Rather Be Healthy

Even Your Physician May be on the Drug Industry’s Payroll
When it comes to making health care decisions, which can deeply impact your life, you need access to truthful, unbiased information and science, or at least access to a physician who does.

Yet true, independent research — the foundation upon which the modern medical system is supposed to be based — is becoming an increasingly rare commodity … if it’s not already extinct.

In a scathing expose in Scientific American,1 journalism professor Charles Seife shows very clearly how the pharmaceutical industry is funneling money to prominent research scientists conducting studies on their products, and no one – not the researchers, not their funding sources, not scientific institutions and not even the government – appears able (or willing) to stop it.

Massive Conflicts of Interest are Ruining Medical Science

It’s well known that studies funded by industry or conducted by researchers with industry ties tend to favor corporate interests. That’s why it probably comes as no surprise that many so-called “experts” are very much on the drug industry’s payroll — but they masquerade as independent medical experts or even state officials during their “day jobs.”

It is, by the way, 100% legal for drug companies to pay medical professionals to promote their products.

The conflict of interest within this practice is obvious, which is why the drug industry often keeps quiet on their actual payments, as do the medical professionals involved. Although many medical, educational and research institutions require faculty members to disclose such potential conflicts of interest, many do not actively monitor employees’ activities.

Seife writes:

“The entanglements between researchers and pharmaceutical companies take many forms. There are speakers bureaus: a drugmaker gives a researcher money to travel — often first class — to gigs around the country, where the researcher sometimes gives a company-written speech and presents company-drafted slides.

There is ghostwriting: a pharmaceutical manufacturer has an article drafted and pays a scientist (the ‘guest author’) an honorarium to put his or her name on it and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. And then there is consulting: a company hires a researcher to render advice.

Researchers ‘think what these companies are after are their brains, but they’re really after the brand,’ says Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. ‘To buy a distinguished, senior academic researcher, the kind of person who speaks at meetings, who writes textbooks, who writes journal articles — that’s worth 100,000 salespeople.'”

Are You Receiving Medical Advice That’s Been Tainted by Drug Company Money?

If you’ve visited a physician lately, the answer is quite likely “yes.” You see, the compromised research doesn’t simply stay in the medical journals … it often gets translated into your medical care. It is based on these purportedly scientific results that drugs get approved and public health recommendations are made.

Take Avandia, the diabetes drug that is now known to have killed tens of thousands of people and significantly increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. Research from the Mayo Clinic revealed that 90 percent of scientists who wrote favorable articles about the drug had financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline, the drug’s maker.2 A committee of independent experts still recommended that Avandia remain on the market, despite its clear risks, and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.

Well, “it came out that members of the committee, too, had been taking money from drug companies,” Seife reported.

This is, of course, but one example. There are, unfortunately, countless others. Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the 2004 cholesterol guidelines, which are still in use today, had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs — wouldn’t you know it, the same drugs the new guidelines suddenly created a dramatically larger market for in the United States.

Researchers and certainly those who sit on government panels are supposed to disclose these types of relationships with the drug industry, but they often don’t and little is done about it. According to the investigative report:

“Several layers of checking are supposed to ensure that conflicts of interest are caught and exposed even when an oblivious or dishonest researcher does not report them. When a scientist fails to report such a conflict, the university or hospital he or she works for is supposed to spot it and report it. And when a university or hospital is not doing its job catching conflicted research, then the government agency that funds most of that research — the National Institutes of Health — is supposed to step in.

Unfortunately, that backup system is badly broken. “Institutions often look the other way, or they have policies in place that are quite weak,” says Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in Georgetown University’s department of pharmacology and physiology.”

The NIH May be One of the Worst Offenders…

Government funding is supposed to be neutral — an independent source from which unbiased scientific research can be drawn. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is actually the second-highest funding source for drug studies (first is the drug companies, themselves). Many assume NIH-funded studies are unbiased and funded strictly through taxpayer dollars, but NIH accepts a great deal of money from Big Pharma and is deeply enmeshed with the industry.

For instance, two leaders from the NIH — Gary Nabel, one of the NIH’s most prominent researchers in the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and Elias Zerhouni, former director of the entire NIH) recently switched sides to work for Big Pharma (specifically, Sanofi). So this might help explain why Seife uncovered that several individuals working on NIH advisory committees were granted waivers exempting them from ethics laws (even though they had received thousands of dollars from drug companies, which were not disclosed on the waivers).

In the fall of 2003, the NIH — with Zerhouni at its head – also faced grave accusations when it came to light that hundreds of its scientists had financial ties to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. According to a 2004 article in the NIH Record, over 100 scientists did not get approval for their industry activities, even though the rules were so loose virtually all requests to conduct outside work were approved by the agency, without any limits on compensation or hours worked for outside entities.

The NIH is not unique in these ties. Joining a parade of other high-ranking government officials who passed through the revolving doors between government and Big Pharma, in January 2010 Julie Gerberding, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which makes the U.S. immunization schedule, became the president of Merck’s vaccine unit, which makes 14 of the 17 pediatric vaccines recommended by the CDC, and 9 of the 10 recommended for adults.

Even Your Physician May be on the Drug Industry’s Payroll

I suspect many Americans would be surprised to learn that many thousands of doctors, researchers and other medical experts – some of whom you probably depend on to provide unbiased information and advice pertaining to your health care – receive large amounts of supplemental income from drug companies, but it is reality nonetheless.

In many cases, these individuals do not believe the relationship influences their medical advice, research or prescribing habits — although clearly the drug industry would not continue devoting millions of dollars to this type of marketing if it did not pay off. But even prominent researchers and expert physicians are often being influenced by the industry, whether they realize it or not.

I speak from experience because, in fact, I used to be one of those lecturers. I was hired as a “rising star” shortly after I finished my residency training in 1985 and flew across the country lecturing on estrogen replacement therapy, and receiving handsome checks from the drug companies for doing so.

I stopped this nearly 30 years ago when I realized that the entire approach was a scam. Fifteen years later all the major studies came out showing that estrogen replacement therapy radically increased heart disease and cancer, and did not prevent it like the drug industry’s manipulated studies suggested.

Currently there are tens of thousands of U.S. physicians and researchers who have replaced my lecturing role and are currently on Big Pharma’s payroll. An ongoing investigation by ProPublica3 revealed that 12 drug companies paid $761.3 million to physicians for consulting, speaking, research and other expenses in 2009, 2010 and, for some, the beginning of 2011 — and that represents only the disclosed payments. In all actuality, this figure is probably far too low.

More Transparency in the Medical Field is Coming in 2013

Thanks to the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which starts in 2013, drug companies and medical device manufacturers will be required to reveal most of the money they are giving to physicians. Starting in 2013, you will be able to determine if a health care provider you trust is actually on the drug industry’s payroll, thanks to the new federal law, which mandates the following:
•Drug and medical device companies will be required to report and disclose all payments (including stock options, research grants, knickknacks, consulting fees, travel expenses and more) to physicians (March 2013). Unfortunately, payments to nurses, physician assistants, and other medical professionals will not have to be disclosed
•The information will be displayed in an online government database that you will be able to search (September 2013)

In the meantime, you can search ProPublica’s database4 to see the disclosed payments made to physicians in your state. Many of the most prestigious universities, including Harvard, are now banning their staff from receiving money from drug companies for speaking, and this new disclosure requirement will hopefully push more institutions in that direction.

Breaking the drug industry’s stranglehold on the conventional medical industry will not be easy — after all, the drug industry spends nearly twice as much on promotion5 as it does on research and development – but increasing numbers of people are now waking up to these harsh realities, and that is instrumental in getting the tide to turn. You, being among those who are informed, can help share this knowledge with others. More than 1.5 million people receive this newsletter, and together we can make a huge difference.

The ultimate goal is to have a critical mass of people refuse the unnecessarily dangerous and counterproductive solutions currently offered by conventional medicine, as this will be the powerful stimulus to generate authentic change. You can also act now, on a personal level, by making the necessary lifestyle changes that will allow you to take control of your health, instead of leaving it in the hands of the drug industry who has likely manipulated and deceived the physician you are consulting with.
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By Dr. Mercola

Vitamin K is a fat-soluble vitamin most well known for the important role it plays in blood clotting. However, many do not realize that there are different kinds of vitamin K, and they are completely different.

The health benefits of vitamin K2 go far beyond blood clotting, which is done by vitamin K1, and vitamin K2 also works synergistically with a number of other nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D.

Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue, a naturopathic physician with a keen interest in nutrition, has authored what I believe is one of the most comprehensive books on this important topic, titled: Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life

“I tuned in to the emerging research about K2 early in 2007,” she says. “Not long before, I had read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. When I learned about vitamin K2, I thought:

“Hey, you know what? I’m sure Price talked all about this in his book.” I went to the book, looked through it, and didn’t find any reference to vitamin K2. I was really stumped.

A little bit later in 2007, I read a brilliant article by Chris Masterjohn that links vitamin K2 to Prices’ work on Activator X.

Once I realized that link, the light bulb went on about how important this nutrient is, and how overlooked it’s been for so long. It really provides the missing piece to the puzzle of so many health conditions, and yet it was being completely overlooked, despite the overwhelming amounts of modern-day research.”

What’s So Special About Vitamin K2?

Vitamin K is actually a group of fat-soluble vitamins. Of the two main ones, K1 and K2, the one receiving the most attention is K1, which is found in green leafy vegetables and is very easy to get through your diet. This lack of distinction has created a lot of confusion, and it’s one of the reasons why vitamin K2 has been overlooked for so long.

The three types of vitamin K are:
1.Vitamin K1, or phylloquinone, is found naturally in plants, especially green vegetables; K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain healthy blood clotting
2.Vitamin K2, also called menaquinone, is made by the bacteria that line your gastrointestinal tract; K2 goes straight to your blood vessel walls, bones, and tissues other than your liver
3.Vitamin K3, or menadione, is a synthetic form I do not recommend; it’s important to note that toxicity has occurred in infants injected with this synthetic vitamin K3

Vitamin K1 exclusively participates in blood clotting — that’s sole purpose. K2 on the other hand comes from a whole different set of food sources, and its biological role is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also plays a role in removing calcium from areas where it shouldn’t be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues.

“K2 is really critical for keeping your bones strong and your arteries clear,” Rheaume-Bleue says.

Now, vitamin K2 can be broken into two additional categories, called:
1.MK-4 (menaquinone-4), a short-chain form of vitamin K2 found in butter, egg yolks, and animal-based foods
2.MK-7 (menaquinone-7), longer-chain forms found in fermented foods. There’s a variety of these long-chain forms but the most common one is MK-7. This is the one you’ll want to look for in supplements, because in a supplement form, the MK-4 products are actually synthetic. They are not derived from natural food products containing MK-4.
The MK-7 – these long-chain, natural bacterial-derived vitamin K2 – is from a fermentation process, which offers a number of health advantages:
a.It stays in your body longer, and
b.It has a longer half-life, which means you can just take it once a day in very convenient dosing

How Much Vitamin K2 Do You Need?

The optimal amounts of vitamin K2 are still under investigation, but it seems likely that 180 to 200 micrograms of vitamin K2 should be enough to activate your body’s K2-dependent proteins to shuttle the calcium where it needs to be, and remove it from the places where it shouldn’t.

“The most recent clinical trials used around those amounts of K2,” Rheaume-Bleue says. “The average person is getting a lot less than that. That’s for sure. In the North American diet, you can see as little as maybe 10 percent of that or less. Certainly, not near enough to be able to optimize bone density and improve heart health.”

She estimates that about 80 percent of Americans do not get enough vitamin K2 in their diet to activate their K2 proteins, which is similar to the deficiency rate of vitamin D. Vitamin K2 deficiency leaves you vulnerable for a number of chronic diseases, including:

Osteoporosis

Heart disease

Heart attack and stroke

Inappropriate calcification, from heel spurs to kidney stones

Brain disease

Cancer

“I talked about vitamin K2 moving calcium around the body. Its other main role is to activate proteins that control cell growth. That means K2 has a very important role to play in cancer protection,” Rheaume-Bleue says.

“When we’re lacking K2, we’re at much greater risk for osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer. And these are three concerns that used to be relatively rare. Over the last 100 years, as we’ve changed the way we produced our food and the way we eat, they have become very common.”

