Eats « Weekly Gravy

As a consumer, you probably see “heart healthy” labels on food items all the time. But do you really know what heart health means and why it’s important? Experts from Tufts University in Boston offer some details on how your heart works and how you can safeguard your heart’s health. “It’s not as if you turn 65 or 70 and everything falls apart,” said Alice Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition team at Tufts’ Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. “If your aim is to keep your vasculature healthy, you have to start early and be a good role model for your offspring,” she said in a school news release. The heart does a lot of important work, pumping blood through arteries and veins to carry oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. With age, blood vessels can stiffen and blockages can build up. The whole system may become more prone to inflammation, increasing risk of heart attacks, heart failure and other cardiac dysfunction. Lifestyle can’t control all of this. Some of it is the result of genetics and your environment. While men have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease than women when they’re young, women’s risk rises sharply after menopause, according to Tufts. The blood vessels expand and contract based on the body’s needs. But they also become less flexible over time,… read on > read on >

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 11, 2023 (HealthDay News) – California has become the first state to ban four chemicals commonly added to food that are linked to health issues. Although the law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, only bans the additives in his state, it’s possible the chemicals could be removed from products across the country, NBC News reported. The chemicals are red dye No. 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil and propylparaben. All four are currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but they are illegal in the European Union and some other parts of the world, NBC News reported. “The additives addressed in this bill are already banned in various other countries,” Newsom said in a statement. “Signing this into law is a positive step forward on these four food additives until the United States Food and Drug Administration [FDA] reviews and establishes national updated safety levels for these additives.” Assembly member Jesse Gabriel introduced the bill with Assembly member Buffy Wicks. Gabriel said that the law won’t eliminate the foods these additives typically go in — ranging from orange soda to hamburger rolls and candies — but the manufacturers will need to make “really minor” changes to ingredients. “We have incredible confidence that consumers are still going to be able to enjoy all the products that we know and love here in… read on > read on >

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers about risks of using compounded versions of the drug ketamine, often taken for psychiatric disorders. Compounded products are not evaluated by the FDA for safety and effectiveness. They’re also not regulated like approved drugs, so they present a greater risk. “Although compounded drugs can serve an important medical need for certain patients when an FDA-approved drug is not medically appropriate, they also present a risk to patients and should only be used under the care of a health care provider,” the FDA said in a news release. It offered an example of a concerning case reported about a patient in April. That person had taken compounded oral ketamine outside of a health care setting for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The result was slowed breathing and a ketamine blood level that appeared to be twice what a person would typically receive as anesthesia, the FDA said. Patients are increasingly interested in taking compounded ketamine products, including oral formulations, for mental health disorders including depression, anxiety, PTSD and obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to the FDA. Known safety concerns associated with the drug are abuse and misuse, psychiatric events, increases in blood pressure, slowed breathing and lower urinary tract and bladder symptoms. In the FDA-approved version of ketamine, the expected benefit outweighs these risks when used at… read on > read on >

Cigarette makers are using synthetic menthol substitutes in what appears to be an effort to skirt a looming federal menthol ban, researchers say. The menthol flavor appeals to younger and newer smokers, according to investigators at Duke Health in Durham, N.C., and Yale University in New Haven, Conn. These new “non-menthol” cigarettes are being introduced in states that have already banned actual menthol in advance of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban later this year. In studying these “non-menthol” products, researchers identified new compounds that achieve cooling sensations similar to menthol. “We found that tobacco companies are adding a synthetic cooling agent called WS-3 to these new ‘non-menthol’ cigarettes,” said senior author Sven-Eric Jordt, an associate professor at Duke University School of Medicine. “The added amounts are sufficient to produce robust cooling sensations, with some brands having more cooling activity than their menthol equivalent cigarettes,” he said in a university news release California and Massachusetts have already banned menthol cigarettes. After California’s December 2022 ban, RJ Reynolds and ITG introduced non-menthol cigarettes with packaging and marketing strategies similar to those of menthol products. Lead author Sairam Jabba, a senior research scientist at Duke, measured whether cigarettes purchased in the two states with bans contained chemicals that activate the cold/menthol receptor. “We found that four of the non-menthol cigarette products, all manufactured by RJ Reynolds,… read on > read on >

You have a lot of choices when buying milk, from the traditional cow variety to some made from plants. But how do these options compare in terms of nutrition? An expert from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston breaks down the differences. “If you’re looking for a high-protein product, cow’s milk and soy milk are the best options. If you want something lower calorie that doesn’t need to meet your protein needs, a plant-based product might be the right thing,” said Sarah Mahlke, senior program management associate at Baylor’s Weight Loss and Metabolic Center. “Maybe you’re just going for taste, which is important too, because at the end of the day, food makes us happy, and that’s a good thing,” Mahlke said in a Baylor news release. Cow’s milk Cow’s milk contains calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, B2 (riboflavin), B12, and minerals such as magnesium, zinc, potassium and phosphorus. It’s also high in protein, much more so than most plant-based milks. Cow’s milk is also a source of less heart-healthy saturated fats, but skim and nonfat milk provide a less fatty option. “All of the dairy milks have similar amounts of calcium and vitamin D. Choosing the type of cow’s milk to drink depends on the stage of life that you’re in and what your goals are,” Mahlke said. Trying to lose weight? Nonfat or… read on > read on >

