Dementia Incidence Linked to Inflammatory Foods

 

• Diets higher in inflammatory foods were linked to increased dementia risk in older adults.
• Risks were higher for both all-cause dementia and Alzheimer's dementia.
• The study tracked Dietary Inflammatory Index scores measured at three time points over 10 years.

Diets higher in inflammatory foods were tied to an increased incidence of dementia in older adults, longitudinal data from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort showed.

Over 13 years of follow-up, higher Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII) scores averaged across three time points were linearly associated with an increased incidence of all-cause dementia (HR 1.21, 95% CI 1.10-1.33, P<0.001), reported Debora Melo van Lent, PhD, of UT Health San Antonio in Texas, and co-authors.

Similarly, higher DII scores were linearly associated with an increase in Alzheimer's disease dementia (HR 1.20, 95% CI 1.07-1.34, P=0.002), the researchers reported in Alzheimer's & Dementiaopens in a new tab or window. Findings were adjusted for demographic, lifestyle, and clinical covariates.

"Although these promising findings need to be replicated and further validated, our results suggest that diets that correlate with low DII scores may prevent late-life dementia," van Lent and colleagues noted.

Previous cross-sectional researchopens in a new tab or window from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort showed that higher DII scores -- indicating more pro-inflammatory foods consumed -- correlated with smaller total brain and gray matter volumes and larger lateral ventricular volume.

Other cohort studies, including a 3-year study in Greeceopens in a new tab or window, tied diets with high inflammatory potential to an increased risk of incident dementia. And clinical trial data showed the MIND dietopens in a new tab or window -- a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet that is rich in anti-inflammatory foods -- had a similar effect on cognition and brain MRI outcomes as mild caloric restriction over 3 years, possibly due to high adherence of the control group to lifestyle advice.

However, there's limited information about the long-term relationship between diet-driven inflammation and incident dementia, van Lent and co-authors noted.

The researchers evaluated 1,487 participants in the Framingham Heart Study Offspringopens in a new tab or window study who were age 60 or older at baseline with no prevalent dementia. More than half (53%) were women, and mean baseline age was 69. About 22% carried an APOE4 allele.

DII scoresopens in a new tab or window were calculated using the 126-item Harvard semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire, which was administered at three points over 10 years from 1991 to 2001.

The DII used in the analysis consisted of 36 dietary components including nutrients, whole foods, and caffeine from food intake. Components were categorized as anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory.

Anti-inflammatory components included alcohol, beta-carotene, caffeine, dietary fiber, folic acid, magnesium, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, zinc, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, omega-3 fat, omega-6 fat, selenium, flavan-3-ol, flavones, flavonols, flavanones, anthocyanidins, green or black tea, pepper, garlic, and vitamins B6, A, C, D, and E.

The mean DII score was -0.30, indicating that participants' diets were anti-inflammatory, on average. DII scores were grouped into quartiles. Education, body mass index, total energy intake, and smoking status varied across the four groups.

Follow-up was a maximum of 22.3 years and a mean of 12.8 years. In that span, 246 participants developed all-cause dementia, mostly Alzheimer's dementia (187 people). There were no significant interactions between DII scores and APOE4, sex, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, or cardiovascular disease in relation to incident all-cause and Alzheimer's dementia, the researchers noted.

"The most pro-inflammatory components of the DII (i.e., saturated fat, trans fats, and total energy intake) are present in the pro-inflammatory 'Western diet' -- a summary term for dietary patterns consumed in Western societies -- which has shown an association with increased concentrations of biomarkers of systemic inflammation and risk factors of all-cause and Alzheimer's disease dementia, and also with neurodegenerative disease-related outcomes," they wrote. "Western diets having inflammatory potential especially known to be pro-inflammatory may have enormous implications for preventive dietary interventions."

The study had several limitations, van Lent and colleagues acknowledged. Its design was observational and the study cannot show causality. The findings relied on food frequency questionnaire data that may have measurement error or recall bias. In the Framingham Heart Study Offspring study, only 36 of 45 possible DII components could be assessed.

The DII was created based on studies of micro- and macronutrients and bioactive compounds in relation to inflammatory markers, not specific disease outcomes. "A limitation of this approach is that some individual DII components may have an opposite effect on the health outcome under study," the researchers pointed out. "For example, vitamin B12 is considered pro-inflammatory in the DII score, but the vitamin has been hypothesized to be protective for dementia risk."

Disclosures

The Framingham Heart Study is supported by the NIH. This analysis was supported by the Alzheimer's Association, the NIH, and other groups.

van Lent disclosed that she is the chair of the Alzheimer's Association ISTAART Nutrition Metabolism and Dementia professional interest area.

