A recently released study commissioned by the Pew Foundation examined the level of organic contaminants in fish purchased from wholesalers and retailers in both Europe and the USA. For the study they purchased whole raw farmed salmon and whole wild salmon. Amongst others they tested for the toxins such as RCB's, dieldrin, dioxins and toxaphene, all of which are fat soluble compounds.
They found that the farm raised salmon contained significantly higher levels of contaminants compared to their 'wild' cousins. In fact, farm raised salmon had average dioxin levels11 times higher than wild salmon. They also found that the most heavily contaminated samples came from Scotland and the Faroe Islands in the northern Atlantic with the least contaminated from Washington State in the US and Chile.
However, all samples from farm raised salmon had significantly higher levels of contaminants than any of the 'wild' salmon which also had contaminants. Based on this information the researchers recommend limiting consumption of farmed salmon to one-half to one meal per month.
Omega 3 essential fatty acids are as suggested... 'essential'. So is DHA for sound brain functioning! There is however a viable solution as to how you can get around this problem. I will explain in detail in next weeks edition of Xtend-Your-Life.
You will recollect that in the last issue of Xtend-15sec-News that we ran a short story on the first case of Mad Cow Disease (BSE) reported in the USA. Reference was made to the first case of the human variant form of 'Mad Cow Disease' (BSE) in the USA has now been made public. The human form is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), or vCJD.
We reported that the first case of human BSE in the USA had been made public. We were corrected shortly after by a couple of our diligent readers who pointed out that the CDC says there were no cases of the disease in humans. After confirming this we emailed a correction to our readers.
The issuing of the correction prompted more than a dozen emails to me from readers who had specific first hand experience of someone dying from an unknown disease with symptoms identical to BSE. In some instances CJD was actually confirmed by autopsy.
This information ties in with my own personal experience of a young man I knew in Southern California two years ago who died from an unknown disease with symptoms identical to BSE. He was about 30 years of age. When the physician treating him suggested BSE to the authorities he was suspended from the hospital. It can't help make you wonder if the official line is indeed the true one.
I don't believe there is any cause for alarm but nonetheless it would still be prudent to follow the simple precautions referred to in an earlier issue of this newsletter. You can find it in the archive section on our website.
A final word on this somewhat unpleasant subject. There is a very disturbing and well researched article about BSE written by United Press's medical correspondent Steve Mitchell. If you are interested in learning more about this subject I would highly recommend that you read it. We have posted it on our website and you can access it by clicking here.
Back when our grandparents were young, (and many of us as well) there were no Supermarkets on every corner. Stocking up on groceries meant daily visits to the village to purchase from individual specialty shops. Meat came from the butcher, while the 'greengrocer' provided the fruits and vegetables. Green produce was grown in local market gardens or in a plot in the backyard and only eaten in season.
Although some people still grow their own vegetables most people now rely on visiting their local supermarket for their supplies of fruit and vegetables. We all know how important it is to eat fruit and vegetables and the emphasis is always on 'fresh'. But, is fresh always best?
A New Zealand author and researcher Lynda Wharton has just published a short article in which she looks at this very question. We thought that you may find it of interested so you can read it by clicking here.
Mad Cow: Linked to thousands of CJD cases? (Full Article)f1By Steve Mitchell
United Press International
Published 12/29/2003 9:50 AM
The U.S. government's monitoring system for cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal human brain illness, could be missing tens of thousands of victims, scientists and consumer advocates have told United Press International.
A form of the disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or vCJD can be caused by, among other things, eating beef contaminated with mad cow disease -- but the critics assert without a better tracking system it might be impossible to determine whether any vCJD cases are due to mad cow or obtain an accurate picture of the prevalence of the disorder in the United States.
Beginning in the late 1990s, more than 100 people contracted vCJD in the United Kingdom and several European countries after eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- the clinical name for mad cow disease.
Only one case of mad cow has been reported in U.S. cattle -- on Dec. 23 in a cow in Washington state -- and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's monitoring system has never detected a case of vCJD due to eating contaminated American beef. Nevertheless, critics say, the CDC's system misses many cases of the disease, which currently is untreatable and is always fatal.
