Health & WellnessS


Attention

US: Toxic Mercury in Found in Skin-Lightening Creams

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© Minnesota Dept. of HealthFasco skin lightening cream contains 4,600 parts per million of mercury, the Minnesota Health Department said after it conducted tests on this and other skin-lightening products.
Minnesota health officials warned consumers to stop using the products, which are extremely dangerous.

They have names like Fasco Herbal Cream and FC Lemon Herbal Whitening Cream. And they're widely sold in local immigrant communities, with labels saying they contain nothing more ominous than vitamins and natural plants.

But on Wednesday, Minnesota health officials said they detected dangerous and illegal levels of mercury in almost a dozen types of skin-lightening products. They warned consumers to avoid all skin-lightening products unless they can be sure they're mercury-free.

Some of the samples tested by the state Health Department contained more than 33,000 times the permissible level of mercury, so much that they urged consumers to treat the products as hazardous waste.

"It's a very significant level," said Aggie Leitheiser, assistant commissioner of health.

So far, no known illnesses have been linked to the products in Minnesota, Leitheiser said. But she said mercury can be extremely dangerous, especially to pregnant women and young children, because it can damage the kidneys and nervous system.

Leitheiser said the products seem to be marketed largely to minority groups, but that they're also sold to treat freckles and age spots, which means anyone might use them.

Comment: Mercury is a deadly toxin. Dr. Mark Hyman discusses mercury toxicity and how to rid the body of this toxin here:

Many cosmetics are loaded with other toxic chemicals and often they are not disclosed on the packaging - it would be wise to educate yourself before using them. Read more here:

The Ugly Side of Beauty, Some Cosmetics Can Be Toxic
The Danger of Toxic Consumer Products, Fragrances
Everyday Products Are Filled With Toxins - And We're Not Doing a Thing About It
The Chemicals In Your Cosmetics


Beaker

Bacterial Ecosystems Divide People Into 3 Groups, Scientists Say

In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Blood type, meet bug type.

"It's an important advance," said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. "It's the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types."

The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes.

The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.

Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people's health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make.

Health

Why Salt Doesn't Deserve its Bad Rap

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© GristA good pinch of this won't do you any harm.
For something that's so often mixed with anti-caking agents, salt takes a lot of lumps in the American imagination. Like fat, people tend to think of it as an unnecessary additive - something to be avoided by seeking out processed foods that are "free" of it. But also like fat, salt is an essential component of the human diet - one that has been transformed into unhealthy forms by the food industry.

Historically, though, salt was prized. Its reputation can be found in phrases like, "Worth one's salt," meaning, "Worth one's pay," since people were often paid in salt and the word itself is derived from the Latin salarium, or salary.

Those days are long over. Doctors and dietitians, along with the USDA dietary guidelines, recommend eating a diet low in sodium to prevent high blood pressure, risk of cardiovascular disease, and stroke; and doctors have been putting their patients on low-salt diets since the 1970s. But a new study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that low-salt diets actually increase the risk of death from heart attack and stroke - and in fact don't prevent high blood pressure.

Magnify

Scientists identify source of lethal bug in Germany

German experts Thursday identified Spanish cucumbers as the source of a virulent super-bacterium that has killed three people and left hundreds ill.

Hamburg's hygiene institute discovered the bacterium on three cucumbers from Spain, the city's Health Senator Cornelia Pruefer-Storcks said.

'It cannot be ruled out that other food produce is a possible source of infection,' Pruefer-Storcks said.

Bell

Groups Sue FDA to Stop Addition of Antibiotics in Livestock Feed

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© foodsafetynews.com
Several environmental and public health groups filed suit against the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday to try to force the government to stop farmers from routinely adding antibiotics to livestock feed to help animals grow faster.

The groups say widespread agricultural antibiotic use and the FDA's allowance of the practice are compounding a public health crisis: the increasing prevalence of "superbugs" that infect people and do not respond to antibiotics.

Comment: For more information on the increasing prevalence of superbugs and antibiotic resistance read the following article: Superbugs: Will Millions Die Needlessly Before We Act?

