AT7 Health News

Survival Of The Kindest - Social Scientists Show Kindness Is A Key To Species Success

2011-04-15T12:21:00.001-07:00

Social scientists build case for 'survival of the kindest'

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 08 December 2009
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/12/08_survival_of_kindest.shtml

BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

(Photo illustration by Jonathan Payne)

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

"Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others," said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. "Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.”

Empathy in our genes

Keltner's team is looking into how the human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic.

The study, led by UC Berkeley graduate student Laura Saslow and Sarina Rodrigues of Oregon State University, found that people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances.

Informally known as the "cuddle hormone,” oxytocin is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain, where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love, among other functions.

"The tendency to be more empathetic may be influenced by a single gene,” Rodrigues said.

The more you give, the more respect you get

While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question some UC Berkeley researchers are asking is, "How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?"

(Photo illustration by Nick Stanger)

One answer, according to UC Berkeley social psychologist and sociologist Robb Willer is that the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. In one recent study, Willer and his team gave participants each a modest amount of cash and directed them to play games of varying complexity that would benefit the "public good.” The results, published in the journal American Sociological Review, showed that participants who acted more generously received more gifts, respect and cooperation from their peers and wielded more influence over them.

"The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated,” Willer said. "But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status.”

"Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish,” he added.

Cultivating the greater good

Such results validate the findings of such "positive psychology” pioneers as Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose research in the early 1990s shifted away from mental illness and dysfunction, delving instead into the mysteries of human resilience and optimism.

While much of the positive psychology being studied around the nation is focused on personal fulfillment and happiness, UC Berkeley researchers have narrowed their investigation into how it contributes to the greater societal good.

One outcome is the campus's Greater Good Science Center, a West Coast magnet for research on gratitude, compassion, altruism, awe and positive parenting, whose benefactors include the Metanexus Institute, Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday and the Quality of Life Foundation.

Christine Carter, executive director of the Greater Good Science Center, is creator of the "Science for Raising Happy Kids” Web site, whose goal, among other things, is to assist in and promote the rearing of "emotionally literate” children. Carter translates rigorous research into practical parenting advice. She says many parents are turning away from materialistic or competitive activities, and rethinking what will bring their families true happiness and well-being.

"I've found that parents who start consciously cultivating gratitude and generosity in their children quickly see how much happier and more resilient their children become,” said Carter, author of "Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents” which will be in bookstores in February 2010. "What is often surprising to parents is how much happier they themselves also become."

The sympathetic touch

As for college-goers, UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton has found that cross-racial and cross-ethnic friendships can improve the social and academic experience on campuses. In one set of findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he found that the cortisol levels of both white and Latino students dropped as they got to know each over a series of one-on-one get-togethers. Cortisol is a hormone triggered by stress and anxiety.

(Photo illustration by Eva Rousse)

Meanwhile, in their investigation of the neurobiological roots of positive emotions, Keltner and his team are zeroing in on the aforementioned oxytocin as well as the vagus nerve, a uniquely mammalian system that connects to all the body's organs and regulates heart rate and breathing.

Both the vagus nerve and oxytocin play a role in communicating and calming. In one UC Berkeley study, for example, two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching one other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety.

Researchers were able to see from activity in the threat response region of the brain that many of the female participants grew anxious as they waited to be touched. However, as soon as they felt a sympathetic touch, the vagus nerve was activated and oxytocin was released, calming them immediately.

"Sympathy is indeed wired into our brains and bodies; and it spreads from one person to another through touch,” Keltner said.

The same goes for smaller mammals. UC Berkeley psychologist Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney, a professor of biological psychiatry and neurology at McGill University, found that rat pups whose mothers licked, groomed and generally nurtured them showed reduced levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, and had generally more robust immune systems.

Overall, these and other findings at UC Berkeley challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last, and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion.

“This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin's observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct,” Keltner said.

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Dynamic Stretching

2011-03-31T13:29:00.001-07:00

Stretching: The Truth

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

November 2, 2008

Phys Ed

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/playmagazine/112pewarm.html
Also see link's video

WHEN DUANE KNUDSON, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Chico, looks around campus at athletes warming up before practice, he sees one dangerous mistake after another. “They’re stretching, touching their toes. . . . ” He sighs. “It’s discouraging.”

If you’re like most of us, you were taught the importance of warm-up exercises back in grade school, and you’ve likely continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg’s muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements.

“There is a neuromuscular inhibitory response to static stretching,” says Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. The straining muscle becomes less responsive and stays weakened for up to 30 minutes after stretching, which is not how an athlete wants to begin a workout.

THE RIGHT WARM-UP should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body. When you’re at rest, there’s less blood flow to muscles and tendons, and they stiffen. “You need to make tissues and tendons compliant before beginning exercise,” Knudson says.

A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels pull oxygen from the bloodstream more efficiently and use stored muscle fuel more effectively. They also withstand loads better. One significant if gruesome study found that the leg-muscle tissue of laboratory rabbits could be stretched farther before ripping if it had been electronically stimulated — that is, warmed up.

To raise the body’s temperature, a warm-up must begin with aerobic activity, usually light jogging. Most coaches and athletes have known this for years. That’s why tennis players run around the court four or five times before a match and marathoners stride in front of the starting line. But many athletes do this portion of their warm-up too intensely or too early. A 2002 study of collegiate volleyball players found that those who’d warmed up and then sat on the bench for 30 minutes had lower backs that were stiffer than they had been before the warm-up. And a number of recent studies have demonstrated that an overly vigorous aerobic warm-up simply makes you tired. Most experts advise starting your warm-up jog at about 40 percent of your maximum heart rate (a very easy pace) and progressing to about 60 percent. The aerobic warm-up should take only 5 to 10 minutes, with a 5-minute recovery. (Sprinters require longer warm-ups, because the loads exerted on their muscles are so extreme.) Then it’s time for the most important and unorthodox part of a proper warm-up regimen, the Spider-Man and its counterparts.

“TOWARDS THE end of my playing career, in about 2000, I started seeing some of the other guys out on the court doing these strange things before a match and thinking, What in the world is that?” says Mark Merklein, 36, once a highly ranked tennis player and now a national coach for the United States Tennis Association. The players were lunging, kicking and occasionally skittering, spider-like, along the sidelines. They were early adopters of a new approach to stretching.

While static stretching is still almost universally practiced among amateur athletes — watch your child’s soccer team next weekend — it doesn’t improve the muscles’ ability to perform with more power, physiologists now agree. “You may feel as if you’re able to stretch farther after holding a stretch for 30 seconds,” McHugh says, “so you think you’ve increased that muscle’s readiness.” But typically you’ve increased only your mental tolerance for the discomfort of the stretch. The muscle is actually weaker.

Stretching muscles while moving, on the other hand, a technique known as dynamic stretching or dynamic warm-ups, increases power, flexibility and range of motion. Muscles in motion don’t experience that insidious inhibitory response. They instead get what McHugh calls “an excitatory message” to perform.

Dynamic stretching is at its most effective when it’s relatively sports specific. “You need range-of-motion exercises that activate all of the joints and connective tissue that will be needed for the task ahead,” says Terrence Mahon, a coach with Team Running USA, home to the Olympic marathoners Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor. For runners, an ideal warm-up might include squats, lunges and “form drills” like kicking your buttocks with your heels. Athletes who need to move rapidly in different directions, like soccer, tennis or basketball players, should do dynamic stretches that involve many parts of the body. “Spider-Man” is a particularly good drill: drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall. (For other dynamic stretches, see the sidebar below.)

Even golfers, notoriously nonchalant about warming up (a recent survey of 304 recreational golfers found that two-thirds seldom or never bother), would benefit from exerting themselves a bit before teeing off. In one 2004 study, golfers who did dynamic warm- up exercises and practice swings increased their clubhead speed and were projected to have dropped their handicaps by seven strokes over seven weeks.

Controversy remains about the extent to which dynamic warm-ups prevent injury. But studies have been increasingly clear that static stretching alone before exercise does little or nothing to help. The largest study has been done on military recruits; results showed that an almost equal number of subjects developed lower-limb injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, etc.), regardless of whether they had performed static stretches before training sessions. A major study published earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, on the other hand, found that knee injuries were cut nearly in half among female collegiate soccer players who followed a warm-up program that included both dynamic warm-up exercises and static stretching. (For a sample routine, visit www.aclprevent.com/pepprogram.htm.) And in golf, new research by Andrea Fradkin, an assistant professor of exercise science at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, suggests that those who warm up are nine times less likely to be injured.

“It was eye-opening,” says Fradkin, formerly a feckless golfer herself. “I used to not really warm up. I do now.”

You’re Getting Warmer: The Best Dynamic Stretches

These exercises- as taught by the United States Tennis Association’s player-development program – are good for many athletes, even golfers. Do them immediately after your aerobic warm-up and as soon as possible before your workout.

STRAIGHT-LEG MARCH

(for the hamstrings and gluteus muscles)

Kick one leg straight out in front of you, with your toes flexed toward the sky. Reach your opposite arm to the upturned toes. Drop the leg and repeat with the opposite limbs. Continue the sequence for at least six or seven repetitions.

SCORPION

(for the lower back, hip flexors and gluteus muscles)

Lie on your stomach, with your arms outstretched and your feet flexed so that only your toes are touching the ground. Kick your right foot toward your left arm, then kick your leftfoot toward your right arm. Since this is an advanced exercise, begin slowly, and repeat up to 12 times.

HANDWALKS

(for the shoulders, core muscles, and hamstrings)

Stand straight, with your legs together. Bend over until both hands are flat on the ground. “Walk” with your hands forward until your back is almost extended. Keeping your legs straight, inch your feet toward your hands, then walk your hands forward again. Repeat five or six times. G.R.

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BWN - Health v5

2011-03-31T13:28:00.001-07:00

Stretching: The Truth

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

November 2, 2008

Phys Ed

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/playmagazine/112pewarm.html
Also see link's video

“It was eye-opening,” says Fradkin, formerly a feckless golfer herself. “I used to not really warm up. I do now.”

You’re Getting Warmer: The Best Dynamic Stretches

STRAIGHT-LEG MARCH

(for the hamstrings and gluteus muscles)

SCORPION

(for the lower back, hip flexors and gluteus muscles)

HANDWALKS

(for the shoulders, core muscles, and hamstrings)

US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

2011-03-10T11:48:00.001-08:00

"The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm," says David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service, part of the USDA. "That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...)

prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

run out of water for its farms.
harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America since the Great Depression.

'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

It does not replenish.

But Texas, true to its self-conscious style of 'rugged individualism', has no such legal controls.
'right to capture'.

'But with a bit of luck, we get eight to 10 inches a year, and we have learnt to capture it. I aim for half-and-half, half rainfall and half aquifer.' He can now grow crops using five acre-inches a year, rather than acre-feet. '

The Texas oil billionaire and corporate raider T Boone Pickens is after their water.

buying up Panhandle land with water rights over the Ogallala. He is now the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry. That is 65 billion gallons a year, or, to put it another way, 124,000 gallons a minute. T

Pickens plans to pipe it 250 miles to Dallas

defied the attempts of their fellow farmers to protect water supplies for the benefit of all.

'In Kansas, the state owns the water – not so in Texas,' he says.
'We own it, and we don't see why we should give up our right to capture

To a man they loathe Pickens, while defending his 'right to capture'.

'We are drying up. People don't learn from history, and if we keep breaking the ground and run out of water, it'll happen again.'

He misses the life. 'I used to go out on the land before dawn
+++

US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

For years the Ogallala Aquifer, the world’s largest underground body of fresh water, has irrigated thousands of square miles of American farmland. Now it is running dry

Image 1 of 5

The town of Happy, Texas, sits on top of the rapidly depleting Ogallala Aquifer. Its population is dwindling by 10 per cent a year. Photo: Misty Keasler

By Charles Laurence 7:00AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

162 Comments

There is not much to be happy about these days in Happy, Texas. Main Street is shuttered but for the Happy National Bank, slowly but inexorably disappearing into a High Plains wind that turns all to dust. The old Picture House, the cinema, has closed. Tumbleweed rolls into the still corners behind the grain elevators, soaring prairie cathedrals that spoke of prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

Happy's problem is that it has run out of water for its farms. Its population, dropping 10 per cent a year, is down to 595. The name, which brings a smile for miles around and plays in faded paint on the fronts of every shuttered business – Happy Grain Inc, Happy Game Room – has become irony tinged with bitterness. It goes back to the cowboy days of the 19th century. A cattle drive north through the Texas Panhandle to the rail heads beyond had been running out of water, steers dying on the hoof, when its cowboys stumbled on a watering hole. They named the spot Happy Draw, for the water. Now Happy is the harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America since the Great Depression.

'It was a booming town when I grew up,' Judy Shipman, who manages the bank, says. 'We had three restaurants, a grocery, a plumber, an electrician, a building contractor, a doctor. We had so much fun, growing up.' Like all the townsfolk, she knows why the fun has gone. 'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

Those wells were drilled into a geological phenomenon called the Ogallala Aquifer. It is an underground lake of pristine water formed between two and six million years ago, in the Pliocene age, when the tectonic shifts that pushed the Rocky Mountains skywards were still active. The water was trapped below the new surface crust that would become the semi-arid soil of the Plains, dry and dusty. It stretches all the way down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the badlands of South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle. It does not replenish.

Happy is the canary in the coalmine because the Ogallala is deepest in the north, as much as 300ft in the more fertile country of Nebraska and Kansas. In the south, through the panhandle and over the border to New Mexico, it is 50-100ft. And around Happy, 75 miles south of Amarillo, it is now 0-50ft. The farms have been handed over to the government's Conservation Reserve Programme (CRP) to lie fallow in exchange for grants: farmers' welfare, although they hate to think of it like that.

'Water mining' is now a prime culprit for raising sea levels
09 Oct 2010
Investors tap into water
02 Apr 2010

The first ranchers, and the Plains Indians before them, knew of water below the ground from the watering holes that sustained buffalo and then cattle far from any river. The white man learnt to drill, leaving primitive windmills on top of wooden derricks silhouetted against Wild West horizons.

But it was only in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl (the result of a severe drought and excessive farming in the early 1930s), that the US Geological Survey worked out that the watering holes were clues to the Ogallala, now believed to be the world's largest body of fresh water. They were about to repeat the dreams of man from the days of Ancient Egypt and Judea to turn the desert green, only without the Nile or Jordan. With new technology the wells could reach the deepest water, and from the early 1950s the boom was on. Some of the descendants of Dust Bowl survivors became millionaire landowners.

'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons – or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to a football field flooded a foot deep – have been pumped. 'The problem,' he goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'

Brauer's agency was set up in direct response to the Dust Bowl, with the brief of finding ways to make sure that the devastation never happens again. If it does, the impact on the world's food supply will be far greater. The irrigated Plains grow 20 per cent of American grain and corn (maize), and America's 'industrial' agriculture dominates international markets. A collapse of those markets would lead to starvation in Africa and anywhere else where a meal depends on cheap American exports. 'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'

Estimates vary, but with careful conservation, less wasteful irrigation and seeds for corn, cotton, wheat and sorghum genetically engineered for drought conditions, farming may yet go on for 60 years. That would be over the deepest stratum of the Ogallala. But the husbanding of water, soil, minerals or anything else has never been the Texan way, and without it the dust will start blowing in as few as 10 years.

Water – not oil – has always been the most valuable resource in the West. Wars have been fought over it, feuds maintained, and fortunes won or lost. Apart from the Ogallala, the main source remains the Colorado River, flowing west from the Rockies, its annual bounty of snow melt providing the drinking water for Las Vegas, irrigation for California's Central Valley, and the swimming-pools of Los Angeles. No one is surprised that the mighty Colorado now runs dry before it reaches the Pacific, nor that climate change, with falling rain and snow levels, spells potential disaster for the Sunshine States. There are at least public controls over most of this water, even if it is actually owned by corporations and very rich people with 'water rights'.

But Texas, true to its self-conscious style of 'rugged individualism', has no such legal controls. It maintains its Wild West-era laws of 'right to capture'. This means that if you have water under your land, or in a river running through it, you can take and use as much of it as you like. You can water the corn or the cows, or you can make a buck by selling it to the nearest thirsty suburb. If you want to drain your land into desert, you may.

With the American 'can-do' faith in technology, Brauer's own hopes are for the 60-odd years of reduced but viable farming. 'We don't want it to be a bust,' he says. 'We have to be optimistic.'

In Happy, that sounds more like wishful thinking. The early December sun sinks towards the winter solstice at a few minutes after six, leaving Main and its crossroads with the railway tracks in darkness but for a few street lights. A miniature suburban-style housing grid stretches between Main and the high school on the eastern edge of town. The football team is the Happy Cowboys, their cheerleaders the Happy Cowgirls. Old pick-up trucks in the car-park denote an away match, their drivers piled into yellow school buses for the trip. Most of the houses are still lived in, valued at about half the Texas average. Some are dilapidated, their gardens planted with rusting detritus, others spruce with the Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze. Nowadays, the working population drives an hour or so north or south to small cities where they find employment.

The temperature drops below freezing. Kay Horner sits in My Happy Place, her diner on Highway 87, hoping for traffic and customers. She has moved back from Arkansas, snapping-up a Main Street store for only $10,000 to turn into her home. 'There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000,' she says. 'Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl.'

Less than 20 miles south, towards Lubbock, the next town down Interstate 27, Barry Evans is still farming. His 2,200 acres came from his great-uncle Freeman, who watched it turn to dust in the 1930s. Evans's father, in his eighties, still works the farm next door. Evans has sunk new wells to make up supply as old ones dry from producing 1,000 gallons a minute to 100, but the aquifer is deeper here and they have enough Ogallala water left to pump and make a profit. They want to make it last, their eyes fixed on the future so that Barry's son, Eric, can take over for a fourth generation. He is in his last year at high school and is raising four pigs of his own for the 4H (young farmers) competition at the County Fair. It will not be easy, but at 48 Evans has taken himself to the cutting edge of farm technique and technology. If there is a future for Ogallala farming, it depends on men such as Evans.

'You have to see this as a business like any other,' he says. 'To earn a living, to stay on the land, you have to maintain the margin between cost and product value. Our water level is 10 per cent of what it was 30 years ago, and we have to make up for that by technique. That means looking for more yield from less water.'

