Posts Tagged ‘North Carolina’

Fat Andy’s Burger brings the beef to Long Beach Road

Hugging the boundary between Oak Island and Southport, Fat Andy’s features a brief menu of burgers, all made with North Carolina-raised Angus beef. Burgers are build around a 3 oz. patty, and served as singles ($2.50, $2.75 with cheese), Double D (3.75) or Triple D ($5.00) stacks, which also pile on the cheese with each extra patty. In addition to the standard burger toppings, Staiger serves them all-the-way with chili, mustard and onions.

In addition to the burgers, his latest venture is rapidly gaining a positive reputation for their fresh-cut fries ($1.75). “It’s fresh, it’s local and we put a lot of love in it,” Staiger said of the menu.

Fat Andy’s is open Mon-Sat from 11:00 am – 7:00 pm, and can only accept cash at the moment. There isn’t any seating in the restaurant, but there are tables outside.

Article source: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130308/ARTICLES/130309687?Title=Fat-Andy-s-Burger-brings-the-beef-to-Long-Beach-Road

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Too Fat to Vote – Truth

Miami voters waiting in a three hour line for early voting, November 3, 2012. (Photo: Phillip Pessar)You know why black folk in the south don’t vote? According to the New York Times and the experts at the Pew Charitable Trust, they’re just too damn fat!

Normally I wouldn’t care what the Times is passing off as fact, except for that, on February the 27th, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act was the law that Martin Luther King Jr had a dream about a half-century ago: that all citizens will be able to exercise their right to vote. But, like all pleasant dreams, morning means waking up to the ugly reality sleeping next to you.

The pug-uglies in this case are the four Supreme Court justices hostile to the Act. If one more joins them, you can kiss Martin’s dream goodbye.

The dream-busters are led by Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2009, he wrote, “The historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable.” But – and Roberts’ “but” is huge – the Act is out of date and “fails to account for current political conditions”.

According to Roberts, “Jim Crow laws” – the apartheid rules used in the Deep South to keep African-Americans from the polls – have long passed away.

It’s true, black folks now fare better in Dixie. Why, just last week, Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery 147 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (I kid you not).

So, Roberts is ready to dump the key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act – the “pre-clearance” requirement.

Sixteen states must “clear” any changes in voting procedures with the US Department of Justice. That’s to make sure there’s no racial funny business – that new rules aren’t clever tactics meant to remove black, brown, Native American, Catholic, Mormon or other minority voters.

In the current case before the Court, some rebel states are hollering that they were unfairly singled out for this special scrutiny.

However, it was arithmetic in the law, not the Civil War, that put Mississippi on the list. Before the Act, only seven percent of its black citizens were registered to vote, below the law’s 50 percent line.

In November, at least a few Americans got quite upset to see television coverage from Florida of long lines of black folk waiting four or five hours to vote for the President. So is Jim Crow really dead and gone in Dixie?

That’s the weighty question addressed by the prestigious Pew Charitable Trust.

Why pick on Dixie? After all, despite what we saw with our own eyes, Pew shows that there’s only a 23 minute wait to vote in Florida – less time than it takes to cast a vote in Indiana. Overall, Florida ranks near the best in Pew’s “Elections Performance Index”. Let’s give a medal to Florida’s former Secretary of State, Katherine Harris!

Pew was advised by Yale law professor Heather K Gerken, who explained the study for the New York Times.

“Poor Southern states perform well, and they perform badly. Rich New England states perform well and badly – mostly badly,” she said. In other words, Justice Roberts is right: “The evil that [Voting Rights Act Section 5] is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance.”

In other words, why pick on Florida and the 15 others?

But wait. Something’s missing: colour. Sure, the average Floridian waited 23 minutes to vote, but what about black voters?

In November, I joined African-American voters on “Souls to the Polls” day. Their wait for a ballot: four hours. Then I went up the road to an all-white polling station. Wait: zero minutes. There were unused rows of balloting machines, more poll workers than voters and a pot of coffee brewing for the pale suburban-Americans casting ballots.

Oddly, despite a hot, hot Presidential contest with an African-American candidate, by mid-May 2012, theCensus Bureau reported that the number of African-Americans registered declined by over one million. Hispanic names on voter rolls fell, too, despite massive registration drives. A big decline in voters of colour was reported in the South’s huge swing state, Florida.

So, overall voter turnout fell short. But the reason, according to the Pew expert featured in the Times, is that, “States in the Deep South with high obesity problems seem to be having a problem getting people to the polling place.”

Apparently, citizens of colour south of the Mason-Dixon line are just too fat to vote.

Maybe there’s another explanation for black and Hispanic names disappearing from the polls. Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran, was removed from the voter rolls in 2000 because the Republican Secretary of State of Florida listed him as a felon. I met Steen. He’d never got so much as a parking ticket. He was, like tens of thousands of others, guilty of “VWB”; Voting While Black. 

Secretary of State Katherine Harris sent Steen a note of apology for the “error”, but only after the election of George W Bush. Then, in 2004, Steen, who is quite slender, was purged again.

Steen’s name matched that of an Ohio felon named “O’Steen” on a database created by Republican hacks. The name-match game cost 58,000 innocent voters their registrations in just one year.

This was just one method of nine used to hold Florida’s black voting rate to 58 percent compared to 65 percent for whites. 

Jim Crow isn’t dead, he’s just changed his white sheets for spreadsheets.

And in 2012, a new Republican Secretary of State again set out to bleach the rolls.

