Vitamin E supplements do more harm

Good morning friends. Indiscriminate use of high-dose Vitamin E supplementation does more harm than good, a new study has warned.

"There were so many conflicting reports about Vitamin E and its effect on various diseases, particularly heart disease, that we wanted to set the record straight, says Prof. Dov Lichtenberg of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine.

Study co-author Dr. Ilya Pinchuk said: "Our new study shows that some people may be harmed by the treatment, whereas others may benefit from it. Now we’re trying to identify groups of people that are most likely to benefit from the effects of Vitamin E.”

The researchers evaluated the results of the prominent studies measuring the health benefits of Vitamin E but reached varying conclusions. There have been many previous publications on the subject.

Analysis of the results of all these past publications together revealed that subjects who did not take a Vitamin E supplement enjoyed more quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY), a standard parameter used in medicine to assess the effect of medical interventions.

Dr. Pinchuk said: "To explain the meaning of this parameter, consider a participant who was healthy during the first 10 out of 20 years of the study, but then suffered a stroke and became dependent on others throughout the following 10 years.

“The QALY during the first 10 years of healthy life is 10, but after the stroke the quality of life is only half of what this person had before. Therefore, the second decade is considered the equivalent of merely 5 years of healthy life and in sum a person’s QALY is 15,” Dr. Pinchuk added.

The researchers examined data from more than 300,000 subjects in the US, Europe and Israel.

"Our major finding was that the average quality-adjusted life years (QALY) of Vitamin E-supplemented individuals was 0.30 less than that of untreated people. This, of course, does not mean that everybody consuming Vitamin E shortens their life by almost 4 months. But on average, the quality-adjusted longevity is lower for vitamin-treated people. This says something significant," Dr. Pinchuk said.

The results were recently reported in ATVB, a leading journal of cardiology, and discussed in the journal BioFactors. The Times of India

61st Republican Day

Wishing All A
61st Republican Day
To My Countrymen

Happy Uttarayan from Gujarat

Happy Uttarayan to All

from Dhirendra from Gujarat.

May this 2010 1st feastival

bring Happiness to your life.

I wish you and your family a very

Happy Makar Sankranthi.

Calcium vital to tickle our taste buds

Good morning friends. A new study has shown that calcium plays a vital role in tickling our taste buds.

The team of Japanese researchers have shown that calcium channels on the tongue are the targets of compounds that can enhance taste. Kokumi taste foods contain various compounds that have no taste themselves, but can enhance the basic sweet, salty and umami taste sensation they co-exist with. Lead researcher Yuzuru Eto examined whether calcium channels- which sense and regulate the levels of calcium in the body- might be the mechanism involved.

They found that calcium channels are closely related to the receptors that sense sweet and umami (savory) tastes and that glutathione (a common kokumi taste element) is known to interact with calcium channels. During the study, researchers created several small molecules that resembled glutathione and analyzed how well these compounds activated calcium channels in cell samples.

They diluted the same test substances in flavored water (salt water, sugar water, etc.) and asked volunteers (all trained in discriminating tastes) to rate how strong the flavors were. The findings revealed that the molecules induced the largest activity in calcium receptors and also elicited the strongest flavor enhancement in the taste tests. The research tested several other known calcium channel activators, including calcium, and found all exhibited some degree of flavor enhancement, while a synthetic calcium channel blocker could suppress flavors. The Times of India