Health & WellnessS


Syringe

Squalene: The Swine Flu Vaccine's Dirty Little Secret Exposed

Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com
Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:06 UTC
According to Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, your children should be the first target for mass swine flu vaccinations when school starts this fall.[i]

This is a ridiculous assumption for many reasons, not to mention extremely high risk.

In Australia, where the winter season has begun, Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon is reassuring parents the swine flu is no more dangerous than regular seasonal flu. "Most people, including children, will experience very mild symptoms and recover without any medical intervention," she said.[ii]

Sydney-based immunization specialist Robert Booy predicts swine flu might be fatal to about twice as many children in the coming year as regular influenza. Booy estimates 10-12 children could die from the H1N1 virus, compared with the five or six regular flu deaths seen among children in an average year in Australia.[iii]
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Pills

Number of Americans taking antidepressants doubles

Liz Szabo
USA Today
Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:16 UTC
The number of Americans using antidepressants doubled in only a decade, while the number seeing psychiatrists continued to fall, a study shows.

About 10% of Americans - or 27 million people - were taking antidepressants in 2005, the last year for which data were available at the time the study was written. That's about twice the number in 1996, according to the study of nearly 50,000 children and adults in today's Archives of General Psychiatry. Yet the majority weren't being treated for depression. Half of those taking antidepressants used them for back pain, nerve pain, fatigue, sleep difficulties or other problems, the study says.
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Attention

Body Building Supplements Linked to Serious Liver Damage, Other Problems


NewsInferno
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:04 UTC
Body building supplements, including those sold by American Cellular Laboratories under the names "TREN-Xtreme," "MASS Xtreme," "ESTRO Xtreme," "AH-89-Xtreme," "HMG Xtreme," "MMA-3 Xtreme," "VNS-9 Xtreme," and "TT-40-Xtreme" have been linked to serious liver damage and other health problems, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) warned yesterday. Consumers should not use these, or any body building supplements that claim to contain steroid-like ingredients.

The FDA has received five adverse event reports, including serious liver injury, in men taking products marketed as dietary supplements by American Cellular Laboratories including TREN-Xtreme and MASS Xtreme. Acute liver injury is generally known to be a possible side effect of using products that contain anabolic steroids. Some of the cases resulted in hospitalization, but there were no reports of death or acute liver failure.
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Health

Researchers find altered micriobiome prevalent in the diseased esophagus

Dorie Klissas
New York University School of Medicine
Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:41 UTC
Gastroesophageal reflux diseases , or GERD, affects about 10 million people in the United States, yet the cause and an unexpected increase in its prevalence over the last three decades remains unexplainable. Now, researchers have discovered that GERD is associated with global alteration of the microbiome in the esophagus. The findings, reported in the August 1, 2009 issue of Gastroenterology, may provide for the foundation for further study of the condition as a microecological disease with new treatment possibilities.

The findings of an altered microbiome may have profound implications for treating diseases of the esophagus, among the most common disorders affecting Western populations. In fact, about 40% of adults experience heartburn symptoms at least once a month. Chronic inflammation associated with GERD can lead to the development of Barrett's esophagus, precancerous condition. The incidence of cancer of the esophagus has increased six-fold since the 1970s--the fastest increasing cancer in the Western world.
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Heart

The Living Link Missing From Our Diets

Dr. Al Sears
Total Health Breakthroughs
Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:40 UTC
Image
For millions of years, our ancestors hunted for meat and gathered fruits, nuts and other plant organic vegetables foods. They followed the food supply, so there was no kitchen sink to wash it in. Instead, they brushed the dirt off the foods they gathered. Or rinsed it in a nearby stream.

Today, factory farms add thousands of tons of pesticides and herbicides to our food. Even if we wash our fruits and vegetables thoroughly, we run the risk of slowly poisoning ourselves.

This modern dilemma means that our ancestors received a benefit from their food that we don't. I think of that benefit as "living foods" - the good bacteria that inhabit our guts.
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Health

Professor of Midwifery says pain during birth preferable to drugs


BBC News
Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:27 UTC
The pain of childbirth may have benefits on which women who opt for painkilling epidurals miss out, a senior male midwife has said.

Dr Denis Walsh, associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University, said pain was a "rite of passage" which often helped regulate childbirth. He said it helped strengthen a mother's bond with her baby, and prepared her for the responsibility of motherhood.

But the obstetrician said epidurals were an important option for some women. Dr Walsh, who wrote on the subject in a piece submitted to the journal Evidence Based Midwifery, agreed that in some cases epidurals were very useful.
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Magnify

If psychopaths are born, not made, social policy can't do much to help

Anjana Ahuja
The Times
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:18 UTC
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© Molecular PsychiatryA L Glenn, A Raine and R A Schug, “The neural correlates of moral decision-making in psychopathy,” Molecular Psychiatry 14: 5–6 (2009)
On rare occasions, they can be mad, bad and dangerous. More usually, they live uneventful, friendless lives on the fringes of society, unable to sustain relationships or employment. If they have children, the same cycle of separateness, coldness and brutality is repeated anew.

Psychopaths have long fascinated scientists. They seem doubly burdened - both nature (bad genes) and nurture (poor parenting) have conspired to make them social outcasts. Governments, including this one, have long sought to reduce antisocial behaviour by tackling the nurture bit and encouraging more responsible parenting. Now a study by the Institute of Psychiatry suggests that, broadly speaking, they are backing a loser.
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Red Flag

A Cancerous Conspiracy to Poison Your Faith in Organic Food

GM Watch
Organic Consumers Association
Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:09 UTC
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Debate: Despite its obvious benefits organic food continues to be denigrated by the political and corporate establishment in Britain.
There's lots of support for organic food and farming published in UK national newspapers today in response to yesterday's findings by the pro-GM, anti-organic Food Standards Agency (FSA).

The FSA review dismisses health benefits of eating organic food but admits to a lack of research on which to base findings, while completely ignoring other benefits (eg to the environment and animal welfare) and the risks and damage that arise from intensive agriculture.

The Ecologist reports that researchers could only identify 11 studies relating to the health content of organic food and admitted the current evidence base was, "extremely limited both in terms of the number of studies and the quality of studies found".
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Cow

UK Study Misleads Public by Ignoring Documented Health and Environmental Benefits of Organic Food

Gary Hirshberg
Huffington Post
Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:55 UTC
As Stonyfield Farm President and CE-Yo, I believe that a new study dismissing the health benefits of organics does in fact mislead an increasingly savvy public by ignoring documented health and environmental benefits of organic.

The supreme irony is that this study is getting an enormous amount of media attention in part because of heightened consumer awareness of where our food comes from, thanks to the popularity of the documentary "Food, Inc." and the discussion it's triggering across the country. "Food, Inc." lays bare just how bankrupt and dangerous our current food system really is, and what we are allowed to know about it. The result is that consumers are looking more critically than ever at studies like this.
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Bulb

Organic Food Is All That, and More. Just Eat It.

Timothy LaSalle
Huffington Post
Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:48 UTC
Good news! You can rest assured that the organic food you bought today is every bit as beneficial for you and the planet as it was three days ago. Advantages for health and ecological soundness are still there, despite a review released this week claiming that there is insufficient evidence to prove organic superiority on the nutritional grounds it evaluated.

The work, a review of research completed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and funded by the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency (FSA), was rigorous in its selection of 55 studies from 50 years of nearly 50,000 studies, some of which were conducted before the creation of national organic standards. Unfortunately, it failed to include contemporary research showing organic strengths, and dismisses areas of organic superiority within its reviewed work, including antioxidant capacity (important for cancer-fighting properties).
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