c r e a t i n g h e a l t h n o w

Plant-based diet greatly reduces risk of cancer, say studies

Three new studies published in the journal of the American Medical Association are proving the benefit of a plant-based diet in greatly reducing the risk of cancer. The studies show that high consumption of fruits and vegetables wards off a variety of cancers. (They also show that consuming red meat multiplies the risk of colon cancer.) Another study in the same issue shows that consuming olive oil reduces the risk of breast cancer.

So here we're talking about a wide variety of cancers: prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, even leukemia and multiple myeloma. And across the board, we're seeing that consuming a plant-based diet is what prevents cancer and enhances health at many different levels, including cardiovascular health.

But here's what's fascinating about this study that you probably haven't heard in the mainstream press: it was conducted on regular, everyday people that are generally consuming unhealthy diets to begin with. Let me explain further: if you select 1000 people out of the population and examine their diets in terms of cancer prevention, the vast majority of those 1000 people are consuming a lot of cancer-causing ingredients in packaged meats (the sodium nitrite ingredient), they're consuming artificial coloring, and they're eating monosodium glutamate and other ingredients that actually promote cancer. And yet, we see that the small amount of fruits and vegetables these people consume actually protects them from the dangerous effects of those ingredients.

Now, if you were to repeat this study and look at the anti-cancer benefit in holistic nutritionists, or people who consume vegetarian organic diets, you would see a much stronger protective effect. The cancer rates in that group would plummet. Because, let's face it, even in the published studies when people talk about eating fruits and vegetables, a lot of the data come from self-reported surveys. And the things that people consider to be fruits are not necessarily healthy fruits. For example, eating apple pie is counted as a fruit in clinical trials. Personally, I wouldn't count that as a fruit. It's a cooked, sugary apple pie made with hydrogenated oils, refined white flour and refined sugar in the crust. To me, that's not fruit. That's junk food. But medical studies call that "fruit."

The same is true with vegetables: a lot of people might think spinach lasagna counts as a vegetable serving. And, again, I consider that to be junk food. It's loaded up with cheese, it probably has some sort of chemical taste enhancer if it's been purchased at the store, it has refined carbohydrates in the crust, and it probably has refined sugar in the tomato sauce. And yes, there's a little bit of spinach in there too, but that's not a vegetable serving. That's just junk food with a bit of spinach filler.

To me, eating spinach means buying raw spinach and having a nice spinach salad, or giving it a Chinese-style stir fry with nothing but garlic and a little bit of soy sauce. That's a real vegetable serving. So if you look across the population at what people consider to be fruits and vegetables, to me it's amazing that there's any health benefit coming out of these studies at all. Because people have distorted definitions of what fruits and vegetables really are. (Some people consider strawberry ice cream to be a serving of fruits!)

As a result, if you observed a group of people in a study and you made sure they ate raw fruits and vegetables and avoided all of the refined, manufactured food products, you would see phenomenal results. If you had people eating raw blueberries, nuts, green leafy vegetables, salads, and consuming whole drinks made from vegetable concentrates, then the results would be vastly different from what you're seeing in these published studies. You'd see diseases like cancer literally vanishing in the group.

And yet even these mainstream studies using unhealthy people on minimal plant diets are showing positive results. It goes to show you that even people who have poor dietary habits can dramatically reduce their risk of cancer by consuming a few fruits and vegetables along with their unhealthy foods.

There's an important side note in all of this too: the common fault of all clinical trials. The population at large is so unbelievably unhealthy that clinical trials using everyday people lose relevance to the nature of healthy human physiology. Because, let's face it, when you're conducting trials on the existing population, you're really only asking the question, "What will be the effect of this treatment or drug or supplement on diseased people?" That's the question you're asking.

So you get all of these study results about prescription drugs or olive oil or nutritional supplements, and really these results only tell you how they operate on unhealthy people. We don't really have any clinical trials being conducted on strictly healthy individuals, because where do you round up 1,000 healthy people who follow an organic, plant-based diet, who engage in regular physical exercise, and who avoid all the metabolic disrupting ingredients that I commonly write about here? Where do you find people like that? Maybe only at a natural health convention, but certainly not in the population at large. Look around: the population is heavily diseased. Why are we basing all modern medical studies on the physiology of diseased people?

(Some medical researchers might answer by saying, "Because that's who we need to treat with the drugs!" And I say, sure, but if you only study unhealthy people, how do you expect to learn anything about the causes of health? You see, modern medicine really only studies disease. That's why med school graduates are generally clueless about nutrition (see related ebook on nutrition) and disease prevention.)

All this leads us to a startling realization, which is that we now have a system of medicine based on a collection of clinical evidence that was derived from studying how unhealthy, chronically diseased, malfunctioning human bodies respond to certain chemicals. That's what we have today. So when people call it evidence based medicine, it's actually not based on any realistic evidence of how healthy bodies might respond. It's all based on running clinical trials with diseased individuals.

That's how conventional medicine smeared the reputation of vitamin E, by the way. Some vitamin E haters rounded up a bunch of people dying from advanced stage heart disease, then they gave them synthetic vitamin E (i.e. a non-natural chemical) in very low doses. When the people started dying off from their heart disease, the researchers put the blame squarely on vitamin E. Hence the bizarre news headlines in late 2004 proclaiming, "Vitamin E will kill you!" It's all nonsense. The people were dying of heart disease in the first place, and the statistics were not adequately adjusted to take expected mortality rates into account.

But getting back to the JAMA studies, we at least now know that eating more plants -- even small portions of those plants -- will vastly improve the health of most people (even diseased people). That much is clear. And if you actually eat real fruits and vegetables instead of processed ones, you'll benefit even more.

Overview:

• Plant-based diet greatly reduces risk of cancer, say studies

Source: http://www.newstarget.com/005070.html

Fad vs. Fat: Popular diets

What's the problem with quick weight loss?

Being overweight has been shown to take a considerable toll on our health, from upping our risk of heart disease to diabetes to some forms of cancer. So you'd think it would be wise to lose weight any way you can. But losing weight on an unsafe diet plan or repeatedly losing and gaining weight, as can happen as a result of fad dieting, can also cause health problems. The vicious cycle of losing and gaining weight is often referred to as yo-yo dieting. While some people may tell you yo-yo dieting can make it harder to lose weight the next time around, a number of studies have shown that to be a myth. But that doesn't mean yo-yo dieting is good for you. One study that was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association suggests that yo-yo dieting may weaken the immune system. The study, which measured immunity by testing the activity of natural killer cells - which fight off viruses such as the common cold, viral pneumonia, herpes, and more - found that postmenopausal women who had ever intentionally lost at least 10 lbs. had weaker immune systems. And the more times the participants had lost 10 or more pounds, the greater the effect. Women who lost weight and kept it off, however, seemed to have stronger immune systems. There is also some evidence that yo-yo dieting may increase your risk of developing high blood pressure and gallstones. But while many experts say the risks associated with yo-yo dieting shouldn't stop you from trying to lose weight if you are overweight, they do underscore the importance of finding a weight-loss plan that will help you not only lose the fat, but keep it off as well. And yo-yo dieting aside, fad diets can have other negative effects on your health. For example, many fad diets are effective for quick, short-term weight loss because they require a very low-calorie diet, which has been linked to gallstones in obese patients. Cutting out particular foods or severely cutting calories may also limit the vitamins, nutrients, and minerals you get from dietary sources, causing a nutritional deficiency. Even if you are losing weight on a more reliable diet plan, you should talk to your doctor, pharmacist or a registered dietitian about whether you need any vitamin supplements.