"The longer we use these drugs, the less effective the arsenal becomes," said Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which filed the complaint in federal court with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animals Concern Trust and Public Citizen.

Info

This is supposed to be science?! "Bacteria In Atmosphere May Play Key Role In Hail, Rain, Snow"

After finding high concentrations of bacteria inside hailstones, researchers suggest there is mounting evidence that atmospheric microorganisms play a key role in how water molecules aggregate in hail, rain, snow and other weather events.

At the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in New Orleans this week, Alexander Michaud of Montana State University in Bozeman presented his team's latest findings in the new and growing field of "bioprecipitation", where researchers investigate the extent to which bacteria and other microorganisms influence weather events.

Comment: Is this supposed to be science? The organisms cause the rain? How about this: there are more organisms in the atmosphere due to other causes and they just happen to be brought down in the rain!


Info

With No Labeling, Few Realize They Are Eating Genetically Modified Foods

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© Alex GarciaProtesters demonstrate against GMOs in food at the Whole Foods Market on North Kingsbury Street in Chicago
Some consumers are concerned that such foods may pose health risks and say manufacturers should be required to identify them for consumers.

When a team of activists wearing white hazmat suits showed up at a Chicago grocery store to protest the sale of genetically modified foods, they picked an unlikely target: Whole Foods Market.

Organic foods, by definition, can't knowingly contain genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs. But genetically modified corn, soy and other crops have become such common ingredients in processed foods that even one of the nation's top organic food retailers says it hasn't been able to avoid stocking some products that contain them.

"No one would guess that there are genetically engineered foods right here in Whole Foods," said Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association, which organized the protest. The activists dramatically trashed a battery of well-known health food brands outside the store, including Tofutti, Kashi and Boca Burgers.

Bacon

Best of the Web: Book Review: Why We Get Fat - and What to do About it

Why we get fat cover
Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious - obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth - is what makes it so alluring. But it's misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it's hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world - while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat - but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat

Smoking

Best of the Web: Lies, Damned Lies & 400,000 Smoking-related Deaths: Cooking the Data in the Fascists' Anti-Smoking Crusade

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Truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. The big lie, repeated ad nauseam in anti-tobacco circles, is that smoking causes more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. That mantra is the principal justification for all manner of tobacco regulations and legislation, not to mention lawsuits by dozens of states for Medicaid recovery, class actions by seventy-five to eighty union health funds, similar litigation by thirty-five Blue Cross plans, twenty-four class suits by smokers who are not yet ill, sixty class actions by allegedly ill smokers, five hundred suits for damages from secondhand smoke, and health-related litigation by twelve cities and counties - an explosion of adjudication never before experienced in this country or elsewhere.

The war on smoking started with a kernel of truth - that cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancer - but has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statistics - tendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated by health "professionals" bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.

The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco lies - that smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, let's look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.

Comment: The real cause of death is staring you in the face on your breakfast table every morning and on your TV screens every evening. Gluten, dairy, excessive carbohydrate consumption, nuclear testing, war, artificial famine, manufactured economic crises, proven killers all of them, not statistical lies... how much more stress can you take until you see that those who would convince you that smoking is killing you are blowing smoke rings around your brain?

Let's All Light Up!


Family

Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?

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© Stephanie Sinclair/VII New York TimesTwo, United as One: Krista and Tatiana Hogan are craniopagus conjoined twins — joined at the head, they share a neural bridge.
It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. "I want one more hug!" Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, "I miss you!"

But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out again, then back under, over and over, seeming to mesmerize each other with the rhythm.

Suddenly the girls sat up again, with renewed energy, and Krista reached for a cup with a straw in the corner of the crib. "I am drinking really, really, really, really fast," she announced and started to power-slurp her juice, her face screwed up with the effort. Tatiana was, as always, sitting beside her but not looking at her, and suddenly her eyes went wide. She put her hand right below her sternum, and then she uttered one small word that suggested a world of possibility: "Whoa!"