Researchers are also looking into other health benefits. For example, one recent study published in the journal Modern Rheumatology1 found that vitamin K2 has the potential to improve disease activity besides osteoporosis in those with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Another, published in the journal Science2, found that vitamin K2 serves as a mitochondrial electron carrier, thereby helping maintain normal ATP production in mitochondrial dysfunction, such as that found in Parkinson’s Disease.

According to the authors:

“We identified Drosophila UBIAD1/Heix as a modifier of pink1, a gene mutated in Parkinson’s disease that affects mitochondrial function. We found that vitamin K(2) was necessary and sufficient to transfer electrons in Drosophila mitochondria. Heix mutants showed severe mitochondrial defects that were rescued by vitamin K(2), and, similar to ubiquinone, vitamin K(2) transferred electrons in Drosophila mitochondria, resulting in more efficient adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production. Thus, mitochondrial dysfunction was rescued by vitamin K(2) that serves as a mitochondrial electron carrier, helping to maintain normal ATP production.”

The Interplay Between Vitamin K2, Vitamin D, and Calcium

As I’ve discussed on numerous occasions, vitamin D is a critical nutrient for optimal health and is best obtained from sun exposure or a safe tanning bed. However, many are taking oral vitamin D, which may become problematic unless you’re also getting sufficient amounts of vitamin K2. Dr. Rheaume-Bleue explains:

“When you take vitamin D, your body creates more of these vitamin K2-dependent proteins, the proteins that will move the calcium around. They have a lot of potential health benefits. But until the K2 comes in to activate those proteins, those benefits aren’t realized. So, really, if you’re taking vitamin D, you’re creating an increased demand for K2. And vitamin D and K2 work together to strengthen your bones and improve your heart health.

… For so long, we’ve been told to take calcium for osteoporosis… and vitamin D, which we know is helpful. But then, more studies are coming out showing that increased calcium intake is causing more heart attacks and strokes. That created a lot of confusion around whether calcium is safe or not. But that’s the wrong question to be asking, because we’ll never properly understand the health benefits of calcium or vitamin D, unless we take into consideration K2. That’s what keeps the calcium in its right place.”

IMPORTANT: If You Take Vitamin D, You Need K2

This is a really crucial point: If you opt for oral vitamin D, you need to also consume in your food or take supplemental vitamin K2.

“There are so many people on the vitamin-D-mega-dose bandwagon, taking more and more of vitamin D. And it could absolutely be causing harm if you are lacking the K2 to complete the job to get the calcium where it’s supposed to be,” Rheaume-Bleue warns.

“We don’t see symptoms of vitamin D toxicity very often. But when we do, those symptoms are inappropriate calcification. That’s the symptom of vitamin D toxicity. And it is actually a lack of vitamin K2 that can cause that…”

While the ideal or optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be elucidated, Rheume-Bleue suggests that for every 1,000 IU’s of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms of K2, and perhaps as much as 150-200 micrograms (mcg).

The latest vitamin D dosing recommendations, which call for about 8,000 IU’s of vitamin D3 per day if you’re an adult, means you’d need in the neighborhood of 800 to 1,000 micrograms (0.8 to 1 milligram/mg) of vitamin K2.

“My earlier recommendation was not taking into account people who were doing high dose of vitamin D supplementation,” Rheaume-Bleue says. “That’s where it gets a little bit more technical. It seems that for the average person, around 200 to 280 micrograms will activate your K2 proteins and do a lot of good for your bones and your heart. If you’re taking high levels of vitamin D… then I would recommend taking more K2.”

The good news is that vitamin K2 has no toxicity. No toxic effects have ever been demonstrated in the medical literature.

“The reason why K2 doesn’t have potential toxic effect is that all vitamin K2 does is activate K2 proteins. It will activate all the K2 proteins it finds. And if they’re all activated and you take extra K2, it simply won’t do that. That’s why we don’t see a potential for toxicity the way we do with vitamin A or D,” she says.

If You Need Calcium, Aim for Calcium-Rich Foods First

For those who are calcium deficient, Rheaume-Bleue recommends looking to food sources high in calcium, before opting for a supplement. This is because many high calcium foods also contain naturally high amounts of, you guessed it, vitamin K2! Nature cleverly gives us these two nutrients in combination, so they work optimally. Good sources of calcium include dairy, especially cheeses, and vegetables, although veggies aren’t high in K2.

Additionally, magnesium is far more important than calcium if you are going to consider supplementing. Magnesium will also help keep magnesium in the cell to do its job far better. In many ways it serves as nutritional version of the highly effective class of drugs called calcium channel blockers. If you do chose to supplement with calcium, for whatever reason, it’s important to maintain the proper balance between your intake of calcium and other nutrients such as:
•Vitamin K2
•Vitamin D
•Magnesium

The Importance of Magnesium

As mentioned previously, magnesium is another important player to allow for proper function of calcium. As with vitamin D and K2, magnesium deficiency is also common, and when you are lacking in magnesium and take calcium, you may exacerbate the situation. Vitamin K2 and magnesium complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease.

Dietary sources of magnesium include sea vegetables, such as kelp, dulse, and nori. Few people eat these on a regular basis however, if at all. Vegetables can also be a good source, along with whole grains. However, grains MUST be prepared properly to remove phytates and anti-nutrients that can otherwise block your absorption of magnesium. As for supplements, Rheaume-Bleue recommends using magnesium citrate. Another emerging one is magnesium threonate, which appears promising primarily due to its superior ability to penetrate the mitochondrial membrane.

How Can You Tell if You’re Lacking in Vitamin K2?

There’s no way to test for vitamin K2 deficiency. But by assessing your diet and lifestyle, you can get an idea of whether or not you may be lacking in this critical nutrient. If you have any of the following health conditions, you’re likely deficient in vitamin K2 as they are all connected to K2:
•Do you have osteoporosis?
•Do you have heart disease?
•Do you have diabetes?

If you do not have any of those health conditions, but do NOT regularly eat high amounts of the following foods, then your likelihood of being vitamin K2 deficient is still very high:
•Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, dairy)
•Certain fermented foods such as natto, or vegetables fermented using a starter culture of vitamin K2-producing bacteria. Please note that most fermented vegetables are not really high in vitamin K2 and come in at about 50 mcg per serving. However, if specific starter cultures are used they can have ten times as much, or 500 mcg per serving.
•Goose liver pâté
•Certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda (these two are particularly high in K2, containing about 75 mcg per ounce)

“An important thing to mention when it comes to cheese (because this becomes an area of confusion), [is that] because cheese is a bacterial derived form of vitamin K2, it actually doesn’t matter if the cheese came from grass-fed milk. That would be nice, but it’s not the milk that went into the cheese that makes the K2. It’s the bacteria making the cheese, which means it doesn’t matter if you’re importing your brie from France or getting it domestically. Brie cheese, the bacteria that makes brie cheese, will make vitamin K2,” she says.

Fermented vegetables, which are one of my new passions, primarily for supplying beneficial bacteria back into our gut, can be a great source of vitamin K if you ferment your own using the proper starter culture. We recently had samples of high-quality fermented organic vegetables made with our specific starter culture tested, and were shocked to discover that not only does a typical serving of about two to three ounces contain about 10 trillion beneficial bacteria, but it also contained 500 mcg of vitamin K2.

Note that not every strain of bacteria makes K2. For example, most yoghurts have almost no vitamin K2. Certain types of cheeses are very high in K2, and others are not. It really depends on the specific bacteria. You can’t assume that any fermented food will be high in K2, but some fermented foods are very high in K2, such as natto. Others, such as miso and tempeh, are not high n K2.

Pregnant? Make Sure You’re Getting Enough Vitamin K2

Last but not least, while vitamin K2 is critical for the prevention of a number of chronic diseases listed above, it’s also vital for women who are trying to conceive, who are pregnant, and for growing healthy children. “K2 plays a very important role throughout pregnancy (for the development of teeth for both primary and adult teeth, the development of proper facial form, healthy facial form, as well as strong bones), then again throughout childhood to prevent cavities, and through adolescence as the skeleton is growing,” Rheaume-Bleue says.

Vitamin K2 is needed throughout pregnancy, and later while breastfeeding. It may be particularly important during the third trimester, as most women’s levels tend to drop at that time, indicating there’s an additional drain on the system toward the end of the pregnancy. Since vitamin K2 has no toxicity issues, it may be prudent to double or even triple — which is what Rheaume-Bleue did during her own recent pregnancy — your intake while pregnant.

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

By Dr. Mercola

Most people are aware that carrying excess weight increases your risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, but few realize that it may also harm your bones. And, it turns out, where you carry the fat matters, with excess belly fat being among the worst types of fat for bone health.

A “Beer” Belly May Mean Your Bone Health is at Risk

New research presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America revealed that obese men who carry more of their fat deep in their belly are at a greater risk of weak bones and fractures than obese men who have more fat located just below the skin around their thigh and buttocks areas.

It was predicted that the men with belly fat would be 25 percent more likely to break a bone than the other men.

Since it’s well known that weight-bearing exercises are great for building up your bones, this news may come as a surprise. It has been long believed that carrying extra weight provides a benefit for bone strength by increasing the dynamic forces on your bone.

However, it’s now known that this is not necessarily the case. Newer research shows that the excess fat deep in your belly and around your organs, known as visceral fat, has been linked to lower bone mineral density, a measure of bone strength.1 This is true even among children and adolescents, for whom higher levels of visceral fat are associated with lower bone mineral density.2

Another study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found adolescent girls with high body fat had bones that were 8 percent to 9 percent weaker than those with normal body fat.3

It’s thought that these fat cells produce substances not yet identified that may lead to bone disease, along with other hallmarks of overweight and obesity, like heart disease and diabetes. Furthermore, people with more visceral fat are also more likely to have more fat within their bone marrow, which may further weaken your bones.

Your body is designed to operate best when it’s at an ideal weight, which varies slightly from person to person. Carrying around extra pounds will inevitably increase your risk of developing just about every chronic degenerative disease, while taking a toll on your bone health as well.

Your Waist Size is a Powerful Predictor of Your Health

Whether you’re overweight, obese or at a healthy weight, keeping tabs on your waist size is important — likely far more so than monitoring your BMI (body mass index). The visceral fat that tends to build up in your belly is related to the release of proteins and hormones that cause inflammation, which can in turn damage not only your bones but also your arteries and affect how you metabolize sugars and fats.

An expanded waistline is associated with insulin resistance, high blood pressure, blood lipid imbalances, cardiovascular disease, thickening of the walls of your heart, and even increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease decades later.

This is why waist size provides a far more accurate benchmark for predicting your risk of death from a heart attack and other causes than simply monitoring your weight. Waist circumference is also far better than BMI for evaluating whether or not you may have a weight problem, as BMI fails to factor in both how muscular you are, and your intra-abdominal fat mass.

Determining your waist size is easy. With a tape measure, measure the distance around the smallest area of your abdomen, below your rib cage and above your belly button. The following is a general guide for healthy waist circumference:

You can also use your waist-to-hip measurement. This is done by measuring the circumference of your hips at the widest part, across your buttocks. Then measure your waist at the smallest circumference of your natural waist, just above your belly button. Divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement to get the ratio. (The University of Maryland offers an online waist-to-hip ratio calculator4 you can use.) The Mayo Clinic uses the following waist-to-hip ratio designations:5

These measurements are useful to take even if your weight is in the normal range. In a presentation at the European Society of Cardiology Congress, senior author Francisco Lopez-Jimenez said that people who are of normal weight, but who have a high waist-to-hip ratio (i.e. belly fat), have an even higher risk of death than people who are considered obese, based on BMI alone.6 The risk of cardiovascular death was 2.75 times higher, and the risk of death from all causes was 2.08 times higher in people of normal weight with central obesity, compared with those with a normal body mass index and normal waist-to-hip ratio.

Busting Belly Fat: The Number One Dietary Secret

To address a greater-than-ideal waist size, the first step you need to take is remove all grains and sugars, particularly fructose, from your diet until your weight has normalized. Following my comprehensive nutrition plan can help you take control of your diet in an incremental manner.

The average American now consumes about 70 grams of fructose every day. Worse yet, about 25 percent of all Americans consume over 134 grams of fructose a day, according to research by Dr. Richard Johnson, chief of the division of kidney disease and hypertension at the University of Colorado.

