Healthy Life Journal

Ever heard of a small fruit that alters your taste buds, making all sour things sweet? Synsepalum dulcificum, also known as the “Miracle Fruit” is a West African native berry that has been enjoying a recent refresh in American interest. Chewing the fruit, or letting one of the commercial tablets dissolve in your mouth, will turn anything bitter or sour you eat sweet for approximately ten minutes.

The little berry has been getting a lot of media attention lately due to recent success with cancer patients. After chemotherapy, patients taste buds are often dulled, giving all foods a very bland taste. After a while, patients have no desire to eat anymore, and can go through rapid weight loss. Dr. Mike Cusnir, a leading researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center, says that the majority of his patients utilizing the berry have experienced improved taste buds.

Although many people have never heard of them, they are by no means new. In fact in the 70’s there was a failed attempt to commercialize them, with a lot of controversy. When submitted to the FDA, it was supposed to be labeled as a sweetener, because there was not a caloric penalty involved. Instead the FDA labeled it as a “dietary supplement”, pretty much destroying any chance of success it may have had. Many believe that the FDA was trying to protect the sugar industry at the time.

Our friends over at the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believe food from cloned livestock is just as good as getting food “the old fashioned way.” Personally I don’t exactly see what the big deal here is, whether it is cloned or not, it is still meat. However many people are skeptical about how healthy cloned livestock is.

Although companies have the go-ahead to start, the FDA urges them to wait a bit longer. Not for safety reasons, but marketing. The FDA wants the market to have a chance to ease into the change. The average cloned cow will cost betweek $10,000 and $20,000 - thus it’s safe to say that farmers will be cloning for breeding purposes, letting their offspring be used for meat.

According to a study published by Synovate on Wednesday, Britons are the largest consumers of fast food in the world, followed closely by Americans.

“People are inherently contradictory and nowhere is it more obvious than on such a sensitive and important issue as their weight,” says Steve Garton, who jointly produced the survey with BBC. “The results show there’s a world of people who cannot deny themselves that hamburger or extra piece of pizza, but probably make themselves feel better by washing it down with a diet cola.”

So who are the least likely to stop at a local McDonald’s? Believe it or not, it’s the French.

The Health Blog’s occasional encounters with bears have prompted various modes of reflection. One thought that’s never crossed our mind: Why doesn’t that bear have osteoporosis?

But that’s just what Seth Donahue thought nearly a decade ago, when he saw a bear while hiking in California’s Sierra Nevada, according to WSJ’s Lab Journal. People’s bones become weaker if they are bedridden for just a few weeks, but bears hibernate for months on end without suffering from brittle bones when they wake up.

So Donahue, a biomedical engineer at Michigan Technological University sought out other researchers who were studying bears — some in the wild, some in captivity — and began to study what kept bear bones strong. He found what he believes to be their secret: a potent form of parathyroid hormone.

He’s even convinced industry that he may be on to something. Apjohn, a company founded by ex-Pharmacia and Upjohn employees (companies since absorbed by Pfizer), has partnered with Michigan Tech to commercialize the finding. For that project, they’ve created a company called Aursos, whose name comes from the Latin word for bears.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re fretting about drinking, you might be skipping red wine despite evidence that the grape squeezings may carry health benefits.

Some day, if all goes well in the lab, you may be able to take a pill instead. And Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a pioneer of the approach, just reported results from an early study in diabetic patients. The company’s drug, code-named SRT501, is based on resveratrol — a chemical found in red wine.

The results look promising, reports the WSJ, though it’s very early days. Resveratrol, which we’ve written about here and here, appears to slow the aging process and modulates blood sugar and insulin by activating the sirtuin 1 enzyme.

The company said yesterday that a 28-day safety study showed the drug known as SRT501 was well-tolerated and safe for patients, with no serious adverse events recorded. The drug also showed a statistically significant improvement in an oral glucose tolerance test on day 28, but not in fasting plasma glucose levels.

There’s a long way to go before we’ll know whether SRT501 will actually be a safe and beneficial drug for diabetic patients, but it’s being watched carefully because it could be helpful for other diseases as well. It’s the first to work by acting on the genes that control the aging process, Peter Elliott, senior vice president of development at Sirtris, said in the release.

“We chose diabetes because it’s a big market, but the biology says the drug could work on any number of diseases,” David Sinclair, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Sirtris, told the WSJ.

Red wine image by Gonzalo Viera Azpìroz via Flickr