Popular soda ingredient, caramel color, poses cancer risk to consumers

Public health researchers have analyzed soda consumption data in order to characterize people's exposure to a potentially carcinogenic byproduct of some types of caramel color. Caramel color is a common ingredient in colas and other dark soft drinks. The results show that between 44 and 58 percent of people over the age of six typically have at least one can of soda per day, possibly more, potentially exposing them to 4-methylimidazole (4-MEI), a possible human carcinogen formed during the manufacture of some kinds of caramel color.The results were published online in PLOS One.

Building on an analysis of 4-MEI concentrations in 11 different soft drinks first published by Consumer Reports in 2014, researchers led by a team at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) estimated exposure to 4-MEI from caramel-colored soft drinks and modeled the potential cancer burden related to routine soft drink consumption levels in the United States.

"Soft drink consumers are being exposed to an avoidable and unnecessary cancer risk from an ingredient that is being added to these beverages simply for aesthetic purposes," says Keeve Nachman, PhD, senior author of the study and director of the Food Production and Public Health Program at the CLF and an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "This unnecessary exposure poses a threat to public health and raises questions about the continued use of caramel coloring in soda."

In 2013 and early 2014, Consumer Reports partnered with the CLF to analyze 4-MEI concentrations of 110 soft drink samples purchased from retail stores in California and the New York metropolitan area. This study pairs those results with population beverage consumption data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) in order to estimate the population risks and cancer burden associated with 4-MEI exposures through soda.

While the 2014 study of the 110 samples of soda brands was not large enough to recommend one brand over another or draw conclusions about specific brands, results indicated that levels of 4-MEI could vary substantially across samples, even for the same type of beverage. "For example, for diet colas, certain samples had higher or more variable levels of the compound, while other samples had very low concentrations," says Tyler Smith, lead author of the study and a program officer with the CLF.

While there's currently no federal limit for 4-MEI in food or beverages, Consumer Reports petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to set limits for the potential carcinogen last year. It also shared the findings with the California Attorney General's office, which enforces the state's Proposition 65 law aimed at reducing consumers' exposure to toxic chemicals. Under this state law, any food or beverage sold in the state that exposes consumers to more than a specific amount of 4-MEI per day requires a health-warning label.

"This new analysis underscores our belief that people consume significant amounts of soda that unnecessarily elevate their risk of cancer over the course of a lifetime," says Urvashi Rangan, PhD, executive director for Consumer Reports' Food Safety and Sustainability Center. "We believe beverage makers and the government should take the steps needed to protect public health. California has already taken an important step by setting a threshold for prompting Prop 65 labeling based on daily 4-MEI exposure from a food or beverage, such as a soda. This study sought to answer a critical question: How much soda do American consumers drink on average?"

Researchers also found sharply contrasting levels of 4-MEI in some soft drinks purchased in the New York metropolitan area, versus California. "Our study also found that some of the soft drink products sold in California that we sampled had lower levels of 4-MEI than the samples we looked at of the same beverages sold outside the state, particularly in our earlier rounds of testing. It appears that regulations such as California's Proposition 65 may be effective at reducing exposure to 4-MEI from soft drinks, and that beverages can be manufactured in ways that produce less 4-MEI," suggests Nachman. "An FDA intervention, such as determining maximum levels for 4-MEI in beverages, could be a valuable approach to reducing excess cancer risk attributable to 4-MEI exposure in the U.S. population."

The research was supported by Consumers Union, Grace Communications Foundation, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (1K01HL096409).

Culled from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Link to InspireIT Founder Interview on World Pulse

I am a strong advocate for more women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and that is why I started InspireIT.

InspireIT is a free mentoring program for young girls and women studying or interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

I was interviewed by Lisa Anderson from World Pulse about InspireIT.

Please click on the link below to read the full interview:

https://www.worldpulse.com/en/global-issues/stories/world-needs-more-female-software-engineers

Olive oil more stable and healthful for frying food

Frying is one of the world's most popular ways to prepare food -- think fried chicken and french fries. Even candy bars and whole turkeys have joined the list. But before dunking your favorite food in a vat of just any old oil, consider using olive. Scientists report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that olive oil withstands the heat of the fryer or pan better than several seed oils to yield more healthful food.

Mohamed Bouaziz and colleagues note that different oils have a range of physical, chemical and nutritional properties that can degrade oil quality when heated. Some of these changes can lead to the formation of new compounds that are potentially toxic. By-products of heating oil can also lower the nutritional value of the food being fried. Bouaziz's team wanted to find out which cooking oil can maintain its quality under high heat and repeated use.

