Day: 08/30/2015

Hormone Reset Diet

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Your hormones could be making you gain weight. Learn how to stay slim for good.

Here’s a mind-bender: Being overweight often has nothing to do with calories or exercise. For a huge number of us, the problem is instead about misfiring hormones. Research is still catching up with this paradigm shift, which has yet to be comprehensively studied. But seeing how this revelation has helped my patients (and me) slim down and feel better gives me confidence that it’s true for most women who are trying to lose weight and can’t. (Do you think off-balance hormones are causing your weight gain? Find out how to control them and lose up to 15 pounds with The Hormone Reset Diet.) You already know about some weight-affecting hormone issues, like thyroid and insulin imbalances. But other, more subtle ones could also be keeping you from the body you want. Biology class, anyone?

Estrogen expands your fat cells.

 

I think of leptin as the hormone that says, “Darling, put down the fork.” Under normal circumstances, it’s released from your fat cells and travels in the blood to your brain, where it signals that you’re full. But leptin’s noble cause has been impeded by our consumption of a type of sugar called fructose, found in fruit and processed foods alike. When you eat small amounts of fructose, you’re OK. But if you eat more than the recommended 5 daily servings of fruit (which in recent decades has been bred to contain more fructose than it used to) plus processed foods with added sugar, your liver can’t deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. Instead, your body starts converting it into fats, sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides and depositing them in the liver and elsewhere in your belly. As more fructose is converted to fat, your levels of leptin increase (because fat produces leptin). And when you have too much of any hormone circulating in your system, your body becomes resistant to its message. With leptin, that means your brain starts to miss the signal that you’re full. You continue to eat, and you keep gaining weight.

The so-called stress hormone cortisol can create all kinds of trouble for women who want to shed weight. When cortisol rises, it encourages the conversion of blood sugar into fat for long-term storage. Hoarding body fat in this way was a useful survival adaptation for our ancestors when they faced stressful famines. Not so much today. Obviously, reducing stress in your life will help rein in this fat-storing hormone, but there’s another very common source of the problem: daily coffee, which elevates cortisol dramatically, causing your body to hoard fat when you least need to.

 

Although estrogen is responsible for making women uniquely women, it’s also the hormone that can be the most troublesome in the fat department. At normal levels, estrogen actually helps keep you lean by goosing the production of insulin, a hormone that manages blood sugar. When estrogen gets thrown off, though, it turns you into a weight-gain machine.

Here’s how: When you eat, your blood sugar rises. Like a bodyguard, insulin lowers it by escorting glucose into three different places in your body. When insulin is in good working form—not too high and not too low—it sends a small amount of glucose to your liver, a large amount to your muscles to use as fuel, and little to none to fat storage. When you’re healthy and in good shape, your pancreas produces exactly the right amount of insulin to have your blood sugar softly rise and fall within a narrow range (fasting levels of 70 to 85 mg/dl). But when your estrogen levels climb, the cells that produce insulin become strained, and you can become insulin resistant. That’s when insulin starts to usher less glucose to the liver and muscles, raising the levels of sugar in your bloodstream and ultimately storing the glucose as fat. Your fat tissue can expand by as much as four times to accommodate the storage of glucose.

How do estrogen levels climb? Meat is one of the primary reasons. You take in a lot less fiber when you eat meat; research suggests that vegetarians get more than twice as much fiber as omnivores. Because fiber helps us stay regular, and we process excess estrogen through our waste, eating less fiber drives up our estrogen.

Meat also contains a type of fat with its own estrogen problem. Conventionally raised farm animals are overloaded with steroids, antibiotics, and toxins from their feed and the way they’ve been raised. When you eat them, those substances are released into your system. They can behave like estrogen in the body, adding to your overload.

 

You are confronted with an astounding number of toxins each day, including pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and about six different synthetic hormones in meat. Toxins are lurking in face creams, prescription drugs, processed foods, your lipstick, the linings of tuna fish cans, the fire-retardant materials in couches, and even the air you breathe. The list goes on.

