Month: December 2010

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that in addition to taking drugs for conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma, children are now taking things like sleeping pills, diabetes drugs and even statin drugs, which are typically only prescribed for adults. The report cites an eight-year-old boy, for example, who has been taking blood pressure medications since he was a baby.

Dr. Danny Benjamin, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University, admitted to the WSJ that prescribing chronic medications to children is a serious problem. "We know we're making errors in dosing and safety," he said, noting also that parents must do more to question the safety of medicines their doctors prescribe.

Experts worry that the increasing prevalence of children on prescription drugs is causing these young people serious harm, and that parents should instead seek out dietary and lifestyle changes for their children. But because many doctors continue to dole out the drugs like candy, despite known dangers, many parents just accept them for their children without giving it a second thought.

And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has done little, if anything, to warn the public about the dangers of using chronic prescription drugs, especially in small children. Safety studies in young people are not necessarily required in order for doctors to prescribe adult medications to children, as long as the drug is already FDA-approved.

"Our data suggest that the association between vitamin D and wheezing, which can be a symptom of many respiratory diseases and not just asthma, is largely due to respiratory infections," explained Camargo in a statement. "Acute respiratory infections are a major health problem in children. For example, bronchiolitis — a viral illness that affects small airway passages in the lungs — is the leading cause of hospitalization in U.S. infants."

The team evaluated data from over 1,000 children in New Zealand. Researchers analyzed samples of umbilical cord blood taken from 922 of them and found that 20 percent were very deficient in vitamin D, with levels below 25 nmol/L. Average levels were 44 nmol/L, which is still considered low as many now consider levels as high as 100 nmol/L to be a healthy amount.

After comparing the data, the team found that infants with vitamin D blood levels below 25 nmol/L were twice as likely as infants with levels above 75 nmol/L to develop respiratory infections. And incidentally, children with the highest blood levels of vitamin D had the lowest risk of developing wheezing or other respiratory illness by age five, and vice versa.

Though the team did not observe a specific correlation between vitamin D and asthma risk, Camargo explained that vitamin D may actually play a very important role in mitigating asthma symptoms.

"There's a likely difference here between what causes asthma and what causes existing asthma to get worse," he said. "Since respiratory infections are the most common cause of asthma exacerbations, vitamin D supplements may help to prevent those events, particularly during the fall and winter when vitamin D levels decline and exacerbations are more common. That idea needs to be tested in a randomized clinical trial, which we hope to do next year."

Lawrence Payne, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently told AOL News that steroid use among cops is a "big problem" and that "it's something we shouldn't ignore." After all, numerous investigations have revealed an alarmingly high rate of use, including an investigation in New Jersey that pinned 248 cops and 53 firefighters with steroid use.

Former South Bend police officer Tony Macik, for instance, served a 300-day jail sentence for dealing steroids and assaulting one of his wife's co-workers, an incident likely related to steroid use (http://www.wndu.com/localnews/headl…). And an 84-year-old Florida man who suffered a broken neck after being tackled by Officer Travis Lamont from the Orlando Police Department says that Lamont's "erratic, sporadic and aggressive behavior" was indicative of steroid use (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/s…).

And there are countless other cases of both steroid use and possession among officers across the country. But because most people are unaware of it, little is being done to stop the practice. Officers are not necessarily even required to undergo drug testing, and some departments say that forcing officers to get tested for drugs after they assault citizens violates their rights.

According to Larry Gaines, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, San Bernardino, steroid use has escalated among police officers largely due to increased emphasis on strength and fitness. And because officers are not in the limelight in the same way that professional athletes are, most of society remains clueless and unconcerned about the resulting widespread negative effects.

(NaturalNews) A recent report published in the journal HortTechnology has revealed that, despite literally being green, grass and lawn care management techniques are far from being "green" in the environmental sense. Even though organic lawn care techniques exist and work just as well, if not better than, conventional methods, most homeowners and professional lawn care companies continue to use toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers instead.

