Why are they so irritated by water?

Six years ago, scientists trashed the “eight glasses of water a day” dictum, a standard that, as far as anyone can tell, magically appeared from nowhere.

Now, there’s no reason to lug around water bottles if you don’t want to, because there’s not much evidence showing that drinking “lots” of water will improve our health, according to the editorial “Just Add Water” by University of Pennsylvania researchers in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

That means excessively hydrating won’t necessarily clear toxins from your system, keep organs healthy, curb hunger pains, reduce headaches and improve your skin tone, said authors Dan Negoianu and Stanley Goldfarb of Penn’s Renal, Electrolyte and Hypertension Division.

“Our purpose was to relieve people of the burden that they have to drink extra water in order to be healthy,” co-author Stanley Goldfarb told me. “There’s no evidence of that.”

But while the researchers say they wish they could “demolish all the urban myths found on the Internet regarding the benefits of supplemental water ingestion,”they never tell us what “excess” water consumption is. How much is too much?

And what they ultimately concede after reviewing the literature is that there’s not enough evidence for either side: No clear data exists for a lack of benefit, either.

In the review, Goldfarb and Negoianu looked at what they consider to be “four major myths” of extra water drinking: that it helps excrete toxins, improves skin tone, reduces appetite and helps cure headaches. Here’s a brief look at what they found.

* Excrete toxins: The human body is made up of 60 percent water, so a 200-pound person consists of 120 pounds of water or 15 gallons, said Goldfarb. He contends that adding a cup of water to 15 gallons wouldn’t make much of an impact.

“In fact, drinking a lot of water very quickly tends to lower blood flow to the kidney,” Goldfarb said. “That actually impairs its ability to excrete toxins,”  he said.

But they also found that several studies reveal that drinking water does have an impact on clearing various substances by the kidney, including sodium and urea. These studies, however, do not indicate any sort of clinical benefit that might result.

* Skin tone: Goldfarb maintains that whenever you ingest water, it’s distributed equally throughout the body; there’s no reason the skin would get preferential treatment. Plus we have so much skin that the possibility that a few ounces would have an effect seems unlikely and there’s no evidence that this has been carefully studied.
* Reduces appetite: Studies are inconclusive but there is a possibility that if you drink water before you eat, it would stay in the stomach–a small volume area–and suppress your appetite. But drinking water with meals didn’t seem to have the same effect, and no one has looked at the possibility whether it leads to weight loss, Goldfarb said.

On the other hand, studies have shown that drinking diet soft drinks can lead to obesity. So drinking water instead of diet soda might confer health benefits.

* Headaches: Dehydration can make you feel ill and give you non-specific headaches, but that’s different from stress and tension headaches, Goldfarb said. Only one small trial (15 migraine sufferers) has addressed the question, and the researchers found participants who increased their water intake experienced fewer headaches than those who did not. To me, that sure sounded like evidence of a health benefit. But Goldfarb called the results “not statistically significant.”

When I asked Doctor Alexa Fleckenstein, author of “Health20–Tapping into the Health Power of Water” what she thought of the editorial, she agreed that water is not a cure-all.

“And I definitely abhor seeing people everywhere running around with a glass or a bottle in their hands - you never need water that urgently, at least not if you are not hiking,” she told me. “Even in aerobics class drinking can wait until you are done.”

But Fleckenstein is a firm believer in water’s healing properties and tells people to drink seven glass per day.

“Not because I have a study but precisely because there is NO study giving the exact amount - and seven is a sacred number,” she said.

Moreover, we all require different amounts of water because of “different climates, different sizes, different exertion, different clothing (to name a few of the parameters),” she said.

(The average intake is about a quart a day, and most experts say to drink when you’re thirsty.)

Fleckenstein says that “common sense and observations in daily life show that skin turgor is better when one drinks enough: I can always tell when my husband forgot to drink - he looks 10 years older.”

She adds anecdotally:

“I found out that my ear problems during flights are much improved if I keep solidly hydrated. Other than that, the authors are right: We have no studies. Wish we had!”

