Rather Be Healthy

PhysEd: Do We Have to Cool Down After Exercise?

If you’re like most people, the time you spend exercising is a valuable commodity that you’ve carefully planned and fit into your day. And when your workout is over, you may simply grab a quick shower or pull on a sweatshirt, skipping the post-exercise cool down because you’re eager to get on with your day.

Cooling down after exercise has long been touted as a necessary step to help prevent muscle soreness and improve recovery, but is it really?

The Case for Skipping Your Post-Exercise Cool Down

In 2007, one of the first studies on cooling down was published.1 The finding? Cooling down for 10 minutes after a workout had no impact on delayed-onset muscle soreness. Even though more than half a decade has passed, these results have yet to translate into practice, as most people are still under the impression that a cool down is beneficial.

Yet, newer research also suggests that the choice to cool down is simply one of personal preference – not one that will drastically impact your recovery. For instance:
•Cooling down after performing strenuous forward lunges had no impact on muscle pain the next day among active adults; those who cooled down had the same amount of pain as those who did not2
•Cooling down after soccer practice had no impact on performance, flexibility or muscle soreness the next day among professional soccer players3, 4

While it appears unlikely that cooling down has any real benefit in your post-workout recovery, muscle pain or next-day performance, it may help prevent the buildup of blood in your veins, which can lead to dizziness or fainting.5

The cool down also brings fresh blood into areas to help with lactic acid removal, while bringing your heart rate down to resting pulse quicker. A proper cool down also helps lower a raised heart rate down to resting heart rate safely.

Further, it may also help you to simply unwind after an intense workout, easing the transition back to your normal level of activity.

Personally I only cool down for three minutes after doing a high-intensity workout. If you are pushing your body to extremes it makes loads of sense to do a cool down, especially if you are close to or exceeding your maximum calculated heart rate (220 minus your age).

Static Stretching Before Exercise: Another Myth Busted

As with cool downs, stretching before exercise is another fitness dogma many of us wouldn’t dare neglect. After all, we’ve been told for decades that stretching is key for warming up your muscles and helping to prevent injuries.

However, pre-exercise static stretching generally hurts rather than helps your athletic and muscle performance, particularly when the stretch is held for 60 seconds or more.6 Static stretching is when you hold your muscle in a fixed position for a prolonged period, such as bending over to touch your toes.

This technique has been regarded as the gold standard for decades, but now research shows that it actually decreases the blood flow within your tissue creating localized ischemia (a restriction in blood supply) and lactic acid buildup. This can potentially cause irritation or injury of local muscular, tendinous, lymphatic, and neural tissues.

The evidence is so clear that the American College of Sports Medicine now advises against this form of stretching prior to your workouts. Unlike the cool down, however, which you can generally safely skip, all forms of stretching should not be avoided prior to exercise, only static stretching.

Dynamic stretching, on the other hand, has been shown to positively influence power, speed, agility, endurance, flexibility, and strength performance when used as a warm-up.7 And unlike cool-downs, warm-ups are very important and have been shown to help reduce and prevent muscle soreness.8

My favorite type of dynamic stretching is active isolated stretches developed by Aaron Mattes. With Active Isolated Stretching or AIS, you hold each stretch for only two seconds, which works with your body’s natural physiological makeup to improve circulation and increase the elasticity of muscle joints.

This technique also allows your body to help repair itself and prepare for daily activity. If you’re an avid exerciser, this news to overhaul your pre-workout stretches and your post-workout cool-down may come as a surprise, but these tips can help you to make the most of your workouts.

More Tips for Optimizing Your Workouts: The Benefits of Short and Intense Activity

If you’re excited at the prospect of cutting down your workout time by skipping your cool-down, you’ll be even more enthused to learn about high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Remember if you do this type of exercise I do believe a three-minute cool down is important.

Researchers have repeatedly confirmed the superior health benefits of HIIT compared to traditional and typically performed aerobic workouts. For example, high-intensity interval-type training gives a natural boost to human growth hormone (HGH) production—which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor—and has been shown to significantly improve insulin sensitivity, boost fat loss, and increase muscle growth. Anaerobic HIIT can be performed on a recumbent bike or an elliptical machine, or sprinting outdoors (with proper guidelines to avoid injury). You can even perform high-intensity strength training.

While there are a large number of variations, the HIIT routine I recommend involves going all out for 30 seconds and then resting for 90 seconds between sprints, as demonstrated in the video above The total workout is typically 8 repetitions. In all, you’ll be done in about 20 minutes, and you only need to perform HIIT two or three times a week.

Contrary to popular belief, extended extreme cardio actually sets in motion inflammatory mechanisms that damage your heart. So while your heart is indeed designed to work very hard, and will be strengthened from doing so, it’s only designed to do so intermittently, and for short periods—not for an hour or more at a time. This is the natural body mechanics you tap into when you perform HIIT.

How to Round Out Your Exercise Program

In addition to doing high-intensity interval exercises a couple of times a week, it’s wise to alternate a wide variety of exercises in order to truly optimize your health. As a general rule, as soon as an exercise becomes easy to complete, you need to increase the intensity and/or try another exercise to keep challenging your body. I recommend incorporating the following types of exercise into your program on days when you’re not doing HIIT:
•Strength Training: If you want, you can increase the intensity by slowing it down. You need enough repetitions to exhaust your muscles. The weight should be heavy enough that this can be done in fewer than 12 repetitions, yet light enough to do a minimum of four repetitions. It is also important NOT to exercise the same muscle groups every day. They need at least two days of rest to recover, repair and rebuild.