Evans went to the local university for an agriculture degree, and stayed on to complete half a master's in business. He does not own a cowboy hat, and pulls on a winter coat bearing the logo of a seed company, a salesman's gift, as he sets out to tour his 'sections', fields of a square mile each. At ground level the rows look faintly curved, but from the air you can see that the fields are circles, and from passenger jets at 30,000ft they look like the crop circles of Salisbury Plain. They are ugly and alien on the wide-open land, but they have become the landscape of Ogallala agriculture because they are cut to fit the sweep of the enormous arm of a pivot irrigator, turning like the hand of a clock, a hand a half a mile long. They cost $180,000 each.

Evans stops by a well. There is no derrick, only a concrete block sprouting heavy pipes, because nowadays the pump is at the bottom of the well. Inside a steel box is a computer: it controls the pivoting arm to lay down an average of an inch in eight days. Every drop counts. On many farms you can see the effects of drought from the air as a quarter or a third of the land is left dry to burn brown in the sun. 'During the 90s, I really thought it would never rain again,' Evans says. 'But with a bit of luck, we get eight to 10 inches a year, and we have learnt to capture it. I aim for half-and-half, half rainfall and half aquifer.' He can now grow crops using five acre-inches a year, rather than acre-feet. 'That's a big difference,' he says.

He strides into the field along the line of the pivot arm, 12ft over his head. Every few yards a spray nozzle dangles on a hose, low enough to spray below the canopy of the crops. That is one way to minimize waste through evaporation. Next, he stoops to the soil to show the flattened stubble of last year's crop, and of the year's before that. He no longer ploughs – nothing dries the surface to turn the soil to dust like ploughing. Instead, the old stalks hold down the soil, keep the moisture in, and rot down to nutrients. The seeds, themselves 'engineered', are dropped below the surface by a machine that opens a narrow channel in front of the dispenser, and closes it behind them.

Then there is the choice of crops. Evans has switched from corn, wheat and cattle to cotton and sorghum, which makes oil and ethanol for fuel, alternating them around his circular fields. They use less water, and he has got rid of the cattle altogether. 'I don't want to drill more wells,' he says. 'Why would I want to own a desert?'

At the Ogallala Research Service's experimental farm just west of Amarillo, soil scientist Steve Evett nods his approval and says, 'The smart, educated farmer survives: the ones that fall behind do not.' He is out in his half-sized 'pivot' field, showing off the next generation of irrigation systems. This one is fully automated and, with a bit of luck, may save another drop or two. It starts with a new nozzle, a 'sock', which drips the water right on to the ground by each root. Between each dangling pipe is a cable with a sensor at one end, and a computer relay at the other. It measures the amount of moisture in the canopy, and takes a light-spectrum scan of each plant to determine its health, just as the gardener judges the colour of his leaves. This information goes back to the computer mounted at the well-head for even finer metering.

In another field, there is what might become the last resort: a system buried underground, watering only individual roots, with evaporation limited to any that might reach the surface. 'We are already seeing much less water used,' Evett says, 'and there is going to be less and less to use. Things will get harder and harder, but we can use technology to offset the drying for as long as we can.'

All may come to nought in the face of a threat that has nothing to do with corn or beef, but everything to do with the American devotion to making money at any cost. The Texas oil billionaire and corporate raider T Boone Pickens is after their water. He is proving to be the ultimate test of their free market gospel of the 'right to capture'.

Ten years ago Pickens concluded that the prophets of climate-change may well be right, and if they were, that water would become more valuable than the oil that had made his fortune. He formed a company called Mesa Water, and began buying up Panhandle land with water rights over the Ogallala. He is now the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry. That is 65 billion gallons a year, or, to put it another way, 124,000 gallons a minute. The plan? Ninety-five per cent of Ogallala water is now used for agriculture, but Pickens plans to pipe it 250 miles to Dallas, expected to triple in size in 30 years, with a demand for water far exceeding supply. Pickens is making the hottest of climate-change bets: that water's value will rocket as it runs dry. One man's thirst is another man's fortune. Irrigation farming would simply follow gold mining, open-range ranching and oil drilling in the traditional cycle of boom and bust. 'There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it,' Pickens has said. 'That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing.'

'Obviously it would be a disaster for the Panhandle,' Steve Walthour, manager of the North Plains Groundwater Conservation District, says. 'But if there are no limits, he can take all he wants. That's the law of capture.'

Texas conservatives, at the core of America's faith-and-business culture, root for Pickens. Brent Connett, a policy analyst for the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, pushes the view that trading farming for selling water is a 'right' upheld by 100 years of Texan law, and can only bring new prosperity. 'The water business, if allowed to bloom,' he believes, 'can be the advent of another multi-billion-dollar business that will tremendously benefit all Texans, especially those who hold the rights to the water in the Panhandle.'

Connett does not offer a count of winners versus losers. But a group of landowners in the far north of the Panhandle could certainly be winners. Taking advantage of another quirk of Texas law, they have voted against joining Walthour's Conservation District. That was their democratic right even as it defied the attempts of their fellow farmers to protect water supplies for the benefit of all. The other Ogallala states all have some form of government controls metering water use. Texas has the Conservation Districts instead, with the local farmers voting their own restrictions. The problem is that these are voluntary. 'The idea,' Walthour says, 'is to balance individual water rights with the common interest. It's the best thing to do. Otherwise the biggest pump wins – and everyone goes dry.'

Will Allen, among the 'opt-out' owners with a 'spread' close to the Oklahoma border, does not see it that way. 'In Kansas, the state owns the water – not so in Texas,' he says. 'We own it, and we don't see why we should give up our right to capture. We would be giving away property that belongs to us.' His family settled here in 1905 and he holds to their belief that the aquifer is less of a lake than a series of 'pockets', private to the land immediately above. Only the prospect of Pickens draining the water from underneath him seems to dent Allen's stand-alone verities. Would he chase him out of town? He chuckles, a little uncertainly. 'Well, I wouldn't want him as a neighbour,' he says. 'But if he takes out water he owns, that is his right.'

There is an air of fatality hanging over the farmers of the Panhandle. At the Elk Junction Restaurant in Stratford, a crossroads village 70 miles north of Happy at the heart of the 'opt-out' district, a group of half a dozen farmers has gathered to gossip over pies and coffee. Most are retired, or planning to quit, handing over to their sons if they want the land. Not all do. These men are mostly losing the struggle for water and the slender margins of profit that can keep them on the land. They have worked long and hard through often brutal weather, farming vast tracts with a couple of sons until they quit for college or city jobs. The land they have hung on to is worth a pension, as long as there is still some water for irrigation, but their real reward is their pride. To a man they loathe Pickens, while defending his 'right to capture'. This is Texas, and they are Texan.

The water boards would like to stop him but they know that state government would not dare challenge individual rights to ownership. Their only real chance is to persuade the county authorities to stall on 'zoning' permits when he starts to build his pipeline, and that is an outside chance.

'The heart of the Dust Bowl was here, you know,' says Wayne Plunk, whose great-great-grandfather came over from Germany. He is big and round, strong as an ox in his day, but now he looks a good 10 years older than his 69 years. 'When I was six I was asking my dad for a $1 umbrella against the sun for the tractor I drove all day. He said no, and bought me a 25-cent hat instead.' He has not stopped working since. He went to college to train as a teacher, and for 25 years taught at local schools while farming in the remaining hours. 'We are drying up. People don't learn from history, and if we keep breaking the ground and run out of water, it'll happen again.'

Plunk believes that one way or the other, farming the High Plains will have to end. Like the farmers of Happy, he has handed his land to the CRP to let it return to the Plains that nature intended. He misses the life. 'I used to go out on the land before dawn when I worked at school,' he says, 'and I would always plough to the east. I ploughed into the rising sun, and I knew there was a God.' He pushes back his cap, and stares into the distance.
===

(NaturalNews) It's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being pumped dry.

See the map of this aquifer here: http://www.naturalnews.com/images/O...

Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the heartland of America.

This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.

In some regions along the aquifer, the water level has dropped so far that it has effectively disappeared -- places like Happy, Texas, where a once-booming agricultural town has collapsed to a population of just 595. All the wells drilled there in the 1950's tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer and seemed to provide abundant water at the time. But today the wells have all run dry.

Happy, Texas has become a place of despair. Dead cattle. Wilted crops. Once-moist soils turned to dust. And Happy is just the beginning of this story because this same agricultural tragedy will be repeated across Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Colorado in the next few decades. That's a hydrologic fact. Water doesn't magically reappear in the Ogallala. Once it's used up, it's gone.

"There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000," says Kay Horner in a Telegraph report (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...). "Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl."

The end of cheap food in America?

It's a sobering thought, really: That "America's breadbasket" is on a collision course with the inevitable. A large percentage of the food produced in the United States is, of course, grown on farmlands irrigated from the Ogallala. For hundreds of years, it has been a source of "cheap water," making farming economically feasible and keeping food prices down. Combined with the available of cheap fossil fuels over the last century (necessary to drive the tractors that work the fields), food production has skyrocketed in North America. This has led to a population explosion, too. Where food is cheap and plentiful, populations readily expand.

It only follows that when food becomes scarce or expensive (putting it out of reach of average income earners), populations will fall. There's only so much food to go around, after all. And after the Ogallala runs dry, America's food production will plummet. Starvation will become the new American landscape for those who cannot afford the sky-high prices for food.

Aquifer depletion is a global problem

It's not a problem that's unique to America, by the way. The very same problem is facing India, where fossil water is already running dry in many parts of the country. It's the same story in China, too, where water conservation has never been a top priority. Even the Middle East is facing its own water crisis (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...). This has caused food prices to skyrocket, leading directly to the civil unrest, the riots and even the revolutions we've seen taking place there over the last few months.

The problem is called aquifer depletion (http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aqui...), and it's a problem that spans the globe. It means that today's cheap, easy food -- grown on cheap fossil water -- simply isn't sustainable. Once that water is gone, the croplands that depend on it dry up. Following that, erosion kicks in, and the winds blow away the dry soils in a "Dust Bowl" type of scenario.

A few years after that, what was once a thriving agricultural operation is transformed into a dry, soilless death pit where nothing lives.

"The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm," says David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service, part of the USDA. "That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...)

Such is the legacy of conventional agriculture, which is based almost entirely on non-sustainable practices. Its insane reliance on fossil water, petroleum fertilizers, toxic pesticides and GMOs will only lead our world to agricultural disaster.

Be prepared and be safe

I want all NaturalNews readers to be prepared, informed and safe when facing our uncertain future. We know that trouble is stirring around the world, and much of it is either caused by or will lead to food shortages.

The GMO companies, of course, will exploit this situation to their advantage, claiming that only GMOs can grow enough food to feed the world. This is a lie. GMOs and patented seeds only enslave the world population and lead to great social injustice. The days of food slavery are fast approaching for those who do not have the means to grow at least a portion of their own food.

As part of our effort to help people become more self-reliant -- with greater food security -- throughout 2011 and 2012 I plan to bring you more articles, videos and webcast events that focus on home food production, self-reliance, family preparedness and sustainable living. Recently we announced a live webcast event on financial preparedness but the available seats at that event sold out in a matter of days (http://www.naturalnews.com/Economic...).

Based on the huge demand for this event, we have decided to roll out a second preparedness event in April, focused on food preparedness and security. Watch for an announcement on that soon.

In the mean time, I am personally working on growing more of my own food and will be creating a new series of videos and articles based on some of what I learn along the way. From living in South America and producing quite a large amount of food there, I have a fair amount of experience on home food production, but of course there's always more to learn, right?

My gut feeling on all this is that learning to grow and store some portion of your own food is going to become a crucial survival skill over the next few years. And that means understanding water, soil, open-pollinated seeds, organic fertilizers, soil probiotics, insect pollination, growing with the seasons, sprouting, food harvesting, food drying, canning, storage and much more. It's a whole set of skills that have faded away in America in just two generations, leaving very few people who now know how to live off their own land.

What's becoming increasingly obvious from events such as the drying up of aquifers is that home food production is going to become a critical survival skill. I want NaturalNews readers to know and practice these skills as much as possible so that you can experience the comforts (and freedoms!) of genuine food security.

Watch for more stories about preparedness, home food production and self-reliant living here on NaturalNews.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_aquifer_depletion_Ogallala.html#ixzz1GDrCPcxw

Brazil Considers Adding 'Happiness' To Constitution

2011-02-14T18:49:00.001-08:00

constitutional amendment
to protect the pursuit of happiness

make the search for happiness an inalienable right

the Happier Movement, a non-governmental organization backing the legislation

Both Japan and South Korea include the right to happiness in their constitutions

Bhutan pioneered the idea of maintaining a "happiness index." W
1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence made its often-noted stand for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

"pursuit of happiness" into Article 6 of the constitution, which states that education, health, food, work, housing, leisure and security – among other issues – are the social rights of all citizens.

holding to account a government that has long been accused of not providing basic services to the poor.

"This great proposal would establish tools that would permit, in the pursuit of happiness, the rescue of social rights,"
change expectations.

Brazil Considers Adding 'Happiness' To Constitution

MARCO SIBAJA 02/ 2/11 07:20 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/02/brazil-happiness-constitution_n_817397.html

BRASILIA, Brazil — In a nation known for its jubilant spirit, massive parties and seemingly intrinsic ability to celebrate anything under the sun, is a constitutional amendment really required to protect the pursuit of happiness?

Several lawmakers think so, and a bill to amend Brazil's Constitution to make the search for happiness an inalienable right is widely expected to be approved soon by the Senate, which reconvened Tuesday. The bill would then go to the lower house.

The debate comes a month before Brazil's Carnival, a raucous festival replete with tens of thousands half-naked men and women that Rio officials call the largest party on Earth. But supporters say the happiness bill is a serious undertaking despite the revelry, meant to address Brazil's stark economic and social inequalities.

"In Brazil, we've had economic growth without the social growth hoped for," said Mauro Motoryn, the director of the Happier Movement, a non-governmental organization backing the legislation. "With the constitutional amendment, we want to provoke discussion, to seek approval for the creation of conditions in which social rights are upheld."

Similar explorations of officially finding happiness have been pushed by other governments. Both Japan and South Korea include the right to happiness in their constitutions, and earlier this month, the British government detailed plans to begin a $3 million project to measure citizens' well being.

In the early 1970s, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan pioneered the idea of maintaining a "happiness index." Well before that, the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence made its often-noted stand for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The bill before Brazil's Congress would insert the phrase "pursuit of happiness" into Article 6 of the constitution, which states that education, health, food, work, housing, leisure and security – among other issues – are the social rights of all citizens.

Cristovam Buarque, a senator and former minister of education who is the bill's sponsor in the Senate, said adding the "pursuit of happiness" was essential to helping ordinary people begin holding to account a government that has long been accused of not providing basic services to the poor.

While Brazil is on track to becoming the world's fifth largest economy by the time its hosts the 2016 Olympics, it's lagging public education system, poor roads and railways and crime-ridden slums threaten further advances.

Cristiano Paixao, a constitutional law expert and professor at the University of Brasilia, said he thought the proposed amendment was pointless tinkering that would end up being "legal folklore" as Brazil's democracy has moved beyond the need for such gimmicks since the end of the 1964-85 military dictatorship.

"It would make sense if we were in the moment of redemocratization, of the movement for direct elections," he said. "Now, it just won't be of use."

At a Senate hearing before the bill was passed by a committee last November, Daniel Seidel of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops criticized the "pursuit of happiness" movement as little more than a marketing campaign that didn't propose solutions to Brazil's social woes.

"Wouldn't it be better to speak clearly about social welfare, about the reduction of inequality?" he asked senators.

But Luciano Borges, president of the National Association of Public Defenders, said the movement could breathe life into a legal push for stronger social rights.

"This great proposal would establish tools that would permit, in the pursuit of happiness, the rescue of social rights," he said.

Motoryn, of the Happier Movement, said he is simply hoping society will take a serious look at the proposed amendment, and perhaps change their expectations.

"Happiness isn't a game, people confuse it with something that is superfluous and it isn't," he said. "We need quality health care, which we don't have. We need quality education, which we don't have.

"It's about creating conditions for people to pursue happiness, but with training, with knowledge, preparing us to be a more advanced society in the future."

Acrylamide - Causes Cancer, Nerve Damage, Kidney Damage, Muscle Control, Alzheimers

2011-02-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

Toasting bread increases acrylamides significantly - doubling, even over 5 times in this white bread:
Pepperidge Farm Original White Bread (not toasted) 36
Pepperidge Farm Original White Bread (toasted) 216

Acrylamide is a well-established carcinogen and neurotoxin
the typical American diet contains rather large amounts of acrylamide
even more prevalent in diets that contain a lot of fried foods.

diets low in fried starchy foods contain very low levels of acrylamide.

fried, deep fried or oven-baked during production or preparation are not considered to contain any appreciable levels of acrylamide.
No levels could be detected in any of the raw foodstuffs or foods cooked by boiling, including potatoes, rice, pasta, and flour.³

the best thing, of course, is to eat NO fried foods at all.
avoid burning food during frying, deep-frying, broiling and grilling, and to especially not eat burned food, period! ³

N-acetyl-cysteine and lipoic acid have been shown to be protective against acrylamides toxicity

rats and mice that were given acrylamide over a period of seven days developed tumors

acrylamide's neurotoxicity was due to a dramatic reduction in glucose metabolism in nerve cells

eat lots of fruits and veggies, and protect yourself with a good antioxidant.

limit the amount of fried foods in your diet, as they contain both acrylamide and other damaging chemicals formed by the heating and oxidation of oil
---

Acrylamide
present in certain foods cooked at high temperatures

acrylamide can cause nerve damage in humans, such as loss of feeling, loss muscle control and tingling.

acrylamide levels
starch-based foods, such as potato chips, french fries, cookies, cereals and bread
Tortilla chips, breakfast cereals, breads, cookies, crackers, and other bakery products contain
significant amounts of acrylamide.

They do not form when food is cooked in water,

higher the cooking temperature, the more acrylamide is formed.

