Beyond Bones

For Neck Pain, Chiropractic and Exercise Are Better Than Drugs

2012-01-21T14:17:00.001-08:00

January 3, 2012, 11:00 AM

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
What’s the best treatment for neck pain?
Seeing a chiropractor or engaging in light exercise relieves neck pain more effectively than relying on pain medication, new research shows.

The new study is one of the few head-to-head comparisons of various treatments for neck pain, a problem that affects three quarters of Americans at some point in their lives but has no proven, first-line treatment. While many people seek out spinal manipulation by chiropractors, the evidence supporting its usefulness has been limited at best.

But the new research, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, found that chiropractic care or simple exercises done at home were better at reducing pain than taking medications like aspirin, ibuprofen or narcotics.

“These changes were diminished over time, but they were still present,” said Dr. Gert Bronfort, an author of the study and research professor at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Minnesota. “Even a year later, there were differences between the spinal manipulation and medication groups.”

Moderate and acute neck pain is one of the most frequent reasons for trips to primary care doctors, prompting millions of visits every year. For patients, it can be a difficult problem to navigate. In some cases the pain and stiffness crop up without explanation, and treatment options are varied. Physical therapy, pain medication and spinal manipulation are popular options, but Dr. Bronfort was inspired to carry out an analysis because so little research exists.

“There was a void in the scientific literature in terms of what the most helpful treatments are,” he said.

To find out, Dr. Bronfort and his colleagues recruited a large group of adults with neck pain that had no known specific cause. The subjects, 272 in all, were mostly recruited from a large HMO and through advertisements. The researchers then split them into three groups and followed them for about three months.

One group was assigned to visit a chiropractor for roughly 20-minute sessions throughout the course of the study, making an average of 15 visits. A second group was assigned to take common pain relievers like acetaminophen and — in some cases, at the discretion of a doctor — stronger drugs like narcotics and muscle relaxants. The third group met on two occasions with physical therapists who gave them instructions on simple, gentle exercises for the neck that they could do at home. They were encouraged to do 5 to 10 repetitions of each exercise up to eight times a day. (A demonstration of the exercises can be found at www.annals.org).

After 12 weeks, the people in the non-medication groups did significantly better than those taking the drugs. About 57 percent of those who met with chiropractors and 48 percent who did the exercises reported at least a 75 percent reduction in pain, compared to 33 percent of the people in the medication group.

A year later, when the researchers checked back in, 53 percent of the subjects who had received spinal manipulation still reported at least a 75 percent reduction in pain, similar to the exercise group. That compared to just a 38 percent pain reduction among those who had been taking medication.

Dr. Bronfort said it was a “big surprise” to see that the home exercises were about as effective as the chiropractic sessions. “We hadn’t expected that they would be that close,” he said. “But I guess that’s good news for patients.”

In addition to their limited pain relief, the medications had at least one other downside: people kept taking them. “The people in the medication group kept on using a higher amount of medication more frequently throughout the follow-up period, up to a year later,” Dr. Bronfort said. “If you’re taking medication over a long time, then we’re running into more systemic side effects like gastrointestinal problems.”

He also expressed concern that those on medications were not as empowered or active in their own care as those in the other groups. “We think it’s important that patients are enabled to deal with as much control over their own condition as possible,” he said. “This study shows that they can play a large role in their own care.”

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/for-neck-pain-chiropractic-and-exercise-are-better-than-drugs/

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
What’s the best treatment for neck pain?

Artificial Sweetener Disease: It Looks (And Feels) Just Like Fibromyalgia

2011-12-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

Artificial Sweetener Disease; a new breed of sickness

NaturalNews) Artificial Sweetener Disease (ASD) is sweeping across America, affecting tens of thousands of consumers, and Western medicine calls it anything but what it really is, so that doctors can prescribe expensive pharmaceuticals and set up "check up" appointments for the following weeks.

Call it recurring headaches, unbearable migraines, depression, anxiety, muscle pain, arthritis flare ups, buzzing or ringing in the ears, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn's disease, inflammation, even acid reflux, but don't call it ASD, or the patient may stop consuming synthetic sweeteners, and then not schedule more doctor visits.

The symptoms of ASD can change overnight, depending on how much chemical sweetener you consume, and which ones. Some combinations are especially toxic. Consumers can go from a migraine headache to vomiting or from vision problems to an upset stomach. Many people experience central nervous system disorders, cramping, nervous twitches and abnormal reflexes. (http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/)

It all started when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. He immediately fired the head of the FDA, under advisement from Donald Rumsfeld (CEO of Searle Pharmaceutical at the time), and hired Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., who auspiciously approved aspartame. It was the decade of the diet craze, and Rumsfeld and his constituents made a fortune off the artificial sweetener which had been banned for decades due to laboratory testing results proving it was carcinogenic. The same FDA tainted approval process gave way to sucralose in 1991, and then sorbitol in 2003. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robbi...)

Gulf War Syndrome mainly ASD

It is not a coincidence that a wave of fibromyalgia cases hit the American troops during the Gulf War. Studies revealed that drinking diet sodas in the 120 degree heat lead to serious health repercussions. It was cleverly chalked up under the umbrella term "Gulf War Syndrome," but the same problems are occurring for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan now. (http://www.militaryspot.com/resourc...)

It is also no coincidence that 4 out of 5 fibromyalgia cases affect women, who are more likely to eat diet foods and consume diet drinks than men. Nearly all chewing gum and breath mints are loaded with artificial sweeteners. (http://healthwyze.org/index.php/com...)

The popular saying that "there's not enough artificial sweetener in any specific product to cause health concerns" is a lie, especially now that in 2011 there are synthetic sweeteners in over 25% of all food, drink, gum and candy available. This cumulative effect has created ASD, and thanks to little or no regulation of chemical agents in food, it's not going away any time soon.

There is no prescription drug, and there never will be one, that cures the problems that artificial sweeteners create. In fact, over 70 percent of reported cases of fibromyalgia, chronic depression, IBS and acid reflux are caused by consuming chemical agents which have been approved by the FDA for consumption. (http://www.foodintol.com/food_intol...)

Cancer may be the distant, long term result of consuming chemicals, but ASD is the short term consequence, and it is very serious. If you look to prescription drugs to cure these "chronic ailments," then you will experience even more side effects from the prescription medicines, and maybe worse ones than you already have.

The good news is the cure for Artificial Sweetener Disease is absolutely free and involves no doctor, no health insurance co-pays, and has zero side effects. Here is the secret cure for ASD: throw away your sugar free gum and candy, and then trash all foods and drinks you have that are labeled "light" and "zero." Read the labels on everything, so you can filter out all artificial sweeteners from your products, including aspartame, sucralose, sorbitol, acesulfame-k, aspartic acid, and saccharine.

As an alternative to poisoning yourself, try Xylitol or Stevia in order to cut calories, or simply eat more organic vegetables! If problems persist, take a list of everything you ate this week to your Naturopath or Nutritionist to analyze. Remember, if you're getting sick from moldy bread, don't look for a prescription drug to cure you, just stop eating moldy bread.

Sources for this article include

http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robbi...

http://www.militaryspot.com/resourc...

http://www.aspartamekills.com/mpvalley/

http://www.medicinenet.com/artifici...

http://www.naturalnews.com/022785.html

http://www.earthclinic.com/CURES/as...

http://www.foodintol.com/food_intol...

http://healthwyze.org/index.php/com...

http://www.thepanelist.net/general-...

http://www.naturalnews.com/034320_a...

http://www.naturalnews.com/033914_S...

Put the fat cats on a diet: Stop buying tainted food from billion dollar corporations Thursday, December 08, 2011 by: Ronnie Cummins

2011-12-08T09:46:00.001-08:00

(NaturalNews) "I have not spoken to one farmer who doesn't understand the message of Occupy Wall Street, the message that so many people keep saying is nebulous. It's very clear. Because of business and corporate participation in agriculture, farmers are losing their livelihoods... And if it goes on like this, all we're going to have to eat in this country is unregulated, imported, genetically modified produce. That's not a healthy food system." Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer.

"A Farmer Speaks to Wall Street," The New York Times, December 5, 2011

For the first time since the late-1960s, the American elite and their indentured politicians are losing legitimacy, part of a deepening global crisis that is simultaneously political, economic, and ecological. In the powerful wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, the European Summer of the Indignados (the indignant ones), and the Occupy Wall Street movement, rebellion is in the air. As protestors in New York put it "The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

Across the U.S. and planet, the corporate elite is under attack. An emerging army of indignados are starting to act on the premise that minor policy adjustments in corporate boardrooms, or a cosmetic reshuffling of faces in Washington, are not enough. What the Earth and the 99% underclass need, including consumers and farmers, is a grassroots revolution -- a fundamental transfer of power from the corporatocracy to the people. What is required in the face of economic meltdown, deteriorating public health, and climate disaster is a full-scale mutiny on the USA Titanic, a radical change of course before the 21st Century suicide economy of Wall Street and Corporate America puts an end to the human species and life on Earth.

Perhaps the first order of business on the USA Titanic is to stop stuffing money in the pockets of the greedy 1% who are steering us toward disaster. This is why a million consumers, and thousands of community organizations, unions, and churches, have started to strike back against the "banksters," staging sit-ins and protests and moving billions of dollars out of Wall Street and the big banks into community credit unions and local banks. As the internet campaign http://moveyourmoneyproject.org proclaims, it's time to "invest in Main Street, not Wall Street, and to lend a hand to local businesses."

Following a similar trajectory a debtors' campaign is gathering steam among students and ex-students to stop paying their onerous student loans, which now total one trillion dollars, and demand the implementation of a federal program of free college tuition and jobs for youth and the unemployed. Approximately 11% of student loans in the U.S. are already in arrears. Similarly millions of Americans are turning away from Big Pharma's drug pushers and embracing holistic, preventive medicine.

The time has come for America's 300 million food consumers to join the mutiny. Our trillion dollar food and farming System has been corrupted and manipulated by Wall Street, Corporate Agribusiness, and Big Food Inc. into what can only be described as a weapon of mass destruction, severely damaging public health, the environment, and the climate; torturing animals in filthy, disease-ridden factory farms; exploiting immigrant farm workers and food industry workers; and destroying the livelihoods of small farmers and rural communities.

As the first official Declaration of Occupy Wall Street explained on September 29: "They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization..."

Food Democracy or Corporatocracy?

Did you ever vote to allow corporate agribusiness to spray a billion pounds of toxic pesticides, and dump 24 billion pounds of climate-destabilizing chemical fertilizers on U.S. crops and farmlands every year? Did you give the OK for factory farms, so-called Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), to feed billions of hapless creatures massive amounts of genetically engineered grain, antibiotics, hormones, steroids, blood, manure, and slaughterhouse waste? Did you give Monsanto, Dow, and Dupont permission to "modify" so-called "conventional" supermarket, school cafeteria, and restaurant food with genetically engineered bacteria, viruses, foreign DNA, and antibiotic-resistant genes? Did you sign a permission slip for the USDA or your local school system to feed students, including your children, greasy, fatty, unhealthy, chemical food in the cafeteria?

If we intend to break the stranglehold of the corporatocracy over the economy, including what and how American farmers grow and what most people eat, it's time to stand up. If we believe that a healthy, organic, and equitable system of food and farming are essential to our health and the health of the planet, we need to think twice before we pull out our wallets at the supermarket or sit down for a meal in a restaurant or a fast food joint. Do you want to be supersized by Monsanto, Wal-Mart, or McDonald's, and allow biotechnocrats, factory farms, and chemical food manufacturers to dictate your food choices?

It's time to vote with our food dollars at the grocery check-out aisle. It's time to rein in elected public officials who take money from corporate agribusiness and Monsanto in the voting booth. It's time for the Great Boycott of Big Food Inc., and a culinary strike against all of their chemical, genetically engineered, sugar, and fat-laden processed foods and beverages. It's time to put the fat cats on a diet, shrink the profits of Wall Street, and drastically reduce the collateral damage of chemical agribusiness, Big Box food stores, and billion dollar junk food restaurants. It's time to Occupy our food chains, kitchens, lunchrooms, and school cafeterias, and transform our $30 billion local and organic food and farming system from being the niche alternative to being the norm in the nation's trillion dollar food economy.

The good news is that most people already know that chemical food is bad for them, bad for their children, and bad for the environment. No one wants to eat Big Ag or Big Biotech's pesticide residues, antibiotics, hormones, or feces-tainted meat. No one is enthusiastic about food that has been irradiated, genetically engineered, or grown with municipal sewage sludge. A recent national poll found that 54% of Americans prefer organic food, especially locally-produced organic food. Millions say they'd buy more organic products if only they had a decent paying job, or less mortgage, medical, or school loan debt. That's partly why millions of us are becoming backyard organic gardeners, or small "market farmers" growing our own. That's why a new generation of food lovers and health addicts are swearing off corporate food and marching to the kitchen, cooking from scratch and celebrating the joys of home-cooked fare with our friends and our families.

Millions of us are starting to break the chains of corporate control in our lives, by supporting organic, fair made, and locally produced products and businesses.

Tired of the quality and range of our daily essentials being dictated and degraded by a powerful network of Brand Name Bullies and Big Box chains? Tired of profit-at-any cost, Wall Street-traded corporations "outsourcing" from sweatshops in the factories and fields, cutting corners on public health and the environment, and sucking up billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies? "Basta," enough already.

So make your pledge today to put the fat cats on a diet. Buy organic and fair made/fair trade products, preferably locally produced. Boycott factory farmed meat and animal products. Eat more raw food, dairy, and vegetables. And if you can, start growing some of your own, even if for now, your "garden" on consists of potted herbs or tomatoes on your window sill or a sprout-making machine in your kitchen. And finally keep in mind that where you buy a healthy, sustainable product has a very large impact on the economy, the environment, and climate stability. Do you really want to buy your organic food or your fair trade coffee from a multi-billion dollar corporation like Wal-Mart, Safeway, Starbucks, or even Whole Foods Market and Trader Joes?

Ronnie Cummins is the co-founder and National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

A simple way to improve your diet

2011-08-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

A simple way to improve your diet is to stop eating factory "food". When I say "improve your diet" I mean improve your health, your energy, your mood, your sleep & your world.

Exercise Has Changed | beyond bones

2011-08-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

Exercise Has Changed | beyond bones

I added a page to my website. It looks like we can get into better shape and increase growth hormone levels with shorter bursts of exercise so we can actually cut our workout time. Who would have thought? Click the link to go to the page.

Peter Abaci, M.D.: Why Our [Medical] Approach To Chronic Pain Is Flawed

2011-08-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

"The great news here is that when pain patients learn how to adopt healthy lifestyle habits and start exercising regularly, connect better with others and become less dependent on external resources like heavy medications, then they start to feel a whole lot better. Once you look at the new research being done on the brain in pain, you start to see why this holistic approach works better than drugs and surgeries."

Read the whole article in the Huffington Post:

Why Our Approach To Chronic Pain Is Flawed by Peter Abaci, M.D.

Here's a concise list of "food" additives to avoid when you're reading labels. You are reading your food labels, aren't you?

2011-07-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

What's Really In The Food? The A to Z of the Food Indrustry's Most Evil Ingredients

Thursday, July 28, 2011

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)

(NaturalNews) Ever wonder what's really in the food sold at grocery stores around the world? People keep asking me, "What ingredients should I avoid?" So I put together a short list that covers all the most toxic and disease-promoting ingredients in the food supply. These are the substances causing cancer, diabetes, heart disease and leading to tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary health care costs across America (and around the world).

If you want to stay healthy and out of the hospital, read ingredients labels and make sure you avoid all these ingredients:

Acrylamides - Toxic, cancer-causing chemicals formed in foods when carbohydrates are exposed to high heat (baking, frying, grilling). They're present in everything from bread crusts to snack chips, and because they aren't intentional ingredients, acrylamides do NOT have to be listed on labels.

Aspartame - Chemical sweetener that causes neurological disorders, seizures, blurred vision and migraine headaches. (http://www.naturalnews.com/030918_a...)

Autolyzed Proteins - Highly processed form of protein containing free glutamate and used to mimic the taste-enhancer chemical MSG.

BPA (Bisphenol-A) - A hormone mimicking chemical found in nearly all food packaging plastics. Active in just parts per billion, BPA promotes cancer, infertility and hormone disorders. It also "feminizes" males, promoting male breast growth and hormone disruption (http://www.naturalnews.com/032860_B...).

Casein - Milk proteins. Hilariously, this is widely used in "soy cheese" products that claim to be alternatives to cow's milk. Nearly all of them are made with cow's milk proteins.

Corn Syrup - Just another name for High Fructose Corn Syrup (see below). Frequently used in infant formula products (http://www.naturalnews.com/029863_S...).

Food Colors - FD&C Red #40, for example, is linked to behavioral disorders in children. Nearly all artificial food colors are derived from petroleum, and many are contaminated with aluminum.

Genetically Modified Ingredients - Not currently listed on the label because the GMO industry (Monsanto and DuPont) absolutely does not want people to know which foods contain GMOs. Nearly all conventionally grown corn, soy and cotton are GMOs. They're linked to severe infertility problems and may even cause the bacteria in your body to produce and release a pesticide in your own gut. If you're not eating organic corn, you're definitely eating GMO corn. (http://www.naturalnews.com/026426_G...) Learn more at www.ResponsibleTechnology.org or watch my GMO music video (hilarious) at www.NaturalNews.com/NoGMO

High Fructose Corn Syrup - A highly processed liquid sugar extracted with the chemical solvent glutaraldehyde and frequently contaminated with mercury (http://www.naturalnews.com/032948_h...). It's also linked to diabetes, obesity and mood disorders. Used in thousands of grocery items, including things you wouldn't suspect like pizza sauce and salad dressings.

Homogenized Milk - The fats in the milk are artificially modified to change them into smaller molecules that stay in suspension in the milk liquid (so the milk fat doesn't separate) (http://www.naturalnews.com/022967_m...). While it makes milk look better on the shelf, it's also blamed for promoting heart disease and may contribute to milk allergies. Raw milk is healthier, which is why the government had outlawed it (http://www.naturalnews.com/029322_r...).

Hydrochloride - When you see anything hydrochloride, such as Pyridoxine Hydrochloride or Thiamin Hydrochloride, those are chemical forms of B vitamins that companies add to their products to be able to claim higher RDA values of vitamins. But these are synthetic, chemical forms of vitamins, not real vitamins from foods or plants. Nutritionally, they are near-useless and may actually be bad for you. Also watch out for niacinamide and cyanocobalamin (synthetic vitamin B-12). (http://www.naturalnews.com/032766_c...)

Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein - A highly processed form of (usually) soy protein that's processed to bring out the free glutamate (MSG). Use as a taste enhancer.

Partially Hydrogenated Oils - Oils that are modified using a chemical catalyst to make them stable at room temperature. This creates trans fatty acids and greatly increases the risk of blocked arteries (http://www.naturalnews.com/027445_f...). It also promotes what I call "sludge blood," which is thick, viscous blood that's hard to pump. This is usually diagnosed by doctors as "high blood pressure" and (stupidly) treated with blood-thinning medications that are technically the same chemicals as rat poison (warfarin) (http://www.naturalnews.com/023149_d...).

Phosphoric Acid - The acid used in sodas to dissolve the carbon dioxide and add to the overall fizzy-ness of the soda. Phosphoric acid will eat steel nails. It's also used by stone masons to etch rocks. The military uses it to clean the rust off battleships. In absolutely destroys tooth enamel (http://www.naturalnews.com/021774.html). Search Google Images for "Mountain Dew Mouth" to see photos of teeth rotted out by phosphoric acid: http://www.google.com/search?q=moun...

Propylene Glycol - A liquid used in the automotive industry to winterize RVs. It's also used to make the fake blueberries you see in blueberry muffins, bagels and breads. (Combined with artificial colors and corn syrup.) See shocking "Fake Blueberries" video at: http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=7...

Sodium (Salt) - The processed white salt lacking in trace minerals. In the holistic nutrition industry, we call it "death salt" because it promotes disease and death. Real salt, on the other hand, such as "dirty" sea salt or pink Himalayan salt, is loaded with the trace minerals that prevent disease, such as selenium (cancer), chromium (diabetes) and zinc (infectious disease). Much like with bread and sugar, white salt is terrible for your health. And don't be fooled by claims of "sea salt" in grocery stores. All salt came from the sea if you go far back enough in geologic time, so they can slap the "sea salt" claim on ANY salt!

Sodium Nitrite - A cancer-causing red coloring chemical added to bacon, hot dogs, sausage, beef jerky, ham, lunch meats, pepperoni and nearly all processed meats. Strongly linked to brain tumors, pancreatic cancers and colon cancers (http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html). The USDA once tried to ban it from the food supply but was out-maneuvered by the meat industry, which now dominates USDA regulations. Sodium nitrite is a complete poison used to make meats look fresh. Countless children die of cancer each year from sodium nitrite-induced cancers.

Soy Protein - The No. 1 protein source used in "protein bars," including many bars widely consumed by bodybuilders. Soy protein is the "junk protein" of the food industry. It's made from genetically modified soybeans (often grown in China) and then subjected to hexane, a chemical solvent (http://www.naturalnews.com/026303_s...) that can literally explode.

Sucralose - An artificial chemical sweetener sold as Splenda. The sucralose molecule contains a chlorine atom (http://www.naturalnews.com/027491_a...). Researchers have repeatedly found that artificial sweeteners make people fat by actually promoting weight gain (http://www.naturalnews.com/024543_h...).

Sugar - The bleached, nutritionally-deficient byproduct of cane processing. During sugar cane processing, nearly all the minerals and vitamins end up in the blackstrap molasses that's usually fed to farm animals. (Blackstrap molasses is actually the "good" part of sugar cane juice.) Molasses is often fed to farm animals because every rancher knows that farm animals need good nutrition to stay alive. Amazingly, conventional doctors don't yet realize this about humans, and they continue to claim that eating sugar is perfectly fine for you. Sugar promotes diabetes, obesity, mood disorders and nutritional deficiencies.