To learn more about how fructose impacts your weight and health, I highly recommend reading Dr. Richard Johnson’s new book The Fat Switch. In it, he reviews groundbreaking new research showing that eating too much and exercising too little are NOT solely responsible for why you keep gaining weight or have trouble shedding those excess pounds.

His research shows that metabolic syndrome (characterized by central obesity or increased waist circumference, high blood pressure and insulin resistance) is actually a normal condition that animals undergo to store fat. Animals’ ability to gain “hibernation fat” appears to be regulated by a switch in the mitochondria that is turned on and off by a common food that no longer provides survival advantage to humans living in contemporary society, namely fructose.

Fructose-containing sugars cause weight gain not by the calories they contain, but by triggering this “fat switch,” which tells your body it’s time to store fat, just as if you were an animal preparing for hibernation. Furthermore, uric acid is increased by fructose, and also causally contributes to obesity and insulin resistance. Effective treatment of obesity therefore requires turning off your fat switch — by avoiding fructose, which is the trigger — and improving the function of your cells’ mitochondria.

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day. However, for most people – especially if you struggle with high blood pressure and insulin resistance – it would be wise to limit your fructose to 15 grams or less, as it is virtually guaranteed that you will consume “hidden” sources of fructose from most beverages and just about any processed food you might eat.

Tips to Build Your Bones

One of the best ways to achieve healthy bones is a diet rich in fresh, raw whole foods that maximizes natural minerals so that your body has the raw materials it needs to do what it was designed to do. In addition, you need healthy sun exposure along with regular, weight-bearing exercise. To sum it up:
•Optimize your vitamin D either from natural sunlight exposure, a safe tanning bed or an oral vitamin D3 supplement. Check your blood levels regularly to make sure you’re within the optimal range. If you take oral vitamin D, be sure you are also aware that you need to optimize your vitamin K2 accordingly (you should take 100 mcg of vitamin K2 per 1,000 IU’s of vitamin D).
•Optimize your vitamin K2 through a combination of dietary sources (fermented foods like natto, raw milk cheeses, etc.) and a K2 supplement, if needed. Although the exact dosing (for oral supplementation) is yet to be determined, and you must use caution on the higher doses if you take anticoagulants, if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150-300 mcg daily. Vitamin K2 is the “miracle” calcium glue that actually removes the calcium from your artery’s lining and puts it back into your bones.
•Make sure you do weight-bearing exercise, which has profound benefits to your skeletal systems. My favorite is Peak Fitness, a short intense training protocol that improves muscle energy utilization and expenditure due to its positive effects on increasing muscle mass and improving muscle fiber quality. It is also very important to do strength-training exercises to produce the dynamic piezoelectric forces in your bones that will stimulate the osteoblasts to produce new bone. Power Plate is also particularly useful for building bone, so much so it was used by the Soviet space program to preserve astronaut bone density.
•Consume a wide variety of fresh, local, organic whole foods, including vegetables, nuts, seeds, organic meats and eggs, and raw organic unpasteurized dairy for calcium and other nutrients. The more of your diet you consume RAW, the better nourished you will be. Minimize sugar and refined grains.

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

Caroline Barringer is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), and an expert in the preparation of the foods prescribed in Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) Nutritional Program.

I first met Caroline at the November 2011 Weston Price Wise Traditions event, where I had the opportunity to enjoy some amazing fermented vegetables that her company had prepared.

I immediately started incorporating them into my own diet, and after about six weeks, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this minor change had dramatically decreased plaque formation on my teeth, which has been a chronic problem for me.

Caroline has been involved with nutrition for about 20 years, and is now one of Dr. McBride’s chief training partners, helping people understand the food preparation process, which relies heavily on fermented and traditionally-prepared whole foods.

Caroline’s journey began when her health suffered a blow.

“First and foremost, I’m a professional singer and voice-over artist. In my younger years, when I first moved to New York (I’m originally from Florida), I had a rigorous performance schedule, and this schedule really took a toll on my health,” she says.

“I noticed severe energy issues and chronic fatigue, acne, and a lot of reflux, a lot of digestive issues. So, I was searching for food to be my medicine.

I was a vegetarian for a while, so I first started out with Ann Wigmore’s Living Foods Lifestyle. And of course, she’s mostly vegan, but she’s into the whole enzyme-rich foods, the probiotic-rich foods. And that was really pivotal for me, even though I was still a vegetarian and I did not realize the importance of animal fats and animal products in my diet. It was the beginning of the journey to health for me.”

The Phenomenal Health Benefits of Fermented Vegetables

Cultured or fermented foods have a very long history in virtually all native diets, and have always been highly prized for their health benefits.

The culturing process produces beneficial microbes that are extremely important for human health as they help balance your intestinal flora, thereby boosting overall immunity. Moreover, your gut literally serves as your second brain, and even produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin—known to have a beneficial influence on your mood—than your brain does, so maintaining a healthy gut will benefit your mind as well as your body.

Fermented foods are also some of the best chelators and detox agents available, meaning they can help rid your body of a wide variety of toxins, including heavy metals. This is part of what makes Dr. McBride’s GAPS Nutritional Protocol so effective. It effectively restores your own detoxification system, and the fermented/cultured foods are instrumental in this self-healing process. And you don’t need to consume large amounts either.

Caroline recommends eating about a quarter to half a cup (2 to 4 oz) of fermented vegetables or other cultured food, such as raw yoghurt, with one to three meals per day. Bear in mind that since cultured foods are very efficient detoxifiers, you may experience detox symptoms, or a “healing crisis,” if you introduce too many at once. Caroline recommends beginning with very small servings and working your way up to the quarter- to half cup serving size. This way your intestinal microbiota has the chance to adjust.

“If they introduce too much, too fast, they will experience some die-off symptoms that can be uncomfortable and confusing. This is where we lose people. The innate intelligence of their bodies tells them to eat more cultured foods because they’re in such a state of dysbiosis. So, they go to town and eat a whole jar of veggies. Then they go into a healing crisis and they are afraid to try cultured foods again,” Caroline warns.

“… Start slow, and that way you won’t have a headache or you won’t have that outbreak… you will start to see yourself eliminating more naturally, and the proper stool will form, the shape will change, and it will be all be beneficial to you. Let your innate intelligence guide you, and if you see something or feel something that’s not so right, don’t dismiss the cultured foods and say, “Oh, that was bad for me, it caused a reaction.” That’s not what your body’s telling you. Your body’s telling you, “Slow down.”

There are Many Varieties of Cultured Foods

Ideally, you’ll want to include a variety of cultured foods and beverages in your diet, as each food will inoculate your gut with a variety of different microorganisms. Fermented foods you can easily make at home include:
•Cultured vegetables (including pureed baby foods)
•Chutneys
•Condiments, such as salsa and mayonnaise
•Cultured dairy, such as yoghurt, kefir, and sour cream
•Fish, such as mackerel and Swedish gravlax

In this interview, Caroline discusses the process of fermenting your own vegetables in some detail, so for more information, please listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript. According to her, most people are very intimidated, if not downright frightened that the culturing process might lead to some horrific pathogenic infection… While understandable, this fear is undeserved. Caroline addresses this and other concerns in her article “Taking the Mystery out of Culturing Your Own Superfoods.”[1] Clearly, educating yourself about the process will help alleviate concerns about eating fermented foods, which are very much “alive.”

“If they could only grasp the important concept that it’s NOT the microbe; rather, it is the terrain (immune system) we should be worried about!” she says.

How to Culture Your Own Vegetables

While you can do wild fermentation, which is allowing whatever is on the vegetable or fruit that you’re culturing to just naturally take hold and culture the food, this method is very time consuming. Inoculating the food using a so-called starter culture speeds up the fermentation process.

Although you can use a crock pot, Caroline recommends culturing your veggies directly in the glass Mason jars, which eliminates the need for a crock pot and eliminates a transfer step in the process. This also allows you to make smaller batches, and it eliminates the presence of wild yeasts which can occur when using a crock. These yeasts tend to give the food a cheesy sort of flavor, which many find unpalatable.

Here’s a quick summary of Caroline’s recipe for how to make your own fermented veggies:
1.Shred and cut your chosen veggies
2.Juice some celery. This is used as the brine, as it contains natural sodium and keeps the vegetables anaerobic. This eliminates the need for sea salt, which prevents growth of pathogenic bacteria
3.Pack the veggies and celery juice along with the inoculants (starter culture, such as kefir grains, whey, or commercial starter powder like our Complete Probiotics, all of which can be used for vegetables) into a 32 ounce wide-mouthed canning jar. A kraut pounder tool can be helpful to pack the jar and eliminate any air pockets
4.Top with a cabbage leaf, tucking it down the sides. Make sure the veggies are completely covered with celery juice and that the juice is all the way to the top of the jar to eliminate trapped air
5.Seal the jar store in a warm, slightly moist place for 24 to 96 hours, depending on the food being cultured. Ideal temperature range is 68-75 degrees Fahrenheit; 85 degrees max. Remember, heat kills the microbes!
6.When done, store in the refrigerator to slow down the fermentation process

Here are a few of Caroline’s suggestion for how to store the jars for optimal fermentation. (Remember, they don’t require a heated environment and only need to be kept around 72 degrees):

“Simply put the jars into a [portable] cooler and place the cooler OFF the floor (the floor is usually too cold due to heat rising away from it). Wrap the jars inside the cooler in an old towel and place an additional jar of HOT water into the cooler to make the environment warm. You can replace the hot water jar when you “think” about it – no need to obsess.

You can also place the jars in a casserole dish or baking dish and wrap them in a towel and place them in your oven with the oven heat OFF of course, but switch the oven light on. The heat emitting from the appliance bulb will keep the veggies warm.

Another option is to place as many jars as possible into a dehydrator and set it to the lowest temperature setting, but most dehydrators only accommodate a couple of jars max. It’s best to prepare many jars at one time due to the given fact that making veggies is a labor intensive process. I like the cooler or oven incubation processes best. They work well every time.”

Last but not least, resist the temptation to eat out of the jar! This can introduce organisms from your mouth into the jar. Instead, always use a clean spoon to take out what you’re going to eat, then, making sure the remaining veggies are covered with the brine solution, recap the jar.

One Dozen Tips and Tricks for Making Delicious Cultured Vegetables

Due to my own interest, Caroline has shared a lot of information with me. Here are a dozen more of her tips and tricks that she didn’t share during the interview:
1.Cabbage should comprise at least 80 percent of your vegetable blend. Carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, turnips and other hard root veggies can also serve as a great base for your cultured veggies, but they’re not as economical.
2.Five to six medium-sized heads of cabbage will yield about 10-14 quart-size (32 oz) jars of fermented veggies.
3.You can use red or green cabbage, but make sure they’re hard and heavy, with densely packed leaves. The lighter, leafier varieties will tend to turn into mush that doesn’t ferment well.
4.Add in other vegetables to suit your taste, such as: red, yellow or orange bell pepper, butter nut squash, dill, parsley, kale, collards and red or golden beets. Beware: use bell peppers sparingly as they have a very strong presence. One small pepper for 12 to 14 jars is plenty.
5.Always use ORGANIC vegetables!
6.Peel your vegetables as the skins can add a bitter flavor.
7.When adding aromatics, such as onion, garlic and ginger, remember that fermenting increases the flavor multiple-fold, so a little goes a long way. Don’t overdo it! A few medium-size cloves is enough to infuse a dozen jars or more with a mild garlic flavor.
8.Onion tends to overpower, no matter how little is used, so Caroline doesn’t use it in any of her blends.
9.When adding herbs, only use fresh organic herbs, in small amounts. Tasty additions include: basil, sage, rosemary, thyme and oregano.
10.Add sea vegetables or seaweed to increase the mineral, vitamin and fiber content. You can add pieces of whole dulse, or use flakes. Wakame and sea palm, which do not have any kind of fishy flavor, need to be presoaked and diced into desired size. Arame and hijaki do have a fishy flavor.
11.Use two packets of starter culture for a 12-14 jar batch during summer season. In the winter, you’ll need three packets.
12.During summer, veggies are typically done in three to four days. In the winter, they may need up to seven days. Just open up the jar and have a taste. Once you’re happy with the flavor and consistency, move the jars into the fridge.

