S 510 and YOU

Not bad for a list to ponder, but just where in this bill was there anything to really address the core issue of factory farming?

How the new food safety bill might affect you

Here's How You Can Contact Your Member of Congress to help stop the vote in the House of Representatives.

Don't Ya Just Love Bad Media Reporting

This is an excerpt from one of my recent newsletter issues. I'm including it because the latest mainstream medicine/media cartel would like you to be scared away from using supplements of any kind, and in this case calcium and vitamin D.

"The base level for vitamin D for both adults and children is 50 nanograms/mL If your level is below 50 then you will use it as fast as it is made, and you may be at risk for deficiency. This is more of a concern for people of color, those who do not go in the sun, those who are confined or live in climates where it is darker in winter, and those who wear clothing that covers the entire body.


Blood serum levels above 80 ng/mL allow for reserve storage. Levels above 200 ng/mL are thought to be toxic. The optimal range at all times is between 50 and 80ng/mL for adults and children."

Now that you know what your serum D3 level should be, are you willing to be frightened into believing you get all the nutrients you need from food?

If you are following the Big AG Food Safety Bill in the US Senate perhaps they will offer you more should you wish to fall into the trap that they have set for you and your health.

Think about it!

When I was growing up vitamin D was believed to be a very important nutrient. In some areas of medicine and health care it remains important today. Yet now it is a serious concern because of the 30+ years of non fat and low fat diets that keep you from absorbing nutrients in need of fat.

Calcium, by the way, requires vitamin D in adequate stores, a healthy thyroid (tough when you have fluoride in your water and drugs), a healthy parathyroid, and healthy fats in your diet (not soy and canola oil).

Vitamin D is Critical

I do think calcium is oversold. My belief is that you need about 800 mg daily, taken with food, and in the correct form.

You can order the vitamin D test and thyroid panel, or other tests, from our organization. Many states allow you to order your own. We also provide a service that includes interpretation of what lab results mean for your health. Help yourself to quality supplements, including vitamin D here

If you have concerns about "stones" try more vitamin C and drinking more pure water.  If you are getting care for kidney health issues then choose vitamin D2.

Use the Natural Health News search box to check out all out vitamin D posts, all 8 pages...

IOM is WRONG...

A new report, released 11/30/10 by the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, says that few people are vitamin D deficient. The scientific research says otherwise.
The new Institute of Medicine (IOM) report says that persons between the ages of 1 and 70 do not need more than 600 IU of vitamin D daily—and makes the outrageous claim that few people are actually vitamin D deficient. This is especially troubling considering we’re moving rapidly into the thick of flu season, when people need more vitamin D, not less.
This is the government’s first official vitamin D recommendation since 1997. Despite raising the new vitamin levels by 300% for most Americans, the IOM guidelines are still in contrast to overwhelming scientific evidence that confirms the significant medical benefits of higher vitamin D levels, and that one-third of Americans are vitamin D deficient.
Changes in US lifestyles mean that many people in the US get less exposure to the sun and often inadequate dietary levels of vitamin D. The New York Times reports that a number of prominent doctors have advised vitamin D supplementation for a wide variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. Their research shows that more and more people know their vitamin D levels because they are being tested for it as part of routine physical exams.
The IOM is wrong in its findings, wrong in ignoring the bountiful scientific research that indicates the need for higher levels of vitamin D in our system, and wrong for not educating folks about the ability of vitamin D to combat the flu. Our campaign to end the silence on vitamin D is one attempt to educate the public and get the government to listen to the clear scientific findings. (Source:ANH)

and other experts disagree

World AIDS Day 2010

World AIDS Day 2010 is all about raising awareness to tackle HIV prejudice and help stop the spread of HIV.

Most read from 8 pages of posts on HIV/AIDS at Natural Health News

Natural Health News: World AIDS Day: activists and HIV-positive ...
Participants include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Ambassador and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Eric P. Goosby, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, assistant to the president ...

Natural Health News: Scientific Foundation for Homeopathy Discovered
A NOBEL laureate who discovered the link between HIV and AIDS has suggested there could be a firm scientific foundation for homeopathy. French virologist Luc Montagnier stunned his colleagues at a prestigious international conference ...