 

Researchers from Purdue University in Indiana compared four different lawn care techniques to see which ones fared best in terms of overall lawn health and aesthetic appearance. They found that organic methods typically work just as well as conventional ones, but many people are either unaware of this, or falsely believe that organic methods are somehow inferior.

Victoria A. Caceres, Cale A. Bigelow and Douglas S. Richmond, authors of the study, explained that the reason organic methods have not been more widely adopted involves "a combination of high aesthetic standards and a perceived lack of reliability or cost effectiveness associated with biologically based alternatives." But in reality the team found that "the natural organic program produced lawns of similar quality on the majority of rating dates."

Besides aesthetics and effectiveness, the team also measured the economic differences in terms of overall costs among the management methods. They found that the organic method cost more than the competing conventional methods, indicating that many consumers are likely still using conventional methods simply because they are cheaper.

However, a 2008 study conducted by the National Gardening Association found that interest in organic lawn care methods is growing. Between 2004 and 2008, there was a seven percent increase in the use of organic lawn management techniques. One such technique is adding clover to grass seed to naturally provide soil with needed nutrients like nitrogen.

 

(NaturalNews) Herbal remedies are a centuries-old gout treatment that remains widely used even today. Gout arthritis, or simply gout, is a one of the most painful forms of rheumatism. It is an arthritic condition resulting from an accumulation of uric acid crystals in the joints, particularly the large joint of the big toe, causing intense pain and acute inflammation. You can treat gout naturally with herbal remedies.

 

Black Currant Leaf Herbal Tea

In his book "Jude's Herbal Home Remedies," Jude Todd recommends drinking black currant leaf herbal tea as a natural gout treatment. Add one tablespoon of chopped black currant leaf to one cup of boiling water, cover and let steep for about 10 minutes. Strain the herbal tea and drink a cup three times a day.

Cherry Stems Decoction

Drink a cherry herbal tea decoction brewed from cherry stems. Add one cup of cherry stems to 2 cups of water. Bring the mixture to a boil and then let it simmer for half an hour. Strain the decoction and stir in 2 cups of honey. Drink a cup three times a day.

Charcoal Foot Soak

Lihua Wang, in the book "Chinese Home Remedies," writes that a charcoal foot soak is an ancient Chinese home remedy for gout in the foot. Boil 8 ounces of charcoal in water for 10 minutes. Remove the charcoal, let it dry and then wrap it in a cotton fabric bag. Place the bag in a container large enough to hold your feet, and add enough warm water to submerge your feet in it. Soak feet in the charcoal water for 30 minutes, once daily for a month.

Strawberry Leaf Herbal Tea

Steep 4 to 5 fresh strawberry leaves in one cup of boiling water for 10 to 15 minutes. Strain the strawberry herbal tea, add honey and drink two to three times a day. Alternatively, Jude Todd notes that one folk remedy recommends eating strawberries and nothing else for two days.

Water

One of the easiest remedies for gout treatment is simply water, notes Bill Gottlieb in his book "Alternative Cures," because gout is caused by high levels of uric acid in the body. Once you have had an attack of gout, it is important to flush excess uric acid from the body with water by drinking about a gallon per day. It also dilutes the concentration of uric acid in the body. Water is not only helpful as a stand-alone remedy but also complements other treatments of gout as well.

(NaturalNews) Nearly one million people fall victim to heart disease every year. The vast majority of these people are unaware that this devastating condition can be prevented with a natural approach to diet. Researchers from the European EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) study have developed a plan that can reduce the risk of coronary artery disease by 81%. Medical researchers understand that heart disease begins early in life and progresses to threaten life as we approach our senior years. The good news is that heart disease can be controlled and reversed by making simple changes to lifestyle and diet.

