Fast Food May Expose Consumers to Phthalates

(Reuters Health) – People who eat a lot of fast food may be exposed to higher amounts of certain chemicals in plastics that are believed to disrupt human hormones and possibly cause cancer, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers found that people who eat the most fast food have up to 39 percent more of two industrial chemicals called phthalates in their blood than those who eat less, or no fast food at all.

“We found a significant association suggesting that the more fast food someone eats, the higher the levels of two particular phthalates known to be used in food packaging and food contact material,” said lead author Ami R. Zota of the department of environmental and occupational health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Phthalates make plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) more flexible and are used in vinyl flooring, adhesives, detergents, lubricating oils and automotive plastics. People can be exposed by eating and drinking foods and beverages that have been in contact with plastic containers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The human health effects of phthalate exposure are not known, according to the CDC, but they have been shown to affect the reproductive systems of lab animals.

“Phthalates are of concern because animal and epidemiology studies have linked exposure to a range of adverse health outcomes, from toxicity to developing male reproductive systems, neurodevelopmental issues, miscarriage, and preterm birth,” said Justin Colacino of the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, who was not part of the new study.

Phthalates can mimic hormones in the body, and those in this study are also suspected to be carcinogens, Colacino told Reuters Health by email.

The study team used data from more than 8,000 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys between 2003 and 2010, including their self-reported fast food intake, the type of fast food they ate and the fat content of their food over the previous 24 hours. The surveys also included objective measurements of chemicals in urine samples.

As people’s fast food intake increased, so did evidence of phthalate exposure in their urine, according to the results in Environmental Health Perspectives.

There was no link between fast food consumption and urinary levels of bisphenol A (BPA), one of three plasticizing chemicals the researchers measured.

But people who got more than a third of their total calories from fast food over the previous day had 24 percent more of one chemical, di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), and 39 percent more of a second one, diisononyl phthalate (DINP), than those who did not eat any fast food.

These chemical exposures seemed to be tied specifically to how much grain-based or grain- and meat-based fast food people ate.

The researchers accounted for age, sex, race, body weight, household income, and in some models adjusted for other potential sources of phthalate-containing foods, like those obtained from vending machines and restaurants, but the association with fast food remained, Zota said.

“These studies cannot alone establish causality,” she noted. But, “the results are both statistically significant and meaningful,” she said.

“Some likely sources include the tubing used upstream in the processing of dairy and meat, as well as the packaging at various stages of production,” she said. “Another potential source is the gloves employees wear while handling it,” which are often vinyl gloves, Zota said.

“The results suggest that if you as an individual want to limit your chemical exposures, one potential way to do that is limiting fast food and processed food,” she said.

But individuals can only do so much to limit their exposure to these ubiquitous chemicals, she said.

“It’s going to require a number of stakeholders to address the problems including people who regulate what can be added to food contact materials and food packaging, the Food and Drug Administration, fast food companies themselves, and manufacturers of tubing,” Zota said.

Phthalate levels are regulated in food in the European Union, but not in the U.S., she said.

SOURCE: 1.usa.gov/1YtM51A Environmental Health Perspectives, online April 13, 2016.

Being ‘Out of Shape’ Ups Diabetes Risk Regardless of Weight

An overweight woman sits on a chair in Times Square in New York, May 8, 2012.

REUTERS/LUCAS JACKSON

Reuters Health – For adolescents, low cardiorespiratory fitness and poor muscle strength increase their risk for type 2 diabetes later in life, regardless of body weight, according to a study of young men in Sweden.

“Not only were both low aerobic and muscular fitness linked with a higher long-term risk of diabetes, but this was true even among those with normal body mass index,” said lead author Dr. Casey Crump of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

These risk factors had a synergistic effect. In other words, the combination of low aerobic and muscular fitness increased diabetes risk more than the sum of the two individual risks, Crump told Reuters Health by email.

The researchers used data on more than one million 18-year-old military conscripts in Sweden between 1969 and 1997, without a history of diabetes.

The researchers followed these men until 2012, identifying type 2 diabetes diagnoses using national hospital and outpatient registries.

About 2%, or 34,000 men, were diagnosed with diabetes during follow-up, which lasted into middle age for most. Half were diagnosed after age 46.

Those who were least fit as 18-year olds were three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than those with better measures of aerobic capacity and strength, even for young men with a healthy body mass index, as reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, March 7.

“This study showed that fitness traits were important for the prediction of future diabetes at any body weight so it should not be ignored,” said Peter T. Katzmarzyk of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

But “every study uses a different definition of ‘fitness’ and it is not really possible to come up with a single number that can define fitness level, especially given the known difference across ages and between men and women,” he told Reuters Health by email.

Activity level and genetics are major determinants of physical fitness, but activity level is the most important modifiable factor, Crump said.

“More studies will be needed that measure physical fitness as well as diet and BMI at other time points across the lifespan to examine age windows of susceptibility to these factors in relation to diabetes,” he said.

These should include women and other populations, he said.

“Young people should maintain regular exercise and both aerobic and muscular fitness, and avoid barriers to this such as screen time,” Crump said.

Current guidelines recommend 60 minutes of exercise daily, most of which should be aerobic activity, but should also include muscle-strengthening activities at least three days per week, he said, but only about half of U.S. children and youth meet these guidelines.

SOURCE: bit.ly/1p3bDqD

Chocolate Makes You Smarter, Study Suggests

It’s good for your heart, reduces the risk of strokes and even helps protect your skin from the sun.

Now, another apparent benefit has been added to the list of chocolate’s nutritional qualities: it makes you smarter.