HIV/AIDS Risk to Vets
What also concerns me is the lack of attention to natural treatment that is able to stop the transmission of HIV to AIDS, and other therapy outside the use of anti-retrovirals that have severe health risks of their own. ...

Politics, HIV/AIDS and GMO Drugs
The AIDS epidemic has been a world wide environmental and public health issue wince the concept was thrown out in the Nixon Administration by Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger that led the Department of defense to a plan for bio warfare ...

A Real Food Thanksgiving in Morocco

One of the greatest blessings of our recent trip was to spend Thanksgiving with our dear friends MS and MC and their children. Because this is their first Thanksgiving abroad they were especially anxious to have a taste of home.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of them all. I love the food, the smells, the family. I love that it is a whole holiday all about being grateful for the bounty of this life. I cannot think of a better reason to take a couple days off work than to celebrate all the things that we have to be thankful for. I am reasonably religious, and so this tradition truly touches my heart. So many of the blessings of this life are given to us. Even if we have worked hard to make them grow and blossom, we were once fortunate enough to be given the tiny seed by something more powerful than us. So we should give thanks and know that we are not islands, but rather receivers of many countless daily gifts. I love that Thanksgiving is our culture’s way of taking time out to voice our thanks.

Our friends decided that since we were coming they would host a proper American Thanksgiving. They invited some friends, a dear French couple who had seen a Thanksgiving episode of Friends which spurred their desire to experience a proper American Thanksgiving, another French couple, and another American couple who had been living abroad longer. But as is normal for all good plans, the second French couple had to bow out at the last minute and a Peace Corps family ended up taking their place because their own plans fell through. It just isn’t Thanksgiving without accepting all to the table. So there we were, a big group: two Americans, four American ex-pats, two French and two Moroccans, plus three three year olds and three babies.

Our dear friends value real food in the same way we do, so there was never a doubt that our meal would be cooked from scratch and prepared with local ingredients. Besides, it is very hard to find processed ingredients in Morocco (or completely impossible). MS arranged with a local meat shop to order a turkey, which apparently can be procured, and are even common in the countryside. I actually saw one walking around someone’s yard as we drove back from Fez. Sides included cornbread and sausage stuffing, a highly altered version of my family’s famous creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffed mushroom, some homemade cranberry relish (thanks to the store at the American Embassy) and a little runny gravy cooked up at the last second. Please forgive me if I have forgotten something. I am still battling some powerful jet lag.

Desert consisted of an apple pie, a pumpkin pie and pumpkin custard for the gluten free folks. First of all, the pumpkin pie was made from the biggest pumpkin I have ever seen in my life. MC went to the Medina to get pumpkin and bought 10 kilos from a man who literally would just cut part of a pumpkin for you. So he only brought home less than half the pumpkin, but it still weighed over 20 pounds. Seeing it was intimidating! The flesh was so orange and flavorful. I have never had a pumpkin pie that was made from fresh pumpkin before. The flavor was far more intense. The apple pie was simple, apples and lemon zest, vanilla, cinnamon and a little bit of rapadura sugar in a whole wheat crust. But when we bit into it, everyone asked if we had added rose water to the pie. The apples were so fragrant it was as though the orchard had been planted next to a hillside of roses which infused a floral scent into the fruit. I have never tasted anything quite like it.

But it wouldn’t be a true Thanksgiving without a couple of screaming kids. My Things had started to really struggle with food by Thursday. Thing 1 had not eaten any dinner Wednesday night, not even one bite. I think he had only had a couple of bananas and a piece of toast during the day, so he did not have the energy for a house full of guests. He played with the other kids for a while, but just before dinner he began to sulk and yell. I knew we were in for a fight. Both the kids put up such a fight that DH and I ended up in the kitchen with our screaming Things, me with tears streaming down my face from the desperation. Big crowds are hard enough for Thing 1 without the added pressure of unfamiliar faces. Add to that an unfamiliar country and food and it was a recipe for disaster. But having them so upset was also horrible for me because we were in a house full of people we didn’t know (except for our dear friends), people who had never seen our Things more gentle sides. I hate to think that adults will dislike my child, or that we will be “that family”, but there we were. And of course I really wanted all these new people to like us!! I was very embarrassed at my kid’s behavior, it was fueled by their not having eaten well during the day and all that came to a head as soon as everyone sat down to dinner.

