What Doctors Don't Tell You

A prescription for old age

Joanna Evans — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:29:00 GMT

Most of us assume that if we’re lucky enough to exceed our threescore and ten—the Biblical estimate of our lifespan—we do so at the expense of our bodies. We’ve come to expect that the long path to our demise is accompanied by an inevitable decline in our physical health. And perhaps our most terrifying fear is of growing feeble, forgetful and immobile.

The latest evidence—disclosed by WDDTY publisher Bryan Hubbard in this month’s special report—suggests that this perception of old age is largely the result of the interfering hands of modern medicine. The fact is that old people are drowning in unnecessary medication. The over-60s make up just 8 per cent of the population, but they are prescribed more than one-third of all medicines dispensed by doctors. In fact, the average 60-plus person is prescribed at least six drugs, all of which are interacting to unknown effect.

As WDDTY has discovered, the major drugs routinely dispensed as just-in-case medicine for the over-60s—from cholesterol-lowering drugs to aspirin—cause all of the conditions that we’ve come to associate with old age: physical instability; forgetfulness; incontinence; and dementia. At least five major classes of drugs routinely prescribed to seniors cause falls, while many types of drugs cause incontinence. And virtually any drug—even those sold over the counter—is capable of bringing about some sort of cognitive impairment or ‘brain fog’, with all the hallmarks of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

I saw this close to home with our neighbour ‘Sam’, who handled all the gardening and physical labour around his daughter’s house well into his 80s. One of his party tricks was to race around the garden with his small grandson in a large wheelbarrow. When he became a bit forgetful, his doctor prescribed powerful antipsychotics. In short order, he completely lost his memory, became paranoid and difficult, landed in a nursing home, refused his food and, finally, just gave up and died.

Our neighbour’s situation begs the question of which came first: the problem, or the problem caused by the ‘solution’? If seniors given drugs present with symptoms, doctors are quick to reach for the prescription pad to hand out yet more drugs to handle what are simply side-effects from a drug that the senior probably didn’t need in the first place.

This also begs the question of whether the conditions we associate with old age are inherent to the ageing process, or are largely the outcome of our medicalization of the elderly. How much cognitive decline is inevitable, and how much is due to preventative medicine and a misunderstanding of what the body needs as it ages?

A clue comes from examining the oldest people on earth who live in the so-called ‘Blue Zones’. In places like Sardinia, home to more centenarians than anywhere else on the planet, men and women in their tenth and eleventh decades continue to work and remain highly mobile. Their days are full and active, their diet consists of locally grown, fresh, organic food, and they enjoy strong social ties.

We would do well to realize that a prescription drug can never take the place of a purposeful, productive and well-connected life.

Plants help improve the environment

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:46:00 GMT

We read an article the other that walking through herb-covered mountainsides and forests is rejuvenating for four reasons. In nature one can just take things in without thinking too hard, the trees absorb pollutants and put out beneficial oils and aromas and if we do look at the long distant scenery and the soil beneath our feet we are enriched by the natural creations of the old world we see everywhere.

On the other hand, with a jog or walk around the streets of a city, one is constantly having to think about others on the pavements, uneven surfaces, missing manhole covers, dogs, cars etc, we absorb pollutants with every heavy breath, cursing about the harsh-looking architecture and, as a result, we rarely go back motivated by the new world that we have created.

So if you don’t walk or live in an area of natural beauty, the development of a densely-planted garden, the planting of an apartment terrace, the keeping of a bonsai collection, or placing plants in the office are all beneficial things to do.

In the literature, claims are made that citrus trees, garlic and geraniums have disinfecting properties, pine and oak trees in pots absorb pollutants, rosemary and thyme have insecticidal and stimulant properties, and cacti and spider plants absorb electromagnetic radiations. You can place the latter plants in front of computers and on top of televisions. You can’t hang a plant on your mobile but you could sit in an area surrounded by plants before you use it!

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe. Holistic gardeners and authors living in Spain. Books include ‘Your Garden in Spain’ and others. www.gardeninginspain.com.

Detox: the fingerprint principle

Joanna Evans — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:10:00 GMT

January—that month of atonement for many Christmases past—is the time of year that healthfood shops look forward to their best sales of detox products all year. So, it caught our eye when the self-styled quackbusting watchdog, Sense about Science, announced that detox products are useless and unnecessary, and that our bodies are perfectly able to sweep up and throw out the trash without the need of any extra special assistance.

So well-oiled are these systems, claims the appropriately initialled SAS, that the 80,000 chemicals to which we are now routinely exposed in our air, water, food and homes don’t pose any particular toxic threat.

Such a mindset, which is commonly found in medical circles, betrays not only shocking ignorance of the body’s elaborate system of detoxification, but also of what makes for health or illness.

One of the biggest mistakes that Western medicine makes is lumping us all into single categories. It’s the very impulse that insists on labelling disease and treating the label, not the individual. It assumes that we all fall ill in the same way—that all illness stems from the same cause, that all illnesses act alike and there is only one way to cure them.

However, the fact is that our body and its needs are uniquely individual, the sum total of our relationship with our environment. As Dr Leon Eisenberg of the social medicine department at Harvard Medical School once put it in an address to doctors: “Between genotype and phenotype, a lifetime of individual experience has fashioned what began as an envelope of stochastic probabilities into a single personal embodiment: the patient who faces us.”

The individual’s health profile, he was saying, is as individual as his fingerprints. And so too, as our deputy editor Joanna Evans writes in this month’s cover story, is our ability to detoxify. Some of us do it well without help, but an increasing number of people cannot.

Detoxification is extraordinarily complex, but essentially involves enzymes that make the toxic waste sticky enough to adhere to the agents that can safely eliminate them before they cause us harm. It’s like the workers in a nuclear reactor who painstakingly collect and dispose of nuclear waste so that it doesn’t contaminate the surrounding countryside. Unless handled efficiently, any spillage in the process can prove more dangerous than the toxic waste was to begin with.

The extent to which each of us can handle this delicate operation has to do with an extraordinary number of factors: what we were born with, what we eat and where we live, both indoors and out. Yet, nearly half of us lack the genetic code for efficient garbage disposal, and a large proportion of us are so overwhelmed by our toxic environment that our detox systems have virtually shut down. In other cases, we may be eating food that hampers our ability to detoxify.

In other words, our detox status is rather like a fingerprint—unique, and treatable only on a case-by-case basis—but, happily, there’s a host of natural methods proven to work. Detoxification should always be viewed a little like a case of CSI-style forensics—something that inevitably requires a focus from the general towards the particular.

Insider trading

Joanna Evans — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:01:00 GMT

If you haven’t seen the 1999 movie The Insider, it offers a cautionary tale about the mobile-phone industry. It’s based on the true story of a producer (played by Al Pacino) of the American TV show 60 Minutes and a former employee of the tobacco industry (played by Russell Crowe), and their joint attempt to blow the whistle on the tobacco industry.

Although supposedly restrained by a non-disclosure agreement, Crowe reluctantly shares his inside knowledge that the corporate heads of the tobacco titans, who long knew that tobacco was highly addictive, suppressed that information for years through industry sponsored ‘studies’, which repeatedly claimed to find no such association. All of smoking’s risks were hidden behind a smokescreen of official
research. As we now know, the only studies that found passive smoking wasn’t harmful were those sponsored by the tobacco industry.

This pattern is now repeating itself in the mobile-phone industry. As WDDTY Deputy Editor Joanna Evans reveals in our cover story this month, a new review of all the independent data—yet to be published—leads one to an indisputable conclusion: mobile phones cause cancer.

