Set Your Kids A Good Example When It Comes To Eating Habits!

By scotie Keithlow

Parents often teach their children poor food habits. For example, during a busy morning, when everyone is running late, there is little time to think about making and eating breakfast, although it is the most important meal of the day. So parents will skip the children's breakfast and tell them to eat well at lunch when they are at school.

When lunchtime arrives, the parent is still not very hungry so he or she will eat a snack bar and a diet soda and go back to work. It may be that the children have done something similar during their lunch period. When it is time to make dinner, the family is rushing around, trying to make sure that everyone gets to practice or completes some chore like picking up the dry cleaning. On the way to an errand, the parent realizes that dinner needs to be prepared. Short on time and energy, the parent decides to stop on the way home for a pizza instead. Or perhaps the family would rather have hamburgers and fries.

While deciding what to have for dinner, the children are getting very hungry. If there is a snack food dispenser nearby, they are likely to load up on soft drinks and candy. After making the final stop to pick up a child from practice or wherever, everyone is in the car and ready to get home. The parent has decided that pizza is the right choice and has already called in an order so that it will be ready for pick up.

Unfortunately, this scenario is typical of the daily food rituals experienced by many families. Most Americans spend their day rushing around with little thought to their nutritional needs. They rely on convenience foods without knowing that these short cuts to meals give exactly the wrong message about food and nutrition to their children.

Everyone reads articles about good nutrition and how it impacts overall health. Everyone has made the connection between eating appropriate foods and living longer and healthier lives. Few people actually take action on the basis of this information, however, and no one thinks about how much of every day goes by without any nutritious food being consumed at all.

As children grow, parents may wonder why they seem pale and less than healthy. Parents must recognize that children live in a stressful environment, one without exercise, and one that imposes unhealthy eating habits.

It is a parental responsibility to ensure that children are taught about good morals, work ethics, and family values. It is also important to teach them the importance of taking care of their health. They cannot have a good quality of life if they are not healthy enough to enjoy it.

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How vitamin C stops the big 'C'

By Nick Zagorski

Nearly 30 years after Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously and controversially suggested that vitamin C supplements can prevent cancer, a team of Johns Hopkins scientists have shown that in mice at least, vitamin C - and potentially other antioxidants - can indeed inhibit the growth of some tumors ¯ just not in the manner suggested by years of investigation.

The conventional wisdom of how antioxidants such as vitamin C help prevent cancer growth is that they grab up volatile oxygen free radical molecules and prevent the damage they are known to do to our delicate DNA. The Hopkins study, led by Chi Dang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and oncology and Johns Hopkins Family Professor in Oncology Research, unexpectedly found that the antioxidants’ actual role may be to destabilize a tumor’s ability to grow under oxygen-starved conditions. Their work is detailed this week in Cancer Cell.

"The potential anticancer benefits of antioxidants have been the driving force for many clinical and preclinical studies," says Dang. "By uncovering the mechanism behind antioxidants, we are now better suited to maximize their therapeutic use."

"Once again, this work demonstrates the irreplaceable value of letting researchers follow their scientific noses wherever it leads them," Dang adds.

The authors do caution that while vitamin C is still essential for good health, this study is preliminary and people should not rush out and buy bulk supplies of antioxidants as a means of cancer prevention.

The Johns Hopkins investigators discovered the surprise antioxidant mechanism while looking at mice implanted with either human lymphoma (a blood cancer) or human liver cancer cells. Both of these cancers produce high levels of free radicals that can be suppressed by feeding the mice supplements of antioxidants, either vitamin C or N-acetylcysteine (NAC).

However, when the Hopkins team examined cancer cells from cancer-implanted mice not fed the antioxidants, they noticed the absence of any significant DNA damage. "Clearly, if DNA damage was not in play as a cause of the cancer, then whatever the antioxidants were doing to help was also not related to DNA damage," says Ping Gao, Ph.D, lead author of the paper.

That conclusion led Gao and Dang to suspect that some other mechanism was involved, such as a protein known to be dependent on free radicals called HIF-1 (hypoxia-induced factor), which was discovered over a decade ago by Hopkins researcher and co-author Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Program in Vascular Cell Engineering. Indeed, they found that while this protein was abundant in untreated cancer cells taken from the mice, it disappeared in vitamin C-treated cells taken from similar animals.

"When a cell lacks oxygen, HIF-1 helps it compensate," explains Dang. "HIF-1 helps an oxygen-starved cell convert sugar to energy without using oxygen and also initiates the construction of new blood vessels to bring in a fresh oxygen supply."

Some rapidly growing tumors consume enough energy to easily suck out the available oxygen in their vicinity, making HIF-1 absolutely critical for their continued survival. But HIF-1 can only operate if it has a supply of free radicals. Antioxidants remove these free radicals and stop HIF-1, and the tumor, in its tracks.

The authors confirmed the importance of this "hypoxia protein" by creating cancer cells with a genetic variant of HIF-1 that did not require free radicals to be stable. In these cells, antioxidants no longer had any cancer-fighting power.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Authors on the paper are Dean Felsher of Stanford; and Gao, Huafeng Zhang, Ramani Dinavahi, Feng Li, Yan Xiang, Venu Raman, Zaver Bhujwalla, Linzhao Cheng, Jonathan Pevsner, Linda Lee, Gregg Semenza and Dang of Johns Hopkins.

Contact: Nick Zagorski Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

Bayho Health News http://www.bayho.com/article.php?id=200

Contact: Nick Zagorski Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions Bayho

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