Eating rice may help prevent obesity, research suggests.
Experts found that people following a Japanese or Asian-style diet based on rice were less likely to be obese than those living in countries where rice consumption was low.
Researchers said low-carbohydrate diets — which limit rice — are a popular weight-loss strategy in developed countries but the effect of rice on obesity has been unclear.
They looked at rice consumption in terms of grams per day per person and calorie intake in 136 countries. They also looked at data on body mass index.
In the U.K., people were found to consume just 19 grams of rice a day, below dozens of other countries including Canada, Spain and the U.S.
The researchers calculated that even a modest increase in rice consumption of 50 grams per day per person could reduce the worldwide prevalence of obesity by 1 percent (from 650 million adults to 643.5 million).
Professor Tomoko Imai of Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto, who led the research, said: “The observed associations suggest that the obesity rate is low in countries that eat rice as a staple food. Therefore, a Japanese food or an Asian-food-style diet based on rice may help prevent obesity. Given the rising levels of obesity worldwide, eating more rice should be recommended to protect against obesity even in Western countries.”
Imai said rice was low fat, adding: “It’s possible that the fiber, nutrients and plant compounds found in whole grains may increase feelings of fullness and prevent overeating.”
The authors concluded: “The prevalence of obesity was significantly lower in the countries with higher rice supply even after controlling for lifestyle and socioeconomic indicators.”
Tam Fry, chairman of the U.K.’s National Obesity Forum, said: “We have known for centuries that Far Eastern populations tend to be slimmer than in the West because rice is a staple food, but few obesity specialists may have appreciated why.
“This novel research is the first to hypothesize that we could nail obesity by eating a modest amount more.”
The study was presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Glasgow.
China’s vaccine scandal is sparking protests and panic among parents, with the revelation two drugmakers sold poor-quality vaccines for infants reviving anxiety over the country’s ability to ensure safety in the world’s second-biggest health-care market.
Demonstrators gathered outside the National Health Commission in Beijing Monday, according to videos posted on Twitter, demanding tougher regulation of vaccine sales in China after Changsheng Bio-Technology Co., a drugmaker listed in Shenzhen, and state-owned vaccine maker Wuhan Institute of Biological Products Co. were found by a government probe to have made hundreds of thousands of low-quality vaccines. Changsheng was found to have also falsified production and inspection data.
Changsheng Life Sciences offices in Changchun, Jilin Province.
Photographer: VCG via Getty Images
The revelations have triggered a crisis of confidence among consumers that’s exploded on social media in China. It’s also sending parents to Hong Kong to seek vaccinations by foreign drug companies, dealing another setback for China’s $122 billion drug industry, which has been dogged with concerns over safety. The stocks of many Chinese drugmakers have plunged as investigations continue, wiping out the equivalent of about $22 billion in market value since the scandal broke.
The industry is still recovering from a 2016 scandal over expired vaccines being sold nationally. The reaction from investors and the public have some money managers recalling the tainted milk scandal a decade ago in which at least six babies died and hundreds of thousands of others were sickened after consuming locally made infant formula laced with the chemical melamine.
“The vaccine scandal could be more serious and have wider ripple effects than the tainted milk incident,” said Wang Chen, a Shanghai-based partner with Xufunds Investment Management Co. “As long as it concerns public health there’s no such thing as a small incident.”
The fallout in China’s pharmaceutical industry has spread beyond vaccine makers. Health-care companies in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 index have dropped about 9 percent since Changsheng announced in mid-July it was recalling its rabies vaccine, with none of the 20 stocks traded showing gains during the period.
Vaccine makers Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products Co. and Changchun High & New Technology Industries Inc. have slid at least 20 percent since July 16. Shares in those and other drugmakers dropped on Monday after the securities regulator said that companies found to have severe violations in areas including public health will be forced to delist.
Changsheng, which isn’t part of the CSI index, has declined for the past 10 sessions it has traded, tumbling 59 percent. Even Shanghai Hile Bio-Technology Co., which produces inoculations for swine, was hit, wiping out about $483 billion off its market value in the past six days.
