New York's attorney general said that tests on popular store brands of herbal supplements at Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC found that roughly four out of five of the products contained none of the herbs listed on the labels.
He plans never again to take roles that require drastic weight change and has stated publicly, “I’ve talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles and — just out of the sheer physical toll on one’s knees and shoulders — no one wants to do it again.” Other stars who have become diabetic include Halle Berry, Paula Deen, Larry King, Nick Jonas and Sherri Sheppard. Hanks used pizza as his main food to gain weight, with huge amounts of fat from cheese and other toppings, and sugar from the flour crust.
How Gaining and Losing Weight Can Lead to Diabetes
Every time you lose weight, you lose both fat and muscle. However, when you gain weight by overeating, you gain only fat. So with every rise or drop in weight, you are fatter than you were previously.
Having excess fat in your liver causes high blood sugar levels, a condition that affects more than 50 percent of North Americans.
You can find out if you have a fatty liver with a simple, safe and relatively inexpensive test called a liver sonogram. Your liver controls your blood sugar levels. When blood sugar levels rise, your pancreas releases insulin into your bloodstream.
Insulin drives sugar from your bloodstream into your liver. When your blood sugar level drops too low, your liver releases sugar from its cells into the bloodstream.
However, when you have a fatty liver, your liver cannot accept sugar from your bloodstream. Instead it releases sugar from its cells to raise blood sugar levels even higher.
What Causes a Fatty Liver?
High rises in blood sugar causes fat to be deposited in your liver. When blood sugar levels rise, your liver can use the sugar immediately for energy or store a small amount in your liver and muscles. All the remaining sugar is converted to a fat called triglycerides, a small amount is used for energy and the rest is stored in cells in your body, primarily the liver.
As you keep on getting high rises in blood sugar, more and more fat is stored in your liver until you have so much fat in your liver that your liver stops accepting sugar from your bloodstream to cause blood sugar levels to rise very high, leading to diabetes.
When blood sugar levels rise too high, sugar can stick to the outer membranes of every type of cell in your body. There the sugar is converted by a series of chemical reactions to sorbitol which destroys the cell. This is how high blood sugar levels can cause dementia, heart attacks, arteriosclerosis, strokes, impotence, certain cancers and all of the other consequences of diabetes.
What You Can Learn from Tom Hanks • Avoid overweight and yoyo dieting • Eat lots of vegetables and fruits • Avoid sugared drinks and sugar-added foods, and restrict other refined carbohydrates such as foods made from flour (bakery products, pastas) • Avoid red meat (blocks insulin receptors). • Avoid fried foods (contain Advanced Glycation End products that raise blood sugar levels) • Exercise (converts sugar to energy instead of storing it in your body primarily as fat) • Keep blood levels of hydroxy vitamin D above 75 nmol/L (low levels of vitamin D block insulin receptors)
VISIT any health shop and you are likely to see them: packages of homeopathic remedies claiming to cure whatever ails you, from coughs and fever to insomnia and asthma.
Flip the package of medicine, however, and you may be confused by the listed ingredients.
Some claim to contain crushed bees, stinging nettles and even arsenic, as well as sugars such as lactose and sucrose. Americans spend some $3 billion a year on homeopathic medicines. What are they thinking?
The history of homeopathy — literally, "similar suffering"—dates to the late 18th century.
Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor, was unimpressed by contemporary medicine, with good reason. Doctors used leeches to let blood and hot plasters to bring on blisters, which were then drained. In 1790 Hahnemann developed a fever that transformed his career.
After swallowing powder from the bark of a cinchona tree, he saw his temperature rise. Cinchona bark contains quinine, which was already known to treat malaria.
Hahnemann considered the facts: cinchona seemed to give him a fever; fever is a symptom of malaria; and cinchona treats malaria.
He then made an acrobatic leap of logic: medicines bring on the same symptoms in healthy people as they cure in sick ones. Find a substance that induces an illness and it might treat that illness in another.
Hahnemann then decided that ingredients should be diluted and shaken repeatedly, a process called "potentiation". The smaller the amount of the active ingredient, the more powerful the medicine would become, he believed.
Homeopathic remedies use various bits of terminology to convey their supposedly potency. One common designation is "NC", where C signifies that a substance is diluted by a ratio of 1:100 and N stands for the number of times the substance has been diluted.
So a dilution of 200C would mean that one gram of a substance had been diluted within 100 grams of water, with the process repeated 200 times. At this dilution not a single molecule of the original substance remains.