Co-authors reported relationships with AbbVie, Isaac Health, and the Danone North America Essential Dairy and Plant-Based Advisory Board.

Primary Source

Alzheimer's & Dementia

Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowvan Lent DM, et al "Association between Dietary Inflammatory Index score and incident dementia" Alzheimer's Dement 2024; DOI: 10.1002/alz.14390.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/113388

'France Downgraded by Moody’s After Le Pen Derails Deficit Push'

 France’s credit rating was downgraded Moody’s Ratings after far-right leader Marine Le Pen toppled the country’s government in a dispute over deficit reduction.

In an unscheduled change, Moody’s lowered its assessment of the euro area’s second biggest economy to Aa3 from Aa2, three levels below the maximum rating. France has already been cut to equivalent levels by Fitch and S&P.

The decision “reflects our view that the country’s public finances will be substantially weakened over the coming years,” Moody’s said in a statement. “There is now very low probability that the next government will sustainably reduce the size of fiscal deficits beyond next year.”

The rebuke comes just hours after President Emmanuel Macron appointed Francois Bayrou as France’s fourth premier in a year. Bayrou’s predecessor Michel Barnier was ousted in a confidence vote last week after Le Pen’s National Rally lined up alongside left-wing parties to protest against his plans for narrowing France’s budget deficit.

Outgoing Finance Minister Antoine Armand said the downgrade reflects the recent parliamentary developments and uncertainty around the budget.

“The nomination of Francois Bayrou as prime minister and the reaffirmed will to reduce the deficit will provide an explicit response,” Armand said in a social media post.

The government’s collapse and the scrapping of France’s 2025 budget add to months of political upheaval that has already hammered business confidence, with the country’s economic outlook steadily deteriorating.

Barnier’s budget foresaw significant belt tightening by historical standards to bring the deficit to 5% of economic output from 6.1% this year. The next government will likely have to pare back those ambitions in order to get support from some of the lawmakers who toppled Barnier, but economists say the final outcome may even be no improvement.

Plans to repair public finances were already derailed this year by poor tax revenues as consumer spending and corporate profits disappointed.

The political turmoil has driven the spread between French government bonds and their German counterparts to the widest since 2012.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/france-downgraded-moody-le-pen-231538072.html

Natural Gas - Not Nuclear - Is the Key To Powering North America's Future

 by Gwyn Morgan via The Epoch Times,

After decades on the outs with environmentalists and regulators, nuclear power is being heralded as a key component for a “net zero” future of clean, reliable energy. Its promise is likely to fall short, however, due to some hard realities.

As North America grapples with the challenge of providing secure, affordable, and sustainable energy amidst soaring electricity demand, it is time to accept this fact: Natural gas remains the most practical solution for powering our grid and economy.

Nuclear power’s limitations are rooted in its costs, risks, and delays. Even under ideal circumstances, building or restarting a nuclear facility is arduous. Consider Microsoft’s much-publicized plan to restart the long-dormant Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. This project is lauded as proof of an incipient “nuclear revival,” but despite leveraging existing infrastructure it will cost US$1.6 billion and take four years to bring online.

This is not a unique case. Across North America, nuclear energy projects face monumental lead times. The new generation of small modular reactors (SMRs), often touted as a game-changer, is still largely theoretical. In Canada—Alberta in particular—discussions around SMRs have been ongoing for years, with no concrete progress. The most optimistic projections estimate the first SMR in Western Canada might be operational by 2034.

The reality is that nuclear energy cannot scale quickly enough to meet urgent electricity needs. Canada’s power grid is already strained, and electricity demand is set to grow significantly, driven by electric vehicles and enormous data centres for AI applications. Nuclear power, even if expanded aggressively, cannot fill the gap within the necessary time frames.

Natural gas, by contrast, is abundant, flexible, low-risk—and highly affordable. It accounts for 40 percent of U.S. electricity generation and plays a critical role in Canada’s energy mix. Unlike nuclear, natural gas infrastructure can be built rapidly, ensuring that new capacity comes online when it’s needed—not decades later. Gas-fired plants are cost-effective and capable of providing consistent, large-scale power while being capable of rapid starts and shut-downs, making them suitable for meeting both base-load and “peaking” power demands.

Climate-related concerns surrounding natural gas need to be put in perspective. Natural gas is the lowest-emission fossil fuel and produces less than half the carbon dioxide of coal per unit of energy output. It is also highly adaptable, supporting renewable energy integration by compensating for the intermittency of wind and solar power.

