Health & WellnessS


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Naps Clear Brain's Inbox, Improve Learning

Victoria Jaggard
National Geographic News
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:00 UTC
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© Joel Sartore/National GeographicNaps wipe the brain's memory slate clean, a new sleep study says.
If your brain is an email account, sleep - and more specifically, naps - is how you clear out your inbox.

That's the conclusion of a new study that may explain why people spend so many of their sleeping hours in a pre-dreaming state known as stage 2 non-rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.

For years sleep studies have hinted that shut-eye improves our ability to store and consolidate memories, reinforcing the notion that a good night's sleep - and power naps - is much more conducive to learning than an overnight cram session.

Now scientists may have figured out how, in part, this happens: During sleep, information locked in the short-term storage of the hippocampus - the part of the brain responsible for memories - migrates into the longer-term database of the cortex.

This action not only helps the brain process new information, it also clears out space for the brain to take in new experiences.
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In Learning, the Brain Forgets Things on Purpose


U.S.News & World Report
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:00 UTC
Scientists have known that newly acquired, short-term memories are often fleeting. But a new study in flies suggests that kind of forgetfulness doesn't just happen. Rather, an active process of erasing memories may in some ways be as important as the ability to lay down new memories, say researchers who report their findings in the February 19th issue of the journal Cell, a publication of Cell Press.

"Learning activates the biochemical formation of memory," says Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "But you need to remove memories for new information to come in. We've found that forgetting is an active process to remove memory."

The researchers have traced that process to a molecular pathway including a small protein known as Rac. When that mechanism is blocked, flies hold on to newly acquired memories for longer than they otherwise would.
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Cow Skull

Beef really is made with chicken s#*t

Tom Philpott
Grist
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:23 UTC
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What the hell are you feeding us?
Agricultural societies, I imagine, have always fed waste products to livestock. On diversified farms, pigs and chickens get lots of kitchen scraps and "culls" - produce that can't be sold. And it's worthwhile to keep cows around if you have access to pasture - cows convert a wild, low-input perennial crop (grass), which humans can't digest, into highly nutritious beef and milk.

But as agriculture industrialized, the waste products that farmers serve to farm animals have industrialized, too. Before the rise of massive facilities that house thousands of chickens and vast feedlots that confine thousands of cows, I doubt anyone thought of feeding "chicken litter" - feces mixed with bedding, feathers, and uneaten feed - to cows. Chicken litter was a valuable fertilizer; it added not just nitrogen and other nutrients to soil, but also plenty of organic matter.

But with the rise of industrial chicken production, farms produced way too much litter to be absorbed by nearby land (not that they don't often severely overload the land around them).

So what was once a resource has become a waste problem - and one solution has been to feed chicken litter to cows. Cows consume between 1 million and 2 million tons of chicken waste per year - and then we consume those cows This is a vile practice that should be banned. Here's how Consumers Union describes the quality of chicken litter as cow feed:
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People

Do Our Organs Have Memories?

Jurrian Kamp
Care2
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:17 UTC
Transplant patients sometimes take on part of their donors' personalities.

Glenda lost her husband, David, in a car crash. She made his organs available for transplant. A few years later, as part of a study by neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the young Spanish-speaking man who had received her late husband's heart. Filled with emotion, Glenda asked if she could lay her hand on his chest. "I love you, David," she said. "Everything's copa­cetic."

The young man's mother, also present, was startled. "My son uses that word now," she said. "He never said it before his heart transplant. I don't know that word; it doesn't exist in Spanish. But it was the first thing he said after the operation."
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Health

Vaccine Link to Autism Dismissed

Martin Johnston
New Zealand Herald
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:00 UTC
Vaccination
© Christchurch StarThe controversial reasearch paper was withdrawn as a result of a preliminary verdict that the authors had acted 'dishonestly' and 'irresponsibly'.
The retraction of a controversial research paper on vaccination, 12 years after it suggested a link to autism, is hoped to lead to an increase in the number of children who receive vaccinations.

The paper investigating the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination was published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1998 by Dr Andrew Wakefield and colleagues. It triggered an international scare and is credited with causing a reduction in use of the MMR vaccination and a consequent increase in the diseases it protects against.

The Lancet said this week that it had withdrawn the paper as a result of last week's preliminary verdict by a panel from Britain's General Medical Council that Dr Wakefield and two of his co-authors had acted "dishonestly" and "irresponsibly".

Comment: Pharmaceutical companies make billions from the sale of vaccines. Almost all vaccines given to the general public contain mercury. Mercury is a poison. That one study into the link between autism and has been discredited does nothing to explain the many cases where children developed the first signs of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine.

