HGH Sprays Are a Scam, Says FTC

For years, companies have been marketing oral sprays that are claimed to contain human growth hormone (HGH, an anti-aging drug popular among those who can afford it). The FTC has filed a temporary restraining order against three companies requiring them to stop making such false claims. Read the story here.

The whole premise of supplemental HGH use for fat loss is silly. It takes pharmaceutical doses (supraphysiological levels) to induce any fat loss. This isn't possible without actually injecting the drug, which is a popular approach to anti-aging among the wealthy (and not without risks). However, all other attempts at increasing HGH levels with supplements or workout strategies are doomed to failure.

Health News You Can Use

High Protein Intake Promotes Thermogenesis
Many studies support the high protein diets advocated by Atkins and the South Beach plan. New information suggests that high protein intake triggers an increase in heat-producing chemicals known as uncoupling proteins (UCPs). UCPs increase metabolic rate (calorie burning), making it easier to lose weight. This study used rats as subjects, but similar findings have been found in humans. (Eur J Nutr, published online, Dec. 2004)


Replace Simple Sugars with Whole Grains
For many of us, it's obvious that consuming simple sugars results in fat storage. UMass researchers confirmed the obvious, finding that those who consume simple, high-glycemic carbs had higher body mass indexes than those who consume complex carbohydrates. (Am J Epidemiol, 161: 359-367, 2005)

So ditch the simple sugars (any form of sugar, white flour, and some fruits) and add whole grains into the diet. Whole grains tend to have higher protein content and higher fiber content, both of which slow digestion, preventing sharp increases in insulin levels. Insulin leads to fat storage (except post-workout) so you should be trying to control your insulin levels. Whole grains also leave you feeling fuller after a meal. (Am J Clin Nutr, 80: 1237-1245, 2004)


Eat Fish to Prevent Senility
Another new study demonstrates the brain-protective power of fish oils. If you can't tolerate eating fish, and some people can't, get some fish oil capsules and take 4 to 24 a day (more for blood sugar control and reduction of inflammation).

From CBS/WebMD:

(WebMD) Fish really is brain food after all, according to a new study, which shows eating fish can slow the mental decline associated with aging.

The results show that eating fish at least once a week slowed the rate of mental or cognitive decline in elderly people by 10 percent to 13 percent per year.

"That rate of reduction is equivalent to being three to four years younger in age," write researcher Martha Clare Morris, ScD, of Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, and colleagues in the Archives of Neurology.

Their findings were released online today in advance of the scheduled December publication date in the journal.

Researchers attribute the protective effects of fish on the brain to omega-3 fatty acids. Fish, especially oily types like salmon and tuna, are a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential for brain development and normal brain functioning.

Eating fish regularly has already been linked to a lower risk of dementia and stroke, and some animal studies show that at least one type of omega-3 fatty acid known as DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) plays an important role in memory performance during aging.

Fish Slows Mental Decline
In the study, researchers looked at the relationship between fish consumption and age-related cognitive decline in more than 4,000 participants aged 65 and over in the ongoing Chicago Health and Aging Project.

Researchers interviewed the participants every three years and assessed their mental function as well as their diets.

After more than six years of follow up, researchers found that the more fish people ate, the slower their rate of mental decline.

People who ate fish at least once a week experienced a 10%-13% lower rate of cognitive decline than those who ate fish less frequently.

Researchers say these protective benefits of fish persisted even after adjusting for other dietary factors, such as fruit and vegetable consumption.

"This study suggests that eating one or more fish meals per week may protect against cognitive decline associated with older age," write the researchers. "More precise studies of the different dietary constituents of fish should help to understand the nature of the association."

Sources: Morris, M. Archives of Neurology, Oct. 10, 2005 online edition; vol 62.
News release, American Medical Association.
Story by Jennifer Warner
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
© 2005, WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.

