The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just came out with the results of a study showing that there is little effect that a fruit and vegetable diet has on cancer risk. My contention is that they are looking in the wrong direction. You may say this is on purpose, if you’re inclined to be an uber-skeptic. Maybe it’s ignorance. Whatever the reason, researchers are barking up the wrong tree and I’m pretty sure they know it.

In my humble opinion, cancer rates continue to soar because of the QUALITY and CONSTITUENTS of foods, chemical overload (including from food), stress and a variety of psychological factors.

Here’s what researchers have concluded: “A very small inverse association between intake of total fruits and vegetables and cancer risk was observed in this study. Given the small magnitude of the observed associations, caution should be applied in their interpretation” (Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access published online on April 6, 2010, JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute, doi:10.1093/jnci/djq072 ).

The findings are probably making junk food eaters jump with Almond Joy. They may even be polishing off their old Bible of Defamatory Monikers and calling nutrition proponents names like granola heads and tree huggers.

But wait a minute. Let’s take a step into reality and break this down logically. Scientists know very well that manmade chemicals are causing cancer. These chemicals are found in all processed foods, air pollution, in the drinking water, in pesticides and personal care products and in drugs. Chemicals cause cancer. If your foods, EVEN FRUITS AND VEGETABLES, are grown in toxic chemicals, sprayed with pesticides and fertilizers, then they can cause cancer. It doesn’t matter that they are fruits and vegetables. What matters is that they are a source of carcinogens.

Just to break this down even further, consider this: If you take a bowl of cherries, grapes, apples, zucchini and broccoli and douse them with Raid, Black Flagg or even the stronger stuff used by conventional farmers, would this make them as safe to eat as if you didn’t spray them?

It’s really not difficult to surf the web and find all kinds of connections between chemicals and cancer cases. It’s one way to while away the hours on a snowy afternoon.

Let’s face it, the chemical business is one of the most profitable industries in history. The industry loves to tell us about how it saves lives with vaccines and drugs, makes life more convenient with plastics and food preservatives, and can even duplicate vitamins and make something that looks very similar to cheese, YET it takes no blame or responsibility for the cancer it causes. Instead, researchers look elsewhere for the cause, making me think they are either brilliant and stupid at the same time, evil, in denial paid off, sociopathic or something else beyond my comprehension.

Murphy looks on as research specialist Alina Garbuzov peers into the microscope at the roundworms, which show up as whitish specks on the slides.

by Kitta MacPherson

Princeton Weekly Bulletin

Princeton researcher Coleen Murphy says it may be technologically possible to someday stall aging sufficiently so that people can live in their adult prime bodies until they die.

As an assistant professor in the University’s Department of Molecular Biology and at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Murphy is also an award-winning scientist working in the competitive world of molecular biology. Her specialty is hermaphroditic worms.

Murphy’s work examining the life cycle of roundworms known as C. elegans is taking her into uncharted territory. Understanding the genetic mechanisms controlling the beginning and end of a lifeform’s reproductive capability could lead to learning how to exert control over it. What if reproductive life could be extended indefinitely? Can other signs of aging — memory loss, slackening muscles, even wrinkling skin — be similarly undone?

“She’s a pioneer,” said Virginia Zakian, the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences at Princeton, who studies the parts of chromosomes that may play a role in the prevention of cancer. “She has discovered that there are aspects of aging in humans that can be modeled in this hermaphroditic worm.”

Others agree.

“Coleen is totally fearless,” said her colleague, Manuel Llinás, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton who has known Murphy since they were postdoctoral fellows together at the University of California-San Francisco. Their labs are now one floor apart. “She has taken her research into avenues that are virtually unexplored in any organism, and she is applying her ideas to the worm because it is such a fantastic genetic tool,” he added.

A revelation
It’s a long way from Kansas, where she grew up, with a father who was a Ph.D. biochemist and a biologist mother who possessed a master’s degree and ran the county public health system. Murphy planned on becoming a chemical engineer. As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, which she attended on a scholarship, Murphy was pulled toward biological research while studying for her protein chemistry and genetics classes. In those courses, the students were taught from primary sources — real research papers, not textbooks.

“It was kind of a revelation,” Murphy said. To look at the original ideas of scientists, words that had not been digested and interpreted by someone else, was empowering and exciting. The thought that the authors had done experiments “with their own two hands” and could therefore explore the mysteries of nature was deeply appealing, she said. “I knew I could connect the dots too and extend the boundaries of knowledge,” she said. “I wanted to do that. It had never occurred to me before that this was possible.”

