A protein thought to be associated with regulating blood pressure turns out to have a role in nutrition instead. The angiotensin- converting enzyme2 (ACE2) protein was discovered as a result of the Human Genome Project. Being similar to ACE1, it was expected to play a related role in controlling blood pressure and body fat. However, Prof Stefan Broer of the Australian National University’s School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology found that it is actually involved in the uptake of nutrients in the small intestine.”Before it can be used by the human body, protein is split into its subunits, called amino acids,” Broer explains. “The amino acids are then removed from the intestine by specialised cells which are endowed with a large number of transporters moving nutrients from the intestine into cells.”

Broer’s group, with colleagues from the University of Sydney, found that mutations in a gene encoding an amino acid transporter cause Hartnup disease, a rare disorder associated with skin rashes and, in severe cases, difficulties walking. Some mutations caused the transporters to be completely non-functional, or “scrambled” as Broerputs it. Other mutations prevented the transporters from making contact with the ACE2 proteins, with the same consequences for health.

Hartnup disease can be cured with nutrient supplements, and thus is clinically not very important. However, Broer says the discovery may also throw light on more common and serious conditions such as the breakdown of kidneys - where ACE2 is also expressed - in the latter stages of diabetes.

The research was published in The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Copyright Control Publications Pty Ltd Jun 2008

(c) 2008 Australasian Science. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Smart vacationers looking to chalk up healthy miles this season research hotel options months before finalizing their accommodations. “Vacationers, especially when they’re driving, are coming in and making sure the hotels they are staying at either have an indoor or outdoor swimming pool or some sort of fitness center,” noted Shaun Seufert, public affairs assistant for the American Automobile Association of Western New York. “People are not wanting to break their fitness routines.”Here are a few hints to ensure your workouts don?t take a vacation when you do:

*Treadmills have become a popular fixture in many hotel fitness centers, but with 100 to 2,000 people staying in a given property every night, and only a handful of treadmills available to accommodate them, chances are slim you’ll find a vacant machine. Welcome “In Room Fitness,” an online service that reserves a treadmill for you to use in your room (inroomfitness.com/ hotelfinder. php). Participating hotels include: Hilton, Omni and Hotel Monaco. Fees range from $10 to $25 per day.

*VersaStick is a 3-pound portable fitness package that fits into a carry-on bag. (The Transportation Security Administration approved VersaStick as a carry-on.) Just snap the bar together, attach one of the resistance bands and prepare for a 30-minute cardio workout. The package also includes an instructional DVD with routines targeting core, free-standing or cardio resistance, and quick workout options (www.versastick.com) $79.95.

*BODiBEAT by Yamaha is an MP3 player that selects and plays songs to match the pace of your workout. The unit’s software automatically categorizes each downloaded song by beats per minute, so the tempo of the user controls the songs played. Better yet? BODiBEAT also comes with a heart monitor that clips to your ear (www.bodibeat.com) $299.99.

*Online technology helps travelers stay fit and healthy. At www.healthytravelnetwork. com, programs are available for download that will not only help track calories burned but provide caloric breakdowns for 5,000 food items. Also available are fitness podcasts - many are free - that offer great reminders about portion control when eating out and making the most of a workout while traveling.

- Jane Kwiatkowski

(c) 2008 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

A number of fitness centers are looking to increase membership by developing programs for children. It’s a way to expand their market by reaching out to other members of the family.It can also reinforce a relationship with existing customers.

Parents and their children can work out at the same time, which reinforces the idea that if the parents are exercising, it must be good for the kids too. It’s no secret the United States is facing a serious problem of obese children.

For fitness centers, the challenge is to add children to workout programs without alienating adult members.

Gold’s Gym in Waynesboro is creating programs for kids. “It is part of what we’re trying to do to reach out to the community for seniors and children,” said Suria Ryckis, who with husband Kevin, owns the fitness center. “Our mission is to have everyone fit.

“The parents are the first through the door. We’re starting dance classes for kids and then a kids’ fitness class for exercising.