The first symptoms of vCJD typically include memory loss and difficulty keeping balance and walking. As the disease destroys the brain, patients rapidly progress in a matter of months to difficulty with movement, an inability to talk and swallow and, finally, death.
Spontaneously-occurring or sporadic CJD is a rare disorder. Only about 300 cases appear nationwide each year, but several studies have suggested the disorder might be more common than thought and as many as tens of thousands of cases might be going unrecognized.
Clusters of vCJD have been reported in various areas of the United States -- Pennsylvania in 1993, Florida in 1994, Oregon in 1996, New York in 1999-2000 and Texas in 1996. In addition, several people in New Jersey developed CJD in recent years, including a 56-year-old woman who died on May 31, 2003.
Although in some instances, a mad cow link was suspected, all of the cases ultimately were classified as sporadic. Still, new research, released last December, indicates the mad cow pathogen can cause both sporadic CJD and the variant form.
"Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked to (mad cow disease)," said Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University, who conducted a 1989 study that found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually had CJD.
Several studies, including the one by Manuelidis, have found autopsies reveal 3-percent-to-13-percent of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia actually suffered from CJD. Those numbers might sound low, but there are 4-million Alzheimer's cases and hundreds of thousands of dementia cases in the United States. A small percentage of those cases could add up to 120,000 or more CJD victims going undetected and not included in official statistics.
Experiences in England and Switzerland -- two countries that discovered mad cow disease in their cattle -- have heightened concerns about the possibility some cases of sporadic CJD are due to consuming mad-cow-tainted beef. Both countries have reported increases in sporadic CJD since mad cow was first detected in British herds in 1986.
Switzerland discovered last year its CJD rate was twice that of any other country in the world. Switzerland had been seeing about eight to 11 cases per year from 1997 to 2000. Then the incidence more than doubled, to 19 cases in 2001 and 18 cases in 2002.
The CDC says the annual rate of CJD in the United States is one case per million people, but the above studies suggest the true prevalence of CJD is not known, Manuelidis told UPI.
Diagnosing CJD or Alzheimer's is difficult because no test exists that can identify either disease in a living patient with certainty. So physicians must rely on the patient's symptoms to determine which illness might be present. Sometimes, however, the symptoms of one disease can appear similar to the other disorder. The only way to determine the disease conclusively is to perform an autopsy on the brain after death.
Unfortunately, although autopsies once were performed on approximately half of all corpses, the frequency has dropped to 15 percent or less in the United States. The National Center for Health Statistics -- a branch of the CDC -- stopped collecting autopsy data in 1995.
"If we don't do autopsies and we don't look at people's brains ... we have no idea about what is the general prevalence of these kinds of infections and (whether) it is changing," Manuelidis said.
At the same time autopsies have been declining, the number of deaths attributed to Alzheimer's has increased more than 50-fold since 1979, going from 857 deaths then to nearly 50,000 in 2000. Though it is unlikely the dramatic increase in Alzheimer's is due entirely to misdiagnosed CJD cases, it "could explain some of the increase we've seen," Manuelidis said.
"Neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease have become a wastebasket" for mental illness in the elderly that is difficult to diagnose conclusively, she said. "In other words, what people call Alzheimer's now is more broad than what people used to call it, and that has the possibility of encompassing more diseases -- including CJD."
The autopsy studies that found undiagnosed CJD cases raise the question of whether the United States "already has an undetected epidemic here," Jeff Nelson, director of vegsource.com, a vegetarian advocacy Web site, told UPI.
"What's the source of that?" Nelson asked. "Could it be the same source of encephalopathy we saw in minks?"
Nelson referred to an outbreak of a mad-cow-type disorder in minks in Wisconsin in the 1980s. The origin was traced back to the animals' diet, which included parts of so-called downer cattle -- sick cows that are unable to stand, which often indicates a neurological disease, including mad cow. The mink disease raised concerns about whether U.S. cattle were carrying a mad-cow-like pathogen even prior to the U.K. epidemic that began in 1986.
