What Doctors Don't Tell You

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:
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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:
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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.

The selling of Gardasil

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:48:00 GMT

Eighteen months ago and amid enormous fanfare, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that it had produced the first vaccine against cancer. Gardasil would fight against the human papillomavirus that caused cervical cancer and the target would be *** girls, who would be protected before they have sex.

The launch of Gardasil has been so successful that one in four teenagers in America has already been given the jab, and countrywide vaccination programmes have been launched in the UK, Canada, Australia and other countries. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that 30 million American girls and women aged 11–26 be vaccinated.

Yet, hardly had the vaccine programme begun when the US government began receiving reports of thousands of girls suffering from serious side-effects, including paralysis, heart attack and death.

The selling of Gardasil represents a new low in pharmaceutical tactics to market their wares to an uneducated and trusting public. As WDDTY’s special investigation in its current issue (November 2008) reveals, this vaccine arrived on the market with not a single long-term test demonstrating its safety or effectiveness.

Although the drug was licensed for use in the States in June 2006, the first trials of
the vaccine with clinically relevant endpoints—evidence that it does actually prevent something—only appeared a year later, in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet (N Engl J Med, 2008; 359: 861–2; Lancet, 2007; 369: 2161–70).

And small wonder. The two large-scale studies (both sponsored by Merck) showed only modest benefit (20 per cent or less) in preventing early cervical lesions, the vast majority of which revert to normal on their own (N Engl J Med, 2007; 356: 1991–3).

Furthermore, the vaccine has never been tested for effectiveness among the population targeted to receive the drug. The only test among *** girls simply demonstrates an immune response—it raises antibodies in the blood.
Products and books don’t become best-sellers by accident. Well before the vaccine’s launch date, Merck engaged the services of some of the world’s top advertising brains to heighten fear in the public mind about cervical cancer. The admen then unleashed its most potent weapon: a direct-to-*** ad campaign that made it cool to be vaccinated.

How did Merck manage to finesse their new product and direct-to-girls advertising through the regulatory process? To answer that, it’s important to examine what has happened to the drugs regulatory process in the US, which has undergone deregulation not dissimilar to that of the US and UK financial systems.

In the early 1990s, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drastically downsized its network of independent drugs-safety experts, and began hiring more people simply to ‘rubberstamp’ drugs.

Presently, drug companies pay ‘user fees’ to fund the majority of the FDA’s drugs review process. These fees and how they’re spent are renegotiated every five years, with Big Pharma having a big say as to which drugs are fast-tracked. At this time, the industry continually presses for faster drug approval as well as approval of direct-to-consumer ads.

This leaves the FDA’s regulatory budget and priorities open to control by the very industry they are paid to oversee.

Now that we are all involved in tightening up the economic free-for-all that resulted from a totally deregulated financial industry, it’s also time to crack down on authorities like the FDA which, at the moment, are less a watchdog than a drug company’s dearest friend.

Grandparents play a key role

Bryan Hubbard — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

On the basis of our fruit and vegetable books, we were invited to join 8000 other participants from 150 countries at the third Slow Food international Terra Madre conference in Turin.

For four days a diverse mix of food communities, small scale farmers and fishermen, chefs, traditional medicine growers and practitioners, university educators, consumers - including over a thousand young people - considered how good traditional vegetable, fruit, herb, fish and meat produce and products could be preserved and expanded by self-sustaining methods.

Fortunately the original focus on food’s taste and texture was widened to include health, not surprisingly when you consider the background of GM-led industrial agriculture having a detrimental effect on rural life and health in many developing nations.

It was sad that many of the young people who were studying agriculture had opted out of the organic/ecological modules because bigger salaries lay elsewhere but, to offset this, the concept of school gardens is being resurrected on a major scale in many countries, and growing your own, as we do, was seen as a essential contribution to good health by most of the more elderly participants like us.

In several sessions a big plea was made for the world’s grandparents, who can remember the days of heirloom seeds and breeds and gardening without chemical products, to share this knowledge together with healthier recipes with their mobile/fast food-focused grandchildren. If they don’t succeed, much valuable local knowledge will be lost for ever.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical gardeners, authors and broadcasters living healthily from their holistic garden and slow life in Spain. Books include the bestsellers 'Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain' and 'Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain'.

© Clodagh and Richard Handscombe www.gardeninginspain.com November 2008
( Apologies that the website was wrong on our two previous contributions).

Start with a kitchen garden

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:13:00 GMT

Growing fresh healthy crops full of vitamins and minerals does not require a large vegetable plot. Indeed even with a large vegetable plot we still grow things in the kitchen in areas of less than one or two sheets of A4 paper to demonstrate what is possible for apartment dwellers, the infirm and children.

