Infant Rattles Recalled by Lee Carter Co.

CREDIT: CPSC

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with Lee Carter Co., of San Francisco, Calif., announced a voluntary recall of about 25,000 Infant Rattles.

Hazard: The rattle's handle is small enough to fit into a child's throat, posing a choking hazard and violating federal rattle standards.

Incidents/Injuries: None reported

Description: The recalled rattles are made out of multi-colored, woven plastic and have a bell inside. They measure about 4 1/2 inches long. "Made in Mexico" and "Lee Carter Company" are printed on a tag on a purple plastic loop at the end of the rattle's handle.

Sold at: Various Mexican specialty craft stores nationwide from February 2001 through October 2011 for about $ 4.

Manufactured in: Mexico

Remedy: Consumers should immediately take the recalled rattles away from infants and return them to Lee Carter Co. for a full refund or credit towards a replacement product.

Consumer Contact: For additional information, consumers should call Lee Carter Co. collect at (415) 824-2004 anytime, or visit the firm's website at www.leecartercompany.com.

Read More @ Source

Multiple Births Can Multiply Mom's Weight

CREDIT: Pregnancy photo via Shutterstock

Moms have often complained that the more children they have, the harder it becomes to shed the extra pounds gained during pregnancy, and a new mouse study may help explain why.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati found that mouse moms who gave birth four times were 45 percent heavier than mouse moms who gave birth just once, despite eating similar amounts of food. 

The findings suggest that in mice, as in humans, giving birth multiple times, regardless of age, can lead to weight gain and inflammation in the body, according to the researchers.

Moreover, the researchers identified specific metabolic changes in mothers and in offspring that are likely involved in obesity, the researchers said in a statement.

The study was published Jan. 26 in the American Journal of Physiology — Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Researchers engineered a type of mouse that mimics human moms who gain weight after multiple births. They compared mice that gave birth four times with mice that gave birth only once.

Researchers weighed the animals, assessed the size of their fat deposits, tested the mice to see how well their bodies controlled their blood sugar levels and measured their levels of inflammation.

Study findings showed that mouse moms with multiple offspring had fat deposits several times larger than mouse moms with a single offspring. They also had larger blood sugar spikes after meals, a warning sign for diabetes.

Mouse moms with multiple offspring had higher levels of inflammation, compared with the mouse moms with a single offspring, as well as other moms who were given a high-fat diet. Elevated inflammation has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and a variety of other diseases.

Researchers performed similar tests in the male offspring of the mice.

They found that the male offspring of those who'd given birth multiple times weighed as much as 40 percent more than the male offspring of mouse moms with a single offspring, even though they didn't eat more food.

The differences became apparent when the offspring were older, suggesting that excess energy was stored as fat only after their growth slowed down, according to the researchers.

When the researchers examined genes responsible for storing versus using fat, the multiple offspring animals appeared to use less fat compared to the single offspring animals.

The researchers said that effective ways to help women lose weight between pregnancies could help maintain their health, and that of their children.

Pass it on: Multiple births lead to extra pounds in mouse moms and male offspring.

Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @MyHealth_MHND. Find us on Facebook.

Read More @ Source

Creating Silence from Chaos

Post written by Leo Babauta.

We are often afraid of silence, because its emptiness feels idle, boring, unproductive, and scary. And so we fill our lives with chaos, noise, clutter.

But silence can be lovely, and therapeutic, and powerful.

It can be the remedy for our stress and the habits that crush us.

If we want quiet in our lives, how do we create it?

I've been exploring this myself. As a father of six kids, I have to admit that I don't always have silence in my life. That's not a complaint — I love the messy noise that my family brings — but silence can be a welcome refuge from that noise at times.

I create silence by subtracting, and not filling the resulting emptiness withe noise or clutter.

And so my life is a constant experimentation with subtracting. When I've subtracted, and learn to love the empty silence, I subtract some more. Subtraction is a beautiful process.

