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EPA Program on Children's Toxic Exposure "Flawed"

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© davegranlund.com
According to a new report released yesterday, efforts to protect children's health have been fatally blocked by American industry's refusal to submit information on the commercial use of chemicals.

In a scathing critique of a voluntary reporting strategy launched with great fanfare under the Clinton administration - and quietly killed in recent years - the EPA's Inspector General wrote that the Voluntary Children's Chemical Evaluation Program was a bust.

According to the Inspector General, the much-hyped program was "hampered by industry partners who chose not to voluntarily collect and submit information, and EPA's decision not to exercise its regulatory authorities under the Toxic Substances Control Act to compel data collection. EPA has not demonstrated that it can achieve children's health goals with a voluntary program."

This is not news to anyone who has followed EPA's uphill battle to regulate toxic chemicals in the environment and in consumer goods. Nor is it news to anyone who has watched the agency's various voluntary programs fail to win industry cooperation - despite endless "stakeholder meetings" in which companies repeatedly promise to pony up the details about their products' potential health risks.

Syringe

Vaccine Propaganda failing in Washington as State leads nation in parents opting out of vaccines

vaccine
© unknown

Washington is experiencing an epidemic of worry over vaccine safety. The state leads the nation in the percentage of parents opting out of vaccinations for their kindergarten-age children, but a new state law could be poised to change that distinction.


Comment: An "epidemic of worry" is quite justified given current and past claims of vaccine contamination such as this recent story below:

FDA Faults Merck Plant For Charred Shrink Wrap In Vaccine Vials


More than 6 percent of Washington kindergarteners were missing one or more immunizations in the 2009-2010 school year. The most commonly skipped vaccine was the chicken pox vaccine, The Daily Herald reported in Sunday's newspaper.

Since 1997, there's been a steady, statewide decline in the number of school children who are fully vaccinated.

A new state law that went into effect in July seeks to close a loophole that parents used to avoid providing proof of vaccinations to schools. Now, parents must meet with a medical provider, get a signed letter confirming that the consultation took place, and provide the note to child-care centers or schools.

Magnify

EPA Considers New Call for Toxicity Testing of BPA

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© American Chemical SocietyOn the money. Currencies from around the world-certainly all 21 seen here-host BPA that can rub off, new data show.
Turning up in and on everything from food to money, BPA's ubiquity is raising concerns.

The Environmental Protection Agency solicited public comment, July 26, about whether to require new toxicity testing and environmental sampling of bisphenol A, an ingredient in many plastics and food-contact resins.

"A number of concerns have been raised about the potential human health and environmental effects of BPA," said Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Data from the proposed new tests, he said, "would help EPA better understand and address the potential environmental impacts of BPA."

Moreover, the agency observes on its BPA Action Plan website, because this high-volume commercial chemical "is a reproductive, developmental, and systemic toxicant in animal studies and is weakly estrogenic, there are questions about its potential impact, particularly on children's health and the environment."

Megaphone

A (pre) historic, two-day event that unites the Ancestral Health movement

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"The Woodstock of Evolutionary Medicine"

- Loren Cordain


The Ancestral Health Symposium fosters collaboration among scientists, healthcare professionals and laypersons who study and communicate about health from an evolutionary perspective to develop solutions to our modern health challenges.

About the Symposium

The symposium is presented by the Ancestral Health Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating healthcare professionals and laypersons on ancestral lifestyle dynamics.

This year's inaugural event has been produced by a hobbyist volunteer model, utilizing the strengths of various individuals who proudly live an ancestral lifestyle. This model has helped keep the cost of attending the symposium low.

Heart - Black

Eating Too Much Sugar Can Increase Heart Disease Risk Factors

pop, coke, sugar
© unknownSugary soft drinks are considered a risk factor for heart disease.
Adults who consume high levels of sugar have significantly elevated levels of several risk factors for heart disease, according to a new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, and in Japan.

The study results suggest that U.S. dietary guidelines for sugar may be lax and should be reconsidered, the researchers say. Their findings will be reported online today (July 28) in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, and will appear in the journal's October print edition.

"While there is evidence that people who consume large amounts of sugar are more likely to have heart disease or diabetes, it has been controversial as to whether high-sugar diets may actually promote these diseases," said Kimber Stanhope, the study's senior author and a research scientist at UC Davis.

"Our new findings demonstrate that several factors associated with an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease were increased in individuals who consumed 25 percent of their calories as fructose or high fructose corn syrup," Stanhope added.

Health

Harvard Expert Ties Mental Illness "Epidemic" to Big Pharma's Agenda Since 1980s

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© Minyanville

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- better known as the DSM -- has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there's the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That's a label almost everyone can lay claim to.

These codes are used by doctors, psychologists, and regulators to maintain a mutual language; it's a handy shorthand system for bureaucratic purposes. But over the past few decades, the staggering, ever-expanding influence of the ever-expanding DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, has also played a lead role in building wealth and off-label product uses for the major drug manufacturers. In an insightful essay in this week's New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains how.

