Health & WellnessS


Penis Pump

'Get shredded in six weeks!' The dark side of extreme male body transformations

Sirin Kale
The Guardian
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 06:00 UTC
male body transformation
Before and after ... Jon Lipsey, the cover star for the May 2018 issue of Men’s Fitness.
Men's Health magazine has transformed many men - and its own fortunes - by featuring extreme muscle makeovers. But does changing shape fast have a dark side?

In 2004, Men's Health journalist Dan Rookwood walked into his editor's office in a funk. The topless beefcakes who appeared on their covers were unrealistic, he had decided. No one actually looked like that - not least the staff of what was then the UK's third-biggest-selling men's magazine. His editor smiled. He felt a feature coming on.

Just over a year later, a smirking Rookwood appeared on the March 2006 cover of Men's Health. His biceps were huge, his six-pack extraordinarily well defined. "From fat to flat!" read the cover line, alongside a picture of a mournful-looking Rookwood, pre-transformation, his belly soft and rounded. It became the biggest-selling Men's Health issue of all time.

The transformation genre of men's magazine cover stories was born. Since then, they have become the bread and butter (or steamed spinach and chicken breast) of these publications. Pick up a copy of Men's Health every six months or so and you will see a topless staffer grinning for the camera, next to the words "Get shredded in six weeks!" or "From scrawny to brawny!"

Comment: While body dysmorphia tends to be thought of as mostly a women's problem, men are just as likely to be victims. It's tougher to spot and comes in a very different form than the female counterpart, but the effects are just as devastating. The ideals that men try to achieve are truly unnatural and require massive investments of time, money and effort to achieve and maintain. Why not just be healthy?

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Pills

Depression - a side effect of commonly used prescription drugs?

Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:11 UTC
depression
© Great Lakes LedgerA new study shows that over a one-third of American adults take medication that includes depression as a potential side-effect.
Historically, conventional science views depression as a side effect of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Most pharmaceutical-oriented solutions for depression still to this day revolve around this theory, even though the serotonin-hypothesis has been largely debunked.1As noted in a 2014 paper on antidepressants:2
"Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain ... But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect ...
Analyzing the data ... we were not surprised to find a substantial placebo effect on depression. What surprised us was how small the drug effect was.
Seventy-five percent of the improvement in the drug group also occurred when people were given dummy pills with no active ingredient in them. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future."
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Display

Gaming addiction: Is it a disease - or a symptom of other mental health problems?

Annabelle Timsit
qz.com
Wed, 20 Jun 2018 20:59 UTC
Gaming addiction
Like a good book, the best compliment anyone can give a new video game is that they just can't put it down. But taken to an extreme, excessive gaming can tilt into unhealthy territory. This week, the World Health Organization lent credence to the seriousness of the issue by adding "gaming disorder" to its manual of disease classifications.

In the latest revision of the manual, ICD-11, WHO classifies compulsively playing video games as a mental health condition, similar to gambling addiction. Under the new guidelines, symptoms of gaming disorder include being unable to control how often you play video games; giving the activity priority over everything else in your life; and persisting in this behavior despite negative consequences. In order for doctors to diagnose patients with gaming disorder, WHO says the symptoms must have been present for at least a year, and that the effects have to be severe enough to "result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning."

Comment: Brains of Excessive Gamers Similar to Addicts

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Bacon n Eggs

Anti-fat hysteria! New study says saturated fats cause PTSD

Georgia Ede MD
Psychology Today
Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:01 UTC
lard


Saturated Fat Strikes Again

Lock your doors - saturated fat is on the prowl again . . . and this time it's not waiting around until you're middle-aged to clog your arteries and give you diabetes. It's coming for your teenagers' brains. Yes, according to the press release headline announcing this new study in the peer-reviewed journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, PTSD is the new fatty fear on the block:

"ADOLESCENTS WHO CONSUME A DIET HIGH IN SATURATED FATS MAY DEVELOP POOR STRESS COPING SKILLS, SIGNS OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AS ADULTS."

This new headline about PTSD has already been picked up and published by a number of online news outlets.

Comment: Or is it a study worth doing? It seems this study has done absolutely nothing to further our understanding of health and nutrition. It only serves to grab headlines and further bolster the public's fear of saturated fat. These 'scientists' should be ashamed to put their names on a study like this.

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Book 2

Whitewash: Stunning book on the story of Glyphosate


Sustainable Pulse
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 11:46 UTC
whitewash
What influenced you in your time at Reuters to start uncovering the dirty secrets of the food and chemical industries?
Sustainable Pulse are excited to interview Carey Gillam, the author of the stunning new book Whitewash, which unveils the truth about the world's most used herbicide - glyphosate.

It actually was simply a process of doing my job - researching and reporting on the evolving big business of agriculture. Reuters assigned me in 1998 to cover Monsanto and its corporate peers as they competed in what was at that time a new and different way of farming built around genetically engineered seeds. I kept hearing about all the consumer and environmental benefits that these GMO seeds were going to bring, but the reality that was playing out on the ground did not match up with the messaging the corporations were pushing.
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Cupcake Pink

Study: The body-positive movement is probably contributing to the obesity crisis

Tanya Edwards
Yahoo!
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 09:17 UTC
bathroom scale
Newly released research could strike a blow to the body-positivity movement because it shows that the normalization of larger body sizes is leading to increasing numbers of people underestimating their weight. Consequently, some individuals are not making an effort to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight.