 

Drugs Can`t Fix Heart Disease
The typical patient diagnosed with heart disease is placed on a low fat diet and given a handful of medications including statins. Statins cause muscle pain in 40% of those who take them, and information from a study published in The Lancet journal confirms that this class of medication causes diabetes. Volumes of research confirm that high cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, yet it remains a popular target of treatment because it`s easy to lower with drugs. Similarly, a low fat diet perpetuates and worsens heart disease as it triggers continual blood sugar surges and high triglycerides.

Correcting the Real Cause of Heart Disease
The results of the EPIC study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine demonstrate that changes in diet could lower the risk of a heart attack by 81% through inflammation reduction and lowering blood pressure. The study highlighted four dietary factors that result in heart disease.

Refined Carbohydrates, Grains and Sugar: Processed foods have become a staple in the typical diet. These foods are loaded with simple carbs that quickly break down to glucose and cause rapid blood sugar spikes. This eventually leads to insulin resistance and damages the delicate inner endothelial lining of the coronary arteries. Cut all breads, pasta, rice, sugary treats and any foods made with wheat (including whole grain) or corn.

Excess Omega-6 Vegetable Oils: Vegetable oils are used in virtually all baked and processed foods to enhance flavor and increase shelf life. Excess amounts of vegetable fats trigger the release of inflammatory chemical messengers that increase oxidative stress and damage the vascular system. Vegetable oils are only stable at room temperature and should not be used for cooking. Avoid all fried foods and corn fed meats.

Omega-3 Fat Deficiency: Our modern diet is virtually void of health-sustaining Omega-3 fats that have been a part of the human diet for countless generations. The proper ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fats is ideally 1:1. Experts agree that many people are closer to a 20:1 ratio. This creates an imbalance and promotes systemic inflammation. Include tuna, salmon, sardines, nuts and seeds to balance your fat ratio or include a high potency fish oil supplement.

Oxidative Stress: The normal course of breathing, eating and moving generates free radicals that can damage our genetic structure and cause LDL cholesterol to become oxidized. We can`t avoid the process entirely but we can include healthy quantities of fresh vegetables, berries and targeted supplements to negate the effects of free radicals on our heart and other organs.

Heart disease is the leading killer of people in western society. Most of these deaths can be prevented by following a natural diet and adopting a healthy lifestyle. Reduce your risk of death from heart disease by making these changes today and live to pass the word to your great grandchildren.

What these vaccine advocates absolutely will not admit, however, is how many of those who are sick with the flu this year also got vaccinated last year. This little detail is left out of every mainstream media report on vaccines and the flu. They simply refuse to mention this all-important number, leaving readers to leap to the incorrect conclusion that only those who were not vaccinated get sick with the flu.

Most infected patients were previously vaccinated
That assumption is false. In fact, of the 450 critical care beds in England that are now occupied by flu patients, I have no doubt that most of those infected patients are people who received flu vaccines in the past.

Such statistics are never made available to the public or the press, of course. To release such statistics would expose the Great Lie of the vaccine industry: That flu vaccines simply don't work on 99 percent of people!

In fact, the people who are most susceptible to catching the flu are precisely the very same people who get vaccinated. Why is that? Because vaccines weaken the immune system in the long run, leaving you more vulnerable to future infections. They deny your immune system the opportunity to practice its own adaptive response to invading microorganisms or viruses, thereby causing your immune system to atrophy in the same way that a wheelchair-bound person will experience leg muscle atrophy.

The immune system is a lot like a muscle: Use it or lose it!

But flu vaccines provide weakened viruses to the immune system (along with other preservative chemicals that can be extremely dangerous to neurological health). It's sort of like working out your muscles at the gym but having your trainer do all the heavy lifting for you. Obviously you're not going to have very strong muscles in the end because your body won't need to invoke a very strong adaptive response.

The same is true with vaccines and the flu: If your body is exposed to weakened flu viruses year after year, it gets lazy and weak, and when it one day comes into contact with a full-strength virus circulating in the wild, it's not in good enough shape to handle the challenge.

