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Saturday, July 16, 2011

This Cooking Oil is a Powerful Virus-Destroyer and Antibiotic…

You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, like elevated cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Meanwhile during this same 60 years the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed compared to our ancestors, and even compared to modern-day primitive societies using saturated fat as a dietary staple.
Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30-60% of their total caloric intact from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease?[1]
Clearly, a lot of confusion and contradictory evidence exists on the subject of saturated fats, even among health care professionals.
But I'm going to tell you something that public health officials and the media aren't telling you.
The fact is, all saturated fats are not created equal.
The operative word here is "created", because some saturated fats occur naturally, while other fats are artificially manipulated into a saturated state through the man-made process called hydrogenation.
Hydrogenation manipulates vegetable and seed oils by adding hydrogen atoms while heating the oil, producing a rancid, thickened oil that really only benefits processed food shelf life and corporate profits.
The medical and scientific communities are now fairly united in the opinion that hydrogenated vegetable and seed oils should be avoided.
These unsaturated fats, artificially manipulated into saturated fats, are also called trans fats, and no doubt you've heard about them lately. Some cities and states have now outlawed their use. There is no controversy anymore regarding the health dangers of these artificially saturated fats.
And guess what?
These are the same damaged trans fats that have been touted as "healthy" and "heart-friendly" for the last 60 years by the vegetable and seed oil interests!
But the truth finally came out. Trans fat was rebuked, debunked, and revealed as the true enemy to good health that it has always been, regardless of what the seed- and vegetable oil shills told the American public for the last half century.
Unfortunately, this rightful vilification of hydrogenated saturated fats has created a lot of confusion regarding naturally occurring saturated fats, including coconut oil.
If one form of saturated fat is bad for you, the argument goes, then all saturated fat must be bad.
Right?
Nothing could be further from the truth!

The Truth about Coconut Oil

The truth about coconut oil is obvious to anyone who has studied the health of those who live in traditional tropical cultures, where coconut has been a nutritious diet staple for thousands of years.
Back in the 1930's, a dentist named Dr. Weston Price traveled throughout the South Pacific, examining traditional diets and their effect on dental and overall health. He found that those eating diets high in coconut products were healthy and trim, despite the high fat concentration in their diet, and that heart disease was virtually non-existent.
Similarly, in 1981, researchers studied populations of two Polynesian atolls. Coconut was the chief source of caloric energy in both groups. The results, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,[2] demonstrated that both populations exhibited positive vascular health.
In fact, no evidence exists that the naturally occurring high saturated fat intake had any kind of harmful effect in these populations!
That's not what you expected, is it? Based on 60 years of negative public policy towards naturally occurring saturated fats, you would expect these cultures to be rife with clogged arteries, obesity and heart disease.
It may be surprising for you to realize that the naturally occurring saturated fat in coconut oil actually has some amazing health benefits, such as:
  • Promoting your heart health[3]
  • Promoting weight loss, when needed[4]
  • Supporting your immune system health[5]
  • Supporting a healthy metabolism[6]
  • Providing you with an immediate energy source[7]
  • Keeping your skin healthy and youthful looking
  • Supporting the proper functioning of your thyroid gland[8]
But how is this possible?
Does coconut oil have some secret ingredients not found in other saturated fats?
The answer is a resounding "yes".

Coconut Oil's Secret Ingredient

50 percent of the fat content in coconut oil is a fat rarely found in nature called lauric acid. If you're a frequent reader of my newsletter you already know that I consider lauric acid a "miracle" ingredient because of its unique health promoting properties.
Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa properties.[9]
Monolaurin is a monoglyceride which can actually destroy lipid coated viruses such as:
  • HIV, herpes
  • Measles
  • Influenza virus
  • Various pathogenic bacteria
  • Protozoa such as giardia lamblia.
Lauric acid is a powerful virus and gram-negative bacteria destroyer, and coconut oil contains the most lauric acid of any substance on earth!
Capric acid, another coconut fatty acid present in smaller amounts, has also been added to the list of coconut's antimicrobial components.
This is one of the key reasons you should consider consuming coconut oil, because there aren't many sources of monolaurin in our diet. But the health benefits of coconut oil don't stop there.

The Benefits of Medium-Chain Fatty Acids

Coconut oil is about 2/3 medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), also called medium-chain triglycerides or MCTs. These types of fatty acids produce a whole host of health benefits.
Coconut oil is nature's richest source of these healthy MCFAs.
By contrast, most common vegetable or seed oils are comprised of long chain fatty acids (LCFAs), also known as long-chain triglycerides or LCTs.
Let me tell you why these long-chain fatty acids are not as healthy for you as the MCFAs found in coconut oil[10] :
  • LCFAs are difficult for your body to break down -- they require special enzymes for digestion.
  • LCFAs put more strain on your pancreas, liver and your entire digestive system.
  • LCFAs are predominantly stored in your body as fat.
  • LCFAs can be deposited within your arteries in lipid forms such as cholesterol.
  • In contrast to LFCAs, the MCFAs found in coconut oil have many health benefits, including the following beneficial qualities:
  • MCFAs are smaller. They permeate cell membranes easily, and do not require special enzymes to be utilized effectively by your body.
  • MCFAs are easily digested, thus putting less strain on your digestive system.
  • MCFAs are sent directly to your liver, where they are immediately converted into energy rather than being stored as fat.
  • MCFAs actually help stimulate your body's metabolism, leading to weight loss.