Vioxx & FDA corruption

Monday, February 21, 2005

With COX-2 decision, no longer any doubt about FDA corruption and U.S. drug racket

Following the death of as many as 60,000 Americans from COX-2 inhibitors (source: British Medical Journal, author Dr. David Graham, FDA drug safety researcher), an FDA advisory panel has now voted to allow the drugs to return to the market with full FDA safety approval. The fact that a single COX-2 drug has reportedly killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War is apparently not sufficient for the FDA to characterize it as unsafe.

With this decision, a "safety approval" by the FDA has now become meaningless. If the agency can put its stamp of public safety approval on a drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans and that was removed from the market by its own manufacturer following the revelation of studies showing alarming increases in heart attack risk, then what, pray tell, could possibly be the FDA's definition of a dangerous drug?

For the FDA to consider a drug dangerous, it apparently has to kill more than 60,000 Americans. I'm curious what threshold must be reached before the FDA actually does its job and seeks to protect the U.S. public. Do 250,000 people have to die before the FDA calls a drug unsafe? 500,000 people? How about a million people?

There can no longer be any doubt whatsoever about the FDA's true purpose. Regardless of what the agency publicly states, when it comes time to make key decisions about the safety of U.S. consumers, the FDA will side with drug companies every time. We've seen it time and time again: with the FDA's reluctance to pull obviously dangerous drugs off the market in a timely fashion (Rezulin, for example), with the FDA's attempts to silence its own drug safety scientists (censorship of Dr. David Graham, for example), and with the FDA's collusion with drug companies in suppressing clinical trials and other forms of evidence that raise safety questions about prescription drugs. Corruption runs deep at the FDA, it seems.

This decision with Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors was a defining moment for the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration. It was a moment where the agency could have sided with public safety and held fast to a position of responsibility and ethics. Instead, it chose to favor drug company profits and put its stamp of approval on a class of drugs that is arguably the most deadly drugs ever to hit the open market.

A sane, ethical FDA would have not only banned COX-2 inhibitors outright, it would have put an end to direct-to-consumer advertising that ultimately led to the over-hyping and over-prescribing of these painkillers in the first place. Most people taking COX-2 inhibitors don't even need them. They would be better off with simple over-the-counter painkillers or, better yet, natural health treatments like nutrition, herbal remedies and supplements that work far better than prescription drugs for stopping arthritis pain (and without all the negative side effects). Astaxanthin supplements, for one, greatly ease arthritis pain. So do whole food concentrates made from cherries, blackberries and other fruits. There are dozens of other natural health strategies that ease pain as well.

To pull off this public charade of a serious meeting about COX-2 inhibitors, meeting organizers paraded a line of pain victims in front of FDA panelists and got them to beg for the availability of COX-2 inhibitors. The implied message was, "If we can't have Vioxx, we'll suffer!" What this faulty argument fails to mention is the whole universe of alternative treatments, healing foods and natural health therapies that end arthritis pain at least as well as prescription drugs. Nowhere was there a discussion of other choices these patients might make to treat their pain. Instead, it was a fool's choice: Vioxx or nothing.

And thus the whole FDA panel meeting was a sham. It was contrived from the start and designed to do one thing: to give the panel justification to reinstate Vioxx and avoid banning COX-2 inhibitors as a class of drugs. This, in turn, would dramatically boost stock prices of drug companies and keep the drug profit machine churning away for years to come. (I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of the people on the FDA advisory panel, by the way, own stock in the very drug companies impacted by this decision.)

It was brilliant theater, but bad medicine. And with this decision, whatever credibility the FDA thought it had remaining has now evaporated. The agency is suddenly the laughing stock of the world. It has taken what many consider to be the most dangerous class of prescription drugs ever introduced and rubber stamped the whole class with the label of "FDA approved."

The very label of "FDA approved" is now synonymous with "Poison." It sort of makes you wonder about all the other drugs the agency has approved, doesn't it? The agency sure has a funny way of defining "safe."

And if you, like many Americans, were holding out in the hopes that the FDA would, for once, do the right thing and protect the American public, you now realize that the agency is so blatantly corrupt that only radical, wholesale reform will ever restore any sense of credibility.

There is an abundance of evidence available right now, published in peer-reviewed medical journals like the British Medical Journal, showing COX-2 inhibitors to be deadly drugs. That's not to mention the internal drug company memos and emails leaked to the press that directly acknowledge the dangers of these drugs. No reasonable person can argue that these drugs are not dangerous. Yet the FDA will no doubt claim there's not enough evidence to show COX-2 inhibitors are dangerous enough to ban them.

I find this fascinating. When the FDA is attacking herbs and nutritional supplements, they will claim there's not enough evidence to prove they are safe. But when it comes to prescription drugs, the agency says there's not enough evidence to prove they're dangerous. All drugs approved by the FDA, it seems, are deemed safe until proven deadly. And even when proven deadly, they apparently aren't deadly enough to warrant banning them.

The FDA is now so clearly the regulatory puppet of Big Pharma that it has proven itself unable to reform from within. It's time for the U.S. public and its legislative representatives to revoke the power of authority over drug safety that has been granted to the FDA in monopoly fashion. It's time to put the power of drug safety into the hands of people who actually care about safety, not those who benefit from drug sales. And it's time to end the oppressive, Dark Ages reign of the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration which is not only complicit in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Americans, but which seems determined to continue its campaign of power and corruption, no matter what the cost in the American lives.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe (PublicCitizen.org) was right all along. I say we team Dr. Wolfe with Dr. Graham and let them run the FDA. They can start by firing all the bureaucrats that landed us in this drug safety mess in the first place.

Overview:

• With COX-2 decision, no longer any doubt about FDA corruption and U.S. drug racket

Source: http://www.newstarget.com/004728.html

change your health for the rest of your life.........

Why You Need Nutritional Supplements
for the Rest of Your Life

If you think you may not need dietary supplements, read this. It could change your health for the rest of your life.

Finally, after more than 50 years, leading medical journals now recommend all adults take multivitamins. Both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association have concluded that: "Most people do not consume an optimal amount of all vitamins by diet alone" "Inadequate intake of several vitamins has been linked to chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis." "Suboptimal folic acid levels, along with suboptimal levels of vitamins B6 and B12, are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, neural tube defects, and colon and breast cancer; low levels of vitamin D contribute to osteoporosis and bone fracture; and low levels of the antioxidant vitamins (vitamins A, E and C) may increase risk for several chronic diseases." "It appears prudent for all adults to take vitamin supplements." A large body of research has clearly demonstrated that the nutrients found in dietary supplements reduce your risk of chronic disease, improve quality of life, and increase longevity.

Why You Can't Depend on Food Alone
for Essential Nutrition

Listed below are 22 reasons why you cannot depend on food alone to provide you with all of the nutrition you need to stay healthy.

Reason #1. Overfed and undernourished. The average American is overfed and undernourished. It's no secret. Just look around you. Most people are gaining weight. Even kids are overweight these days. You or someone you know has a chronic disorder of some kind.

If you're like most Americans, you're consuming fabricated convenience foods high in calories but low in food value (nutrition). This type of diet leads to "subclinical" or marginal deficiencies that lead to vague health complaints such as nervousness, listlessness, recurring minor infections, general aches and pains, difficulty concentrating, irritability, depression, muscle weakness, fatigue, insomnia, and just not feeling right.

A large body of research has demonstrated that most Americans are not getting what they need from their diet. For example, in one recent U.S. Dept. of Agriculture survey of 20,000 people, not a single person was consuming adequate levels of all the vitamins and minerals. In this study, the percentage of Americans were found to be deficient as follows: 90% in vit. B6, 75% in magnesium, 68% in calcium, 57% in iron, 50% in vitamin A, 45% in vitamin B1, 41% in vitamin C, 34% in vitamin B2, 34% in vitamin B12....and the list goes on.

