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Human Clinical Trials To Begin On Drug That Reverses Diabetes In Animal Models
Zothecula writes: A study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has shown that verapamil, a drug widely used to treat high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat and migraine headaches, is able to completely reverse diabetes in animal models. The UAB team will now move onto clinical trials to see if the same results are repeated in humans.
Well, this isn't quite a new low in first posts. After all, Golden Girls, Gaping nether parts and blatant misspellings are just rampant in our attempt to be the first to reply to these important and challenging topics.
But the drug's name, verapamil, is the 13th word in TFS. How long does that take to read?
Slow down Cowboy! We're here all day!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"Get rid of corn subsidies and watch your obesity/diabestes epidemic grind to a halt."
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Slashdot may usually be progressive technologically (sometimes even too progressive in some ways), but it can be backward/conservative in other ways (especially regurgitating mainstream medicine's party line, which is why your amusing-to-me over-generalization got modded flamebait). Obviously, there is still a lot of variety here, so this is just an observation on trends...
A couple things on that tangent: ... ..."
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09...
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so.
Gambetta and Hertog found engineers only in right-wing groups -- the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.
Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. Yet these organizations mastered the same technical skills as the right-wingers. Between 1970 and 1978, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany staged kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies and bombings. Seventeen of its members had college or graduate degrees, mostly in law or the humanities. Not one studied engineering.
The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions -- "the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority." Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? Itâ(TM)s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.
Much of medicine is filled with ambiguity (if you ignore nutritional missteps being at the root of much chronic disease that plays out in a variety of different symptoms). Much of the rest of disease is related to lifestyle or environment (e.g. leaded gas causing the past few decades of increasing crime, now dropping as leaded gas has been banned). As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us weak links, but whether they get pulled on to the breaking point is a function of diet and lifestyle and environment. That is not the sort of thing engineers are going to like to here... They want a quick answer prescribed by an authority like a drug. Dr. Fuhrman calls prescriptions for drugs like blood pressure medicine or diabetes-related medicines for type II diabetics as "permission slips" by authority to continue with current bad behavior regarding diet, lifestyle, and environment. Likewise, getting the label of "bad genes" is another permission slip for misbehavior... Not saying some people don't get dealt a much worse hand of cards in terms of genes, family habits, and environment than others... Still, consider how so much of life is what we make of it:
"An Afternoon with comedian Brett Leake '82"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"I'd like to find a person that adheres to a strict vegan diet devoid of GMOs (corn being the primary offender) that suffers from diabetes. I doubt such a person exists, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of a 300+ lb. diabetic vegan if anyone can provide evidence to the contrary."
BTW, a lot of vegans eat terrible. Too much processed vegan junk foods, too many carbs, not enough vegetables, nutritional deficiencies relating to B, D, Iodine, Omega 3s/DHA, etc.. Dr. Fuhrman talks about this. ... A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health food store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little turkey, chicken, fish, or eggs but consumes large volumes of fruits, vegetables, and beans. That combination of little or no animal products with a higher consumption of fresh produce is the crucial factor that makes a vegetarian diet healthful."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"What You Need to Know About Vegetarian or Vegan Diets; Following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.
Personally, considering even Gorillas get about 5% of their calories from termites and such, I don't think any primate is adapted to be totally vegan. Maybe it is possible, but it is really pushing it. In the West, we just don't eat many insects or enough dirt (yes, I mean that, about gut bacteria and vitamin B12, although dirt today is probably not what it used to be like with lead and mercury contamination and e coli contamination and such).
However, there are lots of people for whom turning vegan improved their health for a couple years until various deficiencies set in. And I think those deficiencies could be managed for people who are aware of them or do various tests. A big thing is to eat a larger variety of foods than most people in Western society on a SAD diet are used to eating. I'd guess iodine deficiency is a big issue for many Western vegans, since some soils are depleted and sea vegetables are not common in a Western diet, and now that much bread has bromine in it instead of iodine as a dough conditioner, the situation is even worse. I also think there may be vitamins in various animal fats that we may not get enough of easily on a vegan diet for some people, especially those whose genetics are more adapted to some situations (same as lactose intolerance, but in reverse, like they are not as good at making vitamin A from plants compared to absorbing it from animal products...)
Still, in general, vegans tend to be more health conscious, so:
http://www.veganhealth.org/art...
"The only prospective study measuring rates of diabetes in vegans, the Adventist Health Study 2, found them to have a 60% less chance of developing the disease than non-vegetarians after two years of follow-up. Previously, a cross-sectional report from the Adventist Health Study-2 showed vegans to have a 68% lower rate of diabetes than non-vegetarians. A number of clinical trials have now shown that a vegan, or mostly vegan, diet can lower body weight, reduce blood sugar, and improve other parameters for type 2 diabetes."
Corn syrup manufacturers used to (maybe some still do?) clean their equipment with a mercury-based cleaning agent, and so some batches of high fructose corn syrup were contaminated with higher levels of mercury that would have contributed to ill health. Also, in any society with a dominant food (like corn in the USA) more people tend to get allergic to it. An undiagnosed food allergy is going to cause all sorts of problems including stress, which might contribute to obesity. Few people in the USA are probably allergic to rice since the US does not eat so much of it, but a rice or soy allerg
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.