Health & WellnessS

Cheeseburger

Proof mounts on restricted diet

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period.

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At 27 both these monkeys are elderly, but it's the one on the left who has eaten more over his lifetime and looks the worse for wear
Cutting calories may delay the ageing process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests.

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period.

Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted.

Writing in Science, the US researchers hailed the "major effect" of the diet.

Light Saber

Venezuela bans Coca-Cola 'Zero' because it's bad for people's health

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© Coca Cola
Venezuela's Health Ministry has banned the Coca-Cola Zero sugar-free drink citing dangers to human health, national media said on Thursday.

The ministry's inspectors visited a ร‘oca-Cola factory on Wednesday and discovered a "harmful ingredient" in the Coke Zero drink. Media reports did not specify the health threat posed by product.

Health Minister Jesus Mantilla has ordered the drink to be removed from Venezuela's stores saying: "The product should be withdrawn from circulation to preserve the health of Venezuelans."

Comment: Coke Zero - Zero sugar!... but laden with aspartame

Venezuela has simply done what health officials in any sane country would do: exact "punitive measures" against the proliferation of toxic substances being marketed to children the world over.


Syringe

Interview: Science journalist files suit alleging H1N1 'swine flu' a hoax to sell vaccines, commit genocide

Interview with Jane Burgermeister, a science journalist who has filed criminal charges against the World Health Organization, U.S. officials and business executives. She alleges that the H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic is a hoax designed to sell vaccines.

Jane Burgermeister, an Austrian science journalist and investigative reporter has filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and high ranking U.S. officials and business executives. She alleges that officials conspired to use a virus - the H1N1 "swine flu" - that was engineered in a lab to create a flu pandemic in order to sell vaccines.

Her accusations are extremely bold, yet carefully researched and documented and rely on evidence from published scientific research, legal actions, and interviews with prominent scientists. What Burgermeister has done is connect the dots, but has she come to the right conclusion?

The U.S. government has classified the bird flu and swine flu vaccines as bioweapons which would appear to some as incriminating, given the circumstances and the long strange tale of how vaccines become weapons.

One of the key points of Burgermeister's suit is that the new strain of flu is a synthetic structural recombinant containing genes from birds, humans, and pigs from different continents. Burgermeister said it's reasonable to assume it came out of a laboratory, specifically a bioweapons laboratory. "Mother Nature does not naturally recombine bird, swine and three human influenza viruses," asserts Burgermeister. Further, some respected scientists who examined H1N1 say the virus contains strains of the 1918 Spanish Pandemic flu. That flu strain was reassembled by molecular pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. and distributed to other agencies, the WHO and pharmaceutical companies around the world.

Another is that Baxter released contaminated vaccines onto the general public in Austria which resulted in death and sickness. She also warns of plans to make the vaccines compulsory in several countries in reaction to the manufactured pandemic.

On the surface the charge appears outrageous, and yet the evidence Burgermeister has gathered is compelling.

It's also a lot to digest so I contacted Burgermeister to summarize her allegations.

She calls it an act of bioterrorism.

Comment: While the idea that the UN or WHO taking over the US seems quite paranoid, the research done here does effectively paint a rather gruesome picture. And consider this unclassified CIA document from a meeting of "life science experts" in 2003:
According to scientists convened, other classes of unconventional pathogens that may arise over the next decade and beyond include binary BW [Bio-Weapons] agents that only become effective when two components are combined (a particularly insidious example would be a mild pathogen that when combined with its antidote becomes virulent); "designer BW agents created to be antibiotic resistant or to evade an immune response; weaponized gene therapy vectors that effect permanent change in the victim's genetic makeup; or a "stealth" virus, which could lie dormant inside the victim for an extended period before being triggered. For example, one panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their forties with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems.
Think about that for a moment and think about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, or the autism epidemic in the US/UK where vaccination rates approach 90% or more.


Attention

What's in that Bottle? Congress says Water Unclear

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Bottled water makers make millions off people who believe their products are purer than tap water, but consumers do not realize that they are less regulated than plain old tap water, according to a U.S. Congressional report released on Wednesday.

The report from the General Accountability Office also found that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has little power to regulate the safety of bottled water, and even states with the power to regulate it concentrate more on tap water.

