Free Newsletter for Friends of Natural Health

Published monthly ONLY for members of Natural Health - Dr Hohn’s free answering service!

Read disclaimer at the end prior to continuing. The content of this newsletter only expresses the views and opinions of the author. Click here to unsubscribe. If you work for the FDA or FTC, please delete immediately as this email has reached you by mistake. If you are not a supporter of Health Freedom, please delete! All the information in this email is what I personally do or suggest to my patients. Since you are not my patient, I suggest you ask you own health care professional before using any of the information I supply to you for educational purposes only. This publication is written under German law! See Disclaimer below before reading.

Germany February 5, 2007

Dear Friends of Natural Health,

Happy February! Generally speaking people tend to become lethargic and melancholy during the month of February because of the weather and lack of sunlight. If you live in a cold northern place, you are more likely to suffer than those who live in the south. I mention this because there are some things you can do to feel better.

Get the Ucure Power Break system and listen to a session once a day particularly when you are feeling down. Go to www.20minutestolessstress.com and put in coupon nchs2021 for $99.99 EP.
Turn off the television and read a book or a magazine or anything that is enjoyable.
Exercise at all costs even if it means bending over and touching your toes. Preferably go to a gym if you cannot walk. Just 10 minutes a day will transform your energy and lift your mood.
Give yourself tasks to keep busy and once you finish one move on to another.
Get together with friends.
Decide that it is time to get healthy and start a cleansing protocol such as the Tri-Decathlon whole food cleanse from wholefoodfarmacy or go to http://www.vlformulas.com and check out their opti blends.
For a mood enhancer try Seroctin from http://www.vlformulas.com
Eat healthy – fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. Avoid sugar laden foods…

And if none of this helps please write me for other suggestions.

I will be announcing some new and exciting information over the next few months so be sure to look for upcoming newsletters. In addition, I have been told that some of the companies that we know and trust are going to be introducing new and exciting products over the upcoming months.

I came across so many interesting articles that I could not help myself from including them all in this edition. I think you will agree that the information is valuable at least I hope so…

I hope you experience a successful and healthy month. Thank you as always for all your support and please let me know if you are interested in particular subjects. I remain your most appreciative servant,

Your German friend,

Dr. Thomas Hohn MD

Director of Natural Health Research, Germany

A NATURAL HEALTH FRIEND SHARES HER FEELINGS…

Dear Dr. Hohn,

I wanted to write to you for you to share with your e-mail "friends" if you so choose to that my husband died a sudden death of a massive heart attack from hardening of the arteries and an enlarged heart on November 19, 2006. He always went for his annual physicals and had the blood work taken, but I now find out after he is dead that this type of disease is NOT detected in the annual blood work done. Another way our government and the medical community is lying to us and constantly feeding us false hope. What will KILL us is not even checked for in our annual physicals, but we can keep going to the doctors and giving them our money every year for that false assurance. We will not be the wiser until someone we love dies!! My husband had only a few moments when one or two symptoms even occurred. They were not frequent or severe, so they were dismissed by both of us. If he had any other warning signs that something wasn't right, he did not say so, which tells me they didn't alarm him.

My biggest regret is I did not spend the $35.00 to buy the Heart Remedy available on one of your links below. I had this information 5 months before my husband died, but I did not take action, and I am now a widow. My husband just turned 45 on October 13, 2006. I was not ready to lose him, but I didn't take heed to the warnings that our health was at risk, and if we didn't take control of it, no one would.

We have no children; so needless to say, the loss of my husband was a HUGE blow to me and my lifestyle. My husband WAS my ALL. He was the BEST husband a woman could ask for, and now he is gone.

Thanks for trying to Warn all of us Dr. Hohn. It CAN save a life of a loved one, if we only take heed to the warning.

TAKE NOTE OF GREAT BOOK

I recently came across a book that I feel everyone could benefit from. It's called, If This Is Love, Why Am I Unhappy? Relationship Specialist, Scott Kudia, Ph.D., discusses our two greatest needs and our two biggest fears in every relationship. He then illustrates how our parents may be inadvertently running our relationships and what we can do about it. I don't know how many people need help with their relationships, but I do know that everyone wants more from their relationship. Dr. Kudia's book empowers everyone using it to raise your relationship to another level because it is based on what we think, what we feel, and what we can do to get more from our relationships. And he does so without sounding technical or doctery. Dr. Kudia is offering free gifts to celebrate the release of his new book on January 11th. Go to www.scottkudia.com/bonus.htm to check it out!

MORE ON ELECTROMAGNETIC POLLUTION

LSI.

The following are a group of articles that refer to this subject matter – please read:

THE LIE:

National & World News

Danish study: Cell phones don't trigger cancer

WASHINGTON (AP) — A huge study from Denmark offers more assurances that cell phones don't trigger cancer. Scientists tracked 420,000 Danish cell phone users, including 52,000 who have had one for ten years or more.

THE TRUTH:

Friends:

I have some very unique personal insight that I would like to share on this new Danish study. I will have a formal analysis and Safe Wireless Alert out on this by the end of the week. But, here is important background.

Indeed, John Boice and his colleagues have been on the cell phone industry payroll, and for big money, since the late 1990's. The money laundering vehicle is the International Epidemiology Institute -- the name sounds like a non-profit by design, but make no mistake, this is a big for-profit enterprise. When I ran the WTR, the International Epidemiology Institute, with Boice and a fellow named Joe McLaughlin, applied for funding to do this exact epidemiology study that was released this week. After much discussion within the WTR, they were refused funding because I felt they were blatantly biased and had overtly given us the notion that they would always create findings that were favorable to the industry. They thought that is what we wanted in the WTR -- they thought they were playing to the audience. But, they were wrong. When we refused to give them funding to do work, they went directly to the industry with the same pitch, and were hired. They were able to make good on their pitch of being able to put "put all of this under the radar" by further laundering the industry support money through the Danish Cancer Registry. This is the pitch that was given to me personally and directly. I still have their proposal.

The study released this week is the second such study with the same "spin on the findings" from this group of investigators. In 2001, they also had "one of the largest studies to date", and Boice went on a bit of a television tour -- paid directly by the industry -- to blunt the effects of my Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age book tour. I faced off with him a couple of times on T.V. most notabley on John Gibson's news show on MSNBC. It is interesting that MSNBC is also asleep at the switch on this one.

Interestingly, the other person quoted in the news reports on this study -- and I am certain his name was given in the press package released by the industry for the study as that is common practice to make sure there is "independent corroboration" -- is Joshua Muscat. Muscat worked for me under the WTR. Muscat blatantly changed his data after his studies were completed under pressure from the industry. Specifically, Muscat's work -- peer reviewed and completed according to a specific protocol under the WTR -- identified a near tripling in the risk neuroepithelial tumors and a correlation between the side of the head where the phones were used and the side of the head where the tumor was located that were both statistically significant. I speak of these findings in my "Cell Phones" book because they were the findings in the final peer-reviewed report of the data. The findings of a statistically significant increase in neuroepithelial tumors and significant tumor laterality concordance were the official findings of the WTR. However, the industry hired an epidemiologist named Linda Erdreich to participate in the peer review. Under her influence, Muscat's data "mysteriously" changed -- not once, but twice. First, in the report Muscat gave at the Second State of the Science Colloquium -- and published in the book that contains all of the papers presented at the Long Beach Colloquium in June 1999 -- the statistically significant correlation between side of the head where tumors were and side of the head where phones were used disappeared. Then, yet again, in the paper that he submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the data were further altered so that the statistically significant increase in tumor risk disappeared as well. Both of these alterations in the data were flagrant breaches of the peer-reviewed scientific protocols that were intended to guide that research. In a letter to the editor of JAMA before the study was published, I pointed these inconcistencies out and indicated that I was the funder of the study. The journal ignored the letter and went forward with the publication. Clearly, the industry carefully orchestrated the Muscat fraud so that the data that were "published" in JAMA carried no statistical significance. The press release for that study carried the "no statistical findings" heading. Of course, all of these data manipulations are evident in published papers, but no one has chosen to raise the issue in the media.

Interestingly, when the Muscat JAMA study was released in January 2001, there was another "high credibility" companion paper released in the industry package along with it to support the "no cancer from cell phones" spin. That study, done by Inskip et al., was realeased two weeks early at the request of the industry, so that there would appear to be two leading journals debunking the cell phone-cancer hypothesis at the same time. They were all bundled into one package that was sprung on me one night when I was being interviewed by Dan Rather of CBS News. In that paper, Inskip himself pointed out that the study did not include any tumors that were within the range of exposure to the cell phone near field plume. However, even with the admitted shortcoming that the data were only marginally relevant to actual cell phone induced radiation exposures, it was lauded as another cell phone safety harbinger in the press package. And, who was that Journal who agreed to release the study early under pressure from the cell phone industry? You guessed it, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. And, who had just left the payroll of the National Cancer Institute who runs the journal at the time? You guessed it -- John Boice.

Finally, also now circulating in the press package as part of this latest study are comments from Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. He is using this as an entre to get in the news to raise some money for ACS. His take -- the studies show no risk. Of course, what people don't know is that in 2002, scientists from the American Cancer Society testified in brain cancer litigation in Federal Court in Baltimore, Maryland on behalf of the cell phone industry. They would want you to believe that no one was paid for that testimony. However, shortly after that, a report was released by the American Cancer Society that included cells phones as one of the greatest cancer myths. So blatant was this connection between the American Cancer Society and the cell phone industry, that last year, when Sanjay Gupta of CNN ran a story about the belief of Johnnie Cochran's surgeon that his fatal brain tumor was due to his cell phone use, the industry did not even reply in the story. Instead, they simply referred to and quoted the American Cancer Society's report on cell phones being one of the cancer myths. Thus, they used the American Cancer Society paper as a public relations shield.

Everything I say here is fully documented by publicly available information. But, it is so diffuse that it is difficult for folks to connect the dots. Inexplicably, there remains a peculiar absence of investigative journalists who are working on uncovering the full breadth and depth of the industry's orchestrated manipulation program. Where are Woodward and Bernstein when you need them?

Am I calling out some very prestigious groups and openly showing their conspicuous unethical behavior, questionable integrity and disregard for public health? You bet I am. The Danish Cancer Registry, John Boice, Joshua Muscat, Michael Thun, Linda Erdreich, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Cancer Society have ties to the telecommuncations industry that compromise their ability to provide meaningful information on this important public health issue. As sad as it is, this is a "follow the money" exercise that is yet another example of public health being compromised by industry subterfuge.

Please feel free to pass this word. Dr. George L. Carlo

NEUROSCIENCE: A Swedish study links mobile phones to brain damage - in rats, anyway.

by Elizabeth Svoboda

February 2004

The safety of cellphones has been called into question, again. This time the scientific community is paying very close attention.

Last summer neurosurgeon Leif Salford and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden published data showing for the first time an unambiguous link between microwave radiation emitted by GSM mobile phones (the most common type worldwide) and brain damage in rats. If Salford's results are confirmed by follow-up studies in the works at research facilities worldwide, including one run by the U.S. Air Force, the data could have serious implications for the one billion?plus people glued to their cellphones.

The findings have re-ignited a longstanding debate among scientists and cellphone manufacturers over cellphone safety.

Many of the hundreds of studies performed during the past decade suggest cellphone use may cause a host of adverse effects, including headaches and memory loss. Other studies, however, have shown no such effects, and no scientific consensus exists about the effect of long-term, low-level radiation on the brain and other organs. A comprehensive $12 million federal investigation of cellphone safety is currently under way but will take at least five years to complete.

Meanwhile, the research world is scrambling to replicate Salford's surprising results. His team exposed 32 rats to 2 hours of microwave radiation from GSM cellphones.

Researchers attached the phones to the sides of the rats' small cages using coaxial cables -- allowing for intermittent direct exposure -- and varied the intensity of radiation in each treatment group to reflect the range of exposures a human cellphone user might experience over the same time period. Fifty days after the 2-hour exposure, the rat brains showed significant blood vessel leakage, as well as areas of shrunken, damaged neurons. The higher the radiation exposure level, the more damage was apparent. The controls, by contrast, showed little to no damage. If human brains are similarly affected, Salford says, the damage could produce measurable, long-term mental deficits.

The cellphone industry so far has been quick to dismiss the data, saying emissions from current mobiles fall well within the range of radiation levels the FCC deems safe (body-tissue absorption rates of under 1.6 watts per kilogram). "Expert reviews of studies done over the past 30 years have found no reason to believe that there are any health hazards whatsoever," says Mays Swicord, scientific director of Motorola's Electromagnetic Energy Programs. Dr. Marvin Ziskin, chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Committee on Man and Radiation, is similarly skeptical. "The levels of radiation they used seem way too low to be producing the kinds of effects they're claiming."

Salford is the first to admit that it's too early to draw any conclusions, but contends the unusual results deserve a closer look. "The cellphone is a marvelous invention; it has probably saved thousands of lives," he says. "But governments and suppliers should be supporting more autonomous research." Meanwhile, Salford advises users to invest in hands-free headsets to reduce radiation exposure to the brain.

ELECTRIC SENSITIVITY

By Arthur Firstenberg and Susan Molloy

The 750,000-watt Doppler weather radar at Fort Dix, New Jersey, overlooks the Township of Brick. Why is that of interest to anyone but meteorologists? It’s not, except that eight out of every 1000 children born in Brick since the radar station was built in 1994 are autistic. The Brick Township Autism Investigation (1), conducted in 1998 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, uncovered 60 cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among children age three through ten in this town of 77,000 residents. As in much of the rest of the world, autism is increasing here. But the prevalence of both ASD and classic autism in Brick Township were found to be dramatically higher than normal in the 3-to-5-year-old age group, i.e., those born since 1994. Forward-thinking educators and parents have done a good job in recent years of tackling the difficult issues involved in protecting sensitive children from chemical contaminants, dyes, preservatives, and allergens in their food, medications, classrooms, and homes. However, an additional burden has been overlooked and even ridiculed as untenable as a factor in many children’s profound neurological and behavioral problems. Some readers may react with disbeliefto our suggestion that the Fort Dix Doppler might qualify for a place on the radar screen of those scientists who are puzzled by the local epidemic of autism. (2)The authors of this article are adults who are made extremely sick, sometimes incapacitated, from exposure to normal amounts of electromagnetic energy. We’ve seen some children respond as we do, as their well-meaning parents and teachers equip them with newer, faster, more powerful safety and communication devices, oblivious to the potential consequences for their children’s health and development. We’re not oblivious to these consequences because we ourselves respond directly and immediately, with debilitating pain, confusion, and neurological symptoms, to cell phones, cordless phones, computers, televisions, and other normal elements of today’s home, work and school environments. And we are in increasingly good company.

