Search results matching tag 'vitamins'

Not my problem

jowddty — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:00:00 GMT

In 2002, WDDTY learned of plans within the European Union to radically restrict natural medicine across all member countries, starting with laws to create a very low ceiling of ‘safe upper limits’ in vitamins.

Although the laws were ostensibly to create a ‘level playing field’ within the European supplement market, the proposals bore the heavy hand of Big Pharma.

At the time, the solution appeared simple. As most people in the UK use some form of natural medicine, all we needed to do was band together and whip up a national protest to stop them in their tracks.

In early 2003, we invited all the heads of the largest vitamin companies and representatives of all the leading natural medicine organizations—homeopathy, herbal medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture and others—to a meeting in central London.

Many of the organizations never showed up. Of the 50 or so that did, many felt that our concerns were alarmist. Others welcomed the new moves as good for business. The few attempting to fight the legislation were more busy fighting each other.

No group seemed able to see the bigger picture. Each organization was mainly concerned with whether their own business was under fire. If it wasn’t, they weren’t interested. Not my problem.

As publisher Bryan Hubbard makes clear in this month’s cover story, Big Pharma had big plans even then. Without sufficient opposition, within the next year or two, laws will come into effect in the EU that will drastically restrict all access to high-dose vitamins and herbal medicine.

And this pogrom won’t end with Europe. The near-identical international laws that have been drafted within the United Nations suggest that a well-organized, concerted effort is afoot to finish off any forms of alternative options to orthodox medicine.

The plan is to watch Europe closely to assess the level of consumer protest. Thus far, that protest has been minimal. The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) and Consumers for Health Choice—the two consumer groups that have maintained any sort of consistent attack, challenged the law and lobbied Parliament—are starved of funds.

The individual organizations to this day remain isolationist. Not my problem. This attitude reminds me what Pastor Martin Niemöller reportedly said about the passivity of many Germans towards Nazism:

“First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn’t a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Social Democrats, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn't a Social Democrat;
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

For all of us wishing to maintain alternatives to drug-based orthodox medicine, these laws are all our problem, and every last one of us has an obligation to speak up now.

Re: Vitiligo

Spottydog — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:15:50 GMT

I have had very extensive vitiligo for most of my life. It started when I was a toddler and gradually spread over the years until my body was roughly 80% affected. I have found the condition difficult to live with and - at times - quite distressing. But I always tried to maintain a sense of proportion and a generally positive outlook. I also became a great fan of make up and self tanning products! However, about a year ago I stumbled on a treatment that is working amazingly well for me (a combination of nutritional supplementation and UVB light therapy) and I have gone from zero expectation of ever getting any of my true skin colour back to being quietly confident that I will reach 95% if not total re-pigmentation within the next few months. I have no idea if the treatment I am having will help others or not, but I would like to think it might, so I have told my whole story on a website called www.vitiligoprotocol.co.uk

Re: ROSEACIA

David Musgrave — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:43:25 GMT

Hi Josephine

I have a friend who trained as a Naturopath as a result of curing her own Rosacea with a combination of lots of Flax seed oil, B Vitamins and unpasteurised mineral water. She also needed to avoid red wine and felt there waas a strong mental component around anger which she had to address.

The skin is usually the first place in your body to show up a shortage of Omega-3's - check our my latest blog which is on this subject at http://chewingtheflaxfat.wordpress.com/

Re: Moods

apdyson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:10:12 GMT

Hi Jane, I suggest you make sure you take enough vitamins and minerals as part of your diet. Many experts have stated that we no longer receive enough vital minerals in our diet alone and the recommendation is to suppliment these. A good mineral suppliment I have used for years is Neways Maximol taken along with Revenol a very powerful antioxidant. These (and perhaps also a good Omega 3 EPA tablet) can provide very positive results for people who suffer from anxiety and depression. I myself have previously been clinically diagnosed with anxiety and stress and had to take time off work to recover. I now regularly take Maximol, Revenol & Omega 3 EPA which I find helps my mood. Please visit my site to read more testimonials . I really hope this information helps you.

