Truth on Agave

Agave syrup (nectar) is basically high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as a health food. Agave nectar is an amber-colored liquid that pours more easily than honey and is considerably sweeter than sugar. The health-food crowd loves it because it is gluten-free and suitable for vegan diets, and, most especially, because it's low-glycemic (we'll get to that in a moment). Largely because of its very low glycemic impact, agave nectar is marketed as "diabetic friendly".

Agave nectar has a low-glycemic index for one reason only: it's largely made of fructose, which although it has a low-glycemic index, is probably the single most damaging form of sugar when used as a sweetener. With the exception of pure liquid fructose, agave nectar has the highest fructose content of any commercial sweetener.

Fructose -- the sugar found naturally in fruit -- is perfectly fine when you get it from whole foods like apples (about 7 percent fructose) -- it comes with a host of vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. But when it's commercially extracted from fruit, concentrated and made into a sweetener, it exacts a considerable metabolic price. Fructose has also been linked to non-alcoholic, fatty-liver disease. Rats that were given high fructose diets developed a number of undesirable metabolic abnormalities including elevated triglycerides, weight gain and extra abdominal fat.

What is a Sugarholic to do?

If you want to use a sweetener occasionally use:

1. Use the herb stevia.

2. Use organic cane sugar in moderation.

3. Use organic raw honey in moderation.

4. Avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than fructose.

5. Avoid agave syrup since it is a highly processed sap that is almost all fructose. Your blood sugar will spike just as it would if you were consuming regular sugar or HFCS. Agave's meteoric rise in popularity is due to a great marketing campaign, but any health benefits present in the original agave plant are processed out.

6. Avoid so-called energy drinks and sports drinks because they are loaded with sugar, sodium and chemical additives. Rehydrating with pure, fresh water is a better choice.

High Fructose Corn Syrup...

Study after study are taking their place in a growing lineup of scientific research demonstrating that consuming high-fructose corn syrup is the fastest way to trash your health.

And fructose in any form -- including high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and crystalline fructose -- is the worst of the worst!

Fructose is a major contributor to:

• Insulin resistance and obesity
• Elevated blood pressure
• Elevated triglycerides and elevated LDL
• Depletion of vitamins and minerals
• Cardiovascular disease, liver disease, cancer, arthritis and even gout

If you received your fructose only from vegetables and fruits (where it originates) as most people did a century ago, you'd consume about 15 grams per day -- a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical adolescent gets from sweetened drinks.
There are two reasons fructose is so damaging:

1. Your body metabolizes fructose in a much different way than glucose. The entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver.

2. People are consuming fructose in enormous quantities, which has made the negative effects much more profound.

Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used in food and beverage manufacturing are made from corn, and the number one source of calories in America is soda, in the form of HFCS. As the truth comes out about HFCS, the Corn Refiners Association is scrambling to convince youthat their product is equal to table sugar, that it is "natural" and safe.

Of course, many things are "natural" -- cocaine is natural, but you wouldn't want to use 142 pounds of it each year. The food and beverage industry doesn't want you to realize how truly pervasive HFCS is in your diet -- not just from soft drinks and juices, but also in salad dressings and condiments and virtually every processed food. The introduction of HFCS into the Western diet in 1975 has been a multi-billion dollar boon for the corn industry.

For more information click here

Running Barefoot is Better

Mother Nature has outpaced science once again: the bare human foot is better for running than one cushioned by sneakers. What about those $125 high-tech running shoes with 648 custom combinations? Toss 'em, according to a new study published online January 27 in the journal Nature(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). "Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts," Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said in a prepared statement. "But actually you can run barefoot on the world's hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain…It might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."

Lieberman and his group used 3-D infrared tracking to record and study the running and strike style of three groups of runners: people who had always run barefoot, people who had always run with shoes, and people who had switched from shoe to shoeless. They found that when runners lace up their shmancy sneakers and take off, about 75 to 80 percent land heel-first. Barefoot runners—as Homo sapiens had evolved to be—usually land toward the middle or front of the food. "People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," Lieberman said.

