The Health News USA November 23 2017

• Ancestry, 23andMe and dozens of other genetics companies all started selling on Amazon in the “home tests” category in the past year or two, with the bigger players working closely with Amazon to make that happen. Among the first to initiate sales on the website was Ancestry, which started offering a DNA test for lineage and family connections through the marketplace in 2015.
• An old study is now shedding new light on the sugar industry’s controversial past, and its secrets are being revealed in a new paper. The 1960’s study, which suggests a link between a high-sugar diet and high blood cholesterol levels and cancer in rats, was sponsored by the sugar industry, according to the perspective paper published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday.
• New research suggests this may be true when giving an insulin pill to try to prevent or delay type 1 diabetes. Researchers tested the effect of insulin pills on 560 children and adults whose relatives had type one diabetes. For most of them, the drug had no effect on whether or not they developed type one diabetes, or how quickly they developed it. The researchers said that for those at the highest risk of developing type 1 diabetes sooner rather than later, insulin pill therapy delayed the time it took to develop the full-blown disease by about 2-and-a-half years.

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 23rd of November 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/amazon-has-suddenly-become-a-big-marketplace-for-selling-genetic-tests.html

As if Amazon hadn’t become a big enough part of our lives, the website is now increasingly the place people are going to find if they’re of African heritage or if their children are at risk for certain rare genetic conditions. DNA-testing companies that offer everything from ancestry information to tests for common inherited diseases are projecting record sales over the holiday season, with Amazon serving as a new marketplace for many of them.

Ancestry, TwentythreeandMe and dozens of other genetics companies all started selling on Amazon in the “home tests” category in the past year or two, with the bigger players working closely with Amazon to make that happen. Among the first to initiate sales on the website was Ancestry, which started offering a DNA test for lineage and family connections through the marketplace in two thousand fifteen. At that time, the company was selling four hundred to five hundred sets a day, a number that swelled to close to one thousand three a day by late  two thousand sixteen, said Vineet Mehra, Ancestry’s chief marketing officer. It’s proved to be a larger-than-expected chunk of sales for Ancestry, which directs the bulk of its marketing and advertising to its own site.
The company has sold more than six million tests for seventy nine dollars apiece (recently down from ninety nine dollars). Amazon featured Ancestry and chief rival TwentythreeandMe on Prime Day, prompting a spike in sales. They could get another boon in the next week, thanks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/21/health/sugar-industry-cancer-history-study/index.html

An old study is now shedding new light on the sugar industry’s controversial past, and its secrets are being revealed in a new paper. The nineteen sixties study, which suggests a link between a high-sugar diet and high blood cholesterol levels and cancer in rats, was sponsored by the sugar industry, according to the perspective paper published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday. Yet the study itself was never published and has been forgotten until now.
“All we know is that the plug got pulled and nothing got published,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the new paper.

This enigmatic study seems to provide evidence of the harmful health impacts of eating too much sugar. It also suggests that a group then called the Sugar Research Foundation might have manipulated scientific research in its favor, according to the new paper.
The authors of the new paper previously conducted a separate historical analysis of sugar industry-related documents and studies. That analysis, published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggested that the Sugar Research Foundation sponsored a research program that successfully cast doubt about the health hazards of a high-sugar diet and rather promoted fat “as the dietary culprit” in health concerns such as heart disease.

The foundation, now called the Sugar Association, spoke out against that analysis last year and has contested the new PLOS Biology paper, telling CNN that it’s “not actually a study, but a perspective: a collection of speculations and assumptions about events that happened nearly five decades ago, conducted by a group of researchers and funded by individuals and organizations that are known critics of the sugar industry.”
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The study was called Project two five nine , and the Sugar Research Foundation initially authorized fifteen months of funding for it from June nineteen sixty eight to September nineteen sixty nine, according to the paper. Project two five nine also showed a statistically significant decrease in triglycerides, a type of fat in blood, in rats that were fed a high-sugar diet and were stripped of bacteria in their guts, compared with conventional rats fed a basic diet. Colonies of bacteria in your gut are known as the gut microbiome. The Sugar Association’s statement added that sugar consumed in moderation can be part of a balanced lifestyle and that the association remains committed to supporting research to further understand the role sugar plays in consumers’ diets.

https://health.usnews.com/health-care/articles/2017-11-21/insulin-pill-may-delay-type-1-diabetes-in-some

New research suggests this may be true when giving an insulin pill to try to prevent or delay type one diabetes. Researchers tested the effect of insulin pills on  five hundred sixty children and adults whose relatives had type one diabetes. For most of them, the drug had no effect on whether or not they developed type one diabetes, or how quickly they developed it. The researchers said that for those at the highest risk of developing type one diabetes sooner rather than later, insulin pill therapy delayed the time it took to develop the full-blown disease by about two-and-a-half years. “This is the largest study using oral insulin,” said the study’s lead author, Doctor Carla Greenbaum. Participants also had known autoantibodies that indicated a very high risk of developing type one diabetes in their lifetimes, said Greenbaum, chair of Diabetes TrialNet.
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With type one diabetes, you have to inject insulin through shots or a tiny tube attached to an insulin pump. Insulin taken by mouth is different from injectable insulin and cannot be used to replace lost insulin because it has no effect on blood sugar levels, said Greenbaum. The digestive system breaks down insulin pills. The theory is that its peptides might be seen as harmless by the immune system. This might dampen the autoimmune attack, at least for a little while, the researchers hoped.