Health & WellnessS


Attention

India: Mystery fever toll climbs to 46 in Bihar

The fatal 'mystery fever' on Tuesday claimed one more life in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, taking the death toll to 46, even as ambiguity still prevails over the disease with scientists ruling out encephalitis.

Chief Medical Officer K P Singh said one more child died at Kejriwal hospital during the day.

Two more children were being treated at the Srikrishna Medical College Hospital and the Kejriwal hospital, he said.

A central team which visited the hospitals last week had initially diagnosed the disease as encephalitis and sent the blood samples to Pune's National Institute of Virology for further tests.

Heart

Meditation Can Cut Heart Attacks by as Much as Half

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© Getty ImagesTranscendental Meditation was popularised in the 1960s through the Beatles who learnt the technique through their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Transcendental meditation, the relaxation technique made famous by the Beatles, can cut heart attack and stroke death rates by up to 50%, new research has found.

The practice, which involves the continual repeating of a mantra, was found to reduce high blood pressure, cholesterol and thickening of the arteries. It is also protects against diabetes.

"This is a seminal finding," said Dr Norman Rosenthal of the American government's National Institute of Mental Health.

"The prevention of heart attack and stroke and actual lengthening of lifespan by an alternative

treatment method is exceedingly rare, if not unprecedented.

"If Transcendental Meditation were a drug conferring so many benefits, it would be a billion-dollar blockbuster."

Comment: For more information about an easy to use approach to Meditation check out the Éiriú Eolas Stress Control, Healing and Rejuvenation Program here.


Info

Best of the Web: Gluten Then and Now

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© glutendoctors.blogspot.com
Over the past decade, the frequency of conversations about gluten intolerance (GI) and celiac disease (CD) in the United States has gone from almost unheard of to commonplace. Chances are your local supermarket sells dozens of items labeled "gluten free" where none existed five years ago. Restaurants and school lunch programs frequently offer gluten-free alternatives. What happened?

Before I dive into that discussion, I want to clarify some terms to minimize confusion. "Gluten" is the general term for a mixture of tiny protein fragments (called polypeptides), which are found in cereal grains such as wheat, rye, barley, spelt, faro, and kamut. Gluten is classified in two groups: prolamines and glutelins. The most troublesome component of gluten is the prolamine gliadin. Gliadin is the cause of the painful inflammation in gluten intolerance and instigates the immune response and intestinal damage found in celiac disease. Although both conditions have similar symptoms (pain, gas, bloating, diarrhea), or sometimes no gastrointestinal symptoms at all, celiac disease is an autoimmune reaction to gluten that can cause severe degradation of the small intestine; whereas, gluten intolerance/sensitivity is an inability to digest gliadin with no damage to the intestines.

Comment: For more information on Wheat and Gluten intolerance read the following articles:

The Dark Side of Wheat - New Perspectives on Celiac Disease and Wheat Intolerance
Opening Pandora's Bread Box: The Critical Role of Wheat Lectin in Human Disease
Gluten: What You Don't Know Might Kill You
Facts you might not know about gluten
Book Review: Gluten Toxicity - The Mysterious Symptoms of Celiac Disease, Dermatitis Herpetiformis, and Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerance
Can You Stomach Wheat? How Giving up Grain May Better Your Health
Just because someone doesn't have coeliac disease, doesn't mean they don't have a problem with gluten
Beyond Gluten-Free: The Critical Role of Chitin-Binding Lectins in Human Disease
Gluten Sensitivity and the Impact on the Brain


Red Flag

Roundup: Birth Defects Caused By World's Top-Selling Weedkiller, Scientists Say

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© Common Dreams
The chemical at the heart of the planet's most widely used herbicide - Roundup weedkiller, used in farms and gardens across the U.S. - is coming under more intense scrutiny following the release of a new report calling for a heightened regulatory response around its use.

Critics have argued for decades that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides used around the globe, poses a serious threat to public health. Industry regulators, however, appear to have consistently overlooked their concerns.

A comprehensive review of existing data released this month by Earth Open Source, an organization that uses open-source collaboration to advance sustainable food production, suggests that industry regulators in Europe have known for years that glyphosate, originally introduced by American agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in 1976, causes birth defects in the embryos of laboratory animals.

Comment: Corporations like Monsanto Lies, Again (and Again and Again) about the safety of their toxic products. Read the following articles for more information about the truly evil and detrimental chemical Roundup and why agencies like the EPA are desperately trying to ignore and hide scientific studies that prove this chemical is highly toxic to human and environmental health:

Roundup Kills More Than Weeds
Death by Multiple Poisoning, Glyphosate and Roundup
Groundbreaking Study Shows Roundup Link to Birth Defects
Roundup weed killer kills human cells. Study intensifies debate over 'inert' ingredients


Health

Best of the Web: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?