There are literally hundreds of medical studies to suggest it’s a virtual certainty that you and every member of your family are deficient in one or more essential nutrients.

Reason #2. Soil depletion. Modern mass-production agriculture depletes nutrients from the soil without replenishing them. The application of synthetic fertilizers stimulates the growth of beautiful-looking plants. However, the nutrient content is missing.

So when you bite into that healthy salad or slice of whole-wheat bread, you're getting less nutrition today than from the identical foods grown in the same soil fifty years ago.

Reason #3. Commercial food processing. Much of the food you eat is processed in one way or another. When foods are processed, they are exposed to heat, light, oxygen, or drastic change in temperature or humidity. This exposure causes the destruction of vital but fragile nutrients. Examples of processing include baking, extruding, milling, grinding, boiling, cooking, recombining, spray-drying, etc.

Reason #4: Food storage and transportation. All foods deteriorate as they age. This is a problem for the food industry, because many foods are shipped over great distances. Therefore chemicals are added to preserve foods and give them a longer "shelf life". Unfortunately, in spite of chemicals, the nutrient content of foods decline over time, even though they may look the same.

Even fresh fruits or vegetables may be sprayed, gassed or fumigated in order to make them look "ripe" and "fresh". So what looks healthy isn't necessarily as healthy as you may think.

Reason #5: Preparation and cooking of foods. Many people eat out or bring something home from the market that is already cooked. Even if you prepare your meals at home, most of your food is probably cooked, not raw. Here's the problem: the more you cook a food, the less its nutrient value.

Of course, there are some foods, such as grains and dried legumes that you have to cook because they're inedible when raw. You're obviously not going to eat a bowl of raw rice. However, if you overcook rice, you lose nutrients.

Reason #6: Home storage of food. Have you looked in your refrigerator lately? How long has that head of lettuce been in there? What about those leftovers from three days ago? Refrigeration does slow down the deterioration of food, but it certainly does not stop it. As every day goes by, whatever is in your refrigerator is losing its nutritional value.

Some people will eat something out of the refrigerator that is three weeks old, or something from the pantry that is a year old. By this time, some vital nutrients have been completely lost.

Reason #7. Food irradiation. Exposing foods to gamma rays, x-rays or other radiation extends their shelf life by destruction of microorganisms, inhibition of sprouting, and delay of ripening. Some meats, chicken, and vegetables are irradiated. Foods served in restaurants or schools may be irradiated. The problem with irradiation is that vital nutrients, especially antioxidants and fat-soluble vitamins, are destroyed. There's no label to tell you if a food has been irradiated.

Reason #8. Pesticides in foods. A pesticide is a poison. A little bit of pesticide will kill a bug. A lot of pesticide will kill you. Most foods contain pesticides. Even organic produce contains pesticides, although a lot less than regular produce. Pesticides may be applied to the soil, to the growing plant, or to the food while in storage or shipment.

Keep in mind that you can’t see, smell or taste these pesticides. So you have no way of knowing if what you're eating contains pest poisons. But your body knows. Some pesticides can accumulate in the body and cause problems. Your body has to deal with the problem by expending valuable vitamins and minerals to detoxify and try to eliminate these poisons.

Reason #9. Genetically modified foods. Millions of acres of genetically modified corn, cotton and potatoes have been planted in the U.S. (Cotton is mentioned here because cottonseed oil is found in many processed foods, and cottonseed meal is fed to cattle.) These foods, which are now in our food supply, have been engineered to produce a naturally occurring pesticide that is supposedly toxic only to insects. There are no long-term human studies to indicate that genetically modified foods are safe. However, rats fed genetically modified potatoes had increased intestinal infections, reduced immunity, and reduced weight of intestine, pancreas, kidneys, liver, lungs and brain. Since you may be unknowingly consuming genetically modified or irradiated foods, you would need dietary supplementation to offset the invisible but potentially negative effects of such foods.

Reason #10. Environmental pollution. We dump nearly six billion pounds of chemicals into our environment every year. While some of it ends up in our food, much of it is in our air and water. If you breathe air and drink water, you are ingesting chemical pollution. Medical research has clearly established that environmental chemicals contribute to degenerative diseases.

You have no choice but to eat food, drink water, and breathe air. Therefore, you will need dietary supplements to help you process and detoxify the pollution entering your body every day.

Reason #11. Bioaccumulation of pollution in animal foods. There are certain "persistent" pollutants that tend to accumulate in any living thing, whether animal or plant. The higher up the food chain, the greater the accumulation. Take swordfish for example. Swordfish is known to have high levels of mercury, a toxic metal.

The problem starts when small bait fish eat organic material that contains mercury. They metabolize the organic material but retain the mercury. Small predatory fish then eat the bait fish, thus inheriting their accumulated mercury. The more bait fish they eat, the more mercury they accumulate. Finally a swordfish comes along and eats a bunch of small predatory fish, and picks up a load of mercury. So a big swordfish can gather a lot of mercury over time. But the swordfish is not the end of the chain. You are! You eat the swordfish, and now all that accumulated mercury is stored in "your" body.

Swordfish is only one example out of hundreds. Here's the point. You're at the top of the entire food chain on earth. Therefore, you unknowingly accumulate heavy metals and chemical pollutants, which are proven to be detrimental to your health. If you consume animal foods, you need dietary supplements to help you handle the pollutants they contain.

Reason #12. "Energy" pollution. Energy pollution invisibly burdens your body. The form of energy pollution you’re familiar with is radioactive fallout, like that from nuclear testing in Nevada which caused an increase in cancers downwind from the test site. Another, less well known form of energy pollution is altered magnetic fields from electrical motors and circuits, and all kinds of energy transmissions (microwave, radar, cell phone, etc.). Not only can energy pollution destroy or damage cells directly, but it causes a stress reaction in the body which leads to hormonal imbalances. For example, energy pollution reduces your levels of melatonin, an essential hormone. Once again, dietary supplements are a method to assist your body to compensate for another type of pollution from which there is no escape.

Reason #13: Genetic weaknesses. Each of us is genetically and biochemically unique. But none of us is perfect. We all have some kind of genetic weakness. For example, you might have a genetic abnormality in methionine metabolism called homocystinuria (methionine is an amino acid required to make your body function). In this case, taking large doses of vitamin B6 is a way to compensate for this weakness. There are hundreds if not thousands of possible genetic abnormalities. Many of them can be minimized with dietary supplementation.

Reason #14. Chronic Stress. “Stress” occurs when your body has a “fight or flight” response to any situation. Most of the time, you're not aware of it. Stress can come from anywhere at any time. It could be a barking dog, a disagreeable boss, a car that needs repair, an unpaid bill, a relationship that isn’t working, or living alone. Anything at all. You become so accustomed to stress that you consciously tune it out – but your body doesn’t.

When stress is repeated over and over, it is called chronic stress, which seriously depletes your body of energy and vital reserves. Chronic stress produces hormones that have a long-term weakening effect on your body which accelerates the aging process and leads to chronic degenerative disease. Supplements reduce the detrimental effects of chronic stress.

Reason #15. Your lifestyle. How you behave may increase your need for supplementation. For example, smoking or drinking alcohol to excess dramatically saps your reserves of vital nutrients. In both cases, dietary supplementation is not an option - it's a requirement.

On the other hand, if you're an avid mountain climber or high-performance athlete, you use up nutrients faster than the average person. The same is true if you work in a physically demanding occupation. Your performance will be improved with dietary supplementation.

