Health & WellnessS


Cut

Anti-vaccine movies disappear from Amazon, are books next?

Jon Sarlin
CNN Business Report
Fri, 01 Mar 2019 13:45 UTC
Amazon
© CNN
Amazon has apparently started removing anti-vaccine documentaries from its Amazon Prime Video streaming service. The move came days after a CNN Business report highlighted the anti-vaccine comment available on the site, and hours after Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saying he is concerned "that Amazon is surfacing and recommending" anti-vaccination books and movies.

Anti-vaccine movies that were previously available free for Prime subscribers, like We Don't Vaccinate!, Shoot 'Em Up: The Truth About Vaccines, and Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe," are now "currently unavailable."

BuzzFeed News was first to report that Vaxxed was no longer available. Amazon did not respond to questions about why the films are no longer available on Prime Video.

However, while some anti-vaccine videos are gone from the Prime streaming service, a number of anti-vaccine books were still available for purchase on Amazon.com when CNN Business reviewed search results on Friday afternoon, and some were still being offered for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. A sponsored post for the book Vaccines On Trial: Truth and Consequences of Mandatory Shots also remained live.

Comment: The scare mongering continues...

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Mail

The Association of American Physicians & Surgeons: Statement on Federal Vaccine Mandates

Jane M. Orient, M.D.
aapsonline.org
Tue, 26 Feb 2019 17:02 UTC
American physicians and Surgeons
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) strongly opposes federal interference in medical decisions, including mandated vaccines. After being fully informed of the risks and benefits of a medical procedure, patients have the right to reject or accept that procedure. The regulation of medical practice is a state function, not a federal one. Governmental preemption of patients' or parents' decisions about accepting drugs or other medical interventions is a serious intrusion into individual liberty, autonomy, and parental decisions about child-rearing.

A public health threat is the rationale for the policy on mandatory vaccines. But how much of a threat is required to justify forcing people to accept government-imposed risks? Regulators may intervene to protect the public against a one-in-one million risk of a threat such as cancer from an involuntary exposure to a toxin, or-one-in 100,000 risk from a voluntary (e.g. occupational) exposure. What is the risk of death, cancer, or crippling complication from a vaccine? There are no rigorous safety studies of sufficient power to rule out a much lower risk of complications, even one in 10,000, for vaccines. Such studies would require an adequate number of subjects, a long duration (years, not days), an unvaccinated control group ("placebo" must be truly inactive such as saline, not the adjuvant or everything-but-the-intended-antigen), and consideration of all adverse health events (including neurodevelopment disorders).
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Apple Red

Weight Watchers is getting crushed by keto

Paul R. La Monica
CNN
Thu, 28 Feb 2019 23:22 UTC
weight watchers
Oprah Winfrey famously proclaimed "I love bread!" in a Weight Watchers commercial three years ago. But carbs aren't cutting it for the company anymore.

Shares of WW (WTW) - Weight Watchers' new name - closed down 34% on Wednesday after the company shocked Wall Street with poor earnings and sales. The stock rebounded a bit Thursday morning, rising 8%.

CEO Mindy Grossman attributed the problem to the keto diet, a popular eating regimen that makes bread and other carbs taboo. She said during a call with analysts Tuesday that keto is "becoming a cultural mean," and she even called it a "keto surge."

Comment: It's no real surprise that Weight Watchers, which relies on the woefully outdated calorie myth for weight loss is feeling the crunch from the ever-increasingly popular ketogenic diet. Considering the ketogenic diet is unmatched for weight loss and has a host of benefits beyond the scale, starvation diets simply don't stand a chance.

See also:

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Whistle

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exposes Bill Gates & his relationship with Big Pharma

Children's Health Defense
Collective Evolution
Sun, 24 Feb 2019 12:50 UTC
Bill Gates
Bill Gates is fond of using his bully pulpit to talk about "miracles" and "magic." Gates has featured one or both words in nearly all of his annual wrap-up letters for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017), most often in reference to the Gates Foundation's outsized financial and ideological support for global vaccine programs. As Gates says, "In the same way that during my Microsoft career I talked about the magic of software, I now spend my time talking about the magic of vaccines."