Using lists of illegal aliens, the GOP hack-marked 182,000 (!) voters whose names matched the deportees.

But wait: it’s a jail-time crime for a non-citizen to register or vote, so that’s one heck of a crime wave.

So how many illegal foreign voters were arrested in Florida? One: a Canadian gun aficionado.

Yet, nearly one in ten Hispanic voters would have been barred from the polling booth. But, at the last moment, federal voting rights law stopped the Republican’s latest José Crow manoeuver.

But wait – if the Voting Rights Act required Florida to get federal approval for voter roll purges, how could Steen and other black men have been stripped of their rights?

Answer: Florida lied. The state used a loophole in the Voting Rights Act, claiming the purge was not a change in rules, just a clerical clean-up of the voting lists.

What’s the solution to the new trickery? Not, as Justice Roberts suggests, to eliminate Section 5, but to expand it.

Indeed, the reach of the Voting Rights Act was massively expanded by presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Reagan!

As a result of their changes, states designated officially racist include the Confederate states of… California, Arizona, New York, New Mexico, South Dakota and Alaska. Alaska? You betcha!

And for good reason. Take California – under a Republican Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, 42 percent of voter registration forms were rejected, an overwhelmingly amount of those Hispanic, Arab-American and Asian. Jim Crow, it seems, became a surfer dude.

In 2004, in McKinley County, New Mexico, only one in ten voters cast a ballot for President – at least, that’s what the machines said. In fact, the voting machines simply disappeared the vote – almost all cast by Navajo Natives. Unfortunately McKinley was, by that time, “bailed out” of the Voting Rights Act, which any state can do by proving it no longer discriminates. (Apparently there’s not much you have to prove.)

And those lines I filmed of black voters standing for hours and white voters waltzing in for a ballot without a wait? That was in Ohio, with arguably the most racially bent voting system in America. (When the black voters finally made it to the voting station, I discovered they’d been given “absentee” ballots, subject to challenge, rather than the regular ballots given to the white voters.)

The horror show in Ohio does not absolve the racist voting systems of Florida, it merely calls for another expansion of the pre-clearance list to reflect a new reality. Jim Crow voting games are more widespread and far more sophisticated today than in 2000 when I first uncovered the Florida black-out.

That’s because Jim Crow is now Dr. James Crow, database analyst, a hired gun who knows it’s easier to win elections by blocking voters rather than winning their votes. Identifying and challenging “suspect” voters is far more effective in chasing away blacks than burning crosses.

In 2012, cyber-guru Karl Rove created a massive voter profiling system called Data Trust. Rove stated then that, for example, “Even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama’s] winning margin in North Carolina. If [black voters’] share of turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr Obama’s winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.”

A little purge goes a long way. Add in a requirement of voter IDs with photos (which Indiana used to bar about 72,000 black voters this year), and voting games, not voters, will pick our government.

The solution is not for the Supreme Court to let Jim Crow ride again through the Southland, but another expansion of pre-clearance scrutiny to Ohio and those states that need a little Reconstruction.

Article source: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14795-too-fat-to-vote

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Too Fat To Vote: Will A Supreme Ku Klux Kourt Kill Dr. King’s Dream Act? – OpEd

By Greg Palast — (February 24, 2013)

You know why black folk in the south don’t vote? According to The New York Times and the experts at the Pew Charitable Trust, they’re just too damn fat!

Normally I wouldn’t care what the Times is passing off as fact, except for that, on February the 27th, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act was the law that Martin Luther King Jr had a dream about a half-century ago: that all citizens will be able to exercise their right to vote. But, like all pleasant dreams, morning means waking up to the ugly reality sleeping next to you.

The pug-uglies in this case are the four Supreme Court justices hostile to the Act. If one more joins them, you can kiss Martin’s dream goodbye.

The dream-busters are led by Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2009, he wrote, “The historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable.” But – and Roberts’ “but” is huge – the Act is out of date and “fails to account for current political conditions”.

According to Roberts, “Jim Crow laws” – the apartheid rules used in the Deep South to keep African-Americans from the polls – have long passed away.

It’s true, black folks now fare better in Dixie. Why, just last week, Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery 147 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (I kid you not).

So, Roberts is ready to dump the key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act – the “pre-clearance” requirement.

Sixteen states must “clear” any changes in voting procedures with the US Department of Justice. That’s to make sure there’s no racial monkey business – that new rules aren’t clever tactics meant to remove black, brown, Native American, Catholic, Mormon or other minority voters.

In the current case before the Court, some Rebel states are hollering that they were unfairly singled out for this special scrutiny.

However, it was arithmetic in the law, not the Civil War, that put Mississippi on the list. Before the Act, only seven percent of its black citizens were registered to vote, below the law’s 50 percent line.

In November, at least a few Americans got quite upset to see television coverage from Florida of long lines of black folk waiting four or five hours to vote for the President. So is Jim Crow really dead and gone in Dixie?

That’s the weighty question addressed by the prestigious Pew Charitable Trust.

Why pick on Dixie? After all, despite the hours-long lines of Black voters in Florida we saw with our own eyes, Pew shows that there’s only a 23 minute wait to vote in Florida – less time than it takes to cast a vote in Indiana. Overall, Florida ranks near the best in Pew’s “Elections Performance Index”. Let’s give a medal to Florida’s former Secretary of State, Katherine Harris!

Pew was advised by Yale law professor Heather K Gerken, who explained the study for the New York Times.