Reason #16: GI problems. Any kind of digestive or gastrointestinal problem will diminish your absorption of vitamins, minerals, protein, essential fats, and plant substances required to maintain a healthy body. Irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, Crohn's disease, or chronic diarrhea hurt your ability to absorb nutrients. Ditto for bacterial, viral, yeast or parasitic infections. Food allergies are notorious for causing GI problems. In short, any inflammation in your GI tract means trouble. Therefore, you will need supplements to help you deal with the inflammation, as well as to increase the amount of essential nutrients you are consuming and absorbing.

Reason #17: Weak digestion. Heartburn, bloat after eating, burping, or gas may suggest you have an impaired ability to digest your food. If you can't digest your food, it can't be absorbed into your body. Supplementary digestive aids may be indicated.

Reason #18: Getting older. Medical studies have proven that you lose your digestive power as you get older. By the time you're "elderly", you have a serious problem that can only be corrected by supplementation.

In addition, studies have shown that many elderly people eat less well than they did in earlier years. In this case, dietary supplements can augment an otherwise inadequate diet.

Reason #19: Teenager. It's no secret that adolescents eat and drink things that are very unhealthy, i.e., "junk food". This is no way to nourish a maturing body. Most teenagers need dietary supplementation.

Reason #20. Chronic disease or disorder. It doesn't matter what the disorder is. It could be arthritis, macular degeneration, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, eczema, PMS or anything else. Specific dietary supplements can help almost any disorder.

Reason #21. Medications. Americans consume an astounding quantity of prescription and over-the-counter medications. However, nothing in your body operates in isolated compartments - everything interacts with everything else in some way. Many drugs interact with supplements, or cause an increased need for them. For example, women on birth control pills may have an increased need for vitamin B6. People on Glucophage need more calcium, B12 and folic acid. The list is endless. So if you're on medication, consult with one of our physicians to determine the specific supplements you need.

Reason #22. Pregnancy. Your requirement for nutrients undergoes a big shift when you become pregnant. It's to your and your baby's benefit to take supplementation to reduce your risk of a miscarriage or pregnancy complications, and to have a healthier baby.

BOTTOM LINE: Because of worldwide pollution and degradation in the quality of our food supply, it's hard to imagine anyone who will not need nutritional supplements for the rest of his or her life. In addition, many people have health problems, a lifestyle, or special situations where supplements are advisable.

MURDER IN THE KITCHEN

by Denis Pequin

Are you getting the nutritional value from the food you eat? You may think you are. You get home and you’re in a big hurry so you take out these potatoes. You pull out a paring knife and, because you want no witnesses, you cut the eyes out of the potato. You then take the paring knife and you proceed to skin the poor little potato alive. Depending on the mood you’re in and how much time you have, you may end up with a third of a bag of peels from a ten pound bag of potatoes, and a bunch of square potatoes. You should get a refund on the peel, there goes a third of your food budget! And worse that that, in the potato peel alone that is thrown away in the average home every year, is the same amount of vitamin C as 95 glasses of orange juice, the same amount of protein as 60 steaks, and the same amount of iron as 500 eggs. THE BEST PART OF VEGETABLES GROWN BELOW THE EARTH IS THE PEEL. If you take the potato that you peeled – or carrot – and plant it in the ground in the garden, it’ll rot. If you plant the peel, it’ll grow. The best part of vegetables grown below the earth is the peel. So if you peel the vegetable before you eat it, you’re trying to grow the live part of your body with the dead part of the food! So the next thing we do is we take that poor potato, drown it in water and boil the life out of it for twenty minutes. We lift the cover and stab it to death with a fork. So when we say dinner’s done, we’re not kidding! So if we didn’t peel it away or flood it away, we now drain it away. The famous Dr. Mayo of the Mayo Clinic said that if garbage pails and sinks had stomachs, they’d be the healthiest members of the family. Now some people say, “Well, I boil it just a little bit.” Well, that’s like saying, “I’m just a little bit pregnant.” Because when you boil, you have water, when you have boiling water, you have 212 degrees Fahrenheit. If you could stand to hold your finger in boiling water for one minute, it would have to be amputated. The life giving forces would be totally destroyed – in one minute. What in the world could be left with that much temperature when we boil fruits and vegetables for that amount of time? We have water – water’s a solvent. We have heat - heat is very destructive. When you boil a soup bone, you throw away the bone and keep the broth. Coffee; you boil coffee, you throw away the grounds, you drink the coffee. You boil vegetables, … Some people say that they save all the cooking water to make gravy, but the truth is, they don’t really use all that water. You might as well save the dishwater. Well, some people say, “But I don’t boil my vegetables, I steam them.” Well, now you’re at 230 degrees. If you steam or stir fry, your vegetables look better and taste better but how come two hours later you’re hungry again? Why? Because oxidation in the air destroys the minerals. If you destroy the minerals, the vitamins are absolutely useless to your body. You can bring back the color, bring back the flavor, but you aren’t bringing back those things that you really need in your food. What if you say, “Oh, I don’t steam, I pressure cook!” Oh, that’s a real winner – that’s 260 degrees Fahrenheit! EVEN THE FLIES WON'T EAT IT! IT SHOWS THAT SOMETHING DRAMATIC HAS HAPPENED TO THE FOOD. How about microwave: anyone here ever use one of those? Go home and do this: take a 60-watt light bulb. It can even be burnt out – you know how you shake it and the little filament rattles around in there? Put it in your microwave, set it for 6 seconds and hit the “power.” The intense heat will light the burnt light bulb. The scrambling of the molecules in the food and the friction it creates is so destructive you can zap your favorite meat in there and leave it out for the flies. Even the flies won’t eat it! It shows that something dramatic has happened to the food. Then there’s air: You cut an apple in half and it turns brown. That’s oxidation. Air is really bad news. For example, take cruciferous vegetables: Broccoli, cauliflower, kale. The way people prepare those, we call them 2x2x2x2 vegetables: you boil them for 2 hours, smell them for 2 blocks, digest them for 2 days and you won’t eat them again for 2 weeks. They turn pink, they stink, they shrink, it’s ridiculous. We eat a full meal, and an hour or two later, the first thing we do is get up and go to the refrigerator. It’s called being incredibly overfed and undernourished. So ignore the stories about the environment, the water, the air, the stress levels, the lifestyles. Ignore everything else, but you can’t ignore what you’re doing to your fruits and vegetables once you get them home. It probably didn’t have everything in it when you got it home, but don’t worry about it, you got rid of it anyway. THE REALITY TODAY IS THAT WE'RE ALL TERRIBLY OVERFED AND UNDERNOURISHED. The reality today is that we’re all terribly overfed and undernourished. So it’s not a matter of whether you should supplement your food; it’s a matter of what quality supplement.

Do the new Dietary Guidelines need supplements?