Andrew Monjan, chief of the neuropsychology of aging program at the National Institute of Aging -- part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. -- acknowledged there has been an increase in U.S. Alzheimer's cases. However, he told UPI, this probably is due to the aging of the population -- as people grow older, they develop a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's.
"There's been no change in the number of CJD cases in the country and there has been clearly a tracking of the unusual cases of CJD" that could be due to mad cow disease, Monjan said. However, Terry Singletary, coordinator of CJD Watch -- an organization founded to track CJD cases -- says efforts to track the disease have been close to nonexistent. For example, only 12 states require such reports. Therefore, many cases might be going undetected, unreported or misdiagnosed.
If more states made CJD a reportable illness, there would be more clusters detected across the United States, said Singletary, who became involved with CJD advocacy after his mother died from a form of CJD known as Heidenhain variant. In the 18-year period between 1979 and 1996, he noted, the country saw a jump from one case of sporadic CJD in people under the age of 30 -- a warning sign for a link to mad cow because nearly all of the U.K. victims were 30 years of age or younger -- to five cases in five years between 1997 and 2001. "That represents a substantial blip," he told UPI.
Singletary also said there have been increases in sporadic CJD in France, Germany and Italy, all of which have detected mad cow disease in their cattle.
So far, the CDC has refused to impose a national requirement that physicians and hospitals report cases of the disease. The agency has not chosen to make CJD a reportable disease because "making it reportable is not necessarily directly helpful in surveillance because in some states where it's reportable you may not get the physician to report it," said Dr. Ermias Belay, CDC's medical epidemiologist working on CJD.
Instead, the agency relies on other methods, including death certificates and urging physicians to send suspicious cases to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which is funded by the CDC. However, because autopsies generally are not done, if a CJD case is misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's or dementia, a correct diagnosis might never be determined and therefore the cause of death listed on a death certificate might be inaccurate.
Belay told UPI he discounted this possibility. It is unlikely to happen, he said, because it is easy to distinguish CJD from Alzheimer's -- the two conditions display different symptoms.
Manuelidis disagreed. It can be quite difficult to determine accurately if a patient has CJD, as evidenced by her study, in which respected and competent neurologists and psychiatrists at Yale originally diagnosed patients with Alzheimer's, yet were wrong at least 13 percent of the time. Another study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, which found 6 percent of dementia patients actually were suffering from CJD, supports the difficulty in distinguishing the illnesses correctly.
The U. Penn. researchers concluded: "These results show that in patients with a clinical diagnosis of dementia, the etiology (cause) cannot be accurately predicted during life."
In addition, the NPDPSC sees less than half of all the CJD cases each year, so the CDC's investigational system not only is missing many of the misdiagnosed CJD cases, it also is not conducting autopsies on most of the detected cases.
Belay said the CDC follows up on all cases of CJD that occur in people under age 55, as these could be linked to variant -- mad-cow-related -- CJD. But so far, all have turned out to be sporadic forms of the disease. About 30 cases of the disorder occur each year in the United States in this age group, while the remaining 270 or so are older.
The case of Carrie Mahan -- a Philadelphia woman who developed a brain disorder that appeared to be CJD and died from it in 2000 at the age of 29 -- illustrates just how difficult it can be to diagnose the disease.
Mahan's physician, Dr. Peter Crinos of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, ruled out other disorders and felt certain the young woman had died of CJD, a concern that raised the possibility of a link to mad cow disease because of her young age. When neuropathologist Nicholas Gonatas, who had seen CJD before, examined Mahan's brain after her death, he, likewise, was confident he detected the microscopic, sponge-like holes caused by the disease. But when he sent brain samples to the NPDPSC, the results came back negative. Gonatas, convinced the surveillance center's finding was erroneous, sent off two more samples, only to have them both come back negative.
Subsequent research, however, has shown the test used by the surveillance center cannot rule out CJD, said Crinos, an assistant professor of neurology.
