Rather Be Healthy

It’s Time to Change American Disease-Management into a Health-Fostering System

By Dr. Mercola
I’ve recently written a couple of articles about the exorbitant cost of medical care in the US, which is incompatible with the poor health outcomes of Americans at large.

Americans pay the most for but reap the least amount of benefits from their health care, compared to other industrialized nations. Overcharging and over-treating are two factors contributing to this enormous problem.

Andrew Weil, author of You Can’t Afford to Get Sick: Your Guide to Optimum Health and Health Care, recently jumped into the fray with an article on CNN1 and a full one-hour long CNN documentary. The documentary is called Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which CNN premiered on March 10. Weil writes:

“The most insistent political question of the past four years has been: How can more Americans get access to medical care?

The federal response was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Better known as ‘Obamacare,’ it is a complex mix of insurance changes and tax credits. When the act takes effect on January 1, 2014, it will provide access to insurance to about 30 million people who currently don’t have it.

Unfortunately, that was the wrong question. So the looming ‘answer’ is wrong as well. Here’s the right question: How can we improve medical care so that it’s worth extending it to more people? In other words, how can we create a health care system that helps people become and stay healthy?”

Disease-Management versus Health Care

I could not agree more with Weil’s statement that the US does not have a health care system; we have a disease-management system.

It’s a system that is wholly dependent on expensive drugs and invasive surgeries, opposed to preventive measures and simpler, less expensive treatment alternatives. In short, it’s a system rooted in an ideal of maximized profits, opposed to helping people maintain or regain their health.

The majority of the diseases we’re trying to “manage” in this manner are lifestyle-related, and if you don’t address this root cause, you’ll never get better. You’re just paying for overpriced band-aids that do absolutely nothing to fix the underlying cause.

As Weil states:

“Making this system more accessible by passing costs to taxpayers will simply spread its failures more broadly.”

Like myself, Weil promotes integrative medicine (IM) as a better alternative to the current system. IM offers a combination of conventional medical therapies and complementary or alternative therapies “for which there is some high-quality scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness.”

Placing greater emphasis on prevention, IM fosters long-term health, and when disease does set in, conventional drug and surgery approaches are used sparingly and/or as a last resort.

Our current system does the exact opposite. Drugs and surgery are employed FIRST, and then, when the patient has exhausted all conventional avenues, he or she will sometimes turn to alternative therapies or nutritional interventions out of sheer desperation, on their own (and at their own expense).

Frequently this is what ends up saving that person’s life… Unfortunately, many have been financially ruined by the time they’ve wound their way through the conventional system.

Escape Fire takes a deeper look at the problems inherent with our medical system; the cause of the problems and its devastating effects, and provides some hopeful solutions. Weil issued the following highlights from the film:
•The torturous journey of Sgt. Robert Yates, an injured veteran wounded in Afghanistan. He was prescribed a shopping bag full of prescription medications that left him broken and miserable in body, mind and spirit. Watching Yates begin to regain his health through gentle, low-cost therapies, including meditation and acupuncture, is profoundly moving.
•A look at the revolutionary Safeway Healthy Measures Program. It gives the supermarket chain’s employees financial incentives for taking responsibility for their own health, decreasing Safeway’s insurance costs significantly while improving participants’ well-being.
•The dramatic story of Dr. Erin Martin, an Oregon primary care physician fed up with being pushed to treat patients faster and faster to boost clinic profits. She enrolled in the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine’s Fellowship Program to find a better way, explaining that “I’m not interested in getting my productivity up — I’m interested in helping patients.”

Why the Affordable Health Care Act is Unlikely to Benefit Your Health

Last fall, I gave a presentation at Harper College, in which I discussed the Affordable Health Care Act, and why it’s likely to make matters far worse rather than better. It’s important to understand that guaranteed health insurance does NOT equate to guaranteed health care.

A major part of the problem is that the Act does not include any strategies designed to actually prevent illness. It also does not contain any measures to rein in or reduce out-of-control health care costs related to overcharges. Instead it expands an already flawed model of “care” that has been and continues to be a leading cause of both death and bankruptcy in the US.

For example:
•Americans spend twice as much on health care per capita than any other country in the world; in fact according to a series of studies by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, the US spends more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia.

Despite that, we rank dead last in terms of quality of care among industrialized countries, and Americans are far sicker and live shorter lives than people in other nations
•A review of U.S. healthcare expenses by the Institutes of Medicine2 last year revealed that 30 cents of every dollar spent on medical care is wasted, adding up to $750 billion annually. Exorbitant hospital costs are a leading cause of this overspending
•According to a 2011 report by the global consulting firm Milliman, annual healthcare costs for the average American family of four, if covered by a preferred provider organization, is still a staggering $19,3933
•As opposed to other countries, American laws prevent the government from restraining drug prices. Federal law even prevents the single largest drug buyer – Medicare – from negotiating drug prices
•Overall, Americans pay 50 percent more than other countries for identical drugs. This year alone, the US will spend more than $280 billion on prescription drugs. If Americans paid the same prices other countries pay for the same products, we’d save about $94 billion a year

We Need a Whole New System of Medicine

When it comes to medical charges, you the buyer are completely separated from the seller or provider. There’s absolutely no market feedback to regulate and control the prices that are charged, whether they are related to medications or hospital/treatment charges. For the most part, drug makers and hospitals are allowed to charge as much as they want, which plays a large role on why these charges have gotten so outrageously out of control. This simply does not happen in countries outside of the US.

As a result, more than half, or approximately 60 percent, of all personal bankruptcies in the US are related to medical bills. Even more remarkably, the majority of those bankruptcies are among people WITH health insurance… Weil writes:

“The film [Escape Fire] takes its name from the practice of setting a small fire to clear out nearby brush, allowing a fast-advancing forest fire to pass by harmlessly. Will we be sufficiently clear-eyed and rational to take a similarly bold action to avoid disaster wrought by our dysfunctional health care system? I hope so. In the film, I say, ‘The present system doesn’t work, and it’s going to take us down. We need a whole new kind of medicine.'”

This new system needs to address preventive strategies, and allow for less expensive, less invasive and more health-promoting alternatives as the first line of treatment. This automatically means reduced profits for the medical industry as a whole, but the pharmaceutical industry in particular would have to relinquish its grasp on its greatest cash cow, the American drug consumer.

When you consider how far Big Pharma has gone to manipulate the political system to its advantage, lobbying for laws to protect and bolster its profits even to the detriment of the country as a whole, this is not going to happen overnight. But you don’t have to wait for the system to change. You can take control of your own health in the meantime, and proactively work to protect not only your life but your pocketbook as well. At the end of this article, I will list a few of my top healthy lifestyle considerations, the most important of which is proper food choices.

Most of the Leading Causes of Death are Preventable

Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel because you CAN take control of your health – you don’t have to listen to and abide by this system that makes and keeps you sick in order to make multinational corporations wealthy.

The majority of deaths are due to chronic, not acute, disease. And most chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, are largely preventable with simple lifestyle changes. Even infectious diseases like the flu can often be warded off by a healthy way of life. Just imagine the lowered death toll, not to mention costs to the economy, if more people decided to take control of their health … heart disease and cancer alone accounted for 47 percent of deaths in the United States in 2010, and there are many strategies you can implement to lower your risk of these diseases.

The added bonus to this is that the healthier you are, the less you will need to rely on conventional medical care, which is a leading cause of death. So what does a “healthy lifestyle” entail? The following is a short list of the basics expounded upon in my nutrition plan:
•Proper Food Choices

For a comprehensive guide on which foods to eat and which to avoid, see my nutrition plan. It’s available for free, and is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and all-inclusive guides on a healthy lifestyle out there. Generally speaking, you should be looking to focus your diet on whole, ideally organic, unprocessed foods that come from healthy, sustainable, ideally local, sources.

For the best nutrition and health benefits, you will want to eat a good portion of your food raw. Nearly as important as knowing which foods to eat more of is knowing which foods to avoid, and topping the list is fructose. Sugar, and fructose in particular, can act as a toxin in and of itself when consumed in excess, and as such drive multiple disease processes in your body, not the least of which is insulin resistance, a major cause of accelerated aging and virtually all chronic disease.

For most people (although there are clearly individual differences), a diet high in healthful fats (as high as 50-70 percent of the calories you eat), moderate amounts of high quality protein, which is far less than the average amount most people eat, with the bulk of carbohydrates coming from vegetables and very low or no carbohydrates from grains and sugars, will set you on the right track toward health.
•Comprehensive Exercise Program, including High-Intensity Exercise

Even if you’re eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including not only core-strengthening exercises, strength training, and stretching but also high-intensity activities into your rotation. High-intensity interval-type training boosts human growth hormone (HGH) production, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor. I’ve discussed the importance of Peak Fitness for your health on numerous occasions, so for more information, please review this previous article.
•Stress Reduction and Positive Thinking

You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease — from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer. Effective coping mechanisms are a major longevity-promoting factor in part because stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day. Meditation, prayer, energy psychology tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium.
•Optimize Vitamin D with Proper Sun Exposure

We have long known that it is best to get your vitamin D from appropriate sun exposure during times when UVB rays are present. Vitamin D plays an important role in preventing numerous illnesses ranging from cancer to the flu.