The researchers deep- and pan-fried raw potato pieces in four different refined oils -- olive, corn, soybean and sunflower -- and reused the oil 10 times. They found that olive oil was the most stable oil for deep-frying at 320 and 374 degrees Fahrenheit, while sunflower oil degraded the fastest when pan-fried at 356 degrees. They conclude that for frying foods, olive oil maintains quality and nutrition better than seed oils.

The authors acknowledge funding from the Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique and the Ministère de l'Agriculture, Tunisia.

Source: American Chemical Society,2014 

Eating deep-fried food linked to increased risk of prostate cancer

Regular consumption of deep-fried foods such as French fries, fried chicken and doughnuts is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, and the effect appears to be slightly stronger with regard to more aggressive forms of the disease, according to a study by investigators at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Corresponding author Janet L. Stanford, Ph.D., and colleagues Marni Stott-Miller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow and Marian Neuhouser, Ph.D., all of the Hutchinson Center's Public Health Sciences Division, have published their findings online in The Prostate. While previous studies have suggested that eating foods made with high-heat cooking methods, such as grilled meats, may increase the risk of prostate cancer, this is the first study to examine the addition of deep frying to the equation.

From French fries to doughnuts: Eating more than once a week may raise risk specifically, Stanford, co-director of the Hutchinson Center's Program in Prostate Cancer Research, and colleagues found that men who reported eating French fries, fried chicken, fried fish and/or doughnuts at least once a week were at an increased risk of prostate cancer as compared to men who said they ate such foods less than once a month.

In particular, men who ate one or more of these foods at least weekly had an increased risk of prostate cancer that ranged from 30 to 37 percent. Weekly consumption of these foods was associated also with a slightly greater risk of more aggressive prostate cancer. The researchers controlled for factors such as age, race, family history of prostate cancer, body-mass index and PSA screening history when calculating the association between eating deep-fried foods and prostate cancer risk.

"The link between prostate cancer and select deep-fried foods appeared to be limited to the highest level of consumption -- defined in our study as more than once a week -- which suggests that regular consumption of deep-fried foods confers particular risk for developing prostate cancer," Stanford said.

Deep frying may trigger formation of carcinogens in food Possible mechanisms behind the increased cancer risk, Stanford hypothesizes, include the fact that when oil is heated to temperatures suitable for deep frying, potentially carcinogenic compounds can form in the fried food. They include acrylamide (found in carbohydrate-rich foods such as French fries), heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (chemicals formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures), aldehyde (an organic compound found in perfume) and acrolein (a chemical found in herbicides). These toxic compounds are increased with re-use of oil and increased length of frying time. Foods cooked with high heat also contain high levels of advanced glycation endproducts, or AGEs, which have been associated with chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. Deep-fried foods are among the highest in AGE content. A chicken breast deep fried for 20 minutes contains more than nine times the amount of AGEs as a chicken breast boiled for an hour, for example.

For the study, Stanford and colleagues analyzed data from two prior population-based case-control studies involving a total of 1,549 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and 1,492 age-matched healthy controls. The men were Caucasian and African-American Seattle-area residents and ranged in age from 35 to 74 years. Participants were asked to fill out a dietary questionnaire about their usual food intake, including specific deep-fried foods.

The first study of its kind "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to look at the association between intake of deep-fried food and risk of prostate cancer," Stanford said. However, deep-fried foods have previously been linked to cancers of the breast, lung, pancreas, head and neck, and esophagus.

Because deep-fried foods are primarily eaten outside the home, it is possible that the link between these foods and prostate cancer risk may be a sign of high consumption of fast foods in general, the authors wrote, citing the dramatic increase in fast-food restaurants and fast-food consumption in the U.S. in the past several decades.

The project was supported by the National Cancer Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Source: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 2013

Link between relative lengths of index and ring fingers in men and behavior towards women

Interesting!

Maybe you should take a good look at your partner's fingers before putting a ring on one. Men with short index fingers and long ring fingers are on average nicer towards women, and this unexpected phenomenon stems from the hormones these men have been exposed to in their mother's womb, according to a new study by researchers at McGill University. The findings might help explain why these men tend to have more children. The study, showing a link between a biological event in fetal life and adult behaviour, was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Men's index fingers are generally shorter than their ring fingers. The difference is less pronounced in women. Previous research has found that digit ratio -- defined as the second digit length divided by the fourth digit length -- is an indication of the amount of male hormones, chiefly testosterone, someone has been exposed to as a fetus: the smaller the ratio, the more male hormones. The McGill study suggests that this has an impact on how adult men behave, especially with women.