The new research, along with the INTERPHONE study, a multimilliondollar, 13-country investigation into a possible cancer risk, reveals a ‘tipping point’—the amount of incremental exposure that causes mobile-phone use to become highly deadly. After 10 years’ of regular use, according to one study, your risk of brain cancer rises by an astonishing 280 per cent. However, the risk begins at surprisingly small doses. For every 100 hours of use, your risk increases by 5 per cent. And the risk isn’t limited to only mobile phones, but to any cordless phone—and what modern house is without one these days?

For years, the mobile-phone industry has bought and paid for studies that consistently show no risk, thus keeping the debate over the dangers alive. Indeed, the industry once produced a study showing that sticking a phone to your head actually protects against brain cancer. Most scandalous of all, by keeping the hazards in doubt, the industry has been allowed to market directly to children. Blackberrys and other
brands, formerly only targeted at the high-use corporate types, are now being scaled and priced down for preteens and teenagers this Christmas.

It stands to reason that children are more exposed to danger, as the protective mechanisms of the skull and neural connections are still developing. Nevertheless, we have no idea exactly how much risk our
children are facing. No study has ever bothered to investigate exactly what this sea of radiation is doing to them, nor ask what happens if a child keeps a phone constantly to hand or head. However, what is especially disturbing about the new evidence is how easily industry of any sort—whether pharmaceuticals, tobacco or mobile phones—can purchase scientific credibility.

All Western governments live comfortably off the billions of dollars and pounds paid to them by mobile-phone licensing deals, so they are the last people to look closely at whose pocketbook has funded the research. Thankfully, the French have taken the lead by banning phones in primary schools. May the rest
of the EU and the US not wait as long as they did with tobacco.

The poisoned generation

Joanna Evans — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:04:00 GMT

Perhaps the most underappreciated health scandal in modern times is the fact that, every day, we are all subjected to some 80,000 drugs—virtually all of which have not undergone a single regulatory test before their release on the market.

By ‘drugs’, in this case, I’m referring to the synthetic man-made compounds that are part of the industrial ‘chemical revolution’. Now found ubiquitously in everything—from pesticides to personal toiletries and cleaning products—these agents have made their way into our drinking water, soils, air, food and, hence, our fatty tissues—and now, as this month’s cover story discloses, even our eggs and sperm.

The latest findings on these industrial chemicals, as WDDTY deputy editor Joanna Evans reports, suggest that they could be a major source of infertility in both men and women. What’s more, some of these toxic chemicals are making their way into fetuses, affecting their fertility in turn, all the way down the generational line.

The situation today echoes the scandal of diethylstilboestrol (DES), the wonder drug in the 1950s that was supposed to prevent miscarriage. The side-effects of the drug only began showing up in the adult offspring some 30 years later in the form of reproductive problems and cancer.

Nevertheless, that was an isolated compound that was allowed to be given as a test drug before the advent of ‘informed consent’. As a 2005 study from Stanford University and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) concluded: “All of us now carry in our bodily tissues and fluids a virtual stew of heavy metals and hundreds of synthetic chemicals”—some of which persist in the body for years.

The utter regulatory freedom that industrial giants now enjoy makes the DES scandal pale in comparison. As Stanford University discovered, there is no requirement for the chemical industry to test their products for effects on human health prior to their release onto the market other than in the case of certain pesticides and food additives.

The burden of safety testing falls entirely upon the shoulders of federal and state agencies—but only after the products have been made available to consumers and distributed throughout the environment— and then, only if someone raises concerns over specific health risks.

“The result,” states the Stanford report, “is that more than 85 per cent of the 80,000 synthetic chemicals registered have never been assessed for their effects on human health.” The other worrying aspect is the closing-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted aspect of any potential crackdown. Even if organizations such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to put proper systems of regulation in place, these chemicals are now so pervasive in our waterways and foodchain that it could be many generations before we are free of them.

Forty-seven years ago, Rachel Carson wrote The Silent Spring, about the catastrophic effects of chemicals on the futures of plants and animals. Little did she know that she might be referring to the human race as well.

Your good health is down to you

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:13:00 GMT

One thing is sure in this world: only you can establish total wellness and health. Unless you want it, and are sufficiently motivated to gain it and keep it, no amount of outside support will succeed. Taking responsibility for your own health should be a prime personal objective. Succeed and you will achieve a more enjoyable and successful social and working life, irrespective of your age. Best of all, you will be reducing your dependence on medications and other medical services, whether ‘free’ or private.

Many countries are struggling to fund an expanding medical service. There is a growing mentality that ‘if the service is free, I should use it to the full and demand the latest drug or treatment that I have read or heard about’. In parallel, public and private medical professionals are increasingly rewarded in relation to the number of specific tests, treatments and prescriptions they provide, prescribe and refer to specialists. Will anyone ever dare suggest that the most successful doctors are those with a practice that has a rapidly-reducing need for their services?

As WDDTY and this website often remind us: ‘There are no free lunches to good health’, and it’s interesting that the following notice is included on vitamin bottle labels:
• These are no substitute for a balanced diet.
• Don’t exceed the recommended consumption.
• Discuss their use with your medical practitioner.

Yet there is no label on commercial non-ecological fruit and vegetables that says: ‘It is recommended that you wash and peel before consumption’, and few medical professionals have comprehensive training in nutrition, which surely has to be a fundamental basis of our wellbeing.
Last November we attended a session at the Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin on the topic of ‘What medications do we have to combat poor diets?’ presented by a panel of six Italian doctors. Replies to two questions from the audience were enlightening. They were along the following lines:
Q1. ‘Why has the panel not focussed on what we should eat to prevent the need for the new high-tech medications’?
R1. ‘None of us had any education on nutrition and good eating during our medical training and, like most, we have probably eaten badly during our careers. Fortunately a few hours of education are now provided to doctors in training but it is insufficient and squeezed into an overfull curriculum’.

Q2. ‘Why is a holistic health specialist not included in the panel’?
R2. ‘The organiser cannot be seen to be openly supporting alternative medicine’.

But luckily most of the conference was focussed on expanding the production and consumption of healthy foodstuffs by traditional ecological methods, and for local consumption and with the producers getting a fair reward. Unfortunately it is a struggle in many countries; in Spain, farmers are abandoning the land because the price they are paid is less than the production costs. Virtually no produce is sold locally, but instead is transported to warehouses and packing stations where they are treated in order to improve their appearance and to preserve them while they are shipped to retail outlets, often in packs labelled ‘Fresh – eat by the end of the week’.

At least if you grow your own, you have the chance to eat truly fresh food – ‘picked at their best just before consumption’.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe Authors of ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ and ‘ Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’. Read their October article ‘ Living Very Well from our Spanish Garden’ on their website ‘www.gardeninginspain.com.
October 2009.

DNA: it's not destiny

Joanna Evans — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:00:00 GMT

When we become ill, most of us lay the blame at the feet of our ancestors: my heart problem is like dad’s, who had a dicky ticker; I’m likely to get breast cancer because it’s what my grandmother died of. We look upon ourselves in a sense as victims—victims of our genetic history.

Nowadays, virtually all of medicine is built upon the notion that the blueprint of our life and health lies in our DNA, the genetic coding that supposedly holds a fixed menu of our potential for health or illness.

Medicine has accepted the neo-Darwinist interpretation of health—that each of our cells, equipped with a full pack of genes, mostly lives out a preprogrammed future. In the simplest terms, this means that genetics is destiny or, as Sylvia Plath put it, “Fixed stars govern a life”.

Nevertheless, as our cover story this month shows, growing evidence, popularized by the remarkable work of biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, convincingly demonstrates that our genes, far from being a pre-determined destiny, exist much as subatomic particles do—only as a potential.

