Yes, this article is about bread. Bread because we all eat it - well most of us. Bread is super useful for students, and tasty if it’s made right. My Indian roommate never ate rice - but he certainly ate bread all the time. Similarly, I eat bread about twice a day. According to last week’s AMA Newsletter, the CDC finds bread is actually the top source of sodium in US diet, as well. I have stopped buying bread because commercial bread in the United States is usually awful. When I read this article on whole grains products often actually not being whole grain, I felt affirmed.

For about a year I have been using the Panasonic SD-YD250 Automatic Bread Maker, a bread maker, and I can whole heartedly (grainly?) recommend it. Not only have I already saved the cost of continuing to buy bread from the grocery store, I also now control what goes into my bread 100% of the time. I can add flax seeds, sesame seeds, rasins, nuts, etc.

It’s one of the few commercial items that have really improved my life and I would buy it again without doubting my choice. Bread is great for students - you can make sandwiches and take them with you. You can also throw a lot of different things on bread like meatballs, fried eggs, or hot dogs on top, not to mention cold cuts. So yeah, I’m big on bread :-).

One in five people in the US smoke cigarettes. It’s likely you have someone close to you who does, or maybe you smoke yourself. My step-dad smokes about a pack and a half a day, and I have friends who smoke as well. I’ve tried it myself and admittedly enjoy a hookah with some friends once or twice a year.

It seems as though everyone in the health care field is advocating to quit smoking, but why? Why is it socially acceptable to smoke cigarettes but not cool for obese people to overeat? Neither are healthy, and both endanger lives and poorly impact one’s health.

Since the 1960s, when cigarettes became readily available and were used in just about every movie and TV show, lung cancer rates have exponentially increased. (Click below to enlarge.)

Cancer Rates Since 1930

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancerous death in the US. It usually develops a number of years after one first starts smoking. In the past few years, steps have been taken to fight the preventable cancer. The FDA now mandates cigarette companies to display the effects of smoking on their packages: “SMOKING CAN KILL YOU”, “CIGARETTES CAUSE CANCER”, “CIGARETTES CAUSE FATAL LUNG DISEASE” are a few of the warnings.

As of today in the US, 19.3% of adults over 18 are smoking. The number hasn’t decreased much since 2007, where the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Report stated a smoking prevalence of 19.8% amongst American adults. Quitting any addiction is a difficult task and it requires discipline, counseling, and support from peers or loved ones. Prevention, however, is the best cure.

If you’ve seen Food Inc., you’re well aware that corn products are dominating our grocery shelves. Don’t get me wrong, I love salty, buttered Jersey sweet-corn, but the fact that much of modified corn-products (like high-fructose corn syrup) is in so many of our foods and snacks is extremely worrisome.

If you haven’t seen Food Inc. yet i highly recommend it. It reminded me of Supersize Me (full-length) but was more in-depth and scientific. I know that some of us will not care about the effects of fast food or high-fructose corn syrup one bit, because the bite into a crispy Mc Chicken is just too tempting.

Anyway, the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) increased > 1000% between 1970 and 1990, far exceeding the changes in intake of any other food or food group - which mirrors the rapid increase in obesity in the United States.

A super recent study compared a soda beverage (Dr. Pepper) that contained sugar with the same beverage that contained high-fructose corn syrup. The study is called Effects of high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose on the pharmacokinetics of fructose and acute metabolic and hemodynamic responses in healthy subjects, and concluded:

Changes in postprandial concentrations of serum uric acid, and systolic blood pressure maximum levels were higher when HFCS-sweetened beverages were consumed as compared with sucrose-sweetened beverages. Compared with sucrose, HFCS leads to greater fructose systemic exposure and significantly different acute metabolic effects.

This study is one of the first to strongly suggest that HFCS is worse than sugar.

Before I state my opinion I would like to say that this is a very emotional topic because autism is a very emotional issue. It is emotional because the parents and families suffering because a child of theirs has autism can be great. Generally, it is good to be cautious even with vaccines, but it is also important to debunk some of the lies that have been spread by some populists.

Even after 14 years since the publication of Wakefield’s 1998 article in The Lancet linking autism to the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, many people are still skeptical of getting vaccines. It’s time to address this and move on with our falsely-driven fears.

Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist who is no longer licensed due to gross scientific misconduct and fraudulent actions, hypothesized that the MMR vaccine caused inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract. He stated that the injurious inflammatory cells entered the central nervous system and were cause for autism - a far stretch for those of us who have taken any immunology/pathology courses. This was simply scientifically false; there is no link between autism and vaccines.

What got people questioning the validity of Wakefield’s statements instead of just dismissing them was that the MMR vaccine is given around 3-10 years of age, and that is the age children start developing the disease. However, it’s coincidental, and thousands of dollars have been spent on short-term and longitudinal studies just to prove that point. This poorly-spent money could have been used for research on HIV, cystic fibrosis, or a plethora of other debilitating diseases.

Here are two of the many studies published on the topic:
- The American Journal of Preventative Medicine (2003) published a study comparing the incidence of autism in those who were vaccinated with thimerosol in the vaccine, to those who were vaccinated without the thimerosol compound. (Thimerosol was a compound in question; the study was from 1992-2003.) The results showed no difference in autism incidence.
- Pediatrics (2004) published a longitudinal study from 1996 to 2004 comparing the rate of autism in children who had the MMR vaccine and those who did not. There was no difference in incidence.

The Lancet retracted the article, and Andrew Wakefield was tried and found guilty for scientific misconduct. Wakefield’s lies decreased the number of MMR and other routinely given vaccinations significantly in the UK and Ireland and thus increased the incidence of these not yet eradicated diseases. If this is new news to you, do us all a favor and spread the word: vaccines save lives.

We’ve been talking about big dreams here on this blog. For a little lego man, even the sky wasn’t the limit last week.

Two Canadian students filled a weather balloon with helium, built a box out of styrofoam and captured the lego man’s journey with an attached video camera. The cherry on top is that the video quality is amazingly good!

This story proves to me that amazing things are possible when you have a big dream and get creative. The only thing that is missing is some sweet background music in the video!

Here is the complete story.