The consumption of berries can enhance “beneficial signaling in the brain.” Plant foods are our primary source of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds, but some plant foods may be better than others. As I’ve explored before, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial showed us that one cup of blueberries a day can improve cognition among older adults, and the same happens in children after just a single meal with blueberries, though two cups of berries may work better than one.

As I discuss in my video Benefits of Blueberries for Mood and Mobility, that single hit of berries may also improve mood. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, young subjects were asked a series of questions, such as Are you very slightly or not at all, a little, moderately, quite a bit, or extremely interested? Excited? Strong? Ashamed? And so on. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:55 in my video, before and after drinking the placebo, there was no significant change in young adult participants aged 18 through 21. But, two hours after consuming about two cups of blueberries, their positive mood scores improved significantly. They felt more enthusiastic, alert, inspired, and attentive. The same results were found in seven- to ten-year-old children. Benefits achieved not with some dangerous new mood-enhancing drug or Ritalin, but blueberries—and after just a single meal.

Now, blueberries can’t do everything. Although a cup of berries certainly appears to improve brain function, no improvements in walking (gait) or balance were observed. What if you tried two cups of blueberries a day?Might six weeks of two cups of frozen blueberries a day affect the functional mobility in adults over age 60? Study participants were randomized to prepackaged blueberries or prepackaged carrot juice as a control, and researchers measured tasks, including one where “two bright yellow ropes on the floor outlined the narrow path, and participants were instructed to walk within the roped path.” The blueberries beat out the carrot juice control, and significant improvements suggest “blueberry supplementation may provide an effective countermeasure to age-related declines in functional mobility…” In retrospect, the researchers thought perhaps the control should have been “a true placebo (e.g., cucumber powder) without antioxidant properties,” since the carrots themselves may have offered some benefit, too. Had they used a different control, the blueberry results may have been even more impressive. “Overall, this study demonstrates the need for greater exploration of blueberry supplementation as a nonpharmacologic countermeasure to the public health issue of age-related declines in functional mobility and independence.” Or, to use the punnier version, “dietary interventions with polyphenol-rich [phytonutrient-rich] foods, such as blueberries, present a potentially fruitful strategy for combating some of the deleterious effects of age-related neurodegeneration.” (Emphasis added.)

Isn’t science grand! I love that these studies were conducted.

The video I referred to is Flashback Friday: Benefits of Blueberries for the Brain.

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/iQS9ZbW
via IFTTT

Only about one in four people have heard of Campylobacter, compared to 90 percent who are familiar with Salmonella. “Although the incidence of these two…gastrointestinal infections is amazingly high,” infecting more than a million Americans every year, “it is even outranked by the incidence of infection caused by extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC)”—a bug even fewer people have likely heard of.

Extraintestinal? That means outside of the intestines, as in causing bladder infections, and pathogenic, meaning disease-causing. Indeed, E. coli results in millions of infections annually. As I discuss in my video Friday Favorites: Urinary Tract Infections from Eating Chicken, “multiple lines of evidence indicate poultry as a major food animal reservoir for urinary tract infections”—that is, a source for the bacteria that cause UTIs in people. (You may recall I explored this several years ago, as discussed in my video Avoiding Chicken to Avoid Bladder Infections.) This is based not only on studies showing that blood infections, brain infections, and urinary tract infections in mouse models can be caused by these kinds of E. coli from commercial chicken meat and eggs, but also on studies of women with multidrug-resistant urinary tract infections reporting significantly more frequent consumption of retail chicken. Similarly, elderly consumers of chicken were significantly more likely to have Cipro-resistant bladder infections compared to those eating no chicken at all. Pork, but not beef, was also associated with increased risk, as you can see below and at 1:14 in my video.

“There have been few observed associations between beef cattle or retail beef and human ExPEC, suggesting that beef cattle are not a reservoir for human ExPEC” (bladder infections), whereas, in chickens, of the up to 90 percent of chicken carcasses harboring E. coli, about one in five isolates tested had the potential to cause urinary tract infections.

What about eggs? We know retail chicken meat “is contaminated with ExPEC isolates that resemble the strains that cause human infections,” but what about retail chicken eggs? Instead of one in five being ExPEC in chicken meat, it was more like just 1 in 20 among eggs, which is closer to levels for pork or beef.

Researchers are so sure that chicken is the primary reservoir that when they find the same kind of strain in a vegetarian, they interpret that “as consistent with human-to-human transmission or errors in reporting of poultry consumption rather than human strains being derived from a source other than chicken.” Someone may claim to be vegetarian but actually eat some chicken, for instance, or perhaps there was human-to-human or even shopping-cart-to-human transmission. (See my How to Shop for, Handle, and Store Chicken video.) Most people fail to sanitize their hands after picking up a package of poultry in the grocery store, so the “bacteria potentially left on the cart could affect other shoppers….A shopper who is not purchasing poultry, or is purchasing poultry and is following safety precautions, could still be exposed to poultry contaminates via the cart.”

“It’s difficult to estimate how much ExPEC exchange can be attributed to person-to-person contact” after the rectum of a poultry consumer has been colonized. Researchers swabbed public restrooms to try to quantify the risk, collecting more than a thousand samples from 56 public restrooms in 33 establishments. As you can see in the graph below and at 3:07 in my video, they found a lot of evidence of E. coli in general, but particularly in restrooms at public parks and fast-food joints—even more so than gas stations, which surprised me. What was really unexpected for me, though, was that women’s restrooms were worse than men’s!

