Anyone who bakes cookies knows, there’s nothing quite like eating a bit of raw cookie dough from the spoon. However, it may be that raw cookie dough isn’t the healthiest thing to eat.

The Dangers of Raw Cookie Dough

The FDA recently released a warning against the consumption of raw cookie dough. There are a number of ingredients within raw cookie dough that are not safe to eat, including raw eggs and raw dough, both of which carry food poisoning dangers.

In fact, any type of raw dough, from tortilla dough to bread dough, is dangerous to eat. It’s not even safe to play with raw dough or batter containing flour. Kids that play with raw dough – even if they do not eat it – could get germs onto their hands. If they don’t wash their hands immediately afterwards and put their hands into their mouths, they could develop an infection.

The Reason Why Raw Cookie Dough Could Cause Food Poisoning

Flour is derived from grains that come directly from the field. These grains are not usually treated to kill bacteria. Because of this, animal waste could contaminate the grains with bacteria before they are harvested and turned into flour. This bacteria can be killed by baking, frying, roasting, boiling, or even microwaving the flour, but raw dough can still contain germs.

Infections Caused by Raw Dough Poisoning

An investigation into infections caused by raw dough ingestion was recently launched by U.S. health officials. A strain of bacteria known as Shiga toxin-producing E.coli has infected dozens of people throughout the country. Symptoms of the Shiga toxin-producing E.coli infection can include abdominal cramps as well as diarrhea.

The infection typically only lasts a week, but more severe cases can lead to hemolytic uremic syndrom, which is a type of kidney failure and is more common in children that are under five, adults with weak immune systems, and older people.

Avoid eating raw cookie dough as it can result in food poisoning. For more health safety advice, be sure to visit us at The Benefits Store.

The Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence, located at the University of Portsmouth in England, recently revealed potentially groundbreaking research in regards to the use of a new liquid aspirin in the treatment of brain tumors. There will be 23,770 new brain tumor cases and 16,050 deaths related to brain and nervous system cancers this year in the U.S. alone.

Crossing the Blood-Brain Barrier

According to the research, the newly developed liquid aspirin could cross the blood-brain barrier, which is the coating that prevents foreign substances in the bloodstream from getting into the brain while at the same time allowing essential molecules to pass back and forth from the bloodstream into the brain and vice versa.

This blood-brain barrier makes it extremely difficult to develop a drug to treat brain tumors that could pass through to the brain. Some of the drugs that have been developed in recent years that can destroy tumors in other parts of the body are unable to attack brain tumors because they are unable to get through the blood-brain barrier.

How Liquid Aspirin Can Help Fight Brain Tumors

The liquid aspirin’s name is IP1867B and it combines aspirin with two other ingredients. This is the first time a liquid aspirin has been developed. Previous drugs known as liquid aspirin were not fully soluble – they actually contained small particles of solid aspirin. Because of this, they often caused gastric side effects.

All three ingredients in the new liquid aspirin have been shown to kill tumor cells without damaging healthy brain tissue. Research has shown that it could be extremely effective against glioblastoma, which is one of the most common and devastating types of brain tumors. The drug was tested on cancer cells taken from both adults and children with brain cancer. The ingredients were discovered to be 10 times as effective as any other drug, both individually and in combination, than any currently used drugs.

The new liquid aspirin has already been approved for clinical use. Stay up to date with all the newest health related news by visiting The Benefits Store.

Alzheimer’s disease continues to be a serious problem, especially with experts believing that Alzheimer’s patients will triple in the United States alone by 2050. Because of this, there has been a large effort by the medical community to identify an effective treatment. In fact, a recent study revealed that marijuana may be the key to treating Alzheimer’s.

Beta-Amyloid Proteins and Their Role in Alzheimer’s Disease

The marijuana study was recently published in the Aging and Mechanisms of Disease journal. According to the study, marijuana contains a compound that helps reduce beta-amyloid protein levels. Beta-amyloid is a protein commonly linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Basically, it clumps together within the brain of patients affected by the disease, causing a plaque to form.

Several studies have shown that the plaque caused by the beta-amyloid protein causes a disruption in the communication between the brain’s neurons. This disruption is what’s said to cause the symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s disease, such as memory loss. The problem with attempting to prevent beta-amyloid proteins from accumulating is that researches are still unfamiliar with the exact process that the protein has in the development of Alzheimer’s.

How Marijuana Can Help Treat Alzheimer’s Disease

The research team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, found that an increase in beta-amyloid production led to the increased expression of pro-inflammatory proteins in the nerve cells. This, in turn, would cause both inflammation and nerve cell death. Inflammation is something that has always been associated with Alzheimer’s, but most researchers believed that this was being caused by immune-like cells within the brain and not the actual nerve cells.

How does marijuana fit into all of this? Marijuana contains THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which are similar to endocannabinoids, which are naturally produced by nerve cells to help aid nerve cell signaling. Basically, researchers figured out that marijuana could reduce the levels of beta-amyloid and eliminate the inflammation caused by the protein.

It turns out that marijuana could be extremely useful in helping treat Alzheimer’s disease. For more health-related news, visit us at The Benefits Store today.

According to state officials, UnitedHealth Group Inc. will be leaving California’s insurance exchange at the end of this year. UnitedHealth is the largest health insurer in the nation. They have decided to drop out of all but a few of the 34 health insurance marketplaces that it was participating in. They have yet to discuss their plans in California and their existing policies will remain in effect until the end of the year.

UnitedHealth will most likely continue to offer coverage to California employers as well as to government workers and their families via the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Stephen Hemsley, the Chief Executive of UnitedHealth, released a statement back in April announcing that the company was no longer willing to keep losing money on the health insurance exchange business. He claimed that UnitedHealth would not be able to serve the market on an effective and sustained basis because of the smaller size and the short-term, high-risk profile of the market segment.

UnitedHealth had only joined the California exchange this year. This means that their withdrawal will not have too big of an impact considering that they only had 1,200 enrollees. According to the California Department of Managed Health Care, as of April 27th, UnitedHealth did not have any individual policyholders that existed outside of the exchange. However, critics of the Affordable Care Act are using the insurer’s exit from California, which is a high-profile state, as evidence that health-law insurance exchanges are not financially sustainable. This claim has been rebuked by the President’s administration, who have pointed out that the number of health plans that offer exchange policies have actually increased since they launched back in 2014.

There are around 1.4 million people enrolled in the state’s insurance exchange — and unlike other states, large insurance companies have reported profits from selling on California’s marketplace in part because they have one of the healthiest risk pools in the nation. For additional information about the state of the health insurance industry in California or for all health insurance–related news, be sure to visit us at the Benefits Store today.

Image credited to  Katherine Welles / Shutterstock.com