Molecular biology beckoned to her as a field with many mysteries begging to be solved. “There are lots of questions that haven’t yet been asked, and the answers to these are accessible,” she said. “That’s amazing. The idea that you could do this and learn something new was overwhelming to me.”

Murphy knew that Cynthia Kenyon was asking interesting questions. The professor of biochemistry at the University of California-San Francisco was studying the aging process. Kenyon had wagered that, like so much else in biology, aging was probably not a randomly and haphazardly chosen development, but was most likely controlled by genes.

Kenyon also knew that some of the most important discoveries in science have come not from studying people themselves, but from watching simpler creatures, such as bacteria, yeast, mice and roundworms. They often share universal mechanisms of life at the molecular level. Kenyon chose the microscopic roundworm C. elegans as her model organism.

Murphy joined Kenyon’s lab in 2000 as a postdoctoral fellow, just after earning her Ph.D. at Stanford University. She turned up a few years after Kenyon’s group had discovered that a tiny change in the worms’ daf-2 (short for “dauer formation”) gene, which directs the production of DAF-2, the worm’s insulin receptor, doubled the worms’ lifespans. Though she didn’t yet know how to use it, Murphy proposed using a cutting-edge technique known as DNA microarray technology to examine the genetics further. Kenyon put her to work with those techniques. Murphy’s friend from graduate school, Joe DeRisi, gave her advice and training and, best of all, let her use his equipment.

Microarray technology allows the rapid study of large numbers of genes. It helps determine how a cell can control the expression of large numbers of genes simultaneously. Murphy was able to make a whole genome-wide microarray for 20,000 genes almost singlehandedly.

She also learned to use RNA interference technology, another powerful new technique that worked extraordinarily well in the genome of roundworms. Silencing the function of a gene in this way sometimes can allow a researcher to infer what the function of that gene may be.

In June 2003, the lab, led by Murphy’s work, reported that it could identify which genes became more or less active as a result of the mutation of the daf-2 gene.
The alteration enhances the activity of genes that fight infection and control metabolism as well as genes that control the cell’s response to stress, and it dampens the action of specific genes that shorten life. Like a switch, daf-2 ramps up or slows down the activity of a host of different genes. Murphy was the first author on papers that followed in journals such as Nature and Science.With that work finished, Murphy was itching to go off and try something new. But she decided to wait a year to think through what should come next. “It was very important for me because it meant I moved from doing what was the next obvious thing to going beyond that,” she said. “It occurred to me it might be more interesting to ask some new questions. After all, what is it about aging that really intrigues us?”

A new direction
When Murphy arrived at Princeton four years ago to continue her work on C. elegans, she knew she would take it in a different direction. She has moved away from studying death and is focusing on the processes, such as reproductive ability, that decline with age.

Her keen sense of timing and selection of topics is indicative of her immense talent, according to Llinás. “Coleen is good at identifying what the crucial next steps are for a burgeoning field and has done exceedingly well at positioning herself at the right point in time and bringing the right technologies to a field as it has become necessary,” Llinás said.

She has already won the kinds of early career awards that are the mark of an up-and-coming scientist. Among them, she was named a Distinguished Young Scholar in Medical Research for 2008 by the W.M. Keck Foundation, a leading supporter of pioneering medical research, science and engineering. She also was among 31 scientists named recipients of the 2008 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards.

She also enjoys teaching immensely. As the Richard B. Fisher Preceptor in Integrated Genomics, she led undergraduates this year in an intensive course where she combined leading-edge techniques with research.

Denrick Cooper was so inspired by Murphy that he developed his senior thesis around his research in her lab. He also presented his work on Alzheimer-like conditions in roundworms at a scientific conference earlier this year. “I was able to get my first real research experience in Professor Murphy’s lab,” said Cooper, who wants to go on to earn an M.D.-Ph.D. degree. “And I found that I really like it. It’s great to have the ability to learn information firsthand.”

It is also highly instructive to work with such a bold thinker, her students say. “People tend to be more comfortable with sitting on the ideas that they have been instilled with — it takes much more and is sometimes even painful to challenge old beliefs or to switch old ways of thinking,” said Shijing Luo, a graduate student in Murphy’s lab. “However, science will never evolve without doing so. I think this habit of critical thinking is what I have learned most from Coleen, and I will definitely benefit a lot from it.”