Gates's words give us an immediate clue that he is engaging in his own brand of magical thinking-which social scientists define as "illogical causal reasoning." How else to explain his simplistic endorsement of vaccines as a miraculous intervention with unmitigated benefits and no down side? The Gates Foundation's global spreadsheet appears to have no room to tally the massive flood of vaccine injuries afflicting children worldwide, despite abundant evidence that this damage is standing the vaccine risk-benefit calculus on its head and turning childhood into an extended round of Russian roulette.

Comment: The Global Vaccine Program: Conflicts of interest, corporate philanthropy & the Gates Foundation
More recently, the BMGF has come under scrutiny regarding the manner in which it operates and the impact of its programs and initiatives. Philanthropy, particularly on a large scale like this, is not as simple as it may appear to be.4 Global Justice Now expresses its concern by stating:
Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is that, despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices. Global Justice Now is concerned that the foundation's influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development, which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the foundation, are unable to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage.2


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Flashlight

Consumers should not be in the dark on dangers lurking in personal care products

Jon Whelan
timesunion.com
Sat, 12 Jan 2019 10:26 UTC
powder
If you haven't been following the news about Johnson & Johnson, you're missing out. A brief summary: Since 1971 J&J has known their baby powder contained cancer-causing asbestos. Executives knew. Mine managers knew. Lawyers knew. Literally everyone knew. Except consumers.

This past summer, 22 women with ovarian cancer won a $4.69 billion lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, exposing this fact. Just before the new year, another report emerged, revealing an intricate and in-depth conspiracy to cover up who knew what and when.

Many consumers think, how could this happen? The answer: It's the law. A quirk in federal law actually allows companies to knowingly sell products with carcinogens. Manufacturers of personal care products are required to list ingredients on labels, but if something wasn't intentionally added, like asbestos, it does not have to be disclosed to consumers on the label. This is an open secret, a labeling loophole.

Comment: How many of us know the ingredients in the cosmetic products we use?
...Because the FDA doesn't test cosmetics for safety, that job goes to the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, which is funded and run by the cosmetics industry through its trade association, the Personal Care Products Council. Safety advocates are concerned that, in effect, the industry is policing itself.


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Christmas Tree

Tree resins: Forgotten natural remedies


herbs-info.com
Thu, 28 Feb 2019 10:14 UTC
tree resin
Trees have been among our greatest allies since ancient times. They play a very important role in the production of oxygen and the absorption of carbon dioxide from the environment. Trees have also become a source of wood, paper, and other materials used in our everyday lives.

However here is another fact that many are not aware of - trees deserve a place among our lists of potential natural remedies. We tend to think of herbs as small leafy plants nestled between rocks in a herb garden. But herbalism encompasses all varieties of plants. The thousands of species of trees offer us a fantastic array of therapeutic potential.

Some famous remedies are made from trees. Taxol - the cancer medicine - is made from the Yew tree. We also have essential oils made from trees - such as eucalyptus, sandalwood, cedarwood, cypress and so on.
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Ice Cream Bar

Hands off the chocolate! First chocolate company to brag about being pro-GMO supports GMO cacao trees

Yelena Sukhoterina
Alt Health Works
Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:01 UTC
GMO cacao
While many companies fight against using genetically modified ingredients, and others do not care that they are using them, the first company to openly brag about being pro-GMO has officially arrived on the scene.

That company is Ethos Chocolate, which is creating and selling its product with hopes that our beloved cacao trees will be genetically modified soon.

Their project is supported by about 1,600 farmers of A Fresh Look, which also support GMOs.

Comment: Funny that a company that is openly pro-GMO would call themselves "Ethos". Maybe they should have called themselves "Lack-of-Ethos".