Many types of these toxins, such as pesticides, plastics, and industrial chemicals, behave like estrogen when absorbed in the body. Experts believe that our increasing exposure to toxins helps explain why so many girls are entering puberty earlier and earlier and why many boys exhibit feminine characteristics such as developing breasts. Xeno-estrogens, as these particular toxins are called, have been associated with an elevated risk of estrogen-driven diseases like breast and ovarian cancers and endometriosis.

MORE: 5 Everyday Food Chemicals That Could Be Making You Gain Weight

All this fake estrogen overwhelms your body’s testosterone—which is vital for hormone balance—and contributes to estrogen overload. Testosterone contributes to muscle growth, which in turn supports metabolism. And, as we already know, estrogen overload raises insulin insensitivity. The combination adds pounds to your frame: A study from Sweden published in the journal Chemosphere showed that exposure to a particular type of pesticide called organochloride was linked to a weight gain of 9½ pounds over 50 years.

And that’s just one type of toxin. Your risk of weight gain and disease from exposure to toxins may be greater than you realize. A survey by the CDC demonstrated that 93% of the population has measurable levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in store receipts and canned foods that disrupts estrogen, thyroid, and androgen hormones. Endocrine disruptors have been shown to interfere with the production, transportation, and metabolism of most hormones.

Now you know the “whys” of your broken metabolism, the reasons regular diets don’t address the root cause of your weight gain. Hormones dictate what your body does with food. Fix your hormones and your body will slim down without any extra effort from you.

Water Will Help You With Weight Loss – Here Are the Most Current Fact-Based Reasons Why

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Gaining weight is easy..taking it off is another matter.  There are certain action steps that we can take in our daily lives to help us achieve weight loss or any goal.  Assuming the goal is weight loss, drinking water each day is one action step towards that goal.  The trick is to be consistent and and follow-through.

How Does Water Help Promote Weight Loss?

The role water plays in weight loss is very important and here’s why: The kidneys require water to function properly and to expel toxins from the body.  When there is a lack of fluid (water), the kidneys can’t perform well and it needs the assistance of the liver.  The liver then, has the added burden of detoxing the body when it should be metabolizing fat stores.  This means that the liver is not metabolizing the fat in your body like it should be, thus, fat stores remain in the body and weight loss ceases.

What is the Most Recent Research?

There is abundant research showing water’s effect on fat metabolism in the body.  One such study (International Journal of Obesity, 2009) looked at whether weight loss was seen with the use of an ACE-Inhibitor – an ACE-Inhibitor reduces blood pressure.  They noted that rats given the ACE-Inhibitor in the study had lost fat despite eating the same amount.  The reason for this, they concluded, is that the rats treated with the ACE-Inhibitor drug drank twice as much water as untreated rats. Hydrated cells allow for better fat metabolism.  Dehydrated cells reduce their ability to take-up glucose. This inability to utilize glucose slows down our metabolism and energy allowing for weight gain.

Two recent studies (Boschmann M,, Steiniger J, 2003) using humans showed that when blood is diluted through water intake, the breakdown of fat (Lipolysis) in the body is promoted.  This further supports the notion that water, indeed, is a useful fat loss tool.

Dr. Michael Boschmann found that by drinking 500 ml of water, increased metabolic rate by 30% in both men and women.  The increase was observed 10 minutes after the consumption of water and the metabolic increase was sustained for over an hour!  They attributed this to the increased metabolic action of room temperature water warming-up to body temperature.  Additionally,  the large amount of water that dilutes the blood, promotes the release of adrenalin and norepinephrine to handle this demand. This metabolic process increases heat production and thus, burns calories.

Water Suppresses Your Appetite

Water acts as an appetite suppressant which helps prevent overeating, thus promoting weight reduction.  People who do not include water as part of their fat loss arsenal, are much hungrier because the brain has trouble differentiating between hunger and thirst.  This is why we tend to think we are hungry when in actuality, we are thirsty.

