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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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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
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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.
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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
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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:
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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).
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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.
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Last week I was in Chicago, where I’d started at university, and what impressed me most about the place was not the sheer size of Lake Michigan, the flatness of the Great Plains or even the deep-dish pizza.
What most hit me in the face was drugs. They were everywhere - in magazine ads, at airline checkout counters but especially on the air. I’d turn on the breakfast news, and hear ad after ad about Cialis or Allegra or
Claritin or Lunesta. Even drugs for dogs were being advertised on TV.
Eleven years ago, when the then Republican-controlled Congress agreed to allow the pharmaceutical industry to advertise, drug companies have taken their wares directly to the public. From 1997 through 2005, pending on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising increased twice as fast as spending on research and development of new products or promotion of existing drugs to doctors. In 2005, drug companies spent $4.2 billion on DTC advertising—a figure that is growing by 20 per cent every year.
This tactic has revolutionized the way patients are prescribed drugs. Consumers gain daily familiarity with the latest in pharmaceuticals and now ask for them by name. A survey in Consumer Reports magazine last year revealed that more than three-quarters of the doctors surveyed claimed that their patients asked for drugs advertised on TV. But even more alarmingly, more than two-thirds of doctors admitted to writing out the prescription their patients asked for. Instead of being selected by discerning physicians, medicine is now all but prescribed by the patient.
Aside from the fact that the tail is now wagging the dog, the biggest problem with on-air advertising is that a soundbite doesn’t present a balanced picture of a drug’s downside.
When a 2007 University of Georgia journalism and mass communication team analyzed a week’s worth of DTC ads, it found that the average one-minute commercial contained less than 8 seconds of side-effect disclaimers, a 30-second ad had less than 4 seconds’ worth - and almost none of the side-effects appeared in text, but were mentioned in only a short voice-over.
The obvious result of all this is that ‘meds’ - their cute appellation in America - are increasingly sampled like Tic Tacs, and just as easily thrown down the toilet once a side-effect comes to light. Small wonder that this avalanche of easy-come, easy-go drugs makes its way into the water supply in both the US and Europe.
As reported in the June edition of What Doctors Don't Tell You, scientists from the US Geological Service tested the water from a large water-treatment plant fed by two small rivers. In these supposedly crystalline waters, the scientists discovered evidence of 40 prescription and nonprescription drugs.
After years of strictly hands-off, the US Congress is finally finding fault with the US Food and Drug Administration for its lax handling of DTC advertising.
Also, following a number of highly publicized drugs whose ineffectiveness and side-effects were allegedly concealed by their manufacturers, Congress is conducting hearings to crack down on the manner in which doctors are educated about drugs - which, at the moment, is almost exclusively through the greased-palm schmoozing of drug-company salesmen. If passed, two bills would provide unbiased materials for doctors on the safety of drugs, and force Big Pharma to disclose the amount of money given to doctors through payments, gifts, honoraria or travel.
While decidedly mild, these bills represent the first efforts of the American government to rein in Big Pharma’s stranglehold on the information leak about their products, and a rebuke to the FDA for being too chummy with the industry they are charged with regulating. Long may it continue.
For more details, please consult the June edition of What Doctors Don't Tell You. Please click here for subscription information.
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The latest views about children with autism is that it is a multifactorial problem, due to a combination of vaccination, heavy-metal exposure and even to microwaves, as generated by mobile phones. Typically, a child exhibits gut conditions, problems with detoxification and heavy-metal
poisoning. Here are a few basic ways to regularize these symptoms.
- Make sure your child receives good supplements of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, including trace minerals such as zinc and selenium.
- Remember, gut health can be enhanced with probiotics and digestive enzymes.
- Fix any Candida problems (see The Candida and ME Handbook. London: WDDTY, 2001).
- Supplement with glutathione and products that boost its uptake, which helps with mercury detox. Children exposed to thimerosal have lower cellular levels of glutathione (NeuroToxicology, 2005; 26: 1–8). A number of companies offering such support suggests that the products should be sodium benzoate-free to support clearing of metals and other toxins.
- Support the rebuilding of gut cellular barriers with the use of glycosaminoglycans. These gut-protective barriers are often impaired when a child is exposed to the MMR shot or heavy metals.
- Chelate heavy metals naturally or with homeopathic methods. One such agent is zeolite, a natural volcanic mineral that claims to chelate heavy metals more gently than do chemicals such as DMSA.
- Keep your home free of wireless and mobile-phone radiation, and consider using equipment that minimizes such radiation.
The full story, 'Hiding behind junk science', is in the April issue of WDDTY.
