A long-term study has determined that smoking and high salt intake contribute somehow to the development of acid reflux [stomach acid causing heartburn, belching, etc.]. Tea and alcohol, long thought to be responsible, have no identifiable effect on the disease.

Seems that nitrites in the stomach (from a salty diet) can cause an excess of nitric oxide–which, as we know, is good for relaxing blood vessels–also relaxes the muscle at the bottom of the gullet and thus encourages reflux. Astonishing what a single substance can do–both positive and negative–in our bodies. Apparently you can decrease your risk, though, by regularly eating fiber and exercising.

Geez, will they never run out of reasons for telling us to eat healthy and exercise?

This nitric oxide is amazing–it rushes to help rebuild your tissues after injury, but it can get too enthusiastic. Just read this in a press release from a company called LymphaCare (good, descriptive name…kind of like BioMedNews) that’s making a more effective–and cheaper–way to deliver “non-visible and visible infrared light energy to promote regeneration and revascularization of damaged capillaries by releasing excess nitric oxide [emphasis added]from cells.

The system uses a combination of lights because each type penetrates the skin to different depths. Visible light helps heal infections as it reaches problems near the surface like wounds, cuts, scars, “trigger points, and acupuncture points.” I’m putting quotes around that because it’s key to realize that the concepts of Eastern “that-stuff’s-only-for-weirdos” medicine is creeping its stealthy way into the everyday language of Western professionals.

This reminds me of the way the Catholic Church announced one day that “a sin” it had been condemning people to hell for for generations (eating meat on Friday) was no longer a sin–and offered nothing in the way of explanation or apology. Oh, well, it’s okay. At least this marriage is coming off, no matter that we may choose not to acknowledge it.

The other light, the Invisible Infrared light, goes deeper and helps heal bones, joints, deep muscles, etc. in the same way as the visible light.

It makes sense that light would heal–look how we feel to walk out into a sun-drenched day, especially after a few days of cloudy weather (let alone we midwesterners, after weeks of the gray, rainy stuff). And isn’t it strange–and wonderful–that now we know one of the reaasons: ’cause nitric oxide responds to it, too.

I bet if we look hard enough, we will eventually find a natural solution to a lot of the problems we’ve created with our chemical creations. In the April, 2004 Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology you find this on how seaweed can speed up the neutralizing process: ‘DDT gets into this ‘box,’ so the microbes that would normally break it down can’t get at it. Seaweed has sodium in it. Sodium opens that box. It separates the tightly bound matrix that holds soil particles together and allows microbes to get in.”

My dad was a farmer in his retirement–just a little half-acre garden in deep-sandy-soil Indiana. He tried his best always to identify and use natural ways to battle the Japanese bettles and the moles and chipmunks and fungi and viruses. The local county extension agent probably got tired of all his calls. But dad lived on the land, so he knew and respected it. As we isolate ourselves form the earth with technology and offices and buildings, we forget to ask Nature for help.

The rise of “green” and “sustainable” as respected business terms is a good sign. But nothing will make us smarter like actually being in contact with the earth. That’s where bioscientists have an edge–they deal with life in all its myriad forms every day.

High risk, yes. Immeasurable returns, yes, indeed.

Imagine observing a surgery live while you’re on vacation. Imagine being able to review functionality on a new model of spectrophotometer without having a salesperson present.

Motorola has handed out sample models of a new cell phone with a video camera in it. And they’ve given free rein to a professional cinematographer just to see what he can do with it. These short films viewable online give you a good idea of the clarity this new technology can achieve. Not sure how splitting the screen into 6 or 9 slightly different views works–or if it has any function other than artistic…

A media observer says “cellphone marketing will become even more personalized than the Internet.” Imagine getting a custom-made-for-you television show–say a technology review or a travel guide–delivered to your phone when you ask for it. It’s kind of the AAA (auto club) model of come in here and we’ll draw a “triptik” for you while you watch–only you don’t have to go to the storefront.

I know how much I enjoy having an embedded digital camera in my PDA–half the time I carry the thing more for the camera than for the information content–since if I’m going to be actually working, I’m starting to bring my laptop with me. (Tried implementing the use of a portable computer a little bigger than a PDA, but have never succeeded in getting the thing to work properly–so I gave up the idea of buying a folding keyboard for it.)

So maybe it’s going to be a race to see who gives us truly everything-in-a-box first: our laptops, our cell phones, or some entirely new device that’s lurking in the minds of the technogeeks out there.

Where will you be going when you can carry your office in your pocket?

If we know the facts, we’re less likely to overeat and/or eat stuff that’s bad for us. So goes the thinking at the FDA lately.

It’s commendable that they are wanting to help people understand the consequences of their dietary choices. But I wonder if the proposal they’ll be making next month, that

FINDINGS (washingtonpost.com)”would tell food manufacturers for the first time to list on packages the percentage of daily recommended calories the product contains” will really make a difference. They believe it will “shock” people to see that a food item constitutes 50% of their daily allowance of calories…

Well, maybe. It’s certainly valuable to have the information handy and may help some, but fighting obesity is about paying attention. And that’s what many of us don’t want to do. So having more information means simply that there’s more evidence we can ignore as we choose to eat the cream-filled chocolate cupcake or the greasy fried chicken anyway–just ‘cuz we want to.

