As the year winds down, sunset arrives earlier in the day. If you want to see just when darkness will fall next, just type the word “sunset” and your current ZIP code into the search box on the Google or Yahoo home page and hit the Enter key to see the time of the next sunset displayed at the top of the results page. Typing “sunrise” brings up the time of the next day’s first light. If your browser is set to use your computer or mobile device’s location data, you do not even need to include your ZIP code in the search box because the search engine already knows where you are.
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France Grants Its Recognition to Syria Rebels as U.S. Waits
Label: World
Javier Manzano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Smoke billowed from burning tires as a Syria rebel fired towards regime forces during clashes in the Al-Amariya district of Aleppo in Syria on Tuesday.
PARIS — Syrian authorities ordered airstrikes for a third straight day close to the Turkish border on Wednesday, and said a French decision to recognize and consider arming a newly formed Syrian rebel coalition was an “immoral” act “encouraging the destruction of Syria.”
The French move represented an attempt to inject momentum into a broad Western and Arab effort to build a viable and effective opposition to hasten the end of a stalemated civil war which has destabilized the Middle East. For its part, the United States on Wednesday signaled a reluctance to go beyond its characterization of the rebel alliance as a legitimate representative of the Syrian people, rather than as their sole representative.
Speaking in Perth, Australia, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington first wanted to see the coalition influencing events on the ground.
“As the Syrian opposition takes these steps and demonstrates its effectiveness in advancing the cause of a unified, democratic, pluralistic Syria, we will be prepared to work with them to deliver assistance to the Syrian people,” news reports quoted her saying.
At the same time, she announced $30 million in American humanitarian aid to feed people affected by the civil war, bringing the total American assistance to almost $200 million.
The airstrikes on Wednesday underscored the urgency of the diplomatic maneuvers. Journalists along the 550-mile border between Turkey and Syria near the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar said they witnessed a Syrian airstrike in the adjacent Syrian town of Ras al-Ain, where rebels say they have ousted troops loyal to Mr. Assad. It was the third such strike there in as many days.
In response, Reuters reported, Turkey scrambled fighter jets to its southeastern border with Syria, recalling Turkey’s insistence that it will not refrain from a tougher reaction against Syria.
The official SANA news agency in Syria made no direct reference to the Western moves. But the deputy foreign minister, Faisal Muqdad, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that the establishment of the opposition coalition in Doha, Qatar, was a “ declaration of war.” "We read the Doha document and they reject any dialogue with the government."
Referring to the French recognition of the alliance, he said: “Allow me to use the word, this is an immoral position. They are supporting killers, terrorists and they are encouraging the destruction of Syria.”The announcement by President François Hollande on Tuesday made France the first Western country to fully embrace the new coalition, which came together this past weekend under Western pressure after days of difficult negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
The goal was to make an opposition leadership — both inside and outside the country — representative of the array of Syrian groups pressing for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad. Although Mr. Assad is increasingly isolated as his country descends further into mayhem and despair after 20 months of conflict, he has survived partly because of the disagreements and lack of unity among his opponents. Throughout the conflict, the West has taken half measures and been reluctant to back an aggressive effort to oust Mr. Assad. This appears to be the first time that Western nations, with Arab allies, are determined to build a viable opposition leadership that can ultimately function as a government. Whether it can succeed remains unclear.
Mr. Hollande went beyond other Western pledges of support for the new Syrian umbrella rebel group, which calls itself the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. But Mr. Hollande’s announcement clearly signaled expectations that if the group can establish political legitimacy and an operational structure inside Syria, creating an alternative to the Assad family’s four decades in power, it will be rewarded with further recognition, money and possibly weapons.
“I announce that France recognizes the Syrian National Coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people and thus as the future provisional government of a democratic Syria and to bring an end to Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” said Mr. Hollande, who has been one of the Syrian president’s harshest critics.
As for weapons, Mr. Hollande said, France had not supported arming the rebels up to now, but “with the coalition, as soon as it is a legitimate government of Syria, this question will be looked at by France, but also by all countries that recognize this government.”