13/01/2005 - The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans were unveiled yesterday. Jess Halliday reports on the role supplements have to play and the guidelines’ wider implications. Among 41 individual recommendations, the key messages of the new guidelines focused on calorie control and exercise. Consumers are encouraged to choose foods carefully in order to get the most nutrition out of calories consumed. Foods from every food group should have a part to play in a healthy, balanced diet – in particular fiber-rich foods, vegetables and whole grains. While recognizing the sound basis of the guidelines, the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA) expressed concern that nutritional supplements do not feature prominently enough. They draw attention to the needs of certain sectors of the community, such as older adults who may need more vitamins B12 or D in their diets. The guidelines do allow for the use of supplements to fill a “nutrient gap” in some cases, but warn that “nutrient needs should be primarily met through consuming foods.” “When it comes to supplements, these guidelines are more ideal than real. Studies confirm that most Americans don't get adequate nutrition through the foods they eat,” said David Seckman, NNFA's executive director and CEO. In September 2004 the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) submitted comments on the draft guidelines urging recognition of the importance of dietary supplements in the final version. “Not all of our comments are addressed,” CRN president Annette Dickinson told NutraIngredients-USA.com, “but we are pleased to note that the final guidelines do highlight some nutrients that are lacking in people’s diets”. “They don’t recognize the need for everyone to take a multivitamin, but the bottom line is that if you need an assortment of nutrients one way to get them is through a multivitamin,” she added. The US is currently in the grip of an obesity epidemic, with almost two thirds of Americans overweight or obese. While the guidelines do seek to aggressively tackle the epidemic, this is not their sole or primary function. The science-based advice on how a good diet can promote health and reduce the risk of disease is applicable to all people over the age of two years, no matter what their weight. “Promoting good dietary habits is key to reducing the growing problems of obesity and physical activity, and to gaining the health benefits that come from a nutritionally balanced diet,” said Tommy Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Adults should engage in 30 minutes minimum intensity exercise almost every day of the week in order to stave off the risk of chronic disease, increasing to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise to prevent gradual unhealthy body-weight gain and 60-90 minutes to sustain weight loss. Dietary guidelines, now in their sixth edition, are drawn up every five years by the HSS and Department of Agriculture (USDA). “The process we used to develop these recommendations was more rigorous and more transparent than ever before,” said agriculture secretary Ann Veneman. The three-stage process included a science-based report, comments solicited from agencies and the public and the translation of the guidelines into easy to understand messages for the public and educators. More than an external public education exercise, the guidelines form the basis of federal food and nutrition education programs. They will underlie the revised Food Guidance System, currently called the Food Guide Pyramid, which is due to be released in the spring. They also arm health education experts with the latest science-based recommendations. Cathy Nonas, spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and registered dietician, told NutraIngredients-USA.com that she was particularly pleased with the advice on fruit and vegetable consumption, that is two cups of fruit and two-and-a-half cups of vegetables each day for a reference 2000-calorie intake increased or reduced depending on the required calorie level. “Balanced diets and small portions are the most important,” she said. “If you keep to the concept of half your plate in vegetables everything else falls into place.” As for the impact the guidelines will have on America’s health, she said: “It’s a good message to tell people. It will make people think.” “It will be interesting to see what well-known food companies and fast food outlets do to follow these guidelines,” she added. The Grocery Manufacturers Association issued a statement pledging work with the HHS and USDA to promote the dietary guidelines. “As the companies that make the foods that consumers know, trust and buy everyday, GMA members are developing and introducing new products that will make it easier to meet the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines,” it said. “We share the government’s concern about the quantity of saturated and trans fats in the average American diet. Over the past two years, GMA member companies have reduced or eliminated trans fat in countless products.” In fact, the guidelines do not specify maximum recommended daily trans fat consumption, simply advising “keep trans fat consumption as low as possible”. Thompson explained that the advice has been left general because the FDA is currently reviewing the recommendation on trans fats. “These guidelines are not static,” he said. “They are evolving and are a benchmark of right now and we are looking update them.”

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Poor nutrition, junk foods lead directly to pharmaceutical industry profits

If nutrition is so good at preventing and even reversing chronic disease, why isn't it taught by the practitioners of conventional medicine? Why isn't your doctor giving you the fundamentals of nutrition? Why don't you see television ads promoting nutrition?

The reason is quite simple. There's no profit in it. Let's face it, conventional medicine is a commercial entity. Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make money. They want to maximize their profits. Their mission statement should read "Our goal is to maximize profits, no matter what it takes, as long as we can get away with it."

By their behavior, you can see that pharmaceutical companies are far more interested in generating profits than actually improving human health on a global scale. Drug companies are in business to make money, not make people healthy You see this in many ways including the price gouging of American consumers, attempts to block the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, the refusal of companies to fund AIDS drugs initiatives in Africa, and so on. You especially see it in the suppression of prevention by conventional medicine at the FDA. There is actually an effort underway to minimize any discussion of disease prevention and instead focus on disease symptom treatments -- especially those involving pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures.

There is really no money in disease prevention. Or put another way, if you find a way to be extremely healthy, it doesn't create profits for anybody except you. In fact, if you used to be diseased, and you changed your lifestyle and started consuming outstanding foods giving you optimum nutrition, the pharmaceutical industry is now losing a customer. You have just cost conventional medicine a paying customer. And given the sky-high cost of most prescription drugs these days, they might have been counting on you to generate a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars in revenues over the next few years. But now, by taking control of your own health and using disease prevention coupled with nutritional fundamentals, you are a healthy human being who has eliminated a measurable profit from the pharmaceutical companies.

So it's not hard to understand why the pharmaceutical companies are not interested in promoting nutrition. And since most of conventional medicine today is really just an extension of "Big Pharma," the whole system has little or no interest in teaching prevention. Hospitals don't earn money when you're healthy either. Surgeons certainly don't benefit when you take care of your own cardiovascular health and no longer need heart bypass surgery. In one case after another, when you take control of your health and practice outstanding nutrition, you are actually taking money away from a for-profit industry.

Healing foods cannot be patented and, therefore, cannot be exploited for profit Another important point to note here is that food cannot be patented by the pharmaceutical companies. You can't take a tomato and patent that tomato, then restrict it from the population and make sure it can only be prescribed through pharmacies. Of course, certain hybrid tomatoes can be patented, but those are more along the lines of scientific experiments than ordinary, everyday garden tomatoes that I'm talking about here. The point is that these healing foods -- like broccoli, garlic and onions -- can't be patented. So the pharmaceutical companies cannot own the intellectual property that's at stake here. As a result, they can't make money by selling these foods and promoting their disease prevention abilities.

We have a medical system that suppresses information about the correlation between foods and disease prevention. The system is designed to make sure that the only information you, as a consumer, receive is information about synthetic pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures or other things that generate profits. And foods don't generate profits. At least, not on the scale that would be expected by pharmaceutical companies.

Another reason you don't hear much discussion on the correlation between nutrition and chronic disease in the popular press these days, or among practitioners of conventional medicine, is because most of the revenues generated from conventional medicine actually come from the treatment of the symptoms caused by nutritional imbalances and deficiencies. In other words, the big money makers for conventional medicine are diseases that are in fact caused by nutritional deficiencies and nutritional imbalances in the first place. If poor nutrition wasn't so widespread, the lucrative disease treatment industry would collapse due to lack of customers.

This article is an excerpt from the book, The 7 Laws of Nutrition by Mike Adams.

Overview:

Poor nutrition, junk foods lead directly to pharmaceutical industry profits

Source: http://www.newstarget.com/002688.html

Dietary fat is necessary for absorption of vitamins, nutrients and phytochemicals from fruits and vegetables

A fascinating new study published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that dietary fat is necessary for the absorption of nutrients from fruits and vegetables. In the study, people who consumed salads with fat-free salad dressing absorbed far less of the helpful phytonutrients and vitamins from spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots than those who consumed their salads with a salad dressing containing fat.

This is interesting research, but not necessarily all that surprising. We've known for a long time that healthy fats are a critical part of a healthy diet, and that avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease. The key is in choosing the right kind of fats for your diet and making sure you don't overdo the fats, because fats have a very high caloric density and can add far more calories to your meal than you might expect.

In this study, the focus was on eating salads with either fat-free salad dressing or regular salad dressing containing fat in the form of canola oil. However, these findings apply to far more than just eating salads. Every meal that you consume should contain healthy fats, even if only in small portions. What are the healthy fats? Canola oil is what I consider a neutral fat, meaning it's not necessarily a bad fat, but neither is it considered one of the healthier fats. The healthy fats include extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed oil, and fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, avocados, and coconuts. These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Failure to include these fats in a meal will result in many of the nutrients consumed during the meal not being absorbed by the body. That's because many nutrients are fat-soluble nutrients. Beta carotene, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E are three such nutrients that require fat in order to be absorbed and used by the human body, but there are many other nutrients that also need fats for human metabolism.

