Healthy Diet of Fruit and Vegetables Extends Life Expectancy in Women

Women in their seventies who exercise and eat healthy amounts of fruits and vegetables have a longer life expectancy, according to research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University studied 713 women aged 70 to 79 years who took part in the Women's Health and Aging Studies. This study was designed to evaluate the causes and course of physical disability in older women living in the community.

"A number of studies have measured the positive impact of exercise and healthy eating on life expectancy, but what makes this study unique is that we looked at these two factors together," explains lead author, Dr. Emily J Nicklett, from the University of Michigan School of Social Work.

Researchers found that the women who were most physically active and had the highest fruit and vegetable consumption were eight times more likely to survive the five-year follow-up period than the women with the lowest rates.

To estimate the amount of fruits and vegetables the women ate, the researchers measured blood levels of carotenoids-beneficial plant pigments that the body turns into antioxidants, such as beta-carotene. The more fruits and vegetables consumed, the higher the levels of carotenoids in the bloodstream..

Study participants' physical activity was measured through a questionnaire that asked the amount of time the spent doing various levels of physical activity, which was then converted to the number of calories expended.

The women were then followed up to establish the links between healthy eating, exercise and survival rates.

Key research findings included:

• More than half of the 713 participants (53%) didn't do any exercise, 21% were moderately active, and the remaining 26% were in the most active group at the study's outset.
• During the five-year follow up, 11.5% of the participants died. Serum carotenoid levels were 12% higher in the women who survived and total physical activity was more than twice as high.
• Women in the most active group at baseline had a 71% lower five-year death rate than the women in the least active group.
• Women in the highest carotenoid group at baseline had a 46% lower five-year death rate than the women in the lowest carotenoid group.
• When taken together, physical activity levels and total serum carotenoids predicted better survival.

"Given the success in smoking cessation, it is likely that maintenance of a healthy diet and high levels of physical activity will become the strongest predictors of health and longevity. Programs and policies to promote longevity should include interventions to improve nutrition and physical activity in older adults," said Dr. Nicklett.

When You Eat Matters, Not Just What You Eat

When it comes to weight gain, when you eat might be at least as important as what you eat.

When mice on a high-fat diet are restricted to eating for eight hours per day, they eat just as much as those who can eat around the clock, yet they are protected against obesity and other metabolic ills, the new study shows. The discovery suggests that the health consequences of a poor diet might result in part from a mismatch between our body clocks and our eating schedules.

"Every organ has a clock," said lead author of the study Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That means there are times that our livers, intestines, muscles, and other organs will work at peak efficiency and other times when they are—more or less—sleeping.

Those metabolic cycles are critical for processes from cholesterol breakdown to glucose production, and they should be primed to turn on when we eat and back off when we don't, or vice versa. When mice or people eat frequently throughout the day and night, it can throw off those normal metabolic cycles.

"When we eat randomly, those genes aren't on completely or off completely," Panda said. The principle is just like it is with sleep and waking, he explained. If we don't sleep well at night, we aren't completely awake during the day, and we work less efficiently as a consequence.

To find out whether restricted feeding alone—without a change in calorie intake—could prevent metabolic disease, Panda's team fed mice either a standard or high-fat diet with one of two types of food access: ad lib feeding or restricted access.

The time-restricted mice on a high-fat diet were protected from the adverse effects of a high-fat diet and showed improvements in their metabolic and physiological rhythms. They gained less weight and suffered less liver damage. The mice also had lower levels of inflammation, among other benefits.

Panda says there is reason to think our eating patterns have changed in recent years, as many people have greater access to food and reasons to stay up into the night, even if just to watch TV. And when people are awake, they tend to snack.

The findings suggest that restricted meal times might be an underappreciated lifestyle change to help people keep off the pounds. At the very least, the new evidence suggests that this is a factor in the obesity epidemic that should be given more careful consideration.

"The focus has been on what people eat," Panda said. "We don't collect data on when people eat."

Are Women’s Handbags Dirtier Than Toilets?

Women's handbags have more microbes than those that exist in most toilets surface of the toilets. Women put the bag all over the place. They take the bag with them all the time and are passing germs from hand to bag. And no bleach goes in the bag.

The study carried out by Maulori Cabral, Professor at the Institute of Microbiology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) reveals that hand cream, lipstick and make-up kits are the dirtiest items that women carry in their handbags. The study compared findings with research carried out by the UK market research company Initial Washroom Hygiene which specializes in cleaning public toilets.