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Health

The logic, wisdom and scientific evidence for the homeopathic treatment of influenza

Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH
Mercola.com
Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:01 UTC
homeopathic medicine
This is the time of year that Big Media seeks to appease its biggest advertisers, Big Pharma, by helping to spread fear and panic about this year's "flu epidemic." They commonly quote sensationalized statistics, suggesting that you will die or become very ill unless you vaccinate. However, conveniently enough, even the Lung Association admits that the vast majority of these deaths associated with the flu are not from this illness at all but from pneumonia.1

This merging of statistics is rare in medicine or science, except when the economics of Big Pharma (or another big industry) are involved, as their bible seemingly becomes "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics" (in other words, how to use statistics to create fear and sell drugs). The fact that last year's flu vaccine was a dismal 42 percent effective2 is completely ignored by the media, though the 2014 to 2015 flu vaccine was only 23 percent effective (and not surprisingly, virtually no major media reported on this fact).

The real problems from getting the flu are not from the disease itself but from the mismanagement of the disease by doctors and by patients. People with the flu mistakenly take aspirin or acetaminophen to "lower the fever" of the flu, but that is one of the worst things that you can do for yourself, unless one happens to have a fever with a high temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit or more (a very rare experience, except in infants).

Comment: See also:

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Heart

Why getting enough sleep reduces cardiovascular disease risk


Science Daily
Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:01 UTC
arterial plaque affected by sleep
© Filip Swirski, Ph.D., Harvard Medical SchoolImages of plaque from the artery of a mouse model of atherosclerosis that experienced a normal sleeping pattern (left) and an image of arterial plaque from a mouse model that underwent sleep fragmentation (right). The amount of arterial plaque in the sleep-fragmented mouse is significantly larger.

Sleep-modulating hormone hypocretin found to also control production of inflammatory cells.

Getting enough sleep is key to good health, and studies have shown that insufficient sleep increases the risk of serious problems, including cardiovascular disease. Now Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have discovered one way that sleep protects against the buildup of arterial plaques called atherosclerosis. In their paper receiving advance online publication in Nature, they describe the mechanism by which insufficient sleep increases production of inflammatory white blood cells known to be major contributors to atherosclerosis.

"We have discovered that sleep helps to regulate the production in the bone marrow of inflammatory cells and the health of blood vessels and that, conversely, sleep disruption breaks down control of inflammatory cell production, leading to more inflammation and more heart disease," says Filip Swirski, PhD, of the MGH Center for Systems Biology, senior author of the Nature paper. "We also have identified how a hormone in the brain known to control wakefulness controls processes in the bone marrow and protects against cardiovascular disease."

Comment: See also:

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Cow

My mother's vegetarian diet contributed to her early death. We should all learn from it

Dr Aseem Malhotra
iNews
Thu, 28 Feb 2019 14:14 UTC
Aseem Malhotra and mom
© Aseem MalhotraAseem Malhotra, right, with his mother Anisha, who was a GP, at the launch of his book The Pioppi Diet.

NHS cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra: my mother's diet was full of ultra-processed foods and was ultimately to the detriment of her health

Two weeks ago, my father and I made a trip to Rishikesh in northern India to scatter my mother's ashes in the River Ganges at an idyllic location at the foothills of the Himalayas. This was in keeping with her wishes as a devout Hindu that her spirit be released at a place she loved and previously visited on pilgrimage. Our family lost a greatly cherished mother and wife who went before her time, at only 68 years old.

I believe that what was finally written on her death certificate - severe sepsis and discitis with concomitant myocardial infarction (heart attack) - was entirely avoidable.

For most of her adult life, my mum was vegetarian and significantly overweight. Growing up, I witnessed her regular consumption of starchy carbohydrates and ultra-processed snack foods of biscuits, crisps and chocolate. Our kitchen was flooded with these products. I still have a vivid memory of her only meal on a weekly fast day consisting of a large chapatti and what can only be described as a mountain of table sugar. Her weight contributed to developing high blood pressure in her 40s and as a result, she suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2003.

Comment: It's a sad story, all the more so because it is increasingly common. Since vegetarianism is assumed to be healthy, so many vegetarians subsist on a junk food diet high in sugar and starch. It's not just teenage vegetarians surviving on french fries and cookies - many adults base their diets around these as well.

See also:

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