Health & WellnessS


Bacon

Seven reasons why you should eat lard

Craig Fear
pvnutritionaltherapy.com
Wed, 01 Jan 2014 08:19 UTC
Image
I'll never forget the day I said the L word in front of my mother.

Back when I was living home on Long Island for a few years I was actually getting a weekly farm share from Amish country.

It was so incredible. A real food lovers dream.

I'd hop online to place my weekly order and at the tip of my fingertips was all sorts of pastured meats, fermented vegetables, kefir, real butter and yogurt, bones, chicken feet, stocks, etc. I've never seen anything like it since.

However, this way of eating was, let's just say, different to my family.

One week my mother asked me what I was getting in my weekly share and I wasn't thinking when I uttered the L word. It just slipped out.

It was kinda like that scene in A Christmas Story when Ralphie says the F bomb.
Time slowed down as the L word was coming out of my mouth.

Laaaaaaaaa...

There was this little voice in my head that was saying, "What are you doing? Don't say it!"

But my mind couldn't catch up to my mouth.

....rrrrrrrrrrrrrdddd.

Lard.
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Bulb

Sleep to protect your brain

Christian Benedict
Uppsala University
Tue, 31 Dec 2013 01:59 UTC
A new study from Uppsala University, Sweden, shows that one night of sleep deprivation increases morning blood concentrations of NSE and S-100B in healthy young men. These molecules are typically found in the brain. Thus, their rise in blood after sleep loss may indicate that a lack of snoozing might be conducive to a loss of brain tissue. The findings are published in the journal SLEEP.

Fifteen normal-weight men participated in the study. In one condition they were sleep-deprived for one night, while in the other condition they slept for approximately 8 hours.

"We observed that a night of total sleep loss was followed by increased blood concentrations of NSE and S-100B. These brain molecules typically rise in blood under conditions of brain damage. Thus, our results indicate that a lack of sleep may promote neurodegenerative processes", says sleep researcher Christian Benedict at the Department of Neuroscience, Uppsala University, who lead the study.
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Health

City cycling may save the planet, but not your lungs: study


CTV News, Canada
Tue, 31 Dec 2013 12:52 UTC
City Cyclist
© Paul Chiasson/The Canadian PressA cyclist rolls down a bicycle lane in downtown Montreal in this 2010 file photo.
Urban cycling, while good for the environment, may pose a risk your health, a new Dublin study has found.

Cycling in congested cities could do more harm than good to your heart and lungs, due to the breathing in of dangerous pollutants in the air, the study found.

While pedestrians are exposed as well, cyclists exert themselves more and breathe more heavily, which increases their risk, The Australian reports. Problems include breathing in exhaust fumes as well as tiny particles generated by vehicle brakes and tires.

The study, led by Marguerite Nyhan of Trinity College, recruited 32 fit, healthy cyclers who opted for mostly traffic-free routes.
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Pills

Doesn't ADD Up: Doctors behind ADHD study question drug treatment


RT
Mon, 30 Dec 2013 21:10 UTC
ritalin
The co-authors of a 20-year-old study promoting the use of prescription drugs to combat the effects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are now claiming the report may have overstated medication's benefits.

According to a report in the New York Times, at least two co-authors of the highly influential study - called the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD - have come forward to express concern that the original report also downplayed the benefits of behavioral therapy.

"There was lost opportunity to give kids the advantage of both and develop more resources in schools to support the child - that value was dismissed," said co-author Dr. Gene Arnold, a child psychiatrist and professor at Ohio State University.

"I hope it didn't do irreparable damage," added a second co-author, Dr. Lilly Hechtman of Montreal's McGill University. "The people who pay the price in the end is the kids. That's the biggest tragedy in all of this."

Comment: Ritalin Linked With Sudden Death of Children
Children 'wrongly given' Ritalin
"I think in 10 years time we will ask ourselves what we were thinking giving these children amphetamines."
Drugs for ADHD 'not the answer'
The Wholesale Sedation of America's Youth
ADHD Drugs Proven Absolutely Useless for Children - Plus, They Stunt Growth
Ten Year Old on Two Drugs Dies After Hanging Himself
More Children on Drugs Than Ever: Chronic Prescriptions Increase Dramatically
Psychiatrist admitted on his death bed that ADHD was a fictitious disease
New Research Fuels Skepticism (and Questions) About ADHD Diagnoses

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Bacon

The Inuit Paradox: How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier than we are?

Patricia Gadsby and Leon Steele
Discover
Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska, is talking about the native foods of her childhood: "We pretty much had a subsistence way of life. Our food supply was right outside our front door. We did our hunting and foraging on the Seward Peninsula and along the Bering Sea.

"Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish - salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too."

Cochran's family also received shipments of whale meat from kin living farther north, near Barrow. Beluga was one she liked; raw muktuk, which is whale skin with its underlying blubber, she definitely did not. "To me it has a chew-on-a-tire consistency," she says, "but to many people it's a mainstay." In the short subarctic summers, the family searched for roots and greens and, best of all from a child's point of view, wild blueberries, crowberries, or salmonberries, which her aunts would mix with whipped fat to make a special treat called akutuq - in colloquial English, Eskimo ice cream.

