Yet another medicinal reason for beer consumption

It kills blood borne parasites.  At least in fruit flies.  A common scourge of fruit flies is a parasitic wasp.  The wasp lays its eggs in the fruit fly larvae where they grow until eventually killing the host and hatching.  Well, fruit flies have come up with a defense.  If you think about it, they live in a world of booze.  Their food is decaying fruit.  Another way to describe decaying fruit is fermenting fruit.  The amount of alcohol in their normal environment can range from 5 to 15%.  (Mine too because I like the heavier microbrews . . .)  Researchers found that infected fruit flies actually sought out and consumed alcohol to kill the parasites.  And it worked.  When they dissected the the previously infected fruit flies, the researchers found wasp larvae with organs spewing out their anuses.  The interesting part is that the infected fruit flies actually sought out the alcohol where the uninfected ones did not.  So if you will excuse me, I need to go do a little paraticide.  Just in case.  TGIF.

Wow. This could be huge for defeating Alzheimer's

Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind have been found serendipitously (Borepatch, that means by accident).  Penicillin, Teflon, plastic and even Coca Cola are great examples of things that were invented accidentally.  Well, you may be able to add bexorotene as an outright cure for Alzheimer's to that list.  Bexorotene is a drug that is used to treat certain forms of skin cancer.  Researchers at Case Western were giving high doses of the drug to mice as part of a research project that had nothing to do with the horrible, degenerative, mind wasting disease.  And within 72 hours, a mouse with that had exhibited all of the signs of Alzheimer's was cured.  They ran more tests.  Normal mice would use a sheet of tissue paper to line their nest.  Alzheimer's mice forgot how.  Normal mice would not re-enter a cage where they had previously been given an electrical shock.  Mice with Alzheimer's would.  After being given high doses of bexorotene, the Alzheimer's mice feathered their nest with tissue and would refuse to go into the electrified cage.  When the researchers checked the amyloid plague build-up in the brains of the mice previously diagnosed with Alzheimer's (which is a hallmark of an Azheimer's diseased brain), it was reduced by 25% in just 6 hours and by 50% in three days time.  This is not a chance discovery of a preventative medication, it is a cure.  And since bexorotene is an already FDA approved drug, human trials can begin immediately.  Lets keep our fingers crossed.

The medical/scientific community finally seems to be coming around

After decades of them telling me that basically my entire diet is bad for me, they seem to have given up. As I said in one of my posts yesterday and others, studies are increasingly being published about the health benefits of beer. Then it was shown that your morning jolt of java was good for you.  Now there is more good news.  Turns out that whole thing about fried foods clogging your arteries kinda like spackling them with plaque is not true.  A recent Spanish study followed more than 40,000 people over a decade.  It was just published in the British Medical Journal.  The study, based in Spain, found no correlation between heart disease and the amount of fried food in the diet.  So stop by the Colonel's for a bucket on the way home tonight.  The stop and pick up a six-pack to go with it.  And since I seem to be the new model for healthy dietary consumption, I suggest you get ahead of the curve and start loading up on potato chips, cheesecake and pork sausage, too, cuz they're part of my well rounded and now medically vindicated diet, too.

I remember when news of a study broke that linked coffee to pancreatic cancer



Not that it slowed down my coffee consumption, but it did make me sad that one of my relatively few vices and pleasures in life was, in fact, bad for me. Fortunately, subsequent research thoroughly debunked the first finding. Now we find out that it is actually good for you. A Chinese study has been released that shows several compounds in coffee are quite good in warding off type 2 diabetes. Insulin, the hormone that is required for the body to metabolize glucose, is made by the pancreas. An amyloid protein called hiAPP can accumulate to the point of killing pancreatic cells. It turns out that caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid and even caffeine all prevent the formation of hiAPP and thus protects the pacreatic cells. So have another cup of joe. It's good for you.

I knew it!



Not that it would cause me to stop drinking beer, but it is always nice to be vindicated.  I suspect my body instinctively knew how good beer was for me.  It is just nice to have the medical community catch up with me.  Beer has been determined to have some great health benefits (I'm talking about the physical benefits, the mental ones are obvious).