For more information about using super slow weight training as a form of high-intensity interval exercise, please see my interview with Dr. Doug McGuff.
•Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability.

Exercise programs like Pilates, yoga, and Foundation Training are great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer.
•Stretching: As mentioned, my favorite type of stretching is Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) developed by Aaron Mattes. This technique allows your body to repair itself and prepare for daily activity. You can also use devices like the Power Plate to help you stretch.

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Science will destroy humanity, says team of scientists

One of the primary goals of science is to advance knowledge and understanding to improve the human condition, but all too often this noble field of study has devolved into a profit-seeking quest for power, at the expense of mankind.

Indeed, the science of technology is perhaps the worst culprit, a team of mathematicians, philosophers and scientists at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is warning.

The team, in a forthcoming paper titled, Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority, says humankind’s over-reliance on technology could lead to its demise, and that human beings are facing a risk to our own existence.

What’s more, the team says humankind’s demise is not far off; it could come as soon as the next century.

‘Threats we have no track record of surviving…
“There is a great race on between humanity’s technological powers and our wisdom to use those powers well,” institute director Nick Bostrom told MSN. “I’m worried that the former will pull too far ahead.”

Since our existence on this planet there have been those who have predicted the end of world as we know it, the latest “fad” in this realm being the hoopla surrounding the now-disproven 2012 Mayan prophesies. Still, folks can’t seem to let go of the notion that, at some point in our future, life on Earth will cease to exist.

From Bostrom’s paper:

Humanity has survived what we might call natural existential risks for hundreds of thousands of years; thus it is prima facie unlikely that any of them will do us in within the next hundred. This conclusion is buttressed when we analyze specific risks from nature, such as asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, earthquakes, gamma-ray bursts, and so forth: Empirical impact distributions and scientific models suggest that the likelihood of extinction because of these kinds of risk is extremely small on a time scale of a century or so.

In contrast, our species is introducing entirely new kinds of existential risk – threats we have no track record of surviving. Our longevity as a species therefore offers no strong prior grounds for confident optimism. Consideration of specific existential – risk scenarios bears out the suspicion that the great bulk of existential risk in the foreseeable future consists of anthropogenic existential risks – that is, those arising from human activity.

Continuing, Bostrom predicts that future technological breakthroughs “may radically expand our ability to manipulate the external world or our own biology.”

“As our powers expand, so will the scale of their potential consequences – intended and unintended, positive and negative.”

Bostrom goes onto say that well-known threats like an asteroid strike on the planet, supervolcanic eruptions and earthquakes likely won’t threaten humanity in the near future. Even a nuclear explosion won’t completely wipe out life; in that event, he says, enough people would survive to rebuild.

Rather, it is the unknowns that will wind up as a bane on the existence of humankind.

Science has an obligation to serve mankind
Not all of the news is bad, Bostrom says.

“The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history,” he writes.

Mike Adams, The Health Ranger, notes in an Infographic posted here at NaturalNews that the onus for protecting humanity falls on those who are creating the technology.

“If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that it is NOT harmful falls on those taking the action,” the graphic says.

Check out the rest of the graphic here.

Sources for this article include:

http://news.yahoo.com

http://news.msn.com

http://www.latimes.com

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Lipstick found to contain alarmingly high levels of aluminum, cadmium and lead

A popular cosmetic product since time immemorial, lipstick has long been used by women in many diverse cultures to accentuate their femininity and emanate their own unique expressions of elegance and style to the outside world. But a new study released by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) School of Public Health raises fresh concerns about the safety of using conventional lipstick products, as many of them were found to contain dangerously high levels of aluminum, cadmium, lead and other toxins.

UCB researchers tested 32 common lipstick and lip gloss products widely sold in stores today and found that many of them are loaded with cadmium, chromium, aluminum and at least five other metals. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the findings revealed that women who use such products even at modest levels could be greatly increasing their risk of developing a host of potential health conditions, including gastrointestinal upset, nerve damage, and cancer.

“Lipstick and lip gloss are of special concern because when they are not being blotted on tissue or left as kiss marks, they are ingested or absorbed, bit by bit, by the individual wearing them,” explains a UCB press release about the study. “Using acceptable daily intakes derived from this study, average use of some lipsticks and lip glosses would result in excessive exposure to chromium, a carcinogen linked to stomach ulcers.”

Most conventional beauty products contain a multitude of toxins at varying levels
Of the 32 products tested, researchers found that 24 of them, or 75 percent, also contained lead, which is known to cause brain, cellular, and DNA damage. Since no level of lead exposure is considered safe for young children, this discovery is particularly concerning as many younger girls use lipstick with their friends when they play dress up and other childhood games.

“I believe that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) should pay attention to this,” says Sa Liu, author of the study and researchers in environmental health sciences at UCB. “Our study was small, using lip products that had been identified by young Asian women in Oakland, Calif. But, the lipsticks and lip glosses in our study are common brands available in stores everywhere. Based upon our findings, a larger, more thorough survey of lip products – and cosmetics in general – is warranted.”

The FDA actually did conduct its own investigation back in late 2011 on lead in lipstick and found that every single sample among 400 collected contained lead. A shocking 380, or 95 percent, of the lipstick samples tested contained levels of lead at more than 0.1 parts per million (ppm), which is higher than the maximum level permitted in candy bars. But in typical FDA fashion, the agency largely discounted its own findings, declaring at the time that lead levels are “very low and [do] not pose safety concerns.”