No Soft Drinks in Arizona Schools

From KIKO News:

The Arizona Republic reports that efforts are being made to extend a ban on soft drink sales from elementary and middle schools to high schools. State School Superintendent Tom Horne and state Representative Mark Anderson say they plan to introduce legislation in January to do that. High schools were originally included in the legislation that passed this year. But they were taken out of the final version after heavy opposition from the food and beverage industry. The Arizona Beverage Association says it will continue to fight to keep the soda ban from being extended to high school. The group issued a school vending policy this week that promotes a variety of choices for high school students. This includes keeping at least half of the slots in vending machines for regular soda. The other half would be for nutritious and "low calorie" beverages. Horne says he would agree to keep diet soft drinks in high schools if the association will stop serving sugary soft drinks.

California has made similar efforts, as have other states. With the ever-increasing problem of teen obesity and diabetes, it's time to realize that health is more than a "personal willpower" issue. Yes, people should know better than to ingest poisons (high-fructose corn syrup), but kids are the most impressionable segment of the population -- they respond to emotional cues more than rational thought (peer pressure or prestige, for example). The soft drink companies target a young audience because they have disposable income and they are easily influenced.

There is no good reason to have soft drinks in the schools. The kids should be drinking water, milk, or fruit juice (and not Gatorade or Powerade unless they are in a school sport that entails dehydration risk). The soft drink companies have built a business model around getting young people attached to their product with the awareness that these kids will likely become lifetime customers (same scam the cigarette companies once used).

Stepping back to look at this politically, what these new laws are saying is that health is not simply a personal choice -- the social structures (capitalism in this case) play a role as well. This is part of the Integral Fitness Solution to getting a handle on the obesity epidemic. We cannot ignore the role our society plays in the problem, nor can we ignore the role of cultural values ("the Pepsi Generation," "Have a Coke and a Smile").

Kevin Trudeau Sells Snake Oil

The FTC won't let Kevin Trudeau sell or promote supplements, but they can't stop him from promoting his book (Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About), which (due to a gullible public and pervasive infomercials) has become a bestseller.

Trudeau is responsible for the coral calcium scam, among others. He made millions off an overpriced calcium supplement that is no better than cheap oyster shell calcium. The FTC banned the infomercials due to the fallacious claim that coral calcium could cure cancer.

His book claims that natural substances can cure everything from cancer to herpes. One of his claims is that microwaved food is responsible for nearly all ills under the sun. He claims to have proof of everything he claims.

Here's the problem: he presents partial truths. For example:

• Natural cures do work for some illnesses.
• The government is corrupt in sponsoring and protecting the pharmaceutical industry.
• Drug companies do lie to the government and the public about their drugs.

If people were not so convinced that science is a lot of "hocus pocus," the public wouldn't be dumb enough to buy this moron's pitch. He's taking advantage of a skeptical and uneducated public to get rich. DON'T BUY HIS BOOK OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE!

Antioxidant in Green Tea May Fight Alzheimer's Disease

Green tea has become a wonder plant in recent years, touted for everything from weight loss to anti-cancer properties to reducing the risk of heart disease. A new study suggests that the active ingredient, EGCG, may also protect the brain from Alzheimer's disease.

From the WebMD article:

In the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers studied the effects of treating mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's disease with high doses of the green tea antioxidant.

After several months of daily injections of EGCG, the results showed that the nerve cells of treated mice generated as much as 54% fewer beta-amyloid protein than nontreated mice nerve cells.

"The findings suggest that a concentrated component of green tea can decrease brain beta-amyloid plaque formation," says researcher Jun Tan, PhD, MD, director of the Neuroimmunology Laboratory at the University of South Florida, in a news release. "If beta-amyloid pathology in this Alzheimer's mouse model is representative of Alzheimer's disease pathology in humans, EGCG dietary supplementation may be effective in preventing and treating the disease."

Based on the format of the study, it's likely that drinking green tea won't impart the same health benefits. However, there are now a variety of green tea extract supplements available that could provide enough ECGC to have a positive impact on brain health. The researchers believe that a 1,500 to 1,600 milligram dose of ECGC daily is needed to see benefits. This intake level has already been determined to be safe for humans.

