Health & Wellness
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its latest assessment of the chemicals people are carrying around in their bodies.
The biomonitoring study is the most comprehensive in the world, measuring 212 chemicals in the blood and urine of 8,000 Americans.
The CDC highlighted a few chemicals because they are both widespread -- found in all or most people tested -- and potentially harmful.
Just like eating organic food, using toxin-free toiletries is a good way to keep our bodies - and the environment - healthy, and more of us are choosing products that are labelled "natural", or better still "organic", believing that they will be good for us. But can we trust these claims?
Over the past five years there has been a boom in "organic" and "natural" brands that are supposedly free of nasty chemicals. Yet in reality, a product can use those labels if just one per cent of its ingredients fall into either category - the other 99 per cent can be man-made. This situation makes those who produce truly organic brands justifiably angry.
"Companies use the 'organic' label falsely to cash in on its marketing cachet," says Michael Bronner, the vice-president of the US organic brand Dr Bronner's Magic Soaps. "As a consumer, this makes me feel cynical and deceived; as a business owner who makes certified organic products, it makes me feel cheated out of eco-conscious customers who want organic products but actually buy cheap ones that are labelled falsely."
Hundreds of public sector workers who claim their lives have been wrecked by vaccines say the Government has abandoned them.
Up to 200 doctors, nurses, firefighters, prison officers, police officers, forensic scientists and binmen say they have developed serious physical and mental health problems after injections essential for their work over the past 10 years. All have given up their jobs and some are now 60 per cent disabled.
Last night it emerged they are to miss out on payouts, prompting furore among campaigners. More than 150 MPs have lent their support to demands for a better deal for the victims.
Olivia Price, of the Vaccine Victim Support Group, said: "These people have given their lives in the service of looking after others and this is how they're repaid. They've lost their careers and are a burden to their families. It is very degrading."
Certain personality traits may create better perpetrators and, unfortunately certain cues may create better victims. In a study by Wheeler, Book and Costello of Brock University, individuals who self reported more traits associated with psychopathy were more apt to correctly identify individuals with a history of victimization.
In the study, male student participants examined video tapes of twelve individuals walking from behind and rated the ease at which each could be mugged. The men also completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III (Paulhus, Hemphill, & Hare, in press) which measures interpersonal and affective traits associated with psychopathy as well as intra-personal instability and antisocial traits. Finally, they were asked to provide verbal rational for their ratings. Overall results confirmed a strong positive correlation between psychopathy scores and accuracy of victim identification. This means that individuals that score higher for psycopathy are better at selecting victims. Statistically significant results for psychopathy traits including interpersonal manipulation, callous affect and antisocial bevavior were found.
Unusually High Autism Rates in Some Areas Not Tied to Environmental Causes
Researchers have found clusters of autism in 10 areas around California -- but with no suggestion of a link to local pollution or other environmental exposures, they said.
Instead, the only consistent factor among the areas -- identified largely in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay region -- was a population of well-educated parents, Karla Van Meter of the University of California Davis and colleagues found.
In six of the clusters, a college-educated parent conferred a risk of autism that was more than four times as great as a parent who didn't graduate from high school, they reported online in Autism Research.
For a couple of years, the Institute for Responsible Technology has predicted that the US would soon experience a tipping point of consumer rejection against genetically modified foods; a change we're all helping to bring about. Now a December article in
Supermarket News supports both our prediction and the role the Institute is playing.
"The coming year promises to bring about a greater, more pervasive awarenes" of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply, wrote Group Editor Robert Vosburgh, in a trade publication that conventional food executives and retailers use as a primary source of news and trends in the industry. Vosburgh describes how previous food "culprits" like fat and carbs "can even define the decade in which they were topical," and suggests that GMOs may finally burst through into the public awareness and join their ranks.
For the first time, a long-term health study has demonstrated that the Mediterranean diet may help diabetes patients control their blood sugar without the use of medication.
"A Mediterranean-style diet is a very important part in the treatment of diabetes," said endocrinologist Loren Greene of New York University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. "We knew that, but there just hasn't been a good study to confirm this before."
In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers assigned 215 overweight, adult residents of Naples, Italy, to adhere to one of two diets. Participants in one group were assigned to follow a Mediterranean diet -- eating large quantities of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and certain healthy fats such as olive oil; favoring lean protein sources such as nuts, poultry and fish; and gaining no more than half their daily calories from carbohydrates. Participants in the other group were assigned to follow a low-fat diet similar to that recommended by the American Heart Association -- with no more than 30 percent of its daily calories from fat and 10 percent from saturated fat; low in sweets and high-fat snacks; and high in fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
An overweight America may be fixated on fat and obsessed with carbs but nutritionists say the real problem is much sweeter -- we're awash in sugar.
Not just any sugar but high fructose corn syrup.
The country eats more sweetener made from corn than from sugarcane or beets gulping it down in drinks as well as in frozen food and baked goods. Even ketchup is laced with it.
Almost all nutritionists finger high fructose corn syrup consumption as a major culprit in the nation's obesity crisis. The inexpensive sweetener flooded the American food supply in the early 1980s just about the time the nation's obesity rate started its unprecedented climb.
The question is why did it make us so fat. Is it simply the Big Gulp syndrome -- that we're eating too many empty calories in ever-increasing portion sizes? Or does the fructose in all that corn syrup do something more insidious -- literally short-wire our metabolism and force us to gain weight?
© Ashycat/Flickr
If you're drinking a fountain beverage from a restaurant right now, you probably want to skip to the next blog entry. You've been warned. A team of microbiologists from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia have conducted one of those studies that we never -- ever -- like to hear about. They discovered coliform and fecal coliform bacteria and other "opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms" present in more than half of all restaurant soda machines.
Fecal coliform bacteria is exactly what it sounds like.
In other words, if the beef doesn't make you sick from the bacteria and the ammonia used to clean the processed beef filler, the soda might come back to haunt you with "episodic gastric distress."
According to the study, pathogens ranging from
E. coli to
Chryseobacterium meningosepticum, which is a bacteria that causes infections such as meningitis and pneumonia, were discovered on the commonly used soda dispensers. They also discovered
Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and
Serratia.
Oh, and it gets worse. The strains of bacteria were resistant to 11 different antibiotics.
Have you ever noticed that, as a rule, children sleep better than adults? I have spent the last week with a five-year old girl and an eight-year old boy. Once they get their bedtime story and put their heads down to sleep, they are out cold. We have probably seen this many times in our life: children passed out in their parents' arms; children sleeping on a couch in a room full of people. Not all children are like this all the time of course, but in general, the rule holds.
Why is this? Why do children sleep better than adults? Answers coming out of innovative areas of neurology and bio-psychology indicate that due to stress, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and in particular the use of stimulants (coffee, tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs, recreational drugs) adults are experiencing neurotransmitter imbalances and disturbed neurotransmitter receptor sites that are translating into poor sleep. On the other hand, children -- especially well-fed, well-loved children and breast-fed infants -- have a healthier balance of neurotransmitters and pure neurotransmitter receptor sites and thus sleep better.
The indication is that neurotransmitters play a crucial role in sleeping and how well we sleep.
Comment: There is an even greater risk than "gastric distress" by consuming high-fructose corn syrup. See: Sugar coated / We're drowning in high fructose corn syrup. Do the risks go beyond our waistline?