Dozens of bottles of low-priced California wines sold under such labels as Franzia, Mogen David and Almaden contain dangerously high levels of arsenic, according to a lawsuit filed by four California residents.
The industry group Wine Institute dismissed the lawsuit as "irresponsible," adding it has not called for any vintner to pull any of the wines named in the complaint from store shelves.
The complaint, which seeks class-action status, was filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court. It lists as defendants 28 California wineries. It also asks for unspecified damages and a halt to production of arsenic-tainted wine.
"We believe this allegation is false and misleading and that all wines being sold in the U.S. marketplace are safe," the institute, which represents more than 1,000 California vintners and related businesses, said in a statement.
Institute spokeswoman Gladys Horiuchi said Friday that although the United States doesn't have specific arsenic levels for wine, many other countries do. She added that California vintages have never come close to exceeding those levels.
According to the lawsuit, tests by three independent laboratories found that in some cases arsenic levels were 500 percent higher than what's considered safe. Horiuchi said those comparisons were based on levels considered safe for drinking water, not wine.
The lawsuit's lead attorney, Brian Kabateck, said the levels were originally found in tests done by the head of the Denver-based lab BeverageGrades.
"He decided to test 1,306 bottles of wine representing more than 75 percent of the wine consumed in the U.S." Kabateck said Friday. "Out of those he found 83 that had excessive arsenic levels."
The attorney added that subsequent cross-testing at two other labs confirmed the findings.
Arsenic occurs naturally in the air, soil and water in small amounts, as well as in wine and other beverages. In larger amounts, it can be deadly.
Kabateck said tests showed the arsenic found was "inorganic" or not naturally occurring. He said it might have been introduced in the vinting process. He noted nearly all of the affected wines sell for between $5 and $10 a bottle.
"Out of 1,306 tests only 83 came back," he said. "We know that the vast majority of the wine business is safe. If you're spending $20 on a bottle of wine you're not going to have concerns most likely."
LOS ANGELES — TWO years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy. A simple blood test had revealed that I carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene. It gave me an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. I lost my mother, grandmother and aunt tocancer.
I wanted other women at risk to know about the options. I promised to follow up with any information that could be useful, including about my next preventive surgery, the removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes.
I had been planning this for some time. It is a less complex surgery than the mastectomy, but its effects are more severe. It puts a woman into forced menopause. So I was readying myself physically and emotionally, discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine, and mapping my hormones for estrogenor progesterone replacement. But I felt I still had months to make the date.
Then two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor with blood-test results. “Your CA-125 is normal,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief. That test measures the amount of the protein CA-125 in the blood, and is used to monitor ovarian cancer. I have it every year because of my family history.
But that wasn’t all. He went on. “There are a number of inflammatory markers that are elevated, and taken together they could be a sign of early cancer.” I took a pause. “CA-125 has a 50 to 75 percent chance of missing ovarian cancer at early stages,” he said. He wanted me to see the surgeon immediately to check my ovaries.
I went through what I imagine thousands of other women have felt. I told myself to stay calm, to be strong, and that I had no reason to think I wouldn’t live to see my children grow up and to meet my grandchildren.
I called my husband in France, who was on a plane within hours. The beautiful thing about such moments in life is that there is so much clarity. You know what you live for and what matters. It is polarizing, and it is peaceful.
That same day I went to see the surgeon, who had treated my mother. I last saw her the day my mother passed away, and she teared up when she saw me: “You look just like her.” I broke down. But we smiled at each other and agreed we were there to deal with any problem, so “let’s get on with it.”
Nothing in the examination or ultrasound was concerning. I was relieved that if it was cancer, it was most likely in the early stages. If it was somewhere else in my body, I would know in five days. I passed those five days in a haze, attending my children’s soccer game, and working to stay calm and focused.
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Angelina Jolie PittCreditLuke MacGregor/Reuters
The day of the results came. The PET/CT scan looked clear, and the tumor test was negative. I was full of happiness, although the radioactive tracer meant I couldn’t hug my children. There was still a chance of early stage cancer, but that was minor compared with a full-blown tumor. To my relief, I still had the option of removing my ovaries and fallopian tubes and I chose to do it.