"It is fascinating to see that moderate variations of hormones before birth can actually influence adult behaviour in a selective way," says Simon Young, a McGill Emeritus Professor in Psychiatry and coauthor of the study.

Smiles and compliments

Several studies have been conducted previously to try to assess the impact of digit ratio on adult behaviour. This one is the first to highlight how finger lengths affect behaviour differently depending on the sex of the person you are interacting with. "When with women, men with smaller ratios were more likely to listen attentively, smile and laugh, compromise or compliment the other person," says Debbie Moskowitz, lead author and Professor of Psychology at McGill. They acted that way in sexual relationships, but also with female friends or colleagues. These men were also less quarrelsome with women than with men, whereas the men with larger ratios were equally quarrelsome with both. For women though, digit ratio variation did not seem to predict how they behaved, the researchers report.

Digit ratio and children For 20 days, 155 participants in the study filled out forms for every social interaction that lasted 5 minutes or more, and checked off a list of behaviours they engaged in. Based on prior work, the scientists classified the behaviours as agreeable or quarrelsome. Men with small digit ratios reported approximately a third more agreeable behaviours and approximately a third fewer quarrelsome behaviours than men with large digit ratios.

A previous study had found that men with smaller digit ratios have more children. "Our research suggests they have more harmonious relationships with women; these behaviors support the formation and maintenance of relationships with women," Moskowitz says. "This might explain why they have more children on average."

The researchers were surprised to find no statistically relevant link between dominant behaviours and digit ratios. They suggest future research could study specific situations where male dominance varies -- such as competitive situations with other men -- to see whether a correlation can be established.

This study was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council -- Canada.

Culled from McGill University, 2015

Drinking wine could help you burn fat, study suggests

Drinking red grape juice or wine -- in moderation -- could improve the health of overweight people by helping them burn fat better, according to a new study coauthored by an Oregon State University researcher.

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The findings suggest that consuming dark-colored grapes, whether eating them or drinking juice or wine, might help people better manage obesity and related metabolic disorders such as fatty liver.

Neil Shay, a biochemist and molecular biologist in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences, was part of a study team that exposed human liver and fat cells grown in the lab to extracts of four natural chemicals found in Muscadine grapes, a dark-red variety native to the southeastern United States.

One of the chemicals, ellagic acid, proved particularly potent: It dramatically slowed the growth of existing fat cells and formation of new ones, and it boosted metabolism of fatty acids in liver cells.

These plant chemicals are not a weight-loss miracle, cautions Shay. "We didn't find, and we didn't expect to, that these compounds would improve body weight," he said. But by boosting the burning of fat, especially in the liver, they may improve liver function in overweight people.

"If we could develop a dietary strategy for reducing the harmful accumulation of fat in the liver, using common foods like grapes," Shay said, "that would be good news."

The study, which Shay conducted with colleagues at the University of Florida and University of Nebraska, complements work with mice he leads at his OSU laboratory. In one 2013 trial, he and his graduate students supplemented the diets of overweight mice with extracts from Pinot noir grapes harvested from Corvallis-area vineyards.

Some of the mice were fed a normal diet of "mouse chow," as Shay calls it, containing 10 percent fat. The rest were fed a diet of 60 percent fat -- the sort of unhealthy diet that would pile excess pounds on a human frame.

"Our mice like that high-fat diet," said Shay, "and they overconsume it. So they're a good model for the sedentary person who eats too much snack food and doesn't get enough exercise."

The grape extracts, scaled down to a mouse's nutritional needs, were about the equivalent of one and a half cups of grapes a day for a person. "The portions are reasonable," said Shay, "which makes our results more applicable to the human diet."

Over a 10-week trial, the high-fat-fed mice developed fatty liver and diabetic symptoms -- "the same metabolic consequences we see in many overweight, sedentary people," Shay said.

But the chubby mice that got the extracts accumulated less fat in their livers, and they had lower blood sugar, than those that consumed the high-fat diet alone. Ellagic acid proved to be a powerhouse in this experiment, too, lowering the high-fat-fed mice's blood sugar to nearly the levels of the lean, normally fed mice.

When Shay and his colleagues analyzed the tissues of the fat mice that ate the supplements, they noted higher activity levels of PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma, two proteins that work within cells to metabolize fat and sugar.