The important factor when it comes to vitamin D is your serum level, which should ideally be between 50-70 ng/ml year-round. Sun exposure or a safe tanning bed is the preferred method for optimizing vitamin D levels, but a vitamin D3 supplement can be used when necessary. Most adults need about 8,000 IU’s of vitamin D a day to achieve serum levels above 40 ng/ml, which is still just below the minimum recommended serum level of 50 ng/ml.

Be aware that if you take supplemental vitamin D, you also need to make sure you’re getting enough vitamin K2, as these two nutrients work in tandem to ensure calcium is distributed into the proper areas in your body. Vitamin K2 deficiency is actually what produces the symptoms of vitamin D toxicity, which includes inappropriate calcification that can lead to hardening of your arteries.

While the ideal or optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be elucidated, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue, author of Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life, 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).

Fermented vegetables 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 a two to three ounce serving contained about 500 mcg of vitamin K.
•High Quality Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats

Animal-based omega-3 fat like krill oil is a strong factor in helping people live longer, and many experts believe that it is likely the predominant reason why the Japanese are the longest lived race on the planet.
•Avoid as Many Chemicals, Toxins, and Pollutants as Possible
This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.

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

Americans spend twice as much on health care per capita than any other country in the world; in fact according to a series of studies by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, the US spends more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia.

Despite that, we rank dead last in terms of quality of care among industrialized countries, and Americans are far sicker and live shorter lives than people in other nations. How is that possible? The short answer is: We’re being fleeced.

In the video above, CNN interviews a family blindsided by medical bills amounting to more than $474,000 after 60-year-old Bob Weinkoff spent just a few days in the ICU, suffering from difficulty breathing.

According to a 2011 report by the global consulting firm Milliman, annual healthcare costs for the average American family of four, if covered by a preferred provider organization, is a staggering $19,393.1

Between 2002 and 2011 alone, the average cost of health care for American families doubled, and since absolutely nothing is being done to rein in the absurd overcharges, there’s every reason to believe costs will continue to skyrocket until the bottom falls out.

Cancer treatments, in particular, have increasingly become exorbitantly expensive, even though no one can explain exactly why it has to cost upwards of $1 million.

By dissecting the medical bills people have received, journalist and author Steven Brill says we can see exactly how and why we are overspending and where the money is going.

Bitter Pill – The Absurd Costs of American Health Care

In a recent Time Magazine interview,2 Brill discussed his very impressive 11-page cover story, Bitter Pill:3 This is one of the longer investigative pieces and thankfully Time made it available for free.

“Simple lab work done during a few days in the hospital can cost more than a car. A trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion brings a bill that can exceed the price of a semester at college. When we debate health care policy in America, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?”

In his article, Brill gives numerous examples of shocking markups on many hospital charges, such as $1.50 for a generic acetaminophen tablet, when you can buy an entire bottle of 100 tablets for that amount, $18 per Accu-chek diabetes test strip that you can purchase for about 55 cents apiece, or $283.00 for a simple chest X-ray, for which the hospital routinely gets $20.44 for when it treats a Medicare patient.

Most need to know that going to the ER can bankrupt you if you don’t have insurance. One example given in his article was a school bus driver who slipped and fell on her face and went to the ER. Three CT scans cost her nearly $7,000. She was just short of qualifying for Medicare and wound up being billed the full charge, for which Medicare would have only paid $825. But since she didn’t have Medicare, she got the FULL bill.

Even with insurance you can be decimated. The featured story reviews a man in his 50s who had insurance, developed pneumonia and was hospitalized for one month and came out with a nearly $500,000 bill. After insurance coverage, their bill was still over $400,000. This was in part due to the hospital’s policy of not just double billing for items but TRIPLE billing. Lab tests are another large cost and hospitals generate over 70 BILLION dollars every year from this service, while the largest lab tester in the country, Quest Diagnostics, only generates ONE TENTH of those charges, and they most likely do far more tests.

As an example, according to Stamford Hospital’s latest expense report, which each hospital is required to file with the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the hospital’s total expenses for lab work in 2010 were $27.5 million. Its total charges were $293.2 million, meaning it charged patients about 11 times its costs for lab work.

The Chargemaster: What You Need to Know About if You Want to Avoid Medical Bankruptcy

As Brill discovered, each hospital has an internal price list called a chargemaster, which contains every single item you may be given or come in contact with during your hospital stay. That includes the little white paper cup you get your medicine in, every box of tissue and band-aid, even a toy to a child (which many mistake as a “gift”) can be billed at upwards of $200. The problem is, no one quite knows how the prices in the chargemaster are created.

“It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it…

I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills… No hospital’s chargemaster prices are consistent with those of any other hospital, nor do they seem to be based on anything objective – like cost – that any hospital executive I spoke with was able to explain. ‘They were set in cement a long time ago and just keep going up almost automatically,’ says one hospital chief financial officer with a shrug.

…That so few consumers seem to be aware of the chargemaster demonstrates how well the health care industry has steered the debate from why bills are so high to who should pay them… [T]he drag on our overall economy that comes with taxpayers, employers and consumers spending so much more than is spent in any other country for the same product is unsustainable. Health care is eating away at our economy and our treasury.”

There is no real marketplace as such, as you the buyer is completely separated from the seller. There’s absolutely no market feedback to regulate and control the prices that are charged. For the most part the hospitals charge as much as they want, which plays a large role on why these charges have gotten so outrageously out of control. This simply doesn’t happen in countries outside of the US.

This is a Flash-based video and may not be viewable on mobile devices.

Nonprofit Profitmakers

About the only defense for the chargemaster rates Brill was able to get was that it has to do with charity. John Gunn, chief operating officer of Sloan-Kettering told Brill:

“We charge those rates so that when we get paid by a [wealthy] uninsured person from overseas, it allows us to serve the poor.”

If this strikes you as nonsense, you’re not alone. Brill found two major holes in that argument. The first one is the most obvious: The hospital is not only charging those rates to wealthy medical tourists or “Saudi Sheiks,” as Brill puts it. These chargemaster rates are billed to average uninsured Americans who aren’t poor enough to qualify for the hospital’s financial assistance program, and don’t qualify for Medicaid.

So in essence, middle-class Americans are being bankrupted to help pay for the poor and the elderly while still allowing the hospital to rake in massive profits and paying their executives some rather astounding salaries. For example, at Montefiore Medical Center, a large nonprofit hospital system in the Bronx, its chief executive has a salary of $4,065,000, the chief financial officer of the hospital makes $3,243,000, the executive vice president rakes in $2,220,000, and the head of the dental department makes a not-so-shabby $1,798,000 per year. Similarly, 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1 million.

“Second, there is the jaw-dropping difference between those list prices and the hospitals’ costs, which enables these ostensibly nonprofit institutions to produce high profits even after all the discounts,” Brill writes.

“…[N]o matter how steep the discounts, the chargemaster prices are so high and so devoid of any calculation related to cost that the result is uniquely American: thousands of nonprofit institutions have morphed into high-profit, high-profile businesses that have the best of both worlds. They have become entities akin to low-risk, must-have public utilities that nonetheless pay their operators as if they were high-risk entrepreneurs.

As with the local electric company, customers must have the product and can’t go elsewhere to buy it. They are steered to a hospital by their insurance companies or doctors (whose practices may have a business alliance with the hospital or even be owned by it). Or they end up there because there isn’t any local competition. But unlike with the electric company, no regulator caps hospital profits.”

Hospitals Profit Despite Receiving Only a Small Portion of Billings

Most hospitals end up receiving just 35 percent of what they bill, yet they still manage to make tens of millions of dollars in operating profits each year. Some hospitals, including Sloan-Kettering and MD Anderson, who are tougher in their negotiations with insurance companies, end up getting around 50 percent of their total billings, which quite literally amounts to a fortune. Stamford Hospital reported $63 million in operating profits in 2011, even though about half of their patient base is highly discounted Medicare and Medicaid patients. The actual revenue received, which included all the discounts off the chargemaster, was $495 million.

“That’s a 12.7% operating profit margin, which would be the envy of shareholders of high-service businesses across other sectors of the economy,” Brill writes. “Its nearly half-billion dollars in revenue also makes Stamford Hospital by far the city’s largest business serving only local residents. In fact, the hospital’s revenue exceeded all money paid to the city of Stamford in taxes and fees. The hospital is a bigger business than its host city.”

Medicare is Part of the Problem

Medicare was signed into law in 1965. At the time, the House Ways and Means Committee predicted the program would cost $12 billion in 1990. By the time 1990 rolled around, the actual cost was $110 billion. This year, Medicare costs are estimated to hit nearly $600 billion. As if stuck in an infinity loop, Medicare and Big Pharma (which has successfully manipulated the political system to their unbridled advantage) drive health care costs ever skyward.

As opposed to other countries, American laws actually prevent the government from restraining drug prices. Federal law even prevents the single largest drug buyer – Medicare – from negotiating drug prices. This is a perfect example of how Big Pharma has successfully manipulated laws in such a way that they can operate completely unrestrained in the US, under the flimsy argument that high prices and profits are required in order to fund costly research to develop potentially groundbreaking drugs to treat our ever-proliferating ills.

The only thing Medicare is allowed to do is to add six percent on top of the average sales price drugmakers sell the drug for to hospitals and clinics.