WARNING: If you decide to take this much ECGC on a regular basis, please be aware that dehydration will be a risk. You will likely lose weight (mostly water) in the first few days. You will also feel jittery due to the caffeine still present in most green tea extracts on the market.

At this point, I would not recommend using the existing supplements at such a high dose due to the concerns I just raised. Use the supplements as directed. I suspect that within a year, pure ECGC supplements without the caffeine will be available.

Extra Bodyfat Damages Arteries in Teens

The prevailing wisdom was that obesity didn't have a significant impact on health until adulthood. However, a new study shows that extra bodyfat, even in teens who are not overweight or obese, can have a detrimental effect on artery health.

A study appearing in the Sept. 20 issue of Circulation reports that:

Even teenagers who aren't overweight can show signs of cardiovascular damage if they carry excess bodyfat.

As early as age 13 teens showed evidence of reduced blood vessel elasticity -- an early warning sign of heart and vascular disease in adults. Higher amounts of body fat were associated with lower elasticity.

The teens who weighed the most appeared to have the greatest risk. But even those who were not considered obese or even overweight showed evidence of reduced blood vessel function.

Pediatric cardiologist Stephen Daniels, MD, says the study offers some of the best evidence yet that carrying excess body fat early in life can lead to the blood vessel damage that is a major cause of heart attack and stroke.

Daniels is a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and a spokesman for the American Heart Association.

Read the rest of the WebMD article here.

The Truth About Mercury in Your Tuna

If you eat a lot of tuna as a good source of protein, you've probably heard all the fears about the mercury content in tuna. T-Nation has posted a good article on the topic with some solid recommendations. It looks as if three cans of tuna a week may be the safe upper limit, although supplements may make a higher intake possible. Read the article and decide for yourself.

Tips to Feel Full When Dieting

Five Suggestions for Feeling Full and Eating Less
Eric Sabo, Healthology

It's a common complaint: how can you lose weight if you're hungry all the time? The solution may be easier than you think. Many acts of overeating, in fact, may have less to do with appetite than the sheer amount of food we have on our plate, says Dr. Barbara Rolls, a nutrition expert at Penn State University and author of The Volumetrics Eating Plan.

If we "super-size" our meals, it only stands to reason we would want to get our money's worth by cleaning our plates. But this is not how our bodies are meant to work. "Big meals override the cues that tell us we are full and should stop eating," says Rolls, who has seen this time and time again in various studies. "It's quite strange."

Food packaging and commercials may suggest cravings that are not really there; plus there's depression, anxiety and other outside influences that cause us to eat when we're not really hungry. Of course, a healthy appetite can make it hard to lose weight, especially if your stomach is grumbling because you've cut back on calories to shed a few pounds.

So rather than just eating less, Rolls and others say, there are ways to feel full without giving up all that much. For hunger pains that don't go away—real or imagined—here's what the latest studies suggest:

Super-size filling foods Fruits and vegetables contain a lot of water and fiber, which can quickly fill you up. Better yet, they are low in calories. Ross suggests super-sizing these foods much like you would fast food. "Rather than cutting back, just eat more fruits and vegetables instead," she says.

Try a variety to a keep your diet interesting. Corn or strawberries may prove more appealing than Brussels sprouts or grapefruit for some, so don't give up on all of these foods if you don't care for a few.

Eat your protein A high-protein, low-carb diet is believed to be unhealthy over the long term, but the latest diet craze has helped reveal a little-appreciated detail: protein-rich foods are possibly more filling. In a recent study, Dr. David Weigle of the University of Washington School of Medicine followed 19 people who kept to a 2,000-calorie diet for several months.

At first, they got 15 percent of calories from protein. Then they upped their protein to 30 percent. The men and women ate the same percentage of carbohydrates throughout, while cutting back on fats. Compared to the weeks they ate less protein, volunteers reported feeling more full when they ate 30 percent of their calories from protein. They also lost more weight.
No one has studied whether a juicy steak is more filling than fruits and vegetables, at least calorie by calorie, says Rolls. But as long as the protein is lean, she says that including such foods in your diet may help you eat less and lose weight.

