Health & WellnessS


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The New Dirty Dozen: 12 Foods to Eat Organic and Avoid Pesticide Residue

Dan Shapley
The Daily Green
Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:19 UTC
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© Getty Images
Fruits and veggies are an essential part of a healthy diet, but many conventional varieties contain pesticide residues.

And not all the pesticides used to kill bugs, grubs, or fungus on the farm washes off under the tap at home. Government tests show which fruits and vegetables, prepared typically at home, still have a pesticide residue.

You can reduce your exposure to pesticides by as much as 80% if you avoiding the most contaminated foods in the grocery store.

To do so, you need the latest info from the why the Environmental Working Group's "Dirty Dozen" list of foods most likely to have high pesticide residues. Since 1995, the organization has taken the government data and identified which type of produce has the most chemicals.

This year, celery takes the number one spot and both blueberries and spinach make an appearance (displacing lettuce and pears).
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Ambulance

SOTT Focus: Snake Oil Humbles Nexus Conference

Joe Quinn
Sott.net
Sun, 25 Apr 2010 06:13 UTC
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COINTELPRO: 'Bishop' Jim not so Humble
As regular SOTT and SOTT forum readers will be aware, Laura Knight-Jadczyk was scheduled to talk at the May 1st 2010 Nexus magazine conference in Amsterdam. As the only female in a six person line up, Laura was planning to give not just a woman's perspective but also the perspective of probably one of the few people alive today whose knowledge and insight spans and plumbs the depths of just about every one of the problems currently facing the human race. As Richard Dolan noted in his review of her book "High Strangeness":
I believe that Laura understands, better than probably anyone you will ever know, just how dire is the plight of our civilization - the plight of our species. She also understands that to change one's life, one must be willing to fight.
Initially when asked to attend, Laura suggested to the Nexus conference organizers that Richard Dolan (a friend and colleague of Laura's) would be a great addition to the line-up and was indeed willing to attend. The response from the organizers was that, unfortunately, they only had space for 6 speakers in one day.

We were therefore somewhat surprised when we checked the conference web site on Saturday 24th April and saw the announcement:
"Breaking News! Jim Humble is coming to Amsterdam!"
Not only that, but Jim Humble is now headlining the conference.

Apparently the Nexus conference organizers had managed to find extra space for another speaker. So, we, and Laura in particular, were rather disturbed by this development for a number of reasons. Richard Dolan is recognized as the pre-eminent UFO researcher in the world today. He is a very entertaining speaker and his talks are always fascinating. So could Jim Humble really have been so important a figure that he deserved being 'squeezed' in? Who is Jim Humble anyway?
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Bad Guys

Congressman Waxman Sneaks Anti-Vitamin Amendment into Wall Street Reform Bill

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Getty ImagesHenry Waxman
Of all the sneaky tactics practiced in Washington D.C., this recent action by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is one of the most insidious: While no one was looking, he injected amendment language into the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) that would expand the powers of the FTC (not the FDA, but the FTC) to terrorize nutritional supplement companies by greatly expanding the power of the FTC to make its own laws that target dietary supplement companies.

This is a little-known secret about the FTC and the nutritional supplements business: The FTC routinely targets nutritional supplement companies that are merely telling the truth about their products. Some companies are threatened by merely linking to published scientific studies about their products.

For example, here's an important article that describes how to FDA criminally extorts money out of supplement companies.

The FTC does much the same thing. They target a particular company that's having success in the natural products marketplace, then they accuse that company of "inferring" that their products have some health benefit. From there, the FTC demands that the company engage in paying a massive fine to the FTC, which the FTC calls "consumer redress" even though none of the money actually goes to the consumers.
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How the Human Brain Learns Language


DNA India
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:00 UTC
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© BerCon Ltd.
There is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species, says a new study from the University of Rochester.

Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.

Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task.

"We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."
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Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Blinking Eyes Indicate Mind Wandering


ScienceDaily
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:00 UTC
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© Getty Images
When your mind wanders, you're not paying attention to what's going in front of you. A new study suggests that it's not just the mind, it's the body, too; when subjects' minds wandered, they blinked more, setting up a tiny physical barrier between themselves and the outside world.

Cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Smilek, of the University of Waterloo, studies how people pay attention -- and don't. For this study, he was inspired by brain research that shows, when the mind wanders, the parts of the brain that process external goings-on are less active. "And we thought, OK, if that's the case, maybe we'd see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information," Smilek says. "The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more."

