HUNTING FOR FOOD

HUNTING FOR FOOD

Mark Berry, head of plant biology and biochemistry at the consumer company Unilever's research and development unit, says there are also positive signs in data from studies of "Palaeolithic" or stone-age diets - plans designed to mimic the diet of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers of that era.

A sign of its current popularity is that "Paleo diet" was one of the most "Googled" terms of 2013. The idea is based around foods that can be hunted, fished or foraged for - meat, seafood, eggs, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables.

Berry said his research showed little impact on glucose response in the body in people eating a Palaeolithic diet, but did find a significant impact on hormones that signal satiety and tell the brain the eater is full.

"The high satiety effects of increased protein in the diet seems to be a contributing factor to the success of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets," she said.

Johnstone cited data showing the amount of weight lost on high-protein diets is around double that lost on a comparable low-fat diet at the six-month mark.

But there is little difference in weight loss after one year, as dieters often lose momentum and their resolve to slim down fades. "There's no magic bullet," she said.

Judy Buttriss, head of the British Nutrition Foundation, said the evidence for popular diets was clearly nuanced. While there are several that can be used as tools for effective weight loss and maintenance, she said "there's currently no evidence that one is any better than another in the long term".

all about health

Starting Jan. 1, central provisions of the Affordable Care Act kicked in, allowing many uninsured Americans to afford health insurance. But the landmark law still faces heavy opposition from Republicans and from a public that remains skeptical the law can improve health care coverage while lowering its cost.
The law has already altered the health care industry and established a number of consumer benefits. It has sweeping ramifications for consumers, state officials, employers and health care providers, including hospitals and doctors.

However, healthcare.gov, the federal website that is managing enrollment in 36 states, has been plagued by electronic problems that botched the Oct. 1 rollout of the health law’s online marketplaces, or exchanges. The problems frustrated potential enrollees and gave Republicans new fodder for their argument that the law was doomed to fail. After hundreds of hardware and software fixes, federal officials have said that the site works for the “vast majority of users,” but some problems remain.

Skin Disease

Between 5.8 million and 7.5 million people live with the skin disease psoriasis, yet almost half with moderate to severe cases are not getting treatment and others are receiving out-of-date treatment. Why? Because the condition is still widely misunderstood—people who live with it can be subject to prejudice and discrimination—and treatments have not been very good until now.

“Just a few years ago, we didnt have such great options,” says Steven Feldman, MD, PhD, professor of dermatology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC. “Thats changed! Treatments are now more effective, safer, and easier to use than ever.”

Psoriasis is an often painful and itchy chronic skin condition that produces red, inflamed patches on the skin. The patches, which are not contagious, are usually covered with a white buildup of dead skin cells. Scientists are not sure what causes it, but they do know that psoriasis involves a genetic dysfunction that triggers an inappropriate immune response, leading to the rapid production of new skin cells.

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There are five types of psoriasis: plaque (the most common form), guttate, inverse, pustular, and erythrodermic. Psoriasis can appear anywhere on the body and up to 30% of people with psoriasis will develop psoriatic arthritis, a painful condition in which joints are inflamed and stiff.

“Psoriasis is largely an inherited condition, but it involves multiple genes and possibly some environmental factors to bring the disease on,” says Dr. Feldman. Common triggers include stress; skin trauma, such as sunburn or wounds; some medications, including antimalarial drugs; and, in the case of guttate psoriasis, strep infection.

Physical Activity

shows that people who spend less time sitting and more time physically active have a lower risk for chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer and others.
Even just standing more and sitting less appears to make a difference to health and quality of life, say Sara Rosenkranz and Richard Rosenkranz, both assistant professors of human nutrition, who led the study.
Prof. Richard Rosenkranz says:
"Not only do people need to be more physically active by walking or doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, but they should also be looking at ways to reduce their sitting time."

Breaking up long periods of sitting, by exercising or simply standing, promotes better health and 'successful aging.'
Image credit: Kansas State University

The researchers had already shown in earlier work that the more people sit, the greater their chances of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and premature death.
For their new study, reported in the journal BMC Public Health, the Rosenkranzes and colleagues wanted to take a positive approach and find out to what extent increasing physical activity might benefit health and quality of life.

Health insurance

Health insurance companies are on the prowl for more customers. There are still three months to go for people to enroll in health plans under the Affordable Care Act, but insurers don’t want to rely solely on state or federal websites to find them.