Prefer subtraction over addition.

Learn to be content with little, or nothing.

Realize that silence is beautiful.

Find yourself in the empty space that results.

Empty a room, and put almost nothing back except that which produces quiet.

Speak less, listen more, contemplate even more.

Walk in silence. Watch the leaves quiver, fall in silence, whisper in the wind.

Sit and do nothing. Listen to your mind make noise in the silence, allow it to subside.

Eschew video, iPods, books, the Internet, mobile devices, social networks, and other purveyors of noise.

Be quiet, so that life may speak.

—

A Mini-Course in Meditation

I will be leading an online mini-course in February on creating the habit of meditation. It will be very simple, but in those few minutes of meditation every morning, you will find lovely silence.

The mini-course will be available only to Premium Members of Zen Habits, which is a paid membership I haven't announced yet. What will the membership consist of? Exclusive bonus articles, videos, interviews, live webinars each month on simplicity, habits, clutter, fitness, finances, creating a business around your passion, families and more. Mini-courses every 2-4 months on topics you choose. Guest experts on all these topics. The ability to ask me questions about anything.

More next week. Thanks, my friends.

Read More @ Source

The Truth About Guarana

The seeds of the guarana fruit.

CREDIT: Antonio De Azevedo Negrão | Dreamstime

Bombastically named energy drinks such as Full Throttle, Monster, Red Bull and Rockstar all contain the herbal supplement guarana. The compound is also found in over-the-counter weight loss products, and it's been marketed as an aphrodisiac. What is guarana, and does it have any physiological effects?

Guarana is a South American fruit that looks like suspiciously like an eyeball, with a fleshy white fruit that surrounds dark brown seeds. These seeds are about the size of coffee beans, but they contain more than twice as much caffeine. As a supplement, guarana is considered "generally recognized as safe" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The guarana vine originated in the Amazon basin, where local people have long taken advantage of its stimulating properties. A 17th century Jesuit missionary noted that guarana gave members of an Amazon tribe "so much energy, that when hunting, they could go from one day to the next without feeling hungry." Brazilian soft drinks have included guarana since 1909, but it only became widely used in the United States recently, when energy drinks gained explosive popularity.

Very generally speaking, whenever you see both guarana and caffeine on an ingredients list, you can read guarana as even more caffeine. Additionally, however, guarana contains tiny amounts of theophylline and theobromine (the later is chemical that makes chocolate poisonous to dogs and cats), which are similar to caffeine, although they exert subtly different effects on the body.

Guarana also contains molecules called tannins, which some say causes the caffeine in guarana to release slowly, producing a long-lasting energy plateau. (Tannins are found in some wines, where they bring a woody flavor.) The fact that guarana's doesn't readily dissolve in water also supposedly contributes to its long-lasting effects, but no one has conclusively shown that the body processes guarana-derived caffeine differently than the caffeine found in coffee beans or tea leaves.

The caffeine that humans seek in guarana serves a very different purpose in the wild: it's a natural insecticide that keeps plant-eating bugs at bay. Still, hungry birds can digest the fleshy, caffeine-free fruit, but the caffeine-rich seeds pass unscathed through their digestive tracts, often landing in a new location, helping give rise to a new generation of guarana plants.

 Pass it on:  Guarana is a potent source of caffeine; avoid it before bedtime.

Food Facts explores the weird world of the chemicals and nutrients found in our food, and appears on MyHealthNewsDaily on Fridays. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @MyHealth_MHND. Find us on Facebook.

Read more Food Facts columns:

Read More @ Source

Avastin's Failure in Breast Cancer: New Study May Explain Why It Happened

CREDIT: Dreamstime

A new study may explain why the cancer drug Avastin hasn't worked in the treatment of breast cancer patients. Although the drug stops tumor growth for a short time, it often leads to more invasive tumors in the long run.