Tools of the Trade

Having the right tools can make the process easier. You don’t need much, but canning jars, and a food processor to slice and dice large amounts of vegetables are recommended.

Canning jars can be found at your local hardware store and at some grocery stores as well. Amazon.com and other online sources also carry them. The 32 oz jars work really well, but you can find both smaller and larger, depending on your needs. Do get the wide-mouthed version, as they are much easier to work with. It allows you to get your hand down into the jar, and it’s very important to pack the jar firmly with vegetables to eliminate any air pockets.

Caroline explains:

“You want to squeeze all the oxygen out, and you want your cultured veggies or whatever you’re culturing to be anaerobic, meaning oxygen-free. Underneath water is the best way to do that, or underneath the liquid in the jar. And that wide-mouthed allows you to keep pressing down… A kraut pounder [can be helpful]. It looks like a tiny baseball bat. You can go to krautpounder.com, I believe, and you can buy a little kraut pounder, and you just use that to press down to get all the oxygen out. That way, when you seal up this jar, you have this perfect, anaerobic environment within that vessel for it to culture.”

Caroline recommends a couple of models of food processors, emphasizing quality and power for optimal performance:
•Cuisinart Home Kitchen Models, Elite series: This is for general home use and usually available on Amazon.com. Very reliable, powerful and it has a large 14-cup capacity so you don’t have to keep taking it apart to dump out the processed contents.
•Waring Cuisinart Commercial Food Processor with feed chute: Heavy-duty and high quality, this food processor is worth the investment ($599 and up) if you plan to make veggies often and in larger batches. This one is NOT available on Amazon.com. You will need to purchase online from a restaurant supply store.

Another tip includes using the shredding disc rather than the “S” shaped blade. Make sure the food processor model you buy comes with a shredding disc, as some don’t. In worst case, purchase it separately. According to Caroline, “the shredding blade makes a “slaw/traditional kraut-like” texture to the veggies. The “S” blade finely minces veggies into a more pulp-like, crushed consistency. This can be too soupy and during the culturing process, become more like a mushy salsa. Definitely SHRED your veggies for the best results – unless you like the crushed version.”

Additional Resources

In addition to the wealth of information shared in the interview above, I highly recommend getting the book Gut and Psychology Syndrome, which provides all the necessary details for the GAPS protocol. We were finally able to convince Dr. Campbell-McBride to print it in the U.S., so I now offer it for sale in my store. It saves you a few dollars, compared to ordering it from the U.K..

www.Immunitrition.com is another helpful resource where you can learn more about cultured and fermented foods. If you’re so inclined, you can also find information about how to become a Certified Healing Foods Specialist here.

Additionally, if for whatever reason you just don’t have the time, effort, energy, ambition, motivation, or discipline to ferment your own foods, but you understand and appreciate the value of them, Caroline has a company that sells them. I used hers for a month before I started making my own. So, if you just want to put your toe in the water and see if you like them, you can order a jar or two and try them out.

You can find her products on www.CulturedVegetables.net or www.CulturedNutrition.com.

I feel very strongly that if we can catalyze a movement to get more people to implement this ancient dietary wisdom to their normal eating patterns, then we’ll start seeing a radical change in health.

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

By Dr. Mercola

When you’re feeling under the weather, is it better to curl up in bed for some rest or push yourself to exercise?

One of the benefits of being fit is that you can take time off and recover and use the reserves that you have built up to help you recover. It is kind of like having stored fat during times of famine.

Your built up fitness levels will provide you with the immune buffers and support to allow your body to effectively address the illness. If you don’t stop exercising you can easily exceed your body’s recovery capacity and actually get worse.

A simple guideline to follow is that if your body is under stress when you’re sick, seek rest as your body mobilizes to fight off the illness. Too much exercise, especially intense exercise, should therefore be avoided, as it will place an additional stressful burden on your already stressed system.

That said, moderate exercise, like walking, is generally fine, as long as you are careful and listen to your body to make sure you don’t overdo it.There are certain times when moderate exercise is actually preferable when you’re sick as well.

When is it OK to Exercise While Sick?

If your symptoms are above your neck, it’s usually ok to exercise, albeit at a lower intensity than you’re used to. This includes symptoms such as:
•Runny nose
•Nasal congestion
•Sneezing
•Sore throat
•Headache

If you have enough energy to tolerate it, increasing your body temperature by sweating from exercise will actually help to kill many viruses. In fact, according to research, exercising with a cold may be well advised. At the end of one 10-day trial, those who exercised 40 minutes every-other day, at 70 percent of their maximum heart rate, felt better than those who remained sedentary—even though the clinical severity and duration of their symptoms were virtually identical.1

The key to exercising when you’re sick is to do so carefully. Over-exercising will place more stress on your body, which can suppress your immune system, so you should keep the intensity of your workouts on a moderate level if you’re sick. So, you might just go for a brisk walk if you are coming down with a cold, or simply tone down your regular workout. As noted in Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews:2

“Prolonged intense exercise causes immunosuppression, whereas moderate-intensity exercise improves immune function and potentially reduces risk and severity of respiratory viral infections.”

6 Surprising Times When a Workout Might do You Good

There are many surprising scenarios when, while you might be tempted to lounge on the couch, exercise is actually just what the doctor ordered. This includes:
1.Recovering from Surgery
Hitting the gym after you’ve had minor surgery can be highly beneficial, helping to both decrease side effects and get you back into the swing of your daily life faster. You will, of course, need to be mindful of the level of intensity and avoid exercises that may stress a surgical incision or repair, but generally speaking the sooner you can get moving after surgery, the better.

2.Cancer Patients
Exercising during and after cancer treatment can help reduce your risk of dying from cancer; reduce your risk of cancer recurrence; boost energy; and minimize the side effects of conventional cancer treatment. A report by Macmillan Cancer Support notes that cancer patients and cancer survivors should exercise at least 2.5 hours a week,3 and cites an excerpt from the American College of Sports Medicine consensus statement on exercise guidelines for cancer survivors, which states:

“Exercise is safe both during and after most types of cancer treatment… Patients are advised to avoid inactivity and return to normal daily activities as soon as possible after surgery, and during adjuvant cancer treatments.”

3.Osteoarthritis or Joint Pain
If you have joint pain, exercise is a must; it helps prevent and relieve joint pain through a number of mechanisms, including strengthening key supportive muscles, restoring flexibility, improving bone density and joint function, and facilitating weight loss.

The notion that exercise is detrimental to your joints is a misconception, as there is no evidence to support this belief. Quite the contrary, actually, as inactivity promotes muscle weakness, joint contractures, and loss of range of motion, which can lead to more pain and loss of function, and even less activity. To break this potentially devastating cycle, regular exercise is essential.

If you have osteoarthritis or joint pain and you find that you’re in pain for longer than one hour after your exercise session, you should slow down or choose another form of exercise. Assistive devices are also helpful to decrease the pressure on affected joints during your workout. You may also want to work with a physical therapist or qualified personal trainer who can develop a safe range of activities for you. If the exercise causes pain that persists longer than several hours it most likely was too much.

4.Chronic Pain
Exercise can help with long-term pain relief for a variety of conditions, including osteoarthritis, back and musculoskeletal pain. Furthermore, because exercise often leads to improved posture, range of motion and functionality of your body, it can help treat the underlying source of your pain as well as help prevent chronic back pain. Exercises that can be particularly helpful for chronic pain include stretching, resistance training, and swimming.

5.Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
If you have the lung disease COPD, exercise can help to improve your circulation, helping your body to use oxygen more efficiently. It may also help to strengthen your heart, improve your symptoms, and boost your energy levels so you can perform more daily activities without fatigue or becoming out of breath.

6.Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
Dietary strategies are key for healing irritable bowel syndrome at the foundational level, however exercise can help improve IBS symptoms, as well. In one study, exercise led to improvements in problems like cramps, bloating, constipation and diarrhea, with, 43 percent of exercisers showing a significant improvement in their symptoms.4

When Should You NOT Exercise While Sick?

It’s generally advised that you avoid exercise if you have symptoms that are “below your neck,” such as:
•Fever
•Coughing or chest congestion
•Fatigue
•Widespread body and muscle aches
•Vomiting, upset stomach and/or stomach cramps

But no matter what your symptoms, you need to be very careful and listen to your body. If you don’t feel up to it, and all you want to do is get some rest, then that’s what your body needs.

And I can’t stress enough that if you don’t feel well, you should not do your full, normal exercise routine, as that could clearly stress your immune system even more and prolong your illness if you are not careful and wind up overdoing it.

High-intensity exercise like Peak Fitness should be avoided when you’re sick, because any kind of intensive exercise boosts production of cortisol, a stress hormone which inhibits the activity of natural killer cells—a type of white blood cell that attacks and rids your body of viral agents. This is why running a marathon can actually increase your chances of getting sick shortly thereafter. In fact, elite endurance athletes can suffer anywhere from two to six times as many upper respiratory infections during a year, compared to average, active individuals.5

If You’re Trading Your Workout for a Good Rest, Make Sure You’re Doing This …

Feeling fatigued when you’re sick is your body’s way of telling you to slow down so you get some much-needed rest while your body heals. A good way to help the recovery process is to ground while you are sleeping.

Grounding, or Earthing, is defined as placing one’s bare skin on the ground whether it be dirt, grass, sand or concrete (especially when humid or wet). When you ground to the electron-enriched earth, an improved balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system occurs.

The Earth is a natural source of electrons and subtle electrical fields, which are essential for proper functioning of immune systems, circulation, synchronization of biorhythms and other physiological processes and may actually be the most effective, essential, least expensive, and easiest to attain antioxidant. Your immune system functions optimally when your body has an adequate supply of electrons, which are easily and naturally obtained by barefoot contact with the Earth.

When grounding is restored, many people report significant improvement in a wide range of ailments, including chronic fatigue. These changes are rapid and often occur within 30 minutes.

Obviously, most of us are not going to be comfortable sleeping outside on the ground, so the alternative is to use a grounding or Earthing pad, which allows you to get the benefits of the Earth’s electrons even if you’re indoors, especially when you’re sleeping. If you’re not feeling well, grounding while you sleep is highly recommended to help support your recovery.

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Shocking Confessions of a
Drug Company Insider

The plot of this story seems to be ripped from the headlines … or maybe a movie about a big conspiracy or a cover-up of foul play … just like the Oscar award-winning “The Insider.”

But the story is 100% true.

In 2003, a top executive of the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-SmithKline – worldwide Vice President of genetics – confessed that “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90% – only work in 30 to 50% of the people.”

What that means is … most prescription drugs DON’T work on most people who take them!

Dr. Allen Roses is the pharmaceutical industry insider who made this shocking confession. Although it’s been an open secret within the pharmaceutical industry that most of the drugs it produces are ineffective in most patients, this is the first time that a high-ranking pharmaceutical executive has gone public.

Some industry analysts said that the confession of Dr. Roses is reminiscent of the famous words uttered by Gerald Ratner, a British retail magnate in 1991, who said that his high-street shops are successful because they sell “total crap.”

But it’s one thing for a company to sell worthless products … and it’s another thing altogether to sell worthless products that kill instead of heal.

FACT: In the U.S., the odds of being killed by conventional medicine are almost 20 times (2,000%) greater than being killed in an automobile accident and almost 30 times (3,000%) greater than being killed by a gun.

It’s no wonder that the majority of doctors are frustrated. They entered the medical profession wanting to cure people – but the only tools that medical school training provides them for treating patients are … drugs and surgery.

Doctors have been thrust headlong into a marketing culture that relies on selling as many drugs as possible to the widest number of patients. It’s a culture that has made Big Pharma the most profitable industry in the world – even though most of its drugs are useless, at best – and even possibly harmful or deadly for many patients.

Dr. Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, further states: “Drugs for Alzheimer’s disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients.”

The growing sentiment among doctors is that they want to offer their patients more treatment choices for curing disease than the medical system offers. One member of that growing number of doctors is Dr. Paul Beals.

