Teenagers blame eating disorders on health messages

As usual, Leftist nuts hurt people under the pretext of helping. It should be noted that the very severe eating disorder known as anorexia is clearly just a type of OCD and, as such, the sufferer would have a substantial genetic susceptibility. Most psychoses do however need to be "triggered" by environmental factors and there is no doubt that the obesity war would have caused all incipient anorexia to become full-blown

SCHOOLGIRLS with eating disorders are blaming the fight against the obesity epidemic for their illnesses, researchers have found. Many teenage girls with eating disorders "strongly believed that their illness was nurtured, exacerbated or sometimes even caused by the well-meaning action in schools", UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported.

John Evans, a professor of Sociology of Education and Physical Education at Leicestershires Loughborough University, told the newspaper that many girls said the fight against obesity caused their illnesses. The tales they told were incredibly revealing about what schools were doing, in good faith, that was propelling these girls towards this damaging relationship with food and exercise, Professor Evans said.

One girl told how, in class, the PE teacher pointed to a broomstick and said, 'That's the shape we are aiming for. He said another girl had told him about a class weigh-in. The whole class got weighed and the teacher said, 'Oh, it's the big one,' and I was the heaviest in the year."

Prof Evans said some children were being given the wrong message by their teachers. But he also said those teachers may have formed their opinions on obesity from elsewhere. "I've heard prominent spokesmen compare obese people to the so-called freaks that used to appear in circuses in the 1920s and 1930s," he said. The message being passed down is that obese people can be legitimately laughed at, stigmatised and considered irresponsibly abnormal."

The results of the four-year study will be published in a book later this year.

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Saliva may reveal heart attack

Could be useful if confirmed

A SIMPLE saliva test may one day be used in ambulances, restaurants, convenience stores and elsewhere in the community to quickly tell if a person is having a heart attack. "Proteins found in the saliva have the ability to rapidly classify potential heart attacks," said John McDevitt, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr McDevitt and colleagues developed a nano-bio-chip sensor that is biochemically programmed to detect sets of proteins in saliva capable of determining whether or not a person is having a heart attack or is at high risk of having a heart attack in the near future. With the saliva heart attack diagnostic test, a person spits into a tube and the saliva is then transferred to credit card-sized lab card that holds the nano-bio-chip containing a standard battery of cardiac biomarkers. The loaded card is inserted like an ATM card into an analyser that determines the patient's heart status in as little as 15 minutes.

In a study involving 56 people who had a heart attack and 59 healthy "controls" who did not, "we found that our test could distinguish between heart attack patients and controls with about the same diagnostic accuracy" as that of standard blood tests, Dr McDevitt said.

Many heart attack patients, especially women, had non-specific symptoms or had normal EKG readings, making timely diagnosis difficult, he said. "In our small trial, we had about one third of the patients with these...silent heart attacks on EKG." These patients need to go the emergency department and have their blood drawn and tested for enzymes that are indicative of a heart attack, "which could take an hour to an hour and a half."

The saliva test could be used in conjunction with the EKG and "aid in rapidly diagnosing heart attacks that are silent on EKG," Dr McDevitt said. Larger and more refined studies were planned.

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