The six Arab countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including key opposition supporters Qatar and Saudi Arabia, recognized the rebel coalition on Monday as the legitimate Syrian government. Political analysts called Mr. Hollande’s announcement an important moment in the Syrian conflict, which began as a peaceful Arab Spring uprising in March 2011. It was harshly suppressed by Mr. Assad, turned into a civil war and has left nearly 40,000 Syrians dead, displaced about 2.5 million and forced more than 400,000 to flee to neighboring countries, according to international relief agencies.
False Posts on Facebook Undermine Its Credibility
Label: Business
SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.
But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”
The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.
Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.
Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”
Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.
The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.
Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.
Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.
Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.
Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.
In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.
“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.
But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.
Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.
Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
The election season seems to have increased the fakery.
Lance Armstrong Cuts Officials Ties With His Livestrong Charity
Label: Health
In the wake of being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, Lance Armstrong last week cut all official ties with Livestrong, the charity he founded 15 years ago while he was treated for testicular cancer.
On Nov. 4, he resigned from the organization’s board of directors; he had previously stepped down as the chairman of the board Oct. 17. He has distanced himself from the charity to try to protect it from any damage caused by his doping controversy, the new board chairman, Jeff Garvey, said in a statement.
“Lance Armstrong was instrumental in changing the way the world views people affected by cancer,” Garvey said. “His devotion to serving survivors is unparalleled, and for 15 years, he committed himself to that cause with all his heart.”
Garvey said that the Armstrong family had donated nearly $7 million to the foundation and that the organization under Armstrong had raised close to $300 million to serve cancer survivors.
Last month, the United States Anti-Doping Agency made public its evidence in its doping case against Armstrong, saying he had doped and encouraged his teammates to dope so they could help him win races. He was subsequently barred from Olympic sports for life and was stripped of all the cycling titles he won from August 1998 on.
Since then, Armstrong has spent several weeks in Hawaii, out of the public eye. On Saturday, though, he posted a photograph on Twitter showing him at home in Austin, Tex. He is lounging on a couch with his seven yellow Tour jerseys framed on the wall in the background.
In the post, he said, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” The photograph had more than 400,000 page views as of Monday evening, with many people posting negative comments on the page.
“Lance, you have no moral conscious and it’s obvious many of your followers don’t either,” said one person who went by the Twitter handle “irobot,” who also posted that Armstrong needed “professional help.”
A person posting under the name “Aumann” said: “An art thief enjoying all his da Vincis.”
Other people posted words of support, including many who said they still thought Armstrong was the top cyclist in history.
“TomShelton” said of Armstrong’s seven Tour titles, “You earned all 7 of them no matter what is being said about you!”
Lance Armstrong Cuts Officials Ties With His Livestrong Charity
Label: Lifestyle
In the wake of being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, Lance Armstrong last week cut all official ties with Livestrong, the charity he founded 15 years ago while he was treated for testicular cancer.
On Nov. 4, he resigned from the organization’s board of directors; he had previously stepped down as the chairman of the board Oct. 17. He has distanced himself from the charity to try to protect it from any damage caused by his doping controversy, the new board chairman, Jeff Garvey, said in a statement.
“Lance Armstrong was instrumental in changing the way the world views people affected by cancer,” Garvey said. “His devotion to serving survivors is unparalleled, and for 15 years, he committed himself to that cause with all his heart.”
Garvey said that the Armstrong family had donated nearly $7 million to the foundation and that the organization under Armstrong had raised close to $300 million to serve cancer survivors.
Last month, the United States Anti-Doping Agency made public its evidence in its doping case against Armstrong, saying he had doped and encouraged his teammates to dope so they could help him win races. He was subsequently barred from Olympic sports for life and was stripped of all the cycling titles he won from August 1998 on.
Since then, Armstrong has spent several weeks in Hawaii, out of the public eye. On Saturday, though, he posted a photograph on Twitter showing him at home in Austin, Tex. He is lounging on a couch with his seven yellow Tour jerseys framed on the wall in the background.
In the post, he said, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” The photograph had more than 400,000 page views as of Monday evening, with many people posting negative comments on the page.
