More and more research keeps coming out to suggest that it is not good for humans to have a lot of fructose in their diets. While fructose is found in relatively small quantities in fruit, most people consume it in the form of high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS for short.

Readers of the Times Online learned on Sunday about a research study on this cheap form of sugar:

Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

What’s new in this study is the increase in visceral fat, the fat around body organs. This is a huge deal. Visceral fat is a major risk factor for everything from metabolic syndrome to organic brain disease to liver cancer and prostate cancer. Visceral fat is most easily spotted as a “beer belly” and it doesn’t take much searching to realize that this is far and way the worst kind of fat to have. Read the rest of this entry »

As we sit at our desks this holiday season, perhaps glancing at goodies that some thoughtful co-worker has brought in, we know that come January many of us will find ourselves needing to lose a few pounds. Some of you may ask yourselves why you are gaining weight when you are eating the same stuff you did 20 years ago. And while it’s easy to blame a slowing metabolism, that isn’t really the problem at all.

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Two interesting studies this week on relatively fatty foods. First, mice fed a lard-based diet with 60% of their diet from fat “got worse at fighting bacteria in the blood“. While scientists expected the mice to get fat (they did), the impaired immune system was a surprise. Researcher Louise Strandberg pointed out that “Obesity is usually associated with inflammation that does not result from an infection, which simply means that the immune defences [sic] are activated unnecessarily. Ironically, the mice on the high-fat diet seem to have a less active immune system when they really need it.” It is worth noting that not all fatty diets are equal: when compared to vegetable fat or fish oil based diets, lard based diets in mice have already been linked to reduced diet induced thermogenesis (body temperature rising after eating) and impaired glucose tolerance.

In other news, pistachios are good for you. That is, even better for you than was previously thought! Scientists already knew that they are heart healthy despite the fats they contain, they actually lower cholesterol, contain anti-oxidants, and vitamin E. Of course, vitamin E is known to protect against certain cancers, but pistachios contain a form of vitamin E specifically thought to protect against lung cancer, gamma-tocopherol. Tocopherols are already thought to have some benefits for treating and/or preventing age related macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cataracts, glaucoma, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. In addition, they are used as preservatives and in cosmetics.

Last week the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists released their revised guidelines for treatment of growth hormone deficiency. This revised document greatly updates the organization’s position on the use of Human Growth Hormone (hGH) and provides guidance for uses outside the traditional scope of rare metabolic diseases.

We’ve written about hGH before, and the recognition of hGH deficiency in patients that are outside the realm of strange endocrine tumors is a big step forward. Sadly, these guys aren’t the most compelling or bounciest writers. From time to time we have to cover the very dry scientific literature, this is one of those times. Let’s take a look at what the endocrinologists had to say.

Research from the University of Southern California suggests that a key to humans living longer than other primates is in the genes. However, these same genes that let us live longer also make us more susceptible to cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

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