However, Congress does not control what drugmakers charge for their drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to set their own prices, and when it comes to one-of-a-kind drugs like some cancer drugs, the safeguards built into a free market system disappear, making price setting anything but fair.

Pharmaceutical companies also give rebates to hospitals to create incentive to dispense the drug, as the hospital can then make a greater profit. But since hospitals around the country not only get the same drug at varying rates, and the “average sales price” Medicare bases its payments on doesn’t necessarily reflect these rebates, the base price Medicare uses is oftentimes not very average at all… In some cases, this can result in a hospital still making upwards of 50 percent profit on what Medicare pays for the drug!

In the example Brill includes in his report, a cancer serum called Flebogamma costs the manufacturer an estimated $200-300 to collect, process, test and ship. According to the drugmaker, the average sales price for the drug is $2,003. Sloan-Kettering bills $4,615 for the drug, which Medicare then cuts down to $2,123 ($2,003 plus 6 percent).

“In practice, the average sales price does not appear to be a real average. Two other hospitals I asked reported that after taking into account rebates given by the drug company, they paid an average of $1,650 for the same dose of Flebogamma, and neither hospital had nearly the leverage in the cancer-care marketplace that Sloan-Kettering does. One doctor at Sloan-Kettering guessed that it pays $1,400. …So even Medicare contributes mightily to hospital profit – and drug-company profit – when it buys drugs,” Brill notes.

Further adding to the problem of unrestrained costs is the fact that Medicare is not allowed to pay attention to comparative-effectiveness research. What this means is that if two drugs are found to be of equal effectiveness but one costs far less, Medicare is not allowed to make the decision to reimburse for the lower priced drug only.

Americans Pay 50 Percent More than Other Countries for Identical Drugs

As a result of laws and regulations preventing the US government from reining in drug prices like other nations do, drugs are wildly overpriced in the US. Overall, Americans pay 50 percent more than other countries for identical drugs. This year alone, the US will spend more than $280 billion on prescription drugs. If Americans paid the same prices other countries pay for the same products, we’d save about $94 billion a year! The explanation given by the pharmaceutical industry when confronted about this price difference is that:

“US profits subsidize the research and development of trailblazing drugs that are developed in the US and then marketed around the world.”

But, as Brill states, should a country with a health-care-spending crisis really subsidize the rest of the developed world? Who made that decision? Furthermore, the numbers tell us Americans really do not need to pay such inflated prices in order to guarantee continued drug research and development:

“According to securities filings of major drug companies, their R&D expenses are generally 15% to 20% of gross revenue… Neither 5% nor 20% is enough to have cut deeply into the pharmaceutical companies’ stellar bottom-line net profits. This is not gross profit, which counts only the cost of producing the drug, but the profit after those R&D expenses are taken into account… All the numbers tell one consistent story: Regulating drug prices the way other countries do would save tens of billions of dollars while still offering profit margins that would keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies’ quest for the next great drug.”

A New Cottage Industry: Medical-Billing Advocates

A small grassroots-type industry has emerged as a result of shell-shocked patients reaching out for help to understand their medical bills. Referring to themselves as medical-billing advocates, they help you not only read and understand the content of your bills, but also negotiate with the hospital to reduce the charges. Brill quotes Katalin Goencz, a former appeals coordinator in a hospital billing department who now runs her own medical-billing advocacy business from her home in Stamford:

“The hospitals all know the bills are fiction, or at least only a place to start the discussion, so you bargain with them.”

The problem with that, of course, is: what about the people who don’t realize they CAN bargain with a major hospital? And should we really accept “bills of fiction” to begin with? Brill writes:

“Goencz is part of a trade group called the Alliance of Claim Assistant Professionals, which has about 40 members across the country. Another group, Medical Billing Advocates of America, has about 50 members. Each advocate seems to handle 40 to 70 cases a year for the uninsured and those disputing insurance claims. That would be about 5,000 patients a year out of what must be tens of millions of Americans facing these issues – which may help explain why 60% of the personal bankruptcy filings each year are related to medical bills.”

Even with the help of a medical-billing advocate (who of course charges a fee for the service), many uninsured patients still overpay. After all, getting a 50 percent discount on a test billed at $200, which should cost $15 is not necessarily a great bargain, although it’s certainly an improvement if we only take fictional numbers into account. The sad thing is, as mentioned earlier, the overcharges are SO grossly inflated that even if you get the bill cut in half, the hospital still makes out like a bandit!

50 Signs US Health Care System is Gigantic Scam About to Collapse

A recent article lists 50 signs that the US health care system is a gigantic money making scam that is about to collapse.4 This list includes the following amazing statistics:
•This year the American people will spend approximately 2.8 trillion dollars on health care, and it is being projected that Americans will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019
•If the U.S. health care system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet
•Approximately 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills
•The U.S. health care industry has spent more than 5 billion dollars on lobbying our politicians in Washington D.C. since 1998
•The U.S. ambulance industry makes more money each year than the movie industry

Another factor driving this broken health care system is direct-to-consumer drug advertising. According to FiercePharma,5 the pharmaceutical industry spent $2.7 billion on drug ads for TV, magazines, newspapers, radio and billboards over the past 10 years.

“The world’s largest drug company, Pfizer, tops the list, spending 23 percent of that $2.7 billion on some of its best-selling drugs. In fact, as the data show, it is generally a company’s best-selling drugs that get the greatest spends, suggesting that DTC advertising remains very effective.”

Natural is Better, and Less is More

The U.S. health care system has an awful lot of room for improvement. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among high income countries, and ranks dead last in terms of life expectancy among 17 affluent nations. You could say wanton greed is killing this nation…

If throwing money into the system isn’t the answer, then how can we improve the health of Americans? The answer is simpler than most care to admit. I don’t think anyone in the medical community disagrees with the idea that changing your lifestyle can go a long way toward “fixing” a number of chronic conditions, such as diabetes. As identified by the NIH,6 five life-changing factors that can do this are:
•Following a healthy diet
•Maintaining an optimal body weight
•Engaging in regular physical activity
•Not smoking
•Keeping alcohol use to no more than one drink per day for women, and two drinks per day for men

In a Waking Times article from last year,7 Dr. Dennis Antoine discusses the many lifestyle factors contributing to the rise in cancer incidence, and why we have to stop being so foolish as to think we “don’t know” why cancer has become so commonplace. As a group, chemicals play a major role: chemicals in your water, soil, air, in your clothes and in your home, in your household cleaning products and in the lotions and potions you spray and rub onto your skin, and in the vaccines injected into your body.

He also mentions a few different alternative cancer treatments, such as that by Dr. Max Gerson, who in 1938 discovered he could put cancer patients into remission using vegetables. Alas, there’s ample evidence that the cancer industry is not at all interested in finding cures. Its only interest is finding profitable treatments. Dr. Antoine writes:

“At this time in history, a bill was appropriated for 100 million dollars to anyone who could show promise and results in treating cancer. Dr Gerson in 1946 presented 5 terminal cases and 5 additional patients’ records showing his effective treatment and cure of all of these cases. Well, guess what? The Pepper-Neely bill was defeated by four senators who were medical doctors. Also of note, radio announcer Raymond Gram Swing who was in the room, was as astonished as any of the others and made a broadcast that night detailing these events and Gerson’s effective treatment. Two 2 weeks later, Swing was fired from his job.”

What Constitutes a Healthy Lifestyle?

That’s not an impossible list. The great thing about these behavior changes is that they don’t cost extra money to do – and they’re almost guaranteed to save you money in the long run. I would add a few things to this list, though. Of all the healthy lifestyle strategies I know of that can have a significant impact on your health, normalizing your insulin and leptin levels is probably the most important.

There is no question that this is an absolute necessity if you want to avoid disease and slow down your aging process. That means modifying your diet to avoid excessive amounts of fructose, grains, and other pro-inflammatory ingredients like trans fats. In addition to the items mentioned above, these additional strategies can further help you stay healthy:
•Learn how to effectively cope with stress – Stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day, so developing effective coping mechanisms is a major longevity-promoting factor.

Meditation, prayer, physical activity and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium. I also strongly believe in using energy psychology tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique to address deeper, oftentimes hidden emotional problems.
•Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels to between 50 and 70 ng/ml, ideally by exposing enough of your skin to sunshine or a safe tanning bed.
•High-Quality animal-based omega-3 fats – Correcting the ratio of omega-3 to healthful omega-6 fats is a strong factor in helping people live longer. This typically means increasing your intake of animal based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil, while decreasing your intake of damaged omega-6 fats (think trans fats).
•Get most of your antioxidants from foods – Good sources include blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, beans, and artichokes.
•Use coconut oil – Another excellent anti-aging food is coconut oil, known to reduce your risk of heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and lower your cholesterol, among other things.
•Avoid as many chemicals, toxins, and pollutants as possible – This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.
•Avoid prescription drugs – Pharmaceutical drugs kill thousands of people prematurely every year – as an expected side effect of the action of the drug. And, if you adhere to a healthy lifestyle, you most likely will never need any of them in the first place. However if you are currently taking prescription drugs it is best to work with a trained natural health care professional to help you wean off of them.

