Hoddinott et al have written a very timely clinical review of breast feeding in the BMJ of 19th April 2008.Breast feeding is crucial to infant health in developing countries, but there are possible longer term benefits to act against subsequent obesity, high blood pressure, cholesterol, and cancer. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends exclusive breast…
Read moreThe Lancet for April 23 2008 is largely devoted to the Countdown programme for 2015. This initiative is so important for the poor countries of the world.Of enormous importance for our world and the future of the populations. The features of the Countdown Initiatives are Country Focus Individual country profiles of coverage with selected information…
Read moreModern farming industry and other industries are causing a large amount of nitrogen to enter the soil at double the natural rate.The nitrogen is in the form of nitrates and much elutes into streams, rivers and lakes. There is increased plant and bacterial growth in the water, a process known as eutrophication.However some nitrate is…
Read moreAgeing It is painful to read Nutrition papers proposing that some element of the diet is affecting expectation of life and that in the olden golden days life expectation was better. This is palpably not the truth.In developed countries the expectation of life has increased over the last 200 years from the late 40s to…
Read moreThe world is facing a real crisis in obtaining fresh water. This topic, central to any Population Nutrition economy has been discussed at length in a recent edition of Nature 1 billion people lack access to fresh drinkable water. 2 billion lack proper sanitation. Whilst climate change is an important factor other factors are contributing…
Read moreOtto Warburg demonstrated the difference between metabolism in cancer ceils and that in normal adult tissue. Cancer cells take up glucose at higher rates than normal tissue but use a smaller fraction of this glucose for oxidative phosphorylation. This effect is known as aerobic glycolysis or the Warburg effect Lewis Cantley and colleagues now report…
Read moreIt would appear that pleasure can be mapped.According to Plassmann el al., “…a basic assumption in economics is that experienced pleasantness from consuming a good depends only on its intrinsic properties and on the state of the individual” . By contrast, it is known by so-called marketers that experienced pleasantness can be influenced by “…changing…
Read moreIn a fascinating study Lawler and his colleagues review decade two of the lifetime diet restriction study of the dog. Labrador retrievers (n 48) were paired at age 6 weeks by sex and weight within each of seven litters, and assigned randomly within the pair to control-feeding (CF) or 25 % diet restriction (DR). Feeding…
Read moreVariation in the human genome and the consequences for health are giving exciting result, largely through genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Such studies need to be large and repeatable.. Since early 2007, variations at nearly 100 regions of the genome have been associated with an increased risk for diseases with a complex genetic background, such as…
Read moreKhursheed N Jeejeebhoy has reviewed the benefits and risks of a fish diet and should we be eating more or less?Omega-3 fatty acids, eg eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids which are plentiful in fish oils may preventing coronary artery disease. Eating three fish meals a week reduces risk in contrast to ineffectual high-fibre and low-fat diets…
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