We’re now beginning to understand that the environment that surrounds us—our diet, the quality of our air and water, the emotional climate of our family, the state of our relationships, our sense of fulfilment in life—has the most to do with what is ultimately expressed by our genes.

Although standard science still adheres to the notion that a cell is controlled by its nucleus, scientists are learning that it is, in fact, the outside influences filtering through the cellular membrane that actually control the cell and, consequently, the behaviour and health of the whole organism.

The membrane contains hundreds of thousands of protein receptor switches that regulate a cell’s function by turning a certain gene on or off. But what prompts the turn of the switch is an environmental signal, so the final control of a gene—and whether it is activated or not—is determined by one of a myriad influences outside of our body.

A cell has no individuality without its interaction with the environment. All the influences from the outside will determine a cell’s expression and how it will react within its world, and whether it will conform or be an outlaw to its fellows.

Evidence is now mounting that environmental influences affect the expression of much of our ill health, including mental illness. Indeed, far from being a genetically inspired event, even women with a family history of breast cancer are more likely to get it from an environmental insult such as hormone replacement therapy.

This, of course, has extraordinary implications for modern medicine. It makes a nonsense of genetic manipulation or, indeed, of family history as a life—and death—sentence. What the new research under-scores is that health or disease is the sum total of how we live our lives. That places the responsibility for our health squarely back on our own shoulders, not those of our parents or grandparents.

That piggish flu

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:51:00 GMT

Be careful, it’s coming your way! The boogey flu will get you! We’re having a pandemic! Everyone is in danger!

I say, bah humbug. All this advance notice is very suspicious to me. It seems to me that these are scare tactics so that people out of fear become willing to buy drugs and vaccines for something that hasn’t even happened. There has been no real evidence that the H1N1 flu is any more dangerous than the regular flu. There is however the real possibility of adverse effects from untested vaccines (remember the 1976 swine flu, where people got Guillain-Barre from the vaccines?).

I would be much more concerned about the dangers of mandated vaccines, especially if drug companies are not liable for people who get hurt by them. See
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/20/Legal-Immunity-Set-for-Swine-Flu-Vaccine-Makers.aspx

What to do then?
1. First of all, don’t get sucked into this fear and paranoia – wait for evidence.
2. Keep sensible precautions, such as washing your hands with soap several times during the day.
3. Don’t worry about this all the time. Remember the old saying “That which I feared hath come to pass.”
4. If you get the flu, don’t think of it as a big deal.
5. Treat the flu you get, whatever its name, with sensible natural remedies: rest, plenty of fluids, chicken soup, herbal teas, lots of garlic (a natural antibiotic), and more rest.

Here are two great ways to increase your intake of garlic.
1. Peel a small clove of garlic and chop it into small pieces. Swallow this with some juice or water, without chewing, and you will not get garlic breath. It’s a great preventative.

2. Russian Garlic toast. Make a slice of good wholemeal toast. Peel a clove of garlic and rub the garlic all over the toast. It may get all used up. Sprinkle with a teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil, and a few grains of sea salt. Eat heartily. You may want to give some to the rest of the family, as this will give you garlic breath. Worth it!

Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.

The message of pain

Joanna Evans — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:07:00 GMT

We are a society gripped by constant pain of one sort or another—and life appears to be getting more painful by the year. In the UK alone, according to Liam Donaldson, the UK’s principle medical advisor, at least a third of all households—representing some eight million of us—have one or more members suffering from moderate-to-severe persistent pain of some variety. This is two to three times more than such sufferers in the 1970s.

Matters are even worse in the US. According to the American Pain Foundation, more than 26 million Americans aged 20–64 experience frequent back pain alone. Almost a third of all adults aged 65 or over report some variety of knee pain, and more than one-sixth report having hip pain or stiffness. Staggeringly, some 25 million cases of pain have to do with migraine, or jaw or lower facial pain such as of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ).

Despite the fact that pain is the biggest ‘illness’ of our times—vastly overtaking cancer, diabetes or any of the other degenerative diseases in its incidence—medicine’s only answer is to use chemicals to block or suppress pain signals or inflammation in the nerves, brain or muscles. Millions of patients survive for years on over-the-counter medications such as paracetamol, aspirin and anti-inflammatories, despite warnings against their long-term use.

As our cover story this month points out, the stark reality is that the pills just don’t work. Most nursing-home patients remain in constant moderate or severe pain, despite the universal use of a plethora of pain-killing medications. And most of the rest of us report that, most of the time, our pain is beyond the reach of most drugs.

This is not surprising, given what we’re now learning about how the body works. The rationale for pharmaceutical medicines rests on the premise that chemical processes in the body progress in a linear and orderly fashion, so that a drug can precisely target tab A in order to pop into slot B. However, we’re now beginning to realize that chemical reactions in the body are distinctly not linear, but chaotic.

As frontier biologist Bruce Lipton observed in his book The Biology of Belief, interactions between a small group of cellular proteins in fruit-fly cells involved in the synthesis and metabolism of RNA molecules make up an impossibly complicated web of interconnections that can never be reduced to a simple linear progression of cause and effect.

Recently, scientists have theorized that the more than 6000 proteins in the human body have a network of more than 70,000 physical interactions. Proteins with certain physiological functions such as gender determination also influence proteins that have an entirely different job, such as RNA synthesis. Trying to tease apart or isolate any protein’s sole job in any genuine sense becomes virtually impossible.

Furthermore, we are now beginning to recognize that Nature is economical with its building blocks: the same proteins or signals may be used in entirely separate organs or tissues of the body for completely different functions. Pain, we are learning, is not merely symptomatic of mechanical parts breaking down, but relates to a complex interaction between mind and body. This means that many alternative forms of new medicine can treat pain by targeting mental and emotional issues.

Practitioners of these new modalities now recognize that pain can be a symptom of too little or too much of something our body needs. New evidence, for instance, shows that pain is often the side-effect of a simple lack of vitamin D—which may be why Britons, living in a sunshine-poor country, have a proportionately high incidence of pain.

Clearly, it’s time that we stop trying to just temporarily turn off pain and, instead, listen harder to what it’s trying to tell us.

Sweet and sour

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:41:00 GMT

Recently a Michelin-starred restaurant, that uses some of our ecological vegetables, presented us with a copy of a recipe book called ‘Menus for Cardiovascular Health’. It was published jointly by the Californian Walnut Association and Spanish Heart Foundation to promote the use of walnuts in leading Spanish restaurants.

We were surprised, however, that more than half the recipes used sugar or corn syrup, and not stevia. When we raised this with one of the contributing chefs, he said that ‘clients respond well to sweet-tasting dishes. and the use of sugar is not that unhealthy’. We were surprised by his reply for two reasons. In the past few years he has lost over fifty kilos in weight, and he has a supply of stevia. But he is right about one thing: we have always been given sugared things as a treat from an early age and often prefer them to things that are spicy or tart.

This prompted a look at the shelf of British products in a local store stocked to attract expatriate customers, which included a popular brand of horse radish sauce.
Horse radish is easy to grow in Spain and we regularly grate a root to mix and dilute it with nothing other than extra virgin olive oil if we are to eat it with meat, and cider vinegar or fresh lemon juice to accompany a fish dish.

But back to the bottle on the shelf. Its contents read ‘Horse radish 30%, water, spirit vinegar, vegetable oil, turnip, glucose syrup, sugar, pasteurised egg yolk powder, salt, stabiliser gum, mustard flour, flavouring, sodium meta-bisulphite as a preservative’.

If you have a terrace, patio or garden, why replace the natural healthy benefits of an easy-to-grow inexpensive healthy plant for a product that contains flavourings, sweeteners and other ‘enhancers’? The plant has a unique flavour of its own, and it contains useful levels of vitamin C, potassium calcium and sulphur; it has anti-inflammatory, and diuretic, properties, and it also helps our metabolic rate.