Gro Harlem Brundtland is director-general of the World Health Organization. A medical doctor with a masters degree in public health, as well as former prime minister of Norway, she has recently been speaking in public about her own sensitivity to computers, cordless phones and cell phones. Not only has she warned parents against allowing their children to use cell phones or microwave ovens, but she said that she herself has become so sensitive to the radiation that she does not allow anyone to enter her office with a cell phone turned on. If you enter my office, you are invited by me. No one who is invited would like to give me headaches, she said at a news conference in Oslo on July 1, 2002, where she was attending an international conference on cancer.

Awakening to the potential of electricity affecting children’s health and development can be initially disheartening, because electromagnetic pollution is so inescapable, and its sources so often are conveniences for which we’ve eagerly expended considerable resources. It can also be empowering because it gives parents and practitioners an additional tool and offers a new range of potential factors that may be influencing seemingly intractable health or behavior problems. Both of us went to school and graduated from college before personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, and everything that goes along with them even existed. As environmentally sensitive people, we feel lucky to have grown up before today’s conditions became the norm.

What Can We Do? Computers in the classroom are practically unquestioned now, and that is fine. However, our society should provide computer-free classrooms for the vulnerable children for whom this is a necessary and effective accommodation. In schools where wireless computers or regular computers with wireless keyboards/mice are installed, even a computer-free classroom will not be an effective intervention for a child whose Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is triggered or exacerbated by electromagnetic radiation. This is because the microwave frequencies used by these technologies, identical to the frequencies used in a microwave oven, pass through walls and do not respect the boundaries of classrooms. What we suggest runs counter to the prevailing educational trend, which is to throw more and more computer-enabled devices at physically and developmentally disabled children in an effort to improve their functioning, without any consideration of the potential effects of the extra radiation on their developing nervous systems. When adult populations were sampled within the last year for the prevalence of electrical sensitivity, estimates by researchers varied from 1.5% (Stockholm, Sweden) to 3.3% (state of California) to 7% (Marin County, California) of the population. One patient group in Germany puts the number as high as 15% of the German population. Nobody knows exactly, because this is an isolating, disabling, and ridiculed problem that is still in the public health closet, along with most of its victims. Children are the most vulnerable segment of the population. They are also the most unaware of the potential effects of this invisible and largely unacknowledged pollutant coming from equipment that is so fervently sought by their peers and esteemed by their parents and teachers.

Medical facilities, also, are sites of electronics proliferation. The growing field of medical telemetry uses wireless technology to monitor the vital signs of hospital patients. But also, in hospitals, nursing homes, day care and elder care facilities, mental health institutions and group homes, remote monitoring of patients is in increasing use, not only for medical purposes, but simply to cut back on personnel costs.

New automobiles have much larger electromagnetic fields than they had ten or twenty years ago. This is due to multiple computer-controlled operating systems, GPS satellite-tracking devices, digital dashboard displays, and, commonly, a cell phone constantly charging in the car.

The situation is not hopeless.

At home, every parent can easily do the following experiment - before your family goes to bed, unplug all of the following items: the TV, the computer, the base unit of the cordless phone, the entertainment center, and the baby monitor. Then pay attention to everyone’s sleep, how you feel in the morning upon awakening, and note whether you and your child seem calmer. Appliances should be completely unplugged, not just turned off at a surge protector (which itself may be a source of electromagnetic fields). If your child has a motorized wheelchair, don’t plug it in overnight next to his or her bed. Often these children are especially vulnerable as they may already have epilepsy, cerebral palsy, or other mobility-impairing conditions.

Electric floor or ceiling heaters, fluorescent lights, dimmer switches, and electronic security systems can all produce problematic electromagnetic fields. Finding all the sources and eliminating or avoiding them requires patience and may be time-consuming but is not necessarily difficult or expensive. Your basic measuring tools are a $40 magnetic field meter, or gauss meter and a cheap (poorer quality is better for this purpose) battery-operated AM radio. When the gauss meter reads 0.2 milligauss or less, and the radio, when tuned between stations, remains silent (does not buzz or give loud static), you have a relatively calm environment - especially important in the sleeping area. These two measuring devices will not detect the very high frequency radiation produced by cordless phones, wireless computers, baby monitors, remote controls for appliances, radio-controlled toys, and other wireless equipment. We recommend eliminating wireless technology from the environment altogether. Many homes will have ambient magnetic fields that cannot be reduced to 0.2 milligauss because of factors outside your control, most commonly nearby power lines and transformers. Neighbor activities may also be a factor. But reducing exposures to the extent possible within the home may still have a significant effect, especially on neurological or behavioral problems in developing children. Exposures outside your control, such as from the street, a radar station or cell tower, at school, or in hospitals and medical facilities, can be dealt with effectively only on a societal level. We have a long way to go before these problems are given the serious attention they deserve.

Ironically, some of our societal problems like school violence and kidnappings of children are used as the reason to attach more cell phones to our kids for their safety and our peace of mind. But these very devices, and the millions of towers and antennas that make their use possible, expose all of us to a level of radiation that we know (from studies and painful first hand experience) can contribute to the anxiety, depression, irritability, impulsivity, confusion, and general unrest that feed the very concerns which led to the need for all those cell phones in the first place. This can begin to change as more of us turn them off and experience the difference.

About the authors:

Arthur Firstenberg is founder and director of the Cellular Phone Taskforce, a nonprofit organization that disseminates information about electromagnetic radiation and advocates for electrically sensitive people. He is editor of the Taskforce.s publication, No Place to Hide, and the author of Microwaving Our Planet: The Environmental Impact of the Wireless Revolution. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1971 with a B.A. in mathematics, he went to medical school from 1978 to 1982. Injury by x-ray overdose cut short his career. Firstenberg explains that after receiving about 50 diagnostic x-rays during extensive dental work, he became sensitive to high-powered equipment in the hospitals where he worked. “I could literally feel the radiation from the equipment; it made me weak and dizzy, but I kept working. After several months I collapsed. I was 31 and no one knew the cause of my illness. I was bedridden for about three months and at first I was not sure if I would survive…” Firstenberg.s symptoms included a slow heartbeat, chest pain, extreme shortness of breath on exertion and weight loss. By reading Eastern European literature on the subject, he eventually discovered that he had the symptoms of radio wave sickness. He later learned that any type of electromagnetic field may provoke similar illness in sensitive people, which commonly manifests with nausea, dizziness, headache, irritability, insomnia, and difficulty with memory and concentration. He also gradually became chemically hypersensitive. His therapeutic approach is strict avoidance. At home, he has no computer, no television, no wireless equipment, no microwave, and uses only incandescent lighting. He moved cross-country to Mendocino, California which has minimal electrical pollution, and he is symptom-free as long as he avoids exposure. As is often the case in advocacy organizations, Firstenberg’s personal experience led him to study the condition that plagued him. He is now an international spokesperson and advisor on the subject of electrical sensitivity (ES). He can be contacted by phone at (707) 937-3990 or mail P.O. Box 1337, Mendocino, CA 95460.

Susan Molloy has an MA in disability policy and provides referrals and troubleshooting for people with symptoms provoked by environmental exposures. She is cofounder of the Environmental Health Network (EHN) of California and edited EHN.s newsletter for 11 years. She served as chair of the Independent Living Council in Arizona and works at New Horizons Independent Living Center in Prescott Valley. She works from home due to her inability to withstand electromagnetic exposure, and uses a custom-shielded computer provided by Arizona Rehabilitation Services Administration. Molloy has a history of allergies since childhood and was hospitalized with chemical sensitivities at age 31. ES symptoms emerged shortly after this.” When I go under power lines or fluorescent lights, it feels like a blow to the top of my head”, she explains. Asked if she could run errands, Molloy explains, “I can go into buildings, it’s getting back out that’s the problem. I tend to lose coordination and would often be stumbling if I didn’t use a wheelchair. I get disoriented and my speech is also affected…” Professional-grade ear protectors help soften the impact of auditory hypersensitivity to motor noises. She feels that living in the desert, where she keeps appliances to a minimum, has given her more stamina. “I’d like to think that Arthur and I are just special cases that people can stand back and distance themselves from our difficulties. I’d like to think that others won’t suffer similar problems. But we know better. The numbers are growing, and no one is listening…” She can be reached at (928)536-4625 or susanm@cybertrails.com.

IS SEX A PROBLEM? NOT ANY MORE IT ISN’T…

A Natural Healthy Solution for Sexual Dysfunction

Male Erectile Dysfunction and Female Sexual Dysfunction affects millions of people worldwide. Currently there are medications for men to treat the symptoms, but they have serious side effects including permanent impotence, painful erections lasting more than 24 hours (called priapism), splitting headaches, and even death. For women, there are risky hormone treatments which have been prescribed with mixed success.

National advertising campaigns promote the latest and greatest solutions for sexual dysfunction as though this was like taking aspirin for a headache. The result is it's hard to separate what works from what causes more harm than good.

Virility is different from most sexual aids in that it increases libido, desire and assists in sexual dysfunctions with long term benefits as opposed to long term side affects so often associated with pharmaceutical products. Formulated for use equally by men and women, it is designed with two purposes;

· as a libido and performance enhancer (to be taken before sexual activity), and

· as a maintenance dose to gradually reduce/eliminate the cause of sexual dysfunction.

It is important to address the natural aging process, diet, exercise, stress and illness when thinking about your sexual health as all of these can affect our natural sexual drive. Although sexual issues can occur in women of all ages, they may become more prevalent during hormonally transitional times, such as postpartum or menopause, as well as with major illnesses, such as cancer. To learn more about a natural healthy herbal support protocol, click here www.vlformulas.com.

We also suggest adding Seroctin to Virility for a double whammy and an assured positive result. Seroctin is available at www.vlformulas.com .

VACCINATION DECISIONS- to vaccinate or not?

INTRODUCTORY MESSAGE from www.nvic.org

If you are trying to make a decision about whether to vaccinate yourself or your child we hope you find the information on our website helpful in making an informed decision. We recommend that you not only use NVIC’s information in making a decision but also talk to trusted health professionals and consider browsing through other vaccine information web sites, many of which are linked directly from this web site.

If you or your child has suffered a serious health problem following receipt of a vaccine, it is very important that you make a vaccine adverse event report to NVIC (click here to report a reaction). Since 1982, NVIC has operated a vaccine adverse event database which is helping to stimulate independent research into vaccine adverse events. A record of what happened to you or your child could help identify common factors which pre-dispose individuals to reacting to vaccines; find ways to prevent others from suffering the same kind of vaccine-related health problems you or your child are suffering; and may well contribute to future development of therapies to help repair vaccine damage.

You should also make a vaccine adverse event report to the federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The health professional that administered the vaccine has a duty under the law to report all serious health problems which develop within 30 days of vaccination to VAERS. If that person refuses to make the report, contact NVIC and we will help you make the vaccine adverse event report to VAERS yourself.

For more information order the Consumer’s Guide to Childhood Vaccines or other books and videos available through our NVIC Store.

We hope you will become a member of NVIC so we can continue our mission of preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. As a member you will receive special reports and newsletters which will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in vaccine research, development, policymaking and legislation.

Barbara Loe Fisher
Co-Founder & President

VACCINATION DECISIONS FOR PARENTS

Vaccination is a medical procedure which carries a risk of injury or death. As a parent, it is your responsibility to become educated about the benefits and risks of vaccines in order to make the most informed, responsible vaccination decisions.

1. Your doctor is required by law to provide you with vaccine benefit/risk information materials before your child is vaccinated. Consumer groups, including the National Vaccine Information Center, worked with government health agencies to develop parent information booklets on each mandated vaccine. Ask your doctor for the booklet and take time to read it before your child is vaccinated. You may also ask your doctor to show you the information insert provided by the drug company which manufactured the vaccine(s) your child is scheduled to receive.

2. Your doctor is required by law to keep a permanent record of all vaccinations given, including the vaccine manufacturer's name and lot number. Ask for a copy of the doctor's record on vaccinations given to your child to keep for your records.

3. Your doctor is required by law to report all adverse events, including injuries and deaths which occur within 30 days after vaccination to federal health authorities. If your doctor refuses to report a reaction following vaccination, you have the right to report to the government yourself.

4. If your child is left permanently brain damaged or dies as a result of a vaccine reaction, you may be entitled to benefits under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. By 2004 the federal vaccine injury compensation program had compensated nearly 2000 families at a cost of $1.5 billion.

DO:

Become educated about childhood diseases and vaccines. You have the ultimate responsibility for your child's health and well-being and you, not your doctor or state or federal health officials, will live with, and be responsible for the consequences of your decision.

Ask your doctor to give your child a physical exam to make sure your child is healthy before you permit vaccination. A sick child can be at increased risk for having a vaccine reaction.

Write down your child's personal and family medical history listing major illnesses and diseases or medical conditions, especially previous reactions to vaccinations, and have it included in your child's permanent medical records. Before permitting vaccination of your child, ask your doctor if any of these conditions will put your child at risk for having a vaccine reaction. A child who has had a previous severe reaction to a vaccination can be especially at risk for even more severe reactions if more vaccine is given. If you are not satisfied with the answers you are given, get a second opinion.

Monitor your child closely after vaccination. Call your doctor if you suspect a reaction. If your doctor is not concerned and you are, take your child to an emergency room.

Obtain a copy of your state mandatory vaccination laws. Become educated about state vaccine requirements, your rights and legal exemptions to vaccination.

Don't be intimidated by medical personnel and forced into a vaccination decision before you are comfortable with your decision.

GARDASIL AND HPV INFECTION - GET THE FACTS

Click here www.nvic.org/Diseases/HPV/HPVHOME.htm

Surprising Long-Term Consequences of the Chicken Pox Vaccine

At my daughter's annual physical, her pediatrician made an interesting observation about the chickenpox vaccine. Jeanne Marconi, MD, told me that there appears to be some fallout from the vaccine, which was licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995. She is seeing fewer cases of chickenpox (varicella), but the cases that do show up in her office tend to be far worse than they used to be in children. Instead of 100 or so lesions or blisters that used to develop during a typical case of chicken pox, there are now hundreds of blisters or lesions on unvaccinated children and adults who get this once fairly benign childhood disease.

These more severe cases of chicken pox can lead to potentially life-threatening complications such as pneumonia, warns Dr. Marconi. Her theory for the change -- acquired immunity, a passive immunity that we develop from being part of a general population in which viruses and bacteria exist, has decreased. This is in part due to antiseptic, germ-free environments and mass vaccination programs. Unvaccinated people are getting more severe chicken pox than they would have before the chickenpox vaccine started being widely used. This is because they are less likely to be continually exposed to the varicella zoster virus that causes chicken pox, says Dr. Marconi. Lacking exposure and reexposure, they don't have the opportunity to develop even low-level antibodies to chickenpox, she added.