AGEs may also cause cancers, aging of tissues, and arteriosclerosis by raising cholesterol and causing clotting and are associated with loss of kidney function, Alzheimer's disease, thinning and wrinkling of skin and cataracts.

Cooking with water prevents sugars from binding to proteins to form these poisonous chemicals.

ACRYLAMIDE

Gabe Mirkin, M.D.

http://www.drmirkin.com/nutrition/1220.html

Research in four countries is suggesting that French fries and potato chips may be a leading cause of cancer in the Western world. Scientists at the meeting of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization are very concerned about the very high levels of acrylamide in the food supply. Acrylamide is a chemical used in the manufacture of plastics. It was first discovered to be present in certain foods cooked at high temperatures as the result of work announced in Sweden in April 2002.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have concluded that acrylamide causes cancer in laboratory animals, but there are no studies of the relationship between acrylamide and cancer in humans. However, solid research shows that acrylamide can cause nerve damage in humans, such as loss of feeling, loss muscle control and tingling.

The Swedish research and subsequent studies in Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, have found that acrylamide levels in certain starch-based foods, such as potato chips, french fries, cookies, cereals and bread, were well above the level given in the World Health Organization's Guideline Values for Drinking Water Quality. Potato chips contain 500 times the maximum allowable amounts of acrylamide, and French fries sold in fast food chains contain more than 100 times the maximal allowable amounts. Tortilla chips, breakfast cereals, breads, cookies, crackers, and other bakery products contain smaller but significant amounts of acrylamide.

Acrylamide belongs to a class of chemicals that form advanced glycation end products, also known by their first letters as AGEs. They are a group of molecules that are formed when sugar attaches on protein when starchy foods such as potatoes and grains are cooked in the absence of water at very high temperatures. They do not form when food is cooked in water, and the higher the cooking temperature, the more acrylamide is formed.

Diabetics form advanced glycation products in their bodies because high blood sugar levels cause sugar to stick on the protein in cell membranes to form AGES, and it is these AGEs that cause the horrible side effects of diabetes, such as blindness, deafness, heart attacks, strokes and kidney damage. AGEs can damage every tissue in the body. HBA1C, the blood test doctors use to measure control of diabetes, actually measures this sugar bound to the protein on a person's cells. AGEs may also cause cancers, aging of tissues, and arteriosclerosis by raising cholesterol and causing clotting and are associated with loss of kidney function, Alzheimer's disease, thinning and wrinkling of skin and cataracts.

Exciting research from the University of Reading in England may eventually allow us to eat French fires and potato chips without being harmed by acrylamides (4). Deep frying at high temperature causes sugar in potatoes to stick to protein to form acrylamides. Donald Mottram showed that asparagine, only one of the 21 amino acids that form protein in humans, sticks to sugar. If this is true, it may be relatively simple to finding and use strains of potato with a low asparagine content, or genetically engineer potatoes or wheat that lacks asparagine. Then foods could be made from them that did not have asparagine available to form acrylamide.

Cooking with water prevents sugars from binding to proteins to form these poisonous chemicals. Since steamed and boiled vegetables, whole grains, beans and fruits are cooked with water, they do not contain significant amounts of advanced glycation products. This is another reason that you should eat your fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans -- raw or cooked with water. We no longer recommend eating potato chips or French fries as a source of salt when you exercise, and we will avoid eating them ourselves.

=====

Acrylamide: The Food Toxin That Could Cause Cancer

http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/view/acrylamide-the-food-toxin-that-could-cause-cancer/#fn-333-5

Acrylamide is a well-established carcinogen and neurotoxin (causes nerve damage). According to Lois Gold, director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at the University of California, Berkeley, "You get more acrylamide from smoking than you do from food." But based on a newly released Swedish report that indicates acrylamide is a by-product of fried foods, there is definite room for concern-not panic.

The study was based on the original findings that adduct levels (products of acrylamide that react with blood hemoglobin) were found in people who hadn't been exposed to it. Because the amount is considered a cancer risk, it was deemed important to identify acrylamide's origin. A scientific group at the University of Stockholm, headed by Professor Margareta Törnqvist, found that acrylamide is formed during the heating of starch-rich foods to high temperatures. ¹

The same thing was shown in a previous Swedish study, done two years ago, in which rats were fed fried animal feed for one or two months. ²

What's your risk? The bad news is, the typical American diet contains rather large amounts of acrylamide, and it's even more prevalent in diets that contain a lot of fried foods.

The good news is that diets low in fried starchy foods contain very low levels of acrylamide. Also, the amount of acrylamide needed to cause cancer in humans is still unknown.

What foods contain acrylamide? Acrylamide is probably formed in many types of food, many of which have not yet been analyzed. But among the foods that have been analyzed, potato chips and French fries generally contained the highest levels. The average content in potato chips is approximately 1000 micrograms/kg and in French fries approximately 500 micrograms/kg. Other food groups which may contain low as well as high levels of acrylamide are fried bread products-such as doughnuts-breakfast cereals, fried potato products, biscuits, cookies and snacks, such as tortilla chips and popcorn. ³

Foods that are not fried, deep fried or oven-baked during production or preparation are not considered to contain any appreciable levels of acrylamide.
No levels could be detected in any of the raw foodstuffs or foods cooked by boiling, including potatoes, rice, pasta, and flour.³

How much acrylamide do you ingest on a daily basis? The Swedish National Food Administration's 1997-98 survey3 of 1200 individuals, aged 17 to 70, found that an average intake of approximately 25 micrograms per day (maximum intake is approximately six times higher) of acrylamide is obtained, based on the food groups shown below. The remaining food groups are estimated to account for approximately 10-15 micrograms of acrylamide; in total an average intake of 35-40 micrograms. The percentage contribution based on an intake of 40 micrograms acrylamide per day results in:

potato products: 36 % (French fries 16 %, fried potatoes 10 %, potato chips 10 %)
bread: 16 %
biscuits, cookies and wafers: 5 %
breakfast cereals: 3 %
remaining foodstuffs groups, basically not investigated yet: 40 %

What does that mean?

It's still too soon to know exactly how much acrylamide is considered dangerous to humans.

What can you do to counteract the bad effects of acrylamide? If you have a lot of will power, the best thing, of course, is to eat NO fried foods at all. The Swedish National Food Administration advises people to stop smoking, and to avoid burning food during frying, deep-frying, broiling and grilling, and to especially not eat burned food, period! ³

Have your cake and eat it, too. If you must have your fries and chips, and want to counteract the bad effects of acrylamide, there are a couple of nutritional supplements that are believed to offer protection against acrylamide's toxicity.

N-acetyl-cysteine and lipoic acid have been shown to be protective against acrylamides toxicity and offer a dietary means of counteracting acrylamide's bad effects.

One study showed that rats and mice that were given acrylamide over a period of seven days developed tumors. When they were also treated with N-acetyl- L-cysteine, the incidence of tumors was inhibited. ⁴

Another study showed that acrylamide's neurotoxicity was due to a dramatic reduction in glucose metabolism in nerve cells, and that lipoic acid could help prevent this negative effect and help restore normal metabolism and prevent damage. ⁵

Is acrylamide risk new?

Probably not, according to the Swedish National Food Administration. "We have probably been exposed to acrylamide in food for generations." Other sources than foodstuffs (estimated average intake of 35-40 microgram/day), e.g. cosmetics, drinking water, and a possible endogenous formation in the body of acrylamide, could, to a lower extent, contribute to a background level. "The new, emerging knowledge may make it possible to reduce the risks that we have so far accepted. This is a very positive development." ⁶

In the meantime, eat lots of fruits and veggies, and protect yourself with a good antioxidant. And it wouldn't hurt if you limit the amount of fried foods in your diet, as they contain both acrylamide and other damaging chemicals formed by the heating and oxidation of oil

References

Tareke E, Rydberg P, Karlsson P, Eriksson S, Tornqvist M. Analysis of acrylamide, a carcinogen formed in heated foodstuffs.J Agric Food Chem, 2002 Aug 14;50(17):4998-5006.

↑
Tareke E, Rydberg P, Karlsson P, Eriksson S, Tornqvist M. Acrylamide: a cooking carcinogen? Chem Res Toxicol 2000 Jun;13(6):517-22

↑
http://www.slv.se/

↑
Park J, Kamendulis LM, Friedman MA, Klaunig JE Acrylamide-induced cellular transformation. Toxicol Sci 2002 Feb;65(2):177-83

↑
Anuradha B, Varalakshmi P. Activities of glucose-metabolizing enzymes in experimental neurotoxic models with lipoate as an alleviator. J Appl Toxicol 1999 Nov-Dec;19(6):405-9

↑
http://www.slv.se/

↑

====

A good study on bread including acrylamides in backed bread and other baked and fried products:
http://www.joyfulaging.com/Bread.htm

Modern white bread is bad for your longevity, health and happiness – It should be avoided, ESPECIALLY by adults and by everyone who is overweight or has high blood sugar.

headaches, vascular damage, strokes, heart attacks, degenerative nerve disease, dementia, memory loss, vision problems, depression, lethargy, poor job performance, personality changes, poor judgment, slow reaction time, deadly accidents, stomachaches, liver damage, breast cancer (and other forms of cancer), poor digestion and improper metabolism. The measurable nerve and liver damage associated with internal yeast fermentation is seldom as rapid as with ingested alcohol, but the long-term net brain, vascular and liver damage is essentially the same.

When you eat a diet that is high in refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour, fructose, corn syrup, etc.), your intestinal flora and fauna (like Candida Albicons yeast germs) can proliferate exponentially, along with various forms of harmful bacteria, molds and fungi. Increased numbers of yeast and harmful bacteria generate well-known cell-killing toxins,

Too much iron stored in our tissues can do severe damage to our cells, tissues and internal organs. For the many men over 40 and post-menopausal women with high iron storage, the iron supplements in almost all commercial flour and bread products can accelerating aging and do serious damage,

“Asparagine” is a naturally-occurring amino acid found in carbohydrate foods that, when heated with sugars such as glucose, forms the acrylamide carcinogen. Many natural uncooked foods contain enzymes – proteins made up of amino acids that act as a catalyst and aid in the metabolism of the food, so the body can use it effectively. The higher the temperature used to prepare a starchy food and the longer it is cooked, the more likely that the three dimensional chemical structure of its enzymes will denature (break down) and become inactive, ineffective, or worse yet, a toxic, cancer-causing mutagen like acrylamide.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration made determining how to lower acrylamide levels in food “one of its highest research priorities,” according to an aggressive plan that FDA officials presented to consumer advocacy groups and food manufacturers on September 30, 2002.

Canada's government previously discovered the acrylamide / asparagine chemical reaction and quickly ordered food manufacturers to look for ways to alter it and lower acrylamide levels in foods.

Wasa Original Crispbread Fiber Rye	504
Sara Lee Plain Mini Bagels (toasted)	343
Herr's Extra Thin Pretzels	309
Dare Breton Thin Wheat Crackers	300
Pepperidge Farm Original White Bread (toasted)	216
Streit's Lightly Salted Matzos	182
Gerber Finger Foods Biter Biscuits	130
Keebler Town House Crackers Reduced Fat	130
Indian flat bread (from local restaurant)	125
Nabisco Arrowroot Biscuit (baby food)	113
Stella D'Oro Anisette Toast Cookies	107
Nabisco Chips Ahoy! Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies	97
Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats	78
Utz Unsalted Sourdough Specials	70
General Mills Cinnamon Toast Crunch	61
Gerber Graduates for Toddlers Animal Crackers	60
Pepperidge Farm Natural Whole Grain Whole Wheat (toasted)	59
Sara Lee Plain Mini Bagels (not toasted)	58
Sara Lee Honey Wheat Bagels (toasted)	57
Pepperidge Farm Cheddar Goldfish	57
Maruchan Instant Lunch Ramen Noodles with Vegetables Chicken Flavor	52
Super G Bread Crumbs Regular Style	42
Super G Unsalted Tops Crackers	41
Contadina Bread Crumbs Three Cheese	39
Pepperidge Farm Original White Bread (not toasted)	36
Pepperidge Farm Dark Pump Pumpernickel (not toasted)	34
Lipton Asian Side Dishes Teriyaki Noodles	34
Boboli Italian Pizza Crust (not baked)	33
Sara Lee Honey Wheat Bagels (not toasted)	27
Red Oval Farms Mini Stoned Wheat Thins	26
Shoppers Food Warehouse Cake Doughnut	24
Boboli Italian Pizza Crust (baked)	24
Nabisco Zwieback Toast (baby food)	20
La Banderita Flour Tortillas (fried)	15
Shoppers Food Warehouse Plain Doughnut	14
Super G Macaroni & Cheese Dinner	12
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner	11

Bottom Line Summary: If you want to live a long, happy, healthy life,

AVOID: HIGH BLOOD SUGAR, ALL SOURCES OF ACRYLAMIDES and
TRANS FATS, INCLUDING BREAD. INCREASE INTAKE OF ANTIOXIDANTS.

===

How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

2011-01-22T08:15:00.001-08:00

How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

link

THE SLOW INSIDIOUS DISPLACEMENT of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from MacDonald’s. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food.” More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.

Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in US pre-school aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don’t watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network, than actually preparing their own meals. In his series Food Revolution, Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can’t recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don’t know how to cook.

I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork.

The family dinner has been hijacked by the food industry. The transformations of the American home and meal outlined above did not happen by accident. Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans, and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods—the foods we co-evolved with over millennia—had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed-food industry and industrial agriculture has changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.

That we need nutritionists and doctors to teach us how to eat is a sad reflection of the state of society. These are things our grandparents knew without thinking twice about them. What foods to eat, how to prepare them, and an understanding of why you should share them in family and community have been embedded in cultural traditions since the dawn of human society.

One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food; grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast-food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food—there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. In the modern age that tradition, that knowledge, is being lost.

The sustainability of our planet, our health, and our food supply are inextricably linked. The ecology of eating—the importance of what you put on your fork—has never been more critical to our survival as a nation or as a species. The earth will survive our self-destruction. But we may not.

Common sense and scientific research lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies we must put the right raw materials in them: real; whole; local; fresh; unadulterated; unprocessed; and chemical-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free food. There is no role for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, or for industrially developed and processed food that interferes with our biology at every level.

That is why I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork. Imagine an experiment—let’s call it a celebration: We call upon the people of the world to join together and celebrate food for one week. For one week or even one day, we all eat breakfast and dinner at home with our families or friends. For one week we all eat only real, whole, fresh food. Imagine for a moment the power of the fork to change the world.

The extraordinary thing is that we have the ability to move large corporations and create social change by our collective choices. We can reclaim the family dinner, reviving and renewing it. Doing so will help us learn how to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, teach our children by example how to connect, build security, safety and social skills, meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

Here are some tips that will help you take back the family dinner in your home starting today.

Reclaim Your Kitchen

Throw away any foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or sugar or fat as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your shelves with real fresh, whole, local foods when possible. And join a community support agriculture network to get a cheaper supply of fresh vegetables weekly or frequent farmers markets.

Reinstate the Family Dinner

Read Laurie David’s The Family Dinner. She suggests the following guidelines: Make a set dinnertime, no phones or texting during dinner, everyone eats the same meal, no television, only filtered or tap water, invite friends and family, everyone clean up together.

Eat Together

No matter how modest the meal, create a special place to sit down together, and set the table with care and respect. Savor the ritual of the table. Mealtime is a time for empathy and generosity, a time to nourish and communicate.

Learn How to Cook and Shop

You can make this a family activity, and it does not need to take a ton of time. Keep meals quick and simple.

Plant a Garden

This is the most nutritious, tastiest, environmentally friendly food you will ever eat.

Conserve, Compost, and Recycle

Bring your own shopping bags to the market, recycle your paper, cans, bottles and plastic and start a compost bucket (and find where in your community you can share you goodies).

Invest in Food

As Alice Waters says, food is precious. We should treat it that way. Americans currently spend less than10 percent of their income on food, while most European’s spend about 20 percent of their income on food. We will be more nourished by good food than by more stuff. And we will save ourselves much money and costs over our lifetime.

Now I’d like to hear from you.

Do you think the health of our planet and the health of our diet are linked? How?

Which of the steps outlined above have you taken in your own life and how have they worked for you?

What ideas do you have that will help us reclaim the family dinner and revive the tradition of eating real, whole foods?

Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

Foods you should buy from organic sources

2010-12-17T21:54:00.000-08:00

Foods you should buy from organic sources

Friday, December 17, 2010 by: Shona Botes, citizen journalist
http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html#ixzz18RKZNBIX

(NaturalNews) Organic foods have started taking root (no pun intended) in the minds of more and more consumers each year as people strive to live healthier lives.

Not only do they taste a lot better (without the help of chemicals and flavour enhancers), but they also provide far more nutrients and benefits than their often irradiated and chemically fertilized counterparts. Admittedly, organic foods are often more expensive, but the benefits of consuming them are well worth the expense.

While growing, some foods absorb a lot more chemical fertilizers and pesticides than others, so they should be bought organically as much as possible. There are still cases where crops are absorbing Dieldrin (a highly carcinogenic insecticide) from soil, even though it was banned way back in 1974!

Some foods absorb a lot more chemicals than others, so even if you truly cannot afford to purchase all organic foods, there are some that you should only ever buy organic:

Apples:

Apples absorb more pesticides than any other fruit. Around 36 different chemicals have been discovered on them. There were as many as seven different chemicals found on a single apple. Therefore, it makes good sense to only purchase these from an organic source. Alternative options for these would be tangerines, bananas and watermelon.

Strawberries:

These are also among the most contaminated fruits you can buy. If you cannot buy these organic, rather opt for kiwifruit or pineapple.

Peaches:

These have also been known to absorb far more chemicals and pesticides than other fruits.

Baby Foods:

Babies and children have developing immune systems, so it's very important for them to be exposed to as little pesticides and chemicals as possible. Wherever possible, purchase organic baby foods, or better still, make and puree your own, using organic fruit and vegetables.

Blueberries:

These may be hailed as a superfood, but this only applies if they are organic. Tests have shown them to be contaminated with as many as 52 different pesticides.

Dairy Products:

Most cows consume grain that contains chemicals, pesticides and antibiotics. Wherever possible, try to source organic dairy products. Or better still, 100% raw milk and cheese will be 100% healthy and nutritious, unlike the pasteurized versions.

