Health & WellnessS


Nuke

Nuclear Radiation Exposure Concerns Mount for Mothers in Japan


Womens News Network
Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:36 UTC
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© Wendy TannerJapan mother and child.

As parents from Fukushima prefecture line up in Tokyo for public protests and a more recent 7.0 level earthquake hit off shore of the east coast of Honshu, Japan on July 9, the latest data on nuclear power reveals: the amount of radiation inside the plant's reactor has reached much higher than originally expected levels. Current released figures through JAIN - Japan Atomic Industrial Forum show 4,000 millisieverts per hour of radiation on June 4 was measured in Reactor No. 1 through a steam release rising from a crevice in the floor.

But what do the figures mean? And what does it mean for mothers and women who are pregnant in regions that are highly impacted by six damaged nuclear reactors with three complete core melt-down failures at the Fukushima plant?

According to the Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission the total release of radioactive iodine-131 to date is now equal to 630,000 terabecquerels, a figure that has caused numerous public and private safety concerns in Japan.

Parents along Japan's eastern region are now facing increased worries about their children, especially the youngest members of the family.

Some mothers who feel they have been exposed to levels of radiation that could cause their breast milk to be compromised are also making decisions away from breast feeding their infants. Even the possibility of compromised powdered milk, used to feed infants, is being scrutinized.

Current radiation release figures from TEPCO, the power company that operates and manages the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant now reveals that larger than originally reported releases of radiation at 770,000 terabecquerels did happen, a level that may hold much more significance as the disabled plant is expected to continue to release radioactive isotopes over an extended period of time.

Comment: The reader should keep in mind that the government and MSM have been downplaying the effects of radiation on people since this event began.

Read these articles for more information:

Radiation Protection: Your Child and Your Pregnancy...

Japan Radiation Survey Shows 1 In 20 Fukushima Children Will Develop Thyroid Cancer

There is no 'safe' exposure to radiation

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Health

Even BPA-Free Plastic Not Always Safe

Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:33 UTC
Plastic Container
© iStockPhotoSome plastic containers are safe, others aren't. And there's currently no way to know which are which.

The elimination of the chemical BPA from plastic baby bottles, water bottles and other types of food and beverage packaging has given many people a sense of control over the plastics in their lives and the potential health risks involved.

But a BPA-free label doesn't mean a product is harmless, suggests a new study. When scientists conducted lab tests on more than 20 top-brand baby bottles along with more than 450 plastic food and beverage-packages, virtually all leached chemicals that acted like the hormone estrogen, even though many were free of BPA.

The new study, along with other work, suggests that the public's attention on BPA has been misguided. It now looks like there are thousands of possible chemicals in all sorts of plastics that act just like BPA. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals falsely tell the body's cells that the hormone estrogen is around, potentially causing all sorts of troubling developmental and reproductive consequences.

"Baby bottles, plastic bags, plastic wrap, clamshell food containers, stand-up pouches: Just about anything you can think of that's made of plastic that food or beverages are wrapped up in, we found this activity," said study author Stuart Yaniger, vice president of research and product development at PlastiPure, a technology company that works on developing safe plastics but gets most of its funding from government agencies. "It was shocking to us."

"The message is not anti-plastic," he said, adding that it is very easy to make plastic without estrogenic properties. "Plastics are good, but they can be made safer."
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Magnify

Lyme Disease - Why Lyme is the Mystery Disease

Leo Galland, M.D.
pilladvised.com
Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:12 UTC
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© hometownoneonta.allotsego.com
Summer is peak season for transmission of Lyme disease.

The only known transporter of Lyme disease bacteria, the deer tick, goes through the most infectious stage of its life cycle in the summer. But you don't need to be in contact with a deer to get a deer tick bite and Lyme disease.

Deer ticks can hitch a ride on small animals and land right in your backyard.

Here is a case study that highlights why Lyme disease is a mystery illness.
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Bulb

Best of the Web: Going Against the Grain Towards Better Health


Greenmedinfo.com
Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:38 UTC
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© greenmedinfo.com
Grains are often called the "staff of life," having a sort of credibility that is biblical in proportion. So prevalent is the perception that grains make for "good food" that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) - which is the United Nation's international agency for defeating hunger - uses a head of wheat as its emblem, with the Latin Fiat Panis or "Let There Be Bread" as its motto.

Despite the rather lofty secular position a loaf of whole grain bread may hold in the international community, the biblical record actually shows that the first foods mentioned in the Bible were the Herbs and Fruit Trees (Genesis 1:29), and that by punishment for sin God gave man bread:
"...cursed is the ground for thy sake;...In the sweat of thy face shalt though eat bread, till though return unto the ground..." (Genesis 3:17,19).
The inherent wisdom of this biblical message has long been forgotten and today, according to the USDA MyPlate, grains should constitute a sizeable sector of our diet in the form of "bread, cereal, rice, and pasta." Many of us, whose hyper-agrarian taste buds and gastrointestinal tracts have never once gone a day without some grain-derived morsel of bread or cracker, find ourselves expressing our dependency on these foods in telling, half confessionary phrases like: "I'm starving for a piece of bread," or "that pizza is to die for," forgetting that among non-agrarian peoples, grains were universally considered a last resort, or, starvation food only.
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2 + 2 = 4

MSG: The Flavor Enhancer That Sickens In Two Ways


Greenmedinfo.com
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:18 UTC
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© greenmedinfo.com
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) contributes to illness in two distinct ways: 1) It makes food that is bad for us taste really, really, really good. 2) It is a toxic chemical that directly damages neurological tissue, as well as induces generalized endocrine disruption throughout the body associated with metabolic syndrome.

