Forks Over Knives Trailer

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The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.

Britain's fattest teenager now ANOREXIC and given six months to live after gastric bypass surgery

A woman who was once Britain's fattest teenager is now battling with anorexia after her life was turned upside down by a gastric bypass operation.

Malissa Jones, 21, lost so much weight that she now tips the scales at just 8 stone. Four years ago, before her surgery, doctors were warning her that she had to take drastic action after ballooning to 34 stone.

They warned her she had to shed 20 stone or would die within months. Now the pendulum has swung the other way for Malissa, from Selby, North Yorkshire with doctors now warning she could die in six months unless she increases her food intake.

Worrying: Malissa Jones, who dropped from 32st to 8st, is now anorexic after developing a fear of eating following her gastric band surgery. Right, taken two years post-surgery, Malissa carried 2st of excess skin

Malissa told Closer magazine: 'I would urge anyone wanting surgery to lose weight healthily. I wish I had. 'Surgery can have consequences you might never have imagined.'

Malissa was the youngest person in the world to have a stomach bypass when surgeons performed the £10,000 NHS operation in January 2008.

She consumed 15,000 calories a day from gorging on chocolate, crisps and junk food - seven and a half times the recommended 2,000 calories for a girl of her age. But parents Richard and Dawn were unable to stop her food cravings.

Despite the risk of drastic surgery in such a young girl, she survived the operation and within a year lost more than half her body weight.

She started going clubbing and fell pregnant with farmer boyfriend Chris Robottom, 22. In February, after six months' pregnancy, she became ill with liver failure and her baby had to be delivered by Caesarean.

Sadly her baby, Harry, died an hour after delivery. Doctors then revealed Malissa's failure to eat properly had led to him being malnourished.

Malissa's weight dropped rapidly as she lost interest in food and doctors have now diagnosed her as anorexic.

'Food made my physically sick,' she said. 'I had to force myself to eat.' Her daily diet is now three cooked carrots, two portions of parsnip and a roast potato, which provides 300 calories.

Doctors have advised her to eat between 500 and 1,000 calories a day. Malissa, who is 5ft 8in tall, says: 'I am not deliberately starving myself but, right now, I would rather die than force myself to eat.

'I'm too thin. My body shocks me. But swallowing is painful. Eating a tiny amount gives me stomach cramps or makes me sick.

'My consultant says, if I continue like this, I only have six months to live.

'I will most likely die of a heart attack, so I must persevere with eating. I am trying, but it is so hard.'
Malissa Jones says: 'I'm too thin. My body shocks me. But swallowing is painful. Eating a tiny amount gives me stomach cramps or makes me sick'.
Malissa ate so little she ended up in hospital

'My body shocks me': Malissa is unhappy with how thin she is but swallowing is painful and she eats so little that she frequently ends up in hospital



Clinical psychologist Dr Funke Baffour from Waltham Cross, Herts, said: 'There would have been psychological reasons for Malissa' obesity that a gastric band would not have dealt with.

'It is not surprising she has swapped one emotional relationship with food for another.

'Perhaps, subconsciously, Malissa is so afraid of becoming obese again, she is stopping herself from eating.'

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1383049/Malissa-Jones-Britains-fattest-teenager-battling-anorexia.html

Age at Menopause May Predict Cardiovascular Risk

Researchers at the University of Alabama say that asking a woman at what age she went through menopause may be a good tool to predict her future risk of cardiovascular disease. The results of the study were presented the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society, on June 19, 2010 in San Diego, CA.

The researchers found that women who reported early menopause were twice as likely as others to have any kind of heart disease.

Approximately 2,500 women who were part of the Multi-Ethnic Study for Atherosclerosis were followed in the current study. All women had gone through menopause naturally or surgically (for example, by having their ovaries removed). Early menopause was defined as occurring before the age of 46, and 693 of the study’s participants fell into this category. More women undergoing early menopause were African-American or Hispanic than other ethnicities, and more women who’d reported early menopause went through it because of surgery.

The researchers found that women who reported early menopause were twice as likely as others to have any kind of heart disease, which included “heart attack, resuscitated cardiac arrest, definite angina, probable angina (if followed by revascularization), stroke, stroke death, coronary heart disease death or other atherosclerotic/CVD death," said lead researcher Melissa Wellons in a University news release.

Wellons did point out that it’s important to remember that this study was correlational in nature, so it does not provide concrete evidence of cause and effect. Still, the age of onset of menopause could be an effective marker to help predict a woman’s likelihood of having a cardiovascular event down the road. She says that the findings “will give clinicians a new tool potentially to assess cardiovascular risk... the simple tool of asking when a woman had a hysterectomy or their ovaries removed or when they went through natural menopause.”