Thing 1 never did eat dinner. In fact, though he has never made quite this much of a scene during Thanksgiving before, he has never actually eaten Thanksgiving dinner. Crowds make him crazy and it is very difficult for him to concentrate enough to eat. He eventually melted down into a little puddle and DH had to take him into a back bedroom so he could calm down. He fell asleep at 6pm. Thing 2 had a hard time too. He is regularly a wingy baby with a lot of complaints about your average everyday situations. He was very grumpy through dinner and also did not eat a proper dinner, but he did manage to eat some bread. What a frustrating evening! Every year I look forward to sitting down to a lovely dinner on Thanksgiving. This year I did not get to do that until after both my kids went to sleep. But once I did, the food was delicious. And thoroughly American. The food the company and the setting could not have been lovelier. I just do hope that our new friends were able to forgive our children’s behavior and see it for what it really was-a couple of tired kids on a long vacation a ways away from the comforts of a familiar home.

As for me, that day in Morocco didn’t feel much like Morocco at all. It was American through and through.

US 49th in Life Expectancy but don't tell John Boehner

Coming soon to your health insurance plan, especially as the deficit commission plans to shift more costs from employers to workers.

Please Mr Obama, stop caving in on the needs of the people who are your true "boss".  Listen up and stay away from those back room deals with politcos...

Inefficiency Hurts U.S. in Longevity Rankings By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
November 29, 2010


By any measure, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation. Yet according to the World Fact Book (published by the Central Intelligence Agency), it ranks 49th in life expectancy.
Why?
Researchers writing in the November issue of the journal Health Affairs say they know the answer. After citing statistical evidence showing that American patterns of obesity, smoking, traffic accidents and homicide are not the cause of lower life expectancy, they conclude that the problem is the health care system.
Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, compared the performance of the United States and 12 other industrialized nations: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. In addition to health care expenditures in each country, they focused on two other important statistics: 15-year survival for people at 45 years and for those at 65 years.
The researchers say those numbers present an accurate picture of public health because they measure a country’s success in preventing and treating the most common causes of death — cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes — which are more likely to occur at these ages. Their data come from the World Health Organization and cover 1975 to 2005.
Life expectancy increased over those years in all 13 countries, and so did health care costs. But the United States had the lowest increase in life expectancy and the highest increase in costs.
In 1975 the United States was close to the average in health care costs, and last in 15-year survival for 45-year-old men. By 2005 its costs had more than tripled, far surpassing increases elsewhere, but the survival number was still last — a little over 90 percent, compared with more than 94 percent for Swedes, Swiss and Australians. For women, it was 94 percent in the United States, versus 97 percent in Switzerland, Australia and Japan.
The numbers for 65-year-olds in 2005 were similar: about 58 percent of American men could be expected to survive 15 years, compared with more than 65 percent of Australians, Japanese and Swiss. While more than 80 percent of 65-year-old women in France, Switzerland, and Japan would survive 15 years, only about 70 percent of American women could be expected to live that long.
In narrowing the blame to the American health care system, the researchers first eliminated several other factors. Obesity and smoking are the most important behavior-related causes of death, but obesity increased more slowly in the United States than in the other countries and smoking declined more rapidly, so neither can explain the differences in survival rates. Homicide and traffic fatality rates have remained steady over time, and social, economic and educational factors do not vary greatly among these countries.
But not all experts agree with this analysis. Samuel Preston, a demographer and a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, says the analysis is faulty.
“The basic message is correct — that measures of U.S. health, including mortality and morbidity, are very poor in comparison with other countries,” he said. But the Columbia researchers “have no direct evidence about the health care system in this article,” he continued. “Their conclusion is extremely speculative.”
That they did not find smoking at fault, Dr. Preston said, “is mysterious to me, particularly since they show high lung cancer mortality for the U.S.” Dr. Preston has published widely on mortality trends and the effects of smoking.
Dr. Muennig conceded that the study examined only life expectancy and health care spending in the 13 countries, and not the structure or economics of health care. “We did a pretty good job of showing that smoking isn’t the culprit,” he said.
“Smoking and obesity are still major risk factors for an individual’s health,” he said. “But they are sapping life expectancy in all countries. Whereas in the U.S. we have a highly inefficient health system that’s taking away financial resources from other lifesaving programs.” SOURCE