I did not do this solely because I carry the BRCA1 gene mutation, and I want other women to hear this. A positive BRCA test does not mean a leap to surgery. I have spoken to many doctors, surgeons and naturopaths. There are other options. Some women take birth control pills or rely on alternative medicines combined with frequent checks. There is more than one way to deal with any health issue. The most important thing is to learn about the options and choose what is right for you personally.
In my case, the Eastern and Western doctors I met agreed that surgery to remove my tubes and ovaries was the best option, because on top of the BRCA gene, three women in my family have died from cancer. My doctors indicated I should have preventive surgery about a decade before the earliest onset of cancer in my female relatives. My mother’s ovarian cancer was diagnosed when she was 49. I’m 39.
Last week, I had the procedure: a laparoscopic bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. There was a small benign tumor on one ovary, but no signs of cancer in any of the tissues.
I have a little clear patch that contains bio-identical estrogen. A progesterone IUD was inserted in my uterus. It will help me maintain a hormonal balance, but more important it will help prevent uterine cancer. I chose to keep my uterus because cancer in that location is not part of my family history.
It is not possible to remove all risk, and the fact is I remain prone to cancer. I will look for natural ways to strengthen my immune system. I feel feminine, and grounded in the choices I am making for myself and my family. I know my children will never have to say, “Mom died of ovarian cancer.”
Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause. I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes. But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.
I feel deeply for women for whom this moment comes very early in life, before they have had their children. Their situation is far harder than mine. I inquired and found out that there are options for women to remove their fallopian tubes but keep their ovaries, and so retain the ability to bear children and not go into menopause. I hope they can be aware of that.
It is not easy to make these decisions. But it is possible to take control and tackle head-on any health issue. You can seek advice, learn about the options and make choices that are right for you. Knowledge is power.
This article appeared in the March 29 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Dark moods are bad for your health. Scientists have known for decades that a wide variety of unpleasant emotions, like shame, depression and anxiety, are linked to greater rates of ills like heart disease, inflammation, cancer and premature death. Conversely, positive feelings have been shown to be good for you.
Far less is known, however, about the health benefits of specific upbeat moods — whether contentment, say, might promote good health more robustly than joy or pride does. A new study singles out one surprising emotion as a potent medicine: awe. And happily, awe seems to be much easier to come by than many might expect, even for the busy and stressed-out.
For the study, published in January in the journal Emotion, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions focused on some particularly moody subjects: college freshmen. Ninety-four Berkeley students were recruited to fill out questionnaires about how frequently during the past month they felt various positive and negative emotions, like hostility, enthusiasm and inspiration. The students then supplied saliva samples, which were analyzed for interleukin-6, a molecule known to promote inflammation throughout the body. Because inflammation is tied to poor health, researchers figured that low levels of IL-6 might signal good health. As anticipated, when students’ moods were checked against their IL-6 levels, those who had experienced more positive emotions generally had lower levels of IL-6 than classmates whose moods were more frequently sour.
Researchers next enlisted 119 students to complete more elaborate questionnaires about their normal dispositions and the extent to which they had recently felt seven specific emotions: awe, amusement, compassion, contentment, joy, love and pride. The students also provided a saliva sample. While happy moods were collectively still associated with low IL-6 levels, the strongest correlation was with awe. The more frequently someone reported having felt awe-struck, the lower the IL-6.
“There seems to be something about awe,” says Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology and the senior author of the study, who is also the faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley. (He has studied laughter, empathy and blushing, too.) “It seems to have a pronounced impact on markers related to inflammation.”
Somewhat surprisingly, awe isn’t necessarily a rare occurrence, he adds. On average, the students in the study reported feeling the emotion three or more times a week. “How great is that?” Dr. Keltner says.
While acknowledging that awe is conceptually squishy and subjective, Dr. Keltner says that in general, a primary attribute of an awe-inspiring event is that it “will pass the goose-bumps test.” And he advises that people “seek it often.” He is just not certain what that means for everyone. “Some people feel awe listening to music,” Dr. Keltner says, “others watching a sunset or attending a political rally or seeing kids play.”
Article toolsAmid rumours that precision gene-editing techniques have been used to modify the DNA of human embryos, researchers have called for a moratorium on the use of the technology in reproductive cells.
MOLEKUUL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The gene-editing technique CRISPR uses an enzyme (white) and RNA guides (blue) to cut DNA at a point specified by a DNA fragment (red).
