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Bill Briggs CNBC.com Oct. 24, 2013

For men of a certain age who feel lethargic, lumpy and maybe a tad limp, it is — they are convinced — T time.

In record numbers, American guys are turning to testosterone boosters to repair their pep, revive their sex drive, even erase their erectile issues. Annual sales of the prescription hormone have more than doubled since 2008, according to IMS Health, Inc., reaching $1.6 billion last year, en route to $5 billion by 2017, some analysts predict. And that doesn’t include testosterone supplements purchased over the counter or via the mail.

“We are seeing a very dramatic increase,” in men taking testosterone supplements and drugs, said Dr. Edmund Sabanegh, chair of the urology department at the Cleveland Clinic.

But the quick medical fix many seek for nagging male ills that come as naturally as receding hairlines also can bring on side effects including blood clots and infertility.

After age 30, testosterone levels dip about 1 percent each year. As internal stores of that hormone decline, men can experience a loss of muscle mass and strength, depression, lethargy and a waning interest in sex.

“The symptoms of low testosterone are kind of what many of us feel when we get older: maybe a little decrease in energy, a little erectile problem, a little drop in libido,” Sabanegh said. “Often, those are normal” for men in their 40s, 50s or older.

“And when that’s the situation, we just talk about making lifestyle changes, taking a few pounds off, getting on a regular exercise program, improving their diets,” Sabanegh added. “Those sorts of things can, in many patients, give them the kind of effect they were hoping for in the testosterone.”

For Sabanegh to place a patient on testosterone therapy, he said the man must exhibit the saggy-draggy clinical symptoms of low testosterone. Then, a lab test must confirm that the patient’s hormone level has slumped to an abnormal number. Although that line varies by individual, typically Low T means the count is less than 300 nanograms per deciliter.

While supplements can boost a man’s energy and get his sexual enthusiasm back to normal, the problem is many men’s testosterone use isn’t monitored by a physician. Sabanegh has treated patients who show up suffering the side effects from hormone dosing. “On occasion,” he said, “…I have seen acne and elevated red blood cell counts” – which can cause blood clots. Simply stopping the medication will end those side effects.

One testosterone user who has not suffered any such symptoms is Dan Nobel, 61, a nutrition store owner in St. Louis. In fact, the only changes he has noticed, he said, are a happier lifestyle and strength improvements.

A competitive bodybuilder, Nobel routinely scrutinizes his meals and his weight, 165 pounds. Last year, he decided to try his first over-the-counter testosterone supplement, 2TX, simply because he had reached age 60. (He’s never had his testosterone count checked by a physician, he said.)

“At the gym, when I did a squat (press) or a bench press, I went up 10 pounds. My libido seemed better too. And that was just after like two days of being on it,” Nobel said. “I thought, wow, this does seem to make a difference.”

Recently, at a local bodybuilding competition, Nobel won his division – men aged 60 to 69.

Meanwhile, anti-aging clinics catering to men (and women) in that same age bracket have sprung up across the nation, with many promoting testosterone drugs to their male clients.

At Vitality Logix, a wellness center specializing in aging in New York City, founder Joshua Gizersky said the key to “successful therapy” is diagnosing the reason testosterone is low “and judiciously replacing (it) to levels consistent with a 25-year-old male.”

“Guys in their early 20s are thought to have some of the highest testosterone levels in their lifetime and commonly surpass (a count of) 800,” said Gizersky, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Consequently, “this age is chosen as the ideal target, especially when using testosterone for age-management reasons in older men.”

That can mean prescribing enough extra testosterone to propel a man’s count from about 250 to twice or as much as four times that amount, Gizersky said.

The range for “normal” testosterone in a healthy male is 300 to 1,200 nanograms per deciliter, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In addition, users of oral (typically, over-the-counter) testosterone supplements — like the one Nobel has taken — should be wary, both doctors warned. Some over-the-counter forms of testosterone taken orally are known to cause liver damage when the supplements are metabolized, Sabanegh said.

“Most of the people working at GNCs and Vitamin Shoppes have very little education on this subject matter,” Gizersky said. “Many are high school kids or college students without any concept of what they are selling and certainly no knowledge of the human physiology involved, nor the production methods used in these products — which makes for a very dangerous situation.”

The World’s First Hamburger Made From Lab-Grown Meat Has Just Been Served

The Economist Magazine Aug 10th 2013

AS FREEBIES go, it was a disappointment. Of the hundred-odd representatives of the world’s media who crammed into a television studio in London on August 5th, none got so much as a bite of the food on offer. What they did get, though, was a taste of what may prove to be the future of eating. The meal they gathered to witness other people digest consisted of the world’s first hamburger made of meat grown from scratch in a laboratory.

What the 140-gram patty lacked in heft it made up for in price. At more than $330,000, a tab partly picked up by Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, it must rank among the most expensive dishes in history. After sizzling in a pan for a few minutes under the watchful eye of a chef, the burger was served to two preselected tasters—a nutrition scientist and a food writer. Their verdict, “like meat” but “not that juicy”, did not perturb Mark Post of Maastricht University, who grew the beef. In fact, Dr Post, who also savored some of his creation (and is pictured holding it), had every reason to call it “a good start”.