“Poor Southern states perform well, and they perform badly. Rich New England states perform well and badly – mostly badly,” she said. In other words, Justice Roberts is right: “The evil that [Voting Rights Act Section 5] is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance.”

In other words, why single out Florida and the 15 others?

But wait. Something’s missing: colour. Sure, the average Floridian waited 23 minutes to vote, but what about black voters?

In November, I joined African-American voters on “Souls to the Polls” day. Their wait for a ballot: four hours. Then I went up the road to an all-white polling station. Wait: zero minutes. There were unused rows of balloting machines, more poll workers than voters and a pot of coffee brewing for the pale suburban-Americans casting ballots.

And Oddly, despite a hot, hot Presidential contest with an African-American candidate, by mid-May 2012, the Census Bureau reported that the number of African-Americans registered declined by over one million. Hispanic names on voter rolls fell, too, despite massive registration drives. A big decline in voters of colour was reported in the South’s huge swing state, Florida.

So, overall voter turnout fell short. But the reason, according to the Pew expert featured in the Times, is that, “States in the Deep South with high obesity problems seem to be having a problem getting people to the polling place.”

Apparently, citizens of colour south of the Mason-Dixon line are just too fat to vote.

Maybe there’s another explanation for black and Hispanic names disappearing from the polls. Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran, was removed from the voter rolls in 2000 because the Republican Secretary of State of Florida listed him as a felon. I met Steen. He’d never got so much as a parking ticket. He was, like tens of thousands of others, guilty of “VWB”; Voting While Black.

Secretary of State Katherine Harris sent Steen a note of apology for the “error”, but only after the election of George W Bush. Then, in 2004, Steen, who is quite slender, was purged again.

Steen’s name matched that of an Ohio felon named “O’Steen” on a database created by Republican hacks. The name-match game cost 58,000 innocent voters their registrations in just one year.

This was just one method of nine used to hold Florida’s black voting rate to 58 percent compared to 65 percent for whites.

Jim Crow isn’t dead, he’s just changed his white sheets for spreadsheets.

In 2012, Florida’s new Republican Secretary of State Ken Detzner again set out to bleach the voter rolls whiter than white.

Using lists of illegal aliens, the GOP hack marked 182,000 (!) voters whose names matched the deportees.

But wait: it’s a jail-time crime for a non-citizen to register or vote, so that’s one heck of a crime wave.

So how many illegal foreign voters were arrested in Florida? One: an Austrian-Canadian gun aficionado.

Yet, nearly one in ten Hispanic voters would have been barred from the polling booth. But, at the last moment, federal voting rights law stopped the Republican’s latest José Crow manoeuver.

But wait – if the Voting Rights Act required Florida to get federal approval for voter roll purges, how could Steen and other black men have been stripped of their rights?

Answer: Florida lied. The state used a loophole in the Voting Rights Act, claiming the purge was not a change in rules, just a clerical clean-up of the voting lists.

What’s the solution to the new trickery? Not, as Justice Roberts suggests, to eliminate Section 5, but to expand it.

Indeed, the reach of the Voting Rights Act was massively expanded by presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Reagan!

As a result of their changes, states designated officially racist include the Confederate states of… California, Arizona, New York, New Mexico, South Dakota and Alaska. Alaska? You betcha!

And for good reason. Take California – under a Republican Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, 42 percent of voter registration forms were rejected, an overwhelmingly amount of those Hispanic, Arab-American and Asian. Jim Crow, it seems, became a surfer dude.

In 2004, in McKinley County, New Mexico, only one in ten voters cast a ballot for President – at least, that’s what the machines said. In fact, the voting machines simply disappeared the vote – almost all cast by Navajo Natives. Unfortunately McKinley was, by that time, “bailed out” of the Voting Rights Act, which any state can do by proving it no longer discriminates. (Apparently there’s not much you have to prove.)

And those lines I filmed of black voters standing for hours and white voters waltzing in for a ballot without a wait? That was in Ohio, with arguably the most racially bent voting system in America. (When the black voters finally made it to the voting station, I discovered they’d been given “absentee” ballots, subject to challenge, rather than the regular ballots given to the white voters.)

The horror show in Ohio does not absolve the racist voting systems of Florida, it merely calls for another expansion of the pre-clearance list to reflect a new reality. Jim Crow voting games are more widespread and far more sophisticated today than in 2000 when I first uncovered the Florida black-out.

That’s because Jim Crow is now Dr James Crow, database analyst, a hired gun who knows it’s easier to win elections by blocking voters rather than winning their votes. Identifying and challenging “suspect” voters is far more effective in chasing away black than burning crosses.

In 2012, cyber-guru Karl Rove created a massive voter profiling system called Data Trust. Rove stated then that, for example, “Even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama's] winning margin in North Carolina. If [black voters'] share of turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr Obama’s winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.”

A little purge goes a long way. Add in a requirement of voter IDs with photos (which Indiana used to bar about 72,000 black voters this year), and voting games, not voters, will pick our government.

The solution is not for the Supreme Court to let Jim Crow ride again through the Southland, but another expansion of pre-clearance scrutiny to Ohio, Indiana and those states that need a little Reconstruction.

Article source: http://www.eurasiareview.com/24022013-too-fat-to-vote-will-a-supreme-ku-klux-kourt-kill-dr-kings-dream-act-oped/

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Aerobic exercise, not resistance, best bet for weight and fat loss

When it comes to weight and fat loss, aerobic training is better than resistance training, researchers say.

The study led by North Carolina researchers is believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults.

