Pain and unhealthy levels of inflammation are fast becoming default bodily states in the industrialized world. While in most cases we can adjust the underlying pro-inflammatory conditions by altering our diet, and reducing stress and environmental chemical exposures, these approaches take time, discipline and energy, and sometimes we just want the pain to stop now.

In those, often compulsive moments, we find ourselves popping an over-the-counter pill to kill the pain.

The problem with this approach is that, if we do it often enough, we may kill ourselves along with the pain...

Take ibuprofen as an example. This petrochemical-derivative has been linked to significantly increased risk of heart attack and increased cardiac and all-cause mortality (when combined with aspirin), with over two dozen serious adverse health effects, including:

1. Anemia[1]
2. DNA Damage[2]
3. Hearing Loss[3]
4. Hypertension[4]
5. Influenza Mortality[5]
6. Miscarriage[6]

Ibuprofen is, in fact, not unique in elevating cardiovascular disease risk and/or mortality. The entire category of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) appears to have this under-recognized dark side; of the 100 unintended adverse health effects associated with their use, cardiovascular disease and cardiac mortality score highest on the list.

So, what does one do? Pain is pain. Whether it happens to you, or you witness it in another (which can be worse), finding relief is a top priority.

Rather than continue to put up with endless stonewalling and excuse-making by federal and state governments that refuse to require mandatory labeling of genetically-modified organisms, a massive, grassroots effort is currently underway to spur individuals across the country to begin labeling GMOs right now.

The Label It Yourself (LIY) campaign, which describes itself as a "decentralized, autonomous grassroots campaign born out of our broken food system," is cultivating a nationwide network of concerned individuals that are willing and able to take it to the grocery stores in pursuit of full transparency in food labeling.

The campaign is urging the "99 percent," which of course represents the common man, to download and print labels that say, "Warning, May Contain GMOs," and affix them on various processed and non-organic food products that likely contain GMOs. The 1.5 inch by 1.5 inch stickers, which feature a skull head and two ears of corn, draw attention to the presence of GMOs, and direct consumers to the LIY website.

Would you eat chicken that ate arsenic and banned antibiotics? You probably already have.

When eating that delicious nugget, or scrumptious chicken salad.... do you ever wonder how the tender, juicy, and appealing shades of pink get to your dinner plate? Welcome factory farming.

The human consumption of poultry products is more than any other animal. Each year, factory farms raise about 9 billion broiler chickens. The 'rendering industry' is a recycling business that converts animal byproducts into marketable materials, including feed.

Following the poultry slaughter, feathers are routinely rendered into a feather meal and sold as animal feed. This provides a potential pathway for reentry of their feed into the human food chain.

A very strange and disturbing brew is fed to chickens, combining rendered chicken parts, and pharmaceuticals. Keeve Nachman, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University led a team to see if antibiotics were given to chickens. A chemical panel (test) also looked for other chemicals found, and what they accidently discovered, was appalling, shocking many.[1] [2]

The tests identified the proprietary chicken to include: Fluoroquinolones (banned antibiotics), arsenic, caffeine, antidepressants, antihistamines, acetaminophen, and green tea. Are you kidding? Why all of these?

More than 2.2 million pounds of roxarsone (an arsenic-based animal drug) is utilized to fight parasites and increase the growth rate of chickens...and the arsenic is just a component of the feed.

Breaking new research indicates that manufacturers throughout the world who were using the toxic hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA), have simply switched to an equally toxic analogue in the same bisphenol chemical class known as bisphenol S (BPS), to evade regulatory oversight and trick consumers with their misleading "BPA-FREE!" labels....

If you are already sensitive to the highly concerning issue of toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products, you've probably noticed these "BPA-Free" labels popping up everywhere. Bisphenol A (BPA), of course, is a chemical capable of disrupting our hormones, and is especially problematic in pregnancy, infancy and childhood -- times of greatest susceptibility to the adverse effects of environmental exposures.

Now that consumers are refusing to buy BPA-containing containers, manufacturers have had no choice but to oblige with seemingly bisphenol-free alternatives. Ironically, BPA is used to make Sippy Cups (and polycarbonate) shatterproof, and therefore "safer."

But, instead of manufacturers actually removing the danger in BPA-free labeled products, many are capitalizing on this marketing opportunity by removing only the perception of danger, opting to substitute BPA for equally toxic members of the bisphenol chemical class.

An Alphabetic Soup of Toxic Bisphenols In Consumer Goods

While BPA has received the most negative attention, often being labeled as "bisphenol" for short, the bisphenols are such a broad chemical class that they are identified pseudo-alphabetically, spanning letters A-Z:

1. Bisphenol A
2. Bisphenol AB
3. Bisphenol AF
4. Bisphenol B
5. Bisphenol BP
6. Bisphenol C
7. Bisphenol E
8. Bisphenol F
9. Bisphenol G
10. Bisphenol M
11. Bisphenol S
12. Bisphenol P
13. Bisphenol PH
14. Bisphenol TMC
15. Bisphenol Z

A significant number of adults are at risk of unintentionally overdosing on over-the-counter (OTC) pain medication, according to a new study in the US by Dr. Michael Wolf, from Northwestern University in Chicago, and his colleagues. Their work, looking at the prevalence and potential misuse of pain medication containing the active ingredient acetaminophen as well as the likelihood of overdosing, appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published by Springer.

