Health & WellnessS


Megaphone

Codex Committee: "You can't tell people that food prevents disease!"

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Not even nutrient-related disease! Our executive director's gripping report from the front lines.

As we discussed last week, ANH-USA attended the international Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses, which met last week in Germany. Our executive director, Gretchen DuBeau, reports that the committee made a number of decisions that may well affect natural health in the US.

Here in the US, we have been debating various issues concerning natural health: Will we retain access to a wide variety of dietary supplements in high-nutrient-level dosages? Will we be able to access nutritious, healthy foods, or will selection and quality diminish because of industry or government control? Will we finally achieve mandatory labeling for GMOs? We naturally think that, if we are able to convince our policymakers, our rights will be protected. But we could be wrong. We have to keep a close eye on what happens overseas too.

Codex, which was established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is creating international guidelines for member nations to follow. And while these guidelines are supposed to be voluntary, it is conceivable that our country's food policies could be overridden by international trade law. At the very least, the wrong international guidelines won't make it easier to keep the right ones here.

Apple Red

Lectins worse than gluten

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Lectins are sugar-binding proteins. In plants, lectins serve as a natural defense system to fight off mold and parasites.
One of the reasons grains may be such a problem to eat is because they contain lectins - in addition to gluten. Although gluten in wheat, rye and barley has gotten the headlines, lectins are a bigger problem, according to Sayer Ji, author of The Dark Side of Wheat.

Wheat found in bread today (triticum aestivum) is a far cry from the bread of Roman times. It has been genetically tweaked - not genetically modified, but aggressively crossbred and hybridized. And with all that hybridization, the gluten content of some varieties has increased by as much as 50 percent.

Wheat also contains a lectin known as wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). Lectins are sugar-binding proteins. In plants, lectins serve as a natural defense system to fight off mold and parasites. When plants sense an invader, lectins counterattack by binding to the foreign sugar molecules to stop the unwanted cells in their tracks. That is good news for the plants.

But when lectins get into your body, they are still programmed to attack sugar molecules. That is bad news for your digestive system, which is lined with sugar-containing cells that help you break down food. Lectins are drawn right to that lining, and your immune system retaliates.

Lectins are found in all foods, but in some more than others. All seeds of the grass family - wheat, rye, rice, spelt, etc. - are high in lectins. You also find lectins in beans, dairy and in the nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant). According to a 1991 study, dairy may be potentially more harmful in pasteurized, processed milk because of the reduction of SIgA, an immunoglobulin that binds dangerous lectins.

Comment: Our research suggests that the best protection against lectins is to stop eating them. They are particularly resistant to stomach acid and digestive enzymes and research suggests that at least 60 percent remain biologically active and immunologically intact. This combination represents a time bomb in the digestive tract.

Our change in diet since the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age has systemically destroyed our health. The mismatch between our ancient physiology - which thrived with little or no edible plant food - and our current diet is at the root of many so-called diseases of civilization: coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, etc.

We are children of the Ice Age. We have spent a significant amount of time in an Ice Age with only very brief periods of warmer weather which was when edible plant could have grown over a significant part of the Northern Hemisphere. Only those who adapted under such frigid and difficult conditions survived. It is certainly food for thought as the next Ice Age approaches.

For more information, please visit our forum threads Life Without Bread and Ketogenic Diet: Path to Transformation?


Ambulance

Staph outbreak at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center caused by surgeon's infected hands

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Five patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center became infected after a heart surgeon operated with an inflammation on his hands

Five heart patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center contracted staph infections after a doctor operated on them with bacteria on his hands, the hospital said this week.

The doctor, whom the hospital declined to name, had an inflammation on his hand when he implanted replacement heart valves into five patients last June.

He wore gloves, but they developed microscopic tears, the hospital said, causing the infection to pass to patients.

Wine n Glass

Mothers risk passing their drinking habits down to their children, think tank warns

Drinking Alcohol
© Medical Daily
Mothers can pass their drinking habits down to their children, experts from a British think-tank warned.

Researchers at the think-tank Demos analyzed a survey of 17,000 adults in their 30s. The participants were asked how often their mother and father drank when they were 16, with options like always, often, sometimes or never.

Researchers found that teenagers who had mothers who "always" drank were nearly twice as likely to have alcohol problems in adulthood.

Many middle class parents "reach for a bottle of wine at night to cope with the stress," and while adult may think that their drinking may have "no impact on their families," researchers said that this habit may be obstructing their ability to be effective parents, Daily Mail reported.

Experts at Demos estimated that a fifth of UK children or a total of 2.5 million children live with a parent with a bad drinking habit.

Researchers stressed that the example set by a family member is significantly more important than the minimum price per unit of alcohol, currently being proposed in the UK.

X

Abuse during childhood linked to adult-onset asthma in African-American women

According to a new study from the Slone Epidemiology Center (SEC) at Boston University, African-American women who reported suffering abuse before age 11 had a greater likelihood of adult-onset asthma compared to women whose childhood and adolescence were free of abuse.

The study, which is published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was led by Patricia Coogan, DSc, senior epidemiologist at SEC and associate professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health.

This study followed 28,456 African-American women, all of whom are participants in the Black Women's Health Study, between 1995-2011. They completed health questionnaires and provided information on physical and sexual abuse during childhood up to age 11 and adolescence, ages 12-18.

Heart

High dose IV vitamin C kills cancer cells

"...it takes much more than logic and clear-cut demonstrations to overcome the inertia and dogma of established thought." - Irving Stone
vitamin c
© Unknown
Irving Stone was an early thinker and writer about vitamin C (its scientific name is ascorbic acid). He knew it would be an uphill battle to change the way the medical profession viewed vitamin C. While most doctors accept that scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency illness, few have made the rather humongous jump to seeing high dose intravenous vitamin C as a major player in the management of cancer.