Coconut Oil Helps Fight Diabetes

Your body sends medium-chain fatty acids directly to your liver to use as energy. This makes coconut oil a powerful source of instant energy to your body, a function usually served in the diet by simple carbohydrates.
But although coconut oil and simple carbohydrates share the ability to deliver quick energy to your body, they differ in one crucial respect.
Coconut oil does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream. You read that correctly, Coconut oil acts on your body like a carbohydrate, without any of the debilitating insulin-related effects associated with long-term high carbohydrate consumption!
Diabetics and those with pre-diabetes conditions (an exploding health epidemic in America), should immediately realize the benefit of a fast acting energy source that doesn't produce an insulin spike in your body. In fact, coconut oil added to the diets of diabetics and pre-diabetics has actually been shown to help stabilize weight gain, which can dramatically decrease your likelihood of getting adult onset type-2 Diabetes.[11]

Cococut Oil, the Friend to Athletes and Dieters

If you live in the United States, you have an almost 70 percent chance of being overweight.
And, by now, I'm sure you're well aware that obesity affects your quality of life and is linked to many health concerns.
One of the best benefits of coconut oil lies in its ability to help stimulate your metabolism.
Back in the 1940s, farmers found out about this effect by accident when they tried using inexpensive coconut oil to fatten their livestock.
It didn't work!
Instead, coconut oil made the animals lean, active and hungry.
However, many animal and human research studies have demonstrated that replacing LCFAs with MCFAs results in both decreased body weight and reduced fat deposition.
In fact, the ability of MCFAs to be easily digested, to help stimulate the metabolism and be turned into energy has entered the sports arena. Several studies have now shown that MCFAs can enhance physical or athletic performance.[12]
Additionally, research has demonstrated that, due to its metabolic effect, coconut oil increases the activity of the thyroid. And you've probably heard that a sluggish thyroid is one reason why some people are unable to lose weight, no matter what they do.
Besides weight loss, there are other advantages to boosting your metabolic rate. Your healing process accelerates. Cell regeneration increases to replace old cells, and your immune system functions better overall.

Coconut Oil on Your Skin

Besides the mounting medical and scientific evidence that coconut oil has powerful positive health benefits when eaten, it has also been used for decades by professional massage therapists to knead away tight stressed muscles.
However, you don't have to be a professional massage therapist to gain the skin and tissue support benefits of coconut oil. Just use coconut oil as you would any lotion.
Coconut oil is actually ideal for skin care. It helps protect your skin from the aging effects of free radicals, and can help improve the appearance of skin with its anti-aging benefits.
In fact, physiologist and biochemist Ray Peat, Ph.D. considers coconut oil an antioxidant[13] , due to its stability and resistance to oxidation and free radical formation. Plus, he believes it reduces our need for the antioxidant protection of vitamin E.
Like Dr. Peat, many experts believe coconut oil may help restore more youthful-looking skin. When coconut oil is absorbed into your skin and connective tissues, it helps to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles by helping to keep your connective tissues strong and supple, and aids in exfoliating the outer layer of dead skin cells, making your skin smoother.

Coconut Oil and Your Heart

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S. And heart disease is often a silent killer. The first sign of cardiovascular disease is commonly a heart attack, and sadly, over one third of heart attacks are fatal.
And despite the propaganda, the truth is this: it is UNSATURATED fats that are primarily involved in heart disease, not the naturally occurring saturated fats, as you have been led to believe.[14]
Plus, the polyunsaturated fats in vegetable and seed oils encourage the formation of blood clots by increasing platelet stickiness. Coconut oil helps to promote normal platelet function.

Coconut Oil in Your Kitchen

I only use two oils in my food preparation.
The first, extra-virgin olive oil, is a better monounsaturated fat that works great as a salad dressing.
However, it should not be used for cooking. Due to its chemical structure, heat makes it susceptible to oxidative damage.
And polyunsaturated fats, which include common vegetable oils such as corn, soy, safflower, sunflower and canola, are absolutely the worst oils to use in cooking. These omega-6 oils are highly susceptible to heat damage because of their double bonds.
I strongly urge you to throw out those omega-6 vegetable oils in your cabinets.
Why?
Reason # 1: Most people believe that frying creates trans-fat. That is not the major problem, in my opinion. Although some are created, they are relatively minor. There are FAR more toxic chemicals produced by frying omega-6 oils than trans-fat.
Frying destroys the antioxidants in oil and as a result oxidizes the oil. This causes cross-linking, cyclization, double-bond shifts, fragmentation and polymerization of oils that cause far more damage than trans-fat.
Reason # 2: Most of the vegetable oils are GMO. This would include over 90 percent of the soy, corn and canola oils.
Reason # 3: Vegetable oils contribute to the overabundance of damaged omega-6 fats in your diet, which creates an imbalance in the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. As you know from my extensive writing on this subject, I believe that excessive consumption of damaged omega-6 fats contributes to many health concerns.
They are all highly processed and consumed in amounts that are about 100 times more than our ancestors did a century ago. This causes them to distort the sensitive omega-6/omega-3 ratio which controls many delicate biochemical pathways which results in accelerating many chronic degenerative diseases.
There is only one oil that is stable enough to resist mild heat-induced damage, while it also helps you promote heart health and even supports weight loss and thyroid function -- coconut oil.
So, whenever you need an oil to cook with, use coconut oil instead of butter, olive oil, vegetable oil, margarine, or any other type of oil called for in recipes. Even though I don't fully recommend frying foods, if you must fry, by all means use coconut oil -- it's your smartest choice.

Coconut Oil Safety

The medium-chain fats in coconut oil are considered so nutritious that they are used in baby formulas, in hospitals to feed the critically ill, those on tube feeding, and those with digestive problems. Coconut oil has even been used successfully by doctors in treating aluminum poisoning.[15]
Coconut oil is exceptionally helpful for pregnant women, nursing moms, the elderly, those concerned about digestive health, athletes (even weekend warriors), and those of you who just want to enhance your overall health.
References:
You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, like elevated cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Meanwhile during this same 60 years the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed compared to our ancestors, and even compared to modern-day primitive societies using saturated fat as a dietary staple.
Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30-60% of their total caloric intact from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease?[1]
Clearly, a lot of confusion and contradictory evidence exists on the subject of saturated fats, even among health care professionals.
But I'm going to tell you something that public health officials and the media aren't telling you.
The fact is, all saturated fats are not created equal.
The operative word here is "created", because some saturated fats occur naturally, while other fats are artificially manipulated into a saturated state through the man-made process called hydrogenation.
Hydrogenation manipulates vegetable and seed oils by adding hydrogen atoms while heating the oil, producing a rancid, thickened oil that really only benefits processed food shelf life and corporate profits.
The medical and scientific communities are now fairly united in the opinion that hydrogenated vegetable and seed oils should be avoided.
These unsaturated fats, artificially manipulated into saturated fats, are also called trans fats, and no doubt you've heard about them lately. Some cities and states have now outlawed their use. There is no controversy anymore regarding the health dangers of these artificially saturated fats.
And guess what?
These are the same damaged trans fats that have been touted as "healthy" and "heart-friendly" for the last 60 years by the vegetable and seed oil interests!
But the truth finally came out. Trans fat was rebuked, debunked, and revealed as the true enemy to good health that it has always been, regardless of what the seed- and vegetable oil shills told the American public for the last half century.
Unfortunately, this rightful vilification of hydrogenated saturated fats has created a lot of confusion regarding naturally occurring saturated fats, including coconut oil.
If one form of saturated fat is bad for you, the argument goes, then all saturated fat must be bad.
Right?
Nothing could be further from the truth!

