KirstenMortensen.com

Anybody who knows me also knows: I’m the first to applaud efforts to get rid of toxins, particularly in our food and — most certainly — in anything our kids might put into their mouths.

But we now have another textbook example of why we can’t entrust Congress with this responsibility.

They’ve passed a law mandating that all products sold to kids 12 and other be tested for lead and phthalates.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is, the law is written so broadly that nobody can sell second-hand children’s clothing any more. Anyone who wants to will first have to test every article.

Can you imagine how expensive that would be?

“We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy,” said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children’s clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.

I know my posts of late have been dripping with disgust for our politicians, but I’m sorry, it’s warranted.

Really, is it too much to ask for them to read their stupid laws before they vote on them?

And while I’m at it, activists who push for legislation on these things — I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you need to learn a lesson here, too. Even if this law is softened in some way, it will still have two consequences that I bet you will hate to see.

1. More stuff — including perfectly safe stuff–will be sent to landfills instead of being reused/recycled and

2. Toxic stuff that’s of any value, but that can no longer be sold second hand here, will be shipped overseas where laws are more lax.

That twinge you feel is your conscience . . .

$88,000 a year sound like a good figure?

Because–as I posted last summer–that’s what we spend annually to fluoridate our water in this county.

I’ve been fuming about that figure again lately, and not only because we’re facing the prospect of unprecedented tax hikes, thanks to the poor fiscal management of our pols.

There’s also, this, now: A new round-up, courtesy of the Fluoride Action Network, of 23 studies to that link fluoride consumption to lower IQ.

Much of this research was originally published in China, but the FAN is translating it.

Meanwhile, the National Research Council, which has reviewed a handful of these studies, says “the consistency of the collective results warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence.”

Yeah, well how about discontinuing mass fluoridation of our water until we know for sure, folks?

It’s almost enough to make you believe the conspiracy theorists who think the government is deliberately trying to make people stupid.

At the least, it’s a clear window into how these agencies view their responsibilities toward the American people. They’re not going to err on the side of protecting us from brain damage. What do they care if our kids’ IQ loses 5 or 10 points? They’re collecting their salaries, and seeing their names published in prestigious medical journals, and being invited to speak at all the right conferences.

Nice people. So glad they’re in charge.

Several blogs, including Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, and JustOneMinute have picked up Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 4 piece in the NY Times that calls attention to the problem of iodine deficiency in third world countries, such as Pakistan.

I’ve just been reading this 2006 paper by Stephen A. Hoption Cann, PhD, published by the American College of Nutrition, Hypothesis: Dietary Iodine Intake in the Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease which states that the “proportion of the US population with moderate to severe iodine deficiency (<50 µg iodine/L in urine) has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

That’s right here at home, people.

I posted in August about my own experimentation with iodine supplementation. Today I typically take 25 mgs/day — thousands of times the RDA — and the results have been incredible. Now that winter’s here, for instance, I’ve noticed I don’t get cold as easily, and my skin doesn’t feel dry and itchy like always has in past winters. And of course, the fibrocystic breast tissue that was with me since my 20s is completely gone.

I’m a believer. I’ll never stop taking the stuff.

I just hope other people catch on & start taking it too.

What I find most fascinating about the whole subject is that iodine is so critical to so many of the human body’s biochemical systems that you have to wonder: how pervasive is the impact of our epidemic of iodine deficiency?

Obesity is an obvious candidate for thought. It began taking off in the United States during during the late 1980s. That corresponds pretty closely to the 20-year timeframe cited in Cann’s paper.

Some of that is probably because we no longer get any iodine from bread. The FDA “explicitly approved bromate for . . . use in bread through the standards for bread and rolls promulgated in May of 1952.” One of the flour conditioners potassium bromate displaced, with the FDA’s blessing, was potassium iodate.

Another likely factor is that we’ve been instructed to reduce salt intake. When we’re urged to cut back on salt (which the National Research Council was doing as far back as 1989, and probably further — I remember my grandfather being told not to eat salt in the 1970s) then we’re not necessarily eating enough iodized salt per day to get even the RDA for iodine.

Then there’s this: does the salt you sprinkle on your pommes frites provide as much iodine as it’s supposed to? See this e.g. (translated I think from French — but you’ll get the gist):

Iodine content of reference iodized salt was 38.53?6.92 on June 1997. After the salt was stored at room temperature with a relative humidity of 30 % -45% and in sealed paper bags for three years, iodine content changed to 18.25 ??4.72. Thus 52.63 % of was lost in approximately 3.5
years. This means that standing time and storage conditions is very effective storage of iodine in food.