and from UPI, trends in waiting, as the health insurance reform bill waits to go full throttle -

Some insurers switch to cheaper drugs

UPPER NYACK, N.Y., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Health insurers change as much as 70 percent of medication prescriptions, resulting in adverse reactions among some patients, a U.S. survey indicates.
A survey by the Global Healthy Living Foundation, a non-profit patient advocacy group, found some patients with chronic conditions who responded well to a particular drug relapsed after being switched to a cheaper drug.
"This disturbing finding is not a simple case of switching a brand-name drug for a generic one, a common and generally accepted practice used for many illnesses, and one GHLF supports," Louis Tharp, executive director of the GHLP, says in a statement. "We found that health insurance companies throughout the U.S. switch one brand-name drug for another simply because the switched drug is cheaper -- if the drugs are identical, physicians generally have no objection, the survey found, but national medical groups have said most drugs are not identical and switching can cause adverse reactions and poor recovery rates."
Tharp says his group is working with other advocacy groups, state insurance commissioners, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state attorneys general to see what action can be taken to stop the practice.
"Switching is a practice that is starting to get a lot of attention," Tharp says.
"Legislation pending in New York, California and Missouri would outlaw this practice," and, he added, "Louisiana passed a law last year prohibiting it."
No survey details were provided.

Perhaps this abstract from AHRP.org says more, just like the Harvard study that found only 80% or modern medicine actually works...

Medical Errors Contribute to Hospital Deaths -

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report, To Err is Human, documenting the extraordinary high rate of fatal medical errors at U.S. hospitals: medical errors caused 98,000 deaths and more than a million injuries a year, most being preventable.  

Two major recent analyses of U.S. hospital safety found NO IMPROVEMENT in patient safety.

One study, by a Harvard Medical School team analyzed medical errors at 10 North Carolina hospitals found: "harm to patients was common and the number of incidents did not decrease over time."  For every 100 patients admitted to a hospital, 25 suffered harm requiring medical intervention.

The other study, by the U.S. Inspector General of the DHHS, analyzed 1,000,000 Medicare patients' hospital records documenting that 1 in 7 suffered adverse events during hospitalization in the month of October, 2010.  The IG report calculates the cost of such errors to taxpayers to be several billion dollars a year.

An Interesting Take on How You Can Trust the FDA

Most who know me know that I have worked in mental health and psych for many years, albeit, mainly with a keen interest in natural mental health.

I believe nutrition has a very important role in health, physical and mental.  However, with the furor over S510 it does concern me that good, sound nutrition won't be part of the landscape.

And as you can see here in the following three articles, leaving it to the FDA leads us down a very slippery slope.

Looks like more and more no one in Congress or government is doing too much of a good job for the electorate these days.

And outside the issue of risky antidepressant drugs, FDA allows so many more that we have alerted our readers to their dangers for many, many years... 

