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Cutting Carbohydrates From the Diet May Increase Longivity

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You may be able to extend your life and stay fit throughout your old age with a simple change of diet that switches on your “youth” gene.

Professor Cynthia Kenyon, whom many experts believe should win the Nobel Prize for her research into aging, has discovered that carbohydrates directly affect the genes that govern youthfulness and longevity.

By tweaking the genes of roundworms, she has been able to help them live up to six times longer than normal.
->The carbohydrates we eat directly affect two key genes that govern youthfulness and longevity
The genes that controlled aging in worms also do the same thing in rats and mice, probably monkeys, and there are signs they are active in humans, too. She found that turning down the gene that controls insulin in turn switches on another gene which acts like an elixir of life.

The Daily Mail reports:
“Discovering the … [first] gene has prompted the professor to ­dramatically alter her own diet, cutting right back on carbohydrates. That’s because carbs make your body produce more insulin (to mop up the extra blood sugar carbs ­produce) … so the vital second gene, the ‘elixir’ one, won’t get turned on.”

Source: Daily Mail October 26, 2010

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Clean Living ‘Slows Cell Ageing’

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Taking more exercise and eating the right foods may help increase levels of an enzyme vital for guarding against age-related cell damage, work suggests.
………………….CLICK & SEE
Among 24 men asked to adopt healthy lifestyle changes for a US study in The Lancet Oncology, levels of telomerase increased by 29% on average.

Telomerase repairs and lengthens telomeres, which cap and protect the ends of chromosomes housing DNA.

As people age, telomeres shorten and cells become more susceptible to dying.

It is the damage and death of cells that causes ageing and disease in people.

Several factors such as smoking, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle are associated with shorter-than-average telomeres.

Professor Dean Ornish, from the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in California, and his team wanted to find out if improvements in diet and lifestyle might have the opposite effect.

They asked 30 men, all with low-risk prostate cancers, to take part in a three-month trial of comprehensive lifestyle changes.

These consisted of a diet high in fruit and vegetables, supplements of vitamins and fish oils, an exercise regimen and classes in stress management, relaxation techniques and breathing exercises.

Telomerase activity was measured at the beginning of the trial and again at the end.

Among the 24 men who had sufficient data for analysis, blood levels of telomerase increased by 29% on average.

Increases in telomerase activity were linked with decreases in “bad” LDL cholesterol and decreases in one measure of stress – intrusive thoughts.

The researchers say it is too early to tell if the boost in telomerase levels will translate to a change in telomere length.

But there is evidence to suggest that telomere shortness and low telomerase activity might be important risk factors for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

“This might be a powerful motivator for many people to beneficially change their diet and lifestyle,” they told The Lancet Oncology.

Professor Tim Spector, from King’s College London, who has been researching ageing and telomeres, said: “This work builds on what we already know.

“Lifestyle can affect your telomeres. It would be interesting to find out whether it is diet, stress or both that is important.”

“This might be a powerful motivator for many people to beneficially change their diet and lifestyle ”

The study authors

Source: BBC NEWS:15th. Sept. ’08

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News on Health & Science

Of Glowing Proteins and Killer Viruses

This year’s Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine have a strong Japanese flavour.

As is the case with most great scientific discoveries, it all started with a bit of curiosity. In the 1960s, Osamu Shimomura wondered why crystal jellyfish gave off green pinpricks of light. Now, half a century later, Shimomura has been awarded for his curiosity with the Nobel prize in chemistry.

Shimomura was fascinated by the chemistry involved in bioluminescence and collected more than one million jellyfish from Friday Harbor in Washington State in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. He spent the next 40 years meticulously examining the proteins that made them glow. In a crystal jellyfish’s approximately 300 photo-organs, Shimomura found a protein he named aequorin that produces blue light, which subsequently is converted to green light by green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

In the decades since Shimomura isolated it, GFP has revolutionised stem cell research, cloning, organ transplants, neuroscience — and everything in between. That’s because GFP can be attached biochemically to proteins within a cell, making a formerly invisible protein fluoresce beneath blue light. Proteins are extremely small and cannot be seen, even under an electron microscope. But attaching GFP makes a protein fluoresce: it’s like seeing headlights from the window of a plane even if you’re too high to make out the cars.

Proteins in human cancer cells have been tagged with GFP, and the resulting fluorescent tumours have been implanted in mice. As cancer cells break from the tumour and begin to metastasise, or move about the body, they continue to fluoresce, and scientists can watch the cancer spread.

