Topic: Colorado

Brownsville weather service warns of watersprout forming in hurricane Alex

The national weather service in Brownsville issued a statement saying there is a watersprout 32 Miles east of South Padre Island. The Thunderstorm is heading towards South Padre Island.


THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN BROWNSVILLE HAS ISSUED A

* SPECIAL MARINE WARNING FOR...
  LAGUNA MADRE FROM THE PORT OF BROWNSVILLE TO THE ARROYO COLORADO.
  WATERS FROM PORT MANSFIELD TX TO THE RIO GRANDE RIVER FROM 20 TO 60
  NM.
  COASTAL WATERS FROM PORT MANSFIELD TX TO THE RIO GRANDE RIVER OUT
  20 NM.

* UNTIL 130 PM CDT

* AT 1244 PM CDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A
  THUNDERSTORM...CONTAINING A WATERSPOUT...32 MILES EAST OF SOUTH
  PADRE ISLAND...MOVING WEST AT 55 KNOTS.

* THE THUNDERSTORM WILL BE NEAR...
  SOUTH PADRE ISLAND BY 115 PM CDT.
  LAGUNA VISTA BY 125 PM CDT.

"We are change" rips up Al Gore's book in his face, calls him traitor

At a recent book signing the group called "We are change" from Colorado ripped up Al Gore's new book. They reason that what Al Gore said he was going to do and what he is now doing are two different things. They also say Al Gore will cause people all over the world to pay pollution tax which is far from his apparent "stop pollution" agenda.

Al Gore's agenda is starting to become more open and revealed by the day.

In this video (if you cant watch it) "We are change" Colorado rips up Al Gore's book and infiltrates his book signing, the also explain why the did it.

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Trail leading to Pneumonic plague in Ukraine involved "chemtrails" or mysterious spray, fears of vaccine

In 2002 the US military was acused of “conducting a chemical weapons research and development program in violation of international arms control law” Whereby they replied

“JNLWD's [US Department of Defense's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate] secret program is not focusing on highly lethal agents such as VX or sarin. Rather, the emphasis is on "non-lethal" chemical weapons that incapacitate. JNLWD's science advisors define "non-lethal" as resulting in death or permanent injury in 1 in 100 victims.(1) JNLWD's Research Director told a US military magazine "We need something besides tear gas, like calmatives, anesthetic agents, that would put people to sleep or in a good mood." These weapons are intended for use against "potentially hostile civilians", in anti-terrorism operations, counterinsurgency, and other military operations.

The major focus of JNLWD's operation is on the use of drugs as weapons, particularly so-called "calmatives", a military term for mind-altering or sleep inducing chemical weapons.”

March 26 it was reported that Vaccine side effects scare grips Ukraine as thousands of Ukrainians refused the vaccinations being scared of diseases like diphtheria, mumps, polio, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, whooping cough among others.

Then the Health officials said that the fear of getting these vaccinations could lead to disease outbreaks spreading through out the Soviet republic and beyond. Health officials around the world then said they are struggling with the repercussions of the vaccination fears as they were unwarrented and dangerous

June 26 Suspicious aircrafts were forced to land. A US operated AN-124 changed its call sign from civillian to military which then triggered a response from the IAF upon entering Pakistani air space, the plane was forced to land in Mumbai while the second one was forced down by Nigerian figther jets that also arrested the crew.

According to reports China (China’s People's Liberation Army Air Force) contacted the Indian and Nigerian intelligence officials about the presence of these US operated Ukranian aircrafts amidst growing concern that the United States were spreading "biological agents" in the Earth's atmosphere also which some Chinese officals believed to be a attempt to mass genocide via the spread of h1n1 swine flu.

The strange thing about these reports and arrests as well as the forcing down of the planes were that these aircrafts were carrying "waste disposal" systems that could spray up to 45000kg or 100pounds of aerial type mist from sophisticated network of nano pipes that led throughout the trailing edges of the wings thereby dispersing whatever was in these tanks through a mist.