Maulori Cabral agrees with the research. "That's what she (the woman) touches more often, but from the outside". He explained that the lipsticks, themselves, already have antimicrobial agents. The same is true regarding hand cream. Vials containing cream are all the time being held by female hands.

Maulori Cabral clarified that when a person holds an object, he/she transfers part of his/her microbiota to it. "Every living creature you meet has a population of microbes associated with the body itself. Each person has their bacterial populations. This set of bacterial populations that is associated with a body called microbiota," he said.

Cabral ruled out, however, that the fact that handbag presents more microbes than the surface of toilets endangers human health. "No way. This is all about creating panic. The microbiota is part of the evolution of living beings. Each person carries about 100 trillion bacteria. The adult body consists of 10 trillion cells that are descendants of fertilization, i.e. our embryonic origin". When the creature is born, it becomes contaminated with bacteria, including from the mother herself, and when it becomes an adult, the person carries ten times more bacteria than embryonic cells. "When you touch something, you pass your microbes onto it".

In the virologist´s assessment, washing your hands so often does not reduce the number of bacteria present in women's handbags. What you need is always to wash the hands before meals and after going to the bathroom. "When you wash your hands, you do not get rid of your germs, you get rid of the germs of others. Because yours are part of your microbiota. The microbes belonging to others are the ones that can harm you, or not".

Cabral reiterated that human beings are born to live with microbes. "Dressing microbes up as something evil is the greatest absurdity". He said that children take lactobacillus alive because it is good for their health and said that microbial contamination is a natural thing. Although microbes are invisible, they are the most powerful beings on the planet," stated the UFRJ Professor.

 "Microbes are part of everyday life," Cabral explained that as the human being is a social animal, men greet each other, exchanging microbes in the handshake. "The first thing you do is: here, have some of my microbes and give me some of yours". When there is more intimacy with another person, kisses are exchanged. "Then the thing complicates" because, according to Cabral, each droplet of saliva has 100,000 bacteria. "But is there anything better than swapping bacteria?" joked the professor. This means that the more intimate the greeting, the more microbiota are shared.

Improving Food Safety by Monitoring Suppliers and Traceability

Food safety concerns have been on the rise since the horsemeat scandal earlier this year showed how little control many food companies really have over their supply chain. Public confidence has been shaken as a result of these fraudulent actions. The horsemeat scandal has demonstrated the importance of proper controls.

When something goes wrong and food or feed product is recalled, the loss of product is really the least of concerns, as damage to the brand and subsequent lawsuits quickly outpace the cost of the recall itself.

In the past, food companies have relied on third-party external audits to make sure their suppliers and food processors were delivering a high quality product, but the third-party audits are often announced well ahead of time and were paid for by the suppliers and manufacturers. Supplier auditing has become more common.

The hazards include microbiological, chemical, including allergens and physical, issues that can cause food to be unsafe, shall be controlled and monitored by a strong food safety management system. If unchecked, they could lead to serious brand or/and financial damage for the business.

Food safety management system is term that encompasses many aspects of handling, preparation and storage of food to prevent illness and injury. A priority of food quality is control of:

• Chemical properties of which allergens can be life threatening to some people, or vitamin and mineral content which affect the overall quality of the food.
• Physical particles which are crucial but are not as significant in terms of food safety. As glass and metal can be hazardous and cause serious injury to consumers. 
• Microbiological hazards such bacteria, viruses and toxins are possible contaminants of food and impact food safety.

Food manufacturers and distributors are increasingly concerned about building effective food safety management system, decreasing the possibility of occurring food safety events and then control corporate managing risk.

User friendly tools which will help maintaining supplier approval process and verifying internal policies, procedures and systems have been developed by a team of food safety experts.

The Food Safety Audit, Supplier Risk Assessment, BRC Issue 6 Audit and Traceability Audit aim at reducing and preventing issues along the supply chain, from the suppliers to the customer.

Supplier Risk Assessment is the process of evaluating risks to safety, legality and quality of the products. To get a full picture of suppliers individualized risk assessments shall be made on the performance of each supplier.

Food Safety Audits are a crucial aspects of maintaining food safety standards, by providing transparency and assurance that standards are being maintained.

Traceability is a way of responding to potential risks that can arise in food and feed, to ensure that all food products are safe.

Traceability is a risk management tool, allowing food businesses to withdraw or recall products that have been identified as unsafe.