It is true that there is no one action that will promote fat loss, it is a combined strategy of consuming fewer calories, exercise, adequate sleep and hydration.  Remember to stay fully hydrated throughout the day with a minimum intake of 8 eight oz. glasses of water each day.

New ‘Tissue Velcro’ could help repair damaged hearts .

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This photomicrograph shows three sheets of the scaffold on top of each other; the hook and loop mechanism can be seen in the middle layer.
Credit: Radisic Lab

Engineers at the University of Toronto just made assembling functional heart tissue as easy as fastening your shoes. The team has created a biocompatible scaffold that allows sheets of beating heart cells to snap together just like Velcro™.

“One of the main advantages is the ease of use,” says biomedical engineer Professor Milica Radisic, who led the project. “We can build larger tissue structures immediately before they are needed, and disassemble them just as easily. I don’t know of any other technique that gives this ability.”

Growing heart muscle cells in the lab is nothing new. The problem is that too often, these cells don’t resemble those found in the body. Real heart cells grow in an environment replete with protein scaffolds and support cells that help shape them into long, lean beating machines. In contrast, lab-grown cells often lack these supports, and tend to be amorphous and weak. Radisic and her team focus on engineering artificial environments that more closely imitate what cells see in the body, resulting in tougher, more robust cells.

Two years ago, Radisic and her team invented the Biowire, in which heart cells grew around a silk suture, imitating the way real muscle fibres grow in the heart. “If you think of single fibre as a 1D structure, then the next step is to create a 2D structure and then assemble those into a 3D structure,” says Boyang Zhang a PhD candidate in Radisic’s lab. Zhang and Miles Montgomery, another PhD student in the lab, were co-lead authors on the current work, published today in Science Advances.

Zhang and his colleagues used a special polymer called POMaC to create a 2D mesh for the cells to grow around. It somewhat resembles a honeycomb in shape, except that the holes are not symmetrical, but rather wider in one direction than in another. Critically, this provides a template that causes the cells to line up together. When stimulated with an electrical current, the heart muscle cells contract together, causing the flexible polymer to bend.

Next the team bonded T-shaped posts on top of the honeycomb. When a second sheet is placed above, these posts act like tiny hooks, poking through the holes of honeycomb and clicking into place. The concept the same as the plastic hooks and loops of Velcro™, which itself is based on the burrs that plants use to hitch their seeds to passing animals.

Amazingly, the assembled sheets start to function almost immediately. “As soon as you click them together, they start beating, and when we apply electrical field stimulation, we see that they beat in synchrony,” says Radisic. The team has created layered tissues up to three sheets thick in a variety of configurations, including tiny checkerboards.

The ultimate goal of the project is to create artificial tissue that could be used to repair damaged hearts. The modular nature of the technology should make it easier to customize the graft to each patient. “If you had these little building blocks, you could build the tissue right at the surgery time to be whatever size that you require,” says Radisic. The polymer scaffold itself is biodegradable; within a few months it will gradually break down and be absorbed by the body.

Best of all, the technique is not limited to heart cells. “We use three different cell types in this paper; cardiomyocytes, fibroblasts and endothelial cells, but conceptually there is really no limitation,” says Radisic. That means that other researchers could use the scaffold to build layered structures that imitate a variety of tissues, livers to lungs. These artificial tissues could be used to test out new drugs in a realistic environment.

Moreover, the ability to assemble and disassemble them at will could enable scientists to get much more detailed information on cell response than is currently possible. “You could take middle layer out, to see what the cells look like,” says Radisic. “Then you could apply a molecule that will cause differentiation or proliferation or whatever you want, to just that layer. Then you could put it back into the tissue, to see how it interacts with the remaining layers.”

The next step is to test how well the system functions in vivo. Radisic and her team are collaborating with medical researchers in order to design implantation experiments that will take the project one step closer to the clinic.