Airplane registration was UR-CAK

People usually call these chemtrails.

19 September A Chicago researcher dies working with Yersinia pestis (the plague) (which is now supposedly spreading through Ukraine)

A University of Chicago researcher died Sun., Sept. 13, at the Medical Center's Bernard Mitchell Hospital from an infection which may be attributable to a weakened laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague.

The researcher studied the genetics of harmful bacteria, including a weakened strain of Yersinia pestis that lacks the bacteria's harmful components. This strain is not known to cause illness in healthy adults and has been used in some countries as a live-attenuated vaccine to protect against plague. It has been approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for routine laboratory studies. The weakened strain does not require the special safety precautions required for work with virulent strains.

Though there does not appear to be a threat to the public, and no other illness related to this case has been reported, the Medical Center infection control team is working with the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and the CDC to investigate the case and take all appropriate precautions.

“This death is a tragic loss to our community,” said James L. Madara, MD, Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Medicine, and CEO of the Medical Center. “We are all saddened to lose a valued colleague.”

The patient's initial autopsy showed no obvious cause of death except for the presence of bacteria. Routine cultures of the patient's blood grew the weakened strain of Y. pestis. Whether the attenuated strain caused the fatal illness in this researcher remains uncertain. Additional studies to assess the connection are underway.

Nevertheless, once the attenuated strain of Y. pestis was identified on Sept. 18, Medical Center officials immediately notified the CDPH. As a precautionary measure and in cooperation with the CDPH, Medical Center personnel began notification of family, friends, colleagues and health care personnel who may have had contact with the patient.

People exposed to Y. pestis typically develop symptoms within 2 to 10 days. None of the potential contacts has reported illness. The weakened strain is not believed to be dangerous to healthy individuals, but underlying health conditions could potentially increase susceptibility. Anyone who might have been exposed will be offered antibiotics as a precaution.

While rare in the United States, plague remains a significant problem in the developing world, where up to 3,000 cases are reported every year. U.S. cases still occur in parts of California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. The last known case of person-to-person transmission of plague in the United States occurred in 1924.

Then LAST WEEK Airplanes sprayed mysterious substance over Ukraine days before pneumonic plague outbreak

Kiev, Ukraine - Authorities in the town of Kiev, Ukraine denied any spraying of "aerosolized medication" by aircraft over the city. This after it was reported that light aircrafts were seen flying over the forest market area that sprayed a aerosol substance to fight h1n1 or swine flu.

5 Sources confirms this and the local newspapers of Kiev also received hundreds of phone calls from residents and business owners close to the area the planes were spraying the suspicious substance. Not only that but local businesses and retailers were "advised" to stay indoors during the day by the local authorities.

As if that is not enough, the government authorities also pushed the radio stations in Kiev to deny the reports. Online on forums, websites and blogs reports came in about eye witness accounts that confirms this. There was also reports of helicopters spraying aerosols over Kiev, Lviv, Ternopil and throughout Ukraine.

30th October the Ukraine president Viktor Yushchenko ordered the army or Ministry of Defense to establish mobile hostpitals to provide “essential medications” for people infected with h1n1 (swine flu).

Then just recently the entire Ukraine was put under martial law, more shocking is the statement before the serious pneumonic plague broke out “Due to the complex epidemiological situation in the western regions of Ukraine, where tens of thousands of people have become ill, thousands are in hospital, and dozens have died.”

So what exactly is going on here? Coincidence or not?

Arctic Lake Sediment Record Shows Warming, Unique Ecological Changes in Recent Decades

An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change -- like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth's orbit -- changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 indicate expected climate cooling is being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions. The research team reconstructed past climate and environmental changes at the lake on Baffin Island using indicators that included algae, fossil insects and geochemistry preserved in sediment cores that extend back 200,000 years.

"The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores," said lead study author Yarrow Axford of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes."

