Health & WellnessS

Bad Guys

FDA Running Extortion Racket: Natural Supplement Companies Threatened with Arrest if They Don't Pay Up

Natural News has learned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is running a criminal extortion racket designed to drain cash from health supplement companies and shift it into the pockets of top FDA contractors. This organized crime operation has been running for years, and it has operated with impunity because each company targeted by the scam feels isolated and alone, unable to face the astronomical legal bills of going to court and battling the FDA. So one by one, they agree to "settle" with the FDA for crimes they never committed. Part of the settlement, of course, involves the payment of FDA employees or contractors who pocket the money extorted from health companies.

Coffee

Women Face Drink & Shrink Dilemma



Ladies, if you care about being a C or a D cup, you better put down that coffee cup.

A new study has found that drinking caffeine over an extended period of time makes women's breasts shrink.

Coffee Drinker

Health

US: Elderly man dies after contracting West Nile

Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. - An elderly Rancho Palos Verdes man has died after contracting West Nile virus.

Seven Californians have died of the mosquito-borne disease this year.

The Los Angeles County West Vector Control District says the Rancho Palos Verdes man, whose name is being withheld, was hospitalized with encephalitis and he died Oct. 10.

It is not clear where the victim was when he contracted the virus, which is transmitted by mosquito bites and can cause encephalitis, meningitis, fever and sometimes death, especially in elderly people or those with immune deficiencies.

Family

Teen motherhood: Celebrity buzz belies its cost

Teen motherhood has gained a bit of celebrity allure with the pregnancies of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, but front-line professionals see a starkly different reality involving poverty, lost opportunities and a cost to taxpayers in the billions of dollars annually.

Syringe

HIV scare puts Mo. school in uncertain territory

Students at a suburban St. Louis high school headed to the gymnasium for HIV testing this week after an infected person told health officials as many as 50 teenagers might have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS.

Health

Deceptively Happy: Angelman Syndrome Often Misunderstood

Ryan Ravellette and mother
© Susan RavelletteRyan Ravellette, 6, and his mother Susan.
Six-year-old Ryan Ravellette is a happy and sociable child; he has a smile that can light up a room. But his beaming smile both belies and reveals a genetic condition that will affect him for the rest of his life -- and make normal communication all but impossible for the upbeat little boy.

Ryan is one of a few thousand children in the United States who has Angelman syndrome, a condition associated with severe cognitive and developmental disorders, as well as seizures.

What sets this condition apart from many others is the unusually cheerful, gregarious disposition of the children who have it. This characteristic, along with the syndrome's effects on coordination, has earned it the nickname "happy puppet syndrome."

People

Warm Hands Warm Your Heart

You're probably familiar with the expression, "cold hands, warm heart." Now there's science to show the opposite is true.

Lawrence Williams, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John A. Bargh, PhD, professor of psychology at Yale University, conducted two studies on undergraduate students to assess how temperatures affect emotions. They found that holding warm things may actually make people view others more favorably and may also make people more generous.

Arrow Down

'Detoxifying' Foot Pads are a Scam

footpads
An NPR experiment on Kinoki foot pads tested to see if they'd drawn anything out of a reporter's body.

Reporter Sarah Varney and her husband bought some "detoxifying" Kinoki foot pads and wore them to bed. In the morning, they both awoke find the pads covered in the brown mess that the advertisement had promised. But when they took the foot pads to a lab and had them analyzed and compared with unused pads, the used pads were almost identical to the blank.

Further experimentation showed that the "gunk" in the pads shows up if you hold the pad over a pot of boiling water. Who knew steam had "metabolic waste"?

Syringe

No Escape from the Madness: Bill Gates funds 'flying syringe' mosquitos to deliver vaccines

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded 100,000 dollars each on Wednesday to scientists in 22 countries including funding for a Japanese proposal to turn mosquitos into "flying syringes" delivering vaccines.
'Flying Syringe' Mosquitos
© Agence France PresseA group of mosquitos are shown inside a net

People

Food allergies increase by 18% in US kids since 1997

Food allergy chart
© Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Food allergies in American children seem to be on the rise, now affecting about 3 million kids, according to the first federal study of the problem. Experts said that might be because parents are more aware and quicker to have their kids checked out by a doctor.

About 1 in 26 children had food allergies last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday. That's up from 1 in 30 kids in 1997. The 18 percent increase is significant enough to be considered more than a statistical blip, said Amy Branum of the CDC, the study's lead author.

Nobody knows for sure what's driving the increase. A doubling in peanut allergies - noted in earlier studies - is one factor, some experts said. Also, children seems to be taking longer to outgrow milk and egg allergies than they did in decades past.

Comment: With the continuing poisoning of the environment and food supply, is it any surprise that food allergy is sharply increasing? Check out our forum where we gather and discuss the best ways to protect our health from the onslaught of the environmental toxins.