Shares of Changsheng dropped 5 percent in early trading Tuesday, while the CSI 300 Health Care Index advanced as much as 1.3 percent.
Flocking to Hong Kong
The government said about 650,000 child vaccines didn’t meet standards. That means the immunizations may not offer the children who received them protection from deadly diseases: whooping cough, tetanus and diphtheria. The news has triggered a surge for children’s inoculations in Hong Kong from mainland parents, according to Henry Yeung Chiu-fat, a doctor who’s president of the Hong Kong Doctors Union.
A private clinic that performs vaccinations in Hong Kong.
Photographer: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images
Hong Kong Vaccination Station, a private clinic in Kowloon’s Tsim Sha Tsui, said appointments for some child immunizations are fully booked in July and August because of a surge in demand. Manna Wang, an insurance agent in Shenzhen, booked 20 vaccination appointments for clients last week, compared to an occasional request before.
Olivia Zhang, a Beijing mother of two, was among those who sought shots in Hong Kong for her children. She made an October appointment for her children to get jabs for meningococcal immunization in Hong Kong. Her four-year-old daughter received the Changsheng-produced vaccine in April.
“I will not trust the regulator nor Chinese medicines anymore,” said Zhang. “No words can be used to describe my anger when I first read the scandal in news. The safety of children should be society’s bottom line.”
Scrutiny on Drugmakers
Insurance agents, including ones from industry giants AIA Group Ltd. and Prudential Plc, are advertising services on WeChat and Weibo social media platforms to help mainland families make appointments at private clinics in Hong Kong. AIA and Prudential representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Production of Changsheng’s infant vaccine that was the subject of last year’s inspection has been suspended, while Wuhan Institute has resumed production after correcting problems, according to Xinhua’s report. Changsheng has apologized for the lapses. Wuhan Institute didn’t respond to a request for a comment.
As for investors, many are bracing for authorities to scrutinize some sectors of the pharmaceutical industry. The public outcry has been so pronounced that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping have stepped in to vow action. The Chinese government said it will continue investigating the country’s $4.4 billion vaccine industry.
Authorities are now under pressure to toughen regulations to win public trust, said Sun Jianbo, president of China Vision Capital Management in Beijing.
“For health care companies, I expect them to step up quality control, which could lead to slower earnings growth and weaker profitability,” he said. “The impact on the sector’s shares will be long term.”
The semi-submersible Ocean Farm 1 off the coast of Norway can hold 1.5 million fish. July 30, 2018
By
Adam Popescu
Towing the Ocean Farm 1 into the Norwegian Sea.
SOURCE: SALMAR
Three miles off Norway’s rugged coast, 1.5 million salmon swim in a 220-foot-high, football-field-long mass of floating mesh-wire frames and nets. This is Ocean Farm 1, the world’s first deep-sea aquaculture project, designed by leading salmon farmer SalMar ASA. The company paid China Shipbuilding Industry Corp. $300 million upfront for six facilities that offer more space than conventional shoreline farms (large nets in sheltered waters) while diffusing fish waste, allowing them to be packed in tighter.
Ocean Farm 1
SOURCE: SALMAR
How It Works
Oxygen sensors and high-definition cameras monitor the salmon for, among other things, growth and signs of illness. Midway through Ocean Farm 1’s yearlong trial run, SalMar says it’s seen strong growth and low mortality rates.
A SalMar employee cleaning the distribution center.
SOURCE: SALMAR
Sixteen movable, submerged valves disperse food at set times and allow fish to live at depths of up to 180 feet, rather than clustering them near the surface, as in other farms.
Next Steps
SalMar plans to harvest the farm’s first generation of salmon in the second half of the year and says that if the development phase is successful, it’ll be possible to establish fish farming anywhere in the open sea. The company says OF1 can withstand devastating waves, on the order of 50 feet.