New Large Hadron Collider study may overturn Standard Model of physics .

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© Pierre Albouy
US scientists have conducted potentially revolutionary research that could force a rewrite of the Standard Model, the theory for how particles interact, which has been accepted by physicists since the 1970s.

A team at the University of Maryland studied the behavior of leptons, tiny subatomic particles that form the building blocks of our universe, during the initial run of CERN’s $9 billion research facility in 2011 and 2012.

Leptons are highly unstable, and decay at a fast, but previously predictable rate. Yet scientists noticed that there was a mysterious force that was affecting this process, when they studied the readouts from the Swiss facility. The impact was small, and the team is still unsure about the explanation for it, but the effect was consistent, and unaccounted for in the Standard Model, which explains almost all particle phenomena, and even helped predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, which has since been proven to be real.

“The Standard Model says the world interacts with all leptons in the same way. There is a democracy there. But there is no guarantee that this will hold true if we discover new particles or new forces,” said Maryland professor Hassan Jawahery, ahead of the publication of his study in Physical Review Letters. “Lepton universality is truly enshrined in the Standard Model. If this universality is broken, we can say that we’ve found evidence for non-standard physics.”

The research is particularly important, as it indirectly builds on another experiment, the Stanford University-based BaBar study, which has been in progress since the 1990s, and also appears to contradict the Standard Model.

“The experiments were done in totally different environments, but they reflect the same physical model. This replication provides an important independent check on the observations. The added weight of two experiments is the key here. This suggests that it’s not just an instrumental effect – it’s pointing to real physics,” said Brian Hamilton, one of the study authors, in a press release published by the University of Maryland.

The Maryland team say they will now mine data from current CERN experiments, to see if an explanation can be found for the new force.

“We are planning a range of other measurements. The LHCb [Large Hadron Collider beauty] experiment is taking more data during the second run right now. We are working on upgrades to the LHCb detector within the next few years. If this phenomenon is corroborated, we will have decades of work ahead. It could point theoretical physicists toward new ways to look at standard and non-standard physics,” Jawahery said.

While the study of particles that are one-hundred-million-billionth of a meter might seem esoteric, researchers say that leptons could give the key to understanding the entire universe.

“Any knowledge from here on helps us learn more about how the universe evolved to this point. For example, we know that dark matter and dark energy exist, but we don’t yet know what they are or how to explain them. Our result could be a part of that puzzle. If we can demonstrate that there are missing particles and interactions beyond the Standard Model, it could help complete the picture,” Jawahery said.

Hawaii’s newest power plant uses ocean temperatures to generate energy

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As the demand for renewable energy grows, approaches that have previously gone out of fashion are coming back into vogue, and that includes Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) – the process powering a new power plant in Hawaii. OTEC takes advantage of the temperature difference between the chilly depths of the ocean and the warmer water found circulating near the surface.

The idea behind OTEC originated in 1881, as Mary Beth Griggs reports for Popular Science, with the first working implementation of it arriving in 1930. That power plant was destroyed by storms, and in subsequent years engineers struggled to make an OTEC plant that generated large amounts of energy in an efficient way. The several decades of low oil prices that followed seemed to have put paid to OTEC for good.

Now it’s back, as the plant built by Maki Ocean Engineering proves. It’s the largest of its kind in the world, and it’s expected to produce power for up to 120,000 homes on the island, which has a population of around 1.4 million people.

At the heart of the OTEC system is ammonia, which has a low boiling point compared to other liquids. First, it passes through pipes surrounded by warm water, which causes the ammonia to evaporate into a gas – this then powers a turbine and generates energy. Freezing cold water taken from the ocean depths (around 900 metres down) is used to reverse the process, returning the ammonia back to liquid form, and again powering turbines as it falls. Afterwards, the water is pumped back into the ocean.

A similar process was used on board the SOLO-TREC submarine launched by the US Navy several years ago, with Hawaii again being the chosen location. The vessel’s acronym stands for ‘Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangian Observer – Thermal RECharging’ and it had the unique distinction of generating more energy than it used up while it patrolled around the ocean.