Limit fatty foods, can the soda Cakes and other fatty foods pack a lot of calories without adding much substance. A recent study on mice found that high-fat diets seem to override a hormone that tells the body when it's full. Foods laden with sugar and fat may taste good, but they do little to fill you up.

Indeed, researchers at Tufts University found that nearly two-thirds of adults got more calories from soft drinks than any other specific food. As a whole, they were also more obese than those who stuck to fruit juice and low-fat milk.

Snack "smart" A little snacking may not only keep your hunger in-check between meals, but may also leave you less tempted to overeat at dinner. Indeed, some research suggests that snacking throughout the day instead of sitting down for regular meals may lead to greater weight loss.

Keep in mind that this does not apply to what we think of as traditional snacks, such as cookies or chips. Nibbling on nuts or cheese, which are high in protein, may leave you fuller than snacking on foods that are high in carbohydrates or calories. To make sure snacking doesn't become just another big meal, try picking out different foods that are low in calories and keep them handy for when hunger strikes.

Eat until you're hara hachi bu Translated from Japanese, this literally means "eat until you're 80 percent full." Residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa, who are among the oldest and healthiest people on the planet, have perfected this practice over the years.

In general, Okinawans eat 10 percent to 40 percent fewer calories than Americans. Try eating until you feel mostly full, then wait 20 minutes. Research suggests that many people are satisfied after following the 80 percent rule, even though they eat less.

Posted on ABC News website.
Copyright 2005 Healthology, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Integral Fitness Solution

As a professional fitness trainer, my job usually involves helping people lose weight. I get the occasional person who wants to build some muscle or get stronger, but most often the goal is to lose body fat. People who join a gym and hire a trainer are actually the minority among those who are seeking to lose weight. My clients are willing to work their bodies as part of the process.

Most of the people wishing to lose body fat are looking for a magic pill. The underlying belief is that fat loss is a matter of making our bodies do what we want them to so that we can continue to eat badly and avoid exercise. The magic pill might be literal, or the newest fad diet, or some kind of gadget advertised in an infomercial. It is not surprising that most of the people who begin a fat loss program fail to follow through with the plan for more than two weeks.

However, if we take a step back and look at all the issues involved in becoming overweight, it is apparent that there is more to it than poor diet and lack of exercise. There are actually four major areas of our lives that contribute to our issues with body weight: our bodies, our psyches, our cultural beliefs, and our social structures. Addressing all four areas of our lives is the foundation of the Integral Fitness Solution.

The Body
The obvious place to begin is with our bodies. There are two major areas to look at here, diet and exercise. We all know we eat badly, consuming too much sugar, the wrong kinds of fats, and too much junk food. We also know that most of us don’t get enough exercise. Those are the easy ones. There is also disease to consider, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. All three of these are usually caused by poor habits in diet and exercise, but once they manifest, they can impact the ways in which we work with our bodies to get healthy again.

Another area to look at is genetics. Biology is certainly not destiny, but it provides limitations on what we can expect to accomplish or how we work toward our goals. Some of us are designed to be bigger and some thinner. A woman can be healthy and fit and still not be a size two. A man can be healthy and fit and not have visible abdominal muscles. Beyond the obvious physical considerations, there are also other factors to look at, such as hormones, age, body structure, innate energy levels, and so on.

Yet the solution begins with exercise and healthy nutrition. As little as an hour a day, five days a week is all the exercise it takes to make significant improvements in cardiovascular fitness, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar metabolism. A program of moderate cardio exercise and weight training can improve body composition, depression, self-esteem, sexual desire, bone density, strength, flexibility, and an assortment of other physical and quality-of-life components. Additionally, simply eliminating sugary beverages from the diet can produce weight loss of between five and fifteen pounds in a single year. If fried foods are also reduced and baked goods eaten in moderation, cholesterol levels would improve for many people.