Textured Vegetable Protein - Usually made of soy protein which is extracted from genetically modified soybeans and then processed using hexane, an explosive chemical solvent (see Soy Protein, above). Widely used in vegetarian foods such as "veggie burgers" (most of which also contain MSG or Yeast Extract, by the way).

Yeast Extract - Hidden form of MSG that contains free glutamate and is used in many "natural" food products to claim "No MSG!" Yeast extract contains up to 14% free glutamate. You'll find it in thousands of grocery store products, from soups to snack chips. I even once spotted it used on fresh meat!

Food label tricks

Here's a trick food companies frequently used to pack more sugar into their products without making sugar look like the first ingredient:

Ingredient labels, you see, must list the most prominent ingredients first, and some consumers might freak out of they saw a box of cereal that said, "Sugar, whole grain wheat, corn" and so on. Instead, the company uses 3 or 4 different forms of sugar to distribute them farther down the label, like this:

"Whole grain wheat, sugar, corn syrup, corn syrup solids..."

This way, the first ingredients looks like "whole grain wheat" when, in reality, the cereal might be over fifty percent sugars!

How to buy honest food

• Shop are your local farmer's market, food co-op or CSA.

• In the USA, look for the USDA Organic label on foods. This is a legitimate claim to being certified organic. It's one of the few programs run by the USDA that actually has integrity.

• Read the ingredients labels! If you see names of chemicals you can't pronounce, don't buy it.

• Buy more unprocessed food ingredients and make your own meals rather than buying ready-to-eat, processed foods, which are almost universally formulated with disease-promoting ingredients.

• GROW some of your own food! The best food you can ever eat is food from your own garden.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033162_food_ingredients_chemicals.html#ixzz1TViww3bg

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2010, Adams created NaturalNews.TV, a natural living video sharing site featuring thousands of user videos on foods, fitness, green living and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and enjoys outdoor activities, nature photography, Pilates and martial arts training.

HEALTH FREEDOM ALERT--"If you want continued access to all the elements of natural health, if you want the marketplace to reflect your needs and concerns, if you want freedom of choice, instead of a corporate statism, in which drug-based medicine will be the all-embracing, all-ruling monopoly it intends to become—step up."

2011-07-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Jon Rappoport -- Government Killing Natural Health

GOVERNMENT KILLING NATURAL HEALTH

By Investigating Journalist Jon Rappoport
July 15, 2011
NewsWithViews.com

HEALTH FREEDOM ALERT

re: FDA NIDA Guidelines 2011
re: Food Safety Modernization Act 2011
re: S.1310 Dietary Supplement Labeling Bill 2011

I just finished interviewing brilliant constitutional lawyer, Jonathan Emord, on my radio show. Emord has taken the FDA to court and beaten them eight times. No other attorney in America comes close.

So when Jonathan talks, I listen.

And I can tell you that the government is coming after your nutritional supplements. Again.

The radio interview will be archived in a day or two:
Scroll down to The Jon Rappoport Show and you'll find it.

You need to listen to the hour of radio and get the link out there to anyone who has a pulse.

The new approach to killing natural health is through the bogus issue of “safety.”

There are three vectors in the attack—the recently passed Food Safety Law, new FDA regulations, and a bill now in committee sponsored by Dick Durbin.

They are all draconian. They use the issues of “good manufacturing practices” and “potentially unsafe ingredients.” The intention is to drive nutritional companies into the ground via a bureaucratic nightmare that involves inspections, charged fees, red tape, denying the use of many nutrients, and prosecutions.

Nutritional supplements are safest ingested products in the world. On the other hand, the pharma-system kills 106,000 Americans a year with its drugs. (See Starfield, JAMA, July 26, 2000, “Is US health really the best in the world?”)

In the next three years, you will see nutritional products disappearing from the shelves of your health food store, and then you will see a sudden escalation of that process, as funding for these government attacks swells.

The nutritional industry has been asleep at the wheel, scared, blithely wishful, and deferential to government regulators. It has displayed egregious weakness, and the FDA, which is an owned and operated subsidiary of the pharmaceutical business, has moved in for the kill—to eliminate its boss's competition.

The trade groups that represent the nutritional industry are the most idiotic, fawning, and ineffective bunch of lobbyists Washington has ever seen. To them I say: if I'm wrong, prove it.

The only rescue and hope is a sustained and very aggressive grass roots campaign launched by millions of Americans, who want free access and free choice when it comes to their health.

There is at least one online petition circulating. I believe the best way to go is the old-fashioned way: letters and phone calls. Not emails. When they can delete anything delivered online with a click, they feel nothing. When they have to deal with phone calls and postal carriers delivering tons of letters, they are inconvenienced to the point where they know something is happening to them.

Flood them.

Make yourself known to your representatives, the FDA, and the White House.

In 1994, this worked. I was there. Slicker methods of communicating don't necessarily mean better ways of communicating.

The difference between what I saw in 1994 and what I see now is the difference between a tiger on the move and a tiger asleep in a zoo cage.

We also need at least one nutritional company with deep pockets to pour finances into this campaign, and to enlist celebrities who care about natural health to step up to the plate and
speak out. On television. Celebrities who will be listened to. It isn't just a Twitter world.

Get the link to the Emord radio interview and this article out there.

In the last 15 years, since the explosive and partially successful Health Freedom movement, the public has been trained in Being Nice. This is operant conditioning. This is useless.

If you want continued access to all the elements of natural health, if you want the marketplace to reflect your needs and concerns, if you want freedom of choice, instead of a corporate statism, in which drug-based medicine will be the all-embracing, all-ruling monopoly it intends to become—step up.

To the degree that the White House has claimed it is an advocate for health, it is a complete and utter fraud. The president should make it clear these new FDA regulations and the Durbin bill will never see the light of day. And the DOJ should take steps to declare major sections of the Food Safety Law unconstitutional. Sorry, but one organic vegetable garden on the lawn of the White House is not enough.

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But don't hold your breath waiting for the federal government to bail us out.

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Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, Jon has published articles on medical fraud, politics, alternative health, and sports in LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, Stern, and other magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.

He is the is author of several books, including The Secret Behind Secret Societies and The Magic Agent (a novel).

Jon is the author of a new course for home schoolers, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.

E-Mail: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Web site, www.nomorefakenews.com

Web site, www.insolutions.info

"Wonder" If There's Anything To It? Bread Makes You Sick & Fat

2011-06-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

How Bread with Refined White Flour Affects Your Health

In 1911, the bread which made up 40 percent of the diet of the impoverished people of Britain was blamed for widespread poor health. Modern nutritional science confirms the accuracy of this assessment.
Refined white flour contains almost no natural minerals and vitamins. In particular, vitamin B deficiency from poor diet resulted in a range of illnesses that the Victorians called 'wasting diseases'. And white flour at the time was usually laced with alum, which made bad flour look whiter.
According to the Daily Mail:

"[In modern times], the Real Bread Campaign, a non-profit pressure group, claims that bread has actually gotten worse since 1911 in terms of secret adulterants -- enzymes that do not have to be declared on labels -- still being smuggled into it. Today, despite the modern fashion for healthy eating, 'nutritionally empty' white bread accounts for more than 50 percent of what we buy."

Sources:

The Daily Mail June 15, 2011

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

It's truly astounding—100 years ago, low-quality bread made up about 40 percent of the average Briton's diet (and the situation was likely similar in the US as well), and today, even lower quality bread makes up nearly 50 percent of the average diet!
Back in 1911, white bread was identified as a primary culprit for the declining health of the British population, which led to a massive campaign to revert back to more wholesome bread. At the time, wholegrain bread was considered a sign of poverty, so people from all levels of society sought after white, refined flour bread.
The campaign spearheaded by The Daily Mail was eventually successful. But it didn't last long... White bread was actually banned during World War II in the UK, and as a result, Britons were said to be in better health by 1947 after subsisting on limited rations of wholegrain breads for eight years.
However, at the end of the war, white bread was rendered legal once again, and today, more than 60 years later, our grocery shelves are stocked with breads and grain-products that are of even lower quality than 100 years ago... And, as in 1911, white processed bread is a major contributor to rampant obesity and poor health.

Do You Know the Chemicals Lurking in Your Bread?

As illustrated in The Daily Mail, the quality of bread has gotten far worse rather than better over the years. Back in 1911, salt, cheap fats, alum, lime powder, and bleaching constituted "bad" bread. Today, there's a whole new breed of health-harming ingredients to contend with in your typical store-bought bread, including:

Processed salt	High fructose corn syrup	Trans fats (hydrogenated oils)
Soy	Treatment agents (oxidant chemicals)	Reducing agents
Emulsifiers	Preservatives	Enzymes (typically from fungi or bacteria)

Many of these ingredients are hidden, as they're not required to be listed on the label. I've written numerous articles on many of these ingredients. For more information, simply follow the links provided. But hidden and potentially harmful ingredients aren't the only problem with modern bread. Today we have such things as Wonder Bread, and it's a wonder that anyone even considers it to be "bread" in the first place...

Refined Foods are Devoid of Nutrients

It's important to realize that when food is refined, vital nutrients are destroyed. In some cases it's questionable whether what remains is even fit to be considered food... at least if the term "food" implies something of nutritional value. In terms of bread, once you remove the most nutritious part of the grain, it essentially becomes a form of sugar.
Consider what gets lost in the refining process:

Half of the beneficial unsaturated fatty acids	50 percent of the calcium	80 percent of the iron	50-80 percent of the B vitamins
Virtually all of the vitamin E	70 percent of the phosphorus	98 percent of the magnesium	And many more nutrients are destroyed -- simply too many to list.

How Processed Grains Can Deteriorate Your Health

The end result of the excessive consumption of white bread and other processed forms of grain products can be seen all around you in the form of:

Obesity	Diabetes	Heart disease
Allergies and asthma	Gluten intolerance and Celiac disease	Vitamin deficiencies and related health problems

Vitamin B deficiencies in particular contribute to a wide range of illnesses, and vitamin B deficiencies are pervasive around the world. For example, an estimated 25 percent of American adults are deficient in B12.
We've also seen an extraordinary rise in digestive illnesses, such as gluten intolerance and Celiac disease, and modern industrial baking methods are likely a major contributor to these widespread problems. The rise in asthma and allergies may also be related to our modern food processing and manufacturing practices. For example, one of the enzymes commonly used in modern bread making is amylase, which is known to cause asthma.
Many also forget that most commercial wheat production is, unfortunately, a "study in pesticide application," beginning with the seeds being treated with fungicide. Once they become wheat, they are sprayed with hormones and pesticides. Even the bins in which the harvested wheat is stored have been coated with insecticides. These chemicals all contribute to increasing the average person's toxic load, which is a contributing factor to virtually every possible disease imaginable. I can't think of any illness that is not made worse by frequent toxic exposure, such as what we get through conventionally-grown foods and unfiltered water.
Whereas old time mills ground flour slowly, today's mills are designed for mass-production, using high-temperature, high-speed steel rollers. Next, it's hit with another chemical insult--a chlorine gas bath (chlorine oxide). This serves as a whitener, as well as an "aging" agent. Flour used to be aged with time, improving the gluten and thus improving the baking quality. Treating it with chlorine instantly produces similar qualities in the flour (with a disturbing lack of concern about adding another dose of chemicals to your food).
The resulting white flour is nearly all starch, and now contains a small fraction of the nutrients of the original grain. Additionally, the chemical treatments on the grain results in the formation of a byproduct, alloxan—a poison used in the medical research industry to induce diabetes in healthy mice. Alloxan causes diabetes by spinning up enormous amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them. Beta cells are the primary cell type in areas of your pancreas called islets of Langerhans, and they produce insulin; so if those are destroyed, you develop diabetes.
Given the raging epidemic of diabetes and other chronic diseases in this country, it may be unwise to be complacent about a toxin such as this in your bread, even if it is present in small amounts...

Why a High-Carb Diet Can be Disastrous to Your Health

Overconsumption of carbs is the primary driving factor for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately, the dietary establishment has unwisely been extolling the virtues of carbohydrates while warning you to avoid fats. But anyone who bought into the high-carb, low-fat dietary recommendations has likely struggled with their weight and health, wondering what they're doing wrong…
The truth of the matter is that a diet high in grain carbs (as opposed to vegetables) and low in fat may be dangerous to your health, and if you want to shed excess weight and improve your health, the converse diet is what you're looking for!
Why are high-carb diets so bad?
In a nutshell, overeating carbohydrate foods can prevent a higher percentage of fats from being used for energy, and lead to an increase in fat storage. It also raises your insulin levels, which in short order can cause insulin resistance, followed by diabetes. Insulin resistance is also at the heart of virtually every disease known to man.
Contrary to popular belief, eating fat does NOT make you fat—carbohydrates, such as sugar and grains, do. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates, but it can easily convert those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat. Any carbohydrates not immediately used by your body are stored in the form of glycogen (a long string of glucose molecules linked together). Your body has two storage sites for glycogen: your liver and your muscles. Once the glycogen levels are filled in both your liver and muscles, excess carbohydrates are converted into fat and stored in your adipose, that is, fatty, tissue.
So, although carbohydrates are fat-free, excess carbohydrates end up as excess fat.
But that's not the worst of it. Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates will also generate a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rapid rise, your pancreas secretes insulin into your bloodstream, which then lowers the levels of blood glucose. The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that's stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat!
Too Much Wheat or Grain Converts Into Fat
In other words, when you eat too much bread, pasta, and any other grain products, you're essentially sending a hormonal message, via insulin, to your body that says "store fat."
Additionally, increased insulin levels also:
Make it virtually impossible for you to use your own stored body fat for energy
Suppress two important hormones: glucagon and growth hormone. Glucagon promotes the burning of fat and sugar. Growth hormone is used for muscle development and building new muscle mass.
Increases hunger: As blood sugar increases following a carbohydrate meal, insulin rises with the eventual result of lower blood sugar. This results in hunger, often only a couple of hours (or less) after the meal.
So, all in all, the excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you fat, they make sure you stay fat. Cravings, usually for sweets, are frequently part of this cycle, leading you to resort to snacking, often on more carbohydrates. Not eating can make you feel ravenous shaky, moody and ready to "crash." If the problem is chronic, you never get rid of that extra stored fat, and your energy and overall health is adversely affected.
Below is a list of some of the most common complaints of people with insulin resistance (IR). Many of these symptoms may occur immediately following a meal of carbohydrates; others may be chronic:

Fatigue. Some are tired just in the morning or afternoon; others are exhausted all day.	Brain fogginess. The inability to concentrate is the most evident symptom. Loss of creativity, poor memory, failing or poor grades in school often accompany insulin resistance, as do various forms of "learning disabilities."	Hypoglycemia. Feeling jittery, agitated and moody is common in IR, with an almost immediate relief once food is eaten. Dizziness is also common, as is the craving for sweets, chocolate or caffeine.
Intestinal bloating. Most intestinal gas is produced from dietary carbohydrates. Sometimes the intestinal distress can become quite severe, resulting in a diagnosis of "colitis" or "ileitis."	Sleepiness. Many people with IR get sleepy immediately after meals containing more than 20-30 percent carbohydrates. This is typically a pasta meal, or even a meat meal that includes bread or potatoes and a sweet dessert.	Increased fat storage and weight. In many people, the most evident sign is a large abdomen, or belly fat.
Increased triglycerides. High triglycerides in the blood are often seen in overweight persons. But even those who are not too fat may have stores of fat in their arteries as a result of IR. These triglycerides are the direct result of carbohydrates from the diet being converted by insulin.	Increased blood pressure. It is well known that most people with hypertension have too much insulin and are IR. It is often possible to show a direct relationship between the level of insulin and the level of blood pressure: as insulin levels elevate, so does blood pressure.	Depression. Carbohydrates are a natural "downer," and it's not uncommon to see many depressed persons also having IR. Carbohydrates do this by changing your brain chemistry—they increase serotonin, which produces a depressing or sleepy feeling. (This is a significant consideration for those trying to learn, whether at school, home or work.)

Does this sound like you?

One of the Fastest Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Health

The best suggestion for anyone wanting to shed excess fat and improve health is to moderate and normalize your insulin response by limiting (ideally, eliminating) your intake of refined sugars and fructose, and limiting all other carbohydrate intake as much as possible. (Proteins and fats generally do not produce much insulin.)
With the stress of insulin resistance eliminated, your body can finally be able to correct many of its own problems, and this is also why I keep reminding you that the underlying factor of most disease states that MUST be addressed is insulin resistance. Once you've normalized your insulin levels, your body actually has a phenomenal capacity for self-healing.

Awesome News: EFT As Effective As EMDR!

2011-06-17T20:39:00.000-07:00

EMDR vs EFT for PTSD

A Controlled Comparison of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Two Psychological Therapies for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing vs. Emotional Freedom Techniques

Thanos Karatzias, PhD, Kevin Power, PhD, Keith Brown, FRCPsych, Theresa McGoldrick, BA, Millia Begum, MRCPsych, Jenny Young, BA, Paul Loughran, MSc, Zoe Chouliara, PhD, and Sally Adams, MScL
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (2011), 199(6), p 372-378.

Abstract

EFT Tapping Points

The present study reports on the first ever controlled comparison between eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and emotional freedom techniques (EFT) for post-traumatic stress disorder. A total of 46 participants were randomized to either EMDR (n = 23) or EFT (n = 23). The participants were assessed at baseline and then reassessed after an 8-week waiting period. Two further blind assessments were conducted at post-treatment and 3-months follow-up. Overall, the results indicated that both interventions produced significant therapeutic gains at post-treatment and follow-up in an equal number of sessions. Similar treatment effect sizes were observed in both treatment groups. Regarding clinical significant changes, a slightly higher proportion of patients in the EMDR group produced substantial clinical changes compared with the EFT group. Given the speculative nature of the theoretical basis of EFT, a dismantling study on the active ingredients of EFT should be subject to future research.

Here's A Totally Easy Way To Keep Food & Healing Journals

2011-06-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

FOOD
If you want to hype up your awareness of what you are really putting in your mouth or if you want to figure out which foods are causing inflammation and cut them out, keeping track of everything you eat is key.

A totally easy way to keep a food journal is to use your calendar. I use Google calendar but I imagine my method will work with other digital calendars, perhaps with a tweak or two.

Here's how:

Create a calendar called "Food" in Google calendar
Create an all-day event called "Food" also in the Food calendar
Select "available" on "show me as" in Event Details
Set the "Food" event to repeat daily in Event Details
Each day click on "Food" in your daily calendar and type in everything you've had to eat and drink that day in the "notes" or "description" field
Save "only this instance"
TA DA, you're done!

It's so simple, isn't it? A one-time-only 3 second set-up and then a little note each day.

If you are one of those people who goes into denial about what you eat, I suggest recording your meals and snack immediately, so, several times a day. This way you won't "forget" and you'll end up with an accurate account.

If the word "food" triggers a bad reaction, call your calendar and event something else like "LOVE" or "nourishment" or "fud" like in that old Gary Larson comic. Use a word that makes you feel gud.

HEALING
For a healing journal replace "food" with "healing" and enter the details of your healing process. These may include:

pain

location
rate intensity from 1-10 where 10 is most intense
quality, i.e., tingly, stinging, achy, deep, throbbing, sharp, diffuse
duration, i.e. constant, intermittent, or exact number of minutes or hours
anything unusual that happened that day in general

symptoms

type: describe in detail
location
rate intensity from 1-10 where 10 is most intense
duration, i.e. constant, intermittent, or exact number of minutes or hours
anything unusual that happened that day in general

A wonderful thing about the healing journal is that you can be as concise or detailed as you like. So, if keeping a healing journal feels like an overwhelming burden, just enter the bare minimum. Even "better" or "worse" is more useful than nothing. You might find it useful to include a word about your mood.

On the other hand, if you enjoy the process of keeping track and watching progress, record as much detail as you wish for an eventual, full picture of the wondrous process of healing.

The one deficit of this system is that I have not yet found a way of viewing all the notes at the same time so I can see the progress all on one screen or page. If you figure it out before me, or if you already know how, please share that news in the comments!

Trust the process.
Process the trust.

Vitamin D protects against low radiation damage and radiation-induced cancer

2011-06-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

As understanding of Vitamin D increases, it is becoming apparent that its most active form, Vitamin D3 (calcitriol), may offer protection against a variety of radiation-induced damages. Vitamin D’s protective action is carried by a wide variety of mechanisms, including cell cycle regulation and proliferation, cellular differentiation and communication, and programmed cell death (apoptosis).

A paper on the subject argued that vitamin D should be considered among the prime nonpharmacological agents that offer protection against low radiation damage and radiation-induced cancer -- or even the primary agent.

According to the paper in the International Journal of Low Radiation:

"... [O]ur understanding of how vitamin D mediates biological responses has entered a new era ... In view of the evidence that has been presented here, it would appear that vitamin D by its preventive/ameliorating actions should be given serious consideration as a protective agent against sublethal radiation injury, and in particular that induced by low radiation".

Sources:
International Journal of Low Radiation 2008; 5(4)

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Many concerned readers have been asking for strategies to help prevent damage caused by radioactive fallout from the recent nuclear disaster in Japan. In all likelihood, radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant is NOT a serious threat to your health unless you are in the near vicinity. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has so far uncovered only very low radiation levels and notes that even those are declining.

As of May 3, 2011, they wrote:

"It is important to note that all of the radiation levels detected by RadNet monitors and sampling have been very low, are well below any level of public health concern, and continue to decrease over time."