[Source: : featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com]

By ANDREW DALTON, Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES - Just days after her release on parole, a former 1970s radical was headed back to prison Saturday to serve at least one more year after corrections officials said a miscalculation resulted in her early release.

Criticism over the early release from prison Monday of Sara Jane Olson, who lived as a fugitive for years in Minnesota, spurred a review of her sentence and the timing of her parole, Scott Kernan, the chief deputy secretary for the California Department of Corrections, said at a news conference. The review revealed that a 2004 miscalculation led to the former Symbionese Liberation Army member being released a year too early, he said.

“The department is sensitive to the impact such an error has had on all involved in this case and sincerely regrets the mistake,” Kernan said.

He said the review was ordered “after many concerns raised in the media.” The union that represents Los Angeles police officers and the son of a woman killed in a decades-old botched robbery at a bank near Sacramento opposed Olson’s release.

Olson, 61, was detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday night and told her right to leave the state had been rescinded. She was sent to stay with family in Palmdale, where authorities kept watch outside the house overnight, and was arrested Saturday and imprisoned in Corona, about 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles, Kernan said.

She will be returned to the same prison in central California that she walked out of Monday and will not be eligible for release until March 17, 2009, he said.

Olson’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, called her client’s return to custody “ridiculous” and said prison officials caved in to outside influences.

“As far as we’re concerned they’re bowing to political pressure and they are wrong,” Holley said. “It’s like they make up all new rules when it comes to her. It’s like we are in some kind of fascist state.”

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents more than 9,000 Los Angeles police officers, said it was relieved that Olson had been returned to prison, but was “far from satisfied.”

“Parole shouldn’t even be an option for terrorists who are convicted of murdering innocent bystanders and attempting to murder police officers,” said the group’s president Tim Sands. “Anyone who tries to kill police officers should get significant jail time and serve their full sentence.”

Olson, who was formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was charged in 1975 with attempting to bomb police cars with the SLA, a group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. But Olson vanished soon after she was charged and reinvented herself as a housewife — changing her name to Sara Jane Olson, marrying a doctor and becoming a mother of three in St. Paul, Minn. She was arrested in 1999 after FBI agents acted on a tip from TV’s “America’s Most Wanted.”

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty to the attempted bombings. She pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento. After several adjustments, Olson’s sentences, to be served consecutively, included 12 years for the attempted bombings and two years for the bank slaying, said Seth Unger, a Department of Corrections spokesman.

The clerical error that resulted in her release came from a failure to properly factor the Sacramento sentence into her parole calculations, Kernan said.

“This is an extremely unusual situation,” said the department’s general counsel, Alberto Roldan.

Roldan said the long period between Olson’s crimes and her sentencing made the calculations especially difficult.

Asked repeatedly by reporters at the news conference why the thorough review wasn’t done until after Olson was released, Roldan said parole calculations are done when a person comes into prison rather than when they are released, and a “triggering event” such as a court motion is required to prompt such a review.

He said Olson’s sentence had been reviewed several times, and there was no special reason to review her case at the time she was freed. But he said after Olson’s release, a reporter pointed out to his department that the Sacramento district attorney’s office had expressed concerns about the calculations.

The SLA started in 1973 when no more than a dozen white, college-educated children from middle-class families adopted a seven-headed snake as their symbol and an ex-convict as their leader. Their slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

Besides kidnapping Hearst, the group claimed responsibility for the murder of a school superintendent and was involved in an armed bank robbery and other violent activities. Eventually those activities caught up with the group’s members, including Olson, who was charged in the attempted bombings.

___

AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch contributed to this report.

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Employers slashed 63,000 jobs in February, the most in five years and the starkest sign yet that the country is heading dangerously toward recession or is in one already.
 
The Labor Department’s report, released Friday, also indicated that the nation’s unemployment rate dipped from 4.9 percent in January to 4.8 percent last month as hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps discouraged by their prospects — left the civilian labor force.