A study, published recently in the journal, Appetite, indicated that people who eat chocolate at least once a week saw their memory and abstract thinking improve.

“It’s significant – it touches a number of cognitive domains,” psychologist Merrill Elias, one of the leaders of the study, told the Washington Post.

Mr. Elias began studying the cognitiveve abilities of more than 1,000 people in the state of New York in the 1970s, initially looking at the relationship between people’s blood pressure and brain performance.

About 15 years ago, he decided to ask participants of the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) what they were eating, adding a new set of questions about dietary habits.

Leading the analysis of the study, which was held between 2001 and 2006, was Georgina Crichton, a nutrition researcher at the University of South Australia. Ms. Crichton recognized the study presented a unique opportunity to examine the effects of chocolate on the brain, using a large sample size of just under 1,000.

Examining the mean scores on cognitive tests of participants who ate chocolate less than once a week and those who ate it at least once a week, the researchers found eating chocolate was strongly linked to superior brain function. The benefits, Ms Crichton told the Washington Post, would mean you would be better at daily tasks “such as remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time”.

“Our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability”

Psychologist Merrill Elias

In order to see whether smarter people simply tend to eat more chocolate or if the food does actually improve brain function, the researchers studied 333 participants whose cognitive abilities had been tested an average of 18 years before they were quizzed about what they eat. They found cognitive ability does not predict whether you a chocolate eater or not.

“Our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability,” Mr. Elias told the newspaper.

Why this is the case remains uncertain. However, previous studies have shown that food containing nutrients called flavanols, such as chocolate, improves brain function. In 2009, research found mental arithmetic became easier after volunteers had been given large amounts of flavanols in a hot cocoa drink.

In 2014, a study also suggested that a diet rich in cocoa could help stave off dementia-like memory loss in the elderly.

Chocolate has also found to help ward off memory loss.  Photo: Nassima Rothacker

However, Mr Elias stressed they weren’t suggesting people stuffed their faces with chocolate bars all week.

“I think what we can say for now is that you can eat small amounts of chocolate without guilt if you don’t substitute chocolate for a normal balanced healthy diet,” he added.

But make it dark chocolate, always! 

Broccoli May Reverse Damage, Prevent Cancer in Liver

 Photo by mama_mia/Shutterstock

Adding broccoli to the diet of mice in the lab reversed fat buildup in their livers, as well as reduced the number of cancerous nodules found in the rodents livers.

URBANA, Ill., March 3 (UPI) — Eating broccoli three to five times per week has been shown in experiments to reduce the risk for liver cancer, in addition to reducing damage to the liver that increases risk for cancer, according to new research with mice.

Researchers at the University of Illinois found eating broccoli a few times a week can counter the development of fat in the liver, which causes it to malfunction and increases the risk for liver cancer.

The vegetable is known to reduce the risk for other types of cancer, including breast, prostate and colon, so researchers were less surprised by its link to decreased risk for cancer than its effects on diseased livers.

The researchers said they worked specifically with mice that were not genetically predisposed to obesity, opting instead for rodents that became obese because of diet and activity. Their reasoning was most people are not genetically likely to become obese, focusing instead on the effects of the Western diet that has led to three-quarters of Americans being overweight or obese.

“There are actually two ways of getting fatty liver: one, by eating a high-fat, high-sugar diet and the other by drinking too much alcohol,” Elizabeth Jeffery, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, said in a press release. “In this case, it is called non-alcoholic fatty liver, because we didn’t use the alcohol. And it is something that is becoming prevalent among Americans. This disease means you are no longer controlling the amount of fat that is accumulating in your liver.”

For the study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, the researchers gave four groups of mice either a control diet with or without broccoli or a “Western diet” high in lard and sucrose with or without broccoli.

The researchers report that mice on the Western diet had more cancer nodules and larger nodules in their livers, but when broccoli was added to their diets the number of nodules decreased. Additionally, the researchers said the Western diet increased fat retained in the liver, but with broccoli added to their diets, the rodents livers increased the their output of lipids.

Jeffery said the mice did not lose weight when broccoli was added to their diets, but their livers got healthier. This, she said, suggests adding the vegetable to meals can make people healthier.

“I think it’s very difficult, particularly given the choices in fast food restaurants, for everybody to eat a lower fat diet,” Jeffery said. “But more and more now you can get broccoli almost everywhere you go. Most restaurants will offer broccoli, and it’s really a good idea to have it with your meal.”

published in the Journal of Nutrition

Temporarily Quitting Alcohol Brings Health Benefits

by Beth Skwarecki at Vitals

Alcohol has some health benefits, but too much of the stuff can interfere with your health. Even if your drinking doesn’t rise to the level of a true addiction, quitting temporarily appears to benefit your body.

Alcohol, like caffeine, has an enormous reputation but loose understanding in popular culture.…Read more lifehacker.​com

The staff at New Scientist put that idea to the test by abstaining from alcohol for a month, while undergoing evaluations from a liver expert. Over that time, liver fat decreased by 15 percent (fat in the liver is a precursor to liver damage). The participants’ blood glucose, measured while fasting, fell by 16 percent. Staffers who kept drinking as normal during the month showed no changes in either measure.

The study is small and informal, but it fits with what we know about how alcohol works on our bodies. Rather than quitting for a month and then going back on your usual schedule, it’s probably better to use this as a lesson in how easy it is to reverse some of the effects of alcohol. If you’re careful to budget your intake, you can even lose weight while you continue drinking socially. Read more at the link below for what the staff of New Scientist learned from their experiment.

Our Liver Vacation: Is a Dry January Really Worth It? | New Scientist

Photo by Angelo Amboldi.

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