“Some of the toxic metals are occurring at levels that could possibly have an effect in the long term,” says UCB professor S. Katharine Hammond, who helped lead the new study. “It’s the levels that matter.”

Sources for this article include:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/05/02/toxic-metals-in-lipstick/

http://www.usatoday.com

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If you or someone you love is considering the Gerson Therapy – there are a few things you must understand. Making monumental lifestyle changes can be challenging, to say the least. The Gerson Therapy is quite demanding – before starting any cancer treatment program – get educated and always work with a qualified healthcare professional.

You can reverse cancer – naturally! Don’t miss this rare opportunity to learn from two extraordinary leaders in the field of natural health and healing. Jonathan Landsman takes us behind the scenes of the Gerson Therapy and reveals how it has helped save countless lives.

Visit: http://www.naturalhealth365.com and enter your email address for show details + a FREE gift!

How does the Gerson Therapy help cancer patients?

The Gerson Therapy is designed to regenerate the body – back to optimal health. Each therapy is used to repair the metabolic system by flooding the body with nutrients from about 15- 20 pounds of organically grown fruits and vegetables daily.

In particular, the fresh raw juice, is given to cancer patients up to one glass per hour for up to 13 glasses per day.

In addition, raw and cooked solid foods are generously consumed. In a short period of time, cancer patients can dramatically improve their oxygenation. This is obviously very important since oxygen deficiency in the blood contributes to many degenerative diseases.

The metabolism is also stimulated through the addition of thyroid, potassium and other supplements, and by avoiding heavy animal fats, excess protein, sodium and other toxins.

A key component of the Gerson Therapy is its use of coffee enemas for detoxification. Cancer patients go through an extensive detox program to eliminate wastes, regenerate the liver, reactivate the immune system and restore the body’s essential defenses – enzyme, mineral and hormone systems.

What does the “typical” Gerson diet look like – on a daily basis?

The Gerson diet is entirely organic and vegetarian. The diet is naturally rich in vitamins, minerals, enzymes, micro-nutrients, and extremely low in sodium, fats, and proteins. The following is a typical daily diet for a Gerson patient on the full therapy regimen:

Thirteen glasses of fresh, raw carrot/apple and green-leaf juices prepared hourly from fresh, organic fruits and vegetables.

Three full vegetarian meals, freshly prepared from organically grown fruits, vegetables and whole grains. A typical meal will include salad, cooked vegetables, baked potatoes, Hippocrates soup and juice.

Fresh fruit is available at all hours for snacking, in addition to the regular diet.

To learn more about the Gerson diet and its healing methods – be sure to tune into the next NaturalNews Talk Hour with Jonathan Landsman. Always educational and empowering!

This week’s guests: Charlotte Gerson and Howard Straus

Learn how the Gerson Therapy can help eliminate the threat of “incurable” diseases

Charlotte Gerson, is the author of Healing the Gerson Way – Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases and daughter of the great physician Max Gerson. After her father’s death, she continued to publish his last book, A Cancer Therapy – Results of 50 Cases and started to lecture on the Gerson Therapy. Charlotte has lectured worldwide about the virtues of natural health and healing.throughout the United States, Europe and Australia.

Howard Straus is the grandson of Max Gerson and author of Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless. Howard will share his years of experience in helping people deal with serious illnesses. He is a shining example of how to live a healthy, vibrant and happy life and will inspire YOU to take better care of yourself.

Don’t miss this show! This is a rare opportunity to learn from two extraordinary leaders in the field of natural health and healing. Jonathan Landsman takes us behind the scenes of the Gerson Therapy and reveals how it has helped save countless lives.

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

Two large honey packers, including one of the nation’s biggest – Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich. – have admitted to purchasing millions of dollars’ worth of honey that was falsely labeled.

National Public Radio reports that the goal of this mislabeling, which has been suspected of taking place within the honey industry for some time now, was to “acquire cheap honey from China.” This, despite the fact that Chinese honey is subject to strict “anti-dumping” duties the United States imposed in 2008, “after U.S. honey producers complained that Chinese exporters were selling their honey at artificially low prices,” NPR said.

To get around those anti-dumping restrictions, however, Chinese exporters began using middlemen to move honey in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, where it was re-labeled as a local product before being sent on to the U.S. Also, Chinese exporters used another tactic; they would label containers of honey as something else, like rice syrup.

We’ll play by the rules this time, we promise
Both companies are now facing criminal charges, but NPR reported that they have struck deals with the government to avoid immediate prosecution:

The companies are promising to play by the rules and to set up programs to ensure that all the honey they buy in the future comes from legitimate sources. Groeb Farms also replaced its senior management last summer.

“This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer, the actual user,” that they were knowingly importing mislabeled honey, Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, an industry consortium that has set up an auditing and testing system to guarantee the true origin of honey, told NPR.

The consortium was set up in 2012. Wenger says True Source-certified honey now accounts for at least 25 percent of U.S. honey consumption.

In an email to NPR, Jill Clark, vice president for sales/marketing at Dutch Gold Honey in Lancaster, Pa., which helped establish the program, said that the recent indictments are “just another reason why we felt it necessary to verify ethical sourcing of honey.”

In reality, there is much more to this than just dumping of honey. The bottom line has more to do with Chinese food production standards or, rather, the lack of standards.

From TreeHugger.com:

When Chinese consumers stopped buying IKEA meatballs when they learned they were made in China, there was an obvious inference that Chinese-made and Chinese-grown foods face an uphill battle when it comes to consumer confidence.