“Lance, you have no moral conscious and it’s obvious many of your followers don’t either,” said one person who went by the Twitter handle “irobot,” who also posted that Armstrong needed “professional help.”
A person posting under the name “Aumann” said: “An art thief enjoying all his da Vincis.”
Other people posted words of support, including many who said they still thought Armstrong was the top cyclist in history.
“TomShelton” said of Armstrong’s seven Tour titles, “You earned all 7 of them no matter what is being said about you!”
False Posts on Facebook Undermine Its Credibility
Label: Technology
SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.
But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”
The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.
Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.
Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”
Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.
The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.
Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.
Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.
Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.
Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.
In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.
“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.
But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.
Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.
Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
The election season seems to have increased the fakery.
Afghan Warlord Ismail Khan’s Call to Arms Rattles Kabul
Label: World
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Mujahedeen commanders at a gathering in Herat, Afghanistan, to address the threat to security posed by the Taliban.
HERAT, Afghanistan — One of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders in Afghanistan, Ismail Khan, is calling on his followers to reorganize and defend the country against the Taliban as Western militaries withdraw, in a public demonstration of faltering confidence in the national government and the Western-built Afghan National Army.
Mr. Khan is one of the strongest of a group of warlords who defined the country’s recent history in battling the Soviets, the Taliban and one another, and who then were brought into President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet as a symbol of unity. Now, in announcing that he is remobilizing his forces, Mr. Khan has rankled Afghan officials and stoked fears that other regional and factional leaders will follow suit and rearm, weakening support for the government and increasing the likelihood of civil war.
This month, Mr. Khan rallied thousands of his supporters in the desert outside Herat, the cultured western provincial capital and the center of his power base, urging them to coordinate and reactivate their networks. And he has begun enlisting new recruits and organizing district command structures.
“We are responsible for maintaining security in our country and not letting Afghanistan be destroyed again,” Mr. Khan, the minister of energy and water, said at a news conference over the weekend at his office in Kabul. But after facing criticism, he took care not to frame his action as defying the government: “There are parts of the country where the government forces cannot operate, and in such areas the locals should step forward, take arms and defend the country.”
President Karzai and his aides, however, were not greeting it as an altruistic gesture. The governor of Herat Province called Mr. Khan’s reorganization an illegal challenge to the national security forces. And Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, tersely criticized Mr. Khan.
“The remarks by Ismail Khan do not reflect the policies of the Afghan government,” Mr. Faizi said. “The government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people do not want any irresponsible armed grouping outside the legitimate security forces structures.”
In Kabul, Mr. Khan’s provocative actions have played out in the news media and brought a fierce reaction from some members of Parliament, who said the warlords were preparing to take advantage of the American troop withdrawal set for 2014.
“People like Ismail Khan smell blood,” Belqis Roshan, a senator from Farah Province, said in an interview. “They think that as soon as foreign forces leave Afghanistan, once again they will get the chance to start a civil war, and achieve their ominous goals of getting rich and terminating their local rivals.”
Indeed, Mr. Khan’s is not the only voice calling for a renewed alliance of the mujahedeen against the Taliban, and some of the others are just as familiar.
Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, an ethnic Tajik commander who is President Karzai’s first vice president, said in a speech in September, “If the Afghan security forces are not able to wage this war, then call upon the mujahedeen.”
Another prominent mujahedeen fighter, Ahmad Zia Massoud, said in an interview at his home in Kabul that people were worried about what was going to happen after 2014, and he was telling his own followers to make preliminary preparations.
“They don’t want to be disgraced again,” Mr. Massoud said. “Everyone tries to have some sort of Plan B. Some people are on the verge of rearming.”
He pointed out that it was significant that the going market price of Kalashnikov assault rifles had risen to about $1,000, driven up by demand from a price of $300 a decade ago. “Every household wants to have an AK-47 at home,” he said.
“The mujahedeen come here to meet me,” Mr. Massoud added. “They tell me they are preparing. They are trying to find weapons. They come from villages, from the north of Afghanistan, even some people from the suburbs of Kabul, and say they are taking responsibility for providing private security in their neighborhood.”
