FDA Diabetes Actos (pioglitazone) Cancer Risk

 FDA reviewing preliminary safety information on Actos (pioglitazone):

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced it has begun a safety review of the diabetes drug Actos (pioglitazone), after receiving preliminary results from a long-term observational study designed to evaluate the risk of bladder cancer associated with use of this drug.

The preliminary results are based on five-year data from an ongoing, 10-year observational study by the manufacturer, Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America Inc., San Diego. These early results showed no overall association between Actos exposure and risk of bladder cancer. However, there was an increased risk of bladder cancer in patients with the longest exposure to Actos and in those with the highest cumulative dose of the drug.
Despite this The agency has not concluded that Actos increases the risk of bladder cancer.

Meanwhile a group of Doctors in America have researched a drug free, free of dangerous side effects , way of tackling the Diabetes epidemic now the scourge of the Western World - eat real food! Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine PCRM are gathering information from ongoing research that shows a Plantarian Diet can have a dramatic effect on type 2 (and in some cases type 1) diabetes.

This is pretty much the same diet used by President Bill Clinton to lose weight and deal with his heart disease.
The Diet does come with a health warning ! The effects are so dramatic that you have to carefully watch your medication and be prepared to reduce the dose otherwise you may have an overdose.

The Food for Life Alliance has recently trained instructors in the diet principles and will soon be conducting a number of free workshops around the UK starting with Stoke , Birmingham and London.

Fight Cancer With Chocolate Mousse | NBC Dallas-Fort Worth

Fight Cancer With Chocolate Mousse | NBC Dallas-Fort Worth:

Free cooking classes promote nutrition to prevent and fight cancer

At 27 years old, Katherine Lawrence was an Iraq war veteran, but it was the battle she was facing at home that would prove to be the toughest.

"I started to have really bad pain in my abdomen, and I found out I had severe endometriosis and uterine cysts and ovarian cysts," said Lawrence.

"My doctor wanted to put me into early menopause, and then schedule me for a hysterectomy," said Lawrence.

Desperate to avoid that, she started eating a low-fat, vegan diet and in just five weeks her health problems were virtually gone.

"My doctor was amazed," said Lawrence.

Now, she teaches cooking classes to help prevent and battle cancer in conjunction with a non-profit group called The Food for Life Alliance working with the charity The Cancer Project that was set up by PCRM.

Late 2010 Katherine came over to the UK to teach 14 students and train them to deliver Cancer and Diabetes fighting Cookery workshops.

To find out more see One World Day and Saladmaster

Prostate cancer paradox

Many observational studies associate prostate cancer with markers of metabolic syndrome. Which gives us the omega3/trans fat paradox, well discussed in several places around the net.

Here's a similar prostate paradox.

How come these two exceptions buck the trend? Here's a random thought:

Let's assume prostate cancer is related to chronic hyperinsulinaemia, a reasonable idea, ie it is "metabolic syndrome of the prostate".

Conversely, castration is a component of conventional prostate cancer treatment.

Getting to the chemical-castration stage of metabolic syndrome might well be prostate cancer protective.

Omega 3 fats probably slow progression of metabolic syndrome, trans fats probably accelerate it.

If you want to get to the castration level of metabolic syndrome as fast as possible, to maximise this prostate benefit, never forget to ask for your favourite lipotoxin by name.

For metabolic castration you should always ask for Crisco.

Peter



Alternatively I have a couple of bricks available. It's an old anaesthetist's joke:

Surgeon: "I don't need to use anaesthesia for castration."

Anaesthetist: "Really, what's your technique?"

Surgeon: "I have these two bricks and I smash them together on the testicles."

Anaesthetist (aghast): "Doesn't that hurt?"

Surgeon: "Only if you get your thumbs in the way."

Mice and breast cancer

Laura and Elizabeth (thanks for full text) both forwarded links to this study.

Low carb diets, in the correct mouse model, delay onset and slow progression of breast cancer.

It says the sorts of things you would expect it to say and, if you really feel this highly artificial mouse model has relevance to the sorts of breast cancer humans might develop, it certainly suggests that a low carbohydrate diet might have some benefits. But the paper itself is awful.

Two giggles did come out of it. First was the use of high percentage of casein as the sole protein source. Now somewhere, sometime, there was a vegan nut who screamed that casein was carcinogenic. China? China Syndrome? China Study? T. Colon Campbell???? Shrug. These has-been vegans get everywhere.

The second is the extreme fat phobia of the authors. I know these people have to make a crust and funding is not what it used to be and fat bashing is always helpful but there eventually comes a point when people really believe that fat causes cancer. Even highly saturated milk fat.

You can just imagine that cows evolved casein and palmitic acid to kill their calves. Or humans are not mammals in the same way as cows are, human breasts having evolved to sell newspapers rather than to feed offspring. Human babies should be fed sucrose water with a little soya bean oil added of course. It's a strange world.

I have reached the point where I no longer give any credence to high fat diet studies where 30% of the calories are coming from sucrose or the pellets are stained red to signify Crisco. Not so the current authors.

Ultimately, while sucrose and trans fats are excellent substances to study when looking at the effects of pushing the profitability of the food industry to its absolute maximum, they have nothing to do with a high fat diet based on Food.

Reading through the full text there are so many failures of perception and basic biochemistry that it might be worth a post in the end, but here's a typical blooper. Not only do we have Gourmand rats, we also have mice who need false teeth!

First we have to have another black box warning

******************************************************************
Untested ad hoc hypotheses can make you look very stupid.

******************************************************************

Here we go:

"Although mice on 8% CHO diet had slower growing tumors, they lost weight, weighing, on average, 20% less than mice on 5058 diet (Fig. 1D). This was consistent with the mice eating less than the 5058 group (data not shown), likely because the 8% CHO pellets were significantly harder to chew."

Executive summary: We're idiots.

Extended translation:

Diet 5058 is standard breeding colony crap-in-a-bag with 55% of calories from starch. It appears to be mildly obesogenic compared to 8% of calories from starch... That MUST be because the lower carb diet is too hard to chew. We couldn't be arsed to have a control group offered a harder diet with 55% carbs because we're idiots, as are our scrutineers.

GCBC anyone?

Oh, and another giggle: 5058 is described, COMPLETELY incorrectly, as a "Western Diet". It's a starch based, sucrose free, 20% fat, mostly PUFA, trans free diet, remarkably similar to Barnard's idiotic vegan diet for the progression of diabetes in humans. It's standard mouse chow.


Where do funding bodies find these people to throw their money at?

Eeeh, yer has ter larph.

Peter