Also, it was a reminder that absent proper traceability of the food consumed in the U.S., as well as transparency in how it is processed and transported, it simply is not possible “to ensure food safety or sustainability no matter where a product originates from,” the website noted.

The answer is, of course, food freedom
In a statement, Groeb Farms said the company has come to an agreement with the Department of Justice that includes a hefty fine – $2 million – as well as the implementation of a “comprehensive compliance program.” In addition, the company said senior executives who were allegedly responsible for the purchasing decisions have had their contracts terminated.

“We take full responsibility for and deeply regret any errors that were made in the past regarding the import of honey,” said Rolf Richter, the new Groeb Farms CEO. “I would like to clarify that there are no allegations regarding the safety of our products. I can assure you that operating in a safe and ethical manner in all aspects of our business is a top priority for our new team. We are all committed to ensuring that we continue to deliver safe products that are of excellent quality, pay all duties and fees, and meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

That’s great, TreeHugger.com said, “but it does beg the question for consumers – if all this monitoring and regulatory oversight is necessary to keep the multi-national food giants on the straight and narrow, why not just buy from the beekeeper down the road?”

What? Food freedom? Why didn’t we think of that?

Sources for this article include:

http://www.npr.org

http://www.treehugger.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/025322_honey_Chinese_FDA.html

http://www.groebfarms.com

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Do you really know what’s in all the food you’re eating that’s imported from China? If you don’t, you’re actually in good company: The FDA only inspects 1% – 2% of all the food imported from China, so they don’t know either. Even when they inspect a shipment, they rarely test it for heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs or other toxic contaminants.

Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute, added emphasis to this point as he testified this week in The House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, saying, “We don’t trust, for good reason, the Chinese to supply ingredients for our dog and cat food. Why should we trust Chinese exporters for the food that we are feeding our children and families?”

It’s a good question. Especially when, as Kastel adds, Chinese food is being routinely found to contain “unapproved chemicals, dyes, pesticides and outright fraud (fake food).”

Heavily contaminated food from China
As Natural News has already reported, food from China is frequently found to contain alarming levels of heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury) and other contaminants. Politically, China is a communist dictatorship where freedom of speech is completely outlawed. Environmental regulations are virtually never enforced. The culture is one of total deception where lying, cheating, stealing or committing fraud to get ahead is considered completely acceptable — because that’s how government is operated there. The moral decay of China is directly reflected in the alarming dishonesty of the food supply. (Yes, a country’s food exports will reflect its cultural and political philosophies. Freedom produces healthy food. Oppression and communism produces deceptive, deadly food.)

And yet, even with all this being widely known, Chinese farms are rarely inspected by organic certifiers. “U.S. certifiers are unable to independently inspect farms and assure compliance to the USDA organic food and agriculture standards that are required for export to the U.S.” explained Kastel in testimony. “These imports should not be allowed to reach our shore until and unless we have a system in place to assure consumers they are getting what they pay for. Just like U.S. grown organic commodities, the safety of these products must be rigorously overseen by independent inspectors.”

Read Kastel’s full testimony here.

Counterfeit ingredients are the new norm in China
Also testifying at the hearing was Patty Lovera, the Assistant Director of Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch. The news on food fraud out of China “is a steady stream of controversies ranging from adulteration with counterfeit ingredients like melamine in dairy products, to widespread outbreaks of animal diseases like avian flu, and high levels of pesticide residues,” Lovera testified. “Just last week, news reports described a Chinese government campaign to break up a fake meat operation, leading to arrests of more than 900 people accused of passing off more than $1 million of rat meat as mutton.”

See Natural News coverage of the fake rat meat scandal here.

You are eating far more food from China than you think
Why does any of this matter? Because you’re eating far more food from China than you probably think.

Not only do retailers like Whole Foods sell “certified organic” food grown in China, the vast majority of superfood powders sold in North America use raw materials purchased in bulk from China. Nutritional supplements, herbs and vitamins are often made using materials from China.

Not everything from China is bad, but in our own lab tests here at Natural News, we’ve been shocked to discover just how frequently products from China are contaminated with metals, chemical solvents and pesticide residues. We have rejected dozens of suppliers in our own search for clean ingredients to use in our product formulations, and we’ve even had to send back product that showed up at our warehouse and simply didn’t meet our stringent quality control requirements. (True fact: We recently had to return several thousand pounds of goji berries to one supplier after discovering the product failed our quality control review.)

But here’s the even scarier part in all this:

I am repeatedly told I’m the ONLY person asking these questions
When I talk to suppliers of raw materials, I am repeatedly told that I am the only person asking them for heavy metals tests, pesticide tests and product samples to send to our own lab.

This happens over and over again. From this, I have learned there is virtually NO due diligence being conducted by natural products retailers. Most retailers simply buy and sell, shipping boxes and moving product while turning a blind eye to the truth about what they are buying and selling. They literally do not care whether their products are contaminated with heavy metals. They just want to sell, sell, sell!

Even more shockingly — and I seem to be the only journalist reporting this jaw-dropping fact — there are currently NO LIMITS set by the USDA for contamination of certified organic foods. A product may be USDA organic and still contain deadly levels of mercury, arsenic or lead. The USDA does not test or even regulate heavy metals in foods via its organic certified program!

So you can be shopping at a famous natural products retailer and you might pick up a product carrying the USDA Certified Organic logo, thinking, “This is certified healthy and safe by the U.S. government.” You are being lied to. That product could be grown in China in a field of mercury runoff from an industrial factory. It could contain ridiculously high levels of mercury, arsenic, PCBs and even chemical solvents. You could be eating pure death while paying a premium for it!

