A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can't escape it in our cars. It's in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there's a reason why you've never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name - and no antidote.

The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised "better living through chemistry," but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat.

None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we're part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they've put in our environment - and so our bodies - could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.

An influential group of worldwide cancer experts has warned that the astronomical prices charged by drug companies are in effect condemning some patients to death.

More than 100 leading cancer specialists have accused the world's drug industry of "profiteering" from cancer patients in the same way that unscrupulous food vendors raise the price of basic food stuffs after a natural disaster.

The authors of the article, which appeared in the journal Blood, are all specialists in blood cancer. Blood cancers, such as Leukemia, have been proven to be very responsive to cancer drugs.

The specialists are keen to get the message across that they understand that drug companies must make a profit on what they do, but the profit should be in relation to the money invested and should not take advantage of people with life threatening medical conditions.

"What determines a morally justifiable 'just price' for a cancer drug? A reasonable drug price should maintain healthy pharmaceutical industry profits without being viewed as 'profiteering'. This term [profiteering] may apply to the trend of high drug prices where a life threatening medical condition is the disaster," the specialists wrote in the report.

Joanne Webster, professor of parasite epidemiology at Imperial College London, explains that many parasites favor the brain, "because it shelters them from the full fury of the immune system". But, she says, "it also gives them direct access to the machinery to alter the host's behavior".

The Telegraph reported that,

There is a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is found in domestic cats, and is estimated to infect 350,000 people a year in Britain. Its effect on humans became the obsession of Jaroslav Flegr, professor of evolutionary biology at Charles University in Prague, who linked it with disturbed behaviours such as reckless driving and a greater risk of suicide. Rats infected with Toxo, as scientists at Imperial College discovered, actually like the smell of cat urine, instead of being terrified by it. And studies at Stanford University in California have revealed the neural changes that lay behind this transformation.

Toxo - which comes in the form of tiny single-celled cysts - was clustered in two areas of the brain: those controlling fear and pleasure. Pathways that normally responded to the smell of cat urine with alarm had been damped down, while the pleasure hormone dopamine, normally released in response to female rodent urine, was now triggered by the whiff of cat. Most recently, researchers have shown that Toxo's DNA includes two genes that boost dopamine production. Human brains have plenty of similarities with those of rats and mice, suggesting that the greater number of car crashes among those with Toxo infection could be due to it damping fear responses.

For nine months, the umbilical cord is a lifeline between mother and baby, sending oxygenated blood to the growing fetus. Once the baby is born, usually within the first minute of birth, that connection is often quickly severed. Mounting evidence suggests that clamping the cord within seconds of the baby's arrival deprives it of vital blood from the placenta -- which can lead to iron deficiency and anemia in later life.

Medical bodies, senior doctors and the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) want maternity staff to instead leave the umbilical cord untouched for anything from 30 seconds to whenever it stops pulsating naturally - usually within two to five minutes.

"The later the better," said Midwife Naomi Karns. "Between four to five minutes is the ideal delay period in cutting the cord to maximize therapeutic potential."

The umbilical cord carries nutrients and oxygen from mom-to-be's placenta to the developing infant's abdomen. (It leaves a life-long impression in the form of the belly button.) When the practice of immediate cord clamping first began about a half century ago, the value of cord blood, especially its stem cells, which can develop into a suite of other cells, was not known. But now we know that stem cells have many therapeutic properties.

A review, which appears in an issue of the Cochrane Collaboration, found that delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord for up to 120 seconds in premature infants can lead to an increased number of red blood cells, the need for fewer transfusions due to anemia or low blood pressure, and a decreased risk of bleeding in the brain.

Anemia - a disorder which means you have a less than the normal quantity of hemoglobin in the blood - can later be associated with brain development and can affect cognitive ability.

It's important for parents to at least consider the potential dangers and lack of necessity of vaccinations. Now some pediatricians are withholding treatment for children whose parents' have rejected all or some vaccinations - this simply isn't right. But it's important not to cave in to those pressures, and continue researching vaccines from multiple sources.

Vaccine Advocate Says Children Can Receive 10,000 Vaccines at Once

An example of, let's call it lunacy, from high places in the vaccine industry, Dr. Paul Offit once publicly remarked that children can safely receive 100,000 vaccines at once. He later changed that to 10,000. Unfortunately, this leading pediatrician who holds influential University and Clinical positions has media clout and has been interviewed often.

He has written publications refuting vaccination dangers and condemning those who refuse vaccinations for their children, even to the point of encouraging pediatricians to not provide care for children not vaccinated.

Energy-intensive industrial farming practices that rely on toxic chemicals and genetically engineered crops are not just undermining public health - they're destroying the planet.