Nuclear energy advocates frequently highlight its zero-emission credentials, yet they overlook its immense challenges, not just the front-end problems of high cost and long lead times, but ongoing waste disposal and future decommissioning.

Natural gas, by comparison, presents fewer risks. Its production and distribution systems are well-established, and North America is uniquely positioned to benefit from the vast reserves underlying all three countries on the continent. Despite low prices and ever-increasing regulatory obstacles, Canada’s natural gas production has been setting new records. Streamlining regulatory processes and expanding liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity would help revive Canada’s battered economy, with plenty of natural gas left over to help meet growing domestic electricity needs.

Critics argue that investing in natural gas is at odds with the “energy transition” to a glorious net zero future, but this oversimplifies the related challenges and ignores hard realities. By reducing reliance on dirtier fuels like coal, natural gas can help lower a country’s greenhouse gas emissions while providing the reliability needed to support economic growth and renewable energy integration.

Europe’s energy crisis following the recent reduction of Russian gas imports underscores natural gas’s vital role in maintaining reliable electricity supplies. As nations like Germany still phase out nuclear power due to the sheer blind ideology of their left-wing parties, they’re growing more dependent on natural gas to keep the lights (mostly) on and the factories (partially) humming.

Europe is already a destination for LNG exported from the U.S. Gulf Coast, and American LNG exports will soon resume growth under the incoming Trump administration. Canada has the resources and know-how to similarly scale up its LNG exports; all we need is a supportive federal government.

For all its theoretical benefits, nuclear power remains impractical for meeting immediate and medium-term energy demands. Its high costs, lengthy timelines, and significant remaining public opposition make it unlikely to serve as North America’s energy backbone.

Natural gas, on the other hand, is affordable, scalable, and reliable. It is the fuel that powers industries, keeps homes warm and provides the stability our electricity grid needs—whether or not we ever transition to “net zero.” By prioritizing investment in natural gas infrastructure and expanding its use, we can meet today’s energy challenges head-on while laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s innovations.

*  *  *

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/natural-gas-not-nuclear-key-powering-north-americas-future

AI with reasoning power will be less predictable, Ilya Sutskever says

Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, had a prediction to make on Friday: reasoning capabilities will make technology far less predictable.

Accepting a "Test Of Time" award for his 2014 paper with Google's Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, Sutskever said a major change was on AI's horizon.

An idea that his team had explored a decade ago, that scaling up data to "pre-train" AI systems would send them to new heights, was starting to reach its limits, he said. More data and computing power had resulted in ChatGPT that OpenAI launched in 2022, to the world's acclaim.

"But pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end," Sutskever declared before thousands of attendees at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver. "While compute is growing," he said, "the data is not growing, because we have but one internet."

Sutskever offered some ways to push the frontier despite this conundrum. He said technology itself could generate new data, or AI models could evaluate multiple answers before settling on the best response for a user, to improve accuracy. Other scientists have set sights on real-world data.

But his talk culminated in a prediction for a future of superintelligent machines that he said "obviously" await, a point with which some disagree. Sutskever this year co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc in the aftermath of his role in Sam Altman's short-lived ouster from OpenAI, which he said within days he regretted.

Long-in-the-works AI agents, he said, will come to fruition in that future age, have deeper understanding and be self-aware. He said AI will reason through problems like humans can.

There's a catch.

"The more it reasons, the more unpredictable it becomes," he said.

Reasoning through millions of options could make any outcome non-obvious. By way of example, AlphaGo, a system built by Alphabet's DeepMind, surprised experts of the highly complex board game with its inscrutable 37th move, on a path to defeating Lee Sedol in a match in 2016.

Sutskever said similarly, "the chess AIs, the really good ones, are unpredictable to the best human chess players."

AI as we know it, he said, will be "radically different."

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/ai-reasoning-power-less-predictable-033536567.html

New technology aids Brazil's crackdown on illicit Amazon gold trade

Harley Sandoval, an evangelical pastor, real estate agent and mining entrepreneur, was arrested in July 2023 for illegally exporting 294 kilos of gold from Brazil's Amazon to the United States, Dubai and Italy.

On paper, the gold was sourced from a legal prospect Sandoval was licensed to mine in the northern state of Tocantins. But police said not an ounce of gold had been mined there since colonial times.

Using cutting-edge forensic technology, along with satellite imagery, Brazil's Federal Police said it was able to establish that the exported gold did not come from the Tocantins prospect. Instead, it had been dug up from three different wildcat mines in neighboring Pará, some on protected Indigenous reservation lands, according to previously unreported court documents dated November 2023 seen by Reuters.