A total of 234 previously sedentary overweight or obese males and females, age 18-70 years of age, were enrolled in one of three eight-month supervised protocols: aerobic training (AT), resistance training (RT), or a combination (AT/RT). Of the total, 119 participants completed the trials and had complete data for the variables of interest in the article.

Those assigned to aerobic training exercised vigorously, at about 70-85 percent of maximum heart rate. They exercise approximately 45 minutes three days per week throughout the study period.

Individuals assigned to resistance training also exercised three days a week, completing three sets of 8-12 reps on eight resistance machines that targeted all major muscle groups. Resistance was increased throughout the study to maintain a steady level of challenge as the participants gained strength.

Individuals who were assigned to AT/RT performed all the exercises assigned to both AT and RT groups. At the end of study each enrollee was assessed for weight, body composition, waist circumference, cardiopulmonary fitness and strength compared to their baseline.

The researchers found that the groups assigned to aerobic training and aerobic plus resistance training lost more weight than those that did resistance training only. In fact, those who did resistance training only actually gained weight due to an increase in lean body mass.

Fat mass and waist circumference significantly decreased in the AT and AT/RT groups, but were not altered in RT. However, measures of lean body mass significantly increased in RT and AT/RT, but not in AT. The finding suggests that aerobic exercise is more effective in reducing these measures.

Lean body mass increased with both RT and AT/RT, but not AT. Having the benefit to of both modes of exercise allowed AT/RT to decrease body fat percent significantly more than either AT or RT due to decreased fat mass combined with increased lean body mass.

Importance of the Findings

“Given our observations, it may be time to seriously reconsider the conventional wisdom that resistance training alone can lead to weight and fat loss,” Leslie H. Willis, an exercise physiologist at Duke University Medical Center and the study’s lead author, said.

“If increasing muscle mass and strength is a goal, then resistance training is required. However, the majority of Americans could experience health benefits due to weight and fat loss. The best option in that case, given limited time for exercise, is to focus on aerobic training. When you lose fat, it is likely you are losing visceral fat, which is known to be associated with cardiovascular and other health benefits,” Willis added.

The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Physiology published by the American Physiological Society.

Article source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130106/lifestyle-health-workplace/article/aerobic-exercise-not-resistance-best-bet-weight-and-fat

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Aerobic exercise, not resistance, best bet for weight and fat loss

Washington, January 3 (ANI): When it comes to weight and fat loss, aerobic training is better than resistance training, researchers say.

The study led by North Carolina researchers is believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults.

A total of 234 previously sedentary overweight or obese males and females, age 18-70 years of age, were enrolled in one of three eight-month supervised protocols: aerobic training (AT), resistance training (RT), or a combination (AT/RT). Of the total, 119 participants completed the trials and had complete data for the variables of interest in the article.

Those assigned to aerobic training exercised vigorously, at about 70-85 percent of maximum heart rate. They exercise approximately 45 minutes three days per week throughout the study period.

Individuals assigned to resistance training also exercised three days a week, completing three sets of 8-12 reps on eight resistance machines that targeted all major muscle groups. Resistance was increased throughout the study to maintain a steady level of challenge as the participants gained strength.

Individuals who were assigned to AT/RT performed all the exercises assigned to both AT and RT groups. At the end of study each enrollee was assessed for weight, body composition, waist circumference, cardiopulmonary fitness and strength compared to their baseline.

The researchers found that the groups assigned to aerobic training and aerobic plus resistance training lost more weight than those that did resistance training only. In fact, those who did resistance training only actually gained weight due to an increase in lean body mass.

Fat mass and waist circumference significantly decreased in the AT and AT/RT groups, but were not altered in RT. However, measures of lean body mass significantly increased in RT and AT/RT, but not in AT. The finding suggests that aerobic exercise is more effective in reducing these measures.

Lean body mass increased with both RT and AT/RT, but not AT. Having the benefit to of both modes of exercise allowed AT/RT to decrease body fat percent significantly more than either AT or RT due to decreased fat mass combined with increased lean body mass.

Importance of the Findings

“Given our observations, it may be time to seriously reconsider the conventional wisdom that resistance training alone can lead to weight and fat loss,” Leslie H. Willis, an exercise physiologist at Duke University Medical Center and the study’s lead author, said.

“If increasing muscle mass and strength is a goal, then resistance training is required. However, the majority of Americans could experience health benefits due to weight and fat loss. The best option in that case, given limited time for exercise, is to focus on aerobic training. When you lose fat, it is likely you are losing visceral fat, which is known to be associated with cardiovascular and other health benefits,” Willis added.

The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Physiology published by the American Physiological Society. (ANI)

Article source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/aerobic-exercise-not-resistance-best-bet-weight-fat-073429865.html

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Gut Bacteria Can Affect Fat Absorption, and Act in Accordance to “Social …

By Dr. Mercola

Much new research is now emerging on the importance of bacteria – intestinal bacteria, to be more exact. These are commonly referred to as probiotics, and are the antithesis to antibiotics, both of which I’ll discuss below.

These microscopic critters are also known as your microbiome.

Around 100 trillion of these beneficial bacterial cells populate your body, particularly your intestines and other parts of your digestive system. In fact, 90percent of the genetic material in your body is not yours, but rather that of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microorganisms that compose your microflora.