Nectarines:

These contain as many as 33 different chemicals and pesticides. If they are not available as organic, safer alternatives would be papaya, watermelon and mango.

Cucumbers:

These have been ranked as one of the most contaminated fresh foods.

Bell Peppers:

Because these have a very thin skin, they absorb pesticides and chemicals very easily. Should they not be available as organic, safer alternatives to these would include peas, cabbage and broccoli.

Grapes:

These can contain as many as 17 different chemicals and pesticides. They are also very high in fructose, so they should be consumed in moderation. Safer alternatives include kiwifruit and raspberries.

Spinach and Kale:

The leaves of these two vegetables are capable of absorbing as many as 48 different pesticides, so it is very important to only use the organic varieties. Safer alternatives would be cabbage, broccoli and asparagus.

Potatoes:

Potatoes have been known to absorb as many as 37 chemicals and pesticides. Safer alternatives to these would be mushrooms, eggplant and cabbage.

Winter Squash:

These have also been known to absorb Dieldrin from soil.

Green beans:

These unfortunately rank high on the contamination list, with as many as 60 different pesticides being used on them.

Meat Products:

Organic meats are always healthier, as they contain no growth hormones and stand little to no chance of containing any pesticide products.

Sources:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/health...
http://business-ethics.com/2010/07/...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html#ixzz18RKJMyxY

Natural flavonoids from fruits and vegetables dramatically lower cancer risk

2010-12-01T00:10:00.001-08:00

Natural flavonoids from fruits and vegetables dramatically lower cancer risk

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 by: John Phillip, citizen journalist

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030582_flavonoids_cancer.html#ixzz16qU80TR7

(NaturalNews) Natural compounds commonly found in many fruits and vegetables are among the most powerful agents we have in our dietary arsenal to combat many forms of cancer. Flavonoids and proanthocyanidins have evolved as a protective mechanism for a variety of different plants and play a critical role in preventing disease in humans. Our body uses these powerhouse nutrients to lower inflammation, reduce blood pressure and fight the aging effect of free radicals. New research shines a bright light on the cancer fighting capacity of flavonoids you need in your diet to provide optimal disease protection.

Study Finds Significant Risk Reduction for Many Cancer Lines
The results of a study published in the journal Nutrition and Cancer conducted in Italy over the past 20 years found that a high flavonoid diet played a key role in cancer prevention. Study participants with the highest intake of flavonoids and proanthocyanidins demonstrated a 44% lower risk of oral cancer and a 40% reduced occurrence of laryngeal cancer. Incidence of colon cancer was lowered by a third and reductions in breast, ovarian and kidney cancers were noted as well.

The study authors attributed the findings to the powerful antioxidant, anti-mutagenic and anti-proliferative properties of the dietary compounds commonly consumed by the participants in the study. They conclude: "The findings from this large network of Italian case-control studies have provided support for an apparent protective role of flavanones on upper aerodigestive tract cancers; flavonols, anthocyanidins, and proanthocyanidins on colorectal cancer; flavonols and flavones on breast cancer; isoflavones on ovarian cancer; and flavonols on renal cancer."

Including Flavonoids in Your Diet to Prevent Cancer
Health conscious individuals will want to take advantage of these essential nutrients to achieve optimal disease protection. Include some of these flavorful options in your diet every day to lower your risk of many deadly cancer lines.

Black, Green and White Tea: All members of the tea family are packed with a special group of flavonoids known as flavonols (catechin, epicatechin, epigallocatechin, epicatechin gallate). Research has shown that these powerful flavonoids work directly on replicating DNA sequences to prevent mutations that lead to cancer initiation. Drink 2 to 4 cups of fresh brewed tea daily.

Garlic, Leeks and Onions: Quercetin is the key flavonoid in this family of vegetables. Known for its ability to spark the immune system into action, quercetin is rapidly taking its place at the top of the antioxidant pyramid. Some people have trouble eating garlic and onions due to the sharp taste so supplementing may be a good option.

Blueberries, Acai Berries and Grapes: Humans have been eating berries and grapes since early in our history. The flavonoids in these foods have been shown to help our immune system attack and destroy rogue cancer cells before they have a chance to develop and become malignant. Enjoy 1 to 2 servings of these super foods for maximum cancer protection.

Diet is our most powerful agent in the fight against many diseases. Adding natural foods including those packed with flavonoids gives our body the ammunition to fight many dangerous lines of cancer so we can live a life free of disease.

Article References:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/conten...
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/conte...
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/se...

About the author

John Phillip is a Health Researcher and Author who writes regularly on the cutting edge use of diet, lifestyle modifications and targeted supplementation to enhance and improve the quality and length of life. John is the author of 'Your Healthy Weight Loss Plan', a comprehensive EBook explaining how to use Diet, Exercise, Mind and Targeted Supplementation to achieve your weight loss goal. Visit My Optimal Health Resource to continue reading the latest health news updates, and to download your Free 48 page copy of 'Your Healthy Weight Loss Plan'.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030582_flavonoids_cancer.html#ixzz16qTryo8s

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Nutrition & Elimination Of Toxins Prevent & Cure Disease: Antoine Bechamp vs. Louis Pasteur

2010-11-14T08:44:00.001-08:00

most illness is due to cellular malfunction caused by cellular toxicities and cellular malnutrition, both of which can be avoided and overcome naturally.

Louis Pasteur, the so-called "father of modern germ theory" so widely revered by mainstream medicine,

a more esteemed contemporary whose works Pasteur plagiarized and distorted.
Antoine Bechamp, one of France`s most prominent and active researchers and biologists whose theories and research results stood in stark opposition to Pasteur`s germ theory.

Bechamp, on the other hand, proved through original research that most diseases are the result of diseased tissue and that bacteria and viruses are largely after-effects instead of causes of disease.

Antoine Bechamp was able to scientifically prove that germs are the chemical by-products and constituents of pleomorphic microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced, malfunctioning cell metabolism and dead tissue that actually produces disease. Bechamp found that the diseased, acidic, low-oxygen cellular environment is created by a toxic/nutrient deficient diet, toxic emotions, and a toxic lifestyle.

Pasteur`s germ theory ended up winning the day with mainstream medicine - owing in large part to the fact that the theory enabled mainstream medicine to hugely profit from the patented drugs and treatments for fighting germs.

Hippocrates also advised, "Leave your drugs in the chemist`s pots if you can cure your patient with food."

Lack of nutrition combined with exposure to toxins is what causes us to become ill.

the words of Thomas Edison may prove to be a welcome prophesy:
"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
+++

Louis Pasteur vs. Antoine Bechamp: Know the True Causes of Disease

Saturday, November 13, 2010 by: Tony Isaacs, citizen journalist
http://www.naturalnews.com/030384_Louis_Pasteur_disease.html

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine believes that virtually all illness is caused by germs or genetic hereditary weakness, as well as deformities and trauma injuries. Their solution and strategy is to have us believe that there are over 10,000 different diseases and that each of these diseases requires outside intervention from drugs and surgery. The truth is that most illness is due to cellular malfunction caused by cellular toxicities and cellular malnutrition, both of which can be avoided and overcome naturally.

It was Louis Pasteur, the so-called "father of modern germ theory" so widely revered by mainstream medicine, who was largely responsible for germ theory being a primary precept of today`s medical practice. Few people are aware of the controversy which surrounded Pasteur in his early days or of the work of a more esteemed contemporary whose works Pasteur plagiarized and distorted. That contemporary was fellow French Academy of Sciences member Antoine Bechamp, one of France`s most prominent and active researchers and biologists whose theories and research results stood in stark opposition to Pasteur`s germ theory.

Pasteur essentially dug up the germ theory of disease and put his name on it. It wasn`t a new idea. The concept, which theorizes that many diseases are caused by germs, had actually been outlined by other people many years before. Pasteur nevertheless claimed to have "discovered" germs. Bechamp, on the other hand, proved through original research that most diseases are the result of diseased tissue and that bacteria and viruses are largely after-effects instead of causes of disease.

Antoine Bechamp was able to scientifically prove that germs are the chemical by-products and constituents of pleomorphic microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced, malfunctioning cell metabolism and dead tissue that actually produces disease. Bechamp found that the diseased, acidic, low-oxygen cellular environment is created by a toxic/nutrient deficient diet, toxic emotions, and a toxic lifestyle. His findings demonstrate how cancer develops through the morbid changes of germs to bacteria, bacteria to viruses, viruses to fungal forms and fungal forms to cancer cells.

After some initial controversy, Pasteur`s germ theory ended up winning the day with mainstream medicine - owing in large part to the fact that the theory enabled mainstream medicine to hugely profit from the patented drugs and treatments for fighting germs. After all, had Bechamp`s discoveries been incorporated into current medical curriculum, it would likely have meant a virtual elimination of disease and the end of the pharmaceutical industry.

The germ theory of medicine stands in stark contrast to thousands of years of man looking to nature to nourish and heal it, dating back to ancient Chinese medicine which treated the whole body instead of the symptoms of illness. As Hippocrates, "the father of medicine" observed 2400 years ago, "Nature is the physician of man." Hippocrates also advised, "Leave your drugs in the chemist`s pots if you can cure your patient with food."

Though mainstream medicine might have us believe otherwise, the simple truth is that no one ever became ill due to a deficiency in pharmaceutical drugs. Lack of nutrition combined with exposure to toxins is what causes us to become ill.

Someday, germ theory and unnatural drugs will be relegated to the science junk pile where they belong and man will re-discover the value of eating a nutrient-dense organic diet, avoiding toxins and nutritional deficiencies and living a healthy lifestyle. When that happens, the words of Thomas Edison may prove to be a welcome prophesy:

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."

Sources included:

http://arizonaenergy.org/BodyEnergy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_t...
"Cellular Toxicities & Cellular Insufficiencies", The Crusador, May/June 2010 edition
http://www.naturalnews.com/028093_l...

About the author

Tony Isaacs, is a natural health author, advocate and researcher who hosts The Best Years in Life website for baby boomers and others wishing to avoid prescription drugs and mainstream managed illness and live longer, healthier and happier lives naturally. Mr. Isaacs is the author of books and articles about natural health, longevity and beating cancer including "Cancer's Natural Enemy" and is working on a major book project due to be published later this year.
Mr. Isaacs is currently residing in scenic East Texas and frequently commutes to the even more scenic Texas hill country near San Antonio and Austin to give lectures in health seminars. He also hosts the CureZone "Ask Tony Isaacs - featuring Luella May" forum as well as the Yahoo Health Group "Oleander Soup" and he serves as a consultant to the "Utopia Silver Supplement Company".

Articles Related to This Article:

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• Disease names like diabetes and osteoporosis are misleading and misinform patients about disease prevention

• Heal yourself in 15 days: Stop making disease by embracing the recipe for health (part eight)

• Psychiatry and disease mongering: Road Rage Disorder is latest spontaneously "discovered" disease

• The Cure Con: how you're being deceived by charities that claim to be racing for the cure for cancer and other chronic diseases

• Medical myths explained: Why health researchers mistakenly think one disease causes another

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Child Gives Great Lecture - What's Wrong With Our Food System

2010-11-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Nov 05, 2010

What's Wrong With Our Food System

Birke Baehr wants adults to know that while they might be oblivious for a while, once they are in the know kids are interested and concerned about what is happening to the American food system. They want to learn more about where the food they are eating is coming from, what they can do to make the system better, and what their choices are. Watch an articulate and upbeat Birke tell it like it is.

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Flex Muscle To Make Better Choices - Over Rides Compulsive Choices

2010-10-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

tighten ... muscles, regardless of which muscles ... tightened -- hand, finger, calf, or biceps -- ... greater ability to make better choices
muscle tightening specifically helped when the choice aligned with the participants' goals.
tightening of muscles only helped at the moment people faced the ... dilemma [Over Rides Compulsive Choices]

Medical science discovers remarkable yet simple way to instantly increase your willpower

Thursday, October 28, 2010 by: S. L. Baker, features writer
http://www.naturalnews.com/030208_willpower_mind-body_medicine.html

(NaturalNews) Here's good news that's just in time to help you avoid the temptation of sugary goodies served up at holiday parties. If you feel your willpower weakening as you pass the desserts piled high, just tighten up your muscles -- flex any of them, including your finger or calf muscles. Sound crazy? Not according to new research. Scientists have found that firming muscles literally shores up self-control.

Researchers Iris W. Hung of the National University of Singapore and Aparna A. Labroo of the University of Chicago collaborated on a study that put volunteers through a range of self-control dilemmas revolving around accepting immediate pain for long-term gain. For example, in one study participants held their hands in an ice bucket to demonstrate pain resistance and, in another, the research subjects had to drink a healthy but awful-tasting vinegar drink.

In yet another experiment, study participants decided whether they could look at disturbing information about injured children devastated by the earthquake in Haiti and donate money to help. And in a final study, the volunteers were observed while making food choices for lunch at a local cafeteria to see if tightening muscles helped them overcome picking tempting but not-good-for-them foods.

"Participants who were instructed to tighten their muscles, regardless of which muscles they tightened -- hand, finger, calf, or biceps -- while trying to exert self-control demonstrated greater ability to withstand the pain, consume the unpleasant medicine, attend to the immediately disturbing but essential information, or overcome tempting foods," the authors concluded in their paper, which was just published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers found that the muscle tightening specifically helped when the choice aligned with the participants' goals. For example, if a person didn't want to eat healthy foods, tightening their muscles wouldn't keep them from chowing down on sugary junk. Hung and Labroo also found that the tightening of muscles only helped at the moment people faced the self-control dilemma. In other words, tightening your muscles before faced with a plate of sugar cookies doesn't work but tightening your muscles when the cookies are in front of you seems to.

Bottom line: the research is a new example of the connection between the body and the mind. "We draw on theories of embodied cognition to explain our results, and we add to that literature by showing for the first time that one's body can help firm willpower and facilitate the self-regulation essential for the attainment of long-term goals...The mind and the body are so closely tied together, merely clenching muscles can also activate willpower," the authors stated in their paper. "Thus simply engaging in these bodily actions, which often result from an exertion of willpower, can serve as a non-conscious source to recruit willpower, facilitate self-control, and improve consumer will."

For more information:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/do...

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How to opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners at the airpor

2010-10-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

How to opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners at the airport

(NaturalNews) I encountered my first airport naked body scanner while flying out of California today, and of course I decided to "opt out" of the scan. You do this by telling the blue-shirted TSA agents that you simply wish to opt out of the body scanner. Here's what happened after that:

A TSA agent told me to step to the side and stay put. He then proceeded to shout out loudly enough for all the other travelers and TSA agents to hear, "OPT OUT! OPT OUT!" This is no doubt designed to attract attention (or perhaps humiliation) to those who choose to opt out of the naked body scanner. I saw no purpose for this verbal alert because the same TSA agent who was yelling this ultimately was the one who patted me down anyway.

For the pat down, first I was required to walk through the regular metal detector. From there, I was asked if I wanted to be patted down in a private room, or if I didn't mind just being patted down in full view of everyone else. Not being a shy person in the first place, I told the agent I didn't need a private room.

He then explained to me that he was going to pat down my entire body, including my crotch and my buttocks, but that he would use the back of his hands to pat down the crotch and buttocks areas. This is probably designed to make the pat-down seem less "personal" and more detached. That way, air passengers can't complain of being felt up by TSA agents who might get carried away with the pat-down procedure. He asked if it hurt for me to be touched anywhere, and I told him no, at which point he proceeded with the pat down.

It was a well-scripted pat-down, covering all the areas of my body, including a mild crotch sweep (it wasn't especially invasive or anything, as doctors will do far worse during a physical exam). He swept my arms, legs, hips, back of the neck, ankles and everywhere else. To the TSA's credit, this guy was fast, efficient and only used a light touch that was in no way disturbing. But it did take an extra five minutes or so compared to walking through the naked body scanner.

Speaking of the naked body scanners, as I was having my crotch swept by the back of the hand of this TSA agent, I was observing other air travelers subjecting themselves to the naked body scanners. They were told to walk into the body scanner staging area and then hold their arms in the air in a pose as if they were under arrest. They were told to freeze in this position for several seconds (perhaps 10 seconds) during which they were being blasted with ionizing radiation that we all know contributes to cancer.

The TSA, of course, will tell you that these machines can't possibly contribute to cancer. But they said the same thing about mammograms, and we now know that mammograms are so harmful to women's health that they actually harm ten women for everyone one woman they help (http://www.naturalnews.com/020829.html). So I'm not exactly taking the U.S. government at its word that naked body scanner radiation is "harmless."

As these air travelers were being scanned, their naked body images were appearing on a screen somewhere, of course. Some TSA agent was examining the naked body shape and contours of all these people, and even though we were told by the TSA that the image viewing machines cannot store images, we have since learned that the machines actually do have the capability to store those images (http://www.naturalnews.com/029378_f...). In addition, rogue TSA employees could simply use their cell phones to take snapshots of what they see on the screen. There are no doubt rules against such behavior, but it's bound to happen sooner or later.

Meanwhile, my own security screening was proceeding fully clothed. I don't want to broadcast my naked butt cheeks on the TSA's graphic monitors, thank you very much!

Very few people opt out of the naked body scanners

The most fascinating part about this entire process was not the verbal broadcast of my opt out status, nor having my crotch swept by the latex-covered back hand of some anonymous TSA agent, but rather the curious fact that I was the only one opting out. Although I must have watched at least a hundred people go through this particular security checkpoint, there wasn't a single other person who opted out of the naked body scan.

They all just lined up like cattle to have their bodies scanned with ionizing radiation.

To me, that's just fascinating. That when people are given a choice to opt out of being irradiated, they will choose to just go along with the naked body scan rather than risk standing out by requesting to opt out.

You see, I'm not convinced that the TSA's naked body scanners enhance air travel security at all. Previous security tests conducted by the FAA show quite clearly that the greatest threat to airplane safety isn't from the passengers but from ground crews, where bombs and other materials can be quite easily smuggled onto planes.

But even though naked body scanners may not enhance air travel security, they do accomplish something far more intriguing: The successful completion of an experiment in human behavior. If you were to pose the question "Will people line up like cattle to be electronically undressed in front of government security officers?" The answer is now unequivocally YES!

