Stay happy by avoiding junk food, says study

Feeling blue? Drop the burger and donuts.
While junk food and processed foods may provide a dose of instant gratification, Spanish researchers say they’ve found a direct link between the consumption of fast food and depression.
After observing 8,964 participants over six months, scientists found that consumers of fast food were 51 percent more likely to develop depression. And the more they ate, the greater the risk.
Their findings, published in the March issue of Public Health Nutrition, reveal a grim portrait of the junk food binger: single, inactive, with poor dietary habits like eating less fruit, nuts, fish, vegetables and olive oil.
They also tend to be smokers who work more than 45 hours a week.
While the chosen participants had never been diagnosed with depression or taken anti-depressants, by the end of the study 493 were diagnosed with the condition or started to take mild anti-depressants.
Even eating small quantities of processed foods like pre-packaged cakes and hot dogs is linked to a significantly higher chance of developing depression, researchers said.
The latest study builds on previous research from the same group which found that while trans fats and saturated fats have been linked to an increased risk of depression, olive oil can actually protect against mental illness.
Meanwhile, WebMD.com offers a list of mood-boosting foods which also happen to be rich in vitamins and nutrients.
For example, look for foods rich in folic acid like beans and spinach, and fish, lean poultry and dairy, which are good sources of vitamin B12, two nutrients which have been shown to help keep mood disorders at bay.
Strong evidence has also linked depression to deficiency in Vitamin D –- better known as the sunshine vitamin. Dietary sources include fatty fish, beef liver, cheese and egg yolks.
And for an instant mood lift, treat yourself to a small piece of dark chocolate, which releases the feel-good endorphins that can send people on a momentary, all-natural high.

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Aging in America Conference Attendees Told Who Will 'Transform Aging'

The American Society on Aging held its annual Aging in America Conference that ended Sunday in Washington. The Sunday general session answered concerns about how aging will change within the decade.
Aging in America 2012 Conference
The conference is held each year to allow those interested in aging and older adults to come together to talk, learn and advocate for their various agencies, businesses and institutions, as explained in the conference introduction. Three thousand attendees were expected for the event. With 80 million Americans reaching age 65 from 2011 to 2029, all aspects of American life will be affected, just as they have been throughout the lifetimes of the baby boomer generation.
Putting Effects of Baby Boomer Aging into Perspective
Ken Dychtwald, CEO of AgeWave and noted gerontologist, was one of the panel of presenters at the conference. Dychtwald said just as hospitals, pediatricians, schools and other institutions were strained by the volume of those people born from 1946 to 1964, so it is with health care and geriatric medicine today, according to the Huffington Post.
Solutions for Dealing with Aging and the Future
Baby boomers have done more than strain institutions and budgets throughout the decades. As Dychtwald stated, "Anyone who thinks (the boomers) will turn 65 and be the same as the generation before are missing out on the last 60 years of sociology. The boomers change every stage of life through which they migrate."
Rhonda Randall, chief medical officer of United Healthcare, said the single biggest factor driving the cost of health care upward is the care required for chronic diseases. Preventive care is becoming increasingly important -- and covered -- by health insurance providers.
Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatter reported Dychtwald's proposed solutions for the future in CrescentNews.com: Americans need to take control of their health by avoiding unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking and becoming/remaining overweight; more funding is needed for scientific research to eliminate, control and cure diseases affecting older adults; and more health care professionals need to be better versed in health and lifestyle issues associated with aging.
Smack dab in the middle of the baby boomer generation, L.L. Woodard is a proud resident of "The Red Man" state. With what he hopes is an everyman's view of life's concerns both in his state and throughout the nation, Woodard presents facts and opinions based on common-sense solutions.

