Plant Sugars | Are They Worth It? |

Why is it that Proteins are deemed essential, we now know there are essential vitamins and minerals, we have essential fatty acids (oils) but the 4 th food group carbohydrates are not deemed essential. Well thats all beginning to change but the process is slow and frustrating and tinged with vested commercial interests. Our diets are overly rich in you can food that produces Glucose - which invariably leads towards being overweight and possibly obese and is a major factor in the development of diabetes. Conversely too little of 7 (possibly 10) other biologically active carbohydrates or plant sugars. The result of the deficiencies are still only just emerging but include arthritis, eczema, heart disease, Altzhiemers, Dementia, parkinsons, strokes, brain function and neurological disorders. In fact you can trace every disease state back to some sort of physiological malfunction which invariably has a nutritional component as a major part. Unless we recognise that our diets today are devoid of much of the nutrition we need and address it by one means or another then disease and ilness will continue to grow. Pharmaceutical drugs have their place but we have become overly dependant upon them and seem to think that they keep us healthy - the don't - the simply manage symptoms and suppress uncomfortable pain. Change your diet or expect more sickness!!!

US scientists have found that the shape of sugar molecules on cell surfaces in the upper respiratory tract determine how easy it is for influenza viruses to infect humans, and suggest that if the deadly strain of H5N1 bird flu were to adapt a way to bind to this shape of sugar molecule it would spread easily from human to human and provoke a world pandemic.

The study, which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is published in the 6th of January early online issue of Nature Biotechnology. The research team that conducted the study was led by Dr Ram Sasisekharan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The deadly strain of H5N1 can only pass from bird to human, because it does not have the ability to spread via coughing and sneezing since the virus does not yet have a way of gaining entry to cells in the human upper respiratory tract.

In this study Sasisekharan and colleagues have discovered what makes it possible for some flu viruses to gain a foothold in the cells lining our noses and throats and why other strains find it more difficult.

Dr Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (the part of NIH that sponsored the research) said:

"Using an approach that combines experimentation and database analysis, Sasisekharan's team has changed our view of flu viruses and how they must adapt to infect us."

"The work may improve our ability to monitor the evolution of the H5N1 virus and thwart potential outbreaks," he added.

The researchers were interested in a group of sugars called glycans. These are long chain molecules of different shapes that sit on the surfaces of cells and control entry into them. They are like gatekeepers of the cells and only let in agents that have the correct protein (rather like a "pass key"). Some viruses can get in because they have the correct protein to bind with the appropriate glycan.

The flu virus has a pass key called hemagglutinin, a protein that is slightly different for each strain of flu, and latches onto glycans for different cell types. The hemagglutinin of flu viruses that transmit easily between humans are able to bind to the glycans of the cells in the upper respiratory tract (the ones that line the nose and throat).

But the bird flu virus does not have the right type of hemagglutinin to gain access to the upper respiratory tract, it can only bind with glycans on the surfaces of lower respiratory tract cells.

However, Sasisekharan had seen some studies that found bird flu hemagglutinin had sometimes been able to bind to glycans on cells in the upper respiratory tract, and was puzzled as to why the virus didn't spread very well. So he and his team decided to investigate this.

They consulted a database maintained by the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) which holds information on the interactions between proteins and different types of glycan sugars.

They used the CFG glycan preference array which allowed them to see the different protein-glycan preferences and started to look at the shapes and structures of the glycan chains to see if there was a consistent pattern for the upper respiratory tract sugars.

Sasisekharan said they were surprised by the diversity of shapes:

"Even though these glycans are all linked the same way chemically, they have very different shapes."

There was however a consistent pattern. Upper respiratory tract glycans tend to be either short and cone-like, or long and umbrella-like.

The hemagglutinin from human-adapted flu viruses attached mainly to the long umbrella glycans that dominate the upper respiratory tract and the bird flu hemagglutinin attached mainly to the short cone glycans that dominate the lower respiratory tract.

The researchers concluded that H5N1 would have to change its hemagglutinin structure so it could latch onto the long umbrella glycans in order to get a foothold in the upper respiratory tract of humans and thereby spread more easily and provoke a pandemic.

Hopefully this new information will alert scientists to keep an eye on how the H5N1 virus evolves, especially in the way it attaches to long glycans.

It will also help to develop new types of therapies for seasonal and pandemic flu, said the researchers.

"Glycan topology determines human adaptation of avian H5N1 virus hemagglutinin."
Aarthi Chandrasekaran, Aravind Srinivasan, Rahul Raman, Karthik Viswanathan, S Raguram, Terrence M Tumpey, V Sasisekharan & Ram Sasisekharan.
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 06 January 2008.
doi:10.1038/nbt1375

Stem cells are all the rage now. Everyone is talking about stem cell transplants and what they can do. Would it suprise you to learn that your own body can and does make millions of stem cells every day. These stem cells are moved around the body to where ever they are needed including the brain and nervous system. One of the possible reasons we might be seeing an increase in the incident of non infectious disease is the decline in our bodies abilities to make stem cells and therefore it becomes harder to repair and replace damaged tissue and organs. These same plant sugars i have been talking about are the key components that the body needs to produce stem cells in your own bone marrow. A conventional stem cell transplant might give the recipient 50,000 cells. Good nutritional support with these plant sugars will produce millions each week. Autonomous stem cell support is already known to be helping many people with health challenges.