Take Control of Your Health

Incorporating these healthy lifestyle guidelines will help set you squarely on the path to optimal health and give you the best shot at living a longer life. Remember, it’s never too late to take control of your health, but the sooner you begin, the greater your long-term payoff.

When even a minor illness requiring hospitalization may cost you your child’s college tuition fund, and a severe disease like cancer can bankrupt the entire family, taking control of your health and being proactive about staying healthy is not a luxury, it’s essential.

Clearly, the American health care system is broken and in need of a serious overhaul – NOT in terms of who should pay these padded bills, but rather how can we get a more reasonably priced system that won’t be the leading cause of bankruptcy? At the present rate the current system is unsustainable. However, I suggest you don’t wait for this miracle, and start focusing on simple, inexpensive lifestyle changes that can help prevent some of the most common health problems plaguing the US today.

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

Mango’s health benefits include heart health, anemia prevention, detoxing and healthy skin

Mangos have been used for centuries as medicine and food. The mango fruit contains vitamins A, C and D along with beta-carotene. In Unani medicine, mangos are used to remove toxins, treat anemia, and heal the nervous system. Ayurvedic medicine uses the dried mango flowers to treat diarrhea, dysentery, as well as urinary tract infections (UTI). Mango leaves, seeds, roots, bark, as well as the fruit all contain healthy nutrients, especially the phenolic acids, flavonoids like catechin, and the xanthone mangiferin. Mango has a high ORAC score because of the presence of natural antioxidants found in the fruit. While the high iron count in mangos treats anemia, mango pulp is added to facial products because of its ability to prevent acne by cleaning pores.

Healing the heart with mangiferin and mango polyphenols
Research has shown that mangiferin can improve heart. This nutrient from the mango tree can lower blood sugar and lipid levels. Mangiferin is a mild diuretic. There is some evidence that mangiferin also acts to prevent tumor growths in some cancers. The OREC rating for the mango fruit is 4500 umole TE/g. This denotes the amount of antioxidants per gram.

About the mango tree
The mango fruit comes from a tree that is related to the cashew. Its scientific name is Magifera indica, and it’s a member of the Anacardiaceae family. The mango tree originated in India, Burma, and eastern Asia but can now be found in most tropical regions. The shape of the mango fruit varies depending on in which regions it is found. Mangos can range in size from five pounds to the size of a small plum. Their shapes vary as well; from round to oval, heart shaped, long and skinny, or kidney shaped. Colored from red, to yellow, to green, the mango fruit on the 50-foot tall trees provide shade and food for birds as well as people.

History of the mango tree and mango fruit use
The name mango was given to the fruit by the Portuguese when they ventured to India. Previous to that, the mango was called man-kay or man-gay. The Portuguese brought the mango with them to Brazil in the 1700s and from there, its use spread throughout the Western hemisphere. In religious history, the Buddha was given a mango grove in order to find “repose in its grateful shade.”

Sources:

http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/mango-fruit.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/027992_mango_breast_cancer.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/034540_Indian_gooseberry_Amla_mango.html

About the author:
Talya Dagan is a health advocate and health coach, trained in nutrition and gourmet health food cuisine, writing about natural remedies for disease and nutrition and herbal medicine.

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

Vermont may become first state with mandatory GMO food labeling laws

The state of Vermont is poised to become the first in the nation to mandate the labeling of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), following the recent passage of H.112 by the Vermont House Committee on Agriculture and Forest Products (HCAFP). In an historic eight to three vote, HCAFP voted in favor of the “GMO labeling bill,” which would require producers to put labels on raw agricultural, processed, and packaged food products that contain genetically-modified (GM) ingredients.

As reported by Vermont Right to Know GMOs, a grassroots collaboration of farmers and citizen activists working towards honest food labeling in Vermont, HCAFP’s affirmation of H.112 is just the first step in a potentially long journey toward full transparency in food labeling. But the committee’s affirmative vote is “a very positive sign,” according to the group, and one that indicates the ultimate goal of getting GMOs labeled is definitely within reach.

“It’s a consumer bill,” Rep. Will Stevens, an Independent from Shoreham and member of HCAFP that voted in favor of H.112, is quoted as saying to the Addison County Independent (ACI) about the bill. “It lets people have information that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”

Though similar versions of the bill introduced in both 2011 and 2012 were defeated, there appears to be broad and growing support among legislators for this year’s version. According to ACI, 50 members of the Vermont House and 11 members of the Vermont Senate have already signed on as cosponsors to H.112, and many more could be swayed in the coming weeks to lend their support as well.

“Vermonters have a right to know what’s in their food, and right now GMOs are a threat to the Vermont brand,” says Dan Barlow, a lobbyist for the group Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, which openly supports H.112. “I think this move can only strengthen the Vermont brand going forward.”

Vermonters urge Gov. Shumlin not to cave to pressures from Monsanto to oppose H.112
The next step for H.112 will be a review process by the House Judiciary Committee, according to ACI. If it survives this review, H.112 will then go to the floor for a vote, and eventually on to Governor Peter Shumlin who will have to sign it into law. But as reported by the Times Argus, Gov. Shumlin has already indicated his belief that the bill will “cause more harm than good,” presumably referring to threats of lawsuits by Monsanto and others in the biotechnology industry.

But many Vermonters see things differently, including Roxbury resident Michael Feiner who recently wrote an open letter to Gov. Shumlin that was also published in the Times Argus. In his letter, Feiner calls Gov. Shumlin out for “hemming in the face of Monsanto,” and urges him to stand strong and be a man.

“Monsanto wants to sue, bring it on!” says Feiner. “You want to show what kind of politician you can be, start by showing what kind of man you can be and tell Monsanto exactly what they can do with their GE experiments.”

Sources for this article include:

Home

Homepage

http://www.timesargus.com

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

Seaweed extract outperforms chemo drug in shrinking breast tumors – but without the toxic side effects

The extract of an edible red seaweed was found to be 27 percent more effective than standard chemo in shrinking breast tumors in rats while showing much less toxicity to liver and kidneys, and even improving the rats’ antioxidant status in both blood and tissues.

Eucheuma cottoni – A potential natural treatment for breast cancer
The seaweed used in this remarkable study was Eucheuma cottonii L., an edible, tropical red seaweed which grows naturally within about 20 degrees of the equator and is most commonly found around Southeast Asia. The Euchema group of seaweeds is already widely commercially farmed for use in the production of carrageenan. Researchers at the University Putra Malaysia harvested the seaweed from the coastal waters of North Borneo during January. The seaweed was shade dried for three days and extracted using an 80 percent ethanol solution which was then evaporated to leave a dry powder extract. The extract was found to be rich in iodine, quercetin, catechin, rutin, carotenoids, and more exotic antioxidants such as phytopheophylin and phlorotannins.

To test the extract against breast cancer, Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with LA-7 breast cancer cells and divided into three groups: one group was not treated at all, the second was treated with the most commonly used breast cancer chemo drug at 10 mg/kg body weight, and the third group was treated with the seaweed extract at 100 mg/kg body weight. According to the researchers, this dose is equivalent to giving a 50 kg woman an 800 mg tablet of the seaweed extract.

27 percent more effective than chemo while improving antioxidant status
Rats treated with the chemo drug for four weeks showed a 71 percent decrease in the size of their tumors, but those treated with the seaweed extract had their tumors shrink by 91 percent – an improvement of 27 percent over chemo. The chemo drug also caused significant toxicity to the rats’ kidneys and livers, causing visible lesions on those organs. Not only did the seaweed show no toxicity (no liver or kidney lesions), it actually improved the rats’ antioxidant status. MDA (malondialdehyde) is a key marker of oxidative stress, with higher MDA levels indicating increased oxidative damage (MDA levels often rise with cancer). Treatment with the chemo drug decreased rats’ MDA levels by 27 percent, but again, the seaweed performed better and decreased MDA levels by 46 percent. Conversely, an important marker of antioxidant status is the glutathione level in erythrocytes (red blood cells), with higher glutathione levels indicating improved antioxidant status. Chemo treated rats saw their levels drop by 57 percent. But glutathione levels actually increased by 78 percent in seaweed treated rats – showing a sizable advantage for antioxidant status.

Seaweed for cancer – an established history
Various seaweeds have been used for centuries in Chinese and Japanese traditional medicine against breast cancer. Epidemiological studies have also showed that daily seaweed consumption may dramatically lower breast cancer risk, and is considered one reason why Japanese women have 83 percent less breast cancer than those in the West. More recently, a clinical trial in the U.S. showed that just five grams per day of dried seaweed (Undaria) decreased levels of a key pro-cancer protein (uPAR) by 47 percent in postmenopausal women.

This new study provides yet more good science to the case for using seaweed against breast cancer. And while this latest seaweed still must be proven out in human patients, it is impressive that the effective dose is likely attainable in human patients, using the extract of a seaweed which has been routinely eaten by Malaysian locals for decades with apparently no ill effects.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23441613
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10811-012-9931-0
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16554116

About the author:
Ethan Evers is author of the award-winning medical thriller “The Eden Prescription,” in which cutting-edge researchers perfect an effective, all-natural treatment for cancer, only to be hunted down by pharmaceutical interests which will stop at nothing to protect their $80 billion cancer drug cash machine. The Eden Prescription is based on the latest science and draws on real historical events stretching back to the beginning of the “War on Cancer.” Ethan has a PhD in Applied Science.