The Truth about Coconut Oil

The truth about coconut oil is obvious to anyone who has studied the health of those who live in traditional tropical cultures, where coconut has been a nutritious diet staple for thousands of years.
Back in the 1930's, a dentist named Dr. Weston Price traveled throughout the South Pacific, examining traditional diets and their effect on dental and overall health. He found that those eating diets high in coconut products were healthy and trim, despite the high fat concentration in their diet, and that heart disease was virtually non-existent.
Similarly, in 1981, researchers studied populations of two Polynesian atolls. Coconut was the chief source of caloric energy in both groups. The results, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,[2] demonstrated that both populations exhibited positive vascular health.
In fact, no evidence exists that the naturally occurring high saturated fat intake had any kind of harmful effect in these populations!
That's not what you expected, is it? Based on 60 years of negative public policy towards naturally occurring saturated fats, you would expect these cultures to be rife with clogged arteries, obesity and heart disease.
It may be surprising for you to realize that the naturally occurring saturated fat in coconut oil actually has some amazing health benefits, such as:
  • Promoting your heart health[3]
  • Promoting weight loss, when needed[4]
  • Supporting your immune system health[5]
  • Supporting a healthy metabolism[6]
  • Providing you with an immediate energy source[7]
  • Keeping your skin healthy and youthful looking
  • Supporting the proper functioning of your thyroid gland[8]
But how is this possible?
Does coconut oil have some secret ingredients not found in other saturated fats?
The answer is a resounding "yes".

Coconut Oil's Secret Ingredient

50 percent of the fat content in coconut oil is a fat rarely found in nature called lauric acid. If you're a frequent reader of my newsletter you already know that I consider lauric acid a "miracle" ingredient because of its unique health promoting properties.
Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa properties.[9]
Monolaurin is a monoglyceride which can actually destroy lipid coated viruses such as:
  • HIV, herpes
  • Measles
  • Influenza virus
  • Various pathogenic bacteria
  • Protozoa such as giardia lamblia.
Lauric acid is a powerful virus and gram-negative bacteria destroyer, and coconut oil contains the most lauric acid of any substance on earth!
Capric acid, another coconut fatty acid present in smaller amounts, has also been added to the list of coconut's antimicrobial components.
This is one of the key reasons you should consider consuming coconut oil, because there aren't many sources of monolaurin in our diet. But the health benefits of coconut oil don't stop there.

The Benefits of Medium-Chain Fatty Acids

Coconut oil is about 2/3 medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), also called medium-chain triglycerides or MCTs. These types of fatty acids produce a whole host of health benefits.
Coconut oil is nature's richest source of these healthy MCFAs.
By contrast, most common vegetable or seed oils are comprised of long chain fatty acids (LCFAs), also known as long-chain triglycerides or LCTs.
Let me tell you why these long-chain fatty acids are not as healthy for you as the MCFAs found in coconut oil[10] :
  • LCFAs are difficult for your body to break down -- they require special enzymes for digestion.
  • LCFAs put more strain on your pancreas, liver and your entire digestive system.
  • LCFAs are predominantly stored in your body as fat.
  • LCFAs can be deposited within your arteries in lipid forms such as cholesterol.
  • In contrast to LFCAs, the MCFAs found in coconut oil have many health benefits, including the following beneficial qualities:
  • MCFAs are smaller. They permeate cell membranes easily, and do not require special enzymes to be utilized effectively by your body.
  • MCFAs are easily digested, thus putting less strain on your digestive system.
  • MCFAs are sent directly to your liver, where they are immediately converted into energy rather than being stored as fat.
  • MCFAs actually help stimulate your body's metabolism, leading to weight loss.

Coconut Oil Helps Fight Diabetes

Your body sends medium-chain fatty acids directly to your liver to use as energy. This makes coconut oil a powerful source of instant energy to your body, a function usually served in the diet by simple carbohydrates.
But although coconut oil and simple carbohydrates share the ability to deliver quick energy to your body, they differ in one crucial respect.
Coconut oil does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream. You read that correctly, Coconut oil acts on your body like a carbohydrate, without any of the debilitating insulin-related effects associated with long-term high carbohydrate consumption!
Diabetics and those with pre-diabetes conditions (an exploding health epidemic in America), should immediately realize the benefit of a fast acting energy source that doesn't produce an insulin spike in your body. In fact, coconut oil added to the diets of diabetics and pre-diabetics has actually been shown to help stabilize weight gain, which can dramatically decrease your likelihood of getting adult onset type-2 Diabetes.[11]

Cococut Oil, the Friend to Athletes and Dieters

If you live in the United States, you have an almost 70 percent chance of being overweight.
And, by now, I'm sure you're well aware that obesity affects your quality of life and is linked to many health concerns.
One of the best benefits of coconut oil lies in its ability to help stimulate your metabolism.
Back in the 1940s, farmers found out about this effect by accident when they tried using inexpensive coconut oil to fatten their livestock.
It didn't work!
Instead, coconut oil made the animals lean, active and hungry.
However, many animal and human research studies have demonstrated that replacing LCFAs with MCFAs results in both decreased body weight and reduced fat deposition.
In fact, the ability of MCFAs to be easily digested, to help stimulate the metabolism and be turned into energy has entered the sports arena. Several studies have now shown that MCFAs can enhance physical or athletic performance.[12]
Additionally, research has demonstrated that, due to its metabolic effect, coconut oil increases the activity of the thyroid. And you've probably heard that a sluggish thyroid is one reason why some people are unable to lose weight, no matter what they do.
Besides weight loss, there are other advantages to boosting your metabolic rate. Your healing process accelerates. Cell regeneration increases to replace old cells, and your immune system functions better overall.