Eventually, Maki Ocean Engineering wants to move its new plant from its current location at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) further out into the Pacific Ocean, which would mean the pumped water having less distance to travel. The company estimates that 12 commercial-scale plants like this could provide energy for the whole of Hawaii.

One of the benefits of this type of technology is that it can run around the clock, with no peaks or troughs in supply. But the plant is still being treated as an experimental test run to see if OTEC can meet its potential more than 100 years after it was first proposed. Similar schemes are currently in operation in Japan and South Korea as well.

Four-day school week linked to better academic performance, study finds.

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As long as school has existed, students have wanted to spend less time there. But for the first time, a study in the US has shown that giving primary school kids a three-day weekend doesn’t appear to have a negative impact on academic performance – in fact, the results suggest it can even boost some test scores.

The study looked at the effect of the four-day school week on the reading and maths scores of children in years 4 and 5 in Colorado. While the shortened week wasn’t associated with a change in reading ability, maths test scores were significantly higher among children who went to school one day less a week.

The research comes at a time when a large number of schools in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming have already cut back their weeks to four long days, and other states are considering following their lead to reduce costs. To be clear, the four-day school week contains the same amount of hours as a traditional school week, but they’re just condensed into four days rather than five.

“What interested me about our results is they were completely opposite to what we anticipated,” Mary Beth Walker, one of the researchers from Georgia State University, said in a press release. “We thought that especially for the younger, elementary school kids, longer days on a shorter school week would hurt their academic performance because their attention spans are shorter. Also, a longer weekend would give them more opportunity to forget what they had learned.”

But the results showed the opposite. The study looked at the number of students in each school that scored “proficient or advanced” on state-wide maths and reading tests, both before and after the school changed to a four-day week.

On average 55.5 percent of a school’s students were achieving these top scores in their maths tests the year before they switched to a four-day week, but after changing, 63.1 percent were getting those results.

This improvement increased over time, with an average of 72 percent of students scoring “proficient or advanced” on their maths tests two years after they’d switched to a four-day school week. The percentage of students scoring the same level in their reading tests also increased from 61.5 to 71 percent, but this change wasn’t statistically significant.

Obviously the study only shows a correlation between the four-day school week and better academic performance, and doesn’t prove that the reduced days in class directly impacted test scores. The researchers also admit that they can’t yet explain exactly how having a three-day weekend would benefit the kids’ scores. But they do have some suspicions.

“My own personal hypothesis is teachers liked it so much – they were so enthusiastic about the four-day week – they did a better job,” said Walker. “There’s some evidence in other labour studies that four-day work weeks enhance productivity.”

This initial study was only conducted in rural school districts, and further research is needed to show whether the four-day school week can also benefit those living in big cities, as well as to provide some insight into exactly why they work.

But for now the early evidence would suggest that cutting a day off the school week doesn’t negatively impact academic performance. And if it helps schools save money, and potentially also helps students and teachers get more engaged in education, then it could be a very good thing.

We just hope that once schools begin to catch on to the benefits of the three-day weekend, workplaces might begin to do the same. Because honestly, who couldn’t handle working a few longer hours Monday to Thursday to get Fridays off?

Beat Sugar Addiction in One Week with Peppermint

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Refined sugar is unbelievably addictive. Professor Hoebel of Princeton Universityfound that “sugar stimulates receptors to activate the same pathways that are stimulated directly by drugs such as heroin or morphine.” The Journal of Psychoactive Drugsstated in a study published in 2010 that ‘Sugar addiction” follows the same pathways in the brain that a habit-forming drug does. Sugar addiction is a difficult habit to break for many people, especially when the body and digestive tract become so overrun with yeast, candida, parasites and other sugar-loving bacteria that not eating sugar triggers intense withdrawal symptoms.
Fortunately, you can beat sugar addiction using natural tools such as peppermint essential oil.
Alan Hirsch MD studied peppermint’s ability to directly affect the brain’s satiety center, which triggers a sensation of fullness after meals. He found that inhaling peppermint can directly affect your brain’s satiety center, the ventro-medial nucleus of the hypothalamus.