Many adults in the US regularly use OTC pain medication containing the active ingredient acetaminophen, the most commonly used OTC pain medication in the US. They take it either on its own or in combination with other drugs, which may also contain acetaminophen. The ease of access to OTC drugs presents a challenge to patient safety as many individuals may lack the necessary health literacy skills to self-administer these medicines appropriately. Indeed, individuals make independent decisions that match an OTC product to a self-diagnosed symptom or condition. Worryingly, acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause of acute liver failure.

Rats with spinal cord injuries and severe paralysis are now walking (and running) thanks to researchers at EPFL. Published in the June 1, 2012 issue of Science, the results show that a severed section of the spinal cord can make a comeback when its own innate intelligence and regenerative capacity is awakened. The study, begun five years ago at the University of Zurich, points to a profound change in our understanding of the central nervous system. According to lead author Grégoire Courtine, it is yet unclear if similar rehabilitation techniques could work for humans, but the observed nerve growth hints at new methods for treating paralysis.

With the last few posts having been focused on the big yellow orb in the sky, and with several papers focused on cholesterol scattered on my bedroom floor that I have every intention of writing up, tonight's paper of the week, month, whenever...whatever... seems to form a nice bridge between the two themes. And it is a bit of an old-school paper, dating back to 1996...

Sunlight, cholesterol and coronary heart disease

We investigated the relationship between geography and incidence of coronary heart disease, looking at deficiency of sunlight and thus of vitamin D as a factor that might influence susceptibility and thus disease incidence.

Sunlight deficiency could increase blood cholesterol by allowing squalene metabolism to progress to cholesterol synthesis rather than to vitamin D synthesis as would occur with greater amounts of sunlight exposure, and the increased concentration of blood cholesterol during the winter months, confirmed in this study, may well be due to reduced sunlight exposure.

Six days ago, I broke a story about the FDA. On one of its own web pages, the agency admits that medical drugs kill 100,000 Americans a year.

Of course, none of those drugs would have reached the public, if the FDA had ruled them out as dangerous. The FDA is the single entity responsible for certifying medical drugs as safe and effective. On its web page, the FDA neglected to mention that fact.

Imagine this. You go to an FBI web page and read the following: "Murders committed by FBI agents are the third leading cause of homicides in America every year."

Wouldn't that set off alarm bells? Wouldn't there be a public outcry? Wouldn't the the press go crazy with the story?

Yet somehow, the FDA gets away with its crimes, its homicides. There are no alarm bells, no arrests, no hearings, no public statements, no press reactions, no shakeups at the Agency.

It's a miracle.

As I've been saying and writing for a decade now, the power of the medical cartel is gigantic.

When I was running for a Congressional seat from the 29^th District of California, in 1994, and during my participation in the Health Freedom movement of that period, I insisted we had to take the attack to the FDA. We had to make their crimes public.

I was told by the people who were leading the charge for Health Freedom that priority had to be given to passing a law that would protect us all from attacks on nutritional supplements. Then, when we had that law, we could think about going after the FDA.

Well, we got the law, which only gave us temporary protection, and afterward, there was no "going after the FDA." It was suddenly a dead issue.

I remember the people who said, "Don't attack the FDA." I remember their attitudes, their faces, their words. They were not my friends, and they weren't your friends. Some of them were yuppies selling "let's be nice" New Age sentiment. A few were most likely plants who had infiltrated the Health Freedom movement to water it down.

The number of people with cancer is set to surge by more than 75 percent across the world by 2030, with particularly sharp rises in poor countries as they adopt unhealthy "Westernized" lifestyles, a study said on Friday.

Many developing countries were expected to see a rise in living standards in coming decades, said the paper from the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.

But those advances could come at a cost - an increase in cases of cancers linked to poor diet, lack of exercise and other bad habits associated with affluence and linked to diseases like breast, prostate and colorectal cancers, it added.

"Cancer is already the leading cause of death in many high-income countries and is set to become a major cause of morbidity (sickness) and mortality in the next decades in every region of the world," said Freddie Bray from IARC's cancer information section.

The study was the first to look at how present and future rates of cancer might vary between richer and poorer countries, as measured by the development rankings defined in the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI).

While pregnant with her son Edgar, Melissa Wolfe followed the lead of many a cautious woman before her. She took prenatal vitamins and ate organic vegetables. She avoided dyeing her hair and using hairspray. She even went as far as to leave the kitchen whenever someone turned on the microwave.

"I was very vigilant. Perhaps a little crazy," said Wolfe, of Brentwood, N.H.

Yet Wolfe still fears that her 4-year-old's autism may have resulted from chemicals infiltrating her womb, whether components of her migraine medicine, contaminants brought home from her husband's work installing rubber flooring, or remnants of the remodeling the couple did on their house.

The remodeling "created even more chemicals that I was breathing while pregnant," she said. Wolfe also wonders if her father's exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, which the government has now blamed for his prostate cancer, might be somehow connected to her son's disability.