“Whether they are or aren’t getting enough exercise in school, we should try to do everything we can to keep them active.

“We can bridge the gap by easing them into fitness. If they can enjoy it now as part of a group exercise, then hopefully they will continue when they become older.

“We have the children in a separate room so they are not running around the cardio room.”

At the South Pointe Fitness Club in Hagerstown, Manager Tom Mease said children’s classes began four months ago. “In today’s society, we have a high percentage of obese kids. We’re trying to do our little part to help.

“We have yoga and Zumba classes, each are 45 minutes. Zumba is a Latin salsa, a hip-hop dance. The instructors make it fun for the kids.”

Mease said parents with very small children often participate with them in the classes. “We offer it free . for single moms with kids six, seven or eight years old.”

South Pointe also has family memberships, which include husband and wife, with additional charges for each child between 13 and 18- years old.

“We are trying to get more children involved in our programs, as more and more parents are being ,made aware of them,” said Mease.

Copyright News for Business, Inc. May 2008

(c) 2008 Quad - State Business Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

© YellowBrix, Inc. Copyrig

Your gut is home to millions of microbes _ good bacteria that usually keep the bad guys at bay. Sometimes, though, they need reinforcements.Enter probiotics, healthful microflora that can aid digestion, improve nutrient absorption and boost immunity. Once confined to supplements and dairy products like kefir and yogurt, probiotics are stepping out.

There’s even a probiotic cereal, Kashi Vive ($4.49, 12 ounces). It’s whole grain (wheat, rye, triticale, brown rice, barley, buckwheat, oats plus freeze-dried broccoli sprouts) with a masterly 12 fiber grams per 1-\ cup serving.

Vive’s probiotics come from cultured nonfat dry milk and yogurt, appearing as little white puffballs among the flakes. It’s crunchy-munchy and mildly sweet, with 170 calories, 2.5 fat grams and a billion probiotics.

A billion’s nothing, babe. Lifeway, your kefir king, has developed SoyTreat ($3.40, 32 ounces), an organic soy kefir with up to 10 billion probiotics per 8-ounce serving. Available in peach and strawberry, SoyTreat doesn’t taste especially fruity, but it’s creamy-dreamy with 10 active dairy cultures (so, like Vive, it’s not vegan). One serving contains 160 calories, 4 fat grams and a third of your daily calcium needs. It’s in the refrigerator case.

That’s also where you’ll find NextFoods’ dairy-free, wheat-free (but not vegan) GoodBelly ($4.49 for four 2.7-ounce bottles). It’s 30 percent juice and 70 percent cane sugar, barley malt and cultured oat flour _ the source of the probiotics.

One serving has 50 calories, no fat, your daily allowance of vitamins C, E, K, B-6 and B-12 plus minerals including zinc, selenium, manganese and chromium. The main attraction though: a whomping 20 billion live active probiotics.

Bright tangy blends like blueberry-acai make for a probiotics party. The bad guys don’t stand a chance.

___

(Ellen Kanner writes biweekly about vegetarian concerns. Contact her at: ekanner(AT)MiamiHerald.com)

___

(c) 2008, The Miami Herald.

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Your genes are not your medical destiny. With relatively uncommon exception, that is the new rule established by groundbreaking research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That rule could, and perhaps should, remake the way you play the game of life. The new research was a pilot study of 30 men with early-stage prostate cancer who were eligible to be observed carefully for disease progression without undergoing surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. These men were enrolled into a trial called GEMINAL, developed and implemented by Dr. Dean Ornish and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco.Ornish is best known as the ardent proponent of a very low-fat, plant-based diet for heart disease prevention. His Lifestyle Heart Trial, published almost 20 years ago, showed that an intensive lifestyle program — including a plant-based diet, daily exercise and stress management — could cause the plaques that block coronary arteries to shrink. A follow-up study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 showed that this same intervention substantially reduced the rate of heart attacks.