Comment: To learn more about how healthy a diet high in saturated fat is, see:

A Big Fat Mistake
Saturated Fat is Good for You
Enjoy Saturated Fats, They're Good for You!
Why Humans Crave Fat
Wrongly Convicted? The Case for Saturated Fat
Latest Research Debunks The Saturated Fat Diet Myths
You've Been Living A Lie: The Story Of Saturated Fat And Cholesterol

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Bulb

British doctors start prescribing books to help treat depression, anxiety and other disorders

Travis Gettys
Raw Story
Mon, 30 Dec 2013 17:38 UTC
Image
© Shutterstock
Doctors have been prescribing books to help treat patients with depression in hopes that reading will help them find connections.

Under a new program that launched in June by Britain's National Health Service, primary care physicians may recommend specific titles to patients diagnosed with mild to moderate depression.

"Bibliotherapy" is based in part on research by the Welsh psychiatrist, Dr. Neil Frude, who noticed that some of his patients had begun reading about their mental health conditions while awaiting treatment - and some of the self-help books appeared to help.

British doctors are prescribing such titles as "Overcoming Depression," "Mind Over Mood" and "The Feeling Good Handbook" for patients diagnosed with depression, and they're prescribing other books for patients with such conditions as obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, anxiety and eating disorders.
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Syringe

Pregnant nurse: I was fired for refusing flu vaccine

Allie Malloy
CNN
Mon, 30 Dec 2013 11:35 UTC
A pregnant nurse tells CNN she was fired from her job after she refused to get a flu shot for fear of miscarrying.

"I'm a healthy person. I take care of my body. For me, the potential risk was not worth it," Dreonna Breton told CNN Sunday. "I'm not gonna be the one percent of people that has a problem."

Breton, 29, worked as a nurse at Horizons Healthcare Services in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when she was told that all employees were required to get a flu shot. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention advises that all health care professionals get vaccinated annually.

She told her employers that she would not get the vaccine after she explained that there were very limited studies of the effects on pregnant women.

Breton came to the decision with her family after three miscarriages.

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Health

New research once again disproving doctor's advice - The risks of aspirin outweigh the benefits

Marco Torres
Prevent Disease.com
Sun, 29 Dec 2013 14:58 UTC
Aspirin
© Prevent Disease.com
Mainstream medicine has been claiming for decades that aspirin lowers our risk of heart attack, stroke and even reduces the risk of cancer. All of these assumptions, which were never conclusively proven in any study have been subjected to the scrutiny and criticism of hundreds of health experts. Now, the most comprehensive review ever undertaken by Warwick Medical School for the NHS National Institute for Health Research has concluded that people should avoid aspirin all together.

The review, conducted by the research arm of the NHS, said the dangers of bleeding in the brain and stomach caused by aspirin exceed any benefit of the long standing recommendation by millions of physicians worldwide.

The conclusion by researchers was to avoid taking the drug until there was more evidence. Prof Aileen Clarke, who led the research, said: "The risks are finely balanced and for now there is not the evidence to advise people to take it."

Aspirin is so inexpensive that some doctors in recent years have recommended a daily dose of about 100 mg for anyone to prevent heart disease. But the very large, European-based Aspirin for Asymptomatic Atherosclerosis (AAA) study, among others, suggested it was very irresponsible and very risky for doctors to make the claim.

By taking aspirin, people seriously increase the risk of a hemorrhagic stroke or internal bleeding with absolutely no benefit to compensate for the risk.

Highly controversial and poorly designed studies have even suggested aspirin cuts the risk of some cancers, something even oncologists regard as very unlikely adding more doubt to the thousands of scientific publications biased towards pharmaceuticals.
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Nuke

Flashback How X-ray mammography is accelerating the epidemic of cancer

Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo
Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:15 UTC
radioactive mammograph
While a growing body of research now suggests that x-ray mammography is causing more harm than good in the millions of women who subject themselves to breast screenings, annually, without knowledge of their true health risks, the primary focus has been on the harms associated with over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and not the radiobiological dangers of the procedure itself.

In 2006, a paper published in the British Journal of Radiobiology, titled "Enhanced biological effectiveness of low energy X-rays and implications for the UK breast screening programme," revealed the type of radiation used in x-ray-based breast screenings is much more carcinogenic than previously believed:
Recent radiobiological studies have provided compelling evidence that the low energy X-rays as used in mammography are approximately four times - but possibly as much as six times - more effective in causing mutational damage than higher energy X-rays. Since current radiation risk estimates are based on the effects of high energy gamma radiation, this implies that the risks of radiation-induced breast cancers for mammography X-rays are underestimated by the same factor.[1]
In other words, the radiation risk model used to determine whether the benefit of breast screenings in asymptomatic women outweighs their harm, underestimates the risk of mammography-induced breast and related cancers by between 4-600%.
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Cheeseburger

McDonald's tells employees fast food is unhealthy, make healthier choices

Jenn Harris
Los Angeles Times
Tue, 24 Dec 2013 10:09 UTC
McDonald's wants its employees to know that fast food is unhealthy. The company famous for its Big Mac hamburgers and fries has language on its resource site McDonalds.Mynurturelife.com advising workers that instead of eating fast food, they should look for healthier options.

McDonald's is currently investigating the posts on the website, which were written by a third party vendor called Adam. The posts were still live on the site at the time of publication.

Under a section of the website titled "fast food tips," a picture of a fast food meal of fries, a burger and a soft drink are labeled "unhealthy choice" and a picture of a meal of a submarine sandwich, salad and a water are labeled as "healthier choice."
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