So, Smilek and his colleagues, Jonathan S.A. Carriere and J. Allan Cheyne, also of the University of Waterloo, set out to look at how often people blink when their mind wanders.
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Attention

Be Aware of the Most Common Over-the-Counter and Prescribed Killer Drugs

Paul Fassa
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:35 UTC
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© CreativeLoafing
It has been confirmed that correctly prescribed pharmaceuticals rank among the five highest causes of death in the USA, and that the U.S. medical system is responsible for more deaths in the USA than anything else! And what dangerous ingredient is common to both prescription painkillers and over the counter (OTC) cold remedies and painkillers?

Acetaminophen. It is in over 100 OTC pain pills and other cold remedies, including cold, cough, and fever remedies for children.

What's Wrong With Acetaminophen

As reported in a recent Natural News article on glutathione, hospital emergency (ERs) carry a rapid glutathione booster pharmaceutical N-acetylcysteine (NAC), for acetaminophen poisoning. It has to be in ERs because acetaminophen liver poisoning happens often! The acetaminophen destroys glutathione and the liver goes into extreme stress, sometimes causing death.
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Bad Guys

Corruption: USDA Looks Out Only for Self Interests

Aaron Turpen
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© USDA
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was created in 1889 and has the stated mission of providing for the health and safety of American agriculture while promoting good agricultural practice. It has devolved into an organization whose primary purpose appears to be to protect and defend Big Agribusiness and the profits it brings while ignoring the safety and health concerns it causes.

The latest in the saga of corruption and conflicts of interest to beset the U.S. government's agricultural oligarchy is President Obama's appointment of Islam Siddiqui as chief agricultural negotiator for the U.S. trade representative.[1] Siddiqui was appointed in a sidestepping maneuver that went around Congress, despite serious concern expressed by citizens, small farm advocates, and organic growers.

Siddiqui is not new to the government game. He was undersecretary in charge of the marketing and regulatory programs of the USDA's organic labeling standards. These are the same standards that allowed genetically modified (GMO) crops, irradiated foods, and worse to be labeled as "organic." He also worked hard to convince the European Union to accept both hormone-treated beef and GMO crops.
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Activated Charcoal Fights Heart Disease in Kidney Patients

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Ambrosia RemediesActivated Charcoal
Activated charcoal may reduce the risk of heart disease in patients with kidney disease, according to a study conducted by researchers from Vanderbilt University and presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition of the American Society of Nephrology.

"We found that oral activated charcoal lessens atherosclerotic lesions in experimental mice with kidney damage," researcher Valentina Kon said. "This is especially important because there is no effective treatment to reduce the high rate of cardiovascular mortality in patients with end-stage renal disease."

Patients with advanced kidney disease suffer a significantly elevated risk of developing hardened arteries (atherosclerosis), as well as a heightened risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Charcoal has a long history of use as a poison antidote, due to its ability to bind to molecules (adsorption) and remove them from the body. In modern times, activated charcoal -- designed to have a larger surface area and correspondingly higher adsorption capability -- has shown benefits far beyond poison control.
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Many Soy Veggie Burgers Contain Toxic Hexane

Ethan Huff
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Chris Campbell/Flickr
A recent study put out by the Cornucopia Institute (CI) explains the truth behind most processed soy products that are sold as health foods. Many veggie burgers, which are often touted by soy-enthusiasts as being healthier than meat, are actually made from highly processed soybeans that have undergone treatment with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and neurotoxin.

Soy is a fairly recent phenomenon on the American landscape, having emerged as an alleged health food within the past several decades and growing in popularity to epic proportions. Truthfully, soy is merely a cheap crop that industrial agriculture can grow easily and use in a variety of applications.

Many vegetarians swear by veggie burgers, most of which are made by soy, because they believe the fake meat is healthier than animal meat. But actually, most brands of non-organic soy burgers use "textured vegetable protein" and "soy protein isolate", two examples of highly-processed soy product that are used in soy products. And in order to remove the fat from the soy, manufacturers essentially give soybeans a hexane "bath" in order to separate the protein from the oil.

According to CI's senior researcher Charlotte Vallaeys, hexane is very commonly used on non-organic soy products, even ones that appear to be "natural".
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Attention

Teen Girls Bribed to Get Gardasil Vaccine with Shopping Vouchers

Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Dailycentered.com
The British National Health Service (NHS) has begun bribing teenage girls between the ages of 16 and 18 to get Gardasil vaccines.

Officials are giving shopping vouchers worth the equivalent of roughly $70 to girls who agree to get jabbed with the vaccine, which has been implicated in numerous cases of severe harm and death.

Officials from NHS Birmingham East and North have initiated the pilot program which is costing taxpayers the equivalent of about $35,000. No parental consent is required in order for young girls to participate in the program.

Many governments around the world have been pushing Gardasil through national campaigns designed to scare and entice women into getting the vaccine. The U.K. is no exception, as it continues to push for all girls between 12 and 18 years old to receive the shots, despite outcry from concerned citizens over the dangers of the vaccine.
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