Four other scientists are largely responsible for making this curious glowing protein into the most useful modern imaging technique available. Douglas Prasher cloned the GFP gene and was the first to think about using GFP as a fluorescent protein tag. Sergey Lukyanov won the race to find the first red fluorescent proteins, which he found in corals in a Moscow aquarium, and his research led to the discovery of fluorescent proteins in many other marine organisms.

Unfortunately, the Nobel can be shared among only three people, and these two worthy scientists were denied a slice of the $1.4 million prize.

Two others, however, join Shimomura as the new chemistry laureates: Marty Chalfie, who was the first to use GFP to light up bacteria and worms, and Roger Tsien, who has been in the forefront of fluorescent protein research since 1994 and has created a series of fluorescent proteins whose colours span the spectrum.

Many more continue to contribute to GFP research. GFP has been used to show how HIV travels from infected to non-infected cells. In another study, scientists created a mouse with fluorescent neurons that connect its whiskers with its cortex. By replacing part of its skull with a glass window, they have been able to observe how the mouse rewires its brain to cope when half of its whiskers are removed. This fluorescent window into the brain is being used to study the effects of ageing and neuro-degenerative diseases.

GFP is the microscope of the 21st century. It lets us see things we have never been able to see before. And, like the microscope, it has completely changed the way we think about science.

Green fluorescent protein has been floating in the ocean for more than 160 million years, but it took an inquisitive scientist, fascinated by bits of green light, to begin unlocking its potential.

Two French researchers were awarded the Nobel prize for medicine last week for discovering the AIDS virus, bypassing an American researcher who played a key role in the discovery.

Luc Montagnier of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute, both in Paris, were awarded the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for their 1983 identification of what was later named the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

The pair split the $1.4 million prize with Harald zur Hausen of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, who discovered that another virus, the human papilloma virus (HPV), causes cervical cancer.

Excluded from the prize was Robert C. Gallo, who for years was locked in a bitter dispute with Montagnier over credit for the discovery of HIV from work he did while at the National Cancer Institute in the US. Gallo is now at the University of Maryland.

Although the prize’s rules limit the number of scientists who can win the award to three, Jans Jornvall, scientific secretary to the assembly, made it clear the committee felt that Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi deserved sole credit because in 1983 they published the first papers identifying the virus in the journal Science.

“We think the two that we named are the discoverers of the virus,” Jornvall said in a telephone interview. “If you look at the initial papers on the publication of the discovery you will find those who discovered it.”

Jornvall praised Gallo’s work but said the committee based its decision on the French researchers publishing their work first.

“Dr Gallo is an excellent person and has meant very much for science, but there are many people who are excellent and do very much for science,” Jornvall said. “We named the three people we consider to be the discoverers of the viruses we named.”

Other researchers said Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi clearly deserved the prize, but that it was disappointing that Gallo was excluded.

“Gallo deserves enormous credit,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “It’s a shame you can’t give it to four people because Gallo’s contributions were enormous.”

In a written statement, Gallo congratulated the winners, adding that he was “gratified” by Montagnier’s “kind statement” that he was “equally deserving.”

“I am pleased that the Nobel Committee chose to recognise the importance of AIDS with these awards and I am proud that my colleagues and I continue to search for an AIDS vaccine,” he said.

Montagnier and Gallo were locked in a bitter dispute in the 1980s over the discovery of the virus. Beyond who should get the credit, millions of dollars were also at stake from fees for blood tests. President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac eventually signed an agreement in 1987 that divided the royalties equally, and Gallo and Montagnier published a paper together in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 acknowledging each other’s work.

In announcing the award, the Nobel Committee said Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi’s initial discovery led to a series of crucial advances, including deciphering how the virus reproduces and infects cells and the development of the blood test and powerful antiviral drugs that have helped contain the spread of the virus and reduce the death toll.

The committee also praised zur Hausen’s work, saying he “went against current dogma” when he proposed that HPV caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women and the most common sexually transmitted agent. Among other things, the work led to the development of vaccines against strains of the virus.

“The global public health burden attributable to human papilloma viruses is considerable,” the committee said.

“I’m of course totally surprised. It’s of course a great pleasure for me,” said zur Hausen, 72, said during an interview posted on the Nobel Committee’s website.

An American and two Japanese physicists won the 2008 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery of tiny asymmetries in nature’s fundamental particles that help explain why our universe exists.

Yoichiro Nambu, of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, will receive half of the $1.4 million prize. The other half will be split between Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.

The three physicists were pioneers in understanding “broken symmetry,” which explains why the universe can contain life as we know it. When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate one another, leaving only radiation. In a symmetric universe with an equal amount of matter and antimatter, life — if any could exist — would be nasty, brutish and short.