More recently, Ornish and his colleagues have been focused on the potential for lifestyle interventions to prevent and treat prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is of particular interest for several reasons. First, it is highly prevalent, among the leading causes of cancer death in men in the United States. Second, although we have tests to screen for prostate cancer, we can’t always predict the behavior of the disease once we find it.

Some prostate cancers progress, and metastasize throughout the body, to bone in particular. When this occurs, the disease is both devastating and often lethal. But some tumors of the prostate are indolent; in essence, they just sit there, doing nothing. As many as 80 percent of men in the U.S. who die after age 80 have prostate cancer, but they die with it, rather than of it.

The new study took advantage of this indolent variety of prostate cancer to assess the effects of a lifestyle intervention, without the confounding influences of medical or surgical cancer treatments. The men participating in the GEMINAL study received a lifestyle intervention much like that in the earlier Lifestyle Heart Trial: low-fat, whole-foods, plant-based nutrition; stress management techniques; moderate exercise; and participation in a psychosocial support group. The study lasted three months.

Many of the usual measures of overall health were tracked, such as weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. They all improved significantly, as one would expect. The PSA, a tumor marker for prostate cancer, improved, but only trivially.

But what makes this study unique — and groundbreaking — is that it measured health markers beyond the list of usual suspects. Using advanced laboratory techniques, the investigators measured the effects of the intervention at the level of the genes.

What they found was remarkable. By examining prostate biopsy specimens before and after the three-month intervention, they saw significant changes in gene activity. Roughly 50 genes became more active in generating RNA, and nearly 500 became less active. The pattern of change observed in gene activity was all associated with lower risk of cancer development and progression.

We have long known that lifestyle has a powerful influence on health across a wide array of outcomes. It will not surprise you to hear that eating well, being active, controlling your weight, managing stress, and not smoking, for instance, can influence your fate.

But we have tended to think in terms of “nature versus nurture,” as lifestyle and genetic influences on health as independent, and potentially competing forces. This study ostensibly changes the game. It suggests that lifestyle and genetics are not independent after all, but interact. Even our genes are influenced by lifestyle choices. We can, it seems, nurture nature.

To a preventive medicine specialist like me, this is of profound importance. Complacency and fatalism are enemies of disease prevention. For many people, the notion that their medical destiny is written in their genes is a disincentive to take matters into their own hands.

The lifestyle intervention in GEMINAL was rather intense, allowing only 10 percent of calories from dietary fat, and requiring more than 1 1/2 hours of exercise and meditation daily.

We don’t yet know if less intensive lifestyle approaches would influence genes as this program did. And the current work is, admittedly, only a pilot study, limited to 30 men with prostate cancer.

More research will be required to prove what it suggests. But what it suggests is quite provocative enough for now: Take good enough care of yourself, and even your genes will get a makeover.

What we have in this new study is nothing less than an initial indication that the concept of “nature versus nurture” is flawed and obsolete.

Healthful behaviors are not a mere attempt to bluff our way through whatever genetic hand we were dealt.

They are, it turns out, an opportunity to reshuffle the genetic deck in our favor.

My concluding perspective on that opportunity, and I hope yours as well, is simply this: Deal me in!

Dr. David L. Katz can be reached at www.davidkatzmd.com.

(c) 2008 New Haven Register. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Telling coach potatoes to think of ways they could increase exercise performance led to a boost in cardiovascular fitness, U.S. researchers said.Laura L. Ten Eyck of the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, along with Dana P. Gresky and Charles G. Lord, studied 61 college students who did not exercise on a regular basis or exercised inconsistently.

The researchers asked some students to think of a list of reasons why they should increase the performance of a target cardiovascular exercise such as being healthier. Other participants were asked to list actions they could take to increase exercise performance, such a joining a gym or working out with a friend.

Having the students for eight weeks bring to mind and list actions they could take to increase exercise performance led to an increase in exercise and improved cardiovascular fitness. However, having students repeatedly bring to mind the reasons why they should do the target exercise did not increase time spent exercising, the researchers said.

The study is published in the Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research.