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How to Communicate with Younger Colleagues

How to Communicate with Younger Colleagues
In today's workforce, baby boomers constantly interact with younger co-workers and managers. These younger workers have been raised in a generation of social media, with connectivity always and everywhere. Individuals constantly update their status and current events via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, texting, and other technologies. If anything new or unexpected occurs, friends are notified immediately. This tendency to constantly update and make on-the-fly changes sometimes leads to reluctance to meet commitments for meetings and appointments.
When baby boomers were young, our technology was pretty basic. We called each other from a land line, mail was in written form and took days to arrive, and "being connected" meant you knew people, rather than were accessible 24/7. Making plans required planning in advance, and last-minute changes happened only for emergencies. Our lives may have seemed less flexible, but we generally met commitments and arrived on time.
With the advent of today's smart phones, people are perpetually connected. Why worry about making changes in advance when, with a quick text, plans are easily altered at the last moment. It is a new way of thinking. Being late has become acceptable as long as you warn your companion before the actual hour ticks by. Fewer people feel obligated to honor specific time commitments since they can quickly make changes on the fly. Without feeling a need to stick to a scheduled event, a mindset develops that accepts last-minute changes as the norm, often frustrating those patiently waiting at the other end.
Have you had the experience of arriving on time only to receive a last minute message that "plans have changed" as your young friend lays out an alternative agenda? Some young people make on-again, off-again arrangements for a visit which changes multiple times until the very last minute. I have learned to write in pencil on my calendar and believe the kids are coming only when they physically walk through the front door.
Another concern is the incredible distraction that perpetual connectivity encourages. Everywhere you go people are using smart phones to communicate and update their status. Lunches are interrupted, conversations misunderstood, and attention is diverted from where it should be directed. Not only does it give the impression that those on the other end are more important than the person you are currently engaged with, but it can be dangerous. Every day I see people texting while driving. There is a time and a place for connectivity. A balance needs to be maintained if we are to best interact with each other.
Respect for each other's time and busy life is a basic tenant of living and working together harmoniously. Calendars are typically packed with events for the weeks and months ahead as we carefully monitor and balance free time with our obligations. We count on others to be there when they say, and that most changes will be made in advance.
This new lifestyle with instant access everywhere is not a bad thing. It is a powerful technology with broad applications that can be more effective if better controlled and managed. Baby boomers should attempt to understand that this is how the younger generation operates and adapt accordingly. If you have an appointment, reconfirm as the date gets closer. If you experience a last-minute change of plans, don't get angry. At least you were made aware of the delay and understand what is happening, rather than wondering what is up. Feel free to inform others that you are a bit of a stickler when it comes to being on time, but realize that you may be in the minority. Since it appears that perpetual connectivity is here to stay, a little tolerance can go a long way.

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Cave Artists Had Leg Up On Moderns

Who was the better artist, a caveman or Leonardo da Vinci? It turns out that early depictions of four-legged animals walking are more accurate in some ways than modern ones—even those crafted by the Renaissance master. The study is in the journal PLoS ONE. [Gabor Horvath et al, Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today] Without fancy cameras, we two-leggers can have trouble visualizing the sequence of leg motion in a quadruped's gait. Hungarian scientists recently analyzed a thousand statues, paintings and other art created in prehistory or more recently. Specifically, the researchers checked how the legs of ostensibly moving quadrupeds hit the ground, to see if these depictions matched actual animal locomotion. Of course, 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge famously captured a horse's motion in stop-motion photographs. Artwork in the centuries prior to his photos got the legs wrong 84 percent of the time. The error rate dropped to 58 percent after his photos came out. But prehistoric artists topped all with just a 46 percent error rate. Perhaps those cave painters paid such close attention to detail because they wanted to avoid being starving artists.

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Women can tell a cheating man just by looking at them: study

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Women can tell with some accuracy whether an unfamiliar male is faithful simply by looking at his face, but men seem to lack the same ability when checking out women, according to an Australian study published on Wednesday.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that women tended to make that judgment based on how masculine-looking the man was.

"Women's ratings of unfaithfulness showed small-moderate, significant correlations with measures of actual infidelity," wrote the team, led by Gillian Rhodes at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

"More masculine-looking men (were) rated as more probable to be unfaithful and having a sexual history of being more unfaithful."

Attractiveness was not a factor in the women making the link.