In Murphy’s space on the first floor of the modernistic, light-filled Icahn Laboratory, undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and a handful of staff members spend much of their time peering through microscopes and staring at whitish specks on the slides. These are the microscopic nematodes or roundworms that have already been of enormous use to science.

The bacteria-gobbling worms, which are about 1 millimeter long, live in temperate soil environments like gardens and compost heaps. Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner began his study of their molecular and developmental biology in 1974. They come in two varieties, hermaphrodites and males. Hermaphrodites — which have both male and female reproductive organs — predominate.

Scientists like to study them because they are cheap to breed and can be frozen. Though multi-cellular, the worms are simple enough to be studied in great detail. They are transparent, allowing scientists to watch their development in such detail that they have been able to track the fate of every cell produced at birth.

C. elegans are one of the simplest organisms that exist with a nervous system. Scientists, as a result, have already mapped out every neuron in their bodies. They were the first multicellular organisms to have their genomes completely sequenced.

They can be surprisingly complex. They have been found to experience the same symptoms humans experience when they quit smoking. They are hardy too: C. elegans specimens on board the Challenger Space Shuttle survived its tragic crash in February 2003.

They have yielded a rich bounty to science. At least three Nobel Prizes have been awarded to researchers working on C. elegans. Scientists at Princeton and other leading universities worldwide have formed “worm clubs” to discuss the latest developments. Murphy met her husband, Zemer Gitai, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton, in the worm club at the University of California-San Francisco.

Murphy likes roundworms because their life cycles make it easy to study them for aging issues. They live for about two weeks. It takes two and a half days for them to grow from egg to adult. Then they reproduce for about four days (the hermaphrodites produce both sperm and eggs and fertilize themselves). If their life span or reproductive cycle is doubled through genetic manipulation, they can still be monitored in a reasonable amount of time for a scientist’s purposes.

In her lab, Murphy, staff members and students are examining three questions. They are continuing her earlier work, studying how gene expression in worms changes as a result of mutations in key genes associated with aging, like the daf-2 gene. They are examining whether cognitive decline with age can be measured in worms. The Keck grant, which will be for up to $1 million over the next five years, will support Murphy’s efforts to identify the genes critical for the maintenance of higher neuronal activities, in particular, learning and memory, during aging.

Lab members also are looking at whether reproductive life in worms can be extended. Murphy’s New Innovator Award from the NIH will support these efforts with $1.5 million in direct costs over five years. Research team members will be studying the causes of reproductive aging and help identify candidates for the treatment and prevention of age-related reproductive decline and maternal age-related birth defects.

This work already has led them to discover a genetic pathway in roundworms that doubles the span of their reproductive lives and produces eggs that lack the genetic problems often seen in the eggs of aging mothers. Such work could ultimately lead to a drug that could help women.

Murphy views this as a breakthrough. If the results can be translated to humans so that the reproductive lives of female humans could be extended and the quality of their eggs maintained as they age, that could avoid lots of medical intervention, she said. Women are often forced to make difficult personal and career decisions based on their reproductive age, she said.

“I don’t think women should have to think about it at all,” she said. “Men don’t have to.”

Murphy and Gitai are the parents of a son who is almost 2, and she considers herself fortunate to have been able to combine motherhood with professional success. She is also quite glad to be married to another scientist. “We understand each other so well,” she said. “When I say I’ll be done in an hour, he knows that means three hours!”

Dr. Mamdooh Ghoneum presented his findings Tuesday, Feb. 2 at a special conference on “Cell Death Mechanism,” sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) at the Omni San Diego Hotel in San Diego.

“The central focus of the meeting is cell death regulation and how to mine and exploit it for therapeutic gain,” a written evaluation of the AACR special conference states. “This conference includes new complexities of cell death and cell survival, new technologies, and clinical translational aspects necessary for the evolution of new therapeutic strategies.”

For more than two decades, Dr. Ghoneum has pursued a theory that cancer cells self destruct when exposed to small quantities of yeast.

In laboratory tests, Dr. Ghoneum exposed cancer cells to yeast and observed as they ingested the yeast—through a process known as phagocytosis—and then as the cancer cells died. First, he investigated this phenomenon in test tubes (in vitro), introducing yeast to breast, tongue, colon, and skin cancers.

“I have no doubt that I am close to unlocking the mystery as to why cancer cells weaken to the point of destruction after eating common baker’s yeast,” Dr. Ghoneum said. “The cells just gravitate to the yeast. I call it fatal attraction.”

