Tom Boggioni is a writer, born, raised and living in San Diego — where he attended San Diego State University. Prior to writing for Raw Story, he wrote for FireDogLake, blogged as TBogg, and worked in banking, marketing and construction.
A single mother was placed under arrest by Houston police and later released after being accused of abandoning her children at a mall food court while she interviewed for a job just 30 feet away, reports KHOU.
Laura Browder said she took her 6-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son with her to a mall for a suddenly scheduled job interview because she didn't have enough time to line up child care. According to Browder, she bought the children lunch at the McDonald's in the food court and sat them at a table approximately 30 feet away and well within sight while she interviewed.
Browder was taken into custody by police when she went to claim her kids, after someone at the mall called police saying the children had been left there crying.
Browder said she was arrested after accepting the job offer, but now worries if the arrest may cause her to lose it.
The woman appeared before a judge who released her and gave her full custody of her children although Child Protective Services is still investigating.
Browder released a statement saying, "This was very unfortunate this happened. I had a interview with a very great company with lots of career growth. I am a college student and mother of two. I would never put my name, background or children in harms way intentionally. I have a promising future ahead of me regardless of what the media tries to portray me as."
According to KHOU, reports of Browder's arrest resulted in offers of help for the single mom as well as additional job offers.
Browder's story is reminiscent of the arrest of another black woman, Shanesha Taylor, in March of last year who left her kids in a car in Phoenix while interviewing for a job. Taylor's story, accompanied by her heartbreaking mugshot, captured the attention of the nation and a fundraiser was launched to help her with her legal fees and to help support her kids.
Republican caucusgoers in Iowa tossed their ballots for their choice of GOP presidential nominee into supermarket brown paper bags Tuesday night in chaotic scenes captured on video. In one, caucusgoers walk up and toss their ballots into a HyVee Supermarket bag, in another the brown bag is passed around. In both videos the word "ballots" is written in magic marker at the top of the bag. Critics are calling out the possibility of fraud and claiming hypocrisy by the party that says it is focused on election integrity.
"Voters jotted their candidate on sheet of paper before they were all collected in a brown grocery bag," notes WFAA senior reporter Jason Whitely in this video that has received over half-a-million views.
CANDIDATE SPEECHES over at this site for the #IowaCaucus in West Des Moines. Voters jotted their candidate on sheet of paper before they were all collected in a brown grocery bag. pic.twitter.com/oP4QcauK99
— Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) January 16, 2024
"Weird how this crowd - that is notoriously suspicious of improper voting procedures - is cool with this method and know one seems to be questioning the outcome," wrote Brian Hastert, who hosts the Local Selection podcast about state and municipal elections and governance.
Some critics online mocked the process, with one asking, "So how did Republicans maintain election security here, did they double bag it?"
WISN political director Matt Smith posted this video, which now has 4.7 million views, showing Iowa caucusgoers walking up to a man in a red vest, also with a HyVee Supermarket brown paper bag, and tossing in their ballots.
Iowans voting, writing their candidate’s name on a piece of paper, throwing it into the paper bag to be tallied pic.twitter.com/aOiEZY7xHl
— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) January 16, 2024
"This is how the greatest country on earth elects the most powerful person in the world? High school student government elections are more sophisticated than this," wrote one critic online. Another called it, "the old 'write a name on a piece of paper and put it in a grocery bag' method that wouldn’t fly in a 2nd grade vote for lunch line monitor."
On its website the Republican Party of Iowa informs caucusgoers, "If you are not a registered voter or a registered Republican, that's okay! Just be prepared to register in-person at your caucus location on caucus night!"
"Remember to bring a valid form of ID with you on Caucus night," they add.
Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro are weight loss and diabetes drugs that have made quite a splash in health news. They target regulatory pathways involved in both obesity and diabetes and are widely considered breakthroughs for weight loss and blood sugar control.
But do these drugs point toward a root cause of metabolic disease? What inspired their development in the first place?
It turns out your body produces natural versions of these drugs – also known as incretin hormones – in your gut. It may not be surprising that nutrients in food help regulate these hormones. But it may intrigue you to know that the trillions of microbes in your gut are key for orchestrating this process.