This is not an attack on the USDA, by the way. Their organic certification program is surprisingly good for the scope of what it attempts to accomplish. But understand that USDA organic certifies a process, not a result. At the farm level, it means foods are not intentionally grown with pesticides and herbicides, but it does not say anything whatsoever about heavy metals contamination of food production fields in China.

Massive organic food FRAUD
In truth, what’s really happening right now on a global scale is a massive organic food fraud. Food is grown in China and certified organic even though no U.S. inspectors even visit the farms. That food is then imported into the U.S. and almost never inspected. It’s packaged and sold at top dollar in natural foods retail stores, emblazoned with the USDA Organic label.

But nowhere along the way — except in extremely rare cases — is that food ever tested for heavy metals or other contaminants. This is why Mark Kastel correctly states this food can’t even be trusted “for dog food,” much less to feed yourself and your family.

Make no mistake about it: China is a nation full of immoral, unethical liars and deceivers. (Taiwan, on the other hand, is very different and has a much stronger moral code as well as basic human decency.) Remember: I speak Mandarin Chinese. I’ve lived in the Chinese culture. I’ve traveled throughout Asia and even given numerous public speeches to Chinese audiences. At the same time, I’ve investigated and written about food and food safety for more than a decade. Very few people are as qualified to tell you the truth about what’s really in your food coming out of China, and I can tell you that I don’t trust it.

In fact, the only way I will eat anything from China is if I subject it to extensive testing and verify that contamination levels are acceptably low. There are some great products out of China that are completely safe and healthy. Certain medicinal mushrooms, for example, are produced in China and are very clean. Some producers of goji berries are very honest and clean. There are no doubt organic growers who are producing very clean products in China, but these would be the exception, not the rule. By default, we must all now assume that anything from China is heavily contaminated.

Almost universally, food grown in North America is cleaner and less contaminated. This isn’t true 100% of the time, but usually so.

Toxic Chinese agriculture puts honest U.S. farmers out of business
The sad part about all this is that food from China is economically displacing U.S. and Canadian farmers who are generally far more honest and ethical in their farming practices. So while U.S. farmers are being put out of business for following the rules set by the EPA, FDA and USDA, the Chinese farmers are selling us contaminated, toxic “organic” food frauds produced by breaking all the rules!

That’s why I say grow local, buy local and eat local as much as possible. And until China cleans up its act on food contamination, do your best to avoid food from China. I don’t trust it unless EVERY BATCH is comprehensively lab tested and those lab tests are made public.

Props to Cornucopia’s Mark Kastel for having the courage to lay a lot of this out in congressional testimony. Rest assured Congress will never ask me to testify on food contamination because I would describe a truth so horrifying that people would stop eating for days…

P.S. The reason all your dogs and cats are dying from diabetes and cancer these days is because you’re giving them highly toxic pet treats imported from China. They are loaded with toxic solvents and industrial chemicals that cause permanent liver and kidney damage, among other devastating side effects. You can find these toxic, colorful pet treats sold at all the major pet store retailers. They are selling you PET DEATH and making a tidy profit doing so.

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

Why the FDA and Big Pharma don’t want you to know any of this

According to the FDA, calcium is calcium is calcium. In their minds, there’s no difference between calcium from rocks and calcium from broccoli. But chemically, in terms of real molecular biology, there is a HUGE difference. Your body wants nutrition from food, not rocks.

How do you know this is true? Because even starving people don’t eat rocks. People will die from starvation before they try to eat rocks. That’s because rocks are not food. This point should be obvious to anyone. So why do vitamin companies put ground-up rocks in their formulas?

Big Pharma, of course, doesn’t want you to know anything about real nutrition. They want you to keep taking their fake, synthetic chemical vitamins so that you get even more sick and require their high-priced prescription drugs to “manage” your disease symptoms. What better way to keep you sick than take over the vitamin industry (which they have largely done) and sell people a bunch of chemicals and rocks that keep everybody sick and malnourished? Pure (evil) genius.

Truth be told, there are all sorts of vested interests in the industry who don’t want you to have access to real food-based nutrition. Medical insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and even the entire cancer industry all want to make sure as many people as possible stay sick. They’re all future customers, after all, and if the people discover they can prevent disease through intelligent nutrition, the “sick care” industry will lose out on billions of dollars in revenues. (Your health is their loss, in other words.)

Switch to MegaFood starting right now

The number of multivitamin companies using food-based nutrients is ridiculously small. In fact, I can only think of two: MegaFood and Pure Synergy. There may be others I’m not aware of, but in any case it’s a frighteningly small number.

If you are currently taking multivitamins that are not from real food-based sources, you need to switch to food-based nutrients immediately. On that topic, I want to be 100% on the record here, saying that your No. 1 best source of nutrition is live, fresh foods and superfoods. No vitamin, no matter how amazing, can replace real, fresh foods and superfoods you grown in your own garden or aquaponic system.

But for a long list of reasons, most people can’t get the nutrition they need from the foods they buy. One huge reason for all this is that soils are depleted of minerals like selenium, one of the most important trace minerals to support healthy brain function, immune response and normal cell functions. So even if you’re buying fresh food, it’s almost certainly depleted of magnesium, zinc, selenium and other trace elements you need in food form.