I.H.T. Special Report: Oil & Money: China Leads the Way as Demand for Coal Surges Worldwide
Label: Business
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
Coal piles behind a yurt in Gobi, Mongolia. Coal remains a critical component of the world’s energy supply, despite its bad image.
RICHMOND, Va. — Last summer, nearly half of India’s sweltering population suddenly found the electricity shut off. Air-conditioners whirred to a stop. Refrigerators ceased cooling. The culprits were outmoded power generation stations and a creaky electricity transmission grid.
But another problem stood out. India relies on coal for 55 percent of its electrical power and struggles to keep enough on hand.
Coal remains a critical component of the world’s energy supply, despite its bad image. In China, demand for coal in 2010 resulted in a traffic jam 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, long caused by more than 10,000 trucks carrying supplies from Inner Mongolia. India is increasing coal imports.
So is Europe, as it takes advantage of lower coal prices in the United States. Higher-priced natural gas on the Continent is creating demand for more coal imports from the United States, where coal is taking a drubbing from less costly natural gas.
Dirty, fickle and dangerous, coal may seem an odd contender in a world where promising renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydroelectric power are attracting attention. Anathema to environmentalists because it creates so much pollution, coal still has the undeniable advantages of being widely available and easy to ship and burn.
The biggest attraction, however, is low cost. By many estimates, including that of Li Junfeng, longtime director general of the National Development and Reform Commission of China, burning coal still costs about one-third as much as using renewable energy like wind or solar.
Coal is not subject to the vagaries of windless or sunless days and can easily meet base-load demands of electricity consumers without interruption. So can nuclear power, but the nuclear industry is still reeling from the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. Countries like Germany have turned away from nuclear reactors.
Global demand for coal is expected to grow from 7.9 billion tons this year to 8.9 billion tons by 2016, with the bulk of new demand — about 700 million tons — coming from China, according to a Peabody Energy study. China is expected to add 240 gigawatts, the equivalent of adding about 160 new coal-fired plants to the 620 operating now, within four years. During that period, India will add another 70 gigawatts, via more than 46 plants.
“If you poke your head outside of the U.S., coal-fired plants are being built left and right,” said William Burns, an energy analyst with Johnson Rice in New Orleans. “Coal is still the cheapest fuel source.”
Besides strong demand for thermal coal, which is burned in power plants, use of metallurgical coal or coking coal, used in blast furnaces, is also expected to more than double in China, to about 1.7 billion metric tons by 2016, as the country’s steel mills churn out more steel for automobiles, skyscrapers, and export goods, the Peabody study says.
Coking coal will be increasingly in demand in other steel centers like Brazil and India, pushing coal companies to scrounge for new reserves in places like Botswana, Mongolia and Mozambique.
In all, coal use is expected to increase 50 percent by 2035, said Milton Catelin, executive director of the London-based World Coal Association
“Last year, coal represented 30 percent of world energy and that’s the highest share it has had since 1969,” he said.
Within a year or two, coal will surpass oil as the planet’s primary fuel, Mr. Catelin predicted.
For now, coal seems to be sidestepping a major potential impediment to its use. International accords restricting greenhouse gas emissions to prevent climate change so far have been ineffective.
China plans to put carbon-emission reducing equipment on new plants. But China and other big coal producers still have a long way to go in matters like mine safety. On average, about 2,500 Chinese coal miners die in accidents every year.
On Aug. 29, for instance, a blast at the Xiaojiawan mine in Sichuan province killed more than 40 miners. Officials blamed lax safety and overcrowding in the shafts.
Industry officials insist that as large Chinese coal companies like the Shenhua Group buy out smaller mines, and new technologies develop that can detect dangerous methane gas and automatically shut down mines, safety will improve.
Nowhere are the controversies surrounding coal more pronounced than in the United States. Coal became an important issue in the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, with the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, accusing President Barack Obama of being anti-coal.
The American coal industry says Mr. Obama is waging a “war on coal” in response to his proposed regulation of air pollution and surface mining in mountain areas.
Well: Can Foods Affect Colon Cancer Survival?
Label: HealthA new study suggests that what you eat may affect your chances of surviving colon cancer.