The reason for this revved-up invasiveness, researchers concluded from experiments done in mice, is that drugs like Avastin increase the portion of a tumor made of breast cancer stem cells.

Although Avastin, when initially given, causes some cancer cells to die and tumors to shrink, what's left behind are the cancer stem cells, according to the study. These cells can then multiply, and they are among the most lethal cancer cells — they can sprout new tumors more easily than run-of-the-mill cancer cells.

The finding suggests that clinicians could improve Avastin's effectiveness by blocking this unwanted effect of the drug. It's a potentially bright spot for the drug, after a November decision by the Food and Drug Administration that the drug should not be used to treat breast cancer after studies showed the drug failed to lengthen patient's lives.

"This result explains why they don't work as well as we hoped it would, and it really points to what we need to do to develop drug combinations that are more effective," said Dr. Max Wicha, author of the new study and an oncologist at the University of Michigan.

The new findings, which may also apply to other drugs in the same class as Avastin, were published Monday (Jan. 23) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The seeds of a tumor

Avastin falls into a category of cancer drugs called antiangiogenic agents, which aim to work by blocking the growth of blood vessels that supply tumors with vital nutrients and oxygen. Without a blood supply, tumors will die, the thinking goes.

"There was a lot of excitement about using these drugs to block the blood supply to tumors," Wicha said. "But the first large studies showed that while Avastin seemed to be preventing tumors from progressing for a few months, the tumors would then start to grow again, and be even more aggressive."

Wicha said he and his colleagues suspected the cause of the new, aggressive growth, might be cancer stem cells. "These cells are the most dangerous, if they're left in the body," he explained. "They're like the seeds of a plant."

The researchers tested their theory by giving an antiangiogenic drug to mice with breast cancer tumors. As expected, the tumors shrank and had fewer blood vessels feeding them. When the team analyzed the cells within the tumors, however, the tumors of mice that had been treated with an antiangiogenic drug had five times more stem cells.

Further, the scientists found, the lack of oxygen — called hypoxia — in the tissues that followed the death of the blood vessels had the side effect of encouraging the growth of these dangerous cells. If doctors could combine drugs that kill the cancer stem cells with antiangiogenic drugs, they may have a winning formula, Wicha said.

"Our research suggests that it's going to necessary to target both angles of this at the same time," he said.

Two sides of a drug

The new findings didn't surprise Celeste Simon, a molecular biologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who studies the role of the body's low oxygen environments to human health. 

"Stem cells really like to reside in a low oxygen area," Simon said.

What the study adds, Simon said, is evidence that drugs like Avastin increase the pool of cancer stem cells living in these low-oxygen conditions.

"The notion is that by making the tumor more hypoxic, you're actually selecting for the more aggressive cells," she said. "This and other papers underscore a growing idea in the therapeutic world that, like all treatments, antiangiogenic drugs need to be very carefully evaluated in terms of their full impact on human health."

But more work is needed, she said, to flesh out the full molecular details of the observation. Tumors implanted into mice, such as the study used, aren't always a perfect mimic of human biology. "While these results are intriguing, they need to be followed up, from my point of view, with experiments on more sophisticated mouse models or primary tumors," Simon said.

Pass it on:  Although Avastin successfully cuts off the blood supply of breast cancer tumors, it also increases the number of so-called breast cancer stem cells that can lead to tumor growth in the long run.

Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @MyHealth_MHND.  Find us on Facebook.

Read More @ Source

"Aspects of Freedom" by Ajahn Nyanadhammo

Ajahn Nyanadhammo, abbot of Wat Pah Nanachat International Monastery, visits Perth. His talk had the audience spellbound as he explained Buddhist strategies that can take us out of the unsatisfactoriness of human existence to freedom. We also hear of the oldest monk in the world who was swallowed and then regurgitated by a giant python! And why red light districts have red lights...