People today are also in a hurry. They want real nutrition in a convenient, portable, storable format. It’s hard to beat MegaFood in this category. MegaFood is shelf stable, packed in glass bottles (not plastic), extremely easy to take, and it can be used to enhance any regular meal you might be eating. For example, if you’re eating a salad for lunch and you realize, “Hey, this salad is depleted of nearly all nutrients, grown in nutrient-depleted soils,” you can just take a MegaFood multivitamin with your salad, and now you’ve got a real nutrition for lunch.

MegaFood is 100% no GMO, no soy, no gluten, no dairy, no pesticides and tested free from common allergens.

Click here to get some now from Natural News.

In addition, the entire MegaFood line is ridiculously “clean” in terms of low levels of toxic metals such as cadmium, lead, mercury and arsenic. As you may know, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on laboratory testing of superfoods and raw materials over the past few months, and I’ve seen a large number of test results come back with alarmingly high numbers. I’ve seen arsenic at over 400ppm. I’ve seen cadmium at over 8ppm (toxic!). I’ve seen lead at 16ppm in some foods.

I have personally rejected a huge number of products and raw materials from our store because they had high levels of metals. So as part of my research into MegaFood, we looked into their heavy metals levels and we found them to be incredibly clean. The MegaFood standards are:

Arsenic less than 1 ppm
Cadmium less than 0.2 ppm
Mercury less than 0.5 ppm
Lead less than 1.0 ppm

And the actual test results were much lower than these limits! In the world of foods and superfoods, this is ridiculously clean. So it meets my standards, because I won’t endorse anything that contains high levels of metal contaminants.

In addition, MegaFood was tested for pesticide residues, and the results were phenomenal: On all the categories tested — organochlorine, organophosphorous, organonitrogen and pyrethroids — the results were lower than Prop 65 requirements, which are the strictest requirements in the world.

MegaFood also passes all the tests on allergenicity for gluten, dairy and soy. It passes all the tests on e.coli, yeast, mold, salmonella and coliform, making it one of the cleanest and most high-quality nutrient sources available anywhere today.

Now you see why I call MegaFood a “breakthrough” in food-based nutrition. This isn’t some run-of-the-mill chemical multivitamin. MegaFood supplements are essentially food concentrates that just happen to resemble the physical shape and size of a multivitamin. Click here to get some now from the Natural News store.

MegaFood formulas we carry

At the Natural News Store, we work tirelessly to bring you the most potent, cleanest and high-integrity sources of foods and superfoods from around the world. Our shopping cart is small because we have ridiculously high standards on what we carry.

To launch MegaFood in our store, I have personally selected a dozen or so top formulas that I believe are most needed by Natural News readers. Most of these are available right now, ready to ship at the best discounts we are allowed to offer. In time, we intend to expand this line to include even more of the MegaFood product line, possibly even the entire line.

You can find them all at:
http://store.naturalnews.com/Multivitamins_c_59.html

Thyroid Strength – Quite possibly the best thyroid support formula on the planet. Made with food-state iodine and selenium, with L-tyrosine, sacred basil leaf and more. Naturally contains all-important iodine in a food-based format. The selenium is also a hugely important trace mineral.

Selenium – Simply put, this is the source of selenium you need to be taking. This single product has had a huge impact on my life and productivity. As you know, selenium supports healthy brain function as well as providing other enormous benefits for healthy cell function. Research this online and you’ll see why selenium is one of the most underrated trace minerals missing from everyone’s diet.

Blood Builder – Super popular formula based on beetroot and food-state vitamin C, vitamin B-12, iron and folate. Especially useful formula for women to replenish blood strength. Rave reviews from current users.

Women’s One Daily – An amazing, full-spectrum concentrate of real food nutrients, covering everything from vitamins and minerals to plant extracts and phytonutrients that support women’s health.

Men Over 40 One Daily – Same as the women’s formula but nutritionally tuned to the needs of men over 40. Extremely potent. It’s amazing they can fit all this into the vitamin format. Take this and see how much different you feel in just 30 days.

… and many more. See the full line of MegaFood supplements at the Natural News Store:
http://store.naturalnews.com/Multivitamins_c_59.html

Note: We are immediately increasing our MegaFood line and expect more products to arrive next week. MegaFood is a small company and they make these nutrients “artisan-style,” in small batches. They are not a mega-sized company that cranks out chemical vitamins on a factory floor. These food-based nutrients take time to manufacture, and we expect to be in short supply for many months, but we’ll do our best to keep them coming our way. Subscribe to my email newsletter (below) to be alerted when we expand our MegaFood line and have more products in stock.

To your health,

– Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

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

It’s one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of nutrition: Those “conventional” multivitamins sold at grocery stores, pharmacies and big-box stores are filled with synthetic chemicals that are fraudulently called “vitamins.” Ascorbic acid, pyridoxine (B6), niacin (B3), magnesium oxide and dozens more… these are all synthetic, isolated or inorganic forms of vitamins (i.e. rocks) and minerals that in some cases may actually cause more harm than good to your body.

It’s all a cruel con… the selling of synthetic, isolated chemicals and ground-up rocks as “food.” When you take a typical multivitamin made with calcium carbonate, iron sulfate and magnesium oxide, you are eating rocks, not minerals. And when you take a multivitamin made with “standardized” isolated vitamins, you are eating chemicals, not real nutrition.

There is a better way to get real nutrition from multivitamins. It’s called “food-based” nutrition, and it means that all the vitamins and minerals in the supplement come from genuine food-based sources.