This information was released before the operator of Fukushima announced at the end of May that additional fuel rods had melted at the facility, although it's unclear whether that will impact U.S. risks since the meltdown reportedly occurred in the hours and days immediately following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Regardless, considering the United States has many older nuclear plants that are susceptible to disasters like the one that occurred in Japan, this should not be considered the final word on radioactive fallout. Should a disaster occur close to home, or if you are currently in the vicinity of the Fukushima plant, it's important to have non-toxic strategies for protection available, and one of these may be vitamin D.

How Does Vitamin D Protect Against Radiation-Induced Damage?

Scientists have identified a total of nearly 3,000 genes that are upregulated by vitamin D, so it makes sense that it would have "multifaceted protective actions," as researchers noted in the International Journal of Low Radiation.

The report found that the most active molecular form of vitamin D -- D3 (also known as calcitriol) -- may offer protection against a variety of radiation-induced damages, including those caused by background radiation or a low-level nuclear incident, through the following mechanisms:

Cell cycle regulation and proliferation
Cellular differentiation and communication
Programmed Cell Death (PCD)
Anti-angiogenesis (a process that stops tumors from making new blood vessels, which means they stop growing)

The protective mechanisms are so strong that researchers suggested vitamin D3 should be considered among the prime (if not the primary) non-pharmacological agents to protect against sub-lethal low radiation damage and, particularly, radiation-induced cancer.

It's unclear how much vitamin D is necessary to protect against radiation-induced cancer, but researchers have found that daily intakes of vitamin D by adults in the range of 4,000-8,000 IU are needed to maintain blood levels of vitamin D metabolites in the range needed to reduce the risk of breast and colon cancers by about half.

Earlier studies have shown that optimizing your vitamin D levels could help you to prevent at least 16 different types of cancer including pancreatic, lung, ovarian, prostate, and skin cancers, so it's not a stretch to add radiation-induced cancer to that list.

It has been my experience that many are still nervous about taking doses larger than 1,000 to 2,000 units per day. This is unfortunate as most adults without sun or safe tanning bed exposure will need 6,000-8,000 units of vitamin D per day to attain healthy vitamin D levels.

Three Points to Remember About Vitamin D

When using vitamin D therapeutically, it's important to remember the following:

Your best source for vitamin D is exposure to the sun, without sunblock on your skin, until your skin turns the lightest shade of pink. While this isn't always possible due to the change of the seasons and your geographic location (and your skin color), this is the ideal to aim for. Vitamin D supplementation or use of a safe tanning bed can fill the gaps during the winter months outside of the tropics, when healthy sun exposure is not an option.

If you supplement with vitamin D, you'll only want to supplement with natural vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). Do NOT use the synthetic and highly inferior vitamin D2, which is the one most doctors will give you in a prescription unless you ask specifically for D3.

Get your vitamin D blood levels checked! The only way to determine the correct dose is to get your blood tested since there are so many variables that influence your vitamin D status. I recommend using Lab Corp in the United States. Getting the correct test is the first step in this process, as there are TWO vitamin D tests currently being offered: 1,25(OH)D and 25(OH)D.

The correct test your doctor needs to order is 25(OH)D, also called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the better marker of overall D status. This is the marker that is most strongly associated with overall health.

What Else Can You do to Protect Against Radiation Risks?

Biologists and drug makers have long been on the hunt for a pill that would protect humans from radiation in the event of a nuclear accident or terrorist attack. Currently, there is no such "magic pill," but there are a few close seconds, aside from vitamin D:

Potassium Iodide

If you're exposed to radioactive iodine, your thyroid, which uptakes iodine from your blood to make thyroid hormones, will actively take in this substance. This is why thyroid cancer is one of the greatest risks following exposure to this type of radiation.

Potassium iodide (a stable form of iodine) works by essentially "flooding" your system with iodine so your thyroid has no need to take in the radioactive form. The American Thyroid Association recommends that anyone living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant have potassium iodide in their household at all times in the event of a radiation emergency, and advises the supplement be made available to those living within 200 miles of a plant.

However, you should only take potassium iodide if you are near active radiation fallout. This is NOT a strategy that should be used as a long-term preventive because it only protects your thyroid for one to three days, no longer, and taking it when not absolutely necessary could result in thyrotoxicosis.

In this regard, vitamin D may be far superior because it can be taken before, during and after a radiation incident with only positive ramifications, assuming you monitor your blood levels to keep them in the optimal range.

Remember, it's only if you are deficient in iodine that if a radioactive cloud passes by, your body will tend to suck that radioactive iodine into your thyroid gland to fill up its iodine stores.

In an ideal situation you will have been taking adequate amounts of iodine from safe sources, which will protect you from radioactive iodine naturally. In reality, however, many are likely iodine deficient.

I recently conducted an interview with Dr. David Brownstein, who has compiled a tremendous amount of clinical data on this topic and can be considered an expert in this area.

Dr. Brownstein has been working with iodine for the last 20 years. He has tested over 5,000 patients in his clinic and found over 95% of them to be iodine deficient. This is an incredible result as it puts iodine deficiency on par with the percentage of people that are deficient in vitamin D.

Spirulina

Spirulina -- a blue-green algae -- might be another useful alternative to protect against the effects of radiation, and there is in fact research backing this up. Spirulina was actually used to treat children exposed to chronic low levels of radiation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

According to a scientific review of spirulina's benefits:

"Up to very recently, the interest in Spirulina was mainly in its nutritive value. Currently, however, numerous people are looking into the possible therapeutic effects of Spirulina.

Many pre-clinical studies and a few clinical studies suggest several therapeutic effects ranging from reduction of cholesterol and cancer to enhancing the immune system, increasing intestinal lactobacilli, reducing nephrotoxicity by heavy metals and drugs and radiation protection."

But what is it about this blue-green algae that gives it this radiation-protective capacity?

Spirulina has a 16 percent phycocyanin content—a blue pigment that is attached to its photosynthetic membranes. Phycocyanin is also a nitrogen storage molecule. The nitrogen atoms can form a complex with heavy metals such as radioactive cesium and stronium, hence "cleansing" these radioactive metals from your body.

Sweet Whey

I interviewed Ori Hofmekler for an alternative viewpoint with regard to how you can decrease the risk to your health from radiation. Ori makes some compelling arguments for the use of sweet whey to help protect against absorbing radioactive minerals.

One of the reasons for using sweet whey in a situation like this is because whey protein contains all the precursors that help your body produce glutathione, which is one of the best ways to detoxify these toxins.

The other reason is that sweet whey is whole whey. It's the highest source of all minerals and trace minerals that exist in nature. It has every possible mineral and trace elements -- including organic sodium -- that your body needs in the most bioactive form.

Other Herbs and Supplements

In general, the following foods, herbs and supplements may also help support your overall health in the event of a nuclear accident:

Ginseng Kelp and other seaweeds (high in natural iodine) Zeolites (to neutralize radiation) or bentonite clays
Ashwaganda (an adaptogenic herb) Fulvic Acid Reishi mushrooms (strong immune support
High-dose vitamin C Magnesium Selenium
Coconut oil, which supports optimal thyroid health Astaxanthin (has some protective function against ionizing radiation) Chlorella (contains chlorophyll, which will increase your resistance to radiation)

So my friend, Scott Freeman-who is also a chiropractor, by the way-was in excruciating pain...

2011-05-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

...So my friend, Scott Freeman--who is also a chiropractor, by the way--was in excruciating pain and ended up asking himself if pain is good or not. I love his story about how he came up first with the question and then with the answer. I love how he details his whole process and solution.

Is Pain Good?

This is the most important article I've written to date. It's long. And it's that important.

Four years ago, I severely injured my left hip. I slammed it into a marble table while walking through a restaurant, spraining the joint so bad I could barely walk.

I was in desperate pain, and did almost everything I could to get rid of it. Chiropractic, yoga, meditation, energy work, more (though no drugs). The pain kept getting worse, it shifted locations, it'd come and go. I eventually learned to live with it, doing my best to either ignore it, or be numb to it.

Two years ago, while packing to move to Singapore, my hip spasmed so bad I couldn't walk. The pain would even wake me at night when I rolled over. I spent 3 weeks in a recliner at my mom's house recovering. I made it to Singapore, but my hip has spasmed three more times since arriving, the last time about a month ago.

The pain was so bad, I spent the first few days on my back pushing across the cold marble floor with my feet just to reach the restroom. Can you imagine my humiliation and shame? "I'm the doctor!", was my angry and frustrated mantra. "I teach this stuff!", but I was humbled by it.

Then we bumped into our neighbor. He saw me hobbling and said he'd just visited a chiropractor. My girlfriend nodded towards me and said, "He's a chiropractor". The guy replied, "That's not supposed to happen to you."

I was furious, my shame boiling over into anger. "Forget you! I'm human.", was my hurt and indignant thought.

That's when I broke. The helplessness and honestly I heard in my own voice reduced me to tears....and my real healing began.

See, I never tried to heal my hip.

I only tried to get rid of the pain.

And those are two very different things.

The word "heal" comes from Old English & German roots for being "whole". To heal, means to incorporate, integrate, add, accept, be a part of. It does not mean to get rid of, reject, abandon, separate, alienate, annihilate, nor destroy. I had only tried to get rid of the pain, to kill it off. I had never attempted true healing. And symptoms only resolve as we heal, as we become more whole.

In my moment of helplessness, I finally started accepting myself. I quit rejecting the pain that I'd been holding down for years, and started feeling what I'd been denying. The frustration, the limitations, the numbness, the shame, humiliation, and raw physical pain. I cried. It hurt. And I felt great. It was my liberty.

So is pain good?

YES

"Pain provides a clear, direct message that tells us to modify our behavior or stop what we are currently doing."

- Dr Donny Epstein

Founder, Network Spinal Analysis

Author, "Healing Myths, Healing Magic"

In plain language, pain means three things:

1) Stop what you're doing

2) Pay attention

3) Do something different

The purpose of pain is to let us know that we are off track, and that change is necessary. That something we are doing is either not working, not in our best interest, or will lead to danger and damage. The feedback from our body is designed to guide and direct us towards healthier, more sustainable action. It's the foundation of how communication works in our body. It's a blessing, a gift.

The medical model we've all learned tells us that pain is bad, and no pain is good. So when we have pain, we try to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Physically, emotionally, etc. Our goal is to "fix" the problem, like we're machines that just need a good mechanic.

Any "fix" will do, natural, chemical, or otherwise. Drugs, needles, alcohol, Reiki, surgery, physio....it doesn't matter the method. They're all used in the same manner, with the same philosophy - get rid of the pain. That's what I tried to do with my hip, and it failed. It did not get rid of the pain, NOR did I heal.

The World Health Organization documents that 10 out of 10 causes of death in High Income Nations are lifestyle diseases, diseases related solely to how we live our lives. And research shows that most people spend more money on their health in the last two weeks of life, than the entire rest of their lives put together. Wouldn't it have been better to take the early warning signs from our bodies and act healthfully at the time?

The evidence is in. Our prevailing medical model does not work. It is too much science, without enough wisdom. Too much data and analysis, without enough trust and experience. We misinterpret pain, thinking it's bad, when it's our savior preventing further damage and guiding us in the direction of healing.

A new model is needed.

Using my own situation as an example, I'll present the Philosophy, and some Practical Application.

PHILOSOPHY

"The body's inner intelligence

is the ultimate and supreme genius."

- Dr Deepak Chopra

Endocrinologist, Ayurvedic Physician,

Best-Selling Author, "Perfect Health"

There is a wisdom, an "innate intelligence" that pumps our hearts, circulates our blood, digests our food, grows us from an egg to a fetus to a baby, a child, and an adult. It heals our wounds, mends our bones, cries our tears. It wards off 1000's of deadly chemicals, parasites, viruses, bacteria and more every single day. And still, after the millions of miracles our body performs daily, we somehow think its making a mistake when it gives us signs and signals, simple impulses, feelings, senses, and instructions to follow? Like "Stretch, walk around, take a breathe, eat this not that, trust him not her, or change your behavior (pain)"?

Granted, it's not always the easiest thing to understand. Our body does not speak English, Mandarin, Spanish, or Malay. ;) It speaks in the simple language of sensations - pain, pleasure, pressure, tingling, etc. And we're not very well trained in this language.

For thousands of years, our cultures have taught us to ignore everything our body tells us. Our sports heroes say, "No pain, no gain", meaning "Ignore your body". Most all marketing and entertainment says our real body, and all signals from it, is disgusting, must be changed and ignored. Many cultural and religious beliefs teach us that our body is dirty, even sinful.

The ultimate message from the culture is that in trusting the wisdom of our biology, we risk losing the love and acceptance of those we care so much about. It's too much to lose. Forced to make a choice, we sacrifice most of our natural, normal biological instincts. We reject and ignore everything our body is crying for (nutrition, hydration, sunlight, rest, healing, recreation, intimacy, fulfillment, so much more), trading it in for certain symptoms and diseases - physically, mentally, and emotionally - confused, sometimes even pretending that we don't see exactly what's going on.

Folks, when it ain't broke, don't fix it. But when it is, make the change.

Say this,

"I am accepting and listening to my body, instead of ignoring and rejecting it."

Say it again. And again. And again. Say it over and over 1000 times til you get it.

It's brave. When you choose to heal (to make whole), by definition you must grow into something new. Most people don't do that. They're too scared to change. And because symptoms are the body's way of getting your attention so you can heal, they will keep coming back until you do. So if your goal is to get rid of the symptoms simply to return to who and how you were, to keep doing the same stuff that got you into this situation in the first place, then you've failed in your attempt to heal.

Definition of Insanity:

Doing the same thing over and over again,

expecting a different result.

We've been taught to always refer to an OUTSIDE AUTHORITY for expertise - doctors, teachers, books, the church, etc. To dismiss our own internal signals and knowing, putting external knowledge over our own wisdom and experience. This undermines and devalues the natural signals that your body is freely providing at all times.

I am NOT dismissing nor ignoring outside information. I am simply trusting my own body and incorporating this wisdom into any decision I make for healing. I see my chiropractor, I consult a nutritionist, I seek and receive help from others. And I do it because the wisdom and instinct from my body, heart, mind, and soul directs me to, NOT because I "think" I should, or because somebody has good credentials, etc. My direction comes from within.

We are all naturally connected with the wisdom of our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls. And it gets knocked out of us as we learn from our cultures. I am reminding you of your own natural healing capacity and ability, of what your natural instinct already knows. And to relearn and become proficient in these skills that our culture has forsaken, takes time, guidance, coaching, and desire.

In my case, with my hip, I am taking the pain as a strong signal to make some vast and immediate changes in my life. To modify behavior. I'm taking it as a gift. A gift preventing further damage, and a gift pushing me (strongly) in the direction of better health.

PRACTICAL ACTION

Pain means that's something's off track, and that change is necessary. So I've been asking, "What must I to change to improve my health? Thanks to this pain, what opportunities do I now have to grow?". Use my examples to inspire your own.

1) Food

Part of my hip pain is due to inflammation in my Large Intestine. I grew up with horrible eating habits - too much sugar, eating to avoid emotions, eating when I wasn't hungry, more.

While I've improved a lot in my adulthood, I still had a ton of unhealthy habits, and decades to make up for.

What my hip pain is helping me do, is be more present, attentive, and selective to what my body is actually calling for IN THIS PRESENT MOMENT. Not what I "think" would be good, not what I was "used to" eating, but what I can sense and feel is good for me now.

"Am I genuinely hungry right now? If so, for what specifically? What food can I sense would promote more ease, peace, flexibility, and healing in my body?"

Three days ago, the only thing I wanted for lunch was Watermelon. To my analytical mind, it made no sense. And I trusted. When I ate it, my insides relaxed and calmed more than they had in three weeks. I felt great! Sure, we can look up the biochemistry and nutritional value of watermelon to validate the choice. Or we can just accept that it worked. :)

What are my results? I'm finding that I'm eating much less food, far more vegetables, very little processed foods, and little to no sugar. I have no desire for chocolate, pickles, or chips, which used to be standards. I'm noticing a desire to eat more alkaline producing foods, and less acid producing foods. I've lost 4 kg, I feel lighter and healthier, my insides are healing, and symptoms are diminishing. This is all making me happy, and it feels good in my body. I am willing to make the change.

I am reading Deepak Chopra's "Perfect Digestion", generally following the "Eat Right 4 Your Type" system, and plan to visit an Ayurvedic Doctor. I am incorporating external knowledge along with my personal experience. And given the years of ignoring my body's wisdom, it's critical at the moment to regain the trust and confidence in my own senses.

2) Bodywork/Stretching

This is a big one. I have become SO sensitive to the subtle signals of my body asking me to stretch, move, or even to just stay still. I'm noticing how easy it is for me to think about things, and disconnect from my body's actual experience. I'm noticing that my body is asking me to stretch a LOT, especially in the hip/waist region. I trust it. I do it. I put my pens down, I drop my notebook, I delay the calls for 30 seconds, and I move the way my body is asking. I notice that I most always feel better, looser, more relaxed, at ease, and the pain usually diminishes. I'm not stretching to get rid of the pain. I'm stretching because it feels right. Sometimes pain goes away. Sometimes it stays, AS IT SHOULD, because I'm still in the healing process. I would not want the fire alarm ringing to stop if there's still a fire.

Most of the time I just stretch in whatever ways my body asks. It's bold, cause it's rarely linear, logical, nor within the strict confines of acceptable motion we've grown up with. But I know the costs if I don't.

I regularly do some of the yoga that I've written about in prior newsletters. I trust what's needed, whether a skill I already have, or something I seek from another.

Network Chiropractic (the work I do at Freeman Wellness) has been a HUGE help. When visiting my chiropractor just today, in fact, I started breaking apart some of the immense scar tissue that had built up in my hip joint. It was incredibly painful, and it felt great. :) The scar tissue had built up to hold things still as a defense to prevent further damage. It was a great strategy at the time, but is no longer appropriate. I've changed. I'm no longer at war with my body. I'm not trying to prevent anything. I'm ready for real healing, so the defense is no longer necessary. My body is ready to heal, and holding the defense would prevent that.

A traditional chiropractor would have slammed through the joint, trying to break up the scar tissue and create motion. Noble intent, and with one major flaw - there's no growth in the patient. The patient's body is still acting in defense. They are not in a healing process. So they will almost immediately return to the same patterns of living that got them tight and defended in the first place, most often repeating the same symptoms.

With Network, my body is learning how to better manage and self-regulate itself. Instead of repeating lifestyle habits that produce defense and constriction, I'm developing new habits that promote health, ease, and connection. I'm becoming more reliant on myself, instead of my doctor. My body is learning how to take care of itself, instead of always needing an outside agent. Yes, I've been doing it for years. And I never applied it in this region of my body or life. I'm ready now.

The big take home point here, and it's a major one for me, is being present to the senses of my body, trusting it, and doing as it's directing me, over sitting around thinking about things. Thinking generally takes me out of the moment, away from being present. I get caught up in my mind instead of right here in my body and my life. I'm finding that I'm spending less time on the computer too, cause it takes me away from being present, and I usually have to sit in crouched positions that hurt.

I trust how my body needs to move, and am ready to change and grow.

3) Emotion

This is the heart of it for me. For most of my life, emotion meant pain. So I'd avoid it. I'd stuff my feelings, and move on as quickly as possible. I'd convince myself I was healing, cause I sure knew all the right ideas. And I'd rarely get real and simply feel the truth of my experiences.

I'm finding now that it's far more painful and costly to hold on to stuff than to be bold and feel it. Ask my hip. :) So a lot is coming out, and as it does, I usually find that my body loosens up, feels more flexible, at ease, and pleasurable. Yes, sometimes I cry, even wail. Because that's what's real. And because, despite the temporary pain, the overall result is much happier, more relaxed, and flexible in my body and emotions.

And really, the bottom line is this: feel what you really feel. What you REALLY feel. Quit darting, dodging, ducking, or analyzing. There is nothing to understand. Understanding will never heal anything. Letting yourself simply experience what you really experience is all that's needed. It's a liberty and a self-respect that few afford themselves, choosing to stuff things down and suffer instead. I know it well, so I can advise just as well. ;) Network Chiropractic helps massively with this, as does Meridian Stretching. That's why I teach these things at Freeman Wellness.

4) Mind
Two things are going on here. One, I'm realizing more and more that I am not my mind. What used to be normal, was that I'd think all the time, never-endingly. It was so normal, I didn't even know I was doing it! All this overthinking would disconnect me from my ACTUAL experience in this present moment. I'd think about feelings, but not actually be feeling them. So scary.

What I'm doing now, as much as possible, is every time I find myself off thinking about something, I shift my attention to the sensations of my body. That's it. Very simple. Then I take my guidance from what my body feels and senses. It's very new, very different, and not always easy or comfortable. But I do it, cause I know the value of it, and what it'll cost me if I don't.

The second thing I'm doing is consciously being more supportive of myself. During those first few days when even rolling over on the couch would send me screaming in pain, I quickly found that criticizing, judging, and blaming myself just made me feel worse. I'd get emotionally dejected and depressed, and I'd experience my body tensing and having more pain. So I changed.

Instead of focusing on how I had failed, I focused on how I was succeeding. If I moved 4 cm without too much pain, if I discovered a new way of rolling over, or of positioning my leg to find more ease, I congratulated myself! "Way to go!! Good job!!" This is very honest. I decided that I had a choice, and that giving myself raving support felt much better than criticism. And when I do, my body always responds by relaxing and reducing pain. In these ways, my mind became my friend.

Again, Network Chiropractic significantly helps me with these two things. One, it helps me be more body present, and out of my head. Two, research shows that over 95% of people receiving Care find their "inner voice becomes more compassionate". I'm very lucky to have such a gift, such a resource.