Besides powdered egg and breadcrumbs (for binding) and beetroot juice and saffron (to enhance color), the patty was composed entirely of cultured muscle cells. To make it, Dr Post began with stem cells taken from two live cows (a Blanc Bleu Belge and a Blonde d’Aquitaine). He multiplied these cells a trillion fold and then merged them into myotubes (in essence, artificial muscle fibers), each less than 3mm long. This done, he wrapped the myotubes around hubs of agarose, a gel-like polymer extracted from seaweed, and fed them a diet of amino acids, sugars and fats (all derived from plants) to make them big and strong.

Muscle cells’ natural tendency to contract and relax meant that the myotubes bulked themselves up into rings of muscle tissue through continual movement. When each ring had grown sufficiently (this took three months, which is, as Dr. Post points out, “faster than a cow”), he cut it free to create a strand. He used 20,000 of these strands to make the historic burger.

The result was a far cry from a Porterhouse or a fillet steak. Cultivating something like that would mean growing the cells into big three-dimensional structures—which would in turn entail delivering nutrients deep inside the tissue. To do so would require blood vessels or some artificial equivalent. A real steak would also contain fat cells, the absence of which explained the lack of juiciness. Such cells are harder to culture than muscle. Dr. Post and his team are working on both these points.

Carnivores should cheer. The world’s appetite for meat is forecast to rise by 70% by 2050. Nearly a third of the world’s ice-free land is already used to raise livestock or grow fodder for these animals. Without a radical technological shift the new demand will be hard to satisfy. Vegetarians, too, have reason to egg Dr. Post on. A single sample of stem cells could, he reckons, yield 20,000 tons of “cultured beef”. This is enough to make 175m quarter-pounders, a number that would require 440,000 cattle to be slaughtered.

In addition, animal husbandry is responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, since cattle produce prodigious quantities of methane—a gas whose warming potential is 20 times that of carbon dioxide’s over the course of a century. Growing meat in factories would help reduce these emissions. And if home-based meat kits eventually became available, it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase “hand-reared”.

Standing Orders: Real Science Lies Behind the Fad for Standing Up at Work

The Economist Magazine – Science and Technology – Aug 10th 2013

WINSTON CHURCHILL knew it. Ernest Hemingway knew it. Leonardo da Vinci knew it. Every trendy office from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia now knows it too: there is virtue in working standing up. And not merely standing. The trendiest offices of all have treadmill desks, which encourage people to walk while working. It sounds like a fad. But it does have a basis in science.

Sloth is rampant in the rich world. A typical car-driving, television-watching cubicle slave would have to walk an extra 19km a day to match the physical-activity levels of the few remaining people who still live as hunter-gatherers. Though all organisms tend to conserve energy when possible, evidence is building up that doing it to the extent most Westerners do is bad for you—so bad that it can kill you.

That, by itself, may not surprise. Health ministries have been nagging people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that prolonged periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like jogging or pounding treadmills in the gym. What you need as well, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in the Lancet found that bus conductors, who spend their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spend their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in the effects of low-intensity activity—like walking and standing—waned.

Over the past few years, however, interest has waxed again. A series of epidemiological studies, none big enough to be probative, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people, in 2012 and concluded that those individuals who are least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who are most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most ambulatory. Crucially, all this seemed independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

Correlation is not, of course, causation. But there is other evidence suggesting inactivity really is to blame for these problems. One exhibit is the finding that sitting down and attending to a task—anything from watching television to playing video games to reading—serves to increase the amount of calories people eat without increasing the quantity that they burn. Why that should be is unclear—as is whether low-level exercise like standing would deal with the snacking.

A different set of studies suggests that simple inactivity by itself—without any distractions like TV or reading—causes harm by altering the metabolism. One experiment, in which rats were immobilized for a day (not easy; the researchers had to suspend the animals’ hind legs to keep them still) found big falls in the amount of fats called triglycerides taken up by their skeletal muscles. This meant the triglycerides were available to cause trouble elsewhere. The rats’ levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) fell dramatically as well. HDL is a way of packaging cholesterol, and low levels of it promote heart disease. Other studies have shown the activity of lipoprotein lipase—an enzyme that regulates levels of triglycerides and HDL—drops sharply after just a few hours of inactivity, and that sloth is accompanied by changes in the activity levels of over 100 genes.

Papers which focus on people rather than laboratory animals have found similar effects. Happily, this research also suggests the changes can be reversed by small amounts of fairly relaxed activity. A study published last year by Dr Dunstan found that breaking up prolonged periods of sitting with two minutes of walking every 20 minutes made a big difference. After feeding his volunteers a sugary meal, he discovered that people who had been walking in this way had blood-glucose levels almost 30% lower than those of people who had remained seated.

For some scientists, this combination of epidemiology, animal experiments and human trials suggests that light-to-moderate exercise—standing up, walking around and the like—is something qualitatively different from an energetic, high-intensity workout. But not everyone is convinced. Many of the human studies are small-scale. (Dr. Dunstan’s paper, for example, involved just 19 participants.) And not every study that has gone looking for the ill effects of inactivity has found them.

Still, the potential size of the problem means not everyone is prepared to wait for definitive proof. Sellers of standing desks are, naturally, jumping on the latest research findings to advertise their wares. And it is surely only a matter of time before the first law suit from a sickly cubicle slave reaches court.