【推荐2】People who eat just two servings of red meat per week may have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes (糖尿病) compared to people who eat fewer servings, and the risk increases with greater consumption, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

While previous studies have found a link between red meat consumption and type 2 diabetes risk, this study, which analyzed a large number of type 2 diabetes cases among participants being followed for an extended period of years, adds a greater level of certainty about the association.

Type 2 diabetes rates are increasing rapidly in the U.S. and worldwide. The disease is not only a serious burden, but also a major risk factor for kidney disease, cancer, and dementia.

For this study, the researchers analyzed health data from 216,695 participants from the Nurses' Health Study, and Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Diet was assessed with food frequency questionnaires every two to four years, for up to 36 years. During this time, more than 22,000 participants developed type 2 diabetes.

The researchers found that consumption of red meat, including processed and unprocessed red meat, was strongly associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate the least. Every additional daily serving of processed red meat was associated with a 46% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes and every additional daily serving of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 24% greater risk.

The researchers also assessed the potential effects of substituting one daily serving of red meat for another protein source. They found that substituting with a serving of nuts was associated with a 30% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and substituting with a serving of dairy products was associated with a 22% lower risk.

In addition to health benefits, substituting red meat for healthy plant protein sources would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions: and climate change, and provide other environmental benefits, according to the researchers.

【推荐3】Some of the world’s biggest junk food makers are being paid millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to develop healthier snacks.

They are being handed grants by Vince Cable’s Business Department to meet pledges(承诺) to cut the salt and fat content of their food. Many firms have received the cash. The money is being used for research into new technologies and ingredients.

But critics have condemned the use of the public purse to help billion-pound companies because they have already benefited from tax breaks available for carrying out research and development.

At least ￡2.9 million has been handed over. While the work is done in cooperation with academic researchers at universities, the projects are manufacturer-led and commercial gain is the main consideration. Some companies have their own multimillion-pound research and development facilities which have received hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding.

In an attempt to curb people’s obesity, 170 companies signed a voluntary pledge to reduce the calories and levels of salt in their products. More than 390 have now signed up to the Public Health Responsibility Deal. Critics say junk food makers should be properly regulated rather than being allowed to sign up to a voluntary deal.

A spokesman in one of the companies added, “By working in partnership in this way and co-funding important research, we can have a wide-reaching, positive impact on the health of the nation.”

【推荐1】A new drug is generating excitement. Just a jab (注射) a week, and the weight falls off. The new drug, called glp-1 receptor agonists (受体激动剂), is shown in clinical trials to lead to about 15% weight loss. Analysts think glp-1 drugs couldn’t have arrived at a better time. In 2020, two-fifths of the world’s population were overweight or obese. By 2035, that figure could swell to more than half.

These trends are alarming because obesity causes many health problems. Carrying extra weight made people more likely to die of diseases. And being fat may affect children in schools and playgrounds. The consequences of obesity for the public purse and the wider economy are large. Despite what consumers worldwide spent on dieting and weight loss last year, the battle to get slim was largely being lost.

The new obesity drugs arrived after treatments meant for diabetics (糖尿病患者) were observed to cause weight loss. They stimulate a feeling of fullness and reduce the appetite, and switch off the mental urge to eat. But with the jabs already in high demand, there are uncertainties. Two big ones will be safety and affordability.

Consider safety first. The newness means that their long-term consequences aren’t yet known, which requires careful analysis through studies. Understanding these risks will be important, because many patients who take the drugs may need them for the rest of their lives. Another concern for policymakers is cost. In America the bill for glp-1 runs at around $1,300 a month. Judged by such prices, lifelong prescriptions look expensive.

What to do meanwhile? Governments must ensure that those who most need the drugs get them. The long-term effects must be carefully studied. States should keep pressing other anti-obesity measures, such as exercise, healthy eating and better food labelling, which may help prevent people from getting fat in the first place. But spare a moment to celebrate, too. These new drugs mean that the world’s fight against obesity may eventually be won.

【推荐2】In the textbooks, science is simple. You come up with an idea, put it to the test, and then accept it or reject it depending on what your experiments reveal. In the real world, though, things are not so straightforward, as a paper just published in Science Translational Medicine shows. In it, a group of researchers led by Patrick Yu-Wai-Man from Cambridge University investigated a promising new genetic therapy (基因疗法) for LHON, a form of blindness. But things didn’t turn out as they had expected.

A faulty gene in a sufferer’s mitochondria—the tiny structures that provide a cell’s energy—causes retinal (视网膜的) cells to die, which leads to a sudden loss of sight. It affects between one in 30, 000 and one in 50, 000 people. Treatment is limited and not particularly effective.

Since most cases are caused by a change in a single gene, LHON can be theoretically cured by replacing the faulty gene with a working one. Dr Yu-Wai-Man’s team put a corrected copy of the gene onto a defanged (无害化的) virus and then injected (注射) the virus into their patients’ eyes. It couldn’t reproduce but was able to replace the damaged gene with a working copy.

Most medical studies make use of a control group, so that researchers can measure the effectiveness of the treatment. Here, the researchers controlled the experiment by injecting only one of each patient’s eyes with the virus, leaving the other untouched.

The surprise came several months into the study. The researchers had hoped to see a big improvement in the treated eyes, compared with the untreated ones. They did not, and for that reason the study failed. Instead, in more than three-quarters of their patients, they saw substantial improvements in both eyes. Follow-up studies found that the virus had found a way to travel from one eyeball to the other.

While the study is technically a failure, the potential for curing it reveals means that an effective treatment for LHON may at last be in reach.

【推荐3】Climate change is starving polar bears into extinction, according to research published Monday that predicts the apex carnivores could all but disappear within the span of a human lifetime. In some regions they are already caught in a vicious downward spiral (螺旋), with shrinking sea ice cutting short the time bears have for hunting seals, scientists reported in Nature Climate Change.

Their dwindling body weight undermines their chances of surviving Arctic winters without food, the scientists added. “The bears face an ever longer fasting period before the ice refreezes and they can head back out to feed,” Steven Amstrup, who conceived the study and is chief scientist of Polar Bears International, told AFP.

On current trends, the study concluded, polar bears in 12 of 13 subpopulations analyzed will have been decimated within 80 years by the galloping pace of change in the Arctic, which is warming three times as fast as the planet as a whole.

“By 2100, recruitment” — new births — “will be severely compromised or impossible everywhere except perhaps in the Queen Elizabeth Island subpopulation,” in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, said Amstrup. That scenario foresees Earth’s average surface temperature rising 3.3 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial benchmark. One degree of warming so far has triggered a crescendo of heatwaves, droughts and superstorms made more destructive by rising seas.

But even if humanity were able to cap global warming at 2.4 degrees Celsius — about half-a- degree above Paris Agreement targets, but hugely ambitious all the same —it would probably only delay the polar bears’ collapse. The threat is not rising temperatures itself but the top-of-the-food-chain predators’ inability to adapt to a rapidly shifting environment.

Half of Earth’s land-based megafauna are classified as threatened with extinction, but only polar bears are endangered primarily by climate change. But that status may not be unique for long, and should be seen as a harbinger (前兆) of how climate will impact other animals in the coming decades, the authors warned. The polar bear’s “vulnerable” status on the IUCN Red List of endangered species — less severe than “endangered” or “critically endangered”— does not accurately reflect their plight, the authors argue.

Categories established by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are based mainly on threats such as poaching (偷猎) and habitat encroachment (侵入) that can be addressed with local action on the ground. “But we cannot build a fence to protect sea ice from rising temperatures,” said Amstrup.