5) Enjoyment
Ultimately, this is what it's all about. I'm doing more and more of what makes me happy in life. Why? Cause it feels good!

Less and less of what I'm supposed to do, or should do. Less and less of what's appropriate, more and more of what fulfills and makes me happy. Less self-sacrifice, more happy fulfillment.

It's a simple recipe, and it works. For me, this means playing more piano, making more music, starting to set up a music career, reading books I like, talking more with friends and family, being more successful in business, improving my relationships, and more. It's different for everyone.

We have one choice: do what feels good and is healthy, or do what we've been told by our families, cultures, doctors, etc. Sometimes those are the same, often they're not. You must make a very wise, and often bold choice - sacrifice yourself or be fulfilled. If we're off track in life, it's supposed to hurt. As our body and life works better, the pain, the signal, goes away. Every word I speak has deep scientific support.

SUMMARY

Is this a lot of change? YES! Does it scare the shit out of me sometimes? YES! Does it excite me other times? Yes. And is it worth it? 100%. It doesn't always feel like it, and yes.

Pain is good, cause it guides us towards healing. We only have problems when we ignore it.

We're here to help at Freeman Wellness. I've been through it., so I understand If you need some help, give a call.

Take care

Dr Scott

Freeman Wellness

www.freemanwellness.com

drscottfreeman@gmail.com

+65 6224 1185

Derek Rydall: The One-Minute Mystic: Simple Things You Can Do to Stay Connected

2011-05-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for the spiritual seeker is meditation. For the new initiate, it can be a frustrating, even painful, experience. And for many already on the path, there's often still resistance to meditating consistently.

But meditation isn't a chore; it's a state of being that sets you free. It's not about the technique -- the technique is not meditation. The state of relaxed, undistractable attention -- that moment you "shoot the gap" between thoughts and touch the timeless dimension of being -- that is meditation.

And there are as many paths to this connection as people.

In that light, I want to offer a practice that doesn't require you to join a monastery or sit in lotus for hours. Using simple, one-minute sessions during the day, you can strengthen focus, lengthen attention, dissolve blocks, and increase connection -- and still have time to live life fully.

In this way you become what I call the "One-Minute Mystic."

These practices are deceptively simple; most authentic spiritual practices are, because they're not about ego, which tends to need complex processes to make it feel important. So don't brush them off or take their power for granted.

When you use them consistently -- the key to their effectiveness -- they will result in a transformational shift in consciousness.

Practices of the One-Minute Mystic:

Before you get out of bed, take a minute to connect with your breath. Watch it breathing itself. If your mind kicks in, assure it you'll be with it shortly, then bring attention back to the breath. Instead of "Good God, it's morning!" try, "Good morning, God" Give thanks for everything in your life -- including life itself -- then put your feet on the floor.

As you take your bath or shower, take a minute to become conscious of the water against your skin, the sensations, the sounds. Stay in your body, instead of drifting into the future, planning your day or fantasizing that you won that argument! As your body is cleansed, affirm that mental and emotional debris is being washed away as well.

At breakfast, take a minute to smell the aromas, taste the food, and give thanks that it's fueling your body. For a longer contemplation, trace back the origins of your meal. Those eggs were delivered by a truck driver, stocked by a grocer, gathered on a farm. Someone fed the chicken, delivered the feed, harvested the grain, and planted the seed. Millions of people went in to making that breakfast possible -- not to mention the animals, sun, rain, and the whole cosmic dance of the universe.

In your car (or on mass transit), when you reach a stop, take a minute to watch your breath, give thanks for the perfect harmony in the universe, and how it's reflected in the way the traffic lights and streets organize and order the chaos.

At work, before beginning, take one minute to give thanks for your job, bless everyone there, everyone it touches on the planet, and intend this to be the most inspired day of your life. If you're 'unemployed,' give thanks for all the abilities you have, and the extra time for contemplation and connection with loved ones. If negativity arises, breathe, watch it, then focus on what you're grateful for. This cultivates a mindset of abundance.

When you use the restroom, take a minute to give thanks for how your body eliminates what no longer serves -- and affirm that your heart and mind are doing the same. If you're having physical problems, focus on a healthy area. Feel the well-being there, give thanks for it. This cultivates the inner conditions for greater health to emerge.

Every hour or so, stop for one minute to check in, breathe, re-connect, give thanks for your life, and go back to work. This is the foundational practice of the One-Minute Mystic. If you do nothing else, this practice alone will have a significant impact.

At night, if you watch TV, pause during commercials and re-connect. Market your own life-enhancing images to your mind, rather than letting someone else do it.

As you fall asleep, affirm that your mind and body are renewed while you rest, and that you will awaken more inspired than ever before.

As you practice being a One-Minute Mystic, it might feel mechanical and require discipline. But after a while you'll notice yourself turning within to re-connect automatically -- even with your eyes open, in the midst of conversation or activity.

The key is consistency. As you stop, for just a minute, several times throughout your busy schedule, you'll not only have more energy and creativity -- you'll literally create new neuropathways that eventually allow you to feel centered, tapped in, and turned on all day long!

Stay Inspired,

Derek

* * * * *

P.S. Would you like to qualify for a free "Breakthrough Coaching" session with me? Just click here to learn more.

P.P.S. To get the free e-course on The Law of Emergence and learn more about Emergineering, which is about engineering the full emergence of your authentic life or any part of it, click here.

www.DerekRydall.com
www.LawOfEmergence.com

CraZy GReEn NoURisHmEnt of the DaY

2011-05-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

Blenderize:

(of course, I always mean ORGANICALLY GROWN)

1 cup water (more or less depending the thickness desired)
6 large strawberries
1 orange peeled
1 lemon peeled
1 banana peeled
a huge handful of spinach
2 big leaves of chard
1 stick of celery
a few sprigs of parsley
1 dose of Omega 3 oil
protein powder ( I use Sun Warrior Organic Raw Rice Protein)
3 drops of stevia
a drop or a few of vanilla extract

Top Ten Most Nutritious Vegetables and How to Grow Them in Your Garden

2011-05-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Reposted from http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/top-ten-most-nutritious-vegetables-and-how-to-grow-them-in-your-garden/

Photo Credits (left to right): Wanko, Qfamily, George Scholz, via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License . By Colleen Vanderlinden Treehugger

A perfectly ripe, juicy tomato, still warm from the sun. Sweet carrots, pulled from the garden minutes (or even seconds!) before they’re eaten. Growing your own vegetables is one of those activities that balances practicality and indulgence. In addition to the convenience of having the fixings for a salad or light supper right outside your door (or on your windowsill), when you grow your own vegetables, you’re getting the most nutritional bang for your buck as well. Vegetables start losing nutrients as soon as they’re harvested, and quality diminishes as sugars are turned into starches. For the tastiest veggies with the best nutrition, try growing a few of these nutrient-dense foods in your own garden.

And don’t let the lack of a yard stop you – all of them can be grown in containers as well.

1. BROCCOLI

Broccoli is high in calcium, iron, and magnesium, as well as Vitamin A, B6, and C. In fact, one cup of raw broccoli florets provides 130% of your daily Vitamin C requirement.

How to Grow Broccoli

Grow Broccoli in Containers: One broccoli plant per pot, pots should be 12 to 16 inches deep. What to Watch Out For: Cabbage worm. If you start seeing pretty white butterflies fluttering around your broccoli, you’re guaranteed to start seeing little green worms all over your broccoli plants. To avoid this, cover your broccoli plants with floating row cover or lightweight bed sheets. If you start seeing cabbage worms, simply pick them off by hand.

2. PEAS

There is nothing like peas grown right in your own garden – the tender sweetness of a snap pea just plucked from the vine is unlike anything you can buy in at a store. Aside from being absolutely delicious, peas are high in fiber, iron, magnesium, potassium, and Vitamin A, B6, and C.

How to Grow Peas

Grow Peas in Containers: Sow peas approximately 2 inches apart in a pot that is at least 10 inches deep. Provide support for peas to climb up. What to Watch Out For: Hot weather. Once the weather turns hot, pea production will pretty much shut down. Grow peas in early spring and late summer/autumn, or any time of year when temperatures are consistently between 40 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

3. BEANS (ESPECIALLY NAVY BEANS, GREAT NORTHERN BEANS, KIDNEY BEANS)

While snap beans (green beans/wax beans) are a great addition to any garden, it’s the beans we grow as dried beans that are real nutritional powerhouses. Dry beans, in general, are high in iron, fiber, manganese, and phosphorous.

How to Grow Beans

Grow Beans in Containers: Bush beans are your best option for growing in containers. Plant beans four inches apart in a container that is at least 12 inches deep. What to Watch Out For: Harvest at the right time. Harvest dry beans when the pods have completely dried on the vine. The pods should be light brown, and you should be able to feel the hard beans inside. Shell the beans, and let them sit out a few days to ensure that they’re completely dry before storing them in jars in a cool, dark, dry place.

Photo Credits (left to right): norwichnuts, photon, S. Diddy, via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License

4. BRUSSELS SPROUTS

The bane of many a childhood, Brussels sprouts get a bad wrap mostly due to overcooking. When prepared right, Brussels sprouts are sweet, tender, and delicious. They also provide tons of fiber, magnesium, potassium, and riboflavin, as well as high levels of Vitamins A, B6, and C.

How to Grow Brussels Sprouts

Grow Brussels Sprouts in Containers: Grow one plant per 16-inch deep container. What to Watch Out For: Cabbage worms (see “Broccoli, above.)

5. TOMATOES

Fresh, homegrown tomatoes are the reason many gardeners get into vegetable gardening in the first place. There’s just nothing that compares to eating a perfectly ripe tomato, still warm from the sun. Tomatoes are also incredibly good for us, packing plenty of fiber, iron, magnesium, niacin, potassium, and Vitamin A, B6, and C. They’re also a great source of the antioxidant lycopene.

How to Grow Tomatoes

Grow Tomatoes in Containers: Container sizes will vary depending on the variety you’re growing. If you’re growing an indeterminate variety, your container will need to be at least 18 inches deep. For determinate varieties, 12 inches is a good depth, and for dwarf or “patio” type tomatoes, 8 inches is perfect. One tomato plant per pot.

What to Watch Out For: Tomato horn worm can be a problem in many areas – these large caterpillars should be removed by hand whenever you see them. Also watch out for signs of blight, which is a real problem in many parts of the U.S.

6. RED BELL PEPPERS

Red bell peppers are high in potassium, riboflavin, and Vitamins A, B6, and C – in fact, one cup of red bell pepper packs an amazing 317% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C and 93% of the recommended Vitamin A.

How to Grow Peppers

Grow Peppers in Containers: Plant one pepper plant per each 8 to 12 inch deep pot. What to Watch Out For: Aphids and flea beetles are the two most common insect pests when growing peppers. While both can be controlled with insecticidal soap, which is a common organic option, you can also make all-natural, homemade sprays to deter these pests. A tomato leaf spray will get rid of aphids, and garlic/hot pepper spray works very well on a flea beetle infestation.

Photo Credits (left to right): La Grande Farmer’s Market, SummerTomato, color line, via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License

7. BEETS

Beets are a great “two-fer” crop – you can harvest the beet roots, of course, but you can also harvest and eat the greens. Young beet greens are delicious when added raw to a salad, and larger beet greens can be sauteed as a quick side dish or used the way you’d use other greens such as spinach. Beet roots are very high in iron, potassium, and vitamin C. Beet greens are even better, as they are high in iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and Vitamins A, B6, and C.

How to Grow Beets

Grow Beets in Containers: Plant beet seeds three inches apart in a container that is twelve inches deep. Because each beet seed is actually a cluster of seeds, be sure to thin the seedlings to one per cluster. Thinnings can be added to salads or sandwiches. What to Watch Out For: Knowing when to harvest. Beet roots are at their best when they are harvested small – between one and two inches across. At this size, they are sweet and tender. Larger beets tend to be kind of woody and less flavorful.

8. LEAF AMARANTH

Leaf amaranth is a less-common vegetable that is well worth a try in your own garden. The leaves have a sweet and slightly tangy flavor that works well in a variety of dishes, from stir- fries and soups to simply steaming it all by itself. As a bonus, leaf amaranth is one of the few heat-tolerant greens. It won’t bolt in the heat of summer the way spinach and kale are prone to. Nutritionally, leaf amaranth is very high in calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, riboflavin, zinc, and Vitamins A, B6, and C. Everyone should be growing this!

How to Grow Leaf Amaranth

Growing Leaf Amaranth in Containers: Scatter the tiny seeds over the soil’s surface in a pot that is at least 8 inches deep. Harvest the leaves when they are two to four inches tall. You will be able to get at least two or three harvest before you’ll have to sow more seeds.

What to Watch Out For: Leaf amaranth is fairly easy to grow, and relatively problem-free. Rarely, leaf miners can become a problem.

9. CARROTS

Carrots are at their sweetest, crunchiest best when freshly harvested from the garden. These icons of healthy eating deserve their “good-for-you” rep – they’re very high in fiber, manganese, niacin, potassium, and Vitamins A, B6, and C. Their only drawback is that they do tend to be high in sugar, so if you’re watching your carb intake, you’ll want to limit the amount of carrots you eat.

How to Grow Carrots

Grow Carrots in Containers: Sow carrot seeds two to three inches apart in a pot that is at least twelve inches deep. Look for shorter varieties, such as ‘Thumbelina,’ or ‘Danver’s Half Long.’ What to Watch Out For: Harvesting at the perfect size. Carrots are at their tastiest when harvested small. Leaving them in the ground too long can result in overly large, woody carrots. You’ll also want to make sure to keep your carrots evenly moist, as letting the soil dry out too often can also result in somewhat bitter, fibrous carrots.

Photo Credits (left to right): Oakley Originals, djprybyl, djprybyl, via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License

10. LEAFY GREENS

OK, I cheated here. I can’t recommend just ONE leafy green, because they are all incredibly good for us, as well as delicious — kale, collards, spinach, turnip or dandelion greens — how can you possibly choose just one? In general, the “green leafies” contain high amounts of calcium, iron, potassium, and Vitamins A, B6, and C.

How to Grow Kale and Other Leafy Greens

Grow Greens in Containers: Grow one kale or collard plant per ten inch deep pot. Other greens can be grown a few plants to a pot — they should be planted at least 4 inches apart and harvested small.

What to Watch Out For: Heat and cabbage worms. Most leafy greens are cool- weather crops, so they’re best grown in spring and fall in most areas – hot weather will cause them to bolt. In addition, many of these greens are members of the Brassicas family, which means they are prone to cabbage worm infestations. Control them with the same methods outlined in the “Broccoli” section, above.

Try growing one or two (or all!) of these nutrient-dense, delicious vegetables in your own garden, and you’ll get double the health benefits: healthy food and time spent outdoors, nurturing your plants.

Get Your Green On!!

2011-05-08T13:39:00.000-07:00

Hardly anybody actually gets enough greens. We have become a society of supplement takers. I suppose we may have been more deeply influenced by the Jetson's than we ever imagined. Remember their food?

Certainly, circumstances sometimes occur which require supplementation for proper and optimal care but mostly, if we would just get enough greens, we could throw out most of our supplements.

The question is how?

A super easy way to add greens to your daily diet is to add them to your smoothies.

What?!

I know...it sounds gross at first but if you try it, and don't use any bitter greens, you'll be totally surprised; and if you keep adding greens, in the long run you'll also be totally stoked.

Here's my smoothie for today. It came out very sweet and refreshing. I think that was due to the watermelon and cucumber. They add a summery quality.

Blenderize:

1 cup of water (add more or less depending on how thick you want it)
1 cup watermelon (no rind)
1/2 a cucumber (unpeeled)
3 strawberries
a big handful of lettuce leaves
4 or 5 sprigs of parsley
1 kale leaf
1/2 a lemon (peeled)
3 drops stevia
a scoop of protein powder

It was never the Jetson's food that I wanted. It was always the car. Where's my *&%@ flying car? That would be so much more awesome than food pellets.

CraZy GReEn NoURisHmEnt of the DaY

2011-04-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Blenderize:
2 cups watermelon
a handful of sunflower sprouts
a handful of arugula
a handful of spinach
a few dandelion leaves (however many you can stand!)
4 dates
a dose of flavored omega-3 oil
2 or 3 drops of stevia
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup water

CraZy GReEn NoURisHmEnt of the DaY

2011-04-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

Blend together in blender or Vitamix:

CraZy GReEn NoURisHmEnt of the DaY

1/2 cucumber
1/4 fennel bulb
a HUGE handfull of spinach
1 peeled orange
1 banana
protein powder
flavored fish oil or coconut oil
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup water

You already know what's next: pour into a glass and slurp it up. Use a straw to make it even more fun!

Did you know: the weaker the cell phone signal, the more potent the radiation emission into your head?

2011-04-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

For several years, doctors, scientists and activists have been raising concerns about the possible connection between cell phones and brain cancer.
And recent research by scientists at NIH and the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory conclusively determined that a cell phone's electromagnetic field can indeed cause changes in brain activity.
CNN reports:

‘The effect is very small, but it’s still unnatural. Nature didn’t prepare our brains for this.’
"Brain activity means that the cells are using glucose to create energy ... Compared with subjects whose phones were turned off, the group whose phones were on had 'significantly higher' brain activity in the area closest to the telephone antenna."

Time Magazine lists five simple ways to reduce your exposure to cell phone radiation:

Use a wired headset
This keeps the antenna far away from your skull.
Get used to texting
Texting also keeps the handset away from your brain, reducing the radiation risk.
Don't use your cell phone as an alarm clock
If you use your phone as your wake-up call, you'll likely need to keep it close to your head; there's still radiation being emitted even when it's not taking calls.
Don't carry your phone in your pocket
There's preliminary research to indicate that men who carry a phone in their pocket all day could be putting their fertility at risk, and women who carry their phones in their bra could be increasing their risk of breast cancer.
Use a radiation-blocking case
These can reduce cell phone radiation by two-thirds.

These are all important precautions, especially since the recent study by leading brain imaging researcher Nora D. Volkow, MD et al— one funded by the US government and led by one of "Top 100 People Who Shape Our World" (2007) according to Time —has found that cell phone use does affect your brain.
After just 50 minutes on a cell phone, the emitted radiation increases the activity in your brain cells, the study found. The exact effects of that brain activity are as of yet unknown. But the study in effect has debunked the myth that cell phone radiation at non-thermal levels does not cause biological changes, as the SAR exposure involved was only .901 W/Kg, well under the FCC limit of 1.6 W/Kg for cell phones. The study has also raised the specter that if acute cell phone radiation is impacting glucose in the brain, an established marker of brain activity, might it also be impacting neurotransmitters and other brain biochemistry?
Chronic elevated glucose levels in the brain is, of course, also of concern, and is currently being investigated by Volkow.
Scientists are now calling for urgent research on effects on the brain from cell phone radiation, previously believed in orthodox circles to have no effect. They are also calling for reinstatement of federal funding for bioelectromagnetics research, which dried up in the mid-1990s as government facilitated the roll out of cellular infrastructure across the country.
Dr. Ronald Herberman, former Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, says,

"We know that increased glucose also occurs with infections and other inflammatory processes, and leads to the production of potentially damaging reactive oxygen radicals that can alter the ways that cells and genes work. This important finding should stimulate many biologists to perform in-depth studies to determine the consequences of such changes in nerve cells or other bodily cells in the region of the radiation. We need to develop a better understanding of how radiofrequency radiation might contribute to increased risk for brain tumors as well as other alterations in brain functions."

David Carpenter, MD, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment, University of Albany, has called the NIH study 'dynamite'. He says it will now be hard to deny that cell phones alter nervous system activity.
However, Louis Slesin of Microwave News cautions,

"For decades, the microwave community has been awash with reports that low-level radiation can lead to numerous neurological effects, such as leakage through the blood-brain barrier, changes in calcium in and around brain cells and DNA breaks in the brains of exposed animals. But in each case skeptics have countered that they could not repeat the experiments and therefore the original work must have been flawed and should be repudiated. Volkow's new study will no doubt face a similar barrage of criticism."

Slesin, a long time, well-respected expert in this field, also noted he learned, "The closing sentence of original version of the JAMA paper advised cell phone users to keep the antenna away from the brain by using a wired earpiece. This was edited out in the review/revision process." So, while it is encouraging a respected journal such as JAMA has published on this topic, and also issued a press release about the research, we must all realize there could still be interests wanting to downplay the importance of the finding for cell phone users.

The Volkow study was the first to look at how electromagnetic radiation from cell phones affects glucose metabolism in the brain. When glucose metabolism goes up, it activates cells. Many scientists believe this may provide insight into the biochemical process leading to increased incidence of brain tumors in heavy cell phone users.
Based on the NIH research, Mayor Mark Barron and the City Council of Jackson, WY last week initiated a cell phone safety awareness program in schools for students in grades K-12. Jackson is the first town in America to take specific action to protect schoolchildren from microwave radiation.
Mayor Barron states

"Given the extraordinary acceleration of cell phone use by our school children and the seeming social acceptance of placing this powerful tool next to our head, it is only prudent to address the issue at this time."

Sources:

Time Magazine February 23, 2011

CNN February 22, 2011

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) February 23, 2011; 305(8):808-13

Microwave News

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

I have been talking about this for a very long time, and the mounting evidence continues to support my early health warnings. This study clearly adds to the growing evidence that we simply MUST invoke the precautionary principle with regards to cell phone use, as well as other wireless technologies.