Shay hypothesizes that the ellagic acid and other chemicals bind to these PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma nuclear hormone receptors, causing them to switch on the genes that trigger the metabolism of dietary fat and glucose. Commonly prescribed drugs for lowering blood sugar and triglycerides act in this way, Shay said.

The goal of his work, he added, is not to replace needed medications but to guide people in choosing common, widely available foods that have particular health benefits, including boosting metabolic function.

"We are trying to validate the specific contributions of certain foods for health benefits," he said. "If you're out food shopping, and if you know a certain kind of fruit is good for a health condition you have, wouldn't you want to buy that fruit?"

The research was supported by the Institute of Food and Agricultural Science at the University of Florida and Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

Shay's research with mice was supported by the Blue Mountain Horticultural Society, the Erath Family Foundation, and the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences.

Story Source: Oregon State University.

Individuals with partial hearing loss may benefit from hybrid cochlear implant

Hearing loss can affect anyone, at any time. But it can be especially frightening for someone who suddenly starts to lose hearing during adulthood. A new study is investigating the effectiveness of a new cochlear implant device that aims to restore hearing for individuals with high-frequency hearing loss and functional low-frequency hearing.

Hearing loss can affect anyone at any time. But it can be especially frightening for someone who suddenly starts to lose hearing during adulthood. Tom Groves, 77, first noticed his diminishing hearing when he was in his early 40s. He was unable to hold conversations with large groups of people, found it nearly impossible to socialize in high-background noise environments like restaurants. and couldn't enjoy radio, TV and movies unless they were captioned. Now, Groves is hearing much better than he has in 30 years, thanks to an experimental hybrid cochlear implant. Northwestern Memorial Hospital is one of nine centers in the U.S., and the only in Illinois, that is participating in a study investigating the effectiveness of a new cochlear implant device that aims to restore hearing for individuals with high-frequency hearing loss and functional low-frequency hearing.

This group of patients doesn't meet the criteria for conventional cochlear implants because they have near perfect residual hearing in low pitches that allows them to perform well on tests used to determine candidacy for traditional implants. However, their hearing in high pitches is so poor that a hearing aid is not helpful, making them ideally suited for the hybrid implant, which addresses both issues.

"We are hopeful that the hybrid cochlear implant will provide a subset of people who were previously not candidates for an implantable device the opportunity to test the device to determine if they can experience sound again," said Northwestern Medicine neurotologist Andrew Fishman, MD, principal investigator of the study, staff in the departments of otolaryngology and neurosurgery at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and Mr. Groves' cochlear implant surgeon. "The potential for patients with a significant amount of residual hearing, but a large amount of high-frequency hearing loss, to have an alternative to hearing aids would be a great improvement over what is currently available."

Cochlear implants were FDA approved in 1984 as a treatment option for restoring hearing in people with severe and profound hearing loss. The surgical implant system is designed to stimulate the auditory nerve by bypassing damaged parts of the ear. A small battery-operated mini "computer" and microphone are worn on the outside of the ear and convert sounds into electric signals. The signals are then transmitted to implant electrodes in the cochlea, which stimulate the nerve endings so sound can be perceived by the brain.

The hybrid cochlear implant works in the same way as traditional cochlear implants, stimulating nerve endings in the cochlear so that high-pitched sounds can be heard. In addition, it also involves amplification for low-pitched sounds, similar to a hearing aid. Like traditional cochlear implants, the hybrid version is worn outside the ear and converts sounds into acoustic and electric signals.

"The surgical implantation of cochlear devices is typically done on an outpatient basis, and usually with non-serious complications, aside from mild discomfort following surgery," said Northwestern Medicine otolaryngologist Alan Micco, MD, co-investigator of the study and chief of otology/neurotology at the Feinberg School of Medicine. "A few weeks following surgery, the activation process and fine-tuning take place to determine what audio thresholds work best for the individual, and sounds can usually be perceived shortly thereafter."

Post-activation evaluations take place at three, six and 12 months following the initial activation process to assess progress of the cochlear implant. An audiologist will also test the implant to determine if participants are able to understand words, sentences in noisy and quiet environments, as well as experience music recognition.

A few months post-surgery, Groves is happy to have some of his hearing restored. "I'm very excited and encouraged by my experience with the implant. I know I'm hearing better than I have for many, many years, and for that I'm very grateful."

Culled from Northwestern Memorial Hospital