Quoted message said:Subject: Re: Andrew Chung FAQ
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:In any case, his medical advice should be avoided, or at least
verified by one's own physician.
Actually, from what I have seen his advice has been quite knowledgeable and
helpful. Two pound diet issues aside - which seems to inflame a lot of
passion - can you provide some examples, or any example for that matter, of
medical information that he has provided that is factually incorrect?
http://www.google.com/groups?q=g:thl3147059742d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sel
m=20030830135620.14517.00000240%40mb-m12.aol.com
Below is a snip from his response to my question above in the groups as to his
seemingly cavalier attitude to the PROBLEM .. of .. craving / addiction to
food.
As you can see by the parts of my post he 'snipped' .. nothing at all was said
about using pills to control diet .
He either didn't read the post OR purposely lied ..
Either way .. as a physician one could / should / would expect MORE of a
'professional' attitude .. IF ..he were truly a medical professional.
wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:(3) If you feel hungry between meals, try drinking some water instead of
snacking. Also, doing things like your favorite hobbies or socializing can
get
Quoted message said:your mind off of eating.
Spoken like a true doctor ..
That's what I am. The alternative would be to swallow an appetite
suppressing pill. Your choice.
Quoted message said:"it's all in your head .."
Sorry, the stomach is not in the head.
Quoted message said:So your advice to someone who has food cravings is .. " bite the bullet .."
...
Quoted message said:?
Nope. It is wait till supper. However, if you do snack, do keep
track of it per the 2PD instructions at:
http://www.heartmdphd.com/wtloss.asp
Quoted message said:One would think addressing the underlying cause OF .. craving .. might be in
order ..?
see:
http://www.heartmdphd.com/wtlossfaqs.asp
<articles about taking pills to suppress appetite snipped>
Quoted message said:
If not, why do you believe such advice should be avoided?
Simply because the guy doesn't do any type of reading ..
He believes he can quelch ANY type of discussion which might reflect badly on
his ability as a physician.
His seeming 'childish' attempt at quelching the information I provided can be
seen directly through a search of the groups ..
Below is the part of my post which was snipped.
As he states above ..
<articles about taking pills to suppress appetite snipped>
which as one can see below is simply .. untrue .. so again either he didn't
read the articles OR .. he is lying .. to quelch discussion as to his ability
to UNDERSTAND CRAVING AND ADDICTION ..
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/health/19REWA.html
February 19, 2002
Hijacking the Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
ompulsive gambling, attendance at sporting events, vulnerability to
telephone scams and exuberant investing in the stock market may not seem
to have much in common. But neuroscientists have uncovered a common
thread.
Such behaviors, they say, rely on brain circuits that evolved to help
animals assess rewards important to their survival, like food and sex.
Researchers have found that those same circuits are used by the human
brain to assess social rewards as diverse as investment income and
surprise home runs at the bottom of the ninth.
And, in a finding that astonishes many people, they found that the brain
systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside
of conscious awareness. In navigating the world and deciding what is
rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the
time.
The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists,
challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what
they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the neuroscientists say, much of
what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.
The idea has been around since Freud, said Dr. Gregory Berns, a
psychiatrist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Psychologists have studied unconscious processing of information in terms
of subliminal effects, memory and learning, he said, and they have
started to map out what parts of the brain are involved in such
processing. But only now are they learning how these different circuits
interact, he said.
"My hunch is that most decisions are made subconsciously with many
gradations of awareness," Dr. Berns said. "For example, I'm vaguely aware
of how I got to work this morning. But consciousness seems reserved for
more important things."
Dr. P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston, says the idea that people can get themselves to work on
automatic pilot raises two questions: how does the brain know what it
must pay conscious attention to? And how did evolution create a brain
that could make such distinctions?
The answer emerging from experiments on animals and people is that the
brain has evolved to shape itself, starting in infancy, according to what
it encounters in the external world.
As Dr. Montague explained it, much of the world is predictable: buildings
usually stay in one place, gravity makes objects fall, light falling at
an oblique angle makes long shadows and so forth. As children grow, their
brains build internal models of everything they encounter, gradually
learning to identify objects and to predict how they move through space
and time.
As new information flows into it from the outside world, the brain
automatically compares it to what it already knows. If things match up -
as when people drive to work every day along the same route - events,
objects and the passage of time may not reach conscious awareness.
But if there is a surprise - a car suddenly runs a red light - the
mismatch between what is expected and what is happening instantly shifts
the brain into a new state. A brain circuit involved in decision making
is activated, again out of conscious awareness. Drawing on past
experience held in memory banks, a decision is made: hit the brake,
swerve the wheel or keep going. Only a second or so later, after hands
and feet have initiated the chosen action, does the sense of having made
a conscious decision arise.