In a Comment published on 12 March in Nature1, Edward Lanphier, chairman of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine in Washington DC, and four co-authors call on scientists to agree not to modify human embryos — even for research.
“Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications. We are concerned that a public outcry about such an ethical breach could hinder a promising area of therapeutic development,” write Lanphier and his colleagues, who include Fyodor Urnov, a pioneer in gene-editing techniques and scientist at Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. Many groups, including Urnov's company, are already using gene-editing tools to develop therapies that correct genetic defects in people (such as by editing white blood cells). They fear that attempts to produce ‘designer babies’ by applying the methods to embryos will create a backlash against all use of the technology.
Known as germline modification, edits to embryos, eggs or sperm are of particular concern because a person created using such cells would have had their genetic make-up changed without consent, and would permanently pass down that change to future generations.
“We need a halt on anything that approaches germline editing in human embryos,” Lanphier, who is also chief executive of Sangamo, told Nature’s news team.
But other scientists disagree with that stance. Although there needs to be a wide discussion of the safety and ethics of editing embryos and reproductive cells, they say, the potential to eliminate inherited diseases means that scientists should pursue research.
Related trials
Geneticist Xingxu Huang of ShanghaiTech University in China, for example, is currently seeking permission from his institution’s ethics committee to try genetically modifying discarded human embryos. In February 2014, he reported2 using a gene-editing technique to modify embryos that developed into live monkeys. Human embryos would not be allowed to develop to full term in his experiments, but the technique “gives lots of potential for its application in humans,” he says.
Besides Huang’s work, gene-editing techniques are also being used by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a developmental biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, to eliminate disease-causing mutations from mitochondria, the cell's energy-processing structures. Belmonte's work is on unfertilized eggs; human eggs with such modified mitochondria could one day be used in in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures to prevent a woman's offspring from inheriting mitochondrial disease.
There are also suspicions that scientists have already created human embryos with edited genomes. Several researchers who do not want to be named told Nature’s news team that papers describing such work are being considered for publication.
Scientists who attended a meeting in Napa, California, in January to discuss potential uses of germline gene-editing have written a perspective paper about their concerns for publication inScience. Geneticist Dana Carroll of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who was at the Napa meeting, says that it will call for discussions of the safety and ethics of using editing techniques on human embryos.
“Germline genome alterations are permanent and heritable, so very, very careful consideration needs to be taken in advance of such applications,” Carroll says.
Wide concerns
Germline gene editing is already banned by law in many countries — a 2014 review by Tetsuya Ishii, a bioethicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, found that of 39 countries, 29 have laws or guidelines that ban the practice. But the development of precise gene-editing techniques in recent years has brought fresh urgency to the issue. These techniques use enzymes called nucleases to snip DNA at specific points and then delete or rewrite the genetic information at those locations. The methods are simple enough to be used in a fertility clinic, raising fears that they might be applied in humans before safety concerns have been addressed.
One concern, for example, is that the nucleases could cause mutations at locations other than those targeted. Guanghui Liu, a stem-cell researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics in Beijing, collaborated on a study3 that showed that modifying one gene in stem cells resulted in minimal mutations elsewhere, but he warns that this is only one case.
Every application to use gene-editing technology for a therapy would have to be validated independently as safe and effective, says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It would be necessary to decide, for each potential application, whether the risks outweigh the possible benefit to a patient. I think this assessment must be made on a case-by-case basis,” she says.
Ishii worries about countries such as the United States: there, germline editing is not banned but requires government approval, but such restrictions have a history of being circumvented, as in the case of unproven stem-cell treatments. He is also concerned about China, which prohibits gene-editing of embryos but does not strictly enforce similar rules, as shown by failed attempts to curb the use of ultrasound for sex selection and to stamp out unauthorized stem-cell clinics. China is also where gene-editing techniques in primates have developed fastest. “There are already a lot of dodgy fertility clinics around the world,” he says.
Behind all those canned compliments for older adults — spry! wily! wise! — is an appreciation for something that scientists have had a hard time characterizing: mental faculties that improve with age.
Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence.
Still, young adults who consult their elders (mostly when desperate) don’t do so just to gather facts, solve crosswords or borrow a credit card. Nor, generally, are they looking for help with short-term memory or puzzle solving. Those abilities, called fluid intelligence, peak in the 20s.