The research is among the first to look at the impact that specific nutrients have on the likelihood of disease recurrence in people with colon cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death in the United States. It found that people treated for Stage 3 disease, in which tumor cells have spread to lymph nodes, had greatly increased chances of dying of it or experiencing a recurrence if their diets were heavy in carbohydrate-rich foods that cause spikes in blood sugar and insulin.
The patients who consumed the most carbohydrates and foods with high glycemic loads — a measure of the extent to which a serving of food will raise blood sugar — had an 80 percent greater chance of dying or having a recurrence during the roughly seven-year study period than those who had the lowest levels. Stage 3 colon cancer patients typically have a five-year survival rate of about 50 to 65 percent.
The study, however, was observational, meaning it could only highlight an association between carbohydrates and cancer outcomes without proving direct cause and effect. The researchers also obtained some of their data from food questionnaires that required patients to recall details about their diets, a method that can be unreliable.
Still, the researchers, who published their findings in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, believe insulin may play a critical role in colon cancer recurrence. Chronically high insulin levels have been linked to cancer recurrence and mortality in previous research, and people with a history of Type 2 diabetes or elevated plasma C-peptide, a marker of long-term insulin production, have also been found to have an increased risk of colon cancer. One hypothesis is that insulin may fuel the growth of cancer cells and prevent cell death, or apoptosis, in cancer cells that have spread.
“It’s not simply that all carbs are bad or that you should avoid all sugar,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Meyerhardt, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. It’s not as simple as ‘sugar causes cancer to grow.’”
He added: “Different carbs and sugar lead to different responses in your body. I think people should focus on a well-balanced diet” and substitute foods associated with lower glycemic loads or carbs for foods that have higher levels.
Earlier research published by Dr. Meyerhardt’s group showed that Stage 3 colon cancer patients who most closely followed a Western-style diet — with high intakes of meat, fat, refined grains and sugary desserts — had a threefold increase in recurrence and death from the disease compared with those who most strongly deviated from Western patterns of eating.
For this study, Dr. Meyerhardt and his team wanted to see to what extent carbohydrate intake could influence the progression of the disease, so they followed about 1,000 Stage 3 colon cancer patients taking part in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. The patients, who had all had surgery and chemotherapy as part of their treatments, provided information on their diets and lifestyle habits. But the researchers went beyond just carbohydrate and sugar intake, taking into account glycemic measures.
The glycemic index, an increasingly popular nutritional measure, looks at the rate at which carbohydrate-containing foods raise a person’s fasting level of blood sugar and subsequent need for insulin. Sugary drinks, white bread and other highly processed carbohydrates rank higher on the index, while those that are digested more slowly, like brown rice, many vegetables, unrefined grains and legumes, have a lower index value.
Another barometer, however, is the glycemic load, which refers to the blood sugar effect of a standard serving of a food. A glycemic load of 10 or less for a food is generally considered low, while 20 or more is high. The latest study showed that glycemic load and total carbohydrate intake were the best predictors of cancer recurrence and mortality, and the link was strongest in people who were overweight or obese.
Dr. Meyerhardt said the findings suggest that colon cancer patients would be wise to keep glycemic load in mind while making food decisions, looking for ways to work into their diets foods that rank lower on the scale.
“So if you think about beverages, most juices and certainly sodas have a higher glycemic load than flavored waters and tomato juice and things like that,” he said. “Fruits like a date or raisins have very high glycemic loads, whereas fresh fruits like an apple, orange or cantaloupe all have sugar but have a very low glycemic load. Substitute brown rice for white, whole grains instead of white bread, and instead of having a starchy potato as your side dish, substitute beans and vegetables.”
One expert who was not involved in the research, Somdat Mahabir, a nutritional epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute’s division of cancer control and population sciences, said the findings from the latest study must be borne out in further research. But in the meantime, making dietary changes that reduce glycemic load is a reasonable recommendation for colon cancer patients, he said, since it can only be helpful, not harmful.
“The results of the current study need to be confirmed, but the current indications are that diet is important to colon cancer survival,” Dr. Mahabir said.
Well: Can Foods Affect Colon Cancer Survival?
Label: LifestyleA new study suggests that what you eat may affect your chances of surviving colon cancer.