Most people, it turns out, will simply do whatever they're told by government authorities, even if it means giving up their privacy or their freedoms. Almost anything can be sold to the public under the guise of "fighting terrorism" these days, including subjecting your body to what is essentially a low-radiation CT scan at the airport!

I don't know about you, but I don't think I should be required to subject myself to ionizing radiation as a condition of air travel security. Of course, the more technically minded readers among you might counter by saying that high-altitude travel is, all by itself, an event that subjects you to low levels of ionizing radiation (which is true). But that's all the more reason to not add the body's radiation burden any more than necessary. Americans already get far too much radiation from CT scans and other medical imaging tests (not to mention mammograms). Do we really need to dose peoples' bodies with yet more radiation every time they board an airplane?

Trusted traveler program?

I don't know why the TSA never pursued its "trusted traveler" program. I actually suggested this years ago, and there was word that the TSA was working on something similar. The way it worked was very different from the current system. Under the current system, every person entering an airport security line is assumed to be a terrorist, and it is only through the various security screenings that you are eventually deemed to be innocent. This is a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to air security, and it's the system in place all across America (and around the world) today.

Under a trusted traveler program, people who pass rigorous background screening procedures, criminal history checks and other similar tests would be assumed innocent unless suspected of being guilty. They might carry "trusted traveler" cards linked to a federal database so that their status could be verified as they pass through a security checkpoint. They might even have their fingerprint scanned at that checkpoint in order to biometrically verify their identity.

For whatever reason, the TSA is no longer pursuing any such trusted traveler program (at least not to my knowledge). Perhaps the agency just figures it can trust no one. Hence the need to have everybody line up in front of the naked body scanner machines and raise their arms in a humiliating "I'm being arrested" pose.

It's actually just like the scene from the movie called The Fifth Element starring Bruce Willis. Remember the scene where the cops are searching the apartment block and they use an X-ray scanner to see through the walls? As they search the apartment building, they announce that all residents must face the wall and place their hands inside the yellow circles on the wall. This scene eerily resembles what the TSA makes U.S. travelers do right now.

And virtually no one protests. That's the really amazing part about this.

Seasonal flu shots offered at the airport, too

After completing my security pat-down, by the way, I entered the terminal where I walked by a kiosk offering a seasonal flu shot. There was a big sign claiming that the flu shot would prevent you from catching the flu, and a nurse of some sort stood right behind the kiosk, ready to inject you with a vaccine for just $35.

First the naked body scanners, and then the flu shot propaganda. It reminded me that the U.S. government really is trying to push people into self-destructive behaviors that will ultimately benefit the sick-care industry. After all, the more cancer and Alzheimer's disease people develop (from radiation and vaccines, of course), the more business gets generated for Big Pharma.

I know enough about health and freedom to avoid these little disease bombs, but most Americans don't know enough to resist the propaganda. They just allow themselves to be irradiated, injected and poisoned, and they think it's all okay because the government tells them it's good for them.

It's odd that people trust the government when the government doesn't trust them at all. If the government treats you like a criminal, a terrorist, a lab rat and a vaccine depository, doesn't that only prove they don't honor you as a sovereign individual?

And that sends a powerful message confirming that the U.S. government has forgotten it is supposed to serve the People, not rule over them.

Just wait and watch how this gets even worse. Today, you can opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners, but after a year or two -- once the sheeple get comfortable with giving up all their freedoms -- these scans will become mandatory. That's the day I give up air travel for good.

Gee, I sure will miss having my crotch swept by the latex-covered back hand of some anonymous TSA agent who's wasting taxpayer money by treating me like a terrorist.

Spiritual Strength - Without Racing Mind's Over Sensitivity To Little Things

2010-10-19T07:15:00.001-07:00

Not Enough Time? Try Doing Nothing

A racing mind that reacts sensitively to little things indicates thinking that has lost its spiritual strength. Meditation restores that power. --Anonymous

Tip of the Day:
I thought I took my bike on a ride through New York City's Central Park. But really? My bike took me on one. My experience changed many times as external forces determined my mood. Happiness anticipating a great ride, frustration imagining it would be ruined by the race, relief when it wasn't, fear when people ran in front of me, fear again, followed by guilt and self-criticism, when my distraction nearly led to a crash. All in the course of a few short minutes. Which is how most of us go through our day. An angry comment puts us in a bad mood; an unexpected compliment cheers us up. It all matters, which is why the smallest comment can unhinge us. The solution, though, is simple. All we have to do is nothing. The trick: do it regularly, at least a few minutes a day. [ more ]

Be The Change:
Practice "doing nothing" as this article suggests, in response to situations that would ordinarily push your buttons, and by sitting in silence for 5 minutes each day.

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Even Modest Weight Gain Can Harm Blood Vessels, Mayo Researchers Find

2010-10-15T14:00:00.001-07:00

Even Modest Weight Gain Can Harm Blood Vessels, Mayo Researchers Find

http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2010-rst/5919.html

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers found that healthy young people who put on as little as 9 pounds of fat, specifically in the abdomen, are at risk for developing endothelial cell dysfunction. Endothelial cells line the blood vessels and control the ability of the vessels to expand and contract.

"Endothelial dysfunction has long been associated with an increased risk for coronary artery disease and cardiovascular events," says Virend Somers, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic. "Gaining a few pounds in college, on a cruise, or over the holidays is considered harmless, but it can have cardiovascular implications, especially if the weight is gained in the abdomen."

For the study, which was published in this week's Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Somers and his team recruited 43 healthy Mayo Clinic volunteers with a mean age of 29 years. They were tested for endothelial dysfunction by measuring the blood flow through their arm arteries. The volunteers were assigned to either gain weight or maintain their weight for eight weeks, and their blood flow was tested. The weight-gainers then lost the weight and were tested again.

Among those who gained weight in their abdomens (known as visceral fat), even though their blood pressure remained healthy, researchers found that the regulation of blood flow through their arm arteries was impaired due to endothelial dysfunction. Once the volunteers lost the weight, the blood flow recovered. Blood flow regulation was unchanged in the weight-maintainers and was less affected among those who gained weight evenly throughout their bodies.

Dr. Somers says the study is unable to offer conclusions about whether recovery of blood flow is possible if the weight is kept on for several years. "Patients should know that having a big belly may be more harmful than simply being obese," he says. "Letting weight creep on during college or as the result of aging should not be accepted as normal.

"Physicians should know that the location of fat is important. Greater attention should be given to the circumference of a patient's waistline, not just their body mass index (BMI)." BMI is a formula that uses height and weight to estimate body fat and associated health risks.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Mayo Clinic co-authors are Diane Davison; Prachi Singh, Ph.D.; Christine Huyber; Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, M.D.; and Michael Jensen, M.D. Co-authors formerly at Mayo Clinic are Abel Romero-Corral, lead author; Fatima Sert-Kuniyoshi, Ph.D.; Justo Sierra-Johnson, M.D., Ph.D.; Marek Orban, M.D.; Apoor Gami, M.D.; Snigdha Pusalavidyasagar, M.B.B.S.; and Susanne Votruba, Ph.D.

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Food Addictions Come with the Standard American Diet

2010-10-14T08:31:00.001-07:00

avoid ... these addictive foods; avoiding processed foods, which are known for being heavily-laden with salt, sugar, and fat, will also help people avoid the worst of these foods.

People don't want to be slaves to their food; food should nourish, satisfy, and fuel a body, not make it go through withdrawal symptoms when people can't get their lunch fix right away.
---

Food Addictions Come with the Standard American Diet

(NaturalNews) No, people don't think of food addiction like they do other addictions. For example, people don't go to a dark alley with a wad of cash to score a chocolate chip cookie, and people don't go to a rehab clinic so they get help kicking their caffeine addiction. While there are no food rehab clinics and there are no illegal foods that are bought and sold on the black market, food addiction is very real. Unfortunately, food addictions are inevitable if one is following the Standard American Diet.

Just a little research on the topic will lead readers to discover that withdrawal from food addictions can result in many of the same symptoms drug addicts suffer when they withdraw, suffering from symptoms like headaches, sweating, chills, and depression, among others.

Foods that People Might Find Themselves Addicted To

Caffeine: Most people have heard and know that caffeine can be addictive. Caffeine is a mild stimulant that can be found in a variety of foods, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, and - of course - soft drinks with added caffeine. While there is still much debate as to whether caffeine is good or bad, many people would agree that any substance that causes addiction is not good.

Sugar: Few people would argue today that sugar is a good additive to have in food. Not only is sugar highly addictive, but it also has been proven to be bad for one's health. Sugar, in its many forms, can lead to many diseases, the most well-known being Type 2 Diabetes.

Salt: Salt is added abundantly to many processed foods and so it is easy to become addicting. Most Americans eat far more salt than is necessary and, like other foods, they can become addicted to it, craving more and more as time goes on.

Fat: One now-famous study published in Nature Neuroscience in March 2010 demonstrated that rats who became addicted to high-fat foods experienced withdrawal symptoms similar to those experienced by drug users, and they found it difficult to quit the fat. Fatty foods can be addictive to people as well.

Casein: Casein is a protein found in cow's milk and consequently cheese and other dairy products. Casein, according to Dr. Neil D. Barnard, breaks down during digestion into casomorphins, which are opiates that work just like any other opiate. They make the eater feel good during and after eating, create cravings, and cause withdrawal when the eater gives them up. Barnard states that casein is more concentrated in cheese than in milk.

So how does a person avoid becoming a food addict? Barnard, like other experts, recommends a low-fat vegan diet, which avoids many of these addictive foods; avoiding processed foods, which are known for being heavily-laden with salt, sugar, and fat, will also help people avoid the worst of these foods. People don't want to be slaves to their food; food should nourish, satisfy, and fuel a body, not make it go through withdrawal symptoms when people can't get their lunch fix right away.

[Editor`s Note: NaturalNews is strongly against the use of all forms of animal testing. We fully support implementation of humane medical experimentation that promotes the health and wellbeing of all living creatures.]

Sources:

http://www.eruptingmind.com/withdra...
http://www.medicinenet.com/caffeine...
http://www.medical-library.net/salt...
http://www.vegsource.com/articles2/...

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Coffee doesn't really boost your energy or alertness, study reveals

2010-10-14T08:26:00.001-07:00

Coffee doesn't really boost your energy or alertness, study reveals

Friday, October 08, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Coffee no longer boosts energy or alertness levels above baseline in regular drinkers of the beverage, according to a study conducted by researchers from Bristol University and published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

"Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal," the researchers wrote.

Scientists assigned 379 volunteers to drink either a beverage containing the caffeine found in a 100-milligram shot of espresso, or a placebo containing no caffeine. Prior to beginning the study, all participants had abstained from caffeine consumption for 16 hours.

The researchers found that among participants who drank less than one cup of coffee per day, drinking the caffeinated beverage resulted in enhanced performance on tests of alertness, while the placebo had no noticeable effect.

In contrast, participants who regularly drank between one and six cups of coffee a day self-reported a decrease in alertness and an increase in headache following consumption of the placebo, in contrast to the low-coffee-drinkers who reported no such effects. Regular coffee drinkers who received the placebo also scored lower on objective tests of alertness than members of all other groups.

Regular coffee drinkers who had received real caffeine, by comparison, scored the same on alertness test as infrequent drinkers who had received the placebo.

The study supports the theory that the body quickly develops a dependence on caffeine, soon requiring it just for normal levels of alertness.

Thus, regular coffee drinkers actually become less alert when they stop drinking it, not more alert when they consume it.

A spokesperson for the British Coffee Association disputed the findings, stating that caffeine increases alertness levels and is safe to consume in moderation. He also said that pregnant women should avoid consuming more than 200 milligrams of caffeine per day.

Sources for this story include: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1....

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Commercial Targeting McDonald’s Goes Viral

2010-10-06T12:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.pcrm.org/newsletter/oct10/mcdonalds.html

Over 1 Million Served: PCRM's Commercial Targeting McDonald's Goes Viral
PCRM's new "Consequences" ad, which takes aim at McDonald's high-fat menu, racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube in just days last month. The provocative ad was also covered by newspapers and broadcast media across the world, including The Wall Street Journal, U.K.'s The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and hundreds of other media outlets from Germany to China. Watch Ad >

Over 1 Million Served: PCRM's Commercial Targeting McDonald's Goes Viral

PCRM's new "Consequences" ad, which takes aim at McDonald's high-fat menu, racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube in just days last month. The provocative ad was also covered by newspapers and broadcast media across the world, including The Wall Street Journal, U.K.'s The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and hundreds of other media outlets from Germany to China.

"Our nation's addiction to Big Macs and other high-fat fast food is literally breaking our hearts," says Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., PCRM's nutrition education director. "PCRM's commercial tackles heart disease head-on by educating millions of people about the dangers of fast food."

How unhealthy is the McDonald's menu? The world's largest fast-food chain serves a long list of high-fat, high-cholesterol items and offers almost no healthful choices. Even many McDonald's items that consumers may believe are healthful—salads, for example—are generally high in calories, fat, and sodium.

The Big Mac, the chain's signature sandwich, packs a walloping 540 calories and 29 grams of fat—but it is hardly the most unhealthful item on the menu. Here are five McDonald's menu items with more fat and calories than a Big Mac:

Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese: 42 grams of fat, 740 calories, 155 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,380 milligrams of sodium
Angus Bacon and Cheese: 39 grams of fat, 790 calories, 145 milligrams of cholesterol, 2,070 milligrams of sodium
Sausage Biscuit with Egg (Large Size Biscuit): 37 grams of fat, 570 calories, 250 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,280 milligrams of sodium
Premium Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken and Ranch Dressing: 35 grams of fat, 600 calories, 75 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,450 milligrams of sodium
McSkillet Burrito with Sausage: 36 grams of fat, 610 calories, 410 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,390 milligrams of sodium

Studies, including one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, show that people who consume fast food are at a higher risk of obesity, a key risk factor for heart disease. Regular consumption of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods increases the risk of heart disease, and studies have found that even a single fatty meal can raise blood pressure, stiffen major arteries, and cause the heart to beat harder.

The commercial will air in fast-food addicted cities with high rates of heart disease over the following months.

To read more about the dangers of fast food, visit PCRM.org/Health.

Water's Memory

2010-10-04T23:58:00.001-07:00

Homeopathy and the Quantum World

Aug 2

Posted by admin in Uncategorized
http://www.hydrogen2oxygen.net/tag/luc-montagnier/

I decided to write this post because I want to share my experience how I come in contact with homeopathy as a skeptic and in order to expose some myths about the professed “skeptic community” that rigorously ignores the evidence of scientific proof for homeopathy.

My personal experience with the “Nothing”
13 years ago I offered a friend of mine a peppermint candy. He refused saying “no thanks, I’m actually on a homeopathic therapy and therefore I’m not allowed to eat peppermint or drink coffee”. Well, I asked what homeopathy is. He tried to explain me as a layman how homeopathic remedies are produced, diluting (and shaking) the original substance more and more until there is nothing in the carrier-substance, only the “information” of the original substance is imprinted on it.

You should know now a little bit of my personal background. Since my childhood I was very interested in science. With eight years I read everything about dinosaurs and with 9 years I swallowed books of cosmology and science of all kind (especially books with colorful illustrations) and with 16 years I read my first book of quantum physics written by Fred Alan Wolf. During this time I experimented also with different kinds of lucid dreaming methods, exploring the puzzling worlds of dreams and consciousness. I was never bored in my life!

In spite of my wide-ranging experience and knowledge I react with skepticism to this healing method called homeopathy. My friend tried to convince me that homeopathy works and I tried to persuade him that he was absolutely wrong, because I was so sure that our world is made of atoms, particles and there is no such thing as “nothing that is a kind of weird information as a residue of some plant or animal” … well, you don’t know my friend, when he is convinced of something … he said to me he don’t know much about science, but his personal experience with that stuff has convinced him and I could never convince him of the opposite.

My first homeopathic proving
In order to prove him that I was right and he wrong I decided to make a proving by myself. He told me how this homeopathic proving is done, taking daily a remedy for several weeks and writing down the symptoms. At that time I didn’t know any remedy, therefore I asked him for a name of one remedy that I could start to prove. So I went to the pharmacy and bought a bottle of Sulphur LM12 and I took every morning and every evening two drops for the next two weeks.

Alice in wonderland
The homeopathic proving revealed me a new world of strange symptoms and feelings. In the same night I dreamed vividly of a “yellow workmanship” building a rail through the wild-west and joking and laughing all the time. They was all covered by a yellow powder. I woke up from the dream laughing by myself, my brothers starring at me as I was holding my belly and shaking for laughing. The thing got even stranger. All my skin itched, especially my head. Everybody could smell a sulfuric odor and I was so hungry at 11 am that I got so angry when I don’t eat something. My nose starts to bleed every day in the evening. And the strange dreams continued during the proving. After two weeks I stopped it. It was too much, for me and my family.

After some weeks I repeated the proving, because the experience was so strange and I could not believe it. How can a remedy work that is diluted over the Avogadro’s number, 10 to the power of 23? This number is so huge and the remedy that I took was a LM 12 potency, this is a dilution of 50000 to the power of 12, equivalent to 10 to the power of 48.

And repeating the proving worked also. Not only that I got symptoms on the level of mind and emotions, my body react so strong that everybody in my vicinity noticed it by the strange smell my body emits. (Sulfur makes the body release sulphuric compounds, therefore the strange odor.)

Since this first contact with homeopathy I studied it intensively and made over 50 homeopathic provings during the last 13 years. Now I know for sure that homeopathy works, not because of a scientific explanation, but because of personal experience and no “skeptic” can convince me of the opposite.

The mainstream believes in homeopathy
Homeopathy has cured millions of people for over 200 years. During this time humankind has made several important discoveries in science that supports homeopathy and still skeptics claims that homeopathy does not work, right? It’s a funny thing, because the fact is that I was a skeptic regarding homeopathy and a simple proving convinced me and hundreds in my circle of friends. But in the TV-shows and in many Youtube videos self-proclaimed “experts” claims that it does not work. When I ask randomly some people, most of them believes in homeopathy. Personally I make the experience that the mainstream believes and only a minority does not. So the mass-media is lying, because they show only their “skeptics” and nobody from the real mainstream. They try to convince us that the mainstream is not believing and try to pull the mass to their side.