“I want to do more for my patients than what’s offered by the pharmaceutical industry because I realized earlier on that modern medicine has become, unfortunately, more of a big business than a healing science.”
—Paul Beals, M.D., C.C.N. Georgetown University School of Medicine (Course Instructor 1996-2004: Introduction to Complimentary and Alternative Medicine)

When Doctors Don’t Know the Cure,
This is What They Turn To…

Some time ago, Dr. Beals focused his medical practice on holistic nutrition and complementary medicine. He set up a holistic program for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, liver disease, and other diseases. His challenge, however, was finding the resources for treating diseases … because conventional medicine offered only drugs and surgery.

He stumbled upon a book of medical breakthroughs and “forbidden treatments” that contained all the cures he was looking for. Interestingly enough, the book was written for the layperson – the general public – not medical professionals. And yet he was impressed to discover that every alternative treatment and healing breakthrough presented in the book was thoroughly researched, meticulously fact-checked and verified for its effectiveness. And it also came with footnotes from peer-reviewed, published medical research and scientific studies. He now regards the book as “… the ‘gold standard’ … the ‘bible’ for alternative medicine” and believes “It should be in everybody’s home and in every doctor’s office.”

Dr. Beals is not alone in his high regard of the book. Countless enlightened doctors from around the world are avid fans of the book – and use the treatments presented in the book when they themselves or their family members are stricken with diseases or health problems.

Dr. Richard Simmons thinks that everyone needs this book of medical breakthroughs and “forbidden treatments” in order to take control of their own health.

Dr. Simmons is a medical doctor who sits on the faculty at Ohio State University, where he’s an Associate Professor of Ophthalmology. He’s also the former Chairman of the Alternative Medicine Committee of the Columbus Medical Association.

Dr. Simmons’ wife developed cancer 6 years ago, and underwent surgery which put the cancer in remission temporarily. A year ago, her cancer came back – and instead of turning to conventional cancer therapy, he and his wife turned to the discoveries presented in the book to help prevent further surgery and further progression of the disease.

A doctor friend of Dr. Simmons, whose practice is based in Hawaii, started developing cataracts. A chapter of the book revealed a discovery about some little-known eye drops … and he began administering the eye drops on himself and noticed significant improvement in vision. He continues to take the drops to this day.

The book of medical breakthroughs and “forbidden treatments” contains dozens of cures for the most prevalent diseases that plague mankind, such as…

A $200 “Cure” for AIDS / HIV – A patented low-voltage device that stops the AIDS virus dead in its tracks. This inexpensive “in-home” device costs only $200, and is safe for home use.

A Nobel Prize Nominee Cures Cancer With 2 Common Household Items – A simple protocol for cancer treatment and prevention based on the use of small amounts of 2 inexpensive food substances combined together in specific proportions. Numerous independent clinical studies prove that these 2 food items provide a powerful and effective means of treating even the most advanced cancers. This method was shown to have a 90% success rate in saving terminal cancer patients from certain death.

An Infra-Red Helmet That Has a 90% Success Rate in Halting the Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease – There’s a space-age helmet that uses new “light beam” technology to reverse Alzheimer’s in as little as 30 days when used 10 minutes a day!

An Extremely Potent Anti-Inflammatory Breakthrough Does Wonders for Arthritis Sufferers – Over 3 decades of painstaking research has led to the development of an anti-inflammation remedy that reduces swollen joints by 79%! The anti-arthritic marine lipids derived from a New Zealand mollusk have been tested extensively at the University of Queensland in Australia – and the results are quite dramatic!

An Herb That Virtually Eradicates Heart Disease… There’s an herb that has been used overseas to treat over 15,000 cardiac patients over a 20-year period – and there has been no recurrence of their disease.

Dr. Ross Andersen, a doctor of naturopathic medicine (N.D.) and chiropractic physician (D.C.), was constantly looking for ways to identify the root cause(s) – of his patients’ problems. He devoted many years of study looking for answers to the diverse health problems of his patients. He found the answers he was looking for in the same book of medical breakthroughs and “forbidden treatments” that has been praised by laypeople and doctors alike.

“This book goes far beyond anything that I’ve ever used,” said Dr. Andersen. “It’s absolutely one of a kind … It’s so complete, so precise, so easy to use.” He particularly appreciates how simple it is for anyone to look up a disease in the index, then flip to the page(s) of the book that features the disease – and find treatments, procedures, healing modalities, and supplements that are not only effective, but also inexpensive, non-invasive, and free of side effects.

“This book is something that every alternative physician … and ultimately every regular physician, and every patient is going to want in their home or office so that they can get the most benefit and the answers that are necessary to get their health condition handled.”

Books offering miracle cures for practically every disease are available everywhere. But oftentimes, they present content that is erroneous, inaccurate, poorly researched – and unsubstantiated by science. It’s no wonder that doctors and scientists ridicule such “cures” as nothing more than folklore or kitchen table wisdom. Click here for more information about real cures for virtually every disease, and read the special report titled “How to Tell if a So-Called ‘Miracle Cure’ is Scientifically Proven – or Utter Falsehood”.

Wishing You the Best of Health,

President
Medical Research Associates

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

By Dr. Mercola

Pharmaceutical companies have kept the wool pulled over Americans’ eyes for many years, and had many convinced that they were working fervently to develop safe medications that would cure and prevent virtually every disease plaguing the world.

But these modern-day messiahs are not the saints they would have you believe … not even close.

According to Dr. David Healy, who has had the opportunity to investigate the circumstances behind the approval of certain drugs at a level that very few others have been able to, drug companies frequently hide vital information about their drugs in order to get it on the market and keep it there.

The drug companies that manufacture some of the best-selling drugs in the world have committed some of the greatest crimes against human health, and all of them have at one point or another been found guilty of criminal activity—some have been nailed several times.

So much so that several pharmaceutical companies are on the Top Corporate Criminals list. Yet we entrust our health, our very lives, to these same corporate “personages” who cannot be put in jail for cutting lives short, and who view billion dollar fines as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

As recently as July 2, GlaxoSmithKline plead guilty to three counts of criminal misdemeanor and other civil liabilities relating to the prescription drugs Paxil, Wellbutrin and Avandia, and agreed to pay a total of $3 billion in fines.

In 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company illegally promoted uses of four of its drugs, including the painkiller Bextra and their antipsychotic drug Geodon.

Dr. Healy, a professor of psychiatry in North Wales and Great Britain is a former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology and author of over 175 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 20 books, including Let Them Eat Prozac (one of my favorites), and Pharmageddon, another favorite.

His time is divided between an active psychiatry practice and research.

For example, he has studied the serotonin-uptake theory in depressed patients, and is adamant that there’s no evidence indicating that depressed patients have something wrong with their serotonin system, which makes selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s) a dubious treatment for depression. It may even be part of the equation for why some people become suicidal on SSRI’s, even if they’ve never had such tendencies before.

“We’ve got 30 to 40 years’ worth of work, and no evidence has come to light that there’s anything wrong with the serotonin system in people who were depressed,” he says.

Profits Before Life—The Sad History of Antidepressant Drugs

Dr. Healy’s conviction that SSRI’s can make people actively suicidal was originally borne directly out of his own clinical experience. Since then, the research demonstrating this link has become quite clear, and this class of drugs now carry a “black box” warning. What’s really infuriating though is the evidence that has since emerged showing that pharmaceutical companies knew about it, and hid it, and it wasn’t until it became an obvious issue in clinical practice that a warning was finally issued. People literally lost their lives because these companies didn’t want to risk sluggish sales.

“I got involved as an expert witness in some legal cases that involved these drugs,” Dr. Healy explains. “When you get involved as an expert witness in legal cases, you get to go behind the scenes. You get to go into the company archives, and you get to see what the clinical trials really showed, and what the company personnel really thought about the issues.

Then it was clear that the trials also really showed those problems. It was clear that the companies knew there was a problem, and they were in the business of trying to hush the whole thing up.

… The regulators also clearly knew there was a problem, I would say from very early on. They may well have known there was a problem even before the drugs came to the market. They certainly knew there was a problem shortly after Prozac was launched and a great number of people complained about the fact that they had a problem on this drug.

When they looked at the data – the kinds of data that the FDA, for instance, would have been able to see when they held the first public meeting about whether SSRI drugs, Prozac in particular, could cause people to become suicidal – they had a lot of data that the rest of us didn’t have. They had data on the other SSRIs that haven’t yet been marketed…. I’m sure it was very clear to them then that the SSRIs can cause people to become suicidal.”

Publicly, the FDA argued that putting a warning on the drug might deter people from treatment, so by doing the right thing, we might end up with a detrimental outcome. However, no one addressed the fact that not putting a warning on the drug might make more people use them, hence killing more people, more indiscriminately. This is exactly the situation we’re dealing with now. Even with the warning, antidepressants are prescribed more or less willy-nilly, for everything from anxiety to pain, high blood pressure, and insomnia—minor ailments that in NO WAY warrant such a huge risk.

“[The information] the FDA had points very clearly not just to the fact that [SSRI] drugs can cause a problem, but that on balance, they harm more people than they help,” Dr. Healy says. “How the FDA squared this, I’m not sure.”

SSRI’s Likely Harm More People than They Help

In addition to suicidal thoughts and behavior, there also seems to be an association between antidepressants and other violent behaviors, such as homicides and school shootings. Unfortunately, while suicide has become a well-established (yet oft-ignored) side effect, the data on other types of violence is, again, being hidden.

“We haven’t had hearings about this issue,” Dr. Healy says. “People haven’t had access to the data. There’s been no publications around it. This is one of the biggest problems on which there’s a huge amount of data, but to which we’ve got little or no access.”

Dr. Healy estimates that possibly 1,000 to 2,000 people taking an SSRI drug commits suicide each year in the US who would not have done so were they not on the drug. He also believes there’s a comparable number of people who will commit a violent act against others as a result of the drug, who would not have done so otherwise. Then there’s the issue of generational harm. Birth defects, miscarriages (as many as 20,000 per year), and voluntary abortions due to the baby being diagnosed with a birth defect are other devastating side effects that get little if any attention.

Why is that?

Why is so little attention given to the very serious nature of the side effects associated with these drugs? Why are antidepressants seemingly handed out like candy to cheer people up, as opposed to treat serious mental conditions?

A major part of the problem is the too-cozy-for-comfort relationship between drug companies and psychiatrists and other prescribers. Adding to that problem is the fact that drug companies are actively hiding and suppressing negative data on their drugs, so psychiatrists prescribe drugs without having the real facts.

Psychiatry is Committing “Professional Suicide”

Dr. Healy was recently featured in Time Magazine1, after giving a speech at the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) second largest annual meeting. The topic of the session was conflicts of interest in psychiatry. Maia Szalavitz writes:

“Arguing that his profession is “committing professional suicide” by failing to address its dangerously close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, he likened psychiatry’s attitude toward its faltering legitimacy to the Vatican’s widely derided response to its child-sex-abuse scandal by priests — essentially that psychiatry is brushing off justifiable concerns as hype instead of dealing with the source of the problem.

Few experts believe that psychiatry’s relationship with the drug industry is healthy. While several speakers at the session pointed out that other specialties are similarly entangled with industry, “everyone does it” is generally not a valid defense where conflicts of interest are concerned.

… “I’m going to argue that we need you to be biased. We want you to be biased by treatments that work,” Healy told his colleagues. “I don’t mind if you’re my doctor and you’ve given talks for industry. My concern is not that you’ve been paid by industry, but that you’ve been fooled by industry. The key conflict is whether people are hiding data from you.”

The article goes on to detail some the more unsavory aspects of conflicts of interest—the kind of suppression activities that lead to demolished careers, and worse. Dr. Healy has been personally targeted by drug companies for speaking out against various drugs and exposing wrongdoing. His presentation at the APA included a document obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, which reveals Eli Lilly’s plan for countering his public discourses on how drug companies hide drug data. One of these strategies includes planting people in the audience of his presentations to argue the industry’s view.

What Clinical Trials Do and Do Not Show

According to Dr. Healy, in the clinical trials done to bring antidepressants to market it is virtually impossible to show that they have an overall positive effect. Part of the problem that few consider is the fact that clinical trials are not designed to answer some of the most important questions we have about any given drug, such as: Does this drug save lives?

“From what we know of the data that’s there, the answer is no, they [antidepressants] don’t save lives,” Dr. Healy says. “Clinical trials also aren’t designed to answer the question, “Will these drugs get people back to work?” From the data we have, we have no reason to think that these drugs will be more likely to get people back to work than placebo would, for instance.

