Oestrogens in milk and breast cancer: a cause for concern…or not?

In this short Research Reflection I address and refute the suggestion that oestrogens consumed in milk might contribute in a significant way to endogenous levels and thereby have a physiological action, possibly resulting in adverse consequences including increased breast cancer risk. Quantitative analysis based on published data shows that, even in worst case scenarios, oestrogen consumption in milk is considerably less than regulatory bodies regard as entirely safe.

Influence of vitamin A as a synthetic preparation “Microvit” on the digestibility of basic nutrients of fodder by bull-calves at their feeding with the use of fragrance granules

They are given data of physiological action of vitamin A in different doses (in the form of its supplement - the pharmacological preparation “Microvit”) when introduced into diets with dry pulp on the digestibility of the main nutrients of fodder by bull-calves in the middle of the feeding cycle. The optimal dose of vitamin A was established. It is 230 IU per 1 head per day, which is 20% more than the recommended norm calculated for carotene. In this case, the digestibility of dry matter significantly increases by 3.3%, of organic one - by 2.7%, protein - by 3.0%, fiber - by 3.2%. There was also a slight tendency towards an increase in the digestibility of fat and nitrogen-free extractive substances by 1.8 and 3.0%, respectively.

‘Le Sigh’: Enactive and Psychoanalytic Insights into Medieval and Renaissance Paralanguage

Sighing is both performative and vital activity, and exemplifies the role of ‘primordial affectivity’ in the organism’s co-creativity with its environment. Emerging from the organism’s ‘cares’, transforming the atmosphere and the affect that initiated it, the sigh is a striking instance of distributed cognition, an action reaching through ancient respiratory processes to the most deliberate forms of self-care. Premodern psychology understood the sigh as an attempt to free the circulation of vital and animal spirits from blockage caused by the overheating of imaginative and estimative faculties when obsessed by the image of a loved object. Contemporary science similarly sees the chief physiological action of the sigh, the opening of air spaces in the lungs, as dynamically engaged with affective experience. In the domain of psychoanalysis, the sigh is a transitional phenomena; it buys time and gives us the time to open up to something new. The sigh relaxes constriction, opening the throat and enabling speech. Hence its vital importance in amorous verse. ‘Le Sigh’ proposes that sighing is the template for the concluding couplet of Shakespeare’s sonnet form. Its innovation is to give us the breathing room to bear our care-full lives.