In the study, 34 men and 34 women were shown colour photographs of 189 Caucasian adult faces and asked to rate them for faithfulness.

The researchers compared their answers to the self-reported sexual histories of the 189 individuals and found that the women participants were better able to tell who was faithful and who was not.

"We provide the first evidence that faithfulness judgments, based solely on facial appearance, have a kernel of truth," they wrote in the paper.

Men, on the other hand, seemed to have no clue. They tended to perceive attractive, feminine women to be unfaithful, when there was no evidence that they were, the scientists noted.

Faithfulness is seen as important in the context of sexual relationships and mate choice, the scientists wrote in the paper. Men with unfaithful partners risk raising another man's child, while women with unfaithful partners risk losing some, or even all, parental and other resources to competitors.

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Trafficked maids to order: The darker side of richer India

NEW DELHI, Dec 4 (TrustLaw) - Inside the crumbling housing estates of Shivaji Enclave, amid the boys playing cricket and housewives chatting from their balconies, winding staircases lead to places where lies a darker side to India's economic boom.

Three months ago, police rescued Theresa Kerketa from one of these tiny two-roomed flats. For four years, she was kept here by a placement agency for domestic maids, in between stints as a virtual slave to Delhi's middle-class homes.

"They sent me many places - I don't even know the names of the areas," said Kerketa, 45, from a village in Chhattisgarh state in central India. "Fifteen days here, one month there. The placement agent kept making excuses and kept me working. She took all my salary."

Often beaten and locked in the homes she was sent to, Kerketa was forced to work long hours and denied contact with her family. She was not informed when her father and husband died. The police eventually found her when a concerned relative went to a local charity, which traced the agency and rescued her together with the police.

Abuse of migrant maids from Africa and Asia in the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia is commonly reported.

But the story of Kerketa is the story of many maids and nannies in India, where a surging demand for domestic help is fuelling a business that, in large part, thrives on human trafficking by unregulated placement agencies.

As long as there are no laws to regulate the placement agencies or even define the rights of India's unofficially estimated 90 million domestic workers, both traffickers and employers may act with impunity, say child and women's rights activists and government officials.

Activists say the offences are on the rise and link it directly to the country's economic boom over the last two decades.

"Demand for maids is increasing because of the rising incomes of families who now have money to pay for people to cook, clean and look after their children," says Bhuwan Ribhu from Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement), the charity that helped rescue Kerketa.

Economic reforms that began in the early 1990s have transformed the lifestyles of many Indian families. Now almost 30 percent of India's 1.2 billion people are middle class and this is expected to surge to 45 percent by 2020.

Yet as people get wealthier, more women go out to work and more and more families live on their own without relatives to help them, the voracious demand for maids has outstripped supply.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

There are no reliable figures for how many people are trafficked for domestic servitude. The Indian government says 126,321 trafficked children were rescued from domestic work in 2011/12, a rise of almost 27 percent from the previous year. Activists say if you include women over 18 years, the figure could run into the hundreds of thousands.

The abuse is difficult to detect as it is hidden within average houses and apartments, and under-reported, because victims are often too fearful to go to the police. There were 3,517 incidents relating to human trafficking in India in 2011, says the National Crime Records Bureau, compared to 3,422 the previous year.

Conviction rates for typical offences related to trafficking - bonded labor, sexual exploitation, child labor and illegal confinement - are also low at around 20 percent. Cases can take up to two years to come to trial, by which time victims have returned home and cannot afford to return to come to court. Police investigations can be shoddy due to a lack of training and awareness about the seriousness of the crime.

Under pressure from civil society groups as well as media reports of cases of women and children trafficked not just to be maids, but also for prostitution and industrial labor, authorities have paid more attention in recent years.

In 2011, the government began setting up specialized anti-human trafficking units in police stations throughout the country.

There are now 225 units and another 110 due next year whose job it is to collect intelligence, maintain a database of offenders, investigate reports of missing persons and partner with charities in raids to rescue victims.