Clearly, human beings were designed to eat foods, not rocks. Nutrients are supposed to come from living things, not dead, inanimate objects. This should be common sense, but the entire conventional vitamin industry — which is largely owned by Big Pharma, by the way — has convinced people they should be eating chemicals and rocks.

There is a better solution to all this. It’s called “MegaFood.”

MegaFood is a brand of nutritional supplements that are made almost entirely from actual food. Every nutrient in the bottle is derived entirely from living systems, either microbial flora or plants. They have a full line of supplements for specific health concerns, including thyroid, blood builders, bone builders, and multivitamins for men and women over 40. Natural News now proudly carried MegaFood products in our online store, and this is what I’m taking and recommending to everyone I know.

It’s crucial to understand the difference between MegaFood and traditional multivitamins. MegaFood nutrients are full-spectrum nutrients. Vitamin C, for example, is actually much more than the isolated chemical known as ascorbic acid. In nature, vitamin C exists as a full symphony of related compounds. This is what the body needs for nutrition, and that’s what MegaFood delivers.

Nearly all the plants used in MegaFood formulas are certified organic, and their entire product line is tested to be completely free of pesticides and herbicides. In fact, I grilled MegaFood on whether they had any harmful excipients and fillers, and it turns out their products are incredibly clean, conscientious, and truly revolutionary in terms of delivering bioavailable nutrients to the body.

MegaFood is real food. And that means it’s digestible. While a lot of people have problems with traditional vitamin pills and multivitamin tablets, MegaFood is easy to digest and easy to assimilate because, again, it’s real food not “chemicals and rocks.”

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

BREAKING: European Commission to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with government

A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”

It’s called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.

The draft text of the law, which has already been amended several times due to a huge backlash from gardeners, is viewable here.

“This law will immediately stop the professional development of vegetable varieties for home gardeners, organic growers, and small-scale market farmers,” said Ben Gabel, vegetable breeder and director of The Real Seed Catalogue. “Home gardeners have really different needs – for example they grow by hand, not machine, and can’t or don’t want to use such powerful chemical sprays. There’s no way to register the varieties suitable for home use as they don’t meet the strict criteria of the Plant Variety Agency, which is only concerned about approving the sort of seed used by industrial farmers.”

Virtually all plants, vegetable seeds and gardeners to eventually be registered by government
All governments are, of course, infatuated with the idea of registering everybody and everything. Under Title IV of the proposed EU law:

Title IV Registration of varieties in national and Union registers
The varieties, in order to be made available on the market throughout the Union, shall be included in a national register or in the Union register via direct application procedure to the CVPO.

Gardeners must also pay fees to the EU bureaucracy for the registration of their seeds. From the proposed law text:

The competent authorities and the CPVO should charge fees for the processing of
applications, the formal and technical examinations including audits, variety denomination, and the maintenance of the varieties for each year for the duration of
the registration.

While this law may initially only be targeted at commercial gardeners, it sets a precedent to sooner or later go after home gardeners and require them to abide by the same insane regulations.

Government bureaucracy gone insane
“This is an instance of bureaucracy out of control,” says Ben Gabel. “All this new law does is create a whole new raft of EU civil servants being paid to move mountains of papers round all day, while killing off the seed supply to home gardeners and interfering with the right of farmers to grow what they want. It also very worrying that they have given themselves the power to regulate and licence any plant species of any sort at all in the future – not just agricultural plants, but grasses, mosses, flowers, anything at all – without having to bring it back to the Council for a vote.”

As a hint of the level of insane bureaucracy that gardeners and vegetable growers will be subject to under this EU law, check out this language from the proposed EU law:

Specific provisions are set out on the registration in the Union variety register and with regard to the possibility for the applicant to launch an appeal against a CPVO decision. Such provisions are not laid down for the registration in the national variety
registers, because they are subject to national administrative procedures. A new obligation for each national variety examination centre to be audited by the CPVO will be introduced with the aim to ensure the quality and harmonisation of the variety registration process in the Union. The examination centre of the professional operators will be audited and approved by the national competent authorities. In case of direct application to the CPVO it will audit and approve the examination centres it uses for variety examination.

Such language is, of course, Orwellian bureaucraticspeak that means only one thing: All gardeners should prepare to be subjected to total government insanity over seeds, vegetables and home gardens.

RealSeeds.co.uk warns about any attempt to actually try to understand the law by reading it:

You cannot just read the first 5 pages or so that are an ‘executive summary’, and think you know what this law is about. The executive summary is NOT what will become the law. It is the actual Articles themselves that become law, the Summary has no legal standing and is just tacked on as an aid to the public and legislators, it is supposed to give background information and set the proposed legislation in context so people know what is going on and why.

The problem with this law has always been that the Summary says lots of nice fluffy things about preserving biodiversity, simplifying legislation, making things easier etc – things we all would love – but the Articles of the law actually do completely the opposite. And the Summary is not what becomes the law.

For example, the Summary of drafts 1, 2 & 3 talked about making things easier for ‘Amateur’ varieties. But the entire class of Amateur vegetables – which we have spent 5 years working with DEFRA to register – was actually abolished entirely in the Articles right from the start. Yet the Summary , and press releases based on it, still talked about how it will help preserve Amateur varieties! The Summary is completely bogus. Do not base your views of the law on it!

So, be warned. By all means, read it yourself. But you have the ignore the Summary as that is not the Law, and does not reflect what is in the Law.