The prosecution is one of the first in Brazil using the new technology to tackle clandestine trading that may account for as much as half of the gold output of Brazil, a major producer and exporter of the precious metal. Illegal gold mining has surged at thousands of sites in the Amazon rainforest, bringing environmental destruction and criminal violence to the region.

Seizures of illegally mined gold have surged seven-fold in the past seven years, according to Federal Police records obtained exclusively by Reuters.

Sandoval, who has been released pending trial and continues to preach with his wife at a Pentecostal Evangelical church in the central Brazilian city of Goiania, denies the allegations. He maintains there is no way to establish where the gold was mined once it is melted down into ingots for export.

"That's impossible. To export gold one always has to melt it down," he told Reuters by telephone.

THE DNA OF GOLD

Historically, gold is notoriously difficult to trace, especially once metal from different sources has been melted together, erasing the original signatures. After that, it can easily be traded as a financial asset or be used in the jewelry industry.

But investigators say that's starting to change. A police program called "Targeting Gold" is creating a database of samples from across Brazil that are examined with radio-isotope scans and fluorescence spectroscopy to determine the unique composition of elements.

The technique, long used in archaeology, was pioneered in mining by University of Pretoria geologist Roger Dixon to help distinguish between legal and stolen gold.

The program developed in partnership with university researchers includes the use of powerful light beams from a particle accelerator at a Sao Paulo lab to study nano-sized impurities associated with gold, be it dirt or other metals like lead or copper, that help trace its origins.

Humberto Freire, director of the Federal Police's recently-created Environment and Amazon Department, said the technology allows scientists to analyze "the DNA of Brazilian gold."

"Nature has marked the gold with isotopes and we can read these unique fingerprints with radio-isotope scans," Freire said. "With this tool we can trace illegal gold before it gets refined for export."

The program has helped fuel an increase in gold seizures since leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office last year — up 38% in 2023 from 2022, according to government numbers seen by Reuters. New Brazil central bank gold market regulations, including mandatory electronic tax receipts for all trades and tightened monitoring of suspect transactions, have also helped, according to Freire.

"We estimate that around 40% of the gold that is extracted in the Amazon is illegal," he told Reuters. Brazil exported 110 tonnes of gold in 2020 worth $5 billion, according to official data, ranking among the world's top 20 exporters. Last year, exports were 77.7 tonnes, a drop the government attributes to improved enforcement of illegal mining.

INDIGENOUS TENSIONS

Lula's predecessor, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro weakened environmental controls in the Amazon.

That triggered a new gold rush in Brazil, spurred by record world gold prices that were driven up by geopolitical tensions and central bank purchases, led by China.

Prices have continued to new highs, trading at around $2,650 per ounce on Friday.

Gold rushes have been a hallmark of mineral-rich Brazil from its Portuguese colonial past. But the latest surge in wildcat mining beginning during Bolsonaro's administration has been unprecedented. Satellite images show there are some 80,000 such prospects today in the Amazon rainforest, more than ever registered before.

Once dominated by prospectors with gold pans, artisanal mining in Brazil has become an industrial-scale activity with heavy excavating machinery and million-dollar river dredgers. Criminal organizations fly people, equipment and gold into and out of the region with helicopters and planes that land at clandestine airstrips.

Their excavations often leave behind gaping ponds of sludge contaminated with mercury, used to separate the gold from dirt and other minerals.

Last year, thousands of miners who invaded the Yanomami territory, the country's largest Indigenous reservation on the northern border with Venezuela, brought violence and disease that caused malnutrition and a humanitarian crisis among the tribe, prompting Lula to send in troops.

But many returned this year after the military pulled out. Lula, who has pledged to stamp out illegal gold mining, tried to fight back by deploying special forces of the environmental protection agency Ibama into Indigenous reservations and forest conservation parks.

Police say cracking down on the organized crime gangs that back the wildcat miners is the next step in staunching an illegal trade that feeds the jewelry and watch industry in Switzerland, which buys 70% of Brazil's exported gold, according to government trade data.

Amazon neighbors, including Colombia and French Guiana, are considering adopting the Brazilian gold analysis method to deal with their illegal gold trade and European governments have shown interest, including Switzerland and Britain, the top importers from Brazil after Canada, police and diplomats said.

Brazil accounts for just 1% of gold imported by Switzerland, a global trade hub for the metal, and "measures are in place to import only legally mined gold," a Swiss embassy statement said. The embassy said it has set up a working group with other importing countries to study traceability and anti-counterfeiting tools.