The Eight biologically active plant sugars

In addition to improving cell to cell communication, research shows that these sugars work in the body in the following ways:

MANNOSE
* Prevents bacterial, viral, parasitic and fungal infections
* Eases inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis
* Lupus patients are deficient in this saccharide
* Lowers blood sugar and triglyceride levels in diabetic
patients

FUCOSE
* Influences brain development
* Improves brain's ability to create long-term memories
* Inhibits tumor growth
* Metabolism of this saccharide is abnormal in cystic
fibrosis, diabetes, and cancer and during episodes of
shingles, which is caused by the herpes virus
* Active against other herpes viruses, including herpes I
and cytomegalovirus
* Guards against respiratory infections
* Inhibits allergic reactions

GALACTOSE
* Enhances wound healing
* Increases calcium absorption
* Triggers long-term memory formation

GLUCOSE
* Potent fast-energy source
* Enhances memory
* Stimulates calcium absorption
* Too much or too little can be problematic
* Elderly Alzheimer's patients register much lower levels of
this saccharide than those with organic brain disease from
stroke or other vascular diseases
* Glucose metabolism disturbed in depression, manic-
depression, anorexia and bulimia

N-ACETYLGALACTOSAMINE
* Heart disease patients have lower-than- normal levels of
this saccharide
* Inhibits spread of tumor

N-ACETYLGLUCOSAMINE
* Immune modulator with antitumor properties and activity
against HIV
* Vital to learning
* Glucosamine, a metabolic product of this saccharide
* Helps repair cartilage
* Decreases pain and inflammation
* Increases range of motion
* May also help repair mucosal-lining defensive barrier
implicated in Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and
interstitial cystitis

N-ACETYLNEUROMINIC ACID
* Important for brain development and learning
* Abundant in breast milk
* Repels bacteria, virus and other pathogens

XYLOSE
* Antibacterial and antifungal
* May help prevent cancer of the digestive tract

Cancer has moved from the tenth leading cause of death to number two, even after Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer" spent thirty billion dollars attempting to find a cure. Diabetes has increased 700 percent since 1959. Nearly fifteen million American adults suffer from asthma and the Environmental Health Commission predicts that number will increase to twenty-nine million by 2020. Twenty-one million Americans suffer from arthritis, and approximately fifty million Americans suffer from autoimmune diseases, with 75 percent of these being female. Many of these autoimmune conditions were practically non-existent thirty years ago.

Look at the average diet of children today--soft drinks, processed cereal, pizza, candy, fast food and their favorite and often only source of vegetables: French fries. Could this be why we are seeing a dramatic rise in ADHD, to the point where eight million American children need to be drugged daily? Autism has gone from 1 in 10,000 children to 1 in 150 in just ten years. Further, adult-onset diabetes is occurring at epidemic rates in children as young as eight.

To see and hear Dr Willen talking about glyconutrients click the link
Sweet Language of Life Video

I first heard of this new field of science and nutrition in February or March of 2003. As open minded as I like to think I am, I was not very open to the information at the time. I thought I had the field of nutrition and supplementation down. After all, I used hundreds of products in my office and was getting great results with most of my cases. How could there be something out there I'd never heard of? Well, it took a colleague of mine over 9 months to convince me to use glyconutrient supplementation in my practice and I only tried it because I had a case that was chronic and extremely difficult, a 7-year old girl with horrible eczema over her entire body, and I was getting nowhere using all my tried and true protocols. Not to mention the fact that this little girl was my daughter's best friend! Well, the glyconutrients proved to be the missing link in that case... Her rapid recovery really got my attention! I began doing the research and the reading on this subject and was incredibly impressed with the science backing these products. Four out of the last eight Nobel Prize winners won their prizes because of their research in this area called glycobiology, and thousands of new research papers are published each year in the field. Needless to say, I have continued to use this type of nutrition in my practice since.

The reason I am telling you this is because many healthcare practioners, conventional allopathic doctors as well as alternative ones, can become stagnant in their practices, convinced that they know all there is to know. Sometimes it's not ignorance we deal with when it comes to our practitioners, but an "assumption of knowledge"...king of like, "the world is flat and everyone knows that..." mentality. This kind of pride-full arrogance can be annoying in a healthcare professional, but more importantly, it can be tragic. Knowing what I know now about this incredible nutritional technology, my only regret is that I didn't open my mind to them 9 months sooner. You see, during that time three of my patients passed away, from complications surrounding HIV, Hepatitis C and cancer, that I believe could have been helped with the super immune building properties of these nutrients.

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