No, the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought.
The postdoctoral fellows Joshua Hartshorne of M.I.T. and Laura Germineof Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed a huge trove of scores on cognitive tests taken by people of all ages. The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.
“This dichotomy between early peaks and later peaks is way too coarse,” Dr. Hartshorne said. “There are a lot more patterns going on, and we need to take those into account to fully understand the effects of age on cognition.”
The new paper is hardly the first challenge to the scientific literature on age-related decline, and it won’t be the last. A year ago, German scientists argued that cognitive “deficits” in aging were caused largely by the accumulation of knowledge — that is, the brain slows down because it has to search a larger mental library of facts. That idea has stirred some debate among scientists.
Experts said the new analysis raised a different question: Are there distinct, independent elements of memory and cognition that peak at varying times of life?
“I think they have more work to do to demonstrate that that’s the case,” said Denise Park, a professor of behavior and brain science at the University of Texas at Dallas. “But this is a provocative paper, and it’s going to have an impact on the field.”
The strength of the new analysis is partly in its data. The study evaluated historic scores from the popular Wechsler intelligence test, and compared them with more recent results from tens of thousands of people who took short cognitive tests on the authors’ websites, testmybrain.org andgameswithwords.org. The one drawback of this approach is that, because it didn’t follow the same people over a lifetime, it might have missed the effect of different cultural experiences, said K. Warner Schaie, a researcher at Penn State University.
But most previous studies have not been nearly as large, or had such a range of ages. Participants on the websites were 10 to 89 years old, and they took a large battery of tests, measuring skills like memory for abstract symbols and strings of digits, problem solving, and facility reading emotions from strangers’ eyes.
At least as important, the researchers looked at the effect of age on each type of test. Previous research had often grouped related tests together, on the assumption that they captured a single underlying attribute in the same way a coach might rate, say, athleticism based on a person’s speed, strength and vertical leaping ability.
The result of the new approach? “We found different abilities really maturing or ripening at different ages,” Dr. Germine said. “It’s a much richer picture of the life span than just calling it aging.”
Processing speed — the quickness with which someone can manipulate digits, words or images, as if on a mental sketch board — generally peaks in the late teens, Dr. Germine and Dr. Hartshorne confirmed, and memory for some things, like names, does so in the early 20s. But the capacity of that sketch board, called working memory, peaks at least a decade later and is slow to decline. In particular, the ability to recall faces and do some mental manipulation of numbers peaked about age 30, the study found, “a fact difficult to assimilate into the fluid/crystalized intelligence dichotomy.”
The researchers also analyzed results from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. The test involves looking at snapshots of strangers’ eyes on a computer screen and determining their moods from a menu of options like “tentative,” “uncertain” and “skeptical.”
“It’s not an easy test, and you’re not sure afterward how well you did,” Dr. Germine said. “I thought I’d done poorly but in fact did pretty well.” Yet people in their 40s or 50s consistently did the best, the study found, and the skill declined very slowly later in life.
The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others.
No one needs a cognitive scientist to explain that it’s better to approach a boss about a raise when he or she is in a good mood. But the older mind may be better able to head off interpersonal misjudgments and to navigate tricky situations.
“As in, ‘that person’s not happy with all your quick thinking and young person’s processing speed — he’s about to punch you,’” said Zach Hambrick, a psychology professor at Michigan State University.
The details of this more textured picture of the aging brain are still far from clear, and social measures like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test have not been used much in this kind of research, Dr. Hambrick and other experts said. And it is not apparent from the new analysis whether changes in cognition with age result from a single cause — like a decline in the speed of neural transmission — or to multiple ones.
But for now, the new research at least gives some meaning to the empty adjective “wily.”
In 1946, a new advertising campaign appeared in magazines with a picture of a doctor in a lab coat holding a cigarette and the slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” No, this wasn’t a spoof. Back then, doctors were not aware that smoking could cause cancer, heart disease and lung disease.
In a similar vein, some researchers and consumers are now asking whether wearable computers will be considered harmful in several decades’ time.
We have long suspected that cellphones, which give off low levels of radiation, could lead to brain tumors, cancer, disturbed blood rhythms and other health problems, if held too close to the body for extended periods.