As you might suspect, this move is the “final solution” of Monsanto, DuPont and other seed-domination corporations who have long admitted their goal is the complete domination of all seeds and crops grown on the planet. By criminalizing the private growing of vegetables — thereby turning gardeners into criminals — EU bureaucrats can finally hand over full control of the food supply to powerful corporations like Monsanto.

Most heirloom seeds to be criminalized
Nearly all varieties of heirloom vegetable seeds will be criminalized under this proposed EU law. This means the act of saving seeds from one generation to the next — a cornerstone of sustainable living — will become a criminal act.

In addition, as Gabel explains, this law “…effectively kills off development of home-garden seeds in the EU.”

This is the ultimate wish of all governments, of course: To criminalize any act of self-reliance and make the population completely dependent on monopolistic corporations for their very survival. This is true both in the USA and the EU. This is what governments do: They seize control, one sector at a time, year after year, until you are living as nothing more than a total slave under a globalist dictatorial regime.

An online petition has already been started on this issue and has garnered nearly 25,000 signatures so far.

NOAH’S ARK and 240 other organizations from 40 European countries have also initiated an “open letter” appealing to Brussels bureaucrats to stop the insanity. Click here for a translated version of their petition.

I saw this coming
By the way, I am on the record predicting this exact scenario. Read Chapter Three of my fiction book, “Freedom Chronicles 2026.” (Read it FREE, online.) It depicts a seed smuggler living in a time when seeds are criminalized and people earn a living as professional seed smugglers.

In my book, a woman uses a specially-crafted breast prosthesis to smuggle seeds to “underground gardeners” in full defiance of laws crafted by Monsanto. A vast underground network of grassroots gardeners and scientists manage to put together a “seed weapon” to destroy GMOs and take back the food supply from evil corporations.

Mark my words: Seeds are about to become contraband. Anyone who grows their own food is about to be targeted as a criminal. The governments of the world, conspiring with corporations like Monsanto, do not want any individual to be able to grow their own food.

This is about total domination of the food supply and the criminalizing of gardeners. And this is what big government always does after centralizing sufficient power. All governments inherently seek total control over the lives of everyone, and if you don’t set boundaries and limits for government (i.e. the Bill of Rights), it eventually runs roughshod over all freedoms and liberties, including the freedom to grow your own food.

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All the controversy over the past few years regarding Whole Foods Market and its dubious position on genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) seems to have fizzled following the company’s recent announcement that, by 2018, all GMOs sold in its stores will have to be properly labeled. But in the meantime, are Whole Foods patrons, and particularly those who purchase food at one of its many “fresh” food bars, being duped into paying a premium for products that contain GM canola oil and other unhealthy additives?

If you frequent Whole Foods, you more than likely have been beckoned, at least once, by the siren calls emanating from one of its enticing fresh food buffets, which are typically overflowing with piping-hot fresh vegetables, delectable casseroles, tender meat dishes, and other savory, gourmet delights. And for the most part, these and the many other offerings at Whole Foods fresh bars truly are fresh, containing minimal additives that might cause potential health problems for you and your family.

But the key word here is minimal – and sometimes this minimal is really more like excessive, especially when it comes to those food items that were marinating in a seductive infusion of spices, oils, and other tasty flavor-enhancers prior to landing in those stainless steel chafers. Though the vast majority of the ingredients found in each meal item at a typical Whole Foods fresh bar are, indeed, fresh and healthy, it is Whole Foods’ excessive use of canola oil, refined flours, and other ingredients that defy the company’s own claims about its food offerings.

Most canola oil comes from GM sources, and this ingredient is prevalent at Whole Foods
If you take some time to peruse those neatly-presented ingredient labels at a typical Whole Foods “hot” bar – that is, the bar containing all the warm meal items as opposed to the salad bar – one of the first things you will notice is that many of them contain canola oil. In some cases, an item will contain healthy oils such as olive oil or even coconut oil, but in most cases, canola oil seems to be Whole Foods’ cooking oil of choice.

Why is this such a big deal? Canola oil, as you may well already know, is almost always derived from GM canola if not specifically labeled as organic. And as of this writing, there is no indication that Whole Foods uses either organic or non-GM canola in any of its food items, which means many customers are unknowingly ingesting a toxin that may lead to allergies, diminished immunity, and even cancer.

“It is now believed that rapeseed (canola) has a cumulative effect, taking almost 10 years before symptoms begin to manifest,” writes journalist Vanessa Runs about the dangers of canola. “One possible effect of long-term use is the destruction of the protective coating surrounding nerves, called the myelin sheath. This is like having raw, open wires in the body,” she adds, noting that canola oil consumption has also been linked to depleting vitamin E inside the body, as well as inhibiting the proper metabolism of foods and blocking normal enzyme function.

Tell Whole Foods to remove canola oil from its fresh bar
Many people are still greatly misinformed about canola oil, which is presumably why Whole Foods continues to use it in their fresh bar foods. But canola oil is not safe, especially when it comes from GM canola plants, and it has no business being used by a so-called “natural” grocery chain that claims to use “nothing artificial, ever.”

Those concerned about the continued use of canola oil by Whole Foods are urged to contact the company and ask that it remove canola oil and replace it with a healthier alternative, such as grass-fed butter or ghee, lard, coconut oil, or olive oil. You can contact Whole Foods by visiting:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/customer-service

You can also leave a comment on the company’s Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/wholefoods?fref=ts

Sources for this article include:

Traditional Diet, Holistic Health and Green Living

http://vanessaruns.com

http://blog.fooducate.com

http://www.smallfootprintfamily.com

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