It doesn't take much fat, by the way, to aid the absorption of these important vitamins and nutrients. Eating just 5 or 10 nuts, or one-fourth of an avocado, provides plenty of dietary fat for transporting these nutrients and aiding their absorption. On another note, it's interesting to remember that for decades the American Heart Association insisted that heart patients should avoid nearly all dietary fat. This was during the low-fat craze of the 1980's and 1990's, when people were running scared from all dietary sources of fat and instead consuming massive quantities of sugar and refined carbohydrates.

We now know that this advice from the American Heart Association was, in effect, causing extreme nutritional deficiencies and actually reducing the life span of heart patients rather than helping them. Such is the case with information from many so-called disease organizations, such as the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association. Personally, I wouldn't listen to nutritional advice from any association that is so politically motivated and receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, as both of those organizations do.

The other thing to keep in mind with this finding is that if you are supplementing your diet with nutritional supplements or superfoods like the ones I frequently recommend, it's a good idea to do so in combination with a few nuts, seeds, or a tablespoon of flax oil or olive oil. One tablespoon of flax oil will give you about 100 calories, so keep that in mind in terms of keeping your total daily calorie intake under control. By consuming fats as you take these nutritional supplements, you will multiply the effectiveness of the phytonutrients found in those supplements, thereby giving your body far greater nutritional help from the very same capsules and pills.

In other words, if you take superfood supplements without fat, you're not getting the same benefit as taking the same supplements with a little bit of fat. So keep some nuts handy, as I always do, and eat a few nuts with each meal. I highly recommend macadamias, cashews, pecans, peanuts, and almonds, and all nuts should be purchased and consumed in their raw form, without absolutely no added salt or flavors, and with no roasting or cooking. Raw nuts are the healthiest way to go, and will provide you with all sorts of additional beneficial nutrients that go beyond what you're getting in your food.

One more bit of advice about all of this -- if you're thinking that you should start eating your salads with salad dressing because of this new research, be sure to double-check the kind of fat that is in your salad dressing. Most of the cheaper salad dressings are made with soybean oil, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with soybean oil, but it is not the healthiest oil you can choose. It is used by the food manufacturing industry primarily because it's cheap -- it's a cheap source of calories, and it tastes the same as any other fat to most people. But canola oil is better than soybean oil, and olive oil is better yet.

You can also count on any salad dressing you find at national restaurant chains or fast food restaurants to be made with the cheapest oils possible, which would include soybean oil and partially hydrogenated oils, which of course, should be avoided at all costs.

Overview:

• July 27, 2004 -- Eating your salad or carrot sticks with a little fatty salad dressing may actually be better for your health than pouring on the fat-free stuff.
• A new study shows that eating fresh vegetables with a little fat, such as oil-based salad dressings or cheese, helps the body absorb valuable nutrients found in vegetables, such as lycopene and beta-carotene, which have been shown to help prevent heart disease and cancer.
• In contrast, eating a salad without any fat in it may deprive your body of these healthy nutrients, which are known as carotenoids.
• "We're certainly not advocating a high-fat diet, or one filled with full-fat salad dressing," says researcher Wendy White, associate professor of food science and nutrition at Iowa State University, in a news release.
• "Our findings are actually consistent with U.S. dietary guidelines, which support a moderate diet, rather than one very low, in fat."
• "But what we found compelling was that some of our more popular healthful snacks, like baby carrots, really need to be eaten with a source of fat for us to absorb the beta carotene," says White.
• In order for these carotenoids to be absorbed by the human digestive system, fat is needed.
• But researchers say exactly how much fat is needed to provide optimal absorption of these nutrients is not clearly defined.
• Seven healthy men and women ate salads of spinach, romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and carrots topped with Italian dressings containing 0, 6 (0.2 ounces), or 28 grams (almost 1 ounce) of canola oil on different occasions during a 12-week period.
• The study found that only negligible amounts of alpha- and beta-carotene and lycopene were detected in the blood after eating a salad with fat-free dressing.

Source: http://my.webmd.com/content/article/91/101131.htm?lastselectedguid=%7B5FE84E90-BC77-4056-A91C-9531713CA348%7D

Dietary fat is necessary for absorption of vitamins, nutrients and phytochemicals from fruits and vegetables

A fascinating new study published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that dietary fat is necessary for the absorption of nutrients from fruits and vegetables. In the study, people who consumed salads with fat-free salad dressing absorbed far less of the helpful phytonutrients and vitamins from spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots than those who consumed their salads with a salad dressing containing fat.

This is interesting research, but not necessarily all that surprising. We've known for a long time that healthy fats are a critical part of a healthy diet, and that avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease. The key is in choosing the right kind of fats for your diet and making sure you don't overdo the fats, because fats have a very high caloric density and can add far more calories to your meal than you might expect.

In this study, the focus was on eating salads with either fat-free salad dressing or regular salad dressing containing fat in the form of canola oil. However, these findings apply to far more than just eating salads. Every meal that you consume should contain healthy fats, even if only in small portions. What are the healthy fats? Canola oil is what I consider a neutral fat, meaning it's not necessarily a bad fat, but neither is it considered one of the healthier fats. The healthy fats include extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed oil, and fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, avocados, and coconuts. These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Failure to include these fats in a meal will result in many of the nutrients consumed during the meal not being absorbed by the body. That's because many nutrients are fat-soluble nutrients. Beta carotene, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E are three such nutrients that require fat in order to be absorbed and used by the human body, but there are many other nutrients that also need fats for human metabolism.

It doesn't take much fat, by the way, to aid the absorption of these important vitamins and nutrients. Eating just 5 or 10 nuts, or one-fourth of an avocado, provides plenty of dietary fat for transporting these nutrients and aiding their absorption. On another note, it's interesting to remember that for decades the American Heart Association insisted that heart patients should avoid nearly all dietary fat. This was during the low-fat craze of the 1980's and 1990's, when people were running scared from all dietary sources of fat and instead consuming massive quantities of sugar and refined carbohydrates.

We now know that this advice from the American Heart Association was, in effect, causing extreme nutritional deficiencies and actually reducing the life span of heart patients rather than helping them. Such is the case with information from many so-called disease organizations, such as the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association. Personally, I wouldn't listen to nutritional advice from any association that is so politically motivated and receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, as both of those organizations do.

The other thing to keep in mind with this finding is that if you are supplementing your diet with nutritional supplements or superfoods like the ones I frequently recommend, it's a good idea to do so in combination with a few nuts, seeds, or a tablespoon of flax oil or olive oil. One tablespoon of flax oil will give you about 100 calories, so keep that in mind in terms of keeping your total daily calorie intake under control. By consuming fats as you take these nutritional supplements, you will multiply the effectiveness of the phytonutrients found in those supplements, thereby giving your body far greater nutritional help from the very same capsules and pills.

In other words, if you take superfood supplements without fat, you're not getting the same benefit as taking the same supplements with a little bit of fat. So keep some nuts handy, as I always do, and eat a few nuts with each meal. I highly recommend macadamias, cashews, pecans, peanuts, and almonds, and all nuts should be purchased and consumed in their raw form, without absolutely no added salt or flavors, and with no roasting or cooking. Raw nuts are the healthiest way to go, and will provide you with all sorts of additional beneficial nutrients that go beyond what you're getting in your food.

One more bit of advice about all of this -- if you're thinking that you should start eating your salads with salad dressing because of this new research, be sure to double-check the kind of fat that is in your salad dressing. Most of the cheaper salad dressings are made with soybean oil, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with soybean oil, but it is not the healthiest oil you can choose. It is used by the food manufacturing industry primarily because it's cheap -- it's a cheap source of calories, and it tastes the same as any other fat to most people. But canola oil is better than soybean oil, and olive oil is better yet.

