near the border with mali madagascar is trying to contain an outbreak of the playing at least thirty people have died in the past two months while the latest outbreak has spread to urban centers the world health organization is calling for calm the leader of spain's catalonia region says he wants mediators to help resolve the standoff with the central government over its efforts to gain independence but spain says for that to happen the region must respect the law russia says it's investigating and i saw a video which apparently shows two of its soldiers captured by the armed group in daryn's or the russian foreign ministry says it's working to establish details about the men its defense ministry has previously denied any of its soldiers have been captured iraqi forces have reportedly advanced into the heart of the isolate held city of how we put it to leaders say a group of troops police and a shia force and now in the city center ice is lost control of several cities in iraq this year including its former stronghold of mosul turkey's president has met

is a rainy and counterpart in tehran for talks on kurdish secession efforts to these valleys and to take decisive steps to stop kurdish leaders from declaring an independent state from iraq both men oppose the move believing this could cause unrest in their own countries well those were the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after technique thanks a lot and laugh it up. supersized . scientists around the world make a desperate plea to stop the epidemic of obesity. but now new research goes beyond that to reveal a risk that could be even greater. techno expose the science of.

this is a show about innovation and change not just we're going to explore the intersection of hardware not my doing it in a way this is a show about science i find. it's the ingredient the bring smiles to the faces of children around the world health experts agree in moderation it's an essential part of nutrition but it's also becoming the number one culprit in a global health crisis according to the world health organization consumption of free sugars especially sugary drinks is behind a large increase in cases of obesity and diabetes. in two thousand and fourteen one in three adults worldwide were reported to be overweight. by two thousand and

fifteen. forty two million children under the age of five overweight or obese. of those children living in asia and africa. in mexico the problem is even worse. according to a study by. national institute of public health seventy percent of adult overweight or obese mexican. than anywhere else on the planet. one hundred sixty three. percent more than the average american one hundred eighteen. in two thousand and fourteen mexico imposed a ten percent excise tax on those during. the. calling for a global sugar tax consumption sugary drinks. hungry island

in the u.k. have. a growing body of research just behind. in two thousand and fourteen harvard university i did sugar intake. look to. not just finding quote a significantly increased risk of. research being conducted inside the davis california may be the first to show cause and effect the project under the us national institute of health put subjects' on a highly controlled sugary diet for ten weeks then measures the effects of that added sugar. time and. the cutting edge research is being done at the department of molecular bias science school at the university of california at davis professor kimba stan hope invited

techno inside for the final phase of the trial. picks up the story behind the science of sugar. it's early in the morning for this small group of college students they're not here for a class their subjects in one of the most advanced sugar studies to date. in just a few moments they will each undergo a magnetic resonance imaging exam doctors are most interested in what's been happening inside their bodies over the past ten weeks. hey guys good morning morning and really has wrapped up bright and early for your standards so really get you guys dressed in the scanner who's who's up first. this is

day seventy were. the final day of the study and benjamin lamb angela osborne and lore are ready for their m.r.i. . dr john began is one of the world's leading specialists in diagnostic radiology he is supervising the imaging part of the trial. lore is a senior at u.c. davis he's a science student who decided to volunteer for the summer study i remember going on . it's. like the other subjects more had a previous scan the start of the trial doctors captured the before image of his abdominal region this morning we'll get the after it's quite is fair is. something i've never done before and i think. just

a week i really don't know about myself. and this technology is being used to chart what happens to. internal organs when sugary drinks are consumed those results cannot be calculated by scales and are not visible to the naked eye that's where the m.r.i. comes in dr mcgann showed us exactly what he's looking for in the scan the key i don't know we're looking at in this study is this structure here sort of a little darker or greater structure which is the over what we're trying to do we do need different m.r.i. sequences and then later on we go ahead and we calculate the amount of fat with the livable pre and post study and why is liver fat porton here liver fabulous important because it's sorta helps and regulates a lot of different things within the body of glucose metabolism it also regulates

name on a trike list price that we have circulating within the body so it's actually sort of a clearing agent you know for a lot of different things here produces cholesterol so there's all sorts of different things the liver does and in order to really get a sense for this particular subject you'd have to look at the scans exactly and we look to back both at the libbers so we calculate well how much fat is there in the liver before we started this study and then all this and we can go back again at the end of this study and we know exactly what our bad calculations are how much fat is there at the end of this study and then we compare those two is it decreased is that the same or said increase to many of our study patients this latest sugar research should help professor stan hope and her team answer two important questions about sugary diets dr stand up tell me about the sugar study that you

have going what specifically are you looking to find out the first question is. does sugar cause undermine our health. that by that i mean increased risk factors for cardiovascular disease so such as what for example cholesterol big that's the most obvious one does cardiovascular disease increase when you consume a high sugar diet even if you don't gain weight is the sugar have a specific a fact that other foods such as bread mill rice do not have all your your current study is focusing on subjects that are relatively young and healthy why if we prove in a relatively young healthy. person that sugar increases risk factors with. have shown that this is