Cooking conditions is very effective on the stabilization of iodine. In the case of oxidants in diet loss of iodine is more effective, 82% of iodine may lost during the high temperature cooking oxidized medium. So it is advised to consume iodide to put the food not before the cooking after the cooking. On the other hand, if consuming of iodide not advised to people who have problems with their thyroid, long term treatment at oven with an mild oxidant may loss 81% of iodine and 55% of iodine without an oxidants.

Less obvious is iodine’s role in other bodily systems that aren’t obviously linked to the thyroid.

Like heart disease, for instance.

That Cann paper I linked up top explores the correlation between low iodine levels and cardiovascular disease. Talks about selenium as well, another nutrient that’s deficient in our diets.

Here’s a taste:

Uotila et al. [18] made the observation that subjects who died from coronary sclerosis often had goitre. In order to further examine this phenomenon, 250 Finnish subjects who had died from coronary heart disease were age and sex-matched to controls who died from other causes [19]. The risk of death from coronary heart disease was found to be significantly higher in individuals with goiter (odds ratio (OR) = 3.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.43–4.99). It was noted that the average thyroid weight was higher in those dying from coronary disease. Moreover, among the coronary disease cases with goiter, there was a lower average age of death and a higher average heart weight. Due to the low iodine content of foods and lack of an iodization program at the time, endemic goiter was common in Finland, particularly in the east.

Well worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Good Sunday eve reading ;-)

The point Kristof tries to make in his NY Times article is that nutrient supplementation makes for boring public policy. He is referring to foreign aid/humanitarian policy, but the same is true right here at home. We’re happy to pour billions of dollars into breast cancer research, for instance (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has spent $1 billion over 25 years). And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where’s the enthusiasm for using iodine supplementation to prevent breast cancer? It’s not there — not on anything like the pink-ribbons-everywhere scale of mainstream breast cancer campaigns — because it’s such a prosaic and unpatentable approach.

But think about it.

Iodine supplementation may well be an very inexpensive way to address a whole range of very costly health issues that are faced by a huge majority of Americans.

What would become of the “healthcare crisis” if that proved to be the case?

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at The Enterprise Institute, has written an article about a new study on the placebo effect.

The study, by the National Institutes of Health, surveyed practicing U.S. internists and rheumatologists about whether they prescribe placebos. It was published in the British Medical Journal. Half of the MDs surveyed say they prescribe placebos. More than two-thirds say they think prescribing placebos is an acceptable thing to do.

One way to “read” the study, of course, is that MDs are leading patients down the proverbial path. Prescribing sugar pills. But as Satel points out, the reality is a bit more complex:

[O]nly a handful of the almost 700 physicians who completed the survey claimed to use inert substances such as sugar pills or saline. The vast majority offered innocuous over-the-counter products, sometimes called “impure” placebos, such as vitamins or Tylenol, though 13% used antibiotics and another 13% used sedatives. By offering an actual pharmaceutical, doctors stand on firmer ground in telling patients that what they are prescribing is a medication whereas describing a sugar pill as medication is much harder, perhaps impossible, for most to justify as a matter of conscience.

The other important factor is that the research “targeted” internists and rheumatologists — whose patients, in Satel’s words, typically suffer from “chronic illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, that are notoriously refractory to care.”

In other words, these are docs who are unable to help a significant percentage of their patients.

So they’re “prescribing” vitamins or Tylenol or sedatives.

Satel then goes on to discuss the psychological implications of placebos: that even sugar pills bring short term relief if patients believe they’re therapeutic.

But (she notes) there’s a risk as well. If patients begin to feel they’ve been duped, their trust in their physicians, and in the medical profession itself, will be lost.

What Satel doesn’t say is that the loss of trust has already happened. Or is, at least, in the process of happening. Which is why so many people gravitate to alt medicine.

To tease it out a bit more, the most important element at play, here, is the doctor’s fallibility.

Imagine what it must be like to be an MD facing a patient you do not believe you can help.

This person wants to trust you; this person believes you are his only hope; he needs you to stop the hurting, to ward off Death, to restore him to the full and happy life he’s watched slip away.

And you can do nothing. You know you cannot help; you are stumped. There is no drug, no therapy that has shown to reliably erase this condition. Any that have shown promise, you’ve already tried, and they’ve failed. You are stumped. You know it, even if you don’t quite dare let that thought form in your mind as you sit there in the exam room, facing the poor wretch. There is nothing in your bag that will make things better, no wand you can wave.