1. Strong bones.  Beer has silicon which is important for building bone density.  Better still, a 2010 study showed that the rich, hoppy micro brew type beers were the best for you and the light lagers and the non-alcoholic beers were the least good for you.
2. Stronger heart.  A study last year aggregated the data from 16 previous studies which meant they ended up with 200,000 subjects.  And the evidence of the heart health benefits was startling.  People who quaffed a pint of beer daily had a thirty one percent lower risk of heart disease.  We will just skip over the part about how those benefits declined and went the other way if you drank too much...
3. Healthy Kidneys. A recent scandanavian study showed that people who drank a beer a day had a forty percent lower chance of developing a kidney stone.  They postulated that the beer helped lessen leaching of calcium from the bones and also flushed out the kidneys.
4. My personal favorite-increased brain capacity.  A 2005 study found that daily beer drinkers had up to a 20% lower risk of dementia or Alzheimer's.  They also scored 18 months mentally younger than non-drinkers.  I know the scientific reason why beer makes you smarter, too.  So I am not accused of academic plagiarism, I first saw it postulated by Cliff Claven on Cheers.  Everyone knows that beer kills brain cells.  And everyone knows that's nature's way is for the weakest to die off first and for the strong to survive.  Ergo, the more you drink the more you kill of the weak brain cells so only your strong ones thrive.
5. Lower caner risk.  Apparently it must be haute cuisine to marinade steak in beer in Portugal.  That is the only reason I can come up with as to why they would do a study about the effects of such marinating, but they did.  And the miracle fluid that is beer once again came through with shining colors.  It showed that a 70% reductions in the carcinogens known as heterocyclic amines or HCAs.  Maybe it was the antioxidants or the sugars that blocked formation of HCAs, or maybe just a Divine protection from Bacchus, but it works.
6. More vitamins.  Beer drinkers had a 30% higher level of B6 in their blood than non-drinkers or wine drinkers according to a study in the Netherlands.  It also found higher levels of folic acid and B12.
7. Stroke preventor.  No less than the Harvard School of Public Health found that moderate beer intake lowered the incidence of strokes.  The theory is that it literally thins your blood and helps to prevent the formation of clots.
8. Lower risk of diabetes.  Staying with Harvard, another study of 38,000 middle aged men (no, I wasn't asked to participate) revealed a 25% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.  Apparently beer increases the body's insulin sensitivity which in turn reduces the risk of diabetes.
9. Lower blood pressure.  Maybe I should have gone to Harvard because they seem to drink a lot of beer there.  In yet another study they did, this time of 25-40 year olds, there was a twenty five percent lower risk of high blood pressure if you were a moderate beer drinker.
10. Live longer.  Here is the really cool thing.  A paper published by the US Department of Agriculture that looked at 50 previous studies in 2005 showed that beer drinkers lived longer than non-imbibers.  So you get to drink more beer!!

Ew, gross. I mean cool

I've heard of coughing up a lung, but a lung cancer? Apparently that is what a woman in the UK did. Well, technically it was a throat cancer, but close enough. Thirty seven year old Claire Osburn was driving down the road when she felt a tickle in her throat, turned into a coughing fit, which turned into a three quarter inch lump of liver colored flesh on the seat beside her. The biopsy of the expelled tissue showed it to be metastatic adenocarcinoma - an aggressive form of cancer that likely stemmed from glandular tissue at the back of her mouth. Doctors told her that she undoubtedly had cancer cells in the area surrounding the former base of the tumor. They said that with aggressive chemotherapy she had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Only all of the tests and scan showed that she was completely cancer free. She had hacked it all up. And to think, I was beginning to worry about this persistent cough I can't seem to shake. Now I'm just going to cough harder!

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.



Technically, that should be "her" not him, but we really do have the technology. Barbara Campbell really does have a bionic eye.  Barbara has the genetic disease of retinitis pigmentosa.  It is degenerative and she was blind by the time she was 30.  All of her the photoreceptor cells in her retina were gone.  She was sentenced to a lifetime in darkness.  Until, that is, this past year when at 56 Barbara got a reprieve.  Second Sight Medical Products, in a feat worthy of Steve Austin himself, rescued her with its prototype Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System.  Inside Technology Spectrum describes the process and equipment as follows:

The process that allows the blind to see starts with a pair of sunglasses, which sport a tiny video camera mounted in the bridge just above the nose. The camera captures an image and sends it down a wire to a visual processing unit hanging on the patient's belt. That VPU—which is a little larger than a smartphone—­converts the world's complexities into a 60-pixel image in black and white, which it sends back to transponders on the glasses. From there the image goes wirelessly to antennas wrapped around the sides of the eyeballs, and from there to the 60-electrode arrays that are tacked to the delicate retinas.

Barbara says she can make out streets and buildings.  And they are just getting started.  Hmmm.  Maybe she is more like Data on Star Trek . . .