In terms of what most people understand the word “work” to really mean, which is [in the vein of the questions] “Will my life be saved?” or “Will I be able to get back to being employed?” we have no evidence that these drugs “work.” What we’ve got is clinical trials based on rating scales, where you can show that the drug does marginally better than placebo on these rating scales. But that’s all we have.”

Fortunately, there are other alternatives, which have been shown to have a more life-enhancing effect than antidepressants, such as niacin (vitamin B3). The renowned and recently deceased Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Abram Hoffer was a strong advocate of the use of niacin in psychiatric illness, specifically for schizophrenia, for which there don’t seem to be many really good treatments.

What he discovered was that niacin deficiency is a major contributor to pellagra, the symptoms of which mimic depression.

He believed there’s a subgroup of people who have an increased nutritional requirement for niacin, making them not merely deficient per se, but niacin dependent. When they don’t get it on a regular basis, and typically in far higher doses than normal, they’re predisposed to psychiatric illnesses. Dr. Healy believes there may be significant value in niacin supplementation, adding that one of the mechanisms of niacin is detoxification, especially lead. This makes sense, since it it’s a potent vasodilator, which would increase supply to the filtering organs, thereby aiding in the excretion process.

To view the full interview, please click HERE!

Download the Full Interview Transcript

What’s the Mechanism of SSRI’s that Make Them so Pernicious?

According to Dr. Healy, the mechanism of harm has not been clearly established. The most likely mechanism of harm is the fact that they act on your serotonin system.

“Serotonin is the most primitive neurotransmitter there is. Even in a single-celled creature, it’s there. When you’re acting on it, you’re acting on a mechanism that is very primitive and very, very profound,” Dr. Healy says. “So, it may be just purely the action on your serotonin system that is the problem.

Now, people who say, “I know SSRIs work” are doing the same kind of thing as saying “I know red wine works.” If you have a nice glass of red wine in the evening, you feel mellowed out and chilled out… The SSRIs can work in the same kind of way, and can do a useful thing, which is: chill people out. You can get people who were stressed from work who are now a little less stressed at work because of the SSRI they’re on. In that sense, they can clearly work—not for all people, but for a portion of people.

But when you test them out in groups of people who are clinically depressed (just as we would find if we were to test alcohol out in groups of people who are clinically depressed in six- to eight-week trials) it’s actually rather hard to show that they do any better than placebo. They have, in fact, much the same rates of improvement compared to placebo, as we would expect to find if the drug we were actually testing was alcohol rather than Prozac, for instance.”

… What you’ve got in the case of the SSRIs is much more like a psychic aspirin.

They numb you slightly. They take the emotional pain away. But they do this only when your serotonin system’s working normally. And they make your serotonin system more abnormal after you’ve been on a course of treatment than it was to begin with.”

Do Prescription Drugs Save Lives?

In his book Pharmageddon, Dr. Healy expands on the skewed data and other manipulation techniques employed in drug trials. While we spend a great deal of time discussing antidepressants in this interview (which you can listen to in its entirety by following the hyperlink provided above), the situation in terms of proving benefit is the same for other drugs.

Statins, for example, can indeed lower your cholesterol levels, and many do so quite well. So in that sense, they “work.” But as with antidepressants, if you ask the question “Do these drugs save lives?” the answer becomes rather murky.

“If you ask the question “Are people going to be better able to work on these drugs?” then the answer is clear: They’re actually going to be LESS able to go to work,” Dr. Healy says. “They’re going to have a range of problems and other symptoms that they didn’t have off the pills.

Now, if you got marginally raised lipid levels, that is not something that interferes with your capacity to work. But if you’re on a drug like one of the statins for instance, you are on a drug that may cause muscle aches, pains, cognitive failures, and may seriously interfere with your capacity to work.”

Osteoporosis drugs are another good example of drugs that, overall, do more harm than good.

“They say up to a third of women over the age of 50 have osteoporosis,” Dr. Healy says. “But they don’t. This is an osteoporosis that’s created by the DEXA scanners that the pharmaceutical companies gave away for free when they were marketing drugs for osteoporosis. If you scan bones, you’ll almost always find little bits of thinning here and thinning there.

So you can create the diagnosis of osteoporosis, and you put these women on pills. Because they’re on pills, they think their bones are brittle, so they’ll probably do the wrong thing, which is they’ll think they shouldn’t go out and mow the lawn. They shouldn’t jog… because their bones are brittle and they might have a fracture. But in fact, getting out to mow the lawn, jog, and get physically fit is a much better thing for them to be doing than to be taking osteoporosis pills, unless they’ve got very severe osteoporosis.”

Personally, I don’t see a reason for ever using an osteoporosis drug. They’re extremely poisonous, and they kill your osteoclasts, the cells responsible for destroying old damaged and unnecessary bone cells that set your osteoblasts up to replace it with new bone tissue. This creates a dynamic balance of bone resorption and bone building. They make your bone denser, but at the same time they make them weaker.

Why You Don’t Want a Doctor Who Follows All the Latest Guidelines

The sad truth is, there’s no easy way to determine what you can trust when it comes to medical research and official treatment guidelines. So much of it has been tainted by economic conflicts of interests. An important point made by Dr. Healy is that a doctor who strictly keeps to the guidelines is going to be far more controlled by the pharmaceutical industry than might be good for your health…

“We’re in a world where you want a doctor who, for the sake of giving you good care, is prepared to take the risk of losing their job, because this is the world that good doctors increasingly are being forced into. They’re being forced into being the kind of physician that says, “I know the guidelines are wrong. Yes, they based it on the latest evidence. But the industry actually controls the evidence, and as far as they do, they control the guidelines process also. I’m going to go by what seems to be the best thing for me to do for my patients.”

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to pick out articles in the literature and say, “We can believe this and not that.” In fact, you could almost say that the articles in what we used to think of as the best journals in the field – like the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other journals like this – are more likely to be compromised than articles in perhaps journals that are less well-known.”

A perfect example of this is the article I recently did on a study that was widely promoted in the media, which declared that eggs were associated with as much risk for strokes as smoking. It was a critically flawed study. And when we looked at the funding of the study, we discovered strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Two of the three researchers in question, have declared interests in statins. Now do you think the companies that make statins might have a vested interest in getting you to be afraid of eggs and cholesterol? Of course they do. The third researcher helped create the vegan “Portfolio Diet,” which only allows egg substitutes and then only sparingly, so he too has a financial stake in scaring people away from eggs.

How Outsourcing Clinical Trials Can Skew or Hide Unsavory Findings

Another significant problem that most people don’t have a clue about is how outsourcing clinical trials to other countries can affect their believability. Even trials done in the US have been plagued with fraud, such as enlisting patients that don’t actually exist. The matter of potential fraud increases with overseas trials, because the FDA does not have the ability to double-check the veracity of the data even if they wanted to (and even in US trials they rarely do).

“There’s a trial recently that brought Abilify® to the market with an indication for maintenance treatment for bipolar disorder. This trial was run in approximately 30 U.S. clinical trial centers and two further clinical trial centers in Mexico. In the trial centers based in the United States, when you added all the patients together, you found that Abilify® didn’t do any good.

It couldn’t beat placebo as a maintenance treatment for patients who had bipolar disorder.

In the Mexican centers, however, it really did beat placebo. It wonderfully beat it. All of the patients down there who got Abilify® did well, and the patients who got placebo did poorly. When you added the two Mexican centers into the U.S. centers, overall you’ve got a marginal result, which showed that Abilify® was slightly better than placebo.

But this was caused by the Mexican patients. Now, clearly, the Mexican data looks very dodgy, very shaky. The FDA knew this was happening, but didn’t in any way investigate the issues. They noted that it was odd, but they didn’t investigate the issues, and they didn’t stop the company, later, from publishing the trial without drawing any attention to the fact that, “Well, you know, our results don’t look all that good when you leave the Mexican trial centers out of the picture.”

Dr. Healy’s Take on the Future of Medicine

Dr. Healy doesn’t cast too much blame on the FDA though, stating that the agency always has been and probably always will be an agency that contributes to public health, “but does so by regulating the wording of adverts that the pharmaceutical companies put out.” He points out that it’s not really the FDA’s job to evaluate the product or the practice of medicine, stressing that this responsibility really falls on doctors.

“Back 30 to 40 years ago, we were a lot safer not because the FDA were doing their job better, but because doctors were doing their job better,” he says.

I think it’s medicine that has lost its way. I think the FDA is still doing what it has always been doing, which is a very minimal job. I mean, most people out on the street want someone there to protect them from the risk that drugs or industry may pose. They’re hoping that that’s the FDA, when, in fact, that has never been FDA’s brief. It’s been the brief of doctors to do that, and we’ve been failing at that job more and more in recent years.”

When asked what he thinks the solution is, Dr. Healy responds:

“I think my solution is this: the job of the doctors have been like the job of the pilot of a plane. Their job is to get you from Chicago to Houston alive—not to get you there 15 minutes earlier; it’s to get you there alive…

Doctors seem to have forgotten this. If they can’t get you there alive; if they can’t be the people whose professional identity is linked to keeping you safe when you go on treatment, they’re going to be replaced by cheaper prescribers – by pharmacists or nurses. Anyone can get you on the pill these days. It takes an expert to keep you safe. I think if doctors don’t realize this, they’re committing professional suicide.”

How You Can Get More Informed, and Be Part of the Solution

Dr. Healy is a strong advocate for doing things to make a difference. And this was the impetus behind a brand new website called www.rxisk.org. His goal for this website is to create a people’s movement for safer drugs.

“We want people to go in there and report any of the problems they may be having on the medicines that they’re on. They can report this to FDA as well. But if they report to us, we’re going to feed their reports through to FDA,” Dr. Healy explains.

Potentially one of the most valuable features on the site will allow you to go through a series of questions that will help you determine whether ailments you’re having are associated with any of the drugs you’re taking. At the end, you will get a report that you can then bring with you to your prescribing doctor, to aid you in making a more comprehensive risk versus benefit analysis. The idea is to try and create better teamwork between you and your doctor. Furthermore, you will get feedback on potential problems with individual drugs long before you’d get it from the FDA.

I feel this could be an excellent tool for anyone currently taking any drug, as well as for anyone considering taking one. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and when it comes to drugs, you really need to do your due diligence, as the risks are all on you—not on your doctor, the FDA, or the pharmaceutical company.

Weighing the risks versus the benefits is crucial, but in order to do this, you need reliable, truthful information, and I believe www.rxisk.org can be a valuable resource that will only become more valuable with time, as people begin to use it and file their own reports on side effects. So please, bookmark it on your computer and refer to it whenever needed, and share it on your social networks. Together, as a community, we can help the movement for safer drugs.

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

By Dr. Mercola

I believe many of our country’s chronic health problems would simply disappear if attention was paid, at the highest levels of government, to the root problem—our agricultural subsidies.

We are subsidizing junk food in one federal office, while across the hall another department is funding an anti-obesity campaign.

This hypocrisy shows just how broken and wasteful our regulatory system really is.

“Farm” subsidies bring you high-fructose corn syrup, fast food, animal factories, monoculture, and a host of other contributors to our unhealthful contemporary diet.

The recently published report called “Apples to Twinkies,” discussed in the news video above, compares federal subsidies of fresh produce and junk food.

It was prepared by U.S. PIRG, a non-profit organization that takes on special interests on behalf of the public.The report is part of their Stop Subsidizing Obesity campaign. The report’s findings reveal where your tax dollars are really going, and it’s quite shocking.

If you were to receive an annual federal subsidy directly, you would receive $7.36 to spend on junk food and just 11 cents to buy apples. In other words, every year, your tax dollars pay for enough corn syrup and other junk food additives to buy 19 Twinkies, but only enough fresh fruit to buy less than a quarter of one red delicious apple.

This is what the government’s priorities REALLY are with respect to your health.

With all of the current focus on deficit reduction and wasteful government spending, you would think there would be pretty much universal agreement that there are far better uses for your tax money than subsidizing the ingredients of a Twinkie. Yet, this practice goes on year after year, and whatever feeble efforts emerge to change the status quo end up filed in the “circular file” at the end of the day.

But why is progress so impeded in this area when common sense would suggest practically everyone would be in favor of eliminating such an egregious waste of resources?

