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Circadian Rhythms Influence our Immune System, Study Shows

Catherine Pearson and TS Wiley
The Wiley Protocol
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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Wiley notes, "Sleep is the biggest immunological defense scheme we've come up with yet. We and everything else alive from plankton and fungus to elephants and ants are synchronized to the orbit and rotation of the earth in and out of the sun's light to assure us a food supply. All things great and small have internal sundials that measure time with molecular clocks in every cell that switch genes on and off. The light always spark biochemical reactions and now mankind controls light and dark and we live in an endless summer. And as such we have disrupted our natural circadian rhythm."

It's common knowledge that too little sleep can increase our odds of getting sick, but a new study sheds light on just how direct the connection is. Researchers found that the body's circadian clock controls an essential immune system gene in mice -- a gene that helps the body ward off bacteria and viruses.

"People intuitively know that when their sleep patterns are disturbed, they are more likely to get sick," study author Erol Fikrig, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, said in a press release. "It does appear that disruptions of the circadian clock influence our susceptibility to pathogens."
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Attention

Nanoparticles Cause Disruptions in Nutrient Absorption, Could Impact Long-Term Health

Gail Glover and Ryan Yarosh
EurekAlert!
Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Nature Nanotechnology
This figure shows 50 nm carboxylated polystyrene nanoparticles (green) interacting with a cell culture model of the intestinal epithelium (red). Oral exposure to these particles was shown to affect iron transport.
Binghamton, NY - Nanoparticles are everywhere. From cosmetics and clothes, to soda and snacks. But as versatile as they are, nanoparticles also have a downside, say researchers at Binghamton University and Cornell University in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. These tiny particles, even in low doses, could have a big impact on our long-term health.

According to lead author of the article, Gretchen Mahler, assistant professor of bioengineering at Binghamton University, much of the existing research on the safety of nanoparticles has been on the direct health effects. But what Mahler, Michael L. Shuler of Cornell University and a team of researchers really wanted to know was what happens when someone gets constant exposure in small doses - the kind you'd get if you were taken a drug or supplement that included nanoparticles in some form.
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Eye 1

Aging of Eyes Is Blamed for Circadian Rhythm Disturbances

Laurie Tarkan
The New York Times
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Ellen Weinstein
The aging eye filters out blue light, affecting circadian rhythm and health in older adults.

THE INVESTIGATORS

Dr. Martin Mainster and Dr. Patricia Turner, University of Kansas School of Medicine.

For decades, scientists have looked for explanations as to why certain conditions occur with age, among them memory loss, slower reaction time, insomnia and even depression. They have scrupulously investigated such suspects as high cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and an inactive lifestyle.

Now a fascinating body of research supports a largely unrecognized culprit: the aging of the eye.

The gradual yellowing of the lens and the narrowing of the pupil that occur with age disturb the body's circadian rhythm, contributing to a range of health problems, these studies suggest. As the eyes age, less and less sunlight gets through the lens to reach key cells in the retina that regulate the body's circadian rhythm, its internal clock.

"We believe the effect is huge and that it's just beginning to be recognized as a problem," said Dr. Patricia Turner, an ophthalmologist in Leawood, Kan., who with her husband, Dr. Martin Mainster, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Kansas Medical School, has written extensively about the effects of the aging eye on health.
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Cheeseburger

How Malnutrition Causes Obesity

Dr. Mark Hyman
Huffington Post
Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:31 UTC
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Americans are overfed and undernourished. That's right, the most obese children and adults in the country are also the most nutritionally deficient1!

How can those two things possibly co-exist?

The mistake is to think that if you eat an abundance of calories, your diet automatically delivers all the nutrients your body needs. But the opposite is true. The more processed food you eat, the more vitamins you need. That's because vitamins and minerals lubricate the wheels of our metabolism, helping the chemical reactions in our bodies run properly. Among those biochemical processes greased by nutrients is the regulation of sugar and burning of fat. The problem is that the standard American diet (SAD) is energy dense (too many calories) but nutrient poor (not enough vitamins and minerals). Too many "empty calories" confuse the metabolism and pack on the pounds.

