SCIENCE AND MEDICINE | health & wellness ||
White versus red
Scientists from the National Cancer
Institute followed the health and
eating habits of 537,000 adults age
fifty to seventy-one living in six
states and two large cities in the
United States over a period of six-
teen years. They took into account
deaths from nine causes: cancer, in-
fectious diseases, heart diseases,
vascular disorders and cerebral
hemorrhages, respiratory illnesses,
diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, kid-
ney disorders, and chronic liver im-
pairment, plus a catch-all of “other
causes.” It turned out that
Alzheimer’s disease was the only
malady on the list, the death rate
from which wasn’t associated with
consumption of red meat. Those
who ate red meat had increased
probability of death due to all the
other causes, while white meat low-
ered the probability. The likelihood of
death among those who ate red
meat was 26% higher than among
those who refrained from it. For
white meat, the association was the re-
verse—the more often the study’s partici-
pants partook of it, the less was their
chance of dying prematurely. The differ-
ence in the death rate between those eat-
ing red meat and those eating white meat
reached 25%. Nitrates and iron contained
in meat increased the risk of premature
death by 15%. More than 128,000 people
died over the entire time span of the study.
See also:
www.webmd.com/diet/news/20090323/eating-
red-meat-may-boost-death-risk#1
15
Person to vegetable:
Shall we talk?
At a Microsoft Research labo-
ratory, within the framework of
Project Florence, a system was
worked out that lets a person not
only analyze the condition of
plants, but communicate with
them in the literal meaning of the
word. As Asta Roseway from the
division of promising project de-
velopments relates, communica-
tions that a user types out on a
computer are transformed by a
semantic analyzer into light
pulses emitted around an article
of vegetation such as a tree by
light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
For example, texts bearing posi-
tive emotions are turned into
pulses from red LEDs, because
red light stimulates plants to
blossom. Responding chemical
reactions occur in leaves and
roots: sensors analyze the con-
dition of a tree and its environ-
ment and transform the result
into a text communication that is
understandable to a person
when the text is output to a com-
puter screen or to a printer. “Talk-
ing” with plants will help grow
them without natural soil, create
artificial ecosystems with the
participation of trees and plants,
economically expend water, and
more effectively solve the prob-
lem of soil contamination.
See also: www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/project-flo-
rence/
A new way to suppress a sensation
of hunger
Specialists at Baylor College of Medi-
cine in Houston led by professor of biol-
ogy Lawrence Chan have discovered
that certain blood cells are capable of
producing the specific brain-derived neu-
rotrophic factor (BDNF) hormone, under
the influence of which a person gets a
sense of satiation.
In order to prove the influence of BDNF
on formation of a sense of hunger, the
scientists disrupted production of this
hormone in mice, and then literally
heaped food upon the experimental sub-
jects. “Mice with disrupted BDNF pro-
duction ate to excess, which led to
obesity, development of resistance to in-
sulin, and, as a consequence, to devel-
oping diabetes. Restoration of genes
responsible for activating hormones can
normalize appetite and correct the situ-
ation,” Dr. Chan elaborated. It may be
that scientists will succeed in developing
a technology for artificial insertion of hor-
mone-producing cells of BDNF itself di-
rectly into the body. In any case, the
study’s participants stand on the thresh-
old of discovering a revolutionary way to
fight obesity.
See:
www.wellnessresources.com/studies/bdnf-
and-obesity
www.zoominfo.com/p/LawrenceChan/87074
71
ALPEON.COM