The study was published Oct. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study included researchers from CU-Boulder, the State University of New York's University at Buffalo, the University of Alberta, the University of Massachusetts and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

The sediment cores were extracted from the bottom of a roughly 100-acre, 30-foot-deep lake near the village of Clyde River on the east coast of Baffin Island, which is several hundred miles west of Greenland. The lake sediment cores go back in time 80,000 years beyond the oldest reliable ice cores from Greenland and capture the environmental conditions of two previous ice ages and three interglacial periods.

The sediment cores showed that several types of mosquito-like midges that flourish in very cold climates have been abundant at the lake for the past several thousand years. But the cold-adapted midge species abruptly began declining in about 1950, matching their lowest abundances of the last 200,000 years. Two of the midge species adapted to the coldest temperatures have completely disappeared from the lake region, said Axford.

In addition, a species of diatom, a lake algae that was relatively rare at the site before the 20th century, has undergone unprecedented increases in recent decades, possibly in response to declining ice cover on the Baffin Island lake.

"Our results show that the human footprint is overpowering long-standing natural processes even in remote Arctic regions," said co-author John Smol of Queen's University. "This historical record shows that we are dramatically affecting the ecosystems on which we depend."

The ancient lake sediment cores are the oldest ever recovered from glaciated parts of Canada or Greenland. Massive ice sheets during ice ages generally scour the underlying bedrock and remove previous sediments.

"What is unique about these sediment cores is that even though glaciers covered this lake, for various reasons they did not erode it," said study co-author Jason Briner of the University at Buffalo. The result is that we have a really long sequence of sediment that has survived Arctic glaciations."

Axford emphasized the multiyear research project required expertise from each of the five institutions involved in the PNAS study. "This was a team effort all the way around, and each of the institutions has a unique set of skills that allowed us to carry out this study," she said. "We needed people who understood algae, insects, glaciers and geochemistry, not to mention how to drive snowmobiles and extract the cores."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Geological Society of America.

A study published in Science magazine last month that involved CU-Boulder researchers and reconstructed past temperatures in the Arctic using ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments concluded that recent warming around the Arctic is overriding a cooling trend caused by Earth's periodic wobble. Earth is now about 0.6 million miles further from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was in 1 B.C. -- a trend that has caused overall cooling in the Arctic until recently.

INSTAAR researcher and CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller was a co-author on both the PNAS study and the recent Science study.

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New study reveales diabetic episodes has bad effects on children's memory

A new study reveal that diabetes might have a negative effect on the memory of children.

Children who have had an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis, a common complication of diabetes, may have persistent memory problems, according to a new study from researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.

Diabetic ketoacidosis occurs when the body is lacking insulin and burns fat for energy instead of sugar. Apart from nausea, vomiting and fatigue, patients can feel mentally sluggish. If the condition is not treated, patients may fall into a coma. The new study, published online Oct. 15 in the Journal of Pediatrics, shows that children known to have had such an episode in the past performed worse on memory tests than children with diabetes who had not had such an episode.

Diabetic ketoacidosis -- and its consequences -- can be avoided with proper glucose control in patients known to have diabetes, said Simona Ghetti, associate professor at the UC Davis Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain. Many cases, however, occur at the time of diagnosis of diabetes and these cases are more difficult to detect early.

"These results underscore the importance of maintaining control of known diabetes and prompt diagnosis of new cases should diabetic ketoacidosis symptoms arise," Ghetti said.

The UC Davis researchers studied 33 children with type 1 diabetes and a history of diabetic ketoacidosis, and 29 diabetic children with no history of such an episode. They compared the children's ability to recall events and associations, as measured by simple tests.

Children with a history of ketoacidosis performed significantly worse on the memory tests than children without a history, they found.

The results back up anecdotal accounts from parents, who complain of slight but consistent memory deficits in their children with type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes that are not captured by IQ measures or other typical assessments, such as school grades, Ghetti said.

Co-authors on the paper are UC Davis psychology graduate students Joshua Lee and Dana DeMaster; Nicole Glaser, associate professor of pediatrics at UC Davis; and Clare Sims, graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The work was supported by a Young Investigator Research Award to Ghetti from the Children's Miracle Network.