Dr. Montague estimates that 90 percent of what people do every day is
carried out by this kind of automatic, unconscious system that evolved to
help creatures survive.
Animals use these circuits to know what to attend to, what to ignore and
what is worth learning about. People use them for the same purposes
which, as a result of their bigger brains and culture, include listening
to music, eating chocolate, assessing beauty, gambling, investing in
stocks and experimenting with drugs - all topics that have been studied
this past year with brain imaging machines that directly measure the
activity of human brain circuits.
The two circuits that have been studied most extensively involve how
animals and people assess rewards. Both involve a chemical called
dopamine. The first circuit, which is in a middle region of the brain,
helps animals and people instantly assess rewards or lack of rewards.
The circuit was described in greater detail several years ago by Dr.
Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England, who
tracked dopamine production in a monkey's midbrain and experimented with
various types of rewards, usually squirts of apple juice that the animal
liked.
Dr. Schultz found that when the monkey got more juice than it expected,
dopamine neurons fired vigorously. When the monkey got an amount of juice
that it expected to get, based on previous squirts, dopamine neurons did
nothing. And when the monkey expected to get juice but got none, the
dopamine neurons decreased their firing rate, as if to signal a lack of
reward.
Scientists believe that this midbrain dopamine system is constantly
making predictions about what to expect in terms of rewards. Learning
takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing
rates increase or decrease. When nothing unexpected happens, as when the
same amount of delicious apple juice keeps coming, the dopamine system is
quiet.
In animals, Dr. Montague said, these midbrain dopamine signals are sent
directly to brain areas that initiate movements and behavior. These brain
areas figure out how to get more apple juice or sit back and do nothing.
In humans, though, the dopamine signal is also sent to a higher brain
region called the frontal cortex for more elaborate processing.
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton, studies a part of the
frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate, located in back of the
forehead. This part of the brain has several functions, Dr. Cohen said,
including the task of detecting errors and conflict in the flow of
information being processed automatically.
Brain imaging experiments are beginning to show that when a person gets
an unexpected reward - the equivalent of a huge shot of delicious apple
juice - more dopamine reaches the anterior cingulate. When a person
expects a reward and does not get it, less dopamine reaches the region.
And when a person expects a reward and gets it, the anterior cingulate is
silent.
When people expect a reward and do not receive it, their brains need a
way to register the fact that something is amiss so it can recalibrate
expectations for future events, Dr. Cohen said. As in monkeys, human
dopamine neurons project to areas that plan and control movements, he
said. Fluctuating levels of dopamine make people get up and do things,
outside their conscious awareness. The number of things people do to
increase their dopamine firing rates is unlimited, neuroscientists are
discovering. Several studies were published last year looking at monetary
rewards and dopamine. Money is abstract but to the brain it looks like
cocaine, food, sex or anything a person expects is rewarding, said Dr.
Hans Breiter, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People crave it.
Some people seem to be born with vulnerable dopamine systems that get
hijacked by social rewards. The same neural circuitry involved in the
highs and lows of abusing drugs is activated by winning or losing money,
anticipating a good meal or seeking beautiful faces to look at, Dr.
Breiter said.
For example, dopamine circuits are activated by cocaine; people become
addicted when their reward circuits have been hijacked by the drug, Dr.
Montague said.
Winning in gambling can also hijack the dopamine system, Dr. Berns said.
Many people visit a casino, lose money and are not tempted to go back.
But compulsive gamblers seem to have vulnerable dopamine systems, he
said. The first time they win, they get a huge dopamine rush that gets
embedded in their memory. They keep gambling and the occasional dopamine
rush of winning overrides their conscious knowledge that they will lose
in the long run.
Other experiments show that reward circuits are activated when young men
look at photos of beautiful women and that these circuits are defective
in women with eating disorders like bulimia. Bulimics say they are
addicted to vomiting because it gives them a warm, positive feeling.
Music activates neural systems of reward and emotion. Older people with
age-related impairments to the frontal cortex do poorly on gambling tasks
and, experiments show, are prone to believe misleading advertising.
Neuroscientists say that part of the appeal of live sporting events is
their inherent unpredictability. When a baseball player with two outs at
the bottom of the ninth inning hits a home run to win the game, thousands
of spectators simultaneously experience a huge surge of dopamine. People
keep coming back, as if addicted to the euphoria of experiencing
unexpected rewards.
One of the most promising areas for looking at unconscious reward
circuits in human behavior concerns the stock market, Dr. Montague said.