A Nutritionally Deficient Culture

After reviewing the major nutritional research over the last 40 years and doing nutritional testing on over 10,000 patients - I can tell you that Americans are suffering from massive nutritional deficiencies. What I see in my office is reflected in the scientific literature. Upwards of 30 percent of American diets fall short of such common plant-derived nutrients as magnesium, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, and Vitamin A (2). More than 80 percent of Americans are running low on Vitamin D (3). And nine out of 10 people are deficient in omega-3 fats, which are critical for staving off inflammation and controlling blood sugar levels. (For more information, plus a quiz on where your nutritional imbalances lie, see The Blood Sugar Solution).
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Arrow Up

New Scientific Data Forces Government to Reverse Its Stance on Fluoride in the Water Supply


Alliance for Natural Health
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:49 UTC
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© Alliance for Natural Health
Why are some states simply ignoring the latest studies, and passing new laws that will hurt your teeth and harm your health?

Water fluoridation was introduced to the United States in the 1940s as a way to use waste product from the manufacture of aluminum, a waste product that was expensive to dispose of and which was harming cattle and farmland. Since then, the federal government has taken the stance that the fluoridation of drinking water, which conveniently disposed of the waste, is vitally important to help prevent tooth decay; the CDC called it one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century. But the the latest scientific studies have finally made the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) change their tune on how much fluoride is safe.

The data indicates that dental fluorosi - damage to the teeth from fluoride, ranging from lacy white markings or spots on the enamel to staining and pitting of the tooth surface - happens when fluoride levels are too high. Water is only one of several sources of fluoride. Other common sources include dental products such as toothpaste and mouth rinses, prescription fluoride supplements, fluoride applied by dental professionals, and exposure through our food, which is often sprayed with fluoride-based pesticides.
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2 + 2 = 4

In Eyes, a Clock Calibrated by Wavelengths of Light

Laura Beil
The New York Times
Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:16 UTC
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© Otto Steininger
Just as the ear has two purposes - hearing and telling you which way is up - so does the eye. It receives the input necessary for vision, but the retina also houses a network of sensors that detect the rise and fall of daylight. With light, the body sets its internal clock to a 24-hour cycle regulating an estimated 10 percent of our genes.

The workhorse of this system is the light-sensitive hormone melatonin, which is produced by the body every evening and during the night. Melatonin promotes sleep and alerts a variety of biological processes to the approximate hour of the day.

Light hitting the retina suppresses the production of melatonin - and there lies the rub. In this modern world, our eyes are flooded with light well after dusk, contrary to our evolutionary programming. Scientists are just beginning to understand the potential health consequences. The disruption of circadian cycles may not just be shortchanging our sleep, they have found, but also contributing to a host of diseases.
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Health

Is The Mystery of the Appendix Close to Being Unravelled?

Robin McKie
The Guardian, UK
Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:07 UTC
Appendix
© NIDDK
The appendix is a fingerlike pouch attached to the large intestine in the lower right area of the abdomen.
It is widely regarded as the body's least useful organ, a block of intestinal tissue that often becomes inflamed and occasionally threatens to kill us.

But the appendix is getting a bad press, says US surgery expert Bill Parker. Far from being an organ of evil, it serves a very useful function - by acting as a safe house for beneficial bacteria in our bodies. In effect, the much-reviled organ is really a sanctuary for helpful microbes, explains Parker, an assistant professor of experimental surgery at Duke University medical centre, in Durham, North Carolina.

"My idea is that the appendix is a storehouse, a cultivation centre for the normal, beneficial bacteria that our gut needs," he says. "That safe house would be necessary and useful in the event that the main compartment of bacteria, the large bowel, got contaminated with some kind of infectious organism and got flushed out."

The appendix is not unique to Homo sapiens. The great apes, other primates, the opossum, the wombat and rabbits: all have appendices. And in each case, Parker argues that the appendix behaves in a similar manner: as a resupply centre for benign microbes.