The Eden Prescription is available on amazon: www.amazon.com/Eden-Prescription-cancer-what-think/dp/1439276552/
Follow Ethan on Facebook for the latest breakthroughs and news on natural medicine for cancer: www.facebook.com/pages/The-Eden-Prescription/130965870291786

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

Does splenda damage your gut health?

Splenda®, also known as sucralose, is an artificial, chemical sweetener. You might eat lots of it without knowing in certain “light” foods, “reduced sugar”, or other diet foods.

Despite advertisements stating “Made from Sugar, so it Tastes like Sugar”, which attempt to confuse consumers, Splenda® is not natural and contains no elements of natural sugar.

You may also be surprised to learn that Splenda® contains chlorine. Yes, the same chlorine that goes in swimming pools. And here’s the worst side effect:

Just like chlorine kills off micro-organisms in swimming pools, Splenda® and sucralose kill off healthy bacteria that lives in your gut — healthy bacteria that is VITALLY important to virtually every aspect of your health.

Recently, a study at the University of Duke confirmed this very finding. Not only is sucralose a heavily-processed, chemical artificial sweetener, but it’s also damaging to your gut health, which goes on to affect every other aspect of your health.

Here’s a direct quote from that study:

“Splenda® suppresses beneficial bacteria and directly affects the expression of the transporter P-gp and cytochrome P-450 isozymes that are known to interfere with the bioavailability of nutrients. Furthermore, these effects occur at Splenda® doses that contain sucralose levels that are approved by the FDA for use in the food supply.”

Did you know that 70-80% of your immune system finds it’s home in your gut? In fact, there are more than 100 TRILLION living bacteria in your gut that control many aspects of your health, and due to things like the ingestion of artificial sweeteners like Splenda®, most folks have created a massive bacterial imbalance in their body.

But, it doesn’t just stop with the use of Splenda® or other artificial sweeteners. There are MANY other factors that are contributing to the bacterial imbalances that MILLIONS of folks are silently suffering from all around the world… one of those other aspects is drinking chlorinated water from the tap. It’s best to use a filter to filter out chlorine so you’re not harming your gut flora.

Unlike the gut-damaging sucralose mentioned above, let’s look at 10 foods that help to restore a healthy bacterial balance in your belly by killing off the bad bacteria while at the same time giving you loads more of the vitally important, beneficial bacteria that is so critical to both your health and fat loss goals.

Fortunately, my good friend and Registered Dietician, Brett Hall, has created a brand new report revealing the TOP 10 Gut-Cleansing Foods, and he’s giving it away 100% FREE below. Download your free copy in a few seconds and get your hands on the Top 10 Gut-Cleaning Foods, 100% FREE, right here

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

posted by Mike Geary

Water is the most basic requirement for life. If Earth had no water, life as we know it would not exist. You can go only a few days without water if you hope to survive.

People in the West often take water for granted. You turn on your tap and out it pours – like magic. But with Earth’s natural resources stressed by population growth, pollution and climate change, access to clean water is not a given.

Many scientists predict we are heading into a global water crisis, the likes of which have never before been seen with any other natural resource.

An award-winning documentary called FLOW: For Love of Water investigates the water crisis, described as one of the most important political and environmental issues of the 21st Century. Irena Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an emphasis on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

The film exposes many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while posing the question, “Can anyone really own water?”

Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also explores practical solutions to the water crisis and new technologies that offer promise for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Water, Water Everywhere…

Most people don’t realize that only 10 percent of the world’s fresh water supply is used for homes. The remaining 80 percent is used by agriculture (70 percent) and industry (20 percent).

The average American uses 150 gallons of water every day, yet those in developing countries can scarcely find five gallons. Of the seven billion people on Earth, 1.1 billion don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water.1 Water-related disease kills more people than wars, and nearly half of the victims are children.2

It’s estimated that between 500,000 and seven million people get sick each year from drinking contaminated tap water.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not regulate the 51 “known” water contaminants.3 But those are just a drop in the bucket compared to the vast number of human-made chemicals finding their way into the public water supply. There are more than 116,000 human-made chemicals now detected in public water systems, according to William Marks, author of the book Water Voices from Around the World.

Even if your water seems plentiful, it may not be as pure as you’d like. And the water quality is getting worse as industries continue dumping their toxic sludge back into rivers and streams, all in the name of the almighty dollar. Even if you drink only purified water, you’re not immune. Many of water’s more volatile pollutants enter your body through your skin and lungs while you shower.

Water and Its Contaminants Are Circling the Globe

According to FLOW, the most common water contaminant is a chemical called Atrazine. Atrazine is an herbicide manufactured by the Swiss company Syngenta. It has a number of terrible biological effects and has been completely banned in the EU – which is interesting, since that’s where it’s made. But the ban doesn’t stop the EU from selling 80 million pounds of it to the United States every year, where it’s sprayed on crops from coast to coast.

Atrazine has been shown to “chemically castrate” frogs, feminizing the males and even causing them to grow ovaries. This demasculinization can diminish sperm counts in animals and humans, and has been linked to breast and prostate cancer. You don’t want this sprayed on your food – and certainly not 80 million pounds of it!

The Earth has a water cycle, with weather systems and ocean currents dispersing and moving water, in its various forms, all around the planet. Whatever is dissolved in the water circles the globe as well… pharmaceutical drugs, heavy metals like mercury, pesticides, etc.

This water cycle has returned Atrazine to the EU, where it’s turning up in their rainwater. All sorts of pollutants are being found in remote locations, such as the arctic, far from their points of origin. Pharmaceutical drugs are turning up in fish and wildlife. For example, in Texas, toxicologists have discovered high levels of Prozac in the tissues of every fish they sampled. Clean water is becoming harder and harder to find, even in remote and “pristine” regions of our planet.

The Emergence of a Water Cartel

Traditionally, governments have delivered water to the public as a service. But over the last decade, with growing economic pressures and water shortages, water is turning into a commodity to be bought and sold. A few large multinational corporations have begun delivering water on a “for profit” basis and making big money, as a result.

According to FLOW, the three largest players in the water industry are Suez, Vivendi, and Thames Water. In fact, water is now a $400 billion global industry – the third largest behind oil and electricity!4

Unfortunately, when you make the shift to commercialization, the product goes to the highest bidder. And this means that millions of people who can’t pay the price go without. Water privatization has placed human health in peril. Bad water kills more people worldwide than anything else.

Poor countries like Bolivia and India are, of course, the hardest hit – but could the West be heading in the same direction? Could the land of plenty become a dry and barren landscape where clean water is a luxury reserved for the wealthy? Water is necessary for survival, and whoever “owns” the water owns you. Could nations soon be fighting over clean water in the same way they’ve spent decades dueling over fossil fuel? Many scientists say this is exactly where we are heading, and soon – not in the distant future.

The environment is changing. Human industry has disturbed the delicate ecological balance of our planet. Climate change is evidence of the many stresses humankind has inflicted on the planet. Water IS running out. Many major rivers don’t flow all the way to the sea, as they once did. California’s water supply is already compromised. According to Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant and co-author of Blue Gold, California’s water supply will be completely dry in about 20 years. Private industry is making matters worse instead of better, in many cases. One of the worst is the bottled water industry.

Bottled Water: A Blight on Planet Earth

Worldwide, $100 million is spent annually on bottled water. In 2010, Americans purchased 31 billion liters of bottled water, typically paying upwards of $1.50 per bottle, which is 1,900 times the price of tap water. And approximately 40 percent of bottled water actually IS just tap water that may or may not have received additional treatment.

Tests indicate bottled water is often less pure than city water, because city water has tighter regulations. An independent test performed by the Environmental Working Group revealed the presence of 38 low-level contaminants in bottled water, with each of the 10 tested brands containing an average of eight chemicals. They detected disinfection byproducts (DBPs), caffeine, Tylenol, nitrate, industrial chemicals, arsenic, and bacteria.5

When you drink bottled water, not only is the water itself potentially contaminated, but the plastic bottle it comes in may haveserious risks of its own from chemicals that leach into the water from the plastic,such as BPA and phthalates.

In a scientific study by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC),6 more than 1,000 bottles (103 brands) of water were tested for purity. About one-third of the bottles contained synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria and arsenic. As shown in the documentary, companies like Nestle that are bottling water suck most of the water out of nearby streams, turning rivers into mudflats. Lake levels drop and sinkholes form near the bottling plants. Most of these companies pay nothing for the water, or for the damage to the environment – not a penny! Many don’t even contribute to local taxes. And yet, these companies make upwards of 1.8 million dollars per day in profits. Bottled water is clearly not the answer.

Dams Displace People and Destroy Ecosystems

Even if you’re educated about the negative impacts of bottled water, you may not be aware of the problems dams have posed for the environment and local communities. Dams have displaced millions of people worldwide over the past century. The promises made to people in order to persuade them to move so that a dam can be built are rarely kept, leaving people without food or crops or any means of survival, and without legal recourse.

Dams also disturb the balance of an ecosystem that took thousands of years to evolve. When a river is dammed, organic matter that ordinarily flows downstream to nourish many forms of life gets trapped behind the dam and begins to rot. This not only disturbs the downstream ecosystem, but the rotting matter releases methane into the atmosphere, one of the primary greenhouse gases that is accumulating too rapidly.