Most homeopathic pills are made entirely of sugar. However, the pills are supposed to retain a "memory" of the original substance.
This is bunk.
Studying homeopathy is difficult, points out the world’s biggest funder of medical research, America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), because it is hard to examine the effects of a medicine when that medicine has little or no active ingredient.
Researchers can neither confirm that the medicine contains what it claims to nor show the chemical effect of the diluted medicine within the body.
The most comprehensive review of homeopathy was published in 2005 in the Lancet, a medical journal. Researchers compared trials of homeopathic and conventional medicines.
In the bigger, well-designed trials, there was "no convincing evidence" that homeopathy was more effective than a placebo, they found.
Meanwhile, in similar trials of conventional drugs, medicines showed specific clinical effects. As the NIH dryly notes:
"several key concepts of homeopathy are inconsistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics."
Food-industry representatives hate the recommendations in a new nutrition-panel report - a good indicator of its value - but they should become policy.
Fantastic narration by Burroughs about Danny, a poor unfortunate junkie who reveals his last remains of selflessness and humanity despite his urgent physical predicament.
The Junky's Christmas is a story by William S. Burroughs. It appears in the 1989 collection Interzone and on the 1993 album Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales. It was also made into a 1993 short claymation film directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel. The film was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and was released by Koch Vision on DVD in North America on Nov. 21, 2006. Burroughs narrates the film and appears in live-action footage at the beginning and end of the film.
The obesogen concept proposes that environmental contaminants may be contributing to the epidemic of obesity and its related pathology, metabolic disorder.
The first references to such a notion appeared at the beginning of the current decade, with the hypothesis that the correlation between increasing incidence of obesity and enhanced industrial chemical production was not simply coincidental, but potentially causally related. The next event was the introduction of the term "obesogen" as representing an environmental pollutant that adversely affects various aspects of adipose tissue functions. More recently, the concept was extended to include substances that may modify metabolic balance at the central, hypothalamic level. The actions of two prime candidate obesogens, tributyltin (TBT) and tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA), acting at the central level are the main focus of this review. Having discussed the evidence for contaminant accumulation in the environment and in human tissues and the potential mechanisms of action, data are provided showing that these two widespread pollutants modify hypothalamic gene regulations. Our studies are based on maternal exposure and measurement of effects in the progeny, mainly based on in vivo gene reporter assays. Such models are obviously pertinent to testing current hypotheses that propose that early exposure might exert effects on later development and physiological functions. The potential molecular mechanisms involved are discussed, as are the broader physiological consequences of these hypothalamic dysregulations.
Last night, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonightgot a jump start on this week’s news: SUGAR!!! (Brought to you by the makers of Halloween™.) And instead of making fun of obese, diabetic, candy-gobbling Americans — which is easy, considering that we’ll spend a total of $2.2 billion on the stuff this Halloween — he slammed the high-powered industry behind those spooky diabetes and obesity rates.
For a treat, Oliver offers up a video clip of the sleepy president of The Sugar Association, for instance, arguing that there’s been “plenty of science that exonerates sugar, that clarifies sugar does not contribute to obesity or diabetes.” Problem is, as Oliver points out, what little of such science there is usually comes from researchers who are paid gobs of money by totally unbiased groups like the Corn Refiners Association.
These kinds of groups are precisely the ones battling a new FDA proposal for an “added sugar” label, too, given how freaking much sugar is snuck into regular, non-Halloweeny foods. (“Look at Clamato juice,” Oliver says. “‘The Original Tomato Cocktail With Clam.’ They clearly thought, ‘Let’s improve the taste by adding sugar.’ Instead of thinking, ‘Let’s improve the taste by removing the clam.'”)
Point is, this clip is awesome, and we heart you, too, John Oliver — especially for that brutally honest description of the circus peanut.
At 49, boxer Bernard Hopkins is fighting age — and winning
IBF Light Heavyweight Champ Bernard Hopkins, 49, is next scheduled to fight Sergey Kovalev, 31, at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey on November 8th. Kovalev is currently undefeated with an impressive 25-0-1 record with 23 KO’s while Hopkins, 55-6-2-2, is coming off a string of unforeseen victories.
Hopkins has won his last 3 fights against fighters who were all in their early 30’s capturing, then defending and defending again a Light Heavyweight championship. Before his bout with Jean Pascal in 2011, Pascal suggested that Hopkins’ extraordinarily long-time dominance of the sport is the result of performance-enhancing drugs.