There is actually a wide spectrum of medical uses for vitamin C. Evidence exists documenting it as the best antiviral agent now available ... IF used at the proper dose. Vitamin C can neutralize and eliminate a wide range of toxins. Vitamin C will enhance host resistance, greatly augmenting the immune system's ability to neutralize bacterial and fungal infections. Now the National Institutes of Health has published evidence demonstrating vitamin C's anti-cancer properties. With so many medical benefits, why do so few doctors know of them?

One explanation stems from ascorbic acid's designation as a "vitamin." Consider Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary's definition of vitamin: A general term for a number of unrelated organic substances that occur in many foods in small amounts that are necessary in trace amounts for the normal metabolic functioning of the body. As a vitamin, only a minuscule 60 mg of ascorbic acid is needed to prevent the emergence of scurvy symptoms. As a medical treatment for cancer and life-threatening infections and toxic exposures, tens of thousands of milligrams of ascorbic acid must be administered, often by the intravenous (IV) as well as the oral route.

Comment: For more information on the benefits of vitamin C, please read:
Vitamin C Prevents Radiation Damage
Two Vitamin C Tablets Every Day Could Save 200,000 Lives Every Year
High-Dose Vitamin C Therapy Proven Effective
Pauling's last legacy: a unified theory of cardiovascular disease
200 Reasons To Love Vitamin C


Bacon

High-fat ketogenic diet: Fasting may benefit patients with epilepsy

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© Children’s Hospital at Johns HopkinsAdam Hartman, M.D.
Children with persistent and drug-resistant seizures treated with the high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet may get an added benefit from periodic fasting, according to a small Johns Hopkins Children's Center study.

The results, published online Dec. 3 in the journal Epilepsy Research, suggest the ketogenic diet and fasting can work in tandem to reduce seizures but appear do so through different mechanisms - a finding that challenges the longstanding assumption that the two share a common mechanism.

"Our findings suggest that fasting does not merely intensify the therapeutic effects of the ketogenic diet but may actually represent an entirely new way to change the metabolism of children with epilepsy," says lead investigator Adam Hartman, M.D., a pediatric neurologist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

In the study, six children, ages 2 to 7, and all on the ketogenic diet, were asked to fast on alternate days. All six children had seizure disorders incompletely resolved by the diet alone. Four of the six children experienced between 50 percent and 99 percent fewer seizures after the fasts were added to the dietary regimen. Three of the six were able to continue the fasting regimen for two months or longer.

The Johns Hopkins investigators say while the results are preliminary, they do provide compelling evidence of the potential benefits of fasting. Periodic fasts, they add, may eventually prove to be an alternative standalone therapy in children with drug-resistant epilepsy.

The researchers caution that larger studies are needed to further elucidate the effects of fasting. They also warn that fasting should be done under the strict supervision of a pediatric neurologist.

Ambulance

Severe acute kidney injuries rise rapidly in U.S.

Severe acute kidney injuries are becoming more common in the United States, rising 10 percent per year and doubling over the last decade, according to a retrospective study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

The study, to be published online this week in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, analyzed information from a national database that monitors all causes of hospitalizations and used this data to estimate the total number of acute kidney injuries in the United States that were severe enough to require a patient to be placed on dialysis.

The results showed that these injuries, caused by such incidents as major infections, trauma, complications following surgery and adverse reactions to drugs, increased by 10 percent per year from 2000 to 2009, from 222 to 533 cases per million people. The study also showed that the total number of deaths associated with acute kidney injury more than doubled during that time, from 18,000 in 2000 to nearly 39,000 in 2009.

"That was a staggering revelation of how increasingly common and how life-threatening acute kidney injury has become over the past decade in the United States," said Raymond K. Hsu, MD, a UCSF nephrologist who led the research.

Info

Mind-control parasites hijack immune system, too

T.Gondii
© Ke Hu and John Murray, PLoSThe mind-altering parasite called Toxoplasma gondii has a unique apparatus that is likely used to invade host cells and for its own replication. Shown here, the parasite is building daughter scaffolds within the mother cell.
A parasite known for its ability to influence the minds of its hosts also hijacks the immune system, a new study finds. In fact, the parasite uses cells that would normally help defeat it as transport to get around the body.

Toxoplasma gondii is a tiny parasite that infects about a quarter of the world's population. Most human infections are asymptomatic, though research has hinted the parasite might have subtle behavioral influences.

Infected individuals are more likely to attempt suicide, for example, and T. gondii infection may increase brain cancer risk.

The parasite's real interests, however, are cats and rodents. T. gondii can live in any warm-blooded creature, but it prefers to end up in the gut of a cat, where it can breed.

To do so, the parasite takes control of the minds of its rodent hosts, making the smell of cat urine sexually appealing to them rather than scary. That ups the chances a rodent will cozy up to a cat and get scarfed down, along with the parasite.

Magic Wand

From tomb to table: Cumin's health benefits rediscovered

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© greenmedinfo.com
Traded along spice routes separating ancient cultures by vast distances, spices like cumin were once worth their weight in gold. Has modern science now revealed why, beyond their remarkable aesthetic value, they were so highly prized?

Many spices are perfectly happy living a charmed life as seasonings, peppering things generously with flavor, and without ever arousing the suspicion that they may be capable of profound acts of healing, as well.

Meet cumin, a member of the parsley family, which is to say from a well-known family of healers native to the central Mediterranean region (southern Italy, Algeria and Tunisia).

Cumin's traditional use stretches back into prehistory, as evidenced by its presence in Egyptian tombs. The Greeks actually used it much like we use pepper today, keeping cumin at the dining table in its own container, which is still practiced by Moroccans to this day. It is also been used for millennia in India as a traditional ingredient of curry.