September 2007 Health in the News Archive

[ Monthly Index of New Briefs ]

Magazines used to be chock full of stinky perfume samples until consumer complaints limited the practice. And with increasing numbers of people suffering from allergies or aware of the dangers of chemicals used to make smells, offices have had to limit the use of perfume.

Odors should be confined to situations where people want them.

But get ready for a full assault on your senses. Sensory-based branding and marketing in modern retail is touted in industry journals as the latest thing. It will be interesting to see if KFC's pilot project succeeds.

I think I hear Linus Pauling, the "father of Vitamin C," saying "I told you so!"

All too often, simple nutrients get no respect. Translation – it is not possible to get a patent on a simple nutrient, and pharmaceutical companies cannot make money from them. There is no army of salesmen educating doctors about the curative properties of natural nutrients.

Relationships among particular diseases or illnesses and diet have long been recorded throughout history. The more processed food becomes a mainstay of the diet, the less people eat fresh, whole foods with their natural complement of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.

Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for his work with Vitamin C. But when he first published his findings in 1970, he was attacked by the medical establishment and the medical journals. The "establishment" is way overdue to recognize that Nature's gifts should be emphasized to prevent disease in the first place.

Stevia is a zero calorie plant-based sweetener that has been used for hundreds of years. In Japan, 40% of the sweeteners consumed are said to be from stevia. But here in the U.S., possibly due to lobbying of the FDA by competing products, stevia has been hidden in the shadows by strange labeling requirements. In the U.S. stevia is a dietary ingredient permitted in supplements but not in food.

According to the American Herbal Products Association, "Stevia leaf is a natural product that has been used for at least 400 years as a food product, principally as a sweetener or other flavoring agent. None of this common usage in foods has indicated any evidence of a safety problem. There are no reports of any government agency in any of the above countries indicating any public health concern whatsoever in connection with the use of stevia in foods."

On the FDA's own website, a GRAS petition submitted to FDA in 1995 cited over 900 Stevia studies, none of which indicated any safety concerns regarding human health.

It's no secret that standard table sugar (sucrose) and its even worse cousin, high-fructose corn syrup, rots teeth, leads to obesity, and is a major contributor to diabetes. So over the years chemical companies have concocted an armada of synthetic sugar alternatives such as saccharin and aspartame, but they have been linked to everything from cancer to neurological disorders.

Marketplace forces are pressuring for increased use of stevia. In May, 2007, Coca-Cola Co and Cargill Inc., said they would work together to market stevia, despite lack of FDA approval. Are we seeing battle lines being drawn between three powerful lobbying groups – the sugar lobby, the aspartame lobby, and the soft drink manufacturers?

I am not a fan of soda pop, but this is one time I find myself rooting for the soft drink manufacturers.

This is great news!

The state of Florida even went so far as trying to ban HFCS from schools last year, but the legislation was never signed into law.

HFCS is metabolized to fat in your body far more rapidly than any other sugar. It triggers the "browning reaction" where certain carbohydrate molecules bind with proteins and cause aging. It's sometimes called the Maillard reaction. It changes the structure of enzymes and other proteins, resulting in tissue and organ damage. The corn from which HFCS is made nearly all comes from genetically modified corn which has adds even more health concerns to the picture.

Consumers have more power than they may think. The more people learn about how food impacts their health, the more they demand change. And the marketplace responds to consumer demand.

I find that the point of view taken on this matter is more important than even the findings.

"… the system is not adequately protecting patients…" the analysis said. Well, yes and no.

Yes - because conventional medicine is recognizing pharmaceutical drugs are problematic, from how they get approved despite negative studies to how they do not work as hoped in people.

No - because conventional medicine is much too quick to look to fix problems with a synthetic, patentable substance from a laboratory rather than with organic nutrients that for thousands of years nourished mankind.

Approximately 80 percent of doctors' visits are made by people with chronic illness. Their arthritis, their "bad back pain" and other ailments were usually years in the making. We simply cannot fix these with a magic pill overnight. Increasingly we are seeing that chronic inflammation plays a part in many chronic illnesses, especially cancer and auto-immune diseases. What caused the inflammation? Simply suppressing the symptom will not bring healing and at worse, brings adverse reactions, even death in some cases.

It is much easier to cause cancer in mice than it is in people. Lab mice are prone to develop cancers at an injection site, regardless of what was injected. And there is no documentation to suggest animals with implants are developing tumors.

We implant pacemakers and stents and other foreign objects into human bodies but these are not related to tumor growth that I have ever read in the literature

To date, the use of the chips has been to transmit medical data. Having worked in an emergency room for many years, I can tell you how valuable a medical history can be, when the patient is unconscious or otherwise incapacitated.

To some, the microchip is a high-tech wonder that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities find Alzheimer's patients, and allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.

To others, the practice of tagging people would eventually be mandatory for convicts, then parolees, then illegal immigrants, then people with certain diseases or genetic markers — until one day, virtually all Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged and unable to spend money if the government chose to "turn off" their chip. Mistrust runs deep.

"We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action — some would even claim, our very thoughts — will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," says Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For better or worse, chips are already embedded in some human employees, Michelin tires, library books, passports and in a variety of items sold at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

There is a question whether the German government actually made such a decree - which would be the most damning ruling to date by any government.

The Independent has been crusading about the dangers of WiFi; Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews.com suggests the newspaper went overboard. Fleishman wrote the next day that the "ruling" was actually a response by the Environment Ministry to the German Parliament about the government's knowledge of the deployment of Wi-Fi hotspots and the risks. Problem is, the document is in German, not English.

Ruling or not, it underscores the inability of the telecommunication companies to stop people from examining the health risks of wireless technology.

WiFi - that ability in the internet cafes worldwide to use the Internet remotely - is convenient. But saturating an entire city with WiFi adds to the existing burden of "electrosmog." People already receive exposures from a wide range of other everyday products - from baby monitors and electric blankets, to TV signals and ubiquitous cell phones.

And many are worried. In 2004 for example, the U.S. International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) decided they would not permit cell phone antennas on firehouses; citywide WiFi uses a signal strength similar to cell phones.

Research is mired controversy, but health concerns center upon DNA damage, tumors, childhood leukemia, and electrohypersensitivity (brain fog, headache, nausea, joint pain, heart palpitations and more). In August, an international working group of scientists, researchers and public health policy professionals (The BioInitiative Working Group) released its report on EMF and health. They document serious scientific concerns about current limits regulating how much EMF is allowable from power lines, cell phones, and many other sources of EMF exposure in daily life.

Citywide WiFi is only the latest RFR wireless technology to place us involuntarily at risk.