Health & WellnessS


Question

Could GMOs be behind your digestive problems?

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Digestive Problems?

Don't wait for science to sort it out, do your own test on the GMO effects on your health

The debate rages on as to whether genetically modified foods are safe for human consumption. While sixty-one countries - including most of the European nations, Brazil, and even China - require labeling on GMO products, our own country has no such protection in place for its citizens. There are also a growing number of countries who are refusing our GMO tainted exports, as is the case with the long grain rice Japan refused as far back as 2006 after tests revealed the rice contained trace amounts of GMO that were not approved for human consumption.

America's investor, Bill Gates, who purchased 500,000 shares of a biotech giant in 2010 says GMO crops are needed to fight worldwide starvation. Great Britain's Prince Charles has warned for years that companies developing those genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster of all time.

Meanwhile, the 20-year unofficial experiment here in America on many unsuspecting consumers has not yielded a sizeable number of provable studies as to the definitive health impact caused by GMOs in our food supply. And make no mistake, they're in our food supply. Genetically modified organisms are in an estimated 80% of the processed foods in our grocery stores, and some say they're responsible for the growing number of people suffering from a wide variety of symptoms, particularly digestive issues.

Alarm Clock

Exxon made us sick: Ann Jarrell is outraged, and she's not alone

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© UnknownExxon Made Us Sick: Ann Jarrell Is Outraged, and She's Not Alone
Ann Jarrell, a 54-year-old software trainer, received an urgent phone call at work from her 23-year- old daughter, Jennifer, in March of this year.

"It smells terrible out here, Mom," she said. "I don't know what's going on, but you need to get home."

What was going on was that the Pegasus pipeline, which carried Alabasca heavy crude oil (tar sands) from Illinois to Texas, had ruptured en route and the Jarrell's tiny town of Mayflower, Ark. had a river of oil flowing through its streets.

Jarrell has long blond hair and a voice hoarse from coughing. She told me last week that she'd been sharing her home with her daughter and four-month-old grandson, Logan, at the time of the spill. Their first concern was the child, but they couldn't decide what was best for him.

Her daughter wanted to pack up the baby and leave, but Ann wasn't sure what they should do. Her first instinct was to call the police. She did so, only to find a frustrating lack of answers.

"I asked, 'Do we need to evacuate?' They said, 'Do you have oil on your property?'" Jarrell remembered. When she told them there wasn't, and reported the smell, she says the answering officer was unmoved. She says he told her not to evacuate, and that the smell was the result of some sort of police containment situation. "'The smell's just so we can tell when it breaks,'" he told her. "'Just like they do with the natural gas line."

This is not true. No such mechanism existed for the pipeline.

Arrow Down

Dozens of cyclospora cases reported near Houston

Cyclospora
© CDC

Experts are investigating dozens of cyclospora cases in Fort Bend County.

The food-borne intestinal illness is caused by a parasite found in food and water. It's usually spread by produce tainted with feces.

Thirty-six cases have been confirmed by lab tests and eight more are likely cyclospora, according to the Fort Bend County Health Department.

Fort Bend County Health and Human Services experts are working with the CDC to track the source of the outbreak.

CDC experts traveled to Fort Bend County recently to interview dozens of restaurants and grocery stores. They hope to have an answer in the next few weeks.

At last check, at least four cases of cyclospora have been confirmed in Harris County.

A nationwide outbreak of cyclospora has sickened hundreds of people nationwide.

The CDC traced illnesses from Iowa and Nebraska to salad mix from a Mexican farm that was served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants.

The rest of the illnesses - many of them in Texas - are still a mystery, state and federal officials say.

Bacon n Eggs

A little pain, a lot of gain

resistance exercise1
Can you handle seven minutes of pain?

It's the science story that many gyms may not want to hear. What if you could reap the benefits of running and weight-bearing exercise without any expensive runners or contracts and do it all in, say, seven minutes?