a problem. stan hope's team will follow a total of sixty subjects over the course of ten weeks the group techno was permitted to follow are all young mid twenty's and apparently healthy they're excited to see the finish line and exhausted from their dietary regimen this study was hard food wise because being around your family. there's always fried chicken and mashed potatoes and you have to stick with it released to be tempted to. eat other food you're not supposed to be to not supposed to so i would say the hardest part is just the discipline that it's been quite a challenge for me. because i love for. people who likes to cook. whenever i smell their cooking i just want to get their food. through the course of

the study researchers strictly controlled the food consumed by each subject specifically the amount of sugar and calories in their diet the study is a single blind study meaning only the scientists know who is getting what one group of fifteen subjects will be giving beverages sweetened by high fructose corn syrup a sweetener commonly found in soft drinks a second group will get beverages sweetened by the artificial sweetener aspartame to other groups will get the same drinks but they will be allowed to eat as much food as they'd like the idea is to see if high fructose corn syrup causes cardiovascular problems and if weight gain is the morse high fructose corn syrup is the sweetener used in the majority of those so-called sugary drinks like soda it was invented in one thousand nine hundred seventy one by japanese scientists took a saki. the scientists from japan took corn starch and they added. enzyme or acid to turn it into

a glucose syrup the scientists in japan added another and zine and that turned a bunch of the glucose is in the glucose syrup into fructose since narrow you have a very sweet fructose are up. you can add that glucose syrup and that fructose syrup together and get any kind of combination of glucose to fructose that you want the beverage industry began using high fructose corn syrup in one thousand nine hundred eighty because it is twenty to seventy percent less expensive than sugar that's when consumption of soda began to soar according to the u.s. department of agriculture from one thousand nine hundred eighty to two thousand consumption went up by forty percent to four hundred forty cans of soda a year per person in india sales increased ten percent

a year since one thousand nine hundred ninety eight now up to eleven leaders per person each year also in the one nine hundred eighty s. supersizing begin scientists say that's when obesity diabetes and heart disease rates went up. so what does it take to pull off a study like this well for starters it takes food and a lot of it now this package contains a fourth pre-prepared meals how it's divided is determined by the research team but we're talking about breakfast lunch and dinner all prepared for each and every one of the subjects that equals two hundred and ten individual meals per person over a ten week period. garlock you can post their sugar beverage. there. it is the final night of the study this is what dinner looks like in a science lab. everything from the main course to the

sugary beverage has been measured and recorded the amount of sweetener a subject is given comes in the drink the food supplies the daily intake of calories you lor will get to enjoy his meal. then like the other subjects he will be tested with a device that measures how fast his body burns fat on this diet no exercise is allowed that would burn calories and skew results. ok ok it's simply measuring oxygen consumption and c o two production through your breath yes so all's you're doing and putting a face mask on are subjects with a long list that leads from their mouth. to the analyzer.

and so it's a c o two carbon dioxide and oxygen analyzer so it's just taking the air that the subjects is exhaling and telling us ok this much oxygen this much c o two and from there then we do production and consumption values from bad. fat burning it's technically called fat oxidation can be calculated this test will determine if that burning in the liver is impaired when the liver is overloaded with the sugar talks there will be one more test tonight. each of the subjects blood will be drawn to vials worth. and taken to the lab first sophisticated round of blood analysis.

some just removing the bottom layer which contains or looted fraction dr candace price is in charge of the liquids lab lupin's are fats found in the blood her work is key to the study we're here in the lab your job is to look at the blood of the study subjects and determine whether or not there's fat present not blood right now show me how some of this process thanks the work requires a steady hand blood samples are reduced to components and separated into the different fats scientists are focusing on including cholesterol which to this too is one subject from one time point there are thousands of blood samples that require meticulous care and so for example this is drop twenty five meaning at. one of the time points drop twenty five blood was taken and this will

represent that time for one person from one person each person in the study will have blood drawn two hundred twenty six times over the course of the study once the samples are prepared dr pryce will use what's called a capillary tube to spread the liquid across the glass plate her number these your lab right. and repeat that across the four lines here right for the final step in the process some special effects are needed ok so someone can light for me. ok. and this is the u.v. light which will allow us to see the fluorescent spray there with the force and die which is what will allow us to say that ok about the dye we can't see anything so here this bottom fraction is the request for all and as we move up the plate we see the triglyceride fraction here and at the very top of the plate which doesn't seem to be quite as abundant in this particular so samples but here we see the

questionable mystery so those are three limits that are really important for arthrosclerosis which is exactly a risk factor yes the plates work much like a chart that allows researchers to see what kind of cardiovascular risk may be coming from the sweetener by the time the study is completed we'll have a strong database to work from but the effects of the sweetener can be detected almost immediately so how quickly do you do you see the results in people well we know for sure from our previous study our second and i age funded study it was only two weeks long our average subject their age was twenty five two weeks. and you saw an increase in what. the risk factors for cardiovascular disease this study we called our dose response study because we actually fed four levels of high fructose corn syrup zero. ten percent seventeen and