There's No More Denying it—Cell Phone Radiation DOES Affect Your Brain

Here, in a US government-funded study published in JAMA, researchers measured the brain activity of 47 healthy adults while using a cell phone for 50 minutes, to determine if and how cell phone radiation affects glucose metabolism in the brain.
The levels were measured while the phone was transmitting and placed against the ear, and when the phone was kept against the head but turned off.
As reported by CNN:
"Compared with subjects whose phones were turned off, the group whose phones were on had "significantly higher" brain activity in the area closest to the telephone antenna.
The findings of the study, which examined the subjects during just one 50-minute exposure, raise a key question, the researchers said: What, if any, are the long-term consequences of repeated increased brain activity due to exposure to cell phone radiation?
"We need to rule out that there is a not long-lasting effect in healthy people," Volkow said. "We don't know what repeated exposure and artificial activation of the glucose will have on the brain."
One thing we know is that glucose metabolism equates to cell activation. So the findings indicate that radiation from your cell phone radiation clearly has a well-defined measureable influence on your brain. Normally, your brain produces just enough glucose it needs for proper function, so you're artificially activating your brain cells when you're putting a cell phone against your head.
What this excess glucose production ultimately means for your brain health is still unknown.
However, contrary to industry propaganda, there's plenty of peer-reviewed published hard-core evidence showing that cell phone radiation has a detrimental impact on cellular and DNA function, as well as on the integrity of the blood brain barrier and on cognitive function, aside from increased glucose metabolism.
What is notable about the recent study is that it was actually accepted in and publicized by JAMA. Over 10 years ago, in December 2000, when JAMA published a CTIA-funded study showing increased risk for neuroepithelial brain tumors by Muscat et al, controversy arose because when the peer reviewed results were shown at the June 1999 Bioelectromagnetics Society meeting it was statistically significant (OR=2.6, 95% CI=1.2-5.4), yet the published study reported a non-significant result (OR=2.1, 95% CI= 0.9-4.7). In spite of direct communication with the JAMA editors by Dr. George Carlo who was head of the CTIA "research" project, no explanation for this change was made.

Cell Phone Safety Spin is Based on Flawed Research

When the CTIA (the wireless industry trade group) states that "no research has found cell phones to be a danger to health," they're misinterpreting and misrepresenting certain studies while ignoring a large portion of the published research showing harm.
For example, according to CNN, John Walls, the CTIA vice president for public affairs, claims that the 2010 Interphone project "found that 'overall, no increase in risk was observed with the use of mobile phones."
But not so fast!
Remember, I wrote about the serious flaws of this study when it was first released. The International EMF Collaborative found that the study seriously underestimates the brain cancer risk from cell phone use. They found 11 key design flaws, including:
Results were only provided for brain cancers (gliomas) and meningiomas, but not tumors within the 20 percent of the brain's volume irradiated by cell phones
Risk was not broken down by gender, which may have obfuscated even higher risk of meningiomas in women
The 5-year old results are woefully inadequate as a gauge of risk today, as adults and children now speak on cell phones many hours a day compared to only 2 to 2 ½ hours a month at that time
Categorizing subjects who used portable phones (which emit the same microwave radiation as cell phones) as 'unexposed', thus comparing subjects who were actually 'exposed' with others who were 'exposed' as a means to gauge risk
Excluding people who had died, or were too ill to be interviewed as a consequence of their brain tumor
Excluding children and young adults, who are more vulnerable to the effects of radiation and who now use cell phones heavily
Also ignored by the CTIA and the media is the fact that the Interphone Study Group did eventually acknowledge that there is an increased risk of brain cancer among "long-term, heavy users" of cell phones—which is MOST people today, including children and teens. This was not the headline, or what most media picked up on, though it should have been.

Interphone Study DID Find Increased Risk of Brain Cancer!

While certain media outlets continue to claim that regular cell phone use is unlikely to cause brain cancer, you should know that Interphone found "heavy users" of cell phones were found to have an approximately doubled risk of glioma, a life threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.
While certain media outlets continue to claim that regular cell phone use is unlikely to cause brain cancer based on the 'overall' results of the study, you should know that Interphone found "heavy users" of cell phones to have an approximately doubled risk of glioma, a life threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.
The kicker here is that their definition of a "heavy user" was someone using a cell phone for about two hours per month, because when the Interphone study was conducted (1999-2004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today!

How could any rational objective scientist claim that this study proved cell phones safe? I mean, how many people do you know that uses their phone less than two hours a month these days? The only way they would make this conclusion is if they had some massive conflict of interest involved.
For more information about the Interphone study, I highly recommend reading the report, "Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone." After closely reviewing the facts and the flaws of the Interphone study, the report concluded:
There is a risk of brain tumors from cell phone use
Telecom-funded studies underestimate the risk of brain tumors
Children have larger risks than adults for brain tumors
Also, see the letter published January 24, 2011 in the U.K. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine by the lead scientist on the Interphone study, Elizabeth Cardis, and Siegal Sadetzki, who led the Israeli component of the study. Post publication of the Interphone study, these two world class female scientists unexpectedly released a startling message clarifying the Interphone study results and communicating that the cell phone-brain tumor data is troubling.
According Powerwatch UK, the researchers stated in the prestigious British JOEM:
"Simple and low-cost measures, such as the use of text messages, hands-free kits and/or the loudspeaker mode of the phone could substantially reduce exposure to the brain from mobile phones.
"Therefore, until definitive scientific answers are available, the adoption of such precautions, particularly among young people, is advisable.
"While more studies are needed, indications of an increased risk (of gliomas - a particularly dangerous form of brain tumour) in high and long-term users from Interphone and other studies are of concern. ... Even a small risk at the individual level could eventually result in a considerable number of tumours and become an important public-health issue."
Camilla Rees of www.ElectromagneticHealth.org says,
"It is very important these two scientists are now independently and personally taking such a strong stand, particularly in light of the Interphone study group's own Press Release, which avoided highlighting the risks of brain tumors the study indeed did find.This gives us faith more scientists may inform the public about what the science is really telling us on this very important public health issue."

Why We Must Think Long-Term when Evaluating Risks

Another common problem with studies showing "no risk" is that they're focused on the short term—too short to predict the real heath outcome for heavy users who start using the technology at an early age.
For example, Devra Davis, PhD, of the Environmental Health Trust , has also pointed out the danger of believing the media spin of a European study published in 2009 that proclaimed cell phones safe.
In that study, researchers analyzed annual incidence rates of two types of brain tumors -- glioma and meningioma -- among adults aged 20 to 79 from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1974 to 2003. But they did NOT tie these trends in any way to actual patterns of use of cell phones!
"In Sweden, Norway and Finland, about half of all persons had cell phones in 2000," Davis said. "It would be unreasonable to expect to see any general population effect from such phone use in such a short period of time. Scientists know that brain cancer can take a decade or longer to develop in adults."

Latency Period for Brain Tumors May be Three to Four Decades!

Other examples of long-term latency include:
The Hiroshima bombing that ended World War Two. Brain cancers associated with that one time massive exposure to radiation did not become evident until 40 years later.
Likewise, a study in Radiation Research showed a 30-year latency for brain tumors in a study of patients treated for ringworm with x-rays.
This places most of the risk on today's children, as even toddlers are now exposed to portable phones and cell phones on a regular basis.

Professor Lennart Hardell of Sweden has found that those who begin using cell phones heavily as teenagers have 4 to 5 times more brain cancer as young adults!
In contrast, very few of those included in that European study were likely to have been heavy users of cell phones for more than a decade, and even fewer would have used cell phones since early adolescence. So to conclude that the absence of a clear trend of increased brain tumors in Scandinavia means there will be no such trend in the future is simply wishful thinking that endangers us all—especially your children.
Lloyd Morgan, lead author of Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, was also outraged by the media's misleading portrayal of that European study, pointing out that the induction period for brain tumors is at least 30 years. He said:
"It continues to amaze me how easily the media is manipulated. The authors KNOW that no solid tumor, particularly brain tumors, has such a short latency time. And, it is not until nearly the end of the paper where they qualify what is said in the abstract."

Industry Simply Ignores Published Research Showing Harm

These are but two examples of studies the wireless industry falls back on to convince you there's nothing to worry about. Please, don't make the mistake of swallowing industry's misleading safety statements hook line and sinker...
Because not only are they misrepresenting the findings from flawed studies, they're also ignoring the multitude of studies showing harm. In fact, if you believed their statements you'd think there wasn't a single study linking cell phone radiation to any kind of biological damage...
Nothing could be further from the truth!
There are plenty of peer-reviewed published studies showing harm. For a great overview of the latest research that helps explain the mechanism that causes damage to cells and DNA, please see this recent article featuring Martin Blank, PhD of Columbia University. And for a more comprehensive summary of the science see the Electrosensitivity Primer, developed for physicians by Michael Bevington in the U.K., which documents hundreds of studies , or the legendary Ecolog Report, commissioned by T-Mobile and Deutsche Telecom MobilNet GmbH . This report offers an extensive, well-organized summary of the known biological effects from microwave radiation, as does the BioInitiave Report, much of which was later published in Pathophysiology.

Who's at Greatest Risk?

As CNN reports,
"The Federal Communications Commission's safety guidelines for radiofrequency exposure do not differentiate healthy individuals from children or those with brain disorders. However, Volkow says different levels of protection may be in order.
"If someone already has brain damage and then stimulates it with electromagnetic exposure from a cell phone, it could trigger something dangerous," Volkow said. "We cannot say with certainty that for a person with a vulnerability in the brain that radiation from a cell phone would not make it worse."
This is a very important issue, and research has already shown that children are FAR more susceptible to damage from cell phone use than adults, due to the fact that their skulls are both thinner and smaller in volume. Hence radiation penetrates far deeper into their brains. Their cells also divide at a faster rate, making the potential impact of cell phone radiation exponentially larger.

Please Protect Yourself, and Your Family, Starting Today

All the evidence points to the fact that our current safety standards are completely inadequate. Our rapidly expanding wireless technologies must be properly evaluated, first of all, and the precautionary principle must be invoked when new technologies emerge.
While you can't completely avoid radiation in today's wireless world, you can at least minimize your exposure by heeding the following advice:
Children Should Always Avoid Using Cell Phones: Barring a life-threatening emergency, children should not use a cell phone, or a wireless device of any type. Children are far more vulnerable to cell phone radiation than adults, because of their thinner skull bones.
Reduce Your Cell Phone Use: Turn your cell phone off more often. Reserve it for emergencies or important matters. As long as your cell phone is on, it emits radiation intermittently, even when you are not actually making a call.
Use a Land Line at Home and at Work: Although more and more people are switching to using cell phones as their exclusive phone contact, it is a dangerous trend and you can choose to opt out of the madness.
Reduce or Eliminate Your Use of Other Wireless Devices: You would be wise to cut down your use of these devices. Just as with cell phones, it is important to ask yourself whether or not you really need to use them every single time.
If you must use a portable home phone, use the older kind that operates at 900 MHz. They are no safer during calls, but at least many of them do not broadcast constantly even when no call is being made.
Note the only way to truly be sure if there is an exposure from your cordless phone is to measure with an electrosmog meter, and it must be one that goes up to the frequency of your portable phone (so old meters won't help much). As many portable phones are 5.8 Gigahertz, we recommend you look for RF meters that go up to 8 Gigahertz, the highest range now available in a meter suitable for consumers.
Alternatively you can be very careful with the base station placement as that causes the bulk of the problem since it transmits signals 24/7, even when you aren't talking. So if you can keep the base station at least three rooms away from where you spend most of your time, and especially your bedroom, they may not be as damaging to your health. Another option is to just simply turn the portable phone off, only using it when you specifically need the convenience of moving about while on a call.
Ideally it would be helpful to turn off your base station every night before you go to bed.
You can find RF meters as well as remediation supplies at www.emfsafetystore.com. But you can pretty much be sure your portable phone is a problem if the technology is DECT, or digitally enhanced cordless technology.
Use Your Cell Phone Only Where Reception is Good: The weaker the reception, the more power your phone must use to transmit, and the more power it uses, the more radiation it emits, and the deeper the dangerous radio waves penetrate into your body. Ideally, you should only use your phone with full bars and good reception.
Also seek to avoid carrying your phone on your body as that merely maximizes any potential exposure. Ideally put it in your purse or carrying bag. Placing a cell phone in a shirt pocket over the heart is asking for trouble, as is placing it in a man's pocket if he seeks to preserve his fertility.(See ElectromagneticHealth.org's Letter to Parents on Fertility and Other Risks to Children from Wireless Technologies)
Don't Assume One Cell Phone is Safer Than Another.There's no such thing as a "safe" cell phone.
Keep Your Cell Phone Away From Your Body When it is On: The most dangerous place to be, in terms of radiation exposure, is within about six inches of the emitting antenna. You do not want any part of your body within that area.
Respect Others Who are More Sensitive: Some people who have become sensitive can feel the effects of others' cell phones in the same room, even when it is on but not being used.
If you are in a meeting, on public transportation, in a courtroom or other public places, such as a doctor's office, keep your cell phone turned off out of consideration for the 'second hand radiation' effects. Children are also more vulnerable, so please avoid using your cell phone near children.
Use Safer Headset Technology: Wired headsets will certainly allow you to keep the cell phone farther away from your body. However, if a wired headset is not well-shielded -- and most of them are not -- the wire itself acts as an antenna attracting ambient information carrying radio waves and transmitting radiation directly to your brain.
Make sure that the wire used to transmit the signal to your ear is shielded.
The best kind of headset to use is a combination shielded wire and air-tube headset. These operate like a stethoscope, transmitting the information to your head as an actual sound wave; although there are wires that still must be shielded, there is no wire that goes all the way up to your head.
I strongly urge you to take the above precautions to reduce your risk and the risk to your children, who are even more vulnerable to long-term damage. I also invite you to help raise awareness by sharing this information with your loved ones.

More Information

For further information, I highly recommend listening to this excellent Media Teleclass on Cellphones and Brain Tumors.
Listen for yourself to experts who are independent of the telecom industry and close to the science, as well as to the questions the media posed of them. Moderated by Camilla Rees, MBA of www.ElectromagneticHealth.org, the teleclass features Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, David Carpenter, MD, Lloyd Morgan, BS and Joel Moskowitz, PhD.

The Galaxies In Our Heads

2011-03-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

On average, there are more neurons in the human brain than there are galaxies in the known universe -- about 100 billion in all, arranged on a scaffold of one trillion or so supporting, thread-like glial cells.

Reality...What Reality? See How Your Brain Works

2011-03-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

Beau Lotto's color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception.

How Drinking Pure Water Can Improve Every Facet of Your Health

2011-02-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Mercola

With all the different types of water out there and all the hype that goes with each, it can be very easy to get confused about which types of water are really best for your health. And, if you find yourself struggling with the environmental concerns of bottled water versus the dangerous chemicals in tap water, I understand.
That's why I created this page to help clear up some confusion and help you take control of your health.

Symptoms of Dehydration

Since most of you are no longer tuned in to your bodies the way your ancestors were hundreds of years ago, you may be overlooking your body's many cries for water.
There is a silent and growing epidemic of chronic dehydration. So many suffer from it yet are simply unaware of the symptoms.
Are you one of them? The major symptoms of dehydration are thirst, dry skin, dark colored urine and fatigue but take a look at some commonly overlooked symptoms of chronic dehydration.They are:

Digestive disturbances such as heartburn and constipation
Urinary tract infections
Autoimmune disease such as chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis
Premature aging
High cholesterol
Weight gain

Types of Water – How Your Choice Makes the Difference

When it comes to water, there's more to choose from than simply tap versus bottled. Let's closely examine each so you can make informed decisions about your water and your health.

Tap Water – Danger in Every Glass

Plain old tap water: It's easy. It's convenient and it comes right out of your kitchen faucet. However, as I'm sure you've heard, most tap water is contaminated with a host of pollutants that increase your risk of serious health problems. Let's take a look at some of these contaminants and how they can adversely affect your health and that of your family.
Arsenic
As I've been stating in my articles about water since 2001, the level of arsenic in US tap water is incredibly high. This poisonous element is a powerful carcinogenic, which has been linked to an increased risk of the development of several types of cancer. In 2001 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lowered the maximum level of arsenic permitted in drinking water from 50 ug/L to 10 ug/L due to the established cancer risk.
The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates as many as 56 million Americans living in 25 states drink water with arsenic at unsafe levels. For more information, see the USGS website, which offers maps showing where and to what extent arsenic occurs in ground water across the United States.
Aluminum
You may have heard how aluminum increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease, but did you also know that the aluminum found in your municipal water supply can cause a wide variety of other health problems?
Aluminum has been linked to:
Hyperactvity
Learning disabilities in children
Gastrointestinal disease
Skin problems
Parkinson's disease
Liver disease
Fluoride
If you still believe fluoride in your drinking water prevents cavities and helps build strong teeth, you've fallen for a cleverly devised mass-deception.. As this recent study done on children in India shows, fluoride is anything but a cavity fighter. fluoride is a well-known toxin that actually leads to an increased risk of cavities and can cause a wide range of health problems, including weakening your immune system and accelerating aging due to cellular damage.
Prescription and OTC Drugs
You may have been told that if you dispose of your unwanted or expired prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs in the trash instead of the toilet that you do not run any risk of it ending up in the water supply. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
As I mentioned in this previous article, water that drains through landfills, known as leach rate, eventually ends up in rivers. Although not all states source drinking water from rivers, many do.
According to studies, human cells do not grow normally when exposed to even minute amounts of prescription or over-the-counter drugs. Some drugs that were never meant to be combined are mixed together in the drinking water you consume every day. Millions of people have drug allergies. Are you among them? If so, how do you know the strange symptoms you've been experiencing are not due to ingesting small doses of the drugs you're allergic to from your water?
Pregnant women should be especially wary. The toxic substances you take into your body from tap water will have a negative effect on the development of your unborn child.
Disinfection Byproducts (DBPs)
Most tap community water supplies are treated with chlorine and although it may not be the healthiest element you can consume, it is far better for you than what is left behind. In my video, "Tap Water Toxins – is Your Water Trying to Kill You?", I interview water filtration pioneer Robert Slovak about the dangers of disinfection byproducts.
Disinfection byproducts are the result of disinfecting water with chlorine. It is important to note that while consuming chlorine is certainly not healthy, DBPs are TEN THOUSAND TIMES more dangerous!
In addition to being a powerful carcinogenic, DPBs have also been linked to liver, kidney and nervous system problems.

So, Bottled Water is the Way to Go, Right?

If you're thinking you're safe from all of the harmful contaminants I listed above because you drink bottled water instead of tap water, I'm afraid I must be the bearer of some bad news:
40 percent of bottled water is bottled TAP WATER!
Yes, you read correctly. As I stated in my article about the deceptions of bottled water, 40 percent of bottled water is just bottled tap water, which may or may not have received additional filtration. Remember the arsenic and DPBs you were trying to avoid from tap water? Well, an independent test done by the Environmental Working Group found these and 36 other harmful pollutants hidden in bottled water.
Also, drinking from plastic bottles is not a good idea. Plastic bottles contain a chemical called bisphenol A or BPA, which is a synthetic hormone disruptor that has been linked to serious health problems such as:
Learning and behavioral problems
Altered immune system function
Prostate and breast cancer
Risk of obesity
Early puberty in both genders
Aside from the health risks, the devastating impact bottled water has had on our ecosystem is staggering!

Distilled Water – Use with Caution

Some health conscious people have been misled into believing that distilled water is healthy for them. As I've stated before, this is simply not true.
The problem with distilled water is that it is boiled and evaporated away from its dissolved minerals. The water then becomes acidic and seeks to balance itself by drawing minerals right out of your body. It will also draw out contaminants from the container it's stored in for this same reason.
What's worse, any contaminant in the water that vaporizes at a lower temperature than the water, such as volatile organic compounds, like disinfection byproducts that are thousands of times as toxic as chlorine, will be condensed and actually concentrated in the finished distilled water. So what you end up with is water that contains even more dangerous contaminants than what you started with!
I only recommend using distilled water for a short period of time and only for the purpose of detoxification, as this water can help pull toxins from your body. Drinking it long-term, however, will most likely invite health problems.

Alkaline Water

In my interview with water filtration expert, Houston Tomasz, I asked for his thoughts on the growing use of alkaline water. There are several potential problems with alkaline water.
First of all, most water ionizers and alkalizers are marketed by multi-level marketing (MLM) companies with questionable ethics
Some people experience an initial "high" when they start drinking alkaline water. This can easily be attributed to detoxification, and the fact that they are likely just becoming better hydrated.
Detoxification is about the only benefit of alkaline water, and this benefit is limited to very SHORT TERM USE (no more than a week or two). An additional concern is that many individuals have stomach dysfunctions like GERD or ulcers that are largely related to having too little stomach acid. Long-term use of alkaline or ionized water can interfere with your body's natural digestive process by reducing the acid needed to properly break down and absorb food. This could then lead to an upset of your body's good bacteria, which can then open the door to parasitic infection, ulcers and malabsorption.
For more information, please review my special report on this topic.

"Vitamin" Waters – Do NOT Be Fooled!

If you've recently switched from soda to vitamin water because you believed it to be a healthier choice, you may be disappointed by what I have to say about them: Vitamin waters are nothing more than a clever marketing scheme designed to promote a product that is just as unhealthy as soda!
Vitamin waters often contain dangerous high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), artificial colors, additives, preservatives and caffeine. What's even worse is these manufacturers use distilled water to make their products, which, as you've read above, is one of the worst types of water you can put into your body!
Now that you know which types of water to avoid, let's take a look at the water you should be drinking for optimal health!

Filtered Tap Water – Getting to the Gold

The most economical and environmentally sound choice you and your family can make is to purchase and install a water filter for your home. I recommend three different types of water filters and weigh the pros and cons of each. Let's take a brief look below.
Reverse Osmosis Filter
In addition to removing chlorine, inorganic, and organic contaminants in your water, an RO filter will also remove about 80 percent of the fluoride and most DPBs. The major drawback is the expense of installing an RO filter as most need a plumber to get up and running.
Ion Exchange Filter
Ion exchange is designed to remove dissolved salts in the water, such as calcium. This system actually softens the water or exchanges natural-forming mineral ions in the water with its own ions, thereby neutralizing their harmful effect of creating scale build-up.
The ion exchange system was originally used in boilers and other industrial situations before becoming popular in home purifying units, which usually combine the system with carbon for greater effectiveness.
Granular Carbon and Carbon Block Filters

These are the most common types of counter top and under counter water filters.