Exercise science is a fine and intellectually fascinating thing. But sometimes you just want someone to lay out guidelines for how to put the latest fitness research into practice.

An article in the American College of Sports Medicine's Health & Fitness Journal does just that. In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort - all of it based on science.

''There's very good evidence that high-intensity interval training provides many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,'' says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Florida, and co-author of the article.

Work by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and other institutions shows, for instance, that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.

Interval training, though, requires intervals; the extremely intense activity must be intermingled with brief periods of recovery.

Comment: Resistance training is the perfect complement to the Paleo Diet or Ketogenic Diet.


Heart

The hidden truth about exercise

Exercise
© The Age, AustraliaExercise may be able to drastically alter how genes operate.
We all know exercise promotes health, reducing most people's risk of developing diabetes and becoming obese. Now light has been shed on how it does this at a cellular level.

It seems exercise may be able to drastically alter how genes operate, studies show. Genes are not static. They turn on or off depending on the biochemical signals they receive from elsewhere in the body. When turned on, genes express various proteins that in turn prompt a range of physiological actions in the body.
It seems exercise may be able to drastically alter how genes operate.
One powerful means of affecting gene activity involves a process called methylation, in which methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, attach to the outside of a gene and make it easier or harder for that gene to receive and respond to messages from the body. In this way, the behaviour of the gene is changed, but not the fundamental structure of the gene itself. Remarkably, these methylation patterns can be passed on to offspring - a phenomenon known as epigenetics.

What is particularly fascinating about the methylation process is that it seems to be driven largely by lifestyle. Diet, for instance, notably affects the methylation of genes, and scientists suspect that differing genetic methylation patterns resulting from differing diets may partly determine whether someone develops diabetes or other metabolic diseases.

Arrow Up

Bigger and healthier: European men grow 11cm in a century

Bridge of London
© Reuters/Paul Hackett
The average height of European men grew by a surprising 11 centimeters from the early 1870s to 1980, reflecting significant improvements in health across the region, according to new research published on Monday.

Contrary to expectations, the study also found that average height accelerated in the period spanning the two World Wars and the Great Depression, when poverty, food rationing and hardship of war might have been expected to limit people's growth.

The swift advance may have been due to people deciding to have fewer children in this period, the researchers said, and smaller family size has previously been found to be linked to increasing average height.

"Increases in human stature are a key indicator of improvements in the average health of populations," said Timothy Hatton, a professor economics at Britain's University of Essex who led the study.

He said the evidence - which shows the average height of a European male growing from 167 cm to 178 cm in a little over a 100 years - suggests an environment of improving health and decreasing disease "is the single most important factor driving the increase in height".

Shoe

Dean Karnazes: The man who can run for ever

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© PatitucciPhotoDean Karnazes running in Tuolumne Meadows, California
Most runners have to stop when they reach their lactate threshold, but Dean Karnazes' muscles never tire: he can run for three days and nights without stopping. What's his secret?

From club runners to Olympians, every athlete has a limit. Scientifically, this limit is defined as the body's lactate threshold and when you exercise beyond it, running rapidly becomes unpleasant. We've all experienced that burning feeling - heart pounding, lungs gasping for air - as your muscles begin to fatigue, eventually locking up altogether as your body shuts down. However, there is one man whose physiological performance defies all convention: Dean Karnazes is an ultrarunner from California and, at times, it seems as if he can run forever.

Karnazes has completed some of the toughest endurance events on the planet, from a marathon to the South Pole in temperatures of -25C to the legendary Marathon des Sables, but in his entire life he has never experienced any form of muscle burn or cramp, even during runs exceeding 100 miles. It means his only limits are in the mind.

"At a certain level of intensity, I do feel like I can go a long way without tiring," he says. "No matter how hard I push, my muscles never seize up. That's kind of a nice thing if I plan to run a long way."