Parveen Kumari, director in charge of anti-trafficking at the ministry of home affairs, says so far, around 1,500 victims have been rescued from brick kilns, carpet weaving and embroidery factories, brothels, placement agencies and houses.

"We realize trafficking is a bigger issue now with greater demand for labor in the cities and these teams will help," said Kumari. "The placement agencies are certainly under the radar."

NATIONAL HEADLINES

The media is full of reports of minors and women lured from their villages by promises of a good life as maids in the cities. They are often sent by agencies to work in homes in Delhi, and its satellite towns such as Noida and Gurgaon, where they face a myriad of abuses.

In April, a 13-year-old maid heard crying for help from the balcony of a second floor flat in a residential complex in Delhi's Dwarka area became a national cause célèbre.

The girl, from Jharkhand state, had been locked in for six days while her employers went holidaying in Thailand. She was starving and had bruises all over her body.

The child, who had been sold by a placement agency, is now in a government boarding school as her parents are too poor to look after her. The employers deny maltreatment, and the case is under investigation, said Shakti Vahini, the Delhi-based child rights charity which helped rescue her.

In October, the media reported the plight of a 16-year-old girl from Assam, who was also rescued by police and Shakti Vahini from a house in Delhi's affluent Punjabi Bagh area. She had been kept inside the home for four years by her employer, a doctor. She said he would rape her and then give her emergency contraceptive pills. The doctor has disappeared.

ONE ON EVERY BLOCK

Groups like Save the Children and ActionAid estimate there are 2,300 placement agencies in Delhi alone, and less than one-sixth are legitimate.

"There are so many agencies and we hear so many stories, but we are not like that. We don't keep the maids' salaries and all are over 18," said Purno Chander Das, owner of Das Nurse Bureau, which provides nurses and maids in Delhi's Tughlakabad village.

The Das Nurse Bureau is registered with authorities - unlike many agencies operating from rented rooms or flats in slums or poorer neighborhoods like Shivaji Enclave in west Delhi. It is often to these places that maids are brought until a job is found.

There are no signboards, but neighbors point out the apartments that house the agencies and talk of the comings and goings of girls who stay for one or two days before being taken away.

"There is at least one agency in every block," says Rohit, a man in his twenties, who lives in one of scores of dilapidated government-built apartment blocks in Shivaji Enclave.

With a commission fee of up to 30,000 rupees ($550) and a maids' monthly salary of up to 5,000 rupees ($90), an agency can make more than $1,500 annually for each girl, say anti-trafficking groups.

A ledger recovered after one police raid, shown by the charity Bachpan Bachao Andolan to Thomson Reuters Foundation, had the names, passport pictures and addresses of 111 girls from villages in far-away states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Assam and Chhattisgarh, most of them minors.

The Delhi state government has written a draft bill to help regulate and monitor placement agencies and has invited civil society groups to provide feedback.

But anti-trafficking groups say what is really needed a country-wide law for these agencies, which are not just mushrooming in cities like Delhi but also Mumbai and other towns and cities.

The legislation would specify minimum wages, proper living and working conditions and a mechanism for financial redress for unpaid salaries. It would also specify that placement agencies keep updated record of all domestic workers which would subject to routine inspection by the labor department.

In the meantime, victims like Theresa Kerketa just want to warn others.

"The agencies and their brokers tell you lies. They trap you in the city where you have no money and know no one," said Kerketa, now staying with a relative in a slum on the outskirts of south Delhi as she awaits compensation.

"I will go back and tell others. It is better to stay in your village, be beaten by your husband and live as a poor person, than come to the city and suffer at the hands of the rich."

(TrustLaw is a global news service covering human rights and governance issues and run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters)

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Fast-growing fish may never wind up on your plate

WASHINGTON (AP) — Salmon that's been genetically modified to grow twice as fast as normal could soon show up on your dinner plate. That is, if the company that makes the fish can stay afloat.

After weathering concerns about everything from the safety of humans eating the salmon to their impact on the environment, Aquabounty was poised to become the world's first company to sell fish whose DNA has been altered to speed up growth.