The Psyche
The second area we must look at in understanding how we become overweight is the psyche. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to place several distinct areas of inquiry under the umbrella of the psyche: emotions, intellect, soul, and spirit. Each of these is a unique developmental line in our lives, each with a unique impact on weight issues.

Emotions The emotional self is the most powerful aspect of the psyche factoring in weight issues. For most people who are more than twenty pounds overweight, fat loss is not merely a matter of better diet and exercise -- there are patterns of emotional eating that have contributed to weight gain. Emotional eating may involve something as simple as gravitating toward the snack table at parties as a way to deal with social anxiety or rewarding a positive behavior with a favorite treat, or more often, soothing difficult emotions with “comfort food.” I know many people, women and men, who hit the ice cream or cookies when they are angry, depressed, or sad. Among men, the tendency is to grab a few beers and order a pizza or some fast food.

Emotional eating serves one key purpose for those who engage in it -- it allows us to bury our emotions beneath a flood of soothing neurochemicals. Look at the foods most people favor for binge eating: ice cream, chocolate, cookies, cake, potato chips, soft drinks, and so on. All of these foods are predominately carbohydrate based, and the resulting change in brain chemistry is an increase in serotonin. Serotonin is known to be a calming substance associated with relieving depression, inducing relaxed states, and facilitating sleep. Many of the prescription anti-depressants work by making more serotonin available for uptake by brain cells.

Once we learn that certain foods can produce specific chemical reactions in our brains (a learning that is often unconscious), we can become addicted to the mental state produced by those foods. Over a period of months or years, emotional eating becomes a way to avoid dealing with difficult emotions. All of those emotions that are not worked through go “underground” in the psyche, and occasionally leak out in ways that totally baffle us. Over time, an emotion that is buried will gain in power until it eventually becomes a psychological complex that can act as a distinct personality all on its own.

Many of us feel our emotions in our bodies. Anxiety is felt as butterflies in the stomach. Stress is tension in the back or shoulders. Anger is often a clenched fist or general contraction of the body’s musculature. Sadness or depression is often experienced as a loss of energy in the body that results in slumped shoulders and a rounded back, as though we are carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. Over time, as we engage in emotional eating to bury the emotions, we develop a layer of fat that serves to insulate us from our feelings. We become less able to feel our bodies. Instead of our bodies animating our emotions and feelings, they become dead weight we drag around with us. Many seriously overweight people have a lot of repressed emotions that will surface as they lose the weight.

The situation is made worse by a cultural sanction of “comfort foods.” As often as not, this is a tradition passed down from a mother to her children, although it can also circulate among friends. I cannot count the number of times I have seen women I know or work with share chocolate as a way to deal with a broken heart. Of course, now we know there is a chemical in chocolate that triggers the same part of the brain that is active when we are first feeling the flush of new love. Not only is this behavior shared among friends, it is also culturally sanctioned -- it is something we see on television and in movies.


Intellect For some, intellect or education can also be a factor. In fact, despite the efforts of the media, few people really know how to eat healthy. Maybe because of the media overload and the contradicting studies that come out nearly every day, most people don’t know how to make sense of the information available. Few of us are actually taught how to think discriminatingly and to separate useless information from what is valuable. Should we follow Dr. Atkins or Barry Sears The Zone, Dean Ornish (low fat) or Bill Phillips Body for Life? Few of us know how to choose the correct approach for our own goals.

Part of the solution is to become better educated. For some this will simply mean reading food labels or one of the many books published each year that offer sound advice on healthy eating. For others, there may be a need to learn to think more rationally or discriminatingly. For all of us, the more we know, the better the decisions we can make about how best to feed our bodies.

Soul & Spirit I firmly believe that soul and spirit (simply “soul” for our purposes) play a crucial role in optimal health, as well. How and what we believe about the nature of reality has an impact on our health. If we dismiss soul as woo-woo mumbo-jumbo, we are not likely to believe our efforts amount to anything, so why bother? However, if we believe that we are here for a reason, we are more likely to put forth the effort to be healthy. Failing that, we at least might see that dying young of a heart attack would prevent us from fulfilling our purpose on this planet.