Agribusiness and Pharmaceutical Lobbies Are Formidable Forces in Public Health

The Department of Agriculture is deeply entrenched with agribusiness, and current legislations protect the profits of these large industries at the expense of your health. According to PIRG:

“Our tax dollars should only go to things that serve the public good, yet we’re handing out taxpayer subsidies to big agribusinesses to help subsidize junk food. Huge, profitable corporations like Cargill and Monsanto are pocketing tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, and turning subsidized crops into junk food ingredients—including high fructose corn syrup. These taxpayer giveaways are all the more absurd at a time when one in three kids is overweight or obese, and obesity-related diseases like diabetes are turning into an epidemic.”

You don’t hear about it as often, but the political influence of agribusiness is just as hazardous to your health as that of Big Pharma. They may not write checks quite as large as those issued by the pharmaceutical industry, but the fact that they are controlling something as basic and essential as your food supply gives them a great deal of influence over your health.

U.S. PIRG reports that agribusiness spent 200 million dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions in 2008. However, OpenSecrets.org reports 142 million dollars for that year. According to sector rankings, the agribusiness lobby ranks tenth among the most powerful, in terms of dollars spent, with the pharmaceutical lobby occupying the number one position. Agricultural industry agenda, plus the agenda of Big Pharma, add up to one gigantic obstacle between you and optimal health.

Sadly, you also see the influence of Big Ag in nutrition science. Current policy is actually not designed to help you make sound dietary choices but rather to allow food companies to make health claims to increase profits, and this is a primary reason why you cannot get sound dietary advice from your government. Take the Food Pyramid, for example. Back in 2005, when the updated food pyramid was unveiled, nutritionist Luise Light, a former USDA insider and contributing architect of the original version of the Food Guide Pyramid, exposed how the US government bows to industry interests and plays a key role in the obesity epidemic.

According to the California PIRG (CALPIRG), more than 50 percent of farm subsidies went to only four percent of American farms. Since 1995, 90 percent of the $245 billion in agricultural subsidies went to producers of just five crops—and 30 percent went to corn. This is why high fructose corn syrup is found in nearly every single processed food on the shelf.

Didn’t You Know? Pizza is a Vegetable

Presently, the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza counts as a serving of vegetables in your child’s school cafeteria lunch. Absurd, but true! The USDA proposed guidelines that would have raised the amount of tomato sauce required to qualify for vegetable status. Provisions to limit the use of starchy vegetables (such as French fries and tater tots) in school lunches were also proposed. Of course, food companies, including those that manufacture frozen pizzas for school lunches, as well as potato growers, lobbied against the proposed changes, complaining that the new standards were too strict.

Congress caved under the pressure of the lobbyists and vetoed the bill.

Making matters worse, manufacturers of sugar-laden processed foods pay “rebates” (aka “kickbacks”) to food service companies that serve school districts across the United States, which likely contributes to their reliance on heavily processed foods like muffins, pizza, tater tots and flavored milk in lieu of fresh produce. It’s been established that when kids eat more nutritious lunches, they behave better, are less likely to be obese, and it may improve their grades. So, malnourished kids are not only at risk of chronic disease, but their performance in school inevitably suffers.

Cost of Heart Disease to Approach a Trillion Dollars by 2030

Want to cut the federal budget? Have a country of healthy people. Stop subsidizing Happy Meals. Stop lying to children by telling them pizza is a vegetable. Medical costs are skyrocketing as average health is deteriorating, and as chronic illness appears earlier and earlier in people’s lives. For the first time in history, your child may have a lifespan that is 10 years shorter than yours. Obesity now costs more than smoking, in terms of healthcare dollars spent. Diet-related disease is the number one killer in the U.S., and other countries are not far behind.

Heart disease is a direct reflection of poor dietary choices. Heart disease costs us $189.4 billion per year. However, statistics show that by 2030, these costs will triple, resulting in a mind-bending $818 billion!

A few famous chefs are leading movements to combat childhood obesity and malnutrition. For example, Chef Ann Cooper’s National Food Challenge is a movement to make school lunches more healthful using practical strategies, such as increasing the availability of salad bars in schools. And well-known British chef Jamie Oliver has been leading a decade-long Food Revolution to battle childhood obesity and malnutrition, trying to revamp school lunches. In 2010, he launched a campaign to “save the health of America’s next generation.”

You can sign his petition here—his goal is one million signatures, and he has less than one quarter million to go. I also encourage you to watch Jamie’s passionate, entertaining, and award-winning TED speech about food and childhood obesity.

An Argument For KEEPING Agricultural Subsidies

Mark Brittman of the New York Times wrote an interesting commentary in March of 2011 about fixing agricultural subsidies, as opposed to nixing them. He argues that reformed subsidies can be used to move us forward toward economic—and nutritional—recovery. He writes:

“Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies… Farm subsidies were created in an attempt to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression, which makes it ironic that in an era when more Americans are suffering financially than at any time since, these subsidies are mostly going to those who need them least.”

Brittman argues that subsidy money, which is already IN the budget, could be redirected toward leveling the playing field and helping smaller farmers to compete in the marketplace. The money could be redirected, for example, in the following ways:
•Funding research and innovation in sustainable agriculture
•Providing incentives to attract new farmers
•Saving farmland from development
•Assisting farmers who grow currently unsubsidized fruits and vegetables, while providing incentives for monoculture commodity farmers (corn, soy, wheat, rice) to convert some of their operations to more desirable foods
•Leveling the playing field so that medium sized farms can more favorably compete with agribusiness as suppliers for local supermarkets

If we’re going to subsidize, let’s subsidize in a way that helps restore the health of our citizens and our land—programs that might just pay for themselves by the reduction in healthcare costs they bring about. But these changes are not going to be an easy hill to climb, given the pressures to maintain the status quo. If you’re curious about which farms and commodities are subsidized in your state, you can visit the Environmental Working Group’s 2011 Farm Subsidy Database, which breaks down subsidies by category and by region.

The Secret Farm Bill of 2011

A 2011 farm bill designed to create a new handout that would guarantee income to the biggest farmers—despite their near-record profits—thankfully died, for the time being. EWG called it the “Secret Farm Bill” of 2011. Big agribusiness and their powerful Congressional allies tried to slip the bill into law through the top-secret Super Committee process without justification, open debate, or a single vote. Although the 2011 bill imploded under pressure from concerned representatives and a feeding frenzy of lobbyists, there is sure to be “episode two” of the saga in 2012.

According to US PIRG, Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona has introduced a bill for 2012 that would reform the worst of the agricultural subsidies—cutting $28 billion over the next 10 years.

If you don’t like the idea of your tax dollars lining the pockets of wealthy corporations that flood the market with sugary sodas and corn chips, now is the time to speak up, as Congress is preparing to vote on the legislation that perpetuates this system. US PIRG provides a handy link on their website to help you send a letter to your state representatives.

But remember, you can also voice your opinion every day by voting with your checkbook. Support small family farms in your area. Even if it means buying just one or two items at your local farmers market, instead of the big box store, those little purchases add up.

Return to a diet of real, whole foods—fresh organic produce, meats from animals raised sustainably on pasture, without cruelty, and raw organic milk and eggs. Say no to junk food producers by not buying it. Eating this way will earn you a long, healthy life—whereas the typical American diet may set you on the path toward a triple bypass.

References
Environmental Working Group 2011 Farm Subsidy Database
Rand Corporation 2001 and 2002
Huffington Post April 21, 2011
Chef Ann Cooper’s National Food Challenge
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
New York Times March 1, 2011
Environmental Working Group December 20, 2011

If you like what you read, please consider donating to help support my blog, even as little as $5 will help.

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:
Dr. Mary Newport writes about ketone bodies, an alternative fuel for your brain which your body makes when digesting coconut oil, and how coconut oil may offer profound benefits in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.

If her theory is accurate, this could be one of the greatest natural health discoveries in a long time. Backing up her claims is the remarkable recovery of her own husband.

Bear in mind however that contrary to Dr. Newport, I personally do NOT support using drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, and based on his condition believe enrolling him in a vaccine study is completely contraindicated and ill advised.

That said, I believe Dr. Newport may have stumbled upon a powerful natural strategy to help prevent and treat Alzheimer’s, and that’s what I want to address here.

“Brain Starvation” is a Hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease

One of the primary fuels your brain needs is glucose, which is converted into energy.

The mechanism for glucose uptake in your brain has only recently begun to be studied, and what has been learned is that your brain actually manufactures its own insulin to convert glucose in your blood stream into the food it needs to survive.

As you may already know, diabetes is the condition where your body’s response to insulin is weakened until your body eventually stops producing the insulin necessary to regulate blood sugar, and your body’s ability to regulate (or process) blood sugar into energy becomes essentially broken.

Now, when your brain’s production of insulin decreases, your brain literally begins to starve, as it’s deprived of the glucose-converted energy it needs to function normally.

This is what happens to Alzheimer’s patients — portions of their brain start to atrophy, or starve, leading to impaired functioning and eventual loss of memory, speech, movement and personality.

In effect, your brain can begin to atrophy from starvation if it becomes insulin resistant and loses its ability to convert glucose into energy.

It is now also known that diabetics have a 65 percent increased risk of also being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and there appears to be a potent link between the two diseases, even though the exact mechanisms have yet to be determined.

It seems quite clear however that both are related to insulin resistance – in your body, and in your brain.

Alternate Brain Food Can Stop Brain Atrophy in its Tracks

Fortunately, your brain is able to run on more than one type of energy supply, and this is where coconut oil enters the picture.

There’s another substance that can feed your brain and prevent brain atrophy. It may even restore and renew neuron and nerve function in your brain after damage has set in.

The substance in question is called ketone bodies, or ketoacids.

Ketones are what your body produces when it converts fat (as opposed to glucose) into energy. And a primary source of ketone bodies are the medium chain triglycerides (MCT) found in coconut oil!

Coconut oil contains about 66 percent MCTs.

The benefits of ketone bodies may also extend to a number of other health conditions, according to Dr. Newport:

“Further, this is a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclero­sis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease), drug resistant epilepsy, brittle type I diabetes, and diabetes type II, where there is insulin resistance.

Ketone bodies may help the brain recover after a loss of oxygen in newborns through adults, may help the heart re­cover after an acute attack, and may shrink cancer­ous tumors.”

Medium chain triglycerides (MCT) are fats that are not processed by your body in the same manner as long chain triglycerides. Normally, a fat taken into your body must be mixed with bile released from your gallbladder before it can be broken down in your digestive system.

But medium chain triglycerides go directly to your liver, which naturally converts the oil into ketones, bypassing the bile entirely. Your liver then immediately releases the ketones into your bloodstream where they are transported to your brain to be used as fuel.

In fact, ketones appear to be the preferred source of brain food in patients affected by diabetes or Alzheimer’s.

“In Alzheimer’s disease, the neurons in certain areas of the brain are un­able to take in glucose due to insulin resistance and slowly die off, a process that appears to happen one or more decades before the symptoms become apparent,” Dr. Newport states in her article.

“If these cells had access to ketone bod­ies, they could potentially stay alive and continue to function.”

The Ketonic Diet – Why Avoiding Grains Also Protects against Neurodegeneration

Another way to increase ketone production in your body is by restricting carbohydrates.

This is what happens when you go on a high fat, high protein, low carbohydrate diet: Your body begins to run on fats instead of carbohydrates, and the name for this is ketosis.

This is also why you don’t starve to death when you restrict food for weeks at a time, because your body is able to convert stored fat into ketones that are used as fuel instead of glucose.

Consuming medium chain triglycerides such as coconut oil is a better option, however, because the ketones produced by ketosis are not concentrated in your bloodstream, but are instead mostly excreted in your urine.

MCTs and Alzheimer’s Research

The mechanism of this MCT-ketone metabolism appears to be that your body treats MCTs as a carbohydrate and not a fat. This allows the ketone energy to hit your blood stream without the normal insulin spike associated with carbohydrates entering your bloodstream.

So in effect coconut oil is a fat that acts like a carbohydrate when it comes to brain fuel.

Therapeutic levels of MCTs have been studied at 20 grams per day. According to Dr. Newport’s calculations, just over two tablespoons of coconut oil (about 35 ml or 7 level teaspoons) would supply you with the equivalent of 20 grams of MCT, which is indicated as either a preventative measure against degenerative neurological diseases, or as a treatment for an already established case.

