China launches campaign to break sex taboos

BEIJING (Reuters) – China on Sunday launched a national sex education campaign aimed at breaking traditional taboos and getting more people to seek treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and infertility.

Just seven percent of women and slightly more than eight percent of men seek immediate medical help for sexual problems, while more a third of people never seek help, said one of the campaign's advisors.

"These numbers are shocking," Xia Enlan, head of the obstetrics and gynaecology department of the Capital University of Sciences' Fuxing Hospital, told a news conference.

"The numbers who get medical attention for sexual problems are extremely small," she added. "This delays treatment for some very serious diseases."

The campaign, called "The sunshine project to care for gender health," will feature posters, competitions and sponsorship of an international sex toy fair in Beijing, organisers said, in a bid to breach "painful topics" of sex.

It will be fronted by Hong Kong starlet Yvonne Yung and her husband Will Liu, who will be the campaign's "image ambassadors."

"Sexual health is an important part of family life and good for helping build a harmonious society," said Cui Yandi of the China Woman and Child Development Centre, one of the programme's main sponsors.

China reported a one-fifth rise in syphilis last year, with a total of 257,474 cases, according to the Health Ministry, though gonorrhoea cases dropped by a tenth.

HIV/AIDS in China is also now mainly sexually transmitted. In the past, most infections were caused by intravenous drug use.

By the end of 2007, China had an estimated 700,000 people infected with HIV, up from an earlier estimate of 650,000, but is believed to have many unreported cases.

While the government has rolled out a television campaign to promote condom use, a major move for a country where talking about sex is problematic for many people, Xia said traditional shyness about discussing sex remains a huge issue.

"It's taboo. The influence of feudalistic thinking has been around for many years. People are not very open," she told Reuters.

"People need to talk about it now that the economy has been growing so fast and we're becoming more and more open," Xia said.

"The traditional way of thinking has not been broken," she added. "We need more publicity, and to talk about these issues in the open. That's why we need this campaign."

Fish oil prevents cholesterol

WASHINGTON: Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center have found yet another reason why eating fish can be beneficial.

Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum, Director of the Columbia Institute of Human Nutrition, has found that a diet rich in fish oils can prevent the accumulation of fat in the aorta, the main artery leaving the heart.

The researcher says that the beneficial actions of fish oil, which block cholesterol build-up in arteries, are even found at high fat intakes. Fish are generally rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to provide many health benefits, such as helping to prevent mental illness and delaying some of the disabilities associated with aging.

Eating tuna, sardines, salmon and other so-called cold water fish seems to protect people against clogged arteries. Omega-3 fatty acids are also known to lower triglycerides, a type of fat often found in the bloodstream.

The current study was carried out in three separate populations of mice--one was fed a balanced diet, one a diet resembling a "Western" diet high in saturated fat, and a third was fed a high fish fat diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids.

The researchers observed that the fatty acids contained in fish oil markedly inhibit the entry of "bad" cholesterol (LDL) into arteries, and, consequently, much less cholesterol collects in these vessels. According to them, this is related to the ability of those fatty acids to markedly decrease lipoprotein lipase, a molecule that traps LDL in the arterial wall.

The research team say that their finding may help improve the scientific understanding of omega-3 fatty acids' benefits on heart health. Dr. Deckelbaum says that people can obtain these health benefits by increasing fish intake, or by using supplements that contain the "long-chain" fatty acids, EPA and DHA, which are found in cold water fish.

The research was published by the American Heart Association's Arteriolosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

Fat cells help weight reduction

WASHINGTON: Georgia State University researchers have discovered that fat cells in the body work in the same fashion as a thermostat regulates temperature inside a house—giving feedback to the brain to regulate the process of fat burning.

C. Kay Song and Tim Bartness, who conducted this study in collaboration with Gary J. Schwartz of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, say that their work may help advance the scientific understanding of how weight is shed. The researchers found that during the process of burning fat, known as lipolysis, fat cells use sensory nerves to feed information to the brain.

The team revealed that they used viruses to trace communications in the nerves of Siberian hamsters, and found that the brain uses part of the nervous system used to regulate body functions, called the sympathetic nervous system, to in turn communicate back to the cells to initiate, continue or stop the fat burning depending upon the information the brain receives from the fat.

"The brain can trigger lipid burning by fat cells and through these sensory nerves, the fat cell can give the brain feedback. This is a really important concept in biology, as it can regulate the process of lipolysis much like how a thermostat regulates temperature in your house, using input from the air and output to a furnace or heating unit," Bartness said.

"The presence and function of the sensory nerves has been completely ignored and the areas in the brain that receive this sensory information were unknown until we did these studies," he added.