We’re now discovering that the composition of this microflora has a profoundimpact on your health. For example, we now know that your intestinal bacteria influence your:

• Genetic expression
• Immune system
• Brain development, mental health, and memory
• Weight, and
• Risk of numerous chronic and acute diseases, from diabetes to cancer

Certain Gut Microbes Affect Absorption of Dietary Fats

Most recently, a research team that includes Carnegie’s Steve Farber and Juliana Carten has revealed that certain gut microbes increase the absorption of dietary fats.¹ According to the authors:

“Diet-induced alterations in microbiota composition might influence fat absorption, providing mechanistic insight into how microbiota-diet interactions regulate host energy balance.”

Medical News Today² recently reported on the findings, stating:

“Previous studies showed gut microbes aid in the breakdown of complex carbohydrates, but their role in dietary fat metabolism remained a mystery, until now… ‘This study is the first to demonstrate that microbes can promote the absorption of dietary fats in the intestine and their subsequent metabolism in the body,’ said senior study author John Rawls of the University of North Carolina. ‘The results underscore the complex relationship between microbes, diet and host physiology.’”

The bacteria identified as instrumental in increasing fat absorption are called Firmicutes, which, incidentally, have previously been linked to obesity, as they’re found in greater numbers in the guts of obese subjects. The researchers also found that the abundance of Firmicutes was influenced by diet. This adds weight to previous research postulating that gut bacteria can increase your body’s ability to absorb fat, and therefore extract more calories from your food compared to others who have a different composition of bacteria in their intestines – even when consuming the same amount of food.

New Research Suggests Bacteria are Social Microorganisms

Three years ago, I posted a TED video featuring Bonnie Bassler, in which she discusses how bacteria “talk” to each other using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks.

This is a Flash-based video and may not be viewable on mobile devices.

Now, more recent research published in the journal Science³ reveals that bacteria may have “social structures similar to plants and animals.” According to the authors:

“In animals and plants, social structure can reduce conflict within populations and bias aggression toward competing populations; however, for bacteria in the wild it remains unknown whether such population-level organization exists. Here, we show that environmental bacteria are organized into socially cohesive units in which antagonism occurs between, rather than within, ecologically defined populations.

By screening approximately 35,000 possible mutual interactions among Vibrionaceae isolates from the ocean, we show that genotypic clusters known to have cohesive habitat association also act as units in terms of antibiotic production and resistance.

Genetic analyses show that within populations, broad-range antibiotics are produced by few genotypes, whereas all others are resistant, suggesting cooperation between conspecifics. Natural antibiotics may thus mediate competition between populations rather than solely increase the success of individuals.”

What this means is that certain bacteria have the ability to produce chemical compounds that inhibit the growth of other bacteria, while not harming their own kind or “close relatives.” These chemical compounds or natural antibiotics act as a type of chemical warfare, allowing the bacteria in question to gain a competitive edge by killing off the competition. Meanwhile, other “allies” are spared, as they are resistant to the antibiotic chemicals produced.

As reported by Medical News Today:⁴

“‘The research has the potential to bridge gaps in our understanding of the relationships between plants and humans and their non-disease- and disease-causing bacterial flora,’ said Robert Fleischmann, a program director in the Division of Biological Infrastructure for the National Science Foundation.

‘We use antibiotics to kill pathogenic microbes, which cause harm to humans and animals,’ said Polz. ‘As an unfortunate side effect, this has lead to the widespread buildup of resistance, particularly in hospitals where pathogens and humans encounter each other often.’

In addition, the results help scientists make sense of why closely related bacteria are so diverse in their gene content. Part of the answer, they say, is that the diversity allows the bacteria to play different social roles. Social differentiation, for example, could mitigate the negative effects of two species competing for the same limiting resource – food or habitat, for instance – and generate population level behavior that emerges from the interaction between close relatives.”

Beware of Fluoridated Antibiotics that Can Ruin Your Gut Flora and Your Health

Your lifestyle can and does influence your gut flora on a daily basis. All of these common exposures can wreak havoc on the makeup of bacteria in your gut, but researchers are now increasingly looking at the cascading ill effects of antibiotic drugs in particular. For example, your gut bacteria are extremely sensitive to:

• Antibiotics
• Chlorinated water
• Antibacterial soap
• Agricultural chemicals
• Pollution

Antibiotics are severely overused – not just in medicine, but also in food production. In fact, about 80 percent of all theantibiotics produced are used in agriculture – not only to fight infection, but to promote unhealthy (though profitable) weight gain in the animals. Hence, if you want to avoid overexposure to antibiotics, it’s also crucial to avoid conventionally-raised meats.

That said, certain antibiotics prescribed in medicine are so harmful they probably shouldn’t be used at all. Medications such as Avelox, Cipro, and Levaquin have been named in over 2,000 drug injury lawsuits.⁵

These are all fluoroquinolones, a class of fluoridated antibiotics associated with a number of serious side effects, such as potentially blinding retinal detachment, kidney failure, and permanent tendon damage. Fluoroquinolones do carry a black box warning for tendonitis, ruptured tendons, and its potentially detrimental effect on neuromuscular activity, but many patients simply do not read the warning labels before taking the drug. Other serious injuries linked to fluoroquinolones include:

Learn More about the Dangers of Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics

Shockingly, despite all these risks, fluoroquinolones are one of the most commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics in the world. John Fratti, who was hired by the FDA in a part-time position as an FDA Patient Representative for drug safety, is on a quest to raise awareness on the dangers of fluoroguinolone toxicity. He filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the FDA on two of the top fluoroquinolones, Levaquin and Cipro, and learned that they are associated with over 2,500 deaths.