© By Clodagh and Richard Handscombe, holistic gardeners living in Spain. Their website is www.gardeninginspain.com and their latest books relevant to all Mediterranean climate situations are ‘Your Garden in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthby Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’. August 2009.

All carbs aren’t equal

Joanna Evans — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:01:00 GMT

A few months ago, thinking ahead to bathing-suit weather, I decided,
like most women on the planet, to lose five pounds. Intrigued by an ad
in the newspaper that promised a diet combining low-carb with natural
fat-burning foods, I sent away for the details and received a pack that
was, essentially, a more extreme version of the Atkins low-carbohydrate
diet. The diet was kickstarted by three days of protein-only foods and,
thereafter, only included foods with a very low glycaemic index (GI)
score, with three snacks a day composed entirely of protein.

However, like God, you could rest on the seventh day and eat whatever
you wanted, so long as it was followed by a protein-only day.
Although highly sceptical of an approach so heavily reliant on a single food group, I
decided to try it for a week. After all, my metabolic type slightly favours a high protein
consumption, so I eat a lot of protein anyway.

I embarked on my first protein-only day—and abandoned it by dinner time. In the time
in between, my system was virtually shut down: my brain had ceased to function; my bowels
had blown up with gas and constipation; my breath smelled bad; I carried around a lowgrade
headache; and, on top of that and contrary to all assurances, I felt constantly hungry.
I tell you this by way of a cautionary note related to our cover story this month, which is
about the new evidence of a link between high insulin levels and cancer, as well as evidence
that a low-carbohydrate diet may be cancer-protective.

But all low-carb diets are not the same. Many, like BodyTrim or the Atkins, initially
cut out other food groups and encourage the consumption of anything, no matter how
processed—Diet Coke, highly processed cereal bars, bacon fat, protein shakes—so long as
it’s not a carbohydrate.

This is why, in the wake of the Atkins ‘diet revolution’, the food industry has declared
open season, replacing low-fat foods with a huge array of highly processed low-carb ‘food’.
Indeed, heart specialist Dr Dean Ornish has taken it upon himself to act as a one-man
critic of the Atkins approach. As he points out, evidence shows that the Atkins diet can
increase calcium and potassium loss—as a result of protein overconsumption—leading to
osteoporosis, or brittle bones. In those with kidney problems, it can put excess stress on
the kidneys, lower blood flow to the heart, lower cognitive function and even, in the case of
one young woman, trigger fatal cardiac arrest.

In addition, according to one study, large numbers of patients endure bad breath,
constipation, headache, hair loss, abnormal periods (in the case of women) and dizziness.
Nevertheless, Ornish’s own answer to heart disease and cancer is also extreme: a wholefood
vegan diet, which many may find difficult to adhere to and which also often includes
many soy products that themselves have been linked to cancer.

However, there is a third option: the Montignac diet is low in carbs, yet encourages
healthy amounts of whole natural foods, wholegrains, natural fats, and unlimited amounts
of most fruits and vegetables. The Montignac diet is, in a sense, a kind of French Stone Age
diet—low in grains, with wine thrown in—the closest we have to a sensible, holistic low-carb
approach.

I went on the Montignac diet this spring and not only lost my five pounds, but stabilized
what was beginning to feel like yo-yo hypoglycaemia.
The simple secret of the Montignac diet is that an organic wholefood, non-processed diet
that includes most fruit and vegetables is, essentially, a low-carb diet—and one that is likely
to be your biggest weapon against cancer.

New healthy plants for our garden – and perhaps yours!

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:47:00 GMT

Although our garden is packed with plants, we can always find room for special things that look attractive and have benefits for our health.

Friends in the Leida Aragon branch of Terra Madre in Spain had set up an association called Dulce Revolucion – ‘Sweet revolution’. It was created to make people aware of plants that members had found beneficial, and to make them available in return for a small donation to the Association.

Inspired by this, we arranged a rural tour to collect some plants for ourselves or friends and others. Two weeks later we have the following three types of plants being trialled under different microclimatic conditions as the plants are not native to Spain

Stevia: The variety Stevia rebaudiana has the balance of Rubiocicide and Steviocide of the original plant from Paraquay and has not had the sweetener content increased by genetic breeding as has apparently happened in countries such as Japan.

We can now use fresh or dried leaves instead of honey in infusions and cooking. They may be able to help reduce the amount of medications that diabetic type 1 and 11 sufferers need to take, and help reduce fat build up, blood pressure and anxiety.

It’s usually consumed as an infusion.

Perilla: Perilla frutescens is an attractive purple-leaved plant that has useful culinary and health benefits.

It is used in the preparation of Japanese Shiso dishes. Healthwise, it is used in Asia for relieving allergic, respiratory and food poisoning conditions etc. It’s generally consumed as an infusion or leaf but it can also be included in salads.

Kalanchoe: The exotic-looking succulent plants we have are planted in a dedicated raised bed. The varieties are pinnata, dalgremontianum and gastionis-bonnieri. The benefits claimed include helping reduce cell damage and cancerous conditions, rheumatism, psychological crisis and hypertension. Like the other two, it’s taken as infusions or in salads.

Although we’re healthy (or believe we are), we are using a different leaf each day in our health-sustaining diet.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe July 2009. Their website is www.gardeninginspain.com and their best-selling books are Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain, Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain and Your garden in Spain .

The heart's a lonely hunter

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:24:00 GMT

Medicine likes to trumpet its treatment of heart disease because it is possibly the only degenerative disease where the numbers of fatalities are falling. However, the self-congratulation is premature. Heart disease remains the number-one killer in the West, still dispatching some 40 per cent of us.

As WDDTY publisher Bryan Hubbard noted in this month’s cover story (July 2009), every 37 seconds in the US alone, someone’s heart fatally packs up. So, in our special report this month, we’ve taken a closer look at medicine’s treatment of heart disease to discern where exactly medicine is going wrong. What we found was nothing short of revelatory: in fingering cholesterol as the bad guy, medicine essentially is taking aim at the cavalry.

Far from being the enemy, cholesterol appears to be the body’s chief means of eleventh-hour cardiovascular repair. To my mind, heart disease is chiefly a disease of emotional pain. The famous American heart specialist Dr Dean Ornish discovered that smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle and high-fat diet only accounted for half of all heart disease.
No one risk factor appears to be more important than isolation—from other people, from our own feelings and from a higher source.

In a study of nearly 20,000 people observed for up to nine years, those who were lonely and isolated were two to three times more likely to die from heart disease and other causes than those who felt connected to others. The results were independent of risk factors such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking (Am J Epidemiol, 1988; 128: 370–80). Lately, scientists have been studying a phenomenon called ‘broken-heart syndrome’, where an emotional upset, such as the loss of a loved one, causes dysfunction of the left ventricle (the heart’s main pumping chamber). In one study, researchers at Johns Hopkins found that women with the syndrome, which often leads to heart failure, had none of the usual predisposing factors for heart disease. Indeed, bereavement and sadness had caused such high levels of stress hormones, particularly adrenaline, that they had ‘stunned’ the heart, literally causing it to break (N Engl J Med, 2005; 352: 539–48).

The role of social ties in heart disease were highlighted in the heart-attack statistics in Nevada vs Utah. As neighbouring states, their ethnic mix is similar and they both have similarly high education statistics, although Nevada is the more successful state, with 15- to 20-per-cent higher incomes. Nevertheless, their statistics on mortality from heart attack were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Nevada had one of the highest death rates in the country, while Utah was among the lowest.