Here's how:

Generating Massive Greenhouse Gas Pollution (CO2, Methane, Nitrous Oxide) and Global Warming; While Promoting False Solutions Such as Industrial Biofuels, So-Called Drought-Resistant Crops, and Genetically Engineered Trees

Evaluations of corn grown for ethanol show that whatever reduction in emissions you get from burning corn instead of oil in the gas tank is more than offset by the fact that producing biofuel from corn requires as much fuel as it could replace.

Corn production, like the production of all of the crops (corn, cotton, canola, soy, and now, sugar beets and alfalfa) that Monsanto has so successfully industrialized through its business model of selling patented GMO seeds to increase the use of its pesticides, is very fossil fuel intensive.

But that's just the beginning of Monsanto's contribution to agriculture's green house gas emissions. With ever-increasing acreage, where are all those GMO crops going? They're being fed to animals, and when you look at emissions from factory farms, you'll wish we burned them in the gas tank instead!

An estimated 12.5 million people had some form of cancer in 2009, according to the American Cancer Society. Another 25.8 million have diabetes. These two preventable diseases are responsible for millions of deaths worldwide each year. In the constant battle to stay healthy, many of us know that too much sugar in the blood can lead to diabetes and that by controlling our diets we can both prevent and even reverse the disease. But, could the same be said for cancer?

According to researchers, sugar and cancer are indeed connected.

The Sugar-Cancer Connection

Obesity and high blood sugar are risk factors for diabetes. And diabetics have an estimated double risk of suffering a colon or pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Scientists say that the two facts are connected and that blood sugar could play a role in the development of cancer.

In one study published in the journal Molecular Cell, a team of researchers under Dr. Custodia Garcia-Jimenez, have identified how sugar could directly increase the cancer risk.

A recently-published Harvard University meta-analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has concluded that children who live in areas with highly fluoridated water have "significantly lower" IQ scores than those who live in low fluoride areas.

In a 32-page report that can be downloaded free of charge from Environmental Health Perspectives, the researchers said:

A recent report from the U.S. National Research Council (NRC 2006) concluded that adverse effects of high fluoride concentrations in drinking water may be of concern and that additional research is warranted. Fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in laboratory animals, including effects on learning and memory ...

To summarize the available literature, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies on increased fluoride exposure in drinking water and neurodevelopmental delays. We specifically targeted studies carried out in rural China that have not been widely disseminated, thus complementing the studies that have been included in previous reviews and risk assessment reports ...

Findings from our meta-analyses of 27 studies published over 22 years suggest an inverse association between high fluoride exposure and children's intelligence ... The results suggest that fluoride may be a developmental neurotoxicant that affects brain development at exposures much below those that can cause toxicity in adults ...

Serum-fluoride concentrations associated with high intakes from drinking-water may exceed 1 mg/L, or 50 Smol/L, thus more than 1000-times the levels of some other neurotoxicants that cause neurodevelopmental damage. Supporting the plausibility of our findings, rats exposed to 1 ppm (50 Smol/L) of water-fluoride for one year showed morphological alterations in the brain and increased levels of aluminum in brain tissue compared with controls ...

In conclusion, our results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children's neurodevelopment. Future research should formally evaluate dose-response relations based on individual-level measures of exposure over time, including more precise prenatal exposure assessment and more extensive standardized measures of neurobehavioral performance, in addition to improving assessment and control of potential confounders.

Abbott Laboratories Shareholders Set To Vote on Non-GMO Policy

Shareholders of Abbott Laboratories will vote on whether the manufacturer of Similac, a leading brand of infant formula, should adopt a policy of sourcing ingredients that have not been genetically engineered.

The vast majority of corn and soy-based ingredients in processed foods in the United States, including infant formula, come from genetically engineered crops developed by Monsanto and other biotechnology companies. Dairy ingredients may come from dairy cows that were treated with genetically engineered bovine growth hormones.

The annual meeting, open to all owners of Abbott stock, takes place at Abbott Laboratories' headquarters in Abbott Park, IL on April 26.

Every once in a while a documentary comes along that really does a great job of reaching out and changing the mind of people who are skeptics. One such documentary is Statin Nation by director, Justin Smith. It's full of information that we've all heard over and over again, but it does it in such a way that nearly anybody will understand.

If you have friends or relatives that are skeptical of your way of life, send them this video, it's a fantastic introduction into what we know as the truth. It will at least open people eyes to the possibility that everything that we thought we knew about food was false and how data was manipulated in the name of profit. Some might call this a conspiracy theory, but it's pretty hard to disagree when you see the facts.