How to Use Peppermint Essential Oil

You can also use a diffuser and inhale deeply as cravings come on. Applying peppermint essential oil to the feet also helps.

  • Apply several drops (2-4) with a carrier on location, abdomen and temples
  • Mix 2 drops of coconut oil with 2 drops of peppermint essential  oil. Apply the mixture down the inside center of your wrists.  Do it every morning and evening.

365 days in a bubble: Scientists to simulate life on Mars for a year.

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A group of six scientists have shut themselves in a dome on a volcano in Hawaii for a one-year NASA mission imitating life on Mars. The project aims to find out how humans interact between each other in a closed space without fresh air, food or privacy.

Crew commander and soil scientist Carmel Johnston, doctor of medicine Sheyna Gifford, architect Tristan Bassingthwaighte, astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux, physicist and engineer Christiane Heinicke and pilot Andrzej Stewart started their “Martian” mission Friday.

 

http://www.rt.com/news/313834-mars-simulation-mission-year/

Doctors say a mid-day nap lowers blood pressure and can ward off heart attacks .

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  • Daily nap can also cut need for blood pressure medications, experts reveal
  • People should follow in the footsteps of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher by taking sleep during the day
  • Research was carried out at Asklepieion Voula Hospital in Athens, Greece

A regular mid-day nap can help lower blood pressure and ward off heart attacks, doctors have revealed.

Experts in Athens, Greece, say people should follow in the footsteps of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher by taking siestas.

The new research, presented at the European Society of Cardiology conference in London, revealed how a daily snooze of an hour or more also cuts the need for blood pressure medications.

A regular mid-day nap can help lower blood pressure and ward off heart attacks, doctors have revealed (file picture)

A regular mid-day nap can help lower blood pressure and ward off heart attacks, doctors have revealed .

Sir Winston famously said that nature had not intended man to work from 8am until midnight ‘without that refreshment of blessed oblivion’ in the middle of the day.

Dr Manolis Kallistratos, a cardiologist at Asklepieion Voula General Hospital in Athens, who led the new study, said: ‘Although (poet) William Blake affirms that it is better to think in the morning, act at noon, eat in the evening and sleep at night, noon sleep seems to have beneficial effects.

‘Two influential UK prime ministers were supporters of the midday nap.

‘Winston Churchill said that we must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner while Margaret Thatcher didn’t want to be disturbed around 3pm.

‘According to our study, they were right because midday naps seem to lower blood pressure levels and may probably also decrease the number of required antihypertensive medications.’

The study included 386 people with raised blood pressure who were aged 61 on average.

Experts in Athens, Greece, say people should follow in the footsteps of Winston Churchill (pictured) and Margaret Thatcher by taking siestas

Experts in Athens, Greece, say people should follow in the footsteps of Winston Churchill (pictured) and Margaret Thatcher by taking siestas

Dr Manolis Kallistratos, who carried out the research, said Margaret Thatcher (pictured) 'didn't want to be disturbed around 3pm'

Dr Manolis Kallistratos, who carried out the research, said Margaret Thatcher (pictured) ‘didn’t want to be disturbed around 3pm’

 

After adjusting for other health factors that might influence the results, it found that nappers had a 4 per cent lower blood pressure reading when they were awake and a 6 per cent lower reading while they slept at night than people who did not nap.
Dr Kallistratos said that although the reductions seemed low, even modest reductions could cut the risk of cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, by up to 10 per cent.
Other findings from the study also suggest that midday sleepers experience less damage from high blood pressure in their arteries and heart.
Dr Kallistratos said: ‘Our study shows that not only is midday sleep associated with lower blood pressure, but longer sleeps are even more beneficial.
‘Midday sleepers had greater dips in blood pressure while sleeping at night which is associated with better health outcomes.
‘We also found that hypertensive patients who slept at noon were under fewer antihypertensive medications compared to those who didn’t sleep midday.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3215971/Good-news-like-snooze-Doctors-say-mid-day-nap-lowers-blood-pressure-ward-heart-attacks.html#ixzz3kNFghvS5
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

Should GMO companies be held liable when your gut starts producing pesticides?