CONCERNS WITH THE CHICKENPOX VACCINE

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) now recommends two-dose chickenpox vaccinations for children, taken three to five years apart for children under 13 and at least 12 weeks apart for those age 13 and above. All states require certain vaccines to attend school. However, depending upon the state, there are medical, religious and philosophical exemptions that parents may be able to obtain for their children to opt out of one or more vaccines. According to a 2002 CDC study, the "effectiveness of the vaccine was 44% against disease of any severity and 86% against moderate or severe disease." The remaining 15% failed to respond to the first chicken pox vaccination, leaving them susceptible to a mild case of the disease at some point.

However, there are lingering questions about the vaccine. Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a national, non-profit, educational organization dedicated to the prevention of childhood vaccine injuries and deaths, has safety concerns about the vaccine, and believes that it should not have been mandated.

According to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), there were 67.5 adverse events per 100,000 doses of varicella vaccine reported between 1995 and 1998. In some cases, these were severe, including shock, encephalitis (brain inflammation), Guillain-Barre Syndrome, herpes zoster (shingles), cellulitis (serious bacterial skin infections) and death. From March 1995 to December 2001, according to VAERS, there were 15,180 reports of adverse events -- 759 of which were considered serious. While the CDC's position is that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks for most people, Fisher points out that there are many questions about the true adverse event profile. In particular, the numbers of adverse events may be understated since events such as seizures and other signs of brain inflammation following vaccination are often dismissed as coincidental, she says. Additionally, chickenpox is generally mild in vaccinated children, and most children who have chickenpox develop lifelong immunity to it. The chicken pox vaccine, like all vaccines, gives only temporary immunity. This means that as adults, vaccinated individuals could still be vulnerable to chickenpox -- and in adults, chickenpox can be a far more serious disease. As Dr. Marconi has observed, while far fewer, the current cases of chicken pox that are occurring in the unvaccinated are far more severe and dangerous for some than they might have been if the vaccine had not been made mandatory in most states.

There is also concern that despite the drop in the incidence of chickenpox, there will be a corresponding rise in shingles, or herpes zoster. This acute viral infection -- characterized by numbness, burning and tingling on parts of the body -- causes a searingly painful, blistering rash. Shingles is most common in the elderly or adults over 50 and is caused by the same varicella zoster virus that causes chickenpox. The theory is that adults receive natural, asymptomatic immune boosting against shingles by occasional contact with children who have chickenpox. Because shingles usually strikes decades after chickenpox, and the vaccine was only approved in 1995, it is not known how long the temporary immunity associated with the vaccine will last and if adults who were vaccinated when young will remain protected against shingles in the same way those who experienced chicken pox as children in past generations, were protected from both chicken pox and shingles as adults.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

The NVIC recommends that you address the following eight questions before vaccination:

Is my child sick right now? If so, you may want to hold off on vaccination, since adverse effects can be more likely to occur in ill people and a coinciding viral or bacterial infection at the time of vaccination can affect the ability of the vaccine to stimulate even the temporary immunity.

Has my child had a bad reaction to a vaccination before? According to the CDC, people who have had a life-threatening allergic reaction to chickenpox vaccine, neomycin or gelatin should not receive the chickenpox vaccine. The NVIC advocates caution if a child has previously had a bad reaction to any vaccination.

Does my child have a personal or family history of vaccine reactions... convulsions or neurological disorders... severe allergies... immune system disorders? According to the CDC, people should consult with their doctor about whether or not they should get the chickenpox vaccine if they have any kind of cancer or are receiving cancer treatment with X-rays or drugs... a disease that affects immune function... are receiving treatment with drugs such as long-term steroids (as in some cases for asthma, for example)... or have recently gotten blood products (or a transfusion). In addition, the NVIC advocates caution if a child has had a personal or family history of convulsions, neurological disorders, severe allergies or immune system disorders.

Do I know if my child is at high risk of reacting? NVIC urges caution if a child is sick at the time of vaccination, or has a personal or family history of vaccine reactions, convulsions or neurological disorders, severe allergies or immune system disorders. Discuss the risks versus benefits of vaccination with your physician.

Do I know how to identify a vaccine reaction? The most common reaction is soreness, redness or swelling at the shot site, which occurs 20% of the time... chicken pox lesions on the body within one to four weeks of vaccination... and fever over 102 degrees F. In the case of more serious reactions, such as a seizure or other signs of brain inflammation, seek immediate medical attention. Children should be monitored for at least four weeks following vaccination for signs of serious changes in physical, mental or emotional health and all symptoms of health deterioration reported to a doctor.

Do I know how to report a vaccine reaction? The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) monitors adverse effects of vaccines. Ask your physician or health department to file a Vaccine Adverse Event Report System form, or call 800-822-7967.

Do I know the vaccine manufacturer's name and lot number? Get this information from your physician at the time of vaccination.

Do I know I have a choice? Most states require the chickenpox vaccine for child care and school entry. However, there are possible medical, religious and philosophical exemptions depending upon the vaccine laws in your state. If you have concerns about vaccination, check with your state health department to learn more about them.

Thanks to the reduction in naturally acquired immunity to chickenpox because of mandatory vaccination policies, we are now between a rock and a hard place in deciding whether or not to vaccinate ourselves or our children. Should we get the vaccine and risk future wellness from vaccine side effects or increased risk of shingles? Should we skip the vaccine, and risk a potentially severe case of chicken pox? Should we get one dose of the vaccine but skip the booster?

So much for doing no harm and protecting the public health.

VACCINE RUINED HIS HEALTH, CAREER, FORMER AIRMAN CLAIMS

The Army Times
December 18, 2006

Staff writer

When Staff Sgt. Jason Adkins joined the Air Force, he never expected to end up a pariah especially not when he followed orders to the letter.

In 1998, Adkins, a C-5 flight engineer, was transferred to Dover Air Force Base, Del., and ordered to take the anthrax vaccine. Other service members and civilian employees refused the inoculations, but Adkins wasn’t one of them.

Between September 1998 and October 2004, he received eight shots — the initial six-shot regimen and two boosters — which he said subsequently left him with debilitating side effects.

When he tried to speak out about a possible link between his health problems and the vaccine, he said, his chain of command came down on him hard and left a promising 14-year military career in shambles.

An untold number of troops were punished for refusing the anthrax vaccine from 1998 through late 2004 — the exact number is unknown, but certainly at least hundreds — but Adkins’ case is an unusual twist on the legal issues related to the anthrax vaccine.

Adkins has fought back, suing the government in federal court in Delaware to have his records corrected and a letter put in his personnel file stating that his free-speech rights were violated.

Twice, the Defense Department has asked a judge to throw out the case, and twice the request has been denied, most recently in August, said Stephen Neuberger, Adkins’ attorney.

Before taking the anthrax vaccine, Adkins was the fitness monitor for his flight squadron, able to bench-press 425 pounds and the picture of health.

“I was the textbook person for the Air Force in the flight suit,” he said.

When he was ordered to take the shots, Adkins said he trusted that the military was doing it for his own good. But symptoms crept up on him, he said, as he went through the shot regimen.

His lawsuit says six of his shots were “tainted with squalene,” a vaccine additive that can boost immune response but can cause serious side effects and is not approved for human use by the Food and Drug Administration.

In late 2000, the FDA found traces of squalene in five lots of anthrax vaccine delivered to Dover. The Pentagon has denied deliberately adding squalene to any stocks of the vaccine and said its trace presence in the Dover lots was an accident.

In an interview, Adkins said he experienced joint pain, muscle loss, migraines, ringing in his ears, memory loss, severe headaches, body aches, weight loss and an irregular heartbeat.

He was afraid to discuss any of his problems for fear of being permanently grounded. “Flying was my world,” he said.

But on the night before a mission in October 2004, he came down with a migraine headache so severe that “he felt his health would endanger the lives of his crew, the mission and the aircraft,” court documents state.

Adkins finally went to his flight surgeon, who indeed grounded him. Within hours, documents state, his commanders accused him of dereliction of duty and of faking his migraines so he wouldn’t have to fly, banned him from wearing his flight suit and wings and issued him a written reprimand.

“They came down on him, and they came down on him hard,” Neuberger said.

Lawyers for the government argued that Adkins has not demonstrated that he was singled out for retaliation and that he has not exhausted all military administrative options. On the question of the violation of Adkins’ free speech, they argued that what he said was not a matter of public concern and that the military’s need to maintain “the obedience of its enlisted personnel” trumped Adkins’ right to free speech.

Defense Department officials declined to comment on the case because it is pending.

The Pentagon’s anthrax vaccine Web site, www.anthrax.osd.mil, has an “adverse events” section that instructs those who think they are having a negative reaction to the vaccine to “go to their health care provider as soon as possible.”

According to the site, it is the patient’s responsibility to ask the health care provider to file a report with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a Health and Human Services Department database.

The FDA said in late 2005 that from July 1990 through March 2005, VAERS logged 4,279 reports of health problems as a result of the anthrax vaccine, with 390 listed as “serious.”

But critics claim the number of adverse events is higher, and even the FDA acknowledges the “passive” nature of VAERS may lead to underreporting. There is no requirement that reactions to the inoculations be reported, to VAERS or anyone else.

The Pentagon has established a national Vaccine Healthcare Centers Network, with a hub based at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The VHC is designed to act as a “specialized clinical support system for the development and implementation of programs, research and services that enhance vaccine safety, efficacy and acceptability,” according to its Web site.

Despite repeated requests, officials at Walter Reed would not make doctors available to Navy Times to discuss documentation, tracking and rates of adverse reactions to the anthrax vaccine.

The VHC’s main Web page — www.vhcinfo.org/index.htm — does not seem to have been updated in almost a year. At press time, it featured a Dec. 19, 2005, announcement that the FDA had issued a final order finding the vaccine to be effective against all forms of anthrax, stating that the vaccination program would remain voluntary until further notice and that the policy was under review by “senior civilian leaders.”

Meanwhile, the man whose world revolved around flying now runs a lawn care business in Delaware.

His problems are chronic, and while the symptoms may become manageable over time, Adkins said, they’ll never go away. Doctors have told the 30-year-old that he has the hip joints of a 50-year-old.

“You just learn to deal with it,” he said.

He also said he lives with deep disappointment at how the military treats those who dare to even suggest they may have been sickened by a vaccine that was supposed to protect them.

“Walk into any military hospital and say ‘anthrax vaccine,’ and it’s like you pulled a fire alarm,” Adkins said. “I was their textbook kid, a golden boy — until I mentioned that word.”

REPROGRAMMING YOUR BIOCHEMISTRY FOR IMMORTALITY:

An Interview with Ray Kurzweil
By David Jay Brown

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, software developer, inventor, entrepreneur, philosopher, and a leading proponent of radical life extension. He is the coauthor (with Terry Grossman, M.D.) of Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which is one of the most intriguing and exciting books on life extension around. Kurzweil and Grossman’s approach to health and longevity combines the most current and practical medical knowledge with a soundly-based, yet awe-inspiring visionary perspective of what’s to come.

Kurzweil’s philosophy is built upon the premise that now we have the knowledge to identify and correct the problems caused by most unhealthy genetic predispositions. By taking advantage of the opportunities afforded us by the genomic testing, nutritional supplements, and lifestyle adjustments, we can live long enough to reap the benefits of advanced biotechnology and nanotechnology, which will ultimately allow us to conquer aging and live forever. At the heart of Kurzweil’s optimistic philosophy is the notion that human knowledge is growing exponentially, not linearly, and this fact is rarely taken into account when people try to predict the rate of technological advance in the future. Kurzweil predicts that at the current rate of knowledge expansion, we’ll have the technology to completely conquer aging within the next couple of decades.

Part of what makes Kurzweil’s upbeat vision of the future so appealing is his impressive track record as an inventor and engineer, as well as the success of his past predictions. Kurzweil is a leading expert in speech and pattern recognition and he invented a vast array of computer marvels. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font (any type font) optical character recognition software, the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.

Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed ten businesses in speech recognition, reading technology, music synthesis, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. In 2002, Kurzweil was inducted into the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he received the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology from President Clinton in a White House ceremony, and has received 12 honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

In addition to coauthoring Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil wrote The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, and several best selling books on the evolution of intelligence—including The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity Is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil’s books on the evolution of intelligence read like mind-bending science fiction, but are based on a scientific analysis of technology trends. Kurzweil predicts that computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence in only a few decades, and that it won’t be long after that before humans start merging with machines, blurring the line between technology and biology.

For more information about Kurzweil see his Web site www.kurzweilai.net, where you can subscribe to his free newsletter. Web sites on his books include www.Fantastic-Voyage.net and www.Singularity.com

Kurzweil works in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I spoke with Ray on February 8, 2006. Ray speaks very precisely and he chooses his words carefully. He presents his ideas with a lot of confidence, and I found his optimism to be contagious. We spoke about the importance of genomic testing, some of the common misleading ideas that people have about health, and how biotechnology and nanotechnology will radically affect our longevity in the future.

Q: What inspired your interest in life extension?

Ray: Probably the first incident that got me on this path was my father’s illness. This began when I was 15, and he died seven years later of heart disease when I was 22. He was 58. I’ll actually be 58 this Sunday. I sensed a dark cloud over my future, feeling like there was a good chance that I had inherited his disposition to heart disease. When I was 35, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and the conventional medical approach made it worse.

So I really approached the situation as an inventor, as a problem to be solved. I immersed myself in the scientific literature, and came up with an approach that allowed me to overcome my diabetes. My levels became totally normal, and in the course of this process, I discovered that I did indeed have a disposition, for example, to high cholesterol. My cholesterol was 280 and I also got that down to around 130. That was 22 years ago.

I wrote a bestselling health book, which came out in 1993, about that experience, and the program that I’d come up with. That’s what really got me on this path of realizing that—if you’re aggressive enough about reprogramming your biochemistry—you can find the ideas that can help you to overcome your genetic dispositions, because they’re out there. They exist.

About seven years ago, after my book The Age of Spiritual Machines came out in 1999, I was at a Foresight Institute conference. I met Terry Grossman there, and we struck up a conversation about this subject—nutrition and health. I went to see him at his longevity clinic in Denver for an evaluation, and we built a friendship. We started exchanging emails about health issues—and that was 10,000 emails ago. We wrote this book Fantastic Voyage together, which really continues my quest. And he also has his own story about how he developed similar ideas, and how we collaborated.

There’s really a lot of knowledge available right now, although, previously, it has not been packaged in the same way that we did it. We have the knowledge to reprogram our biochemistry to overcome disease and aging processes. We can dramatically slow down aging, and we can really overcome conditions such as atherosclerosis, which leads to almost all heart attacks and strokes, diabetes, and we can substantially reduce the risk of cancer with today’s knowledge. And, as you saw from the book, all of that is just what we call ‘Bridge One.’ We’re not saying that taking lots of supplements and changing your diet is going enable you to live 500 years. But it will enable Baby Boomers—like Dr. Grossman and me, and our contemporaries—to be in good shape ten or 15 years from now, when we really will have the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution, which is ‘Bridge Two.’