The primary difference between the two states was the stability of the social structure and close-knit families in predominantly Morman Utah, compared with the high degree of broken and dysfunctional family life in Nevada. It was the weakening of the social fabric, concluded the researchers, that had the biggest influence on the difference in mortality (Fuchs V. Who Shall Live? New York: Basic Books, 1975).

In some native populations, heart disease is a rarity even when the inhabitants adopt Western diets. For instance, a group of researchers studying the native populations of the Solomon Islands found that they had no coronary heart disease or high blood pressure even after they’d adopted Western diets and religious practices. This puzzled the researchers until they discovered one area that had remained constant: the social ties and roles within the family (Circulation, 1974; 49: 1132–46).

So, rather than worrying about your cholesterol levels, your doctor should be more concerned about the most important diagnostic test of all: the state of your friendships.

* To start your subscription to ‘What Doctors Don't Tell You’, and receive the special heart report, please follow this link:
http://www.wddtyhealthshop.com/products.asp?recnumber=246

It's getting hot for Big Pharma

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:27:00 GMT

Ever since doctors became little more than salesmen for the pharmaceutical industry, medicine has ceased to be a science, only occasionally is an art, and is almost always a commercial enterprise.

Research into non-drug solutions was rarely undertaken, simply because there was nobody to fund it, and so the scope of medicine has continued to narrow.

Doctors are beginning to wake up to the straitjacket they find themselves in, and some of the more pioneering souls are becoming like their Victorian forebears in their thirst for knowledge and zeal for new ideas.

These thoughts are sparked by news this week that cancer specialists in Texas are trying out thermal therapy as a way of countering pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal forms of the disease.

Not that the idea is exactly new. The observation that a high fever can kill cancer cells was observed as long ago as 1866 in Germany, and the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was also aware of it.

It was actively pursued in the 20th century by Dr William Coley, who devoted his life to researching the best herbs, and the correct quantities, for inducing a fever in cancer patients. Sadly, America’s drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, put a bar on the work, and conventional cancer therapy has been restricted to chemotherapy drugs and surgery.

As with heart disease, cancer is a disease that is far too much of a challenge to humankind to be left in the hands of commercial interests.

We hope the Texas oncologists receive all the funding and help they need, and without Big Pharma trying to sabotage their efforts.

Beating cancer naturally

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:55:00 GMT

In 1991, I visited my GP to ask for advice about a large lump on top of my neck. I was told that everyone in their fifties starts to get lumps like these, and there was nothing to worry about. I was then 54.

Two year later, I asked the same GP to check out the lump as it was throbbing, and my mouth was full of blood each morning. At first told I was told I had gum problems, and I should see my dentist. I insisted that this was not so, and an appointment to have an ultrasound examination at the local NHS hospital was arranged. When I got there, the operator could not work the machine properly, and only a vague shadow about 4 by 2 centimetres showed up. He suggested that I come back the following month when he would obtain a special dye that, if injected into blood stream, would improve the quality of the image.

Not happy with that experience, I demanded that the GP refer me to a head and throat specialist at the local private hospital as I had medical insurance for 20 years, and which I’d never used. I saw a specialist within a week, who said that I should have visited him two years before. I was operated on within two weeks and a salivary gland, with a large tumour within, and some lymph glands were removed.

The tumour was diagnosed as being slow growing and was resistant to radio- and chemotherapy, and as I had been swallowing blood, it was likely to spread to the lungs rather than reoccur in the upper neck. The doctor suggested that it would be better if I had a second operation two weeks later to remove another lymph gland and flesh around the gland - and then retire early to my Spanish holiday home full time for a less stressful, Mediterranean diet and physically active lifestyle - but to come back for annual check-ups.

So, in 1994, I did as the doctor ordered and moved full time and solo to Spain and did four things: I researched what the real Mediterranean diet had been in our then self-sufficient valley and started to follow it; I started to mountain walk; I worked on the Executive Overseas project at high altitude in Bolivia for a month and then walked in Peru to build up strength in my lungs; and I developed a mountainside garden that included areas for healthy ecological herbs and vegetables, and which involved collecting tons of rocks in a wheelbarrow, and eating ecological local meats and I caught my own fish in sea.

In 1996 I met Clodagh, now my wife, on top of mountain. Clodagh then was known as ‘the Green Witch’ for her amateur knowledge of beneficial uses of herbs. She had stopped drinking coffee and tea and was instead drinking infusions of mint, rosemary, lemon verbena, lemons, ginger, rue etc.

In 1998, and by then 61, I walked across Spain via the Pyrenees from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean in 52 days – that’s 950 kilometres and up and down 33,000 metres - with Clodagh, and with heavy rucksacks and tent. As a result of seeing small communities still self sufficient in organic/ecological vegetables, and as traditional agriculture in our valley was being abandoned at a fast rate and was changing from natural to chemical methods, we took on an allotment to have the space to become self sufficient in ecologically grown vegetables, herbs, edible flowers and soft fruits. Although I’ve grown a hundred different vegetables, we focussed especially on those with high antibiotic, vitamin and mineral content.

I expanded the number of beneficial herbs in the garden, and I made both the garden and house chemical-free. I stopped going for check-ups as regular x-rays are a risk in themselves ( I suspect that dental x-rays were one of the possible causes of the cancer, and I refused the dentist’s money spinning x-rays since 1993).
In 1999, we started to write our six books on gardening in Spain, giving radio talks and talks to gardening and dinner groups plus writing articles for many newspapers and magazines..

In 2001 we walked around Cuba to see the food growing revolution for ourselves. This helped us improve some of our practices, and we started to breed chickens and quail for eggs and meat, and rabbits for a healthy meat for an AB blood group.

Last year we took over the stewardship and regeneration of an abandoned olive grove – and we started the ‘Living well from your garden’ blog for WDDTY.

This year I’m 72, and still enjoying mountain walking, physical work in the garden allotment and olive grove. I talk every week about ‘Living well from your garden’ to local gardening and embryo allotment groups which are new to Spain.

We continue to eat well, and we are looking forward to our own first cold pressings of hand-picked extra virgin olive oil in 2011.

Interestingly, the surgeon has never enquired if his advice worked or if I am still in good health!

Luckily the increase in the popularity of our latest trilogy of books ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Your Garden in Spain’ funds our purchase of eco wines cheeses and lamb, which we don’t home produce.

Swine flu: The phony war

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:28:00 GMT

What Doctors Don't Tell You had its genesis in a swine flu epidemic—33 years ago. In 1976, at the start of my career as a young editor at the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, one of my columnists was Dr Robert Mendelsohn, who wrote The People’s Doctor. Mendelsohn had been entrenched in the very heart of the American medical establishment. Nevertheless, here was this kindly, mildmannered man, your prototypical Jewish grandfather, denouncing medicine as excessive and unproven. Every week, his column would savage yet another medical sacred cow.

In 1976, America was in the grip of an identical pandemic scare. It was the first time most of us had ever heard of swine flu. Prompted by his medical advisors, the then President Gerald Ford launched an ambitious programme to vaccinate every last person in the US, a programme that was on the scale of the polio vaccination of the 1940s and 1950s.

Mendelsohn was one of the few voices out there predicting that it would be a phony war. The rank and file ignored him. He also predicted that the swine flu vaccine wouldn’t work and probably would kill people. Again, he was largely ignored. Most of America dutifully lined up to get their shots. A few months later, after 40 million people had been vaccinated, hundreds of them began to develop a strange form of paralysis—inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy—more commonly known as ‘Guillain–Barré syndrome’, after the two French neurologists, George Guillain and Jean Alexandre Barré, who first identified it in a World War I soldier. Guillain–Barré syndrome, also known as ‘French polio’, is an acute, highly debilitating, autoimmune response that affects the peripheral nervous system, starting with weakness in the legs and eventually sweeping up to the face. In virtually all forms of Guillain–Barré, the body is invaded by a foreign antigen, but the immune system mistakes its own nervous system as the enemy. Vaccination is the perfect inciting incident for this kind of tragic mistake.