BRC Issue 6 Audits are a systematic, independent and documented activity in which objective evidence is gathered and assessed to determine if a food safety system is appropriate and effective. BRC Issue 6 Audits also provide evidence that food is manufactured in a safe environment and help determine if hazards are properly identified and controlled or eliminated.

See more at http://www.haccpeuropa.com

IFS Food Defense

We would like to introduce food quality manuals we have developed. We have started with Food Defense. I hope you will find it interesting.
Food Defense is preventing or eliminating the deliberate contamination of food by bacterial agents, toxins, chemicals, radiation, or a physical object, as compared to Food Safety which is the protection of the food supply from unintentional contamination. Prevention is the most important aspect of food defense.
The intentional contamination may come from an angry employee, a criminal element, a dishonest competitor or an organized terrorist. Threats to Food Defense might occur at any level in the food-supply chain.  The motivations for such attacks vary greatly and include, but are not limited to, financial gain, thrill/challenge, prestige, revenge, publicity, chaos, competitive advantage, or political reasons.
Find out more...  http://www.haccpeuropa.com

Diabetes Linked to Quantity of Sugar Intake

Eating too much of any food, including sugar, can cause you to gain weight; it’s the resulting obesity that predisposes people to diabetes, according to the prevailing theory. For years, scientists have said eating too much sugar “not exactly” causes diabetes.

But now the results of a large epidemiological study suggest sugar may also have a direct, independent link to diabetes. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco examined data on sugar availability and diabetes rates from 175 countries over the past decade. After accounting for obesity and a large array of other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates, independent of obesity rates.

“It was quite a surprise,” said Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the study’s lead author. The research was conducted while Basu was a medical resident at UCSF.

The study provides the first large-scale, population-based evidence for the idea that not all calories are equal from a diabetes-risk standpoint, Basu said. “We’re not diminishing the importance of obesity at all, but these data suggest that at a population level there are additional factors that contribute to diabetes risk besides obesity and total calorie intake, and that sugar appears to play a prominent role.”

Specifically, more sugar was correlated with more diabetes: For every additional 150 calories of sugar available per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes in the population rose 1 percent, even after controlling for obesity, physical activity, other types of calories and a number of economic and social variables. A 12-ounce can of soda contains about 150 calories of sugar. In contrast, an additional 150 calories of any type caused only a 0.1 percent increase in the population’s diabetes rate.

Not only was sugar availability correlated to diabetes risk, but the longer a population was exposed to excess sugar, the higher its diabetes rate after controlling for obesity and other factors. In addition, diabetes rates dropped over time when sugar availability dropped, independent of changes to consumption of other calories and physical activity or obesity rates.

The findings do not prove that sugar causes diabetes, Basu emphasized, but do provide real-world support for the body of previous laboratory and experimental trials that suggest sugar affects the liver and pancreas in ways that other types of foods or obesity do not. “We really put the data through a wringer in order to test it out,” Basu said.

The study used food-supply data from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization to estimate the availability of different foods in the 175 countries examined, as well as estimates from the International Diabetes Foundation on the prevalence of diabetes among 20- to 79-year-olds. The researchers employed new statistical methods derived from econometrics to control for factors that could provide alternate explanations for an apparent link between sugar and diabetes, including overweight and obesity; many non-sugar components of the food supply, such as fiber, fruit, meat, cereals and oils; total calories available per day; sedentary behavior; rates of economic development; household income; urbanization of the population; tobacco and alcohol use; and percentage of the population age 65 or older, since age is also associated with diabetes risk.

“Epidemiology cannot directly prove causation,” said Robert Lustig, MD, pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and the senior author of the study. “But in medicine, we rely on the postulates of Sir Austin Bradford Hill to examine associations to infer causation, as we did with smoking. You expose the subject to an agent, you get a disease; you take the agent away, the disease gets better; you re-expose and the disease gets worse again. This study satisfies those criteria, and places sugar front and center.”

“As far as I know, this is the first paper that has had data on the relationship of sugar consumption to diabetes,” said Marion Nestle, PhD, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who was not involved in the study. “This has been a source of controversy forever. It’s been very, very difficult to separate sugar from the calories it provides. This work is carefully done, it’s interesting and it deserves attention.”

The fact that the paper used data obtained over time is an important strength, Basu said. “Point-in-time studies are susceptible to all kinds of reverse causality,” he said. “For instance, people who are already diabetic or obese might eat more sugars due to food cravings.”