No matter what our belief system, if we cultivate an inner peace through some form of contemplative practice, we can build an inner strength that will serve us well as we struggle to overcome defeating emotional patterns and physical habits. In fact, contemplative practice can offer us a unique tool to assist in our efforts. One of the first things that happens as we meditate or pray, practice mindfulness or walk in nature, is that we begin to develop an observer self. The observer is a part of our psyche that can disentangle itself from our behaviors and watch them as though it is an impartial observer. When we gain the ability to observe our own behavior, we have much more power to identify limiting behaviors and replace them with expanding behaviors.

Cultural Beliefs
A third area to examine when trying to understand weight gain is the cultural influence on our beliefs about food and our bodies. As mentioned above, our culture rewards and promotes specific beliefs and behaviors that run counter to having a healthy body, such as emotional eating and comfort foods. There are other cultural influences, as well. Each year, around the holidays, many offices become a heaven for baked goods lovers. Cakes, cookies, pies, fudge, and many other forms of delicious and unhealthy food appear in the break room each morning. To refuse this generosity of our co-workers is seen as rude and (this is the sinister part) perceived as though we are depriving ourselves of the good things in life. There is an unstated cultural rule that says we must indulge our every whim or else we are depriving ourselves. This is not the reality. I personally enjoy almond butter on celery as much as most people enjoy Krispy Kreme (quite possibly the unhealthiest food on the planet, short of eating lard dipped in sugar), and my almond butter is great source of healthy monounsaturated fats.

If our ideas about social eating are strange, our ideas about healthy bodies are even stranger. For most of the '90s, the “anorexic model” look (also known as heroin chic) was the ideal for women. Not only is this ideal twisted (the women look like adolescent boys), but that level of thinness is a sickness and is in no way healthy. Until the last ten years or so, men had been immune from these unrealistic ideals of how bodies should look. Now there is a rising trend in teen and young adult males of eating disorders. The ideal has become the “ripped abs” of the models in men’s style magazines or on billboard advertisements. Magazine cover models are inspiring young men to starve themselves, spend crazy hours in the gym, or use steroids so that they can have the “shredded” look these genetically gifted models obtain only for the occasional photo shoot.

We must look at how these beliefs shape our behaviors. Do we believe comfort food makes us feel better when we are sad or hurt? Do we think we need to lose 10 more pounds to be attractive? Do we need cosmetic surgery because we feel inferior to the cultural standard for beauty? None of these things is inherently wrong. However, if we hold these beliefs unexamined, they can shape us in ways that are beyond our awareness and, therefore, beyond our control. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The truth is that the unexamined life is not our own, but is instead a life shaped and controlled by cultural beliefs.

Social Structures
Finally, there are social structures that contribute to our problems with weight control. How many of us have time to cook healthy meals each day? Fast food is prevalent and easy.

Our capitalist society is set up to reward those who work hard and make sacrifices to get ahead. Further, capitalism also rewards corporations who can create products that the public will consume. These two basic tenets of capitalism create a dynamic in which most of us are struggling to have enough time in the day, a situation which forces us to look for quick and easy meals that taste good. Most fast food is among the worst choices a person can make when trying to eat healthy foods. This is changing a little bit with the introduction of items on many menus designed to attract those who eat healthier.

Still, capitalism also rewards the cheapest production with the highest profits. Many of our foods could be made healthier, but it would cost more money and reduce their market share. Take produce, for example. We know that pesticides and fertilizers sometimes leave toxic residues on our produce, but organic production costs more and reduces the beauty of the produce. Until more of us demand healthy alternatives (and only ten percent of us buy organic foods now), production sources will not see a need to offer healthier choices.

“Sin taxes” on junk food will not solve the problem either. The government needs to quit taking money from lobbyists for the food industry and make some tough choices, such as banning trans-fatty acids from our foods (a cause of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer), rewarding organic produce growers with tax incentives, and providing incentives for meat producers to raise free-range poultry or cattle.

