Hot MedFax

I win.  My husband and I argue all the time about vitamin pills and supplements.  I don't take anything other than fish oil but he believes in just about every claim ever made about supplements.  Now I'm finally being proved right.  A new study has found that,  using DNA analysis, only two out of 12 companies tested sold supplements that were all completely genuine and free of plant substitution.  The others?  They contained fillers such as soy, rice, and wheat, or weeds or potentially harmful contaminants. According to Sarah B. Weir at yahoo.com, re searchers at a university in Ontario tested things like St. John's wort and echinacea -- and 42 others -- that are sold by 12 different companies in Canada and the United States, and they found that "one-third of the supplements contained none of the plant extracts indicated on the product label. " In addition, 59 percent were contaminated with plant species not listed on the ing...

I can't remember when I started trying to lose weight -- I think it was somewhere around 5th grade.  (Actress Ginnifer Goodwin, now 32, beat me -- she joined Weight Watchers at 9).  But now we're finding that there can be emotional consequences from being put on a diet too early in life. According to Jen Weigel at the Chicago Tribune, the last thing people with children who are a little too pudgy should do is bug them about it.  She quotes a woman, who should know, whose mom was obsessed with her food intake, Karen Kataline, author of "Fatlash: Food Police & the Fear of Thin. "She had unresolved issues about weight and appearance and she wasn't happy with her own body." Kataline says that her mother was obsessed with her weight from infancy. Now mine didn't start quite that early, but almost since I can remember I, and a cousin, were teased about being overweight by our stringy, fast-metabolism siblings. Children as young as six and eight hat...

Sad, but true.  Antioxidants won't make it easier to have a baby.  Cure cancer.  Or help you live longer. Studies for some time have shown that these elements are not the miracle drug we once thought they were -- though my husband (who doesn't believe in doctors, but then, he's a dentist) still gulps a handful of supplements every day and this most likely won't stop him. But according to a story at yahoo.com, a recent fertility study contradicted an earlier one that showed that partners of men who took antioxidants seemed to get pregnant more easily.  The new study, though scientists admitted it was of low quality, completely turned that treatment advice on its head. You partner can take all the antioxidants he wants but it's probably not going to get you pregnant. As someone who sought out every old wives' tale under the sun -- cut out diet soda (cyclamates), stop using the microwave, drink red raspberry leaf tea -- to get pregnant, I kno...

Something new to worry about.  Prostate cancer and fish oil.  Will these doctors ever get it right? A new study has shown that too much fish oil (and fish) could lead to prostate cancer.  Say what?  Writes David L. Katz, MD, MPH, director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center, this recent headline caught his attention: "Fish oils may raise prostate cancer risks, study confirms." Katz neither confirms nor denies the possibility that the study may be correct.  Instead, he reports, "The study does not prove that fish oil intake causes prostate cancer. But nor is the study dismissible rubbish, as the large crowd of fish oil proponents gathered around it with harpoons in hand would like to contend." There were some steps taken that aren't usually in a study like this, and some that were.  "Blood was obtained from men at baseline as they enrolled into the study," he relates. Over time, more than 800 men developed prostate cancer, whi...