A 2022 study by non-profit watchdog Instituto Escolhas found that 52% of the gold exported from the Amazon was illegal, nearly all from protected Indigenous reservation lands or national conservation parks.

A vibrant lobby for informal gold mining has survived Bolsonaro in Brazil's Conservative Congress, where pending bills propose legalizing wildcat mining.

For now, though, gold samples from across Brazil are being added to a database with the help of scientists at the Federal Police's criminology institute lab in Brasilia, where forensic expert Erich Moreira Lima oversees microscopic scanning of gold nuggets that are kept in a safe.

"Now that we have a team set up, we hope to analyze the 30,000 gold samples the Brazilian Geological Service has collected. In a few years, we should have mapped all Brazil's 24 gold producing regions," he told Reuters.

Geologist Maria Emilia Schutesky and her team at the National University of Brasilia's geosciences lab conduct mass spectrometry scans on gold samples to identify associated molecules, such as lead, to place the gold's origins.

"We researchers seek a 100% ability to trace gold, but that is more than what the police needs to prove a crime, which is just to establish that the gold does not come from where a suspects claims it is from," Schutesky said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/technology-aids-brazils-crackdown-illicit-110742575.html

Porsche SE Withdraws 2024 Profit Guidance; Sees Porsche AG, Volkswagen Impairments

 Porsche Automobil Holding SE withdrew its profit forecast for the year and said it could expect a significantly negative result due to impairments related to Volkswagen and sports-car-maker Porsche AG.

Porsche SE said Friday that Volkswagen had informed it that Volkswagen's and Porsche AG's current planning isn't expected to be done by Dec. 31 and Porsche SE can't rely on the results of their current approved plan for accounting purposes. Porsche SE is the major shareholder in Volkswagen.

Due to the delay, Porsche SE's management board currently assumes the carrying amounts of the company's investments in Volkswagen and Porsche AG are likely to result in impairment losses for the year, with a significantly negative effect on after-tax profit.

Porsche SE previously had expected after-tax profit of between 2.4 billion euros and 4.4 billion euros ($2.51 billion to $4.61 billion) for the year.

The company also cited "the market environment with further increasing uncertainties, lower demand than originally expected on various markets and increasing geopolitical tensions and protectionist tendencies" as factors leading to the estimates of the investments' carrying amounts.

Porsche SE confirmed its forecast for the net debt as of the end of the year between 5 billion euros and 5.5 billion euros.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202412137028/porsche-se-withdraws-2024-profit-guidance-sees-porsche-ag-volkswagen-impairments

US House panel finds BlackRock, other asset managers leery of joining climate initiative

 Top U.S. asset managers worried that signing up to an industry climate initiative could make them appear to be working too closely together and draw regulatory scrutiny, according to a report released Friday by a Republican-led U.S. Congressional Committee.

The report is the latest released by the panel's Republican majority as part of a probe they say has shown fund firms and activists are part of a "climate cartel" that colludes through shareholder organizations pressing to cut emissions. The committee's Democrats have dismissed those allegations.

Top fund firms have denied wrongdoing, but material cited in the report shows they had always been concerned about appearing too cozy with shareholder groups engaged in climate activism.

BlackRock's view in 2019 was that "We don't do collective action/engagements. Too risky," according to the report, citing an e-mailed summary of a meeting that unidentified BlackRock executives held with Ceres, a Boston-based environmental advocacy group, obtained by the committee.

Likewise State Street also raised concerns around 2020 about "collusion" if it joined a Ceres-backed effort to press companies to cut emissions known as the Climate Action 100+, according to the report. The firm worried about raising the "perception of engaging or voting as a block," the report states.

BlackRock declined to comment. State Street and Ceres did not immediately comment. Both wound up joining the group known as the CA100+, then stepped back earlier this year citing independence concerns.

Republican officials, many of them from oil and gas producing states, have objected to investors coordinating to pressure corporate management on climate issues at the expense of corporate growth and returns.

Last month Republican attorneys general from 11 states sued BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, saying their climate activism reduced coal production and boosted energy prices. The firms collectively manage $26 trillion. BlackRock and State Street have denied wrongdoing, while Vanguard has declined to comment on the matter.

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump campaigned against President Joe Biden's moves to fight climate change and promised to boost U.S. oil and gas production. In theory Trump's administration could follow up on the congressional committee's findings. A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment on what if any talks it may have had with current or future administrations.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BLACKROCK-INC-176512022/news/US-House-panel-finds-BlackRock-other-asset-managers-leery-of-joining-climate-initiative-48591123/