Now, this gets into my whole theory of information technology. Biology has become an information technology. It didn’t used to be. Biology used to be hit or miss. We’d just find something that happened to work. We didn’t really understand why it worked, and, invariably, these tools, these drugs, had side-effects. They were very crude tools. Drug development was called drug discovery, because we really weren’t able to reprogram biology. That is now changing. Our understanding of biology, and the ability to manipulate it, is becoming an information technology. We understand the information processes that underlie disease processes, like atherosclerosis, and we’re gaining the tools to reprogram those processes.

Drug development is now entering an era of rational drug design, rather than drug discovery. The important point to realize is that the progress is exponential, not linear. Invariably people—including sophisticated people—do not take that into consideration, and it makes all the difference in the world. The mainstream skeptics declared the 15 year genome project a failure after seven and a half years because only one percent of the project was done. The skeptics said, I told you this wasn’t going to work—here you are halfway through the project and you’ve hardly done anything. But the progress was exponential, doubling every year, and the last seven doublings go from one percent to 100 percent. So the project was done on time. It took 15 years to sequence HIV. We sequenced the SARS virus in 31 days.

There are many other examples of that. We’ve gone from ten dollars to sequence one base pair in 1990 to a penny today. So in ten or 15 years from now, it’s going to be a very different landscape. We really will have very powerful interventions, in the form of rationally-designed drugs that can precisely reprogram our biochemistry. We can do it to a large extent today with supplements and nutrition, but it takes a more extensive effort. We’ll have much more powerful tools 15 years from now, so I want it to be in good shape at that time.

Most of my Baby Boomer contemporaries are completely oblivious of this perspective. They just assume that aging is part of the cycle of human life, and at 65 or 70 you start slowing down. Then at 80 you’re dead. So they’re getting ready to retire, and are really unaware of this perspective that things are going to be very different ten or 15 years from now. This insight really should motivate them to be aggressive about using today’s knowledge. Of course, all of this will lead to ‘Bridge Three’ about 20 years from now—the nanotechnology revolution—where we can go beyond the limitations of biology. We’ll have programmable nanobots that can keep us healthy from inside, and truly provide truly radical life extension.

So that’s the genesis. My interest in life extension stems primarily from my having been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I really consider the diabetes to be a blessing because it prodded me to overcome it, and, in so doing, I realized that I didn’t just have an approach for diabetes, but a general attitude and approach to overcome any health problem, that we really can find the ideas and apply them to overcome the genetic dispositions that we have. There’s a common wisdom that your genes are 80 percent of your health and longevity and lifestyle is only 20 percent. Well, that’s true if you follow the generally watered-down guidelines that our health institutions put out. But if you follow the optimal guidelines that we talk about, you can really overcome almost any genetic disposition. We do have the knowledge to do that.

Q: What do you think are some of the common misleading ideas that people have about health and longevity?

Ray: One thing that I just eluded to is the compromised recommendations from our health authorities. I just had a lengthy debate with the Joslin Diabetes Center, which is considered the world’s leading diabetes treatment and research center. I’m on the board, and they’ve just come out with new nutritional guidelines, which are highly compromised. They’re far from ideal, and they acknowledge that. They say, well, we have enough trouble getting people to follow these guidelines, let alone the stricter guidelines that you recommend. And my reply is, you have trouble getting people to follow your guidelines because they don’t work. If people followed your guidelines very precisely, they’d still have type 2 diabetes. They’d still have to take harsh drugs or insulin.

If they follow my guidelines, the situation is quite different. I’ve counseled many people about type 2 diabetes, and Dr. Grossman has treated many people with it, and they come back and they have completely normal levels. Their symptoms are gone, and they don’t have to take insulin or harsh drugs. They feel liberated, and that’s extremely motivating. In many ways it’s easier to make a stricter change. To dramatically reduce your high glycemic index carbs is actually easier than moderately reducing them, because if you moderately reduce them you don’t get rid of the cravings for carbs. Carbs are addictive, and it’s just like trying to cut down a little bit on cigarettes. It’s actually easier to cut cigarettes out completely, and it’s also easier to largely cut out high glycemic index starches and sugars, because the cravings go away and it’s much easier to follow. But, most importantly, it works along with a few supplements and exercise to overcome most cases of type 2 diabetes.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the attitude of our health authorities. The nutritional recommendations are consistently compromised. There’s almost no understanding of the role of nutritional supplements, which can be very powerful. I take 250 supplements a day, and I monitor my body regularly. I’m not just flying without instrumentation. Being an engineer, I like data and I monitor 50 or 60 different blood levels every few months, and I’m constantly fine-tuning my program. All of my blood levels are ideal. My homocysteine level many years ago was eleven, but now it’s five. My C-reactive protein is 0.1. My cholesterol is 130. My LDL is about 60, and my HDL—which was 28—is now close to 60. And so on and so forth.

I’ve also taken biological aging tests which measure things like tactile sensitivity, reaction time, memory, and decision-making speed. There are 40 different tests, and you compare your score to medians for different populations at different ages. When I was 40, I came out at about 38. Now I’m 57 —at least for a few more days—and I come out at 40. So, according to these tests, I’ve only aged two years in the last 17. Now you can dispute the absolute validity of these biological aging tests. It’s just a number, but it’s just evidence that this program is working.

Q: Why do you think that genomic testing is important?

Ray: Our program is very much not a one size fits all. It’s not a one-trick pony. We’re not saying that if you lower your carbs, lower your fat, or eat a grapefruit a day then everything will be fine. In fact, our publisher initially had a problem with this, but they actually got behind it enthusiastically, because it fundamentally differs, as you know, from most health books that really do have just one idea. We earnestly try to provide a comprehensive understanding of your biology and your body, which does have some complexity to it. Then we let people apply these principles to their own lives.

It is important to emphasize the issues that are concerns for yourself. We use an analogy of stepping backwards towards a cliff. It’s much easier to change direction before you fall off the cliff. But, generally, medicine doesn’t get involved until the eruption of clinical disease. Someone has a heart attack, or they develop clinical cancer, and that’s very often akin to falling off a cliff. One third of first heart attacks are fatal, and another third cause permanent damage to the heart muscle.

It’s much easier to catch these conditions beforehand. You don’t just catch heart disease or cancer walking down the street one day. These are many years or decades in the making, and you can see where you are in the progression of these diseases. So it’s very important to know thyself, to access your own situation. Genetic testing is important because you can see what dispositions you have. If you have certain genes that dispose you to heart disease, or conversely cancer, or diabetes, then you would give a higher priority to managing those issues, and do more tests to see where you are in the progression of those conditions. Let’s say you do a test and it says you have a genetic disposition to type 2 diabetes. So you should do a glucose-tolerance test. In fact, we describe a more sophisticated form of that in the book, where you measure insulin as well, and can see if you have early stages of insulin resistance.

Perhaps you have metabolic syndrome, which a very substantial fraction of the population has. If you have these early harbingers of insulin resistance that could lead to type 2 diabetes, so obviously the priority of that issue will be greatly heightened. If you don’t have that vulnerability then you don’t have to be as concerned about insulin resistance, and so on. But if you do have insulin resistance, or you have a high level of atherosclerosis, then it really behooves you to take important steps to get these dangerous conditions under control—which you can do. So genomic testing is not something you do by itself. It’s part of a comprehensive assessment program to know your own body—not only what you’re predisposed to, but what your body has already developed in terms of early versions of these degenerative conditions.

Q: What are some of the most important nutritional supplements that you would recommend to help prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease?

Ray: We spell all that out in the book. Coenzyme Q10 is important. It never ceases to amaze me that physicians do not tell their patients to take coenzyme Q10 when they prescribe statin drugs. This is because it’s well known that statin drugs deplete the body of coenzyme Q10, and a lot of the side-effects such as muscle weakness that people suffer from statin drugs are because of this depletion of coenzyme Q10. In any event, that’s an important supplement. It is involved in energy generation within the mitochondria of each cell. Disruption to the mitochondria is an important aging process and this supplement will help slow that down. Coenzyme Q10 has a number of protective effects including lowering blood pressure, helping to control free-radical damage, and protecting the heart.

A lot of research recently shows that curcumin, which is derived from the spice turmeric, has important anti-inflammatory properties and can protect against cancer, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s disease.

Alpha-Lipoic acid is an important antioxidant which is both water and fat soluble. It can neutralize harmful free radicals, improve insulin sensitivity, and slow down the process of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which is another key aging process.

Each of the vitamins is important and plays a key role. Vitamin C is generally protective as a premier antioxidant. It appears to have particular effectiveness in preventing the early stages of atherosclerosis, namely the oxidizing of LDL cholesterol.

In terms of vitamin E, there’s been a lot of negative publicity about that, but if you look carefully at that research, you’ll see that all of those studies were done with alpha-tocopherol, and vitamin E is really a blend of eight different substances—four tocopherols and four tocotrienols. Alpha-tocopherol actually depletes levels of gamma-tocopherol, and gamma-tocopherol is the form of vitamin E that’s found naturally in food, and is a particularly important one. So we recommend that people take a blend of the fractions of vitamin E, and that they get enough gamma-tocopherol.

There are a number of others that are important to take in general. If you have high cholesterol, Policosanol is one supplement that is quite effective, and has an independent action from the statin drugs. Statin drugs actually are quite good. They appear to be anti-inflammatory, so they not only lower cholesterol but attack the inflammatory processes, which underlie many diseases, including atherosclerosis. But as I mentioned it’s important to take coenzyme Q10 if you’re taking statin drugs.

There are others. Grape seed proanthocyanidin extract has been found to be another effective antioxidant. Resveratrol is another. We have an extensive discussion of the most important supplements in the book.

Q: What sort of suggestions would you make to someone who is looking to improve their memory or cognitive performance?

Ray: Vinpocetine, derived from the periwinkle plant, seems to have the best research. It improves cerebral blood flow, increases brain cell TP (energy) production, and enables better utilization of glucose and oxygen in the brain.

Other supplements that appear to be important for brain health include Phosphatidylserine, Acetyl-L-Carnitine, Pregnenolone, and EPA/DHA. The research appears a bit mixed on Ginkgo biloba, but we’re not ready to give up on it.

We provide a discussion in the book of a number of smart nutrients that appear to improve brain health. There are also a number of smart drugs being developed, some of which are already in the testing pipeline, that appear to be quite promising.

Q: What do you think are the primary causes of aging?

Ray: Aging is not one thing. There are a number of different processes involved and you can adopt programs that slow down each of these. For example, one process involves the depletion of phosphatidylcholine in the cell membrane. In young people the cell membrane is about 60 or 70 percent phosphatidylcholine, and the cell membrane functions very well then—letting nutrients in and letting toxins out.

The body makes phosphatidylcholine, but very slowly, so over the decades the phosphatidylcholine in the cell membrane depletes, and the cell membrane gets filled in with inert substances, like hard fats and cholesterol that basically don’t work. This is one reason that cells become brittle with age. The skin in an elderly person begins to not be supple. The organs stop functioning efficiently. So it’s actually a very important aging process, and you can reverse that by supplementing with phosphatidylcholine. If you really want to do it effectively you can take phosphatidylcholine intravenously, as I do. Every week I have an I.V. with phosphatidylcholine. I also take it every day orally. So that’s one aging process we can stop today.

Another important aging process involves oxidation through positively-charged oxygen free radicals, which will steal electrons from cells, disrupting normal enzymatic processes. There are a number of different types of antioxidants that you can take to slow down that process, including vitamin C. You could take vitamin C intravenously to boost that process.

Advanced glycation end-products, or AGEs, are involved in another aging process. This is where proteins develop cross-links with each other, therefore disrupting their function. There are supplements that you can take, such as Alpha Lipoic Acid that slow that down. There is an experimental drug called ALT-711 (phenacyldimenthylthiazolium chloride) that can dissolve the AGEs cross-links without damaging the original tissues.

Atherosclerosis is an aging process, and it’s not just taking place in the coronary arteries, of course. It can take place in the cerebral arteries, which ultimately causes cerebral strokes, but it also takes place in the arteries all throughout the body. It can lead to impotence, claudication of the legs and limbs, and like most of these processes, it’s not linear but exponential, in that it grows by a certain percentage each year.

So that’s why the process of atherosclerosis hardly seems to progress for a long time, but then when it gets to a certain point it can really explode and develop very quickly. We have an extensive program on reducing atherosclerosis, which is both an aging process and a disease process. We cite a number of important supplements that reduce cholesterol and inflammation—such as the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA—as well as the statin drugs. Supplements like curcumin [turmeric] are helpful. Supplements that reduce inflammation will reduce both cancer and the inflammatory processes that lead to atherosclerosis. There are a number of supplements that reduce homocysteine, which appears to encourage atherosclerosis. These include Folic Acid, vitamins B2, B6, and B12, magnesium, and trimethylglycine (TMG).

So you can attack atherosclerosis five or six different ways, and we recommend that you do them all, so long as there aren’t contraindications for combining treatments. But generally these treatments are independent of each other. If you go to war, you don’t just send in the helicopters. You send in the helicopters, the tanks, the planes, and the infantry. You use your intelligence resources, and attack the enemy every way that you can, with all of your resources. And that’s really what you need to do with these conditions, because they represent very threatening processes. If you are sufficiently proactive, you can generally get them under control.

Q: What are some of the new anti-aging treatments that you foresee coming along in the near future, like from stem cell research and therapeutic cloning?

Ray: It depends on what you mean by “near future,” because in ten or 15 years, we foresee a fundamentally transformed landscape.

Q: Let’s just say prior to nanotechnology, and then that will be the next question.

Ray: The next frontier is biotechnology. We’re really now entering an era where we can reprogram biology. We’ve sequenced the genome, and we are now reverse-engineering the genome. We’re understanding the roles that the genes play, how they express themselves in proteins, and how these proteins then play roles in sequences of biochemical steps that lead to both orderly processes as well as dysfunction—disease processes, such as atherosclerosis and cancer—and we are gaining the means to reprogram those processes.

For example, we can now turn genes off with RNA interference. This is a new technique that just emerged a few years ago—a medication with little pieces of RNA that latch on to the messenger RNA that is expressing a targeted gene and destroys it, therefore preventing the gene from expressing itself. This effectively turns the gene off. So right away that methodology has lots of applications.

Take the fat insulin receptor gene. That gene basically says ‘hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.’ That was a good strategy, not only for humans, but for most species, thousands of years ago. It’s still probably a good strategy for animals living in the wild. But we’re not animals living in the wild. It was good for humans a thousand years ago when calories were few and far between. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. How about turning that gene off in the fat cells? What would happen?

