By CHRIS HAWLEY, Associated Press Writer
Mar 25, 2004

UNITED NATIONS - The brainpower of entire nations has diminished because of a shortage of the right vitamins, and slipping nutrients into people's food seems to be the only solution, a new U.N. survey says.

To fight the problem, the United Nations is prescribing a whole pantry of artificially fortified foods: soy sauce laced with zinc, "super salt" spiked with iron, cooking oil fortified with vitamin A.

Deficiencies in these vitamins are having alarming effects in developing countries, even ones where people generally have enough to eat, said the study, released Wednesday.

A lack of iron lowers children's IQs by an average five to seven points, the report said. A deficiency in iodine cuts it 13 more points, said Venkatesh Mannar, president of the Micronutrient Initiative, which produced the report along with the United Nations Children's Fund. Birth defects increase when mothers don't get enough folic acid, and a shortage of vitamin A makes children 25-30 percent more likely to die of disease.

"So ubiquitous is vitamin and mineral deficiency that it debilitates in some significant degree the energies, intellects, and economic prospects of nations," the study said.

It looked at 80 developing countries representing some 80 percent of the world's population. It found:

_ Iodine deficiency has lowered the intellectual capacity of almost all of the nations by as much as 10 to 15 percentage points. It causes 18 million children a year to be born mentally impaired.

_ Iron deficiency in adults is so widespread that it lowers the productivity of work forces — cutting the Gross Domestic Product in the worst-affected countries by 2 percent.

_ Deficiencies in folic acid — a nutrient needed for tissue growth, especially in pregnant women — causes approximately 200,000 severe birth defects every year in the 80 countries.

_ About 40 percent of the developing world's people suffer from iron deficiency, 15 percent lack adequate iodine and as many as 40 percent do not get enough vitamin A.

In most Western countries, governments have fought the problem with additives: iodine is sprayed onto salt before packaging, vitamin A is added to milk and margarine, and flour is enriched with niacin, iron and folic acid.

But that doesn't work in countries where governments are weak, food is not processed in big mills and diets are based on a single starchy staple like rice or corn.

Other health experts said the U.N. findings echoed other studies showing the link between intelligence and nutrition.

"This is absolutely happening," said Ronald Waldman, a professor of clinical health at Columbia University. "Vitamin deficiency is a disease, and when people have this disease they don't reach their ideal mental potential."

While some deficiencies, like lack of vitamin A, can be corrected, "If you grow up and your IQ has suffered from iodine deficiency, it's not going to be reversible," Waldman said.

Furthermore, things are getting worse in some countries, the report said. The percentage of salt that is iodized has slipped to 25 percent in some Central Asian countries and to 50 percent in India, the country with the largest number of iodine deficient people, the report said.

Getting vitamins to people other ways just doesn't work, researchers said. In the United States, most people ignored government pleas to take more folic acid, a nutrient found in nuts — until the government started putting it in flour in 1998. The result: cases of spina bifida and anencephaly, two serious birth defects, dropped by at least 20 percent.

"It becomes an issue of compliance. If people have to eat a vitamin pill every day, a lot of them won't do it," Mannar said.

The report urges countries to step up enrichment in foods that people don't make themselves — things like soy sauce, cooking oil or margarine. It also endorses a new kind of salt fortified with iron in "microcapsules."

Putting more nutrients into the food has a measurable economic effect, Mannar said. He cited an Indian study that showed a 20 percent increase in production among tea leaf pickers after iron was added to their diets.

But the most disturbing gap between countries with good and poor nutrition is in intelligence, said Cutberto Garza, a Cornell University professor who also leads the nutrition program at United Nations University.

"A difference of five to seven IQ points doesn't sound like a lot, but you have to look at the tail ends of the (statistical) curve," Garza said. "You are significantly reducing the number of gifted people and increasing the number of people with mental incapacities."

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Overweight and obese individuals (BMI of 25 and above) are at increased risk for physical ailments such as (NIH pp.12-20; Stunkard p. 224)

• High blood pressure, hypertension
• High blood cholesterol, dyslipidemia
• Type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes
• Insulin resistance, glucose intolerance
• Hyperinsulinemia
• Coronary heart disease
• Angina pectoris
• Congestive heart failure
• Stroke
• Gallstones
• Cholescystitis and cholelithiasis
• Gout
• Osteoarthritis
• Obstructive sleep apnea and respiratory problems
• Some types of cancer (such as endometrial, breast, prostate, and colon)
• Complications of pregnancy
• Poor female reproductive health (such as menstrual irregularities, infertility, irregular ovulation)
• Bladder control problems (such as stress incontinence)
• Uric acid nephrolithiasis
• Psychological disorders (such as depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, and low self esteem).