Granular carbon filters and carbon block systems perform the same process of contaminant removal, adsorption, which is the chemical or physical bond of a contaminant to the surface of the filter media.

Granular activated carbon is recognized by the EPA as the best available technology for the removal of organic chemicals like herbicides, pesticides and industrial chemicals. However, one of the downfalls of granular carbon filters is that the loose material inside can channel--the water creates pathways through the carbon material, escaping filtering.

Carbon block filters offer the same superior filtering ability but are compressed with the carbon medium in a solid form. This eliminates channeling and gives the ability to precisely combine multiple media in a sub-micron filter cartridge. By combining different media, the ability to selectively remove a wide range of contaminants can be achieved.

Ideally, you want a filtration system that offers a variety of methods to remove different contaminants. Most systems do not address a combination of organic, inorganic, cyst, sediment and metals.
I'm pleased to announce that I have located a family of filters that I believe are the best filters on the market in terms of effectiveness, value, and ease of use. They are all manufactured in the U.S. under exclusive contract with a company specializing in advanced water treatment products, and will include both countertop and under-counter filters.

Living Water – Keeping the Balance

In choosing the right type of water for you and your family, you want to aim for pH balance. Distilled water is too acidic and alkaline water is too alkaline. The ideal pH of your water should be between 6.5 to 7.5, which is neutral.
Mountain spring water is in this ideal range. It is some of the healthiest water on the planet because it is "living water". Living water, like "living food is in its raw, natural state the way nature intended.
One of the main reasons I am such an advocate for eating raw, organic vegetables is because these "living foods" contain biophotons, small units of light stored by all organic organisms, including you.
Gravity-fed spring water is alive in much the same way. When you take this vital energy into your body, you are re-charging it with health and encouraging it to return to a whole and balanced state.
Now, when I mention mountain spring water, I don't mean the two-gallon jugs you see sitting on your grocery store shelf. I'm talking about water you bottle yourself from a gravity-fed spring. There's a great website called FindaSpring.com where you can find a natural spring in your area. This is a great way to get back to nature and teach your children about health and the sources of clean water.
The best part is that most of these spring water sources are free!
It is important to bring either clear polyethylene or glass containers on your trip to collect the water so no unsafe chemicals can contaminate your pure drinking water on the way home. If you choose to use glass bottles, be sure to wrap them in towels to keep them from breaking in the car.

How Much Water Should You Drink?

So, how much pure filtered or spring water should you drink per day? Six glasses? Eight?
Well, here's a good rule of thumb:
You should be drinking enough water to turn your urine a light-colored yellow.
If you are outside on a hot day or engaging in strenuous activity, it is advisable to increase your water intake as needed. It is also important to note that as you age, your thirst mechanism works less efficiently. Older adults need to pay more attention to the color of their urine to see if their water intake is adequate.

Coconut Water and Vegetable Juicing – Adding a Little Variety

As I mentioned in a previous article, coconuts are an excellent source of fresh, pure water and electrolytes. Coconuts are also rich in lauric acid, which is known for its immune-boosting as well as its antiviral, antibacterial and antifungal properties so it's an ideal choice when you're sick.
An even better pure healthy water is vegetable juicing. I recommend buying pesticide-free, organic vegetables for optimal nutritional benefit.

Health Benefits of Drinking Pure Water

I can't say enough about the health benefits of drinking pure water. Here are only a few of the many health benefits you and your family will enjoy once you make the switch to pure water, it will help you:
Maintain a healthy body weight
Properly digest food and absorb nutrients from food
Have healthy, glowing skin
Decrease muscle and joint inflammation
Have better circulation
Detoxify your body naturally
Finally, the extensively researched and fascinating book, Your Body's Many Cries for Water, should be required reading by all, and definitely belongs on every health care practitioner's bookshelf.

Lipitor: Thief of Memory

2011-02-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

Dr. Duane Graveline on Cholesterol and CoQ10: "Dr. Graveline has an interesting background that makes him particularly suited to speak on the topic of statin drugs. He's a medical doctor with 23 years of experience whose health was seriously damaged by a statin drug. His personal questions brought him out of retirement to investigate statins, which he's been doing for the past 10 years."

Just Because You Can Eat It Does Not Mean It's Food!

2011-02-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Definition of Food:

1. a material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy; also such food together with supplementary substances (as minerals, vitamins, and condiments) b inorganic substances absorbed by plants in gaseous form or in water solution
2. nutriment in solid form
3. something that nourishes, sustains, or supplies

This definition means that all the crap in those packages on the grocery store shelves - the ones containing processed "food stuff" that has been "preserved" with chemicals, and denatured to such an extent that nutrients actually have to be added back into it in order to give it any nutritional value at all - is not food!
Food nourishes and replenishes. It does not deplete. It is generally produced by the earth, naturally and organically, not in a factory or a lab. Just because you can eat it does not mean it is food!

: Smarties Cereal Video

: Smarties or these...what's the difference?

NOURISHING FOODS: Fresh, organic, naturally grown, whole, unprocessed foods eaten raw or lightly cooked. They are nutritious and easy to digest; they help us keep our bodies in exceptional health. These are the only foods we should be eating.

DEPLETING FOODS: Fast food and packaged foods are highly processed, devitalized foods, high in chemical additives and low on enzymes. These foods are hard to digest, they strain the body’s metabolic processes and lead to inflammation, illness and low vitality. Let's not mistake our debilitating pleasures, AKA vices, for food or nourishment.

Here are a few food rules for a lifetime of health & happiness.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --Antione de Saint-Exubery

1st Rule:
KEEP IT REAL

a) NO drugs: both medications and over-the-counter remedies
b) NO chemicals: additives, flavorings, colorings, or preservatives
c) NO artificial sweeteners: No PINK, no BLUE, No YELLOW ...Splenda is NOT splendid!

2nd Rule:
NO MARGARINE, OR HYDROGENATED OILS
Most margarine is 80% hydrogenated soy oil. (see rule #3) It was produced as a cheap butter substitute, then marketed as “healthy” in the 60's. Hydrogenated oils do not occur in nature and have Trans-Fatty Acids (TFA’s) that create free-radicals and cause human DNA to mutate. Adding hydrogen atoms to liquid oils to make them solid ensures a good shelf-life, but your body can’t break them down. TFAs block the cell receptor sites required for proper essential fatty acid metabolism.
Cook with raw Coconut Oil (it has a high TFA point), flavor with Cold-Pressed Olive Oil, butter your toast with RAW, un-pasturized Butter.

3rd Rule:
NO SOY PRODUCTS OF ANY KIND
Contrary to popular belief and slick advertising, soy is neither a good bean nor a good protein alternative to meat, fish and other legumes. Even in its natural state it has several anti-nutritive properties, and has never been a staple of Asian diets. Soy Isolates, Soy Lecithin, Soy Proteins are dead, devitalized by-products of the soy oil industry and are the most over-processed, devitalized and toxic products sold as food. To add insult to injury, the genetically modified (GM) versions have all but eliminated the natural bean.
You must read labels; this stuff is now in over 70% of all foods on grocery shelves. For a detailed explanation of the detriments and politics of soy, read Dr. Tim O'Shea's chapter online.

4th Rule:

NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP
This artificial sweetener is particularly dangerous because it destroys your insulin-producing cells and causes adult onset diabetes and morbid obesity, even in very young children. Unfortunately, it is in almost all packaged and prepared foods and drinks. You will have to diligently read every label to eliminate this from your diet.
Read labels. Stop drinking soda. If you must drink sweet drinks, add pure fruit concentrate to water.

5th Rule:
NO FAST FOODS
The fast food industry is simply an unethical money-making delivery system for cheap, artificially colored, artificially flavored, non-food that is full of high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and salt. So much so that America’s obesity problem and it’s related diseases could change almost overnight if we eliminated these little shops of horrors.

Never go here. Period. Watch the movies "Supersize Me"! and “Fast Food Nation.”

6th Rule:

NO WHITE FOODS; REDUCE SUGAR INTAKE
White Sugar, White Flour, and White Rice are DEPLETION foods that have been stripped of all nutritive value. The husk or ‘germ’ of the food has been removed because it contains all the living, enzyme-rich components that will go bad. They are now essentially sugar, which you need to cut down. You will know these by the label, ‘Enriched’ which means stripped of their true nutrients, then painted on with synthetic ones to meet FDA requirements.

Eat: sprouted grain breads, brown rice & quinoa; honey, grade B pure maple syrup, and molasses in small amounts.

7th Rule:
EAT BREAKFAST

When you skip breakfast, you immediately go into dietary debt, and that means your body mobilizes enzymes to break down your own muscle for protein. Since your body thinks you’re starving, it craves the nearest edible thing ..like that sugar-filled muffin staring at you from behind the coffee shop counter.

Sprouted whole grain cereals; spouted, cooked grains; organic eggs, toasted sprouted whole grain breads, and fresh fruits are all good morning fare although we have friends who thrive on steak and vegetables for breakfast! Ezekial 4:9 Cereal

8th Rule:
EAT MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

7 to 10 servings per day. Try to stay with seasonal, organic, small farm-grown produce. Support your local Farmer’s Markets.
An exception to lab-free food is some of the whole, raw, organic super green food powders which can make it a bit easier to get all your servings in. EAT YOUR VEGGIES! but if you can't, green powders are better than skipping the nutrition. Greens First, Deeper Greens, Perfect Food.

9th Rule:
WATER

Drink 1-2 liters of water per day. Avoid municipal tap water, it’s full of Chlorine and Fluorine, two toxic chemicals you don’t need. Many bottled waters, especially ‘house’ brands and those owned by soft-drink companies, are just filtered tap water, so don’t drink them unless you have to. Reverse osmosis removes everything from the water, including the minerals your body needs, so stay away from that, too.

Bottled natural spring waters are pure and have good mineral content. If you can, do an under-the-sink NSF-certified (not just ‘tested’) or whole house, high-carbon filter.

10th Rule:
EAT AT HOME

In addition to controlling which ingredients you use, you have the opportunity to add the vibration of love and consideration to those who will partake of your efforts. And that, my friends, makes food not merely something that fills your belly, but something that creates, sustains, and transmits LIFE.

EATING OUT...

Truly, most restaurants don't use organic, local ingredients and are best skipped. When you do eat out, here are a few guidelines: Eat at a local place that serves fresh food; stay away from chains as they tend to use more pre-packaged sauces and dressings high in HFCS and hydrogenated oils. If you order a sandwich or salad that comes with a dressing, ask for it on the side. That way you will know they didn’t put it on the food, and you can throw it out. Don’t eat the bread. Ask to have veggies or fruit instead of French fries and bread.

The best foods to eat:

NOURISHING FOODS
1-2 Litres of Good Water
Organic, Raw Fruits
Organic, Raw Vegetables (or lightly steamed)
Fresh fruit and vegetable juices
Whole Grains/ Whole Grain Cereals
Sprouted Whole-Grain Bread (not "whole wheat")
Organic, Free-Range Eggs
Clean Red Meats, Cooked Rare (grass-fed, organic, free-range, no hormones or antibiotics)
Grilled/Roasted Fish (wild, not farm-raised)
Clean Chicken, Turkey (free-range, organic, etc.)
Raw, i.e. unpasteurized, Dairy Products
Raw Nuts and Seeds
Honey, Pure Maple Syrup

Recommendations on fats and oils:

Cook with organic, raw coconut oil, which is solid at room temperature. Then season your food with Raw Butter or Extra Virgin Olive Oil just before plating your food. Keep your EVOO in an opaque container away from heat, air, and sunlight. It should always smell like fresh olives... if not, it's rancid and should be thrown out. Don't use any other vegetable oils for anything. Flax seed oil and supplements are good... but not for cooking. If you need to put mayonnaise in your tuna, buy one with non-hydrogenated oils (not soy!), use ½ the amount you are used to, and add a tbsp of EVOO.

A NOTE ON SWEETS

If you crave sweets everyday assess your protein intake. People who don't eat enough protein crave sweets. People with candida overgrowth crave sweets. Sweets are one of the delights in life but cravings are not, and no good comes from chowing down the sweets when we need to add protein or eliminate candida.

My friend and colleague, Dr. Lou Fabale, gets much of the credit for this post. When I asked him if could plunder his list he said,

Lou Fabale, D.C.

"Truth is truth, and I want EVERYONE
to stop eating shit so they [the manufacturers]
won't make it anymore!!"

Dr. Lou's Website Dr. Lou's Blog

Many thanks to
Tim O’Shea, D.C. @ thedoctorwithin.com and
Joseph Mercola, O.D. @ mercola.com
Dr. Mercola's Beginner Nutrition Plan

Lower Your Blood Pressure Without Drugs!!!

2011-01-31T15:00:00.000-08:00

New Stress Management Tool Reduces Blood Pressure Without Drugs
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) -- Conventional stress management protocols like meditation, relaxation exercises, deep breathing or anti-anxiety medication may help people cope with stress. But they do not address the cause of stress. A pioneering approach to stress management targets a person's disrupted energy meridian system as the real driver behind heightened stress levels. A simple technique balances the energy and eliminates the body and mind's stress response.

Gary Craig, the Stanford-trained engineer who developed EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) maintains "according to EFT theory, people who have a heightened stress response also have a disrupted energy meridian system. Conventional coping strategies tend to be ineffective because they fail to balance these vital pathways."

EFT is a do-it-yourself acupressure technique that anybody can learn. It combines focused thought with gentle fingertip tapping on key acupressure points. It is a portable tool that can be used during stressful situations. Even children can perform EFT for themselves when they are having a tough day at school.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) states that stress in the workplace is costing over $300 billion as a result of absenteeism, accidents, employee turnover and diminished productivity as well as medical, insurance and workers compensation costs. More than 25 percent of employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives.

Stress causes both physical and emotional symptoms. Common physical symptoms like tension headaches, backache, stiff neck, upset stomach, rapid heartbeat and high blood pressure are caused by stress.

Stress also affects people's mood, their behavior, and ways of thinking. Stressed people may tend to feel irritable and intolerant of minor disturbances, jumpy and worrisome, exhausted and unfocused.

Gary Craig explains, "EFT has chronicled thousands of cases where both the physical and emotional symptoms of stress were eliminated within just a few minutes, or a few sessions. When the energy meridian system is balanced with EFT, people can return to a stressful environment, like the workplace, and not experience the same stress response. EFT has even chronicled cases of people lowering their blood pressure and reducing heart palpitations."

Peggy Thiel was on leave from work due to a persistent and worsening irregular heartbeat combined with high blood pressure (160/105 when she left work). Having an aversion to taking medication, Peggy researched alternatives on the Internet, found the EFT website and downloaded the free manual which teaches the basics of performing EFT.

First, she spent about 3 minutes doing EFT for her heart palpitations. The palpitations subsided and stayed away all day. Then she took her own blood pressure reading (144/92) before performing one application of EFT. After a few minutes of EFT, her blood pressure was 121/86 (120/80 is considered normal). Thiel writes, "I am a rank beginner, having never even heard of this process until last night, I've only done it now a total of 3 times, and it's stabilized my heart rhythm and lowered my blood pressure over 20 points ... I have never seen anything work like this."

Thiel didn't know the mechanics behind EFT; she simply followed the procedure and balanced her own energy meridian system. In doing so, she moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone of Stage 1 Hypertension. According to Craig, "not everybody can expect to have the same instant results, but if performed correctly and with persistence, EFT's clinical results show that people improve their condition in about 80% of cases".

Craig believes that large corporations and small businesses could lower job-related stress and build staff morale by incorporating EFT into their Employee Assistance Programs. Says Craig, "EFT is like emotional first aid and it should be in every company's first aid kit."

Over 225,000 people have downloaded Craig's free training manual and another 5,000 to 10,000 download it each month. Known as The EFT Manual, it has been translated by volunteer practitioners into nine languages. The EFT website is the sixth most actively visited natural health site in the world.

The EFT Manual gives anyone all the basics so they can apply it right away. It can be freely downloaded at...

beyondbones.com and emofree.com

People Who Keep A Food Diary Lose More Weight

2011-01-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

Invariable, whenever I ask someone to write down everything they eat I am met with resistance. I see slumping and sighing. I hear groaning and excuses.

Most people do not want to keep track. Many people feel they will be exposed as gluttons, as if gluttony is true only if one records it.

Here are two pieces of good news:

Firstly, keeping a food diary is now as easy as the click of a button. We love our clicking, don't we? Well, rather than laboriously and meticulously writing or typing after every meal we can just snap a photo! Click! and it's done. Put your food on a plate and take its picture. Then eat it. Repeat at next meal. Easy as pie.

Secondly, people who keep a record of their food lose more weight than those who do not. Not only that, but there is evidence that merely recording food intake without making any other changes is likely to result in weight loss! Is that totally amazing? Something to do with awareness. Simply activating and employing this kind of awareness helps people lose weight even when they do not exercise or diet.

If you try it I would love to hear about your results.

Here's my breakfast, as an example. I accidentally ate one of the broccoli flowers before I remembered to snap the photos.

What is it? If you care to know, it's eggs, beans, and feta cheese; sprouted toast with raw butter; and steamed broccoli. Yummy and nourishing!

Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong - Newsweek

2011-01-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong - Newsweek:

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.

But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.

Medical Breakthroughs: The Good and the Bad

It’s a disturbing view, with huge implications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his role as one of medicine’s top mythbusters. “People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.

This is Ioannidis’s moment. As medical costs hamper the economy and impede deficit-reduction efforts, policymakers and businesses are desperate to cut them without sacrificing sick people. One no-brainer solution is to use and pay for only treatments that work. But if Ioannidis is right, most biomedical studies are wrong.

In just the last two months, two pillars of preventive medicine fell. A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. (Pfizer, which makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk factors is complicated”). In November a panel of the Institute of Medicine concluded that having a blood test for vitamin D is pointless: almost everyone has enough D for bone health (20 nanograms per milliliter) without taking supplements or calcium pills. Cost of vitamin D: $425 million per year.

Ioannidis, 45, didn’t set out to slay medical myths. A child prodigy (he was calculating decimals at age 3 and wrote a book of poetry at 8), he graduated first in his class from the University of Athens Medical School, did a residency at Harvard, oversaw AIDS clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health in the mid-1990s, and chaired the department of epidemiology at Greece’s University of Ioannina School of Medicine. But at NIH Ioannidis had an epiphany. “Positive” drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and “negative” trials, in which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. “But negative trials took an extra two to four years to be published,” he noticed. “Negative results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.” With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies, patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective. That made Ioannidis wonder, how many biomedical studies are wrong?

FORGOTTEN TRAILBLAZER by Dr. Tim O'Shea

2011-01-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

Dr. Royal Lee was the pioneer researcher in the field of whole food vitamins. For decades he documented the basic facts summarized in this chapter. His work has never been scientifically refuted. Anyone who seriously undertakes the study of vitamins today corroborates Lee’s work. His story is a fascinating study in itself, a study of indomitable perseverance in the pursuit of true principles. Jensen tells us that Royal Lee’s work will not be appreciated until the next century.

Hasn’t happened yet.

Lee felt the full weight of organized drugs/medicine bearing down on him. Reading like something out of Schindler’s List, we learn that the FDA not only persecuted Lee for challenging the economics of synthetic vitamins, produced by giant drug companies, but that he was actually ordered by a court to burn all his research of the past 20 years! Burn his research! When has that ever happened in this country? They didn’t even do that to Larry Flynt.

Going off on a tangent, ever wondered how the FDA attained its present position as attack dog for the drug companies and food manufacturers? It’s another whole story in itself. The precursor of the FDA was the Bureau of Chemistry. Up until 1912 the Bureau of Chemistry was headed up by a man named Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. Here’s a quote from Dr. Wiley that illustrates where his interests lay:

“No food product in our country would have any trace of benzoic acid, sulfurous acid or sulfites or any alum or saccharin, save for medical purposes. No soft drink would contain caffeine or theobromine. No bleached flour would enter interstate commerce. Our foods and drugs would be wholly without any form of adulteration and misbranding. The health of our people would be vastly improved and the life greatly extended. The manufacturers of our food supply, and especially the millers, would devote their energies to improving the public health and promoting happiness in every home by the production of whole ground, unbolted cereal flours and meals.”

- The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law, 1912

Now obviously we can’t have a dangerous lunatic like this in charge of the public nutrition, can we? Dr. Wiley actually filed suit against the Coca-Cola company in an attempt to keep their artificial product out of interstate commerce, and off the market. Fortunately Wiley was eventually replaced by a saner individual, more attuned to the real nutritional needs of the American people, as determined by the experts who knew what was best for us: the food manufacturers. This was Dr. Elmer Nelson, and in his words we get an idea of the change in philosophy that marked the transformation of the Bureau of Chemistry into the FDA:

“It is wholly unscientific to state that a well-fed body is more able to resist disease than a poorly-fed body. My overall opinion is that there hasn’t been enough experimentation to prove that dietary deficiencies make one susceptible to disease.” - Elmer Nelson MD

Washington Post 26 Oct 49

Bernard Jensen illustrates how the tobacco industry and the food giants like Coke were indirectly behind the legal persecution of Royal Lee. Cigarette ads in the 40s and 50s showed medical doctors promoting the digestive benefits of smoking Camels. Or the advertising of Coke and other refined sugar foods stating that “science has shown how sugar can help keep your appetite and weight under control.” (Empty Harvest)

During this same period, Royal Lee was kept in courts for years, fighting to keep the right to advertise his vitamin products, because he was a threat to the food manufacturers. Lee knew they were poisoning the American public. He proved that refined sugars and devitalized, bleached flours were destroying the arteries and the digestive system, causing heart disease and cancer.