Hopkins has never failed a drug test but has said that his low-carb, organic diet serves as his enhancement.
It has been noted that while Hopkins was jailed at the age of 18, for 5 years, he adapted to eating jail house portions, working out and not drinking and smoking. This discipline appears to have stuck with him, he tells Dave Golokhov of AskMen, “I don’t have no damn cook. I don’t need that. I decided about eating a long time ago when I was in prison how to eat, and I learned how to discipline myself.
I learned how to eat by watching different people, different shows, learning as I went, and I knew that certain things ain't good for you but whether you can stay away from them is another battle.
So I understand that even dairy — when you get to a certain age — isn't good for you, so I realized that if I can find the best things to give me the best energy and the best vitamins for my body, then I’d be better off.
After he left prison, he continued to remove sweets, alcohol, pizza and soda from his diet. He also tells Dave Golokhov, “You know, it’s not cheap to live healthy. So, for me, it’s not about a cook or a diet, it’s about a way of life and a way to live.”
Today, Hopkins mostly cooks for himself using only organic, low-carb foods and nothing processed or fried. Instead he leans towards egg whites, fish and vegetables. He eats red meat only when in training. This is a big reason why that t 49 years of age, he is the oldest boxer ever to win and defend a world title.
Hopkins smoked marijuana and consumed alcohol before he was even in his teens but he is proof that at any age, anyone can be in championship shape if they commit to a drug and alcohol free lifestyle and a healthy diet, free of sugar and processed foods, which is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. "
Revealed: How eating junk food just wants to make you eat MORE junk
Scientists at Sydney's University of New South Wales may have found the reason why overweight people struggle to give up fatty foods The UNSW study could prove that particular high calorie foods are addictive The study performed on rats shows that junk food not only makes rats fat, it also stops them from seeking out a balanced diet
PUBLISHED: 13:20 GMT, 3 September 2014 | UPDATED: 15:27 GMT, 3 September 2014
Ever thought that giving up your favourite sweet treat was almost impossible?
Scientists at the University of New South Wales have found that feeding rats a junk food diet made it harder for the rats to return to a healthy diet.
This study could explain why it's harder for overweight people to avoid high calorie foods.
Junk food could actually be changing your brain's ability to eat healthy food
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Junk food could actually be changing your brain's ability to eat healthy food
The study published in Frontiers in Psychology led by Professor Margaret Morrie helps explain how excessive consumption of junk food can change behavior, weaken self-control and lead to overeating and obesity.
The team of researchers taught young male rats to associate two different sound cues with a two particular flavours of sugar water.
Healthy rats, raised on a healthy diet, stopped responding to cues linked to a flavour they had recently overindulged in.
This instinctive mechanism in animals protects against overeating and promotes a healthy, balanced diet.
The key to why junk food is so addictive may have been found
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The key to why junk food is so addictive may have been found
After two weeks on a diet that included pies, dumplings, cookies and cake – with 150 per cent more calories – the rats’ weight increased by 10 per cent and their behaviour changed dramatically.
They became indifferent in their food choices and no longer avoided the sound advertising the over familiar taste, indicating they had lost their natural preference for novelty.
The change lasted for some time after the rats returned to a healthy diet.
'We think that a junk diet causes lasting changes in the reward circuit parts of the rats’ brains in the area responsible for decision-making,' said Professor Morris.
The researchers think that a junk diet causes lasting changes in the area of the brain responsible for decision-making
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The researchers think that a junk diet causes lasting changes in the area of the brain responsible for decision-making
'Because the brain’s reward circuitry is similar in all mammals, this could have implications for people’s ability to limit their intake of certain kinds of foods.'
'If the same thing happens in humans, eating junk food may change our responses to signals associated with food rewards. It’s like you’ve just had ice cream for lunch, yet you still go and eat more when you hear the ice cream van comes by,' she explained.
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You CAN train your brain to like healthy foods: Researchers reveal diet that can kick junk food addiction
Dr Amy Reichelt from the School of Psychology in UNSW Science says:'As the global obesity epidemic intensifies, advertisements may have a greater effect on people who are overweight and make purchases of snacks like chocolate bars harder to resist.'
Ultimately the study shows that if the human brain works like the rats brain, junk food is almost an addiction that our bodies are not able to resist.
Back to William S. Burroughs
The Junky's Christmas (1993)