That doesn’t happen because there is a tiny imbalance of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles, resulting in the matter-dominated universe we live in today.

How exactly this happened is still a mystery. But Nambu, 87, born in Tokyo, was among those who opened up the field to further questions with the discovery of “spontaneous symmetry breaking”.

Nambu’s work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behaviour of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model of the universe, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force. The working of gravity, and how it relates to the other three forces, is still a mystery.

Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted there were three families of quarks, instead of the two then known. Their calculations were confirmed by experiments in high-energy physics, leading to the discovery of the six quarks known today. Quarks and leptons are considered to be the two basic components of all matter, which make up atomic particles like protons and neutrons.

“It is my great honour and I can’t believe this,” Kobayashi told Reuters news service.

Physicists are now searching for spontaneous broken symmetry in the Higgs mechanism, which threw the universe into imbalance at the time of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland will be looking for the Higgs particle when they restart the collider in spring 2009.

Sources:
The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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Herbs & Plants

Chlorella

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Kingdom: Flora

Division: Chlorophyta

Class: Trebouxiophyceae

Order:
Chlorellales

Family: Chlorellaceae

Genus: Chlorella

Chlorella is a genus of single-celled green algae, belonging to the phylum Chlorophyta. It is spherical in shape, about 2 to 10 ?m in diameter, and is without flagella. Chlorella contains the green photosynthetic pigments chlorophyll-a and -b in its chloroplast. Through photosynthesis it multiplies rapidly requiring only carbon dioxide, water, sunlight, and a small amount of minerals to reproduce.

The name Chlorella is taken from the Greek word chloros meaning green and the Latin diminutive suffix ella meaning “small.” German biochemist Otto Heinrich Warburg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931 for his study on photosynthesis in Chlorella. In 1961 Melvin Calvin of the University of California received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on the pathways of carbon dioxide assimilation in plants using Chlorella. In recent years, researchers have made less use of Chlorella as an experimental organism because it lacks a sexual cycle and, therefore, the research advantages of genetics are unavailable.

Many people believed Chlorella could serve as a potential source of food and energy because its photosynthetic efficiency can, in theory, reach 8%, comparable with other highly efficient crops such as sugar cane. It is also an attractive food source because it is high in protein and other essential nutrients; when dried, it is about 45% protein, 20% fat, 20% carbohydrate, 5% fiber, and 10% minerals and vitamins. However, because it is a single-celled algae, harvest posed practical difficulties for its large-scale use as a food source. Mass-production methods are now being used to cultivate it in large artificial circular ponds.

Chlorella as a food source:-
Following global fears of an uncontrollable population boom, during the late 1940s and the early 1950s Chlorella was seen as a new and promising primary food source and as a possible solution to the then current world hunger crisis. Many people during this era thought that world hunger was a growing problem and saw Chlorella as a way to end this crisis by being able to provide large amounts of high quality food for a relatively low cost.

Many institutions began to research the algae, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the NIH, UC Berkeley, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Stanford University. Following WWII, many Europeans were starving and many Malthusians attributed this not only to the war but to the inability of the world to produce enough food to support the currently-increasing population. According to a 1946 FAO report, the world would need to produce 25 to 35 percent more food in 1960 than in 1939 to keep up with the increasing population, while health improvements would require a 90 to 100 percent increase. Because meat was costly and energy-intensive to produce, protein shortages were also an issue. Increasing cultivated area alone would go only so far in providing adequate nutrition to the population. The USDA calculated to feed the US population by 1975, it would have to add 200 million acres (800,000 km²) of land, but only 45 million were available. One way to combat national food shortages was to increase the land available for farmers, yet the American frontier and farm land had long since been extinguished in trade for expansion and urban life. Hopes rested solely on new agricultural techniques and technologies. Because of these circumstances, an alternative solution was needed.

To cope with the upcoming post-war population boom in the United States and elsewhere, researchers decided to tap into the unexploited sea resources. Initial testing by the Stanford Research Institute showed Chlorella (when growing in warm, sunny, shallow conditions) could convert 20 percent of solar energy into a plant, when dried, contained 50 percent protein. In addition, Chlorella contained amino acids, fat, calories, and vitamins. The plant’s photosynthetic efficiency allowed it to yield more protein per unit area than any other plant — one scientist predicted 10,000 tons of protein a year could be produced with just 20 workers staffing a one thousand-acre (4 km²) Chlorella farm. The pilot research performed at Stanford and elsewhere led to immense press from journalists and newspapers, yet never proved out. Chlorella was a seemingly-viable option because of the technological advances in agriculture at the time and the widespread acclaim it got from experts and scientists who studied it. Algae researchers had even hoped to add a neutralized Chlorella powder to conventional food products, as a way to fortify them with vitamins and minerals. However, the hype far surpassed the productivity of the plant, and early estimates of its success were proven to be no more than exaggerated optimism.