So, What is Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)?

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a commonly used "flavor enhancer," and so powerful that arguably you could spray it on roadkill and it would taste good. This omnipresent ingredient in modern mass market food takes advantage of our biologically hard-wired taste receptors, and makes it very hard to stop eating the foods "seasoned" with this ingredient. In fact, it is doubtful that without the MSG trick many of these mass market processed foods would be palatable enough to maintain their status as economically viable commodities.
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Butterfly

Study Says Treatment, Not Medicine, Helps Asthma Patients Feel Better

Gene Emery
Reuters
Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:59 UTC
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© Clivir Learning Community
Inhaling albuterol helps asthmatic lungs work better, but patients who get it don't feel much better than those treated with a placebo inhaler or phony acupuncture, according to a U.S. study.

The results, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrate the importance of, literally, caring for patients and not just providing drugs, said co-author Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School.

The findings also demonstrate the impact of the so-called "placebo effect," or the phenomenon seen in clinical trials when people given inactive, fake "treatments," such as a sugar pill or saline, show improvements.

Comment: Having adequate levels of Vitamin D are linked to lower risk of severe asthma.

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Bell

Vagus Nerve Stimulation Helps Resolve Tinnitus in Rat

Jamie Talan
Neurology Today
Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00 UTC
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Study authors Dr. Navzer engineer (left) and DR. MICHAEL KILGARD in the Cortical Plasticity Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Investigator paired tones with brief pulses of vagus nerve stimulation, eliminating the physiological and behavioral symptoms of tinnitus in noise-exposed rats.

Investigators were able to use vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) to restore neural activity to normal and reverse the pathology of tinnitus in a rat model, according to a paper published online Jan. 12 before the print edition of Nature.

Based on the findings, the investigators - scientists at the University of Texas and MicroTransponder, a medical device company - are working to design a clinical trial for treating tinnitus.

"Brain changes in response to nerve damage or cochlear trauma cause irregular neural activity believed to be responsible for many types of chronic pain and tinnitus," said the senior investigator Michael Kilgard, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The brain maps in the somatosensory and auditory cortex are changed in response to the noise trauma and this generates pathological neural activity thought to be responsible for the tinnitus, the study author explained, adding that the severity of the tinnitus is correlated with the degree of map reorganization.

"When we paired tones with brief pulses of VNS we eliminated the physiological and behavioral symptoms of tinnitus in noise-exposed rats," said the lead author Navzer D. Engineer, PhD, vice president of preclinical affairs at MicroTransponder and a former post-doctoral fellow in the Dr. Kilgard's laboratory. The animals were monitored for three weeks after the therapy and the changes remained constant. "Pairing sounds with VNS provides that precision by rewiring damaged circuits and reverses the abnormal activity that generates the phantom sound."

Comment: It is possible to safely and easily stimulate the vagus nerve through gentle breathing exercises. To learn more about Vagus Nerve Stimulation, through breathing exercises, and naturally producing the stress reducing hormone Oxytocin in the brain, visit the Éiriú Eolas Stress Control, Healing and Rejuvenation Program here.

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Life Preserver

A daily dose of cod liver oil helps 'cure' arthritis

Jenny Hope
Daily Mail
Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:39 UTC
Scientists have discovered that cod liver oil can repair arthritic joints as well as lubricating healthy ones.

They say Granny really did know best when she insisted on a daily dose, because it halts the inflammation and destruction of joint cartilage caused by arthritis.

And they believe supplements could help thousands of patients waiting in agony for hip and knee replacements by beginning a reversal of the degenerative process.
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Ambulance

Best of the Web: Mass Psychosis in the U.S.

James Ridgeway
aljazeera.net
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:30 UTC
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© GALLO/GETTYDrug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits.
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.
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Attention

Low Fat Diet Dramatically Worsens Diabetic Blood Sugars


diabetesupdate.blogspot.com
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:35 UTC
Over the past month the media have been busy doing what they do best - reporting bady designed animal research as if it were human research. As a result we read "A high-fat diet during pregnancy may program a woman's baby for future diabetes, even if she herself is not obese or diabetic." This headline multiplied through the web appearing on dozens of newspaper sites.

Only by reading the full article do we learn that the researchers concluded this after an undisclosed, but probably low, number of "obesity-resistant rats" were "fed... either a high-fat or a control diet from the first day of gestation."

Rodents have evolved to eat a very different diet than humans and don't do well on high fat diets. They have very different pancreases and enzyme function than humans. And, of course, the "high fat diet" used in rat research is also a high carbohydrate diet. But that didn't deter the media from reporting this finding as if it were a human study.

Another study that was reported in the media claimed that "Pregnant women who tuck into fatty foods are at greater risk of having a stillbirth."
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