Cuckoo's Nest
© United Artists/PhotofestLan Fendors, Louise Fletcher, and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975
The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
by Irving Kirsch
Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper)

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
by Robert Whitaker
Crown, 404 pp., $26.00

Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry - A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis
by Daniel Carlat
Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were "anxiety disorders," including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); "mood disorders," including major depression and bipolar disorders; "impulse-control disorders," including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and "substance use disorders," including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment - up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.

Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from "talk therapy" to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.

Bacon

Tips & tricks for starting (or restarting) low-carb Pt II

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In the last post we discussed ramping up the fat intake as the single best way to hurry the low-carb or keto adaptation along. I didn't mention it in the previous post, but another little secret is to keep an eye on the protein intake. Too much protein will prevent the shift into ketoses because the liver will convert some of the protein into glucose - this glucose will then be used first and slow down the ketogenic process. Which, if course, prompts the question, how much protein is too much? As long as you're getting your protein from meat, especially fatty cuts of meat, you're probably okay. If you go for the extremely lean cuts of meat, say, skinless chicken breasts, or if you are supplementing your diet with low-fat protein shakes, you could have a little more trouble low-carb adapting. If you're going the shake route, I would recommend you add some coconut oil to the shakes for a couple of reasons. First, you'll hasten the keto-adaptation, and, second, the fat in coconut oil will help remove the fat from your liver (which I'll discuss more later in this post).

As I said, you need to really crank up the fat intake to push yourself over the adaptation divide as quickly as possible. If you don't like fatty cuts of meat, you can add a little medium-chain triglycerides (MCT) to your diet. MCT are absorbed more like carbohydrates and are used quickly by the body. They are almost never incorporated into the fat cells, so they burn quickly, and any extra that might be hanging around are converted to ketones. So, MCT will drive the ketone production process. And so will coconut oil if you prefer that.

Comment: You can avoid the mistakes Dr Eades continues to make by cutting out coffee and alcohol altogether. Caffeine stimulates the pancreas and messes with blood sugar levels and can cause fat deposition in lumpy bumps. That's the hidden effect of coffee that you get even if you don't get an initial "reaction" to it. If you haven't read "Life Without Bread" and "The Vegetarian Myth", do so as soon as possible as everyone really needs to understand the science of how the body works in order to know how what you put in your mouth is actually affecting you.

As regards alcohol, this comes from sugar and its transformation requires the assistance of the fungi yeast. Consider this from Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine:
"The process starts with glucose, which is the sugar both humans and yeast use to power their bodies. Like humans, yeast cells prefer to burn their glucose with oxygen to produce energy. But yeast cells sometimes find themselves in situations where oxygen is scarce - for instance, when they are trapped in the bottom of huge vats of grape juice. [...]

The details of that process are interesting in their own right, but all we're really concerned with here are those two shards remaining after the glucose is finally split. Those shards are molecules of ethanol.

The birth of alcohol via this inefficient splitting of glucose has one very salient consequence for humans: most of the chemical energy of the original glucose molecule remains bound up in the ethanol fragments. That energy equals calorics: about seven per gram - which works out to about a hundred calories in a standard drink from the alcohol alone.

Alcohol, in other words, is no diet drink.

Alcohol's origins also explain some facts about the alcohol content of some common drinks. Yeast cells struggling to survive under suffocating conditions quickly excrete the ethanol fragments because they are basically poisonous. Ethanol interferes with many of the reactions vital to the life of a cell. As a result, yeasts excrete ethanol, which slowly builds up in the surrounding liquid - exactly where the brewer or vintner wants it. Given an adequate amount of glucose, the ethanol content of a fermenting liquid rises until it reaches about 12 percent. At this point, it starts to back up inside the yeast cells because it can no longer diffuse across the cell wall. Unable to dispose of the poisonous waste, the yeasts shut down and become dormant.

All activity stops, including the production of new ethanol. This is the reason that most table wines have roughly a 12 percent alcohol content: that's as high as it can go before the yeasts throw in the towel. Some wines can achieve slightly higher values if they are unusually rich in glucose, but the only way to get significantly higher ethanol levels is by distillation."
And here's some perspective about the reputed benefits associated with moderate alcohol drinking, also from Buzz:
"With all this evidence suggesting that moderate consumption of wine - and probably other forms of alcohol as well - confers protection against heart disease, why isn't everyone reaching for their favorite bottle of cabernet? There are several reasons.