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Boy floating away in home made air balloon - Video

Officials in Colorado, USA reported a boy in a balloon. According to sources this is a home made balloon made out of tin foil and other materials.

The balloon landed a few hours after this video was taken but the basket is not attached anymore.

The boy has not been found.

Video by AP

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Janus' Cratered South

October 8, 2009 by evl

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the south pole and cratered surface of Saturn's moon Janus.

The pole of Janus lies on the terminator about one-third of the way inward from the bottom of the image. This view is centered on terrain at 42 degrees south latitude, 32 degrees west longitude. Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 600 meters (1,968 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Arctic Sea Ice Recovers Slightly in 2009, Remains on Downward Trend

Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from record-setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent remains significantly below previous years and remains on a trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

According to the CU-Boulder center, the 2009 minimum sea ice extent was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping began in 1979. The past five years have seen the five lowest Arctic sea ice extents ever recorded.

"It's nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there's no reason to think that we're headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s," said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder's geography department. "We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades."

The average ice extent during September, a standard measurement for climate studies, was 2.07 million square miles (5.36 million square kilometers). This was 409,000 square miles (1.06 million square kilometers) greater than the record low for the month in 2007, and 266,000 square miles (690,000 square kilometers) greater than the second-lowest extent recorded in September 2008.

The 2009 Arctic sea ice extent was still 649,000 square miles (1.68 square kilometers) below the 1979-2000 September average, according to the report. Arctic sea ice in September is now declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade and in the winter months by about 3 percent per decade. The consensus of scientists is that the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth's atmosphere, as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Sea surface temperatures in the Arctic this season remained higher than normal, but slightly lower than the past two years, according to data from University of Washington Senior Oceanographer Mike Steele. The cooler conditions, which resulted largely from cloudy skies during late summer, slowed ice loss compared to the past two years. In addition, atmospheric patterns in August and September helped to spread out the ice pack, keeping extent higher.

The September 2009 ice cover remained thin, leaving it vulnerable to melt in coming summers, according to the CU-Boulder report. At the end of the summer, younger, thinner ice less than one year in age accounted for 49 percent of the ice cover. Second- year ice made up 32 percent of the ice cover, compared to 21 percent in 2007 and 9 percent in 2008.

Only 19 percent of the ice cover was over two years old -- the least ever recorded in the satellite record and far below the 1981-2000 summer average of 48 percent, according to the CU-Boulder report. Measurements of sea ice thickness by satellites are used to determine the age of the ice.

Earlier this summer, NASA researcher Ron Kwok and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle published satellite data showing that ice thickness declined by 2.2 feet between 2004 and 2008.

"We've preserved a fair amount of first-year ice and second-year ice after this summer compared to the past couple of years," said NSIDC scientist Walt Meier of CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. "If this ice remains in the Arctic thorough the winter, it will thicken, which gives some hope of stabilizing the ice cover over the next few years. However, the ice is still much younger and thinner than it was in the 1980s, leaving it vulnerable to melt during the summer."

Arctic sea ice follows an annual cycle of melting through the warm summer months and refreezing in the winter. Sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the Arctic region cool and moderating global climate temperatures.

While Arctic sea ice extent varies from year to year because of changing atmospheric conditions, ice extent has shown a dramatic overall decline over the past 30 years.

"A lot of people are going to look at the graph of ice extent and think that we've turned the corner on climate change," said NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos of CU-Boulder's CIRES. "But the underlying conditions are still very worrisome."

NSIDC is part of CIRES and is funded primarily by NASA.

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Cassini Reveals New Ring Quirks, Shadows During Saturn Equinox

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists are marveling over the extent of ruffles and dust clouds revealed in the rings of Saturn during the planet's equinox last month. Scientists once thought the rings were almost completely flat, but new images reveal the heights of some newly discovered bumps in the rings are as high as the Rocky Mountains. NASA released the images Monday.

"It's like putting on 3-D glasses and seeing the third dimension for the first time," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is among the most important events Cassini has shown us."