Who are the “skeptics”?
Follow the money! One bottle of a homeopathic remedy costs perhaps only 10 dollar and it’s content is sufficient for one month of therapy or even more. Chemical based drugs costs much more and the patient becomes addicted to it. The homeopathic remedy is able to cure the cause, the chemical only covers it. Therefore I say there are many false skeptics, not even scientists, only show mens, entertainer, that are charismatic and able to fool the masses with their pseudo scientific claims. They work for the pharmaceutical lobbies or are sponsored by them. The real problem is not the scientific evidence, it’s the pseudo scientific propaganda against homeopathy and the low awareness of the masses.

The real skeptic
A real man of science is a skeptic and it is good to be a skeptic. There is nothing wrong to be a skeptic, it’s no contradiction to be also open minded at the same time. Skepticism is a requirement for scientific work. To question a thing, something that is seen as a fact from the mainstream, requires skepticism. For me my skepticism has forced me to make a homeopathic proving and after this it convinced me that homeopathy works. But I am still a man with a skeptic attitude. Believing in homeopathy has not transformed me in a all-believer. It has only opened for me a new dimension of reality that is worth to study more in the deep.

The pseudo skeptics and their typical Alumina mind symptoms

Pseudo skeptics differs from the scientific well educated skeptics. They identifies themselves with a certain kind of skeptic community that questions really everything. Their behavior is sarcastic, underbred and childish. This kind of skepticism is a state of illness and has nothing to do with real scientific thinking.

Doctor Vithoulkas has once proposed to this skeptic community to make a self-proving of a specific homeopathic remedy, called Alumina. This remedy fit very well to their mind symptoms. Let’s analyze them one by one:

1) Absence of ideas
None of this pseudo skeptics has ever considered to open their mind and make some research how homeopathy really works on a quantum level. Their superficial understanding of the universe is still based on a materialistic worldview, but quantum mechanics already proofed that atoms are not solid and they are non-local until they are observed by a intelligent being. Non-locality is a strange phenomena in the quantum world where entanglement between the particles or even between entire systems exists and information is exchanged at zero time. All evidence in quantum mechanics indicates that we are living in a dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process. The absence of ideas in the Alumina state prevents to see the whole picture.

2) Extremely peevish and obstinate
When exposing the evidences in modern science to the skeptics, they are not willed to consider it. They are extremely peevish and obstinate with a contradictory humour. This state of mind is similar to Baryta carbonicum. Because of their feeling of incompetence they refuse every scientific theory that points towards a non materialistic theory. They feel more secure in a materialistic based universe where all systems are isolated from each other. Indeed they have no real friends.

3) Disposition to be angry
Pseudo skeptics has the strong tendency to use cuss words and get very angry when you ask them for their “solid based arguments” against the homeopathy. They reacts with anger when they become aware of their lack of understanding of the nature and unable to find a logic explanation they dumb themselves down to a low level, with sarcasm and laughter.

4) Dissatisfied with everything
No theory, no evidence, no proof is satisfactory for the obstinate minded Alumina pseudo skeptic. Deliver them with the most clear and well founded solid proof, they will not be satisfied with it. Therefore they are the ideal propaganda slaves for the pharmaceutical lobbies. Their illness is misused cowardly by this public relation agencies.

5) He takes everything in the worse sense
Every homeopathic doctor are for this pseudo skeptics a “quack”. It is true that not every homeopathic doctor is a true healer. Some of them use methods that Hahnemann would never use, like astrology or radionics, but this does not mean that all homeopaths are on the wrong way. For the pseudo skeptics exist no balance in their mind. “Everyone that makes use of homeopathy is stupid and ignorant.” A black and white world without a middle way.

6) Consciousness is not clear, feels low-spirited
A life that is based on a strictly materialistic worldview, being skeptic on really everything and obstinate to accept a new world view, … how can such a person find the meaning in life? The consciousness can only be clear if there is a target to follow, a path. No wonder that this kind of person are so depressed and low-spirited, constantly possessed by bad thoughts, anxious, with a peevish mood, not disposed for anything.

The Scientific Evidence is overwhelming

With the time I changed my worldview from a materialistic perspective to a wholistic one. The change was triggered by the study of the works of Sir John Carew Eccles on Mind and Brain, describing the brain as a quantum interface rather than a computer.

Information is non-local
Dr. Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his promotion of the scientific study of consciousness, and his theories of the mechanisms of consciousness. Similar to John Carew Eccles, Hameroff and Roger Penrose saw the principles of quantum theory as providing an alternative process through which consciousness could arise.

It is spacetime. I don’t think you need to get out of, or can get outside of spacetime. When we get down to this fundamental level, this information is non-local and holographic. You don’t need to get outside. In fact, I just read a very interesting article about how this Planck scale information actually repeats holographically at larger and larger scales. I’ll send you the link. They’ve gotten it up to very close to biological levels. I think that the biological system is even better tuned than any device that anybody has built yet. But the cosmic information is non-local, existing in multiple places, even across the universe. This is basically quantum entanglement.

Source: Is Consciousness Connected to the Fine Structure of the Universe?

Consciousness and the physical world cannot be kept apart
There is a interdependency of insights for both homeopathy and the quantum physics. Both should be considered when studying the most basic fundament, the consciousness.

…there is frankly an overwhelming amount of evidence from a number of different disciplines, such as the ‘New Physics’ , Cognitive Neuro-physiology etc., that invalidates the very notion of an independent objective reality, and it therefore seems strange and somewhat absurd not to explore the possible implications for homeopathic therapeutics.

Source: Homeopathy and the unprejudiced observer

Without consciousness there would be no world
Carl Jung influenced many modern scientists towards the idea of a group mind and a collective consciousness. Jung was influenced by his friendship with Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958)

Consciousness is fundamental
Max Planck reinforced the abstract idea that it is consciousness that creates (or projects) matter and not the other way around.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Max Planck, as quoted in The Observer (25 January 1931)

You can see, the mainstream is heading towards a non material science, towards a science that regards consciousness as fundamental for the universe and space-time. The minority will become the majority in a near future.

Every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole
David Bohm had suggested that were we to view the cosmos without the lenses that outfit our telescopes, the universe would appear to us as a hologram. Karl H. Pribram extended this insight by noting that were we deprived of the lenses of our eyes and the lens like processes of our other sensory receptors, we would be immersed in holographic experiences.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

Source: The Universe as a Hologram, by Michael Talbot

Noetic Sciences
The main struggle some scientists has, is to understand how quantum mechanics can have an effect on macroscopic level. It could be of great help if this scientists would consider the real complexity of biological systems rather than to reduce everything to it’s smallest unity. Reductionism is a tool that should be used probably if necessary, but not as the main method of research.

Most of the discussion about homeopathy in the mainstream medical and scientific literature has focused on the molecular nature of, or lack of molecules in, homeopathic remedies. At the same time, most of the attraction that homeopathy holds for its practitioners and serious students is in its holistic worldview, comprehensive philosophy, and practical capacity to translate the consciousness of a remedy source into physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing. In short, homeopathy affirms the unity of consciousness and the living physical world.

Consequently, the unique place for homeopathy in the noetic sciences may lie in its potential to bridge the nonphysical and physical realms of existence.

Source: The Homeopathic Universe – Disease and Healing as Manifestations of Consciousness

Quantum Entanglement
Quantum entanglement plays vital roles in biology and consciousness and, once better understood and harnessed, has far-reaching consequences and applications in many fields such as medicine and neuroscience.

Similarly, the therapeutic effect of a homeopathic remedy, if it truly exists beyond and above the placebo effect, can be explained as the entanglement of the substances being diluted out of existence through vigorous shaking/stirring with the diluting solvent and then the subsequent entanglement of the solvent with the quantum entities involved in the diseased biological and/or physiological processes and the effect of such entanglement on the latter processes. Indeed, there are reports in the existing literature exploring the use of generalized entanglement to explain the therapeutic ingredient in a homeopathic remedy (See, e.g., Milgrom, 2002; Wallach, 2000 & Weingärtner, 2003).

Source: Thinking Outside the Box: The Essence and Implications of Quantum Entanglement

Water has a Memory
Even the Nobel prize-winner Professor Luc Montagnier discovered that water has a memory.

Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering a link between HIV and AIDS, has shocked fellow Nobel prize-winners by telling them that water has a memory that continues even after many dilutions. The idea is one of the foundations of homeopathy, which maintains that the potency of a substance is increased with its dilution.

Montagnier has discovered that solutions containing the DNA of viruses and bacteria “could emit low frequency radio waves”. These waves influence molecules around them, and turn them into organised structures. These molecules in turn can emit waves. He has discovered that the waves remain in the water, even after it has been diluted many times.

Source: Nobel Scientist Discovers Scientific Basis of Homeopathy

DNA Phantom Effect
Professor Luc Montagnier’s discovery is similar to the DNA Phantom Effect discovered by Dr. Vladimir Poponin, a quantum physicist who is recognized world wide as a leading expert in quantum biology.

This discovery has tremendous significance for the explanation and deeper understandings of the mechanisms underlying subtle energy phenomena including many of the observed alternative healing phenomena.

Source: The DNA PHANTOM EFFECT – Direct Measurement of A New Field in the Vacuum Substructure – by Dr. Vladimir Poponin

Quantum phenomena in biology
Already the eminent quantum physicists Fritz London and Niels Bohr suggested that quantum phenomena might be essential for life processes. During the last decade especially, increasing evidence is accumulating that indicate that this is indeed the case.

These experimental findings about DNA control of cellular processes mediated by electromagnetic/quantum mechanical mechanisms have not been considered by biotechnology researchers. They introduce important new elements that radically change our understanding of the workings of DNA.
Most importantly, they seriously undermine the present biotechnological dogma where DNA is treated as a micro-object that is “clipped” and “glued”. In stead, so far completely unknown Quantum Wave aspects have been found to be involved that may radically change our understanding of what happens in genetic engineering.
This reveals another aspect of the great incompleteness of the knowledge of present biotechnology.

Source: Quantum phenomena in biology

Undivided Wholeness and the Implicate Order
This key concept of an undivided wholeness is the ultimate conclusion that all science fields leads to. The understanding of how the universe works on it’s most basic level is a requirement to understand how homeopathy works. In a materialistic based universe, where all parts are isolated from each other, nothing like homeopathy could ever work. But David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics shows that we are living in a giant hologram, where the small part contains the whole. Scientists that has understood this concept and comes into touch with the homeopathic theory will not be skeptic towards it. Pseudo skeptics will not even consider it to study David Bohm’s work, because their materialistic world view is threat by this modern physics.

The holomovement is a key concept in David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics and for his overall wordview. It brings together the holistic principle of “undivided wholeness” with the idea that everything is in a state of process or becoming (or what he calls the “universal flux”). For Bohm, wholeness is not a static oneness, but a dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process. The concept is presented most fully in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in 1980.

The basic idea came to Bohm in the early 1970s, during an extraordinary period of creativity at Birkbeck College in London. The holomovement is one of a number of new concepts which Bohm presented in an effort to move beyond the mechanistic formulations of the standard interpretation of the quantum theory and relativity theory. Along with such concepts as undivided wholeness and the implicate order, the holomovement is central to his formulation of a “new order” in physics which would move beyond the mechanistic order.

Source: Holomovement – Wikipedia

David Bohm has evolved a new and controversial theory of the universe, a new model of reality that Bohm calls the “Implicate Order.”

The theory of the Implicate Order contains an ultraholistic cosmic view; it connects everything with everything else. In principle, any individual element could reveal “detailed information about every other element in the universe.” The central underlying theme of Bohm’s theory is the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”

Source: Bohm’s Gnosis: The Implicate Order

Resonance and Bioresonance Interactions in Homeopathic Solutions
One of the possible explanation how homeopathy works is the ability of water to form stable water clusters, that carry information. But I personally see in water clusters only the “materialization” of the invisible forces and fields that derives from succussion, the serial dilution with shaking by forceful striking. (This water clusters may form from succussion and remain stable till to an certain dilution. Homeopathy works also without the water clusters.) Effects that derives from succussion can also be found in the studies of Victor Schauberger on implosion vortexes observed in nature.

The mathematical probabilities for the formation of stable water clusters cannot be computer calculated. The computer can calculate the probable positions of 8 water molecules. This is a proof for the huge potential of the “memorization” of water. The availability of inorganic chemical compounds with low concentration may lead to cluster structures that are more stable in time. The stability of these clusters depends on the resonance among the separate molecules. In the cluster structures, information among the organic and the water molecules or in biological models can be stored on the grounds of bioresonance. The originator of the bioresonance theory is Dubrov (1980).

There exist interesting proof already that several molecules from a certain substance can significantly change the structure of water clusters. Homeopathy is a classical example for this. Experiments were conducted under the leadership of the eminent French immunologist Benveniste. The homeopathic principle was reproduced on biological models. When to one of the immune cells types in man specific antibodies interacting with them were added, a cell reaction was observed. Upon decrease of the concentration of the antibodies in some dilutions, an effect was observed, and in other cases – it disappeared. Such an alteration of biological activity of “solutions” was also observed in concentrations when the probability of the presence of even one protein molecule was only slight. The authors presumed that the transfer of biological information was due to the “memory” of water.

Source: Resonance and Bioresonance Interactions in Homeopathic Solutions

Conclusion:
Even there exist a huge evidence in science, I recommend to make an self-proving with an homeopathic remedy (under a medical control). One can lack in scientific knowledge, but a personal experience will convince the most skeptic scientist. For the pseudo-skeptics I see only a small hope, maybe a self-proving with Alumina could help.

Further reading:
- Quackbusters are busted
- The Homeopathic Universe – Disease and Healing as Manifestations of Consciousness
- Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost – French virologist Luc Montagnier
- Holomovement – Wikipedia
- Homeopathy and the unprejudiced observer
- Role of water in biosystems (PDF)
- Homeopathic psychology: Alumina
- The Materialist Superstition

Doctor Sets Up Successful Organic Food Market Outside Hospital

2010-10-03T09:35:00.001-07:00

a widespread interest in food and healthy eating among his peers.

“This is a generation that cares a lot more and knows a lot more about the importance of diet,” he said. “We need a system that educates physicians about nutrition, and we’re the ones who are going to have to fight for it.”

The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,”

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.”

a regional growers’ cooperative

putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

“As someone who relies on evidence-based medicine, it bothers me that we don’t have clear metrics to guide these food-related initiatives,” he said. “But for now, I remind myself of the enduring value of another care-giving principle: common sense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/dining/22doctors.html?pagewanted=all

Doctor’s Orders: Eat Well to Be Well

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Dr. Preston Maring, left, who began a farmers’ market at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, with his son, Ben.

By KATRINA HERON

Published: September 21, 2010
OAKLAND, Calif.

DR. PRESTON MARING was striding along a hospital corridor at double speed on a recent Friday morning, his tall frame, white hair and frequent gesticulations prompting waves of greetings from colleagues, who also took care to sidestep his forward momentum. His destination was the weekly farmers’ market he started in 2003, just outside the front door at the Kaiser Permanente medical center here.

“Since it’s mine, I made the rules — all organic,” he said as he skimmed by a line of stalls where fresh fruits and vegetables are sold to hospital workers, passers-by and even, he said, those bringing patients to the emergency room.

Dr. Maring, 64, a gynecologist and obstetrician with three decades as a surgeon, is well known as a former physician in chief at the hospital, the man who spearheaded the creation of its new pediatric neurosurgery unit.

But increasingly, his reputation and perpetual motion revolve around his conviction that in the health professions, the kitchen must become as crucial as the clinic. Food is at the center of health and illness, he argues, and so doctors must make all aspects of it — growing, buying, cooking, eating — a mainstay of their medical educations, their personal lives and their practices.

Though Dr. Maring blithely refers to himself as “that food nut around the hospital,” he is serious about the role he believes doctors should play in creating awareness of healthy food choices. To that end, he has worked to obtain fresh local food for hospital trays and in cafeterias. He began a Web site and blog that offers recipes and advice on meal planning and budgeting. He spent the summer working on a series of three-minute Web videos to explain the basics of shopping for healthful foods and efficient preparation techniques.

He also created a kind of culinary road show, which regularly takes him to health care institutions around the country, toting a PowerPoint presentation, a couple of plastic vegetable knives (“one of the great technological breakthroughs”), some salad ingredients and the makings of a vinaigrette.

“I like to put doctors on the spot,” he said, referring to his penchant for hauling a senior clinician up to the front of the room to chop vegetables with him. “We tend to be exalted, and I want to show the staffs that many of us don’t know how to mince garlic.”

If there was ever a time when doctors need to be as handy with a peeling knife as they are with a scalpel, this may be it. The draft version of the federal government’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines, which will be formally released in December, identifies obesity as the nation’s greatest public-health threat. It also notes the relationship of fast food (and physical inactivity) to unhealthy weight gain and emphasizes the importance of plant-based foods in the diet.

Despite evidence that doctors have a greater life expectancy than average, they don’t necessarily look after their own dietary health, said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “You’ll have a pretty hard time these days finding a doctor who smokes, but not nearly as hard a time finding one who eats terrible food.” He recalled a major breakfast gathering he attended several years ago: “I came in a bit late and was struck by the surreal image of senior scientists feeding on junk while discussing solutions to national nutritional problems.“

Dr. Willett cited surveys showing that during examinations of obese patients, doctors often don’t remark on overweight as a health issue. “Many of them just avoid it,” he said, either because they doubt their counsel will be heeded or because they don’t know the issues well enough themselves, leading the patient to underestimate the gravity of the situation.

For many doctors, an uneasy relationship with nutrition starts as early as medical school. Long hours and ready access to fast food, often on the hospital grounds, tends to undermine students’ best dietary intentions, said Dr. Robert F. Kushner, a professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Lifestyle Medicine. “Even the ones who come in excited about eating well and exercise find that good habits are harder and harder to maintain as time goes on,” Dr. Kushner said.

Dr. Maring’s son, Ben, 30, a fourth-year medical student at New York University School of Medicine, hopes to change that. Mr. Maring has developed a series of cooking classes that incorporate salient aspects of nutrition and clinical medicine. He named his scheme CHEF — for Cook Healthy, Eat Fresh.