Ambulance

Unsung Heroes Work Hard to Cut Hospital-Acquired Infections

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By upending conventional wisdom, Alfonso Torress-Cook was able to slash hospital-acquired infection rates.
For years, Alfonso Torress-Cook followed the rules in his quest to eliminate hospital-acquired infections. Patients at his hospital received large doses of antibiotics and were scrubbed down with alcohol-based soaps, as he and his colleagues aimed to kill every bacterium possible. Search and destroy was the mantra.

Sun

Vitamin D and Mental Health

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It was with interest that I read Dr. Soram Khalsa's post on The Huffington Post about the Vitamin D epidemic in this country today. The medical doctor writes this:
As a board certified internist, I have chosen, for the last 30 years, to take a personalized approach in my practice of integrative medicine. I have worked with literally hundreds of herbs, vitamins and dietary supplements, to help my patients, often when drugs did not work. In all this time, I have not seen one nutritional supplement that has the power to affect human health as much as vitamin D. This is because Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin -- it is a hormone that has the ability to interact and affect more than 2,000 genes in the body.

Over my 30 years of practicing medicine, countless times I have had to deliver or discuss with a patient their sad and possibly terminal diagnosis. Diseases like cancer and heart disease are at best life altering, and most times life threatening. When I have this kind of difficult conversation with a patient, I often reflect that if their vitamin D level had been normal for the previous many years, maybe they would never have developed this disease.
Ideally, your health care provider is your partner in exploring your vitamin D status, but patients usually do not want to visit their doctor just to ask for a vitamin D level, and many doctors are not yet up to date on the importance of vitamin D. If you use the at-home test kit and your blood level of vitamin D is low, I would encourage you to discuss this information with your physician.

Red Flag

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Found in Fertilizer Could Breed More Super Bugs

Waste-water treatment by-products, also known as sewage sludge, are frequently used as fertilizer. And that means whatever this stew of sewage leftovers contains, including substances hazardous to human and animal health, could potentially get into the food supply.

According to research just published in the European medical journal Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, that exact scenario may have already happened. Scientists have recently found antibiotic resistant super bugs in sewage sludge -- and they are sounding the alarm about the danger of antibiotic resistance genes passing into the human food chain.

Sun

Daily Dose of Broccoli Halts Ulcers and Cancer

Eating just a few ounces of broccoli each day may significantly reduce a person's risk of ulcers and stomach cancer, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have found.

In a study published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, scientists assigned 50 people in Japan to eat either 2.5 ounces of broccoli sprouts or 2.5 ounces of alfalfa sprouts each day for two months.

Syringe

Tamiflu Resistant Novel H1N1 in Saskatchewan Raises Concerns

This new influenza is an animal strain that has been circulating in swine populations in North America since 1997.

It has been combined with two genes from the H1N1 seasonal flu, said Dr. Frank Plummer, scientific director-general of the national microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg.

"We think because of the genetic sequence of the virus, we think it would be resistant to Tamiflu," he said.
The above comments on the novel H1N1 identified in farm workers in Saskatchewan indicate the novel virus has a contemporary H1 and N1 from the Brisbane/59 seasonal flu strain, which has H274Y (Tamiflu resistance) levels near 100%. Although swine with human H1N1 has been described previously, this version has the oseltamivir resistance marker and is in a cluster of farm workers, two confirmed and one suspect case. Since the surface genes are human, the novel virus should transmit human to human efficiently, and since the novel virus was not found in the swine associated with the workers, it is likely that the workers were infected by other humans and the two confirmed cases may have infected the suspect case.

Health

Fluoride/Cancer Link is Plausible

"Fluoride appears to have the potential to initiate or promote cancers, particularly of the bone...," according to the most recent and extensive review of fluoride toxicology by the prestigious National Research Council (NRC). (1)

Fluoride chemicals are added to about 70% of public water supplies ostensibly to reduce tooth decay, not to purify the water.

In 2006, the NRC found the The Environmental Protection Agency's Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) for fluoride is too high to be protective of health (4 mg/L) and must be lowered. EPA scientists have been saying this since 1986; but EPA management caved to political pressure and over-ruled its scientists. EPA is long overdue in revising fluoride's MCLG based on the 2006 NRC Fluoride Report, which was done at EPA's request.