Should Fluffy and Fido go vegan? A new study says yes — for the environment. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock are responsible for 14.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions. In response, some experts say eating vegan — meaning a nutritionally sound diet without animal proteins or products — for two-thirds of meals could slash food-related emissions by 60%. “Vegan pet food is clearly associated with very large savings in greenhouse gas emissions, land and water use, and a range of other environmental parameters,” said Dr. Andrew Knight, a professor of philosophy at Griffith University in Australia, who led the new study. “If implemented globally, such diets would also save the lives of billions of ‘food’ animals annually, and enable the feeding of billions of additional people (and dogs and cats), with the food energy saved.” The new study said American dogs and cats consume about one-fifth as much meat as their human counterparts and about one-tenth of that worldwide. Recent research suggests that nutritionally sound vegan diets — lacking meat, eggs and dairy — are safe for pets and may have comparable health benefits, the study noted. If all U.S.-based dogs and cats went vegan, researchers estimated that the lives of 2 billion livestock animals a year could be saved, along with billions of aquatic animals. If pets around the… read on > read on >

While HDL cholesterol is considered the “good” kind for heart and brain health, too much or too little of it may up a person’s risk of dementia, new research suggests. “This study is especially informative because of the large number of participants and long follow-up,” noted study author Maria Glymour, of Boston University. She said her team was able to “study the links with dementia across the range of cholesterol levels and achieve precise estimates, even for people with cholesterol levels that are quite high or quite low.” Still, that can’t prove that high or low levels of HDL cholesterol actually cause dementia, the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) cautioned in its news release about the study. To learn more about the potential connection, researchers studied data on more than 184,000 people from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Health Plan, with an average age of 70. The patients did not have dementia at the start of the study. The participants filled out a survey on their health behaviors and had their cholesterol levels measured during routine health care visits an average of 2.5 times in the following two years. These people were then followed with their electronic health records for an average of nine years. More than 25,000 study participants developed dementia during that time. The average HDL cholesterol level for people in the study… read on > read on >

Going vegetarian is trendy and popular, along with being a healthy choice, but a large portion of those who say they want to stick with a plant-based diet don’t. It might come down to your DNA, suggests new research that has uncovered three genes that seem to be strongly linked to vegetarianism. “It seems there are more people who would like to be vegetarian than actually are, and we think it’s because there is something hard-wired here that people may be missing,” said corresponding study author Dr. Nabeel Yaseen, a professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. As many as 48% to 64% of people who identify as vegetarian still report eating fish, poultry and/or red meat, the study authors pointed out in a university news release. To study the impact of genes on eating behavior, the scientists compared UK Biobank genetic data from more than 5,300 strict vegetarians — those who ate no fish, poultry or red meat — to more than 329,000 non-vegetarians (the “control” group). The investigators found 31 genes that are potentially associated. Several of these genes, including two of those most closely associated, are involved in metabolizing fat and/or brain function. “One area in which plant products differ from meat is complex lipids,” Yaseen said. “My speculation is there may be lipid component(s) present… read on > read on >

Drinking dark tea daily may help balance blood sugar levels and stave off type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease most closely tied to obesity. This is the main message from a new study that looked at tea-drinking habits and diabetes risk among people in China. Folks who drank dark tea every day had a 53% lower risk of developing prediabetes and a 47% reduced risk for type 2 diabetes when compared to people who never drank tea. Prediabetes refers to blood sugar levels that are higher than normal, but not high enough to be called diabetes yet. Dark tea is an aged tea from China that has gone through an extensive fermentation process and is rich in healthy bacteria or probiotics that may improve gut health. The new study wasn’t designed to say how, or even if, drinking dark tea improves blood sugar control, but researchers do have some theories. “Tea has been reported to exert numerous desirable effects, which help to reduce inflammation and [damaging] oxidation and improve insulin sensitivity,” said study author Dr. Tongzhi Wu, an associate professor at the Adelaide Medical School in Australia. For the study, researchers asked 1,923 adults aged 20 to 80 living in China how often they drank tea and what type of tea they preferred whether green, black, dark or another type. The investigators then… read on > read on >

Some common medications — including antidepressants, sleep aids and painkillers — may dull the driving skills of seniors, a new study finds. Many different medication classes have been linked to the risk of driving impairment, as anyone who has ever read the label warning “do not operate heavy machinery” might have guessed. But the new study took a particularly rigorous approach to investigating the issue — following older adults for up to 10 years and testing their driving skills with annual road tests. And it turned out that those using certain classes of medications were at greater risk of failing the road test at some point. When older folks were taking either antidepressants, sedative/hypnotics (sleep medications) or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), they were nearly three times more likely to get a failing or “marginal” grade than non-users. The findings do not prove the medications are to blame, said lead researcher Dr. David Carr, a specialist in geriatric medicine at Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis. It can be hard, he said, to draw a direct line between a particular medication and diminished driving skills: Is it that drug, or the medical condition it’s treating or another medication an older adult is taking? In this study, though, Carr and his colleagues were able to account for many factors, including participants’ medical conditions, memory and… read on > read on >