But you can’t say it. If you say it, everything crumbles. Saying it means you admit your fallibility, it means you admit how tiny and precarious your understanding is, how close to you is the drop-off into the pitch-black gulf of your ignorance. To say it is to let your patient fall off into that gulf, both of you helpless to save him.

So instead you — the MD — reach for what is, in fact, your OWN placebo. In the lingo of the study, you reach for “[A] medicine not typically used for [your patient's] condition, but [that] might benefit.”

The placebo makes YOU, the doctor, feel better. It gives you the illusion that you do have some control, some authority; it relieves you of having to speak aloud the unmentionable.

Most likely you can also discern at least some relief in your patient. The tension in that exam room is eased.

Your relationship with your patient, and your profession, is intact.

You can continue to practice, because you have proven again that you always have at least some answer. And it might help. It might relieve the symptoms, it might make the patient feel better, and who knows. The patient might even get better, maybe for reasons out of your control, but in the meantime, you’ve done something.

The patient, meanwhile, has gained a slightly better grip on hope. It might not last very long. Maybe only until the physician leaves the room. Or until the symptoms worsen again, and it becomes clear that this “medicine not typically used for your condition” isn’t really helping you at all.

Of course, this isn’t an ideal situation, by any stretch. Our study into the mechanics, and then the biomechanics of the human body have improved our ability to patch it together — and a godsend that is in many cases. But there’s still so much we cannot do.

There’s still so much we don’t understand. By some estimates, the human body comprises 10 trillion cells; each cell comprises trillions of molecules (for instance, there are 10,000 different proteins in a single human liver cell, and millions of molecules of each of those proteins). And each cell is perpetually busy, moving molecules about, assembling them, cutting them up, generating signals for other cells, reacting to signals it receives. All this at speeds we would call “lightening” if we could perceive it.

It’s unimaginably complex. Throw out those drawings you made in high school biology — the circle with the nucleus in the center and maybe a mitochondria or some other “organelle” alongside. That was a cartoon. It wasn’t even close.

The best minds in alt medicine (many of whom are not practitioners, but lay people with an aptitude for chemistry or who have used their own “incurable” illnesses as a catalyst for studying biochemistry) have grasped the implications of this complexity, and are humbled by it. They realize what mainstream practitioners dare not admit: that the drugs we purchase from pharmacies are crude instruments at best. Big, foreign molecules that blunder about in our cells, changing things, yes, which sometimes does bring relief from our symptoms, yes — but also knocking about like the proverbial bull and inevitably, at times, disrupting cellular processes that are better left alone. Causing “side effects.”

Alt medicine, at its best, looks instead to juice the body’s own inherent healing processes. It’s such a simple and logical concept that it amazes me that people dismiss it, but they do. They do. People laugh at the notion, for example, of “detoxification.” Quackwatch, the smarmy online bastion of mainstream medical fanaticism (run, btw, by a man who is himself a quack in the truest sense of the word), calls detoxification “an elaborate, manipulative hoax,” for instance.

But who can argue that the body’s cells know how to eliminate “waste” — molecules which are of no use, and which if retained would be dead weight at best? Of course cells “know” how to do that. They do it all the time. So the question becomes, what processes do cells use to eliminate waste molecules, and are there ways to support those processes, so that cells become in effect cleaner and better able to function?

You can argue that there are effective ways to support given cellular processes, and ineffective ways, but the basic premise is unassailable. As is the premise that nutrients — those molecules our cells have used, for billions of years, as their natural building blocks — are the basis for fundamental health. Cells need nutrients to survive. Not just calories. Much more than just calories. Nutrients — all those oddball molecules that do things like make an tomato red or a piece of salmon savory. Those are the things our cells reach for when they need to patch something up or build an enzyme or produce a secretion.

Meanwhile, mainstream medicine hopes our understanding of biochemistry will eventually become so sophisticated that we’ll be able to craft molecules that deliver “cures” — meaning, molecules that alter certain cellular processes without disrupting others. So one day, a pharmaceutical sales rep will stroll into our MD’s office, open his briefcase, and hand out samples of the pill that cures fibromyalgia.

When that happens, the placebo can be tossed away for good.

And so our mainstream practitioners mark time, and wait.

And roll their eyes when people lose faith in them, leave their offices, log onto the Internet, and type “alternative cure” in the google keyword search.

According to Peter Barry Chowka, a journalist who has written extensively on the alternative health industry, if you care about alternative health, you’d better not vote for Obama.

I’m copying his closing paragraphs below.

These are all assertions, of course — his beliefs. But if you care about being free to make decisions about your healthcare, his assertions should at least give you pause.

