Monday, November 19, 2012

Just trying to save the country, here...

Don't miss this @Tugginc screening of Escape Fire: The Fight To Rescue American Healthcare

We are hosting a screening and Q & A session of this outstanding documentary. We urge ALL to come!

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

7:30pm

AMC Loews Orpheum 7 Theater

New York City

Thursday, October 25, 2012

A little bit of NYC in the Sunshine State

Congratulations to our lead researcher, Eric R. Braverman, M.D.!

We look forward to the wonderful things to come!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Brain Awareness Week (March 11-17, 2013)

We are happy to announce that we are an official partner of DANA Foundation's

Brain Awareness Week!

We are gearing up for our big benefit dinner on March 16th, 2013 to celebrate Brain Awareness Week and raise funds for our continuing neuro-research.

Stay tuned for more details to come, and let us know if you would like to be involved! We are currently looking for supporters to sponsor and host tables. Please contact the PATH Foundation NY office if you are interested. 646.367.7411.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Vitamins with the vita-max

Recent questions came about as to whether vitamins from "whole foods" (not to be confused with the Whole Foods Market grocery store) are better than normal vitamin supplements. John Pillepich, PhD, CPhT from Total Health Nutrients was able to provide a good answer.

No Advantage to Whole Food Supplements

So-called food-form or whole food vitamins claim that they absorb better because they are bound to some kind of food base. The products are made by adding regular, isolated vitamins and minerals to a liquid medium containing live organisms, either yeast-based or fungal (mushroom)-based. The slurry is usually “aged” for 24-48 hours, and then dried. Presumably the live organisms have incorporated the vitamins and minerals into their cell bodies, and therefore the isolated vitamins and minerals are now bound up in a “whole food complex”. But, the organism may have selective uptake of the nutrients, and thus not all the nutrients may make it into the cell, and certainly not in the ratios that humans may need. What isn’t taken up is still part of the dried remains, mostly in the original form. Additional nutrients are usually added to get the potencies and ratios that appear on the product’s label.

So, what is the benefit of this? Well, not only is there no benefit, the products are actually not as good as the usual vitamin supplement. Why?

The body cannot absorb vitamins and minerals bound up in whole food complexes. The whole purpose of digestion is to release nutrients from food, and therefore reduce the complexes to molecular size. Using protein for an example, a protein is reduced from being at polypeptide size, to oligopeptide size, and finally to the sizes meant for absorption: tripeptides, dipeptides, and free amino acids.

If a whole food complex was absorbed into the blood stream, the body would recognize it as not-self, and treat it as a foreign invader. This would result in increased inflammation, an allergic reaction, or possibly anaphylaxis, a severe reaction that could result in death.

True, whole food vitamins do contain additional nutrients that were in the live organism and growth medium (mostly amino acids and lipids), but, so what? The amounts would be miniscule, and presumably the pills would be taken with food that would contain 10x to 100x more than that.

Start And Finish Every Task safelY

PATH Foundation NY visits Entergy's Indian Point Energy Center

Our team took a trip to the nuclear power plant that supplies about 20%-30% (depending on the time of day) of our city's electricity and were given a very comprehensive tour.

During our visit to this facility, we were able to get a much better understanding of how nuclear energy works and why it isn't as scary as previously believed. Without a doubt, there should be serious radiation exposure guidelines and precautions, but from what we could tell, Indian Point's activity does not pose a risk to the health or safety of either the plant personnel or the surrounding general public.

Many thanks to Mr. Patrick Falciano, our tour guide, who was able to give us a very thorough and informed explanation of how the plant operates. He has 42 years of experience in nuclear energy and started the tour outreach program at Entergy in 2003. Although he retired in 2007, he still acts as a "consultant" for Entergy and continues to guide tours.

Although Indian Point Energy Center was one of the first nuclear power plants (a few had been previously developed by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army) in the United States its operation seemed to be tidy and very well organized . It is composed of three units, one only partially in operation, but we toured almost all of the facility.

Below is a diagram that is nearly identical to the structure of Indian Point Reactors 2 and 3. This demonstrates how the reactor is made up of three separate systems; Primary System (shown in red), Secondary System (shown in green), and the Condenser System (shown in light blue). Radioactive particles do not leave the primary system. There have been claims that nuclear radiation could possibly be "leaking" into the Hudson, but you can see below that not only would the particles have to enter into the Secondary & Condenser Systems (which is not permitted at the steam generator), but they would also have to break through the barriers that keep the systems separate from the river water.

This is a glance at the cooling canal where the water from the river is cycled through to cool down the systems. Even thought the water reaches 600° Fahrenheit (the high pressure allows the water to be heated without boiling) in the steam generator, the canal temperature is only 13°-17° warmer than the river. The extreme temperatures are only reached inside the Primary System in the Containment Building.

Above are the turbines of the Secondary System for Indian Point 2.

Carmen Queral and Raquel Lohmann pose with the large turbines. Below is a glance at one of the turbine's internal temperature (138° Fahrenheit)

Below is a picture of the pool where the spent rods are kept.

Our PATH Foundation NY team posed with our tour guide, Pat Falciano. We are standing in the training room where an exact replica of the actual command center serves as one of the many tools to prepare Indian Point workers for the field.