Coconut Oil on Your Skin

Besides the mounting medical and scientific evidence that coconut oil has powerful positive health benefits when eaten, it has also been used for decades by professional massage therapists to knead away tight stressed muscles.
However, you don't have to be a professional massage therapist to gain the skin and tissue support benefits of coconut oil. Just use coconut oil as you would any lotion.
Coconut oil is actually ideal for skin care. It helps protect your skin from the aging effects of free radicals, and can help improve the appearance of skin with its anti-aging benefits.
In fact, physiologist and biochemist Ray Peat, Ph.D. considers coconut oil an antioxidant[13] , due to its stability and resistance to oxidation and free radical formation. Plus, he believes it reduces our need for the antioxidant protection of vitamin E.
Like Dr. Peat, many experts believe coconut oil may help restore more youthful-looking skin. When coconut oil is absorbed into your skin and connective tissues, it helps to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles by helping to keep your connective tissues strong and supple, and aids in exfoliating the outer layer of dead skin cells, making your skin smoother.

Coconut Oil and Your Heart

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S. And heart disease is often a silent killer. The first sign of cardiovascular disease is commonly a heart attack, and sadly, over one third of heart attacks are fatal.
And despite the propaganda, the truth is this: it is UNSATURATED fats that are primarily involved in heart disease, not the naturally occurring saturated fats, as you have been led to believe.[14]
Plus, the polyunsaturated fats in vegetable and seed oils encourage the formation of blood clots by increasing platelet stickiness. Coconut oil helps to promote normal platelet function.

Coconut Oil in Your Kitchen

I only use two oils in my food preparation.
The first, extra-virgin olive oil, is a better monounsaturated fat that works great as a salad dressing.
However, it should not be used for cooking. Due to its chemical structure, heat makes it susceptible to oxidative damage.
And polyunsaturated fats, which include common vegetable oils such as corn, soy, safflower, sunflower and canola, are absolutely the worst oils to use in cooking. These omega-6 oils are highly susceptible to heat damage because of their double bonds.
I strongly urge you to throw out those omega-6 vegetable oils in your cabinets.
Why?
Reason # 1: Most people believe that frying creates trans-fat. That is not the major problem, in my opinion. Although some are created, they are relatively minor. There are FAR more toxic chemicals produced by frying omega-6 oils than trans-fat.
Frying destroys the antioxidants in oil and as a result oxidizes the oil. This causes cross-linking, cyclization, double-bond shifts, fragmentation and polymerization of oils that cause far more damage than trans-fat.
Reason # 2: Most of the vegetable oils are GMO. This would include over 90 percent of the soy, corn and canola oils.
Reason # 3: Vegetable oils contribute to the overabundance of damaged omega-6 fats in your diet, which creates an imbalance in the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. As you know from my extensive writing on this subject, I believe that excessive consumption of damaged omega-6 fats contributes to many health concerns.
They are all highly processed and consumed in amounts that are about 100 times more than our ancestors did a century ago. This causes them to distort the sensitive omega-6/omega-3 ratio which controls many delicate biochemical pathways which results in accelerating many chronic degenerative diseases.
There is only one oil that is stable enough to resist mild heat-induced damage, while it also helps you promote heart health and even supports weight loss and thyroid function -- coconut oil.
So, whenever you need an oil to cook with, use coconut oil instead of butter, olive oil, vegetable oil, margarine, or any other type of oil called for in recipes. Even though I don't fully recommend frying foods, if you must fry, by all means use coconut oil -- it's your smartest choice.

Coconut Oil Safety

The medium-chain fats in coconut oil are considered so nutritious that they are used in baby formulas, in hospitals to feed the critically ill, those on tube feeding, and those with digestive problems. Coconut oil has even been used successfully by doctors in treating aluminum poisoning.[15]
Coconut oil is exceptionally helpful for pregnant women, nursing moms, the elderly, those concerned about digestive health, athletes (even weekend warriors), and those of you who just want to enhance your overall health.
References:
Read More


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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Salt: How Bad Is It, Really?

Much like cell phones and eggs, salt is one of those things that studies say is bad for you one day, but O.K. the next.

Just last year, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated (using previous studies' numbers) that the U.S. could prevent 44,000 deaths annually if Americans reduced their salt intake by 3 grams per day.

Then, early this month, a review of seven real-life interventions to reduce salt consumption found nothing of the sort. The review, from the Cochrane Collaboration, found only ambiguity, with no evidence to suggest that salt reduction did the trial participants any good or any harm.

"It's Time to End the War on Salt," a headline in Scientific American proclaimed last week. "For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not," the article said. As if to prove that point, a new paper this week in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine now argues, again, that too much salt is bad.

The latest study used national U.S. survey data linked to mortality files to show that the more salt people ate, the higher their death rates from all causes combined. The study looked further at salt intake in relation to potassium intake, and found that the lower people's potassium and the higher their sodium, the more likely they were to develop heart disease or die of a heart-related cause.

So just how bad is salt for us exactly — and why is there so much disagreement on the issue?
Much like cell phones and eggs, salt is one of those things that studies say is bad for you one day, but O.K. the next.

Just last year, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated (using previous studies' numbers) that the U.S. could prevent 44,000 deaths annually if Americans reduced their salt intake by 3 grams per day.

Then, early this month, a review of seven real-life interventions to reduce salt consumption found nothing of the sort. The review, from the Cochrane Collaboration, found only ambiguity, with no evidence to suggest that salt reduction did the trial participants any good or any harm.

"It's Time to End the War on Salt," a headline in Scientific American proclaimed last week. "For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not," the article said. As if to prove that point, a new paper this week in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine now argues, again, that too much salt is bad.

The latest study used national U.S. survey data linked to mortality files to show that the more salt people ate, the higher their death rates from all causes combined. The study looked further at salt intake in relation to potassium intake, and found that the lower people's potassium and the higher their sodium, the more likely they were to develop heart disease or die of a heart-related cause.