Job losses were widespread, with hefty cuts coming from construction, manufacturing, retailing, financial services and a variety of professional and business services. Those losses swamped gains elsewhere, including education and health care, leisure and hospitality and the government.

The latest snapshot of the nation’s employment climate underscored the heavy toll of the housing and credit crises on companies, jobseekers and the overall economy.

To provide relief to persistent credit problems, the Federal Reserve announced Friday that it will increase the amount of loans it plans to make available to banks this month to $100 billion.

It has already provided a total of $160 billion in short-term loans to cash-strapped banks since the auctions began in December. Another Fed step will involve making $100 billion available to a broad range of financial players through a series of separate transactions.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrials were down by nearly 90 points in early afternoon trading as the Fed’s actions helped to blunt worry about the eroding jobs situation.

The Labor report also showed that January’s job losses were worse than the government first reported. Employers cut 22,000 jobs, versus 17,000.

It was the first monthly back-to-back job losses since May and June 2003, when the job market was still struggling to recover from the blows of the 2001 recession.

The health of the nation’s job market is critical in shaping how the overall economy fares. If companies continue to reduce hiring, that will spell more trouble.

“It certainly solidifies the notion that the economy has fallen into a recession,” said Ken Mayland, economist at ClearView Economics.

Friday’s report was much weaker than economists were expecting. They had been forecasting employers to boost payrolls by around 25,000. However, they were also expecting the jobless rate to edge up to 5 percent. The reason why the jobless rate went down, rather than up, is because so many people stopped looking for work and left the labor force.

President Bush’s top economic adviser, Edward Lazear, acknowledged Friday that it’s possible the economy shrank in the current January-to-March quarter. A growing number of economists think that will be the case, however, Lazear’s comment was the most pessimistic assessment heard out of the White House. He would not discuss whether the White House is predicting the economy will actually fall into a recession. Some economists think it already has.

“We are disappointed any time you see a number showing lost jobs,” Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told The Associated Press. “This is consistent with a slowdown,” he said. Still, he was hopeful that the recently enacted economic stimulus package forged by the White House and Congress will help bolster the economy in the second half of this year.

Workers with jobs, however, saw modest wage gains.

Average hourly earnings for jobholders rose to $17.80 in February, a 0.3 percent increase from the previous month. That was on target with economists’ forecasts. Over the last 12 months, wages were up 3.7 percent. With high energy and food prices, though, workers may feel squeezed and feel like their paychecks aren’t stretching that far.

With the economy losing momentum, fears have grown that the country in on the brink of its first recession since 2001.

Economic growth slowed to a near standstill of just a 0.6 percent pace in the final quarter of last year. Many economists predict growth in the January-to-March quarter will be worse — around a 0.4 percent pace. Some believe the economy is shrinking now.

Spreading fallout from the housing and credit debacles are the main factors behind the economic slowdown. People and businesses alike are feeling the strains and have turned cautious. Adding to the stresses on pocketbooks, budgets and the economy: skyrocketing energy prices. Oil prices have set a string of record highs in recent days. Gasoline prices have marched higher, too.

To help shore up the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke signaled last week that the central bank is prepared to lower interest rates again. Economists predict another cut on March 18, the Fed’s next meeting. The Fed, which has been slicing the rate since September, recently turned more forceful. It slashed the rate by 1.25 percentage points in the course of just eight days in January — the biggest one-month reduction in a quarter century.

The White House and Congress, meanwhile, speedily enacted an economic relief package, including tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses. That — along with the Fed’s rate cuts — should help give a lift to the economy in the second half of this year, says Bernanke.

Still, unemployment is expected to move higher this year. The Federal Reserve predict the jobless rate will rise to as high as 5.3 percent in 2008. Last year, the unemployment rate averaged 4.6 percent.

All the economy’s troubles are putting people in a gloomy mood.

According to the RBC Cash Index, confidence sank to a mark of 33.1 in early March, the worst reading since the index began in 2002.

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By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A senior Justice Department official says laws and other limits enacted since three terrorism suspects were waterboarded has eliminated the technique from what is now