Health & Wellness
From the McDonald's McGriddle to Wendy's "Baconator" to "baconnaise" to bacon-infused vodka, bacon has become a ubiquitous ingredient in many diets in this era of extreme food combinations. Arun Gupta of
The Indypendent writes, "Behind the proliferation of bacon offerings is a confluence of government policy, factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste that has turned bacon into a weapon of mass destruction."
Amy Goodman: We're joined here in our firehouse studio by Arun Gupta, journalist, editor of
The Indypendent newspaper in New York. He's writing a book on the decline of American empire for Haymarket Books. His latest article is published at Alternet.org and
The Indypendent, and it's called
"Gonzo Gastronomy: How the Food Industry Has Made Bacon a Weapon of Mass Destruction," looking at how industrial farming is central to the processed food industry. Arun also happens to be a trained chef, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute.
As well, we're joined from Link TV's studios in San Francisco by Dr. David Kessler, who is the former FDA commissioner, has written the book
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.
Shelagh McLoughlin
The WitnessFri, 31 Jul 2009 13:53 UTC
WHAT is raw food?
Raw food is plant-based, uncooked food the way nature provides it to us. By cooking we mean heating anything beyond 47°C, which is the temperature at which enzymes in food begin to be destroyed. To test how hot this is, if it burns your finger it's too hot.
Why eat it?
Uncooked food provides you with more nutrients. The cooking process has been shown to destroy nutrients and the higher the temperature, the more is detroyed. Because of the destruction of enzymes, cooked food requires more energy to digest.
What are the benefits?
Most common is a feeling of lightness and clarity. Emotions become more stable. Chronic conditions often improve and skin, hair and nails look better. Less sleep is required, as your body is no longer detoxifying all night and weight loss is often dramatic. I can see this being easier to follow in summer than in winter.
A new advanced method for nano-scale imaging of vesicle-fusion - vesicles are biological nano-sized containers - could add to our understanding of diseases of the nervous system and viral infections. In the long term, this could be useful in developing a cure for neurological diseases and mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, depression, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease). Researchers from the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology and the Nano-Science Center at the University of Copenhagen are behind the new data, which have recently been published in the prestigious scientific journal PNAS.
Neurons communicate with each other with the help of nano-sized vesicles. Disruption of this communication process is responsible for many diseases and mental disorders like e.g. depression. Nerve signals travel from one neuron to another through vesicles - a nano-sized container loaded with neurotransmitter molecules. A vesicle fuses with the membrane surrounding a neuron, releases neurotransmitters into the surroundings that are detected by the next neuron in line. However, we still lack a more detailed understanding of how the fusion of vesicles occurs on the nano-scale.
If you are a man, you've probably had the fear of prostate cancer drilled into you -- along with the idea that it is critical to your health, and probably your life, to have regular prostate cancer screenings. But two just released large randomized trials indicate that if there is any benefit to screening, it is extraordinarily small. The authors of a review of this research, just published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, Otis W. Brawley, M.D. of the American Cancer Society and Donna Ankerst, Ph.D. and Ian M. Thompson, M.D. of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, say that prostate cancer is almost inevitable in men as they grow older, so a medical goal to find more prostate cancers is not acceptable.
In fact, they point out that principles of good public health policy call for screenings only if they reduce the risk of death and/or suffering from prostate cancer, or reduce health care costs when compared with a non-screening scenario. And according to the new research, prostate cancer screenings do none of these things. But they can cause havoc in a man's life.
A new scientific study proves that the mercury-based compound used as vaccine preservative -- known as 'thimerosal' -- induces neural damage similar to that seen in autism patients.
According to the study, thimerosal-induced cellular damage caused concentration- and time-dependent mitochondrial damage, reduced oxidative-reduction activity, cellular degeneration, and cell death. Thimerosal at low concentrations induced significant cellular toxicity in human neuronal and fetal cells.
Thimerosal was found to be significantly more toxic than the other metal compounds examined.
A woman lost 55 pounds after undergoing hypnosis to implant memories of a gastric band surgery in her head.
"I've tried every other diet and exercise plan the world has to offer," said the woman, Marion Corns. "Now I am able to shed up to three pounds a week because I believe I've had a band fitted into my stomach. Bizarrely, I can remember every part of the 'procedure' - including being wheeled into theatre, the clink of the surgeon's knife and even the smell of the anesthetic."
People who understand body cleansing, understand what detoxification symptoms are. Medical professionals understand the symptoms that make up what we call disease. But the odd thing is that most detoxification symptoms are also the symptoms used to detect a disease.
If you think about that for a minute, what does it really tell you? The truth is: When we have a problem in the body, the body tries to detoxify itself to remove the problem. That is why we experience detoxification symptoms in the presence of a problem. Yet, your doctor will often call the presence of these symptoms the problem, without understanding what the body is trying to do about the problem.
Elevated cholesterol levels in midlife - even levels considered only borderline elevated - significantly increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia later in life, according to a new study by researchers at Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research and the University of Kuopio in Finland.
The study appears in the journal Dementia & Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
The four-decade study of 9,844 men and women found that having high cholesterol in midlife (240 or higher milligrams per deciliter of blood) increases, by 66 percent, the risk for Alzheimer's disease later in life.
A team of US scientists has for the first time unravelled the entire genetic code of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, paving the way for a better understanding of how these types of viruses infect humans and hopefully speeding up the discovery and development of new drugs.
The work was done by Dr Kevin Weeks, a chemistry professor of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, and colleagues, and features as the cover story of the 6 August issue of Nature.
Before this work, researchers had only modeled small regions of the HIV genome, which is very large and made of two strands of nearly 10,000 building blocks or nucleotides each.