In the end, scientists discovered Chlorella would be much more difficult to produce than previously thought. The experimental research was carried out in laboratories, not in the field. In order to be practical, the entire batch of algae grown would have to be placed either in artificial light or in shade to produce at its maximum photosynthetic efficiency. Also, for the Chlorella to be as productive as the world would require, it would have to be grown in carbonated water, which would have added millions to the production cost. A sophisticated process, and additional cost, was required to harvest the crop, and for Chlorella to be a viable food source, its cellulose cell walls would have to be pulverized. The plant could reach its nutritional potential only in highly-modified artificial situations. Economic problems and the public’s distaste for the flavor of chlorella and its byproducts ultimately led to the plan’s demise.

Since the growing world food problem of the 1940s was solved by better crop efficiency and not from a “super food,” Chlorella has lost public and scientific interest for the time being. Chlorella can still be found today in rare occasions from companies still promoting its “super food” effects

Nutrition:
It was believed in the early 1940s that, unlike most plants, Chlorella protein was “complete,” for it had the ten amino acids then considered essential, and it was also packed with calories, fat, and vitamins. Chlorella has been found to have anti-tumor properties when fed to mice. Another study found enhanced vascular function in hypertensive rats given oral doses of chlorella. Although at its onset Chlorella was thought to add a “dirt-cheap” form of high protein to the human diet, studies proved otherwise. Chlorella, which actually loses most of its nutritional value when altered or processed in any way, was no longer an effective protein, and, therefore, pro-Chlorella supporters decided to communicate other health benefits of the algae. Hence, weight control, cancer prevention, and immune system support are all positive health benefits attributed to this algae.

It was also thought humans would never eat algae directly; instead, they believed it could be added to animal feed, thereby increasing to protein consumption indirectly.

Under certain growing conditions, Chlorella yields oils high in polyunsaturated fats—Chlorella minutissima has yielded EPA at 39.9% of total lipids.

Active Ingredients: Dried Chlorella contains: Moisture 4.6%; Protein 58.4%; Total lipid (fat) 9.3%; Carbohydrate, by difference 23.2%; Fiber, total dietary 0.3%; Ash 4.2%. Minerals (per 100g): Calcium, 221mg; Iodine 0.4mg; Iron, 130mg; Magnesium, 315mg; Phosphorus, 895mg; Zinc, 71.0mg. Vitamins: Vitamin C, 10.4mg; Niacin 23.8mg; Biotin 0.2mg; Pantothenic acid 1.1mg; Vitamin B-1 1.7; Vitamin B-2 4.3; Vitamin B-6 1.4mg; Vitamin B-12 0.13; Folate, 94mcg; Vitamin A (activity) 51,300 IU; Vitamin E >1.5mg (ate). Lipids include essential fatty acids and gamma linolenic acid (GLA). Amino acids: Tryptophan 0.5g; Threonine 2.4g; Isoleucine 2.3g; Leucine 4.7g; lysine 3.0g; Methionine 1.3g; Cystine 0.7g; phenylalanine 2.777g; tyrosine 2.6g; Valine 3.2g; Arginine 3.3g; Histidine 1.1g; Alanine 4.3g; Aspartic acid 4.7g; Glutamic acid 5.8g; Glycine 3.1g; proline 2.4g; serine 2.0g; Proline 2.5; Others 11.4. [Source of Information: Dr. Joseph M. Mercola 1997-2001].

Health Benefits and healing effects:
The use of Chlorella for healing effects has received criticism. However, clinical studies demonstrate healing effects of chlorella, including dioxin detoxification in humans and animals, healing from radiation exposure in animals and the ability to reduce high blood pressure, lower serum cholesterol levels, accelerate wound healing, and enhance immune functions in humans.

You may click to see:>Chlorella provides a tremendous source of concentrated nutrition

>Chlorella for cleansing and detoxification

>Superfoods For Optimum Health: Chlorella and Spirulina
Chlorella – The Natural Wonder Supplement

> Health Benefits of Chlorella:

Disclaimer:
The information presented herein is intended for educational purposes only. Individual results may vary, and before using any supplements, it is always advisable to consult with your own health care provider.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorella

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