That was actually tried in mice, and these mice ate ravenously, and they remained slim. They got the health benefits of being slim. They didn’t get diabetes. They didn’t get heart disease. They lived twenty percent longer. They got the benefits of caloric restriction while doing the opposite. So turning off the fat insulin receptor gene in fat cells is the idea. You don’t want to turn it off in muscle cells, for example. This is one methodology that could enable us to prevent obesity, and actually maintain an optimal weight no matter what we ate. So that’s one application of RNA interference.

There are a number of genes that have been identified that promote atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes, and many other diseases. We’d like to selectively turn those genes off, and slow down or stop these disease processes. There are certain genes that appear to have an influence on the rate of aging. We can amplify the expression of genes similarly, and we can actually add new genetic information—that’s gene therapy. Gene therapy has had problems in the past, because we’ve had difficulty putting the genetic information in the right place at the right chromosome. There are new techniques now that enable us to do that correctly.

For example, you can take a cell out of the body, insert the genetic information in vitro—which is much easier to do in a Petri dish—and examine whether or not the insertion went as intended. If it ended up in the wrong place, you discard it. You keep doing this until you get it right. You can examine the cell and make sure that it doesn’t have any DNA errors. So then you take this now modified cell—that has also been certified as being free of DNA errors—and it’s replicated in the Petri dish, so that hundreds of millions of copies of it are created. Then you inject these cells back into the patient, and they will work their way into the right tissues. A lung cell is not going to end up in the liver.

In fact, this was tried by a company I’m involved with, United Therapeutics. I advise them and I’m on their board. They tried this with a fatal disease called pulmonary hypertension, which is a lung disease, and these modified cells ended up in the right place—in the lungs—and actually cured pulmonary hypertension in animal tests. It has now been approved for human trials. That’s just one example of many of being able to actually add new genes. So we’ll be able to subtract genes, over-express certain genes, under-express genes, and add new genes.

Another methodology is cell transdifferentiation, a broader concept than just stem cells. One of the problems with stem cell research or stem cell approaches is this; If I want to grow a new heart, or maybe add new heart cells because my heart has been damaged, or if I need new pancreatic islet cells because my pancreatic islet cells are destroyed, or need some other type of cells, I’d like it to have my DNA. The ultimate stem cell promise, the holy grail of these cell therapies, is to take my own skin cells and reprogram them to be a different kind of cell. How do you do that? Actually, all cells have the same DNA. What’s the difference between a heart cell and pancreatic islet cell?

Well, there are certain proteins, short RNA fragments, and peptides that control gene expression. They tell the heart cells that only the certain genes which should be expressed in a heart cell are expressed. And we’re learning how to manipulate which genes are expressed. By adding certain proteins to the cell, we can reprogram a skin cell to be a heart cell or a pancreatic islet cell. This has been demonstrated in just the last couple years. So then we can create in a Petri dish as many heart cells or pancreatic islet cells as I need, with my own DNA, because they’re derived from my cells. Then inject them, and they’ll work their way into the right tissues. In the process, we can discard cells that have DNA errors, so we can basically replenish our cells with DNA-corrected cells.

While we are at it, we can also extend the telomeres. That’s another aging process. As the cells replicate, these little repeating codes of DNA called telomeres grow shorter. They’re like little beads at the end of the DNA strands. One falls off every time the cell replicates, and there’s only about fifty of them. So after a certain number of replications the cell can’t replicate anymore. There is actually one enzyme that controls this—telomerase, which is capable of extending the telomeres. Cancer actually works by creating telomerase to enable them to replicate without end. Cancer cells become immortal because they can create telomerase.

As we’re rejuvenating our cells, turning a skin cell into a kind of cell that I need, making sure that it has its DNA corrected, we can also extend its telomeres by using telomerase in the Petri dish. Then you got this new cell that’s just like my heart cells were when I was twenty. Now you can replicate that, and then inject it, and really rejuvenate all of the body’s tissues with young versions of my cells. So that’s cell rejuvenation. That’s one idea, or one technique, and there are many different variations of that.

Then there’s turning on and off enzymes. Enzymes are the work horses of biology. Genes express themselves as enzymes, and the enzymes actually go and do the work. And we can add enzymes. We can turn enzymes off. One example of that is Torcetrapib, which destroys one enzyme, and that enzyme destroys HDL, the good cholesterol in the blood. So when people take Torcetrapib their HDL (good cholesterol levels) soar, and atherosclerosis dramatically slows down or stops. The phase two trials were very encouraging, and Pfizer is spending a record one billion dollars on the phase three trials. That’s just one example of many of these paradigms: manipulating enzymes. So there are many different ideas to get in and very precisely reprogram the information processes that underlie biology, to undercut disease processes and aging processes, and move them towards healthy rejuvenated processes.

Q: How do you see robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology effecting human health and life span in the future?

Ray: I mentioned that we talk about three bridges to radical life extension in Fantastic Voyage. Bridge One is aggressively applying today’s knowledge, and that’s of course a moving frontier, as we learn and gain more and more knowledge. In Chapter 10 of Fantastic Voyage, I talk about my program, and at the end I mention that one part of my program is what I call a positive health slope, which means that my program is not fixed.

I spend a certain amount of time every week studying a number of things—new research, new drug developments that are coming out, new information about myself that may come from testing. Just reading the literature I might discover something that’s in fact old knowledge, but there’s so much information out there, I haven’t read everything. So I’m constantly learning more about health and medicine and my own body and modifying my own program. I probably make some small change every week. That doesn’t mean my program is unstable. My program is quite stable, but I’m fine-tuning at the edges quite frequently.

Bridge Two we’ve just been talking about, which is the biotechnology revolution. A very important insight that really changes one’s perspective is to understand that progress is exponential and not linear. So many sophisticated scientists fail to take this into consideration. They just assume that the progress is going to continue at the current pace, and they make this mistake over and over again. If you consider the exponential pace of this process, ten or 15 years from now, we will have really dramatic tools in the forms of medications and cell therapies that can reprogram our health within the domain of biology.

Bridge Three is nanotechnology. The golden era will be in about 20 years from now. There’ll be some applications earlier, but the real holy grail of nanotechnology is nanobots, blood cell-size devices that can go inside the body and keep us healthy from inside. If that sounds very futuristic, I’d actually point out that we’re doing sophisticated tasks already with blood cell-size devices in animal experiments.

One scientist cured type 1 diabetes in rats with a nano-engineered capsule that has seven nanometers pores. It lets insulin out in a controlled fashion and blocks antibodies. And that’s what is feasible today. MIT has a project of a nano-engineered device that’s actually smaller than a cell and it’s capable of detecting specifically the antigens that exist only on certain types of cancer cells. When it detects these antigens, it latches onto the cell, and burrows inside the cell. It can detect once it’s inside and then at that point it releases a toxin which destroys the cancer cell. This has actually worked in the Petri dish, but that’s quite significant because there’s actually not that much that could be different in vivo as in vitro.

This is a rather sophisticated device because it’s going through these several different stages, and it can do all of these different steps. It’s a nano-engineered device in that it is created at the molecular level. So that’s what is feasible already. If you consider what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns, which is a doubling of the power of these information technologies every year, within 25 years these computation-communication technologies, and our understanding of biology, will be a billion times more advanced than it is today. We’re shrinking technology, according to our models, at a rate of over a hundred per 3-D volume per decade.

So these technologies will be a hundred thousand times smaller than they are today in 25 years, and a billion times more powerful. And look at what we can already do today experimentally. Twenty five years from now these nanobots will be quite sophisticated. They’ll have computers in them. They’ll have communication devices. They’ll have small mechanical systems. They’ll really be little robots, and they will be able to go inside the body and keep us healthy from inside. They will be able to augment the immune system by destroying pathogens. They will repair DNA errors, remove debris and reverse atherosclerosis. Whatever we don’t get around to finishing with biotechnology, we’ll be able to finish the job with these nano-engineered blood-cell sized robots or nanobots.

This really will provide radical life extension. The basic metaphor or analogy to keep in mind is to ask the question, "How long does a house last?" Aubrey de Grey uses this metaphor. The answer is that a house lasts as long as you want it to. If you don’t take care of it, the house won’t last that long. It will fall apart. The roof will spring a leak and the house will quickly decay. On the other hand, if you’re diligent, and something goes wrong in the house you fix it. Periodically you upgrade the technology. You put in a new HVAC system and so forth. With this approach, the house will go on indefinitely, and we do have houses, in fact, that are 1000's of years of old. So why doesn’t this apply to the human body?

The answer is that we understand how a house works. We understand how to fix a house. We understand all the problems a house can have, because we’ve designed them. We don’t yet have that knowledge and those tools today to do a comparable job with our body. We don’t understand all the things that could wrong, and we don’t have all the fixes for everything. But we will have this knowledge and these tools. We will have complete models of biology. We’ll have reverse-engineered biology within 20 years, and we’ll have the means to go in and repair all of the problems we have identified.

We’ll be able to indefinitely fix the things that go wrong. We’ll have nanobots that can go in and proactively keep us healthy at a cellular level, without waiting until major diseases flare up, as well as stop and reverse aging processes. We’ll get to a point where people will not age. So when we talk about radical life extension, we’re not talking about people growing old and becoming what we think of today as a 95 year old and then staying at a biological age 95 for 100's of years.

We’re talking about people staying young and not aging. Actually, I’m talking about even more than that, because in addition to radical life extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion. The nanobots will be able to go inside the brain and extend our mental functioning by interacting with our biological neurons. Today we already have computers that are placed inside people’s brains that replace diseased parts of the brain, like the neural implant for Parkinson’s disease. The latest generation of that implant allows you to download new software to your neural implant from outside the patient—and that’s not an experiment, that’s an FDA approved therapy.

Today these neural implants require surgery, but ultimately we’ll be able to send these brain extenders into the nervous system, noninvasively through the capillaries of the brain, without surgery. And we’ll be using them, not just to replace diseased tissue, but to go beyond our current abilities—to extend our memories, extend our pattern recognition and cognitive capabilities, and merge intimately with our technology. So we’ll have radical life expansion along with radical life extension. That’s my vision of what will happen in the next several decades.

Q: What are you currently working on?

Ray: I spend maybe 40 or 50 percent of my time communicating—in the form of books, articles, interviews, speeches. I give several speeches a month. Then there’s my web site: www.kurzweilai.net We have a free daily or weekly newsletter; people can sign up by putting in their email address (which is kept in confidence) on the home page.

Then I have several businesses that I’m running, which are in the area of pattern recognition. I’ve been in the reading machine business for 32 years. I developed the first print-to-speech technology for the blind in 1976, and we’re introducing a new version that fits in your pocket. A blind person can take it out of their pocket, snap a picture of a handout at a meeting, a sign on a wall, the back of a cereal box, an electronic display, and the device will read it out loud to them through an earphone or speaker.

We’re developing a new medical technology, which is basically a smart undershirt that monitors your health. There will be a smart bra version for women. It takes a complete morphology EKG and monitors your breathing. So, for example, if you’re a heart patient it could tell you whether your atrial fibrillation is getting better or worse. When you’re exercising, it can tell you if you’re getting into a problem situation. So it gives you diagnostic information. It can also alert you if you should contact your doctor. So basically your undershirt is sending this information by Bluetooth® to your cell phone, and your cell phone is running this cardiac evaluation software. So that’s another project.

David Jay Brown is the author of four volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers, Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. (Mavericks of Medicine will be published by Smart Publications as a book in late 2006.) He is also the author of two science fiction novels, Brainchild and Virus. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and was responsible for the California-based research in two of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s bestselling books on unexplained phenomena in science: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At. To find out more about David’s work visit his award-winning web site: www.mavericksofthemind.com

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FDA Dairy Recommendation May Create New Problems

A report released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last June called for restaurants to put more milk on their menus. In particular, it encourages more fast food restaurants to offer more low-fat and fat-free milk products with children's meals. Good idea? On the face of it, you would think so. It's obviously desirable that kids drink less sugary, calorie-laden soft drinks. However, replacing them with hard-to-digest milk -- which, contrary to what the dairy industry would have you believe -- is far from the ideal way to boost dietary sources of calcium.

Loren Cordain, PhD, a professor in the department of health and exercise science at Colorado State University and author of The Paleo Diet explained that more and more health and nutritional professionals are concerned that milk and dairy consumption presents numerous risks for disease. He believes the take-home message for good health should instead be to eat more fresh fruits and veggies.

MILK IS DIFFICULT TO DIGEST

This should give us a clue: The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend giving it to infants under one year. Babies have plenty of the enzyme (lactase) to digest mother's milk and cow's milk. The problem is that early introduction of cow's milk increases the risk for a number of autoimmune diseases and contains a nutrient profile quite different from mother's milk, including key hormones and proteins that are alien to human babies, explains Dr. Cordain. It doesn't get much better for adults. Approximately 70% of the world's population lacks the enzyme (lactase) to digest the sugar (lactose) found in milk, added Dr. Cordain. When milk or dairy is consumed by these people, this can result in nausea, bloating, cramps, diarrhea and gas.

NOT THE BEST SOURCE OF CALCIUM

Many people believe that drinking milk is the best way to take in calcium, an essential mineral for building and maintaining bone health. But consider this paradox: Even though the US numbers among the largest consumers of milk and milk products, we have one of the world's highest rates of osteoporosis. The problem remains primarily with absorption, observes Dr. Cordain. Better calcium-rich alternatives include collards, turnip greens, broccoli, and canned salmon or sardines with edible bones.

MORE MILK EQUALS MORE WEIGHT

In the last few years, the dairy industry, including the National Dairy Council, has spent millions of dollars promoting the idea that milk can help you lose weight. Not so, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School -- the more milk children drank, the more weight they gained, and those who drank more than three servings a day were 35% more likely to become overweight after one year. The data also suggested that replacing soda with milk would not provide significant weight loss.

Better alternative: Skip the soft drinks, cut back on the milk and opt for water.

COW'S MILK BETTER LEFT TO CALVES

Cow's milk has been implicated in a wide array of health concerns, from acne to obesity to cardiovascular disease to prostate cancer. What's behind the recommendations from the FDA-commissioned report, "The Keystone Forum on Away-From-Home Foods," that was produced by the Keystone Center, a nonprofit public policy organization? Is it a really strong dairy industry lobbying effort? That's not for me to say. Just know, in spite of the recommendation, cow's milk is best left to the calves. At restaurants, Dr. Cordain advises that we encourage children to skip the milk, skip the chicken nuggets and French fries and instead eat more fresh fruits and vegetables accompanied by a nice, tall glass of water.

YOUR FOOD IS BEING GENETICALLY MODIFIED

Without a doubt this is one of the best documentaries TO HELP YOU TO understand the very real threat that all future generations face as a result of genetic engineering.

