Category Archives: Health

200 million pounds of milk products imported into North America from China. How much of it is tainted with melamine?

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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.

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.

Iodine goes mainstream

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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.

Previous post about my Iodine decision here.

Yum. Sludge.

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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.

They say “NO” to testing meat for mad cow

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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?

Adventures in Iodine

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I’ve hesitated posting about this subject because of all the alt-health things I’ve tried, this may be the one that is a true lightening rod. But I’m going public: since late spring of this year, I’ve been orthosupplementing with iodine.

I didn’t work up the courage to try this overnight. I first heard someone speculate that iodine deficiency might be ubiquitous about four years ago . . . that was from Ingeborg Eibl, a Rochester, New York chiropractor (and btw gifted healer).

Eibl mentioned iodine to me and gave me photocopies of some research papers to read. I looked them over but didn’t take it any further.

What’s changed since then is that the Internet now offers a wealth of information about iodine supplementation.

I started reading.

Most of the information is based on the work of a couple of medical researchers. Guy Abraham is one of them–he’s the driving force behind The Iodine Project, through which thousands of women have been supplementing with iodine to evaluate its ability to protect against breast disease.

Abraham and other pro-Iodiners share a couple of premises. First, that iodine is essential to a broad range of metabolic processes, and second that we’re not getting nearly enough from our diets (no, not even if we’re eating iodized salt).

How broad do I mean by “broad range?”

This broad:

The commonly accepted medical opinion is that iodine’s only role in the body is to help make thyroid hormones. Although this is an extremely important function, Abraham demonstrates that the role of iodine in the body goes far beyond its function of making thyroid hormones. Other possible functions include: helping to regulate moods, preventing cancer (especially in breasts, ovaries, uterus, prostate and thyroid gland), preventing and treating fibrocystic breasts in women, helping to regulate blood pressure, helping to regulate blood sugar and prevent and treat diabetes, and helping to prevent abnormal cardiac rhythms.

Here’s another iodine supplementation website worth perusing. The page I’ve linked presents categories that themselves hyperlinked to pages with additional information, so you can read about Iodine and the breast, heart, immune system, gastrointestinal system, skin (I’ve read elsewhere that 20 percent of the body’s iodine is found in the skin), glandular system, lungs, eyes (“Iodine occurs in large quantities in the ciliary body and lachrymal glands of the eye. It has been related to cataract formation and glaucoma, and is seen as useful in treating eye infections. Iodide has been found to be protective against UVB radiation.”), mouth (“The salivary gland concentrate iodine 20 to 100 times serum levels.”), bones, and blood (“Iodine has been studied as an antioxidant in human blood and has been found to be as powerful as Vitamin C.”).

Unfortunately, although iodine was once touted as a highly beneficial nutrient, its reputation was tarnished in the mid-20th century. Abraham recounts what happened here. A couple of researchers injected rats with iodine, misinterpreted the experiment results, and extrapolated the misinterpretation to humans. Our government, which has never seen a cow pie too small to miss, went right for it, splat: it used the so-called Wolff-Chaikoff effect to help set the official RDA for iodine at a miniscule 150 mcg/day.

To make a bad decision even worse, most of us are probably getting even less Iodine than the RDA. Iodine was once commonly added to bread — it acts as a flour conditioner — but that has declined since the early 1980s (bread makers today often use bromide instead, which is molecularly similar but unfortunately not very good for us. Hell, why mince words, the s**t’s toxic, it’s poisoning us, and we’re exposed to it by far more than in the bread we eat — from pesticide residue to the fire retardants sprayed on our mattresses.)

There’s some iodine in some seafood, and in seaweed, and of course there’s iodized salt — but it’s debatable whether we eat enough iodized salt to maintain optimum iodine levels.

Mainland Japanese, meanwhile, consume considerably more iodine, because they eat quite a bit of seaweed. Abraham uses as his guideline 13 mg/day. Here’s a lower estimate, but at 1.2 mg/day it’s still nearly 10 times the US RDA.