In later experiments, yeast was injected inside the tumors of mice and, again, he observed a decrease in the size of the tumor mass. Then, in his most recent tests, he examined whether yeast could kill cancer cells in mice that had cancer metastasized to the lung. These tests also showed significant clearance of the cancer cells from the lung.

“We observed that when the cancer cells eat the yeast, they die,” Dr. Ghoneum said.

The next step, Dr. Ghoneum said, is to conduct clinical trials to determine safety, efficacy of dosage and a method of treatment.

Born in Egypt, Dr. Ghoneum earned his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo in 1980 and did his postdoctoral studies at UCLA, School of Medicine. Dr. Ghoneum is an internationally recognized immunologist, who is an expert in Cancer Immune Therapy. He holds patents for inventing three biological response modifiers for the treatment of cancer. He has been a researcher and professor at Charles Drew University for twenty-five years, specializing in identifying natural cures for cancer.

Dr. Ghoneum’s work has been studied and duplicated by leading scientists worldwide with results published in top medical journals. His findings have been confirmed by similar studies at the U.S. Department of Health and Science, National Institute of Health (NIH).

“There is a possibility that we could find a way to treat not only the local tumor, but the tumor that has spread throughout the body,” said Dr. Gus Gill, Chairman Emeritus, Department of Otolaryngology, Charles Drew University. “As a surgeon, I always thought that a better way was to try to get rid of surgery (as a necessity) when dealing with cancer.”

For more information on Dr. Ghoneum’s research please view the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoWNQ6-qm94

You want your liver to be happy and healthy or you’ll feel the effects in a dozen different ways. Here are some things that hurt your liver:
• all artificial ingredients
• junk food
• bad and fake fats
• drugs (even prescription drugs)
• alcohol

A daily vegetable juice helps tremendously. Here’s one you can try:
• red organic beet
• organic parsley
• organic carrots
• 1 teaspoon SuperGreens PhytoFood powder

If you have a Champion juicer, that’s ideal, but there are also other great juicers on the market. The important thing is that these kinds of vegetable juices give you powerful nutrients that go right into your blood stream and help cleanse your liver.

1. Bad breath. This is correctable by changing to a vegetarian diet that includes 70 percent vegetables.
2. Foot odor. Very common but not necessary. See above solution.
3. Lack of energy. You can change this by cutting out sugar and junk food and eating foods that contain vitamin B complex.
4. Bad body image. Again, correctable. Losing weight is easy on a real foods diet. Exercise tones you up and good food gets rid of most skin problems.
5. Lack of sexual desire. Believe it or not, sexual desire is usually connected to eating the wrong foods. The hormonal system needs real whole foods.
6. Bad habits. One therapist says, “Wearing socks to bed can be the best birth control known to humankind.”

What causes you to lack energy, want to fall over on the floor or not show up for the day? If it helps, you are definitely not alone. Millions of people every single day feel like they would rather lay on the couch or take a nap an hour after they get up.

Energy is supposed to be a naturally created resource, but for too many people it is not. Why? Because, although your cells are designed to produce energy, what you are lacking is the proper fuel. Energy comes from real, whole foods — specific ones that your cells use and convert into electrical impulses and dancing molecules.

And another thing… there are many things people do to quickly use up their energy, other than just running around. These energy-enervators include:

• stress
• lack of fuel foods
• drugs (including all prescription drugs)
• junk food
• smoking
• overweight conditions
• lack of daily exercise
• worries
• mentally exhausting problems and disinterest
• negative people and their stupid opinions
• illness

If you want more energy, take a close look at these factors.

Despite the continuous and repetitive media stories that pop up every couple of years claiming that a cure for cancer is right around the corner, the facts seem to bear out that it ISN’T. How can we cure cancer when we can’t even admit that the disease is the result of bad diet and toxins? Worse, there’s too much money to be made on cancer therapies and drugs, even though they are ineffective in stopping cancer from happening.

John McDougall, MD, writes “The reason that treatment of the breast area with any amount of surgery or radiation has no effect on the ultimate outcome of this disease is that by the time of diagnosis the course of the disease has already been determined. If it is an aggressive tumor then it has already spread to other parts of the body – beyond the reach of surgery or radiation. If it is not an aggressive tumor, then it is unlikely to affect a woman’s life regardless of what medical actions she takes.”

You can read  more about breast cancer – prevention, mammography, standard treatments, and the advantage of diet therapy in the McDougall Program for Women book.

Modern scientific research shows that all you have to do is follow a natural course and you can not just avoid heart disease — but actually reverse it.