The Food and Drug Administration in 2010 concluded that Aquabounty's salmon was as safe to eat as the traditional variety. The agency also said that there's little chance that the salmon could escape and breed with wild fish, which could disrupt the fragile relationships between plants and animals in nature. But more than two years later the FDA has not approved the fish, and Aquabounty is running out of money.

"It's threatening our very survival," says CEO Ron Stotish, chief executive of the Maynard, Mass.-based company. "We only have enough money to survive until January 2013, so we have to raise more. But the unexplained delay has made raising money very difficult."

The FDA says it's still working on the final piece of its review, a report on the potential environmental impact of the salmon that must be published for comment before an approval can be issued. That means a final decision could be months, even years away. While the delay could mean that the faster-growing salmon will never wind up on American dinner tables, there's more at stake than seafood.

Aquabounty is the only U.S. company publicly seeking approval for a genetically modified animal that's raised to be eaten by humans. And scientists worry that its experience with the FDA's lengthy review process could discourage other U.S. companies from investing in animal biotechnology, or the science of manipulating animal DNA to produce a desirable trait. That would put the U.S. at a disadvantage at a time when China, India and other foreign governments are pouring millions of dollars each year into the potentially lucrative field that could help reduce food costs and improve food safety.

Already, biotech scientists are changing their plans to avoid getting stuck in FDA-related regulatory limbo. Researchers at the University of California, Davis have transferred an experimental herd of genetically engineered goats that produce protein-enriched milk to Brazil, due to concerns about delays at the FDA. And after investors raised concerns about the slow pace of the FDA's Aquabounty review, Canadian researchers in April pulled their FDA application for a biotech pig that would produce environmentally friendly waste.

"The story of Aquabounty is disappointing because everyone was hoping the company would be a clear signal that genetic modification in animals is now acceptable in the U.S.," said Professor Helen Sang, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who is working to develop genetically modified chickens that are resistant to bird flu. "Because it's gotten so bogged down — and presumably cost AquaBounty a huge amount of money — I think people will be put off."

AGAINST THE CURRENT

The science behind genetic modification is not new. Biotech scientists say that genetic manipulation is a proven way to reduce disease and enrich plants and animals, raising productivity and increasing the global food supply. Genetically modified corn, cotton and soybeans account for more than four-fifths of those crops grown in the U.S., according to the National Academies of Sciences.

But there have always been critics who are wary of tinkering with the genes of living animals. They say the risk is too great that modified organisms can escape into the wild and breed with native species. Not that we don't already eat genetically altered animals. Researchers say the centuries-old practice of selective breeding is its own form of genetic engineering, producing the plumper cows, pigs and poultry we eat today.

"You drive a hybrid car because you want the most efficient vehicle you can have. So why wouldn't you want the most efficient agriculture you can have?" asks Alison Van Eenennaam, a professor of animal science at University of California, Davis.

Aquabounty executives say their aim is to make the U.S. fish farming industry, or aquaculture, more efficient, environmentally friendly and profitable. After all, the U.S. imports about 86 percent of its seafood, in part, because it has a relatively small aquaculture industry. Aquaculture has faced pushback in the U.S. because of concerns about pollution from large fish pens in the ocean, which generate fish waste and leftover food.

Aquabounty executives figure that the U.S. aquaculture industry can be transformed by speeding up the growth of seafood. The company picked Atlantic salmon because they are the most widely consumed salmon in the U.S. and are farmed throughout the world: In 2010, the U.S. imported more than 200,000 tons of Atlantic salmon, worth over $1.5 billion, from countries like Norway, Canada and Chile.

Using gene-manipulating technology, Aquabounty adds a growth hormone to the Atlantic salmon from another type of salmon called the Chinook. The process, company executives say, causes its salmon to reach maturity in about two years, compared with three to four years for a conventional salmon.