The research is among the first to look at the impact that specific nutrients have on the likelihood of disease recurrence in people with colon cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death in the United States. It found that people treated for Stage 3 disease, in which tumor cells have spread to lymph nodes, had greatly increased chances of dying of it or experiencing a recurrence if their diets were heavy in carbohydrate-rich foods that cause spikes in blood sugar and insulin.
The patients who consumed the most carbohydrates and foods with high glycemic loads — a measure of the extent to which a serving of food will raise blood sugar — had an 80 percent greater chance of dying or having a recurrence during the roughly seven-year study period than those who had the lowest levels. Stage 3 colon cancer patients typically have a five-year survival rate of about 50 to 65 percent.
The study, however, was observational, meaning it could only highlight an association between carbohydrates and cancer outcomes without proving direct cause and effect. The researchers also obtained some of their data from food questionnaires that required patients to recall details about their diets, a method that can be unreliable.
Still, the researchers, who published their findings in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, believe insulin may play a critical role in colon cancer recurrence. Chronically high insulin levels have been linked to cancer recurrence and mortality in previous research, and people with a history of Type 2 diabetes or elevated plasma C-peptide, a marker of long-term insulin production, have also been found to have an increased risk of colon cancer. One hypothesis is that insulin may fuel the growth of cancer cells and prevent cell death, or apoptosis, in cancer cells that have spread.
“It’s not simply that all carbs are bad or that you should avoid all sugar,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Meyerhardt, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. It’s not as simple as ‘sugar causes cancer to grow.’”
He added: “Different carbs and sugar lead to different responses in your body. I think people should focus on a well-balanced diet” and substitute foods associated with lower glycemic loads or carbs for foods that have higher levels.
Earlier research published by Dr. Meyerhardt’s group showed that Stage 3 colon cancer patients who most closely followed a Western-style diet — with high intakes of meat, fat, refined grains and sugary desserts — had a threefold increase in recurrence and death from the disease compared with those who most strongly deviated from Western patterns of eating.
For this study, Dr. Meyerhardt and his team wanted to see to what extent carbohydrate intake could influence the progression of the disease, so they followed about 1,000 Stage 3 colon cancer patients taking part in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. The patients, who had all had surgery and chemotherapy as part of their treatments, provided information on their diets and lifestyle habits. But the researchers went beyond just carbohydrate and sugar intake, taking into account glycemic measures.
The glycemic index, an increasingly popular nutritional measure, looks at the rate at which carbohydrate-containing foods raise a person’s fasting level of blood sugar and subsequent need for insulin. Sugary drinks, white bread and other highly processed carbohydrates rank higher on the index, while those that are digested more slowly, like brown rice, many vegetables, unrefined grains and legumes, have a lower index value.
Another barometer, however, is the glycemic load, which refers to the blood sugar effect of a standard serving of a food. A glycemic load of 10 or less for a food is generally considered low, while 20 or more is high. The latest study showed that glycemic load and total carbohydrate intake were the best predictors of cancer recurrence and mortality, and the link was strongest in people who were overweight or obese.
Dr. Meyerhardt said the findings suggest that colon cancer patients would be wise to keep glycemic load in mind while making food decisions, looking for ways to work into their diets foods that rank lower on the scale.
“So if you think about beverages, most juices and certainly sodas have a higher glycemic load than flavored waters and tomato juice and things like that,” he said. “Fruits like a date or raisins have very high glycemic loads, whereas fresh fruits like an apple, orange or cantaloupe all have sugar but have a very low glycemic load. Substitute brown rice for white, whole grains instead of white bread, and instead of having a starchy potato as your side dish, substitute beans and vegetables.”
One expert who was not involved in the research, Somdat Mahabir, a nutritional epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute’s division of cancer control and population sciences, said the findings from the latest study must be borne out in further research. But in the meantime, making dietary changes that reduce glycemic load is a reasonable recommendation for colon cancer patients, he said, since it can only be helpful, not harmful.
“The results of the current study need to be confirmed, but the current indications are that diet is important to colon cancer survival,” Dr. Mahabir said.
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