Are you willing to allow pharmaceutical companies to get rich by scaring you into taking or giving your children non-trial-tested and potentially dangerous vaccines?

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The Top 10 Toxic Products You Don't Need


healthychild.org
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:03 UTC
It's become so common in our culture to assume we need things - a lot of things. Over-consumption is not only a strain on our bank accounts and environment, it can also be harmful to our health. Whether there's a warning label or not (usually not), many of the things we buy have associated health risks.

Here are ten toxic products, in no particular order, that you don't need. And, once you read about them, you probably won't want them either. Be aware that different homes may have different products that are more toxic than these. This is just a basic list of some of the most commonly purchased products that are almost entirely unnecessary, but pose significant risks.
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Health

GlaxoSmithKline Deliberately Hid Evidence of Avandia Harm, Says Senate Report

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
GlaxoSmithKline, maker of the diabetes drug Avandia, knew the drug was linked to tens of thousands of heart attacks but went out of its way to hide this information from the public, says a 334-page report just released by the Senate Finance Committee.

This report also accuses the FDA of betraying the public trust, explaining that FDA bureaucrats intentionally dismissed safety concerns found by the agency's own scientists.

The report says that Big Pharma's drugs "put public safety at risk because the FDA has been too cozy with drug makers and has been regularly out maneuvered by companies that have a financial interest in downplaying or under-exploring potential safety risks." Sales of Avandia were $3.2 billion (yes, billion) in 2006.

According to a statistical analysis in the report, if all the diabetics currently taking Avandia were put on a "safer" drug, it would avert 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure every month in the United States alone. Presently, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still taking this drug, and hundreds will continue to die each month as a result, according to the report estimates.
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Health

Why Our Environment is Still Awash in Dangerous Chemicals

Spencer Hunt
The Columbus Dispatch
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:46 UTC
When it comes to dry cleaning, nothing else gets stains out like a chemical called perchloroethylene, or "perc," for short.

"I can't say I've seen anything better," said Mike Hill, plant manager for the Caskey Cleaning Co. at 47 W. Gates St. on the South Side.

Maybe, but for decades, officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been studying the chemical as a cancer threat. After years of research, the EPA has proposed changing that threat level to people from "possible" to "likely."

Ohio businesses released an estimated 313,000 pounds of perc into the air in 2008, but industry groups continue to argue that even a "likely" cancer connection hasn't been proved.

"I've been working around it now for over 14 years, and my father has been working around it for over 30 years," Hill said. "We haven't seen any ill effects."

EPA officials and environmental advocates point to perc as an example of an even-bigger problem - a federal law that they say keeps the government from protecting people from dangerous chemicals.

Comment: The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act effectively allows industry to escape the proper controls necessary to restrict continued public exposure to a wide array of chemicals that have been clearly identified as having detrimental health effects.

From Dr. Sherry A. Rogers' book, Detoxify or Die, available from Red Pill Press:
"These unavoidable environmental hormone mimics come in a variety of disguises, from plastics to pesticides, from cleansers, solvents like TCE (trichloroethylene) and detergents to heavy metals like cadmium. Even breath samples from 350 New Jersey residents found perchloroethlyene in 93% of folks, benzene in 89%, trichloroethylene in 29% and numerous other carcinogens [Wallace L, et al, 'Concentrations of 28 volatile organic compounds in air and drinking water of 350 residents of New Jersey compared with concentrations in their exhaled breath', Journal of Occupational Medecine, 28:603-608, 1986]. Pollutants are ubiquitous and inescapable. And don't forget that benzene is a known cause of leukemia by itself, while trichloroethylene was the cause of the childhood leukemia epidemic where it contaminated drinking water in the small town of Woburn, Massachsetts. Just how many environmental pollutants that are known causes of leukemia does it take to produce leukemia in one person?"
How many indeed! And how much longer until our elected representatives actually act in the public interest instead of what is obviously the interests of their corporate associations?

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Health

High Levels of Vitamin D in Older People Can Reduce Heart Disease and Diabetes


Science Daily
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:41 UTC
Middle aged and elderly people with high levels of vitamin D could reduce their chances of developing heart disease or diabetes by 43%, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.

A team of researchers at Warwick Medical School carried out a systematic literature review of studies examining vitamin D and cardiometabolic disorders. Cardiometabolic disorders include cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome.

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that is naturally present in some foods and is also produced when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin and trigger vitamin D synthesis. Fish such as salmon, tuna and mackerel are good sources of vitamin D, and it is also available as a dietary supplement.
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Health

(The MSG and canola oil song) Dude, Who Poisoned My Food?

NZtrillion
YouTube
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:21 UTC
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