Aquabounty executives say if their fish are approved for commercial sale, there are several safeguards designed to prevent the fish from escaping and breeding with wild salmon. The salmon are bred as sterile females. They also are confined to pools where the potential for escape would be low: The inland pens are isolated from natural bodies of water.

And the company says that these pens would be affordable thanks to the fast-growing nature of Aquabounty's fish, which allows farmers to raise more salmon in less time. Overall, the company estimates that it would cost 30 percent less to grow its fish than traditional salmon.

TOUGH SALE

But getting the fish to market hasn't been easy.

The company began discussions with the FDA in 1993. But the agency did not yet have a formal system for reviewing genetically modified food animals.

So Aquabounty spent the next decade conducting more than two dozen studies on everything from the molecular structure of the salmon's DNA to the potential allergic reactions in humans who would eat it. By the time the FDA completed its roadmap for reviewing genetically modified animals in 2009, Aquabounty was the first company to submit its data.

After reviewing the company's data, the FDA said in a public hearing in September of 2010 that Aquabounty's salmon is "as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon." The FDA also said the fish "are not expected to have a significant impact" on the environment.

But as the company has inched toward FDA approval it has faced increasing pushback from natural food advocates, environmentalists and politicians from salmon-producing states. In fact, following the FDA's positive review of the fish, the House of Representatives passed a budget that included language barring the FDA from spending funds to approve a genetically engineered salmon.

"Frankenfish is uncertain and unnecessary," said Rep. Don Young of Alaska, who authored the language. The Senate did not adopt the measure.

Despite such opposition, environmental groups such as the Food and Water Watch say that FDA approval seems inevitable. "We think there is a clear bias toward approving genetically modified animals within the FDA," said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit that promotes environmentally friendly fishing and farming practices. "This thing is trapped in a regulatory process that is predisposed toward approving it."

But the delay could cause Aquabounty to go bankrupt before its salmon reaches supermarkets.

Aquabounty, which started in 1991 focusing on proteins used to preserve human cells, changed direction after acquiring the rights to gene-manipulation technology from researchers at the University of Toronto and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Initial financing came from Boston-area investors and biotech-focused venture capital funds, but the company has burned through more than $67 million since it started.

According to its mid-year financial report, Aquabounty had less than $1.5 million in cash and stock. And it has no other products besides genetically modified salmon in development.

In February, the cash-strapped company agreed to sell its research and development arm to its largest single shareholder, Kakha Bendukidze, a former Republic of Georgia finance minister turned investor, in return for his help raising $2 million in cash to stay afloat. Aquabounty's CEO Stotish fretted that Bendukidze, who controlled nearly 48 percent of Aquabounty's public stock, would move the company overseas. But in October Bendukidze's investment fund sold its shares to Intrexon, a biotech firm headquartered in Germantown, Md.

Stotish views the sale as a positive development, but he still worries that the U.S. government is unwilling to approve the technology at the heart of his company's work.

"This is about more than Aquabounty and more than salmon," Stotish says. "And shame on us if we allow this to slip away because of partisan bickering and people who oppose new technology."

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Tapping citizen-scientists for a novel gut check

WASHINGTON (AP) — The bacterial zoo inside your gut could look very different if you're a vegetarian or an Atkins dieter, a couch potato or an athlete, fat or thin.

Now for a fee — $69 and up — and a stool sample, the curious can find out just what's living in their intestines and take part in one of the hottest new fields in science.

Wait a minute: How many average Joes really want to pay for the privilege of mailing such, er, intimate samples to scientists?

A lot, hope the researchers running two novel citizen-science projects.

One, the American Gut Project, aims to enroll 10,000 people — and a bunch of their dogs and cats too — from around the country. The other, uBiome, separately aims to enroll nearly 2,000 people from anywhere in the world.

"We're finally enabling people to realize the power and value of bacteria in our lives," said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He's one of a team of well-known scientists involved with the American Gut Project.

Don't be squeamish: Yes, we share our bodies with trillions of microbes, living communities called microbiomes. Many of the bugs, especially those in the intestinal tract, play indispensable roles in keeping us healthy, from good digestion to a robust immune system.