On Aug. 11, sunlight hit Saturn's rings exactly edge-on, performing a celestial magic trick that made them all but disappear. The spectacle occurs twice during each orbit Saturn makes around the sun, which takes approximately 10,759 Earth days, or about 29.7 Earth years. Earth experiences a similar equinox phenomenon twice a year; the autumnal equinox will occur Sept. 22, when the sun will shine directly over Earth's equator.

For about a week, scientists used the Cassini orbiter to look at puffy parts of Saturn's rings caught in white glare from the low-angle lighting. Scientists have known about vertical clumps sticking out of the rings in a handful of places, but they could not directly measure the height and breadth of the undulations and ridges until Saturn's equinox revealed their shadows.
"The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings," said Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at JPL. "To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving."
The chunks of ice that make up the main rings spread out 140,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) from the center of Saturn, but they had been thought to be only around 10 meters (30 feet) thick in the main rings, known as A, B, C, and D.

In the new images, particles seemed to pile up in vertical formations in each of the rings. Rippling corrugations -- previously seen by Cassini to extend approximately 804 kilometers (500 miles) in the innermost D ring -- appear to undulate out to a total of 17,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) through the neighboring C ring to the B ring.

The heights of some of the newly discovered bumps are comparable to the elevations of the Rocky Mountains. One ridge of icy ring particles, whipped up by the gravitational pull of Saturn's moon Daphnis as it travels through the plane of the rings, looms as high as about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). It is the tallest vertical wall seen within the rings.

"We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we've come across walls more than 2 miles [3 kilometers] high," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

Scientists also were intrigued by bright streaks in two different rings that appear to be clouds of dust kicked up in collisions between small space debris and ring particles. Understanding the rate and locations of impacts will help build better models of contamination and erosion in the rings and refine estimates of their age. The collision clouds were easier to see under the low-lighting conditions of equinox than under normal lighting conditions.
At the same time Cassini was snapping visible-light photographs of Saturn's rings, the Composite Infrared Spectrometer instrument was taking the rings' temperatures. During equinox, the rings cooled to the lowest temperature ever recorded. The A ring dropped down to a frosty 43 Kelvin (382 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). Studying ring temperatures at equinox will help scientists better understand the sizes and other characteristics of the ring particles.

The Cassini spacecraft has been observing Saturn, its moons and rings since it entered the planet's orbit in 2004. The spacecraft's instruments have discovered new rings and moons and have improved our understanding of Saturn's ring system.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA and the European and Italian Space Agencies. JPL manages the mission for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. JPL also designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute. The Composite Infrared Spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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High-sugar diet increases men’s blood pressure; gout drug protective

Study 1 highlights:
• Just two weeks on a high-fructose diet raises blood pressure in men.
• A drug used to treat gout seems to protect against that blood pressure increase and some aspects of metabolic syndrome.
Study 2 highlights:
• A study in mice finds that the time of day when fructose is consumed is linked to abnormalities in blood pressure, weight gain and behavior.

Abstract P127

CHICAGO, Sept. 23, 2009 — A high-fructose diet raises blood pressure in men, while a drug used to treat gout seems to protect against the blood pressure increase, according to research reported at the American Heart Association’s 63rd High Blood Pressure Research Conference.

“This is the first evidence of a role of fructose in raising blood pressure and a role for lowering uric acid to protect against that blood pressure increase in people,” said Richard Johnson, M.D., co-author of the study and professor and head of the division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension at the University of Colorado–Denver medical campus in Aurora, Colo.

In the study, excessive fructose consumption seemed to increase new onset of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors associated with the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. On the other hand, the gout drug seemed to halt it — most likely by lowering uric acid, which affects blood pressure.

Fructose, one of several dietary sugars, makes up about half of all the sugar molecules in table sugar and in high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener often used in packaged products because it’s relatively cheap and has a long shelf life. Glucose makes up the other half. Fructose is the only common sugar known to increase uric acid levels.