Fratti has established a non-profit organization called Quinolone Vigilance Foundation to spread awareness of the dangers associated with this class of drugs, and the Foundation’s website contains both information and support for those injured by these drugs. Fortunately, fluoroquinolones have started getting some well-deserved media attention as of late.

According to a recent article in The New York Times:⁶

“A half-dozen fluoroquinolones have been taken off the market because of unjustifiable risks of adverse effects. Those that remain are undeniably important drugs, when used appropriately. But doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have expressed concern that too often fluoroquinolones are prescribed unnecessarily as a ‘one size fits all’ remedy without considering their suitability for different patients.

Experts caution against giving these drugs to certain patients who face higher than average risks of bad reactions – children under age 18, adults over 60, and pregnant and nursing women – unless there is no effective alternative. The risk of adverse effects is also higher among people with liver disease and those taking corticosteroids or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

When an antibiotic is prescribed, it is wise to ask what the drug is and whether it is necessary, what side effects to be alert for, whether there are effective alternatives, when to expect the diagnosed condition to resolve, and when to call if something unexpected happens or recovery seems delayed.”

Last year, PBS NewsHour⁷ aired a segment highlighting the dangers of fluoroquinolones. Fratti, who is himself a victim of fluoroquinolone toxicity, was interviewed. He was prescribed Levaquin a few years ago for a minor bacterial infection. The drug caused nerve damage, tendon damage and damage to his central nervous system.

Watch Certain Antibiotics Spur Widening Reports of Severe Side Effects on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

This is a Flash-based video and may not be viewable on mobile devices.

How to Optimize Your Gut Flora

The good news is that positively influencing the bacteria growing in your body is relatively easy. Aside from reserving antibiotics for serious cases of infection only, one of the most important steps you can take is to stop consuming sugary foods. When you eat a healthy diet that is low in sugars and processed foods, one of the major benefits is that it causes the good bacteria in your gut to flourish and build up a major defense against the bad bacteria getting a foothold in your body in the first place.

This is one of the many reasons I highly recommend reducing, with the plan of eliminating, sugars and most grains from your diet. Following my recently updated nutrition plan will help you optimize your diet in a systematic step-by-step fashion. A healthy diet is the ideal way to maintain a healthy gut, and regularly consuming traditionally fermented or cultured foods is the easiest way to ensure optimal gut flora. Healthy options include:

 

Just make sure to steer clear of pasteurized versions, as pasteurization will destroy many of the naturally occurring probiotics. For example, most of the “probiotic” yogurts you find in every grocery store these days are NOT recommended. Since they’re pasteurized, they will be associated with all of the problems of pasteurized milk products instead. They also typically contain added sugars, high fructose corn syrup, dyes, and/or artificial sweeteners; all of which are detrimental to your health.

Consuming traditionally fermented foods will also provide you with the following added benefits:

• Important nutrients: Some fermented foods are excellent sources of essential nutrients such as vitamin K2, which is important for preventing arterial plaque buildup and heart disease. Cheese curd, for example, is an excellent source of both probiotics and vitamin K2. You can also obtain all the K2 you’ll need (about 200 micrograms) by eating 15 grams, or half an ounce, of natto daily. They are also a potent producer of many B vitamins
• Optimizing your immune system: Probiotics have been shown to modulate immune responses via your gut’s mucosal immune system, and have anti-inflammatory potential. Eighty percent of your immune system is located in your digestive system, making a healthy gut a major focal point if you want to maintain optimal health, as a robust immune system is your number one defense system against ALL disease
• Detoxification: Fermented foods are some of the best chelators available. The beneficial bacteria in these foods are very potent detoxifiers, capable of drawing out a wide range of toxins and heavy metals
• Cost effective: Fermented foods can contain 100 times more probiotics than a supplement, so just adding a small amount of fermented foods to each meal will give you the biggest bang for your buck
• Natural variety of microflora: As long as you vary the fermented and cultured foods you eat, you’ll get a much wider variety of beneficial bacteria than you could ever get from a supplement

When you first start out, you’ll want to start small, adding as little as half a tablespoon of fermented vegetables to each meal, and gradually work your way up to about a quarter to half a cup (2 to 4 oz) of fermented vegetables or other cultured food with one to three meals per day. Since cultured foods are efficient detoxifiers, you may experience detox symptoms, or a “healing crisis,” if you introduce too many at once.

Learn to Make Your Own Fermented Vegetables

Fermented vegetables are easy to make on your own. It’s also the most cost-effective way to get high amounts of healthful probiotics in your diet. To learn how, review the following interview with Caroline Barringer, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) and an expert in the preparation of the foods prescribed in Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) Nutritional Program. In addition to the wealth of information shared in this interview, I highly recommend getting the book Gut and Psychology Syndrome, which provides all the necessary details for Dr. McBride’s GAPS protocol.

Although you can use the native bacteria on cabbage and other vegetables, it is typically easier to get consistent results by using a starter culture. Caroline prepares hundreds of quarts of fermented vegetables a week and has found that she gets great results by using three to four high quality probiotic capsules to jump start the fermentation process.

Download Interview Transcript

Article source: http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Disease/gut_bacteria_10011210.html

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AMA Paper Says Fat Taxes, Soda Bans Make Dollars and Sense

Taxing or limiting the serving sizes of high calorie junk food may sound like the perfect weapon in the war against obesity, but it seems to have backfired in at least one instance.

