Food Lobby Rigs EU Sugar Laws While Obesity And Diabetes Spiral Out Of Control

Food lobby rigs EU sugar laws while obesity and diabetes spiral out of control

The food and drink lobby is winning the fight over EU sugar regulation. As Corporate Europe Observatory’s new report “A spoonful of sugar” illustrates, existing laws are being undermined and much-needed measures fought off that are vital for tackling Europe’s looming health crisis.
An increasing number of people in Europe are struggling with obesity, heart disease and diabetes linked to excessive sugar consumption. This public health crisis has not stopped trade associations that represent the biggest players in the food and drink industry from resisting regulation at all cost: snacks, drinks, and processed foods that are high in sugar have the highest profit margins.
In total, the key trade associations, companies and lobby groups behind sugary food and drinks spend an estimated €21.3 million annually to lobby the European Union.
“A spoonful of sugar” highlights how, despite rhetoric about addressing the health crisis, industry lobbyists are derailing effective sugar regulation in the European Union.
Their strategies include:
Pushing free trade agreements and deregulation drives that undermine existing laws;
Exercising undue influence over EU regulatory bodies;
Capturing scientific expertise;
Championing weak voluntary schemes;
Outmaneuvering consumer groups by spending billions on aggressive lobbying.
Health policies like upper limits for sugars in processed foods, sugar taxes, and labels that clearly show added sugars are long overdue. We need lobby transparency and a clear division between the regulators and the regulated. Rules and guidelines that help pe Continue reading

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#LCHF The genius of Dr. Joseph R. Kraft - Exposing the true Extent of #Diabetes

Recently acquired Dr. Kraft's excellent book: 'Diabetes Epidemic & You' - (Kindle version)thanks to George Henderson and Grant Schofield for switching me on to this. What a guy - see his pedigree here. Essentially he has decoded the hyperinsulinemia mess in society, unveiling the true extent. As we know, Fasting Glucose, Fasting Insulin and general measures of hyperinsulinemia track with atherosclerotic vascular disease (and other types of heart disease to be honest) - but not as much as one would expect - they are noisy variables. Proinsulin (good predictor of Hyperinsulinemic physiology) and direct measures of hyperinsulinemia/diabetes like Kraft's, are the real trackers. This book indicates why that is. Measuring the WRONG metrics has its consequences. It has led to an almost-criminal underestimation of Insulin issues as the primary driver for Vascular Disease, bar none.
Dr. Kraft properly measured people for Insulin/Diabetic issues - 14,384 of them, ages 3 to 90, over 20 years of proper/accurate '5 hour glucose with hourly insulin assays'. He accurately quantified essential Type 2 Diabetes (or not) in each person, and the prevalence was far higher than generally perceived from standard tests (the orthodox increase in T2D can be observed here). For these 16k people, he accurately measured their Insulin response to carbohydrate/glucose load, learning that there were 5 patterns of response. The first response 'Pattern I' is healthy or 'Euinsulin' as he called it - not many of the poor people achieved this however. Hidden diabetic phenomena far exceeded the levels that woul Continue reading

Smart Insulin Patch Could Replace Painful Injections for Diabetes

Painful insulin injections could become a thing of the past for the millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes, thanks to a new invention from researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who have created the first “smart insulin patch.” Though it has thus far only been tested in an animal model, the patch has been shown to detect increases in blood sugar levels and secrete doses of insulin into the bloodstream whenever needed.
The patch – a thin square no bigger than a penny – is covered with more than one hundred tiny needles, each about the size of an eyelash. These “microneedles” are packed with microscopic storage units for insulin and glucose-sensing enzymes that rapidly release their cargo when blood sugar levels get too high.
The study found that the new, painless patch could lower blood glucose in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes for up to nine hours. More pre-clinical tests and subsequent clinical trials in humans will be required before the patch can be administered to patients, but the approach shows great promise. A paper describing the work, “Microneedle-array patches loaded with hypoxia-sensitive vesicles provide fast glucose-responsive insulin delivery,” is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We have designed a patch for diabetes that works fast, is easy to use, and is made from nontoxic, biocompatible materials,” said co-senior author Zhen Gu, PhD, a professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill. Gu also Continue reading

Diabetes breakthrough: Insulin-producing cells formed using malaria drugs

Diabetes currently affects 29 million Americans. For decades, researchers have been trying to replace the insulin cells of the pancreas that are destroyed by the disease. Groundbreaking research may have found a way to genetically transform alpha cells into insulin-producing beta cells.
Diabetes ranks as the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC report that 29 million Americans currently live with the disease, and another 86 million have prediabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is characterized by the inability of the pancreas to produce insulin. More specifically, the body's own immune system stops recognizing the beta cells normally responsible for producing insulin. Instead, it attacks and destroys them.
Without insulin - which normally "tells" the body to start reducing the levels of glucose - the blood sugar cannot enter the cells, where it is normally transformed into energy. As a result, glucose gets stuck in the bloodstream, leading to diabetes.
For decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to replace these beta cells - sometimes referred to as islet cells because they are located in an endocrine area of the pancreas known as the islets of Langerhans.
Researchers have attempted to replace destroyed beta cells with new ones using stem cells and adult cells. Although the results have looked encouraging, they have yet to succeed.
Now, researchers from the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine in Austria seem to have found the missing link, giving hope of a cure for type 1 diabe Continue reading

FDA approves Medtronic's 'artificial pancreas' for diabetes

Medtronic Plc won U.S. approval on Wednesday for an "artificial pancreas" that is the first device to automatically deliver the right dose of insulin to patients with type 1 diabetes, freeing them from continually monitoring insulin levels throughout each day.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in its approval of the device, the MiniMed 670G, hailed it as a breakthrough.
The device offers type 1 diabetics "greater freedom to live their lives without having to consistently and manually monitor baseline glucose levels and administer insulin," Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's medical device division, said in a statement.
Analysts said the FDA approved the device six months sooner than expected. However, it will not be available until the spring of 2017.
The MiniMed 670G is the first device that allows a glucose sensor to communicate with an insulin pump and automatically regulate the insulin flow. The device is approved for those aged 14 and older.
The device measures glucose levels every five minutes and automatically administers insulin as needed. Patients will still need to instruct the device to deliver extra insulin for meals and notify the device when they exercise - which lowers glucose levels.
About 1.25 million American children and adults have type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin - a hormone needed to obtain energy from food.
Patients take insulin injections at various times of the day. But blood sugar can drop to dangerously low levels if too much insulin circulates in the bloodstream, requiring patients to fr Continue reading