Long-term symptoms from whiplash injury include neck pain, arm paresthesia, back pain, headache, dizziness, and tinnitus.

3)      Women and older patients have a worse outcome from whiplash injuries.

4)      Radiating arm pain is more common in those with severe symptoms.

5)      Between 10 and 15 years after the accident, 18% of the patients had improved, whereas 28% had deteriorated.

6)      Soft-tissue injuries to the cervical spine may give persisting symptoms.

7)      Most whiplash-injured patients reach their final state by two years after being injured, but this study shows ongoing symptom fluctuation between years 10 to 15.

8)      At the 15-year follow-up, neck pain was present in 65% and low-back pain was present in 48%.

9)      80% of women and 50% of men continued to have symptoms at 15 years.

10)   Back pain and tinnitus increased between years 10 and 15.

11)   Symptoms remained static in 54%, improved in 18% and worsened in 28%.

12)   Degenerative changes are associated with a worse prognosis for recovery.

13)   60% of symptomatic patients had not seen a doctor in the previous five years because the doctors were unable to help them.

14)   18% had taken early retirement due to health problems, which they related to the whiplash injury.

15)   Whiplash symptoms do not improve after settlement of litigation.

16)   Most radiating pain is referral from the facets, and not radicular.

17)   Chronic whiplash symptoms will cause an abnormal psychological assessment after 3 months.

18)   In this study, 100% of patients with severe ongoing problems had cervical spine degeneration.

C5 Radiculopathy

C5 Radiculopathy

With radiculopathy involving C5, there typically is no pain distal to the elbow and no numbness or paresthesia in the hand. The patient generally reports cervical pain along with pain in the shoulder, medical border of the scapula, and upper arm. Paresthesia or numbness or both may be seen over the deltoid area and radial aspect of the upper arm. The biceps reflex may be decreased or absent, although this is less likely than with C6 radiculopathy. Motor loss involves shoulder abduction. 

Foods to Avoid

AVOID:

Ripened cheeses (Cheddar, Emmentaler, Stilton, Brie, Camembert)

                              (permissible cheeses: American, cottage, cream, Velveeta)

Herring, pickled or dried

Chocolate

Anything fermented, pickled, or marinated

Sour cream (no more than ½ cup daily)

Nuts, peanut butter

Sourdough bread, breads, and crackers containing cheese or chocolate

Broad beans, lima beans, fava beans, snow peas

Foods containing monosodium glutamate (MSG)-soy sauce, meat tenderizers, seasoned salt

Figs, raisins, papayas, avocados, red plums (no more than ½ cup daily)

Citrus fruits (no more than ½ cup daily)

Bananas (no more than ½ cup daily)

Pizza

Excessive amounts of tea, coffee, or cola beverages (no more than 2 cups daily)

Sausage, bologna, pepperoni, salami, summer sausage, hot dogs

Chicken livers, pate

Alcoholic beverages: (If you do drink, limit yourself to two normal size drinks selected from Haute Sauterne, Riesling, Seagram’s VO, Cutty Sark)

Diet and Headache

Diet and Headache

Below is a list of foods that may trigger headaches. Dietary triggers do not necessarily contribute to headaches in all patients. Certain foods may trigger attacks in certain individuals, but not on every occasion. Be your own expert by trying to log the foods you have eaten before a migraine attack and see whether their removal reduces or eliminates your headaches.