Now. There’s a huge debate going on about all of this. I spent weeks reading arguments on both sides, including a series of articles published by Townsend Letter that pits Abraham and another M.D., David Brownstein, against Alan Gaby, M.D.

And maybe I’m being a damn fool. But in the end, it’s like the witticism that if you have two clocks you never know what time it is, while if you have only one clock you always know. I decided to trust the clock that says we should be eating more iodine than we are.

I also took it easy, especially at the beginning. Upping iodine can displace other molecules that one might have built up in the body, including the aforementioned bromide, as well as fluoride and mercury. I followed the advice published on this website, including taking the companion nutrients that have been identified as useful to help offset the “side effects” of bumping up iodine levels.

I did experience periods of what I believe to be detoxification. The worse came within a week of starting. The symptoms were uncomfortable (headache primarily, flu-like symptoms) but temporary. I took a break for a couple of days (pulsing, per Breast Cancer Choices) and never experienced those particular symptoms again. More recently I’ve hit a different set of (much milder) symptoms which I believe are caused by the displacement of fluoride and/or bromide in my body. As before, I pulse to give my body a chance to rest and “catch up” on eliminating the offending substances.

Other than these episodes, the experience has been amazing. I feel sooooooo good. It’s hard to describe. I was healthy already; I was a happy gal already. But I can tell there is something very different about how my body runs now. It’s akin to how you feel when you’ve been hungry, and finish a delicious meal. A kind of visceral sense of well-being. I should also report . . . sorry to be vague about this, can’t quite bring myself to discussing certain benefits explicitly . . . my experience bears out the promise of the research on breast health. It’s turned back the clock. How’s that for a benefit.

I would never go so far as to urge this onto other people. The plain fact is that many people should start this under the guidance of an iodine-savvy health care practitioner, particularly people who have existing thyroid conditions or who are sick or whose bodies are more compromised than mine with mercury or other toxins. (Here’s one place to start looking for a practitioner.)

But I would strongly, strongly urge everyone to take the time to look into it for themselves. I believe most of us are iodine deficient, and that one day in the not-too-distant future that will become a widely recognized fact. I believe that we’ll come to understand that a staggering range of systemic imbalances that are overtaking so many people, thinks like obesity and hormonal problems and osteoporosis, will be traced to lack of iodine.

You heard it here.

In the meantime, if this has grabbed your attention, do yourself a favor and start educating yourself. Don’t wait for mainstream medicine to catch up.

Five alt health trends predictions

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I first became interested in alternative health in the early 1980s, and it’s since become so much a part of my life that I hardly give it any thought. At the same time, I’m actually quite conservative in my participation in the alt health scene. I’ve seen so many fads come and go that I hardly ever jump on some “new” palliative, because in nearly every case today’s fad turns out to be tomorrow’s false lead. I’ve also experienced the placebo effect first hand lots & lots of times — a sobering experience when you recognize how deceptive it can be. Because it wears off. Darn it all :-)

What else. I view most Internet alt health advice with extreme suspicion, if for no other reason than that the human body is mind-bogglingly complex and individual biochemistry is extremely variable, two factors that often render casual health advice at best worthless, and at worst dangerous. The Internet is a good start for research, a terrible substitute for professional diagnostics. If something’s wrong with your body, find a medical doctor sympathetic to alt health who can diagnose you, and take your Internet print-outs along to your exam. /end sermon

I rarely use herbal supplements. I don’t trust them to contain what they say they’re going to contain, and if perchance they do, taking them amounts to self-medicating, and I don’t believe that as a lay person I have adequate information to do that cavalierly. Although I fully support other peoples’ right to use them.

My main alt health strategy is to put into my body foodstuffs that are as close as possible to what I imagine humans were evolved to eat. Yeah, I know there is a lot of arguing going on about that, too. But some of it is quite simple nonetheless. Avoid too much processed food, eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (I try for at least 7-9 servings a day), go for the nutrient-dense stuff.

The funny thing is, that rule has steered me toward choices that tend to preshadow trends. I started avoiding trans fats, for instance, in the 1980s. Switched to whole grains about that same time. Never quit eating eggs. Etc.