Salad for breakfast

bshubbard — 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.

Not even wrong

bshubbard — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:04:00 GMT

You can prove the darnedest things with science. You can demonstrate that dangerous drugs are safe; you can even establish that vitamins and nutritional supplements can shorten your life, a sleight of hand that was performed this week. And the great thing is that, because it’s done in the name of science, everyone believes you!

As you may have read (and because every newspaper in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way had it on their front page, you probably did), the highly-regarded Cochrane Collaboration concluded that not only would the antioxidants A, C and E do next to nothing to improve your health, they might also shorten it.

This had everyone scratching their head. It was a startling conclusion that went against everything we thought we knew, and was contrary to the conclusions reached by almost every other significant research paper written over the past 40 years.

So how did they do it? The Cochrane paper was a meta-analysis, which means it re-analysed all existing papers that passed certain criteria for inclusion. Usually the main criterion is ‘good science’ – the studies are well-controlled and reputable.

But things weren’t quite so straight-forward with the Cochrane meta-study. The research team started out with 16,111 scientific papers, and they immediately discarded 14,910 of them. Why? Well, said the researchers, they included cancer studies, or they were duplicates, or because they were ‘not relevant’, although nobody defined what to the study was relevant. However, the researchers did include studies of precancerous lesions and skin cancer which were. . .cancer studies.

So, the researchers were left with 1,201 papers that covered 815 separate clinical trials. Of these, a further 747 were rejected because nobody died during the course of the study. After throwing out all the positive papers that demonstrated health-giving benefits of vitamins, the researchers were left with a small handful of just 68 that suggested vitamins didn’t extend life, but might even shorten it.

Of course, the discarded 16,043 papers discovered the very reverse.

Some science is so bad that scientists have a disparaging phrase for it. They say it's not even wrong. Sadly, even 'not even wrong' papers get good coverage in the media, and at a time when the EU and others around the globe are deciding on safe upper limits of vitamins, and those we shouldn't be allowed to take at all.

It would be a tragedy if this paper becomes a major influence in their decision-making.

Vitamin wars: Saving us from what exactly?

bshubbard — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:45:00 GMT

Just how dangerous are the vitamin supplements we buy at the health shop?

To give you a clue, they're not as dangerous as perfume, which kills two Americans every year, and they're certainly nowhere near as fatal as dishwasher detergent, which wipes three Americans off the face of the globe annually.

And they don't even come close to pharmaceutical drugs, which kill anything from 106,000 to 140,000 Americans every year, and that's according to the most conservative figures possible.

No, the annual fatality rate associated with B-complex, niacin, vitamins A, D and E is - zero.

So why are the European Union and the Codex committee trying to restrict our access to some nutritionals, or reducing the potency levels to an ineffective level - in the name of public safety and wellbeing?

It was the turn of Codex the other week to hold its annual conference. More than any other group, Codex is setting an agenda on standards, safe upper limits and availability of all nutritional products that is likely to be adopted by governing bodies around the globe.

Inspired by Codex's guidance, the EU is likely to set the maximum permitted 'safe' dose of beta-carotene at a level that equates to two carrots, while selenium's is likely to be the equivalent of that found in two brazil nuts.

Codex is also looking to replace the governmental RDA (recommended daily allowance) with the NRV, or Nutrient Reference Value. This one-size-fits-all approach doesn't take into account individuals, their ages and their varying health issues, nor the fact that our nutritional needs are not being met by food that is being grown in depleted and nutrient-poor soil.

One observer at the latest Codex meeting was Dr Rob Verkerk, scientific director to the Alliance for Natural Health, the consumer watchdog group. He describes the Codex/EU activities as "a passport system for big business."

Can he possibly be right, we muse. And why are grown men spending years trying to control an industry that harms nobody, and may well benefit many thousands?

Do you know?