Archive for February, 2009
A meal at a fast food restaurant could expose children to “staggeringly” high levels of salt, a survey has suggested.
Lobby group, Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash), found one meal from Pizza Hut contained four times the daily limit of salt for a six-year old.
KFC also did poorly in the analysis of hundreds of food items, which also included McDonalds and Burger King.
All the restaurant chains said they had reduced salt levels considerably in their products in recent years.
The government recommends a maximum of 6g of salt per day for adults, 5g a day for children aged 7-10 and 3g for children aged 4-6.
According to the Cash survey, a family of four sharing a Pizza Hut meal deal – consisting of one Cheesy Bites Meat Feast, one medium Super Supreme, a portion of garlic bread, a portion of potato wedges, chicken wings, and a cheesecake desert – could eat 12.3g of salt each.
The amount of salt consumed in one meal is more than twice the daily limit for an adult and four times the daily limit of a six year old.
A family meal from KFC – consisting of eight mini breast fillets, two regular popcorn chicken portions, four regular fries, a large portion of BBQ beans, a large coleslaw and a 1.5 litre Pepsi shared equally between four – could contain 5.2g of salt per person.
Of meal combinations aimed specifically at children, the salt content varied from 4.3g of salt in a Pizza Hut chicken wrap and a soft drink to 0.6g in a McDonald’s Happy Meal of chicken nuggets and a fruit bag.
CASH said all the restaurants had information on the salt content of their food on the company websites, but Pizza Hut and KFC had no information at the point of sale.
The saltiest individual meals:
Pizza Hut Meat Feast Italian Pizza Plus (meat feast pizza, potato wedges, cheesecake) 9.7g
KFC Variety Meal (three chicken pieces, two hot wings, Colonel’s Crispy Strip, regular fries, regular diet coke) 6.3g
Burger King Chicken BLT Baguette Meal (chicken BLT baguette, regular fries, regular coca cola) 4.8g
McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal (quarter pounder burger with cheese, medium fries, medium coca cola) 3.2g
They called for all restaurants to carry nutrition information so people could make informed choices.
“It is over four years since the maximum daily limits for salt were established for adults and children,” said Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of Cash.
“And yet this survey shows that the salt levels in some of these meals are staggeringly high.
“How can these companies justify selling food that contains more than the maximum daily limit for adults and children in a single meal?”
He added that high levels of salt in childhood contributed to increased blood pressure and risk of heart attack in later life.
A spokesperson for Pizza Hut said the pizzas highlighted in the survey are not part of a family meal deal and that they had been working since 2004 to cut the salt in their foods.
Lower salt options
McDonalds Chicken McNuggets Meal (six chicken nuggets, medium fries, medium coca cola) 1.5g
KFC Colonel’s Meal (two chicken pieces, regular fries, regular diet coke) 2.5g
Burger King Hamburger Meal Deal (hamburger, regular fries, regular coca cola) 2.96g
Pizza Hut Seafood Lovers Pan Pizza Plus (seafood pizza, garlic bread, chocolate fudge cake) 4.7g
“Every sensible parent knows that Pizza Hut is an enjoyable treat and we have significantly reduced the salt levels in our products over the past few years.”
A spokesperson for KFC said they had reduced salt by up to 30%.
“We were the first – and remain the only – fast food chain to have removed salt from our fries, leaving customers to choose whether they want to add salt or not.”
McDonalds said they had worked hard to make significant reductions in salt levels and would continue to do so.
Burger King said their burgers had no added salt.
News Source: BBC NEWS
The door opened and in she walked – as skinny as a coat of paint with show-stopping cleavage, flashing the greatest smile money could buy.
Year-round tan, legs up to here. A Bond-girl body which had clearly been the regular recipient of sea-salt wraps and expensive exfoliations. Yet CC’s body was not quite the shape she wanted it to be.
A niggling layer of fat – virtually undetectable to the naked eye – clung stubbornly to her inner thigh, refusing to yield even in the face of a daily exercise routine rigorous enough to bring a Greek god to his knees.
Like many women in Los Angeles, CC demonstrates the sort of devotion to physical perfection which in some other parts of the world would be seen as obsessive.
In her case peer pressure undoubtedly plays a part. As host of her own internet TV show she mixes it with some of the most glamorous people on the planet.
A fixture at the very poshest parties and premieres, there is hardly a red carpet in town which has yet to cushion CC’s perfectly pedicured feet.
Yet when the time came for the love handles to leave she wavered. Uneasy about going under the knife she shopped around only to discover there was another option, a procedure called lipodissolve.
Lipodissolve represents a potential goldmine for doctors, which may explain why clinics are sprouting up faster than Starbucks
Once injected into the fat a chemical known as PCDC, which is derived from soya bean, breaks the fat down. After a short series of injections, a few weeks apart, those festively plump areas are soon a thing of the past.