The researchers had to rely on food-availability data for this study instead of consumption data because no large-scale international databases exist to measure food consumption directly. Basu said follow-up studies are needed to examine possible links between diabetes and specific sugar sources, such as high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose, and also to evaluate the influence of specific foods, such as soft drinks or processed foods.

Another important future step, he said, is to conduct randomized clinical trials that could affirm a cause-and-effect connection between sugar consumption and diabetes. Although it would be unethical to feed people large amounts of sugar to try to induce diabetes, scientists could put participants of a study on a low-sugar diet to see if it reduces diabetes risk.

Basu was cautious about possible policy implications of his work, stating that more evidence is needed before enacting widespread policies to lower sugar consumption.

However, Nestle pointed out that the findings add to many other studies that suggest people should cut back on their sugar intake. “How much circumstantial evidence do you need before you take action?” she said. “At this point we have enough circumstantial evidence to advise people to keep their sugar a lot lower than it normally is.”

Vitamin D Supplements Intake During Pregnancy Linked to Food Allergies

Vitamin D has always had a good reputation: it strengthens bones, protects against infections particularly during the cold winter months and aids the nervous and muscular systems. Especially in the prevention and treatment of rickets, it has been given to babies and infants around the world for around 50 years. However, recent scientific investigations are increasingly questioning the positive aspect of the “bone vitamin.” At the end of the 1990′s, for the first time people’s attention was drawn to a link between high vitamin D levels and the development of allergies.

Pregnant women should avoid taking vitamin D supplements, according to a new research carried out by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. Substitution appears to raise the risk of children developing a food allergy after birth.

To pursue the problem, together with Prof. Gabriele Stangl’s group from the Institute of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Dr. Kristin Weiße from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig devoted herself to the following task: can it be proved that there is a correlation between the concentration of vitamin D in the blood of expectant mothers and in cord blood of the babies? The researchers from the UFZ in Leipzig were furthermore interested in the association between vitamin D levels during pregnancy and at birth, the immune status and allergic diseases of the children later in life. Or, in other words: does the vitamin D level of pregnant women affect the allergy risk of their children?

To investigate the question, Dr. Kristin Weiße’s team from Leipzig used samples from the LiNA cohort that the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) had established together with the St. Georg municipal clinic between 2006 and 2008 headed by Dr. Irina Lehmann. In total, it was possible to include 622 mothers and their 629 children in the long-term study “Lifestyle and environmental factors and their impact on the newborn allergy risk.” The level of vitamin D was tested in the blood of the pregnant mothers and also in the cord blood of the children born. In addition to this, questionnaires were used to assess the occurrence of food allergies during the first two years of the children’s lives.

The result was clear: in cases where expectant mothers were found to have a low vitamin D level in the blood, the occurrence of food allergies among their two-year old children was rarer than in cases where expectant mothers had a high vitamin D blood level. In reverse, this means that a high vitamin D level in pregnant women is associated with a higher risk of their children to develop a food allergy during infancy. Furthermore, those children were found to have a high level of the specific immunoglobulin E to food allergens such as egg white, milk protein, wheat flour, peanuts or soya beans. The UFZ scientists also got evidence fot the mechanism that could link vitamin D and food allergies. Dr. Gunda Herberth — also from the Department of Environmental Immunology at the UFZ — took a closer look at the immune response of the affected children and analysed regulatory T-cells in cord blood in particular. The cells are capable of preventing the immune system from overreacting to allergens, with the result that they protect against allergies. The UFZ researchers know from earlier analyses that the allergy risk increases in cases where too few regulatory T-cells are present in cord blood. The interesting result of the current research project: the higher the level of vitamin D found in the blood of mothers and children, the fewer regulatory T-cells could be detected. The correlation could mean that vitamin D suppresses the development of regulatory T-cells and thus increases the risk of allergy.

Apart from diet, Dr. Kristin Weiße explained that the level of vitamin D is mainly affected by conditions such as season, exposure to the sun and the amount of time spent outdoors — these factors were also taken into account in the current risk analyses of vitamin D and food allergy. Even though the occurrence of food allergies is undoubtedly affected by many other factors than just the vitamin D level, it is still important to take this aspect into consideration. The UFZ researchers would rather advise pregnant women not to take vitamin D supplements. “Based on our information, an excess of vitamin D can increase the risk of children developing a food allergy in the first two years of their life.”