Women Health Online

“Would you like some Monster Energy Drink with that coffee?” Thats what our waitress should have said to us, this morning.

Backtrack a minuteKara and I decided to go to breakfast today we each got our respective workouts in, then told Ella it was a special treat today and we were going out to eat instead of our normal routine.  Poor thing has been a bit sick so has been mopy for the last couple days.  Time for some change!

She was excited.  And for us theres just a few weeks left with just the 3 of us before Baby #2 is here.

After we ordered, I could see our waitress behind our table when she went to the back to get the pot of coffee for refills.  And I noticed her take a sip of a Monster Energy Drink, then put it down and pick up a cup of coffee (I know because she just refilled hers)

now it wasnt that early.  It was about 8:30 or so, particularly since I had been up since 4:30 AM for Mohr Results Boot Camp.  In fact by that time I feel like I should be eating lunch!

I digress.

Then I wondered just how caffeinated we are as a society, as Im sure her “Monster/Coffee Combo” drink is not that rare. 

Nothing against coffee at all.  In fact, theres a lot of really good science showing coffee has tons of health benefits.  But how much caffeine is enough?  Or too much?  And at the root of the real problem at hand, how is the lack of sleep people are getting having an impact on health? 

And energy drinks is an entirely different issue.  With over 600 options on the market, Energy Drinks are certainly here to stay.

But do the REALLY work?

Red Bull and Monster.  Gels, goo, and even energy chews are popular these days in a market that “Just-drinks.com” says will reach $47 billion by 2014 (its currently almost $5 billion).  Pretty impressive for something thats only been available for around 10 years. 

Crazy.

For all that money spent, they better give a pick up, finish your work at the office and take care of your to do list when you get home too!

So whats all the hype about?  Do these things actually give you “energy” or merely a false sense of alertness to carry you through the day?

Theres certainly no shortage of claims on the drinks from improving your workouts and health, to increasing focus and improving alertness.

So lets pick apart the labels and see whats in these “magical elixirs” that are surely giving Baristas a run for their money at the local coffee shops.maybe they should start offering a 2 for 1 deal, as this waitress was doing this morning. 

Should we be drinking energy drinks for a daily pick me up? 

Not so fast.  Theyre loaded with caffeine (upwards of the equivalent of 3.5 cups of coffee), usually pretty high in sugar, and offer a combination of various amino acids, B vitamins, and some other ingredients that are thought to add to the “energy boost.”

Caffeine works.  We know that. 

Sugar does too.  No surprise there.

The B vitamins and amino acids, though, leave a little to be desired.  There actually are some data showing some performance improvements when using energy drinks, but that should be of no surprise again, caffeine and sugar do work. 

But when you rely on these drinks like a crutch, as so many do (particularly teenagers), they can be addictive (caffeine is, technically, a drug). 

Heres the other thing one of the more popular drinks out there ROCKST*R has the same amount of calories and sugar as SIX Krispy Kreme doughnuts!  Imagine how youd feel if you wanted a little pick me up so instead grabbed half a dozen Krispy Kremes!

Want REAL energy?  Here are 6 ways to do that without slugging energy drink after energy drink.

1. Slee

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Using highly potent antibodies isolated from HIV-positive people, researchers have recently begun to identify ways to broadly neutralize the many possible subtypes of HIV Now, a team led by biologists at the California Institute of Technology Caltech has built upon one of these naturally occurring antibodies to create a stronger version they believe is a better candidate for clinical applications

Current advances in isolating antibodies from HIV-infected individuals have allowed for the discovery of a large number of new, broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies directed against the host receptor CD4 binding sitea functional site on the surface of the virus that allows for cell entry and infection Using a technique known as structure-based rational design, the team modified one already-known and particularly potent antibodyNIH45-46so that it can target the binding site in a different and more powerful way A study outlining their process was published in the October 27 issue of Science Express

NIH45-46 was already one of the most broad and potent of the known anti-HIV antibodies, says Pamela Bjorkman, Max Delbrck Professor of Biology at Caltech and senior author on the study Our new antibody is now arguably the best of the currently available, broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies

By conducting structural studies, the researchers were able to identify how NIH45-46 interacted with gp120 – a protein on the surface of the virus thats required for the successful entry of HIV into cells – to neutralize the virus Using this information, they were able to create a new antibody dubbed NIH45-46G54W that is better able to grab onto and interfere with gp120 This improves the antibodys breadth – or extent to which it effectively targets many subtypes of HIV – and potency by an order of magnitude, according to Ron Diskin, a postdoctoral scholar in Bjorkmans lab at Caltech and the papers lead author

