Nutritional supplements: prevalence of use and contaminationwith doping agentsIn a review article by van Thurne and colleagues they discuss the role that nutritional supplements play in the lifestyle of a substantial proportion of the populationIn addition to vitamins or minerals products, several precursors of anabolic steroids are marketed as nutritional supplements. Another group of commercially…
Read morePeter Atkins has written a non mathematical book on thermodynamics.To my mind there are three elements to nutrition.1. What goes into the system ( food)2. How the food is metabolised ( metabolism and thermodynamic)3. What happens to the metabolic process e.g. growth , exercise etcWhilst much attention is given to 1 and to an extent…
Read moreI bought a sandwich from BON APPETIT and found this advise on how to slim. It was such common sense that I thought it was worth handing on. I have not contacts with the firm and only occasionally eat sandwiches but this is such good advise.EAT WITH YOU& HEAD They interviewed loads of French women…
Read moreA new development in our understanding of metabolism as controlled by our genome is the finding of a large family of small non coding RNAs.In a clear summary in Nature Grobhans and Filopwicz explain their biologyThere arc three main types of well characterised RNA:Messenger RNA, transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA.Messenger mRNAs are translated into proteins,…
Read morePrion infection is a worry with beef in the human food chain. This ratheresoteric paper is an important step in the detection of this threat to humanwell being., Privat et al 2008 Human prion diseases: from antibody screening to a standardizedfast immunodiagnosis using automation. Modern Pathology vol 21, 140-149 Demopstration of pathological prion protein accumulation…
Read moreI was trained a s a lipid chemist and have always enjoyed this aspect of biochemistry, along with the analytical techniques and function studies. A series of reviews in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology are hence very interesting to me. The place of nutrition in these stories is through the building blocks which is so…
Read moreLetai (2008) Diagnosing and exploiting cancer’s addiction to blocks in apoptosis Nature Reviews Cancer H, 121-132Apoptosis is an important bodily function, but the control of which has yet to be associated with nutrition.Cancer cells survive despite violating rules of normal cellular behaviour that ordinarily provoke apoptosis. The blocks in apoptosis that keep cancer cells alive…
Read moreAdding fluoride to water supplies.This is such a contentious subjects. The observation that towns in the North East of England which were close together had different teeth decay levels lead to the observation that the fluoride content of the drinking water was the determinant.The next step was to fortify the drinking water of fluoride deficient…
Read moreThe BMJ of 6th October has two interesting articles on trying to encourage the young to take exercise.Exercise is a key contributor to weight and the more exercise the better.However one’s experience is that children vary so much in how much they exercise. There was a time when the young would walk to school and…
Read moreDavid A. J. Lloyd and Simon M. Gabe 2007 Managing liver dysfunction in parenteral nutrition, Proceedings of the Nutrtion Society vol 66 530-538Parenteral nutrition is such a help in the compromised patient. When I ran the TPN service in the Hospital where I worked live abnormalities were a constant problem . So I found this…
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