Stroke probably doesn’t mean much to you–unless you know someone who’s had one. If you do, you may know something about how devastating the physical and mental consequences can be. Now $12 million from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has gone to Columbia University, which won against many other competing institutions. Worthy studies they’ll be doing:

They’ll be studying the safety of taking high-dose statins–typically used to lower cholesterol–as a preventive measure. There’s some evidence that people already taking statins for other reasons tended to have less severe strokes and a better recovery.

They’ll also be looking to see if brain activity patterns shortly after the onset of stroke can predict recovery. They’ve observed that activity begins on the other side of the brain from where the stroke is, but they don’t yet know what this might mean. That want to see if treatment can be adjusted to mitigate neurological deficits.

Fast treatment for stroke is essential to minimize damage. Columbia U. scientists are also going to test a novel technique in behavioral change to see if they can get stroke survivors (who are more prone to additional strokes) to recognize stroke symptoms quickly, get to the hospital faster and negotiated their way through the Emergency Department for faster treatment. They’ll start by testing the information on people in northern Manhattan.

If you know someone who’s had a stroke, tell them about this study so they can keep an eye on it–maybe even ahead of their own doctor. Keeping up on the latest developments is a way to keep our health truly in our own hands.

Exciting, incredible, “political incorrect” discovery. Adding a combination of a couple of older drugs to the current heart medications increases longevity by 40% for African Americans being treated for heart disease–while it does nothing for white people. Here’s an quote from this student-operated online newspaper called “The MNDaily”:

:…blacks seem to be more predisposed to heart disease than whites because some unknown factors — genetic, environmental or both — predispose them to having less active nitric oxide systems, which are protective of the heart and arteries. BiDil [the new combo drug] contains nitric oxide enhancers” which two university researchers suspect will make the drug more effective for African Americans. They’re out to get FDA approval and getting flack from various quarters for even suggesting that drugs might be race specific.

The students of the University of Minneapolis who run the paper call for the medical and legal communities to quit beating around the bush and admit that there can be physiological differences between the races–without implying there are differences on which discrimination might be based.

The CDCP (now tellingly known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have awarded St. Louis University’s School of Public Health millions to examine chronic health issues like “OBESITY, SMOKING, NUTRITION, EXERCISE, HEALTH, WELLNESS, FLU, and CANCER.”

My first reaction is, hallelujah! This makes so much sense: to look at helping people change the lifestyle factors that so influence our human health and wellness. It’s going to be a long struggle to find out how to affect how people make choices–which has so much, if not everything, to do with emotional health–but it’s so the right place to look. And if the project takes full advantage of the discoveries of quantum physics about energy and thought and of the Candace Pert discoveries about emotions and neuropeptides, chances are great that truly meaningful progress will be made.

My second reaction is, holy mackerel, what a drop in the bucket $5.8 million is for a work of such vast scope. BUT I guess that means other schools of health in other locations and perhaps some public companies may be able to tap into this kind of funding, too. It’s an amazing, exciting time to be a scientist or researcher or doctor or bioscience company owner or employee.

And it’s an amazing time to be alive to see all the miracles that their discoveries and inventions are creating.

As a writer, I’m always conscious of the power of words to influence thoughts. As a marketing professional I know how careful any company is about the words its people use in a press release or marketing materials. That’s why the opening paragraph of this story on WebMD.com sent my antennae up:“Getting tough on cholesterol with high doses of the cholesterol medication Lipitor may help prevent heart attacks.”

“Getting tough” is not an expression you use in a press release. It’s an expression our politicians love to use–I said “politicians” because we can be pretty sure that anything they say is profoundly aimed at influencing our thoughts, often with only a casual nod towards truth. An unbiased source of news would never use an opening sentence like this one. And not surprisingly, we find at the bottom of paragraph 3 these statements: “The study was funded by Parke-Davis and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Pfizer is a WebMD sponsor.”

Now pharmaceutical companies often pay for research studies. And it’s natural and okay that this one wants to use its own website to promote its products. But it’s not okay that they want to act as if this is an objective news story. Their choice of words was the first clue. Having previously written about the questionable results of a number of studies (including Vioxx) for some legal websites, I know some of the ways in which study results can be skewed.

When you read a supposedly unbiased news story starting with “Getting tough” keep your eyes and your mind open. What you won’t hear is probably the most important part of the “study.”

Always wondered how it happened that when my father had his heart attack and they looked closely at his cardiac situation, they found that though he’d had a mild attack earlier in his life (that went undiagnosed and untreated because he was a stubborn guy about his health when he was younger), they found a huge vein that had grown around his heart to replace an artery that had become blocked. So now we can safely assume it was a protein called Netrin-1, one of a family of “neural guidance cues” that coax nerve fibers to go in specific directions as they grow, that must have caused his vein to kick in for the damaged vessel.

The scientist discovered this property of Netrin-1 after he found there was a receptor for a different neural guidance factor. Heck, they probably could have imagined this idea years before if they thought much about what they saw in my dad’s chest. When we see a miracle in a body, chances are we’ll be able to find a physiological mechanism in the body that made it happen.

But the “why” is another story.That’s where quantum physics and neuropeptides come in. If you haven’t yet seen the movie “What the #$@##$^ do we know?” I highly recommend it. Documentary style interviews with eminent physicists around the world are interspersed with a little story of self-discovery acted out by the young, attractive deaf actress Marlee Mattlin. The scene with the red, blue and silver emotional cells alone is worth the price of admission.

But the point is the existence of receptors in every part of our bodies and the power of our thoughts to influence the behaviors of those receptors and of our cells themselves. It’s worth seeing.