Economists do not study people, they study collective neural systems in
people who form mass expectations. For example, when the Federal Reserve
unexpectedly lowered interest rates twice last year, the market went up,
he said. When it lowered interest rates on other occasions and investors
knew the move was coming, markets did not respond.
Economists and neuroscientists use the same mathematical equations for
modeling market behavior and dopamine behavior, Dr. Montague said.
Neuroscience may provide an entirely new set of constructs for
understanding economic decision making.
____________________________________________________________________________
J Psychoactive Drugs 2000 Nov;32 Suppl:i-iv, 1-112
Reward deficiency syndrome: a biogenetic model for the diagnosis and treatment
of impulsive, addictive, and compulsive behaviors.
Blum K, Braverman ER, Holder JM, Lubar JF, Monastra VJ, Miller D, Lubar JO,
Chen TJ, Comings DE
Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Texas, Denton,
Texas, USA.
The dopaminergic system, and in particular the dopamine D2 receptor,
has been implicated in reward mechanisms. The net effect of
neurotransmitter interaction at the mesolimbic brain region induces
"reward" when dopamine (DA) is released from the neuron at the nucleus
accumbens and interacts with a dopamine D2 receptor. "The reward
cascade" involves the release of serotonin, which in turn at the
hypothalmus stimulates enkephalin, which in turn inhibits GABA at the
substania nigra, which in turn fine tunes the amount of DA released at
the nucleus accumbens or "reward site." It is well known that under
normal conditions in the reward site DA works to maintain our normal
drives. In fact, DA has become to be known as the "pleasure molecule"
and/or the "antistress molecule." When DA is released into the
synapse, it stimulates a number a DA receptors (D1-D5) which results
in increased feelings of well-being and stress reduction. A consensus
of the literature suggests that when there is a dysfunction in the
brain reward cascade, which could be caused by certain genetic
variants (polygenic), especially in the DA system causing a
hypodopaminergic trait, the brain of that person requires a DA fix to
feel good. This trait leads to multiple drug-seeking behavior. This is
so because alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, nicotine, and glucose
all cause activation and neuronal release of brain DA, which could
heal the abnormal cravings. Certainly after ten years of study we
could say with confidence that carriers of the DAD2 receptor A1 allele
have compromised D2 receptors. Therefore lack of D2 receptors causes
individuals to have a high risk for multiple addictive, impulsive and
compulsive behavioral propensities, such as severe alcoholism,
cocaine, heroin, marijuana and nicotine use, glucose bingeing,
pathological gambling, sex addiction, ADHD, Tourette's Syndrome,
autism, chronic violence, posttraumatic stress disorder,
schizoid/avoidant cluster, conduct disorder and antisocial behavior.
In order to explain the breakdown of the reward cascade due to both
multiple genes and environmental stimuli (pleiotropism) and resultant
aberrant behaviors, Blum united this hypodopaminergic trait under the
rubric of a reward deficiency syndrome.
Publication Types:
* Review
* Review, academic
PMID: 11280926, UI: 21177392
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Sheng Li Xue Bao 2001 Oct;53(5):334-8
[Relationship between dopamine and iron contents in the brain of parkinsonian
rats].
[Article in Chinese]
Jiang H, Chen WF, Xie JX
Medical School of Qingdao University, Qingdao 266021.
[Medline record in process]
Using fast cyclic voltammetry (FCV), atomic absorption/flame emission
spectrophotometry and high performance liquid chromatography for
electrochemical detection, we studied the change in iron content in
the substantia nigra (SN) of 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) lesioned
Parkinsonian (PD) rats and the toxic effect of intranigral injection
of iron on DA neurons. The neuroprotective effect of desferrioxamine
mesylate was also observed. The results are as follows. (1) The iron
content in SN on the lesioned side of 6-OHDA-lesioned PD rats was
about three times as high as that in unstandard PD rats. (2) The iron
content in caudate putamen (CPu) on the lesioned side of PD rats was
not different from that on the unlesioned side. (3) DA release as well
as the content of DA and its metabolites were significantly decreased
on the lesioned side of PD rats. (4) In the rats pretreated with
intracerebroventricular desferrioxamine mesylate before 6-OHDA
injection, the release and content of DA on the lesioned side were not
significantly different from those on the unlesioned side. (5)
Intranigral injection of 40 micrograms FeCl3 resulted in a dramatic
reduction of both DA release and content in CPu. The above results
strongly suggest that 6-OHDA reduces the DA release from CPu, in which
iron plays an important role. Elevation of iron content in SN is one
of the mechanisms responsible for the reduction of DA content.
Desferrioxamine mesylate may exert a protective action on dopaminergic
neurons.
PMID: 11833414, UI: 21821751
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