So just how bad is salt for us exactly — and why is there so much disagreement on the issue?
Read More


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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Scientists Discover That Antimicrobial Wipes and Soaps May Be Making You (and Society) Sick

By Rob Dunn | Jul 5, 2011 06:59 AM | 22

A few weeks ago as I was walking out of a Harris Teeter grocery store in Raleigh, North Carolina, I saw a man face a moment of crisis. You could see it in the acrobatic contortions of his face. He had pulled a cart out of the area where carts congregate, only to find that its handle was sticky with an unidentifiable substance. He paused and looked at the handle, as if to imagine the nature of the offense. Gum? Meat juice? Chewed marshmallows? So many vulgar possibilities. Forlorn, he reached for an antibiotic wipe conveniently placed by the door. He scrubbed his hands VERY diligently and then pushed the cart back for someone else to rediscover [1].
Scenarios like this one are playing out all over America. There is an epidemic of sticky, dirty and otherwise gross handles on shopping carts. But it isn't just carts. Disgusting doorknobs have also been found, as have cryptically damp table-tops in restaurants and even, sad as it is, slimy back rests on the weight machines in gyms! Increasingly, the world seems to be rife with contamination. Fortunately, all of the main companies producing hygiene products have offered a solution--sanitary, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antibiotic, wipes, and soaps to kill anything that dares to creep into our wholesome lives. These salves will cure us of the demons that dare to grow near us.
The really intriguing news--a kind of breakthrough--is that the main compounds in antibiotic wipes, creams and soaps, triclosan and/or the chemically similar triclocarban, have also been sprinkled around our lives more generally. A recent study notes that triclosan is now used to "impregnate surfaces and has been added to chopping boards, refrigerators, plastic lunchboxes, mattresses as well as being used in industrial settings, such as food processing plants where walls, floors and exposed machinery have all been treated with triclosan in order to reduce microbial load." You can now go home, wipe your world down and live a happier life, surrounded by an antibiotic force field. Be especially sure to wipe your children down. Children are just about the grimiest thing in the world.