Our automatic starter is often producing a diversity of sprouting seeds – eighteen possibilities are listed in our vegetable book. A cardboard box of spore impregnated compost produces shitake mushrooms over a period of several months each autumn. On the outside or onside windowsill a trough or row of pots can yield a diversity of herbs and miniature vegetables. On a worktop a deep earthenware container grows three or four litres of the healthy Kombucha drink a week (the active ingredient of Kombucha is a floating fungi/lichen type plant).

Instructions for such mini vegetable gardens are given in Part Two of our vegetable book. Why not have a go? Surely less than five minutes a day is a productive investment in one’s own health!

________________________________________________________________________________

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical gardeners and authors living healthily from their holistic garden in Spain. Books include Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain and Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain.

The alternative's better - whatever the price

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:05:00 GMT

Does anyone remember the ‘controlled experiment’, decades ago, that I can just vaguely recall, in which a high quality perfume was masquerading as two competing fragrances (although they were, of course, the identical product): one at a high selling price and the other as a discounted drug store item (selling at a small fraction of the cost of the other) ? The outcome was that the very expensive version far outsold the other and was considered by the users to be markedly superior to the same but cheap one.

Well, now, déja vu: Dr D Ariely has given two groups of volunteers identical placebos which he palmed off as painkillers, advising one group that the tablets cost about £2 each and told the other that they had been discounted to around 8p each (J Am Med Ass, vol 299: p 1016). Of course, the participants in the trial didn’t pay for the tablets, but the cohort that took the “highly priced” sham pills felt much less pain from subsequent electric shocks than those who took the “cheap” ones. The conclusion that was reached: Price affects people’s response to medication.

So then, is it because orthodox medication is virtually cost-free in the U.K. that alternative medicines, which need to be paid for in full, are gaining on them at a rate of about 15% p.a. ? Yet in countries where there is no N.H.S. (Ireland, South Africa, U.S.A., for instance) the cheaper ‘alternatives’ are gaining on the ‘conventional’ at exactly the same rate. So what is going on ?

Could it be that, perhaps, the ‘alternatives’ generally produce better results, the price notwithstanding ?

__________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Harald Gaier is a registered naturopath, osteopath, homeopath and herbalist. He writes the monthly ‘Alternatives’ column in ‘What Doctors Don't Tell You’. You can e-mail him a question about your health to: admin@drgaier.com, and he will try either to offer some general guidance or investigate your health problem as a case study in a future issue of the publication. You can also visit his website at: http://www.drgaier.com

Measles - what next?

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:29:00 GMT

Vaccination rates are dropping. I believe that is a good thing. Living has its risks (and its benefits, of course). We are always making choices. In this case, it’s the risk of getting measles vs. the risk of getting autism or other neurological disease. It’s a no-brainer as to which one I would rather expose my children to. Many of us older people – say, older than 45 – have had measles, and survived it quite well, thereby becoming immune for life, no boosters needed.

Let’s remember that human beings are extremely complex organisms. The idea that a single virus will create a disease by itself in a body is absurd. If it were true, humanity would be erased within a day as viruses and bacteria of all kinds are literally crawling all over us when we’re well (as well as when we’re sick). There was a great disagreement between Louis Pasteur (the bacterium does it) and Auguste Bechamp, his contemporary, who insisted that the bacterium only does it in a susceptible terrain. It’s like saying that flies cause garbage, rather than recognizing that when there is garbage, flies appear. Best way to get rid of the flies is in cleaning up the garbage, not by shooting the flies.

So, to prevent disease, let’s strengthen the human terrain. Good, nutritious food is the best means for that. In the case of measles, it is well recognized that a deficiency in vitamin A increases the morbidity and mortality of this disease. Studies show that vitamin A supplementation in children is associated with a reduction of 23% to 30% in mortality risk and a noticeable reduction in the severity of symptoms. (Cad Saude Publica. 2007 Nov;23(11):2565-75. [Evidence of the impact of vitamin A supplementation on maternal and child health] [Article in Portuguese] Oliveira JM, Rondó PH.) I would extend that discovery to the notion that malnutrition in general can increase the risk for infectious diseases. Keeping those two concepts in mind, here is how to reduce the risk of measles in children, especially in very young ones:

1. Breastfeed them for at least 6 months, but better still, for 2 years. Solids can be introduced when they become interested and start putting things in their mouth to chew – about 6-8 months. The mother’s diet, of course, should be rich in nutrients.