"There's no question that Carrie had a spongiform encephalopathy," Crinos said, but added although it appeared to be CJD, it is difficult if not impossible to say if it was due to mad cow disease.
Crinos told UPI until the CDC implements a better tracking system, a lot of questions will remain about CJD and cases like Carrie Mahan's. One central question: Why are cases of what is presumed to be a rare disease popping up in clusters in certain areas of the country? Crinos said the clustering suggests an environmental or food-borne cause, but so far, "No one knows the answer to that."
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Fresh, Frozen Or Canned? (Full Article)f2
12/01/2004 02:19 PM Fitness Life's Lynda Wharton
Ever wondered whether frozen or canned vegetables are as nutrient dense as fresh produce? Lynda Wharton explains why there is more to this question than meets the eye.
How times have changed in the span of three generations. Back when our great-grandparents were young, there were no Foodtown or New World monoliths on every corner. Stocking up on groceries meant daily visits to the village to purchase from individual specialty shops. Meat came from the butcher, while the 'greengrocer' provided the fruits and vegetables. Green produce was locally grown (or at least grown in New Zealand rather than abroad), and available only in season. Back then, New Zealanders eating bananas from Ecuador, or oranges from California, were virtually unheard of. As a general rule of thumb, if it wasn't grown on New Zealand soil, then it wasn't available here. Great-grandparents, and even grandparents, will reminisce of their childhood, when much of their fruit and vegetables came freshly picked from their own land. Fruit trees, vines and a vegetable patch in the back yard, were once the Kiwi norm.
Fast forward to the modern antipodean family, and life is vastly different. Few of us now have the time, energy, space or inclination to grown our own vegetables. Grocery shopping is usually a once-a-week or fortnightly ordeal, with a mega trolley of food from the closest supermarket. We are accustomed to buying virtually any type of fruit or vegetable at any time of the year. Much of the produce we absentmindedly throw into the trolley has journeyed from far corners of the world, before finally resting beneath New Zealand or Australian supermarket lights.
'Fresh is best' according to the greengrocers commercial mantra. But then, just what is 'fresh' these days? While the word still conjures up visions of veggies plucked from the ground and plonked straight on to a waiting plate, the modern day reality is vastly different. Much of the green produce available in the supermarket or greengrocers is far from fresh. It is not uncommon for produce, after harvesting, to spend several days being sorted and packaged. Once placed in a refrigerated truck, the hapless vegetable may spend several more days on a journey to a distribution centre, where yet more time may be spent stored in a refrigerator. When it finally makes its way through a supermarket checkout, the 'fresh' vegetable or fruit may have spent a week or more in storage from the time it was picked. Cold storage, fluctuations in light and temperature, and display beneath supermarket lights, each cause degradation and breakdown of nutrients. Tests show that green beans, for example, lose 40 percent of their vitamin C content in the first two days after harvesting, and within three days of harvesting, a whopping 58 percent of vitamin C has gone. Often foods are harvested before they are fully ripe, with the expectation that further ripening will occur after harvest. The downside of this is that unripe fruits and vegetables never reach their maximum nutritional content before they are harvested.
Realising that 'fresh' can now mean several days old, it is worth questioning the relative merits of 'fresh' versus frozen or canned vegetables and fruit. While frozen foods don't conjure up the same image of health and vitality, the reality is that frozen vegetables and fruit may actually contain more nutrients than their 'fresh' counterparts. Remember those green beans that lost 58 percent of vitamin C in three days? Their frozen counterparts lost just 15 to 20 percent of vitamin C in the hours between picking and freezing. Similarly, frozen peas typically have about 60 percent more carotene than 'fresh' peas. The reality is that in numerous instances, frozen produce contains more nutrients than fresh. In controlled testing, quick frozen fruits and vegetables were compared with fresh fruits and vegetables exposed to air and fluorescent lighting (such as occurs in supermarkets) for periods of time ranging from a few days to two weeks. Frozen produce retained more nutrients in all cases.
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