Yet, although I hesitate to digress or cause trouble, the devil on my shoulder, that voice of so-called reason, is urging me to avail myself of more than the vague suspicion that everything around me is contaminated. Maybe, the devil says, we should glance, just for a second, at what scientists like to call--in their nasally ivory-tower voices--"the evidence." I do not mean anything too fancy… Let's just take a moment to look at a study here and there that might be relevant as we go about coating our lives--from underpants to kitchen pans--in antibiotic wonder.
For example, what if we just considered whether people who wipe down the world around them with antibiotic soap or wipes are less likely to be sick. Of course, they must be. The world is gross and they are, God bless them, clean, but let's just check.
OK, we shouldn't have checked. There are some problems. One is the actual evidence, or just as often, lack thereof. Case in point: along with her colleagues, Allison Aiello, a professor at the University of Michigan, recently surveyed all of the experimental or quasi-experimental studies published in English between 1980 and 2006 on the effectiveness of different hand washing strategies [2]. Aiello focused on studies that compared different strategies, for example the use of normal soap versus the use of antibiotic soap, in terms of their effect on the probability of developing gastrointestinal or respiratory illness. Our intuition is that antibiotic soaps and wipes should make everyone healthier. Aiello's results were something else entirely.
Aiello's first result was fine enough, but it set the stage for the trouble to come. She found "the use of nonantibacterial soap with hand hygiene education interventions is efficacious for preventing both gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses." In other words, if you wash your hands with soap (and are educated about washing your hands with soap) you are less likely to get sick. Score one for intuition and grandma's admonitions. But then things went terribly wrong.
Aiello next considered the antibiotic soaps and wipes now used, in one form or another, by 75% of American households. Odds are that you use them. Go check your labels. Sadly, Aiello and colleagues found that antibiotic soaps and wipes with triclosan were no more likely than good old-fashioned soap to prevent gastrointestinal or respiratory illness. In Aiello's words, "There was little evidence for an additional impact of new products, such as alcohol-based hand sanitizers or antibacterial soaps compared with nonantibacterial soaps, for reducing either gastrointestinal or respiratory infectious illness symptoms."
For example, in a study Aiello reviewed that was conducted in Pakistan, gastrointestinal illnesses were reduced by half when people washed their hands with soap and by a little less than half when they washed their hands with antibiotic soap [3]. What is worse, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the effectiveness of antibiotic and non-antibiotic soaps in the U.S., led by Elaine Larson at Columbia University (with Aiello as a coauthor), found that while for healthy hand washers there was no difference between the effects of the two, for chronically sick patients (those with asthma and diabetes, for example) antibiotic soaps were actually associated with increases in the frequencies of fevers, runny noses and coughs [4]. In other words, antibiotic soaps appeared to have made those patients sicker. Let me say that again: Most people who use antibiotic soap are no healthier than those who use normal soap. AND those individuals who are chronically sick and use antibiotic soap appear to get SICKER.
Here, then, is the evidence we need, evidence very clearly at odds with our intuition to scrub and scrub. Yet hardly anyone has followed up on Larson's study and no one has reexamined what happens with chronically sick patients and antibiotic soaps. The truth is that few biologists are studying what antibiotic soaps do to us. Still, the evidence indicates that when confronted with a dirty grocery store cart handle, we should just wash with soap and water like our great grandmothers would have done (if they had had grocery carts). At the very least, antibiotic wipes do not appear to help us and, it may be that they are actually hurting us.
The devil on my shoulder suggests we need to take the radical step of actually thinking for a second about what happens when you wash your hands, or whatever other part. This is a step almost never taken in the study of illness. Our skin (just likeLady Gaga's skin) is covered in bacteria species. More than a hundred species of bacteria (not to mention fungi and other kinds of organisms) can be found on a single hand of any given adult [5] or for that matter belly button, forehead or other part, at any given moment (Image of some of the more abundant bacteria in the author's belly button:http://www.wildlifeofyourbody.org/?page_id=8 ). It appears that those species include two main groups. There are the "native" species, our own bodily citizens that have evolved to live in peace on our skin and, in doing so, benefit us by acting as a kind of defensive layer. Then there are the tourists. It is these tourists that cause us harm, the tourists who bear chemical knives.
When you wash your hands, the goal is not to kill all the microbes. As Larson and a group of colleagues put it in a 2003 paper "Handwashing with a non-antimicrobial soap does little to modify the natural [citizen] flora. In fact, such an effect would be undesirable." What is desirable is, instead, to kill the tourists who have just turned up but not yet established, or at least the dangerous among those newly arrived species. Kill the tourists is a reasonable hand washing motto (although the truth is we still know surprisingly little about the citizens; they are the neglected serfs of our bodies). Soap is thought to be effective at killing the tourists, not always, but at least often, although this hypothesis has never been directly tested.
But what do antibiotic wipes and soaps do? Amazingly, no one really knows. In the vacuum of a laboratory they can kill both viruses and bacteria, but what about on the jungle of our bodies? It seems possible that they are able, in some cases, to kill both some of the tourists AND some of the citizens. Perhaps (which is to say, I am mostly guessing for the rest of this paragraph) when we are mostly healthy, this doesn't matter; the bacteria regroup and recover or our body in other ways defends. But when we are already unwell, it may be that this is enough to make us more unwell by killing both natives and tourists and, in some cases, allowing the weediest tourists to recolonize first. Maybe, but this is just my scientific intuition which, let's be honest, needs to be as carefully doubted and picked at as with our intuitions more generally.
What we do know is that the influence of these wipes and salves does not end with our hands, but instead spreads from them down our drains and out into society. What happens when antibiotic soaps and suds go down drains? To find out, a group of scientists recently made artificial drains clogged with bacteria (oh, the difficulties of science) and then subjected them to low and high doses of triclosan (similar to what happens when your detergent goes down the drain). Even at high concentrations, triclosan appears to have no effect on the number of bacterial cells in our drains. BUT, it does affect which species are found there. Triclosan kills "weak" bacteria but favors the tolerant, among them species of bacteria that eat triclosan [6]. Yes, I said eat triclosan. Triclosan may also favor lineages of bacteria that are also resistant to the oral antibiotics used in hospitals and elsewhere [7], though how often and consistently is, as of yet, unclear. Nonetheless, the hint of the tougher future triclosan might be favoring is, perhaps, a bit troubling.
Nor are drains the end of the story. Triclosan continues its journey, the little chemical that could, on to sewage treatment plants and into water supplies. In many municipal water supplies triclosan can now be found in relatively high concentrations. Those high concentrations affect the microbes that are always present in water, but also appear to act as endocrine disrupters in fish. For example, fish exposed to triclosan have lower sperm counts than those that are not [8]. Even if you don't care about the sex lives of fish, this might still worry you, given the great similarities, on evolutionary grounds, between the hormones of fish and humans [9].
But I apologize. All of this was a diversion from the original story of the man with the cart, the man wringing his hands. This story digressed from his story, just as the consequences of his choice appear to cascade away from him out into the world.
The man continued on into the store, pausing only briefly to look at me, as if maybe he knew me. Then I saw that he was looking at my son. I looked at my son too, which is when I saw his marshmallow covered hands. I mouthed sorry back to the man, having realized, of course, that it was my cart he had first taken. My son would have mouthed sorry too, if he talked yet, and if his mouth wasn't so gummed up with marshmallows.
"Sorry…," I was going to mouth again, but then he was gone and we needed to be going too, to get home and eat, after washing our hands, but just with good old fashioned soap. I'll abandon the antimicrobial soap, detergent, and wipes. And I am pretty sure that I have never purchased the other antimicrobial products, whether the counter tops or underpants. This may seem sad, as though we have lost the war on the bad bacteria and viruses, those tourists with their counterfeit visas. If it does, I extend my apologies to you too. What is worse is that we seem to have lost it at a terrible time, what with all of the gross shopping carts and, more seriously, the reality that last year 2 million people died of respiratory infections. The good news, though, is that scientists have figured out a way to reduce the frequency that people get sick by as much as forty percent.
It turns out that although we know that washing our hands prevents a range of illnesses and are incredibly eager to buy products marketed to kill germs, we don't actually take the simpler measure of washing hands in the first place. A study of nearly eight thousand individuals in five U.S. cities found almost half of the participants failed to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. In this light, no mystery salve is necessary, no miracle cure, special wipe, or magic. We need to wash our hands, because soap does the body good, at least in all the ways studied so far. It is not fancy. It is not expensive or heavily marketed and yet it works, as it long has, even though as of yet, no one can conclusively, unambiguously, tell you why.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Those who are ignorant of cart history are doomed to repeat it.
[2] Aiello AE, Coulborn RM, Perez V, Larson EL. 2008. Effect of hand hygiene on infectious disease risk in the community setting: a meta-analysis. Am J Public Health98:1372-1381.
[3] Luby SP, Agboatwalla M, Painter J, Altaf A, Billhimer WL, Hoekstra RM. Effect of intensive handwashing promotion on childhood diarrhea in high-risk communities in Pakistan: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2004;291:2547–2554.
[4] Larson EL, Lin SX, Gomez-Pichardo C, Della-Latta P. Effect of antibacterial home cleaning and handwashing products on infectious disease symptoms: a randomized, double-blind trial. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:321–329.
[5] Fierer, N. M. Hamady, C.L. Lauber, R. Knight. 2008. The influence of sex, handedness, and washing on the diversity of hand surface bacteria. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, USA. 105: 17994-17999.
[6] McBain, A. J.; Bartolo, R. G.; Catrenich, C. E.; Charbonneau, D.; Ledder, R. G.; Price, B. B.; Gilbert, P. Exposure of sink drain microcosms to triclosan: Population dynamics and antimicrobial susceptibility. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2003, 69, 5433−5442.
[7] Aiello AE, Larson EL. Antibacterial cleaning and hygiene products as an emerging risk factor for antibiotic resistance in the community. Lancet Infect Dis. 2003;3:501–506.
[8] Raut, S. A., and R. A. Angus 2010. Triclosan has endocrine-disrupting effects in male western mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis. Environ Toxicol Chem 29: 1287–1291.
[9] Rees Clayton, E.M., Todd, M., Dowd, J.B., Aiello, A.E.† (2010) The impact of bisphenol A and triclosan on immune parameters in the US population, NHANES 2003-2006. Environmental Health Perspectives
By Rob Dunn | Jul 5, 2011 06:59 AM | 22