Video Rating: 4 / 5

Use of Actors, Photoshop Not OK in Public Health Ads, Experts Say

CREDIT: Copyright: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Whether shocking or saddening, pictures of people who are suffering the consequences of smoking or obesity can be powerful in public health messages. But in some cases, the moving stories are not entirely authentic.

Take the Strong4Life initiative, a campaign run by Children's Healthcare of Atlanta that aims to curb childhood obesity. A girl featured in one of the ads is portrayed as having diabetes, but she does not, according to ABC news. And recently, a New York Times investigation revealed that picture of a man in a diabetes awareness poster was photoshopped to show him without a leg.

You don't expect Red Bull to really give you wings, nor for Snapple to actually be made from the "best stuff on Earth." But how truthful do public health campaign ads need to be? Is it wrong to misrepresent an individual's story to get a do-good message across?

Bioethicists and health communicators say untruthful testimonials in public health campaigns are wrong, even if their messages are, in a broad sense, advertisements. Falseness in these ads loses the public's trust, which is critical in public health initiatives, experts say.

"I think it really hurts the credibility of a campaign when they're using actors," said Timothy Edgar, director of the graduate health communication program at Emerson College in Boston. "If it's not unethical, it's certainly on thin ice, and the ice has a crack in it," Edgar said.

And if the truth comes out — that the actors don't actually have the condition they're portrayed as having — the public's focus shifts to talking about the slipup, rather than the public health advice relayed by the campaign.

"The people who have done this campaign have done themselves a great disservice," Edgar said of the diabetes ads, which ran in New York City.

Personal connection

When Eric Asche, chief marketing officer at Legacy, an organization that advocates prevention of youth smoking, and his colleagues went about creating anti-smoking ads featuring the health effects of tobacco use, it was very important to use real people, Asche said. The goal of Legacy's ads is to present consumers with honest information about tobacco addiction and its consequences. Using real people in the ads is part of that honesty.

"We want to tell the truth," Asche said. "We want to tell the real story, and to tell the real story, we use real people."

To not use a real person would feed many people's perception that smoking's health effects "won't happen to me," which is a view many young people have, Asche said. "It's so easy to dismiss the consequences," he said.

Using real people in ads can also put a face on the struggle, and give the ads a sympathetic tone, Asche said.

Indeed, Edgar said, when he watched a Strong4Life's anti-obesity video ad featuring a girl with diabetes, he felt particularly moved by the girl's story. When he later learned the girl did not have diabetes, "I felt angry. I felt like I had been tricked," Edgar said. "And all of a sudden their whole campaign…went down in my eyes."

Pretending to have a condition when you do not is bad because "you are claiming personal knowledge that you do not have, and a link to others that does not exist," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even promoting a behavior such as healthy eating can get you into an ethical mess if you don't eat healthfully.

"You should not urge people to do things that you yourself do not do, or do not believe in— that harms public trust, which is a key component of public health initiatives," Caplansaid.

Higher standard

City officials in New York said putting real people in their ads was not always feasible, according to the New York Times. "We might stop using actors in our ads if the food industry stops using actors in theirs," John Kelly, a New York health department spokesman, told the Times.

Edgar said he found this comment offensive. If public health campaigns are to be successful, "We have to be better than the food industry. We have to be better strategically, and better ethically."

"We're spending the public's money, that's why we have such an ethical obligation," Edgar said.

Edgar said it was lazy not to use real individuals in these campaigns, especially when conditions such as diabetes affect so many people.

"I'm sure it wouldn't be that difficult to find someone who would be willing to devote his or her time," to the initiative, he said.

Pass it on: A public health campaign that features a testimonial from someone who doesn't actually have the disease they're portrayed as having is ethically wrong, experts say.

Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner. Find us on Facebook.

Read More @ Source

Early Morning Meditation Inspiration - 1/27/2012

"Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace."