We have every intention of continuing our studies on radiation exposure, so we will keep you up to date on new findings of this topic. We understand that the information we gathered from this trip could have been accompanied by some partiality and will be fact-checking all the claims made to the best of our ability. Our conclusion at this point is that nuclear energy is an extremely clean alternative to coal and oil. As with all things, safety is of primary importance and a focus should be made on proper maintenance of nuclear reactors and predicting unintended events/conditions.

For more information on how the nuclear plant actually supplies energy, follow this link for a great, informative article.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power.htm

Monday, September 24, 2012

Is obesity an economic issue?

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, it is.

In the recent article from Healthcare Finance News, "Obesity epidemic threatens to bankrupt the nation," several federal institutions and legislators were urged to join the fight against obesity.

Published on Healthcare Finance News (http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com)

Obesity epidemic threatens to bankrupt the nation

By Rene Letourneau, Editor

WASHINGTON – The obesity epidemic in the U.S. will eventually bankrupt the nation if left unchecked, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which held a webcast Tuesday to outline its recommendations for curbing the crisis.

In its report, “Lots to Lose: How America’s Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future,” the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative, co-chaired by former U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Ann Veneman and former U.S. Secretaries of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and Mike Leavitt, calls on the public and private sectors to collaborate in creating healthy families, schools, workplaces and communities.
The report’s goal is to draw attention to the role obesity plays in the nation’s mounting healthcare spending, which is expected to reach $4.6 trillion dollars annually and consume 19.8 percent of the GDP by 2020, said Glickman.
“We Americans are a very overweight and unhealthy nation and as a nation we spend $2.6 trillion on healthcare (annually). Those costs are the primary driver of our nations’ debt,” said Glickman, adding that the current level of healthcare spending will “bankrupt our country.”
In addition to the high cost of healthcare, other issues the nation will face as the obesity epidemic worsens include lost workforce productivity and the armed forces’ inability to recruit and retain qualified military personnel, said Glickman.
The Bipartisan Policy Center is calling on legislators on both sides of the political aisle to get involved in the fight against obesity, he said.
“Some issues are just too important to be partisan and this is clearly one of those issues. We must all take action to beat this threat,” said Glickman. “This is an issue that has cried out for simple solutions in every respect. It’s complicated, but it’s not so complicated that we can’t find ways to deal with it.”
“(This) report focuses on practical steps we can take in the real world,” he added.
Among the report’s recommendations are:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should extend federal guidelines for diet and physical activity to all children under six and enhance public awareness and understanding of these guidelines.
USDA should ensure that all its nutrition assistance programs reflect and support federal dietary guidelines.
All key institutions, including hospitals, workplaces, communities, government and insurance providers, should support and promote breastfeeding with the goal of substantially increasing U.S. breastfeeding rates for the first six months of an infant’s life.
Schools should improve nutrition and physical activity offerings, in partnership with the private sector.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in partnership with private companies, should develop a database of exemplary workplace wellness programs with a rigorous cost/benefit analysis to help scale up existing best practices in both the private sector and within government.
The Ad Council or similar organizations should coordinate a multi-media campaign to promote healthy diet and physical activity, funded by leading private sector companies in collaboration with federal agencies.
Food retailers should adopt in-store marketing and product placement strategies to promote the purchase of healthier, lower calorie products.
CDC and HHS should continue robust efforts to collect and disseminate information on food, physical activity and health – including information on the social determinants of health and future costs – and Congress should continue to support these monitoring and information-gathering functions.

Although this epidemic poses an extraordinary financial cost, most importantly, obesity is a killer of life and liberty. We are continuing our study on the failure of BMI to also include the mental effects of being overweight and obese. We have joined the fight, have you?

All donations to PATH Foundation NY are not only a gift of support for important scientific research, but also an investment in the future health of our country. We encourage you to visit our website to learn more about our efforts to improve our medical system. While you're at it, make a small donation...or a big one. www.pathfoundationny.org

Thursday, September 20, 2012

If you haven't already...

...you must check out our publication with Nirav R. Shah, M.D. (now New York State Health Commissioner). We have almost reached 20,000 views! This research paper made the news big-time, but the focus was more about "We are fatter than we think" instead of the real message we were trying to get across..AMERICA IS NOT PROPERLY DIAGNOSING OBESITY. Please take the time to read this paper, if you haven't already. We have already started on a continuation of this study to really establish the importance of measuring leptin. Stay tuned for more! Read the study HERE.

Our Summer Soiree

August 25th turned out to be a beautiful day to come together and raise funds for our foundation. Although we were definitely missing some of our supporters (many away for the holidays and end-of-Summer activities) we were still able to have a great time and share our upcoming studies. We were happy to see our loyal donors come all the way out to join us for a relaxing and lovely reception to benefit our foundation. The gracious people at the Parrish Art Museum allowed us to host our event on their gorgeous lawn by there series of Caesar statues. Even with the small crowd, we were able to raise close to $4,000 dollars! More than the money we brought in, we were grateful for the time spent with our precious donors and we look forward to seeing them at future events.