Not only did we design an improved version of NIH45-46, our structural data are calling into question previous assumptions about how to make a vaccine in order to elicit such antibodies, says Diskin We hope that these observations will help to guide and improve future immunogen design

HIV-1 and HIV-2 Subtypes

– To date, two major groups of HIV-1 exist, M and O for outlier The virus that causes the great majority of HIV-1 infections diagnosed and studied in the world are in the M group The O group includes a small number of isolates discovered in Africa with one case found recently in the US These are genetically quite distant from the M group, and consequently may not show up on some standard laboratory tests for HIV-1

– HIV-2 is divided in the subtypes A and B, but further subtypes C through E have recently been characterized by DNA sequencing

By improving the efficacy of antibodies that can neutralize HIV, the researchers point to the possibility of clinical testing for NIH45-46G54W and other antibodies as therapeutic agents Its also plausible that understanding effective neutralization by powerful antibodies may be useful in vaccine development

The results uncover the structural underpinnings of anti-HIV antibody breadth and potency, offer a new view of neutralization by CD4-binding site anti-HIV antibodies, and establish principles that may enable the creation of a new group of HIV therapeutics, says Bjorkman, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator

Geographic Distribution

– In the predominant M group of HIV-1, 8 subtypes A through H have been identified to date Most all are found in one area or another of Africa, while in other regions of the world, certain subtypes predominate – In Europe, subtype B is predominant in men who have sex with men, while a variety of subtypes are found in the relatively small numbers of people infected through heterosexual contact in Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union Subtype B has also been noted in Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan – In India, subtype C predominates, with a small number of A and B infections In Thailand, E predominates, while a minority of B infections occur in drug users, and this B strain has also been found in drug users in Myanmar Burma, Malaysia and southeast China – In the Americas North, South and Central, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Japan, subtype B is most common Subtype F occurs in Romania, and along with subtype C also is found in a small proportion of strains in Brazil

Other Caltech authors on the study, Increasing the Potency and Breadth of an HIV Antibody by Using Structure-Based Rational Design, include Paola M Marcovecchio, Anthony P West, Jr, Han Gao, and Priyanthi NP Gnanapragasm Johannes Scheid, Florian Klein, Alexander Abadir, and Michel Nussenweig from Rockefeller University, and Michael Seaman from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston also contributed to the paper The research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the German Research Foundation

No matter how dedicated or genetically gifted people are, eventually Father Time will catch up to us all, although some fight off old age a lot longer. In our 50s is when the majority of people really start to notice fitness levels decline. But as with all stages of life, if you have a healthy lifestyle you can continue to minimize the effects of age. In your 50s, you can still have the endurance level of a 20-year-old, which really surprises some people. You just won’t have the strength or jumping ability like you once did. If you stay at a healthy weight and engage in regular physical activity you won’t notice too big of a difference in day-to-day life, although you won’t be able to do things like take it to the hoop on the basketball court the way you once did. “The

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I remember going to my first nutrition class at Penn State.

I was eager to jump right in since that was what I was there for, but had to wait until some of those darn pre req classes were out of the way.

I walked in day 1.  Liz Evans was our professor.  And she certainly didnt look like the people I saw in the pages of the magazines I was getting all my information from up until this point.  Hey, you have to start somewhere.

Anyhow, after going over the syllabus, “one of the most important lessons in nutrition in the entire course,” Liz said, “is that all calories are equal.  Nutrition, health and weight loss are really simple” she continued “Calories in equal calories out, your weight is stable.  Calories out are more than calories in, you lose.  If calories in are more than calories out, you gain weight.”

Like all the other students, I was writing as quickly as I could. 

And this message continued.  Through my masters and into my PhD, where my research focus was on teaching people how to lose weight permanently.

But it was then that I started to question things a bit more. 

REALLY?  Are all calories the same?

It didnt make sense to me.  You see from a law of thermodynamics, it does make sense.  If you walk for 1 mile you burn 100 calories.  If you eat 100 calories worth of food, youve essentially created a “wash.”  Nothing gained.  Nothing lost if were solely looking at this with regards to body weight.

But what if you compare extremes?

1 pound of sugar = 1,540 calories

~26 apples = 1,540 calories

Same calories.  But do you think the quality of 1 lb of sugar and 26 apples is the same?  Of course notaside from the laundry list of nutrition problems eating a days worth of calories from just sugar would cause (nutrient deficiencies, scurvy, tooth decay, etc), how do you think the person eating the 1 pound of sugar would look, feel and perform after she did so?  Of course 26 apples isnt the ideal “diet” either, but you get the point. 