(exerpt from www.thedoctorwithin.com by Tim O'Shea, D.C.)

Benefits of Network Care | beyond bones

2011-01-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

One of the salient features of Network Care is the focus on the healthy areas of the spine where free energy is available and the amplification of that free energy for healing. This focus on free energy is exquisitely efficient, effective and unique. The resulting changes span many aspects of physical and emotional being, extending far beyond simply relieving pain.

"Network Care has a direct effect on client self-reported wellness which is twice that expected from healthy lifestyle practices (exercise, risk avoidance, optimal food choices). Network also has a major indirect effect on wellness promoting healthy life-style choices."
R.H. Blanks, Ph.D. Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology University of California, Irvine

A recent retrospective study of 2,818 patients receiving Network care in the United States and around the world, demonstrated that Network care is associated with profound and statistically significant improvement in self-reported wellness areas. Patients report changes in:
Stress
Patients report improvement in their:

overall health and general well-being
ability to cope with daily problems
family relationships
significant relationships
work

Life enjoyment
Patients experience:

openness to guidance by inner feelings
increased relaxation and well-being
positive feelings about self
interest in maintaining a healthy life-style
feeling of openness when relating to others
compassion for others

Life-style changes
Patients report increases in:

regular exercise
practice of Tai Chi/Yoga
meditation and prayer
relaxation and self-hypnosis
consuming health food and vitamins
eating partial or total vegetarian diet
decreased need for prescription medications

Quality of Life
Patients experience improvement in:

personal life
self-awareness
ability to adapt to change
handling problems in life
accomplishments in life
life as a whole
overall contentment with life
relationship with significant other
job satisfaction
life being as one wants it to be
romantic life
actual work done
relationship with co-workers
physical appearance

References:
Blanks, RH; Boone, WR; Schmidt, S; Dobson, M; Network Care: A retrospective outcomes assessment. 1996
Dobson, M; Boone WR; Blanks, RH; Women and Alternative Health Care: A retrospective study of recipients of Network Care. 1996
95% of individuals receiving NSA care report that their expectations have been met.

The FDA Is Not A Reliable Source For Determining Our Safety When It Comes To Drugging

2011-01-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

THINK FOR YOURSELF because the drug companies value something over our health and the FDA has approved killers forever. Here are only a few...

Martha Rosenberg: The Year in Pills

2010's Hall of Shame

The Year in Pills

By MARTHA ROSENBERG
2010 will go down as the year the diet pill Meridia and pain pill Darvon were withdrawn from the market and the heart-attack associated diabetes drug Avandia was severely restricted.

But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive. Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, hid some 1,000 instances of GSK-paid doctors illegally promoting Wellbutrin to other doctors, say authorities.

It was also the year prominent psychiatrists Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg were accused of writing an entire book for GSK called Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care.

Here are the drugs which make 2010's Hall of Shame.

Yaz and Yasmin

Soon after Bayer launched the pill Yaz in 2006, billing it as going "beyond birth control," 18-year-olds were coming down with blood clots, gall bladder disease, heart attacks and even strokes. FDA ordered Bayer to run correction ads that detail the drugs' risks though Yaz sales are still brisk. In fact, financial analysts attribute a third quarter slump to a Yaz generic coming online, not dangerous side effects.

Lyrica, Topamax and Lamictal

In August FDA ordered a warning on the seizure drug Lamictal for aseptic meningitis (brain inflammation) but it is still the darling of military and civilian doctors for unapproved pain and migraine uses. All three drugs increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors according to their mandated labels, in addition to the memory and hair loss patients report.

Humira, Prolia and TNF Blockers

The drug industry's highly promoted biologic drugs are made from genetically engineered hamster cells and suppress the immune system, inviting tuberculosis and several cancers. Yet Humira is advertised to healthy people for "clearer skin" and Prolia is advertised to prevent osteoporosis in healthy women.

Chantix

After 397 FDA cases of possible psychosis, 227 domestic reports of suicidal behaviors and 28 actual suicides, the government banned pilots, air-traffic controllers and interstate truck and bus drivers from taking the antismoking drug Chantix in 2008. Its neuropsychiatric effects were immortalized when New Bohemians musician Carter Albrecht was shot to death in 2007 in Texas by a neighbor after acting aggressively on the Chantix.

Ambien

The sleeping pill Ambien was immortalized as the drug Tiger Woods reportedly cavorted with his consorts on and former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his Ford Mustang on, while driving to Capitol Hill in the middle of the night to "vote" in 2006. Law enforcement officials say it has increased traffic accidents from people who drive in a black out and don't even recognize arresting officers.

Tamoxifen

Is it a coincidence that Tamoxifen maker AstraZeneca founded Breast Cancer Awareness Month and makes carcinogenic agrochemicals that cause breast cancer? As a breast cancer prevention drug, an American Journal of Medicine study found the average life expectancy increase from Tamoxifen was nine day . Public Citizen says for every case of breast cancer prevented on Tamoxifen there is a life-threatening case of blood clots, stroke or endometrial cancer.

Lipitor and Crestor

Why is Lipitor the best selling drug in the world? Because every adult with high LDL or fear of high LDL is on it. And also 2.8 million children, says Consumer Reports. All statins can cause muscle breakdown called rhabdomyolysis. And Crestor is so linked to the side effect, Public Citizen calls it a Do Not Use and the FDA's David Graham named it one of the five most dangerous drugs before at a Congressional hearing.

Boniva

Boniva and other bisphosphonate bone drugs are a good example of FDA approving once unapprovable drugs by transferring risk onto the public's shoulders. The list of dangers on the label includes waiting 60 minutes before eating or drinking anything except plain water, never taking the drug with mineral water, sparkling water, coffee, tea, milk, juice or other oral medicine, including calcium, antacids, or vitamins and not lying down after you take it.
Prempro

Pfizer's hormone drug Prempro is linked to a 26 percent increase in breast cancer, 41 percent increase in strokes, 29 percent increase in heart attacks, 22 percent increase in cardiovascular disease and double the rate of blood clots. But its cognitive and cardiovascular "benefits" are being tested right now at major universities to debut an HT "Light," hoping the public has a short memory.

Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, SSRIs

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Lexapro probably did more to inflate drug industry profits than Viagra. But many say the drugs have also inflated police blotters. In addition to 4,200 published reports of SSRI-related violence, including the Columbine, Red Lake and NIU shootings, SSRIs can cause serotonin syndrome and gastrointestinal bleeding when taken with certain drugs. Paxil is linked to birth defects.

Effexor, Cymbalta, Pristiq, SNRIs

Selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) are like their SSRIs chemical cousins except their norepinephrine effects can modulate pain, which has ushered in your-depression-is-really-pain, your-pain-is-really-depression and other crossover marketing. SNRI's are also harder to quit than SSRIs. 739,000 web sites address "Effexor" and "withdrawal."
Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, atypical antipsychotics

The antipsychotic Seroquel tops 71 drugs on the FDA's January 2010 adverse event report and is linked to unexplained troop deaths and many research scandals. But it's the fifth biggest-selling drug in the world. Atypical antipsychotics cause weight gain and diabetes, the tardive dyskinesia they are marketed to prevent and death in the demented elderly. Yet FDA approved Zyprexa and Seroquel for children last year and the new atypical antipsychotic, Latuda this year. Maybe the FDA is bipolar.

Ritalin, Concerta, Strattera, Adderall and ADHD Drugs

ADHD drugs rob "kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors," says Anatomy of an Epidemic author Robert Whitaker. But they are a gold mine for the drug industry. During an August conference call with financial analysts, Shire specialty pharmaceuticals president Mike Cola lauded the "very dynamic ADHD market," and the "co-administration market" (in which kids don't need one drug but several.

Gardasil and Cervarix Vaccines

A pharma-government plot to inoculate the public with dangerous vaccines? Maybe not but why are governors like Texas' Rick Perry mandating vaccination of girls for HPV? And why was University of Queensland lecturer Andrew Gunn silenced when he questioned the Gardasil vaccine? The HPV vaccine doesn't work for all viral strains, requires a boo$ter and is linked to 56 US girls' deaths as of September, according to the CDC.

Foradil Aerolizer, Serevent Diskus, Advair and Symbicort

Unlike drugs that look safe in trials and develop "safety signals" postmarketing, the long-acting beta agonists (LABA), salmeterol and formoterol, found in many asthma drugs, never looked safe. Studies link them to an increase in asthma deaths, especially in African-Americans and children. They may have contributed to 5,000 deaths said Dr. David Graham at FDA hearings about the controversial asthma drugs.

Singulair and Accolate, leukotriene receptor antagonists

Leukotriene receptor antagonists also never looked safe. Original FDA reviewers said asthma control "deteriorates" on Singulair and it may not be safe in children. Last month, Fox TV reported Singulair, Merck's top selling drug, is suspected of producing aggression, hostility, irritability, anxiety, hallucinations and night-terrors in kids, symptoms that are being diagnosed as ADHD. It is huckstered to parents by the trusted educational service Scholastic, Inc. and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Martha Rosenberg can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net

What's in Your Food? You Might Be Surprised. - AOL Health

2011-01-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

By Victoria Stein

Folklore has it that in the 1970s, McDonald's used Styrofoam balls as a filler in its milkshakes, until customers began to notice the fuzzy floating substances and complained. While the story is not true, several other McDonald's products are full of ingredients you might think twice about eating. Take, for example, the Chicken McNugget. Among the 30-plus ingredients in each bite are dextrose, wheat starch and sodium phosphate -- and that's just in the meat!

Unlike in Thailand and the United Kingdom, where food manufacturers must disclose specific percentages for main or "important" ingredients on food packages (e.g., exactly how much chicken is in chicken noodle soup), American regulations require that labels list only ingredients in descending order by weight. As a result, consumers are left with a much vaguer picture of what is (and is not) in their food. A quick glance at a box of Ritz Bitz cheese sandwiches, for instance, would tell you that cheese is the ninth ingredient, but you'd have no way of knowing that the crackers are only 3 percent cheese.

To help you know some of the stuff you might want to avoid, check out AOL Health's list of some of the biggest ingredient offenders.

1. The package for Gerber Graduates for Preschoolers' juice treats pictures a bounty of fresh fruits -- oranges, grapes, peaches, cherries, pineapples and berries -- yet one look at the ingredient list will tell you there's no orange, peach, cherry or pineapple in the food and there's less than 2 percent raspberry juice concentrate. What you do get is four teaspoons of refined sugar in every serving, thanks to a hefty dose of sugar and corn syrup. Gerber isn't the only culprit, though. Plenty of food companies serve "made with real fruit" claims that they can hardly back up.

2. In 2001, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, measured the amount of shrimp in Nissin Cup Noodles With Shrimp. The result? Just zero to four shrimpy crustaceans in each cup. Nearly a decade later, the instant soup mix hasn't changed its recipe, but the box still pictures five plump shrimp.

3. Assume that your bowl of strawberries and cream Quaker instant oatmeal is full of strawberries? Think again. In truth, the "strawberries" are dehydrated apples that are dyed red. Similarly, the peaches and cream variety has dehydrated apples that are dyed a peachy hue and doesn't contain any real peaches.

4. Who needs carrots when you can have "carrot-flavored pieces"? Betty Crocker's Supermoist Carrot Cake Mix is mostly flour, sugar and corn syrup, with a few carrot-flavored pieces for good measure. Made from (more) corn syrup and flour plus corn cereal, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, carrot powder and artificial coloring, the ingredient list reads like a fifth-grade science project. If you can't spare the time to make a cake from scratch, you're better off with Duncan Hines, which lists dehydrated carrots as the third ingredient after flour and sugar.

5. "Made with whole grains" is another misleading claim. Thomas' 12 Grains English Muffins do contain 12 grains, but the first ingredient, enriched wheat flour, is just regular old flour. Whole-wheat flour and a smattering of other grains are listed further down on the ingredient list, after water. A better alternative is Thomas' 100 percent whole-wheat English muffins, which lists whole-wheat flour as the very first ingredient. When shopping for breads and cereals, look for the word "whole" before wheat or grain at the top of the ingredient list.

6. We hate to pick on Betty Crocker again, but who would have thought that Bac-Os bacon-flavored bits are kosher and free of animal products? How is that possible? They are a blend of defatted soy flour, partially hydrogenated soybean oil (a trans fat), artificial flavoring, salt and sugar. Hormel bacon bits are made from real bacon and have fewer calories and the same amount of fat (albeit most of it saturated) as the Betty Crocker variety.

7. Yogurt-covered raisins and pretzels certainly sound healthier than their chocolate-enrobed cousins. But with no yogurt and just as much saturated fat, these treats are a diet disaster. Sun-Maid's vanilla yogurt-covered raisins are made primarily from sugar and trans fatty palm kernel oil with a smidge of yogurt powder for flavoring. One serving contains five teaspoons of sugar and four grams of saturated fat. That's 21 percent of your daily allowance for saturated fat. And each serving is one-fifth cup, about 18 pieces.

Reverse Aging with Chiropractic Care

2011-01-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

(NaturalNews) Our body is in a constant and never ending struggle for survival. Scientists estimate that each of our cells must withstand around 10,000 individual assaults from reactive oxygen species (ROS) or free radicals. Amazingly, the body has an incredible system of self-healing that withstands the onslaught and rebuilds what has been damaged. Chiropractic care has been shown to be a powerful method of stabilizing and enhancing this self-healing ability.

The central nervous system is the primary system that controls all function and healing within the body. This flow of nerve energy from the brain to the body coordinates all 75 trillion cells to action. The brain is then fed through movement information that it receives from skin, joint, & muscle receptors. This movement information is called "proprioception." The brain depends on adequate proprioception for optimal function.

Physical nerve stress occurs when the spinal bones are twisted or thrown out of alignment. This is caused every day by macro traumas such as falls, car accidents, & sporting activities. Micro traumas such as bad posture, repetitive movements, and poor sleeping habits can damage the spine & nervous system as well. Physical nerve stress causes a deficiency in healthy brain-body signaling and an increased release of the stress hormone cortisol. This disrupts the body's ability to heal.

Chiropractic adjustments remove this built-up pressure on the nervous system allowing the body to heal as it was designed. Many studies have shown chiropractic care to be a powerful form of anti-aging.
In 2005, a landmark study published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation (JVSR) found evidence that chiropractic care can reduce oxidative stress in the body.

Oxidative stress is the damage that occurs when free radicals outnumber the body's antioxidants. Oxidative stress damages all body cell components: proteins, lipids and DNA. In fact, researchers have found that one out of every three proteins is rendered dysfunctional by unchecked free radical damage.

Thiols are sulfur containing compounds in the body that act as antioxidants. They react with free radicals to neutralize them. Serum levels of thiols reflect DNA's capacity to repair itself, report scientists of Biomedical Diagnostic Research, Inc, and can be used to measure aging and disease status. In a 2003 study published in the Journal of Anti Aging Medicine, low serum thiol levels were found in nine different categories of human sickness and disease.

The study published in JVSR consisted of 76 participants: one group received short-term chiropractic care; a second group received long-term chiropractic care; and the third group received no chiropractic care.

The study qualified participants for age, sex and the use of nutritional supplements. Healthy individuals that received chiropractic care for 2 or more years had higher serum thiol levels than those with disease. Some of the chiropractic patients had serum thiol levels higher than what is associated with normal wellness.

Chiropractor Dr. Christopher Kent explained: 'Oxidative stress, metabolically generating free radicals, is now a broadly accepted theory of how we age and develop disease.'

'Going through life,' he adds, 'we experience physical, chemical and emotional stress. These stresses affect the function of the nervous system. We hypothesized that these disturbances in nerve function could affect oxidative stress and DNA repair on a cellular level.'

'Chiropractic care appears to improve the ability of the body to adapt to stress,' concluded Kent.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030004_chiropractic_aging.html#ixzz1A8VG3YUd

Reverse Aging with Chiropractic Care

Autism Gives Woman An 'Alien View' Of Social Brains : NPR

2011-01-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

"We all avoid different things. I avoid polyester clothing. They avoid talking about death."-Lisa Daxer

It takes a smart brain to invent a spaceship. But putting one in orbit takes a brain with extraordinary social skills.

That's because getting from concept to launchpad takes more than technology — it takes thousands of people agreeing on a common goal and working together to accomplish it.

Humans have succeeded in part because we evolved a brain with a remarkable capacity for this type of complex social interaction. We automatically respond to social cues and facial expressions. We can look at the world from another person's point of view. We are predisposed to cooperate.

But all these things are so much a part of us, they're easy to take for granted.

Unless you have autism, like Lisa Daxer.

Daxer, 27, is a biomedical engineering major at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. And for her, things like reading faces and understanding what's on another person's mind are a struggle.

When Daxer was in elementary school, it became clear that although she was better than her classmates at reading and math, they were better at social interactions. "I realized that they had friends and I didn't," Daxer says.

Skip Peterson for NPR

Lisa Daxer says she doesn't want a typical brain and that her autism is part of who she is. But she says she will probably always feel like a bit of an "alien."

Autism has made Daxer feel like an outsider, even an alien. "I have a weird brain," she says.

read the rest: Autism Gives Woman An 'Alien View' Of Social Brains : NPR

Vitamin D makes seasonal flu shots irrelevant

2010-11-07T17:18:00.000-08:00

Vaccination rates fall among better educated families even while CDC keeps pushing vaccine quackery

CELEBRATING HEALTH / HUGE DISCOUNT IN OCTOBER

2010-10-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

CELEBRATING HEALTH / HUGE DISCOUNT IN OCTOBER

October is officially Breast Cancer Awareness month. I propose a month of celebrating Healthy Breasts & Healthy Bodies! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

For the rest of October, in honor of all women (and men too) who wish to take action toward living a life of health and well-being, I am slashing the cost of the first week of Network Chiropractic Care to anybody who says they wish to "CELEBRATE HEALTH" when making their appointment. Please spread the word to your loved ones.

THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL GET for only $45:

* health history evaluation

* spinal exam

* posture analysis

* report of findings

* recommendations

* AND three extremely gentle adjustments

The usual fee for the first week of care is between $290 and $450.

During October 2010 you can GET THE WHOLE SHEBANG FOR ONLY $45 when you say that you wish to "CELEBRATE HEALTH".

Please spread the word to your loved ones.

Dr. Kimberly Rousseau

beyondbones.com

667-2211

This awesome rare deal is offered to those who have not previously received Network Care from Dr. Kimberly. All 3 free visits must be completed within one week of the first visit.

October 2010 only.

Is Your Adrenal Gland As Fatigued As You Are? | Owning Pink

2010-09-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

Is Your Adrenal Gland As Fatigued As You Are?

Lissa Rankin, June 10, 2010

Adrenal fatigue? Say what? I hear you. It’s certainly nothing they ever taught me in medical school, and chances are that if you go to your doctor at Kaiser and ask to get tested for it, they’ll raise a white coat eyebrow at you.

What Are The Adrenal Glands?

As Dr. Christiane Northrup describes it, “The adrenal glands are the body’s primary shock-absorbers.” These small organs that sit right above your kidneys make hormones like cortisol, DHEA, and norepinephrine, which help your body negotiate the metabolic requirements of keeping a body healthy, energetic, and safe.

What Do These Adrenal Hormones Do?

Our bodies are super smart in that they’re designed to help us in times of stress. Back when we were cave people, running away from cave bears, we needed highly tuned systems in place to activate our “fight or flight” mechanisms. Hormones like norepinephrine (which converts to epinephrine, aka “adrenaline”) and the adrenal hormone cortisol were critical hormones that meant the difference between life and death.
The problem is that most of us are no longer high-tailing it away from cave bears. Instead, we stress about finding a job, our divorce settlement, problems with our teenagers, marital problems, meeting the right guy, getting promoted, and a whole host of other “stressors” that have nothing to do with living or dying. As a result, our bodies live in “fight or flight,” spitting out norepinephrine and cortisol as if the cave bear is right on our heels.

Chronic Stress Is Not Our Friend

What this means is that we’re shooting out these hormones all the time, and this takes its toll, particularly on the adrenal gland. Poor thing. It’s only doing its job. When the stress never lets up, the adrenal gland poops out- and adrenal hormone production falls off, leading to deficiencies in hormones like cortisol, DHEA, and pregnenolone.

What Is Adrenal Fatigue?

When you’re under chronic stress, calling upon the adrenal gland’s reserves simply to get you through an ordinary day, the adrenal gland tends to get weary, and levels of adrenal hormones fall off. Suddenly, the hormones you’ve become used to getting you through a normal work day are depleted, and you wind up with debilitating fatigue, depressed mood, loss of interest in the things you used to love, irritability, decreased libido, memory loss- in short, you’ve lost your mojo.

How Can You Tell If You Have Adrenal Fatigue?

If you wake up feeling exhausted after eight hours of sleep, have to chug two Starbucks cappuccinos to get started in the morning, crave sweets when your energy levels get sluggish, feel depressed, are not interested in sex, keep catching colds, and then- at the end of an exhausting day- you have trouble falling asleep, you may have adrenal fatigue. If you’re perimenopausal, your symptoms may be exacerbated by the hormone swings that accompany this transition.
Serum or salivary tests can confirm the diagnosis, but make sure you see a health care provider who believes adrenal fatigue exists. Many traditional Western medical doctors will look at you funny if you ask to be tested, which means they won’t know how to interpret your lab results, even if they order them, since many people with adrenal fatigue have lab results that are within the normal range, albeit on the low end of normal. Every lab is a bit different, so it’s hard to establish firm rules, but many integrative medicine doctors are skilled at helping you figure out the status of your adrenal glands.

