“Volunteers,” by which we mean prisoners, were deprived of nutrients and then given the bare minimum they needed to be restored to health.

My Tuesday question from student readers of NYU’s Washington Square News:

Question: how can we determine our individual caloric, vitamin, carbohydrates, fats and other intake requirements per day based on our own individual weight, height and lifestyle?

Answer: You can’t. You will have to be satisfied with estimates based on measurements performed years ago on a small number of study subjects.

We require calories and nutrients — 40 to 50 separate substances that our bodies cannot make, we must get from food. because these interact, studying one at a time gives results that may well be misleading.

Early nutrition scientists got “volunteers”– in quotes because study subjects often were prisoners — to consume diets depleted in vitamin C, for example. They waited until the subjects began to develop scurvy, a sign of vitamin C deficiency. Then they fed the subjects the smallest amount of vitamin C that would eliminate symptoms.

Because individuals vary in nutrient requirements, scientists used this data to estimate the range of nutrient intake that would meet the needs of practically everyone.

The Institute of Medicine compiles such data into Dietary Reference Intakes and presents the estimates by sex and age group. You can look up your requirements in DRI tables. DRIs account for the needs of 98 percent of the population. If your requirements are average, you will need less.

Few American adults show signs of nutrient deficiencies, but if you are worried about your own intake of nutrients, you can take a multivitamin supplement. Note, however, that we have no evidence to show supplements make healthy people healthier.

You can estimate calories by looking up everything you eat or drink in food composition tables, but it is easier to weigh yourself at regular intervals. If you are gaining weight, you are eating too many calories for your activity level.

With nutrition, it’s best to get comfortable with estimates and probabilities.

Fortunately, eating a healthy diet takes care of nutrients without your having to give them a thought. Eat your veggies!

A version of this article appeared in the Tuesday, may 1 print edition. Marion Nestle is a contributing columnist. Email her questions at dining@nyunews.com.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

by Carolyn Roesbery – for the Cordova Times

Keeping a sense of humor about this winter’s abundant snowfall is one way the folks at Harborside Pizza are dealing with things, helping to put a smile on all our faces by creating these bumper stickers which they have been handing out for free. Jennifer Gibbins/The Cordova Times

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According to measurements at Humpback Creek, 120″ of snow had accumulated at the beginning of 2012, and then came the big snow which became an official disaster on January 6, 2012. The sound of snow plows running all night; clinking of chains, beeping back up and varying pitch of heavy engines lost its aura of annoyance and became the sound of rescue as comforting as the music from a child?s ballerina jewel box.

The rest of this article is archived, and is only available to subscribers. Subscribe to the Cordova Times today and access our archives, PDF library, and more!

Public release date: 20-Mar-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Marty Rayaray6@partners.org617-726-0274Massachusetts General Hospital

Measuring the levels of small molecules in the blood may be able to identify individuals at elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes as much as a decade before symptoms of the disorder appear. In a report receiving advance online release in Nature Medicine, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describes finding that levels of five amino acids not only indicated increased diabetes risk in a general population but also could differentiate, among individuals with traditional risk factors such as obesity, those most likely to actually develop diabetes.

“These findings could provide insight into metabolic pathways that are altered very early in the process leading to diabetes,” says lead author Thomas Wang, MD, of the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center (CVRC) and Division of Cardiology. “They also raise the possibility that, in selected individuals, these measurements could identify those at highest risk of developing diabetes so that early preventive measures could be instituted.”

New technologies to measure levels of metabolites — small molecules produced by metabolic activities and released into the bloodstream — are giving investigators increased insight into an individual’s metabolic status. Since the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes marks the culmination of a years-long breakdown of the body’s system for metabolizing glucose, the ability to detect that breakdown at a stage when lifestyle changes could halt the process may significantly reduce the incidence of the disease. Known risk factors such as obesity and elevated glucose levels often signify that diabetes actually is present, so earlier identification of at-risk individuals is critical to more effective preventive measures, the authors note.

Some earlier studies had found elevated levels of certain amino acids in individuals who are obese or have insulin resistance, a condition that precedes full-blown type 2 diabetes. but no previous study examined whether levels of these or other metabolites predicted the future development of diabetes in currently healthy individuals. The current study began with an analysis of data from the Framingham Offspring Study, which follows a group of adult children of participants in the original Framingham Heart Study. Out of 2,400 study participants who entered the study in 1991 and 1995, about 200 developed type 2 diabetes during the following 12 years. using the baseline blood samples, the research team measured levels of 61 metabolites in 189 participants who later developed diabetes and 189 others — matched for age, sex and diabetes risk factors such as obesity and fasting glucose levels — who remained diabetes free.

This analysis found that elevations in five amino acids — isoleucine, leucine, valine, tyrosine and phenylalanine — were significantly associated with the later development of type 2 diabetes. several of these amino acids were the same ones found in smaller studies to be elevated in individuals with obesity or insulin resistance, and other evidence has suggested they may directly affect glucose regulation. The association of levels of these five amino acids with future diabetes development was replicated in 326 participants in the Malmo Diet and Cancer Study.

The investigators then found that measuring combinations of several metabolites, as opposed to a single amino acid, improved risk prediction. Overall, in individuals closely matched for traditional risk factors for type 2 diabetes, those with the highest levels of the three most predictive amino acids had a four to five times greater risk of developing diabetes than did those with the lowest levels.