This really is a must see video about the state of our government, and how our food is being poisoned by being genetically modified, the food industry being placed in the hands of a few people, and family farmers being driven out of business. It is well produced and I think you will find it interesting and informative.

http://www.mercola.com/2007/jan/11/the-future-of-food----you-need-to-watch-this-video.htm

Are Your Fat Cells Thin?

Metabolic syndrome, once called syndrome X, has become an important diagnostic tool for identifying people at risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. The World Health Organization came up with a definition of metabolic syndrome, a super-diagnosis if you will, only eight years ago and it has really taken off as a way of isolating specific conditions that predispose people to the above diseases. According to US guidelines, a person is classified as having metabolic syndrome if he/she has at least three of five symptoms in particular -- elevated triglycerides... low HDL cholesterol... elevated blood pressure... elevated fasting blood sugar... and excess abdominal fat.

That last one is intriguing because it doesn't say generalized obesity, but specifically targets excess fat in the abdomen as presenting the greatest danger. Given that men nearly always put their excess weight on the belly, that refinement covers just about all men who are heavy. But for women it's a different story because they become overweight in one of two different shapes -- the apple shape with the large belly or the pear shape with wide hips and thighs. And clearly, while being overweight is never good because of a wide range of health-related reasons, being overweight with an apple-shaped body is even more troubling.

However, there is a secondary aspect to abdominal fat that also is an indicator of increased risk for heart disease and diabetes. According to Barbara Nicklas, PhD, professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the size of abdominal fat cells themselves can also be considered a risk factor for these two diseases, independent of other conditions, including being overweight. Controversy has long swirled around whether the number of fat cells a person has can change, but Dr. Nicklas says it is well established that the size of fat cells can indeed change, describing them as similar to balloons that expand or deflate according to the amount of air they have.

HOW FAT IS FAT?

Dr. Nicklas and a team of fellow researchers at Wake Forest University recently published results of a study designed to evaluate the most effective way to shrink fat cell size. The study team set out to compare the impact of diet alone on abdominal fat cell size, the effect of diet plus low-intensity exercise or, finally, diet plus high-intensity exercise. Forty-five participants in the 20-week study were post-menopausal women with an average body mass index (BMI) of 31, which qualified them as officially obese. The women were placed into one of the three groups. All groups were on a strictly controlled diet that created a deficit of 2,800 calories each week through diet or diet plus exercise. However, group one did not follow an exercise program while group two walked at a leisurely pace (about one to two miles an hour), for a maximum of 55 minutes three times each week. Members of group three walked at a higher intensity at 3.5 to four miles an hour but limited the time to just 30 minutes each session, also three times a week. Both exercise groups, however, burned the same amount of calories through walking at 400 calories per week.

At the end of the study, all of the women had changed their body profile to a similar degree regardless of the group they were in. The women had all lost between 19 to 23 pounds, lowered their fat mass, and reduced their waist girth by four inches and their hip girth by three to four inches. However, those who were in the diet-alone group, in spite of weight loss, did not have any significant change in the size of their abdominal fat cells. This compared with an impressive decrease of about 18% in the size of the fat cells that the women in both exercise groups achieved. How could they all lose the same, but have it be different? Not everyone lost fat cells deep in the abdominal section. Only the exercise groups did... the others lost weight in other parts of the body like the thigh.

When I spoke with Dr. Nicklas about the study, she emphasized the importance of understanding that weight loss through diet alone will not reduce fat cell size in the abdomen and it's the fat cell size in this location that is critical to reducing risk of heart disease and diabetes. In order to have healthy weight/fat loss, exercise of some kind must be added into the weight-loss program. Since both leisurely levels of exercise and more strenuous levels resulted in similar reduction in fat cell size, the key is to do it regularly and for sufficient amounts of time in order to make a difference in this aspect of health. Of course, more strenuous exercise is needed to build muscle strength and/or cardiovascular strength via aerobic exercise. Dr. Nicklas says that they are now doing a follow-up study to track if the women regained weight and how much any weight gain increases the size of the cells. But since even non-obese people can have oversized abdominal fat cells, the message once again to one and all is get off the couch and get moving. That doesn't change.

Bubbles Bad for Bones (sODAS)

Is there anyone around who has a good word for sodas? Besides our kids? We already know that sugary soft drinks are one of the main culprits of obesity, and the ingredients in the diet versions have their own set of problems. Now, new research from Tufts University provides even more fuel to the anti-soda fire.

Colas, in particular, have been connected to bone loss due to the phosphoric acid that gives them their tart flavor. The phosphoric acid is added to the colas as a flavoring agent and acts as a preservative. Lead researcher Katherine L. Tucker, PhD, explained that because not all soft drinks contain phosphoric acid they didn't see the bone loss with, for example, the lemon-lime or grape sodas used in the study. However, there are in fact quite a few non-colas that do contain phosphoric acid, including Dr Pepper, root beer and cream sodas.

"The data are very strong," said Dr. Tucker. "Women drinking as few as three 12-ounce cans of cola a week showed significantly lower bone density." And this includes diet colas. "People drink huge amounts of diet cola thinking it can't possibly do any harm since it has no calories," Dr. Tucker warned. "But the research shows that diet soda is far from innocent when it comes to bones."

The reduction of bone mineral density was even greater with the consumption of caffeinated colas, since caffeine itself has a somewhat negative effect on bone density. "But even the decaf colas had an effect," said Dr. Tucker.

Although the study only saw a pronounced effect of colas in women,
Dr. Tucker believes that colas (and the phosphoric acid they contain) affect
the bones of men as well. "Men usually have larger, denser bones, so it might take more cola to produce a measurable effect," she told me, "but men who are smaller -- and those who are worried about osteoporosis -- should still be careful."

The American Beverage Association was quick to issue a press release in an attempt to cast doubts on the results of the Tufts University findings and assure people that colas had no significant negative effect on bone density. "Don't believe it," said Dr. Tucker.

A Fiber Reminder

Fifteen years ago or so, the health hot topic was the importance of fiber in the diet. Recent years have focused on reduced fats, low carbs, mad cow disease, etc., and the fiber conversation seems to have gotten lost. However, a recent study published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition about dietary fiber and C-reactive protein (CRP) -- a marker of inflammation and predictor of heart disease -- is a vital reminder of just how important a role fiber plays in protecting us from cardiovascular disease. Researchers found that people who consumed the most fiber were 63% less likely to have elevated CRP than those who consumed the least amount.

To learn more about this all-important nutrient, I spoke with Susan Finn, PhD, RD, chair of the American Council for Fitness and Nutrition and past president of the American Dietetic Association. She told me that adults should take in at least 25 grams of dietary fiber daily as part of a healthful diet. Unfortunately, the average American consumes only about a third of that.

REMEMBER YOUR ROUGHAGE

Whole grains are by far the best source of fiber, and we should aim to get half our daily fiber intake from them, says Dr. Finn. Other good sources are fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes and nuts. Fiber-rich foods are packed with antioxidants, help modulate cholesterol and blood glucose levels, promote a healthful balance of flora in the gut, encourage food to move quickly and efficiently through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and send excess bile out of the system so it is not reabsorbed and sent to the liver.

Examples of fiber content of foods include...

Food	Serving Size	Total Fiber (grams)

Apple	1 small	2.8

Asparagus	1/2 cup	2.8
Black Beans	1/2 cup	6.1
Carrots	1 large	2.3
Kidney Beans	1/2 cup	7.9
Oat Bran	3/4 cup	4.3
Peanut Butter, smooth	1 tbsp	1.0
Strawberries	1 1/4 cup	2.8
Sweet Potato	1/2 cup	4.0
Wheat Bran	1/2 cup	12.3
Whole Wheat Bread	1 slice	1.5

WHAT YOU CAN DO

As I've written here time and again, the typical American diet consists of too much processed, fast and junk food and too few nutrient-rich whole foods. The more processing, the less fiber. However, it's really not that hard to incorporate more fiber into your diet -- a bowl of whole-grain cereal sprinkled with strawberries for breakfast, peanut butter on whole wheat bread for lunch, an apple for a snack and wild salmon, steamed asparagus and brown rice for dinner, and you're there.

Other helpful strategies...

Avoid GI upset and unpleasant gas output by increasing fiber intake gradually rather than suddenly. At the same time, make certain that you up your fluid intake, since fiber absorbs water. Without increasing water intake, constipation can occur.

Replace fruit juices with fiber-packed whole fruits.

Munch on raw veggies such as carrots, celery or pepper slices, instead of salty and sugary snacks.

Substitute whole-grain breads, pasta and cereals for "white" carbohydrates (white bread, white spaghetti, white rice, etc.) that send your blood sugar soaring.

Several times a week, replace meat portions with tasty, fiber-rich options such as black bean chili or white kidney bean soup.

NOT FOR CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH ALONE

Of course, fiber is not for heart health alone. According to Dr. Finn, this vital nutrient also has a protective effect against diabetes, diseases of the GI tract and certain types of cancer. So do your body a favor, and start today to give it all the raw materials it requires to ensure your optimal health.

*** Take Enzymes every time you eat to aid with digestion – www.vlformulas.com – Florazymes.

OBESE PEOPLE TWICE AS LIKELY TO LOSE SIGHT

Obesity rates are still on the rise, with increases noted in 31 U.S. states. Fortunately, obesity is preventable, and treatable, by taking a few, very important, proactive steps.

There is simply no way someone becomes obese without seriously elevated insulin and leptin levels. When these hormones are elevated they promote serious inflammation in your body and one of the side effects can be compromised blood supply to the retina which results in the most common cause of blindness in the US, age related macular degeneration (ARMD).

In addition to lowering your insulin and leptin levels, it is also vitally important to eat a wholesome diet that is full of unprocessed vegetables and fruits that are loaded with micronutrients that nourish your eye and also squelch the free radicals and inflammation.

Here are some other strategies that will help lower your risk of eye disease:

Retool your diet based on your body's unique metabolic type.

We all have a unique metabolic type and each type benefits from varying ratios of macronutrients (fats, proteins and carbohydrates) to feel great and avoid chronic degenerative diseases, like those associated with obesity.

Generally speaking, when you eat a meal that is right for your metabolic type you will feel a marked and lasting improvement in your energy, mental capacities, emotional well being, and you will have feeling of being well-satisfied for several hours.

Exercise is one of the most important steps you can take to normalize your insulin and leptin levels.

The key to exercising is to keep in mind three important variables: length of time, frequency and intensity. By doing so, you will ensure all your hard efforts are not wasted and are having a positive effect on your body and overall weight.

I encourage my patients to gradually increase the amount of time they are exercising to 60 to 90 minutes a day. Even though initially the frequency is daily, this is merely a treatment dose until they normalize your weight or insulin levels.

Once normalized, you will only need to exercise three to four times a week. Also, you should exercise hard enough so that it is difficult to talk to someone next to you; however, if you cannot carry on a conversation at all, then you have gone too far and need to decrease the intensity.

Take Plenty of Animal Based Omega-3 Fats

Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) may help protect and promote healthy retinal function. DHA is concentrated in the eye's retina and has been found to be particularly useful in preventing macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness.

I don't recommend eating fish due to the concerns of mercury and other toxins that have been found in fish from oceans, lakes and streams and farm-raised fish.

Get Plenty of Lutein

Lutein is a carotenoid found in vegetables and fruits. While beta-carotene, another carotenoid, is commonly thought of as important for vision health, lutein may be even more important. Some excellent sources include kale, collard greens, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts and egg yolks, particularly raw egg yolks.

Egg yolks also have zeaxanthin, another carotenoid, in an equal amount to lutein. Zeaxanthin is likely to be equally as effective as lutein in protecting eyesight. It is important to note that lutein is an oil-soluble nutrient, and if you merely consume the above vegetables without some oil or butter you can't absorb the lutein.

Eat Dark Colored Berries

Not only do berries taste great, but also the compounds that give them their dark color are great for your health. The European blueberry, bilberry, is known to prevent and even reverse macular degeneration, and bioflavonoids from other dark-colored berries including blueberries, cranberries and others will also be beneficial. They work by strengthening the capillaries that carry nutrients to eye muscles and nerves.

Avoid Trans Fat

A diet high in trans fat appears to contribute to macular degeneration. Trans fat may interfere with omega-3 fats in your body, which are extremely important for your eye health. Trans fat is found in many processed foods and baked goods, including margarine, shortening, fried foods like french fries, fried chicken and doughnuts, cookies, pastries and crackers.

Link Found Between Periodontal Disease and Pancreatic Cancer

In a new study, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that periodontal disease was associated with an increased risk of cancer of the pancreas.

Newswise — Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the U.S.; more than 30,000 Americans are expected to die from the disease this year. It is an extremely difficult cancer to treat and little is known about what causes it. One established risk factor in pancreatic cancer is cigarette smoking; other links have been made to obesity, diabetes type 2 and insulin resistance. In a new study, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that periodontal disease was associated with an increased risk of cancer of the pancreas. The study will appear in the January 17, 2007 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“Our study provides the first strong evidence that periodontal disease may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. This finding is of significance as it may provide some new insights into the mechanism of this highly fatal disease,” said lead author Dominique Michaud, assistant professor of epidemiology at HSPH.

Periodontal disease is caused by bacterial infection and inflammation of the gums that over time causes loss of bone that supports the teeth; tooth loss is a consequence of severe periodontal disease. Two previous studies had found a link between tooth loss or periodontitis and pancreatic cancer, but one consisted of all smokers and the other did not control for smoking in the analysis, and therefore no firm conclusions could be drawn from these studies.

Data for the new study came from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which began in 1986 and includes 51,529 U.S. men working in the health professions. Participants respond to questionnaires about their health every two years. After analyzing the data, the researchers confirmed 216 cases of pancreatic cancer between 1986 and 2002; of those, 67 reported periodontal disease.

The results showed that, after adjusting for age, smoking, diabetes, body mass index and a number of other factors, men with periodontal disease had a 63% higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer compared to those reporting no periodontal disease. “Most convincing was our finding that never-smokers had a two-fold increase in risk of pancreatic cancer,” said Michaud.

One possible explanation for the results is that inflammation from periodontal disease may promote cancer of the pancreas. “Individuals with periodontal disease have elevated serum biomarkers of systemic inflammation, such as C-reactive protein, and these may somehow contribute to the promotion of cancer cells,” she said.

Another explanation, according to Michaud, is that periodontal disease could lead to increased pancreatic carcinogenesis because individuals with periodontal disease have higher levels of oral bacteria and higher levels of nitrosamines, which are carcinogens, in their oral cavity. Prior studies have shown that nitrosamines and gastric acidity may play a role in pancreatic cancer.