A crucial part of Parker's theory rests on the importance of the bacteria found in our intestines. Our bodies are made up of around 10 trillion cells. However, we carry about 10 times as many microorganisms inside our bodies, and most of these are found in our gut. Their relationship with humans is symbiotic. The bacteria take some of our sources of energy, our food in other words, and in return they help to prevent the growth of harmful, pathogenic bacteria, and also produce vitamins and hormones. They are crucial to our wellbeing, in short.
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Health

New Finding: Consuming Trans Fats Linked To Aggression

Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo
Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:30 UTC
Fist
© GreenMedInfo

In the first human study of its kind researchers have linked trans fatty acid consumption to increased aggression. Published in the Public Library of Science's own journal, PLoS, March 5th 2012, researchers at the Dept. of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, reported:
"Dietary trans fatty acids (dTFA) are primarily synthetic compounds that have been introduced only recently; little is known about their behavioral effects. dTFA inhibit production of omega-3 fatty acids, which experimentally have been shown to reduce aggression. Potential behavioral effects of dTFA merit investigation. We sought to determine whether dTFA are associated with aggression/irritability."
The study looked at 945 adult men and women who were not on lipid-lowering drugs, and who were without LDL-cholesterol extremes, diabetes, HIV, cancer or heart disease. Outcomes assessed adverse behaviors with impact on others based on both objective (life histories of aggression) and subjective (self-rated impatience and irritability) sources of information. The researchers concluded:
"This study provides the first evidence linking dTFA [dietary trans fatty acids] with behavioral irritability and aggression."
This novel finding adds to a growing body of existing clinical research indicating that synthetically produced trans fatty acids adversely affect human health, particularly cardiovascular health and cancer risk.
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Top Secret

Scandalous: Scientists and Doctors Falsifying Data

Mike Barrett
Activist Post
Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:02 UTC
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© Activist Post
Medical doctors are nearly revered by many individuals for their medical knowledge accumulated after years of schooling. These doctors have gone through years of training in what is regarded as the western based medicine philosophy, where drugs and surgery are more or less their specialties. In addition to knowing virtually nothing about nutrition, natural solutions, and how to address the root causes of health conditions, many doctors, as well as scientist, have also been shown to be falsifying data in order to have research published. What's more, many colleagues of the scandalous individuals are urged to keep quiet about what they know.

Scandalous: Scientists and Doctors Falsifying Data for Research to be Published

A survey of nearly 2,800 scientists and doctors in the UK has found that 13 percent of them admitted to witnessing the falsification and fabrication of data created by their colleagues. Additionally, 6 percent of the nearly 2,800 individuals surveyed were aware of research misconduct at their own workplace which had never been properly investigated to looked into. Needless to say, there could very well be more scientists or doctors not speaking up, further increasing the scandal rate.
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Beaker

Powerful Drug Cocktails Have Deadly Results For Troops

James Dao, Benedict Carey & Dan Frosch
New York Times
Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:34 UTC
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© The New York Times
Pain AND Depression: Senior Airman Anthony Mena in Baghdad in 2007. After his death in 2009, a toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood.
In his last months alive, Senior Airman Anthony Mena rarely left home without a backpack filled with medications.

He returned from his second deployment to Iraq complaining of back pain, insomnia, anxiety and nightmares. Doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed powerful cocktails of psychiatric drugs and narcotics.

Yet his pain only deepened, as did his depression. "I have almost given up hope," he told a doctor in 2008, medical records show. "I should have died in Iraq."

Airman Mena died instead in his Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge. A toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood, including three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two potent painkillers.

Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded. What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but the interaction of many. He was 23.

Comment: The story of these soldiers over medicating themselves to death is tragic and clearly depicts: The War on Addiction Has Been Brought Home. In addition this article brings to light the issue that soldiers returning from war are suffering more than PTSD, they have injured souls:

Beyond PTSD: Soldiers Have Injured Souls
These veterans and thousands like them grapple with what some call "the war after the war" - the psychological scars of conflict. Working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and private organizations, these men and women are employing treatments both radically new and centuries old. At the center of their journey is a new way of thinking that redefines some traumas as moral injuries.

The psychological toll taken by war is obvious. For the second year in a row, more active-duty troops committed suicide in 2010 (468) than were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan (462). A 2008 RAND Corporation study reported that nearly 1 in 5 troops who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression.

Since the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, to its diagnostic manual in 1980, the diagnosis has most often focused on trauma associated with threats to a soldier's life. Today, however, therapists such as Jonathan Shay, a retired VA psychiatrist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant; Edward Tick, director of the private group Soldier's Heart; and Brett Litz, a VA psychologist, argue that this concept is too limited. What sometimes happens in war may more accurately be called a moral injury - a deep soul wound that pierces a person's identity, sense of morality and relationship to society. In short, a threat in a solder's life.


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