In 1976, more than 500 people were permanently paralyzed and dozens of others immediately died—not from the flu itself, but from the ‘cure’. In the midst of this disaster, we waited for swine flu to arrive. And waited. Not only was there no pandemic but, as with the current ‘epidemic’, it wasn’t even communicable disease of any appreciable size. A tiny number contracted the disease, and only one person died. The drug company that had produced the vaccine literally got away with murder. The company had signed a ‘no harm’ clause, refusing to take financial responsibility for any side effects, leaving the US government to pick up the $93 million tab for the injured. This episode stayed with me over the years, sending tremors through the very foundation of my belief system and largely prompting me to carry on Mendelsohn’s work through WDDTY. To me, it also showed that the very institutions we rely on for our health could not only get it seriously wrong, but could even walk away with fat pockets, completely unscathed.

This time, as our cover story this month details, there is evidence that the swine flu virus is a strange recombinant variety that almost appears to be man-made—and it just so happens that the one drug that officials claim saves the day are drugs like Tamiflu, the antiviral synthesized by Roche. By sheer coincidence, the US and the UK have millions of dollars’ and pounds’ worth of Tamiflu to hand, which they bought up to combat the avian flu that never arrived. And again, by sheer coincidence, the stocks of Tamiflu are very close to their sell-by date. As in 1976, this looks suspiciously like another phony war—although, this time, it’s a far more sinister one.

• The latest issue of What Doctors Don't Tell You, which includes the Swine Flu report, is now available to all new subscribers. To begin your subscription, please follow this link:
http://www.wddtyhealthshop.com/products.asp?recnumber=246

Beyond the blueprint

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:47:00 GMT

More than 50 years before Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wrote Les Recherches sur L’Organisation des Corps Vivants, the first book to set out a coherent and well-developed theory of evolution.

Where Lamarck differed from Darwin was in his belief that the environment, rather than genetic coding, was responsible for changes in animals, and that these changes could be inherited.

Lamarck—who has been ridiculed for generations—has now been vindicated by recent studies showing that environmental influences cause changes in organisms that may even persist through generations. Scientists are only now beginning to understand that it is outside influences filtering through the cellular membrane that control the expression of most genes and, in turn, affects the chemical coating (methylation) of the DNA double helix, which is exquisitely sensitive to the environment, particularly during the early stages of life. In our cover story this month (May 2009), WDDTY Deputy Editor Joanna Evans has uncovered a wealth of evidence showing that environmental exposure to pollutants—pesticides, plastics, even tobacco smoke—may be responsible for widespread obesity. The most extraordinary revelation is that the damage mostly occurs through prenatal exposure.

This is especially worrying as many ‘epigenetic’ changes persist through many generations. In times of famine, for example, populations exposed to famine prenatally have lower birth weights and higher-than-normal rates of degenerative diseases such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancer. Yet, even when they received adequate nutrition, those whose mothers had been starved produced smaller-than-normal children and grandchildren.

The environmental conditions affected at least two generations down the line (Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol, 1992; 6: 240–5 3). This suggests that those who are overweight due to chemical overload as babies will produce several generations of fat offspring.

The only note of optimism is the evidence that a good environment can also correct illness.
A mouse study by La r ry Feig and his colleagues at Tufts University looked at whether or not a stimulating environment could override knocked-out genes (Ras-GRF), without which the animals can neither learn nor remember. Put these mice in an unpleasant situation they’ve already experienced, provide the stimulus that should trigger the unhappy memory— and they won’t have the foggiest recollection of it.

But, when the researchers exposed such 15-day-old mice to the equivalent of a indoor theme park—a large cage with play tubes, cardboard boxes, a running wheel, and toys and nesting material—that was changed or rearranged every other day. After two weeks, the mice developed a compensatory new protein pathway that helped their long-term memory and learning. Even though they were still missing the gene, a stimulating environment, in effect, turned it back on. The mice showed normal memory and fear conditioning.

Feig then took this one stage further and examined what happened to their offspring, which were given the usual environment rather than the theme park. Astonishingly, these offspring showed every evidence of normal memory and learning ability even though they had inherited the knocked-out gene and had experienced no additional stimulation.

In fact, the environmental effect of their ancestors again overrode their genetic destiny—this time to positive effect.

This means that perhaps it’s not too late for us to begin cleaning up our environment.
Certainly, we owe it to our great-grandchildren.

Lynne McTaggart

This latest blog introduces the main story in the May 2009 issue of 'What Doctors Don't Tell You'. It is available only to subscribers. To subscribe, please follow this link:

http://www.wddtyhealthshop.com/products.asp?recnumber=246

A birthday message

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:46:00 GMT

This is a personal milestone for me and my husband, publisher Bryan
Hubbard, as it represents the entire trajectory — from infant to adult—of
not only this publication, but also our family. I was pregnant with our
firstborn, Caitlin, while setting up this newsletter; indeed, Caitlin’s fourweek-
late arrival held up publication of the first instalment. When she
finally decided to enter this world, so did volume 1 number 1—one of the
first exposés of the newly launched MMR vaccine.

This year, she began her first year of university. As she grew, matured
and finally transformed into an adult, so has W D D T Y.

When we launched W D D T Y, the Internet wasn’t around, and the lay public in Britain and
America found it difficult to get any information on the true risks and benefits of orthodox
treatments. We were rightly described by the London T i m e s as a “voice in the silence”.

From our launch, we set out our stall with an uncompromising stance of investigative
journalism. We would be wedded to telling the truth about conventional and alternative
medicine, without fear or favour.

Medical information is now cheap to come by on the Net and in the press. Nevertheless,
our small, talented team of investigative journalists regularly breaks stories that often never
see the light of day anywhere else.

We disclose modern medicine’s private conversation buried in the medical literature—the
potential dangers of certain drugs or procedures—as an early-warning system. The We s t e r n
press is generally content to count the bodies. Last year, we warned parents of the potential
dangers and ineffectiveness of the cervical cancer vaccine; this year, the British papers sadly
p roved our prescience by reporting on the 1500 girls seriously injured by the vaccine.

Re c e n t l y, we uncovered evidence that a large consignment of Baxter International’s
seasonal flu vaccine, due to be circulated to 18 European countries, had been infected with
the deadly live avian flu virus (see page 4). Had this contamination not been detected, the
vaccines may have set off an avian flu pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.

This only came to light when a Czech researcher—who’d made the discovery by accident—
fed the story to the Czech papers. At that point, the story should have been picked up and
splashed across the front pages of the world’s newspapers. In fact, almost no paper carried
it other than the To ronto Star in Canada. The press in both the US and UK remained
conspicuously silent.

I decided to become a journalist after witnessing two young Washington Post journalists
bring down a corrupt presidency. That experience imbued in me an appreciation of the power
and responsibility of the Fourth Estate to provide a check on the excesses of commerce and
politics. Nevertheless, it’s a state of mind that is fast disappearing from the job spec.

Reporters Without Borders, a global organization devoted to press freedom, publishes a
yearly Press Freedom Index, rating the comparative levels of free expression in countries
a round the world. The shocking fact is that the US during and after the last presidential
administration slipped badly to 53rd place, well beaten by the likes of Bosnia and El Salvador.

The UK’s press, at 27, while considered almost twice as free as the US, was nevertheless still
beaten out by most of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union.

At a time when the Western free press has largely been subsumed by giant corporate
conglomerates with overriding financial considerations, there is more need than ever for an
independent voice on healthcare.