Think I’m kidding? Think this is theoretical?

The first thing they did when my late grandmother was admitted into a nursing home was forbid her from taking any supplements. They weren’t part of the program. They aren’t Medicare.

So they could dose her with antibiotics to try to treat her recurring urinary tract infections, but don’t bother mentioning D-mannose. D-mannose, a simple sugar, is the constituent in cranberry juice that naturally helps the body expel E. coli. But there’s no place for D-mannose in Medicare-based healthcare. So don’t bother even bringing it up. The docs, the nurses, they won’t have heard of it. They’ll be irritated that you disturbed them with your wild-eyed ideas. You found that on the Interweb? Go away!

How many other alt health treatments would they dismiss, because they’ve never heard of them? Because they aren’t written up in some pharma company’s literature? Because they aren’t cleared by the FDA?

As our founding fathers knew, centralizing too much power with the federal government doesn’t SOLVE problems, it CREATES problems.

In healthcare, we end up being forced to live with the consequences of ill-informed decisions (such as fluoride in our water) and lulled by the illusion of protections that are in fact non-existent (and so end up with melamine-tainted candy and power bars).

That’s why I don’t understand how any thinking person could support a stronger Washington. Honestly. It really seems, sometimes, like people are just offering themselves up to slaughter.

People who I’d think would know instinctively that we’re better off when we’re free as individuals to maneuver, to make our own choices, to separate ourselves from the crowd — these same people turn around and preach that a strong federal government will make everyone’s life so much easier.

I just don’t understand it.

No, our current healthcare system isn’t perfect. Even with this current system, we are sometimes pressed into choices that may not be ideal.

But you don’t make it better by giving even more control to politicians. You just don’t.

Here’s Chowka:

Until the early 1990s, before the government began an aggressive re-expansion of its role in American health care, alternative medicine was thriving. Part of the statist federal agenda was to rename and reconfigure alt med as “CAM” (complementary alternative medicine, or alt med light), and to integrate ancillary, secondary, non-threatening alt med light therapies into the dominant conventional, allopathic medical mainstream.

Helping this agenda along was a bone thrown to the original alt med community in the form of the creation of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) in 1991, later expanded to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in 1998. These organizations, true to form, stifled creativity, channeled alt med’s thriving progress into bureaucratic quagmires, and ultimately made primary alternative therapies go out of fashion and become much less available.

And all of this took place before the federal government completely took over all of medicine – a prospect that may be imminent, and certainly will be if Obama is elected.

I have reported, commented on, and argued about these developments including the diminution of alternative medicine for years. In recent times, the audience of independent thinkers who are in touch with and informed by alternative medicine’s philosophical roots of independence and freedom has apparently diminished, as alt med/CAM players, proponents, and “stakeholders” have followed their self-interests toward the gilded cage of more government involvement and control.

It will be interesting to see what happens on November 4. If McCain, whose health care plans involve expanding free market choices and options, wins, we will be allowed four more years of relative freedom in health care. If Obama comes out on top, it is likely that we will have seen the last of the once strong and autonomous alternative medicine field as it is subsumed under statist government-run universal health care.

Amen.

This is a MUST WATCH video.

Melamine is deadly.

READ LABELS. These milk products may be listed as casein, milk powder, whey, lactic acid.

Oh, and thanks, FDA.

Once again our federal government demonstrates how stupid it is to entrust it with protecting us.

More: Tainting of Milk Is Open Secret in China:

Before melamine-laced milk killed and sickened Chinese babies and led to recalls around the world, the routine spiking of milk with illicit substances was an open secret in China’s dairy regions, according to the accounts of farmers and others with knowledge of the industry.

Click the link above to read the rest.

Nobody believes it any more. From Rasmussen:

Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11% who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain. Twenty-six percent (26%) say reporters offer unbiased coverage . . .

The article goes on to break down the numbers by party.

Dems are most likely to think reporters are unbiased most of the time.

They also are least likely to think that the media treats their candidate more fairly.

How to ’splain that?

One possibility is that it’s just a coincidence.

More likely: the perception of “bias” is so subjective that people don’t even realize they’re accommodating it. Take this side by side comparison of the questions that Charlie Gibson put to Obama and Palin, which I’ve adapted from this Hillary Clinton forum:

Obama interview:
(Source: ABC News transcript.)

Did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?
Has it sunk in yet? Do you take joy from the win?
What did your daughters think of you winning the nomination?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:
(Source: Fox News transcript.)

Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking?
Doesn’t it take hubris to accept the VP nomination, considering how inexperienced you are?
Have you ever met a foreign head of state?
Do you believe America is fighting a holy war in Iraq like I claim you said you did?
Are you sending your son to fight as a task from God?
What are your positions on territorial integrity of Georgia?
. . . Allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO?
. . . NATO treaty?
. . . Iranian nuclear threat?
. . . What to do if Israel attacks Iran?
. . . Al Qaeda motivations?
. . . The Bush Doctrine?
. . . Attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan?

Now an objectively “unbiased” interviewer would put the same set of questions to both individuals. I think everyone could agree on that. If anything, the more hard-hitting questions would go to the Presidential candidate, as opposed to the VP candidate.

But suppose you believe that Obama is the best Presidential Candidate since Washington himself? In that case, to your thinking, questions about hubris or attacking Pakistan or whatever wouldn’t be warranted, because you’ve already decided that Obama is a fine guy — those issues are settled, to your mind, before they’re raised.

If a candidate is prima facie superior, what would be the point of difficult questions?

Put another way: to some peoples’ minds, Sarah deserves the tougher questions; Obama does not. Therefore, lobbing softballs at him isn’t bias — it’s just How Things Should Be Done.

Simple!

Featured on the front cover of First magazine as the “food switch” that “revs metabolism by 250 percent.”

Like I’ve written before, for some reason I seem to stumble upon alt health trends ahead of the curve. Iodine is a perfect example. You will start seeing lots of articles about it in the very near future.

A good portion of them, of course, are going to be Scary Warnings about how Dangerous it is. Navigating these things is tricky.

Threshold Guardians abound.

Isn’t it nice to know that everything anyone pours down the drain — ya know, like Drane-O, and expired meds, and oh! don’t forget! Industrial waste! — can be captured, concentrated, BRANDED and sold as “fertilizer” to be spread on fields where our food is grown?

And who should we thank for this brilliant idea?

Why, our government, of course! Because forbidding meat packagers from testing for mad cow and saying “hell yeah!” to irradiating our food isn’t mischief enough!

Be sure to tell them how happy you are that they keep The Peoples’ best interests foremost in their pure little hearts. Here’s your chance:

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, announced that EPW will have hearings on the disposal of sewage sludge on agricultural and other land. These hearings will be held on September 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

The September 11 hearing on sludge is currently scheduled for 10:30 AM.

The hearings are usually live streamed on the web. Check the EPW website the day of the hearing. Confirmation of the day and time are usually posted a few days beforehand on the EPW website.

That info comes courtesy of Sludge News. Because not everyone agrees it’s a good idea to eat our own waste. You go, Sludge News.

Who would DO such a thing?

Why, our very own United States Department of Agriculture, that’s who!

The Agriculture Department is within bounds to bar meatpackers from testing slaughter cattle for mad cow disease, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel said in a 2-1 ruling on Friday.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, a small Arkansas packer, filed suit on March 23, 2006, to gain access to mad-cow test kits. It said it wanted to test every animal at its plant to assure foreign buyers that the meat was safe to eat . . .

In a 25-page ruling, Appellate Judges Karen Henderson and Judith Rogers said USDA has authority under the 1913 Virus-Serum-Toxin Act to prevent sale of mad-cow test kits to meatpackers. USDA interprets the law to control products for “prevention, diagnosis, management or care of diseases of animals.”

David Sentelle, chief judge of the District of Columbia appeals circuit, dissented from the decision. He said USDA “exceeds the bounds of reasonableness” for a law enacted to prevent the sale of ineffective animal medicine.

Because, you know, if any ol’ meatpacker had the capability to test for mad cow, it might, um. Mess things up. They might — horrors! — use the results to “market” their product as mad cow-tested.

USDA . . . says the tests should not be used as a marketing tool and the cattle that comprise the bulk of the meat supply are too young to be tested reliably.

And we can’t have that. The USDA has to be in CONTROL.

USDA allows the mad-cow test kits to be sold only to laboratories that it approves.

This is where our tax dollars go. This is how a federal agency established to serve this country’s interest is spending our freaking money. To protect ITSELF and its hold on power and the status quo IT has established.

Rather like the Food and Drug Administration, which thinks we should be irrradiating spinach to kill E. coli. Who cares that we’re adding one more item to our lengthening list of biologically altered foodstuffs, as meanwhile we’re already dropping dead from the crap we eat? Who cares if irradiation destroys folate and Vitamin A and who knows what other phytonutrients and might have other, poorly-understood effects on our food?

(Hey, here’s an idea — lets turn over healthcare to a government agency too! It’s worked so well in so many other areas.)