One drawback: Packing so many fish so closely together heightens the risk of widespread disease if even a few get sick. It also forces the salmon to stay in much deeper water with less oxygen than they’re used to, which limits their growth, according to Tim Dempster, a marine ecologist and professor of biosciences at the University of Melbourne. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-30/this-300-million-deepwater-platform-houses-1-5-million-salmon
Viagra History From Sex Icon to Generic Drug On Monday, a generic drug company is going to begin selling sildenafil in the U.S., and to tell you the truth, I’m surprised the news hasn’t gotten more attention.
By
Joe Nocera
18
Marketing pitch.
Source: Bloomberg
You see, is the compound that goes by the brand name Viagra. Introduced by Pfizer Inc. in March 1998, Viagra has generated over $17 billion in the U.S. alone. Although the Viagra patent doesn’t expire until 2020, Pfizer agreed about four years ago to allow Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. to sell a generic version starting in December 2017, settling a legal battle between the two companies. 1
But Viagra’s patent history is hardly the point, is it?
Viagra was the first drug to allow impotent men to maintain erections. That made it the first true “lifestyle” drug and showed the pharmaceutical industry that there was money to be made developing drugs that improved people's lives without curing disease or alleviating pain. Its advertising — happy couples enjoying life thanks to Viagra (with the drug’s side effects read hastily as music swells) — was a precursor to the direct-to-consumer pharma advertising that now assaults us daily.
Although its critics have often decried Viagra as representing a degradation of American life — a descent into “a quick-fix pill culture," as one author put it 2 — there's no denying that it has allowed millions of men to reclaim their sex lives. And thanks in part to the way Viagra and its eventual competitors, Cialis and Levitra, have been marketed, it’s also been used by millions of men with little or no need for it at all.
The 1990s, when Viagra was first brought to market, was the era of the pharmaceutical blockbuster, defined as drugs that generated $1 billion or more a year in revenue. At the time, Pfizer had Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft in its portfolio. Sildenafil was expected to join them — as an angina medication. Alas, trials showed that the compound didn’t do much for angina, 3 but it had a remarkable side effect: With very little arousal, men got sustained erections.
This did not cause Pfizer’s top executives to jump for joy. In that more sedate age, they worried about being accused of selling a recreational drug. They feared that the company’s reputation would be besmirched by manufacturing a sex aid. They even toyed with the idea of spinning Viagra off into a separate company, as a way to keep its new drug at arm’s length.
But after conducting marketing surveys and focus groups, Pfizer became convinced that Viagra was destined to become another blockbuster. (Indeed it was: It hit the $1 billion mark in its first full year 4 on the market.) So instead of distancing itself from its new drug, Pfizer went all in, cooperating with stories it knew would be more salacious than not.
If creating a lifestyle drug was the first innovation, selling one was the second. Traditionally, companies sold drugs by having salespeople persuade doctors to prescribe them. But that wouldn’t work for Viagra; doctors were as reluctant to ask patients about their sex lives as anyone else. The only way doctors were going to prescribe Viagra in large quantities was if patients asked for it.
Luckily for Pfizer, the year before Viagra was launched, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed to allow drug companies to advertise on television. No company used this new form of advertising as shrewdly as Pfizer. Its first ads featured Bob Dole, then a 75-year-old former Kansas senator and war hero who had run for president in 1996. Dole’s task was to show that he wasn’t embarrassed to discuss his own impotence, the result of prostate cancer, and that others shouldn’t be either.
He also popularized the phrase “erectile dysfunction,” a term that suggests that with the right medication, what is dysfunctional can become functional. And he encouraged men to talk to their doctors about the condition. 5 Many doctors who remember those days say that men would bring up Viagra sheepishly, just as the visit was wrapping up. Still, they asked. According to one survey, 33 percent of the men who saw a Viagra ad in those early years brought it up with their doctor.
It wasn’t long before Dole’s work was done, and he was replaced by a series of sports stars like Pele, the soccer great, and the baseball slugger Rafael Palmeiro. They sent the message that your masculinity would not be besmirched if you needed a drug to get an erection — and, just as important, that you didn't have to be part of Dole’s World War II generation to benefit.