When running, you break down glucose for energy, producing lactate as a byproduct and an additional source of fuel that can also be converted back into energy. However, when you exceed your lactate threshold, your body is no longer able to convert the lactate as rapidly as it is being produced, leading to a buildup of acidity in the muscles. It is your body's way of telling you when to stop - but Karnazes never receives such signals.

Beaker

Flashback Global chemical toxicity: 'The Disappearing Male'

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"We are conducting a vast toxicological experiment in which our children and our children's children are the experimental subjects." Dr. Herbert Needleman

The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.

The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer.

Magnify

Lawsuit claims: Shampoos still contain carcinogens

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© chictrends.com
An Oakland watchdog group has sued four companies and plans to sue dozens more for allegedly manufacturing or selling shampoos, soaps and other care products without attaching labels warning consumers that they contained high levels of a carcinogen.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court by the Center for Environmental Health, accused Walgreens, Lake Consumer Products, Vogue International and Ultimark Products of selling products that allegedly had cocamide diethanolamine, or cocamide DEA.

The group said it intends to sue more than 100 other companies that make or sell such products. The organization listed Walmart, Trader Joe's, Kohl's, Target, Rite Aid, Sears, T.J. Maxx, Sephora and Colgate Palmolive.

Cocamide DEA, which is used to make foam and bubbles, was named last year as a carcinogen under Proposition 65, which requires warnings for consumer products with harmful amounts of certain toxic compounds. The chemical was added after the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared it a possible carcinogen in humans.

Comment: Are you Swimming in Chemicals? Read more about everyday products that contain cancer causing carcinogens:

Toxic Cosmetic Ingredients
The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products
Dangerous Beauty: 5 Hazardous Beauty Products
The Danger of Toxic Consumer Products, Fragrances
Recognizing Toxic Chemicals in Body Care Products
Many Scented Consumer Products Emit Toxic Chemicals: Study
Toxic Burden: Women Put 515 Chemicals on Their Faces Every Day
Bodies of Pregnant Women Polluted with Chemicals Found in Consumer Products
Everyday Products Are Filled With Toxins - And We're Not Doing a Thing About It


Red Flag

Eating whole grains is killing you

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In case you haven't heard, eating whole grains is slowly killing you. I know this goes against Canada's food guide and everything you've been taught, but I'm here to tell you the truth.

Canada's food guide

Canada's food guide is complete bullshit. If you want to get fat and unhealthy, go pick up a copy and follow it to a tee. They'll tell you to eat 3-8 servings of whole grains a day (1)

I basically follow a diet that's the direct opposite of what I was taught in my nutrition degree and medical school. Why? It's not because I like being different and opposing every mainstream view out there, it's because I'm constantly in pursuit of being the fittest, healthiest person I can possibly be

Wheat contains anti-nutrients

Wheat contains phytates (2). Phytates block the absorption of key minerals like magnesium, calcium and iron (2). Low iron? Ditch the wheat; it can inhibit its absorption by up to 50%! (2). It also blocks the absorption of magnesium, (3) a mineral that is crucial in preventing type two diabetes (4). Low testosterone and sex drive? Wheat blocks the absorption of zinc, a mineral that's critical to your sex life and building muscle (5). I take zinc everyday.

Comment: Read the following articles to learn more about the negative health effects of a grain/wheat based diet:

Wheat: The Addictive Opiate
Wheat the Opiate of the Masses?
Why Refined Grains Are Harmful
Facts you might not know about gluten
Caveman Diet: Grain Free, Disease Free
Wheat contains over 23,000 potentially harmful proteins
Modern wheat is the 'perfect chronic poison' says expert
Take a Look at the Damage Wheat Bread Can Cause You
Wheat's Cardiotoxicity: As serious as a heart attack
Beyond Celiac disease: The universal toxicity of wheat, Part I
Super-common food that's ruining your skin, joints and blood sugar
Can You Stomach Wheat? How Giving up Grain May Better Your Health