The study by Raya Muttarak, DPhil, from the University of East Anglia and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, published today in the journal Obesity, showed that the number of overweight people who who underestimate their weight has increased over time, from 48.4 percent to 57.9 percent in men and 24.5 percent to 30.6 percent in women between 1997 and 2015.

Comment: It's no surprise that internalizing the message that everyone is fine, just the way they are, is going to lead to a decrease in making any efforts to change, simply because the motivation to do so has been eliminated. While the study is simply observational (really, the only solid finding is that the number of people who underestimate their weight has gone up and they're hypothesizing a connection to the body positivity movement), the hypothesis probably isn't unfounded. People don't need to be told they're perfect, because feelings - they need to be encouraged towards improving themselves in any way that they're able.

See also: Social Justice Targets Personal Trainers: Check Your Thin Privilege and Anti-Fat Bias

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Syringe

DNA vaccines and the permanent alteration of human genetics

Jon Rappoport
Natural Blaze
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:31 UTC
DNA vaccine
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has launched efforts to create a vaccine that would protect people from most flu strains, all at once, with a single shot.

Over the years, I've written many articles refuting claims that vaccines are safe and effective, but we'll put all that aside for the moment and follow the bouncing ball.

Massachusetts Senator and big spender, Ed Markey, has introduced a bill that would shovel no less than a billion dollars toward the universal flu-vaccine project.

Here is a sentence from an NIAID press release that mentions one of several research approaches:

"NIAID Vaccine Research Center scientists have initiated Phase 1/2 studies of a universal flu vaccine strategy that includes an investigational DNA-based vaccine (called a DNA 'prime')..."

This is quite troubling, if you know what the phrase "DNA vaccine" means. It refers to what the experts are touting as the next generation of immunizations.
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Book 2

Book review: 'Aroused' recounts the fascinating history of hormone research

Erika Engelhaupt
Science News
Mon, 25 Jun 2018 16:10 UTC
brain samples
© techbint/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)Hormone History: Neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing did pioneering work on the hormone-producing pituitary glands in the early 20th century, as described in a new book. Samples of the brains he studied are now displayed in the Yale medical school library.


Aroused
Randi Hutter Epstein
W.W. Norton & Co.

The first scientific experiment on hormones took an approach that sounds unscientific: lopping off roosters' testicles. It was 1848, and Dr. Arnold Berthold castrated two of his backyard roosters. The cocks' red combs faded and shrank, and the birds stopped chasing hens.

Then things got really weird. The doctor castrated two more roosters and implanted a testicle from each into the other's abdomen. As Randi Hutter Epstein writes in a new book, each rooster "had nothing between his drumsticks but a lone testicle in his gut - yet he turned back into a full-fledged hen-chaser, red comb and all." It was the first glimpse that certain body parts must produce internal secretions, as hormones were first known, and that these substances - and not just nerves - were important to the body's control systems.

Comment: As with many scientific discoveries, it seems people are eager to experiment with hormones, on themselves and others, before having a clear picture what they actually do. Considering the fact that scientists are really just scratching the surface of the extremely complicated interplay between hormones, to take one and expect a linear effect seems foolhardy to say the least. One should exercise extreme caution when messing with hormones.

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Info

Herpes virus contributes to Alzheimer's disease says new study

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 18:21 UTC
Virii
© Pixabay/Freepic Composite
Two years ago, a group of scientists published an editorial in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease asking the scientific and medical community to investigate a possibility that the herpes virus could contribute to the onset of Alzheimer's disease. It's a controversial topic among scientists, who have long resisted the idea that Alzheimer's might be influenced by microbes. The prevailing hypothesis is that the disease is a result of built-up substances called amyloid beta brain plaques. Now, however, it seems the call to investigate herpes has paid off - big-time.

According to research led by Dr. Joel Dudley - a geneticist and genomic scientist from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai - examinations of genetic material in 876 brains led his team to discover a pattern they hadn't expected (and weren't looking for). Viral DNA from herpes virus 6A was much more common in brains affected by Alzheimer's - as was RNA from HHV-6A and a related form of herpes, HHV-7. Even more striking was the fact that this viral genetic material seemed to interact with genes that affected one's risk of developing Alzheimer's. According to Dudley: "What I believe is that in genetically or physiological susceptible individuals, the virus is acting as an agonist of the disease."
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Info

Persistent and insidious: Nonstick chemicals can really stick around - in your body

Rebecca Beitsch
PEW
Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
contamination nonstick chemicals, teflon
© Mike Groll/APNew Yorkers call for regulators to examine groundwater for potential contamination. A newly released draft of a federal report shows some common chemicals might be more dangerous than previously thought.
For decades, American consumers have been buying water-resistant packaging and clothing, stain-resistant carpets and Teflon cookware. Now there is growing alarm that the chemical components that give those products their appeal are ending up in the water supply.

Drinking water in 33 states from New Jersey to California has been tainted by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, more commonly referred to as PFAS. Now they are also showing up in human blood: A 2015 study found PFAS in 97 percent of blood samples tested.

A newly released draft of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency says the substances that have made their way into drinking water are more dangerous to human health than previously thought. Its release was delayed for months after a Trump administration aide said it would create a "public relations nightmare."

The substances are uncommonly difficult to break down. PFAS, of course, are water-resistant, but they are also used in firefighting foam and cookware for their ability to stand up against high temperatures.

Despite that resistance, microscopic particles break off and end up in the food chain, causing health problems from high cholesterol to cancer.

Comment: According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), studies in humans with PFAS exposure have shown that certain PFAS may also affect growth, learning, and behavior of infants and older children, lower a woman's chance of getting pregnant, affect the immune system and increase the risk of cancer.

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