2. Offer regular sources of vitamin A. These include plant foods (orange vegetables such as carrots, winter squashes, and yams, as well as leafy greens), and animal foods (organic, grass fed butter, liver and eggs with their yolks).

3. As vitamin A is fat soluble, there should be reasonable amounts of healthy fats in the diet, including extra virgin olive oil, organic butter from healthy cows, flax oil, coconut oil.

4. For supplementation, the classic European custom of giving children cod liver oil is probably one of the best.

Should they still get measles, heaven forfend, treat it with homeopathy. Then you can be reasonably assured that it will be mild and give them lifetime immunity.

Here is my favorite recipe for greens, which my kids used to eat with gusto from the time they were about 5.

Garlic greens (about 4 servings)

1 lb collards, kale, or mustard greens, stems removed.

2 T extra virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

Fresh grated nutmeg

1 tsp lemon juice (optional)

1. Fill a large pot with water, bring to a boil, drop in the greens, and simmer them, uncovered, for about 10 minutes. Push them down with a wooden spoon if they poke out too far.

2. Fish out the greens with a colander, and chop into bite size pieces. (You can drink the “greens water” with a little lemon juice while hot, a great alkalizer – discard once it has cooled, it gets too bitter).

3. Heat the olive oil in a skilled, add the garlic, sizzle for a minute, add the greens, stir and heat for about 3 minutes. Dust a faint sprinkling of nutmeg all over (less than ¼ teaspoon), add the lemon juice if desired, and serve hot. (If there are leftovers, add some beaten eggs with a pinch of seasalt, and make a scramble or a frittata next morning.)

Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.

ANNEMARIE COLBIN, Ph.D., CHES, is an award-winning leader in the field of natural health She founded Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts (TM) in New York City in 1977, and is adjunct professor of nutrition at the city’s Empire State College. She is the author of four books, including The Book of Whole Meals (Autumn Press, 1979; Ballantine Books, 1983), The Natural Gourmet (Ballantine Books, 1989, 1991), and Food and Healing (Ballantine Books, 1986, 1996). Her website is: www.foodandhealing.com

Meditate yourself healthy

Joanna Evans — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:33:00 GMT

In today’s fast-paced society, more and more people are turning to meditation to help deal with the stresses and strains of everyday life. But meditation is more than just a way to switch off and relax. As the latest research shows, this age-old technique is in fact a powerful tool that’s proving to be beneficial for an array of health conditions — from insomnia and anxiety to cancer and heart disease.

Although there are individual differences among meditation techniques, they all share some core features. The following is a simple basic technique.

Sit in a comfortable position either crosslegged on the floor or in a chair. Be sure to sit up tall, keeping the spine straight, the shoulders relaxed and the chest open.
Rest the hands on the knees with the palms facing up. Lightly touch the index finger to the thumb. Relax the face, jaw and belly. Let the tip of the tongue rest on the roof of the mouth just behind the front teeth. Allow the eyes to lightly close.
Breathe slowly, smoothly and deeply in and out through the nose. Let the inhaled breath start in the belly and rise gently up into the chest. As the breath slows and deepens, let go of any thoughts or distractions, and allow the mind to focus on the breath. Feel the breath as it moves in and out of the body — through the nose, throat, windpipe and lungs. Feel the body as it rises and falls with each breath.
Keep your awareness and attention focused on the body and breath. If external thoughts intrude, let them gently pass by, and return the focus back to the body and breath.
Practise this for 10–20 minutes.
To end, gently let the eyes blink open, and inhale, bringing the palms together in front of the chest, then exhale and gently bow. Take a moment or two before resuming your usual activities.

Meditation is the subject of the Mind Health report in the November issue of ‘What Doctors Don’t Tell You’. It will be with subscribers on Saturday November 1st. If you would like to subscribe, please click here.

Grow your own

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:58:00 GMT

Labels on bottles of vitamin pills frequently include the note 'Not intended as a substitute for a balanced diet'. Heath authorities worldwide now recommend that we eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day for their vitamin and mineral contents, others emphasise that these are best if fresh and grown ecologically/organically without the use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides. The Slow Food movement recommends that we should try and eat local produce to sustain the local economy.

Such produce is not always easy to buy or is expensive due to today’s oil-based, long-distance distribution systems by air or road transport, and packaging materials. So why not grow your own in containers on apartment terraces, in raised beds in small gardens, in the garden or if convenient an allotment? The great advantages are that you can focus on growing those fruits and vegetables with the greatest beneficial vitamin and mineral contents and harvest each day just what is required for each meal or day.