So as we started to look into this more on our own, with our own clients, and with our own writing & research we changed our tune and go against the grain of mainstream nutrition to instead give this message:

QUALITY of the diet is more important than QUANTITY of the diet.

Of COURSE calories still do matter. 

But quality is crucial to permanent success.  And it made us even happier when we read a recent study by researchers at Harvard University confirming our point of how the quality of the diet above and beyond just quantity can help with fat loss.

The study certainly wasnt the final word and definitely had limitations it wasnt a “cause and effect” study, but rather a correlation study that asked over 120,000 healthy, well educated men and women about their dietary habits every 2 years for a total of between 12 and 20 years.

They then teased out some of the food items that were associated with weight loss or weight gain among the subjects. 

First, as a whole, they found that the average participant gained about 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) per year.  Who cares, right?  Its JUST 1 lb.  The problem year after year after year that 1 lb adds up and people never lose it and long term its more and more dangerous.

The question, then, is what foods did they find contributed to the weight loss vs. those that contributed t

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A new computational approach has predicted numerous human proteins that the human immunodeficiency virus HIV requires to replicate itself These discoveries constitute a powerful resource for experimentalists who desire to discover new targets for human proteins that can control the spread of HIV, according to the authors of this study that appears in the Sept 22, 2011 issue of PLoS Computational Biology, a journal published by the Public Library of Science

The authors of the article are: T M Murali, a computer scientist, and Brett Tyler of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, both located at Virginia Tech, and Michael G Katze, a microbiologist and associate director of the Washington National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington

David Badger of Blacksburg, Va, one of Muralis graduate students, and Matthew D Dyer of Applied Biosystems of Foster City, Cal, also contributed to the study, which was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health to Katze, the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute Fellows Program to Murali and Tyler, and the Virginia Techs Support Program for Innovative Research Strategies to Murali 

When a person contracts HIV, it causes the progressive failure of the bodys immune system, with the onset of life threatening infections and diseases such as cancer Over 25 years of intensive research have failed to create a vaccine for preventing HIV Moreover, drugs used to cure HIV become rapidly ineffective because HIV is able to develop mutations against drugs, Murali said

A recent line of research is examining whether human proteins can be targeted to cure HIV Since viruses such as HIV have very small genomes, they must exploit the cellular machinery of the host to spread Therefore, disrupting the activity of selected host proteins may impede viruses Moreover, since human proteins evolve at a much slower rate than HIV proteins, human proteins that are targeted by drugs are very unlikely to develop mutations that render the drugs ineffective

In fact, three studies published in 2008 systematically silenced virtually every human gene in order to discover HIV Dependency Factors HDFs, ie, those genes that are necessary for HIV to survive and replicate Each of these three studies discovered hundreds of HDFs However, a puzzling aspect was that only a handful of HDFs were common to two or more experiments

We set out to untangle this mystery, Murali said We hypothesized that many HDFs have not yet been discovered Other papers had suggested that HDFs may themselves interact with each other Inspired by these observations, we hypothesized that we could predict new HDFs by exploiting the proximity between HDFs within networks of interactions between human proteins

To this end, they used an algorithm called SinkSource developed by Murali and Tyler Tyler explained the algorithm using this analogy: We treated the human protein network as if it were a system of tanks connected by pipes carrying water This arrangement allowed us to study the flow of predictive information water from proteins we are certain about full tanks to those we are uncertain about empty tanks The further you get from the full tanks, the weaker the trickle, and the less water accumulates in the bottom of the tank Mathematically you can show that, over time, every empty tank accumulates some stable level of water At the end of the analysis, tanks accumulating lots of water were judged to be good predictions

We found that SinkSource and one of its variants made predictions of very high quality, Murali added We evaluated predicted HDFS using a number of additional datasets that we did not use during the prediction step

Their most exciting results used an analysis of HDF activities in two non-human primate species that respond differently to Simian Immunodeficiency Virus SIV One species, the African green monkey, does not develop disease when infected by SIV, in contrast to the other species, pig-tailed macaque Using data already published by Katze, the authors showed that predicted HDFs had very different patterns of expression in the two species, especially in lymph nodes and within 10 days after infection with the virus They also showed that predicted HDFs participated in human cellular processes that are known to be subverted by the virus, including gene transcription and translation, energy production, protein degradation, and transport across the nuclear membrane Moreover, many predicted HDFs themselves directly interacted with proteins in HIV

From these results, Murali, Tyler, and Katze concluded that existing genomic screens are incomplete and many HDFs are yet to be discovered experimentally Our results suggest that many HDFs are yet to be discovered and that they have potential value as prognostic markers to determine pathological outcome and the likelihood of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome AIDS development