Patients with high blood pressure, diabetes and kidney disease often have high uric acid levels and gout. But all the ways in which those conditions might contribute to the development or worsening of the others isn’t completely understood, Johnson said.

Johnson and co-author Santos Perez-Pozo, M.D., a nephrologist at Mateo Orfila Hospital in Minorca, Spain who led the study, evaluated 74 adult men, average age 51, who consumed a diet that included 200 grams (g) of fructose per day in addition to their regular diet. The amount is much higher than the estimated U.S. daily intake of 50 g to 70 g of fructose consumed by most U.S. adults. Half of the men were randomly assigned to get the gout drug allopurinol and the other half acted as controls.

After only two weeks on the diet, the high-fructose plus placebo group experienced significant average blood pressure increases of about 6 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) in systolic blood pressure (the pressure when the heart beats) and about a 3 mm Hg rise in diastolic blood pressure (the pressure between heartbeats). They were measured with strap-on monitors that record blood pressure periodically around the clock.

In contrast, men on the high-fructose diet plus allopurinol had significantly lower uric acid levels and virtually no increase in systolic blood pressure (only 1 mm Hg). The blood pressure levels of most of the men returned to normal within two months of the study’s conclusion when the participants returned to their normal dietary intake, Johnson said.

The study also found changes in the incidence of metabolic syndrome. The United States and the international community define the syndrome slightly differently, so researchers used both criteria in the study. In general, metabolic syndrome is defined as having three or more of these five risk factors:
• Increased waist circumference;
• High triglyceride levels;
• Low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), a component of total cholesterol thought to have a protective effect;
• High blood pressure; and
• High fasting blood sugar.

After just two weeks, the incidence of metabolic syndrome more than doubled in the men who consumed a heavy fructose diet and took the placebo pill. The incidence went from 19 percent at baseline to 44 percent at the study’s end, according to the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program-ATP III (NCEP–ATP III) definition, and from 25 percent to 58 percent under the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) definition.

Among men consuming fructose plus allopurinol, virtually no change in the rate of metabolic syndrome occurred — perhaps because the gout drug prevented the blood pressure rise associated with increased fructose consumption.

The study should be viewed as a pilot and more investigations are needed before doctors consider lowering uric acid in the clinical setting, said Johnson, noting that allopurinol can have rare but serious side effects.

Men in both groups had an increase in fasting triglycerides and an indication of insulin resistance by a method called homeostatic model assessment (HOMA), while on the increased fructose diet. The HOMA method is used to quantify insulin resistance and beta-cell function. Allopurinol treatment appeared to lower low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), a component of total blood cholesterol linked to the development of cardiovascular disease, compared to placebo, the researchers reported.

“These results suggest that fructose may be a cause of metabolic syndrome,” Johnson said. “They also suggest that excessive fructose intake may have a role in the worldwide epidemic of obesity and diabetes.”

Fruit, which has just 4 g to 10 g of fructose per serving, also contains many beneficial substances including antioxidants, vitamin C, potassium and fiber that are believed to counter the effects of fructose alone. The main risk for excessive fructose consumption in the Western diet comes from sweetened drinks and foods rich in sugar or high fructose corn syrup, he said.

“When you give fructose to animals, they absolutely develop every feature of metabolic syndrome: they get abdominal fat, high triglycerides, low HDL, their blood pressure goes up and they get insulin resistance,” Johnson said. “However, you must give massive amounts of fructose to rats to raise uric acid levels, because rats and most other animals have an enzyme that breaks down uric acid. Humans lack that enzyme. It turns out humans get gout but other animals don’t.”

If you inhibit the enzyme in rats that breaks down uric acid, it takes only a small amount of fructose to cause uric acid to rise and the symptoms of metabolic syndrome to appear in the animals, he said.

Johnson’s other co-authors are Jesse Schold, Ph.D., and Julian Lopez Lillo, M.D. Author disclosures are on the abstract.

The National Institutes of Health funded the study.

Actual presentation time: 6:45 p.m. CT, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009