Hormone Treatment for Adrenal Fatigue

If laboratory testing reveals that your adrenal glands aren’t functioning properly, you can tackle the problem in several ways. First, you can replace the hormones directly. If DHEA is low, try replacing it with pharmaceutical grade DHEA supplement in low doses (5-10mg in the morning, although some people need up to 25 mg twice a day). If your cortisol is low, you can supplement with a product like IsoCort (a freeze-dried adrenal cortex supplement made by Bezwecken) and/or Adrenogen (an herbal supplement to help heal the adrenal glands by Metagenics). In severe cases, some people need very low doses of hydrocortisone until the adrenal gland heals enough to begin producing adrenal hormones again. Pregnenolone, when low, can also be replaced. Dosing depends on the severity of the deficiency.

Holistic Alternatives For Adrenal Fatigue

While hormones are usually effective for treating the symptoms of adrenal fatigue, you won’t achieve long-term healing unless you get to the root of the underlying issue. The goal is to replace your hormones, but not for long. By working on what caused the adrenal fatigue in the first place, you should be able to wean off your hormones and allow your body to begin making the hormones it needs, but this can take some effort on your part.

Tips For Improving Adrenal Fatigue

Reduce your stress. Adrenal fatigue usually signals a deeper underlying issue that’s begging for your attention. Does something need to change at work? Are you unhappy in your marriage? Are your kids making you crazy? As long as your body is still in fight or flight mode, your adrenal glands are unlikely to recover.
Never skip breakfast. Your body needs healthy fuel to get you going in the morning.
Eat healthy snacks often to keep your blood sugar stable. Try supplementing with green juice you make at home with your juicer.
Eliminate sugar and caffeine. I know, I know- how are you going to do that when that’s all that gets you through the day? Trust me on this one. It only makes things worse.
Eat a whole foods, healthy diet high in protein and veggies.
Avoid alcohol.
Take a good multivitamin.
Try Siberian ginseng or licorice root (but if you take the licorice, keep an eye on your blood pressure if it trends towards high).
Sleep 8-10 hours per night. Your body needs it.
Move your body- but not too much. If you’re extremely adrenally fatigued, you may need to cut down your exercise until you build your strength back up. But if you’re not exercising at all, start out slow and take walks, gradually increasing your movement until you feel better.
Focus on healing, loving thoughts. What makes you feel good? What do you desire? What brings you pleasure? Bring your attention to these things and invite healing juju to help you heal your adrenal glands and your life.

Lissa Rankin is an OB/GYN physician, founder of Owning Pink, and author of the forthcoming What’s Up Down There: Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend (St. Martin’s Press, September 2010).

Tracing Your Food From Farm to Fork, Part III

2010-08-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

by Alisha Prakash | Aug 18, 2010

Do You Know Where Your Food Comes From?

For years, the term "food traceability" has permeated the media, and there has been a greater emphasis on consumers' right to know where their food comes from.

With the high profile of foodborne illness outbreaks that caused the infamous case of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old girl who was left paralyzed after eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger produced by Cargill and the Peanut Corporation of America's demise after its products were determined to be the source of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds, and the weekly litany of food recalls for contamination with pathogenic bacteria, allergens, or for other causes, consumers are paying more attention to the origins of their food.

With this in mind, Food Safety News set out to learn more about food trace back and traceability. We spoke with representatives from Scoring Ag, HarvestMark, Top Ten Produce, Recall InfoLink, and HCL Technologies about what they're doing to help the food industry trace products from farm to consumer. We'll be featuring an interview with each in this series on traceability.
Top Ten Produce

"What you need to know about Top Ten Produce is that it's about people." This is the first thing that executive director of Top Ten Produce John Bailey said in an interview with Food Safety News. "It's about know your farmer, know your food," he says. Top Ten Produce follows a local traceability program, including person, place, and item.

By snapping a picture of the barcode with a cell phone, or entering the data into the computer, consumers will immediately know the farmer who produced that particular food product, his or her name and life story, the farm, as well as information about the product itself. The grower also has the option of including pictures and a video to connect with his consumer.

Top Ten Produce focuses on independent farms. "All of our growers are rugged individualists, typically small, almost exclusively a million dollars or less," says Bailey. "We're in 10 states, so it's rapidly expanding, but at the same time, we're not seeking out the traditional business that the other companies are going for."

Bailey advocates focusing on smaller, independent farmers because of the Top Ten Produce personal approach, as it tends to hone in on what a consumer wants. "Today's consumer wants to support their local growers, they want to support a real person, they want to know the person they're buying from and trust that person," says Bailey. "But, not everyone can get to the farmer's market. So, we have them meet real growers themselves through social media." Consumers are able to communicate back and forth with every single grower that is growing under the brand.

"Consumers can learn to know their farmer--to know that there's a real person behind the brand. And, that's the whole point of Top Ten," says Bailey. "Be your own brand. Be yourself. You can really be yourself."

And, for those consumers who use Twitter, they simply have to mention the farmer's grower number--a state abbreviation and number--and the comments will appear on the grower's profile. A direct communication can then ensue.

Consumers aren't the only ones to benefit. Much like HarvestMark and ScoringAg, Top Ten Produce benefits everyone along the food chain. "You can have a recall of a product and it's going to trace back only to one farm, even if that farm is intermingled in the beginning," says Bailey. "It's the precision that the retailer will like."

And, like the other two systems, Top Ten Produce also works in real-time. It is not the quickness that Bailey believes is essential during a recall, however. Bailey focuses on the preciseness. Using an analogy with cars, Bailey suggests that each food item has a specific identity, just like a car has a one of a kind, distinguishable Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). If a factory produces thousands of an item, consumers are able to identify which one product is under recall. "Our recall is specific to the farm," says Bailey.

While it does have plans for any product used on a small independent farm to become part of the system, Top Ten Produce currently only focuses on fresh produce. And unlike HarvestMark where there's no limit to where you can source your product from, Top Ten Produce zeroes in on solely American farms. "We're really encouraging local search systems," says Bailey. "It's nice to build a relationship with people in your own community that give back to your own community."

Bailey acknowledges the fact that that there are many farmers who resist these trace back programs. "[Farmers] are running a small operation on a thin margin," says Bailey. "It's going to cost them to get a number to even begin the program. Then, they have to figure out how to use the program. They're going to set it up, so there's a significant capital contribution and tremendous time contribution for something they're not getting any value out of."

Bailey suggests, however, that Top Ten Produce provides a return investment on a system that farmers believe they get no benefit from. "We connect them directly to their consumer, so now they can talk to the actual people buying their produce," says Bailey.

Tracing Your Food From Farm to Fork, Part II

2010-08-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

by Alisha Prakash | Aug 17, 2010

For years, the term "food traceability" has permeated the media, and there has been a greater emphasis on consumers' right to know where their food comes from.

With the high profile of foodborne illness outbreaks that caused the infamous case of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old girl who was left paralyzed after eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger produced by Cargill and the Peanut Corporation of America's demise after its products were determined to be the source of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds, and the weekly litany of food recalls for contamination with pathogenic bacteria, allergens, or for other causes, consumers are paying more attention to the origins of their food.

With this in mind, Food Safety News set out to learn more about food trace back and traceability. We spoke with representatives from Scoring Ag, HarvestMark, Top Ten Produce, Recall InfoLink, and HCL Technologies about what they're doing to help the food industry trace products from farm to consumer. We'll be featuring an interview with each in this series on traceability.

HarvestMark

Another leader in food traceability is HarvestMark, which also provides insight to consumers, retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and everyone else involved in the food chain. With 1.5 billion items under its wing, HarvestMark has made headway in the last 18 months.

Like ScoringAg, HarvestMark aids the food channel in product ambiguity in case of a recall. "HarvestMark is like a license plate," says Elliot Grant, founder of HarvestMark. "It gives every item of produce a unique identity."

Logging onto the HarvestMark Website or using the iPhone app gives consumers the opportunity to explore information the handler chooses to share with them. This information can range from date of harvest to pesticides used, in addition to all the traditional harvest event data from a critical safety perspective, according to Grant. "We can give you information you can't find anywhere else about the product in your hand," says Grant.

According to Grant, HarvestMark works in conjunction with approximately 35 labeling and packaging converters across the world, who also use the technology. "Because we're implemented on labels and clamshells, we have to work with a lot of the label manufacturers that the growers use. We spent the last few years working with these label companies, getting them equipped," says Grant. "Nobody even comes close to that kind of ecosystem."

HarvestMark focuses much of its attention on item-level traceability, which centers mainly on individual items rather than cases. And, the benefits of this are boundless, according to Grant. After conducting five research studies in the last four years, Grant says the consumer they know favors traceable food. "Something like 70 to 80 percent of people considerably say they prefer traceable food," says Grant. "And, when we ask them why, they say it gives them peace of mind." With the grower willing to share information, the consumer feels confident and possesses greater trust with the food they put away.

According to Grant, HarvestMark also gives consumers the ability to provide feedback about products to the grower--positive or negative. Consumers can share comments with the producer or retailer, and the producer can share this information with the retailer as well. Farmers receive messages that inform them with the time and location that the consumer has eaten the product, in addition to when and where the grower picked the item.

"If you're a strawberry shipper, for example, you obtain all these variables--what do I plant, how do I water, how do I harvest, how do I train my crew--to provide fresh high quality produce in the consumer's kitchen," says Grant. "It's very hard for the farmer to optimize that without getting feedback from the consumer."

If consumers trace a product, but choose not to provide any feedback, HarvestMark captures an IP address, as well as the date of the tracing, and is able to notify the farmer how long it takes a particular product to reach the market, as well as the quality of the item when it arrived. "For the first time, the grower can see all the way through the supply chain," says Grant.

And, all these benefits don't even include the food safety advantages.

"From a business point of view, most food is perfectly safe day in and day out," says Grant. "Real value for the consumer is peace of mind, loyalty, and feedback. For the farmer, it's feedback that is meaningful and for the retailer, for them to be able to improve quality and freshness is their goal."

According to Grant, HarvestMark possesses a couple of data centers where they host all the information for their customers. Every item that is harvested and shipped gets a record of where it went and where it was picked. When a consumer checks, the system tracks that data as well. "In many ways, we're a data management company," says Grant.

Consumer information is kept anonymous unless the consumer chooses to provide their name and address. If they choose to remain anonymous, the information is received simply as an IP address. Consumers also have the option of leaving their e-mail address, in case they wish to open a much more personal and direct connection with their grower.

In addition to the tech-savvy iPhone app, HarvestMark has a rating button, where consumers can rate products. This allows growers to see how they stack up against others in the U.S., like with the Netflix rating system.

As a major player in the produce traceability world, HarvestMark is able to provide nationwide support. And, due to their widespread influence, HarvestMark has become a trust brand in traceability, gaining a large network of partners and retailers who employ the technology in their factories.

Similar to ScoringAg, HarvestMark also works in real-time. "When there's a recall, we want to be able to tell a consumer right away if their product is affected or not," says Grant. In fact, when Freshway Farms recalled Romaine lettuce, traces on salad on HarvestMark appeared within the hour that the recall was announced to the press. "We were able to put up a message that read 'yes, there is a recall going on right now. It affects Freshway Farms, and this bag is not affected,'" explains Grant. "We were able to reinforce the confidence in those consumers that the bag they bought from that brand was fine to eat."

And, much like ScoringAg, HarvestMark is cost effective. It costs a fraction of a penny to put a HarvestMark code on a product, according to Grant. And, there is minimal hardware required as well.

HarvestMark not only informs consumers if there is a safety problem, but also provides notification when there's a new traceable item in local supermarkets and tips on how to choose specific products.

"Traceability gives the shipper and operator information that they can use to make their products fresher, get to the market faster, respond to consumers' feedback, and make choices about variety, harvesting, and the shipper who has implemented traceability. As a grower, there are not many ways to distinguish yourself from another, aside from competing from seasonality, Grant suggests. "Traceability provides a really powerful source of differentiation in both consumer preference and in operations," he says.

Tracing Your Food From Farm to Fork

2010-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Tracing Your Food From Farm to Fork

Tracing Your Food From Farm to Fork
by Alisha Prakash | Aug 16, 2010
Do You Know Where Your Food Comes From?

For years, the term "food traceability" has permeated the media, and there has been a greater emphasis on consumers' right to know where their food comes from.

With the high profile of foodborne illness outbreaks that caused the infamous case of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old girl who was left paralyzed after eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger produced by Cargill and the Peanut Corporation of America's demise after its products were determined to be the source of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds, and the weekly litany of food recalls for contamination with pathogenic bacteria, allergens, or for other causes, consumers are paying more attention to the origins of their food.

With this in mind, Food Safety News set out to learn more about food trace back and traceability. We spoke with representatives from Scoring Ag, HarvestMark, Top Ten Produce, Recall InfoLink, and HCL Technologies about what they're doing to help the food industry trace products from farm to consumer. We'll be featuring an interview with each in this series on traceability.

Coping with Information Overload

"I've stopped eating red meat because I really don't know what it's in it anymore, or where it's coming from," said one 23-year-old consumer from Manhattan, who preferred to remain nameless for this story. And, more now than ever, consumers are demanding the right to information about the food they are consuming.

In the modern era, where food-borne illness outbreaks have occurred, distrust is created between the consumers and producers, lawyer Denis Stearns, a partner in the Marler Clark law firm and a professor at Seattle University School of Law, suggests. Unlike in the past, where face-to-face transactions dominated the way people exchanged food, consumers today have a smaller connection to where their food is coming from.

As the food distribution system has evolved, technology has hindered the progression of food trace back systems. Over the years, however, technology has slowly caught up, changing and developing to improve traceability.

"It's a whole supply chain that exists. It's not just one or two entities that are involved in this," says Ravi Sankar of HCL Technologies. "That's why it has always been very difficult in the past to pull this information together." Today, technology has advanced so that individuals can build interfaces into different systems and collect trace back information with little to no difficulty, explains Sankar.

Because the volume of transactions between the number of items and suppliers is also quite large today, Sankar suggests that policies should be required to ensure that the only vital information is recorded to avoid overload. "Information storage has become more inexpensive as time has gone on," says Sankar. "In the past, that would have been a big barrier."

To aid in providing consumers with peace of mind, various businesses and companies are pooling their forces and creating different technologies and management data systems that can trace back food to its origin. These companies are utilizing the available technology to ensure not only the public's health, but also making certain that the suppliers along the food chain, whether it be the retailer, the wholesaler, the distributor, or even the producer, are protected as well.

ScoringAg

"Food safety is about communicating between the farmer, the trucker, the distributor and everybody in that food chain saying, 'I did a very good job getting that produce to you in a clean form,'" says the President of ScoringAg, William Kanitz. "And, that's what ScoringAg does."

ScoringAg is an online record-keeping system that hoards data for a wide host of products. "It can handle any product on the face of this earth, including food machinery," says Kanitz. It provides an easily understandable, instant, and inexpensive trace back system that can help in case of a recall.

To search a product's origin and profile, registered users must enter a barcode, RFID, or SSI-EID--internal tracking codes--which are all printed on the item itself. According to Kanitz, in the case of a meat product, the animal's origin, picture, tag, vaccination dates, feed, certifications, any slaughter tests received, and/or other additional information the handler chooses to incorporate appears on the product's online profile. ScoringAg is a database that backs up labeling, Kanitz says.

Every individual involved in the food channel--retailers, suppliers, wholesalers, growers, distributors, consumers, and more can use ScoringAg information. "It actually creates a link between [people]," says Kanitz. "Everyone along the way can know that they can see the attributes, they can see the variety, they can see when it was planted, or who it was certified by."

The web-based system is an empty database that virtually anyone can sign in and take over themselves. ScoringAg is also available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. And, French and German translations are in the process of being created, according to Kanitz.

What ScoringAg prides itself on is the immediacy and real-time in which the system works. "Whether you have the smallest farmer in the world or the poorest farmer in the world, they all have almost the same speed as someone like our mega farms that we have today," says Kanitz.

The trace back happens quickly--in not 24 hours, not 48 hours, but seconds, according to Kanitz. "When somebody needs information, they need to look at that information and asses it to make a purchasing decision immediately," continues Kanitz. "It benefits everyone along the chain because it erupts in real-time."

This system is cost effective, too. Anyone can purchase ScoringAg records for $10, depending on the volume of entities, the volume of locations, the volume of pictures and/or video that you're using, Kanitz mentions.

According to Kanitz, ScoringAg has the cheapest labeling system there is with $0.0025 for a trace back code to stick on a product. ScoringAg is the lowest cost operating trace back system worldwide, he says. "You don't need an exorbitant cost to have a traceability system," says Kanitz. "You need some common sense and the right equipment. You can have a complete trace back system for a low cost or you can have a partial system for an expensive cost, the way I see it. The low cost system will always win."

Consumers can access ScoringAg, but they receive a public version of the records that don't include the grower's name, unless the grower chooses to include that information. "The same we protect our growers and shippers and retailers and wholesalers, we have to protect that information," Kanitz says. "In this case here, there's a certain amount of risk and people need to know they can go to a place and there's products and you can see more attributes about them."

What makes this system unique, Kanitz says, is that ScoringAg is not a traceability system, but a trace back system. "The starting record stays intact from the original starting point to the final destination and the consumer can see the public part of the record, including picture and video, if uploaded," says Kanitz. According to Kanitz, ScoringAg provides complete trace back up and down, not just a portion of the traceability. "One-step up and one-step down trace back systems are proven inadequate in case of a recall," he says.

According to a recent article published in Fresh Plaza, ScoringAg is the only system that facilitates all worldwide partners in the food chain to upload from their internal systems, trace back relevant data, and move it efficiently to the next supplier within the chain.

ScoringAg also can provide item level, case, and bin trace back with records for all agricultural products--raw, processed, or commingled, according to Kanitz.

As a professional farmer himself, Kanitz knows the fine points the industry. For now, Kanitz devotes his time to help other people, so farmers can sell their safe food no matter what country they're in. "If it's made into food, then we need to know whether it's compatible with what we eat," Kanitz says. "There's a certain amount of risk and this is going to keep on expanding until we can fix it. The objective is if I know what made me ill, then we can help the guy who raised it or trucked it or processed it, so he can make an adjustment and he can keep on producing food for the population."

"ScoringAg is food safety. ScoringAg is trace back. ScoringAg is foodborne pathogen prevention. We have all those different attributes in ScoringAg and you can document them," says Kanitz. " And, in order to see your product worldwide anymore, you've got to have records."

152 Million More Eggs Recalled, Egg Co. Sued

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152 Million More Eggs Recalled, Egg Co. Sued

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell | Studio Daily

2010-08-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell | Studio Daily

Nuclei, proteins and lipids move with bug-like authority, slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space. “All of those things that you see in the animation are going on in every one of your cells in your body all the time,” says XVIVO lead animator John Liebler

Tylenol tied to childhood asthma - Health - Kids and parenting - msnbc.com

2010-08-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Tylenol tied to childhood asthma - Health - Kids and parenting - msnbc.com: "o"

Dr. Joseph Mercola: The Cholesterol Myth That Could Be Harming Your Health

2010-08-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

Dr. Joseph Mercola: The Cholesterol Myth That Could Be Harming Your Health

Not only is cholesterol most likely not going to destroy your health (as you have been led to believe), but it is also not the cause of heart disease. And for those of you taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, the information that follows could not have been given to you fast enough. But before I delve into this life-changing information, let's get some basics down first.

Food Safety Bills in Congress | Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance

2010-08-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

S. 510 would undermine the rapidly growing local foods movement by imposing unnecessary, burdensome regulations on small farms and food processors - everyone from your local CSA to the small bakers, jam makers, and people making fermented vegetables to sell at the local farmers market.

Food Safety Bills in Congress | Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance

NOVA | The Elegant Universe: Pt 1

2010-07-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

NOVA | The Elegant Universe: Pt 1

Vibrating strings smaller than quarks, additional dimensions, probable impossible events! The supernatural is merely natural and physics has theories to explain it all: The Theory of Everything. This video is fantastic! Physics never looked so good.

Alzheimer's disease: The best bets for prevention, so far

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Alzheimer's disease: The best bets for prevention, so far - latimes.com

Keep your brain in shape by staying active both physically and mentally and feeding your body well. It is the same plan we have for wellness overall.

Carcinogens in baby shampoo? Are you kidding me?

2010-07-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

Annie Leonard: The Story of Cosmetics: What's Really in Your Personal Care Products?:

The labels are reassuring: "Gentle." "Pure." "Natural." "Free of Harsh Ingredients." "Recommended by Pediatricians." "Dermatologists Approved." And of course, "No More Tears."

But when you turn the bottles around, get out a magnifying glass and read the fine print on the back (and get online to do some research) it's a different story: sodium laureth sulfate, diazolidinyl urea, ceteareth-20, PEGs, quaternium-15 -- all these are typically contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals like formaldehyde or 1,4 dioxane.

Carcinogens in baby shampoo? Are you kidding me?

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The 7 foods experts won't eat - Healthy Living on Shine

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Announcing the True Food Shoppers Guide Mobile App � The True Food Network

2010-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Announcing the True Food Shoppers Guide Mobile App � The True Food Network

The Center For Food Safety has made it easy to identify NON-GMO food with your iphone while you are at the market.

Today, thousands of products on supermarket shelves are made with ingredients from genetically modified (also known as genetically engineered [GE]) crops. But GM foods are not labeled in the U.S., despite warnings from doctors and scientists that these foods may not be safe in the diet or the environment. This lack of mandatory labeling can make it difficult to determine which products are made with GM ingredients and which are not. The new application is designed to give health-and-safety-conscious consumers who wish to avoid GM ingredients the tools they need to make informed purchasing decisions.