Give saturated fat 2nd chance

WASHINGTON - RESEARCHERS backed by the US dairy industry say saturated fat is unfairly blamed for causing heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems.

Instead of blaming whole milk and cheeses for clogging arteries, they argue, people should reduce carbohydrates and eat more fish - alongside a glass of milk. That's the message from the Global Dairy Platform, promoting a series of research articles published in the October issue of Lipids.

'Although diets inordinately high in fat and saturated fat are associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk in some individuals, assuming that saturated fat at any intake level is harmful is an over-simplification and not supported by scientific evidence,' said Bruce German, a food science professor at the University of California.

The dairy industry says saturated fat intake has a limited impact on cardiovascular disease risk. For years they have argued that dietary advice wrongly blames saturated fat as the major cause of heart attacks, strokes and high blood pressure.

Still, the American Heart Association advises that no more than seven percent of daily calories come from saturated fat, which occur naturally in many foods, including fatty beef, pork, cream, butter and other dairy products.

The AHA says, for example, that people who need 2,000 calories per day should get no more than 140 of them from saturated fats, which translates to about 16g of saturated fats per day. Total fat intake should not exceed 35 per cent of daily calories, the AHA advises. Remaining fat should come from nuts, fish and vegetable oils, which are sources of mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. -- AFP

New clues to womens' cancer

PARIS - GENE detectives said on Sunday they had netted a clutch of tipoffs to help identify women with a higher inherited risk of ovarian and breast cancer, dubbed 'silent killers' for the stealthy way they claim lives.

The work gathered experts from the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, who trawled through the genetic code of tens of thousands of women, looking for single-letter changes found among women with cancer but absent among women who were otherwise healthy. Their work was published online in the journal Nature Genetics.

One study found telltale DNA on chromosomes 2, 3, 8, 17 and 19 that strongly indicated risk from serious ovarian cancer, the term for the commonest and most aggressive form of this disease.


Another paper found that a variation of DNA on Chromosome 19 amplified the risk of breast cancer associated with a well-known culprit, a faulty copy of the BRCA1 gene, which is located on Chromosome 17.

What role these variants perform in the biology of cancer is unclear, and finding out will probably take many more years of investigation. Even so, the researchers believe that the clues add powerfully to the basket of genetic telltales for cancer, which thus opens the way to diagnostic tools for women at risk.

'These latest findings raise the possibility that in the future, women in the general population who are at the greatest risk of developing ovarian cancer because they carry these newly discovered DNA variants can be identified and given closer surveillance,' said Andrew Berchuck, a professor at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, who headed one of the investigations. -- AFP

New treatment for asthma

LOS ANGELES - RESEARCHERS say they've found a possible new treatment for adults with hard-to-control asthma. Their discovery, however, came at a price.

Scientists of a US government-funded asthma study had to spend nearly US$1 million (S$1.33 million) of taxpayers' money after British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC declined to donate its asthma drug and look-alike dummy medicine for the study, which compared two other treatments.

Editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the study, chastised Glaxo, saying its actions made the research harder and more expensive to do. Drug companies aren't required to supply their medicines for study, but they often do.

'In the end, the study results provided the truth' - the drug, Spiriva, was as good as Glaxo's Serevent, they wrote. The study was published online on Sunday to coincide with a presentation at a medical meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

About 300 million people worldwide suffer from asthma. In the US, 22 million Americans have asthma, which kills about 4,000 a year. For people who can't control their asthma with inhaled steroid medicine, current guidelines call for doubling the dose or adding a different drug that relaxes the muscles to help patients breathe.

Researchers tested three inhaled treatments: doubling the steroid dose, adding Glaxo's Serevent or adding Boehringer Ingelheim's Spiriva, which is approved for emphysema and other chronic lung conditions, but not asthma. -- AP