Eat Vegetarian food for slim waist

Do you want to know who has the slimmest waist? Meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians, or vegans? Well, well! According to a new study, vegans do. Vegans are vegetarians who not only forego eating meat, fish, or fowl but also all foods derived from animals. However, the reason vegans tend to be slimmer may lie in what they do eat: fibre. Lots of it. And that’s a habit you can easily duplicate. Fibre makes you feel full longer, and it seems to inhibit fat absorption. Broccoli pizza on whole-wheat crust, anyone? Although fibre seems to help limit fat deposits, a meat-laden diet does just the opposite - it actually can cause an increase in body fat, especially in the belly, one of the worst places for it to accumulate in terms of both your health and your self-image. In one cross-sectional study, meat-eaters had the highest body mass indexes (BMIs), the height-weight ratio that’s the gold standard for separating healthy weights from weights that are too high or too low. Fish-eaters and vegetarians had lower BMIs than people who regularly ate meat, and vegans tended to have the lowest indexes of all. One possible explanation is that high-protein diets may change the hormonal make-up of the body, altering body chemistry in a way that increases fat around the abdomen. Whatever the reason, the point is clear: You have yet another reason to up your intake of fibre-rich fruits, veggies, and whole grains — a smaller waist

Link Times of India

Tobacco plant to fight against cancer

A personalized vaccine made using tobacco plants — normally associated with causing cancer rather than helping cure it — could aid people with lymphoma in fighting the disease, US researchers said. The treatment, which would vaccinate cancer patients against their own tumour cells, is made using a new approach that turns genetically engineered tobacco plants into personalized vaccine factories. "This is the first time a plant has been used for making a protein to inject into a person," said Ron Levy of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This would be a way to treat cancer without side effects," Levy said in a statement on Monday. "The idea is to marshal the body's own immune system to fight cancer." Levy was working with a team of scientists from the now defunct Large Scale Biology Corp, which helped fund the study, as well as Bayer AG's Bayer HealthCare, CBR International Corp, Integrated Biomolecule Corp, The Biologics Consulting Group Inc and Holtz Biopharma Consulting. They were working on a type of cancer known as follicular B-cell lymphoma, a kind of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that attacks the immune system. The cancer makes a specific antibody that is not found in healthy cells. The technology exploits the tobacco plant's vulnerability a virus that only attacks tobacco plants, which most people associate with causing cancer, and not curing it. The researchers altered the virus, adding the specific antibody gene from a patient's cancer cells. Then, they infected the tobacco plants with the gene-carrying virus. "You scratch it on the leaves and it turns the plants into a protein-producing factory for the protein of interest," Levy said. Other approaches that use animals to make the vaccines can take months, but the plant-based approach is very fast. "A week later, you extract the protein. It's that fast." In a test of 16 patients with follicular B-cell lymphoma, 70% of people injected with a made-to-order vaccine developed an immune response, and none had any side effects. Levy said the study suggests personalized cancer vaccines could be produced efficiently and cheaply using plants. The early-stage study only focused on the safety and immune-stimulating ability of the plant-produced vaccines. Future studies will be needed to show how effective they are as a treatment.

Link Reuters

Scientists identify obesity gene

British and French scientists have identified several variants of a single gene that boost the risk of obesity, according to a study published Sunday in the British journal Nature. Previous research had shown that an extremely rare mutation in the same PCSK1 gene can, all by itself, lead to huge gains in weight, making it the only known source of so-called "monogenetic" obesity.
But a team led by Philippe Froguel of Imperial College London wanted to find out if PCSK1 might lead, in combination with other genetic factors, to more complex and widespread forms of obesity as well.
When they compared the genomes of 13,000 obese individuals of European ancestry to those of a normal control group, the researchers found three mutations in the gene that were far more common among those coping with excess weight.
These same variants were also linked to increased risk of childhood obesity, as well as less extreme weight gain, the study found.
The benchmark for obesity is the body-mass index (BMI), defined as one's weight in kilograms divided by the square of one's height in meters.
A BMI from 18.5 to 25 is considered in the healthy range, from 25 to 30 is overweight, and 30 or higher is obese.
PCSK1 produces an enzyme, called proconvertase 1, that plays a critical role in converting inactive forms of hormones that control appetite and regulate energy metabolism into active forms.
These hormones include insulin and glucagon, involved in the metabolism of sugar and carbohydrates, as well as a third molecule that signals to the brain that one has eaten enough.

Link Agence France Presse