I am a gastroenterologist at the University of Washington who studies how food and your gut microbiome affect health and disease. Here’s an inside-out perspective on the role natural gut hormones and healthy food play in metabolism and weight loss.
A broken gut
Specialized bacteria in your lower gut take the components of food you can’t digest like fiber and polyphenols – the elements of plants that are removed in many processed foods – and transforms them into molecules that stimulate hormones to control your appetite and metabolism. These include GLP-1, a natural version of Wegovy and Ozempic.
GLP-1 and other hormones like PYY help regulate blood sugar through the pancreas. They also tell your brain that you’ve had enough to eat and your stomach and intestines to slow the movement of food along the digestive tract to allow for digestion. This system even has a name: the colonic brake.
Prior to modern processed foods, metabolic regulatory pathways were under the direction of a diverse healthy gut microbiome that used these hormones to naturally regulate your metabolism and appetite. However, food processing, aimed at improving shelf stability and enhancing taste, removes the bioactive molecules like fiber and polyphenols that help regulate this system.
Removal of these key food components and the resulting decrease in gut microbiome diversity may be an important factor contributing to the rise in obesity and diabetes.
A short track to metabolic health
Wegovy and Ozempic reinvigorate the colonic brake downstream of food and microbes with molecules similar to GLP-1. Researchers have demonstrated their effectiveness at weight loss and blood sugar control.
Mounjaro has gone a step further and combined GLP-1 with a second hormone analogue derived from the upper gut called GIP, and studies are showing this combination therapy to be even more effective at promoting weight loss than GLP-1-only therapies like Wegovy and Ozempic.
These drugs complement other measures like gastric bypass surgery that are used in the most extreme cases of metabolic disease. These surgeries may in part work much like Wegovy and Ozempic by bypassing digestion in segments of the gastrointestinal tract and bathing your gut microbes in less digested food. This awakens the microbes to stimulate your gut cells to produce GLP-1 and PYY, effectively regulating appetite and metabolism.
Many patients have seen significant improvements to not only their weight and blood glucose but also reductions in important cardiovascular outcomes like strokes and heart attacks. Medical guidelines support the use of new incretin-based medications like Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro to manage the interrelated metabolic conditions of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Considering the effects incretin-based medications have on the brain and cravings, medical researchers are also evaluating their potential to treat nonmetabolic conditions like alcohol abuse, drug addiction and depression.
A near-magic bullet – for the right folks
Despite the success and prospect of these drugs to help populations that may benefit most from them, current prescribing practices have raised some questions. Should people who are only a little overweight use these drugs? What are the risks of prescribing these drugs to children and adolescents for lifelong weight management?
While incretin-based therapies seem close to magic bullets, they are not without gastrointestinal side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation. These symptoms are related to how the drugs work to slow the gastrointestinal tract. Other more severe, but rare, side effects include pancreatitis and irreversible gastroparesis, or inflammation of the pancreas and stomach paralysis.
These drugs can also lead to a loss of healthy lean muscle mass in addition to fat, particularly in the absence of exercise. Significant weight gain after stopping the drugs raises further questions about long-term effects and whether it’s possible to transition back to using only lifestyle measures to manage weight.
All roads lead to lifestyle
Despite our greatest aspirations for quick fixes, it’s very possible that a healthy lifestyle remains the most important way to manage metabolic disease and overall health. This includes regular exercise, stress management, sleep, getting outdoors and a balanced diet.
For the majority of the population who don’t yet have obesity or diabetes, restarting the gut’s built-in appetite and metabolism control by reintroducing whole foods and awaking the gut microbiome may be the best approach to promote healthy metabolism.
Adding minimally processed foods back to your diet, and specifically those replete in fiber and polyphenols like flavonoids and carotenoids, can play an important and complementary role to help address the epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease at one of its deepest roots.
People around the world eat too much sugar. When the body is unable to process sugar effectively, leading to excess glucose in the blood, this can result in diabetes. According to the World Health Organization, diabetes became the ninth leading cause of death in 2019.