The WDDTY chart 'Guide to the healthiest foods' is a useful indicator of this.
Following the traditional Mediterranean Diet, we include a selection of fresh home-grown antioxidant/vitamin/mineral-rich foods such as dark green spinach and dandelion leaves, sprouting broccoli, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers and leaves, garlic, onions, tomatoes, carrots in all meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - and, when walking the mountains or playing tennis, we enjoy our own home dried unadulterated fruit, vegetables and nuts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Clodagh and *** Handscombe are practical gardeners and authors living healthily from their holistic garden in Spain. Their books include 'Growing healthy fruit in Spain' and 'Growing healthy vegetables in Spain' (Santana Books). Many of the practical ideas are applicable worldwide.

ADHD overload

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:42:00 GMT

Nobody has anything nice to say about NICE - so, being a contrarian, I will! As you may know, NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) determines the drugs that should be made available on the National Health Service based upon their effectiveness and price.

Invariably it makes decisions that upset some groups, and is seen as a skinflint denying life-saving pharmaceuticals to people in desperate need. That's the rub, of course. People in desperate need a magic bullet, and are more than willing to swallow any drug company hype, whereas NICE has to take a more considered view.

The institute has hit the headlines again in the past week, this time urging doctors to reduce the prescriptions on drugs such as Ritalin for children with ADHD (attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder). It wants to see the numbers of prescriptions reduced to a third of their current levels, and reserved only for the most extreme cases.

There are a number of pressures going on here, and NICE is being the voice of reason. The first pressure is from the drug's manufacturer. Years ago, WDDTY got hold of a secret memo to the salesforce, stating that it was concerned that too few children in the UK were taking Ritalin. It was the start of a concerted drive, and, as usual, the doctors were willing accomplices.

The second pressure is from parents and doctors alike, who both see any form of errant behaviour as 'ADHD'. It's a catch-all umbrella term that captures any form of problematic behaviour that, once upon a time, was dismissed as 'boys being boys' and the like. Any excitability is exacerbated by diet, and often times the removal of sweets and processed foods from the diet will result in an almost immediate improvement to any bad behaviour.

Of course, this is not to diminish the problems of ADHD and the hell that parents of genuinely afflicted children go through. But NICE has it about right - the prescriptions need to be reduced to around a third of the level of where they are now.

It's time to stop seeing every childhood problem as ADHD in order to sell more drugs.

You are your world

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

One of the central messages of our site is that you have to take responsibility for your own health. There's no such thing as the free lunch when it comes to your health (and, if you happen to be a 'free lunch' believer, you probably also cling to the notion of the 'magic bullet' antidote, which keeps the drug company coffers full).

While taking responsibility includes all the usual suspects of diet, nutrition and general lifestyle, there's a real possibility that it has an even deeper significance.

A while back I had the very great fortune to meet Dr Bruce Lipton, who came to speak at one of our 'Living The Field' conferences. Bruce has been one of the earliest pioneers of a branch of biology known as epigenetics, which studies the impact of the enviornment on our genetic make-up.

Bruce lost a very lucrative position as professor at a prestigious American university for even suggesting that our DNA is not a set code, but instead can be influenced and changed by the environment. At the time the science of epigenetics was dismissed as a heresy, and those who pronounced it were banished from academia.

But, of late, the tide has been turning. Researchers who studied obese families found that parents and children weren't necessarily genetically predisposed to be obese but rather that their immediate environment played a more significant role. This is not so astonishing to those who haven't swallowed the DNA argument whole; if you're in a family that eats processed foods in front of the television and drives to the corner shop, then you're more likely to get fat yourself, irrespective of your gene pool.

It goes deeper. What makes up your environment? It's not just your lifestyle choices, it's your thoughts and beliefs, and your perceptions of the world beyond your body. This complex mix all adds to the rich subtleties of your immediate environment.

And, if your environment can change your coding, where does 'you' end and the 'world' begin?

Epigenetics is an exciting new branch of science that suggests a feed-back loop system where we are constantly influenced by that which we influence.

So, now, who needs pills?

This pill makes you rich

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Let's get down to the real nitty-gritty of what medicine is all about - money. As stock watchers amongst you may know, Big Pharma is being marked down by City (and Wall Street) slickers, who are putting up 'Sell' notes wherever they are seeing a pharmaceutical company.

Why? Haven't drug companies found a cure for cancer yet? Or perhaps they're not getting the rapid recovery rate for their patients?

Not a bit of it. Had that been the criteria for drug companies' share price, they would have been in the bargain basement long since. No, the reason for the panic sell is simply that many drugs are now passing out of the protection of patent, and so can be copied - with very minor modifications - by all and sundry.