Last week, the Danish government announced plans to scrap the tax it instituted just last year on foods high in saturated fats. The reason for the decision: Businesses are bleeding jobs and profits because Danes are crossing the German border to buy their sinful snacks more cheaply.

Despite the Danish experience, legislation to help curb obesity is gaining momentum in the U.S. New York City has led the charge by prohibiting artificial trans fats in restaurant foods, working with manufacturers to limit salt content and most recently, adopting a controversial “soda ban” to limit the size of sugary drinks sold in restaurants and bars.

Thomas A. Farley, M.D., commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and one of the architects of the New York City large soda ban, has written a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) explaining why he thinks government regulation of junk food — and sugary drinks in particular — is reasonable.

“The balanced and most effective approach is for governments to regulate food products that harm the most people, simultaneously encourage food companies to voluntarily produce and market healthful products, and then provide information to consumers in ways that facilitate their choosing healthful products,” he said.

In the commentary he noted that while many foods contribute to excess calorie intake, sugary drinks are among the biggest culprits in the American diet. He said there’s been up to a ten-fold increase in serving sizes and a near tripling of consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks since the 1970s to coincide with skyrocketing obesity rates.

“The average consumer now drinks 140-180 excess calories per day in sugary drinks. That’s enough to add several pounds a year, every year. Consumption has also been linked with diabetes and heart disease independent of weight gain,” he said.

Barry Popkin, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, agreed there’s plenty of data to justify legislation against highly sweetened beverages. In 2010 he published a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine that followed the dietary habits of 5,000 people for more than 10 years, and found that both weight and risk of diabetes decreased in communities where soda and fast-food prices increased.

“We know that if we tax sugar-sweetened drinks at a rate of at least 20 percent — a few cents an ounce — it helps lower obesity rates,” Popkin said.

Some experts disagree, however.

“The problem is we think if we tax these things people will drink tap water — they won’t,” said Brian Wansink, professor of marketing at Cornell University.

Wansink cited a soon-to-be published study in which he asked an upstate New York supermarket chain to place a levy on soda and junk food for a year. As predicted, the extra cost led to lower consumption of those items — but it also led to a sizable increase in beer sales.

Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/jama-commentary-weighs-fat-taxes-soda-ban/story?id=17264452

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Is Your Gut Bacteria Making You Fat?

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Every person carries around millions of bacteria in their guts, which help maintain a healthy colon and digestive system, and may even prevent colon cancer. But they aren’t all good.

Researchers have found that some of the bacteria in the gut may be making you fat.

In a paper published in the September 2012 issue of the journal Cell Host and Microbe researchers from the University of North Carolina have identified a type of bacteria that increases the amount of fat and calories the intestines of zebrafish can absorb.

(Zebrafish were used because they are nearly transparent when they are young, so it’s easy to see inside their guts.)

They were fed fatty acid molecules tagged with a florescent dye to observe the fat absorption. Zebrafish with the bacteria got more calories from the same diet than zebrafish without this bacteria.

Although this study was performed in zebrafish, previous research in humans found correlations between relatives of this bacteria and obesity.

Luckily, we can change the kinds of microbes that live in our guts: The researchers also found that the populations of this bacteria were influenced by diet. Fattier diets promoted larger populations of Firmicutes which would then lead to more fat absorption. The increase of this bacteria is reversible by following a low-fat diet.

Some research has shown that you can also increase your “good” gut bacteria by taking probiotics — bacteria in the form of supplements and even yogurt.

See Also: 16 Great Reasons To Love Your Body’s Bacteria

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Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/is-bacteria-making-you-fat-2012-9

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Many Livers ‘Too Fat’ For Transplant

SAN DIEGO — Increases in factors associated with fatty liver disease may be leading clinicians to discard more donated organs, researcher found.

In an analysis of data from the United Organ Sharing Network (UNOS), age, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension were associated with an increased risk of a liver being discarded, Dr. Eric Orman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues reported during a press briefing at Digestive Disease Week here.

“We’re actually throwing out livers that in the past may have been able to be used … [because] of all these factors associated with fatty liver disease,” Orman explained.

Read this story on www.medpagetoday.com.

Orman said that over the past few years, there’s been a decline in the number of liver transplants done, but that drop isn’t explained by flat donation rates alone.

“Although donation rates have decreased overall, they haven’t decreased to the same extent as the decline in the number of livers transplanted,” he said, adding that one explanation may be an increase in discard rates due to poor quality of organs.

So he and colleagues conducted a retrospective study of data from UNOS between 1994 and 2010 totaling 93,232 organ donors. Living donors, split livers, and donors with a body mass index of less than 14 or more than 50 kg/m were excluded.

Among the nearly 94,000 donors, 75 percent of livers were transplanted and a quarter of livers were not used.

They found that the number of discarded organs was stable until 2003 (with a total of 1,058 organs discarded in that last year), and then rose to 1,828 by 2010.

In a bivariate analysis, they found that discarded livers more often came from donors who were older (median 49 versus 43 years), obese (35 percent verses 22 percent of non-obese donors), diabetic (35 percent versus 24 percent of nondiabetics), and hypertensive (31 percent versus 22 percent of normotensive patients).

Discard rates were also higher in donation after cardiac death, which is different from standard procurement. In the latter, a patient is declared brain dead but kept on a ventilator to keep the organs perfused (65 percent versus 22 percent). In donation after cardiac death, perfusion of blood to the organs is disrupted.

They estimated that in 2010, 44 percent of discards were due to increased age, 9 percent to obesity, 5 percent to diabetes, and 5 percent to hypertension. These proportions were stable over time, they said.