To paraphase Sylvia Plath: the blood jet is truth; there is no stopping it. May it continue
to flow from these pages.

Herbs for health

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:34:00 GMT

Herb plants have many benefits in the garden. Many are perennials that flower for long periods, they add perfume to the garden, are reasonably drought-resistant, and they expand over the years to usefully cover an area of not so good soil. They also add flavour to salads, cooked dishes and refreshing drinks, and, most importantly, are an aid to better holistic health.

This morning our garden - after an early morning shower and with the heat of the rising sun - was as relaxing as an aromatherapy parlour. Wandering round it to see what spring flowers would be out for Easter, we harvested rosemary for an energy-stimulating infusion before going out for a four-hour mountain walk to celebrate Richard’s 72nd birthday and 16 years of surviving cancer by following a Mediterranean diet and avoiding radio- and chemo- therapies.

Along the way we collected horse radish to grate into olive oil to have with lamb chops at dinner and to boost our metabolic rates, garlic to mash with tomatoes frozen from last year’s crops to spread on home-made bread at lunch time – a popular tasty and natural antibiotic and antioxidant snack along the Med - jasmine and thyme flowers to flavour some of the latest batch of Kombucha, and parsley and basil to add to our breakfast salads.

Tomorrow and the day after we may make other choices for we have set out to have as many edible herbs, flowers, vegetables, and fruits as possible growing in the garden - and all are grown ecologically. Month by month others are using our trilogy of books ‘Your Garden in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ to do the same.

To us it seems the natural thing to do and we feel good for our age because of it. The only surprise is that the surgeon who suggested that Richard risk a follow-up to his two operations has never contacted us to find out if he is still alive!

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic gardeners living in Spain who wrote their books to share their ideas and experiences with others. For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.

Natural born killer

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:09:00 GMT

Our cover story this month exposes the shocking revelation
that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a ubiquitous sweetener used in
everything from cola to ‘healthy’ snacks, is heavily laced with mercury
that has inadvertently been added during its manufacturing process.

So widespread is HFCS, and so contaminated by mercury in the manufacturing
process, that most of us—even those consuming so-called
‘natural’ or ‘organic’ processed foods and snacks—could be ingesting
some 28.5 mcg of mercury every day. Indeed, the average American is
eating more than 42 lb (19 kg) of it every year.

What’s more, new evidence suggests that the use of HFCS may be behind the rise in
obesity in Western countries such as the US and UK.

Naturally, the corn industry, which was more or less saved from extinction by the discovery
in the 1970s of an enzyme that could convert the glucose in corn syrup to fructose, counters
that HFCS is ‘natural’—derived entirely from natural substances with no artificial additives
or ingredients.

But that begs the question of what exactly we mean by ‘natural’. Of the two types of highfructose
corn syrup being widely used, HFCS-55 is 55-per-cent fructose and HFCS-42 is 42-
per-cent fructose. The remainder percentages of each sweetener is largely made up of glucose
plus approximately 6 per cent of higher saccharides.

The manufacture of HFCS is an involved process. The first step is to extract the corn starch
from corn, which is then treated with the enzyme alpha-amylase, a natural enzyme present
in human saliva and pancreatic fluids but, in this instance, produced commercially from
bacteria. The resulting polysaccharides produced from the chemical interaction of corn
starch and this enzyme are treated with yet another enzyme called ‘glucomylase’—harvested
through a process that uses fungi from the Aspergillus family.

The third step in this process involves passing the mixture over a third enzyme called
glucose isomerase. This enzyme is entirely synthetic, and this is what is responsible for doing
most of the work—that is, converting part of the corn glucose into fructose so that the
resultant HFCS is 42 per cent fructose, 6 per cent other saccharides and 52 per cent glucose.
To produce HFCS-55, the HFCS-42 is put through liquid chromatography, which helps
manufacturers to separate out only the fructose, resulting in a liquid that is 90-per-cent
fructose. Then the HFCS-42 and HFCS-90 are blended together and the result is HFCS-55,
with a higher concentration of sweetness and the sweetener of choice for most soft drinks.
Some 90 per cent of the soft drinks produced in the US are made with HFCS-55.

In a number of plants (all of the HFCS plants in the UK and one-third of those in the US),
the manufacturing process exposes this ‘entirely natural’ product to caustic soda (sodium
hydroxide), which requires the use of mercury in the process.

This means that this all-singing, all-dancing, ‘natural’ substance is produced through a
three-stage enzyme-conversion process, including one totally synthetic enzyme and, in the
manufacturing process at some plants, exposed to a good deal of mercury, which mysteriously
‘disappears’.

All this mixing, dividing and refining may be why there is increasing evidence that this
sugar derivative could be causing massive weight gain. As with most food that is manipulated
in any major way, the body simply doesn’t recognize it or, indeed, know what to do with it.
I don’t know about your dictionary but, to my mind, HFCS is to natural sugar what a saline
implant is to female breasts—a weird approximation that can never be called an equivalent
to the real thing.

You can read the full report in the March issue of 'What Doctors Don't Tell You'. To begin your subscription, please follow this link:

http://www.wddtyhealthshop.com/products.asp?recnumber=246

Feeding the bones

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:16:00 GMT

I have a new book out (toot toot). It’s called “The Whole-Food Guide to Strong Bones.” It’s an update of a book I published 10 years ago, and it is MUCH better.

Let me tell you a story from someone who read the old version. She wrote to me that she had been through some bone problems – diagnosed with osteoporosis, weak in general, and had been vegan for more than 10 years. In my book I mention that yes, vegetarians are supposed to have less osteoporosis than meat eaters – and there is a general impression that meat is not good for the bones. However, that turns out to be not quite true. Protein is essential for the bones as well.

Recent research shows that people who eat meat have stronger bones than people who don’t. This makes sense to me, because 35 per cent of the bone is the collagen matrix, which is a protein. While the calcium in the bone makes it dense and hard, that is not enough – the collagen makes it flexible. It is the flexibility that keeps the bone from breaking, not the hardness. Some people have thin bones that don’t fracture, and others have dense bones that do.

Anyway, this woman mentioned that after so many years of being vegan, and then worrying about her bones, she found my book and started following my recipes, eating some more meat and animal protein with the vegetables, doing more exercise, and a couple of years later her bones had returned to normal. So – more vegetables for some, more meat for others – that’s how people improve their bones.

What hurts the bones, on the other hand, are the refined carbohydrates – sugar, white flour, white rice. Our beloved cakes, cookies, pastries, ice cream – those are good to help us weaken our bones. As osteoporosis and fractures are increasing, and they increase more in countries where people eat those foods, in addition to milk and milk products, we should take note of this sad trend.

Whenever I put out a book, I hold my breath until I get the first few feedback comments. I could have written something to the best of my ability, and yet it may not have come out right. But feedback of the kind above, where people find what I write helpful, is the best and most satisfying kind. I think many of us want to help the world be a better place, and we do what we can within our possibilities and limitations. I believe that if only one person benefits from what we offer, we’re doing fine. If more that one benefits, that is so nice to know. So please, I hope that some of these ideas are of use to you, dear reader, and that you will pass along the information to your friends and acquaintances.

Annemarie’s book is available from Amazon.com. Click here to purchase:
http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Food-Guide-Strong-Bones-Holistic/dp/1572245808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236704460&sr=8-1

Salad for breakfast

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:27:00 GMT

For us there’s nothing more gastronomic, healthier and economic for breakfast than a home-grown vitamin- and antioxidant-rich salad and an egg boiled, fried or as an omelette.