Michaud, senior author Charles Fuchs, a gastrointestinal oncologist at Dana-Farber, and their colleagues believe that further studies should be done to investigate the role of inflammation from periodontal disease in pancreatic cancer. However, Michaud notes that the underlying mechanisms for this association are speculative at this point. “More research is needed both to confirm this finding in other populations and also to explore the role of inflammation in this particular cancer,” she said.

“A Prospective Study of Periodontal Disease and Pancreatic Cancer in U.S. Male Health Professionals,” Dominique S. Michaud, Kaumudi Joshipura, Edward Giovannucci, Charles S. Fuchs, JNCI, 2007; 99:1-5

PANCREATIC CANCER

The symptoms are subtle, so it's rarely diagnosed in the early stages when treatment is most effective. This is how pancreatic cancer came to be known as the "silent disease."

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 32,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, but fewer than 2,000 of those patients will survive more than five years. In fact, according to the National Cancer Institute, pancreatic cancer has the poorest likelihood of survival among all major cancers.

Last week, Northwestern University researcher Halcyon Skinner, Ph.D., told Reuters Health, "Because there is no effective screening for pancreatic cancer, identifying controllable risk factors for the disease is essential for developing strategies that can prevent cancer."

The two most prominent controllable risk factors are obesity and cigarette smoking, both of which raise the risk of developing the cancer. As for prevention, Dr. Skinner recently led a study that shows how supplements of one vitamin may reduce pancreatic cancer risk by a surprisingly significant degree.

--------------------------------------------
Sunshine Superman
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Looking for dietary or environmental factors that might affect pancreatic cancer risk, Dr. Skinner and his team analyzed data from two long-term population studies that followed the medical conditions and dietary habits of more than 122,000 subjects. About 75,000 subjects were women, and most of the subjects were over the age of 40.

Three key results stood out:

Subjects who took supplements that supplied at least 400 IU of vitamin D per day (the recommended daily allowance) lowered their risk of pancreatic cancer by 43 percent
Those who took vitamin D supplements that supplied less than 150 IU of the vitamin per day lowered their risk by 22 percent
Those who took more than 400 IU per day did not lower their risk by any more than 43 percent

As I've noted in many e-Alerts, the best source of vitamin D is sunlight. When your skin is exposed to ultraviolet light, your body responds by manufacturing vitamin D. Unfortunately, the amount of sun needed to develop vitamin D is only available in most of the U.S. during the summer months.

Put a tomato in it

While you're upping your vitamin D intake, there's another dietary choice that may help lower pancreatic cancer risk.

Last year, Canadian researchers investigated a possible link between pancreatic cancer and dietary intake of carotenoids; organic plant pigments that have been shown to help control inflammation. Subjects included 462 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and more than 4,700 healthy people selected from eight Canadian provinces.

Researchers found that beta-carotene and total carotenoid intake was associated with a significantly reduced risk of pancreatic cancer among non-smoking subjects. But the most striking result concerned the carotenoid lycopene. Those who had the highest lycopene intake reduced their pancreatic cancer risk by more than 30 percent, compared to subjects with the lowest intake.

The richest dietary source of lycopene is tomatoes, and absorbency of this important antioxidant is increased when tomatoes are served warm with a source of fat, such as cheese or meat.

Studies have shown that lycopene may also offer protection against breast cancer, prostate cancer, and heart disease. The symptoms are subtle, so it's rarely diagnosed in the early stages when treatment is most effective. This is how pancreatic cancer came to be known as the "silent disease."

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 32,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, but fewer than 2,000 of those patients will survive more than five years. In fact, according to the National Cancer Institute, pancreatic cancer has the poorest likelihood of survival among all major cancers.

Last week, Northwestern University researcher Halcyon Skinner, Ph.D., told Reuters Health, "Because there is no effective screening for pancreatic cancer, identifying controllable risk factors for the disease is essential for developing strategies that can prevent cancer."

The two most prominent controllable risk factors are obesity and cigarette smoking, both of which raise the risk of developing the cancer. As for prevention, Dr. Skinner recently led a study that shows how supplements of one vitamin may reduce pancreatic cancer risk by a surprisingly significant degree.

________________________________________________________________

911

Attached is a link to a 15 minute video with Alex Jones interviewing Aaron Russo on Aaron's involvement with Nick Rockefellor regarding 911 eleven months prior to the occurence, its fraudulent purpose to create a perpetual state of fear among the sheeple (called TERRORISM) so they will voluntarily accept our invasion of (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc) for the expansion of the NWO, increased surveilance and control measures like microchiping, etc.

Please take the time to watch this so you can see things for what they truly are and not as they appear to be.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1263677258215075609&hl=en

(MORE) KEEP THE BIG PICTURE BURNING BRIGHTLY!

One-Third of Americans Believe the U.S. Government Allowed 9-11 to Happen

http://www.mercola.com/2006/dec/26/a-third-of-americans-believe-the-us-government-allowed-9-11-to-happen.htm

CODEX

For those of you who have not seen this following wonderfully informative movie about the future of supplements, do yourself a favor and watch

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5266884912495233634&q=nutric

VITAMIN C, CHOLINE OR BETA-CAROTENE?

Here's a pop quiz: Which of these nutrients is essential for keeping your memory sharp?

A) Vitamin C
B) Choline
C) Beta-carotene

The answer is B: choline. But don't be dismayed if you thought, "What the heck is choline?" You're not alone.

According to a recent survey, nearly three out of four people have little or no idea that choline is an important nutrient. This isn't really surprising - choline (pronounced "koleen") was only recognized as part of the B vitamin complex in 1998, so it's spent less than a decade in the limelight.

Now that you've been introduced, here are five key reasons why choline might be your new best friend:

The body uses choline to make a neurotransmitter that facilitates memory storage and muscle control
Helps prevent fatigue and insomnia
Helps prevent the build up of fats in the liver
Helps maintain healthy cell membranes
Choline deficiency has been associated with poor kidney function, memory loss, fatigue, and insomnia, while extreme cases of deficiency may contribute to anemia, high blood pressure, heart disease, and kidney failure

The best source of choline is egg yolks. And if you've heard that eggs are bad for you, don't believe a word of it. Choline is just one of many excellent nutrients eggs deliver. Other good choline sources include organ meats, legumes, milk, cauliflower, and flax seeds.

Unfortunately, most Americans aren't getting nearly enough choline. According to a report from Ivanhoe Newswire, average choline intake in the U.S. is about 315 mg, but the RDA for women is 425 mg, and 550 mg for men. Many multivitamins contain choline, but usually not enough to come close to the RDA.

This low intake could pose serious problems for heart health because choline deficiency can also cause a deficiency of folic acid. Folic acid is essential for managing homocysteine, an amino acid that promotes plaque buildup on blood vessel walls. A recent study from Harvard Medical School shows that choline may also be effective in managing homocysteine.

Researchers used dietary data and blood samples gathered from more than 1,900 middle-aged subjects to determine intake of choline and betaine, a nutrient in spinach, broccoli and beets.

The Harvard team found that subjects with the highest intake of choline had nearly 10 percent lower total homocysteine compared to subjects with the lowest choline intake. When highest and lowest betaine levels were included in the analysis, homocysteine levels dropped even lower among subjects in the highest intake group. Researchers also found that choline and betaine intake reduced homocysteine even when intakes of folate and other B vitamins were low.

GROWTH HORMONE. . .

Is It All Hype? Does Growth Hormone Really Produce The Startling Results People Claim?

Growth hormone (GH) is a hormone secreted by the pituitary gland which is located in the center of the brain. A normal pituitary gland stores about 10 milligrams of growth hormone which is usually released in a series of pulses into the bloodstream throughout the day and night.

What does it do?

Growth hormone has many functions in your body, including promoting cell regeneration in the bones, vital organs and muscles, and repairing damaged tissue. It is responsible for enhancing muscle growth, burning fat, and maintaining the immune system, and even helps support healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and reduces C-reactive protein.
Growth hormone production declines with age, so that by the time we reach 60 almost a third of us are no longer producing any GH. This has led some scientists to believe that growth hormone is a key factor in the speed with which we age … and a contributing factor to the loss of skin and muscle tone, an increase in fat tissue, and the tendency for our skin to wrinkle. In fact, GH levels start to decline as early as age 30—which may be one of the reasons that "crow's feet" start to appear shortly thereafter.

Why should you consider taking a GH supplement?

The bottom line is we're all getting older, and the older we get the less growth hormone we produce. Whether you're 30 or 80 years old, if you want to maintain good immunity and cardiovascular health (or to help restore it) … if you want to build lean muscle mass while reducing stored fat … if you want to improve your overall health and appearance, young adulthood is not too soon—and it's certainly never too late—to start taking a clinically proven growth hormone releaser.

Adult Growth Hormone Deficiency
Years ago it was thought that growth hormone deficiency was something you were born with, or resulted from head injuries later in life that affected the release of growth hormone from the pituitary gland. It was well known that GH levels declined dramatically after early adulthood, but even older adults had detectable levels of GH.

When growth hormone and the tests that measured blood levels of GH became widely available in 1985, scientists and doctors finally recognized that some adults develop a severe deficiency of GH far beyond what is seen in normal aging. This new endocrine condition was termed Adult Growth Hormone Deficiency (AGHD).1

Symptoms of Adult GH Deficiency include increased body fat, decreased muscle mass and impaired exercise capacity, depression, abnormal blood lipids, and cardiovascular problems

You are probably thinking that the symptoms of AGHD sound a lot like normal aging, and in a sense you are right. GH levels drop dramatically as we age … but people with medically recognized AGHD experience an even more severe version of the GH drop all of us experience. The first studies using GH in people with AGHD resulted in dramatic effects, including: decreased body fat, increased muscle mass, improved exercise capacity, improved mental outlook, increased bone mass, and decreased cardiovascular risk factors.2 In other words, AGHD patients given growth hormone had many of their premature symptoms of aging reversed within a matter of months. Over the last decade, AGHD has become a widely recognized syndrome that is easily and safely treatable with GH replacement, with dramatic positive effects on health and quality of life.3

The # 1 caveat you need to be aware of

It's important to realize that all of the studies about GH supplementation that are commonly quoted are based on GH injections. The previous study2, which reverses premature aging in a matter of months, is a good example. Regardless of what the manufacturer or supplement company claims, you can not expect this rapid response with an oral GH releaser. Most marketing claims will quote the fast acting results of GH given as an injection. But oral GH releasers are generally not as strong and it may take longer for users to notice the desired benefit.

If you want a significant rise in your GH, and if you don't mind the cost and the needle pokes, then please go find some GH from an open minded doctor or from an overseas pharmacy (see our web site, www.smart-publications.com). Otherwise, take what we consider the next best thing—a GH supplement that contains APG/Lysine.

GH and aging
It is well established that GH benefits children who are deficient in it, and adults who have abnormally low or undetectable GH levels. But the effect of GH on normal aging adults is still a subject of intense scientific scrutiny. This mostly stems from the fact that deficiencies in the GH/IGF system in animals often result in very long life spans compared to normal animals.4 Additionally, animals that have been genetically modified to produce extra amounts of GH have reduced life spans.5

This may seem surprising, in light of the popular belief that extra GH extends life span. However, we also know that individuals who don't produce GH and are not given any GH replacement during their entire life have a dramatically shorter life span than normal people, living only about 40 years.6 So, there seems to be some optimum amount of GH needed to maximize life span and health. Too little or too much GH both adversely affect health and life span … while maintaining a proper amount of GH as we age can dramatically improve our number of healthy years.

GH and cardiovascular health
People with a GH deficiency generally have numerous cardiovascular risk factors and increased death from heart disease. On the other hand, GH replacement therapy has been shown to help lower blood pressure, increase HDL (good) cholesterol, and decrease C-reactive protein.7

While we are all familiar with the benefits of raising HDL cholesterol and decreasing blood pressure, the improvement in C-reactive protein is also very significant. C-reactive protein is a newly recognized cardiovascular risk factor related to inflammation in the circulatory system.8 In fact, even if you have normal blood pressure and lipid levels, your risk for heart disease increases dramatically if you have elevated C-reactive protein levels.

The combination of improving HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and C-reactive protein has dramatic cardiovascular health benefits. The good news is that researchers have also measured the thickness of the carotid artery in the neck as a marker of atherosclerosis and found that GH replacement actually caused a reduction in the thickness of the carotid artery, which is evidence of an actual reversal of artery disease.8

Does GH help you grow taller?
As discussed in "The historical use of GH supplementation" (see side bar), the first use of synthetic growth hormone was as a replacement for growth hormone derived from human pituitary glands obtained from cadavers. With the new availability of synthesized growth hormone, it wasn't long before scientific debate began about which children would benefit from growth hormone therapy. Before 1985, most children who were given growth hormone therapy had what is called idiopathic growth hormone deficiency. But only a small percentage of short children actually have this condition. In fact, the growth hormone system is very complex and involves hormones that release growth hormone itself, and receptors on cells that growth hormone activates.9 Additionally, one of the major effects on the body of growth hormone is to increase levels of another hormone complex named Insulin-Like Growth Factors (IGFs).10 Many of the effects of GH are mediated by the IGFs released by GH.

So as you can see, the GH/IGF hormone system is quite complicated, and a failure to grow normally can involve defects in one or more parts of this system. Because of this, extra growth hormone will not always result in increased growth. Despite these pitfalls, many short children with normal GH functioning continue to be treated with growth hormone in an attempt to increase their adult height.

Growth Hormone can have two kinds of effects:

Direct effects are the result of growth hormone binding its receptor on target cells. Fat cells (adipocytes), for example, have growth hormone receptors, and growth hormone stimulates them to break down triglyceride and suppress their ability to take up and accumulate circulating lipids.

Indirect effects are mediated primarily by an insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a hormone that is secreted from the liver and other tissues in response to growth hormone. A majority of the cell health and maintenance effects of growth hormone is actually due to IGF-1 acting on its target cells.

Choline and Growth Hormone

In order to release GH effectively, you need proper cholinergic function.

The cholinergic system—the system of nerve cells that uses acetylcholine as its neurotransmitter and is damaged in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer's—helps regulate GH through the release of growth hormone—releasing hormone, which in turn triggers secretion of GH from the pituitary gland.33

In one study, in order to learn the effect that Glycerylphosphorycholine (GPC) had on GH secretion, GH-release hormone (GHRH) was given to young and old human volunteers, with or without the addition of GPC. The younger subjects showed a higher level of GH secretion than the older individuals, and both groups had a greater growth hormone response to the GHRH plus GPC than to GHRH alone. The ability of GPC to increase GH secretion was more pronounced in the older subjects.

The results showed that supplementation with GPC enhances the release of growth hormone (GH),34 indicating that it can help counteract aging in the elderly and help build muscle mass and strength in the young.

WHY ARE KIDS ENTERING PUBERTY BEFORE THEY ENTER SCHOOL?