So, on that thin basis, I claim adequate authority to compose this post :-)

Anyway, we’ll know in time whether my authority pans out, since I’m doing this publicly. So here it is: alt health trends I predict will be getting major mainstream attention within the next five to ten years:

1. Seed oils bad, bad, bad. Categorize this as a trend we should have dodged: I predict that soon the worm will turn and we’ll be demonizing seed oils — corn and canola oils, in particular — with the same vigor we now demonize trans fats. See The Weston Price Foundation articles on fats or read Ray Peat’s article on unsaturated oil if you want the background on this one. In place of seed oils, recommendations will be coconut, palm, and olive oils, plus butter and lard, of course. Mmmmm, lard.

2. Probiotics for oral health. Speaking of mmmmmm, we’ll soon be seeing mouthwashes designed to innoculate the mouth with “good bacteria.” Health claims will start with controlling breath odor, preventing gum disease, preventing tooth decay, and perhaps even strengthening enamel. At least one dentist is already on it. Probiotics packagers will be next. Additional claims may play on the link between oral health and other health issues, such as heart disease and maybe even cancer.

3. Probiotics for skin health. Because, yanno, why not. The skin is a microorganism habitat, too.

4. The body’s glandular system will be cast in a starring alt health role. Thyroid function in particular will emerge as fundamental to a new model of alt health treatment. The result will be near madness as journalists pump out the usual “this may save your life and also avoid it, it’s too new and scary” trends articles and every supplement manufacturer and would-be health guru in this country and the next scramble to sell you their books and supplements.

5. Bioidentical hormones will be enlisted for period suppression and possibly even birth control. Now that the “no period pill” has its own marketing campaign, alt health-savvy women will start asking whether their compounding pharmacists can’t do the same with bioidentical hormones. Off-off label use of hormone therapy will ensue.

6. Natural vision therapy will address presbyopia. Natural vision therapy is a fairly mature subgenre within the alt health canon, but it’s failed so far to penetrate mainstream awareness the way, for example, vitamins have. Too bad, because our eyesight situation is a mess. Anyway. Today natural vision mostly deals with myopia (nearsightedness) and hyperopia (non age-related farsightedness). I predict that the aging boomers are, even now, working on applying vision therapy to presbyopia — the difficulty with near vision associated with aging — and in the very near future we’ll start seeing self-help books on the subject begin to crop up. (I blogged here about my experience with using vision therapy for myopia.)

There, those are the Big Ones that I can think of right now. I’ll add to the list if any more come to mind.

There are others that aren’t quite as risky to make or I’d list them, too. Vitamin D will be the next Vitamin Darling. Full spectrum lighting will move over to make room for lighting that projects specific colors, including regimens that incorporate blue light to help people sleep better. Official recommendations on number of servings/day of fruits and vegetables will be revised upwards. (Beat the crowd, buy a juicer.)

Oh, one other thing. If you read this and find yourself inspired with a business plan that eventually makes you a zillionnaire you owe me a very nice dinner. Or at least an antioxidant-laden glass of most excellent red wine :-)

Seeing is believing

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me sixth grade

At some point in fifth grade, I noticed the blackboard in Mrs. Marshman’s math class was blurry. I mentioned it to my parents, and within a few weeks had been fitted with my first pair of glasses.

I didn’t submit to the experience wholeheartedly, by any means. Most troubling was the sense that I was now damaged in some way. Poor eyesight is a mild disability for sure, generally more a nuisance than a crippler. Still, the finality of it weighed on me. It also complicated things. My eyeglass lenses were constantly in need of cleaning, the frames would get knocked about and no longer fit, and then, of course, came puberty, and to my other insecurities came the added burden of a reputation for braini-slash-nerdiness — of which my glasses were an obvious sign.

college photoThe body is always in a state of flux, of course, and once pointed in the direction of poor vision dutifully explores that trajectory; the silver lining was that as my eyesight worsened I swapped the hornrims for gold wire rims, and later contact lenses. Not quite so homely.

But I still hated them.

Then I learned about William Bates, an early 20th Century physician who had made the astonishing claim that poor eyesight is learned — and can be unlearned.