Without shoes, landing on the heel is painful and can translate into a collision force some 1.5 to 3 times body weight. "Barefoot runners point their toes more at landing," which helps to lessen the impact by "decreasing the effective mass of the foot that comes to a sudden stop when you land," Madhusudhan Venkadesan, an applied mathematics and human evolutionary biology postdoctoral researcher at Harvard who also worked on the study, said in a prepared statement. But as cushioned kicks have hit the streets and treadmills, that initial pain has disappeared, and runners have changed their stride, leading to a way of high-impact running that human physiology wasn't evolved for—one that the researchers posit can lead to a host of foot and leg injuries.

Cancer & Lifestyle Choices

This year, the message for World Cancer Day, 4th February, is "Cancer can be prevented too", with experts suggesting that 40 per cent of the 12.4 million cancersdiagnosed and 7.6 million cancer deaths worldwide could be prevented if we applied what we know about avoiding infections and changing lifestyles. The International Union Against Cancer (UICC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) who are marking World Cancer Day, said such reductions could be within our reach were we to apply "evidence-based cancer prevention strategies".

If someone came up with a single vaccine or drug that was proven to cure 40 per cent of all cancers we would all be dancing in the streets, yet in effect this is what we have says the UICC, except it isn't in one tablet, it's in lots of different bits of knowledge and strategies, we just need to apply them effectively and comprehensively.

The UICC said cancer prevention strategies include simple things like:

• Quitting use of tobacco and avoiding second-hand smoke,
• Limiting consumption of alcohol,
• Avoiding too much sun,
• Keeping to a healthy weight through healthy diet and exercise, and
• Protecting against infections that cause cancer.

To coincide with World Cancer Day, the UICC has prepared a report titled "Cancer can be prevented too: protection against cancer-causing infections" that highlights 9 infections that can lead to cancer: including cervical and liver cancers, which can be prevented by vaccines. The nine infection areas covered in the report are: Hepatitis B virus (causes liver cancer); Hepatitis C virus (a growing threat that also causes liver cancer); HPV (certain strains cause cervical cancer); Epstein Barr virus (causes Burkitt'slymphoma, especially high incidence in children in equatorial Africa); HIV (Kaposi's sarcoma and AIDS-related lymphomas); Helicobacter pylori (a bacterium that can cause stomach cancer); Liver flukes and cancer of the bile ducts; Schistosomiasis and bladder cancer; and HTLV-1 and adult T-cell leukaemia.

The report explains that over the last three decades infections have emerged as an important risk for cancer, and suggests that current cancer research should focus on their prevention, detection and treatment.

Co-author Harald zur Hausen, who won the Nobel prize for his discovery of human papillomaviruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer, wrote that:

"Globally, efforts to identify agents involved in human cancers and to study the mechanisms of how they lead to cancer are still remarkably underrepresented."

information taken from:

Medical News Today

Hormones in Meat

Based on the scientific literature, besides World Health Organization (WHO) reports, there is explicit evidence that the use of sex hormones to increase meat production poses serious dangers to consumers. Of particular concern are the increased risks of hormonal cancers since 1975: breast by 23 percent, prostate by 60 percent, and testes by 60 percent.

Some three decades ago, Dr. Roy Hertz, then Director of Endocrinology of the National Cancer Institute and world authority on breast and other hormonal cancers, warned of cancer risks due to the use of estrogenic cattle implants, particularly for the breast. Dr. Hertz emphasized that these implants increase normal hormonal levels, and that such imbalance cause reproductive cancers. Hertz also warned of the essentially uncontrolled and unregulated use of these extremely potent biological agents, no levels of which can be regarded as safe.

For More Information:

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
Professor emeritus Environmental & Occupational Medicine
University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health
Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition
email: epstein@uic.edu
www.preventcancer.com

Sitting Kills

Here's a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly. Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods – even if you also exercise regularly – could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place – at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV – just the overall number of hours it occurs.

Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences suggested that authorities rethink how they define physical activity to highlight the dangers of sitting. "After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals," Ekblom-Bak said. She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down. Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting, from working at their desks to sitting in cars.