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Reference

Stunkard AJ, Wadden TA. (Editors) Obesity: theory and therapy, Second Edition. New York: Raven Press, 1993.

National Institutes of Health. Clinical guidelines on the identification, evaluation, and treatment of overweight and obesity in adults. Bethesda, Maryland: Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1998.

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Study Tells Overweight Adults to Walk

Jan 13, 2004

From The Associated Press

CHICAGO - Overweight adults who are not on a diet need only a small amount of exercise - the equivalent of a half-hour of brisk walking per day - to prevent further weight gain, a study found.

Participants who got no exercise during the eight-month study gained an average of almost 2.5 pounds. But 73 percent of those who briskly walked 11 miles a week, or about 30 minutes a day, were able to maintain their weight or even lose a few pounds.

The most noticeable weight loss occurred in those who did the most vigorous exercise - jogging about 17 miles weekly. They lost an average of nearly eight pounds over eight months, and also shed more than 10 pounds of body fat and gained about 3 pounds of lean body mass on average.

The study was led by Duke University researchers and involved 120 overweight or mildly obese adults who were instructed not to diet during the research. The findings appear in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

The study confirms that exercise without cutting calories is not the most effective way to lose weight, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

But demonstrating that small amounts of exercise alone can prevent weight gain is significant, given the nation's growing obesity epidemic, Klein said.

"That's important because on average we gain about a pound of fat a year from age 25 to 55 in this country," he said. "Preventing that would be very important."

The men and women studied were ages 40 to 65. They had an average body-mass index of 29.7; anything between 25 and 29 is considered overweight, while 30 and above is obese. The index is a height-weight ratio.

Government estimates suggest more than 60 percent of American adults are overweight.

The study may help settle confusion over conflicting recommendations from the Institute of Medicine and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The institute, a private group that advises the government, has recommended adults get at least an hour of moderate-intensity exercise daily.

The study's findings suggest that may be unrealistic and unnecessary for weight maintenance; they are more in line with the CDC's recommendations for a half-hour of moderate exercise per day, said Duke researcher Cris Slentz, the study's lead author.

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Nancy Walsh
New York Bureau

By WILLIAM McCALL, Associated Press Writer

For the first time, scientists say they have proved what creative minds have known all along: that our sleeping brains continue working on problems that baffle us during the day, and that the right answer may come more easily after eight hours of rest.

The German study is considered to be the first hard evidence supporting the commonsense notion that creativity and problem-solving appear to be directly linked to adequate sleep.

Some researchers said the study provides a valuable reminder for overtired workers and students that sleep is often the best medicine.

"A single study never settles an issue once and for all, but I would say this study does advance the field significantly," said Dr. Carl E. Hunt, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health. "It's going to have potentially important results for children for school performance and for adults for work performance."

Sleep has long been thought to improve creativity. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards said the riff in "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" came to him in his sleep, while the 19th-century chemist Dmitri Mendeleev literally dreamed up the periodic table of elements.

Scientists at the University of Luebeck found that volunteers taking a simple math test were three times more likely than sleep-deprived participants to figure out a hidden rule for converting the numbers into the right answer if they had eight hours of sleep. The findings appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Jan Born, who led the study, said the results support biochemical studies of the brain that indicate memories are restructured before they are stored. Creativity also appears to be enhanced in the process, he said.

"This restructuring might be occurring in such a way that the problem is easier to solve," Born said.

Born said the exact process in the sleeping brain for sharpening these abilities remains unclear. But it appears that memories start deep in an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and are eventually pushed outward to the neocortex to be consolidated.

The changes leading to creativity or problem-solving insight occur during "slow wave" or deep sleep, which typically occurs in the first four hours of the sleep cycle, he said.

The findings also may explain the memory problems associated with aging, because older people typically have trouble getting enough sleep, especially the kind of deep sleep needed to process memories, Born said.

History is rife with examples of artists and scientists who have awakened to make their most notable contributions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the epic poem "Kubla Khan" after a long night of rest. Robert Louis Stevenson credited a good night's sleep with helping him create scenes in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." And Elias Howe came up with his idea for the sewing machine after waking up.

Other researchers have long suspected that sleep helps to consolidate memories and sharpen thoughts. But until now it had been difficult to design an experiment to demonstrate it.

Born and his team "have applied a clever test that allows them to determine exactly when insight occurs," Pierre Maquet and Perrine Ruby at the University of Liege said in an accompanying commentary.

Some 70 million Americans are believed to be sleep-deprived, contributing to accidents, health problems and lower test scores.

Maquet and Ruby said the study should be considered a warning to schools, employers and government agencies that sleep makes a huge difference in mental performance.

The results "give us good reason to fully respect our periods of sleep — especially given the current trend to recklessly curtail them," they said.<

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