Second-Hand Smoke Proven Harmless -- Again

EIB/RUSH: James Delingpole writing in I don't know what.  I did not print out.  But I've heard the name Delingpole, and I know he's got credibility.  The bottom line is that passive smoking, i.e., for those of you in Rio Linda, secondhand smoke, does not give you lung cancer. 

Now, this is something that I, El Rushbo, have known instinctively my whole life.  Ever since the anti-smoking zealots got geared up, they have tried to pass off this silly idea that secondhand smoke can cause cancer as well, and it's always been laughable. The tiniest bit of common sense will tell you it couldn't.  But there were enough people scared about it, that believed it, but there's a new report publicized by -- are you ready? -- the American Cancer Institute.  (gasping)  Which will come as no surprise to anyone with a shred of integrity, decency, or intelligence, who's looked into the origins of the environmental tobacco smoke crisis. 

"It was a decade ago that the British Medical Journal, published the results of a massive, long-term survey into the effects of second-hand tobacco smoke."  Do you remember we had that survey and it got buried?  We publicized it.  UN, any number, there was no danger whatsoever attached to secondhand smoke.  Might not like it, might make you uncomfortable.  It was not and did not and could not make you sick.  And it got buried. 

"Between 1959 and 1989 two American researchers named James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat surveyed no few than 118,094 Californians. Fierce anti-smoking campaigners themselves, they began the research because they wanted to prove once and for all what a pernicious, socially damaging habit smoking was. Their research was initiated by the American Cancer Society and supported by the anti-smoking Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

"At least it was at first. But then something rather embarrassing happened. Much to their surprise, Kabat and Enstrom discovered that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (i.e. passive smoking), no matter how intense or prolonged, creates no significantly increased risk of heart disease or lung cancer."

Now, again, it's important to remember that the two guys who started this research were fervent anti-smoking zealots, and they were out to prove that secondhand smoke killed.  It didn't take 'em long to find out that not only did it not kill anybody, it didn't matter.  It didn't make anybody sick.  It didn't matter.  And then similar conclusions were reached by the World Health Organization, which concluded in 1998 after a seven-year study that the correlation between secondhand smoking and lung cancer was not statistically significant. 

That got buried, but we have always kept it available.  We can bring it back to life any time we want at RushLimbaugh.com.  So now we've got three different studies proving that there is no cancer risk, no heart disease risk to secondhand smoke.  Now, you might be saying, "So what, Rush? If people still don't like it, what, are you grassroots to bring back smoking in public?"  No, no. I'm not that unrealistic. 

Again, the lesson here is that you were lied to by a bunch of leftist busybodies. You were lied to in order to be forced to live your life the way they wanted you to.  You were being denied freedom.  You were being lied to and manipulated into believing something that wasn't true so as to impact the way you and everybody else lives, and you were converted into a member of the army of the anti-smoking who would go out and harass anybody else who smoked.  You were lied to, to further the lies of a bunch of zealots. 

That's the important point here, and who are these people?  They're leftists.  I don't care whether you're Phil Robertson or whoever. They will try, they will do whatever, they will lie to you. But their attempt, their effort is to control the way you live and what you think.  Now there's medical news today. I kid you not.  "Apple-a-Day as Effective as Statins" for whatever statins do.  What are statins for, cholesterol? Yeah, an apple.  Medical research.

I got the news. It's a news story.  An apple a day is far more effective than whatever prescription medicine you're taking.  But apples don't come with prescriptions and doctors can't be paid to tell you to eat one.  Well, I guess they could.  But who's gonna do it?  And you can't eat apples 'cause Meryl Streep said they're putting Alar on 'em, which is killing our kids. It was a big story on 60 Minutes. 

This stuff, I don't know, it's a bugaboo with me, folks. Because the left is made up of busybodies, or worse. Do you realize how many people are going through life believing things that aren't true, and it's affecting their enjoyment of life? It's affecting the way they raise their kids. It's affecting the way they live themselves.  It's so unnecessary.  That's what bugs me about it. 

Gotta take a break.  Well, that's for another day. 

I was gonna talk about cigars and cigar smoking, but I'm not gonna make this personal.

Related:

• UK Telegraph: Passive Smoking - Another Of The Nanny State's Big Lies
• RushLimbaugh.com: EIB Excerpt: Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer. UK Telegraph 03.08.1998
• RushLimbaugh.com: In Flip, World Health Organization Claims Secondhand Smoke Kills - 11.29.12

Turning back time: ageing reversed in mice

Aging…No longer inevitable, for mice (Image: Design Pics Inc/Rex)

New Scientist: Imagine if we could turn back time. A team that has identified a new way in which cells age has also reversed the process in old mice whose bodies appear younger in several ways. The discovery has implications for understanding age-related diseases including cancers, neurodegenerative disorders and diabetes.

One way all mammalian cells produce energy is via aerobic respiration, in which large molecules are broken down into smaller ones, releasing energy in the process. This mainly occurs in the mitochondria – the "powerhouses" of cells. Mitochondria carry their own genomes, but some of the cellular components needed for respiration are produced partly by the nucleus, so the two must coordinate their activities.

As we age, mitochondrial function declines, which can lead to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. To investigate why this decline occurs, Ana Gomes at Harvard Medical School and her colleagues compared the levels of messenger RNA (mRNA) – molecules that convey genetic information around a cell – for the cellular components needed for respiration in the skeletal muscle of 6 and 22-month-old mice.

They found that the level of the mRNA in the nucleus did not change much between the young and old mice, whereas those from the mitochondria appeared to decline with age.

Similar changes were seen in mice that lacked a protein called SIRT1 – high levels of which are associated with calorie restriction and an increased lifespan. These mice also had higher levels of a protein produced by the nucleus called hypoxia inducible factor (HIF-1α).

What was going on? It appears that communication between the nucleus and the mitochondria depends on a cascade of events involving HIF-1α and SIRT1. As long as SIRT1 levels remain high and the two genomes communicate well, ageing is kept at bay. But another molecule called NAD+ keeps SIRT1 on the job; crucially, the amount of NAD+ present in the cell declines with age, though no one knows why, leading to a breakdown in communication.

Turning back time

The team wondered if this aspect of ageing could be reversed by increasing the amount of SIRT1 in the cells. To find out if that was possible, they injected 22-month-old mice twice daily for a week with nicotinamide mono nucleotide (NMN) – a molecule known to increase levels of NAD.

At the end of the week, markers of muscular atrophy and inflammation had dropped and the mice had even developed a different muscle type more common in younger mice. Together, these features were characteristic of 6-month-old mice.

"We found that modulating this pathway can improve mitochondrial function and age-associated pathologies in old mice, and therefore it gives a new pathway to target that can reverse some aspects of ageing," says Gomes.

"This paper clearly demonstrates that NAD+ production is a sort of 'Achilles' heel', [a lack of which] significantly contributes to ageing, and also that this problem can be ameliorated by boosting NAD+ production with key intermediates, such as NMN," says Shin-Ichiro Imai, at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.

Journal reference: Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.11.037