a half percent and twenty five percent of energy requirement and we saw. a dose perfect stairstep response for cholesterol for triglyceride. for your acid so as you increased the intake your risk factors and right to take in in la and what was very important was that even the ten percent group showed increases significant increases compared to their baseline level that was only a quibble and take him and be a written there are research subjects one and a half cans of soda a day so basically a half a can of breakfast a half a can lunch a half a can a dinner was the equivalent. again

a surprise i would not have expected to see significant increases in risk factors with only a half a can per meal but in two weeks i would have believed it could have happened in six months but i didn't know we would see it so quickly the study group that drink an artificial sweetener aspartame instead of high fructose corn syrup experienced none of those risk factors what causes the increase in cardiovascular risk back in radiology dr mcginn explained how high fructose corn syrup affects the body. so the anatomy that we're really looking at is a structure here which is the liver ok and what we do we take specialized samurai barracks and were able to calibrate the exact amount of fat within the liver were just important to the study and what we see here is two different sets of fact we call this the subcutaneous that this has been this sort of. that somebody could

control and somebody if you wanted to but then inside the muscle here we have the visceral fat the visceral fat is the white structure we see here so we're trying to look at the difference between the visceral fat and the so you can use that there are differences in. the health risks of deposition subcutaneous versus visceral yes so we found it in the study patients are proved those diets bait and actually forming more visceral fat than subcutaneous fat so that some to this study and then there's other metabolic events that we found out of what we think of fat is fat but actually in this study that isn't all the same so your study was the first one to show that what you eat can impact where fat is deposited on the body whether it's like the fat here versus fat elsewhere is that right. to the best of my knowledge yes we were the first and

that's important because we know for sure there's a big difference between the a facts of where our fat is stored and it's our health why why is fructose so much worse that is a such an important question the enzyme for fructose is not in communication with the liver in fact it's always turned on it's always working hard therefore pretty much every single fructose molecule that goes through the liver failure the part of vein gets pulled in the liver and gets sent down the metabolic pathway the liver does the best it can using all this fructose when there's still too much substrate around. the liver ban turns it into fact in

our ancestors it was easy there wasn't much fructose around no problem but now we have great big thirty two an ounce sodas. that overloads the liver with front toes so now what happens with this well the first thing extra fat in the liver does is cause the liver to send it out into the blood it sends it out into with little packages that include lots and lots of triglycerides but also includes cholesterol immediately blood triglycerides go up but eventually the cholesterol levels go up too high fructose corn syrup appears to be behind these problems but dr stan hope says sucrose any sugar made from sugar cane or sugar beet may also increase liver fat she suggests limiting intake of all types of sugars and sweeteners brown white or artificial the best advice is to stick with mother nature

get your sweet fix from fresh fruit the only way you can over each sugar in nature is the eat a lot of honey that is the one that actually occurring food at super high and sugar everything else pretty low levels even and sugar came where we get our commercial sucrose is only ten percent sucrose so if you were to rely on the sugar cane to get all your sugar you'd be naing for a long time results from the study will take time to be completed and calculated for the students who completed this leg of the research there are more immediate concerns i'm going straight home and having a child norm is pizza delivered to me fresh and hot out of the oven. i can't wait oh i think radio this story. was going to stoke the hope piece a large piece of the hamburger. sushi and then just whatever

i could get my hand. i'm really proud about to finish it all the way i have been waiting for this for two nights i've been waiting for this pizza. think about that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death so we're not talking about this real obscure death and it doubles and so instead you know ten people now there's twenty people dying now it's thousands and thousands and thousands of extra deaths. that can be attributed to that high level of sugar. cardiovascular disease that's our number one killer already we have obese children now we have children with fatty liver we have children with diabetes that never used to happen but children didn't used to have access to sugar breakfast lunch and dinner and us now. extra added isn't just

found in sweetened drinks it's in much of the process for you to be consume the world health organization recommends added sugars make up less than ten percent of daily diets but modern diets often filled with processed foods containing high levels of added sugar. the world health organizations call to cut these products has gone out the question is who will listen to techno i'm dr mara c.n.n. time. poll reefs the rain forests of the sea we continue on our current way we won't have whole race within twenty thirty years from now so you're subtly trying to recreate the ecosystem but under controlled conditions the main goal is to develop still

hasn't risen to. the great barrier saveable but we're going to start now and get everyone behind the solution. at this time on the edges iraq. the big breaking news story can be chaotic and frantic behind the scenes. people shouting instructions and if you're trying to provide the best most accurate up to date information as quickly as you can. it's when you come off on things that you realize you witnessed history in the making. it was since i was a little boy in india my dream was to make bollywood films so five years ago i decided i was finally going to do it one man's quest to realize a lifelong ambition the story i chose to lose my one village and your stance

publishing going behind the lens that's gone from saying brings his personal story to life. al-jazeera correspondent my own private bollywood at this time. and hundred ported world on. u.s. and british companies have announced the biggest discovery of natural gas in west africa but what to do with these untapped natural resources is already a source of heated debate nothing much has changed they still spend most of their days looking forward to form dry river beds like this one five years on the syrians still feel battered or even those who managed to escape their country haven't truly been able to escape the war. the doctors the nurses all of the people of the last battle have done their job that's indescribable hailing first responders as heroes president trump made.