So what is the answer to the water crisis?

It boils down to conservation and decentralization. We need to employ small water harvesting structures that can serve people at the community level, instead of massive dams and pipelines that are costly to build and maintain. We already have natural disinfection technology, and it’s surprisingly cost effective. Water can’t be treated like a commodity. Every human being should have access to clean water, regardless of socioeconomic status or geography.

Fresh Water for Only PENNIES Per Person

The United Nations estimates it would cost an additional 30 billion dollars per year to provide clean drinking water to every person on the planet. Sounds like a lot of money until you consider we spent three times that amount on bottled water last year alone! Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Senior Scientist Ashok Gadgill said the annual cost of providing 10 liters of clean drinking water to every human being, every day, is just $6 USD. You do the math. That’s less than two cents per day. Imagine how illness and death rates would fall!

Clean water has saved far more lives than vaccines7. Every year, diarrhea causes two million deaths, and 1.5 million of those victims are children.8 According to Unicef,9 bad water kills 4,000 children per day. It costs $20 million to vaccinate those 1.5 million children against rotavirus so that they don’t develop the diarrhea that can kill them.

On the flip side, the same amount of money – $20 million – is enough to provide wells, clean water and irrigation pumps to 100 million families. If you figure each family has a father, mother and two children, that means with the same investment it takes to vaccinate 1.5 million children for rotavirus, you can provide clean water to 400 million individuals, which will also help prevent other enteric diseases such as cholera and polio. At the same time, it will irrigate their crops and essentially lift those families out of poverty.

If instead you only vaccinate the children in that 400 million, you’re spending $2.8 billion just on rotavirus vaccines alone. Nor will they have clean water, wells, or a means to financial freedom. In addition to clean water, lack of sanitation and basic hygiene education are problems that must also be addressed if we are to help children around the world.10

Bill Gates Pushes Vaccines, Instead of Safe Water and Sanitation

You might think the world’s top philanthropists would jump at the opportunity to improve the health of their fellow humans by funding clean drinking water and sanitation projects. But the big money is not going toward clean water – instead, it’s going into the pockets of big industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry. Even vaccine magnate GlaxoSmithKline admitted to the WHO11 that safe drinking water has a greater impact on reducing mortality rates than vaccines and antibiotics, but that’s more lip service than action.

For example, Bill Gates, the biggest philanthropist in the world, continues to channel his billions into vaccines. It’s tragic when you realize clean water and hygiene education are far more effective at reducing the spread of disease than any vaccination campaign.

The latest example is Gates’ African malaria vaccine campaign, which has been an abysmal flop.12 Despite this, he continues to push vaccines. It’s pretty clear where Mr. Gates’ loyalties lie. But is this really a surprise, coming from a man who suggested vaccines could be a means of reducing Earth’s population by 10 to 15 percent? Gates unabashedly proposed this idea as a way to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions during a Ted presentation in February 2010.13 When philanthropy fails, it’s time to effect change at the local level. In the words of Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch:

“If we’re going to effect change, we need an organized army of water activists in every single congressional district.”

Help Pass ARTICLE 31: Clean Water is a ‘Fundamental Human Right’

One of the ways you can be a “water warrior” is by helping pass Article 31, which would establish clean water as a fundamental human right.

This is a Flash-based video and may not be viewable on mobile devices.

There is a petition proposing the addition of one more article to the 30-article Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they need your signature. In 1948, the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were ratified by all the nations of the world. These 30 articles guaranteed a broad sweep of human rights across many human endeavors, from life to liberty to freedom of thought. Now, 60 years later, recognizing that over a billion people across the planet lack access to clean and potable water and that millions die each year as a result, it is time to add one more article to this historic declaration.

Article 31, the Right to Water, states:

“Everyone has the right to clean accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access of quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.”

Please consider signing the petition for this important measure. If you’re interested in more information about water, we have an entire section of our website devoted to it.

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

Strength training is an integral part of a well-rounded exercise program, and is recommended for both sexes of all ages, including kids and seniors. In the video above, Skyler Tanner, the youngest Superslow™ certified instructor in history, discusses how to make intense exercise safe, effective and efficient.

Unfortunately, many ignore weight training when devising their exercise plan, thinking they don’t want to “bulk up.”

But gaining more muscle through resistance exercises has many benefits, from losing excess fat to maintaining healthy bone mass and preventing age-related muscle loss as you age.

The intensity of your resistance training can achieve a number of beneficial changes on the molecular, enzymatic, hormonal, and chemical level in your body, which will also help slow down (and many cases stop) many of the diseases caused by a sedentary lifestyle.

Therefore it’s also an essential element if you want to prevent common diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, or weakening of your bones (osteoporosis), limited range of motion, aches and pains.

Strength Training Beneficially Impacts 10 Biomarkers of Aging

As explained by Tanner, above, biomarkers of aging are “the 10 determinants of aging that you are capable of controlling. They are things that tell you how old you would be if you didn’t know how old you were.” This includes the following — all of which strength training has a beneficial impact on:

Strength and muscle mass (which results in greater balance, as you get older)

Body composition

Blood lipids

Bone density

Cardiorespiratory fitness

Blood pressure

Blood glucose control

Aerobic capacity

Gene expression, and telomere length

Why Those with Heart Disease Should Not Shun Strength Training

According to Tanner, strength training may be of particular benefit for those with heart disease, and here’s why:

“Chronic congestive heart failure is the inability of your heart to supply your body with a sufficient amount of blood… [In one study] they put these individuals on a leg press [and] inserted the central catheter to measure exactly what was going on, on a moment-by-moment basis.

What they found was that at the highest intensities on a leg press, over 80 percent of their one rep max… the more the vascular system opened up and allowed for blood flow to occur.

This in part is because in order for the heart – again, it’s a closed hydraulic system – to pump, it has to be getting blood back. The way this works is that your left ventricle, the largest, pumps [the blood] out. It comes back to the right aorta, which then moves the blood into the right ventricle (which pumps it through your lungs), and then back in the left aorta (which moves in to the left ventricle), back to move out of your body.

That’s why the left is larger. It’s got to move the blood the larger distance, rather than just front and back to your body.

What happens is with these smooth, controlled contractions of a leg press… the muscle’s actually constricting on the vascular system and shortening the amount of blood that’s moved each repetition. If you think about running, it’s a series of [short] repetitions. More smooth, heavy effort leg press [exercises] is pumping huge amounts of blood back to the heart, so it’s more efficient.

If you don’t have to pump very fast, if your rate of [exertion] is smooth and consistent, you don’t have to constantly adjust to these changes in a pressure. That’s why strength training shows a slight increase in arterial stiffening, an increase in vasodilation, and a reduction in blood pressure while working. People with heart failure, you guys, you just need to work out hard leg press, and your heart’s going to be in great shape.”

Strength Training for Blood Glucose Control

Normalizing your blood glucose is also very important if you want to avoid, are at high risk, or have already been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. By controlling your glucose levels, you can reduce your risk of a cardiovascular disease event by a respectable 42 percent. Strength training can be very beneficial for glucose control. According to Tanner:

“Strength training drains glucose like you wouldn’t believe. Two sets of 10… use about five grams of glucose, or to keep it simple, carbohydrate. So, a workout might use 35 to 60 grams of carbohydrates, depending on how long it is, with weights. It’s not nearly as aggressively draining those muscle tissues with a cardiorespiratory-type training.

The thing about your muscles is they do not like losing any glycogen at all, so there’s a process called super compensation. When you drain them, they make room for more glycogen to be stored. If you’re constantly somewhat emptying the tank, you always create a headroom to take on any amount of glucose – or not any.

There’s a limit. It’s something to the effect of 1,200 grams for 180-pound person. That’s about the maximum amount of intramuscular glycogen only for short periods of time, and only after fully unloaded tissue. We’re talking about endurance athletes big time. [For] your average person, maybe it’s about 500 grams. But if you’re constantly pulling out of this tank and reinvesting, pulling out and reinvesting, your body makes room for more of this. You don’t have to ever have abnormal blood glucose levels, because it always has somewhere to go.”

Intense Exercise = A Potent Anti-Aging Strategy

While it’s never too late to start exercising, the earlier you begin and the more consistent you are, the greater your long-term rewards. Having an active lifestyle is really an investment in your future well-being. Interestingly, strength training has been found to have a beneficial impact on your gene expression — not only slowing aging but actually returning gene expression to youthful levels in seniors who start using resistance training. According to Tanner:

“…they showed that strength training in the elderly reversed oxidative stress and returned gene expression in 179 genes to a youthful level. It moved them back to about 10 years. Let me repeat that. The genes got 10 years younger. That’s impressive.”

Biological aging, and eventually death, can be defined as “the changes in structures and functions of humans with the passage of time that does not result from disease or gross accidents.” Tanner believes that under the right conditions, you can live indefinitely, as long as you can prevent or recover from biochemical, cellular and physical accidents.

Diet accounts for the majority, about 80 percent, of the health benefits you reap from a healthy lifestyle, but exercise is a crucial component and adjunct to a healthy diet. As Tanner states, exercise, and strength training in particular, from his point of view, is a force multiplier and the great leveraging agent. I couldn’t agree more, although I believe that, overall, high-intensity interval training may give you even greater payoffs than strength training. Ideally, you’ll want to incorporate both.

