The latest scientific research and how it relates to health & longevity.
Teenages and Risk Factors
A survey of more than 2,000 American teens released in Sept. 2011,from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that those who have infrequent family dinners — fewer than three per week — are almost four times likelier to use tobacco and are more than twice as likely to use alcohol or marijuana compared with teens who have five to seven family dinners each week. They’re also nearly four times as likely to say they expect to try drugs in the future.
Calcium and Kidney Stones
Calcium Intake and Stone Prevention The largest prospective epidemiological study ever published on calcium and kidney stones, (New England Journal of Medicine, 1993), concluded that high calcium intake is associated with a decreased risk of symptomatic kidney stones(1). Perhaps just as importantly, the study, conducted among over 45,000 men, found that those individuals who consumed less than 850 mg of calcium per day were at an increased risk for a higher incidence of kidney stones. The authors concluded that calcium may actually have a protective effect by binding to oxalate in the gut and preventing its absorption in a form that leads to kidney stones. In another study calcium restriction led to an increase in absorption and excretion of oxalate in the urine in both normal subjects and patients with kidney stones. The authors, as well as many previous investigators, have also concluded that urinary oxalate appears to be more important than urinary calcium in the formation of stones. This conclusion was supported by a subsequent study on long-term calcium supplementation in premenopausal women which found no increase in stone formation. Calcium supplementation lowered both urinary oxalate and urinary phosphorous (also thought to contribute to the formation of stones) by binding both agents in the intestine.