A report was presented at the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting describing how a preschool-age girl and her kindergarten-age brother began growing pubic hair.

This was not an isolated case; in 2004, there was similar cluster of five children, and previous clusters in outbreaks occurring along the lines of disease epidemics or environmental poisonings.

In 1979, there was an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, most likely caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry.

Most commonly, these outbreaks traced to accidental drug exposures. But some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty due to the increasing availability of classes of drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants called endocrine disruptors.

In the case of the two children described in the report, their testosterone level was nealy100 times the normal amount. The cause was traced to a concentrated testosterone skin cream being used by their father. The children absorbed the testosterone through normal skin contact with their father.

Sex hormones like testosterone are particularly potent because they are easily absorbed through the skin and resist degradation. Other known triggers of early puberty have included a shampoo that contained estrogen and placental extract, shampoos containing lavender and tea tree oils, and industrial pollutants.

It's about time medical "experts" are finally recognizing the growing number of health problems resulting from contact with toxic chemicals.

It is shocking, but nevertheless, increasingly common for five and six year old children to go through precocious puberty. The signs of which include:

For girls before age 8:

Breasts
Armpit or pubic hair
First menstruation

For boys before age 9:

Enlarged testicles and penis
Armpit or pubic hair
Facial hair

Accidental contact with endocrine disruptors present in many household products and cosmetics, including:

Bovine growth hormones commonly added to commercial dairy
Soy products which are loaded with hormone like substances
Bisphenol A, commonly used in many plastics
Phthalates also commonly used in plastics
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) -- better known as Teflon

The disruption of your hormone system, and all of the consequences resulting from it, is a typical way that environmental toxins negatively impact your body.

No surprise, Congress told the EPA to develop a comprehensive screening program within three years a decade ago. The agency never got around to it, however, due to efforts to squash it by representatives from the chemical industry serving on a program committee.

If you have children this is clearly something you will want to avoid. Here are some measures you can take to protect you and your children from common toxic substances which will cause them to go into puberty more than a decade before they were designed to:

Store your food in glass containers whenever possible, as it is the most inert container you can use.
Only use natural cleaning products in your home. Most health food stores will have these available or you can search online for them.

· Buy and eat, as much as possible, organic foods, especially milk which is frequently contaminated with bovine growth hormone.

Avoid processed foods.
Switch to natural brands of toiletries, including shampoo, toothpaste, antiperspirants and cosmetics. Same sources as above for these, either your local health food store or you can search online.

· Review Our Stolen Future, probably the best resource on this topic

PRESCHOOL PUBERTY AND A SEARCH FOR THE CAUSES

By DARSHAK M. SANGHAVI
New York Times
Published October 17, 2006

Parents often think their children grow up too quickly, but few are prepared for the problem that Dr. Michael Dedekian and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported recently.

At the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May in San Francisco, they presented a report that described how a preschool-age girl, and then her kindergarten-age brother, mysteriously began growing pubic hair. These cases were not isolated; in 2004, pediatric endocrinologists from San Diego reported a similar cluster of five children.

It turns out that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings. In 1979, the medical journal The Lancet described an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, probably caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry. Similar epidemics in Puerto Rico and Haiti were tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s.

Increasingly though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called endocrine disruptors, that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.

Most commonly, outbreaks of puberty in children are traced to accidental drug exposures from products that are used incorrectly.

Dr. Dedekians first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.

The doctors realized that the girls father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement. The boy, in particular, also developed some aggressive behavior problems.

Sex hormones are potent because they are easily absorbed through the skin and resist degradation better than many other hormones. Unlike protein-based hormones like insulin, sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen are technically steroids, meaning they are derived from cholesterol.

Primarily made by the liver, cholesterol begins with tiny pieces of sugar that are joined, twisted and oxidized in a dizzying series to make an end product that resembles the interlinked rings of the Olympic emblem. Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, Nobel Laureate and a biochemist in Texas, once called it the most highly decorated small molecule in biology, because 13 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for its study.

Through further processing, primarily in the gonads and adrenal glands, cholesterol is converted into sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone. Kenneth Lee Jones, the former chief of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, noted pediatric cases similar to those described by Dr. Dedekian in a 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics.

At that time, unregulated prohormones like Andro, famously used by Mark McGwire, the former St. Louis Cardinals power hitter, and banned by federal law in 2005, were available as topical sprays used to enhance libido. Dr. Jones said the sprays used by adults in some households permeated the childrens bedsheets, and the early puberty stopped only when the adults stopped using the sprays and also discarded old sheets.

Testosterone-containing products are not the only trigger of disordered puberty in children.

In a 1998 paper in the journal Clinical Pediatrics, Dr. Chandra Tiwary, the former chief of pediatric endocrinology at Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, reported an outbreak of early breast development in four young African-American girls who used shampoos that contained estrogen and placental extract. The early puberty reversed once the shampoo was stopped.

In the tradition of previous physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to possible pathogens, Dr. Tiwary tried the shampoos on himself. He carefully measured his own levels of various male and female sex hormones to establish his baseline, used the shampoos for a few days, then repeated the tests.

While Dr. Tiwary is quick to admit that his unpublished findings must be interpreted with great caution, some of his sex hormone levels changed by almost 40 percent after he used the shampoos. In some cases, substances other than sex steroids may also disrupt normal sexual development. In Boston at the annual Endocrine Society meeting in June, Clifford Bloch of the University of Colorado School of Medicine presented several cases of young men who had developed marked breast enlargement from using shampoos containing lavender and tea tree oils, which are widely used essential oil additives that present no problem for adults. (Unlike Dr. Dedekians cases, these cases were not a result of passive transfer from parents. The boys themselves used the shampoos.)

Dr. Bloch collaborated with scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina to test the oils on human breast cells grown in test tubes. Lavender and tea tree oil had the same effect on the cells as estrogen.

Dr. Bloch speculates that the findings, which he is submitting for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, may explain the boys breast growth. He noted, however, that cells in a test tube are a far cry from humans, so the relationship of the essential oil to breast growth remains hypothetical.

While pediatric endocrinologists have implicated pharmaceutical or personal care products for causing pubertal problems in children, some environmental scientists also claim that some widespread industrial and pharmaceutical pollutants harm the normal sexual development of fish and animals. By extension, they may also contribute to earlier or disrupted puberty in children, these scientists contend. Robert Havelock, a senior reproductive toxicologist at the Environmental Protection Agency, said these concerns caused a shift in worry from cancer to noncancer effects of environmental pollution over the past decade.

In 1994, scientists found that estrogen-like chemicals from plastics manufacturing plants that had contaminated sewers in England caused genetically male fish to develop into females. In the early 1980s, major spills of the DDT-like pesticide dicofol in Florida led to the feminization of the reproductive tracts of male alligators.

Robert Cooper, the chief of endocrinology at the reproductive toxicology division of the Environmental Protection Agency, says various sources of endocrine disruptors, like manufacturing chemicals, may be leaching into the environment. While their relation to pubertal problems in children remains highly speculative, he believes further study is needed.

Past epidemiological evidence, however, does worry Dr. Cooper, because some chemical exposures have been associated with early puberty. In 1973, thousands of Michigan residents ate food contaminated by a flame retardant, PBB, which was later correlated with earlier menstruation in girls. In Puerto Rico, which has some of the worlds highest rates of early puberty, the condition was linked to higher levels of a plasticizer called phthalate in affected children.

Governmental efforts to create a systematic method to assess possible endocrine disruptors from environmental sources have stalled.

In 1996, Congress directed the E.P.A. to develop a comprehensive screening program for possible endocrine disruptors within three years. Dr. Cooper says no such program has begun operation, a failure he attributed largely to stonewalling by chemical industry representatives who serve on an advisory committee for the program. Now the proposed rollout is December 2007, but Dr. Cooper said, They may be dreaming. Critics cite the programs high potential costs and lack of reliable laboratory tests.

Protecting children from endocrine disrupters in cosmetics and prescription drugs may also be difficult in the near future.

In 1989, the Food and Drug Administration proposed allowing up to 10,000 units of estrogen per ounce of cosmetic, the approximate oral daily dose of hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women. Dr. Tiwary said that in the early 1990s he filed an adverse drug report with the agency about hormone-containing shampoos but that to his knowledge, it never came to anything.

Reached by e-mail, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said that the agency was aware of some reports describing premature sexual devolepment with shampoos but that it had concluded that there is no reason for consumers to be concerned.

At this time, placental materials are neither prohibited by cosmetic regulations nor restricted by the F.D.A., she wrote.

Dr. Dedekian said that while prohormones like Andro are no longer commercially available, lax regulation of so-called compounding pharmacies allows the manufacture and sale of concentrated testosterone creams, like the one affecting his patient, without government oversight.

Topical lotions and creams containing testosterone may become more common. In 2000, Solvay Pharmaceuticals secured F.D.A. approval for Androgel, a lotion to treat a syndrome the company calls low T, referring to low testosterone. According to the companys Web site, the condition affects 13 million men over 45. From 2000 to 2004, the number of testosterone prescriptions doubled to over 2.4 million a year.

Solvay Pharmaceuticals referred questions on Androgels possible risks to Natan Bar-Chama, an associate professor of urology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Dr. Bar-Chama acknowledged the theoretical risks of transfer of the hormone through skin contact with children, but he said he had never seen a case among the hundreds of men he has treated. He added, however, that it was prudent to take precautions when using the product, including hand-washing after handling the gel and wearing clothing to avoid skin-to-skin contact with others.

In 2003, an Institute of Medicine report stated, There has been increasing concern about the increase in the number of men using testosterone and the lack of scientific data on the benefits and risks of this therapy.

Dr. Dan Blazer, a psychiatrist at Duke who was chairman of the committee, said, In no way did we find a condition that we defined as low T.

The major clinical trial of Androgels effectiveness for low T, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2000, included neither a placebo group (patients who received an inactive dummy lotion) nor a control group (patients who did not have low T) for comparison.

Dr. Ronald Swerdloff, the chief of endocrinology at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., and a consultant for Solvay, who ran the study, said the trial was limited in scope since it examined a new route of administration for an already established drug.

Isolationism on TV

So you're home alone and you have nothing to do. You turn on the TV. It passes the time. It keeps you company. And it's killing you.

Loneliness is bad for your health. Television may not be the cause of loneliness, but it is often used to avoid facing and dealing with loneliness. "TV is a marker of how alone we are," says David A. Lipschitz, MD, PhD, author of Breaking the Rules of Aging (LifeLine Press). Dr. Lipschitz is affectionately known to the viewers of Arkansas Education Television Network (AETN) as Dr. David. He is also the chair of the Donald W. Reynolds Department of Geriatrics and Director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. "When older people become isolated and lonely, they experience a dramatic increase in risk of heart attack and stroke."

It turns out that the things that keep us healthy, vital and independent are the exact opposite of television. "Love, faith, purpose and self-esteem are the keys to a long and healthy life." And these are exactly what television is replacing. "It might be a different story if people were gathering in big groups to watch television together. But in most cases, people are watching television because they are not with friends and loved ones," Dr. David notes. "TV distracts them from their loneliness."

He also warns that for older people, a fear of moving away from the ancestral home will contribute to excess TV watching. "Older people, usually women, who are afraid of losing their independence, will stay in a home that is too big for them and that might have stairs that they cannot maneuver." While these people think they are being independent, they in fact have become trapped in their home. "They end up eating poorly and watching television since they have nothing else to do and no where else to go. Their health will decline in very little time."

But Dr. David says that you are never too young to start building habits to prepare you for the future. Put some practices into place now that will contribute to a long and healthy life.

What should you be doing instead of watching your television? Well, if you want to stay healthy, here are some strategies...

Fall in love -- and stay that way. Married people live longer and experience a better quality of life than single, widowed or divorced people. They are less likely to be depressed or abuse substances, and are more likely to eat breakfast, wear a seatbelt and go to the doctor. Married men live eight years longer than single men... and married women three years longer than single women. (Faithful married men and women live longer than those who are not faithful.)

Exercise. Walking is good, but consider other fun and exciting ways to move and get going. Try swimming, biking or taking a dance class. "Obesity is one of the greatest health risks we face today, and TV is one activity that puts people at high risk for obesity, more so than other sedentary activities such as being on the computer or reading," says Dr. David.

Spend time with loved ones -- every day, seven days a week. You need to be around people that you love and who love you. Spending time with your parents, children, friends and neighbors is good for you. In fact, love is one of the strongest contributors to health and well being. Older parents should not be left alone all day long. If you are older and have a big loving community, reach out to the people you know who are lonely or far from their children and friends. "We would never leave a baby or a small child unattended, but we do so with our older members of society all the time. It is dangerous for both their safety and their health," says Dr. David.

Participate with your spiritual community. Faith is a great way to stay young and healthy. Go to your place of worship and find out what kinds of social programs they offer.

Take up a fun and exciting hobby -- not stamp collecting or knitting. Try running or kayaking. You're too old you say? Dr. David has a patient that started riding a Harley in her 80s, and one that started marathon training at 64. And there are many seniors at the ballroom dance class that I attend.

Volunteer. Having a purpose is one of the best ways to keep yourself vital, not to mention that it is a great way to remind yourself of the blessings you have. It will get you out of the house and into your community. And doing something for others will boost your self-esteem.

What if you really are housebound? Then, perhaps creating a community on-line is right for you. There are many chat rooms on all sorts of subjects that consist of like-minded people. Or, you can play games such as chess against distant opponents.

Television has its place. Unfortunately, its place is spreading in our homes like an out-of-control vine that needs pruning. Nip your excessive viewing in the bud.

LIPSTICK NEWS

This information has not been confirmed. This was sent in the form of an email for you information only.

Subject: Lipstick you need to avoid
From: Dr. Nahid Neman - Cancer unit at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in Toronto

Recently a lipstick brand called "Red Earth" decreased their prices from $67 to $9.90. It contained lead. Lead is a chemical which causes cancer.

The lipstick Brands that contain lead are:
            1. CHRISTIAN DIOR
           2. LANCOME
           3. CLINIQUE
           4.   Y.S.L
           5. ESTEE LAUDER
           6. SHISEIDO
           7. RED EARTH (Lip Gloss)
           8. CHANEL (Lip Conditioner)
          9. MARKET AMERICA-MOTNES LIPSTICK.

The higher the lead content, the greater the chance of causing cancer.

After doing a test on lipsticks, it was found that the Y.S.L. lipstick contained the most amount of lead. Watch out for those lipsticks which are supposed to stay longer. If your lipstick stays longer, it is because of the higher content of lead.

Here is the test you can do yourself:
1. Put some lipstick on your hand.
2. Use a Gold ring to scratch on the lipstick.
3. If the lipstick color changes to black, then you know the lipstick contains lead.

This information is being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center Dioxin Carcinogens cause cancer, especially Breast Cancer.

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