Humans are not the only mammals that love sugar. Fruit bats do, too, eating up to twice their body weight in sugary fruit a day. However, unlike humans, fruit bats thrive on a sugar-rich diet. They can lower their blood sugar faster than bats that rely on insects as their main food source.
We are a team of biologists and bioengineers. Determining how fruit bats evolved to specialize on a high-sugar diet sent us on a quest to approach diabetes therapy from an unusual angle – one that sent us all the way to Lamanai, Belize, for the Belize Bat-a-thon, an annual gathering where researchers collect and study bats.
Authors Nadav Ahituv, left, and Wei Gordon. Wei Gordon, CC BY-ND
In our newly published research in Nature Communications, we and colleagues Seungbyn Baek and Martin Hemberg used a technology that analyzes the DNA of individual cells to compare the unique metabolic instructions encoded in the genome of the Jamaican fruit bat, Artibeus jamaicensis, with those in the genome of the insect-eating big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus.
Approximately 2% of DNA is composed of genes, which are segments of DNA that contain the instructions cells use to create certain traits, such as a longer tongue in fruit bats. The other 98% are segments of DNA that regulate genes and determine the presence and absence of the traits they encode.
To understand how fruit bats evolved to consume so much sugar, we wanted to identify the genetic and cellular differences between bats that eat fruit and bats that eat insects. Specifically, we looked at the genes, regulatory DNA and cell types in two significant organs involved in metabolic disease: the pancreas and the kidney.
The pancreas regulates blood sugar and appetite by secreting hormones like insulin, which lowers your blood sugar, and glucagon, which raises your blood sugar. We found Jamaican fruit bats have more insulin-producing and glucagon-producing cells than big brown bats, along with regulatory DNA that primes fruit bat pancreatic cells to initiate production of insulin and glucagon. Together these two hormones work to keep blood sugar levels balanced even when the fruit bats are eating large amounts of sugar.
The kidney filters metabolic waste from the blood, maintains water and salt balance and regulates blood pressure. Fruit bat kidneys need to be equipped to remove from their bloodstreams the large amounts of water that come from fruit while retaining the low amounts of salt in fruit. We found Jamaican fruit bats have adjusted the compositions of their kidney cells in accordance with their diet, reducing the number of urine-concentrating cells so their urine is more diluted with water compared with big brown bats.
Why it matters
Diabetes is one of the most expensive chronic conditions in the world. The U.S. spent US$412.9 billion in 2022 on direct medical costs and indirect costs related to diabetes.
Most approaches to developing new treatments for diabetes are based on traditional laboratory animals such as mice because they are easy to reproduce and study in a lab. But outside the lab, there exist mammals like fruit bats that have actually evolved to withstand high sugar loads. Figuring out how these mammals deal with high sugar loads can help researchers identify new approaches to treat diabetes.
By applying new cell characterization technologies on these nonmodel organisms, or organisms researchers don’t usually use for research in the lab, we and a growing body of researchers show that nature could be leveraged to develop novel treatment approaches for disease.
The authors disentangle a fruit bat from a net during the Belize Bat-a-thon.
What still isn’t known
While our study revealed many potential therapeutic targets for diabetes, more research needs to be done to demonstrate whether our fruit bat DNA sequences can help understand, manage or cure diabetes in humans.
Some of our fruit bat findings may be unrelated to metabolism or are specific only to Jamaican fruit bats. There are close to 200 species of fruit bats. Studying more bats will help researchers clarify which fruit bat DNA sequences are relevant for diabetes treatment.
Our study also focused only on bat pancreases and kidneys. Analyzing other organs involved in metabolism, such as the liver and small intestine, will help researchers more comprehensively understand fruit bat metabolism and design appropriate treatments.
What’s next
Our team is now testing the regulatory DNA sequences that allow fruit bats to eat so much sugar and checking whether we can use them to better regulate how people respond to glucose.
We are doing this by swapping the regulatory DNA sequences in mice with those of fruit bats and testing their effects on how well these mice manage their glucose levels.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