“Several groups have suggested that these amino acids can aberrantly activate an important metabolic pathway involved in cellular growth or can somehow poison the mitochondria that provide cellular energy,” says Robert Gerszten, MD, director of Clinical and Translational Research for the MGH Heart Center, the paper’s senior author. “From a clinical perspective, we need to see if these markers, which we found using data from only about 1,000 individuals, do identify truly high-risk individuals who should be triaged to early preventive treatment and intensive lifestyle interventions. Additional basic investigations can reveal if these metabolites play a role in the process leading to diabetes and if there are ways we can stop the damage.” Gerszten and Wang are both associate professors of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

These studies were performed in close collaboration with Clary Clish, PhD, director of Metabolite Profiling of the Broad Institute. Additional co-authors of the Nature Medicine report are Susan Cheng, MD, Elizabeth McCabe, MS, and Gregory Lewis, MD, MGH Cardiology; Eugene Rhee, MD, MGH Renal Unit; Vamsi Mootha, MD, and Jose Florez, MD, PhD, MGH Center for Human Genetic Research and the Broad Institute; Martin Larson, ScD, Ramachandran Vasan, MD, Christopher O’Donnell,MD, and Caroline Fox, MD, MPH, Framingham Heart Study; Paul Jacques, DSc, Tufts University; Celine Fernandez and Olle Melander, MD, PhD, Lund University, Malmo, Sweden; and Stephen Carr, PhD, and Amanda Souza, Broad Institute..

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Leducq Foundation, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, and the American Heart Association. The Framingham Heart Study of the National, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Boston University is supported by a contract from the National Institutes of Health.

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1811, Massachusetts General Hospital is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of nearly $700 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, reproductive biology, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.

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I grew up next door to my grandmother and for hours, she would keep my sisters and I hostage to talk to us about recipes. I’d watch her do all of the preparations for major dishes, like tamales or menudo and she always scolded us for not getting the right ingredients or measurements. oh abuelita! The desire to keep her memory alive made me think about those sweet adolescent years. Suddenly, I remembered the recipes, taquitos, arroz, chile reyenos, were all about consumption and not a single one on PREVENTION. Of all the things my grandma talked to us about, there was never one conversation on things like sex or cervical cancer.

January was cervical cancer awareness month, but it shouldn’t be the only time we talk about it. The fact that any woman who has ever had sex can get HPV (human papillomavirus) is a reason to talk about cervical cancer with your amigas, comadres, moms, sisters, and abuelitas.  It is important to note that while not all HPV infections lead to cervical cancer (in fact, most don’t!), the possibility is there and we must discuss these links.  so pongansen las pilas, prevention needs to be part of the conversation about cervical cancer.

Did your mom or abuelita ever throw a dicho at you growing up? – mas sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo (the devil knows more for being old than for being devil), meaning that experience means more than just a position. we know through other women’s experiences that cervical cancer can be detrimental to one’s life. Por ejemplo, approximately 4,000 women die of cervical cancer annually with Latina deaths at a proportion nearly 40% higher than that of non-Hispanic White women. What’s more striking, 80-85% of cervical cancer deaths could have been prevented. But when we talk about health, often, we don’t talk about cervical cancer, and when we do, it’s too late and the cancer has spread to lower portions of the vagina or other parts of the body. That’s why we need to talk about prevention.

To start the screening guidelines say Pap smears should start when a woman turns age 21 or after first sexual intercourse. But what is it about Latinas that make us more susceptible to cervical cancer than women of other racial/ethnic groups? Cervical cancer prevention has traditionally relied on pap smears and HPV tests for early detection and treatment.

A pap smear does not identify HPV directly, but rather can look for symptoms of HPV. Once symptoms are discovered, an HPV test will determine exactly which type of HPV is present. Therefore, women must have regular pap tests to look for symptoms of HPV and, once symptoms are found an HPV test can be performed to find out if she has a high-risk strain, which can lead to cervical cancer.

What’s striking about Latinas, is that often we forgo these exams due to limited access to adequate healthcare and barriers associated with cost, health insurance, embarrassment, and lack of knowledge about cervical cancer. this is why prevention and conversation on this issue can make a world of difference for Latinas. NPR recently ran this story about this challenge in the Latina community.

That’s why the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) kicked off a series of events in January to spread the message that through education and appropriate care, cervical cancer can be entirely prevented.

On January 6th we partnered with Tamika and Friends, a national organization dedicated to raising awareness of cervical cancer and its link to HPV, to host a House Party of FiVe (HPV). The purpose of the HPV Party was to raise awareness of cervical cancer among Latinas and African American women. Similar to having a cafecito with your girlfriends or comadres, women gathered at the NLIRH office in DC to chat about cervical cancer. while we know that it’s never ideal to talk about cervical cancer, the HPV Party provided a safe environment to learn from and share stories about cervical cancer and experiences about what women did when they got the news that their pap-test result was abnormal. Learn more about the parties in this news story.

We also joined efforts with Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) and Tamika and Friends on January 26th to talk about cervical cancer with a group of union workers, advocates and students. this time, the discussion was more on understanding the HPV vaccine, which is a series of three shots to protect against the types of HPV (strains 16 and 18) that is responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases. The event took place at American Federation of Teachers and women played games on sexual behaviors to define high risk and low risk attitudes and behaviors of HPV.

Remember that it’s important to put your health first, arm yourself with a good support system, and educate yourself about the things that impact your body! Cuidate. Armate. Educate. It’s never too late to get the word out to the women in your life – girlfriends, hay que cuidarnos, lo merecemos!

By Rebecca Medina, Policy Analyst