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On Monsanto’s website, this multinational seed conglomerate makes the claim that Bt toxin engineered into its genetically-modified (GM) corn and cotton crops is “naturally occurring” and poses no threat to “humans, other mammals, birds, fish or beneficial insects.” But a closer look at the science reveals that Bt toxin can survive and replicate in the human gut following ingestion, which begs the question: Should Monsanto and other purveyors of GM crops bearing this transgenic trait be held responsible for potential health damage caused by this patented pesticide?

GMO

Contrary to industry claims, horizontal gene transfer and DNA absorption of GM crops bearing the artificially engineered Bt trait can and does occur. A 2013 paper published in the online journal PLOS One looked at this more in-depth, revealing that DNA molecules from various substances can survive processing and end up being absorbed into the bloodstream. This includes the controversial Bt trait, which was designed to be self-replicating for the purpose of bursting the intestines of pests, thus killing them.

“Blood is not free of DNA,” the paper explains. “[T]here are animal studies, mainly focusing on the GMO issue, supporting the idea that small fragments of nucleic acids may pass to the bloodstream and even get into various tissues. For example, foreign DNA fragments were detected by PCR based techniques in the digestive tract and leukocytes of rainbow trouts fed by genetically modified soybean, and other studies report similar results in goats, pigs, and mice.”

An earlier paper from 2005 published in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology lays the groundwork for how horizontal gene transfer affects humans, describing in detail how GM crops directly alter intestinal flora through microbial “transgenes.” It points out how pre-approval safety assessments should (but to this day, don’t) include an evaluation of the potential for horizontal gene transfer, among other effects.

GM transgenes capable of surviving digestion and proliferating in human digestive tract

The Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT) notes that these transgenes, which the biotech industry claims are destroyed by the digestive system, are fully capable of surviving and persisting in the human gut. Affirming the findings of the PLOS One study, IRT explains that GM genes like Bt toxin can not only survive digestion and replicate, but also spread to further generations.

“Once transferred into gut bacteria, transgenes may confer survival advantages, allowing them to endure and spread,” the group explains. “The only human feed trial ever published confirmed that genetic material from Roundup Ready soy transferred into the gut bacteria in three of seven human volunteers. The transferred portion of the transgene was stable inside the bacteria and appeared to produce herbicide tolerant protein.”

In other words, ingestion of these GM traits can potentially turn a person’s gut into a living, breathing pesticide factory. This just so happens to be the subject of a pending lawsuit against Monsanto filed by three residents of Los Angeles, who allege that Monsanto’s claims that Roundup herbicide “targets an enzyme found in plants but not in people or pets” is patently false.

Concerning engineered Bt toxin, numerous studies prove that ingestion of this built-in pesticide by mammals can provoke a negative immune response, inflammation, allergies, and other harm. And once present in the intestinal tract, this self-replicating poison can induce long-term health damage for which there may not be a remedy.

“Bt-toxin breaks open the stomach of insects. Could it similarly be damaging the integrity of our digestive tracts?” asks IRT’s Jeffrey Smith.

“The biotech companies insist that Bt-toxin doesn’t bind or interact with the intestinal walls of mammals, and therefore humans. But here too they ignore peer-reviewed published evidence showing that Bt-toxin does bind with mouse small intestines and with intestinal tissue from rhesus monkeys.”

Investigate the origins of your food and find new articles on GMO foods at GMOFood.news

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050985_Monsanto_gut_microbes_legal_liability.html#ixzz3kNIZLqyK