Cosmetic surgeons call it a “miracle cure,” yet the treatment has been banned in several countries (including the UK) and has yet to gain regulatory approval here in the US.
“It’s the new Botox,” CC told me excitedly as a Beverly Hills doctor discharged a syringe of the magic potion into the perfectly brown flesh of her upper right thigh.
Botox, I need not remind you, is a derivative of botulism. A toxin used to paralyse muscles in the face, freeze frown lines, and iron out wrinkles.
It is now the most popular non-surgical procedure in America. Health regulators took a while to get enthused about that as well. Something to do with injecting a deadly toxin into your body – I can’t imagine why.
Yet amongst the rich and the famous, Botox is now de rigueur. The little vial of poison has become a latter day elixir, hailed by Beverly Hills “ladies who lunch” as a veritable fountain of youth.
Some believe lipodissolve could go the same way. It is a non-invasive procedure so there are neither cuts nor stitches to mar the body beautiful.
The injection takes about 15 minutes (hence its nickname ‘lunchtime lipo’) and unlike those old-fashioned methods of losing weight – such as dieting and exercise – the results are evident within a matter of days.
The only side effects, so it is said, are a slight swelling and numbness around the area where the needle pricked the flesh.
Try telling all that to the growing number of women who report problems with lipodissolve.
One, who wanted to lose some fat remaining from a pregnancy, reportedly developed a lump the size of a tennis ball after the treatment led to an infection in her abdomen. It took a week in hospital to recover, and her stomach is now the shape of a spoon. Another person who does not have a good word to say about lipodissolve is Dr Brian Kinney of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
A medical man of the old school he nonetheless proudly showed off his assistant’s nose job (“all my own work”) before rounding on the latest unproven practice in his profession.
The greatest concern is – what happened to the fat once it was dissolved?
Did it somehow find its way to the kidneys and thence into the urine? Or meander into the liver only to be metabolised? Or somehow wriggle into the muscles only to be burned up?
Nobody who carried out the procedure seemed to know.
“There’s a lot of basic science that still needs to be done,” Dr Kinney told me. “The danger is that instead of going out looking more beautiful the patient goes out maimed or disfigured.”
In a country suffering an obesity epidemic, the notion of an elite group spending thousands of dollars fine-tuning their fat seems self-indulgent to say the least.
Lipodissolve represents a potential goldmine for doctors, which may explain why clinics are sprouting up faster than Starbucks coffee shops.
Yet patients like CC say the results are amazing and contend the treatment represents the perfect answer for those who are not able or simply do not have the time to lose weight naturally.
With a flash of those perfectly white teeth she told me she would be back for another injection in a few weeks time.
News Source: BBC NEWS
The ingredient which makes jalapeno peppers hot also makes prostate cancer cells commit suicide, a study suggests.
Tests showed that capsaicin triggered 80% of the cells to start the process leading to cell death.
The US research in the journal Cancer Research also found tumours treated with capsaicin were smaller.
UK prostate experts say capsaicin could be the basis of a future drug but warned eating too many hot peppers has been linked to stomach cancer.
We caution men with prostate cancer in the UK against upping their weekly intake of the hottest known chillies
Chris Hiley, The Prostate Cancer Charity
In the study, researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center studied mice who had been genetically modified to have human prostate cancer cells.
They were given a dose of pepper extract equivalent to a man of 200 pounds (90.7kg) taking 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week.
That would be the same as having between three and eight fresh habanero peppers – the highest rated peppers for capsaicin content.
Normal cells go through a constant process where millions die every second – a process called apoptosis – while millions more are made, to keep the numbers the same.
But cancer cells avoid that process and “dodge” apoptosis by mutating or deregulating the genes that participate in programmed cell suicide.
Capsaicin was seen to increase the amount of certain proteins involved in the apoptosis process.
Capsaicin also reduced the amount of prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a protein whch is often produced in high quantities by prostate tumours.
Fish intake
Dr Soren Lehmann, who led the study, said: “Capsaicin had a profound anti-proliferative effect on human prostate cancer cells in culture.
“It also dramatically slowed the development of prostate tumours.”
Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: “This is interesting laboratory-based work on cells but we don’t yet know how, if at all, it might help men with prostate cancer.
“Eventually, it may be possible to extract the capsaicin and make it available as a drug treatment.
“In the meantime we caution men with prostate cancer in the UK against upping their weekly intake of the hottest known chillies – high intake of hot chillies has been linked with stomach cancers in the populations of India and Mexico.
“For now, if men with prostate cancer want to improve their diet they should avoid fatty foods, eat less red and processed meat, increase their fish intake and enjoy a wide and plentiful range of fruit and vegetables every day.”
News Source: BBC NEWS
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