Some are finding a path to new customers by partnering with companies that operate health-screening kiosks –- those machines in supermarkets and drug stores where people check their blood pressure or weight.

A SoloHealth kiosk in a Safeway supermarket in Lafayette, California. SoloHealth has an exclusive contract with Anthem Blue Cross in Calif. to promote that company's plans on the Covered California marketplace. (Photo by April Dembosky/KQED).

One of these kiosks sits in aisle 10 of a Safeway grocery store in a city near San Francisco. Sitting down at the machine is like slipping into the cockpit of a 1980s arcade game. There’s a big plastic seat and foot rest for measuring weight and body mass index, a window for testing vision and a blood pressure cuff.

“Make sure the cuff comes up above your elbow,” says an attractive brunette on screen. She is wearing a white lab coat, and she asks a lot of personal questions, like “Do you have a blood relative who was told they have a heart problem?” And, “During the past 30 days, how many days have you felt sad or depressed?”

The machines are owned by a company based near Atlanta called SoloHealth. It started installing the kiosks in Walmart and other retail stores in 2008 to give people a way to keep better track of their health. Today there are more than 3,500 SoloHealth stations across the U.S. and the company plans to install another 1,500 this year.

SoloHealth first made money by selling ads for pharmacy items displayed near the kiosks. But in the era of health care reform, it happened upon a new business model. The data it collects is suddenly very valuable to health insurance companies.

“As much as we’ve moved to the market, the market has really moved to us,” says Bart Foster, CEO of SoloHealth. “We’re able to provide much more detailed information than the health plans even know what to do with today.”

In this case, providing means selling information about people who have used SoloHealth kiosks. For now, SoloHealth is selling names, email addresses and phone numbers to insurers who want to market health plans directly to consumers. Now that all Americans are required to have insurance by March 31 or pay a penalty, insurers are looking for new ways of finding potential customers, and competing with each other to get their attention. Anthem Blue Cross is one of them. It brokered an exclusive agreement with SoloHealth to be the sole insurance company featured on kiosks throughout California.

“We know that engaging consumers early and engaging them with our messaging helps improve the chances of them choosing Anthem as their health plan,” says spokesman Darrel Ng.

As a part of that strategy, SoloHealth added a new service to its machines in October offering help with understanding the Affordable Care Act.

“If you would like to learn more about the upcoming changes to the health care system and how they affect you” a male voice now says to visitors at the kiosks, “select the ‘continue’ button at the bottom of the screen.”

A drawing of a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck flashes and the voiceover says, “We can have an experienced professional reach out to help you find the plan that meets your specific needs.”

But what the friendly voice doesn’t make clear is that the “experienced professional” is not a doctor or SoloHealth representative, but an insurance rep. That is only explained after the customer enters his or her name and email.

Privacy advocates say this is misleading.

“Consumers have every reason to be shocked this is happening,” says Pam Dixon, executive director of the nonprofit World Privacy Forum based in San Diego.

She says most consumers don’t understand that their information is being sold. While there is a two-page health privacy disclosure, it can only be viewed by clicking a blue button at the bottom of the screen. Whether customers read it or not, they agree to all the terms when they hit a separate green button. Dixon says that’s not good enough.

“The fact that they’re not being told in a clear, conspicuous and prominent manner is problematic,” she says.

SoloHealth says it is reviewing the customer experience of its kiosks.

After partnering with insurance companies SoloHealth has made another recent change. Until a couple weeks ago, the company’s comprehensive privacy policy — governing what the company can do with the data it collects — wasn’t on the machine. There was a web address provided, but since there was no internet connection at the kiosk, there was no way to read it. At first, SoloHealth said it was too cumbersome to scroll through the information on the small kiosk screen. But then, in mid-December, the company added the full policy to its machines. SoloHealth said the change was to improve transparency.

“We work with retail partners, our attorneys, and our corporate sponsors to make sure that we’re totally buttoned up,” says Foster, SoloHealth’s CEO. “We have a number of very large companies that have looked at this and are very comfortable with where we are.”

But some consumers aren’t very comfortable. Stacey Winn has been using the kiosk at her local supermarket for the last six months to track her blood pressure. She doesn’t remember ever seeing a privacy policy, even when she visited late last month after it was added. What she did notice for the first time were ads for a health insurance plan. Now she feels uneasy about her blood pressure records, weight, age, and ethnicity details being stored in SoloHealth’s database.