Recently we gave a talk entitled ‘Living well from your garden’ to a Costa Blanca U3A (University of the Third Age) conference. Most speakers focused on achieving better health by gentle exercise, meditation, massage, skin care, and they were followed by a medical doctor who emphasised that there are now pills to not only overcome vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but also to extend life expectancy. He himself took over 100 pills a day, half that of his US mentor, and it was suggested that if 35-year-olds started a course they could reasonably expect to live to a 100 or longer.

Most participants seemed to prefer the idea of eating vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit from their gardens and thought that they would find it very difficult to swallow over 100 pills a day, even if they were drinking three litres of water a day!

During our talk we mentioned the best vegetables to eat, and for breakfast that we included a salad (as do those Spaniards still following any remnants of a Mediterranean diet) and a freshly-laid egg.
There was an immediate audience reaction - ‘Salad for breakfast, ugh!’ and ‘aren’t eggs dangerous?’ We pointed out that the English newspapers had recently reported that the British Nutrition Foundation now admitted that it had been wrong in suggesting for many years that eggs were dangerous and that its views since 2005 were that ‘Going to work – or gardening - on an egg’ was a great idea, except for the small number of people with familial hypercholesterolaemia .

We explained that our salad was not of the lettuce leaf variety, but that it included nasturtium, parsley, rocket, marjoram, red lettuce and young spinach leaves, chopped young garlic stalks and root, sliced spring onions, sprouted radish and broccoli seeds with extra virgin olive oil as a dressing to give us a good dose of vitamins, minerals and, most importantly, natural antioxidants and antibiotics. Home-grown tomatoes, carrots and shitake mushrooms are added when in season.

Anyone can grow this breakfast in a small-raised bed or even in containers on apartment terraces as well as in the open garden. Our book ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ demonstrates how easy it is.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books to share their ideas and experience.
For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.

Fruits all year round

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:36:00 GMT

One of the joys of gardening in Spain is that delicious fruits full of undiluted antioxidants, vitamins and minerals are at hand throughout the year for eating, harvesting for later in the year, drying for snacks or storing at the end of the season.

Unfortunately our fresh raspberry harvests finished in November – having started in May! - but by then we had vitamin/antioxidant-rich late grapes, fresh pomegranates, various varieties of seasonal mandarins and oranges, and, of course, lemons on our perpetual flowering/fruiting lunar lemon tree. From autumn harvests, almonds, pecan nuts and walnuts are stored in their shells without exposure to air until they are cracked for eating.

Having been grown ecologically, the mandarin and orange peel is safe to dry and eat or include in cooked dishes. Since we rarely water the fruit trees in order to maximise flavours rather than artificially maximising the size and weight of fruit, one is constantly tempted to eat more than the minimum recommended five to nine portions of fruit and vegetables a day. At Christmas the pudding and mincemeat was made from home grown and dried fruits and nuts.

Why not plan now to do the same!

Clodagh and *** Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books, including ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’, and many articles to share their ideas and experiences.
For more information, visit their website: www.gardeninginspain.com.

Crossed currents

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:33:00 GMT

There is now no dispute: electromagnetic fields (EMFs) harm our health. WDDTY has assembled the latest evidence that electrical and magnetic fields may be behind cases of ongoing puzzling illnesses like Alzheimer’s , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and cancer. But the most shocking aspect of the EMF story is that it ever saw the light of day. The real story here is not that power lines are risky, but that the guardians of our health have so much interest invested in keeping that information from us.

When Bristol Professor Denis Henshaw began uncovering the first significant evidence of a link between power lines and childhood cancer, the UK’s National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) referred to such evidence as implausible and purely speculative.

Then, when the Oxford Childhood Cancer Research Group (CCRG), the largest-ever publicly funded UK study into power lines and cancer in children, presented its first results linking exposure to high-voltage power lines with childhood leukaemia, the Department of Health (DoH) kept the evidence hidden from public view for more than four years.

It was the Environmental Action Campaign, an independent activist organization, that eventually forced the DoH’s hand into making the findings public in 2004.

Although the NRPB has finally admitted to a likely relationship between power-frequency magnetic field exposure and cancer risk, the UK government is still unwilling to push for any law limiting exposure to power lines, mobile phones, WiFi and all other devices emitting EMFs.

Last year, a panel of 40 experts assembled to ‘discuss’ the government’s request that they examine how to cut public exposure to power lines. That panel included a number of members of the industry, who continued to fight against the strongest measures, such as burying lines underground or creating an ‘avoidance corridor’ around power lines where new buildings cannot be erected.

In the US, the California Department of Health Sciences led a $7m initiative—the
California EMF Project—which analyzed all research and concluded that there was strong evidence that magnetic fields are a likely cause of leukaemia, brain cancer, spontaneous abortions and ALS.
Nevertheless, no body within the US government has rushed to do anything about it.

At the moment, virtually all standards are based on the assumption that the only concerns with such fields are to do with tissue-heating or induced electrical currents in the body; any other effects are still not understood.
Yet, in a 2007 BioInitiative Report, a team of 14 international scientists, arguing for a
public-exposure standard for EMFs, concluded that it is electromagnetic radiation (rather than heat) that causes biological changes.

As noted by the EMF Project, other environmental concerns that have smaller health risks are subject to tougher regulation, even when the mechanisms of the risk are not understood. We still don’t know, for example, how smoking causes cancer; nevertheless, the restrictions on the tobacco industry continue to grow.
The reason for all the foot-dragging is clear. Electromagnetic fields are rather like the modern banking industry: since the discovery of electricity, they have underpinned our modern lifestyle. Any attempt to responsibly restrict the vast network of industry that creates, makes or uses EMFs would also severely limit new technologies (such as mobiles and WiFi ), which is tantamount to driving a stake into the very heart of our economic system.

Nevertheless, as the BioInitiative Report argues, admitting that there is problem and then defining new exposure standards is a very good place to start.

The Power Lines special report is now available to all new subscribers to ‘What Doctors Don't Tell You’, who take out a full subscription (note: the report is not available to those who take up a trial, £4.99, subscription).
To subscribe, and receive the Power Lines special report, please follow this link:
http://www.wddtyhealthshop.com/products.asp?recnumber=246
Note: All new subscribers who pay at the full price also receive a CD that contains nearly 20 years of health research, compiled by the WDDTY team. The CD usually retails for £200 ($300).

Midges and mosquitoes

Bryan Hubbard — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:57:00 GMT

When we first came to Spain we were delighted that there were not all the midges that prevented us from dining outside in our previous garden in Windsor, but there were the occasional mosquitoes hovering around.

We resisted the overkill of installing mosquito screens on all the windows and the use of plug in chemical vaporisers. Rather we planted lantana plants in beds against the house, having been advised on a walking holiday in Mauritius to rub lantana leaves on our skins against mosquitoes – and it worked – and caught a couple of geckoes ( lizards with suction pads on their feet that enable them to walk across ceilings) that kept village houses free of flying insects and built a pond soon inhabited by insect eating frogs and toads.

However we could not take fresh lantana leaves frogs and geckoes in our luggage on a recent visit to the jungles of Costa Rica so we looked up the back numbers of WDDTY, and found just what we wanted - an ecological mix of essential oils that could be added to olive oil which we used already as the basis for daily body and a sun protection oils. The mix we made up was 100ml olive oil from olives we had picked, 12 drops of lemon grass oil, 8 drops of thyme oil, 8 drops of lavender oil and 8 drops of oil of peppermint. The latter two oils having been distilled previously from herbs in the garden for other purposes. It worked, providing a good body lotion as well as protection from mosquito bites. Chatting to other travellers, some had been well bitten even though they were using proprietary sprays.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe December 2008.
Holistic and self-sufficient gardening authors living in Spain.
http://www.gardeninginspain.com/

Their books include Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain, Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain and Your Garden in Spain.