You can also count on any salad dressing you find at national restaurant chains or fast food restaurants to be made with the cheapest oils possible, which would include soybean oil and partially hydrogenated oils, which of course, should be avoided at all costs.

Overview:

• July 27, 2004 -- Eating your salad or carrot sticks with a little fatty salad dressing may actually be better for your health than pouring on the fat-free stuff.
• A new study shows that eating fresh vegetables with a little fat, such as oil-based salad dressings or cheese, helps the body absorb valuable nutrients found in vegetables, such as lycopene and beta-carotene, which have been shown to help prevent heart disease and cancer.
• In contrast, eating a salad without any fat in it may deprive your body of these healthy nutrients, which are known as carotenoids.
• "We're certainly not advocating a high-fat diet, or one filled with full-fat salad dressing," says researcher Wendy White, associate professor of food science and nutrition at Iowa State University, in a news release.
• "Our findings are actually consistent with U.S. dietary guidelines, which support a moderate diet, rather than one very low, in fat."
• "But what we found compelling was that some of our more popular healthful snacks, like baby carrots, really need to be eaten with a source of fat for us to absorb the beta carotene," says White.
• In order for these carotenoids to be absorbed by the human digestive system, fat is needed.
• But researchers say exactly how much fat is needed to provide optimal absorption of these nutrients is not clearly defined.
• Seven healthy men and women ate salads of spinach, romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and carrots topped with Italian dressings containing 0, 6 (0.2 ounces), or 28 grams (almost 1 ounce) of canola oil on different occasions during a 12-week period.
• The study found that only negligible amounts of alpha- and beta-carotene and lycopene were detected in the blood after eating a salad with fat-free dressing.

Source: http://my.webmd.com/content/article/91/101131.htm?lastselectedguid=%7B5FE84E90-BC77-4056-A91C-9531713CA348%7D

A brief history of nutritional deficiencies and chronic disease

There is a long history of discovering relationships between nutritional deficiencies and chronic disease. One of the most well known is probably scurvy -- a disease where your bones lose their rigidity due to a deficiency of vitamin C. The historical accounts of this mostly involve sailors who, on long sailing voyages, were overcome by this nutritional disease. And it actually took hundreds of years before the right scientist came along and discovered that this was caused by a simple nutritional deficiency that could be cured by eating fruits high in vitamin C such as limes. Hence the name 'limeys' for sailors.

That's just one example of a disease caused by nutritional deficiencies. There are many other diseases such as rickets and beriberi caused by nutritional deficiencies. Asian people who historically ate polished, processed rice (white rice) frequently got beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency in vitamin B1 (thiamin). Until the nutritional causes of beriberi were established, however, physicians of ancient Asia thought the disease was some sort of plague.

In America, the term 'redneck' actually comes from a vitamin B deficiency that caused heightened susceptibility to sunburns. Interestingly, most Americans are, today, deficient in B vitamins as well, making them technically rednecks. It also explains why many people are so easily sunburned. As explained in Staying Healthy With Nutrition by Dr. Elson Haas, M.D.:

For a long period of history, the niacin deficiency disease, pellagra, was a very serious and fatal problem. Characterized as the disease of the "three Ds," pellagra causes its victims to experience dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia. The fourth D was death. As described previously, the classic B3 deficiency occurs mainly in cultures whose diets rely heavily on corn and where the corn is not prepared in a way that releases its niacin. One of the first signs of pellagra, or niacin deficiency, is the skin's sensitivity to light, and the skin becomes rough, thick, and dry (pellagra means "skin that is rough" in Italian). The skin then becomes darkly pigmented, especially in areas of the body prone to be hot and sweaty or those exposed to sun. The first stage of this condition is extreme redness and sensitivity of those exposed areas, and it was from this symptom that the term "redneck," describing the bright red necks of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century niacin-deficient fieldworkers, came into being.

The early colonial settlers in America, by the way, didn’t know how to properly process corn as the American Indians did. The American Indians processed corn using potash (which is highly alkaline) that makes the B vitamins in corn available for assimilation during digestion. But the American settlers, not understanding how to prepare corn, would simply grind up their corn and consume it as corn flour (corn meal). By the way, that's how most people eat corn today: as ground up cornmeal ingredients in chips and foods.

In more modern times, we know very well about what happens when you're deficient in folic acid and you are a pregnant woman: your baby may be born with serious spinal cord defects or even be stillborn. In fact, birth defects are almost always explained by nutritional deficiencies or the consumption of foods and beverages by the mother that interfere with good nutrition.

We also know that iodine is absolutely essential for human health, which is why salt is enriched with iodine. That's in an effort to prevent goiter, a disease that was quite common in the United States until iodine was finally mandated as a salt supplement (enrichment) by the FDA.

As a nation we have managed to force a handful of minerals and vitamins into the food supply that prevent only the most grotesque and physically obvious disorders and diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies. And by the way, those are the only ones that really get addressed through the food supply.

If there is an obvious and immediate link between nutrition and a particular disease such as birth defects caused by a lack of folic acid, then of course this gets recognized and addressed very quickly. But other metabolic disorders such as cancer and diabetes are more complex and so the cause/effect relationship is not so easy to see from the point of view of scientists, the FDA, and even the public. So these don't get addressed.

And that, frankly, is why the public is still not being taught the correlation between nutrition and chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis and even mental disorders like clinical depression.

This article is an excerpt from the book, The 7 Laws of Nutrition by Mike Adams.

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

There is a curious tendency in conventional medicine to name a set of symptoms a disease. I was recently at a compounding pharmacy having my bone mineral density measured to update my health stats. I spotted a poster touting a new drug for osteoporosis. It was written by a drug company and it said exactly this: "Osteoporosis is a disease that causes weak and fragile bones." Then, the poster went on to say that you need a particular drug to counteract this "disease."

Yet the language is all backwards. Osteoporosis isn't a disease that causes weak bones, osteoporosis is the name given to a diagnosis of weak bones. In other words, the weak bones happened first, and then the diagnosis of osteoporosis followed.

The drug poster makes it sound like osteoporosis strikes first, and then you get weak bones. The cause and effect is all backwards. And that's how drug companies want people to think about diseases and symptoms: first you "get" the disease, then you are "diagnosed" just in time to take a new drug for the rest of your life.

But it's all hogwash. There is no such disease as osteoporosis. It's just a made-up name given to a pattern of symptoms that indicate you've let your bones get fragile.

As another example, when a person follows an unhealthy lifestyle that results in a symptom such as high blood pressure, that symptom is actually be assumed to be a disease all by itself and it will be given a disease name. What disease? The disease is, of course, "high blood pressure." Doctors throw this phrase around as if it were an actual disease and not merely descriptive of patient physiology.

This may all seem silly, right? But there's actually a very important point to all this.

When we look at symptoms and give them disease names, we automatically distort the selection of available treatments for such a disease. If the disease is, by itself, high cholesterol, then the cure for the disease must be nothing other than lowering the high cholesterol. And that's how we end up with all these pharmaceuticals treating high cholesterol in order to "prevent" this disease and lower the levels of LDL cholesterol in the human patient.

By lowering only the cholesterol, the doctor can rest assured that he is, in fact, treating this "disease," since the definition of this "disease" is high cholesterol and nothing else.

But there is a fatal flaw in this approach to disease treatment: the symptom is not the cause of the disease. There is another cause, and this deeper cause is routinely ignored by conventional medicine, doctors, drug companies, and even patients.