On the other hand, the proportion of livers discarded due to donation after cardiac death rose from 0.2 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, suggesting an increasing reluctance to use these grafts, they reported.

Orman said that, overall, the findings are important “because if these trends continue, we’re going to see further declines in liver transplant.”

Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/livers-fat-transplant/story?id=16430511

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Nighttime fasting may foster weight loss

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring “the kitchen is closed” seems a quaint relic of an earlier era.

It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence.

A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation’s epidemic of obesity — and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it.

Just eat your cake — or better yet, an apple — earlier. Then wait 16 hours, until breakfast the next morning, to eat again.

“We have to come up with something that is a simple alternative to calorie counting,” said Satchidananda Panda, a regulatory biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla who led the study published online Thursday by the journal Cell Metabolism.

Panda and his team put groups of mice on different eating regimens for 100 days. Animals in two of the groups dined on high-fat, high-calorie chow. Half of them were allowed to eat whenever they wanted, and nibbled on and off throughout the night and day. The other mice had access to food only for eight hours at night, when they were most active.

In human terms, this would be rough: No ice cream while watching “Glee.” No second glass of wine while talking things over with the spouse. Not even a late-night glass of warm milk.

The difference was astonishing. Even though they ate a high-fat diet, the mice who wrapped up their eating day early and were forced to fast for 16 hours were lean — almost as lean as mice in a control group who ate regular chow. But the mice who noshed on high-fat chow around the clock became obese, even though they consumed the same amount of fat and calories as their counterparts on the time-restricted diet.

Extra weight wasn’t their only problem. The obese mice developed high cholesterol, high blood sugar, fatty liver disease and metabolic problems. The mice who ate fatty food but were forced to fast showed hardly any signs of inflammation or liver disease, and their cholesterol and blood sugar levels were virtually indistinguishable from those of mice who ate regular chow. When put on an exercise wheel, they showed the most endurance and the best motor control of all the animals in the study.

The data suggest that the stomach, the brain and the body’s digestive machinery need to take a break from managing incoming fuel; otherwise, we may be working ourselves into a state of metabolic exhaustion. When combined with high-calorie, high-fat diets, the result is weight gain, a liver clogged with fat, accumulation of cholesterol in the arteries and unused glucose in the blood.

In the mice who fasted for 16 hours daily, measures of digestive hormones, cholesterol and glucose suggested that liver enzymes were working hard to break down cholesterol into bile acids. The body’s stores of “brown fat,” the stuff that converts extra calories into heat, were revved up, and the liver ceased production of glucose. As they burned fat, their body temperatures were actually higher, Panda said.

The results of daily fasting were “phenomenal,” he said.

If only we were mice.

Leo Garcia, a 37-year-old auto mechanic whose adult years have been a steady march up the scale, said he was intrigued by the notion that he could lose some of his 250 pounds by wrapping up his mealtime early and resisting the urge to nibble. “It seems easier to do something like that than to join a gym and do cardio,” he said.

But the study drew both exasperation and cautious interest from obesity researchers, who underscored that lab mice aren’t tempted by fast-food restaurants with late-night specials and have no alternative to the menu and feeding schedule set by lab technicians. Being nocturnal, they also have different circadian clocks. The conclusion that humans could prevent or reverse obesity by wolfing down steak and chips for eight hours and then stopping for 16 would be premature and almost certainly dangerous, some said.

“I hope it’s true, but I doubt it,” said Barbara Corkey, director of obesity research at Boston University School of Medicine.

Barry M. Popkin, a nutrition expert at the University of North Carolina, said the study plies “uncharted territory” that needs exploration. A clinical trial published in 1992 suggested that eating frequent, small meals resulted in better insulin control and longevity.

“This one study cannot tell us that this science is wrong,” Popkin said. “However, it is suggestive that scholars in the diabetes, obesity and other areas related to heart disease need to test this issue further in animals and humans.”

Panda acknowledged that his research would need to be refined and tested in humans before it could be used to fight the war against obesity. The 16-hour fast that was so effective in preventing obesity in mice “may not be a magic number” for people, he said.

But extending the nighttime fast is a cheap and simple dietary adjustment that has no discernible side effects and doesn’t require anyone to count calories or even deprive themselves — unless you just can’t watch a playoff game without a beer or can’t fall asleep without tea and honey.

All you need is a clock, said Panda, who noted that most after-dinner snacks are high in fat, sugar, salt and calories, and are best cut out anyway.

Research into the basic drivers of obesity — both social and biological — are under greater scrutiny than ever. Pharmacological help for the nation’s 78 million obese adults and 12.5 million obese children has been elusive, as have the keys to behavior change for enduring weight loss.

Scientists acknowledge that obesity results from a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors, such as sedentary lifestyles, consumption of sweetened soft drinks, growing portion sizes and the increasing role of calorie-rich restaurant meals in American diets.

Panda thinks researchers may be overlooking the role that timing has on the body’s response to food. In the agricultural lifestyle of an earlier time, Americans ate heartily but were thinner. They did chores, then had a big breakfast, followed by more physical activity, a hearty lunch, work and an early dinner. Soon after the sun set, it was time to sleep.

“Most people ate mostly in daytime,” Panda said. Today, “our social life starts at sunset. Family time starts at the evening. So essentially, we have increased our eating time in the last 40 to 50 years.”

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Article source: http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-fasting-diet-20120518,0,498874.story?track=rss

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