One of the Best Ways to Fight Osteoporosis

A recent article in Forbes magazine1 highlighted the benefits of strength training for the aging population, rightfully asserting that it plays a far more important role than aerobic exercise. As Tanner joked, what good is a healthy heart if you don’t have the muscle strength and stability to get out of your chair? According to Forbes:

“[T]he average 30-35 year old person will experience roughly a 25 percent decline in his or her muscle strength and tone by the age of 70-75, and up to a 50 percent decline approaching the age of 90. Simply doing aerobic exercise such as walking or light treadmill workouts will not be adequate to preserve muscle tone, bone health, balance and posture. If you are not engaging in strength or resistance training, the chances are high that you will lose strength and become less functional as you age.

… Research has clearly shown that strength training can help to reduce the pace of bone loss, while some studies have demonstrated that such training can actually help to build bone… Movements and exercises that place stress on bones help to form additional calcium deposits and stimulate bone forming cells.”

Weight-bearing exercise is one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis. For example, a walking lunge exercise is a great way to build bone density in your hips, even without any additional weights. The last thing you want to consider is to take a drug to improve your bone density, as without question, that is more likely to cause long-term harm than benefit.

Weight Training IS Cardiovascular Training…

Research over the past several years has really revolutionized the way we look at exercise. Not only have researchers found that traditional aerobic exercise is one of the least effective forms of exercise, it’s also one of the most time consuming, and could even be counterproductive. You’re really getting the least amount of bang for your buck when you spend extended amounts of time running on a treadmill.

High intensity interval training on the other hand, has consistently risen to the top as the most effective and efficient form of exercise.

While the fitness industry divides exercise into categories such as anaerobic, aerobic and cardiovascular training, fitness experts like Dr. McGuff and Phil Campbell point out that in order to actually access your cardiovascular system, you have to perform mechanical work with your muscle. How you do that is up to you; you can do that on an elliptical machine, on weight training equipment, or using free-weights. So truly, weight training isn’t just strength training, it’s a cardiovascular workout. To better understand this, you need to know that your heart has two different metabolic processes:
1.Aerobic, requires oxygen for fuel, and
2.Anaerobic, does not require any oxygen

Traditional strength training and cardio exercises work primarily the aerobic process. High-intensity interval training, such as Peak Fitness, on the other hand, work your aerobic AND your anaerobic processes, which is what you need for optimal cardiovascular benefit. You’re actually getting MORE benefits from high-intensity training than you do from aerobic/cardio, in a fraction of the time — all because you’re utilizing your body as it was designed to be used. You can literally be done in about 20 minutes, compared to spending an hour running on the treadmill.

Similarly, you can turn any weight training routine into a high intensity routine by slowing it down. Besides Tanner, Dr. Doug McGuff is another proponent of Super-Slow strength training. You only need about 12 minutes of Super-Slow type strength training once a week to achieve the same growth hormone production as you would from 20 minutes of Peak Fitness sprints.

The key to make it work is intensity. The intensity needs to be high enough that you reach muscle fatigue. If you’ve selected the appropriate weight for your strength and fitness level, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of just seven or eight repetitions. Furthermore, when the intensity is high, you can also decrease the frequency of your exercise. In fact, in order to continue to be productive, the higher your fitness level, the more you can decrease the frequency without losing benefits.

This is because, as a weak beginner, you can exercise three times a week and not put much stress on your system. But once your strength and endurance improves, each exercise session is placing an increasingly greater amount of stress on your body (as long as you keep pushing yourself to the max). At that point, you’ll want to reduce the frequency of your sessions to give your body enough time to recover in between. To learn more, please see my previous interview with Dr. McGuff on his Super-Slow weight training recommendations.

Keep Yourself in Motion!

Optimal health is dependent on an active lifestyle; eating fresh, whole foods, avoiding as many processed foods as possible, exercising regularly, and addressing the stress in your life. Ignoring any of these basic tenets of health will eventually lead to a decline in health and any number of diseases.

Ideally, you’ll want to include a variety of exercises for a well-rounded fitness regimen. Strength training is an important component as it’s the number one way for you to remain strong, young, and independent well into old age, and what good is living long if you’re too decrepit to enjoy it?

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Ten food label entries that should send you running

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039502_food_labels_ingredients_avoid.html#ixzz2Ncqxtf9f

There are billions of consumers out there and only a few manufacturers of food. This means that to meet consumer demands, manufacturing companies need efficient processes in order to be in the competition. Enter food additives that serve to present and preserve packaged foods for consumer satisfaction. Thanks to federal laws, companies are now required to print all food ingredients on food packages. That means we are allowed to choose what we eat. Here are 10 of the food additives that we need to stay away from.

Sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite

What: Food preservative; helps retain red coloring in processed meat products.

Effects: Its chemical component contains carcinogens, and when accumulated in the body, can lead to stomach, prostate, and breast cancers. It has also been found to cause fetal deaths, miscarriages, and birth defects among animals in the laboratory.

Option: Seek for nitrate or nitrite-free meat products.

Butylated hydrozyttoluene (BHT) and Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA)

What: Common among processed foods and also in cereals, potato chips, vegetable oils, and chewing gums

Effects: Increases the risk of cancer development, liver enlargement, and hampers cell growth.

Propyl gallate

What: Found in stocked chicken soup, gum, and in a few processed meat products.

Effect: Still being suspected as a carcinogen, propyl gallate is found to cause gastrointestinal, kidney, and liver problems.

Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

What: An artificial flavor enhancer, MSG is found in canned soups, chips, crackers, salad dressings, and frozen foods. It is also disguised under label entries like “spices,” “natural flavoring,” and “seasonings.”

Effects: Found to cause dizziness and nausea.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil

What: Known as a trans fat, this can be found in microwave popcorn, chips, pastries, cookies, pies, cakes, lard, margarine, cottonseed oil, coconut oil, and palm kernel oil.

Effects: Cardiovascular diseases like stroke, kidney failure, and other heart diseases.

Options: Virgin olive oil and other monounsaturated fats.

Aspartame

What: An ingredient in gelatin, frozen desserts, yogurt, puddings, diet sodas, low-calorie diets, and children’s vitamins.

Effect: Can cause food poisoning and makes up the bulk of consumer complaints directed to the FDA.

Options: Xylitol and Stevia which are natural sweeteners.

Acesulfame-K

What: Food sweetener and has been recently approved by the FDA as a food additive in baked goods, diet soda, gelatin desserts, and chewing gums.

Option: Xylitol and Stevia as healthy sweeteners.

Food colorings 1, 2, 3, and 6

What: These are blue, red, green, and yellow. Used in beverages, baked goods, and candies, cherries, fruit cocktail, sausage, and gelatin.

Effects: Causes tumors in the different parts of the body like the kidneys and adrenal glands.

Olestra or olean

What: Artificial fat preventing healthy fat absorption in the digestive system and can be found in potato chips.

Effects: Found to cause diarrhea, intestinal problems, and other gastrointestinal problems.

Potassium bromate

What: Bleaching agent in white flour and can be found in pizza dough, breads, and rolls.

Effect: Found to cause cancer in both animals and humans.

Option: Un-bromated flour products.

As a supplement to the above, other additives that can be harmful are also high fructose corn syrup and sodium chloride.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au

About the author:
Sandeep is an avid rock climber, Mountaineer, runner, and fitness coach. He shares his tips for staying in shape and eating healthy on several fitness sites.

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(NaturalNews) Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

keep hearing, even among some in the alternative media, that the overpopulation of humans on our planet is a myth because “all the people in the world could fit in the state of Texas.”

Sure they can, but then where would they pee?

This is not an idle question. The argument that the world isn’t overpopulated merely because they could theoretically all be squeezed into one large land mass is an utterly fallacious argument, and I need to urge my friends in the alternative media to stop making this argument because it doesn’t fly.

The question of overpopulation is not — and has never been — how many humans the planet can physically hold in terms of cubic meters and physical volume. The question is how many humans the biosphere can support in terms of sustainable life.

This isn’t a complicated thing to understand: Your physical body could fit in a box that’s 24 x 24 x 80 inches. It’s called a coffin. But your biological needs require a far larger footprint on the planet. You need water, for starters. Where does it come from? I guarantee you use far more water each day than falls on a 24″ x 24″ piece of land. The water needs of a single person vastly outpace the physical space that person occupies. The entire population of Los Angeles, for example, needs literally thousands of square miles of water basin space to capture all the water that’s pumped into their artificial city.

You need food. Where does the food come from? Vast tracts of land that need sunshine, water and soil. It’s not hard to imagine that the food needs of a single person on our planet probably exceed one thousand square meters of land. If we really squeezed the entire global population into the state of Texas, where would they grow their food?

You produce biological waste. Where does all your waste go? Processing that waste and “recycling” it back into the ecosystem requires huge amounts of land space. Nature needs a large, functioning ecosystem to dilute, process and transform the waste products of humanity, and in fact nature isn’t even keeping up.

All told, the amount of land space required to support one human life is immensely larger than the amount of physical space occupied by one human body. This is classically called the “ecological footprint” of a human being. It’s not a conspiracy theory and it’s not something fabricated by Al Gore: We really do need a LOT of space to meet the demands of food, water, energy, resources, waste processing and so on.