Most people just need to realize that heart disease is something that you can avoid by staying away from bad fats, sedentary lifestyles, smoking and failing to eat real whole foods that include a variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, berries and a little white meat and fish.

The amazing thing is that if you keep a few ideas in mind, it’s enough to keep you healthy.

Just a few ideas:

1. Only eat real, whole foods. Avoid red meat.
2. Never eat chemicals (check product labels for nonfood words, chemical names)
3. Only eat these oils: coconut butter, organic butter, extra virgin cold pressed olive oil and flaxseed oil. NO OTHER OILS
4. Exercise four times a week doing an activity that increases your heart rate
5. Participate in a stress-reducing, relaxing daily enterprise. This can range from meditation to golf to yoga.
6. Scientific studies have shown that certain emotions, such as grief, fear and loss will constrict blood vessels, so be sure to follow number 5 above.

Vascor contains supportive foods discovered through scientific research.

A new study of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing could help to understand the positive effect of dietary restriction on healthy ageing. Previous evidence from different organisms (fruit flies and mice) have shown that dietary restriction increases longevity, but with a potential negative side effect of diminished fertility. So the female fruit fly reproduces less frequently with a reduced litter size on a low calorie diet, but its reproductive span lasts longer. This is the result of an evolutionary trait, as scientists believe: essential nutrients are diverted towards survival instead of reproduction. (Nature, December 3, 2009)

Researchers from the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne have studied whether health benefit stem from a reduction in specific nutrients or calorie intake in general by manipulating the diet of female fruit flies. The fruit flies were fed a diet of yeast, sugar and water, but with differing amounts of key nutrients, such as vitamins, lipids and amino acids. The scientists were able to show that longevity and fertility are affected by a combination of the type and amount of amino acids; whilst varying the amount of the other nutrients had little or no effect. Furthermore, the researchers found out in previous studies that levels of a particular amino acid – methionine – were crucial to increasing lifespan without decreasing fertility. By carefully manipulating the balance of amino acids, both lifespan and fertility were maximised. For the first time, this indicates that it is possible to extend lifespan without wholesale dietary restriction and without lowering reproductive capacity.

As the effects of dietary restriction on lifespan is evolutionary conserved – observed in different organisms – researchers believe that the essential mechanisms apply to it as well. Even though the human genome has about four times the number of genes as the fruit fly genome, there are many similarities on a genetic level, allowing these results to be of significance for humans as well.

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Original work: Richard C. Grandison, Matthew D. W. Piper & Linda Partridge; Amino-acid imbalance explains extension of lifespan by dietary restriction in Drosophila; Nature, December 3, 2009, doi:10.1038/nature08619

In two studies, researchers asked subjects to identify the sex of a series of faces. In the first study, androgynous faces with lowered eyebrows and tight lips (angry expressions) were more likely to be identified as male, and faces with smiles and raised eyebrows (expressions of happiness and fear) were often labeled feminine.

The second study used male and female faces wearing expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear or a neutral expression. Overall, subjects were able to identify male faces more quickly than female faces, and female faces that expressed anger took the longest to identify.

“The present research shows that the association between anger and men and happiness and women is so strong that it can influence the decisions about the gender of another person when that person is viewed briefly,” said Ursula Hess, PhD, from the Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal.

According to the report, the findings from this study as well as others lead to the idea that “the face is a complex social signaling system in which signals for emotion, behavioral intentions and sex all overlap.”

Hess said that the same cues that make a face appear male – a high forehead, a square jaw and thicker eyebrows – have been linked to perceptions of dominance. Likewise, features that make a face appear female – a rounded, baby face with large eyes – have been linked to perceptions of the individual being approachable and warm.

“This difference in how the emotions and social traits of the two sexes are perceived could have significant implications for social interactions in a number of settings. Our research demonstrates that equivalent levels of anger are perceived as more intense when shown by men rather than women, and happiness as more intense when shown by women rather than men. It also suggests that it is less likely for men to be perceived as warm and caring and for women to be perceived as dominant.”

This research is part of a larger set of studies showing that men’s faces are perceived as angrier and women’s faces as happier. Hess’ team is also investigating other facial features that affect the way people perceive emotion, including the effect of signs of aging such as wrinkles and furrows on the perception of emotions in the faces of the elderly.

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Source: eurekalert.org.  The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) is the largest eye and vision research organization in the world. Members include more than 12,500 eye and vision researchers from over 80 countries. ARVO encourages and assists research, training, publication and knowledge-sharing in vision and ophthalmology.