Conclusion
All four areas of our lives -- our bodies, our psyches, our culture, and our social structures -- must be examined when we attempt to understand our nation’s struggle with being overweight. We can seldom solve any problem by addressing a single area, or even two areas. Different people will have different needs in working with these concepts, but in general, we must address all four quadrants of our lives. The approach I am advocating is an integral approach to fitness -- The Integral Fitness Solution.

After nearly 30 years of fad diets and fitness crazes, we have seen that simply addressing the physical quadrant of our lives is not working. Addressing the psychological without working through the other areas also will not work. Both of these approaches focus on the individual, but we must also look at how our cultural values and social structures impact our health. All four quadrants of our lives are interconnected in uncountable ways. Only an integral approach will ever solve our obesity epidemic.


[For a deeper look at Integral Theory, please read Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything, Shambala Publications.]

Research News

* Low Testosterone Can Shorten Life
As men age, androgen levels decrease, a condition now termed andropause. Researchers at the University of Washington report that older men with low levels of testosterone who were admitted to a geriatric rehabilitation hospital died sooner and were less likely to survive an accident than men with high levels. (J Am Geriatr Soc, 52: 2077-2081, 2004)

There is no clear cause and effect demonstrated in this study, so the conclusions that can be drawn are conjecture at best. Still, we know that low testosterone levels in aging men are associated with muscle wasting, joint pain, osteoporosis, depression, heart disease, decline in mental function, and other conditions. It seems there is no good reason not to treat andropause with testosterone replacement.

*Prostate Cancer Drugs Increase Fracture Risk
About 30,000 men die each year from prostate cancer, making it the second leading cancer-related cause of death (lung cancer is still first). The first choice in treatment is often testosterone-suppressing drugs that work by decreasing levels of DHT, a derivative of testosterone metabolism linked to prostate cancer. University of Texas researchers found that men treated in this way had a 20 percent risk of suffering a fracture (verses 13 percent in those not taking the drugs). (N Engl J Med, 352: 154-164, 2005)

Prostate enlargement and cancer are not a given, even in men who are receiving hormone replacement therapy. Researchers from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston report that testosterone replacement does not promote prostate cancer, even in men with a precancerous condition called prostatic intrepithelial neoplasia. The study covered a twelve-month period with no negative effects noted. (J Urology, 170: 2348-2351, 2004)

*DHEA Fights Depression
Congress is about to ban DHEA, relegating it to the same status as steroids. (Tom Harkin of Iowa is the moron behind this legislation.) Researchers from the National Institutes of Mental Health report that DHEA reduced major and minor depression and improved sexual performance in more than half of middle-aged men and women taking it during a six-week study. (Arch Gen Psychiatry, 62: 154-162, 2005)

Not every one responds to DHEA, although dosage is often a factor. This study supports scores of other studies reporting the same benefits, which also include increased muscle mass and strength, both of which are important for those who want to age with dignity.

Two New Creatine Studies
Creatine may be the most widely studied supplement in history. One new study shows that creatine, like glutamine, can reduce muscle wasting during immobilization. Brazilian scientists report that creatine prevented muscle wasting in the legs of immobilized rats and increased muscle creatine phosphate levels by 18 to 25 percent (this is a good thing). It appears that the creatine helps spur the production of satellite cells, which are crucial for protein synthesis. (Clin Nutr, 23: 1176-1183, 2004)

The other creatine study suggests that it can improve carbohydrate metabolism in muscle, a finding that could be helpful for treating metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Researchers from St. Louis University report that creatine increased levels of a glucose-transporting chemical called GLUT4, which increases the deposition of glucose in cells. (Am J Endocrinol Metab, 288: E347-E352, 2004)

Everyone should be using creatine at a dosage of 5 grams a day. Studies continue to reveal new benefits of this supplement, one of the safest known to science. What was once just a supplement for weight lifters and sprinters should now be a part of everyone's daily intake.