The antidepressant reboxetine: A headdesk moment in science

By SciCurious Nov 30, 2010 08:44 AM 

Every so often there comes a truly "headdesk" moment in science. A moment where you sit there, stunned by a new finding, and thinking, blankly..."ok, now what?"
For psychiatry and behavioral pharmacology, one of those moments came a few weeks ago with the findings of a meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal (Eyding et al., 2010). The meta-analysis showed that an antidepressant, reboxetine (marketed by Pfizer in Europe, but not in the US, under the names Edronax, Norebox, Prolift, Solvex, Davedax or Vestra) doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, it REALLY doesn’t work, and it turns out that Pfizer hadn’t published data on the putative antidepressant from 74% of their patients. Some people have reported that the study found that reboxetine was even "possibly harmful," but that’s not quite true. What the study DID find is that reboxetine produced more side effects (noted as "adverse events") than placebo (as might be expected), but with no positive effects at all. While many antidepressants on the market today are not great, most are effective in around 60% of patients, reboxetine turns out to be even worse than that.
SOURCE and complete article

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The next two reports come from the Alliance for Human Research Protection news feed, www.ahrp.org

A letter of complaint by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was sent to the director of the National Institutes of Health, documenting $66.8 million in NIH grants over the last five years awarded to a handful of psychiatrists who used ghostwriters for scientific publications. 

The instances in the letter involve ghostwriting by only one company--Scientific Therapeutics Information-- and involve only one drug--GlaxoSmithkline's antidepressant, Paxil.

Duff Wilson of The New York Times reports that previously sealed GlaxoSmithKline documents reveal that a textbook in psychiatry, whose listed authors are  Charles Nemeroff, MD and Alan Schatzberg, MD, was actually ghostwritten by Sally Laden of STI. GSK paid the ghostwriter and the "authors" who penned their names to the book.

The sheer audacity prompted former FDA commissioner, Dr. David Kessler to exclaim: "To ghostwrite an entire textbook is a new level of chutzpah. "I've never heard of that before. It takes your breath away."  Surely that is a
dubious distinction in academic medicine!

and

On November 23, 2010, Terry Vermillion, Director of FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation announced his  retirement next month amid a brewing scandal involving corrupt practices.

The announcement came after complaints by Republicans in Congress who raised concern about his misdirection of the Office's resources: instead of pursuing drug companies and researchers who commit crimes when seeking FDA approval for drugs, OCI pursued drug-abuse cases--which are the purview of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The issue came to a head when Senator Chuck Grassley sent a complaint to the Acting Comptroller General of the General Accounting Office (GAO) about a "less than stellar" GAO investigative report which whitewashed misconduct at OCI. 

The investigation and the report were compromised by a GAO mole who tipped off someone at the Office of Criminal Investigations.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/grassleyletter.pdf   

More on Low Cholesterol Dangers

Several years ago I started a thread about the risk of having too low levels of cholesterol, following on all of the work I had been trying to do over many years to educate people about the risk of cholesterol lowering drugs.

One sad situation is that of a friend who with his MS doctor agreed to using these drugs.  He ended up in a wheel chair.

It is just all hit or miss in prescribing these days.  More " miss", and probably why incoming House leader Boehner thinks we have the best health care in the world here in the US. Consistent ranking in the high 30s and 40s tells otherwise.  But I guess we aren't on the payola train like most members of Congress these days.

I happened to see this link so I thought I'd add it in to the 30+ posts on the low cholesterol and related "health matters" -

The Overlooked Health Risks of Very Low Cholesterol

Selected posts from Natural Health News
Natural Health News: Low Cholesterol Risks

Nov 13, 2008

While most hear about how high cholesterol is so bad and how many risky drugs you need, often you don't hear that low cholesterol can impair your immune function or defer review of other more risky markers. Triglycerides included.

More reports on low cholesterol and cancer

Feb 23, 2008

Some studies have linked low cholesterol levels to higher death rates from cancer in general, Dr. Kouichi Asano, of Kyushu University, Fukuoka, and colleagues explain in the International Journal of Cancer. "With respect to gastric ...

Low Cholesterol Does A Body Bad - Once More, with feeling

Dec 23, 2008

This new study, with a reasonable sample size, unlike most studies I review, raises concern over low cholesterol levels. As someone who has been a skeptic on the cholesterol drug mania for so very many years I am pleased to see this ...

Cholesterol lowering drugs already known to be linked with cancer

Aug 21, 2008

But wait a minute, even if this were true, how about if lower levels of cholesterol actually increased our risk of other important conditions? Might an increased risk of, say, cancer, offset any apparent advantages of low cholesterol ...