In 2009, he began lugging duffel bags filled with cooking implements and ingredients from his Brooklyn apartment to the medical school campus on East 31st Street in Manhattan, where he commandeered a spare lounge and taught fellow students simple preparation techniques, introduced guest speakers in specialties like diabetes and endocrinology, and handed out reams of recipes.

“I thought it was important for medical students to learn how to cook and eat well,” he said. “I also thought it was important for us to walk the walk when it comes to counseling patients about the importance of diet. We get so little training in nutrition that I wanted to provide some basic knowledge.”

Dr. Maring said: “You should have seen him trying to drag a convection oven into a taxicab. We cooked together as a family when he was a kid, but he blew past me a long time ago. Now I’m his sous-chef.”

Ben Maring, who has his father’s imposing build and forceful personality, but with a quieter, more scholarly mien, first planned on a career as a chef and did a post-culinary-school apprenticeship at Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant in Manhattan in 2005.

“It was very much like the world of a hospital, where you’re on your feet the whole time, you have to make the right decisions very quickly, and you have to be highly self-motivated while also working as part of a team,” Mr. Maring said. Nor was Mr. Keller’s keen appraisal of the neophyte’s technique unlike the scrutiny he now endures on hospital rotations. “I remember being at the pass” — the area closest to the dining room — “about to sauce a plate, and Keller came and stood right next to me,” Mr. Maring said. “I was so nervous. I was trying to artfully drizzle a broken foie gras vinaigrette, and my hand was just shaking. He jokingly asked if I had had too much caffeine.”

Mr. Maring is encouraged that CHEF’s feedback surveys show students are developing confidence in their cooking skills, making better food choices and feeling more comfortable talking to patients about the links between diet and health. He is developing recipes geared to the seasonal offerings at a new farmers’ market at Bellevue Hospital Center, adjacent to the N.Y.U. medical campus, which was begun in July by Aviva Regev, 24, a third-year student and CHEF participant.

Mr. Maring has another ally in Benjamin Navot, 25, a third-year student who entered medical school directly after graduating from the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan and has taught some CHEF classes. Mr. Navot acknowledged that, like Mr. Maring, his perspective on food is greatly influenced by his previous experience. But he, too, senses a widespread interest in food and healthy eating among his peers.

But the older generation can pick up a few new tricks, too. Preston Maring said that in some ways, his attempts to get more fresh local foods into hospitals have been reminiscent of his days as a young resident at Kaiser, particularly the need to climb a steep learning curve.

“I became the person who asks dumb questions constantly,” he said of the time he has spent over the last couple of years studying the technical aspects of food-distribution systems. “I just learned, for example, that cherry tomatoes with the stems still on are a no-go in an inpatient setting, and that at Kaiser there’s a specific size limit for an apple on a tray, because they’re stacked vertically for delivery.”

Kaiser Permanente, which is a provider and an insurer, is the largest nonprofit health care system in the country, with about 8 million members, 15,000 doctors and 170,000 employees, predominantly in western states. The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,” Dr. Maring said. Kaiser Permanente Oakland, for example, serves 6,000 inpatient meals a day, 80 percent of which have no special restrictions.

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.” Toward that end, he helped start a regional growers’ cooperative and joined the board of the nonprofit entity that administers it, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers.

Dr. Maring also envisions Kaiser’s role expanding into areas like environmental stewardship, and he has carved out a kind of subspecialty in institutional real estate, with the goal of eventually putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

“As someone who relies on evidence-based medicine, it bothers me that we don’t have clear metrics to guide these food-related initiatives,” he said. “But for now, I remind myself of the enduring value of another care-giving principle: common sense.”

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Another Study Shows Significant Lifestyle Changes - Diet, Exercise - Are Much Better Than Medication

2010-10-03T09:10:00.001-07:00

Drastic lifestyle changes are best treatment for diabetes, obesity

Saturday, October 02, 2010 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
http://www.naturalnews.com/029918_diabetes_lifestyle_changes.html

(NaturalNews) A new study published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine has found that making considerable lifestyle and dietary changes are highly effective at improving the health of diabetes patients, as well as preventing of cardiovascular illness. Getting regular exercise and eating better, say researchers, are once again the best routes to take when combating disease, rather than simply take medication.

Researchers compared the effects of two different treatment approaches on over 5,000 obese patients with type-2 diabetes. One group participated in an "intensive lifestyle intervention" program that involved dietary changes and fitness regimens, while the other group took medication and met three times a year for group education and support sessions. After four years, the lifestyle intervention group lost an average of more than six percent of their body weight, while the education and support group lost less than one percent.

The lifestyle intervention group also experienced lower blood pressure levels, improved hemoglobin A1c levels (a measure of blood glucose) and elevated levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), also known as "good" cholesterol.

"[T]he differences between the groups averaged across the four years were substantial and indicate that the intensive lifestyle intervention group spent a considerable time at lower cardiovascular disease risk," explained the study authors.

Medication alone does little to improve the long-term health of diabetes patients. This study and others prove that lifestyle and dietary changes are absolutely necessary to improve overall health, which starts with maintaining a healthy weight, eating foods that support good health and staying physically fit.

Avoiding highly-refined foods like white sugar, white rice and pasta are a given for most diabetics. But eating foods like organic, raw vegetables and nuts for instance, can help not only to improve symptoms but even reverse the disease.

To find out how to stop diabetes in 25, check out the book How to Halt Diabetes in 25 Days by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...

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• Pursuing a Healthy Lifestyle Cuts Your Risk of Strokes Drastically

• Good Dietary and Lifestyle Health Habits can Drastically Cut Cancer Risk

• Interview with "Kevala" Karen Parker, master raw foods chef

• Prostate Diagnosis and Treatment Lags, but Research on Lifestyle Yields Clues

• Eight Weeks to a Healthier Lifestyle Revisited

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Brain plaques do not cause Alzheimer's (we've been lied to for 20 years)

2010-10-03T09:02:00.001-07:00

Brain plaques do not cause Alzheimer's (we've been lied to for 20 years)

Saturday, October 02, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
http://www.naturalnews.com/029921_brain_plaque_Alzheimers.html

(NaturalNews) Turning 30 years of established Alzheimer's dogma on its head, researchers are now increasingly rejecting the theory that sticky plaques in the brain are responsible for the mental degeneration caused by the disease.

"The plaque is not the main culprit in terms of toxicity," said Alzheimer's doctor and researcher Scott McGinnis of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

In Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, patients' mental functions steadily deteriorate, including their memories and ability to care for themselves. Researchers have long believed that this degeneration was caused by sticky brain plaques of a protein known as amyloid beta. Now, they are instead blaming free-floating pieces of amyloid beta known as oligomers.

"If you say Alzheimer's, everyone immediately thinks that it's the plaques that actually cause the disease. That couldn't be further from the truth," said Andrew Dillin of the Salk Institute in California and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "The data actually suggest these plaques are a form of protection that the body tries to put on. So this is a sign that your brain was trying to do something very useful and helpful to you, and the remnant was the formation of amyloid plaques."

In a recent study, researchers genetically engineered mice that could produce oligomers but could not form plaques. Compared with mice that could produce both, the plaque-free mice did not fare any better.

Similarly, drugs designed to prevent the human brain from forming plaques have consistently failed to deliver any improvement in Alzheimer's patients, and have not slowed the progress of the disease.

If plaques are actually a bodily defense mechanism as the new theory suggests, such drugs may actually make things worse.

"This [plaque] hypothesis is actually completely wrong, and we need a new way to start looking at this disease," said Dillin. "This is actually not a viable therapeutic avenue."

Sources for this story include: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS....

Articles Related to This Article:

• How Acetyl-L-Carnitine prevents Alzheimer's disease and dementia while boosting brain function

• NIH panel foolishly insists Alzheimer's can't be prevented (are they demented?)

• Essential fatty acid phosphatidylserine (PS) is powerful prevention for memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia

• Caffeine May Prevent and Help Reverse Alzheimer's Disease

• Popular Alzheimer's Drug Found to Be All But Worthless in Independent Study

• Tips to Prevent Alzheimer's Disease Revealed in Three Recent Studies

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BWN - Health v5

2010-09-29T14:15:00.001-07:00

Published on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by TEDx (via Civil Eats)

11-Year-Old Describes Broken Food System in Five Minutes

As Posted at Civil Eats by Paula Crossfield

Last month, an 11-year-old had much to say about the perils of the American food system. Speaking at a TED conference for young people called TEDx in Asheville, North Carolina, Birke Baehr discussed food irradiation, GMOs, CAFOs, farm run-off, the problem with marketing food to kids and more, all in five minutes. On the subject of paying more for better quality food, Baehr said, “With all the things I’m learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or pay the hospital.”

He also talked about his future aspirations. “Awhile back I wanted to be an NFL football player. Now, I’ve decided I’d rather be an organic farmer instead,” he said to the cheering audience. “That way I can have a greater impact on the world.”

Watch it here:
http://www.tedxnextgenerationasheville.com/presenterbios

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Death by Vaccination: The Gates Foundation and the New Eugenics

2010-09-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

Death by Vaccination: The Gates Foundation and the New Eugenics

September 22, 2010
Gary Null

Richard Gale & Gary Null

September 22, 2010
http://www.garynull.com/home/death-by-vaccination-the-gates-foundation-and-the-new-eugeni-1.html

While lecturing at the elitist TED 2010 conference in Long Beach,CA, Bill Gates slipped a statement while speaking on the dangers ofclimate change and over population: “Vaccines? I love them.” Hisadmission was made in the context of his philanthropic strategy and, aswe will see, vaccines play a dominant role in his firm conviction thatpopulation reduction is an urgent priority for the survival ofhumanity. Then the question is, who should be eliminated from thepopulation? Who is elected from the public to make such decisions? Theshort answer is no one. Hence it is being done quietly thrufoundations, international agencies and private industry.

Today the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is “the most powerfulcharity in the world, and one of the most quietly influentialinternational organizations of any sort.”[1] The Foundation is fundedto the tune of $34.6 billion plus an additional $30 billion fromWarren Buffet’s investments. This is almost the entire budget of theWorld Health Organization (WHO).

Gates has followed in the footsteps of the Rockefellers’ lead tousher the New Green Revolution, an aggressive onslaught of geneticallymodified seeds (GMOs) to increase large scale corporate-influencedagriculture in Africa, India and elsewhere. The international GMOinitiatives have devastated small cooperative farms that have served asthe lifeline of food for centuries and as resulted in the deaths ofhundreds of thousands of farmers. Of course nobody among the oligarchicelite, such as Gates, Rockefeller and Monsanto execs, will suffer fromthe consequences of this failed revolution.

However, it is vaccine research and development targetingAfrica primarily, but also other developing nations, that holds centerstage in his Foundation’s strategic funding. During the recent 2010World Economic Forum, Gates announced he would spend $10 billion overthe next ten years on child vaccine development for poorer nations.[2].While calling this admirable might appear to be an understatement,which vaccines and which channels of funding rquire scrutiny in orderto assess the value and motives of the Foundation’s mission.

In 2000, the Gates Foundation founded the International FinanceFacility for Immunization (GAVI) and that organization’s Global Fundfor Children’s Vaccines. GAVI is a global collaboration that includesgovernments, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, WHO, theInternational Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, UNICEF,vaccine makers, and other influential entities. All of these are zealotvaccination promoters. The organization’s mission is to vaccinate everychild in Africa. Through GAVI and its various programs, an estimated250 million children in developing countries have already beenvaccinated.[3] But the Foundation itself does not perform drugand vaccine research and development. In addition to traditional grantgiving, it also provides lines of credit. For example, theInternational AIDS Vaccine Initiative received from the Foundation a$100 million line of credit to empower the nonprofit organization toinfluence HIV vaccine development within the vaccine industrialcomplex.[4]

Over the past several years, evidence is accumulating over Gates’and his Foundations’ duplicity in saying one thing and actingotherwise. For example, frequently Gates has stated his opposition toBig Tobacco and claims he refuses to invest or fund any organizationand company contributing to smoking. However, a recent investigationshowed that the Foundation has in fact invested in Big Tobacco forquite some time.[5] Similarly, behind his verbiage on tackling climatechange and shifting to non-fossil fuel technologies at the TEDconference, Gates remains a heavy investor in Big Oil, particularlyExxon-Mobile and British Petroleum—perhaps the two oil companies themost corrupt history in recent decades.[6]

We appear, therefore, to be faced with a serious uncertainty overthe public image of the very likable, mild-manner Bill Gates, whoexpresses repeatedly his ambition to improve the health of thedeveloping world, and then the possibility of other ulterior motivesthat are contrary to saving lives. Should we take Gates and hisFoundation’s word that their primary objective is to improve the healthand well-being of children in poorer nations by fighting disease andillness with vaccines? Or is his vaccine agenda another ruse with amore sinister agenda? For example, it is hard to imagine that Gates isunaware that his commitment to the Green Revolution is in point of facta Green Disaster and that no GMO has lived up to its promise. Yet hesimply continues his enormous funding of agricultural geneticmanipulation projects. Therefore, we believe there is sound reason thathis Foundation’s many international vaccine initiatives represent muchmore than excessively kind-hearted charity.

Over the past several years, the prestigious British medical journalThe Lancet has printed a series of in-depth analyses of the GatesFoundation with disturbing revelations. In a September 2008 article,“Misfinancing Global Health: A Case for Transparency in Disbursementsand Decision Making,” the authors’ investigation came to the conclusionthat aside from excessive funding of high profile Western institutionsand organizations, there was “a heavy bias in funding towards malariaand HIV/AIDS, with relatively little investment into tuberculosis,maternal and child health, and nutrition--with chronic diseases beingentirely absent from its spending portfolio.”[7] And a later study byDr. David McCoy from the Center for International Health found that“the grants made by the Foundation do not reflect the burden of diseaseendured by those in deepest poverty.”[8] None of these findings havebeen covered to any extent by mainstream media nor any governing body.

No one can doubt Gates’ intellectual genius and talent/ Neither arewe questioning his philanthropic endeavors that exceeds that of anyother human being. So, then, why is his Foundation spending suchwealth unwisely, and why is it ignoring far more effective and lesscostly solutions and practices for relieving the suffering of millionsof children, women and men throughout the developing world.

In his deconstruction of Bill Gates’ charitable agenda, F. WilliamEngdahl writes, “Vaccinating a child who then goes to drinkfeces-polluted river water is hardly healthy in any respect. But ofcourse cleaning up the water and sewage systems of Africa wouldrevolutionize the health conditions of the Continent.”[9] Farmore effective would be the Foundation donating its billions to improvesanitation and hygiene, and provide nutrition to the 2.6 billion peoplewho have none, for increasing clean water sources so 900 million globalresidents can have access to drinkable water (now at 1 in 3 Africans).Instead, the Foundation could be funding thousands of health clinicsfocusing on the chronic illnesses these populations suffer frommost.[10] This is simply common sense. “Bad water,” says theStockholm International Water Institute’s director, Anders Bentell,“kills more people than HIV, malaria and war together.”[11]

Spending billions of dollars to develop new vaccines and launchmonumental efforts to vaccinate African children plagued withdiverse infectious illnesses promises to be a fruitless enterprisewhile these populations continue to live in squalor. Afterdecades of mass vaccination programs across Africa, current vaccineshave neither proven their medical effectiveness and safety nor theirability to truly enhance the quality of life of impoverished Africans.Instead, as part of its Millennium Development Goal, the Foundationprefers to make its Rotavirus Vaccine Program to battle diarrhealdiseases one of its two major focuses (in partnership with PATH, theWHO and the CDC).[12] The FDA has already announced warnings ofRotavirus vaccine’ life threatening adverse effects, such asintessusception or the severe twisting of children’s intestines thatcan lead to death.[13] Children in developing countries, alreadysuffering from extreme immune-deficiencies due to malnutrition, lack ofsanitary living conditions, and local diseases only have their bodiesfurther weakened after any vaccination.

As a keynote speaker at the TED 2010 conference, Gates laid out hisrationale for an international effort towards globaldepopulation. He said, “If we do a really great job on newvaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lowerthat [projected to 9 billion people by 2050] by perhaps 10 or 15percent.“ New vaccines for depopulation? What Gates mightbe referring to by “new vaccines” is the creation of new generationsterilizing and/or aborting vaccines with an ingredient or geneticallyengineered component that can go undetected. Vaccines to preventpregnancy already exist; in fact, they have been with us for a longtime. One area of vaccine research the Gates’ Foundation is funding inits Grand Challenges Explorations is the use of nano-particles.[14]Such engineered vaccines, with no gold standard for long term safetyand efficacy, could virtually go undetected without highly advanced andexpensive technologies to identify their presence.

As early as 1968, the Rockefeller Foundation’s annual reportrecommended anti-fertility vaccines as a viable means for lessening thehuman population growth rate that should be aggressively pursued.

The quandary lies in an ethical, moral and transparent means, whichhonor the free choice of the individual, for reducing the global birthrate. Unfortunately, past history shows that previous attempts toinoculate communities with anti-fertility vaccines have not only beenunethical but covert and criminal. And when one thinks about it, whatbetter way to lessen population growth, in addition to reducing yearsof life-expectancy, than through family planning vaccination programsspearheaded by government mandated international finance and healthorganizations, such as the World Bank, UNDP and WHO, and by willinggovernments and billionaires who are happy to help fund eugenicefforts? In addition, there are many powerful non-profitorganizations, such as Save the Children and US Aid, who benefithandsomely from these multilateral institutions and rely upon theirfunding to carry out their demands.