Vitamin D deficiency is widespread in Britain
At the same time this is going on, a person who is vitamin D deficient will also have an alarmingly weak immune system response because vitamin D activates the immune system to do its job. In people with extremely low vitamin D levels, even vaccines containing weakened viruses won't solicit an antibody response. But instead of testing patients for vitamin D deficiency and prescribing that with the vaccine, conventional medical doctors and contagious disease authorities robotically urge everyone to just "get multiple vaccine shots" as if following one failed vaccine with yet another failed vaccine will somehow make them both work.

That's idiotic, of course. And the other idiotic thing about all this is that if people had sufficient levels of vitamin D circulating in their blood, they wouldn't need seasonal flu vaccines in the first place! That's because a strong, healthy immune system with lots of circulating vitamin D is universally effective at halting ALL seasonal flu strains, with near 100% success in those with vitamin D levels between 50 – 70 (ng/dL).

The three main reasons behind Britain's flu pandemic
So the real reason Britain is suffering a swine flu pandemic right now is actually three-fold:

#1) It's winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and Britain is so far north (of the equator) that the people living there aren't currently generating any vitamin D whatsoever. This makes virtually the entire British population ridiculously vitamin D deficient throughout the winter.

#2) The majority of the British population has been subjected to flu vaccines in previous years, weakening their immune systems and making them more vulnerable to this year's flu strains.

#3) The flu strain itself is so successful in the wild precisely because so many Britons walk around in chronic states of immune suppression (from vitamin D deficiency, chronic stress, poor dietary habits and so on). This creates a "viral breeding ground" which encourages more rapid virus mutations that make vaccines obsolete anyway.

The question you are not allowed to ask vaccine quacks
The vaccine-pushing quack medical community believes that if they could magically convince 100 percent of the people to get vaccinated, they would have this problem licked. In their own minds, they have unscientifically convinced themselves that a vaccine equals automatic and full protection against a flu virus.

And yet even they won't dare ask this simple question: Of all the people sick from the flu who are right now lying in Britain's hospital beds, what percentage were vaccinated against the flu last year or this year?

The answer to that question will expose the outright fraud of the vaccine industry because the answer is a very large number. No one in the medical industry dares ask that question, of course, because they realize that delving into the actual re-infection rate of flu vaccine recipients would expose their quackery and fraud, causing yet more people to lose faith in vaccines which are, after all, sold based entirely on misplaced faith and clever propaganda.

The flu vaccine propaganda, of course, demands that people never be allowed to collide with the scientific facts about how many people who are vaccinated against the flu still catch the flu anyway. (The flu re-infection rate.) That's why you will NEVER see an honest answer to this question released by hospitals, vaccine companies or vaccine-pushing doctors.

Keep taking your flu jabs, everybody. But don't ask whether they actually work, because that question isn't allowed to be asked in the cult of medicine that dominates the sick-care landscape around the world today.

We wouldn't want actual science to interfere with a really profitable con job now, would we?

by: David Gutierrez

"This research is very welcome and adds to the growing weight of evidence about the many benefits of breastfeeding," said Janet Fyle of the United Kingdom's Royal College of Midwives.

Researchers followed 926 new mothers and their infants for the first 12 months, tracking infections and breastfeeding habits. All participants lived in Greece and had access to high-quality health care throughout the study.

In contrast with the low breastfeeding rates found in the United States, 91 percent of infants in the study were exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life (as recommended by all major world health bodies). These infants were significantly less likely to acquire infections during their first year than infants who had been bottle fed, or who had been fed both breast milk and formula. When breast-fed children did contract infections, their illness was less severe than that experienced by bottle-fed children.

These associations remained strong even after adjusting for potentially confounding factors including number of siblings or tobacco smoke exposure.