Angell's essay is based on a review of three current books examining the psychiatric industry: The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker, and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry--A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat. She also cites the DSM-IV, the most recent edition of the manual, while her review traces big pharma's role in our current mental disorder epidemic to the DSM-III, published in 1980.

Heart

What Your Doctor Didn't Tell You About Cholesterol: Eggs, Part 1

Cracked Eggs
© Science Kukuchew.com
More than 16 percent of U.S. adults have high cholesterol, defined as 240 mg/dL and above, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even the average level for Americans, 200 mg/dL, is borderline high, they say.

This high cholesterol, public health agencies say, is putting people at an increased risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This stated "fact" scares millions of Americans into take statin cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their levels as low as possible ... but what if this "fact" was actually not true?

Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?

Cholesterol is actually an essential part of your body, used to produce cell membranes, steroid hormones, vitamin D and the bile acids your body needs to digest fat. Your brain needs cholesterol to function properly, as does your immune system, and if a cell becomes damaged, it needs cholesterol in order to be repaired.

In fact, making excess cholesterol is actually your body's response to inflammation, which it does to help heal and repair your cells. So if you have high cholesterol you probably have high inflammation levels too (more on this later).

Many Americans are under the mistaken impression that all cholesterol is bad, but in reality cholesterol is good for your body and necessary for you to live. Unfortunately, the "lipid hypothesis" (aka the "diet-heart hypothesis"), the one that claims foods high in saturated fats drive up your cholesterol levels, which clog your arteries and lead to heart disease, is widely accepted and has helped to spread the misinformation about cholesterol throughout the public.

But the lipid hypothesis is actually seriously flawed.

In his book The Cholesterol Myths, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., explained that Ancel Keys, who performed the study upon which the Lipid Hypothesis is based, used cherry-picked data to prove his point that countries with the highest intake of animal fat have the highest rates of heart disease.

Ravnskov revealed that the countries used in the study were handpicked, and those that did NOT show that eating a lot of animal fat lead to higher rates of heart disease were left out of the study, leading to entirely skewed, and faulty, data.

Bulb

Depression - Caused by Inflammation, Thus Like Other Diseases of Civilization

depression
© Kevin Dooley
Part of the possible connection between diet and mental illness is how a bad diet can lead to a generalized inflammatory state. The theory goes like so: first you eat a ton of vegetable oil in processed food that fills the body with inflammatory molecules derived from the omega-6 fatty acids, then you add a lot of grains or legumes with lectins and immunoreactive proteins, and top it off lots of modern chronic stress. Do this for a long period of time, and your body gets irritated - obesity, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune diseases are all related to inflammation. Turns out your brain can get pretty irritated too.

It is well known that symptoms of clinical depression are likely mediated by inflammation in the brain. A number of lines of evidence support this idea, including that depressed people, old and young, have elevated levels of certain inflammatory proteins in the plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. Anti-inflammatory agents treat depression, and pharmacologic agents such as interferon, that cause depression, also lead to increases in the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-alpha. In addition, when someone who is depressed responds to an antidepressant treatment, these same inflammation markers decrease 1. People with generalized inflammatory syndromes (such as acute viral illness, rheumatoid arthritis, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease) have higher rates of depression than the general population too. I also notice in my clinic that people who have had bone surgery tend to get depressed for a few weeks after the operation, more so than people who had other kinds of surgery. I always wonder if sawing through the bones releases an enormous wave of inflammatory cytokines.

Question

Can I Eat Quinoa?

. . . or beans, or brown rice, or sweet potatoes? Or how about amaranth, sorghum, oats, and buckwheat? Surely corn on the cob is okay!

These are, of course, non-wheat carbohydrates. They lack several crucial undesirable ingredients found in our old friend, wheat, including no:
  • Gliadin - The protein that degrades to exorphins, the compound from wheat digestion that exerts mind effects and stimulates appetite to the tune of 400 additional calories (on average) per day.
  • Gluten - The family of proteins that trigger immune diseases and neurologic impairment.
  • Amylopectin A - The highly-digestible "complex" carbohydrate that is no better - worse, in fact - than table sugar.
So why not eat these non-wheat grains all you want? If they don't cause appetite stimulation, behavioral outbursts in children with ADHD, addictive consumption of foods, dementia (i.e., gluten encephalopathy), etc., why not just eat them willy nilly?

Health

The Westman Diet

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© openlibrary.org
Dr. Eric Westman has been a vocal proponent of carbohydrate restriction to gain control over diabetes, as have Drs. Richard Bernstein, Mary Vernon, Richard Feinman, and Jeff Volek.

Several studies over the years have demonstrated that reductions in carbohydrate content of the diet yield reductions in weight and HbA1c (glycated hemoglobin, a reflection of average blood glucose over the preceding 60-90 days).

Among the more important recent clinical studies is a small experience from Duke University's Dr. Eric Westman. In this study, obese type 2 diabetics reduced carbohydrate intake to 20 grams per day or less: no wheat, oats, cornstarch, or sugars. Participants ate nuts, cheese, meats, eggs, and non-starchy vegetables.