~The Buddha

Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma

Read More @ Source

The Height of Happiness - 52-min documentary

See full film here: vodsite.journeyman.tv April 2008 Long thought of as a secluded paradise hidden deep in the Himalayas, and renowned for its pursuit of happiness over economic prosperity, Bhutan now struggles to accommodate the invasion of tourists, new media and western materialism in the twenty first century. As monks play with condoms, clowns offer advice on AIDS and farmers feed cannabis to pigs, we hear the thoughts of Government officials, Meditation monks, tourists and ordinary Bhutanese themselves, as they face up to the challenge to the underlying spiritualism of this mystical country and its rapidly changing identity in an internet shrunk world.

Video Rating: 4 / 5

China’s bloody crackdown on Tibetan protesters escalates, as self-immolations continue

Xeni Jardin (BoingBoing): Ethnic Tibetans throughout Tibet this week held some of the largest demonstrations against Chinese rule in four years. Chinese forces responded by shooting protesters. Up to 5 are said to have been killed and more than 30 wounded, according to Tibetan advocacy groups.

On January 9, a 42-year-old monk became the latest in a continuing string of desperate protesters who burned themselves alive to protest Chinese military rule and cultural repression.

A New York Times report gathered accounts from a number of human rights groups. NPR's Morning Edition today aired an extensive report on the worsening human rights crisis in Tibet (MP3 link).

Details are hard to confirm, as foreign press access to the areas involved is all but impossible. Free Tibet has more, and Radio Free Asia has compiled various reports.

Dr. Lobsang Sangay of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, issued a statement on the conflict, published in video on YouTube (and embedded above).

I want to tell my dear brothers and sisters inside Tibet that we hear your cries loud and clear. We urge you not to despair and refrain from extreme measures. We feel your pain and will not allow the sacrifices you have made go in vain. You all are in our heart and prayers each and every day. (…)

To demonstrate our solidarity with Tibetans in Tibet, I urge Tibetans and our friends around the world, to participate in a worldwide vigil on Wednesday, February 8, 2012. Let's send a loud and clear message to the Chinese government that violence and killing of innocent Tibetans is unacceptable! I request everyone to conduct these vigils peacefully, in accordance with the laws of your country, and with dignity.

Transcript here.

The Chinese government responded to activist groups' reports on one recent shooting incident with a statement blaming monks and protesters, saying they attacked stores and a police station, and started a riot.

"The mob, some armed with knives, threw stones at police officers and destroyed two police vehicles and two ambulances," read the report from China's official news agency Xinhua.

And there are reports of fresh protests again today, with more shootings. From an item at Phayul.com, posted just three hours ago:

In reports coming out of Tibet, another Tibetan was killed and several others seriously injured in police firings in eastern Tibet earlier today. This is the third bloody incident this week when unarmed Tibetan demonstrators have been fired upon by Chinese security personnel.

At around 12 noon local time, a Tibetan man named Tharpa put up signed flyers around Zu To Bharma Shang, declaring that until the demands of the Tibetans who have self-immolated are met, Tibetans will never abandon their struggle and continue to organise more campaigns.

Since March 2011, 16 Tibetans have set their bodies on fire demanding the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from exile and protesting China's continued occupation of Tibet.

In a release today, the exile base of Kirti monastery said that Tharpa had himself gone around the town putting up the flyers with his name clearly signed on it.

"You, Communist Chinese, come and arrest me," Tharpa had challenged.

Following the wave of self-immolations, numerous flyers and pamphlets have been reportedly cited in Ngaba and Drango areas, stating that many more Tibetans were ready to set their bodies on fire.

Read More @ Source

Gordon Ramsay's Pad Thai

Gordon Ramsay prepares pad thai for the Buddhist monks in the Wimbledon Thai temple. He gets help from head chef at the Blue Elephantrestaurant. Season 5 of The F Word. A bold, modern and mischievous take on the world of food combines location VTs, kitchen actuality, celebrity interviews, stunts and recipe based challenges to give the format its trademark energy, pace and visual richness and create waves in the food world and beyond.

Video Rating: 4 / 5