A few weeks ago as I was walking out of a Harris Teeter grocery store in Raleigh, North Carolina, I saw a man face a moment of crisis. You could see it in the acrobatic contortions of his face. He had pulled a cart out of the area where carts congregate, only to find that its handle was sticky with an unidentifiable substance. He paused and looked at the handle, as if to imagine the nature of the offense. Gum? Meat juice? Chewed marshmallows? So many vulgar possibilities. Forlorn, he reached for an antibiotic wipe conveniently placed by the door. He scrubbed his hands VERY diligently and then pushed the cart back for someone else to rediscover [1].
Scenarios like this one are playing out all over America. There is an epidemic of sticky, dirty and otherwise gross handles on shopping carts. But it isn't just carts. Disgusting doorknobs have also been found, as have cryptically damp table-tops in restaurants and even, sad as it is, slimy back rests on the weight machines in gyms! Increasingly, the world seems to be rife with contamination. Fortunately, all of the main companies producing hygiene products have offered a solution--sanitary, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antibiotic, wipes, and soaps to kill anything that dares to creep into our wholesome lives. These salves will cure us of the demons that dare to grow near us.
The really intriguing news--a kind of breakthrough--is that the main compounds in antibiotic wipes, creams and soaps, triclosan and/or the chemically similar triclocarban, have also been sprinkled around our lives more generally. A recent study notes that triclosan is now used to "impregnate surfaces and has been added to chopping boards, refrigerators, plastic lunchboxes, mattresses as well as being used in industrial settings, such as food processing plants where walls, floors and exposed machinery have all been treated with triclosan in order to reduce microbial load." You can now go home, wipe your world down and live a happier life, surrounded by an antibiotic force field. Be especially sure to wipe your children down. Children are just about the grimiest thing in the world.