But which combinations of bacteria seem to keep us healthy? Which ones might encourage problems like obesity, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome?

And do diet and lifestyle affect those microbes in ways that we might control someday?

Answering those questions will require studying vast numbers of people. Getting started with a grassroots movement makes sense, said National Institutes of Health microbiologist Lita Proctor, who isn't involved with the new projects but is watching closely.

After all, there was much interest in the taxpayer-funded Human Microbiome Project, which last summer provided the first glimpse of what makes up a healthy bacterial community in a few hundred volunteers.

Proctor, who coordinated that project, had worried "there would be a real ick factor. That has not been the case," she said. Many people "want to engage in improving their health."

Scott Jackisch, a computer consultant in Oakland, Calif., ran across American Gut while exploring the science behind different diets, and signed up last week. He's read with fascination earlier microbiome research: "Most of the genetic matter in what we consider ourselves is not human, and that's crazy. I wanted to learn about that."

Testing a single stool sample costs $99 in that project, but he picked a three-sample deal for $260 to compare his own bacterial makeup after eating various foods.

"I want to be extra, extra well," said Jackisch, 42. Differing gut microbes may be the reason "there's no one magic bullet of diet that people can eat and be healthy."

It's clear that people's gut bacteria can change over time. What this new research could accomplish is a first look at how different diets may play a role, "a much better understanding of what matters and what doesn't," said American Gut lead researcher Rob Knight of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"We don't just want people that have a gut-ache. We want couch potatoes. We want babies. We want vegans. We want athletes. We want anybody and everybody because we need that complete diversity," added American Gut co-founder Jeff Leach, an anthropologist.

One challenge is making sure participants don't expect that a map of their gut bacteria can predict their future health, or suggest lifestyle changes, anytime soon.

"I understand I'm not going to be able to say, 'Oh, my gosh, I'll be susceptible to this,'" said Bradley Heinz, 26, a financial consultant in San Francisco. He is paying uBiome $119 to analyze both his gut and mouth microbiomes; just the gut is $69.

"The more people that participate, the more information comes out and the more that everybody benefits," he added.

Participants can sign up for either project via the social fundraising site Indiegogo.com over the next month. They also can send scrapings from the skin, mouth and other sites, to analyze that bacteria. Sign up enough family members or body sites, or be tracked over time, and the price can rise into the thousands. American Gut researchers plan some free testing for those who can't afford the fees, to increase the experiment's diversity.

Don't forget the pets: "We sleep with them, play with them, they often eat our food," Leach said. What bacteria we have in common is the next logical question.

Already, American Gut researchers are preparing to compare what they find in the typical U.S. gut with a few hundred people in rural Namibia, who eat what's described as hunter-gatherer fare. Also, Leach will spend three months living in Namibia next year, and is storing his own stool samples for before-and-after comparison.

But diet isn't the only factor. Your bacterial makeup starts at birth: Babies absorb different microbes when they're born vaginally than when they're born by C-section, a possible explanation for why cesareans raise the risk for certain infections. Taking antibiotics alters this teeming inner world, and it's not clear if there are lasting consequences, especially for young children.

Then there's your environment, such as the infections spread in hospitals. In February, a new University of Chicago hospital building opens and Gilbert will test the surfaces, the patients and their health workers to see how quickly bad bugs can move in and identify which bacteria are protective.

Whatever the findings, all the research marks "a huge teachable moment" about how we interact with microbes, Leach said.

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Study: Drug coverage to vary under health law

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new study says basic prescription drug coverage could vary dramatically from state to state under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

That's because states get to set benefits for private health plans that will be offered starting in 2014 through new insurance exchanges.

The study out Tuesday from the market analysis firm Avalere Health found that some states will require coverage of virtually all FDA-approved drugs, while others will only require coverage of about half of medications.

Consumers will still have access to essential medications, but some may not have as much choice.

Connecticut, Virginia and Arizona will be among the states with the most generous coverage, while California, Minnesota and North Carolina will be among states with the most limited.

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