In the past few days, both AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have been downgraded because several of their key profit-making drugs are soon to pass out of patent. GSK, in particular, faces a turbulent 2009 as some of its hot-shot drugs suddenly face stiff competition from the 'me-too' boys who will be swamping the market with very similar concoctions.

It's sad that medicine is so judged. As I've often observed, what purports to be a benefactor of mankind is, in fact, purely an instrument of gain for shareholders.

And the sooner everyone wakes up to that reality, the sooner we may finally see a medical model that first serves mankind and its suffering.

Extra, extra! Get your free vitamin D!

Annemarie Colbin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:32:00 GMT

Vitamin D, essential for human health, is more a hormone than a vitamin, and you can indeed get it for free – as it is secreted by the body under the influence of sunlight. This activity involves the skin, the liver, and the kidneys, and about 36 hours after the sun exposure the synthesized vitamin D (known as cholecalciferol, or vitamin D3)is available in the bloodstream. It has multiple effects, one of major ones being that of helping the absorption of calcium from the intestines. The body can store this “vitamin” for several months, so that we can survive the winter with little or no sunshine. Latitude has a lot to do with the availability of sunlight – people below the 40th parallel get better exposure.

Surprising amounts of research are now showing that a deficiency of that vitamin is associated with a large number of disease states, including osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, and many different kinds of cancers including those of the breast, colon, ovary and kidney. Studies have also found that lack of vitamin D is implicated in the tendency of older people to fall. While most people believe that the sun causes cancer, a number of studies have found that there is an inverse relationship between the incidence of cancer and the exposure to sunlight – that is, the more cancer, the less sunlight, and viceversa. Hospital patients who are put in sunny rooms recuperate a lot faster than those in rooms with little daylight.. Sunlight is a nutrient much like food, and the lack of it can give us many problems, both physical (as we just saw) and psychological – lack of sunlight is associated with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), and possibly depression.

Many health professionals are seeing an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency, even in sunny climates like Hawaii, Florida, and other places where the weather is often bright. What is going on here? Three things: 1) both adults and children stay indoors a great deal of the time, with work, homework, computers, and TV; 2) when outside, people don’t necessarily walk to where they’re going, but take the car, bus, train, or other covered conveyance, the glass windows of which do not admit the UV rays needed for Vitamin D production; and 3) if they do go out, they cover themselves and their children in abundant sunblock creams. Considering that a sunblock of SPF 8 prevents the body from getting as much as 85% of the normal vitamin D, anything higher means you get NONE.

Any vitamin D in foods? Indeed there is some, mostly in eggs and fish. Fish livers are particularly rich; the classic Northern European source is cod liver oil. Try a couple of teaspoons per day in some juice during the winter months. A little caviar on toast would help, as a tablespoon can give you close to 10% of your requirements. Pricey, though. There are vitamin D precursors in vegetables, notably in parsley and shiitake mushrooms. So make yourself a nice 2-egg omelet (organic eggs, please) with 2 tablespoons of chopped parsley and ¼ cup of fresh sautéed shiitake, and you may get yourself some 115 IU of vitamin D, or close to 30% of your daily requirement. If you’re rich, add a tablespoon of black caviar, and you’re up to 40%. And it tastes nice too!

Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.

Your right - even when you're wrong

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:48:00 GMT

The struggle between the Sons of the Enlightenment and medical quackery - as they view any therapy that doesn't involve powerful pharmaceuticals - is getting more bitter by the day.

In the past week, the University of Central Lancashire has closed its BSc course in homeopathy following what the lecturers describe as a relentless campaign by David Colquhoun, one of the Sons of the Enlightenment. But another SoE has been at the receiving end; Simon Singh, co-author of the recent book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine On Trial, is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association over claims he makes about the therapy in the book.

The SoEs seem to be forgetting something pretty important in their relentless campaign: an individual's right to choose. They may claim that homeopathy doesn't work and so shouldn't be offered, but surely that is for the patient to decide. By all means, give him or her all the 'facts' - and, by this, it should be even-handed - but then leave well alone.

Put another way, the SoEs are effectively saying that they are protecting people against their own stupidity, and this is where the weakness of their position is exposed. Who are they to determine what I, or you, should be free to try? It's dangerous ground, and could be applied to many walks of life and provides unrasonable power to self-appointed experts who, in the name of the public good, decide what we can say or do.

Ultimately, it's the difference between having either a belief in the State - which becomes the ultimate authority on everything we are allowed to have and experience in life - or the common-sense of the individual. A quick scan over the history of the 20th century tells me which approach I would prefer, even if it means that, on occasions, I am wrong in my judgement and choice.