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Kellogg Pulls Immunity Claims from Rice Krispies

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Kellogg Co. says it will pull immunity claims from its Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereal boxes amid the public's growing concern about swine flu.

Kellogg began adding extra antioxidants to its cereal last year, which it says help support the immune system. The company began advertising the change with large labels on cereal boxes that read in bold letters: "Now helps support your child's immunity."

But the food maker said Wednesday that given the public attention to swine flu, it has decided to phase out the message from its packages.

Cow Skull

Best of the Web: H1N1 Flu - The Truth About The Vaccine

Highly Recommended!

Teresa Forcades is a Benedictine nun at the monastery of San Benet at Montserrat, near Barcelona, Spain. Before joining the monastery Teresa practiced medicine for several years as a physician, specializing in internal medicine. She is a Doctor of Public Health having received her Phd from Barcelona University. She also conducted a period of research at NY State University USA.

In this video presentation (divided into 6 part totaling about 50 minutes) Teresa discusses the likely origins of the current H1N1 Flu virus, its likely origins and why, despite the claims of the WHO organisation, there is no pandemic. She also discusses the details and risks of the vaccination program, the politics and economics that are driving it and the danger that, under a contrived WHO "pandemic" frenzy, mandatory vaccinations may be introduced.

Part 1


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Teach Children to Ignore Junk-Food Advertising, Say Experts

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A number of studies have made links between junk food advertising and rising levels of childhood obesity
Fruits, vegetables and juices were advertised in only 1.7 per cent of commercials on US children's TV, says study, but reducing junk-food advertising may not be enough.

Children are being bombarded by junk food advertising according to a study of US television networks.
Researchers at the University of California-Davis found that children's networks exposed viewers to 76 per cent more food commercials per hour than other networks.

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Treating Mild Iodine Deficiency Boosts Brain Power

New York - Iodine supplements may improve mental function in children with even mild deficiencies in the nutrient, a small study suggests.

Iodine is a chemical element necessary for normal growth and development of the brain and body. Because the body does not make iodine, it must be obtained from the diet -- from sources like seafood, dairy products, plants grown in iodine-rich soil and iodized table salt.

Severe iodine deficiency has long been known to cause mental impairment, stunted growth and other problems in children. Such deficiency remains a major problem in parts of the world -- typically where the soil is iodine-poor, people eat little seafood and salt is not iodized.

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Why Some People Get Sick from Harmless Smells

People who become ill from harmless smells are not being silly, says Dutch researcher Patricia Bulsing. Rather, they perceive these smells differently than other people. The smell is detected more rapidly by the brain and processed more deeply. If you expect to become ill from a smell, then the smell in question might really make you ill.

Would your favourite perfume smell just as attractive if the bottle displayed a large label saying 'Warning: perfume can be toxic'? Probably not. But some people react even more violently, actually becoming ill. Analyses of odour molecules and receptors in the nose have not yet been able to show why people become sick from what are actually harmless odours. According to Patricia Bulsing, our unconscious perception may well have a part to play in this. She has discovered, for instance, that people subconsciously associate the notion of odours with illness. Also, our own experiences exert a significant influence on the way our brains process incoming odours.

If you've ever eaten anything that actually made you ill, you know that afterwards you cannot tolerate the smell of the food concerned for a while. You then associate the odour with a feeling of queasiness. This is the sort of association that Bulsing taught her trial volunteers. She combined a smell with a painful stimulus in the nose. This led to the volunteers expecting a specific odour to be associated with pain.

Not in your nose and not between your ears, but in your brain.

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Why fat angers the immune system

Overweight people get heart disease and diabetes - and more severe swine flu - because their fat triggers inflammation, an immune response meant to fight infection. Now the protein responsible for this sequence of events may have been found.

Jerrold Olefsky and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, killed the bone marrow cells in mice that make immune cells called macrophages. Then they injected the mice with macrophages lacking a surface protein called TLR4.

When the team fed the mice high-fat diet, all grew obese, as did a group of normal mice. But unlike the normal mice, those with altered macrophages showed no signs of inflammation, such as changes in insulin production, high levels of immune chemicals, and macrophages in their belly fat.

Comment: There are fats and there are fats. Unfortunately, the fats most prevalent in the North American diet are precisely the worst ones to feed the body: hydrogenated "vegetable" oils and transfats. Those mice would have done just fine on a diet heavy in cold-pressed olive or grapeseed oil.

Why not skip the drug and just consume fats that are good for the body? Oh right, no money in that.

See also: Autoimmune Disease: How To Stop Your Body From Attacking Itself


Target

Me, me, me! America's 'Narcissism Epidemic'

Authors say long-term consequences are destructive to society

In their new book, The Narcissism Epidemic, psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell explore the rise of narcissism in American culture and explain how this can lead to aggression, materialism and shallow values. An excerpt.

Introduction

We didn't have to look very hard to find it. It was everywhere.

On a reality TV show, a girl planning her sixteenth birthday party wants a major road blocked off so a marching band can precede her grand entrance on a red carpet. A book called "My Beautiful Mommy" explains plastic surgery to young children whose mothers are going under the knife for the trendy "Mommy Makeover." It is now possible to hire fake paparazzi to follow you around snapping your photograph when you go out at night - you can even take home a faux celebrity magazine cover featuring the pictures.

A popular song declares, with no apparent sarcasm, "I believe that the world should revolve around me!" People buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their ability to pay - or at least they did until the mortgage market collapsed as a result. Babies wear bibs embroidered with "Supermodel" or "Chick Magnet" and suck on "Bling" pacifiers while their parents read modernized nursery rhymes from This Little Piggy Went to Prada. People strive to create a "personal brand" (also called "self-branding"), packaging themselves like a product to be sold. Ads for financial services proclaim that retirement helps you return to childhood and pursue your dreams. High school students pummel classmates and then seek attention for their violence by posting YouTube videos of the beatings.

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Rejection massively reduces IQ

A.E.B.C. Editor's Note: This article is reprinted from New Scientist, March 15, 2002. http://www.newscientist.com

Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.

"It's been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive," says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. "But we've found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive."

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Bad moods 'boost memory and judgement'

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© GettyThe study found that people in a bad mood were also less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudices
Being in a bad mood may not be all gloom and doom after Australian scientists found that negative feelings improved judgement, boosted memory and made people less gullible.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a bad mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," Prof Forgas wrote.

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Corn Ethanol Biofuels Contaminated with Antibiotics

Byproducts from the production of corn for ethanol biofuels have been found to be contaminated with antibiotics.

"Ethanol's drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to impose a moratorium on production of fuels from grains," wrote Stan Cox for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle. "If industry cannot supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits."

Ethanol production has previously been criticized for diverting land from food to fuel production and for degrading soil, depleting water supplies and increasing various forms of pollution.

"Now to the list of ethanol's environmental insults we can add pharmaceutical pollution," Cox wrote.