In 2003, Eli Lilly & Co. introduced its own erectile-dysfunction drug, Cialis, and Bayer Pharmaceuticals came out with Levitra. That year, Viagra hit $1.9 billion in revenue. Then sales dropped the next three years, as Cialis and Levitra stole away market share. For all three companies, but especially for Pfizer, the game became expanding the market by getting the drug to men for whom impotence wasn't a major problem.
And so, little by little, certain self-imposed cautions were swept away. Doctors talking about erectile dysfunction gave way to happy couples and swelling music, which gave way to, well, “mastery.”
At least that’s how Jennifer Zimmerman, the chief global strategy officer at McGarryBowen, described her advertising agency’s approach when it had the Viagra account between 2009 and 2013.
“When we took a look at the business,” she told me, “we saw that there was a fundamental issue with people looking at this as dysfunction. We thought you should look at it through the lens of mastery. Either talk about the one thing that isn’t working so well, or acknowledge all the things that are working well as a point of contrast.”
When the agency pitched the business to Pfizer it used the tagline: “This is the age of man. This is the age of Viagra.”
Today, the market has indeed expanded; taken together, Viagra, Cialis and Levitra generate more than $5 billion a year. The market will expand even more once generic Viagra is available. Cialis, too, is going off patent soon, and Lilly is expected to try to get it approved as an over-the-counter drug.
Men with medical problems take erectile dysfunction drugs, 6 but so do college students on spring break who want to make sure their alcohol intake doesn’t impair their ability to have sex. No one tries to disguise the fact that expanding the market has turned Viagra into a recreational drug, the very thing Pfizer once feared.
A few years ago, when I was thinking of writing a book about Viagra, I interviewed a few old Pfizer hands, people who had been present at the creation. They exhibited great pride in having helped birth Viagra, but they were also touchy whenever I said anything that suggested that sildenafil was anything other than a medical breakthrough. But they seem to be the only ones who still care.
That includes Pfizer itself. In recent years, its ads have thrown caution to the wind. One shows a young woman laying stomach-down on a bed, her bare feet swinging in the air as she gives a come-hither look. Another shows a woman in a football jersey sitting on a hotel bed tossing a football in the air. The ad ends with her walking to a big window, and opening the shade in a manner so suggestive you can’t possibly miss its meaning.
Over the years, sex has gone from being a largely private matter to something that is constantly in our faces. There are many reasons for the transformation, from the social upheavals of the 1960s to the introduction of the birth-control pill to the changing conception of aging. Somewhere in the march of progress, if that's what it is, Viagra and its marketers played a role.
Then again, maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing. I once asked a psychiatrist of my acquaintance why he prescribed Viagra and why he thought the drug was so popular.
“Because it works,” he said.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
1.Teva will pay Pfizer a royalty on its Viagra sales until April 2020, when other generic manufacturers will also be able to sell the compound.
2. “The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America,” by Meika Loe
3. Years later, sildenafil was approved for heart problems as well. It is especially useful for lowering elevated pulmonary pressures that prevent blood from getting to the lungs of newborn babies.
4. It also surpassed Lipitor for the highest number of prescriptions in its first week in pharmacies.
5. Dole once told me that he agreed to do the ads on the condition that he didn’t have to mention Viagra by name. “I don’t know why I insisted on that,” he said. “Seems kind of silly now.”
6. One man who could have really used Viagra was Frank Sinatra. By the early 1980s, he was impotent, which he tried to fix with the only available remedy at the time, penile implant surgery. But as James Kaplan recounts in “Sinatra: The Chairman,” the second volume of his magisterial biography, the implant failed “because Frank tried to use it too soon.” When Kitty Kelly published her salacious biography of Sinatra in 1986, suggesting he had had an affair with Nancy Reagan, his wife Barbara was unworried, knowing that her husband was physically incapable of having an affair.