“I wonder now what they’re doing with that information when I hadn’t really wondered that before,” she says. “There’s a saying that if a service is offered for free then you’re actually the product that’s being sold, and I think that this is turning into an example of that.”

Ultrasound

Ultrasound - echoing acoustic frequencies that are undetectable to the human ear - is already a common guidance tool for some animals, including bats and whales. As far back as 1929, experiments had shown that ultrasound affected the nerves, muscles and eyes of frogs and turtles.

Subsequent studies involving cats, mice, rats, rabbits and monkeys also revealed that controlled exposure to ultrasound could disrupt seizures or cause other controlled changes to brain function.

But this new study, conducted by scientists at the Virigina Tech Carilion Research Institute and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to show evidence that focused, low-intensity ultrasound can have a positive, measurable effect on human brain function.

Researchers focused an acoustic beam of ultrasound at the area of the cerebral cortex responsible for processing sensory information from the hand in human volunteers. The scientists then stimulated the major nerve running through the arm by placing an electrode on the volunteers' wrists.

The responses in the volunteers' brains were measured using electroencephalography (EEG), and two traditional neurological tests were used to record how accurately the subjects could distinguish between the sensations of pins or puffs of air touching the skin.

For Travis Hill, it was an offer too good to refuse. Last year when the 30-year-old neuroscientist was admitted to a new program at the NYU School of Medicine that would allow him to complete medical school in only three years and guarantee him a spot in its neurosurgery residency, he seized it. Not only would Hill save about $70,000 -- the cost of tuition and living expenses for the fourth year of medical school -- he would also shave a year off the training that will consume the next decade of his life.
"I'm not interested in being in school forever," said Hill, who earned a PhD from the University of California at Davis last June and started med school in Manhattan a few weeks later. "Just knowing where you're going to be for residency is huge."
So is Hill's student loan debt: about $200,000, dating back to his undergraduate days at the University of Massachusetts.

And he won't begin practicing until he is 40.
The chance to finish medical school early is attracting increased attention from students burdened with six-figure education loans: The median debt for medical school graduates in 2013 was $175,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This year, the combined cost of tuition and fees for a first-year medical student ranges from just over $12,000 to more than $82,000.

Brain Remember concepts

The researchers explain that "processing loops," in which visual information flows from the retina to the "top" of the visual processing string in the brain and then back down again for more processing, were previously thought to be necessary in identifying specific scenes or objects.
As such, they expected to observe a substantial decline in performance around the 50-millisecond mark, the time other studies have suggested it takes for visual information to complete such a loop.

But they found that the participants still continued to perform better than chance when the image exposure time dropped from 80 milliseconds to 53, 40, then 27 and finally 13 milliseconds, which was the fastest possible speed their computer monitor could manage.
"This didn't really fit with the scientific literature we were familiar with, or with some common assumptions my colleagues and I have had for what you can see," says Prof. Potter.
As the images were progressively shown faster, she believes the subjects' better performance may be attributable to the practice they had in fast detection.

'Feedforward processing' enough for brain to remember concepts

Prof. Potter says that she and her team were able to "show more evidence of knowledge than in previous experiments where people hadn't really been expecting to find success, and didn't look very hard for it."
The study shows evidence that "feedforward processing," which is the one-directional flow of information from the retina through visual processing centers in the brain, is sufficient for the brain to recognize concepts without needing to do more feedback processing.
Additionally, the researchers add that although the images were only seen for 13 milliseconds before the next image appeared, the results suggest that part of the brain continues processing the images for longer.
Prof. Potter says that in some cases, participants were not asked about the presence of a specific image until after they had seen the whole sequence, adding:

"If images were wiped out after 13 milliseconds, people would never be able to respond positively after the sequence. There has to be something in the brain that has maintained that information at least that long."
She notes that the ability to identify images seen for such a short span of time may help the brain decide where to focus the eyes.

The team is now conducting research on how long visual information presented for a brief period can be held in the brain, as well as investigating - via magnetoencephalography scanners - which brain regions are active when a person completes the identification task.
Medical News Today recently reported on a study that suggested directing ultrasound at the human brain improves sensory perception.