Yet here we are in 2015, with companies like Apple and Samsung encouraging us to buy gadgets that we should attach to our bodies all day long.
While there is no definitive research on the health effects of wearable computers (the Apple Watch isn’t even on store shelves yet), we can hypothesize a bit from existing research on cellphone radiation.
The most definitive and arguably unbiased results in this area come from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a panel within the World Health Organization that consisted of 31 scientists from 14 countries.
After dissecting dozens of peer-reviewed studies on cellphone safety, the panel concluded in 2011 that cellphones were “possibly carcinogenic,” and that the devices could be as harmful as certain dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides. (Note that the group hedged their findings with the word “possibly.”)
The W.H.O. panel concluded that the farther away a device is from one’s head, the less harmful — so texting or surfing the Web will not be as dangerous as making calls, with a cellphone inches from the brain. (This is why there were serious concerns about Google Glass when it was first announced, and why we’ve been told to use hands-free devices when talking on cellphones.)
A longitudinal study by Dr. Lennart Hardell, a professor of oncology and cancer epidemiology at the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, concluded that talking on a mobile or cordless phone for extended periods could triple the risk of a certain kind of brain cancer.
There is, of course, antithetical research. But some of this was partly funded by cellphone companies or trade groups.
One example is the international Interphone study, which was published in 2010, and did not find strong links between mobile phones and an increased risk of brain tumors.
Another study in the British Medical Journal, which measured cellphone subscription data, rather than actual use, said there was no proof of increased cancer. Yet even here, the Danish team behind the report did acknowledge that a “small to moderate increase” in cancer risk among heavy cellphone users could not be ruled out.
But what does all this research tell the Apple faithful who want to rush out and buy an Apple Watch, or the Google and Windows fanatics who are eager to own an alternative smartwatch.
Joseph Mercola, a physician who focuses on alternative medicine and has written extensively about the potential harmful effects of cellphones on the human body, said that as long as a wearable does not have a 3G connection built into it, the harmful effects are minimal, if any.
“The radiation really comes from the 3G connection on a cellphone, so devices like the Jawbone Up and Apple Watch should be O.K.,” Dr. Mercola said in a phone interview. “But if you’re buying a watch with a cellular chip built in, then you’ve got a cellphone attached to your wrist.” And that, he said, is a bad idea.
(The Apple Watch uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to receive data, and researchers say there is no proven harm from those frequencies on the human body. Wearables with 3G or 4G connections built in, including the Samsung Gear S, could be more harmful, though that has not been proved. Apple declined to comment for this article, and Samsung could not be reached for comment.)
Researchers have also raised concerns about having powerful batteries so close to the body for extended periods of time. Some reports over the last several decades have questioned whether being too close to power lines could cause leukemia (though other research has also negated this).
So what should consumers do? Perhaps we can look at how researchers themselves handle their smartphones.
While Dr. Mercola is a vocal proponent of cellphone safety, he told me to call him on his cell when I emailed about an interview. When I asked him whether he was being hypocritical, he replied that technology is a fact of life, and he uses it with caution. As an example, he said he was using a Bluetooth headset during our call.
In the same respect, people who are concerned about the possible side effects of a smartwatch should avoid placing it close to their brain (besides, it looks a little strange).
But there are some people who may be more vulnerable to the dangers of these devices: children.
While researchers debate about how harmful cellphones and wearable computers actually are, most agree that children should exercise caution.
In an email, Dr. Hardell sent me research illustrating that a child’s skull is thinner and smaller than an adult’s, which means that their brain tissues are more exposed to certain types of radiation, specifically the kind that emanates from a cellphone.
Children should limit how much time they spend talking on a cellphone, doctors say. And if they have a wearable device, they should take it off at night, so it does not end up under their pillow, near their brains. Doctors also warn that women who are pregnant should be extra careful with all of these technologies.
But what about adults? After researching this column, talking to experts and poring over dozens of scientific papers, I have realized the dangers of cellphones when use for extended periods, and as a result I have stopped holding my phone next to my head and instead use a headset during phone calls.
That being said, when it comes to wearable computers, I’ll still buy the Apple Watch, but I won’t let it go anywhere near my head. And I definitely won’t let any children I know play with it for extended periods of time.