The French, while enjoying their much reduced rates of heart disease, develop liver disease at a rate that is roughly twice that of Americans (Dolnick 1990). In addition to taxing the liver, moderate drinking has been associated with a slightly increased risk of breast cancer and cancer of the bowel. And, of course, even a single shot of liquor consumed quickly can produce transient blood alcohol levels high enough to reduce reaction times and impair coordination, thus increasing the risk of accidents.

Second, advising abstainers to begin drinking could lead to increased alcoholism because it is not yet possible to predict who will succumb to alcohol's addictive potential. Other methods, such as losing weight and exercising, offer even greater benefits and have fewer associated risks."



Better Earth

In Defense of Nutritious, Delicious Grassfed Butter

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The domination of our government by the large agricultural industry has led to some of the most ignorant and ill-advised nutritional advice in the history of our planet. I thought the idiotic "food pyramid" with its emphasis on dead carbohydrates as the foundation of diet and its demonizing of healthy fats and protein was as bad as it was going to get.

I truly did underestimate our government. The replacement for the "food pyramid," "MyPlate," is even worse.

The first clue as to how bad this is comes when you look at the plate, at "choosemyplate.gov." The plate has sections for fruit, vegetables, grains, and protein. There is also a small circle labeled dairy. The text on the page informs us that the dairy should be 1% fat, or less. But there is no place for the most important food group, fats. To our government, fat is no longer a food.

I know that the most nutritious food ever discovered is the butter from grassfed animals. But where in "MyPlate" is the butter?

Bell

US - Arizona Death: Possible Connection to E.Coli Outbreak

More deadly than previous outbreaks, doctors say

The death of an Arizona patient could be linked to the deadly German E. coli epidemic that caused 29 deaths and sickened thousands, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday. The outbreak has alarmed doctors, who have never seen such an aggressive intestinal bacteria before.

U.S. health officials say the epidemic was more deadly than previous outbreaks because it combined dangerous characteristics of two different strains of the bacteria. The unusual combination of traits makes it more likely for infected people to develop a potentially fatal kidney complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, researchers said.

There are already five confirmed cases in the U.S., but the Arizona man would be the first death directly linked to the outbreak in Europe.

It has been confirmed that the man had recently visited Germany, according to a statement by the CDC.

His death is currently under investigation but health officials say he did have hemolytic uremic syndrome (kidney failure) similar to the hundreds of afflicted people in Europe.

The massive outbreak has sickened 3,601 people, including 815 with HUS, and killed 39, according to the Robert Koch Institute.

Ambulance

Pharmageddon: America's Top Selling Statins Cause Diabetes

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© drhyman.com
If all doctors followed the latest cholesterol treatment guidelines, and all their patients took their prescribed statin medication, there would be 3.5 million more diabetics in America. But wait! There is another pill (injection actually) that has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes. And it's only about $50,000 per year per patient. Let's see 3.5 million times $50,000. What does that bring us to?

Pharmageddon!

We are stuck in an absurd cultural habit of thinking that medication will save us from lifestyle and social diseases.

Two separate studies in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) underscore that we have come to the end of an era of being saved by medication. Antibiotics and vaccines were a huge advance in medicine in the 20th century. But the single pill for the single ill just doesn't work for 21st century chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes.

Attention

Consequences of systematic poisoning? 350 million adults have diabetes: Study reveals the scale of global epidemic

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© Unknown
A major international study collating and analyzing worldwide data on diabetes since 1980 has found that the number of adults with the disease reached 347 million in 2008, more than double the number in 1980. The research, published today in The Lancet, reveals that the prevalence of diabetes has risen or at best remained unchanged in virtually every part of the world over the last three decades.

Diabetes occurs when the cells of the body are not able to take up sugar in the form of glucose. As a consequence, the amount of glucose in the blood is higher than normal. Over time, this raises the risk of heart disease and stroke, and can also cause damage to the kidneys, nerves and retinas. High blood glucose and diabetes are responsible for over three million deaths worldwide each year.

The new study found that between 1980 and 2008, the number of adults with diabetes rose from 153 million to 347 million. Seventy per cent of the rise was due to population growth and ageing, with the other 30 per cent due to higher prevalence. The proportion of adults with diabetes rose to 9.8 per cent of men and 9.2 per cent of women in 2008, compared with 8.3 per cent of men and 7.5 per cent of women in 1980.

The estimated number of diabetics was considerably higher than a previous study in 2009 which put the number worldwide at 285 million.