Yet, although I hesitate to digress or cause trouble, the devil on my shoulder, that voice of so-called reason, is urging me to avail myself of more than the vague suspicion that everything around me is contaminated. Maybe, the devil says, we should glance, just for a second, at what scientists like to call--in their nasally ivory-tower voices--"the evidence." I do not mean anything too fancy… Let's just take a moment to look at a study here and there that might be relevant as we go about coating our lives--from underpants to kitchen pans--in antibiotic wonder.
For example, what if we just considered whether people who wipe down the world around them with antibiotic soap or wipes are less likely to be sick. Of course, they must be. The world is gross and they are, God bless them, clean, but let's just check.
OK, we shouldn't have checked. There are some problems. One is the actual evidence, or just as often, lack thereof. Case in point: along with her colleagues, Allison Aiello, a professor at the University of Michigan, recently surveyed all of the experimental or quasi-experimental studies published in English between 1980 and 2006 on the effectiveness of different hand washing strategies [2]. Aiello focused on studies that compared different strategies, for example the use of normal soap versus the use of antibiotic soap, in terms of their effect on the probability of developing gastrointestinal or respiratory illness. Our intuition is that antibiotic soaps and wipes should make everyone healthier. Aiello's results were something else entirely.
Aiello's first result was fine enough, but it set the stage for the trouble to come. She found "the use of nonantibacterial soap with hand hygiene education interventions is efficacious for preventing both gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses." In other words, if you wash your hands with soap (and are educated about washing your hands with soap) you are less likely to get sick. Score one for intuition and grandma's admonitions. But then things went terribly wrong.
Aiello next considered the antibiotic soaps and wipes now used, in one form or another, by 75% of American households. Odds are that you use them. Go check your labels. Sadly, Aiello and colleagues found that antibiotic soaps and wipes with triclosan were no more likely than good old-fashioned soap to prevent gastrointestinal or respiratory illness. In Aiello's words, "There was little evidence for an additional impact of new products, such as alcohol-based hand sanitizers or antibacterial soaps compared with nonantibacterial soaps, for reducing either gastrointestinal or respiratory infectious illness symptoms."
For example, in a study Aiello reviewed that was conducted in Pakistan, gastrointestinal illnesses were reduced by half when people washed their hands with soap and by a little less than half when they washed their hands with antibiotic soap [3]. What is worse, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the effectiveness of antibiotic and non-antibiotic soaps in the U.S., led by Elaine Larson at Columbia University (with Aiello as a coauthor), found that while for healthy hand washers there was no difference between the effects of the two, for chronically sick patients (those with asthma and diabetes, for example) antibiotic soaps were actually associated with increases in the frequencies of fevers, runny noses and coughs [4]. In other words, antibiotic soaps appeared to have made those patients sicker. Let me say that again: Most people who use antibiotic soap are no healthier than those who use normal soap. AND those individuals who are chronically sick and use antibiotic soap appear to get SICKER.
Here, then, is the evidence we need, evidence very clearly at odds with our intuition to scrub and scrub. Yet hardly anyone has followed up on Larson's study and no one has reexamined what happens with chronically sick patients and antibiotic soaps. The truth is that few biologists are studying what antibiotic soaps do to us. Still, the evidence indicates that when confronted with a dirty grocery store cart handle, we should just wash with soap and water like our great grandmothers would have done (if they had had grocery carts). At the very least, antibiotic wipes do not appear to help us and, it may be that they are actually hurting us.
The devil on my shoulder suggests we need to take the radical step of actually thinking for a second about what happens when you wash your hands, or whatever other part. This is a step almost never taken in the study of illness. Our skin (just likeLady Gaga's skin) is covered in bacteria species. More than a hundred species of bacteria (not to mention fungi and other kinds of organisms) can be found on a single hand of any given adult [5] or for that matter belly button, forehead or other part, at any given moment (Image of some of the more abundant bacteria in the author's belly button:http://www.wildlifeofyourbody.org/?page_id=8 ). It appears that those species include two main groups. There are the "native" species, our own bodily citizens that have evolved to live in peace on our skin and, in doing so, benefit us by acting as a kind of defensive layer. Then there are the tourists. It is these tourists that cause us harm, the tourists who bear chemical knives.
When you wash your hands, the goal is not to kill all the microbes. As Larson and a group of colleagues put it in a 2003 paper "Handwashing with a non-antimicrobial soap does little to modify the natural [citizen] flora. In fact, such an effect would be undesirable." What is desirable is, instead, to kill the tourists who have just turned up but not yet established, or at least the dangerous among those newly arrived species. Kill the tourists is a reasonable hand washing motto (although the truth is we still know surprisingly little about the citizens; they are the neglected serfs of our bodies). Soap is thought to be effective at killing the tourists, not always, but at least often, although this hypothesis has never been directly tested.
But what do antibiotic wipes and soaps do? Amazingly, no one really knows. In the vacuum of a laboratory they can kill both viruses and bacteria, but what about on the jungle of our bodies? It seems possible that they are able, in some cases, to kill both some of the tourists AND some of the citizens. Perhaps (which is to say, I am mostly guessing for the rest of this paragraph) when we are mostly healthy, this doesn't matter; the bacteria regroup and recover or our body in other ways defends. But when we are already unwell, it may be that this is enough to make us more unwell by killing both natives and tourists and, in some cases, allowing the weediest tourists to recolonize first. Maybe, but this is just my scientific intuition which, let's be honest, needs to be as carefully doubted and picked at as with our intuitions more generally.
What we do know is that the influence of these wipes and salves does not end with our hands, but instead spreads from them down our drains and out into society. What happens when antibiotic soaps and suds go down drains? To find out, a group of scientists recently made artificial drains clogged with bacteria (oh, the difficulties of science) and then subjected them to low and high doses of triclosan (similar to what happens when your detergent goes down the drain). Even at high concentrations, triclosan appears to have no effect on the number of bacterial cells in our drains. BUT, it does affect which species are found there. Triclosan kills "weak" bacteria but favors the tolerant, among them species of bacteria that eat triclosan [6]. Yes, I said eat triclosan. Triclosan may also favor lineages of bacteria that are also resistant to the oral antibiotics used in hospitals and elsewhere [7], though how often and consistently is, as of yet, unclear. Nonetheless, the hint of the tougher future triclosan might be favoring is, perhaps, a bit troubling.
Nor are drains the end of the story. Triclosan continues its journey, the little chemical that could, on to sewage treatment plants and into water supplies. In many municipal water supplies triclosan can now be found in relatively high concentrations. Those high concentrations affect the microbes that are always present in water, but also appear to act as endocrine disrupters in fish. For example, fish exposed to triclosan have lower sperm counts than those that are not [8]. Even if you don't care about the sex lives of fish, this might still worry you, given the great similarities, on evolutionary grounds, between the hormones of fish and humans [9].
But I apologize. All of this was a diversion from the original story of the man with the cart, the man wringing his hands. This story digressed from his story, just as the consequences of his choice appear to cascade away from him out into the world.
The man continued on into the store, pausing only briefly to look at me, as if maybe he knew me. Then I saw that he was looking at my son. I looked at my son too, which is when I saw his marshmallow covered hands. I mouthed sorry back to the man, having realized, of course, that it was my cart he had first taken. My son would have mouthed sorry too, if he talked yet, and if his mouth wasn't so gummed up with marshmallows.
"Sorry…," I was going to mouth again, but then he was gone and we needed to be going too, to get home and eat, after washing our hands, but just with good old fashioned soap. I'll abandon the antimicrobial soap, detergent, and wipes. And I am pretty sure that I have never purchased the other antimicrobial products, whether the counter tops or underpants. This may seem sad, as though we have lost the war on the bad bacteria and viruses, those tourists with their counterfeit visas. If it does, I extend my apologies to you too. What is worse is that we seem to have lost it at a terrible time, what with all of the gross shopping carts and, more seriously, the reality that last year 2 million people died of respiratory infections. The good news, though, is that scientists have figured out a way to reduce the frequency that people get sick by as much as forty percent.
It turns out that although we know that washing our hands prevents a range of illnesses and are incredibly eager to buy products marketed to kill germs, we don't actually take the simpler measure of washing hands in the first place. A study of nearly eight thousand individuals in five U.S. cities found almost half of the participants failed to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. In this light, no mystery salve is necessary, no miracle cure, special wipe, or magic. We need to wash our hands, because soap does the body good, at least in all the ways studied so far. It is not fancy. It is not expensive or heavily marketed and yet it works, as it long has, even though as of yet, no one can conclusively, unambiguously, tell you why.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Those who are ignorant of cart history are doomed to repeat it.
[2] Aiello AE, Coulborn RM, Perez V, Larson EL. 2008. Effect of hand hygiene on infectious disease risk in the community setting: a meta-analysis. Am J Public Health98:1372-1381.
[3] Luby SP, Agboatwalla M, Painter J, Altaf A, Billhimer WL, Hoekstra RM. Effect of intensive handwashing promotion on childhood diarrhea in high-risk communities in Pakistan: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2004;291:2547–2554.
[4] Larson EL, Lin SX, Gomez-Pichardo C, Della-Latta P. Effect of antibacterial home cleaning and handwashing products on infectious disease symptoms: a randomized, double-blind trial. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:321–329.
[5] Fierer, N. M. Hamady, C.L. Lauber, R. Knight. 2008. The influence of sex, handedness, and washing on the diversity of hand surface bacteria. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, USA. 105: 17994-17999.
[6] McBain, A. J.; Bartolo, R. G.; Catrenich, C. E.; Charbonneau, D.; Ledder, R. G.; Price, B. B.; Gilbert, P. Exposure of sink drain microcosms to triclosan: Population dynamics and antimicrobial susceptibility. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2003, 69, 5433−5442.
[7] Aiello AE, Larson EL. Antibacterial cleaning and hygiene products as an emerging risk factor for antibiotic resistance in the community. Lancet Infect Dis. 2003;3:501–506.
[8] Raut, S. A., and R. A. Angus 2010. Triclosan has endocrine-disrupting effects in male western mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis. Environ Toxicol Chem 29: 1287–1291.
[9] Rees Clayton, E.M., Todd, M., Dowd, J.B., Aiello, A.E.† (2010) The impact of bisphenol A and triclosan on immune parameters in the US population, NHANES 2003-2006. Environmental Health Perspectives
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