I read his book, Better Eyesight Without Glasses, tossed my contacts aside, and began muddling about the world without my visual crutch.

I was encouraged at first. With my eyes freed to function more naturally, my vision improved quite a bit right away; my right eye (the “weaker” of the two) went from 20/180 to 20/80 or so.

But 20/20 vision eluded me. I could induce it for short periods — I’ve passed vision tests, twice, for my driver’s license — but much of the time my world was still blurry. I didn’t put my glasses back on. But sometimes I wondered if the received wisdom wasn’t correct, after all. It seemed that perhaps poor eyesight is inescapable, a curse bestowed by our genes or the modern necessity of being tethered to close-up work, reading, computers.

Now I know differently.

The clues I needed were in another book, Relearning to See, by Thomas Quackenbush. I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my discovery, but the upshot is that I needed to relax and stop trying to see. By trying to see, I was distorting either the shape or the alignment of my eyeballs. When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, the world around clears.

This isn’t a purely physical change. On the contrary, Candace Pert is right on when she says the body is the subconscious mind. Granted, straining to see has a measurable effect on the physical body (this image

myopia

is one Quackenbush reprinted from Bates’ Perfect Sight Without Glasses; the woman had perfect vision at the time the leftmost photo was taken. In the middle photo she has myopia — see how her eyes look different? And on the right, she’s furrowing her brow as she tries to see) — but it is first and foremost a condition of being. Put another way: my vision began to blur when I was a child not because my eyes were failing but because as I transitioned from early childhood into social awareness — when I began valuing how others viewed me — a kind of habitual anxiety that defined my relationship to myself hardened into fact. Little wonder the world around me went dim.

When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, I feel something that affects more than my eyes. It’s like sinking back into a comfortable chair, a state of being in which I am letting go instead of struggling. The clarity of my vision is ancillary: a function of a different vantage point rather than a different way to hold the muscles of my eyes.

Quackenbush touches on this as well in his book, writing:

The individual with blurred vision is interfering with the normal, relaxed way of using the mind and body.

Plenty has been said about the way we modern folk are so stressed; how we react to non-physical stimuli with the same fight/flight response our forebears depended upon to escape saber toothed tigers. But how many of us realize that this response literally distorts our experience? It’s a perversion of our ability to think abstractly: we wrap ourselves in a kind of continual low-grade nightmare, little realizing that our anxiety defines what we can touch and know.

“Cultivate a habit of relaxation.” It’s the first New Year’s resolution on my list, because I’ve begun to understand that everything else flows from it . . .

The body electric

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I expected something different from Candace Pert’s latest book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d. For starters, the title’s a bit of a bait to the text’s switch. You aren’t going to find that promised Everything here. In fact, you aren’t going to find much, if any self helpy advicey stuff.

Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d Candace Pert

What you’re going to find, instead, are two other books. The one that takes up the most room is an autobiographical account of Pert’s efforts to deal with personal “issues” she’s realized have sabotaged her efforts to realize her vision of an AIDS cure. Pert and her husband, Michael Ruff, have pioneered research on peptides that block the receptors that permit the AIDS virus to enter cells (Pert’s a recognized experts in peptides and peptide receptors; as a graduate student in the 1970s, she proved the existence of opiate receptors). The original research they did was funded by the National Institute of Health; the two have been fighting for years, now, to wrest control of it from others who, for various reasons, have either quashed it or tried to leverage it for other, less compelling causes. This content is no doubt of interest to Pert’s fans, and will no doubt be a useful model to people struggling through parallel difficulties, but it’s not what I was looking for when I bought the book.

The other book got me excited. Unfortunately, it’s on the thin side: bits scattered here and there, primarily as summaries of presentations Pert has given over the last couple of years during her many public appearances.

The first bit peeks out at us right away, when Pert tells us she believes in something even more radical than “mind over matter. ” She believes that “mind becomes matter” — and that there is “real science” to support that assertion.

