Swedish News:

Too much meat may cause stroke. Obesity increasing among adults. Snus for sale. 100-year-old sun mystery solved. Older men steal most.  

• Too much meat may cause stroke
  A diet rich in protein but with few carbohydrates increases the risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke, according to a new Swedish-American study. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute and Harvard University have followed 43,000 women in the Uppsala region for 16 years in what is one of the largest scientific studies so far of the long-term effects of low-carbohydrate diets. 1,270 of the women suffered a heart attack or stroke and the risk increased as they kept levels of carbohydrates down and consumed more protein, though a higher percentage of protein from plants was not as damaging as protein from meats. As an example, the researchers mention that a decrease of carbs with approximately 20 grams (the amount found in a small roll of white bread), and a 5 gram increase of protein (about what is found in a boiled egg), increased the risk for cardiovascular disease by 5 percent. The study examined the popular Atkins Diet program, and will be published in the British Medical Journal.

• Obesity increasing among adults
  The number of obese people between the ages of 30 to 60 is increasing significantly, according to new statistics from the Swedish diabetes register, as informed by Rapport (the Swedish TV news program). Every other man and six out of ten Swedish women today are fat or have a Body Mass Index over 30. This leads to diabetes attacking more and more younger people. Today, hundreds of thousands of Swedes already have diabetes and don't know it. For more on obesity problems in Sweden as reported in Nordstjernan:
  nordstjernan.com/news/briefs/4687/

• Snuff for sale
  According to a British report, it’s fairly easy to order “snus” (snuff) from Sweden, in spite of the fact that it’s illegal to export it to other EU countries. British researchers made 43 orders to ten EU countries, and in all but two cases the orders were delivered, according to Upsala Nya Tidning. Most of the 18 sites used were Swedish. A managing director for one of the companies admits to the sales but reports that the “orders were sent from our warehouse in the U.S. or some other warehouse in Europe.” Swedish customs tends to look the other way when dealing with the export of snuff to European Union countries. “We don’t check packages being sent off,” says Sune Rydén, national specialist in alcohol- and tobacco issues at Tullverket (Swedish Customs Service). And in June a Swedish couple who had sold eleven tons of snuff for foreign export was freed.

• 100-year-old sun mystery solved
  Magnetic tornadoes in space may be the explanation for why the circle surrounding the sun is much hotter than the sun’s surface. International researchers (among them researchers from Uppsala University) now believe they have solved a 100-year-old mystery. The circle is about 200 times as hot as the surface of the sun. The surface of the sun is about 6000 degrees Celsius (10,832 Fahrenheit). The explanation, published in Nature, is now believed to be magnetic tornadoes, which have been observed with the help of a combination of very detailed photographs from the Swedish sun telescope at La Palma on the Canary Islands as well as information from NASA’s satellite Solar Dynamic Observatory. These tornadoes, which can reach the size of Europe, have a magnetic “skeleton,” and they can reach a speed of about 10,000 kilometers (6,213 miles) per hour. Researchers now believe these magnetic fields, which are constantly being twisted around, transport energy from the center of the sun, passing the sun’s surface to the outermost layers of the corona.

• Older men steal most
  Four of ten men have at some point in their career stolen information from their employers, and just as many admit they’d do it again if they were to change jobs. This according to a study conducted by interviewing 1700 people in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It is the data security company Ibas Laboratories that’s behind the study, and according to its director in Sweden, Åke Lundqvist, these thefts have increased. An article in the trade journal Kollegan reports that it is mostly older men who are guilty of information theft in some form at work. Lundqvist says the reason is older men usually have more information after having worked for a company for a long time, and they feel they can take that information with them when they change jobs. “Many of those who’ve admitted to taking information with them weren’t aware that they’d committed a crime,” Lundqvist says. In the U.S. it’s common for a contract to include what is and isn't valid in situations like this—which is something Lundqvist wants for Swedish companies as well, to make it clear that information and content of electronic media belongs to the company, and the company alone.