Only about 1 percent of the samples the researchers took were positive for ExPEC bacteria, however, but they were recovered from sites that were not associated with toilets and were not visibly contaminated. So, one might come into contact with ExPEC bacteria with their bare hands after turning off a faucet after washing their hands, for example. In this way, the risk “could not be fully eliminated by careful hand washing or avoidance of fecal-appearing debris”—though it’s probably a good idea to avoid that anyway. Using hand sanitizers after exiting the restroom, not to mention in the meat aisle after touching a package of poultry, may offer additional protection.

What proportion of the seven million bladder infections—a common form of urinary tract infection (UTI)—every year in the United States is caused by chicken meat? “If no more chicken were consumed, how many E. coli UTIs would be prevented and how much would the prevalence decline?” It’s hard to tell because of the “time lag between the acquisition and asymptomatic colonization of the intestine with an ExPEC organism and the development of an infection.” You can eat some contaminated chicken today, but the UTI-causing ExPEC bacteria may hang out in your colon for months before making their way into your bladder and triggering an infection. The reason we know it can take that long is by studying the intestinal population dynamics of UTI-causing E. coli between partners. Increased rectum-to-rectum transfers “might be explained by the high levels of E. coli present in the urine of an infected woman, increasing the probability of transmission via direct contact.” That is, the E. coli could then be transferred to their partners, depending on certain intimate practices, such as cunnilingus.

The bottom line? There is “compelling evidence that retail meat, particularly poultry, serves as an important reservoir for human exposure to antibiotic-resistant E. coli that is causing UTIs. Thus, the term foodborne UTIs or FUTIs has been adopted to describe these infections.”

Certainly, we could decrease the burden of these foodborne bladder infections by developing some sort of ExPEC vaccine, but why not just reduce our contact with fresh or frozen poultry? No harm, no fowl.

Hold on. Who eats undercooked chicken? Typically, it’s a problem of cross-contamination, as I discuss in Food Poisoning Bacteria Cross-Contamination.

These days, there is particular concern about antibiotic-resistant infections. See Past the Age of Miracles: Facing a Post-Antibiotic Age and Friday Favorites: What About Kosher and Organic Chicken? to learn more about bacterial contamination.

Would buying organic be better? See my video Superbugs in Conventional vs. Organic Chicken.

What about treating UTIs? Check out Can Cranberry Juice Treat Bladder Infections?.

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/2lgFyIH
via IFTTT

Psoriasis is a chronic, inflammatory skin disease that affects about one in 40 people, making it “one of the most frequent chronic skin diseases worldwide.” There are a lot of different drugs for it, some of which cost more than $100,000 a year to get a response. There are cheaper ones, like cyclosporine, but they carry long-term risks of kidney damage, hypertension, and malignancies. In fact, cyclosporine can cause cancer and kidney toxicity in more than 50 percent of the patients treated long-term, and, in terms of risk of malignancies, it carries up to 42 times the rate of cancer. And it doesn’t even work that well: It only keeps the disease at bay in a little more than half of the patients over a four-month period. There’s got to be a better way.

What about plants? “Topical botanical agents for the treatment of psoriasis?” As I discuss in my video Aloe Vera for Psoriasis, aloe vera gel is said to possess “anti-inflammatory, anti-pruritic [anti-itching], and wound-healing properties.” You may recall that it actually made things worse when it was put to the test for healing wounds. (See my earlier video Is Aloe Effective for Blood Pressure, Inflammatory Bowel, Wound Healing, and Burns?.) “The exploitation of aloe preparations has been accompanied too often by misinformation and exaggerated claims in advertising literature and commercially-inspired articles in the press and popular periodicals.” There is some impressive evidence, though. For example, to test its anti-inflammatory properties, it was tested head-to-head against steroids for exposure to mustard gas.

Mustard gas is probably the most widely used chemical warfare agent. It was first used in World War I, and the last widespread military use was in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, with more than 100,000 military veterans and civilians exposed, “and many of them are still suffering from long-term complications,” predominantly itching. Even decades after surviving a gas attack, 70 to 90 percent of victims are still suffering.

Topical steroids, the most frequently administered medications, do help, but long-term use is associated with a variety of side effects and is not recommended. How about safer agents, like aloe vera?

Sixty-seven veterans injured by chemical warfare were randomized to apply either steroids or an aloe vera and olive oil cream, and the aloe vera mixture appeared to work as well as the drug, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:27 in my video.

So, researchers decided to give it a try for the management of psoriasis. By the end of a month-long study, the aloe vera-based cream had cured 83 percent of the patients, compared to the placebo’s cure rate of less than 10 percent, and resulted in “significant clearing of the psoriatic plaques,” the skin lesions.

That’s compared to an inactive placebo, though. How about compared to steroids? Aloe was found to be “more effective…in reducing the clinical symptoms of psoriasis,” as you can see in before-and-after photos below and at 3:02 in my video.

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of a commercial aloe vera gel for the treatment of slight to moderate psoriasis, conditions improved in 70 percent of the sites treated with aloe, compared with 80 percent of the placebo-treated areas improving. The placebo beat out the aloe. Indeed, “the high response rate of placebo indicated a possible effect…in its own right, which would make the Aloe vera gel treatment appear less effective.” The placebo was essentially xanthan gum and water, and the researchers figured that, instead of aloe failing, maybe xanthan gum works, too!

All in all, for psoriasis, the “results on the effectiveness of Aloe vera are contradictory,” but applying it on the skin appears safe, so why not give it a try?

You may be interested in my video Is Aloe Effective for Blood Pressure, Inflammatory Bowel, Wound Healing, and Burns?. I have many others in my extended series on aloe, and the most amazing one is probably Can Aloe Cure Cancer?.

Also check out Aloe Vera Gel: Best Treatment for Lichen Planus? and Aloe for the Treatment of Advanced Metastatic Cancer.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my free videos here and watch my live, year-in-review presentations—2015: Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet, and my latest, 2016: How Not to Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers.

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/pmUOhH8
via IFTTT