By sorting out the autobiographical diary-of-a-seeker stuff, one is able to find hints of that science. A big piece of it is that James Oschman (with whom Pert has collaborated on another book) has proposed “a physical structure in the body composed primarily of collagenous fibers, the kind that make up your connective tissue.” This structure, which Oschman calls “the matrix,” connects and penetrates every cell of the body, “a new understanding that flies in the face of the classical view of cells as empty little bags whose interior isn’t hooked up to existing structures.”

The significance of this structure, Pert writes, is that it’s “actually a semiconductor, a substance capable of supporting fast-paced, electrical activity . . . [I]n many ways, it’s like a giant liquid crystal.”

Apparently peptides — some of which we recognize as neurotransmitters that affect mood, e.g. serotonin — cause our cells to give off electrical signals which are transmitted by/across this structure. In other words, when we resonate with an emotion, we really are resonating. Furthermore, others around us can be affected by this resonance, rather like a tuning fork, rung, can cause another tuning fork to vibrate. You know the old quandary about how could a flock of birds sitting in a tree suddenly take off at once, as if they were one organism? Well, based on Pert seems to be saying, they are one organism: they are matrices within a greater matrix . As are the crowds of people at a concert or sporting event or political rally or church service.

Our body can also store charges — i.e., past emotional charges can be recorded by or imprinted in our bodies, causing us to essentially “lock in” to certain habitual ways of feeling or responding emotionally.

There are some other bits as well about the frequencies of music, color, and brain waves sharing identical wavelengths. Put it together and there’s the suggestion that, for example, our emotional response to music can be attributed the way the tones stimulate our cells’ neurotransmitter receptors. Wild. Wish there was more of that kind of stuff in the book.

Mainstream medicine . . . catching up

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bowl of dirt
I hate to be the one who says “I told you so” but when the pointed commentary fits ;-)

The news wires are carrying, today, a story about research showing a correlation between obesity and gut flora.

They aren’t sure what the relationship means, yet. Specifically, nobody knows if, say, inoculating the gut with certain strains of microbe could promote weight loss.

But at least they’re finally acknowledging that gut microbes play a role in human health. Kind of like what the alt health crowd has been saying for, oh, thirty-odd years now?

Long live bacteria

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Here’s a tribute [UPDATE: link no longer good, ah, the fickle Interwebs] (by Lynn Margulis and Emily Case, in Orion) to the little critters.

Some of the language of the piece is a bit much — you just can’t use “xenophobia” to characterize anyone’s attitude toward germs. LOL

But if you cut the authors some slack, the piece makes some good points. We do have to stop categorically demonizing bacteria — and touting sterilization as the magic bullet of disease prevention:

Bacteria also sustain us on a very local, intimate scale. They produce necessary vitamins inside our guts. Babies rely on milk, food, and finger-sucking to populate their intestines with bacteria essential for healthy digestion. And microbial communities thrive in the external orifices (mouth, ears, anus, vagina) of mammals, in ways that enhance metabolism, block opportunistic infection, ensure stable digestive patterns, maintain healthy immune systems, and accelerate healing after injury. When these communities are depleted, as might occur from the use of antibacterial soap, mouthwash, or douching, certain potentially pathogenic fungi—like Candida or vaginal yeast disorders—can begin to grow profusely on our dead and dying cells. Self-centered antiseptic paranoia, not the bacteria, is our enemy here.

Yeah, “self-centered.” LOL

Well. If we eschew blaming laypeople for fearing germs, it’s clear that we consumers are not the real culprit. We do the best we can with what scientists and the media tell us.

Laypeople can’t be expected to challenge something as seemingly self-evident as “E coli-tainted food can kill ya.” Particularly when scary stories about poison spinach and undercooked burgers and raw milk are shoved down our throats with grim regularity.

The real culprit is medical research: researchers who’ve spent the last 100+ years playing the whodunnit game that guys like Pasteur got started — and, as a result, haven’t bothered asking broader questions about microbial ecology.

But one of these days, we’re going to wake up and realize that one of our most powerful tools for fighting disease is to colonize our bodies with certain strains of bacteria (and other organisms too, probably). Like what we whole foodies do with yogurt and kefir only taken to a whole new level.

That will be a healthy development ;-)