Drug Studies: Alcohol most harmful and Pot Soda

From Discovery News

Alcohol More Harmful Than Heroin, Cocaine: Report

Alcohol is more dangerous than heroin, cocaine and other “hard” drugs, claims a new study published in The Lancet.

Researchers scored a variety of legal and illegal drugs on 16 criteria of harm, nine related to the harms the drug produces in the individual taking them and seven related to the harm to society. They studied substances such as alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, LSD and tobacco.

full article

Marijuana Soda Provides a High Without the Smoke

One Colorado soda company has developed a line of sodas that have an unusual ingredient: marijuana. Dixie Elixirs has made their drinks available to anyone with a prescription for medical marijuana.

The drinks come in eight different flavors, including pink lemonade, root beer and grape. But if the company really wants to get their drinks into the hands of marijuana lovers, they may want to start working on pizza and nachos flavors.  full article

 

Boys have penises and girls have vaginas

Scientists discover that men and women are kind of different sometimes.

New York Times June 30, 2010, 12:01 am

Phys Ed: What Exercise Science Doesn’t Know About Women

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Several years ago, Dr. David Rowlands, a senior lecturer with the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health at Massey University in New Zealand, set out to study the role of protein in recovery from hard exercise. He asked a group of male cyclists to ride intensely until their legs were aching and virtually all of their stored muscle fuel had been depleted. The cyclists then consumed bars and drinks that contained either mostly carbohydrates or both carbohydrates and protein. Then, over the next few days, they completed two sessions of hard intervals. One took place the following morning; the next, two days later.

Dr. Rowlands found that the cyclists showed little benefit during the first interval session. But during the second, the men who ingested protein had an overall performance gain of more than 4 percent, compared with the men who took only carbohydrates, “which is huge, in competitive terms,” Dr. Rowlands says. Other researchers’ earlier studies produced similar results. Protein seems to aid in the uptake of carbohydrates from the blood; muscles pack in more fuel after exercise if those calories are accompanied by protein. The protein is also thought to aid in the repair of muscle damage after hard exercise. Dr. Rowlands’s work, which was published in 2008, was right in line with conventional wisdom.

Not so his latest follow-up study, which was published online in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise and should raise eyebrows, especially lightly plucked ones. After his original work was completed, Dr. Rowlands says, “we received inquiries from female cyclists,” asking to be part of any further research. So, almost as an afterthought, Dr. Rowlands and his colleagues repeated the entire experiment with experienced female riders.

This time, though, the results were quite different.  read full story at NY Times.