Proof of ketogenic diet efficacy raises hopes for epilepsy patients Children with epilepsy should have better NHS access to a special diet proven to prevent seizures, say UK researchers.The call comes after the first randomised trial into the ketogenic diet showed it cut seizure rate by 50-90 per cent in children with poorly controlled epilepsy.

The ketogenic diet has been used to control drug-resistant epilepsy since the 1920s, but doubt over its value remains.

It is managed by a dietician and has a high-fat, low- carbohydrate content to boost production of ketone bodies, rather than sugar, to fuel the brain.

The latest study involved almost 150 children, aged two to 16 years. They all had severe epilepsy, suffering a fit daily, and had failed to respond to at least two antiepileptic drugs.

Half were randomised immediately to the ketogenic diet but the therapy was delayed for three months in the other half.

Complete data was available for 54 children in the diet group and 49 controls. Compared withbaseline, 38 per cent fewer seizures were recorded in the diet group. But 37 per cent more fits noted in controls.

Seizure rate halved in 38 per cent of the diet group, compared with 6 per cent of controls. Seven per cent in the diet group had a 90 percent fall.

Side-effects included constipation, vomiting and hunger.

Dr Elizabeth Neal, a research dietician at the Institute of Child Health in London and part of the study team, said the ketogenic diet is not used enough.

‘It does take a lot of dietetic time so it takes a lot of resources,’ she said. ‘Another [thing] is an awareness issue.’

Although access to the ketogenic diet should be quicker, it needs to be restricted to children who have failed to respond to two medications, she added.

Lancet Neurology Online, live links at healthcarerepublic.com

rachel.liddle@haymarket.com

Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. May 9, 2008

(c) 2008 GP. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

High blood pressure is becoming increasingly resistant to drugs that lower it, according to a panel of experts assembled by the American Heart Association.”It’s becoming more difficult to treat, and it’s requiring more and more medications to do so,” said the panel chairman, Dr. David Calhoun, a hypertension specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The problem is not that the medications have stopped working, said the report, published this month in the journal Hypertension. Instead, many blood-pressure patients are sicker to begin with and require more drugs, at greater dosages, to manage their conditions.

Hypertension is an underlying cause of heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease and heart failure.

Research shows that the risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles with every 20-point increase of systolic pressure, the top number, or 10-point increase of diastolic pressure, the bottom number, starting at a blood pressure of 115/80.

“High blood pressure is currently the biggest single contributor to death around the world, because it is so common,” said Dr. Neil Poulter of the International Center for Circulatory Health at Imperial College London.

Resistant hypertension is defined as blood pressure that remains above clinical goals, even after a patient has been put on three or more different classes of medications. Additionally, patients whose blood pressure can be lowered to normal on four or more drugs should be considered resistant and should be closely monitored, the panel said.

After reviewing the research on drug-resistant hypertension, the panel found that it became more likely with advanced age, weight gain, a diet high in sodium, sleep apnea or chronic kidney disease.

The new report is one of the first to help doctors recognize and manage this growing group of difficult cases.

By reviewing studies of patients with at least some hypertension, the panel estimated that 20 percent to 30 percent could not control their blood pressure with three or more drugs, even when taking them exactly as prescribed. The 20- to 30-percent cohort appears to be growing. A large study in 2006 from Stanford found that the number of blood-pressure patients who were prescribed three or more drugs had increased over 12 years, to 24 percent from 14 percent.

If patients need that many drugs, experts say, they are likely to be at greater risk for illness.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

YOUNGSTERS are climbing their way to fitness at two health events this week.More than 200 pupils from the Newton Aycliffe area are taking part in fitness sessions at the town’s leisure centre.

The events have been organised by County Durham Primary Care Trust’s school nursing team, Sedgefield Borough Council’s leisure services department and local schools.

The first one was held yesterday, when ten and 11-year-olds enjoyed a range of activities including indoor climbing, judo and basketball.

They also learned about the benefits of a balanced diet, made and tasted nutritious smoothies and toured the centre’s fitness suite which is now accessible to 11-years-olds.

(c) 2008 Northern Echo. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.