"Mothers should be advised by health professionals that, in addition to all the other benefits, exclusive breastfeeding helps prevent infections in babies and lessens the frequency and severity of infectious episodes," the researchers wrote.

Although health experts agree that breastfeeding is best for mothers and infants, mothers in many nations still face many obstacles to exclusive breastfeeding, including short maternity leaves and even social stigma.

"We know that breastfeeding is the default method of infant feeding for babies; good for mothers and good for the health of the nation," Fyle said. "That is why we need to continue our efforts to ensure that we maintain a high rate of breastfeeding in the United Kingdom … and to move away from some of the outdated and negative stigma that is depressingly still attached to it, specifically breastfeeding in public."

(NaturalNews) Agricultural crops can absorb pharmaceuticals found in the water used to irrigate them or the sewage sludge used to fertilize them, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Toledo-Ohio and published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

When humans consume pharmaceuticals, active traces of those drugs are excreted in their feces and urine. Modern treatment methods for water and sewage do nothing to remove these biologically active chemicals.

Previous studies have shown that crops grown directly in animal manure can absorb veterinary drugs, and that cabbages grown hydroponically can absorb human drugs. To simulate more natural agricultural conditions, researchers grew soybeans — the second most widely planted crop in the United States — in regular soil. Half the crops were fertilized with solid waste, while the other half were irrigated with chemical-spiked water. In order to simulate the reclaimed sewage or wastewater commonly used in industrial agriculture, the researchers spiked water and waste with the drugs carbamazepine (an anticonvulsant), diphenhydramine (Benadryl) and fluoxetine (Prozac), along with the common antimicrobial chemicals triclosan and triclocarban.

Using mass spectrometry, the researchers then analyzed the plants' tissues just before flowering and after the production of beans. The plants absorbed carbamazepine, triclocarban and triclosan from both soil and water, although absorption from water was greater. All three chemicals accumulated in root tissues, stems and leaves, while the antimicrobial compounds also accumulated in the beans. Diphenhydramine and fluoxetine accumulated in low concentrations in the roots.

The health effects of this absorption remain unknown, but they could be severe. Triclosan, for example, has been shown to build up in the bodies of humans and other animals.

"Triclosan disrupts hormones, can affect sexual function and fertility, and may foster birth defects," write Frank Lipman and Mollie Doyle in their book Spent: Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Feel Great Again.

"If you find those compounds in the plant, what are they going to do to the plants or to animals that eat the plants?" researcher Chenxi Wu asked.

(NaturalNews) Australian organic farmer Steve Marsh recently had his organic certification status pulled by the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture, Australia (NASAA) because his organic wheat field was contaminated by a nearby genetically-modified (GM) canola field. And after Marsh threatened to sue the GM farmer for the incident — which has cost Marsh his entire business, by the way — Monsanto, the owner of the GM canola, came out and said it would legally back the GM farmer "in any way [it] could."

A previous NaturalNews report on the issue explains that GM canola materials blew from a nearby GM field about a mile away and contaminated over 540 acres of Marsh's organic wheat fields (http://www.naturalnews.com/030686_G…). As a result, Marsh's fields can no longer be considered organic due to very high standards in the Australian organic industry that hold a "zero tolerance" policy concerning contamination with foreign genetic material.

But rather than work towards prosecuting both the GM farmer and Monsanto for the environmental damage they caused, West Australia Minister for Agriculture and Food, Terry Redman, is instead going after the organic industry, urging it to modify its contamination standards to accommodate Monsanto. Redman has declared that perfect purity is "unrealistic" and that a maximum contamination threshold needs to be established for GM contamination of organics.

But neither Marsh nor the organic industry is taking the toxic bait. Despite efforts by Redman to persuade Marsh to influence the NASAA to compromise its high standards, Marsh has indicated that he plans to sue the farmer for ruining his business, following the release a pending government investigation of the matter. And Monsanto, of course, has promised to help defend the GM farmer in the event of a lawsuit.