The ethnic differences found in the study may also be important for doctors to keep in mind: "Because black and Hispanic women reported more incidence of early menopause, these findings may be particularly helpful and relevant to them," said Wellons. "However, more research still is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms behind early menopause and cardiovascular disease."

Source: http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/content/womens_health/art2979.html

When Are You Most Likely to Have a Heart Attack?

Heart disease, including heart attack, is the world's No. 1 killer. A person's risk of heart attack depends mostly on a familiar repertoire of factors: exercise, smoking, diet, weight, genes. But our bodies' circadian rhythms also play a role, leaving us more prone to injury during certain hours than others. If you're guessing that the danger zone comes at the end of a stressful workday, guess again. Here to explain is Roberto Manfredini, professor of internal medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy.



Q: What time of day am I most likely to have a heart attack?

A: The most dangerous times for heart attack and for all kinds of cardiovascular emergency — including sudden cardiac death, rupture or aneurysm of the aorta, pulmonary embolism and stroke — are the morning and during the last phase of sleep. A group from Harvard estimated this risk and evaluated that on average, the extra risk of having a myocardial infarction, or heart attack, between 6 a.m. and noon is about 40%. But if you calculate only the first three hours after waking, this relative risk is threefold.

The cardiovascular system follows a daily pattern that is oscillatory in nature: most cardiovascular functions exhibit circadian changes (circadian is from the Latin circa and diem, meaning "about one day"). Now, a heart attack depends on the imbalance between increased myocardial oxygen demand (i.e., a greater need for oxygen in your heart) and decreased myocardial oxygen supply — or both. And unfortunately, some functions in the first hours of the day require more myocardial oxygen support: waking and commencing physical activities, the peak of the adrenal hormone cortisol [which boosts blood-pressure and blood-sugar levels] and a further increase in blood pressure and heart rate due to catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline), which show a peak when you wake up. All those factors lead to an increase of oxygen consumption but at the same time contribute to the constriction of vessels. So you have reduced vessel size and reduced blood flow to the coronary vessels.

You have to remember that blood coagulation is important in the genesis of what we call thrombi, the blood clots that can block the blood vessels and cut off supply to the heart. When we wake up, platelets, the particles in the blood that make thrombi, are particularly adhesive to the vessels. Usually we have an endogenous system — it's called fibrinolysis — to dissolve the thrombi. But in the morning, the activity of our fibrinolytic system is reduced. So we have a greater tendency to make thrombi that can occlude the coronary vessels. This contributes to further reduction of coronary blood flow. Thus, at the same time that you need more blood flow, you have less.

All these changes, however, probably are not so harmful in healthy people. But for a person with a plaque in the coronary vessel, if these changes occur at the same time and peak at the same time, the final result is a higher risk of heart attack during that specific window of morning hours.

Why is the risk also higher during the last part of sleep? Usually, during the night, the cardiovascular system is "sleeping," which is characterized by low blood pressure and heart rate. But the last stage of sleep — REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep [when we believe most dreaming occurs] — is a risk period for cardiovascular emergencies because when you dream, you have a dramatic increase of activity of the autonomic nervous system — even more than when you are awake. Probably each of us can remember waking up in the morning sometimes feeling very tired. That's because during that stage of dreams, we were running or facing some danger. Your heart was running, so it was consuming oxygen. And for similar reasons to those when you're awake, that activity is risky if you don't have a good vessel system.

It's probably difficult for people to minimize the effects of their own biological rhythms. For example, you cannot avoid your morning risk by simply waking up later. Some researchers have tried an experimental model, in which people were instructed to stay in bed for four hours after they woke up before rising. But the same pattern simply occurred four hours after waking, because the risk is linked to our activities. We can't be afraid of the catecholamines and the peak in blood pressure in the morning. It's part of our physiology. And for healthy people, it's not a problem.

It's important for doctors, however, to remember this risk when we give therapy. Usually people take hypertensive drugs in the morning, when they wake up. But this is already the higher-risk period — so is the last hour of activity of the pill they have taken the day before [and not all pills give 24-hour coverage]. We have to be sure that the pill we're prescribing is still active when patients need it most. It's not as easy as simply asking patients to take pills before bed instead of first thing in the morning, because during sleep we have a low heart rate and blood pressure. If you lower your blood pressure too much during the night, you risk reducing blood supply to the brain, and that can be harmful too.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1825044,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-healthsci