When the body has a low amount of a carbohydrate called glycogen, which acts as fuel for lipolysis, the body starts this process to release energy stored in fats. Finally, nerves that are part of the sympathetic nervous system, a chemical called nor epinephrine are released to trigger the breakdown of fat.

Bartness says that sensory nerves later inform the brain about the status of the lipolysis, communicating whether too much or too little energy has been released – and the activity of the sympathetic nerves can be adjusted accordingly.

"If you're doing a moderate amount of exercise or even if it has been a fairly long interval since you last ate, you will use up all or most of the available glycogen, necessitating the break down fat to yield sufficient energy. But you don't want to break down more than you need. So, this would be a way to stop the sympathetic nervous system from triggering the release of too much lipid energy from fat," he said.

According to the researchers, though this communication process is known to play a role in the short-term burning of fat, it has yet to be determined whether this process is involved with the long-term issues of burning fat – important in understanding obesity and why some people burn fat more readily than others.

"It could be that sensory nerves have a dual function. In addition to the moment-to-moment lipolysis process, they might also have a longer term function. It's complicated, and it might be a different subset of the sensory nerves performing the long-term monitoring of fat reserves," he said.

Teen brains still budding

LONDON: Are you clueless as to why your teenage kid ignores home rules? Well, British scientists have got the answer: their brain's ability to adopt the viewpoint of others is still budding.

Dubbed as the theory of mind, the ability to infer another's perspective - emotional, intellectual, or visual -boosts with age.

To reach the conclusion, the researchers made kids watch two puppets - Sally and Anne - play with a marble, then put the marble back in a box. Anne "left" and Sally grabbed the marble, played with it, and then returned the marble instead to a bag.

Where will Anne first search for the marble, the researchers asked the children as part of the study.

"Before four, kids say she's going to look in the bag, but after four they know she has a false belief," New Scientist quoted Iroise Dumontheil, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK, who led the new study.

However, Dumontheil said, brain scans suggest that a teenage mind toils harder when inferring the outlook of others, compared with adults. And a brain region implicated in theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, continues to develop through adolescence, the scientist added.

To see if there is a behavioural consequence of these biological changes, she and colleagues tested children, adolescents, and adults on their ability to infer the spatial perspective of another person in a simple computer game.

Volunteers- 179 females ranging in age from 7 to 27 - saw a bookshelf with a variety of different sized balls and other objects on four different rows. Few of the objects sit in front of opaque backgrounds, obscured to someone standing on the other side of the shelf, while some sit in front of a see-through background.

Participants were asked to adopt the perspective of a man standing on the other side of the shelf and move the small ball to the left, using a mouse. In a typical test, a golf ball and tennis ball are both visible to the participant, but the golf ball is obscured from the point of view of the observer.
The correct response, then, is to move the tennis ball.

Kids under the age of 10 moved the wrong ball in about three-quarters of trials. Children aged 10 through 13 scored marginally better, and teens answered wrong on two-thirds of trials. Adults, however, did better than 50-50, on average.

Added salt increases hypertension

WASHINGTON: Health experts are urging people to avoid food with high salt content because it may lead to health problems like hypertension and strokes.

Dr. Ken Flegel, Dr. Peter Magner and the CMAJ editorial team write that added salt in diets is unnecessary. They insist that customers must be vigilant, read food labels, and demand low salt food in stores and restaurants.

"Of the estimated one billion people living with hypertension, about 30 per cent can attribute it to excess salt intake," write the authors. According to them, populations, such as the Yanomami Indians in South America, with very low levels of salt intake do not have hypertension.

In contrast, Japan, with a salt intake of 15 g per person, has high rates of hypertension and the highest stroke rates in the industrialized world. The authors recommend a maximum daily intake of 2.8 g for active young people, and 2.2 for older adults.

"The correct default should be no added salt in food we purchase, leaving those who still wish to do so free to indulge at their own risk," they conclude.

Love does improve with age, claims researcher

WELLINGTON: Love can last forever, claims an Otago University professor, who found that adoration consistently improves with age.

According to Amanda Barusch, who teaches social work and community development, twilight love brings lifestyle changes.

To reach the 'eternal' conclusion, the professor investigated love and romance among baby boomers aged over 50.

Professor Barusch found that the people she surveyed "consistently reported that love improved with age," the Salt Lake City Tribune reported.

She found a wide range of romantic experience when she interviewed 91 people aged 51 to 97 - most of them widowed, but also including married couples and divorcees.

The researcher kept looking for a natural "cliff" when romantic experiences became consistently different but didn't find one. Flexibility was prompted by intimations of mortality: some older women had no reservations about initiating relationships with younger men, even if they were raised with a different set of cultural mores, the researcher found.