Thus, the argument that “the entire population of the world could fit inside the state of Texas” is complete nonsense. You can fit a dozen people in a phone booth, but if you leave them in there for too long, they will die. If you cut off Los Angeles from the rest of the world, it will die. If you cut off New York City from the rest of the country, it will die. To support life, people need far more land mass on the planet than their physical bodies occupy.

“Carrying capacity” is a real concept
The Earth obviously has a finite amount of any given resource. The water volume is finite (but reusable if cleaned by nature). Oxygen production is finite. The amount of sunlight radiation reaching the surface of the planet is finite. Soil is finite. Rare earth minerals are finite. Oil is finite at any given moment in time, even if the Earth does produce more oil over long periods of time.

Given that all these things are finite — and therefore not unlimited — the global population that depends on these things for sustenance must obviously be finite as well. Anyone who argues that the human population can be “unlimited” even while depending on finite resources is being ridiculous.

Clearly, by all foundations of logic, there is a limited “carrying capacity” of the planet, meaning there is a finite number of human beings who can be supported by the biosphere.

It’s not rocket science to realize this, yet I still hear people arguing that overpopulation is a “myth” because the Earth has no limits. That’s absurd. Of course the Earth has limits. If the Earth had no limits, it would be larger than the solar system, larger than the Milky Way, and larger than the entire galaxy. Because infinite is greater than any integer. If you give me a really, really large number, like 1.2 to the power of 10 to the power of one trillion, infinity is still larger than that. So to argue that the Earth’s resources are “infinite” is to admit you are mathematically retarded.

The real question is this: Have we already exceeded the carrying capacity of this planet with finite resources, or is it still far off?

Those who say overpopulation is a myth insist that the current human population — over 7 billion people — is nowhere near the carrying capacity of the planet and that we can continue to double our population every few decades for the foreseeable future. If that were true, then the current population would need to be living in harmony with the planet, with an excess buffer of fresh water, food, topsoil, ocean life, watershed areas and so on.

And yet, when I look around I do not see a civilization living in harmony with the ecosystem. In fact, I see a civilization living on borrowed time, having already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet to the point where a population collapse is inevitable.

Human civilization is living on borrowed time
What are the signs that we are living on borrowed time? Let me name just a few:

• In America, India and China, underground water aquifers that produce the food that feeds the population is plummeting rapidly. Many aquifers will be dry by 2040, including the Ogallala Aquifer that stretches from Texas to South Dakota and provides irrigation for the breadbasket agricultural hub of America.

• The pollution produced by the current population is murdering every ecosystem imaginable. Oceans are dying, coral reefs are dying, rivers are dying and rainforests are dying. If the human population were small compared to the total carrying capacity, we shouldn’t see the natural ecosystems dying all around us.

• Soils are disappearing across the world’s agricultural centers. We are losing topsoil at a record pace around the world, and once those top soils are gone, food production yields plummet. (You can’t feed the world by growing food in sand.)

• Humanity’s voracious appetite for energy has led to the global proliferation of “Earth-killing” technologies such as nuclear power plants. The Fukushima disaster proved that demand for power has caused energy industries to risk the viability of human life across the planet in order to produce more power for humanity’s artificial cities.

• Hydrocarbons continue to drive the world economy, yet there’s very good evidence that oil supplies in the Middle East are drying up (production is falling). While the planet can produce more hydrocarbons over millions of years, it cannot double its oil supply in a few decades. Thus, the demand for oil vastly outstrips the ability of the planet to produce it.

• Look at the outrageous crowding in cities like New York and Los Angeles. The highways exist in a seemingly endless logjam, and there’s hardly a public open space left remaining anywhere in these cities, with New York’s Central Park being the rare exception. Housing shortages and housing building materials shortages (wood, concrete, steel) are all very, very real. This is why building homes has become ridiculously expensive over the last few years. China is buying concrete and steel from the USA and shipping it overseas on large sea freighters.

• The depletion of ocean fisheries is also very real. As the human population over-fishes the oceans in search of food, ocean life is experiencing an unprecedented die-off. Many species have plummeted to “red alert” levels due to over-fishing.

I could go on, but the point is that when I look around, I do not see a world functioning with excess capacity. I see a world that seems to be over-tapped, over-exploited, over-farmed and over-populated. Nearly every river that empties into the oceans creates a massive “dead zone” of chemicals, heavy metals and pharmaceutical runoff. Chemical contamination has become so alarmingly bad that every person reading this carries 250+ synthetic chemicals in their bodies that don’t belong there. Autism is skyrocketing, cancer is striking younger and younger children, and the food is increasingly tainted with pollutants caused by humankind.

This is not the description of a planet with excess carrying capacity. This is a description of a planet that is DYING.

Another fallacious argument about the overpopulation myth
Yet another poorly-conceived argument used by the “overpopulation myth” supporters goes like this:

The world isn’t overpopulated because populations are actually falling in many developed nations like Japan.

Yes, that’s the entire logic of the argument. But the logic forgets to take into account that populations are falling in selected areas precisely because they are already overpopulated there.

Tokyo, by any stretch of the imagination, is wildly overpopulated. The population of Tokyo, in fact, has vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the entire island nation of Japan, requiring vast inputs of resources and food from other land masses around the globe. If Japan halted all imports, the population of Tokyo would starve to death in a matter of weeks.

The primary reason why Japan’s population is in decline is because intelligent young Japanese couples look around and see skyrocketing costs for housing (caused by overpopulation), skyrocketing costs to feed a new baby (caused by overpopulation), skyrocketing costs for home construction, clothing, education and other things… all caused by overpopulation (i.e. too many people and not enough resources or open space).

The decline in Japan’s population is a classic example of a self-regulating population that sees the overcrowding (and all the economic penalties which accompany it) and make a conscious decision to not reproduce.

Yet, somehow, the overpopulation myth people say Japan’s declining population is proof that it’s not overpopulated!

Wow, that’s the complete opposite of reality.

But beware of population control eugenicists
All this does not mean, by the way, that I support the globalist population control agenda. Governments and global controllers are seizing upon the overpopulation problem and using it to justify mass murder.

The population control agenda is being run right now, right under your nose, through programs like toxic vaccines, free abortions, geoengineering pollution (chemtrails) and GMOs. The point of all this is to collapse the human population and get it “closer to zero,” as Bill Gates often explains.

People like Gates and Ted Turner openly admit they are pursuing population control measures, but they call it safe-sounding things like “reproductive health.” In no way do I support their death agendas for the human race, and I do not support their contention that the global population should be reduced by 90% or so (depending on who you ask). Ted Turner wants the population to be no more than 1 billion people. That means somehow six billion people have to die.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, frankly, we don’t. Because we’re such an infantile race of stupid creatures just barely more intelligent than apes, we are going to ride this crazy train of idiocy right into the ground. We are going to burn out this planet, kill the ecosystem, poison the waters and taint the skies. And most of the population is going to giggle all the way to their own graves as they perish from the very same systems of self-destruction they voted for at the polling booths.

From a galactic perspective, humankind wears the “dunce” hat. In fact, we are probably referred to by other intelligent civilizations as the “radioactive hominids” because we are stupid enough to detonate hundreds of nuclear weapons on our own planet, followed by building hundreds more nuclear power facilities, all of which are extremely vulnerable to a solar flare event that could kill virtually all human life on the planet.

I predict the human race will destroy itself and collapse back to a tiny population of ragged survivors. Even beyond that, I say this has likely already happened at a smaller scale. We are not the first civilization to rise and fall on this planet, nor will we be its last. Our planet is full of evidence of lost civilizations that were once great yet perished into oblivion. There is convincing evidence that an atomic blast happened in the Middle East thousands of years ago. There is also evidence that ancient civilizations possessed highly advanced technologies that have since been lost. (A full discussion of this is covered in Jim Marrs’ new book, Our Occulted History.)

We modern humans stomp around the planet with a twisted sense of arrogance intertwined with obliviousness, having no idea what destroyed previous civilizations on our planet yet somehow believing we are immune to such outcomes. We believe we are “superior” but can’t answer the question, “Superior at what?” Making nuclear bombs? Manufacturing synthetic pesticides? Creating genetic monstrosities that dot the agricultural landscape?

This is not progress, and it’s not sustainable life on a planet. Unless we change very soon, we will destroy ourselves and render the overpopulation problem moot. Before long, no one will even be left alive to care that there even existed an evil creature named “Bill Gates.” It matters not one inkling in the timescale of our planet’s existence.

When future archeologists dig up our modern-day cities to study humanity’s dark past, they will find mercury, plastic bags, pill bottles, toxic electronics and fragments of human bone giving off curiously high levels of radiation. They will wonder what calamity struck the human race and caused the collapse of global civilization, and they will likely rise up out of the ashes to make the same mistakes we are making.

Humanity is a race of short-term thinkers, and short-term thinkers have no real future on any planet. From a sufficiently distant perspective, our entire civilization looks like little more than a colony of hungry bacteria spreading across the surface of a petri dish until nothing is left to eat and the entire system collapses. Don’t kid yourself: We are not as smart as you’ve been led to believe. If we were, then why would we poison our own food, water, soils, skies, infants, oceans, crops and planet?

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