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All of us rest easy in our beds at night in the belief that someone, somewhere, has our best interests at heart. That sense, that there are scientists sitting in lofty institutions who make decisions, however ultimately flawed, from a sense of right so permeates our psyche that even so jaded a science reporter as I was rattled when sifting through the evidence of a possible link between vaccination and autism. According to documents acquired by concerned parents through the US Freedom of Information Act, in June 1999, a group of 51 top scientists and health officials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and representatives of various vaccine manufacturers, met at the Simpsonwood Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, to listen to the findings of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist. He had found alarming evidence in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Database of a strong association between neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative used at the time in many US vaccines, and still present in many vaccines used in Europe. In the ensuing years, the CDC withheld these findings, held off removing thimerosal until 2002 and eventually ‘lost’ the data. When it resurfaced, the agency handed it over to a private company, America’s Health Insurance Plans, thereby placing it out of the reach of any researchers or journalists who attempted to access it under the Freedom of Information Act. The CDC then launched a worldwide campaign to court foreign researchers with data, no matter how flawed, that would support evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, while discrediting honest scientists like gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Wakefield, the first to publish evidence that MMR caused gut problems that eventually can lead to autism. Meanwhile, no one was willing to ask the most obvious question of all: do more vaccinated children have autism than unvaccinated ones? Since 1991, after recommendations by the CDC for three additional vaccines containing the preservative to be given to children virtually at birth, cases of autism increased 15-fold—to one in every 166 children. The CDC consistently refused to carry out such a study. Generation Rescue, a self-funded group of 350 parents, raised more than $200,000 to provide an answer. It recruited SurveyUSA, an independent opinion-research firm, to carry out a telephone survey in nine counties across two states involving some 18,000 children, comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children of the same gender. This methodology deliberately mirrored that used by the CDC to establish the prevalence of ADHD and autism. The study found that boys who were vaccinated had a 155-per-cent greater chance of having a neurological disorder like ADHD or autism than unvaccinated children. When one unusual county’s results were left out of the analyses, vaccinated boys were 146-per-cent more likely to have autism and 279-per-cent more likely to have ADHD. The first court decision to link autism to a vaccine (see the April issue of WDDTY) has done more than place on trial the current vaccination schedule—presently some 34 vaccines before US children even go to school. It has also exposed egregious error in science, deceit in government, and collusion by what used to be called ‘the fourth estate’. Many journalists have decried this publication many times for promoting so-called ‘junk science’. The history of the vaccine-autism story reveals to what extent junk science could lie at the very heart of fundamental decisions on health care.
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Recently, homeopathic hospitals across Britain have had their funding withdrawn because of the claim that homeopathy lacks the proof of modern ‘evidence-based medicine’. I’ve turned my usual column over to master homeopath and naturopath Dr Harald Gaier for his response.—Lynne McTaggartThe bedrock of modern conventional medicine is the principle of causality, the idea that if we fully know the present, we can then predict the future. Yet, causality has been challenged by Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, which says that, as you can’t truly define all aspects of matter on a subatomic level, the law of causality doesn’t hold. This is in accord with one of the most basic tenets of naturopathy: that disease is only possible if a combination of preconditions is present such as impaired resistance, diminished vital energy, the presence of toxins, parasites or nutritional imbalances, dietary or other abuses and psychogenic stress. As Professor Stuart Close, the eminent philosopher of homeopathy, explained, “The fatal tendency in . . . medical research to focus attention and effort upon one cause to the exclusion of all others inevitably leads to error and failure . . . Any successful method of treatment must be able to meet all the conditions arising from any existing combination of the causes.” So how does Orthodox Medicine arrive at the cause or, more important, its ‘evidence-based’ medications? Conventional medicine believes that it is possible to generalize the responses of more than one patient, as individual unpredictabilities will then cancel each other out if a large-enough group is analyzed. So, the higher the number of patients in the generalization, the more broadly established it becomes. That is the rationale behind medicine’s ‘gold-standard’ randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Nevertheless, such an approach is fundamentally flawed. When testing drugs, medicine obliterates the causal elements in patients by submerging them in a sea of other people, all of whom are being collectively tested. From these data, medicine derives a generalized, homogenized result. But this result, by definition, is inexact for any given individual. When a broadly tested agent is dispensed to an individual patient, laden with diverse unpredictabilities (as individuals always are), doctors are then surprised by the individual response, which can vary to a little or large extent from the expected, published and statistically significant, generalized and homogenized one. In short, orthodox evidence-based medicine takes individual patients with their idiosyncrasies, places them in a crowd of other patients to obliterate these differences, and hopes to obtain a lowest-common-denominator’ result. When it does, it then uses this result to treat each idiosyncratic patient, who is far removed from the ‘lowest-commondenominator’ patient—who is, after all, a fiction created solely by clinical methodology. Any naturopath worth his salt would call this inappropriate prescribing. Naturopaths treat individual patients, not disease categories. This difference in approach calls into question the very foundations of conventional medicine—the concept of ‘best practice’, based as it is on the vagaries of medical science’s flawed experimental models. So, to put it most simply, the questions that need to be asked are not only where’s the evidence in the standard medical model, but where’s the evidence that so-called evidence-based data offer any genuine proof of effective treatment? Harald GaierDr Gaier, also an osteopath and herbalist, practises at The Allergy and Nutrition Clinic, 22 Harley Street, London, and the Irish Centre of Integrated Medicine, Co. Kildare (www.drgaier.com).
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