Pulmonary Hypertension
Children and teenagers like soft drinks, and so do adults. British drink more than 5 billion liters each year while American consumes more than a quarter of all drinks. Carbonated soft drinks, or fizzy drinks as what they are commonly called, are loaded with sugar and caffeine. They are so popular yet they have very little nutritional value.
Very few of us will consider these drinks to be healthy. But, how bad they are? Why are they bad for our health? Not too many of us can answer such questions.
The most important harm they will bring to us is tendency of obesity. A can of sugary soft drink can contain about 135 calories. If we consume a can per day, each month there is about 4,000 calories, which is equivalent to half a kilo of body fat, accumulated in our body.
A British study indicated that if children who were encouraged to cut back on sugary soft drinks were found to be much less likely to become fat than those who were not. People, especially teenagers tend to drink them in such a large quantity and end up forming a significant part of the total calories they consume. Obesity has been proven to be one of the risk factors for heart disease, and there is no reason why we should make ourselves obese simply by drinking high quantity of these unhealthy drinks.
Carbonated soft drinks are also bad for our teeth because plaque bacteria act upon the sugars in the drinks, leading to tooth decay. Moreover, regular drinking of carbonated soft drinks, even the sugar-free varieties, can add considerably to the amount of dental erosion because these drinks are just a solution of carbonic acid.
These acidic drinks tend to affect our body’s pH level. The body will need to neutralize this effect using its stores of calcium. So if we are not getting enough calcium in our diet, osteoporosis may develop. This is a particular problem for teenage girls.
Many of these drinks contain caffeine that is a stimulant. Too much of it can make us jumpy and nervous, and prevent us from sleeping properly. Some people can even suffer withdrawal symptoms, such as headaches or irritability, when forced to go without their daily fix. There is reasonably strong evidence that very large quantities of caffeine taken over a period of many years can harm the cardiovascular system though moderate amounts of caffeine intake do not seem to be harmful.
If carbonated drinks are bad for us, then what are the alternatives? Tap water is good, milk is good, and unsweetened fruit juice is also fine. However, switching drastically from fizzy drinks to healthy can never be an easy job. Fizzy drink addicts may initially limit their consumption to about a single serving a day and gradually increase their intake of healthy drinks.
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If you want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, don’t count on the academia, the National Institute of Health (NIH), or the biotech/pharmaceutical industry. With all the money they have spent on researching these diseases, they have very little to show for it.
In 1971, during the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer.” Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and private R&D, about $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This money produced 1.56 million papers on cancer. Yet, today we are no closer to a cure than we were in 1971. Why?
Consider what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Industry in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug industry in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I would urge you to read his paper, it’s an eye opener on relationship between academic research and commercial drug discovery): “When the basic science/biology of disease is not available, no new drugs come to market.” With the billion of dollars spent by the NIH on basic science, and the millions of papers published on the topic, the question is, “Why isn’t the basic science/biology of disease available? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. However, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To connect the dots you need a theory. The Blind Men and the Elephant is a famous story about six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Each man, seizing on the single feature of the animal, which he appeared to have touched first, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his limited opinion on the nature of the beast. The elephant was considered a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan or a rope, depending on whether the blind men had first grasped the creature’s side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the problem of the reductionist approach in biology. A recent book Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and the Origin of Chronic Disease, by Hanan Polansky [11], presents an alternative. The book identifies the disruption that causes atherosclerosis, cancer, obesity, osteoarthritis, type II diabetes, alopecia, type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, graft versus host disease, and other chronic diseases, and describes the sequence of events that leads from the disruption to the molecular, cellular, and clinical effects.“
What are the implications of the NIH failure? A decline in the number of new drugs introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Consider what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new drugs from the pharmaceutical industry (Taylor D. Fewer new drugs from the pharmaceutical industry. BMJ. 2003 Feb 22;326(7386):408-9): “In 2002 spending on medicines exceeded $400bn (?248bn; 377bn) worldwide. Optimists in the pharmaceutical industry believe that the global market for their products will go on expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to lead towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical industry is also increasing worldwide. It is now over $45bn a year—twice the sum recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Concerns are growing, however, about the productivity of research being funded by the major pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical evidence indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The number of medicines introduced worldwide that contain new active ingredients dropped from an average of over 60 a year in the late 1980s to 52 in 1991 and only 31 in 2001. The overall number of new active substances undergoing regulatory review is still falling.”
On the one hand, the expenditure on research is increasing. On the other, the number of new drugs is decreasing. The professionals call this situation the productivity crisis in drug discovery.
The NIH failed to produce the so much needed biology of chronic disease because it is caught in the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we need to seriously consider his alternative.
About the Author
John S. Boyd, Ph.D. The Center for the Biology of Chronic Disease, and causeofcancer.org, Rochester, NY
We are a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that specializes in researching the original disruption that causes a disease, and the sequence of events that lead from the original disruption to the development of clinical symptoms.
Tags: Heart Disease