Let's take a closer look at high blood pressure. What actually causes high blood pressure? Many doctors would say high blood pressure is caused by a specific, measurable interaction between circulating chemicals in the human body. Thus, the ill-behaved chemical compounds are the cause of the high blood pressure, and therefore the solution is to regulate these chemicals. That's exactly what pharmaceuticals do -- they attempt to manipulate the chemicals in the body to adjust the symptoms of high blood pressure. Thus, they only treat the symptoms, not the root cause.

Or take a look at high cholesterol. The conventional medicine approach says that high cholesterol is caused by a chemical imbalance in the liver, which is the organ that produces cholesterol. Thus the treatment for high cholesterol is a prescription drug that inhibits the liver's production of cholesterol (statin drugs). Upon taking these drugs, the high cholesterol (the "disease") is regulated, but what was causing the liver to overproduce cholesterol in the first place? That causative factor remains ignored.

The root cause of high cholesterol, as it turns out, is primarily dietary. A person who eats foods that are high in saturated fats and hydrogenated oils will inevitably produce more bad cholesterol and will show the symptoms of this so-called disease of high cholesterol. It's simple cause and effect. Eat the wrong foods, and you'll produce too much bad cholesterol in the liver which can be detected and diagnosed by conventional medical procedures.

Yet the root cause of all this is actually poor food choice, not some bizarre behavior by the liver. If the disease were to be accurately named, then, it would be called Fatty Food Choice Disease, or simply FFCD.

FFCD would be a far more accurate name that would make sense to people. If it's a fatty foods choice disease, then it seems that the obvious solution to the disease would be to choose foods that aren't so fatty. Of course that may be a bit of simplification since you have to distinguish between healthy fats and unhealthy fats. But at least the name FFCD gives patients a better idea of what's actually going on rather than naming the disease after a symptom, such as high cholesterol. You see, the symptom is not the disease, but conventional medicine insists on calling the symptom the disease because that way it can treat the symptom and claim success without actually addressing the underlying cause, which remains a mystery to modern medicine.

But let's move on to some other diseases so you get a clearer picture of how this actually works. Another disease that's caused by poor food choice is diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the natural physiological and metabolic result of a person consuming refined carbohydrates and added sugars in large quantities without engaging in regular physical exercise that would compensate for such dietary practices.

The name "diabetes" is meaningless to the average person. The disease should be called Excessive Sugar Disease, or ESD. If it were called Excessive Sugar Disease, the solution to it would be rather apparent; simply eat less sugar, drink fewer soft drinks and so on. But of course that would be far too simple for the medical community, so the disease must be given a complex name such as diabetes that puts its solution out of reach of the average patient.

Another disease that is named after its symptom is cancer. In fact, to this day, most doctors and many patients still believe that cancer is a physical thing: a tumor. In reality, a tumor is only a side effect of cancer, not its cause. A tumor is simply a physical manifestation of a cancer pattern that is expressed by the body. When a person "has cancer," what they really have is a sluggish immune system. And that would a far better name for the disease: Sluggish Immune System Disease or SISD.

If cancer were actually called Sluggish Immune System Disease, it would seem ridiculous to try to cure cancer by cutting out tumors through surgery and by destroying the immune system with chemotherapy. And yet these are precisely the most popular treatments for cancer offered by conventional medicine. These treatments do absolutely nothing to support the patient's immune system and prevent further occurrences of cancer. That's exactly why most people who undergo chemotherapy or the removal of tumors through surgical procedures end up with yet more cancer a few months or a few years later. It's also another reason why survival rates of cancer have barely budged over the last twenty years. (In other words, conventional medicine's treatments for cancer simply don't work.)

This whole situation stems from the fact that the disease is misnamed. It isn't cancer, it isn't a tumor and it certainly isn't a disease caused by having too strong of an immune system that needs to be destroyed through chemotherapy. It is simply a sluggish immune system or a suppressed immune system. And if it were called a sluggish immune system disease or a suppressed immune system disorder, the effective treatment for cancer would be apparent.

There are many other diseases that are given misleading names by western medicine. But if you look around the world and take a look at how diseases are named elsewhere, you will find many countries have disease names that actually make sense.

For example, in Chinese medicine, Alzheimer's disease is given a name that means, when translated, "feeble mind disease." In Chinese medicine, the name of the disease more accurately describes the actual cause of the disease, whereas in western medicine, the name of the disease seems to be intended to obscure the root cause of the disease, thereby making all diseases sound far more complex and mysterious than they really are.

This is one way in which doctors and practitioners of western medicine keep medical treatments out of the reach of the average citizen. Because, by God, they sure don't want people thinking for themselves about the causes of disease!

By creating a whole new vocabulary for medical conditions, they can speak their own secret language and make sure that people who aren't schooled in medicine don't understand what they're saying. That's a shame, because the treatments and cures for virtually all chronic diseases are actually quite simple and can be described in plain language, such as making different food choices, getting more natural sunlight, drinking more water, engaging in regular physical exercise, avoiding specific food toxins, supplementing your diet with superfoods and nutritional supplements and so on.

See, western medicine prefers to describe diseases in terms of chemistry. When you're depressed, you aren't suffering from a lack of natural sunlight; you are suffering from a "brain chemistry imbalance" that can only be regulated, they claim, by ingesting toxic chemicals to alter your brain chemistry. When your bones are brittle, it's not brittle bones disease; it's called osteoporosis, something that sounds very technical and complicated. And to treat it, western doctors and physicians will give you prescriptions for expensive drugs that somehow claim to make your bones less brittle. But in fact, the real treatment for this can be described in plain language once again: regular physical exercise, vitamin D supplementation, mineral supplements that include calcium and strontium, natural sunlight, and avoidance of acidic foods such as soft drinks, white flour and added sugars.

In fact, virtually every disease that’s prominent in modern society -- diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, clinical depression, irritable bowel syndrome and so on -- can be easily described in plain language without using complex terms at all. These diseases are simply misnamed. And I believe that they are intentionally misnamed to put the jargon out of reach of everyday citizens. As a result, there's a great deal of arrogance in the language of western medicine, and this arrogance furthers the language of separation. Separation never results in healing. In order to effect healing, we must bring together the language of healers and patients using plain language that real people understand and that real people can act upon.

We need to start describing diseases in terms of their root causes, not in terms of their arcane, biochemical actions. When someone suffers from seasonal affective disorder or clinical depression, for example, let's call it what it is: Sunlight Deficiency Disorder. To treat it, the person simply needs to get more sunlight. This isn't rocket science, it's not complex, and it doesn't require a prescription.

If someone is suffering from osteoporosis, let's get realistic about the words we use to describe the condition: it's really Brittle Bones Disease. And it should be treated with things that will enhance bone density, such as nutrition, physical exercise and avoidance of foods and drinks that strip away bone mass from the human body.

All of this information, of course, is rather shocking to old-school doctors and practitioners of western medicine, and the bigger their egos are, the more they hate the idea of naming diseases in plain language that patients can actually comprehend. That's because if the simple truths about diseases and the causes of health were readily available to everyday people, that would lessen the importance of physicians and medical researchers.

There's a great deal of ego invested in the medical community, and they sure don't want to make health sound attainable to the average person without their expert advice. It's sort of the same way that some ultra-conservative churches don't want their members talking to God unless it all goes through their priest first. Doctors and priests all want to serve as the translators of "truth" and will balk at any attempts to educate the public to either practice medicine or talk to God on their own.

But in reality, health (and a connection with spirit) is attainable by every single person. Health is easy, it is straightforward, it is direct and, for the most part, it is available free of charge.

Don't believe the names of diseases given to you by your doctor. Those names are designed to obscure, not to inform. They are designed to separate you from self-healing, not to put you in touch with your own inner healer. And thus, they are nothing more than bad medicine masquerading as modern medical practice.

Overview:

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

Source: http://www.newstarget.com/002800.html