An early anti-fertility trial using human chorionic gonadotrophin(hCG), a hormone essential for pregnancy, in vaccines was completed in1988 in India through a Rockefeller collaboration with India’s NationalInstitute of Immunology. The Rockefeller annual report declaredsuccess. Yet according to Betsy Hartman, Director of HampshireCollege’s Population and Development Program, “although one vaccine hasbeen tested on only 180 women in India, it is being billed there assafe, devoid of any side effects and completely reversible.”[15]

Perhaps the most thorough documented investigation into the covertuse of anti-fertility vaccines is a 1995 report, “Are New VaccinesLaced with Birth Control Drugs,” compiled by J.A. Miller, acorrespondent for the pro-life missionary movement Human LifeInternational. In the early 1990s, the WHO, supported by theRockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme,and the US’s National Institutes of Health undertook stealthanti-fertility initiatives under the disguise of tetanus vaccinationprograms. These vaccines were administered to unsuspecting and poorcommunities in Mexico, Nicaragua and the Philippines.[16]

The tetanus vaccines, manufactured by Connaught and Intervex inCanada, and CSL, Ltd in Australia (a leading maker of the H1N1 fluvaccine that has been implicated in statistically significant numbersof seizures and heavily supported by the Rupert Murdoch family) werelaced with hCG.[17] Scientists working on the project discovered thatthe tetanus vaccine was an ideal vehicle for introducing hCG peptidesthat when injected into a woman’s body would induce hCG antibodiesthereby preventing pregnancy. In brief, a woman’s body turns onautopilot to attack her own natural production of hCG.[18]

All would have gone well for the scheme’s masterminds if it were notfor individuals working in local religious charities having observedsome highly suspicious procedures. For example, why were only womenbetween the ages of 15 to 45 receiving the tetanus shot and no men? Andwhy were multiple booster shots required during the following monthswhen a single tetanus injection is well-known to provide protection forten years? In the Philippines, laboratory results of vaccinated womanin almost all cases discovered the presence of hCG antibodies; labinvestigations into the vaccines uncovered the presence of hCG; and asubsequent investigation found that none of the hCG-laced vaccine lotshad been registered with the government’s Bureau of Food andDrugs. The episode was entirely a black op, a super human stealthexperiment preying upon poor innocent women.[19]

While the above is the best documented example, other less wellknown eugenic experiments during the 1990s using anti-fertilityvaccines have been conducted in Haiti and among the Akha people inThailand, in poorer African-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles, andamong indigenous people in North and Latin America.

A 1995 BBC documentary, “The Human Laboratory,” interviewed Filipinowomen’s activist Mary Pilar Verzosa, who reported on the vaccine’sadverse effects. These included fertility cycles that were “all fouledup,” spontaneous bleeding and miscarriages.[20] Seemingly, women werenot screened to determine whether or not they were pregnant beforeinjections. Consequently in addition to interfering with a woman’sability to become pregnant the WHO was launching a clandestineexperiment to observe whether the vaccine would trigger miscarriages.

No published studies exist for long-term follow up on womenreceiving hCG-laced vaccines and associated severe adverse effects.Given the WHO’s past record of seriously flawed misjudgments andsecrecy--their recent fabrication of a level-6 H1N1 pandemic being anexcellent recent example--and those of the other organizationscomplicit in covert vaccine operations, we should not be surprised thatsuch studies exist. Because the hCG hormone is involved in many otherbodily functions besides pregnancy, it is likely that artificiallycreating hCG antibodies in a woman would result in a cascade of seriousincurable health problems. The hormone plays an important role inendocrine functioning of the brain’s hypothalamus. It is a knowndiagnostic marker for certain types of tumors. Artificiallyinterfering in its production could potentially cause any number ofdifferent cancers. Since hCG is essential for healthy pituitary glandfunction, such toxic vaccines would interfere with this master gland’sregulatory function of maintaining homeostatic balance, hormonalequilibrium, throughout the body’s endocrine system. There can be anincalculable number of adverse conditions resulting from such a vaccine.

If used with the wrong motives, vaccines can e excellent devices forlessening lifespan. In addition, there are unanswered questions abouthow safe and effective vaccines actually are. For example, a child willnot develop cancer or acquire a chronic autoimmune dysfunction a weekor two after receiving a flu or measles injection. Yet, vaccines,especially those relying upon animal tissue to culture viruses duringthe manufacturing process—the influenza, the MMR, and yellow fevervaccines—are known to be highly contaminated with foreign animalviruses (including Avian Leukosis Virus and Equine Arteritis Virus),genetic fragments of such viruses, oncogenes (genes that turn normalcells cancerous), and prions (tiny proteins responsible for incurablediseases and neurological disorders in animals and humans). Publicawareness of this fact appeared in transcripts from private meetings ofthe Center for Disease Control’s Vaccine and Related BiologicalProducts Advisory Committee and the Evolving Scientific and RegulatoryPerspective Workshop in 1998 and 1999 respectively and obtained byBritish investigative journalist Janine Roberts.[21]

According to the committees’ participants representing, “the largestpublic health institutions in the West,” it is impossible to remove DNAcontaminants from vaccines. When the question was raised whether or notvaccine DNA contamination could cause cancer or autoimmune disease, onerespondent stated, “when you consider that almost every one of thesevaccines is injected right into the tissue... I think you couldn’t domuch more to get the DNA expressed [to get contaminating cancer-causingDNA taken up by human cells] than to inject it into a muscle in the wayit’s being done.”[22]

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the health committees in the GermanParliament and the European Council, reported that Novartis was using a“nutrient solution” relying on cancer-cell lines in a bioreactor tomanufacture its H1N1 vaccine. He issued warnings that adverse reactionsto this kind of engineered vaccine are unknown.[23]

Bill Gates’ mission to protect poorer populations from diseasethrough mass vaccination, his sense of urgency that the globalpopulation is too large and needs to be reduced, and his deep financialand collaborative enterprises with the oligarchic elite, healthagencies and multilateral organizations with a past history of eugenicintentions and experimentation, make for a bizarre mix that raisesserious questions about the truth behind his Foundation’s motives.

America has a long history of eugenic science through the first halfof the twentieth century--John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Sanger, PaulPopenoe, Madison Grant and others. The names of the organizations andfacilities they founded or supported tells the story. Andrew Carnegie’sInstitute was the primary funder of the Eugenics Record Office thatoperated from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. The Laboratory wasclosed in 1944 after the public became aware of thousandssterilizations it oversaw.

Likewise the Rockefellers were major funders of not only Cold SpringHarbor but also the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics, which becamethe center of the Nazi’s extermination experiments. The Rockefellers’Population Council, with the mission to advance birth control, wasfirst headed by Frederick Osborn, a leader in the American EugenicsSociety.[24] And there is no reason to believe America’s eugenictradition has died out, although it has mutated into what might appearto be a less malignant form compared to the days when over half of thefifty states were conducting forced sterilization on poor woman andinmates in prisons and mental institutes.

Nobody should doubt the eugenic agenda remains alive and well inAmerica. In fact, behind the closed corridors among the global elite,it is gaining fuel. For these people, sacrificing poor people in thedeveloping world on the altar of a distorted Manifest Destiny, andsetting their own rules in modern technologies--vaccines and GMOseeds--with the potential to destroy every unborn child is simplyracism and bigotry. Kenyon College anthropologist Ken Smail, in a 2004World Watch article, wrote, “That there will be large scale reductionin global human numbers over the next two or three centuries appears tobe inevitable. The primary issue seems to be whether this process willbe under conscious human control and (hopefully) relatively benign, orwhether it will turn out to be unpredictably chaotic and (perhaps)catastrophic.”[25]

The weakness in today’s elites’ depopulation agenda is fourfold.First it has always been the poorer, less educated segments of humanitythat should be reduced and no one else. Therefore, second, since theycannot be allowed to have a freedom of choice or vote on the matter,the elites must make this decision for them. Third, their argumentcrumbles since it is the elites themselves that place value on oneparticular life as being different than another. And finally, sincedepopulation cannot be executed transparently, it must be done throughdeceit and clandestine means.

So what are the lessons to be learned from this? The wealthiestelite on the planet are rarely questioned about the correctness oftheir actions and schemes. As long as one of these individuals say theyare giving huge sums of money to a cause to end disease and suffering,we are not suppose to probe further. Rather, in the case of mainstreammedia, such people are to be worshiped as saviors. The oligarchic eliteare so well interconnected on multiple boards of directors, clubs forthe rich and powerful, think tanks, and among the high ranks of electedlegislators and politicians that it is difficult to have an open andhonest debate on the merits of their actions and spending. When a TedTurner says we should reduce the world’s population by more than half,and Bill Gates suggests a 15 percent reduction, do we really understandthey are following a form of eugenic genocide?

NOTES

[1] Beckett, Andy. “Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.” Guardian UK. July 12, 2010.

[2] Engdahl, F. William. “Bill Gates Talks about Vaccines to Reduce Population.” Financial Sense Editorials. March 4, 2010.

[3] “Gates Foundation Decade of Vaccines.” The Lancet. March 2010. Vol. 10. No. 3. p. 39

[4] Beckett, Andy. Op cit.

[5] Schestowitz, Roy. “Gates Foundation Retreats After Being Exposed as Funder of Big Tobacco.” Techrights.org. April 19, 2010.

[6] Schestowitz, Roy. “Bill Gates Invests Heavily in Deception aboutGlobal Warming and in Abusive Monopolies.” Techrights.org. February 22,2010.

[7] “What has the Gates Foundation Done for Global Health,” The Lancet. Vol. 373, no. 9675. May 9, 2009

[8] Ibid.

[9] Engdahl, F. William. Op cit.

[10] Deen, Thailif. “Summit Failure on Water, Sanitation Would be Recipe for Disaster,” Commondreams.org September 14, 2010

[11] Deen, Thailif. “Time Running Out Faster than Water, Experts Warn,” IPS News. September 6, 2010

[12] GAVI Alliance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAVI_Alliance

[13] “New Rotavirus Vaccine Danger: FDA Warns as PossiblyLife-Threatening for your Child” Health and Wellness. February 13, 2007

[14] Butler, Byron. “Gates Foundation donates $7.8 million to global initiatives.” The Daily Tell. May 14, 2010

[15] Maessen, Jurriaan. “Rockefeller Foundation Developed Vaccinesfor “Mass-Scale” Fertility Reduction.” Infowars. August 5, 2010.

[16] Miller, JA. “Are New Vaccines Laced with Birth Control Drugs?”Human Life International Reports, Vol. 13, No. 8, June/July 1995

[17] Centers for Disease Control. “ACIP Recommendation for Use of CSL Influenza Vaccine.” CDC Press Release, August 5, 2010

[18] Miller, JA. Op cit.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Taylor, Daniel. “Vaccinate the World: Gates, Rockefeller SeekGlobal Population Reduction.” Global Research. September 7, 2010.

[21] Gale, R, Null G. “Vaccines’ Dark Inferno: What is not on InsertLabels” Global Research. September 29, 2009; also see, Roberts, Janine.Fear of the Invisible: How Scared Should We be of Viruses and Vaccines.Impact Investigative Media Productions: Bristol UK, 2009

[22] Ibid.

[23] “Does Virus Vaccine Increase the Risk of Cancer.” Bild.com (Germany) September 7, 2009

[24] Taylor, Daniel. “Eugenics Moves to the Twenty-First Century,” Old-Thinker News. August 27, 2007

[25] Smail, Ken. “Global Population Reduction: Confronting the Inevitable,” World Watch. September/October, 2004

Mexico bans sodas, fried foods and junk food from public school (while the USA does nothing)

2010-09-19T13:19:00.001-07:00

Sunday, September 19, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writerEmail this article to a friend Printable Version FREE Email Newsletter
http://www.naturalnews.com/029776_public_schools_Mexico.html

(NaturalNews) The Mexican government is moving forward with plans to ban all junk foods from public school by the start of the coming school year, officials have announced.

"The kids are going to complain, of course," said education minister Alonso Lujambio. "We are going to start a profound cultural change."

In January, President Felipe Calderon launched a major anti-obesity campaign, and government officials have regularly referred to Mexican children as the world's fattest. While the merits of this specific claim are open to dispute, it is well confirmed that obesity rates in Mexico are rapidly approaching those of its northern neighbor, and that 4.5 million children between the ages of five and 11 -- 26 percent -- are already overweight or obese.

According to health minister Jose Angel Cordoba, fruit and vegetable consumption has dropped 40 percent in the last 15 years, while consumption of sweetened beverages has increased 50 percent. In addition, runaway urbanization is blamed for destroying open spaces and thus leading to a drop in physical activity.

Under the new rules, schools will be bared from serving or selling sugary sodas, juices or processed snacks, including local favorites such as tamarind candies. Unhealthy less-processed foods to be banned include pork rinds, atole (a sweetened corn starch-based beverage), fried tacos and tortas (sandwiches). Some exceptions will be made for healthier versions, such as tortas made from beans, avocado and cheese, or chicken and vegetables. All tacos, burritos and salads must be low in fat.

While the law does not target the off-campus vendors who gather at school gates at the end of the day, Lujambio said the government will soon initiate programs designed to improve the nutritional content of their foods as well.

The guidelines will apply to all 220,000 public and private elementary and middle schools in the country. Before taking effect, they must be approved by experts and a review committee.

Sources for this story include: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/201... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor....

Labels: Food, Junk Food, School Food, Mexico
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THE FOREST AND THE FIRE-KEEPER - "In every Ending There Is A New Beginning"

2010-07-24T15:29:00.001-07:00

From the last story of the book the Global Forest
by Diana Beresford-Kroeger , pages 163-166,

Meet her in a short video:
http://www.stuartbernstein.com/beresford-kroeger.html

THE FOREST AND THE FIRE-KEEPER
"In every Ending There Is A New Beginning"

Unlike books, words are old. So are the oral traditions of global cultures. A collective memory was kept alive and passed on in the oral traditions of storytelling, songs, poetry, and family bloodlines. Occasionally within a culture a mystic would arise who could see a clear vision of the future from the patterns of the past. These mystics were prophets. They had the gift of prophecy and their words were remembered.

The oral tradition of any culture is its essence. It skims off wisdom and keeps these nuggets close from bosom to bosom down through the generations. This wisdom is collectively gathered and is committed to memory for use. Those who gather this wisdom have many names in many cultures. For the First Nations, the aboriginal peoples of North America, they are called the "Fire-keepers."

The fire-keeper is the keeper of legends. The fire-keeper is also charged with the memory of prophecy. Such items of future history are recorded according to a dateline of some event outside of the normal measurement of time. This clocks the event into the future in a timeline that nobody can dispute.

The forecasts of prophecy are fairly common phenomena that are often adopted universally and become embedded in the public's consciousness of the time. These, too, are remembered in common as an anchor for the prophecy itself.

At present there is a prophecy for the direct future of the times in which we all live. This prophecy concerns nature itself. Nature or Mother Nature, which is sometimes described as Gaia, is composed of a complex web of life in which all things live in an interdependent manner. The small is equal to the large in this network of life. And the small is codependent on the large for its life force. Every cog is placed in every wheel for a reason. There is a balance there too, a little play in this giant system so that it all works together hand in hand.

There is a timeline for this prophecy, too. The prophecy will happen around the time of the great dying of the North American maples, Acer saccharum, the sugar maples. These maples are the great feeding trees of the eastern seaboard of America. These trees will begin to decline from the tip. At first the tops of the trees will wither and die. Then the disease will spread downward through the trees until they lose all of their leaves. This dying is the beginning of the timeline of the destruction of nature.

The rape of nature has then begun. Other trees will succumb to various infestations. The loss of the forests will foreshadow a period of devastation. People will not realize what they have done, but they will continue in their path of demolition. From the peoples of today will arise another new generation of children. These children will be different from all those who came before. These children will have many gifts. They will be able to do extraordinary things.

Primarily these children will have the gift of telepathy. They will be able to communicate with one another across the globe, even though they do not know one another. Their recognition factor will be youth itself. These children too will have the gift of the dream. In the dream they will have clarity of vision. From this dream they will understand what has happened to nature. They will understand it and comprehend what their parents have done. Many of these children, too, will have the gift of prophecy. This will frighten them in the beginning until they gain an understanding.

Then the children of this generation will want to help the planet and nature in a collective way. They will hold hands across the planet in their minds. They will alter their parents' ways. They will encourage one another. In this circle of life the children will save their parents through a dream and through a prophecy. In saving their parents they will save the planet.

This is an old legend, told before the advent of the computer or the Internet. It was told before the advent of radio, television, mass media-even before electricity. It was told at a time when the sugar maples were healthy and producing copious quantities of sap for maple sugar.

Even as the words of the legend of the fire-keeper come together there is a truth to them. The media is filled with stories of nature's abuse. Those who should protect nature calmly put whole forests like the boreal forest on the chopping block without a moment's hesitation. Those who want more oil are busy with their killer sonar techniques in the krill-rich waters of the Tatarskiy Proliv (Strait of Tatar) between Sakhalin Island and mainland Russia, the birthing ground of the bowhead and the feeding grounds of the great whales. There seems no end to greed and no beginning to sustainable management of the planetary resource basis.

But the children exist. They have been taught a better mode of planetary management. The consumerism in their lives bores holes of unbearable solitude. They are already reaching for something else, something elusive, something that is color-blind to race. It is called dignity, the dignity of life, all life.

===

Diana Beresford-Droeger is a botanist and medical biochemist who is an expert not he medicinal, environmental, and nutritional properties of trees. She lives in Ontario, Canada, surrounded by her sprawling research gardens filled with rare and endangered species.

From an Amazon.com review:
Perhaps because of the Irish ancestry she references at the outset, with its tradition of storytelling, the form of the essays is far from scientific but rather that of almost mystical, poetic appreciation. They even begin with a subtitle "refrain" that captures the essence of each piece. Yes, the book is full of the amazing facts I was hoping to find - such as the existence of warm-blooded plants and the complex chemistry that trees have evolved in order to survive. And there is a hopeful theme of the potential to reverse global ecologic devastation through reforestation. But most of all this is the sensually and lovingly written ode of a passionate scientist, harking back to writers of more enlightened ages."

From the cover of The Global Forest:
All of life as we know it hangs on trees in a matrix of complexity we call the living earth.
Her extraordinary bioplan shows how trees can be planted in rural and urban areas to promate health and counteract pollution and maintain biodiversity in the face of climate change.

Using the voice and style of her ancestors including, Irish Seanchai, the traditional story tellers who drifted through the landscape at night visiting farmsteads, she has crafted an original work of natural history. Her indisputable passion of life inspires people to see trees and their own connections with nature with awe.
http://www.stuartbernstein.com/beresford-kroeger.htm

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AT7 Health News

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THE FOREST AND THE FIRE-KEEPER - "In every Ending There Is A New Beginning"