Remember though that people tolerate coconut oil differently, and you may have to start slowly and build up to these therapeutic levels. My recommendation is to start with one teaspoon, taken with food in the mornings. Gradually add more coconut oil every few days until you are able to tolerate four tablespoons.

Coconut oil is best taken with food, to avoid upsetting your stomach.

You Also Need Dietary B12 for Optimal Brain Health

According to a small Finnish study recently published in the journal Neurology, people who consume foods rich in B12 may also reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s in their later years. For each unit increase in the marker of vitamin B12 (holotranscobalamin) the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was reduced by 2 percent.

However, I strongly disagree with the dietary advice published by CNN Health on this topic, which included fish and fortified cereals.

Fortified cereals are most definitely NOT a good source of dietary B vitamins. They also have inorganic iron added. This is the worst type of iron to use as a supplement and it will raise already elevated iron in those that don’t need it, like most adult men and postmenopausal women.

Elevated iron levels will actually increase your risk of Alzheimer’s

Additionally, most fish are today so contaminated, I cannot recommend increasing consumption of fish either. One exception would be sardines, which are high in B12 and small enough to typically be less contaminated, compared to larger fish.

Instead, your ideal dietary sources of B12 vitamins would include:
•Liver from organic calf
•Wild caught salmon
•Organic, grass-fed beef
•Lamb (which are typically grass-fed even if not specified as organic)
•Organic, free-range eggs

Vitamin B12 is present in natural form only in animal sources of food, which is one of the reasons I advise against a strict vegetarian or vegan diet. The few plant foods that are sources of B12 are actually B12 analogs. An analog is a substance that blocks the uptake of true B12, so your body’s need for the nutrient actually increases.

There are many well-documented cases of brain abnormalities in strict vegetarians, resulting from vitamin B12 deficiency.

Foods to AVOID to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Meanwhile, besides incorporating ketone therapy (coconut oil), as either a preventative step or as a treatment, there are other steps you can take to help minimize your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease decades from now.

For instance, it’s important to know what foods to avoid, in order to protect the health of your brain.

These four foods in particular can be pinpointed as enemies of optimal brain health:
1.Sugars, especially fructose — Excessive sugar and grain consumption are the driving factors behind insulin resistance, and the strategies that protect your brain are very similar to those for avoiding diabetes.

There is simply no question that insulin resistance is one of the most pervasive influences on brain damage, as it contributes massively to inflammation, which will prematurely degenerate your brain.

Ideally, you’ll want to restrict your total fructose consumption to below 25 grams a day. This includes refraining from eating too many fruits, if you normally eat a lot of them. If you consume more than 25 grams a day of fructose you can damage your cells by creating insulin and leptin resistance and raising your uric acid levels.

Berries tend to be lower in fructose, and wild blueberries, for example, are also high in anthocyanin and antioxidants, and are well known for being beneficial against Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.

2.Grains – Even whole, organic grains will convert to sugar in your body and spike your insulin levels.

Ideally you’ll want to devise a nutritional plan geared to your specific nutritional type to maximize your health benefits, as grain carbs are far more detrimental to some than others. I believe this is essential to everyone’s health, and I’m very pleased to now be able to offer the full online nutritional typing program for free. We’ve previously charged $29 for this test, so please do take advantage of this free offer.

3.Artificial sweeteners – Aspartame, for example, is an excitotoxin that can literally destroy your brain cells. There are many studies showing the dangers of aspartame. For example, one study published in 2000 found that aspartame shortens the memory response, impairs memory retention and damages hypothalamic neurons in mice.

And the results from a 2002 study published in the journal Nature suggest that aspartame may cause mental retardation, although the mechanism by which it does that is still unknown.

Other animal studies have linked aspartame to brain damage and brain tumors, even in low doses. I believe aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are dangerous to your health in so many ways, I even wrote an entire book on this topic called Sweet Deception.
4.Soy — Unfermented soy products are another common food that should be avoided if you want to maintain healthy brain function.

One well-designed epidemiological study linked tofu consumption with exaggerated brain aging. Men who ate tofu at least twice weekly had more cognitive impairment, compared with those who rarely or never ate the soybean curd, and their cognitive test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older than their current age.

What’s more, higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight. Shrinkage does occur naturally with age, but for the men who had consumed more tofu showed an exaggeration of the usual patterns you typically see in aging.

Dr. Kaayla Daniel has written an excellent book, The Whole Soy Story, which covers the health dangers of soy in great depth and I highly recommend it to anyone still under the illusion that soy is a health food.

Additional Guidelines to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease While Combating Diabetes at the Same Time

Clearly, the best-known “treatment” for Alzheimer’s disease is prevention, not drugs.

There is no question that insulin resistance is one of the most pervasive influences on brain damage as it contributes massively to inflammation, which will prematurely degenerate your brain — just as it destroys the rest of your body and contributes to degenerative and chronic diseases of all kinds.

As a general rule for optimal physical and mental health, you’ll want to keep your fasting insulin levels below 3.

Interestingly, normalizing your body’s insulin and leptin levels will typically help raise your production of brain insulin, which is a good thing.

In addition to the dietary recommendations already discussed above, the following seven guidelines can further help you prevent Alzheimer’s disease and keep your mind sharp as you age:
1.Optimize your vitamin D levels through safe sun exposure, a safe tanning bed and/or vitamin D3 supplements.
2.Take a high-quality animal-based omega-3 fat. I recommend consuming high quality krill oil to meet the optimal amount of omega-3 fats needed to achieve good health and fight Alzheimer’s. I recently did an interview with Dr. Rudi Moerck, an industry expert, which goes into great detail as to why I am strongly recommending krill.
3.Exercise. You probably know that exercise is good for your cardiovascular system, but studies have found that exercise can also protect your brain, thereby warding off Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

According to one study, the odds of developing Alzheimer’s were nearly quadrupled in people who were less active during their leisure time, between the ages of 20 and 60, compared with their peers.

Similar to a healthy diet, regular physical activity is one of those actions that can significantly improve many aspects of your physical and emotional health. For the elderly, simple activities such as walking and lightweight training would likely provide benefits. For those who are younger, more strenuous exercise will radically improve the benefits.

4.Avoid and remove mercury from your body. Even trace amounts of mercury can cause the type of damage to nerves that is characteristic of the damage found in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dental amalgam fillings are one of the major sources of mercury, however you should be healthy prior to having them removed. Once you have adjusted to your improved diet, you can follow my mercury detox protocol and then find a biological dentist to have your amalgams removed.

Other sources of mercury include most seafood, thimerosal-containing vaccinations and flu shots, which contain both mercury and aluminum.

5.Avoid aluminum. Aluminum has been widely associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Your main sources of exposure are likely through drinking water and antiperspirants.

Aluminum cookware may also be a source of exposure. Although aluminum pots are probably less problematic than the sources mentioned above, I personally would not use aluminum cookware.

6.Challenge your mind. Mental stimulation, such as traveling, learning to play an instrument or doing crossword puzzles, is associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. Researchers suspect that mental challenge helps to build up your brain, making it less susceptible to the lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
7.Avoid anticholinergic drugs. Drugs that block acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter, have been shown to increase your risk of dementia. These drugs include certain night-time pain relievers, antihistamines, sleep aids, certain antidepressants, medications to control incontinence, and certain narcotic pain relievers.

A recent study found that those who took one drug classified as a ‘definite anticholinergics’ had a four times higher incidence of cognitive impairment. Regularly taking two of these drugs further increased the risk of cognitive impairment.

Final Thoughts on Combating Alzheimer’s with Coconut Oil

The damage done to your brain from the wrong foods and from unbalanced insulin and leptin levels actually begins decades before you show any of the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s. So it’s vitally important to make healthy decisions now, before you unwittingly do decades of damage to your brain and nerves that you may not be able to reverse.

If you undertake a coconut oil or MCTs therapy protocol, be sure to start slow with the oil, and always take it with food to minimize stomach discomfort. If it takes you a few weeks to work up to the four tablespoons of coconut oil required for a therapeutic dose, that’s normal. Not everyone can tolerate so much coconut oil in a single dose right from the start.

The coconut oil or MCTs should also be taken in the morning, as it takes a minimum of three hours for the oil to convert to ketones and reach your brain. Repeating the dose of four tablespoons of coconut oil twice a day may be beneficial for those already suffering from pre-Alzheimer’s or Alzheimer’s conditions.

With 15 million cases of Alzheimer’s predicted in the United States by the year 2050, you can help ensure you are not one of the victims of this tragic disease by taking steps now to take charge of your health.

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The laws governing the sale of drugs and food additives require substances be safe for human consumption. The artificial sweetener aspartame primarily consumed in beverages and as a popular sugar substitute has consistently been found to cause tumors and brain seizures in animal subjects. In 2005, a European Cancer Research Center, the Ramazzini Foundation, called for an urgent re-examination of aspartame in food and beverages to protect children. This call is made in the face of the US FDA stand that aspartame is safe for human consumption on the ground that “aspartame as a carcinogen is not supported by data.”

Aspartame: A brief history
As early as 1960 aspartame was determined to be a dangerous chemical and the emerging research years later only served to affirm the true nature of this artificial sweetener. Over the years, aspartame has been found to create holes in brain tissue, adversely affect the brain and nerve development in the fetus, cause cancer, migraines, headaches, seizures, convulsions and even retinal damage. With this amount of negative findings, aspartame should have been removed from the market years ago!

Ironically, aspartame was indeed removed from the market after it was already approved for limited use based on tests selected by Searle, the company who originally produced the artificial sweetener. This was after Dr. John Olney, a research psychiatrist from Washington School of Medicine, revealed that consumption of aspartic acid, a major ingredient in aspartame, produced holes in the brains of animal subjects.

After two task forces that found questionable laboratory practices as well as findings, the FDA ordered a grand jury investigation of aspartame studies, but lawyers for the government failed to initiate a legal action against Searle. Time ran out, and the grand jury investigation had to be terminated. Of interest to note was that one of the lawyers for the government, U.S. attorney William Conlon, later joined the law firm representing Searle.

Unfazed by this setback, the FDA this time recommended a Public Board Inquiry which recommended that aspartame be kept off the market until further tests could prove that it did not cause tumors. This led to a formation of another team of experts brought together to look into the Public Board of Inquiry’s conclusions. This team found itself in a deadlock over aspartame approval, causing the FDA Commissioner not to approve aspartame this time.

In April 1981, Dr. Arthur Hayes was appointed the new Commissioner for the FDA and he later approved aspartame for use in dry goods. In 1983, he also approved aspartame for use in diet drinks, conveniently leaving months later to work for Searle’s advertising agency.

Warning to aspartame consumers
We can only guess and read between the lines what kind of politics it took to get aspartame approved. After more than 8,000 complaints on Nutrasweet side effects, a list of symptoms attributed to aspartame from complaints submitted to the FDA was made public. This list included among others: hallucinations, diarrhea, seizures, depression, migraine, fatigue and insomnia. Aspartame has also been linked to tumors, cancer and infertility.

Except for a brief declaration that carefully controlled clinical studies showed aspartame is not an allergen, the FDA merely issued an advisory that products containing aspartame must include a warning to phenylketonurics, people sensitive to the compound phenylalanine. It still continues to adhere to its stand that “aspartame as a carcinogen is not supported by data.”

Aspartame was never tested on humans before its approval. Now, it is found in 6,000 products and consumed by more than 250 million people, with Americans consuming around half of the world supply. By default, we have now become the test subjects for aspartame’s safety. Unwittingly we are providing evidence to aspartame’s toxicity through the devastating effects it is slowly producing among its consumers. The list of complaints submitted to the FDA as well as from anecdotal reports does not seem to end anytime soon. If the government chooses to turn a blind eye on aspartame, let us at least choose not to be a willing conspirator and suffer the consequences of being a willing victim.

Sources for this article:

http://www.fda.gov
http://www.colorado.edu
http://www.aspartame.org/aspartame_experts_regulatory2.html
http://www.sweetpoison.com
http://answers.hhs.gov/questions/3011

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035195_aspartame_brain_tumors_seizures.html#ixzz2EplKpYRw

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